"Invasion of the Straw Men"

commentary by Roger Erickson

Italian Economy Contracts for Fourth Straight Quarter

This is just sad. Markets are already pricing in continued asset transfers? No questions are being asked, and we're calling it "recovery?"  A few brave people uncover what is happening and try to stop them (to no avail, in the first version;  later retelling twists the plot to declare that the good guys actually win).

Look for another movie: "Invasion of the Straw Men"

"They Came From Another Paradigm!"

"They're Everywhere You Look!"

"They're Insatiable!!!"

"They're in YOUR Bank Account!!!" 

"Only a Secret Weapon Called [TARP/euro .. whatever] can defeat them." 

(but will the latest version work this time?)

Aka, the wolves who keep crying wolf for every newly invented, nameless fear at the door.

Nothing like shamelessly inventing a ridiculous "crisis," and then profiting off it before "solving it."

Under "emergency conditions" theft becomes an incidental asset transfer.

Foolish electorates and their real assets are continually parted? Especially if they worship straw men, boogie financiers and wolves - and are Controlled by that fear?  Since we worship what we hope will protect us from our fears, we essentially worship what we fear, and hence fear itself.  Is that a convoluted way of worshiping whatever can effectively motivate our growing numbers?  The God of sociology may indeed work in strange, lumbering ways ... but not necessarily in very impressive ways.

The Library of Congress will even preserve the current strawman story as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," but won't do anything to preserve the will to resist the recurring cycle.

There is a better way. We could continually reallocate resources more gracefully, by organizing on a larger scale - since we must continue to explore our emerging options anyway. Continually turning those options over to crooks, and then trying to recover them is a strange way to keep ourselves motivated. With a little coordinated, statistical process control, we could graft all the efficient steps of Maneuver Warfare between crooks and citizens into Maneuver Context Management of ourselves?

Maneuver Warfare between an organized electorate and it's emerging options?  If we can have "Total Soccer," why not total national alignment to a fully organized adaptive rate?

Just saying it's possible. If we only had a brain. And if we actually wanted to use it.

A group intelligence is a terrible thing to waste.