McLuhan, the Economist

Marshall McLuhan used various analogies to explain his celebrated, confusing formula, “the medium is the message.”  In one, he likened the content of media to “the juicy steak held out by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” Media dangle in front of us all kinds of allurements. Whether we’re news junkies, sports fans, avid consumers, or gossip column devotees, media demographers have us targeted. They’ll invest millions to research our habits and attitudes to help them hone their content to seduce us into handing over to them our precious time.  But behind the enticing content and the operations that engineer it, a panoply of technologies roils away, magnifying, reviving and retiring one another in an accelerating process of innovation, assimilation and succession. This constantly shifting technological background recalibrates our sensory and cognitive experiences, day after day, year after year, shaping and reshaping our psychological biases and expectations—our comfort level. Media massage us unconsciously. That is their primary effect, to which McLuhan called our attention.

Another analogy McLuhan used was that of the cocktail party at which someone tampers with the thermostat, notching it up or down a few degrees.  If the climate-control system of a modern building co­­­­nstitutes a medium, and anyone who reads McLuhan’s opus, Understanding Media, will see that all technologies fall under his purview as media, because all extend some physical or psychical human capacity, then the thermostat illustrates how a medium can bear no message other than itself. In the case of the thermostat, no message distinguishes itself from the medium. But changing the temperature in a room will create a new psychological space; the occupants will feel new sensations; their concerns will shift; they will orient themselves differently in the space and towards one another. They will adapt to the environment created by the medium, but no alphanumeric message will have been sent from it, no semantic content will have issued from it, nothing that a dictionary could help decipher will have been uttered, printed, broadcast or posted online by that thermostat. Its message is felt, but it’s not a linguistic one.

The common element in these analogies is that they reveal a figure/ground relationship.  The juicy steak is a distracting figure; the thermally modified room an uncomfortable ground. McLuhan’s project was to get people to pay less attention to the baubles of content and more attention to the invisible ground. Training oneself to attend to the psychosocial effects of media as environments, and to spend less time critiquing their contrived contents, helps insulate a mind against the content engineers’ hypnotic ambitions. McLuhan was prescribing a therapy when he urged us to shift our focus from figure to ground.

So, what does this have to do with economics?

One half of today’s economy plays an important role as message—juicy distraction—as packaged and delivered by the news-manufacturing and punditry industries.  That half is concerned with government appropriations and taxes, congressional budget haggling, that is, with fiscal policy. This is the sideshow that people visit to root for liberals and conservatives grinding their axes.

But fiscal policy has a bitter half, the shadow twin, a subterranean half that lurks beneath the economic ground.  This economic mirror of fiscal policy mediates, invisibly, the staging of the fiscal Left-Right (melo)drama.  The hidden half of the economy has to do with the background against which fiscal policy is debated: who originates money in the first place? How do they move new money into the economy? Who’s on the receiving end of the new money? And under what terms do the receivers get the money? Money itself is conjured by fiat, so who attends the great power of turning nothing into spendable cash will control the ground on which our personal prosperity or impoverishment figures. (At least we have the Left-Right puppet show to entertain us.)

Coverage of the current economic meltdown makes it clear that corporate media work hard to make the partisan tax-and-spend debates as contentious as possible. This keeps the public preoccupied with the message of fiscal policy and diverts attention from the medium of exchange, the economic ground: monetary policy. We would do ourselves a great favor if we shifted our attention from the overt economic figure to the covert economic ground. We need to re-set the economic thermostat.

It is shameful that in the free democratic republic of the United States, a taboo persists against scrutinizing the Federal Reserve cabal of private banks, which sets the country’s, and through the IMF and World Bank the world’s, monetary policy. This cabal is a private business that operates independently of government oversight. But the mainstream media are very efficient at marginalizing people who break the taboo. And so public attention stays focused on the staged wrestling match between perennial fiscal contenders Socialist Left and Capitalist Right.

It’s temping to see the current pop culture fascination with zombies as a mirror. Maybe we’re trying to snap ourselves out of our collective dream. Entranced by the alluring, insistent voices of media, we have become a nation of zombies. But don’t expect people conditioned to fixate on media content to give up their preoccupation. As McLuhan also noted, somnambulism—sleepwalking—is a highly motivated state.

Or, if that seems too insulting, cool off with this analogy. There’s a droll saying that goes, “If you kill one person, you’re a murderer.  If you kill a hundred thousand people, you’re a conquerer.”  Apply that to economics, and it runs something like this, “If you run a ponzi scheme involving $billions, you’re a contemptible crook (e.g. Bernie Madoff). If you run a ponzi scheme involving $trillions, you’re the venerable Federal Reserve Bank.

Christian Eschatology

Hell is the mythic form of Earth, an intuition or premonition of a possible future state, terrestrial and bleak, hot and enslaved by incarnations of wickedness. Heaven, similarly, is the mythic form of a possible future, one that is not of this Earth, extraterrestrial, weightless, juvenile, omniscient.

Christian eschatology hits the nail almost on the head. It’s off by an extraneous supernaturalism.

"Seek simplicity and distrust it."
-- Alfred North Whitehead

Autism, Aspergers, Neurodiversity & Evolution

I've corresponded sporadically with a guy named Andrew Lehman, whose websites contain his thoughts on evolution and autism. He makes the case that autism is an evolutionary adaptation. Not only is it here to stay, but autism will become increasingly prevalent in each new generation. Mr. Lehman regards autism as an expression of the evolutionary mechanism called neoteny, which occurs when aspects of normal development are delayed, producing adults with juvenile features. Neoteny also figures in the Star Larvae Hypothesis (here and here).

Mr. Lehman constructs elaborate arguments about the origins of autism that have to do with intrauterine exposure to hormones, such as testosterone and estrogen. He advocates acceptance of neurodiversity, or normalizing the Autism-Aspergers spectrum of behavior. We'll see if neurodiversity ever gains a visibility in psychology or civil-rights politics comparable to that of biodiversity in ecology and environmental politics. Though, already businesses are learning to exploit the unique qualities of people with autism/Aspergers, such as their sustained ability to focus and attend to details. If you find this sort of thing intriguing, check out Mr. Lehman's main websites http://www.shiftjournal.com/ and http://www.neoteny.org/. (I cannot imagine how he finds the time to update these sites as often as he does.)

Here is an edited comment I left on the Shift Journal site:

Maybe autism is a label for a particular clumping of tendencies within the broader sweep of the pandemic of psychological syndromes and disorders. No doubt the pharmaceutical industry plays a role in the coining of new mental and behavioral maladies, but on the face of it there seems to be an explosion of neurodiversity in the current generation of children. OCD, ADHD, bipolar, autism/Aspergers (how about peanut allergies?) and other clumps skew the psychographic profile of this generation. Maybe these tendencies were always present in the population at their current levels, but, for sociocultural or medical-diagnostic reasons, did not attain much visibility. Now, there are no secrets.

Have you considered the postmodern neurodiversity explosion as a psychological version of the Cambrian explosion of biodiversity? All kinds of critters arrived suddenly on the scene about 530 million years ago, giving natural selection a trove of resource material to work with. Needless to say, countless of the new species remained extant only briefly. The fittest begat phyla still with us. It might be that evolution will cull most of the new neurological phenotypes, and, though all might have neotenous roots, natural selection will favor relatively few, and those few will set the stage for a shift in humankind's evolutionary trajectory. See, Founder Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect

Here are a couple videos hosted by people with Autism/Aspergers. I'm impressed by their earnest, well-spoken appeals.

And see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4PCKa3TNO8 (embed code not available)

Mockery of Democracy II: Federal Reserve

In August 2009, President Barack Obama re-appointed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve, months before Bernanke’s term was set to expire. In making the announcement, the president vowed to “continue to maintain a strong and independent Federal Reserve.”

But why, Mr. President? Why do we need a strong and independent Federal Reserve?

Obama’s Treasury Secretary and former head of the New York Federal Reserve, Timothy Geithner, delivered the rationale.  In an August 2009 Digg Dialogg hosted by the Wall Street Journal, Geithner defended the Federal Reserve’s opaqueness when it comes to monetary policy. “[Y]ou want to keep politics out of monetary policy,” he asserted.

But why, Mr. Secretary? Why do we need to keep politics out of monetary policy?

Didn’t our strong, independent, nonpoliticized Federal Reserve fail to prevent the mess we’re in? Didn’t the Fed’s monetary policy, which kept interest rates too low for too long, enable this recession?  We need a strong and independent Federal Reserve? Really? Why?

Well, maybe we do. The putative wisdom of Obama and Geithner got me thinking. After all, if it’s a good idea for monetary policy to be free of politics and under the control of a strong, independent private cartel (even though the U.S Constitution assigns monetary responsibility to Congress*), then why shouldn’t other Constitutional responsibilities of the federal government be handled privately?

For example, why not a strong an independent military?  By Obama-Geithner logic, a military junta operating outside government control would be a good thing, so that military decisions don't become politicized. Yes, a rogue army is what we need. Keep politics out of it.

Or why not a strong and independent diplomacy corps?  Let lobbyists enter into treaties with other countries on behalf of the citizenry of the United States. We don't need a politicized State Department negotiating with the rest of the world, do we? Neither national defense nor national diplomacy should be political footballs, should they? Surely private interests can decide more clearly than elective office holders.

 

In fact, the same logic would apply to every decision. Really, think about it. Is any decision-making process improved by being politicized? Why do we need government at all?  It just--yech!--politicizes the important decisions of the day. Indeed, let’s take privatization of government services all the way and establish a monarchy. If the elected legislature of a democratic republic can’t be trusted with monetary policy, why trust it with anything?

Hopefully this reductio ad absurdum of Obama-Geithner (-Bernanke) logic makes the point that there’s no real justification for putting monetary policy on a pedestal, beyond the reach of normal political scrutiny and regulation. Protestations to the contrary amount to hand waving. Indeed, given the pollution of our economy with toxic assets during the past several years, it’s clear now that public scrutiny and regulation of monetary policy are overdue.

The government monitors and regulates polluters who pour toxic waste onto public lands.  Federal regulators constrain pharmaceutical companies, whose products must be deemed safe and effective before they can be dumped on the public. Why should new products developed by the financial industry not also have to pass muster, not also have to pass a test to prove themselves safe and effective, before they are dumped into the economy? Toxic assets are toxic assets, whether chemicals or exotic financial instruments. Wall Street needs to be tightly regulated along with all the other polluters and for all the same reasons.

At the macro level economists segment the economy into two sectors: Public and Private. But, to reflect the real economy, this traditional segmentation needs to be augmented by a third sector. Let’s call it the Pirate sector. The Pirate sector of the economy operates by a distinctive set of rules that distinguishes it from the other two sectors.

The Public sector consists of elected officials, at the local, state, and federal levels, and their attendant bureaucracies. This sector is subject to regulation, internally, by the system of checks and balances among its legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and externally, by the threat of discipline by voters on election day. Rightists use the epithet “Socialist” against people who advocate greater economic leeway for this sector.

Corporations and other for-profit entities comprise the Private sector of the economy.  This sector is subject to regulation by the Public sector and by the “invisible hand” of the market. Market discipline means that the potential benefit of large profits is counterbalanced by the potential cost of incurring large risks. Leftists, at least traditionally, have used the epithet “Capitalist” against people who advocate greater economic leeway for this sector.

But now a stealthy third sector has lumbered from behind the scenes and into the spotlight. Let’s call it the Pirate sector. It consists of the Federal Reserve and Wall Street’s large commercial and investment banks, along with top players in the insurance industry, it seems. This sector cannot be overruled by any branch of government, not the judiciary, not congress, not the president—or at least its most powerful component, the Federal Reserve, cannot, as former Fed chair, Alan Greenspan, boasts in the video segment at the end of this post. The Pirate sector operates outside of our democratic system of checks and balances.

And this sector’s prospects for enormous profits are not balanced by prospects of incurring a corresponding enormity of risk, as in the normal Private-sector market mechanism. The Pirate sector is not subject to market discipline, because bailouts, whether directly to its financial institutions or indirectly through government insurance (e.g., the FDIC) or government bailed-out private insurance (e.g., AIG), take risk out of the equation.

The Federal Reserve cannot be disciplined by the market and cannot be overruled by the elected government. It and its orbiting financial services partners constitute a distinct third sector of the economy, with the fed setting monetary policy and the for-profit financial industry cashing in on that policy. Fed bailouts shift the risk to the taxpayer while executive compensation policies keep profits private.

In the WSJ/Digg Dialogg, Treasury Secretary Geithner says that the fed’s current level of transparency is adequate, that the fed’s actions (outside of making monetary policy) are on public display and that people can judge for themselves whether it is acting responsibly.  Great. What good does it do to judge an institution as acting irresponsibly if NO ONE can overrule its policies?  Former Fed head Alan Greenspan brags: NO ONE has the authority to overrule the decisions of the Fed. A totalitarian dictator by any other name . . . .

The corruption of the U.S. monetary system cries out for sweeping reforms. One way to restructure the system fundamentally would be to convert the banking industry into a public utility. The elected Congress should re-assert its Constitutional prerogative to determine monetary policy and issue real dollars, instead of Federal Reserve Notes (I.O.U.’s owed to private for-profit banks), at fixed interest and use the interest collected to offset the tax burden that weighs on the public. “Capitalists” might complain that government should not get into the banking business. But more to the point would be the corresponding “Socialist” complaint that banks need to get out of the governing business.

_______________

*With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, Congress abdicated its monetary responsibilities and conceded monetary authority to a private banking cartel, the Federal Reserve.

Topless, Bottomless, Womb, Ocean

Proletariat's Prayer

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR BIWEEKLY BREAD.

Mockery of Democracy: Federal Reserve

Is the U.S. federal government not to be trusted, because it is the tool of socialists who want to centralize power and control? Or is the U.S. federal government not to be trusted, because it is the tool of capitalists who want to centralize power and control? What do these questions have in common? Are they operationally indistinguishable?

The Project/Object opus

In his biography, Zappa, author Barry Miles, quotes a 1988 interview with FZ:

“The conceptual continuity is this: everything, even this interview, is part of what I do for, let’s call it, my entertainment work. And there’s a big difference between sitting here and talking about this kind of stuff, and writing a song like ‘Titties and Beer’. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s all part of the same continuity. It’s all one piece.”

Zappa built an opus. “Conceptual continuity” is the term he and his fans used to describe the cohesion that bound together the disparate elements of Frank Zappa’s life’s work: surf music, avant gardism, do wop, potty humor, Suzy Creamcheeze, poodles, First Amendment advocacy, eyebrows, Beefheart, German, usw. He called his opus the Project/Object.

The quote from FZ underscored for me this simple, trenchant insight of psychologist James Hillman:

Creative people are occupied not so much with creativity as they are fascinated with an opus.

The creative Frank Zappa left behind an opus, his project.

In college I worked for a short time as a reporter for the campus newspaper and had the opportunity to interview the famous atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, in town for a fundraiser. I had the temerity to ask her why she was so preoccupied with preaching the gospel of atheism. She snapped back, “Your life has to be about something.”

The Curse of the Keywords

I’ve been forced by a search engine optimization (SEO) project at work to confront the hegemony of keywords. These insidious locutions are words and phrases that function as hallowed text in the Google era. The magical incantations are elevated by their statistical, not semantic, character.

It might seem an irrelevant complaint, audio and video having their way so handily with print/type/text in cyberspace.

But some of us like to write and read, and SEO lobotomizes us. “Optimization” turns syntax, semantics, and grammar into stuffing to tuck in around keywords, the precious cargo. SEO stupidizes language for the convenience of computer collation. Keywords are language turds; too many make prose stink.

For example, if, while writing normal prose, you have to refer to a subject repeatedly, you have to be creative. You paint the thing with various brushes; you use indirection to bring out nuances. You tap your mental thesaurus.

But no more, at least not online. Now, you're supposed to keep repeating those keywords, the exact words, repeating and repeating them. Rote repetition is a good thing to do. Gotta drive up that keyword density.

In the shadow, or service, of SEO, writing converges on the literary stylings of a fifth grader or a newly enrolled student of English-as-a-second-language. Pursuing the grail of a high search engine ranking necessarily constricts vocabulary and discourages metaphors, similies, analogies, examples, and probably every other kind of literary device that makes reading enjoyable.

And, while we’re assessing the damage, let’s anticipate the passing of those humble servants, the pronouns. They deserve our respects for many centuries of reliable service. But those services are no longer needed. Here lies an obsolete part of speech, R.I.P.

The economy of SEO is clear. SEO makes it easier to exploit offshore labor in the manufacturing of text. The next step seems obvious: entirely computer-generated prose. Input a list of keywords and let the SEO Wizard go to town, writing prose for its mate, the indexing spider. Computers writing for computers.

No wonder the kids gravitate toward audio and video. The next generation likely will regard readers of written English as we regard readers of hieroglyphics.

(So, dear God, please tell me, why don’t browsers have a read-aloud function? If Adobe can put it into Acrobat, why can’t Mozilla put it into Firefox?)

Ooooops

A random error produces value. Darwin must have been a stamp collector.

Chains we can believe in‏

Campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to post online, for at least five days, all pending legislation so that the public could review it. Now, he’s president, so, sorry chumps, it was only campaign rhetoric. Duh, assholes.

Campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Now, he’s president, so, sorry chumps, it was only campaign rhetoric. Duh, assholes, I’ll detain anybody I want for as long as I want.

Campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to end the war in Iraq. Now, he’s president, so, sorry chumps, it was only campaign rhetoric. Duh. Six months into the Obama administration, the Democratic majority in Congress approves another $106 billion for the war. That's bad enough. But then Obama says he will use "signing statements" to ignore parts of the bill--after attacking Prez. W. Bush for doing the same thing!! Oh, and the sections that Obama wants to exclude are provisions regulating U.S. aid given to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Can't cross his banker buddies, now can he?

It goes on and on:

Taking Bush's position, administration denies msnbc.com request for logs
The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn't have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama's pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com's request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present.

Meet the new boss. Same as the olde boss.

Fearful Symmetry

The political Left and Right perfectly balance each other in a coordinated pincer movement, the objective of which is to skewer the middle class (well under way) and ultimately institute a global slave economy—packaged as protection and care.

At the behest of the financial controllers, the left and right departments of the political system expand government’s coercive power from behind blustery rhetoric about the evils of intrusive government (intrudes too far into markets says the Right, too far into personal privacy says the Left).

Global warming and terrorism illustrate this Left-Right symmetry.

Here’s a passage from George Will’s 6/22/09 Newsweek column:

“Nowadays, green reasoning is the first refuge of scoundrels. Global warming has become like God: It is an explanation for everything and an all-purpose excuse for the political class to do whatever it wants to do—what it has a metabolic urge to do—and that is boss people around. It can maximize its opportunities for doing that if it maximizes the number of people dependent on government, and the number of ways in which they are dependent.”

The ostensibly observant Will fails to note that homeland security reasoning is another first refuge of scoundrels and that terrorism also has become like God, explaining everything and giving the political class an excuse to boss people around (have you tried boarding a plane lately?)

Whether climate change is imminent and if so whether human industry plays a role, I don’t have the scientific understanding to say. Whether terrorists are at our doorstep, however, seems doubtful. The U.S.-Mexican border has remained wide open since 9/11, with uncounted thousands of visitors crossing into the U.S., backpacks full of God knows what, undocumented and untraceable. And yet, the border states have not suffered terrorist bombings, suicidal or otherwise. The door is open, the bad guys are not walking through. The threat is overblown.

But the terrorist threat functions for the political Right exactly as the climatological threat functions for the political Left. Both are pretexts for monitoring and controlling you and me.

Psychology of Alchemy

Theology of McLuhan the Prophet

The surveillance environment of cameras everywhere (officially in and on government buildings and private businesses and unofficially in everyone’s pocket or purse) intercepted phone and email traffic, biometrics and RFID, along with voluntary, eager self-disclosures through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., serves the community’s need to know. (The need is guaranteed, whether to ensure that you adhere to the dictates of homeland or climatological security. Choose your partisan poison.) In this environment, privacy is dangerous (what are you hiding?), and the book becomes an illicit drug that incites anti-social behavior. Reading silently in solitude breeds subversion and sedition. All must plug into the matrix.

From Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage :

“Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional idea of private, isolated thoughts and action—the patterns of mechanistic technology—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electronically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful, and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early ‘mistakes’.”

In any situation, no one’s thoughts or actions are so private as to escape God’s omniscience. Technology is re-creating for us the infallible omniscience (omni science) of divinity. The subjective aim that God supplies to the advance of universal creativity pulls along our intuition of our own technological potential. Actualizing that potential, we recreate nature in our own image, giving rise to new universes.

Neural Plasticity in Outer Space

Seek out novel sensorimotor feedback experiences to forge new neural circuitry:

Quantum Entanglement: It's All In Your Head

Interesting article on using the language of quantum entanglement to model word assocations.

http://www.physorg.com/news154180635.html

excerpt:

"This kind of research is an example of an emerging field called “quantum cognition,” the aim of which is to use quantum theory to develop radically new models of a variety of cognitive phenomena ranging from human memory to decision making. Although speculative, this research is gaining momentum. For instance, later this year, the highly regarded Journal of Mathematical Psychology will publish a special issue of quantum models of cognition."

Admittedly, the authors say that they are not proposing a model of quantum psychology, but just borrowing descriptive language from quantum mechanics. Still, I think that the usefulness of quantum mechanics concepts and vocabulary will prove indicative of future research findings, in which quantum mechanics increasingly will be appropriated for explanatory modeling, and eventually the quantum mechanics-derived models will transition from being implicit to being explicit explanations of consciousness.

Viva La Evolución

"Pandrogyne" Genesis P-Orridge comes at transhumanism from hir own unique angle. Here, in the second part of a four-part interview, SHe advocates genetic engineering to enable hibernation during space travel. The weightlessness of space will impose its own influences on the human phenotype.

Cyberfetus Matrix

Here is an early vision of extraterrestrial citizenry, an inspired rendering from the early days of the theory (thank you, MacPaint).

Proliferation of the cyberfetus, perhaps through cloning, follows a neotenous trajectory in the weightless, technology-dense environment of the space colony. Today, phone and internet carry much of our social connectedness, and our descendants will become increasingly symbiotic with their media infrastructure, as communications and tracking devices become increasingly somatically integrated. The rendering here suggests a persistence of electromechanical connections, but in the weightless cyberfetus matrix, chemical media—e.g., hormones, enzymes, neurotransmitters—probably initially will compete with, then complement, then supercede electromagnetic channels.

Not framing the transition in terms of neoteny, Herbert Marcuse nonetheless saw that technology, spawned from the repression of libido, completes itself in the liberation of libido. He writes in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia,

"The achievements of repressive progress herald the solution of the repressive principle of progress itself. It becomes possible to envisage a state in which there is no productivity resulting from and conditioning renunciation and no alienated labor: a state in which the growing mechanization of labor enables an ever larger part of the instinctual energy that had to be withdrawn for alienated labor to return to its original form, in other words, to be changed back into energy of the life instincts. It would no longer be the case that time spent in alienated labor occupied the major portion of life and the free time left to the individual for the gratification of his own needs was a mere remainder. Instead, alienated labor time would not only be reduced to a minimum but would disappear and life would consist of free time."

The Need to Teach Religion

A while back on this blog I recommended that the public schools include religion as a subject in the standard curriculum. I've learned since that outspoken atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett makes the same recommendation. I feel vindicated, finding myself in such eminent company. His gist, and mine, is that religion is most dangerous when people don't understand it.

Welcome to Post-Democracy America

It was a vile screed.

The Spotlight, a tabloid published by a group called Liberty Lobby, warned its readers that Communists, negroes, Jews, Catholics, immigrants—and the Federal Reserve—threatened the purity and wholesomeness and righteous authority of the United States of America. I encountered The Spotlight in a factory where I worked when I was a student. The factory owner had a box of the papers delivered each week, to which employees could help themselves.

Reading The Spotlight was my first exposure to what respectable folk and journalists call "conspiracy theory." To my mind the paper was a curiously crazy right-wing rag, alternately unintentionally disgusting and unintentionally comical. I was struck at the time by the commingling of attacks on the Federal Reserve with race baiting and anti-semitism. I wondered why these redneck hate mongers were paranoid about bankers.

As misguided as the editors of The Spotlight were about non-Whites, non-Protestants, and leftover hippies, they seem to have thrown their net wide enough to pull in some genuine threats, as we're seeing now — now that global financial markets are underwater, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few has accelerated off the charts, at least partially because of Fed policies. The Liberty Lobby, John Birchers and their kind have done the United States a double disservice. Fundamentalist populists not only have spread White supremacist bile and other sordid hate mail, but by associating scrutiny of the Federal Reserve and its privileged status with their xenophobic venom, they succeeded in casting a taint of kookiness onto any examination of the Fed's origins, operations and accountabilities. They helped insulate the Fed from proper public scrutiny. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might suspect that the whole thing had been a plot from the beginning to set the Fed outside the bounds of normal journalistic investigation. (Liberty Lobby was put out of business in 2001 by a lawsuit related to accusations it printed regarding the Kennedy assassination. Good riddance, though it has come back in miniature, online.)

Whatever paranoid tendencies I have are stoked daily now that it's becoming clear how privileged the executive class is as it exists among the country's largest banks. There might be token wrist slappings here and there or a ceremonial condemnation of executive bonuses that amount to a sliver of the total bailout swindle, but by and large the people at the top of the Federal Reserve system of banks and associated financial institutions remain in place, collecting their generous compensation packages and wielding their vast influence to shake down the economy.

Those who occupy the financial stratosphere remain unfazed by elections. Political parties and candidates apparently function in their hands as disposable tools to be picked up or discarded at will. The elite executive class similarly is unfazed by markets, being compensated equally for performance and nonperformance. Doesn't a corporation's board of directors have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that executive compensation is tied to performance, as in increasing shareholder value? That's a fine theory, but the executives choose the board, which in turn sets executive compensation. It's a clubby world at the top. I wish I could handpick the people who set my compensation. I might even signal to them my availability to join their boards and, you know, one hand washes the other. This mutual aid society for the financial elite, the system of interlocking directorates, ensures with rare exceptions that even when executives fail to deliver shareholder value (shares in the major U.S. banks now sell for pocket change), the responsible chieftains will remain ensconced.

And somewhere in the global financial mess, there must be fraud. No one would have purchased the toxic assets unless the value of those assets had been misrepresented. But will criminal charges be brought, will anyone besides expendable flunky scapegoats be prosecuted? There's been no indication so far. Besides, our laws of incorporation invent legal fictions, called corporations, to protect personal fortunes from corporate missteps. Talk about leverage.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo

In short, the top-level, most connected bankers, even the deadbeats, are not subordinate to anyone. They occupy the top office of the control pyramid, despite the quaint reassurances that mass media spoon feed to the public about an elected government being in charge. More saccharin, yum, yum.

Untouched, unscathed, unruffled, a bemused Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, the eye of the hurricane, surveys his bequeathed estate from sea to shining sea. He is a dictator answerable to NO ONE. Given the inability of elections, laws, and markets to deliver a just system of accountability, what should be taught in civics classes today? That all that business about democracy, elections, the consent of the governed, the balance of powers, and all the rest of it is a bunch of fairy tales? Maybe. Weave those fantasies in with the mythic rivalry between capitalists and socialists and you've got a realistic curriculum for the current generation.

Capitalism and socialism, those wacky kids, poking each other in the eye and calling each other names, a regular Punch and Judy sideshow: "Am I a Democrat or a Republican? I'm both and neither. Never mind that man behind the curtain. Let my slapstick transfix you!"

It's an obsolete rivalry, folks. OK, break it up and go home.

For one thing, a premise of the capitalist/socialist rivalry, that the public and private sectors are distinct entities, has evaporated. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, central players in the current debacle, are government owned corporations, mutant entities whose operations span the supposed gulf between the public and private sectors. And consider the revolving door that connects federal office holders with Wall Street board rooms and lobbying consultants. Same people, different letterhead. What about the privatizing of government functions? If I'm a peacekeeper in Kabul, what difference does it make if my paycheck says U.S. Army or Blackwater ? In either case the money is taken from the taxpayer and given to me, via the Pentagon. Where there is an intervening private contractor, it's just another layer in the bureaucracy, skimming salaries at taxpayer expense.

And don't forget about the venerable tradition of budgetary earmarks and pork that codify through legislation the transfer of public monies into private hands. Indeed, all government procurement networks redistribute wealth from taxpayers to private beneficiaries. Corporations lay off employees, who then collect unemployment from the government, which pays those benefits from monies pulled from private hands by taxation. And now we have the spectacle of Too Big To Fail (TBTF). The banking and auto industry bailouts, by eliminating the possibility of failure, pull the rug out from under capitalism. TBTF? There's a cure for that. It's called anti-trust.

Then there's the nuclear bomb of all public/private demolitons, the Federal Reserve.

The Fed is presented to the public as if it were an agency of the government, and most people probably believe that it is, but the Federal Reserve is a system of privately held banks whose shares are not available for purchase by the public but are held by a small clutch of elite shareholders.

Capitalist/Socialist? Don't bother. The public and private sectors of the economy are so intricately interwoven and intertwined and interdependent at this point that economic models based on some categorical distinction between the two sectors are just incoherent. "Public sector" and "private sector" are no more than tropes that radio talk jocks spew.

But how about Master/Slave? Now there's an economic distinction that remains meaningful.

When I was a youngster futurists populated my prospective adulthood with personal helicopters and lawn-mowing robots. The promise of technology was wealth and leisure for the masses, because machines would do the work. The technology arrived, right on schedule. Automation delivered the promised per-capita productivity improvement. So, given the new industrial efficiencies, where's the wealth and leisure for the masses? As Sarah Palin might say, "I ain't seein' it."

What was wrong with the crystal ball?

It apparently failed to account for something. That overlooked variable seems to have been the ability and willingness of the gilded class to redistribute wealth from our pockets to theirs, without guns or political revolutions, but simply by sucking pensions into the financial markets (the 401k swindle), then deregulating and manipulating those markets. At least Bush failed to suck in Social Security or that would have been wiped out too.

If it's time to restructure the economy, let me suggest that we go through a simple exercise and ask ourselves, "What should an economic system do?" The problem is that we (are encouraged to) confuse means and ends. An economic system should not be graded in terms of markets, taxes, profits, or other abstractions. The success or failure of the economy should be defined in terms of feeding, clothing, housing, and educating everybody. There's enough wealth to do it. If markets get the job done, great. If centralized planning does it, great. Those things are potential means. They possess no intrinsic merit. Their merit derives only from their results.

Moral of the story, getting back to The Spotlight: If you want to insulate your interests from criticism, get on the enemies list of some outspoken bigots. Getting lumped in with targets of bigotry will coat you in Teflon. "You're criticizing me? Look, those bigots are criticizing me too. You must be a kook like them." This tactic is glaringly evident in official attempts recently to link criticism of the Federal Reserve and criticism of globalism to "violent" "terrorist" groups. Only an enemy combatant would chant, "End the Fed"?

Fortunately, a new generation is growing up that, thanks to Ron Paul and others, effectively has decoupled the redneck mentality from a critique of the Federal Reserve and never internalized the taboo against questioning monetary policy along with fiscal policy.

Then again, if only the conspiracy theorists had praised to the hills the piety and patriotism of the Federal Reserve. Then we might not find ourselves becoming reduced to slavery, indebted financially to such vile masters as the plutocratic kleptomaniacal oligarchy that owns the presses that print the money.

Militant Atheists Stir the Pot

An interesting debate—Hitchens and D’Souza are capable and entertaining—but frustrating, because the debaters fail to tease apart several discrete issues:

Do people inspired by religion or secularism tend to behave virtuously or wickedly?

Does any answer to the above question have any bearing on the existence or non-existence of God?

What are the merits and demerits of the philosophical, logical, scientific and theological arguments for and against the existence of God?

Even if the arguments for the existence of a supreme being prevail, would those successful arguments necessarily have any bearing on the status of the Bible or any other scriptural writing?

The current atheism-religion debate launched by Hitchins, Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and other militant atheists tends to conflate these issues. Much is at stake, and I commend the new breed of atheists for their in-your-face style (lord knows the other side has been in everybody’s face for a long, long time). But clarity isn’t served by rhetoric that veers herky-jerky from morality to theology to cosmology to anthropology, etc., without ever spending enough time in one place to dig in.

The Man Who Destroyed America

IF YOU VOTED for George W. Bush for president, then you must search your soul deeply and find that place where your gullibility lies, and purge from your soul that place and cast it into the furnace of hell and watch it burn until you know that it is consumed beyond any chance of resurrection, and swear by God then that you never again will drop your guard and be taken in by a facade of patriotism and religiosity.

The Bushes and their cohorts have no interest in the welfare of the United States of America. Their only regard for the republic and its democratic institutions lies in their capacity to be commandeered. As president, Bush prostituted the country to serve the interests of the emerging global control system, in which the Bushes and their circles operate.

The control system is undaunted by distinctions between the public and private sectors, between political parties, or between ideologies. It is a supranational, suprapolitical movement that rests on three legs:

1. The financial sector that in the United States revolves around the Federal Reserve system of banks, and globally works through the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and similar organizations

2. The energy sector that constitutes John D. Rockefeller's legacy, the transnational petroleum industry

3. The military sector, made up of the Pentagon and its procurement networks, martial enforcement power encircling a financial black hole.

Review the legacy of George W. Bush's presidency, and you will see that he worked diligently, behind a ruse of incompetence and homeland security, to advance the interests of these controlling sectors of the emerging world system.

It remains to be seen whether the current economic collapse is the product of an overreaching miscalculation on the part of the globalists, in which case they might be at risk and will work to, at least partially, right the ship, or whether the current situation reflects a plan to deflate the middle class and impose on humankind a global feudalism that reduces the strata of world society to two classes: master and slave.

In the meantime, let history remember George W. Bush as the man who destroyed America.

Swiss watches, Italian shoes, French wine, and American cars

The TARP auto industry bailout has less to do with the U.S. economy than with America as a mindset. Economically, the auto industry got a big bailout already, on January 1, 1980, when the law allowing 401(k) accounts went into effect, providing a new way for U.S. corporations to fund worker retirements. As corporations phased in 401(k) plans, they phased out the old pension plans, which they said burdened them when competing against foreign manufacturers.

Apparently, at least as for the auto industry, it wasn’t enough. In December 2008, the big three begged Congress for more help, and after a round of ceremonial debate, a generous bailout of $24.9 billion was granted. But why? Any economic hit to the U.S. economy from the collapse of the big three would have been short term.

Just how would the demise of the big three impact the economy? The suffering of employees, extending down the supply chain, would be very real, as it would be in the wake of any large corporate demise. But the bigger picture would be anything but dire.

If the big three automakers perished, their best engineers, business managers, sales reps and other key employees would start new ventures. Entrepreneurs would fill the void with new car companies—built on new technologies, new production methods, and new distribution channels. And venture capital, not government bailout money. And if there was a shortage of private seed money, the government could provide. If government funding is the proper way to stimulate nascent industry, as is presumed by the recent bailout, why should the public sector favor proven losers, why not seed upstarts?

Economics cannot be the reason for the auto bailout. Market resiliency would fill the gap left by the big three in a heartbeat. So why invest $billions to prop up industrial dinosaurs?

As Tevye would explain, “Tradition!”

GM, Chrysler and Ford are no longer essentially manufacturing businesses. Sure, they slap together a few chassis, which nobody wants, but that’s incidental to their real role, which is cultural. They are organs of the collective psyche. Manufacturing cars is part of America’s identity. Psychologically, the big three are mythic players in America’s field of dreams.

And the auto executives know this. They know that their enterprise is part of the American mythos. The U.S. auto industry is so much a part of the identity of the United States that auto executives know they are immune to the disciplines of the market, that sentimentality will trump reason. Like the monopoly of professional baseball, the big three auto makers are vouchsafed their tri-opoloy by national sentiment. Nothing to do with economics. They are saved into perpetuity by a collective nostalgic pining for America’s manufacturing glory days. Making cars is as much our national pastime as pitching fastballs. And Detroit occupies as cherished a place in Americana as does Yankee Stadium.

Other countries have had centuries to incorporate their native crafts into their national identities. With technology speed-up, the United States has done it in less than a century. Just as the Swiss have their watches, the Italians their shoes, the French their wines, Americans have their big honkin’ cars.

The United States’ frontier sensibility has succumbed to domestication. We have joined the old world. We navigate by quaintness.

Good God, Why the Ungodly Fear of God?

I got a treat a while back in my inbox. A man named John Smart invited me to join an online community, the Evo-Devo Universe (EDU). Mr. Smart had found the star larvae site and liked what he saw (or thought he did). He said he thought the ideas on the site complemented other ideas being developed in the community. I looked at Mr. Smart’s own site and the EDU site and got excited about hooking up with these brazen visionaries.

I can understand Mr. Smart’s interest in star larvae. Here’s an excerpt from EDU’s Project Page:

Problem. Recent developments in cosmology, evolutionary developmental biology, and complexity sciences are providing new but scattered ways to understand our universe in a broader, ‘meta-Darwinian’ framework in which selectionist evolutionary and replicative, hierarchical developmental processes appear to generate complexity at multiple scales.

Solution. These results and hypotheses need to be explored, criticized, analyzed and possibly integrated into an expanded conceptual framework, by an interdisciplinary scholarly research community, Evo Devo Universe (EDU).

Links to members’ sites on the EDU People page lead to lots of fascinating angles on evolution, information theory, cosmology and other topics.

I replied to Mr. Smart, maybe too provocatively. I started expounding on people who have creative insights but become overly preoccuppied with establishing scientific credentials. I wrote,

People I encounter who have an interest in speculative cosmology, or whatever we might call our endeavor, tend toward extremes of scientific rigidity or New Age wooliness. At least, that is my observation. I try to keep my thoughts on these matters somewhere in the middle. The scientific types tend to be preoccupied with establishing scientific credentials for their ideas. While I have bolstered my speculations with scientific references, where I am able, I have grown less concerned with receiving blessings from science. My project is philosophical, theological, political, psychological and has many other dimensions, including the scientific. I don't feel a compunction to position all other dimensions subordinate to the scientific. I think that humankind can be served by conceptual breakthroughs in philosophy, theology, etc., as much as by breakthroughs in science. (Of course science has a certain privileged veto power, and if any idea I propose is scientifically disproven, I will have to abandon or reformulate that idea.)

He wrote back, having looked deeper into the starlarvae site, and withdrew his offer to join the EDU community. The scope of the community’s research themes specifically excludes

Non-naturalistic orthogenesis or teleology, intelligent design, supernaturalism, and theology.

So, by weaving in theology, I disqualified www.starlarvae.org from joining the club. On the site, I refer to the supernatural only dismissively or if I need to place an idea in a historical context. But I crossed the line. Mr. Smart was put off also by my dba, Advanced Theological Systems. I explained to him,

The name Advanced Theological Systems is perhaps a misguided lark, but it makes me chuckle. I worked for a while in the high-tech sector, and "Advanced [fill in the blank] Systems" became such a cliché of organizational nomenclature, I couldn't resist dropping in "theology" for the irony vis a vis sci/tech.

If I ever exorcise the theological threads from the site I'll approach you anew. I understand your apprehension. Somewhere in the blog I write about theophobia, which you might have a mild case of. It's a common affliction among many of my friends. And it unfortunately relinquishes God, with all his sociopolitical clout, to hands that I would rather not see wielding such clout.

The “Exorcise” comment referred to his offer to reconsider, if I ever scrubbed theology from the site, his invitation to join the EDU community.

It never occurred to me that the theological angle (and I’m not sure I could formulate precisely what it is) would be a showstopper. But I was fascinated. I asked him for permission to post our email exchange here on the blog, but he demurred, saying that he would have taken more care with his words if he’d been writing for a public audience. I think that’s fair, and I’m respecting his wishes.

Maybe I should quit being surprised by big thinkers who bristle before God. Poor God, so misunderstood.

Ontogeny, Phylogeny, Teleology and Evolution’s Empirical Conundrum

Scientists and philosophers of science have proposed various metrics by which to assess the merits of scientific theories. An often cited one is Karl Popper’s requirement that a theory be in principle empirically falsifiable. For example, the discovery of rabbit fossils in Precambrian geological strata would demolish Darwinian theory. Another often cited measure of merit is a theory’s ability to make accurate predictions. This has always been a difficult hurdle for Darwinian evolution. What predictions can the theory make?

Unfortunately for Darwinian theory, the difficulties are several. They include the time scale required, the need to rely on necessarily incomplete fossil remains, and the small sample (one planet). But something new has changed the situation. Darwinian theory now is in a position to belly up to the bar and, like other respectable scientific theories, make some bold predictions.

What has changed is our ability to analyze DNA. Genomic sequencing and analysis projects are in full swing around the world. Researchers are using new technologies to, not only sequence DNA, but also statistically analyze those sequences across species. So, Darwinians, what’s going to come of it? If you understand how changes in DNA propagate through generations within a species and into new species, if you understand the sources of genetic novelty, if you understand why some genes are preserved in a species and others selected out, then let’s have some predictions.

What will ongoing genetic sequencing and analysis turn up that will corroborate Darwinian evolution and falsify rivals?

But before we try to pin Darwinists to the mat, let’s entertain a relevant thought experiment, as an intermission:

Let’s suppose that we observe a complex process, one that involves discernibly discrete entities. We might call these entities organisms. We notice that over time, as the process progresses, the organisms give rise to new organisms. And we notice that older organisms perish.

We notice that the descendants differ from their ancestors. As more generations turnover, the forms of the descendants vary more dramatically. Morphological forms, and their attendant functions and behaviors, proliferate through the population of descendant organisms. And, having been fortunate enough to observe the process from its outset, we know that the multiplicity of forms descended, ultimately, from a single ancestral form.

An intriguing process. How to account for it? Let’s consider two competing theories.

(1) We might conjure an explanation that invokes a more or less deterministic influence, one that bridges the generations and guides the process as it works its way from the ancestral form to the many descendant forms. Such an influence would be teleological. We might call this formative influence a genetic program. Its action across the generations would constitute development, an unfolding of pre-programmed potential into a multiplicity of forms.

(2) Alternatively, we might conjure an explanation that invokes nondeterministic, nonteleological factors. We might say that the process is the result of two interacting subprocesses, one being unpredictable changes that exaggerate variation among the members of a generation, and the second being the varying numbers of progeny that members of each generation leave behind. We might call the first subprocess random mutation and the second process natural selection, and we might posit a relationship between the two that causes descendant populations to display a diversity of morphologies (and functions and behaviors) based on pure chance and environmental selection. There is no preprogrammed potential unfolding, just selection among various traits among individuals and a disproportionate retention in descendant generations of the selected traits.

Now comes the hard part: determining which explanation best accounts for the observed process of descent. Being conscientious scientists, we want empirical corroboration. What observations might we make, in principle, that could determine which explanation has the greater merit? How would one distinguish, empirically, a teleological process from a Darwinian one? What would one look for to detect the presence or absence of a program?



Phylogeny: Polymorphous descent from a common ancestor. In principle, what sort of observation would establish the presence or absence of a program?










Ontogeny: Polymorphous descent from a common ancestor. In principle, what sort of observation would establish the presence or absence of a program?


One observation that would help clear the air is the discovery of an information code in the organisms that expresses itself as the organisms’ various morphological traits. The codes for the traits we might call genes. If we were to find genes in ancestors that lay waiting, unexpressed, but are preserved and jump to life in descendant species, this would bolster the case for a programmatic process. A Darwinian process would not predict such a discovery. Darwinism includes no anticipatory mechanism whereby genes needed in the future would be present, though dormant, in ancestors. Only a teleological theory would predict an anticipatory genome. Anticipatory evidence would suggest a pre-coded program underlying the process of multi-generational morphological diversification.

And this is precisely what we observe in ontogeny. We observe that genes dormant in the fertilized ovum do not express themselves until the time comes for them to produce muscle cells, liver cells, brain cells, etc. Then these dormant genes spring to life. Their expression unfolds sequentially to create descendant species of cells of multifarious types.

Or at least this is the prevailing account. Alternatively, maybe it’s just a coincidence that genes dormant in the fertilized ovum are useful in descendant cell types. Maybe nature is resourceful and discovers uses for the inherited supply of genes. It might be the case that the differentiation of cell types during embryonic development has nothing to do with any precoded program. Maybe it’s happenstance, the result of random mutations and natural selection.

This line of thinking probably is not worth pursuing. But is phylogenetic descent really that different? Would the discovery of descendant genes in ancestors argue for a programmed phylogeny, or would it argue only for the happenstance of random mutations and natural selection?

These are no longer rhetorical questions, because genomic sequencing and analysis is finding unexpected, unpredicted instances of descendant genes in ancestors. Does Darwinian evolution predict that the genomes of primitive species should contain genetic programs for newer, more complex species—?The discovery challenges the logic of normal evolution theory, because it suggests that evolution, as ontogeny is thought to do, unfolds from a pre-programmed genetic potential. These findings are ongoing:

A news release (11/24/2005) issued by the journal Trends in Genetics announces that

"Corals and sea anemones (the flowers of the sea), long regarded as merely simple sea-dwelling animals, turn out to be more genetically complex than first realised. They have just as many genes as most mammals, including humans, and many of the genes that were thought to have been "invented" in vertebrates are actually very old and are present in these "simple" animals."

The full text of the release is available at http://www.sars.no/research/technau_Science.pdf

Newer (2007) sequencing and analysis results corroborate the anemone anomalies. Another example comes from research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which found human genes in a marine worm. The news release (11/24/2005) announcing the finding is at http://www.embl-heidelberg.de/aboutus/news/press/press05/press25nov05/index.html

Additional research discovered that genes essential for human nerve cells to communicate with one another are present already in bacteria. This research is described in a NIH news release (6/1/2004) at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/new/releases/genes.cfm These and other anomalous (in the Darwinian context) results of genome analysis are collected at http://www.panspermia.org/oldgenes.htm.

This page of Brig Klyce’s "Cosmic Ancestry" web site includes commentary on the relevance of these findings to panspermia. The discovery of advanced genes in primitive organisms suggests that the evolution of life on Earth constitutes an ontogeny—the ontogeny of Gaia.

If a process of descent is programmatic, then it would seem to be dependent on some kind of timing mechanism. What triggers the production of new descendant types? How does the developing embryo know when to kick out a new cell/tissue type? In the case of ontogeny, researchers posit various chemical signals from within the organism and/or from its gestating parent as potential triggers. In the case of phylogeny the timing triggers are harder to determine.

Nonetheless, various candidates present themselves. Phylogeny might also be paced by chemical signals. Organisms exchange chemical signals all the time, through eating one another, through exchanges of pheromones. Terence McKenna argues that ingestion of plant drugs among our primate ancestors played a role in human speciation. Other environmental triggers might include the terraforming of Earth’s atmosphere by the release of oxygen from photosynthesis. Glaciations might act as triggers. Industrial pollution is another candidate.

Maybe the prevailing accounts of ontogeny and phylogeny are artifacts of the time scales involved. If we could observe a sped-up movie of evolution might we perceive a programmatic development from the first to the most recent species—the gestation of a pregnant planet from impregation to delivery? If the embryonic development of a long-lived organism required a few billion years, might it not look like a Darwinian process?

So how do approaches to evolution stack up as scientific theories based on their abilities to predict? A teleological, programmed model, predicts that genes active in descendant species can be found already in distant ancestors. What does the Darwinian model predict? Genomic sequencing and analysis is in the early stages. There’s time to render predictions. The star larvae hypothesis predicts an accumulating pile of anomalous data that will stretch the Darwinian model to the breaking point. Those data, however, will find themselves well integrated in a new paradigm, one that proposes an overarching ontogeny that envelops evolution and repositions biology into the role of larvae to the stars.

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

Rare McLuhan Audio

I rescued from cassette this talk that Marshall McLuhan gave at Johns Hopkins University in the mid 1970s. I have not found an audio file of this talk anywhere online. So far as I know it's an original contribution to the archive of McLuhan audio. Enjoy.

SUPERCLASS, the Global Power Elite and the World They are Making

A moneyed elite controls the world. That’s conspiracy theory. And that's just the way it is, according to David Rothkopf, author of Superclass. Rothkopf hobnobs with this elite. His resume includes a stint as director of Kissinger Associates. (Yes, that Kissinger.) He describes mingling with the multibillionaires at Davos. But the book is not an exposé. The author describes the structure of the elite, the astronomical magnitude of individual fortunes, the revolving doors that connect the U.S. Defense, Commerce, and Treasury Departments with the board rooms of the Fortune 100, and he seems perfectly pleased with it all.

Rothkopf’s purpose is less than clear. At times he plays the anthropologist and renders an objective, dispassionate account of rites and rituals among the upper tiers of the global control hierarchy. He narrates a kind of travelogue of interesting journeys among the high and mighty.

Ostensibly, Rothkopf also is trying to debunk conspiracy theories. He portrays the elite as people with a strong work ethic who embrace honest capitalism. They’re just smart operators. Nothing conspiratorial. But he seems oblivious to the prospect of the sheer magnitude of the elite’s wealth and influence delivering an outcome that for all practical purposes is identical to that of the successful execution of a conspiracy. When the wealthy can shuffle back and forth between the highest executive levels of the public and private sectors, then conspiracy might be an imprecise notion, but not one fundamentally flawed. Rothkopf describes a vast financial control elite whose machinations carry it ever nearer to total global control. A conspiracy by any other name . . . .

Late in the book, Rothkopf does address conspiracy theories directly and plies the old saw about people being scared by the apparent randomness of events and then seeking comfort in the idea that events are managed from behind the scenes. He writes,

“Conspiracy theory is the comfort food of politics. Actually, it is more than that. According to psychologists, it fills a fundamental desire to balance perceived causes with perceived consequences and thus satisfies our sense that bad outcomes are not the product of happenstance.”

He then offers a couple facile quotes from psychologists:

“If we think big events like a president being assassinated can happen at the hands of a minor individual, that points to the unpredictability and randomness of life, and that unsettles us."

and

Conspiracy theories are “psychologically reassuring because what they say is that everything is connected, nothing happens by accident and that there is some kind of order in the world.”

What psychobabble. Insipid.
If conspiracy theories are so reassuring, so warm and fuzzy, then why does a prominent conspiracy magazine go by the name, Paranoia? Why not, Milk and Cookies?

Think about how empty is this dismissal of conspiracy theories. They put people at ease? Puh-leeze.

Take as an example the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis. What is the more comforting belief, that the bridge fell because budget cuts reduced inspections, because the warnings that were offered were ignored, because the bridge was overloaded with equipment during repairs, because the original construction used inferior materials—in other words, because of human foibles and bad luck?

OR, is it more comforting to believe that the bridge was brought down deliberately by evil agents conspiring behind the scenes?

The idea that conspiracy theories are comfort food is ridiculous. Just the opposite is true. They are bitter fare. Start espousing conspiracy theories, and your loved ones eventually will start asking you questions like, “If you actually believe that, then how can you sleep at night?” The conspiratorial view is unsettling.

Indeed, people looking for comfort amid the seeming randomness of big events turn to the reassuring tones of network television and mainstream print media to be told that all is as it should be and that our elected leaders are on top of things. The alphabet soup of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, BBC, and NPR constitutes the comfort food of politics.

Of course, one can defend the concentration of wealth in the hands of so few with an assertion that those with wealth are deserving of it. But this leads to a Darwinian tautology:

Who are the wealthy? The deserving.

Who are the deserving? The wealthy.

Come January’s transfer of power, we’ll see how many Bush administration officials and how many congressmen ousted by the election dash over to Wall Street to catch the monies they just pitched over there. Maybe this was the real reason the bailout had to be rushed. The bill had to be signed before the new administration and congress took office. Fresh leadership might have come under pressure to consider the welfare of people outside the millionaire’s club.

It worked by skulduggery, but an autonomous executive class has positioned itself on top of the American masses. The concentrated wealth that this class wields renders inoperable any distinction between public and private sectors. Beyond the reach of democratic institutions and insulated from the discipline of markets, the executive class alternately assumes public office to ratify its wishes then retires to the boardroom to pocket the results in a perpetual cycle of self enrichment.

Conservative: Someone who hates socialism when it benefits poor people but loves socialism when it benefits the wealthy.

And the winners are
J. P. Morgan Chase
Goldman Sachs
Citigroup

Philosophical Disputation

One reason this blog has languished is that I've been airing, or baring, my thoughts in a more interactive environment, at a philosophy forum site. Once you log in, you can view a log of my comments there HERE.

RANDOM CHANCE BOGUS

Insofar as (otherwise) scientific accounts of nature invoke chance and randomness, they admit their weakness as scientific accounts.

Chance and randomness are fudge factors. They play the same role in scientific thinking as is played by miracles in religious thinking. And they reduce scientific thought to quasi-religious thought.

The question to anyone who explains anything in terms of chance and randomness is, "What are you talking about?" Take quantum physics as an example of a discipline that leans heavily on randomness. "Random" in quantum mechanics seems only to mean that physicists can’t predict the outcome of quantum processes. But that just begs the question, Why can’t the outcome be predicted? There are only three possibilities:

1) The outcome is not predictable, because, though deterministic and in principle predictable, the process involves a causal chain too complicated to unravel.

2) The outcome is not predictable, because it "just happens," that is, it is an event that occurs without having been caused. This would seem to pose a problem for science. At least miracles have causes, albeit supernatural ones. But for an event to occur with no cause whatsoever? (In quantum physics the outcome of a quantum collapse is taken to be random, even though triggered by an environmental factor, or, in the case of Roger Penrose’s Objective Reduction, the collapse is caused by gravity. But in any case, the collapse can in principle produce any of a number of outcomes, only one of which actually occurs. Which one occurs from among the possibilities is not predictable, and so the spectre random is invoked as a gloss that lets the scientists elude the responsibility of causal elucidation.)

3) The process is not predictable, because a subjective agent decides, or at least influences, the outcome.

Scientific thinking leans on chance and randomness in some cases when scientists observe seemingly teleological effects, as in the seeming directedness of evolution from simple to complex organisms, but scientists are professionally prohibited, and probably temperamentally inhibited, from invoking teleological explanations. Hence, the usefulness of the gap-fillers, chance and random.

To see in more detail why chance and randomness are conceptual fuzz and need to be expunged from scientific thinking, exposed as spectres, consider the classic example of a deck of cards, shuffled in the normal way or arranged according to a rule.

Shuffling is taken to be a randomizing of the deck, so that if you were to pick a card from position thirty in a thoroughly shuffled deck, the identity of that particular card would be a matter of chance. You can’t predict it. But the card at position thirty in a nonrandom deck, one that is set up deliberately in a contrived pattern according to a rule, should be predictable. This is how these things typically are understood.

But the opposite seems actually to be the case.

The position of any card in a shuffled deck is usually figured to be given by chance, but what’s occurred during the shuffling of the deck is that the indeterminism has been removed, and the process has become deterministic, with a determined outcome. The positions of the cards in the deck are determined by deterministic physical determinants: the stiffness of the cards, how much they’re bent back, how quickly and with how much force you roll your thumbs over the edges and so forth, starting with the original ordering of the cards in the deck. So if you knew all the physical variables, you could, in theory, predict which card would end up at position thirty. Because there’s no indeterminism involved, an algorithm will solve the problem. It’s just a matter of the physical characteristics of the cards, and how much force is imparted to them,how much they bend, and so forth.

So actually you could predict the so-called chance or random result. The “chance” or “random” aspect of the shuffling—the absence of deliberate ordering—is precisely what allows card positions to be predicted. The exclusion of indeterminate causes makes the outcome predictable.

Now, if you’re given a deck of cards, and you’re told that someone has arranged them in a particular pattern and then suddenly died or been abducted by aliens, then you have no way to determine—to predict—which card is at position thirty. Given no additional information, there’s no calculation you can do based on the physics of the cards and the initial arrangement that will tell you where any particular card is or which card is at any particular position. Additional information is needed to figure it out: the rule by which the cards were arranged.

The "random" arrangement is the predictable arrangement. The nonrandom arrangement is the unpredictable one.

The dead or abducted person’s choice in arranging the cards, the rule they select, is presumably not deterministic. That person had a range of choices and decided on one. They might have chosen a convoluted rule or a simple one. To someone who doesn’t know the rule, if it’s a convoluted one, say like find the first ace and double the value of its ordinal position in the deck and square that number and divide by five and take the second digit of the remainder for the next card . . . something like that, the result might well look like a random arrangement to someone who doesn’t know the code. Once the code and the initial arrangement are known, one can use an algorithm to determine card thirty. This is cryptography.

This example underscores a problem with the naïve view of information and information theory. There’s no way to determine whether a seemingly random set of signals actually is random—"does not encode information"—or whether the set of signals is highly ordered and contains a great deal of information, unless one knows that a code or rule was used to arrive at the order. And one knows what the rule was. Or if one knows the initial physical conditions and all of the physical variables involved. In other words, it is impossible to determine a priori the signal-to-noise ratio of any set of pulses.

Take, as another illustration, solar radiation, or sunshine, a seemingly "random" mixture of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. What is the information content of sunshine? It tells us about the nuclear reactions occurring inside the sun, so it has some information content. But it also tells the plants it strikes in which direction to face their leaves. Does that imply additional content? In the case of conscious minds deliberating over wavelengths so as to discern something about solar physics, sunshine is taken to contain information, and solar researchers are involved in information decoding. But the response of the plants is "automatic," not deliberate, and few people would interpret it as an instance of information processing, only energy processing. But what is the meaningful difference?

The notion that information is somehow inherent in physical nature makes sense only if we assume that there is a natural code. I suppose we WANT to believe that information inheres in nature. And so we’re led necessarily to some kind of crypto-theology. In other words, if there’s information in nature, then there’s a code (design), and then there’s a coder (designer). Any philosophy that takes information to be an inherent aspect of physical nature is necessarily a theological philosophy. One way around this, for congenital theophobes, is to deny that information inheres in nature and to admit that it inheres only in conscious minds. Same thing with computer memory. The strings of 0's and 1's are geometrical configurations of electrons in spacetime in the physical circuitry, but only a mind can determine whether any information is present.

I’m not sure many scientifically minded people would sign onto that necessity.