Nov. 10, Marine Corps' birthday. Semper Fi.
http://content.jwplatform.com/
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One of the curses of Capitalism is that it produces wealth. Wealth leads to the worship of materialism. Wealth is modern man's apple.(See 1 below.)
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WSJ Editorial Board believes Trump is wrong regarding his Asian trade strategy. (See 3 below.)
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I get sent a lot of corny messages, jokes, etc. I spare you more than I send but every one in a while I can't contain myself. (See 4 below.)
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Dear Dick,
With all the tempest in the tax reform teapot about reform being only for the rich, I wish you might highlight the revolutionary concept of "no taxation without representation". Wasn't taxation reform one of the central fairness issues behind the 1776 founding of the U.S.? How about demanding that congress change election laws to grant the right to vote only citizens who pay taxes?*
* those who pay more in taxes than they receive in benefit payments
With best regards,
S------"
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Dick
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1)The Pox of Materialism
There is nothing wrong with the good things of life: the pleasure of leisure, the joy of good wine and good food, the happiness of dance and music, the comfort of a nice home, the delight of travel and all the other stuff of life. But there is everything wrong with making these things the center of our lives and the measure of our success.
This is precisely the attitude of all the hateful totalitarianisms of the last century. All railed about the wrong allocation of "stuff" or the need for a state plan that would produce more stuff for the masses. While we are not as evil or dishonest as Bolsheviks or Nazis, the character of our spiritual disease is the same.
Materialism is the worship of the gadgets, cars, vacations, homes, food, and such things in place of the worship of the Creator of these things and the values of honor, compassion, sacrifice, decency, and love. The more we worship stuff, the less we care about what is really important in life.
The more we judge our lives by stuff, the more addictive it becomes to us. Like all narcotics, stuff grabs hold of us, and we must have bigger and bigger fixes of stuff to satisfy, for the moment, our insatiable appetite for more.
We see the consequences of this addiction all around us. Politicians prattle on about the vital importance of the economy or the proper distribution of national wealth despite the fact that Americans live much better than they did fifty years ago. No one is really hungry in America anymore, and our "poverty" is largely a lack of relative affluence in a land filled to the bursting point with stuff.
One might think that in a land where the greatest health problem is obesity from overeating and the greatest mental health problem is boredom leading to pathetically puerile electronic games, all of us would see that we are rich by the standards of any other age of mankind.
When your whole universe is simply stuff, however, all perspective is savaged, and all sense of value is warped. Most of us think like Hollywood stars or sports heroes or wildly successful businessmen and assume that stuff is all there is in life and that no value above economic value can exist.
The inevitable descent into seedy and unsavory lust of stuff slowly dissolves all real hope in life to nothingness, because life inevitably ends in death. If this is all there is – or, more precisely, if we behave as if this were all there is – then there is truly nothing at all of value in life. The dismal, shadowy realm of naked materialism will engulf and devour our souls.
The tonic is faith in something greater than stuff, but that trust in the transcendent instead of the transitory is harder and harder to find in our world today. Europe is almost totally materialistic, and faith has dwindled into almost nonexistence in many European nations. The other English-speaking democracies like Britain, Canada, and Australia are just about as interested in stuff rather than spirit.
Dreadfully, Islam has more support in our world today than Christianity or Judaism, which means that when people look for something greater than stuff, they find it in Islam. The prospect of an increasingly atheistic Europe surviving an invasion by radical Islam grows more hopeless by the day.
The contempt young Muslims have for stuff-mongers in Europe, who are concerned more about their pensions than their souls, has a perverse logic to it. Why respect someone who behaves like an amoral and gluttonous rodent and not a divinely created man? If these Europeans behave as if they had no souls, then why treat them as if they have souls? This seems cruel to us, but we permit – even fund – each year the murder of half a million unborn babies based upon equally macabre reasoning.
Stuff can never make us good, never make us happy, never find us peace, and never provide meaning to our lives. In its proper and narrow place, stuff serves a purpose, but when we make it the center of our lives, we lose everything.
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3) Trump’s Pacific Trade Tear
Things were going so well. Then he returned to his worst subject
By
Donald Trump was having a successful Pacific sojourn this week, and then came Friday’s speech to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation confab in Vietnam. This was supposed to lay out his vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific, but instead he went on a tear against multilateral trade agreements. This dismays America’s friends, gives a new opening to China, and threatens the rules-based order Mr. Trump says he wants. The biggest victim will be the United States.
“I will make bilateral trade agreements with any Indo-Pacific nation that wants to be our partner and that will abide by the principles of fair and reciprocal trade,” the President said. “What we will no longer do is enter into large agreements that tie our hands, surrender our sovereignty, and make meaningful enforcement practically impossible.”
Mr. Trump is wrong that multilateral agreements have allowed other countries to “take advantage of” the U.S. The multilateral trading system the U.S. created after World War II has built foreign markets for American exports, which now represent 12.3% of U.S. GDP and an estimated 11.3 million jobs. Mr. Trump is also wrong to believe he can force Asian nations to go along with his plan. They are already on the way to proving that his decision in January to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact was a strategic and economic mistake.
Evidence is growing that the U.S. is already losing out. The remaining 11 countries party to the TPP reached partial agreement on the deal without the U.S. at the APEC summit this week. If they succeed and the U.S. doesn’t rejoin, American exporters will be disadvantaged in markets that represent 16% of global GDP.
Japan’s reaction shows why abandoning TPP will backfire on Americans. Shinzo Abe needs the deal to underpin his economic reform and strengthen the country’s alliance with the U.S. The Japanese Prime Minister is resisting Mr. Trump’s requests for a bilateral deal because he wants to coax the U.S. back into TPP.
In July Japan used domestic trade law to impose a 50% tariff on U.S. frozen beef. But Australian beef is taxed at 27.5% because Tokyo and Canberra locked in their TPP concessions two years ago. Japan has also signed a deal with the European Union to open its market to farm products. It is working on a similar deal with Canada, whose pork producers are taking market share from American competitors.
Meanwhile, China is pushing its own trade group, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which includes 16 nations accounting for 39% of global GDP. While that deal isn’t as ambitious in promoting free trade as TPP, it bolsters China’s economic influence. The irony is that by leaving TPP Mr. Trump is letting China extend its mercantilism, which promotes its “national champions,” more broadly at the expense of the U.S.
The U.S. simply doesn’t have the economic leverage to force Asian nations to make big concessions in bilateral agreements. Perhaps it did in the 1980s, when Mr. Trump’s understanding of world trade seems to have stopped. Then the U.S. was the destination market for the bulk of Asia’s production. Countries have many other destinations for goods and services, and companies are focused on trade within the rapidly growing region. Complex supply chains have made bilateral trade deals less important, and mulilateral rules often trump bilateral trade terms.
As the U.S. is left behind, the biggest American losers will be the President’s supporters in the Midwest and farm states. TPP remains America’s best chance to benefit from Asia’s growth, and the deal addresses many of the President’s complaints about intellectual property theft, predatory industrial policy and enforcement of rules. America’s friends at APEC were disappointed by Friday’s speech, but their commitment to multilateral trade can force Mr. Trump or his successor to change course.
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4)PUNS FOR EDUCATED MINDS
LOVE ‘EM OR LEAVE ‘EM!
1. The fattest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.
2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.
3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.
4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.
5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.
6. My dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.
7.Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: ‘You stay here; I’ll go on a head.’
8. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
9. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: ‘Keep off the Grass.’
10. A backward poet writes inverse.
11. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you’d be in Seine ...
12. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at the vulture and says,
‘I’m sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.’
13. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal was to “transcend dental medication.”
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