The law of karma describes the way that cause and effect govern the patterns that repeat themselves throughout all life. Karma means that nothing arise s by itself. Every experience is conditioned by that which precedes it. Thus our life is a series of interrelated patterns. The Buddhists say that understanding this is enough to live wisely in the world.
The growing body of adaptive information available in the minds of other people also drove genetic evolution to create a second form of human status, called prestige, which now operates alongside the dominance status we inherited from our ape ancestors.
The hard right, that is, abandoned multilateralism for unilateralism. For a weak power like Britain, unilateralism is a fantasy. For strong powers like the United States or China, it promises autarchy and disruption.
A thematic umbrella under which the factions of the right could gather was hostility to government. Reagan rocked audiences with jibes at the expense of “big government” so skillfully that they forgot that big government was what he was asking them to let him run. He spoke out against government spending and waste but watched deficits soar, boasting that he might be old but was not stupid, and never once sent Congress a balanced budget.
I am asking whether the age-old habit of considering the natural world (or world of things which happen of themselves) as a world consisting of various natural realms is the only possible way of considering that world. The answer is that any system of classification or division, whether the things classified or divided are colours or things that happen of themselves, is a system not ‘discovered’ but ‘devised’ by thought. The act of thought by which it is laid down is not proposition but supposition.
Hence all art, religion, and science rest on perception or history, as the earlier terms of any dialectical series on the later. But the extraordinary powers of history, the kind of intellectual feats that can be performed by a Grote or a Gibbon, though they are an essential part of the historical life, are actually acquired by this life only when it recognizes itself as historical.
“No one’s model of the power system envisioned that all 254 Texas counties would come under a winter storm warning at the same time,” said Joshua Rhodes, an expert on the state’s electric grid at the University of Texas, Austin. (NYT)
In 1971, Lewis Powell [later appointed as a justice to the U.S. Supreme Court by Richard Nixon], an attorney for the tobacco industry, wrote a confidential memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce outlining how business interests could overturn the New Deal and retake control of America. Powell focused on putting like-minded scholars and speakers on college campuses, rewriting textbooks, stacking the courts, and pressuring politicians. He also called for “reaching the public generally” through television, newspapers, and radio. “[E]very available means should be employed to challenge and refute unfair attacks,” he wrote, “as well as to present the affirmative case through this media.” https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-17-2021?
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