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| [GMW #965] Just & Fair Government Not Government Of Economics And Of Giant Corporations
| Thursday June 8, 2006, Editor: Easy | RobertMuller.org | Contact | Subscribe | Unsubscribe |
| GMW Blogs: English | Portuguese I Spanish | Tagalog | Dutch | | | Idea Dream | | ~ Idea 6446 ~
When I studied economics at the University of Strasbourg in France, the main course was on Economie Dirigée, an economy guided by the State in order to be of benefit to everybody, including the poorest. When I later studied economics at the University of Columbia, I was taught that the free market and competition would take care of everything. State directed economics were the ultimate evil to be avoided at all costs. Today governments and public services have become the servants of economics and of giant corporations. In the American dream of today, the pursuit of happiness goes through the market, not through just government as proclaimed by the Founding Fathers.
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Daily Idea Dream Topics: Peace, Idea Dreams 1 - 6999, Ending War,
Planet Of Hope, Religion & Spirituality |
| | Robert's Golden Sayings | Our lives resemble those of trees: heavy winds and tempests make us stronger and dig our roots deeper. We must gain strength from every gust of adversity.
* | | My Testament to the UN
-A Contribution to the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations, 1995, Chapter 9 | The United Nations Charter will survive and gain incessant ground in the world, even if the UN should disappear. The Oath of Strasbourg between the sons of Charlemagne, forerunner of the European Community, survived Lotharingia and all Franco-German wars.
The Magna Carta survived feudalism and blossomed centuries later into the Declarations of Independence and Human Rights. The Declaration of Human Rights survived the French Revolution and Napoleon. Similarly, the UN Charter and declarations will survive and win. And history will be astonished how rapidly this will take place.
The UN is scoring victory after victory for independence, for peace, for development, for freedom, for justice, for quality of life, for the environment, for human rights, for racial equality, for the rights of women, of children, of the elderly, of the handicapped, etc. Even the most stubborn contemporary issues, namely the cold war, armaments, militarism and national sovereignty have or will succumb to the power of this new bold paradigm.
The UN is the latest and greatest landmark in the ascent, progress and further evolution of humankind towards the fulfillment of its intended role on this miraculous planet in the vast universe.
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Happiness: the science beyond your smile http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/newslink/index.html?ref=1115137791
A psychology lecturer has published a book which explores the scientific reasons behind people's happiness. Happiness: The science behind your smile, by Dr Daniel Nettle of the School of Biology, is published by Oxford University Press (OUP). The OUP explains what the book is about in this extract from its publicity material. “Enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence is the idea that one of our most important rights is the right to pursue happiness," it says. "Indeed, we commonly feel that the things are only worth doing if they make us happier, and that if our desires and aspirations were fulfilled, we would be happier than we are now. But things are not that simple. Human happiness is full of paradoxes and contradictions. Until recently, these were the province of philosophy and the arts. “Over the last twenty years, an increasing amount of scientific research has gone into the topic, and Daniel Nettle has written about what it has found, and what the lessons are for everyday life. “The brain contains at least three inter-linking systems, one for desire, one for pleasure, and one for serenity, all of which are products of our evolutionary history. Each has different functions, and each can be activated in partial independence from the others, so that we can become addicted to things that provide neither pleasure nor serenity, and attain serenity without necessarily fulfilling our desires. “Confounding both Jeremiahs and Polyannas, the evidence shows that most people consider themselves fairly happy, but almost no-one perfectly so. Interestingly, getting what you want in life, whether it be marriage, wealth or material goods, has little effect, because of the phenomenon known as the hedonic treadmill, whereby we quickly adapt to whatever we have. On the other hand, genetically inherited personality characteristics play a large role, since general level of happiness is stable over long periods of time and tends to run in families. There is good news, though, since practices like meditation can make a real difference to how the brain works.”
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