Arts and Technology

In the Arts series I offer SEEPER, an interactive arts and technology collective. Seeper has been exploring natural user interaction, responsive enviroments, devices and architecture to create multi-sensory experiences.

Suggested FULL Screen Viewing.

The LightLine of Gotham from seeper on Vimeo.

TED 2010 from seeper on Vimeo.

ACDC Vs Iron Man 2 - Architectural Projection Mapping on Rochester Castle from seeper on Vimeo.

The Ice Experience from seeper on Vimeo.

Orwellian "Corporatocracy"

"Orwellian" describes the situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free society. It connotes an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past, including the "unperson" — a person whose past existence is expunged from the public record and memory, practiced by modern repressive governments. Often, this includes the circumstances depicted in his novels, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's ideas about personal freedom and state authority developed when he was a British colonial administrator in Burma. He was fascinated by the effect of colonialism (or Corporatism in Wes world ) on the individual person, requiring acceptance of the idea that the colonialist oppressor exists only for the good of the oppressed person and people.

There has also been a great deal of discourse on the possibility that Orwell galvanized his ideas of oppression during his experience, and his subsequent writings in the English press, in Spain. Orwell was a member of the POUM militia and suffered suppression and escaped arrest by the Comintern faction working within the Republican Government. Following his escape he made a strong case for defending the Spanish revolution from the Communists there, and the mis-information in the press at home. During this period he formed strong ideas about the reportage of events, and their context in his own ideas of imperialism and democracy.

This often brought him into conflict with literary peers such as W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender^[1].

In 1940 he engaged himself in the practise of supporting mis-information for a revolutionary purpose with The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. A counter-point to his previous work, immediately after his return from Spain, Homage to Catalonia. Homage was elementary in Orwell's definition of the process of truth-power connection and its relevance to ideas of freedom versus authority, whereas Lion & Unicorn was a formative piece of 'propaganda'. The narrative of the two is one that informed Orwell's later works such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.

Buchtrailer "George Orwell - 1984" from Eric Dirschedl on Vimeo.

1984 from abc1230 on Vimeo.

When Giants Fall...

Friday Night Jazz - Oscar Peterson style

...with Nat King Cole



...with Ray Charles



...with Count Basie



...at Ronnie Scott's Club, London 1974...



...with Ray Brown and Niels Pederson, both on bass...Montreux Jazz Fest 1977

QE2 and the Alleged Deflation Threat - Mises Daily

Mises Daily

QE2 and the Alleged Deflation Threat

by Robert P. Murphy on October 21, 2010

The markets and financial pundits are all abuzz over the prospect of another round of quantitative easing — "QE2" — in which the Fed may start buying yet another trillion dollars in assets after the elections. The justification for this massive bout of new inflation is, of course, the threat of deflation.

But if we actually look for ourselves, we see that prices are not falling. The Fed has already fueled another boom in various asset prices, just as it did when trying to provide a "soft landing" after the dot-com crash. The economy will never truly recover until the government and central bank let the market process take its course.

What Deflation?

It is curious that the financial press and many major economists are so convinced that the United States is on the edge of a deflationary cliff, by which they mean that various prices are about to tumble. On his blog, Paul Krugman has been beating this drum for years, and to prove the case he'll cite graphs like this:

Now I have not studied the case of Japan and its "lost decade" (and counting) so I can't responsibly comment on its experience. However, if Krugman's treatment of the "lessons" of Herbert Hoover is any indication, I am skeptical that the Japanese episode really means what Krugman and other Keynesians keep telling us that it means.

There are several problems with the exclusive reliance on "core CPI" as a gauge of the tightness of monetary policy. First and most obvious, it is absurd to focus on the "core," which excludes food and energy prices. It is precisely these prices that are the most important for struggling households — and they are certainly not falling. According to the government's own figures, from September 2009 to September 2010, consumer food prices were up 1.4 percent, while consumer energy prices rose 5.4 percent.
Given that many households are either in financial distress or are terrified that they soon will be, is it really so surprising that consumers aren't spending gobs of money on things besides food and energy?

Another problem is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics can't very well document changes in product quality, which tend to mute price increases. To take an example offered by Silas Barta, the next time you open a cereal box, check out how flimsy the cardboard is; it was sturdier several years ago. I doubt that the government CPI figures take this sort of thing into account when telling us how weakly prices have responded to Bernanke's incredible bouts of money creation.

Looking at Other Prices

Besides nitpicking the construction of CPI data, there is the problem of focusing just on consumer prices in the first place. For example, according to the latest report of the Producer Price Index, in the last year prices for finished goods are up 4.0 percent, the prices for intermediate goods are up 5.6 percent, and prices for crude goods are up a whopping 20.3 percent.

But wait — there's more! According to economic theory, there's actually a very sensible reason to include asset prices when trying to determine the "cost of living." This is because most people don't want to live for a single day on milk and bread that they just bought at the grocery store. In principle an ideal price index would include prices for both present and future goods. As a convenient proxy, it makes sense to include asset prices when wondering whether monetary policy is causing the dollar to strengthen or weaken.
On that score, it certainly seems as if Bernanke's policies have been a "success," and that the United States is not heading into a "deflationary trap" as the pundits keep warning us. Gold keeps hitting new highs, and look at what happened to the stock market as Bernanke first bailed out the banks in late 2008, and then embarked on the first round of quantitative easing in early 2009:

The above chart should be frightening to anyone who believes that Greenspan's easy-money stance after the dot-com crash merely fueled the housing and stock bubbles. Bernanke is simply setting us up for another collapse.

Before closing, let's look at just one more graph. This time, it shows the strength of the US dollar compared to a basket of other currencies:

As the chart shows, the dollar briefly surged after the global financial panic in the fall of 2008. But since early 2009, the dollar has resumed its nearly decade-long slump. From its peak in 2002 to the present, according to this measure, the dollar has depreciated by more than 20 percent against other currencies.
Are we still so sure that our problem is a dollar that's too strong? Are we still so sure that more inflation is the answer to our economic woes?

Conclusion

It's true that some Austrian economists — including me — were warning that consumer prices would begin rising more quickly than they have so far. Even so, it is still hardly the case that the economy is on the verge of a "deflationary trap."

$25 $22

In any event, a free people have nothing to fear from falling prices. The market economy is quite resilient, if only the politicians and central bankers would let it operate. Nobody would be so foolish as to claim that the computer industry is stagnant because of constantly falling prices, and nobody breathes a sigh of relief that medical care keeps getting more expensive.

It was a futile attempt to evade a bad recession that led Alan Greenspan to blow up the housing bubble. Now Ben Bernanke is doing the same thing, only with far more intensity. If he really wanted to help the economy, Bernanke would stop debasing the dollar and would allow market prices to tell the truth.

Robert Murphy is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute

Positivism and Behaviorism

Mises Daily: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 by Ludwig von Mises

[Excerpted from chapter 11 of Theory and History. An audio version of this article, excerpted from the forthcoming audiobook version, read by John Pruden, is available as a free MP3 download.]

What differentiates the realm of the natural sciences from that of the sciences of human action is the categorial system resorted to in each in interpreting phenomena and constructing theories. The natural sciences do not know anything about final causes; inquiry and theorizing are entirely guided by the category of causality. The field of the sciences of human action is the orbit of purpose and of conscious aiming at ends; it is teleological.

Both categories were resorted to by primitive man and are resorted to today by everybody in daily thinking and acting. The most simple skills and techniques imply knowledge gathered by rudimentary research into causality. Where people did not know how to seek the relation of cause and effect, they looked for a teleological interpretation. They invented deities and devils to whose purposeful action certain phenomena were ascribed. A god emitted lightning and thunder. Another god, angry about some acts of men, killed the offenders by shooting arrows. A witch's evil eye made women barren and cows dry.

Such beliefs generated definite methods of action. Conduct pleasing to the deity, offering of sacrifices and prayer were considered suitable means to appease the deity's anger and to avert its revenge; magic rites were employed to neutralize witchcraft. Slowly people came to learn that meteorological events, disease, and the spread of plagues are natural phenomena and that lightning rods and antiseptic agents provide effective protection while magic rites are useless. It was only in the modern era that the natural sciences in all their fields substituted causal research for finalism.

The marvelous achievements of the experimental natural sciences prompted the emergence of a materialistic metaphysical doctrine, positivism. Positivism flatly denies that any field of inquiry is open for teleological research. The experimental methods of the natural sciences are the only appropriate methods for any kind of investigation. They alone are scientific, while the traditional methods of the sciences of human action are metaphysical, that is, in the terminology of positivism, superstitious and spurious. Positivism teaches that the task of science is exclusively the description and interpretation of sensory experience. It rejects the introspection of psychology as well as all historical disciplines. It is especially fanatical in its condemnation of economics.

Auguste Comte, by no means the founder of positivism but merely the inventor of its name, suggested as a substitute for the traditional methods of dealing with human action a new branch of science, sociology. Sociology should be social physics, shaped according to the epistemological pattern of Newtonian mechanics.
The plan was so shallow and impractical that no serious attempt was ever made to realize it. The first generation of Comte's followers turned instead toward what they believed to be biological and organic interpretation of social phenomena. They indulged freely in metaphorical language and quite seriously discussed such problems as what in the social "body" should be classed as "intercellular substance." When the absurdity of this biologism and organicism became obvious, the sociologists completely abandoned the ambitious pretensions of Comte. There was no longer any question of discovering a posteriori laws of social change. Various historical, ethnographical, and psychological studies were put out under the label sociology. Many of these publications were dilettantish and confused; some are acceptable contributions to various fields of historical research.

Without any value, on the other hand, were the writings of those who termed sociology their arbitrary metaphysical effusions about the recondite meaning and end of the historical process which had been previously styled philosophy of history. Thus, Émile Durkheim and his school revived under the appellation group mind the old specter of romanticism and the German school of historical jurisprudence, the Volksgeist.
In spite of this manifest failure of the positivist program, a neopositivist movement has arisen. It stubbornly repeats all the fallacies of Comte. The same motive inspires these writers that inspired Comte. They are driven by an idiosyncratic abhorrence of the market economy and its political corollary: representative government, freedom of thought, speech, and the press. They long for totalitarianism, dictatorship, and the ruthless oppression of all dissenters, taking, of course, for granted that they themselves or their intimate friends will be vested with the supreme office and the power to silence all opponents.

Comte without shame advocated suppression of all doctrines he disliked. The most obtrusive champion of the neopositivist program concerning the sciences of human action was Otto Neurath, who, in 1919, was one of the outstanding leaders of the short-lived Soviet regime of Munich and later cooperated briefly in Moscow with the bureaucracy of the Bolsheviks.[1] Knowing they cannot advance any tenable argument against the economists' critique of their plans, these passionate communists try to discredit economics wholesale on epistemological grounds.

for the rest of the story...http://mises.org/daily/4607

A Conversation with Steve

Steve says -


I thought you might want to see this picture of my dog Smash on my hike today.   Ok, I know that's a long shot!

How is everything?   How's the riding?

Steve

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Wes says-

…you don’t need an entrée to write…what a beautiful scene…and dog.

…weather has been incredible in H-Town…we are going on our fourth week of perfect weather…not the usual 2 or 3…absolutely beautiful…mid-50’s in the AM, high in the upper 80’s…blue sky, relatively low humidity…gorgeous, but without your mountain view…

…we are preparing for Matt (1^st born son) and Laura’s engagement party that we are hosting next Saturday, the 23^rd…it is an exciting time in that respect…wedding next March…she is in UT Dental School…Matt is working for a small advertising firm…they are living in mid-town…

…getting ready for the morning ride…knee had been acting up, so went to see the orthopedic guy…prescribed meds…see this x-ray for a good laugh…as long as it is not your knees…

You Don't Want these Knees

Late, 

Wes

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Steve says-

My left knee looks worse than this x-ray, it’s a wreck.   My right knee is pretty good.    I will get a knee replacement in the next 2-3 years.  I’m waiting on Medicare, which starts for me next March.   Not sure where I’ll have it done, but probably in Houston.

Great news about Matt!   That’s very exciting.

Our weather has been wonderful too, Fall is great.   It’s just a little cooler than Houston, around 35-40 when I get up and highs around 70.    All the aspens and cottonwoods and scrub oaks are bright yellow and orange, it’s our favorite time out here.

Tough times politically.    So much of the discourse these days is, as David Ignatius says, willfully stupid.

Steve

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Wes says-

We are in the GIB (Global Idiot Bubble)…and politics and religion are at the center…

Greetings from Idiot America

Click post title to link to the full article…if I recall correctly it is circa 2005…

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Steve says-


Yes, but the religion part is nothing new.   Religious belief is no more crazy today than it has always been.   The difference is that we used to have a secular government.    Maybe you are too young to remember when Kennedy had to come to Houston to guarantee a bunch of protestant ministers that his religious faith would not influence his decision-making.    Now, a politician can’t get elected without guaranteeing the public that his decisions will be informed by his religious belief.   It is a monumental change and a scary one.    And, I don’t trust the Roberts Court to protect us.

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Wes says-

…well, you know me, I am not into politics…but, I have a few comments, questions, thoughts…not too deep…

…when was JFK assassinated? 1961-2…aha, Friday, November 23^rd 1963…I was in 6^th grade and was 10 yo…so, I don’t remember the meeting with the Houston preachers, but I have read that he had to do this type of thing, not the specific, or how many times or when and where…

So, wrt the Robert’s Court and Obama’s choices, are you saying the court is biased toward faith-based thinking (or should I say faith-based non-thinking) and that influences their deliberations?  Will the net change lead to more rational decisions?  I’ve always thought that more women should be judges since they have a (sorry if this sounds sexists) compassionate view…but, these crazy bitchez like Palin and O’Donnell makes me wonder if my over generalization is totally off the wall, however, I am not trying to equate the two, just questioning my prejudices…

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Steve says-


The nature of the Roberts Court is a long conversation, but it is a source of great concern, at least to progressives.   There is a solid 4-member extreme right wing (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito).   These people are young, and are substantially more conservative than the American people as a whole.   And, they are perfectly willing to overturn decades of Supreme Court opinions, as we have seen recently in the Heller (handguns) and Citizens United (campaign contributions) cases.  

In regard to religion, a case several years ago is instructive.   Two Kentucky counties had posted the King James version of the 10 Commandments in their courthouses; the ACLU immediately sued.   The Court ruled 5-4 that this was impermissible in violation of the Establishment Clause of the 1^st Amendment to the Constitution.   A member of that majority was Sandra Day O’Connor.   She has now been replaced by Samuel Alito, who presumably will switch sides; he is a very reliable right-wing vote.   As an aside, all of the members of the right-wing voting block on the Court are Catholic:  Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Kennedy.   Is this important?    I don’t know.

The Kentucky 10 Commandments case is now headed back up to the Supreme Court and will be heard this term.   The likelihood is that the decision will change.    In his dissent in the original case, Scalia complained bitterly about the Court’s “hostility to religion.”    Presumably, with Alito having replaced O’Connor, this “hostility” will have changed to “sympathy” and we will start seeing the 10 Commandments posted in all our courthouses.   Here is a good piece about the Kentucky case:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/nine-justices-and-ten-commandments/

The upshot of all this is that the Roberts Court seems much more inclined to allow religion, at least the Christian religion, to play a role in government.

In regard to the women, Sotomayor and Kagan replaced Souter and Stevens, who were both members of the “liberal” group on the Court.    Their appointments don’t change the conservative/liberal balance on the Court, nor did Robert’s appointment to replace Rehnquist.   However, Alito replacing O’Connor moved the Court significantly to the right.   I guess we should be thankful for Palin and O’Donnell; they prove that women can be just as stupid and crazy and dangerous as men.

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Wes says-

…i understand the “conservative – liberal”  distribution of the justices, but have we gone so far in extremis that there will be no crossover voting possible?…recently I heard justice Stevens in an interview say that he is now called a liberal, but when he was first on the court he was a moderate and that he had not changed, but the court (and perhaps the country) has moved so far to the right that he is now viewed as a liberal…he was nominated by Gerald Ford…in any case, Scalia is the scary one to me, very smart, to be sure, but, based on his 60 minutes interview of a few years back, he is in total denial of his biases and believes he can interpret the original meaning of the constitution in an intellectually unbiased manner, regardless of his personal belief system – pretty good mind trick that would be, if it were possible…just look at his voting record…

…in any case, I am gravitating to a place in politics where it is not Left v Right, it is You v The Corporation, and You are loosing…all this divisive political rhetoric at the center of the GIB is just a distraction…we have, and perhaps always have been, not so much a democracy with a capitalistic economic system, but I would say America is a Corporatocracy…if that is even a word…all this political wrangling is just a smoke screen – the earth turns in another dimension…just follow the money…but, in the end it is not really about money, the flow of money is just the telltale, it is about power…and it does not reside with “we the people”…

…you mentioned the Citizens United case, which seemed absolutely incredible to me that the Supreme Court could decide in this manner opening up, essentially unlimited financial support to congress critters from the coffers of the corporations…but, then, more recently I discover that corporations have the same rights as people!...and that has been the case since the beginning of US laws pertaining to incorporation…the problem to me with this is that if you treat a corporation effectively as a person, while limiting the liability of the owners and directors of the corporation, it becomes a creature that has no moral compass…you have an entity that does not give a shit…about anything other than maximizing value…so, to me it is incredulous to really consider a corporation as a person…is this really the way the law views corporations?

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Steve says-

A lot to talk about, this discussion really should be over beer sometime.

There is no question that the Court has moved hard to the right and has become very politicized.    Stevens was nominated by Ford and Souter was nominated by the first President Bush, and both ended up on the “liberal” wing of the Court, because the Court has moved so far to the right.    Nominations to the Court have become very political, and Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito are political figures, they spent their lives in the Republican Party and the Federalist Society.

Thomas is the worst in some ways; he is not very smart and is virulently right-wing.   His wife is a national leader in the Tea Party movement.    He does not speak in oral arguments, never asks questions, hasn’t spoken a word in years.   He is an embarrassment to the Court.    Scalia, amazingly, may be the least dangerous of the bunch.   He actually has some principles, and although I (and many others much smarter than I of course) think his “originalist” approach is utter bullshit, he will occasionally surprise you with a ruling that is based on principle rather than partisanship.   Overall, however, you are right that he is extremely right wing and smart and dangerous.

Roberts and Alito are in another category unfortunately.   They are deeply, aggressively partisan, and routinely will favor the corporation over the individual.   I think you are absolutely right that money and corporate power are ascendant, and unfortunately those forces have 4 very reliable votes on the Court.   Kennedy is the swing vote.   The hardcore right-wing members of the Court are hostile to civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and most individual rights except for gun ownership.    They are pro-corporate, pro-religion and anti-government regulation.    They are the Republican Party’s dream team.

It is too simple to say that Corporations are always treated like people.   A corporation is a fictional entity created under state law, and how it is treated is usually a function of state law and can vary from state to state.   For some legal purposes a corporation is treated like a person, for others it would be otherwise.    But what the Court did in Citizen’s United was shocking; to say that a corporation is entitled to the free speech protections of the First Amendment.    To say that a Corporation is treated like a “person” for purposes of service of process or personal jurisdiction is one thing, but to accord a basic civil right to a fictional business entity is just weird and depressing.   We are seeing the results of Citizen’s United in this campaign cycle; corporations are spending unprecedented amounts of money, and they are doing so anonymously, and at a rate of 9-1 in favor of Republican candidates.   That decision was just a straightforward gift to the corporate world and the Republican Party and I think the majority intended exactly this result.   Campaign finance is not a very sexy issue but is so important, and we are getting our ass kicked badly by the moneyed interests.

You ask about crossover voting.    We are at a point now where, on a case that has political (or corporate) importance, there is a 4-member right wing whose votes are reliably pro-right and pro-corporate.    There is a 4 member left wing (Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan).    And Anthony Kennedy seems to be in the middle.   There is some movement; Breyer switched sides in two 10 Commandments cases, but generally each side has 4 reliable votes.    And, the conservative wing is younger.    In every Presidential election, the media is all focused on the hot button issues, but it is Supreme Court appointments that scare me the most.   Bush was a frightful President, but we will live with Roberts and Alito for a long time.    If Obama should lose in 2012, I fear that Ruth Bader Ginsburg will not last another 4 years, and the consequences of another extreme right-wing corporate appointment would be terrible and would be with us for decades.

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Wes says-

OK, thanks for that…

The treatment of a corporation as a person is governed by State law, not Federal…

…the big point on Citizens United is that the Supremes attached 1^st Amendment Individual (human being) rights to an artificial construct, a business entity…

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Steve says-


Yes, that is my big complaint about Citizen’s.   That’s the crux of the opinion, that the right of corporations to spend unlimited money on campaigns can’t be limited because they have a constitutional right of free speech under the First Amendment.   Sounds insane, but there it is.

I need to clarify the other point; it is more complicated than I indicated I guess.   Corporations are all creatures of state law.   Each corporation is incorporated under the laws of a particular state (often Delaware).    For jurisdictional purposes, corporations are considered citizens of two states:  the state of incorporation, and the state where its principal place of business is located.  

On the question of whether a corporation is treated like a person, you have to ask, for what purpose?   Every law, state or federal, will state how it is applied and who is subject to it.   If it applies to all “persons,” then persons will be defined in the statute and may or may not include corporations, partnerships, etc.    For some purposes we want laws to apply equally to corporations just as though they were persons, so living assholes can’t just incorporate to avoid a particular statute.   For other purposes, we want to treat corporations differently.    So, it depends on the legal situation.   Can a corporation commit fraud?   Yes.    Can a corporation commit rape?    Probably not.    So, it depends. 

Even considering the Bill of Rights, context matters.    For example, a corporation is clearly protected by the 4^th amendment search and seizure protections; the police need a warrant to go seizing corporate files and poking through records.    But, free speech?     The point of the 1^st Amendment protection of speech was to give the powerless the right to speak out, not to allow powerful fictitious business entities to overwhelm our political system with their money.

Now see what you’ve done, you’ve gotten me to start ranting.   Sorry.

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Wes says-

…good, now we are in the same place…rant mode…