Time's Fool

How Wall Street Occupied America | The Nation : "This article is adapted from a speech Bill Moyers gave in October at Public Citizen’s fortieth-anniversary gala.   During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”" 'via Blog this'

(from a "Foundations of The Free Market Economy" course.) It's an economy even if there is no trade! The arrangement of social relations toward the satisfactory provisioning of all the people involved is an economy. In one extreme, if every individual alone were to provide for the satisfaction of all hir (his/her) needs, that would be the "negative" endpoint of the scale. (Negative in the sense that no economy would exist.) At the other extreme, if everything went into a common pool and everyone simply drew out what they needed, that would the other endpoint. (Still, an utterly simple economy.) In fact, most hunting-gathering cultures arranged for some division of labor and some redistribution of the results of that labor, but a redistribution that involved traditional/customary status-based assignment/choice of labor and distribution patterns. E.g., both the male hunters and the female gatherers would, by customary expectation, give some of the fruits of thei...

Conscious thoughts. Clear thoughts. Precise thoughts. Sloppy thinking. Unconscious thoughts, and wishes. Muddled thoughts. Half-baked ideas. True thoughts. Incomplete thoughts. Imprecise thoughts. Simple thoughts. Complex thoughts. Thoughts like a shuffle-step-shuffle. Thoughts like a tango, or flamenco, wild, abandoned, and passionate. Thoughts like a waltz, precise and flowing. Inarticulate thoughts, disordered, meandering. Thoughts of beauty, thoughts of pain, prohibited thoughts, required thoughts, thoughts of the heart's desire and of the punishments of the devil. Logical thoughts, thoughts like a treasure hunt, or like a maze. Thinking through a long proof of a mathematical theorem, slowly, carefuly, each step selected carefully to make the following step possible. Thinking through an unproven mathematical theorem, puzzling, selecting, sifting, rejecting, accepting, creating. Thinking dangerously. Thinking differently. Thinking exactly like you're supposed to, exactly wha...

The Economist, Mar 3rd 2011: India’s Supreme Court ordered the head of the country’s anti-corruption commission to resign, because he faces corruption charges. The recently retired head of Bolivia’s drug police was arrested in Panama and sent to the United States to face charges of trafficking cocaine.

"The symbolism of logic can be rightly construed as a determination to reproduce as mechanically as possible the deductive thinking that takes place in our brains in a split second without our knowing how. . . . Accordingly, it is with form that logic is concerned. The content of any argument is nothing more than an inconsequential vehicle of its form. And symbolism is the device for distilling the essence." Gerald B. Standley, New Methods in Symbolic Logic, p.3, 1971 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/offer-listing/039505429X//104-9891999-2979931?condition=all "In trying to place (the syllogism) in a deeper mathematical foundation, we come across (or up against) the inconsequential relation, apparent in ordinary speech, between a form and its content, occasioned by the partly accidental fact that the existence of a particular content can serve to negate a general form." LOF, p.129, 1969 The Essential Tractatus 1. The world is everything that is the...

" If the duration of the current rally were to take the same portion of its ruling cycle that the 1929-1930 rally did, when would it end? The 1929-1930 rally lasted 155 days out of 968 in the cycle (1932 was a leap year), for a ratio of 0.1601. The 16.6-16.9-year span ends between February 19 and June 9, 2016. Applying the 0.1601 ratio to this period of 2541-2652 days from the March 6, 2009 low would give rally durations of 406.81-424.59 days, suggesting a peak in the current rally between April 16 and May 5. Using intraday turning dates projects exactly the same range. As Beautiful Pictures shows, time targeting usually works out to within 3 days. With April 14 already behind us and May 8 a Saturday, we can project a top on this basis between April 15 and may 7, 2010. April 16, by the way, marks the anniversary of the 1930 rally peak. These dates pertain only if the current rally matches its predecessor in percent-of-cycle terms, which is conjecture, but given all the other evid...