A Fatal Malady For Democracy

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Here, below, is just another in an endless series of examples ... it's a pity that this - and many other books - aren't Open Sourced.

Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

It comes down to a direct friction between AdaptiveRight vs CopyRight, and the resulting lag in adaptive rate from such friction.

Whether you're for against remote assassinations - or the expanding pace of other, worldwide MICC (or other business-lobby) operations which you don't even know about ... wouldn't it be better if our electorate was adequately informed BEFORE the next election?

Our biggest hurdle seems to be the slow population-penetration of mission-critical information.

That's a fatal malady for democracy.

If it weren't for Central Planning, by oligarchs ... we wouldn't have no planning at all?

Even an informed electorate isn't adequate, if the information consistently comes too late to drive aggregate adaptive rate. Or, if they don't get enough practice to effectively USE information in time to matter.

Is this all connected to economics? Yup. Always is. We've trained citizens to hopelessly conflate personal vs aggregate entrepreneurialism, and personal capitalism vs aggregate capitalism. Citizens are so confused that they no longer even know what aggregate capital is, or what it's for.

Just pay people enough so that they can consume all they can produce?

Even Marriner Eccles & CH Douglas agreed upon that. It's called optimal social asset allocation, or "putting your money to work." Even the bible includes a semblance of that logic, for better or for worse.

Adaptive Rate Is Neither Left Nor Right, Neither Communist nor Capitalist ... it's OpenSource :)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Gotta love it. Trotsky once called for open-source, totally transparent looting ... as the only way to keep capitalists honest! :)

At the risk of alienating everyone, let me cite Trotsky's article, "The Transitional Program of the Fourth Internationale." In arguing for total fiscal transparency Trotsky points out that "business secrets" are routinely justified on the basis of efficient competition. But in fact they are not "secret" from the supposed financial "competitors," only from the public being routinely bilked.

(in the comments)

As stated: Adaptive Rate is neither left nor right ... it's OpenSource! :)

"Beyond Squid" making fiat credit functions as simple as possible, but no simpler

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson; hat tip to EconIntersect)



When a VC whirs its blender vanes in Silicon Valley, it's never too late to short John Deere? :(

So get yer synthetic food while it's cheap .... 'cuz Vampire Squid is coming to town.

“How I Stopped Eating Food”

Initial ingredients posted here.

These techie inventors initially seemed a bit naive about basic food & fiber operations (e.g., distinction between more-hydrolyzed canola oil vs, say, less-hydrolyzed olive oil - since corrected, apparently) - not to mention water itself.

Maybe Monsanto has already patented a follow-on, Colon Cleanser, derived from ... non-GMO-FOOD!!! [Nobody could have predicted that, right?]

Regardless, the biggest revelation is that extracted nutrients are currently so much cheaper than raw food! Ponder the likelihood. That outcome is a byproduct of existing but transient industrial and tax policy. An "externality," you might say - and therefore subject to arbitrage.

Next? Look for Goldman Sachs to start buying & hoarding basic nutritional ingredients, in the same warehouses* as their aluminum & copper & politician stockpiles? Just like rentiers buy up cultural information, and hoard it as "copyrighted" material, instead of serving culture, by distributing it wherever & whenever useful.

Per the classic plot line of Greek Tragicomedy, after Guar Gum Wars story appears, look for the inevitable Return of the Rentiers.

And in subsequently expected episodes: The Vampire Strikes Back, followed by something featuring colon-cancer rates and an unfinished Barf Star doomsday weapon.

Actually, all this also leads directly to a proposed OpenSource or fiat book:

 "Beyond Squid"

making fiat credit functions as simple as possible, but no simpler

If OpenSource-Fiat is the basic medium of information, which binds all culture together, then the SquidSide of the farce is the inevitable parasite, opposing culture. A Squid Lord, you say? Supposedly extinct for 80 years? And how could one exist undetected in the midst of Democracy? Hmmm. Always tentacles there are. So which is the Squid, and which are the suckers?** To unravel this mystery, we need to travel back through UMKC, to the center of the universe, and on further, to Ogden, Utah, where local prophesy holds that another Marriner will someday bring nuance to the farce.*** Even those in Darwin should approve.

---

* Congress is merely a Goldman Sachs warehouse? Where bankers stockpile policy, before doling it out to the highest bidders?

** Hiding in plain sight, as rentier & renters?

** but only when ready, these electorates are

Yet Another Claim That The US Is An Oligarchy, Not A Democracy: So Much For Rational Agents Having Access To ALL Necessary Pricing (or other) Data! :)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study

Although it always worries many when a study group goes to the length of stating that they ran a "scientific" study.

Semantics.

Everything is "scientific," so just look at the details of the study terms and weigh relevance for yourself.

Note, that it can seem problematic when articles in peer-refereed research journals are "leaked" to the public ahead of actual publishing (since it's not clear if all the reviews are in). When is that crossing the borders between politics, PR and double-blind research studies? Sometimes when it's politically convenient? Sometimes when the TEMPO of discussion outweighs worries about validity? C'est la Vie. There's no reliable answer.

OpenSourcing the article in question to the lay public, for full AND TIMELY public review, certainly helps the rate of dissemination of public discourse, and public learning from the diverse components of itself. Overall, that's why most of nature openly broadcasts most data, and then races to recognize new patterns and discern their implications for new contexts.

In this case, we have both occurring, though asynchronously. The authors of this study are Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, and their article is eavailable from their edu website as a pdf, entitled:

"Testing Theories of American Politics."

So why bother with subsequent publication in a peer-reviewed journal operating behind a paywall? One reason is simply the layers of tenure-track processes that this publishing process involves, for both authors and reviewers. University academic operations are quite as due for a systemic overhaul as our banking system is. Most people outside of academia simply aren't familiar with the arcane, outmoded operations involved in University management.

Given all that, go get 'em, USA. How do YOU spell "D.E.M.O.C.R.A.Z.Y?"

Personally, I think this article should be discussed by every classroom & household in the country. We'll worry about how scientific it is throughout the ongoing discussion. Whether oligarchy or democracy, the big point to remember is that success tracks the quality (including tempo!) of distributed decision making. That reminds us that it's always a war between Central Planning (by any other name), and effective Democracy.

The Tortuous Process Of Distributed Learning .... Watching The Masses Slowly Learn

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Escape From The Matrix: Alternative Finance And Investment Advisors

Very interesting, even if slow. The euro-zone may be slow to learn, but it's not like we're all THAT much more agile here in the USA.

ps: the close inspirations for the Matrix movies go back as early as R. Heinlein 1941, D. Knight in 1955, & P.Dick 1957, not to mention the vaguely similar ideas throughout classic literature - all of which stoke our collective imagination.

Every time I think of that, I'm personally VERY offended. Why on Earth wasn't every 10-yr old in the USA able to rapidly obtain OpenSource access to obviously adaptive memes like those early sci-fi books in that list? It would have made a difference for me, growing up. I've read only a very few of those texts listed, and obviously wish I'd read more of them, back when I was avidly reading sci-fi, in grade school.

We're actively retarding our cultural adaptive rate, aka the rate at which our electorate learns, and orients to changing context.

Wherever we could be going, we ain't gonna get there at this current rate, with too many brakes on, rent-seeking from Intellectual Property, instead of seeking the far higher returns on social coordination that even some amoebas are "smart" enough to stick to.

It's rather astounding to watch members of a social-species spending most of their time planning individual, rather than aggregate investing. As one of the Wachowski brothers' other movie character says, "That don't make no sense!"

Is it foolish to look for logic in the chambers of the human CNS?

Parasites Are Utilizing Control Fraud Strategies To Drive The Latest Epidemic of Cultural Diseases

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

We're supposed to be excited that Qatar launches gene mapping to combat diseases?

Good move, but it'll be too late, and too little, if we and other nations don't address social issues generating an order of magnitude greater impact on societies.

For decades, the most statistically relevant public burdens have been the human crime syndicates which parasitize human cultural systems. Such "human culture parasites" have long since moved on to Control Fraud, and operate on a whole new level.

Combatting physiological disease is a tactic. Meanwhile, the parasite world is already employing actual strategies, and moving on to hijack even our national policies! That's why all we're getting only Pyrrhic victories in arenas which, increasingly, THEY already own outright. Meanwhile, our Cultural Health Burden dwarfs even our net, public health burden.

That's also why it's not even remotely good enough that we're Using 'Open Source' Tools to Fight Sexually Transmitted Infections.

That's nice, mundane, and necessary, but it is not by any means sufficient. It should be as incidental as wetting your pants in a dark suit. We have orders of magnitude bigger parasitic burdens to defend against. How about using OpenSource tools to to fight Cultural Infections transmitted through Control Fraud?

To address our biggest burdens, we need orders of magnitude more OpenSource Meme Mapping. First to educate people about the range and hierarchy of cultural burdens, continually identify the overwhelmingly dominant ones, and then to combat those emerging Cultural Diseases. We've already waited far too long to add Control Fraud and White Collar Crime to that list, and move them to the top.

A large part of every parasite's toolkit is dedicated to sowing distractions and confusion, and diverting attention elsewhere. That's how the strategy of divide & conquer works. It doesn't just set us against one another. It also diverts too many of us to less important targets. Like diverting nearly all FBI agents from White Collar Crime to international, physical terrorism, not to mention keeping the bulk of our police diverted to Blue Collar vs White Collar crime. Has anyone compared the actual, comparable losses from blue collar crime and and even physical terrorism damage vs White Collar Crime as separable burdens on society? 

It's not even close!

Solution? So far, the Control Frauds buy Congresspeople purely to keep our attention diverted to terrorism and Blue Collar Crime! It's called politics. Masquerading as politics and policy, the social parasite strategies have successfully made our national economy a poor person's burden and a 1% solution.

We need more OpenSource discussion, immediately, if we're going to ramp up an effective social-immune-system. Right now, the parasites have most of our fledgeling, social-immune responses diverted to attacking ourselves! As an example, see the discussion here.

At the very moment that White Collar Crime is at a historic peak, in both absolute magnitude and also proportion of national output, the majority of both our population and our clueless politicians are ACTUALLY DISCUSSING further dismantling the USA, and thereby further enabling the Control Frauds, through steps like more deregulation, less governance, reduced public initiative, and more privatization of the public Commons, right down to private ownership of prisons and highways. We may as well cede the atmosphere to frauds and pay them rent so that we can breathe.

If return-on-coordination is always the highest return, by far .... then for our own sake less invest LESS in coordination? Werks fur mi!  And, it works exquisitely for the Control Frauds looting our increasingly uncoordinated nation.