The only thing left is for central banks to buy unlimited amounts of debt in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable.

Don’t for one second fool yourself, the sovereign debt of the US, at this point, is basically backed by the United States Marine Corps.

The underlying structural collapse of the financial markets continues to vividly develop. And the structural decline of the US economy, which began around 1970 and tipped decidedly negative by 1980, also remains completely ignored. Keynesian interventions were never intended to address these types of structural catastrophes. And deficit stimulus spending cannot fix the collapse of either the financial sector or the manufacturing base. Impossible.

It would be a ray of light to simply see someone lay the cards on the table: US post-War prosperity was the direct result of a nearly complete absence of foreign competition, and the selfless labors of The Greatest Generation. We benefit from neither of those factors today. We either develope a new model for American prosperity, or the lower 1/3rd of America slides off into the Third World. Period.

“In every important area of economic and social policy—health care, fiscal policy (deficits, debt, taxes), public investment, retirement security, climate change, education, job growth, income distribution—there’s so much misinformation, so many false assertions, that it is impossible for anyone paying attention to evaluate the choices with which they’re faced.”

Fundamentally, this is due to recent historical advances in measuring our social, economic and technological environment causing people to assume that the ‘system’ of judgements and evaluation heuristics they encounter are accurate.

Most people assume that other people are doing the hard work of evaluating whether these metrics are accurate, while at the same time almost no one listens to people who point out the flaws in the validity of these metrics, due to the perception that a standard for evaluation can only arise by replacing the previous standard when neither is likely to be inherently more accurate.

This can ironically be seen in a paper that introduced the idea of “countersignalling” (http://zhongwe2.serverpros.com/cs/), in which the authors failed to perceive the importance of the limited information available to participants in a game on their choices to signal or not signal, due to the significant lack of homogeneity of society on a large scale which results from active and conscious efforts by the participants and the implications of being aware or unaware of the decisions of other players resulting from this non-homogeneity.

Within this context, any efforts to “educate people on more accurate standards to evaluate information” on these major issues, is likely to lead as much overall harm as it does good, because the assumption that the newly learned methods are accurate will naturally lead to problems when those specific methods deteriorate in quality or when methods on other issues are assumed to be just as accurate, when in fact they are not.

Similarly, inaccurate standards will lead to an eventual improvement in the evaluation methods due to the system failures which will result, causing discussion and analysis of the specific failures. Educating people on how to critically evaluate information regardless of existing metrics is a somewhat more difficult thing to do, but a system similar to the one described at http://pastebin.com/Q86Zhgs9 should work.

Don’t you think it’s the president’s job to design, shape, and drive national political discussions instead of only reacting to political debates designed and led by others and otherwise staying cloistered up in the white house?

If it’s not the president’s job, then whose is it?

And if you think the president’s already trying to drive the national discussion, isn’t the base quality of the national discussion proof that the president is failing?

As so often, leaping from a few uttered opinions to personal characteristics, reveals more about the guesser than the “guessee”. (But sure, I am broke and I am a government employee.) The funny thing is there are so many people out there who are neither of the three, and still share Andy’s feelings.

And about “so called” Americans, did it ever occur to you that your United States of America is only part of the two half continents called the Americas? Thus, Fidel Castro is not a socalled American, he IS an American like you and unlike me.

But what you mean is that somebody who isn’t of your opinion is really more like Fidel Castro and not a “true” citizen of the U.S. I was happy enough to having been born after WWII but the husband of my god-mother was hanged for being “un-German” during WWII.

Both assumptions in the ignominious tradition of Martin Dies and Joe McCarthy are preposterous: Neither is only the U.S “America”, nor is only right wing ideology “American”.

Then again if this is the kind of decisions you tend to make then Mr. Obama, and the country, are probably better off without you.