One interesting stat from early modern England

This is one of those times where a single statistic can open up a wealth of insight, and yet it does not come from our present but our past.  This one is coming from the Open Yale courses, which are freely available for viewing and have some of the most interesting professors that can have a wealth of information.  The stat comes from the HIST 251: Early Modern England which covers the time period of the late 16th century to the early 18th century and is presented by Professor Keith E. Wrightson.  To understand the transformation of England during this period it is necessary to see where it started from circa Henry VII, just before all the major changes in England took place.  I've been watching these with my lady and our side conversations tend to make the simple presentation quite long as it is necessary to pause the presentation so we can discuss material.  Thus the insight comes from that discussion.

In the mid- to late-16th century there was a relatively stable social stratification that has the Nobility at the top, the Gentry of landed estates and 'gentle birth' next, then the Yeomen class who were not of 'gentle birth' and tended to be well considered in towns and cities running trades and businesses (as well as some farms which was necessary for the era, the Craftsmen and those earning a living via craft work, and then gradations through the poor end of the spectrum which ends in Unskilled Labor.  The Clergy are considered separate (remember pre-Henry VIII) and while they can have power, it is not by lineage (as in the Nobility and Gentry) but by appointment to position (such as Bishop or Arch Bishop) by the Pope.  Literacy was low outside of those who could afford such education or that required it for daily operation (like the Clergy).  Schooling was done at home and as soon as children could contribute in any way to a household, they did so via work, first at home and then, if coming from a poorer family, by paying a Master Craftsman to take on a boy as an apprentice or by going to a household to work in any of a variety of tasks for a one year term.

This society can be characterized as stratified and one in which survival at all but the upper ranks of society is a constant pre-occupation.  Mercantile capitalism tends to fall in to the Yeomanry and Craftsman realms of society, and while the Yeomanry were socially limited they could earn quite a lot of money and purchase land from plying business trades.  Across all strata of the non-Clergy is one particularly interesting phenomena and the statistic of interest: marriage tended to be put off until the early- to mid- 20's.  This was done because establishing a new household is a costly affair (even for the rich) and must be done with much due consideration.  At the upper ranks of society choices in one's class were limited, and matches between young men and women could take time but also required agreement between families.  Sliding down into the Gentry, Yeomanry and Craftsman realms of society, men and women had a bit more in the way of choices and leeway, but parental and family consent made marriage a multi-lateral agreement in which any single party could hold a veto.  This sort of concern lessened going down to the lowest levels of society, where there was a lot more freedom for couples, agreement tended to be limited to parents, but start-up costs of a new household was high in proportion to the income of the poor.

From that this society can be said to have a high overhead cost of maintenance to it: it costs a lot of time as well as funds to get a household going.  Child birth, statistically, would happen within 18 months of marriage and then be a cyclic affair every 2 or 3 years of the woman's childbearing years.  Added to this was the high rate of infant mortality, endemic diseases, pandemics of plague, plus the normal assort of death by accidents, and life expectancy, while better than in Neolithic times, tended to be in the mid-30's with rare individuals surviving past 60.

Why is this interesting?

My lady was startled because of the American experience with families up to the early 20th century: large families with marriage happening in the late Teens.  Many marriage laws for what society would consider 'children' today included age of consent down to 12 in some States.

There are important changes by the start of the 19th century for Americans, but the life expectancy had not increased much over the 16th century, and while the Industrial Revolution would begin to transform America after the 1820's, American family size continued to be large even with advances in medicine, public sanitation and better diet.  Taking these factors into consideration, there is one other major factor that is encountered in the US that sets it apart from its Early Modern English forbearers in the 16th century: it is a society of not much in the way of 'classes' and it is one with a low overhead for maintenance.

The first is relatively self-explanatory, and while there were major land and slave holders in the Southern States (an equivalent of the Gentry class circa 16th century England)  and huge differences between those living in cities and those in rural areas, these are not largely different from the share-cropper system and differences between city and rural folk of the 16th century.  Without the rest of the class structure to burden the system and plenty of wilderness to settle in what happened is that the Americans of the early 19th century gained a definition that stuck until the early 20th century: a Frontier Culture.

By now, of course, this has interrupted all viewing of the course as this is a vital topic but approached in an oblique way.  There are large differences between a 'Settled' culture and a 'Frontier' culture, most of which revolve around the cost of maintenance of the infrastructure necessary to sustain the culture.  It is difficult to think of Early Modern England as a 'settled culture' but it has natural geographic limits to it, even when you consider Great Britain or the UK as a whole: these are islands and have definite boundaries and no frontiers.  Once an island has undergone initial exploration and settling, that is it for new resources and to get claimed land one must purchase it, which requires capital.  If you live in a town or city you can rent space, of course, but in the villages and household settings to have a new household requires land either by purchase or lease, and then a home on it.  There are many records in England from the late 16th century onwards, which allows us to glimpse a bit of everyday life via the records of deaths and coroner's inquests.  Prof. Wrightson recounts the death of one young woman who was working as a servant in a household who, at her death, had a total of 3 Pounds, 3 cows, and a chest containing items of clothing, bedding, bowl, spoon and the like.  Indeed an average of all deaths can actually yield that individuals owned perhaps as many as 25 to 35 items, total upon death.  The savings of a young woman was that of hoping to find a husband, marry, and establish a household amongst the poorer ranks of society.  She was already bringing something to the table for a marriage: she was gathering necessary overhead capital and goods for the start of a future household.

This is a stark contrast to the American Frontier experience that included clearing land, marrying early, and settling that cleared land for little to no overhead cost beyond sweat equity.  Raw materials were readily available, land was anywhere from free to cheap (compared to Early Modern England, at least), and the idea of 'go forth and multiply' was something that was held near and dear to the heart in reverence to God.

What is the condition of America today?

Settled.

It has a high overhead cost of maintenance to start a household.  Even with politicians distorting lending markets no end, the cost of starting a household is high.  Those that learn the Trades in America, today, actually have a low overhead cost from education: there is less burden on them and a trade craft repays the cost of education in it quickly.  A distorted market in 'Higher Education' arising from the 'good deed'  in the GI Bill post-WWII flooded colleges and universities with people which then changed the requirements in the marketplace for what is a 'minimum necessary education'.  That 'Higher Education' no longer repays itself and is a debt burden to those who go through such education and have no useful job skills at the end of it.  It is a high cost that must be paid down before starting a family.  The result?  The age of marriage has increased, couples expect both parties to bring something to the new household, children are put off for a period of time after marriage, on average and yes there are exceptions to this just as there were in Early Modern England of the 16th century.

At the lowest end of the economic spectrum there is a payment of funds from tax receipts (or in added debt) to the poor to 'care for women and children' who happen to have children out of wedlock.  Women get payments based on number of children and husbands are no longer required to get support: government has taken on that role.  The result is a liquidation of the once solid poor family structure that was purposefully uprooted during the 'Urban Renewal' that started with the Truman Administration and the movement of poor families from homes they owned to tenements they rented from under the 'Great Society' programs.  Add in payments based on childbirth to women who are not required to be married and have a stable family situation, and you liquidate the foundations of the stable culture that was once a part of the urban landscape prior to the 1950's.  Although a Nation in which by any objective standard pre-1940 there is no poverty, at all, we still have the strange belief that the poor are a condition of poverty.  And yet the poor are always with us, as being poor is part of the condition of individuals within mankind. 

Poverty, as such, was transitional in America where anyone could aspire to be a 'rags to riches' story and maybe end up in the Middle Class or at least better off than one's parents in material goods and security.  What there also used to be was no support system for the rich who failed: you could go from rags to riches to rags and cycle back and forth between them.  The establishment of regulatory regimes to allow failing concerns to remain open (and even get direct government help via taxpayer funds) means that those who make poor decisions under those regulatory regimes no longer fail and they no longer succeed, either.  They become zombie concerns depending on the lifeblood of taxpayer funds and supported regulatory regimes to survive and exist.  Any comparisons between this and later English companies supported by the Crown and later found to be bankrupt is purely coincidental with the Modern England.  In the Early Modern England there was too much upheaval to allow for such things.

Thus there are similarities of type between the US of 2014 and mid- to late-16th century England, but not of kind.  There are entirely different sets of overhead concerns for starting a household, and yet they arise for the same reason of being in a settled and geographically limited society.  The Old West in America is just that: the historical Old West.  And while there are still unsettled lands in the US, no one can rightly call them a Frontier in the expansive way of the early 19th century.  Yes Alaska is still nasty, has a low population level and if you can gather the overhead costs to establish yourself there, it has a frontier-like feel to it.  Social stratification becomes more apparent in the modern US but not due to the gentleness of birth but the connectedness to corrupt government and those that serve and service its corruption.  Just as in Early Modern England this is not a stable situation.

The result in Early Modern England was the Industrial Revolution and the great colonization effort that spanned the globe.

America, today, is at the cusp of a similar sort of transformation, as well.  It is not a dour and bleak totalitarian one, that is if we don't work to counter it.  No, it is one that also had an antecedent in Early Modern England: a New Frontier.

America has tested its endless expanse and now is home to many private concerns that dream big dreams of endless expanses of territory and wealth to be made.  It can't be made just by the rich or even with robotic systems, as those are fragile to this new and hostile wilderness.  And in this wilderness children will learn from the earliest of ages how to survive, what to do and not to do, and the rest of 'education' as we know it will be geared to those concerns first and foremost.

What happened when the English had access to new territories?  Some people were banished to them.  Others fled to them because of the freedom they offered for a new life at great risk.  They were Frontiers.  No social stratification.  Relatively low cost of overhead compared to what was left behind. Great and terrible risk to eke out a new life together with those who also decided that this was better than being settled.  Vast populations from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy... they followed when the cost of transportation to the Frontier was cheap enough to escape the settled lands of their old homes.

As I've said before and say again: there isn't anything so wrong with America that a New Frontier will not cure.

Freedom and Independence will beckon to us, to all mankind.

No one from the time of Henry VII could have seen the rapid changes that would follow his death.

And we can compress those massive changes of centuries down to decades, and no totalitarian power will be able to stop it once the flood gates open.

All we must do is curtail the grasp of tyranny in the present, hold it off by all means possible, and a New Frontier will open to us.  Like Early Modern England seemed a strange place to look for such transformation in its stratified ways and settled lands, so, too, does America look like a strange place to expect the push for a New Frontier.  Yet Early Modern England was pre-adapted to such things by its history and America, along with a few other Nations, is pre-adapted to Frontier culture by its cultural heritage. 

It is easy to fight tyranny in space: open an airlock.  Nature plays no favorites, but you can.

Congressional software design

The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was a piece of legislation that did far more than just try to transform the medical care and delivery sector of the economy and also brought in such things as Student Loans under its heading in a separate section of the bill.  Be that as it may the bulk of the bill dealt with a series of mandates and payments to government (taxes and penalties), and within those the requirement of health insurance companies to provide certain types of care for 'free', plus hand out individual 'subsidies' meant that there had to be a large-scale interplay between private insurers and the public purse.  To facilitate that a series of 'exchanges' were to be set up either by the State governments or, if they opted out of Obamacare, the federal government.  Thus there are a whole list of exceptions, exemptions, requirements and so forth that differ per State that the entire system must provide for, and these vary from State to State, as well.

In the previous part of my life before ill-health befell me, I worked for the federal government on the DoD civil side for an Agency that had some actual things to produce for the military.  As I was technically astute and able to deal with large scale bureaucracies (my prior university experience gave me that) I was able to shift from production work, which I enjoyed, to process improvement (or one of its synonymous variations over time) and then to new system procurement.  Thus I got to learn the government side of contracting, specifications and requirements: the whole series of hoops to go through to show that what you wanted would work, it had a set cost and it would have a series of set functions while interacting with previous work systems.  This required a whole set of understanding from the system level architecture to data file types and their metadata, library storage of digital work, shifting work from physical media to digital media and back again...plus all the network architecture for a closed system, software specifications to do particular types of work, and the equipment that would be required to proof and make press ready printing plates.  I became a one-man band of specialists and held a number of specialist hats for the agency as well as the Contracting Officer Technical Representative (COTR) hat for the project.

In that era of the late 1990's the federal government was shifting from the old procurement systems of detailed specifications and looking to utilize Commercial Off The Shelf technology (COTS) and go from a 'low bidder always wins' to 'best value can win' paradigm.  That last meant that if a contractor actually exceeded minimum specifications and offered more value for the dollar than the lowest bidder, it was possible to seek a change in funding levels with a justification for it.  I got to experience that and a firm from the old 'sole source' days trying to leverage its contacts to win with a lowball and then up the price through a series of Request For Changes (RFCs).  In contracting parlance the RFC can start to add to the cost of the contract if accepted by both sides, although either side can propose one.  The US Navy is infamous for their massive cost over-runs due to the number of RFCs on ship construction... luckily I was working on a simple IT project, but knew the RFC dance from my time in the agency.

For a contract Request For Proposal I had a tight set of specifications, workstation requirements, networking requirements, library storage system requirements, software requirements... an entire system specified for with minimal performance levels to it.  That went about 20% over on final award, but we got way more for that money in the way of reliability and software backing than the lowball bidder could ever provide.  I had spent years working with everyone from every system that would be impacted by this project not just the output groups but those on the input and library storage realm, as well as making the system Continuation Of Operations Plan compliant in case any single site were totally destroyed, so that we could at least get data to a printer with digital systems and get product.

Because I had been through the process improvement dances by attending seminars and inter-governmental meetings and just reading a lot on the subject, I was fluent on things like the Mythical Man-Month and the concept of a Death March development project.  In prior times my agency had a large scale project that suffered from the mythical man-month problem of program management, and it was a Death March as well: it was an IT system specified for in the 1980's, getting first deliverables in the mid-1990's and had a Y2K bug that would kill it.  Some items were delivered mere weeks before Y2K.

When you are specifying for how many people you need to do a project you do it in man hours or man months (or man years depending on the scale of it).  It is a generalized way of estimating how many people you need to do tasks on a project and useful for scaling personnel for a project or program.  So many people to work so many hours on X task gets you so man man hours.  Burden that by 20% and you get a realistic ballpark figure of how many actual people you need.  The burdening is to add in such things as sick time, unexpected delays, bureaucracy, etc.  Unfortunately when you have a project that has had only a few people on it and it is behind on its schedule, you start to try and throw more people at the problem.  These people are not up to speed on the project, may not know all the work that has gone on, and may or may not have the necessary skill sets to do the work.  As a program manager you need those man hours or man months of work in, however, and when you are late you do throw people at the project to burn those man hours up.  What happens, however, is that the delays get longer as the new people do take time to get familiarized with the system and when they make mistakes they have to be caught and then work re-done.  The less familiar people are with the project the more likely they are to commit mistakes which actually begins to set meeting the deadline further back.  Of course to avoid that you add more people to the project!

Ed Yourdon who wrote the Death March book (I read it in 1st edition back in the day) followed through on this mentality to see how modern program managers dealt with the problems of the mythical man-month.  Mostly they hadn't.  But a new phenomena had cropped up and it wasn't just in the Info. Tech. world, either, and that was the problem of changing customer specifications and unrealistic milestone schedules.  A death march project suffers from poor specifications for a system from the start and I read books to try and deal with just that problem as part of my job, too.  With poor specifications and milestone schedules what happens is that a project gets started with one set of specifications that then get changed in whole or in part, and prior work which was accepted now no longer advances the program to its milestones and must be abandoned.  On the IT side, however, some of that is in software code modules which may still have absolutely valid functions to help meet the schedule, so that software is kept for those functions.  New software is build around it for other functions but, when debugging must occur, problems can crop up between that older module and newer work if all the data structures haven't been well defined: old code may start to work on other parts of data passed to it due to the way it was sent to the module.  Even worse there may be dependencies in the module for information from other modules which weren't developed and that will hang up the entire development for that function to de-conflict these problems.  This eats up time.  It can invite the mythical man-month problem, and does, but also has feedback to the customer as the code structure may now need to be changed based on the newer specifications so as to avoid older software.  In theory you want to just rebuild modules from scratch, but as they have already been accepted you are stuck with them as a developer. Plus de novo work costs more, which wasn't budgeted for.

In a death march a project has a moving set of specification goal posts and the mythical man-month personnel problem plays into the problem as individuals begin to identify the project as one that actually can't reach its goals.  Yet because the customer wants results and money is available the project continues and begins a process of cycling through people within it, so that the people who started the death march project may be gone within a few months as the first set of changes come in and they see either a program manager unable to get the idea of hard set specifications or a customer unwilling to provide them.  Because money flows the project continues, and the personnel begin to flow as well so that the second group have not just the mythical man-month problem of not knowing the project fully, but also have already completed code that may not be well documented to deal with.  Without impeccable program documentation both outside and inside the computer code, new personnel face the daunting task of having to deal with changed functions and not fully understanding what has been done before them.  Of course the first set of changes brings problems and may break prior functions, thus requiring code rework... fine and dandy if it ended there, but a death march will see requirements and functions change yet again due to changes in management, possibly, or changes in customer specifications and requirements as they process through what the prior set of changes actually are.  The morale of a death march project is abysmal, and yet it happens often enough to have its own set of criteria adorning it and its own category of failure.

Obamacare came in with Congress setting some pretty broad but ill-conceived specifications for what would be a software project.  Plus there are hard legal deadlines set by Congress that met political realities but have no real parallel for a large scale software project.  In other words the federal customer shopped around a project with ill-defined goals and expectations and an unknown number of variables for which organizations and systems it would have to interact with.  Each State that didn't want to do an 'exchange' then changed the federal system as it must cover that State with all of its legal requirements, as well, which generate up new system requirements and interactions with previously designed code.  The number of States that refused was high, when it was expected to be only a couple of States, and that meant more had to be picked up by the federal system.  Yet that system now had to interact with insurance groups in different States each having their own data requirements.

The SCOTUS decision also gave States leeway on other parts of the law which also affected the 'exchanges' and because States took different routes on that, each of them that went away from the original template then brought with it changes to the system.

What Congress created was an ever changing set of functional variables within the system that would not allow the overall interaction to be a known quantity until a date perhaps as little as six months and no more than a year before the deliverable was required, by statute, to be in place.  In the modern age such laws that have so many parts to them become, effectively, IT projects.  They are designed by a committee.  They are carried out by an entirely different branch of government that must deal with its complexities, and yet the activation date is set to political realities not actual realities of software design and roll-out.  This latter problem is one that is well known: large scale systems fail more often than they succeed in all realms of business and government.

By not taking these realities into account the law is bad law, and is worse as a software design and integration project.  Any complex system requiring interactions between a set of knowns (federal agencies) has problems within the federal government.  The FBI tried twice in the 1990's to create a single sign on system for its agents to get access to all the databases the agency held.  It failed both times because the systems each had their own data standards, hardware and software, and some had human interaction requirements because they were never dreamt of being fully automated in the first place.  DoD attempted to revamp its pay system in the '90s, as well, and failed to replace multiple separate pay and leave systems with a single, unified one.  Another part of the DoD attempted a large scale system roll out for gathering map data and the RFC database became nearly as large as the project, itself.  And any ship the Navy has built for it will have a huge file behind it of changes done with a frequency that is mindboggling.  The federal government has problems within each of its departments and agencies, and working across them in an automated way is problematical due to the complexity of existing IT infrastructure.  When the States, private insurance companies and all the individuals in the US are added to this, along with federal and State laws that are at variance for each State, is it any wonder that this system is failing like we see it failing today?

Each of the three branches of the federal government has changed the specifications for the system: the legislative by the law itself, the executive in trying to prioritize functions, and the judicial by changing the interpretation of the law in a way unknown from all prior rulings.  Each of these entities can change the parameters, functions and deliverables of the system in an instant.  And yet the already accepted code is just that: accepted.  It is there be it functional, semi-functional or zombie waiting for some errant function to bring it back to life once more.  It is the far-reaching scope of the law that is a failure because no federal entity can deal with so much complexity.  The software is on a death march because of the inability of any of the three branches of the federal government to grasp that they are writing deliverable code requirements with variable function parameters.  Yet even if this was done by hand on paper it wouldn't work because of the rate of change to parameters of each part of the system: State, three branches of federal, insurance systems and advances in medical technology shifting the entire basis for treatments and medications.

That last is at peril with Obamacare as it puts a high price on new treatments and attempts to create a static system to deal with what already exists in the way of medicine.  Yet, with the entire genome now available for study, we are getting some of the first treatments to long-standing diseases which have the opportunity to alter what we see as medicine and health care.  You and I can adapt to that quite readily.  A large, hide-bound bureaucracy with hard coded imperatives and functions in its software will not.  Our freedom and liberty make it possible to change the entire idea of what health care actually is, and the idea of 'insurance' may get replaced by other systems of delivering health care that have little to do with doctors or pharmacies, and yet costs less and is more widely  distributed.  We are heading into an era of miniaturized labs on a chip that can do more complete work than an actual lab employing tens or hundreds of people per lab.  Similarly with stem cells that can come from each individual and be differentiated to organ based cells, these cells can be printed into a 3D matrix to be put into the body without fears of rejection factors.  Telemedicine and automated systems for analysis aren't just on the horizon with the former being here for nearly a decade and the latter now available interactively via web sites.  Incorporate these with labs on a chip and miniaturized sensors and you have something very close to Larry Niven's Autodoc: a machine capable of doing a complete bio-analysis of an individual to find systemic problems and even treat certain conditions, as well as do simple things like set bones, and call on specialized individuals or emergency personnel. 

Just take a look at the last century of medicine and compress the number of changes coming down to half or one-quarter of that time.  What sort of fit is a One Size Fits All Fits None Well system of paying for health care for what is coming?

Misrule and privacy

Do you have a fundamental right to privacy?

That is to ask: do you have the fundamental right to have freedom and liberty in your movement, your personal information, your associates,  and your transactions without being watched over by government?  In the US there is an exception for being suspected of a crime and requiring a judge to issue a warrant to gather information on you, and that is only for a criminal investigation.  Roe v. Wade ruled that a woman had a right to privacy and that came from the 'emanations' and 'penumbra' of the US Constitution, not solidly rooting it in Amendments IX and X.  Your privacy, which is to say your freedom to conduct lawful business without the scrutiny of government and to have liberty in your own lawful affairs, is rooted in Amendments IX and X, not on the SCOTUS ruling of Roe v. Wade

Today we have two major sections of the US federal government that does not believe in your fundamental right to privacy and feel free to intrude on your affairs, capture data about you and do with it what they please:  DoJ and NSA.  Actually, the IRS has now demonstrated its want for your medical information to run Obamacare and has already seized medical records of millions of US citizens without their knowing about it.  In collecting this information without due process procedures in open court available for public scrutiny, the US government has, in fact, decided that you are subjects and no longer citizens.  Eric Holder's positions as Attorney General of the US is that you have no privacy in your e-mail or online activities, and yet you don't see him ready to put forward the entire DoJ archives of e-mail and traffic records that flow through the Internet from all the parts of DoJ.  Not all of it revolves around criminal investigation and mere administrative e-mails, which is to say procedural and fiduciary e-mails, should be open to the public on demand if AG Holder really means what he says.

Instead you are supposed to be transparent to the government and the government is to be opaque to you, the subject because you have not done the things necessary to remain a citizen.

Now if you think the NSA capture of metadata is benign and can explain why the NSA needs more record space than can hold the entire history of mankind, to date, up to five times over then may I ask: why?  Are you made more or less secure by this activity?  More importantly, if and when government uses such information to malign purposes, say quelling political discontent by some power hungry group or cabal, is your liberty secured or threatened by this data capture?

Do hold that thought for the exact, same question can be asked about the domestic wiretap information garnered by DoJ and your financial and medical records held by the IRS.  Are you safer in your possessions, your effects, your ability to travel, which is to say your freedom and liberty to exercise it as you will with this or without it?  Not just for today, mind you, but in a worst case scenario of malign government deciding to prosecute past crimes that they decree illegal now, because they no longer feel restrained by the US Constitution and are going to be quite able to create ex-post facto laws and then pull up records to see who has to be rounded up.  Data collection is only about today when it is restricted to case work that must start from scratch and the public record.  Yet, in silence, the government has decided that we are all future criminals, and that no one is secure from its scrutiny, ever.

Let us change venue for a moment and go to the Google Glasses and HUD developments of other groups that is starting up in the last six months to a year.  This is Gen Zero of these devices which will augment your reality by offering you a computer display on the inside of glasses to help you better understand the world.  No matter how stylish they become, they are an artifact of on-line use and technology and there are good real world uses to them.  Add in a cell phone connection on-demand and there you have the NSA and DoJ ready to collect your data queries along with your GPS position, and timestamp.  What you want, when you want it and where you want it are now all available metadata to them, and you have decided to write it off.  Isn't that grand?

What would you want out of such a system?

High Definition overlays?  Easily done by installing a camera either at the bridge section over the nose or, if you want 3D object recognition, one each at the base of the arms so you get stereo vision and 3D capability.

Virtual Real World Synthesis?  This is where the cameras on your device begin to automatically filter resolution for re-display either with semi-transparent lenses or meshing up the virtual and real world together for display on the inside of the glasses.

Active object and face recognition?  Boy won't this be handy to call up the publicly shared data on individuals and items, huh?  Never a bad date... and that stalker will be able to figure out if you are armed or not.  Good job, that!  Always easier to target the unarmed than the armed, you know.

Active tracking of finances in real time?  Handy at the store and probably a Version 1 or 2 item to let you find out the UPC code information and maybe look for competitive pricing before you go shopping.  Add in an on-line inventory system and you can even know if you should go to a store or not, based on what you want.  Mind you, they capture that query information and may only make that available to their 'special customers' who agree to give up their shopping habits at that store chain to them.  Which is then sold in bulk to marketers who accumulate all your 'special' purchase information together to more readily target you with ads, on the fly, and to help you 'decided' in favor of certain products and services.  Handy, huh?

Photo and Video Capture?  Full HD resolution photos and video capture, at least locally to start but for those who love streaming this stuff to your FB or other social media account, now your friends will always know where you are, what you are doing, with whom, where you go and how long you stayed there.  Heck, a bit of hacking and they can know how much you spent, too.   Even create a full 3D image of your body, clothed and unclothed!  Just like the TSA!

Cellphone is a given.  Add in a couple of small aural conducting speakers to vibrate your skull so you can hear stuff and maybe wrap the arms a bit around the ears to get microphones close to the mouth with some data augmentation to clear up your voice, and you now have full data capture of what you do.  The cellphone system may become a bit strapped, but there is plenty of spectrum left over from the demise of the old broadcast TV just sitting out there.  I'm sure all of that can be pressed into service in no time at all, legally or otherwise.

Expect all of that in the 5 to 15 year time horizon.

You couldn't live without your cellphone, right?

And as you don't give a flying whoop about government data capture for them, then you certainly won't mind government knowing all of that information I've just outlined, right?

If you want a National Sales Tax, just imagine how easy THAT would be to implement and NOT even require the seller to get it: they can charge you on your purchases DIRECTLY without any of that messy privacy stuff because you signed it away.  Why bother with a middle-man when you can just grab that information DIRECTLY FROM YOU CONSTANTLY.  By giving the government the power to tax individual purchases it is given a reason to collect that data.  And why do it on the bulk side when you can get far more in revue AFTER the mark-up has been put in place?

And finances are not even the start of it.

Messy divorce?  Those details will now never go away because of social media.  Have a lover on the side... and how short a time is it until that is found out?  Paternity test shows that the husband is not the father?  Spend too much?  Spend too much time with friends and neglect your children?  Pregnant?  Every argument that is captured by these devices will be put up for constant reminder to you of your past.  They will not go away.

This will be wonderful for exercise!  Your doctor and the IRS can see just how much of it you do, when you do it, how often and what you do.  Sex, too, of course since that is mere exercise, you know?  What is your favorite position?  How often?  How much?  And if you forgot and kept those glasses where they can see what you are doing, then, really, its your fault, right?

Your private life?  Gone.  And that is if, and only if, you do nothing today to not just celebrate Independence but to BE Independent.

I have a couple of cellphones in the Faraday Cage.  Pay a fee to make sure I can get some connection in the case of a disaster if there are any surviving cell phone towers or at least ones that are powered up and working.  They are a few years old.  I don't use them for non-emergency purposes and I live without them.

Beyond these blogs and a couple of places I sometimes leave commentary, I have no social media connection or contacts.  Period.  No FB, no Twitter, no LI, and that is fully and completely intentional. I keep a public e-mail account by a compromised company, the same one you are reading this from, BTW.  Always glad to use the enemy's tools against them. 

Yes conservatives should be utilizing social media.  I am no conservative.

If you saw the movie Minority Report, you have a sense of how this is going, outside of the putative storyline there are the surroundings of the characters that must be taken into account.  Advertising that is always addressing itself to you as you go through malls, along sidewalks, indeed everywhere there is a camera there is a means to follow and contact you.  Luckily you will be carrying the necessary tracking devices with you in your brand new HUD Mark X!

I cannot live and get the necessary tools for being Independent without making on-line purchases.  You can spin-up real quickly by doing so.  Getting tools, fasteners, raw materials, equipment and the rest of it is done much faster via those channels and doing without them slows up a process that I do not have years to do.  Minimal exposure is about the best I can accomplish.  This isn't the 1970's or 1980's or 1990's, but the 21st century.   This is no longer an era where privacy can be assumed but must be protected actively, by you, against all intrusions no matter how seemingly benign they disguise themselves as for you to agree to them.

And if life extension continues on at its current rate, this sort of thing will not leave you, forever.  No matter if you turn over a new leaf, the moment you do that is recorded.  Your first instance of failure is recorded.  Everything you do, say, purchase, talk to, and every movement you make will be recorded.  At that point you are no longer a citizen nor subject, but a lab rat who is no longer a person, no longer an individual, but just a collection of data to be devoured by companies and government.  Your pluses and minuses as a person all get recorded constantly because you agree to it and actively want it.  You will even pay for it.

Yes, yes indeed you will pay for it.

Forever.

I will do my best to live to the attitude of The Prisoner:

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.

My life is my own.

I am a free man.

Are you?

Anomie and you

anomie
n 1: personal state of isolation and anxiety resulting from a lack of social control and regulation
2: lack of moral standards in a society
Source: WordNet (r) 1.7

Or

anomie
an·o·mie [an-uh-mee]
noun Sociology.
a state or condition of individuals or society characterized by a breakdown or absence of social norms and values, as in the case of uprooted people.
Source: Dictionary.com

This concept of anomie is one that is targeted at individuals who are the basis for society. Social isolation, societal removal of norms, and the result of them create a more isolated set of individuals that no longer work as a cohesive society. This trend pre-dates the internet and was worrying sociologists for decades long before you ever get to Facebook, Myspace or 'social media'. One of the causes for concern in those days was the concept of 'media' being an isolation system that left the individual with few tools to reach out on the problems of society. The telephone is person-to-person, the television, radio and film are one-to-many and neither of these offered the capacity to actually get mass interaction amongst individuals. What these shared were an isolating interposition of technology turning individuals into passive viewers of information or at least being able to deal with a single other person from the comfort of your kitchen or bedroom while talking.

Movies, while seen together in a theater, were only a 'social' event if you actually were able to socialize with others afterwards, and that was limited to art house venues or similar small venues that gathered like-minded viewers together and then had a post-viewing experience to actually share the experience and find out what others thought about that shared experience. Big Box Multiplexes, the multi-screen venue, and even the large and ostentatious theaters of the 1920's and 1930's, while having lovely settings, did not offer the ability to interact and even discouraged it by having the ushering of audiences out so the next one could then see the film.

Media, be it newspaper, radio, television, film, or any other process of presentation of information to a mass audience lacked the ability to bring individuals together to actually discuss topics: media is anomic to the individual by definition as it only presents information in a relatively static way and even the interaction with a known other on a telephone is not the same as being together physically.

Being INTP

INTP is a personality type derived from using the descriptive Myers-Briggs test(s) and is one of the earliest attempts to do this to help individuals understand just why they act, think and feel in the way that they do, and there is The Myers & Briggs Foundation dedicated to this task and resources to help you find out about what your personality type actually is. Actually there are lots and lots of MBPT tests out there, from quick and easy to the multi-session ones that take a few days. What you get are Type Indicators (MBTI) for your personality, which are rough outlines of what the basis for your personality actually is. This does not mean you adhere to it in all instances, in fact no one does because personality has many different modes of expression because of individuation, so that you have a unique personality type that is individual to you. While identical twins will often have many of the same personality characteristics, because they are individuated they will have slightly different responses via their personality that are distinct to them, even when having a high degree of similarity.

The rough basis of the MBTI is based upon dichotomies of personality preferences as expressed by individuals (that is not only expressed as in 'taking the test' but as how traits drive certain responses) that serve as the basic four letter encapsulation of one's personality. There are refinements to the test, yes, but they are refinements to the rough outline of one's MBTI. They are as follows:

Extraversion/Introversion (E/I) – Extraversion is outward turning, while Introversion are inward turning personality types. This set is first and primary and helps to determine the main social outlook of individuals via the MBTI.

Sensing/Intuition (S/N) – How do you perceive the world and gather information about it? The Sensing (S) person takes in what is around them via their senses and trusts that as this data has meaning in a concrete way. The Intuition (N) person takes in data and then abstract it and associate it with other information to find out how current information fits into a larger scale of information.

Thinking/Feeling (T/F) – These are judgmental functions of personality. Thinking for judgment allows for decisions to be made based on the rational factors presented by such data utilizing an understanding of interactions between events by rules such as causation and consistency within a given framework of known information. Feeling for judgment utilize empathy and internal weighting to attempt to get a harmonization of what has happened and consider such things within the framework of how it affects other people.

Judging/Perception (J/P) – These two are lifestyle determinates and they serve in reference to the other functions. Judging personality determinates have a preference to settle matters and for Extraverts can be the dominant mode of personality, while for Introverts it is an auxiliary to their personality to seek conclusion only after introspection. Perceptive types utilize the framework of keeping options open and that what is set today may not be the best way to do things. Again the driver for Extraverts with Perceptive is that openness to keep understanding open as a dominant function, while for Introverts it is an auxiliary function. For Introverts either of these can become a driver, but only when the internally understood worldview is unsettled by them.

As an INTP, then, these modes put the Introversion thinking as dominant to the Extraverted type, utilized a dominant Intuition perception over the inferior Sensing type, have a Thinking dominant and Feeling auxiliary judgmental type, and utilize Perception over Judging as an auxiliary to my Introversion personality type. I have a flexible world view that must have not just hard data, but have conformity between such data and known frameworks via abstraction of data for a coherent world structure.

Or, as one of the books looking at how often personality types put it, the INTP appears in less than 5% of the population and appears to be a space alien to everyone else.

Anomie and Personality

The vast majority of the population is of basic Extraversion type: gregarious, able to get along with each other, socially needing other people and generally those having a better time working with people than working alone.

Our media enforces just the opposite of that. As I see it (P) that is not in accordance with social norms (T) which creates a disassociation amongst individuals who are not temperamentally suited to such activities (N) and no good for anyone in such a situation (I). That is a worldview expression based on the information and derived abstraction of it utilizing observations of society and individuals to derive an end view that is open to change but serves as a foundational piece for then putting forth that something is horribly out of whack.

No good shall come of that.

The G.O.D. Theorem

The G.O.D. Theorem (as I call it, there are other names for it) is pretty simple: everything was better in the Good Old Days. If you watch any of Bill O'Reilly raging against the machines, you know exactly what I'm talking about, and his tirades against the use of modern technology is both deplorable and comedic, simultaneously. All this technology is killing society, is the short of the BOR rant, and it has been heard for ages about pool halls, pinball arcades, that decadent artwork that actually put perspective into paintings and the Waltz. All of that has been driving the morally upright society downhill, forever and this modern technology will be the end of us all.

Hey! I'm the guy who just said that no good will come of technology, right?

Yes, yes I am, but I am telling you in a bit more refined mode than BOR and NOT telling you pithy little tips of the day nor bemoaning about the harmful crudities of society caught on YouTube, not fit for children, save the teasers which show the worst of it and aren't fit for children, but you don't tell anyone about those. That is a bit on the hypocritical side utilized to build audiences. Building an audience that sits isolated in their homes, watching the program... on a machine... which is evil in the BOR mindset. Don't ask me how that works, I am clueless.

No, what I am pointing out is from my prior bit on the media as a dissociative factor as it is meant for passive or at most response only interaction. Both of these put individuals in isolation and passive response, very much like the educational system that emphasizes 'learning' (passive intake of information) instead of critical thinking (analyzing information to put it into a contextual framework). That dates back to the 1920's and the Progressive movement's March Through the Institutions where Progressive thought would be pushed out at every venue available to disrupt the coherent society and reform it into a passive edifice under hierarchical control. The modern schooling movement of the late 19th and early 20th century helped to foster this as did the Dewey Decimal system which attempted to order information and teaching along strict 'scientific' lines (that is to say lines that Progressives liked, instead of lines towards creative analytical thought).

The main institution for this societal change would be via politics and that meant having to break up the old internal party structure and put in a Boss (top-down) based system. This would be utilized to slowly remove the easy association of individuals to their local party system and seek to support apparatchiks over true representatives at all times in all political venues in each political party. By utilizing governmental power granted to it by the people, government would then begin remolding the people and society to the ends of those who controlled government, who saw themselves as 'enlightened' and you as ignorant. These were the idea put forward by Edward Bernays via the conceptualization of Propaganda which he gained from his advertising background. If you want the man to blame for getting women to smoke, it is Mr. Bernays.

Edward Bernays saw that the subversion of choice preferences for goods could be translated into politics. In politics advertising would be utilized to 'shape' opinion and form it within society to the benefit of those benevolent know-it-alls that should be the ones ruling over you and making decisions for you. He worked with Woodrow Wilson and others and only came to realize what he had actually created after WWII and the explicit use of internal Propaganda by the Nazi Party to have passive social distancing of society from the death camps be put in place after years of advertising against Jews as a whole. And yet that end is not out of the normal course of events when society has individuals get a feeling of isolation, powerlessness and a morally perverted sense pushed at them as 'normal'.

That is anomie.

And it is pushed by the passivity of the educational system, the power structure of the political parties and sustained by socially anomic media that discourages physical interaction save for the most base sort of sexual distraction. This enforced isolation and lack of external social contacts in a real, physical way leaves those using Extraversion with few outlets and those that are left are the most base sort and encourage no thinking whatsoever.

If you have a personality type with an E at the beginning, then you are the target and you are not temperamentally suited by your personality to handle enforced Introversion. This is done with malice aforethought since the late 19th century and the goal is to reshape society but its actual outcome is to liquidate society and remove moral and firmly rooted concepts for the basis of society from individual support. You are isolated and taught to be docile, to have an imposed exterior mental framework of pre-decided moral relativism fed to you, to have any moral standard run down, to no longer invite critical thinking about societies and their relative value but to put forward that all societies (even those that encourage infanticide) as being 'equal' and that you are powerless and should only entertain the most base thoughts towards your fellow man.

I am an Introvert and know how to handle my own internal world domain and situation. Self-imposed isolation and having few friends is not a problem to me and gives me leeway to decide just who is and isn't a friend and doesn't leave me grasping at any 'Friend' in the cyber-way as a means to uphold my personality needs for Extraversion. Because I have a firm reference basis built up of observation and yet one that is flexible to all of mankind, I can utilize my auxiliary traits to understand just what the goal and object of such things are. I can then utilize an understanding of history and tell you that enslavement is the BEST end scenario for individuals at the end of this and the total decay and collapse of modern civilization the WORST end for this scenario. And I can reference at least 3 'Dark Ages' (pre-Ming Dynasty China after the takeover by non-Chinese creating social isolation, Late Bronze Age with Egypt, the Hittites, Achaean Greeks and arguably all those effected by the Sea People, and the end of the Roman Empire) to demonstrate that enforced isolation (social or physical) means that individuals are ill-prepared for what comes when their world is reshaped by external events.

Note that this is Perception talking not Judging: the interior framework of world understanding that I have must have a high degree of correlation to the exterior world so that I can survive. I am willing to do the hard work, hunt down sources no one is even willing to talk about to find answers and I share them with you and encourage you to seek them out, read them, and then examine your own internal worldview to see if where we are in the modern world can come to ANY good end. What I do that is more than BOR is to hand you alternatives, outlets and other means to deal with things, although I also encourage you to get out to coffee shops, go out to see real, physical friends and to really think long and hard about your social valuation structure.

Family, Friends, Associates

My basic structure for social needs and interaction on a personal level are simple and stated above.

Family, first – these are the closest associates you have and biology is only a part of it, as this also includes those others that you have mutual agreement with to share the most personal aspects of your life. If Marriage is the basis for the Nation, then Family is the first social structure of the Nation we make. You can't help the family you were born into, but you can help who it is you pull in close to you in your life. If you value your online 'Friends' that you have never met, that you have never physically associated with, that you have not shook hands with face to face, then, not in a Judging way but in a Perceiving way, you have a problem. I am not here to Judge you, I am here to say that you social structure and Extraverted nature is being used to isolate you and this will cause you to be dependent on the first thing offered to you. It is intentional, malicious and means no good end for you... that is the framework and pattern you get when you passively allow these things to happen to you. You are in extreme danger, personally, and by not being an active part of the physical society, you are part of the destructive Progressive methodology to control even you cyber 'Friends'. I'm sorry if I'm the one that has to break this to you. There is good in having such 'Friends', but only if you actually invest time, effort and real physical location displacement to meet them and understand them directly, physically, as individuals.

Friends, second – the real thing, the ones where you get in a horrible accident, the family is on vacation and have just one or two people to turn to for help. The person who will get to the hospital to see you. The person that will bail you out of jail, give you a ride home, and tell you that you don't have to pay them, just do your duty to show up and they will stand by your side. That person is a FRIEND. And as someone who has gone friendless most of his life, I can tell you that such a person isn't to be passed off lightly. If you ignore this person (or if damned lucky a handful of them) for your cyber 'Friends' you are asking for a world of hurt even if you are interacting with these people as cyber 'Friends' because only the physical bonds of common projects sustain friendship. Trust me on that if you can't figure it out for yourself. Because I am Introverted and self-reliant, I damn well do my best to avoid such situations: you can't. Being basically friendless by choice is one thing, disdaining that person that will get to the hospital to make sure you are OK is lethal. If you lose that person, you have lost your back-up and if you aren't thinking ahead of time to get other back-up in place, then you will be dead in that crisis. Physically spend time with your friends, especially those close friends as an Extravert you need it and deserve it and so do they. Even those Introverts who are your friends... especially them as they are more likely to show up when NO ONE ELSE WILL. Just let them know they are your back-up, OK?

Associates, third – The people you meet up with in your life on a relatively frequent basis at work or at school. You have little choice but to have such associates unless you are: an author, run a sole proprietor business, or are in a cave living off of investment income. Authors who work alone get much say in how their works get distributed, and thus have the ability to choose who they will work with to a great extent. Running your own business and being your own boss and employee means you do have work contacts, yes, but they tend to be commerce related and not a daily recurring physical meeting situation. Then there is Ted Kaczinski, Howard Hughes and the totally bugged out that are self-sufficient and are rarely seen. If you aren't any of those, and do have daily contacts in business or school, then you have associates: those people you associate with frequently. This also includes church organizations, charitable work, helping to run a scout troop, and a whole host of activities from sports to games to reading circles and everything in between that you do for a social life. Your co-workers are those people you may go out and blow off steam after work, fulfilling a good social function and decompressing from the day to be sociable in the rest of your life. These also tend to be cyber 'Friends' that you may interact with via video, instant messaging or text messaging with or without images. This is by no means an unimportant category of people in your life, but they are in that next shell out and the least tied to you even when you physically meet up on a regular basis.

All of these people, plus the casual acquaintances, are a necessary and vital part of staving off anomie in one's life and help to gain some social grounding for you in this life. And while you may be in the situation where you have no choice but to spend time with Associates as a majority of your time, they in no way make up for Family and Friends. All three are critical to all humans, save the Kaczinski types, of course, but everyone needs them in different amounts and spending too much time with groups of people can even be stress inducing to Introverts, who tend to take the rest of humanity in smaller and measured doses. As humans grew up and got acculturated to each other through history, from pre-historic times to present, there are strong bonds that all people form to emotionally sustain them and give them moral and ethical roots in society. I stress physical meeting because there is no substitute for them: actually being in someone's direct presence has physical, psychological and emotional feedback into your psyche that is, generally, positive.

Just don't save up negative feelings for Thanskgiving and Christmas time with your family. Having positive time together as a family with friends is one of the most important things that can be done: let the preachers do the preaching that everyone wants to hear, not what you need to get off your chest or pontificate about. You are better than that. If you have bothered to learn self-restraint, that is.

The Body Politic

You participate in the Body Politic even if you haven't registered to vote, disdain the political system, and generally decry it at all turns. You are a member of society and are to be considered part of the Body Politic no matter how little you want to have to do with it.

Using the G.O.D. Theorem, I can state that there used to be a different era of politics that were not centered on elections, not centered on candidates, and were centered on the positive social impact of being in a political party that met up as smaller units for social gatherings. There are very, very, very few positives in growing up in a socialist leaning family, let me tell you that right off. In fact the only great aspect was seeing how the traditional, old-line socialists actually ran their political lives together at party meetings. Party meetings were things like: barbecues, a day at the beach, spending a day to celebrate one of the respected people in the party chapter on their birthday, stuff like that. Maybe 3 meetings a year, tops. The total time spent on politics at a typical 5-7 hour meeting was 1 hour or less, usually with a speech or two. You have to give the old line socialists credit for continuing on a tradition that had been lost in the late 1960's and early 1970's by the mainstream parties. But then the old-line, First International Socialist types had speeches on actual political outlook, dogma and not about plans or policy, by and large. Really, what sane person would attend a nice day at the beach to talk about the intricacies of tax policy or which programs are actually doing any good? Those get shuffled off to meeting rooms, run by party apparatchiks... and that is in the mainstream political parties as well as the old line socialists. No one wants to see how political sausage is made, these days.

With the shift in party power in the mainstream parties from wards, precincts and districts to the higher level offices until the National offices came to run the party, also came the distancing of people from actually discussing politics as a moral, ethical and popular matter. Political parties used to be about ideals and moral viewpoints, not about getting a slice of the power pie. The Body Politic only works well when there is a healthy discourse and intercourse amongst individuals and parties based on ideology, dogma, and arguing the basics of each to see how viewpoints that differ lead to different conclusions. It is society that creates the requirement for government by having a commonality of understood law amongst all members of society, and Nations are formed to differentiate societies due to the ideological, ethnic, religious and moral differences between them.

To unmoor individuals from this connection, those connections must be devalued, slowly removed and the ability of individuals to have say over the Body Politic and the organ of society we call 'government' must also be distanced. This is generally not a fast process and takes much time to degrade and demoralize society via other organs of education, church and the law. Government is created not to think for society, but to be a Punisher and ensure that those that would attack society are punished. It is given power to do those things, but they are safeguarding powers, not productive powers. For all the great edifices put up by government, they come at the expense of human liberty and freedom and the larger the edifice the greater the expenditure in lost productivity to gain it. Necessary infrastructure is to be created and safeguarded as directed by society through government for the benefit of all members of society and the welfare of society as a whole. This requires active participation in the political process to ensure that government only safeguards society and does not think that it is the determinative organ of society.

When government assumes that latter role we have various names for it: tyrannical, authoritarian, and imperial. Those individuals that wish to remove differences across all society are putting forward an imperial dogma as the ones doing the pushing are also the ones doing the deciding on what, really, you need in the way of liberty and freedom. Similarly those trying to liquidate national boundaries are trying to homogenize mankind to end its differences and reduce mankind to the lowest common moral denominator which, when done across cultures, is called savagery. The very worst components of all cultures, taken as the base of all human culture, is a savage thing and it is the conscious effort to move away from infanticide, slavery and so on, that gives a higher moral standing to those who eliminate such things in their own society. Yet this is diminished in 'moral relativism' that says that all good things are only good on a sliding scale and not a positive good in and of themselves.

This end is reached by starting to alienate individual from government by utilizing government's punitive powers against individuals of a certain group or class. Income tax was put into place on a class basis to 'tax the rich' and would 'never go above 7%'. Yet within 7 years it went to 70%, and still the insatiable appetite of government was not assuaged. Also demonized were the 'fat cat' tycoons of the trusts: Carnegie, Rockefeller, and those who sought to purchase corrupt politicians to their cause. While the anti-trust act was passed to break up the large trusts, the large banks counter-attacked because of the problem government had in funding itself. JP Morgan floated loans to the US government and prior to WWI the largest bankers in the US got together to put together legislation to put a Federal Reserve run by them into legal form, via the Progressive banner. The very types of trusts Progressives decried in industry, were most amenable to them in banking and their reach, to this day, is much larger than any or all of the tycoons in business combined. But you will not hear their modern day counterparts talking about breaking such an establishment or member banks up as they are 'too big to fail'. If the public had gotten any word of this legislation, at the time, it would not have passed. The public was not consulted, however, because the new Progressives didn't want the public to know of the deal that went down. Really, parties are only for passing legislation, not representing people, right?

With the Anti-Trust Acts, Federal Reserve and Income Tax, the Progressives had already changed the basis of government to exclude popular oversight and distance government from the Body Politic and society as a whole. It was an intentional set of acts to start creating anomie and isolate the individual by class, by economic status and to then punitively utilize the tax code to further isolate those that politicians didn't like. The media played its role as purveyor of information from government, but rarely, if ever, serves as a feedback instrument past that era of partisan newspapers that populated all sides of the political spectrum. By choosing who is and is not worthy to propagate information, government chooses the propagandists who then change their tune to better suit what government wants purveyed. You have little to no say in this, it is taken from your hands intentionally and you are no longer taught about your right to publish as part of your freedom of speech. It is implied that the freedom of the press is held by the press, not by the people, and yet it is the people who set up the organs that create the press, not the other way around.

The goal of this agenda, started over a century ago, is to install a small group of Elites as those who will dictate your life to you via government. If you depend on government for 'retirement', medical care, and even something like surviving a disaster, then you are no longer doing the basics necessary to secure your own life and survival. Such programs are sold as one thing, that is being a positive good, but they come at a cost of productivity, lost investment opportunity and having you as a thinking, vital member of society. Instead the individual becomes a mere cluster of group overlaps where any single group might be demonized to distract from the work and lacks of the Elites. When you group together to 'protest' against 'banksters' you are no longer holding government to account for it NOT allowing the process of justice work its ends on them. A bailed out company is one that is inefficient, poorly run and no matter how big it is, deserves to go through hard and deep restructuring of all of its elements just to survive. When allowed to tell people what energy is good and what energy is bad, then the most efficient and economical forms of energy can be marginalized so as to jack up the cost of actually having a modern life until the economy grinds to a halt and the dissociative media can soothe you by letting you know that this was the fault of this or that evil company, not your fault for helping to foster such government which wishes to impoverish you after driving you apart from your fellow man and making you dependent upon an authoritarian government that changes how you learn, what you learn and diminishes the ability to think critically.

As an individual I do not sit in judgment of you but tell you of what I perceive and the changes in the course of the world due to the structure of how society works and what part in it you play or do not play. When you hand over government by not even participating in its functioning, then you are giving the assent of apathy to have your life dictated to you by others. You could have a say, you could create a vibrant society that is rich in thought and discussion, and you could hold government to account to yourself and your fellow citizens by actually being a citizen and doing the job of a citizen. That job requires thinking and not just superficially but the deep and profound thinking of what it actually means to be you beyond distractions from media and seeking an easy life of doing what you are told by a set of Elites you do not elect but assent to by being passive. This passivity creates a frail society, a weak society and one that then gains fewer and less robust points of failure, until only a few are left that have no back-up, no capacity to respond to any failure because they all must do those things which you no longer do. And then there is a failure that cascades and your world disappears as the complex systems have gained simplistic governance that has a reach that is vast and a grasp of very little at all. That governance will seek to vilify and displace blame from itself so that you will be angry at anything, anyone, any group but those who have claimed so much and now can perform nothing and fail.

In anomie the individual becomes dependent, all moral decisions including that of which to sustain, life or death, becomes equal as all morals are rendered to have no value. That cannot sustain a society. That cannot sustain a government of any sort as you no longer self-govern. And those who fostered this have forgotten that they sit atop this set of vast and complex systems and for all they say they do not understand that complexity one whit better than those they are trying to control. When such vast societies fail they fail for the rich and poor alike, and while the rich might gain a cushion from their wealth, their very lives have the exact, same value as the very poorest who bear the brunt of their decisions. Soon there are fewer wealthy, fewer poor, and society is reduced by fire and iron to base survival where those who think and can plan are left to pick up the pieces to try and create a better world out of ruins. That is how such plans end as raw power is not competent in anything, save savagery. In that it excels because it is loosed from the bounds of having to weigh and judge towards civilized ends and is no longer held in check by citizens, but is used over mere subjects who are just subject to power, forgetting that they are its very author.

You cannot forget what you have not been taught. Sadly the Elites suffer this as badly in their quest for power. Once your life becomes all about you, then you are the absent author of power, the absent creator of society and the present instigator of your impoverishment by doing nothing to stop it on your own behalf. One cannot be sustained without work and without fear of outcomes: these two things do not go together and allow survival of society.

I prepare and plan for the failure of my fellow man writ large.

I do my part in warning and in letting you know that thinking, while difficult, is worth it as it is the creative process necessary to have a society that upholds your right to think. I see the destructive ends of anomie applied to my fellow man and what its effects are over time and point them out. That is my duty as a citizen to my fellow countrymen and as someone who loves his fellow man globally. I can still do that even with what I see happening around me because judgment is open-ended, adaptable and what is as it is can change. If you believe that being civilized is easy, then I ask that you look at where such ease ends and point out that those ends are savagery. I will, however, not step on the path of savagery with my fellow man and must point out the better, harder, tougher, nastier and yet more fulfilling way that allows you to be the great author in the hardest work of all: civilization.

You have been lied to not just as an individual, but your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents as well. Fed a belief that is destructive to self and society for generations, we are now near the end of that anomie that it has fostered. You have not been taught the basics and, instead, learn only to be dependent upon power held by the Punisher which is authored by us all, and it is base and raw in every instance, at every turn, and in every way. Power is a slavering beast inside us and manifests in that one organ of society that must process the rough and harsh people who forget what it means to be civilized. That is not the brain of society, but that most base organ that is yet so essential to the health of society. It grows cancerous through inattention, spreads its cancer when unchecked and when it claims to be the author of itself, then its true author is reduced to subjugation to it. Thus are the Elites turned into the savages they so desire you to become. That takes work to stop with your fellow man, and it cannot be done without you. For you are also the author of Hope. Unfortunately she got stuck at the bottom of the box and someone has to reach in and help her out after all the demons of savagery have been loosed upon the world and this task cannot be done alone. You must change to get hope, not ask for hope and change inverted for it does not and cannot work that way.

Hope is not bestowed, it is reached for.

Hope does not arrive upon a litter borne up by vast multitudes, but alone, unclothed and shivering when she must be helped up from the box of terrors.

Hope is not released but must be set free by those who change their viewpoint and will to no longer indulge themselves but to offer a hand of kindness to her with their fellow man.

Hope is many things.


Hope is not a strategy.

Hope is not delivered it is built.

Hope is not the product of government, but its dearest enemy for she offers to hold it accountable for its deeds.


You are the author of Hope.

I hold my hand out to you to help you out of the box of terrors.

There is a better way and you are the light of your own life and of our own world once out of that box of horrors and to love those around you and not demonize them for not being you.

I say that not in judgment of you but for the simple fact that it is true.

It takes effort to step out of that warm, dark, and lethal box and a lifetime of work to stay out of it as it is so warm, so dark, so cozy, and if you stay too long the horrors then put the top back on the box and then you are dead and Hope extinguished.

I ask you unleash the power of Hope in yourself, to hold the Hope enslavers to their deeds, to free yourself from the shackles of dark comfort and ill ends and to transform the world together by holding a hand out to the oppressed and a shield against the savage.

You cannot fail me.

You can only fail yourself.

And in my deepest love of you I do not want to see that happen.

Getting out of the fiscal hole

Our Nation has plied blithely past $16 trillion in debt, equal to our entire GDP, and barely rattled as it did so.  In truth the whole world is rattling and a bit more on our part isn't going to be quickly identified, although its longer term consequences will have a drastic impact on events at home and globally.  If the state of the federal level of government is unsustainable, a number of our States are as bad off if not worse off than the federal government.  CA is seeing an exodus of businesses and jobs as the tax rate, crony kick-backs to politicians, and bureaucracy seep into every area of life in an attempt to control it from the governmental level.  Like IL there is a huge debt problem of what is 'owed' to civil servants who have been lucky enough to get unionized and then enrich politicians via their unions so that they can have a say on both sides of the negotiating table.  Other States like NY, MA, PA, NJ and WI are not immune to this problem, as well, and each have similar problems of too much government promising and too little forethought as to what those promises actually mean.  WI is digging itself out the century-long hole of Leftist policies by simply cutting spending, requiring workers to put more into their own care and freeing up local counties and districts to be able to chart their own courses on fiscal needs.

The simple removal of bureaucratic overhead, spending mandates, and requirements to adhere to contracts that were done to reward the minority with the wealth of the majority in an unsustainable system are critical.  Sovereign governments are the source of contractual authority and, being that source, cannot be bound to the same laws that they pass for everyone else at all times.  That is a perilous thing to have sovereign government do, but it is essential to have a system of regular laws that are upheld for the benefit of all to the detriment of none, and that is part and parcel of the sovereign power, as well.  A sovereign government can, thusly, break promises and contracts for the survival of the sovereign entity.  Just as at the National level a sovereign government can break treaties with foreign Nations when they put the sovereign of the Nation at peril so, too, can lesser sovereigns exercise such authority in their domains of power.  Throughout history this is exercised only by the most corrupt of regimes or when a government is in dire peril of being liquidated for past problems it has caused: better to break the contracts, reform government and pursue the goals of the people as a whole than to be dissolved by that whole and start over.  Yet, as sovereign governments are the representation of the people who create the Nation, they can change or abolish the State (the government) when it no longer meets their needs and imposes unjustly upon them outrageous costs that no people should ever bear.

This part of the debt burden held by States is, then, amenable to State sovereign power which is recognized as distinct from the federal Nation State sovereign power.  The reason we have no laws for bankruptcy of States is that it is expected that this sovereign power will be used to address the localized problems and allow the people of a State to reform, amend, change, or abolish and create anew their government.  It is perilous to renounce debt as those depending on debt servicing get the shaft.  Russia learned this, to its dismay, when it renounced Czarist debt, Nationalized companies and then found that skilled management at home was absent and that no one abroad would invest in such a place that could not recognize its debt obligations.  When the USSR began to finally honor the Czarist debt and pay it off in the early 1980's, the end for their system was written in the need for outside help.  Socialist and Communist regimes are always born in debt and find it hard to do much of anything because they will not recognize this debt payment obligation. 

For the US, our States in the most dire of need will have to recognize the error of their ways, re-organize debt and stop accumulating new debt, which means breaking promises on retirement amounts (or even having any funds dedicated to such from government) so that the government can down-size and do its few basic functions and continue to pay its debt off.  Such debt can be re-negotiated, however, and offer pennies on the dollar but for those pennies it is expected that the debtor (the State) reform its ways and walk the straight and narrow and actually pay that amount.  If you want an example of what happens when that falls through, look at Greece, Italy, Spain and the rest of the EU that has huge debt and getting even pennies on the dollar is a pipedream.

To bring around States to the realization they can't finance their promises requires that those purchasing such debt recognize that it can't be reasonably repaid and stop purchasing it.  This has already happened at the Nation State level with the Federal Reserve now holding a massive portion of US debt.  That is to say that the ones running the printing presses get to call the shots in the very near term.  The flip side of easy lending to a government by a central bank is that the government becomes beholden to that central bank when spendthrift ideas are backed and paid for with debt obligation.  Once the Federal Reserve just acted as a for-profit pass-through of US debt (we paid for that service) but as our creditors have started to dump debt (read: China and Russia) the Federal Reserve holds such debt and can only balance it by creating new funds to pay in inflated dollars.  There are only two things the Federal Reserve knows how to do to deal with fiscal problems: inflate currency by printing more money or increase the interest rate to burn more money.  For all the window dressing on the Federal Reserve, that is what they do.

Total debt obligation for the US government and all the States is in the range of $70 trillion with some estimates putting it over $80 trillion, and none of that can be paid off with the current economy.  Even a booming economy for a decade can't do it.  Or two.  Why?  The spending doesn't stop and always outstrips tax revenue.  I've gone over the so-called 'entitlements' (basically taxes paid in to pay to current beneficiaries with IOUs from the Treasury for future payment now coming due) and would be remiss to point out that the next largest growing portion of the federal budget is debt servicing.  At some point in the near future the question will be: you can have 'entitlements' with debt servicing and NO other government, or you can have government's necessary functions with debt servicing and NO entitlements.  That choice will be yours.  The folly of the USSR points out what happens when you reneg on debt and it isn't pretty.

If the theme of the 2010 Tea Party election was 'Stop The Spending' then this message must be reinforced in this election to put it as 'Stop The Spending Now Damn It'.  Politicians, generally lacking in spine, find saying 'no' to goody giveaways very hard.  These politicians must be replaced, and if their replacements fail then they must be replaced and so on in a process I call 'Fire Until Competence Is Found'.  It is what President Lincoln did with Union Generals, and it works quite well and is eminently suited to the electoral process at all levels.  As citizens our duty is to get this message across AT all levels of government, and I heartily endorse taking part in any election at the local, county, State and federal level to drive this message home.  If we can get just a few more States beyond TX and VA into solvency, then a real path out for the spendthrifts can be pointed out as good examples to follow.

Stopping the spending is the most important part of this equation, and can (indeed must) act in concert with other portions of it to bring home the true bankruptcy of the 'entitlement' system.  Most citizens when they hear of the insolvency of, say, Social Security will point to 'guarantees', which were made by politicians.  Remind them that believing in a politician is the surest way to get in the hole and that these politicians must be held to account for their ill-actions.  No matter how 'good' the cause, the actions, themselves, are ill and need to be rethought.  With that said there now needs to be trust garnered by the federal government (and the States as well) that they understand that things not given to them to do in the small realm must be lopped off to show that government understands dire fiscal times.  At the federal level this means antiquated departments like the EPA, Education, Energy, Agriculture, Labor and choice portions of Interior that is holding land in States that the State legislatures have not signed off on the federal government having to control per parcel.  Perks must go, including large Secret Service details, flying first class and huge staff sizes at all levels of government. 

Structural reforms to get the federal government out of the home lending market ENTIRELY and to remove the ability of commercial banks to operate in that realm are necessary: a local banking system offers depth and flexibility that a larger system cannot achieve while remaining profitable and requiring local judgment on who is worthy of getting a loan.  The only requirement is that loans are given out based on fiscal background, type of loan, and if said loan actually is not at risk for being lost or devalued for the customer once given all of which are local decisions and can be handed to different officers in a company to judge just those factors shorn of all other outside factors completely.  This entire concept goes for student loans, as well, as we are moving out of the 13th century bricks and mortar schooling realm and into a 21st century realm with on-demand courses and self-paced systems now coming out to allow the bright to excel as fast as they can and the less bright to realize just what their limits are quickly so as to adapt to a better suite of skills to meet their individual talents.  For we all have talents in different proportion and they are least well served by diploma mill physical education institutions with a 'One Size Fits All, Fits None Well' approach.  And this is at the Primary, Secondary and Post-Secondary levels of education, not delimited to Colleges and Universities, although the loan part is aimed at them.  As a society we will adapt to the changing understanding that education is life-long, that touchstones are what one can do not how many classes one has attended, and that the greatest drive for education is self-education.  This will mean that what we consider 'vocational' systems will revive as those not suited to book learning but can learning engineering, physics, and chemistry by hands-on application will require these venues to expand, not diminish and they do require physical structures as they deal directly with our physical reality.

Trust building is a two-way street and government is ill-served by seeking power to control those things it is not designed to do.  Reduction in federal regulation and putting that burden on the States means adaptable responsiveness to local and regional problems as States can work with each other without the requirement of federal oversight.  So long as they do not put bias in the internal trade system of the US, States can work together to solve regional problems via State to State agreements run by the States and held accountable by the people in them.  Handing back control of natural resources (i.e. having lands held by the federal government go back to State control) means that these localized system which are adaptable to local concerns can be put into play without a straightjacket of having to put in tropical screening in facilities above the arctic circle.  As ND has shown with some spillover to MT and SD is that State and regional resource exploitation can be done competently, within reasonable accommodation to the environment and still get one heck of a return.  CA has so much oil off its coast that it comes out in seeps, but because of regulations the pressure can't be relieved by drilling because of environmental fears... which are being realized by not drilling the oil pockets.  Not everyone will succeed equally and some States may never get a clue, but that should not be for lack of good examples by other States.  As the States have demonstrated good and responsible capability for near-shore drilling and exploration, they have a track record of success and the federal government should withdraw its regulatory schema for economic zone drilling and put that in the hands of the coastal States as well.  Pipelines that cross international borders only need Nation to Nation agreement on the crossing and the internal apparatus of each Nation in Provinces and States be allowed to find the best routing solution for them.  As the Nation needs refining capacity (we are now exporting crude oil for refining) the States should serve as the focus for this local concern, as well, and perhaps provide federal land that is too contaminated to be used for much of anything to the project.  In short the federal government really can demonstrate trust by removing regulations and supporting States and the people to figure it out for themselves.

In short removal of regulations for labor, environment and agriculture, along with a host of others for education, energy and land use, puts the most capable and local of government in control of their own destiny.  Yes there will be those who don't do so well, better a few fail and we garner good examples from others, than to fail everyone by doing nothing or doing a little poorly or not well by fiat from the federal government.  Getting prosperity back requires these things and a comprehensible tax code.  As I pointed out previously to this article, exemptions must be eliminated as tax rates are lowered to get a net tax rate that is lower than the purported rate, but is closer to the rate already paid with exemptions and other write-offs.  The entire set of write-offs can be eliminated to get a flat tax, payable by all who earn income of any sort, with only some lowering of rates below the poverty line so as to lessen the impact on the poor so that their amount steps up towards the norm for those above the poverty line as they make more.  This is equality of the tax code and puts citizens into the drivers seat by not collecting taxes by having businesses do it, but by those who vote understanding the direct cost of what they vote for once per year.  This would also mean rolling in separate taxation for 'entitlements' (like FICA for Social Security) and removing them as separate line items, which simplifies the tax code.  Former Soviet States like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Albania, Russia and others have all concentrated on this as it eliminates tax avoidance and puts a stronger assurance on compliance and a better feel for revenue over time.  An assured revenue stream is mandatory for paying down debt obligations.

Now as I am not a set-size pie person, the way to remove debt is to make more in hard currency: produce more wealth.  Remove the wealth reducers in regulation, tax policy and other bureaucratic overhead is necessary and often results in economic expansion with diminished boom and bust cycle depth as artificial causes of bubbles from government disappear.  You still get such cycles, but that is because of increased technical capability removing older industries and that takes a hard change-over as expectations for existing industries go down and new ones arise.  Creative destruction is for the betterment of all mankind, to produce more worthwhile goods at a lower cost so that more people can afford them to lead better lives.  Luckily, this is a very profitable endeavor and can't be done without the profit motive to do more and gain more for any given produced unit of an item or service.  Thus the future must be examined for what it brings.

Until we get to quantum computing we will see an expansion and filling-in of the now old cyber structure of the digital age.  With hard physical limits for silicon and reduction in circuit size now being reached the realms of nanotech, quantum tech and biotech will all serve as future platforms for expansion and they are in their most nascent stages of development at this time.  Even awaiting those areas (and the new companies and industries that will make them) the older technology for personalizing computing and laboratories will create labs on a chip for home medical diagnostics when, coupled with expert systems, will expand and reduce the cost of everyday medical care.  Put robotics in with that and you get Larry Niven's autodoc, where you step into a booth or lay down on a bed with automatic scanners and medical tools to do everything from examine your daily health to stabilizing the condition of someone who has been in a horrific accident, perhaps with some surgical needs addressed immediately and specialists on-line to deal with the worst that can happen to an individual.  This will remove Medicare, Medicaid, and even medical insurance once done and the technology is starting to be integrated today to put scanners together with expert system software.  Autonomous robotics is also advancing and when applied to medicine and surgery, the cost of everyday care and even minor surgical procedures will drop as they become mass-customizable by technology.

I have already addressed schooling and the manual arts, and these, too, will be augmented by low cost computing platforms that are autonomous or semi-autonomous.  Because our structures are not designed for automated maintenance, there will always be a requirement for manual labor to repair existing infrastructure until we can adapt technology to it or supersede it with better ways of doing things.  If you do construction in New York City you must deal not only with modern pipes, power cables, conduit, etc. but those left by previous utilities dating back to the 1840's if not earlier, and that is not something that robotics or autonomous systems will handle well for some decades yet.

Returning to space for commercial activity is already on the drawing board, and going back to the moon to exploit its resources (mostly for space use and for those items that can only be made in micro or zero gravity) may start out with remotely operated vehicles or semi-autonomous vehicles, but will require some amount of direct human oversight at some point in time.  A minor asteroid brought into Earth orbit (or Lunar orbit come to that) can be easily rendered into separate elements by the process of solar mirror melting.  Put a bore hole into the interior, deploy a few square kilometers of thin film reflector to concentrate sunlight into the center of an asteroid and perhaps a thin film enclosure to capture escaping gasses and just let nature take its course.  When thoroughly melted the micro gravity will separate out the elements and then when it cools you get concentric shells of denser and denser elements presorted by atomic mass.  Other methods can be used to remove hot melt by layer and re-melt layers so that they are more easily dealt with when solid removal can't be done quickly or efficiently.  An asteroid of just a few hundred tons might yield a ton of gold or silver, and many more tons of iron, cobalt, nickel and copper.  Essentially the same can be done on the moon, as well.  In all, expansion of an economy when done on this scale is no longer that of a Nation State as we now know it, yet the basic economics never changes and no matter how much money comes into a government, it always seems to expand to absorb more and more of it.

For all the good news to come about, it is up to the citizen to put government on the strictest of diets and boil our social questions out for open and frank discussion.  The morality of taxing the unborn to pay for the current elderly and sick is one that does need to be in the open as the deceitful discussion led over the prior century has attempted to sugar coat something that no one in their right mind would agree to.  It is up to each of us to learn how to deal with the things life hands us for good and ill.  I've made no plans based on: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or any other 'entitlement'.  They will not last forever no matter HOW MUCH MONEY the government gets because any government that sees fit to remove liberty for this cause will do so for ANYTHING and then use its removal as a club against free men.  That money is gone and overspent many-fold, and isn't coming back, isn't in a 'lockbox' and treats our children and grandchildren as our ATMs.  We have garnered much material wealth and a bit of better health with that, and if we must do without we now have that as a cushion to fall back on when we realize that government is not a guarantor of retirement, health care or any other thing. 

We are.

As individuals and in our cooperation with each other to create accountable systems that meet our needs outside of government.

That is why we seek to have a just government that can uphold contracts amongst us, and understand that it must guarantee that system while we understand that often our best impulses come to the worst ends via government.  Our essential duty is to learn this and teach it to our children: free men take their lives into their own hands for good and ill and we also must create the means to catch those who fail in this.  That is not the task nor role of our government, to be positive to us, but to simply uphold the just means so that we can achieve the good things that create a strong society and a free population.  When we do wrong, even for the best of reasons, we admit to it, mend our ways and pay off our debts and NEVER burden others with this especially those who have NO SAY IN IT.  Which is our children and grand-children.  If we are far on the side of lax morals now, we can always straighten up, take our lumps, admit our humility and uphold our duty and right to pay off our debts and stop doing the asinine things we currently do with such good words that belie such ill outcomes.

We are can create that future and get out of this fiscal hole by forcing our government to stop trying to provide an easy life that none can afford.

Life isn't worth living because it is easy.  No it is death, death is equal to all and easily found at all times across all classes of society and respects none.

No, life is hard to fight for, hard to keep, hard to maintain and must be all those things so that we can create a better world for all mankind to enjoy the fruits of their life.  And not have it picked from them by government to go begging for the rind of the fruit while government sucks the succulent flesh from it.

It is for these reasons I vote.

I am happy to vote, but it is too important a task to not take as an earnest duty and obligation to my fellow citizens so we may all be free from government's tender mercies.