The Cynical Optimist

70% of the US economy is consumer spending. Consumer spending is fueled by jobs. The unemployment rate may be down, but it doesn’t take into account discouraged workers. It also doesn’t take into account stagnant living wages and people who have only found part-time employment.

Couple that with inevitable inflation from all those years of QE and bailing out. Also couple it with inevitable rise in treasury bond interest rates (resulting in shift out of stocks and into treasuries), not only because of inflation, but also because we still have a debt problem that’s been swept under the rug for the time being. Don’t even get me started on the credit card and student loan bubbles.

With all of those matters considered, a 15K dow is still 1,000 points higher than the 14K high of October 2007 (right before the financial collapse).

I can’t time when the correction will come, but it is only rational that it will come sometime between now and the next two years.

Here are two excellent articles explaining why people are mistaken when they doubt America’s future.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-12/u-s-is-no-1-china-is-so-yesterday

http://pragcap.com/biggest-myths-in-economics

If “America, the Has-Been” were a TV series, it would now be in its fifth season. The first, Decline 1.0, opened in the 1950s, after the Soviets launched their Sputnik. Weren’t they growing and arming faster? The myth of the “missile gap” gripped the land. Yet a generation later, the Soviet Union was no more, dying peacefully on Christmas Day 1991 and leaving behind 15 orphan republics.

Decline 2.0 swept the nation during the Vietnam War, and once more the U.S.’s best days were over, intoned a chorus of pundits and politicos. But it remained far and away No. 1 economically and strategically, making up for the loss of South Vietnam by eventually corralling Hanoi as a quasi-ally against China.

Decline 3.0 was initiated in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter when he moaned in his so-called malaise speech that the U.S. was beset by “a crisis of confidence,” one “that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our nation.” The depression ended with Ronald Reagan who proceeded to out-arm the Soviet Union. By 1984, it was “morning again in America.”

Decline 4.0 cast Japan as the next No. 1. Having failed in Pearl Harbor with their bombers, these super-samurais would now triumph with their Toyotas and Sonys. Like China, Japan had been growing at double-digit speed, but after 1988 it was downhill, and it isn’t the end yet. Four years later, the U.S.’s longest expansion began. It lasted essentially until the recession of 2007-10.

Now it is Decline 5.0, starring China as the master of the universe. The World Bank should have looked at history. As early as 1984, China’s growth peaked at 15 percent. Now, the rate is down to one-half that. The sluggish world economy plays a part, but the underlying reasons are structural.

She writes: When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

Copyright ©2003 Ann Druyan

Here is the dedication Carl Sagan wrote in his best-selling book Cosmos:

For Ann Druyan:

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time,
it is my joy to share
a planet and an epoch with Annie.

If I had to pick a blog post out of my past, present, and future blog posts to represent the theme of my character, it would be this one:

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spaceprobe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth, as part of the solar system Family Portrait series of images.

In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, astronomer Carl Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

 

If you enjoyed reading that, you might be enlightened enough to enjoy this bit from George Carlin’s stand-up on God and religion.

Great read: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2503370/Quantum-physics-proves-IS-afterlife-claims-scientist.html

I’m not sure if life creates the universe (see criticism of Lanza).  His book seems like a very insightful read. The only problem I have with Lanza is that he goes a little further than say that our perception affects our feel of the universe. He full-on proposes that we CREATE the universe. Interestingly, he can be both wrong and right at the same time, because we do create the universe that we perceive, but that doesn’t mean we are also creating the universe that simultaneously preexists (or might preexist) our conscience.

But I agree that our perception impacts our “feel” of the universe. Or I should call it multiverse–because:

There are an infinite number of universes and everything that could possibly be (and happen) is being and happening.  or example, if I can fathom that Obama and John McCain are gay lovers that live in a red house with blue sand and eight-legged giraffes, then that scenario exists somewhere.

Quantum mechanics is the answer to life (and “death”).

Note: I would simplify biocentrism to the idea that life in the universe is a reflection of the universe reflecting on itself. But I don’t think this necessarily warrants biocentrism as a reality, because, while we might be “creating” the universe as far as our purposes and perceptions are concerned, that doesn’t mean there is no universe without our created perception of it. Go back to the double-split test: the particle was still doing SOMETHING (it was behaving as a wave) even before the scientists watched it. Similarly, the universe can still exist (and not necessarily in the traditional sense of existence) prior to our subjective rendering of it.

Because the system is designed to fuck you, the retail investor–the poor bastard that doesn’t get to buy the stock until it is in the secondary market.

Meanwhile, the IPO takes place in the primary market: The banks “determine” the price of the stock (and charge Twitter a separate fee) for doing so. In reality, the banks set this price as low as they can get away with, so they can dump it in the secondary market (poor bastard individual investors who buy on excitement alone) for massive profit.

Essentially, initial public offerings (IPOs) are a means for Big Money into scamming you for more big money. Here, Twitter’s stock price doubled in the secondary market, which means Twitter got fucked out of $10 billion in investment money that it would have received in the secondary market, but which instead went into the pockets of the investment banking sector. Bravo, Wall Street.

I do believe that everything we can imagine can in fact happen. The concept of infinity encapsulates even our imagination. Conversely, I would even be as bold as to say that our imagination can only go as far as it can BECAUSE it is tuned into the multiverse.

Think of your brain as a radio on the receiving end. Think of the multiverse as a giant satellite dish emitting infinite signals. When your brain is tuned into the right station, then a particular idea that is specific to that “station” pops into your head.