It was Marcus Aurelius who said “Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.” Looking toward our future in this age of industrial and technological super-boom, maybe whats looming just ahead, is the justice of a balance only nature must keep. In other words, the eventual, equally unrelenting… Super-bust. Its a topic I’ll continue to discuss from a variety of perspectives going forward. The content shown below is mostly reiterated from here, it describes how something just like this can happen, only with our financial structure.

Financial speculator and billionaire, George Soros states in his FT.com commentary: “the current crisis is the culmination of a super-boom that has lasted for more than 60 years.” In June’s Higher Rates Reflect Default Risk we described the end of the last credit boom: “In 1928, the U.S. Treasury Bond similarly broke out of the channel and rose to a higher yield. This coincided with the end of ‘easy’ money which forced the deleveraging of the economy and concluded with the financial crisis of 1929-1932.” Compare the two Treasury Bond Yield charts below. In 2005-2006 higher bond rates “broke out of the channel” and inflicted damage on the housing market. This marked “the end of ‘easy’ money.” Similarly since 2006, there has also been a flight to quality.

George Soros explains what happens next: “if federal funds were lowered beyond a certain point, the dollar would come under renewed pressure and long-term bonds would actually go up in yield. Where that point is, is impossible to determine. When it is reached, the ability of the Fed to stimulate the economy comes to an end.” As we described last June, we expect 10 year Treasury Bonds to be sold for cash in the panic, just as occurred at the end of the last credit cycle. Billionaire investor Julian Robertson agrees. As he revealed to Fortune: “the biggest bet that Robertson has in his own portfolio at the moment” is “long the price of two-year Treasury and short the price of the ten-year Treasury.”

HR1955 like most Mistakes of the Day do, makes me sick to my stomach. It is not that this law could (and likely will) be abused, but the sheer need for it to exist.

You see, America has become entertainment for the world. The respected leader turned clown; our country found of freedom continues to pass legislation which cannibalizes that — her very soul. Soon, what will be left of her magic act? Likely only a stage littered with the disgust of what its audience propelled upon its ill performers as its final Act.

Rather than address the shift in social mobility, the current state of our wars and destruction around the globe, our lack of an equilibrium or development of sustainability, or even in the broadest sense how these things act together to orchestrate an on-going decline of our society, we choose to fill our Congress (and our minds) with things as trivial as baseball and celebrity.

Forget her business savvy, her amber waves of grain, and all the magic she’s shown us thus far. For, America is not the salt and garbage stew of the Atlantic, the ashy remains of the fiery West, nor the litter covered grounds of her monuments. No, America is an idea. One that unfortunately is slowly turning sour. While its officials use a magician’s misdirection, games and other social engineering polar tricks, we “Romans” are trapped in the Colosseum of our own excess.

On the stage of the world, we have become the magician’s rabbit; entertainment for the business of show. As an audience we’ve grown too large to leave our seats, too disinterested and egotistical to pay attention to the show, so jaded we have no appreciation even for our own existence. These are times troubled by man.

For all those pedestrian-minded simpletons who walk along the surface of liberty so many have fought to protect, I ask that you awaken from your lazy, sleep-walking, dream. The framers of our Constitution knew this day would come and speak to us all in the spirit of the law. Perhaps it is time we listened to their ghosts. It seems alive, they had eyes with which to see centuries gone, what we cannot see upon us, now.

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
– James Madison, US fourth president, 1751-1836

The final frontier isn’t a new country to be discovered; its not the ocean depths, nor the heights of the sky, and it is not, despite what people tell you, the vastness of space. No, the final frontier is the Internet my friend, its the virtual space we can create, destroy, use to enlighten and enrich or to bias and deprive. It is truly… the last bastion of human hope that freedom will prevail (for now). In all the venues of our existence one thing remains true: When a judgment is made about any information, excepting its usage by human beings of course, mostly only ignorance can only follow.

Here’s someone who wants to give the bad guys the final frontier. How? By making various terms and their study a special, rare, or otherwise protected thing. This has always led to the formation of counter-cultural structures (because people won’t accept your judging them or discounting their contribution to society). Maybe you missed the war on drugs? Its a misleading campaign which has prescribed the creation of hundreds of drug-related counter cultures which only help to allow the war on it to persist. This notion of censoring what you fear being studied is very much the act of the Ostrich, sticking his head in ground.

“I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector … on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism,” Frattini told Reuters.

It stands to reason, that once you censor, you empower those to which you cannot silence.

There is an article I read which I can’t seem to say enough is Absolute Genius — because thats what its describing: absolute genius. Its called Programming can Ruin Your Life. I keep saying absolute genius because, for me, all of this is truth about reality. Every bit in the article.

I feel what the author has described here, is sort of the weight to which genius can burden. I covered and explained this idea that genius grows exponentially through its own internally created pressures or burdens in a series of essays I wrote entitled “Neurogenesis”. Maybe one day I’ll republish them here. In the meantime, let me lay in with examples of this wonderful piece of literary work… and give you an idea of the bold diagnosis this writer has made of most Programmers (or, as I state in Neurogensis, most geniuses).

When faced with an interesting programming problem your mind will chew it over in the background. Maybe it’s an algorithm you need to develop, maybe its a tricky architecture problem, maybe its data that needs a model. It doesn’t matter. Your mind will quietly work the problem over in search of a solution. The ah-ha! moment will come when you’re in the shower, or playing Tetris. This practice of constant churning will slowly work its way into the rest of your life. Each problem or puzzle you encounter will start its own thread; the toughest and most troubling of which will be blocking.

This all seems very, very accurate to me. I’ m even quite certain that this sort of problem-solving phenomena translate to other careers too. In fact, I contend it translates across so many disciplines because this describes a human compulsion toward optimization (or the providing of a solution of an optimization problem). I contend optimization is the only problem ever being solved during all human problem-solving. But, thats a contention that takes us to deeper place than I want to go with this post. Don’t worry, we’ll get there some day.

One thing I notice about other people is how little they think and I mean that about everything. I can’t imagine how one could exist with such precious little going on inside them as I find with most people. In fact what I’m noticing is not how little those people think but how much I myself think by comparison. I always wonder,”Why don’t they just stop and think for a second?” Thats a good example though.

No wait, its not good, its a Programmers example, its perfect! I’m wondering why others are NOT thinking, in effect, thats just more thinking I have to do [for them] (or thats how I observe the case to be). You see, in problem-solving with Programmers, what I realize is, they’re always thinking, because they’re always programming. But, consider it, and it should only make more sense to you even if you’re a non-programmer.

If your job is to feed exotic and somewhat exclusive phrases of a dynamic and specific language into some device and then predict outcomes as well as manage the unpredictable outcomes, you will become as much like that device as possible. This is the mammalian method-trait called mimicry. This method-trait is true of how human beings grasp information at all through all language. Progressively over time the input and output of procedures of communication with others grow as we do, embedding in our minds the pathology to interact socially. Or as it could also be described, so that we’re able to feed other people information and predict outcomes as well as manage the unpredictable ones.

So Programmers, like anyone learning or coping with anything follow a pattern of mimicry in order that they become even better at translating these exotic phrases and languages and predicting outcomes (or at least as close as they can become to the machine). But, mimicry has its draw backs in this case since we’re now trying to mimic something not nearly human — a programming language.

Programmers become obsessed with perfection. This is why they are constantly talking about rewrites. They cannot resist optimum solutions. Perfection requires tossing aside mediocre ideas in search of great ones. A good programmer would rather leave a problem temporarily unsolved than solve it poorly. A good solution takes into account all predictable outcomes and solves the largest number of them in the most efficient way. This mindset prevents you from writing code with limited utility and life span. While its a wonderful trait to have in programming, the demons of scope and efficiency will start to assert themselves on your ordinary life. You will avoid taking care of simple things because the solution is inelegant or simply feels wrong. Time to think will no doubt yield a better result, you’ll say.

This statement by the author acts to solidify my point as well as his; that an obsession for perfection is actually a shedding of the human condition. This means Programmers have trained their minds to be inhuman as such that they cannot make a choice knowingly acceptant that it will be deficient or have a limited life time. This kind of avoidance of care for simple things such as is described is something well known about the personality of most Programmers.

Finally, note the point above that thinking in this way reduces the number of your potential choices to those seemingly optimal at design time. This means Programmers only do things that they analyze as optimal in that moment. So, a night out on the town where one acts foolishly without regard for themselves to a degree, as well as the feelings of the others around (whom act and have cascading affect on those they surround thereafter) — throwing caution to the wind — would not be very attractive to someone measuring each element of their experience in terms of optimality toward building a method based in perfection.

And, it is for some of those reasons that genius tends to burden. Or, as I have put it in Neugenesis: Elegant thought is a symptom of a passionate, sensitive mind, its expression is nothing more than the easing of its burden.