We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
The Daoud Affair - How Western intellectuals turn themselves into the enemies of an entire class of liberal writers from Muslim backgrounds
The Western intellectuals accuse the liberal from the Muslim world of being a racist against Muslims, or an Islamophobe, or a “native informant” and a tool of imperialism. Sometimes they accuse the liberal from the Muslim world of stupidity, too, or lack of talent. This was Salman Rushdie’s experience in the years after he came out with The Satanic Verses, back in 1988, which he has described in his memoir Joseph Anton. The experience of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, originally from Somalia, offers probably the most widely discussed example after Rushdie’s. But the pattern of Western condemnation can be observed in many other cases as well, directed at liberal writers of different kinds and views—the authors of political essays, memoirs, literary criticism, journalism, and novels, from backgrounds in countries as diverse as Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Kamel Daoud’s Algerian colleague, the novelist Boualem Sansal, last year’s winner of a prize from the French Academy, has come under this kind of condemnation. And now the pattern has reemerged in regard to Daoud himself.
The problem actually first surfaced very early in the history of the republic. The occasion was the War of 1812, in many ways an adjunct conflict to what may be considered the first “world war”: the struggle against Napoleon and the pernicious ideals of the French Revolution. It was the crying manpower need of the British Royal Navy in that protracted conflict -- which led to the British boarding American merchant vessels and impressing American sailors into naval service on the grounds that anyone born an English subject would always be one -- that precipitated the war. However, most of the major actions of the war took place along the frontier between the U.S. and Canada...
We already know Hillary plans to continue Obama's war on coal. Coal isn't, or rather shouldn't be, a dying business. But it is, and it's dying because of politics. At a time when politicians keep saying they want to create jobs and improve the general welfare, why would they be attacking a healthy industry? Yes, natural gas has become cheaper and more plentiful - but only because of fracking, and the people seeking to shutter coal are also trying to end fracking. So this is not strictly an economic consideration, there are political currents swirling everywhere.
As I drive my son to college in Ohio, I drive through coal country. Billboards about this war have been up for the last 3 years. The job losses are mounting. Some regions of PA and WV are starting to hurt severely because of this war. It's a political war, and it's driven by a lobby group with significant access to the current administration. Coal has long been one industry the US could rely on to produce energy when other methods faced economic uncertainty due to politics or economics. That is changing, and yet 4 years ago, we were told there was no threat. But even as other nations open coal fired plants, the US shutters its plants because of political, not just economic, realities.
One of the grave errors of the modern mind – an error found in America in the presumptions, assertions, and actions of “Progressives” from Woodrow Wilson through Barack Obama – is the belief that society must, or should, be engineered. This principal belief naturally entails the subsidiary beliefs that the engineering must be done by the state, and that in doing its engineering the state must ignore, or even destroy, any forces of social organization that hamper state-officials’ social-engineering efforts.
A great deal of legislation and, especially, law in a free society is inevitably inconsistent with the blueprints of social engineers. And so, in their unreflective and unscientific presumption that society has no self-organizing forces, the social engineers are blind to the logic of the law and to the importance of legal processes. The social engineers therefore do not see – because their blindness prevents them from seeing – the benefits that emerge over time through the operations of decentralized, spontaneous-ordering forces. The social engineers’ designs and intrusions destroy, or at least severely weaken, these forces. But being blind to these forces, the social engineers are blind to what they destroy.
Technically, the USA is still around, of course. We have the framework, sagging and rotted as it is, of what the country means still in place. There are the habits of a Republic still here. Technically we still vote. In name at least we have representatives in office. All of it still looks more or less the same. Its just been gutted, like the shell of an insect that has been burrowed out from within by parasites.
The only direction this nation goes from here on out is away from liberty, away from the founders, away from the great experiment, and toward inevitable failure and tyranny. There's only one vector, even if it staggers a bit once in a while.
Liberty means freedom from the power of the State. America's founders grappled mightily with the paradox of assigning the State to preserve freedom form an overly-powerful State.
Reflecting on his American travels, which he hoped would help him better understand the democratic wave he saw sweeping Europe, Tocqueville noticed the buds of a more troubling tyranny—not an intellectual oppression but a gentle though genuine political oppression—that threatens all democratic nations and that later really did come to full flower not just in the European Union but—though much less flamboyantly—even in America. Democratic governments, Tocqueville theorized, have a tendency toward paternalism, which would be untroubling if “its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing”—as with my Soviet acquaintance’s sexual revolution. Such a government, writes Tocqueville, in his most-quoted passage, “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better but a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” Such “gentle . . . servitude,” Tocqueville feared, could easily coexist with “the outward forms of freedom” and arise even “under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.”
Prophetic words, for in fact, America lives under that gentle servitude and has done for decades, without really noticing and without understanding how it happened. Woodrow Wilson, believing that the Founders’ checks and balances merely gummed up the efficiency of government, set out to replace their Constitution and the “nonsense [they] talked about the inalienable rights of the individual” with a “living constitution,” reshaped daily “with boldness and a touch of audacity” by “judicial interpretations” that would be ever “more liberal, not to say more lax.”
I recently was at a conference having a conversation with the sponsor's Chief Revenue Officer, who is a friend of mine. He's very intelligent, has a Master's in Economics, a Law degree, and practiced for some time. His great love was negotiation, so he found himself gravitating back to sales and eventually into his current role. We were having drinks late in the evening and talking about different topics of interest.
He is deeply involved in holistic and alternative medicines. That, in itself, is no big deal. I know plenty of people who use these approaches, as I have from time to time (despite being the son of a doctor). My father once told me, "If it works, it doesn't matter what it is. Even placebos have a place in medicine." Of course, he wasn't all that thrilled about me seeing a chiropractor, but I figure that was just professional jealousy kicking in.
What the CRO said to catch my attention was this - "there is no incentive for the medical community to cure cancer because they make far more money by just treating it." From someone as highly educated as he is, I was shocked.
It's not like I haven't heard this comment before. I just never heard it from a person capable of thinking deeply about an issue like this.
His premise is based on the existence of one thing called 'cancer' which must be somehow curable. I tried to explain to him there is no single thing called 'cancer'. There are forms of cancer, and they are all quite different. In addition, we all have some form of 'cancer' within us, it's really just a question of whether the deadly or invasive form has been activated. Furthermore, the term "cure" isn't perfectly applicable. There are many ways of dealing with disease, such as prevention (one example is vaccines - the HPV vaccine should reduce the rate of cervical cancer over time) and altered diets and behaviors (there is evidence that healthier eating habits, reduced sugars can help slow some cancers from spreading - and even ending smoking or drinking can help). But even treatment is a form of 'cure' (many lymphomas are now 'cured' if caught early and treated aggressively). Regardless of how you approach the issue, strides are being made to find a 'cure'.
The idea that you "make more from treatment so you're not looking for a cure" is like saying "the attempt to cure the disease generates so much revenue, they aren't really trying to cure it." In other words, the money generated from 'curing' it isn't really an attempt to 'cure' anything. Which is a nice bit of circular logic I guess only a lawyer can get away with.
The truth is, many cancers may be 'curable', but because all cancers are such complex diseases there is no magic bullet. This, of course, makes Obama's State of the Union call a bit outlandish, and it also tends to forget that we've been trying to find a cure since 1971, when Nixon was the first president to declare "war" on cancer. This doesn't mean we should stop trying simply because we haven't cured all forms yet. However, it does mean we should keep everything in context. We've 'cured' several forms, we've made tremendous progress, and there is no value in ignoring everything which has happened to improve the lives of those with various forms.
If treating diseases generates so much money that 'curing' them isn't a goal, then I'd like to know why we do have so many curable diseases today? Treating diseases like smallpox, polio, and a host of other diseases generates plenty of money - why did we 'cure' them by finding vaccines?
In a way, the logic employed by my CRO friend is an application of Bastiat's "Broken Window Fallacy" - the idea that breaking windows makes us wealthier by keeping the glazier at work, and money changing hands. It's a logic that ignores the massive costs of lost value and misallocation of spending. Cancer's costs on productivity far outweigh the revenue any treatment can generate. 'Curing' all its forms is a goal simply because the overall gains in productivity will be greater than the revenues generated by simply managing it.
The American proposition is precisely the opposite of what Herself imagines: The U.S. government exists at our sufferance, not the other way around. We have governments because there are some things that we as individuals have a hard time doing through private enterprise, and we have a federal government because there are things that the several states cannot manage separately, such as national defense and border security. (And, bang-up job on the latter, Washington.) A president isn’t a prince, and a citizen isn’t a serf.
Herself’s invocation of serfdom is the logical extension of “You Didn’t Build That”-ism, the backward philosophy under which the free citizen is obliged to justify his life and his prosperity to the state, in order to satisfy the economic self-interest, status-seeking, and power-lust of such lamentable specimens as Elizabeth Warren, a ridiculous little scold who has never done a single useful thing in her entire public life. The American model is precisely the opposite: Government has to justify itself to us. The states created the federal government, not the other way around, and the citizens created the states, not the other way around. We don’t owe these jackasses any service.
Americans have a different view of government from Europe, thank God.
It has always seemed quite simple to me: Socialist schemes require governmental force while free markets permit people to do what people naturally do of their own accord- trade things they make, or trade their work, to get whatever they want. Freedom can not exist without property rights.
Of course, there are no truly free-market nations, so it is all relative.
For an excellent summary of the inspirations of the socialist, "idealistic," totalitarian-minded youth, The Leftist Intellectuals Hovering over the Campuses. Short version: They want my stuff, by force if necessary. Take my freedom, my autonomy, my stuff - and then what? Shoot me as a bourgeois, hang me as a kulak - and then what happens?
Frankly, it isn't. We have been conditioned from birth to believe compromise is somehow 'good'. Even as I write this, I feel bad thinking that compromise isn't a welcome path for me anymore in my political views. Is it age? No, because this is a question I asked long ago in college while studying political science. Some friends would say I never compromised, forgetting my path to Libertarianism required years of questioning, change, and compromise. Even now, I am willing to compromise. Between the anarchist wing of Liberatarianism and the minarchist wing of the Republican Party. I fail to see much value in discussing policy with Democrats. They've spent too much time saying "You have nothing to offer." Well, actually there is a tremendous amount which has been offered, you've simply refused to look at the datasets that support our views. For you, it's always been "I want what I want, or at least compromise so I get a little of what I want while you get nothing."
For years, I've been taught that 'win-win' solutions are the best. They certainly are, and I try to find them whenever possible. But in this vein, how is compromise necessarily 'win-win'? It can be, certainly, but it is not always and definitely. In my day-to-day life, 'win-win' is what I live for. It's what keeps business running. But it is no longer useful in politics.
My friends who are Democrats bemoan the Republican stance saying "How can they block Obama at every turn? Why can't they compromise?" I don't doubt their sincerity of motive, their desire for what's best. I know they want to do well and good for themselves, others, and the nation. All they hear are flowery stories of 'curing cancer' or 'feeding the poor' and decide "Hey! That's a great idea, and politicians say we can do it by taxing the rich."
Great.
But I prefer shrinking the government. So do many people in this nation. When a Democrat says "I want to grow government infinity, and you don't, so let's compromise and only grow it 10%" I immediately start to get angry. Only growing it a little less than you want still constitutes growing it, and I am opposed to growing it. Where do we compromise?
We used to. We shouldn't anymore. It's time to say no. It's time to push back and take back. Which is why I don't particularly like the methods used in Oregon, but I support them. After all, Eric Holder took part in an armed takeover while at Columbia. How was his 'good' and theirs 'bad'?
The only compromise from here on in, as far as I'm concerned, is to agree to grow a Democratic program while cutting a larger one somewhere else - or not agree to growth at all. It's time for these people to choose what's important, and not throw shit on a wall to see what sticks. Nearly every article in the mainstream is heralding the idea that Joe Biden is going to cure cancer. This is, without question, one of the most laughably stupid concepts I've heard from anyone, anywhere, anytime. 'Cancer' isn't one single disease that a silver bullet cure can be created for, and chasing all the cures needed is absurdly expensive and outlandish regardless of what the mainstream journalists say.
Let's allow "Diamond" Joe Biden a return to pushing his copper business and let's start shrinking government by saying "No" to compromise that always has growth of government at its core.
Myron Magnet summarizes the history of the decay of the US Constitution. Even the founders thought that might be inevitable, given their wisdom about human nature, but they did their best to provide roadblocks. Securing the blessings of liberty (from government, of course) and securing defense from exterior powers...
There is always the excuse of a reason: Security, or To Do Good.
... we had better understand just what happened. There’s no single villain. As these books show, all branches of government conspired over more than a century to turn the Constitution that the Framers wrote in 1787, plus the Bill of Rights that James Madison shepherded through the first Congress in 1789 and the Fourteenth Amendment ratified in 1868, into something their authors would neither recognize nor endorse.
Today, in the news links, Bird Dog linked to a post related to Bernie Sanders and his loathing of the successful. The questions pondered by the author are legitimate. But it's fair to say a good number of people, at some point in their lives, probably have a level of dislike for the success others. The basis of this dislike results from a variety of sources, and though envy is probably the most common reason, I know there are many others. For example, I never liked Al Dunlap, or "Chainsaw Al" as he was often referred to. He was successful, he was an often sought-after manager, and he grew wealthy from his success. Of course, his method of becoming successful was not admired by many (including me) and many of his 'successes' later turned out to be based on certain fraudulent procedures, not least of which was channel-stuffing.
I imagine this is Bernie's thought process. But if he's in control, he's the entitled minority.
I don't consider my loathing of Dunlap to be particularly unusual or unjustified. I don't know the man, but his behaviors were pretty transparent. It was easy to not like him, as opposed to a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, who have proven themselves astute and relatively even-handed businessmen (even if you don't necessarily admire their politics).
There are still other reasons why people loathe the successful, and the death of flamboyant glam-rocker David Bowie reminded me of some. Many popular music stars have no problem speaking out against successful business people or businesses - even those in their own industry. I don't know if Bowie ever had anything bad to say about the marketers who helped turned him into a cottage industry, but plenty of his contemporaries certainly had/have very negative things to say about the successful. I have sat through more than one concert (Roger Waters in particular) which did nothing but complain about corporations and greed.
As a younger person, I used to complain about paying $X to go see a band. "The greedy music companies want to soak us." I still paid and saw the band. I never considered that the $X I paid covered a large number of costs which provided jobs to people. Sure the music promoters got wealthy, but these promoters were usually making money on the margins, and managed several events which also lost money. Whatever I ultimately paid for the ticket probably covered the costs for the show, as well as some losses on other shows.
As I aged, I realized even though I paid $X, jobs were created to service my entertainment needs. I also realized my willingness to pay $X meant I believed $X was a fair exchange for my entertainment. I no longer believed some wealthy promoter was ripping me off - I was engaging in a fair trade which left both of us better off. I enjoyed my entertainment and the promoter got paid for his ability to put together a show which thousands may enjoy.
What we need is to have individual rights protected by government, not doled out to us like candy by politicians and self-appointed guardians of the social 'good'.
I have an issue with the comment “Nobody needs (whatever it is I don't think they should have)”. In this particular case, Whoopi Goldberg says nobody needs certain kinds of guns. Really? Well, I don't think Whoopi needs chocolate cake, but I'm not going to pass a law to prevent her from extending her girth to even larger proportions.
Whoopi says she has no problem with someone who wants to search for her gun (she says she's a gun owner, which I don't doubt) and has no problem registering her weapon. Good for her. I do have a problem with it. Why do I have to do it because she doesn't have a problem? I need to register because she's OK with it? Well, I want her to register with my gym and start attending with me, because I did it and it's good for me and it would be good for her.
What people need isn't someone to tell them what they may or may not "need." What they NEED is to be left alone to make their own (however good or bad) choices. There is no justification for a bunch of dim-witted people sitting around a table on TV telling individuals who are viewing what they need. Nor is there any justification for a bunch of dim-witted politicians doing the same down in Washington by passing laws about what they think the citizens need.
I didn't need the extra piece of roast beef last night, but I wanted that extra piece of roast beef.
I didn't need to drive 40 in a 25 MPH zone, but I did and nobody was harmed.
I didn't need to cross 34th Street against the light while there was traffic, but I made a choice and I was prepared to deal with the consequences.
Laws which are created by people based on the belief they are needed for others miss an essential point. The 25 MPH zone exists to protect children who live on the street. But at 1am, with well lit streets, I am fairly certain I'm not putting them at risk and I can see very well to react in a timely fashion. While I crossed against the light on 34th Street, and stepped into traffic, it was at a standstill due to a jam. What we 'need' is not always what works in a given situation, and it does not properly address the desire to pursue happiness (my roast beef, or my wish to get across 34th Street quickly).
Others telling us what we "need" or passing laws based on what they feel we "need" are really just telling us what they want or don't want us to have based on their own biases and desires. That's not what this nation was built on. It is what totalitarian regimes are built upon.
A friend of mine who has been in and out of work for the last few years contacted me today because I have a connection with the president of sales in an organization seeking someone with his skill set. My friend asked if I'd make an introduction. I told him there was a bit of a catch. My connection is old, I hadn't worked with him in 15 years, and I last spoke with him 3 years ago. I was hesitant to just call up and tell him about my friend who would be a great hire by his organization. As we discussed potential ways for me to make the contact, my friend explained the job had been open for some time. He noticed it a few months ago, then it was gone. It reappeared and was again removed from the listings. When he saw it recently he realized either they were having problems filling the job, weren't sure what kind of candidate they wanted, or were looking for a "purple squirrel" - something that doesn't exist. I laughed and suggested that it would be wise for him to speak with my old colleague and perhaps find out more about the organization, which offered me a respectable way to make the introduction as an informational interview.
The "purple squirrel" comment made me laugh because it's perfectly descriptive. I've been involved in many job searches for "purple squirrels." Watching the evolution of the job listing, from purple to brown or gray, as different candidates are interviewed can be alternately frustrating and comical. It's mostly annoying and aggravating, though.
On the other hand, as I pointed out to my friend, you can always have a purple squirrel if you have enough dye and the willingness to hold down the squirrel while you change its colors. It's not a good way to run an organization, but I've seen that happen, too. Happens every day in politics, which is probably why the process of electing a leader is about as enjoyable as the job search for that "purple squirrel." Not only are we trying to find one, but after we elect one, the leader usually becomes the one trying to inflict the dye job on the population.
“Social justice” was purportedly a new addition to the classical legal, distributive, and commutative justice ideas found in Aristotle. It was rather connected with the Leviathan state. Social justice was based on the idea that what is “due” to people for their flourishing is what decides their good. It was not personal virtue that was at the center of moral and political life. Social and political “structures” determined virtue and vice.
So the “vocation” to “social justice” derived its nobility from “service” to the poor and down-trodden through promises to “re-structure” the state or economy. Oftentimes this renovation of society was promoted in revolutionary terms, because state and social “structures” determined the meaning of virtue and vice. “Social justice” always hovered in the shadow of totalitarianism. The state became the center of all human life. Social Justice received its self-justification from what it distributed to everyone.
"The government can not only evoke fear in its victims; it can also evoke a sort of superstitious reverence. It is thus both an army and a church, and with sharp weapons in both hands it is virtually irresistible. Its personnel, true enough, may be changed, and so may the external forms of the fraud it practices, but its inner nature is immutable."
Behind a pencil stand millions of cooperating people, but no mastermind. Which is why worshipers in the church of government, the source of top-down authority, disparage a free society’s genius for spontaneous order: It limits the importance of government and other supposed possessors of the expertise that supposedly is essential for imposing order from above.
George is so old-fashioned. People just want more free "services" to make life easier.
Of course giving people money ends poverty, technically. (In the US, poverty stats ignore the value government benefits. Poverty stats also ignore those with voluntarily low reported incomes: clergy, grad students, hippies, criminals, the early-retired, budding entrepreneurs, aspiring actors, etc etc).
People ought to make life choices designed to meet their goals. To put it another way, in the absence of mental illness or mental incapacity, we should respectfully assume that adults' choices are guided by their goals. In America, part of poverty is electing not to do the things that prevent poverty. The best way not to be poor is to be married before having kids. Statistically, single motherhood is the best path to poverty and dysfunctionality.
Aren't they sposta be our moral and intellectual superiors?
Today is the first day of Hannukah, and of course we are well into Advent now. These times have a large secular component (and Christmas, of course, a large pagan component), and can be enjoyed by everybody regardless of religion or lack thereof. Even atheists tend to love Christmastime.
Thus perhaps the great Cornell University is worried about the hypersensitivities and potential postal rages of the Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, Ba'hai, Confucian, Zoroastrian, Wikkan, and Muslim students and faculty, but naturally nobody has heard those hypersensitivities expressed because who could be or would want to be that much of a negative, obnoxious a-hole?
This is all to be laughed about without wasting any mental bandwidth on angry indignation: It's Holiday Season for all, so cheer up and lighten up, you university sillies and you university pantywaists.
My message to university administrators: Chill out, have an eggnog, and and go look for a pretty girl (or boy) under the pagan mistletoe. You will feel better.
I used to read theChristian Science Monitor regularly. It was a good, relatively balanced, source of information. In the last few years, it has become a more-or-less mainstream piece of garbage. It regularly runs articles pushing the liberal agenda, without questioning or even analyzing the information presented. As another bullhorn for Progressive policy, CSM has simply joined an echo chamber. It may be a popular way to make a buck in the media industry, but it's not good journalism.
Which is why, when I read this piece, I began to question whether it's worth reading any more at all. The article implies the U.S. is somehow failing its children since, as a nation, we lag the rest of the developed world in providing pre-school education.
My parents divorced the year I entered kindergarten, aged 6. I had an older brother who was a year ahead of me, and 2 sisters who were younger. For the next 3 years, she was a single mother raising 4 kids and holding down a regular job. We all went to Catholic school. When my mother remarried, my youngest sister was just starting kindergarten. None of us had pre-school
Despite the lack of pre-school, we were all high performers in school and all of us got a college degree, while two of us continued into post-grad work. Maybe we were genetically predisposed to do well. I doubt pre-school would have helped, though we will never know for sure.
An early start to education is useful, but it is not necessary and does not guarantee performance. It's my guess higher performance later in life has to do more with factors such as the involvement and care of parents in their children's lives, as well as the relative success that allows many families to send their kids to pre-school. You can't replace a caring parent and loving family with a (hopefully) good teacher and assume that will yield great students. But that's the story you'll get from Bill de Blasio, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton (as well as a few Republicans). The OECD and CSM will push that agenda, too.
Some readers may remember when that was a bumpersticker. (It's on the same order as Bird Dog's old school football cheer: "Repel them, repel them; make them relinquish the ball.")
It is a theme on this blog to think about the things that people hold most dear and the things they hold to be sacred. I tend to judge such things based on people's behavior, not on what they say. I tend to believe that God should come foremost in my life, but I can be a hypocrite at times.
Karl Reitz at TCS looks at secular religions - systems of belief which can play as strong a role in shaping people's lives as loving God can for the religious. His piece is consistent with several things we have written over the past week or two. A key quote from An atheist's defence of religion:
The fundamental difference between traditional religions and these secular religions is that secular religions promise us that perfection (heaven) is possible here, on earth, in present times. Conservatives, starting with Eric Voegelin, have long warned against buying into these secular religions by warning us not to "immanentize the eschaton." As Jonah Goldberg explained:
"Immanentize means to make part of the here and now. Eschaton, like eschatology, relates to the branch of theology which deals with humanity's destiny. You know, the end times, when all of that wacky, end-timey, Seventh-Seal stuff happens (oceans boil, the righteous ascend to heaven, Carrot Top is funny, etc). Hence 'immanentizing the eschaton' means, in effect, trying to make what is reserved for the next life part of the here and now."
There are two utopias - the womb, and Heaven (if you can get there before they close the door). Life is bracketed by utopias, but in between we must toil and strain and sometimes suffer. It's "the way things are", as the mice say.
Bliss and ease are only momentary during this brief spell on earth, and it has something to do with how reality was built. Specifically, I think it has to do with finiteness, limits, and scarcity - of just about everything, and not just of material things. I know only about four things that do not fit that: air, a dog's love, God's love...and blogs. No scarcity of good blogs.
Thinking by post: Isaiah Berlin's letters reveal how his ideas still hold relevance - One of the great liberal thinkers of the post-war period, Affirming: Letters 1975-97 makes clear the continuing relevance of Berlin's thought.
Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
No threatening menorahs and no traumatic Christmas trees?