Category Archives: Art and Ideas

Genesis On the Resource Wars…

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From the Parsha of Toldot (Genesis 25: 19 -28:9)

“Isaac has now moved into the valley of Gerar (meaning: Lodging Place) and settled his family. Here alone I believe we can stop and look at what he has gone through. Surely we can say this was a man of faith. He had to believe that the L-rd truly intended to bless him as He had his father Abraham. Isaac demonstrated patience by never giving up on G-d, for the birth of his heirs. He trusted in the midst of a famine that the land he was led to would be blessed. He even had to trust, that now, as he was being “forced” from the land where he became so wealthy, that G-d still was faithful to keep His promises. We know that Abraham was a man of faith but likewise so was Isaac. Yet, it’s still not here where our lesson stems. It is in the land where Isaac has now settled, in the valley.

Isaac is in this valley, the very same place his father had been years before Isaac’s birth. Isaac now decides to re-dig the wells his father had once dug. He even intended to give each the same name his father had given to each. These wells had to be restored, because after the death of Abraham, the Philistines had sealed off all of the wells that Abraham had dug. As the servants of Isaac dug and discovered water, the herdsmen of the valley began to quarrel with Isaac’s men. These men demanded that the water of this new well belonged to them. This quarrel led Isaac to name the well Esek, which means “contention”. However, instead of stewing over or forcing his way into ownership of this well he moves on to dig another. Again, there is another argument of this the second well. Once more the long-suffering character of Isaac, which was formed through his twenty years of waiting on the L-rd for children, through his stay with the Philistines and here in the “lodging place”, becomes evident. Instead of arguing over this second well he leaves it as well and calls it Sitnah which means “enmity”. Many of us may be tempted to quit at this point and submit ourselves to the task of just trying to make as little stir as possible and not run the risk of having our work stolen from us again. Not Isaac.

Just when it seems as though every well Isaac seeks to dig will be stolen by the people of the valley, his servants dig another well. Isaac doesn’t stop and think what if I dig this well and they come and take it from me again. Instead, he decides he will dig once more. If the L-rd has blessed him then no man can stop that blessing. Isaac’s faith further deepened his resolve to go out and dig one more time. It is this well where, finally, no conflict arises……”

My Comment

And likewise with inventing or writing or starting a business….

The libertarian way is to move on, realizing that the answer to a fight over resources or markets (or attribution), is to move to a new place. It’s also the thesis of a popular business book, The Blue Ocean Strategy

Unlike Malthusians or Marxists, the true free marketer (unlike the opportunistic free marketer) recognizes that neither resources nor markets nor credit are really limited (they might sometimes seem to be) and that only the uncreative needs to poach.

Tagore on Freedom

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“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by
narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening
thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country
awake!”

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Johns Lanchester on Neo-Feudal Bad Times to Come

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John Lanchester in The London Review of Books cited by Chris Hedges at Truthdig:

“The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.”

Friedrich Hayek on the Pretence of Knowledge

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Friedrich Hayek on “the pretence of knowledge:”

“Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process… will hardly ever be fully known or measurable.”

Thanks to Kevin Duffy.

Mandukya Upanishad on the Ego and Dream States

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The Upanishads are Sanskrit texts of commentary on the four primary Vedic religious classics of Hinduism (the Rig, Sama, Yajur, Atharva).

This passage is a commentary on dream analysis contained in one of them:

“Dreams, therefore, are due to repressed desires. This is one of the causes behind dreams. This is the only factor that the psychoanalysts of the West emphasise. But Indian psychologists and psychoanalysts, like the Raja Yogins and the philosophers of the Vedanta, have touched another aspect of dream. The dreams may be, to some extent, of course, the results of complexes created by frustrated desires. But, this is not wholly true. Dreams may be due to other reasons also; one such reason being the working of past Karma. The effects of past Karmas, meritorious or unmeritorious, may project themselves into dream when chances are not given to them for expression in waking life. Also, a thought of some other person may affect you. A friend of yours may be deeply thinking of you; and you may have a dream of him, or you may have a dream with experiences corresponding to his thoughts. Your mother may be far away, crying for you, and her thought can affect you; you may have a dream. All this is equal to saying that a telepathic effect can produce dreams. In the case of spiritual seekers, Guru’s grace can cause a dream; and catastrophic experiences that one may have to pass through in the waking world may pass lightly as a dream experience by his grace. Due to the power of the Guru, one may have a dream suffering, instead of a waking one…….. The reason is that you oppose their function in waking life, due to the assertions of the ego. You counteract Isvara’s working and Guru’s blessing by the action of your own egoism. But, in dreaming, the ego subsides, to some extent. You become more normal, one may say, and you approximate yourself more to reality, rather than to artificiality, in dream. Thus, it is easier for these powers to operate in dream than in waking. .”

— The Mandukya Upanishad on dreams, elucidated by Swami Krishnananda

Samuel Johnson on Hypocrisy

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Samuel Johnson writing about the misuse of the charge of “hypocrisy”:

“Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.”

Libertarian Living: A Country Boy Can Survive

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A Country Boy Can Survive
– Hank Williams Jr.

The preacher man says it’s the end of time
And the Mississippi River she’s a goin’ dry
The interest is up and the Stock Market’s down
And you only get mugged
If you go down town

I live back in the woods, you see
A woman and the kids, and the dogs and me
I got a shotgun rifle and a 4-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive

I can plow a field all day long
I can catch catfish from dusk till dawn
We make our own whiskey and our own smoke too
Ain’t too many things these ole boys can’t do
We grow good ole tomatoes and homemade wine

And a country boy can survive

Country girl know how to fry..etc.

War Pigs

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War Pigs – Nothing’s Changed
Hat-tip to Brad Spangler

It’s still the bankers making money from debt and war…

While the sheeple swing their woolly heads back and forth, hypnotized –

left-right

black-white

public-private

socialist-capitalist

gay-straight, feminist-patriarchal, Muslim-Christian, East-West, poor-rich, working-class-middle-class, urban-rural, blue-state-red-state…

back-forth…democrat-republican…