Tuesday, February 15, 2005

new beginnings I am starting a continuations' of Roughcast at a site using software called Bubbler. Its advantage of me is the ability to post both from the desktop and the tablet PC. The address there is www.bubbler.net/dougcarmichael postings will remain here at lrast for a few months until I get them archived at my homepage, www.dougcarmichael.com I hope to continue to develop the same themes - even more so. Posted by douglass carmichael 7:59:37 PM    comment []

	Monday, February 14, 2005

I have been reading Christopher Lasch's great history of social change in America, The True and Only America . One theme of the book is that critics of change since the founding fathers continually saw what was negatively happening and it made no difference. There  emerged a kind of iron law of industrialization in our social theorizing, the capitalist version of Marxist historical determinism, saying the split between workers and owners was inevitable But craft and skill baed owndership of the tools of experize used to be owned by artisans.. Now the information age has replaced fixed hierarchies with floating ones and there is an amazing opportunity to reinvent ourselves.   In the early days of commerce , late 1700's,  people saw the problem of strength and virtue sapping  luxury but believed also that it supported individual development and initiative. The idea that there were excesses was lost quickly, and later, as commerce became in fact  an exchange between corporations, the idea that it was individual development was also lost.   We need to look at the organizations of work and property in the United States and how they weaved all together. This is really the history from 1800 through the Civil War to 1900.  The country started with a combination of large (with slaves) and small farms and artists and craftsmen. The development of technology, simple things like sharper tools and the first small machinery, started a kind of industrialization that required wage labor. Failing farmers and new immigrants provided it. This led to a great struggle of the artisans against the power of industries, using borrowed money from banks, to create increasingly powerful factory systems. The professional rise of management and the need for a large number of intermediaries in the industrial system supported the growth of a large middle class. It carried us into and through a number of wars which solidified the power of bureaucracy and its connection to the world of corporations. Information technology is tending both to make life easier for capital but also easier for workers to find identities outside of their corporations. The resulting flux means everything is floating and there's a great deal of insecurity. But there is also opportunity for the creation of new social forms that take us back to rethinking their relationships between work and property, capital and ownership, homes and families. Education and the richness of individual human lives.   ** In a conference on climate change, I saw some usefulnes to the analysis of what happened with Y2k.   Can society solve a major problem?   A few years ago I got very involved in nY2K. What fascinated me was that people had their mind made up, big deal or not, without evidence. And very few were actually in between, looking for information. The more I worked at it the more I got invited into major corporations, and then even governments. What I saw were very senior managers very scared, and spending hundreds of millions in a single corporations. The efforts were extraordinary. And congress passed legislation which made any compute investment a y2k maintenance issue, so for tax purposes there was a lot more spent.   As it got down to the wire I saw senior managers tell staffs to disconnect suspicious systems, and added "we will not have any problems. Do you hear me." That is, do what you must but don't report it. It was considered wimpy to have a Y2k problem. One company spent $200m on an approach and then told me *it failed* (by shifting over to SAP, which was then politically defeated by division VP's) , and then announced lower earnings because of Asian competition.   When y2k rolled over, many machines had been replaced, many were disconnected, or run in simplified modes.   And immediately the word went out - very few problems. Implication, it had all been hype. Several conclusions.   The run up in spending for IT stopped at January 1 (or shortly thereafter (as systems were brought back on line, replaced or software had to be reintegrated) and the DOW started down in January and the NASDAQ in March. I do believe the current recession is a result.   Second, after it was over, everyone wanted to forget about it. Those who thought it was going to be a blip had a few weeks of "I told you so" and those who thought it was big were embarrassed.   But key, much work was done because accountability was inside the organizations, where the effects were. People would have been seriously blamed for unsolved problems come Jan 1.   But other issues, such as climate change, are external to organizations and have no accountability. The result is, nothing much will be done.   ** There is a fascinating discussion of Big History going on over at  from H-net world history http://www.h-net.org/~world/   Patrick Manning, World History and African-American Studies, Northeastern University, writes.. (to give a snippet at what is being discussed.     David Christian, who coined the term "Big History," is also the first person to write a big book about big history. Others have written on history at this scale: Fred Spier wrote a very smart little book on big history and Graeme Snooks wrote four volumes surveying the dynamics of life on earth. But it is Christian who most coherently and yet in most detail has developed a historical "play of scales" presenting, within two covers, the vast yet mysterious simplicity of the birth of the cosmos, the complexity of modern society (so localized in time and space), and several well chosen stages in between.   For a review and discussion by world historians, however, we should get rapidly past marveling at the breadth of the author's undertaking and into the question of how this work fits into the perspective of world history.  Is world history a latter-day segment of big history? Is big history a field or approach within world history? Is it the case that big history (because it includes everything) is better defined than world history (because we can't agree where the latter begins)?   We may begin by claiming the difference to be that world history is centered on human history (whenever it started), while big history sets human history in the context of the natural world. But it's worth noting that more than half of Christian's work addresses human history. Clearly big history is intended to be set at the broadest available scale. But aside from differences in scale, does big history bring a perspective or style of analysis that is distinctive from that of world historians (or other world historians)? Let me go into some other details, and try to return later on to this issue of broad characterization of big history.   Maps of Time is organized into six sections containing one to four chapters each. The sections address the inanimate universe, life on earth, early human history, the Holocene era (meaning early agriculture and early civilizations), the modern era (the past thousand years), and the future.  (The section on the future naturally has only one chapter; the section on the modern era has four chapters; and the other sections have two or three chapters each.) Christian's periodization is this distinctive and provocative.   I wrote back   Maps of Time forces us to think through some assumptions.  Here's my take.   As a story it may be true - but irrelevant, or ideological. As presented it is a story about human life from the point of view of science, biology, large political organizations. This is just one possible "grand history". We could have a grand history of say the writing of poetry, an claim that The Map of Time, is one kind of poem, that humans are poetry makers (or story makers) and The Map of Time is a very plausible and successful story - but a story nevertheless that comes out of our story making capacity.   It is very different to say the Universe Story led to us than to say us humans created stories of which the universe story is one. In one case we are the product of the story, in the other the story is the product of us.   Behind this reasoning is my sense that a story that tends to be believed in is doing ideological work for the society. In particular, just as Marx had an inevitability thesis, so does market capitalism - that larger and larger organizations will emerge (Richard Wright's non-zero, where complexity always wins). With an inevitability that should make you hopeless about any alternative. The purpose o an ideology is to affect what is happening now, and the birth and death of the earth are events very far away in either direction, and may occlude the vision of the present as a livable artistic and, let's say, poetry centered world.   The point is, no widely believed story of human history is neutral as regards hidden ideological vectors.   Having written that I went to the history and philosophy site and found   From: johngay@fairley.ca Date: Mon, 03 May 2004 01:42:34 -0700 Subject: "Art" & "History"   "Art" and "history" are not simply abstractions. The relationship of text and narrative, of the sign (whether of language, ritual, and/or the esthetic), and of the shared story that tells of the emergence of the sign in a communally significant event, are somehow fundamental to human nature. The first collectively remembered sign and story, as with every representation since, must have figured a centre (a thing in context) for a shared attention. And however many and diverse our figures have become, the inevitable contest for even a minimal centrality, for acknowledgement of one's difference, does not allow for an entirely placeless subjectivity, pace the postmodernists. Even as we question the totalizing categories "art" and "history", we further our claims on/against a tradition of centralizing figures. The impression grows that since it is dangerous to claim, and sometimes to refuse, centrality, it is sure tempting to deny it. But sooner or later we’ll need some way to free these purported abstractions from their present assignments as fall guys in the metaphysics of deconstruction/ deconstruction of metaphysics, and open up some form of frankly anthropological-historical investigations into text and narrative, within which "history" and "art" will be western historical figures, at root human and relational whatever the abstract qualities of the metaphysics in which they have often appeared.   However, I share Hayden White's desire to see more "histories" than "history", since the relatively nonviolent course of history is generally one of decentralizing, or widely distributing access to, the scenes that our shared stories tell about. But, use of the singular collective noun remains in some respects appropriate. We need "history" to account for our collective participation in a single (now global) economic system, and in a shared ethical and historical process of foregoing earlier (usually more centralized and ritualized) forms of socioeconomic organization and religion. On the other hand, it is only in individual minds and histories that knowledge of the human is synthesized, e.g. by studying earlier art forms that emerged from the social and religious forms we have given up; similarly it is through individual, interacting minds and histories that new art forms emerge. Hence our love and resentment for creators whose implicit or explicit presence mediates our experience of works of "art" and "history" (in ways more memorable, or revelatory, than the experience of mere entertainment), and in relation to whom our own subjectivity is shaped. (Can talk of memes explain this essential, mimetic dynamic of art history?)   One might say that it is because we can't completely forego a shared "history" for our particular histories, that all stories and all art have, and will forever have, mythical or "constructed" qualities; but this speaks to their role in mediating the inescapable paradoxes of human interaction and is no reason to go to the extreme of denying their worldly referent in this same interaction - a denial White makes for at least the singular, history: "no one has ever perceived this thing "history"".  But I think I perceive it, right now: as a lived experience, history is only partly perceived in terms of one's personal experience of social or professional differences/interactions; but this individual history is mediated in terms of our relationship to culture's shared scenes or representations (from whose authority many feel alienated, out on a desiring periphery, while some learn a faith and become happily peripheral). This is to say that the concrete essence of "history" is the changing esthetics and ethics on which all forms of identity, narrative, and exchange depend. And further, it is the fictional, or hypothetical, quality of all narratives, including "history" that allows new truths about the human to be proposed and in time recognized by some ethical consensus or experience.   And I find myself much more at home in the openess of the art and theory folks than the standard historians.   And on climate, the complexities and secondary efects ar extreme. Look at   Reference Idso, C.D. and Idso, K.E.  2000.  Forecasting world food supplies: The impact of the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration.  Technology 7S: 33-56.   Background As the world's population continues to climb, there is increasing concern about the sustainability or carrying capacity of the planet; and in making decisions about long-term research and development policies, movers and shakers from many sectors of the global economy need to know if there will be sufficient food fifty years from now to sustain the projected population of the globe.  After all, it is only prudent that we attempt to gain such insight into the human condition (see our Editorial: Prudence Misapplied), for we all have a stake in the future progression of man and womankind.   What was done The authors developed and analyzed a supply-and-demand scenario for food in the year 2050.  Specifically, they identified the plants that currently supply 95% of the world's food needs and projected historical trends in the productivities of these crops 50 years into the future.  They also evaluated the growth-enhancing effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on these plants and made similar yield projections based on the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration likely to have occurred by that future date.   What was learned The authors determined that world population will likely be 51% greater in the year 2050 than it was in 1998, but that world food production will be only 37% greater if its enhanced productivity comes solely as a consequence of anticipated improvements in agricultural technology and expertise.  However, they further determined that the consequent shortfall in farm production can be overcome - but just barely - by the additional benefits anticipated to accrue from the aerial fertilization effect of the expected rise in the air's CO2 content, assuming no Kyoto-style cutbacks in anthropogenic CO2 emissions.   What it means In order to avoid the unpalatable consequences of widespread hunger in the decades ahead - as though there were not enough of it already - it would appear to be necessary to allow the air's CO2 concentration to rise at an unrestricted rate.  Consequently, efforts designed to discourage CO2 emissions are seen in this light to be inimical to our future well-being, as well as that of generations yet unborn.   Posted by douglass carmichael 3:02:49 PM    comment []

	Wednesday, February 09, 2005

on philanthropy, and a few shocking ideas. the secondary unplanned consequences of Lorge anoint of wealth.From Fred Turner. The special mandate of the philanthropic or voluntary gift economy. And it will suggest ways in which the artistic and literary culture can begin to celebrate and offer guidance to the philanthropic enterprise.   Estimates of the amount of wealth that will be inherited or given away in trusts and the like in the next few years range from ten to twenty trillion dollars, riches that will be provided as a gift, riches not earned, not acquired by conquest, nor legislatively appropriated. The amount over the next 55 years is estimated at between 41 and 136 trillion. This is an almost inconceivable sum—around seventeen thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child on the planet—and it will surely alter the world’s economy profoundly, loosening the tie between effortful production and personal wealth that has been so important a feature of capitalism.   Other periods of history give testimony about the benefits and also the great dangers of such large wealth transfers. In the last years of the Roman republic, a period of gigantic untaxed fortunes, gifts and bequests to the Roman people and its army by the great magnates—such as Sulla, Marius, Lucullus, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Octavius, Antony—were a crucial instrument of policy. The publication of a will before or after the donor’s death could and did alter the course of world history. The result was enormous wars, a flowering of cultural production, and an epochal change from republic to empire. The Black Death in Europe, combined with a ripening of technological development and a warming of the climate, created another huge wealth transfer, ushering in the Renaissance, the Reformation, and more large-scale wars. More modestly, but perhaps in the long run just as momentously, the vast generational wealth transfers that occurred in Europe through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided almost every novel, opera, and drama of the period with the mainspring of its plot—the will or entail that frustrates or liberates the lovers. The accumulated capital of the Industrial Revolution fell into the hands of a section of society that had tired of the process of money-making, while being kept from the aspiring classes that would have been happy to put it to use. Posted by douglass carmichael 3:53:17 PM    comment []

	Monday, February 07, 2005

Social Security   The amazing story now is social security. The discussion is getting very good. The best site to follow may be Brad Delong's http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/   He quotes around a lot, and gets flavor and details.   Josh Marshal has been doing an extraordinary job of embarrassing congress people who are wavering. To learn about congress this is a good opportunity - and about political courage and doggedness. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/   Chinese wisdom   Zhuangzi told this story to his disciples to make a point. Once a zookeeper said to his monkeys: "You'll get 3 bananas in the Morning and 4 in the afternoon." All monkeys are upset. "OK. How about 4 bananas in Morning and 3 in the afternoon?" Hearing this, the monkeys are content.   One should realize that sometimes a change in phrasing does not represent a real change.   Pasted from <http://www.chinapage.com/story/monkeyfeed.html> Posted by douglass carmichael 9:24:38 PM    comment []

	Monday, January 31, 2005

Picked up from Kevin Drum   LESSONS OF HISTORY?....Tom Cleaver of Redress Press sends along this clip from the New York Times. The date is September 3, 1967: U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. ....A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February. The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.   I know, I know, this doesn't mean Iraq is Vietnam. But you have to admit, this story is pretty spooky.   Pasted from <http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_01/005556.php> Real interest now in the future of the Democratic party and the struggle over chairperson of the DNC. Posted by douglass carmichael 6:17:15 PM    comment []

	Sunday, January 30, 2005

Yesterday's before the election, a zogby poll. This poll is very good. It says that Iraqi's want the US out, they want a non-religious government, and they are interested in voting. The bad news is that the Shia's aare I being isolated. The other news of course is that the US really loses, unless we can reframe this as agood outcome, which I believe. Things have moved to the point wher Bush gets little credit, and that leaves us in the US with a major problem. What kind of a US do we want?   Zogby International did a poll of 805 Iraqis between January from January 19 to 23, 2005 in the cities of Baghdad, Hilla, Karbala and Kirkuk, as well as Diyala and Anbar provinces. Results: Sunni Arabs who say they will vote on Sunday: 9% Sunni Arabs who say they definitely will not vote on Sunday: 76% Shiites who say they likely or definitely will vote: 80% Kurds who say they likely or definitely will vote: 56% Sunni Arabs who want the US out of Iraq now or very soon: 82% Shiites who want the US out of Iraq now or very soon: 69% Sunni Arabs who believe US will hurt Iraq over next 5 years: 62% Shiites who believe US will hurt Iraq over next five years: 49% Shiites who want to hold elections on Jan. 30: 84% Kurds who want to hold elections on Jan. 30: 64% Sunni Arabs who want to postpone elections: 62% Sunni Arabs who consider guerrilla resistance against the Americans legitimate: 53% Iraqis who would support a religious government: 33%   Today, with the election behind us, except for the counting, Juan Cole as usual is on top of the implications.   I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan. Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.   Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005. This enormous delay allowed the country to fall into much worse chaos, and Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did.   So if it had been up to Bush, Iraq would have been a soft dictatorship under Chalabi, or would have had stage-managed elections with an electorate consisting of a handful of pro-American notables. It was Sistani and the major Shiite parties that demanded free and open elections and a UNSC resolution. They did their job and got what they wanted. But the Americans have been unable to provide them the requisite security for truly aboveboard democratic elections.   With all the hoopla, it is easy to forget that this was an extremely troubling and flawed "election." Iraq is an armed camp. There were troops and security checkpoints everywhere. Vehicle traffic was banned. The measures were successful in cutting down on car bombings that could have done massive damage. But even these Draconian steps did not prevent widespread attacks, which is not actually good news. There is every reason to think that when the vehicle traffic starts up again, so will the guerrilla insurgency.   The Iraqis did not know the names of the candidates for whom they were supposedly voting. What kind of an election is anonymous! There were even some angry politicians late last week who found out they had been included on lists without their permission. Al-Zaman compared the election process to buying fruit wholesale and sight unseen. (This is the part of the process that I called a "joke," and I stand by that.)   This thing was more like a referendum than an election. It was a referendum on which major party list associated with which major leader would lead parliament. Many of the voters came out to cast their ballots in the belief that it was the only way to regain enough sovereignty to get American troops back out of their country. The new parliament is unlikely to make such a demand immediately, because its members will be afraid of being killed by the Baath military. One fears a certain amount of resentment among the electorate when this reticence becomes clear. Iraq now faces many key issues that could tear the country apart, from the issues of Kirkuk and Mosul to that of religious law. James Zogby on Wolf Blitzer wisely warned the US public against another "Mission Accomplished" moment. Things may gradually get better, but this flawed "election" isn't a Mardi Gras for Americans and they'll regret it if that is the way they treat it.     . Posted by douglass carmichael 7:47:19 PM    comment []

	Friday, January 28, 2005

Iraq   On Iraq, with elections a day away, almost everyone now wants a good electoral outcome, but not to blres Bush's war. The folowing is about as good a perspective as I have seen.   Iraq: Winning the Unwinnable War James Dobbins By losing the trust of the Iraqi people, the Bush administration has already lost the war. Moderate Iraqis can still win it, but only if they wean themselves from Washington and get support from elsewhere. To help them, the United States should reduce and ultimately eliminate its military presence, train Iraqis to beat the insurgency on their own, and rally Iran and European allies to the cause. Pasted from <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/current/>   And forget about the 14 bases and the big Embassy. Posted by douglass carmichael 5:24:26 PM    comment []