This just in ...
... A man, thinking that the secret service was out to get him, went into Hillary Clinton's campaign headquarters claiming to have a bomb and taking hostages.
The secret service went in and got him.
The self-fulfilling prophecy is a very interesting example of the reflexive paradox and a good example of people arriving at the right conclusion for the wrong reason.
In all likelihood, it was the action of taking hostages that caused the secret service to go in and get him and not the pre-existing notions that made him think the SS was after him.
In other news, apparently a large number of people (especially those in the liberal media) appear to be of the mind that there will be a major devaluing of US currency and a deep recession in 2008. Such folks might, en masse, convert their currency from dollars to dinars, and disengage in local economic activity; thus causing the recession they fear.
Trying to figure out how to keep our society from destroying itself by our own schizophrenic way of thinking is a challenge. Imbalances in our economy might make self-fulfilling prophecies come true. On the whole, far too much money in the United States is invested in realty. Left leaning countries of the world might engage in George Soros's hobby of devaluing currencies and cause a monetary crisis in the United States by dumping dollars.
IMHO, preoccupation with the reflexive paradox is a hallmark of modern thinking. The central theme of modern thinking is that the psychological state of mind creates our reality.
I am a regressive thinker who holds that our actions are the primary cause of our reality. All of the the imbalances of the economic world can and will be exploited by wanks like George Sorros. The goal is to position ourselves so that we are not caught and destroyed by the sway of public opinion.
The US has a few nasty exposures that could turn around and cause a great deal of hardship in the upcoming decades: Most Americans depend on the government for their retirement, their education and healthcare (that is a nasty imbalance). Since we depend on the government for most necessities of our lives, few Americans these days directly own wealth producing assets (that is another nasty exposure). That government is leveraged to the hilt.
On the home front, Americans have far too much of their equity invested in their homes. Current mortgage and housing price woes have a lot of Americans in a financial bind. Those that have chosen to walk away from their loans have put our financial institutions in a bind.
It is possible that we will have a deep recession in 2008. The effect of social security and medicare is a society with an unbalanced portfolio with our futures dependent on the health of a single financial institution ... the Federal government. Our imbalanced investment portfolios that gave the manufacturing sector to China while we contented ourselves with flipping houses also created an imbalance.
It may be possible for the left to engineer a recession in 2008. I think the root cause of the recession is the imbalances caused by our progressive politics and not our thoughts.
The desire for a recession or depression is a wish of those that desperately want a Democrat in the White House. As Mark Stricherz explains in this interview, the GOP has an advantage in presidential elections ever since the power structure of the Democratic Party was taken over by radical activists, because most social conservatives (even those that are registered Democrats) always vote for the candidate that is most socially conservative. But the social conservatism factor can be overcome by a bad war or a bad economy. Since it appears that they can't make much hay on the war issue, they are hoping to do so on the economy.
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