Sunday, October 26, 2008

quotes of the day...

mood: bewilderment
sometimes, psychology (wishful thinking, denial, cognitive bias, blind spots, ideology, ...) is stronger than intelligence.

alan greenspan's comments on the financial/economic crisis:

I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.

That's precisely the reason I was shocked because I was going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief.

source oversight.house.gov.

Friday, October 17, 2008

the worst of two worlds

mood: disgusted
reading the daily news can at times be quite a depressing experience. psychological protective mechanisms maintaining the mind's sanity can vary from cynicism over callousness to denial, etc. and so most news events don't cause any lasting effects...

apart from "normal" global tragedies as war, genocide, poverty, famine, opression, species extinction, catastrophic climate change events, etc. and the current ludicrous financial and economic crisis, in the last years the cannibalistic activities of Armin Meiwes and the horrific ordeals of Natascha Kampusch and Elisabeth Fritzl have been particularly shocking.

today the list can be extended by another unfathomable abomination. the titles of the articles read:
From the content:

A link between terrorism plots and hardcore child pornography is becoming clear after a string of police raids in Britain and across the Continent.

During a crackdown on the mosque, police were astonished to discover pornography on computer hard drives. But what was not reported then was that the haul included images of children being sexually abused that were encoded with messages as a clandestine method of communication.

on the one hand, there is (in my opinion) the worst acts of destruction sentient beings can perform: systematically abuse the most fragile members of the society for pleasure. contaminate the cradle of future generations. personally i don't understand why there has been no global uproar, as the victims of child abuse become younger and younger and the atrocities worse and worse (some statistics), calling for a coordinated international effort to stop such and related activities (like female genital mutilation, child labour, ...).

and on the other hand, people driven by ideology to kill certain other people with different ideologies are using these unspeakable crimes as a vehicle for their own means of spreading death, destruction and suffering...

deep insights into the abyss of the human soul...

:-(