[rescue package] let's bend the rules

Couldn't hold back on this one:

Analysts expect the government would waive any antitrust concerns related to Lloyds and HBOS. “In more normal times, a tie-up … wouldn't have even been considered because of the competition issues,” CreditInsights analyst Simon Adamson told Bloomberg. “These aren't normal times.”

At the same time:

World banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, are pumping $US360 billion into global markets in a coordinated effort to avert a lock-up of the financial system.

Isn't that interesting? Forgive the logic, if it is faulty but it looks a little like this to me:

Sub-prime lending, billionaire boys' club type speculation with people's funds, hedge funds et al, egged on by advertising, created both unreal expectations of what constitutes the good life and gave a pie-in-the-sky way to get it - credit and mortgages, together with essentially bad financial advice.

The bottom dropped out and who is poised to 'help'? Why the big finance of course and governments gratefully step to one side and waive financial regulations, e.g. anti-trust laws, in these 'abnormal times'.

Wonderful. Net effect?

Well, given that the average citizen has been effectively owned by his/her bank since the late 60s and given that those banks are now effectively owned by the big money e.g. the Fed regulated, in effect, by the FOMC, then the big money now, in real terms, directly controls the average cit and can leverage governments worldwide.

So, in the case of the Fed, this means New York and this in turn means Morgan etc. Take a quick look at their history.

Now, given that it was the actions of the finance, in the first place, which got the world into trouble, [yes, of course it was technically our aspirations and ambitions but the finance was surely playing on our human folly and vulnerability in the most cynical manner, e.g. sub-prime lending], then again and again we come back to the same question - was all this the result of incompetence or design?

Either way, 'short and curlies' is the phrase hovering over my mind just now.

Those in the business are talking up the economy - that we've now bottomed out and are looking at a jittery return of confidence in the next few years and it may well be so but the difference is who will be in the driving seat once that happens and where will we all be?

UPDATE: Courtesy of Anon. It's on the edge, with lots of underlining for emphasis but watch the vid anyway and chew it over.

[orgone] accumulating craziness and stripping away inhibitions

Wilhelm Reich, [whose brother Third became famous in a separate sphere], was operating at a time of great craziness, the 30s. My own study is more from the 1890s through to the early 30s, when equally weird things were happening and social experimentation was at it's height.

One manifestation of this was the hypothesized existence of orgone which, as Wiki says, entailed:

... an extrapolation of the Freudian concept of libido as a physical, bioenergetic force, developed by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in the late 1930s, who generalized and abstracted it far beyond Freud's semi-metaphoric use.

Reich's followers, such as Charles R. Kelley, went to the extent of claiming orgone to be the creative substratum in all of nature, and compared it to Mesmer's animal magnetism, the Odic force of Carl Reichenbach and Henri Bergson's Élan vital.

The dangers in upgrading a metaphor into a science and surrounding it with scientific trappings is especially poignant with orgone:

Freud focused on a solipsistic conception of the mind, in which unconscious and inherently selfish primal drives (primarilly the sexual drive, or libido) were suppressed or sublimated by internal representations (cathexes) of parental figures; for Reich libido was a life-affirming force repressed by society directly ...

In plain English, if you could release this sexual energy and accumulate it in an orgone accumulator, then the sky was the limit. With a world backdrop of Nazi Germany, eugenics and the like, such a concept was always going to be seized upon by both the bohemian world and twould be examined by the crazies at the top of the political tree.

Politically, it was a double-edged sword in that while it could be harnessed as a destructor of the old order of values and society, a desirable outcome for the new order, it was, at the same time, going to free humans from all social constraints and that was something up with which governments were not going to put, especially Nazi Germany, where Reich had offended Hitler anyway.

Orgone was at once anarchic and destructive, a cranked up form of hedonistic rush, where one followed basic impulses rather than any consensus of rules. It was free sex with a codicil that the only law was to do as you wished, every last person, in some sort of sexual healing claimed to set the world to rights.

In a largely sympathetic article on Reich, Gerald Grow wrote:

During the 1940s, Reich became more and more isolated, working with a small circle of trainees and close supporters and a wider circle of kindred spirits, including A. S. Neill, founder of Summerhill school, and William Steig, the cartoonist ... Like many charismatic figures, Reich could be overbearing (Sharaf reports that Reich warned one student: “Keep away from me. I am overwhelming. I burn through people.”), and his faith in his creative thinking repeatedly led him beyond what some considered to be sanity.

Therein lie two interesting threads - A.S. Neill and the borderline of sanity. Anyone over forty years of age in education is probably going to know that Neill's theories had enormous currency in education, as Spock's did with families and were one of the key factors leading to the disastrous 70s "open plan" education experiment on which it is hard to find any negative online reviews, due to education being dominated today largely by the same people. Nevertheless, this touches on the issue:

The construction of open classroom schools declined by the mid-1970s. Concerns about noise and distraction encouraged educators to return to a traditional approach. Although the open classroom movement lost popularity, certain aspects of its philosophy and methods were reshaped and used.

Were they ever and now you can observe the result - less literacy, less numeracy, inadequate socialization and inadequate interface between education and the corporate world into which graduates must survive.

But that's another issue.

[job hunting] from portsmouth to queensferry

This job hunting has some unexpected sidelights to it.

I was talking to a supermarket sub-manager about running his staffing programme when what looked like the young chap in charge of the produce section came through to the alcove where we were speaking and said that a customer had asked him for half a head of lettuce. Produce apparently told him they only sold whole heads of lettuce.

Produce then told the sub-manager the moron was causing trouble and at that moment, what was clearly the angry woman herself appeared, at which Produce turned round to her and said, "and this lady wants the other half."

The sub-manager asked me if I'd wait, smoothed it over and then told Produce, "That was impressive. We like people who think on their feet. You're from Portsmouth, right?"

"Right, sir, South Hayling," said Produce.

"Well, why did you leave Portsmouth?"

"There's nothing but tarts and footballers down there."

"Really?" the sub-manager said, while I cringed. "My wife comes from Purbrook!"

Produce replied, "Gosh - did she ever try out for Pompey?"

[dead pubs] dead society

Toque says, about this pub:

The plan is to demolish Chequers and build some flats. Local residents do not want the pub to be demolished ...

That's as maybe and this blog thoroughly agrees with the sentiment. However, business is business and if it's not paying, it has to be sold. The real question is why people stopped drinking there in any numbers anyway.

The answers include the smoking ban, supermarket and off-licence booze, massive franchise establishments, changing fast and trendy lifestyles, poor service, the change downwards in the nature of the remaining clientele and so on but the simple fact is that people are not coming through that door, except in search of a pee.

Why? In my case - the cost. With lunch at £6, dinner main course at £10 and a beer at £3, just one evening with your wife or mates adds up to a substantial bill. Only the white collar worker in relatively safe employment can afford that any more.

One of this blogger's major character flaws is to continually ask why. So why has the price gone into the stratosphere and the pub become a less cheery place to go now? More importantly, what ultimate price will be paid by the society by removing one of the key pillars in British social cohesion? Like the coffee houses of the time of the men of letters, the pub was always the ideas exchange, where social values and community cohesion were reinforced.

Was the acquisitive society on speed a natural consequence of change or was there any social engineering behind this, long ago?

[the viper inside] pre-emptive paranoia alive and well

Yeah, right, Mr. McNab. How did you ever get inside as a church mentor in the first place?

Don't answer that.

Brits of a certain age will also recall David Jenkins and his 'conjuring trick with bones' statement and there is a healthy [?] tradition of clerics worming their way into positions of influence within the church and then doing dirt on it.

Why would a national newspaper choose to run a giant poster like yesterdays' in prime position on the front page and run this guff as front page news?

Why would a modern newspaper choose to run a denunciation when there had been no positive assertion otherwise which had grabbed the popular imagination and needed counteracting in the first place ?

These pre-emptive denunciations have a history too.

The Dome on the Rock, in its Inner Octagonal Arcade, [then stressed twice in the Outer Octagonal just for good measure], assures the world that Jesus of Nazareth is in no way divine.

Why? Why would they even bother?

Why wouldn't they just lay out their own stall and let it go at that? Why, today, would anyone bother decrying a religion which is supposedly down on its knees and virtually snuffed out? Why does Christmas need to be renamed by the paranoid when it is just a historic tradition with little modern relevance to its roots, according to the renamers? If multiculturalism is the reason, then surely this festival takes its place as one of the many under the tolerant umbrella of relativism?

Why bother pro-actively discriminating against this particular one? And a second question: 'How scholastically honest is it to do so?' And why would a university administration go into a Christian chapel, remove and lock away a cross, declaring the chapel open to all religions?

Do you detect a whiff of obsession with these people? What is it that they actually fear?

[british airports authority] interesting decision

Interesting priorities, in that BAA chose to keep Stansted and let the others go.

Assuming that they are not complete idiots, that they have their own forward planning and no doubt have inside info on government forward planning and realizing they had to sell off any two of the three, then why would they release the multi-billion pound Gatwick, first particularly as the DfT said:

We do not support options for two or three new runways at Stansted.

Any ideas?

[charisma] is it calculated or natural

The prettiest picture I could find of Mata Hari

Mata Hari illustrated two things, as far as I can see:

1. how people whom you would not actually describe as 'beautiful' can carry themselves in such a way that they 'create' charisma and an air of mystery [the French are masters of this], as distinct from being natural charismatic as people;

2. that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Anne Boleyn [forgive me for not using the other spelling] was also counted not beautiful and yet she had enough to keep the red-blooded Henry sufficiently enthralled but out of her bed for around seven years. How many more, both men and women, could be counted in that category? Would you put Groucho Marx in there?

I suspect there's a lot of arrogance and 'lack of caring beneath the caring' in many charismatic people and they tend to polarize opinion. On the other hand, just the simple character trait of being interested in and caring for others [and I hold up my mother in this category] illustrates the point well. Pity you never got to know her though undoubtedly yours was also the goods.

I wonder how much of a role a smile plays. McDonalds seems to think it's pretty important.

A detractor made the comment on an earlier post that, 'Really, it's being such a cynic that keeps you happy, isn't it? The thing about being in a down time is to remember it is not everyone's fault, may not be yours, may be no one's at all!'

Well no, cynicism doesn't keep a person happy - quite the opposite. She was right, however, in the sense that a positive outlook itself is more pleasant for all around and that's what I think she was driving at. Which brings us to the next point.

People prefer other people to have cheery countenances 24/7 and the vacuum created by current social conditions means that there is a premium on a smile and a person with one [though not a permasmile] is more likely to do well. That, in a way, is a form of charisma by default.

[odd one out] and why

Answer:

They're all from London except Jane Seymour, who came from a little further out and calls it Middlesex.

[the myth of multi-tasking] inefficient and shallow

How To Shower - Men Vs Women - The most popular videos are here

Gender differences?

My friend here has a theory that no one actually "multi-tasks" - he or she is "time-slicing", i.e. creating a timetable mosaic of filled in spaces.

Whilst many agree that women do this better than men, there are downsides to it, e.g.:

An example of a negative impact that divided attention or multitasking can cause is when someone’s attention is stretched as in “divided attention,” memory is negatively affected. Psychologist John Arden (2002) writes in his book about theories on multitasking that “Multitasking decreases your memory ability.” He also claims that for every new task that you take on “you dilute your investment in each task.” (Arden, 2002)

Also, it's a myth that it is more efficient:

Dr. David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, claims that multitasking can actually slow you down (Seven, 2004). He says that through research he has discovered that the more complex activities a person takes on, the more time it actually takes in the long run. His point is in agreement with Arden’s (2002) written views. Again, when you take on multiple tasks, you cannot perform them all at an optimum level. Meyer is also in agreement with Arden that when you are multitasking too much, you can experience short-term memory problems or difficulty concentrating.

... and:

Dr. Glenn Wilson (2005) recently performed a study for Hewlett Packard to explore the productivity of multitasking. What he discovered is astonishing. The average worker’s functioning IQ, a temporary qualitative state, drops 10 points when multitasking. That is more than double the four point drop that occurs when someone smokes marijuana.

As for the gender difference:

Dr. Marcel Just, Director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University agrees with Meyer. His studies on brain mapping, with participants between the ages of 18 and 32, show that women only score higher when asked to listen to two things at the same time (Just, 2001).

I like the vertical, linear model. Whilst every effort is made to fill each space with effect energy usage, as my friend says, you can only do one thing at a time. When you split your attention to concentrate on another thing, even for a short time, the divided attention dilemma comes in.

He points out that it depends on the task.

When putting the spuds in to cook, it's pointless sitting watching them, so you do another task. Well, that's agreed but time is still linear. I was thinking more of the general manager walking along with his entourage, with people coming at him, left, right and centre, to whom he replies in shotgun, staccato fashion.

I'd like to do a time and motion study on him to see just how efficient he is overall. There is the little matter of the depreciation in the quality of his attention due to the constant switching, no matter how second nature it becomes.

Certainly there are tasks which can run themselves and so you spread your attention over different fields but in the end, it is still linear, time.

Is it a myth to say that multi-tasking is more efficient and it's certainly not more in-depth? Is it also a myth that women do it significantly better? There is a definite psychological mindset [of which women have only a part stake in the territory] in which the person sees him/herself as more effective if doing things this way. It's like a self-reassurance he/she wants those who matter to share.

At this point, the whole shebang is brought to a shuddering halt by observation, i.e. in the workplace, women DO seem to perform multiple tasks better. Why? If you accept the psychological test results, then there has to be another reason.

My friend comes up with a reason - women are more interested in doing it this way, therefore they've had tons of practice, therefore they do it better. Put her on a rugby field with it's intricate plays and would she do as well? Put her on a dance floor and she'll most certainly drop into her rhythm as if it's second nature, which it is.

Another thing to look at is exactly which tasks she is actually multi-tasking - how demanding is each and how in-depth is each? How much lateral thinking is required?

In the end, one would have to conclude that the gender differences in this are minor but the differences in life stories, interests and what has been practised so far may be immense. These are erroneously construed, by many, as gender differences.

[the power of people] separate yet together

Firstly, Ordo asks today:

Are we seeing the beginning of another Great Depression?

We're certainly on the brink of one, but whether we totter over the edge or not depends on how world governments respond to the current financial crisis. Unfortunately, nobody really has a clue what to do.

Martin Kelly has similar thoughts.

Ordo, I see it, not as being dependent on what governments do but on what WE do, as people. Guthrum's and Wat Tyler's piece touch on the matter and David Farrer quotes Vox Day:

This isn't a failure of free market capitalism. It's precisely the opposite, it's the failure of government-controlled faux market capitalism.

An example of good intervention, on the other hand, is the way that a threatened blogger can be supported. Read Alwyn's piece on this:

Last year there was a blog consensus that the blogosphere would stand up to rich people trying to bully individual bloggers when Asmanov went after Bloggerheads, where is that blog support for Kez [Kezia Duggdale ]?

There are other issues as well, such as social engineering [read Richard Havers on this] and people out there who can put things so much better in one paragraph than I can in five strung out posts, such as:

Ultimately a Fabian State will be a “Failed State”, under UN current definitions, given the administration costs associated with a deliberately destabilised civil society, and the absence of industry and jobs resulting from a high taxation bureaucratic regime that administers lorry-loads of “sand” to the economic “cogs”. The nature of this failed state must necessarily be militaristic.

Here is another beauty:

Incompetent state structures have been put in place, at monumental expense, to substitute for the State Destroyed structures, those of the “family”, primarily, and continue to grow their legal mandate for ever more state intrusion into the personal lives of the citizens, all in the name of social cohesion, which the Fabian thought processes have set out to, and succeeded in, destroying/undermining in the first place.

Anon now waxes lyrical but also to the point:

Imagine that, like some kind of science fiction dictator, you intended to rule the world. You would probably have pinned over your desk a list something like this:

[1] Eliminate personal knowledge.
Make it hard for people to know about themselves, how they function, what a human being is, or how a human fits into wider, natural systems. This will make it, impossible for the human to separate natural from artificial, real from unreal. You provide the answers to all questions.

[2] Eliminate points of comparison.
Comparisons can be found in earlier societies, older language forms and cultural artefacts, including print media. Eliminate or museumize indigenous cultures, wilderness and nonhuman life forms. Re-create internal human experience—instincts, thoughts, and spontaneous, varied feelings—so that it will not evoke the past.

[3] Separate people from each other.
Reduce interpersonal communication through life-styles that emphasise separateness. When people gather together, be sure it is for a prearranged experience that occupies all their attention at once. Spectator sports are excellent, so are circuses, elections, and any spectacles in which focus is outward and interpersonal exchange is subordinated to mass experience.

[4] Unify experience, especially encouraging mental experience at the expense of sensory experience.
Separate people's minds from their bodies, idealise the mind. Sensory experience cannot be eliminated totally, so it should be driven into narrow areas. An emphasis on sex as opposed to sense may be useful because it is powerful enough to pass for the whole thing and it has a placebo effect.

[5] Occupy the mind.
Once people are isolated in their minds, fill the brain with prearranged experience and thought. Content is less important than the fact of the mind being filled. Free-roaming thought is to be discouraged at all costs, because it is difficult to control.

[6] Encourage drug use.
Recognise that total repression is impossible and so expressions of revolt must be contained on the personal level. Drugs will fill in the cracks of dissatisfaction, making people unresponsive to organised expressions of resistance.

[7] Centralise knowledge and information.
Having isolated people from each other and minds from bodies - at this point whatever comes from outside will enter directly into all brains at the same time with great power and believability.

[8] Redefine happiness and the meaning of life in terms of new and increasingly uprooted philosophy.
Anything makes sense in a void. Formal mind structuring is simple. Most important, avoid naturalistic philosophies; they lead to uncontrollable awareness. An emphasis on sex as opposed to sense may be useful because it is powerful enough to pass for the whole thing and it has a placebo effect.

They may well be the Statist's Standing Orders but in Britain, say, there is also a strong innate, quiet determination within the indigenous people to passively resist this seemingly all-powerful push and ultimately one has to believe that the human being will win out and here's where I part from my humanistic brothers in that I firmly believe in that biblical expression 'ye are gods'.

This expression does not say, IMHO, that each of us is an island in him/herself but rather that there is a bit of the deity in each of us, connected to the whole and unable to exist on its own, just as the hand or foot cannot exist without the rest of the body and mind. I believe that that is what caused all the trouble way back when it was discovered what G-d was up to - recreating really good things in a package called Man.

I believe the primary purpose of a certain force I nether fully understand nor wish to understand was to separate man from his higher self, to bestialize him, to do dirt on him and this force has legions of accolytes because it is the province of the weak-willed, the ones who prefer the easy solution and are attracted by bells and whistles.

That explains a lot, such as why Man sees himself as controlling his destiny when he can't, why he sees himself at the centre of his universe, when he's not, why he destroys so easily but can only build under certain circumstances. We don't like to see ourselves as mere cogs in the machine but people like the Australian aborigines find no problem in that, in being at one with the whole of nature. We don't like to see ourselves as the star's tennis balls, do we?

Why are we satisfied with staying in our little boxes and not relating neighbour to neighbour? Get down to specifics and look at WW2 or any other conflict where the people have ultimately won out, [only to go under again].

Right here is where some of us part ways, I suppose.

The socialist construct is that social cohesion, being such a powerful force, is best served by mindless Socialism, as Anon described above, of forcing people to combine in ultimately unproductive and inefficient ventures, whilst killing off incentive.

Some of us, though, point to two things:

1. the silent [divine?] power which is produced when humans combine for good purposes, such power, by definition, only operating well when it is free of constraints and yokes and is a voluntary combining of individual powers;

2. the vital importance in humans being able to pursue personal goals in an atmosphere which encourages that and supports it without applying constraints. So if you've worked all your life for certain things, the politics of envy is abandoned. Rather than glance enviously across at our neighbour, we try to do well ourselves and find people are willing to help people who try to help themselves.

The State is powerful and creates it's own new autocratic entity to sustain itself but the divinity inside people who combine for good always ultimately wins out, though at a terrible cost.

Phew! [What did I just have for breakfast?]