Damn! Did You Ever Imagine It Would Come To This?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

"In other words, this is a bullshit report written by neocons in order to foment war with Russia."

What did Marriner Eccles say?

Marriner Eccles gloomy last speech, 1977:

"... the wrong road was taken every time we had a chance to alter course ... "

That's from a lifelong Republican, mind you, who was for the New Deal, for normalizing relations with China in 1950, and against the Vietnam war.

Didn't Khrushchev say something very similar to Marriner's words, as soon as Stalin died? "We could have been a great country."

Institutional momentum = tangents to evolution .... over-adapting to transient context (aka, playing with death).

In a country this big & talented ... we have much better things to do than waste time conquering other countries & looting their natural resources. Our best return comes from investing in all of our own talents (not just in weapons to use on others).

NeoCons:  If they can't find it (reality), they must be hiding it from themselves. 

Do "The police exist to maintain the divide between the upper class and everyone else. Nothing more." ?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

You can't blame some citizens for considering the overall validity of the title conjecture, given our current context.

I wonder how long it takes, on average, for the average local cop on the beat - fresh out of a police academy - to become aware of, let alone come to grips with, the default institutional lobbying that comes from perennial class competition, whether overt or "Innocent Fraud".

With current education practices, the bulk of our citizens seem to remain politically naive for most of their lives, so there's no reason to expect the bulk of police officers to catch on much faster, if ever.

Progress requires much more organizational effort to get all citizens on the same page, and realizing that we're all in this together.

There's so much to gain from social coordination (teamwork), and each year we've less to lose.

Meanwhile, it's still true that adversarial approaches are unlikely to work. In fact, they'll play into classic methods for confusing, dividing & conquering electorates by default, i.e., narrow business lobbies & politics as usual. Here's yet another example.

How FBI Illegally Stole Ross Ulbricht's Laptop & Brought Down The Silk Road

In response, a contact wrote:

"The police exist to maintain the divide between the upper class and everyone else. Nothing more."

I'm not the only one wondering why the FBI action against Ross Ulbricht & Silk Road was such a priority.

Especially given persistent unemployment levels, student loan debt, poor K-12 schools*, white collar crime, blue collar crime, etc, etc.

Not to mention money laundering & other financial terrorism by Wall St. banks

   ----

* Compare schools today with Sam Adam's early education, 200+ years ago. Read it and weep.

"Sam Adams, like five of the fifty-six signers of the Declarations of Independence, attended Boston Latin School [at ~age 7]. Required reading at the Boston Latin School for a student's first four years included Aesop's Fables, one of the first of which is a tale of a wolf who devoured a lamb despite the lamb's refutation of all the wolf's accusations against him. The moral of the story, according to Aesop, is that 'The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.' ...

In years five through seven of the school, students progressed to reading letters, essays and orations of the Roman politician Marcus Tullius Cicero.  ... 

[Subsequently,] Sam Adams entered Harvard in 1736 at age 14." 

Which was normal for that day, at least for motivated families in and around Boston. So why isn't a similar educational rate "normal" today? After all, a human mind is a terrible thing to waste, and so is a national group mind.

Unfortunately, The "Formulization" Of Other Disciplines Is Also Proceeding. Institutional Momentum vs Aggregate Adaptive Momentum.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

(evolving hitching patterns in different size mule teams)

And you thought that NeoLiberalism in economics was bad!

Rebels in many professions are resisting our current period of systemic decline. Take DoD Personnel Doctrine. Please! Or law enforcement mis-training. Or mis-education in general.

And now we can add sociology. For example, the following paper strikes me as an infatuation with formulae, in this case computer modeling.  The article may make some people think (about SOMETHING), but it is functionally useless as a guide to practitioners of Democracy in the real world.

Conditions for the Emergence of Shared Norms in Populations with Incompatible Preferences

"By means of computer simulations, we study conditions ... "

Is it different this time? Have new tools made distributed logic* obsolete? No.

If there's a computer, there's programmed software. And if there's a software program, 99.999% of the time, there is still a presumed formula for handling a presumed static context.

The insidious, main outcome? Creeping acceptance of formulaic methods reinforces a VERY BAD HABIT. Namely, the naive, underlying belief that systems adapt by predictively reorganizing previously describable degrees of freedom, rather than by completely unpredictable & constantly changing sorting following repetitive trial and error. That sort of institutional momentum delays our endless pursuit of Outcomes Driven adjustments and prolongs wasteful wanderings in Ideologically Driven dead ends.

The simpler, more useful message was already and always known. There are no Cookbook Recipes for adapting and evolving - i.e., no formulae, and no reliable program to use. Our degrees of freedom grow faster than our knowledge, habits, methods and practice base.

Our only recourse is ceaseless expansion of distributed trial-&-error, and frantic selection from our own aggregate feedback. No new tool changes the fundamentals of evolution.

1) We always face new aggregate challenges and capabilities, both demanding and bestowing orders of magnitude more degrees of freedom than we currently perceive. Constant exploration is required.

2) We have zero predictive power, yet seemingly unlimited adaptive power.
We can leverage that adaptive power IF we industriously utilize our full distribution of feedback and analysis. Tempo matters. [None of us is as smart as all of us, or as quick thinking when it comes to aggregate context.]

3) How do we survive every new niche we drag ourselves into? We start trying many things, and then start finding out - ASAP! - what starts to work. In the process, we reshape and tune ongoing, distributed momentum, based on distributed feedback.

4) So please cease, forever, the habit of trying to predict unpredictable adaptive formulas beforehand, and in the process constraining the very distributed activity & feedback which we need to drive massively parallel SELECTION.

5) Preserve fundamentals AND evolve more variables. Constantly retune a GRADIENT involving re-standardizing carefully selected infrastructure, while simultaneously promoting active diversification near the outer edge of your evolving system. [To use a building analogy, consolidate nearer to the foundations, and ceaselessly innovate nearer to the top floors. Our spectrum of innovation must include highly conserved elements as well as increased variance in some elements, just for OUR system to evolve. While not letting innovation fall completely to zero anywhere. To survive, EVERYTHING in our system must change. Just not at the same rates everywhere.]

What we have here - 2014 in the USA - is a lull in an unceasing civil war to evolve.

One combatant is our own urge to rapidly over-adapt to transient context, leading to efficiency traps.

The other combatant is our own requirement and urge to re-orient to changing context, sometimes leading to complacency about transient contexts.

Survival, obviously, requires surviving today as well as endless different tomorrows - but never any of those in isolation.

[Then there is also the constant burden of the untrained zombi or deadweight element, which actively resists any and all change, and actually believes that sitting in the middle of the road isn't suicide. They're not on anyone's side. They're just in the way. If we stop our civil war and pay a bit more attention to education and training requirements, the zombies should soon become statistically insignificant.]

Clearly, we need transient efficiency on demand, plus resiliency on demand, not either in isolation.

Right now, we've hitched up half or more of our own team backwards! Some are demanding too much efficiency, and some are demanding too much resiliency. How do we actually get our swelling ranks of combatants to lubricate all the random frictions, and make recombinant love, not factional war?

Since a formula for solving one, static context can be optimized ... does that mean that EXTENSION OF THE SAME FORMULA can provide optimal solutions bridging multiple, different contexts?

No. Most grandparents learn that the hard way, yet most fail to adequately teach it to their kids. Hence - SO FAR! - most grandchildren must relearn many things that their grandparents learned, but didn't pass on as a permanently incorporated part of our expanding cultural toolkit.

Ok. Does that mean that ANY particular formula will work for the unending stream of different contexts we face? NO!!! We've also learned that too, by trial and error. 

You might say that the only formula that works for any system, is to permanently discount excessive belief in any PERVASIVE formula whatsoever. The only formula that's workable long term is to decline all formula except that of a shifting gradient of distributed innovation.

Slowly change foundations, while rapidly sifting through new experimental variables.

That's how we preserve our aggregate adaptive momentum, while varying it too.

Does this work? Yes. And we actually have a tremendous opportunity to increase our Aggregate Adaptive Rate! 

How? By remarkably subtle and simple tuning of our citizen-development methods. It's a given that all citizens will face new horizons that none can predict or specifically prepare for. The most valuable talent to practice is comfort and familiarity with embracing and extending NEW perspectives on our own aggregate and it's situation.

Practice at audacious innovation - not formulas - is what used to drive American Ingenuity.

There's a difference between Aggregate Adaptive Momentum, and Institutional Momentum, and the former always wins in the end.

There's no reason why most citizens can't learn all this by age 10. Unfortunately, we're not even trying to prepare them!

Summary. New tools and methods are:

a) always prompting us to slowly, recursively improve our highly preserved foundation or "logistic" formulae,

b) while also distracting us from practicing further aggregate innovation.

There's a required duality between foundation and exploration. We survive by coordinating, not consolidating those complementary activities.

Aggregate success means grandparents embracing the inventions of grandchildren PLUS challenging them to explore agile vs formulaic applications of new capabilities.

Youth or beginners start with Institutional Momentum in perceived static contexts, and must grow into perceiving Aggregate Adaptive Momentum in unpredictably evolving contexts.

Without adequate aggregate challenges to generate experience, new generations inevitably get stuck in Static Context outlooks, which reduce their Adaptive Rate.

Our current challenge is to invent AND USE subtly altered education and training methods which permanently capture and preserve a higher adaptive rate in yet a larger population.

Froebel seems to have come close to realizing that, 200+ years ago, and most disciples of Kindergarten promptly forgot it! Go figure.

* Casey Haskins defines logic as "using evidence to draw conclusions".
Evolving, distributed logic is therefore: "using accumulating, distributed evidence to draw NEW conclusions about always changing aggregate situations." Clearly there are multiple, simultaneous levels of logic, and the very concept of logic, like data, is meaningless without context.

Reasons To Turn Away From The MICC & Other Enemies of Peace. We Must Once Again Save Them From Themselves.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)





The MICC and the usual enemies of peace have become a too perfect instrument, possessing their own institutional momentum. We may hate the outcome, but we have to honestly embrace the components of the MICC as well as our other Innocent Frauds, as a part of ourselves, and reform it and them, while not falling prey to the useless frictions of hating a part of ourselves.

  “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
  They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
  Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

War? Monopoly? Speculation? Reckless banking? Profiteering? This all sounds so drearily familiar. We can put these demons back in their box, and this time make it a coffin, firmly nailed shut. We just need the courage - and honesty - to act as our grandparents did. 

Just as a child going through a growth spurt, our cultural growth spurt has rendered us temporarily clumsier, before we can become agile again in our new condition. Yet we can regain cultural and policy agility, by the simple application of distributed cultural practice, thereby retraining our growing numbers to adaptive rather than divisive Public Purpose.

Institutional Momentum? Suppressing New Science Theories? Phenotypic Persistence? What About Adaptive Rate?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



System statistics, by any other name.

IMF (& ECB, & European Parliament) economists all tend to favor economic models which exclude everything relevant to the pursuit of financial stability?

Who new? :( Those who understand fiat currency operations.

Who knows how to combat institutional momentum, & maintain Adaptive Rate?

Many, as it turns out, yet still far too few to matter. This is a recruitment way. We have to save the vast majority from themselves.

Factional Politics: Includes Furthering The Myth That Economics Is Ever Separated From Political Policy

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson; hat tip to Chuck Spinney & Tom Hickey)



There IS no pure economics, only political-economics, aka, factional policy or, rarely, aggregate-policy.

Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare

Gareth Porter on the true history of Iran’s nuclear program

By Andrew Cockburn, Harpers

The emerging evidence about rampant & pervasive myths in both the social sciences and ongoing policy processes should trigger us to simply close down all economics departments ... or at least re-label them as "propaganda" departments set up purely to serve the interests of existing political campaign donors.

The whole premise of economics is to "study the human mind stripped of culture" ?

Impossible. Anyone saying that has never cracked open a biology-101 textbook, or even read many newspapers. At least not honestly.

Just google "feral children." People raised isolated from culture are NOT capable of developing what we think of as the human mind. For Pete's sake!

And orthodox macro-economics purports to study group behavior stripped of aggregate policy? Look, just quit bullshitting me. We are not an aggregate of feral-hermits or feral-communities. Aggregates operating isolated from Public Purpose are also NOT capable of developing what we would consider a group-brain or group intelligence. None of us is as smart as all of us, right?

Unless you flat out lie about the myth of Central Planning, while persisting in paying lip service to democracy.  (All Central Planning is equally fatal? It's just that Upper Class Central Planning is less fatal than than others? Is that the rationalization, among porkers feeding at the common trough?)

To me, them's fightin' words. It's past time to drive the stale numbskulls, rascals & idiot savants out of the temple of Democracy. The only survival option is to save them from themselves .... again. Anything less is long past boring. Their act was pathetic from the start. In fact, it's never been clear why an electorate this smart ever had any interest in the trap of gang, er "party" politics from the beginning.

It's amazing to consider how much ideological momentum it took to keep so much common-sense logic bottled up for hundreds of years, in so many fields.

It's simultaneously fascinating, frustrating & heartening to see these 3 articles in print, precisely for the rarity of seeing simple, straightforward, real thought actually slip through both "scientific," "political" and "journalism" industries.

It's nice to know that that can still happen - even if by accident. :) Yet it is also sobering.

One conclusion? Whenever something starts to be catalogued and systematized, then functionally adaptive wormholes through that catalogue-space begin to be denied, through sheer structural momentum alone.

Such institutional denial can have a strong effect on the herd minded.

Yet for evolution to continue, every herd must keep both it's conservatives and progressives operating safely within - not outside - adaptive tolerance limits. If all of us are smarter than any subset of us, then we need ALL of ourselves, to find ways to utilize ALL of our distributed talents, ALL of the time.

So does that mean having so-called conservatives sitting back and helping to CAREFULLY select from all the insanely great inventions generated by so-called progressives? Ya think? 

What on Earth is there to squabble about? We're staring at an expanding smorgasbord - one that can't run out, only grow, unless we knock the tables over while brawling - and it feels awfully stupid to waste time arguing about which dishes to taste first. As many as possible, ASAP? Then just share feedback, also ASAP, about how all the endless options taste? 

And then? Just follow the feedback momentum, instead of trying to grab some arbitrary option, and hoard it? This ain't rocket science. Hoarding slowly growing static assets instead of leveraging exponentially growing dynamic assets is a strategy of extreme ignorance. We're better than that ..... right?

Do You Get The Impression That Some Groups Are Pushing A Propaganda Myth?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

That is, that political economy outcomes are the Fed's - or the finance industry's - to determine?

Can The Fed Prevent The Next Recession?

Are they implying that us simpletons in the Middle Class are supposed to sit back and leave Class War to the Finance Generals? Isn't every process too important to leave to the presumed process owners? Isn't that last lesson what every economic, political or any other "system" means?

"MIT economics professor Rudiger Dornbusch famously observed in 1997 -

'None of the U.S. expansions of the past 40 years died in bed of old age. Every one was murdered by the Federal Reserve.'......"
 ...

Famously observed? Famously? How about "stupidly opined?" Stupidly? Or cleverly, for reasons tangential to the assertion itself? Clever like a fox, raiding a hen-house?

What happened to Ye Olde Scientific Methode ? i.e., "let's find out" which unpredictable combination of old+new methods will work next, for a growing ensemble traversing unpredictably changing contexts?

500 years after the Scientific Revolution, why are we still caught in this useless clash of superficial opinions - on center policy stage no less? Such clashes offer easy diversion, but only serve to divide & conquer people who ALWAYS have the most to gain by ALL working together - sharing & combining all available feedback into newly adaptive policy paths?

Who could the responsible group be? Oh lets see, the idiotic institutional momentum of aristocracy and class? Personally often innocent through ignorance or stupidity, but institutionally guilty as hell. A divine right? Or a mundane wrong?

Remind me please, the many reasons We the People wrote a Constitution? Surely one was to remind ourselves to listen less to megalomaniacs spouting ideology, and more to the sum of diverse, operational feedback?

All this lingering propaganda, despite what we're supposedly taught about democracy, eventually makes sane people wonder whether there aren't whole classes of people who think small is beautiful, simply because it's a pie that's easier for their limited intellects to steal bigger proportions from.

Finally, why on earth would We the People preferentially select people from the Small-Pie-is-Beautiful crowd to represent a democracy of Americans who like big and bigger things?

This Beggars Belief! BIS Slapped Daily?

commentary by Roger Erickson

St. Louis Fed ‏@stlouisfed
Economists examine whether developing countries with greater credit constraints get more foreign aid.

Ya think? That's why banking cartels constrain credit in the first place!!! To arrange loans, denominated in foreign currencies, to benefit investors in foreign countries. May not be rocket science, but it's quite obvious Racket Science.  Just follow the recorded communications of bank lobbies, from 1776 to 1860 to 1933 to the Rubinesque misinformation of today.

Have even CBs and the BIS become blind to their own Control Frauds? Doesn't matter if the self fraud is innocent or malicious. Is maladaptive institutional momentum out of control?

Only beggars still believe the BIS?

Naming, Discussing and Solving Specific Innocent Frauds, and the Specific Social Catalysts That Will Undo Them

commentary by Roger Erickson

To proceed, we need to specifically name some key hurdles, so they can be more widely discussed. Only then is it clear what catalysts prompt faster adoption of methods driving better results.

Consider: The USAID Virus, or "The International Campaign to Destabilize Bolivia," and then let's jump to MMT & fiscal policy.

Reasoning by Analogy.

An analogy is used, comparing a US Gov agency to a virus, given that both trigger "systemic toxicities" in the afflicted host. At some point, it doesn't matter how true the specific allegations are. There is a better way, for both virus & host.

Anyone observing the intersection of policy & monetary operations knows that the hurdles are very distributed. Therefore, lets consider some distributed background. If we're going to mention hosts & viruses, note that every known species & it's viruses exhibits diverse, competing cultures or variants. For example, each of our nation states, as a variant, has also developed a cloud of significant institutions or practices that define that culture. Also note that each institution itself develops a cloud of "species-specific" protest groups.

Ultimately, however, all institutions & their protest cults develop considerable institutional momentum, and all lack adequate situational awareness of how to adapt to an unpredictable future.  Progress occurs largely through unpredictable, indirect recombinations across or outside existing institutions.

How do we know that past methods always fail? Simply because we've been unable to extract any predictive power by extrapolating from past trends. The result is an accepted rule in all system sciences: "For every intractable problem, there is a solution, and that solution always involves yet another layer of indirection." It is that novel class of new & indirect solutions which cannot be predicted - and hence cannot be supplied by existing institutions or their protest clouds.

Learning not to fear viruses. 

Even initially threatening viruses can eventually be beneficially utilized by a clever recipient, by repurposing either the content or the viral methods. Viruses open up indirect pathways which cannot be accessed by existing hosts or source-institutions sharing existing "paradigm momentum" - nor by the "species-specific" protest groups sharing the same paradigm-momentum, even if in opposition!

Simultaneously, the machinery used by one host to generate & redistribute viruses can also be tuned to benefit both source & recipient. Indirection and indirect options are all around us. Re-purposing them in novel ways is where all the opportunity is - decidedly NOT in joining any aspect of any of them, as is.

There is always an even better way. Finding that better way fast enough to matter, requires situational awareness. Recklessly acting anyway, without at least minimal situational awareness, defines Innocent Fraud.

At their deepest levels, the premise of the USAID-virus articles is that institutional momentum will generate collateral influence, incidentally. We know that, and have options.  Exploring those options is what counts.

Using Viral Methods to Explore Options Faster

Since no subset of actors can wield enough knowledge to adequately predict the consequences of it's own actions, they must fall back on adjustments as reported results rolls in. In that case, the ratio of success vs failure depends entirely upon feedback sampling, and the latency between feedback, adequate analysis and further action.

Throwing caution to the winds and stubbornly proceeding based on ideology alone produces, at best, Innocent Fraud.

Being overly cautious and waiting for certainty before action only cedes discovery and momentum to those generating the range of actions defining success & failure, and is therefore also a failure - by definition - in an adaptive race.

The well known path to success, the very thing that drives evolution, is better/faster/leaner "parsing" of the information cloud incidentally generated by any group in any situation. Simply put, when HP quickly listens to all of HP, it's always clear what to do next. The trick is to find better/faster/cheaper methods allowing HP to listen to all of HP, and then to also parse that information cloud so that all parts of HP can align to accomplish whatever HP needs to do next.

Experience has proven that better/faster/cheaper tuning of input/analysis/response cycles depend largely on "what & how you ask" and "what & how you answer." Asking the precisely right question goes a long way towards getting the shortest, most valuable answer, soonest. Our decision cycle shrinks as all discussants learn how to keep useless information from cluttering & slowing the group decision process.

Making the jump to better/faster/leaner monetary operations - and then going farther.

Viruses, Options and Continuous Development.

If we apply the same cross-discipline analogy to monetary operations, then MMT exposes multiple, well known systemic toxicities affecting policy development. 

We already know where we'd like to be, and we know what constraints are holding us back. That means all attention should be focused on methods for overcoming the constraints, not just publicizing them. 

Methods drive results. If better methods are known but not widely used, then we fall back to catalysts for driving faster adoption of better methods. The best ways to learn are by trial & error, or by example if possible.

Our general problem? We have populations growing faster than their group awareness is growing? You don't say!

That defines a "teratology," i.e., a disorganized system. Teratology was coined to describe mal-development of a recognized system, specifically abnormalities of physiological development. There is even a long standing Teratology Society., dedicated to study of "terata," or abnormalities [Terata-ology, from Greek, = "monster-study"]. A newer term developmental toxicity includes all manifestations of abnormal development, not only obvious terata.

What does this - and similar examples from other fields - imply for all aspects of policy? Quite obviously, that we already have tremendous experience in studying and managing complex development processes, and are simply not applying that knowledge base to the complexity and tempo of group policy development.

New Ideas for Tuning a Continuously Developing System.

A culture is a constantly developing system. It's up to us to notice when our development is proceeding abnormally vs satisfactorily. We know the stakes, for ourselves and our children. How can we best manage our own, incessant cultural development? Hint, we won't get there without discussing key, emerging concepts accurately, widely & frequently enough.

Yet we have not even coined analogous terms for abnormal development of other known developing systems. Why? Obviously because distributed appreciation for those systems is lagging. Study & understanding of scalable, sustainable development methods lags when we do not appreciate a given development process enough to name and adequately discuss it.

What shall we call abnormalities of cultural development? Cultology? (suggestions?)

What shall we call abnormalities of market development? eConology? (suggestions?)

What shall we call abnormalities of ecological development? Stupidology? (suggestions?)

What shall we call abnormalities of political development? Political Parties? (suggestions?)

Once we name more specific examples of abnormal development, we can expand the discussion of identifying better social catalysts (education?) that will accelerate adoption of better methods which exist but are unused (MMT?).