Battle For the Soul of Capitalism

I've been reading Bogle's book over the last week, and I've come to a conclusion ithat he writes around but doesn't actually hit on. That's that the real commodity in our economy is stock. The definition of stock as a representation of a piece of ownership in a corporation has changed, and that the ownership of stock, and the trading of stock is an economy unto itself. Not in the way that stock is traded on the expectation that partial ownership of a corporation engaged in a particular set of industrious actions will increase the price of the stock in the future, rather, there is a "deep branding" effect, where a perception of a fictional other's place in the market of stock trading effects the willingness of a stock owner to purchase at a given price. Deep branding in this case being something I've just made up which suggests a brand unawareness so embedded in any micro-culture that it becomes a pseudo fact.

All this is said in addition to Bogle's commentary on managers capital and municipal complacency.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

"Bush doesn't know anything; he doesn't want to know anything...but he's not stupid"--William J. Clinton (citations in the ether)

This is consistently the meme that has developed among the political elite in this country, and in a triumph of trickle down theory, which has permiated into the ranks of truck stop dialogue. So we must ask ourselves: what is stupid?

Stupidity defined might most easily slip into a clinical description of intellegence quotient and or IQ extablishment testing methodologies. Let us accept first that an expeditionary stupid hunt with origins in this arena leaves the nacent Bushologist stepping away from the intended proposition vis a vie "stupid is defined as..." and turning instead to plant a flag some where on a positivist, anti-positivist, postpositivist type spectrum. I propose that this clinical technique identifies more clearly the Bushologists biases and inevitably diverts focus from the task at hand,namely, how can the Bushological community claim and apply the term stupid.

In this forum we propose that the most apt strategy is comparison in binary oppositions, on the one hand fictional character Forrest Gump and on the other fictional POTUS George W. Bush.

Paper to follow

WHAT AN EMBARASSMENT OF RICHES

The Democratic party is in a position where a woman or a minority will be the titular head of the party. What a gift.

Imagine if either of them were democrats.