One such case is a post from April 24, 2015, entitled, “One of these days . . .”
I begin the piece by citing the book, “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets,” first published right before 9/11 and once a “word-of-mouth sensation on Wall Street.”
Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb relates how “many of things that happen to us—career success, or decisions that turn out well, or gains in the stock market—that we attribute to our own skill or hard work, are really a result of plain dumb luck.”
“Taleb says that “the kind of rare events that really change the world—be they wars or disasters, inventions or serendipitous discoveries, bubbles or crashes—are things we don’t see coming, and aren’t prepared for.”
*****
In an article tagged by Drudge Report today, Morgan Stanley warns there is now a “near one in three chance the world economy will slip back in to recession this year as low oil prices and extraordinary monetary stimulus have a dwindling impact on global growth.”
From the website Investopedia, an article posted March 8 concludes:
“We may be on the verge of another global recession. Patterns in economic data are showing signs of weakness, and the troubles persisting in Europe or the bubble bursting in China may be the trigger that sends the economy over the edge. Unlike in 2008, when central banks were able to lower interest rates and expand their balance sheets, central banks now have much less elbow room to enact loose monetary policy to prevent a recession from happening. Recessions are a normal part of the macroeconomic cycles that the world experiences, and happen from time to time. The last recession was already seven years ago. Signs may show that the next is right around the corner.”
*****
Economist Harry S. Dent, author of The Roaring 2000s who correctly predicted the economic collapse of the fall of ’08, predicts America’s economic stresses won’t be over until 2019.
Dent looks, in part, at the massive infusement of government money, the massive infusement of government takeover of economy and the massive infusement of social welfare programs.
*****
As Jordan repeatedly points out, “We who are Americans are extremely fortunate to have a Christian heritage, but it’s all over with, folks, I’m sorry. When the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s gone. The foundations that were built are not in our country anymore."
Jordan relayed in a study, “I have a book called The Next 100 Years. Boy, if you want to read something fun to read, this is the book! The author, George Friedman, predicts what’s going to happen for the next century and he says it’s impossible to predict the next century. He says, ‘You can’t even predict the next 20 years so I’m gonna do it anyway.’
“Friedman’s thesis is, ‘Don’t give up yet on America. The inherent power of the U.S. coupled with its geopolitical position make the U.S. the pivotal anchor for the 21st Century.’
“He predicts, for example, that every 'wintertime' period there’s a war that is decisive. He tells you there are three places it might happen. One of them (Turkey) is right where God’s Book says there’s going to be a world war one day. It’s fascinating!
“When I first read that I went, ‘Oh, whoa, man, that’s interesting because, just like Strauss and Howe (authors of the book, The Fourth Turning) didn’t know anything about the Bible but were teaching what the Bible teaches about history, this guy doesn’t believe anything about the Bible but he’s teaching things that, when you read them you say, ‘That’s exactly how the Scripture says the scenario’s gonna come about!’
"I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen; I’m just saying he said something that matched Scripture and he says you see it in the tea leaves.”
*****
"When I say don’t give up on America, geopolitics is based on two things. No. 1 it’s based on Genesis 9, 10 and 11. People organize themselves into larger units than families.
"In Genesis 1-6, all the units are families. What you learn is that family structure, volition, marriage . . . family is not enough to provide the safe, orderly maintenance of humanity and culture.
“So God wipes the slate clean, starts again, but when He starts again, He adds nationalism. Paul says in Acts 14, ‘God sets up the bounds of their habitations.’
"The way He sets up the bounds of their habitation is through the character of a nation being determined to a great extent by its geographic boundaries.
“If you look at (Shorewood Bible Church missionary) Bobby Barlow’s book Origin of the Races, you’ll see where he goes through Genesis 10 and how they divided up the nations, families, languages. Borders, languages and culture are basically what make up a nation and that’s exactly the foundation in Genesis 10.
“Geographic boundaries and a common language and the two things that will produce a common culture. Geopolitics is based on the fact people instinctively organize themselves into bigger units than families—into communities and the homeowners associations and local towns—into nation states, and that they gain a characteristic based upon the geographic boundaries.
“Now what that has to with America is there is no nation on the planet like America or ever can be like America in that regard. There are two great oceans on the planet. The Atlantic and the Pacific. The only nation that has any potential to have a significantly large border on both oceans is us.
“You say, ‘Well, Canada can.’ Yeah, but who can get into Canada in the wintertime, or would want to? You can get on the borders of Canada, but going TRANS-Canada isn’t easy for most of the year. You ever watch the show the Ice Truckers? Well they only run three months of the year. That’s why they make that ungodly amount of money.
“You say, ‘Well, South America.’ You ever wonder why Chile is such a little bitty country down the side? Look at the map. There’s some big mountains. You’re not going to go across South America down in the southern quarter of it because of the topography.
*****
“When the settlers came from Europe to America and started going west and got about to the Mississippi and went a little further, they developed a concept called ‘Manifest Destiny’.
“It just made common sense to go all the way to the Pacific—‘Look at all that territory out there!’—and made no sense not to. And you say, ‘What happened when they got to the Rockies?’ They said, ‘Oh, that’s no big deal, if the antelope and the caribou can go through it we can too and they built two railroads across it and you say, ‘Wow, geez, how’d they do that?’ They used their creative genius but they KNEW.
“So what we have is the ability to dominate the Atlantic and the Pacific, and the nation that dominates the ‘sea lanes’ dominates the world. The only Asian nation that can potentially challenge us in the Pacific is China because they have an ever-growing navy that they stole from us.”
*****
Below is another post that keeps collecting hits, entitled “Truth drowned in sea of irrelevance,” dated May 15, 2015:
Years ago a friend recommended the 1985 book, Amusing
Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, as a “must-read” for my journalistic
understanding.
In an absolutely astonishing on-the-money-for-2015 foreword,
Postman compares the fear of George Orwell’s 1984 coming true with the
reality of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World being the real outcome.
“Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and
Orwell did not prophesy the same thing,” he writes. “Orwell warns that we will
be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big
Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history.
“As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to
adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley
feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no
one who wanted to read one.
“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley
feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity
and egoism.
“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley
feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
“Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared
we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the
feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
“As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil
libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny
‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’
“In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
*****
Toward the end of the book, Postman revisits this theme with, “In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural
life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public
conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an
audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself
at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
*****
Here’s just a smattering of other great quotes from Postman’s
book:· “The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.”
· “Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.”
·
“Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological
changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes
in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you
change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community,
history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you
do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a
cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla
resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without
words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to
make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of
progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing
if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that
technology is the force behind that movement.”
·
“The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed
page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to
be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the
facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood
implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no
time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To
the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.”
· “To engage the
written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable
powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover
lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common
sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to
connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a
certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by
the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an
apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought
is too busy for that, and too detached.”
·
“In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a
definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of
the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with
serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason
was coexistent with that growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in
America.”
·
“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist
a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no
cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of
amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when
serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's
being drained by laughter?”
·
“The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual
readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading,
one's responses are isolated, one's intellect thrown back on its own resources.
To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon
language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus,
reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an
essentially rational activity.”
·
“...there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and
a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures
must frequently be submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that
learning to be critical and to think conceptually and rigorously do not come
easily to the young but are hard-fought victories.”
· “It is not
necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and
narcotized by technological diversions.”
·
“What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the
product but what is wrong about the buyer.”
. “If politics is
like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or
honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.”
·
“Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine
but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists
upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.”(new article tomorrow)
No comments:
Post a Comment