"The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united. From the conclusion of [ ( Read more... )

Group identification. None of us totally accepts the practicability of a given set of mores or values to effectively and efficiently regulate behavior over a broad cross-section of participating members. We all have personal agendas. We all have preferences. We all have these personal amorphous needs that most of us are only partially aware of, and ( Read more... )

It strikes me that a lot of people seem to conclude that the symbology behind something (an act/behavior/representation) becomes the thing itself. That often pulls in an artificial framework of symboology that then becomes and overlay or a guide for our lives. Maybe that's where we get our "Values". To have a premade framework is handy because it ( Read more... )

I had an amusingly Religious thought yesterday ( Read more... )

The brain jarring comparison between the way Florida handled 3 hurricanes last year and the way NOLA is collapsing on itself has made me realize something. Bush relies almost solely on the competence and resources of the people on site. The fact that Florida had much better emergency preparedness and was able to put more resources in the air and on ( Read more... )

Unconfirmed sources indicate that insurgent commando squads have been spotted debarking makeshift Cuban landing craft near downtown New Orleans. Long known to be harboring invasion plans, authorities have always figured that the hammer would fall closer to Florida's Southern coastline. Defense department officials refuse to comment on the ( Read more... )

There are things that other people do that we regard as silly or childish, and often this is probably an entirely valid judgement. But it set me to thinking about what we consider acting in a non-adult manner. While acting like a adolescent is viewed with distain in the world of the thirtysomethings and up, I think the worst invective is acting ( Read more... )

Reading the journal of a performance artist lamenting the sale of an item that she had linked to a goal she never attained, she broke it down to an example of your psyche pointing out to you that you're paying too much attention to one part of your existence. Or are paying the wrong kind of attention to your existence. It struck me as an ( Read more... )

Purpose vs. Accomplishment

"The problem" she said, "is one of perspective. Purpose is easy as it usually is pre-defined. You don't usually do something without having some idea of why you're doing it. Accomplishment, on the other hand, is entirely subjective. Even when we're told or have physical evidence that we've accomplished something to some ( Read more... )

Basically the largest fallacy when trying to apply economic theory to social situations is the failure to reaize that economic theory is a synthetic statistical aggregate estimation of an expected pool of results. In other words the result of an economic prediction is only true within the context of the parameters of the prediction (within a larger ( Read more... )