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The World: The Impossible vs the Unprecedented – Why Bad News is GOOD NEWS…

WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.

Original Post Date: 2008-11-11 Time: 00:00:06  Posted By: Jan

[I was sitting tonight thinking about all the hard work one does, and wondering to myself what the future holds. Its not bad news that scares me. Its not the unprecedented that scares me. What really depresses me is seeing nothing much happening. What depresses me is never-ending dawdling. Lots of talk and no action – that depresses me. Action – either good or bad, does not bother me.

I look forward to bad news. To me, bad news is good news because bad news implies change. You see, when everything is good and people are happy, there is no change. But when people are unhappy… then you see change. Then people scream for change. We need change. This world needs to start taking a new direction. And when I see all sorts of chaos arise… it makes me feel happier.

I was reading about Zimbabwe and the latest worthless round of talks. It depressed me. It depresses me when the MDC is wishy washy. I wish they had more fire. Then I saw a black general in the DRC saying he’d rather fight forever in order to be free of Marxist Kabila – and that made me happy. I liked hearing what that black general had to say. I want to be on the side of someone like that General – a black man who wants to fight. I wish whites would want to fight too. But the whites will only fight when they have suffered enough. No, chaos is good. And bad news is happy news. It means people are stressing. And when people stress, they start making a plan.

Things will only change when there is a lot of pain. We need lots of chaos so that there is lots of pain and when there is lots of pain, people will be in the mood for change.

I’ve always looked forward to the chaos, and the chaos beckons. The chaos gives me hope. Many people will want to run from the chaos, but I want to find a way to get into the heart of the chaos. That’s where I want to be. Jan]

Global Agenda: Impossible vs unprecedented

Nov. 6, 2008
Pinchas Landau , THE JERUSALEM POST
The Red Queen had exactly the right approach. To Alice’s claim that “There’s no use trying, one can’t believe impossible things,” the Red Queen responded: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed six impossible things before breakfast.”

We have the dubious privilege of living in a period in which unprecedented things happen virtually every day. The most striking unprecedented event of recent days was, obviously, the election of the first African-American president in the US. The day before, General Motors and other car manufacturers announced the sharpest drop in car sales since the World War II and, in population-adjusted terms, the largest fall ever.

Virtually every day this week, indicators of economic activity from countries around the world have recorded the sharpest falls ever measured. On Thursday, the Bank of England cut interest rates by 1.5 percent, the sharpest cut ever made by the central bank since it became independent in 1997; interest rates in the US and UK are soon likely to be at their lowest levels in modern times, perhaps ever.

All of these developments would have been considered “impossible” until recently. Anyone predicting them – any of them – last November would have been widely regarded as weird. But why? They are all perfectly logical – when seen as part of a continuum. After black congressmen, mayors, senators, generals and cabinet members it didn’t require a massive leap of the imagination to envisage a black president. GM has been in decline for decades and in a terminal state for years. Adding a sharp recession to that trend leads inevitably to a disastrous slump in sales and looming bankruptcy.

Anyone following the global financial crisis and its development into a severe economic slump could figure out that dramatic measures would be taken; after all, so many have been taken already, so why not more? Yet not a single mainstream analyst ventured to suggest that the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street would cut by so much; the consensus was for 0.5%. Many thought that 0.75% was probable and some urged the Bank to cut 1%, but they really didn’t believe that could or would happen.

Throughout the credit crisis and financial disaster that has been under way since July 2007, the mainstream economists, bankers and brokers have stuck doggedly to the supposedly solid ground of what they know, what they were taught and what they are used to. The ideas of Nassim Taleb – he of the “Black Swan” type of low-probability, high-impact events that the theoretical models consider to be impossible but actually happen frequently – are not only unknown to them, but actually indigestible. At every stage of the ongoing slump, they are engaged in frantic efforts to mentally adjust to a situation in which virtually everything is unprecedented, at least in their experience.

It is, therefore, not surprising that they – and by extension, their clients – are shocked to the point of mental numbness. Their desperate hope is that things will soon return to what they regard as normal. The thought that what used to be normal will not be seen again for years, if ever, is something that they cannot contemplate.

Yet, for those who wish to survive, financially and probably in much wider senses too, there is no choice but to accept that we are in a new reality that, from the vantage point of the pre-crisis world, is a Looking Glass World. Practice thinking for half an hour a day about things you consider to be impossible. Try and persuade yourself that they could happen. Many of them already have, many others probably will. Then try and distinguish between the impossible and the unprecedented, because many of the supposedly impossible things are merely unprecedented – like a black president and General Motors going bankrupt.

Finally, think carefully about supposedly unprecedented events and trends, because in most cases there are precedents, whether they occurred decades or centuries ago in other countries and cultures. In the social sciences, which include politics and economics, and which Ecclesiastes seemed to know pretty well, there really is nothing new under the sun, although, as he noted, there are always people saying “behold, this is new.” But it is only new to them, and that is not a valid reason for declaring it impossible and refusing to accept that it can, and probably will, happen.

Source: http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1225910057146&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull