Happy Halloween.
Do not cut and run,
Until you see the Whites of their Orange Alert Eyes.
Stake your Course, oh you skeleton bones.
Prepare for the October Surprise.
The Only thing we have to fear is our fears and moans,
and .. our remorses.
Yes we will always have our lizard head bosses.
So Spike another Stake onto our Courses (corpses?).
Don't Tread on the Mosses.
Happy Halloween.
Ask NOT what you can do for your congress person
...
...
...
...
...
Ask what your Congress person can do for your children.
FRONT LINE ON A FLATTENING EARTH
Every once in an epoch, Falt-Earth Friedman (NY Times editor) surprises us with an introspective analysis worthy of notice. Rather than being the usual apologist for the US President and for the American way of non-negotiable life, Tom the Tome takes us on a panoramic plummet down to Peru in this weekend's editorial, to visit the receding glaciers of Machu Piccu. He charms us into the mindset of a Peruvian corn farmer whose wilting crop worsens with each year's lessening of glacial run off. Tom even goes so far as to challenge the wisdoms of the Adam Smith religion by noting that receding water levels and shrinking crop outputs will force Peru to drill for and export more oil, thus hastening its own demise due to Global Warming.
Yes, once again the Invisible Hand guides us to the most "efficient" utilization of our depleting resources. Rest In Peace, oh you humanity.
The sky blooms into wide open blue glory as Hero finds himself soaring with a supportive flock of like minded friends.
This is where eagles hang. No one cuts and runs. Heroes do not flinch and flee. Heroes remain loyal to the cause. Stay the course. Stick to the plan. Remain on message.
And what is the message?
Hero pauses for a listen.
They are all murmurring the same lines of prayer that he had learned so well in Edge-occasion school. It can't be wrong if they all say it is right. Can it?
The murmur of the flying crowd continues.
"The Market shall provide." "The Market shall provide." "The Market shall provide." "The Market shall provide."
"Progress is perpetual." "Progress is perpetual." "Progress is perpetual."
"Technology is our savior." "Technology is our savior." "Technology is our savior." "Technology is our savior." "Technology is our savior."
The Smith is Great.
Blessed is the Smith.
His will be done.
Here on Reality Earth as it is in Fantasy Heaven.
Hero finds himself tumbling down a tube; a Tunnel of Visions, or a TV for short.
Along the horizontal scan line, he spies a black monolith emerging from the dusts of time. "Thus Spake Zarathustra," it says to him in flashdance bursts. "The Enlightened Millenium is upon us." Hero stares at the flashing monolith in awe. His bird brain binds to the monolith's blinding lights. His herd-again ears hang onto every captivating tone within its cacophony of remixed messages. "We shall reveal for you a most wonderous secret," it promises, "on the other side of the break."
Hero sees the monolith growing and expanding, becoming a black streak spreading itself from farm to field in a relentless chase after its own tail.
Busy bee dots swarm up to cover the enlarging black tarp. Their wheels spin furiously in a stampede like rush towards the promised land: Extopia. Gushers of Juice snake behind the dots, feeding them with life and motion, feeding the black tarp with a darkish glue that holds its gravelous rocks together. The tarp advances from mall to mall and from Sears to shining Sears.
"T'is the Trail to Eden," he murmurs. "The Invisible Hand guides our growth and guides us to an inevitable array of prosperous futures. The Markets provide us, each with his wants, each according his ability to pay. Our Technology delivers. We are negotiating our way smartly along these routes and asserting our dominion over everything, even over Mother Nature! Ours will be the glory. Blessed is the Smith."
Heavens, No ! Mrs. Robinson.
Hero the Graduate confronts the realities of SUV-Irbia.
"One word:" buds in a gray-hair
tea toadler,
"Global-Ismynation."
Hero knows not what to say.
Cock a doodle do, Mrs. Robinson?
Here he stands in the confusion of Sprawl-Mart Land with hardly a grasp on the spin and balance of the place. Media attacks come from everywhere. Buy this. Shop that. Get more. Get more. Gitt mo. Help!
All his Edge-OK-shin dissolves into a diffuse background beat in the face of this on-the-edge occasion. His professors had not prepared Hero for the onslaught of the Madison Avenue and K-Street mind benders. Hero's chicken brain takes over control in this moment of fright, fear and confusion. Save us, it says. We must continue. We must persevere. Our preciousness must go on. Grab for the brass ring. Become one with Subversia. Hero faints.
Graduation.
Hurray. Free at last. Free at last.
Hero has his mortar board and his certificate of Edge-OK-shin.
He is ready to tackle the "real world".
He has been duly trained in understanding what is "real" outside the walls of alma matta and what is superficial facade.
"The Invisible Hand shall guide you," assured his professors, "to engage in that are endeavorsbest both for you and for society."
Hero amazes even himself with his ability to spout the speak of the Psycho-nomic Pundits. "The gain in Spain," he repeats, "falls mainly on the vain." Absolutely brilliant.
"The Market provides."
"Ask not what the markets will do to you, ask what you can do for the markets."
"I pledge allegiance to the Invisible Hand and to the system for which it stands, one world, under Smith, indivisble, with free will and tradable options for all."
Hero marches boldly forward, towards the inmate release ramp, confident that he is armed with all the correctionalized thoughts of Chairman Smith. Fogland here I come!
"
E
a
c
h
m
e
m
b
e
r
special
-izes
in
one area
of
expertise,
becoming brighter and better in that one endeavor while growing
ignorant about everything else," crows the teacher in delight.
Hero has a hard time understanding the "sound logic".
He dares not ask a question though. His beady bird eyes focus on the wide open spaces around each "peak of excellence".
"It is unimportant," the instructor inserts, "that each member is dumb in almost everything else because collectively our society is brilliant. Just add up all the bell curves."
Learning economics is going to be hard hard work for Hero. He still does not get the concept: Wealth from Tunnel Visions? Maybe it works for lemmings. How can it work for a c o mplex society that plans to soar to new heights? Won't certain worrisome things slip between the cracks?
In a blink
of a
bird's
eye,
Hero finds himself caged
in a Thought
Correct-
ional
Facility.
"You have free will," booms a voice from the front. "Ours is a free market where all can compete fairly and freely in pursuit of their life, liberty and happiness."
"But before you are loosed on society, we must make sure you understand the rules. Our only text is 'Wealth of Tunnel Visions' by Adam Smith. It will be your Bible. We do not mix religion with state affairs. However, by the time we are done with you, you will believe unquestionably in an 'Invisible Hand'. The Hand knows all and does good for all who worship it."
"Let us begin. Open your book to Chapter 1, Supply and Demand in an ideal marketplace ..."
With
Corny
Porcu
-popia
reading
materials in hand, Hero continues deeper into the territory of Fog Land.
Without warning, a member of the Right-Stuff Thought Tanking Brigade emerges from the fog and stops Hero right in his tracks.
"Our mission is to correctionalize the thinking of all in Fog Land so that they all think the Right way," proclaims the headhardenned driver of the machine.
"We will test your thinking to make sure you have proper econo-minded thoughts framed in your head before we let you "pass", graduate, and move on with your journey," continues the controller of the Thought Tanking apparatus. "It's called an Edge-you-K-shun."
As he
reaches
the edge
of Fog Land,
our Myopic Hero
finally starts to under
-stand
why they
call it
Fog Land.
It is shrouded
in a low lying fog.
Here, everyone has a vision problem. They cannot see far up along the road ahead. They cannot see the extent of the precious Tree of the Life Juice. It's just guess work.
"You must be a new guest worker," opines a suspicous looking and yet smile happy stranger.
"How rude of me. Sorry. Welcome. My name is Corny Porcupian. Welcome to my home country. Welcome to Fog Land. Here everything is bea-u-tiful. No? The Tree she is bea-u-tiful. Our future, it is bea-u-tiful. We have always had acces to The Prize, to our precious Juice of Life, and it will go on for ... well, basically forever. Think of it as a Bottomless Well."
Hero is stunned.
As far out as his myopic powers let him see, a sea of ladders stretch across the visible ground, each rigged to go high up into the dense fog, to access another part of the unseen tree.
Everything he had imagined was wrong. The natives had not surveyed the full scope of the juice-giving tree in detail. Instead they climbed up their rigs wherever they could, and if lucky, they brought down all they could grab from a low-lying branch.
"What happens when the low lying branches start to run down?" Hero asks.
"Oh that will never happen," quips Corny Porcupian. "Gloomers and doomers have been predicting that we will run out of Juice for hundreds of years. They have been wrong every time and they will continue to be wrong. Malthus was wrong. The famines never came because technology saved the day. Hubbert (a Juice oriented gloomer) will also be wrong. Technology will come through as it always does and help us to extract ever greater amounts of Juice from the Tree practically forever.
Hero says nothing. He thinks to himself, "Why is this cornucopian grinning fool all so eager to meet me at the frontier edge of Fog Land and bend me towards the cheerful view of life? Every bird brain knows that no tree climbs to the sky and beyond. Why is Corny Porcupian so yearning to give me the false impression that the Tree is without limit and that the juice will flow forever? Who pays him to do this? What is their goal?"
No doubt,
it must be
like this,
He imagined.
With only this one Tree of the Life Juice available, the folk who have dominion over the tree must have taken extreme measures of care and planning.
They must have scoped out the full limits of the tree. There would be only so many branches and only so much removable fruit on each branch.
They would take carefully from the tree only after having fully justified the depletion of this wonderous resource. Surely they would not be like drunken madmen and grab heedlessly everything they could get their hands on without nary a care for what happens when it is all gone.
Nearsighted as he might be, our Myopic Hero was unfazed.
He committed all his resources to a journey that would take him to the Land of the Fog, to find the mythical Tree of the Life Juice.
As he walked, he noticed the geological formations below his web-toed feet.
Mother Nature, it seems had followed a strange pattern. There were rocks of all sizes, large and small. However, the largest of the large never seemed to exceed a certain size. And for every large there were many more smalls.
Why even a bird brain could understand that once all the largest marbles had been removed from the pool there would only remain the smaller of the geological formations. And once the the bigger of those remainders were removed, there would only remain the smaller of what Mother Nature had created.
It was a simple truth. He was still a long way off from the crazed frenzy of Fog Land. This basic concept seemed clear as a desert oasis to our intrepid voyager. Soon, however, he would forget himself as he fell into the drunken world of the Life Juice.
While
wandering
in the
wilderness,
our Myopic Hero
stumbles upon a stranger with wonderous tales. He speaks of an elixir that gives one ever lasting power. It is called the Juice of Life. It comes in flavors, sweet and sour. Those who posses it attain great powers, abilities to transport almost instantly to far away places, abilities to work large farms with a single hand, in short to enjoy a life style that soon becomes non-negotaible.
But where to find this wonderous juice, asks our short of vision voyager.
A tree, answers the wise stranger.
It roots in the Land of the Fog. There is only one such tree and all who know of it seek it out to satiate their ever growing thirst.
They mis-led us about their Cause 'a Bellie (reason for war) the last time around. Remember their WMD Intelli-flops and flips? Remember their We'll-be-met-with Showers-of-Flowers fibs? Remember Colin Powell's UN show & tell? Remember Valerie Plame? Remember Niger Yellowcake?
Now they deceive us again.
This time their deceptions and diversions spin about our so-called "Pain o' the Pump".
They suggest a conspiracy of greedy oil giants. They point to evil foreigners who withhold the goodies from us or take what is rightfully ours.
They play the partisan pull-me push-you game. All to keep you away from knowing what is really happening on the global scale. Global production is falling behind. Global demand is leaping ahead. --Production will never catch up with Demand again. We are rolling over the peak and falling into the downhill abyss.
The politicians are forever suckering us deeper into the tar pits with misdirects and misleads.
Learn the deeper truth here at The Oil Drum
Seeing
is
believing.
To control the ape brain,
One needs to control what it sees.
Hide the unpleasant pictures.
Flash the enobling ones.
Nobility is, as nobility shows itself.
Do not gaze on the image below.
It is a hoax.
Fabricated by unpatriotic traitors.
By those
who refuse to see
that freedom is on the march.
Them who did not cut and run,
now lay proud, free and noble.
Dare not criticize them who made the ultimate sacrifice,
or those who gave them the opportunity to do so.
See my minion smile.
His resignation is now
on file.
He failed to make me look good.
So leave he must for sake of nationhood.
I am the Decider man.
In other words, doing the hard decisions as best I can.
These are hard hard times.
Thank Higher'd Father for the guy that writes my rhymes.
Image is Position in our Pyramid Scheme Society.
At every station up along the Triangles of Power there stands a Lord who bades his or her minions to make the Leader Look Good, or else.
Bad news does not shine a politically proper kind of spotlight in the Leader's throne room.
Bad news, real as it may be, is to be buried, denied and denegrated.
Cornucopian news, false as it might be, is to be blared with bubbly enthusiasm from every bullhorn in the Leader's realm.
"Make me look good" is all that counts.
So what if a catastrophe of epic proportions threatens the Kingdom? So what if the coffers are spent beyond all measure of rational exuberance? So what if the armies are meeting with defeat after defeat? So what if the economy is faltering? So what if the liquid of power is running dry? Ours is not to question. Ours is not to be disloyal. Ours is to bow in awe of that shining image on the top of the Hill.
We sure know how to bow to false but authoritative images.
The concept of Chicken Little (CL) confronting Mr. Ostrich Head (MOH) comes from Anthropik here
Not discussed is the risk v. reward equation. Let's say there are equal chances that CL and MOH are right. If MOH is right and we panic & spend money trying to fix a problem that is not there, well then we are out of that amount of money. If CL is right and we DON'T panic & spend money trying to fix the problem, then we pay the price of the sky falling on our head. Which is worse?
