Three Sigma Systems

Time for a rant.

It seems to me that America has become a nation paralyzed by fear into impractical inaction. Our greed bubble has popped. The wizards of finance have been unmasked and the pyramid has collapsed. The double-dip recession is a depression produced by wanton double-dipping. The marks have been fleeced out of what they had and then what they didn’t have. Now there’s no blood left to suck. All that is left is to point fingers at someone — anyone but ourselves. So we roll about in the dung of our empty opinions, bolstered by the opinion making pundits on TV, radio, and blogs, unwilling to take on the challenges that are burying us alive. We want our free pass at the candy store back, but it’s gone, gone, gone.

To paraphrase Viktor Emil Frankl, to be human is take on the challenges that life puts before us. In our blame-shifting, name-calling, do-nothingness — health-care? (Hell no), financial reform? (Hell no!), help our fellows who are out of work? (Hell no), tackle climate change (Hell no!), dig ourselves out of the pit of our greedy folly? (Hell no!) — we are failing the test of being human.

Tomorrow I will set sail in my little boat. My intention is to make a 300-mile run down the windy coast of California. It has been a great relief to devote my mind and body to the tasks of preparing her. It will be an even greater relief to give myself over to the the challenges that life will put before me on the open sea. Out there, my opinions are of no consequence. All that matters is that I tether my mind and body to the challenges at hand. I do not even contemplate the price of inaction in such a circumstance.

While our nation languishes in inaction, the seas of change are washing over her. America is drowning in her own fear, reaction, and despair over lost treasures it never possessed.

Theory underlies ALL human experience including every seemingly raw observation or assertion of true fact. Theory is the vehicle of all conscious experience.

Simply put, theory-making consists of setting forth an assertion, no matter how trivial or grand, in which we claim “If this, then that”. In other words, theory is prediction.

My theory of consciousness is that it is rooted in our genetic predisposition to construct theory (Darwinian). The structure of theory is narrative. Theory is “story” that we tell to, among, and with others, real and imagined, as in our imagined “selves”.

The construction of narrative (i.e. theory), is no more mysterious than the behavior of birds gathering twigs and bits of string to shape into a nest in which they will thereafter reside, along with their developing offspring.  Instead of twigs and string, we gather up our self-created vocal and gestural material and shape it into symbolic-narrative nests of varying utility, in which we reside, and without which we are not and cannot be conscious.

Every conscious being comes into existence in the context of theory shared by others as narrative, and thereafter in continuous interaction with others and the substantive world at large. It is in this complex ongoing interaction of story-tellers predicting their way through the world that theory comes to be accepted and taken-for-granted. Theory that comes to be taken-for-granted (e.g. Self-evident or “proven”) forms the foundation for the edifice of subsequent theory we construct continually.

We cannot extricate ourselves from theory — we cannot be conscious of ourselves from outside our narrative nests. I think of this as a “belief barrier” that we can only overcome by practices designed to give-up self-awareness (i.e. Non-consciousness). OOOOM!

In the business of formal theory-making that we call modern science, the predictions made — the “if this then that” stories told — can never be proven for the simple reason that in prediction, the totality of all possible future outcomes is unknowable. A theory can be falsified by one disconfirming outcome, but never proven.

But as we approach the belief-barrier, the falsification of theory that forms the foundations of our consciousness threatens our very conception of the socially constructed self. To actually break the belief-barrier would be to descend into incoherent madness — a bird’s nest distorted into useless form —rather than sublimely pure awareness. An individual bird of a nesting species who, for whatever reason, becomes incapable of building a functional nest, is incapable of surviving, and so too for the conscious creature who becomes incapable of constructing a narrative nest.

This helps us to understand why down here, near the belief-barrier, theory often stands despite repeated falsifications in practice. The coherence of our symbolic narrative nest is of paramount importance and evidence-be-damned, such coherence must be sustained at all costs, lest the story-teller be plunged into incoherent, suicidal, madness.

The boundaries of theory-making down near the belief-barrier are circumscribed by what “works” as prediction, more or less, but also by the symbolic material itself. Like twigs and string, the structure of “if this, then that”, prescribes a form that is self-limiting and self-bounding, but infinitely variable within those limits.

In consciousness, we cannot overcome the belief-barrier but we can characterize it. In doing so, we can eschew illusions of truth and proof that restrict our ability to improve the form of our nest with purpose and intention, while sustaining our nest’s functional coherence.

I believe that the process of theory-making down near the belief-barrier is universal in nature and can be both described and explained as a whole. These essential elements transcend the variety of forms regarded as “proven” that continue to confound our inquiry.

Do you remember a few months back, when the U.S. media was busily burying Toyota’s reputation as the be-all and end-all of automotive quality? To me, the media’s myth-busting paroxysms came off more like a witch-hunt than investigative journalism. Now that their fear-mongering Toyota-bashing is no longer in the headlines comes this from NHTSA, who have been carefully investigating Toyota unintended acceleration reports.

“The early results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyotas and Lexuses surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes.”

And,

“In spite of our investigations, we have not actually been able yet to find a defect” in electronic throttle-control systems, Mr. Smith told the scientific panel, which is looking into potential causes of sudden acceleration.

In the wake of the great Toyota panic of 2010, Toyota’s senior managers have tearfully apologized in public and Toyota’s engineers have created numerous fixes for problems still not found. As of February of 2010, Toyota estimated that their cost for recalls and lost sales at about two billion dollars.

In past posts on this blog I have expressed my feeling that there was a hidden agenda designed to play on the xenophobic tendencies of a declining nation that has squandered its edge in quality manufacturing and is now trying to claw its way back, not by rededicating itself to creating great products, but by denigrating its competition.

As I have said before, Toyota is just another automaker in business to make a profit. Their products are far from prefect, but have thus far been much better than anything produced by U. S. automakers. To begin to understand why this is the case we need only study Toyota’s corporate response to the media witch-hunt. Rather than dig their heels in with denials and blame-shifting (see BP oil spill), they bowed, apologized, bent with the wind and went on about the business of improving their products. Their response reflected what has come to be known as “The Toyota Way”. Meanwhile GM, having learned nothing, is giving lip services to digging itself out of the grave it dug itself into with a taxpayer funded sham product called the Volt (see NYT “G.M.’s Electric Lemon“)

No design is perfect and the imperfect design of Toyota vehicles certainly contributed to crashes. After all, if the operator of a vehicle can accidentally apply the gas rather than the brake, the gas-pedal next to the brake-pedal design could stand improvement. But the two billion dollar rush to judgement in the media was most certainly fueled by a desire to take the number-one automaker in the world (not made in America) down a few notches rather than a legitimate concern for product safety.

This is the same con as the one being used by the Republican Party in the U.S.  Rather than earn the respect and loyalty of customer-audiences by creating great product and improving it continuously, the Republican party spends all their effort attacking the other party’s products. This method has the benefits of being cheap, requiring no thought, and by creating nothing, immunizing it perpetrators from responsibility for their (not) products.

But there’s a downside to this technique as well, and I am not defending Toyota. I am attacking the con-artistry of U.S. business interests and media lackeys and more importantly, the gullibility of American audiences who mistake creating nothing for doing something. People who are lost in the funhouse had better wake up soon. These con-artists are shoveling dirt into our grave faster than we can dig ourselves out!

NYT, July 13, 2010 – “Rules Seek to Expand Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s“:

If the guidelines are adopted in the fall, as expected, some experts predict a two to threefold increase in the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

The new guidelines include criteria for three stages of the disease: preclinical disease, mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease and, lastly, Alzheimer’s dementia.

Under the new guidelines, for the first time, diagnoses will aim to identify the disease as it is developing by using results from so-called biomarkers — tests like brain scans, M.R.I. scans and spinal taps that reveal telltale brain changes.

The changes could also help drug companies that are, for the first time, developing new drugs to try to attack the disease earlier. So far, there are no drugs that alter the course of the disease.

The trick to unraveling this con is to follow the money. In this case you, the mark, begin getting fleeced out of your most precious assets —  your money and your sense of well-being — upon being diagnosed with “preclinical” Alzheimer’s as much as 10 years before you lose your keys!

Doctors, MRI manufacturers and operators, drug companies, and snake oil salesmen get richer.

You and other preclinical sufferers like you, get poorer, even as you begin a pill-popping life as a prisoner condemned to an ignominious death without possibility of pardon.

This con is actually a variation of the oldest con in the book. In the ultimate diagnosis of preclinical disease, the day you are born you are sinful and you must spend the rest of your life in the shadow of your incipient affliction. Although there is no cure for your sinful nature, strong doses of the palliatives dispensed by high priests, along with ample tithing, can mitigate your misery and self-loathing.

At the root of the problem with our health care system is a treatment centered diagnostic terrorism that does more to create diseases and profits than enable human health and well-being.

See “Use a brain scanner, go to jail!“

See also: “That Uneasy Feeling“

In a worthy July 4th NYT blog entry, “Friendship in an Age of Economics“, Todd May , a professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, gives himself over to some rather random thoughts on the nature of friendship. He draws upon Aristotle’s classification of relationships — those of pleasure, those of utility, and those that are true — and concludes of the true that:

We might say of friendships that they are a matter not of diversion or of return but of meaning.

May’s “true friends”, are those who sit by his bedside without clear ulterior motive. These friends have a purity of motive that makes their friendship more complete. He quotes John Berger:

“We were not somewhere between success and failure; we were elsewhere.” To be able to sit by the bed of another, watching him sleep, waiting for nothing else, is to understand where else we might be.”

Friendship is the wellspring of meaning. Our friends are the ones who are there with us over time. They are the ones who provide us with the looking-glass by which we come to possess a sense of who we are as we do the same for them. Friends are those who continue to feel “you” and make you, for better and for worse, amidst the ebb and flow of ever-changing events. Friends are there with you, renewing you constantly, and you are likewise, there with them,

I have decided that it is not motive that determines the  nature of friendship, it is time. Friendship is a sustained jam session of call-and-response. Friends are the partners who make up your friendscape. They are there with you time and time again, creating you as you create them.

Without friends, our sense of participation  —- our sense that we mean something — fades away. This fading is called loneliness, and in my experience there is too much of that in our culture of self-justification, self-aggrandizement, self-esteem, and solo performances.

In an age of rationally motivated economic self-interest, friendship is under continual assault, in part because we are indoctrinated with the idea of motivation and in part because we have built a society of predation rather than collaboration.

To experience friendship requires that we accept others for who they are — we let it be. The obstacles to friendship are in our minds as well as in the nature of our “caveat emptor” economic relations. We have engineered a society of lonely self-interest.

Welcome to the funhouse!

It seems to me that we have become so dazed and confused by our own razzle-dazzle that we are now lost in our own funhouse. We are searching for ways to exit the maze but at each turn we find ourselves staring at the reflections of our own folly. The harder we try to get out, the more lost we become.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics reflects the universal observation that unless we put more energy into a system than we take out, the system will become increasingly anarchic, chaotic and cold. We call this “entropy“. Yet we have bought into this idea that it is right that we strive to profit, by which we mean that it is natural and good that each of us seeks to minimize our investment and maximize our return.

Most of us would be quick to spot the con-artist who tries to sell us a perpetual motion machine. For example, we would think twice before investing our hard-earned money in a car that we are told creates more fuel than it uses. But we blithely accept the idea that we can conduct our human affairs by taking more and more out while putting less and less in.

In our striving to get more for less — in other words in our quest for more feel-good “fun” — the system of human enterprise is fast becoming more chaotic and cold. Entropy makes no exceptions. In our quest for a perpetual motion machine, we have become lost in our funhouse.

Funhouse reflections in today’s news:

Economic chaos

Senseless warring

Environmental degradation

Reduction of biodiversity

Unpredictable climate

Militant belief

Poverty amidst wealth

Endemic fear and loathing

Perpetual Motion Machine

In news that should not come as news, Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone magazine submits to readers his article, “Runaway General“, in which he profiles Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan — a movie star blood-and-guts warrior “…who prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else) — shows, in his leaked “candid moments”, nothing but contempt for his weak-kneed and waffling Commander-in-Chief, President Barack Obama.

War Dog

It doesn’t take much effort to surmise that the only weak-kneed and waffling coward in this tragic play is Gen. McChrystal himself, who is scrambling to spin his losing game plan by blaming the Obama administration.

From the very beginning, Obama was faced with an impossible never-ending, never end-able, “War on Terrorism” with a front-line drawn in the deserts and mountains of the mythically unconquerable Afghanistan. Then McChrystal blindsided Obama with his leaked report and speech asserting that, “If we didn’t send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of ‘mission failure’.”

“The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president’s ass.”

If the “mission” was to pacify the tribes of Afghanistan and make them our allies with our big stick military might and our carrot of dollars, we were doomed to failure from the outset. As anyone who has spent time in Afghanistan knows, outside of Kabul the tribal people of Afghanistan are not motivated by fear and greed, although they will take money when offered and hide from bombs when dropped, they are guided by honor, loyalty, and revenge.

“As Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. “The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.”

So the ambitious Gen. McChrystal, born and bred to be an attack dog, has been barking up the wrong tree since day one, and now, having realized this, he is barking up another tree with easier pray, attacking his nation’s leadership on the sly.

As I have written time and time again in this blog (e.g. Dancing in Afghanistan), we have been traveling a hopeless path toward self-destruction in Afghanistan. The generals are wrong and Obama is wrong to listen to them. We continue to dig the hole we have been digging still deeper, and we will be lucky if instead of being buried in it, we manage to crawl out and get on with more important matters than converting Muslims to our somewhat dubious way of looking at the world.

Obama should fire McChrystal with great fanfare and then work out a method for calling off the dogs of war against, against — who is we’re supposed to be fighting?. Muslims? Afghans? The Taliban? The Karzai government? Ourselves? I don’t think anyone knows for sure, and certainly not Gen. McChrystal.

Obama needs to find Osama bin Laden and kill him three times. He needs to stop killing Afghan and Pakistani innocents, even if they are just collateral damage. He needs to stop alienating every Muslim on the planet so that maybe they will be willing help us thwart the fanatic terrorists from all religions and walks of life who actually pose a threat. Getting down to basics, he needs to curb the oil barons who have addicted us to oil, embroiled us in wars of adventure in the Middle East and enraged those populations, poisoned our oceans and coastlines, polluted our water and skies, changed our climate and enshrined greed as the noblest of human callings.

My action plan for Obama:

This is actually an opportunity for Obama to dig himself out from the deadfall we are trapped in. With great fanfare, he should fire the  McChrystal, who deserves it in spades (Truman-esque). Next, he should order Gen. Preteaus, the warrior’s warrior, to the Afghan theater to hold the fort until a new plan can be devised. Then he should implement a plan to draw down conventional forces, start building a narrative that makes some sense of the debacle, and build up on-the-ground intelligence and covert ops in the region so that he can get after the guys that are actually plotting against the U. S.

Update: Sailor Abby Sunderland found safe in Indian Ocean

(Reuters) – A 16-year-old California girl trying to sail solo around the world is safe and well after a massive search and rescue was launched in the Indian Ocean when she triggered distress signals, her parents and Australian authorities said Friday.

I am delighted that Abby has been found aboard her dismasted boat and is unharmed. With the immediate crisis over, I wonder how many people will take the lesson to heart. When Vendée Globe racers disappear, we can all accept the fact that having passed the age of majority, the sailors paid their money and took their chances, but in the case of a 16 year-olds, we should be asking ourselves who is really making the decisions that put them in harm’s way.

Like many sailing addicts, I was one of those kids who dreamed of sailing around the world when I was 13 years old and took a very big interest in the 16 year-old, Robin Lee Graham, who with the help of his father, outfitted a Lapworth 24 and set sail around the world. At the time I thought it was the greatest idea imaginable. But something I can’t quite explain, made Graham’s adventure seem different. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. The following forum post by maxingout in 2008 captures my feeling.

“Robin Lee Graham inspired me do to my own circumnavigation. The National Geographic articles implanted the dream in my mind, and there was no escape. It’s interesting how, every once in a while, people pop up out of nowhere and influence thousands of lives around the world. Joshua Slocum, Harry Pidgeon, and Robin Lee Graham are good examples.

We live in a day of extreme sports and well-financed adventures. The high performance extreme sportsmen of today discourage me rather than inspire me, because most of what they do are stunts (often highly risky). I don’t aspire to follow in their footsteps, and I have no desire to emulate what they do.

This age of brinksmanship is at the opposite end of the spectrum from people like Slocum, Pidgeon, and Graham. They went about their business in average boats with minimal resources, and they had an excellent adventure. Most of all, they inspired me because what they were doing wasn’t extreme. Their dreams were in the realm of possibility in my own life. One of my favorite quotes from singlehanded circumnavigator, Harry Pidgeon is: “I avoided adventure as much as possible. Just the same, any landsman who builds his own vessel and sails alone around the world will certainly meet with some adventures, so I shall offer no apology for my voyage. Those days were the freest and happiest of my life.”

Long live those sailors who inspire ordinary people to live their dreams.”

Can a clear line be drawn between Robin Lee Graham’s project and Abby Sunderland’s? Probably not. There are many reasons why a 16 year-old may be thrown into the path of adversity and forced to rise to the occasion, but to purposely place a child into harm’s way seems a terrible violation of the trust a child places in an adult parent, guardian, or mentor. I took my own 12 year-old son on a sailing voyage that lasted almost six years — but my wife and I were with him.  When it came to passage-making, we “…avoided adventure as much as possible”. Our principal aim was to live as fully as possible in We-Space. As we prepared for departure there where some people who accused us of putting our son in harm’s way.

These are not easy questions to answer. I suppose it’s a matter of judgement, which is after all, a characteristics we attribute to adulthood.

Youngest sailor ever Abby Sunderland feared lost at sea after her crew lost contact with her.

“(Sixteen year-old solo sailor) Abby is approximately 500 miles north of the Antarctic Islands on her bid to become the youngest to circumnavigate the globe in a sailboat, solo.“

Where Abby is

Sixteen year old Abby Sunderland is alone, cut off, and in trouble, somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Her last reported position was midway between Australia and South Africa. Chances are good that she is alive as I write this, but she living at this moment, in the most remote and inhospitable environment imaginable. Terra firma or even ice, provide a purchase point for human habitation, but at sea there is only the hull of one’s tiny boat or still tinier, a rubber life raft, or nothing but the cold dark sea. The nearest rescue vessel is more than 40 hours away. Read more…

Foremost amid the clamor over the Gulf of Mexico gusher has been the call for the mega corporation, British Petroleum, to compensate those affected by their risky behavior. The consensus opinion, at least up until today, seems to be that BP’s huge corporate coffers are great enough to pay whatever it takes.

Big new house. Nice new car. (Click to enlarge)

Of course BP’s coffers, no matter how large, are not large enough to compensate for the damage done and the damage to come. The things that really matter cannot be purchased at any price. There is no amount of money that can erase the consequences of our actions. Replacement species cannot be purchased at the pet store. Wetlands cannot be sent to the dry cleaners. Sadness, fear, and distrust cannot be scrubbed from the minds of people who’s world has been irreparably despoiled.

Nevertheless, we want to assign blame and see justice done. To that end, we will make BP pay. But the only crime BP committed was that of getting caught. They were just one among many corporations, taking risks to maximize profit. Had there been no blowout, we would all be blithely driving our cars, running our air conditioners, and watching our BP stock price in hopes of getting rich quick.

If we are interested in preventing the destruction of that which money cannot buy, then assigning blame and making claims against BP will do little to lower our risk. The profit motive is about money — nothing more. So long as we as a nation of people, continue to cede our responsibility for managing our risks, to profiteering corporations, we will continue to suffer from their depraved single-mindedness.

What will the next runaway gusher or runaway credit-default swaps be? If we could know, we could stop it. But when it comes to unbridled profiteering, we can’t know what the next disaster will be, we can only know that the next man-made disaster is just around the next corner.

IF YOU ARE READING THIS MESSAGE then you have found one of the bottles I have been casting into the sea. I don’t know your name or where you live, but I am certain that you are not too far from where I sit at this very moment.

In 1998, I set sail with my wife, son, and dog, aboard our 42-foot sailboat, on a voyage that lasted almost six years. We crossed oceans, weathered storms, and visited far off places where the natives live in huts made of reeds and wear day-glo brassieres as marks of status.

You might think that my voyage was a risky casting-off from the known world — that I tempted the gods and begged my fate — and that my coming-home would have been a most welcome return to the safety of terra cognita. But my experience was exactly the opposite! It has only been since my return in 2004 that I have become stranded and reduced to stuffing these messages into bottles.

I write my messages and cast them into the sea in hopes that someone like you will read one and set yourself to the task of devising a means of rescue. All the information necessary to formulate a sound rescue plan is contained in this journal. Although it will require some effort, all you need do is to read and understand.

You might want to consider acting quickly. You see, though it may not seem like it, time is running out. We are close in upon a lee shore and the swell is building. A single bout with foul weather; an unanticipated veering or backing breeze, will be all it takes to set us upon those reefs.

All hands on deck! Lay the helm hard-over. Come-about. Sheet in! We can beat our way off that lee shore. We need sea room if we’re to get underway again!

Do some study and when you’ve worked out a plan, send up a red flare if by night, or if by day, sound five long blasts of your horn. I am here — closer than you think — waiting, watching, listening, for your signal. You’d best act soon lest you too find yourself stranded and stuffing messages in bottles.

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In my after cruise (AC) awareness it has become clear to me that our the ship I am now aboard —- our nation —- needs correct its course if it is to avoid foundering upon reefs and shoals that are already in sight. Time is running out. We are close in upon a lee shore. A single bout of bad weather will blow us hard aground. The messages in my bottles all say the same thing. We need to come-about, sheet hard, and beat our way of that lee shore before it’s too late.

“A shovel is a fine tool for digging holes, but a shovel that can only dig holes where the guy who sells it to you says you can dig holes…. Well I’m thinking maybe he just wants me to pay him to dig his holes.”

Tom Sawyer’s cousin

I wrote a blog entry about the much-hyped Apple IPad release back in early April, before the BP disaster (BBP), titled “IPod, IPhone, and IPad: Tied Down and Locked In“. My main idea was that although information age technologies have the potential to liberate people, in the hands of profiteering con artists, they tend to become powerful instruments of enslavement.

In his Baseline Scenario posts, “The Future of Personal Computing, Part I and Part 2, James Kwak has captured my meaning quite well. Read Part 2 if you want to cut to the chase. He wrote:

…[W]hy I find the app craze so perplexing: it seems like a giant step backward, back to a pre-Internet world where we had to install a bunch of separate applications on our computers, and developers had to write different programs for each operating system. It seems worse than that, even, because with Apple the only place you can get software is from the App Store, which means that Apple gets to decide what can run on your iPhone.

'59 Caddie

The comments following Kwak’s article are of particular interest to me. Quite a few of the commentators have clearly drunk Steve Jobs’ Apple Kool-Aid, a brew that has raised him to the status of a techno-guru in the eyes of American consumers and business pundits. His methods remind of nothing more than how U. S. auto makers created brand loyalty and bilked millions of people in the 50’s and early 60’s, when chrome grills and big fins defined value in a car. Style without substance is a powerful drug and as the infamous P. T. Barnum observed, “There’s a sucker born every minute”.

There’s a big difference between Jobs and his like, and P. T. Selling expensive, gas-guzzling transportation machines that are designed to fail, entombs bodies inside garish steel-mobiles, but information technology can entrain minds through gadgets that can be used to control not just what people think, but how they think!

In his article, Kwak compares Google with Apple. He suggests that Google’s path is toward openness and Apple’s is toward closed-ness. He makes a good point, though I tend to think that Google is not entirely altruistic in their road to openness, I do think that they have become captives of their own origins.

Today, when someone Google’s the Internet, it really doesn’t matter which search engine they use. To “Google” means to search the Internet — just like Xeroxing a document meant to make a photocopy no matter what the brand of machine. But when it comes to Apple, it’s got to be “Apple” and nothing else will do — just like parking a ‘59 Caddie with 15-inch fins in your driveway could not be confused with a ‘59 Chevy at the curb.

I understand that we should not begrudge either P. T. Barnum or Steve Jobs for exploiting suckers for a buck. What bothers me is the potential of Apple’s model for enslaving people’s minds just when we need free minds most.

In a Post-BP world (PBP), people do not need to be diddling with Apple toys and running Apple-approved Apps. They need to be Googling information, sifting through ideas, and adopting informed opinions about how to make a better world. We need to embrace substance over style and openness over closed-ness, and anything that reverses these priorities — that distracts people’s minds from the things that matter — does a disservice to human beings. Profits be damned!

Here’s how Kwak wrapped it up:

Conceptually, I still think the best thing for consumers is a model that is open on every level: web-based development, so that content and functionality are available at the same time for anyone using any browser, allowing competition among operating systems and, for a given operating system, between different hardware manufacturers. … Now Apple wants to lock people into their hardware and OS and create an ecosystem of developers, applications, and content that you can only get through Apple.

It should come as no surprise that apocalyptic thinking is pretty much ground into my psyche. I was raised during the 50’s and 60’s, so my formative years were punctuated by air raid sirens, duck-and-cover drills, bomb shelters, and dread of nuclear winter.

Miraculously, we have not annihilated ourselves in a nuclear holocaust; at least not yet. Maybe our powers of reason are actually sufficient to avert outright suicide after all, but it looks as though the power of our greed may do the job anyway.

In our quest for more of just about everything and anything, it seems that we are now taking go-for-broke risks in which the whole human enterprise is on the line. If people have a hard time wrapping their minds around the evidence of global climate change, they should have have no problem grasping the scope and long term implications of the runaway oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Even if the “top kill” works, we have sealed the fate of the entire southeastern coast of the United States for generations to come. The wasteland created by the melt -down of the Chernobyl nuclear “facilities” was nothing by comparison.

The current state of our tampering — our greed and hubris — has us on the brink of self-destruction a thousand times over. Will we do ourselves in by blowing ourselves up or by poising our skies and oceans or by creating microbes that are invulnerable to our medicines or by …?

Although the precise mechanism by which we will precipitate our own demise cannot be predicted, if we continue on our current course, that outcome is 100% certain.

It’s well passed time for a change we can believe in!

NYT, “The Measure of a Disaster“, May 21, 2010 – This oil spill is said to be mostly “sheen,” which means a layer less than one-three-thousandth the thickness of a hair, visible only because it causes mirror-like reflection of light or radar energy.

AP, December 21, 2012 - As BP Oil continues its efforts to stem the flow of oil it triggered in a deep-water drilling accident in April of 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico, drought conditions have now reached a global scale.

Precipitation rates have dwindled to less than 10% of normal for all regions reporting this month, said NOAA meteorologist Kevin Goodweather.

“Cloud formations have become a rarity as atmospheric moisture has virtually disappeared”, said Goodweather.

Across the planet, fresh water reserves in the world largest lakes and reservoirs have been depleted at a rate that was unpredicted just a short year ago. The rapidity of depletion was explained at first in terms of  irrigation and poor water management, but later scientists determined that without adequate precipitation, what climatologists are now calling “dry-air super evaporation”, is making short work of global fresh water reserves.

Although run-of-the-mill famines took a serious toll on equatorial populations during 2011, sudden mass die-offs offs of living organisms around the globe, including humans, only started about a month ago, as fresh water has been disappearing at an alarming rate. Read more…

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again

May 16, 2010, NYT Article, “Fears Intensify That Euro Crisis Could Snowball“:

“the public finances in the majority of advanced industrial countries are in a worse state today than at any time since the industrial revolution,” Willem Buiter, Citigroup’s top economist, wrote in a recent report.

The ideology of free-markets prided itself on the notion that unfettered markets are self-regulating. Like Humpty Dumpty, if left to their own greedy dynamics of individual self-interest, they would sit atop the wall, cyclically tilting this way, then that, but always balancing themselves out over time.

For a long time now, there has been growing evidence that Humpty’s free-market gyrations have been growing evermore erratic as the winds of change have swirled more strongly about him. With each new gust, he has been titled ever closer toward a tipping point from which he cannot recover. We should rightly ask if Humpty is still on the wall, or if he has already fallen?

Some believe that Humpty can be sheltered form the winds of change and his balance restored or even improved, but there is a great deal of evidence that suggests that he is already fallen.

• Jobless economic “recoveries”
• Increasing polarization of national and global wealth
• The Euro meltdown
• Oil gushing unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico
• Endless warring over global resources
• Unbridled proliferation of guns and bombs
• Melting ice caps
• The return to the nuclear option for energy
• Mass extinctions and decreasing bio-diversity
• Ever-increasing environmental degradation
• Endemic hunger and deprivation

… the list goes on.

If Humpty has already fallen, we are wasting our time arguing about how to put him together again — “All the kings horses and all the king’s men can’t put him together again”. Maybe it’s time we be done with business as usual and start thinking about how we can survive and prosper in a post-Humpty Dumpty world.

Wall Street regulators (not) and pundits of all feathers, are racing about trying to calm investor anxiety over the 1000 points-down glitch (Origin of Wall Street’s Plunge Continues to Elude Officials).

“When you hear hoof beats in the hallway, think horses, not zebras.”

Because the “explainers” have the aim to calm fears rather than inform the marks (aka investors) who provide the fodder for the Wall Street con, every explanation they come up with involves accidental, “too complex to understand”, causes. Given an institution in the which name of game is maximizing profits at the expense of suckers, why would anyone look for accidents when there’s real money to be made by manipulating the vig? Welcome to the new age of the Flash-Crash.

The big players, who can buy the game anytime they want, have been manipulating the vig for a long time, but the sophistication of their predations has increased greatly in the age of electronic transactions. The payoffs have also increased greatly. Thursday’s flash-crash had all the trappings of a financial sneak attack that ended before the victims could figure out what hit them. The manipulators are now sitting in their fortress aeries counting their money and LOL as SEC officials try to figure out what the “glitch” was all about. Wink wink, nod nod.

Remember, you heard it here first — If you’ve got the muscle, flash-crash-for-cash economics is the latest and greatest way to control the vig.

This explanation is a good as others and more likely than most.

UPDATE

Somebody finally thinks horses:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. securities regulators are probing whether market professionals violated securities laws during the recent unexplained market crash