Ovine Thunder

The loathsome Teabaggers are at it again, pretending that clamans turbae is somehow an element of American government. Remember, the Crowd and its mind and manipulation was one of the stunning tools of Lenin and Hitler, indeed.

Simpering about in petulant premise that yowling pre-purchased slogans constitutes protest, they wander into Town Meetings and such, acting the faithful stooge the same as many Baby Boomers did, when they "protested" in a manner prescribed and underwritten by that leech upon the Left, the Soviets. Bought and paid for then, the signs pre-made for them, the phrases pre-packaged and sold, they pretended that they were acting independently - but as an interchangeable mob.

It is a horrible thing to see, when Americans consider being a stooge to be the summit of their capacity as citizens.

And nearly all the man, every one of them, would trade their protest over "healthcare" to become a functionary on a "neighborhood life panel," which will speak forth The People's Vote on the end-of-life decisions of its citizenry, ne'er mind the doctors or hospitals or family, We! Love! Life! and will spin out the mortal skein past Atropos' grim hand, for the wreck of brain-dead citizens, derelict of soul. It will be The People's Vote! Yes! That way, we keep Government Out Of Healthcare!

As essays before have shown, the Average American has become a herd animal - defined as he who gets nervous if not in full view of the ass-hole of the neighboring herdmate. Packed in to the center, that's the key, that's the safety; out on the edges, that's where the wolves can see you. Hardly the mind of patriots.

It is not necessary to speculate upon a puppetmaster; perhaps it is in the Mind of the Herd itself, the Group Consciousness.

"Controlling Grandma's Life!" HAW! The Great Depression II has only begun, and if Grand-Ma starves to death on a Plains hovel - as happened to thousands during the Dust Bowl - is that a better death? They chase moonbeams, and will not see what is plainly before them.

Such crowds offer the pretense of independence and spontaneity - but rather, they are most closely akin to the "All-Textile Workers' Spontaneous Demonstration of Support for Peasant Soviet Power!" Bullshit, that is.

Not even the bravery of the Light Brigade; more like a stampede of sheep herded by a clever dog.

You had me at "DUH!" When Americans chose stupidity over independent thought, that was the Cardinal Sin of a citizen. It should be our Official American Slogan. DUH.

teabagger

Powered by ScribeFire.

die Errinerungenslied

Perhaps now is the time.
Seamus Choice, then, pestered me, that walleyed stoat, in his excursy into things of dream and lyric marvel. Maybe the run of Quamalth Av through swerve of shore and Ben Dabaigh, bringth us naigh up to Lake Street, where Monkey Suit Murphy adds his nacent follicle to the Song of Deborah that calleth nach from Aoidē. Such things. Earwicker. Ha. Of the Hullen of Cu, werd id ast vergass, to find at least the cycle of remembrance.

What creatures are we? Neanderthal and Cruans.

From Correspondence.
I strongly agree with the idea of libertarianism prevailing under evolutionary pressure. Whatever folks might say to fuss about the history of evolution, this is a matter of early anthropology, and it's reasonable to say that the more successful tends to prevail.

I'll go with the "really slow murder rate" still. I think of the issue of aggregates of advanced mammals as "pack vs. herd." Packs collide aggressively for dominance; herds just freely merge and separate. The hypothesis I offer about "Homo sapiens cruans" is that we were pack-type animals, like wolves. We see other tribes as threats, and fight them. This was the mechanism of our separation into what we later called "races." When packs aggressively collide, they would tend to act like little genetic islands.

I imagine that Neanderthals were mostly like herd animals - they were constitutionally blind towards the "us vs. them" concept, which is a big lose when colliding with people who act on the pack structure.

So, the Neanderthals were perhaps more "socialist," as the wildebeest and sheep and other grazing animals are more socialist. They are attuned to move in bulk, and have simple societies. Modern humans were more predisposed to acting in small packs; and for humans, this appears to be a huge evolutionary advantage when leaving Africa and going out into unsettled terrain, as was hypothesized to have occurred 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. Pack animals collide and separate; and when there's a whole Earth to be populated, rapidly "subspeciate" into tribal and racial groups.

When the Earth was carpeted by human settlement, the pack approach continued. The genetic predisposition towards tribalism remained. (The Neanderthals had already long ago got put out of the running.) Perpetual conflict and tribalism gave way to methods of interrelations between tribes, more so in other places. The ability to suppress the tendency to scrap with foreigners gave way to the need to trade with them. Civilization and commerce have always been intertwined.

With good or bad elements, we are left with the ultimate endpoint of tribalism - "the tribe of one," the individual. Many schemes have been put in place to aggregate humans into herds, and move them about as though they were interchangeable. This doesn't work for our species.

You cite some countries which are profoundly non-Socialist; in fact, anti-Socialist - USSR and Cuba, also North Korea - which are (or were) ruled over by absolute Alpha Males, with the power of life and death, terror over the lesser animals.

I offer that tribalism no longer acts to our benefit; and herd socialism is simply not in our animal nature, in the way that the lion cannot lie down with the lamb (or like Woody Allen said, the lamb will not get good sleep.) It is only with a new principle, which does not see us as mere elements of tribe or herd, but unique individuals, that can lead to our advancement and prosperity.

A big yes on this: "As a prediction, if there comes a new species of humans even more bent on commerce, they will eventually replace us." We're trying to prevail over genetic predispositions by intelligent behavior - and if we can hold out long enough, eventually the genetics will succumb, given a few tens of millennia.

Bill Bonner and his ugly truths.

Bill Bonner writes such awful stuff. The only thing it has going for it, is that it's almost certainly true. Other than that, it's got no value.

Household debt as a percentage of disposable income hit a low of about 2% just at the end of WWII. It’s been going up ever since. By 2005 it nudged against 15% – seven times higher than it had been 60 years earlier. Household debt represents spending that has been taken from the future. But you can’t take an infinite amount from future earnings. You reach a point when the future can’t handle it. As more and more future earnings are absorbed by past consumption, pretty soon there’s not enough left to live on. At some point, so much of earnings are devoted to paying the interest and principle on past borrowings that the poor householder cannot to pay his expenses. And imagine what happens if his disposable income goes down.

I'm turning him in to the Happy Thought Brigade.

Das Großenkreuz der Physik.

All you ever need to know about classical physics,

is included in this one little expression.

The first is in one dimension, the second is in R3:

This can also be called The Great Chi of

Classical Physics.  Absolutely everything in

the "first year physics" course can be so described.

physics, momentum, gradient, energy

Powered by ScribeFire.

How American Healthcare will die.

The simple assumption underlying America's approach to healthcare is that the market price is wrong. In any market where one adjusts prices for these sorts of reasons, there is either a glut or a deficiency. Here, if the assumption that the market price is too high, one will produce deficiencies.

The underlying assumption, which is not entirely wrong, is that there is a price-fixing cabal which is driving the prices up "faster than inflation." This is an assumption which discards other reasons for price increases - that efficiency is lowered opposite the general trend over time where innovation decreases costs; or that inflation drives prices up artificially. The cabal might well be the government-industry tangle which has been forced upon the healthcare market. This is getting treated with Steroids now, being bulked up.

One element which I believe to be central is that "inflation" and the "healthcare CPI" are one and the same. There are other things in the artificial "CPI index" which cause it to be reported as abnormally LOW. Several economists, such as John Williams on Shadowstats, believe that inflation is actually MUCH higher than reported. Until 2009, the decade's inflation rate has been about 6% - which brings us to about 60% in constant dollars to what we had in 2000.

And efficiency IS lowered - not because healthcare is a free-market commodity, but precisely the opposite. Few people realize that much of physicians' reimbursements are set by Medicare already. The private insurers then negotiate reimbursement as a Percentage of Medicare. Doctors salaries are adjusted politically by measure of the mean state income and "costs" in the various states.

We pretend that lowering price and raising demand will force the innovators to improve quality. The system is seen as burdened by overhead and profit-taking. Overhead cannot be signficantly improved until such things as internal auditing, measuring and "efficiency charting" are reduced. That will not happen.

It takes a certain bit of punitive and harsh attitude to ram changes through at the expense of a certain sector. There is certainly that sort of ire against American healthcare now, and it has been simmering for a long time.

Unfortunately, "punishing healthcare to make it better" is likely to fail.

Powered by ScribeFire.

healthcare, economics

If Fascism is Love, is Mentoring Hatred?

John T. Gatto has a dreadful impertinence, an intellectual Tourette's syndrome, blurting things like this out:

It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.

We've had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.

"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody.

Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, John Taylor Gatto

Perhaps this explains why our society is all so fragile about the risks of sexual predation of children - deferring the issue of intellectual predation.

I've wondered so long about why my education didn't get me further - it wasn't intended to.

1. The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong."
2. The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch.
3. The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command.
4. The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study.
5. In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth.
6. In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched.

Perhaps that is what is so disquieting about President Obama - he was the ultimate achiever within the system, and White folks don't know what blue contacts are for, exactly, nor what an Oreo means - but somehow fear them nonetheless.

Powered by ScribeFire.