President Pac-man
When Rahm Emmanuel remarked that ‘one should never let a serious crisis go to waste’ he meant never lose an opportunity to grab power. When people are grieving, poor or afraid, offer to save them. That’s the best way to get power. One such moment occurred during the financial crisis of 2008. Another such moment, Dana Milbank argues, is occurring now.
It was a most audacious application of the Emanuel rule.
“Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel said when he was tapped to be President Obama’s chief of staff.
Standing in the White House briefing room Wednesday afternoon, Obama observed that recommendation in unorthodox fashion, invoking the grade-school massacre in Newtown, Conn., to advance his agenda not just on gun control but on taxes, the debt limit, energy and immigration reform.
“Goodness,” Obama said. “If there’s one thing we should have after this week, it should be a sense of perspective about what’s important.”
The President has become like Pac-man endlessly gobbling up dots which only earn him the chance to do it again. “When all pac-dots are eaten, Pac-Man is taken to the next stage” — and more dots. But what if the concentration of power only made things worse? Wouldn’t that create even further opportunities to demand even more power from a desperate society? It would and this, according to archaeologist Joseph Tainter, is the reason why civilizations eventually get so complex they eventually fall. Tainter has written a book called the Collapse of Complex Societies which describes in a scholarly way what the Belmont Club called the Shampoo and Conditioner cycle. Politicians sell you conditioner to restore the oils their shampoo leached from your hair. Then to fix your greasy hair they’ll sell you more shampoo.
Today’s problems are yesterday’s solutions and each generation of bureaucrats sets up yet another crisis which they will ‘never let go to waste’. Tainter:
examines the collapse of Maya and Chacoan civilizations, and of the Western Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics and complexity theory. Tainter argues that sustainability or collapse of societies follow from the success or failure of problem-solving institutions. and that societies collapse when their investments in social complexity and their “energy subsidies” reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. He recognizes collapse when a society rapidly sheds a significant portion of its complexity.
According to Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. … Such complexity requires a substantial “energy” subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).
When a society confronts a “problem,” such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge …
For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans “solved” this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (in concrete forms, as metals, grain, slaves, etc.). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory.
Intense, authoritarian efforts to maintain cohesion by Domitian and Constantine the Great only led to an ever greater strain on the population. The empire was split into two halves, of which the western soon fragmented into smaller units. The eastern half, being wealthier, was able to survive longer, and did not collapse but instead succumbed slowly and piecemeal, because unlike the western empire it had powerful neighbors able to take advantage of its weakness.
It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Archeological evidence from human bones indicates that average nutrition actually improved after the collapse in many parts of the former Roman Empire. Average individuals may have benefited because they no longer had to invest in the burdensome complexity of empire. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
The New England Complex Systems Institute has made a comparable argument to explain why the Soviet Union and other centrally controlled societies collapsed in the 1990s, but going the other way. In their view as command societies became more complex (an attribute measured by something called a ‘complexity profile’) they begins to outrun their control systems.
Then structures which were formerly hierarchical begin to exhibit ‘lateral’ or networked characteristics in adapatation to fix problems that could no longer be solved in a top-down fashion. Eventually the system shifted over from the pure hierarchy to hybridized system and the pure command systems collapsed. “Once this is true, hierarchical mechanisms are no longer able to impose the necessary coordination of individual behaviors. Instead, interactions characteristic of networks are necessary.” These strains caused the hierarchy to break down into subsidiary systems.
From earliest recorded history until the fall of the Roman empire, empires replaced various smaller kingdoms that had developed during a process of consolidation of yet smaller associations of human beings … the progression toward larger more centrally controlled systems is apparent. As time progressed, the behavior of individuals diversified as did the collective tasks they performed. The increasing diversity of individual behaviors implies an increase in the complexity of the entire system …
Hierarchical structures are not able to provide a higher complexity and must give way to structures that are dominated by lateral interactions. A hierarchy serves to create correlations in the behavior of individuals that are similar in many ways to the behavior of a network. The hierarchy serves as a kind of scaffolding. At the transition point, it becomes impossible to exercise control, so the management effectively becomes divorced from the functional aspects of the system. Lateral interactions that replace the control function have been present in hierarchical structures, however, they become necessary when the hierarchical control structure fails due to the high complexity of collective behavior. The greater the dependence of a system on the hierarchy, the more dramatic the changes that then take place.
The Soviet Union outran the Five Year Plan and no number of further plans would fix it. It responded in the end by becoming Russia, which could in ways impossible in the old USSR allocate resources and address a greater variety of concerns than the Politburo could.
The intuition that increasingly diverse and complex problems would drive a change in control structures was suggested by the “wicked problem” described in the 1970s. Wicked problems are poorly defined predicaments which defy neat solutions. They have “no stopping rule … Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique … A problem whose solution requires a great number of people to change their mindsets and behavior is likely to be a wicked problem.”
They are precisely the kind of problems which a large, populous, diverse and populous country like the US would expect to have — and which seem to cry out for local solutions. Yet in each case the Federal Government presents itself as a savior with a one size fits all solution. Barack Obama’s attempts to link “the grade-school massacre in Newtown, Conn., to taxes, the debt limit, energy and immigration” may have some political appeal. But it will probably engender a dog’s breakfast of a solution. Obama’s attempts to “fix” these problems will almost certainly make them worse and create yet another crisis for him to solve.
If Professor Tainter is right then nothing is likely to stop this process except a crisis produced by its own waste products; an effluent that it will become so acid it will dissolve the system itself into a networked version of the purely hierarchical system. The prediction is that Barack Obama will keep improving things until he collapses the whole shebang.
The conflictng signals of the last few months suggest that something resembling this may be happening. The 2012 election not only re-elected Barack Obama it brought an unprecedented number of nominal conservatives to victory in the State governorships. Even as the Federal Government reach continues to grow so have social networks. Things are moving in opposite directions. Maybe it’s only a matter of time until they meet.
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“Obama’s attempts to “fix” these problems will almost certainly make them worse and create yet another crisis for him to solve.”
There are some who suspect this is intentional.
Considering what we know about self-organizing systems, it takes a particular type of stupid to insist on hierarchical solutions to every problem.
I liked term “problem-solving institutions.”
In a free market, these are called “businesses.”
I agree with the general argument of the collapse of complex societies , but my first reaction is the wordsmith optics are all wrong. I think the phase does not convey the proper meaning. And I say this as one of the lowest – damn close to the bottom- on the wordsmith/good writing scale of all those who regularly comment here the Belmont Club.
American society at the time of the Revolutionary War could in a sense be called a complex society, for example. Complexity is a matter of degree. What we have devolved into is an overly complex society constipated with procedures, rules and regulations designed primarily to benefit the Ruling Aristocracy and it’s Clerisy.
The free market is a complex system but it is based on some simple ideas like a buyer coming to terms with a seller and the law of supply and demand. That system works. So does the complex system of checks and balances embedded in the Constitution.
But what does not work is accumulation of layers upon layers of the unchecked writing of dubious laws and regulations just for the sake of “doing something” to make the great unwashed feel better or the granting of greater and greater powers to this All Knowing Big Government promising to protect us from every distress known to Man. These are systems based a simply terrible, destructive ideas and have been used by evil demagogues to bring us low.
“Polarization:”
As the media and the administration beat the drum for federal gun control it is revealed that there has been a huge spike in people becoming NRA members and an increase in monetary donations. The Gallup polls are showing more people who think gun control is not the answer.
As Richard illustrates movement at the state level is going opposite than that at the federal level.
You see hate speech and demands for violence coming from the left on twitter and other social media, which in turn is building up resentment at the hypocrisy of it all.
I also fear that we are looking at an upcoming catastrophic failure of intertwined systems, not a long slow decline from the present unpleasant state of things.
We could solve a few of our problems buy shooting the legs off those pesky Bushmasters. They not only walk across international borders, but they also unlock themselves from car trunks and walk into gun free school zones. Seriously, imagine if all of our schools had a big sign that said: This is a gun free school zone EXCEPT our faculty is armed and will defend the students until police arrive. And like the health care workers who were fired for refusing the flu vaccine, fire the teachers who won’t arm up. Problem solved.
Gee; it’s almost like the founders, who among many usurpations, were extremely frustrated by government conducted from an ocean away at a time when a simple request for clarification could take three months to receive from Parliament or a Ministry via the fastest sailing ships; planned for a market economy and federalism among the several states so that each could attempt different solutions to “wicked” problems in order to arrive at the all-around ‘best’ possible outcome.
If only there were some pathway, some plan, some law that codified this idea for decentralized, minimal, efficient government and liberty….
Sincerely, Armageddon Rex
It’s the end of the world as we know it; and I feel fine!
I noticed during the ONE’s speech yesterday morning that he mentioned mental health and increased security only in passing and concentrated mainly on gun control. He then passed the ball to Biden, father of the assault weapons ban. This will bring the entire effort into arena in which guarantees that nothing will be done other than posturing. The final outcome will be a continuation of the divisions that now prevent a solution for the tax/revenue problem. I guess the executive branch’s motto is not “divide and conquer” but “divide and divide again”
Samuel Johnson–
All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it.
Nikita Krushchev–
Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one’s wishes.
von Hayek–
Over and over again powerful governments so badly damaged spontaneous improvement that the process of cultural evolution was brought to an early demise. The history of China provides many instances of government attempts to enforce so perfect an order that innovation became impossible. That country, technologically and scientifically, developed so far ahead of Europe that, to give only one illustration, it had ten oil wells operating on one stretch of the river Po already in the twelfth century. It owed its later stagnation, not its early progress, to the manipulatory power of its governments. Nothing is more misleading than the conventional formula of historians who represent the achievement of a powerful state as the culmination of cultural evolution: it as often marked the end. The astonishing fact revealed by economics and biology is that order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive.
In my years of business consulting and as an executive, one of the things that I most had to look out for was the combination of a “department of f***-ups” and “department of fixes”.
One example was an inside sales group that (among other things) was supposed to ensure that the accounting treatment of orders was correct — and a revenue recognition group in accounting that essentially ignored the inside sales’ analysis and recategorized every transaction.
Another was where a production group built units in one way, but each unit in test had certain modifications made in order to meet spec.
Each “fix-it” fiefdom finds that it’s more convenient to just fix the issue than communicate it to the other fiefdom — but then, the other group is lauded for its success in producing increasing amounts of problems.
Sorry for the brusque tone but I need to be brief—no time for writing today. There are three problems with this thesis, two theoretical missteps and one factual error.
First, it is a type of tautology. We are in effect saying that societies get more and more complex until they don’t anymore, at which point their complexity becomes a liability rather than an asset. The ensuing collapse is then described in basically thermodynamic terms. But any collapse, of anything, for any reason, can in retrospect be described as a thermodynamic collapse. It is always possible to dispose one’s data in that fashion, but doing so adds nothing to the understanding.
Second, when the author(s) admit that hierarchy is “scaffolding” for something else, they stipulate that order cannot be generated without hierarchy. If they would but follow their own reasoning on this point, they would soon see that order cannot be maintained without hierarchy either. The disappearance of hierarchy, whatever else it may signify, is simply the beginning of the end. The mystical reliance upon “networks,” markets, invisible hands, or whatever the phrase du jour happens to be, to supply the legitimacy deficit, is simply the old Whiggish impulse, shibboleth of right-leaning think tanks, reformulated under a new title and sent forth again to display its mock-brilliance to yet another unwitting generation. It is vile republicanism and anticlericalism at its heart, or what used to be known as freemasonry. It is also illogical, but it gives its adherents the conceit that their radicalism is not only useful but moral. The devil never pulled a finer trick.
Third (and this is the factual error), Barack Obama is not really a totalitarian dictator, and is not really controlling our society. Certain self-described conservatives are afraid that he might want to do so if he could, but that is hardly the same thing. For the thermodynamic collapse to occur, Obama would actually have to be something first; but he isn’t.
No, that’s not what he meant. What he meant was a garbled version of an old self-help bromide that’s been making the rounds for decades now, which holds that one should not feel anxious over life’s great changes, since a “crisis” is also an “opportunity” to launch out on a journey of self-discovery and free oneself from old entanglements. It has been attributed to many sources, from Native American folk wisdom to Hindu mythology. The version I first saw referred it back to Chinese mysticism, where supposedly the Chinese character meaning “crisis” is the same character used to mean “opportunity.” Having never spoken Chinese I was unable to verify this, but I doubt it.
And I’m pretty sure that when Obama uttered the infamous “you didn’t build that” phrase, he really was talking about roads and bridges. It was wrong for Republicans to attribute any sinister motives to that figure of speech, and it made them look cloying and wimpy.
Rahm Emmanuel and Barack Obama live in a world where self-help bromides pass for profundity. They really believe them. They also really believe that roads and bridges enable the prosperity of the masses. That is to say, they believe in the wisdom of “networks.” In this respect they are not anti-American. They believe in the exact same suite of ideas that you “conservatives” do—only more.
Yeah, well, wretchard and ye fair folk assembled, as I listed to Obambus yesterday, and the press corps that seemed massively uninterested in the putative topic, I came to a much, much simpler conclusion:
Obama is a demagogue.
This is not news, I suppose. And how is it we get one of those at the top? Equally simple:
Rust never sleeps. Entropy.
The much fancier thermodynamic theories of politics of Tainter and NECSI are very twee, I mean yes maybe true, but totally ivory tower bordering on nutball, I mean yes Korzybski, yes Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General Systems theory, and why not Madame Blavatsky while we’re at it.
Demogogue.
Have a nice day.
What, that doesn’t sound like a constructive analysis? Well, but “demogogue” is a traditional problem, there are traditional fixes for it, without getting into statistical mechanics. Which might even be valid, but all they are going to tell you is you have to fight fire with fire. There is nothing new under the zero point module.
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Ha, I see Matt @ 10 was writing nearly the same thoughts at the same time.
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c @ 9: In my years of business consulting and as an executive, one of the things that I most had to look out for was the combination of a “department of f***-ups” and “department of fixes”.
Yah. Gerald Weinberg, author of the classic “The Psychology of Computer Programming”, later wrote some interesting books on “Quality Software Management” with an intentional ambiguity on whether that Quality applied to the Software or the Management or both, and (back in the day) he was running a public forum for a while on Compuserve (!). Anyway, his insight was that many organization exist only to fight fires. Having just been through two such cycles, I asked what he thought of the organizations that set the fires if none occurred naturally. One guy, CTO I had just worked for, turned out had a twenty year history of never delivering anything that worked, but it was always “lessons learned” and “we’ll get’m next time!” Yeah right. If a coin comes up heads ten times in a row, isn’t any rational person going to bet the next flip will also be heads, that after all it ain’t an honest coin?
Well, among current American voters, apparently something like 47% will entertain such a notion.
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Also, it was remarkable at that press conference, the topic and Obambus’ carefully crafted cliches, the whole episode, was SO OBVIOUSLY A POLITICAL STUNT that even the jaded and cowed Washington MSM press corpse, couldn’t even focus on it. Wau.
Doesn’t matter. In six months they’ll be bullwhipping any uppity press peons at these events, live on camera.
A collapse will take a long time, even with an Obama and his minions and fellow-travelling “progressives” stepping on the accellerator. The paradox of America is that it is still a wealthy country with a lot of depth in its ranks, meaning that it can sustain even more ruin than the “ruin” alluded to by Adam Smith when Britain was an economic collossus.
#10 Matt:
I think anyone who looks at the second half of America’s lifetime as an independent nation can see that Obama is the latest in a line of progression dating back to at least Teddy Roosevelt. Much of what Obama wants is not new, but a reshash of what past American statists have offered as solutions. It still holds that more and more government — which is what we’re getting — runs smack into the law of diminishing returns.
Yup, and the second thing he whispered under his breath was, “If there is no crisis create a crisis to be exploited” these folks are not above making a crisis to take advantage of it..
Instead of a “self-help bromide” it’s a “help yourself to more” strategy that they continue to employ.
One of my observations from my time working in the DC environment is that there are people there who truly love the bureaucratic complexity. It may, in fact, be a necessity of the organizational attitudes but it also appears to have some strange beauty of some kind for some people. Perhaps long-term DC Denizens have come to accept it so much that they cannot envision things any other way; maybe they have been programmed by necessity.
And out of DC we get the same basic idea over and over again: consolidate requirements, combine programs. For example, it seems logical that NASA and the Air Force consolidate their space launch requirements. Logical, but out of that we got that that disaster called the Space Shuttle. It is said that a camel is defined as a horse designed by a committee and an elephant is a mouse designed to government specs, the Shuttle was both.
Such disasters do not faze the Denizens of DC. Next time they will get it right. But first let’s do a study, using the same DC groupthink tanks and universal study organizations as we did the last time. And we can’t use people who actually know something about the subject because that result would be tainted with the evil called real world experience and might even involve actual competence.
Matt, why are you making excuses for Buraq?
His “you didn’t build that” line was a verbal sleight of hand – just like his “benghazi was an act of terror ” debate line. He was telling entrepreneurs “You didn’t build that” with a “roads and bridges” phrase thrown in for cover.
Go back and look at the video again. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQu2SVFF-cU
When you look at the combined efforts of Obama, – his gratuitous over ride of Constitutional prohibitions and our rights, his zealous and reckless overspending and his massive printing of money, the horrors of Obamacare, the debilitating effect of FrankenDodd, the thousands of new mind boggling regulations his administration has decreed, and his actions in Libya with his unwavering support of the Islamofascist Morsi, we are well on our way to the point where we are a Republican Constitutional Democracy in name only.
We are facing a serious economic slump in the making. The next four years could easily bring another 6-8 trillion dollars of money printing. With that kind of currency debasement, it’s kind of hard to see how the “full faith and credit” somewhere along that road won’t falter and value of currency won’t go to crap. Hello, economic collapse of the first order.
All these moves point to a concerted effort to bring about revolutionary chaos, on which a new totalitarian state will be built.
One indicator that big government is not just another well intentioned self-help project is the deficit. Its array of solutions are costing more than they return. In fact whatever “solution” President Obama comes up with will have to be paid for on the card.
That is of course, unless it is funded at the expense of other solutions which were presumably vital in themselves. So what is to be sacrificed? Health care, cancer research, teacher’s salaries, another Air Wing, some student loans? What? And these money walls are hard constraints, no matter what Paul Krugman says. As hard as having only 50 miles worth of gasoline when the nearest gas cache was 100 miles away.
Oh they’re going to raise taxes? And where are they going to get them? From someone. There’s always someone who’s holding back on the stash.
One solution to the problem which the LRDG practiced back in the day, was to saw off the fancy grillwork and then throw out the extras; to unscrew the headlights, ditch the back seats and the amenities too. Then with enough weight loss it might make the station. If you look at the old photos they actually did something like this to extend the range of their vehicles.
Today’s fix would probably be to load down the vehicle with an extra 1,127 pounds of forms, hire an inspector to ride along with the vehicle, install the mandated air bag and require the desert navigator to sign an undertaking that he will reach the cache — on pain of — on pain of what?
That is why bloated systems collapse: when the cost of not going along becomes less than the cost of going along. In any case it’s probably worth remembering that at least one root of the Sandy Hook tragedy had its origins in a solution: getting people out of mental hospitals. I guess that was well intentioned. Maybe they did mean well, but that didn’t mean it turned out well.
One reason the administration couldn’t protect the American ambassador in Libya was his security team was costing too much. So they puled them out. This was said to by someone else’s fault for opposing deficit funding. It must be. After all you can always spend money you don’t have. But one thing is arithmetically certain: the ever expanding reach of central government can’t be paid for indefinitely.
16 @Unsk
we are well on our way to the point where we are a Republican Constitutional Democracy in name only
I think he’s made it clear many times that he’s an enemy of our nominal form of government (vile republicanism). Personally, the thought of living under a theocratic monarchy is just as frightening to me as desired end state of Buraq and his Merrie Olde Democrats.
As to the statements of Buraq and Rahm, I don’t see how they could be any more clear in meaning. They have nothing to do with “self-improvement” and everything to do with power politics. I don’t need a 1000-word essay to suss that out.
Josh@11 said:
“… I came to a much, much simpler conclusion: Obama is a demagogue. This is not news, I suppose. And how is it we get one of those at the top? Equally simple: Rust never sleeps. Entropy.”
Yeah, the “sky is blue”, “water is wet” and “Obama is a demagogue”.
Along the lines of “Rust never sleeps. Entropy”: Obama is a symptom of our social malaise and not a root cause.
Wretchard said:
“Wicked problems are poorly defined predicaments which defy neat solutions. They have “no stopping rule … Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique … A problem whose solution requires a great number of people to change their mindsets and behavior is likely to be a wicked problem.”
One of the exercises that aeronautical engineers go through is run Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) computer programs. This involves numerical solution of the Navier Stokes equation. Typically we run CFD programs simulating air flow over a wing, reentry vehicle, engine nacelle, etc. To make the problem tractable, we assume a steady solution and run the CFD program until it converges to a single solution. The computer will happily do this based upon the premise of “garbage in – garbage out” (GIGO). The reality is that most real world problems are intrinsically unsteady. In the case of a wing, there is typically a wake behind the wing composed of various vortices that are wrapping around themselves. Because the solution is intrinsically unsteady, the Navier Stokes equations allows for an infinite number of possible solutions for a given set of boundary conditions. When one forces a steady solution through computer simulation, all one is really doing is blurring snap shots of several different unsteady results into a composite that falls within the approximation of the numerical method. As engineers, we can live with this calling it an “engineering approximation”.
The mathematics describing a political/economic system would be more complex than the solution of air flowing over a wing. People actually try to do this with limited success. It is almost dead certain that the political/economic problem is intrinsically unsteady and a useful single steady-state/equilibrium solution does not exist. Note the word “useful”. There is a single exact solution to air flow over a wing, i.e. the airplane is sitting on the ground and the air is dead still around the wing. There is also a single steady-state/equilibrium solution to a political system, i.e. the economy has crashed to zero and everyone has died.
Modern political/economic systems are so complicated that it would be utter folly to try and model it. People try to do it anyway because they feel they must. Socialism is predicated on the notion that political/economic systems can be so well understood and modeled that a control law can be written around the model.
Socialists are obviously delusional.
Right now Bernanke (not Obama) is trying to control our dying economy through market manipulation and money printing. In essence, Bernanke has become a “lemming herder” guiding us over his preferred cliff to that ultimate steady-state/equilibrium solution.
A number of recent news items help focus the problem. Piers Morgan apparently called one of his interviewees a heartless shame on his country for failing to endorse gun control. Meanwhile some neighborhoods still have no power two months after hurricane Sandy and the killers of Ambassador Stevens are walking around Scott free.
Just because President Obama says he is going to bring the Benghazi attackers to “justice” and promises to “be there” for hurricane victims doesn’t mean he can. There’s just too little butter to spread around. If you add up all the new promises made by government every day there’s just no way they’re all going to be kept. You may ‘want to fix’; you may ‘promise to fix’. But that’s a whole lot different from actually doing it. So whatever Piers Morgan thinks, fixing a problem is not just a matter of caring it more importantly a matter of adopting the feasible course.
Just the other day it was reported that one of the Fast and Furious guns was found at the death site of a Mexican beauty queen. Fast and Furious is a perfect example of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. “Let’s give guns a bad name by sending thousands of weapons to Mexico. It’s for a good cause right?” The problem is that those guns go on to kill hundreds of Mexicans.
You meant well and you killed even better.
But the worst of it is that Fast and Furious gets buried by the rolling news cycle. It’s forgotten and that “solution” clanks on ten layers under the surface of the public policy palimpsest, killing and maiming in the background, until one day maybe it kills some high profile American and we remember it again, for a couple of days.
This is a perfect illustration of what happens when a centralized fixing system is overwhelmed by problems of its own creation. After a while it loses track of even the problems it creates. What will it do? Creating a commission to count the problems and by doing so siphon off resources from some program that may have actually been working.
Evil Cheese
This will bring the entire effort into arena in which guarantees that nothing will be done other than posturing.
RWE
there who truly love the bureaucratic complexity
Josh
Rust never sleeps. Entropy
Now we are getting to the mechanics of the of how entropy increases. While the Founding Fathers gave us a mechanism to limit the damage that a posturing demagogue can do, it provided no protection against the damage that money-seeking bureaucrats can do.
This is how the white-ants will reduce structures to dust: there must be a law against it; we must ascertain the will of the people; we must hold conferences in exotic locations; we must set up degree courses; we must listen to the self-appointed activist ‘Director General of the Global Institute of Everything’; we must link the issue to goodness; we must appoint a Czar; we will need a research institute; we must propose endless bans on something. And of course, a web-site and appearances on TV shows. A couple of thousand bureaucrats – that should do it, job creation, don’cha know. Oh, the morality, why I’d almost do it for nothing!
ADE
Both societies and living creatures grow in complexity until they collapse. I found my friend Ogg sitting in front of his cave, staring vacantly into space. When I asked if there was something wrong he sighed and said…
It’s just all this complexity
Compounded by perplexity
And I confess that I don’t have a clue
The sun comes up too early
And my neighbor’s getting surly
And to top it all my woman’s overdue
As a family we were happy
And though most times things were crappy
We at least had food to eat and clothes to wear
But our families got together
And became a clan to weather
All the storms and strife we could no longer bear
After that we went to tribal
And although that made us liable
To the strains that growing large would put us through
For a time things were just great and
We became a city state and
Did I say my woman says she’s overdue
There was never a vacation
We became a big time nation
And we conquered those around us to survive
And of course you know the story
It was Empire and glory
It was conquer or we’d cease to be alive
When collapse came it came quickly
And my woman got quite prickly
I was Emperor of all that was in view
But now here I sit in sorrow
Broke, in debt, with no tomorrow
And my woman, friend, is three weeks overdue
6. Armageddon Rex – “If only…” LOL – if I weren’t crying. But perhaps you’ve given us an appropriate rallying cry to face the future,
“It’s the end of the world as we know it; and I feel fine!”
I wouldn’t call it complexity: excessive bureaucratization is not increasing complexity, it is increasing rigidity. Rigidity produces cracks. Flexible systems arrest and shrink cracks so they cannot propagate. However all such complex system as societies do exhibit increased “rogidization” over time. And when rigidity riches certain level cracks are no longer contained. The grow and propagate until a critical point is reached and the system either dissolves (as a brick with cracks breaks down into finer and finer chunks) or explodes (like various revolutions).
OTOH, technological progress is accelerating and the tentative singularity event (when new innovations are coming faster than we are able to absorb them) might occur in the mid-century. What interesting in my op. is that there might be a connection between our present societal problems and the fact that all system approaching singularity exhibit oscillatory behavior. If this suggestion is correct than there will fast changes (both left and right) in the near future.
3. Unsk
“But what does not work is accumulation of layers upon layers”
My mild dyslexia translated that into:
But what does not work is accumulation of lawyers upon lawyers
Succumbing to optimistic tendencies, I’ve been wondering if we can’t evolve a solution where the Federal Gov’t. loses much of its power in the domestic realm without an accompanying zombie apocalypse. Instead, the Feds would continue to issue their edicts, while the states and localities would ignore those edicts in order to cope with reality. And the Feds would be too weak and too broke to attempt the use of force to compel compliance. Sort of a “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” on a grand scale.
Perhaps we are seeing the beginnings of this with the refusal of many states to set up ObamaCare exchanges. Michigan’s recent Right to Work law doesn’t directly involve relations with the Feds, but it is a noteworthy poke in the eye to the Obama agenda.
Oh well, one can dream.
“The free market is a complex system but it is based on some simple ideas like a buyer coming to terms with a seller and the law of supply and demand. That system works.”
That system is distributed and networked at the user level. The complexity comes with the centralization.
“This is a gun free school zone EXCEPT our faculty is armed and will defend the students until police arrive.”
Some professor beat you to the punch and recommended that the first person to recommend this should “be executed”. How’s that for freedom of thought?
“Barack Obama is not really a totalitarian dictator…”
No, but he acts as an agent for a government that eschews precedent, constitutional law, and a balance of power. Increasingly Barack tells the EPA that they can disregard case law in regard to drilling and they can follow his dictates with impunity because the chief executive will back them up like he did Susan Rice. What we have here in BHO is a representative of government rather than a representative government. With federal public employee unions we are looking at a new kind of totalitarianism that is more networked but effectively the same as the old variety in that the people’s will is not respected. Look at the midnight vote on 12/24 on Obamacare and all of the parliamentary tricks used by Reid and Pelosi, passing legislation without reading it first and tell me that we are not slipping into dangerous territory.
And I agree with your interpretation that BHO was referring to roads and bridges built by state and local government but event those were by and large built with taxes that have been bought and paid for. How does that confer the right to demand that individuals and businesses owe the government for these facilities, some of which, at the local level were paid directly be the businesses that are purported to benfit by them. Ever try getting a building permit for a million square feet of warehouse space? You think that the government doesn’t charge for putting in services and roads? Really?
The so-called “Cloward-Piven Strategy” explicitly calls for creating crises and exacerbating crises so that totalitarian solutions can be applied. To the left, the failure of the President’s bolshevist initiatives is not a bug, it is a feature.
20 Wretchard
“If you add up all the new promises made by government every day there’s just no way they’re all going to be kept. ”
No. But they sound good to the entitled ones. Every promise sounds good and is a music to their ears. A “good intent” is nearly as good as a “good deed”, said Nasreddin.
Is not there a saturation point at some date in the future, near or not so near?
General assumption would be correct, but if one has a large bus, with an ample room under neath, a sky is nearly the limit. So, one needs to have a supply of willing and unwilling scapegoats to throw under. As long as the supply is there the promissor in chief is relatively safe. “He/she did that!”.
“As long as the supply is there the promissor in chief is relatively safe.”
Enter Emmanuel Goldstein.We’d do all of this great stuff we promised but, ya know, Goldstein and East Eurasia kept us from doing it. You should really focus your anger at that.
28. Punditarian
“The so-called “Cloward-Piven Strategy” explicitly calls for creating crises and exacerbating crises so that totalitarian solutions can be applied. To the left, the failure of the President’s bolshevist initiatives is not a bug, it is a feature.”
True. But they don’t consider difference between Bolshevik circumstances and current situation. These are removed by several orders of magnitude. It is not a quantitative diff (it is but that element is not that important), it is qualitative difference. The current status quo is far more chaotic in potential. So, despite having a relatively precise roadmap (2nd amendment 1st, then rest can be trash-canned), they don’t account for a myriad of variables that would disrupt their carefully constructed stratagem.
Consider case of Hungary 1956. Their stratagem failed utterly, that being confirmed by their bodies swinging from lamp posts. If there was not a biiig USSR as a backup, it would have been that. The obamunists don’t have that kind of behemoth as a backup. They’ll try, but ultimately, they realize the difference of weight between their posterior and their head.
I went back and reread the article on Cloward-Piven. I believe that the methods can be used to break out of the current mess. Force them to do what they say they will do. Mail your income tax in. Handwritten. With all papers included. They are pushing electronic filing cause its easier on them. Dont cooperate. Ask for information. Request required actions. raise hell if they dont do.
They are set up for “normalcy” Change “normal”
Lets not forget Lag Induced Oscillation. Centralized decision making is inherently slower than local (i.e. market) decisions. This lag in providing negative control feedback can lead to a lag induced reversal of the feedback from negative to positive. This happens when the signals that the system is responding to oscillating signals that are changing faster than the lag permits the system to follow. The consequence in this situation is that the system response blows up catastrophically.
So called “pilot error” is a practical example where the mechanical system responds too slowly to the pilot’s attempts at control.
How does a centralized system respond to its own long lags? It tries to low pass filter the input signals. In the case of a centralized society, suppressive controls must be applied to the individuals of the society and information from both inside and outside must be very carefully filtered. In other words, the more centralization the more tyranny. And it becomes increasingly more blood thirsty after a while.
Unfortunately, even tyrannical centralized systems cannot fully damp down the internal noise and the external perturbations. Lag induced societal oscillation becomes inevitable and the system collapses. Its a rule of mathematics and of nature.
The solution: distribute the decision process to the local level so as to minimize lags. In other words, have a free market economy. Free markets are ESSENTIAL for individual freedom even though a market system will also lag oscillate and occasionally crash. It will occasionally crash, but quickly recover.
Chet
16. Unsk
Matt is plumping for monarchy again. He wants Theoden to come riding into power at the head of his eoreds.
BTW, the bus strategy can be only perpetuated in the conditions of competing systems. When applied under a centralized authoritarian system, it’s shelf life is probably 15 years (Prague Spring occurred after 20 years, but the fractures already appeared 5 years earlier). Without a backup a-la USSR, the unintended oscillations would overwhelm the system. Even the backup is not safe, though the death throngs are prolonged (EE satellite states – 41 years shelf life).
I know. It sucks having to live through it. It is so unnecessary. But the silver lining may be that a lot of people would learn, especially the young generations prone to buy the sweet sweet snake oil.
Theoden is broke. All the horses of Rohan have been sold to the glue factory. The Riders are at present mounted on wooden sawhorses whose movements are actuated by a windmill driven crankshaft to keep them in practice. This has unfortunately diminished the valor of Rohan, even though most are convinced their steeds will be redeemed.
Re: 33 – Chet –
“So called “pilot error” is a practical example where the mechanical system responds too slowly to the pilot’s attempts at control.”
Respectfully: Sure you aren’t thinking about pilot induced oscillation (PIO)?
Doesn’t only occur in mechanically linked systems. All it requires is for the system to respond slower than you are inputting control inputs attempting to correct it. Eventually (or quickly in unstable systems) you get to the point where each corrective input is coming at the point of the festivities so as to add to the departure from controlled flight. Solution, as usual is to take hands off controls and wind the clock. Sometimes you have the time to do that. Sometimes you don’t.
I managed to do it to myself once hyrdoplaning a Ford Expedition. Lucky I didn’t roll the beast. Cheers -
17 Wretchard: We are slipping back into a system of government where the citizens, more like serfs, are required to submit a large share of the fruits of their labor as tribute to the oligarchy. We have gotten away from, “Okay, we will build a ship to protect the shores as you requested but you the people need to fund it,” to “We are going to confiscate more of your wealth for programs that do not benefit you directly and there is not a damned thing you can do about it!” For me that is only a scant couple of degrees of seperation from slavery. After all, the plantation owners housed and fed the slaves so they could continue to work for the benefit of the owners- not much difference IMHO.
What is called for is a return to a STRICT interpretation of the Constitution and no cows are sacred. Mandate support for each states’ citizens must come from within the states themselves, no more stealing from Peter to pay for Paul’s relatives’ food stamps. Better rev up those industrial powers, you’re gonna need ‘em.
“Oh, here is your problem, you designed the homing system with a positive feed back instead of a negative.” “Huh?” “Look, for every degree the target moves your algo inputs 1.5 degrees in an attempt to anticipate the target location, but if your target changes speed or direction you start to get large swings due to the over correction. You need to input less correction for the moves of the target that way you don’t get the large oscillation that tumbles your vehicle.” “Are you sure this works?” “ONLY SINCE THE 1950′s It’s called the negative feed back loop. What you were doing is called a positive feed back loop.”
“Is the aircraft ready to roll out the door?” “Yes the paperwork now equals the wet weight of the aircraft.”"I thought we were using dry weight?” That’s for civilian aircraft, military requires wet weight.”
Guys, you can’t apply closed mechanical systems (or electromagnetic, unless you talk plasma) to open chaotic systems. As a crude model, perhaps, but with a lot of caveats.
Addendum… right, planes in the air are chaotic systems, but several orders of magnitude less complex than a human society.
Complex networks interwebbing. Giant hierarchies toppling. Demagogues being stunned by their own visions. Sounds like my experience with those nagging machine ladies at the automated check outs in Safeway.
You could say it all comes back to governments sabotaging the four essentials of Capitalism :- separation of politics and economics; private control of productive assets; highly decentralized decisions about allocating resources; innovation.
When government intervenes to sabotage these essentials then disaster results and the disasters lead inevitably to bigger and bigger government. After the first failed government intervention, more interventions are needed to fix the mess that was, surprisingly, caused by the first intervention and so on.
The Law of Unintended Consequences is operating at full throttle. Its author and Capitalism’s buddy, the Great God of Arithmetic is waiting down the road to punch the stunned Emperors of State in the mouth. Then Capitalism and all of us might be better off.
At least, that’s how it looks from where the trees grow, the rain pours down on the valleys, the mountains are deep in snow and the salt-chuck keeps washing the shoreline clean.
36. wretchard
34. SBW (aka Roughcoat)
“Matt is plumping for monarchy again”.
Thought he is more into oligarchy. He would have to be keen to lick Obamunist boots.
Wait….
Re. # 27. Annoy Mouse
“…The complexity comes with the centralization.”
I cannot agree. For me complexity is system’s property that cannot be reduced by any available means that still preserves functionality. For example, one cannot reduce the number of elementary steps beyond a certain minimum for a specified mathematical function and that number of steps (or its equivalent) measures complexity of this function. When new algorithm. like the FFT is developed it drastically reduce function’s complexity.
If one uses such definition the centralization reduces complexity by replacing the entire (and often redundant) network with (at most few) direct links. It does work cleaner and faster IFF the environment it is designed for doesn’t change. Otherwise it breaks down… badly. There is an old saying that the Soviet Union was brought down by a floppy disk (aka new environmental variable).
“The Law of Unintended Consequences is operating at full throttle.”
But remember, it is applicable across the board. It does not play favorites.
So, the result of the Obamunist centralization attempt may go into another direction than you posit. The whole societal structure may be so disrupted that another, entirely alien paradigm may enter the play field. Hyksos (= Amalek, an Arabian tribe) rule over Egypt (devastated and disrupted, rudderless, as can be glimpsed from Ipuwer papyrus) lasted some 500 years. History rhymes and I see a danger of Islamic Caliphate being the modern equivalent of Hyksos.
e @ 19: Along the lines of “Rust never sleeps. Entropy”: Obama is a symptom of our social malaise and not a root cause.
Entropy doesn’t have a root cause, it’s just something you have to deal with.
You pretend it isn’t there, and the machine breaks.
Eternal vigilance, doncha know, tree of liberty, if we still want that.
grrr
Let me expand. The ocean looks chaotic, yet at any specific interface it does what it is expected to do. In the distributed problem, a near infinitesimally small segment of ocean interfaces with rock. A rock without orthographic boundaries but of defined unit space and mass. It is one thing for a market to balance itself at the buyer seller interface, where each transaction finds its own equilibrium of value, and quite another by attempting to control the economy by central command. The government creates canals like regulations where water will flow but cannot control each and every molecule that flows in the canal. Statistically we must accept that when the deluge comes and the river rises, that a drop might be spilled. A little chaos must be allowed. My belief is that it tries to control smaller and smaller increments of the economy is so that it can capture the wealth of each and every increment of transaction. More controls more accumulation of wealth. This is as plausible as controlling the rising of the seas or taxing a free internet. It is insane, therefore, it shall come to pass.
What coefficient will substitute for natural equilibrium? None that I know. But it is chaos at the edges that allows freedom and it is the desire for greater and greater control of stochastic systems that will result in certain tyranny. Beautiful on paper, terror in its applications.
grrr@44 said:
“It does work cleaner and faster IF the environment it is designed for doesn’t change. Otherwise it breaks down… badly.”
This gets back to my comment at #19 that the system is unsteady and not in equilibrium. Even if you could model the system and devise a control law, the control law would become obsolete before it could be implemented.
What’s the solution?
Accept that the system can not be modeled and instead impose “rate limiters”. The analogy is the playground monitor. The children in a school playground are running around pell-mell fully engaged in chaos. The playground monitor makes no attempt to micromanage the children’s play. Instead, she is watching for dangerous behavior, e.g. the kid climbing a tall tree or the bully stomping on a weaker kid. She intervenes only when she sees what is predefined as dangerous behavior. Likewise she is also scanning the playground’s periphery for paedophiles and drug peddlers. When she sees one, she calls the police.
Government should act more like a playground monitor and less like the control law of an automobile engine.
Twobyfour@45,
It’s interesting that the ancient Jews (Joseph–>Moses) might have been Hyksos or associated with the Hyksos.
@ 20 Wretchard thanks for your reply to Matt’s comment @ 10. While some have criticized or might not always understood the context of my comments here, I can say definitively that the overarching theme has been the corruption of many on the so-called ‘Right’ and their embrace of Authoritarian Statism of which Matt makes some reference…though I hearily agree with the subsequent commenter who says he has no desire to live under a monarch (like the good Tsar Nicholas II who could not keep his country out of WWI and lost his life as a result).
Not only are many unwilling to see government power actually reduced while noisily proclaiming their status as ‘classical liberals’, but many actually insult or defame those who have done something about massive government — thus letting the mask slip and reveal the inner totalitarian behind the ‘classical liberal’ or ‘global democracy advocate’ facade. This rant from University of Houston Professor Craig Pirrong calling Ron Paul and his supporters Khmer Rouge is a CLASSIC example of what one fellow calls the ‘liberast’ mentality: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=5898
What it reveals is that for Pirrong Russia’s crime is not keeping to norms of human rights and behavior — then you’d expect to see him denouncing Saudi Arabia or Bhahrain almost as furiously as Russia — but a refusal to bow and submit to the globalist system he arrogantly still thinks somehow represents him, and America. Russia’s government will only be acceptable when her government, regardless of how universally unpopular the idea of an American missile defense system on their borders is (or would be if the role were reversed and it were a Russian or Chinese ABM system in Mexico or Venezuela), simply slavishly accepts whatever Washington and London decide is best.
But Pirrong has also had his other moments letting the mask slip, as have a couple of commenters here, when they uncritically embraced the use of Alinsky tactics against the Russian Orthodox Church. Do Russian Orthodox believers have a right to worship in peace undisturbed? Or are they mere objects to be used as props in someone’s political drama, whether pro-Kremlin or anti-Kremlin? The contempt for the Russian Orthodox Church’s private property and religious rights as well as the silence on forcing a contraceptive mandate down the throats of the Roman Catholic Church here in the U.S. gives me pause before jumping on Matt’s case.
There are indeed ‘Whig’ elements that are actually not merely secular but militantly Masonic/anti-clerical at heart, hence the shameful refusal to stand up for Catholics or to tell Pussy Riot that while they didn’t deserve two years in jail they had no right to make others hostage to their protest. I won’t go as far as ‘the tin foil hat wearers’ and say there’s a huge Luciferian conspiracy, indeed my Christian beliefs and recognition that the Prince of the Powers of the Air presides over much government doesn’t require actively willing agents at all — Satan can settle for dupes to accomplish his purposes.
Nonetheless, when you see individuals who actually work in the commodities industry who pretend to be classically liberal Obama critics but in practice tolerate the:
1) Looting of 1.2 billion plus of segregated customer accounts with impunity
2) Systematic TSA groping of citizens including elderly women and children
3) Obama signing all sorts of executive orders pushing bills like SOPA/CISPA/NDAA
4) Have very little to say or even express pride in U.S. transferring kill decisions to fully automated drones
5) Ignore Fast and Furious and other documented examples of lawlessness and proven intent to transfer firearms into the hands of the world’s most violent criminals, and insist with a straight face that CIA was only in Benghazi to trap flow of guns to Syrian Islamists not facilitate the flow…
http://reginaldquillbigsis.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/not-so-streetwise-professor-benghazi-fast-and-furious-style-gunrunning-to-jihadis-not-plausible/
Well what IS one to think without perceiving a conspiracy or at least a conspiracy at the spiritual level of Pride going before the fall?
The well-being of an organization depends on the integrity of its members. When democratic elections are fraudulent, the democracy is unstable. The degree pf cp,[;exotu os a sode ossie/
Companies have the advantage over governments of being able to select its members.
When a company or government becomes prosperous, it attracts carrion.
In our case, it would seem that the carrion has already killed the goose.
Again, on the topic of the globalist forces of Evil infiltrating the so-called Right and neoconservative set:
https://twitter.com/ReginaldQuill/status/281483976802189312
This is what they do, blame their critics for the situation their critics correctly point out, in this case that instead of getting rid of Assad and the Iranians, Syria is being taken over by jihadi maniacs with boatloads of cash from Saudi Arabia and Qatar who were cheered on by jihadi fanboys like @ReginaldQuill.
Re #48. Eggplant
“…Government should act more like a playground monitor and less like the control law of an automobile engine.”
And your playground monitor in combination with a playground participants is much more complex system than the auto engine, auto engine control circuitry, or gov.
My point (using your analogy) is that gov. is constantly trying to reduce the playground complexity in order to fit the playground activities to its control scheme. Eventually it will fail, but in a meantime there will be a lot of unhappy playgrounders.
As I recall (and I’m sure video will confirm this), one of Obama’s favorite words is “comprehensive”. This says a lot about his Weltanschauung and also explains why His Majesty is ultimately doomed to failure.
Type in “Obama comprehensive” in Bing or Google and you’ll see what I mean.
Eggplant,
“It’s interesting that the ancient Jews (Joseph–>Moses) might have been Hyksos or associated with the Hyksos.”
Anti-semitic agitprop is rather ancient. No. Not a chance.
1. The timeline is off, be about 3 and half centuries
2. Why would someone claim themselves being slaves. It is more glorious to be conquerors.
3. Jews out of Egypt, Amalek into Egypt. The Exodus notes tat they met and bad a brief skirmish.
4. It was King Solomon that helped Hatshepsut getting a rid of Hyksos invaders and restoring pharaonic rule. Her grand-grandson, though, was unhappy with these uppity Jews, former slaves to boot!, and ransacked Jerusalem and the Temple, reacquiring the riches that Hatshepsut gave to Solomon in appreciation. You can see the detailed inventory on one of Egyptian murals from the period. It is possible that the libel originates from this time. it wouldn’t be the first (and last) time when rulers used scapegoating to cover up their nefarious deeds.
48. Eggplant
In the scenario the teacher, a well trained observer of children and what is happening around them, does what when confronted with a threat? The teacher calls the government who are expected to have experts in dealing with the threat. Then defend the children by taking them out of harm’s way. Many brave teachers have done just that even in the most recent horror.
I know because I am married to a teacher. She is retired from her Montessori classroom now and does other things. I know she would protect her students and have good judgement in a crisis no matter what. She can shoot the .22 pistol better than I can and can handle other guns but never thought about actually bringing them to school. She is an expert in teaching children and always security issues with them such as spotting dangers and making sure they go home with the right person etc. Her job is teaching children about reading, math and science.
Watch a trained teacher dealing with the chaos of 20 preschoolers in the classroom and actually get them organized and learning something. Still amazes me. They would have overrun my limited skills in minutes.
What else do we want from teachers? Now the suggestion from some is just have them carry guns along with all they have to deal with. This sucks. If you want real security then hire professionals to deal with that. These are teachers and they do what they can but they are not soldiers, police, or private security experts. That would be a different job and skill set.
This is failure of government, not teachers. We cannot deal with the real issues and are trying to dump this on teachers. That is not what we hired them to do.
“If you add up all the new promises made by government every day there’s just no way they’re all going to be kept.”
In early May 1999 a massive tornado, or rather a complex of tornadoes, hit an area in Oklahoma where I used to live. Pres Bill Clinton when there consoled the people and stated that there would be an effort “to reduce the power of these storms.” This produced polite applause.
Of course since that time we have had terrible tornadoes hit the Southeast and Midwest. Did anyone ever ask how Clinton’s program to suck the power out of tornadoes, or whatever, is coming along? Did any well groomed newsman or mud-caked survivor say, “Any time y’all want to send that Clinton tornado destroyer down heah, we’d sho nuff ‘preciate it.”? Did law firms start running ads on TV saying, “Was your home damaged or destroyed by the recent tornadoes? You may have the basis of a lawsuit against the Federal Government for failing to use its tornado destroyer device. Contact the law firm of Jackem and Grabm.”?
Nope. You see, despite the polite applause, no one believed one word of what Clinton said. It was too fantastic to be believed. This occurs so often that now almost everything the Left says is too fantastic to be believed. So they are not held to account.
53. MarkJ
Some people say “you know” or “like”, instead.
“This is failure of government, not teachers.”
Right. More government, that’s the ticket!
I suppose that you mean federal government. I think DoE should be DOA. Education should be responsibility of states. If Canada can do it (it is provincial responsibility, the federal Ministry of Education is a mere co-ordinator, nothing more) why not USA?
spindok@55 said:
“Watch a trained teacher dealing with the chaos of 20 preschoolers in the classroom and actually get them organized and learning something. Still amazes me. They would have overrun my limited skills in minutes.”
I’ve also watched preschool teachers in action and been suitably impressed. Twenty preschool kids would overrun my limited skills in seconds (not minutes).
However my earlier analogy @48 still stands that even the most skilled preschool teacher would be overwhelmed if she had to manage too many children. At some point, she would adopt the strategy of being a “rate limiter” and allowing the kids to run loose within the playground while she focused on preventing them from injuring themselves and protecting them from outside predators. That situation is a closer analog to government.
Earlier I mentioned:
“It’s interesting that the ancient Jews (Joseph–>Moses) might have been Hyksos or associated with the Hyksos.”
Twobyfour@54 responded:
“Anti-semitic agitprop is rather ancient. No. Not a chance.”
No argument that anti-semitic agitprop is ancient. I tried to do the follow-through study on Joseph and looked up the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_%28son_of_Jacob%29#Historicity
Key quote: “Modern day scholars believe the historicity of the events in the Joseph narrative cannot be demonstrated.”
So that line-of-inquiry was a dead end. I’ve read that Pharaoh Merneptah was the Pharaoh of the Exodus. I’ve actually visited his tomb in the Valley of the Kings (relatively undistinguished).
Things that aren’t complex aren’t problems. With super-automation and cheap energy, a lack of problems combined with too much energy is the problem. The only jobs left are for high priests and geniuses, and everyone else is slaves to them.
No lateral love-making: only up and down. That’s capitalism, now own it.
Twobyfour,
I could not let the Hyksos thing go and did some more searching. I found the following:
http://www.jewishhistory.org/hyksos-or-hebrews/
Key quote:
“Josephus Flavius, Jewish historian of the 1st century CE and author of The Antiquities of the Jews, identified the Hyksos with the Hebrews. Most historians today disagree, but there are some striking similarities….”
On this topic, I’d be more inclined to believe Josephus Flavius. The Hyksos were already ancient history when Josephus was alive (Roman Empire, 37 – 100 AD). However, Josephus was a Romano-Jewish historian and had access to the ancient Jewish historical traditions prior to the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem.
The Hyksos first appeared in Egypt in 1800 BC. Merneptah ruled from 1213-1203 BC. If we accept the narrative that that Jews arrived in Egypt with the Hyksos and left during Merneptah’s reign then they were in Egypt for 597 years. That’s a long time but the bar Kokhba revolt ended in 136 AD and the state of Israel was founded in 1948. That last diaspora lasted 1812 years.
Eggplant, the standard chronology is quite messed up. I have my notes that have detailed reconstruction, but they are in storage and I haven’t seen them for some 7 years, so a raincheck request, please. I’ll get to it sometimes next year.
Flavius subscribed to the Roman view on Jews, whether because it was expedient or because he encountered the same problem later authors did–messed up chronology.
60. Baobo
Oh how wonderful it would be if we just returned from the washing machines to these washboards. Buccolic and happy!
According to your “theory”, as the purely manual labor has been replaced gradually by automation since the beginning of the industrial revolution, there should be already something like 90 % unemployment.
Aren’t you a fuzzy and cuddly luddite, you!
Besides sabotaging the four essentials of capitalism, governments have mastered the art of favouring the ambitions of themselves and of social engineers over people’s rights. They practice this dark art of denying basic human rights and freedoms under the flag of protecting human rights and so release more unintended consequences and more disasters.
The incomparable George Jonas produced a brilliant expose of this phenomenon here.
“Canada’s commissars for “human rights” are making the front pages again, this time by offering to balance “conflicting human rights.” At least, that’s what they’re selling, and some headline writers are buying it.
The National Post headline that went with Sarah Boesveld’s report last Saturday, for instance, read: “Gender vs. religion: Woman refused haircut by Muslim barber highlights problem of colliding rights.”
No, it doesn’t, actually. What it highlights is the coercive state’s ongoing attempt to deny the human rights it constitutionally guarantees, if they conflict with human ambitions it promotes or protects: In this instance, some matriarchal quest to empower women to have their hair cut by men of their choice, whether they like it or not.
The case itself is too silly for words. Unless there’s an Alice-in-Wonderland edition, the Charter’s guarantee of gender equality doesn’t authorize women to conscript barbers as their hairdressers. For barbers who refuse, invoking religion is, to put it mildly, overkill. “Sorry, I don’t do ladies’ hair” is all that need be said by anyone who finds it more congenial or lucrative to shave male customers.”
The full article is well worth reading because using the coercive power of government to place social ambitions above natural rights is a favourite game of “progressives” tyrannies.
In the case of the woman demanding her hair be cut in a men’s barber shop; it is her right to offer the barber a job and it is his right to accept or reject her job offer. It may be her ambition that he accepts her offer but it is not her right. Nor is it her right to demand that government use its coercive powers to place her social ambitions above the barber’s right of refusal and to force all barbers to cut her hair at her command.
The Hyksos were not Arabs (“Bedu” in the ancient Egyptian/Kmt tongue), nor were they Hebrews. They were a mixed group of Canaanite and Indo-Ruropean adventurers, urbanized and technologically advanced. The Indo-European elements were likely Aryan chieftains and their followers (“Maryanna,” or “Young Heroes”) from the Mitannian realm. Their technological superiority was most conspicuously evidenced in their employment of the light, spoke-wheel horse-drawn war chariot, but also in the crafting of superior bronze armor and weapons. They gained control of Lower Egypt, ruling that region for about 300 years (not 500), but never conquered the nomes of Upper Egypt, which remained independent and hostile to the invaders. In the mid-1500s they were expelled by a nationalistic uprising of the southern nomes led by Seqenenre Tao, King of Thebes. Seqenenre was killed in battle and succeeded by his eldest son Kamose, who reigned three years before also, likely, being killed in battle. Kamose’s younger brother Ahmose finally destroyed the Hyksos realm by capturing their capital at Avaris, becoming first pharaoh and founder of the 18th Dynasty. Hatshepsut was the fifth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty and lived some 600 years before Solomon. The Hebrew tribes, who dwelled in the eastern sector of the Nile delta, not as slaves but as warriors who were settled in the delta along with their families and contracted with the pharaohs to regulate traffic on the delta’s eastern frontier, likely exited Egypt during the reign of Ramesses II, if not earlier (perhaps during the reign of Akhnaton or Ai). By the time of the reign of Merneptah, Ramesses’s son and successor, the Hebrews were well established in what had been Canaan.
History is a beautiful thing, especially when rendered accurately.
‘History is a beautiful thing, especially when rendered accurately.’
‘History’ in any real meaning of the word started hundreds of years after the events you describe with the writings of the ancient Greeks. All of that is either speculation or ancient propaganda and based on a few disparate archeological findings.
64. stevesmith
These busybodies are already slotted for a wither, albeit some acceleration would not hurt. They still spasm here and there, hither and tither on a provincial level (no federal HRC anymore), but they live on a borrowed time.
The article shows, though, the typical “progressive” mindset. If just there was some cure!
Liberals Anonymous?
I think what Tainter’s theory on Complex Societies lacks is a comment on organizing principles.
When the organizing principles are a near thing of beauty with elegance, simplicity, grace and truth as are those of the Constitution, the society based on that can grow in a properly complex way as long as it adhers to it’s original organizing principles.
But when the organizing principles are faulty or based on sheer evil such as Islam or Marxism, no amount of simplicity can save those societies based on those principles.
Where we have gone wrong is that we have strayed far from the organizing principles of our Constitution. As a consequence, much of today’s complexity is a result of that errant journey.
Where instead of acknowledging our God given, nearly divinely inspired inalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, we have pursued the promise of “positive” rights that spring from envy and jealously. Our new wayward government, as a result,must now have unbelievably complex compensating factors and rules to create the optics necessary to sell these evil nutter’s unhinged and contradictory fantasy schemes to the masses because at their root the organizing principles pushed by these “positive rights” leftards defy all that is good of human nature.
49. Not Uncle Joe
I really, sincerely doubt that anyone here misunderstands the context of your comments. Nor do I doubt that you will continue to attempt to enlighten us on that score.
Wretchard,
Complex, high-energy systems throw off a lot of goodies until they don’t, past and present. That’s why its so painful to give them up.
Thanks for a great summary of “Collapse of Complex Societies.” This important book deserves a wider audience.
A great companion tile is “The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization” by Bryan Ward-Perkins. He looks at the economic impact of the Fall of Rome on her citizens and it gets ugly. Try pricing shipping insurance after the Vandals came through. They didn’t call it the Dark Ages for nothing. Required reading for collapse mavens.
66. Steve D: “All of that is either speculation or ancient propaganda and based on a few disparate archeological findings.”
More than a few; many more. And not disparate. The scholarship is immense and growing literally every day. What I wrote is representative of that scholarship, which I am involved in and helping to advance. Sometime you ought to drop by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where I work, and delve into that scholarship.
to @64. stevesmith
about the ”the four essentials of capitalism”
(Should a woman be required to remove her niqab while testifying? This framework will apply on a case-by-case basis, and the result will depend on each case.)
and the court answer was … in four steps:
(As the court ruled, no right is absolute. In trying to reconcile the right of religious freedom versus the right to a fair trial, we should consider four questions)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/supreme-courts-niqab-decision-strikes-a-reasonable-balance/article6599756/
no more right or wrong, no more in between, just as many steps as required by sensitivities.
reality has become a process… Heidegger, Charles Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead etc
SF
Steve D @ 66 said:
“‘History’ in any real meaning of the word started hundreds of years after the events you describe with the writings of the ancient Greeks. All of that is either speculation or ancient propaganda and based on a few disparate archeological findings.”
Bingo! Herodotus was the “Father of History” but really little more than a story teller. Thucydides was the first true historian and arguably the inventor of the scientific method (one of my heros).
[Again, I've blown through the four comment limit. I'm done for this thread]
71. SBW (aka Roughcoat)
I love the appeal to authority.
73. Eggpalnt
“[Again, I've blown through the four comment limit. I'm done for this thread]”
Ooops! Completely forgotten about it.
You are making fun of the Amish, Haredi, and noble Tibetan savages. The mystical Tree-of-Knowledge branches forever like a babbling graduate thesis with no end. No tree can grow forever without toppling under its own heaviness.
I believe Eve’s endless research will make WMD commonplace. Genetics won’t turn kids into supermen, but into docile blobs — like autistic androids but with really good hearing and eyes. This is because Man’s ideal child is just like an angel or a Grey alien: sexless, good at math, and incapable of misbehaving. (This isn’t God’s plan, everybody knows that…)
Remember Captain Kirk’s “Nexus” was chopping wood forever. Not owning an Apple Tricorder to do things for him, but working really hard at nothing, and not knowing why. You just insulted him.
72. SF
My reply to that Supreme Court decision would be, it is an established right in our justice system (and for all I know may be a Constitutionally guaranteed right) to see the face of one’s accuser, the faces of the jury, judge, witnesses, barristers and the faces of Uncle Tom Cobbley and all in a Canadian courtroom.
From my point of view it is her ambition to conceal her face. The Canadian Supreme Court promoted a social agenda by using their coercive power to elevate her ambition (Religious or otherwise) to conceal her face in court, over my right to see her face. In my opinion they have just negated another right in favour of a social ambition.
If I tried to give evidence in court while wearing a harlequin mask or a woolen sock pulled over my head and face they would say “no way Jose”, whatever reason I might give. I think that the Canadian Supreme Court just proved the point that George Jonas made.
On the other hand, apparently?? I can now wear a niquab in court, just like she can. Do they come in hot pink with a Vancouver Canucks hockey logo sewn onto them?
Hold the presses. Matt is correct about something. File under stopped clocks etc. The theory is a tautology. The theory assumes that complexity is a condition of increasing civilization, a term that itself is slippery, and then it equates simplicity with collapse. Why not consider that simplicity, as a demonstrated move to efficiency and rational problem solving, can be evidence of greater civilization or wealth generation or success?
Morton Kaplan in his “Systems and Process” described both “system dominant” and “subsystem dominant” systems. His theory was intended to describe various theoretical international systems and he did not dogmatically apply it to economic or social systems but doing so may serve a heuristic purpose.
Modern Liberal Democracy as a political system and the associated Capitalist economic system and associated social systems are all complex and subsystem dominant. The small footprint of the non-dominant system in a subsystem dominant model can appear simpler, even as the size wealth and productivity of the overall system is increasing. Britain ruled India with a very small footprint and the Subcontinent expanded in overall wealth and social complexity under British rule.
Bureaucratic Authoritarianism and associated economic and social systems are all system dominant. Over time system dominant systems tend to consume resources inefficiently and limit growth. They do that partly by restricting information flows between subsidiary subsystems. This results in decreasing complexity as wealth decreases and subsystems wither.
75. Baobo
Darn, I’m probably already over a monthly quota.
“You are making fun of the Amish, Haredi, and noble Tibetan savages.”
Do I? Not aware I mentioned them. As for noble Tibetan savages or rather their monks, I have nothing but admiration. They invented these praying… whatchamacallit… rolls and all they have to do is cranking up a row and its 1000′s prayers per minute. If that is not a superb example of automation, then I don’t know what it is.
“I believe Eve’s endless research will make WMD commonplace”
I don’t know her, but if what you say is true, you better keep that wench of yours in check.
I am not enamored with genetic engineering of humans at all. I think it already happened once and look what good it did. Even fixing up telomeres may be a bad idea. I’d rather live a shorter span that having to watch some horrendous schmuck living for eternity or near its duration.
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa for insulting Cpt Kirk, but between us, if he was my commander, I’d have to stuff him behind an airlock, and despite some pangs of guilt for his ultimate decompression, I’d be in bliss for a while. He reminds me of my mother in law.
What he meant was a garbled version of an old self-help bromide that’s been making the rounds for decades now, which holds that one should not feel anxious over life’s great changes, since a “crisis” is also an “opportunity” to launch out on a journey of self-discovery and free oneself from old entanglements
that is some serious bullshit.
Maybe … but no to masks …well I understand your argument…in other words … masks are not to be permitted …(http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/1175841–conservative-mp-blake-richards-proposed-crackdown-on-masked-protesters-goes-too-far) … than they might be ,,, as I wrote it’s a process …
we’ll see on a case by case basis … you’r Occupy … then no problem wear a Guy Fawkes … otherwise … well I think you understand !!
”From my point of view it is her ambition to conceal her face” You said it. Its all about a political agenda. But she’s leading up front
79. rumcrook™
Right. It’s far superior to wallow endlessly in self-pity.
Wait… on a second thought, not so sure.
And with that, merry Christmas or happy holidays of your particular persuasion.
/2×4 off
Is it worse when everything the controlling authority does is wrong?
How about when everything the controlling authority does is designed to enrich itself and increase its power rather than address the problem?
What about when the people who supposedly have the “problems” are actually more interested in petty thievery than an effective society?
What about when the “leader” is a megalomaniac?
It’s gonna take a mega-crash or a another revolution.
@ 69 SBW (aka Roughcoat)
re: 49 Not Uncle Joe
“I really, sincerely doubt that anyone here misunderstands the context of your comments. Nor do I doubt that you will continue to attempt to enlighten us on that score.” Good. Then Belmont Clubbers will be awake to the wicked and prideful idiots posing as Right wingers who will betray their neighbors and their country at the drop of a hat when the time comes, much like the small town Republican mayor character watching the Sovs mow down the Wolverines’ families and neighbors in ‘Red Dawn’.
I saw the magic phrase ‘agitprop’ above and thought the fellow I’ve been exposing as a perfect example of this ‘infiltrate the Right with globalzi memes’ had stopped by (@ReginaldQuill, cough cough). He says I’m obsessed with him. Not really, if he’s here it’s because he’s getting Google alerts everytime his name gets mentioned anywhere online. He’s just a pathetic Gollum-like example I use to show others what globalist memes…
http://reginaldquillbigsis.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/do-i-worry-about-reginaldquill-no-way-i-worry-what-quill-represents/
i.e. ‘Paulbots’/Constitutionalists = Neoconfederate racists
surrendering our guns is smart politics and for the children
Syria jihadis are FREEDOM FIGHTERS and if they admit they’re Al-Qaeda and want to gas Allawites it’s Russia’s fault
You’re a tin foil hat wearer if you read NYT/McClatchy saying the ‘Free Syrian Army’ is chock full of Al-Qaeda
Anyone who suggests the terrorist attack on the consulate in Benghazi was sparked by a massive Fast and Furious style gun running operation run out of that location is an agent of ‘Russian agitprop’ (not someone with a brain who notices that even the recently released State Dept. report about the whole deal is a coverrup and that the American survivors of the attack have yet to be allowed to say ANYTHING to the press!)
http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/archives/7285#more-7285
the Federal Reserve and unlimited fiat money = freedom, gold = slavery and Eurasia/Eastasia
to watch out for.
EOT for me.
Well, so what does it mean that the New York Stock Exchange is being eaten by some good ol’ country boys from Atlanta?
They gonna start clearing lower Manhattan and planting peaches?
One interesting line of thought is that the 17th amendment (direct election of Senators) eliminated an important control function in the constitution. The Senators were supposed to be the representative of State’s rights in the Congress. The conflicts in state government apparently became so great in the late 19th century, resulting in failure to elect Senators, that the movement for direct sprung up and eventually resulted in the 17th amendment (http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Direct_Election_Senators.htm). With the strong re-emergence of State vs. Federal control of issues, the role of the Senator as a representative of the State should become more important. However with direct election and lack of accountability to the legislature, it would seem that this role is diminished.
The interesting observation to me is that with so many legislatures in Republican hands in 2010 and now (27), if the 17th amendment were not in force, it is possible that the US Senate would be in the hands of the Republican party as well, providing a stronger counter-weight to President Obama, placing a stronger break on his agenda and enabling a united congressional agenda going the other way. With direct election of Senators, it may take longer, if ever, for this state majority to express itself in the national elections.
Rick Perry seems to have some thinking along these lines, seeing the 17th amendment as an error. While it is unlikely a repeal could happen, it would make for an interesting study to see what impact the 17th amendment has had on acceleration of the progressive agenda through the 20th century and what lessons it could provide on how to compensate for this loss of state control over the Federal government.
When Canada hit the fiscal wall and had to balance it’s books, there are two places you didn’t want to be; government employee or dependent on government money in any of it’s guises.
I think Obama and his crowd see the end of the gravy train coming and are building in so many dependencies that they imagine that it cannot be changed. All they are doing in fact is guaranteeing the depth of hardship. If individuals are looking for adjustments to make that will limit the damage, it is to wean your business or family from any government money. It is going to dry up.
There are hard limits. As mentioned above, there isn’t any money. Oddly the electorate in it’s immense wisdom voted in divided government, not trusting either with power. The triumph of experience over hope.
From the White Lightning thread http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/12/18/white-lightning/#comment-231301
This comes as the first indictments in LIBOR rock UBS http://tinyurl.com/c738zsn
Will Joe Biden “waste a crisis” by failing to investgate the possibility that because “The love of money is the root of all evil”, the scions of the LIBOR conspirators tend to become mass murderers?
It turns out that there actually IS a way to eliminate public school violence.
I have no intention of making excuses for Obama. Rather, I would like consevatives, Republicans, or whatever they want to call themselves these days, to examine their own hearts and philosophical antecedents more closely. The GOP does not have a message that anybody cares about. They are unable to put together a winning coalition, not even against an unpopular, enfeebled, Affirmative Action president. Why?
Why did so many choose to interpret the “You didn’t build that” comment as an attack on their personal businesses even though that obviously was not what Obama was saying?
Why did Rahm’s comment raise so many hackles? The Chinese crisis-and-opportunity trope goes all the way back to Kennedy and Nixon. It’s right here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_%22crisis%22
Obama and Rahm are in error, but they are not in the kind of error they are here being charged with. They are dangerous, but not for the reasons you think. They are dangerous precisely because the same disruption of truth and tradition which brought about the Enlightenment and all its connotated forms (including the US Constitution) has reached its mature form in these men. They are not the enemies of the constitutional republic, they are the essence of it. And that is why the GOP can not beat them: the GOP is just a wilted and mealy-mouthed version of what the Democrats are in strength—radicals screaming for liberty, license, and privilege.
It’s like a bumper sticker reading “Cthulhu for President: Why choose the lesser evil?“
Re:65. SBW (aka Roughcoat) Hyksos.
The Eastern kings that ruled Egypt during the Sixteenth Dynasty were indeed called “Hyksos” by the Greeks. The Gobpt were also called Copt, thus Egypt. Today the Arabic word is Mitzra. The Hebrews called them Mitzraim. The Egyptians did indeed hate these Eastern kings. They had invaded with the use of the new chariot, having been invented by them or borrowed from the Phoenicians. They easily walked right in with little or no resistance.
It is easy to understand why the Hebrews were not slaves at this time. The word Hebrew (from egyptian Abiru) means “from beyond the great river Euphrates”. They were practically neighbors; both considered shepherd. It was not until after the ouster of the Amori were the Hebrew put into subjection as slaves by either Ahmos or Amenhotep.
It is thought by many as these Easterners having come from upper Mesopotamia, from the kingdom of Mari, or as called in Scripture, Amori or Amorites (English). Ahmos did drive the remnant of the Amori from Lower Egypt and Amenhotep completed the conquest of the Levant, driving them across the Jordan River. There they remained until the Hebrews encountered them during the Exodus just before they entered Canaan.
Moses’ Egyptian adoptive mother was Thermuses, probably the daughter of Amenhotep and sister of Thutmos the first. Thutmos and Moses grew up together in Pharaoh’s court. They each became generals in the Egyptian military. Moses was sent to Upper Egypt to quell the invasion of Ethiopia where he was successful. He married the daughter of the King of Ethiopia. Scripture calls her his “Cushite wife”. (see works of Josephus).
Thutmos II was jealous of Moses and Moses had to go into exile. The only country available to him was Midian on the East coast of Aqaba. 40 years later Moses returned under the direction of God and led the Hebrews out. The Pharaoh of the Exodus would have been Thutmos III. The timing is correct corresponding with the theory of the early date of the Exodus.
10. Matt
If you find something that quacks like a duck and threatens and then goes around the Constitution on numerous times, I’m thinking it may be more like a parakeet, an otter, or worst, a unicorn.
But it never could be a tyrant, because tyrants are centered and thoughtful beings who know about lots of things that are simply not true. They then pursue them vigorously.
No…a marmot perhaps. I may have that confused with wolverine.
I know how you feel Matt, I often get frustrated and irritated with banal propositions. But never with my own. To your apparent point: Conservatives are silly to worry about Barack because he’s finding his way to tyranny by accident rather than acumen. In the long game, what’s the difference if we all end up serfs?
37. agimarc
I managed to do it to myself once hydroplaning a Ford Expedition. Lucky I didn’t roll the beast. Cheers -
Good for you. Mine was a Toyota 4Runner. The sense of wind driven pirouette to 15 degrees off true vehicle vector at 60 mph was exhilarating. Hit the first concrete barrier at 45 degrees and bounced across the roadway hitting the center divide backwards and flipped over on driver’s side. When the Officer got there he asked the assembled multitude, “Was the driver taken by EMS – was he OK? They all pointed to me and the officer looked me up and down like he was seeing at a ghost.
“Are you really OK?”
“My left wrist is a little sore.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Good for you.”
Remind me of the time I flew into a cane field on approach to Royal Kaanapoli airfield in Maui in 1974, and what my “Pappy” used to say: “Too soon old; too late smart.”
There really is such a thing as grace and mercy.
And for me – in spades.
Don’t know about the President ‘Pac Man’ Obama analogy, but my better half suggested it is like a ‘cat coughing up the same hairball’ analogy.