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Taking Alex and Abbie to college today. Both oldest kids in Ann Arbor, living about one mile from each other. A sad day, but life moves on.

Quotes and Notes

“When proponents say 'let's do something about it,' they mean 'let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.' And that somebody else is invariably you.” Chodorov
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"It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him." Simone Weil
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Herbert Spencer's Social Statistics and Henry George's Progress and Poverty are, taken together, "the complete formulation of the philosophy of human freedom; the one complements the other." Albert Jay Nock. A heady recommendation, indeed. I plan on reading both, but Nock recommends that people read George's pamphlet on the Irish Land Question first. It's not an easy read.
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"When rebuked for taking no part in Athenian politics," Socrates replied that "this showed only that he and his followers were the very best politicians in Athens." Nock.

Similarly, by not voting in a federal election, an American today arguably shows that he's more interested in democracy than the people who vote. The "non-vote" is a vote against the tyranny of the federal government and spittle cast at the direction of both political parties who merely use Washington's power to satisfy their lust for power and reap monetary benefits for themselves and friends. Who, in other words, act most un-democratically.
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Nock, writing about the reception of his little book, Theory of Education in the United States: "[A]s a class the Jesuits are the only people in the United States who would have any idea of what I was talking about, and if the Jesuits praise a work on education, is is sure to be a good one." A Journal of These Days, July 30, 1932. Keep in mind, this is the 1920s, well before the Jesuits (or a large chunk of the Jesuits) went off the rails in the 1960s. If a Jesuit in the 1920s approved of Nock's theory on education, it's a good sign that the Catholic Church approved of it . . . and still does.

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