tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67565722024-03-08T17:13:55.076-05:00ergioThe world is never outside of itself, the anarchists are just as much a part of the system, we never escape our times, everything is commentary. ---
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Not for reproduction without permission of the author Ricardo CorreaRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.comBlogger58125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-82915301809447246352011-12-05T13:37:00.003-05:002011-12-05T13:50:58.932-05:00Quantum Entanglement Observations<span style="font-weight:bold;">Quantum Entanglement Observed </span><br /><br />It is commonly observed that quantum entanglement is a condition met when two constituents A and B are placed in material contact and associated with one another. That action induces the entangled condition which allows for a particle spin of A to induce a particle spin in B at a distance. The distance itself has no special limit and the interesting result observed is that the spin condition induced in A induces an equaled spin reaction in B instantly; that is trasspassing the limitations imposed by space-time. In short the communication and reaction are instantaneous without going through space-time.<br /> <br />How do the two particles communicate and react with one another while ignoring the laws of physics? <br /><br />To some comfort physicists have observed that the entangle condition is not persistent but rather that it untangles so that particle A will cease to effect particle B's condition over time; the comforting element being that that implies that space-time has some affecting influence. <br /><br />If a logical twist to A's spin, over a certain period of time will cease to equally affect and spin B then they are technically unentangled. This becomes a problem if you are using quantum entanglement for things like computing and encryption. If you cannot count on the persistence of the entangled state the logic will have finite potential states and you will get errors when calculating answers to open ended questions. Though anyone aware that you can reconstruct information that disappears beyond the event horizon of a black hole knows that if we can reconstruct that the shadowing of the trails of quantum entanglements ought to be easier to spot; that clearly implies that entanglement is somehow never lost though it might not be detectable.<br /><br />The easiest way to resolve this is to ignore the laws of physics so as to gain an understanding. Knowledge is always a sign that something is not being understood; anything that is clear and understood requires no learning or explanation because the truth cannot be known and knowledge is just a stopgap measure to that reality. <br /><br />In the case of particle A inducing a momentum condition in B instantly is true and not true at the same time. What is actually happening is that what is not happening is being observed and described to explain the entangled condition. First the particles are not actually entangled at their first meeting, they are also not yielding to each-others spin condition at a distance, and they are equally not untangling. <br /><br />What is being observed is not what is transpiring but the “observation” remains in effect for some time and at some point it gets critical and it untangles. That is observation is not persistent. In short particles are never untangled, they are always in a tangled state or more accurately there is no distance between them because there is no space between particles but for the perception of time-space. Thus the observation makes an entangled event possible even though it has never transpired - but it can be observed if one assumes that a particle is untangled and entangled in space-time. In short a condition of separation and synchronicity between things that are identical or actually the same thing can be observed if a categorization has taken place. This is no different than seeing particles, waves and strings all as representations of the same space-time elements. <br /><br />The categorization is measurement and observation based, the action is responsive and the effect evident as entanglement. If I spin A in one point of space, and I observe B equally spin and then after a certain passage of time it does not spin anymore, what I am observing is different states of observation over the same motivating subject. When I observe a complimentary entangled spin that is what I am measuring, equally, that is what I am measuring, when I observe an untangled state. Any basic mathematics should yield that particles can never be untangled because nothing in the universe is ever untangled from anything else. Entanglement is the nature of the universe but things are not so much entangled as simply they are the same thing being observed differently. <br /><br />Let me know if you have any questions.Ricardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-35024411048042389652010-12-04T15:41:00.002-05:002010-12-04T16:08:33.317-05:00QUANTUM EFFECTS AT ROOM TEMPERATURE AND THE NATURAL NORMALIZATION OF RELATIVITY WITHIN QUANTUMQuantum and Relativity - it has long been a problem, overexposed, and in present view without a solution. However the dilemma of how to harmonize the disparity of quantum observations with relativity has been solved by me. <br /><br />If what makes the universe are particles, waves, strings, why does the real world seem so deterministic? Why does it not fluctuate in and out of the nothingness like the subatomic particles that compose it? <br /><br />Well the answer is that: Reality is the sum of a collapsed wave function that obscures all other potential states. <br /><br />A subatomic particle can quantum entangle with another particle, it can tunnel, it can behave as a wave or as a particle. A subatomic particle suffering from quantum effects and subjected to the uncertainty principle could be everywhere at once and nowhere equally. The real world, where we play baseball and eat hotdogs does not behave like that. As much as you might like a hotdog cannot be everywhere at once. If a hotdog is in New York it can only be in New York nor can it be polarized to mimic another hotdog in Japan. If you twist a hotdog, with your fingers, in New York, the hot dog in Japan will not entangle twist with it. Sadly there is a strong probability that a hotdog is always a hotdog just like a pig is always a pig. It is unlikely that a hotdog can be anything else, it is unlikely that a hotdog may levitate and tunnel through walls, and yet all of the subatomic particles that compose a two-dollar-and-ninety-five cent hotdog can do these things that a hotdog cannot do. <br /><br />One can make the argument that the same applies to car parts only backwards. A carburetor, a fuel pump and a gearbox cannot move from point A to point B by themselves but as part of a car they have the physical capability to do so. The process however is not reducible to its lowest level components, the process of moving from point A to point B. The Macro world, made up of cells, atoms or car parts cannot be expected to behave in the same way as its subdivided components. And yet here I hope to prove that nothing could be further from that truth. <br /><br />A hotdog in Japan can change polarity if I dare twist a hotdog in New York. This can be done through a physical state called quantum entanglement which is as close as scientists can get to defining universal union and love. What they do in the lab is join two particles at the hip and then separate them by 149 kilometers and then, through prodding and poking they change the polarity of one particle and surprisingly the polarity of the other particle, that is 149 kilometers away, changes instantly without taking the time it takes to conquer the space in between them. This is what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” I will just say, for the record, that we were all joined at the hip before the big bang, and anything you do always affects me. <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">THE QUANTUM DYNAMIC IS INFINITELY STATIC AND IT IS NOT MOVED OR ALTERED BY OBSERVATION BUT RATHER MEASURED BY IT</span>. <br /><br />The first part we must understand about quantum is that it is not deterministic. There are no absolutes in quantum physics, in quantum everything has a probability of existing or not existing at all. States and conditions can be met with complete disregard for time and space, and in any direction for either. <br /><br />In the quantum world you can make something happen but it probably would a happen without you knowing it happened anyway. For instance when a quantum particle goes through a wall and appears on the other side that is not what has actually happened. An engineer, working on a microprocessor design, is sitting there expecting that very result, called quantum tunneling, but in reality nothing of that sort has happened. In quantum physics the particle was on the other side of the wall already, in fact it has always been on the other side of the wall and on both sides of the wall at the same time, so it never has to go through it. The reason why we say that a particle has quantum tunneled is more so that we can explain to the engineer what has happened in her terms. <br /><br />Particles don’t sit around performing stupid tricks for engineers, which is also why when a scientist observes light leaving a place it hasn’t entered, the only thing that has happened differently in the universe that day is the observation. The quantum dynamic itself is infinitely static and it is not moved or altered by observation but rather measured by it. Measurement itself is what reality is. When you measure something you are baking reality or more accurately opting to observe something that already exists but doesn’t exist for you until you observe it. <br /><br />The second thing to know about quantum is the most important thing to know about it. Quantum is entirely based on observation. Quantum reality is not like American women that feel insulted when they are observed, it is instead like Latin women who feel offended when you don’t observe them. In Quantum it is what is observed that “theoretically” happens. It is what is recognized and acknowledge that eventuates. Quantum reality is entirely based on observation, this is because all quantum reality is energy based, and energy will not normalize until it is subjugated by an observation. This means that what you believe in, counts as much as what you see because the observer creates the reality that is observed. The macro reality, the collapsed wave function, caused by the observation, yet remains a probability after its proper construction. This accurately implies that all realities can deconstruct if you stop voting. The only reason why there are corrupt politicians and political parties it’s because you are still voting for them. <br /><br />The third thing to know about quantum is: it does not care what you want to believe. It does not have a preference towards one type of reality or one type of universe or one type of physical laws over another. It will create the universe that you want to observe. This is because Quantum is always in a state of ambivalence until someone touches it. This is critical as it implies that there is a state of quantum where there is no polarity, that is neither negative nor positive, nor good and evil, quantum allows for a more primordial conditions of absolute coherence, in which all states are represented as an infinity, or more accurately nothing at all, as all of their values are absolute and therefore have no way to reference one another. <br /><br />The fourth thing to know about quantum effects is that, because they are based purely on observation, they are entirely subjective. There is no such thing as objectivity in quantum physics because it is all dependent on observation, and when we talk of observation we are also talking about touch, feel, sensing, smelling, and instinct, mood, colors, etc. All subjective elements. This is critical because if you scale quantum upwards into the macro world it would then have to be equally subjective. <br /><br />Which raises the question: If quantum is all subjective, why is there objectivity in the macro world? Or shall we call that objectivity relativity? <br /><br />Relativity has always been the greatest misnomer of all time because Einstein was not saying that things are relative but that things are not relative, that they are fixed, that the universe is deterministic and that observation can skew one’s perception of the universe. In short relativity is the formula to observe the true physics of the universe in the same manner regardless of which point in space-time you are standing on. This is why it is so important to experiment in order to know if what is being observed is accurately representing the given reality. For instance, time can speed up and slow down. To anyone looking at a clock on earth or looking at a clock on the moon, time dilation is not an issue, until you compare the two and realize that the lack of gravity on the moon makes time on the moon pass at a slower pace. Relativity allows you to formulate the discrepancies and know the objective time between the two, moon and earth. It is called relativity because Einstein was trying to obviate the relativistic effects and ground the reality. <br /><br />Relativity, like science, is objective. In other words in order for relativity to be correct there has to be an observable space-time that is independent of you and I. Einstein is using relativity to show the genuine reality, regardless not only of where you are in space-time but more horrific, regardless of who you are! In Einstein’s relativity the universe and its geometry can exist without you in it! There are fixed laws of physics, why light goes around planets, why gravity warps space-time, drags mass, instead of mass pulling mass or why energy and matter are equivalent to one another and no different than space-time; and why these are knowable things that can be calculated with a high degree of accuracy. So that a physicist’s in Japan and a physicist’s in New York, both eating a hotdog, can derive the same results merely counting on physical properties without ever having to worry about how they each feel that particular morning. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">SCIENCE IS THE STUDY OF WHAT IS KNOWABLE, 10% OF THE UNIVERSE</span><br /><br />Science, and physics in specific, to no good end have been trying to resolve this odd rift between relativity and quantum. You could imagine a quantum scientist’s telling you: “No don’t observe that!” Because the quantum scientist’s knows that you are going to change everything through observation, where an expert on relativity would tell you that regardless of whether you are there or not, things are going to behave precisely in the same manner, so go ahead and touch it, feel it, look at it, it changes nothing. This is the equivalent of unrequited love. According to relativity the universe does not have to respond to your advances and even when it does it is merely you thinking that it is responding. Succinctly put, Relativity is Einstein thinking that Relativity can exist without Einstein, and as luck would have it, he immortalized himself explaining just that. <br /> <br />The problem is with the nature of science. Science is derived from the desire to explore a singularized and polarized decoherence. Decoherence is that state where things cannot hide from themselves or from one another. That means that science is the study of what is knowable. And yes there is a portion of the universe that is knowable, about 10% would be a good guess though it could be less and absolutely not more. <br /><br />Science is able to study things that harden, that stand still, that can be dismembered, that respond to probing with tools, or questionnaires, it can study things that answer questions, and it can know things that always respond in the same manner regardless of who is asking the question. The empirical soul of science is there to explore things that can be observed nakedly, that can be taken apart, that can be classified, and that can be named. In other words science can only observe and study things that have lost most of their dynamic, are cooler by nature, will be reproducible in a laboratory and stay still long enough to be photographed. <br /><br />When Science stumbled into quantum it stumbled into the “unscience.” It stumbled into something that requires a great deal of faith. When you are designing a microprocessor, for one of today’s computers, you have to truly believe what some of these particles are going to do, things like quantum tunneling; it’s like walking through walls only you end up on the other side without going through them; and you, as a digital engineer have to believe it is going to happen, that is all you can do, you don’t know how they do it, you just know it is possible, but no idea why and yet your processing results count on it. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">SUPERPOSITION AND DECOHERENCE</span> <br /><br />When you are watching a baseball game and you are eating your hotdog, if you are like me, you might wish that your hotdog would turn into a ribeye steak. Since a hotdog is a particular of the generality of meat, it technically has the potential to be a ribeye steak in part because meat has the potential to be all meats. Like a stem cell has the ability to become a liver, kidney or pancreas, we can say, for the sake of this example, that those are all super positions, better called super potential, are held in a potential state until the cell starts to observe itself and it is observed by others as say, a liver. When a stem cell becomes a liver we can say that it has suffered decoherence, that is to say it has lost all other superposional states, it has absorbed a singularity and made it whole. It is now a liver and as a liver it has lost the potential states to become anything else. We do not observe superpotential in the macro world, planets cannot become suns, suns do not become books of matches, etc. In the same manner a particle in a quantum superposition can assume any and all physically probable states. If we say a particle is in a superposition we could just as easily be saying that there is no particle there, it is instead a state containing all possible states that a particle might assume. When we take that particle from its superposition and load it into a supercollider and measure and observe its position the particle loses its hypothetical potential states, and suffers decoherence into the state of a particle that the experiment or the reality have rigged into manifestation. In short everything that is observed in the process of making a hotdog conspires to make it less and less likely that it will ever be a ribeye steak. <br /><br />Science being a methodology for exploring the singularity of a polarized decoherence has the ability to review any particles that have suffered decoherence in it, but it cannot review or visit the particle states that remain in a superposition. Remember that in quantum anything that you observe or touch with instrumentation will suffer decoherence as based on your expectations; that is the “tendency” of the given reality. Thus the focus of the, default reality, prejudices further observation and reproduces, i.e. reinforces, reality by polarizing the range of observable events into a massive, end-to-end singularity. And this prevents the observation of the fluidity between the macro and micro, quantum and relativity. <br /><br />The thing that produces science, the micro-world and, the result, empirical observation, is what is preventing science from marrying quantum and relativity. Further, the bridge between quantum and relativity cannot be built by science because it is not an observation a scientific mind can make or experiment with. <br /><br />We are then faced with a reality that could suffer superposition but doesn’t because everyone is focusing their observations and are comatose by them. The reality, by being what effects observation forces more observation of the same reality and reduces the micro superposition into insolvency. It would require a highly disruptive event to refocus the macro reality to react to its native and inherent fluidity. You don’t exist, you exist, you can go through walls, you can go backwards and forward in time, time does not exist so you exist at once, in some guise in a timeless void, which you cannot observe because you are focusing, observing the linearity of time, and thus creating the forward events that decohere superpositional states as you walk towards them. This may sound fantastic, it isn’t, it is everyday existence subsuming all other potential realities that causes you to adhere to the prevailing view of reality. <br /><br />Science is in fact something that can only exist in a deterministic universe. This may come as a surprise to you but scientists, in order to make sense of things not only round off, they also avoid the nuisance that is infinity and timelessness. While their mathematics accurately goes on indefinitely scientists normalize mathematics to stop infinity from being a problem to the required results which are always deduced from the higher plane of reality. This devolves from the premise that there are knowables, i.e. knowledge, and that the knowledge can be used and reused as required. That makes science not only a participant in the creation of the knowable universe but it also makes it a conspirator in keeping the radius of the universe only pointed towards the knowable end of the spectrum. Science like a laser beam, not only narrows and focuses reality but through its pragmatic observations makes it logically knowable and thus linear and limited.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">OBJECTIVITY IS RECOMBINANT SUBJECTIVITY</span><br /><br />The abyss between Relativity and Quantum physics cannot be surmounted by modern science so a Grand Unified Theory is impossible. Science does not have the irrational grasp to be able to accept superpositions, which unify all or nothing at once, and lack all decoherence. It always seeks to make logic out of the universe and its components and limits it to such. It is up to a whole new way of looking at the universe, with a more subjective approach; where the subjective observer realizes once and for all that there are no objective realities only subjective realities. Any apparition of objectivity is merely an agglomeration of recombinant subjectivism which confluences to agree and decohere superpositions towards same principles; and those same principles can be misinterpreted, by a detached observers, say scientists, as objective.<br /><br />Science by being rational limits its own understanding, and our understanding of the universe. Science reaches the limits of knowledge, either from its own logical limitations, or the more abundant but not less limited circumference of the knowable; it will cease to be able to realize the formulas that power its existence. Yes, science is as limited as knowledge only more so because to explore something you have to be within its parameters. Science can never know everything because the knowing of everything would destroy science, as science is powered by ignorance and feeds on knowledge. <br /><br />The quantum state of superposition, and the decoherence factor allow a consciousness of any given type to explore those dimensions or states rational or irrational, but at cost in belief, you cannot believe that you are seeing something that is fixed, you must believe in the fluidity of existence to experience the quantum effect at room temperature. As with any fluid calculus the unknowns are too many, and the human not so adventurous. It is easier to watch a sequel of existence or to romanticize about the past than to experience something that could be so completely different that it might not have us, in a conscious framework. <br /><br />Reality is then a singularity effect of an absolute decoherence that produces the effect of a singular reality because everyone is looking and observing in the same direction intently. From that perspective it is impossible to observe any other realities unless of course one does metaphysics instead of physics and contemplates instead of observing. If you want to marry relativity and quantum, then you will need to use metaphysics, because only metaphysics can turn the water into wine. Or more accurately, it is willing to do it. <br /><br /><br />Sincerely, <br />Ricardo CorreaRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-74785051693521814212009-08-09T22:38:00.002-05:002009-08-09T22:42:03.975-05:00AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM LOVE<span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Love is not romantic.<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span>Ricardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-32364600394043481962009-01-01T18:51:00.001-05:002009-01-02T22:24:35.371-05:00A message to my friends<span style="font-weight:bold;">A message to my friends</span><br /><br />I first I must admit that I was wondering if I was the only one that has noticed that the world ended, (The Clash of Civilizations aside,) that everything was over, that, well what can I add to that that is not already brilliantly summarized in the statement and testament: “the end of the world.” That engraves it in stone nicely. <br /><br />I think that a lot of the people out there worried lots about the end of the world coming, and they were not looking forward to it, chaos, famine, pests, floods, infestation, mass graves and the gnashing of plural teeth, diabolical manifestations trouncing and baking birthday cakes, man against man, dog against man, fish against man, women raging furiously through the land, children aimlessly throating through the streets, animals, specially pigs, panicked and searching for a safety zone that did not exist, infectious anger, viral hate, guilty happiness, wolfs strolling through the streets, owls hunting babies in broad daylight, chickens and eggs rotting on each other, cows dying of malnutrition, the sun melting from its an overdose of plasma, wickedness in every drop of water, sinning adopted as normalcy, pervasive womb death everywhere, hustlers running out of drugs, alcohol and cigarrettes causing a furious luxury war, not enough makeup to hide all the women's tarnishing auras, dwarfed dreams becoming real, stale bread next to stale love, stolen hearts ripening in death throws. Yes, the end of the world had all the symptoms of depravity and raw hardship. No one wanted it to come, everyone wanted the current world to be saved even if it was and is bad, some went to churches hoping that membership would save them from the end of the world as we know it; only when the end of the world as we know it came, it wasn't what we expected at all. <br /><br />It was different, so different that no one noticed it. <br /><br />The Rein of Capitalism ended and I thought I was the only one that took noticed. I felt a celebration was immediately in order, I got a funny feeling all over my countenance, and I wanted to rush out and tell everyone and see them overjoyed at the event, “It happened in our life times!” What a joy. We did not have to wait, it happened now. But I went out into the streets screaming “Oh joy, Capitalism is dead, capitalism is dead, soul revival, the resurrection of feelings, the second coming of emotions, the heart rules, the passions won the cold war, the passions won the cold war.” But everyone just looked at me like one giant crazy plastic pickle walking around the farmers market on a bright Sunday day and way too yellow green. <br /><br />I wondered if the children knew, they are so naturally intuitive they had to know, I checked. I asked the child in my head: “Is the world different today?” I got a happy face. Children will smile at anything, the world could have ended and they would smile at that, they don't know, they are purely feeling creatures, they just don't know. <br /><br />I got a little shy about saying anything about it to anyone. Even Domaine, my adorable and insightful wife, would have held me crazy if I had said it, or so I thought, “The end of the world is upon us.” I did not say anything to her. <br /><br />The spirits, which I have always trusted and which have told me and taught me many impressive things, were not talking either; they left, they were not talking to me, they were gone, gone, they were not within sight, they did not come out at 3 am, they did not rub themselves against me or go within me, not the good ones, not the bad ones, none came into my nights. <br /><br />The world is empty of spirits, right now the world is empty of spirits, the world has surely ended then. <br /><br />But you get into trouble when no one else notices what you notice. I pondered for a while: “Did anyone that went to see Napoleon Bonaparte being coronated Emperor Supremo know that they were witnessing the universal capitulation of monarchies?” <br /><br />“Did the signatories of the Magna Carta know that they were saying goodnight to feudalism?” <br /><br />“Did the Crucifiers of Christ realize that they had put paid on the Roman Empire?”<br /><br />“Did those chopping away at the Berlin Wall, causing its collapse, have an inkling that they were collapsing the principal pillar of what America meant to the world?” <br /><br />Fundamentally my question was: “Are the cornerstones, the pivot points, the metric tensors of history noticeable within the context of their times?” <br /><br />“Did the French revolutionaries know that Bastille day marked the birth of The Republic?”<br /><br />To be fair I doubt that the inventors of the wheel thought they were creating a revolution, we may not appreciate our times, we might be too much family to love our own accomplishments, the defeat of capitalism without any great bloodshed or notice ought not be a great surprise.<br /><br />It has been an usual pattern of our times that there is less and less bloodshed during dramatic changes.<br /><br />You cannot have watched Genghis's path through now China, or Napoleon's or Hitler's marches through the old world and dare say, “These were moderate fellows,” they were not. Their mark on history was brute and distinguishable from goodness without much of a moral quandary. But the candlelight empire, Britain, undid itself without much ado about it, they dwindled and sunk slowly into irrelevance, largely without the average Britton ever noticing it. Some bloody how within the British psyche there is still some kind of subconscious empire, the lack of blood in the demise, through cost cutting of their navy and of their colonies, seems to not have left a noticeable mark in their blocke. When ever they try to wake up from the dream of empire the “English” always somehow manage to think that because they are favorite brother with Uncle Sam, that somehow that means that they are still world dominators or some sort of thing like that. And this is so much true that they still sell themselves as cohorts to the world power, that they might whisper you wishes into Uncle Sam's ear, in his sleep, or so the rest of Europe thinks.<br /><br />It doesn't matter, the world is over, I am running through the streets, my arms waving high “The world ended! The world has ended!” my friends call me crazy if you will, but Americanism and Englishnism, capitalism, consumerism and democracy are dead, dead!”<br /><br />It will take sometime to sink into the mass national consciousness of every country on earth, after all there still appears to be money in the world although all the value has now been artificially manufactured and propped into a pedestal made of hay. <br /><br />“Hey lucky people find your value.”<br /><br />One of the key foundations of capitalism is that the value of a good or a service has to be genuine. That is the core foundation of the worth of capital and of its possible offspring profit; the value has to be real, appreciative over time, and negotiable via an unprincipled or principled third party. <br /><br />The other principle value of capitalism is that all labor can be turned to money. That is that labor, work is convertible into a monetary value and that it can be stored and reused and exploited in such a manner. <br /><br />Only problem is that when the value of labor or capital is artificially generated none of that is true and all of it becomes autonomously unsupportable, and nothing murder's capitalism more than dependancies. Capitalism's claim to independent resourcefulness gets neutered when there is any kind of social or governmental intervention. <br /><br />If there were any hope for capitalism that time has cometh to pass. It has passed because there isn't anyone alive that can claim, after you save the capitalists, that there are any capitalists left. The capitulation of capitalism came when the capitalists proactively thought governmental intervention on their behalf and shamelessly took a bail out that favored them without any reagard to the implications. That they did not have the courage to say no, that is when they hanged themselves, that is when they surrendered capitalism into the hands of defeat. <br /><br />When JP Morgan saved capitalism it was different, it was different because that was a capitalist saving the capitalists. They could save face then though there was some governmental intervention, but today, they cannot claim that government intervention is bad. The free hand has been chopped. <br /><br />If Serverus can't save you no one else can. <br /><br />However I think my friends and I have something to celebrate, that the end of a system came and went and hardly anyone noticed is a good thing. Not only does it show how useless it was but how worthless its profit was. <br /><br />If the world economy can lose 40 trillion dollars in value and not suffer any dramatic emotional cataclysm the genuine value was never there in the first place. <br /><br />Capitalism is done for, that implies many new and interesting things, we will not known what those will mean any more that those that made the transition from feudalism to mercantilism to capitalism knew their fates; however it shall none the less offer new prospects for a greater good, a world consciousness, a more enlightened age, and greater awareness that we are not the prime objective of the universe but for our superlative arrogance. <br /><br />And perhaps the greatest wisdom may yet come from a realization that there is nothing to save. <br /><br />I will say no more as my antagonist is gone. As for my friends they might not know but they are aware. <br /><br />Ricardo CorreaRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-53967758823578272342008-10-12T22:17:00.001-05:002008-10-12T22:24:58.574-05:00Economic correction: ABOLISH THE STOCK MARKET!I don't understand why no one has cometh forth with the logical correction to the current world's economic catastrophe. Here we are suffering the complete collapse of the capital infrastructure and instead of considering the abolition of Wall Streets everywhere governments are opting to finance its subsistence until it is able to again carry its own weight in gold. <br /><br />Why would we want to save something that is not working and has proven inherently unstable? Since the Stock Market crash of 1929 less than 80 years have passed; and in between we have had other severe crisises such as the famed internet bubble burst and the Savings and Loan debacle to name but the top rated of them. And so how can we stand here today and say that there isn't something inherently wrong with the financial system, there is, there is something wrong with the system, it is obviously not working.<br /><br />First of all we can all claim that the stock market is a necessity however it isn't. There was a time when there wasn't a stock market and most of humanity at least till the seventeenth hundreds, has actually financed itself and operated successfully without a functioning stock market. Some might argue that before the stock market existed the same mechanisms were in place but had not been formalized and that is very much a proper case to make; and more accurately it points out that there is no need for the stock market. Which is why here we must say that the stock market is more dangerous than any value it accrues. <br /><br />The reason why the stock market is less beneficial than the value it accrues it's because the value that it accrues is not genuine value, sure at first that may have been the case, the initial stock market somewhere in Amsterdam probably dealt with genuine value, meaning that the investors had more or less a clear understanding of the possible accruals that would befall their investment. This is not because there was something inherently more honest in the character of the participants, those floating stocks and those investing in them, no they were probably suffering no greater virtue than their equivalent in the modern day. However the stock market was young, it was naive as youth is always naive and so discouragingly honest about its ways; and for that matter so were the investors, they were on a new venture together and this meant that the market had not yet created false expectations as it would later grandly do. <br /><br />However the general propensity of any stock market is to bet on itself, a stock market is nothing more than a formalized gabling casino for companies and investors to bet on each others savvy. Anyone under the conception that the stock market is not a gambling institution would be wise to look at the market now. You can accumulate huge profits and huge losses but it is all based on calculated risk and you are betting that you can beat the house, or more accurately the house and you are both betting that you are going to win against the incalculable number of odds that besiege companies and investors. This is why investors constantly walk away with millions of dollars in loses and don't bother to expect someone to make it right, they know that it was a risk without a safety margin, they are aware that it was a risk they were willing to take. <br /><br />National and international economic entities are willing to allow stock markets to exist because they realize that this is the only way to finance risky investment propositions that would otherwise not find capital to survive. The Internet was financed by lots of private capital that was lost when the Internet bubble collapsed but the Internet itself did not collapse; in fact the Internet has always been growing even after the Internet bubble went bust the Internet was growing and making millionaires everywhere, however many original investors lost grandly. The same took place with the Telecoms investments of the eighties, many of the original investors lost their shirts but overall the infrastructure that was built up is in used today much to the benefit of all. <br /><br />On second thought when you think about the collapse of the mortgage industry it makes more sense to have a stock market, and in retrospect the Internet and the Telecoms investments were largely successful over generations of investors that is; so that the overall investment was sound though it took say three or four generations of investors for the profit capitalization to take effect. The same was true with the railroads, most of the investors that financed the tracks had to sell out before they made a profit. Stock markets start to make more sense if you don't look at them in terms of one time investors and start to measure the results over a few generations of investors. What that means is that an investment is not inherently of a nature to necessarily benefit the first generation of investors but rather best looked at as a more glacial investment that accrues its greatest benefits and value to intricate infrastructure projects or large scale enterprises. The stock markets makes sense over time and each generation of investors is sort of the guardian angel, of the moment, on watch till the day arrives when the investment matures to accrue a genuine success and profit. <br /><br />This is why when you look at the stock market over time it has always performed well, it has always grown, yes it has had its abysmal performances but over time it has grown and blossomed riches from it. That brings us to the great mortgage investment crisis of today. Looked at it from a perspective of the immediacy of the moment it looks like a perfect description of a disaster. Over the last couple of decades the barriers to home ownership have been lowered because the risk associated with mortgages had been logistically diminished by the ability to pawn off the risk on someone else. If you owned a billion dollars in mortgages you could creatively repackage it into a mortgage baked security investment that someone else could purchase from you. The ability for financial entities to offload their mortgage liabilities gave them an incentive to continue adding new mortgages to their books; this created a downward market treasure that logically increased the potential number of mortgage loans. It thus became easier to buy a house because a greater number of, unusual, third party investors were helping the cash flow of first rate lenders to remain buoyant. In a sense what we were seeing was a mortgage investment binge, where foreign governments and local and foreign investors were willing to buy Susie's and Bill's mortgage in Kansas City and counted it as a futuristic asset. <br /><br />As so many times happens the future failed to materialize the past's version of the future. we only need to go back to the eighties and nineties when homes were being built with all the networking wiring integrated into the walls so they would be ready as the networking home of the future. When wireless networking became the norm by the year 2001 all that walled in network cabling became a future wrongly fore casted. We now know that what they thought in the 1940s and 1950s about the year 2001 would mostly never materialize, their futuristic cars and houses could not have calculated what new materials and different life styles would conjure. In the same way in modern times it seemed right to invest in mortgages, generally not an unsafe investment, what no one could imagine is that the ability to sell mortgages to third party investors would create a huge pool of available loans so that new home owners with riskier credit habits would become eligible to own a house; and as a result it soon came to be that anyone could buy a house and make a good investment a bad investment. <br /><br />The lure of home ownership is grandiose because it also offers the opportunity to get more credit, once you own a home the ability to get credit cards, second mortgages and instant cash is there for the taking, and people do just that. They get gobbled up by the ability to get instant credit cards and instant cash and of course no house is really a home till you add a second floor, tear out the backyard and remake it in your own image, or make a game room in the basement. As that happens the ability to pay the mortgage becomes strained, aside from the fact that you might have never been able to buy the home in the first place because you didn't rally merit it financially. The catastrophe grows from there. <br /><br />But there again is another way to look at it, and it makes more sense if you look at it in longer term glacial cycles. Not many of those people would have owned a new home had the regulations not been eased so that mortgage liabilities could be repackaged and transfered to third parties, and in turn allow for the creative idea of sub prime mortgages which basically allowed anyone ignorant enough to take the risk to become a home owner while mildly unaware that their interest rates could double and triple depending on the economy. Moreover many investors that would have usually not invested in mortgage backed securities found themselves amiable to the idea thinking that they were buying safety margins by investing in assets that could be repossessed thus limiting their liabilities; a concept that as a whole was sound for it was based on the assumption that foreclosures would not become the norm; and when they did they turned mortgage holders into property owners of houses that they did not want with assets that could not be sold even at depreciated values. <br /><br />We are witnessing something rather exquisite in these our times, the free market being unable to self correct proved that it could be bullish against reason and further proving that it does not have a cautious hand at the wheel or any self regulatory interests. Left to its own devices the free hand will always work to churn out the maximum potential of any investment market without much ado about the consequences to any and all. <br /><br />Of course the very idea of a self regulating market is preposterous but at the same time that does not mean that the results are as bad as some would make them out to be. We have witnessed now first hand, in a clear and concise manner, in the span of no more than two decades what can happen when the freehand is left to its own devices. Now consider the results. First there are the investors that originally thought the whole idea of buying mortgage backed securities a good idea. They have all taken huge losses. These were investment houses, private and some public, the Chinese government may have up to 100 billion of its money in such investments, little towns in Iceland have put part of their portfolios on it, and an infinite set of investors that again may have never invested on the concept of a mortgage rather invested on the concept of mortgaged backed securities and all did lose their money as foreclosures exceeded expectations. What is interesting here is that these are a group of investors that actually entered a whole new creative investment infrastructure and so moved their capital to a new frontier and of course lost. Whereas normally these investors might have put the same money into General Electric or US Savings Bonds they turned to an investment that more directly affected the lives of everyday Americans. Thus the capital was redirected towards a riskier, less traditional client and therefore a more unpredictable market as a result we may have the largest redistribution of wealth ever in the history of The United States, and the world for this was a global investment tree. <br /><br />At the other end of the spectrum is the consumer, all those persons that bought houses and had dreams of owning a home or of being more accepted as true middle class citizens. Many that could not afford it bought homes and for the first time got an inkling of the responsibilities, duties and economic dynamics that revolve around the concept of owning property. Some of those, a great number perhaps will keep their houses, either helped by relatives, the mortgage company, the local bank or some form of government assistance. As such those that never had a home have gotten an expensive education and those that managed to keep their home, whereas otherwise they might never have owned one, are now up one rung on the ladder to a stable middle class caricature. <br /><br />In a sense what we have just witnessed was rather beneficial to the global economy because the capital wealth violated all of the possible processes for normal capital transference between individuals and entities and between government and individuals; a general bypass has been instituted where now the capital is going to get to where it needs to go fast and pronto. However that also implies that the capital itself has breached the wall of standard operating procedures within Wall Street and that means that the usual parties have not immediately benefited or received payment in kind for their investments.<br /><br />Now aside from the obvious redistribution of wealth which will make a great academic study in a decade or two, we also have the other calamity, governments everywhere have had to redirect taxpayers money to guarantee the life of their banks and financial institutions as well as the stock markets of the world. England for instance, has had to guarantee the moneys of its compatriots in Iceland, that is an amazing accomplishment, to get a self centered England to accept external liabilities and to insure them for the sake of stabilizing its economy in relationship to Iceland of all places. And of course they have had to Nationalize their two most important banks so that kind of writes an epitaph for the glorious accomplishments of Margaret Thacher and Tony Blair. As Lady Thacher thought to create a freer market by moving more to the right than was right; and Tony Blair sort of gets banged all over the place as his centrist policies have now been turned entirely to the Left, left obliged. You see now the Government of England is more like the rest of Europe, or as the French might put it now, “Today England is more like the rest of us. And finally none of us can grasp the immensity and drastic change of the last few weeks as evidenced by the fact of a joint international action by major central banks to join in an unprecedented synchronized lowering of interest rates. Toto we are not in Kansas anymore. <br /><br />In America the problem is more fascinating still, the home of capitalism has had to financed itself by selling securities to the communist Chinese and now it has to spend a trillion dollars of tax payers money shoring up the crisis while Russians can happily bargain shop the world with their 500 billion dollar surplus. And all this happened under a Republican administration; and to add to the irony it was the Democrats that fought hard to pass the bailout bill as proposed by a lame duck president and yet the bill lost on the first called vote thanks to the elephants in the house. Regardless, by default, the American government now owns Wall Street. There is no other way to look at it, the trillion dollars is only part of the investment, there is probably another half a trillion that will be invested via back end alleys to maintain confidence in the economy such as the 25 billion that has already been promised to the national car industry. So the entire system of capitalism has shown that it is unsound and that it needs constant government assistance in order to correct its calumnious vices. <br /><br />Further how much capitalism can there be left if the government becomes the number one employer and consumer in the nation as is already the case? <br /><br />But take that another way and this is the good side. We could save capitalism by simply eliminating the stock markets. Stock markets have one interesting value, they create an environment where capitalists can meet with entrepreneurs, they are a central plaza for investors, you want to invest you go into the stock market, instantly you will have access to a long list of companies that are searching for investment. The Stock Market most importantly creates liquidity in the investment process and reduces the investment cycle and by doing so also reduces risk. Money in any guise hates to stay still, the fact that one investor can sell his shares to another investor via a centralized depository is of great value. This allows for savvy investors to quickly best determine where there money is better spent, and it allows for a more evident value recognition based on demand. The assumption is that the hoards cannot be wrong, if everyone is investing in say, Google, they must be right. Still the point is that for the managing of investment capital, ease of capital flow, through a complex tier of investment layers, is essential and that is the genuine reason why stock markets exists and why they make sense. <br /><br />However that very fluidity of investment also becomes the greatest risk opportunity within the constrains of the market. If investors can change their mind about a stock and sell it at will within a moments notice, instead of creating a more mature and sound market that creates a more volatile market because the short term investor is not interested in long term outcomes; and so what the ease of interchange does is create a rather whimsical market that is steered by the short term investor. The difference between a long term investor and a short term investor is that one is interested in the maturing process that companies go through to accrue the greatest value without having to transfer the initial investment to other investment ventures. The short term investor is only interested in accruing an immediate value by capitalizing on the fluctuations of the market however minute they may be. Thus they profit from instability by a process of increasing gain by selling and buying as if they were walking through the water by hoping rocks, sometimes doubling backwards to go maintain a forward perspective. This invariably, in the large scaling of the process, will destabilize the markets, however its effects are greatly shored up by the steady might of long term investors. <br /><br />If we abolish the stock market the corrective is instant, without a stock market short term investment becomes an impossibility because without a central process for exchange capital flows will decrease liquidity. <br /><br />What this means is that no investor would be allowed to go through a third party so as to invest their capital. All investors will have to go directly to the company or entrepreneur that they want to invest in and they will have to then decide if they want to invest based on the particular company strategy. This will mean that they are least likely to be short term investors, this is because they have to manually workout the value of the company, they have to negotiate the terms of the investment with that company, and even if these values are standardized they will still require more time than me going online right now and purchasing ten thousand shares of Google stock. My transaction is complex but not that difficult to execute, and frankly I don't know what Google's real strategy is other than the gathering of the worlds information, but the stock market allows me to invest without my being aware of the intricacies of the stock, whereas if I had to go directly to Google and convince them to take my money, which is pretty much as it sits right now, then it would make a greater degree of procedural detail that would make it both more participatory and also more difficult to get out of the investment; as you would have to negotiate your own terms for the purchase and sale of your investment. <br /><br />Google is a perfect example of a company that is currently overvalued by any measure of the imagination. I am by the way a fan of the Google Brotherhood but the problem is that their value is pure speculation, if you look at Google today, after the free markets have just collapsed, you can no longer say that just because it looks good and it feels good it is a good investment. In the case of Google imagine that they now have so many investors believing their game plan that they have to execute but for all intends and purposes Capitalism may have ended as an economic engine when the US senate voted to pass the 700 billion dollar bailout package and it is under that guise that Google has to be judged. It's difficult to see how Capitalism could survive such massive amounts of government investment and sustain a fighting chance as a free and unadulterated market glad-handler. You have to consider the implications, if the consumer is not the principal means by which companies employ themselves in their particular business but rather do so through government bail outs of their obviously unsustainable business models, then it stands to reason that showing people the right place to shop via Google search, with uncanny accuracy, will still not yield any serious Google dollars returns to their respective clients. Now you might say but Google is still a sound investment. And I would retort that if investors, financiers and bankers are only in business because they have been bailed out by the government then it stands to reason that your job and my job are also being secured by the government, making any assumption of a free economy ludicrous and thus making Google stock highly suspect. <br /><br />Thus what this means is that Google being a good investment has been swindle by false speculation about its natural capacity to deliver a return on investment; the natural capacity is just not there, it is only there as speculation which is what drives the price of Google stock. As such it has to at some point collapse, basically around the time that investors realize that Google has mastered search engines but little else. When you think of Google you think of a search engine, what else can Google do for you? It does not produce any information of significant value, it does own a liability in huge data centers that could at any time become useless warehouses of redundant data, as none of the data that Google snakes out of the Internet is Google property, the data is in the cloud at large and it is equally replicated for search criteria by the likes of Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft to name but a few. <br /><br />The problem is not however with Google, the problem is with the stock market that allows for such kind of speculation, so take the stock market out of it which in all truth is merely an arbitrage engine that adds very little value to the transactions it generates for the transactions are all speculative, they may never accrue any genuine value, or as happens it most cases, they may generate values that are bought and sold and profited from without the genuine product or value ever being produced. The stock market fundamentally allows for hypothetical values to be traded, that is the core of its business process, to permit entities to exchange equity on perceived values under the assumption that eventually those values are hammered out by a genuine, real world, business transaction. It is in this way that companies can have three, four, seven, one hundred or hundreds of thousand of times their real market value in stocks. <br /><br />This would not be a problem if the speculating didn't become exponential without a cap. If there were a regulation that said that a company's stock market value could not exceed three times its gross earnings, or three times its capitalized assets, or three times its profits, then you would have a more real market valuation and a more clear headed investment process. But then who are we to say what a company is worth, if a company like Google can convince investors that it is worth hundreds of times its gross asset value. Who are we to say that that value is not real, specially so if Google continues to grow value in both the perceived and the real world scenarios?<br /><br />Well the answer to that is simple, markets are not rational creatures they are irrational creatures, and are therefore more subject to err than to be right. The time is then ripe to abolish the stock market and to replace it with something more mundane, raw company stock. Each company has the ability to say what it is worth, something that can easily be determined not by potential sales, not by perceived value but by real asset and sales figures, what do you have on hand, and how much of it can you sell this year. It is that simple, based on that formula, you would still have a stock market type environment but without a stock market each investor would have to go directly to each company and bargain the purchase of the stock with them directly and regardless of potential whimsical fortune all market based capitalizations would be based on a maximum of three times asset and sales, assets and profit figures. Now if you think that is tightening the potential value of companies ask yourself how many companies are capable of growing 300 percent? Most companies are only capable of growing 300 percent their first year of business, which is not saying much, after that most companies never manage more than a meager stock market average of 15% growth. That's the reality. <br /><br />That aside the most relevant change here is that there would be no speculative market, companies would not be able to capitalize via a third party entity so all of their transactions will be managed internally and as a result, will have very little speculative value; this is because it is much harder for an individual entity to increase its own worth than it is for a series of third party financial institutions to create a greater perception of wealth accrual potential. This is particularly so because those that benefit from the actual transactions of share trading have no other means of value accrual than the very transaction. And there is the inherent problem in the stock market, it is the transactions that matter and not the companies, there is no loyalty to companies, products and customers, there is only a value based on the transactions exchanged, remunerated, sold and resold, it is the volume of the transactions which accrues value, not the actual business of business. <br /><br />The loss of the stock market will cause the economy to lose many jobs and businesses that are based on the slightest of bubble value accruals, that is jobs that are not real regardless of how we look at them, jobs that mislead value instead of accrue it, and as a whole the market would grow at a much slower pace, and you would see companies potential stifled by lack of investments because the only way that they could grow value in their internal stock is to genuinely grow their business. <br /><br />Of course any action calling for the end of stock markets might just as well be calling for the end of capitalism. A call that has probably already been dealt by the current internal destruction of capitalism by government interference, and more with the support of Wall Street capitalists begging for government handouts. In other words, capitalism's Berlin Wall has smashed Wall Street from within, it is no small amount of irony that the leader of the largest bailout in history, the secretary of the treasury is a wall street lifer from the King of investment banks Goldman Sachs. <br /><br />The current bail out will probably reach two trillion by the time you add up all the international shoring up that is currently taking place throughout all the major economic zones. Further once you have such huge amounts of artificial investment into a false economic model there is no telling how much hemorrhaging there will yet be to do. After all we have lost the free hand of capitalism and we are now under the bureaucratic hand of government that has a proven anachronistic corrective. <br /><br />I therefore take no credit for something that has already been done, the destruction of the free market by no lesser free marketer pamphleteer than the American government and all because it lost all faith in market forces, or more accurately because it was frightened into action by them. <br /><br />Ricardo CorreaRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-7840904087879856352008-09-08T18:25:00.001-05:002008-09-08T18:27:29.235-05:00Individualism = human energy disruptorIndividualism hasn’t been always with us nor will it be long with us in the annals of the universe it is a phase that comes and goes but has no fundamental basis to sustain an individual existence. Simply put individualism doesn’t exist any more than does freedom of speech but both are very dear to the human imagination as it conceptualizes a perfect version of itself that is capable of putting its personalized stamp within universe.<br /><br />The idea of individualism can be said to be an endemic part of the human consciousness but that does not mean that it is real, genuine and indestructible. We can say it is endemic to our consciousness, and for that matter to all ergio (emotive) type consciousness, meaning emotive consciousness, because it arises from the disruption of essence wholeness or more accurately the apparent disruption of essence wholeness, as wholeness of essence cannot be disrupted. It is therefore right to say that individualism is as apparently genuine as the genuiness of a disruption in essence wholeness may appear. <br /><br />Without needing to devolved to the most base standards of an essence wholeness as promulgated before time and space disruptions enter into play, we can say with absolute certainty that all beings are emotive and that their principal essence as it manifest itself in the universe is an identifiable emotive principle; you must sense feeling-being wherever the essence of an emotive being is as one of the same; a feeling we measure starting at the lowest possible quotient of emotion an ergio unit. A bite smaller than a Planck length, as it is not fundamentally dependant on time and space; this is because all fundamental essence types have no sense of time nor space, in fact time and space are an enigma to emotive essence. The fact that mathematicians have, with their formulae, detected that there really isn’t any time and therefore there really isn’t any space only proves that mathematicians are also emotive beings that have not successfully managed their logical escape from emotion.<br /><br />The fact that there isn’t any time nor space means also that somehow all things are as one even if their perceptions do not acknowledge or allow for a divisible perception. Even if we were to kindly allow for the fact that mathematicians could be wrong, that the mathematics was giving them a wrong result one could still formulate that any universe, by its very conceptualization and realization, has felt all of its parts and therefore its wholeness is based on the symmetry of its parts, a symmetry that can only be obtained by sameness of origins and an absolute simmering of all genuine contradictions. That is to say that the universe as universe doesn’t exist without any and all of the parts that comprise it, the universe is encapsulated as universe only through the tale of aggregation told, but the story itself is unworthy of telling without the wholeness of universe.<br /><br />None of the parts of the universe make sense by themselves; Atoms, Sun, Moon, Solar Systems and even galaxies are pointless without the conceptualizations of a universe. And the reverse is also true, the universe does not make sense without black holes and quasars and super novas. The relationship continues to invert the Macro and Micro worlds into an infinity of the other; for the universe is not only infinite in length and width and height and breath, it is infinite in the opposite direction into the infinitesimally small, the smallest part of the universe, the lowest possible quotient of energy as it implodes does not have a finite absolute point nor an absolute zero, no. Absolute zero is merely where observation ends, no different than the macrocosm where the furthest reaches of the universe hitherto end where observation ends.<br /><br />But it would be folly to say that the universe is as wide as perception and more folly to say that the universe stops being at absolute zero, where energy is naught, no universe beyond that becomes an absurd naught. Why it would be difficult to accept for many obvious reasons, one being that perception dominates that assumption and so therefore substantiates its own limitation, no one has ever championed a universe based purely on perception though I grant you that scientists have done their damnedest to say that only what they know and therefore everything else has to prove itself worthy of empirical documentation; I offer that purely rational creatures serve up their own mortality rating. Regardless the point is that infinity runs in any general direction of the universe be it inward or outward or multidimensional and there is no end to that. And there is no end to that because there is no time nor space which is where energy resides but I say there is a ciphers energy beyond the scope of energy.<br /><br />Now picture yourself in a universe without time and space, there would not be any individualism there because everything would very much be the same thing over and over again to the point of absolute boredom which is precisely why most people are against a world of sameness and why most people prefer to marry their opposites and like to think of themselves as different from everyone else. This is true as long as you don’t closely examine their values and ideals which tend to rhyme with those that they marry and that they harbor in friendship.<br /><br />The idea that the universe would be boring if we were all the same is of course false, it would not be any more boring than it already is because we are already all the same. The fact that we do not acknowledge our sameness does not eliminate the fact of it. Our diversity is based on ignorance of one another; and our originality is based on our inability to realize the interconnectedness of things. You would not dream of driving a Ferrari if you could not show it off, nor would a Ferrari make any sense outside of social status, nor would the designers and mechanics of Ferraris make sense in a world all to themselves, they make sense in the greater context and the context makes it associative, that is similar if not identical, when a Ferrari is bought it certifies its lack of individual appeal and instead certifies its social appeal, the more Ferraris that are sold the lesser its uniqueness and since Ferraris are not manufactured in mass number one must measured their mass appeal, which is, as you well know, huge; and so there you have a car built more for mass appeal than for mass purchasing though its value is rightly commensurate to its mass appeal.<br /><br />Individuality if taken to its logical conclusion has no value what so ever, its value its entirely based on perception, Very much like the French and the British before them 350 million Americans feel freer than the rest of the world, 350 million Americans feel independent of one another, 350 million Americans feel that they live in the best nation in the world and they believe that it is such a model of Justice, Freedom, Economics and Governance that they want the whole world to be just like that and so they admirably embark to proselytize and enforce that view throughout the rest of the world; and this they do as religious evangelists, traveling tourists, musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, business people, journalists, novelists all focused on selling the American way of life as the succinct model of perfection for the rest of the world, that is individualism and freedom en mass at work.<br /><br />There is of course no individualism in mass acts. If I do something original and everyone else starts doing it too it not only ceases to be original but rather it also proves that it never was original in the first place. Common wants and needs and dreams and desires are not unique to any given civilization that has made its mark!<br /><br />If there has ever been a true individual or an original idea then you and I have not known it and will never know it. This is because in order for an individual to exist esh has to be part of a tribe to thrive. That is to say that the most unique things would be the most disconnected things from everything else and therefore they would not acquire recognition and perish thusly.<br /><br />The genius of Einstein does not make any sense without the entire scientific community and the world at large to acknowledge it and recreate it. We must be grateful that Einstein never intellectualize the property of Relativity; but then realistically it would not have made any sense either for when property is intellectualized and accredited to a single source you have to deny all of its heritage or more accurately its heritage goes unpaid. Relativity is a product of humanity Eistein was just the fellow that summarized it for us all to understand it.<br /><br />Individualism as applied in modern life is ever more suspect as commercialization exploits what we have in common, it is because marketers can divine a common ground for their products, candidates and services that they are successful; and the more successful the more they step and step and stampede trample down the notion of individualism. We are not made to think the same but we think the same. Given the choice to be common or unique and different most people prefer to be common, it is not only easier but it also means that you are going to like most things on offering.<br /><br />Individualism doesn’t exist. It is instead a divider, the idea is, it divides us from the ability to work together as one for a common purpose.<br /><br />Each nation in this world, I think there are 196 of them, each nation in this world represents one fundamental individual hagiography combined into a nationalistic package, each nation represents an individual will that has contrived to substantiate itself patriotically and has successfully projected its civic mindedness according to shared cultural, economic, wellbeing and religious values; each nation is as closed to an individualist absolute as one can get, and any one person represented under that flag and living under its enforceable geography is part of the individualized national psyche it projects into the community of nations we call world. That is to say that the common belief in the American dream, free markets, democracy, Christian morality, protestant work ethic, is a shared belief agglomerated into a nation-state.<br /><br />These individual-nations then divine to war against one another for world resources because they see each other as competing against one another for vital resources such as coal, gold, gas, livestock, farmland, water, labor, etc. And this is why there are now at least 7 different space exploration programs in our world today, because no one sees the shared interest humanity has at stake here, and so you could argue, and it is the argument I make that we are losing human energy through repetitive, redundant efforts such as the space program or idiotic efforts to abolish one another all due to our false sense of nationalism-individualism and our lack of awareness at the shared and codependent experience that is existence. Imagine if instead of 7 nations working to build a separate space program there was only one space program to which all nations contributed? Does it seem silly to you or possible? If it seems impossible it is your individualism talking, “It will never work.” And that’s you building mental barriers that become real from shared opinions; after all individualism is a shared experience that denies community. <br /><br />The amount of human effort and energy that has been dedicated to an individualized framework of existence has detracted from the benefits and true potential of our combined humanity as one. This is not a view that has escaped the business world. Businesses, because they have been allowed unfettered development see the benefits of globalization and integration because they realize that they can do so much more and reach their fullest market potential no doubt in a globalize economy. The Enterprise has now become the champion of globalization, in other words the single most massive attack on individualism comes from the world’s top 1000 companies that all correctly grasp that there is only one, 1 market, not many markets, not many consumers, one market and one consumer.<br /><br />An idealists business person wants to avoid business regulation and local laws and local think and they want to increase the flexibility of labor so that their cost structures are globally sound; they want to eliminate variances in cross border regulation and taxation so that their goods can flow freely from one end of the earth to another on an even keel; this is not so crazy, even for a bad reason it is not so crazy; sure they want to sell and profit from bigger and larger markets but their intent is actually harmonizing the world, the more you integrate economies the less individualism the less conflict that arises from tribal differentiation, and the greater the revenues no doubt; but the point is that businesses all over the world are realizing that catering to national agendas has little to show for returns on investment. Further businesses are realizing that products are not national goods but international goods; they don’t want to say it is made in America or China, businesses want to manufacture where it is most convenient, they are not nationalistic they are realists!<br /><br />Monopolies are a logical by product of the internalization of business models, the largest corporations are able to assimilate labor energy with greater ease and because their focused is concentrated in a single-minded philosophy of business principles they are able to out-compete smaller operations and swallow them whole.<br /><br />By internationalizing labor and its constructs businesses are replenishing the concept of a singular humanity and one world think. This of course is against the nature of politicians which need to keep the world nationalistic and divided, fortunately businesses have been in control of the show and are far wiser for it and so they are indeed running countries into globalize submission because in the end governments have to believe in economy and jobs as they have to generate taxes to maintain the infrastructure of nations and their political careers. The increasing need for flexible labor includes in it the mobility of labor, labor will have to be able to migrate at will for its own benefit and the to the benefit of the conglomerates; and as such the time must come when you will be able to live anywhere without having to ask permission from some local official, somewhere there is a movement arising for the freeing of all peoples to have the substantive right to live and work wherever they please, regardless of geography. That movement however has a preconceptual requirement: we must not think of home as our family, town, or our nation but home must be our world, Earth.<br /><br />Thus business today, and we must include world religions too as they are monopolies, today these two are the biggest enemies not only to national and cultural concepts of personal identity but also to family. As businesses and faiths explode into the mega church of world they will find that they need a more politically correct labor force or worshiper base which implies a self void of its own opinions and values, a self that can be retrained at will, a flexible individual that brings about a kill of the individual force and if you kill the individual you kill the number one proper upper stage of individualism in the world today, the family. The one that keeps on telling you that “you are special and unique and different from your fellow neighbor” much to the detriment of your humanity.<br /><br />No one of course is truly special, no baby is better than any other baby, yes preferences are made, and like we bet on horses when the babies fall out and get going in the rat race we all start placing our bets and backing those closest to us, those that identify with the personalized “I”; but that personalization could happen under any other nationality if we are placed there by chance or destiny.<br /><br />The human condition is a generic condition, the emotional beings that inhabit this earth the whale and the dolphin and the monkey, etc, are by nature like the rest of us, that is to say that they come from the same essence being that brings about existence, there is not a lot of margin for originality in that, two degrees in any direction outside the solar system and you can stop being a whale or a human. What allows our existence is a cosmic microclimate of emotions that are very narrow minded in scope and that in turn make us myopic observers that see mostly self-interest and out of that self-interest is born the conclusion of our Individualism!<br /><br />The conclusion is wrong, individuality does not exist, it is a self centered expression from a being that has lost direction in the context of existence, through time and space individualism grows because we have given it an extended value due to a felt but unreal isolation, we do not think as a group we think as individuals, to think as a group we join systems which are external from us and that divert our attention from a fundamental emotive that while dangerously powerful and chaotic, as it has no point of reference other than a moment, is indeed our only hope of ever understanding the true nature of our being; an eternal emotive core that has no disparate parts, that cannot talk or live outside of itself and when it enters time and space starts to live and talk as caused by an abysmal indifference from matter to its subject-being.<br /><br />If humanity learns to think as one, without fearing the loss of identity that is both false and useless, then the energy of combined minds based on emotive essence produce a harmony of energy that could do many, today, unimaginable things, amazing things, things like levitation and telepathy are possible only when beings synchronize as one; like twins we are all the same but individualism has tripped our humanity, and has relegated us into a raw game of survival, where we see only immediate interest without working for the greater good of all.<br /><br />As a source of unfeeling energy Individualism can challenge the material world but since the creatures that use it are emotive beings every move they make with it has a pyrrhic toll; for it is individualism that causes us to play games against one another, it is individualism that pits us into competition voiding us of the ability to work as one humanity in one world for a common cause. Life.<br /><br />Ricardo CorreaRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-7909871801752960942008-02-23T12:44:00.002-05:002008-02-23T12:50:35.207-05:00A VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCEIt is time to put my prophetic talents to the test on the upcoming election, while it is too difficult to say who in particular might win, why even professional pundits refuse to put themselves out to venture a specific guess on one particular candidate, I am going to be bold and daring as I don’t have a reputation on the line.<br /><br />First we must interpose some givens to the calculation, one it is not a two party system that we are analyzing, inherently the United States only has one party that is divided into a liberal and a conservative wing, the Democrats and the Republicans are thus part of the same idealistic structure executing predefined characteristic aspects based on a scaling left or right tendency.<br /><br />As a rule of thumb we have observed that the Democrats tend to remain to the left of the political scale while the Republicans tend to be on the right wing of it. The two parties would have us believe that they offer a full spectrum to satisfy and guide our diplomatic and political needs. The assumption suffices to make it difficult for any third parties, i.e the Libertarians, greens, etc, from acquiring a significant hold within the Washington structure, though it is not necessarily impossible for another party to enter into the political arena, as was the case when the Republican party entered Washington, however it is interesting to note that the Republicans succeeded not in adding another party but in supplanting the Wigs thus proving amply that the political infrastructure of Washington at least as far back as the American Civil War, was already unable to carry the weight of three parties and so silently defaulted and organized itself under the dichotomy of the Democrats and Republicans.<br /><br />That assumption will seem ludicrous to most people ask a conservative “What do they have in common with a Liberal?” and the reply will come back to instant animosity, they will find it difficult to explain similarities, they will find it necessary to make the Democrats communist and foreign sympathizers, and launch them off the patriotic branch as traitors. The reply will not be any different from a Liberal; the conservatives will always be uptight, xenophobic, money grabbers of uncaring magnitudes. However both parties are undoubtedly linked as one.<br /><br />We have observed the Clintonesque revolution which was actually when the party of the left went way towards the center if not outright trespassed into Right wing mythology, rule from the center, the left can be business and labor union friendly ambidextrously, it could be equally against excess regulation and Monopoly friendly towards first rate job producers and first rate exporters such as Microsoft.<br /><br />The revolution did not just happen in such context at a national level, it was visible from the island across the pacific where Tony Blair was able to denude the Tory’s of all pride by displaying a natural friendliness towards conservative economic values while running a savory economy as managed by his star Mr. Brown. It would be difficult to discern valuable differences between the Tories and Labor when the Tony/Brown team was executing, to the point that one could dare egregiously state that from the side lines some Tories not so far from center approved of the Tony and Brown show.<br /><br />Finally nothing could demonstrate better how far the British Prime Minister had gone over the conservative wall than his support and active lobbying for President Bush’s Iraq war project II. Tony’s indefatigable sale of the war reached comic proportions, against the British peoples and even against the strong on defense Tory’s, some which became doves when faced with a hawkish Labor Prime Minister.<br /><br />Of course Tony Blair was not setting a precedent when he opted to use conservative values to blur party lines and thus confuse everyone into inaction while Tory and Labor alike fuddle around figuring which PM eject-system’s cogs and pullies to yank. It was Disraeli, perhaps the brightest man to ever rule Britain, while less charming than Sir Winston he, Disraeli was able to judo master his opposition into disrepair with their own arguments. And while I am not going to prove it here, it may well be that Disraeli was the most callous and cunning liberal that ever existed, regardless he did an spectacular job as a Tory Leader, something which still baffles my mind to no end; except for the obvious, once the Tory’s figured that they had a liberal usurper within the clan and they realized that he could win elections, they figured it was better to be the party in power under the leadership of a impostor than to be ruled by the opposing party in any guise.<br /><br />The point is that while the concept of Liberal and Conservative values have been segmented into stark contrast to the benefit of a chained bicameral party structure that does not mean that they don’t share each others values nor that those values are not to the benefit of their constituency and what is most relevant, what fuels the parties are the voters and they come from the same pool, regardless of class, ethnicity and generation the voters are one amorphous mass, they must all be lured to vote so that the differences and tendencies of the national psyche may be discerned.<br /><br />Which means that it is the voters that will decide the 2008 election for the United States of America will ultimately decide where the country’s psyche is as regards to the threat environment, economic prospects, social and moral, etc… consciousness. But that leads directly to the prospect choices and how they will stand out from the pack, even in a state of representative government the voters will decide all outcomes.<br /><br />While all of that explanation may seem out of context it squarely sets responsibility upon each individual voter to state their position and to allow them to participate in the intricate meshing of all varying political positions to be silently recombined into a single possible candidate option that will satisfy the national psyche. Yes, it is a lot of responsibility placed on one by the many, and yes it probably is primitive that we still believe in the concept of one decision maker leading the pack and they having ultimate power over all, and we are thus to patriotically and blindly follow after executing only one vote of trust.<br /><br />But there is one thing we must take into consideration despite of what the pundits will have you believe the truth is that we do not formulate our opinions overnight, or even in a matter of two year long campaigns, each individual voter is influenced by an infinite set of factors, some radical some not so radical and oddly some not so of this world, so while campaigns can be rather interesting and adrenalin filled they are only there not so much to acquire a following but rather to spit out the candidate that will best spit out the desires and wants of the mass psyches. In a sense it is a campaign for the hearts and minds but in reality the minds and hearts are already predefined by the given number of circumstances and happenings that have already molded the posterity of the national psyche. In that context each candidate is not so much formulating a platform but rather catering to the platform that the mass national psyche has rendered over decades of experiences.<br /><br />When we look at elections we must also take into consideration the epoch effect, this is not something that can be taken lightly even as it takes centuries to accumulate its effects, it is glacial dynamic and so change is hardly perceptible but eventually there is enough pressure in any given direction to cause your occasional significant tectonic plate shift, in this case we are of course referring to the politics and the accidents that accompany such into a demolition of old into new or old-new political operational models.<br /><br />Charting the tumultuous of these events is not a simple thing to do and we are not going to do it here, we are instead going to prophesy as that allows us to be wrong in every way and still carry forward a reputation. First the guiding post of the prophesy, we are going to say that “there is currently a movement silently cresting that will cause havoc throughout the consumer based economies and ripple outwards into all other economies in so far and so impact full as they are economically internationally connected. Yes those with the least to lose will be those that have not made it into the international economic stage or/and those, ironically, that have been sanctioned, and thus kept forcefully out of the economic grid.”<br /><br />That is the first aspect of the prediction we are also going to say that the time frame for it to eventuate is imminent, meaning that many of those that read this will witness the prophesy here within.<br /><br />Now on to the election of 2008, which may or may not be truly a desirable post to be in. It is herewith believed that the election will be interesting from a historical point of view as it will not be the usual overseen of the superpower and policing enforcement of all of its policies world wide, instead it will be more that management of a severe downturn of affairs; this we mean that even if the hemorrhaging of economy doesn’t overtly manifest itself there will still be a substantial undertow that will drain and devastate entire sectors of the economy bringing necessary protectionisms to an overbearing dimension that will cause more harm than good and cause fanatical oscillations throughout the land with nationalistic and international consequences.<br /><br />No one wants to be a prophet of doom not only because there have been so many failed prophets of doom but also because no one likes the bad news and so will disdain the prophet for it; but there are times when the burgeoning dimensions touch the prophet in such a way that they mandate telling even if it is merely heart burn. And so we proceed, “The election will be won that best represents the times pending.”<br /><br />We have a precedent of a woman in Argentina winning the election so we can say with some certainty that there could be a trend towards female rulers developing, thus while everyone will be impressed with an American female president it certainly will not be the first female president of the Americans much less so of the world; we could thus rebuff the claim accordingly.<br /><br />Currently there is also a trend in the Americas to lean to the left, though the Left is not sure what to make of that because it is still recovering from winning at politics with business, defense, religion friendly politics and by sidestepping traditional social and union concerns. Still we have seen how Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil have elected leaders to the left of the democrats, so there is some form of developing pattern there but we are going to ignore it, instead we are going to use the most difficult gauging parameter possible, the glacial change meter.<br /><br />“The time has cometh for glacial change drama; people and times will bring about a cataclysm through the urgings of innerving energetic movements in the world political psyche, we are further going to brand ourselves heretics by saying that politics is an accident and not a natural institution, in philosophical terms an accident is something you can do without because it is not part of your pure essence, your eyes are blue, your blood is red, your pretty, but those are accidents of your being, you are none of those things, above those things is your soul, your soul is what energizes your existence, your body, even your body is an accident of your soul, something that happens because your soul enters the world, and here we are saying that when you enter the world your communication with others breaks down, chatters, and the fragments try to realign and communicate again, they start talking and signing contracts and politics arises such is the reproach to one’s and another’s soul. Politics is an institution but it is not natural, entire societies, civilizations, cultures and peoples can live without politics.”<br /><br />Everyone is of course expecting the democratic party to win the election, Bush is such a stark contrast and so maligned by his handling of the war and his fervent isolationists policies that one does not have to go far to assume that he has lost the election for the Republicans. But that would be too simplistic of analysis, there is ample evidence that the Republicans could win the election again, after all there is a lot of pent up Anger in the American psyche, the American people feel cheated, they think the United Nations and the World bank are using America while employing and helping American batchers. They feel that the European union forgot how it got its start and is now becoming a competitor, so much so that American politicians go out of their way to fragment the EU alliance by catering to British dissent. And then there are those Muslims, no matter how often Americans sacrifice their lives to give them the right to vote and allow their women to drive and to cover their faces with Revlon instead of cloth, they are rebuffed, and then a jihad is declared against them with such furor that one cannot understand how their number one customer for oil can be so ill treated. But even with the plausibility of these arguments the reality is that Bush got reelected even as he had failed not because anyone thought he could fix the mess he got the nation into but rather because he continued to truly express America’s discombobulated anger over foreign disdain for American values and form of governance thus a conservative court overruled democracy, in an election, when it counted.<br /><br />I put this in a separate paragraph intentionally, the supreme court did not elect a president that wasn’t desired by the national psyche, had there been a coin toss the results would have been the same, the race was close because the nation was jittery and confused, but it leaned on the side of the irrational, “react, react, lets not be reasonable, we are tired of being reasonable.” Gore would have been reasonable because he is afraid of emotion which is why he intellectualizes presuming that what you can know cannot bite you in the ass; Gore was too reasonable, he would have left volumes of national pent up angst unrepresented, given the choice the nation decided to vent via the junk yard dog that could not tell friend from foe.<br /><br />The question is: “Is the nation willing to endure one more republican?” The answer is as simplistic as it needs be, “No.”<br /><br />Regardless of how emotional Americans can be at heart they are more pragmatic and reasonable, they are afraid of runaway power, they want power to be controlled because they are afraid of how power corrupts and may then wrecks havoc upon the mass, for the most part the two party system has been the biggest check and balance against power mongers, and it is highly doubtful that Americans feel that they can allow the war prone party to rule for another four, the political propensity should lean away from the Republicans because of chance or due to the natural pendulum of political movements, or most likely because it just does not make sense anymore; the rampage period has come to a close.<br /><br />We can eliminate Bush, and we can eliminate Rudy from the equation, I like Rudy, he seems to be a charming enough fellow, he could carry on the Bush legacy, his human factor is high for he has ample flaws and, marketing wise, is willing to admit to it, but he has that little bit of: “I love myself more than I love you.” And I think we will all have a problem with that.<br /><br />Thompson, his tired, he doesn’t have a plan for the rest of his life so he decided to run fro president as if it was on the list of: “What do I do next?” Aside from that there is nothing original about that and presidents do not win elections because their wife’s are more competent.<br /><br />I think we are all aware that the truth talking candidate has a truth talking candidacy but nothing else and in the real world it does not matter if you were proved your patriot soul by being in a Vietnamese jail because you went there to kill them, there has to be more than that, such as policy other than defense, there has to be an international and an economic policy, besides patriotism is becoming a liability and not an asset in an advancing world economy and freer labor flows. Sorry Senator McCain but unlike you we are all not still fighting from the perspective of Vietnam, this in no way ought lessen your suffering or sacrifice, we are just dealing with European, Russian, Asian economic markets that have nothing to do with weather we like our own country.<br /><br />We could go down the endless row of republican candidates and you can argue that it is pointless; no one is going to win because the republicans are going to lose. We can then examine Obama the charming fellow coming almost out of nowhere to capture serious attention but equally proving that a charmed front can be subdued through substance. Yes there is something not there about his approach, he didn’t read enough, he forgot that charming can be deadly if ennobled with a real agenda, instead he allowed Hilary to prove that whatever she lacks in charmed she makes up by being prepared and able. This could be an argument for competence, the American people have had enough incompetence from their President, they are ready for someone who is going to mend fences and build relationships with the international community while keeping a strong sense of defense, there is something mighty and righteous about Hilary Clinton, she doesn’t seem to be a push over, and she certainly has had to battle, sometimes with her hands tied behind her back as when she was first lady, and others with the full arsenal of the senate in hand and no one can say that winning a New York senate seat is easy, she did it. Of course some will say she is riding on the coat tails of her husbands supreme political capital as he is a master at the craft of diplomacy, frankly I still don’t know if there is such a thing as Clinton doctrine but if there is it is probably I am happy with the way things are but sometimes bad things make me cry, I feel a lot.<br /><br />Yes I think Clinton was sort of the Left’s response to Regan’s immense popularity with the electoral, but Regan had a very codified platform both in Economics and International policy, his expenditure on defense in a relative peaceful time for superpower politics should have seemed senseless, and it probably was, but he orchestrated well and then took the credit for the fall of the soviet union in a single sweep public relations coup that could have had little basis in reality. After all we now know that he was miss informed about Soviet Potential and capability. Where he did cause great impact was in not interfering with the disintegration, it must have been tempting, his national security advisors and secretary of state must have been tempted to proactively scavenge for the leftovers of the Soviet Empire, Regan didn’t go there, he dint cause any unnecessary friction, he let the twilight of the cold war go unsung, perhaps his greatest achievement. However Clintonesque politics did not call for change or high minded agendas, they called for equilibrium between the left and the right, he blared the last trumpet for discourse between the right and the left, and more remarkably he was able to do so even as the Republicans unleashed an all out attack, but Clinton held the middle ground in his politics and when he left the middle ground caved in and Right and Left when at each other in every platform and arena possible, the slug fest continues.<br /><br />The colossal nature of the battle between the two camps is interesting because they are indeed part of the same concatenating political machine, but it helps us to conclude that the barometric pressure is set to blow, it is possible to imagine that the two party system is at an end, that it has run out of ideas or that the post cold war order calls for something else, that we are indeed facing a pending change in how politics are done at home and abroad, and we can question if it is feasible to have an Executive Branch, so much power concentrated on the whims of one elected official seems anti democratic and dangerous indeed, perhaps the day of the republics are coming to an end, its possible. If that is the case we may use that criteria to further narrow down if our next candidate will be an Elephant or a Mule. <br /><br />Reality time, if a liberal wins the election, which is most likely, it implies that there are is still potential energy in the context of the capitalistic and democratic system as we know it today, that is to say that Democrats are more likely to take risk and spend callously and to take care of people, as they are naturally insecure and think that caring for others will some how imply that those others or the system will eventually care for them, thus they make the argument of socialize health care, nutrition programs and hand holding till old age. Any election that elects a democrat not only means that there is still potential in the current existing system but further that there is still hope, hope of changing and modifying the system enough so that it can keep going on from here to eternity.<br /><br />There are plenty of people that think that the constitution does not need to be modified that it is some kind of perfect conceptualization of the ideal politic and can therefore remain unchanged and unchallenged for eternity. This might be a bit naïve considering that so many emperors and kings thought that there could be no alternative to monarchy and even the people that they subjugated respected such ideal, at some point though the concept of monarchy failed to fit into the national political psyche and it was thus abandoned.<br /><br />It is most likely, based on the historic record, that our ideals of government, constitutions and even justice will be outmoded by new ideas and manners which we have not predicted, and so here we have a firm hard rule judgment to make, has the time come for a change of mind sets, have we reached a point the history of histories where we can no longer operate on the set of standards set forth more or less around the French revolution and the Greek foundation of rock voting democratically?<br /><br />How then are we to tell that the time has come for such dramatic change?<br /><br />If the time has come for change then it follows that the conservative forces will have to dominate the political arena, and I think that there is plenty of evidence that everything is shifting to the right, again it would be difficult to think of Clinton or Blair as left wingers, it would be impossible to say that they were not pro business, further they were willing to sacrifice ideals so as to reach compromises and master the art of statistically popular governance.<br /><br />There is then enough evidence before us to say that if the Left has begun to lost its idealism for socialistic principles, if the unions and regulation have lost support within the Democratic party, if Hilary Clinton is willing to rethink her health package so that it is healthier on hospitals, pharmaceuticals, the American Medical Association and Insurance, then we can say that the discerning eye would have a difficult time discerning Right from Left.<br /><br />It is not, and this is what we are saying, it is not a compromise, the country has shifted left, even its liberals are shifting gears for the Right, so that you can say that there will not be a valid sense for good old liberal values, what Hilary Clinton and Obama will be doing is looking to the center or the right for guidance, and their electorate will feel more comfortable if they do that, after all it is not like unions can sit there and argue that jobs can be created in the American car market when the cost of labor and production overseas can clip the value of American labor in half.<br /><br />Which implies that we could argue that if the Left wins the election it is still somewhat as if the Right have won it, that they Left have successfully stolen the platform from the left, that in fact they have made themselves giraffes that can eat on either side of the fence, the implication is that if the nation is getting conservative as a whole then the stamina and potential of its institutions is used up. However ff Hilary Clinton gets elected it will not imply that liberal values have won because she has mastered the art of staying as close to the center of opinions and values so that everyone may can of say, “Well she might not be that bad.” As oppose to Obama that only has one position on the war in Iraq and so would have no option but to be against the war and could not back down from it, Hilary can turn towards the necessity of the occasion as warranted.<br /><br />The problem is not one inherent to the candidates but rather one inherent within the confines of the system the political parties have not only matured but are in their twilight, we know this because they have perfected their arguments to the point of paralysis, they are out of new ideas nothing that a Republican or a Democrat tells you is going to surprise you. Some people will argue that there is still a lot of steam in their engines but these are the same people that would look at a combustion engine and think that because it only outputs about 40 percent of its energy towards locomotion that we can get to 90 percent efficiency, that is of course a fallacy, the basic principles and architecture that define the combustion engine capitalize all of its true potential at about forty percent, to gain efficiencies in output you have to change the concept an turn it into a hybrid, or base an engine on entirely new technologies and principles, which means that the best researches on engine power aren’t dedicating their energies to combustion, the system has been perfected, regardless of how many flaws are left.<br /><br />In the same way we can see that anyone could say that there is still a lot of room for improvement within the framework of a bicameral democratic system, and equally and more accurately say that as things are you are not going to get anymore out of the two parties that drive this political machine, the time is ripe for a change, the question is will that change come now or later, and if later how much later. Again the stagnant nature of ideas of both parties indicate an imminent change, no one has found the third way or if the current system will just morph into a hybrid of some sort. But regardless we must take that into consideration as to who is going to get elected.<br /><br />If the system still has potential in it then it should be a democrat, if it has close to zero potential it should a conservative or a overall conservative democrat, thus our choices are not easy; besides that there is another factor, Hilary is a woman and Obama is a black man, people like to make history or more accurately to participate in historic events, either way it would be history in America, since we still make distinctions based on national borders, we can discount Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Germany, Argentina President Cristina Fernandez, and Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, so women in America and some men will cast their vote based on gender to break the glass ceiling, others, blacks, minorities and liberal whites might side with Obama as they would cast a vote to put the first black president in office, in the end these type of voters will have to draw their choice from the leading member candidate up to the election but doubt not that it will be a perceived value aggregator to the one of the two that makes it to the finals.<br /><br />The thing is that there are no accidents as to who gets elected, the national psyche will make corrections till the very last minute like an owl homing in on its prey never letting the beak break center from the quarry jetting right or left, ascending or descending .000003 second adjustments accordingly, however prophets make predictions and move on and are therefore prone to philosophical accidents, i.e. things that are not natural to their predictions happens.<br /><br />We can then predict that, since it is not a two party system but rather a two stroke engine, the people will raise to power the appropriate politician for their times and hungers. If the parties had a possibility at all, of losing to a third party the engine would be more diverse, complicated and dynamic, but party creation is not an instantaneous process, and well structured systems have rightly, or wrongly, a focused vision. Two eyes are always better than one, but not two right eyes nor two left eyes.<br /><br />As a final note I will unveil my vote of no vote for either party. I will not participate in the national spectacle that has become the political arena because my consciousness is not reflected in it. The belief that we have to vote for at least the lesser of two evils is not for me a realistic approach to making a serious difference in world affairs. The fact is that when peoples are in harmony they are the least political, it is not to the advantage of political parties to see solutions beyond the political realm, thus it is objectionable that they will have us think that we are by some endemic nature political beasts. By denying the energies of my vote to the political process I am limiting the scope of their mandate and perhaps adding weight to the unveiling of other possibilities.<br /><br />Ricardo CorreaRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-77561046391013280342007-02-25T19:15:00.000-05:002007-02-25T19:16:00.455-05:00As my cats love me I love meFirst things first, consciousness, the meaning of consciousness is a matter of supreme importance but we can nailed it shut in a most succinct description of say the child developing such. Yes, consciousness is that simple, it is merely an awareness of self, the child recognizing its face for the first time, and the child realizing peer pressure and the realization of such as a consciousness based process. Indeed.<br /><br />Consciousness as awareness of self makes perfect sense, but what does not make perfect sense is when consciousness is not taken to the next step and that is awareness of others, and through awareness of others a realization of sameness.<br /><br />Consciousness is for the here and now, it is a real-time operant, it is therefore not something profound though it can have profound implications, the universe, life and everything is based on something that is wholly subconsciousness based and has absolutely no foundations in the immediate present, the recognition of the present is an afterthought, the afterthought when identified, we can call such process consciousness. I am me and I exist. That is consciousness.<br /><br />Now knowing that you are you, is an amazing discovery because it occurs in the here and now, after you have gone through the mired meshed of birth process, and come out into material existence knowing not an ink of what you were before or where you come from or why you are here. The environment slams into you, the reality doesn’t give you time to think and ponder anything, everything starts unfolding and you just have to deal with it as best as you can with your reactive and intuitive species based actions.<br /><br />Once you enter the here and now and realize yourself it is because you have come to a comprehension of your relationship to your environment, a mountain climber has a very conscious full-idea of himself in relationship to the mountain. I know who I am in relationship to philosophy, the world definition of self-to-world is a mandatory prescription for self-awareness, to get there you just have to hope that you have enough species-level-subconsciousness to survive before some hunter, epidemic or catastrophe kills you.<br /><br />When you start to look at yourself with time to ponder you begin to realize the possibility of plastic surgery, that is to say that you can change yourself, that realization is paramount to come to the next more important conclusion, you can change yourself and adapt to meet the constrains of world parameters then it follows that not only can you adapt but that you can also change the environment, change world!<br /><br />That is a paramount realization because the world is not necessarily made of you or for that matter made of those others that are like you, it is something else, to transform the earth to dig for emeralds, to refine cooper to roast coffee there has to be a consciousness transformation from self to world! Once you can create a bridge between yourself and world that has regular back and forth interaction then you get to another amazing thing, you reach another like you through the medium of world. That other can be another culture, another civilization, another tribe, another person, a nomad, but it is another like you. The discovery of the Americas was a phenomenal demonstration of two worlds coming together through the bridges created by the consciousness of world; today Indians own casinos, go to Harvard and play in the Olympics, the bridge has not only been crossed but it has been narrowed to the point of nullification. The other is not only like you but has the ability to be just like you.<br /><br />The catalyst to climb into the unknown is to reach others like us, it is to find more like us that have crossed from the other side, from before life, we want to meet them in the here and because we knew them back then, before consciousness in the subconsciousness which propagates these us alls.<br /><br />Consciousness then is aptly named from the roots of a subconsciousness, a silent awareness, we have always known and been aware of ourselves as coming from one giantess source that comprises us all in some magnificent singularity, from which only a bright whiteness could be seen till the great separation created the multitude of colors which we now consider individuals. <br /><br />Those that hate gays, once exposed to them as a brother or a sister or a mother come to realize that they are not that different from the rest of us tolerable, and given enough time on this earth anyone might equally realized that the difference between the neocon and the militant left winger ideology are none, and given enough time the two could merge into one; as it is today they are still building the bridge towards each other with a dialectic construction crew that is busy demolishing everything that stands in between them.<br /><br />Ricardo RojoRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-80380827232530553632007-02-25T18:54:00.000-05:002007-02-25T18:55:41.465-05:00The Chicken and the Egg ProblemThe problem is fairly straightforward, people think that chickens come from eggs and eggs come from chickens and some people think that god created chickens and then chickens started to recreate themselves by laying eggs. The problem is that everyone needs a Prime Mover, a force that caused the initiated event, if there is a god the problem of what came first is solved; God doesn’t make Eggs, he created a Rooster and a Hen first and then commanded them to reproduce, their chances of survival were enhanced by the fact that they started out in paradise, and thus today you can have all the Fried Chicken you want.<br /><br />God is, and has been for some time the prime mover of many things, this is because when there is no answer to something then God becomes the default answer:<br /><br />“Who created everything?”<br /><br />“God did.”<br /><br />“Who created the Earth?”<br /><br />“Why God of course?”<br /><br />“Who made the Universe so perfect looking?”<br /><br />“God did.”<br /><br />Sadly the problem is that omnipotent entities suffer from the very impossibility of the chicken and egg problem, saying that God created chickens leaves us only one notch behind the problem and resolves nothing:<br /><br />“Who created God?”<br /><br />Because in the end the chicken and egg problem is merely one of first principles, god came first solves the problem part way, god was before the chicken and before the egg, god doesn’t eat dairy, he didn’t need eggs or fried chicken so why did god create chickens and eggs? Because he wanted to make humans and humans needed something to eat.<br /><br />“Why did god not just make humans without a need to eat?”<br /><br />“Why was it impossible to make a self-sustainable trouble free human?”<br /><br />Because there is only one God and obviously gods are the most impossible thing to create in the universe, one God is a lot of god, one is enough, universes by themselves can only tolerate one God! Yes, yes the Hindus and Buddhist have a lot of gods, 700 or 10 thousand, but those are not gods, they are deities they have flaws, they don’t have supreme power, they can lose and gain their powers, and they spend a good deal of their eternities quarrelling and having affairs among themselves, not perfect!<br /><br />Conclusion, there is only one god.<br /><br />Problem “Who created god?” If we can answer the question of who created god we have solved the chicken and egg riddle.<br /><br />Answer, no one created God because God, as an omnipotent all imperishable, none corrosive, self sustaining is a resource impossibility! God would and does require infinite energy just to be everywhere, and know everything and more complicated to create everything, therefore god’s will and actions or just even his thoughts would use up all of the universe’s energy faster than he could say “I exist!”And thus a god thing would cause the universe to implode upon itself two seconds after its inception, which is about how long it would take god to start contriving everything in existence and caput the entire universe’s energy count.<br /><br />Conclusion, Gods are not an effective energy construct which is why universes avoid being contaminated with the god thing.<br /><br />Which leads us to another perplexing conclusion that might solve another riddle, “Does god exist?” <br /><br />Answer, “He doesn’t say because doing so would extinguish the universe and/or cause the universe to extinguish him and we don’t know which one would happen first.<br /><br />Conclusion, if there is no god because god is such an absolute energy construct that it is equally auto-self-destructive because the concept consumes resources faster than they can be created then, and get this, then god did not have time to create chickens!<br /><br />Impressionably for us little people, we have now solved a part of the problem, we know for sure and beyond all doubt that god did not create chickens because god doesn’t exist; which means that we know that we have the wrong answer and can move further forward or backwards to find the correct answer.<br /><br />Evolution didn’t create chickens either.<br /><br />Now we are not going to say that there isn’t any evolution because that would be wrong, anyone who has survived a fifty year marriage knows that there is no evolution that something can remain stagnant for at least a half a century and repeat itself indefinitely, but that doesn’t mean that things that live longer than fifty years don’t evolve, they do and can and things that cross life times in the form of species indeed do in fact evolve, and we have sufficient proof from the archeological record to conclude that species adapts, and species survives because it evolves. However that doesn’t tell you who or what created species.<br /><br />Some say, that we come from a chemical whorehouse, where all of these chemicals got together and made a kind of not so delicious acidic soup and after rubbing back and forth a swirling concoction sprouted a cellular organism of some sort or at least the basic proteins were conjured to lead to organized organisms, hence the structural nomenclature. This is of course entirely possible, that a mixed up noodle sort of chicken soup created organized cell structures and there started to mate proteins from primordial acids and the whole thing is plausible but we still get stuck in the crux of our problem: “Who or what thing created the organic structures that would create the primordial soup?” <br /><br />Well we are not going to go all the way back to the presumed beginning of time the big bang; because you know that the assumption of a big bang initiated universe implies and fantastically presupposes that there was a lot of pressure to create an inevitable universe and that assumption of such beautifully sculpted physical forces, as conjured by modern day physicists, imply something existing before the universe seems preposterous enough not to need much considering but still, if we think about our riddle far enough back we do get to the big bang maximum sperm count, and who or what forces created universe leads us to interrogate ourselves supremely yet again: “What came before the forces that created universe?”<br /><br />We are not string theorists, nor have we the grandest of minds to be such, we are merely and purely emotional creatures, most of us, that simply defy meaning and so we are left in the quandary of first principles yet again. However I think it possible to deduct deductively towards some rational construct of those first principles: The chicken came first. It had to in order to lay the egg. The sin in the bible was sex and we know eggs lay chickens from consummated relationships, there is no way that the egg could have come first, none!<br /><br />The very premise of laying an egg is a chicken type characteristic and not the reverse an egg type characteristic, you don’t assume that the egg is capable of laying a chicken and this one of those cases where the name is symbolic, you know that when the chicken lays the egg it lays it with everything there to make the chic after it has laid with everything there to make a chic, and you know that every single chicken that is born is born from an egg, except of course the very first chicken.<br /><br />It has to be then that the egg came second, and that the chicken came first, and so the question is finally laid to rest here, in a world, in a universe where there are logical progressions, it is logically possible to stump one’s self with paradoxical quandaries because one is making huge assumptions and one huge one in particular, that there was a first moment, and there lays our self induced rooster of a problem, there is no time, the universe isn’t sequential, it isn’t even parallel, it is all there instantly, chickens start laying eggs as soon as they are conceived… …conceived by the universe!<br /><br />I propose then to conclude here that there are no ends, that there are no beginnings that there is no time as has been well concluded by the quantum types, there was no time before quantum, there was no time before relativity, there was no such thing ever as a universe without chickens that laid eggs, there is of course no measure for the magnitude of such universe nor a speed limit for the things in it, the infinity stretches forever, in such infinity not only can all things be in their superposition, there can be a superimposed god and if someone wants to fence things in and lock them down and corner them, they can be allowed and can even follow a sequence, particularly if there is a localize need to be logical about it.<br /><br />RicardoRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1164497771900799022006-11-25T18:35:00.000-05:002006-11-25T18:36:11.916-05:00PERSONAL JUDGEMENT REACHES INTO USIt is a rainy day outside, I am without transport of the private kind so instead I am waiting at the bus stop with my raincoat doing wonderfully to keep the wet and cold outside, I am most happy, I like rainy days, the bus will more or less arrive on time, it doesn’t matter, I don’t expect it to be on time, I am in a pleasant contemplative state, levitation being one of the topics my head is musing, when I hear a screeching hard breaking sound, the slippery wet, the unclenching rubber, the imposing red light, a card skidding sideways, and in seconds, a collision is avoided by oncoming traffic, while the car that crossed in red captures its composure, the driver, perhaps startled, after clearing the intersection, parks at the edge. Surprisingly seconds withheld a police car was just around the corner and quickly lights a Christmas tree of lights. I feel the wave of subsided panics that must have gone through the unlucky driver’s gut, levitation harshly forgone.<br /><br />As I watch the emergency lights chatter the air, I ponder what I would do were I that police officer? From the breaking you could tell that the driver hadn’t meant to cross the red light illegally but had instead found a surprising red light; intent in trespassing the law was obviously none. The car was not a new model car, while I could not place the year it was obvious that the driver was of limited financial means, a ticket was the last thing this person needed. No one was hurt, sure the oncoming traffic had been obstructed but they had adequately, taken evasive maneuvers and continued on appropriately, it all transpired so quickly and smoothly, for such an event, that no one even bothered to use their horns. Concluding that, an unfortunately absent-minded driver had made a mistake, I as the police officer, would not have given the subject a traffic ticket, I would have said, “just be more careful next time.” The officer in charge of this event didn’t feel the same way, a ticket was issued at the scene. <br /><br />But that act would be a violation of the police officer’s code ethic, “to enforce the law without personal judgment.” In our society rules are not suppose to be broken thus even if they are broken without intent, they then have to be punished. This is considered “reasonable” and it is based on the assumption that punishment is a deterrent and serves to maintain alertness within the common civic mindedness. The assumption being fewer people will run red lights as long as we enforce the law regardless of the particular circumstances. <br /><br />That is to say, we will not look at the individual nor offer a personalize judgment of an event, in that manner we may remain objective and serve our community’s civic mindedness well. <br /><br />After a while I started to wonder if the police officer went home and felt bad about giving this particular driver a ticket, but then I figured than an experienced officer could depersonalize the situation and distance himself enough from it so that the good sleep would not be interrupted. But then it occurred to me, “what if it was his wife running that red light, what if by coincidence the person running that light were indeed his wife or even his brother, or even his best buddy,” then I kind of thought that perhaps the officer would become more humane and personalize his judgment of the event, and let them each go without a fine. Sure I think there is any number of police officers that would still have given their best friend a ticket while saying something like, “I am doing this for your own good, I want you alive and safe…” But I think the majority, observing the very uniqueness of the situation: no one was hurt, traffic automatically restored itself to normal flow, the person had not intended to run the light, then the officer would have told his buddy or his wife: “hey, your lucky it was me that caught you, be more careful or next time you might not be so lucky.” And let it go at that. <br /><br />But then I think the officer might get pissed-off too if, for instance, it were his wife or his buddy with children in the car. The officer might then feel possible personal pain nearer as caused by the loss of a loved one, and thus personalizing hurt issue a ticket in anger that someone carrying children could be so careless.<br /><br />Regardless the point is that the depersonalization of this event, by justice logic, causes indifference between the officer on duty and the absentminded driver. Neither is allowed to connect with the other, the officer begins to judge the situation more accurately when it is a loved one, but is more sterile in his judgment when it is an unknown person. And the intercourse of the encounter between officer and absent minded driver is one intended not to emotionally touch either one of them, it is almost as if they had put plastic gloves on their minds, for the driver is probably thinking the following: “What was I thinking…” … “How stupid of me…” … “I am lucky to be alive, the officer is just doing his job, I should have been paying attention…” Contextually the absentminded driver will merely justify the legal actions and expect a well-deserved fine, the incident was/is against the law, and for good reason it should have never taken place. The fine will hurt but it could all have been worse. <br /><br />What both characters in this play fail to do is to connect to one another and they fail to do that because the secular character of their society does not allow it, that is to say that the police officer and the driver agree that the normalization of their relationship has to remain secular and depersonalized so that the system can work, that individual circumstances must be ignored which is why the situation should be judge on its most basic principles, the light was red, you are suppose to stop at a red light, the driver didn’t, there is a fine, that is the law. <br /><br />This is hard knowledge, this is a fact of life, traffic laws are not very forgiving, thousands of people lose their lives and are maimed in traffic accidents per day, per year, it is a harsh reality that has to be kept to a minimum as transport for us all is not an option but a necessity of the distances between work, home and the shopping center, the three pillars of our existence. <br /><br />The rain decides to increase, my very nice and lovable olive Sanyo raincoat is beginning to personalize the existing rain, it isn’t keeping out the cold as well, the bus hasn’t arrived, I fancy it will soon, but then I fancy something else more, I fancy that all those empty seats that are passing by, SUVs that can sit 8 people pass me by, endless cars with 3 empty seats pass me by, all that tonnage and energy, with heating inside, not far from me is an untenable option for a ride, even as some of them if not many of them are going near to where I am heading, and could easily offer a lift but don’t and wont. <br /><br />The reason they don’t offer me a lift its because they too have depersonalized me, if I was their wife, or their buddy I would have been picked up long ago, but I am someone that they don’t know, they would rather not be bothered with helping me out of the rain, besides that there are so many bad people out there that I could be one of them, better not to take a chance, even as most people tend to be honest, and most people are not criminals, and most people waiting for a bus are probably the least likely to be aggressive types, it requires patience and a certain degree of docility to take public transport, still it is too dangerous to pick up a stranger, the probability of picking up a weirdo or a serial killer might be .000000001 percent specially as most aggressors are driving BMWs and SUVs; but the nightly news from all over the world floods us with threats from everywhere, we are logically or should I say reasonably scared, and as such distrustful of strangers, so I fancy no one is going to want to chat with me, at least part of their lonely way to somewhere. <br /><br />Still I harbor this strange belief that maybe that driver that run the red light might not have run it had she or he given me a ride, as their passenger I might a said, “hey watch out there is a red light.” And then I think if all those empty seats, passing me by, were filled with people going in the same direction pooling riders together, there would be fewer accidents and fewer cars on the road, but that would require so much personalization of our world, and besides that, my bus has arrived. <br /><br />Ricardo ©Ricardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1163898074765658152006-11-18T20:00:00.000-05:002006-11-18T20:01:14.786-05:00POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC THINK CHANGENow the democrats are high on the hog with their enchanting victories, not only did they do well by winning congress but also the senate, control of both houses was unexpected, the American public however felt it necessary to create a balance that has apparently been voided by a strong White House. Thus the overcorrection but what has taken place is fascinating only in so far as boring can be fascinating. <br /> <br />Generally speaking the idea of checks and balances was that an independent supreme court, a strong legislature and executive, would benefit from power struggles between all three and keep them honest till the end of days. It hasn’t, it didn’t work, it is one of the aspects of our time honored constitution that ought to be revised however it isn’t going to happen until death do as apart. This is because when you fall in love with your constitution it equally becomes an unchanging premise. Thus congress, the executive and judicial will have to corner themselves indefinitely, they being the bulk of the constitution, which might explain why they don’t want to change it. <br /><br />Consider our current situation, the voters have made leaders of the democrats but the democrats have amply shown that they don’t have the genius or the guts to stop the president. Still the voters figured that someone needed to send a message to the Whitehouse that its “anything goes one way forever” war strategy wasn’t working, being that the president does not have any self correcting abilities, this was necessary, it wasn’t an option, the voters didn’t have a choice, they had to mandate change not through process but by ousting the republicans from the podium. It shouldn’t be that way, the process of checks and balances ought to work, it very well didn’t. <br /><br />Why it didn’t work is actually as pretty as how pretty it would have been if it had. The reason the process didn’t work its because America has been in decline since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ever since then America has been going through some severe psychological changes at every level, cultural, political, religious, and specially in the case of labor, labor has been going through a massive surge in productivity unequaled everywhere in the world. <br /><br />Part of the reason for the change is obvious, the Soviet Union was a strategic enemy to have, it was “the perfect” enemy to divvy up the world with, it knew where its turf was and it did not frequent into American claimed territory, which is why the wars fought between the USSR and the USA were mere skirmishes fought through proxy, no one with any real sense of history will consider American losses in Vietnam or Korea significant in the context of two global and critically nuclear empires budding heads. However the collapse of the USSR created a huge hole where their interdependencies mattered. Defense, strategic and global hegemony, economic superiority, and good guy bad guy schematics. <br /><br />America could no longer, for instance, be the only good guy, in a world where there was no Soviet Union American superiority moral or economic or even militarily could be challenged. As is the case with China and the European Union today challenging America for economic might and military autonomy. NATO has died and it is only true on paper, the EU is a mighty economic power, and the Euro is accreting EU integrity through a fresh supra-national sense of citizenship, the EU is showing that countries and borders do not pose a burden towards integration; counter that with America that is instead securing and fencing its territories from any country South of its borders. America the country that integrated autonomous states to form a successful union does not lead in creating united citizenship nationals or even in global monetary unification. <br /><br />Through its actions in the Middle East where its interest cannot be seriously disguised America has vanquished moral superiority, the overthrowing of what was mostly an incompetent dictator and even a, like us secularists, instead we have placed the Middle East in grater turmoil and allows Syria and Iran to act with a certain degree of moral immunity, everyone is doing it, pushing their ways, stratifying their extremism, if the Americans can wield their sword at anyone, anywhere it creates a world of nomads, or at least gives a green light in that direction. <br /><br />As is the case with Nuclear proliferation where America seems to favors India’s nuclear program but not North Korea’s or Iran’s, where you can assert who can make nuclear bombs and who can’t, you cannot!<br /><br />Defense is another matter, no one likes an aggressor, America always seemed the one that would attack only as a matter of last resort, the rhetoric during the cold war was not to strike first but to strike in retaliation hitting hardest then. Today the policy on defense is twice removed from that, it is not about retaliation, it is not even about a first rapid strike, it is beyond all that, the new policy is of preemptive strike, that is to kill America’s enemies while they are still in the womb, as soon as you can hear their heart beat like beasts. America is confident that it is sensitive enough to realize friend from foe, collateral damage will be kept to a minimum; freedom however must be safeguarded at any cost to international laws, treaties or human rights. In some ways America is right, terrorist do lose their rights by tying the knot on them can ripple senselessly through money trails, communications tapping and detention without a public forum. <br /><br />American productivity has risen to astonishing levels since the fall of the Soviet Union. Economist will have any number of reasons for this, I have a couple of my own, consider that after the Soviet Union fell there was nothing that could stand in the way of American success, in short if the fall of the USSR proved that America was right then the question was how much right it could further be, and that would lead to a logical extremism of the American way. <br /><br />The manifestation of that extremism started with the American people, whatever doubts they may have had that they lived in the best country in the world were now eliminated, as the USSR collapsed it proved how bankrupt it was, this was a matter of finance, the USSR had failed to finance it self, it could not loan money to it self the rubble became unrubbled. Americans could then rightly or wrongly feel that they were superior, that there was now physical evidence that their system was indeed the best of all possible systems, further evidence of which could be found by the acceptance of capitalism by China, in other words Chinese and Russian acceptance of capitalism implied that capitalism was not only right but also that it was the guiding principle of economic truth. As such the American workers, capitalists, marketers, bankers, financiers, professionals, now knew for sure that it was up to them to fully exploit the power of capitalism to their own advantage, now it was just a matter of working a little harder, of producing a little more, or taking a risk on that new business venture, there was no naught on the road to wealth and happiness, there was a lot of hard work in between, but the conclusion here is this, the American peoples mindset was hardwired to think that the only way to fail was if the failed to try harder, they had all the right stuff, and so productivity skyrocketed. <br /> <br />Religiously America could then turn to the right and administer moral conservatism, if American values had won in the world then it stood to faith to keep them sacred, and sacred meant unchanging, marriage, the family, the fetus, had to be defended against any new ideas that could corrupt it, gay marriage, lack of prayer in schools, evolution, etc., thus there was a right wing religious uprising to preserve what was right about America and to logically, if fanatically, eliminate what was wrong, as a result a whole evangelical Christian movement surged throughout the country and became something rather unfaithful, that is to say political. <br /><br />The political activism of a nationalistic religiosity put the secular constitution through an ordeal, to what degree could freedoms be granted and still be considered freedoms? Could you for instance teach “creation” in public schools, and still say that there was a separation of church and state? And what would you tell the Buddhists if the republican president was willing to hand out tax dollars to Christian do gooders but not to their monks and monasteries.<br /><br />But then the idea that there has been a separation form state of any type is of course a fleece, America’s beef industry is as tied to Washington as the cows existence is tied to meat eaters, as we have seen recently even Indian casinos are part of the constituency of congress, and Enron created and wrote energy policy as much as it wrote off stocks, but then if capitalism is good and it has been proven good beyond belief, then it stands to reason that it is ok to logic that businesses have to lobby Washington and in the process absentmindedly make Washington, a government entity and thus not naturally given to capitalism. Governments cannot at any fundamental level be capitalistic, governement is about control, taxation, regulation, and so businesses have to lobby so that they can convince the government that capitalism is good and that it should be left alone and given maximum freedoms so it can produce jobs and taxes which is what the government actually cares about. <br /><br />Which is why the constitution is sort of bankrupt, though a pretty document no lesser to any other greater, but it is bankrupt in that it doesn’t acknowledge that the first and foremost constituency is not the people but rather the beholden interest of business which wields power through its ability to create jobs and pay taxes which as far as superior to any of the people or for that matter any individual. I will not send my jet to pick up the president any time soon, equally I don’t think the president is going to come and stay in my spare bedroom, in fact I doubt that I could ever be the presidents friend, or even Nancy Pelosi’s friend, I mean Nancy is probably a nice person but Nancy is also a person of power and power that is not gotten cheaply nor easily, what makes a president also makes a speaker of the house, sorry Pelosi, the filtering process for democrats that make it to the top of the nation’s stage is the same, by the time the process has sifted through the rut, what is left is a political process beholden to moneyed interest. The constitution doesn’t address this matter, the constitution doesn’t address the matter that campaigning is expensive and that the people, or individual freedom, cannot pay for it. Today’s mightiest democracy is elected “by institutions.” <br /><br />Recently the leading economist for the free hand of capitalism died, Milton Friedman was the man who tied Keynes’s belief that government had a right and a duty to interfere in the economic process, and fanatically promulgated the idea that the government that governs best governs least. There might be some truth in that, but since the fall of Keynesian economics and the rice of Milton Friedman there has only been more government and more regulation, and more laws and more taxes and so even as Milton would have liked to convince us that he could convince Reganomics and the republicans that government was generally a bad thing, he forgot one key thing, politicians are based on government foundations, regardless of what anyone thinks, a bureaucrat isn’t going to think like a businessmen any time soon! Nor is a business friendly president or congress going to successfully operate a country like a CEO, instead politicians will always do what is the politically right thing to do, “agree with their times.” As such we must be somewhat relief that Friedman is not with us anymore, for as one who undid Keynes, we can only assume that in passing he has at least undone himself and his times. <br /> <br />In the mean time, enjoy your riches. <br /><br />Ricardo ©Ricardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1163357681657086682006-11-12T13:53:00.000-05:002006-11-13T12:44:59.590-05:00FREEDOM, ITS JUST NOT FOR EVERYONECould you ever imagine a dog saying, "hmmm... I don't like the way that smells."<br /><br />One of the more difficult tasks ahead for America is to get out of the war with Iraq, it will be difficult because it wasn’t easy to get into the war in the first place, reasons for the war had to be created in order to justify it. The enemy had to be created, Saddam Hussein it now turns out was more of an illusionist and more a danger to his own people than to the outside world; but still the American presidency, against the unwilling will of congress, was able to turn him into: Hitler II. He had weapons of mass destruction, he used illegal chemicals, he was working on a dirty bomb, he tortured and gassed people, he didn’t allow for freedom of speech, this latter being particularly offensive to the American people, and so on, till there was naught else to do but do the right thing, take him out. <br /><br />There was however an uncomfortable problem, first the Americans had supported Saddam’s regime in its early years and so he sort of had some insight into how Americans think, I read somewhere that he feared the ethnic and religious factions within Iraq more than he feared the Americans. But also there was the fact that while America was boycotting Iraq the French and the Russians had generated some substantial rivers of moneyed interests building infrastructures, adding a generator or a power plant and selling them weapons thus creating a symbiotically beneficial relationship, and of course this gave the French and the Russians an interest in fascist stability in Iraq. <br /><br />Fortunately America has always been very good at marketing even if the product is missing some fundamentals, a war could always be lobbied and sold through a fear mongering marketing campaign that would shame even New York’s top ten marketing agencies. Satellites produced detailed photos of mobile labs that were brewing chemical malice, intelligence read that there were mobile missiles that could possibly reach Israel, and the Continent of Africa had provided Uranium while from somewhere else they had centrifuges. But more critical, Russian scientists that had not fared well since the fall of the Soviet Union, were selling dirty bomb schematics to Saddam. And then one day with the honorable Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, a trusted spokes person, the war was sold but not so well that everyone wanted to join the invading army. And so America did what any child does when it doesn’t get its way, it went at it alone. Besides that would work out better, for as everyone knows the United Nations is controlled by the third world and NATO and the European Union fight wars through a bureaucratic committee process that is paralyzing and America, the can do kid, is better off without those anchors. <br /><br />And so we went to war. <br /><br />But as with all things here this one was to be based on everything that had been learnt in the Civil War, WW I & II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, plus with added insight from the first battle with Iraq as done by Bush Senior, that liberated Kuwait’s oil fields from the invading tribal cousins. America also had the valuable advantage of video games and artificial reality, at any given moment Americans, very much like Roman gladiators trained in their on backyards, but at any given moment there are millions of Americans training for war through video games that realistically engage their participants in real world war scenarios, where fighter jets and tanks and soldiers are constantly being strategically engaged, all while in suburbia, to destroy the known foe. But also there are the surrealistic games which also create hyper scenarios of super beings that are able to travel through grave danger to acquire immortal powers, magical potions, double tipped whips and jewel studded daggers, and a plethora of specialize weapons that could scurry battalions of anythings anywhere; and so in general America has always been <span style="font-style:italic;">at the ready</span> not only to go at it alone, but also to be imaginative and ready in the battle front by administering the un-conscripted maximum amount of training to civilians, the national guard and active soldiers even when they are off duty, through realistic sims.<br /><br />And behind all this, almost as if sent by god was Rumsfeld the Secretary of War, he was a peculiar character in this historic times in that he understood the fog of war could be lifted through the internet of war, if you could know where every soldier was through magic dust, and know if he or she was still beating a heart, and if this soldier could feed real time battle information back to headquarters, then our army would have a greater advantage over that of the enemy’s, specially if our army were smaller, lighter and could be moved on a moments notice, and so we were ready to fight the war of the future today, with the centurion Rumsfeld at the helm.<br /><br />Sold then by the nice Secretary of State that was himself a former soldier-general but overall a man of peace, who believed that war should be a weapon of last resort but if used should then be one of absolute maximum killing force, we had no choice then, having all means at our disposal, having to rescue the world from terrorists, and from Islamist fanatics, and from dictatorships, our leader, President George W. Bush told us that there would now be a campaign to spread democratic values and free market values to free the peoples of the middle east, and there was naught to do but that or forsake our turn at history. <br /><br />Tony Blair, a Prime Minister with socialist leanings was whiling to go to it too, because in part he understood one thing above all others, America would win that war. I mean I don’t know how bookies do odds, but I think anyone could see that regardless of how powerful and mighty Saddam was, he could not bankroll a 300 billion dollar war, in the end his psycho babble would collapse because it didn’t have adequate financing, and so I think Tony Blair being the labor minister, crunched some numbers and saw that the math projected inadequate financing in Mesopotamia, and he figured that after the destruction along the Tigres river there would be plenty of construction contracts and he, if he stood by Bush, would be rewarded with the spoils of war and the Unions would see this as an astute labor campaign, after all British truck drivers and British mercenaries are making easy six figure salaries in Iraq. Power to labor. <br /><br />Towing his good friend behind him to give legitimacy to the cause, Mr. Bush had now no choice but to go to war, he had to prove his mettle, and this he did, Mr. Saddam was recently sentenced for Crimes Against Humanity, and he will hang for it, undoubtedly this is a step in the right direction, the inquisitors made right when they used to do the same, however this is not meant to fix everything, Saddam being choked to death is only part of the way to democracy in Iraq. <br /><br />Now part of this newly installed government in Iraq, is working day and night, with the American military command, to introduce a professional army, a disciplined police force, and there are any number of American and British companies rebuilding the entire country, its going to look pretty when they are done, however there is just one thing, the ethnic violence, 150 thousand dead in an undeclared civil war. These tribes will just not get along, they are trying to kill one another, brother against brother, mano a mano and the bloodshed is staining the introduction of democracy, freedom and the right to drive a car and cover your face with makeup, and to show your booty. <br /><br />And where do we find ourselves? Back to square one, we cannot liberate these peoples from themselves, they just don’t want to be free, they love the fray, tragedy is married to them, they don’t want to work together for the common good and no matter how much our good will wants to triumph there, to allow them to be Mormons if they want to be Mormons, to allow them to speak freely against their government if they want to, to allow them the privilege of voting plus a Western style education, to give them the benefits that knowledge and the more important that "reason" has brought us, we can give them all these things but they just don’t want them, they don’t want to practice constitutional rights, hence why things are not working out. <br /><br />We will probably have to pull out of Iraq, but after spending 300 billion dollars, 3000 American casualties no one, least of all Tony Blair, will be able to say that we didn’t try, that we didn’t give it our best, those peoples over there, they just want to do things their own way, shame to see all the suffering that cost them. <br /><br />But where does that leave us, a good portion of us didn’t want the war in Iraq, but we support the troops, and we support our president, no one can say anything bad about our mother or our sense of patriotism. Now we are in a perplexing situation, if we say we are against the war does that mean we are being critical of the office of the president and unsupportive of our troops? Of course it does, it is no longer Bush’s war it is now The Nation’s War! Bush might have gotten us there but it is now our war, all of us are now in it, frustrated and perplexed but it is now our war, and it doesn’t matter one bit that Rumsfeld, a leading proponent of testing his theories on defense in real war scenarios, is out and now there is a, use the cross walk please, Mr. Gates. It doesn’t matter the country is now engaged in a war of international proportions and because we went at it alone and didn’t share the reconstruction contracts the French and the Russians are just going to sit by idly amusing themselves. “We told you so.”<br /><br />And of course we have to support our troops as much as we have to support the defense department and the defense industry jobs. Or we could do the brave thing, and admit that our country was wrong, that we made a mistake, that we have to pull out and that we have added to the instability of the middle east, we could do that, but we are not going to do that, because that kind of valor is suicidal, we will have to tow the line, and the democrats, now in control of senate and congress are not going to stop it, they are not going to because they cannot and suffer not from the will power to do it, in the same manner that they didn’t suffer the brilliant thoughts required to prevent the war in the first place.<br /><br />The new approach is simpler than admitting defeat, it is to allow the peoples of Iraq to fail them selves, we will keep sending money and troops till they prove beyond all doubt that they cannot be helped because they are not whiling to participate in their own rescue operation. There is already ample evidence of this as they don’t want to end sectarian violence, the national police has been infiltrated by the infidels and they are carrying out poorly disguised massacres. They will fail because they are just not us, they are not like us, they don’t care about freedom and voting and separation of church and state, they don’t, if anyone has given them the chance it is us, Europe was not willing to rescue them from themselves, China has kept mostly quiet, the only ones that dared to care for them was us, and now we have to watch all our efforts come to naught. <br /><br />A few years from now we will leave Iraq, the bookies surely knew we would win the war, no one said anything about winning hearts and minds, bookies, ever wise, wouldn’t have given odds on that. <br /><br />Ricardo ©Ricardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1154643749376883712006-08-03T17:22:00.000-05:002006-08-03T22:17:56.663-05:00Hillary La Loca For PresidentHillary La Loca For President<br /><br />I think because male labor is generally considered the more expensive and technical and that it has been easier to demonstrate the cooking talents of a male, thus that made it easier for males to colonize the upper echelons of the food industry. This is because male talent is demonstrative, remember that males externalize, for men make a big deal out of anything that they do and know, when a woman does a good teriyaki, though there might not be such thing as far as I am concerned, she doesn’t brag about it, and more she doesn’t cook by metrics she cooks largely by intuition, as I do too, and so the technique of male gets processed more in the context of intellect and system, and that is why not only are male chefs more defined in the context of the task but so are male waiters. Which is why expensive restaurants will not have women as wait staff, sooner they will have them washing dishes.<br /><br />I still don’t like her but Maureen Dowd that asked why it was that when a man cooked everyone had to pay attention as if he were accomplishing some great feat and yet everyone ignores it when its a woman doing cooking.<br /><br />The key factor here is that male elements gather there strength from social and system recognition, that is why titles are so important to males, males need careers and education and actions to define them because they feed and feed the external; women however have an internal guidance system and since they are the progenitors of society haven’t the need or want to belong to the system as a way to personify their character. Again here the critical part is that women is inward looking she knows herself and is aware of her inner desires and generally will intuitively be aware of what she wants and this does not require external approbation, a woman is fundamentally satisfied with her self, a man is fundamentally unaware of anything that he is, and generally he cannot support more than one view of himself as this is very energy intensive because he doesn’t intuit himself, that is he has to make himself into someone of relevance. <br /><br />Camille Paglia, one of those philosophers that I do not like because she is too much like a man, but then philosophy is wholly masculine as it is descriptive, to the point that you could positively say that philosophy is the superbowl of intellect, anyways Camille, she is still a woman if by name only, wrote a wonderful and mentally stimulating book title Sexual Personae, I couldn’t stop laughing the whole reading, and in a couple of chapters she completely neuters males and naturally empowers women, and it would be very difficult to disagree with much of what she says. <br /><br />It basically boils down to the fact that male is the artifice of life and female is what is natural or endemic to nature, she ties this in many ways, explaining such things as the beauty of the male penis as it searches to penetrate which is an outward looking function and how too vagina, which she considers an ugly monstrosity, is this thing sitting there waiting to be penetrated and equally she notes that the vagina engulfs. <br /><br />Again she did a hilarious job though I don’t think much of Paglia should be taken seriously as she has become masculine and thus has dismembered her intuition. <br /><br />The problem with the feminist view of the world, as I see it, is that the feminist think that men are powerful creatures and that their power leads them to dominance and that dominance is good and so good that it has undermined women and their potential contribution in the context of systems and society.<br /><br />After making such glorified assumption, and it does require a certain degree of analytic suspension, they then go on to prescribe that females adopt male characteristics in order to take back the world that was stolen from under their skirts. Ha!<br /><br />What I find fantastic about this is that it makes the assumption that nature was from the get go against women, that is it gave males the upper hand by making them stronger in a cavemen’s world, that is to say that species can play favoritism within the context of its endemic gender biology. <br /><br />The assumption further assumes that only contributions that are observable count in the context of systems and societies. This even as we already know that 90% of the Universe is not observable, but of course feminists are just male minds within female bodies and so they are looking for evidence of woman’s historical actions in the observable economic and systemic aspect of civilization; this is perhaps the wrong place to look.<br /><br />I have always said and it think you have heard me say it, that a bullfight represents the perfect critical review of male and female interaction in the process of civilization and so I will use such accordingly, though it is not limited to that, you can see it in less aesthetic formats such as American Football, and the Executives Office where a greater bull than the CEO there isn’t. <br /><br />First I don’t think that women are weak, I think that they are stronger than us males, second I don’t think that they have been shorted by history, and third I think that they do indeed control the world as indeed they must as it is in their interest that there be a civilization; and Paglia doesn’t make any mistakes here, she correctly notes that it was in woman’s interest to civilize man because in civilized society there are less rapes, in fact according to Paglia and myself, we both agree wholeheartedly here, it is woman that tempers men thorugh a civilizing process! Paglia correctly assumes that women will suffer greater the less civilized the society. And while I think that the culling of male aggression through civilizing education does have its side effects, perversion being one of them, there is still a far greater accomplishment to the benefit of female, and that is that it makes society feminine in gender.<br /><br />This is a very subtle reality but as I watch my male cats fight each other to secure a territory and to show that they are stronger and mightier than the other macho and I watch the females rush to watch the fight between Loki and Pacho, I know precisely where the motivation is for the fight, it is the feminine that demands an aggressive male, and those males are doing what has been pre approved as the proper way to win a female and win reproduction rights. It will not hurt us any to further note here that African tribal women refuse to have sex with the men that don’t bring meat home. <br /><br />Further we cannot, even in our wildest dreams, ignore the fact that 90 percent of all species reproduce without males within their lot. Nature as a whole only produces males where the environment and conditions are so extenuating that they need someone who has been short-circuited of feelings to come and react in such environment. <br /><br />However the paramount contribution of the feminine are in fact greater than that of any male or group of males, the problem is that they are not observable because it is subconscious in its representation; men perform at the conscious level, and probably don’t have much subconscious to speak of, they may indeed live and operate only in surfaces, but women operate at great subconscious levels, and males that are properly married acquire their civil guidance as it radiates from wife or mate, if either of those representations are missing then the male will default to mother and if mother is not present male will default to sister for guidance. <br /><br />It has been said a thousand times, man alone is destructive and out of control, man with wife is prone to discipline, to adopt social norms, to go to church and to perform better at his job, and this has all been documented in study after study, and finally something I don’t have to make up. Ha! <br /><br />The problem is that the feminists cannot see but the overt and thus they have become envious of men, and funny enough this doesn’t work against males, instead it favors them and thus feminism does it’s worse harm to women, and more detrimental to us all it does a greater harm to society because it breaks the natural equilibrium between males and females, and their dominance over society because when you have masculinated females you have lost a portion of that critical balance that nature has deigned and reigned throughout countries, with a remarkable precision of 51% females 49% males. Even nature knows enough to give the majority of the vote to the women. Further the greater the number of women cannot be overlooked from another perspective, male aggression cannot be diffused by fewer females, it can only thus increase, the fewer feminine traits in a given society the more externally and internationally aggressive and destructive that society will become, and as that society becomes more aggressive it will further masculinate its women too so that they too cannot feel the pain, for an ability to tolerate pain is a unique male ability and that becomes a terror; as your women become tough too and thus desensitized.<br /><br />The society suffers as a result, think what it means that in China and in India mothers prefer to have little boys so they condone the killing of baby girls, think what it means that in Latin America parents wish their first born to be a boy, and in America think what it means that the seductive woman has been turned into an open minded coffin of ideas. Where there is no sacredness in her body, no hidden treasures, where her intense mystery has been nullified through the categorical knowledge that she can now brag of possessing. <br /><br />What is a burka? A burka is a way to curve female power, man is made shameful when he spots his weakness against female might, man is always in the position of being rejected, while woman is always in the position of accepting, the pretty women watching the bullfighter are impressed by him and he will have his pick of them when he puts down the bull; his red cape is however a dress for teasing the bull, and our bullfighter is really representative of the female with his fancy jeweled golden suit, delicately tailored so that one would think he was going to an evening dance instead of a bullfight, he is not dressed for the violence of this occasion, and in a sense he is saying to the bull I am going to show you that refinement and aesthetics win over raw brute force. The bull of course doesn’t see the bullfighter as a formidable opponent, he looks smaller, weaker, dainty and he doesn’t have horns, and so that only gives the bull greater confidence to keep on ramming into that dancing red dress; till unfortunately behind the teasing dress a sword discovers bull’s mid center shoulder blades and tears at his insides, thus from his own barbarous recoiling movement the bull’s death is made. <br /><br />The matador represents psychological power, the bull represents the power of action, action will always be at a disadvantage to psychological might because it is largely invisible, hidden behind an aura of beauty and tenderness and apparent harmlessness. The dance between the bull and the matador makes society and civil society at that. The Burka like the chastity belt give men a false sense of control over the feminine might, however man must live according to her bible and its righteous commands, which though written by men are against male attributes and have nothing of his interest in mind but rather to curve his brute force and use it for social purposes instead. The problem is that when males are made to wear burkas it is not obvious, today’s greater feeling sensitive male is a bull with a burka. <br /><br />The process by which this comes about emasculates males because the feminine is dominant in any realm she enters and the emasculated males become this docile little creatures that don’t even know themselves as part of the curriculum mandates that they hate what its male in order to make contact with the liberated feminine; now they have to be sensitive and caring and nurses and loving and tender, and that is not technically male and so they are lost, lost from their personality, but unlike women these males don’t have the inner resource of character to manage their situation thus they have to depend on the self-help society, they will go out there and reconstruct themselves, they will make themselves sensitive, they will somehow make themselves right, and why not, surely they can, they come from a male history of can do, and so they will fix themselves, and in the end they will look like those women that make themselves ever prettier in their heads with just one more facelift! <br /><br />Today women can be president I suppose we can thank the feminist movement for that, and so in 2008 Hillary Clinton will be president, ask me however if I needed that and I will tell you never! Because that first female American president is now a man! Because she could calmly stand by her man when she should have given him hell for being a lying cheat womanizer, but Hillary didn’t care about her personal life, she didn’t care about the little world, the bricks didn’t matter, she was now living in big social ideas and handling large systemic issues, ephemeral things that matter no doubt but the little thing, keeping her house in order didn’t matter, and when we care more about the ephemeral ideas the neighborhood collapses which is why subconsciously we love the Midwest because it keeps giving the national heart localize certainty. What happen was that Hillary didn’t go ballistic because she cared about her profession, she was no longer working for self and edifying self, she is edifying a system and honoring it by being respectful to it, she wasn’t going to make a mess in the Whitehouse, she wasn’t going to indignantly turn the Whitehouse into an insane asylum, Hillary la loca! La loca walking her spirit though the Lincoln bedroom eternally counting all the trespasses, La Loca Hillary wrenching her suffering on the Whitehouse lawn, La Loca destroying her family because of the derailed character of her man! <br /><br />That day I would have preferred to have the country singer that stood by her man but would surely chop off his gonads if he cheated on her. I wanted to see passion, instead in Hillary I saw a bureaucrat and a bureaucrats wife all in one; Clinton himself, the little boy that is in fact not capable of loving a woman because he is a sensitive little boy, could not have felt better, he got away even as caught with his hands in the cookie jar, and it was in fact the system than reproved him, it, the god damned system reproach went berserk on him, costing millions of passionate and zealous investigation dollars, and the system did in fact impeached him! And for what? Well it had to be for cheating on his wife. Thus Hillary is vindicated in the context of system, the system protected her by acting irate on her behalf, by going berserk on her behalf, by showing feelings and illogic and passion!<br /><br />And it cannot escape one how her impressive self control locks her down, it cannot escape us how we will know that as our future first lady president she will keep a level and cool head under the most difficult of situations, we can thus trust her because she is not going to be Hillary la loca!<br /><br />ricardo (c)Ricardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1141602140095991362006-03-05T18:41:00.000-05:002006-03-05T18:42:20.096-05:00My thoughts on GUTI don’t think that any Grand Unified Theory of physics could survive a person levitating.<br /><br />RCRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1141602014376463762006-03-05T18:38:00.000-05:002006-03-05T18:40:14.396-05:00Democracies Are EverywhereFrom my point of view I don’t like any particular country or government, in that regard my compatriots here in Colombia can amply testify to that, as they constantly ask me: “Why are you here if you don’t like it?” <br /><br />The answer to that is simple, I am in life, I am a change agent, I am not here to like what is here I am here to change it if I can. Futility is a possible consequence of my endeavor, probably the most likely scenario, but I will persist in attempting to change this place because it bothers me the way it is.<br /><br />Now let me explain what my beef is with American democracy, in that it believes that at least it is some what more just or at least that it allows more freedom of expression, or more so than other systems. <br /><br />The matter is that to me, a system is composed of the general assumptions of its peoples. All systems regardless of their morality or civic stance, are the product of the conduct, aspiration and self definition of their peoples. <br /><br />As the self definitions cross each other over the social medium they are altered and reach a third party identity, a sort of objective composition of all the national subjectives - recombined to make a national psyche, that ought to satisfy no one in particular but is in the end result the most likely possible accord, or more precisely the most simmering point of agglomerated subjectivism. <br /><br />That silent social accord is what generates the, or any, system, and with it the gamut of intolerances or tolerances that will define its institutions. <br /><br />My friend Bob once recently found himself being helped from a treacherous excursion in Africa by a tribe that fed him milk and blood and offered him a virgin for a bride if he hunted down a lion. Bob was then living in a world very difficult for him to understand, specially because his potential bride had had her clitoris removed; Bob probably enjoys more satisfying a woman than being himself satisfied and so that certainly put a damper on the matter of killing the lion. <br /><br />Now you would not know it from our understanding of culture but the girls and women of that tribe unite to serve up the practice of clitoris clipping. It is a right of passage, as I assume a circumcision is for Jews or even for the medical profession which for many decades approved and practically, through the auspices of hygiene, mandated the practice. Fortunately I escaped it unscathed. <br /><br />To be an American you have to be many silent things, I was one for a time, I still hold many American values and I contributed to the national psyche of the country, my taxes paid, certainly bought bullets, my considerate amount of attention to National politics have contributed valuable energy to that system. <br /><br />Upon my return to Colombia I attempted to transfer the American work ethic values to this country, my fellow compatriots won out on that one and today I am grateful that I have lost my ability to work efficiently and with much dedication. <br /><br />My point is that what I was when I was in America, how I melted into that culture, was mandated not only by my circumstances but equally by what the system needed from me and how that triangulated with the contrived national psyche. At some point it became unbearable for me, the militancy of the national psyche was too much, I cowered under, I begun to fail at my work and in my personal relationships because I wasn’t synchronized to the professional discipline of the American national psyche.<br /><br />Upon my move to Colombia I found all the inadequacies of a third world country frustrating but equally I realized that I was disengaged from the machine, that Colombia could not churn out anything efficiently, that there was plenty of indifference, and that complied, at least for now, with what I needed, I didn’t want the world staring at me as it does the United States, I didn’t want to be the center of attention, I didn’t want to improve myself every year, I didn’t want to take any more tests, I didn’t want to be defending my job from the litany of aspirants; the world slowed down, a lot, almost to a stand still. <br /><br />Of course with being a Colombian come many terrible things, children are abused, people are shot, farmers are destitute, peoples lives are constantly in turmoil, there is no organization, there is little hope, no one is going to rescue anyone, everyone is out to protect the little self and by process our national psyche is small, little, insignificant, I don’t expect contributions from us to the greater world, I don’t think we are going to get out of our inner beings, we are still adolescents. <br /><br />All societies have these sort of unwritten consequences, America consumes the world, 60 percent of its resources, and its politics are largely based on that horror, in some way America is always gobbling something, it has to, you cannot be so huge and powerful and not, it is that which makes it all so super-size for those of us that think little, that cannot muster the energies and concentrations to gobble things up. Colombians are self destructive, I prefer that, and that is a consequence of being in Colombia or a Colombian. <br /><br />To me all nation-states are democratic, either silently or not, it is the mass aggregate will with its subconscious-simmering-psyche that makes it all happen, the final agreement that holds a nation together is that, a little bit of everyone represented as none of them in particular. <br /><br />As such when you see the apparent horrors of any given government, it must also be obvious that the overall society is willing to pay that price, either to reinforce a national psyche or as a sad or fatal by product of the embroidery that is a civilization. <br /><br />I admire the catholic church, 2006 year old institution, I am obviously not a Catholic but that is a supra-global psyche, the rituals seem so pointless, the priest so perverted, and yet the institution has lasted the times. There is something to be said for that. <br /><br />America is a young country, as such a rouge state, so goes the book, and so has been the history of most world powers, Britain was an ass in its hay day and so we should not expect anything different of America. Unlike most I do believe that America is just a phase in human history, we are not going to be dominated by capitalism and democracy, the new world will perhaps be ruled by some metaphysical divination, a sort of -“I am aware and I comprehend…”- mind and heart set. <br /><br />Of course when America fades into the sunset many things that come with it will fade too, the concept of “marketing” might go extinct, the idea that profit is a prerequisite for someone to act, might fade away as well. I expect the field of knowledge to be the first to suffer, knowledge will undoubtedly suffer, MIT and Harvard might fail as well it should be as these are institutions that have their basis on the American mind set. <br /><br />Grant you none of these things were invented by America, nor is America the only one afflicted by them, it is simply that America has bought into them and perfected them unlike anyone else. <br /><br />Marx did get one thing right, economy drives the essence of the thing, you look at Americas economic logistics and it is the only proper way to understand its behavior pattern. <br /><br />Now I don’t blame America for being what it is, that is a world condition, America is just good at it, no more. <br /><br />The problem is one of civilization and contribution to the world in general. America is still young enough, as far as countries are concerned that we don’t know what its actual contribution to humanity will be in the end, for all we know, and I rather think it so, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Hollywood could be a blink in human history. The terracotta soldiers are 2300 years old, Chinese civilization was going through a Jade age 6000 years ago, Indian society has well over 5000 years behind it, that in itself is a very amazing thing, but see I admire things that last a long time, that establish continuity, that form foundations that linger throughout the ages. <br /><br />America to me seems more like a fad, something based on spontaneity, capriciousness, a desire to be in a sort of hedonistic postponement, that is to say America is always working on the next nearest thing, and is always planning for the next event and dully postponing its enjoyment while absorbing a child like happiness of the moment.<br /><br />There have been plenty of 300 year old countries that never lasted the ages. They are in fact the norm. One only needs to go back to the 19th century to see that the map makers have been busy. America’s immediate necessity is to live for the moment, and I will argue that that is why it is so able in the here and now! <br /><br />This is because most people are living a cultural event, most of India is, they are not living for the immediacy of the moment, that is why they don’t see the transgressions that we witness in India. By an large they are living a movement, most of India is not living the current love affair with Western ways, most of India is like Iran when America imposed their dictator of choice the Shah; but Iran’s cultural clock ticks slowly but eventually it strikes an hour of regressive change, boom! <br /><br />Culture as atomic bomb.<br /><br />People that live in culture take a while to realize what’s happening, because the beauty of culture is that you don’t have to think all the time and be on the alert, that is the beauty of culture, it is also why American political strategists have so little patience with it, and equally why they think they can change it all within a year. Those people in Iraq don’t look very smart from afar, they don’t look very complicated, they look largely like savages with their contradictory and illogical ways; but what the Harvard and Chicago schools don’t measure is how those societies have clicked throughout the centuries, and that is no small accomplishment and as such it isn’t going to be undone unless it is annihilated. <br /><br />The problem is that America’s youth, the lack of its own predefined culture is also what makes it appear superior, light on its feet, able to change at a moments notice, Americans can change jobs, homes, cars, friendships and location on a moments notice, just show them where the opportune horizon stretches and they will head in that direction; that real time adjustment to world events makes them winners, first to get there types; equally such looseness does not favor culture because culture is based on the locking-down of traditions. Culture doesn’t change overnight it changes over the centuries and flowery horizons are mistrusted. <br /><br />If you look at all of civilization as a singular entity, and I do, then you can imagine that we needed our impetuous child explorer, America, to go out there and find out what else could be out there, in a way it had to be an isolationist, few could brave the rub that change would imply to those living in culture, America went at it alone, and perhaps it found something, only history will tell; that India and China and Russia are finally listening makes an interesting case, but then we must hope it is not the fringes of those societies, the aggressive types that are making their adoptions of the American way. Because if it is only them, then it will not last, somehow those cultures must emblematize and absorb the work ethic, the professionalism, the delusion that a career defines self, the mastery of the moment, all those things with logistical precision must be adopted wholly, else they will only reek and the clock of tradition will reach yet another hour of boom. <br /><br />India, what is India to me? Nothing, I don’t know it, I am reading the Buddhist bible, it’s a translation, it was written by a man with Western values, I slept with an Indian girl once, her name was Rita, I doubt that that was her name in India, but I do think that sleeping with someone from that culture brings you all the energies that have harbored her essence, and that could be a lot. Beyond that is the cuisine which shows an amazing level of gorgeousness and essence at the same time, or maybe is the fact that they have 1700 or so plus Gods, you have to be very spiritual to have all those gods, the West is practical it only likes to maintain monotheism, but India I would guess has a lot of devout to maintain that colossal religiosity. Maybe too it is the mystics, the transcendentalists that somehow offer a different path that doesn’t seem caught up in the Tarot and the Zodiac. Or maybe it is the fact that cows are sacred and can roam free, why one of them could be the next Dali Lama. <br /><br />But I really don’t know what India signifies to me except that it has lasted 5000 years and this even as their main religions are anointing inaction, the nothingness and indifference to the self. <br /><br />When my nephew went to New York city, he didn’t like it. I love New York, it amply demonstrates that we can live in purely artificial environments and relationships, and that loneliness can be ignored indefinitely through fatigueless entertainment. When we go to conquer the other planets, we will need that kind of indifference to tolerate the more indifferent environment; I just love New York!<br /><br />RCRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1131112209575597282005-11-04T08:46:00.000-05:002005-11-06T18:34:41.003-05:00Truly Liberal RadicalismNothing is more harmful to the radical liberal movement than its stance against capitalism and globalization. Thus I propose the following: <br /><br />-It is obvious that capitalism is its own worst enemy. <br /><br />-It is obvious that a market-driven humanity is not sustainable or humane.<br /><br />-The marginalization of all human activity based on productive and economic measure is a self-collapsing proposition. <br /><br />Thus I will urge all the liberals, the radicals, the socialists to cease fighting against capitalism and globalization, as antagonism only serves to moderate the effects of capitalism on our humanity and thus increase the longevity of its life span. <br /><br />Capitalism is a phase in the contextual history of humanity, inevitably it will come to pass but it will come to pass much faster, that is humanity will get capitalism out of its system sooner if liberals participate in it rather than fight against it. <br /><br />I propose that the inherent instability of capitalism, its callousness towards the human spirit can be radically magnified through participation, so that it becomes a case against itself and thus an unsustainable proposition. <br /><br />What liberal forces must weigh is what has the greatest probability of defeating capitalism, being for it or against it?<br /><br />I conclude that being for and pro and working for capitalism is most likely to cause the very thing to implode upon the fallacy of its premises. By becoming more capitalistic liberal forces would prove their point beyond all doubt. <br /><br />One must have faith enough to believe that if one has a truth it has the potential to become painfully obvious. <br /><br />RC<blockquote></blockquote>Ricardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1127945707445240122005-09-28T17:13:00.000-05:002005-09-28T17:15:07.466-05:00The Great Mall of the AmericasI could not find my way back to my truck, it was there, at the Great Mall of the Americas. I don’t feel too bad about it, that is about losing my truck at the Great Mall of the Americas, anything that huge had to be a challenge for someone little like me to remember; I was diminutively speaking a small man, 5 feet 3 inches, most people are now taller than that, Lucy the ancestor of human kind was only 3 feet 6 inches, and Lucy, of the Lucy and Ricky Ricardo show was certainly taller, at 5 feet 7 inches, taller than even Ricky, her Cuban husband. Like wise the mall of the Americas dwarfs me and I lost my truck in it. <br /><br />I didn't expect to lose my truck, I am more likely to lose my keys, but this time I lost my truck. I thought I might lose my notebook but I didn’t lose my notebook though I have nightmares about losing my notebook I lost my truck instead. My truck weighs in at 4300 pounds, my notebook weights in at 4.3 pounds, most soldiers have to carry fifty pound backpacks, me 4.3 pounds and a couple more, and I am ok with that for I never walk very far, I don’t like walking. I don’t like walking long distances, it seems pointless; I don’t like cars, I don’t like being in cars for more than fifteen minutes, I don’t like plane travel for more than 45 minutes, I am a short distance person, the American continent would have never been discovered by me; I don’t have the urge to travel, the travel industry would have never materialized nor would have the international marketing industry if my genes predominated the human species, they don’t. I am but an antler within the human species, a nail of deciduous layered growth, so as to create a bony structure that intimidates yet a pair of nail clippers would cut it off. <br /><br />My name is Davit Nutt, from Albarsperk, a small town in the Dacoma territories that used to belong to the Dacoma Indians but then they signed it over to the white men, and now they just operate the casinos. I am not however an Indian, I am a white man, and I don’t own the greatest mall in the Americas, I am just there now because we had a business meeting, I am a shoe salesman. I work for Longer and More Comfortable Molly’s. We specialize in shoes for people that are made larger by the culmination of their appendages.<br /><br />We call them Molly shoes, I don’t know why we call them that, but I suppose Alph Parks, the owner of the company probably had a fat girlfriend named, perhaps Molly and he married Ethel Swarny and probably wanted to remember Molly instead, at least when he went to work and so there you have us, we are Molly Shoes Inc. <br /><br />I am a catalog salesman, I go from door to door and sell shoes to people that are challenged by the size of their foot. This year, I made it to the list of top ten sales reps within the company; that is damn right I am the sixth most successful sales rep nationwide, frankly it is an honor. But equally I cannot brag, it isn’t that hard to sell shoes that are larger and more comfortable for larger people. And it isn’t hard because shoes of our size, large, extra large and wider and extra wider, (the secret of our design success,) large and cushy, well where else are you going to get that if not at Molly’s Shoes! <br /><br />You have to give credit to big Alph, he saw the market coming, he predicted that America, as it became a bigger nation, would need bigger hamburgers, bigger malls and bigger steaks and consequently bigger cows, and bigger sex toys and logically it followed that Americans would get bigger, as success breeds size and their bigger size would make them not fit into their shoes; and thus Alph, a former hotdog salesman from Romaine Kansas opted to match the opportunity with the shoe and he begun to design shoes that are bigger and cushier and more comfortable and he hired me as his first salesman. <br /><br />Why he hired me is still mesmerizing to me, the good lord cares for us in mysterious ways, I was at a greyhound bus stop, waiting for a bus to go nowhere, my wife had left me, precisely because she was not impressed by me, she once said that I could inspire a poem about yawning. When she left she took our daughter Nancy with her, Nancy ate a lot of cornflakes, and had grown where now she could use Molly Shoes but I don’t know where they are. They also took Henry with them, gosh when I think about it why even our children had sort of fat names, maybe that had something to do with it, or could it have been the chili-fries? <br /><br />Ah what is a father to know, I don’t even know when we made those kids, maybe they are not even mine, frankly I wish I had greater paternal sentiments but I am more proud of having been invited to the Top Ten Molly Salesmen of the Year reunion, than I am of fathering Henry and Nancy; though they are harmless both and nice kids too. Still, as I hate to admit it, Nancy is nothing more than some kind of gum consumption machine that I am afraid will reproduce by happenstance; and Henry is a Video game fanatic consumer, where the games can never keep up with him, there is even a sweat spot on the carpeting right where he sits in front of his video game player to slaughter civilization over and over again. All this while our pooch Darwin, perhaps the most evolved member of the former family sits and muses over a bone shaped biscuit. <br /><br />Davit Nutt, that is me, I am skinny, no more flesh on me than is required to cover up them bones, you can see my veins and arteries fluctuate in size with the ambient temperature, I am deathly afraid of the cold, I might be a mammal but my blood gets cold at the sight of a shadow, I am always looking for heat, maybe that is why I was attracted to my wife, she had layers of flesh. I am naturally attracted to heft, and so it is easy for me to sell oversized shoes, really I don’t understand how the other salesmen got ahead of me, they might have lied on their sales reports, maybe their managers bought some of the shoes to earn bonus points, maybe they faked sales, or maybe they overstuffed the inventory, because really I doubt that someone could beat me at the art of selling oversize Molly shoes. <br /><br />I get into a house and I go in there and I say, “Look it here you see this here shoe, it will support all aspects of your lovely leg, (eighty percent of my customers are women,) and see how we have constructed the support structure to mimic how grass cushions a foot, why there are hundreds of thousands of invisible grass hairs growing right out of our shoes, and they use this new and exclusive and patented nano-organic technique where, by recovering the humidity produced by the sole of your feet, they will regenerate the grass like follicles in our shoes, so as to create a fresh grass sole supporting turf, where you will never notice you are wearing shoes, you might even feel your lovely feet naked.”<br /><br />Then they sniffle and say, “But what about smells?”<br /><br />“Oh nothing to that, don’t even mention it, because our nano-organic shoes have self reproducing soles they are also, impressively, self refreshing and so you go on and enjoy them as you might the morning dew under your naked feet.”<br /><br />Of course I don’t use our shoes and they notice this and ask, “Why don’t you use them if they are so good?”<br /><br />“Oh gosh” I flush red, “I wish I could use them, I have asked Alph to make them my size but as you can see a skinny fellow like me has not the frame to support a naturally growing sole environment shoe underneath his feet; there is not the necessary pressured conditions to create the ambient temperatures and chemical cataclysms to regenerate new soles, a process that is usually bi-monthly, for anyone offering two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch.”<br /><br />The buyers do seem a little confused by all the science and so I reassure them, “But Alph keeps working at it, that guy he doesn’t give up, he knows that there is a huge market potential for his shoes and he doesn’t want to stay just a niche shoe, he wants to branch into the Olympics and Wimbledon. Why just imagine if the tennis stars could feel the grass underneath their feet, it be a whole different game; we at Molly Shoes realize the responsibility of the experience that we need share with our sole mates.”<br /><br />I think it is because I am skinny that they think they have to take me under their arms, but when I smell underarm perspiration I know that I have made another sale, and there you have it, that is why I am here today, at the biggest mall of the Americas celebrating the biggest shoe success story of all time. Only I had a few wines, I normally don’t drink wine but since the boss has gotten a little rich he now feels that he has to drink wine and so he orders wine for us all too and you just cannot say no to the boss, he has this way of convincing you that you should drink wine and sell his shoes and so I do both, only the wine doesn’t sit well for me; I think us men of skin and bones should really stay away from any kind of liquor and so now because I didn’t follow that rule I am searching for my truck. <br /><br />My truck doesn’t have an alarm, I get tired of alarms going off without reason, cars screaming smog are bad enough we don’t need them being obnoxious too. I never got the alarm option even as my insurance company was willing to give me a 10 percent discount off of the insurance bill if I added the alarm, apparently thieves are scared off by alarms, I refused that; and I also refused the 3 percent discount if I took the model without an ashtray, apparently smokers get into accidents three percent more than non-smokers; I also got the yellow paint job even though there was a 1 percent discount on that as well; but the truth is that I like yellow even though yellow crashes and clashes with red cars more often than not, and besides that I do smoke and so I figured what is the difference, I have a 3 percent greater probability of crashing and that probably buries that other 1 percent for having an attractive paint scheme. <br /><br />And even with the attractive paint scheme I cant find my truck, damn. And if that were not enough I think the alcohol is having some effect, this I think because I have good reason to believe that at the Great Mall of the Americas I keep on going up the same stairs and the same ramp at least five times, and unless I get sober fast I might not find my truck.<br /><br />Now in the old days it was easy, if you lost your vehicle at the mall you could just sit it out till about 10 pm where everyone had gone home and then the only car on the parking lot would be your yellow truck, but today the malls are open twenty four hours per day, and the people too are open twenty four hours per day, and so there is no way to empty out the parking lot. <br /><br />Of course I hadn’t given up the faith, I figured I could find my truck, either by waiting for a sober memory or by ending the number of parking slots available for parking, I am an optimist, I think. And so I get into this mammoth elevator, I think it could house 30 people, and it goes straight up fast, I am going to explore the upper levels of the super parking complex, the elevator doors open like a portal into another dimension, slowly so as not to rip a little girl’s fingers off, slowly so that if there are thirty people in the elevator they can all witness with each other the industrial might of the great mall. I walk off into the ninth floor, I think it is the last one, I don’t dare to assume that I know how wide this mall is or how tall, I am on the ninth floor, ok. <br /><br />Immediately as I step off I am elated at finding a Mall Cop in a white scooter type mobile with blue warning lights all over, the young man in it is a healthy fellow, well built but not robust, just good looking, he could have been in a golf cart without that blue uniform and looked the part of a wealthy country chap, I yelled with my voice while reaching him with wild armed signals. <br /><br />“Hey there fellow, have you seen a yellow truck with red stripes running through the side and a chrome step, there are no two alike.”<br /><br />“Well maybe yours is yours sir and with all due respect that makes it unique but here I see Ferraris by the half dozen.”<br /><br />And with that he punctured the gas pedal on that electric kart gizmo and sped off, where I operated to catch him with my legs. <br /><br />“No, no, just wait a minute; ok maybe there are others like mine, ok, (I was gasping for air,) but could you just be so kind as to give me a ride around this floor to see if it is here?”<br /><br />The young man, I must say, was all proper, “Hey Mr. I sure would if I could but company policy doesn’t allow me, you might sue us if we get into an accident and I could lose my job,” <br /><br />I paused him, “Yeah, yeah don’t worry I know and your girlfriend is pregnant and you really need this job, lets leave it at that and I will just walk on.” <br /><br />With that we both signaled a mutual salute of professional attention and he purred off in his electric gizmo. <br /><br />I scratched my head, I felt silly being lost, but I felt more silly for being drunk on the wine, still I went off to review the cars on the ninth floor. Not mine, not mine, Ferrari, not mine, Ferrari, not mine, not mine, Lamborghini, not mine, till I came up to a large concrete wall with the number nine on it; I had completed all the rows, I didn’t, anyway remember driving up nine levels, four maximum, I was afraid of heights. As I stood in front of the wall as if I were peeing like a Frenchman, I realized that I was in front of a door, I opened the door, and before me stood a clown in a huge ruffled yellow dress with white gloves, red cheeks and a falsely welcoming smile. <br /><br />“Hey, hey Mr., you are our one millionth customer to the ride of the cytoplasm, you get to get on for free, put your money away, your money is not good here, (he was patting my back) your money is not good here, you are on us today, Mr., free suite, free food, free rides all day long and you get to start here, this is the get go point; (his happiness and incessant jolliness contagious but in a must way), you just get right on here, right on here. (guiding me with that charming force of a clown that hinders none.)”<br /><br />“But I am not here to ride your ride, sorry I was just looking for my truck.”<br /><br />“Yes, yes adults always have some fancy excuse as to why they don’t really want to ride our rides, but you dint come to the ninth because you dint know we were here, obviously you got here and you didn’t get here by accident right!”<br /><br />“No, no you don’t understand Mr. Clown, what is your name, I am sorry what is your name?”<br /><br />“Me, (his hand confirming towards his lapel,) “me, I am The Clown of the Mall of the Americas!” And with that he let lose a huge sarcophagus laughter, and repeated it for my enjoyment and any near-by listener, “The Clown of the Mall of the Americas!, that is me sir.”<br /><br />“Well Mr. Clown of the Mall of the Americas, may I just walk by you, and sorry to have gotten caught in your life line.”<br /><br />While I was saying that a huge squelching sound irked my ears and ended audibility within the vicinity, it was the sound of a huge mechanical machine on rail road tracks coming into its station; the cart however was little, tiny, a pure black pure metal contraption huge enough for one tiny person, but it had amplified sounds, and an amplified personage and what was more interesting was that the rails were on top so that its wheel carriage was hanging from its roof. The whole contraption, cart for one, was accompanied by a child’s song blurting out so loud that you could not hear what was audible.<br /><br />“The crash cart, the cart of carts, the steroid of carts, is here to take you away, away, away you will slim into other worlds, you will hide behind the buttons of giants, you will skim the surface of milk waffles, and aid us in adding cherries to the supper chocolate sundae engine, and when we run out of cherries, which we will, you will help us push the last mile into the station. Hop, hop yourself and hop on board you all, we are on the cherry train, on the cherry train to the spiral, the black and white spiral awaits hurry on board for this train is ready to depart.” The music jostling the train and my ears, the clown pushed me onboard and locked the little black door tightly shut. <br /><br />The cart as I tell you was no larger than I was, I felt like a man with a funny hat in a silent film, awkward and unaccountable. The cart whisked off at about ten miles per hour, a silence whisked in. Clouds started forming over the track, the cart began to feel, as indeed it was, too small for me. I could not make myself comfortable as an inch of something, bolts, rods, levers, pullies, wheels, springs would inch into me from all angles; my head barely cleared the metal ceiling, there were fortunately no windows so I could breath fine fresh air, but beyond that it was very claustrophobic and now I was in the plenitude of pure flight, on a track moving somewhere, but where?” I scratched any part of my body that I could scratch, I looked for moving parts on the cart, there were none, helpless, I ducked the clouds, frowning at parrots, seagulls and condors. <br /><br />I don’t know why but at some point I started feeling comfortable when the thing sped up, wow, sped faster, I thought for sure it would come off the track, then it did a 360 track route, and swung downwards, I banged my head several times, my arms bruised too, I covered my eyes to prevent injury and then the thing flattened out after a remarkable screw entrance into a tunnel, and stopped; as if its passenger were not human the whole contraption swung and sprung open as if a dump truck, and thus unleashed me into the pavement. A sweet voice arrived over the intercom. <br /><br />“You have arrived at the spiral tour, you do not need a ticket, you have been properly identified as our one millionth customer, your rides with us are free for the rest of your life and consecutive life times there after, please sit and wait, please sit and wait, we will be loading you into the spiral very soon, you need not get anxious, enjoy some drinks and food on us, don’t eat too much the spiral can make you a little dizzy, if you are pregnant or on your period we don’t recommend that you ride the spiral.”<br /><br />I got up and scrubbed myself off while taking notice of a food stand and went right to it. A young lady, short, full of tightly straightened blond hair and dressed in a cheerleader outfit, came up to me before I could reach the counter; she was on roller skates, and made sure to halt me. “Don’t go to the bar sir, please, if you go there they don’t give me credit for your service, and if you tip while there I have to then share the tip.” <br /><br />I was flustered but I leaned into the red stool that was nearest me, “Please may I have some water?”<br /><br />“Oh is that all you want?”<br /><br />“Yes please just a glass of water urgently.”<br /><br />“But sir it doesn’t cost you anything, you are our one millionth customer and they will tip me based on your order, couldn’t you help me out, order more, I can take it home with me if you don’t want it, just help me out, its not going to cost you anything.”<br /><br />Gasping for air. “Ok, Goldy, (the name on her name tag,) just order what you will, all I want is the glass of water.”<br /><br />“No sir, I am not in this just for myself, you must order something for yourself, please.” Spitting her gum on the floor. <br /><br />“Ok order me a hotdog and fries, and a glass of ripe cold water please.”<br /><br />“Ok, that sounds better, I will add a couple of hamburgers for myself and my boyfriend, but don’t you tell anyone old man, I don’t want to lose my job over this.”<br /><br />“Listen if you get me a glass of water then everything is fine, please the water.”<br /><br />Giving me a sort of up and down dirty look for a skinny man. “Alright.”<br /><br />Goldy came back with the glass of water and bags packed with hotdogs, fries and hamburgers, I left everything at the table and went to look at the sky, and that is when I realized it was night time. You could count every star in the night sky, amazing, it was a privilege, I got all moved by the scenery, the sky was sort of blue from the stars bleeding their light over it, and there were so many of them, and while marveling this a chorus of voices came to me. <br /><br />“There he is boys, there is the millionth dollar customer of the mall of the Americas, this is a grand moment for us all.”<br /><br />With that they started to shake my hand, while photographers snapped pictures of what were obviously company executives and company clowns with me. <br /><br />I saw the president, a man that I identified himself as, “I am the president of the Great Mall of the Americas, it gives me great pleasure to be here with you tonight to witness you becoming the first of our spiral ride customers. Why I envy you, I wish I were going first.” He elbowed me, and as he said that the cameras snapped on furiously. <br /><br />“Sir I think there has been some huge mistake I haven’t bought anything at your mall, I was just looking for my yellow truck and that is how I ended on the ninth floor.”<br /><br />The fat, jolly, well dressed fellow smiled big eye, “We love modesty, that will sell better, you’re a good fellow, I admire you, sure fellows, this isn’t our million dollar customer, he is too modest for the title.”<br /><br />They all laughed, clowns hugged me and forced me to dance with them, and then all the lights went off and a huge drum roll went off blaring an operatic voice, “The ride of rides, the spiral of spirals - spirals over us all, this is the moment, this is us, this is the time of the greatest mall of all time, and our one millionth customer initiates us into the blaring and spiraling infinity.” <br /><br />The lights began to brighten quickening and flooding everything and the floor space opened up; Goldy rushed to pick up her food-to-go, and I backed up against a wall till I could make no half space any further; and suddenly the floor widened and the spiral opened and it was a corkscrew of black and white spinning wildly; I was all scared, and then the clown came up to me. <br /><br />“Sir, you may cut the blue ribbon that unleashes the black and white corkscrew ride, unleash it please.” And with the oversized scissors in my hand, I cut the ribbon and a big orchestra blasted itself into the scenery, and dancers of every type scored every inch of floor space while trumpets blared. <br /><br />The president then came up to me, and as if pointing a gun to my back escorted me to the entrance of the corkscrew, with a couple of fillies to charm me with their adolescent understatement. Still I hesitated, when they pushed me off.<br /><br />I began yelling and yelling, and yelling and the spiral passed through me as if a time machine, the whole of my life was going through me, and there was nothing easy throughout the spiraling fall, until a big scarlet red bed began to seem obvious, and I landed on that huge cushion, and before me splattered cameras, signs hailing the millionth customer, and I, dazed couldn’t understand what it was all about. <br /><br />Seconds later, the president and his executive clown landed near me and got me immediately off the red cushion bedding, sort of cleaned off my ruffled suit, and allowed the immensity of cameras to further pin us. Then a reporter came up to me, “How was it and what did you feel?”<br /><br />“I felt dizzy, I don’t know, I felt lost, I felt spiraling out of control, I am surprised I am not hurt.”<br /><br />And with that a roaring laugh came over those present. And the president grabbed the mike, and pointed at the ride, “You see it is just a spiral, it only takes you from the ninth floor to the first floor, and he felt totally out of control, ladies and gentlemen I give you the greatest mall of the Americas, the greatest mall in the land, where you are sure to feel out of control in a perfectly ordinary world.”<br /><br />I fainted. Thinking about my yellow truck.<br /><br />RCRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1127925799692867222005-09-28T11:38:00.000-05:002005-09-28T11:43:19.706-05:00A Scope of SamenessI muse over the fact that at this very moment in fashion history millions of women the world over, in Japan, England, the entire North American continent and Africa too are all exposing their bellies to show off fashion sense. Oscar Wilde once remarked that fashion was so hideous that it had to be changed every six months. The showing off of your bellybutton trend has been with us at least some five years, though for all I know about fashion it could have ended a while back and we are now only witnessing its whiplash.<br /><br />Bellybuttons are always interesting and fascinating, they are after all the thing that connected everyone of us, except perhaps Jesus Christ, Adam and Eve for they were a trio apparently conceived from a father or a hip; but the rest of us are all tied to mother through the umbilical chord and that harmony resonates through us all, and so when we see each others bellybuttons, well we know we are not Adam or Eve or Jesus but that we are all mammals.<br /><br />Chickens don’t have bellybuttons, dinosaurs (are they mammals?) didn’t have bellybuttons, dolphins probably have belly buttons, I don’t really know that but I am not going to look it up, I should just be able to guess that they do. The matter is that anyone with a bellybutton could in theory participate in the bellybutton fashion show of oneness. <br /><br />There is however one odd thing about fashion sense, African women and the women of India and Persia, have been exposing their bellybuttons for thousands of centuries so they are not so much participating in the fashion sense of the day; for a belly dancer is a cultural icon and her dress code has been defined as it has been for thousands of years; a genie doesn’t dress for the times. and so you could imagine a part of the world, for sure in India and Africa and Persia where exposing one’s bellybutton cannot be defined as fashion sense, instead it becomes an unconscious act, people from these places do not know that they are being fashionable because for them it isn’t fashion as much as it is tradition, and in order to be fashionable you have to be self-conscious. <br /><br />Recently, democratic elections were permitted in Egypt, and wouldn’t you know it, of the seven possible candidates the one that they are most likely to elect is the same dictator they have had for decades, Mubarak. Not unlikely, in Russia, Vladimir Putin the head of state, a man that, according to the constitution cannot run for reelection, would undoubtedly win a democratic election even as he has acted to concentrate power and indeed rules as a benevolent dictator. And in my own country, Colombia, we have a democratically elected president, Mr. Uribe, who is actually more a dictator from the Harvard School of Business; and he is philosophically hopeful that a modified constitution will allow him an uninterrupted reign; for us Colombians only have this one man that can rule our country. At the periphery of Colombia is Venezuela where Hugo Chavez has been democratically elected to lead a Bolivarian revolution that will, if successful, make Uribe redundant. Chavez has facilitated his reign by making healthcare and education a national beneficence thus making himself popular enough to militaristically dictate over the affairs of his own country and its oil production. <br /><br />You can see a pattern in politics much like you may see a pattern in fashion and the pattern here is that a people, democratically ruled, or ruled by dictators or kings, or parliaments are usually being ruled by the person or persons that they would have as their rulers!<br /><br />Democratic states always pride themselves on the fact that they put their politicians up for popular nomination by their constituency. The assumption being that only a vote, a public and monitored vote will produce a true representative of a people. This is of course a fallacious assumption as we have seen throughout political history that countries, be they democratic, parliamentary, republican, dictatorial, militaristic and or monarchistic will invariably elect and promote similar political dynasties; and these dynasties tend to represent the “national character.” <br /><br />The Russians have always liked absolutist tsars to rule them because the average Russian considers himself a serf and is his own worst enemy; as admirers of theological and monarchical theatrics they suffer the disease of blood relations and when it comes to war they love to bleed like the hemophiliacs that they are; but more they bleed because they believe that bloodletting heals the family tree. <br /><br />South Americans have a tendency to love populist dictators or fatherly types because Latin men cannot bring themselves to leave their mothers and cease fearing their fathers; and Latin women have not learned to steal their boys from their mothers and become wives, but rather remain daddy’s little girl. <br /><br />Italians like to be ruled by a mosaic of inconsistencies that are possessed by fanatic objectives.<br /><br />The English have always liked their rulers to have higher aims with lower causes that can only be objectified by indifference and is superimposed by a brilliant disguise of witticisms. <br /><br />Africans have always preferred despots, the African heart despises politics, its ear to the ground it prefers barbarian rule and barbarian law, it sublets politics to instinct and wild passions. <br /><br />Unconsciously, Japan has never wanted its rulers to change, it always selects those that will forgo change, for the Japanese samurai is based on rigor, discipline, intensity of self domination, and subjugation; politically, Japan is a fetish. <br /><br />The Chinese masses promote leaders that will isolate them from the rest of the world so as to acquire their one billionth of uniqueness from the rest of us. The Chinese also prefer leaders that are patient turtles in their acts, throughout Chinese history the thread of continuity is significant: a dominant aversion to foreigners, a certainty about the completeness of the Chinese universe, and as such a country and a people that can only be changed within, while promoting eons of change through spontaneous national-soul-catharses as mandated by their ambivalence towards individualism. <br /><br />It is an inherent and natural tendency for national psyches to predetermine their leaders, regardless of the means to power, by a national and coherent consensus that rigorously mandates the character of the elected one. <br /><br />The Bush-Republican dynasty of America is a consequence of a national psyche that was feeling insecure in the world, and seeks a rearguard action in a desperate attempt to bring a drastically changing world under a new hegemony. Bush has impressively trounced outmoded principles with callous disregard of the possible consequences; and we must be fair to him, the cold war was over, the treaties and the diplomatic mindsets that set international relations were open to discussion, Bush simply disbanded them. That which cannot be undone must be cut! <br /><br />In a sense, the collective American psyche concluded that the world had changed dramatically, from the collapse of the soviet union forward, and that whatever came next no one could know, the only thing that you could do was tear everything apart and then let what must come from it rise as demanded and permitted by the new world order. Much to their credit Americans have always understood that change is something that you cannot control but that it is something that must be done; what defines the American psyche is their willingness to go into the unknown armed with only their wits about them. By selecting a president with no prejudice towards change, by electing a man that had no sense of history and ritual, they elected to realize that the modern world had changed and that they had to put a wrecking ball to the treaties and consensus of old and let what commeth may. <br /><br />It takes a lot of guts to do that and Americans are admirable for their guts. By ball wrecking the past they fast forward the unknown future and have as their advantage the fact that they are always looking towards the horizon to solve all of their problems; thus they are able to perceive and indeed acquire the benefits of change much to the envy of the French who are a backward looking people, always thinking that that they can intellectualize the world and master its poetic passions in stanzas. <br /><br />The French are fascinating, besides the Greeks of old no one has thought, much to their own detriment, more than the French. The French continually administer thought to their feelings, and their feelings are continually made prudish by it. Thus, in a remarkable fashion the French are fashionable but like all fashions their impact is severely handicapped by how fashionable it is. Of course a French leader has to write poems and novels, he has to have an intrusive understanding of history and needs to posses a certain effeminate disposability of character. In America these very traits would be admonished as the means of a charlatan to acquire distinction; and indeed to a large extent French history is a verbal attribute of marmalades through the promenade; still, as we shall see, these intricacies of a romanticized existence play their role in the world community. <br /><br />The French have elected, and are so appointed, to be the guardians of past eccentricities, these only look like eccentricities to us now because they are adulterated by our modern worldview, in their time many of the traditions guarded by the French had their relevance. Today the wine industry has grown globally to a large extent because the French have lost control of the wine making process. But the traditions of wine making so fervently and bureaucratically guarded by the French wine makers have atoned the consistency and largely defined purpose and essence worldwide. This distinction implies that the French guard the historical presence and by doing so create the scope by which all other precedents for winemaking sift into the aging process. <br /><br />It is then true that the meticulousness of winemaking, as done in France, with its infinite varieties and glorified plots would have never made a global en mass wine industry but it is also true that a global wine industry would not have been possible had it not been so.<br /><br />In much the same manner we could judge how France elects its political framers, looks to set a precise precedent that while not the type to conquer the mindsets of the world, will instead be worldly. And that worldly aspect of it will undoubtedly effect, in unknown ways, how others frame their worldview or legal premise. <br /><br />The wine industry is a cognoscenti reference to yet another industry that haplessly marches from tragedy to tragedy, with its own occasional fashion show of characters who trifle with the imagination: The airline industry. <br /><br />Calling it the “airline industry” might be a misnomer as more money is made selling planes than is made flying passengers around the world; certainly Boeing and Airbus benefit greatly from the interesting fact that Airlines benefit from having two suppliers of Airplanes so as to reduce the risk of dependence upon one or the other; and so Boeing and Airbus are exemplars of a dual-monopoly with zero compromises. But still we talk about the “airline industry” because that is the mouth of the monster that feeds the travel industry from any angle: travel agencies, hoteliers, insurances, rental car agencies, plane manufactures, caterers, restaurateurs, conventioneers, eco hot spots, tropical islands, exotic getaways, theme parks, historical England, the royal family, Stonehenge, the pyramids, Bhutan, and the biggest rock in Australia all benefit first and foremost from the passenger-eating airline industry. <br /><br />Yet even as all that is true, with all those dependencies the airline industry would, at first sight appear to be the worst run industry, the least profitable, the most strife-ridden by labor disputes, the most likely to suffer from prime material shortages or price fluctuations, and equally the most regulated of all industries and the least capable of price gouging its customers, as stiff competition sets a low profit margin, and high operating costs set stringently high load factors as the prerequisite to profitability. <br /><br />In the final analysis the industry that most serves to riddle the world with immigrants and to bring businesses, governments and peoples closest together, the industry that shrinks the world continues to be an accountant’s nightmare. But then we must ask why doesn’t it just all go bankrupt and be done with it. Certainly the law of supply and demand would imply that there are far too many seats on airplanes if they are sold as such bargain rates that in the end the traveler is not paying the true cost of a ticket, upfront. That would all call for a logical free hand correction where maybe more airlines would go bankrupt, the prices could then rise, airplane seats per passenger capacity would fall, fewer people would afford travel but then the airline industry could be profitable and stay competitive. <br /><br />Why doesn’t that happen? Is it because countries like Italy want to protect their airlines so that they are willing to subsidize their carriers into inferiority? Is it because bankruptcy laws in the United States are too liberal and kind to those companies that come under its protection? Is it because bankers and investors that finance the billions of dollars in airplane leases do not want to write off their losses and so they continue to renegotiate debt and reinvest hoping for a brighter day?<br /><br />The truth of the airline industry is much less stark, and it is not the harbinger of bad news that the newspaper industry has made it out to be.<br /><br />The airline industry isn’t an industry! It isn’t an industry because it cannot stand by itself, and more because it is not a principal in the acts of its progress. When airlines move people they always do it from a perspective of intermediaries, they are indeed what we ought call a “third-party-industry”; they are acting more as a go between than a causa célèbre or as prime mover of the thing itself. This is precisely why the airline industry does not really have high customer satisfaction and it is also why it doesn’t have high customer loyalty. You will change airlines faster than you would change toothpaste brands. You cannot feel any significant differences in airplanes, as a reason to fly this or that airline, for a modern Airbus or a modern Boeing airliner feel very much the same, first class is first class, but most of the rest of us are in cramped class, and the meals aren’t getting any better and the service is obviously not factor number one with the airlines. <br /><br />If you want to know who cares about you, you just have to review their list of priorities, in the airline industry it is fuel cost, labor cost, maintenance cost, and cost per flight seat mile, then service and food, I might have the order wrong but service and food are certainly least important. So you might ask why doesn’t the airline industry care about you?<br /><br />Well, don’t take it personally, the airline industry simply is not in the business of caring about you. It is in the business of moving you, your family, your friends, your business partners, your government officials, and the rest of the world’s peoples between to and fro; and this is very much like the transportation system of the slave trade, there aren’t any benefits to be gained in making you more comfortable and feeding you better, only more costs. To the airline industry the idea of you is an ephemeral idea, you exist as a piece of inventory that the longer you remain on the shelf the more you depreciate in value and thus the airline follows the old warehouse rule, first in first out and just in time inventory is what you are to them. When a plane lands gotta get you in there fast and out fast and the faster the better. <br /><br />The harrowing narrowing of time between the time that the airline industry picks you up and delivers you to your destination has come under a theological constraint: the speed of sound. The speed of sound is a problem because airplanes that fly at the speed of sound make a lot of noise and people don’t like noisy neighbors. But there is a bigger constraint to it than just shockwaves, fast planes need to be small so they can slip through the air without insurmountable drag-coefficiency penalties. A larger body implies that you touch more of the atmosphere and the more you touch of the atmosphere, well, the more the atmosphere touches you, and anything that touches more costs more money to fly, that’s the drag of it. <br /><br />Thus, unable to increase speed in order to make more flights within 24 hours, the next logical solution to moving more passengers in and out faster is to increase the size of the plane, fit more people in it and then you can move more people without using more planes, hence the new generation of jumbo jets that will be the equivalent of flying two planes at once, only at the cost of flying one plane, and using the flight bandwidth of just one giant plane.<br /><br />But cram them and cram them has its limits too, and no one wants to think of the day that a super jumbo jet with 800 passengers crashes, but that little horror aside the growth of passengers will continue to rise for the foreseeable future so the solution of larger planes offers little hope that travel will actually get better for you and your luggage, though the differences between the two is indiscernible. Why it takes decades to expand an airport and decades to build new airplanes, and decades to understand migration and travel patterns and in decades to come oil is only going to get more expensive, so whatever the airline industry saves on consumption, through newer technologies, it will pay out as higher oil prices, due to increased demand; and that will subsume any cost benefit advantages. <br /><br />You don’t get something for nothing, the airline industry is certainly proof of that and so you might say why are there airline executives even in that crazy industry, if you could be the CEO of a major airline, why would you want that headache when you could just as easily be the CEO of less cumbersome businesses? Certainly pilots love to fly and the intricacies of flying a jumbo jet have their crossword puzzle mesmerizing qualities; and certainly flight attendants love the benefits of being able to travel throughout the world and meeting interesting peoples; and for sure jet engine mechanics love drag racing; and we don’t know what to say about baggage handlers, or ticket attendants, there the glamour of the job is lost, but certainly there are plenty of people that work at an airline because they like what they do, but who would want to run an airline company, a thing three times removed from its consumer, a third-person’s perspective company?<br /><br />The key to the riddle is very simple, the reason why the airline industry shows poor earnings every year, or when it does show a strong year, a rarity, it is usually one of low returns its because we measure companies on a fiscal yearly basis. This fiscal year measure works rather fine for chocolate makers and car manufactures and coal producers, as they are primal companies, thus such annual measure is more realizable than it is to measure an industry that is a third-party to everyone else’s actions; you could say it and it has been said, that the airline industry is there so that the plane makers can make airplanes; and you may extend that in any direction as it is equally true from any angle the airline industry is a third-party constituency to another industry: be it the restaurant or hotel industry or conventions or business industry etc.. the point is that as such, the basis by which we measure the airline industry should be fiscally generational, as tendencies in consumption and trends tend to be generational inflows, and thus an accurate listing of the genuine financials of a third-party type industry, as we now dare to define and claim the airline industry to be, should indicate a more precise and relevant measure of its sound or not business model. Executives that then work in this industry have not the capacity to see that there is no way to make an airline financially sound within the scope of a fiscal year but their myopia allows them to work for the industry. <br />In showing these various relationships some readers would argue that the same could said of the ground transport industry, or the shipping industry that are indeed basic third-party models, (and more industries such as pharmaceuticals which would seem to be fundamentally third-party-industries but that strangely also depend on ephemeral third party constructs, illnesses, diseases, viruses, governmental regulation, etc as catalysts for their own third party drug business to flourish and profit;¬¬¬) and I wouldn’t have any problem with those types of conclusions. <br /><br />In brief: all types that depend on all types are fundamentally represented by their type.<br /><br />RCRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1126484644362507252005-09-11T19:22:00.000-05:002005-09-11T19:24:04.373-05:00In & Of the Way I WriteI have just reviewed the contents of a bottle of Queen Anne whisky and there appear to be plenty enough to last me through this excerpt from a letter to Rosa. Yes I have started drinking whiskey, the logical progression of a distressed alcoholic, an organized life must follow patterns, that is what I say. <br /><br />Lets take up the point of control, and let us try to view the universe through a different set of eyes than those afforded us by the five thinkers that control the modern world psyche. Instead suppose that I am right, and that we are attached to everything and everything is attached to us, and then suppose that our brains are not per say autonomous units that operate to divine logic but instead let us suppose that our brains are nothing more than antennae that pick up all sentient elements, be they experience or aesthetic principles, the latter being voided of experience as they are rather for the enjoyment of feeling the remarkable associations throughout the sentient geometry of all beings. <br /><br />Recently Ravens have been caught in the act of being sneaky, calculating and forward thinking. A raven was spotted stealing from another raven as a way of avoiding doing work like figuring out where the pebble was. The other raven, (doing all the work, figuring out where the pebble was and then pressing the appropriate tray,) realized that he was being taken advantage of by the greater bully, and so tricked the bully into thinking that the pebble was in the place where it wasn’t, and while bully was at it the imaginative raven went on and ate the real pebble. <br /><br />An article, on the subject, in the New York Times, went on to say how we might have to redefine the “Them and Us” way of thinking about the animal world if we keep on encountering behaviors that were once only attributed to humans. <br /><br />If a raven may well be cunning then what realm of human experience isn’t covered by that, not much Id say. Day after day I watch Bush handle a reelection and I say that guy was cunning; then they tell me how he once owned a baseball team and I say that was cunning; and then he makes a war because he is a war president and I say there is a guy that sees opportunity when he sees it; and now with Katrina all over the map, the guy continues to con us all. And so suffice it to say that the difference between Bush and a Raven is that the Raven is less cunning which is to say more good. <br /><br />Regardless of all that the raven is not cunning because he is smart with that bird brain of his, anymore than we can say that president Bush is smart because he has a little brain. However for once, W will help us advance the cause of humankind in much the same way that the Raven will too. Even though they do not have large brains both W and R can be effectively cunning because they tapped into the entire spectrum of sentient activity, they feel their surroundings by letting their essence bleed through and thus the surroundings bled back all the environmental information in a sort of communed feedback loop; where they can then use the gamut of human or sentient essence experience throughout their daily activity; this as if indeed they were all knowing or very smart indeed.<br /><br />It is easier for us to think that our president is a very smart man, else why would he be our president, than it is for us to imagine that he is merely a puppet of a collective political agenda, of which he is merely a fundamental receptor. <br /><br />The brain is really only a receptor that is in one form or another possessed by all sentient life forms, so that they may detect one another and thus share in each others experiences; anyone that uses their brain merely as a receptor is most likely to gain the greatest benefit as they have an unobstructed access to the community of sentient knowledge - that is all throughout the feeling environment. <br /><br />It is only a matter of time before the false barrier of species will be broken by the communality of sentient creatures and the discovery of greedy ravens, gay pigeons and rapist dolphins is only a harbinger of the dilution of barriers between them and us. <br /><br />When I think, actively think, I am performing a cataloging function, that is I am working to retrieve information so that in can be stored in the supra consciousness formulated by all sentient beings; this consciousness feeds and funnels that information to any one willing to receive it or indeed in need of it. If a monkey in Africa learns to use a stick, by using his brain method, this information is instantly available, if so desired or needed, to any other monkey or even human species throughout the world. <br /><br />There are two types of writers, writers that write like me, that is merely to reflect the supra consciousness and then there are writers that write from a discovery point of view. Hemiway, Wilde and good old Victor Hugo write from the point of this is the world, this is the world, and they are securing that reality and feeding that data back to the supra consciousness. Writers like Holderlin, Blake, Rimbaud and that darling Correa write what is already in the supra consciousness. We are not so much investigators as we are assuming that the whole, that has come to be from the collection of its parts, has created an entire unknown entity, within the supra consciousness; it is that entity that we are trying to touch and represent.<br /><br />As such, since I am reading what has already been written then I have no need to think as my brain is only a receptor and any thinking that I do on my part is merely interference. <br /><br />All writers that are technical in nature do well to collect their thoughts and organize them and formulate them accordingly; but writers like me that touch the supreme aesthetic will do best to touch the aesthetic while trying to avoid the very bad feelings that that will bring into this here existence. As a writer of the aesthetic I am often in touch with very primal forces, which while not genuine to our supra consciousness still manage to impose a penalty, a pain upon me which often times causes me to want to curl into a corner and reconcile myself into the wall. <br /><br />The individual actors of this world might well think me insane, they don’t see all the connections that I feel, they don’t recognize that back pain or migraines are actually caused by the misalignment of individuals with their sentient metrics. Nor do they realize that the reason why advance civilizations tend to gain more weight, become fatter, is because more sentient energy, from throughout the world, is centered upon then and thus causes them to increase in heft as they cannot unleash that energy fast enough.<br /><br />Bush is precisely in need of exercising a lot as he has a lot of energy concentrated on him. Equally he has that collective energy to use in ample ways, without having to think, so that he may cruise the globe with the agenda of his nation and the agenda of the world. <br /><br />RCRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1125757687743348272005-09-03T09:27:00.000-05:002005-09-03T09:28:07.753-05:00The Salsa TrainI was now on a train, a train to not exactly anywhere, I had bought my own caboose, two really, one for me and the wife and the other for the boys, my traveling companions, my partners, we sold our secret hot sauces at every train stop. People loved them, people waited for our chili train to return, they would stop working to visit with us, they would forget their children and chores, they say that the towns clocks would stop to give everyone a respite; I believe it, we make good chili salsa.<br /><br />My wife, I better tell you about her now before I forget, she likes to clean a lot, she cleans all the time, these train carts get dirty a lot, they are dust collectors, as they move they pick up everything, from flies to traveling salesmen to lurid lovers, to secret agents, to dirty, dirty people, my wife cleans all the time; right now she is scrubbing the wooden floor, it will look pretty clean to me and to you after she is done, but not to her. I think she needs a kid, we don’t want to have children, or so we tell ourselves. <br /><br />I am 62 now, the wife is 54, yeah I think she can still have children, but there are telling signs that we have endured and besides its just that on a train, well, what kind of life is that. We are always moving, I don’t know any other way to make a living than on this train, selling hot sauce, it’s a good ride, we don’t spend much money, we buy the ingredients at various ends of the continent and then while on the track we make it adding our secret touch, and there you have it, we circle the continent in an endless loop. <br /><br />The train halts, the mountains cease to move backwards, the birds beat the train passing glances with an inching of pride, as the roaring of the diesel engines quiets into a loud humming perseverance of continuance. Diesel engines will run forever, something in them is bred for longevity, the workhorse of trade and industry are these engines, not those weaklings, maintenance heavy gasoline engines; our train is powered by a diesel and I always like to hear that roaring silence as silent as a diesel can get while we stop, the diesel keeps humming saying I am set to go on and on, it is not about speed, it is about endurance. <br /><br />As our train eases into town you stop hearing the wind crossing from every direction, the squeaks and creaking noises disappear and instead you hear the children of Barington, a town full of life and yet of less than 8000 people, of which maybe thirty-five percent are children, we want to get them started early on our hot sauce train culture, and since they all love Emma, my wife, well that makes it all that much easier. <br /><br />Emma comes to life when the children come up to her, they know she brings candy and trinkets from far away places that they will mostly never see, there are little plastic elephants smiling with their trunks way up in the air, and there are tigers made of wood which we pick up from a fellow in Obregon; a cold town with a hostile people with perhaps the best trinket maker in all of Asia, Stapho, or so he calls himself, I doubt he ever had a mother or a father but he was always a child and as such has always been his craft to make wooden lions and tigers and too many cobra snakes for my taste; still Obregon is a cold place, and there isn’t any heart there, the bandits are hardly welcoming though they eat our aji as raw chew for their teeth and we accept their money without questioning its origins; but we really enjoy Obregon because Stapho offers us his trinket craft, and his eyes get painfully happy when we tell him how the children, from far away places, react when we give them his trinkets. His brow lights up, you can see a fire sprinting from behind his old and dirty tunic, his bonny thorax heaves, and swirls of kisses reach us from his palms touching our faces in gratitude. This even as we don’t pay him but the bare minimum for it, Emma is a bargain shopper, she takes care of too many children and so she has to be careful with her spending, and besides that it would be rude to pay Stapho more than what the bandits pay him to make knifes of hardened tree stumps. It would be rude, or worse, unconscionable.<br /><br />The kids love those toys, I keep some in our salsa kitchen, which is also where our bedroom is, they are soothing to the eye, like Stapho they are not looking for anything just a little appreciation perhaps, and that is not that hard to give to little creations of well crafted wood, with golden or green eyes, with dotted or striped bodies, and all in vivid primary colors, enchantingly simple. <br /><br />Emma has a perfect memory of which kids she gave tigers to, or elephants or eagles and throughout the continent she remembers the names of each as if indeed they were all her children; which some would like to think themselves ours as dreams come to them of getting on our train and drifting off into those storied lands made up by Emma for them. These are not the lands we actually see, not those dry desserts, or those freezing mountains, nor the nutrient faulty lands, nor the hungry and poor folk that by far dominate our route, not the sting of cadavers occasionally badly disposed, not the disrobing hangings that happen along the way so as to warn the train travelers not to stop, no Emma leaves an imprint of a world full of marveling and merit, a world that everyone of the children will yearn to see until their elder years make them blind. <br /><br />“No, no Yuri you already got a tiger, you show me your tiger or I will not give you anything, show it to me.” <br /><br />Its sort of a game they play, she wont see Yuri for a few months to come and they just see each other long enough to argue that he would like to have two tigers while Emma would prefer that first all of the other children have tigers, and there are so many of them that we will subside before that happens. <br /><br />But Yuri wants a second tiger, “My tiger madam is sad, very sad, he is lonely, he needs lady tiger to have children with and to marry and to get food for her.” <br /><br />Emma looks askance “…get food for her?” <br /><br />Yuri yells to make sure she hears above the roaring of the other children, “He is not eating he tells me he needs to be a father and a husband that he wants to hunt for someone else, he wants to feed his wife.” <br /><br />Emma retains a small quiet because she wants to burst into laughter, but she holds back because she realizes that in some way Yuri is serious and serious in a way that could be painful to realize, she reconciles this and speaks in a gentle voice, “Well I think your green tiger better eat or there wont be much hope of him finding a wife, maybe on the next trip tiger lady will come with me, I will try to find her for you, but I cannot promise anything.” <br /><br />With those words resonating in his mind, Yuri sort of despondently walks away and Emma calls him back, “Yuri.” He doesn’t turn around he is looking off at the distance, “Yuri!” He pauses and turns back, where Emma is right there to meet him hunkering down and hugging him, “You forgot your candy, its green like your tiger, its tiger food promise me you will eat it.” <br /><br />Yuri retains his seriousness, “When will you return to us?” <br /><br />“Oh it be a few months, maybe they will come faster,” she tries to hide the moisture in her eyes, “…you know the earth is shrinking Yuri, every year now the world is getting smaller, so we might return much sooner.”<br /><br />He softens a little upon the news of a shrinking world. “I will eat the green candy then, but I will wait some days, just some days before I do.” And he grabbed the candy from her hands, pausing to feel with his eyes the pattern of her empty palm, as if a map of her whereabouts revealed itself to him, where he could be with her through some geography.<br /><br />Emma watched Yuri fade into the sands of dry bush, she watched the skinny boy fading into the blades of grass, and from the station I was watching her; her long light grey skirt, picking up some sand, her white shirt reflecting the fragrance of the hot sun, her long burgundy-brown hair bundled into restraint, and still I kept on yelling that last sale. “Get your Aji now, wont be back for a while, get your Aji now, buy enough to last you till our next time…”<br /><br />Only my words were drowning in the rubbing up sounds of a diesel engine roaring to go, the water tank was full, the conductor rang the air plummeting whistle three times fast, whole mechanics and hydraulics were throbbing through the dusty air, the children began to quiet in awe upon hearing the machine come to life; every time it was an amazing thing for them, they never got used to trains, they were other worldly, and we were other worldly too. Everyone started to clear out so as to make room for this huge black locomotive to engorge the scenery with its essence, even as it could not leave the tracks its immensity pounded itself throughout the surroundings engulfing everyone’s senses. Mirk, our conductor, felt all their attention laid upon him and this made him want to roar off even more, his kick was in arriving and in leaving, those two moments made him love his chu-chu train, in-between the stops and gos there was a lot of senile boredom. <br /><br />When the train begun to rumble movement I realized that Emma was still hunkering down as if Yuri were still there, “Emma, Emma! The train, the train, we have to go. It is leaving Emma.”<br /><br />My wife looked at me with her light blue eyes, without a word saying, “Yes I know darling, I am coming.” <br /><br />And she did come, but first she had to swallow her insides whole.<br /><br />RCRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1125406272642041852005-08-30T07:48:00.000-05:002005-08-30T09:38:11.043-05:00On in Intelligent DesignI think it is beyond reason how callous and uninviting the rational world has come to be. <br /><br />I am an atheist but I could not possibly believe that I know that there isn’t a god, there simply isn’t one that I feel. I feel spirits and believe in spirits, but they are just as bad or good as any of us, and not particularly remarkable as they appear to want to deliver messages, have agendas and suffer from a want of association and some times a scary temperament. <br /><br />If some one asked me to prove that there are spirits I would not be able to as they don’t do what I say, and that aside I don’t know how others might detect what I feel. Still they are there, they visit me often and more so lately. <br /><br />Then I think about this Intelligent Design being taught in schools and I think to myself well I don’t really care. I am out of school and really when I was in school I only paid attention to the things that mattered to me, mostly girls, and beyond that I don’t remember much else so what harm there.<br /><br />Intelligent Design might just be a clever way for the Faithful, the God fearing creatures to get their doctrine into secular academics. Clever, yes. <br /><br />Why they might have found the loophole in the constitution for separation between church and state. Intelligent Design, as the title properly connotes, is a rational approach to faith; that is it concludes that god must be intelligent, i.e. not supernatural, just more intelligent than you and I, and so much so as to impress us all. He knows how to tie all those neurons and synapses and make them snap at just the right time so we can know math and math can know us. In other words the Intelligent Design proponents do not believe that God himself is a miracle but simply that he is very much like Einstein only ten billion, billion times more intelligent than E.<br /><br />I don’t think it takes much rationalizing to come to the conclusion that if you rationalize a god and parachute him into the everyday doings of humanity that you will undoubtedly rationalize him out of faith and heart and miracle and religion will thus collapse. If it hasn’t already collapsed, as evidenced by the proponents of Intelligent Design which basically imply that god wasn’t an amazing love-faith-unity thing, but rather just a practical fellow applying the knowable laws and parameters of the universe to make things like humans. In other words if a god that is nothing like us cannot be proven to exist then a god that is everything like us can exist and must be provable and thus teachable. <br /><br />If the evolutionists reasoned it out they would be extremely happy at this magnificent turn of events in their favor. For the problem for the empiricists of this world has been religions lack of faith in reason but now the faithful are trying to be reasonable they are saying that god has to be knowledgeable and intelligent, god is now a thinker type. As such he cannot be far from adopting logic and reason as his mondus operandis and eventually, if the faithful keep going this way, god too will believe in evolution. <br /><br />So if I were the scientific community I would welcome this new worldview from the faithful. Yet we must ponder then why the evolutionists the scientists, the secular philosophers the open minded liberals, why do they mind so much if something is taught at school, specially something like Intelligent Design and the Bible and anything else like it? Why are they so scare of it? Why do they dedicate so much energy and time to lampooning in lacerating language the fact that creationist fervor wants to go back to school?<br /><br />Schools have been the leading dogmatists for secular thought, and if religion wants to become secular, i.e. intelligent, then let it be so. Do scientists really think the brain is going to go backwards? Is logic so fragile that its dominance could be seeing its frightful enemy, religion, getting one leg up on it. Is not the fact that experiment after incoherent experiment continually prove beyond doubt that scientists are indeed right and correct about everything they think about the universe, not proof enough to allow them to feel secure enough so as not to fear giving a lollipop at the school playground to the faithful mongers?<br /><br />I suppose that there are many things one can spend intelligence upon even defending one’s causes, but if the faithful are feeling so insecure that they want to go back to school, so as to prove themselves, by all means let them. <br /><br />It was Christ that said we shall not walk alongside the sinful and tainted, hence the reason why I dropped out of school. <br /> <br /><br />RCRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1124464304935117462005-08-19T10:06:00.000-05:002005-08-19T10:11:44.940-05:00MagdlenWell, well a mystery poet, I liked that touch. <br /><br />It is said that geniuses are dunces and I will now testify that even us normal folk are too; I don’t have the gift to recognize individual characteristics in a person as my mind has the tendency to be a super-modeler, thus in my head personal characteristics are blurred into only those that can be amassed in the giant gelatinous whole we call humanity. <br /><br />So be it you will tell me when you tell me but hey I like the tickling you’ve done.<br /><br />Yes! Yes! Afghan from Kifre was an amazing piece to write, I knew I had released something spectacular, something friction free, something that would just flow and flow unhindered by pretense or by style. You caught that well but you missed one part, it actually was more my ego and id than anything I have ever written, in a purer sense that was the real me writing without the subjugations of intensity, character and social demands that one feels one has to accomplish. And in this way you have it, it was liberating, liberating because it didn’t have my maleness, it didn’t have my thinker, it just had me feeling essence much as I might have felt as a child once, once before reality started pounding reality into me. <br /><br />I would hope that you have stumbled into Lies, would love to hear what you think of that one. It is a mystery novel, I don’t normally write detective mysteries but my wife and my most adorable Rosa, love mysteries and so it was necessary to show them how simplistic that whole enterprise is. <br /><br />You may find it at: http://www.lieslies.blogspot.com<br /><br />Well mystery poet, share only what you must, that is what I say.<br /><br />Besos <br />ricardoRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1124151970073878242005-08-15T19:23:00.000-05:002005-08-15T19:26:10.080-05:00“do you think you can kill a brother off so easily?” MagdlenI don’t know if you are expressing a loose incredulity with the story as a whole, a story that is reaching to show that there are a disproportionate number of beginnings and endings within the context of a life, including the ending of a genuine friend equally ending as a sort of adopted brother, and then having a sort of kissed off euthanasia ending. <br /><br />Either way let me answer the question but first let me admit that I have never killed or hacked a gopher to death much less a brother at least in the literal sense.<br /><br />The Watcher’s is an attempt at dealing with the incessant disconnect that is surmounted by our incessant persistence at consistency and indeed connectivity. Life blinks all the time, when we blink our consciousness remains alert only because the brain shuts down so that we don’t notice incessant blinking. Perhaps the same thing happens when we hack a gopher, the very act shuts something off inside of us, perhaps the very same thing happens in the act of torture, perhaps we blink, perhaps our entire consciousness blinks; perhaps genocide is an act permissible by a humanity blinking away.<br /><br />In The Watchers, our protagonist is dealing with a disassociation that I associate with blinking, he is trying to continue his research, he is figuring out how to continue his research while dealing with the ordeal that his research assistant, Dr Randall, has become a quadriplegic. In short he is looking the other way so as to ignore the obvious, Dr Randall is never going to recover, Dr Randall is like a brother to him and he doesn’t want to face that ending. <br /><br />In my real life Magdlen, (sorry I don’t know your real name) I have suffered the ending of a great friend Antonio, a wonderful brother Gabriel and a phenomenal mother, Patricia; all endings that I didn’t want to face, I always hoped I would die first but then evidence shows that I had my part in their dying first. <br /><br />I never knew Antonio in person as he was a pure theatric of an Internet friendship, we must have poured 600 letters between us but we never spoke a word or saw each other alive. In a sense the absence of presence made for a more promising friendship; which indeed it was. One day however I had to fly to Minneapolis Minnesota to see his corpse, I should have never gone, that put an unwanted period in our semantics. <br /><br />My brother died of AIDS, I suppose I know how pestilence and famine destroyed civilizations, AIDS making bed with my brother brought our entire family to a stand still. In a sense I went a little crazy when my brother took his own life, because he could not sit in a bed anymore; when he called to say goodbye I didn’t answer the phone. That made a runon on our semantics. <br /><br />You think by that point I would have learnt how to say goodbye but I hadn’t. Mother suffered a stroke and by doing so ended my time in America; but as I came to be with her and to sooth some of her ills there was still the challenge of being her son, and I never overcame that; we argued a lot more than either expected to argue, and then when her time was near, she could sense that she would have no further to go with me. She stopped taking her medicine, she told me so, I did nothing to encourage her to resume taking it, I might have helped killed her with the absence of my urgings. <br /><br />In some ways I guess I think it is easy to kill a brother but not as easy as having something to do with killing him by way of everyday simple life associations. Maybe a mother too may be killed in this assimilated manner of indifference.<br /><br />In The Watchers our protagonist is looking at Dr Randall’s wife and he realizes that she is his connectivity to Randall and that Randall must be let go by those that love him; and thus then assumes the only kind and irresponsible and irrational act, he kisses Nancy and ends the blinking slightly off key. <br /><br />Perhaps it was a terrorist act, perhaps it was an act of extreme kindness, perhaps it was an acknowledgement of the feelings had by someone that had not ended. <br /><br />RicardoRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1123362202703949362005-08-06T15:58:00.000-05:002005-08-10T10:00:09.366-05:00The WatchersThe nascent epidemiology of the constant assumes that there are many things in between and no endings and no beginnings as no one wants to accept the responsibility for being the end and no one wants to assume control of the sort that is allotted to beginnings. I was working on precisely these principles, my job as Chief Scientist for The Arribo Group was to establish where there was complete disruption in continuity, by implication where beginnings collapse to allow other beginnings and how endings manifest themselves so as to evidence point to point structures.<br /><br />It is an arcane physics, dealing with such plausible things as the geometry of space-time within such esotericism as the quantification of dimensional border crossings and metaphysical causality; these latter encompassed the quintessence of my research: at what point does reality merge with the universe? where does the border of genuine manifestations accomplish a release from the ether-ephemeral into material realities that embody cause and effect realities?<br /><br />To simplify all that in more legal framework, I think it was Hegel that noted that reality was rational and what was rational was real. Which of course implies that anything that you can explain is real and my concern is why would something bother to cascade into real, that is into the known and explainable? At the very least it seemed boring, still there was a complication: You could not easily explain, much less understand, humans, and thus the premise of my research: If we are real what border had we crossed to become so, and why were we so incomprehensible? That is of course if we dare to assume that Hegel was right and you extend the obvious assumption that we are the only rational animal, in essence the most real and thus the one that must understand things so as to make them real…a.k.a. The Watchers!<br /><br />The extreme of my research was bordered by where the soul enters the essence of self, character structures and, last, the cumbersome body. While my wife Anthelene thought I was rather brilliant for tackling such research, the truth was that studying the border interactions of existence did not match having to understand the essence of anything; I was merely dealing with the interactions between dimensional energies that stirred each other into varying alchemies. Perhaps because I didn't think it so difficult, I thought I could approach the problem with some reasonable axioms, and thus I was able to acquire the necessary grants to pass my days thinking of such matters. In the end the evidence would fall on the lap of the less theoretical physicists the experimenters, a task that I found as mundane as it is unnecessary. Once I worked out a theory I moved on to the next thing; it wasn't that I was lazy it was that I understood that once I thought something it was immediately in the collective memory.<br /><br />Dr. Randall was my associate. I was now waiting for him to miraculously recover from a severe injury he acquired while mountain climbing some iced pinnacle. Don't know what it is about theoretical physicists but they love nature so much that they like to go here and there in expensive climbing boots and a little rope and handhold rocks. Dr Randall, we called him Rand, saved the <span style="font-style:italic;">all</span> from being pronounced and that in itself was part of my study, why <span style="font-style:italic;">Rand</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Randall</span> had an unnatural border against their natural borders. <span style="font-style:italic;">Randall</span> was a whole name, <span style="font-style:italic;">Rand</span> had unnatural borders; thought it could in itself also be a whole and complete name, but for some reason, at least for Dr Randall, the acquisition of a <span style="font-style:italic;">Rand</span> became a subcategory, an alias. The beginning, that is origin, priori, preposition were left untouched but the finale had been collapsed. Why would the latter be allowed by our way of thinking about language and not the collapse of beginnings? Why was the border on the side of beginnings harder to collapse than the collapsing of border endings?<br /><br />Even in heads and tails the evidence was substantial, a lizard can easily lose its tail and survive the experience but not its head. Further evidence pointed to some interesting conjectures, the sum distortions and breakups of last names throughout history pointed to a breakage pattern that anointed a sort of rigidity towards the beginnings of first, middle and last names. This as if beginnings naturally were the controlling center of gravity for names and even words in general. You could see the phonics of names surviving, anchored only by their capital first letter. Randall could dissolve into an extreme such as Rhealdal and still be held together through an arcane conjecture held dismissively through the ages by just the letter "R". This because in some origin of lexicons you could find everything that ever commenced with the letter "R"; or we could dilute it further and still get the same from everything that sounded like an <span style="font-style:italic;">AHR</span> and how it once, for the sake of contriteness, collapsed to rapid <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span>.<br /><br />Suppositions such as those above have a natural tendency to extend themselves into sub-categorical suppositions but there is a border to that as well; for some reason beginnings define endings and thus conclude borders. AHR or R is limited by the supposition of its very existence. Thus the reason, outside of linearity, why the letters Q and L exist is some mindful border crossing that the letter R or the sound AHR cannot and will not violate. In other words, an alphabet is a sign that the vocal universe has not a single letter that encompasses and collapses all. A monk humming the cosmic ohm is always missing something; perhaps ohm stretches as far as vocalistics may stretch but one may conclude that the breadth of ohm cannot define a universal entity or infinity. At best one could suppose, from the phonics of ohm, that its border, at least at one end away from the uttering monk, is slippery but yet finite. <br /><br />These junctions are easily observable in letters as they form words but would be more difficult to observe in Randall's soul and body connection. Yet we could assume that the very same thing that occurred in the happenstance of a name could be transposed and observed in the essence and personification of Dr Randall.<br /><br />My job was not only to establish the link in the gravity that existed starting with the R in Randall and the maximum allowed discombobulation of its phonetics so as to determine the maximum strength of its possessive R, but equally to determine what held Randall the scientist tied to reality even as he has suffered a severe accident, where he was held together by cast body irons and bolts, where he might be wishing himself dead, and yet he was holding himself together, talking to friends, relatives and his wife Nancy through a series of absences of noise and a presence of blinks that amounted to a blinking dependant Morse code.<br /><br />There was also the border that once existed between Nancy and Randall that was now being held and violated by an obviously strong attractive force, which allowed for her to sit next to him for hours on end taking dictation from his ever blinking eyes; where he even mastered independent asynchronous blinking and could dictate two letters at the same time by dislocating the synchronicity of both eyelids. Nancy had learned to interpret and count both unsynchronized blinks simultaneously to deduce letter counts. And so now there had been a new borderless relationship between husband and wife and so possessively nondescript that they had reinvented their form of communication rather than let go of each other, proving how insurmountable their pairing pairs had become.<br /><br />As you might well imagine upon hearing of Dr Randall's unfortunate fall into quadriplegics I panicked thinking that his contribution to our research would be held off indefinitely, and thus pounced us a major set back; we had after all done good work together and I considered him a valuable contributor. But then, in a most miraculous of fashions, it turned out that he was indeed performing a greater contribution now as a quadriplegic; from his ambulatory helplessness I began to realize the order of borders. <br /><br />Nancy was what I would consider an incredibly strong willed woman; she was very active in her own career, an astronomer by trade. I never truly bothered to understand what she did but apparently she was always trying in this or that way to prove that the big bang didn't happen, and rather that the universe as a whole could not be pigeonholed into a singularity of space and time so absolute that it weighed crushing gravities of matter into irreparable insignificance; only to one day cause a vomiting of space-time now called the big bang. Nancy would feistily argue that this singularity was too optimal, too organized, too well thought out and thus too rational to explain the universe. In a sense Nancy thought, and she was also an expert on Quantum, that the universe was irrational, i.e. singularly borderless and using Hegel's inflexible ruler, mostly not real or worse realizable.<br /><br />The problem that I had with Nancy's dinner party chimes was that if she was correct then our reality was merely some coincidental happening and thus it could not be described in any coherent manner. The implications were, to summarize it, that knowledge could not be known, that the epistemology of being was dead from the get go, in short, and it did offer some form of comfort for a researcher in my plight, in short the thing that had the shortest length, the lowest possible density, the quickest beginning and an ending not even plank length was the understanding of being. The understanding of being was inherently so unstable that it would collapse as soon as it was possible to know it, which of course it implied that you could not very much experiment with it. And if these things were true it would certainly explain why in scientific endeavors we scientists always seem to succeed at the expense of our ancestors, where killing off Newtonian and Alchemistic theories bring about new beginnings each with a shorter lifespan than the previous one; this latter for as we understand things a lot faster now they can perish faster still.<br /><br />This indefatigable premise of the rapid extinction of ideas does not in any way explain why ideas continue to be born at such a feverish rate, perhaps it is because they aren't able to mature so they keep on reproducing themselves like viruses. Thus, being unable to understand is an endemic fertile nutrient for ideas. Of course I never paid much attention to Nancy at our dinner gatherings; I laughed a lot at her solemn deconstruction project of neutering the big bang. Why Anthelene and I would ponder that Nancy was actually thinking herself out of existence, nullifying herself with her premise and thus we thought it a bit unhealthy and disproportionately unnatural. As Anthelene put it, "We should be glad she is one of a kind."<br /><br />All that changed in me when the honorable Dr Diana Folleck, a radical feminist and, unfortunately for me, the head of our university, gave a speech about Dr Brodeck's struggle against the male-dominated Big Bang community. According to the undistinguished Diana, a lover of all things masculine except men, Dr Nancy Brodeck was formulating a theory that would single-handedly redefine the universe into a mostly girls school diatribe where the expletive man-logic could be spliced into a cognitive feminine.<br /><br />I would like to tell you that Randal and I listened to her speech but we didn't really, we were merely in attendance to assure that our grants were granted favorable sapphire eyes; but Rand then noted something piquant, "It is possible to see here how Folleck is pinching the ends of male and female divides, if she at once sees no need for man, it has to be because, as it is evident, she has incorporated maleness into herself; in fact she is a Unitarian of singularities, if all men were dead they would be dead outside of her but not within."<br /><br />And perhaps due to my disdain for all feminists, when Rand put it that way it hit me that Nancy was dead on right, the singularity was not self-sustainable, but because it was a singularity it could not acknowledge anything outside of itself. That was the defining factor in border crossings. Sustainability had a mandated, an inward-looking reality, inwardness could be rational and individualistic. Eureka.<br /><br />Bow to that; now that I didn't have Rand around to explain the Nancy logics I had it in me to realize that I had to eliminate the border of humor that I had created between Nancy and I.<br /><br />I spent many days at the hospital. I didn't have the patience to communicate with Rand through his incessant blinking process, so our intermediary was always Nancy, she had pretty much abandoned her research, she had cancelled all her conferences, and with that I started to see the receding borders of her existence. She had to entrench in order to repeal what was happening in her innermost life, her social and professional borders were largely constructs of her relationship to herself and to Randall, and now she had not the energies to overextend her orbits. Anthelene attempted to take her away on weekend trips to our house on the lake, the lake and the nature trails that she adored had no longer the tug to pull her towards them, in a sense Anthelene and I were watching Dr Nancy Brodeck implode into a singularity that her entire science denied. I as the observer could see the definition of borders through entire scales of civilization; gradually Nancy and Anthelene became distant from one another, Nancy's dedication was now to blink with her husband.<br /><br />I walked into the Randalls’ room, the machines keeping his reality alive pronouncing border crossing violations, nurses and doctors pumping their knowledge to sustain a reality called Randall, a reality that would not surrender, that kept dictating insights into our research, a reality that would pause when Randall would finally flicker off and end the cross border association with the machines that even depended on him to keep themselves plugged in.<br /><br />I have worked in my endeavors with many brilliant researchers, Rand was a good researcher but he was not brilliant, he was warm and human and a man of verse, he would tell me what it was like to climb those mountains, to burn his toes with grafting ice, he would see the occasional eagle space itself through thin skies while determining him inadmissible prey; there was a cross-less border, though Randall hypothesized that if he fell to his death, the eagle could cross that border before the snow would cross it and harden him.<br /><br />I think the only mountains that he hadn't trounced were the highest mountains, he climbed only to touch the earth. In some ways, I always felt that Rand was helping me cross the borders from the theoretical towards the real, and I enjoyed him very much, perhaps I even loved him as one might a brother one never had, and now that brother, Randall, was in this sterilized hospital room, watching his wife from some inner corner somewhere far away, longing perhaps to kiss her thin impregnable lips.<br /><br />I sat next to Nancy and did what any good brother might have done, I breached the gap between her lips and mine, it must have lasted less than did the big bang. And the machines and diodes fluttered hyperactive heart and brain activity from Dr Randall's breath and blood, alarms went off.<br /><br />Nancy's faced blushed with anger and incomprehension, nurses and doctors rushing in, "pulse too rapid, blood pressure too high, patient spastic,…" the room fully alive and everyone wondering what was happening to the patient that had been relatively stable for the past four months, except for two people that were outside the room even as they were inside; Nancy and I, she staring furiously at me, I simply looking at her in some form of outside community with Randall, we were inside the three of us, only seconds later, Randall escaped definition.<br /><br />Head nurse shouts, "doctor, I have no pulse." <br /><br />A long flat line after a brother's last mountain climb.<br /><br /><br />RicardoRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756572.post-1122239443785004612005-07-24T16:07:00.000-05:002005-07-24T16:10:43.796-05:00the runaway idea of ShakespeareI am a little surprised to hear that Scott reads science fiction, I wouldn’t have expected it, nor did I expect that he would still be reading Shakespeare. Science Fiction itself is a genre that I think can be compared to video games; SF readers and Video Game players are stuck in some type of a mental loop that they do not seem to recognize; there are a finite number of alien civilizations and a finite number of obstacles and enemies. SF in particular always reconstructs the same theme, which could be summarized as: rational is a practical tool that should not be taken to extremes, technology will save the universe and in the future emotions will serve feelings in a jar. By an large most science fiction entails a pseudo compromise of three things, feelings, biology and technology and they are not much more brilliant than that; science fiction landscapes sustain the same political realities that we perceive today, the same rivalries, the same economic difficulties and similar apocalyptic endeavors. <br /><br />And then Scott makes the mental leap which few with any frame of reference would make by noting that Shakespeare is science fiction, and that trounces the mind. Is it possible? I take another sip of my cup of coffee. The thought comes like a two ton piece of iron 30 feet long, four feet wide and four inches thick. It doesn’t fit. I take another sip of coffee. <br /><br />I always have said that I am bored by Shakespeare, I wish we would get over him and move on. But then I am also bored by Freud and Tchaikovsky and Darwin. I just want to move on, I mean 80 decades of psychoanalysis ought to be enough to include two orbits of repetition! Two centuries of evolution and we have not evolved beyond it! Why then evolution itself must be the best argument against evolution.<br /><br />I think ideas some times are like lollypops, only after a while a lollipop melts away and ideas unfortunately don’t come with self destruct tags, and there is the folly of it. As a result some ideas permeate civilizations well beyond their times and prevent other more brilliant ideas, (read brilliant ideas like mine,) and thus ideas suffer from very long tails that squash everything. <br /><br />Someone less brilliant might say, “But Ricardo doesn’t the fact that the idea of evolution has lasted almost two centuries, doesn’t that mean that it is fertile and rich with insight and thus humanity’s intellect continues to mine it?”<br /><br />No! Absolutely no! An idea is only fertile the first quarter of its life expectancy. Psychoanalysis like Relativity were both exhausted of prime material by the 1970s; there has been no significant revelation made by either camp since the 1980s killed all lines of thought and turned the world into pure action adventure. According to ideal idea life expectancies, having successfully survived adolescence both psychoanalysis and relativity should die out within the next fifty years. Psychoanalysis gets a little longer life expectancy because it is not so much a science as it is an expression of sedentary angst.<br /><br />“Bur Sir Ricardo how do you know the quarter fertile life of an idea without knowing when it died?”<br /><br />It is a good question but not a wise or principled one. There is no need to suspect that ideas have reached the level of half life principles that Radioactivity has championed. Radioactivity has proven beyond all doubt that it is the most substantive singular idea that has ever existed. All things appear to have to come to terms with radiation, and the idea that cockroaches will survive an atomic bomb has obviously not been tested. If I am correct, and there is no reason nor contemporary evidence that disproves this, then radioactivity can also help us date ideas, in much the same way that carbon dating allows us to date mummies. <br /><br />The reason for using radioactivity its because it is pervasive, all encompassing and thus it is an absolute. And as any department of weights and measures will tell you, rulers have to be absolute! Now having defined the ruler where do we start measuring? This is not as foolish a question as it sounds, it is subject to two possible interpretations but fortunately no more than that and so there is 50/50 chance that we will get it right and if not we can change our minds and still get it right anyways. <br /><br />Our starting points have to be when the human species came to be or when ideas came to be within the human species? We have to decide if ideas were born with the inception of homo sapiens or if ideas were born after homo sapiens? That is, is having an idea synonymous with homo sapient existence or is an idea a parasite mandating a precursor homo sapient?<br /><br />Like I’ve said, we may go either way but there is another problem, that is no one knows when humans really came into existence so we don’t know when idea & homo sapiens could have arisen. Rumor has it that it was about 300 thousand years ago. That is not a long time and it assumes that we have all the evidence and well of course we don’t for much of what we know about our origins is pure science fiction with a doctoral endeavor as its only supporting structure. <br /><br />Yet I think we may ascertain one thing, humans have not been around for more than a million years and I am very comfortable with that large margin for error. A million years ago there weren’t a lot things here, and so a million years ago some chemical biology could have risen to create homo sapiens, or god could have said, “Let there be Adam and Eve.” (That must have been his wisest move, naming things, baptism and cataloguing go hand in hand.) Or some aliens might have germinated the planet a mere million years ago. So there you have it, starting with a none to precise number we have been kind and added longevity and resistance and a long time of ignorance to the human species. <br /><br />A starting point is everything, we humans work a lot on beginnings and endings and so we are fortunate that it is only a million years ago; 100 thousand to the tenth power, 333 thousand multiplied by 3 plus a little more, or half a million twice, a million is nothing really! <br /><br />I think you are getting the picture mi Rosa, Rosa mia, Rosa Rosa, if ideas & homo sapiens were born at the same time then the extreme extremists mostess fertile period for ideas can only be 25% of that existence! Then it stands to reason that all ideas must absolutely start to die after a theoretical maximum of 250 thousand years! That is an incredible discovery for it will allow us to measure if an idea has gotten away with humanity. That permits us to know if an idea is becoming too autonomous from us humans and thus dangerous to the human species. <br /><br />Suppose for instance that the idea of there being an omnipotent being was an idea that considered the god-idea more important than the human species, to the point that the idea God would ask humanity to sacrifice itself for the god-idea. Well with our new criteria for the life expectancy of ideas we could readily conclude that such an idea was getting out of hand and, barring there being a Galileo with another idea to challenge it for the hearts and minds of our peoples, then such an idea might have to be put to death! And if peoples wouldn’t want to let go of it, even as they knew it to be bad for them, we could instead give them a lollipop until it melts. <br /><br />Or suppose for instance that there was a nullifying point for evolutionary theory, a point at which humanity ceases to perfect itself through evolution because the environment is no longer a challenge; if there is no conflict with your surroundings then evolution might nullify itself. Where there is no need to adapt why therefore Darwin? One can easily imagine humanity creating such an artificial environment, an environment so subservient to humanity that any evolution could only be a consequence of manipulation. I don’t know if manipulation has been considered as a factor in evolutionary theory but I damn well doubted. The point here being that ideas can and may indeed die of natural causes, i.e. the environment is no longer favorable, or in catastrophes, i.e. unexpectedly turning into vulgar British comedy. <br /><br />But let us continue with the difficulty or not of our measure. The fact of the matter is that the assumption that ideas are born with homo sapiens is wrong. What if ideas were born before homo sapiens? Why we happen to know that Homo Habilis used tools, and to me you have to have the idea to use tools, maybe that is not the same as making tools but if you use a stick to get at some delicious red ants you are in the idea, dark chocolate ideas cannot be far away. Only Habilis wasn’t apparently very successful, indeed in the evolutionary racetrack it dropped out of the race. But that doesn’t mean that we can avoid the heavy to lift idea: Is it possible that ideas originated before homo sapiens?<br /><br />Minds cannot hold such things, it is easy to think that we are the uppermost intelligent of life forms, that doesn’t require any heavy lifting, but the idea that the human species was preconceived by an idea, a superlative at that, that is not so easily graspable and so I grapple with it. Shit, it is easy to say physical evidence easily implies that we are less than a million years old as a species but how do you date the origins of idea if such by reason of causation were to predate the advent of Milesian aquatics and even homo sapiens?<br /><br />I now realize that we are a little dizzy from where we started, for now there is a third question so it is no longer a 50/50 proposition of error. Idea before humanity, Idea after humanity or Idea and humanity at the same time? That is the question.<br /><br />Which in a round about way gets us back to Shakespeare, and that might actually help us to answer the question as Shakespearean thought has been one of the most repetitive ideas of all time to the point where it can even build theaters, actors, writers, wealth, and dramas in real life as a matter of pure consequence. This is a clear and unspoiled sign of a mature idea, The Shakespearian idea is a mature idea because it builds things, immature ideas, that is to say ideas that are still fertile cannot build anything because they haven’t even constructed themselves. <br /><br />And I think here we have finally gotten a hold of something solid, at least when it comes to ideas, which as you have witness is not an easy thing to do. And that solid thing is that ideas that are mature build genuine and solid things! Shakespeare today is an industry, it edifies London and Londoners and indeed civilization; acting or directing a Shakespearian play is often the crux of a fine career; and quoting Shakespeare a sign of self inflicted cultural kudos. More important you don’t have to think Shakespeare any more, everyone knows Shakespearian thought, even the commonest of the commonest, the lowliest of the lowliest knows something or other about the much ado about Shakespeare.<br /><br />And because it is an all pervasive idea it makes it very easy to lavish and subsidize it, and to recreate more of the idea anew until this idea enters every aspect of our existence. And thus I now bleakly realize what a logical transition it was for Scott to conclude that Shakespeare is science fiction. Far from being a brilliant insight it is rather a logical foretelling of what is inevitable, there will be a Quantumitized Hamlet; a Hamlet that at once is and isn’t, a hamlet in 11 stringing dimensions that uses a tractor-bean to bring about the murderers of his father, a Hamlet that will use 3D glasses to see his adulterous mother, a Hamlet that rages through the universe in a hyper-navi-usv squeaking atoms from his rage; and finally a Hamlet that realizes how insignificant he is after overreaching the frailty of his vanities. And in this final episode we can see Hamlet put a finite point in the universe, where he inks with his own blood the stained idea that ideas are before man and will be so after man.<br /><br />A ruler cannot measure an object larger than itself. <br /><br />RCRicardo Correahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04384242569549553228noreply@blogger.com0