George Rebane

– Abdulmutallab – give up the country to defend the party
– The causes of the Great Recession
– Singularity and the Great Recession

When they Mirandized jihadist Abdulmutallab, it was clear to half the country or more that this had been a big mistake by the Obama administration.  Attorney General Eric Holder is currently dangled in the bus lane for that gaffe.  The part that really worries the Democrats is what the independent voters think about criminalizing acts of war against our country.  The questioning of the Islamist was an early issue, what could they squeeze out of him before his lawyers stuck their feet in his mouth.  The resultant scramble to open him up again seems to have worked.  And now the Democrats, eager to absolve the first screw-up, are telling the world what Abdulmutallab is telling them.  Communicating all this to al-Qaida is, of course, screw-up number two.  Peggy Noonan makes a point of this in her 6feb10 WSJ piece.  It seems that the administration is compromising new intelligence gained in order to cover their collective butts.  Community organizing must have been a lot easier.

The causes of what is now being called the Great Recession are a complex web of events that have been simplified into partisan soundbites over the last year or more.  Anyone wishing to understand the labyrinth of conflicting regulations and laws, known to no single individual or group, will benefit from reading Jeffrey Friedman’s ‘A Perfect Storm of Ignorance’ in the recent issue of Cato Policy Report.  This piece illustrates clearly the scientific basis for avoiding collective forms of governance like socialism and social democracy.   Systems science teaches that you don’t want to impose robust centralized control policies on a complex system whose input/output relationships (transfer function) you neither know nor can estimate.  (This is the chimpanzee in the 747 cockpit at 30,000 feet syndrome.)  And that is the prime reason why in nature we always see things work well with widely distributed knowledge and control policies that evolve with time as needed.  Bottom line, in this universe centralized control is extremely unnatural, and the hubristic product of small intelligences.

We live in pre-Singularity times.  One of the harbingers of this is the creative destruction of jobs by accelerating technology.   Looking at the Great Recession, as it compares to its lesser predecessors, we see that it is harder and harder to dig ourselves out of the unemployment holes created by these economic downturns (click on figure to enlarge).  Businesses take advantage of these times to eliminate deadwood and reconfigure themselves into a more productive and competitive stance that always requires fewer people having upgraded skills.  The governments at all levels seem to be immune to this, and are doing their best to take up the slack.  However, that is not a good long-term solution.