Years of Poems and Spirits

Continuing the sentiment …

Taking notes from Yakima, WA. Beautiful full moon rising over the vast East Washington plain tonight.  Reminded me of Ansel Adam’s famous photograph.

Notes:

Leading Democrats advocated financial market deregulation as late as 2007

From a yellowing page I saved from two years ago, on Feb 5, 2007 issue, James Surowiecki commented on a report released by Bloomberg and Schumer. The thesis? Too much regulation hurts America capital market. “The U.S. is losing its leading competitive position” because rules like Sax-O.

Also in the article: numbers to undermine the study and previous dooms day predictions to stall major reforms.

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The Dec. 8, 2008 issue has a profile on Naomi Klein

Summary: accused Milton Friedman of using turmoil and disasters to promote fundamental capitalism. Book “Shock Therapy”. Seems like a popular activist with little academic grounding.

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Stunning photograph: Chen Jiagang, The Great Third Front

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July 28, 2008 Profile on the Chinese PhD student who compiled a popular video after the Tibetan riot. First video of such. Neither artistic nor articulate, yet pretty full of anger (my impression)

Date: 4/25/2008, Name, CTGZ/Tang Jie. Fudan Western Philosophy PhD student, can read English and German. Used books to support his bed.

A typical Fen Qing netizen, except he’s imbused with exposure to Western thoughts. Also, his professor “rejoiced” over the video he produced.

A disconnection between experience and learning, possibly.

Randomly scanned Politico and found this discussion very engaging: what does Obama mean when he said he’d like the next SCOTUS Justice to have “empathy”?

I was pretty moved when I first heard the report. As a Constitutional Scholar, Obama didn’t get carried away by the cherished detachment of his profession. Instead, his statement reveals a profound appreciation of the relationship between law and society.

Since the modern age, the Law (i.e. the judiciary machine, including enforcement) is supposed to be cold, precise, blind and vigilant. The Law is Modernity. The Law is the State.

Yet, the Law is inherently biased: it always favors its enactors and suppresses those on the margin. A legal bureaucrat may steadfastly deny this, but in my mind, the Law is never an embodiment of the social justice de jure (i.e. natural law), but a moat around the justice de facto.

Should the Law be cold and detached? What the President said reminded me of the arguments Karl Polanyi laid out in The Great Transformation. In the very beginning of this book, Polanyi described the tension between the forces that is pushing economic activity into its own domain and the society’s instinct to regulate it. The Vienna school and its disciples extended Smith’s “invisible hand” into a “invisible hand of (economy) God”, emphasizing the independence and detachment of economic activities from other the society.

Largely based on English labor movement, Polanyi argued that despite the constant efforts to market-ize labor, capital and land, they are in fact the very conduits through which a society impose its will on to the economy.

Similarly, if the ultimate goal of Law is to sustain a society, it has to be embedded in a social political environment, has to learn to adapt, to evolve. Otherwise, the blind pursuit of legal independence (at least in a post-modern era) may result in a tyrannic State and a broken Society.

Try not to write too much in one day … very distracting. But this piece hit me pretty hard: In China, Quake Tourism Becoming Big Business

In short, parts of the quake area have become theme parks of sorts for laser tag games, water parks (the quake-dammed lakes), survivor museums, and–perhaps the most egregious–an earthquake simulation project that re-created the horrors. Although the developer said it was for educational purposes, being a wealthy real estate man apparently didn’t lend him much credit with me.

Also, learned a new word, Ghoul (”An evil spirit or demon in Muslim folklore believed to plunder graves and feed on corpses”), as one listener used it to described those developers.

Are they? Either yes or no answer makes me cringe. Like many many things happening in China.

I wonder if any American expat in the Europe in the 19th century had similar experience?