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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 2, 2010 - 11:22pm PT
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So I was re-reading "A Brave New World" by Aldous 'the man' and the parallels to our current society and the directions we're heading are striking. (Good book for jury duty).
Comments?
Aldous was brilliant. He called it. F*#king amazing and shocking at the same time....
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Gary
climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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Commies have the best 'staches.
Birchers, not so much.
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Gary
climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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That must be a lot of fun to drive.
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quietpartner
Trad climber
Moantannah
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The bigger the drivin' rig, the smaller the....
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Dick_Lugar
Trad climber
Indiana (the other Mideast)
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Did ya'll know the Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis died the same day as JFK? Must've been the work of some covert commies...
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dirtbag
climber
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there's a red under my bed
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SteveW
Trad climber
The state of confusion
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I think I'm more afraid of those right wingers like bluey
than I am of communists. . .
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dirtbag
climber
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Kinda sad that people nowadays stay up late worrying about commies.
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/9056
you dont need to look under the bed for red. just come to Seattle...of course this is the same Seattle that votes Democrat, pro-environment, yada yada....must be closet communists
[quote]Lenin Statue
Seattle, Washington
Fremont, self-proclaimed "Center of the Universe," is the venue for America's largest statue honoring Lenin.
No, kids -- not one of the Beatles, but Vladimir Illych Lenin, hero of the workers, Communism, and the former Soviet Union.
The 16-ft. tall bronze originated in Poprad, Czechoslovakia, where it was first erected in 1988. It tumbled along with other heroic (and out of fashion) statues when the Soviets went down in 1989. For a time, the 7-ton Lenin lay face down in the mud at the Poprad dump -- until rescued by American entrepreneur Lewis Carpenter. Carpenter, who admired the artistry, mortgaged his house to buy and transport the statue to Seattle.
Carpenter died in a car accident in 1994. To recover the statue debt, Carpenter's family made an arrangement to loan it to the Fremont district until a buyer emerged. Asking price: $150,000. In 1995, Fremont put the statue up in the center of town, near a Cold War era rocket also displayed as public art.
The statue was controversial and remains so -- especially to Russian immigrants. It's as if someone erected a sculpture of a Klansman in the deep South (wait -- someone has), or Chinese Communists sold tickets for a look at Tibetan temples outside Disney World (oh yeah, that too...). Or someone slapped up a statue of Mark David Chapman, assassin of John Lennon, in Strawberry Fields (not so far).
Sure, Lenin the Man endorsed the use of mass terror against his enemies, created the Soviet Union's secret police, and implemented policies that caused millions of peasant farmers to starve to death. But Lenin the Public Artwork is a beautifully crafted sculpture, and a catalyst for healthy discourse.
Today the statue -- still unsold -- is easily visible up the boulevard, past Organic Espresso and Kwangjai Thai Cuisine. He stands in front of a Taco Del Mar restaurant. Locals and passersby pause in his shadow on their cell phones, or rest on the monument steps after a hard morning of shopping. Ironically, he can’t be photographed without the Mexican fast food signs around him.
In the end, a Capitalist victory? Not really a “We Won” message like the Lenin that once stood in Dallas , or the decapitated Lenin in in Las Vegas.
This one seems to say: "Whenever the world is ready for Communism again, freaky lefty Fremont will be there! Please buy this statue."
quote]
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Far right a-holes like Jim Bunning are holding this country hostage in a way the communists wouldn't have considered possible in their wildest dreams.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 3, 2010 - 07:30pm PT
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Hawkeye, at first glimpse I was gonna guess the Lenin tribute was in Vermont...
Far right a-holes like Jim Bunning are holding this country hostage in a way the communists wouldn't have considered possible in their wildest dreams.
Wow! Holding the entire country hostage? Really??? And don't underestimate good commies, Jim, they're quite capable. Look back at history. Sh#t, look at Venezuela, the newest commie to hit the scene.
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jstan
climber
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A recent piece by Niall Ferguson in the LA Times suggests empires need not fail slowly. They can fail very quickly.
latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ferguson
28-2010feb28,
latimes.com
Opinion
America, the fragile empire
Here today, gone tomorrow -- could the United States fall that fast?
By Niall Ferguson
February 28, 2010
For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the public have tended to think about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms. From Polybius to Paul Kennedy, from ancient Rome to imperial Britain, we discern a rhythm to history. Great powers, like great men, are born, rise, reign and then gradually wane. No matter whether civilizations decline culturally, economically or ecologically, their downfalls are protracted.
In the same way, the challenges that face the United States are often represented as slow-burning. It is the steady march of demographics -- which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- not bad policy that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. It is the inexorable growth of China's economy, not American stagnation, that will make the gross domestic product of the People's Republic larger than that of the United States by 2027.
As for climate change, the day of reckoning could be as much as a century away. These threats seem very remote compared with the time frame for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, in which the unit of account is months, not years, much less decades.
But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic -- at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?
Great powers are complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse.
Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of "fat tail" events -- the low-frequency, high-impact historical moments, the ones that are by definition outside the norm and that therefore inhabit the "tails" of probability distributions -- such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in "The Black Swan" as "the narrative fallacy."
In reality, most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.
To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the spontaneous organization of termites, which allows them to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system.
All these complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes -- what scientists call "the amplifier effect." Causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation are of little use. Thus, when things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate.
There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of "self-organized criticality": It is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is nearly impossible to predict. The key point is that in such systems, a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate disruption.
Any large-scale political unit is a complex system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority -- either a hereditary emperor or an elected president -- but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social and political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems -- including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly.
The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that "averted Armageddon." But this did not seem to be the case at the time. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets' favor for most of the previous 20 years.
Yet, less than five years after Mikhail Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire fell off a cliff, rather than gently declining, it was the one founded by Lenin.
If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time -- it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $1.5 trillion -- about 11% of GDP, the biggest since World War II.
These numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States' ability to weather any crisis.
One day, a seemingly random piece of bad news -- perhaps a negative report by a rating agency -- will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: A complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.
Over the last three years, the complex system of the global economy flipped from boom to bust -- all because a bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged financial institutions. The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the radical monetary and fiscal steps that were taken in response.
Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will ultimately lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece.
Ask Russia too. Fighting a losing battle in the mountains of the Hindu Kush has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. What happened 20 years ago is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.
Washington, you have been warned.
Niall Ferguson is a professor at Harvard University and Harvard Business School, and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. His latest book is "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World." A longer version of this essay appears in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 3, 2010 - 08:32pm PT
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Fighting a losing battle in the mountains of the Hindu Kush has long been a harbinger of imperial fall.
So this implies that nobody will ever have a successful campaign in the Hindu-Kush? Bullshit! With Pakistani support, it's a done deal. Which is what we have and the Russkies never had.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 3, 2010 - 09:29pm PT
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How do I ignore history, genius????
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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If communism was our big worry, I'd be a happy man.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Manichean Jacobins
Plenty of them around.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 3, 2010 - 09:39pm PT
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Let's see... you will never see battle, the Uhmerikun empire will likely fall before your son comes of age, you ignore history, you are afraid of Commies, you don't like to pay taxes, and you despise the federal deficit.
Clearly we are dealing with a rational person here.
Again, how am I ignoring history, genius???
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Manichean Jacobins
I think you just quoted one. Bluey.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 3, 2010 - 10:39pm PT
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What the f*#k are you talking about, Wes? The Russians tried to conquer Afghanistan with no regard for civilians, it was an indiscriminate takeover! Of course, the ENTIRE country rallied against them with a little help from their anti-commie friends, U.S.
What we're doing there now is way different, and unlike anything anybody had done before. That is, ridding the place of oppressive religious thugs, and helping to put in place a humane gov't, while at the same time rebuilding the country like it has never been before.
And it's working. The Taliban have resorted to bombing innocent civilians in their last throws of retaliation.
Lights out Taliban. Time to cash in on your virgins...in a really hot place.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Aldous was describing life in dr. F's progressive utopia.
Both the Dr, and Wes seem to suffer from the same reading comprehension problems.
Dyslexia anyone?
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