I was asked once to post a diary on Lithuanian parties. This week is a fitting opportunity, as Lithuania has Parliamentary elections this Sunday (October 12), and I was most of the last 2-3 weeks there. The later factor didn't help much to feel a better insider, but... political detachment is an obvious part of modern social environment, visibly convenient for the political classes as well.

This is a lazy photo-diary about people who are not allowed to be lazy.

A documentary about them won several film awards recently. The title is "Eisenfresser" ("Iron eaters").

The location is Chittagong, Bangladesh. It is very near in our globalized world.

A big sea-port, long beaches... stranded ships...

Pictures worth a thousand words - Diary rescue by Migeru

As commonly observed, the modern TV is not about news or education, especially in the US. TV programs hook up and play with most basic psychological reactions and dumb down our senses. Can't commercial TV really do no better than stimulate most basic brain circuits and entertain our egos?

Here below is an interesting view from the American continent to European TV experience. Does European TV indeed remain diverse and still enlightening, or is it getting trashy just as well? Does it indeed regularly offer not only confrontational entertainment, but likeably provokes all loving states on mind as well?

Here is the story from David Neiwert's blog:

Dave's [last post] points up just how complicit the media has become in perpetuating the kind of sticky, pernicious racial conflicts so much of the country is trying hard to get past. The deeper problem here, of course, is that conflict sells -- you really can't have any kind of dramatic narrative, fiction or non-fiction, without it. And it's very hard to get the American media to give up on a conflict narrative that's served so many social and political interests so reliably for so long -- even when it's become patently clear to everyone that that narrative is now savaging the soul of the country.

And the infuriating part of it is: It doesn't have to be this way. To prove the point, I'd like to offer two examples of how other countries are using media constructively -- and incredibly powerfully -- to actively help people get past this stuff, instead of staying stuck in it.

Power satisfies people, power corrupts, power moves people, power makes people despair. Why is power so important? How much does it affect humans and societies?

An important book on this subject is

The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution

by Andrew Schmookler. The author has a blog, writes also here.

The main thesis of the book is that

the history of civilization has been largely shaped by the way that, as a system, civilization has no mechanisms for restraining the raw struggle for power between societies.

I am quoting from these excerpts.

Just at the time when we start wondering how much world's developments are influenced by the richest and most powerful persons, which actually get ever more stupendously rich and powerful with ease, there appears the book "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making" by David Rothkopf. I haven't seen the book, but picked up some reviews from Amazon.com and an article at Salon.com. The author is a humble insider of sorts: a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, acclaimed author of Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, now lecturing, serving at advisory firms (say, Kissinger Associates).

Let's catch a wave of blogosphere interest in the Google feature that allows to track and compare frequency of various keywords in Google searches. The particular graph that is being keenly copied is the comparison of the searches for "turkey" and "diet":

So, American people look for "turkey" at around this time, and then again (a smaller peak) for Christmas, and after the New Year party they look for "diet". You can graphically appreciate the inevitability. Searches for hangover peak sharply at around New Year as well, surely enough.

You can play a lot with word combinations. Following blog links, you can find
Pokemon vs US presidential candidates,
depression vs rain & umbrella,
love vs sex,
fishing vs hunting,
snow vs fireworks,
four seasons comparisons.

I read sometimes right-wing commentators, to get a gist of their basic reasoning. So I stumbled upon the article

Altruism and Selfishness

by British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton,
published in the journal "The American Spectator".

Since we like to discuss here ramifications of altruism and selfishness, we may take a look at this particular perspective. The article starts like this:

THE FIRST PIECE OF MORAL advice that parents used to give their children was contained in the Golden Rule: Do as you would be done by. Christian parents backed this up with the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jewish parents with the commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself," enlightened parents with their own version of the Categorical Imperative. It all seemed very simple.

This is a quick (though long) response to a discussion in this thread. The subject jumped suddenly to Darwinian evolution. I am responding to this comment of ThatBritGuy:

I suspect there's a Darwinian bottleneck which means that species intelligence always tends towards the lowest limit needed for immediate gratification, competition and survival. In most environments that's usually going to be too low to make good species-wide strategic planning likely.

What seems to have happened with humans is that the limit rose a bit higher than usual, probably through reproductive competition - but not high enough to be truly smart.

Darwinian solutions are always short-term and instinctive, and more effective in the short term - which is fine as far as it goes, but creates a reproductive cost for the more strategic kinds of intelligence which are capable of planning ahead.

Long term solutions are likely to frustrate any number of hard-wired tendencies, and that's not going to make them popular, or likely, with individuals who don't have the cognitive or empathic skills needed to understand why they're necessary.

And so - most species won't make it. You may get a sudden die-off, or you may get cycles. But breaking out of that pattern is going to take a lot of luck, and some stray well-intentioned randomness.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the first successful launch of a man-made object into the space. The first satellite - Sputnik 1 - circled the Earth for 3 months, 98 minutes per orbit, and was sending the famous "beep-beep-beep" signals for 22 days. When will the glorious times of space race be back? The anniversary is not causing much shock and awe as the original event did - the media is not seeking much educational role. But interesting facts about the first launch emerged last week. It turns out that the Sputnik was a very spontaneous success, rather than a well-planned program of disciplined "soviets".

The start of the space age. Is it over now? -- Colman

Recently I picked up a random book at the Schiphol airport, it was "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Still doubting whether I need to know more about random things, I paid for the book.

The author is a no-nonsense practitioner and educator of uncertainty, hunting at Wall Street for upshots of risk ignorance. The book considers probability not as an engineering or computational discipline; the chapter on human misconceptions about randomness is acknowledged as the least original part.  Instead, probability is introduced as a method of dealing with our ignorance and lack of certainty.

You may remember that I am kind of obsessed with seeing pyramid schemes or Ponzi financing in the glorious markets of today. With so much financial engineering going on, some reinventions of pyramid and Ponzi schemes are bound to happen.

Still, there was a feeling of surprise to dig out that the ongoing crisis with "junk" CDOs (Collateral Debt Obligations) is basically nothing else but unravelling of a pyramid scheme. The key hint can be found in the following article by Henry C.K. Liu, of May 8, 2007:

Liquidity Boom Decouples US Equity Markets from the US Economy

(aka Liquidity boom and looming crisis)

The Hong-Kong born Henry C.K. Liu is an investor and impressive analyst of financial markets, international politics and social-economic trends. He is famous for the article series on "Bubbleland Wizard" Greenspan. He wrote comprehensively about banking history, labour recourses and other matters. His recent article Why the subprime bust will spread was widely cited in the progressive blogosphere.

Henry Liu still has to write something since the outbreak of the current crisis. But his previous articles, though rather technical, have full actuality today. What is very rare among modern pundits.

I am obviously on vacation. There is time for reading, but after some inquiries I decided not to bother with a temporarily internet connection at home. I check ET at an internet cafe sometimes, but there is so much good reading here that I have to dump the texts to a memory key and make some time at home.

I just read fully "Prometheus Rising" by Robert Anton Wilson. Some observations seem to be very relevant to a few ongoing discussions here. In particular, I address the discussions on modern "tribal" nature of politics (and our problems with it), and science education.

Promoted by DoDo

"Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called The Pledge: the magician shows you something ordinary, but of course, it probably isn't. The second act is called The Turn. The magician makes his ordinary something do something extraordinary. Now, if you're looking for the secret... you won't find it. That's why there's a third act, called The Prestige. This is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you've never seen before."

The Pledge. Tony Blair is wondering why Iraqis are angry on American and British troops, after so much was done for them.

[Tell] me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a United Nations-supervised democratic process and the Muslims in both countries get the chance to vote, which incidentally they take in very large numbers. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims.

What's more, British troops are risking their lives trying to prevent the killing. Why should anyone feel angry about us? Why aren't they angry about the people doing the killing?

Indeed, why Iraqis are not grateful for all the opportunities the invasion and occupation has brought them?

Most of us here at ET are capitalism skeptics, obviously.  Discussion of neo-anarchist, social oriented or Veblenian alternatives is almost escalating. At minimum, we see shortcomings of capitalism workings (like forced obsclence) - can't they be corrected?

One of the views is that unrestricted capitalism works all fine while it can be afforded - there is plenty space and resources to utilize, there are still new nations to enter the markets, any kind of growth can continue uninterrupted. Yes, capitalism is supposed to solve scarcity of resources as well - but is it not creating the scarcity problem itself, unneccesarily and at a stupendous pace?

The implication of this view that "funny" things must happen when limits of growth or resources are about to be met. I consider here a couple of examples showing perhaps that the funny times are very near. Here I give one sad example below thw fold, and two examples of other kind in comments. I know, I make the connection with greedy profit seeking by "energetic" individuals in growing economies very easily, but... These consequences are within the nature of greed-admiring enterprising culture, are they not?

A study published in Nature claims detection of egalitarian impulses - a will to take from the rich and give to the poor. This must be driving cooperation, the researchers suggest.

Egalitarian motives in humans

Participants in laboratory games are often willing to alter others' incomes at a cost to themselves, and this behaviour has the effect of promoting cooperation. What motivates this action is unclear: punishment and reward aimed at promoting cooperation cannot be distinguished from attempts to produce equality. To understand costly taking and costly giving, we create an experimental game that isolates egalitarian motives. The results show that subjects reduce and augment others' incomes, at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative behaviour to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of income alterations are strongly influenced by inequality. Emotions towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases, and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average earners' incomes and to increase below-average earners' incomes. The results suggest that egalitarian motives affect income-altering behaviours, and may therefore be an important factor underlying the evolution of strong reciprocity and, hence, cooperation in humans.

From the diaries ~ whataboutbob

This news broke, up to some prominence, a few weeks ago. It was discussed briefly here at ET as well. This time I quote "Der Spiegel":

A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic proportions. The consequences for agriculture and the economy could be enormous. [...]

Felix Kriechbaum, an official with a regional beekeepers' association in Bavaria, recently reported a decline of almost 12 percent in local bee populations. When "bee populations disappear without a trace," says Kriechbaum, it is difficult to investigate the causes, because "most bees don't die in the beehive." There are many diseases that can cause bees to lose their sense of orientation so they can no longer find their way back to their hives.

Manfred Hederer, the president of the German Beekeepers Association, almost simultaneously reported a 25 percent drop in bee populations throughout Germany. In isolated cases, says Hederer, declines of up to 80 percent have been reported. He speculates that "a particular toxin, some agent with which we are not familiar," is killing the bees.

[Since] last November, the US has seen a decline in bee populations so dramatic that it eclipses all previous incidences of mass mortality. Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.

From the diaries - whataboutbob

Recently, I wrote a diary with one of speculations that speculative markets (such as stock and real estate markets) tend to behave like pyramid schemes at certain stages (like now). The crucial feature is the point when the market valuation grows predominantly because of outsiders entering the market with expectations of profitting from the steadily growing market. When the market volume has nowhere to grow, the latest entrants (if only) suffer dearly.

I am content to find out that my suspicion is not a wack unseen to human mind. Please enter Prof. Hyman Minsky (1919-1996), and his Financial Instability Hypothesis.

From the diaries ~ whataboutbob

As this diary originated from a discussion of real estate markets, we will eventually get to financial matters of today. The sweeping bottom question is: how can an apparently steady growth or progress be possibly halted, or even voided? Do civilisations collapse often, and how? Do they just meet bad luck or barbaric invaders sooner or later,  or do they always collapse once they fully employ a "no-brainer" affluence strategy, like greed or self-indulgence? Can gains of globalization and free markets increase forever, or will they abruptly end just "around a corner"?

Globalization must have the limits of the globe, or not? It works all fine while new markets open and expand, while masses of new individuals enter speculative markets, either directly or via inescapably more aggressive pension funds. Will the global economy continue to prosper when the stream of eager new buyers will dry out?

Deep down, it is not exceptionally remarkable that evaluation of the markets grows while their volume rapidly expands. You can run a pyramid scheme with the same effect!

From the diaries - afew

For once, pro-war LA Times commentator Max Boot put up a reasonable article in his column:

Is Iraq turning into Yugoslavia?

[...] In the former Yugoslavia, as in Iraq, ethnic groups have clashed over the years, but they also have had long periods of peaceful coexistence -- and not only under the heavy hand of a Tito or Saddam Hussein. Croats, Bosnians, Slovenians, Kosovars, Macedonians, Montenegrins and Serbs lived together for centuries under the relatively benign Ottoman and Habsburg empires and later under their own monarchy. So did Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis in Mesopotamia.

No, this diary is not an over-ambitious manual for the World... "How the World Works" is the name of a daily blog (by Andrew Leonard) within the webjournal Salon.com.

The postings (and reader's comments) are often really interesting -- frequently sadly exciting. But I just love the postings, so here I present some of today's dish. (All postings, together with reference links, can be read after viewing a short web-commercial. Or if you happen to be a Salon.com subscriber, you can read everything immediately.)

I hope Salon.com will view this occasional diary more as advertisement of their website than a copyright problem ;-)