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by blanc » Thu Aug 25, 2011 2:33 am
by Feilan » Thu Aug 25, 2011 2:34 am
(which i assume is ((part of)) the hoped for trajectory).
...would this horse prefer apples or carrots or both?
by ilyinternet » Thu Aug 25, 2011 6:32 am
Jeff wrote:Thanks, Joe. Coined it for a blog post that is almost ready to post, but ran a google search myself first before claiming it.
by cptmarginal » Thu Aug 25, 2011 11:50 pm
Americas favorite investigative reporter, John Stossel, tackles our favorite myths in his characteristic style and challenges us to look at life differently. Myths and Misconceptions covered in the book include: lIs the media unbiased? lAre our schools helping or hurting our kids? lDo singles have a better sex life than married people? lDo we have less free time than we used to? lIs outsourcing bad for American workers? lSuburban sprawl is ruining America. lMoney makes people happier. lThe world is too crowded. lWere drowning in garbage. lProfiteering is evil. lSweatshops exploit people. John Stossel takes on these and many more misconceptions, misunderstandings, and plain old stupidity in this collection that will offer much to love for Give Me a Break fans, and show everyone why conventional wisdom economic, political, or social is often wrong.
ABC News correspondent Stossel mines his 20/20 segments for often engaging, frequently tendentious challenges to conventional wisdom, presenting a series of "myths" and then deploying an investigative journalism shovel to unearth "truth." This results in snappy debunkings of alarmism, witch-hunts, satanic ritual abuse prosecutions and marketing hokum like the irradiated-foods panic, homeopathic medicine and the notion that bottled water beats tap. Stossel's libertarian convictions make him particularly fond of exposés of government waste and regulatory fiascoes, which are usually effective but lead inexorably to blanket denunciations of "monster government" and sermons on the wisdom of the market. Sloganeering—"Myth: The EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) will make America less sexist. Truth: The EEOC will torment people and enrich lawyers"—sometimes crowds out objectivity. The author's complacent glosses on overpopulation and global warming ("we can build dykes and move back from the coasts") are especially glib and one-sided. Fans of Stossel's similarly opinionated bestseller Give Me a Break will eat up this new book, but other readers may wince when the author's ideology overshadows the facts.
by Wombaticus Rex » Fri Aug 26, 2011 4:14 am
It states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies. The reasons behind the oligarchization process are: the indispensability of leadership; the tendency of all groups, including the organization leadership, to defend their interests; and the passivity of the led individuals more often than not taking the form of actual gratitude towards the leaders.
Michels stressed several factors that underlie the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Darcy K. Leach summarized them briefly as: "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts." Any large organization, Michels pointed out, has to create a bureaucracy in order to maintain its efficiency as it becomes larger—many decisions have to be made daily that cannot be made by large numbers of disorganized people. For the organization to function effectively, centralization has to occur and power will end up in the hands of a few. Those few—the oligarchy—will use all means necessary to preserve and further increase their power.
by Wombaticus Rex » Mon Aug 29, 2011 1:27 am
Review: A First-Rate Madness – Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness
Nassir Ghaemi
5.0 out of 5 stars One Huge Point, Many Smaller Insights,August 28, 2011
When I am torn between a 4 and a 5 I read all the other reviews. I rate this book a five because it advances appreciation for the integration of psychology with history, and contributes somewhat – not the last word – to the rather vital discussion of why so many of our “leaders” are pedestrian, and what marks those who rise to extraordinary heights in the face of complex near catastrophic challenges.
Those critical of the book for the relative brevity of the biographic sections, and the occasional mistakes, are in my view missing the huge point that really matters: in a time of extreme complexity and ambiguity, leaders with the most open of minds capable of very unconventional thinking are vital, and it just so happens that what what some call lunatic fringe or borderline personality have “the right stuff” for such times.
I have five pages of notes on this book. Below are some highlights and a few quotes.
The author refers to an inverse law of sanity and early on quotes Sherman as saying “In these times it is hard to say who are sane and who are insane.” That is precisely how I feel as I watch Wall Street, Big Oil, the Military-Industrial Complex, and a two-party tyranny with a lame President pretending they have not already driven the Republic over the cliff.
The author’s core argument is that in times of crisis, mentally ill leaders do better. While he exaggerates for effect, his essential argument is that “the establishment” produces sterile “well-adjusted” leaders who are best at following convention and staying within their “lanes in the road.”
He cites four positive outcomes for leadership by the mentally-divergent as I prefer to label it:
+ Realism (the “normal” over-estimate stability, future prospects, and ease of staying normal)
+ Resilience (constant struggles with adversity harden the mentally-divergent more than those born to privilege)
+ Empathy (deep pain in self can arouse deep empathy for others including the unconscious who know not what they do)
+ Creativity (not just unconventional solutions, but finding problems others have not even noticed)
QUOTE (11): This theory argues that depressed people aren’t depressed because they distort reality; they’re depressed because they see reality more clearly than other people do.
QUOTE (13): A key aspect of mania is the liberation of one’s thought processes…the emancipation of the intellect makes normal thinking seem pedestrian.
This is a good point to bring in Peter Drucker’s quote, “Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.”
QUOTE (15): The core of mania is impulsivity with heightened energy.
Abnormal personalities have three core traits in this book: neuroticism, extroversion, and openness to experience.
QUOTE (17): Citing German Psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, the first to connect insanity and genius, “Insanity is not a ‘regrettable accident’ but the ‘indispensable catalyst’ of genius.”
I am reminded of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That seems to sum up those who persist in doing the wrong things righter, throwing more money at everything from agriculture to water works without once stopping to do holistic analytics.
Although the biographies are shallow and focused on making the author’s case, I find interesting nuggets in all of them, and consider the most negative reviews of this book to be missing the point. It offers a break-out idea and calls into question the competence of our leaders. For a long free online look at what I am thinking, look up “Integrity at Scale” by Stephen Howard Johnson.
Mania facilitates integrative complexity. Persistence matters–demands independence of character.
QUOTE (32): Sherman on Grant “He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk.”
Ted Turner’s short bio is used to point out that CNN had integrity when he led it, and lost it when he left. This is also where the author observes that normal people severely over-estimate the degree of control and stability in their endeavors.
FDR on Churchill: He has a hundred ideas a day, four of which are good.
Churchill did not fit the times when both parties in England agreed that appeasement was the “bipartisan” course.
QUOTE (65): Churchill was relegated to the wilderness by Baldwin and others because his unconventional personna (partly reflecting his mood illness) provided an excuse to ignore his sadly realistic political judgment.
I am not a politician, but having been labeled “lunatic fringe” when I started the public Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) fight in 1992 with my article in Whole Earth Review, “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, and Intelligence: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security,” I can certainly see the insanity of my being on the sidelines while the Director of National Intelligence blows $80 billion a year on not much of anything worthwhile and fails to provide useful policy, acquisition, and operations decision-support for 96% of the Whole of Government.
Lincoln was a manic-depressive and deeply realistic and empathetic. Here I find my own mistake to chide the author on, he simply does not have the deep background needed. His representation of the Emancipation Proclamation is flat out wrong. Lincoln did NOT free the slaves in the North and South, and he only freed the slaves in the unoccupied south with reluctance and because of military necessity.
Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King attempted teen-age suicide. I learn that the black movement in the USA sought Gandhi out, and that he inspired them in their regard for non-violent resistance. I also learn that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King placed non-violent resistance above violent resistance, and (this is the part I did not know), violent resistance above passive acceptance.
Today in the USA 80% of the public is passively accepting a totally ignorant and corrupt federal government as well as the dominance of the 20% of the public that is flat-out ignorant, idiotic, and downright dangerous–the wing-nuts are on the march.
QUOTE (109): The real Martin Luther King was an “aggressive confrontational realist.”
Resilience is spawned by mental illness.
FDR specifically appreciated the “lunatic fringe,” observing that so many things that were “lunatic fringe” in his boyhood had become standard by the time of his presidency.
I learn that FDR refused to create a deficit burden on future Administrations despite the pressure to do so when he introduced Social Security. That is integrity. We lack that today in the federal government as well as state governments.
The chapter on John F. Kennedy for me is a stunning collage of the deep suffering over a young life that I had never understood.
The chapter on Hitler that upsets some people (the same people that missed Churchill’s praise of Hitler’s skill, energy, and focus) is fascinating.
QUOTE (207): Comparing the degeneration of Hitler in later years and the contrasting excellence of JFK, the author says “In leadership, and in life, drugs can make a major difference.”
The entire section on Bush, Blair, Nixon, and others is boring for me, I know all this and have little regard for most of our so-called leaders, many of them fronts for the special interests that consider nothing more than glorified pawns.
QUOTE (211): “Sanity…does not always, or even usually, produce good leadership.”
Homoclites are “those who follow a common rule.” I annotate: stay in their lanes and do not challenge convention.
The author’s chapter on Nixon is interesting, but he does not realize that Nixon was the victim of a coup by the Bush Gang. While I mention this, I do not believe such limitations detract from the total value of the book.
QUOTE (233): A key characteristic of a homoclite leader is that he or she is effective and successful in peacetime or prosperity, but fails during war or crisis.”
While I agree with that, I observe that the author does not provide for corruption and treason such as we have seen for too long at the highest levels of the US Government (political, political appointees, and compliant flag officers forgetting their Oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America).
I am reminded of Bob Gates as well as Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft and have the annotation: civility has replaced integrity as the core “value” for senior support staff.
The author makes it clear that Obama is a homoclite. I put the book down after a day’s reflections on and off well-satisfied with the book in every respect including price. Our leaders today STINK. They are good people trapped in a bad system and not only do they not know how to retire rich while still serving the public interest, they look askance at those of us who do know the answer to the riddle of public service, of how to achieve public intelligence and public integrity in the public interest.
I am reminded of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
by Gouda » Mon Aug 29, 2011 12:16 pm
by Jeff » Fri Sep 02, 2011 1:11 pm
September 1, 2011
Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American
By Matthew Vadum
Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.
A decade before the Motor-Voter law that required states to register voters at welfare offices was enacted, NAACP official Joe Madison explained the political economy of voter registration drives.
"When people are standing in line to get cheese and butter or unemployment compensation, you don't have to tell them how to vote," said Madison, now a radio talk show host in Washington, D.C. "They know how to vote."
Like Madison, Barack Obama grasped this basic truth when he worked for ACORN's Project Vote affiliate in 1992.
"All our people must know that politics and voting affects their lives directly," the future president said. "If we're registering people in public housing, for an example, we talk about aid cuts and who's responsible."
Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.
Registering the unproductive to vote is an idea that was heavily promoted by the small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
...
by 82_28 » Fri Sep 02, 2011 1:18 pm
The Boulder City Council recently approved a referendum for the November ballot to abolish the concept of corporate personhood. It calls for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution making it the law of the land that corporations do not enjoy any of the rights of persons, like free speech and the ability to spend money defending their interests in the area of public policy and elections.
Such a referendum would have no legal standing. Constitutional amendments must be initiated either by Congress or the states, not cities, and still have to be ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures. This is just another exercise in left-wing posturing in the People's Republic of Boulder which, in the past, has declared its own imaginary policies in foreign affairs and nuclear weapons.
The Boulder City Council vote, coincidentally, took place just after Mitt Romney's response to a lefty heckler in Iowa who angrily insisted that corporations should be taxed, not people. Romney might just as well have been reasoning with the wall when he tried to explain to the man that corporations are people. He wasn't referring to the historical debate over corporations as legal persons or "artificial persons" as opposed to natural persons. Hamilton and Jefferson argued about that more than 200 years ago. The U.S. Code and Supreme Court decisions have long included corporations in their definition of "person" for legal purposes. That's why the anti-corporate-personhood movement calls for a constitutional amendment to reverse this status.
But Romney wasn't referring to legalisms. He meant that corporations are made up of people. This is irrefutable. They're not abstract entities. All businesses start with an entrepreneur who acquires capital from people, hires people to manage people to produce a product or provide a service sold by people and accounted for by other people.
The left's obsession with corporations as a spawn of evil is pathological paranoia. A corporation is just one form of organizing a private business enterprise for purposes of limiting personal liability, issuing stock, filing financial reports and paying taxes. Other forms include partnerships and sole proprietorships. Are they less evil? You buy your groceries from corporations, your cars, newspapers, cellphones, clothing and exercise equipment. Your parents and children work for corporations. Are they evil?
Liberals' hatred of corporations is selective. They like the New York Times Corporation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the spawn of PBS and NPR. They like Ben & Jerry's. And they like corporate executives with deep pockets, like the Hollywood crowd, who support left-wing causes.
The anti-corporate-personhood movement was stirred up by Supreme Court rulings in Buckley vs. Valeo and Citizens United vs. FEC, affirming the First Amendment right of corporations to spend money to influence elections. Leftists, who would strip corporations of that right, hypocritically defend the right of labor unions to do the same thing. They don't complain, either, when liberal media corporations use their power to influence elections. The political arena is awash with money and influence from anti-business PACs and 527s. Activist groups abound, attacking businesses on everything, lobbying for suffocating regulations, myriad restrictions and higher taxes. By what twisted logic should businesses be denied the right to defend themselves in the public policy arena? Corporations represent the producer interest in society, the people who make the things that consumers and other businesses buy. Who would take their place — government?
Incidentally, it's only an illusion that corporations — or any businesses — pay taxes. In fact, they only collect taxes. Taxes are a cost of doing business, just like payrolls, raw materials, utilities, advertising, etc. And businesses must recover all their costs from the people who are their customers. In the end, only people pay taxes.
Freelance columnist Mike Rosen's radio show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA.
by American Dream » Fri Sep 02, 2011 1:23 pm
Matthew Vadum wrote:
Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American
Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. ..
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/ ... rican.html
Wasco County elections
Set up under false pretenses (the true size of the envisioned development was initially downplayed), the growing commune was the subject of intense hostility from local Oregonians and soon found itself embattled.[27] Sheela and other senior Rajneesh followers began to realize that the negative impressions of the county commission called the Wasco County Court towards Rajneeshpuram had become an issue for the organisation.[28] Sheela and Rajneesh together made the decision to attempt to take over influence of the Wasco County Court in the November 1984 election, in which two members would be considered for reelection.[28] At the time there were 20,000 residents of Wasco County and 15,000 registered voters; compared with 4,000 inhabitants of the Rajneesh organisation—the majority of which were not United States citizens and not eligible to vote.[29]
In 1984, Sheela brought 2,000 transients to Rajneeshpuram, saying that it was an experiment to house the homeless. The new residents were taken to register as voters, in what was seen to be an attempt to swing two seats on the Wasco County Commission. A judge ordered registration hearings, and most of the transients left the ashram after it was realised that they would not be able to vote. In several appearances on national television, Sheela called the state and county officials "bigoted pigs", "fascists", "full of shit", and threatened that, "If they touch any one of our people, I'll have 15 of their heads, and I mean business".[9][11][30] The Rajneesh organisation attempted to find an individual who would run against the two commissioners up for re-election, but were unable to secure a politician favourable to Rajneeshpuram
by StarmanSkye » Fri Sep 02, 2011 2:31 pm
by Luther Blissett » Fri Sep 02, 2011 2:34 pm
82_28 wrote:Rosen: Corporations are people, too…The left's obsession with corporations as a spawn of evil is pathological paranoia. A corporation is just one form of organizing a private business enterprise for purposes of limiting personal liability, issuing stock, filing financial reports and paying taxes. Other forms include partnerships and sole proprietorships. Are they less evil? You buy your groceries from corporations, your cars, newspapers, cellphones, clothing and exercise equipment. Your parents and children work for corporations. Are they evil?
Liberals' hatred of corporations is selective. They like the New York Times Corporation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the spawn of PBS and NPR. They like Ben & Jerry's. And they like corporate executives with deep pockets, like the Hollywood crowd, who support left-wing causes.
The anti-corporate-personhood movement was stirred up by Supreme Court rulings in Buckley vs. Valeo and Citizens United vs. FEC, affirming the First Amendment right of corporations to spend money to influence elections. Leftists, who would strip corporations of that right, hypocritically defend the right of labor unions to do the same thing. They don't complain, either, when liberal media corporations use their power to influence elections. The political arena is awash with money and influence from anti-business PACs and 527s. Activist groups abound, attacking businesses on everything, lobbying for suffocating regulations, myriad restrictions and higher taxes. By what twisted logic should businesses be denied the right to defend themselves in the public policy arena? Corporations represent the producer interest in society, the people who make the things that consumers and other businesses buy. Who would take their place — government?
…
by Nordic » Fri Sep 02, 2011 2:47 pm
Jeff wrote:Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections .........
by Joe Hillshoist » Fri Sep 02, 2011 10:08 pm
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