Term Life Policy Quotes

Turns out that once you kill a god, people want to talk to you. Paranormal insurance salesmen with special "godslayer" term life policies. Charlatan's with "godproof" armor and extraplanar safe houses for rent. But most notably, other gods...

Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for. Do students ever hear this? What they hear is a constant drumbeat, in the public discourse, that seeks to march them in the opposite direction. When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them.

my original view was closest to Aristotle’s—that everything we do is done in order to make us happy—but I actually detest the word happiness, which is so overused that it has become almost meaningless. It is an unworkable term for science, or for any practical goal such as education, therapy, public policy, or just changing your personal life.

It’s the difference between utility and virtue. Many policy makers now think of education in functional terms. It’s about learning skills that will help students find employment—such as using a word processor or spreadsheet. Yet what about helping people to figure out the meaning of life? Or become good people? Or make a difference to others? Is education for a stage in life, completed once we find jobs, or should it be a lifelong pursuit?

In recent decades, "pluralism" has become something of a buzzword. It is variously employed. Often it is used to argue that no normative ethic, even of the vaguest and most tentative sort, can be "imposed" in our public life. In practice this means that public policy decisions reflect a surrender of the normal to the abnormal, of the dominant to the deviant. Indeed it is of more than passing interest that terms such as abnormal or deviant have been largely exorcised from polite vocabulary among the elites in American life. The displacement of the constitutive by the marginal is not so much the result of perverse decision makers as it is the inevitable consequence of a polity and legal system in which the advantage of initiative lies with the offended.

What happens, Kissinger asked, “if technology has become such a part of everyday life that it defines its own universe as the sole relevant one?” In this system there was little room for human will or agency or the cultivation of such human qualities as ambiguity and intuition. Hard facts bred a tyranny of their own that prioritized the immediate present over an understanding of the past or a sensitivity toward the future. Focus groups and opinion polls replaced individual decision-making and responsibility; the immediate headline-driven mood of the crowd overrode long-range perspective. Foreign policy was “in danger of turning into a subdivision of short-term domestic politics” in which “the quest is for consensus, less by the exchange of ideas than by a sharing of emotions.” The United States was in danger of “careening through crises without comprehending them.” This was no way for a great power to engage with the rest of the world, least of all in a world armed with nuclear weapons.

The nature of the state itself—the basic formal unit of international life—has been subjected to a multitude of pressures: attacked and dismantled by design, in some regions corroded from neglect, often submerged by the sheer rush of events. Europe has set out to transcend the state and to craft a foreign policy based principally on soft power and humanitarian values. Parts of the Middle East have dissolved into sectarian and ethnic components in conflict with each other; religious militias and the powers backing them violate borders and sovereignty at will. And in several parts of the world we have witnessed, since the end of the Cold War, the phenomenon of “failed states,” of “ungoverned spaces,” or of states that hardly merit the term, having no monopoly on the use of force or effective central authority.

Since our civilization is irreversibly dependent on electronics, abolition of EMR is out of the question. However, as a first step toward averting disaster, we must halt the introduction of new sources of electromagnetic energy while we investigate the biohazards of those we already have with a completeness and honesty that have so far been in short supply. New sources must be allowed only after their risks have been evaluated on the basis of the knowledge acquired in such a moratorium. 
With an adequately funded research program, the moratorium need last no more than five years, and the ensuing changes could almost certainly be performed without major economic trauma. It seems possible that a different power frequency—say 400 hertz instead of 60—might prove much safer. Burying power lines and providing them with grounded shields would reduce the electric fields around them, and magnetic shielding is also feasible. 
A major part of the safety changes would consist of energy-efficiency reforms that would benefit the economy in the long run. These new directions would have been taken years ago but for the opposition of power companies concerned with their short-term profits, and a government unwilling to challenge them. It is possible to redesign many appliances and communications devices so they use far less energy. The entire power supply could be decentralized by feeding electricity from renewable sources (wind, flowing water, sunlight, georhermal and ocean thermal energy conversion, and so forth) into local distribution nets. This would greatly decrease hazards by reducing the voltages and amperages required. Ultimately, most EMR hazards could be eliminated by the development of efficient photoelectric converters to be used as the primary power source at each point of consumption. The changeover would even pay for itself, as the loss factors of long-distance power transmission—not to mention the astronomical costs of building and decommissioning short-lived nuclear power plants—were eliminated. Safety need not imply giving up our beneficial machines. 
Obviously, given the present technomilitary control of society in most parts of the world, such sane efficiency will be immensely difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, we must try. Electromagnetic energy presents us with the same imperative as nuclear energy: Our survival depends on the ability of upright scientists and other people of goodwill to break the military-industrial death grip on our policy-making institutions.

The term 'international relations' (IR) may be used both for a 'condition' and a 'discipline'. Quincy Wright, for example, makes such a distinction. The official relations between sovereign countries are described as international relations, though according to Wright, '… the word "interstate" would have been more accurate because in political science, the state came to be the term applied to such societies'. Viewed thus, international relations, as a condition, refers to the facts of international life, that is to say, the actual conduct of relations among nations through diplomacy based on foreign policy. It also includes actual areas of cooperation, conflict and war. According to Quincy Wright, IR should tell the 'truth about the subject', i.e., how such relations are conducted and, as discipline, IR should treat them in a systematic and scientific manner.

The UK office for National Statistics has identified the things that matter most for happiness as "health, relationships, work, and the environment" - a list that tallies closely with our basic goods. Given that our lives have not noticeably improved in these respects since 1974 it is hardly surprising that we do not feel any happier. Are we then suggesting a return to living standards of 1974? Not necessarily, for the luxuries acquired since then may, even if they have added nothing to our real well-being, be painful to forgo. This is an instance of the general truth that damaging social changes cannot always be rectified simply by being reversed, any more than a man flattened by a steamroller can be restored to life by being run over backwards. What we are saying is that the long-term goal of economic policy should henceforth not be growth, but the restructuring of our collective existence so as to facilitate the good life.

Behavioural economics is an odd term. As Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger once said, ‘If economics isn’t behavioural, I don’t know what the hell is.’ It’s true: in a more sensible world, economics would be a subdiscipline of psychology.* Adam Smith was as much a behavioural economist as an economist – The Wealth of Nations (1776) doesn’t contain a single equation. But, strange though it may seem, the study of economics has long been detached from how people behave in the real world, preferring to concern itself with a parallel universe in which people behave as economists think they should. It is to correct this circular logic that behavioural economics – made famous by experts such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Dan Ariely and Richard Thaler – has come to prominence. In many areas of policy and business there is much more value to be found in understanding how people behave in reality than how they should behave in theory.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia prohibit inmates from voting while incarcerated for a felony offense. Only two states - Maine and Vermont - permit inmates to vote. The vast majority of states continue to withhold the right to vote when prisoners are released on parole. Even after the term of punishment expires, some states deny the right to vote for a period ranging from a number of years to the rest of one's life. This is far from the norm in other countries - like Germany, for instance, which allows (and even encourages) prisoners to vote. In fact, about half of European countries allow all incarcerated people to vote, while others disqualify only a small number of prisoners from the polls. Prisoners vote either in their correctional facilities or by some version of absentee ballot in their town of previous residence. Almost all of the countries that place some restrictions on voting in prison are in Eastern Europe, part of the former Communist bloc. No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law. In those few European countries that permit limited postprison disqualification, the sanction is very narrowly tailored and the number of people disenfranchised is probably in the dozens or hundreds. In the United States, by contrast, voting disqualification upon release from prison is automatic, with no legitimate purpose, and affects millions.

I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilárd proposes to submit to you,” Einstein wrote. “The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilárd is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy.”34 Roosevelt never read the letter. It was found in his office after he died on April 12 and was passed on to Harry Truman, who in turn gave it to his designated secretary of state, James Byrnes. The result was a meeting between Szilárd and Byrnes in South Carolina, but Byrnes was neither moved nor impressed. The atom bomb was dropped, with little high-level debate, on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima. Einstein was at the cottage he rented that summer on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, taking an afternoon nap. Helen Dukas informed him when he came down for tea. “Oh, my God,” is all he said.35 Three days later, the bomb was used again, this time on Nagasaki. The following day, officials in Washington released a long history, compiled by Princeton physics professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, of the secret endeavor to build the weapon. The Smyth report, much to Einstein’s lasting discomfort, assigned great historic weight for the launch of the project to the 1939 letter he had written to Roosevelt. Between the influence imputed to that letter and the underlying relationship between energy and mass that he had formulated forty years earlier, Einstein became associated in the popular imagination with the making of the atom bomb, even though his involvement was marginal. Time put him on its cover, with a portrait showing a mushroom cloud erupting behind him with E=mc2 emblazoned on it. In a story that was overseen by an editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose flair from the period: Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and hair like an aurora borealis… Albert Einstein did not work directly on the atom bomb. But Einstein was the father of the bomb in two important ways: 1) it was his initiative which started U.S. bomb research; 2) it was his equation (E = mc2) which made the atomic bomb theoretically possible.36 It was a perception that plagued him. When Newsweek did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All,” Einstein offered a memorable lament. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I never would have lifted a finger.”37 Of course, neither he nor Szilárd nor any of their friends involved with the bomb-building effort, many of them refugees from Hitler’s horrors, could know that the brilliant scientists they had left behind in Berlin, such as Heisenberg, would fail to unlock the secrets. “Perhaps I can be forgiven,” Einstein said a few months before his death in a conversation with Linus Pauling, “because we all felt that there was a high probability that the Germans were working on this problem and they might succeed and use the atomic bomb and become the master race.”38

Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita metrics. Furthermore, well-known composite indices of urban performance and the quality of life, such as those assembled by the World Economic Forum and magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist, primarily rely on naive linear combinations of such measures.6 Because we have quantitative scaling curves for many of these urban characteristics and a theoretical framework for their underlying dynamics we can do much better in devising a scientific basis for assessing performance and ranking cities. The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money. This is expressed by the superlinear scaling laws whose exponents are 1.15 rather than 1.00. This approximately 15 percent increase in all socioeconomic activity with every doubling of the population size happens almost independently of administrators, politicians, planners, history, geographical location, and culture.

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves? In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his hugely influential paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which famously described people as having a hierarchy of needs. It is often depicted as a pyramid. At the bottom are our basic needs—the essentials of physiological survival (such as food, water, and air) and of safety (such as law, order, and stability). Up one level are the need for love and for belonging. Above that is our desire for growth—the opportunity to attain personal goals, to master knowledge and skills, and to be recognized and rewarded for our achievements. Finally, at the top is the desire for what Maslow termed “self-actualization”—self-fulfillment through pursuit of moral ideals and creativity for their own sake. Maslow argued that safety and survival remain our primary and foundational goals in life, not least when our options and capacities become limited. If true, the fact that public policy and concern about old age homes focus on health and safety is just a recognition and manifestation of those goals. They are assumed to be everyone’s first priorities. Reality is more complex, though. People readily demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice their safety and survival for the sake of something beyond themselves, such as family, country, or justice. And this is regardless of age. What’s more, our driving motivations in life, instead of remaining constant, change hugely over time and in ways that don’t quite fit Maslow’s classic hierarchy. In young adulthood, people seek a life of growth and self-fulfillment, just as Maslow suggested. Growing up involves opening outward. We search out new experiences, wider social connections, and ways of putting our stamp on the world. When people reach the latter half of adulthood, however, their priorities change markedly. Most reduce the amount of time and effort they spend pursuing achievement and social networks. They narrow in. Given the choice, young people prefer meeting new people to spending time with, say, a sibling; old people prefer the opposite. Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future.

we do not know the physics of climate system responses to warming well enough to blame most of the warming on human activities. Human causation is simply assumed. The models are designed with the assumption that the climate system was in natural balance before the Industrial Revolution, despite historical evidence to the contrary. They only produce human-caused climate change because that is the way they are designed. This is in spite of abundant evidence of past warm episodes, such as 1,000- to 2,000-year-old tree stumps being uncovered by receding glaciers; temperature proxy evidence for the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods covering that same time frame; and Arctic sea ice proxy evidence for a natural decrease in sea ice starting well before humans could be blamed. Natural warming since the Little Ice Age of a few hundred years ago is simply ignored in the design of climate models, since we do not know what caused it. Simply put, the computerized climate models support human causation of climate change because that’s what they assume from the outset. They are an example of circular reasoning. There is little to no evidence of long-term increases in heat waves, droughts, or floods. Wildfire activity has, if anything, decreased, even though poor land management practices are now making some areas more vulnerable to wildfires even without climate change. Contrary to popular perception and new reports, there is little to no evidence of increased storminess resulting from climate change. This includes tornadoes and hurricanes. Long-term increases in monetary storm damages have indeed occurred, but are due to increasing development, not worsening weather. Sea level has been rising naturally since at least the mid-1800s, well before humans could be blamed. Land subsidence in some areas (e.g. Norfolk, Miami, Galveston-Houston, New Orleans) would result in increasing flooding problems even without any sea-level rise, let alone human-induced sea-level rise causing thermal expansion of the oceans. Some evidence for recent acceleration of sea-level rise might support human causation, but the magnitude of the human component since 1950 has been only 1 inch every 30 years. Ocean acidification is now looking like a non-problem, as the evidence builds that sea life prefers somewhat more CO2, just as vegetation on land does. Given that CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, yet had been at dangerously low levels for thousands of years, the scientific community needs to stop accepting the premise that more CO2 in the atmosphere is necessarily a bad thing. Global greening has been observed by satellites over the last few decades, which is during the period of most rapid rises in atmospheric CO2. The benefits of increasing CO2 to agriculture have been calculated to be in the trillions of dollars. Crop yields continue to break records around the world, due to a combination of human ingenuity and the direct effects of CO2 on plant growth and water use efficiency. Much of this evidence is not known by our citizens, who are largely misinformed by a news media that favors alarmist stories. The scientific community is, in general, biased toward alarmism in order to maintain careers and support desired governmental energy policies. Only when the public becomes informed based upon evidence from both sides of the debate can we expect to make rational policy decisions. I hope my brief treatment of these subjects provides a step in that direction. THE END

Turns out that when you kill a god, people want to talk to you. Paranormal insurance salesmen with special "godslayer" term life policies. Charlatans with "god-proof" armor and extraplanar safe houses for rent. But, most notably, other gods, who want to first congratulate you on your achievement, second warn you not to try such shenanigans on them, and finally suggest that you try to slay one of their rivals-purely as a shenanigan, of course.

Last Comforts” was born when one nagging question kept arising early in my journey as a hospice volunteer. Why were people coming into hospice care so late in the course of their illness? That question led to many others that rippled out beyond hospice care. Are there better alternatives to conventional skilled nursing home operations? How are physicians and nurses educated about advanced illness and end-of-life care? What are more effective ways of providing dementia care? What are the unique challenges of minority and LGBT people? What is the role of popular media in our death-denying culture? What has been the impact of public policy decisions about palliative and hospice care? The book is part memoir of lessons learned throughout my experiences with patients and families as a hospice volunteer; part spotlight on the remarkable pathfinders and innovative programs in palliative and late-life care; and part call to action. I encourage readers – particularly my fellow baby boomers -- not only to make their wishes and goals clear to friends and family, but also to become advocates for better care in the broader community.

Have you ever had an experience where, had things turned out just a little bit differently, your entire life would have been transformed? Like a Supreme Court clerkship, a Rhodes Scholarship gets mentioned in your obituary. The door was open just a crack, in a way that seemed to say “I have an ‘open door’ policy, but I really don’t want to be bothered.” Success didn’t take you off the treadmill, but simply put you on a different treadmill, at a higher speed and with a steeper incline. When we’re young, overachieving, and unstoppable, we all think we’re special. But as we grow older, we reach a more realistic understanding of our place in the world. It happens at different times for different people, but eventually we all come to terms with our own ordinariness.

Unhorsing capitalism was never the New Deal’s intent anyway. Especially since the outset of the war, the regime had largely come to agreeable terms with big business interests. It shed most programmatic overtures to universalize the welfare state and extend it into areas like health and housing. Structural reconfigurations of power relations in the economy, long-term economic planning, and state ownership or management of capital investments (commonplace during the war) were all offensive to the new centers of the postwar policy making, what soon enough would be widely referred to as the Establishment. Moreover, the “welfare state,” for all the tears now shed over its near death, was in its origins in late-nineteenth-century Europe a creature of conservative elitists like Bismarck or David Lloyd George, and had been opposed by the left as a means of defusing working-class power and independence, a program installed without altering the basic configurations of wealth and political control. As the center of gravity shifted away from the Keynesian commonwealth toward what one historian has called “commercial Keynesianism” and another “the corporate commonwealth,” labor and its many allies among middle-class progressives and minorities found themselves fighting on less friendly terrain. If they could no longer hope to win in the political arena measures that would benefit all working people—like universal health insurance, for example—trade unions could pursue those objectives for their own members where they were most muscular, especially in core American industries like auto and steel. So the labor movement increasingly chose to create mini private welfare states.

The five major sources of income which are exempt for NRIs are: Proceeds from Life Insurance Policy - provided the policy complies with the exemption criteria/conditions Dividend from a domestic company or mutual fund scheme - provided the company or mutual fund scheme has paid the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT), if applicable Interest on an NRE account – provided the NRE account is maintained as per the FEMA rules Interest on FCNR or RFC accounts – provided the account owner is a non-resident or RBNOR under the Income Tax Act Long Term Capital Gain on equity and equity based mutual fund – provided the Security Transaction Tax (STT) has been paid

So grave were the interstate tensions over trade that Nathaniel Gorham, named president of Congress in 1786, feared that clashes between New York and its neighbors might degenerate into civil war. Similarly acrimonious trade disputes erupted between other states with major seaports and neighbors who imported goods through them. The states were arrogating a right that properly belonged to a central government: the right to formulate trade policy. This persuaded Hamilton that unless a new federal government with a monopoly on customs revenues was established, disunion would surely ensue. As individual states developed interests in their own taxes, they would be less and less likely to sacrifice for the common good. In April 1786, amid a worsening economic crisis, Hamilton agreed that the time had come to act and was elected to a one-year term in the New York Assembly. Later on, he told a Scottish relative that he had been involved in a lucrative legal practice “when the derangement of our public affairs by the feebleness of the general confederation drew me again reluctantly into public life.” His zeal for reform signaled anything but reluctance. He was seized with a crusading sense of purpose and had a momentous, long-term plan to enact. Hamilton told Troup he had stood for election because he planned to “render the next session” of the Assembly “subservient to the change he meditated” in the structure of the national government. Indeed, his election to the Assembly was a preliminary step in an extended sequence of events that led straight to the Constitutional Convention.

Anti-corruption policies are like cancer curing treatments. They affect good cells, say good people, in the short run; but make the life of a nation flourish in the long term.

In sum, what drives the seven-fold increase of U.S. mass incarceration since the 1970s, and which holds it in place, cannot be explained in terms of citizens and residents’ offenses, by crime rates rising or falling. Instead, we have to understand it as policy, as modes of state rule and dissemination of social terror. In this chapter I treat six dimensions of this terror that are important to understand. Then, in chapter 2, I place these dimensions of U.S. social life in the setting of U.S. pursuit of global sovereignty.

Abortion is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures in the United States, and it is tragic that many women who have abortions are all too often mischaracterized and stigmatized, their exercise of moral agency sullied. Their judgment is publicly and forcefully second-guessed by those in politics and religion who have no business entering the deliberation. The reality is that women demonstrate forethought and care; talk to them the way clergy do and witness their sense of responsibility. Women take abortion as seriously as any of us takes any health-care procedure. They understand the life-altering obligations of parenthood and family life. They worry over their ability to provide for a child, the impact on work, school, the children they already have, or caring for other dependents. Perhaps the woman is unable to be a single parent or is having problems with a husband or partner or other kids.2 Maybe her contraception failed her. Maybe when it came to having sex she didn’t have much choice. Maybe this pregnancy will threaten her health, making adoption an untenable option. Or perhaps a wanted pregnancy takes a bad turn and she decides on abortion. It’s pretty complicated. It’s her business to decide on the outcome of her pregnancy—not ours to intervene, to blame, or to punish. Clergy know about moral agency through pastoral work. Women and families invite us into their lives to listen, reflect, offer sympathy, prayer, or comfort. But when it comes to giving advice, we recognize that we are not the ones to live with the outcome; the patient faces the consequences. The woman bears the medical risk of a pregnancy and has to live with the results. Her determination of the medical, spiritual, and ethical dimensions holds sway. The status of her fetus, when she thinks life begins, and all the other complications are hers alone to consider. Many women know right away when a pregnancy must end or continue. Some need to think about it. Whatever a woman decides, she needs to be able to get good quality medical care and emotional and spiritual support as she works toward the outcome she seeks; she figures it out. That’s all part of “moral agency.” No one is denying that her fetus has a moral standing. We are affirming that her moral standing is higher; she comes first. Her deliberations, her considerations have priority. The patient must be the one to arrive at a conclusion and act upon it. As a rabbi, I tell people what the Jewish tradition says and describe the variety of options within the faith. They study, deliberate, conclude, and act. I cannot force them to think or do differently. People come to their decisions in their own way. People who believe the decision is up to the woman are typically called “pro-choice.” “Choice” echoes what is called “moral agency,” “conscience,” “informed will,” or “personal autonomy”—spiritually or religiously. I favor the term “informed will” because it captures the idea that we learn and decide: First, inform the will. Then exercise conscience. In Reform Judaism, for instance, an individual demonstrates “informed will” in approaching and deciding about traditional dietary rules—in a fluid process of study of traditional teaching, consideration of the personal significance of that teaching, arriving at a conclusion, and taking action. Unitarian Universalists tell me that the search for truth and meaning leads to the exercise of conscience. We witness moral agency when a member of a faith community interprets faith teachings in light of historical religious understandings and personal conscience. I know that some religious people don’t do

Many policy makers now think of education in functional terms. It’s about learning skills that will help students find employment—such as using a word processor or spreadsheet. Yet what about helping people to figure out the meaning of life? Or become good people? Or make a difference to others? Is education for a stage in life, completed once we find jobs, or should it be a lifelong pursuit?

What establishes the Boomers as a political generation is that the Boomers’ overriding policy ambitions have been defined not in conventional terms like race or gender, but by age and life cycle. This

Too often we're told that advocates of new policies are putting values of fairness above practical concerns, while supporters of laissez-faire are the ones who are serious about the economy. This isn't correct. For today's economy, the question is not whether we should help families with handouts; it's how to help families so they can thrive as workers and consumers. To boost long-term economic growth, businesses need a highly skilled workforce, ready and able to work. In today's economy, where most workers also have care responsibilities, this means we must find ways to address conflicts between work and life. These conflicts aren't trivial private travails; they're serious economic problems.

Our economics, social life, politics and schools have insisted that having more toys is better than having fewer toys; that buying stuff is good for us; that we have to keep up with or exceed others in our consumption; that a high-paying job can take the place of meaningful work; that low-paying meaningless jobs that demean our humanity are better than none and we should be grateful for them because they will turn us into decent citizens; and that a free market has the same powers as a just God. But capitalism rests ultimately not on innovation or entrepreneurship or brains or even a free market - those are just stories we like to tell ourselves because they make those who are successful look good. At its base, industrial capitalism's success rests on exploitation of resources, racism, child abuse, sexism and war. But even more than all these, contemporary capitalism rests on consumption: government and corporate consumption of resources, technology, and scientific research, and citizen consumption of market goods. We are asked to consume not only material goods, but ideas, policies, whole worldviews that are presented with all the persuasive skills and battering psychological hype that can be bought. We are under assault, being laid siege by hype: corporate hype, political hype, military hype, educational hype, commercial hype. And as our civil rights have declined in recent years, freedom has come to mean the freedom to choose among 16 brand names of one product. This is the harvest of a culture so bent on growth with all possible speed that it will pour 100,000 chemicals in the earth and atmosphere, into our lakes, groundwaters and oceans, before it has a clue about the long-term effects of a single one of them.

It was a strange world, he continued, where Soviet expansionism could be called, in the Yalta definition, “establishing a broad democratic basis,” and where a single-party government that used secret police to educate its citizenry qualified as a democracy. It was stranger still when a leader could be called a dictator—the fascist Perón of Argentina was one, the fascist Vargas of Brazil was not—depending on his usefulness to U.S. foreign policy.18 These complaints were appended to Hoover’s larger catalog of the new liberalism’s sins: empty sloganeering, duplicitous policies, arrogant economic planning, sprawling bureaucracies, the buying of people with their own money, the creation of dependencies on the state, intolerance of opposition, the rewriting of history, the use of whipping boys to evade accountability, the turning of citizens against one another by promotion of class division, and an overarching belief, evident in the court-packing episode, that “the objective,” to use a favorite New Deal term, justified the means.19 These all became proofs in Hoover’s larger argument about the increasingly manipulative, overbearing nature of government, and the resulting degradation of public morals and true liberty:

The real struggle of today…is between that view of the world, termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth, and that other view, militarist, or, rather, diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture, and hereditary or racial prejudice.

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Therefore the first bill which passed the provisional Congress provided for receiving troops for short periods—as my memory serves, for sixty days. The chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, the heroic Colonel Bartow, who sealed his devotion to the cause with his life's blood on the field of Manassas, in deference to my earnest remonstrance against such a policy, returned with the bill to the House (the Congress then consisted of but one House), and procured a modification by which the term of service was extended to twelve months unless sooner discharged.

Work Takes On New Meaning In addition, according to Hunnicutt, during the last half century we’ve begun to lose the fabric of family, culture, and community that give meaning to life outside the workplace. The traditional rituals, the socializing, and the simple pleasure of one another’s company all provided structure for nonwork time, affording people a sense of purpose and belonging. Without this experience of being part of a people and a place, leisure leads more often to loneliness and boredom. Because life outside the workplace has lost vitality and meaning, work has ceased being a means to an end and become an end in itself. Hunnicutt notes: Meaning, justification, purpose, and even salvation were now sought in work, without a necessary reference to any traditional philosophic or theological structure. Men and women were answering the old religious questions in new ways, and the answers were more and more in terms of work, career, occupation, and professions.8 Arlie Hochschild, in her 2001 book, The Time Bind, says that families now have three jobs—work, home, and repair of relationships damaged by ever more time at the office. Even corporations with “family-friendly” policies subtly reward people who spend more time at work (whether they are more productive or not). Some offices are even getting more comfortable, while homes are more hectic, inducing a guilty desire to spend more time working because it’s more restful!9 The final piece of the puzzle snaps into place when we look at the shift in the religious attitude toward work that came with the rise of the Protestant ethic. Before that time, work was profane and religion was sacred. Afterward, work was seen as the arena where you worked out your salvation—and the evidence of a successful religious life was a successful financial life. So here we are in the twenty-first century. Our paid employment has taken on myriad roles. Our jobs now serve the function that traditionally belonged to religion: They are the place where we seek answers to the perennial questions “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” and “What’s it all for?” They also serve the function of families, giving answers to the questions “Who are my people?” and “Where do I belong?

The vast majority of states continue to withhold the right to vote when prisoners are released on parole. Even after the term of punishment expires, some states deny the right to vote for a period ranging from a number of years to the rest of one’s life. This is far from the norm in other countries—like Germany, for instance, which allows (and even encourages) prisoners to vote. In fact, about half of European countries allow all incarcerated people to vote, while others disqualify only a small number of prisoners from the polls. Prisoners vote either in their correctional facilities or by some version of absentee ballot in their town of previous residence. Almost all of the countries that place some restrictions on voting in prison are in Eastern Europe, part of the former Communist. No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law.

In the rest of the world, where action on carbon is just as slow and resistance to real policy changes just as strong, denial is simply not a problem. The corporate influence of fossil fuel is present, of course, but so are inertia and the allure of near-term gains and the preferences of the world’s workers and consumers, who fall somewhere on a long spectrum of culpability stretching from knowing selfishness through true ignorance and reflexive, if naive, complacency.

The real struggle of today…is between that view of the world, termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth, and that other view, militarist, or, rather, diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture, and hereditary or racial prejudice.” If

One of the arguments often made in response to weak public understanding of technology is a call to increase technological education - in its simplest formulation, to learn to code. Such a call is made frequently by politicians, technologists, pundits and business leaders, and it is often advanced in nakedly functional and pro-market terms: the information economy needs more programmers, and young people need jobs in the future. This is a good start, but learning to code is not enough, just as learning to plumb a sink is not enough to understand the complex interactions between water tables, political geography, aging infrastructure, and social policy that define, shape and produce actual life support systems in society. A simply functional understanding of systems is insufficient; one needs to be able to think about histories and consequences too. Where did these systems come from, who designed them and what for, and which of these intentions still lurk within them today?

Getting somebody confirmed to the Supreme Court has never been a slam dunk, in part because the Court’s role in American government has always been controversial. After all, the idea of giving nine unelected, tenured-for-life lawyers in black robes the power to strike down laws passed by a majority of the people’s representatives doesn’t sound very democratic. But since Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 Supreme Court case that gave the Court final say on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and established the principle of judicial review over the actions of the Congress and the president, that’s how our system of checks and balances has worked. In theory, Supreme Court justices don’t “make law” when exercising these powers; instead, they’re supposed to merely “interpret” the Constitution, helping to bridge how its provisions were understood by the framers and how they apply to the world we live in today. For the bulk of constitutional cases coming before the Court, the theory holds up pretty well. Justices have for the most part felt bound by the text of the Constitution and precedents set by earlier courts, even when doing so results in an outcome they don’t personally agree with. Throughout American history, though, the most important cases have involved deciphering the meaning of phrases like “due process,” “privileges and immunities,” “equal protection,” or “establishment of religion”—terms so vague that it’s doubtful any two Founding Fathers agreed on exactly what they meant. This ambiguity gives individual justices all kinds of room to “interpret” in ways that reflect their moral judgments, political preferences, biases, and fears. That’s why in the 1930s a mostly conservative Court could rule that FDR’s New Deal policies violated the Constitution, while forty years later a mostly liberal Court could rule that the Constitution grants Congress almost unlimited power to regulate the economy.

Some of you may view your investment policies on a shorter term basis. For your convenience, we include our usual table indicating the gains from compounding $100,000 at various rates: This table indicates the financial advantages of: 1. A long life (in the erudite vocabulary of the financial sophisticate this is referred to as the Methuselah Technique) 2. A high compound rate 3. A combination of both (especially recommended by this author) To be observed are the enormous benefits produced by relatively small gains in the annual earnings rate. This explains our attitude which while hopeful of achieving a striking margin of superiority over average investment results, nevertheless, regards every percentage point of investment return above average as having real meaning.

Before you start to save one penny for a child’s future college costs, I insist that you have the following financial priorities taken care of: You do not have credit card debt. You have an eight-month emergency savings fund. You have a term life insurance policy. You are saving for retirement; aiming to set aside 15% of your gross salary. Until all of that is in place you are not to think about saving for college.

the case of Nelene Fox. Fox was from Temecula, California, and was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 1991, when she was thirty-eight years old. Surgery and conventional chemotherapy failed, and the cancer spread to her bone marrow. The disease was terminal. Doctors at the University of Southern California offered her a radical but seemingly promising new treatment—high-dose chemotherapy with bone marrow transplantation. To Fox, it was her one chance of cure. Her insurer, Health Net, denied her request for coverage of the costs, arguing that it was an experimental treatment whose benefits were unproven and that it was therefore excluded under the terms of her policy. The insurer pressed her to get a second opinion from an Independent medical center. Fox refused—who were they to tell her to get another opinion? Her life was at stake. Raising $212,000 through charitable donations, she paid the costs of therapy herself, but it was delayed. She died eight months after the treatment. Her husband sued Health Net for bad faith, breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional damage, and punitive damages and won. The jury awarded her estate $89 million. The HMO executives were branded killers. Ten states enacted laws requiring insurers to pay for bone marrow transplantation for breast cancer. Never mind that Health Net was right. Research ultimately showed the treatment to have no benefit for breast cancer patients and to actually worsen their lives. But the jury verdict shook the American insurance industry. Raising questions about doctors’ and patients’ treatment decisions in terminal illness was judged political suicide.

What is an Indian?", asked Commissioner Thomas Morgan two years after the Wounded Knee massacre. And his answer, "blood and land". He was right, but not in a way he understood. If the U.S. army and government had spent more in the ruthless elimination of the tribes, root and branch, as Sherman hoped, then strangled off their resources as Congress wanted, the "Indian problem" would have been solved. But nothing is straightforward in American history, not even ruthlessness and the nation's better angels prevented total genocide. Their hearts were right but their methods were mad. To save the Indian, they reasoned, they must kill the Indian inside. Thus began decades of social engineering rivaling the darkest visions of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. The reservation was the laboratory where new and often contradictory policies were introduced and tested much like those classic social experiments where lab rats are shocked and rewarded but always randomly. Each era had its own philosophy. Assimilation, reeducation, christianization and termination of the tribes. Yet the purpose of each was similar. Strip the Indian of his "Indian-ness", then reshape him as an idealized american, stamped and milled as if in a machine. It is easy to see why the young rebels of AIM felt such loathing for the BIA and Washington. In the parlance of the counter-culture, they saw it as "the machine". How does one survive in such a world? The machine is overwhelming and unstoppable, larger than any one woman or man. Black Elk saw it early, though he never used such dystopian terms. Perhaps the only true defense is the most intimate, preservation of one's soul. Seen that way, his life is more than just another tale of Indian vs. white, it becomes instead a parable of modern man.

he made his policy clear in response to a UN repatriation proposal: The refugee question could only be settled as part of an overall peace treaty between Israel and the Arab states, he declared. During the course of those negotiations, the long-term interests of the Arab and Jewish populations would be considered, and the Jewish state would take into account the destruction of Jewish life and property by the Arabs in their war of aggression, as a counterclaim against Arab charges of lost property.

there is no single Keynesian way out of depression, so there is no single Keynesian system of political economy. Keynesianism can at best be a common element in very different systems of mixed economic life. In terms of economic policy it has only one proposition: that governments should make sure that aggregate demand is sufficient to maintain a full-employment level of activity. By what mix of politics, policy and institutional innovation this is to be done is a political-economy question. One thing of which we can be tolerably sure is that the next phase of political economy will see less reliance on export-led growth, a more restricted financial system, an expanded public sector, and a more modest role for economics as tutor of governments.

Michigan is still home to one of the most extreme human containment systems in the United States. Its prison population has increased by 450 percent since 1973, and the state maintains a higher rate of imprisonment than most countries. African Americans are the largest incarcerated group by far in Michigan, with a total population of 14 percent and a penal population of 49 percent. Latinos and Native Americans are incarcerated in Michigan at rates equal to their population percentage. However, white Michiganders, who make up 77 percent of the general population, are underrepresented in the prison population at 46 percent. Racialized sentencing policies have much to do with these statistics. Historians Heather Ann Thompson and Matthew Lassiter, the founding codirectors of the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan, point to "draconian" state legislation that by the 1990s included the infamous "lifer laws," which exacted life terms for narcotics possessions of over 650 grams and extinguished the opportunity for parole. As men and women were thrown behind bars for nonviolent offenses in the 1980s through the early 2000s, Detroit neighborhoods were gutted, children were orphaned, and voter rolls were depleted.

With no clear appreciation of the role of Islam in public life, policies were pursued and judged not in terms of their success or failure to deliver broad social and economic benefits, but in terms of whether they weakened or strengthened the putative Islamic purpose of the state.

Often I look back on the wasted years of the Mao Tze-tung era and the madness of the Cultural Revolution. I feel deeply saddened that so many lives were needlessly sacrificed. I was glad when the Cultural Revolution was officially declared a national catastrophe but I regret the Communist Party leadership’s inability or unwillingness to repudiate Mao’s policy in explicit terms.