Freedom means many things to many people. One of the supposed freedoms we are born with is to exist in nature. This is not a right bestowed by Government or God, but is part of what and who we are. One of the greatest crimes against humanity is the pursuit of profits to line the pockets of the wealthy with scant regard for natural consequences.

Governments pursue economic advantage in order to be considered popular but ministers are not all powerful. Political systems that “evolve” seem more advantageous than ones which overturn established systems however when that evolution is corrupt, when it is masks the democratic interests (of the many) to bestow advantages upon the few, an aristocracy exists. Conservative politicians seek to align the efforts of the many (tax payers) to support rational goals – to reduce national debt – to benefit the actions of corporations who provide much employment to the citizens. Liberal politicians seek to balance the actions of corporations so that the population realises value for their contributions. Socialists seek to claim this wealth back.

When things go out of balance, then injustice occurs. Revolutions too often install a new system of corruption at the top that takes over the levers of power but the needs of the few being placed above the society they serve all too often take precedence over principals. Hence few revolutions result in governments that are considered “saintly” by the West. One example of a successful revolution is that of India, led by one man who sought not power, but social justice, Gandhi. One example of a corrupt revolution, that replaced one ruling class with another is Zimbabwe. The French and American revolutions were based around fundamental principles of liberty and equality even though these principals took hundreds of years to be reflected in peoples’ lives and it remains an on going project, there is still an ongoing aspiration.

The dissolution of the British Empire created the free nations of the Commonwealth and although Great Britain appears now diminished, it is an evolved Empire – one that has had its children. The deeds of the 20th century undid centuries of domination asserted by military superiority. In that way, one could view that revolution as socially progressive.

Except that international finance driven in large part by the migration of population and the need/opportunity to employ them and the economic systems of measurement have resulted in conglomeration, the growth of a world class of corporatisation commonly called “globalisation” against which there is considerable popular protest. Why?

When you consider that the profits of these huge corporatations may avoid taxation then a level of fairness is denied to the population. When you also consider that they are responsible for much of the pollution the world is starting to confront, then you begin to assess the costs above unfair taxation as criminality.

The economic troubles the world is facing are due to corporate irresponsibility. Seeking wealth for the very sake of being competitively powerful does not benefit anyone but cements a super class into an unassailable position and that is the instinct that our laws seek to moderate.

This article in theGuardian UK supports what Disturbing Trends has been saying for years: it is the cost free pollution that is seen as beneficial (provision of jobs) that distort economic systems – that provide an economic rationality to putting political systems in place that allow the rape of society (GW Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin) with no regard for the environment which the majority of us live in. This movement that seeks to discredit climate science is as real a threat as is the terrible expansion of human population in much of Asia and the corporate structure that both feeds it and takes advantage of it.

Humanity needs to reassess what it is doing. Polluting in the name of profit kills people. To herald it as rational is simply false.

When a flaw in the protective shield (that makes airflight possible without holding your breath) exposed American flights a new kind of designer suicide bomber with a concealed and undetectable chemistry set to be set off by an “emergency injection”, the media in the UK highlighted how detailed scanners would fail to show such kit, but would expose peoples’ genitals to the security police. Making people the “apparent victims” because they are viewed as a parade of pornographic images is what the prurient minds of a few are most concerned about? Is that their response?

I avoided international travel for eight years not so much for a fear of terrorists, but the sense that being intimately searched at every border under the watchful eye of machine gun toting security could result in a mistake. But now, that the bullet has been bit and I have travelled to the UK, I find that the real response of this Government is far less intrusive or threatening than when I travelled before 9/11.

If one’s naughty bits are exposed in a virtual lineup parading past the border, then so be it. Security is not infallible, but so long as the scanning of human bodies is not harmful, then it should be employed. Discreet methods to make things harder for the wannabe terrorist are better than being pointlessly delayed and questioned or blown up.

In other words, it a response. President Obama decided that it is not acceptable to rely upon failure and passengers to tackle security and has taken an immediate action by ordering air marshals on all flights into America. And now he has ordered security reviews and responded in such a fashion that it is obvious that he intends to disrupt the threat to public safety that increasingly sophisticated attacks may bring. Thinking ahead of the plotters is the trick and when a politician takes responsibility for solving the previously unsolvable, the public is rightfully reassured to get on with business as usual.

The unacceptable risk of being exposed to acts of war carried out upon the innocent by people who can only be perceived as totally insane or brainwashed far exceeds any fear that security police may view the bodies of the public in a virtual invasive search does provide a better rationale that will have a side effect of reducing the ability of idiots to stuff their bodies with condom wrapped drug contraband as well.

So long as there are no adverse effects, it is not a threat to freedom. And when a politician takes responsibility, there is hope of real progress. Terrorism is a serious wound, triage involves stemming blood loss, while the antibiotics take more time to be effective.

Let us hope that the Obama responsibility extends to winning the war by reducing the motivators that allow insanity to prevail. Terrorism is a terrible sickness that has befallen some of the most committed idiots who’s goals can not be realised because the forces that will act against them are not only far stronger, smarter and increasingly evolving (also), but it now has a leadership that understands responsibility.

China is resisting revaluation of its currency fearing that the reduction in export would seriously affect their economy. They are quite correct, the world buys predominantly products manufactured in China precisely as it is profitable to import them, and resell them at a large profit than to make more slender margins on higher priced goods.

Western economies believe that China is obliged to revalue its currency to swing the balance away from their importing excessive amounts of stock in the hope of reselling it at bargain prices.

The power heavy structure of the China’s centrally controlled but capitalist driven economy exerts control on the factors that reduce earnings per capita to sub-poverty levels unacceptable to the established liberalism of the West, while the economic unreality of world-wide markets accepting floods of cheaper goods not only displace other manufacturing centres but as China resists revaluing, and continues to exchange cheap labour for overvalued foreign exchange, the larger the impact when they do revalue.

And that is the point. As long as the population is engaged in this grand savings scheme and China hordes foreign reserves, the more capital flows into China. The revaluation must occur sometime, or internal changes in China may correct the imbalance, if for example the climate change agreements were to penalise China and the USA, they would have more to pay than others.

Another way of viewing the current situation is that China is on the rise of a bubble.

When competing against countries that have an equitably paid labor force, currency controls ensure that their own workers remain underpaid. Not floating/revaluing the Yuan provides the mechanism.

Reuters article

The US debt emergency is coming, and it is a man made Tsunami – after the erasure of an accumulation of massive fictional wealth – the complex debt structures borrowed with leverage against assumptions that have resulted in systemic deficiencies and bailouts – and may result in the collapse of one set of rules in favour of a new set.

The huge injection of funds into the US economy devalued the US Dollar, resulting in other currencies revaluing. If more and more dollars get printed the Euro may become the more stable international base currency.

Meantime we stare at the disaster unfolding after implementing short term solutions but taking too long to pass long term solutions. That aspect of human nature figures into our financial systems. There is a delay between action and payment allowed, a period of settlement when money is in transit. As though it did not exist.

The fact is that money is a self equalising sea that makes accumulation/wealth expensive, in theory. In fact poverty is made far more expensive by deceptive margin. The way in which human effort is rewarded compared with investment performance appears the basic problem.

Ruling humanity by a points system is absurd. As populations have risen, the money supply has been held back, the conservative “cure” for inflation. Economists must address symptoms or causes as a priority. President Obama ensured that the US would not drown in poverty (symptom) while figuring out what regulation would prevent any repeat of the derivative madness (cause).

Like a gambler perhaps there is a belief that another last burst of derivative action will right the problem. Regulation will stop that. An equitable financial system that serves commonly held goals and eliminates inequality through design rather than force may be a superior solution than regulating or extending instruments that base their logic on flawed theory.

The laws of supply and demand operate as clumsy filters. With online ecommerce – a standard could be reached so all markets are fully equal, so that poverty is not responded to with high interest rate traps, so that credit card companies that charge criminal rates (anything over 10% per annum is effectively slavery) are taxed harshly.

See also: Moneywatch

The “economic crisis” and the “war in Afghanistan” are both threats to the US economy. What is the “US Economy” to the new world that has discovered greed is not exclusively an American sin?

Any society that is not driven by a common economic goal is going to flounder, economically. And one that pursues capitalism or communism too successfully will suffer after success. In this TED talk, Geoff Mulgan talks about the need for capitalism to adopt caring in the new world.

Where capitalism benefits risk takers, communism fosters creativity.

If a society does not take risks with creativity continuously, then relevant winners are not found. Hence the success of capitalism. Democracy serves us by proving change. It is not the cheapest way to determine when it is time for change, but it is indicative of common will.

Whether it is optimal is another question and one best left unexplored. When the Government starts to plan change of government, inevitably human nature steps in and someone gets addicted to dominating everyone else.

But the service of democracy is to favour the other side of the equation. Concentrate on improving the health and education of the people comprising the country, and then make them cycle downhill as fast as they can with more skill. Then prepare for the next hill.

Democracy has a problem. It reacts to history, rather than what is needed. The making of history is the way it is because we turn it into a duality (which is why fair systems, e.g. proportional representation, is so unpopular with the politicians). A duality means winning half the time. If there were five major parties, proposing not just red and blue, but green, white and yellow as well – there comes a point where the “popular mandate” becomes meaningless.

We worship the wrong god. Democracy is not what makes politics work, it is what makes despotism fail.

The “will of the people” is a popular choice, and is usually not the correct choice. It is therefore little more than fiction. Lots of people flock to see terrible movies. It does not improve the inherent value of the art.

Popularism as political muscle is dangerous. The best leaders are not self aggrandizing super humans. Their political views are well formed and with them they can see the (totally right/utterly wrong) approach and from debate, the Government could work out which rhetoric fits the circumstances and overrule the other. Why crossing the floor is such a crime in FPP (first past the post) non-proportional electorates is that a government is defined as a continuous right to control power. Is that the best way?

Probably a non-partisan senate, where candidates are promoted to office (i.e. sponsored) by parties, but need not remain loyal to the party on every vote.

A more elastic form of party politics could mean that governments evolve with the best people from both sides but decisions are weighed for their actual effect rather than each side trying to beat the other with rhetoric.

A more representative and responsive democracy needs to evolve. The constant polling and referendums of the broad population does not produce better answers, just commonly held opinions.

We are smart enough to cause all these problems, we are smart enough to solve them and create more complex ones.

People face life every day. On very few of those days the plain shadow of death falls, and when it does it seems sudden, unexpected, incomplete.

Life is a book that ends in the wrong place. It could be on a train, after a steamy love scene or during a part of the life that the author correctly thought should be skipped entirely. A void from which the main character never re-emerges.

Death is not talked about, except when there are rules. Families suffer death and then it becomes the only thing talked about. Then the thing that must not be talked about. Eventually reflection is possible.

This cultural tendency to shun death, and keep it away from the subject of living seems a good strategy. Do not upset Grandma with that kind of talk, that sort of imperative. The fact that it usually approaches like anything, without an instruction guide, makes us all the more mystified by the obvious change it brings.

The psychological effects of death in the family should not be discounted. The gross effect of war, the intrusion of American forces into a culture that does not respect its intrusion, but associates the arrival of these badly dressed warriors with the death of many of their own family members.

The only time war is justified is to undo an invasion. There is no such thing as improving a culture by killing certain members of it. Enmity causes power to be invested in fighting adversaries.

War is a disease and the cure – it requires plenty of human intelligence. Is death the end game in Afghanistan? Will the bodies of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda leaders be the only product that America can win from this adventure of revenge?

Or will they further invest themselves in “reforming” a culture they do not own or even understand very well?

The big difference between today and thirty years ago – nobody needed passwords then. Just a drivers licence. Now they want our retina and finger prints. Next they will be after our memories and skills. Imprints of our personalities will become available online. Individuality will be lost in a miasma of traded iconography and ideas that betray no reason.

Or we will retain our individuality despite this assault of psychic interception. There is the Internet. And there is the Mobile Internet. People wonder why Facebook is full of these silly questions “What is your favourite colour” and then all your ads go blue.

Marketing could have intimacy as its goal but then it is not marketing. It is futile manipulation and as any manipulator will learn about humanity, they will not play ball. They change their minds and momentum often, and you will go on looking for holy grails.

Check this countdown timer for when the atmosphere has 1,000,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon in it – which is approximately past the threshold when the atmosphere will go above 2 degrees average and the real climatic instability proceeds with potentially disasterous consequences predicted.

Cont/-

For example droughts/flooding ratios would become more extreme than they are. The world will continue to change and evolve until it goes over a certain point where the food chain starts to collapse and then that’s it for a few million years before life crawls back out of the rocks.

Most climate change deniers will be long dead before things get really nasty. It is the lack of responsibility for the people of the future that seems to be contrary to purposes of nations, of our species and of our world.

There will come a point where economic growth will become impossible, so why not take the reigns of it now and make energy non-carbon producing and sustainable? Why is this so hard? Because the oil companies will not own it and they are funding governments through the tax dollar?

If there is any danger that future generations will suffer, then we must understand the science. Listening to one entrapeneur (the guy that started the weather channel) talk about his complete disbelief in climate change is spooky. But when you realise that he is being paid to say what he is saying, his conviction is nothing less than hollow. His evidence is irrelevant – merely things her heard someone say was good enough science to him. He is no qualified sceptic.

And to counter this (apparently) right-wing claim that climate change is merely a scam: prove it. It is your responsibility to prove that your pollution is harmless before it destroys everything. Got it?

There is plenty of evidence that pollution causes death. There is plenty of evidence that the atmosphere is being unnaturally loaded with our pollutants and we have no right under God or Nature to so abuse our environment just so some balance sheet looks nice.

There is plenty to say that we destroyed careful balances nature had established since the last great extinction of 80% of all live on earth. It is possible that a natural catastrophie will get us first before climate change makes modern life impossible.

Modern man has only been around for a fraction of the planet’s natural history. Let’s not let go of that which nature has taken so long to organise before giving us the minds with which to briefly appreciate it, turn it into art and then systematically destroy it. Our representations of nature will be all we have to remember it by.

America has changed culture more than most modern civilizations. This mutability or adaptability is a threat to the older established rigid moral compass of a world that did not have so many variables and survived as a reason of taking great care with physical rules.

Rules about eating and sex characterize religions and form the basis of culture where restriction adds the value of temptation, where the forbidden gives the terribly rich and powerful access to the asinine. In a sense, the decline of civilisation, its very decadence, is not what defines it. It is not the act of the soldier priest that starts the long walk that eventually ends up with coddled children and little bits of shiny plastic. The old model was of a shepherd herding sheep, a leader with vision with followers endowed with perception or enough good sense to follow. In this contrived clash of civilisations (even it was contrived by Osama Bin Laden and his wealth, or a Bush conspiracy) we see the most decadent fighting against the most devout. Both American decadence and deep Islamic devotion are extra-ordinary behaviours based on a lifetime of thinking a certain way. Neither are wrong, indeed, if either are right it is not the reason the other is not. Social coherence is not sourced in the will. For the first part of life we seek the dictates of a leadership, we either wait for permission or we take the reigns. Early life knows no middle ground. Later on we start to realise the value of waiting dissipates and action is required and urge on our younger brothers and sisters to feel responsibility in their lives.

It is the same problem in the self aware culture of the Americas as in the forceful rigour of Afghani life. The young will not listen. But for the clash of civilisations to resolve, the young need to listen because their beliefs are formed around what they fail to understand. American culture has so many levels of pretense it appeals to many personae whereas restrictive cultures can only appeal to a limited range of minds, meaning that they only produce a limited range of mind sets.

Variety in the challenges to the mind set have produced a new approach to finding the “most successful” path. Multiple expertise assists survival in the bleakest of circumstance, but for a culture to master every terrain and climate requires more facets of specialisation. Afghanistan has become a country ruled by war and a distrust for invaders, whom, one after the other, have managed to find an army more suited to the internal conditions of a land that is not typical of every land.

The fear of invasion of America has been a driving force since World War II. The European invasion and colonisation empires collapsed as the colonies develop independent wealth. Trade ensues and is seen as the healthy signs of a cooperating world.

Into the hands of children do they place weapons. Trade supports the flow of weapons in as much as drugs and food. Trade has no conscience. What it carries from one set of hands to another is judged by neither and the mutual risk of rejection by the other is reduced by the use of currency.

On the battlefield, there is no such medium. The exchange is guaranteed to cause disease to both sides. The product of war is reduction in demand and it causes wealth by concentrating ownership. It is the exercise of power, trading the lives of those we old man can influence to fight for their sisters, their wives and children. To fight and kill the other males from over the valley and dale. To exercise their internal need to be dominated we force their energies into each other?

Look inside an ant or a bee hive. What do you see? There are two things that immediately come to mind – first it appears the creatures are all the same, but if you watch it becomes apparent that pockets of mass specialisation occur within the mass of worker female eunuchs, functional components of what we call a “society” appear. We half believe the metaphor of being a cog in a survival machine, while lamenting the boring mundane role we play, we live.

The economic decline is a pause. What went wrong with the machine? Why did it break? Now let’s construct another excuse for our normal accepted behaviour. The banks and AIG that paid executive bonuses with tax payer money were breaking the natural laws of mutual suffering. They caused the problem in their own books in competition with each other, fully aware in the same way that when we say “society” we submit to the constraints on our lives.

We can not just kick back and enjoy the recession, but we have to think of new ways to function – new patterns of ants form as old ones finish their task and a new mutual shape and function is agreed upon with chemical communication or dance. I have not heard ants sing, so I expect their forms of communication evolved in their own fashion. It is conceivable their communication is a little more sophisticated than we are prepared to credit.

California is coming apart at the seams economically. The blame can be laid in all sorts of places, but it is logical that in times of an shared tidal suck of liquidity the most indebted would have the most difficulty as all their income goes to the most wealthy. The onset of economic malaise (the reduction in asset value, generally) is avoided by governments meticulously at the cost of the social order. We are “regrouped” from the lifetime of preparation as an expert on a specialisation that is no longer required.

If we try and move our economic progress so fast that everyone has to retrain – are we not starting to press at a natural limitation? Are we not better to do that which we love for as long as we want, and progress to be modulated to the rhythm of our lives?

Apparently not. We instead try to cram more into our fragile selves, full of aspiration as the bank approves a lifetime of debt so you can protect your family in a wooden box, and when you are successful and the birds leave the nest, progress defines us by interruptions and upheavals.

War is unnecessary. If Governments learned to flip a coin and live with the consequences (if political hegemony was merely a game of luck) then the world would be a little more equal and progress would slow down. If we increase the frequency of progress, then we increase the demand to retrain everybody. Is that a good thing? Increased challenge is evolutionary, up to a point. Retraining every five years is hard. Every six months is itself counter productive. Returning to Plato, we could simply choose to preserve certain arts and not negate their value, because someone is so good at doing it. The print media industry logically could be completely replaced by mobile phones. But I would be happier if both existed side by side for most of the rest of my lifetime. I accept they won’t but the values of the print media must not be lost in a sonic miasma of advertising. Information is.

There is thus a natural tendency, or a social fabric that we knot ourselves into increasingly duping ourselves into believing it is of value when a vast wave comes in and nothing but the skin we were born with is available as a resource to protect yourself. Then you have to retrain and adjust. If we controlled the effect of those collapses but also allowed progress to exist the social fabric would have to be more elastic.

The very idea that progress itself be modulated may infact therefore be what is actually happening. Secret government research is the stuff of fanciful television, but it is also logical that as well as financial reserves, a nation devises a reserve of military and intellectual development. That an academic class structure exists.

The politicians of the world face the constant problem of over population and consequential climate change. To pretend that the answer is not selective annihilation while sitting on nuclear bombs is irrational. What other function do they serve, exactly? “They keep the peace.” Really, what peace?

Look again at that ant’s nest. Their apparent strong social fabric adjusts to change, but it does not deal with progress. Human culture can. Trade was interesting enough to distract us from war and for years America was winning that game. The challenge will be to see in the recovery a return to human value as opposed to the needs of a market fiction.