Mike Pence Says His Role Model Vice President is Dick Cheney

Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence discusses his VP role model and his debate prep on “This Week.”

Let’s stop pretending what he ( Pence) is talking about. Cheney was the “grownup” in the relationship and Bush was the “spoiled kid”.

We can see from where Mike Pence is coming from. He will have to run the country and become the commander-in-chief, because, like Bush, Trump isn’t up to it. He is not completely ignorant, but stupid.

Bush, in a stupor, had to have his Chief of Staff run the war in Iraq, because he, Bush, thought it was about another Crusades.

My guess is that Pence will continue the war against Islam, while ignoring Nixon’s connection to Globalization, while Trump moves America towards authoritarianism. #fail

Source: Mike Pence Says His Role Model Vice President is Dick Cheney

America the Home of the Brave?

larrydunbar Says:

February 4th, 2013 at 4:35 pm

Step 1.Know yourself; Check.

Step 2. Know your enemy. Understand the advantage he/she has in the environment that you both share.

As an example, if the owner of Fox News is from Australia and an elite,  there is some not-so-small advantage in keeping the “Americans” stirred up all the time.

Unlike America, Australia is an island whose history shows that the inhabitants can’t defend.

A friend of the family was sent to Australia to up-root the Japanese that island-hopped their way down to Australia. He and his D8 Caterpillar dug the Japanese out of the sands, as he and the rest of America headed north.

But he also told, in his narrative, how little help he got from the Australians themselves.

Of course, as he writes, it was hard to find the Australians, they were too busy fighting in other parts of the world. I think what surprise him the most was how little civilian help they got in their effort.

But then, as history shows, even if every Australian had given their lives and resources fighting the Japanese, it would not have been enough.

During the war in the Pacific, it was towards the Austrian’s advantage for the U.S. to dig the Japanese out. Australia, negotiating from a position of strength, was and still is: too small, too little populated, and too isolated to defend using just the natives that live there.

China is buying up most of the island now (using US dollars), so the threat of violence, from an outside force, gives the Aussies an edge to work from. I am not saying that “stirring” is the function of Fox, but it, at the very least, looks like stirring is a good chunk of that function that might be supported by the elites.

As Americans and Gamers, stirring the “pot” is not really that hard, right?

So how about instead of trust have a heart, bud, as we move on to step 3 & 4?

via zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » America the Home of the Brave?.

What I Found Interesting This Week 2/2/2013

Unfortunately, many farmers markets are duds.  The prices are too high, the selection is mediocre and many of the vendors sell store brought produce/products.  In contrast, real farmers markets are run by organizations that rigorously maintain standards and recruit/scout/visit participants (to increase supply, competition, and variety).  They hum with life, variety, and are price competitive.

Yes, and this is all because we don’t have a decentralized market, ho, hum.

Well “real farmer markets” are distributive networks that each needs the other.

So while Robb’s decentralized network decentralizes into nodes towards an edge, the distributive market has no outside edges and forms a center of gravity called a community.

Where this “center” forms is any ones guess, but Robb has no clue, because he is looking for an edge, and not a community. He still thinks he is a part of the cure, i.e., a resilient community, and not the problem, too much distribution and not enough decentralization, ha!

So I guess that is what a community organizer does, he organizes all the nodes into a community without edges.

via What I Found Interesting This Week 2/2/2013.

Did news story on riches of China’s Premier weaken reformists?

Bo Xilai is seen as a representative of the leftist wing of the party (which means conservative in China) that is pitted against reformists represented by Wen Jiabao.

If my post on structure and culture is correct that the difference between the Left and Right is structural while Conservative and Liberal differences are cultural, then it is easy to understand the above quote.

Bo Xilai, as a representative of the leftist wing of the party is not structurally in favor of a strong centralist government that acts like a normalizing force between Conservative and Liberal forces inside the Chinese society.

Instead Bo Xilai wants to culturally see the Conservative and Liberal force aligned perpendicular to each other, with the society moving either right or left depending on which force (Conservative or Liberal) is larger. (It should be noted that in this case “right” and “left” is only direction not structure, i.e, when the society moves to the “right” it becomes more conservative–to the “left” more liberal.)

As a Conservative, Bo wants the resources of the economy to continue flowing towards the center (China), but he doesn’t want those at the center to become “gods” and Act like a normalizing force.

A normalizing force controls the friction within a society, and Bo, because of his Liberal and Conservative market forces, doesn’t want friction.

Bo is less against the structure of the Right than he is for the non-frictional market forces of capitalism.  Bo simply wants, through market forces, for the society to become more liberal or conservative depending on which force (Liberal or Conservative) is stronger.

Unlike those on the Right, Bo on the Left wants the Conservative and Liberal forces to control each other, depending on which force is greater.

The structure of the Left that Bo Xilai has been following has been very good to him in the resource department. By being Conservative in position and Left in structure, Bo wants those resources to continue coming towards the center, with him at the center.

But Bo’s effort to structure his country as the Left did not happen, at this leadership change in China. The news story on the riches of China’s Premier may have weakened Bo’s effort, because the release of the story created friction.

The  normalizing structure of the Right controls friction. In fact, except for corruption and an increase of market forces for the poor, there is no structure (such as voting in a Democratic society) to control friction inside China, except for the military.

Those who have just come to power in China control the military, and have decided to Liberally change Bo’s Conservative direction for the country. Bo wanted his country to continue being controlled by market forces, and the leadership change is against his ideas.

The new leadership change in China means a move to re-structure the country as that of the Right, with a strong normalizing central force that controls the friction created by Conservative and Liberal forces at odds with themselves.

Also the leadership change means that China will continue to move Liberally outward, as the leadership needs growth to control the military. Growth outward means China will be gaining forces both Liberal and Conservative under the control of  their Normalizing force.

These Liberal and Conservative forces that China will be gaining as she moves outward will be controlled by an even stronger (if this leadership change actually “takes”) Normalizing force that is Chinese, and more specifically China.

War is brewing in the Pacific, and this move by China has done nothing to make the odds of this happening less, unless the countries of the Pacific what to be control by a Chinese Normalizing force, instead of market forces both Conservative and Liberal.

Maybe the people of China will lessen the odds of war, but that lessening will be up to the people of China and not their leaders that they have just “elected”.

via Did news story on riches of China’s Premier weaken reformists? « China Daily Mail.

Facebook: The antisocial network branded ‘disingenuous and immoral’

Facebook was accused last night of “disingenuous and immoral” tax avoidance after a new analysis of its UK business suggested the social networking giant paid just £238,000 in corporation tax in Britain last year.

I don’t remember Facebook ever claiming that they were not evil.

Of course most people are disingenuous when they post on Facebook. I think it is natural in this environment to “rate” (the source algorithm of Facebook) yourself higher than your “friends”.

As for immorality, it has been estimated that the average Facebook user gives out approximately $4500.00 worth of information to the platform.

So I would say yes, there is a form of  immorality to Facebook, and it is simply showing up as a refusal to support the culture that is supporting the structure called Facebook. If you want truth and no ambiguity you would form your own blog 🙂

Ireland? Ha!

I think Freud would agree that Ireland has never been big on Orientation.

Sometimes payback is a bitch.

via Facebook: The antisocial network branded ‘disingenuous and immoral’ – Business News – Business – The Independent.

Obama’s Strategic Shift: Is Storytelling the Secret Weapon of the 2012 Race?

Obama’s Strategic shift did not just occur in the South China Sea, it also has apparently begun in his attack to keep his job.

.” But it got really interesting when the conversation turned to what the president considers the biggest mistake of his first term. It was, he said, “thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right.”

If you replace the word “policy” with process, then what this statement is saying is: “I have gone strategic.”

Policy builds and maintains the process inside a OODA loop. Strategy creates a moment of inertia to by-pass the policy.

Strategy is, as diagrammed, by the way of the Double Freytag Triangle, in the book Tempo, by Venkatesh Rao, narrative decision-making.

 “The nature of this office,” he said, “is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”

Obama has “found” strategy and he is using it to continue the narrative (“story”-telling) that is the USA.

I wish him luck on this, because all strategy is flawed, and the worst environment to try and maintain strategy is one in which everyone puts the “bad breath” on you and your narrative. Ill-will puts the focus on your flaws, which is a distraction that keeps your “story” from becoming transparent.

The good news is: it does’t take much to hide/expose the narrative, because of the nature of complexity.

The environment that strategy runs in is so complex, in its policy, that the “tipping point” between a successful and failed strategy is very close in either direction. Policy is created to make sure the process is both accurate and precise, it is both of these (accuracy and precision) that “target” the “tipping point”, in any process.

In other words, strategy has just as much chance of success as failure despite the complexity, but it demands that you get the “story” out, which is an uncertain process.

The only thing that is certain, when using strategy instead of process, all strategy is flawed, in at least one point in the narrative. As Venkatesh Rao shows in the Double Freytag Triangle, all strategy starts out as a “Cheap Trick”, but, before the story ends, it changes into a more powerful form of the “Cheap Trick”. If it doesn’t change, then the “flaw” absorbs the strategy into the “story”, and the narrative continues, or not.

I think it is getting close to the time when we will be able to tell if Obama has found that flaw and is able to take advantage of the situation. Perhaps the “Cheap Trick” can be found inside the Constitution, and the story will move on to another “peak”.

As this article leads me to believe that Obama has bet his presidency on strategy, one has to admit that it took some guts and a whole lot of faith, in the process, which he built his strategy on, to change.

via Arianna Huffington: Is Storytelling the Secret Weapon of the 2012 Race?.

What is Strategy?

I was recently asked to define strategy in simple terms.

Dear Larry

I have been reading about what strategy is not, however, I am still looking for a simple definition. Can you help? Many have stopped confusing strategy with operational efficiency but there is still no simple definition.

This was my reply.

I too have been reading about what strategy is not. What I have found that it is has come about in my effort at thinking strategically.

First, all strategy is a complete structure. In other words, it has an end, way and means–it is 3 dimensional.

Second, because the culture is not developed, it is a “Cheap Trick” ( http://www.tempobook.com/glossary/#cheap-trick ). In his book “Tempo”, Venkatesh Rao explains that “strategy is a cheap trick.”, while a “tactic is a metaphoric mapping among primitive actions concepts in two or more domains.” So, to me, this means that strategy is a domain, which is un-finished, while tactics uses domains on its way towards an end way and means. In other words, by giving a liminal passage ( http://www.tempobook.com/glossary/#liminal-passage ) a vertical component, strategy creates a 3-dimensional object, while tactics use two or more points to accomplish the same thing.

Basically, the simple definition is: both strategy and tactics accomplish the same thing, only, if my understanding is correct, strategy is both quick and dirty, and who has the time to wait?

Anyone else care to comment? I too have looked for a simple definition.