In thinking about the political difficulties which inevitably arise every time we generate a too top-heavy oligarchic system, I started wondering how to frame such a challenge to our best thinkers — how would you change society’s rules to take advantage of the tremendous energy towards the accumulation of wealth and power such that those […]

David Letterman plaintively asked Rachel Maddow last night “Why, in 2012, are we still so focused on killing other humans?” during the interview about her book Drift which discusses our increasing disconnect from the process of declaring and making war.  She dodged his question with “That’s above my pay grade” and “Whoever figures that out […]

Before the Beginning was the Void.  Then was the Law: something must change.  And the Law was called entropy, aka time.  So, the Void changed into Something.  And at the next execution of the Law (planck time tick), the Something also changed.  And on, and on, ’til nowabouts … Stars following the first generation formed […]

I recently tweeted: Even the richest person envies someone. The true measure of wealth is gratefulness. That definition works for me, but the economics lecture I attended today explored more traditional notions: value of use, value of exchange, value from production and value from obligation from the Henry George school of thinking about economics. I […]

Another interesting swimming pool conversation this evening, about the recent Supreme Court decision giving corporations the right to essentially buy as many votes as they want, and the relative quiet now that the health care bill has passed. I got to thinking, why fight the system? And, it’s not really that new that corporations have […]

A friend and I were talking about the bailout, and I mentioned an idea I’d heard from a couple of the late night comedians … Instead of giving the $1.5 Trilliion to Wall Street, the banks, and Detroit, we could have given it to ourselves — it would have been about  $50,000 per citizen.  (My […]