Nathan

Where's Mr. Greenspan now?  I think we have a few questions we could ask him.

Is global warming caused by humans? Is Barack Obama a Christian? Is evolution a well-supported theory?

You might think these questions have been incontrovertibly answered in the affirmative, proven by settled facts. But for a lot of Americans, they haven't. Among Republicans, belief in anthropogenic global warming declined from 52 percent to 42 percent between 2003 and 2008. Just days before the election, nearly aquarter of respondents in one Texas poll were convinced that Obama is a Muslim. And the proportion of Americans who believe God did not guide evolution? It's 14 percent today, a two-point decline since the '90s, according to Gallup.

What's going on? Normally, we expect society to progress, amassing deeper scientific understanding and basic facts every year. Knowledge only increases, right?

Robert Proctor doesn't think so. A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.

He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance."

Via

A great day.  It feels like we have had a festering wound now for 7 years or so and we are finally tending to it.  Mr. President, I have all the hope in the world for you and frankly my take is that like a movie you have such high hopes for we really need to work to temper our expectations so as to not be let down, but the time is now yours and I couldn't be more excited.  

Knocking around in this small brain, big head of mine these past couple of days has been: damn, are the rich getting exactly what they want? Is THE war headed THAT way!? 

Read this about Prop 13 and make your decisions as to what this may mean to you and us and the situation that we are currently in.  

Before I fade off to bed, a little gloating. And understanding.

I understand why you and you need, so badly, to have so many reports and so much data. Personally and professionally it has been good for me so thank you, but I do understand. I understand why you needed VaR. I do get it but I also feel sorry for you.

There is so much you won't see in those numbers and reports. There is so much that value at risk won't tell you.

Like some of the stories I told my dad in '99 and early '00 about how it was only the beginning of the market 'adjustment'. That, to paraphrase myself, it would affect every internet company including my current employer Cisco.

I know it sounds like a story. I know all of this is gloating after the fact and it is hard to believe. That I am not that intuitive and that maybe no one can be.

I know you may not believe later, in '06 and '07 my wife and I had an argument about moving. Actually, not just one. We maybe were not talking the same language, but we are now. I am excited to say that as a unit we moved forward. Yes: she wanted to move. Yes: she wanted another house. And yes: she supported me and we supported each other when I offered it was a bad time and that: 'Look with your own eyes. These houses and these properties are not worth what we are hearing and what we are told.'

We made a good decision.

So here, really, is not so much to gloat and say I am intuitive and you are not. Here is to say: may we all be more intuitive and in touch with what our reality is telling us and more true to what we are feeling about this world that we are, after all, simply a dusty part of. May we all be smarter and enjoying some of the things this unit is because we are closer to each other and our shared reality.

'Though the state of the state is “perilous,” he said, this is exactly the wrong time to hunker down and accomplish nothing. He pointedly reminded his audience of fellow lawmakers that New York had done great things in hard times. Construction on the Empire State Building, he noted, began as the nation was sliding into the Great Depression.'

An Open Letter
From: Big Business
To: America

Its been an odd year and wow we apologize. Not sure what happened there but it feels like there is probably more in the air to, ahem, enjoy. Anyway we did want to write to say, you know, help us to help you. I think we aren't doing each other too well. Do you really need results from us, growth from us, every three months? Do we need to be poked and prodded and spend damn near half our days just pumping out statistics and reports and... goddammit its tiring.

We can't help but notice from over here that if you allow entities to form long term strategies and to work towards goals you see more success. Take, oh, we don't know, Warren Buffett for example. Guys like him and, if there is a lord in heaven entities like us some day, are able to look at the horizon and go towards longer term goals. Guys like him are able to get up in 1999 in Sun Valley and make his first real prediction about the stock market in 30 years and tell the young hotshots, the new internet lions: don't get used to it. Guys like him get to laugh 2 years later, 3 years later, 4, 5, 6 years later after they labeled him a dinosaur. Let us laugh. You can laugh with us.

Its been too long and we have indulged this ADD for too long. It is getting ridiculous. Let's move our horizon out. Lets be smarter together. Help us to help you.

Kind regards and here is to a happy 2009,
BB