Process

Noting the dismal economic news this morning, I am reminded that this was set in motion early in the Bush administration, indeed even earlier by Ronald Reagan. It is a process that leads invariably to the results we are seeing now and the even more dismal circumstances ahead. Interesting too to watch the pundits fail to get it. They are not process people but fact followers. And so they are always after the fact, as they are today, seeing what has just happened but not before and not what is going to happen. For that you must understand process, or, if you will, theory. You can only predict from the abstract, not from any given realty. All this is contrary, of course, to the conventional wisdom, fixated, as it is, on the silly notion that theory and abstraction are somehow ethereal and irrelevant.

Keep in mind that we got to the moon and back on theory and very little fact (we had never been there). Obsolescent theory at that, at least so fools would suggest, Newtonian physics and a pre-Copernicus earth centered universe. The test of theory is not if it is true but if it works. And it worked to put the earth at the center of the universe.

But I stray. This morning the important thing is that what we theorticians saw some years ago, that we were then and remain in a crashing economic dynamic, fed not only by loss of any pilot or police but also by the sucking of energy from the producers, the people who work and the people who buy. Not to mention the squandering of our resources on the idle rich and in death and destruction abroad. Some (notably lately Fareed Zakaria) contend that the British Empire was felled by the Boer War, a small incident in itself, but critical by virtue of the timing. Let us hope the timing of the Iraq War is not such.

That aside though, we are heading into a very dark abyss. I trust you are all prepared. Christmas promises to be bleak and perhaps so for years to come. While electing John McCain will clearly make it worse, electing Barak Obama will not solve it, not for a very long time. The damage has been done. And it will take some time to repair it. Let's hope it only takes time.

Oh, for those of you of a conspiratorial bent, I'm sorry to disabuse you of that. Stupidity is the sole culprit here, stupidity coupled with mendacity and short-sighted greed. Conspiracies are just too demanding. This is the simple product of fools.

I was reminded of this as I watched the few parts of the Republican National Convention that I could stand. What a gathering of blind and self-congratulating sycophants. Swamped in evidence that utterly defied every word they had to say.

-Karl-