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Sunday 22 February 2015

The Unforgiving Nature of Trample-Down Economics

For what does it profit a man to make his way along promptly plowed pavement safely to his office building only to slip and crack his head open on the sidewalk below?


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The competitive engine of economic growth drives a cultural obsession more than growth itself. Why not shut things down a bit as long as we are buried, why not hibernate?

The answer, naturally, is that we, whoever that is, would fall too far behind in a game comprised of an unwillingness to forgive debt/rent/mortgage/utility bill, borne out of an inability to get someone else to do the same.

The arbiters of the rules of the game are so large and in charge as to be in a permanent state of paying themselves back for the money they borrowed. Self-lent lucre means never having to get back on your feet, just using them to stomp upon all but your initiates.

Accordingly analogous is the urban desperation evident in the removal of calamitous snowfall, which fuels loads of apocryphal stories like the one that Jane Byrne's mayoral bid in Chicago came down to her predecessor's untimely failure to clear the streets.

I guess what I am saying is that, if debt should be passed, it should be upward first; and all energy should be spent pushing the snow off of the walks and into the streets. What good does it do to clear them, lickety-split, if in the process you're just burying the cars on the side of the road until April Fools'? Move more slowly from December to March — or whenever the march back to the end of the year reveals itself... more naturally.

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I love the Sun, though in the summer I can't make a move without considering to what extent I'll be in a direct path of its unforgiving rays. I don't worship it, though I recognize it as the true capital of this solar system, hence, life on this planet. It is the star to which the greatest central monuments aspire yet pale in comparison.

The Sun is nature, not science or religion. It is so powerful as to be observed religiously, yet not awe-inspiring enough to leave modern science geared to its every move, winding in its wake. For science is under the constant threat of a dogmatic faux-science that has dominated Earth's population since not too long after genus homo went all erectus.

I am not talking about woo-world paganism or fundamental creationist philosophy, even those that would banish empiricism from the temples to the Sun or sons of gods. No. The primary corruption and oppression of the discipline that might otherwise be arrayed for the improvement of the quality of life comes rather from those whose methods are for the advancement of the few over the many.

Science predicts that long after humankind has succumbed to Earth's harshest conditions, the Sun will still be there, providing energy for whatever remains.


Matratzen Concord in der Sonne - Berlin-Friedrichshain - 2015