Month: July 2015

“The vast majority of people want to believe in some definitive higher power. Like the conspiracy issue. People just cannot grasp that perhaps there is nobody really in charge orchestrating everything and we are at the mercy of the whims of finance. I took my son-in-law to Washington for some high level meetings. I told him he better think twice before stepping behind the curtain for he really did not want to see what I see. When we left Capital Hill, he was stunned to realize that this is a runaway train. There is nobody in charge. All they do is try to deal with each crisis as it appears. There is no long-term strategy and certainly no planning. Everyone creates wonderful conspiracy theories trying to create plots of destroying the world with no rational comprehension that the people they are fantasizing about just are not that smart.”

http://www.armstrongeconomics.com/archives/21071

Amen

mike

“Working memory capacity increase of 50 percent; better than yoga

In the study, such activities included climbing trees, walking and crawling on a beam approximately 3 inches wide, moving while paying attention to posture, running barefoot, navigating over, under and around obstacles, as well as lifting and carrying awkwardly weighted objects. After two hours, participants were tested again, and researchers found that their working memory capacity had increased by 50 percent, a dramatic improvement.”

http://www.kurzweilai.net/memory-problems-go-climb-a-tree

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I had experience a few weeks ago in Camotes walking in a old lava field and after a couple of days, I noticed a cognitive flush that seemed rejuvenating and fresh…now I know it was related to this effect…when I get back I plan to do this every morning as I noticed it also involved leg conditioning;)

I have trouble sitting for yoga but the challenge provided by locomotion over uneven surfaces like lava is pretty exhilarating and it’s right out the front door;)

mike

I don’t disagree that we should provide healthcare to the poor but we have the WRONG MODEL IN PLACE to make it happen, so as a result, the costs they said we wouldn’t have…are in fact back, bigger and better than ever…

At 5% growth spread over the next decade, aggregate costs of healthcare (using rule of 72s) will double!

Oops!

mike

Ps: it will be impossible for the system to keep the promises it has made, and system integrity will begin to degrade within the next decade!

https://www.wsj.com/

Read the last paragraph (not copied here)…use link below;)

“The first step is to identify certain constants that have shaped a country’s behavior over time, regardless of personality or ideology (an imperative to gain sea access, a mountainous landscape that requires a large amount of capital to transport goods from point A to point B, a fertile landscape that attracts as much competition as it provides wealth). The country’s history serves as a laboratory for testing how the state has pursued those imperatives and what circumstances have charted its path. What conditions were in place for the state to fail, to prosper, to avoid getting entangled in the collisions of bigger states, to live in relative peace? We take the known and perceived facts of the past, we enrich them with anecdotes from literature, poetry and song, and we paint a colorful image of the present textured by its past. Then comes the hard part: having the guts to stare into the future with enough discipline to see the constraints and enough imagination to see the possibilities. In this practice, extrapolation is deadly, and an unhealthy obsession with current intelligence can be blinding.”

https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/quantum-geopolitics

I liked his references to waves, probabilities and determinism even I didn’t agree on all his assumptions;)

The revolves around Turkey and always will;)

mike

If u don’t know anything about hard wired motives, it would be easy to assume that nurture is what causes people’s learning.

Whereas people who kept learning and acquired post graduate degrees were and are hard wired to learn for some reason, and in some the desire to learn never ends.

Policies that emerge from each line of thinking would have different results, and risks/rewards.

mike

https://news.gallup.com

“Dr. Grant recommends “unleashing your inner ambivert.” “Read each situation more carefully,” he says, “and ask yourself, ‘What do I need to do right now to be most happy or successful?’”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/not-an-introvert-not-an-extrovert-you-may-be-an-ambivert-1438013534

It’s interesting to see what POP Psychology (a la Pink) does to the growth and maturation of “normal wo/man”;)

mike

“The temptation to believe that we are ambiverts, or that we are intrinsically balanced, has been around since Jung created his system of typology and in part seeded his motivation for writing Psychological Types. Jung’s acknowledged goal was to reconcile the “hostile” psychologies of Adler and Freud, each of which had demonstrable value. His realization that Adler’s system was introverted and Freud’s was extraverted was a major revelation, one that  transformed both his theory and his practice of psychology. This understanding led him to consider an understanding of what he called “the personal equation” to be an imperative for psychoanalysts, or in fact for any scholar or scientist pursuing objective truth. Acknowledgement of intrinsic bias became the necessary starting position for his psychology: “Every theory of psychic processes has to submit to being evaluated in its turn as itself a psychic process, as the expression of a specific type of human psychology with its own justification” (1921/1971, para. 857).”

http://typeindepth.com/2015/07/ambiversion-ideal-or-myth/

This article should be read after the “popular” article noted in WSJ;)

mike

 

“I just received the following note from one of our Inner Circle members.  Below the note is my response.”

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Here’s a remarkable interview with Nicole Foss (Automatic Earth) where she elaborates on the same topics as Martenson does in a very lucid and female manner. It’s well worth watching. A friend of mine shared it with me with the comment below.

Mark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNvmIfyQPY

„I enjoyed her expose! Nicole has been a harbinger for accurate analyses of the real issues for decades together with her husband (their platform is automatic earth) and struck me for the powerful contextual thinking that reaches into the depth of issues and as such way back and before the turn of the century when good analyses on system fragility were scarce if not absent in the public space.

After introducing the main parameters of the current predicaments she gets to the issue of the serial boom and bust cycles in the 21st century (beginning 1:08). There she explains the fragility of what has come off 35 years of ponzi schemes in production and finances! Payday is just around the bend. She goes into the foundations  what in reality were the drivers of the decay in all areas of globalized schemes of deceit, manipulations, meaningless rituals, hollowed out structures, outright destruction aso. The associations that we make spontaneously with terms from the macro space are mostly wide off the mark and have little bearing with their current functionality be that economy, democracy, liberalism, markets, retirement arrangement, higher education, healthcare,  – you name it. Any trust in the current power plays and their brokers is completely misplaced. Nothing of what we have build with cheap energy and financial ponzi schemes since 1980 is in the least sustainable, no question asked!

We are not facing problems really, we have arrived at a cliff and must think about how are we going to bolster a steep fall OFF the cliff, i.e. we are in presence of predicaments. If we have no choice a parachute may become a very useful tool, as it were.

Quite methodically she takes us through a number of key areas of what is currently shaping the world as we know it and that has not the slightest chance to function as we move forward. More importantly, she opens up a debate upon those very crucial issues that increase our resilience as individuals and as local communities that CAN work. For doing so she really comes up with a large number of suggestions that should be considered and used as base case for improving our resilience to the kind of collapse of highly leveraged, centralized and energized structures that can only function by sucking in ever larger areas of peripheral providers and dedicating ever more energies in pretend and extend damage control.

Our current ponzi structures are hugely wasteful and the weakest link in their working is for obvious reasons the financial area that maintains the daisy chain of self-serving, totally idiotic arrangements built on maximizing shortest term yields at the cost of staying in harmony with the real boundaries set by limits of all sorts and nature. The virtual character of all money arrangements leverages up the speed of collapse of that space and in seconds, minutes and days the whole damned thing just dissolves into NOTHINGNESS, think of US$ 700 trillions of bets on interest rate alterations by the global financial casinos (i.e. banks), i.e. such amount represents the effective counter party risk and is subject to mind blowing domino and melt-down risks…”

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Mike’s response:

“…we are not as rational as we are rationalizing…”

I haven’t listened to all yet but this is one smart lady…

I don’t agree with all the assumptions BUT this paints a very broad picture of likely structural failure that is entirely consistent with Armstrong’s ECM…

IF you do not have a plan to live simpler in your future, you will suffer greatly…!

All of us are going to have to take apart the structure of your life and see how much socio-economic complexity is wired in and ur going to have to unwire, then rewire your life much less complex.

I feel wonderful that I have written a book @F-L-O-W about to do exactly this process;)

And happy that it’s being validated from structural design people from around the world;)

mike