"All cruelty springs from weakness."

(Seneca, 4BC-AD65)

With what arrogance and lack of shame investors claim that the dollar is more important that human life, even those of our own American retirees. Morningstar.com posted an article, Democrat-Proof Health-Care Stocks, in which Karen Andersen states, "With the Medicare Trust Fund poised for bankruptcy during baby boomer retirement, many Democrats are eager to give the government more control over the drug industry by facilitating direct negotiations over drug prices and a pathway for the approval of generic biologics. While some investors have clearly been discouraged by the prospect of more government control, we think there are several health-care stocks that are well-shielded from any potential Democrat-initiated legislation." Oh, what horror! The democratic legislation to make medications affordable! The type of alienation that occurs such that people are merely seen a objects to be manipulated - that human sacrifice for the god of currency is seen as unquestionable - bares little difference than the horrors perpetrated by fascist regimes that perceived people as objects whose extermination would lead to greater wealth. Absolutely disgusting.

"The effect of riding in automobiles on the perception of pedestrians, bicyclists, and other motorists demonstrates that spaces can banish people to an alien universe even when those others are close by. People who are usually good-natured and gregarious are often likely, as motorists, to resent, berate, and sometimes even attack pedestrians, joggers, and other motorists who occupy the road. The key condition that facilitates this result seems to be that people are enclosed by different spatial boundaries, are moving at different speeds, and have no adequate mode of communication and little mutual understanding about how to stay out of each other's way in unforeseen circumstances. Psychological isolation occurs in spite of total visibility. Indeed, this is the kind of visibility that increases alienation because, like visibility in a prison or psychiatric ward, it is experienced as surveillance and threat. In such settings visibility and proximity only emphasize the impossibility of communication." - Murray Edelman, taken from From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Consequences.

I've been writing a lot lately, hence all the quotes.


"[Immortality striving] was a universal principle firmly anchored in each individual person, no matter who he was; it was present in each culture, no matter how varied its beliefs might seem, or how much mankind itself seemed to change from epoch to epoch. Beliefs were not fixed and final realities; they varied from period to period, from one social from to another. What was fixed was the principle of a “dominant immortality-ideology.” In each historical period or social group, man though that he lived absolute truth because his social life gave expression to his deepest innate hunger . . . “Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis just the same old struggle over . . . immortality” . . . Each person nourishes his immortality in the ideology of self-perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this gives his life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder men go into a fit of rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, [thus] your life becomes fallible." - Ernest Becker, from Escape From Evil.

"Take stock of those around you and you will . . . hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality." - Jose Ortega y Gasset

Just keep this in the back of your head when you hear the War on Terror propaganda:

"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a Communist dictatorship . . . voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

--Hermann Goering to prison psychologist and U.S. Army Captain Gustave M. Gilbert, at the Nuremberg Trials. April 18, 1946. See G. M. Gilbert, Ph.D., Nuremberg Diary (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947), 278-9. [emphasis original].