Currently stuck in my head :

Especially that sweet electric piano riff right before the lyrics start.

I love a lot of things about that song. I love it’s wholesome peaceful vibe. That’s one of the things the Seventies had that I really miss. There was this marvelous sense that people of peace and goodwill could get together and live in harmony with each other and the land and make something better than modern society. Something that would better suit the true nature of humanity.

That’s what a lot of the Seventies agrarianism was about. Getting in touch with nature and the soil and the processes of life itself. I have said before that every animal knows and loves its own habitat, which is what helps keep it in the areas for which it has evolved. I think that’s where our desire to make contact with nature comes from. Modern civilization creates modern citizens, and for the most part, we adapt well to our urban jungles.

But it’s not a perfect adaptation. There is still a part of us that longs for our natural habitat. Often it operates well below the conscious level, as modern society (at least in the West^[1]) doesn’t give us any frame of reference for these feelings of displacement and wrongness, so we suppress them.

The signs (hah) are all around us, though. Why else would we be so fond of trees and lawns? Our ancestors started in the trees and then moved into the grasslands of the Savannah. So both trees and grass appeal to our habitat instincts. Not only that, but trees make us feel safe, because our monkey instincts associate trees with the ability to escape ground based predators when necessary.

We love trees and lawns so much that neighborhoods with plenty of both always have higher property values. That’s because they feel more “like home”. Wholesome. Natural. Good.

I was lucky enough to grow up on one of the nicest streets in Summerside, Belmont Street, which had loads of horse chestnut trees and lawns and other greenery. The whole neighborhood was like that, to a certain extent. Back then, it was of course merely normal. But looking back, and comparing it to some of the depressingly sterile neighborhoods I’ve seen, I feel like I lucked out on that score.

I mean… imagine a typical suburban neighborhood. Now take away all the trees and grass. Where there was lawn, there’s only pavement. Where there were trees there is now only cell phone towers. No bushes, no shrubs, no birdsong, no dogs barking, no kids playing in the street. Nothing alive. And all the houses are grey slabs of concrete.

Sounds pretty fucking depressing, doesn’t it?

Another thing I like about the song is its left-wing Christianity. First in an angry way, shouting at the “All trespassers will be shot on sight” people “man, you’re some kind of sinner!”. That gives me the same warm feeling that I get when I watch A Christmas Carol and one of the spirits (Marley, I think) calls Scrooge a “greedy old sinner”. Whatever happened to that brand of Christianity? The kind that viewed wrath and greed as sins, and was willing to call out both aggressive rednecks and money-grubbing rich people for the anti-Christian degenerates they were?

Remember, usury used to be considered a sin. And you know what usury means? Charging interest on a debt.

Imagine a world where that kind of Christianity had been the kind that took hold and stayed alive into the modern age. A Christianity where refusing to help those in need was considered a terrible sin, where people did their best to live by Jesus’ exhortations to love thy neighbor as thyself, to turn the other cheek, to be gentle and kind and humble and good, and to strive for forgiveness for both yourself and others, for we are all merely human.

I mean, what could be less Christian than the idea that you have the right to kill someone – shoot them DEAD – just because they are on your land without your permission?

The other left-wing Christian verse is the one with the note that says “Thank you lord for bringing me here… I’m alive, and doing fine!”. That, to me, expresses the kind of simple, humanist Christianity that makes sense to me. It’s not about a church, a set of rules, or any sort of “straight and narrow path”. It’s about that marvelously American idea of a close personal relationship with God with which no human agency can interfere.

This frees people’s idea of God to become whatever that person needs. That seems, to me, to be a lot healthier than dogma, which is suited only for people who hate any situation in which they have to make a decision. They want there to be an all encompassing ruleset that is always “right” and therefore only needs to be applied to situations.

That’s why you have people going around saying they are Biblical literalists who believe that every single word in the Bible is the word of God, despite a) the many ways in which the Bible contradicts itself, b) the parts of the Bible which are just plain horrible, c) the completely arbitrary nature of the document itself, being more or less just a bunch of random religious texts stapled together, and d) the extreme left wing bias of everything Christ said, like how you should sell everything you own and give it to the poor, and all that love thy neighbor crap.

They like the idea of the Bible as a perfect document with all the answers, but they value their simplistic concept of what it says (coincidentally exactly what they want it to say) to ever risk it by actually reading it.

Besides, reading is hard and the Bible is boring. Perfect and infallible, sure, but you know…. hard.

And when has religion been about telling people they have to do things they don’t want to do and that they are not allowed to do things they really want to do?

Everyone knows that the only thing religion is good for is defending your actions and attacking those of others without having to think too hard!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just watched a great documentary called Boom Bust Boom, and it’s made me want to write about what I learned from it in order to boost my chances of retaining it.

Here;s the trailer :

The first thing I want to get down is Minsky^[1]. Hyman Minsky was an economist – a real economist. He came up with the Financial Stability Hypothesis, which states that capitalist economies are inherently unstable due to the fact that during prosperous times, a speculative euphoria (what Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance”) takes hold in people, and they get whipped into a speculative frenzy where the financial side of the economy becomes bloated with cash and starts dismantling those pesky regulations (which are totally STUPID and only in place because the GOVERNMENT HATES MONEY) that limit the amount of risk they can take and the kind of people who they can con into taking on that risk themselves.

Every financial crisis, from the Great Depression, has been preceded by a vigorous call for deregulation (because without it, I would be making MORE MONEY and that’s all I can see) and a steep drop in what is known as the “cost of risk index”. Risk becomes too cheap, the price of whatever is the center of the frenzy gets pumped up in a completely artificial way, and eventually it all crashes.

The thing is, like all Ponzi schemes, they really work for a while. People put their money in and get more money out. It really seems, at least to people blinded by greed, that they have found the secret to unlimited wealth and they will violently shout down anyone like Minsky who dares to say that bubbles burst and that the whole thing is bound for disaster.

Then the bubble bursts, enormous financial devastation occurs, and all the traditional economists sit there blinking in shock like cartoon characters when a stick of dynamite goes off in their hand wondering what the hell happened and declaring that the entire thing was completely unpredictable and, you know, stuff happens.

That’s because of another thing that I learned from the movie : Economics is even stupider than I thought it was. All mainstream economists – that is, those who would rather achieve academic success than actually get things right – use as the basis of their theories an economic model that, get this, assumes people are all rational agents and do the rational thing all the time.

That is so gobsmackingly stupid that it buggers the mind to even try to imagine how this ever seemed like a good idea. I am pretty sure that a poll of the entire human race would reveal that 99.9 percent of humans agree with the statement “people are stupid sometimes”.

And yet world economies are being run by people who think it acceptable to completely ignore this fact in order to make their theories more elegant. Economics, I assume, is a field that attracts the sort of person who consider human behaviour to be unpredictable and feels that, therefore, they don’t have to take it into account. They can just live in their happy world of numbers where everything is rational, predictable, and does what it is told, and the thing is, these marching morons have convinced nearly the entire world that they are right.

We might as well be trying to run economies using numerology, for fuck’s sake. That’s all traditional economics is, in the end – a belief that all questions can be answered through crunching numbers.

Well you can crunch all the numbers you want (we’ll make more) but if your fundamental assumptions are wrong, it’s not going to do you a damned bit of good. You might as well just be rolling your “lucky dice” or consulting the I Ching. There is no possible manipulation of numbers that will turn bad numbers into good ones. All you can do is to make the whole thing so complicated that it impresses people into thinking you must be right.

Oh, and another thing that is an unfailing predictor of imminent financial meltdown is debt. The more debt an economy generates, the less stable it gets. And when you think about it, this makes total sense, because debt is not money. Debt is potential money. Maybe that debt will be paid, and maybe not. But the problems arise when debt is treated as actual money, and passed around like it’s the real thing.

And then the bubble bursts, people wake up to the fact that they have been building castles in the air(and mortgaging their real homes to do it) , and most of that debt evaporates because suddenly, nobody has any money to pay their debts.

And poof, billions of dollars disappear from the economy because they were never real or sane in the first place. Like faerie magic, they disappeared when people stopped believing in them, and a whole lot of people end up trying to sell what they bought when the price was high and now have no choice to sell now that the price is low.

Buy high, sell low has never been a successful financial strategy.

The injustice of it all, though, is that billions of people who had absolutely no part in this farce end up suffering the effects anyway. You wake up one morning to find the news telling you everything’s fucked and all those people what invest in them stocks and things are in a panic, and you’re just a working class Canadian with a spouse and kids and a high school education trying to make ends meet, and even though you know nothing about that entire world, you know for sure that somehow, you’re gonna be the one who gets screwed.

And what happens to the people who actually perpetrated this heinous act of lunacy and greed?

Absolutely nothing. Of course. They suffer no penalty and they even still get to be rich.

And that’s what has people so pissed off.

Can you blame them?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.