Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Answer: Since SCOTUS was Ceded to Scalia

commentary by Roger Erickson

The Question: "Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?" William O. Douglas  Posted at The Long Goodbye

Oh, and delegating the Fed to Greenspan, Geithner & Bernanke helped. May as well have installed Bernie Madoff & Meyer Lansky at the Fed, and Robert Rubin & Henry Paulson at Treasury cum Citibank cum Goldman Sachs. Control Fraud becomes a religion superseding but utilizing all prior affiliations.

That left only the insignificant White House for self-fraud intern, Larry Summers, ex-clerk to Rubin.

It is, of course, easy to rail at the current idiots, but they're simply the latest in a cast of characters in a continuing play. Actors waiting in the wings claim that they can do a "better job" at the same role. Working harder to grease squeaky wheels will only starve us. There's a better way, and we need to find it.



Self-delusion used to be simpler, even innocently incompetent. Now it's subtle, and already diversified further.



From all our collective history, there's not enough methodological wisdom in the entire pantheon of all religions & all Constitutions to have prevented this from happening - yet again - the last 40 years, right here in the USA of all places. We're still a day late & a dollar short, and find ourselves still needing faster access to a steady stream of new insights.

So we obviously have to start doing some things differently around here. All of us. Suggestions are welcome.

If we're going to explore our growing pantheon of options, we must at least keep them all constantly visible in one continuous spectrum - shared by all. Situational Awareness does not mean having an opinion. It means being ready to perceive NOVEL opportunities in any mix of events, opinions and actions.  Tactical, strategic & policy agility all follow situational awareness.

Since there is always fear of moving too fast, distributing situational awareness is more important than all other needs. How do we overcome our own innocent frauds, neither too soon nor too late, but with precisely the right timing?

First, we need OpenSource ways to instantly plot all existing opinions on any subject, to make it easy & fast to recognize the organizing axis, the average and the tails of every opinion distribution.  We need to share those tools simply because the return-on-coordination trumps all other returns.  Don't settle for hoarding crumbs, when we can make the pie grow faster than we can eat it!  In systems jargon, the diversity of an "opinion cloud" provides us with enough options.  Yet from that opinion cloud, only parsing skills select the unpredictable profile of the given, complex solution to every situation.

Second, therefore, we also need an easily accessible, OpenSource way to track the 1st & 2nd derivative of every opinion plot, so we can recognize and select success options sooner rather than later.

Here's the simple rub.  If the incompetent, the self-deluders and the outright crooks can band together and self organize across prior divisions, why can't we?  And why can't we always adapt faster than they do?   

Crooks & misfits can organize quickly precisely BECAUSE their Luddite goals are outmoded and simple.  It's largely because they're a smaller group than all of us, and have the advantage of smaller group intelligence as well as small minds.  When they always know what their mindless goal is - hoarding - it's quicker & obviously easier to organize.  

It's far harder to constantly scale White Collar Crime immune processes across a larger and constantly growing population. Multiple examples available from other settings suggest what we already know - we need agile, scalable regulatory institutions able to generate astounding rates of mobilizing and demobilizing, at a moment's notice.  To be agile, we need to train ourselves on agile methods.

What on earth makes us think we can't AFFORD to self regulate, tune and accelerate our own adaptive rate? That's what the entire history of the USA demonstrates. Why lose faith now, at this particular time?  We can't afford to NOT scale up our own self control.

So, please send your suggestions for where to start and, if possible, examples of momentum others can coordinate with.

As you make suggestions, remember that things that work at one scale don't necessarily scale successfully as population grows.  The minor devil may be in every given set of details, but the distributed devil grows with the scaling details.



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