Ray Evans Harrell wrote:
Well said,He's in Princeton's "Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs". so I guess he is not an economist?
I generally agree with you about the lack of wholeness in current economic
studies. As for whether Krugman is an economist or not I tend to look at
that musically.
[snip]
I guess it was all of that reservation Calvinism that I was around but I
just can't stand waste.
I sure agree with this.
I like the communistic slogan
my father said they had in the WWII Army Air Corps
mess hall:
Take what you want. Eat what you take.
I don't care is somebody soaks a cheap crucifix in urine, but I
sure get offended when somebody does not take good care
of their clothes or their car, etc. so that they have to buy
replacements prematurely. *That's* sacrilege, because it
desecrates the human labor -- the human spirit and flesh and
spirit made flesh -- that is incarnated in those things
(what Hegel called: "Objektive Geist").
> Any family that builds seven mansions in seven
countries, for no other reason than the party seasons, tempts me to think that they are useless. In fact, the whole idea of Utility in relation to the super wealthy and the society as a whole makes no sense to me. They don't grow and the poor don't either for opposite reasons. What is the purpose of a society having either?
From those to whom much has been given,
Much should be expected.
(--me)
I think some of the super rich actually don't do so badly
on this measure. Some of the Rockefellers, for instance.
And, although I'm not a fan of the Kennedies, I think Jack
and Robert tried to do good.
But there is one more aspect of these Bloatocrats I find
adds insult to injury: THEY DON'T EVEN LIVE REALLY LUXURIOUSLY
WITH THEIR SUPERFLUITY! The example I keep coming back to here
is the Vanderbilt mansion in Hyde Park New York: The dining room
walls are marble -- up to the height where most people cannot
see the difference, and then it's just painted to look
like marble. Pearls before swine.
I'm afraid the meaning of life for me is to be found in growth and mastery.
While I agree with this, I do believe that RESOURCES help. I have a friend who said that the time to spend money to acquire something in reality is when you can no longer further grow in relation to it in imagination alone. He studied flying extensively and made friends with flying teachers and frequented a flying school and took lessons --> and then he started thinking about buying a plane.
Anyone who doesn't do something with their gifts doesn't make sense to me.
It probably doesn't make sense to them, either. They probably do not make any sense. They live no more than animals (insofar as animals do not reflect on their lives).
But I came from the side of the tracks that most of these folks would never touch and when they had a President that was from a Trailer Park they couldn't stand him and spent 70 million dollars to prove him inferior in some way or another.
Agreed again.
Today, I see misery everywhere. I see people's lives who are effectively
over as far as their talent and potential goes. And they are young. We
don't grow wisdom we grow opinions in the young and then they come back to
me and the other teachers after it is too late and try to revive something
that was lost to old myths planted not by experience but by books and by
having been born to the wrong family.
In a more supportive society, it would be both harder and also
less deleterious to be born to the wrong family.
Such a society
would help families become more right. And if, despite everything,
the child still was born in the wrong place, there would be more
alternative mentors to whom the child could go.
I have a friend who once said about himself (but it applies to me
too):
They put me off at the wrong stop when I was born.
One advantage of close communities and extended families
is that the child may find some place other than their
molecule of origin ("nuclear family") to get their
needs met, their abilities facilitated, and their spirits
inspired.
> Not poor in money but in spirit and
knowledge. They often speak many languages but don't understand the meaning of any of them beyond knowing how to ask where the next meal comes from and how to find the toilet.
That's the problem I find with postmodernist full
professors: They run their
mouths off about the impossibility of communication and so
forth, and yet they still seek out the toilet when they
feel the urge to defecate. I think they
should be consistent and self-destruct by not pretending
one can consistently distinguish between breathing and
not breathing etc. It's all just a play of signifiers, right?
(But I wouldn't get so worked up about these people if I
had their advantages to try to use to better effect both for
myself and for others -- then I would leave the dead to bury
the dead, since I wouldn't be stuck in their cemetery.)
[snip]
I once knew a person who had a privileged upbringing
and related respoinsibly toward it. They did not do the
Simone Weil/St. Francis thing, but they did do an
internship in the locked wards on their way to becoming
a psychoanalyst. It *is* possible to appreciate the good
without having experienced the bad -- at least I think
it would have been for me, even if not for some others.
Never again. Nie einmals! [did I get that right C.R.?]
\[I didn't ask for the name that got pinned on me, and
I have no interest in a different one: "I am who am" is
the only "name" appropriate to a person, IMO.]
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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