The Invisible Fat-Finger and The Phoney Economy

 Swedish Philosopher Nick Bostrom

Adam Smith had his "invisible hand"; we have our barely visible "fat-finger"...

I love being in a Phoney Economy, where everything is an algorithm. It is like living inside a computer simulation at times, where everything resembles "reality", but has a distinct "irreality" about it... sort of like Halo 4.
We used to argue about the question posed many years ago by Nick Bostrom whether we might be living inside a computer simulation... now it seems we are.

For instance:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/09/are-oil-prices-determined-solely-by-fundamentals.html
Are Oil Prices Determined Solely By Fundamentals?

Jim Hamilton on what determines prices in oil markets:

...The Wall Street Journal carried this account last week:

Oil prices dropped more than $3 in less than a minute late in the trading day on Monday, just as trading volume spiked. The move also dragged down prices of gold, copper and even the euro.
"Traders were looking like deer in the headlights," said Peter Donovan, a floor trader... "I called four different desks, and they all said, 'we don't know.' " ...
The move sparked talk of an erroneous trade—called a "fat-finger" error in industry parlance—or a computer algorithm gone awry.

Fat finger or no, there was an even bigger drop on Wednesday...
Those who doubt that oil prices are determined solely by fundamentals would naturally ask, what aspect of the supply or demand for oil could have possibly changed in the course of less than a minute last Monday? The obvious and correct answer is, there was no change in either the supply or the demand for physical oil over the course of that minute. The minute-by-minute price of a NYMEX contract is determined by how many people are wanting to buy that financial contract and at what price, not by how much gasoline motorists burned in their cars that minute. But since changes in the price of crude oil are the key determinant of the price consumers pay for gasoline, doesn't that establish pretty clearly that the whims or fat fingers of financial traders are ultimately determining the price we all pay at the pump?

In one sense, the answer to that question is yes-- last week's decline in the price of crude oil will soon show up as a lower price Americans pay for gasoline. But here's the problem you run into if you try to carry that theory too far. There are at the end of this chain real people who burn real gasoline when they drive real cars. And how much gasoline they burn depends in part on the price they pay-- with a higher price, some people use a little bit less...

 The post continues to establish that there are real classical economical parameters determinant of the price of oil or gas. We are left with a price of Oil = P, and P = Real Demand Price + Speculation Price  (P=RDP+SP), and there is a "malaise feeling" everywhere within reading distance that "SP" has been growing exponentially, while RDP chugs along in a linear fashion.

Speculation Price is to Economics just exactly as Charitable Deduction is to Sermon on the Mount : we have given up our lives to determining factors which are remotely complex, coldly logical, and vastly inhumane by their inhuman scale of application.
--

Amadinajad at the UN

First, let us go back to 2005:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/israeli-minister-agrees-ahmadinejad-never-said-israel-must-be-wiped-off-the-map/

In a reminder that Persian rhetoric is not always easy for English-speakers to interpret, a senior Israeli official has acknowledged that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, never actually said that Israel “must be wiped off the map.”

Those words were attributed to Mr. Ahmadinejad in 2005, in English translations of his speech to a “World Without Zionism” conference that October. As my colleague Ethan Bronner reported the next year, one problem was translating a metaphorical turn of phrase in Persian that has no exact English equivalent — there was, for instance, no mention of a map — and there was a heated debate about whether the original statement was a threat or a prediction.

Last week, Teymoor Nabili of Al Jazeera suggested during an interview with Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister of intelligence and atomic energy, that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s rhetorical flourish had been misinterpreted. “This idea that Iran wants to wipe Israel out,” Mr. Nabili said, “now that’s a common trope that is put about by a lot of people in Israel, a lot of people in the United States, but as we know Ahmadinejad didn’t say that he plans to exterminate Israel, nor did he say that Iran’s policy is to exterminate Israel.”

In response, Mr. Meridor said that Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iran’s ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had said repeatedly “that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right, but, ‘It will not survive.’ ”

And up to the present.
Mr. Amadinejad's speech at the UN last Tuesday was subject to translation failures by the UN staff, and it is not clear to me what he actually said. He seems to have said that "War is hell!", but we've heard that before.
--

Freedom of Speech

If I were in a bar sitting next to a loud and annoying lady who was with a large fellow of about 300 pounds, muscled, tattooed, and motorcycled, and I insulted the lady... if I were pretty offensive, you know, I would sort of actually expect to be punched in the mouth.

Freedom of Speech.
--

The Film "The Master" Revisited

 Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Having subjected myself to the film The Master on Saturday evening, on Sunday morning I proceeded to intensify the process by looking at reviews. There was one review in the New Yorker that was almost as long and stupefying as the movie itself.

However, this review did happen to mention briefly what to me was the most important fact of the film: the fact that the relationship between Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character, Lancaster Dodd (LD hereafter), and Joaquin Phoenix's character, Freddie Quell (FQ hereafter), was actually effective in changing the troubled life of FQ.
Regardless of all the time-travel hypnosis and the talk of alien influence and all the other nonsense, LD did change the life of FQ for the better.

I remember this in the film, for during a session of hypnosis when subjects were going back in time to previous lives, I wondered at it all, thinking that even this strange philosophy seems to have an ameliorating effect on some of the crowd.

Very summarily, LD - The Master -  is eventually disavowed and abandoned by the Wealthy; he is attacked and ridiculed by the Scientific and Educated elite, he is outcast by the social power structure, yet he is successful with FQ, a troubled drifter... he is successful in spite of himself: LD is successful in spite of his nonsense and his moral infirmities and actually makes FQ a better person.

LD's connection with FQ is close and physical: when they have not seen each other for a long time, they embrace warmly. Their connection is a primary engagement, close and up front and intense.

The relationship between LD and FQ is a close engagement, and it is the very basis of religious teaching which tells us to engage directly with the problems of mankind, and by so doing, to defeat the effects of sickness and disease.

So no matter how bizarre LD's doctrine is, no matter how odd his procedures, LD actually redeems the troubled and disaffected in at least a small measure by embracing, sharing, and caring. FQ has a tendency to beat up people who are insufficiently supportive of LD, but this is no more than a metaphor for religious violence from Simon Peter chopping off an attendant's ear up to the present day.

I have a strong suspicion that the film is about what may be called true religious activity, and have almost nothing to do with Scientology. Scientology is used as a way to put the matter in front of the audience in terms the audience immediately understands, but it is not the heart of the matter.
It is not a bit about Scientology actually. Scientology was a mise-en-scene which allowed us to feel comfortable and think that we knew our way around in this microcosm.

I cannot account for all the details in the film: that is beyond my ability... and sometimes my comprehension.
I do know I took an immediate dislike to the film, because the intro dealt with troubled and alcoholic people, and it was too overwhelming for me: I felt the repulsion and disgust, I could smell the acrid sweat of the social misfits sweetened with the stench of nicotine...
Unlike St. Francis of Assisi,  I did not embrace them: I turned away.
I turned away and missed opportunity.

--
notes
1)    wondering whether the sand effigy of a woman was a metaphor for Cybele or the Great Goddess, or Lilith, or Al-Lat?

2) I do not mean to imply that that which I discussed above was what the director had in mind in making the film. I do imply that the film might be a metaphor for what I put forward, and in a real sense the film is a meta-narrative about the hunger and thirst for righteousness' sake...
The audience of today would reject anything too obviously religious, so there is a sense of taqiya, or a dissembling under the guise of Scientology.
--

Cinema: The Master

Took in the film The Master...

If you choose to go and see this film, keep track of the scene when Joaquin Phoenix's acting and posture most closely resembles his role of Johnny Cash in Walk The Line, so much so that you are startled and look around for June Carter.

I really do not see any reason to comment further.
--

Ray Bradbury and I

 

The Sunken Pier at Glen Harbor, Michigan

We spent our youths on the shores of lakes and rivers, Bradbury in Waukegan on Lake Michigan and I in Michigan on Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River.

There is some quiet and subliminal effect of water, flowing, moving, breaking on the shore, or carrying the great storm clouds from the west on its mighty back towards you standing expectantly for hours on the shore, as Lake Michigan does in Empire, Michigan - or in Glen Harbor north of the massive sand dunes where the waves lap the ancient piers and the wind blows sand into your eyes.
(refer to Google Earth  45 degrees 54' 22  86" N / 86 degrees 01'30 45 W  for the ancient piers.)

The interior of the country is oppressive; it is a place where change happens with the slow speed of creeks drying up in the summer and the mud cracking wider and wider. The interior is a land from which water escapes and flows away, and everything runs! Runs at the proverbial speed hydrological, which in our hearts is far faster than the speed of light.

My friend was going to go golfing at a place called Canadian Lakes. It certainly sounded great to me, and I was just a bit envious. But when I looked it up in Google Earth, I discovered it was not in Canada at all, and was furthermore in the middle of the Michigan; it consisted of some landlocked lakes throttled by houses and golf courses.
I was no longer jealous.
Golfing in the prison of land stretching as far as the eye can see - with a few spitoons of lake - is not comparable to golfing at a place, like Antrim Dells, where one starts high on the hills near Lake Michigan and drives down a fairway descending into the deciduous forests of autumn... and no matter how dense the foliage and how deep the declivity, one is never far from the life-giving wind off the lake. The only thing better would be the additional salt on your tongue from a sea breeze.

Water has formed our lives.
The impetuous transformations of water and air forced the minds of Bradbury and myself to the vast, foamy, and quick reaches of imagination.
--

Things That Grind My Gears

Ayn Rand's philosophy grinds my gears, and - truthfully - I do not think I would have liked her personally, either. Paul Ryan supporters claim that he no longer believes in Ms. Rand's philosophy. I suppose he really had to do that since her philosophy is an out-and-out atheistic bit of tripe.

When did he deny her atheistic ontology of the world? It seems pretty recently. At least he did not name a child "Rand" as some other politicians have done, making it harder for the sons to avoid the fallout of the fathers.

Perhaps Mr. Ryan was unaware of Rand's atheism. People like to describe Ryan as a policy and budget "wonk". Apparently he is not a philosophy "wonk".
--

The Zimmerman Effect

I was reading about someone who intended to dress up like Trayvon Martin for Halloween - seemingly they were going to wear a hoodie and Lord knows what else - and as I was digesting that it occurred to me that George Zimmerman shared a last name with the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager.

Indeed, the good doctor was designed by a Dr. Zimmerman, and in at least one episode Robert Picardo portrayed the actual Dr. Zimmerman, the human being creator of Robert Picardo, the medical holographic projection.

So if you're thinking of going as a Zimmerman for Halloween...
--

Views on the Future

In the future, it is illogical that...

... the Economics will be a type of present day Capitalism that contains the mechanics of Boom and Bust cycles.

One of the foremost reasons for this is what we learned from 2008 in that the larger and more complex a society becomes, the more devastating the size of the Booms and - correspondingly - the Busts!
And there are no mathematical, economical guarantees of recovery from any given Bust phase of the cycle.

We also learned that recovery from a Bust cycle that was accompanied by a Fiscal Crisis takes much, much longer than normal recoveries from a Bust.

If we accept the possibility that there may be other combinations of events that will exacerbate the Bust, and we have found precious few combinations that ameliorate it, then we are playing with fire.
--

Weight Watchers and Virtue

Virtue describes a habitual way of acting.
For the most part, virtue is not inborn, but we must learn it through many years practice until it becomes "habitual" and "second nature" to us.

If virtue is not habitual and "second nature", there is always the extremely good chance that we will not act virtuously:  when called upon to act, we may react with something distinctly non-virtuous. It happens all the time.

We must be trained in virtue, we must practice virtue, we must meditate on virtue, and we actually should do so in a way that is at least as structured as the training we undergo for the rest of our lives. We train for good habits in sports, in work, in driving... every activity has its good habits and we try to practice them.

We train for good eating habits. Think of diet and nutrition, and think how difficult that may be, and how we are constantly trying to improve our diets and trying to reduce calories or cholesterol or increase fiber or whatnot. This is the Virtue of Weight Watchers.

We should struggle to be virtuous with at least as much effort as we struggle to eat healthy.

Just as to our regret we have let the Responsibility for our Good Nutrition be handled by Food Processing Companies and Developers of Genetically Modified Foods, so also did we all Responsibility for our Good Virtue to be handled by priesthoods, preachers, and people with a constant flow of new ideas for self-improvement.
This was a mistake that led us to be as ignorant about our food as we are ignorant about virtue; our inability to focus on the processes involved in the entire food procurement and preparation process as well as the inability to train into good habits instilled in us a sense of prudishness that led us to hide the whole messy business, and to encapsulate it all into small and tidy boxes:  the cardboard containers of processed foods ready to gulp down, and the Sunday morning ritual of marching off to holy orders from the pulpit.

It is acceptable for us to be open about our diet and our weight, but we are much more secretive about our morals, unless we are holding forth about what is wrong with the world.
It is a good thing that we keep our sense of morality hidden prudishly, for it is between God and us and no other beings.

Therefore, we need not be endlessly preached at about what is moral, but we do need help establishing our independent quests for morality: we need early training and structure that allows us to eventually stand as adults on our own two feet and be virtuous.
--

The Vacuum of Leadership

Considering the inability of the Congress to formulate reasonable policy and a partisanship which derails any attempt at compromise and a population that disdain our political leadership and questions its legitimacy, we look to Europe and what do we see?

http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/blog/2692481-democracy-shrinking

Is Democracy Shrinking?

With national leaders apparently unable to act, such institutions as the European Central Bank, the German constitutional court, and the European Court of Justice are playing an increasingly influential role in European affairs. French political analyst Antoine Vauchez argues that their intervention amounts to a bending of the rules of democracy which urgently needs to be addressed.

Is there any better illustration of the current paradox of European democracy than the fact that its fate hangs in the balance in the decisions of the board of the European Central Bank and the rulings of the German constitutional court? European political leaders have become so convinced of their lack of legitimacy and their inability to win the “battle of credibility” that opposes sovereign states and the markets, they are voluntarily giving up their room for manoeuvre to “independent” institutions and automatic penalties (the notorious fiscal compact), thereby enabling judges (both national and European ) and central bankers to dominate the daily conduct of European affairs...

 We may have to face up to a failure of present democratic institutions. Our ancestors have done so, and they succeeded. It is not the end of the world.
--

A Song About Romney The Moocher

... a Bain Capital hootchie-cootcher.

I consider the fact that capital gains on certain investment are taxed at 15% (due to a change in tax laws in the recent past) instead of the normal average rate of 35% to be a substantial government bestowed benefit.

It make Romney a much bigger moocher than me, who had no fed tax liability last year....

You know, one of the reasons there may be no federal income tax liability is the fact that no meaningful interest rates are available for the savings of the average run of the population.
No interest income: no tax due on it!
--

Bad News fer Mitt

My Parents - devotees of FOX News - seem to have given up on Romney!
I mentioned something to my mother yesterday, and she just said that it did not matter any more. Now she is very bright and when it comes to politics, she prefers to engage and annoy rather than be calm.

I think they have given up on Romney. My father no longer brings up Joe Biden in the conversation anymore.

Incredible.

Well, I hope the Romney malaise continues through election day. Maybe it is the curse of the demonic Ayn Rand coming home to roost. Brrrr!
--

Division Street

Talk about partisan spirit and an inability to work together....

Mr. Romney - and by implication, the Republican Party - have written off 47% of the population. Mr. Romney says that that large number of individuals are not his concern, neither now nor if he were to be president.
The 47% are the percentage of the population that do not have an income tax liability... a group which some people think Mr. Romney himself is in. Apparently he makes a distinction bwteen "No Income Tax Liability, But Rich As Heck" and "No Income Tax Liability And Poor As A Churchmouse".

This is no small thing. This is no Country Club - 19th Hole - Let's Talk Poor Folks Over Cocktails - type of thing; this is the real deal.

This is the beginning of the end.

Few people see it that way.
I am forbidden from such ways of thinking by my religion, just as I am forbidden from establishing my own moral system (a la Ayn Rand) because I may a bit more intelligent, or a bit wealthier, or more powerful than the folks next door.

I am forbidden, because I have learned that an Ethics of  Power based on Denial and Exclusion leads to darkness and tragedy.

I certainly do not like everyone..., but I am forbidden to write them off as meaningless.

--
ps.
I am never sure where the Big Banks, who certainly are moochers and had to be bailed out by tax payers and government, fall in all this.
--
pps
I did not pay any Federal income tax last year. Maybe I should just forget my enormous LOOPHOLE - the standard deduction - and just pony up the bucks for 2013.

--

Libya and Syria

The death of the US ambassador to Libya in the rioting last week has quite probably given Syria's Bashar Al Assad a new lease on life.

The countries shipping weapons to Syria have been identified by the UN as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar: Iran ships to Assad and Saudi Arabia ships to Sunni Salafis and Fundamentalists, who are in rebellion. Qatar supports Sunni groups also.
Maybe not all rebels are extremists, but just enough are to make them all anathema now.

I would not be surprised if Assad weren't to receive some covert support from the West.
--

Men As Gods

Very well written piece on Mormonism. I am not sure if the author is tongue in cheek or something else.

Why I Love Mormonism
by Simon Critchley

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/why-i-love-mormonism/
--

Romney-Babble

A spokesperson for Romney said that his candidate would have prevented the attack on the Libyan embassy.

Odd that so important an issue was hidden from view until after the attack.
 
--

Why I Have No Cellphone Contract

I pay for time as I need it. I use T-Mobile, and I have done so for 10 years or more, and I have an old Nokia cellphone I inherited from my daughter when she Blackberry-ized upwards: her old Nokia has a screen picture of a teddy bear smiling... which I left on it, at first not knowing how to change the image, then not caring to change it.
I mean, once people see me carrying around a cellphone that is at least 12 years old, I am sure that they would expect me to have a picture of a smiley bear on it.

I do not trust the present day mindset of the communications industry, and I probably never will. I suppose this may tie in with my previous post about Steve Jobs: how a real visionary does things versus how most of the feudal minded rest of the economy is run.

Anyway, Verizon...
http://www.freepress.net/blog/2012/09/13/fcc-defends-net-neutrality-says-verizon-no-internet-editor?akid=3839.9948461.dlcU0w&rd=1&t=2

In July, Verizon teamed up with wireless carrier MetroPCS to challenge the FCC’s right to craft and enforce Net Neutrality rules. After attacking the agency’s legal authority to adopt even basic consumer protections for broadband access, these companies went on to claim that they themselves have the right to edit the Internet.
The companies are currently arguing their case in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Acknowledging that their clients “transmit the speech of … millions of individuals” every day, their lawyers claimed that “broadband providers possess editorial discretion” to feature some speakers — and block others.
That wasn’t their only breathtaking assertion. The lawyers insisted that Net Neutrality rules amount to government seizure of property that rightfully belongs to the Internet service providers. The lawyers also characterized Internet users’ communications as electronic signals that “physically invade” and “permanently occupy” ISPs’ networks...

(emphasis mine)

I remember writing about Wi-Fi and the physical invasion of one's space, and whether it was ethical to use someone else's Wi-Fi for free.

Verizon itself does physically invade my domicile with their electronic signals.
Therefore, by their own logic, they should be paying me for this usage of space.
--

Steve Jobs

I have not read very much that is as amazing and incredible as the life of Steve Jobs in his biography by Walter Isaacson. I was and am totally blown away by it.

I mentioned it to a few people; they said that it would surely be a good read about a capitalist visionary, and blah, blah, and so on.

However, Steve Jobs himself was so very different from most of us...
He thought it was an important part of his life to have searched for spiritual enlightenment, and also to have used LSD.

Very different from the rest of us. Very different.
If there is anything at all to learn from the story of Steve Jobs - and I think there is quite a bit - I am sure that it will go right over most of our heads.

I shall have to read the book at least twice, and then take a long time to ponder it.
--

Ovid

est virtus placitis abstinuisse bonis

it is virtue to abstain even from that which is allowed

The Annual USSR Party

It's almost time for the annual USSR Party.
Slava!
--

Ade Ileke 49: (Egypt) مصر

دوام الحال من المحال

المياه يجد وسيلة

حتى في الصحراء - شجرة

على الجبل - زهرة

 قصر الفرافرة والغراب

 من فوق أو تحت

 المياه يجد وسيلة

دوام الحال من المحال

--

Nothing remains the same (Egyptian proverb)

water finds a way,

even in the desert, a tree;

upon the mountain, a flower;

Qasr Al Farafra and the raven;

from above and below

water finds a way;

nothing remains the same

--

notes

Qasr Al Farafra is a stop on the way to the "White Desert"

--

Capital and Punishment

Are we in a Marxian cycle, leading, willy-nilly, to an unknown future?
The article below is but an introduction to Marx on
(1) Credit Crises and Banks, and
(2) Unemployment.

From Philosophy Now:

Karl Marx famously pronounced: “The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces in such a way that only the absolute consuming power of society would be their limit.”

(1)
In a less well-known pronouncement, quoted in Vince Cable's 2009 book The Storm, Marx also predicted in Nostradamus-like fashion: “Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and mechanical products, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised and the state will have to take the road which eventually will lead to communism.”

(2)
He believed there was a fatal contradiction between the need for an ‘industrial reserve army’ of unemployed to keep wages and prices down (and profits up), and the incompatible need for high employment at good rates of pay to consume the full product (and keep profits up).

Marx did not see how any juggling act within capitalism could resolve this contradiction with its attendant crises and human misery. This is why Marx thought that capitalism would eventually have to go, to be replaced by a more rational system of economics. True, he was not terribly clear about the details of this more rational economics, and so his professed followers (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot) had to more or less make it up as they went along, weaving an uncertain path between Marx’s ideas, historical expediency, and in the case of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, extreme megalomania.

 To be fair, John Maynard Keynes too could not see how any such juggling act was possible within existant capitalism. But he did believe it was possible within a modified form of capitalism, which would then constitute the more rational system of economics apparently needed...


Read more at   http://philosophynow.org/issues/73/Forever_Blowing_Bubbles

--

Is This The Best Government Money Can Buy?

I am not thrilled by the upcoming election, for I consider both parties to be bought and paid for by all the interest groups and entities with all the money that has been directed away from the large part of the population and given to the one-percent that is wealthy.

It's their country now.
--

No Longer Will I Say Nice Things About Romney

I am trying to understand the situation, the events, and the time line of those events in the Middle East which are directly linked to a film offensive to Muslim, and also offensive to many people of other religions.

I do not understand why in the midst of a volatile situation fraught with violence, during which at least 4 US Embassy officials have been killed, any sane person would immediately attack the leader of the country.

I had no love for President George W. Bush, but we stood behind the President on 9/11 and for a long time thereafter.
It never occurred to anyone to heap insults upon the President during the crisis itself !!

Yet now here is this fellow Romney doing just that.
He does well in his ivory tower of Corporate Capitalism, surrounded by hordes of suits. But dealing with fast breaking events seems to be beyond his ability.

Mitt Romney was a brilliant Suit and would be an idiot President.

--

The Ironies of Ayn

Take a moment and think how ironical it is that a certain segment of the American population, which used to - and, I suppose, still does - condemn ideologies such as Communism for being atheistic, eagerly grasped onto Ayn Rand as their own atheistic and Capitalist philosopher.

A pure irony that few of us yet understand: we are the guys walking down the street in a top hat, Irony is the banana peel upon which we slip, or it is the snow ball that is thrown and knocks our topper into the gutter.

With the use of Irony, God cast the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly; He spreads confusion in Babel and the Tower is destroyed; with Irony the powerful financial system is suddenly brought to its knees and cannot exist without money from even the poorest of us.

Irony...

--

Rooms and Looms

Rooms and compartments occupy my this morning.
In particular, I was thinking about the manner in which we compartmentalize our lives and separate religion into its own sphere separate from our workaday world as well as our domestic world.

The sphere of religion is "supernatural".... whatever that means.
I mean, I really find the notion appalling. Superstition is supernatural to my way of thinking: it is a means of understanding which is beyond normal causality and reason: it is "supernatural".
But, the notion of  God as something "missing" from this world and kept severely apart in some existence beyond the natural is bizarre, but it may also be the founding paradigm of the sickness of Western society: the creation of the abyss between reason and faith.

Ever since we created the abyss, we have tried to amend it, sometimes in the most outlandish ways - such as the nonsense of an Intelligent Designer, a notion which is more suited to HGTV to be used in remodeling kitchens rather than in any philosophy, science, or religion.

Or, in another bizarre way which is very common in the present, we politicize religion: many of us receive our "marching orders" once a week from the pulpit of righteousness, reset our brains, and go anew into the fray until we receive another re-charge on the following Sunday.
In the interim, we follow the ethics of Work and Society, where "business is business", and the Meek shall most surely never, ever inherit the Earth... that is, if we got anything to say about it!

The warp of our lives consists of many strings under tension upon which we lay the weft our individual lives. Although we may speak of the different strings of the warp, they are the basis of one indivisible life: when we look at our lives, we do not see the warp and weft separate, nor do we see the warp itself separate into its individual fabrics. It is a network of networks, complex and intertwined, full of warmth and color and resilience.

Separate the pieces of the Textile of Life, and it unravels.
I feel I am viewing a Great Unraveling now.
--

Basketball

On a completely different note, the Chilocco (Oklahoma) Agricultural School Baketball Team of 1908-09.
--

The Goebbels Card

Apparently a California Democrat has played the Jospeh Goebbels card, comparing Paul Ryan to Joey G., and then saying he did not mean all Republicans were Nazis, etc., etc., etc.

I had a moment to wonder if I had overspoke when I did the same thing the day after Mr. Ryan's speech. Upon reflection, I remembered Ayn Rand, and I remembered her baleful influence on just about anyone stupid enough to heed her words.

I consider devotees of Ayn Rand to have the potential to be worse than any monsters of the 20th century.

--

What is a Charitable Deduction?

Peter's Mother Feeling Poorly

A Charitable Deduction?
It is a bookkeeping entry, an accounting event.
Charities defined by the Revenue authorities mean a good deal to accountants, but nothing to God.

Our engagements with the poor, with the sick, with the needy are specifically spoken about in the gospels as being primary engagements, or mano a mano if you will. When Jesus spoke of the sick, He did not throw a few denarii to some people engaged in health care: he went to see Peter's mother - a primary engagement.

He did not say we had to make a living doing such things, nor did he say we had to particularly love it beyond rational understanding; He did say it was a duty we could not slough off nor escape.
We do not have to embrace lepers, nor do we have to "love" those to whom we minister, but we must perform the ministry ourselves; it cannot be assigned to self-appointed ministers.

Our meditation should be directed to finding the frame of other-mindedness we require to make this committment. It is a long-term commitment to a short-term engagement: our lives need to be punctuated with real and first hand charity.

Else, we are not Christian.

Take your pick!

Many of us already have, and choose to ignore those who are in need!
--

The Last Sacrament

Fasting is the Last Sacrament.

It is unique in that it requires no intermediate priesthood.
The discussion of fasting follows immediately upon the words of prayer: Our Father, which is followed by a brief discussion on "our debts".
Fasting follows the "acceptance" of the divine will, the daily receipt of bread, the forgiveness of "debt", and the distancing from trial and evil...
... then comes fasting.

More later after you've thought about this.
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The World's A Stage

Matthew 6:16 “When you fast, do not look sullen like the hypocrites, for they make their faces unattractive so that people will see them fasting. I tell you the truth, they have their reward.

 Fasting requires no thought nor plan; it is a habit between ourselves and the Holy. If we must structure it, if we must choreograph it, fasting becomes a display for others. We have touched upon this in our discussion about the nonsense praying on the football fields and Monday Night Football.

We live in a time of Exterior Display and Interior Emptiness: everything must be scripted because there is an essential nothingness to our lives; we hunger for a script, a scenario, a plan - a diet plan, a multi-tasking plan, a business plan... plan, plan, plan.... all very visible to the Great Critics of the World.

Prayer is silence and shining, and no one knows about it... not even yourself, for then you have denied your obsession with God and turned it into a companionship.
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My Post on Paul Ryan

A friend thought I was over the top in my latest Paul Ryan post.
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/08/paul-ryan-devil-in-details.html

I detest the philosophy of Ayn Rand so intensely, and have observed its baleful influence in such places as Hillsdale College in Michigan, where a Rand devotee, George Roche III, Republican power broker, created his own morality and had a 15 year affair with his own daughter-in-law...  so much do I detest her ideas that I think my attack on any of her devotees is far too restrained.
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Paul Ryan: Devil in the Details

 

 Paul  R.                                           Joe G.

Mr. Ryan accused Mr. Obama of making cuts to Medicare... which cuts are also in Mr. Ryan's proposed budget.
He distorted the story about who was responsible for the Standard and Poor's downgrade...
I have written about that downgrade in my "Post" about those times, and I have written about the Republican responsibility for it.

These are the morals of a Ayn Rand Hero who makes his own morality! The Big Lie as the Truth!

He reminds me of Joseph Goebbels.
 
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Return from the Edge

Haliburton, Ontario Fairgrounds

I have been ill.

My doctor looked at me and asked me to which pharmacy to send the prescriptions. I shook my head and said that I had no pharmacy of choice; I do not take medications. I take aspirins, but I do not take meds. I felt strange and alone, this strange state of being without a pharmacy, without a congery of white-coated professionals hovering behind pharmacy counters.

A couple weeks before, I had gotten a staph infection in a highly visible place. Since I had never, ever had such a thing before, I thought it was something that would disappear in a week or so. It did not. We had made plans to go the Haliburton, Ontario with my wife's sister, my own doctor was on vacation back then, so I went to a CVS minute clinic, and I got a scrip for a minor antibiotic before we left.

During the week, my scrip seemed to keeps things status quo, but when it was done, I became apprehensive. I went to a walk-in clinic in Haliburton, and I received a stronger antibiotic, but my dosage stayed at two tabs a day.
I had only been to the CVS clinic before, so my experience with clinics was not extensive beyond getting a flu shot. Just to be on the safe side, I brought along my lap-top with pretty much my entire medical history for the past 30 years, just in case the clinic doctor wanted to go into some detail.
Of course, since I had never been ill, I had not visited doctors all that much, and 30 years of history is not nearly as much as you might think at first.
Nothing was getting better, however. Maybe not worse, but not better.

I had managed to get a sun burn, which caused scabbing over the area, which combined with the swelling from infection, was a sight from a horror film. I thought of that scene in Ben-Hur where Charlton Heston locates his sister and mother in the leper colony...

Getting in to see my own doctor at last, she prescribed a stronger anti-b at a much higher dose, intending to show the microbes we meant business.

During all this time, however, there was something else. About 10 days before we left for Ontario, a woman who lived about 30 miles away died from necrotizing fasciitis, or a flesh-eating bacteria infection.
I was a bit stunned, because I thought that that microbe stayed in (1) the South in dirty rivers, or (2) Hospitals.
I frequent neither.
The woman in question had been to a clinic to have a boil lanced. I considered that she had walked into forcing-garden hot house of infection... hospital, indeed! What is one to do anymore?

So, we return from Haliburton, I go to my doctor, she prescribes Bactrim, and lots of it, along with a topical. They send the scrip to Wal-Mart, and I make many calls back and forth trying to co-ordinate pharmacy and doctor's office: the topical was no longer available, and the pharmacy was to have called the doctor's office the next morning to tell them that, and to please pull a new choice out of a hat. I call after lunch and discover that the pharmacy had done no such thing - although they cover by saying the doctor's office had not responded. So the calls begin.
The first call to the doctor uncovers the fact they had never heard from the pharmacy.
I do not criticize Wal-Mart pharmacy; that's the way things are today: follow-through is your baby.

Finally, I take new meds. 
The infection had shown signs of spreading, and within a day that plan had been dashed, and the tide began to turn in my favor.
I did not eat for 3 days, however.
I withdrew from human contact, like some great animal headed for the legendary burial grounds, alone on his last fateful pilgrimage.
I was quite sure that my use of triclosan anti-biotic soap had engendered a mutant, anti-biotic-resistant strain of staph, and parts of my face would be cut off in a futile attempt to stem the infection. I had reflections on going around wearing a bag over my head, sort of like Erik in The Phantom of the Opera, only I would not have any operatic expertise to soothe my soul. (During all this time, my wife had taken off to visit our daughter, so everyone thought I was on my own and partying every night. Woo-hoo!)
I had devised a short scenario where skin from my buttocks would be grafted onto my face to make me presentable. There would be skin of a sort, no lips or anything, but there would be skin. I guess I could live with it.
I finally broke this fast with IKEA meatballs in putanesca sauce.

After 7 days, my doctor said that I did not have to come in to see her if the infection had gone away.
Perfectly sensible, except for the fact that everything was covered by a scab, and I was not sufficiently expert to make such a judgement under those conditions. If the skin had been clear and pink and free of any sign of ... well, anything... no problem. But there was the problem that I could not actually see anything of the skin.
It took me 6 1/2 hours back and forth with the doctor office to get the message across:

"I myself am not a doctor and cannot make a judgement. Therefore, either let me come in immediately or extend the prescription for another 7 days."

They decided to go with the extra 7 days, which I thought was just as good, since if I had gone into the office, that's what they would have done anyway; they can't see through scabs any better than I can.
(I seem to remember that back, long ago, doctors and medical professionals used to clean wounds, but no one had the slightest interest in such a procedure anymore.)

Then I got better.
I wash my hands very often nowadays, and am careful about touching various objects in public places.
The fulness of the harvest from what we have done in the past is sort of overwhelming: things like anti-biotic-resistant bacteria and a Sargasso Sea of plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and Mega-Droughts due to climate change.
I have learned a couple of things:
(1) getting sick is not the end of the world,
(2) cleanliness is next to godliness in any list of things to do,
(3) do not starve yourself... until it is the proper time to do so.
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Republican Convention

Paul Ryan speaks today.

Perhaps I will watch. It will be unique to view a man who lauds an atheist philosopher who denies objective moral standards, i.e., Ayn Rand, and to see him applauded by a US Senator named after her, Rand Paul.

It is the abomination in a holy place, and no good will come of this...
Even the elements conspired to preserve us, but we ignored the signs.
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A New Way Of Seeing Things

"You relentlessly mock, but it's not for self-aggrandizement; it's because ideas are bigger than feelings"

Doctor Taube speaking to Doctor Gregory House, episode "Gut Check", Spring, 2012


What does that mean?
I have written that sometimes it takes me a long time to understand films: there is so much to see and understand! It can be the same way with television shows that are well done. So what were the writers trying to state here?

Ideas are bigger than feelings is intended to de-emphasize not just feeling, but the source of feelings: the emotional intelligence. In its essence, Dr. Taube is saying that Ideas are bigger than the emotional generators of ideas: humankind.

Humankind tends to identify with its ideas and not let go of them; they wrap themselves in them and hold them close to give their lives meaning and identity. But ideas go beyond their embryonic human birth and seek to stand on their own two feet. One thing most of us have not learned how to do is to cut the apron strings of even the most sublime of our Ideas!
Look at our notions of God! How trivial we make religion! We laud children who write books about visiting heaven during their illness, and we invest value and meaning in the fact that a child sees a God who is exactly like those described in childrens' stories.
Or we inflate the idea of divinity with our own prejudices and judgements...
Or we force God into our newly discovered cleverness of Intelligent Designer....! That's a step forward, isn't it?!

The idea is greater than ourselves.
--

Reality is walking on the beach, feeling the sand between your toes.

Narrative is looking at the beach from a car window as you drive away.

Language is feeling the hot sand and the cool water.
Narrative is the memory of Language interacting with Reality.

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Toxic Liberty

In Libya, the hard-line Salafists, inspired by the unspeakable Saudi Wahhabi clerics, have attacked and destroyed mosques and shrines of Sufi Islam.  In Timbuctoo recently, similar hard-liners destroyed mosques and libraries.

Arab spring?

Welcome to the Age of Toxic Liberty.
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Romney-Ryan Medicare Plan

The Romney-Ryan Medicare plan depends greatly upon "unleashing competition" in the health care industry, which competition will radically drive costs down.

The only problem is that study after study has shown that the Health Care industry does not experience any cost reductions due to competition. There is no reason to expect it will in the future.

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Affordable Drugs

Big Pharma and its lackeys in Washington, D.C. are always trying to stem the flow of safe but less expensive drugs into the USA from mail-order pharmacies beyond our borders. Since there is money to be made, it is an unceasing fight.

From West Quoddy Head, Maine, to Anchor Point, Alaska, an Iron Curtain is descending around the continent.

Behind this Iron Curtain, Big Pharma and the FDA and Congress seek to create a new world order of monopoly on drugs.

Fight them:

RxRights.org

and click on  "TAKE ACTION"
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The Genesis of Narrative

People often speak of the difference between Narrative and Reality; mostly, other peoples' political beliefs are a "narrative", whereas our own politics are reality-based.

Certainly most religious dogmatic belief systems are narrative, which is to say there is no method to test them as a reality. If there were such a testing, there is always the possibility a religious belief may be found to be false, and that is quite impossible to people who invest heavily in "belief systems".
That is pretty much the meaning of "supernatural"; i.e., not subject to the laws of Nature.

Narratives are based on the Dream process. The Dream is the paradigm of taking seemingly random inputs and weaving a whole. Any entity which dreams will tell stories: histories, annals, fibs, lies, prevarications, fishermen stories, and tall tales...

An election year is usually a good time to observe the conflict of Narratives.
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Popular Science Gets the Facts

Theer is a very good article on the Rep. Todd Akin Theory of conception following rape, and it is in Popular Science:

Rape Results in More Pregnancies than Consensual Sex, not Fewer

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Why Would Anyone Let These People Govern Again?

From a story on Mr. Paul O'Neill, former Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush:
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-592330.html

The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress.
But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.

"Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand," says Suskind. "He says, 'You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.' … O'Neill is speechless."

"It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society," says O'Neill. "And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction."

Did he think it was irresponsible? "Well, it's for sure not what I would have done," says O'Neill.

The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a praetorian guard that encircled the president" to block out contrary views. "This is the way Dick likes it," says O'Neill.

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Frum-ble

David Frum's post on Niall Ferguson is so odd that I am glad I stopped reading his blog, which he shut down to somewhere else. It was all about China and its future status. Why doesn't Frum point an accusing finger at Wal-Mart if he is afraid of the coming Chinese hegemony?

No one fears a New Hegemony like an Old Hegemon.
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Akin is too Legit to Quit

Troy Akin, the Tea Party Republican that is running for the Senate in Missouri:
http://www.policymic.com/articles/13123/todd-akin-legitimate-rape-comments-proof-the-tea-party-is-full-of-crazy-social-views/195985

Akin, who is known for his staunch pro-life beliefs, stated that pregnancy is rare from "legitimate rape" because the woman's body has ways to "shut the whole thing down." Not surprisingly those remarks went viral

 What does Mr. Akin mean by "legitimate"?
Surely he does not mean that such a rape is endorsed by the law.

So what does he mean? Does he mean "real" rape, differentiating it from "imaginary rape"?  I do not think pregnancies stem from :imaginary rapes", either.
So if pregnancy does not result from "real" rape, nor from "imaginary rape", we do not really have a problem.
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The Paradox of Medicare

 Reading http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106198/why-does-the-tea-party-adore-ryan

Ryan’s Medicare plan has been through many iterations, but in all of them the single-payer system in which Medicare exists today would be replaced with a voucher system that would gradually shift medical costs onto senior citizens. A “public option” incorporated into one version of Ryancare would likely outperform private-sector rivals on cost control (government-provided health care always does), but there’s a real question whether Congress would allow a mechanism by which that public option could pass those savings on to consumers. (When a public option was up for debate in Obamacare, Congress worked mightily to cripple its inherent market advantage.)

If it is manifestly true to the Congress that a public option has a market advantage, then it is logical to use that advantage. However, the Congress decided to not use the advantage. Then that becomes a disadvantage.
To whom?
Well, certainly not to the members of Congress.
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Say What?

Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan are attacking the $700 + billion being cut from Medicare under the ACA. Both of these gentlemen are in favor of restoring much of the money... or are they?

Are they actually attacking Mr. Obama because he tried a bipartisan effort to make cuts in the budget?
I believe we are entitled to here something extremely clear and definitive from the Republican candidates. I have had enough hogwash.
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The High Moral Ground of Government Today

Julian Assange has sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He has been accused of sexual molestation and there is a rape charge that keeps flip-flopping in Sweden as to whether it be rape or not.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was also trapped in a sexual situation, the outcome of which was an end to his career at the International Monetary Fund. It also pushed his political career in France off the rails.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn was once a member of the Union of Communist Students. Strauss-Kahn and Francois Hollande, the President of France, are both socialists, but Mr. Hollande was not a Communist - as far as I can tell from the data.

Then there was the weapons inspector, Scott Ritter,  an ex-Marine, who was vociferous in his belief that there were absolutely no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq... until he was accused of improper conduct with under-age girls.

Why are people who do not see things the way the US Empire wants so morally confused? Something is confused. I do not think it is our Government; they know exactly what they are doing.
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Sacrifice Today: The Month of Xocotlhuezin

Aztec Sun God Whose Tongue is a Dagger of Sacrifice

There were three more human sacrifices at Texas A and M campus today. There were four injured, so the human sacrifice count may go up yet. We are feeling absolutely Aztec today!
Add in the Sikhs and the Batman audience and the month of Xocotlhuezin is poppin'!
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Shooting as Sacrifice

There is a lot left to chance in history; why the Greeks made the human sacrifice a criminal delirium was a chance of intuition or introspection of at lest one great Greek mind and the persuasion of others.
Other societies may not experience that.

I have decided to view victims of shootings as our sacrifices to some dark god in order to avert the punishment due our various genocides. Also, the deaths and discords in the cities are necessary sacrifices to avert punishment for slavery and oppression.

It does not matter to dark gods who it is that dies; the victim may be either the oppressor or the oppressed, for it is only the spilling of blood that matters; it is all that ever mattered in human sacrifice.

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The Limits of Individualism 2

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-limits-of-individualism-rugged-or.html

I spoke of Paul Ryan and his love of Ayn Rand's philosophy in the post linked above. Some people thought I was attacking Mr. Ryan personally.
Well, nothing could be further from the truth. I find no fault with Mr. Ryan personally. I may disagree with some ideas and politics, but he is, no doubt, a good man.

Mr. Ryan does not, however, understand this Randian philosophy he talks about. He has looked at Ayn Rand, and he has chosen one facet of her philosophy, and he has assumed that is all there is to it: he can take the wheat and leave the tares behind.

That's not the way it works.
First, if you wish to cherry-pick your philosophies, you will have a mish-mosh of unrelated notions. Now it is probably a fact that most politicians do indeed treat their philosophical ideas like cole slaw (excepting Mr. Jack Kemp, for one), but this is a dangerous procedure.
If any one or mixture of your mish-mosh of ideas comes together and forms a critical mass of mischief and evil for a mass of people who are uneducated and unthoughtful - not to mention the fact that they may well indeed have a nasty streak that has been looking for a Philosophy and an Art (as, for example, white supremacist rock provides the Art for various hate groups ) - the results will not be pretty.

Second, if you wish to embrace a philosophy in its entirety, you had better be clear on the implications of what you are doing. For example, back in 1949, you could not embrace, say, Marxism without also accepting Stalinism.

I get the sense Mr. Ryan's endorsement of Ayn Rand is a mistake of the first type: he has cherry-picked an idea associated with a celebrity name, and he has decided to run it up the flag pole.
We all do things like that.
There is a danger, however, that in the sleep of reason and relaxation of vigilance, the rest of the philosophy creeps in and infiltrates our minds.
Ayn Rand was the foremost spokesperson for an American form of a caricature of Nietzche's "Ubermensch" or "Superman". She presents the idea in its uniquely American way, differentiating it from the European form. The Randian Superman or Genius sets his own Rules.
Which is another way of saying that the Superman has no need of God and God's law.

If you insist, we shall have to try it out.
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Ade Ileke 48: Aurora (Dawn)

Eu ouço o canto do galo;
como eu sobrevivi à noite?
Eu ouço a música da aurora;
O, Orfeu, você joga uma vez mais!
--
I hear the rooster crow;
how have I survived the night?
I hear the music of dawn;
O, Orpheus, you play once more!


the story goes that Orpheus' music is what makes the sun rise at dawn; the child with the guitar above has taken the place of Orpheus gone to ensure that dawn and life goes on. It is from the film Black Orpheus, Orfeu Negre.
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Russia and Syria

I do not necessarily have any great love of Bashar Al Assad of Syria, even though I thought his father could be quite interesting and charming when I briefly met him. I merely speak of personal impressions during a brief encounter, and not about politics and government.

At present, I do support Russia's stance on Syria. I do so for a number of reasons, and I suppose that if my Arabic teacher were to read this, she would put the mother of all curses upon my head.

I firmly believe that the USA betrayed Mikhail Gorbatchev in his attempts at reform of the USSR; the USA believed that the Cold War could only end with the complete destruction of one of the two antagonists... how very much in the same way that it approached the beginnings of the Cold War, exhibiting no tolerance for multi-lateral approaches to atomic energy as supported by Niels Bohr, James Conant, and Robert Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer fully predicted and described the coming of the Cold War, and the USA establishment said "Bring it on!" However, do not forget how close we came to nuclear catastrophe. And we are not yet out of the woods.

After the USSR disappeared, the aid and support for Russia was laughable, even though such a commitment would have helped establish a friend and ally for the future.

The USA believes that there is only one way, even when it is egregiously wrong, as it showed us in the Iraq debacle.

There is a total Media tilt against Russia which sickens me. Now we are treated to the spectacle of a rock band being cruelly treated, and Madonna speaks out in support of Pussy Riot. More nonsense from the mindless.

I consider Russia and the Russian people to be friends, and important friends to whom we should listen.
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Hurricane Karma

The unusual weather system called Hurricane Karma (which has a circulation termed "what goes around, comes around.") has been blamed for the drought in the USA this year. It has also been linked to disturbances in the finances of San Bernadino, California, and the increase in volatility in the world's stock markets.

Most recently, Hurricane Karma hit the mainland of King Capital and wiped out $440 million in poor stock buys within 30 minutes. Clean-up operations are still ongoing.

Hurricane Karma has been demonstrated to simultaneously caused moral synaethesia as well as moral blindess.

Wikipedia:
Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae or synaesthesiae)—from the Ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), "sensation" — is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway...

Thus, when we see the weather pattern known as "what goes around, comes around.", we tend to experience a sudden moral shame at our blindness, or we double down our inability to see the forest for the trees.
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Terrible TV Tunes

Mighty Joe Young and Friends

She-who-must-be-obeyed is watching a real estate show on HGTV, and there is a singer named Michael Feinstein who wishes to list his house. Mr. Feinstein is in a recording studio, singing Beautiful Dreamer, when the real estate agent provacateur comes to visit and discuss house listing.

I did not want want to say anything, for I have never heard nor heard of  Michael Feinstein, but I did not think I had ever heard a weaker interpretation of Stephen Foster's Beautiful Dreamer. I did not think the 19th century produced such mush.

I am sure that the rendition in the original Mighty Joe Young was ever so much superior to this.
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Plagiarism

Most of the stuff in this blog that the reader can read once and understand easily is probably plagiarized. The other stuff that makes one scratch their head, and then go back and re-read and get an entirely different reading is probably mine.

Rule of Thumb:
If it goes down easy, someone else wrote it.
If it is totally obscure, I wrote it on the fly.
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I Do Not Understand...

... why a man who has wanted to be President of the USA for most of his adult life, and who was already very wealthy, has done his taxes over the past 10 years or so in such a way as they would prove an embarrassment to his long-time goal?
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The Limits of Individualism... Rugged or Otherwise

Mr. Romney has chosen Mr. Paul Ryan as his running-mate in the US presidential election. Mr. Ryan has noted his intellectual and philosophical debt to Ayn Rand, a person about whom I have written my opinions in posts about her influence on Hillsdale College.  (http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/06/hillsdale-college-again.html)

I quote an article from The New Republic in 2010 - and I do not necessarily agree nor disagree with the remarks about Mr. Ryan's policy, but I do agree with the condemnation of Ayn Rand, and that is why I chose this article. I do not intend to criticize Mr. Ryan.

Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand
by Jonathan Chait
December 28, 2010

" Another part of Christopher Beam's piece on libertarianism that caught my interest was this bit about Paul Ryan and his deep affinity for Ayn Rand:

Representative Paul Ryan, also of Wisconsin, requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged, describes Obama’s economic policies as “something right out of an Ayn Rand novel,” and calls Rand “the reason I got involved in public service.” 

Earlier this year I wrote about Ryan and his deep devotion to the philosophy of Rand, particularly her inverted Marxist economic-political worldview:

Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan's moral philosophy:

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." ...

At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand's writings when he told his audience that, "Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill ... is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict--individualism versus collectivism."

The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers... "

Ayn Rand believes in a radical individualism which has no higher Morality than the Randian Individual, who alone sets standards and answers to only him/herself for any shortcomings. This incredible philosophy was given a run-through at Hillsdale College, and the result was a tragedy worthy of the Greek tragedians.
The philosophy of Ayn Rand is the culmination of Secularization, which takes the Moral from the hands of any divinity and delivers it into the hand of the human Randian Genius! Such a genius as Howard Roark in Rand's novel The Fountainhead. (Roark can set his own morality because Rand controls the events in the novel.)

I have no doubt Mr. Ryan is a fine and engaging person, and so are many people who consider themselves Randians.

However, their philosophy contains within itself its own destruction, for there is no single nor group of human beings who can be their own Morality independent of the Holy. Every person or group that has tried this has come to a very bad end.

There is a conservative cult of Individualism; like all beliefs, it is not perfect and does not achieve perfect validity everywhere at everytime. There are limits to all human belief. Radical Randian Individualism has aimed for and will - in the hands of lesser men than Mr. Ryan - aim for the deification of a Man, or Woman, or a group as equal to the Holy in the matter of Morality: the Randian Genius will accept nothing less.
(Do we see this already in the ever increasingly defined "Weathy 1%" group versus the rest of society? Does not certain conservative dogma believe that the group of the wealthy are in some important senses "better" than those not wealthy?)

There is no way to modify the philosophy of Ayn Rand without destroying it, for modification would destroy it, since it is a radical critique of anything short of complete moral solipsism.

The philosophy of Ayn Rand is a clear danger not only to us, but to the world.
We believe too fervently in the Individual, and do not make allowances for weakness, and that oversight will be the destroyer.

No one Individual is perfect, although the twentieth century taught us how to propagandize individual men as being so. When the Individual who is the source of all Morality fails, who or what is there to help? How could the Randian Genius accept help from anything less than a God? Could a Randian Individual Genius accept help from a spouse, a family, a church?
Not in Ayn Rand's philosophy, although her life was another matter.

--

Future Flash Crash #3

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/03/future-flash-crash.html
 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/03/future-flash-crash-note.html
 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/03/future-flash-crash-note-2.html
 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/06/why-my-banker-thinks-me-mad.html

These are most of the posts on the coming Flash Crash. Of course, if you have been reading the paper (not ogling TV) you know that it keeps on keeping on. In the New York Times Dealbook on August 3, 2012:

 http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/trading-program-ran-amok-with-no-off-switch/

When computerized stock trading runs amok, as it did this week on Wall Street, the firm responsible typically can jump in and hit a kill switch.
But as a torrent of faulty trades spewed Wednesday morning from a Knight Capital Group trading program, no one at the firm managed to stop it for more than a half-hour.
Some Knight employees and New York Stock Exchange officials noticed the blizzard of erratic orders in the minutes after trading started and sent alarmed messages to Knight managers, according to the exchange and Knight employees who declined to be identified discussing the matter.

As Knight struggled to survive on Friday, employees at the company, market overseers and other electronic trading firms were asking the same basic question: Where was the off switch?
Several market insiders said that they were bewildered, because in a market where trading losses can pile up in seconds, executives typically have a simple command that can immediately halt trading.

“Even just a minute or two would have been surprising to me. On these time scales, that is an eternity,” said David Lauer, a trader at a high-speed firm until a year ago. “To have something going on for 30 minutes is shocking.”
Regulators are planning to look into why there was such a lag...

On Friday, Knight, which in the last decade grew into a leading broker for American stocks, climbed off the mat, securing emergency financing that allowed it to continue operating for the day. It also enticed some of its customers to resume sending client stock trades, two days after it disclosed a possibly fatal $440 million loss from the software problem. But it faced a desperate weekend of maneuvering to find a more permanent solution for its woes. Knight’s short-term financing was meant to keep it alive until Monday, when its executives and advisers hope to have deals completed to remove any doubt about the firm’s future.

Our financial system is continually veering out of control, and it seems that no one is willing to face the reality that events happen much too quickly for human beings to keep up with them. There will always be problems, but there is no time left to cope with them and render them harmless.

It is another big wealth-destruction nail driven into the coffins of the middle-class.
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The Jobs Report

From Bloomberg, April 12, 2012:

Five Years After Crisis, No Normal Recovery 

...After systemic financial crises, however, economies of the postwar era have needed an average of four and half years just to reach the same per capita gross domestic product they had when the crisis started. We find that, on average, unemployment rates take a similar time frame to hit bottom and housing prices take even longer. With the Great Depression of the 1930s, economies on average needed more than a full decade to regain the initial per capita GDP.
“After the Fall,” a 2010 paper written by one of the authors of this article and Vincent Reinhart, a former Fed official who is now chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley, added evidence that in 10 of 15 severe post-WWII financial crises, unemployment didn’t return to pre-crisis levels even after a decade. It also showed that in seven of the 15 crises there were “double dips” in output.
What’s the best way to accurately calibrate recession and recovery after a deep financial crisis? It isn’t enough simply to establish when per capita GDP growth resumes, as economists have traditionally done to mark the end of a conventional recession. As we emphasized in our book, “This Time Is Different,” it is essential to measure where an economy stands compared with pre-crisis levels of important variables such as output, unemployment and housing prices.
There also is the interesting question of whether, after a deep financial crisis, an economy will ever fully reach its earlier trajectory for trend GDP, or whether some output capacity is lost forever. Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that the most likely scenario involves some permanent loss, though extrapolations over long time periods -- a decade or more -- are necessarily subject to a high degree of uncertainty.

 There is a lot of interesting material in this article. There was a good-sized recession, and there was a severe financial crisis. Personally, after the first ten years of the 21st century, I would never trust a politican of any sort again.

If we continue to act like under-educated fools, we will barter our futures for nonsensical political beliefs.
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Phonics Lesson

My mother was watching TV news roulette yesterday, so I took my tea and wandered about the yard for a while. Then I went back into the kitchen, and she came in wondering where I had been. I said that I don't like listening to Cable News. She nodded as if she had actually heard me, went to the sink to start preparing my father's lunch, and launched into an analysis of the Chick-Fil-A affair.
I had read about it last week. I was not terribly interested.

BUT
I did learn that it is pronounced like "Chick Filet" or "Chick  Feel  Ay"!

All this time.... about 5 days, I have been pronouncing it "Chick Fill Uh" with an equal stress on each syllable. Of course, I only pronounced it when I was reading and sounding out the words; it sounded rather like a Neanderthal picnic.
And I have been thinking that that was the stupidest name for a restaurant I ever heard of: chick-fill-uh.... could not quite wrap my mouth around it. I mean, it was as if someone who wanted to name a chicken restaurant had been following me with a notebook, and listening to how I order food in eateries:  "Uh, chicken, uh, like enough ta fill me up, uh..." and so on.
"Let's go get some lunch at the Chick Fill Uh..."
It just did not sound all that inviting.

Chick Feel Ayyy  (pronounce  "ayy" like The Fonz would) makes all the difference.
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The Binman Cometh

Geoffrey Hughes passed last week; he had played Eddie Yeats, the binman, on the incomparable Coronation Street in the 70's and the 80's of some long ago previous century.

Apparently - if all the encomia are to be believed - he was also the voice of Paul in the Beatles' film The Yellow Submarine.

The news quite bowled me over. For a bit I thought it was Geoffrey Palmer (of As Time Goes By) that had passed... not that it would have changed matters, but I could not get poor Judi Dench out of my mind for a bit, and I'd much rather she would not take up residence there.

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How To Create New Theological Concepts

Rule 1:   refuse to see what is before your eyes;
Rule 2:   insert the word "real", or "true", or "essential";
Rule 3:  push the philosophy or theology button.

St. Paul
Phillipians Chapter 3  Verses 2-3
Beware of dogs, of evildoers, of the concision. ³ For it is we who are the circumcision,


Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Beware of the concision - Referring, doubtless, also to the Jewish teachers. The word rendered "concision" - κατατομή katatomē - means properly a cutting off, a mutilation. It is used here contemptuously for the Jewish circumcision in contrast with the true circumcision.

I cannot agree with Barnes. There is an obvious parallel between "concision" and "cirucmcision" in the Latin and in the Greek. "Concision" is a mutilation, and not just any mutilation,  but it is as specific as the word "circumcision" (a cutting around the perimeter) is, and probably deals with the rituals of Cybele and the extremes of self-mutilation among the male devotees.

Barnes merely subscribes to the new conceptual scheme of "true/false circumcision" by way of misinterpreting the passage. One can not only bowdlerize the letter of Paul, one can establish a whole new branch of theological investigation.
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