Sunday, June 07, 2009

spell in error

The recognized, and sometimes accepted, excuse for bad behavior: "I'm only human" is like a tarp. You can toss it over only so much junk before it ceases to disguise what it covers. If a person has simply lost their temper they will later have some regret. For such outbursts, apologies and forgiveness may be exchanged. But when someone blasts away in a fluent flurry of rage and later says they were provoked and the behavior calls for an apology not from them but from the object of their rage, then a very different game is being played. In the first case a person loses their temper, in the second, they loose it.

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Greed is never a victimless crime

Whenever someone enabled by their wealth to do such things, buys more of the limited and exhaustible necessities than they need, be it land, water, food, fuel or whatever, they bid the price of those resources out of reach of someone else who was on the verge of not affording the bare minimum.  That power to diminish well being is not the advertised face of wealth.   Less altruistic behavior is a common reaction to a net scarcity of resources but we make it worse with an economics that artificially worsens the scarcity by enabling some of us to hoard.

When the rich pay for more than they need, 
the poor pay more for what they need.


The merit of having a plan for more sustained or broadly beneficial use of a resource is effectively nil under the reward schemes of our economy.  We put the good faces of Lincoln, Washington, Hamilton and Franklin on our money.  That almost seems like lying to me.  Money is a sweetener to hide the real flavor of the inhumane nature of our transactions.  Lucifer, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, Gordon Gekko, Phil Gramm and Ronald Reagan's faces are the ones we should see each time we trade.