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A Means of Control References, interesting books. A Means of Control References 2 p. pp. 14-15, THE PASSIONS AND THE INTERESTS, Albert O.
3 p 80, AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, George Huppert; Indiana Univ.
Pr., 4 The Seven Deadly Sins are pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. These seven sins are not singled out because they are all grievous sins or because of their severity, but because they are the inevitable source of other sins. 5 p. 12, THE MAXIMUM WAGE, Sam Pizzigati; Apex, 1992; 6 See THE FOULEST OF THEM ALL, at http://dieoff.com/page168.htm 7 THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION, Karl Polanyi; Beacon, 1957; 8 pp. 5-6, AGAINST MECHANISM: Protecting Economics from
Science, 9 p. 328, ECONOMICS, Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus;
10 SCIENCE, RATIONALITY, AND NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS, "The bulk of this text was taken up with examining the claims of neoclassical economic theory to scientific status. Given contemporary views on the nature of scientific theory, I examined neoclassical economic theory in terms of both its historical and contemporary phases. I demonstrated that the cardinal theory of utility that formed the foundation for early neoclassical theory foundered on account of its inability to measure utility in any acceptable scientific way. Its substitute, the ordinal theory of utility, was shown to be equally unacceptable. The scientific pretensions of ordinal utility theory and its correlate, revealed preference theory, were shown compromised by the normative structure of the foundational postulate of rationality. The unscientific nature of ordinal utility theory was further shown to be reinforced by the insulating role played by the ceteris paribus proviso. "This general critique was extended not only to the neoclassical theory of individual agent choice but also to general equilibrium theory and positive neoclassical welfare economic theory. Given the general dissatisfaction with neoclassical theory, a number of alternative theories have been proposed, but the problem with the latter is that, with few exceptions, they are founded on the premise that an objective science of economics is still possible despite its present failings. I pointed out the shortcomings of those theories and argued that on account of the nature of human decision making, no analysis of it could be scientific in the way in which the natural sciences are scientific. Mental states that must be invoked to explain behavior are just not subject to empirical analysis. The attempts by theorists to establish explanatory theories by appeal to heuristic concepts such as rationality were shown to be unsuccessful. The point is that 'rationality' plays a normative role similar to that of 'goodness' in ethical theory. "The sociologist can indeed record the behavior of individuals in terms of cultural norms of 'goodness,' 'badness,' 'deviancy,' and so on, but he or she must recognize that theories of behavior founded on such concepts are necessarily normative. Similarly, the neoclassical theorist who embraces a particular notion of rationality and grounds his or her theories on such a notion is certainly formulating a normative theory. My analysis showed that the neoclassical theorist of economic behavior is confronted with the dilemma of restricting his or her analysis to a case-by-case taxonomy of individual agent choice, given the inaccessibility to mental states, or grounding his or her explanatory theories on the normative heuristic of rational choice. Neither alternative yields scientific results." [pp. 150-151] 11 To "coerce" is to compel one to act in a certain way - either by reward or punishment. When I use "politics" or "political", I simply mean "one coercing another" in the broadest sense. 12 pp. 1-2, FREE TO CHOOSE, Milton and Rose Friedman;
Harvest, 13 DECISION MAKING: Alternatives to Rational Choice Models,
"The social sciences have a long, rich history of writings on rationality. In the tradition of neoclassical economic science, as in the writings of Pareto (1935), an action is rational when it corresponds with the ends or goals sought. Rationality means the adaptation of means to ends. The more congruent the means to the ends, the more efficient the decision and, therefore, the more rational the organization (Weber 1947). Economists abstain from applying the test of rationality to ends." [p.16] 14 p. 31, RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY AND ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY:
15 p. 31, LETHAL MODEL 2: The Limits to Growth Revisited, in
16 pp. 34-36, DANGEROUS CURRENTS, by Lester Thurow; 17 Milton Friedman quoted in p. 33, ECONOMISTS AND THE 18 19 See, for example, LOS SANGRE ES EN TUS MANOS at 20 OIL AS A FINITE RESOURCE: When Is Global Production
Likely to 21 See http://www.petroconsultants.com 22 THE DEATH OF THE OIL ECONOMY, by Ted Trainer; Earth
Island 23 Verleger quoted on the jacket of Adelman's book. For more
24 p. xi, THE ECONOMICS OF PETROLEUM SUPPLY, by M. A.
Adelman; Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Adelman has long been one of the world's foremost energy and resource economists and a leading analyst of international oil and gas markets. He has served as North American Editor of the Journal of Industrial Economics and on the editorial boards of The Energy Journal, Energy Economics, Energy Policy, and Resources and Energy. Professor Adelman has also served on the American Petroleum Institute's Coordinating Committee for Statistics and Economics, the Federal Power Commission's Executive Advisory Committee, the Gas Research Institute's Advisory Council, the American Economic Association's Advisory Committee to the Bureau of the Census, and the National Academy of Science's Panel on Natural Gas Statistics. He has received awards from the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers and the International Association of Energy Economists (IAEE), and he has served as President of the IAEE. But Adelman doesn't understand energy! 25 p. 483, Ibid. 26 THE END OF CHEAP OIL, by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H.
THE IMMINENT PEAK OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION, by C.J. Campbell,
27 Evolution of "development lag" and "development ratio",
by Distribution and evolution of "recovery factor", by Jean
28 Laherrere personal correspondence. 29 Personal correspondence. See Duncan's energy paper THE
WORLD 30 p. 190, THE DARK SIDE OF MAN: Tracing the Origins of Male
31 SUMMARY OF ENERGY AND THE US ECONOMY: A Biophysical 32 The US will make an offer that the major oil producers
(e.g., Saudi Arabia and Venezuela) can't refuse. For a fascinating account of
how American government operates in the black, read According to Peter Schweizer, the Saudis cooperate with the US in exchange for intelligence on dissidents [p. 31], satellite pictures, AWACS aircraft [p. 51], Stinger missiles [p. 190], advanced fighters, direct military protection, and were even "leaked" information when the Treasury Department planned to devalue the dollar so they could shift investments into nondollar assets. [p. 233] During the Cold War, the Saudis worked in the black with the CIA to lower global oil prices and thereby deprive the USSR of the much-needed hard currency it needed to operate. Each $1 drop in oil price cost the USSR about one billion dollars in revenue. A $5 drop in the price of a barrel of oil would increase the US GDP by about 1.4 percent. Poindexter: "It was in our interest to drive the price of oil as low as we could." [p. 218] Weinberger: "One of the reasons we were selling all those arms to the Saudis was for lower oil prices." [p. 203] Alan Fiers: The Saudis were also providing financial aid to the mujahedin and the contras. [p. 202] In the first few weeks of the Saudi push, daily production jumped from less than 2 million barrels to almost 6 million. By late fall of 1985, crude production would climb to almost 9 million barrels a day. [p. 242] Shortly after Saudi oil production rose, the international price of oil sank like a stone in a pond. In November 1985, crude oil sold at $30 a barrel; barely five months later it stood at $12. [p. 243] In the spring of 1986, the downward plunge in international oil prices was causing serious worries around the world but also among some quarters in the Reagan administration. Vice President George Bush was preparing for a highly visible ten-day tour of the Persian Gulf area. A product of the Texas oil country, Bush saw danger, not hope, in the dramatic and recent decline in oil prices. [p. 259] Bush was acting on his own against the Reagan administration! While Reagan, Casey and Weinberger were trying to talk oil prices lower, Bush was meeting with Yamani and Fahd trying to talk oil prices higher! [p. 260] In 1983, the Treasury Department had done a secret study that found the optimum oil price for the US economy was about $20 a barrel. [p. 141] 33 http://cryptome.org/bioweap.htm --
34 p. 165, THE DARK SIDE OF MAN: Tracing the Origins of Male
BOOK RECOMMENDATION "Chimp social structure would be unique were it not for humans acting similarly. This is no coincidence. By most taxonomic criteria, chimps and humans are sibling species. Overall, chimp society is not only extremely sexist -- with all adult males dominant over females-but also xenophobic to the extent of killing all alien males, many infants, and some old females who enter their territory. To some readers, my use of the word war may seem too strong to describe what male kin groups do. But systematic, protracted, deliberate, and cooperative brutal killings of every male in a neighboring community, plus genocidal and frequent cannibalistic murder of many of their offspring, followed by usurpation of the males' mates and annexation of part or all of the losers' territory, matches or exceeds the worst that humans do when they wage war. "Wild chimps reveal the natural contexts of territoriality,
war, "The central 'truth' of sociologists is that nature, especially that of humankind, is nice and that people are designed to do things that, all in all, favor the survival of their species. Hence people could never be equipped by nature with instincts to kill other people. This idea comes from the Bambi school of biology, a Disneyesque vision of nature as a collection of moralistic and altruistic creatures. It admires nature for its harmony and beauty of form and for its apparent 'balance' or even cooperativeness. It admires the deer for its beauty and fleetness, and it grudgingly admires the lion for its power and nobility of form. If anything is really wrong with us, it explains, it is a sociocultural problem that we can fix by resocializing people. It is not a biological problem. "Nature, however, is actually a dynamic state of recurring strife of relentless competition, dedicated predators and parasites, and selfish defense. The deer owes its beauty and fleetness to predators such as mountain lions, which kill the clumsiest and slowest deer first; to competitors for food; and to competition between males to mate. Without predators, deer would not only lack fleetness; they would lack legs altogether. They would be slugs oozing from one plant to another. Yet even if these deer-slugs were the only animals out there, natural selection would favor the evolution of faster and more aggressive deer-slugs and would favor any other trait that made them superior competitors against each other. This would include the killing of one deer-slug by another in situations where it boiled down to kill or die. "Moreover, the power and noble visage of the lion (or of the family cat or dog, for that matter) rest entirely on natural selection having shaped not only a fleet predator and efficient killing machine but also a very violent competitor against its own kind in situations where the options were narrowed to exclude or kill, or else kill to survive or reproduce." [p. 179] METHODOLOGY Michael Shermer provides an excellent definition of hard
science and how it differs from the ideologies practiced by the social
scientists. WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and
Other Confusions of Our Time, by Michael Shermer (Skeptic Society and Skeptic
Magazine), the forward is written by Stephen Jay Gould. SOCIAL SCIENTIST FAQ Why do social scientists have so much difficulty communicating with natural scientists? It's because social scientists do not understand the nature of positive (scientific) knowledge. Social science is nothing but a collection of competing ideologies. And once the neurons and dendrites are committed to a specific ideology, it's usually a lifelong affliction. Why are social scientists so violently opposed to bad news? It's because they are paid to serve as cheerleaders for the utopian agenda. In other words, if the utopian agenda fails, the social scientists are out of a job. Anthropologist Robin Fox explains: "I am not convinced that the social and behavioral sciences, at least implicitly, accept the fact-value distinction. I argue that they are committed to a utopian program by their history and by the expectations that keep them alive and funded, namely, that they will help to improve the future prospects of mankind. This is so taken for granted that many people will not see that there is an issue: 'Of course these disciplines are intended for the future betterment of mankind; why else would we have them?' One answer might be to look for the truth about human social nature whether or not the ensuing news be good or bad. In other words, it is certainly a logical possibility that there is no improvable future for mankind, that the news is indeed bad. At least the issue must be faced, not assumed to be settled. It is hard for the social sciences to face it, however; it is a poor basis for research proposals. "The result is that there is a tremendous bias in all the sciences towards the bearing of good news. It is inconceivable that any news refuting any part of the utopian program should be well received, however incontrovertible." [pp. 2,3] "The reader not familiar with the present state of sectarian
fragmentation in the social sciences -- anthropology in particular -- may be
baffled by some of the responses this book will provoke. The social sciences,
unlike most of the natural sciences, do not have a consensus of 'normal
science' to which appeal can be made in judging a contribution. What they have
are competing ideologies. And as with all sectarian disputes, judgments are
made on the basis of ideological purity versus heresy. It is almost impossible
these days to get a reasoned discussion of issues in the social sciences. The
dominance of neo-relativist, hermeneutic, critical, symbolic,
deconstructionist, and interpretative versions of the social science enterprise
involve a retreat from science and the very "Man is different from other primates, not because he has in
some way overcome his primate nature, but because he is a different kind of
primate with a different kind of nature. At the level of forms and processes
man behaves culturally, because mutation and natural selection have produced an
animal that must behave culturally -- invent rules, make myths, speak
languages, and form men's clubs, in the same way as the hamadryas baboon must
form harems, adopt infants, and bite his wives on the neck." [p. 28, WATCH THE ACTION WITHOUT THE SOUND TRACK "In the introduction to his book The Blind Watchmaker, the distinguished British evolutionist Richard Dawkins was even moved to complain: 'It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and find it hard to believe.' Our universal, and therefore genetic, need to see ourselves as separate from the rest of the animal world ensures that most of humanity will continue to be at least suspicious, if not thoroughly antagonistic, to Charles Darwin's heretical propositions. We conveniently contend that we alone of all earth's species are not normal animals, an extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary proof. And none exists. "Not the slightest scrap of hard evidence, either morphological or genetic, exists to suggest that Homo sapiens is not, like all other animals, a natural product of evolution. Therefore we, like they, are uncontaminated by supernatural influences, good, bad, or divine. We may well be excellent communicators and toolmakers, and the most logical, self-aware, mystical, and malicious animals on earth, but overwhelming evidence shows that these distinctions are of degree, not of kind. The only irrefutable argument in favor of humanity's specialness is in fact purely mystical -- and entirely circular. Yet the myth lives on. "Is it not strange that our genetic makeup should allow, perhaps even prescribe, such naivete? I will argue that our peculiar genetic heritage purposefully blinds us to reality to make us malleable and compliant to its demands, and that our habit of assigning ourselves an imaginary specialness is the mechanism that delivers us willingly into genetic servitude. Our purported spirituality is a consequence of 2 million years of painstaking Darwinian selection. "Having evolved as a cooperative species, Homo sapiens seems to have retained almost all of those mammalian characteristics we most admire -- selfless devotion, compassion, courage, generosity, and wit -- to the point that one of the truly remarkable things about human beings is not how bad we can be but how good most of us are, most of the time -- even by animal standards. Unfortunately we take this goodness for granted and usually fail to note it. When we do, however, we assume it to be uniquely human, an expression of human spirituality. In fact, altruistic behavior is common throughout the animal world, and in other species it seems to be entirely free of tedious sermonizing and self-congratulation. They, like us, simply do what works best for their genetic line. To this end, many species mate for life; feed, protect, and educate their offspring with obsessive fervor; and willingly lay their lives on the line whenever family, tribe, or territory is threatened. "The attribution of human motives and emotions to animals used to be considered sloppy science. The underlying fear was that such thinking might erode some of the respect that we felt we were owed as a uniquely sentient and rational species. That particular academic taboo is less rigidly observed these days, yet in a perverse sense it remains entirely sound. Indeed, no animal displays human behavior. Quite the reverse. Humans display only animal behavior. Watch the action without the sound track and this truth becomes obvious. "I will therefore argue that our much-vaunted spirituality is a cultural illusion that became cemented into the foundations of early human society by our potent combination of language and imagination. Meanwhile the universality of our fascination with things mystic and spiritual displays its genetic origins as plainly as does our compulsion to communicate with one another. I also believe that our obsessive urge to imbue our existence with mystical meaning was once the Excalibur of our species, the invincible weapon that carried our branch of the hominid line from the brink of extinction to the conquest of the planet. Since mystical beliefs of various kinds have also played a primary role in the catastrophic growth of the human population, the final chapters of the book are devoted to exploring mysticism's present and future impact on our already bruised and destabilized environment. "We may not be able to hurl our troublesome Excalibur back into the gene pool from whence it came, but surely it is time we momentarily lowered that dazzling weapon, and for once, with unclouded eyes, saw ourselves for what we are in the only context that ultimately matters: the evolutionary context." The forward is written by Lynn Margulis. E.O. Wilson of Harvard, and Thomas Eisner of Cornell endorse Morrison's book. If you are ready for some answers, read THE SPIRIT IN THE GENE. WATCH THE ACTION WITHOUT THE SOUND TRACK |
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Jay Hanson
If you are intimidated, bored or angered by Plato, Aristotle, Cousteau, Malthus, Mill or Ehrlich, don't bother pointing your browser to Brain Food. Buddycom note: Have you ever noticed that some of the most insightful and eloquent on the subject of ecology aren't ecologists, nor are they biologists, but rather physicists? Why is that? |
