Black swans are always present. Either you choose to ignore or you choose to notice.

Lack of understanding, or I would say of an unwillingness to heed, clear messages shouted out deafeningly in ears which lay mesmerized to the songs of beguiling sirens, oblivious to their imminent doom.

Reporting on the world economy

"Near-zero borrowing costs are the source of speculation since they allow investors to borrow cheaply in yen and take punts in countries where interest rates are higher."

out of thin air, nothing productive, making huge profits out of nowhere, precariously balancing on glass stilts. Is that the growth world economy relies upon, thrives on? Run by speculators?

Created a world of make believe, a bubble afloat a vibrant world, powered by inertia alone, a direct reflection of the so-called economic forces, and have the affront to be called investors.

Black swans? Not seen, unpredicted, your eye. Your eye has not seen them. You can see what you choose to see. A matter of scope. You choose to ignore, but it is there.

A for randomness let's borrow the words from freakonomics

"I keep writing here and there that my definition of randomness is as follows: incomplete understanding or incomplete information."

and

"So the degree of randomness is observer dependent."

And the point is, you are either in knowledge of your incomplete understanding or the fact of incomplete information, or not. And further a matter of choice whether you acknowledge your knowledge or not.

Flap-strapped around the eyes, like cart-pulling cattle, restricting views of the going-ons in the world, in search for black swans. Might as well be blind-folded. Fail to notice the obvious, unwilling to take heed of even the mythoplasy that spawned the term. Black swans did not appear out of nowhere, they were already there, in Australia or wherever.

Likewise, the black swans of today's world are there, but are not given the attention they demand. It is not that they are unpredictable, it is more like the inability, for the sake of want, to predict the chances their predicted values, in the minds of the world's human individuals, stand to sweep you away, fed up of the hogwash they are fed daily, trivializing lives, unwilling pawns to insane insignificant games.

Insignificant as they offer nothing in fullfiling the aspirations of humankind and insane as they are still allowed to exist.

Prepared to face, be exposed, recognize and rigorously exploit Black Swans? Be prepared for more.

The editorial administratum of Forbes.com is wrong. The "Black Swans", the exceptional unpredictable events, that carry a huge impact will not yield to exploitation for the winners, it will end exploitation, in whatever way it could be imagined. An end to useless, precious time squandering, mind-numbing brain wastage, heart-rending anguish in the trivial pursuit of exploiting for financial gains. Instead it will be an enlightening journey to personal and collective fulfillment that only knowledge brings.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's ideas are intriguing, and so after my own thoughts, is uncanny. Even the name given to his personal website is far-reaching, as he correctly contemplates individuals fooled by randomness. Even my current encounter, an unplanned haphazard www link journey, with the thoughts of Nassim Taleb, no matter how random it appears to be, will not succumb me into accepting it as random.

As a few hours ago, contemplating on the claims put forward by Carlos Gershenson, in his attempts to establish the connections between behaviour and the evolution of cognition specifically mentioned:

"We believe that, in order to model plausibly reasoned behaviour in an open, unpredicted, non deterministic environment, we should model first convincingly reflex, reactive, and motivated behaviours."

The appeal to an open, unpredicted, non deterministic environment stopped me in my tracks. It was difficult to accept the claim for an open, unpredicted and non-deterministic environment. It brought into my mind notions about local and global environment. Local environment, its limits defined by the extent of our sensoria, seemingly open, a matter of convention, but in reality closed irrespective of where the boundaries lie. Conventions based on the chosen variables and parametres imply the nature and degree of its openness. And via the variables and parametres the individual chooses to monitor, bounds local environment unpredictability and its apparent determinism or non-determinism.

Advancing knowledge gears changes, of kind, of range, of the variables and parametres monitored by human individuals, in personal and collective level, expand the boundaries of local environments, decrease unpredictability. Introduced changes gradually assume control over attitudes and behaviours and guide acts either in individual or collective capacity. Local environment expanded, widens the arena, an increase in phase space which deterministic chaos explores.

So McCain is another Bush-type candidate?

I read in renoir's comments, in the Huffington Post website, a comment posted in Alec Baldwin's, 'Who can beat Mccain?' post.

"McCain is most certainly a Tool! Consider his pandering to the religious right. Consider embracing Bush after all the slime tossed his way during the last election. Consider not voting to ban torture.... MY GOD! How is this man NOT a tool? Consider his vote that prioritizes immunity for the telecom industry over the Constitution. Consider his lack of knowledge of Shiite vs. Sunni vs. extremists vs. Al Queda and still standing by his insistence that he's the most qualified candidate based on his knowledge of international issues. Consider his abject ignorance of environmental concerns. Then consider his connection to lobbyists while pretending to be all concerned about corporate influence. Consider his complete lack of critical thinking when it comes to this war... and how he is willing and able to ignore not only it's immorality and illegality but also it's impact on our military and let our men and women march into a quagmire that HE said was not winnable not so long ago. Consider his flip-flop over the immigration issue.... he says something that sounds amazingly lucid, compassionate and sensible about illegal immigration but then immediately reverses that when he gets heat from right-wing wingnuts."

So McCain is another Bush-type candidate? Or Reagan-type for that matter? That is a reiterating pattern that makes me wander? Is it the way that the republican party has found in order to avoid the pitfalls of appointing to the presidency an individual, who if it is left on its own devices it might create more trouble than they bargained for?

Have in the presidency somebody pliable, responding to commands, a macho exterior but a limited interior and its performance carefully orchestrated by director's type committees, requiring just an actor to play the part? And what makes the difference is the hypocritical (that is acting) qualities of the incumbent? See Reagan for example and the currently incubated Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger?