The coming evangelical collapse | csmonitor.com

The coming evangelical collapse | csmonitor.com.

Can’t come soon enough!

Agence Global – Article

Agence Global – Article.

Change comes though no one desires it, and though few predicted its path.

Lets Start Fixing the Economy, Thoughtfully

We have the rare opportunity to change our economic paradigm, from one designed in the 18th century and tinkered with, to a new 21st century model. Our entire method of raising, allocating, and spending has to become more democratic. We have suffered from severely overcapitalizing our economy as a whole since industrialization. We need to reevaluate what and which function are public and which are private.

Example: the car industry, as a model going forward. Presupposing an affirmative need for this industry in our country, the Federal government should do these things
1. Create a unit at the Commerce Dept. that can buy publicly traded securities. 2. Buy Chrysler, Ford, and GM, lock stock and barrel. 3. Separate the assets and liabilities. 4. The former corporate liabilities to be parceled out to agency sub units for debt liquidation, pension guaranty. and federal employee health insurance. 5. Determine approximately how much of a car industry America needs and retain a total number of plants and employees to do it. The federal gov’t retains ownership of the plants which are then leased by the companies. 6. The restructured, lean companies are each offered to the public through an IPO, whose proceeds are then used to fund the agencies ongoing activities.

This can be done with airlines, other critical industries, and renders moot anti-trust issues, as the new owners, the feds, can contractually obligate companies to some behaviors. Additionally long term planning instead of quarter by quarter stock manipulation becomes a vehicle of real value production.

Cowardice of the Right Wing

I can’t imagine why rightwingers are always in a tizzy over some imaginary or grossly exaggerated threats. And further why do they pat themselves on the back when their fears mark them as cowards? Our country must be resilient, and true, not resolutely irrational. The Rightwing Worldview of the last three decades has failed, as some predicted. It was only the ‘when’ that was hard to predict, it was easy to predict that foolish polices will have a bad outcome.

How crazy of them is it to fail over and over, be rejected at the polls, and then conclude failure could have been avoided by doing more and greater amounts of the same wacky policies. Their worldview has failed. Lets move on.

Regulation, Deregulation, and Reregulation

People seem to operate based upon the rules and incentives that pertain: official and unofficial. The balance between transparency and privacy is altered by rules changes. It seems to me that being humans ourselves we should be able to perceive potential failure points in our systems. But instead of examining empirical evidence, we tend to operate from belief and ideology. That impedes our ability to understand what happens and to remake our model. We set up a system that allows for abuse in secret then act surprised that abuse has occurred. Collapses are actually inevitable in this circumstance, we assume because it doesn’t happen instantaneously that we have a sound system.

So we are usually playing craps but kidding ourselves into believing in some awesome new paradigm. What tended to be eliminated in the financial services industry has been compliance and oversight, and to allow mixing of different non equivalent, competing fiduciary responsibilities in the same entity, and to let accountability dissolve through special accounting practices that are manipulative. Additionally federal guarantees affect behavior by encouragingly gambling style risk.

At this point we should probably move away from rules based regulations that seem prone to legal manipulation and move to principle based regs.

Tax Cuts and Deregulation

I wonder if people now understand that tax cuts and deregulation are not always good things? How many people still want to control their SSI through private accounts? I wonder how many people on the street bellyaching about lost money voted Republican until now. People cannot routinely make good ad hoc decisions for themselves. But, they can make good abstract decisions about how things should generally go. I hope future President Obama makes use of this to push for a paradigm shift.

What Are We to Do?

There is no question that our government and governing party are at the same time incompetent, arrogant, and ignorant. But they advertise themselves as such. It’s sort of their party line. I have tried for years to explain to people that there are consequences to actions, often foreseeable to persons of historical and geographic learning. But we worship when we should think, believe when we should examine, and rigid when we should be resilient. We have arrived at the logical destination of the prevailing ideology of the last 30 years. We need a paradigm shift.

Evangelicals : Our Village Idiots

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/god-against-obama-dobson_b_118611.html

This is a scathing article against the Evangelicals and their misuse and prostitution of faith.

Marching Thru Georgia

The conflict in Georgia as described in the news is without context or background. First, here’s a linguistic map of the area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Caucasus-ethnic_en.svg

The Ossetian’s are culturally related to Persians, the Georgians are Orthodox Christians. The Ossetia’s and Georgians have not gotten along, for a very long time, going back to the wars between Rome/Byzantium and Parthia/Persia. So, this goes way back, old old hatreds. Russian troops have done in Ossetia, the same thing we have done in Kosovo. Just as Tibetans want to be free of China, Ossetian’s want to be free of Georgians. As do the Abkhaz people, in the other area of “Georgia” that wants self government. The Ossetia’s know independence is unsustainable, but they prefer the remote and light hand of Russia to the close and heavy hand of Georgia. Let it go.

Georgia is physically as close to Russia as Cuba is to the U.S. The Russians appreciate our interference in Georgia probably as much as we appreciate their interference in Cuba. The United States has no national interests in Georgia; Russia does. Push comes to shove, we won’t go to war for Georgia and should therefore not indicate or imply that we would, it makes the Georgian’s take excessive risks. The oil pipeline doesn’t rise to a national interest of ours, it was never realistic to begin with, because it was predicated on a straight line graph prediction that Russia would remain at the nadir of power similar to the late 90’s.

Straight line predictions are almost never right, and Russia was bound to recover, as it has done before. Students of Russian history know that in 1917, Russia government collapsed the country fell apart in chaos, revolution and civil war. Twenty Eight years later in 1945 they were the greatest land power on the planet. They had beaten the vaunted German Wehrmacht and planted their flags in nine capital cities. They conquered Manchuria and Korea, a territory as large as Western Europe in around three weeks. This easily surpasses the early Wehrmacht success in Poland and France. And they stopped. And they proved reasonable over Finland. Russia will have Abkhazia and Ossetia, the real question is will they have Georgia proper too. Russia wins any fight over that.

We Americans need to take stock, of our true national interests and the real world. The nonsensical chest thumping since the fall of the USSR has cost us a lot. Missed opportunities, unproductive ill will, diminution of goodwill, and failure. The fall of the USSR and its meaning has not sunk in too many in the U.S., I’m looking at you Dick Cheney, but that is its own blog topic. Our attempts to apply a different standard to our actions than the actions of other countries is pointless feel good rhetoric. Our national geographic and historical ignorance serve us ill. NATO has got to pull back to Western European countries only, in this I include the Baltic States, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia, and exclude Turkey and Greece. See, the funny thing is we are actually less powerful, not more powerful with the USSR gone. Against the USSR/East bloc we could assert ourselves with cheap nukes. Against a chaotic world, we can only assert ourselves with infantry, and we don’t have nearly enough, not remotely. The stink of our foreign policy failures is rife. Let’s not further add to the list.

Thoughtful Quote

” Six years ago, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, would we have imagined that an open-ended anti-insurgent presence in a country that didn’t attack us would be the proper response?”
—James Fallows

Wolfowitz: Architect of Delusion

Paul Wolfowitz, the embattled leader of the World Bank, is one of the main idiots behind our Iraqi Blunder. He persistently has reversed cause and effect. Radical lunatic idiots like him should be removed from any place of power.

http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN1422387520070414

Enlightening Exchanges

I have had a most enlightening exchange. It has been suggested to me by someone whose opinion I value, that I tend toward rhetorical overreach, and am use language inexactly. I thought about it for several days, and tend to find merit in that notion. Though I think some of that comes from the assumptions we all make about what is generally known or accepted by others.

In any case I think we would all benefit by common usage of words and terms. Politicians have become past masters at manipulating language, and as Orwell suggested we cannot let them have control over the language, because with that, thought follows.

If we could agree on terms, words, and meanings then we could all spend more time discussing an idea, less time arguing past each other.

I am not sure how we could do this. Are there any suggestions?