What Did Lincoln Really Think of Jefferson?

Jefferson believed that the only real wealth was land and that the only true occupation of virtuous and independent citizens in a republic was farming. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote. He despised “the selfish spirit of commerce” for feeling “no passion or principle but that of gain.” And he regarded banks with special suspicion as the source of all commercial evil. “Banks may be considered as the primary source” of “paper speculation,” and only foster “the spirit of gambling in paper, in lands, in canal schemes, town lot schemes, manufacturing schemes and whatever could hit the madness of the day.”

.. “I was once a slave,” he remarked, “but now I am so free that they let me practice law.”

.. As a lawyer, according to colleagues, Lincoln was never “unwilling to appear in behalf of a great soulless corporation” — especially railroads — and had no compunction about recommending the eviction of squatters who farmed railroad-owned land.

As president, he put into place a national banking system, protective tariffs for American manufacturing and government guarantees for building a transcontinental railroad. Lincoln was Jefferson’s nightmare.

.. Patriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart.

Driverless Cars: Insurers Cannot be Asleep at the Wheel

The in-built chauffeur comes in the form of a rotating LIDAR laser taking 1.3 million recordings per second, and it’s a better driver than you.

.. In the UK 23% of all car insurance claims result from parking incidents of which 71% occur during reversing. A switch to driverless cars could largely eliminate these costs.

.. Volvo has aspirationally declared that by 2020 no-one will die in one of its cars – a claim which will hinge on the robustness of Volvo’s technology.

.. As Henry Ford is attributed to saying: “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.

Looking ‘White’ In the Face (Race and Philosophy)

In the gospel Jesus announces his ministry by saying he has come to proclaim good news to the poor and imprisoned and the year of the Jubilee, which meant massive economic redistribution every 50th year! Can you imagine the Christian right voting for that? The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty. But instead of playing the prophetic role of Amos denouncing the American Jeroboam, instead of working to close that gap, the policies of the right wing are exacerbating it.

.. The secular left, on the other hand, won’t touch religion with a stick and abandons the ground of religion to the right. So both the left and the right have a hand around the throat of prophetic religion.

.. Prophetic does not mean the ability to foretell the future. It means the call for justice for “the widow, the orphan and the stranger,” the affirmation that the mark of God is on the face of everyone who is down and out, and a prophetic sensibility requires walking a mile in the shoes of the other.

I remember years ago, the president of a local college (in the Quaker tradition) took a year’s leave of absence to work as a trash collector.

..  I can only assume her intentions were good but I think she was misguided. You can’t be an “intentional” victim, adopt it freely, because that means you are always free to walk away from it if the going gets rough, take a few weeks off for a holiday, or just you change your mind. So it ends up making a mockery of the oppressed — the biting edge of oppression is that is not of your own choosing!

.. This problem also comes up in Christian theology — God intentionally assumed our mortal condition but it wasn’t an inescapable plight visited upon the divine being without its consent.