In former eras the U.S. Government may have sought efficiency in taxpayer dollars getting what President Harry S. Truman called "more bang for the buck". Today the U.S. Government searches for extreme negative return expenditures, and the T.S.A. security screening becoming ridiculously invasive are a case in point.
The negative social psychology impacts upon many by the Federal search procedures could be readily converted into a positive reinforcement strategy with some creative thinking. Elizabeth Edwards died today of advanced breast cancer; how many people pass through T.S.A. portals at airports to worldly destinations with undiagnosed cancers and other illnesses that might have been captured during high-tech imaging procedures?
With some technical determination comercial ariport screening venuess might be made with advanced computer intelligence screened health imaging that exist alongside the invasiive T.S.A. procedures. If the high tech screening could be made a useful medical diagnostic tool many passengers passing through would be grateful rather than unhappy that their body was given a thorough once over by a computer. Those passengers found to have anamolous health problems would be given a print-out of their examination, while those passengers found to have nitro-glycerin breast implants (if that is possible) might be referred to an ordinance disposal room.
With very low cost airport medical diagnostic security screening competition, perhaps the three best diagnostic security-medical screening imaging technology bidders would win coveted space at all of the nation's airports alongside the T.S.A. The U.S. Government should determine to advance quality of U.S. airport screening to a really high tech level that does the public some good rather than making them feel violated by the heavy hand of oppressive government.
12/7/10
Neuro-Scientific Moral Psychology; The Emotive Moral Judgment Boundaries to Evaluations of Collective Behavior
Hanover wrote-"Epistimological questions dealing with what do we "know," preceded our dependence upon the scientific method as a means to obtain knowledge. That is, we claimed to "know" things for 1000s of years before we employed "science" as it's known today. Even today, when we say we know something, we don't always mean that our knowledge is based upon scientific reasoning.
Whether various langauges once used the word "science" and "know" interchangeably, is an interesting artifact, but I don't think it's relevant to the OP's use of the term "science," as I suspect he was using a contemporary meaning."
If knowledge and science are synonyms one might take a more contemporary meaning of science as a specialized method of attaining knowledge of the universe and its composition. Theories of knowledge or episteme regarding knowledge about knowledge are subsequent to sentience and direct awareness-knowledge obviously.
I suppose one might regard direct individual sentience as a Sartrist kind of existentialist paradigm and large organizational science such as occurs in making a phoenix lander on the Martian northern polar ice cap margin to discover that the ice is mostly water-ice rather than co2 as is on the southern pole, or M-Theory researches or particle accelerators as collective social phenomena as Sartre described in the critique of dialectical reason-I believe these activities generally are good although they may produce obstructions to science too-an inherent danger of social bureaucratic ossification developing use truths for purposes of social rewards.
Reading in Stephen Hall's 2010 book 'Wisdom', there is a chapter on morality that regards the present elite University philosophical researches into morality as a neuro-cognitive phenomenon. Kantian individualism is classed with the emotional, deep proprietary side of moral judgment and utilitarianism with a more advanced abstract neurological processing capability occurring in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). Moral judgments are based in organic responses to external stimuli such as food tastes/disgust and threats to personal survival.
I would stipulate that organic stimulus response judgments to the external world and food intake quality and survival may be deeply associated with moral judgments as good or bad, yet primary emotional judgments occurring quickly when not enough time exists for advanced creative reasoning about the values of worldly circumstances and suggested best responses are not necessarily wrong when applied to more abstract circumstances.
Innate moral judgments applied to generally have the potential for being wrong responses as well as fallibility in doing math problems can occur. It Is interesting that innate responses may develop with food readily, though one may also dissociate good taste from high food quality such as in junk food in which PFC thought is required to select the bad tasting Brussel Sprouts (to some) instead of the chocolate pudding. The Congress is presently selecting the chocolate pudding of tax cut extensions.
With a neuro-cognitive moral criterion for deciding the OP it is perhaps somewhat more complicated to find a true rather than a politically correct answer. The epistemological foundation of morality based in brain processing organic history, in which moral decisions of good and bad have a certain grounding in automatic associations to food intake or perhaps survival, present different criteria for deciding the effectiveness of science in advancing planetary interests. If science enables the destruction of life on Earth through innumerable means and even destines the destruction of life on Earth through global warming or biological war it is challenging to claim that knowledge/science is improving the planet.
This irony of eating of the Tree of knowledge is that intelligence arises following willful disobedience to the will of God. With all the knowledge gained in the history of mankind, sin and greed may doom mankind to destroy itself through the wrong use of that knowledge/science rather than ‘improve it.
Hall quotes Marc Hauser in his book ‘Moral Minds’ saying, “moral judgments are mediated by an unconscious process, a hidden moral grammar that evaluates the causes and consequences of our own and others’ actions”. Hall also mentions Leon Kass and his books ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’ and “The Hungry Soul”.
While there may be simple historical existence challenges that become deeply grounded as recurrent experience of good or bad events, the early childhood learning of things such as fire burns, or the examples that Schopenhaur presented in ‘The Fourfold Roots of Reason’ that depth perception is learned offer some room to differ from complete acceptance of an organic foundation for morality that cannot be easily changed.
That modern neuro-philosophy finds evidence for the existence of a natural law of moral judgments that Cicero would have been happy with, when the external referents change character from bad to good as can happen in a new environment, conditioned quick or emotive responses may also change. In contemporary politics the immediate day to day political satisfaction of income takes prescience over longer range reasoning-in the PFC is set aside for the ‘up close and personal’ processing in emotional areas of the brain.
Neuroscientific moral psychology may be able to map out various brain functions-one would expect such, yet like mapping out a computer is does not map the operating system or conscious development of moral structures for evaluating the manifest world and the manifold of complexity presented in the modern world. There seems to be an implicit bias toward proprietary emotive evaluations of external circumstances including large science and other bureaucratic endeavors, yet one should blame that drift toward inefficient political and social management of scientific activities rather than upon innate emotive psychological determination of allocation of financial resources for funding science.
Whether various langauges once used the word "science" and "know" interchangeably, is an interesting artifact, but I don't think it's relevant to the OP's use of the term "science," as I suspect he was using a contemporary meaning."
If knowledge and science are synonyms one might take a more contemporary meaning of science as a specialized method of attaining knowledge of the universe and its composition. Theories of knowledge or episteme regarding knowledge about knowledge are subsequent to sentience and direct awareness-knowledge obviously.
I suppose one might regard direct individual sentience as a Sartrist kind of existentialist paradigm and large organizational science such as occurs in making a phoenix lander on the Martian northern polar ice cap margin to discover that the ice is mostly water-ice rather than co2 as is on the southern pole, or M-Theory researches or particle accelerators as collective social phenomena as Sartre described in the critique of dialectical reason-I believe these activities generally are good although they may produce obstructions to science too-an inherent danger of social bureaucratic ossification developing use truths for purposes of social rewards.
Reading in Stephen Hall's 2010 book 'Wisdom', there is a chapter on morality that regards the present elite University philosophical researches into morality as a neuro-cognitive phenomenon. Kantian individualism is classed with the emotional, deep proprietary side of moral judgment and utilitarianism with a more advanced abstract neurological processing capability occurring in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). Moral judgments are based in organic responses to external stimuli such as food tastes/disgust and threats to personal survival.
I would stipulate that organic stimulus response judgments to the external world and food intake quality and survival may be deeply associated with moral judgments as good or bad, yet primary emotional judgments occurring quickly when not enough time exists for advanced creative reasoning about the values of worldly circumstances and suggested best responses are not necessarily wrong when applied to more abstract circumstances.
Innate moral judgments applied to generally have the potential for being wrong responses as well as fallibility in doing math problems can occur. It Is interesting that innate responses may develop with food readily, though one may also dissociate good taste from high food quality such as in junk food in which PFC thought is required to select the bad tasting Brussel Sprouts (to some) instead of the chocolate pudding. The Congress is presently selecting the chocolate pudding of tax cut extensions.
With a neuro-cognitive moral criterion for deciding the OP it is perhaps somewhat more complicated to find a true rather than a politically correct answer. The epistemological foundation of morality based in brain processing organic history, in which moral decisions of good and bad have a certain grounding in automatic associations to food intake or perhaps survival, present different criteria for deciding the effectiveness of science in advancing planetary interests. If science enables the destruction of life on Earth through innumerable means and even destines the destruction of life on Earth through global warming or biological war it is challenging to claim that knowledge/science is improving the planet.
This irony of eating of the Tree of knowledge is that intelligence arises following willful disobedience to the will of God. With all the knowledge gained in the history of mankind, sin and greed may doom mankind to destroy itself through the wrong use of that knowledge/science rather than ‘improve it.
Hall quotes Marc Hauser in his book ‘Moral Minds’ saying, “moral judgments are mediated by an unconscious process, a hidden moral grammar that evaluates the causes and consequences of our own and others’ actions”. Hall also mentions Leon Kass and his books ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’ and “The Hungry Soul”.
While there may be simple historical existence challenges that become deeply grounded as recurrent experience of good or bad events, the early childhood learning of things such as fire burns, or the examples that Schopenhaur presented in ‘The Fourfold Roots of Reason’ that depth perception is learned offer some room to differ from complete acceptance of an organic foundation for morality that cannot be easily changed.
That modern neuro-philosophy finds evidence for the existence of a natural law of moral judgments that Cicero would have been happy with, when the external referents change character from bad to good as can happen in a new environment, conditioned quick or emotive responses may also change. In contemporary politics the immediate day to day political satisfaction of income takes prescience over longer range reasoning-in the PFC is set aside for the ‘up close and personal’ processing in emotional areas of the brain.
Neuroscientific moral psychology may be able to map out various brain functions-one would expect such, yet like mapping out a computer is does not map the operating system or conscious development of moral structures for evaluating the manifest world and the manifold of complexity presented in the modern world. There seems to be an implicit bias toward proprietary emotive evaluations of external circumstances including large science and other bureaucratic endeavors, yet one should blame that drift toward inefficient political and social management of scientific activities rather than upon innate emotive psychological determination of allocation of financial resources for funding science.
Mandarin Duck Congress Readies to Kiss Butt and Expire (Sine Die) with Corporate Globalist Tax Cuts
Extended tax cuts and another year and a month for unemployment insurance (not much confidence in job creation there) and put it on the Chinese charge card of public debt. Besides being controled by foreign governbments increasingly the congress also has set the economy to be controlled by the Saudis (the major funding of terrorism according to State Department cables); anytime the Saudis like they can let terrorists destroy an oil infrastructure, cut off oil suppling and triple the price of oil allowing the U.S. economy to collapse while Saudis earn more for less production.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12/07/tax.deal/?hpt=C1 The President defends the tax cut extensions. He seems not to realize that tax rebates for the middle class are possible next session nor that Republicans could not oppose middle class tax rebates.
Illegal aliens are another national job feedback control mechanism. As soon as the unemployment rate drop millions of illegal aliens surge in decreasing wages and driving up the unemployment rate. President Obama and other government lawyers with economic sludge for brains throw the nation's sovereignty under the bus as Republican adults become stern with them. Democrats apparently have no confidence in their own economic ideas for reform.
President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are lobbying Congress to lay down and give tax cuts to billionaires and millionaires. These people earn more in a day than the poor earn in a lifetime. Their effect on destroying democracy and replacing it with global corporatism is nearly complete. Poor Americans have a future as lint since millionaires replacing economic activism with homosexual agitation ruled the Democrat party.
A democratic party President is urging the Democratic Majority in the House and Senate to sign off on a two year extension of the Bush tax cuts as its final substantive legislative act before scurrying back to their holes as a defeated lame duck gaggle of underachievers. Democratic Party repudiation of their major two planks-ending the war in Afghanistan and the Bush era tax cuts is a legacy likely to doom their credibility for some time; even with a complete majority government Democratic party political ineptitude would reduce their effectiveness to bent efforts to gay the military and graft a corporatist health care monstrosity unto the global corporate beast.
One may better ponder the evolving role of morality and philosophical-neurological researches at Harvard and Stanford with PFC-pre frontal cortex abstract reasoning of moral dilemmas than the national political false consciousness of economic policy that has become the perennial Lucy-Charlie Brown conundrum of failing to kick the football of balanced budget through the uprights.
Emotion occupies a priority spot in select contemporary research into morality. As the brain recognizes immediate threats, or good or bad things to eat, emotions such as fear or disgust appear before abstract cogitation and neural processing.
Emotion may recognize immediate threats before reasoning. Yet emotion like reasoning can be mistaken about the nature of phenomenal appearances; reasoning may make more complex moral evaluations than emotions. In political economic processing concerns of immediate continuity of wealth and power may override rational engineering allocations of national resources.
Emotion at a political-social level may make it all right for a political party to veto good sense. The consequence of failing to think with the PFC rather than emotion can be hazardous to long-range national prosperity.
The Democratic majority is set to sign off on pervasive low taxes for two years although U.S. history shows that such low taxes last led to the 1929-30 stock market crash. When tax rates were higher than today the nation generally was more prosperous and the standard o living of the poor and middle lass increased while the rich-the rich are always with us, had less distance between themselves and the majority. The Eisenhower years were good years.
The political false consciousness of procrastination on budget balancing and ecological economic reform will probably lead to the end of the government of the U.S.A. eventually. As in the end of the Roman republic and empire the rich became to global, greedy and universal providing unemployment (bread and circuses) to the masses while investing in foreign lands. They also flooded their military with foreign ‘guest soldiers’.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12/07/tax.deal/?hpt=C1 The President defends the tax cut extensions. He seems not to realize that tax rebates for the middle class are possible next session nor that Republicans could not oppose middle class tax rebates.
Illegal aliens are another national job feedback control mechanism. As soon as the unemployment rate drop millions of illegal aliens surge in decreasing wages and driving up the unemployment rate. President Obama and other government lawyers with economic sludge for brains throw the nation's sovereignty under the bus as Republican adults become stern with them. Democrats apparently have no confidence in their own economic ideas for reform.
President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are lobbying Congress to lay down and give tax cuts to billionaires and millionaires. These people earn more in a day than the poor earn in a lifetime. Their effect on destroying democracy and replacing it with global corporatism is nearly complete. Poor Americans have a future as lint since millionaires replacing economic activism with homosexual agitation ruled the Democrat party.
A democratic party President is urging the Democratic Majority in the House and Senate to sign off on a two year extension of the Bush tax cuts as its final substantive legislative act before scurrying back to their holes as a defeated lame duck gaggle of underachievers. Democratic Party repudiation of their major two planks-ending the war in Afghanistan and the Bush era tax cuts is a legacy likely to doom their credibility for some time; even with a complete majority government Democratic party political ineptitude would reduce their effectiveness to bent efforts to gay the military and graft a corporatist health care monstrosity unto the global corporate beast.
One may better ponder the evolving role of morality and philosophical-neurological researches at Harvard and Stanford with PFC-pre frontal cortex abstract reasoning of moral dilemmas than the national political false consciousness of economic policy that has become the perennial Lucy-Charlie Brown conundrum of failing to kick the football of balanced budget through the uprights.
Emotion occupies a priority spot in select contemporary research into morality. As the brain recognizes immediate threats, or good or bad things to eat, emotions such as fear or disgust appear before abstract cogitation and neural processing.
Emotion may recognize immediate threats before reasoning. Yet emotion like reasoning can be mistaken about the nature of phenomenal appearances; reasoning may make more complex moral evaluations than emotions. In political economic processing concerns of immediate continuity of wealth and power may override rational engineering allocations of national resources.
Emotion at a political-social level may make it all right for a political party to veto good sense. The consequence of failing to think with the PFC rather than emotion can be hazardous to long-range national prosperity.
The Democratic majority is set to sign off on pervasive low taxes for two years although U.S. history shows that such low taxes last led to the 1929-30 stock market crash. When tax rates were higher than today the nation generally was more prosperous and the standard o living of the poor and middle lass increased while the rich-the rich are always with us, had less distance between themselves and the majority. The Eisenhower years were good years.
The political false consciousness of procrastination on budget balancing and ecological economic reform will probably lead to the end of the government of the U.S.A. eventually. As in the end of the Roman republic and empire the rich became to global, greedy and universal providing unemployment (bread and circuses) to the masses while investing in foreign lands. They also flooded their military with foreign ‘guest soldiers’.
12/5/10
Science/Knowledge; Good or Bad for Earth?
Science is knowledge. Badly applied science is destructive.
Science enabled the population to expand beyond a billion people, create nuclear weapons, global warming, modern militaries, defoliation, pcbs, Auschwitz, the Interstate highway system, three billion cows, high Arctic pollution, industrial disease, microwave weapons, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Frankenstein...
Painting humanity into an existential-environmental corner is largely the application of science to technology and mass production. One can imagine a humanity that evolved differently as intelligent beings bright enough to start with to not conflict with the environment much while yet inventing new constructions. A zero net loss of biospheric health principle is still fundamental and an inference one must make with all applications of science to the world-sphere-ecology.
Science' has a meaning, strictly; 'knowledge'. Science is a word-meaning unit obviously. One must start somewhere epistemologically speaking. Perhaps you can evolve your communication beyond pettyfoggery. The etymology of the word science is 'knowledge'. That's a definition not a tautology, and the issue of 'is science good for the planet', is not fundamentally a linguistic issue.
Popper wrote that 'rationality can't be proved-that you just know what it is'. Thats a point worth recollecting when denying the validity of basic points of communication.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_etymology_the_word_science
Knowledge is something a human has or does with their brain. Science is not an reflexive behavior such as coyotes do when running under the moonlight in arroyos howling for happiness.
example A of 'Scientific progress does not make the world a better place...
example A; Humans with knowledge can apply it or not. A genius might know how to turn the Pacific Ocean into concrete with some special additive, yet it would be harmful if the knowledge(science) were applied in such a way.
example B: Tilly knows through research how to prevent birth defects. Tilly applies the knowledge and halts all birth defects and makes all voters Republicans, therefor the world is a better place.
One may discern that the application of science can be good or bad, and that too is knowledge as wisdom.
One can readily make categorical confusions or errors in language. Science means knowledge as an historical use of the term. Obviously linguistic philosophical descriptions of the meaning of words is a field for itself. One may readily circumlocute away from reasonably simply empirical concerns into intentional concepts.
It is fair enough to rephrase propositions in order to better answer them.
Substituting 'science' with 'knowledge' we may put the statement of this thread as 'Knowledge progress does not make the world a better place'.
There-we have achieved our point from which to make scathing jokes and reposts such as with the further reductio and contrapositive'Advancing ignorance makes the world a better place'.
Then we may thus generate aphorisms such as 'ignorance must make the world a better place because it is incapable of recognizing anything wrong'.
Discretion in applying knowledge however so technical it may be is the beneficial wit of science.
On the point that knowledge depends on what one does with it--I do not agree. Knowledge is self-standing so far as thought is locally independent in space-time continua in human sentience.
On the further point clarified, that what one does with knowledge is trivial-that is absurd. What one does is the essential variable in the world being made 'better' or not by knowledge/science.
It would be useful to define a list of things that would make the world better if they were made to occur by an application of knowledge/science. Relocating the planet to a better neighborhood in the galaxy with more earth-like planets might make the world better yet that is not within the knowledge base of scientific method right now.
The first rule of medicine in treating a patient is 'don't make the condition worse'. Mindless economic applications of knowledge/science discoveries would certainly fail consequentialist varieties of utilitarian philosophy. Act and rule based utilitarianism applied to science-knowledge a priori in order to determine the effects on the world for good or bad often are not made at all politically or individually. Historically the fundamental criteria for scientific applications are fiduciary and that state certainly is prevalent today.
On the question of is science more efficient or knowledge acquisition more efficient if the methods cohere within a bureaucracy, and do bureaucratic scientific procedures make the world a better place (accomplish goals on the list of things to do that make the world a better place) perhaps versus individualistic scientific efforts, perhaps that is a trivial question if there are no objective parameters for describing making the world better.
It is plain though that scientific applications ares the basic parameter for determining if science a good or bad effect upon world improvement.
Science enabled the population to expand beyond a billion people, create nuclear weapons, global warming, modern militaries, defoliation, pcbs, Auschwitz, the Interstate highway system, three billion cows, high Arctic pollution, industrial disease, microwave weapons, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Frankenstein...
Painting humanity into an existential-environmental corner is largely the application of science to technology and mass production. One can imagine a humanity that evolved differently as intelligent beings bright enough to start with to not conflict with the environment much while yet inventing new constructions. A zero net loss of biospheric health principle is still fundamental and an inference one must make with all applications of science to the world-sphere-ecology.
Science' has a meaning, strictly; 'knowledge'. Science is a word-meaning unit obviously. One must start somewhere epistemologically speaking. Perhaps you can evolve your communication beyond pettyfoggery. The etymology of the word science is 'knowledge'. That's a definition not a tautology, and the issue of 'is science good for the planet', is not fundamentally a linguistic issue.
Popper wrote that 'rationality can't be proved-that you just know what it is'. Thats a point worth recollecting when denying the validity of basic points of communication.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_etymology_the_word_science
Knowledge is something a human has or does with their brain. Science is not an reflexive behavior such as coyotes do when running under the moonlight in arroyos howling for happiness.
example A of 'Scientific progress does not make the world a better place...
example A; Humans with knowledge can apply it or not. A genius might know how to turn the Pacific Ocean into concrete with some special additive, yet it would be harmful if the knowledge(science) were applied in such a way.
example B: Tilly knows through research how to prevent birth defects. Tilly applies the knowledge and halts all birth defects and makes all voters Republicans, therefor the world is a better place.
One may discern that the application of science can be good or bad, and that too is knowledge as wisdom.
One can readily make categorical confusions or errors in language. Science means knowledge as an historical use of the term. Obviously linguistic philosophical descriptions of the meaning of words is a field for itself. One may readily circumlocute away from reasonably simply empirical concerns into intentional concepts.
It is fair enough to rephrase propositions in order to better answer them.
Substituting 'science' with 'knowledge' we may put the statement of this thread as 'Knowledge progress does not make the world a better place'.
There-we have achieved our point from which to make scathing jokes and reposts such as with the further reductio and contrapositive'Advancing ignorance makes the world a better place'.
Then we may thus generate aphorisms such as 'ignorance must make the world a better place because it is incapable of recognizing anything wrong'.
Discretion in applying knowledge however so technical it may be is the beneficial wit of science.
On the point that knowledge depends on what one does with it--I do not agree. Knowledge is self-standing so far as thought is locally independent in space-time continua in human sentience.
On the further point clarified, that what one does with knowledge is trivial-that is absurd. What one does is the essential variable in the world being made 'better' or not by knowledge/science.
It would be useful to define a list of things that would make the world better if they were made to occur by an application of knowledge/science. Relocating the planet to a better neighborhood in the galaxy with more earth-like planets might make the world better yet that is not within the knowledge base of scientific method right now.
The first rule of medicine in treating a patient is 'don't make the condition worse'. Mindless economic applications of knowledge/science discoveries would certainly fail consequentialist varieties of utilitarian philosophy. Act and rule based utilitarianism applied to science-knowledge a priori in order to determine the effects on the world for good or bad often are not made at all politically or individually. Historically the fundamental criteria for scientific applications are fiduciary and that state certainly is prevalent today.
On the question of is science more efficient or knowledge acquisition more efficient if the methods cohere within a bureaucracy, and do bureaucratic scientific procedures make the world a better place (accomplish goals on the list of things to do that make the world a better place) perhaps versus individualistic scientific efforts, perhaps that is a trivial question if there are no objective parameters for describing making the world better.
It is plain though that scientific applications ares the basic parameter for determining if science a good or bad effect upon world improvement.
Intellectually Weak, Spoilt Congress, Drifts Toward Tax Cuts & Deeper Public Debt
Never do today what you can put off for a year or two is contemporary Congressional thought on balancing the budget. An intellectually weak Congress appears set to succumb to fiscal relativism once again and deepen the public debt. A bad hillbilly ethos (the good ones have balanced budgets) makes putting the poor to work and keeping out cheap foreign immigrant labor priority last. The Bush era tax cuts and military spending increases created the present high unemployment rate. Wall Street and the rich are prospering. Extending tax cuts is McConnelnomics of royal advantage for the rich while the nation rots. Molly coddling supremacist dissimulation is weak dogocratic party policy choose letting America degrade.
. Better democratic leaders would have made short work of the McConnell palaver and the fatuous war against terror methodology as well. Let the tax cuts expire and negotiate from a position of strength. Party extremists may actually believe their kookonomic debt deepening will employ the poor right away or simply wish to sell out the U.S.A. to global rule.
Give the middle class its money back through rebates if they too are unwilling to help the nation recover economically. Give just 50% of benefits for extended unemployment payments.
President Obama and the lame duck Congress appear ready to cave in to Republican demands that wealth be concentrated and historically low taxes continue for the ultra-rich. The Congress may sign off on across the board tax cuts without correspondingly cutting spending significantly in order to help Wall Street continue to rise and let Scrooge plan his global strategies better.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/12/04/obamas-leadership-scrutiny-amid-negotiations-gop/
Extending unemployment benefits again-going on 18 months is unprecedented -another charge it to those for the decline and fall period of American history. Tax cuts, a jobless recovery and rising unemployment (9.8%) with more free trade pacts (S. Korea) and a public debt today
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
. Better democratic leaders would have made short work of the McConnell palaver and the fatuous war against terror methodology as well. Let the tax cuts expire and negotiate from a position of strength. Party extremists may actually believe their kookonomic debt deepening will employ the poor right away or simply wish to sell out the U.S.A. to global rule.
Give the middle class its money back through rebates if they too are unwilling to help the nation recover economically. Give just 50% of benefits for extended unemployment payments.
President Obama and the lame duck Congress appear ready to cave in to Republican demands that wealth be concentrated and historically low taxes continue for the ultra-rich. The Congress may sign off on across the board tax cuts without correspondingly cutting spending significantly in order to help Wall Street continue to rise and let Scrooge plan his global strategies better.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/12/04/obamas-leadership-scrutiny-amid-negotiations-gop/
Extending unemployment benefits again-going on 18 months is unprecedented -another charge it to those for the decline and fall period of American history. Tax cuts, a jobless recovery and rising unemployment (9.8%) with more free trade pacts (S. Korea) and a public debt today
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
12/4/10
President Obama's Leadership Crisis; Pro-Homo Blue Dog Faces Tough Issues/Let Tax Cuts Expire
President Obama and the lame duck Congress appear ready to cave in to the regal sounding litigious Mitch McConnell class Republican demands that wealth be concentrated and historically low taxes continue for the ultra-rich. The Congress may sign off on across the board tax cuts without correspondingly cutting spending significantly in order to help Wall Street continue to rise and let Scrooge plan his global strategies better. Just let the tax cuts expire and find some way to rebate those earning less than $100,000 annually.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/12/04/obamas-leadership-scrutiny-amid-negotiations-gop/
Extending unemployment benefits again-going on 18 months is unprecedented -another charge it to those for the decline and fall period of American history. Tax cuts, a jobless recovery and rising unemployment (9.8%) with more free trade pacts (S. Korea) and a public debt today of...
$13 trillion, 849 billion, 512 million and some change...
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
One wonders how long this can continue?
I believe the secret lay within monetary theory and a theory of capital.
Von Mises and the Austrian school of economists began an investigation into the nature of capital and money around the turn of the 20th century. For about eighty years right unto Milton Freedman monetary and capital theory pondered the deep question of the relationship of money to material wealth asking such questions, as is the capital in the goods producing capability of a factory or in the goods themselves?
The market disequilibria between capital, money and bad investing that precipitated the 1929-30 stock market collapse brought the theories of John Maynard Keynes as well as the pragmatism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the fore. Laugher and supply side economics with a neo-Keynesianism deficit spending pump priming of the post Vietnam era economic readjustment and slump set the United States onto a course of economic growth fueled by federal military spending and energy development. There was a critical event in the Nixon administration though that allowed the Reagan economic revolution to proceed; the dollar was taken off the gold standard.
Detaching the dollar from any material direct value association meant that the Federal Reserve had no responsibility to value dollars in relation to gold supply in federal possession. If the Federal Reserve hitherto had printed new dollars it diluted the value of the dollars in relation to the gold. From the Nixon administration on the value of a dollar was just in the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government and in its exclusive right to print dollars that cannot be counterfeited.
Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke's decision to quantitatively ease money supply and print 800 billion dollars of new money in effect to buy U.S. debt (bonds) simultaneously devalues the relative value of the public debt. Perhaps that is the secret elixir of solvency in the voodoo economic policy of the U.S.A.
On the gold standard money supply could not be increased without deflating the value of the dollar. Now, money supply can be increased locally without creating any measurable equanimity between holders of the dollar objectively. The dollar is simply one exclusive though universal currency that has value so long as the traders in dollars honor it against other currencies. It is entirely possible that the dollar one day might be regarded as worthless as confederate dollars if dollar holders defect en mass to another currency through the minting of new exchange paper while the dollar is destroyed.
When the dollar entered the realm of fiscal relativism during the Clinton and Bush II administrations a variety of financial schemes were perpetrated- often enabled by federal economic policy-that paid off in the eventual 2008 economic debacle and present shadow of the past recession. Fiscal relativism is somewhat equivalent to moral relativism and has an essential origin in conflicts in value theory or what philosophers sometimes call axiology.
Moral values do have a true role in value theory. A society may regard full employment and the well being of all citizens and the environment as a high value. A society may consider that a stable monetary policy and enterprise market is no more important than a stable labor market; the working class should not have perennial uncertainty regarding labor supply from legal and illegal foreign immigrants. The producer class should have reduced uncertainty regarding tax rates. Tax rates should be such that wealth is not concentrated to such extent that democratic parameters and national self-interest of the citizen majority are defeated. Taxation creating surpluses can be spent on environmental reconstruction and space habitation, for example.
Dollars may be tied to any given material or existential thing that can be quantified. Historically these things were rare minerals or metals yet the choice is circumstantial and historical. Economic development and methods of exchanging definite value units should function to positively reinforce democratically defined social goals, or at least to proscribe select activities from value unit reinforcement.
The federal policy today of a high entropy global economic phenomenon serviced with dollars valued in fiscal relativism and a large U.S. public debt of phenomenal and uncertain value is evidently an unstable economy best suited to mal-develop the developing nations into ecologically harmful high consumption, non-renewable economic activity. Nationally the policy has permitted the degradation of millions of Americans displaced from real opportunity from meaningful employment such that they could afford to pursue their own preferred self-interests. Work for wages enables citizens to afford graduate education and to become educators instead of being unemployed, collecting food stamps and experiencing their lifetime trickle away in futility.
The Obama administration and national democratic party should let all the tax cuts expire and develop alternative means to reinforce those out of work and drawing unemployment benefits-the benefits should at least be cut in half if extended. New ecological economic reform actions and far better ecologically innovative Mexican border control of illegal migrant labor needs to be advanced strait away. Specific policy actions to identify and put to work all those out of work can be made-yet traditional economic logic detached from pragmatic functionality is what F.D.R. was able to overcome while others would go stand out on an office ledge.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/12/04/obamas-leadership-scrutiny-amid-negotiations-gop/
Extending unemployment benefits again-going on 18 months is unprecedented -another charge it to those for the decline and fall period of American history. Tax cuts, a jobless recovery and rising unemployment (9.8%) with more free trade pacts (S. Korea) and a public debt today of...
$13 trillion, 849 billion, 512 million and some change...
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
One wonders how long this can continue?
I believe the secret lay within monetary theory and a theory of capital.
Von Mises and the Austrian school of economists began an investigation into the nature of capital and money around the turn of the 20th century. For about eighty years right unto Milton Freedman monetary and capital theory pondered the deep question of the relationship of money to material wealth asking such questions, as is the capital in the goods producing capability of a factory or in the goods themselves?
The market disequilibria between capital, money and bad investing that precipitated the 1929-30 stock market collapse brought the theories of John Maynard Keynes as well as the pragmatism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the fore. Laugher and supply side economics with a neo-Keynesianism deficit spending pump priming of the post Vietnam era economic readjustment and slump set the United States onto a course of economic growth fueled by federal military spending and energy development. There was a critical event in the Nixon administration though that allowed the Reagan economic revolution to proceed; the dollar was taken off the gold standard.
Detaching the dollar from any material direct value association meant that the Federal Reserve had no responsibility to value dollars in relation to gold supply in federal possession. If the Federal Reserve hitherto had printed new dollars it diluted the value of the dollars in relation to the gold. From the Nixon administration on the value of a dollar was just in the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government and in its exclusive right to print dollars that cannot be counterfeited.
Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke's decision to quantitatively ease money supply and print 800 billion dollars of new money in effect to buy U.S. debt (bonds) simultaneously devalues the relative value of the public debt. Perhaps that is the secret elixir of solvency in the voodoo economic policy of the U.S.A.
On the gold standard money supply could not be increased without deflating the value of the dollar. Now, money supply can be increased locally without creating any measurable equanimity between holders of the dollar objectively. The dollar is simply one exclusive though universal currency that has value so long as the traders in dollars honor it against other currencies. It is entirely possible that the dollar one day might be regarded as worthless as confederate dollars if dollar holders defect en mass to another currency through the minting of new exchange paper while the dollar is destroyed.
When the dollar entered the realm of fiscal relativism during the Clinton and Bush II administrations a variety of financial schemes were perpetrated- often enabled by federal economic policy-that paid off in the eventual 2008 economic debacle and present shadow of the past recession. Fiscal relativism is somewhat equivalent to moral relativism and has an essential origin in conflicts in value theory or what philosophers sometimes call axiology.
Moral values do have a true role in value theory. A society may regard full employment and the well being of all citizens and the environment as a high value. A society may consider that a stable monetary policy and enterprise market is no more important than a stable labor market; the working class should not have perennial uncertainty regarding labor supply from legal and illegal foreign immigrants. The producer class should have reduced uncertainty regarding tax rates. Tax rates should be such that wealth is not concentrated to such extent that democratic parameters and national self-interest of the citizen majority are defeated. Taxation creating surpluses can be spent on environmental reconstruction and space habitation, for example.
Dollars may be tied to any given material or existential thing that can be quantified. Historically these things were rare minerals or metals yet the choice is circumstantial and historical. Economic development and methods of exchanging definite value units should function to positively reinforce democratically defined social goals, or at least to proscribe select activities from value unit reinforcement.
The federal policy today of a high entropy global economic phenomenon serviced with dollars valued in fiscal relativism and a large U.S. public debt of phenomenal and uncertain value is evidently an unstable economy best suited to mal-develop the developing nations into ecologically harmful high consumption, non-renewable economic activity. Nationally the policy has permitted the degradation of millions of Americans displaced from real opportunity from meaningful employment such that they could afford to pursue their own preferred self-interests. Work for wages enables citizens to afford graduate education and to become educators instead of being unemployed, collecting food stamps and experiencing their lifetime trickle away in futility.
The Obama administration and national democratic party should let all the tax cuts expire and develop alternative means to reinforce those out of work and drawing unemployment benefits-the benefits should at least be cut in half if extended. New ecological economic reform actions and far better ecologically innovative Mexican border control of illegal migrant labor needs to be advanced strait away. Specific policy actions to identify and put to work all those out of work can be made-yet traditional economic logic detached from pragmatic functionality is what F.D.R. was able to overcome while others would go stand out on an office ledge.
12/3/10
Winning With Winter in Anchorage Alaska
Winter is the tipping point for the return of longer days in the northern hemisphere. With the winter solstice on December 21st the shortest day of the year has arrived, the fall of the days is over and things start looking up.
As the frost accumulates on the ceiling of the tent this month,and when the wind chill turns that 9 degree temperature into minus thirty and fine snow dusts the inside of the tent through the vents one knows that if the nose turning purple doesn't become necrotic that it won't be necessary to promote a Liberty Valance chic propaganda campaign next year.
We look forward to the arrival of winter when each day a few minutes of additional sunlight promise the basking days of February. If the homeless of Anchorage have bus passes during the winter provided by the municipal government for free we are sure that the effect of saving many from hypothermia will warm the hearts of bureaucrats collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars of cold compensation. While such a program does not yet exist, it is almost inevitable that the prevailing compassionate conservativism will soon create such relief for the poor finding their way into being stranded in Anchorage from outlying villages.
Studying my tent fora few hours or more, I realized that it is a good model for a solid tempoerary shelter universally. One needs a steel multi-pipe connector at the top and several steel pipes to insert and fasten into it. A shelter roughly like a bell shaped tent wood be structured with insulated panels attached with pipe clamp fasteners. The seem covering would be attached with wing nuts on the left and right. The floor would also be several pipes off the ground level connect the also bracing the side struts. chunks of wood could be tossed under the floor pipe joists before the insulated floor panels are put down.
The shelter could be assembled in two hours or less. The panels could be made of plywood with fiberglass resin rolled on to repel water, and they would be the bread over a one inch blue foam insulation panel.
Since I am writing a little here about the homeless problem in Anchorage Alaska there is one additional point about surviving the winter here I ought to mention.
The City is fairly sprawling and there aren't many places where the homeless or stranded might legally camp. It is a hard thing to be able to build a quality shelter on a day or two from natural wood and instead be compelled for social reasons to spend a winter sleeping on the ground under a bit of nylon cloth without a fire or propane to heat coffee and raise the internal body temperature. All of these comfortable insiders obviously have other priorities and are content enough to write off those not winning at social musical chairs as inebriates and mentals.
As the City outlawed camping in city parks last winter they should create camping facilities for the homeless that could be screened for genuine need such as are food stamp eligibility and as should be social security and medicare are. Quality camp sites just for the screened homelss ought to be made available seasonally.
I cannot create a business here manufacturing those solid temporary dome homeless structures easy to assemble and disassemble. Perhaps the top 2% of income earnings can find another trickle up from the concept and create a local producer who would provide surplus or demo units for the use of the homeless campers seasonally.
There is one shelter in Anchorage Alaska is a cold part of town that is reportedly (see O'Malley's article in the Anchorage Daily News Dec. 2nd) full and over flowing these cold nights with the homeless sleeping packed with more than 200 each night. 16 homeless people perished from hypothermia this year. This week three were rescued in cold weather incoherence and taken to hospital. A better system of realistically affording opportunities for human beings to help themselves in cold weather without being warehoused in communal ad hoc shleters should be made.
40% of the people at a homeless shelter have mental illness issues. The shelters are a first stop for people out of jail. Drug users and alcohol abuse find the shelter a phenomenal stop. Needless too say, such a synergy of social dysfunction is not conducive to personal security or positioning for advancement of personal interest; it is just another challenge for survival in addition to the winter. It is also a source of stress as a stop for rural Alaskans that visit the city of Anchorage and become stranded here for whatever reason-perhaps they missed the last flight to Kodiak for work.
As the frost accumulates on the ceiling of the tent this month,and when the wind chill turns that 9 degree temperature into minus thirty and fine snow dusts the inside of the tent through the vents one knows that if the nose turning purple doesn't become necrotic that it won't be necessary to promote a Liberty Valance chic propaganda campaign next year.
We look forward to the arrival of winter when each day a few minutes of additional sunlight promise the basking days of February. If the homeless of Anchorage have bus passes during the winter provided by the municipal government for free we are sure that the effect of saving many from hypothermia will warm the hearts of bureaucrats collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars of cold compensation. While such a program does not yet exist, it is almost inevitable that the prevailing compassionate conservativism will soon create such relief for the poor finding their way into being stranded in Anchorage from outlying villages.
Studying my tent fora few hours or more, I realized that it is a good model for a solid tempoerary shelter universally. One needs a steel multi-pipe connector at the top and several steel pipes to insert and fasten into it. A shelter roughly like a bell shaped tent wood be structured with insulated panels attached with pipe clamp fasteners. The seem covering would be attached with wing nuts on the left and right. The floor would also be several pipes off the ground level connect the also bracing the side struts. chunks of wood could be tossed under the floor pipe joists before the insulated floor panels are put down.
The shelter could be assembled in two hours or less. The panels could be made of plywood with fiberglass resin rolled on to repel water, and they would be the bread over a one inch blue foam insulation panel.
Since I am writing a little here about the homeless problem in Anchorage Alaska there is one additional point about surviving the winter here I ought to mention.
The City is fairly sprawling and there aren't many places where the homeless or stranded might legally camp. It is a hard thing to be able to build a quality shelter on a day or two from natural wood and instead be compelled for social reasons to spend a winter sleeping on the ground under a bit of nylon cloth without a fire or propane to heat coffee and raise the internal body temperature. All of these comfortable insiders obviously have other priorities and are content enough to write off those not winning at social musical chairs as inebriates and mentals.
As the City outlawed camping in city parks last winter they should create camping facilities for the homeless that could be screened for genuine need such as are food stamp eligibility and as should be social security and medicare are. Quality camp sites just for the screened homelss ought to be made available seasonally.
I cannot create a business here manufacturing those solid temporary dome homeless structures easy to assemble and disassemble. Perhaps the top 2% of income earnings can find another trickle up from the concept and create a local producer who would provide surplus or demo units for the use of the homeless campers seasonally.
There is one shelter in Anchorage Alaska is a cold part of town that is reportedly (see O'Malley's article in the Anchorage Daily News Dec. 2nd) full and over flowing these cold nights with the homeless sleeping packed with more than 200 each night. 16 homeless people perished from hypothermia this year. This week three were rescued in cold weather incoherence and taken to hospital. A better system of realistically affording opportunities for human beings to help themselves in cold weather without being warehoused in communal ad hoc shleters should be made.
40% of the people at a homeless shelter have mental illness issues. The shelters are a first stop for people out of jail. Drug users and alcohol abuse find the shelter a phenomenal stop. Needless too say, such a synergy of social dysfunction is not conducive to personal security or positioning for advancement of personal interest; it is just another challenge for survival in addition to the winter. It is also a source of stress as a stop for rural Alaskans that visit the city of Anchorage and become stranded here for whatever reason-perhaps they missed the last flight to Kodiak for work.
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