An extraordinary philosopher

A relatively unknown philosopher unveils the centerpiece of human existence.

"Everything that matters is relational," our philosopher explains.

In a detailed analysis of quality-of-life issues, an organizational professional and philosopher detailed the various elements of successful living. Interestingly, when reviewed from the bottom up, there appears to be a baseline threshold above which 'more' of anything makes little difference. Above that threshold, issues like wealth and possessions, luxury and convenience add little to the quality of  life as individuals explain in their own self-evaluation.

A person who lives in poverty is greatly served by rising up to a measure of adequacy for food, shelter, access to employment, education, and healthcare.  Above that line, adding more makes little difference in self-described life-quality.

One factor, however, rises on a continuous path to the very peak of significance.  On a scale of one to ten, we might mark the mentioned baseline threshold at two or three.  That would be enough for a good life, and fancier versions of residence or transportation would make little quality difference.  The one exception, rising to a ten on the scale, is personal relationships.  "Everything that matters is relational," our philosopher explains.

Adventures in travel, success at work, financial milestones, all are of little impact unless they are shared, unless they add to the life of another.  The memorable events of our lives are most often related to folks we love and hope to serve well rather than events involving just places and things.

Real Life:  Not surprisingly, parents and astronauts have a difficult time keeping that in perspective.  For parents, one child is a difficult task.  Two is impossible.  Five is a life-consuming brain and body drain.  There are so many details, particularly in the developed world, that have to be handled; it's hard for mom and dad to get a peaceful moment.  In retrospect, though, the first remembered and best recollections are related to family and especially, the children.  For astronauts, it's probably hard to top a spacewalk.

As for parenting:  the easier version of parenting doesn't appear until the first grandchild arrives.  Then you have the comfortable leisure to enjoy the week-to-week changes in the child.  New facial expressions, developing hand-eye coordination, deepening relationship and love bonding, and fascinating interactions.  Grandfather's have time to enjoy such things while the parents do all the hard work.

My granddaughter, like her mother before her, is the centerpiece of why life is so enjoyable these days.  Happiness springs up at the thought of her company.  She's perhaps not all there is to life, but she's extraordinary.  Of course.

So in the larger view of life, each relational context can add or subtract quality.  Our impact on others, on each individual whose life we can touch, is determined by the quality of the relationship and interaction.  If we do well, they're blessed.

You can be a world changer for that one to whom you have relational access.  Or you can ruin their day/year/decade ...

Knowing this, how might we plan the investment of our lives?  We can choose to be loving, supportive, encouraging, and graciously informative, can we not?  It's practical and active, not feelings, by the way.  And, it's two-way; if we do well, we're both blessed.

The way we relate to others is actually number two on the authoritative list of important understandings.  "Do unto others as you would have them do to you."  Know what the first is?  :)

The photo at the top is my granddaughter, by the way.  We spent the day together, reading books, walking in the sunshine, and a first attempt at assisted tree-climbing.  I'll remember that day forever, but I can't remember a single thing of similar significance from that week (or month) at work.

Thanks and a hat tip to the great philosopher, Tim Frink.

Galatians 5:13Amplified Bible (AMP)

For you, my brothers, were called to freedom; only do not let your freedom become an opportunity for the sinful nature (worldliness, selfishness), but through love [a] serve and seek the best for one another.

[a]Footnote: The key to understanding this and other statements about love is to know that this love (the Greek word agape) is not so much a matter of emotion as it is of doing things for the benefit of another person, that is, having an unselfish concern for another and a willingness to seek the best for them.

Free Shipping!? There's no such thing.

"Free Shipping and Handling, 10% Cash Back, and more!"  

Any chance they're doing you a favor? Of course not.  It sounds good, but it's a lie advertisers use to make their deal look more attractive.  The cost of shipping is added to the total cost, and that's what you pay.  Nobody is going to step up and pay part of it for you.

We need to understand, marketing is about sales, and the industry will stretch to the very limits of the law in how they present their product line.  

The movie, Consuming Kids, throws desperately needed light

on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing

machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from

junk food and violent games to bogus educational products

and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care

professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the

film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the

wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used

advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience

to transform American children into one of the most powerful

and profitable consumer demographics in the world. Consuming

Kids pushes back against the wholesale commercialization of

childhood, raising urgent questions about the ethics of children's

marketing and its impact on the health and well-being of kids.

Written by The Media Education Foundation.

From an ethical perspective, every billboard, every product

advertisement, every infomercial, every celebrity

endorsement is a manipulative attempt to

persuade without regard to your benefit.

Explain that to your kids.

More importantly, our children need to be told how to differentiate truth from persuasion and coercion.  If we don't explain it to them, they'll believe it.

Tell your kids about advertising, how it is not about information but about convincing you to buy things.  Talk about ads as they show up, "why would they use a cute dog in that ad about a car?"  

There are no neutral ads.  All of them are attempting to persuade or to extract money.  The multi-billion dollar advertising industry thrives on our collective gullibility.
  
Before their teen years, children generally do not have the clarity on their own to differentiate between information and persuasion.  Tell them.  Make it fun, a contest even.  

Celebrity endorsements are ... advertising.  Reverse mortgages aren't better because some celebrity (i.e., rich mouthpiece) tells you they are.

Fun music with dogs ... (Gimme, gimme, I'm worth it) is advertising.  Cute, but they're after your money and nothing else.


You might find Commercialized Children useful along with Commercialized Children - Continued.
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The Lesser of Two Wevils

Choosing between any two distasteful options is sometimes described as the lesser of two evils, the one likely to do less harm, perhaps.


If the choices are both evil, is their a higher path?  Is there a third option acceptable to conscience?


Or do we have to live with having put our stamp of approval on some dancing weevil?  Can I face years of knowing I had anything to do with it? The destruction of foreign policy, the economic collapse, the upheaval in the court systems, the world turmoil ...  :)  Yeah, though I walk through the valley of whatever, I will fear no weevil.

This year's election includes many offices to be filled and perhaps some ballot initiatives as well.  We'll perhaps skirt that dark insectivoreal realm as we participate, but with liberty comes responsibility.





My wife so hates puns, she wouldn't even let me read this one to her.  

Welfare - Follow the money

A Berkeley study, “The High Public Cost of Low Wages” found that besides stagnant and poverty-level wages, the dearth of employer-provided benefits mean that minimum-wage workers in the United States are even more reliant on federal and state-run public assistance programs than we have been told.

FedGov spends $125+ billion, and states collectively spend $25+ billion on assistance programs just for working families each year. That $150+ billion is not only being spent to help working Americans live, it is yet another instance of taxpayer-funded corporate welfare.  Taxpayers subsidize businesses that are reaping record profits on their highly-productive and low-paid workers.  We pay their prices and we pay taxes to assist their underpaid workforce.  Corporate welfare.

Our tax dollars are taking up the slack and subsidizing highly-profitable corporate employers who refuse to pay a living wage.  That specific reason is why there is a need for a federal minimum wage.  Many employers, particularly large corporate employers will never pay decent wages unless they are forced to.  Since Congress has failed to maintain the initiative, the minimum wage is now a poverty wage, and it is left to taxpayers to “bear a significant portion of the hidden costs of low-wage work in America.”  The failure was visible long before the turn of the century.

Follow the money.  Do your own inquiry.  The extraordinary flow of wealth from the bottom of the economic ladder to the top has accelerated over recent decades.  Persistent poverty, economic and political disenfranchisement, discrimination and inequality, all are visible and generally understood, but not addressed.  The trend is now global.

What if it were all about just one child who didn't get enough to eat, who was stunted and undernourished before age five, who couldn't finish school because of poverty caused by prejudice or class or tribal discrimination.  Or died from starvation.  Now, what if it were your child who faced such unjust exclusion from a good life.  How might you respond?

Can you perhaps imagine how a billion people spread across the world who live in that unjust circumstance today might feel.

You can't fix the world, but you can make a difference.  Extricate yourself from the herd, shed the nonsense of irrelevant style and luxury and unnecessary possessions.  The typical middle-class family in the developed world can easily provide effective assistance for three or more families and their children.  Ask me how.  Or Go See for Yourself.

Or take a look at Change Makers and Help Bringers.

Did you know that college in Kenya (University of Nairobi) costs about $1500 per year.  If you could come up with $125/month, you could help a young person through college.  And graduate school.  Or trade school.  You'd give them a chance, a life.  That's perhaps a worthwhile project for you and your family, and it's deductible.

Elementary school in coastal Africa costs about $40/semester for uniforms and supplies and fees, and they usually get a meal at school.  You could sponsor schooling for 10 kids for about $35/month.

Take care of your family first, of course.  If you get to where you're doing well, could you lend a hand to a few others?  Or many?

Science Friday

My conservative friends don't think there's anything to be concerned about.  My liberal friends are pretty green on such issues.  Disagreements aren't over the science, perhaps, so much as opinions on the degree of impact and risk.  It would all be entertaining discussion, I suppose, if the questions weren't about the fate of the world and life on it.  :)

If we find ourselves agreeing with politicians on environmental subjects, there's little likelihood of scientific objectivity.  If we have time to have an opinion, perhaps we might take the time to review the issues for ourselves.

(There's only 3 paragraphs in the graphic above.  Without looking, remember what's there?)

Inspired by NPR's 'Science Friday' show, obviously.

Today's crookedest bank? Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees for unethical sales practices that they had been pressed into using by management.

Before the truth became public, many whistleblowers were bullied, threatened, or quickly fired, an illegal action by the corporation, of course.

Corporate practice was to press sales personnel to add billable services to customer accounts either by pressuring the customer to agree or by adding the services without the customer's request or consent.

About two million such fraudulent accounts were created without the customer's consent.  Wells Fargo has paid $185 million in fines and penalties for their actions.  The CEO testified before Congress on the integrity of their corporation and the validity of the whistleblower program.  He didn't have any memory of the several whistleblower reports that were sent to him by personnel who were quickly fired for spurious reasons.  Many in senior management were informed, but perhaps having directed the unethical practices themselves, they took no action other than to squelch the complaints.  No senior management were removed.

As has been said, Wells Fargo has a history
of illegal activities.  

So where is the problem?  Is it unrestrained capitalism?  Is it lack of regulatory oversight?  Is it greed and immoral pursuit of wealth?  Wells Fargo and similarly corrupt corporations should perhaps be broken down and de-globalized.  They should have their executives removed, penalized, and decertified.  Is anything less severe likely to clean up the crooked practices in the financial industry of which this is just one?

____________________________________________

Senator Bernie Sanders, “Let’s be clear, the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” 

“There is no better example than the recently-exposed illegal behavior at Wells Fargo.”

During his testimony in front of the Senate Banking Committee, CEO John Stumpf admitted that he and other senior executives were made aware of the account-opening scheme in 2013.

Sanders says the Wells Fargo scandal is "not an aberration," laying out the bank's history of abusing its customers and getting slapped with multiple fines.

Bernie Sanders 

@SenSanders

How many people at Wells Fargo are going to jail? Zero. But if you smoke marijuana in this country, you get a criminal record.

9:56 AM - 20 Sep 2016

Update March 1, 2017 -- Wells had estimated that up to 2 million customers may have had accounts opened in their names without authorization. As part of an expanded review of affected customers, Wells said in its annual 10-K filing that there could be "an increase in the identified number of potentially impacted customers."
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416 Retweets

Update April 3, 2017 -- Wells Fargo Whistle-Blower Wins $5.4 Million Lawsuit and Gets His Job Back17,825 likes