Updates by Wishimay

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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POSTED BY: WISHIMAY
UPDATED: Thursday, October 27, 2016 18:10
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Saturday, September 5, 2015 4:29 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

No, the 99.99% have to stop following the 0.01% ...

I agree.

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

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Saturday, September 5, 2015 4:44 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"More democracy won't work as well as you hope. That isn't because voting is hopeless, but is because voters' minds are a tiny bit deranged."

That's pretty much what I posted. But it didn't just happen, it was done on purpose. All you have to do is withhold real information and analysis of action and outcome; advertise relentlessly, and portray the world the way you want people to think it is at every turn - in the news, the ads, and the shows - and you can end up with a population that couldn't tell you which way is up if their lives depended on it. Which they do - after all, look at how many USers volunteered for Iraq to fight for US freedom.

Anyway, I'm about halfway through the entire BBC production. But while they do a good job explaining the origins of the crazy market theory, they don't explain WHY the politicos adopted it so wholeheartedly. And they don't make the case that the populace substantially did either. I think there's a lot of specific British history and worldview I don't have that make it feel like there are a lot of gaps. But I'll finish it. It's good to get a different POV.

< Fwiw that particular theory is just a model - one of many - that people use to think about the world. Like any model, gigo. The biologists, geneticists, and evolutionary biologists recognized its shortcomings a long time ago. And even as biologists continue to explore its strengths and limitations, they're uncovering one important variable that wasn't accounted for, which is timescale. Short-term success (everyone optimizing their success based on time-limited information) may not be long-term viable - not even genetically. And since evolutionary success is judged in the millions and billions of years, a short-term success will often flame-out over time. And that's an evolutionary dead end. Over the long haul, evolution favors adaptable redundant systems, not wildly booming individual populations.
Even the original Nash analysis, which indicated equilibrium and therefore, one assumes, a limited form of stability assuming nothing changes in the environment, only focused on one type of equilibrium. But there are many equilibria possible through many different processes. So on the whole it provided a new way of looking at evolution and other processes, but I think it by itself was extremely limited, almost crippled.>

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Sunday, September 6, 2015 7:38 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:

Anyway, I'm about halfway through the entire BBC production. But while they do a good job explaining the origins of the crazy market theory, they don't explain WHY the politicos adopted it so wholeheartedly. And they don't make the case that the populace substantially did either. I think there's a lot of specific British history and worldview I don't have that make it feel like there are a lot of gaps. But I'll finish it. It's good to get a different POV.

That's good you're looking into the BBC's The Trap. Some of us sleepwalked into this Trap. Others were pushed. Who is doing the pushing and why? www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=59994&mid=1002273#
1002273

John Ralston Saul sees the problem as originating long time ago. There are villains in his story about the trap we have fallen into. He wrote a book about them called Voltaire's Bastards. Chapter 1 begins like this:

1. In Which the Narrator Positions Himself

In moments of great passion, the mind tends to be flooded with a warm vision of the person in our arms. We are unlikely, at that point, to be analyzing their flaws, real or hypothetical. Even less likely if lying in darkness. As for the possible product of our intercourse, only the most peculiar lover would be fretting, while in the act, over whether such a child might or might not be an appropriate and worthy creation.

Voltaire and the other thinkers of the eighteenth century could be criticized, with the facility of hindsight, for the passion with which they embraced reason. But they lived in societies still ruled by the demeaning vagaries of court life. All of them had been thrown in jail or risked it simply for expressing their opinions. In most countries justice still used torture as an official method of interrogation and the condemned faced a variety of brutal punishments; being broken on the wheel, for example. This and other tools of arbitrary power constituted a social form of darkness. The philosophers of Europe, England and America threw themselves into the arms of reason, convinced that birth would be given to new rational elites capable of building a new civilization. This love affair was fertile to the point of being miraculous and society was subsequently reformed for the better beyond what any of these thinkers had imagined.

And yet the exercise of power, without the moderating influence of any ethical structure, rapidly became the religion of these new elites. And their reforms included an unparalleled and permanent institutionalization of state violence. This was accompanied by a growing struggle between democratic and rational methods, with the rational increasingly at an advantage.

Were Voltaire to reappear today, he would be outraged by the new structures, which somehow deformed the changes for which he struggled. As for his descendants -- our ruling elites -- he would deny all legal responsibility and set about fighting them, as he once fought the courtiers and priests of eighteenth-century Europe.

John Ralston Saul summarizes his book for a reviewer deliberately misreading it for ideological reasons, here: www.nytimes.com/1992/09/27/books/l-voltaire-s-bastards-006192.html

Quote:
I argue that the rational elites, aggressive and without direction, claimed credit for many of the accomplishments of the humanists while blaming the humanists for the disasters they themselves brought on. The effect of this parallel development on military strategy, science, politics and business makes up the body of "Voltaire's Bastards."

In a new introduction twenty years later, John Ralston Saul wrote about our most recent Bastards running this world:

Quote:
The ability to embrace doubt in the middle of a crisis is a sign of strength. Voltaire’s Bastards ends with what might seem a surprising eulogy to doubt— our ability to live with uncertainty as a creative force. You could call this an expression of consciousness. If we can bring ourselves to live consciously then we will be able to embrace both stability and change, which means we may do better at dealing with crises.

That eulogy to doubt included descriptions of what I have seen over the years in both the Arctic and the Sahara. Existing in doubt is a strength of people who live in extreme conditions. They must be conscious or they will die.

We, flowers of the temperate zones, can float half awake through a padded world. We have our dramas and our suffering. But most of that we impose upon ourselves.

The greatest drama we have imposed on ourselves is our willful misinterpretation of consciousness. The Socratic conviction was that virtues were forms of knowledge and therefore no man willingly does wrong. What I said in Voltaire’s Bastards about our modern elites was that, by abandoning humanism in favour of an ideology of reason, they had inverted the equation. Now they justify doing wrong because they do know. This rational sophistication makes them passive, terrified of uncertainty, unable to change when faced by reality, ready to accept the worst.

You might call this profound cynicism: the mindset of the courtier or consultant or advisor. In any case, they believe themselves to be immobilized by what they know. This, they think, is professional behaviour. To be precise, they know so much that they believe it would be amateurish or emotive to do anything much about the environment, global warming, poverty, debt, to mention just a few problems.

This passive or fearful mind-set, tied to expertise and power, has steadily worsened over the last twenty years as the power of managerial leadership has grown. Theirs is a mind-set obsessed by systems and by control over systems as the essence of power. It is the opposite of leadership. It is all about form over content; a mind-set in which continuity and mediocrity are the same thing.

Today their power is such that they feel comfortable manacling the citizenry with debts transferred to them from corporate bodies. They take pleasure in weighing job creation against planetary warming, as if these were opposites. It is as if they, being experts, had cleverly negotiated a deal with the planet itself. A trade off. As simple as that.

Is this naivety? Ignorance? Even Odysseus knew you couldn’t do a deal with Zeus.

I mentioned in Voltaire’s Bastards that the late twentieth century resembled the mid-eighteenth, with a large, sophisticated, self-referential and pessimistic elite. This is what you might call the self-destructive nature of the overly sophisticated. Twenty years later this also is increasingly true: We have an elite pessimistic not only about its own ability to do things but, thanks to an astonishing transfer of responsibility, pessimistic about the citizenry.

The rest of the new introduction to Voltaire's Bastards is at http://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reason-West/dp/1
476718962/

The introduction ends on this note: Given our obsession with efficiency and most of our leaders with professional methodology, many will say we haven’t got time for such time-consuming reflections. As for those who got us into this mess, they are busy raising fear, erasing all memory of their failures while they maintain a steady pace in the same old direction.

Of course, it is entirely our right to continue on our downward spiral. We don’t have to embrace doubt or learn how to live consciously. We can continue to abandon empathy as an expensive, inefficient pastime.

Cultural suicide is a tradition well-established in history.

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Sunday, September 6, 2015 1:16 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr

Interesting insites.

Hav you ever thot about how you woud run the world if you were given absolute power?

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.nooalf.com

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Sunday, September 6, 2015 3:17 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Second

I'm afraid I'll probably never read the book, as worthy as it may be.

But I see several different strains in the process.

One is that rational thinking gave us science. We stopped framing the universe in human terms - the solar eclipse is a signal from the gods TO US - and started to frame it in its own terms (as best we can understand them). And as bits of the universe, our existence too follows some impersonal rules. But we're far, far from understanding those rules, and given the role of random events, we may never understand them. So, trying to frame those rules in impersonal terms, as useful a tool as it may be, should never be mistaken for reality.

The other thing I think is that some portions of biology vigorously embraced Nash's game theory of existence - 'the selfish gene' theory. And while it has some utility, its shortcomings at accounting for the variety of behaviors and organisms were recognized quickly.

So how does a theory - a model - fall out of favor so quickly in the sciences, yet still continue unabated in psychology, economics and politics?

The cynical me says it has as much to do with human reality as social Darwinism has to do with Darwin's mechanism of evolution; or neo-liberalism has to do with liberalism - ie - nothing at all.

To backtrack a bit, I've always wondered if the Maya priest-kings, or the leaders of various church hierarchies, or the Roman emperors, or other people whose power depended on the belief of their subjects, actually believed what they preached. Or was it just a cynical ploy that they used to manipulate others? Or simply a system that they existed in and responded to without too much thought either way?

And when you look at think tanks, whose entire reason for being is to shape our discussion and understanding, you can see a mechanism for how an obviously crippled theory could be inculcated into government.

Did The Framers really believe that all men are created equal, as an outgrowth of Locke and Rousseau, or were they simply rich men grabbing onto a narrative that would let them keep more of their money by getting rid of the king's taxes by getting rid of the king?

Does Obama believe that if you open up the Arctic to drilling but make speeches about the effects of global warming that one will cancel out the other? Does he believe that selling the country to the medical insurance industry is the best way to improve healthcare access? Does he really think that 'the market' will provide the answers? Or is he just cynically shilling for corporations at our expense, simply to line his own pockets?

My impulse is to say 'follow the money'. Belief in 'the market' and the 'rational economic actor' is as unsupported by evidence as any religion.

In sum, an obviously incomplete idea was rejected as the sole explanation in the biological sciences. But that idea has been maintained and even inculcated, in psychology, economics and government - partly through the mechanism of think tanks whose sole reason for being is to influence policy and thought - despite its obvious shortcomings. Like many rationales invoked by the powerful before it - and there are many historical and present-day examples - it's role is as a cover story to bamboozle the powerless, so the powerful can maintain and even extend their power. It makes a handy cover story to do what you want to do.

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Sunday, September 6, 2015 7:24 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Second

I'm afraid I'll probably never read the book, as worthy as it may be.

It might amuse you to read random pages at Amazon. This is page 532 from the chapter “Surviving in Fantasy Land” in Voltaire's Bastards.

Where's the Rest of Me?, Ronald Reagan's autobiography, is out of print. And yet in it Reagan explains how, for the first time in the Age of Reason, a pure star was able to rise to the summit of power.

One of his basic principles was that leadership in a confused era is primarily a matter of clear perspective. He seems to have understood this as early as his first public appearance, when he was scarcely twenty. He was calling a football game live for radio:

“We are speaking to you from high atop the Memorial Stadium of the University of Iowa, looking down from the west on the south forty yard line.” Reagan the autobiographer goes on to comment: “I’ve always believed in the teller who locates himself, so the audience can see the game through his eyes.”

This is a principle which contradicts everything rational men believe and do. They provide answers and then prove them to the listener, who can not help but feel this is an aggression upon his dignity. Reagan may have insulted the intelligence of the people, but he did not question their dignity. He merely placed himself in a chosen position vis-à-vis reality, told people where he thought he was and then described in simple but mythological terms what he saw. If you accepted that he was where he said he was, it was difficult to reject the description that followed. He placed himself in such a manner that he spoke as if he were the people’s eyes.

Actors understand that what all of us want is to believe. The plausibility of drama has always turned on our willing suspension of disbelief. It is not the unwilling suspension. The individual wants to believe. We can hardly be blamed for that.

The rational elites can deny this with answers and arguments, but the truth can be seen in the growing number of below-average politicians who occupy the positions of power from which clear descriptions can emanate. The illusion they create is double that of an actor like Reagan. In search of real power, they must pretend to be people who pretend to be real. The German chancellor, the leaders of both major parties in Britain during the 1992 election, the prime ministers of Canada and New Zealand — all operate from limited intelligence. They adjust their convictions with the arbitrariness of those who rely upon pollsters. They describe these temporary visions with memorized formulas. The stock phrases roll off their tongues. And they behave as much as possible like B-movie actors. In other words, after a period in which technocrats attempted to become stars and stars to become politicians, the political void has been occupied by the force of mediocrity, which can easily master enough of the star techniques to produce inoffensive personalities and enough of the rational vocabulary to create the sounds of competence.

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Monday, September 7, 2015 10:50 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

As an announcer, Reagan made up a a lot of play-by-play. He may have understood the listener's need for a clear narrative, but he used that need to concoct and sell fables.

Quote:
One of his responsibilities was to give accounts of Chicago Cubs baseball games via telegraph. During one game between the Cubs and their arch rivals the St. Louis Cardinals that was tied 0-0 in the 9th inning, the telegraph went dead: An often repeated tale of Reagan's radio days recounts how he delivered "play-by-play broadcasts" of Chicago Cubs baseball games he had never seen. His flawless recitations were based solely on telegraph accounts of games in progress. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/40_reagan/reagan_early.html

6. Once in 1934, during the ninth inning of a Cubs - St. Louis Cardinals game, the wire went dead. Reagan smoothly improvised a fictional play-by-play (in which hitters on both teams gained a superhuman ability to foul off pitches) until the wire was restored.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan

7. Reagan says: “There were several other stations broadcasting that game and I knew I’d lose my audience if I told them we’d lost our telegraph connections so I took a chance. I had (Billy) Jurges hit another foul. Then I had him foul one that only missed being a homerun by a foot. I had him foul one back in the stands and took up some time describing the two lads that got in a fight over the ball. I kept on having him foul balls until I was setting a record for a ballplayer hitting successive foul balls and I was getting more than a little scared. Just then my operator started typing. When he passed me the paper I started to giggle - it said: ‘Jurges popped out on the first ball pitched.’” http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3120.html

http://radio.about.com/od/djsandhostsqt/a/aa060704a.htm

The ability to lie convincingly is the mark of an actor ... or a sociopath. The rather disturbing conclusion I reach from this example ... and pretty much most of human history ... is that most people love to be lied to, as long as it's a story they're used to hearing.

--------------
You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

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Monday, September 7, 2015 4:28 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

The ability to lie convincingly is the mark of an actor ... or a sociopath. The rather disturbing conclusion I reach from this example ... and pretty much most of human history ... is that most people love to be lied to, as long as it's a story they're used to hearing.

People love a good story. They love Apple iPhones and deeply mourned Steve Jobs' death despite this business leader being an irresponsible bastard who had no conscience about killing people and then excusing himself of all blame. I know this from Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (2015) www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Jobs-documentary-a-tale-of-two-Steves-64
80680.php

Apple earned $300 profit from each iPhone and paid Chinese workers $12 for assembling the phone. They were so unhappy working for Steve Jobs that workers were jumping from buildings to their death. Questioned about it, Steve Jobs could see absolutely no connection between their low pay and their suicides. According to him, it was regrettable but a normal rate of suicide.

This was at exactly the same time that Jobs was rewarding himself $20,000,000 of backdated stock options (perfectly illegal, Jobs claimed he knew nothing about the illegality) because he felt he was working too hard on weekends and he needed to be compensated or else he might kill himself from overwork.

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 10:44 AM

WISHIMAY

"With increasing regulations forcing other mines to close, we would see more and more inspectors on our job. At one point, we had 12 inspectors on our property on the same day. They told us they were all there that day because they had nowhere else to go … That would lead to more violations because of their interpretation of laws. More violations lead to higher cost per ton. Higher cost per ton leads to less profits. Less profits lead to job loss.”

SEE, I TOLD YOU PEOPLE THAT OBAMA CLOSED THE MINES.

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 6:10 PM

WISHIMAY

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ucenergy/2016/10/27/whos-waging-the-war-on
-coal-not-the-government/#5903bf87543c

Dumb ass article disproves their own point...

This drop has coincided with new regulations that have raised the cost of operating coal-fired power plants going forward, such as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, the Cross State Air Pollution Rule, and the Clean Power Plan.

YOU PUT THAT MANY REGS ON ANYTHING AND IT WILL FOLD!

It's not like they didn't KNOW that there was already increased competition with natural gas. He saw an opportunity to slit coals' throat and he did it.

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