Thursday, March 8, 2012

'improving' economy

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A bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed news story about an improving economy includes the observation,

Economists expect home prices to fall even further this year. Banks are expected to resume millions of foreclosures now that they have settled with state and federal officials over questionable lending practices.
Stocks are going up (is that possibly because people have nowhere else to put what money they have?), people are starting to borrow ... and no one has done piss-in-a-snow-bank to reform the rules that nourished the 2008 Depression.

Joseph Goebbels, stand up and take a bow!
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4 comments:

  1. Hi.. Was doing some web design halfway and felt lost and funny that it's the kind of time when I will remember to visit your blog for inspiration and at other times before desperation. Took a look at the youtube video in the earlier post by Taigen Shodo Harada Roshi and it feels abit fuzzy all out of a sudden.

    As if sudden enlightenment struck me I was wondering why is that gentleman not smiling to the camera..

    Yeah he's nice and peaceful and tranquil the way zen teachers I imagined to be

    There and then I realised that facing the computer screen for almost the entire day has taken away the smile perhaps like a meditation room that is dim with indoor lighting and intentionally shaded from the outside sun in a manner reminiscent of my first computer-3d-rendered project back in 2004 .. the room I designed back then was exactly the same in terms of ambient lighting as shown in the yotube video

    i wish somebody built a zen hall on top of a tree and hung a swing under the biggest branch where the kiddos can have fun under their dad while he sat and meditated.

    metta.. with funny dreams like now..
    lionel

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    1. touch wood... due respect to the roshi... time to sit again there is something wonderous about the aura which roshis and zen teachers bring about it has a very calming effect

      thanks for the link and the timely reminder to rest :)

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  2. I actually heard Joseph Goebbels for the first time on the radio this morning. It gave me goosebumps. Nothing like I expected: very soft-spoken, eloquent, even understated. Kind of the opposite of Hitler, in a way. No wonder the combination was so successful!

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  3. William Shirer, author of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," was a news correspondent in Berlin during World War II. As a news reporter, he had access to a wide array of perspectives offered on news wires not generally available inside Germany. And in Shirer's "Berlin Diaries," he described what it was like to know the relative truth of world events (from the wires) and yet live in an environment where, when he left the office each day, he was in a world where people were convinced by the 'big lie' that Goebbels propagated. Everyone around him believed something different from what Shirer knew to be true ... and as a result he described how hard it was not to believe what he knew to be untrue. The longing to belong and the relying on others as a means of defining the truth was just too strong. It was a frightening and yet utterly human observation, I thought... claiming to be a fan of the truth and yet collapsing in the face of widely-held perception.

    Without cynicism, Shirer's plight puts meat on the bone of LaRochefoucauld's roughly-translated observation that "the intelligence of the mass/crowd is inversely proportionate to its number."

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