Republican or Democrat? ... or Hippie?

If you're a Republican because you think they're the conservative bunch, it's not really that simple anymore.  You'll perhaps want a better reason.

If you're a Democrat because you think they're the liberal, human rights oriented, environmentally sensitive bunch, they're not so easily defined now. You'll perhaps want to rethink that position.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch,
Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, BoA, Credit Suisse,
Lehman Brothers, and others are responsible for
the world market crash of 07'/08' and the
resulting deaths of hundreds of thousands.

They have inordinate influence still; you  and I
have almost none.

Simple debates on issues are helpful, but promises are often shelved after the race.  What the parties actually do when they're in power is more revealing.  Both groups are much more complex than their simple campaign slogans suggest.  (A little exasperation showing here ...)

The historic differentiations in the two-party system have less effect on their performance in office than we might expect.  Many issues have succumbed to power plays and influence peddlers.

Those of us who were pro-government during the Vietnam conflict have begun to realize, the hippies were probably right about at least some things. Government doesn't deserve our blind trust.

Those of us who chafed during the civil rights and feminist revolutions are faced with the fact that the issues of discrimination were real and inexcusable.  Dissidents then and now are treated like criminals or anarchists.

To a great degree, our most difficult problems are formalized and perpetuated by policy and law.  Visionary leadership, inside and outside government, must go against both party lines to effect needed change. 

When I was a kid, it was against the law for a black kid to drink from the water fountain marked 'white'.

Like issues in the past, today's economic issues are equally inexcusable and are not yet addressed by either of the two parties' offered simplistic perspectives. The fundamental questions being asked by dissidents are valid.  The problems were and are with national policy and practice.

Students protesting at Kent State University in the 70's saw it first hand.  Four were killed, and nine more were wounded.  Some of those shot were protesting the invasion of Cambodia by the U.S.  Others were just bystanders.

They were called un-American,  traitors, and revolutionaries. "I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."^[18] Their accusers didn't get it, of course.  Questions and protests had been waved aside too long for folks with a conscience to tolerate.  The same is happening again on Wall Street and elsewhere.  We're right there again today.

Today's dissidents are being brutalized and arrested as we speak. This week.

The Occupy Movement has dozens of focal points from Wall Street to college tuition, from national government to private corporations.  The general dissatisfaction they express is being resisted as though they were criminals.  It's the same way they abused the peace activists of the Vietnam era. Exactly the same.

The derivatives debacle is one example of government responding to corporations rather than the best interests of the American people.  When the crash came, the government rescued the businesses and shafted the citizenry rather badly.  The bail-outs went to the Wall Street, not main street.  Wall Street firms paid their folks multimillion dollar bonuses in the same year the government bailed them out.  They paid off their congressmen that year as well.   Middle class folks paid the bill.  The poor suffered most.

Senior players in both parties seem to be crooked as a dog's hind leg when it comes to influence, power, selfishness, and hubris.  To be fair, both sides have attempted good initiatives they hoped would serve well.  For example, social aid programs such as welfare have in fact addressed some immediate problems and many folks in need were given a hand up out of poverty. The same programs (since more is better) have gone on to do more harm than anyone thought possible.

Trickle-down didn't.  Welfare wasn't.  Fanny and Freddie failed.  More than One Child got Left Behind; in fact, most suffered loss.  The cheerleader who said, "WE CAN," can't, and now, neither can the rest of us.  Government sanctioned fiscal policy and partisan squabbling over the national debt crisis have tanked the global economy twice in recent years.

Occupy Wall Street is just another round of citizens asking hard questions a bit more emphatically.  

There are no believable answers coming from either party, there are no reasonable responses to the catastrophic state of the global economy which their best efforts have given us, and there are no particularly believable leaders moving toward reasonable change.

Sound familiar?  Almost biblical?  Has either party said anything coherent about the catastrophically fragile and vulnerable financial system?  Beyond patchwork attempts at repair, not word one.

From the New York Times, "The Obama administration is far from perfect, and government is not beyond becoming bloated and being abused, but right is right and truth is truth: government can play a very positive role in protecting the less-well-off from the interests of the more-well-off, and this administration’s view of government is much more benevolent than those of the people who are seeking to unseat it."  True in some respects, perhaps.

I suspect that some (not all) of our current leaders are doing their best amidst the failures to serve the American people, yet their efforts seem to be more of the same.  The Republican alternative offers no more credible solution to our functional failures than does this administration.

Did you know that half of our Congress folks are multi-millionaires?  Congress doesn't feel your pain!
Instead, they make money on the inside information they have from the programs they approve or disapprove.  They sell short while the market approaches free-fall, all while telling the American people everything is fine.  If they weren't congressmen and women, they'd be in federal prison.  Equal under the law is a sad joke.

The gap between rich and poor continues to widen, the economic swings are wider and more destructive, and the magnitude of individual economic events increases at an accelerating rate.

We're flawed not so much in intent, perhaps, as in structure.

Personally, grass-roots-driven change appeals to me.  Not that it's likely to make the problems go away, of course, but if we choose, then we'll own the problems and perhaps be a bit more thoughtful about the process.

So, is it time to think about reengaging our political process personally?  Kinda looks that way, doesn't it.  Heard anything meaningful from your representatives in Congress lately?  It's been strangely quiet there since the debt crisis screw up, if you ask me.

"Suppose you were an idiot.  And suppose you were a member of Congress ...  but I repeat myself."

~ from a letter fragment, 1891, Mark Twain 

They're not idiots, of course.  Foolish, perhaps, 
hubristic, arrogant, inappropriately 
influenced by money 
and power,  ....

It's a little frightening, considering the government's attitude toward such, to discover that I am perhaps more of a dissident than a party participant.  Not interested in being tazed or maced, but definitely had enough of dis-information (lies), market mismanagement (theft),  and patchwork solutions (rule by fiat).

Digital Weaponry

Shared ideas, shared thinking,

... shared vision! 
Jump in?

Bloggers now out-produce all the world's publishing houses combined.

People blog for many reasons; for creative expression, for entertaining their friends, for provoking thought, for changing the world, ....

Bloggers now out-produce all the world's publishing houses combined, and Pew data suggests that 80 percent of bloggers have started publishing only in the last few years; it's still a new and growing crowd of writers.  While most writers are lighthearted about their blogs, many are thoughtfully hoping to ... well, to change the way people think.

Capturing the moment so the world can know ...

So thanks to bloggers (and tweeters), welcome to Egypt and the Arab Spring, welcome to murderous Syria, to Wall Street's back rooms, to Mombasa from inside the government circles, to Nigerian oil-sodden wastelands, to the mass media as seen through the eyes of someone whose vision is larger.

Slammed by the overwhelming will of the people
expressed worldwide and instantly.

 Regarding bloggers and social media publishers, "... be prepared to see the world around you change more rapidly than usual, thanks to their influence, story telling, discoveries, and open sharing of ideas.  Nothing beats the potential that sharing information can have on humans: this is the real digital weapon of our future."  John Blossom

The simplest of examples, a short blog
article on the global economy published
last night has a couple dozen hits already
by early this morning from inside and outside
the U.S.   :)

The Intimate Enemy

Everybody is self-centered at the start.

Until other people become important enough to us, and we love them enough, they're not part of our decisions.

That's how marriage begins.  Two selfish people getting intimately tangled up in each other's lives.  There's no chance that we fully understand each other in the early days (years).  As time passes and the glow of being together settles down, tension escalates.   

• Where did you put my razor?
• No, I hate that tv show.
• Why didn't you get gas?

The issues are irrelevant nonsense, of course.  No one remembers what all the angry fighting was about.  The amount of time we spend being angry is in direct proportion to how selfish we still are.

So without any religious overtones, what's the practical counsel we're given?

John 15:12 My command is this: love each other as I have loved you.

He's not telling us to be spiritual or religious, he's telling us to care.  Do I care what's important to them?  And why it's important?  Can I back them up?  Can I help carry that piece?  The goal is not fight to win, it's fight to love like He did.

Ephesians 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church ...

That's a high bar, and it'll take some thought and change, won't it.

So then, some suggestions for walking it out in real life:

1. In marriage, winning an argument is something you’ll end up celebrating on your own. If you’re going to get healthy in married life, you’ve got to learn how to lose an argument. And to do that, you’ve got to learn how to be wrong.
   Ever been wrong?  Of course you have.
   Ever had a less than perfect attitude in an argument?  Of course.
2. Issues 'between' you are always a problem.
   Between!  That is the problem!
   For every issue, sit side-by-side with your spouse and put the issue over there on the other side of the table/ room/ battleground.  Now, the two of you address the issue.  What do you see in the issue (not in your partner) that's annoying, important, problematic, whatever.  After you've heard each other and fed back what you heard, solve it together.  Don't let there be anything 'between'.  Marriage is not a contest, it's a continual negotiation where you learn from each other and change and grow up.  And grow closer.
3. Practice makes perfect (or better, at least).
   Don't avoid disagreements, dig them up and examine them.
   Schedule the resolution/diplomatic meeting; "Let's do this one over coffee tomorrow morning at Panera!"  (Having your negotiations in a semi-public arena is a great inhibitor of stupid stuff.)  Okay, maybe home is better, but no hollering.
4. Remember the goal, and say it to each other out loud, often.  We're on the same side, two against the world and every destructive influence.  Two becoming one means every battle is to draw closer, grow wiser, and love deeper.
   
   Warning Note:  It is unlikely that the two will mature simultaneously.  Growing up is personal and independent change.  It is not uncommon for one to continue being selfish and the partner to become accustomed to acquiescence.   Don't do that.

Class and the absence thereof

In a country far away, class distinctions are vividly portrayed.  Although tribal ties seem essential, the primary element for distinguishing between classes is wealth (possessions, land, productivity, liquidity) and influence. 

• In the upper reaches, it may be family wealth, leveraged wealth, and corporate ownership that determine ones placement.

• In the middle realms, regular labor and income are the wealth elements.

• At the lowest, individuals have neither possessions nor significant income nor even perhaps fair labor opportunity.

Class perspective includes a sense of superiority looking from upper to lower as though there was greater human and social worth associated with the upper positions.  Individuals relegated to the lower echelons are presumed to be of lesser value, lesser intellect, lesser ability and significance.   Lower class members are artificially and deliberately constrained from moving upward.  

Oh wait, that's US. And the rest of the wealthy world. My mistake.

Interestingly the wealthier people become, the less relevant they tend to be as members of a community.  

Generally, the wealthier a family is, the fewer truly meaningful connections they have to others.  They have no need of connection and are aware of the risks associated with being too available; it might make demands.  The children of the wealthy are often narrowly constrained to their 'social class' and its associated thinking.  Great attention is given to educational development, but perhaps little attention is given to character development.  The fundamental elements of humanity may be neglected, even unknown for generations within a wealthy family lineage.

Among the wealthy, life tends to focus on position, prestige, power and profitability.  Upward mobility, bigger/ better/ more  house/ car/ clothes/ gadgets/ vacations.  Humanity is slowly squeegeed out of the mix.  

Decisions become of greater significance but are made with progressively less awareness of the risks and impact on others.  Ford's Pinto and its tendency to explode are an illuminating example from decades back.  The high probability of killing someone in an inferno and the human need to preclude it happening, those issues never made it into the boardroom decision making process.  GM's deadly ignition switch followed a similar conscienceless path this year.

The world has turned upside down.  Everything you thought ... may not be.

If a wealthy fellow had to survive apart from the shelter of his wealth, he'd die within days, and his family would die with him.

If a poor fellow had to survive apart from wealth ...  what's new?  He's been doing it for years, and taking care of his wife and kids too.  He's the more extraordinarily capable of the two.

On the other side of that equation ... 
If you're looking for good-hearted openness, got to the poor.  
If you need a place to be accepted, to be received, to be loved, go to the poor.  
If you want to see whole-hearted sacrifice or courageous nobility, go to the poor.  
The wealthy, as a rule, are unable to do such things.  They fear you are after their wealth.  Sick, broken creatures, they're poisoned by their luxury.  They have difficulty even making an overture of genuine friendship.  They worry about what it might cost them.

Upper class
Middle class
Lower class

There's no such thing as a lower, middle, or upper-class of course.  There is a middle income group, however, that continues under duress these days.  The gap between rich and poor is widening at an accelerating pace, and the middle income group is disappearing, merging into the 'working class'.  That's the salaried folks and the hourly folks that provide the wherewithal for rich folks to get richer.

So where is the virtue in such an arrangement?  Where might one find a hero worthy of admiration?  Should we look among the ... ?

Things you know that you didn't learn

Fearfully and wonderfully ....

 The genius for math or science, music or art seems to be inherent in us all, if modern science is correctly understanding what we find in the human brain.  We probably have all the natural genius abilities.  We were born with them, designed genetically to have them, but they are inhibited in most of us.  Why?

Science has concluded that such impressive abilities are likely inherent in us all.  As yet though, science has little insight into why or how such abilities are enabled. Or not enabled.  And if the abilities are already there in each one of us, why might they be 'switched off' in most of us and only fully functional in a few?

Photographic memory, intellectual cross-processing of the content in thousands of books, so many abilities show up unexpectedly in those we call either genius or savant.

"It is hard to overstate the complexity of the brain. Not only are there tens of billions of individual nerve cells, or neurons, which make literally tens of trillions of connections between each other. The complexity really lies in the fact that there are hundreds or maybe even thousands of different types of neurons, which are arranged in highly-organized patterns, and which connect to each other in very specific ways."

For the IT folks, that means that one human brain is more capable in terms of processing (and perhaps storage) than any computer or supercomputer (network of computers) today. No binary data bus, no simple logic gates, the brain processes cross into realms of variable signal strengths, variable signal iterations and sequence flags, context modifiers, and multi-parallel processes with continuous real-time decision model modifications.

"Neurons are polarized – they have an end for inputs and an end for outputs. Each of these may be branched to give thousands of independent sites of input and output. For any given neuron, there are other neurons that connect to it (information flows from all those neurons into our subject neuron) and other neurons that it connects to (information flows from our subject neuron out to all these neurons).

But neurons are not all the same. The most obvious and perhaps most important difference between neurons is that some are excitatory, some inhibitory, and some modulatory. When an excitatory neuron is activated, it releases neurotransmitter at the connections it makes with its output neurons – this neurotransmitter tends to make those other cells electrically active. The exact opposite happens when an inhibitory cell is activated – it releases a different neurotransmitter onto its target neurons, which makes them less electrically active.  If modulatory, it provokes other long-lasting effects.  Too, we've discovered, the same signal may have different effects depending on the state of the receiving neuron, so the distinctions are not absolute.

There are hundreds of subtypes of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, all with different jobs to do. The way in which these different cell types are interconnected determines the functional properties of each little microcircuit in the brain – the type of information that comes into the system, how it filters and transforms that information, how long a neuron will be active before it's shut off, whether it will fire with a rhythm and at what frequency, etc."

Dr. Kevin J. Mitchell on September 25, 2011, 12:00 AM

Dr. Kevin Mitchell is a geneticist who studies neural development. 

You've got perhaps 85 - 95 billion neurons and each neuron has about 2500 connections or synapses; that's when you're born.  As an adult, you'll have 10-15,000 connections per neuron.  Connections are electrical or chemical, and add up on average to the equivalent of 120,000 of our most powerful computer processor chips.

"As to processor speed, let’s assume a very conservative average firing rate for a neuron of 200 times per second. If the signal is passed to 12,500 synapses, then 22 billion neurons are capable of performing 55 petaflops (a petaflop = one quadrillion calculations) per second.

The world’s fastest supercomputer, a monster from Japan unveiled by Fujitsu at a conference this past June, has a configuration of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs. It tested out at 8 petaflops (which only five months later was upped to 10.51 petaflops). Our brains are about five times faster."

... and that's just in the cerebral cortex or about one-fourth of your brain.

"On top of that, we are only beginning to understand the complexity of that wiring. Instead of one-to-one connections, some theorists postulate that there are potentially thousands of different types of inter-neuronal connections, upping the ante. Moreover, recent evidence points to the idea that there is actually subcellular computing going on within neurons, moving our brains from the paradigm of a single computer to something more like a self-contained Internet, with billions of simpler nodes all working together in a massive parallel network. All of this may mean that the types of computing we are capable of are only just being dreamt of by computer scientists." 

 To expand a bit on the actual magnificence of a brain, note that a computer processor chip is manufactured, installed, and then used by software.  The brain is continually manufacturing itself; it's structure is dynamic, changing and adapting, adding and discarding as needed.  Further, that's today's common human brain.  The stunning possibilities suggested by the occasional genius and, even more provocatively by the acquired savant, are suggestive of a surprisingly even more capable design from earliest history.

Experiments in Australia suggest that genius/savant abilities may be temporarily accessible through external magnetic manipulation.  Controversial, of course, but what if we could be enabled?  What if each of us could have instant language acquisition, musical and artistic abilities, and grasp of sciences?  The world and humanity would be rather different almost instantly.

Interestingly, we may as a species have once been fully enabled.  We lost it somewhere along the way.  Life became difficult as we had to work rather than breeze through problems.  Languages became confused, memories and much wisdom were lost.  I've heard such before, of course.  In Sunday school.  Is science proving that my Sunday school teacher was right? :)

Know where you are?

Data updated, August 2015

Look where you are in the world.  Those to the left of you in the graph live in a progressively more constrained economy and with fewer resources.  Those above you in the graph have less in the way of health care, immunizations, nutrition, and clean water.  And their children die at a rate higher than yours; maybe twenty times higher or more.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in a healthy economy are so extraordinarily privileged.

Now what are we going to do with the opportunity we've received?

It's difficult to remember the odd and unusual ease with which we live compared to our brothers and sisters who struggle to feed their families, to battle things like common illnesses, and to make a better world for their children.  It's difficult to remember and be thankful... and perhaps to do something meaningful with the chance we're given.

A 'starter' home in the west vs. real life for more than 50% of the world.  We can help, you know.

The hardest question I've ever been asked, "What are you going to do with what you know?"

Scrambling.