“Lobbyists need something to buy, and legislators need something to sell.”

So described Mildred Friedman our beltway government.  Lobbyists have clients who give them money to purchase advantage from legislators who are writing laws that affect them.  Legislators create laws that favor specific individuals and businesses that are represented by lobbyists.  With taxpayer money, they both prospe .  Beltway neighborhoods are among the wealthiest in our nation.  The average Beltway income is directly correlated with the the forever increasing number of pages in the federal tax code.   The business value of the tax preparer company, H.R. Block, correlates with the always increasing size and complexity of the federal tax code.  The Federal Register, the compendium of all federal, bureaucratic rules and regulations, is 20,000 pages long. . . . weekly, and also is always increasing.

The Beltway must create, but also hide, the myriad favors and exceptions to special interests that reside in our federal laws.  And it does. Congress, then, has become not unlike the Catholic church before the reformation.  It sells indulgences –  special exemptions –  from its taxes and laws.  Freedom becomes not freedom from government, but support from government.  Opposing increasing taxation is suspect.  Special groups, increasingly,  are selectively excluded from taxation, while of course still able to vote – “representation without taxation”.

Thinkagain wishes it weren’t so.

To satisfy this ‘market’, Congress must continually expand its role.  More and more social issues and inequalities must be conjured and legislated.  And they are. And the nation’s original federalism is giving way to nationalism. The original Federalists did advocate for a national bank, a national currency, a strong chief executive in time of war, and regulation of interstate commerce.  But not much more.   They believed in the sovereign power of the states over their local affairs.  To the original anti-federalists, confusingly named Republicans originally, (and later called Democrats), the federalists wanted too much power.  They sought to limit federal power, and not just to protect slavery,  many of them were against slavery,  but their knowledge of  european history made them very wary of government power.

Today, nationalism seeks more than a strong central power for defense and commerce,  it seeks national power in local affairs.  Nationalism in the United States has grown from the Progressive movement, the New Deal, and the Great Society.  Confusingly, today’s federalists – neofederalists? – who mostly call themselves Republicans,  are more like the original anti-federalists, seeking to limit national power in local concerns and the economy. Nationalists, today, mostly call themselves Democrats.  They seek a national role over ever more areas of state and local life, and they are increasingly successful.  They have nationalized transportation, public education, food production, and now increasingly medical care, and soon to be college education, with the recent nationalization of all college loans.

Nationalism is Old World government.  The United States, for a time, brought New World government to the Old World.  Increasingly, Old World government is coming to the United States.

Zen Mind is described as a state of egolessness, devoid of self consciousness.   One can utilize this state of mind, Zen shows us, in archery, martial arts, and calligraphy.  Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugene Herrigel, is the short classic story of a westerner’s attempt to achieve Zen Mind and become a skilled [...]

Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek Magazine,  and author of American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House, reviews Christianity, the First Three Thousand Years, by Diamond MacCulloch, in the New York Times Book Review, April 4, 2010.
Meacham tells us he is officially sympathetic to christianity.  ” I am an episcopalian who takes the faith [...]

“Combat fog obscures your fate…and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between men”

In Sebastian Junger’s War, a book about a company of soldiers in the Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan, we experience war conceptually, and devoid of the cynicism of most war commentary.  Junger doesn’t speak to whether war is good or [...]

“The most incomprehensible aspect of the Universe is that it is comprehensible.” Albert Einstein.
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Steven Weinberg.
Science seems to have the unspoken goal of finding explanations that have no arbitrary element.   Nothing can be a certain way, when it could as well be another [...]

In the charming movie, Vitus, a young boy is a piano prodigy.  This becomes very important to his parents, so much so that they almost forget that he is still a young boy.  Too young to understand his gift, he wants to be a young boy.  His parents’ obsession becomes annoying,  so he fakes a [...]

On Deep History and the Brain, Daniel Lord Smail, 2008.
Does culture evolve  and if so, how?  This is a big question, for if culture evolves and we can change its course, then perhaps we can change our future.
Some see cultural history as showing a progression, a direction.  They see accumulation of knowledge as increasing in [...]

“Tell me a horror story, Daddy”.
“. . . Look around you, son.  . . . What do you see?”
There is the abyss, the empty secret that life is ultimately meaningless, that none of us really matter.  It is that existential horror of being.  We could dwell on it, but that would make it very [...]

Jeff Bridges gives a powerful performance, a great portrayal, not just of a failing country music artist, but of an alcoholic.
Alcohol, it is not commonly known,  chiefly blocks emotional intelligence, not intellectual intelligence.  The alcoholic over time doesn’t know what makes him sad, what makes him happy, what makes him anxious.  And we have these [...]

Many consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be  our third greatest president.  In books such as The New Dealers’s War,  Thomas Fleming, 2001, the forgotten man, Amity Shlaes, 2007, however, the case is being made that he is due for re-evaluation.
Not all went as well with FDR as we have been taught.  Unemployment was still 20% [...]