Fear stalks women in America even when amoral men aren’t directly targeting them. This post from last year discusses how fear is a part of our culture, and drives far too much of our politics.
Freedom. It’s the basis of not just our system, but the values that the system was created to protect. Americans value their freedom above everything else.
But do we really have what it takes to be truly a free people today?
. As Barataria has discussed before, business cycles are not only real but heavily define the world in social and technical development terms. These cycles are, in purely economic terms, changes in availability and attitudes towards debt.
It is more than a little chilling to think that progress naturally comes in waves because of something as mundane as debt. But a system defined by money supply which has features that are destabilizing and work against sustainability and resilience is a large part of what we might call “capitalism.” The equilibrium of markets is pushed and pulled by the availability of capital.
One important feature of Fourth Wave Industrialization has to be that these cycles will need to be broken and greater monetary stability has to be achieved for a truly open market. This is likely to mean that equity will have to be favored over debt. But what, really, is the difference?
It’s October! Time for you to watch this absolute classic of animation and lose yourself in the brilliant score. This post is part of the annual tradition, first run in 2015.
It’s the spooky season, but it’s also the fun season. Before Winter wraps its embrace around us there is Halloween, the last chance to have some fun. It’s a challenge to the eerie creep of darkness we’re still adjusting to, still resisting at least one last time.
No movie captures the season for me quite like “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” the epic Tim Burton classic of stop-motion animation from the old school. Released in 1993, it was immediately recognized as a great classic movie for the holidays – Halloween, for the fun of it, and Christmas for the cynically twisted reaction to what it has become.
What makes this movie, however, isn’t just the great story and animation. The score by Danny Elfman is pure genius – and belongs in the repertoire of classical greats.
The Kavanaugh hearing was the most flagrant display yet of the sicknesses at the core of the United States. The tribal divisions were more bare than usual. No one cared about clear abuse of women or obvious ongoing alcohol addiction issues or rather obvious lying that demonstrated how clearly unfit the many is for a judicial position. He was their boy, and that was enough for him to get away with it.
There are no principles left for the nation, only force.
We can and likely will get past some of the worst of this after the November election. Then again, the rise of one party to a position of power and the ability to check these abuses will only make the situation worse in the immediate term. It’s hard to know how to get past this.
Ten years ago, Lehman Brothers collapsed in a pile of overextended debt that could not be sustained by a weakening housing market, stock market, and many other bubbles. It would later be called the end of the “housing bubble” as a general panic ensued over the asset most commonly held by the general public.
But the issue at hand was, more generally, a debt crisis which fueled an unsustainable rise in asset prices in many areas. Banks were caught with more liabilities than assets as loans that should never have been made defaulted.
Today, banks are more wary, especially of consumers. But corporations have been racking up debt to a level that many feel is unsustainable.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 