Just Blame Fred

Many years ago, a large prominent figure wrote an essay by the name, “The World as I see It.” In no way do I presume to even approach the stature of the man who wrote that — Albert Einstein.

However, we do live in a different world than Einstein’s in many respects. For starters, the geopolitical landscape is far different today than it was then. Today’s world affairs are borne on the back of what took place since Einstein’s time.

And yet, in many respects, not much have changed. We still have silly “tribal” conflicts and squabblings, and big “tribes” love to beat up on the smaller “tribes”, and the smaller “tribes” will fight back by any means possible against the bigger “tribes”.

But what about the major differences? In today’s world, we have a level of hyper-connectivity that has never existed before in the history of mankind — the Internet. We also have diversification of wealth at levels that have never existed before. We have mass travel, where anyone can travel great distances to any part of the world in just a few hours and some bucks. We also have far more people alive today than then. We also have diversified levels of education and knowledge that would’ve been the stuff of Science Fiction back in Einstein’s era. And many other wonders.

We also have the specter of ultra-powerful hyper-stable governments that are firmly entrenched and very controlling. We have military machines, weapons, and other technology that would’ve been beyond the imagination of many back then.

And for the first time in human history, humans have the power to wipe itself clean off the map at just the “push of a button”. Those, that “button” currently resides in the hands of the most powerful governments, but the danger increases as that power becomes more distributed among the lesser nations.

Alas, nuclear weapons are not the only threat to our existence. Biological threats exists as well, and as biotechnology progresses, the more possible it will become for anyone to engineer a biological threat that can wipe out large numbers of people.

On the other hand, big powerful governments and corporations are controlled by the hands of a few whose agendas and goals may not be in the best interests of the individual. Pharmaceutical companies may push governments to institute mandates for vaccines that may not be necessary or safe. Military contractors may influence governments to choose military options over diplomatic ones to keep themselves on the gravy train. Big Finance may convince governments to allow them to cowboy the economy. And so on.

Meanwhile, the “little guys” — you and I — are caught in the middle of all of this. Activities of the “Big Boys” may wipe us out individually without the Boys even knowing it, like kids horsing around in a playground trampling ants. Military conflicts sacrifice the lives of innocent men, women, and children to serve some geopolitical — or geo-corproate interest. Entire villages of the “little people” may be bombed out of existence in the efforts to “war against terrorism.”

If you are one of those villiagers, who is the true terrorist in your eyes as you watch your hut go up in flames or one of your kids fragged by an exploding bomb?

Or here in the US, you may be someone who have worked hard all of your life to have a “nest-egg” to rely on in your retirement — except the IRAs and the 401K investments were wiped out in value by downturns in the equities markets.

And it gets even better. Developing nations are creating greater and greater demands for resources that are finite both in absolute size and in the ability to exploit them for use. China and India are probably the two fastest growing in this regard, but there are others as well. Utilization of those resources also creates concomitant impacts on the environment, which is also limited in scope and its ability to adapt to human activities.

Where is all of this headed? What will be the end result?

My concerns are as follows:

1. The Forever Resource Wars — in some form or fashion, resource wars will not only continue, but grow in aggression amidst the deceptions, the propagandas, and the outright lies to “justify” the wars back at home. The allocation of intellectual and financial resources to fight the resource wars put a net drain on the global economy as a hole, not to mention destruction of wealth of the victim nations, deaths to millions of innocent lives, and a dimunition of what it means to be human.
2. Financial and Social Instabilities brought on by Dwindling Resources — as resources become increasingly scarce, prices will rise, destabilizing the financial and social picture on a global scale. More propaganda will be promulgated by the Big Governments to divert people away from the true problems to blame each other, only creating more unrest, socially and geo-politically, feeding the push for The Forever Resource Wars, and other nasties.
3. Ecological Impacts that may be Irreversible — Human activities on a global scale that results in the release of even more carbon and various pollutants into the atmosphere and the biosphere in general, which will have nonlinear and unpredictable impacts on the environment, which most likely will feed into Financial and Social Instabilities, among other things.
4. A Negative Synergism — an emergence of a global set of problems emerging from the interplay of the first 3, which in and of itself might take on an irreversible mode leading to a downward spiral of the overall well-being of humans on this planet.

Note that my above 4 concerns cannot be taken in isolation, but must all be considered. We may project  best-case scenarios and worst-case scenarios from the above, across time into the future.  Some may argue that there is no cause for concern, but it is hard to see how we should not be at least a little concerned given the issues at hand.

It is my estimation that the “Big Boys” will not appreciate the full impact of the above until it is too late — that is, until after its beyond the point of no return. And even if they did, what would they do? Would their major concern be what’s best for us individuals? Or what’s best for themselves? Would they seek to maintain status quo? Or do the right thing? What exactly would they do? That is the question of ages.

There are certain fallacies the “Big Boys” operate from. They are:

1. The Fallacy of Infinite Growth — this bedevils both the financial and resource markets. Both assume that they can continue to have “infinite growth” despite the very obvious and plain fact that resources and people are finite.
2. The Fallacy of “Might Makes Right” — just because loads of  “power” does not mean it’s a good thing to use that power against the individual. If it increases suffering somewhere, how is it ever “right”?
3. The Fallacy of the Assumption that the “Little Guy” can always be “controlled” — You can only fool individuals so many times before they catch on.

The immediate question that comes to mind is what can we do about it, as individuals? As individuals, we acquese power and control to the power elite, collectively, and those few that resist are put down by other individuals that have bought into the “power of authority”. Thus, you have police arresting people even if they’ve done no wrong, soliders kicking the doors in of innocent families even that family has done nothing wrong, etc. Ultimately, we are talking about the little guy being pitted against the little guy at the behest of the “Big Boys”.

But the Big Boys would not have any power or dominance unless there’s acquiescence. It’s just that plain and simple.

More on this later.

You know, against my better judgment, I voted for Obama. Why? Because Palin scared the crap out of me. And yet, I don’t consider our political system as functional with regards to individual rights and concerns. Nonetheless, I did have hope that Obama would be a better choice than McCain, that perhaps Obama might actually represent the seeds for real change.

And now I see that I may have been right — but regret it.

This is a direct quote of Obama taken from the NPR Site:

“Now is the time for a strong international response, and North Korea must know that the path to security and respect will never come through threats and illegal weapons,” Obama said to applause. “All nations must come together to build a stronger, global regime … we must stand shoulder to shoulder to pressure the North Koreans to change course.”

What? Did I hear that right? “Global Regime?” In other words, a One World Government?

WTF? (Even Better: Obama’s New World Order)

Now, many of my more conspiracy-oriented friends had been warning me about this, but I tend to be a reserved skeptic, looking at possibilities, but also looking for evidence.

Well, if I didn’t hear this from the man’s mouth itself, I probably would not have believed it.

And folks, this is how it always begins. It always begins with the “big bogyman”,  and the very next thing you always see is government rushing in with “the solution”, which is almost always to grow more government.

But this is a major enchilada here. If I am reading the words of our new fearless leader correctly, he wants to scare the world into accepting a new “Global Regime” that will then issue dicta to various nations they disagree with, and subsequently may also kick that nation’s butt.

But as we all know, once something of that magnitude becomes established, it will go far beyond that. A One World Government would be a Bad Thing, something extremely anti-freedom. We already saw this with the much-vaunted European Union; now it’s going global?

Now, my friends, it turns out that Obama is not the first to be touting a New World Order. George Bush Senior as well! [See YouTube Video]

WTF!!!!

OK, what’s going on here? Obama sounding like Bush Senior? Did I miss something here? Well, there you have it. Solid Evidence that some thing’s afoot. Call me a conspiracy nut if you like, but from the very lips of both Bush and Obama you hear the same message.

Now that the election is over and Obama creamed McCain, time to get on with the real problems that beset us. Obama certainly does have his work cut out for him — “fixing” an ailed and broken system, flawed at the fundamental roots. I kinda liken Obama as a type of ‘Sheradian’ from Bablyon 5 defeating McCain, a type of ‘President Clarke’ from the same show. Actually, President Clarke is more like President Bush, but analogies only go so far.

I am a Libertarian myself, so I look at both the Democrats and Republicans with great disdain. Alas, I saw that McCain and Palin continually beating the war drum, even saber-rattling with Russia. A war with Russia would be very bad for everyone, because for the very reason that when two nuclear powers have a face-off with each attacking each other’s homelands, the loser will be extremely tempted to use the nuclear option, meaning, of course, the end of life as we know it on this planet.

So, scared out of my gourd with McCain and Palin, I got my butt out there and voted for Obama, despite the fact I don’t like his socialist leanings and his support for the very unions that is responsible for chasing manufacturing jobs out of this country, among other things. I don’t like Joe Biden’s support for the very misandrist “Violence Against Women” bill, because it ignores the violence women exact against men, which according to FBI stats, is about equal with violence women exact against men.

But I digress.

What really bothers me is how NPR has been covering this election. At every opportunity, they choose to hit up the election from the race angle, rasing questions about the “Bradley Effect”, which to my knowledge have not been scientifically confirmed, to ignoring half of Obama’s heritage by referring to him as a “Black Man”, by throwing the race question up in the face of nearly all they’ve interviewed and covered and asked opinions of.

What amuses me is that a number of people on their call-in shows asked the very questions I am asking about why NPR chooses to focus on race so much when this election is clearly NOT about race.

NPR’s response? “We have no choice.”

To which I say, hogwash!

We have seen remarkable progress in this country since the Civil Rights movements of the 60’s. We have seen the rise of a new generation that is, for the most part, unbiased on the so-called “race” issue.

The truth of the matter is that the whole “race” issue is of our parent’s and grandparent’s generation. They still live in that world, for the most part, and still think in those terms. Thankfully, though, their influence on the world is diminishing as we move forward to a bold new future.

That’s not to say that there aren’t racists in they younger generations. But it does not compare at all to what existed 50 years ago.

But I ask the question: What exactly is “racism”, anyway? What exactly is “race”? Why would it even matter to begin with?

Firstly, “race” is purely a social construct with no basis in science. This is already widely known. It makes no sense, anyway, because it does not even speak to the culture a person belongs to, but to some silly notions about humanity — notions that were created by the racists in the past to divide people for the purposes of power and control.

The truth of the matter is that there is only one ‘race’ — the human race. What most refer to as ‘racial characteristics’ are merely regional and climatic adaptations our ancestors who branched out from Africa many thousands of years ago underwent. Those who migrated to the northern regions got lighter so their skin could synthesize more of the vitamin D from the reduced sunlight. Those who migrated to the Asian continents were most likely small clans with features differences that were amplified over time to the billions that exist there today.

Genetics show no basis for “race” at all. And many of these so-called “racial characteristics” are poly-genetic in nature, meaning that many different genetic configurations produce the same phenotypic traits. Meaning, of course, nature simply found many avenues to archive the same adaptive benefits.

Well, duh.

Also, from a memetic standpoint, the ‘race’ meme is a thought contagion, meaning that it’s a meme that programs for its own retransmission, much like religion and politics does. But a deep discussion of memetics is beyond the scope of this blog. Feel free to Google the many references on the Internet for your own self-edification.

NPR’s fixation on race does us all a disservice. Personally, I find it condescending, as though “race” can tell you all you need to know about a person. Actually, it tells you nothing beyond the fading social notion and perception of that person — and it would fade far faster if NPR and other media outlets would cease giving it special attention.

Now, I otherwise like NPR, though they are not perfect, and they did knuckle under to Bush’s War Machine during the genesis of the Iraq war. At that time I was so disgusted with NPR that I stopped tuning them in, and have only recently begun picking them up again.

But with their fixation on the ‘race’ question over and beyond what it needs to be, I may indeed tune them out again. I’ll leave it up to them to see reason instead of racism.

Wow, what a whirlwind of news we’ve all heard over the past couple of weeks! Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and who’s next?

All this squabbling over ecomomic growth problems. All this scrambling to “fix” the problems. All the politics being flung around by Obama and McCain over who’s to blame. All the people on “Main Street” staring like deer in the headlights. All the talking heads making crazy pronouncements of impending doom and gloom. All the other financial institutions scrambling to “protect” themselves from being the next major jaw-dropping headline. All the investors, traders, fund manager, market makers on wall-street shooting worthless tokens — whoops, I mean stocks — back and forth to each other in a never-ending zero-sum Ponzi scheme of Ages.

And yet, a true understanding of what’s really going in is so simple even a 5-year-old can grasp it — if you know where to look and how to understand the results.

And so, let me impart this wisdom to you.

The first requirement is that you understand that, dollar for dollar, the stock markets are a zero-sum game. This is a rather tough concept for some to grasp, and I can appreciate that because all the hype you hear about stocks and the related financial instruments tend to hide this plainly obvious fact from you: that every dollar you make on the stock market comes out of someone else’s pocket, and every dollar you loose goes into the pocket of another trader/investor/what have you. That is the definition of “zero-sum”. When you add up all the gains and losses of the entire system, you come up with zero. Get that? Good. Now for my next pearl of wisdom.

If you look at the stock market over time, it indeed looks complicated. A price rises, a price falls. One company rides to success; another goes down in flame. Traders shoot tokens back and forth to each other representing these companies. And when I say “trader”, I mean anyone who dabbles in the exchange of stock tokens on the stock market, directly or indirectly. Long term, day trader, guy in the pit. The distinctions really don’t matter in the long run as you will soon understand.

Now, I will show you something, a simple something. It’s a chart. It’s derivation is not complicated at all, and anyone in the world can pull this same information and understand it, including a 5-year-old. Brace yourselves. Here it comes.

Now, notice that this is the NYSE chart — a calculated average of all stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Notice that this is yearly data going from 1970 to the present (2008). The “candlesticks”, as they are called, show at a glance how the prices shifted for that period. Since this is a yearly chart, a candle represent price movement for the entire year. If the candle is hollow, it means the price ended higher at the end of the year than it began. Red candles mean the price ended lower for that year. The “stick” part of the candlestick represnts the highs and lows of price movements for that year.

Now you are probably thinking, “so what?” Even this chart shows what looks like a general rise in the NYSE, even though that last candlestick looks meanincing (it represents the year to date movenent of this year– 2008). But there’s more to this chart if it hasen’t caught your eye already.

Yes, the bottom part of this chart is where the real story lies. It represents trading volume. The vertical bars are color-coded for the years they represent — a black bar means the candle above ended at a higher price; a red bar means the year ended at a lower price than it began. But that’s not important. The important thing is the trend in volume itself, and it’s relationship to the price movements.

You will note that from 1970 to 2002 the volume has been increasing almost exponentially. Afterwards, you see a leveling off in volume. In fact, this is the first time the volume has been level since 1987. And you will note that the volume now is much higher than it was back in 1987.

And if you haven’t figured it out by now, let me tell you what that 5-year-old can understand once you tell her.

You will recall my quip about zero-sum games earlier. Now, what does the zero-sum game really mean to you as a trader? Come on, think about it! Even a 5-year-old should be able to figure this out!

Ok, if you still didn’t catch on, it means simply this: You, the trader/investor/whatever you are, are a fool for buying a token with no intrinsic value. The only thing you can do with this token, once bought, is to sell it again. And what do you look for when you sell it again, being the fool that you are? Exactly. You need to find a greater fool than yourself to take it off your hands at a higher price than you bought it! That’s right! You only make out if you find a greater fool than yourself.

And so fear sets in if you cannot find a greater fool than yourself and trading is going on below your strike price. Your only options is to go into a “hope and pray” mode and hope greater fools flock back into the market, or to sell it off and take a hit, hopefully advoiding an even nastier hit if you would be so foolish to hold on to this worthless token longer.

Now with that pearl of wisdom, let’s take a look at another chart — NASDAQ.

You see — not suprisingly — the same characteristic volume trend — a near exponential rise until 2001, then a levelling off. You can directly relate the volume to the number of “fools” in the market, and the volume no longer increases exponentially anymore for one simple reason: You have run out of grater fools!!!!!!!!

Is that surprising? I mean, the population on this planet is a finite number, and the stock market has grown far faster than the population can. What that ultimately means is that you MUST run out of greater fools. What happens after that? The prices will shift about chaotically. Confused investors will all scratch their heads wondering why the old tried and true approaches of the past don’t work anymore. Any such foolishness as “being in it for the long term” is to be laughed at, and you can plainly see why if you look at these charts.

During the 20th century, as prosperity spread to more and more of the population, more and more people were drawn into the stock market, either directly as “investors”, or indirectly through 401Ks, mutual funds, IRA accounts, and the like. All their foolish stategies were really predicated on the notion that there will always be greater fools to take the market higher and higher. That there will always be an exponential increase in volume. That the supply of money is infinite. That, in point of fact, the zero-sum game that is the stock market is not really a zero-sum game. That the money is not really coming at the behest of the loss from someone else, that this Ponzi — or pyramid — scheme can continue forever.

The 5-year-old is now laughing at you.

This MIT Student wasn’t doing anything all that different from what I did as a kid. The breadboard she mounted to her jacket is a very common and very basic part in the tool chest of any electronic tinkerer. I used those very breadboards myself when I was that girl’s age and younger — quite a bit younger. I think I started around age 13 building all kinds of cool electronic circuits using LEDs, ICs, capacitors, resistors, transistors, and diodes. What did I build? Everything from decade counters to simple multiplexers, from wierd music devices to photo-detectors and alarms. I even built a 1024-bit binary counter out of a single 1024-bit by one DRAM chip and some supporting electronics. Once I even built a “character” generator to display a 16 by 16-bit field from a static ram chip onto a TV — using discrete components.

Those were the days.

Even before I got my hands on those cool breadboards, I was building electronic circuits. I once built a tone generator and placed that in a plastic box. I gave that to a neighborhood kid to do his science project with. I tried to explain to the poor kid how the thing worked, but I don’t think he quite grasped it. However, I think he got a good grade anyway!

I could see happening to myself what happened to Star Simpson, had this silly craze of terrorism paranoia been rampant around my time. And I can understand perfectly why she might not even consider for a moment that anyone would be so stupid as to think that a simple circuit breadboard could be mistaken for a bomb. It simply probably didn’t even occur to her, as it would not to myself. At least not my younger self.

Today, I have painfully learned the hard way how stupid your average person is. And that goes 10 times for someone working in the security field of nearly any sort. You can simply — I am sad to say — estimate just how stupid an arbitrary person can be. And I deal with the sad reality all the time.

My full support goes out to Star Simpson, and hope she fairs well in this stick quagmire she stumbled into. As far as the rest of the country is concerned, consider that 41,000 people a year die in vehicle accidents. I see no outcry there. Even my younger brother, a truck driver for FedEx, died in a horrible crash where his body was burned so badly we had a closed-casket funeral for him. Compared to traffic accidents and the related death toll, so-called threats of “terrorism” in our country is a non-issue, even taking 9/11, a single incident, into account. I would say the priorities of our government and the people of this country are totally back-asswards.