vvvvvvvvvvvv.....

...let's see if this thing will turn over. cough, sputter... got some ideas to talk about, but not much time and I'm outta practice. Oh yeah, happy solstice everyone. Here's to new beginnings.

Speaking of which: America is insolvent.
Y'all are going to love this: my little brother is majoring in business and economics, two aspects of human devolution that I consider wholly irrational, and indeed psychopathic. So it's a good thing he's learning them in school! ;) It takes determination to be able to learn to see that mass hallucination, that 'invisible hand', that perfect alibi of all crimes: 'it's just business.' Jail a man and he'll break out eventually. Starve and tell him it's just business: he will wait to die before he will steal his life back. Sometimes he won't, but usually he will.
*ahem*.. so anyway, my brother and I have interesting conversations... he keeps me on my toes, and I, him. So far noone's thrown the knockout rhetorical punch.

Here is a late essay on the life and death of an economist, but it touches on something I hope to write about later (always later!)

The elevation to pre-eminence of an unholy but convenient alliance of technical and ideological imperatives has produced a disciplinary core in economics that is elaborate yet weightless. There has been no consensus on a project to understand the economic system in the large. On the contrary, there has been an implicit consensus that no such project will be contemplated.

The attack on Galbraith by his detractors highlights that he had broken the unspoken rules on the consensus. The attack also highlights how significant has been the ideological imperative in the economic discipline’s channeling of ‘credible’ academic research. Criticism of the prevailing socio-economic system is deemed unpalatable, and inhibition of criticism is enhanced by the maintenance of a project that declines to identify and understand the essential character of that system. The life’s work of Galbraith’s contemporary, Milton Friedman, who died in November 2006, is a testament to that vacuum (Jones 2006).

We seek out the safety of a ordered universe, and as such, we structure our knowledges into self-contained universes of abstraction that cease to pitch and buck with the tides of change. The structure of epistemology becomes its own universe, contemplation of that artificial becomes the end in itself. It's institutional insanity; when structured thought becomes unattached to reality, and mumbles to itself in corridors that might as well be an asylum. That's economics.

'kay, I think the motor's running. Now to clean up the dead links on the sidebar. Oh, linebreaks, R.I.P...