Time's Fool

Economic Epicycles (from 6/10) The shift from national industrial economies to a global financial economy signals a shift (or an order-of-magnitude increase) into a "Ptolomaic epicycles" model of large-scale economic activity. The free-market model of the economy has become, with the shift from local price discovery focused markets rooted in the dual economic functions of allocating production and distribution activities on the primary or sole basis of "real" population needs to international speculative profit-oriented markets which tend consciously to ignore those base functions of economies in favor of pure profit, an effectively "religious" or "free market faith-based" model. The excessive complication of "financial product" creation, such as swaps and other derivatives, greatly resembles the construction of Ptolomaic epicycles to adjust the coherence of increasing astronomical observations to fit the heliocentric model of the astro...

Reconciliation, recognition, openness: I and Thou Reconciliation; Hegel-Gadamer recognition p.339, openness p. 355   "In that this kind of reconciliation is the historical work of the mind,   the historical activity of the mind is   neither self-reflection   nor the merely formal dialectical supersession of the self-alienation that it has undergone, but an experience that experiences reality and is itself real.” (G, 341)

This is from March, 2007: A student wrote: I am not sure what you mean by "this country was built on slave labor."   Are you telling me that this country would not have existed had it not been for slaves?   I do not know where you are getting your information.   I replied: To say that this country was built on slave labor is NOT to say that without slave labor this country would not have existed. (Although that might well be true.) To say that you got to work on the bus this morning is not to say that, had there been no buses, you would not have gotten to work. (Drive your car; take a cab; bike; walk; carpool; hitch-hike.) However, it is in fact highly probable that, had it not been for the availability of slave labor, this country would neither have quite started nor developed as it did . (It probably would have been built very differently. And be very different now.) To an important extent, the development of the industrial North...

I think this may be a (the?) key failing in the US system of governance. (1) In the charters given by governments to corporations, there is no legally enforceable requirement for social responsibility. The only (primary, major?) real such requirement imposed upon corporations is the fiduciary duty to the (monetary) owners —the stockholders— of the company. In the constitutive relationship —a relationship that is established/created by the (Constitution of) the US federal government— by states to the economic corporations that are co-generated by state governments (as authorized by the federal government) jointly with the collectivity of the legal-financial founders of the corporation, the only burden placed on the new entity ("corporations are legal persons") by its state-"parent" is the fiduciary duty to the individual founders and to their financial successors. Even though the State-given charter constitutes the corporation as a kind of public entity (its...

Climate Change & The Meaning of History: Mandlebrodt Sets If so (if that joining of ideas is apt), then what is the shape of the present moment? Along what complex fractal trajectory have we come to the present moment in world history? What (therefore) will tomorrow --the big tomorrow-- bring? Is it possible to use this configuration of ideas as a template for thinking empirically about the present, past and future. Can using it (as a framework of thought, a potential set of algorithms for perceiving reality, and for acting successfully/adaptively with it) provide us with a sufficient sense of meaning that we can see past and present and future together, to prophecy futures if not quite to predict them? To prophecy the future in its form, if not in its particular details? And of what consists an apprehension of the future in its form? [I am circling --looping-- around here in a space of thought. Up a level, over a sub-space, back and forth along a period of time, and between ...

What is really the source, the basis, for economic value? How is wealth created? Why does our society locate the "ownership" of wealth in individuals? Wealth has its source in production. In result, it is the labor of production, or of resource extraction, or of service, that originates the value of wealth. Wealth is the materialization of excess labor, of labor value reserved by society to be invested in tools of production to the end of increasing the productivity of labor. It is socially organized labor that is the basis of economic value. Wealth is created by withholding some product of labor from consumption --consumption for sustenance or pleasure-- by the laborer. That is, by reserving and aggregating that withheld product in some form that can be made available to investment in the tools of production. Toward the end of achieving this investment, society establishes roles (and the corresponding statuses, positions in social organization) that bear the respons...

Mass killings in America and mass killing abroad are not two separate things. The one cannot be stopped without stopping the other. The mass killings in the US and the overweening influence of the NRA over politicians are not problems separate from American weapons killing thousands of children a year in foreign lands and the utter dominance of the military-industrial complex over the American economy.  School shootings are “the war brought home.” Stop the war. Here and there.