Archive for July 8th, 2009

08
Jul
09

Day 246

I’m better than you.

Call it the anti-Franken. I don’t care if I’m good enough, smart enough, or that people like me. I just have to be better than my opponent. Believe me, that’s not a high bar.

If you look at society as a mathematical model, you don’t worry so much about the peaks and valleys. Now we could have a devastating nuclear conflict or a global pandemic, but even then, 7 billion people makes for a global population that’s hard to dispense with.

Conspiracy theories always boil down to the incredible genius at the heart of the scheme. Now, if the architect is Satan and a plot of pure evil, he might have the smarts to pull it off. Regular human beings I don’t think so much of.

If you ask the smartest people in the world how to solve the world’s problems you’ll get more divergent answers than if you ask a collection of average people. Smart people’s biases are amplified by their intelligence. Politician’s biases are amplified by power. Shakespeare’s genius was his common sense. Power corrupts.

This Jackass is screwing up the country’s finances somethign awful. Carter screwed up the economy, but Reagan was able to fix 4 years of destruction in another 4 years. Government programs are hard to kill, but not impossible. Europe is beating back socialism. Chinese communism is being supplanted by cheaper, leaner capitalist Asian countries. The Tea Party movement is fighting back against all-inclusive government. It’s not morning in America, but dawn may be coming.

Global trends don’t require much intelligence. There may be more mob mentality involved in crap like pandemics and global warming carbon taxing than planning. But there are the people getting rich from global trends. I’m going to cover that this week. Stay tuned.