Kessler and The End of Overeating

Remember when this guy was on Bill Maher?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF4EoLa7l78

Why is the potential firestorm that this guy wants (against the food industry), not the same as it was in the 90s with the cigarette companies and nicotine? I had this discussion at work today and one of the doctors brought up a really good point.

Decisions

A 2004 report by Jennifer Lerner, Ph.D. published in Psychological Science explores the effects of overshoot emotion on decision making (Hearth Strings and Purse Strings: Carryover effects of emotions on economic decisions.) Briefly, half the individuals were given an object and then asked how much they would sell it for. The other half of participants were shown an object and asked whether they would like to receive the object or its monetary value. The study concluded that anger decreased selling prices and choice prices; while sadness reduced selling prices and increased choice prices. For example, if you are anger you will sell something cheaper than its actual worth and are less willing to buy something. If you are sad you will pay more for that piece of chocolate to make you feel better than if you were not sad.

Question to the Blog:
The implications of this are obvious in financial and non-financial circumstances. Can self-actualizing compensate this genetic framework?
Knowing that these processes are at work with someone you enter into a competitive dialogue with, how can you avoid eliciting these emotions to maintain an objective argument (both for yourself and other individual)?

The First Book Review: Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Where the fuck is the book review format

Title

Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Author

John Perkins

Date of Publication

2004

Reason for reading

I thought I remembered him on the daily show but when I went to their site I couldn't find him. I still don't know how I heard of this book.

Synopsis

The book is the story of its author who worked as an economic consultant for international consulting firms. Specifically, he would work in less developed countries to convince their officials in adopting huge loans (from the IMF oftentimes) for big infrastructure projects which these countries couldn't really afford. After these countries would fail on their loans, as a special sort of repayment of debt, companies like Haliburton, Bechtel, Brown and Root would come in and "lay waste" to the country.

Review

If it's true, 5/5 stars for bravery (although the writing was average). If it's a lie, 0/5 stars for greed.

Quotes

I forgot to write these down so I'll just take one from wikipedia:

I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950’s, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew the government of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh’s government who was Time‘s magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this without any bloodshed—well, there was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and replaced Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn’t have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt was a C.I.A. agent. He was a government employee. Had he been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. to recruit potential economic hit men like me and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no connection with the government.

Campaign Contributions

Two topics here which may be related: campaign financing and bank bail outs.


We need to find a way to track the campaign contributions made to major political officials. Can we find out who gave money to Obama and other past presidents and see if it made an impact on the decisions made during their term? This shit with the banks is still confusing me. As I see it, the logical thing to do to, as Geitner would say, a bank that is "too big to fail" is to save it first (we can argue about how this should be done in a different post) and then bust it afterward (trust-bust that is).

Historically, I don't know of anything ever done like this before - referring to the 'bank bail outs'.
I tell you, the more I learn about the financial sector, the more I think these people are going to ruin the whole show. Let's discuss it here, let's post on sciforums if the three of us can't think of anything, and then let's write to our Congressman once we're better informed. We might even want to include Josh on this one.

Propaganda versus making a point

This morning Micki and I were discussing Ayn Rand as a result of Rosh's quote on Facebook. When I made the point that Rand can make extreme examples to make her point, Micki argued that it's propaganda. At first I disagreed, but upon further consideration, thought that when you write a novel, and are therefore also writing the opponent, you can make them do whatever you want, so it's not necessarily a realistic (and therefore valid) example. So my question is, where does making your argument become propaganda? As a continuation, where does taking a side become propaganda? An example could be news organizations. No one will argue in situations of genocide that it is wrong, and that is how it's reported. They might report the quotes of those committing the atrocities, but it will likely be reported in terms painting the situation as wrong (which it obviously should be). But say Fox News takes the angle that stem cell research is wrong (I don't know what they've reported on that), and reports on the topic from that viewpoint. Many would call it propaganda, while others would say it's the right viewpoint. Where does the line get drawn?

Western Civilization

Let's define what a "Western" Society is. What does a Western society insinuate about its citizens? Finally, is it time to evolve to a post-Western society or are we currently far from a platonic Western Society and should focus on first becoming one.

Remember, Plato and the Greeks first developed the concept for a Western society more than 2000 years ago.