#dissertation notes

[the-cottage-academia]

March 31, 2026, 6:50 PM.

I made a collage at the library yesterday. Dr. Julien's visual essays have kind of worked their way into my academic thought-routine. I showed up to the Bluebonnet Branch of thd Baton Rouge Libary to work on my CV so I can pitch to schools in Canada, but, instead, I crafted this little "visual thesis statement." Haha. Looking at it will keep me focused on that core argument. 🤞🫶 #LifeOfAFuturePhDStudent (hopefully! 🤞)

[pairedaeza]

Oceania denotes a sea of islands with their inhabitants. The world of our ancestors was a large sea full of places to explore, to make their homes in, to breed generations of seafarers like themselves. People raised in this environment were at home with the sea. They played in it as soon as they could walk steadily, they worked in it, they fought on it.

Epeli Hau’ofa, from ‘Our Sea of Islands’

[pairedaeza]

El valiente, el nómada. La sangre, las venas, la ruptura.

Barbara Jane Reyes, from Poeta en San Francisco

[prairial]

I love this reporter’s name and method of talking about things

[ffionandthemusic]

Dissertation Class

26/01/17

Intro to References and In Text Citations

. Acknowledgement made twice

> in text citation (using someone else’s  ideas to support your work)

> and bib.

How to improve your marks

strengthen your points

acknowledgement

support your idea

research supports your idea (research has to say the same thing)

provide evidence of what you know

showing that you research is varied and how it has helped with your understanding

ideas link and make sense

avoid direct quotes (only 1 or 2, if they are exactly on point)

summarise quotes < general, essential, logical>

References

enough detail to allow the reader to be able to find the source of you research

Acknowledge your sources and how you have formed your opinions

if you are unsure, just cite it!

print research papers on to paper to allow deeper absorption

Strategies to Avoid Plagiarism

> Takes notes in point form

> Synthesise the information

A summary does not include

background to the issue

statistics

direct quotes

personal opinion

minor details

date of access

In Text Citation

Direct quotation - quotation marks -

Summary

Paraphrase

make a clear distinction of what the author has to say and your ideas

P  - POINT

E  - EXPLAIN

E - EXAMPLE

[prairial]

when ur limited powers of searching information fail you

[strangelittleworld]

The start of this BTS pre-debut trailer is taken from the first track of Epik High's debut album. 

It also claims that they represent people in their teens and twenties and the whole 2 Cool 4 Skool thing reminds me of Seo Taiji's Classroom Idea from 1994.

The bassline from No More Dream also sounds a whole lot like H.O.T's Warrior's Descendent another track that tried to represent the repressed youth through its lyrics.

For something as a-historic as K-pop often is, it's interesting to see them make so many references to older work (and that's not even touching on their use of American hip hop influences.) I guess it's a form of representing which fits with the whole 'hip hop idol' thing'.

(NOTE: These are basically notes for my dissertation. You're going to see more over the coming weeks.)

[afh2011]

Notes on Dimensional Time [Dissertation Notes 5]

Dissertation Notes 5 Some non-linear notations on time, money, democracy, fear, power, morality, networks, history, drama, news, management, disease and solution [My Master's thesis posited the end of the epistemological era. Where there is no truth, there is cause to suspend belief. Whether that cause is just in itself an active agent as causation, and so the conditions for circularity, or infinite feedback loop, absent truth, belief or justice, and only automatic cause.] > Max Weber's approving citation of Benjamin Franklin's "Time is money," as a sign of good Protestantism, is today translated into the provisions of self-management, and specifically time-management. Money was a relatively new invention in Franklin's time, a creation of John Law in the preceding century, Law being a Scot in service to the French King Louis XV. Money by Law's invention now was paper and promise, and credit made paper debt a function of time. Franklin might have said, "Money is nothing but a calculated risk," or even "Money is nothing," or "Money is a complex time-based dimensional construct..." Today, Ben Franklin might say, "I am money." That would be the most true thing he could say, and that would be a lie, too, if not a negation of self, even a blasphemy, as a Letourian iconoclash. Ben Franklin is not his graven image on the American 100 dollar bill, but now he is, over and over. Walter Benjamin might have some comment on this reproductive fault line, but he is not with us. By his own hand, his time was up, in 1940. What Walter Benjamin said in Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction applies, extractively: >>

One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great historical films. It extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically: "Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate." Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.

<< Okay, so he was wrong about film, dimensionally. Money is "(t)heir most powerful agent." All one has to do is think of the renaming of college football bowl games in America, and the stadiums they're played in, after corporations and their products, to get the gist, on the macro level. David Foster Wallace had it right in *Infinite Jest*, imagining the corporate branding of years. Some stir occurred a few years ago when people were quasi-celebrated or -denounced for branding themselves with corporate logo tattoos. But marking flesh to empower NIKE or whatever seems extreme, the practice of defining (or defiling) one's bodily temple, so to speak, to pitch the processing or consuming of humanity in bio-sacral terms, is de rigueur in contemporary fashion, as an element of style as it were, since most people who clothe themselves with store-bought apparel do so in conjunction with ostentation as self-branding, and pay on a progressive scale to do so. Self-branding is an advertising scheme, and in advertising or more broadly, marketing, the scheme is time-based, involves money or another in-kind exchange, as in the case of stars on the red carpet, making the components more or less fungible. To envision the barter or sale of body-billboard as a method of self-enslavement by "choice" is not lost on some, but most fail to quibble with the methodology or its beneficiaries, apart from the reactionaries who read Adbusters, and who have the nerve to de-brand their clothed selves, or better yet, re-brand themselves with alt.logos, like the anarchy symbol. The bigger question is whether slavery as a function of time enables people to be purchased under the auspices of employment, consuming, as biparteid activities of managed occupation and/or avocation. In other words, let us examine self-indenture as identity, which is a medium of debt. Choice is the agency that adversely (or perversely) legalizes the action, a variation of external management, hardly separable from indoctrination, though in the end it must be. Business knows how to get around the annoyance of regulation, and it must be plain to see, that the biggest and best businesses, meaning those with the biggest bottom lines - even if the fat is hidden in the financials - as with NPOs or NGOs - rely on extraction/exploitation for success, and one of history's most reliable income generators is the human resource. Labor isn't really extreme enough in characterizing the exchange, since it is only slavery chained to the money-workaround, the anti-slavery regulation getting-over. This is one area where Marx got it wrong, or didn't go far enough. Romanticizing labor isn't enough as we've learned. Philosophy, to anthropomorphize the discipline, and Schirmacher calls Marx the greatest "applied philosopher," got wrangled into "the discourse" of economy, by being fooled into the belief that paying the human resource with any kind of scrip is a rationalization of slavery, leading to a systemic evaluation of effects absent causation, except in the vernacular of terror. In the raw, the relation is clear, whether the example is found in the urban sweat shop or the mines burrowing into the mountains of the countryside. The bloody game is how to make the unjustifiable justified, how to make a man, woman or child a slave to profiteering, and the profiteer, which is the science of productivity, as a compartment within the fulfilled life, in service to a grand master. Capital is only one face of this clock-tower Ravana. The insidiousness of Drucker's contention that Management should be a liberal art finally only proves how blind the society has become to the evil inherent in the system of time-money encompassing the pre-birth>post-death cycle of humanity, as shared and individual consciousness. Economics isn't a science, nor is it an art. It is the false ideology (applied) for the legitimation of the illegitimate awareness of money as the timemaster. Time is one of the central planks of the platform, the marking of time, the buying and selling of it. In housing, it's the timeshare, the lease, the rental, the mortgage. With paid slavery, it's "clocking in." The language is rife with time-slave vernacular: buying on time; pay over time... What is this great bugaboo, inflation? The buying power over time index, which is why Greenspanian/Bernankeian/Randian inflation is kept artificially low - it is linked to buying people over time, as in labor cost calculations. It is a "parasite" killer in Greenspan lingo. No wonder Tom Delay was such a valuable tool to Bush and base. His experience in the pest control business in Texas made him an asset against humanity. The linkage of property ownership and consciousness, has made the processing of human slavery a calculus of deceits. The great cover up, the biggest lie, the true untold story is that working for a living on the clock is slavery by proxy, on time, in the service of ink on paper. Once one confronts this inconvenient truth, the rest of the symptoms reveal themselves in short order. It's only a question of following the money to understand the extent of the corruption, to understand the cruel prohibitions against not "playing along," the secondary effects of anxiety and fear that attach to the scheme, and the equivocations that are required to convince the free agent that no alternative exists. "It's always been this way." "Everyone is doing it." "What choice did I have?" Arendt's analysis of Eichmann is fair enough, as it goes, but what of the genocidal passages in the Torah? What of Cerro Rico? What of Iraq? What is the prevalent scheme? Anything that competes with the definition of time in relation to anything but money must be smashed. Anything that competes with the definition of man, or any of his activities, in relation to anything but money, must be destroyed. Anything that would provide safe haven for anything that opposes the scheme - whether spiritual, emotional, intellectual or physical - must be liquidated. Time is money, sure and money is everything, even if it can't buy you love (it can buy you a prostitute). The Times Weekend section considers three prostitute-serial killers documented as operators on Long Island. Are the phenomena related? Is the murderous behavior time-based, like New Media? Was there money in it? Where? If man reveres the mountain in relation to himself absent the power of money, the mountain must be knocked down. The same goes for the ocean, or the heavens, the woods, the desert, or any other natural imaginary - it's only the destructive terminology that must be modified to fit the incidence of destruction. All must be made subservient to the linkage of time and money. Life itself must not prevail in any free manifestation. God must be linked to alms. The mind must be fashioned into a terrible thing to waste, then wasted. The body must be made productive, then used up. Feelings must be bound to purchase. Birth must cost, and death. A woman produces the child after labor, then the bill comes by post. Death is in the eyes of the law translated into the execution of an estate. Breath even must become commoditized. Have a smoke. Buy oxygen. Zizec at his CUNY lecture suggested that everything be capitalized. In some form, this has been accomplished, or rest assured, some entrepreneur or creative team will be on the job, devoting their time and money to creating a new market. Sickness is an industry. Sex is a business (the oldest one). War is the richest money maker and waster of all. The roof over one's head is determined by revenue. Status is tied to money, and the management of it, either as a form of wisdom or wanton disregard for the long view. Either one is Buffett, or any of the other here-today, gone-tomorrow wealthy wasters. Atop the heap of scrabblers are the old-money families, who are projected as winners over time, worshipped for their individual and collective prowess for clinging to power, status, conjugal or carnal strategic interrelations and wealth. The Royals. The bloodlines of Europe, who post-Revolutions must unhappily foster socially responsible images or lay relatively low, with managed identities, as they reap the rewards of centuries of exploitation and extraction. The whole thing fucking stinks. > But what of the solution, and by that one must mean the reckoning. What good has President Obama's policy of looking forward and not backwards at the host of crimes committed under the auspices of the previous administration(s) [...torture, fraud, theft, environmental devastation, murder, spying, etc.] accomplished? Wall Street is back to business as usual, Bush is on paid vacation in a news, vaccuum. The warrantless wiretaps continue, as do the "victorious" wars in the Middle East. Rove is a pundit for FOX and is working again as a political fixer. Gitmo is still open... For a hint at why so little gets done, justice-wise, one must recognize what "too big to fail" actually means. The men and corporations and governments who have caused such damage and suffering don't have to plead the 5th Amendment anymore. They only have to remind the prosecutor that his successful acquisition of his current position is a function of complicity in the big complex, and the reminder is a threat. Bring me down, it all comes down, including your little piece of it. What is "it?" Arendt notes the excuses of the criminal and the proper response in her books, and what these reveal about civilization as monstrosity. Hannah Arendt's description of the failed criteria for prosecuting Nazi war criminals, which was too small for the crimes, is helpful in considering all such unfathomable crimes against humanity, and can be extended to encompass the totality of European-originating time-crimes, from Scotland (Glencoe), to Cerro Rico, to Nuremberg, to Davos or Salzburg, as a proposition. The reality that "No one is innocent" now is not just a Sex Pistols record, featuring a wanted criminal as lead singer, filling the void emptied by the leads' departure from the band. Although you might think so, if you Google the phrase. Neither is it a movie quote from Twin Peaks or Repo Man. It's not a quote by Patrick Moynihan either. Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia, "The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil." Even when posited as a modern phenomenon, the assignment of guilt is an ontologically forlorn endeavor, but not hopeless. Quite the contrary. It is a celebration of innocence over guilt, as meme of humanity. What is at stake? >>

Human life has never been cheaper than it is at the present time. Today, no nation renounces the intentional killing civilians in war as immoral, as seen in the universal acceptance of aerial bombing of urban centers, and some nations consider it virtually a sacrament. No one is innocent, no one has a right to be spared, therefore no one morally culpable for atrocity. In the the present time of uneasy peace, the rising tide of terrorism and civil war makes Tadeusz Borowski's chilling words from Auschwitz relevant to the whole world of today: "Observe in what an original world we are living: how many men can you find in Europe who have never killed, or whom somebody does not wish to kill?" And for all advocates of extreme and immediate social change, liberal-humanist individualism is an obstacle to be circumvented or knocked aside in the pursuit of the reformulation of society in accordance with collective (class-class conscious or racial-nationalist) ideals. In philosophic and intellectual circles anti-egologists and anti-metaphysicians, following Heidegger, Foucault, and the structuralists, have attacked the conception of the integrity of the individual as an unjustifiable, anachronistic metaphysical claim. The New Left, feminists, and various brands of Marxists have branded humanism an ideology of domination, as the ideology of the supremacy of adult Euro-American males with their self-proclaimed rationality and technical mastery. From the opposite end of the spectrum, the radical right claims that humanism undercuts any possibility of morality, community, and the recognition of super-individual values.

...

Those who have actually heard the sound of jackboots on the stairs may not find the question of humanism esoteric or anachronistic. They take philosophy somewhat more seriously than many critics. Experience has shown them that words and symbols have concrete meanings, that texts refer to realities outside themselves, that a speech at a rally, a mark in a ledger, a star sewn into an overcoat can signify the end of one's private life, can mean barking dogs, starvation, and murder. They know that ideas can have brutal meaning, that romantic ideals of national unity and purity at which intellectuals may laugh have a direct translation in terms of iron and blood. They are aware that the impact of a rifle butt on an apartment door is the most eloquent argument for the the validity of humanism and for its definitive position within the intellectual basis of modernity.

<< - Lawrence E. Cahoone, The Dilemma of Modernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anti-culture ("Epilogue: Humanism, Democracy and Culture) > To situate outrage or resistance in terms of humanism is to not quite go far enough. To postulate the reach of democracy and its effectiveness at combating evil as hegemony or tyranny of whatever kind is not sufficient. The idea of killing time as an anti-thesis or antidote to time well spent is lost in the distinction between leisure and work as polarities in a well-managed life fulfilled. This creed of "the good life" has been demonstrated to be inadequate to the task. Balance is impossible in a world where the guilty are innocent and the innocent guilty, and suffering is redefined as too-big-to-fail productivity. Parsing the dimensional trauma requires dimensional tools and techniques in the emergency state, and in a perpetuated cataclysmic state of unending crime and destruction, the opportunity for relief is the driver for every kind of perversion and iniquity. If the goal is to infect everyone, then call the poison virus a cure. When reflecting on BP's oil spill in the Gulf, only one of many, or the escalating nuclear crisis in Japan, which is now comparable to Three-Mile Island or Chernobyl, the Depression 3.0 of 2007-present, the escalating war zone of the (entire) Mideast, or any of a million million preventable criminal phenomena we can witness, if only by electronic proxy, one can acknowledge that no time-crime tribunal will be appointed by President Obama or the US Congress any time soon, and none will ever be until humanity wills it. But will it we must. Is there really a solution? First we must kill time, and money, and then the rest will flow, as Csikszentmihalyi would put it. Then, we could examine with intelligence and wisdom a statement such as (now-ex-) BP CEO's pathetic, banal and evil utterance, "I'd like my life back." The unfathomable nature of this statement, when juxtaposed with the massive damage BP inflicted on nature and man, only points to the status quo. The bow on this pile of shit is Tony Hayward's lateral move in BP. He is still gainfully employed. > Peter Lamarque gets at the issue by delving into fiction. The subject is pertinent to the narrative development of this essay, by linkage, through futurist Bruce Sterling's current fascination with design fiction. ...It is about time, but it is also about identifying with the other in time, possibly as a means for ignoring one's actual intractable condition as a slave of time and money-power. Which makes Lamarque's subjective choice worth noting. Kings and time are fodder for stop-start fiction, from Shakespeare's MacBeth, etc., to Kurosawa's Ran. Lamarque writes: >>

Desdemona lies innocent and helpless on the bed. Over her towers Othello who pronounces with solemn finality: 'Thou art to die.' The enormity and horror of what is about to happen fills us with anger and dismay. ''Tis too late.' Othello has resolved to act and, deaf to his wife's most pitiful pleas, he suffocates and kills her.

...

No one is in fact murdered in the performance of Othello, just as no one is in fact jealous or innocent. And we know that. On the other hand, we respond often enough with a range of emotions, including fear and pity, that seem to be explicable only on the assumption that we do after all believe there to be real suffering or real danger. For how can we feel fear when we do not believe there to be any danger? How can we feel pity when we do not believe there to be any suffering.

<< - Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology by Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen > The prosecution of time-crime must be merciless. The Davos Man fears the suicide bomber above all else. He should fear the end of time more, and the end of fear. > Shopenhauer offers a clue to time-based relational contingencies expressed in the visual domain, when he writes, "Now, for the reason that much intense suffering is inseparable from much intense willing, the facial expression of very bad people already bears the stamp of inward suffering. If we set aside the reality that we today have many prime examples of very bad people whose image management is so sophisticated that nothing in or upon their faces indicates any minutiae of inward suffering, we can at least turn toward the human response systems that artificially mitigate the intolerable circumstance of subservience to the hegemony of time-fear-death-power. Schopenhauer existed prior to the Second Life avatar, as phenomenon, but he points to our willingness to be deceived, on moral grounds. Most of our responses to bad-suffering currently are administered via electronic devices, and reinforced socially in real time through social convention. What on earth, for instance, is innocent or real about Reality TV, whether the subject is crime and punishment, war (as in the operations of embedded journalists in Iraq), the ugly rich, or the drug-addicted, or the obese, or to frame it in broader terms, the Newscast? To implicate the camera and the processing power of reproductive technology (speaking of visual image and audio capture, although the coincidental reference is noteworthy), is obvious and in direct contraposition to the arts and humanities. Whatever the initial idealism, after the war-motivated invention of the internet, of early web pioneers, the obvious certainty is that the promised capacity of the online network to generate a solution for time-fear-death-power complexes has proven false. The infinity of virtual time is a myth, as is the web's encouragement of anonymous courage except in anomalous movements. Artificial intelligence of any humane type is abandoned, except as a fictional conjecture. The invisible hands of greed as we speak are strangling the life out of the free web, in a blatant capitulation to potent interests like Verizon and News Corp., whose criminal behavior is well-documented, especially in the realm of surveillance or privacy erasure and propaganda generation, absent all libel and slander regulation. Fair and balanced indeed. And still people weep at the dramas of Reality TV. > The revolution will not be digitized. Y2K was the beginning of the beginning of the end, although the processing of the Internet, from democratic commons to enslaved medium began as soon as the network proved itself as a valuable free utility. The camera, the capturer of time, became a liar during the Civil War, or The War Between the States, when the power of suggestion by light, film, and mechanical reproduction was proved a boon to war profiteers. When electricity could be domesticated, the free days of transmitted human knowledge ended, and the hegemony of ATT commenced. The corporation is winning and doesn't even exist. It's not that no one is innocent, it's that the guilty don't exist. > April 10 >>

If I wanted to dramatize somewhat the general problem we all face, I would say that what we have to do is to reinvent the newspaper in a completely new form (this is why Lippman’s wisdom is so important). If it is true, as many historians have shown, that there is a direct link between the invention of the newspaper and the possibility for citizens to articulate political opinions, and if it is true that the old newspaper appears retrospectively as a platform connecting heterogeneous data, then it is extremely urgent to reinvent a platform no longer on paper but in the newly rematerialized world of digital datascapes. Digital democracy has generated a lot of hype, but I believe, as many of you here, that its true development is still to come and that it will be necessary to invest also, in no small part, in the theoretical import of the notion of network as this conference proposes to do. When Lippmann said the public is a phantom, this was not a way to say it does not exist, but on the contrary a plea—and a somewhat desperate plea—to make it appear through the invention of the right tools.

<< - Bruno Latour - “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-­‐network Theorist”* (Keynote speech for the INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR ON NETWORK THEORY: NETWORK MULTIDIMENSIONALITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE 19th February 2010 Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Los Angeles; To be published in International Journal of Communication special issue edited by Manuel Castells. > [REVIEW]: The NY Times is the subject of a 4D scan, conducted over time, in conjunction with the thesis and dissertation; and the threads this weekend are plentiful. The headline story (and several linked ones) focuses on the dark and vile pantomime of Congress and its macabre performance on the budget and the shutdown of government. Of course, the objectivity platform of NYT doesn't frame the episode in this manner. ...What happened to the NYT digital subscriber switchover? ...Did Iceland really just say no to bankster pressure to force the innocent citizens to assume the "losses" incurred by the financial sector elite and their beneficiaries? ...Wikileaks? ...Japan? ...The Times and the Washington Post are remembering American Civil War as a preventative measure. ...Paul Krugman will tell the truth again this week about the economics of slavery, up to a point. Austerity and debt will hover over the human interest stories. ...Herbert is gone. Money will be the overarching topic of every story. Power will be parsed. Deaths will be noted. Fear will be promoted, and diversion, attached. ...The S&P 500 is down 12.39 and stands at 1,311.67. ...Today's film critic's pick is "The Passion of Joan of Arc." ...A Royal wedding approaches. ...Carnage in Libya and drones in Pakistan. ...At JFK one plane "clips" another... "The Burden of College Loans on Graduates Grows." ... "Gulf's Complexity and Resilience Seen in Studies on Oil Spill." What is the cost of knowledge? >>

Student loan debt outpaced credit card debt for the first time last year and is likely to top a trillion dollars this year as more students go to college and a growing share borrow money to do so. While many economists say student debt should be seen in a more favorable light, the rising loan bills nevertheless mean that many graduates will be paying them for a longer time. “In the coming years, a lot of people will still be paying off their student loans when it’s time for their kids to go to college,” said Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com, who has compiled the estimates of student debt, including federal and private loans.

<< What is the cost of a BP oil spill? >>

Dr. Hazen was looking to track the fate of the underwater oil as it spread and instead found it to be entirely gone. “We can detect down to 2 parts per billion,” he said, “but nothing was there.” His work was financed by a grant his lab won from BP, the owner of the well, long before the spill, and it was not in any way reviewed or influenced by the company, he said.

<< And finally, the nut: >>

"Middle-class America experienced a lost decade in their retirement accounts, whereas executives enjoyed record compensation packages through the subterfuge of stock option programs," Mr. Meyers says. "There has been a massive wealth transfer from middle-class America's retirement accounts to the bank accounts of the privileged few. The social consequences of this wealth transfer bear scrutiny."

<< - "Enriching a Few at the Expense of Many" by Gretchen Morgensen Business as usual... Y2K, TARP, the Iraq Invasion, the spectacle of closing the BP well, the fabled Facebook rebellion in Egypt... the budget negotiations, the tax break for the rich, the revelation that GE pays no taxes, the CEO's appointment to the Obama Administration... > >>

Along with material success comes prestige. Salaries and positions translate into dinner parties with important people, heads that turn when one enters the conference room.

<< - Lisa Peattie, "Normalizing the Unthinkable" >>

Evil is never "radical,"... it is only extreme, and... it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension... It is "thought- defying"... because thought tries to reach some­ depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its "banality."

<< —Hannah Arendt, 1964 [SUMMATION (in the voice of Schopenhauer)]: There is no currency with Walter Benjamin's face.