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Literally. Performance is always the issue with these more sophisticated plug-ins … most of my WordPress 2.8 priorities were performance and database related.

Also checking out Scribu … as part of a let’s get organized campaign … though that seems to have gone dead ? Oh well.

I regularly review site hits, as in almost daily, and just occasionally I record summaries here.

Last time I did this a few months ago, the stats were plagued by a number of (new) web crawlers generating loads of indexing hits, which is great, but it was skewing / disguising the real human traffic. Recently there is a much greater % of quality hits, humans hitting what they are looking for and clicking around other links for many minutes. There are always regular – mainly Pirsig related – visitors I can see from their IP’s or mail clients (thanks folks) but increasingly there are regulars who are subscribing to the feed and following up the links (thanks again to you too).

Here is the RSS FEED Subscription Link.
(Currently none too prominent, low down the right hand panel … must fix that.)

Thanks to Sam for the link to this Telegraph piece by Charles Moore.

It took exceptional brilliance not to see a crash coming … 

Just more skilled incomptetence and 20/20 SOMist hindsight, and of course the “regulation” subject is a matter of “rational” management and governance.

I was posting a more prominent link to the TED talk by Sherwin Nuland (related to the ECT Meme thread) when I noticed this interesting piece from Jill Bolte Taylor. A brain scientist who got to study her own brain and glimpsed the euphoric mystical “now” … and like Sherwin saw this mystical revelation as part of their “resurrection” to life after near terminal experience.

Quite different, but highly connected – like our brain hemispheres ?

And in connection with the unity (some unifying metaphysics) behind physics in Nick Maxwell’s agenda … Murray Gell-Mann talking about elegance in truth and beauty behind physics. And even more connected with Nick’s agenda, Barry Schwarz on the loss of wisdom, and appeal to virtue. And so close to James Willis too … a sense in which it is obvious, and yet … literally “demoralising”. And even better “The Paradox of Choice” joining up a few dots around the official dogma of western economies … and clinical depression is the result. Finally for now … how osyter mushrooms will save the planet.

This is a (near) verbatim copy of a MOQ Discuss forum post of mine from a month or so ago.

I caused some offence last year when I dissed Zeitgeist (2007) without having seen this Zeitgeist Addendum (2008). I have since seen this version too. It is pretty comprehensive and on the money 😉 as you say.

I still have my usual “non-conspiracy / cock-up theory” take on this.

The facts are facts and they’re not new – as old as economic empire building itself – just that the world has shrunk to a village. When your (national) industries are backed by (national) governments, backed by clandestine organizations and military might (which otherwise have good “security” – static-latch – reasons to exist). ie this process is a natural outcome of two myths (memes, as I call them).

(1) the myth that progress depends on competition (only) – too simplistic a (Newtonian action / reaction) view of causation.
(2) the myth that the value of progress is measurable with numbers (like money) – too objective a view of value.

The conspiracy is in those myths, and in the ignorance of the fact that they are memes we take for granted. Two kinds of ignorance – one called skilled-incompetence in management, a kind of plausible-deniability, and another simply convenience of the individual, a pragmatism based on the wrong “calculations”. Most of us wage slaves do value the benefits too, and we have to rationalize – look-away from – the cognitive dissonance inherent in that.

Organizations of (mostly) moral men often make immoral decisions, because the decision-making process is immoral. Seeing the SOMist meme as the conspiracy is the key. The cock-up is that we really do know this and still allow it to dominate. The primary solutions for me are education towards this kind of individual enlightenment, and free, wise, open governance of all national and transnational institutions – which are after all generally comprised of such (moral) individuals.

What I distance myself from is the conspiracy theory agenda, when people point at long-standing cabals of evil people as the “cause” of the problem (reptiles in the boardroom, etc) – mercifully this film does not itself do that, but some of the hangers-on are that kind of whacko. We are all slaves to competition accounting – bigger numbers equals better – the tyranny of numbers – incentives we can count and compare quantitatively – we are slaves to SOMism. (Words like scam and fake don’t help matters for me, there are many levels of “illusion” in the reality we value.)

As the film says … the so-called human nature of competitive greed, is nothing more than a cultural meme driving behaviour – “received wisdom”, not real wisdom. The prevailing wisdom of economics is “autistic”, “neurotic” a “mental illness”. Also as the film says (as Pirsig said) – there is nothing evil about the applied science of technology, on the contrary its a tool we can use when we act on an understanding of “what is good”.

Probably the only contentious point for me is the idea of a class-less society – no elites of any kind. If we ever reach that vision as a static global state, then maybe. But, I can’t see how we can ever evolve to that state, without some conservative institutions and processes that defend and preserve real, enlightened, wisdom … otherwise the simplest memes simply continue to dominate … some “management” is necessary. Clearly we need checks and balances against institutions that exist on tradition alone – proper philosopher princes, not the Platonic kind – we must not be naive about what it will take.

But individual choices are easy to make if taken wisely, that’s the point. Like, it might not actually be wise if we all acted at once on all of the recommendations at the end … but the intent is in the right direction.

Thanks gav. I’m glad I watched that again.

Thanks to Sam for this link, interesting to see what a trillion dollars looks like. Big, but not that big, but then the paper denomination is large to start with, it’s only money.

Wonder what it loooks like on some internationally recognized unit of currency (rather than 100 dollar bills). The modern equivalent of Mars Bars … Big Macs I guess ?

Can’t see any acknowledgement of Dennett’s words in the title of this Andrew Marr piece. Looks promising though.

OK so the Swiss “ProtosCar Lampo” is currently only a concept car showing at Geneva, but it is built on the same Wilmington-built GM / Opel / Saturn  GT / Sky platform as my current car. Strangely my previous GM (Opel Sportster/ Vauxhall VX220) Lotus-built aluminium & fibre-glass model was the platform for an award-winning GM diesel powered sports model too.

Busy converting the US electrics of my Sky to European road standards of the Opel GT for use on Norwegian roads. Trickier than it looks.

OK, so enough Zizek for one day … clearly a student of Jacques Lacan is about as “foggy froggie” / PoMo as one can get, but cheeky with it. Hard work, but valuable on balance.

Picked-up the Peter Sloterdijk link in my earlier reference to Zizek. Found this review of his “Critique of Cynical Reason” by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner entitled “In Search of Lost Cheekiness“. A good read.

The Cynic / Kynic distinction is between the Cynic (in the modern sense) who lives with the hypocrisy of working a system in which they do not actually believe, rationalizing the irrational, whereas the Kynic in the Diogenes sense who actually makes a statement out of living outside the system in which they do not believe, refusing to engage in the flawed system of argument. The hypocritical style of cynicism as a “necessary” part of institutional life in both business and science is not new here – Maxwell’s scientific empiricism neurosis, Brunsson & Argyris organizational hypocrisy.

Sloterdijk is more an observer than a philosopher. Clearly the hypocritical cynic is effectively living with a mental illness for life whereas the Kynic is truer to themselves, cheeky with positive intent, but as he also observes there can never be a “majority” outside society’s norms, so long as society as a whole has any norms. The situation can only exist temporarily and/or locally, in carnivals, universities and bohemia. Depressingly the majority must live with rationalizing the irrational, and Sloterdijk offers no alternative formula. Globalization of institutions is itself the problem – the memes win.

Does anybody actually have anything new to say ?

Wikipedia page on Zizek.

For Lacan and Žižek, every word is a gravestone, marking the absence or corpse of the thing it represents and standing in for it. It is partly in the light of this that Lacan is able to refashion Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” as “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I think not”.

This was precisely the point that struck me on completing Thoreau’s Walden.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of their residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains.