Massively dysfunctional enforcement at the SEC and the Fed

TMP has presented a terrible, yet not surprising, description of the enforcement arm of the SEC. Based on this detailed description of this dyfunctional enforcement arm, no wonder securities fraud has been running rampant. Oh, and on a related note, Huffpo reports that:

The inspector general tasked with overseeing and auditing the Federal Reserve knows pretty much nothing about what the Fed is doing. . . . She did not know where the Fed has invested its $2 trillion on the liability side of the balance sheet. "I do not know. We have not looked at that specific area at this particular point on," she said.

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Muffins and the end of innocence

"Did you know there's totally science behind muffins? Totally ruined muffins for me." Ah, the wisdom of youth. That particularly large & shiny pearl came from a blazered private school girl of perhaps 15 who I was standing next to (almost on top of) on my Connex-brand cattle-truck - I mean, "train" - this morning. Girl Student (henceforth "GS") was bemoaning the fact that in her cooking class her teacher explained that the release of carbon dioxide during the cooking process was responsible for the rising of muffins and for the tiny little pockets of air that end up being formed in all things baked. So, in response to this new but unwanted & unwelcome knowledge, GS now proclaims her hatred for - or at least new found apathy toward - the little round cakes she used to love. Naturally, her comment got me thinking. Does GS approach every mundane mystery in her life in such a manner? Would she disavow Myspace if she figured out that barely any of those seventeen thousand and eighty-four "friends" of hers actually qualified for such a title? Would she stop catching the train if she knew a tad more about electricity? What if she found out what keeps planes in the air? Sweet flaming crikey, no more summer trips to the Whitsundays then (probably a good thing, it'd totally suck to find out how that big hot disc in the sky is making you slightly darker). Safer stuck at home I guess, with just the TV/Wii/Blu-Rayer/microwave/mobile phone for company ... on the other hand, perhaps not. Perhaps all those modern wonders are just a fresh crop of parades waiting to be stripped of their brilliance by the acid rain of knowledge. You never know what awful, awful knowledge might leach into your brain if you sit on the remote and accidentally switch to the Discovery Channel.

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The age of agnotology: culturally constructed ignorance

Robert Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford who has pointed out a bizarre modern phenomenon: the coexistence of easily available factual information and ignorance. That is the subject of Clive Thompson's article in Wired:

He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance."

As Proctor argues, when society doesn't know something, it's often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he's a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says. "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."

After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution.

Thompson suggests that we need to develop more tools like Wikipedia to allow society as a whole to "build real knowledge through consensus," thereby allowing us to expose systematic lies for what they are.

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Go Ahead…Make My Day…Again…Again…

It’s like Clint Eastwood has come to town and all the bad guys are hiding under the tables or in closets. President Obama is striking down one stupid rule after another his predecessor left behind. It’s a martial arts level kung fu pen-fest, signing (or consigning) the detritus of ignorance from the last eight years into the dustbin of… Well, he's overturned the international gag rule concerning abortion information. He’s undoing the restrictions on stem cell research. He has ordered Gitmo shut down within a year and a panel to look into what to do with the detainees. Before the vacillations of moral outrage erupt over the gag rule overturn, it should be considered how absurd and cowardly a ban on talking about something actually is. And I don’t mean from a national security perspective. Clearly, some information is sensitive in that sense and should not be publicly disseminated. But in the case of the gag rule, we’re talking about something that is, for all intents and purposes, Public Knowledge. If you know what to look for, anyone can find this information and not be arrested for having it. Yet grown men and women have been constrained from talking about it in the performance of their duties as doctors and nurses. What part of “choice” do the enemies of choice not understand?

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The Economist says good riddance to George W. Bush

The Economist pulled no punches in saying good riddance to George W. Bush.    Consider the headline to this article:"The frat boy ships out."  The article has relatively few good things to say about the Bush Administration, especially when it comes to lack of fiscal restraint, but also the lack of…

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