-----On such a serious day as 9/11, to not provide balance to your panel, is contemptible. It is the last straw and it has broken the camel's back, meaning I am ending my long period of viewing TMG.
-----I have always admired how Eleanor Clift fought the odds, when the panel was not balanced on prior shows, but the stacking against Eleanor Clift, with the standard right-wing team of the 'NeoCon Pull-String Doll'-Monica Crowley and 'Nixon-Reagan Groupie'-Pat Buchanan along with the 'Bernie Madoff Putz'-Mort Zuckerman on your 9/11/09 show ( and its initial topic), is egregious.
-----I will forever be in awe of Eleanor Clift, and appreciate the balanced thoughts of Clarence Page, Eleanor Clift's sole equal, from either side of the aisle.
-----I leave you with a final all-encompassing sentiment for both sides of the aisle of debate, whose supercritical mass was triggered by 'Mussolini Wannabe'-D-I-C-K Cheney's pronouncement that waterboarding was not torture.
-----I lament over the Republican Party's ability to hoax and mislead the American Public as a whole, using yet again another disparaging mantra, "You Lie!" during Obama's last speech to Congress. It is yet another example of what Republicans and their deluded supporters continue to use, the loathsome and hideous means: tactics of confusion, destabilization, and unjust maneuvers to foment and promote their agendas.
-----Republicans, NeoCons, and their like, are nothing more than those who have undeservedly commandeered the mantles of Protectors of Economic Growth and National Security. How much history is enough to embarrass these people and the Republican party into realizing that up to this day, they dont hold a candle, much less a match, to the Democrats, who have led the US through its greatest National threats (wars) and have won and/or stopped aggression (WWI, WWII, Korean Conflict). And subsequently, the Democrats managed, led and nurtured into creation, the four greatest economies into existence (the US, and the nation-building: Japan, Germany, and South Korea). What do the Republicans have historically, three, maybe: the Civil War, Spanish-American War, Iraq War; {the Vietnam War(joint Republican / Democratic disaster, by 1954, Eisenhower was providing 80% of the cost of French war in Vietnam), and as far as the illusionary claim for the downfall of the Soviet Union by Ronald Reagan: lets not forget the Democrats providing the pivotal arms support(stinger missiles) for Afghanistan's Mujahideen fight with the Soviet Union, WAY BEFORE Ronald Reagan jumped on that bandwagon and stealing the reins; combine this with the three greatest global political embarrassments and economic setbacks to the Soviet Union, prior to Reagan, all done under Democratic Rule: the Korean Conflict and the nurturing of the South Korean economic powerhouse, Landing on the Moon, and the Cuban Missile Crisis-Legitimate enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine}. As far as the economic outlook for Iraq, don't even think Iraq will even come close to what the Democrats have led and nurtured into economic existence; Iraq is a pure economic pawn that will, in time, convulse, choke, dry heave, then finally hurl, the Republican-led economic crony-istic structures, they put into place.
-----So how in hell, do the Republicans/NeoCons have any rightful conscience to claim the mantles of Protectors of Economic Growth and National Security?
THEY DON'T!
-----It is all a @#$%& noxious smokescreen and hoax for the sake of Republican Capitalism.
-----Economically, the Republicans have turned their backs on the true realization of free markets and public responsibility. Ask yourself, and answer truthfully, whether any business legislation by Republicans has increased free markets and public responsibility (throughout the entire American history,not just recently). Since Monica Crowley, like D-I-C-K Cheney, stated that waterboarding is not torture, maybe the only reasonable way (Republican reasonable) of getting a truthful answer from Republicans/NeoCons is to WATERBOARD them. After which, getting a truthful answer will lead you to Republican Capitalism, which hates competition, fosters monopolies and specialized interest groups crafting legislation to serve their business goals, which places the health, progression and welfare of American workers (and their families) second,third or fourth to profit, and market domination, while repugnantly campaigning, by subterfuge, to obtain 'personhood' status (and its inalienable rights) to corporate entities.
-----Republican Conservatives/NeoCons have their roots in Hobbesianism, and the essence of Hobbesianism is absolutism, which characterizes the constituency groups that Republicans seek and attract: religion - Christian Fundamentalists, environmental/science - anti-global warming and Creationist science supporters, economic - Wall Street profit-at-all-costs hedge funds and investment banks, who create nothing substantial at all, all the while seeking bailouts for gambling away the retirement funds of millions of American workers, and the list goes on and on.
-----The days of the Republicans ever coming up with an Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt or Dwight D. Eisenhower, are dead and gone!
America needs the Republican Party 'TO DIE', and die soon, and go the way of the Whigs!!!
-----And be replaced by an INDEPENDENT type party, that will keep the ideas of republican democracy (where the people are sovereign, not big business or corporations) fostered and alive, all while keeping the Democrats in check.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Criticism of neo-conservative Mona Charen’s assumptions on President Obama’s planned political direction for the USA.
Dead End
By Mona Charen
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/02/dead_end.html
“President Obama has made it abundantly clear that he intends to hustle this country into European nanny state socialism if he can (and just as fast as he can).”
Let’s start by breaking down her statement, that implies a 'dead end' for this country. That part, “European nanny state socialism”, is implied to be the 'dead end' for this country. Why? Because as a neo-conservative ideologue, anything but “rampant, unchecked, laissez-faire capitalism”, is evil, since it would entail more government. Well let’s look at the United Nations Human Development Index, and see where 8 years of unchecked Republican governance has placed USA among those evil European nanny socialist states. Now remember, human development encompasses life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita, and that last one is what Republicans promote most (“It’s all about the money.”).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
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So we can easily see that those European nanny socialistic states are all ahead of USA, when it comes to making money, as well as, promoting the well-being of their populace. This means that the neo-conservative’s assumption that those European nanny socialistic states are a 'dead end', is pure bunk. And most of these so called European nanny socialistic states are actually a fusion of capitalistic and socialistic states, not some over-simplified, demonized version, that neo-conservatives want you to believe.
Although this is the 2008 index, USA has been consistently below those Euro-nanny states, for decades. So if we have proven that the European nanny socialistic states are not a 'dead end', and they are not completely socialistic, and are highly productive, and competitive economies, then what are we to conclude of the neocon Mona Charen’s statement? We can conclude that neocons favor extremist views over pragmatic views (idealism over pragmatism); that European nanny states increase health, standard of living(high GDP), and education levels of their populace, thereby making them highly competitive in the world market (human dev. Index measurements); that USA will always benefit in the long run, by promoting the well-being of its populace over the repetitive, unrelenting, short-term greed of 2% of the populace. So in the end we have proven, even if Obama were to lead us down that nanny state road, it would not be a 'dead end', nor would it be contrary to what this country needs, like improving our capacity to compete, through better and expanded education, better and expanded healthcare, and promoting a balance of capitalistic growth and human development, that are both sustainable. In the end, to finally answer the question of whether we are heading towards a 'dead end', the question of whether it is best to invest in American citizens, or to invest in pure market mechanisms, or is it best to invest in both, and, make them both sustainable? I view America as one huge family, and I know that the last choice, will bear better, stronger fruit, and for longer periods than any one of the other two choices alone. The following puts the nail in the coffin of Mona Charen's supposition that aspects of a Euro-style government/economy are evil, when the recent World's Top 50 Safest Banks of 2009 from Global Finance website barely has five US banks listed, two of which are specialty banks that do not do consumer loans - Bank of NY Mellon and Northern Trust Corp, and three received government bailout money - JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and US Bancorp, thereby guaranteeing their safety. So technically there aren't any legitimately safe-by-there-own-doing consumer-lending US banks in the top 50. Unfortunately, despite the bailout money, some of these banks continue to snub their noses at the US taxpayer, by behaving as follows: OOPS 1 , OOPS 2 . Since after last years financial meltdown, the top 50 Safest Banks in the World are predominantly in those evil socialistic Euro-economies, it just seems Mona Charen's argument is cynical and worthless thereby dangerous and misleading.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
The Affects of Globalization and why 'Politics as usual' could be the ruin of us all
The US is still considered by many other countries, as a young country, and in its young history, the US has blundered in and out of an isolationistic stance with the world. And due to the effects of globalization, any topic on US National government can hardly be considered isolated from the effects, originating outside its borders, much less considered isolated from affecting anyone and anything outside its borders. This is not an attempt at being apologetic for the topic I have chosen but only to point out, that US National government entails both domestic and international affairs, and the decisions we support or neglect to support, could come back to haunt us all. I have chosen the topic of globalization and its affect, and how it is making it extremely important, which US National policies, both domestic and foreign, are to be followed, now and in the coming years. Following this introductory post is a link to an article that was listed in the 'New Scientist', and although the original title will be a turn-off to many, if it taken as a theoretical stance, then you may digest the rest of the article with more interest.
FEJPWhy the demise of civilisation may be inevitable
* 02 April 2008
* From New Scientist
* Debora MacKenzie
* From New Scientist
* Debora MacKenzie
DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different?
Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see "Will a pandemic bring down civilisation?"). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?
A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.
Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act now to keep disaster at bay.
Environmental mismanagement
History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller Collapse, Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilisation and others, and warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to stop destroying our environmental support systems.
Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees. He has long argued that governments must pay more attention to vital environmental resources. "It's not about saving the planet. It's about saving civilisation", he says.
Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our ancestors started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find solutions to the problems that success brings. "For the past 10,000 years, problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human societies", says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at Utah State University, Logan, and author of the 1988 book 'The Collapse of Complex Societies'.
If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a system to record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew.
Diminishing returns
There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour - or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare - diminishes as that investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar invested in research as that research investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says.
To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage, more information to juggle - and, ultimately, less bang for your buck.
Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and resources available to a society are required just to maintain its existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group.
Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilisations relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart.
An ineluctable process
Western industrial civilisation has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of diminishing returns: the energy required to get each new joule of oil is mounting and although global food production is still increasing, constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental degradation and evolving pests and diseases - the yield boosts per unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are inevitable", Tainter warns, "this process is in part ineluctable".
Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached from studying history. Social organisations become steadily more complex as they are required to deal both with environmental problems and with challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organised.
"To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing", Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point.
This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity", says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. "Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making". This, he says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised.
Increasing connectedness
Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book The Upside of Down. "Initially, increasing connectedness and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food from another village that didn't".
As connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem. "Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways", says Bar-Yam. "This is not widely understood".
The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate networks that tightly connect us together - and move people, materials, information, money and energy - amplify and transmit any shock", says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one side of the world to the other".
For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered blackouts when apparently insignificant nodes of their respective electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled networks like these create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow of Yale University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters.
Credit crunch
Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production system has now reached the point where "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere". This is especially true of the world's financial systems, where the coupling is very tight. "Now we have a debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could be enormous".
"A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism", says Bar-Yam, "random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep". Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear - it may not even be predictable - which chunks of our densely networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late.
"When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it", says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable".
So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have", Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our "global sheep" does not get injured in the first place - something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world's fuel and mineral resources dwindle.
Tightly coupled system
Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled system.
"It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of conditions", says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one.
Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems", says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits".
Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia".
Staving off collapse
Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now. "First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised production of vital goods like energy and food", he says. "Second, we need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action".
The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidise inefficiency in the public interest.
Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls "tectonic" stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more finely tuned to. These include population growth, the growing divide between the world's rich and poor, financial instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate change. In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns - just as we are running out of cheap and plentiful energy.
"This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal", Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse.
Tipping points
Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. "The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime", he says. "There has been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a race between tipping points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse?"
Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-based' approach to the future", he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits.
Studies of the way cities grow by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable.
The stakes are high. Historically, collapse always led to a fall in population. "Today's population levels depend on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture", says Tainter. "Take those away and there would be a reduction in the Earth's population that is too gruesome to think about".
If industrialised civilisation does fall, the urban masses - half the world's population - will be most vulnerable. Much of our hard-won knowledge could be lost, too. "The people with the least to lose are subsistence farmers", Bar-Yam observes, and for some who survive, conditions might actually improve. Perhaps the meek really will inherit the Earth.
From issue 2650 of New Scientist magazine, April 02 2008, pages 32-35 Copyright 2008, New Scientist
(Examples of ever-faster rates of innovation required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse; ecological problems to solve: Ecopolis - City of the Future , future engineering problems to solve: Grand Engineering Challenges) .
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Quotation about Liberty and Power
The French economist Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) compared political parties to "armies" whose sole aim is to win office, distribute spoils and jobs, all at the expence of taxpayers:
These associations, or political parties, are actual armies which have been trained to pursue power; their immediate objective is to so increase the number of their adherents as to control an electoral majority. Influential electors are for this purpose promised such or such share in the profits which will follow success, but such promises—generally place or privilege—are redeemable only by a multiplication of "places," which involves a corresponding increase of national enterprises, whether of war or of peace. It is nothing to a politician that the result is increased charges and heavier drains on the vital energy of the people. The unceasing competition under which they labour, first in their efforts to secure office, and next to maintain their position, compels them to make party interest their sole care, and they are in no position to consider whether this personal and immediate interest is in harmony with the general and permanent good of the nation.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Why be a centrist?
PREMISE:
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
CONCLUSION:
It is easier to be a dogmatic, true believing leftist or rightist, than it is to be balanced thinker/activist---a centrist. Being a centrist requires more mental work, and greater abilities of judgement and innovation than to be leftist or rightist. Being a leftist or rightist, a conservative or liberal, has been and will always be the easier road to follow.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
CONCLUSION:
It is easier to be a dogmatic, true believing leftist or rightist, than it is to be balanced thinker/activist---a centrist. Being a centrist requires more mental work, and greater abilities of judgement and innovation than to be leftist or rightist. Being a leftist or rightist, a conservative or liberal, has been and will always be the easier road to follow.
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