Methodology applied to strange case

Malaysian Flight 370 has given rise to a lot of speculation and, with the sighting of debris off the cost of Perth Australia,  hopefully the final hours of the flight will become known.  Sadly, yes, but known.  The recovery of the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder will bring the case to rest.

Over the days since its disappearance the speculation of what happened to it has had to cope will large amounts of new material, like Boeing revealing that the flight last hours longer after the disappearance of the aircraft from radar.  That was not directional data, however, and left a wide radius from the last known position of the aircraft to the point its fuel runs out (Source: WSJ).  That last point, over the South China Sea, was after one course change that was not scheduled that happened during the hand-off of Air Traffic Control zones, and Flight 370 did not properly communicate with the new ATC zone.  At that point all verbal communication was lost with the flight, as well as its transponder information, but information from the engines continued to be sent.

That was the jumping off point for speculation which immediately went to terrorism.  If it was terrorism, no group is claiming it, so that leaves an empty hole in the situation.  That was filled by the report of Lithium Ion batteries being transported on the flight, and even when stowed properly, they can cause problems in very rare instances, which includes bringing flights down with on-board fires in the cargo hold.  That defaults to the situation for Flight 370 by Occam's razor which is that the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions is the best.

Pilots get trained in a set of skills that start from the beginning, and they are summed up by the process of actually flying an aircraft: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate.

Thus flying the aircraft and keeping it aloft takes precedence, not just during normal flight but during emergency situations.  The terse 'All right, good night' response from the pilot at the last communication point for the ATC zone he was leaving may be an indicator of something going wrong on-board that had not been properly identified.  Just after that the first course change to the South China Sea took place, deviating from the prior flight path heading into China.  The protocol of Aviate, which is fly the aircraft, comes first.  And the loss of verbal and transponder information may be an indication of either a system manual reset or the power supply to those systems going out for other causes.  The engine transmission system has its own power supply separate from those systems, and could remain intact and functional.  It would keep on doing so until the aircraft shut down or the engines ran out of fuel.

If a pilot has a bad situation and is keeping the plane flying as a priority, then that pilot is determining if the plane can continue flying.  With an in-flight emergency being handled a pilot can then change the course, again.  That follows Occam's razor.  What does not follow is the pilot then succumbing to the situation right after that.  The question of it being reasonable that a pilot could misjudge his own capability to the point of not realizing how bad the situation had become after, perhaps, 5 to 10 minutes of dealing with it, is startling.  Human error does occur, yes, and cannot be discounted and may even be the case for Flight 370.  If so that is unfortunate.  That last flight change, to wind up in the Indian Ocean means that there was some capacity to not only Aviate but Navigate.

The South China Sea is a region of shipping that is heavily trafficked, what with Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia nearby, and destinations of Japan and China to the east and India and the Middle East to the west.  A pilot having any doubt about his viability as a pilot has a perfectly satisfactory option of ditching in the South China Sea.  It may seem heroic to try and not to succumb to fumes from a smoldering fire, but to Navigate and think you can do that and not know for a certainty means you have had time to address the situation.  While ditching may be a bad option, it is less worse than calculating your ability to Navigate while having a heavily trafficked area to ditch in.  It is not just the pilot's life, but that of everyone on board that is at stake.

There are circumstance where, perhaps, the ability to control engine speed has been taken out by a fire, leaving the jets to continue on without changes.  A crash into the sea is not a good way to ditch an aircraft, true, and if you cannot have that under your control then you have few options left as a pilot as you no longer control the airspeed of the plane.  That is a serious problem when it comes to Aviate.  There are options of what to do next, but they start to fall in the realm of changing angle of attack, changing elevation and trying to stall the engines out.  A bad situation but better than crashing into terrain or water at speed.

Thus, by Occam's razor, we get in-flight emergency and then gross misjudgment of the situation.

Is there another way to explain this scenario?

Of course: The Joker scenario.

Someone on-board planned to use the aircraft to give a wild suicide ride, and then crash the aircraft.  Some people do just want to see the world burn.  This is a viable option and requires little else beyond madness, which is just as likely as an emergency, a veteran pilot making gross misjudgments  and then succumbing to a situation he thought he could handle.  Even though a viable option, it is one that requires the intent of a man or woman gone mad to do it.  Thus it is less likely than the one by Occam's razor.

At this point it is possible to say that Occam's razor has resulted in a non-simple explanation that requires some types of problems coming together in a single instance that is unlikely.  If this razor is not cutting to a solution, is there another?

Yes, there is, and anyone examining military history will know it pretty well.  A main attribute for this goes to Napoleon, but it has shown up in various forms from various individuals over time. It is Hanlon's razor:  Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

For this instance is stupidity indicated?

Piloting an aircraft and making navigational changes indicates some level of gross competence and skill in these tasks.  These are not stupid acts, but ones with intent behind them.  Their results may be stupid and dumbfounding, yes, but they are done with competence, reason and foresight: they are not acts of a stupid individual.  Deranged, maybe, but not stupid.

When you cross of stupidity with Hanlon's razor you are left with: malice.

With malice you now have a crime of intent.  There is a methodology to examining criminal cases, and while the well known Method, Motive and Opportunity tend to come to mind first, they assume you know who is doing it.  Without who you do not get to MMO.  From that you step back to the 5 W's and 1 H:

Who

What

Where

Why

When

How

For Flight 370 we can definitively say What, Where and When up to the point of the second course change.  In fact that goes all the way back to the first course change, as they are the same thing: the aircraft losing contact and changing course between ATCs.

That leaves us with Who, Why and How.

A smoldering fire from cargo may not be by malice, but fills in each of those: the shipper, the cargo and a rare instance of fire.  Mind you the shipping container was rated for fire containment, but that could have failed.  The flight crew is just trying to deal with the situation in this instance, and are not active participants in the problem save for being unable to deal with it.

Going Joker answers these, also: an experienced or even novice pilot with some ability to fly the aircraft, they were deranged and took it over by some means.  Not pleasant to think about, but can't be discounted.

Terrorism?  This is two pronged as it may or may not involve active flight crew participation.  This broadly includes large scale criminal organizations, terror organizations or hostile governments doing something covertly.

Without participation you get a hostile take-over of the aircraft.  This would mean the debris in the Indian Ocean is from something else if the take-over was successful and the plane went on to a destination unknown.  Now isn't that a frightening prospect?  A large cargo vessel goes down and no one notices it.

Still remaining on the hostile takeover fork, it is possible that the take-over went seriously awry.  That can get the flight to the Indian Ocean.  It can also get it crashing into a mountainside or under triple canopy jungle or in some other waterway.  That could leave the debris from Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean or, again with the horror of finding a ship went down without notice.

On this fork the How is a terror take-over.  The Who would be unknown as would the Why.

With the crew or even just a single member of it, taking the aircraft over, you get the same bifurcation as with the hostile take-over and with the same results, save that How is the member of the crew, Who is the organization behind him/her, and Why is unknown.

There are, perhaps, only a couple of organizations and maybe one government that might try this.  None of them are China since they are the destination of the flight and it would be most easy to redirect a flight to a secure airfield and seize it, and it might be days or even weeks until someone noticed as this is China, after all, a big place with a tight lipped government.  With that said, with so many passengers being Chinese Nationals, any organization attempting to seize the flight would also know that they would get the wrath of China.  Possibly a nuclear tipped wrath, at that.

Who would tempt that?

Criminal organizations can get what they need much more cheaply, and there is little indication of individuals worth kidnapping for any reason.  It is cheaper and easier to kidnap the poor, those remotely located or the unwary for nefarious reasons than it is to take a plane full of people and do... well... what, anyway?  No good reason comes to mind, so while Method and Opportunity can be filled in, Motive or Why gets these types of organizations scratched off the list.

Of the Nations that might try this, possibly only the Magic Kingdom of Mr. Kim might be insane enough to do something like this.  However power hungry and egotistical the ruler is, however, he isn't crazy and not a Joker type.  At least so far as we can puzzle out.  Besides the Motive or Why leaves a gaping hole in the idea of NoKo being behind this.

Terrorists usually don't take an aircraft and do nothing with it, claim no responsibility and generally remain silent about it.  They might buy an aircraft, as bin Laden did in the early '90s in Africa, but hijack one and claim nothing and do nothing with it?  Unless there was something like new bioweapons in with the people or cargo, the rationale even behind the most fantasy based of organizations remains out of the realm of possibility.  The Why part remains unanswered.

Anything left?

A death cult.  AUM once operated in the USSR/Russia and was able to brainwash some KGB/FSB agents before the group dispersed.  Note most went back to Japan, but not all of them did.  AUM had this wonderful idea of liberating people's souls to a better life by killing them now.  In fact that was such a good act in their line of reasoning at the time, that mass-murder was a really great idea.  After being brainwashed with drug, sex and rock'n'roll, the followers had to be convinced that as enlightened individuals they had to save themselves to continue on with the good work.  They might not leave any notes, any causation and generally not want to attract attention to themselves carrying on the good works.  Tends to get people put in jail and deprogrammed, and then put on trial.  So a death cult could fill in Who, Why and How is via the terrorism paths.  Do note that AUM had many competent individuals within its organization and the entire operation ran a chain of computer repair stores in Japan which was their main money-maker for the founder of the cult.  The founder has reformed, of course, but the individuals who were once with it and disappeared when it dispersed, are probably not reformed.

In general the simplest explanation remains the best, and I'm expecting that the debris is from Flight 370.

If it isn't, and its not just something dropped off by a dead circulation spot in the Indian Ocean like the large debris field in the northern Pacific, then things turn nasty.  Perhaps incompetent and nasty.  Or competent and nasty.  And do note that debris is yielded from multiple possible paths, as well.  Only the in-flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder can finally dispel the speculative paths and leave us with what is left.

Evidence is needed to sort this out and remove the suppositional and to fill in the blanks. 

Recovery

A personal retrospective on my physical well-being.

I hope to get some more normal posts up, but such is life.

Late in 2004 I began a trip into a land of darkness where my mind was slowly losing track of work and I was beginning to feel exhausted beyond anything I had experienced in my life before that.  With that also came a lack of awareness of these things and the simple and all too human attempt to rationalize these sensations.  Being made senseless and having one's mind dimmed when aided and abetted by rationalization meant that things that should have alerted me to my dire straights were passed off... until my body forced the issue by giving me a cataleptic attack while driving.  No accident resulted, but that warned me that something truly serious was going on, even through the mists of my befuddled state of mind and being, which was turning into a strange place where being awake and being asleep meant little difference at all.

By 2005 I just wanted to know what was causing these attacks and if they could be dealt with, and the list of tests I went through was long and deep.  The only change had been in a standard medication, one of the statins, and when my endocrinologist heard the symptoms he took me off them, but the damage had been done and worse was to come after that until the full extent of it was finally reached.  My brain had the normal attributes of someone a good 20 years older than my physical age, and yet that was not a natural thing.  Narcoleptic conditions run in the male side of my family and I had thought I had escaped them as they have two general periods of onset: up to teenage years and then again in one's 60's.  Well, my brain had reached that magic age, I guess, just decades ahead of schedule.

Climbing out of that pit meant trying to get my thought structure back together as it had been shattered and eroded by this condition.  I had become a creature of willpower alone, determined not to let this be the end of my life.  The hardest work in my life would not be physical, would not be trying to write great pieces of fiction or histories to last the ages, but to merely scrape back a formulation of my thoughts out of a land between waking and dreaming and back, fully, into the land of the waking and living.  We take the fact that we think for granted, at least most people do, but somewhere within my psycho-dynamic toolkit there is a repair kit that allowed me to begin the hard work of reconstructing my mental capabilities to get some thinking capacity up and running again.

Those dark days are dealt with in my early blogging, which take place after the internal collapse of my mental structure, diagnosis and the first medications to deal with the actual phenomena.  There is no magic pill to rejuvenate the mind, as yet, to repair damage and to regain lost capacity.  Maybe we shall have that in some future, but until that point one is stuck with the old fashioned way of hard work.  I set myself some tasks to exercise my mind: learn some rudiments of Javascript, find out just what terrorism is (not the talking around it to attempt to call it something else, but its actual being as an activity) and then to learn connectivity structures based on Person-to-Person systems which are the basis for so much of human life that it pervades the far reaches of the horrific and the criminal realms.  For, as my Uncle Joe used to say disparagingly of so many corporate and government affairs, 'it isn't what you know, its who you know'.

Thus diagnosis was done by others, but I was willing to go through just about any test they cared to put me through, and I would hazard a good couple of hundred of vials of blood were taken to that end.  I have a long, long, long list of things I don't have and for that I am very thankful, indeed!  I will give the Sherlock Holmes method of scratching off stuff from a list and whatever you are left with is what it is a hat tip: it works.  Unfortunately it is the brute force method of logic, and I prefer inductive reasoning of 'this is the only thing that fits to make the entire thing work' sort of approach to the list scratching business.  As I have learned, that is a bent of mind that one must have by some means other than education as no one can teach you how to take a look at a whole thing and then see where something is missing and say what it is.

Countering the effects of the problem, although not the problem itself, came next.  I was a Type 1 diabetic before this happened and can tell you that dealing with a problem is not the same as curing it.  For all the advances in genetics, biology, biochemistry, and 3D structural analysis of molecules and how they interact, plus the human genome, a simple auto-immune disease dating back into the far reaches of human ancestry is still beyond modern medicine to cure.  Somehow every promising approach is thwarted by it.  Yet one gains a toolkit of mental requirements to deal with such a problem on a daily basis and that means I had one available for yet another problem that has no cure.  We know that there are cases of spontaneous remission of Type 1 diabetes after about 20 years of having it: the poor immune system just gets tired of fighting that part of the body and natural regeneration takes place for islet cells.  That I still have the condition points to an immune system that is still misdoing its job!  Now I also get to take medications that modern medical science can say what its structure is, but has no real idea of how it works.

There are times when I suspect the strain of being known as Witch Doctor is still with us to this day. 'What is it, what does it do?' you ask and the response is 'Dunno, it just works, take it.'

I am not nor ever have been impressed by degrees sitting up on a wall.

Doctors are still practicing medicine.  They need more practice, less overhead, please, as the practice still is not perfected.

Now all of this research, fiddling with code, playing with stuff got me to firearms as there was a warning bell going off in my head circa 2007.  A good year before the elections, hell before there were candidates, some part of me was saying: Prepare For No Good Shall Come Of This.  I took NRA training to ensure that I properly understood function and safety of firearms, plus only rudimentary cleaning... there needs to be a real course on that, not just gunsmithing but just 'how the hell do you clean this piece of Swiss watchmaking called a gun?' sort of course.  And I like older firearms, so drift punches, springs, and scouring around for parts became a ready past-time.  All of this is DIY in the firearms community, and the modern arms are much, much simpler to work with than much of the older stuff until you get back to the bolt action rifle: those are, at least, pretty simple to understand.

My goal was to next find out what sort of useful skills I had or could gain, and I'm still on that path today.  Firearms leads to stocks made of wood and that means wood finishing.  In my family lineage is woodworking going back at least a couple of generations, and I had not only shop class but a father who did cabinetry in his spare time.  That means I had some of the old 'young shop assistant' sort of deal going on, although not a lot of it, enough to get me familiar with the tools of the trade.

Building back stamina became the major goal as of 2009-10 and woodworking, well once you start using the manual tools you now have a major way to utilize physical capacity and measure endurance, now, don't you?  Even on the power tool side, the lifting and toting of boards, planks, and other less savory bits of trees can get you all sorts of exercise, especially if you have a small shop and need to set up and break down the power tools so that you can have access to the rest of the shop when you aren't using them.

Up until the past few weeks here has been the deal: 1 day of a few hours of work, 2 days of recovery.  Doesn't matter if the day is woodworking, shopping, or whatever, either.  On rare times I could string a couple of days together and then need additional down time to recover.  That was getting me to an even keel, but the boat still had water up to the gunwales and I was bailing as fast as I could.  Stamina was not returning but I at least could keep what I had.

About a month ago I talked with my neurologist who told me that there are some preliminary longitudinal studies that indicate that for diabetics in Japan and Germany (two populations with a major concern over the disorder by genetic causation) that the use of a CPAP helps to lower the HbA1c (a basal blood glucose reading that you strive to get to 7% as a diabetic) by a full 1%.  That is an eye-opener, to be sure.  A real eye-opener as a CPAP improves flow of air to the lungs while sleeping.  I had tried a CPAP before as there were indications of some marginal sleep problems, and they continue to be marginal and the neurologist doesn't know what to make of the actual readings as they aren't showing a disorder but something else going on... but that a CPAP might help that and the the cause to actually get one.

Done!

The prior CPAP device made my sleep worse, not better.

There have been improvements over the last 6-7 years, not grand ones but gradual ones, to the point where I can actually tolerate the device, more or less.

It will take some months of use to see what it does for that long term basal blood glucose reading.

A more immediate effect is to get lots of oxygen into my system at night and well distributed through my body.  I do wake up logy, no two ways about it: it is the sleep of someone who has worked themselves to exhaustion.  I knew what that felt like, back before 2004.  It is the sleep that when you wake up you just had no idea of how tired you actually were.  Apparently I need that sort of sleep.

From that sleep I now have better and larger amounts of physical energy and mental awareness longer into the day and even into the evening.  I can accomplish a lot more with the energy once I get the logy feeling out of the system.  Learning to hand plane maple that has just been skip planed is really hard work, let me tell you.  Yet I haven't been tempted to power tools (although I have a planing jig for a router) because it just feels good to be able to put some actual physical capacity into the work.  For a few hours at a stretch.  So now I can have sore muscles when I wake up!  This is a good thing.

The next step of the recovery is actually reversing not just the effects of one of my major conditions, but the thing, itself.  Those require an actual, functioning medical system in which trying to redistribute wealth and making everyone sicker in the name of 'health insurance' is not the goal.  That is an enemy to actual scientific advancement.  Strange that the most backward looking people are now on the political Left: they are starting to sound like the old fogies who just want to do things the same, tired old way that doesn't work well because that is all they know and will tell you about how righteous it is to do things the broken, tired, old way.  Yet the 21st century isn't going to wait for them to catch up, and no matter how much kicking, screaming, and theft under the guise of 'doing good' goes on, this century is set to steamroller the prior 3,000 years of advancement with changes that seemed impossible just a decade ago.  Be it the first formulation for a warp drive or getting to the bounds of computer capacity and then leapfrogging that with quantum computing or finding out that the ways to deal with disorders and diseases isn't to just ameliorate the effects but treat the damned things with some skill ('what does this drug actually do?' 'I dunno, it just works') and get the idea of practice out of the way or education that is self-performed via online systems of study that can't be categorized but can be tested as to skill, knowledge and capacity to utilize it... everything, and I do mean everything, that has been the foundation for the modern world is about to undergo a sea change that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like something for children.

Thus my goal is to survive the current bout of MegaStupidity via Centralized Insanity of Government and get to this new age of Individual Freedom and Liberty writ large.

As has been my threat: the more I recover, the less I will be posting.

I hate repeating myself and that is mostly what I would be doing to no good effect.

I need to recover so I can join this up and coming age of wonder.

The age of Back to Basics, DIY and reaching for the stars and getting off this damned starter home of a planet.

And I hope you will join me.

For we are better than the old 20th century has led us to think.

And governing is the problem, and government is not the solution.

Voting in the 21st century

The 20th century is over and it left a long, blood-stained path behind it.  Unfortunately our political class is married to it, still, and continue to campaign like the 20th century is still going on.  The politics of division such as 'The War on Women' or wanting to put a huge, government led system down for 'health care' ignore the realities of the 21st century.  These realities I've talked about before in Dawn of a New Era, and those drivers are the ones that are currently shifting the basis for what we know as our modern civilization.  Yet the 20th century, for all its problems, has also blessed us with an infrastructure that is vital for the immediate continuance of civilization in the 21st century: electricity, potable water, sewage systems, paved roads, airports, and a vast web of pipelines.  Without this infrastructure in all of its parts modern civilization quickly decays.  A major disruption of the pipeline system crossing the Mississippi River would cripple the entire Nation.  I outlined five major events that are either cyclic (meaning they happen on a regular basis due to forces of nature) or a singular event that has its now understood predecessors so that it is not cyclic, as such, but part of an understood and ongoing process, and all will happen at some point in time to North America.

I will add to those yet another: solar weather.  In testimony on 12 SEP 2012 to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies, the head of the National Protection and Programs Director gave us this on the topic of solar weather:

Solar Weather is created as a result of massive explosions on the sun that may shoot radiation towards the Earth. These effects can reach the Earth in as little as eight minutes with Solar Flare X-rays or over 14 hours later with a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) plasma hurricane. An extreme CME is the Department’s biggest Solar Weather concern. It could create low-frequency EMP similar to a megaton-class nuclear HEMP detonation over the United States, which could disrupt or damage the power grid, undersea cables, and other critical infrastructures. The United States experiences many solar weather events each year, but major storms that could significantly impact today’s infrastructures are not common but have previously occurred in 1921 and 1859 and possibly in several other years prior to the establishment of the modern power grid. The U.S. Department of Energy and utility owners and operators have been focusing on potential threats and steps that utilities can take to reduce possible impacts.⁶ Work is underway in cooperation with a number of federal agencies including the: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Nation Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), United States Geological Survey, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and DHS with industry support and participation to ensure this threat is understood.

The concept of 'ensuring the threat is understood' for a known threat that is understood is verbiage for 'we want to get a few bureaucrats to hold meetings and write reports that might have some conclusions in a decade'.  Just so you know what that means.

The 1921 storm fed power into the nascent grid and took the telegraph service down with blown fuses and damaged equipment and lasted from 13-15 MAY 1921.  Over at Space Weather there is a somewhat longer look at the effects of the 1921 event:

May 13, 1921 - The New York Railroad Storm - At 7:04 AM on May 15, the entire signal and switching system of the New York Central Railroad below 125th street was put out of operation, followed by a fire in the control tower at 57th Street and Park Avenue. Railroad officials formally assigned blame for a fire destroyed the Central New England Railroad station, to the aurora. Telegraph Operator Hatch said that he was actually driven away from his telegraph instrument by a flame that enveloped his switchboard and ignited the entire building at a loss of $6,000. Over seas, in Sweden a telephone station was 'burned out', and the storm interfered with telephone, telegraph and cable traffic over most of Europe. Aurora were visable in the Eastern United States, with additional reports from Pasadena California where the aurora reached zenith.

Such storms originate from a sunspot and can last for hours, days or even weeks.  They have two distinct parts to them when they happen on the orbital plane of Earth and intersect with the planet as the Sun rotates.  First is the initial wave of particles and lightweight radiation: gamma rays, x-rays, along with UV.  Transit time from the sunspot to Earth is just a bit over 8 minutes as they are going at the speed of light.  These interact with the Earth's magnetic field and are deflected by it to the north and south magnetic polar regions.  These particles give the first real taste of the storm and if it isn't much of storm that is all you will get and have some aurora effects a bit further from the poles than normal.  Larger storms send particles along that path and they also interact with the Earth's magnetic field, but due to their mass they also start to push it lower.  This brings the aurora effects to lower latitudes and can make them quite spectacular, and also bring down more in the way of heavier particles to cause secondary radiation effects when they interact with the atmosphere.

This is the stuff that also starts to effect satellites, and if it isn't hardened against this sort of radiation that can be the end of the satellite.  The major problem with this part of the storm is first the pushing in of the magnetic field, which causes ripples that cause long wave ground currents which travel through anything conductive at or just below the Earth's surface, but then as the storm passes, the magnetic field springs back and oscillates, causing more of these currents.  How much current is induced is effected by the wavelength of the magnetic oscillation, which can induce a current down to half the wave length of the oscillation.  What this effectively does is puts a current into things like transmission wires (above and below ground) and into any pipe made of conductive material.  Thus a water system with metal pipes will have an electrical charge going through them. 

Also power plants will have an electrical current fed into them via long-line transmission wires, usually taking out transformer stations, but those may not fail fast enough to protect the power station, itself.  Grounding out a plant does no good as the ground wire is most likely 'live' with current.  In your home if you are grounding out through water mains made of metal pipe, then you will also experience this effect, particularly if the ground wire is not going through the central fuse box or circuit breaker box.  Even killing the main switch to the grid from your home won't stop this unless the ground is centralized through there.  It is much better to have a local ground that is only a few feet long instead of one that is the equivalent of miles long.

A solar storm like this is known as a Carrington Super Flare and one like that was responsible for the Solar storm of 1859.  At Space Weather there is a collection of newspaper articles and I'll give a few excerpts to give an idea of what this sort of ground current means:

Singular Effect of the Uarora Borealis on the Telegraph Wires. New York. August 29, The Superintendent of the Canadian Telegraph Company's line telegraphs as follows in relation to the effect of the Aurora Borealis last night: '…so completely were the wires under the influence of the Aurora Borealis, that it was found utterly impossible to communicate between the telegraph stations, and the line had to be closed.' The same difficulty prevailed as far South as Washington. [Chicago Tribune, p.4]

.…The French telegraph communications at Paris were greatly affected, and on interrupting the circuit of the conducting wire strong sparks were observed. The same thing occurred at the same time at all the telegraphic station in France…[The Illustrated London News, September 24, 1859].

…Lousiville KY, August 31-The telegraph wires between this city and New York, as also throughout Canada, were interrupted by the unusual overcharge of electricity which always pervades the atmosphere during the continuance of this phenomenon…[The New Orleans Bee, September 1, 1859].

…During the auroral display on Thursday night in Boston some curious phenomena were witnessed in connection with the telegraph wires. The following conversation, says the Boston Traveler, between the Boston and Portland operators on the American telegraph line, will give an idea of the effect of the Aurora Borealis, on the working of the telegraph wires: Boston operator, (to Portland operator)--"Please cut off your battery entirely from the line for fifteen minutes." Portland operator-"Will do so. It is now disconnected." Boston-"Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?" Portland-Better than with our batteries on. -Current comes and goes gradually." Boston-"My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the Aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets. Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble."
Portland-"Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?" Boston-"Yes. Go ahead."
The wire was then worked for about two hours without the usual batteries, on the auroral current, working better than with the batteries connected. The current varied, increasing and decreasing alternately, but by graduating the adjustment to the current, a sufficiently steady effect was obtained to work the line very well. This is the first instance on record of more than a word or two having been transmitted with the auroral current. The usual effects of the electric storm were manifested, such as reversing the poles of the batteries, etc…[The Daily Chronicle and Sentinel, Augusta, Georgia, Thursday AM, September 8, 1859].

In addition to the technological issues posed by these 'earth currents' entering the telegraph lines, was the very real potential for direct human injury. The most spectacular, and now legendary, story is told by Frederick Royce: a telegraph operator working in Washington DC. at his station between 8 and 10 PM. " I did not know that the Aurora had made its appearance until 8 or 81/2 o'clock. I had been working 'combination' to Richmond, and had great difficulty from the changing of the current. It seemed as if there was a storm at 'Richmond'. Concluding that this was the case, I abandoned that wire and tried to work the Northern wire, but met with the same difficulty. For five or ten minutes I would have no trouble, then the current would change and become so weak that it could hardly be felt. It would then gradually change to a 'ground' so strong that I could not lift the magnet. While the Aurora lasted the same phenomena were observable. There was no rattling or cracking of the magnet, as is the case in a thunder storm. I looked at the paper between the arrestors, but found no holes. Philadelphia divided the circuit at the request of New York, and we succeeded in getting off what business we had. The Aurora disappeared a little after 10 o'clock - after which we had no difficulty, and we worked through to New York. During the display I was calling Richmond, and had one hand on the iron plate. Happening to lean towards the sounder, which is against the wall, my forehead grazed a ground-wire which runs down the wall near the sounder. Immediately, I received a very severe electric shock, which stunned me for an instant. An old man who was sitting facing me, and but a few feet distant, said that he saw a spark of fire jump from my forehead to the sounder. The Morse line experienced the same difficulty in working." [New York Times, Sept. 5, 1859]

Do remember this is with the telegraph system at the period, and it tells us of the problems of induced ground currents under that pushing down of the magnetic field, during the event which lasted from 28 AUG – 2 SEP 1859.  This all with equipment made of simple coils of wire and batteries.  Now put that sort of electrical charge into the entire power grid of every Nation on Earth in this, the early part of the 21st century.

Unlike a nuclear EMP you probably won't have much of your personal electronics effected by this sort of event unless you are far north of the aurora and getting a lot of that secondary radiation bouncing around: then you might get some of that sort of thing.  What most nuclear EMPs don't do all that well is induce ground currents across the surface of the planet like a CME.  No, the problems aren't from that, but that other part: the induced ground current.  The 1921 event saw transformers explode from a relatively minor solar storm without much of an electrical grid to do that.  Modern electrical grids have orders of magnitude more transformer stations than were on the entire planet in 1921.  Large Nations may utilize some very large transformers for their long-haul lines, and the US has about 6 of these which are vital in connecting up some of the major hydro-electric generation systems into the rest of the grid, and no one really makes those things any more.  Even worse there is at least one of them that took a special rail line to put in place and that has since been removed, and as geomorphology and geography dictate where these things go, it was and is in an ideally situated spot for its function.

Now this effects my voting... I mean this is what the article is about, no?

I've read a bit about what it would take to put in isolation systems for power plants, and it is about $1M per power plant, which comes out to $0.03/month for an individual customer for about 5-10 years to get the project done for existing plants of all sorts: coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar.  You name it and if it isn't built with this sort of protection to start with, it needs a retrofit if it is slated to stay online longer than the life of the retrofit project.

This does not need to happen at the National level: individual States can do this on their lonesome and even coordinate efforts if they want.  No law against it and nothing in the Constitution prohibits it so long as it doesn't tread on federal power grants from the people.

Now find a politician who even KNOWS this stuff.

Go ahead, try and find one that puts SURVIVAL first.  Because if we get a CME from a Carrington Event, then modern civilization is toasty.

'War on women'?  Without electrical power you don't get potable water.  You don't get a sewage system.  You don't get fuels transported via pipelines (and how the induced currents will hit them is anyone's guess).  A good part of the satellites will be dead, although you might still have GPS, but that depends on the size and strength of the event... and taking into account that the Earth's magnetic field has been declining for a few decades since it looks like it is time for a pole reversal in the next few thousand years.  So which is more important: birth control/abortion or survival?

Your choice in the voting booth decides your fate in the future.

More locally the regular geophysical disasters have some very grave implications, like the New Madrid Fault Zone letting slip for a few months.  That will most likely take out bridges, pipelines and a good number of long-haul electrical lines, plus damage or destroy some dams close to the event.  That St. Louis to Memphis region hasn't experienced anything like that since the quake events from 25 DEC 1811 to 7 FEB 1812, which was three major quakes and so many small quakes that it was hard to ensure one's footing during the time it happened.  As so much of the Nation's goods flow north and south along the Mississippi, a sudden onslaught of debris flows going through the river system will cause damage.  For some hours the Mississippi River ran backwards near New Madrid, and the river shifted its course in a few places, drained one lake and created another, as well as causing sand geysers... you tell me what this means for the flow of goods, services and power throughout North America.

And being close to the East Coast means that the island of La Palma's Cumbre Vieja having an earthquake causing a massive landslide will have dire consequences for the entire Eastern Seaboard of the US, Canada, and the entire Caribbean, not to speak of the reflected and refracted tsunami events hitting Europe, Western Africa and Eastern South America.

So how does the 'War on women' play out when National and probably international trade is effected by a large portion of the US going off-line?  Devastation from the NMFZ to the Mid-West and the lower Mississippi River will probably take out a few refineries and pipelines from the Gulf, too, so getting back up and running with those might take a few years.  And as for the Cumbre Vieja landslide event for the Eastern Seaboard, well, there are major population centers and the tsunami will travel across the ocean as a wave at about the speed of a jet liner so you get 6 hours of warning if it can be identified and detected.  A wave form coming in that tops the Empire State Building when it hits NYC isn't something to sneeze at, and similar will hit across the entire coast.

Can we find a politician that puts basic survival first?

Or at least encouraging citizens to prepare because our government is so woefully inadequate that it can't figure out if cheap disaster preparation is more important than birth control when the survival of civilized life is at stake?

Or how about decentralization and disintermediation of government services from the federal to the State and local levels?  The federal government has proven incapable of keeping unguarded memorials open during a government furlough... I mean that is worse than lackluster, it is criminal to prevent the people from seeing public memorials due to a funding fight.  That is piss poor stewardship of sites entrusted to that government and the States really do need to step in and intervene by rescinding permission for the federal government to hold lands in their state for public use.  Eminent domain those babies to get rid of the awful steward in charge of them: we can get more accountable buffoons, cheaper than the federal government can.  On the State level strange functions like 'liquor control boards' are buggy-whip deals and need to go.  And for roads that aren't Interstates and don't really go beyond a couple of counties in a State, why aren't those handed over for purely local control?  Hardening the electrical grid takes State level initiative and waiting for the federal government to study it to death is a recipe for disaster.  And that disaster WILL effect you if the right event hits with NO preparation.

You, at least, can prepare.

A few days of food, potable water, and some method of dealing with physical waste products goes a long way towards dealing with the small problems.  At a month you are at least buying time to take good stock of a much larger disaster.  You can and should prepare beyond that, but when you are in that mode then the problem OF GOVERNMENT comes to the forefront.

It isn't serious about anything.

Politicians care more about dividing electorates than serving them.

Politicians and their parties want political and polarizing fights, ignoring survival level problems that should be the domain of government: self-government, local government, State government and last and least is the federal government.  Yet all we get are top-down solutions for bottom-up problems.

That is the 20th century mindset and it is a recipe for disaster.  It was in the 20th century and it is worse now because we have spent zero time preparing for anything larger than heavy wind storm... and even those don't get any preparation and days of power going out.  Super Storm Sandy gave us the time from civilized behavior to barbarism in the 21st century: 72 hours.  And the supplies to 'deal' with it were so far away that it took a week or more to get them to the disaster... that is a guarantee of a bad disaster going barbarous.  And yet simple decentralization of goods to local management would have alleviated the immediate problems long enough to allow a better regional response.

Didn't happen.

Now with that in mind, picture a Carrington Event in the 21st century.

Not the destruction of Super Storm Sandy, yes, and even gets you a pretty light show for a few days.  The lack of all infrastructure, however, gets you the same decay rate, everywhere that is not prepared.  And we don't have Interstellar friends to bail us out of a global CME.  Yet with some basic preparation for the power plants, getting a decent set of replacement transformers in storage in a salt mine or other safe place, a basic grid can start to reappear in days.  With distributed food and water, plus some localized systems for processing same, you can keep civilization going and get it back on its feet.  Birth control and abortions will be in short supply, I'm afraid, but then having food to eat, water to drink and a safe place to bed down for the night will rise far above any 'War on women' sort of deal as we try to stave off barbarism and a war of Each For His Own.

Thus I have a list of things that politicians must be willing to talk about or they do not get my vote at all.  Period.

Decentralization of services along with an understanding of disaster preparation at all levels of government.  That means FEMA can go away and have its stores divided up by the States and distributed locally.  They suck at disaster response.

This goes double for the State level.

Prioritization of threats so that mere lifestyle 'threats' come long, long, long after basic survival threats.  Yes, nothing is going to save us from Yellowstone if it goes through one of its major eruptive events, unless we have a viable way to get off this planet.  Preparation right up TO that for ANYTHING ELSE should be a priority of all governments starting with self-government.  It isn't costly to be prepared.  A bit of extra canned food stored away after each shopping trip does wonders over a few months to a year.  Stored containers of water with basic additives to allow them to stay potable for up to 5 years is cheap, so is bleach or compounds for swimming pools to make bleach.  A bucket and plastic bags to deal with human waste, plus knowing where to dispose of it doesn't cost much at all.  Each locale has its own other requirements, but getting the basics in place means you won't be a victim of a disaster unless it directly takes you out with its direct damage. If you don't want to take care of yourself, then you have only yourself to blame for the consequences.

If you have read this article: you have been warned.  Nature doesn't care much about you, about me, about our civilization and isn't all that nice, come right down to it.  Don't bother me with 'climate change' if you are unwilling to face realities of Carrington Events that seem to get to us about every century or so.  Oh, its heading on towards a century since the last one... aren't we lucky?  And New Madrid is hitting its readiness for an event in its cycle.  Ditto the Cascadia Thrust Fault.  And who knows when just the right quake will hit La Palma?

I'm looking for a politician willing to address the realities of infrastructure repair (not just 'jobs bills' or that Interstate stuff but the REAL INFRASTRUCTURE) and hardening, along with disaster preparedness.  Because if we don't get serious about these things then civilized life as you and I know it will be cut off with a real disaster.  And the more we let politicians divide us and try to centralize power, the more certain that the first disaster we get will also be ending our civilization increases.

So far, no luck.

Brought to you by A Citizen of the Republic

Growing up Dragon

The Chinese Zodiac Calendar has animal representations for that year which repeats every 12 years.  In general, hand-waving theory, it means you get a suite of predispositions based on the year you were born.  If you extend the Dragon years back you get 1964.  My lady is from the previous Dragon cohort in 1952.  Just so you know what the dynamics are, up front, about what I'm going to talk about, it is important to know the cohort system.  When you are in a cohort, militarily, you are of a set group formed up at a certain time and that cohort remains as that group.  In extreme systems no one else gets to join that cohort and it shrinks as individuals die off.  This is applied to any year and the people in it can be treated as a closed cohort, which helps to examine such things as changes in environment, changes in demographics, and actuarial tables for how fast a cohort dies off.  If you start at the beginning of the Cretaceous and count all the species right at that time and track them, you can do a cohort analysis and see when the last species was to die off... the fact that cohort has a sudden drop mid-way through its expected life-span to zero, demonstrates that something truly large-scale happened at that point, otherwise we would still have dinosaur species from that cohort roaming around.  Birds hadn't evolved by then, although their predecessors were around, these species we see today weren't there.

I can't lend the idea any credence to the Chinese system, but will say that there are some birth year cohorts that seem to stand out.  In the era before 'everyone was special', which means no one is special, was the age cohort that I was in and we were getting remarks from our teachers as we went through school that there was something different about our cohort.  Teachers who had been on the job for decades, and who knew the school system I was in, had a good handle on their fellow instructors across the system: from grade school to high school, the teachers actually had a good working knowledge that was shared across schools and grade levels.  That may or may not be unique to the school system I was in at the time and YMMV.  How did I (and others in my age cohort growing up) find this out?

We stayed after class or came back after school to discuss topics with our teachers.  These may have started off as simple 'find out information' sorts of deals, but once picked up as a habit you got to know your teachers and they got to know you.  I had started picking up that habit around 7th grade and by 9th grade it was in full swing, and I often went back to my prior schools (they were on the way home, after all) and dropped by to talk with previous teachers.  That perspective gained, across multiple years of teachers in diverse topics meant you learned about the teachers interactions throughout the year.  One of the most interesting comments from a prior year teacher in English was that he had been told years before our cohort arrived that we were different, standing head and shoulders above the year before us and after us academically.

What are the phenomena that brought about the 1964 age cohort?

First it is not a true 'Baby Boomer' cohort.  One instructor in Social Studies/Civics said that he liked to think of us like that, but that we had a different set of characteristics than the Boomer kids.  Basically the Boomers formed such large classes that you had to change your lesson plans for them, you had to adjust to those class sizes and it was difficult to apply the rigor of pre-Boomer teaching methods to the Boomers.  No one was catering to the post-Boomer generation.  The general decline in class sizes (which is to say all the people in a cohort year, not the number of people in a class) meant that the number of pupils per instructor ratios were declining, as were some of the older teachers who were leaving the profession.  The first and second wave of Boomer children had finally ebbed off by 1960 and what you get post-1960 are a mixed group of families: Boomer families having a last child after two major sets of same, the beginning of the incline of divorced families and mixed-families still trying to adhere to nuclear family values, the very first children of the Boomers or just pre-Boomers having their first children in families, returnees from Korea now just out of college and settling down to a family, and a very few and sparse pre-Boomer couples having a mid-life to late-life child.

This period from approximately 1962 to 1966 is before Gen X and after the Boomers.  No one catered to it as the 'youth' culture was now college oriented, no longer family/home/child oriented.  We were the generation that went to the video arcade, not the pinball arcade: Boomers went for pinball, our generation went to Atari.  That '62-'66 generation got to see political ineptness at the highest levels: LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter.  There is no nostalgia for a 'better time' amongst this generation, no yearning to Like Ike or sighing about dreamy JFK, we don't remember those guys.  And for all the great press about JFK, he didn't seem like such a hot President, either, what with the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, and continuing the misadventure in Viet Nam started by Truman and kept going on a low level by Eisenhower and upping the ante with political assassination overseas, to boot.

At the local level our cohort got to see the roll and burn of industrial America and the sudden coming of the Rust Belt.  Now that the rest of the Nation understands what 10% unemployment can do to you for a few years, lets just say that in the old areas where Bethlehem Steel, Worthington Compressor, and Westinghouse once ruled, we got to see 15% unemployment and then chronic 12% unemployment until the early 1990's when I left the region.  Political corruption, high taxation and power grabs at all levels meant that the underground economy flourished.  Not for 'black market' goods, but for regular jobs done with under the table payments and the 'you help me by doing this and I can help you by doing that' favor exchanging.  See what the current Administration is doing to the Nation?  Welcome to Rust Belt America.  Been There, Done That, Got The T-Shirt.

In the midst of that semi-generation, not Boomer and not Gen X, came the Dragon Cohort.  The 'Latch Key Kids'.  That was a worry amongst Americans to fret about for, oh, 20 milliseconds.  You know, mom got 'liberated' to do a second job so someone had to let the kid in the house after school... say the kid can use a key?  Who knew?  Starting out in my grade school years in the back of semi-rural areas and then going to suburbia was a shock, and grade 5 meant whole new environs, no fields, no forests, no tractors, and way too much pavement.  Thus my perspective within the Dragon Cohort is relatively unique, maybe only a few thousand have that experience born that year across the US.

Now academic achievement, while nice and all, wasn't a real focus of what I was about.  I loved to read and most of that was Science Fiction and Fantasy (SF&F), and as we couldn't be part of the First Fandom of Trek, we were part of the Second Fandom of Trek, growing up on re-runs... really, what else was there to watch?  OK, Monty Python, that served a major injection point for weirdness to the Dragon Cohort.  If you came to the High School I was at during the years the Dragon Cohort was going through it, up to two hours before school you could find that about four to six tables of the cafeteria had been taken over by us: all members of that same class, meeting up to do school work with each other and discuss issues of school and beyond.  Almost without exception we all watched Star Trek and Monty Python.  About 2/3 of us played D&D and maybe a half of that were general board war gamers as well.  We also tended to congregate at video arcades, not the mall, at least when they were separate establishments.  What this meant is that we had a high affinity for a set of activities that didn't necessarily extend above or below our cohort and, indeed, within the Dragon Cohort at our school those at those tables were the ones who were above average and not in a Lake Wobegone way, either.

What was telling was that neither the class ahead or behind us had that sort of sociology nor mindset, although we did gain a few from both classes, they were only a couple per grade and the rest of the years couldn't even fill a single table at the cafeteria before school on any given day.  Go after school and find discussions with teachers and you were more likely to find a Dragon Cohort member than anyone else: either there were members of the cohort or it was empty.  And even then it was only a few teachers where members congregated in the twos and threes.

After High School college tended to break up the cohort, but by then members were getting a good idea of what was working and what wasn't in the world.  Academically we were seeing a slow degradation of grading standards in not just the K-12 area but in college as well: the hyphenated studies and meaningless classes were starting to infest the college curricula and these sub-groups were trying to divvy up campus space for their classes.  Becoming a diabetic meant time off to deal with understanding that and shifting to a different cohort in classes: it was a necessary re-alignment of my mental life and attitude which put me in contact with some trailers of the Dragons and the first of Gen X.  Academically I wandered and had the problem of only one or two areas where I did poorly, and the rest I did quite well at across a diverse range of topics from science to economics to history to sociology to war studies.  I finally settled on Geology, which saddened one Comp Sci professor who wanted me to do an APL to LISP translator... I let him know that the CS department wanted math theoreticians, not CS coders who just used math as a nuts and bolts tool to do work.  In Geology you had to have more than just a thumbnail knowledge of topics ranging from petrology, sedimentation, plate tectonics, genetics, petro-chemistry, organic chemistry, gravity, the composition of extra-terrestrial bodies, glaciology... and even if you specialize, there is no such a thing as an isolated speciality within geology as it any set of geological forces must take into account all levels of interaction to explain phenomena.

By that point I had gotten to know that the schooling system was corrupt and could be gamed for grades.  To put it bluntly grade inflation decreases the value of grades and that includes ones already issued by any institution undergoing grade inflation.  Many instructors (particularly in the mis-named 'humanities') had started to do that, while the sciences, math and engineering departments kept to the basics of 'if you don't know it, you don't know it'.  By then being a mediocre student in the sciences was putting you mentally above anyone in a hyphenated studies area, and with a better mental toolset to deploy for working life.  Not a great toolset, mind you, but a better one.

One of the drivers towards the sciences was that I enjoyed them and the interactivity between them.  The natural sciences are one of the greatest joys and frustrations as you can be enlightened and you can spend hours of work and realize you screwed up the initial preparations and see that work go down the drain.  You have to really get it right the first time, no do-overs.  The second reason was the set of Congressional hearings on Social Security around 1985 (my memory is inexact) that it was going to go bust around 2050.  Due to demographics.  It was a screwed up system, in other words, and at the very BEST of outcomes it would disintegrate and take the economy with it circa 2050.  Anyone with an ounce of sense realized that if you were young and getting an education, that these older and wiser people had set up a system that was horrifically out of whack and that it wouldn't survive to 2050.  Why?  We looked at all the Boomers who were far OUTSIDE the demographic norms used for the prediction.  You do the math.  I certainly did.  I trust the math and the demographics: the political lies, not so much.

If you were in the regular Dragon Cohort this came during your last year of college.  Luckily I had wandered around, had to take serious re-orientation time off to get my mental and emotional life sorted out (all on my lonesome, I saw the caliber of the psychiatric profession and realized that they weren't qualified to mess around with my head), put back on track, got this wonderful economic shocker and went into the natural sciences.  Wouldn't you?  You can't use your ethno-hyphenated-'feel good about myself' studies to get a job: basic math, hard work, and being able to tell you that 'this lovely building is on a fault line and have you prepared for a disaster?' will do that for you.  And unemployment was still in the 9-12% range, so I knew I would have to de-camp to get a job.  Those years were a joy and a sheer terror, both, but I just applied to every single place I could find once they were over, and finally got a place in DoD on the civil side.  They beat the National Park Service by a couple of weeks.  I saw the future, I needed cash, and while I love the NPS, helping the military and getting decent pay decided it for me.

By 1991 I had paid off my minimal student loan.  Yes, that was only a fraction of a single paycheck, big whoop.  The house loan got cut in half time-wise by hitting at principle continuously and applying any 'extra cash' to the house instead of that fun shiny object du jour.

Starting after school years I applied the principles I had learned growing up: be in debt to no one, pay off principle on your house as fast as humanly possible, cash on the barrel means you are beholden to no one, hard work is its own reward, and, most importantly, Don't Panic.

In fact there is an even better last part: NEVER PANIC.

Panic is not your friend and will, more often than not, get you killed.

The person running in panic from a disaster will be beaten, hands-down, by the determined person who kept their head about them who is sprinting from it.  If you see a disaster you have to run from: sprint.  That poor panicked fellow, well, he should have known better.

So when our economic system has gone to hell, our housing system went through a lovely and politically backed bubble, and the rest of the Ponzi schemes start to implode, living debt free means I don't panic.  I have concerns, yes, but I don't worry, either: worry is a waste of time and energy better spent doing something else, even if it is playing Parcheesi (which I don't play, BTW).  You prepare for disasters years (decades if possible) before they arrive.  I'm not depending on SSA, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps nor any other crackpot, hare brainfart of the political elites meant to impoverish the Nation.  These 'programs' have impoverished the Nation and are going away soon. 

I'm prepared for that. 

Heck I'm prepared for the Cumbre Vieja mega-tsunami event which means I don't think the water will get further than the ridgeline that is before the one I'm on, but I also have a good view of that ridgeline so if it gets overtopped I have about 20 minutes to sprint off of this one towards the next one in any vehicle or in any way I can.  I could really use a hovercraft, you know?  Say, maybe I could make one... wouldn't that be fun?  A real learning experience!

Economic collapse of the Nation?  What?  You haven't prepared for that?  Can't you do the math?  You were told about what was coming with the ending of SSA in 2050... then 2030... then 2020... and it went into the red spending bonds last year so its still moving like a dinosaur but will soon fall over and become a mess on the landscape.  Hope you weren't planning for that any time soon.  I'm not.  And haven't even let that enter into any equation about my future as I know that the basis for all of those programs are unsound, to say the least.  They won't last forever.  I'm not expecting them to last out this decade, but we can cushion the fall for those who are stuck being a slave to the State, you know?

How about a CME, you know, Coronal Mass Ejection?  Fry out the power system and the major transformers for it?  Plus anything you got plugged into a wall socket.  You prepared for that baby?  Globally?  You know, 'no outside help, ever'?  No?  Scared?  Or just want to be put into a panic?  Heck we've never had a geo-magnetic field decaying to a flip-flop like we have now, so how far the ejected and diffuse mass goes into it is anybody's guess.  Remember, get enough of that going on at the right altitude and the stuff that isn't in a faraday cage is also in trouble.  You know, add in some EMP effects to season it?  Slightly different defenses for an EMP than a CME.  You can never be too sure what mother nature will throw at you next time.  Might be flowers, it might be running chainsaws.

I am difficult to panic, to say the least.

Like I said the Dragon Cohort pulls in a few people from non-Dragon years, but anyone can be prepared, which means you prepare ahead of time.  It isn't about intelligence, either, as I've met plenty of really smart, test well, types, who couldn't figure out how to change the oil in their car if their life depended on it.

I'm in that generation that isn't the grand and glorious and over-hyped Baby Boom, and while there are plenty of nice and level-headed folks who are Boomers, the culture tends to cater to them no end.  I'm in that not so special generation that isn't Boomer and isn't Gen X.  As one of my teachers said to me, I'm in the generation that gets the shovel to clean up the mess of the Boomers.  I like to think that we are the ones born with the Cluebats in hand, but that is an over-generalization.  Mine is the forgotten generation that you can't label, the one where everyone doesn't get a prize, the one that was told lies and realizes it as an intellectual and emotional matter that isn't warm and fuzzy and makes you feel ever-so-good about stealing from younger people via government.  Mine is the generation that has asked for no favors, and seeks to have you lead a good life for yourself and ask for help from your friends and family, your churches and social organizations, and to put government in its place as your servant, not your master.  If you expect money from government, it is your master.  And a damned inept and tyrannical one, at that.

I was born free.

I was born into the Year of the Dragon.

I ask for no favors, no handouts, and seek to be a burden to none.

My hand is open to you to help, not raised in a fist to strike for our burden is to do no harm and do good for our fellow man.

We are stuck with the shovel to clean up the mess and it ain't a socialist shovel, that's for damn sure.

The good news is that the future is bright past these times of insanity and lies.

The way of liberty to the stars is opening, soon it will be clear.

Our world is about to change for the better and yet we must also save some from the abyss.

A bit of digging is needed first to bury the blood red 20th century once and for good and all.

I am of the Dragon in the 21st Century and the direction is clear, the path a disaster.

You can do your bit to help, and that means letting go of the failed past and seeking a better future.

I know that is frightening, but the future always is, isn't it?

Persuasion and marketing

Watching the Glenn Beck program on 13 JAN 2011 was a fascinating experience as the topic was Edward Bernays and marketing. Mr. Bernays was one of the first admen to develop advertising campaigns based on psychological methods to create campaigns. To do this he relied on the works of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, who identified basic drives of the body that are part of the unconscious human psyche. Those advertising campaigns introduced the utilization of these drives (survival, thirst, sex, hunger) as part of their basis, so as to appeal to multiple levels of the unconscious mind and to utilize imagery and words that would linger in the association with whatever was being pushed. Additionally he used an 'appeal to authority' by paying for studies that would 'show' certain scientific based concepts (ex. that hunger is better sated at breakfast with a richer meal including bacon and eggs) then send those to either other 'authorities' or to local individuals involved in that area of work (for the bacon example it was physicians). Throw in some study generated numbers, an important institute or doctor and you have an advertising campaign.

It works, too, this appeal to the lowest part of the human psyche: sex sells. Reading Frederik Pohl's works (both science fiction and some his autobiographical pieces) we get to see how this had worked by the 1950's, to the point where admen could sell magazines to doctors offices that didn't want them. The process of advertising and marketing grows up around the concept of the animal part of man (that is natural man) wanting to be led to the successful conclusion of his desires. That is why sex appeal sells, as well as campaigns for getting people to eat more or drink more, and even campaigns to get you to 'switch' brands are based on things other than the actual product being sold or are secondary to that product by slapping a label on it (like 'healthy' or 'diet'). This concept of a herd driven mentality towards products was utilized in politics to sell political parties, programs and ideologies. We went from a Nation that had politicians not doing much, and rarely being reported on, to one in which they were on the airwaves, giving 'photo ops' of things they don't do in their daily life, and generally drying to mold the mind of public opinion on a constant basis.

Bernays recoiled from how these concepts were used in wartime Germany as they utilized the full suite of Freud and found it to be successful. That suite of drives goes beyond those I've already listed and includes the 'death drive' or 'destrudo'. This is part of the Freudian view of human psychology, and while psychology has varied from that even in the Freudian side of things, when one utilizes the concept of base human drives the destrudo is a functional part of that view. The Nazi Party utilized symbology and iconography to enforce this (ex. the death's head symbol as part of the concentration camp SS insignia) and through the concept that the next generation would be fiercer and 'do what is necessary' for the problems of Germany. This also worked and very effectively, to the point where Germans were turning their heads at cattle cars full of Jews going to the concentration camps. At a subliminal level they had been marketed this idea since the late 1920's as the NSDAP rose to prominence, and part of the idea was to 'perfect' Germany's culture by subtracting the 'unwanted' portion of it.

Here, as James Burke would say in Connections, I could follow many paths.

I could follow down the line of books on The Making of the President XXXX where the year would be in the X's. Those works offer insight into campaigns and reviewing them allows for a longer perspective of how marketing has not only changed political discourse and elections, but change the type and kind of people who run for office.

Or I could examine the way companies have utilized marketing to influence public opinion and then turned a small portion of their dollars into the industry of marketing their ideas to government. That forms a cycle of public funds going to favored companies that have good insider contacts so as to garner those public funds via the appropriation process, and then 'reward' that legislator by putting some jobs or work in their district and sending campaign contributions to them. By getting the idea you can 'regulate' something via appeal to public unconscious drives, legislators then push their programs forward and can find not only electoral success but money from those they regulate. This is usually done through the venue of fear, so that people come to believe they have something to fear about the activities of companies... sometimes you do and other times it is just marketing to push an agenda.

I could even look at the intrusion of marketing into grief, as was done at the recent Tucson, AZ memorial service that, for all the pleasant sounding words of the speech given by the President, the symbology and reactions clash in discord. But I've already done that, and it is actually a spin-off that I put out first to help gel a few ideas.

Instead I'm going to look at that complex between science (or at least scientific sounding) work with marketing and the problem of politicians not understanding that the Freud animal driven complex is not the be-all, end-all of psychological analysis.

The problem with going into the animal based subconscious as being the primary driver of man is that it runs into the problem of rational thought. This is driven by the irrational motivations of the body, in the Freudian venue, but has a wholly different perspective under a different school, that of Carl Jung, say. To become a functioning individual you must integrate the rational and irrational, the conscious and unconscious, and retain conscious autonomy so as to be an individual: you are not a beast in a herd but a conscious animal able to integrate and control base desires with the conscious mind. The horror of subliminal advertising, then, is to approach only the unconscious or sub-conscious mind if the conscious mind does not have the necessary understanding to properly tag the subliminal content so that the unconscious mind can weigh the import of any given message with that rational input.

Jung then posed a second part of the human psyche that was not wrapped up inside individuals, but was held by all mankind as part of our natural background. In this view of the unconscious there are also the archetypes of characters that are the pure forms of those beings we have come to represent through mythology and stories. These forms reside within us unconsciously, and we seek out these archetypes when we are troubled in our lives. As someone said of Batman: 'When I was in danger of losing my life I sought to find the answer Batman would have to my situation, and then did that action'. You rarely, if ever, reach into that storehouse on a conscious basis, and yet it is always available to your unconscious mind. Asking 'What Would Jesus Do?' is doing just that: reaching for that which is Jesus in all of us, so as to find his answer and implement it.

Now to show how this works, we have seen the slow erosion of our political and economic systems via the foundations built by the Progressive movement integrating Freudian concepts into campaigns and pushing agendas. As Bernays said, the end result was to have an elite class that would be a benevolent dictatorship to the masses. If you listen to all the Marxist rhetoric, you would expect people to take to the streets, demand ever more, as that is their base natural desires being denied by the act of government after getting them used to living at the government teat for such things as welfare, unemployment, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid... the list is long. This is what is going on in Europe, by and large and is an age-old, archetypical tradition there that stretches back for centuries or even longer. When the King withholds a good to the populace, the peasants revolt... and then are put down and submit to the ruling order.

In America, however, the concepts of thrift, patriotism and each individual making their own way in life has created a force counter to the Freudian driven addictive force for more government: the Tea Party force for less and more accountable government. The elites are being seen as failures not only on the personal scale (where government programs must win adherents) but at the National level as well. When 70% of the population does not want the debt ceiling raised for the country, they are not drawing upon a Freudian drive but a Jungian archetype that we remember from our Founding and Framing eras. America started in debt and only got out of debt when Andrew Jackson was in office: he was the first President to preside over a debt-free country, and he then proceeded to remove the National Bank from the government's rolls so that it couldn't manipulate the economy directly again.

In the realm of fiction there are very, very, very few authors that even attempt this sort of thing. The best that I've read is Gordon R. Dickson who utilizes this throughout his large Childe Cycle of works but most impressively in his novel Way of the Pilgrim. In that novel Earth is taken over by a kindly but really quite powerful alien race... we get a benign despotism to rule over us. We are handed the 'hope' that in a few generations we will become skilled enough so as to be 'brothers' to them. Mankind, as a whole, slowly begins to reject this but not openly. The first sign to show up is a simple stick figure of a man in a cloak with a staff. He is called The Pilgrim. The Pilgrim, as an archetype, exists across humanity and soon, very soon, people start to take up cloak and staff. First it is scattered, then there are more and more. The aliens don't know what to make of this, it is beyond them. Then The Pilgrim begins to manifest directly in one man and he has no conscious knowledge of what The Pilgrim does when it manifests. The message that is carried: mankind rejects your authority and wants you gone from our planet and we will all die in pursuit of this goal. By then there are millions upon millions across the globe wearing cloak and carrying staff: The Pilgrim has come. Unwilling to commit genocide and unable to deal with something they don't have, they are forced to leave: they have no pool of archetypes to draw upon, no deeply shared unconscious capability, for all their power they have met a power greater than theirs in a realm they can't even go into.

This is why the appearance of the Tea Party is such a shock to the political Left and those who invest strongly in man as a barely rational animal: we are not just animals with a thin veneer of rationality, but a rational mind deeply in contact with our own unconscious not just for our bodily needs but for our outlook in life. This is beyond the realm of politics, marketing, or even advertising as there is no way to influence our archetypes. Those who are integrated individuals are not dictated to, but they tell you they wish to live their own lives in peace and to get the hell out of their faces. We know the ways of the Rattlesnake and it is always fair in its warning and you always get it. The message is clear: back off or suffer the consequences of your ill-thought out actions.

How else can one explain the quick spread of the Tea Party movement, from nothing to political force in less than 2 years? This is a remarkably American phenomena because of our storehouse of archetypes, which is a 'can do', 'if you want it done do it yourself' and 'get the hell off my lawn' formation that is NOT present in any other Nation on this planet. Anyone with the integration capability with their unconscious that has some rational basis for these sorts of ideas CAN get in contact with these archetypes: they are universal to mankind, you just have to be flowing into their formation for them to manifest. And once an archetype catches hold, especially in times of danger, it spreads like wildfire without even the need for conscious intention beyond the need for the answer which only the archetype can give.

Now if that isn't enough to scare the socks off the 'market it to their gonads and their minds will follow' crowd, the next part will remind you of how Einstein described quantum physics: 'spooky action at a distance'.

The concept of the Noosphere is given by Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin as the 'sphere of human thought'. This concept of a 'hive mind' has been around for awhile, that being a conscious construct shared by the entirety of humanity. With that said the physical outlay of it is already happening with the World Wide Web teamed with a new set of laws based on computing, networks and the re-utilization of concepts at different scales (which I go over in this article). The reason I say this is that the World Wide Web is a construct that allows our conscious minds to interact with each other in an asynchronous, multi-media mode. This is not, perhaps, what was envisioned for this concept when it was first proposed, but the interesting parallels between the Web and the Noosphere are obvious.

With that said there is a definite unconscious part of the Noosphere that is only reflected in the consciously available material on the Web, and the rest of the material appears to reside elsewhere pre-Internet era. The Noosphere is used to explain how individuals pick up skills and knowledge faster than those people before them, and this is not even a 'direct teaching' form of learning as something like how to fashion bronze looks to be something less than a 'spread' of knowledge and more a 'multiple learning events' sort of knowledge. This is closer to quantum theory and 'spooky action at a distance' than the relativistic view of information spread via slow word-of-mouth means. There are similarities in stone structures across the world (ex. pyramidal structures in Egypt and Central to South America) that have physical understanding as their basis, which is to say the angle of repose for particles cannot exceed a certain angle that depends on density, particle size and surface roughness. The ability to organize relatively modest populations to complete these tasks is one of convergent understanding at a distance: dissimilar cultures find similar ways to organize to complete similar tasks without referents to each other. That is the unconscious part of the Noosphere at work which is a mirroring of Jungian views on archetypes, though expanded to daily process knowledge (i.e. how to do things, make things, and the necessary skills involved for them).

This, like archetypes, is not something you can market or advertise to so as to influence an individual as it operates independently of the physical basis for mankind as it requires conscious and rational thought to allow access to it. That physical basis coupled with rational thought would then be the necessary 'keys to the kingdom' to have access to this shared knowledge from individuals within cultures across cultural domains.

Where I have some disagreement with the Noosphere and individuals like Kurzweil, is the idea of a 'unity' formation of conscious minds to form one larger, complex, cross-cultural mental structure. To date there are no indications of consciousness either by activity nor by messaging of this Noosphere. The biologically based portion of it has acted more as a reference storehouse of knowledge than a communication system: more library with knowledge available than individual actively sharing knowledge by intent. The dissemination of process information and cultural archetypes has been, instead, a form of dissemination far better described by quantum physics ('spooky action at a distance' between entangled particles sharing information at faster than light speed) than by complexity theory.

What the Noosphere does allow people to do as individuals is to process information faster. This is part and parcel of the Feiler Faster Thesis (FFT) which I have examined as a phenomena multiple times. It is represented, at first, by our ability to 'catch up' with the news cycle on a faster basis over time, which is to say that the rate of our rate of adaptation is increasing. This is a 'meta' formulation of examining a process or creation of an artifact, so that meta-thinking is thinking about thinking and the meta-rate of change is the change of the rate of change. Col. John Byrd (USAF) described this as getting within the 'OODA loop' of someone else in combat: Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. Getting 'inside' and opponent's OODA loop is an essential part of combat operations and Col. Byrd's application of it to USAF concerns has proven to be a single instance within a huge category of human activity. That is to say the OODA loop thesis can be widened in scope (utilizing the Gould scale applicability concept) to encompass how businesses operate, how you drive a car safely, how a chess match operates between human opponents, and, indeed, how you absorb information from the news.

The FFT is the process of tightening the individual's OODA loop to be within that of the overall news presentation cycle so that you are less surprised by future outcomes than the news presenters are. Similarly you are better suited, as an individual, to understand the implications of new technology or world events due to the ability to tap into the Noosphere storehouse and find the way to hone your own perceptive skills so as to implement the FFT, since learning to do so is, itself, a skill. If you wonder why government officials, regulatory agencies and such fall out of step with the way of world events or even just social realities, it is because their outward structure cannot incorporate the Noosphere and, thusly, the FFT. Government is an external management system for the basics of ensuring safety for societies, it is not an operative system for enhancing knowledge or disseminating skills. In fact the failure of those governments that try to do this is littered with millions dead in the vain attempt to create something in the physical realm that we already share in the conscious and unconscious realms. What government is, however, is a physical safeguard of a culture and its territory and it is lent the negative powers that are granted to us by having a physical being by Nature, and we then take oversight of this created power structure for the good of all individuals within society.

Here is where the Jungian concept comes fully into play with the Noosphere: the Noosphere isn't a way to create a mass cognitive structure, but a way to allow the individual to create an individual identity within all of human culture and to find the necessary archetypes and process information so as to allow creativity to expand the overall knowledgebase and enhance archetypes, or even create new ones. Thus the individual melds their physical bodies from Nature with their rational thought system keyed to their culture to allow them to better gain individuality and creative expression of their individual self. Thus, if this is correct, we are heading into the steep learning curve era of enhanced individuality re-asserting its power over the social power structures we know as government, and not just within the USA, either.

For if we apply the Noosphere to the human condition with the understanding that it is to enhance human expression, and therefore human liberty, one must be free to utilize their positive liberty freely. That requires the greatest liberty of all: freedom to utilize your positive liberties outside of the negative power oversight of government.

If you wondered how chapters of the Tea Party can form up in the UK, Germany, Italy, Israel, Russia and Australia, now you know.

The FFT is now in play on a global basis.

Gaining one's liberty from the State has always been fraught with danger.

What happens when this goes on a global scale? My dearest hope is we do not get the kind of carnage of 1775-1783 for 10% dead and 15% fled where the 15% have nowhere to go means disaster. There are better ways to do this as Gandhi and Aquino found, as well as some of the faster transitions of power in Eastern Europe with the fall of Communism. I do hope those in power will learn from the Noosphere that it isn't worth the bloodshed to grasp power to the bitter end. There is just no teaching some people, however, for they refuse to learn from the mistakes and lessons we have learned.

For The Pilgrim will not be denied.

QE2 or Titanic?

The question of the Quantative Easing Part 2 being done by the Federal Reserve is the Reserve printing money to buy US Treasuries through 3rd party resellers (like Goldman-Sachs) at a mark-up so as to try and get liquidity into the markets.  To this point in time easy credit policy has not 'stimulated' businesses and the business climate remains unsettled due to government policies being unknown on a day-to-day basis.  Such things like the cost of Healthcare Reform, the Financial Reform bill, and tax policy have all put forward an array of new federal agencies that will, perforce, eat up money and increase regulation while showing very little in return for their work.  Each piece of paperwork needing to be filled out in the private sector to meet some new government program or regulation is time spent not doing something productive.  With the threat of taxes going up, actually keeping a business afloat is a major problem as no one can forecast what taxes will look like even one year down the road.  On top of all of that Social Security is operating deeply in the red, cashing in its Treasury obligations, which takes money from both the federal government via direct payments (FICA and general revenues) and needing to pay for those cashed out Treasuries years before anyone expected them to be cashed out.

Thus the federal government is insolvent: it has burdens that it needs to meet that eat up all available cash and then needs to borrow more money at interest.

It is finding the borrowing climate hard as the economy is in the doldrums, and no one sees how the US can pay for all of its 'entitlements' or even just the few mandatory government functions necessary to run the National government.  There is, actually, cash for the latter, but only if you shed all the 'voluntary' parts of government at the federal level.

With no political willpower to do that, the un-elected Federal Reserve (which will get autonomous powers under the financial reform bill as Congress can no longer to its job) has decided to start buying some Treasuries to help keep things going in the name of liquidity: in order to try and pay for today we are devaluing our dollar in hopes that this will jump-start the economy.  There are, unfortunately, no success stories for that worth mentioning.  Thus this is a failed monetary policy with high-end risks and very few tangible rewards unless the idea is to survive until the next election to be thrown out of office to blame the incoming people for your mess.

Still this idea has its backers on the Right like Ramesh Ponnuru, at National Review Online and he points to others who are backing it under the ideas put forward by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. At one of the sites linked to, at Marco Market Musings is an article by David Beckwith on 08 FEB 2010 that a JMCB article by Larry White discussing this topic (pdf document here).  In that article is an analysis of Brad DeLong's look at Hayek's views on this... following this?  From Ponnuru to Beckwith to White to DeLong, about Hayek!

Right!  Lets take a look at the first summary point of White reviewing DeLong's work (boldface mine unless otherwise noted throughout):

(1) The Hayek-Robbins (“Austrian”) theory of the business cycle did not in fact prescribe a monetary policy of “liquidationism” in the sense of doing nothing to prevent a sharp deflation. Hayek and Robbins did question the wisdom of re-inflating the price level after it had fallen from what they regarded as an unsustainable level (given a fixed gold parity) to a sustainable level. They did denounce, as counterproductive, attempts to bring prosperity through cheap credit. But such warnings against what they regarded as monetary over-expansion did not imply indifference to severe income contraction driven by a shrinking money stock and falling velocity. Hayek’s theory viewed the recession as an unavoidable period of allocative corrections, following an unsustainable boom period driven by credit expansion and characterized by distorted relative prices. General price and income deflation driven by monetary contraction was neither necessary nor desirable for those corrections. Hayek’s monetary policy norm in fact prescribed stabilization of nominal income rather than passivity in the face of its contraction. The germ of truth in Friedman’s and DeLong’s indictments, however, is that Hayek and Robbins themselves failed to push this prescription in the early 1930s when it mattered most.

The 'liquidation' policy was that of putting failing banks to rest via letting them fail in the 1920's.

Things that pop out?

- Re-inflating price levels is questionable: that is trying to get price levels up to a sustainable level after bubble bursts.  In other words don't try to re-inflate the bubble.

- Corrections to money requires some allocative corrections when easy credit has inflated prices.

- The goal is to stabilize nominal income, not prices.

- All of this is done with a fixed gold parity money supply.

The last point is telling, and anyone trying to use Hayek or any other economist from history must review if they are talking about a 'stable' currency (that is gold, precious metal, or other substance backing) or a 'fiat' currency that has no fixed value and has only relative worth over time.  The prescriptions of Hayek for a fixed parity currency do not apply, necessarily, to a non-fixed value currency and any prescriptions for the former cannot be given to the latter as the monetary value of the currency means there is an absolute adjustment level for the fixed value currency and no absolute value to the non-fixed value currency.

With a non-fixed value currency when you attempt to 'stabilize' the currency by pushing bank notes into the system, you get nominal inflation of the currency, meaning it is worth less than it was before the printing of money.  From that inflation and deflation of non-fixed value currency cannot be definitively addressed by monetary policy alone: other adjustments need to be done so as to stabilize the value of the currency so that it has stability.  When more is printed and money is worth less over time, there is increased instability in the markets and pricing adjusts to meet the de-valued currency.

Can government spending on 'work' projects help?  This is point 2 that is examined:

(2) With respect to fiscal policy, the Austrian business cycle theory was silent. Hayek and Robbins did oppose make-work public programs, but they opposed them because they believed that the programs would misdirect scarce resources, not because the programs were financed by public-sector borrowing.

Governments get money via taxation or the printing press.  When money is taken from taxpayers it is not available in the economy to be used in an economic fashion to address the needs of individuals and businesses.  When money is printed the value of it is lessened when it is a non-fixed value currency, which creates additional instability for pricing and valuation of goods, services and income.  Thus government cannot 'stimulate' an economy as it is not utilizing funds in an economically efficient manner.  Non-economically efficient things can be done, yes, but that is a political case not an economic one that needs to be made, especially during times of downturns: they are not a 'cure' for an economic downturn and must meet some other need of the State.

Mr. White then goes on to look at Hayek's theory and monetary policy norm, and its a bit of a long section:

Hayek’s business cycle theory led him to the conclusion that intertemporal price equilibrium is best maintained in a monetary economy by constancy of “the total money stream,” or in Fisherian terms the money stock times its velocity of circulation, MV. Hayek was clear about his policy recommendations: the money stock M should vary to offset changes in the velocity of money V, but should be constant in the absence of changes in V.4 He accordingly lamented the shrinkage of M due to the public’s withdrawing reserve money from banks (as had occurred in 1929-33), referring (Hayek 1937, p. 82) to “that most pernicious feature of our present system: namely that a movement towards more liquid types of money causes an actual decrease in the total supply of money and vice versa.” He declared (1937, p. 84) that the central bank’s duty lay in “offsetting as far as possible the effects of changes in the demand for liquid assets on the total quantity of the circulating medium.”

To stabilize the volume of nominal spending, Hayek (1935, p. 124) urged that “any change in the velocity of circulation would have to be compensated by reciprocal change in the amount of money in circulation if money is to remain neutral toward prices.” Thus Hayek (1933b, pp. 164-65) held that an increased public demand to hold (i.e. to “hoard” or not spend) deposit balances would have undesirable deflationary consequences unless offset by deposit expansion:

Unless the banks create additional credits for investment purposes to the same extent that the holders of deposits have ceased to use them for current expenditure, the effect of such saving is essentially the same as that of hoarding [of base money] and has all the undesirable deflationary consequences attaching to the latter.5

Hayek (1937, p. 93) was as strongly opposed to contraction in nominal income as he was to excessive expansion:

Whether we think that the ideal would be a more or less constant volume of the monetary circulation, or whether we think that this volume should gradually increase at a fairly constant rate as productivity increases, the problem of how to prevent the credit structure in any country from running away in either direction remains the same.

Hayek’s ideal (ibid.) was not a do-nothing monetary policy but “an intelligently regulated international system.”6

Do note that when talking about the 1929-33 banking problems it is with a fixed value currency.  Thus a 'run on the banks' means that the currency is being taken out of circulation.  Thus both M (the amount of money) and V (its movement through the economy) are lowered simultaneously as there is less of it to lend as more of it moves back to the individuals that removed it from the banks.  Shifting some reserves from the vaults and into circulation makes sense with this, so long as it is still a fixed value currency as this is a replenishment of lending stocks.

This is a description of a liquidity problem.

Today there are investors not investing money, and individuals who are paying off debt (a good thing) so as to be more solvent in their daily lives.  There is plenty of money to lend, there are very few people wanting to borrow it.  The borrowing problems are from the instability, and if low cost loans are not an incentive to borrow money at its current value, then how will decreasing the value of it make it attractive to borrow?  In theory, yes because you will pay it off with devalued currency. That devaluation trend will shoot the original investment value to hell in short order: that investment you make in plant, equipment and materials will be worth less tomorrow and you will then have to charge more for what you are doing which causes an inflationary spiral.  Pumping money in to 'prime the pump' makes everything more expensive in the short and long run, and while loans can be 'paid back' your living standard declines unless your wages chase the increases in cost... which also add to the inflationary spiral.

This is the opposite of 'stabilizing' a currency which could only be done with a fixed value currency, and then in relatively small amounts.  With a non-fixed value currency the ability of all that money to have a real world value decreases, thus this is the effect of decreasing the value of M even when increasing the number of notes in circulation.  Worse, still, is if that amount then is not used for borrowing, because borrowers don't see how they can pay it back lacking things like jobs, and if employers don't borrow it because they have no idea what fiscal, monetary, tax, and social policies will do to them in weeks, months and years, then it just sits there without adding to V. 

During a major economic downturn with a non-fixed value currency, that downturn, itself, needs to be corrected for via the simple expedient of letting things continue via the rule of law: that adds stability to the markets as well known processes will continue and assured outcomes are understood.  Doing anything to try and 'prime the pump' with a non-fixed value currency runs the high risk of not encouraging economic growth (due to uncertainty) which means that you do not lower unemployment (via marginal production expansion) and that prices go up because of inflation.  The word coined for this: Stagflation.

And you get that when the government still has some solvency left to it, as was the case in the 1970's.  Today the US government is insolvent, and unable to make its bonds attractive due to the amount of debt and structural costs of government spending on entitlements, the military, and the entire federal bureaucracy that stretches from medication safety to subsidizing sugar producers to paying for entire Departments that can't improve the criteria of what they were made to do one iota, like Education.  That is why the government now has trouble selling bonds: we are overburdened with too much government trying to do too much and it is costing us all dearly.  A non-fixed value currency adds to that by giving an illusion that doing something to loan rates, changing criteria for lending, inflating money supply, indeed a host of things added in since 1911, will actually allow the government to better 'regulate' the economy.  By all of its activity, however, it has done just the opposite.

What will QE2 get us?  Stagflation, at best.

Why? The unsettled economic climate means no one can forecast the economy as those in government try to 'regulate' it from positions unattached to the economy for political reasons.

What is the answer? 

1. Announce a change to a fixed value currency, exchange current notes for gold backed ones on a 10:1 basis so everyone can just move the decimal point one place.  This will require new bills and coins, many struck from gold and silver.  At that point an ounce of gold might be around $100, which sounds about right for fractional quantities.
   
2. Keep 'entitlements' like SSA for those in the system, end it for those not in it, remove the 'retirement age' and admit that 'retiring' is best planned for by individuals not governments.  End FICA and fund the remains directly from tax revenues.  This is a major part of the insolvency problem.
   
3. Remove Medicare/Medicaid by adding them up, dividing by 2 and block granting that to the States and phase it out over 5 years as a payment.  Remove all subsidies for medical care via the tax code.  This is the other major part of the insolvency problem.
   
4. Stop the federal spending by shedding government agencies and functions wholesale and selling off the remains. What the government is actually required to have is short: State, DoD, Commerce, US Coast and Geodetic Survey, a Mint, USPTO for limited duration patents, copyrights and tracking trademarks, and a much downsized IRS.  This gets some liquidity into the system for government to operate and pay off our debts.   This includes the Federal Reserve, Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie, Sallie, SEC and a host of other 'regulatory' agencies that are nothing but political means to meddle in the economy.
   
5. A balanced budget amendment that requires the American People to directly sign off on deficit spending.

Then you can do all the fixed value currency analysis you like.

Yes, this would be wrenching to us, conceptually.  But it would offer firmness of process, an understanding that nothing is 'too big to fail', that the rule of law guides what happens at all points in the economy, that politicians should not try to 'regulate' things they don't understand and then 'fix' their 'regulations' with more ill-founded political beliefs, and that the best people to decide what to do in the economy are those that make it and run it at the lowest level.  Their election to do so was pretty simple: they got a productive job.  Politicians, not so much.