The Chinese economy and the panic of political leadership

This Salon article gives at bit of insight, provided by Paul Krugman, into why the Chinese government is doing exactly the wrong thing to avoid making things worse for their economy. The problem, of course, is that not only does "rapid growth" look good to the rest of the world, it makes most of the elites there very rich. Turning that situation off risks losing the apparent solidarity of those in power, and the confidence that unification is supposed to display to the masses, as well as the rest of the world.

Then there's the reality of the markets themselves, and the fact that those that have aren't spending much, and raising the wages of the masses, so they could spend more, takes away the cheap labor that was much of the foundation for the growth in the first place. Sound familiar?

Supply side economics over here results in a similar situation. The rich don't want to risk the ability to accumulate, as well as keep, increased holdings, so they advocate little taxation, and every kind of investment incentive the mind can conceive. There's also a world competitive market at play, given all of those wonderful tree trade agreements, so the other incentive is to keep our wages low as well. Which all serves to create an ever dwindling middle class, and a growing "the rest of us" who simply cannot afford to buy much of anything, any more, either.

The problem with the usual remedies, however, is that Capitalism simply doesn't work very well with them; especially now that it has been electrified. The bottom line is to somehow control the troika of profits, prices and wages, while still having an environment where innovation and market responsiveness can flourish. Given that such control necessarily requires a bureaucracy of significant magnitude you create a process mesh that is essentially an oxymoron.

Given all of this I am left perplexed, to say the least, at how intelligent people, like Mr Krugman, can criticise the panic of misinformed politicians, while they continue to refuse to acknowledge that the model itself is no longer viable. To see that it is long past it's use by date and that it is now time to redefine requirements, and then how best to address them. Something a software person understands or simply doesn't prosper if not.

Paul Krugman: The dangerous “delusions of competence”

The ugly side of engineered messaging in the new age of "Amplification"

This Daily Beast article, concerning the documentary The Brainwashing Of My Dad,  gives us another informative video we will all need to see.

The thing to remember here is that this also serves as a reminder that "monied free speech," portrayed as an equivalent to individual free speech, is utter nonsense. And it is not only because of the engineering that can be done to message. It is also to be seen from the ability of spreading message across not only a wide breadth of media channels, but to also to give it legs in an otherwise short media attention span.

The only other thing you need to consider is this: Would Big Money spend the incredible sums necessary to create "Amplification" as it now exists if it weren't getting something quite significant in return? If you don't get that then I'm surprised you can read at all.

How Fox News Made My Dad Crazy

Big surprise. Bull Shit is another profit center.

This Salon article makes clear why a good portion of the right competes in the "I can out stupid that" market. Let us not forget, however, the full circle of this stupidity co-dependency, with the media companies, campaign companies (to name just a few of the corporations), as well as the members of "Big Money" who work this from both sides; as in spending some of their profits in funding the idiots who then spend it back on the very companies these guys own major shares of. Talk about a vicious circle.

Of course the real issue is this: Which is more stupid, the idiots who work in the circle, or the rubes among the population who find it all so entertaining?

Rise of the right-wing con artists: How Huckabee & Beck are stoking fears and getting rich

How we're tempted to act in the aftermath of such horrific behavior

A lot of rhetoric will be expanded upon in the next few weeks calling for new gun control laws, or even the outright ban of them. Most of this will be by politicians who appreciate the response poll response such lip service will provide a great deal more than the actual practicalities of spending real political capital in making it happen. This does not change the fact, however, that this will be prompted by the very human need to do something that is obviously reverberating through the population currently.

And lets be clear from the beginning. A couple of fundamental, reasonable, measures to keep fire arms out of the hands of people with a history of violence, or the tendency towards harm to others, would be quite helpful. A truly integrated national database of such behavior, linked with an effective transactional query system to make checks, as well as updates, quick, as well as accurate, would seem like a no brainer. As would having rules for keeping the weapons locked up when not in use, and keeping track of non compliance should also be included.  Unfortunately, governments being governments, of course, make "no brainer's" look like Herculean tasks.

In this, it is also reasonable to ask those who wish to exercise their right to bear arms to bear a significant portion of the cost of implementing, and maintaining this system. Which would be levied in the form of permit fees and gun taxes. And when the right wines about "more taxes" we should simply reply: "If you want the benefit then shoulder some of the responsibility."

What I fear, though, and why I am prompted to make this post, is that we'll get caught up in another well intentioned crusade to ban something outright. And as history as shown quite clearly, all of these "wars" on whatever might be the ill of the day, are often a great deal more harmful than the ill itself. Which is why I would no more ban guns than I would ban drugs.

Both of these things have the potential for stupid people doing stupid things with them. As well as for truly troubled people to do some very troubling things with. The bottom line for me has always been "you simply cannot legislate to any great degree against stupidity or troubled individuals." The best you can do is work around these human flaws to limit the collateral damage.

Being an advocate for social change I am always tempted to put the blame for bad behavior on one or another aspects of the current operating system. Being a Systems Analyst as well, however, makes giving in to that temptation rather difficult. The fact of the matter is that people act out their frustrations, or fears, or anger for a universe of complicated factors. Passion of the moment. The legacy of not being shown how to make better choices, with a balance of discipline and nurturing. Substance abuse. Physical abuse. Brain disorders. A sequence of sudden misfortunes. The list could go on and on.

I'd like to think, of course, that having a more involving, less disconnected, form of social organization would make for a much more helpful environment in which people could learn to make better choices in. Changing that system, however, would in no way eliminate the human propensity for making mistakes in judgement, any more than it would completely eliminate greed, or envy or hate. We are frail beings both emotionally and physically. That's just the way it is. Keeping faith with both Love and Mind, working together, is the only thing that's ever made any sense to me as a way to keep on putting one foot in front of the

The Massacre That Changed a Nation's View on Guns

Why are we avoiding the bigger question?

As this NBCNEWS.com article points out, cancer treatment is way too expensive. The real ignorance here, however, is not in an inability to answer to this obvious question. Any more than this one aspect of inappropriate valuation is the right question to be asking in the first place.

The problem is the insane economic operating system that values net gain more than any thing else. And not just net gain in and of itself, but whatever the marketer can get away with. A system which actually prides itself in encouraging the marketer to behave in exactly that manner.

If city sized groups of individuals were in charge of both production decisions, as well as owning the responsibility of maintaining collective production capability, the only factor in deciding what should be produced is the willingness of those individuals to apply the effort, and resource, to make the production happen. Doing so precisely because they thought it was worth such effort and resource.

Such an arrangement is not rocket science. It is simply a reasoned conclusion of what cooperation, personal involvement, and technology, in balance, can accomplish.

Setting it up, on the other hand, is something that will be extremely difficult. Make no mistake. Saying that, however, does not make it impossible. It just means that the commitment to make it happen will have to be total for everyone who can see that business as usual isn't working any more. It is, in fact, quite unsustainable. It is driving us all insane even as it destroys the planet.

Perhaps the big takeaway here is that the real cancer is Capitalism metastasizing on the carcinogen of electrified money. A cancer that is eating away at everything.

Can We Get Cheaper Cancer Drugs? More Than 100 Experts Weigh In

Economics, Politics and Human Rights

I just can't seem to help myself when it comes to juxtaposing seemingly disconnected news stories. Each story relates to an important, and/or passionately held, aspects of certain events, but we don't always get the bigger picture context that these events play out in. Especially as it relates to the complicated nature of how things can interact in both cause and effect.

Another case in point. Three stories concerning world events:

1: Wall Street is freaking out about China’s economic slowdown: Here’s why humanity should cheer

2: Springtime for America’s Enemies

3: Japan-China Spat: Beijing Plans To Tap Oil Field Near Disputed Waters, Tokyo Says

The first deals with the environmental upside hoped for in China'a economic slowdown. Brief mention is made, of course, to how Wall Street isn't too happy about it, but it does go into the environmental challenges China faces in some detail; as well as the amazing public outcry from a much abused populace (the death rate from particulates alone is astonishing).

The second is a passionate plea from a former Russian chess grand master that America is playing a foolish game of "make peace" with evil governments that cannot be justified by either the long term goals of these regiems (as in Russia, Iran, and Cuba), or their current humanitarian records.

And lastly is another aspect of geopolitics as it relates to the oceans around China, Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam and China (to just name a few).

The bigger picture can become obscured in each of these precisely because there is usually one group or another who benefits from portraying (whether justly or not) particular players as either monolithic evil, greed masters, the enemy de jour, or the patsy de jour. And, as with all good propaganda, there is always an element of truth to any of the claims to make them have feet, if not legs, to stand for a while in the media.

My bias, of course, is the questionable status of the current predominant economic operating system in place across the world; whether governments be supposedly democratic, socialist, communist or a monarchy of whatever sort, they are all capitalist to varying degrees. As such it is my contension that none of the players will be able to successfully coexist with the others until the profit element inherent in commodities, and the resources underlying their production, as well as production itself; with the way we go about it and the connection it has to individual material well begin, are addressed.

How can we ever talk intelligently about peace, or war, when so many either profit, or starve no matter which path we take? How can we know truth in any set of circumstances, so as to negotiate knowledgably, and apply engagement, or isolation effectively, when information itself is a commodity. And if peace or war discussions cannot be initiated as a trust based dialogue, what chance will environmental discussions have?

Profit is power. Profit is permanent war economies. Profit is a permanent class of poor and the unrepresented. Profit is poision in the air, in the ground and in the oceans. Even peace is profit, along with all of the poisons, if you define peace as only the absence of armed conflict. The truly astonishing part of that kind of peace is how the elites are so surprised at how unpeaceful not only the poor and unrepresented become, but how the earh itself responds in kind.

We are data but we are also a great deal more. If only we had an operating system that understood and encouraged that.

The attitude expressed in this article is as depressing as it is illustrative of everyone being unable to think outside of the mandate of money. Remembering that, in this context, money is information and information is money now that Capitalism has been deformed by electricity, and electrified information retrieval systems.

We are data. That is certainly true. But virtually everything is. One has not made much of an enlightening statement when utters this. The real problem is the automatic incentive to fuck with data at every level that Capitalism now provides. The only part here that is inevitable is that someone will respond to that incentive and will try to act upon it before, and/or with better effectiveness, than anybody else, so as to acquire competitive advantage and be more successful in the process of net gain. Because, in that success, is their true power. At least as it relates to further success in playing the money game we call Capitalism. Take away the incentive and you take away a great deal of the inevitability of data in reasoning engines becoming our ultimate successors.

We are data: the future of machine intelligence