Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Politically Speaking
This is a summary or finale concerning US and world politics: US citizenry must recall their independent and autonomous spirit. Each individual and household moving toward self-sufficiency, simplicity and frugality. We are at a far remove from individuals like Franklin or Jefferson, it is an age of weak spirit---so-called great men like B. Gates and other corporate and entertainment media leaders, who are simply ghosts, puffs of dust; brilliant and smart but indifferent to the soul of humanity.
Woodstoves, wells, single acre lots, detached from the dominion of utilities, services, and other corporate strangleholds. Consider, if costs of utilities and other so called essentials rise over a year at only 10%, and the citizen's wage remains the same, how much further behind at the end of this year the citizen will be! Fight back by detaching yourself from the grid as far as possible, prudently.
Do you for one single moment imagine that utility companies or leaders of corporations actually care about ordinary citizen life? If so, then we is the segregation of classes so apparent? Can a prudent working man enter club, or hotel, or restaurant wherein several transactions or purchase might count for several days of this guy's work? It is gambling. Consider proportion: an average citizen earns far less than $50, 000 per year, and works more than 40 hours, time spent in transport is stress, also work, so that what we mean by quality time is short. Now let's consider someone who earns say $200, 000 or more per annum. Is this 4 times $50, 000? No. Your first thousand must be spent on shelter, water, food, the lower levels in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Plumbing, lighting, etc... There is the bulk of $50,000 spent in basics and necessities. So if you earn 4 times, then you have your basics met, and the surplus is to develop you and your friends and family. Is this ethical? not in the least. Not by any standard of classical ethical teaching! Ethics concern itself most of all, not with family and friends, whose congeniality and sociability is a kind of reward if I invest wisely my 'kindness' and 'good deeds'. But ethics really gets to its essential challenge with strangers, aliens, even enemies and how we treat them, return the score, etc...
Loving friends and family is something that mammals do. Observe the deer, the rabbit, the wolf, homo sapiens is no different in this. Great!! Pat on the back! But why, this is simply evolutionarily generated selection with grooming and sharing behaviors common to all mammalia. In a word "mothering". I am thinking about the root of 'mammalia' and the "mammary" hence milkfeeding, wombs, sexuality which implies polar pairs, that is 'sexes'. Cleaning linked with affection is wonderfully developed in cats, dogs, as well as porcupines, and of course, wild rabbits. Licking, cleaning and so forth.
But what about those outside of the loop? Those who dwell at the periphery and margin of family affection. Even in rabbit populations we see attacks, cruelty, in short 'unethical' behavior usually linked with sexual ritual. For example, the 'king' rabbit being deposed by one of his 'sons' to take the Queen rabbit. What Freud called the 'Oedipus Conflict'.
The locus of consideration for ethics in not so much within the clan, whose sociability is guaranteed (to a certain extent) by deeply embedded, fixed rituals having been carefully selected over millenia of millenia, like a polished stone, to produce a seemlessly perfect phenomenon, such as caress, or touching. But it is in fact a carefully embedded natural phenonomen, without reference to any purely transcendent 'love'.
There are outsiders, and the way that we treat them is the essential core of ethics, taking for a natural fact that familial care and concern is smart, but not necesarily ethical in the strict sense. Ethics in the strict sense concerns debts we must pay to one another, to enemies, to ourselves, hence the very idea of corporations engaging in 'ethics' is rather ridiculous. If a man loses his job, or house or wife, he loses all. If a corporation worth billions loses millions it is chump change. A weekend bender, what the hell. Loss of livelihood is another matter. Point is corporations don't pay debts, don't sacrifice, don't lose, will not turn the other cheek, will never give their life for a friend. That is why the corporation is soulless, a dust factory. Crud, metaphysics of crud.
Turn the other cheek, forgive, accept apology, those are the signature behaviors of ethics. Consider your own life, and the profound courage it required to say "I'm sorry" because it is from the heart, it costs your soul and you feel it. This is the realm of ethics. How can a corporation, government, committee, institution or any other such groupthinktank care one iota for anyone's livelihood? It cannot---so like the neanderthal that is is, says to itself, "You know I don't care one iota for anybody if it means my corporation must lose---but this message will not go over well with people if they realize I am simply out for my own gain---so I will try to make them think that I actually care for them." This is the meaning of ethics in corporate life, call it risk management, PR, it's all the same.
Why do we fall so easily into this corporatism? We know deep down in our hearts that corporations have never really given any actual citizen anything of lasting substantial value which was not already available from nature. We know that the the only real souls we can trust are actual humans, we meet and live with---star worship and saints is all in the mind of the beholder. Why do Americans act so shocked when their stars fall? Morally, alcohol, profanity, etc... You know nothing of all these people you have never met save stories, either written or told. The only truth can be derived from individual observation and living together, with real and actual people, not statistics!
When dark winds and storms blow, then we must concern ourselves with more basic survival behavior---clean water, and frugality. There may be many days in which the remaining meals are simply crackers. Citizens have faced far worse trials, but consider how will the citizen face the dark days of reckoning, with the Beemer, Starbuck's Doubleshot, or Absolut (tm.) vodka? You will take what you can get in those days, and it won't be much. So the frugal citizen will already be there with water and the woodstove and the know-how, while the folks out on luxury holidays are in for a rude surprise. Get ready, or be prepared, or 'vsegda gotov' in Russian, means the citizen preparedness, not military, you knuckleheads. Nobody is going to come in and help you out. Look at New Orleans, a situation where---check out these ethics!---citizens are forced at gunpoint to evacuate their homes, and often pets, then to be corralled into the Astrodome a corporately technological structure incapable of being 'shelter' for human species---it is plastic and steel! So these citizens are forced to enter into this "shelter" where human moral atrocity abounds. Can we have a better image of the sheep being led blindly into a den of iniquity? Did anybody except real citizens give a damn about the people whose lives were flooded? Certainly not government leaders and officials. Some time gallons of water will pour onto their living room suites.
Woodstoves, wells, single acre lots, detached from the dominion of utilities, services, and other corporate strangleholds. Consider, if costs of utilities and other so called essentials rise over a year at only 10%, and the citizen's wage remains the same, how much further behind at the end of this year the citizen will be! Fight back by detaching yourself from the grid as far as possible, prudently.
Do you for one single moment imagine that utility companies or leaders of corporations actually care about ordinary citizen life? If so, then we is the segregation of classes so apparent? Can a prudent working man enter club, or hotel, or restaurant wherein several transactions or purchase might count for several days of this guy's work? It is gambling. Consider proportion: an average citizen earns far less than $50, 000 per year, and works more than 40 hours, time spent in transport is stress, also work, so that what we mean by quality time is short. Now let's consider someone who earns say $200, 000 or more per annum. Is this 4 times $50, 000? No. Your first thousand must be spent on shelter, water, food, the lower levels in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Plumbing, lighting, etc... There is the bulk of $50,000 spent in basics and necessities. So if you earn 4 times, then you have your basics met, and the surplus is to develop you and your friends and family. Is this ethical? not in the least. Not by any standard of classical ethical teaching! Ethics concern itself most of all, not with family and friends, whose congeniality and sociability is a kind of reward if I invest wisely my 'kindness' and 'good deeds'. But ethics really gets to its essential challenge with strangers, aliens, even enemies and how we treat them, return the score, etc...
Loving friends and family is something that mammals do. Observe the deer, the rabbit, the wolf, homo sapiens is no different in this. Great!! Pat on the back! But why, this is simply evolutionarily generated selection with grooming and sharing behaviors common to all mammalia. In a word "mothering". I am thinking about the root of 'mammalia' and the "mammary" hence milkfeeding, wombs, sexuality which implies polar pairs, that is 'sexes'. Cleaning linked with affection is wonderfully developed in cats, dogs, as well as porcupines, and of course, wild rabbits. Licking, cleaning and so forth.
But what about those outside of the loop? Those who dwell at the periphery and margin of family affection. Even in rabbit populations we see attacks, cruelty, in short 'unethical' behavior usually linked with sexual ritual. For example, the 'king' rabbit being deposed by one of his 'sons' to take the Queen rabbit. What Freud called the 'Oedipus Conflict'.
The locus of consideration for ethics in not so much within the clan, whose sociability is guaranteed (to a certain extent) by deeply embedded, fixed rituals having been carefully selected over millenia of millenia, like a polished stone, to produce a seemlessly perfect phenomenon, such as caress, or touching. But it is in fact a carefully embedded natural phenonomen, without reference to any purely transcendent 'love'.
There are outsiders, and the way that we treat them is the essential core of ethics, taking for a natural fact that familial care and concern is smart, but not necesarily ethical in the strict sense. Ethics in the strict sense concerns debts we must pay to one another, to enemies, to ourselves, hence the very idea of corporations engaging in 'ethics' is rather ridiculous. If a man loses his job, or house or wife, he loses all. If a corporation worth billions loses millions it is chump change. A weekend bender, what the hell. Loss of livelihood is another matter. Point is corporations don't pay debts, don't sacrifice, don't lose, will not turn the other cheek, will never give their life for a friend. That is why the corporation is soulless, a dust factory. Crud, metaphysics of crud.
Turn the other cheek, forgive, accept apology, those are the signature behaviors of ethics. Consider your own life, and the profound courage it required to say "I'm sorry" because it is from the heart, it costs your soul and you feel it. This is the realm of ethics. How can a corporation, government, committee, institution or any other such groupthinktank care one iota for anyone's livelihood? It cannot---so like the neanderthal that is is, says to itself, "You know I don't care one iota for anybody if it means my corporation must lose---but this message will not go over well with people if they realize I am simply out for my own gain---so I will try to make them think that I actually care for them." This is the meaning of ethics in corporate life, call it risk management, PR, it's all the same.
Why do we fall so easily into this corporatism? We know deep down in our hearts that corporations have never really given any actual citizen anything of lasting substantial value which was not already available from nature. We know that the the only real souls we can trust are actual humans, we meet and live with---star worship and saints is all in the mind of the beholder. Why do Americans act so shocked when their stars fall? Morally, alcohol, profanity, etc... You know nothing of all these people you have never met save stories, either written or told. The only truth can be derived from individual observation and living together, with real and actual people, not statistics!
When dark winds and storms blow, then we must concern ourselves with more basic survival behavior---clean water, and frugality. There may be many days in which the remaining meals are simply crackers. Citizens have faced far worse trials, but consider how will the citizen face the dark days of reckoning, with the Beemer, Starbuck's Doubleshot, or Absolut (tm.) vodka? You will take what you can get in those days, and it won't be much. So the frugal citizen will already be there with water and the woodstove and the know-how, while the folks out on luxury holidays are in for a rude surprise. Get ready, or be prepared, or 'vsegda gotov' in Russian, means the citizen preparedness, not military, you knuckleheads. Nobody is going to come in and help you out. Look at New Orleans, a situation where---check out these ethics!---citizens are forced at gunpoint to evacuate their homes, and often pets, then to be corralled into the Astrodome a corporately technological structure incapable of being 'shelter' for human species---it is plastic and steel! So these citizens are forced to enter into this "shelter" where human moral atrocity abounds. Can we have a better image of the sheep being led blindly into a den of iniquity? Did anybody except real citizens give a damn about the people whose lives were flooded? Certainly not government leaders and officials. Some time gallons of water will pour onto their living room suites.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Sunday, November 05, 2006
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