I have preferred to promote gilt by association to encapsulate the habit of employing either adulation or antagonism towards significant people to enhance the ego. My mother did that and it was a matter of pride that she chose friends for their superior qualities. And she resented that her mother made friends in the lower class. (Though, perhaps that assertion was meant as a critique of my associations I was too dense to get).
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His column appeared in our local paper. I linked the original on FB with comments.
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Since humans are social organisms, the arbitrary exclusion of any group is immoral. Also, exclusive behavior, aka segregation, is abusive and the expectation that the victims of abuse are capable of stopping the perp is unrealistic. All abuse requires a third party intervention to be stopped. Indeed, that is likely the main purpose behind organizing what we call government. And if that is the case, then legislative support for exclusive behavior is not just immoral, but counterproductive. Segregationists undermine the very purpose of social organization and so those who oppose them are providing an indispensible public service.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-man-behind-critical-race-theory

That is what economic theory fixated on monetary profit removed from society. Planned obsolescence (failure by design) and “just in time delivery combined to set the stage for an ill-prepared health care industry when a new virus arrived. The initial whining about stressed hospitals resonated badly with people who had heard for decades that emergency rooms and hospitals needed to be closed.

If nasty surprises are to be avoided, redundancy is a sine qua non.

Now there is a strange word. Does it mean forward motion without any indication of a goal? Or does it refer to a substitute for motion–i.e. stagnation? Empty rhetoric for sure.
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by Phil Specht
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Education is, like health care, a social utility and so society should pay for the delivery. Costs should be born by those who benefit. However when cost/benefit analysis was first introduced by economists, they were quite content to pretend that it did not matter who bore the cost and who got the benefit as long as the numbers for the latter were larger. So, we had an “objective” analysis of present value to project future benefit which almost automatically transferred public assets into private wealth. So, the impoverishment of the nation was systemic, but it was not designed to be racist. In most cases it was a matter of working people being too busy to object to the machinations of the exploiters.

In the late fifties, we were living in New York and my mother had apparently joined something called the English Speaking Union. They had what are now known as happy hours with dancing to which she dragged me along. I remember fending off impudent young men who apparently had the wrong idea about the purpose of the event–to learn to speak English better. LOL
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The federal agencies all have to be redirected from promoting the destruction of our natural resources to generate financial profit to preserving and protecting our natural resources to promote future use and reuse. That just requires a lot more manpower and time, of which we have plenty, if we are not wasting it on funerals and celebrations.

What’s the difference? Commerce benefits someone.
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