Lies of the Times: Obama needs to fufill his promise

But this would be a superficial analysis using "causation," saying "this caused that," and I think most Americans understand this. Most Americans understand that our problems are more complex.  Despite the new president's promise to end the "trickle down theory" aspect of the US economic, and hence global, system during his final and most important presidential speech, things remain much the same.  The US in mired in yet another un-winnable war, the Iraq war resembles Vietnam in many ways, and the "trickle down theory" remains, where improvements in stock market, the simple-minded "causation" measure of the economy, result simply from injections of US cash that is desperately needed else where.

Initially the injections of cash simply resulted in "profit taking" by investors; the initial billions were simply shunted into private holdings, and the market indexes sank again.  As of today, the most recent injection has resulted in record profits by one bank giving the market optimism, though those profits were purely based on government subsidies, hardly old-school capitalism.  The system that created the problem persists, and, as skeptics point out, there is no evidence that America will return to its successful roots as a producer.  One can only assume that America will continue as a sub-division housing and shopping mall producer, and that the key economic indicator will be consumption and production will continue to be ignored.

Global security is more muddled than economics under the new "liberal" president, and hence difficult to understand.  It is also difficult to look at because it is based on killing.  Research has departed as a viable tool for security, the CIA being America's intelligence advisor has mentally decayed into a killing machine designed specifically to punish perceived enemies without the evidence necessary for incrimination. 

Ignored during more than two decades is intense cocaine infiltration from the South: Latin America.  Mexico, leading the world with its nearly purely smuggling-based economy, both dangerous narcotics and equally ruinous illegal labor, attempts to solve its problem with violence, just as the US does in the Middle East.  The barest knowledge of cocaine culture learned from TV specials easily tell the average American that drug wars fit the Biblical adage like no other: violence begets violence.  With the majority of Latin America's income derived from hurting America with its narcotics, the narcotics industry has to be endemic to Latin American culture, and wars will simply shift power as Latin America simply has no ability to sustain the production necessary for a sustainable economy.  This crisis combines war and economics.

Obama's strategies are neither imaginative nor unique, but they are embryonic; he is not yet being blamed for the failure of his strategies as he inherited the present dilemma and he is still within his first 100 days.

The common thread through all these problems, both violent and financial, seems to be mental dysfunction; it was apparent in the last administration, and is becoming apparent in this.

About two years ago I was personally influenced enough by constructivism with it's concept of "community of knowledge" that I altered my life to engage people who are truly linked emotionally, the highest form of information, and to relate all the beneficial components of my life as information structures in community of knowledge that links well into the environment.  I absorbed Darwin's idea that morality is the evolution of the love that animals feel, what he called "natural affection," and within this emotional knowledge is factual knowledge that links to the code of life of the environment; the DNA of nature around us.

From this I created a wiki page on the Wikiversity called the Empathy Model that structures relevant gathered information and shows a structural relationship between healthy psychology, social interactions, and society.  But with much of knowledge about psychology, the focus turned towards what is missing, empathy that we have lost.  A far more accurate way to describe the concept is as "emotional communication," which is the most sophisticated form of communication, as it transports the most sophisticated and complicated information: feelings.  The neural constructs necessary for this are far beyond those necessary for any other task, including mathematics.  In music, which is highly mathematical, the concept explains the criteria for distinguishing between a passable technician and a true artist.

In the early analysis of the Empathy Model, a lack of specific neurons or neural constructs prevents the necessary complex conceptualization and communication necessary to develop beneficially.  Generally agreed is that this lack of neurons describes the sociopath.  But there is resistance to the idea that the obvious mass murdering by societies that is war is necessarily sociopathic.  There is the argument that killing may be necessary for self-defence, but I rarely hear it except in terms of rebellion.  A more common rationalization is that killing is necessarily an outcome of economic conditions, a phenomena unto itself, and that global trade is the necessary solution.  From this we get the idea of global free trade, where the "freedom" is regulated through a concept of global citizenship: each of the biggest global corporations act as "citizens" in a purely corporate society that represents these multi-national corporations democratically, and that all others, all nations and their peoples, are non-citizens: slaves.  This is an obvious extension of the Roman empire's capital structure, its pseudo democracy which is called fascism, and its stretched-out collapse (in the West): Pax Romana. It seems obvious to me that a system like this did not work when conceived, and cannot work, as the basis of economics is the people who support economic systems, and without their efforts, economies collapse, as our global economy is doing right now.  Instead it thrives on bad things: endless debt robs future generations, economic inequities, and environmental collapse. 

These problems can only be reconciled in fantasy, and, in terms of the empathy model, this is what I get: a primary use for intelligence is the rationalization of failure.  As Heinlein said, "Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing animal."  Daniel Goleman uses this quote in Social Intelligence to show that little thinking is done as we step forward, and that most human thinking goes to deflecting blame for humanity's endless mistakes and mis-steps.  Little human mental effort now goes towards technological or sustainable resource development, and the majority goes towards building personal wealth, mostly in the forms of cheaply built but appealing housing, and equally cheap and appealing consumer goods in serially expanding malls along the super-highways.

The empathy model was built in wiki-format, and wikis, such as the wikimedia software of the Wikipedia, promote an excellent way of structuring information so that new, or meta-information, comes from the inserted information. 

Prior to my using a wiki, I focused the study in Internet discussion groups, so as to be able to bring into play many differing ideas and experiences, and also to make available space for debate.  But as the debate ended, I found that there had been little new information added, just a confirmation of available information based on experiences and research.  Debate become contentious; this helped test existing ideas, but further prevented knowledge construction. 

One small information bit that came through the discussion is the idea that the a justice system is not really about what is "just," but what can be rationalized.

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