Retrieved 10:05 AM Pacific 18 Dec 2008 from Is Governor Blagojevich's Conduct Any Different From Those in Congress?
Posted 10:43 AM on 12/18/2008knowBuddhaU permalinkTo conclude: It's all about transferring the Commons into private property in the context of a "holy" or "good" war. RB is crass, but exemplary.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD: "From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. ("Analysis" literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems -- predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again -- and when will we ever learn? -- we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.html?pagewanted=all&ei=5070&en=5e4810b4a0a154e2&ex=1229749200
NAOMI KLEIN: "Larry Summers in 1992: 'Spread the truth. The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere'...."
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/25/naomi_klein_robert_kuttner_and_michael
Feudalists live to exploit, to enrich themselves not as incompetence, but as the display and practice of prowess itself.Posted 11:10 AM on 12/18/2008
With respect to Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EHYPER/VEBLEN/veblenhp.html, and Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions, http://www.kexp.org/streamarchive/streamarchive.asp Mind Over Matters 8AM Sunday December 7, 2008
Bravo, Sister! Respect to CREW. It's feudalism, not democratic republicanism, that rules our day.
"Lordship has emerged as a more centrally important topic than the feudum. The quality of lords" relationships with their dependents, free and unfree, has been debated, with some historians stressing the predatory, exploitative aspects of lordship and others emphasizing its protective, beneficial features." [EB1 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/205583/feudalism]
You want yer despotism Malign, or Benign? Repub or Dem?
"[Feudalism is] based on the relation between lords and the peasants who worked their own land and that of the lord. ... [it] came to encompass all aspects of social organization and was characterized as a system that was both oppressive and hierarchical. [EB2 "feudalism." Encyclopædia Britannica. Standard Edition. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008.]
"[F]eudalism involves the exchange of allegiance for a grant of land (fief) between two people, usually men, of noble status." [EB2]
"Historians and philosophers were persuaded that if the universe operated systematically, so too must societies. In the 16th century some students of the law and customs of the fief declared that feudal institutions were universal ..." [EB1]
Feudalism is the order of our day.