Thursday, January 20, 2005

Health as population growth is ill for some. Posted here Thursday, January 20, 2005 at 7:19:55 AM     The previous item suggests that economic health means natioanl growth, through birth and immigration. But "health" means for the owners of capital, not those sqeezed at the lower end by increasing populations and lower wages. This is an important discussion to follow up. ********

	Saturday, December 04, 2004

Posted here Saturday, December 04, 2004 at 11:44:54 AM     From ABC news's The Note for today http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238 In fact, the greater long-range consequence of the events in Asia gives the Leader of the Free World and the Commander in Chief another extended opportunity to sit astride the world look tough and compassionate at the same time. It looks like Bush can do anything, and the rest of the country is powerless. Social security, environment, .. And "If anything, the history of the Bush presidency so far is that it isn't following historical trends. One reason Mr. Bush has 'beat' history is that the nation is in the midst of a realignment that has been a long time in the making. The war on terror and the end of the Cold War has already transformed foreign policy. Building liberal democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq is also giving the nation a fresh look at its own moral underpinnings. Meanwhile, voters are being confronted with changing the definition of marriage and saving Social Security — the bedrock of the New Deal — from bankruptcy." That might not be exactly correct, but it is providing a winning mindset and formula for the party in power. Krugman's "Medicare and Medicaid are bigger problems" mantra is one that the White House is just waiting to bash back. Protecting social security would itself be part of a larger social policy that just doesn't exist in a quotable form. The President is untouchable and the country is going broke. The second gives him leverage to do what he wants because the democrats have no real alternative that deals with declining revenues, jobs, security and social well-being. the specter of socialism lays its shadows across any proposal for amelioration or social investment.   ********

Posted here Saturday, December 04, 2004 at 10:09:04 AM     Time to return. What a few weeks! The start of a new year has not been under such a cloud for so many since ww2 or 1968. The emerging question in the Indian Ocean tsunami aftereffects is whether the awareness of the conditions of real lives, so many, so fragile, will have any impact on the direction the leadership, the press, and economics will take. Governance and the media live ion a  self serving narrow partial illusion. Can we expect this to get better? What can we do? That is, is there an emerging alternative that has a chance of creating a coherent society we, humanity, could actually step into, out of our current ways, without capsizing in the attempt?   ********

Posted here Saturday, December 04, 2004 at 10:51:11 AM     This is a sign. Ten years ago I raised the question, why doesn't China buy Sun Microsystems? I wasn't thinking big enough. Dec. 3--NEW YORK -- International Business Machines Corp. is negotiating with Lenovo Group Ltd. to sell its personal computer business to China's largest PC maker, the New York Times reported Friday. In Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano of 1950 (!!) the world is divided between managers, machines and unneeded prols. A Saudi prince keeps asking "who are those people?" and after answers like, "employees going in to their office building" he says, "slaves!". We need to de-link the good life from dependence on marketing and consumer identity. We need an economy but not by making slaves of most of the population (including the managers). That connection between life style and a cancerous economy to benefit a very few (who both have high incomes and understand the trap) and to give the appearance of benefiting many, has got to be decoupled - and replaced with a milder version that honors the people, the needs of governance, the need for an economy, and the environment. As I wrote much earlier “My own hope is that the full promise of technology can be seen as something which enhances the whole human community and its context rather than being a mechanism for the transfer of wealth to a few.  A brilliant technological future that is entrepreneurial, diverse, geographically dispersed, with regional and local focus and ownership could emerge.” Bono plans lifelong poverty fight. Rock singer Bono pledges to spend the rest of his life trying to eradicate extreme poverty around the world. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition] Interesting things can happen. Now, if we all did this. Spent the day reading Phil Agre papers (http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/). Mostly on technology and society, and the way computers are layered into existing institutions, affecting and affected by what is, making it more complex. Computational folks stick with the decartian view that the mind is a machine and so is the computer, but rel life practice keeps undermining this, and all real thought is both internal and embedded in a context. Most important is his essay  The Practical Republic: Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship Philip E. Agre http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/republic.html   Where he argues that we live in a republican democracy and it requires skills to form relationships, analyze issues and participate, and there is no good theory of those skills. I was very moved by a review of some Chekhov This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041213&;s=siegel Imitation of Life by LEE SIEGEL The Complete Short Novels  excerpts.. Chekhov's acheful, unsparing eye; his unforgiving yet gentle irony; his characters' dignified pathos and their pathetic attempts to dignify themselves with big theories of how to live in this world; and the writer's uncanny evocation of their self-delusion as simultaneously ludicrous and heartbreaking.   The honest core of Chekhov's art is the acknowledgment that even art is helpless in the face of life.   His own, private, untransmittable experience of life is, and will always be, the only truthful description of life that he will ever know. Somehow, Chekhov's art manages to transmit the untransmittable.   In other words, the only reality is fragile human life: meaningless except for the meanings we deluded and deluding people keep projecting onto it.   And yet it never stops being a parasol; it never becomes "literary." It carries meaning for the reader only because it has accrued the very same meaning for the characters. Unlike, say, D.H. Lawrence's famous rocking horse, the parasol is not a privileged communiqué over the characters' heads between the reader and the writer. It belongs to the characters.   It's as if these parentless children came into life already prepared for the fact that, as Laptev puts it, "there were no firm, lasting attachments." Their future lies in their beginning; they are pre-saddened.   If orphanhood is a pre-sadness, for Chekhov it is also a state of grace.   "Life is given only once," says Vladimir Ivanych, speaking for all of Chekhov's protagonists, "and one would like to live it cheerfully, meaningfully, beautifully." The best of Chekhov's people surrender their illusions and try to endure life's inherent limitations and disappointments. And for this sober honesty they are rewarded with a substitute for the cushioning mediations that they've given up. They learn to forgive themselves and to forgive other people; they learn to be kind. "Kindness" is a word that occurs over and over again in Chekhov. It is a mode of being rather than a big idea about how to live, a quality of experience rather than a mediation of experience. It is cheer, meaning and beauty self-created from within. But the real struggle is between Laevsky and his lover, Nadezhda; and even more than that, between each one's perception of the other and the actual other. Laevsky has grown tired of Nadezhda. Stifled, bored, constantly irritated, he makes plans to leave her, but feelings of guilt and pity keep him stewing in misery by her side. What he doesn't know is that Nadezhda, vain and coquettish, has been slowly drifting away from him and impulsively, even innocently, conducting affairs with two other men. She also is mired in pity and guilt.   The boat is thrown back...it makes two steps forward and one step back, but the oarsmen are stubborn, they work the oars tirelessly and do not fear the high waves.... So it is in life.... In search of the truth, people make two steps forward and one step back. Sufferings, mistakes, and the tedium of life throws them back, but the thirst for truth and a stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Maybe they'll row their way to the real truth...   Rather than issue a thunderous Tolstoyan judgment or proclamation or conclusion, which perhaps reminded him of a cruel father's tyranny, Chekhov finishes his tale with the stubborn facticity of the parasol. Its last sentence is: "It began to drizzle." What makes Chekhov so inestimably precious is that he is a writer who lets life have the last word. Which it does anyway.   It is this kind of reflection, tolerance, kindness, that is one of the gifts of our great writers. ********

	Friday, December 03, 2004

Posted here Friday, December 03, 2004 at 10:22:16 PM     Looks like Bush clears out the old cabinet, except Rumsfeld, and wants to move beyond that to take on Anan.  When does "balance" come into play? Blowback? Resistance? Homeland Security seems like a terrible appointment. Then comes the Supreme Court. On women and population : the reduction in fertility is based on choice to be a worker consumer (driven by the high cost of raising children), and not by free choice. I don't like coercive solutions. On politics and the environment: i think the key leverage point will be food. Food currently is very subsidized. because of cheap energy to produce it (fertilizer from natural gas) and transport it. Food problems (and water) will drive security concerns and costs even in the US.   I know we are increasingly concerned that the US will fight for energy and dominance, against other regions and our own resistance citizens, rather than seek a harmonious world solution.   Bush's current attitude reminds me of a corporate take-over and the arbitrage that follows. I would feel worse except so many of us are in the same situation. After clearing out the Cabinet, now it is the UN to be dismantled.   Right wing view: its a tough world, we need to toughen our families and get people off welfare and government. War is inevitable. People are violent and have to chose sides. The need for religious belief is all that can help us through in an ethical way. People need religion to do it. The church should be the softener - civilizing influence. the government should be cheap and focus on national defense and commercial law. We need to cut back in order to compete and reward leaders who have the guts to make the tough decisions. That's why Bush should get rid of Education, Energy, Commerce, HHS and social security/Medicaid, and Endowment for the Arts. Get on with it. Time is short. ********

	Thursday, December 02, 2004

Posted here Thursday, December 02, 2004 at 6:30:22 PM     Some argue that war and reproduction are the two chief dynamics of human history. Make and destroy, in some kind of balance.  Economics and technology shift where the balance point is, but the underlying dynamic remains the same. Can it be otherwise? That is the real liberal hope. I also just finished Michael Crichton's  1999 TimeLine, a novel about the ability to travel to the past, and the entrepreneur who funds the effort in order to create theme parks of the past as the only real entertainment in the future/present. The novel centers on his corporation in new Mexico and  medieval town in the 1300's that he now wants to rebuild, but wants to go back there and find out what it was really like, in order to control the product, so to speak. Lots of good history and a fair story. ********

Posted here Thursday, December 02, 2004 at 3:41:11 PM     Thanksgiving was a time to think, to experience, to connect with nature and people.  It seems like the Republicans now will turn to some serious infighting, and it may make monolithic governance even harder for them. The Democrats don't seem to have a Central story: nearly winning the election, demographics moving in their favor (young voters more than any other group for Kerry), but the need to tell a story brings out how little of an agreed on story there is. The war? Globalization? Corporatism? There is no real agreement. Makes one just thoughtful. I read Vonnegut's 1950 Player Piano, a wonderful story about a dumb Texas governor, and the division of the world into managers, machines, and prols. What most caught my attention was that the prol description fits much of the red voter profile, but that much of the managers (not admired in the story) fit the profile of many blue voters, and especially their spokespeople. Suggests that the current red/ blue division is very thin, and the real division lines cut across all known identifiers. ********

	Thursday, November 18, 2004

Posted here Thursday, November 18, 2004 at 6:39:48 PM     More on yesterday's post (some repetition) Is there an alternative? I think there is. To go out on a limb I call it “Garden world”. It is realistic about the current population, technology, governance, and violence. It seeks to find a world that can evoked in people, because it is close to human nature, historical symbols, and realizable.   Here is the idea: using high tech and entrepreneurial activity in the context of highly effective guidelines on environmental impact, to push for a high education, decentralized active world working to make everything beautiful, healthy, just, fair, and interesting.   There is a valley in India where the local culture measures economic development by the increase in song birds and biomass in the valley. Fredric Olmstead, who designed Central Park in New York, and much else besides, gives us a model of remediating the environment towards biological sustainability and beauty.   Further, I believe this in the only approach that finds advantage in facing the environmental, health, fairness and justice issues. Facing those issues are more attractive with garden world. The military or one world solutions have too great an incentive to mobilize around their expertise and to continue to aroid critical issues. .   Starting in 2003 I was part of a small group consulting to one of the campaigns on the use of language, and, noticing the difficulty the “progressives” had entering imaginatively and compassionately into the possible thought process of the right, I worked up a seminar called "What is on the minds of the Republicans?" There were two core ideas.   That both progressives and the right feared bigness, but projected it on to the other, and did not take responsibility for their own ties to bigness. The right feared big government and its bureaucracy, but supported big business with its government ties, as well as military which was related to both big government and big business, and the right supports large church organizations. And the left (using right and left as token words, filled with abstraction and error) feared big business and big military, but had its own ties to government programs and the use of courts to impose community standards that could not be achieved by legislation, and was tied to government and high tech business, and much of the left was supportive of a stronger military.   The right was afraid of a government bureaucracy that could undermine family responsibility with welfare, but was happy with farm subsidies and military pensions. and the left feared big business with its concentration of wealth and ties to a media which "determined" peoples' point of view.   Each side demonized the other in order to prevent the confusion, the cognitive dissonance, that came from seeing how close left and right values were. They all believe in education, justice, security, love of nature, healthy families, and a home with access to good food, health and hope.   The divergences, of which there are many and real, were not understood for what they meant - such as gun control and abortion, or Justice and Iraq and the nature of security, and the increasing marginalization in the economy of many - to the other side.   During the later stages of the campaign, George Lakoff's work on political Language ( see his book Moral Politics) became the buzz. He saw the left as favoring a spirit of government acting like a nurturing tolerant family with care and concern for losers. The right was drawn to the image of the paternalistic one right way family building strength of character to win in a tough world.   I could see the advantages of both views. It seems to me that the two together: fear of bigness and image of the family, combined, could "explain" lots of political behavior and the use of language to appeal to voters.   I think these can reduce to fear of change and technology, increasing alienation and the destruction of the ideas around human nature. The left stresses the need for support under change and the right favors retrenchment (and reaching out to religious community) to avoid the changes.   Fundamental issues, such as corporate charters, are not present in the larger debate, but polls I’ve seen and a few informal ones I’ve done suggest that the increase in corporate power, loss of environment, and threats to children are powerful issues.   What we on the progressive side need is to honor the fears on all sides, see our own side in an alliance with corporations and communications technology (for which a major customer is military), and tell a story that is attractive, not articulated in hate or slander.   A business climate that was regulated to protect the environment, maximizing hi-tech and even biotech, with an encouragement of entrepreneurial activity on a regional bases, new forms of more expressive and creative education, mortgage deductions only for houses under say 200,000, and an international policy of fairness and multilateral efforts, making the world safe for travel of people, not just money, protect social security, and rethink medical aid for the vast majority of non exotic illnesses…plus a clear denunciation of the war in Iraq, new efforts to rethink oil so that we don’t victimize the ME by either staying or leaving, new initiatives with Latin America and China (and an interesting plan for Cuba that is humane), and election reform that is clear and transparent. Boldness would have won this election.   What are Americans likely to do to support, to lend legitimacy to?   I think we can agree that increasing population, especially for the us which is currently predicted to grow from 290 million to 360 by 2050, will be continually destabilized by immigration and birth. By destabilized I don’t mean fall apart – only that the increase will be part of a dynamic that must be coped with – or it will fall apart.   And the US is increasingly un-insulated from much of the rest of the world, which means external destabilizations and internal destabilizations tend to get link and reinforce each other’s jolts.   There seem to me two likely paths for the world, and the choice is being made now and might be clear before the end of Bush’s second term.   The first is the one implicit in “Globalization” and American hegemony within that globalization – the integration of the world into a single market system, with interlocking corporate governance boards, unified standards, technologies, and regulations. The basic tendency here is t make the world into a single system. The rub is, that the biggest game in two is, who gets to control, own and benefit from, that system. This is a fairly peaceful world, with lots of controls and restraints. Think Microsoft, Citibank, WTO, UN, Davos.   The second is the division of the world into empires, highly militarized and full of wars in struggles for power to defend arrangements and to create new ones. Think China, US, Euro, Russia, India, a united Arab republic.   Many of us sense that Bush policy is pushing us to an unnecessary world of empires in conflict, rather than the internationally regulated path.   Unspoken so far is the question: is there another way? Clinton and Blair and others talked, in the mid 90’s, about a third way, a kind of democratic, safety net, regulated commercial environment that would be viable. I think they were on to something important,. And Europe and other parts of the world are in very active dialog about what that could be. The unemployment that arises from pitting countries against each other in a drive for low cost production keeps that dialog somewhat in the background, but those who travel to Europe, or have good behind the scenes contacts in China or Japan, and probably other places, know that the discussion is deep and intelligent and well informed. (see for example the book One China: many paths, issued last year). Within Islam there is a similar discussion that is very interesting. Within the Christian churches the issue is fully alive.   But, given the current mind set of the US population, you can see how these “alternatives’ draw out the anxiety, fear, and contempt that characterized the last election.   The press plays a key role because, in the need to sell advertising it needs an audience, and the audience is got by portraying conflict and personality, blood and sex. Us as audience are drawn in by the unconscious expectation that the media present us with images that provide us with very useful education as consumers (what kind of life style), and at the same time telling us what is the emotional atmosphere we live in. To do this the media must act like half a therapist, resonating with the unconscious forces that are active in people, without doing the second part of the work: making these forces conscious so we increase our range of freedom. Every reporter is trying to script what ties into the hopes and feras o the audience, and every editor is looking at what the reporters are giving her to decide which will get the biggest draw, the biggest emotional wow and fix, from the readers or audience.   So it is my view, so far, that Americans are full of images and expectations that are deeply historical and confusing, and that each person, embedded as they are in local culture and available media, in strained economic circumstances, and are vulnerable to emotional appeals that make them less thinkers than scouts. Rove said he looked at a political commercial for how it looks with the sound off (approximating the way he thought people actually take in the ads with peripheral vision more than focused critical awareness). This means people are looking for clues as to how to move through the jungle, what to make of the person ahead of them, to the side, behind and the lay of the land and its shadows, more than they are thinking policy and systems. Our intelligence is engaged at the survivor who is with who level, the kind of intelligence that apparently gave us the edge in the ice age, rather than with the kind of thinking that characterizes the professional office or the university, and requires some focused detachment. (see for example Don Schone’s TheReflective Practitioner)   Seeing it this way, many of us (I actually think very many) are not drawn to either party and its policies. We will fight hard because the “other” party looks so bad, and we need to find an alternative that can work, and hence we identify with one party to fight the other – and forget to work out what our party really will work for.   As it is, “our party”, and I mean republicans and democrats, are working to support both the one world (globalization) and empires at war scenarios. Clinton said at the opening of the Library that he thought war was right, just he timing was wrong. Kerry said the same. Both represent open expansionist markets that have made the rich richer and marginalized much of the world’s population (details here count).   Garden world, a reach, looks to me like the alternative two a managed or a militarized world. And of course, to be successful, it will borrow from the managed and the military solutions.   I was part of a project in 1995- 1999, rethinking military health for 2025. Our final statement was "As national security moves from winning wars to preventing chaos, military health moves from supporting the front line to being the front line." ********

	Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, November 17, 2004 at 5:18:07 PM     We are also confused about the meanings of key words, especially liberal and conservative. Favoring private property, concern for fellow human beings, desire for an ethical society, preserving what is good, avoiding war, or tending to side with tradition? Which goes with which?   Starting in 2003 I was part of  a small group consulting  to one of the campaigns on the use of language,  and, noticing the difficulty the “progressives” had entering imaginatively and compassionately into the possible thought process of the right,  I worked up a seminar called "what is on the minds of the Republicans."  There were two core ideas.   That both progressives and the right feared bigness, but projected it on to the other, and did not take responsibility for their own ties to bigness. The right feared big government and its bureaucracy, and the left (using these as token words, filled with abstraction and error) feared big business and big military. The left was tied to government and high tech business, and the right to business (especially large old style: energy, agriculture, pharmacy and energy) and the military, and to some degree church.   The right was afraid of a government bureaucracy that could undermine family responsibility with welfare, but was happy with farm subsidies and military pensions. and the left feared big business with its concentration of wealth and ties to a media which "determined" peoples' point of view.   Each side demonized the other in order to prevent the confusion that came from seeing how close their values were. They all believe in education, justice, security, love of nature, healthy families, and a home with access to good food, health and hope.   The divergences, of which there are many and real, were not understood for what they meant - such as gun control and abortion, or Justice and Iraq and the nature of security, and the increasing marginalization in the economy of many - to the other side.   At the same time, George Lakoff's work on political Language ( see his book Moral Politics) became the buzz. He saw the left as favoring a kind of government acting like a nurturing tolerant family with care and concern for losers. The right was drawn to the image of the paternalistic one right way family building strength of character to win in a tough world.   I could see the advantages of both views. It seems to me that the two together: fear of bigness and image of the family, combined,  could "explain" lots of political behavior and the use of language to appeal to voters.   I think these can reduce to fear of change and technology, increasing alienation and the destruction of the ideas around human nature. The left stresses the need for support under change and the right favors retrenchment (and reaching out to religious community) to avoid the changes.   Fundamental issues, such as corporate charters, are not present in the larger debate, but polls I’ve seen and a few informal ones I’ve done suggest that the increase in corporate power,  loss of environment,  and threts to children are powerful issues.   What we on the progressive side need is to honor the fears on all sides, see our own side in an alliance with corporations and communications technology (for which a major customer is military), and tell a story that is attractive, not articulated in hate or slander.   A business climate that was regulated to protect the environment, maximizing hi-tech and even biotech, with an encouragement of entrepreneurial activity on a regional bases, new forms of more expressive and creative education, mortgage deductions only for houses under say 200,000, and an international policy of fairness and multilateral efforts, making the world safe for travel of people, not just money, protect social security, and rethink medical aid for the vast majority of non exotic illnesses…plus a clear denunciation of the war in Iraq, new efforts to rethink oil so that we don’t victimize the ME by either staying or leaving, new initiatives with Latin America and China (and an interesting plan for Cuba that is humane), and election reform that is clear and transparent. Boldness would have won this election. ********

	Saturday, November 06, 2004

Posted here Saturday, November 06, 2004 at 6:48:12 AM     There are two problems Iraq and economy. The cure in Iraq is a multinational policing of terror The cure for the economy is to recognize that too many are in jail, widely weak education, too few good jobs, and skewed income and wealth are all intertwined, and a goal of better distribution is essential., and a new business model that is small scale, regional, hi-tech, entrepreneurial and environmentally rigorous. Politics now is a power game with spoils to the winner: no incentive for a really good social solution. The democrats had no answer to Bush's "everyone wants freedom and democracy." Kerry did not offer any actual alternative on Iraq, nor on the economy. He avoided all the real issues, mirroring rather than countering Bush. Kerry did offer a more reasoned style, but it appeared weak and inconsequential. It did not appear to be gentle,warm, humane and related. Kerry offered nothing that appealed  to the red counties. These are mostly people who are traumatized by change, and losers in it, left behind. They are motivated by fear and resentment and their need is primarily to make their failing families work. They cling to the only "community" offering them anything: the church. Outside are drugs, pregnancies, job threat, seductive media, which shows them a world of danger not of promise. A straightforward proposal for policing terror (and corporate crime), and for vigorous environmentally friendly economy, with the education to get everyone there, would have appealed, and won if it were presented with tolerance, even affection, for regional differences. ********