Posted By Terence on May 16, 2012

Brief remarks on film. A billionaire (Anthony Hopkins) is married to a younger model. Her male photographer (Alec Baldwin) is in tension with the former. Three males go out on a brief plane trip and crash in the Canadian Rockies. They must walk back, contending with a grizzly. During the ordeal, Baldwin confronts Hopkins with the claim that he can’t trust anyone, because everyone wants something from him. Baldwin confronts his own dark side. Reminiscent of the interaction between Jean Valjean and the Bishop in Les Miserables.

Towards the end of the film, we hear these lines by Anthony Hopkins, playing the billionaire.

“If this is my life (stuck in the wild), this if my life. You can change your life. … I’ve never known anyone who did actually change their life. I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna start my life over.”

Last lines of the film:

“How did your friends die?

They died saving my life.”

Background: This was a fable. The first friend was killed by a grizzly bear. The second died when he fell backwards into a shaft while plotting to kill the one survivor, a billionaire.

How do we interpret his saying “they died saving my life”? The one who had everything thought he had it all, but had been insecure in his relationship with his wife, who it turns out was having an affair with the second to die. He came to have clarity on the meaning of life. He was lost, and is now found. All the events in the wild can be interpreted as a sort of initiation through which the men go to begin to live seriously.

Category: American culture, Spirituality. | No Comments »
Tags: American culture

Posted By Terence on May 16, 2012

When he disclosed a stunning $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase last week, Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive, insisted that the trades had not violated the Volcker Rule, a crucial part of the Dodd-Frank reform law that is supposed to bar banks from doing risky trading for their own account.

This week, however, the story changed. On Monday, a JPMorgan official told The Times that the trades — which have since ballooned to at least $3 billion — started out as allowable, but had “morphed into something” that crossed the line. On Tuesday, at the bank’s annual shareholder meeting, Mr. Dimon echoed that statement, calling for rules to ensure that permitted trades don’t “morph into something different.”

It might sound as if Mr. Dimon, whose lobbyists have led the charge to undermine Dodd-Frank, is calling for more and better rules. If only. We still don’t know the details of JPMorgan’s disastrous bets. But the Volcker Rule was supposed to be clear: federally insured banks would not be allowed to make speculative bets with their own capital. The problem is that Mr. Dimon and other bankers have been fighting to make the regulations as loose and vague — and as prone to morphing — as possible.

And before JPMorgan’s losses were disclosed, the bankers were almost certain to get what they wanted. In October, regulators issued proposed rules that were weak and toothless, and the final version due this summer isn’t expected to be any better.

Click here for the entire article.

Category: American politics, Political-economics | No Comments »
Tags: Policy and Good Government

Posted By Terence on May 16, 2012

Who among us understand how fragile a well-functioning political-economic system is? We may compare it to a large dance on a floor which is held up only by the moving spaces created by the continued dancing. The threat to this dance is that a perception develops in a few of the dancers that the floor may not hold up, after all. The dance (economic investment, e.g. home buying and business start-ups) requires intense confidence in all the other dancers. If a few dancers suddenly become fearful and as a result of this emotion stop dancing, the threat is that other dancers may observe this. The threat to the stability of the “floor” (the economy) is that enough dancers lose faith in fellow dancers that they “freeze up” and stop dancing. When this happens, the floor collapses. No one knows how big the drop is, or what lies below. It is the history of Western political philosophy to avoid finding this out.

The Americans, in not re-regulating Wall Street banking since 2008 in a robust manner, are allowing a few dancers to make some very wild dance moves that threaten to cause enough dancers to stop dancing in our own country. See JP Morgan. Shame on the Obama Administration for not more aggressively pursuing regulations on derivatives with teeth, and shame on the Republican Party for promoting and praising an orgy in our public living space. Shame on those Americans in the Republican Party for indulging in moral fantasies, refusing to see that their party has been taken over by a morally fanatical cabal which has a deep seated drive to collapse our dance floor.

Category: American culture, American politics | No Comments »
Tags: Disordered Philosophy, Republican Policy

Posted By Terence on May 13, 2012

A few things can be said about the relative weakness of the American left side by side the successful propagation of a lie of world historical proportions on the American right: First, Karl Marx’s criticism of capitalism was motivated heavily by resentment and was not consistent with Western political thought. Second: The American conservatives and libertarian claims about capitalism are equally absurd and as disconnected from the tradition which resulted in the United States. It is fair to see the American right’s claim that “government is bad” as a reaction to the emotionalism of Marxism. The latter allows the former to see a “socialist” under every (American) bed. This fantasy – that Marxian inspired socialism is a real force in the US – creates a bubble in which American conservatives live and breathe, in which they tell themselves morally beautiful fables about the condition of the average American citizen. This article nicely highlights one of the keys of this fantasy: The tendency, seen only in the US among “Christian ‘conservatives’” to feel that American capitalism is wholly consistent with true Christianity.

Click here for relevant article.

Category: Political-economics | No Comments »
Tags: Political-economics

Posted By Terence on May 12, 2012

Exquisite writing by F, Scott Fitzgerald capturing the symbolic meaning of New York City for America, now as a way into what the American mind fears, awareness of its own limits. In this sense, Fitzgerald anticipated what must yet come for us.

“From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.

And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.

Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora’s box.

Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless.

And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.

That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.”

Category: American culture | No Comments »
Tags: American culture

Posted By Terence on May 9, 2012

It is disturbing to see two Tea Party zealots elected in recent primaries, one in Missouri and the other in Indianapolis. There are two fatal flaws in Tea Party ideology. I reserve the term “ideology” for belief systems which are both rigid and disconnected from objective reality. The first flaw is the belief that the purpose of government is to function according to a particular moral absolute. In the case of the Tea Party, there are two values that tend to get treated as moral absolutes. The first is the belief that policy involving redistribution of incomes is unjust. The second is related: economic freedom is meant by our founders to be treated as a deep moral value. Both beliefs are false, and we can find text in John Locke’s writing indicating that the government should be treated as a “force of the community”. See the following text. I mention Locke because conservatives and libertarians tend to assume he holds that any use of government for collective purposes is unjust. No modern political thinker holds that using government to attain ends we can better achieve as a “community” is unjust.

“Political power then, I take to be the right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.”