Thank you for the compliment. I enjoy many of your posts as well. The more we can move away from canned ideologies and the veil of obfuscation that is (many times) intentionally shrouded over most issues, the closer we can come to viewing naked reality.
Inflation benefits all those families who are heavily in debt. The debt they owe will eventually become worthless and they can pay it back with pennies on the dollar in real terms. Those who owed money and were knee deep in debt in the Weimar republic made out like bandits as they paid back their debt with worthless marks but they kept their assets. The losers of Weimar hyperinflation were the banks and creditors. They lent out good money and were paid back with toilet paper.
Ferrari FF and Lamborghini Aventador both sold out for their first year of production http://carscoop.blogspot.com/2011/03/ferrari-ff-and-lamborghini-aventador.html
The gap between the rich and poor is the widest ever!!! Nearly 50,000,000 people in poverty, this recovery was certainly for the rich and no one else!!!!
And the trickle down goes to public employees unions. The rest of the middle class are disappearing....
I just presumed that we would see how Rome failed and take preemptive steps to prevent the same moral degradation that they went through. The more I think about society and the way it functions, the more I realize that it targets youth. Without the inexperience of youth, much of todays garbage would have no legs to stand on. Progress is made by challenging long established beliefs, no question about that, and youth has always been the leader of change. But the same innocence that leads youth to change the world for the better, makes them the more susceptible to the dangers of holding those beliefs into an older age. I have always believed that the role of tradition is to imbue a society with a built in wisdom that fail safes in most circumstances, for the totality of a people. The modern trend is to break down all such things and the economic bottom line is all that counts. In modern societies, the least common denominator is not morality, but economics. if we all died at 35, the current system would probably work quite well! Maybe that is the big insight...
You know, it is almost as if we are on this big rush to get to wherever it is we are heading. I have this strange belief that, perhaps there is a wisdom that we cannot see in all of this. Consider the following. Say a E.L.E is in our "near" future. What if the very qualities that are so ugly in the human race, are the characteristics that allows us to survive or prevent (through some technological innovation) this E.L.E? I know this is a silly argument, but then, there seems to be this invisible hand that is driving us at a faster and faster pace towards, what? "What I'm asking is... are we happier, as a human race? Is the world fundamentally a better place because of science and technology? We shop at home, we surf the Web, and at the same time we feel emptier, lonelier, and more cut off from each other than at any other time in human history..." - Palmer Joss, Contact "You're an interesting species, an interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other." - alien, Contact
My Favorite movie Nitro. Here's a thought. What if the world is just the sum total of all our individual qualities. I've always said this and continue to believe that if everyone focused more on making themselves better that the world around them would change. Think about it. We live in a world where everyone is more focused on everything BUT themselves. We read tabloid magazines, watch reality TV shows, yell at the politicians, celebrities, our neighbors, our relatives. We always talk about the "other" guys problems. Never our own. What if we looked inward. What if each and every one of us just focused on improving ourselves instead of trying to improve other people. Instead of forcing change on to others, we forced change to ourselves. Nitro, I think when most people look in the mirror, they are so disgusted with what they see, that they project their anger and dismay at the world around them saying the world needs to change, not themselves. Just a thought.