Reportedly members of the Obama adminsitration view the Arab Spring as a great event comparable to the end of the cold war. The comparison seems rather inept. Reagan asked the Saudis to increase oil production in order to drive down the world price of oil in order to stimulate the west's economy and ruin the Soviet's economy that was reliant upon foreign oil sales for cash. That was a good idea in its time as were temporary tax cuts and deficit spending to stimulate the U.S. economy. Today the U.S.A. is paying more than a hundred bucks a barrel and the Arab Spring is forcing Americans to pay more at the pump. There economy is springing while our's is flopping-some for the administration to cheer about. Maybe the Boston Empath Club will give him the key to the city.
Perhaps the administration's people making the comparison believe the United States is like the former Soviet Union and the Moslem world is breaking it's economic power a little at a time-progressively. Osama Bin Laden and the 9-11 killers viewed the Soviet Union as one super-power they defeated (in Afghanistan) and that the U.S.A. would be the next.
In Tunisia a government fell and was replaced. In Egypt an old authoritarian President was forced out yet what will follow is hard to anticipate. In Libya we are making a war on the Libyan strong man and former terror plotter Khaddaffi through N.A.T.O. and an ad hoc insurgent army, in Yemen uprisers have about forced the government to leave-maybe the administration supports someone else perhaps from Dhamar Province to lead, in Syria the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to force the harsh Alawite Government of Assad from power-this is compared to the ending of communist authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and Russia by the administration.
I am not of the opinion that U.S. foreign policy is increasing world security. While we spend a lot on foreign military ventures we can displace a lot of potential terrorists from attacking the U.S.A. What is not evident is the opportunity cost of spending several trillion abroad in antipathetic to ecological economic and full employment abroad in military ventures still unconcluded after a decade.
For several decades analysts have predicted the eventual rise of populism to overthrow authoritarian governments in the Moslem world. With an unsustainable economic infrastructure for human and ecological development in much of the Moslem world the implicit social instability will likely lead to more liberal conditions for the waging of ad hoc jihad upon Europe, the United States and possibly Israel from democracies in North Africa and elsewhere in the Middle east. The administration may be unintentionally helping to support the Caliphate of Osama bin Laden's and Saddam Hussein's dreams with twittering pseudo-democratic innovations.
If the administration was half as enthusiastic about finding ways to defend the U.S. borders from illegal alien cheap labor migrants and creating full employment and a recovery of the nation's ecology that would be 'An American Spring' he could write home about (from Paris or wherever The President was today).
28 May 2011
Gabriel Gifford’s Shooter Undergoing Federal Mental Makeover Before Trial
I thought I should throw in a commentary on Loughner’s four month federal chemical personality makeover now in process at the order of a federal judge. Obviously Loughner was guilty of shooting people in Arizona, yet the legal proceedings for adjudicating the process whereby the prosecution has custody of the defendant, has him psychiatrically evaluated by their own criteria, and then finds his mind incompetent to stand trial-a trial for-itself, and then orders the defendant to submit to months of chemical brain modification in order to make him conformal to court appearances and criteria for being a nice defendant seems a little dangerous for U.S. civil liberties.
The legal questions of it a crime occurred and if the person accused committed it should be separated from the question of why a defendant committed a crime. The defendant’s psychological state is a part of the curiosity of why the crime occurred. Those curious questions should be discovered if there is a reason to, after the trial determines if the defendant perpetrated the crime.
Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree occurred in a social environment with federally caused social stresses brought about by federal failure to prevent millions of illegal aliens from invading Arizona during Loeffner’s youth. Year after year raving radio, malicious music, myriad clumps of illegal aliens seeking work in every nook and cranny of Phoenix reduced the prospects for non-Hispanic employment.
Maybe Loughner is not a sort of Serbian shooter of an Austrian heir, yet a U.S. Congresswoman and a federal judge might have seemed blunt opponents to the unclever mind of Loughner. The real political economy of the American S.W. and of New Jersey where so many 9-11 terrorists lived when not in motels near Ft. Meade is changing. Those that are positioned to be more easily stressed by displacing economic forces may generate a percent of individuals resisting with violence the existential invasions of their mind and sometimes nation. Social classes empathic to the invading new social forces may feel especial antipathy toward the symbols of the ebbing social class such as G.E. Loughner might represent.
With the post-9-11 National Security Agency electronic surveillance upgrades and the potential for ubiquitous government eavesdropping it is more important than ever to keep psychiatric voodoo from taking legal power unto itself. Between the external linguistic and logic parameters of psychologists and the inexact target brain and associated behavior of state subjects the cause-effect relationships tend to be less credible than those of voodoo sometimes.
If Loughner’s brain was scanned with Magnetic resonance and the images made available to public scrutiny before he was given psychiatric drugs, we might at least see the prisoner’s present brain condition, blood flow and so forth. It is not possible to see how it was on the day of the shootings obviously. The condition of Loeffner’s brain at the day of trial if viewed with MR might appear different from his ‘normal’ condition. Should the state be free to modify the brain state of a defendant for trial when it differs from who he or she usually is (if a brain state may be regarded as who one is)?
What if Loughner’s brain state changes periodically from violent to non-violent modes-what if he has mood swings equivalent to p.m.s.-male urgings to detonate the opposition in which fantasies might surge into actuality-which state should he be made to conform to for trial-the meek and remorseful mode?
Legal findings of fact and conclusions of law might be held independently of the psychological condition of a defendant with less harm to public interests than a period of incarceration and chemical reconditioning of a yet non-convicted (though obviously guilty) prisoner. In at least some cases it might be better to first try the defendant and then sentence him or her to particular treatment or correction.
The danger of making political incorrectness and thought crimes psychological labels supported by law is a perennial danger to a free society. If psychiatric neurology ever became as exact an accurate as diagnosing a broken leg, and if fixing imbalance minds were as simple (it isn’t likely to be for a number of reasons) regarding psychiatry as more than a skilled voodoo sophism for generating proplits for practitioner might be reasonable. Laws need to be about real material transgressions though-not on what one thinks. Trials need to be about material facts and not about psychology or worse-psychiatric opinions that have less credibility than hear say evidence.
A time for psychiatry for convicts can arise after conviction and before sentencing where it is more appropriate. It is important to keep an effective barrier between free thought and thinking, behavior and legal boundaries. Society can ill afford to develop more legal leverage on individuals on the basis of what government shrinks think the citizens might be thinking.
The legal questions of it a crime occurred and if the person accused committed it should be separated from the question of why a defendant committed a crime. The defendant’s psychological state is a part of the curiosity of why the crime occurred. Those curious questions should be discovered if there is a reason to, after the trial determines if the defendant perpetrated the crime.
Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree occurred in a social environment with federally caused social stresses brought about by federal failure to prevent millions of illegal aliens from invading Arizona during Loeffner’s youth. Year after year raving radio, malicious music, myriad clumps of illegal aliens seeking work in every nook and cranny of Phoenix reduced the prospects for non-Hispanic employment.
Maybe Loughner is not a sort of Serbian shooter of an Austrian heir, yet a U.S. Congresswoman and a federal judge might have seemed blunt opponents to the unclever mind of Loughner. The real political economy of the American S.W. and of New Jersey where so many 9-11 terrorists lived when not in motels near Ft. Meade is changing. Those that are positioned to be more easily stressed by displacing economic forces may generate a percent of individuals resisting with violence the existential invasions of their mind and sometimes nation. Social classes empathic to the invading new social forces may feel especial antipathy toward the symbols of the ebbing social class such as G.E. Loughner might represent.
With the post-9-11 National Security Agency electronic surveillance upgrades and the potential for ubiquitous government eavesdropping it is more important than ever to keep psychiatric voodoo from taking legal power unto itself. Between the external linguistic and logic parameters of psychologists and the inexact target brain and associated behavior of state subjects the cause-effect relationships tend to be less credible than those of voodoo sometimes.
If Loughner’s brain was scanned with Magnetic resonance and the images made available to public scrutiny before he was given psychiatric drugs, we might at least see the prisoner’s present brain condition, blood flow and so forth. It is not possible to see how it was on the day of the shootings obviously. The condition of Loeffner’s brain at the day of trial if viewed with MR might appear different from his ‘normal’ condition. Should the state be free to modify the brain state of a defendant for trial when it differs from who he or she usually is (if a brain state may be regarded as who one is)?
What if Loughner’s brain state changes periodically from violent to non-violent modes-what if he has mood swings equivalent to p.m.s.-male urgings to detonate the opposition in which fantasies might surge into actuality-which state should he be made to conform to for trial-the meek and remorseful mode?
Legal findings of fact and conclusions of law might be held independently of the psychological condition of a defendant with less harm to public interests than a period of incarceration and chemical reconditioning of a yet non-convicted (though obviously guilty) prisoner. In at least some cases it might be better to first try the defendant and then sentence him or her to particular treatment or correction.
The danger of making political incorrectness and thought crimes psychological labels supported by law is a perennial danger to a free society. If psychiatric neurology ever became as exact an accurate as diagnosing a broken leg, and if fixing imbalance minds were as simple (it isn’t likely to be for a number of reasons) regarding psychiatry as more than a skilled voodoo sophism for generating proplits for practitioner might be reasonable. Laws need to be about real material transgressions though-not on what one thinks. Trials need to be about material facts and not about psychology or worse-psychiatric opinions that have less credibility than hear say evidence.
A time for psychiatry for convicts can arise after conviction and before sentencing where it is more appropriate. It is important to keep an effective barrier between free thought and thinking, behavior and legal boundaries. Society can ill afford to develop more legal leverage on individuals on the basis of what government shrinks think the citizens might be thinking.
Privatizing Medicare Would Present Philosophical Issues for Democracy
Fundamentally tax payers should be giving their money to the federal government rather than having the government loop the money over to Wall Street providers of Medicare services. If The Rep. Ryan plan is just a way to slave taxpayers to paying Wall Street Medicare providers from around the globe whatever they choose to deliver to Americans, taxpayers would be submitting to slipping into global government.
It is easy enough to envision U.S. citizens having their personal data stored in the Internet cloud, their pancreas examined via Internet in Bombay and their brain in China. Drugs made in Egypt might be flown be Red Army air direct to Chicago-specialized medicine tailor-made by designer docs abroad to treat a specific individual.
Privatizing Medicare is just another way to make U.S. democracy die the death of a thousand cuts, or be taken down by mirthful Wall Street C.E.O.s to the dungeon of global, corporate economic power.
It is possible to reform medical provisioning for the nation's poor and veterans within the traditional role of democratic government and taxpayers funding just necessary and compassionate government services.
Do middle American cities serve as magnets for tornados because their displacement of biota creates a rising hot-air micro-climate? Perhaps we cannot know, or do anything about global warming either in the global corporate economic shell game. Americans should be able to provide the lowest cost national public health service for the poor however, and increase government efficiency in the process, without any flummery of tax dollars to Wall Street.
It is easy enough to envision U.S. citizens having their personal data stored in the Internet cloud, their pancreas examined via Internet in Bombay and their brain in China. Drugs made in Egypt might be flown be Red Army air direct to Chicago-specialized medicine tailor-made by designer docs abroad to treat a specific individual.
Privatizing Medicare is just another way to make U.S. democracy die the death of a thousand cuts, or be taken down by mirthful Wall Street C.E.O.s to the dungeon of global, corporate economic power.
It is possible to reform medical provisioning for the nation's poor and veterans within the traditional role of democratic government and taxpayers funding just necessary and compassionate government services.
Do middle American cities serve as magnets for tornados because their displacement of biota creates a rising hot-air micro-climate? Perhaps we cannot know, or do anything about global warming either in the global corporate economic shell game. Americans should be able to provide the lowest cost national public health service for the poor however, and increase government efficiency in the process, without any flummery of tax dollars to Wall Street.
Generating Formulae Describing the Collective Psychosis of Political and Corporate Empaths
With a population on Earth moving toward 10 billion in a few decades the social strains and economic conflicts may increase. Competition socially will occur in an existential context. A number of fundamental relationships of the individual to the world and others exist as existential phenomena. Perhaps bringing Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, demographics of the world, global corporate business and governments into a single paradigm subject to formulation as waveforms is possible ( much as ecological economics offers empirical flow quantization examples).
Organizations that demand a detachment from optimal democratic reason pursuing the ultimate environmental social balance and good on a sustainable basis, and governments promoting the oppression of individual security may be formalized as examples of collective social psychosis in this context; such organization work toward the ill health of concatenated individual interests existentially.
The denotation of collective and individual psychosis is something of the perennial struggle of the collective Ratchet versus an individual McMurphy. State governing psychopaths such as Saddam Hussein encounter corrective larger collective powers such as the United States government to shock and awe the monkeys of opposition into submission- ending a sanctions era with a half million collaterally killed innocent victims of sanctions followed by a decade of rebuilding the personality of the Iraqi state through the crucible of terrorism and coercive, chaotic power. The powerful collective psychotic force asserts its will trailing off temporally leaving unintended political formations stimulating the rise of 9-11 non-governmental collective psychotic terrorist organizations.
One may find empathy-led collective condign measures by the United States Government since 1990 were asymmetric kill responses to terrorist stimuli.
I recently took up reading ‘The Shadow Factory’ by James Bamford and heard a story on NPR on a psychological exam predicting criminal recidivism. That started me thinking about the criteria socially in which crimes occur, and why some individuals would commit crimes in some social and economic environments and perhaps not in others. Sometimes the short may be pre-selected to commit crimes and n other it could be the fat or the tall responding to evolutionary stimuli. That idea can lead to an appraisal of humankind in general as naked apes within an evolutionary context as well as a context of original sin and of what things will people do to sustain their own well-being individually and collectively.
One might predict the crime of government led wars now often perpetrated without a declaration of war as a normalized yet scheduled wave function. Intensity of individual and collective challenges may be plotted to find where wave formations will develop as war or other mass social disaster. The causality of wave origins may not originate locally but may actualize waves locally terminally or in transit. Developing holistic waveform analysis to objectify collective behavior as goal oriented psychosis may be possible with the vast quantity of social data available to analysts today.
A myopia of knowledge coinciding with financial self-interest can affect anyone in government, business or even science. Observer bias or determination of events in quantum mechanical measuring contexts is an implicit element of reality. Relativity affects not only space-time but the individual experience of the macro-physics of being human and making abstract assessments of the way things in the world are structured.
I enjoyed reading the book on the state of the National Security Agency through much of the 90’s and 2000’s. It is a better read than most novels. It includes a detailed tracking of 9-11 hijackers right up through the pen-ultimate day of five that hijacked flight 77 to crash into the Pentagon from their field operation center in a hotel two miles away from the N.S.A.’s Fort Meade headquarters to a drive to Dulles Airport etc.
The N.S.A.’s phenomenal computational resources are reviewed here, as is former Rear Admiral Poindexter’s D.A.R.P.A. funded T.I.A.-Total Information Awareness program for intensive data mining of all Americans and their electronic transactions to form analytical behavioral patterns indicating the possibility of terrorist methodology. William Safire’s column on Poindexter’s data mining stimulated the termination of the program yet sent its methods deeper underground.
Data mining is the subject of many fiction books these days. With so much computer power it is possible to put about everything traceable from email to phone calls, hotel reservations, car rentals, credit card purchases and all items sewn with radio frequency transmitters (rtf) into a data base. The N.S.A. can process petabytes of data incoming and if they move up to the Exabyte capacity may be able to calculate the social future-who can say.
President Obama just signed off on a renewal of the Patriot Act, and it is difficult to know to what extent surveillance and data are kept by federal agencies in ways comparable to data bases kept by the private sector to manipulate social interaction. Data acquisition and processing can be used to construct socially controlling policy however data for itself is completely subject to the human factor of using the intell in meaningful existential ontology.
Former N.S.A. Chief Hayden (the appointment of whom I opposed) developed policies that tended to suppress the sharing of intelligence information that could have prevented the 9-11 events from occurring, as it might violate Congressionally set restrictions on surveil Americans (the Echelon scandal).
Philosophically I wonder if the development of behavioral intelligence profiles will not inevitably tend to conformal modeling of politically undesirable behavior. If the political establishment are a kind of proprietary tribe of monkeys seeking to advance their own power interests-their own wealth with all the lack of empathy that women determining abortion to be the best answer to pregnancy might have for the unborn fetus, any number of criteria might be developed that would hinder citizens from exercising not terrorism but non-conformist to the will of the insiders, behavior.
Increasingly the proprietary self-interest of behavioral psychologists and government officials to fabricate for-pay criteria may encourage development of profiles of individuals to guide their intelligence paradigms of opposition force cadre.
Statistically supported analytical paradigms are for themselves phenomenal constructions displacing alternative possibilities. It is as determining as that of quantum measurements of the spin characteristics of entangled photons selecting one wave-packet from myriad that collapse like imaginary potential soufflés. Like a herd of baboons, governments and criminal organizations pursue their own self interest occasionally rising to the level of entirely amoral social psychosis-such as a ‘moral’ individual might regard the battle of the Somme, the killing fields of Rwanda or Cambodia, the 9-11 malicides and Nazi extermination camps or countess more incidents to have been. I do not intend here to mean that government security is always or even usually wrong in constructing opfor profiles, only that the meta-political and meta-economic ontology or circumstance of a given culture determines individual and collective behavior as well as free will. Honest government should not develop a lazy failure to develop competent policy as a norm that requires the destruction of individual human well being-even of the enemy. When The Lord said to love thy enemy, not only was it Godly, it was also the politically pragmatic thing for a confident government to do if it has that elementus regulus innovative capability of leading to the social good for all.
It is possible to regard individualism as an existential fact socially speaking through default. The reef of solipsism prevents experience of other minds directly-fortunately. Yet collective behavior, in which empathy for group consciousness is the fruition, is something of a human historical generality. Groups may define criteria by which they can determine who is likely to empathize with their group consciousness and who will pursue their own Ayn Rand kind of optimalized personal egoism.
For much of mass social behavior in a modern civilization a type B personality asserting ‘empathy’ for class goals in the absence of an ability to assert type A personal egoism is a good selection for an attitude likely to bring personal financial gain. Mass social behavior generally tends to be the more damaging form of what might cause what would be regarded as criminal damage to personal interests. That is wars, repressions, purging, exiles, confiscations and so forth tend to kill more individuals than individual crime. In the classic prisoner torture test, seven of ten ordinary people were willing to cause the pain of torture in an experiment when following orders. Seven of ten people are type B empathic asserters in many societies-they empathize most with power to advance their own self-interest.
Obviously predicting crime is a useful thing-as is predicting terrorism. However we know that crime may become epidemic in various historical periods of history far exceeding contemporary levels. The Green Gang in Shanghai, the Hell’s Kitchen crooks of early New York, some places in Nigeria or Juarez today may have crime rates beyond that of American levels-and we have the most people in the world in jails at high public cost.
It is desirable to control crime, and controlling crimes by governments and enfeofed wealthy social classes against individuals is desirable as well as preventing individuals from perpetrating crime. The difficulty is that as St. Augustine noted, human nature is totally depraved and corrupted by the criterion of existing. Some of the advantaged deceive themselves of that fact and fail to be aware that all human beings have fundamental social needs and given the opportunity to pursue their rational self-interest will do so.
Perhaps I should define the paradigm of original sin as a function of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Human beings need food energy to survive and their other drives are functions of physics. If human beings driven to cannibalism by starvation are usually moral people, it is probably an error to speculate that they perpetrated the crime of cannibalism because they had an evil will or wicked thoughts. Hunger drove them to overcome their moral empathy for others in preference of personal egoism.
Maybe some people fail to comprehend their self-interest because of some complex history, yet in a concatenated society of human corruption the wealthy are satiated sometimes by lack of privation that may continue only while the good times roll. We can discover the hard face of humanity even more so in times of poverty and adversity for an entire society. Often ruling classes become oppressors rather than liberators failing to understand the transcending nature of human nature.
Individuals pursuing their own self-interest are a fundamental way of life, while adaptive collective social behavior is phenomenal. The enemy at the gates today may tomorrow become a friend-Jesus Christ was above it all-yet look where it got him.
The N.S.A. may work on forming U.S. security yet politicians will blunder, neutralizing any technical advantage in learning where every terrorist keeps his stash of porno mags and anti-social pathological fixation on 20 virgins in extra-dimensions over the rainbow. The Mexican border will remain porous, the use of asphalt highways and fossil fuels continue along with other technologies to raise global temperature and decay the ecosystem of Earth.
Network broadcasts of raving intended to make reading the English language seem highly skilled will condition youth to a neo-Alzheimer’s kind of imitative aphasia of speech-well, we didn’t start the fire go the lyrics pianist Billy Joel sang years ago. What can be done to fix the problem of A personality apes, B personality empathize in number follow along apes and others collectivizing the world through corporations to totalize their wealth and power is hard to say. Government could develop and ecological-economic utopian full employment plan at least one would think.
So I will return to finish off the interesting book on the N.S.A. It is informative enough on how our government of well-intentioned, occasionally selfless public servants seeks to make the world a better, safer place-a politically correct place.
Empathizing with others is a good way to draw individuals into collective behavior from security to vengeance, plunder or revolution. The egoistic and self-concerned alternatively may pursue excellence and individualism and become the object of wrath of the collective masses-who can say?
Individuals of nearly psychopathic personal egoism may rise to lead corporations, communes and nations on occasion. They sometimes lead the empathizers amongst us along political channels not actually in the best interests of the masses.
One might compare Tojo or Adolph Hitler’s political leadership to that of ordinary criminals and not and find the individual criminals more democidal.
Apparently human beings should find some moderate course between personal egotism and collective values as their light in the darkness of a human nature without natural virtue. Jesus Christ is a good role model. Yet even today the social lions amongst us would tend to be raging lions seeking to devour the opportunities of the Son of God.
Mankind as individuals in number of more than 6 billion together occupies existential niches of similar challenges. The dilemma is in placing the personal ego amidst a synthetic collective of business and government organizations of individuals and pursuit of an ideal world of self-actualization. Neither course is easy-Nietzche of course choose the latter in his book ‘The Spake Zarathustra’.
We find disaster when individuals assert their ego at the top of political and business organizations in such a way as Nazis-yet human organizations generally require legions of empathizers to follow the leader to do much damage. Following Jesus Christ so far as one can adapts an individual and collective or transcending relationship with God as the collective other.
This is not a small thing. Yet it is readily possible to form a malfunctioning ecclesiastical organization as might any other human organization be a worldly expression of human nature, original sin and bad economic and ecological planning. One may take a divinely inspired idea and process it through human organization back into the mud or clay from which the Potter formed human life.
Not all human organizations are extreme of course. They all do exist as wheels within wheels of organizations existing upon this planet with members all incarnate with original sin. Sometimes these wheels and individuals are balanced and in harmony with others. They often may be on an economically unsustainable foundation and destined to run out of fuel flinging the riders into chaos as their social inertia continues.
On a finite planetary surface with finite resources the education of the population about collective, objective natural resource challenges obviously has difficulty in making its way through to all of the individuals. The wheels of the machine that spin along as Wall Street corporations of Chinese Communist elements may not have enough of a complete idea of how to apportion opportunity objectively amidst the collective concatenation of humanity in a way that conserves individual self-interest most efficiently. We find the conflict of existential social psychosis running up against personal egotism, or even led by it.
As economic challenges for a true, healthy global economy must begin with a rectification of national economy and individual security concatenated, the mass communications of wrong-headed public collective power become even more stark.
Maybe the N.S.A. should record S.E.T.I. data too for future analysis since they might have got everything else.
Organizations that demand a detachment from optimal democratic reason pursuing the ultimate environmental social balance and good on a sustainable basis, and governments promoting the oppression of individual security may be formalized as examples of collective social psychosis in this context; such organization work toward the ill health of concatenated individual interests existentially.
The denotation of collective and individual psychosis is something of the perennial struggle of the collective Ratchet versus an individual McMurphy. State governing psychopaths such as Saddam Hussein encounter corrective larger collective powers such as the United States government to shock and awe the monkeys of opposition into submission- ending a sanctions era with a half million collaterally killed innocent victims of sanctions followed by a decade of rebuilding the personality of the Iraqi state through the crucible of terrorism and coercive, chaotic power. The powerful collective psychotic force asserts its will trailing off temporally leaving unintended political formations stimulating the rise of 9-11 non-governmental collective psychotic terrorist organizations.
One may find empathy-led collective condign measures by the United States Government since 1990 were asymmetric kill responses to terrorist stimuli.
I recently took up reading ‘The Shadow Factory’ by James Bamford and heard a story on NPR on a psychological exam predicting criminal recidivism. That started me thinking about the criteria socially in which crimes occur, and why some individuals would commit crimes in some social and economic environments and perhaps not in others. Sometimes the short may be pre-selected to commit crimes and n other it could be the fat or the tall responding to evolutionary stimuli. That idea can lead to an appraisal of humankind in general as naked apes within an evolutionary context as well as a context of original sin and of what things will people do to sustain their own well-being individually and collectively.
One might predict the crime of government led wars now often perpetrated without a declaration of war as a normalized yet scheduled wave function. Intensity of individual and collective challenges may be plotted to find where wave formations will develop as war or other mass social disaster. The causality of wave origins may not originate locally but may actualize waves locally terminally or in transit. Developing holistic waveform analysis to objectify collective behavior as goal oriented psychosis may be possible with the vast quantity of social data available to analysts today.
A myopia of knowledge coinciding with financial self-interest can affect anyone in government, business or even science. Observer bias or determination of events in quantum mechanical measuring contexts is an implicit element of reality. Relativity affects not only space-time but the individual experience of the macro-physics of being human and making abstract assessments of the way things in the world are structured.
I enjoyed reading the book on the state of the National Security Agency through much of the 90’s and 2000’s. It is a better read than most novels. It includes a detailed tracking of 9-11 hijackers right up through the pen-ultimate day of five that hijacked flight 77 to crash into the Pentagon from their field operation center in a hotel two miles away from the N.S.A.’s Fort Meade headquarters to a drive to Dulles Airport etc.
The N.S.A.’s phenomenal computational resources are reviewed here, as is former Rear Admiral Poindexter’s D.A.R.P.A. funded T.I.A.-Total Information Awareness program for intensive data mining of all Americans and their electronic transactions to form analytical behavioral patterns indicating the possibility of terrorist methodology. William Safire’s column on Poindexter’s data mining stimulated the termination of the program yet sent its methods deeper underground.
Data mining is the subject of many fiction books these days. With so much computer power it is possible to put about everything traceable from email to phone calls, hotel reservations, car rentals, credit card purchases and all items sewn with radio frequency transmitters (rtf) into a data base. The N.S.A. can process petabytes of data incoming and if they move up to the Exabyte capacity may be able to calculate the social future-who can say.
President Obama just signed off on a renewal of the Patriot Act, and it is difficult to know to what extent surveillance and data are kept by federal agencies in ways comparable to data bases kept by the private sector to manipulate social interaction. Data acquisition and processing can be used to construct socially controlling policy however data for itself is completely subject to the human factor of using the intell in meaningful existential ontology.
Former N.S.A. Chief Hayden (the appointment of whom I opposed) developed policies that tended to suppress the sharing of intelligence information that could have prevented the 9-11 events from occurring, as it might violate Congressionally set restrictions on surveil Americans (the Echelon scandal).
Philosophically I wonder if the development of behavioral intelligence profiles will not inevitably tend to conformal modeling of politically undesirable behavior. If the political establishment are a kind of proprietary tribe of monkeys seeking to advance their own power interests-their own wealth with all the lack of empathy that women determining abortion to be the best answer to pregnancy might have for the unborn fetus, any number of criteria might be developed that would hinder citizens from exercising not terrorism but non-conformist to the will of the insiders, behavior.
Increasingly the proprietary self-interest of behavioral psychologists and government officials to fabricate for-pay criteria may encourage development of profiles of individuals to guide their intelligence paradigms of opposition force cadre.
Statistically supported analytical paradigms are for themselves phenomenal constructions displacing alternative possibilities. It is as determining as that of quantum measurements of the spin characteristics of entangled photons selecting one wave-packet from myriad that collapse like imaginary potential soufflés. Like a herd of baboons, governments and criminal organizations pursue their own self interest occasionally rising to the level of entirely amoral social psychosis-such as a ‘moral’ individual might regard the battle of the Somme, the killing fields of Rwanda or Cambodia, the 9-11 malicides and Nazi extermination camps or countess more incidents to have been. I do not intend here to mean that government security is always or even usually wrong in constructing opfor profiles, only that the meta-political and meta-economic ontology or circumstance of a given culture determines individual and collective behavior as well as free will. Honest government should not develop a lazy failure to develop competent policy as a norm that requires the destruction of individual human well being-even of the enemy. When The Lord said to love thy enemy, not only was it Godly, it was also the politically pragmatic thing for a confident government to do if it has that elementus regulus innovative capability of leading to the social good for all.
It is possible to regard individualism as an existential fact socially speaking through default. The reef of solipsism prevents experience of other minds directly-fortunately. Yet collective behavior, in which empathy for group consciousness is the fruition, is something of a human historical generality. Groups may define criteria by which they can determine who is likely to empathize with their group consciousness and who will pursue their own Ayn Rand kind of optimalized personal egoism.
For much of mass social behavior in a modern civilization a type B personality asserting ‘empathy’ for class goals in the absence of an ability to assert type A personal egoism is a good selection for an attitude likely to bring personal financial gain. Mass social behavior generally tends to be the more damaging form of what might cause what would be regarded as criminal damage to personal interests. That is wars, repressions, purging, exiles, confiscations and so forth tend to kill more individuals than individual crime. In the classic prisoner torture test, seven of ten ordinary people were willing to cause the pain of torture in an experiment when following orders. Seven of ten people are type B empathic asserters in many societies-they empathize most with power to advance their own self-interest.
Obviously predicting crime is a useful thing-as is predicting terrorism. However we know that crime may become epidemic in various historical periods of history far exceeding contemporary levels. The Green Gang in Shanghai, the Hell’s Kitchen crooks of early New York, some places in Nigeria or Juarez today may have crime rates beyond that of American levels-and we have the most people in the world in jails at high public cost.
It is desirable to control crime, and controlling crimes by governments and enfeofed wealthy social classes against individuals is desirable as well as preventing individuals from perpetrating crime. The difficulty is that as St. Augustine noted, human nature is totally depraved and corrupted by the criterion of existing. Some of the advantaged deceive themselves of that fact and fail to be aware that all human beings have fundamental social needs and given the opportunity to pursue their rational self-interest will do so.
Perhaps I should define the paradigm of original sin as a function of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Human beings need food energy to survive and their other drives are functions of physics. If human beings driven to cannibalism by starvation are usually moral people, it is probably an error to speculate that they perpetrated the crime of cannibalism because they had an evil will or wicked thoughts. Hunger drove them to overcome their moral empathy for others in preference of personal egoism.
Maybe some people fail to comprehend their self-interest because of some complex history, yet in a concatenated society of human corruption the wealthy are satiated sometimes by lack of privation that may continue only while the good times roll. We can discover the hard face of humanity even more so in times of poverty and adversity for an entire society. Often ruling classes become oppressors rather than liberators failing to understand the transcending nature of human nature.
Individuals pursuing their own self-interest are a fundamental way of life, while adaptive collective social behavior is phenomenal. The enemy at the gates today may tomorrow become a friend-Jesus Christ was above it all-yet look where it got him.
The N.S.A. may work on forming U.S. security yet politicians will blunder, neutralizing any technical advantage in learning where every terrorist keeps his stash of porno mags and anti-social pathological fixation on 20 virgins in extra-dimensions over the rainbow. The Mexican border will remain porous, the use of asphalt highways and fossil fuels continue along with other technologies to raise global temperature and decay the ecosystem of Earth.
Network broadcasts of raving intended to make reading the English language seem highly skilled will condition youth to a neo-Alzheimer’s kind of imitative aphasia of speech-well, we didn’t start the fire go the lyrics pianist Billy Joel sang years ago. What can be done to fix the problem of A personality apes, B personality empathize in number follow along apes and others collectivizing the world through corporations to totalize their wealth and power is hard to say. Government could develop and ecological-economic utopian full employment plan at least one would think.
So I will return to finish off the interesting book on the N.S.A. It is informative enough on how our government of well-intentioned, occasionally selfless public servants seeks to make the world a better, safer place-a politically correct place.
Empathizing with others is a good way to draw individuals into collective behavior from security to vengeance, plunder or revolution. The egoistic and self-concerned alternatively may pursue excellence and individualism and become the object of wrath of the collective masses-who can say?
Individuals of nearly psychopathic personal egoism may rise to lead corporations, communes and nations on occasion. They sometimes lead the empathizers amongst us along political channels not actually in the best interests of the masses.
One might compare Tojo or Adolph Hitler’s political leadership to that of ordinary criminals and not and find the individual criminals more democidal.
Apparently human beings should find some moderate course between personal egotism and collective values as their light in the darkness of a human nature without natural virtue. Jesus Christ is a good role model. Yet even today the social lions amongst us would tend to be raging lions seeking to devour the opportunities of the Son of God.
Mankind as individuals in number of more than 6 billion together occupies existential niches of similar challenges. The dilemma is in placing the personal ego amidst a synthetic collective of business and government organizations of individuals and pursuit of an ideal world of self-actualization. Neither course is easy-Nietzche of course choose the latter in his book ‘The Spake Zarathustra’.
We find disaster when individuals assert their ego at the top of political and business organizations in such a way as Nazis-yet human organizations generally require legions of empathizers to follow the leader to do much damage. Following Jesus Christ so far as one can adapts an individual and collective or transcending relationship with God as the collective other.
This is not a small thing. Yet it is readily possible to form a malfunctioning ecclesiastical organization as might any other human organization be a worldly expression of human nature, original sin and bad economic and ecological planning. One may take a divinely inspired idea and process it through human organization back into the mud or clay from which the Potter formed human life.
Not all human organizations are extreme of course. They all do exist as wheels within wheels of organizations existing upon this planet with members all incarnate with original sin. Sometimes these wheels and individuals are balanced and in harmony with others. They often may be on an economically unsustainable foundation and destined to run out of fuel flinging the riders into chaos as their social inertia continues.
On a finite planetary surface with finite resources the education of the population about collective, objective natural resource challenges obviously has difficulty in making its way through to all of the individuals. The wheels of the machine that spin along as Wall Street corporations of Chinese Communist elements may not have enough of a complete idea of how to apportion opportunity objectively amidst the collective concatenation of humanity in a way that conserves individual self-interest most efficiently. We find the conflict of existential social psychosis running up against personal egotism, or even led by it.
As economic challenges for a true, healthy global economy must begin with a rectification of national economy and individual security concatenated, the mass communications of wrong-headed public collective power become even more stark.
Maybe the N.S.A. should record S.E.T.I. data too for future analysis since they might have got everything else.
27 May 2011
'The Spy' by Clive Cussler
Cussler’s novel 'The Spy'-published in 2011- is set about 100 years earlier circa 1908-1911. A private detective with the Van Dorn Agency navigates through Hells Kitchen and international espionage. With Cussler’s erudite prose Isaac Bell is something like an early 20th century Jason Bourne, Sherlock Holmes and Simon Templar in one defending America against some of the world’s more wicked forces.
Mr. Cussler has written another enjoyable book reading quickly, like those pre-war years, through industrial and technical development leading to the first world war.
Mr. Cussler has written another enjoyable book reading quickly, like those pre-war years, through industrial and technical development leading to the first world war.
26 May 2011
'The Border Lords' by T. Jefferson Parker
I wasn't too happy with his Charlie Hood novel. The plot seemed to have no center regarding Hood. Instead a few simultaneous character event lines only casually related occurred. Hood should have been the Lone Wolf McQuade guy hosing down the drug exporters after emerging from captivity in a terrorist camp's underground drug warehouse.
Parker's writing is pretty good. I recently read 'how to Write a Damn Fine Novel' by james Frey and noticed that Parker used many of the techniques in his work. Maybe Los Angeles county is just so spaced out that things just happen like that, yet more detail and tighter plotting would seem better.
I found the idea of a 21 year old corrupt Los Angeles sheriff a bit over-the top on credibilty-at least one that has so many egregious criminal successes. The border lords seemed ancillary to the plot, and somewhat disparite villians riviling the main villian-good guy for the leading role.
Hood just seems to observe the action happening at a distance. Parker is a fairly good writer though so the novel is interesting enough reading-and he has one interesting gimmick that is quite worth reading about.
I have only written a couple of draft and a half science fiction novels and have far more need to improve than Parker. My criticism is qualified-I would like to write as well as Parker myself.
Parker seems to have got everything right except making an interesting enough plot with more meaning. 'The non-fiction book 'The Border' by Danelo has good data on the border. Parker's below the border descriptions seem more fiction than prose describing the drug goons, yet his writing of everyone else in that troubled country is engaging enough. Yet some of the characters seem set in just for future books in the series. I would think that each novel should be self-standing without leaving unanswered questions for the reader.
Parker's writing is pretty good. I recently read 'how to Write a Damn Fine Novel' by james Frey and noticed that Parker used many of the techniques in his work. Maybe Los Angeles county is just so spaced out that things just happen like that, yet more detail and tighter plotting would seem better.
I found the idea of a 21 year old corrupt Los Angeles sheriff a bit over-the top on credibilty-at least one that has so many egregious criminal successes. The border lords seemed ancillary to the plot, and somewhat disparite villians riviling the main villian-good guy for the leading role.
Hood just seems to observe the action happening at a distance. Parker is a fairly good writer though so the novel is interesting enough reading-and he has one interesting gimmick that is quite worth reading about.
I have only written a couple of draft and a half science fiction novels and have far more need to improve than Parker. My criticism is qualified-I would like to write as well as Parker myself.
Parker seems to have got everything right except making an interesting enough plot with more meaning. 'The non-fiction book 'The Border' by Danelo has good data on the border. Parker's below the border descriptions seem more fiction than prose describing the drug goons, yet his writing of everyone else in that troubled country is engaging enough. Yet some of the characters seem set in just for future books in the series. I would think that each novel should be self-standing without leaving unanswered questions for the reader.
A Comment on 'Jerusalem, Jerusalem' by James Carroll
Surveying this book published in 2011 that I am unlikely to complete, I was disappointed to discover that it seemed to be another one of those secularist interpretations of vast topics that work well in some respects and chop historical logic in others. The timely book by a Boston Globe columnist does not mention any historical academic credentials nor religious affilliation of the author. Well, that may be alright since it seems to be the next book of wisdom of the age on the history of the city of David.
It has some beautiful writing on geography as one might expect, yet the point of view of the author on Christianity seems to place the work of Jesus Christ just within one political context of liberation following upon the work of John the Baptist. Christianity is generally traduced in that it is interpreted mostly within a political rather than a spiritual context. That context seems somewhat in error and rather myopic.
Mr. Carroll has taken a lot of time to examine his subject, yet their is a difference between recounting historical events and finding underlying social and political reasons for social behavior in times past. Mr. Carroll has several fiction books to his credit as well as a few on historical topics, so I naturally wonder if his free wheeling reinterpretation of significant religious contexts of history hasn't been overly stimulated by his author's imagination.
Human history in review may be taken as a kind of best of highlights of large events between which political organization occurred, yet especially in Christian history human beings were largely illiterate and followed along after the new favorite god of the ruler for pragmatic reasons. Human history is 90% below the surface of great events rather more so than the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Logical, rational or moral political choices that might make faith a choice worth war are not usually ascendent over living space, desire for power and a quest for profit. Kings change their religion sometimes, Goths go on volkerwanderuungs, empires invade to expand for pragmatic reasons of power. Even so one ought not rightly relenquish faith and simply interpret the world or even events in Jerusalem's history from a narrow point of view.
The author seems to argue antipathetically to Christian faith, finding Jesus, the apostles and Crusaders to be secularists with political goals. The political and historical facts of Moslem invasion of Iberia, assault on Sicily and Byzantium in the 8th century followed the 7th century capture of Jerusalem, yet the author seems to focus on a gospel characterizartion of Jews asd enemies in error-perhaps a trendy error for the elite insiders of some of the academic world today, yet a significant error in comprehension of the gospel, of Mark, Luke and John.
At least Mr. Carroll serves the purpose of pointing out the problem in returning Jeruslam to a divided 1967 boundary. Thirty foot high walls were built to keep suicide bombers out of sections of the city that would be quite dangerous to remove. With Egypt set to open its border with the Gaza in four days the President should have sought to reinforce Israel's security instead of undermining it at an importunate moment.
I believe that Mr. Carrolls book is probably worth reading for some although it may damage the faith of those weak in that regard. I cannot view Christian history as a core of malicide-though Mr. Carroll may. Christianity has had to struggle against the wicked human nature to move it away from the pagan passions and beliefs as best as it can. It was not successfull a priori in that effort, in fact it is yet an ongoing moral combat that may be about the sole remedy to malacide as a usual human activity of government.
Jerusalem is an important city historically, yet the author seems to fall into the very snares he seeks to avoid. Maybe Dr. Campings interpretation of the end of history on Oct. 21st won't coincide with some next 700ths anniversary of a regime change, yet neither will atheists, secularists and Bostonian skeptical writers be likely to bring utopia to Jerusalem by soon.
It has some beautiful writing on geography as one might expect, yet the point of view of the author on Christianity seems to place the work of Jesus Christ just within one political context of liberation following upon the work of John the Baptist. Christianity is generally traduced in that it is interpreted mostly within a political rather than a spiritual context. That context seems somewhat in error and rather myopic.
Mr. Carroll has taken a lot of time to examine his subject, yet their is a difference between recounting historical events and finding underlying social and political reasons for social behavior in times past. Mr. Carroll has several fiction books to his credit as well as a few on historical topics, so I naturally wonder if his free wheeling reinterpretation of significant religious contexts of history hasn't been overly stimulated by his author's imagination.
Human history in review may be taken as a kind of best of highlights of large events between which political organization occurred, yet especially in Christian history human beings were largely illiterate and followed along after the new favorite god of the ruler for pragmatic reasons. Human history is 90% below the surface of great events rather more so than the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Logical, rational or moral political choices that might make faith a choice worth war are not usually ascendent over living space, desire for power and a quest for profit. Kings change their religion sometimes, Goths go on volkerwanderuungs, empires invade to expand for pragmatic reasons of power. Even so one ought not rightly relenquish faith and simply interpret the world or even events in Jerusalem's history from a narrow point of view.
The author seems to argue antipathetically to Christian faith, finding Jesus, the apostles and Crusaders to be secularists with political goals. The political and historical facts of Moslem invasion of Iberia, assault on Sicily and Byzantium in the 8th century followed the 7th century capture of Jerusalem, yet the author seems to focus on a gospel characterizartion of Jews asd enemies in error-perhaps a trendy error for the elite insiders of some of the academic world today, yet a significant error in comprehension of the gospel, of Mark, Luke and John.
At least Mr. Carroll serves the purpose of pointing out the problem in returning Jeruslam to a divided 1967 boundary. Thirty foot high walls were built to keep suicide bombers out of sections of the city that would be quite dangerous to remove. With Egypt set to open its border with the Gaza in four days the President should have sought to reinforce Israel's security instead of undermining it at an importunate moment.
I believe that Mr. Carrolls book is probably worth reading for some although it may damage the faith of those weak in that regard. I cannot view Christian history as a core of malicide-though Mr. Carroll may. Christianity has had to struggle against the wicked human nature to move it away from the pagan passions and beliefs as best as it can. It was not successfull a priori in that effort, in fact it is yet an ongoing moral combat that may be about the sole remedy to malacide as a usual human activity of government.
Jerusalem is an important city historically, yet the author seems to fall into the very snares he seeks to avoid. Maybe Dr. Campings interpretation of the end of history on Oct. 21st won't coincide with some next 700ths anniversary of a regime change, yet neither will atheists, secularists and Bostonian skeptical writers be likely to bring utopia to Jerusalem by soon.
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