Mind-forged Manacles

Today the Arab countries are ablaze with protests in the streets for a slight to their Islamic god. Yesterday it was the physical assault of the Crusades against the Moors. The pattern repeats itself. Who says history can teach us anything?

Nothing better describes religions than the expression used by William Blake in his famous “London” poem -  “mind-forged manacles”.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

Surely religion is the root cause of much of man’s self-inflicted suffering. Oh if only we could shed those chains, those non-evidence-based claims. Not easy but not impossible. We put them on ourselves. Tradition and authority impose them. An uncritical uneducated population maintains them.

William Blake was aware of the self-inflicted limits placed on thought.  He advocated imagination as a means to overcome the restrictions of tradition and authority. He especially disliked science as he saw it as nature being tooth-and claw and in his London poem quoted above saw the nasty effect of the industrial revolution. But Blake himself had a mind-forged manacle based on the time he lived. For he was limited to what was known at his time. He died in 1827, 32 years before Darwin published his “Origin of Species”.  So when he published his Lamb poem asking, "Little Lamb, who made thee?/Dost thou know who made thee?", he did not realize that Darwin would, for the first time in history, provided an alternative answer to the only one at that time - a religious-based explanation.  Tyger complementing the Lamb poem has the narrator ask: "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" The answer of course is yes. Nature through evolution made both. We know today there is now no need to invoke good or evil or a God for paradoxes seen through the lens of religion. Good, evil, God are anthropomorphic terms that may one day be anachronistic. Unfortunately, as we see in the daily news, they still rule in the southern religious intolerant Taliban-like states of the US and in the eastern Islamic countries.

Why not use our imaginations and slightly rewrite the Grassroot’s song Let’s Live for Today?
I think John Lennon would approve.

"When I think of all the worries people seem to find
And how they're in a hurry to complicate their mind
By chasing after religions and dreams that can't come true
I'm glad that we are different, we've better things to do"

False Economies are Based on Arbitrage - the Sleight of Hand Myth of Hedging.

I was fortunate enough to have obtained a science degree before I got an MBA and learned about arbitrage. Something about arbitrage just didn’t make sense to me. Otherwise I might have bought into this win-lose proposition that business use to hedge their bets and thought it made sense. Basically arbitrage is a form of financial speculation whereby you find a resource that is under priced and then buy it as fast as you can and resell it as fast as you can for the real market price or higher, thus making a quick profit. Business use it to hedge their risky bets; to take risk off the table so they say. But in doing so obviously someone (the someone who had underpriced their resource) loses. But for business, especially Conservative or Republican oriented businesses, where a dog-eat-dog mentality prevails, this sleight of hand is fine. In fact it’s ideal because it minimizes your risk at someone else’s expense. An excuse used for arbitrage is that it determines the real price of a commodity. Again the hidden hand of arbitrage reveals all. Hocus pocus. It’s magic. Let’s not really look too closely at it because it works for this and those in power - the wealthy 1%. In fact arbitrage kills capitalism. 

Conservatives Don’t Know Arithmetic

I have often heard that Conservative times are tough times. But I think Bill Clinton proved that in his nomination speech for Barack Obama at the Democratic Convention last week by providing us some very interesting numbers. He pointed out that Democrats produced twice as many jobs as Republicans in the US.

The Conservatives in Canada are in lockstep with their Republican brethren in the US. Unfortunately Canadians are now suffering under a majority Conservative government. It seems collectively we’re not smart enough to learn from the US experience with Republican governments. It seems we need to find out ourselves how bad the Conservative mind set  really is for our economy. Perhaps we can take a reality check from Bill Clinton.

Clinton pointed out a very interesting but not surprising fact, if you know that Conservative times are tough times. In the US jobs growth with Democrats is much better, double, than with Republicans over the last 50 years.

Overpopulation: The Elephant in the Room

On October 31, 2011, the global population boomed and hit the all-time high of 7 billion people. Some people see this milestone as a great accomplishment of humankind, but I feel it is a step in the wrong direction. Since 1915, the world’s population has quadrupled, increasing by 5.2 billion. The Earth is a closed system. Continued growth of the human population is unsustainable because of this. As our population rises, it grows closer to reaching the earth’s carrying capacity. Increasing populations negatively impact both the human race and the environment it depends upon. Although this affirmation is supported by a vast wealth of scientific evidence, it has serious moral implications. Most notably, it has been argued that limiting population growth infringes upon human rights. A counter argument is presented which demonstrates that not limiting population growth causes greater infringement upon human rights. By adopting an ecocentric viewpoint, I assert that population growth must be limited. I support my argument by providing first evidence that population growth is negatively impacting both the environment and human kind and second refuting the stances against limiting population growth.