Nineteen Twenties and Thirties Isolationist Sentiment in the U.S.A.?

 There may have been some sentiment in the pre-W.W. II U.S.A. to stay out of European problems, conflicts and social diseases. Britain after all had burned down the U.S. capital in 1812 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1874 was no great thing.

The United States had numerous post-civil war reconstruction problems. Intervention in the First World War had created much turmoil. The United States had plenty of work to do in its own space such as building, roads, electrification, dams and so forth. It was a busy time of great post-war expansion that became a bubble that crashed leading to the depression.

As Americans had spent money bailing Europe out of the vast diagonal trench war by joining on the pile of soldiers and artillery that forced Germany to accept an armistice and levied a bill for damages on them (that in part was a motivation for the second round) they spent the 1920′s chasing national progress. That was followed by the depression. Some Americans made clothing out of gunnysacks (large burlap bags to hold potatoes) and sought work.

A former French Chancellor- Clemenceau predicted that when the allies did not guarantee the peace after the First War that the second war would develop and he turned out to be right. American investors felt that building up German industrialization perhaps an I.B.M. or Henry Ford are examples. was a better idea than entering into more military agreements.

It is somewhat doubtful that in the 1920s Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover would have had the international political skill and military power (the United States wasn’t yet a Super power militarily and had no A-bomb up its sleeve) to keep Europe pacified while containing the extreme communist threat from the Soviet Union. In fact the Soviet Union’s emergency into existence during the First World War when Germany beat up the Tsar’s military pretty readily leading to the revolution and Red revolution of 1917 gave the United States a fair reason to reinforce Germany on the right to defrappe the Red threat from the east.

I also suspect that the rich of the gilded age were somewhat sympathetic to the deposed German royalty that were booted out in the German revolution at the end of the first war. The United States had actually sent some military forces to support the white army battling the reds during the Russian revolution - about 2000, and that hadn’t worked out well.

In order to keep things strait U.S. politicians developed a long range policy of being against Reds and Russians that continued to the present. That single attitude makes it easier for U.S. leaders to know how to play their roles without knowing much about international affairs.

In my opinion the U.S.A. wasn’t very isolated in the 20s and 30s. Jet aircraft didn’t exist and even Pan Am hadn’t started trans-Atlantic flights. People that had immigrated here or were descended from immigrants usually hadn’t the money to afford to tour Europe via cruise ship and then return home to the little house on the prairie. The rich however did travel to Europe a lot. Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Europe maybe 30 times before he turned 18 and that probably helped him manage the Second World War better than if he had just rowed up and down the Hudson River on some kind of rowing team when not driving a taxi.

One result of the chaos in Europe was the decision to limit immigration from Eastern Europe where it was believed many anarchists lived who might bring anarchy and communism to the U.S.A. Because the rich were running government then, as now, the red danger from Eastern Eurasia decisively prevented some immigrants from spending their lives breathing the air of freedom that exists some places west of the east coast, or did then, before pollution expanded from automobiles a lot in urban areas of the as as far as Los Angeles.

Why the decrease in freedom

 The greater the population density the more people there are that can adversely impact one’s ‘freedom’. With the profusion and acceleration of technological developments more people can organize more efficiently to oppress others. Organizations have more surveillance and tracking capability each year, and every dollar one spends can be tracked as well as cars, conversation etc. Global media and spy agencies, government officials and the curious get into everyone’s private space apparently so much as they like. Public education conditions students to think in accord with political correctness preferred by the ruling class.

With a limited area that is the Earth for people to live in, exploit and try to control in some ways with governance, free ranges of motion may continue to decrease for some, in some ways, while increasing for others, in some ways. President Biden recently referred to those states loosening Covid 19 mask wearing and public spacing as ‘Neanderthals’ (who presumably would not understand what germs and airborne pathogens are or how to defend against them). Does mandatory masking wearing impact freedom? In some ways it does, in other ways it doesn’t. If one asked some people not to use talcum powder riding public buses because it makes some people sneeze, they might be offended and cry havoc about attacks on their freedom.

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2021/democracy-under-siege

One could move on to the subject of what is freedom and then determine if that can be quantified and if the amount of it is increasing, decreasing or stable. Regulating people so they don’t drive their environment-tramping vehicles into storefronts or throw people out of the good seats at the basketball game that they didn’t pay for impacts things. I wonder if there is some sort of coefficient between population density and freedom that isn’t environmentally determined that also effects the level of skill specialization possible.

A commune with all things equal for everyone would have a kind of freedom that would not exist in a society based on individual rights and political self determination, strong border security, private property and private business, and the latter would have freedom to be exclusive and develop their own ideas and inventions/products etc that would be lacking in a herd of animals without private property, private space or individual rights.

I don’t wish to take swipes and forced free to be the same as everyone else communes here Instead i wonder if demographics won’t drive the two polar opposites toward some sort of balance given the world population continues to increase and the environmental health continues to decline.

Concentrating wealth and networks of production, distribution and communications globally seems to be the inevitable result of transistors and miniaturization that occurred since the mid-20th century. Maybe leadership more like Casey Stengel or Yogi Berra with degrees in environmental economics, philosophy and a load of common sense and dead reckoning will fix the world if we are lucky.

Causes and phenomenalities of the national splintering

 Public education is universal, as well as television, and it may be that the mass culture drives one to select a brand of social products to go along with. If public education for primary and secondary schools is over-mature, the remedy might be to move about 60% of public school financing to contracts for private schools that anyone could choose to send their progeny to. maybe more diversity would let people develop a better sense of individual and personal interest rather than being indoctrinated with political correctness.

National splintering it isn't a new phenomenon... https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674064362

It could be that Alvin Toffler’s 1972 book ‘Future Shock’ about the pace of change and data overwhelming ordinary people actualized with a sense of the masses being intellectual drowned an at a loss or need to be responsible for the governance of their society, or perhaps relinquishing rule to the 1% and the corporate people at the top.

The United States has gone through a zillion social changes forced from the elites and Wall Street the past 30 years, or since the Reagan administration even, and their may be some cynicism. People have taken to a little trendy neo-nihilism and have tuned out from a degree of belief in the decency of society. People have become emulators of the trends sold by Wall Street, and they know Wall Street has been bailed out by the Federal Reserve. Political economic theory and all else is almost dead as people sig the money fuhrer of the time. None besides Bernie Sanders want to be regarded as socialist or disloyal to Wall Street since corporatism has taken over, the rich have bought the broadcast media and corporate censors control free speech giving the Orwellian epithet ‘hate speech’, hate crimes and stopping just short of ‘thought crimes’.

In the Clinton administration I thought it was disgusting that a fellow showed up for work with pink hair highlight, mascara and a hangover. Eventually the neo-conservative Chief Justice of SCOTUS decided to make homosexual marriage the law of the land. That was a lasting split of sentiments. Instead of busting the old wine skin the homosexual crowd should have established a new institution for themselves that left the old intact.

Abortion did not help traditional moral norms, neither has the Democrat Party preference for illegal aliens (now called non-citizens) that flooded the nation with tens of millions of cheap workers. Republicans developed a cadre of neo-troglodytes that hate science, global warming and mass extinction of the Anthropocene era having decided that they are leftist hoaxes.

Democrats prefer legal dope and tend toward being antipathetic to Christian values unless the church has secularly conformed and semi-non-faith doctrinal winkyness.

Some Americans seem to be immersed in a brave new world order and just want an interesting, comfortable and prosperous lifestyle, or ample power and prestige, and don’t really care about suffering of others or social change unless it is trendy to do so. In a way the nation is no longer grounded in meaningful standards and has become Darwinist free floating dollars for themselves without sufficient philosophical education.

Possible more and better philosophers writing for public consumption can be the pipers leading the people to unity (joking).

Modern theories of the role of government are somewhat vague and terms anachronistic

The United States has a government where individuals started out free (except for slaves) and government was minimalist. So many of the roles that government needs to fill today didn’t exist when the United States revolted from England.

The government now has 16 areas that it regards as critical infrastructure and those run across public and private sector concerns. There is a roaster at this web site

https://www.cisa.gov/critical-infrastructure-sectors

Governing theory has it that some tasks are needed to assure the defense and well being of the people that live in a nation. Defense is obvious- without adequate defense a nation may be conquered and the rulers destroyed. Sometimes the people want that to happen (maybe the Inca are an example). Sometimes elements of a society may unite with external proletariats or sympathizers from over the border in order to use a myocardial slow-build insurrection that may formerly have been known as sedition slow-cooked.

Public education arose because governments realized that educated citizens were better and more competitive people. Illiterate hillbillies couldn’t fair well in war against tech-savvy weapons users able to read manuals or calculate trajectories for artillery. Hillbillies might be excellent shots with long-guns, yet that was a different kind of literacy skill that wasn’t transferable to alphabet-based instruction.

If private educators had provided Universal literacy and basic education free the government would not have needed to get involved. When, as today, the nation is saturated with public education structures that could be done with private educators and educational facilities given government contracts or student vouchers it is probable that the historical inertia has become so established that it fails to advance to a higher, newer level of support for public education that avails itself of the vast pool of college educated citizens that haven’t enough jobs as educators as it is- that is more people with advanced degrees could enter into educational facilities to work if more private school existed with the same cost as public schools to parents because of government redirection of funding to the private sector.

There are numerous roles for a government that go beyond basic infrastructure that are requisite for keeping a society healthy, competitive internationally and happy. Ironically government in the U.S.A. tends to flunk the basic infrastructure roles and doesn’t show much ability to continue to improve them such that they would be suitable for sustainable ecological economic parameters. Government lacks some of the theorists and think tanks that should exist to discover, invent and adapt newer forms of infrastructure to existing forms seamlessly.

https://www.ushistory.org/gov/1a.asp

The modern world civilization cannot be well supported with anachronistic theories of political economy. When that is what politicians and others writing in the marketplace of ideas offer the nation does in effect cobble together ad hoc structures at great public expense that don’t work very well and tremendous public spending continues that would not be necessary if a better set of infrastructure and theories existed.

An example might be health care for the poor. Obamacare was designed for the middle class and put a tax on younger workers for a product they mostly didn’t need. Some of the poor that travel interstate for climate and seasonal reasons just can’t pass through the state bureaucratic hoops that require fundamentally a sedentary life with a home, phone, street address and residence in triplicate. A federal program with uniform values that worked everywhere for the poor would have been a better idea. It is Bureaucrats have a different view of the U.S.A. from those people that don’t get an easy regular paycheck.

Does a nation need to pay to support the preservation of historic buildings, or to make sure that grizzly bears and good salmon fishing aren’t extinct? Does a society need to prevent people from breathing a lot of carbon monoxide or clean up toxic waste sites. If one could build a great and affordable mass transit system from Petersburg Florida to Petersburg Russia via Alaska yet only the government could get it done and keep the cost of a ticket down, should it go ahead rather than letting nothing happen?

There are people that are against anything a government might do that could be done by private special interests including military service. Some would leave that to oil corporations if their profit margins declined.

The role of government in a time when the private sector has a great amount of wealth compared to the public sector might be to make sure that fairness and neutrality exists socially so individual self determination and free enterprise can exist with equal protection of the law for all citizens. Government might be tasked to secure public goods and developments coordinating ideas, opportunities and avenues for implementation by the public through the private sector. The challenge of keeping a healthy national ecosystem and good social relations that eliminates oppression and dead-end lives with nowhere to go that never allow people to maximize development of their capacity for progress.

It is amazing that the government is somewhat inefficient with the trillions of dollars it does have in its annual budget that also allows public debt because it is underfunded. Government needs to use the private sector better to work to fulfill public goals and policy objectives in a way that brings profit to the private sector while paying for its own existence and functions. Obviously government needs to know what those ideas and goals a priori.

Is it morally acceptable to make vaccines, ultra-soft kid gloves, lampshades, or cosmetics with aborted human body part ingredients

 Ethical questions arise concerning the Johnson and Johnson Covid 19 vaccine that was made reportedly using stem cell lines from aborted humans. Is it morally acceptable to make vaccines, ultra-soft kid gloves, lampshades, or cosmetics with aborted human body part ingredients, or should human decency respect the dead including those aborted proto-humans.

Nazi scientists were of course not recalcitrant about exploiting anything to advance their purpose. maybe they believed they could socially engineer a better human being. One of those Hobbs and Shaw movies had such a premise in it.

Another concern is the phenomenal possibility of evil in first aborting humans and then using them to engineer vaccines that are from a corrupted source. If Satan exists he might be amused at debasing all of mankind with such self-degradation.

When people take shortcuts to goals that aren't necessary they admit the possibility of deleterious unintended consequences and that should be avoided if one is being cautious at all.

On public debt and monetary policy

 The nature of public debt seems to have changed since the Reagan administration allowed vast deficit spending for that time. Cutting taxation without balancing the budget has been a Republican tradition since the 1980s. Lafferian supply-side economics theory was that economic growth would bring in enough revenues with lower taxes to make up the difference yet it didn’t.

When the United States went off the gold standard it took a few years to realize what a free floating currency implied. Some people still think along the pre-Nixon era paradigm wherein one needed to have a real budget with a real balance and debt mattered. Money theory may have evolved since then. As a non-economist I am as uncertain about what the rich and powerful are doing with the national budget as the next guy.

Well- some people are certain yet incorrect, and a few may be certain and right, yet who to believe in reading what the experts have to say about it with conflicting opinions?

I have different ideas about it all the time. My most recent theory is that when the Federal Reserve gave more than 20 trillion dollars in zero-interest or low interest loans to big banks in quantitative easing since 2008, and the rich had the ability with the marginal reserve rate of 9% or so to electronically mint 9 or 10 dollars in electronic loans for every dollar they have on deposit, yet instead held on to most of the money and didn’t loan it out, they were keeping inflation down. If they were to flood the market with 180 trillion dollars right away that would perhaps devalue the dollars.

The dollar is an abstract medium of exchange. Real capital might be in real properties and skills rather than in the currency of exchange itself, so the value of a dollar may be relative, as is the public debt. If the point of the Federal Reserve is to allow the dollar to be an effective lubricant of business that will keep society healthy, the quantity of dollars available and amount of public debt become less meaningful than if they had some absolute value for-themselves like the number of propane bottles one has in a cabin when the temperature outside is 30 below zero in which case if one has a lot of empty bottles (regarded as debt) or full bottles owed to another cabin, it really matters.

The value of the capital on public exchange may be somewhere around 200 trillion dollars or more. Global wealth is concentrated and ordinary Americans have just a tiny fraction of it, yet the plutocrat class and 1%ers have somewhere more than 60% of the wealth in the U.S.A. (or more). In my opinion the levels of public debt are another aspect of the new relative value of money- the government could even evolve to a different medium of exchange if it would be of value to the rich.

https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/fact-book/

Bad government fiscal policy one would think must be harmful to the nation. Many people including myself tended to support David Stockman’s ideas rather than Arthur Laffer’s, yet monetary relativity has won that ideological contest easily, and people seem happy enough with floating currency and perennially unbalanced budgets.

The Republican party sometimes seems deaf and sadistic in being opponents to clever, practical measures to reform the economic opportunities for the bottom 25% of income earners so they would never be absolutely poor nor struck in poverty. Innumerable practical measures and structures could be made to support relief from poverty for any American that cared to, yet like monetary theory based on the gold standard that seems anachronistic, some political beliefs concerning poverty and what people could do to help themselves if they tried are obsolete in the modern economy.

With the rich seemingly able to influence inflation any time they like as a fractional release of their own money supply, and with the amount of money needed to improve the life of the poor being such a small figure comparably, ideas that affect determinations of the level of unemployment and amount of public spending seems to be first and foremost determined in regard to how changes and constants would affect the 1%.

Probably it would be possible to progressively reduce public debt, yet the federal budget would also need to be balanced at that would require agreement on how to restructure the federal budget. Republicans want to cut spending to the poor, increase military spending, cut taxes on the rich and move along lines that are minimal maintenance of the state- and that figure is about 7–8% of the nation’s annual income. A healthy budget with a level of public spending on socially valuable goods and services might be 20 to 30% of the national income- regardless of the wealth and standard of living of the nation their are some that would be against the latter. Republicans are happy enough with a broken federal budget ongoing with monetary elasticity and relativism enabling them to continue to pile up cash and snap purchase corporations and buy into business opportunities worldwide. Plainly though, real wealth is in the physical things in themselves as well as intellectual capital and social structures to support a system that is in itself in great need of ecological economic reform and value theory evolution to restore wilderness and ecospheric health where possible while, simultaneously relieving poverty and transitioning displaced workers to new and satisfying roles. Tasks a little more challenging than walking and chewing gum at the same time.

Why I stopped trying to invent things

 I felt I could have patented some of my ideas as well, yet couldn’t afford it. When the Star Wars program appeared I thought of applying the electro-magnetic smart-pebbles kind of thing to automobiles and engineless cars and sent the idea to N.I.S.T. to apply for a grant to patent my thought and they wrote back saying that I wanted to develop a concept rather than patent a ready to go concept. The wheel motor configuration did have many possibilities with electro-magnetics pushing and pulling it around.

Volvo developed the idea perhaps first a few years later. Of course the idea was used for weapons to from the pistol by an Australian inventor to naval artillery.

When an idea is released to the public and can be produced by anybody there is competition to sell a product at the best profit and the lowest price/mass production element enters in. Elon Musk released his hyper-tube concept for anyone to build- a paradigm I wrote about in a short story named ‘Vank Island’ a decade earlier with an electro-magnetic powered module moving through a tube from Alaska to Europe.

People have mentioned that releasing patent exclusivity quicker allows faster social implementation of ideas. Consider the Gillette shaving foam from a can that is self-heating. It is a brilliant product that has been suppressed since the 1970s when it first appeared because it is better than anything else. If the patent had expired after 3 years it would be used in about every can of shave cream and Gillette would be stuffed with wealth more than it is as every producer sent them 5% in perpetuity (or maybe a half century). [the patent on The Hot One may have expired]

Since I discovered the impossibility of patenting and producing an idea in the U.S.A. I have stopped trying to invent anything, and if I have a new idea I drop it into a short story, novel or article online because after three years from publication nit cannot be patented and anyone could use it.

Mr. Trump's effect on foreign policy

 I don’t believe the Trump administration harmed U.S. foreign policy. I tended to like it except for his shabby treatment of the Kurds. Maybe an exception would be his maladroit environmental policy, yet that is more of a multilateral, general kind of thing rather than of traditional international relations.

In a sense he should have won the Nobel peace prize for his work getting Arab nations to normalize relations with Israel. Mr. Trump was a traditional Republican seeking the good of U.S. business and skilled at foreign policy. His primary business fault was again in not being cognizant of ecological economics or the extirpation of American wilderness, and of course he was clueless on eliminating poverty in the U.S.A. except through the trickle down approach.

Weather Preparedness

 Preparedness is next to cleanliness, or godliness, or being unprepared was it? Americans could be able to withstand future weather events with training. One will play in the big game as well as one has trained.

Like navy seals Americans could go for swims before dawn in as cold of water as they can find. They could build concrete dome homes able to withstand tornados, and if built on springs like the deep black room at Colorado Springs, they could endure earthquakes with a little dramamine.

Americans could develop hydroponic gardens indoors in geodesic greenhouses. They could recycle the water for the plants and warm their homes with Earth heating and cooling. The Earth is never cold except as compared to hot summer temperatures, and the deeper one goes the warmer it is. There are fundamentally no good reasons why an American using modern building methods from the eco-intelligent construction community would need to rely on the grid for climate survival- in fact doing so is a lazy, silly idea that unfortunately many cannot afford to break from as they are wage slaves to those sending trillions of zero or low interest loans to the rich so they can hide those e-dollars for-themselves to keep inflation down yet snap purchase a bargain overseas should one arise.

Americans should have alternate mass transit infrastructure projects to dampen the effects of shocks to the inefficient automobile transportation system that is reliant upon the grid for electrical charging or volatile, combustive fuel supplies that poison the air we breathe when jogging and a dirty truck blasts past.

American scientists could develop a better artificial fur for hats in case another terrible northerly drifts into the south freezing the southern way of life in its tracks. Northerners could develop better hyper-tube ground transport to the south in case -45 f becomes tiresome.

Americans could have a special water-bladder bag that would fit into a bathtub and safely store 40 gallons of water when there is a prospect for grid and transport system failure. That bag might have a drain release feature and a little bubble-wrap type insulation to keep it from freezing too easily.

In order to make America great again each household should have a pair of four-buckle galoshes that can transform sneakers into cold-weather boots. They should have a set of yellow and dark green sunglass lenses from the dollar store to be able to walk in blizzards or droughts without getting hit in the eye by snowflakes or too bright of sunlight or dust.

A question about education and big data analytics

 It is an interesting question. I wonder what field besides that of professional educators would use such fuzzy logic to classify a statement or proposition?

"Characterize the following research questions as: descriptive, causal, prescriptive, or normative. Briefly explain answer. What factors increase women’s political representation in developed democracies?"

Apparently descriptive questions imply a true or false answer is possible while a normative question suggests that some state of affairs ‘ought’ to be. It’s is a value judgment and subjective.

Causal questions might ask for a cause or reason that something occurs and since David Hume wrote to discredit the relation of cause and effect the notion idea has been troubled.

In my opinion proximal causes as in legal arguments concerning why some x occurred or was done by agent y are generalities and somewhat non-technical philosophically inasmuchas they cannot be absolutely, logically exhaustive description of the state of affairs.

Consider that the entire Universe exists be-cause of the expansion of a singularity (if cosmology is accurate and that is an assumption), therefore that is the original cause of Billy Bob robbing the 7–11 store last night? The cause would need to be advanced up the line to a closer space-time connection. As in ‘Billy Bob robbed the 7–11 last night because his girl needed a Covid 19 vaccination and he was trying to save her from certain death from the South African variant he read was going to arrive in town and he needed the cash to bribe a front-line worker to let her assume her fake identity and get the shot.’ That cannot be considered a very accurate cause in some senses, for instance if he hadn’t been forced out of work by an employer that didn’t like his political opinions he would have had the cash to bribe for a shot for his girl, therefore the former employer is at fault, or was the cause of the robbery?

Anyway causality is a tricky slippery slope. I think people use pragmatism about causality and just cancel out equal terms on both side of the formal logical equation to determine if what remains is the real or even meaningful cause of something.

In the field of big data analysis predictive and prescriptive analytics are use in processing and writing code evidently.

From predictive to prescriptive analytics (part 1) — the benefit of causal diagrams

Predictive analytics would seek to determine what will occur I guess while prescriptive analytics would attempt to shape events.

One example would be the riots at the capitol of January 6, 2021. The electorate could be considered the big part regarded as datums. Some might use big data analytics to predict the outcome of events about crowds of a given size, security at the capitol and other variables. A use of prescriptive analytics might be to determine how to shape events or to shape the description of events so the public considers the riot a faux pas by political tramps or an insurrection.

Big data analysis joined with mass media has several axis for utilizing analytics with all four of the elements mentioned.

On the question of how or why females can have political representation in a democracy, one would need to disambiguate the question initially to clarify the meaning of ‘representation’ before dropping it into the algorithmic engine of big data processing. That is- can a man be a representative politically for women or need the representative be a woman?

If one shapes the question well then using logical processes with it is possible. Personally I would like the generality of adding causes from historical review and put those into a logic box and test them against nations that had accomplished female political representation in a democratic environment.

When one use computer code for analysis, specific values or variables are required in flowing electrons or quantum states through test conditions, forks and so forth along the logic tree. There is a reiteration of specificity unless non-specificity is placed with another tree of branches, forks and test conditions, and that sort of thing is itself specific and determinative as a definite causal agent of further processing. Even if one tries prescriptive iterations to determine a result one might ask if the basic algorithmic method doesn’t imply that necessarily.

The idea of using will to make things happen is perhaps a less rigorous analytic or algorithmic tool. The main point of analysis is of course that it is accurate.