“Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well […]
“The Rise of the New Global Elite“, Chrystia Freeland, The Atlantic, January/February 2011 The global capitalist economy is booming. Global poverty is improving on a scale undreamed of. From 1973 thru 2002, per capita income in China and India have grown 245 percent. Investment, technology, and innovation are creating huge productivity gains, and increasing wealth […]
American Creation, Joseph J. Ellis, 2007 “Indians being the prior occupants of the rights of the soil. . . To dispossess them . . .would be a gross violation of the fundamental Laws of Nature and of that distributive Justice which is the glory of a nation.” Henry Knox, Secretary of War A Boston bookseller, […]
Absence of Mind, Dispelling of inwardness from the modern myth of the Self, Marilynne Robinson, 2010. “But there is a fact of modern history, and there is the fact that intellectuals, renowned in their time, made significant contributions to the worst of it.” So speaks the literary mind, author of the novel, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, […]
“The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things.” Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974 This book came from nowhere and was a sensation in its […]
Transcendentalism, n. 1. the philosophy that proposes to discover the nature of reality by investigating the process of thought rather than the objects of sense experience. . . Webster’s Unabridged Emerson, The Mind on Fire, Robert D. Richardson, Jr. 1995 Scales and chords. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, it was words and sentences. He was a […]
“a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Edmund Burke The past teaches for the future, and society, like life itself, must learn from its experience and carry this knowledge forward. Society must both honor its […]
Vietnam Now, Jonathan Mirsky, a review of Vietnam: Rising Dragon, by Bill Hayton, New York Review of Books, June 24, 2010 Vietnam, now, is ruled iron-clad by a one party Politburo. It is a police state. One in six vietnamese works for state security. Politburo members achieve their position, godfather style, by building guanxi – […]
To endure, free societies must foster access to wealth, there must be democratization of wealth. Everyday people must prosper. Their ability to secure the means to achieve their human needs must be available. At the American founding, wealth for everyday people came from farming. The continent presented a vast supply of essentially free, never-tilled land. […]
John Lennon, The Life Philip Norman, 2008 I read the news today, oh boy About a lucky man who made the grade And though the news was rather sad Well I just had to laugh I saw the photograph He blew his mind out in a car He didn’t notice that the lights had changed […]
