If you insist on being unreasonable, the world will treat you unreasonably. (0)#
Book title musings…”Suicide Run: Or How I Learned to Live with Capitalism”. A story about the absurdity of unmanaged capitalism on a planet of finite resources. To believe in an economic utopia (not to mention a spiritual, or political one) is ultimately as absurd as committing suicide. Sustainable competition exists only within a set of agreed-upon rules–a context predicated on a fundamental agreement about the limits of profit-taking as it impacts long-term resource management of labor and raw materials (0)#
With cheap computers and the large information stores coming online, we’re about to leverage the greatest intellectual leap in humankind. It will be a geometric aggregation of applied knowledge upon a world still factionalized along sectarian roots and disputes. More people can and will find more information about anything than ever before. As that knowledge is applied to humanity,in all its prejudices, we will manifest where the rational meets the irrational and suffer the consequences. Can humanity overcome its capacity for nihilism masquerading as righteousness? Our survival as a species is at stake. (0)#
The bargain between Merkel and Schroeder is between a flexible economy and a contrarian foreign policy. Will Schroeder sell his economic legacy for control of foreign policy in a coalition government? (69047)#
Freedom And Peace - Glad you’re here,” Mr. Bush said to Mr. Blair. “Congratulations on your great victory. It was a landmark victory, and I’m really thrilled to be able to work with you to be able to spread freedom and peace over the next years.” Freedom and peace at the point of a gun and secret, global, detention and ‘render’ network of prison facilities. What’s wrong with this picture? (0)#
The Legacy of Karl Rove - The legacy of Karl Rove will be the use of inflammatory rhetoric, insinuation-PR, and flagrant manipulation of States’ electoral legislation by exploiting the energy of a motivated minority, without regard to its implications on domestic or foreign policy, in order for ‘his man’ to win. A clinical display of political power without regard to consequences. (0)#
Woman Priest - Why not women priests? its the quality of faith, spirit, and the message; not the sex of the vessel giving it. (0)#
We ought not mistake politics that we disagree with, for those we cannot live with. (0)#
Market Price - Oil is the rich man’s herion, and Osama is the price he’s paying for it. (0)#
Future Investment - The America we see today, superpower of the world, did not come about because we’re ‘better people’. The country we have, and profess to love and admire, came into being because our parents, and their parents, made investments for the future through the willingness to pay a reasonable amount in taxes. When everyone shares in the burden, everyone shares in the benefits. Something you’d expect the well-to-do to remember, but in their zeal to ‘keep what they’ve earned’ through lobbying for lower - or elimination of - taxes, they seem to always forget. (0)#
Sturm Und Drang - America will turn from a vibrant, messy democracy, in charge of its destiny while fulfilling the hope of Ben Franklin’s ‘rising sun’, into a cold, hard, calcified conduit of power for the private interest being served by the federal bureacracy. Driven by video Sturm und Drang, signifying little. (0)#
America’s Sharon - Bush is America’s Sharon: a hero who reaches for a gun. “Hey, at least he’s still alive to be able to reach for it!” Sure, but does he live only to survive for tomorrow, or does he live to live for tomorrow?”
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Be fiscally lazy, socially irresponsible, and personally selfish. Use the Constitution as your excuse for deficit-spending, ’small government’ talk while doing big government spending, and irresponsible tax cuts. Stir, drink, and observe the end of the American Experiment. (0)#
How poor - are you willing to get for your security? Almost half a trillion dollars poorer by 2009?
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Bad Things - America is about suffering. America is about the righteousness of ’saving babies’ along with the callousness of accepting 30,000 gun-related deaths a year. America gives opportunity without giving support. America feels good about stopping ‘bad things’ from happening to small people; feels good about doing ‘good things’ for big people; yet feels ambivalent about doing good things for small people. (0)#
Going Green - At a recent meeting of Ceres, GE’s Jeffrey Immelt said: “We are investing in environmentally cleaner technology because we believe it will increase our revenue, our value and our profits. … Not because it is trendy or moral, but because it will accelerate our growth and make us more competitive.” Hooray, and it’s about time we saw environmentalism as a win-win for industry. (0)#
Lust of the Eye - a recent documentary traced the beginnings of civic works for the poor (in NYC) with the first visualizations of the poor by early photography. Maybe the ubiquity of the image in the modern world has made it more difficult to remind the wealthy of the high return of contributing to the public commonwealth? Rather than seeing it as a ‘taking’ by the state of personal profit (ie.taxes), it should be seen as a necessary stewardship of those less well off, no matter the circumstances that make them so. Doing so became the means of achieving great wealth then, why not today? (0)#
Be Different - ‘Narrowcasting’ ultimately means that having an audience is no longer about ‘representing’ that audience, so much as it is being a ‘member’ of the audience, and knowledgeable enough to get themselves in front of a camera. Everything after that is about being ‘different’. (0)#
OneDimensionalMan - Herbert Marcuse, in his 1964 book One Dimensional Man, describes a society in which “…liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. … Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” (0)#
Love Of God - Our love of God is not unlike the love of a child to its parent. The love of a pet for its owner. It wants to be unconditional. It can be self-centered. It can be unwittingly self-destructive. (0)#
Legally Speaking - The adjudication of the line between obligatory governance under law and the personal responsibility of the citizen, is where the judiciary needs to speak. (0)#
“The military-industrial-congressional-complex is a self-licking ice-cream cone.” — unattributed aphorism (possibly from a former employee of a defense contractor?) However, first part of the phrase is ostensibly the original phrase Eisenhower intended to use in his famous Farewell address. He didn’t because he was persuaded that pissing off Congress wasn’t going to do anybody any good. But its meaning is clear: Congress is deeply complicit, and increasingly corrupted by, the largest military economy humanity has ever seen. (0)#
Why is the law important? - Because without law you eliminate consequences. Without consequences the lesser part of ourselves will have a lower threshold for engaging in anti-social behavior thereby tearing apart an organized and stable society. (0)#
American Potential - America has the potential for doing something truly epochal: it could be the catalyst for human survival in spite of humanity’s penchant for self-destructive behavior. It assumes that the well-informed citizen will guide government in order to enable humanity to do what is necessary for survival into geologic time. (0)#
(Re-) Learning How To Lose - Democracy requires, above all else, the willingness to learn how to lose. In a nation whose political rhetoric and machinations increasingly serve the idea of ‘winning’ above all else, true democracy will become an abstraction, thereby opening the door to authoritarianism with a ‘democratic’ veneer. (0)#
Deliberations In Law - The GOP doesn’t understand that the law and the deliberations of men through the law is ultimately more important than their interpretation of what’s in the national interest. In other words, bending the law - especially those that govern institutions - for the sake of political expediency almost never succeeds, and never without negative consequences, whether now or in the future. (0)#
Creator Mathematica - If the rationalist mind creates order from an otherwise natural entropy as a form of creation, what place does the creator of the rationalist world-view have in applying that template on himself? By attempting to template, through natural language, the template-creator; by trying to rationalize order and meaning in the cosmos, we can never be as precise in subject and meaning as with mathematics. (0)#
Wrong People - It was all so unnecessary. We were humbled by how difficult Iraq was. There were those who knew and spoke up about the social aftermath of the US Army rolling through the country. The judgement was that these were the wrong people to talk to by the Bush administration. (0)#
Cowboy Chess - Sure, the cowboy is a straight-shooter and all that, but you don’t think of a cowboy when the game is chess. (0)#
Poseur - There’s more to leadership than simple conviction. Leadership is conviction warranted by the facts available. Leadership without facts is not leadership. Its posing. (25)#
Presumptions of Knowledge - That’s the difference between democracy and everything else. Democracy (when we have it) presumes that people know what they want. Everything else presumes that they don’t. (0)#
Tubular Agenda - Everything coming through that tube has an agenda. Your job is to figure out what it is, and how you relate to it. (0)#
Squatting the Edge Watching television…like squatting the edge of the precipice of human consequence. (0)#
Blaze of Bullets -The story of Najaf - the story of Iraq, is one of armed militias. The US will go out in a blaze of bullets as the arming of the world over the last 30 years comes back to strike at civilization. (0)#
Dangerous Views - The US is in danger of seeing itself as it wants to be seen, rather than for what it actually is in the world. (0)#
Europa - On Discovery Channel, I just saw images of deep sea worms (centipede-like) that live on the surface of methane-hydrate crystals that form in the (terrestrial) deep ocean. The implicit message is: life exists everywhere. If we want to find extra-terrestrial life in our lifetimes, support the mission to Europa. (0)#
Regulation, On Purpose - Historically, regulation has tended to block competition, instead government regulation should sponsor competition by challenging the private interest to meet a public good. That way, government ‘regulation’ will be about what constitutes the purpose of the ’service’ to be provided with respect to the public commonwealth, rather than the purpose of the regulation (too often applied to restrict autonomy by public/private entities). (0)#
“Kerry has made teacher-friendly promises the union likes, but he also proposes ideas the NEA long has opposed, such as paying bonuses to teachers based on how well their students perform on tests.”–When a meritocracy no longer judges itself on its principles, and relies instead on politically-acceptable ‘empiricism’ (an oxy-moron), it becomes an oligarchy. If not in fact, then in practice. Totting up numbers that determine the fate of civilizations. (0)#
Closet Nazi? - The suspension of law for any human being, no matter how criminal, by labeling them ‘evil’ and ‘beyond humanity’ is the same language and justification the Nazis used against their definition of the ‘enemy’. The only difference is we’re only Nazis behind closed doors. (0)#
Capitalist Ethic - Commerce needs to understand that the public institution of government that they’ve taken over still needs to be seen as fair and honorable in order for the world to buy into the idea of globalization. Therefore, it is not only ethically good, but good for business to actually be fair and honorable in implementing a capitalist global economy. (0)#
Exercising Will - If you believe in a God-given capacity to exercise free will, you cannot defend the “rights” of entities (ie. a fetus) that do not have the capacity to exercise it, over those that do–especially when the survival of either is mutually exclusive. (0)#
God is a challenge, not a certainty.–see Isaiah, “My ways are not your ways, my
image is not your image…” (0)#
Degrees of Forgiveness - There may be degrees of sin, but Jesus never talked about degrees of forgiveness. (16)#
Isolate the demagogue. address the environment of those that support the bin Laden’s of the world and to remove the legitimate grievances that are ridden by demagogues to power. Fighting terrorism is a political war as much as its a military one.
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Pimping America - Patriotism is being pimped by the defense contractors who get conservatives in Congress to spend $82 billion for missile defense, to go along with keeping the Iraq War expenses off budget, while the soldiers in the field, and their families, should consider themselves lucky to get a 4% pay rise costing $6 billion.
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Big Wallets - Government should be about setting priorities, not determining who has the biggest wallet and therefore the loudest voice. And those that get to articulate and set priorities shouldn’t be restricted to only those with the most money. (0)#
Time Fears the Pyramids - ‘Man fears time, time fears the pyramids’–Old Arab proverb. An argument for ‘extraterrestrial information storage’. An expression of a species’ survival instinct; leaving a record of existence by making a copy of all extant knowlege and storing it off-world. (0)#
Happy Child - The future is the child of today. A neglected child will not be a happy child.
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Suckers! - We have mortgaged our future to maintain an American ‘lifestyle’; to fulfill the
wants and needs of an American society that otherwise refuses the financial burden, by selling financial risk to suckers on a credit card. (0)#
Stop being the victim the GOP wants you to believe you are; a victim of
“obstructionism”, a victim of “liberalism”, a victim of “cultural agendas”, and finally,
a victim of fear. Be an American again: united in strength, united in purpose.
‘E Pluribus Unum’. (0)#
To those who continue to argue “we did a good thing however we justified it by attacking Iraq…” - Stop patronizing my morals and using it as an excuse to conveniently defend a horrifically bungled ‘peacekeeping’ effort! (0)#
The Sky Is Blue We have become George Bush’s corporate commercial, a place where unpleasant truths are hidden away, and where bad news is relegated to the editing floor. Where the appearance of ‘leadership’ is more important than its consequences; where the sky is blue all day. (0)#
Party Down - The parties no longer exist to consolidate leadership consensus around party policy. They now exist to consolidate corporate consensus on national policy. The fundraising needs of the current political establishment have eviscerated much of party policy-making from, essentially, what ‘the people’ want, to what corporations are willing to accept. (0)#
Catalyzed Into Being - Was naturally-occurring fermentation (alcohol) the catalyst that allowed primates to experience an alternate reality? One that stimulated higher brain function and developed a distinct sense of Self? Could ‘getting high’ have an evolutionary benefit caused by an interaction of environmental variables on the body-chemistry of an animal socially developed enough to have taken advantage of the ‘effect’, first of alcohol, and later all manner of opiates on this sense of self? (0)#
Bush Inc. - This administration is in the energy business. The last thing they want is to produce those missing 28 pages of Saudi connections to al-Queda terrorism and create the political will to enact national energy policies that will impact energy markets. The national interest is the business interest. Bush Inc. (0)#
Global War on Terror, [GWoT] - original caps, seen as a phrase on a White House, PR dept. document stating it as one of the reasons in its explanation of denying access to indigenous natives of Diego Garcia. GWoT is bureaucratic argot for a policy orientation. (0)#
Imaginary World - We live in a world that is imagined, everything we use and most of what we see on any given day is the result of human thought. We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we imagine it to be. (0)#
Killer of the Mind - The ‘television commercial’ is the killer of the mind, the killer of stories–of making the purpose of stories and the creative spirit it represents, secondary to commerce. In most of human history, the story was at *least* as important as commerce. (0)#
I, the Taxpayer - The Constitution has “We the People”; conservatives too often turn that into “I the taxpayer” in their zeal to find support for an idea that ultimately starves the engine of government that has created the conditions that make America the great nation it is today. (0)#