Planets on Display

Those of you that follow astronomical events may know already that the next couple of days feature a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in the early evening sky. The location is eastern Sagittarius east of the TeaPot and near the kite-shaped asterm  with Omega-Sgr and 59Sgr. The young crescent earthshined moon will join them tomorrow and Monday.

Also, Uranus is easy to find for the next few weeks because it is close to the star of nearly the same magnitude 96-Agr in Aquirius. This is north of the Waterjar at about the same RA.

My eyes are bad and getting worse because of a cataract. I used to just be able to  make out Jupiter's moons in the 7X35 binoculars I have, but I can't focus that well now. But after finding out where Uranus was tonight, I could easily distinguish it from the star. They look like an optical double, and for test I looked at Eps-Lyr over in the western sky next to Vega, which I could resolve in the binoculars. I was impressed when my son, who was then 16, said that he could resolve this pair unaided. That is a good vision test.

 

Who Really Matters, Ship of Fools

In the human condition, we worry about legacy, what we leave to our descendants, and we are apt to ponder how it is that a few people in the past really matter to us now, even though their own place in human affairs in their life time may have been doubtful.

In the biggest scope, on the geologic time scale, the life span of a species, such as ours is about 400,000 years, so our time is almost up. We could kill ourselves off or some catastrophe of nature could end up like it has millions of other species. So what is our legacy beyond some scattered fossils? Perhaps it is a random sample of artifacts, which if some suitably intelligent life form from here or somewhere else happens to recover, could figure out what were about.

While we are around we are concerned after we reach a certain age about what we leave behind besides our genes and wonder that even though certain significant people did not leave their legacy in genes but artifacts while most people do not leave much of value at all besides their genes if that. In fact the human condition seems to be that most people are fools who squander what they got from the past and waste what they could give to the future. By a pure stroke of luck these few words could survive both my end on earth and the extinction of mankind to be read by some sentient being. I am not saying that this being would necessary find anything of value in my words, nor do I humbly expect that of human posterity.

More than likely a flood of gibberish will survive for a time at least. Any examination of the flood of images, words and sounds that a beast like the Internet now allows to be splattered into interstellar space will be faced with the task of culling from it what is significant. That is likely to be something that is uncommon, not the consensus, but the exception. A medium as democratic as the Internet multiplies the conventional, banal, consensus. It will reveal a Ship of Fools, that most people didn't think and didn't realize their potential and wasted what they had. Very few among us are lucky enough to find that resonance of emotions and insights that transcends the consensus and at the same time it is the exceptional insights of a very few of us that has changed our world permanently and far beyond the original context of our deeds. It is not that I would have it any other way than it is now, the rights of the rabble, the din of the ordinary, but just that nullification leads to the contribution of the outliers, that if change is what is needed, that it comes from the edge, not the center. We may become aware of a idea as new to us when it has penetrated the center, and already signaled its death, but it started in obscurity.

So what distinguishes those who really matter from the rest is that they begin by knowing who they are in a deep an enduring way, not by comparison to what others tell them. If the human condition is not one of power; that one really cannot get four people together to agree to anything of consequence, ending the myth of conspiracy and grand plans, that human groups are processes of degraded information flow and fragile consensus, explaining the paradoxes if the current global economic crisis not as some grand plan but as the confused chaos of a breakdown of trust and expectations, then the foolishness of people becomes obvious. That seemingly smart and ambitious people who exercised power were deluded both about who they are and the reality of their existence, and their legacy is likely to be not what they imagined. It is likely to be what they caused to be wasted, not what they created. Nothing of their time of earth will endure because they never committed to an artifact who they were.

The people that really matter almost can't help themselves and they seem to get past all the pressure to fit into some mold, that all of the other fools fit into, by the sheer momentum of who they are. History cleanses the collective memory, which by the way is a consensus of fools, by allowing for time to winnow those who promoted themselves and did not really contribute anything tangible, even if that artifact is but a few well-chosen words. The irony is that that author seldom knows that his words will endure.

Sleezy business model of register.com

I have rented my domain, euphon.org through these guys since 2005. Because my housemate changed ISPs we no longer have static IPs and so don't host our own mail and web servers. The result is that now I am exposed to the predation of register.com and other ISPs who have worked up a business model that nickel and dmes the consumer. This all starts with other sleezeoid providers like Comcast, the slime, who provide DHCP. This gives them the power to charge too much for web hosting and for web page tools. Register.com provides one free page of web hosting but its interface is crumby and chinzy. There is an inverse relationship between the cost of storing web pages and what they charge for hosting and that is because the restriction of domain space and IP addresses provides an opportunities for ISVs to gouge. This may also explain why IP6 hasn't caught on, because the four octet IP range provides the business opportunity these guys want. It is true that there are dynamic DNS servers that can get around this, but you pay for those as well. It isn't that I don't want to pay, it is that I don't want to be ripped off, and register.com is a ripoff.

It turns out that this, blogger, might be a good alternative, until Google starts charging for it. I may abandon my web site and just post content to a couple of blogs here.

Why the economy must remain "mixed"

The argument of Libertarians, who I think are bigger fools than most, and Republicans, who have sold out America to make a buck in the world economy, that unfettered Capitalism is the best solution to setting world and national priorities, how people should use their resources and how government should govern, if at all, is, now quite literally, bankrupt. The business cycle has reared its ugly head, and for precisely the same reasons as 80 years ago, and even though the mechanisms have changed and the process will play out differently the result is the same, an upcoming international calamity on the scale of World War II, caused by the failure of market economics and having a similar result, the end of the current world order and its replacement with a new one, actually the old one.

The argument of Conservatives that the New Deal did not end the Great Depression of 1929 but that spending in the World War that followed is moot if you regard the idea that both Stalin and Hitler were a result of the get-rich-scheme set up by the fix of 1918, the Treaty of Versalles, and the resulting economic boom for the U.S. and UK, that came apart in 1929, and cleared the way for an essentially conservative reaction to the flow of capital into Wall Street and its subsequent evaporation. If John Maynard Keynes is wrong it may be the the spending by government on arms is more seductive than spending it on people, the flow of capital is more facile when politicians imagine enemies, whether they are real or not, the issue is only if the spending priorities drive the flow of capital. The spending might only reflect the idea that spending is good, not that is does anything worthwhile for the people at the time. Had there been no New Deal, the economy might have been forced to spend its way out of the depression anyway, but criminals would have killed more plutocrats as they were starting to do in 1934, and so the issue for the most cynical is that they went and killed Germans and Japanese instead of rich people. Does this mean that Latino and Black Gang Bangers and Drug Dealers who are bankrupting the nation's penal systems should be "drafted" to kill Taliban in Afghanistan? That might be the hard-ass Republican solution to what is an essentially economically created imbalance, and it smacks of the Roman solution of the Empire, to create a mercenary army to do the dirty work of the Capitalist world order: Gang Bangers for Oil. Dark Side, Dick Chaney, couldn't have said it better, nor could the "brains" inside Hoover Institution.

The alternative is the have government do what market economics doesn't do well: Create roles for people when markets lose their nerve. Which is why 2.6 million government employees is such an economic force, and like the failure of leadership in the private sector, which is what the economic downturn is really about, the Congress, that pool of potential leadership, has a chance to step up and really use its power to create economic power and leadership, or so does the next President.

The "New World Order", looking for opportunities mostly in Asia to create a cheap manufacturing labor force, and undercut organized labor in the West, will be a failure. It won't be decapitated by political and economic processes within itself, but by a combination of cultural flaws in the US and Asia and by the external timing of ecologic calamity caused by energy "policy", i.e. unregulated energy markets. This has nothing to do with the race or intelligence of people, but everything to do with the economic practices and myths within cultures. Who will emerge triumphant is the "Old" world recast, but with a set of values that caused the Industrial Revolution in the first place, that could be said to have caused all of our current problems, but because of these traditions of openness and curiosity, now declining in the US and never finding ground in Asia, what is now the EU will pick up the pieces later in this century when the economies of Asia and the US have been decimated. The US has a chance to join the EU, not in the literal sense, but in the cultural and intellectual sense by revaluing learning and reinvesting in its roots in European cultural values. Even though other cultural traditions, such as Chinese and Islamic preserved and extended technologies from the Classical tradition, and passed them eventually to the European Scholastic and University system, it was Europe who delivered this amassed knowledge to the rest of the world, and it is Europe who will emerge from the next crunch, especially if the US does not rediscover this tradition and use it to innovate out of its emerging problems.

Failure of Leadership in business and government is due to computer technology as one of the major causes. The failure of the Congress to regulate short-term capital gains and the rapidity of on-line trading has created too much investor speculation and has caused leadership in business and government to become ineffective as control becomes short-term, With investors breathing down the throats of boards and leaders, no one makes any long-term decisions and leaders do not get a chance to develop their craft. We need deliberation and leadership, even if the past was shaped by the abuse of power by leaders who had too much power, at its best men of vision, provide a guide for the rest of us who might make decision on whim or purely by conventional wisdom. The National leaders as well as many of the leaders in business do not lead well. George W. Bush is a poor leader. a man of little vision, who has relied on fear to guide the Nation and a man who is so inarticulate who, even if he had a good idea, can't express it. Many of the leaders of business are so ruled by ROI and the fear that their investors will cut and run that they cannot lead. Planning has become so short-term because investors and markets have the ability in the technology to act as impulsively and as fickle as they can.

And as for the wisdom of crowds, or markets, or investors, there isn't any. A mere consensus or a tally of conventional thinking does not constitute wisdom, and anyway, so far as markets are concerned there is always some 800-pond gorilla in the room. There is always some big player, sometime just the people who got there first who set the agenda, limiting the choices in the so-called "free" market. Or when a market matures, the choices narrow as the "winner-take-all" mechanism eliminates choices, reducing freedom. There is no wisdom in deciding from a set of choices that have been rigged by the people who are first or who leveraged the field. Nor, for that matter are investors all so wise. Most do not know what they are doing, and even if they do, their decision-making is mostly myopic, short-term ROI. Wisdom that involves a long view of things or a plan with a delayed gratification or future reward is in short supply. That is where the vision that comes from effective leadership comes in and that is not determined by the form of the political system, but by how we nurture the quality itself in people.

The wisdom of "Mixed" is that finding the qualities in people to lead comes from a variety of sources and experiences. It comes from a rigorous education that values deliberation and learning, from years of gathering facts, of holding back from impulse, and yet of knowing when to act. It does not come from gathering around you people who agree with you. The key failure of leadership of Hitler, Stalin, and yes, George W. Bush, is gathering around you a group of "yes" men and women, who even though they go through the motions of a lively discussion, really protect the paranoid personality of the leader. This is no less a problem in business leadership, in fact it is more of a problem in my direct experience. Not only do you have to eat your own dog food, as the saying goes, but you have to recognize when it is crap. That is the problem most business people have, seeing that their ideas are crap.

The Candidates are Part of the Problem

Although I like Obama the most of all the contenders, certaintly over McCain and Clinton, we ought not to forget that Congress is the root of most of the problems in the nation, and that all these Persidential contenders are members of Congress and specfically the upper house, the Senate, where influience peddling is in its greatest effect, going back to the Founding of the nation in the U.S. Constitution in 1789.

That is, a big problem with America lies in the framework of the Constitution itself, and in the role of the Legislative branch in not acting. I know that to most Americans this is a heritical view, that the problem with government is in the founding document of the government, and that the Constitution as it sets up representive government with its bicameral legislature and separation of powers needs to be reviewed and changed if the Union has any real chance of surviving for very long.

The problem is what Congress has not done; what the legislative process has not delivered both in terms of service to the general welfare and to providing a check on the other two branches. All these candidates have been in the Congress at a time when it did not act to curb an exective which flaunts the intent of the Constitution, and for all the talk of reform and change, the more time they have been on the inside accepting the traditions of the government as it is; the urge to compromise just to get anything done and the tendency to not act, the less they will truely deliver. It is Congress that sets up the Federal beaucracy and to a large extant the state and local beaucracy under Federal laws, and this results in people going through the motions and delaying services while protecting their jobs. This is beyond partisanship as a negative effect, it is inefficiency run ranpet because a nation under law is also a nation that can wait under the burden of regulatory complexity. This is the pre-revolutionary state of a government rendered impotant by the sheer burden of its traditions. The candidates are powerful forces in this system.

Asside from the obvious constitutional changes, such as abolishing the Electroral College, we need to abolish the favoritism of the ruling plutocracy established by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers and reform the bicameral system. The Constitution does not specify the nature of political parties, but it does set up a leveragable winner-take-all system which needs to be reduced in strength of the control of Government is ever to have even a dim relation to democratic processes. We should consider reverting to both a single house of the legislative and adding a coelition form of governement. America may well decine as a world power as wealth is drained from it by globalism and as world leadership moves elsewhere, such as back to Europe. In order to mitigate the influience of plutocrats leveraging the duopoly, and to allow for more than two political parties a no-confidence vote ought to allow for setting up of elections. The current Consitution is guarenteed to splinter the Union, America may split into several nations by the end of this century as a result.

Did the Internet die?

And is Google killing it? (Loaded Question) Just now I did a search on "Yuba Blue" hoping to find something on the geology of distinctive blue-gray boulders used in landscaping here in California. I saw large boulders a ton or more in weight that were pillow basalts metamorphosed to blue schist facies, and wanted to know more about the probable subduction zone that put them there before the Nevadian orogeny of the Sierra Nevada. I was hoping to quickly get to some web page on the
geology of these rocks.

Instead, I got page after page of links to businesses in Smartville Ca. with the search string. Several links repeated through the search result. This suggests that business people are fooling the search code with spam hits. Long live the Internet?