Revolving Doors with SEC & Wall St and a few other facts

William Cohen (Investigative Reporter and author of House of Cards) announced on Bloomberg August 29th, that while Hurricane Irene raged, the SEC was destroying records and investigative files.  More than 9,000 files were destroyed involving investigations into Goldman Sachs, Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brothers and many others involved with Wall Street.  Cohen stated that there is a revolving door with the SEC and Wall Street.  He said there are 220 former SEC employees that now work on Wall Street.  He said this is unhealthy as they are totally beholden to each other.  Close the doors on the SEC and start over is Cohen's advice!

During the month of August, 5 Trillion was lost on global equities. (Reported on Bloomberg)

Norm Roubini said the US has 60% chance of going into recession. (Reported on Bloomberg)

I just thought you should know that now is a very good time to buy gold as it has dropped to $1821 oz.  Remember it is always good to buy on the down slope.  It will go up again soon enough.  Protect your money by investing in gold. 

Rationalism for The New World Order

Modern:
Rationalism is defined (today) as using reason as the source of knowledge but it is considered to be more of a method which truth is intellectual and deductive.  Rationalism is more a matter of a way to solve problems, not by tradition or experience but as a technique and an engineering. But what does this really mean.  Rationalism is not to be confused with being rational or rationality.

Historical:
It is an ideology that came out of the Renaissance in the 1600's.  Bacon felt that knowledge was not advancing fast enough and he set about to formulate a new method of inquiry.  Bacon believed that natural reason was lacking certainty.  Therefore, he argued that the whole system of gaining knowledge must start fresh, that the mind shouldn't be allowed to take its own path but needed to be guided at every step.  It required a "sure plan, a new way of understanding, an art or method of inquiry."  Thus, he formulated that there must be a technique to inquiry.  Bacon recommended 3 characteristics of inquiry:
1. A set of rules.  A precise set of directions.
2. The set of rules needs to be purely mechanical as if done by machinery, no knowledge needed except of that technique.
3. The set of rules needed to be universal, that is indifferent to subject matter of inquiry.
The rules of discovery would begin anew with a new foundation.  By first purging the mind and thus the new instrument (Novum Organum) was developed.

Character:
Out of the ideas developed a new character, an intellectual type that is the Rationalist. As such the Rationalist have taken Bacon and Descartes as their intellectual guide but have also continued to add and advance their ideolgy and methodology farther.  Today the Rationalist can be left or right, conservative or liberal.  Nevertheless, they all believe in the same methods or techniques to obtain truth. Basically, the Scientific Method and Statistics. 

Politically Speaking:
For the rationalist the way to soliving problems is not through reason, tradition or philosophy but more a matter of engineering and applying the right technique (Political Science).  It is the politics of the determined need of the moment.  The crisis of the moment is now the nature of politics.  Not with the view of the future but only the needs of today.  The Laws are not built on our past traditional moorings but are started fresh and decided anew. 

Ever Learning

I love to learn.  And I especially love to learn what I am interested in.  I am an Information Seeker.  I am a hunter and gather of information that I deem important.  I want to understand the world I live in, present, past and most definitely the future.  I do believe that the past informs us on our future.  I spend most of my time in study and thought.  I get easily bored with the mundane and common.  I love to study hard stuff that I have to chew on awhile to fully understand.  So one will understand that I am both excited and fearful as I begin a new semester at the University.  My courses are all extremely difficult and I hope my mind will grasp the many new avenues that I will traverse.  My posts will discuss things I am learning in class, and through my readings.  It should be enlightening and informing as well.  So be prepared for some controversial information coming your way and hopefully you, as well as I, will learn some new things about the past regimes of fascism, socialism, totalitarianism, Asian Pacific Countries, behavioral statistics, and hopefully some more social psychology.  And as ever, I will still have an eye on the markets and financial occurrences that can affect us all.   

How We Know What Is True

According to psychological statistics the goal of science and psychology is to know what is true.  They teach that the way of knowing what is true is by applying statistics and the use of the Scientific
Method.  There are 3 main ways or methods of knowing:

Authority: Which is based on some other person's ideas or beliefs.  Can be based on tradition or trust of a person or expert.

Rationalism: This method is based on reason and/or logic.  It is the assumption that if the premises are true then the conclusions are true.

Intuition: This is based on our beliefs, faith, hunches, and feelings of what is true.  There is no evidence that is required and conflicting evidence is just discarded.

But the scientific explanation of truth requires that the Scientific Method is applied to test truth:
1. Empirical: based on experiment that can be repeated to get the same result.
2. Rational: it must be logical, and go along with known facts.
3. Testable: that the idea in question can be verified.
4. Parsimonious: that the results are the least complex explanation with the fewest assumptions possible.
5. General: it should apply to a variety of related circumstances, not just the one that is being examined.
6. Tentative: the results are open to revision and replacement if a more accurate explanation is developed.
7. Rigorously Evaluated: constantly evaluated in lew of new evidence.

Thus, according to science and the experts this method of testing truth is preferable to belief, common sense, rational explanation and logic.  This might explain why truth is so fluid and ever changing.  But shouldn't truth based on whatever method just remain true because it is true?

Surveillance as Power

Foucault (French Philosopher) turned the idea that knowledge is power to an expansive idea that "power is knowledge."  He believed that power has access to knowledge of many kinds.  Foucault asserted that power and knowledge were so inseparable that he linked the two words together power/knowledge.

In his book Discipline and Punish (1975) he investigated punishment and separated it into 3 separate periods and forms:
1. Gruesome executions that was meted out by a centralized government and legitimized by the general population.
2.  An abhorrence to previous eras of gruesome punishment, to the 19c of a transformation of use of power through technology.  This new phase introduced punishment based on surveillance and discipline.  Physical punishment was replaced according to Foucault with technologies of observation aimed at the mind rather than the body.  Though less painful, it is deceitful as it proceeds inconspicuous and can be more intimidating.  Foucault contends that social institutions rely of technologies of surveillance and is thus "taken-for-granted" as just part of the system. 
3.  Foucault's last phase of punishment is in a postmodern world that has advanced and developed new forms of power/knowledge through scientific discoveries, educational necessities for employment, psychotherapy, and pharmacology's that now generates new was of applications for power and control. 

This explanation of Foucault's theory of surveillance as a means of punishments and control just needs a little bit of thought to grasp the significance of what he has asserted.  Foucault was a modern man having died in 1985 at the age of 57.  He saw the tip of our advanced technological times.  It is necessary to look at the use of each new development in our day and ask yourself can this be used as a form of surveillance?  And if so, who is doing the surveillance?   And why?  It all seems so harmless today.  But will it remain so? 

Surveillance and You

There has been many changes in the U.S. since 9/11.  One of the most terrifying of these changes is the surveillance that we are under no matter where we go.  I can barely leave my home before the first camera picks me up at the first stop light.  I remember when the first surveillance cameras began to show up.  I read an article by our then Mayor Billings that said the cameras on every corner was to promote more efficient flow of traffic.  But that never seemed to be the case.  Traffic remained slow and congested.  Then cameras where everywhere.  I would sit at a restaurant and see that there was camera pointed straight at me.  (And I was taught that it is rude to stare!) 

Surveillance is suppose to be the price we pay to be kept safe in our paternalist world.  But according to Michael Foucault, the french philosopher, it serves an entirely different purpose.  His argument was that when a society is continually being watched that it puts everyone on their best behavior and creates a "self disciplinary society."  Foucault thought that to be "visible is to be trapped."  He further stated that there will not need to be social structures or specific institutions of power but instead "power will be destructured and individualized, free-floating within society in multiple manifestations." 

The invisible power is watching, collecting data and information about us, documenting and recording and saving it for what....?  It is an odd thought to know that we are watched on camera, the Internet, our phones, our car GPS, through our purchases, school and work and yet we do not know who has access to this information or what they are doing with it.  We know that Google is tracking and saving our every search and our emails.  And Facebook's social networking allows them to have access to all your photos, family and friend connections.  This is all different forms of surveillance and monitoring that did not even exist a few years ago.  I just wonder what all this means and where we are heading in the future.  Smile! You are on candid camera!

The Foolish Mistake Maker

The foolish mistake maker is someone that processes information badly.  Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in Nudge call these people the Homers.  It was decidedly more interesting to study people that do foolish, self-destructive, and irrational things than to show that people are sensible and most often do decent and good things.  Therefore, it has become popular to characterize the thoughts and actions of regular people as "stupid, biased and counterproductive" (Finkel, 2010).  By concentrating and exposing the dumb things people do, it leads to publication and career advancement.  That is why all the research and studies are designed to show people as "fools, suckers, and hypocrites" (2010). 

Another trick of the trade is to show people as lazy and always taking the easiest path without thought or reflection.  It isn't that this is always the case but studies are set up to search out and prove a particular point that has been set forth by the researcher. 

Polls are also designed by highly educated people that know how to ask the questions to get the answers that they want.  We live in a highly sophisticated world of experts that know exactly how to lead the audience to behave like Homers and be manipulated in the direction the choice architects want.  It is everywhere.  It is done everyday.  And in order to not be taken in, it is necessary to think and pay attention.  If we did that...then who would be the foolish mistake maker...us or them?