Schadenfreude Week: ING Party
DJ Tiesto tweaks his knobs at an ING Bank Party last year. This year’s event will feature The Birdy Song and some old geezer’s melancholic saw playing routine.
Schadenfreude Week: Models and Bottles
This week on S Telly, I’ll be posting horrid but typical clips of extinct bling-people. In this one a junior banking analyst that looks like he’s not of legal drinking age orders $200 cocktails and boasts about how much money and girls you need to get into a tacky Zoolander-like New York bar. Seeing as his postured existence looked shallow are miserable even with money, I wonder what its like now?
Soros and Reflexivity
George Soros is the economics equivalent to Stephen Wolfram and physics. Wolfram is a wealthy businessman who discovered a big idea independently of others, that isn’t new or original but that appears to be correct – that the world is based upon algorithmic feedback loops rather than equations. Soros’ equivalent idea is Reflexivity a model of economics based upon feedback loops in an open system – money flows into a system held far from equiibrium which grows, becomes more complex and has periods of turbulence.
Until recently, Soros was considered a maverick, at least academically, proposing that the economy was an open system regulated by events which are provably unpredictable, if deterministic. The alternative and wideley accepted system of economics that people like Greenspan practiced was based on the idea of economics as a closed system which would tend to equilibrium in a free market. It assumed that turbulence was the result of external impediments to smooth free market influences.
When I found out that this was the case, I nearly fell off my chair. It meant that the economy was being run based upon scientific ideas that come from the age of steam engines.
The economy is an open system with a scale free system of interconnected attractors. It means, among other things that the current crisis was a statistically innevitable event and that another crash crash capable event is just as likely to happen tomorrow (just like having thrown a six in a dice throw does not reduce the chances of throwing a six again). This counterintuitive notion, is the same for earthquakes which were found to follow a pattern which was not the result of the release of built up tension and suggests that the economy is similarly susceptabe to events which are removed from simplistic chains of direct cause and effect.
Understanding these phenomena are crucial to our survival as a species, so we shouldn’t waste time even listening to people who are unaware of them. People like Greenspan or many other practitioners of economics, the dismal pseudo science. Soros, on the other hand, has economics ideas that are at least based on science which is less than 100 years old. Here he is at Davos, where James Bond villains hang out and decide how to run the world.
Donald Duck, The Spirit of 43
A piece of US propaganda that argues against consumerism. In the spirit of 43, Donald Duck is caught between good and evil. The good is represented by a frugal Scot with a ‘Lassie Come Home’ accent and the evil is represented by a zoot-suited, big spender.
After the end of the War, in overshoot reaction to Communism, this view of good and evil was perhaps reversed, to the extent that consumerism was seen a part of the ‘non-negotiable’ American way of life, and with the consequences that are now apparent.
What Hitler Wants – Soviet WWII Cartoon
In this cartoon, what Hitler wants is to help the Capitalists, apparently.
Der Störenfried ( 1940 )
This cartoon is a piece of Nazi propaganda, which can be compared with the previous US ones. It has the same adult material wrapped up in a cozy children’s view of the world.
Two things of note here: in my opinion it is really not of the same graphic standard as US cartoons of the same era, which is interesting since much of what the Nazis produced was very sophisticated, graphically; secondly, I’m posting this from France where this video was blocked by Youtube (France has active censorship laws against Nazi material) and I had to access through a US proxy. An example of why application of censorship laws can be ridiculous, since the whole point of this German film was to learn from the mistakes of the past rather than approve of them.
Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs
This week on Smashing Telly, I’ll be focusing on historically interesting cartoons. This one is a black take on Snow White, which on the face of it is an outrageous piece of racist stereotyping. The setting and colors used are the deep reds of a cartoon bordello hell, versus the pastel blues of Snow White and her angel choir backing singers. On the other hand, Coal Black’s world is positively swingin’, and perhaps just goes to show how clawingly saccharin ‘white’ culture really was.
Walt Disney’s: Education For Death
Disney’s adaptation of Education for Death, the making of a Nazi, is a fascinating piece of wartime propaganda. Convincing enough and expertly made, although a few years years later Disney hired a senior Nazi as one of their presenters.
Stuart Kauffman: Reinventing the Sacred
Stuart Kauffman, biologist and complexity theorist, gives a talk about his latest book: Reinventing the Sacred. If you wanted to invent a religion that was much more interesting than outmoded simplistic ones like, oh, Judaism or Christianity etc. then Kauffman’s ideas would be a much better starting point.
There is no Theory of God
A nice little animated film that explains the difference between science and superstition, showing, among other things, that the difference in the colloquial use of the word theory and the scientific use, leads people to dismiss scientific theories which have enough supporting evidence (such as evolution or spherical earth) that they are facts, in colloquial terms. In other words, colloquial theory = scientific hypothesis and scientific theory = colloquial fact.
Perhaps we should turn the argument around – there is no theory of God. In fact, based on the evidence, there is not even a true theory of the supposed historical figure, Jesus. Both are hypotheses, unsupported by evidence.
Running time: 10 mins.
Via Laurence Moran