Holding Forth

These are times when the fabric of society seems to unravel at ever greater speeds, when selfishness, violence and meanness of spirit seem to be rotting the goodness of our communal lives. There is growing evidence that the fundamental ethical stances in life stem from underlying emotional capacities. For one, impulse is the medium of emotion; the seed of all impulse is a feeling bursting to express itself in action. Those who are at the mercy of impulse – who lack self-control – suffer moral deficiency. The ability to control impulse is the base of will and character. By the same token, the root of altruism lies in empathy, the ability to read emotions in others; lacking a sense of another’s need or despair, there is no caring. And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.

Daniel Goleman

But Mr. Ryan is widely portrayed as an intellectual leader within the G.O.P., with special expertise on matters of debt and deficits. So the revelation that he literally doesn’t know the first thing about the debt crises currently in progress is, as I said, interesting — and not in a good way.

Wikileaks cables reveal that the US wrote Spain’s proposed copyright law

Cory Doctorow at 2:24 PM Friday, Dec 3, 2010

Spain’s Congress is about to vote on a new and extremely harsh copyright/Internet law. It’s an open secret that the law was essentially drafted by American industry groups working with the US trade representative.

But it gets gets more interesting: 115 of the Wikileaks cables intercepted from the US embassy in Madrid were tagged with “KIPR” — that is, relating to “intellectual property,” The big question has been: will El Pais, the Spanish newspaper that has the complete trove of Wikileaks cables release them in time to effect the vote on the new law?

Well, now they’ve started. The first 35 of the 115 cables have been released, and they confirm the widespread suspicion: the Spanish government and the opposition party were led around by the nose by the US representatives who are the real legislative authority in Spain.

So here’s the new question: when the Spanish Congress votes on America’s copyright law this month, will they vote for their sovereignty, or act like a US puppet state?

Earlier on Friday, when a judge in Pakistan refused to bar WikiLeaks he argued,”We must bear the truth, no matter how harmful it is.” Some hours later, a Republican member of the U.S. Congress, Ron Paul, echoed those words, writing to his 19,000 followers on Twitter: “Re: Wikileaks – In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.”

As Rachel Slajda reports on Talking Points Memo, the Office of Management and Budget in the White House has “directed all federal agencies to bar their employees from accessing the WikiLeaks Web site and its leaked diplomatic cables.”

Please note this is written from the American perspective.

This quote:

“The rhetoric of tax-cutting so dominates the political debate in Washington that many elected officials are reluctant to acknowledge that the federal government devotes as about as much money to tax breaks — $1.1. trillion — as it does to discretionary spending.”

is from this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/business/economy/13mortgage.html?hp

…….

People say taxes are a burden, but I think they are a burden because we have not employed them 100%. I suggest that we already have severely low taxes considering the services and infrastructure we want; that if we actually stuck to our guns, we would not have to raise taxes much at all–we just need a situation where people contribute their part, with no tax breaks.

After all, what is a tax break if it isn’t a subsidy? In essence, arguing for a subsidy (the Left) or for a tax cut (the Right) is the same exact thing…this just goes to show how much our political atmosphere is twisted.

To pretend that there are absolutes is necessary in making relative judgments, but to believe that there are absolutes and to order one’s judgments accordingly is folly and disastrous. ~ Gore Vidal, Selected Essays – p. 6.

Consider the implications of this for a second, if you will. (Entire article here.)

Humans paying in cash, a largely non-traceable form of monetary transaction, would be flagged as suspicious. The measure of a non-suspicious human then becomes a reflection of their allegiance to a corporate entity (since if one cannot use cash, one would most assuredly use credit cards). Therefore, to not be suspicious, one much be fully traceable by corporations and governments. A bit too 1984-ish for my tastes.

People who have managed to make/save enough cash, once a measure of true financial independence, are now the suspects. Where I come from, people who pay in cash often don’t have the means to extensive lines of credit; they are regularly people of lower socioeconomic standing, immigrants and minorities. From that perspective, such a move as this suggests an increased stratification of social demographics.

Furthermore, such a policy would only encourage the continued abstraction of monetary value (as cash, a material mode of monetary representation, is called “suspicious”), arguably one of the contributing factors to this latest global financial fiasco. The more it is just numbers bankers are pushing around, the easier it is to push competing companies and countries into default. (I realize I am being rash, but too bad.)

We live in a complex world and our methods of analysis and response are in dire need of re-innovation.

Don’t these two dudes look just thrilled to be in a photo-opt for the signing of draconian legislation?