“Is it not in the nature of complex social systems to go wrong, all by themselves, without external cause? Look at overpopulation, look at Calhoun’s famous model, those overcrowded colonies of rats and their malignant social pathology, all due to their own skewed behavior. Not at all, is my answer. All you have to do is find the meddler, in this case Professor Calhoun himself, and the system will put itself right. The trouble with those rats is not the innate tendency of crowded rats to go wrong, but the scientists who took them out of the world at large and put them in too small a box.”
A friend recently consulted me about a rumor he heard. He wanted to know whether the Muslims are investing money in the US in order to take over. This is my reply:
The simple answer is “No, and if they did it was an amazingly stupid investment.”
But I don’t do simple.
I’ll start by saying, screw the Taliban, they’re stone-age guys with guns and a beautiful book of inspired verses that none of them is educated enough to actually read. And WE put them in power to drive out the Russians. Third World Traveler: Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden,
and the Taliban
Unfortunately, in the late ’90′s the Taliban was opposing an oil pipeline through Uzbekistan that would have had to come down through their country. This incensed oilman George W. Bush.
The Taliban doesn’t own anything but poppies, guns and rocks. Their country was destroyed by years of war against Russia. There is an entire generation of people who can’t read, who have no government records like land deeds, marriage licenses or birth certificates. They aren’t investing in anything but the feudal system that protects them from themselves.
We often boost up third-world, authoritarian regimes when there is something in it for us.
Ok, so one way is to go to an underdeveloped nation with a mineral you need that you can’t get in the U.S. Pay the guys in power so that they have absolute control over the populace and can use them to mine the mineral. **Saudi Arabia** is a prime example of that – and Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi until we enlisted him to organize the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein are also good examples of it. Where’s that photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein after they negotiated an oil deal?
Think of Teddy Roosevelt riding roughshod over Libya, etc. NeoCons are “Teddy Roosevelt Republicans.” Iraq didn’t go so well, but they don’t see it. With “trickle-down economics” the poor and the middle class bear the burden. It doesn’t affect the NeoCons so they don’t even know it exists.
I wrote a couple of blog entries on the public debt recently. You really need to read some of Jefferson’s and Madison’s thoughts on scrip before you read my short, simple answer. Here’s the URL and a quote from it.
In modern terms, the Federal Reserve Bank decides on a dollar amount that it needs to borrow to stimulate the growth of new businesses or to fund a war, then it prints dollars to symbolize the debt. When you and I then borrow the dollars, we take on a portion of the Fed’s debt. Once we own the dollar bills, we pay interest on the dollars that the Fed borrowed. The Fed borrows not just interest-free, but at a profit.
Pull a dollar out of your wallet if you don’t believe me. There is statement in the upper-right corner “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” The dollar bill is an I.O.U.!
Having read that, and knowing that the dollar is (or was) the standard world-wide, you can deduce who owns our public debt. Pretty much the whole world, eh?
Foreign investors own large portions of corporate America. Fortunately, most of them don’t own isn’t enough to actually control the companies, but what if they did? They’d still want to make a profit!
At the same time, convince these investors that real estate is booming and to invest not in the real estate itself, but in the real estate and financial instutions that hold the mortgages. Stocks are more liquid than mortgages, who would want that hassle?
The way to make real estate boom is to make it easier to borrow money, that is, to print money so there can be more debt. It also is necessary to make it easier to buy an overpriced house, like with variable-interest loans.
So here’s how to eliminate large portions of the public debt quickly: We have induced foreign countries take an interest in our biggest industries instead of in cash. That would be financial institutions, mostly.
Make the institutions crash and have the government take over, leaving all the investors with nothing.
The conflict in Iraq has been taking away our pay raises for several years, so many folks were unable to meet the balloon payments. Countrywide Mortgage went first, and the foreign investors said oh shit and started trying to get their money out of our financial institutions. The Wall Street version of a run on the bank, 1929 style. Suddenly dollars aren’t so popular. (That’s why it looks as if oil costs more. It’s the exchange rate, people!!!)
If the dollar is worth less, the debt is less! But simultaneously it gets harder to attract those foreign investments we need so badly to support the opulent lifestyle that we euphemistically call “the American Dream.”
The Fed is trying to control it, so the fall is slow, but we are definitely falling and who the hell knows where the bottom is. Maybe it will stop when Americans have the same lifestyle one of our biggest creditors, the Chinese.
Oooo.
Let’s talk about the Department of the Treasury for a minute. When you buy a Treasury Bond or other instrument, you are borrowing money from the future of the United States financial health. What I meant to say actually is that you are betting the the government will be strong enough to pay the bill with the stated interest at the end of the term of the bill. The shakier the U.S. looks, the harder it gets to sell them.
Thee Treasury department web page maintains a list of what countries hold the Public Debt in Treasury notes. If you want to demonize oil producers by generalizing them as Muslims, then they are #4 on the list. Venezuela is actually Catholic. The Carib and Luxemborg entries actually are world banks that launder money for everywhere. Ditto Switzerland.
As for this bailout, your grandkids will still be paying for the last eight years of laissez-faire economics 30 years from now. Personally, I think that only folks who voted for oilman Bush should have to pay for the bailout.
Basically, your question has no meaning. We have been relying on foreign governments to support our opulent lifestyle for years.
I have been considering picking up some cheap real estate to sell a few years from now when the market picks up. I don’t see why our friends the Saudi Arabians wouldn’t do the same thing. Along with lots of Japanese, Chinese and Russian citizens. I don’t see this as a sinister plot, I see it as good Capitalism.
“Vocatus atque non vocatus… deus aderit
Called or not called , GOD will be present.”
– Inscription on Gravestone of Professor Dr. Carl G. Jung, Kusnacht, Switzerland
Quoted from Heaven’s Register
Have you read any Jung? Jung was a medical doctor whose father was a philospher and pastor. Jung believed that God is not “out there” but is inside us all. God is our subconscious mind! You feel deep down what is right, now don’t you?
Jung pointed out that God evolved morally over the course of biblical history. That’s right, God got better and better. He had to, to keep up with his children’s moral evolution.
Being the firstborn is a curse for a lot of reasons, and it didn’t start with that whole “Dad forgot to paint the lintels” thing.
It can be deduced from the concept of a morally evolving God that Jesus Christ was the manifestation of this evolution. the “God made flesh.” God hoped that a physical manifestation would convince the Pharisees, the NT version of the Religious Right, to evolve too. It didn’t work, though. The Pharisees, like any hierarchical structure heavenly or temporal, were notoriously inflexible. Anything the Pharisees disagreed with was a sin, Evil, abomination. As a child Jesus was almost stoned for breaking one of the old rules.
If God is within us, then the fight between good and evil is going on inside us too. In Jung’s words, “from the psychological point of view demons are nothing other than intruders from the unconscious, spontaneous irruptions of unconscious complexes into the continuity of the conscious process.”
Here’s a simplification derived from Alan Watts‘ Tribute to Carl Jung. Satan isn’t in me, it can’t be, because I am Good. The Evil and the hate must be over there in you! (That’s the non-self-aware speaking, the one with Blind Faith and no reason.)
Look in your heart. Both good and evil are right there inside your own subconscious, making you act out their presence. Like a projector you are shining your own ugly thoughts onto the blank screens of the A-theists. This is the psychology of evil.
And until you discover your self-contradictions, you will always hate anyone who disagrees with you.
As for me, I’m not afraid of the guru. I’m afraid of the people who threaten me with eternal torture in his name.
X-Originating-IP: [209.158.227.171]
From: RepGerber@pahouse.net
Reply-To: info@pahouse.net
Subject: Energy crisis demands action now
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:00:13 -0400
Energy crisis demands action now
As the war in Iraq continues, energy and fuel costs rise and America’s energy consumption continues to cause climate change, the need for a cleaner and more energy-independent Pennsylvania is paramount.
The Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act, as part of the House Democratic Caucus’s Energy Independence Strategy, would put Pennsylvania in the forefront of the alternative and renewable fuel economy.
This legislation would mandate the blending of ethanol, soy and other clean energy sources in fuels. It would establish production and distribution standards to advance the shift to cleaner and cheaper domestic fuel sources. And it would help to stimulate the Pennsylvania economy with in-state production of renewable fuels.
Our proposal is likely to come to a vote on the House floor next week and, if enacted into law, would put Pennsylvania on track to produce enough homegrown fuel to replace all the fuel we now import from the Persian Gulf.
Clean the environment. End our dependence on foreign oil. Reduce fuel costs. Stimulate Pennsylvania’s economy. Show your support for this important legislation. Contact your representative and tell them to vote YES on House Bill 1202!
Spread the word!
I am utterly appalled by the ignorance of the present energy issues displayed in HOUSE BILL No.1202, otherwise known as the Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act.
Perhaps the Pennsylvania representatives aren’t aware of the gas crisis in the early or mid-70s where the State of New Jersey had to go to even-odd day gas rationing.
Maybe the Pennsylvania representatives have forgotten the gas crisis in 1978 or 1979 during which lines at the gas station where up to a half mile long. Gas stations sold out their daily allotment by 10AM. People were shooting each other in gas lines in anger and frustration. Increased energy costs caused several years of stagflation, where prices and interest rates went up but salaries didn’t. The average Pennsylvanian’s life savings lost a large percentage of buying power, forcing retirees to go to back to work.
The problems inherent in relying not just on foreign oil but on fossil fuels in general are not new. Any rational, responsible individual opted a long time ago to forego luxuries such as comfort, style or the illusion of safety in favor of reduced emissions and better gas mileage.
Let’s be clear, also, that the United States buys most of its oil from friends and allies. Iraq was once a friend and ally, and continued oil revenue is essential to building a government to replace the one the United States destroyed. It would be wiser to stop buying oil from that notorious Wahabbi stronghold Saudi Arabia.
As it is written, HOUSE BILL No.1202 will have no effect on Pennsylvanians’ driving habits. The bill provides no incentive for individuals to use less gas or to pollute less. There is no mention of the paranoid trend towards larger vehicles that occurred after 9-11, as if the family car is a bomb shelter rather than simply a means of getting from point A to point B. There is also no mention of the windfall profits American oil refineries have made by basing manufacturing overhead allocations that did NOT increase on the increased cost of the raw material. The emphasis in HOUSE BILL No.1202 on biodiesel technology trivializes or ignores viable alternatives to the internal combustion engine, much less the development of proposed new alternative energy technologies. There is absolutely zero mention of the effect continued reliance on fossil fuels will have on carbon dioxide levels in the air we breathe. There is nothing the bill about addressing the soil depletion that will occur if current farming practices are continued while implementing biodiesel technology.
HOUSE BILL No.1202 is an short-sighted, agrarian solution to an industrial problem. In fact, the solutions outlined in HOUSE BILL No.1202 are exactly the solutions that high school ecology clubs were promoting in the ’70s. These solutions are so archaic that to implement the bill as written would be to set energy policy back 30 years. The result of HOUSE BILL No.1202 will be to push Pennsylvania back into the the Dust Bowl era. A post-modern technological solution that addresses multiple social, financial and geopolitical facets of the energy problem makes far more sense to any reasonably intelligent Pennsylvanian.
Interesting web site. It’s about how we define the moment of death. They are turning Emergency Medicine on its head.
If you have advance directives, a living will or a DNR order, it’s because you don’t want to wind up a vegetable after a medical emergency or because you have an incurable, fatal condition. Advanced directives are NOT intended to force the ER doctors to let you die when medical treatment can easily fix you right up. With the exception, of course, of folks whose religion forbids medical treatment.
When I was a whitewater rafting guide I had to be certified in Advanced First Aid and Life Support. This program took four weekends to complete. It was hard for me to put in that kind of sustained effort, now that I think about it, but it really helped my confidence on the job. The point of the course was to enable the guides to stabilize someone injured on the river until we could get real medical help. And it wasn’t a far stretch to consider CPR in case a guest had a heart attack on the river.
Read the UPenn web site. Look at the powerpoint presentations. Read the doctors’ curriculum vitae.
Again: it’s about how we define the moment of death.
Your cells don’t die right away when you die. When oxygen-deprived they go into a kind of stasis and even after several hours a doctor can still extract undamaged, living cells. They haven’t stopped, they’ve just slowed down. You don’t fade out in that first magic 5 minutes. You fall into a deep coma, then actual cell death takes hours – or longer.
This is completely different than what the public and most of the medical profession believes at this time. The current belief is that no pulse equals death. Which really sucks for a few folks who have temporary a artificial heart that whirrrrrs instead of beating. But I digress.
So if you want to define death in terms of brain activity as monitored on an Electroencephalogram (EEG), well, the EEG can only measure down to about 0.5 Hz. This is a limitation of our technology. As you fall asleep brainwaves slow from 30Hz maximum down to around 4Hz. If you go into a deep coma, they slow down even more. No brainwave equals death, then. Except that our technology has serious limitations. Well, it turns out that brain cells go into stasis too.
Now here’s where it gets weird.
Think about what they do in the ER. It’s all about reperfusion, getting oxygen back into the brain as quickly as possible. Jump-start the heart, pump oxygen into the lungs, get a cold patient warm. Well, it turns out that if you pump too much oxygen into a cell that’s in stasis, it self-destructs. That magic 5 minutes isn’t the time that it takes the cells to die. The magic 5 minutes is the time it takes for some of the cells to go into stasis, that is, enough that the self-destruction, or apoptosis, causes wide-spread damage to the body on reperfusion. The heart seems to be the most susceptable organ.
The gist of the web page I linked to is that if someone is brought into the ER suffering from cardiac arrest, they have a better chance at survival if the ER doctors immediately cool them down and add some chemicals to prevent apoptosis before beginning slow reperfusion. The Resuscitation Medicine department at the U of P is working on establishing a new set of protocols.
Where it gets scary is here:
If they bring you in after the magic 5 minutes, present ER protocols can’t save you. Not without massive, permanent damage to the heart and to the brain. They declare you, and that’s it. The body is sent to a funeral home and cremated or injected with preservatives, sometimes long before the several-hour deadline (so to speak) is up.
No wonder the Irish hold wakes. The British, after discovering that an unsettling number of people had been buried alive – used to attach bell cords to the wrists of folks they buried. Saved by the bell.
IRL your family can decide to keep your brain-dead corpse alive despite anything you said in life. Witness what poor Terri Schaivo’s parents did to keep her mindless body alive long after her spirit was gone.
I’ll be watching the Rescusitation Medicine story with great interest.
The boss sent me a geometry puzzle as revenge for one I sent him to solve. I shared it with my favorite philosopher. This conversation ensued.
ME, quoting the boss:
You have a rectangular piece of material out of which are cut two regular polygons of arbitrary number of sides, position and size. (Both holes are entirely contained within the larger rectangle.) Devise a method for dividing the remaining material into two equal areas.
Get back to work!
K: Slice it through from edge-on.
ME: The boss says “No.” He seems to think that the material can’t be split that way. Hmmmph. Where did he find cloth one atom thick? And why isn’t a nuclear blast a valid way of splitting it?
Update 8/2008: The material is probably a monoatomic-thick graphite substance called “graphene.” No idea where he found it.
K: I like nuclear blast; you collect the fallout into two buckets of equal volume.
ME: I made an infinite number of radial folds so that it was made up of an infinite number of layers of rhombi of width zero. Then I cut it in half radially.
He didn’t like that answer either.
K: Well, isn’t he special? Isn’t it bad for engineers to be rigidly wedded to a single answer when other solutions might be available?
ME: Yeah, really. You have to think outside the box, something bipolars are really good at. LOL!!!
Did I mention that after I came up with a truly ugly solution for the trivial case he told me oops, that should have been ONE polygon? Sheesh. So I choked him. I wonder who will sign my paycheck next time?
While a person with depression or bipolar disorder typically endures the same mood for weeks, a person with BPD may experience intense bouts of anger, depression, and anxiety that may last only hours, or at most a day. These may be associated with episodes of impulsive aggression, self-injury, and drug or alcohol abuse. Distortions in cognition and sense of self can lead to frequent changes in long-term goals, career plans, jobs, friendships, gender identity, and values. Sometimes people with BPD view themselves as fundamentally bad, or unworthy. They may feel unfairly misunderstood or mistreated, bored, empty, and have little idea who they are. Such symptoms are most acute when people with BPD feel isolated and lacking in social support, and may result in frantic efforts to avoid being alone.
I’d like to put forth the observation that psychology in the US is mainly concerned with predicting and manipulating the behavior of large numbers of people. There is little or no acknowledgement of an internal landscape, because you can’t measure emotions – you can only measure how they are expressed. The psychologists aren’t healers, they are agents of social control.
So. “Personality Disorder” means that a certain type of personality has been pathologized because their behaviors are uncomfortable to others. The behaviors relate to the coping style – but the real problem is that the person has a damaged ego. They have to rely on others to give them clues as to who they are!
The borderlines experience an overwhelming fear of abandonment. All of the crazy behavior is to prevent you from leaving. Unfortunately, the set point is so low that most of what you do looks like abandonment. Abandonment in this context doesn’t mean left alone to rebuild their life – which majorly sucks but isn’t the End of the World. Abandonment means that who they are has been taken away from them. They have little “I” so they have to be part of a “we.”
You can teach a borderline to withhold their emotions with Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (among others), but I’m not entirely convinced that any therapy changes the real problem. It has very little to do with wanting to change, and everything to do with the fact that the fear of abandonment is so deep that – well, damn, you practically have to tear down the whole house to fix the foundation. You see?
I have been meditating – oops, first wrote “medicating” – on the word post-modern recently.
Ken Wilber says (and I paraphrase), that in the context of Transpersonal Psychology, post-modern means that your personal evolution has carried the human race past the sterile pragmatism and/or atheism of the Computer Age into the next stage. My understanding is that in the next stage, the romantic and the pragmatic will be integrated into a way of looking at the world that retains the best elements of both.
Not “your world” but “the world.”
Unlike the theistic, mystical/magical thinking of the Age that preceeded both of these, the Post-modern Age will be made up of inclusive, open minds. The theistic stage seems to prevent further personal evolution in those who embrace it, so don’t expect the anima mundi as a whole to be transformed any time soon.
On the TV show “Criminal Minds,” one of the characters stated that a post-modernist is likely to use Technology as Art. I took this to mean not that a postmodern human can’t figure out how to use a toaster or telephone, but rather that the infrastructure for using such devices is either in ruins or financially inaccessible to the average postmodernist.
Description of Mark: The mark consists of the exhaust sound of applicant’s motorcycles, produced by V-Twin, common crankpin motorcycle engines when the goods are in use.
It almost makes sense. You pay your hard-earned American dollars to get that distinctive Harley-Davidson sound. You don’t want some Southeast Asian company copying it into their rice-burners. It seems that the USPTO operates only in the visual mode.
If Harley-Davidson had called the sound of a V-Twin “music” they could have copyrighted it and collected royalties. I think I’ll send them an email.
Ford Prefect: " ..you've been here 8 months and you haven't even invented the wheel yet!" Golgofricham hairdresser: " Okay, if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be...."
.
Iraq
Pennsylvania
Persian Gulf
climate change
energy crisis
Rescusitation Medicine
apoptosis
Emergency Medicine
cellular reperfusion injury
EEG
cardiac arrest
moment of death
geometry
think outside the box
engineers
Marsha Linehan
borderline personality disorder
Dialectic Behavioral Therapy
psychology
bipolar disorder
ego
NIMH
