No Free Lunch
Developing Asia Exports
Global stock markets have been falling recently as the world slowly comes to realize that the U.S. financial contagion is spreading throughout Europe and Asia. Perhaps the most striking example of the global slowdown can be seen in deceleration of Chinese exports to the U.S. From 2003-2007 Chinese grew about 26% annually, but in the second quarter of 2008 the annual growth rate was only 8% according to Morgan Stanley. As you can see by the chart above, Developing Asia (China, Korea, Singapore, etc.) has become increasingly dependant on exports. As the U.S. consumer began to pull back, unable to tap their home equity for more money, the Chinese shifted their export focus to Europe and Japan. But now these economies are falling into recession as well.
In Europe, the broad Dow Jones Stoxx index of 600 companies declined 2.1 percent in afternoon trading. In Paris, the CAC-40 index lost 2.2 percent , while the FTSE-100 in London shed 2.1 percent. In Frankfurt, the DAX was off 1.8 percent. Fears about the economic outlook compounded the pessimism in Europe.
“The economic outlook is increasingly worrying,” said Andreus Hürkamp, chief strategist at Commerzbank in Frankfurt. “That’s the main reason why the euro is falling.” A report last week showed that gross domestic product in the euro area fell 0.2 percent in the second quarter. Separate data showed the German and French economies shrank.
For years our politicians and business leaders have preached the benefits of globalization, as world economic growth and trade hit new highs. We are now going to experience the downside as a global business cycle of interconnected economies slides into a worldwide recession that I think could last into 2010. The effects of this slowdown will be geopolitical, cultural and obviously economic.
Before I delve into what I think is to come, I want to spend a minute on how we got here. Last month, I wrote a post called Return to the Mean which had a fairly simple thesis–Bubbles always burst, returning us to normal levels. The most salient chart was of consumer spending as a percentage of GDP. It started soaring in the Reagan era and eventually moved from 62% up to the current 73%. As the U.S. continued to hollow out it’s manufacturing base, we relied more on consumption to fuel our $13 trillion economy. Our need for hyper-growth was fueled not by our income but by an asset impairment and debt based revenue scheme. And in that scheme we had a willing co-conspirator in the Asian economies, happy to loan us money to keep buying their goods. And after 9/11 the Bush government hit the panic button, calling on Americans to go to the mall as their patriotic duty and borrowing ever greater sums from the Asians. This virtuous (or vicious) cycle is now ending. The consumer can’t use his home as an ATM machine and the Asians will have to throttle back their hyper growth in exports and generate domestic consumption.
So what are the implications? In the financial world it seems to me that the consensus expectations of 25% earnings growth for the non-financial component of the S & P 500 in the next year are wildly optimistic. As I’ve said before, I think high quality bonds are perhaps the best place to hide. From a geopolitical point of view, I would have to assume some risk in Asia of civil discontent. China has been growing at about 12% a year. If that slows down to 7% the ability of the government to continue to bring millions into the middle class will be severely challenged, especially if local inflation continues. Throughout Asia, aging populations without a real social safety net will require that dollar reserves be deployed to some sort of social security and health care system. Although Europe is much better prepared to deal with this problem, one can’t ignore the demographic nightmare in countries like Italy, brought on by a shrinking working age population to pay for a growing baby boomer retirement. Needless to say this same inter-generational conflict will play out in the U.S. as has been obvious on this blog. The redeployment of Asian dollar reserves to domestic concerns will mean that easy Asian money to finance U.S. military adventures will not be readily available.
But ultimately I think the cultural shift will be the most gut-wrenching for our country. Ever since Ronald Reagan pronounced that it was “Morning in America” we have lived in the warm and fuzzy illusion that there really was a “free lunch”. We could finance massive military build-ups; fight wars all over the world; cut taxes; get rid of pesky government regulators in food, drugs, banking, media and the environment; build billions of square feet of shopping malls throughout the country to keep this consumer machine growing at 3.5% a year. Well, guess what? There is no Free Lunch. Possibly the greatest failing of our politics since Reagan’s election is the unwillingness of our President to tell the truth about this unsustainable consumption/debt binge. Confronted with the credit crisis, what did we do? Send a $1200 check to every family so they could return to the mall. The Republicans have been the worst in preaching the free lunch, and though Clinton yielded to the Bond Ayatollahs in the early 90′s and cut the government debt, he never did anything to try to reorient the much larger consumer economy towards saving,investment and production and away from consumption and debt. Even though Al Gore “wrote the book” on the energy crisis, we never made any significant investment during the 90′s in alternative energy sources. Bush and Cheney were of course ten times worse.
Now we face an election in which two candidates are vying for the privilege of leading us out of this crisis. One of them, John McCain, living in a fantasy world of multiple mansions and private jets, still believes in the free lunch. He wants to keep the Bush tax cuts on the very rich, continue our military adventurism and thinks we can drill our way out of the energy crisis. By contrast, Obama has said there are “tough choices and many sacrifices” ahead for our country. But he too has been too willing to embrace short term solutions, believing that rapid economic growth is the solution to all of our problems. The transition to an economy that makes serious investments in infrastructure will be painful. I am aware that the obvious solutions to both our fiscal and over-consumption problems–like a $1 per gallon federal gas tax (a lot less than most European gas taxes) to fund alternative energy investment are political dynamite because of 38 years of Republican propaganda about taxes and the free lunch. But ultimately someone is going to have to tell the truth to the American people. Perhaps the coming global recession may provide the dose of reality an easily distracted public needs to face the truth. And in that moment, a realist like Barack Obama, may be just the right person to guide us through the coming crisis.
Totally agree with everything. But seriously, what constitutes high-quality debt these days? Treasuries? ha. Municipal Bonds? double ha.
Totally agree with everything. But seriously, what constitutes high-quality debt these days? Treasuries? ha. Municipal Bonds? double ha.
If the governing economy of the Clinton administration had been continued, we’d not even be having this conversation. Of course, we’d still not have universal healthcare or medicare prescription drugs, but we’d have a balanced budget.
Clinton did a good job of balancing the budget, with slightly higher taxes and cutting spending.
Expect a return to that system. With either McCain or Obama, they will be FORCED to exactly what Clinton did.
You’re the crazy one insisting the solution to massive government debt is MORE DEBT. Yeah, we’ll just spend our way out of it, huh?
——-
And I swear IF you weren’t hell bent on deficit spending to get more stuff for your own generation, I’d take the time to consider worries about military spending. But IF the money is going to be spent anyway, I’d rather see it spent defending the free flow of oil, and getting to alt.energy – than making it easy for baby Boomers to retire and live easy old lives. We need to get back to the days of old, when you work until you are dead, always productive.
Where are the sacrifices made by your generation? What have you done other than usher in ALL the behaviors and addictions, that YOUR generation chose? You are not the leader of the next group of young thinkers, you are the problem, and you can’t SEE IT, because your brain is diametrically opposed to a solution, where YOUR GENERATION must bear the brunt of paying for these excesses.
You think you are giving back at age 61, by teaching kids that we need MORE DEBT? Are you crazy?
Morally, we’d be correct, if we just rose up, disposed of your assets, paid off the debt, and put you all on ice flows. You are lucky we’re letting you stay around.
Why shouldn’t boomers get a smaller share of services, because there are more of you?
Those are the “tough choices,” we’re all prepared to make. Why aren’t you?
The goal of government overspending STARTED this mess, you can’t be amazed that other people with other agendas react to your overspending, with overspending of their own.
I’m in a nightmare funhouse here – you have to STOP trying to imagine that government overspending is acceptable.
If you want all this new stuff, put a real price tag on it, say, “I want to tax people 65% of their wealth,” stop pretending we have some room left on our credit card.
If the governing economy of the Clinton administration had been continued, we’d not even be having this conversation. Of course, we’d still not have universal healthcare or medicare prescription drugs, but we’d have a balanced budget.
Clinton did a good job of balancing the budget, with slightly higher taxes and cutting spending.
Expect a return to that system. With either McCain or Obama, they will be FORCED to exactly what Clinton did.
You’re the crazy one insisting the solution to massive government debt is MORE DEBT. Yeah, we’ll just spend our way out of it, huh?
——-
And I swear IF you weren’t hell bent on deficit spending to get more stuff for your own generation, I’d take the time to consider worries about military spending. But IF the money is going to be spent anyway, I’d rather see it spent defending the free flow of oil, and getting to alt.energy – than making it easy for baby Boomers to retire and live easy old lives. We need to get back to the days of old, when you work until you are dead, always productive.
Where are the sacrifices made by your generation? What have you done other than usher in ALL the behaviors and addictions, that YOUR generation chose? You are not the leader of the next group of young thinkers, you are the problem, and you can’t SEE IT, because your brain is diametrically opposed to a solution, where YOUR GENERATION must bear the brunt of paying for these excesses.
You think you are giving back at age 61, by teaching kids that we need MORE DEBT? Are you crazy?
Morally, we’d be correct, if we just rose up, disposed of your assets, paid off the debt, and put you all on ice flows. You are lucky we’re letting you stay around.
Why shouldn’t boomers get a smaller share of services, because there are more of you?
Those are the “tough choices,” we’re all prepared to make. Why aren’t you?
The goal of government overspending STARTED this mess, you can’t be amazed that other people with other agendas react to your overspending, with overspending of their own.
I’m in a nightmare funhouse here – you have to STOP trying to imagine that government overspending is acceptable.
If you want all this new stuff, put a real price tag on it, say, “I want to tax people 65% of their wealth,” stop pretending we have some room left on our credit card.
Stop consuming beyond basic needs.
Start saving all that you can.
Good post Jon, if money makes the world go round, then when the music stops, there will be an almighty crash.
Stop consuming beyond basic needs.
Start saving all that you can.
Good post Jon, if money makes the world go round, then when the music stops, there will be an almighty crash.
Jimmy Carter told us we needed to discipline ourselves. Reagan told us we deserved a bigger portion. Reagan won. Sad but so.
You say we are way beyond that. I’m not so sure. We aren’t they then so there’s no objective judgement here.
Obama campaigns against the politics of fear but Rush is there to tell us global warming IS fear. So we wait for the newest polling numbers and celebrities to make up our minds for us.
Ah nuts. As the old poster with the vultures said, “Patience my a**.
I for one, think you are right. Again, No Product No Market No Sale No Pay. We hollowed out our economy. Now we’re running out of furniture to burn or will eventually. Budweiser is a Belgian Beer. Oddly enough, that sort of thing isn’t lost on the redneck class. A PBR just won’t do and Schlitz is beer a bear won’t drink.
The average redneck will start looking for solutions. They aren’t patient types and handouts aren’t in their blood. It might be a good idea to tell our inner hippie to be mellow and get our inner redneck to work.
I’ve no answers but also only one credit card and I seldom use it. PayPal acts like a storage battery and if a few cents dribbles in here and there, at some intevals, I can buy new software toys. The key to lifestyle is spending discipline and multiple pots of even if slow, growing income sources.
We have some strange transitions to make. It’s easy to go incindiary about the MIC. Are you looking at the high tech industry? Compare the return for Microsoft to the national economy by selling operating systems then look at what Linux does by turning it all into services? It opens opportunities but are these really offsetting the damage done by the open wars on MS by the open source communities? Not in theory, but in actual dollars? What is it doing to the music industry to drive the value of music content to zero? Did production costs really go to zero (no, they didn’t) and is a tour-based/t-shirt economy that profitable?
Buffet talks about the sharecropper economy. (there are sources that predate him for that model but is nice he uses it because the rest of us who did got beat up for being racists). I use the term, ‘watermelon economy’ because it points out that the sharecroppers were left with a piece of free enterprise: their watermelon patch. It was traditional to let the family patch be solely used and sold by the sharecropper family which was one reason for all of the road side off the back of the truck/wagon stands.
Is that all bad? If we don’t tax internet incomes below certain levels, we do enable a steady drip of income back to small pots. Thus e-bay is a winner. That’s one. Where farmers can lease land for wind farming and get a cut plus electricity for selling back into the grid, that’s two.
There is a brilliant comedy series from Canada called “Red Green” well worth watching. Some dumb ideas work. Again, electrical generation is as simple as turning a wheel and there are LOTS of sources of motion for turning small wheels. The essential problem is storage. McCain’s battery contest actually makes sense in the small.
What constraints can we relax? I’m pretty happy with a smaller house and car if I’ve not much debt to worry with. I don’t need to keep up with the Jones because they aren’t going anywhere I need to be.
When the hippies left the Haight to Get Back To The Country, they had the right idea, but communes aren’t a great lifestyle and free love never is.
But small and tight is still beautiful. It requires discipline. That is the nut of Obama’s problem. He has to sell an idea that Carter couldn’t sell.
There are some awfully talented people here. How would you sell discipline to the engorged without using fear?
Jimmy Carter told us we needed to discipline ourselves. Reagan told us we deserved a bigger portion. Reagan won. Sad but so.
You say we are way beyond that. I’m not so sure. We aren’t they then so there’s no objective judgement here.
Obama campaigns against the politics of fear but Rush is there to tell us global warming IS fear. So we wait for the newest polling numbers and celebrities to make up our minds for us.
Ah nuts. As the old poster with the vultures said, “Patience my a**.
I for one, think you are right. Again, No Product No Market No Sale No Pay. We hollowed out our economy. Now we’re running out of furniture to burn or will eventually. Budweiser is a Belgian Beer. Oddly enough, that sort of thing isn’t lost on the redneck class. A PBR just won’t do and Schlitz is beer a bear won’t drink.
The average redneck will start looking for solutions. They aren’t patient types and handouts aren’t in their blood. It might be a good idea to tell our inner hippie to be mellow and get our inner redneck to work.
I’ve no answers but also only one credit card and I seldom use it. PayPal acts like a storage battery and if a few cents dribbles in here and there, at some intevals, I can buy new software toys. The key to lifestyle is spending discipline and multiple pots of even if slow, growing income sources.
We have some strange transitions to make. It’s easy to go incindiary about the MIC. Are you looking at the high tech industry? Compare the return for Microsoft to the national economy by selling operating systems then look at what Linux does by turning it all into services? It opens opportunities but are these really offsetting the damage done by the open wars on MS by the open source communities? Not in theory, but in actual dollars? What is it doing to the music industry to drive the value of music content to zero? Did production costs really go to zero (no, they didn’t) and is a tour-based/t-shirt economy that profitable?
Buffet talks about the sharecropper economy. (there are sources that predate him for that model but is nice he uses it because the rest of us who did got beat up for being racists). I use the term, ‘watermelon economy’ because it points out that the sharecroppers were left with a piece of free enterprise: their watermelon patch. It was traditional to let the family patch be solely used and sold by the sharecropper family which was one reason for all of the road side off the back of the truck/wagon stands.
Is that all bad? If we don’t tax internet incomes below certain levels, we do enable a steady drip of income back to small pots. Thus e-bay is a winner. That’s one. Where farmers can lease land for wind farming and get a cut plus electricity for selling back into the grid, that’s two.
There is a brilliant comedy series from Canada called “Red Green” well worth watching. Some dumb ideas work. Again, electrical generation is as simple as turning a wheel and there are LOTS of sources of motion for turning small wheels. The essential problem is storage. McCain’s battery contest actually makes sense in the small.
What constraints can we relax? I’m pretty happy with a smaller house and car if I’ve not much debt to worry with. I don’t need to keep up with the Jones because they aren’t going anywhere I need to be.
When the hippies left the Haight to Get Back To The Country, they had the right idea, but communes aren’t a great lifestyle and free love never is.
But small and tight is still beautiful. It requires discipline. That is the nut of Obama’s problem. He has to sell an idea that Carter couldn’t sell.
There are some awfully talented people here. How would you sell discipline to the engorged without using fear?
Morgan
When you run out of Ideas you run out of money, unless of course you don’t travel. Your credit is as bad or good as your performance. The way the world sees the US is directly related to your performance, changes are not bad as such, as long as the performance is improved.
I am just a tourist here speaking from the south-south and I want to make sure that I am not involved in this discussion, pros and cons, this is an Internal affair that you guys will have to resolve as I am sure you will.
No arrogance.
Bernard
Morgan
When you run out of Ideas you run out of money, unless of course you don’t travel. Your credit is as bad or good as your performance. The way the world sees the US is directly related to your performance, changes are not bad as such, as long as the performance is improved.
I am just a tourist here speaking from the south-south and I want to make sure that I am not involved in this discussion, pros and cons, this is an Internal affair that you guys will have to resolve as I am sure you will.
No arrogance.
Bernard
Notice that I proposed a tax ($1/gal.) that would generate $146 billion per year to invest in new infrastructure, which in turn would easily generate the 600,000 new jobs Paulson promised from the stimulus checks. Those jobs never materialized.
As for myself, I am going to ignore the troll and continue to try to have a decent dialogue with the rest of you about real solutions to the coming crisis.
Notice that I proposed a tax ($1/gal.) that would generate $146 billion per year to invest in new infrastructure, which in turn would easily generate the 600,000 new jobs Paulson promised from the stimulus checks. Those jobs never materialized.
As for myself, I am going to ignore the troll and continue to try to have a decent dialogue with the rest of you about real solutions to the coming crisis.
Solutions?
America no longer understands sacrifice for the great good. If people are given a choice between paying less for gas or guaranteeing the existence of their jobs and homes for another 50 years, they’ll choice the former. Carter found that out the hard way. In 5-10 years, we might be able to raise the gas tax, but the entire American economy is based around the concept of cheap gas. If you increase the price of gas, you destroy everyone except the rich.
So, what can be done? Simply put, the US needs to remove fossil fuels from the equation if it is going to avoid a complete collapse. The equation is simple. Withdraw from Iraq and massively downsize the military. Invest that money into alternative energy and battery technology. Even with our atrophying science education infrastructure, we’ve got some miracles left in this country. Spend to find them.
Make geothermal a mandate for every new house built (why not?). Offer outrageous sums for improved solar technology (plants are close to 100% efficient, why aren’t we?). Tax the hell out of every new car that isn’t at least a hybrid. Offer the mother of all tax incentives to the car company that sells the most battery-powered cars in this country. Let the car companies compete to saturate the market. Oh and by the way, solar energy + water = hydrogen fueling stations, if we want to go that way.
Have the US Navy build and run nuke plants. It may only be a temporary solution, but it helps solve the immediate energy problem and it keeps funneling funds into the military. They’re the only group in the country with current experience in handling nuclear power, so lets draw on that expertise.
Balance the budget by raising the tax rate on wealthy people and corporations. We need a lot of money and fast. The poor are tapped out thanks to the non-progressive economic policies of the past 30 years. So the rich are going to have to pay. Fix the corporate income tax. Why are 2/3 of US companies not paying taxes?
After that, we need to fix the infrastructure of this country. In order
1. Healthcare
2. Public Education
3. Retirement
4. Rail System
But the overall problem is that all of this requires raising taxes and sacrifices on the parts of Americans. It will require a President of unprecedented charisma to convince Americans that these measures are both necessary and beneficial. Is Obama up to it? I’ve got no idea. He is clearly better than the alternatives. But is that enough?
Solutions?
America no longer understands sacrifice for the great good. If people are given a choice between paying less for gas or guaranteeing the existence of their jobs and homes for another 50 years, they’ll choice the former. Carter found that out the hard way. In 5-10 years, we might be able to raise the gas tax, but the entire American economy is based around the concept of cheap gas. If you increase the price of gas, you destroy everyone except the rich.
So, what can be done? Simply put, the US needs to remove fossil fuels from the equation if it is going to avoid a complete collapse. The equation is simple. Withdraw from Iraq and massively downsize the military. Invest that money into alternative energy and battery technology. Even with our atrophying science education infrastructure, we’ve got some miracles left in this country. Spend to find them.
Make geothermal a mandate for every new house built (why not?). Offer outrageous sums for improved solar technology (plants are close to 100% efficient, why aren’t we?). Tax the hell out of every new car that isn’t at least a hybrid. Offer the mother of all tax incentives to the car company that sells the most battery-powered cars in this country. Let the car companies compete to saturate the market. Oh and by the way, solar energy + water = hydrogen fueling stations, if we want to go that way.
Have the US Navy build and run nuke plants. It may only be a temporary solution, but it helps solve the immediate energy problem and it keeps funneling funds into the military. They’re the only group in the country with current experience in handling nuclear power, so lets draw on that expertise.
Balance the budget by raising the tax rate on wealthy people and corporations. We need a lot of money and fast. The poor are tapped out thanks to the non-progressive economic policies of the past 30 years. So the rich are going to have to pay. Fix the corporate income tax. Why are 2/3 of US companies not paying taxes?
After that, we need to fix the infrastructure of this country. In order
1. Healthcare
2. Public Education
3. Retirement
4. Rail System
But the overall problem is that all of this requires raising taxes and sacrifices on the parts of Americans. It will require a President of unprecedented charisma to convince Americans that these measures are both necessary and beneficial. Is Obama up to it? I’ve got no idea. He is clearly better than the alternatives. But is that enough?
Crimsoncor, with a few score million more folks who think your way, we’d be on our way to real solutions and real community wealth in the US. I’ll vote for that platform.
Crimsoncor, with a few score million more folks who think your way, we’d be on our way to real solutions and real community wealth in the US. I’ll vote for that platform.
I believe that the free-lunch mentality is at the heart of America’s political and economic crisis.
In Maryland, I’ve called the minority party the Free-Lunch Libertarian Nativist Party, and the majority party is the Tax And Spend Party.
That’s the fundamental choice before the American voter: Free Lunch or Tax And Spend.
I don’t apologize for Tax And Spend, which many take as a slur. Let’s be honest. Government’s job is to tax and spend. If you don’t have the TAX side, you can’t have the SPEND side, and lots of spending is needed for infrastructure and the social safety net.
But I’m not at all confident that either politicians or bloggers will be able to sell Tax And Spend to the American public. The promise of a Free Lunch is so much more appealing. — Bernie
I believe that the free-lunch mentality is at the heart of America’s political and economic crisis.
In Maryland, I’ve called the minority party the Free-Lunch Libertarian Nativist Party, and the majority party is the Tax And Spend Party.
That’s the fundamental choice before the American voter: Free Lunch or Tax And Spend.
I don’t apologize for Tax And Spend, which many take as a slur. Let’s be honest. Government’s job is to tax and spend. If you don’t have the TAX side, you can’t have the SPEND side, and lots of spending is needed for infrastructure and the social safety net.
But I’m not at all confident that either politicians or bloggers will be able to sell Tax And Spend to the American public. The promise of a Free Lunch is so much more appealing. — Bernie
Nuclear navy is seems like pure genius.
You can’t actually tax corporations. It is either higher prices, or less dividends into the pension funds. So pass there. BUT, you can tax the shit out of consumption.
Since we all agree we now have to focus on balancing budgets, we need to find cuts that make sense:
What we can really do, is provide top notch Medicare until someone is say 85 years old, and then stop providing free treatment.
We can encourage the old to move back in with their kids if they retire, let them babysit in their old age.
Maybe taxing retirement is an idea who’s time has come. Maybe we should get rid of the estate tax, and instead tax people when they stop working, while they are still alive. Work till you are dead, and skip the tax man.
Push social security out to 72 years old.
We need to bring competition and choice to education, make it a young teacher’s game. End tenure. Napsterize classrooms.
Open door immigration.
These SMALL changes would MORE THAN FUND a new rail system and still pay off the debt.
Nuclear navy is seems like pure genius.
You can’t actually tax corporations. It is either higher prices, or less dividends into the pension funds. So pass there. BUT, you can tax the shit out of consumption.
Since we all agree we now have to focus on balancing budgets, we need to find cuts that make sense:
What we can really do, is provide top notch Medicare until someone is say 85 years old, and then stop providing free treatment.
We can encourage the old to move back in with their kids if they retire, let them babysit in their old age.
Maybe taxing retirement is an idea who’s time has come. Maybe we should get rid of the estate tax, and instead tax people when they stop working, while they are still alive. Work till you are dead, and skip the tax man.
Push social security out to 72 years old.
We need to bring competition and choice to education, make it a young teacher’s game. End tenure. Napsterize classrooms.
Open door immigration.
These SMALL changes would MORE THAN FUND a new rail system and still pay off the debt.
Then we have to teach them where to find a free lunch. Non-fattening. We have abundance but we don’t share. We hoard.
We’re the willing food of the pundits of a prosperity that isn’t prosperous. We use plastic cards to buy disposable clothes and fast food. We embrace isms to stoke endorphin fires in our brains and we wake every morning hung over from our rage induced nightmares.
We are the fatheads of a generation of high blood pressure and low self-esteem, sex-obsessed, Viagra-fueled, goth rock and raps of rape and misogyny. We’ve forgotten that our children are not us and our children never learned that their children will inherit their mistakes because we don’t admit we made any.
We’re scared to get old and too greedy to live. We won’t endure pain and we can’t stop working. We live for a summer of love long gone and forget that a snow-locked day with one lover is better than all the days spent dancing by ourselves among the multitudes.
We dream of peace. We’re desperate for peace.
We are selling water by the river to buy the desert by the mountains. We’ve forgotten how to laugh and we can’t stop crying.
“Earth Mother your children are here
High on coke and candy.”
Then we have to teach them where to find a free lunch. Non-fattening. We have abundance but we don’t share. We hoard.
We’re the willing food of the pundits of a prosperity that isn’t prosperous. We use plastic cards to buy disposable clothes and fast food. We embrace isms to stoke endorphin fires in our brains and we wake every morning hung over from our rage induced nightmares.
We are the fatheads of a generation of high blood pressure and low self-esteem, sex-obsessed, Viagra-fueled, goth rock and raps of rape and misogyny. We’ve forgotten that our children are not us and our children never learned that their children will inherit their mistakes because we don’t admit we made any.
We’re scared to get old and too greedy to live. We won’t endure pain and we can’t stop working. We live for a summer of love long gone and forget that a snow-locked day with one lover is better than all the days spent dancing by ourselves among the multitudes.
We dream of peace. We’re desperate for peace.
We are selling water by the river to buy the desert by the mountains. We’ve forgotten how to laugh and we can’t stop crying.
“Earth Mother your children are here
High on coke and candy.”
Crimsoncor-The kind of solutions you are presenting is just what this blog was set up for. Thanks somuch for your fabulous input.
Crimsoncor-The kind of solutions you are presenting is just what this blog was set up for. Thanks somuch for your fabulous input.
Thanks jon.
I can take partial credit for the nuclear navy idea. I’ve never heard anyone else advocate for the navy building terrestrial nuc plants (though I do not claim to be extensively versed). However, I got the idea from Kim Stanley Robinison, who in his “40 Days of Rain” novel suggested using existing Naval ships as power generators to take high polluting power plants off line. Just dock the ships and plug them into the grid. Of course, his book is set after we’ve screwed ourselves with climate change. We’ve still got some time to hopefully avoid that, but the Navy is still a great resource for nuclear expertise.
It is also a way to keep the military budget high, without encouraging empire (something you and I both fear, Jon). You could do something similar with the Army and channel it into growing out the Engineering Corp to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. See, we need a President who will “Declare War on America’s Problems”.”
Thanks jon.
I can take partial credit for the nuclear navy idea. I’ve never heard anyone else advocate for the navy building terrestrial nuc plants (though I do not claim to be extensively versed). However, I got the idea from Kim Stanley Robinison, who in his “40 Days of Rain” novel suggested using existing Naval ships as power generators to take high polluting power plants off line. Just dock the ships and plug them into the grid. Of course, his book is set after we’ve screwed ourselves with climate change. We’ve still got some time to hopefully avoid that, but the Navy is still a great resource for nuclear expertise.
It is also a way to keep the military budget high, without encouraging empire (something you and I both fear, Jon). You could do something similar with the Army and channel it into growing out the Engineering Corp to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. See, we need a President who will “Declare War on America’s Problems”.”
“We need a President who will Declare War on America’s Problems” and a Populace that will do the same. But, it can’t be the military that takes on this task though I see your reasoning. It has to be civilian and voluntary and funded by a true shift in priority.
“We need a President who will Declare War on America’s Problems” and a Populace that will do the same. But, it can’t be the military that takes on this task though I see your reasoning. It has to be civilian and voluntary and funded by a true shift in priority.
Hi all. I’ve been a longtime reader, though for this particular discussion I feel like I can contribute a few tidbits of commentary for the first time.
I agree with crimsoncore’s general intent, although I think the approaches can be refined:
- Instead of a geothermal mandate for homes, how about an energy-intensity or efficiency mandate? Performance-based standards usually work better than technology-forcing (e.g. Clean Air Act), and efficiency is usually cheaper in most cases.
- Taxing inefficient cars is a great idea, especially if you push the revenues into rebates for the clean ones. However, a winner-take-all tax incentive may or may not encourage industry-wide competition; relative technical laggards like the Big 3 may decide it is cheaper to fight the regulations than put together a risky catch-up plan for the single-winner tax prize.
- While offering huge incentives for technological improvement can yield early results, it’s important to use those subsidies properly so the industry does not become dependent on them (e.g. agriculture). More important than any X-Prizes are the market fundamentals that make sure renewables can compete fairly with all forms of energy, including efficiency. In a fair fight, efficiency and renewables would win hands down.
- Solar-powered hydrogen cars are still economically a ways off, but in the meantime natural gas would allow the hydrogen economy to wedge itself into consumer culture much earlier than if we waited for the 100% renewable solution. While natgas is a fossil fuel, it’s not as scare and would reduce CO2 emissions by >50% compared to gasoline.
- Re: Navy running nuclear plants… we could get a lot more climate mitigation per buck by using that defense money for renewables. Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute has the details on how nuclear is cost prohibitive: http://rmi.org/sitepages/pid504.php [ a nice chart is at http://rmi.org/images/articles/Newsletter/s08/rminls08-11.jpg ]. Personally, I would want to stay away from nuclear power just for security reasons: if nuclear power is too expensive, then that removes the pretense for other nations to be refining it. The U.S., in cooperation with other nations, could set a clear example by choosing renewable development over nuclear development. As for reliability, sufficiently-distributed turbines can provide a more stable
baseload than nuclear plants, so a sufficiently-large network combined with a modern infrastructure should be able to handle things without the need for nuclear plants.
In any event, that’s just my take. I hope I’ve contributed positively to the discussion. This blog is always a good source of insight… keep up the good work!
Hi all. I’ve been a longtime reader, though for this particular discussion I feel like I can contribute a few tidbits of commentary for the first time.
I agree with crimsoncore’s general intent, although I think the approaches can be refined:
- Instead of a geothermal mandate for homes, how about an energy-intensity or efficiency mandate? Performance-based standards usually work better than technology-forcing (e.g. Clean Air Act), and efficiency is usually cheaper in most cases.
- Taxing inefficient cars is a great idea, especially if you push the revenues into rebates for the clean ones. However, a winner-take-all tax incentive may or may not encourage industry-wide competition; relative technical laggards like the Big 3 may decide it is cheaper to fight the regulations than put together a risky catch-up plan for the single-winner tax prize.
- While offering huge incentives for technological improvement can yield early results, it’s important to use those subsidies properly so the industry does not become dependent on them (e.g. agriculture). More important than any X-Prizes are the market fundamentals that make sure renewables can compete fairly with all forms of energy, including efficiency. In a fair fight, efficiency and renewables would win hands down.
- Solar-powered hydrogen cars are still economically a ways off, but in the meantime natural gas would allow the hydrogen economy to wedge itself into consumer culture much earlier than if we waited for the 100% renewable solution. While natgas is a fossil fuel, it’s not as scare and would reduce CO2 emissions by >50% compared to gasoline.
- Re: Navy running nuclear plants… we could get a lot more climate mitigation per buck by using that defense money for renewables. Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute has the details on how nuclear is cost prohibitive: http://rmi.org/sitepages/pid504.php [ a nice chart is at http://rmi.org/images/articles/Newsletter/s08/rminls08-11.jpg ]. Personally, I would want to stay away from nuclear power just for security reasons: if nuclear power is too expensive, then that removes the pretense for other nations to be refining it. The U.S., in cooperation with other nations, could set a clear example by choosing renewable development over nuclear development. As for reliability, sufficiently-distributed turbines can provide a more stable
baseload than nuclear plants, so a sufficiently-large network combined with a modern infrastructure should be able to handle things without the need for nuclear plants.
In any event, that’s just my take. I hope I’ve contributed positively to the discussion. This blog is always a good source of insight… keep up the good work!
Bear in mind that it is the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics that makes most of the nuke subs and GE that makes most of the reactors. The Navy runs them and maintains them…quite well, indeed.
Bear in mind that it is the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics that makes most of the nuke subs and GE that makes most of the reactors. The Navy runs them and maintains them…quite well, indeed.
Jon,
I truly learn a lot from you, regularly, about finance and macroeconomics (and, from Rick, about microeconomics and small business.) Not like my college days, when I was averse to the “dismal [quasi-] science”, and had to fake my way through it. Part of it is the practiced and considered clarity and zing of your style, and the impeccable minimalism of Rick’s. But mainly because your economic (and also cultural) writing, and that of some of your correspondents here, is plainly authoritative yet immediate and approachable, rather than pedantic.
Two-thirds of the way through your otherwise excellent essay, you turn to the history of modern American political economics, and then conclude with a sweeping endorsement of Mr. Obama. That, I believe, is where you part from the historical record as well as from an incontrovertible fact concerning Mr. Obama.
The Republicans of course scapegoat FDR as the pioneer of American Big Government (guilty as charged), but they confuse this with Free Lunch-ism. FDR may have been a cunning and shameless vote-buyer, but he did it much as Hitler did: he promised to put people to WORK, he restored their personal pride and called upon them to rise to the occasion. This took quite well with the Folk, both in the Original evil empire and over here. And sure enough FDR, with varying degrees of success and probity, promptly made every effort to deliver. It seems to me that generating employment and calling upon the People to honor themselves and their labor is pretty much the opposite of the Free Lunch, the soup line.
FDR was not the American inventor of this quid pro quo approach; two Republicans were: the progressive TR and the conservative Hoover, both of whom were rejected by the voters before they could operationalize their programs. (In Hoover’s case, because Democrats, determined to regain the White House, very effectively scapegoated, obstructed and outmaneuvered the plodding Hoover until he was left holding the bag for the whole damned Great Depression.) But even before Election Day FDR was, quite rightly, assembling a team to cadge, glean, and glom onto anything that would generate employment and stimulate the economy, regardless of its provenance. His handpicked “Brain Trust” was to begin with TR’s platform of 1912, in which FDR himself was an expert. (TR, a cousin very removed from FDR’s branch of the family, was FDR’s lifelong and increasingly secret hero; he went so far as to court and marry TR’s only niece.) FDR’s wisemen were directed next to conduct a salvage operation on Hoover’s sunken program. Then FDR’s Keynesians kicked in, and the Administration’s New Deal was off and running.
The actual Father Freelunchitudinous was neither Mr. Square Deal nor his secret sycophant Mr. New Deal; it was Mr. Great Society. Lyndon managed to make a mockery of the New Deal that had sired and nurtured his political career. He turned FDR’s vote-buying offer of hard, honorable work — as well as the People’s commission from JFK to summon the intrepidity to reach toward a New Frontier — into vote-buying-as-free-lunch. LBJ was the first person in human history to suborn an electorate at the cost of ten digits’ worth of handouts. The man positively cornered the worldwide market in political gaming. He rendered sham all-givers from Mexico City to Beijing mere pikers by comparison. Every ancestral power maniac clear back to the Early Pleisticine — including old Joe Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller! — had been playing the nickel slots; Johnson owned the whole casino, with a neon sign screaming, “FREE LUNCH!”
Even Richard Nixon, that nice Quaker mama’s boy, had to weasel his way onto the appointment calendar of Mephistopheles himself just to have the remotest shot at topping LBJ.
It is quite true that Reagan’s deregulators invited the Savings and Loans to dispurse the fiat money that bought many plastic mansions, champagne wishes and caviar dreams while dotting the Western United States with cheapjack chromium office buildings for which there was no market, and making insurance claimants of practically every owner of a condominium built from 1983-89 anywhere within a devil’s triangle bigger than most countries; construction defect claims so solid and, in the aggregate, so costly to honor and so pointless to litigate that the American insurance industry, fearing collapse, had to plead for a government bailout carrying a price tag that afflicted every state government concerned, as well as — improbable as this may seem — Capitol Hill with such severe sticker-shock that, once the blankets and smelling salts had been administered and the obligatory dog-and-pony hearings held, the nation’s Capitol and the statehouses concluded that the better part of valor was to sweep the whole thing under the rug and stiff the citizenry in favor of the insurance lobby. But hey, old Dutch meant well. He was just trying to pull his country out of its long-running recession. Besides, he’d been Rasputinized by a (very) certain professor of economics from a certain university, both to remain nameless, except to say: Who would know more about funny money than a Laffer?
As for Mr. Obama, he seeks quite openly to become the biggest spender of them all. Take a necessarily high-shutterspeed snapshot of the candidate’s ever-changing Mega-program of mondo-programs. Total it out. When I ran this simple exercise, back before Barack had bested Hillary, next thing I knew I was on the ground, waking up to the astringent odor of ammonia.
Da noive a deese people!
Jon,
I truly learn a lot from you, regularly, about finance and macroeconomics (and, from Rick, about microeconomics and small business.) Not like my college days, when I was averse to the “dismal [quasi-] science”, and had to fake my way through it. Part of it is the practiced and considered clarity and zing of your style, and the impeccable minimalism of Rick’s. But mainly because your economic (and also cultural) writing, and that of some of your correspondents here, is plainly authoritative yet immediate and approachable, rather than pedantic.
Two-thirds of the way through your otherwise excellent essay, you turn to the history of modern American political economics, and then conclude with a sweeping endorsement of Mr. Obama. That, I believe, is where you part from the historical record as well as from an incontrovertible fact concerning Mr. Obama.
The Republicans of course scapegoat FDR as the pioneer of American Big Government (guilty as charged), but they confuse this with Free Lunch-ism. FDR may have been a cunning and shameless vote-buyer, but he did it much as Hitler did: he promised to put people to WORK, he restored their personal pride and called upon them to rise to the occasion. This took quite well with the Folk, both in the Original evil empire and over here. And sure enough FDR, with varying degrees of success and probity, promptly made every effort to deliver. It seems to me that generating employment and calling upon the People to honor themselves and their labor is pretty much the opposite of the Free Lunch, the soup line.
FDR was not the American inventor of this quid pro quo approach; two Republicans were: the progressive TR and the conservative Hoover, both of whom were rejected by the voters before they could operationalize their programs. (In Hoover’s case, because Democrats, determined to regain the White House, very effectively scapegoated, obstructed and outmaneuvered the plodding Hoover until he was left holding the bag for the whole damned Great Depression.) But even before Election Day FDR was, quite rightly, assembling a team to cadge, glean, and glom onto anything that would generate employment and stimulate the economy, regardless of its provenance. His handpicked “Brain Trust” was to begin with TR’s platform of 1912, in which FDR himself was an expert. (TR, a cousin very removed from FDR’s branch of the family, was FDR’s lifelong and increasingly secret hero; he went so far as to court and marry TR’s only niece.) FDR’s wisemen were directed next to conduct a salvage operation on Hoover’s sunken program. Then FDR’s Keynesians kicked in, and the Administration’s New Deal was off and running.
The actual Father Freelunchitudinous was neither Mr. Square Deal nor his secret sycophant Mr. New Deal; it was Mr. Great Society. Lyndon managed to make a mockery of the New Deal that had sired and nurtured his political career. He turned FDR’s vote-buying offer of hard, honorable work — as well as the People’s commission from JFK to summon the intrepidity to reach toward a New Frontier — into vote-buying-as-free-lunch. LBJ was the first person in human history to suborn an electorate at the cost of ten digits’ worth of handouts. The man positively cornered the worldwide market in political gaming. He rendered sham all-givers from Mexico City to Beijing mere pikers by comparison. Every ancestral power maniac clear back to the Early Pleisticine — including old Joe Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller! — had been playing the nickel slots; Johnson owned the whole casino, with a neon sign screaming, “FREE LUNCH!”
Even Richard Nixon, that nice Quaker mama’s boy, had to weasel his way onto the appointment calendar of Mephistopheles himself just to have the remotest shot at topping LBJ.
It is quite true that Reagan’s deregulators invited the Savings and Loans to dispurse the fiat money that bought many plastic mansions, champagne wishes and caviar dreams while dotting the Western United States with cheapjack chromium office buildings for which there was no market, and making insurance claimants of practically every owner of a condominium built from 1983-89 anywhere within a devil’s triangle bigger than most countries; construction defect claims so solid and, in the aggregate, so costly to honor and so pointless to litigate that the American insurance industry, fearing collapse, had to plead for a government bailout carrying a price tag that afflicted every state government concerned, as well as — improbable as this may seem — Capitol Hill with such severe sticker-shock that, once the blankets and smelling salts had been administered and the obligatory dog-and-pony hearings held, the nation’s Capitol and the statehouses concluded that the better part of valor was to sweep the whole thing under the rug and stiff the citizenry in favor of the insurance lobby. But hey, old Dutch meant well. He was just trying to pull his country out of its long-running recession. Besides, he’d been Rasputinized by a (very) certain professor of economics from a certain university, both to remain nameless, except to say: Who would know more about funny money than a Laffer?
As for Mr. Obama, he seeks quite openly to become the biggest spender of them all. Take a necessarily high-shutterspeed snapshot of the candidate’s ever-changing Mega-program of mondo-programs. Total it out. When I ran this simple exercise, back before Barack had bested Hillary, next thing I knew I was on the ground, waking up to the astringent odor of ammonia.
Da noive a deese people!
Al Gore and the non-Rubin wing of the Clinton White House tried hard to put a carbon tax in place during the epic budget battle of 1993. But apart from that moment, Democrats have pretty consistently engaged in the same demagogic fake outrage over high gas prices as the Republicans have. It’s pretty pathetic.
Somebody needs to have the political courage to put this kind of tax back on the agenda. It would help if more libertarian-leaning Republican politicians did some of the work by backing Greg Mankiw’s <a href=”http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/pigou-club-manifesto.html”Pigou Club.
Conservatives generally prefer consumption taxes to income taxes. Maybe a compromise could be reached which gave conservatives some ground on the style of taxation we use (from income to consumption) while giving liberals some ground on where we direct our revenues (from unilateral world-policing to fixing our own broken infrastructure)?
Note that Pigouvian taxes don’t have to be regressive — tax incidence could be engineered to address fairness concerns.
Al Gore and the non-Rubin wing of the Clinton White House tried hard to put a carbon tax in place during the epic budget battle of 1993. But apart from that moment, Democrats have pretty consistently engaged in the same demagogic fake outrage over high gas prices as the Republicans have. It’s pretty pathetic.
Somebody needs to have the political courage to put this kind of tax back on the agenda. It would help if more libertarian-leaning Republican politicians did some of the work by backing Greg Mankiw’s <a href=”http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/pigou-club-manifesto.html”Pigou Club.
Conservatives generally prefer consumption taxes to income taxes. Maybe a compromise could be reached which gave conservatives some ground on the style of taxation we use (from income to consumption) while giving liberals some ground on where we direct our revenues (from unilateral world-policing to fixing our own broken infrastructure)?
Note that Pigouvian taxes don’t have to be regressive — tax incidence could be engineered to address fairness concerns.
Sorry, I garbled that link to le Club Pigou.
Sorry, I garbled that link to le Club Pigou.
Been spending a lot of travel time listening to podcasts of “Bill Moyers Journal”. It’s like having an audible extension of this forum. Moyers came back to NPR because, like many of us, he wanted to try to influence change in a country he perceives as moving in a very dangerous direction.
Some major highlights have included Mickey Edwards and Ross Douthat discussing what has gone wrong with the conservative movement and what it would take to make it viable again (e.g. going back to being the party of small business rather than controlled by mega-cooperations). A really intelligent discussion that reminds one of the fact that not all conservatives are shrill and irrational.
I’ve replayed a two parter Moyers did with Thomas Frank (another conservative) the first being a discussion of Frank’s new book “The Wreaking Crew” which started out with this gem:
BILL MOYERS: Your book describes conservatism as “an expression of American business.” Why exclude Democrats? Jimmy Carter triggered the deregulation frenzy. Bill Clinton pushed for NAFTA, signed the Telecommunications Act of l996 which gave the megamedia companies everything they wanted, auctioned off the Lincoln Bedroom, and swooned over Robert Rubin while showing Robert Reich the door. Democratic Congresses were shaking down corporations when George W. Bush was still tipsy in Texas. And who was running Congress during the S&L swindles of the late 80s? Why single out conservatives as the greedy party?
THOMAS FRANK: Democrats can be conservatives too, of course. In fact, certain Democrats’ embrace of the free-market faith has been just as consequential as the Republicans’ own move to the right. When the Democrats gave up on FDR and came around to the ideology of Reagan, the opposition ceased to oppose. ”
As many people in this forum have pointed out, the Dems are as deep in complicity for our problems as the Republicans, and that phrase “the opposition ceased to oppose” along with his other insights helps explain why electing a Dem majority will not be enough; we will have to make them responsible for working on solutions, not just being your father’s Democratic Party.
The other Thomas Frank interview was actually a very prescient rebroadcast from 2004, when he was promoting his “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” which built a powerful argument that the culture wars were over and the majority last to the wealthy minority, because neither party was doing anything to change the economic problems the majority were facing, so it made sense to vote for the party that addressed the “values” issues in an attempt to get something for their vote. The irony, Frank pointed out, was that this causes the majority to vote against their own interests consistently.
Moyers’ most recent program featured Andrew Bacevich, who was touting his new book “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism” was very powerful, and a major extension of your post Jon, and the majority of responses to it (other than he who shall not be named).
Sorry for the long quotes, but these interviews, as I said, are such natural extensions of this forum that it’s well worth listening to the podcasts, or reading the transcripts. Here’s the heart of Bacevich’s book:
“BILL MOYERS: It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book in which I highlighted practically every third sentence. So, it took me a while to read, what is in fact, a rather short book. You began with a quote from the Bible, the Book of Second Kings, chapter 20, verse one. “Set thine house in order.” How come that admonition?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I’ve been troubled by the course of U.S. foreign policy for a long, long time. And I wrote the book in order to sort out my own thinking about where our basic problems lay. And I really reached the conclusion that our biggest problems are within.
I think there’s a tendency on the part of policy makers and probably a tendency on the part of many Americans to think that the problems we face are problems that are out there somewhere, beyond our borders. And that if we can fix those problems, then we’ll be able to continue the American way of life as it has long existed. I think it’s fundamentally wrong. Our major problems are at home.
BILL MOYERS: So, this is a version of “Physician, heal thyself?”
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, yes, “Physician, heal thyself,” and you begin healing yourself by looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing yourself as you really are.
BILL MOYERS: Here is one of those neon sentences. Quote, “The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people,” you write, “is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.” In other words, you’re saying that our foreign policy is the result of a dependence on consumer goods and credit.”
As many of us have said in various forms, American Politicians (possibly/ probably including Obama) are caught in a trap of their own success of convincing people that morning in America is a viable endless spending spree that never has the bill come due, and our politicians are as unwilling as the public to call attention to the truth, because they know the public will punish them if they do.
Many of us keep assuming it’s just a matter of getting the right people elected, but what so many of these very, very bright and “conservative” guests are saying is that it wont be that simple. I totally agree with Hugo that Johnson’s guns and butter was as anti-New Deal as anything the neo-con thing tanks ever came up with, and he was a Dem. Clinton was as conservative on economics and war as any Republican. It wont be simple, especially if “liberals” get Obama elected, and think the job is done. Nothing so simple…
Sadly, this country will have to go through a major wringer to get to the point where people will vote their economic interests rather than just trying to undo the culture wars of the 60′s.
Been spending a lot of travel time listening to podcasts of “Bill Moyers Journal”. It’s like having an audible extension of this forum. Moyers came back to NPR because, like many of us, he wanted to try to influence change in a country he perceives as moving in a very dangerous direction.
Some major highlights have included Mickey Edwards and Ross Douthat discussing what has gone wrong with the conservative movement and what it would take to make it viable again (e.g. going back to being the party of small business rather than controlled by mega-cooperations). A really intelligent discussion that reminds one of the fact that not all conservatives are shrill and irrational.
I’ve replayed a two parter Moyers did with Thomas Frank (another conservative) the first being a discussion of Frank’s new book “The Wreaking Crew” which started out with this gem:
BILL MOYERS: Your book describes conservatism as “an expression of American business.” Why exclude Democrats? Jimmy Carter triggered the deregulation frenzy. Bill Clinton pushed for NAFTA, signed the Telecommunications Act of l996 which gave the megamedia companies everything they wanted, auctioned off the Lincoln Bedroom, and swooned over Robert Rubin while showing Robert Reich the door. Democratic Congresses were shaking down corporations when George W. Bush was still tipsy in Texas. And who was running Congress during the S&L swindles of the late 80s? Why single out conservatives as the greedy party?
THOMAS FRANK: Democrats can be conservatives too, of course. In fact, certain Democrats’ embrace of the free-market faith has been just as consequential as the Republicans’ own move to the right. When the Democrats gave up on FDR and came around to the ideology of Reagan, the opposition ceased to oppose. ”
As many people in this forum have pointed out, the Dems are as deep in complicity for our problems as the Republicans, and that phrase “the opposition ceased to oppose” along with his other insights helps explain why electing a Dem majority will not be enough; we will have to make them responsible for working on solutions, not just being your father’s Democratic Party.
The other Thomas Frank interview was actually a very prescient rebroadcast from 2004, when he was promoting his “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” which built a powerful argument that the culture wars were over and the majority last to the wealthy minority, because neither party was doing anything to change the economic problems the majority were facing, so it made sense to vote for the party that addressed the “values” issues in an attempt to get something for their vote. The irony, Frank pointed out, was that this causes the majority to vote against their own interests consistently.
Moyers’ most recent program featured Andrew Bacevich, who was touting his new book “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism” was very powerful, and a major extension of your post Jon, and the majority of responses to it (other than he who shall not be named).
Sorry for the long quotes, but these interviews, as I said, are such natural extensions of this forum that it’s well worth listening to the podcasts, or reading the transcripts. Here’s the heart of Bacevich’s book:
“BILL MOYERS: It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book in which I highlighted practically every third sentence. So, it took me a while to read, what is in fact, a rather short book. You began with a quote from the Bible, the Book of Second Kings, chapter 20, verse one. “Set thine house in order.” How come that admonition?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I’ve been troubled by the course of U.S. foreign policy for a long, long time. And I wrote the book in order to sort out my own thinking about where our basic problems lay. And I really reached the conclusion that our biggest problems are within.
I think there’s a tendency on the part of policy makers and probably a tendency on the part of many Americans to think that the problems we face are problems that are out there somewhere, beyond our borders. And that if we can fix those problems, then we’ll be able to continue the American way of life as it has long existed. I think it’s fundamentally wrong. Our major problems are at home.
BILL MOYERS: So, this is a version of “Physician, heal thyself?”
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, yes, “Physician, heal thyself,” and you begin healing yourself by looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing yourself as you really are.
BILL MOYERS: Here is one of those neon sentences. Quote, “The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people,” you write, “is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.” In other words, you’re saying that our foreign policy is the result of a dependence on consumer goods and credit.”
As many of us have said in various forms, American Politicians (possibly/ probably including Obama) are caught in a trap of their own success of convincing people that morning in America is a viable endless spending spree that never has the bill come due, and our politicians are as unwilling as the public to call attention to the truth, because they know the public will punish them if they do.
Many of us keep assuming it’s just a matter of getting the right people elected, but what so many of these very, very bright and “conservative” guests are saying is that it wont be that simple. I totally agree with Hugo that Johnson’s guns and butter was as anti-New Deal as anything the neo-con thing tanks ever came up with, and he was a Dem. Clinton was as conservative on economics and war as any Republican. It wont be simple, especially if “liberals” get Obama elected, and think the job is done. Nothing so simple…
Sadly, this country will have to go through a major wringer to get to the point where people will vote their economic interests rather than just trying to undo the culture wars of the 60′s.
It’s very late in the morning. Please use context to correct all the errors of wording and omissions. Sorry about having so many.
Why is it they only become so blazingly obvious after you hit “submit”?
It’s very late in the morning. Please use context to correct all the errors of wording and omissions. Sorry about having so many.
Why is it they only become so blazingly obvious after you hit “submit”?
Ken,
“we will have to make them responsible for working on solutions, not just being your father’s Democratic Party.”
Whatever the errors, they gloss themselves because the sense of your post is so clear. I find it really healthy that we are finding ourselves by recognizing that all sides have participated in creating and sustaining our current economic and political condition. As not only Bacevich and Frank but the illustrious Bill Maher have pointed out, we the people have been voting against our own interests.
Hugo, I need you to point me at the information that so floored you in Obama’s program. I don’t see him spending, I see him reallocating and reinfusing the economy with it.
Ken,
“we will have to make them responsible for working on solutions, not just being your father’s Democratic Party.”
Whatever the errors, they gloss themselves because the sense of your post is so clear. I find it really healthy that we are finding ourselves by recognizing that all sides have participated in creating and sustaining our current economic and political condition. As not only Bacevich and Frank but the illustrious Bill Maher have pointed out, we the people have been voting against our own interests.
Hugo, I need you to point me at the information that so floored you in Obama’s program. I don’t see him spending, I see him reallocating and reinfusing the economy with it.
The dumbest mistake in the campaign so far is the Obama supporters alienating the Clinton supporters. The Bay vs the Rest of the Democrats debacle is showing in the polls, and friends, Obama is losing.
Here is an article detailing a speech Bill Clinton made on clean energy.
http://earth2tech.com/2008/08/18/bill-clinton-10-things-the-us-government-should-do-for-clean-power/#more-6461
Obama has youth but without experience, judgement is just guesswork with a good speech. The Clinton’s have a history of getting things done and Bill’s speech is a compendium of some of the better ideas for doing it.
But we decided to make a statement instead of winning. How very Abbey Hoffman…
Maybe a miracle will happen in Denver, but I’m still convinced hope is not a strategy.
The dumbest mistake in the campaign so far is the Obama supporters alienating the Clinton supporters. The Bay vs the Rest of the Democrats debacle is showing in the polls, and friends, Obama is losing.
Here is an article detailing a speech Bill Clinton made on clean energy.
http://earth2tech.com/2008/08/18/bill-clinton-10-things-the-us-government-should-do-for-clean-power/#more-6461
Obama has youth but without experience, judgement is just guesswork with a good speech. The Clinton’s have a history of getting things done and Bill’s speech is a compendium of some of the better ideas for doing it.
But we decided to make a statement instead of winning. How very Abbey Hoffman…
Maybe a miracle will happen in Denver, but I’m still convinced hope is not a strategy.
The Culture War is over. Everybody lost.
The Culture War is over. Everybody lost.
rhbee1, civilian and voluntary . . . like joining the military? Look, the US governments creates thousands of jobs and pumps billions of dollars into the US economy through the military. Cutting that funding abruptly would be . . . disastrous at best. But reallocating the priorities of the military, while it would face some internal resistance (though mostly from career desk soldiers. Every combat soldier I’ve talked, minus one, to doesn’t want fight more wars), would be possible.
The military is already a regimented system designed to solve problems. It is also a giant cog in the US economy. So while we can and should reduce the overall amount of military spending, we’re still going to spending countless billions on the military.
So lets have it go for something useful. What soldier doesn’t want to feel like she’s helping to save her country? If it is designing/building highways or nuclear power plants, rather than getting needless killed in Iraq, what could be better?
But all the talk about needing national service/civilian involvement overlooks the fact that the military is already a giant engine of civilian service. It just needs to be repurposed from empire building to nation building.
Quick list of things the military already has expertise in that just needs to be expanded:
Nuclear Power
Dam Construction
Road Building
Bridge Building
Police Work
Emergency Medicine
and that’s just the stuff off the top of my head. I’m sure there is lots more expertise buried in the military. Lets get more value for our money.
rhbee1, civilian and voluntary . . . like joining the military? Look, the US governments creates thousands of jobs and pumps billions of dollars into the US economy through the military. Cutting that funding abruptly would be . . . disastrous at best. But reallocating the priorities of the military, while it would face some internal resistance (though mostly from career desk soldiers. Every combat soldier I’ve talked, minus one, to doesn’t want fight more wars), would be possible.
The military is already a regimented system designed to solve problems. It is also a giant cog in the US economy. So while we can and should reduce the overall amount of military spending, we’re still going to spending countless billions on the military.
So lets have it go for something useful. What soldier doesn’t want to feel like she’s helping to save her country? If it is designing/building highways or nuclear power plants, rather than getting needless killed in Iraq, what could be better?
But all the talk about needing national service/civilian involvement overlooks the fact that the military is already a giant engine of civilian service. It just needs to be repurposed from empire building to nation building.
Quick list of things the military already has expertise in that just needs to be expanded:
Nuclear Power
Dam Construction
Road Building
Bridge Building
Police Work
Emergency Medicine
and that’s just the stuff off the top of my head. I’m sure there is lots more expertise buried in the military. Lets get more value for our money.
Three words: Posse Comitatus Act.
Otherwise the Corps of Engineers already does most of what you are describing. It would be helpful if they were over here instead of over there. In Katrina, they were noticeable by their absence.
Three words: Posse Comitatus Act.
Otherwise the Corps of Engineers already does most of what you are describing. It would be helpful if they were over here instead of over there. In Katrina, they were noticeable by their absence.
Coast Guard is already exempt from the Act, and it wouldn’t be hard for Congress to create other exceptions as needed.
The Corps of Engineers does a lot of this already, but on a much smaller scale. Give the Corps billions to play with, the manpower of the entire Army, and a mandate to fix America’ infrastructure and let them go to town.
Coast Guard is already exempt from the Act, and it wouldn’t be hard for Congress to create other exceptions as needed.
The Corps of Engineers does a lot of this already, but on a much smaller scale. Give the Corps billions to play with, the manpower of the entire Army, and a mandate to fix America’ infrastructure and let them go to town.
I guess I need to say this. The Military follows orders, disciplines those who won’t/don’t. Maybe rushing into artillery fire requires that kind of blind allegiance but civilian work doesn’t. It is the natural opposite. People work together because they want to, and their creativity is rewarded. The military is represented here and now by the Homeland Security attitude towards our freedom and privacy. Screw that.
How about this: we offer a choice. Civilian service with all its strengths and weaknesses or military service for those who want or need the discipline.
And Posse Comitatus should be preserved not set aside.
I guess I need to say this. The Military follows orders, disciplines those who won’t/don’t. Maybe rushing into artillery fire requires that kind of blind allegiance but civilian work doesn’t. It is the natural opposite. People work together because they want to, and their creativity is rewarded. The military is represented here and now by the Homeland Security attitude towards our freedom and privacy. Screw that.
How about this: we offer a choice. Civilian service with all its strengths and weaknesses or military service for those who want or need the discipline.
And Posse Comitatus should be preserved not set aside.
I agree with Civilian Service. The Israelis have shown that can work. The Depression era projects show that can work. OTOH, that’s how the first part of the Autobahn was built too. Complete with posters, picks and shovels.
Yes, the Coast Guard is exempt. They aren’t specifically a combat organization. History shows that the military forces are terrible policemen. That’s not their training or how they are equipped.
Repurposing the military is not the answer. Downsizing doesn’t work either.
The answer is exactly as one Army general said about VietNam: we lay waste and destroy and do it well. Don’t send us where you don’t want those results.
Simplistic but accurate.
I think our best answers for change are going to be combinations of simple things (air up the tires, get rid of the incandescents, turn down the AC) and obvious things (start the switch to alternatives ASAP), and hard things (create a culture of discipline that is neither harsh nor depends on consuming mass quantities).
But let’s look ahead a few years. If we are the intelligentsia and we have media chops, we should learn how to mark the rivers a lot further upstream. Any change in society whether engineered or organic is preceded by a series of emergence events and messages. The real powers that be have learned to seed that stream half a decade or more ahead of the desired changes.
As I said to Jon and he reduced it to nerd noise, you really need to understand how to use a low energy transfer system over Hohman transfers. A Hohman transfer fights the gravity well (two stage to orbit, one stage to moon capture). A low energy transfer trades time for energy (small boosts that put the vehicle into a transfer point where the target gravity captures it). It is how deep space probes manage long flights with less fuel. It is how a skateboarder can circle up the oval then make the jump to the next ramp.
If we really want our culture to change, fighting it won’t work. Shakey the Sphere is right. We all lose. Beauty is in the high of the beholder but the fashion industry still manages to make you buy.
Little pulses, cultural and semiotic, planned years ahead of time will do the trick. The challenge is for the hippies to teach the millenials how to do magick because we will be star dust by the time the next celestial event comes around.
I agree with Civilian Service. The Israelis have shown that can work. The Depression era projects show that can work. OTOH, that’s how the first part of the Autobahn was built too. Complete with posters, picks and shovels.
Yes, the Coast Guard is exempt. They aren’t specifically a combat organization. History shows that the military forces are terrible policemen. That’s not their training or how they are equipped.
Repurposing the military is not the answer. Downsizing doesn’t work either.
The answer is exactly as one Army general said about VietNam: we lay waste and destroy and do it well. Don’t send us where you don’t want those results.
Simplistic but accurate.
I think our best answers for change are going to be combinations of simple things (air up the tires, get rid of the incandescents, turn down the AC) and obvious things (start the switch to alternatives ASAP), and hard things (create a culture of discipline that is neither harsh nor depends on consuming mass quantities).
But let’s look ahead a few years. If we are the intelligentsia and we have media chops, we should learn how to mark the rivers a lot further upstream. Any change in society whether engineered or organic is preceded by a series of emergence events and messages. The real powers that be have learned to seed that stream half a decade or more ahead of the desired changes.
As I said to Jon and he reduced it to nerd noise, you really need to understand how to use a low energy transfer system over Hohman transfers. A Hohman transfer fights the gravity well (two stage to orbit, one stage to moon capture). A low energy transfer trades time for energy (small boosts that put the vehicle into a transfer point where the target gravity captures it). It is how deep space probes manage long flights with less fuel. It is how a skateboarder can circle up the oval then make the jump to the next ramp.
If we really want our culture to change, fighting it won’t work. Shakey the Sphere is right. We all lose. Beauty is in the high of the beholder but the fashion industry still manages to make you buy.
Little pulses, cultural and semiotic, planned years ahead of time will do the trick. The challenge is for the hippies to teach the millenials how to do magick because we will be star dust by the time the next celestial event comes around.
Since when are bridge building or highway repair is something where creativity is a virtue. This nation needs a ton of grunt work to rebuild its basic infrastructure. Roads, bridges, rail lines, buildings, dams, levies. These require as much discipline and care as a military operation.
DHS is far from a military operation; it is just another piece of the security state being constructed to lead America towards empire. It should be radically revised and possibly just dissolved, but that has little to no bearing on rehabilitating the military.
I’m not opposed to civilian service. I think it is a great idea. But it seems to me we already have a system setup to harness the combined efforts of the American citizenry. It is a waste of time and money to attempt to build a second mirror structure, rather than adapting what already exists (and what will continue to exist).
Oh and by the way, Posse Comitatus in NO WAY covers anything mentioned above except Police Work. Anything the military does on local soil that is not related to maintaining local order is not prohibited by the act. All the act does is make it illegal to declare martial law without the request of state governments (who can use the National Guard in this manner). So even without any additional exemptions, the military could still perform massive infrastructure upgrades as the law currently stands. Personally I think there could also be use for MPs doing stuff like peace-keeping work (under local police jurisdiction) in some of the more violent areas of the country. I understand that would make some people nervous and maybe rightfully so. However that is one small component of having the military become a national service organization.
I think we essentially agree on all of this. The issue is in the implementation. In a perfect world, I’d agree with you that a separate civilian organization might be better. But that isn’t our world. We need to find a way to pay for stuff like this without increasing our expenditures. Plus we have a massive military budget that it is nearly impossible to cut without massive political backlash. If you combine those two, you can solve both problems without any major issues.
Since when are bridge building or highway repair is something where creativity is a virtue. This nation needs a ton of grunt work to rebuild its basic infrastructure. Roads, bridges, rail lines, buildings, dams, levies. These require as much discipline and care as a military operation.
DHS is far from a military operation; it is just another piece of the security state being constructed to lead America towards empire. It should be radically revised and possibly just dissolved, but that has little to no bearing on rehabilitating the military.
I’m not opposed to civilian service. I think it is a great idea. But it seems to me we already have a system setup to harness the combined efforts of the American citizenry. It is a waste of time and money to attempt to build a second mirror structure, rather than adapting what already exists (and what will continue to exist).
Oh and by the way, Posse Comitatus in NO WAY covers anything mentioned above except Police Work. Anything the military does on local soil that is not related to maintaining local order is not prohibited by the act. All the act does is make it illegal to declare martial law without the request of state governments (who can use the National Guard in this manner). So even without any additional exemptions, the military could still perform massive infrastructure upgrades as the law currently stands. Personally I think there could also be use for MPs doing stuff like peace-keeping work (under local police jurisdiction) in some of the more violent areas of the country. I understand that would make some people nervous and maybe rightfully so. However that is one small component of having the military become a national service organization.
I think we essentially agree on all of this. The issue is in the implementation. In a perfect world, I’d agree with you that a separate civilian organization might be better. But that isn’t our world. We need to find a way to pay for stuff like this without increasing our expenditures. Plus we have a massive military budget that it is nearly impossible to cut without massive political backlash. If you combine those two, you can solve both problems without any major issues.
One of the great achievements of the right in America is convincing people that the military is the only arm of government that works or should be trusted. Personally I like the National Park Service.
Using the military for civilian goals is a recipe for disaster. If you are looking to remake an arm of government to solve new problems why not NASA? Why not take the increased funds it would take to transform the military into policemen and math teachers (a la DC) and just fund police departments and school boards? Is it that much of a stretch to think laid off Military Police and Military Bridge Builders might simply move over into new jobs in the fully funded police forces and bridge building organizations and companies of civilian America? The military could even let people serve out their time in designated industries/occupations and top up the civilian pay.
If you really want a large number of people on the government payroll, reverse years of contracting-out and wage cuts and make working for the government (as a prison guard, air traffic controller, teacher, airport security worker, postman, housing inspector, passport office worker, etc. etc.) a good job with good pay worth doing well. The skimming of the top that happens when private companies run public services serves only to defeat one of the functions of public provision of services – income distribution.
One of the great achievements of the right in America is convincing people that the military is the only arm of government that works or should be trusted. Personally I like the National Park Service.
Using the military for civilian goals is a recipe for disaster. If you are looking to remake an arm of government to solve new problems why not NASA? Why not take the increased funds it would take to transform the military into policemen and math teachers (a la DC) and just fund police departments and school boards? Is it that much of a stretch to think laid off Military Police and Military Bridge Builders might simply move over into new jobs in the fully funded police forces and bridge building organizations and companies of civilian America? The military could even let people serve out their time in designated industries/occupations and top up the civilian pay.
If you really want a large number of people on the government payroll, reverse years of contracting-out and wage cuts and make working for the government (as a prison guard, air traffic controller, teacher, airport security worker, postman, housing inspector, passport office worker, etc. etc.) a good job with good pay worth doing well. The skimming of the top that happens when private companies run public services serves only to defeat one of the functions of public provision of services – income distribution.
I just googled up this program from 93 to move surplus military into teaching, income support and everything. It seems solutions are already out there.
http://eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED370937&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED370937
I just googled up this program from 93 to move surplus military into teaching, income support and everything. It seems solutions are already out there.
http://eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED370937&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED370937
Since when is creativity not needed when a person is trying to figure out the best way to accomplish the stated goal? Answer: in the military or in a corporation that is run like the military.
Yes, grunting too can be creative. I have come up with some mighty ones in my time — see tennis champions Monica Seles, Rafael Nadal.
BTW, Crimsoncor this is not meant to dampen your enthusiam. You are right about the battle it will take to realign the military budget toward civilian infrastructure projects but I believe that is one of the battles we will have to win in order to accomplish what those above are talking about, including yourself.
Since when is creativity not needed when a person is trying to figure out the best way to accomplish the stated goal? Answer: in the military or in a corporation that is run like the military.
Yes, grunting too can be creative. I have come up with some mighty ones in my time — see tennis champions Monica Seles, Rafael Nadal.
BTW, Crimsoncor this is not meant to dampen your enthusiam. You are right about the battle it will take to realign the military budget toward civilian infrastructure projects but I believe that is one of the battles we will have to win in order to accomplish what those above are talking about, including yourself.
len:
I enjoy your low energy transfer metaphor — but then I’m a nerd, so I guess I’m easily amused. Wikipedia has a friendly illustration of the ways long-range space probes get around.
I’m sure you’re right that one can’t “brute force” cultural change the way rockets have to climb out of Earth’s gravity well. But God only knows where the Lagrange points of a culture are. And I doubt they stay put long.
Jon wrote about the “Interregnum” — our present day as a sort of Lagrange point in American history where some key decisions will have dramatic long-term consequences. I like to think of this kind of blog conversation as a way for lots of ordinary (non-celebrity, non-billionaire, non-elected official) folks to try nudging the culture in another direction. Time will tell.
len:
I enjoy your low energy transfer metaphor — but then I’m a nerd, so I guess I’m easily amused. Wikipedia has a friendly illustration of the ways long-range space probes get around.
I’m sure you’re right that one can’t “brute force” cultural change the way rockets have to climb out of Earth’s gravity well. But God only knows where the Lagrange points of a culture are. And I doubt they stay put long.
Jon wrote about the “Interregnum” — our present day as a sort of Lagrange point in American history where some key decisions will have dramatic long-term consequences. I like to think of this kind of blog conversation as a way for lots of ordinary (non-celebrity, non-billionaire, non-elected official) folks to try nudging the culture in another direction. Time will tell.
Let me rain on the parade, piss in the soup, and otherwise increase my curmudgeon quotient.
1. DHS also funds the reverse 911 systems that call your house or cellphone in case of big bads. Combining public safety with defense definitely has downsides. Pushing it onto the web makes it worse.
Don’t be too sure of your reverse 911 systems with commercial carriers who will change a domain name but don’t map the DNS or have a tested means to prioritize traffic because the net neutrality people gave them an excuse not to put the means in and they won’t put the means in if they can’t monetize it. So come the Big Bad and you all hit your cellphones and web browsers and guess what?
And yes, they will forget you. They do it all the time.
2. Posse comitatus eliminates one of the items on your list, yes. You don’t want to use the military for the police. That’s a Really Bad Idea. You want their budget. Good luck with that. And no you won’t simply legislate it. They have lawyers too.
I agree with Civilian Corps. Do remember that the originators of the Autobahn tried this. No they weren’t the Nazis; the autobahn projects start decades before Hitler came to power (circa 1909 – 1928) and they don’t get far in that period. Under Hitler, the emphasis on using the civilians to build the system used ‘outside work for health’ posters and “this is a good idea for getting out of the Depression” same as we did with the CCC. They built 1860 mi from 33 to 38. A benevolent dictator helps.
At least until he goes Moe Howard on us.
In 1938 they combined the civilian and military planning and later added Russian prisoners. From 38 to 41 they only get another 500 miles built not being able to sustain both war and highway building. They stop construction in 1941 and only resume after the war.
So you can combine them, but they will still be military in their DNA. It’s a Really Bad Idea. Ever look at what happened to the Alaska Highway after the war? Ever look at the Corp levees or the Tombigbee Waterway (the Big Ditch to Nowhere)? They aren’t the right kind of organization for civil works projects if you worry about schedule and budget.
If what you want is their talent, you are already getting that. Military pay sucks and the brain drain into industry after training is like the Mississippi after the rainy season. That’s where airline pilots come from. That’s also why Bush changed the rules on them to make them extend their tours. So market wise you are getting that talent. The problem is the nuclear power industry was in a standstill post Three Mile Island. Things are looking up for those guys.
Then there is the fact that the military has other matters to attend to.
Tensions are ratcheting up right now with the Russians making loud threats today against Poland because Poland signed the missile treaty. Poland being a NATO member, if Russia makes good, we are at full tilt war a la 1939.
Keep thinking of solutions, and please say a little prayer to the deity of your choice. We’re on a toboggan ride internationally. All sides are punching wildly on the sensitive-to-initial-conditions buttons and this side of Fender feedback a la Jimi, that usually blows up the amplifiers and the speaker cones.
If this reads like I’m terrified it’s because I am. We’re playing chicken for keeps.
Let me rain on the parade, piss in the soup, and otherwise increase my curmudgeon quotient.
1. DHS also funds the reverse 911 systems that call your house or cellphone in case of big bads. Combining public safety with defense definitely has downsides. Pushing it onto the web makes it worse.
Don’t be too sure of your reverse 911 systems with commercial carriers who will change a domain name but don’t map the DNS or have a tested means to prioritize traffic because the net neutrality people gave them an excuse not to put the means in and they won’t put the means in if they can’t monetize it. So come the Big Bad and you all hit your cellphones and web browsers and guess what?
And yes, they will forget you. They do it all the time.
2. Posse comitatus eliminates one of the items on your list, yes. You don’t want to use the military for the police. That’s a Really Bad Idea. You want their budget. Good luck with that. And no you won’t simply legislate it. They have lawyers too.
I agree with Civilian Corps. Do remember that the originators of the Autobahn tried this. No they weren’t the Nazis; the autobahn projects start decades before Hitler came to power (circa 1909 – 1928) and they don’t get far in that period. Under Hitler, the emphasis on using the civilians to build the system used ‘outside work for health’ posters and “this is a good idea for getting out of the Depression” same as we did with the CCC. They built 1860 mi from 33 to 38. A benevolent dictator helps.
At least until he goes Moe Howard on us.
In 1938 they combined the civilian and military planning and later added Russian prisoners. From 38 to 41 they only get another 500 miles built not being able to sustain both war and highway building. They stop construction in 1941 and only resume after the war.
So you can combine them, but they will still be military in their DNA. It’s a Really Bad Idea. Ever look at what happened to the Alaska Highway after the war? Ever look at the Corp levees or the Tombigbee Waterway (the Big Ditch to Nowhere)? They aren’t the right kind of organization for civil works projects if you worry about schedule and budget.
If what you want is their talent, you are already getting that. Military pay sucks and the brain drain into industry after training is like the Mississippi after the rainy season. That’s where airline pilots come from. That’s also why Bush changed the rules on them to make them extend their tours. So market wise you are getting that talent. The problem is the nuclear power industry was in a standstill post Three Mile Island. Things are looking up for those guys.
Then there is the fact that the military has other matters to attend to.
Tensions are ratcheting up right now with the Russians making loud threats today against Poland because Poland signed the missile treaty. Poland being a NATO member, if Russia makes good, we are at full tilt war a la 1939.
Keep thinking of solutions, and please say a little prayer to the deity of your choice. We’re on a toboggan ride internationally. All sides are punching wildly on the sensitive-to-initial-conditions buttons and this side of Fender feedback a la Jimi, that usually blows up the amplifiers and the speaker cones.
If this reads like I’m terrified it’s because I am. We’re playing chicken for keeps.
@sts:
Yes, these conversations are exactly that. It comes down to the right people chatting at the right time. I’m serious when I say the Elders should leverage what they were best at and play to their strengths regards long range cultural navigation. Again, the thing I remember best about their output in the Sixties is not their movies or their politics: it’s their songs. But I’m a musician.
You bring up a really excellent question: what are the lagrange points of a culture? First we have to identify the big bodies we orbit. We might take trip in the Wayback Machine and see if our theories match the data.
Easy Rider made a difference. What did it invoke? The Last Waltz is very good but did it change the culture or document a high point? I tend to the latter opinion. The Jefferson Airplane has a huge fast impact globally initially. The Dead has an impact but it was slow and continuous at least until Jerry took the last big trip. Who saw anything like that again until Fish? How did they sustain it? Is the effect limited because they only crossed over into pop on the charts twice?
The Haight culture for its short run impacts American culture to this day even though as a fellow in a bookshop there sitting in a wheel chair said to me in 1986, “No one is home.” But is that impact waning because we don’t understand its strengths well enough to sustain them and those that were there can’t explain them or won’t?
Cultural lagrange points. That’s a topic worth some posts.
@sts:
Yes, these conversations are exactly that. It comes down to the right people chatting at the right time. I’m serious when I say the Elders should leverage what they were best at and play to their strengths regards long range cultural navigation. Again, the thing I remember best about their output in the Sixties is not their movies or their politics: it’s their songs. But I’m a musician.
You bring up a really excellent question: what are the lagrange points of a culture? First we have to identify the big bodies we orbit. We might take trip in the Wayback Machine and see if our theories match the data.
Easy Rider made a difference. What did it invoke? The Last Waltz is very good but did it change the culture or document a high point? I tend to the latter opinion. The Jefferson Airplane has a huge fast impact globally initially. The Dead has an impact but it was slow and continuous at least until Jerry took the last big trip. Who saw anything like that again until Fish? How did they sustain it? Is the effect limited because they only crossed over into pop on the charts twice?
The Haight culture for its short run impacts American culture to this day even though as a fellow in a bookshop there sitting in a wheel chair said to me in 1986, “No one is home.” But is that impact waning because we don’t understand its strengths well enough to sustain them and those that were there can’t explain them or won’t?
Cultural lagrange points. That’s a topic worth some posts.
STS and Len,
Man oh man and sakes alive, its good listening in on you two. It’s SERIOUSLY good.
STS and Len,
Man oh man and sakes alive, its good listening in on you two. It’s SERIOUSLY good.
Inner space , outer space, Earth space geostrategies, isn’t that what understanding this life is all about. I am hoping that as we go forward to make this election work this community will make contact with the other communities.
One such community is the one formed around Personal Finance. Writers like Trent at The Simple Dollar and J.D. at Get Rich Slowly have tremendous audiences from across the country and internationally. They espouse taking a political posture but both clearly have strong and intelligent discussions with their combined 50,000 readers about economic conditions from a very basic level on up to the sophisticated tools for individuals to use to teach themselves.
Another community we could run into out there is the Membership Blog meme. Problogger, Yaro Starak, the Brazen Careerist, Linkedin, and others, will let you Join. Sometimes for free and sometimes to give you a reward for joining if you are willing to pay a fee to learn the marketing skills it will take to make you money on the internet They market at a very creative space called “Learn How to Make Your Own Job in this world”
Another meme I might name that is creating its own space is the Lesbian and Gay and Transgender and Bi writers and readers group that gathers at the juncture of Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge’s blogs.
The art communities have one meme that I know and it meets at the intersection of Making A Mark and the Empty Easel.
Is there a formula to follow a strategy to find more of these communities/points. The ones I mentioned above have one thing in common. They all can be found in the Less Is More state.
Inner space , outer space, Earth space geostrategies, isn’t that what understanding this life is all about. I am hoping that as we go forward to make this election work this community will make contact with the other communities.
One such community is the one formed around Personal Finance. Writers like Trent at The Simple Dollar and J.D. at Get Rich Slowly have tremendous audiences from across the country and internationally. They espouse taking a political posture but both clearly have strong and intelligent discussions with their combined 50,000 readers about economic conditions from a very basic level on up to the sophisticated tools for individuals to use to teach themselves.
Another community we could run into out there is the Membership Blog meme. Problogger, Yaro Starak, the Brazen Careerist, Linkedin, and others, will let you Join. Sometimes for free and sometimes to give you a reward for joining if you are willing to pay a fee to learn the marketing skills it will take to make you money on the internet They market at a very creative space called “Learn How to Make Your Own Job in this world”
Another meme I might name that is creating its own space is the Lesbian and Gay and Transgender and Bi writers and readers group that gathers at the juncture of Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge’s blogs.
The art communities have one meme that I know and it meets at the intersection of Making A Mark and the Empty Easel.
Is there a formula to follow a strategy to find more of these communities/points. The ones I mentioned above have one thing in common. They all can be found in the Less Is More state.
There is an existing use of the military for infrastructure change that is very active daily and that’s the Army Corp of Engineers. Long, long list of being bending to very politically pressured decisions, and having very sensible missions turn sour with time.
The damming of virtually every river in the west, the draining of the Everglades, and the “Taming “of the Mississippi have proven to be very costly to try to undo. Usually it’s when the Corps is asked to do large scale land development for rish speculators that the projects go sour.
The Corps has done some significant work at times, but not always with the kind of fore thought needed. It’s track record would be the most useful model to look at in terms of analyzing whether it’s a good idea to think of using military structure and organization for public works.
Jon has some experience and probably a POV as a result of working on the documentary “Cadillac Desert”. One could argue that the Bonniville Power Adminsitration (BPA) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), were significant pluses, but the channelization of the lower delta not so much.
There is an existing use of the military for infrastructure change that is very active daily and that’s the Army Corp of Engineers. Long, long list of being bending to very politically pressured decisions, and having very sensible missions turn sour with time.
The damming of virtually every river in the west, the draining of the Everglades, and the “Taming “of the Mississippi have proven to be very costly to try to undo. Usually it’s when the Corps is asked to do large scale land development for rish speculators that the projects go sour.
The Corps has done some significant work at times, but not always with the kind of fore thought needed. It’s track record would be the most useful model to look at in terms of analyzing whether it’s a good idea to think of using military structure and organization for public works.
Jon has some experience and probably a POV as a result of working on the documentary “Cadillac Desert”. One could argue that the Bonniville Power Adminsitration (BPA) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), were significant pluses, but the channelization of the lower delta not so much.
Ken- The Army Corps of Engineers utility to the country depends to tally on who is the commanding General. For years the top brass saw their job as building as many dams as they could. They even wanted to dam up the Grand Canyon until David Brower yelled “Stop!” Now they are beginning to see themselves as environmental engineers and water conservation experts. That’s going to be a critical skill as I can’t see how the water problems of the Southwest are going to improve in the next decade.
Reading Len’s comments, I keep coming back to Fritz Schumacher’s ” Small is Beautiful”, elegantly subtitled “Economics as if People Mattered”. That’s where I’d like to head this conversation, and now that I know what the Lagrange Equation is, that should be a part of it.
Ken- The Army Corps of Engineers utility to the country depends to tally on who is the commanding General. For years the top brass saw their job as building as many dams as they could. They even wanted to dam up the Grand Canyon until David Brower yelled “Stop!” Now they are beginning to see themselves as environmental engineers and water conservation experts. That’s going to be a critical skill as I can’t see how the water problems of the Southwest are going to improve in the next decade.
Reading Len’s comments, I keep coming back to Fritz Schumacher’s ” Small is Beautiful”, elegantly subtitled “Economics as if People Mattered”. That’s where I’d like to head this conversation, and now that I know what the Lagrange Equation is, that should be a part of it.
len,
The sort of lagrange points i had in mind were a little more like “seats of power” — positions occupied by politicians, top capitalists or celebrities. Places were a few conversations among key players can produce big results involving lots of other people. Rick Warren occupies one relatively modern such lagrange point.
As the major mass concentrations shift around the lagrange points move with them (eg. the Earth-Sun L1 point where we’ve parked a solar observatory). The simple-minded analogy to a radically more dynamic shape-shifting thing like a whole culture is that these lagrange points are points of opportunity — whether economic or political or ‘cultural’ (music, art, whatever). Places where lots of people are ready to notice a new idea and start attaching themselves and their social “mass” to new leaders.
Rick Warren demonstrated the capacity of his decentralized church-organizing concept to aggregate power the other day with his command performance by the presidential candidates. That’s serious gravitational pull!
Apart from the sheer entertainment value (to me) of spinning such shallow pseudo-scientific analogies, the question for Jon’s far-flung community is: does the internet create new lagrange points for rapid social organizing? Or are we just replacing wasted TV watching with equally ineffectual venting?
I think the founders of MoveOn or DailyKos might argue they’ve found new focal points for political energy. But these haven’t yet grown to the point where they can compete with the Rick Warren ‘purpose-driven’ empire. Whether we set priorities like, say, respond to global warming on a large scale, or decide that frugality and personal savings are important, etc. still depends to a greater extent on Warren’s theological musings (and whether they resonate with his flock) than on anything most of us might say or do. But that might change.
len,
The sort of lagrange points i had in mind were a little more like “seats of power” — positions occupied by politicians, top capitalists or celebrities. Places were a few conversations among key players can produce big results involving lots of other people. Rick Warren occupies one relatively modern such lagrange point.
As the major mass concentrations shift around the lagrange points move with them (eg. the Earth-Sun L1 point where we’ve parked a solar observatory). The simple-minded analogy to a radically more dynamic shape-shifting thing like a whole culture is that these lagrange points are points of opportunity — whether economic or political or ‘cultural’ (music, art, whatever). Places where lots of people are ready to notice a new idea and start attaching themselves and their social “mass” to new leaders.
Rick Warren demonstrated the capacity of his decentralized church-organizing concept to aggregate power the other day with his command performance by the presidential candidates. That’s serious gravitational pull!
Apart from the sheer entertainment value (to me) of spinning such shallow pseudo-scientific analogies, the question for Jon’s far-flung community is: does the internet create new lagrange points for rapid social organizing? Or are we just replacing wasted TV watching with equally ineffectual venting?
I think the founders of MoveOn or DailyKos might argue they’ve found new focal points for political energy. But these haven’t yet grown to the point where they can compete with the Rick Warren ‘purpose-driven’ empire. Whether we set priorities like, say, respond to global warming on a large scale, or decide that frugality and personal savings are important, etc. still depends to a greater extent on Warren’s theological musings (and whether they resonate with his flock) than on anything most of us might say or do. But that might change.
I agree completely, STS. I was thinking about Warren last night in exactly those terms.
To navigate by low-energy transports, one maps out the lagrange points and approaches them slowly by mapping the movement of the big bodies. Certainly celebrities are part of that but it’s not as strong as the cost of milk.
These are all dynamical systems models weakly related by the fact of their impact on the meatspace. Jon points to it: the weakly related effects of entertainment and economics if it cared about the little guy. The main advantage of entertainment is direct feedback: no tickets sold no play. Economics is like the planets: an environment of strong effects but weakly coupled periodic affects.
I do believe that combinations of these can be used with low intensity to change the culture. For a moment, because like McCain I don’t know dip about economics, but something about entertainment, there are two aspects of the act:
1. Listening. What is the other actor doing? There are scripts and there are just-in-time opportunities, serendipity advataged by training. How do we train the actors?
2. Timing. If you are in motion AND the lagrange point is in motion, you have to be ready to move. How do we equip the actors to move freely and still hit the mark?
The Obama camp gets that and have done a fabulous job. IME, he is the wrong candidate at the right time. It was bridge too far. Clinton was going to win it in a walk. Spilt milk but it was an easier sale of a known quantity. Pelosi chose badly and I can’t help but believe she did that for her own ambition. She refused to carry water for Hillary. Once again, women would rule the world if they could just trust each other. IME, they don’t. Call that misogyny if you like.
So I’m looking past November and asking myself what to do next given a win by either candidate. That Coke commercial (I’d like to teach the world to sing…) was a marvelous bit at the right time.
So leave the fantasy world in 1967 where it was last seen working well, (All You Need Is Love), and let’s pick two personalities of the moment.
Assume Obama wins. What do you want on TV next season? Assume he loses. Same question.
Assume McCain wins. Same questions.
Talk to me about the narratives. A good author or songwriter knows exactly how they want the reader or listener to feel at the end of the piece. That’s emotional vectoring.
Human emotions are modeled as strange attractors with attractive and repulsive affects over signals/events which the brain processes. These have components of personal history, physiological endowment, and cultural history mediated through personal history. These load the psyche (for lack of a better term) like a pachinko game meaning a signal creates cascades and these will cause the human to exhibit approach/avoidance, fight/flight and mating behaviors. There are more complex combinations, but most of them are aggregates of the primaries.
Rats. I’m working on HumanML again. Originally, we were trying to provide simpler AI for avatars, then the spooks got involved and I bailed. It was too effective a stick to give them.
I agree completely, STS. I was thinking about Warren last night in exactly those terms.
To navigate by low-energy transports, one maps out the lagrange points and approaches them slowly by mapping the movement of the big bodies. Certainly celebrities are part of that but it’s not as strong as the cost of milk.
These are all dynamical systems models weakly related by the fact of their impact on the meatspace. Jon points to it: the weakly related effects of entertainment and economics if it cared about the little guy. The main advantage of entertainment is direct feedback: no tickets sold no play. Economics is like the planets: an environment of strong effects but weakly coupled periodic affects.
I do believe that combinations of these can be used with low intensity to change the culture. For a moment, because like McCain I don’t know dip about economics, but something about entertainment, there are two aspects of the act:
1. Listening. What is the other actor doing? There are scripts and there are just-in-time opportunities, serendipity advataged by training. How do we train the actors?
2. Timing. If you are in motion AND the lagrange point is in motion, you have to be ready to move. How do we equip the actors to move freely and still hit the mark?
The Obama camp gets that and have done a fabulous job. IME, he is the wrong candidate at the right time. It was bridge too far. Clinton was going to win it in a walk. Spilt milk but it was an easier sale of a known quantity. Pelosi chose badly and I can’t help but believe she did that for her own ambition. She refused to carry water for Hillary. Once again, women would rule the world if they could just trust each other. IME, they don’t. Call that misogyny if you like.
So I’m looking past November and asking myself what to do next given a win by either candidate. That Coke commercial (I’d like to teach the world to sing…) was a marvelous bit at the right time.
So leave the fantasy world in 1967 where it was last seen working well, (All You Need Is Love), and let’s pick two personalities of the moment.
Assume Obama wins. What do you want on TV next season? Assume he loses. Same question.
Assume McCain wins. Same questions.
Talk to me about the narratives. A good author or songwriter knows exactly how they want the reader or listener to feel at the end of the piece. That’s emotional vectoring.
Human emotions are modeled as strange attractors with attractive and repulsive affects over signals/events which the brain processes. These have components of personal history, physiological endowment, and cultural history mediated through personal history. These load the psyche (for lack of a better term) like a pachinko game meaning a signal creates cascades and these will cause the human to exhibit approach/avoidance, fight/flight and mating behaviors. There are more complex combinations, but most of them are aggregates of the primaries.
Rats. I’m working on HumanML again. Originally, we were trying to provide simpler AI for avatars, then the spooks got involved and I bailed. It was too effective a stick to give them.
Let me try to shift back to addressing Jon’s topic a little more squarely, with less esoteric metaphorical baggage — less lagrange might be more
The internet had a big debut with MeetUp and the Dean movement, since then MoveOn has attempted a move into ‘meatspace’ with local councils and actual in-person gatherings. But it still seems to attract the boomer generation somewhat disproportionately. It feels a bit too much like a ‘come back’ by a 60′s folk singer who just doesn’t resonate with the youth of today, so to speak.
Rick Warren epitomizes the “God” part of the Republican God & Mammon coalition (‘bucketloads of cash for the rich, god talk for the poor’) who decided that the post-boomer world was too scary and rootless and retreated into religious authoritarianism out of fear. That’s where the ‘undisciplined’ quality of the boomer generation really does us a disservice these days. Sure it’s a smear, but the DFH label has resonance because so many people really fear the social anarchy hippies represented.
While the God & Mammon coalition on the right gained strength, the Plaintiffs Bar & Union bosses coalition on the left (I don’t have as snappy a phrase for them) has been dissolving as unionism has lost its hold on people. What churches and unions have in common is the “tithing” — the way people make big contributions of time and money and are rewarded with social ‘belonging’ and community recognition.
Political parties have turned into professional fund-raising groups with loose “licensing deals” with “distribution” systems: churches on the right and unions on the left. A lot of our recent political history comes down to the fact that right wing ideas have had strong distribution networks while lefty ideas have had decaying distribution networks.
So the Web2.0 question — since that’s less of a stretch for people than Lagrange — is whether ‘internet distribution’ is capable of eliciting the strong effects — a real sense of community, a real sense of belonging and recognition — that produces political movements and real change. Or are we just a bunch of D&D gamers daydreaming in basements as the MSM would have it?
Let me try to shift back to addressing Jon’s topic a little more squarely, with less esoteric metaphorical baggage — less lagrange might be more
The internet had a big debut with MeetUp and the Dean movement, since then MoveOn has attempted a move into ‘meatspace’ with local councils and actual in-person gatherings. But it still seems to attract the boomer generation somewhat disproportionately. It feels a bit too much like a ‘come back’ by a 60′s folk singer who just doesn’t resonate with the youth of today, so to speak.
Rick Warren epitomizes the “God” part of the Republican God & Mammon coalition (‘bucketloads of cash for the rich, god talk for the poor’) who decided that the post-boomer world was too scary and rootless and retreated into religious authoritarianism out of fear. That’s where the ‘undisciplined’ quality of the boomer generation really does us a disservice these days. Sure it’s a smear, but the DFH label has resonance because so many people really fear the social anarchy hippies represented.
While the God & Mammon coalition on the right gained strength, the Plaintiffs Bar & Union bosses coalition on the left (I don’t have as snappy a phrase for them) has been dissolving as unionism has lost its hold on people. What churches and unions have in common is the “tithing” — the way people make big contributions of time and money and are rewarded with social ‘belonging’ and community recognition.
Political parties have turned into professional fund-raising groups with loose “licensing deals” with “distribution” systems: churches on the right and unions on the left. A lot of our recent political history comes down to the fact that right wing ideas have had strong distribution networks while lefty ideas have had decaying distribution networks.
So the Web2.0 question — since that’s less of a stretch for people than Lagrange — is whether ‘internet distribution’ is capable of eliciting the strong effects — a real sense of community, a real sense of belonging and recognition — that produces political movements and real change. Or are we just a bunch of D&D gamers daydreaming in basements as the MSM would have it?
It has but let’s get a little history in order.
The God and Mammon movement originates in the Jesus Freak movement which originates in the Hippie Movement. Keep in mind that the Haight Culture spread across the entire world creating little subcultures in every city. It is the one movement because coupled to the civil rights movement that can be shown to have had a dramatic impact on American culture in the last fifty years. I grew up where there were signs over bathrooms. American apartheid was a very ugly thing. Being tossed into a wall and having money taken or being threatened with being beaten to death with bricks is too. And that is what the black kids were doing to the hippie kids. It was the redneck kids who were saving the hippie kids. It all gets convoluted once out of the Bay and it did in the Bay too. Look into what happened when the bad guys decided to take over the pot trade in San Francisco.
The Jesus Freak movement was the first reaction. It wasn’t an us vs them. It was a slight move to the right with a recapture of some spiritual ground based on the hippie let it all hang out philosophy leading to waste. You call it lack of discipline but mostly it was lack of a tangible goal. All talk; not enough walk because it turns out, love isn’t all you need. Jobs help. Decent health care helps. And so on.
Goals. Greed became good.
Welcome to the 1980s. Note: whatever a generation is watching on TV and the movies while 2 to 5 years old is what they act on when they are 18 to 29.
1. The Web is not a Magic Christian amulet. It is an amplifier. Full stop. The components of successful spin are the same as in other systems: frequency (how many citations) and amplitude (who is linking or reputation management).
2. The boomers are hard to fool. They know more about TV than the millenials do about the web and they know BS when they see it. Thus Obama is having a hard time hanging on to his initial numbers.
On the other hand, we all tend toward convenience over quality. The boomers preferred cassettes over eight tracks because they had more songs, were smaller, and you could steal with them. Fidelity suffered. Gen-xers prefer ipods over cd-players because you can listen to them anywhere and steal songs. Fidelity suffered. Millenials have given up and are listening to bad folk singers. Well at least the stealing has slowed down but once again, fidelity….
We can sit here all day and swap insults about the generations. It is typical. We hated our parents too. In this, the millenials are sadly average mammals.
Can 2.0 be as effective at producing real change? Clue: web 2.0 is just web 1.0 with an editor. It is interactive media, a feed only slightly less addictive than direct intercranial stimulation of the pleasure centers. Why? In tests by IBM in the 1980s, it was shown that there is an exponential curve of screen stickiness as latency time drops. This is classic Skinner/Pavlovian conditioning but nevermind. When the time drops below two seconds, the affective coupling turns up dramatically. Below one second, it goes almost vertical.
IOW: almost any crap you feed it gets similar results at high rates once the pigeon starts getting results.
So now you have to deal with what is called ‘supersitious acquisition’. This is say spontaneous generation, the world is flat, Tricia Nixon was a virgin, Berners-Lee invented hypertext or HTML and so on. How do you know what the amplifier is feeding you is nutritious or true?
You trust experts. Paris Hilton?
Or you acquire the discipline to test the facts, verify numbers, look up sources, look up more sources, and so on. The web can help you but so can a good library.
So there you have it. Your problem is to figure out when the web is a library vs a bad habit.
A social network of any kind is an affective means to get effective results as long as you have chosen the members wisely. How to become wise about that is up to you, and unfortunately, assuming a generation is smarter than the last one is the first mistake every generation makes.
When in asked in the 80s what this future hypermedia network we were working on would achieve, I said two things:
1. There will be a lot more porn. Why? No brown bags and they are mammals.
2. Changes would speed up. The quality of that was unpredictable except that instead of a few positions and combinations, people would know about a lot of them. See item 1.
It doesn’t help to have more faster unless the quality improves and as Khan told Kirk, paraphrasing, it is disappointing how slow the mammals evolve. Predicting the porn was easy. Look at the history of media. It is always the second thing we do with any new media after the first thing which is always “Hello World! LOOK AT THIS NEAT THING I’VE DONE! CAN I GET LAID NOW??”
But cultures? Cultures change very fast when under stress. That is all the 1960s were really about. We just managed to get it all down in song before the tires blew out.
What do you want? Who will help you? Why will they help you? Will it last?
“One generation got old.
One generation got sold.
This generation’s got no destination to hold.
Pick up your prize.”
Will it matter? Volunteers for America.
It has but let’s get a little history in order.
The God and Mammon movement originates in the Jesus Freak movement which originates in the Hippie Movement. Keep in mind that the Haight Culture spread across the entire world creating little subcultures in every city. It is the one movement because coupled to the civil rights movement that can be shown to have had a dramatic impact on American culture in the last fifty years. I grew up where there were signs over bathrooms. American apartheid was a very ugly thing. Being tossed into a wall and having money taken or being threatened with being beaten to death with bricks is too. And that is what the black kids were doing to the hippie kids. It was the redneck kids who were saving the hippie kids. It all gets convoluted once out of the Bay and it did in the Bay too. Look into what happened when the bad guys decided to take over the pot trade in San Francisco.
The Jesus Freak movement was the first reaction. It wasn’t an us vs them. It was a slight move to the right with a recapture of some spiritual ground based on the hippie let it all hang out philosophy leading to waste. You call it lack of discipline but mostly it was lack of a tangible goal. All talk; not enough walk because it turns out, love isn’t all you need. Jobs help. Decent health care helps. And so on.
Goals. Greed became good.
Welcome to the 1980s. Note: whatever a generation is watching on TV and the movies while 2 to 5 years old is what they act on when they are 18 to 29.
1. The Web is not a Magic Christian amulet. It is an amplifier. Full stop. The components of successful spin are the same as in other systems: frequency (how many citations) and amplitude (who is linking or reputation management).
2. The boomers are hard to fool. They know more about TV than the millenials do about the web and they know BS when they see it. Thus Obama is having a hard time hanging on to his initial numbers.
On the other hand, we all tend toward convenience over quality. The boomers preferred cassettes over eight tracks because they had more songs, were smaller, and you could steal with them. Fidelity suffered. Gen-xers prefer ipods over cd-players because you can listen to them anywhere and steal songs. Fidelity suffered. Millenials have given up and are listening to bad folk singers. Well at least the stealing has slowed down but once again, fidelity….
We can sit here all day and swap insults about the generations. It is typical. We hated our parents too. In this, the millenials are sadly average mammals.
Can 2.0 be as effective at producing real change? Clue: web 2.0 is just web 1.0 with an editor. It is interactive media, a feed only slightly less addictive than direct intercranial stimulation of the pleasure centers. Why? In tests by IBM in the 1980s, it was shown that there is an exponential curve of screen stickiness as latency time drops. This is classic Skinner/Pavlovian conditioning but nevermind. When the time drops below two seconds, the affective coupling turns up dramatically. Below one second, it goes almost vertical.
IOW: almost any crap you feed it gets similar results at high rates once the pigeon starts getting results.
So now you have to deal with what is called ‘supersitious acquisition’. This is say spontaneous generation, the world is flat, Tricia Nixon was a virgin, Berners-Lee invented hypertext or HTML and so on. How do you know what the amplifier is feeding you is nutritious or true?
You trust experts. Paris Hilton?
Or you acquire the discipline to test the facts, verify numbers, look up sources, look up more sources, and so on. The web can help you but so can a good library.
So there you have it. Your problem is to figure out when the web is a library vs a bad habit.
A social network of any kind is an affective means to get effective results as long as you have chosen the members wisely. How to become wise about that is up to you, and unfortunately, assuming a generation is smarter than the last one is the first mistake every generation makes.
When in asked in the 80s what this future hypermedia network we were working on would achieve, I said two things:
1. There will be a lot more porn. Why? No brown bags and they are mammals.
2. Changes would speed up. The quality of that was unpredictable except that instead of a few positions and combinations, people would know about a lot of them. See item 1.
It doesn’t help to have more faster unless the quality improves and as Khan told Kirk, paraphrasing, it is disappointing how slow the mammals evolve. Predicting the porn was easy. Look at the history of media. It is always the second thing we do with any new media after the first thing which is always “Hello World! LOOK AT THIS NEAT THING I’VE DONE! CAN I GET LAID NOW??”
But cultures? Cultures change very fast when under stress. That is all the 1960s were really about. We just managed to get it all down in song before the tires blew out.
What do you want? Who will help you? Why will they help you? Will it last?
“One generation got old.
One generation got sold.
This generation’s got no destination to hold.
Pick up your prize.”
Will it matter? Volunteers for America.
BTW: in case that came off all negative. Study gaming both theoretical (eg Von Neumann) and entertainment (eg, Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun). Immersion ups the sticky factor. When Disney shut down the Virtual Magic Kingdom virtual world, you could hear the screams through the screens. That is one reason I still work with the Web3D Consortium: long life cycles for content. IOW, I don’t want to work on The Farm if you get my drift.
Games are a very effective training tool. Politics are just that with very big bets on the table. So is an invasion of Georgia. Games can be used to train the culture but we are only in the very early stages of understanding how that can be used effectively and the spooky factor is there.
Human brains are quite plastic and I’m fairly no, say very paranoid about that sort of thing in the same way Rick worries about Stewardship. Blogs don’t have nearly the affective power of games. Every time we up the integration quotient (information within a single representation) of a single experience, we up the power and this is logarithmic. Immersion is the next frontier.
A sea tale:
In late 1989 I sat in the food court at the local mall and it all hit me, the virtual world, the virtual library of alexandria would be trivialized, would mean 365 x 24 x 7 surveillance, data mining, cultural programming, cultural selection and even cultural genocide.
And I was helping get that done.
I wept. It freaked out the Taco Bell cashier badly.
Then a few years later, someone showed me HTML and I went ballistic. What a dumb system. Then two years later Yuri Rubinsky said to me quietly while I was screaming at him, “Yes Len, it’s a terrible design, but for the first time Softquad is making money.” Then a few months later, he died.
I went to my recording studio and cried for hours.
So let me put it this way STS and since you are into being an activist, this won’t mean much to you, but I’ll say it anyway: the web is like Baal, just a big gold patina wooden idol. The real power is in the touch of the human hands gathered around it. The real magic is in your emotional attachments to the people at the other ends of these blogs. If you love them, it will work about as well as it can as long as you remember that love is a verb and you have to make choices and if you want power over that, choices of choices.
Love isn’t all you need, but without it, everything else is worthless. So before you get too far into the Web 2.0 mythology, take a look at the person on your left and your right. If you don’t love one of them, then move on. At the end of the day and the end of your life, your loves are all that will matter.
Love determines what your soul becomes. Choose wisely.
BTW: in case that came off all negative. Study gaming both theoretical (eg Von Neumann) and entertainment (eg, Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun). Immersion ups the sticky factor. When Disney shut down the Virtual Magic Kingdom virtual world, you could hear the screams through the screens. That is one reason I still work with the Web3D Consortium: long life cycles for content. IOW, I don’t want to work on The Farm if you get my drift.
Games are a very effective training tool. Politics are just that with very big bets on the table. So is an invasion of Georgia. Games can be used to train the culture but we are only in the very early stages of understanding how that can be used effectively and the spooky factor is there.
Human brains are quite plastic and I’m fairly no, say very paranoid about that sort of thing in the same way Rick worries about Stewardship. Blogs don’t have nearly the affective power of games. Every time we up the integration quotient (information within a single representation) of a single experience, we up the power and this is logarithmic. Immersion is the next frontier.
A sea tale:
In late 1989 I sat in the food court at the local mall and it all hit me, the virtual world, the virtual library of alexandria would be trivialized, would mean 365 x 24 x 7 surveillance, data mining, cultural programming, cultural selection and even cultural genocide.
And I was helping get that done.
I wept. It freaked out the Taco Bell cashier badly.
Then a few years later, someone showed me HTML and I went ballistic. What a dumb system. Then two years later Yuri Rubinsky said to me quietly while I was screaming at him, “Yes Len, it’s a terrible design, but for the first time Softquad is making money.” Then a few months later, he died.
I went to my recording studio and cried for hours.
So let me put it this way STS and since you are into being an activist, this won’t mean much to you, but I’ll say it anyway: the web is like Baal, just a big gold patina wooden idol. The real power is in the touch of the human hands gathered around it. The real magic is in your emotional attachments to the people at the other ends of these blogs. If you love them, it will work about as well as it can as long as you remember that love is a verb and you have to make choices and if you want power over that, choices of choices.
Love isn’t all you need, but without it, everything else is worthless. So before you get too far into the Web 2.0 mythology, take a look at the person on your left and your right. If you don’t love one of them, then move on. At the end of the day and the end of your life, your loves are all that will matter.
Love determines what your soul becomes. Choose wisely.
len:
Thanks for the history and stories. I don’t blame boomers for anything, so no generational offense intended (or taken). Nor am I so much an ‘activist’ as to miss the Baal metaphor. Indeed, my point was basically the same as yours: people don’t fight for abstractions but for their buddies. Churches create communities that focus energy by creating peer pressure to take action. Unions do that too, but not as effectively in recent years.
The internet is only a novel venue for meeting other minds. It has no inherent political valence, left or right, unless perhaps it creates an opening for a more representative and participatory politics. It’s that opportunity to make greater use of more minds in decision making that appeals to me.
Ken B earlier recommended Andrew Bacevich’s appearance on Bill Moyers Journal — a recommendation I heartily second. In this commentary by Michael Winship, a writer on that show leads with a famous 17th century quote from Count Oxenstierna of Sweden: “Know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.” The central conceit of representative government is that many minds are better than one. If there is any truth to that, then the internet could be just the amplifier needed to bring more minds to bear. But only if all that thinking eventually produces actions.
len:
Thanks for the history and stories. I don’t blame boomers for anything, so no generational offense intended (or taken). Nor am I so much an ‘activist’ as to miss the Baal metaphor. Indeed, my point was basically the same as yours: people don’t fight for abstractions but for their buddies. Churches create communities that focus energy by creating peer pressure to take action. Unions do that too, but not as effectively in recent years.
The internet is only a novel venue for meeting other minds. It has no inherent political valence, left or right, unless perhaps it creates an opening for a more representative and participatory politics. It’s that opportunity to make greater use of more minds in decision making that appeals to me.
Ken B earlier recommended Andrew Bacevich’s appearance on Bill Moyers Journal — a recommendation I heartily second. In this commentary by Michael Winship, a writer on that show leads with a famous 17th century quote from Count Oxenstierna of Sweden: “Know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.” The central conceit of representative government is that many minds are better than one. If there is any truth to that, then the internet could be just the amplifier needed to bring more minds to bear. But only if all that thinking eventually produces actions.
Amen to that.
Amen to that.
True.
Simply know it is a GIGO system and without filters, the results are the same as pointing a microphone into the speakers. It can rip the system to pieces. The filters are between your ears. The system is not inherently smart or valuable. If they turned it off tomorrow, you won’t be any smarter or dumber. Just slower.
Otherwise, you’re using the system for it’s intended application. Enjoy.
True.
Simply know it is a GIGO system and without filters, the results are the same as pointing a microphone into the speakers. It can rip the system to pieces. The filters are between your ears. The system is not inherently smart or valuable. If they turned it off tomorrow, you won’t be any smarter or dumber. Just slower.
Otherwise, you’re using the system for it’s intended application. Enjoy.
You all need to get out and have a few beers and play music with 140 other people like I just did tonight at UCSC…no, not the University of California at Santa Cruz, but rather the Ukulele Club of Santa Cruz…”Where you get your real education…” All this blogging is wonderful; it’s pretty much replaced television in my life, but there is nothing like being in a big room full of sweaty happy people all chatting and joining in on song and strumming with a bunch of peers who have upped the fun quotient big time.
Just played a set in the house band, then hung out for a while with pals, then mixed the show so the normal soundman could get up an do a set.
Beats games on screeens…big time.
You all need to get out and have a few beers and play music with 140 other people like I just did tonight at UCSC…no, not the University of California at Santa Cruz, but rather the Ukulele Club of Santa Cruz…”Where you get your real education…” All this blogging is wonderful; it’s pretty much replaced television in my life, but there is nothing like being in a big room full of sweaty happy people all chatting and joining in on song and strumming with a bunch of peers who have upped the fun quotient big time.
Just played a set in the house band, then hung out for a while with pals, then mixed the show so the normal soundman could get up an do a set.
Beats games on screeens…big time.
I keep thinking that sacrifice isn’t really a sacrifice at all, if it’s made for the right reason. Rather, it is an expression of faith that, by giving up something valuable now, you’ll end up with something even more valuable / important / significant later.
You can actually do a very interesting thought experiment by exchanging the idea of ‘sacrifice’ with the idea of ‘risk’.
This seems important, because If you’re talking about economics on a national scale, from an individual human’s perspective, you really need to consider what you’re asking particular people to give up, then place that sacrifice in the context of (a) what they stand to gain (b) what their chances are and (c) how this fits with what we know about how humans do and do not behave.
Of course there’s no free lunch. But there are – in many fields – much smarter, better, faster, and cheaper ways of doing things. Why we’re not doing those things is, often, a function of what we don’t want to sacrifice/risk in order to get there. When an area is generally considered fubar (health care, prohibition, public education, patent and copyright law, etc. ad nauseum) it’s safe to say that it isn’t just corruption or indifference that’s to blame. More often than not, there’s some cherished ideal at work that these institutions are supposed to represent – regardless of whether or not they actually do.
Often, the influence of these sacred cows isn’t entirely clear – especially since the ideals themselves are often unarticulated. So I wonder if it would help, when identifying any new solution or avenue for development, to also identify what we may have to risk to get there.
This is a bit different from a cynical exercise in identifying who benefits from a currently effed-up system. It’s really about identifying the underlying fears, prejudices, or misconceptions that allow the folks benefiting from our dysfunction to gain a toehold in the first place.
But with the enemy within suitably identified, it becomes progressively more difficult for society’s more predatory elements to maintain and extend their dominance by avoiding discussion of the underlying fears that allow disastrous operations to keep operating – with the public’s passive consent, if not their outright blessing.
In other words, I don’t believe that a call to sacrifice – even serious sacrifice – should be regarded with any measure of forbearing or dread. Not when we have so many sacred cows wandering around, each protecting enormously wasteful expenditures of time, capitol, energy, and life. Quite the contrary. Sacrifice should, if done properly, feel like an act of liberation.
As an total aside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. This is due, largely, to the extraordinary influence of the man who created the navy’s nuclear program, Hyman Rickover. He’s a fascinating, and very outspoken character who is likely to appeal to readers of this blog for a whole slew of reasons.
Here’s a great introduction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover
I keep thinking that sacrifice isn’t really a sacrifice at all, if it’s made for the right reason. Rather, it is an expression of faith that, by giving up something valuable now, you’ll end up with something even more valuable / important / significant later.
You can actually do a very interesting thought experiment by exchanging the idea of ‘sacrifice’ with the idea of ‘risk’.
This seems important, because If you’re talking about economics on a national scale, from an individual human’s perspective, you really need to consider what you’re asking particular people to give up, then place that sacrifice in the context of (a) what they stand to gain (b) what their chances are and (c) how this fits with what we know about how humans do and do not behave.
Of course there’s no free lunch. But there are – in many fields – much smarter, better, faster, and cheaper ways of doing things. Why we’re not doing those things is, often, a function of what we don’t want to sacrifice/risk in order to get there. When an area is generally considered fubar (health care, prohibition, public education, patent and copyright law, etc. ad nauseum) it’s safe to say that it isn’t just corruption or indifference that’s to blame. More often than not, there’s some cherished ideal at work that these institutions are supposed to represent – regardless of whether or not they actually do.
Often, the influence of these sacred cows isn’t entirely clear – especially since the ideals themselves are often unarticulated. So I wonder if it would help, when identifying any new solution or avenue for development, to also identify what we may have to risk to get there.
This is a bit different from a cynical exercise in identifying who benefits from a currently effed-up system. It’s really about identifying the underlying fears, prejudices, or misconceptions that allow the folks benefiting from our dysfunction to gain a toehold in the first place.
But with the enemy within suitably identified, it becomes progressively more difficult for society’s more predatory elements to maintain and extend their dominance by avoiding discussion of the underlying fears that allow disastrous operations to keep operating – with the public’s passive consent, if not their outright blessing.
In other words, I don’t believe that a call to sacrifice – even serious sacrifice – should be regarded with any measure of forbearing or dread. Not when we have so many sacred cows wandering around, each protecting enormously wasteful expenditures of time, capitol, energy, and life. Quite the contrary. Sacrifice should, if done properly, feel like an act of liberation.
As an total aside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. This is due, largely, to the extraordinary influence of the man who created the navy’s nuclear program, Hyman Rickover. He’s a fascinating, and very outspoken character who is likely to appeal to readers of this blog for a whole slew of reasons.
Here’s a great introduction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover
I’m with ya, Rick. I do miss my band really bad these days but all good things have a time and season. There’s just something physical about standing in the middle of the Big Noise.
On the other hand, for Labor Day all of the guys who played together or competed in the 70s locally rent all the cabins in the local state park. We spend a few days with our families looking out from the hillside over the valley (what passes for a mountain in the appalachian foot hills) and play… ukeleles. Guitars too, but ukes have become a big favorite since Harrison and McCartney revealed it was one of their fetishes.
There is nothing better than the tribe. The guys we competed hardest against as kids are now the only people who get it, so that’s the tribe.
Chris owns a music shop in Chattanooga and made an interesting observation. He said when we were young turks, we’d sit in IHOP and talk about what music we’d just learned, or who played which parts, or have you tried this or that lick. He says now his students talk about which new gear they just bought and do you own one of these? I see the same thing among the bluegrassers who complain if someone bends a note in the ‘not traditional place’ and oh look at my new whatsis.
Which is why I’m not a bluegrasser even if I was raised playing it, just a songwriter. Is it the case something got lost when it became more important to have the latest guitar gadget instead of feeding our heads?
I’m with ya, Rick. I do miss my band really bad these days but all good things have a time and season. There’s just something physical about standing in the middle of the Big Noise.
On the other hand, for Labor Day all of the guys who played together or competed in the 70s locally rent all the cabins in the local state park. We spend a few days with our families looking out from the hillside over the valley (what passes for a mountain in the appalachian foot hills) and play… ukeleles. Guitars too, but ukes have become a big favorite since Harrison and McCartney revealed it was one of their fetishes.
There is nothing better than the tribe. The guys we competed hardest against as kids are now the only people who get it, so that’s the tribe.
Chris owns a music shop in Chattanooga and made an interesting observation. He said when we were young turks, we’d sit in IHOP and talk about what music we’d just learned, or who played which parts, or have you tried this or that lick. He says now his students talk about which new gear they just bought and do you own one of these? I see the same thing among the bluegrassers who complain if someone bends a note in the ‘not traditional place’ and oh look at my new whatsis.
Which is why I’m not a bluegrasser even if I was raised playing it, just a songwriter. Is it the case something got lost when it became more important to have the latest guitar gadget instead of feeding our heads?
Alex,
I understand the relevance of your Rickover reference to the ongoing debate herein on radical energy sources and radically simple ways to reapply and better use the sources we have already. Rickover really was the man who, especially in the Popular imagination of 1954-59, had tamed the beast of nuclear power. In ’54 he became America’s Captain Nemo. In 1959 he was, next to Ike, the most popularly respected man in the country, considered by schoolchildren and the moms and pops, and by Congress, America’s spearhead in the post-Sputnik national counteroffensive to ensure that the U.S. would “win” the “race” with the USSR to be the Masters of the Universe of Science and Technology.
Unfortunately, his education ideas and DC lobbying were a very unfortunate misuse of the Admiral’s genius. He was one of the principle factors in ensuring that the American public school system would be and would remain to this day, a battleship navy rather than one built around aircraft carriers and direct descents of his, Admiral Nemo’s, Nautilus.
Like the several other “Great Men” of that day charged, after Sputnik, with the task of modernizing the American Public School System, Rickover was known for his genius for things other than schooling. The other “greats” were similarly accomplished in their own fields of University Administration, auto manufacturing, Chemistry, Politics, and Philanthropy, but altogether ignorant of the field in question: pedagogy, and its “modernization”.
What Rickover and the other men did, with the intent of “modernizing” the education system, was to bulk up the high school curriculum with stronger and additional requirements, mostly in science and mathematics. Not only is that not “modernization” of the public school system, it doesn’t even constitute reform, much less restructuring. Rickover, then, did not bring his naval genius to bear upon the challenge to “modernize” the public school system. Instead, he brought only his knack for curriculum design (he had created, for the USN, for MIT and Annapolis, the first course programs in Nuclear Science and Nuclear Engineering, not to say Nuclear Physics, per se). So, since that was what Rickover thought he knew about education, that, instead of his whole genius, is what he brought to the table where sat the others entrusted with the tasking of “reinventing” the nation’s education system.
It were as though Rickover, with his boldly innovative mind for changes OF the [vessels that are] weapons delivery platforms, changes so radical that they necessitated the reinvention of the entire naval service — it is as though THAT man instead had spent his entire post-war life figuring out how to make better torpedoes for diesel and electric submarines. Which is to say, torpedoes as that which is delivered, rather than its platform (or means) of delivery, and the consequent personnel requirements for that platform and, in turn, the training needs of those personnel with, as a result of all of this change: (a) the possibility that what is to be delivered transforms radically (from torpedoes alone to missiles, with torpedoes relegated), and (b) therefore the need to reconsider and restructure the entire Service, its new capabilities, priorities, strategic orientation and relationship to the other Services. What a waste of a brilliant mind, had such a person limited himself or herself entirely to the mere content of that which is already delivered, be it the contents of the torpedoes or the content of school curricula.
Thanks to a handful of blue-ribbon “Great Men”, the “modern” American public high school, their product of the late-1950s, is still the flagship of the school system, and is now more than ever incapable by dint of its hard structure, its built-in blind spots and its increasingly obvious institutional limitations, of “delivering” — much less of projecting — the powerful response necessitated by present challenges. It is no longer of strategic value to the U.S. Education branch of the American Armed Services. The shame and sorrow of Rickover’s contributions to American schooling is that he betrayed his own mind, frittering it, as did the others, on the retrofitting of battleships.
Today, in the words of my sometime colleague Patricia Albjerg Graham, the U.S. has an educational navy based on thousands of increasingly costly, ever-retrofitted battleships we no longer can afford. Instead, we should have a Service — a system of service delivery — the fire platforms of which are not thousands of bloated battleships, but far lesser numbers of air craft carriers, fast, hydroplaning stealth boats, and perhaps even futuristic submarines.
Because of Rickover’s inexplicable aphasia, this nation lost the one best chance it ever had to reinvent and utterly restructure the American public system of educational service delivery. His mind let him down.
He let us all down.
Alex,
I understand the relevance of your Rickover reference to the ongoing debate herein on radical energy sources and radically simple ways to reapply and better use the sources we have already. Rickover really was the man who, especially in the Popular imagination of 1954-59, had tamed the beast of nuclear power. In ’54 he became America’s Captain Nemo. In 1959 he was, next to Ike, the most popularly respected man in the country, considered by schoolchildren and the moms and pops, and by Congress, America’s spearhead in the post-Sputnik national counteroffensive to ensure that the U.S. would “win” the “race” with the USSR to be the Masters of the Universe of Science and Technology.
Unfortunately, his education ideas and DC lobbying were a very unfortunate misuse of the Admiral’s genius. He was one of the principle factors in ensuring that the American public school system would be and would remain to this day, a battleship navy rather than one built around aircraft carriers and direct descents of his, Admiral Nemo’s, Nautilus.
Like the several other “Great Men” of that day charged, after Sputnik, with the task of modernizing the American Public School System, Rickover was known for his genius for things other than schooling. The other “greats” were similarly accomplished in their own fields of University Administration, auto manufacturing, Chemistry, Politics, and Philanthropy, but altogether ignorant of the field in question: pedagogy, and its “modernization”.
What Rickover and the other men did, with the intent of “modernizing” the education system, was to bulk up the high school curriculum with stronger and additional requirements, mostly in science and mathematics. Not only is that not “modernization” of the public school system, it doesn’t even constitute reform, much less restructuring. Rickover, then, did not bring his naval genius to bear upon the challenge to “modernize” the public school system. Instead, he brought only his knack for curriculum design (he had created, for the USN, for MIT and Annapolis, the first course programs in Nuclear Science and Nuclear Engineering, not to say Nuclear Physics, per se). So, since that was what Rickover thought he knew about education, that, instead of his whole genius, is what he brought to the table where sat the others entrusted with the tasking of “reinventing” the nation’s education system.
It were as though Rickover, with his boldly innovative mind for changes OF the [vessels that are] weapons delivery platforms, changes so radical that they necessitated the reinvention of the entire naval service — it is as though THAT man instead had spent his entire post-war life figuring out how to make better torpedoes for diesel and electric submarines. Which is to say, torpedoes as that which is delivered, rather than its platform (or means) of delivery, and the consequent personnel requirements for that platform and, in turn, the training needs of those personnel with, as a result of all of this change: (a) the possibility that what is to be delivered transforms radically (from torpedoes alone to missiles, with torpedoes relegated), and (b) therefore the need to reconsider and restructure the entire Service, its new capabilities, priorities, strategic orientation and relationship to the other Services. What a waste of a brilliant mind, had such a person limited himself or herself entirely to the mere content of that which is already delivered, be it the contents of the torpedoes or the content of school curricula.
Thanks to a handful of blue-ribbon “Great Men”, the “modern” American public high school, their product of the late-1950s, is still the flagship of the school system, and is now more than ever incapable by dint of its hard structure, its built-in blind spots and its increasingly obvious institutional limitations, of “delivering” — much less of projecting — the powerful response necessitated by present challenges. It is no longer of strategic value to the U.S. Education branch of the American Armed Services. The shame and sorrow of Rickover’s contributions to American schooling is that he betrayed his own mind, frittering it, as did the others, on the retrofitting of battleships.
Today, in the words of my sometime colleague Patricia Albjerg Graham, the U.S. has an educational navy based on thousands of increasingly costly, ever-retrofitted battleships we no longer can afford. Instead, we should have a Service — a system of service delivery — the fire platforms of which are not thousands of bloated battleships, but far lesser numbers of air craft carriers, fast, hydroplaning stealth boats, and perhaps even futuristic submarines.
Because of Rickover’s inexplicable aphasia, this nation lost the one best chance it ever had to reinvent and utterly restructure the American public system of educational service delivery. His mind let him down.
He let us all down.
Wow, I had no idea. And yes, military systems are absurd models for the educational establishment.
I wonder if the same thing could be said about the current notion that education is a product, consumed by those who want to increase their own values as products within the larger economy of the job market.
Do the economic anxieties that define our current age have parallels with the security fears from the cold-war era in that they become so dominant, they alter the most basic lens through which we view education?
More specifically, has the educational establishment become fundamentally fear based, periodically ‘reforming’ itself to meet perceived threats?
Seems awfully reactionary. Commodified education also seems like a spectacular feeder system for the materialism with which we’re supposed to measure economic success.
Wow, I had no idea. And yes, military systems are absurd models for the educational establishment.
I wonder if the same thing could be said about the current notion that education is a product, consumed by those who want to increase their own values as products within the larger economy of the job market.
Do the economic anxieties that define our current age have parallels with the security fears from the cold-war era in that they become so dominant, they alter the most basic lens through which we view education?
More specifically, has the educational establishment become fundamentally fear based, periodically ‘reforming’ itself to meet perceived threats?
Seems awfully reactionary. Commodified education also seems like a spectacular feeder system for the materialism with which we’re supposed to measure economic success.
There are little gem oases (I think that’s the plural of “oasis”) of school districts and schools that surprise. I’ve mentioned this before here, but my 13 year old son is in one of those gems, Earl Warren Middle School in Solana Beach, CA. Just a “for instance”…he started taking Japanese last year in 7th grade as an elective. Fantastic. He’s loving it, doing great, and with his natural curiosity about how things work, he’s well on his way to living both a creative and potentially lucrative life as a multi-lingual engineer…or whatever. But the point is that to have the opportunity to study a foreign language that is that outside the normal Romance language norm is just fantastic. That kind of thing should be the norm.
There are little gem oases (I think that’s the plural of “oasis”) of school districts and schools that surprise. I’ve mentioned this before here, but my 13 year old son is in one of those gems, Earl Warren Middle School in Solana Beach, CA. Just a “for instance”…he started taking Japanese last year in 7th grade as an elective. Fantastic. He’s loving it, doing great, and with his natural curiosity about how things work, he’s well on his way to living both a creative and potentially lucrative life as a multi-lingual engineer…or whatever. But the point is that to have the opportunity to study a foreign language that is that outside the normal Romance language norm is just fantastic. That kind of thing should be the norm.
Alex,
Let me be curt. The answers to you paragraphs 3 and 4 are: no, and no.
In reference to your first paragraph, military models — and also military modeling — CAN be excellent models for STRUCTURING the means of service delivery in public education. In the late-1950′s, who better than Hyman Rickover to construe the structure of delivery and the platforms of delivery within that structure, and consequently understand that they were fundamentally counterproductive? Yet he was incapable of transferring his true intellectual gift for that kind of thinking from his military experience to his efforts toward education “reform”. To re-form something is to change its form, its structure. But the admiral was incapable of perceiving (U.S. secondary) education’s form or structure, hence his failure at reform or restructuring. This, to me, is both inexplicable and inexpressibly tragic.
The second and last paragraphs need to be reconciled. Therein, you’re heading into deep theoretical territory, and it’s worth the trek, but I don’t think we could sustain, on this string, the number of back-and-forths we’d probably need to get it straightened out, your conflation of the factory model of education (input/output) and the important concept of commodification. Since I’m being curt to save us both time, you’d need to sort out which it is that is the product, “education” or the graduated pupil, and exactly what it is that’s being commodified, and HOW it relates to perceptions of necessity, such as the “need” for “measuring” the young for future academic success.
The U.S. Sup. Ct. has held that education “is not a right or a privilege, but rather is a duty imposed upon the individual in the interest of the State.”
The relationship of mass schooling to “materialism” is two-fold. First, the public schools fancy themselves devoid of any imposed metaphysical worldview. In fact, under the guise of this false notion of what educators like to call “pluralism”, the schools have barred all worldviews but their own: scientific naturalism, one very definite and very particular worldview, or metaphysical speculation, among many, the rest remaining locked outside the schoolhouse gate. So if you mean “materialism” in its strict, philosophical sense, then there’s your answer.
Second, if alternatively by “materialism” you mean consumerism — which is precisely the conflation and indifferentiation of needs and wants/desires — then through the process in part of the “commodification” of which you speak, ALL systems of mass schooling, regardless of their curricular content, prepare the young to be lifelong service consumers, ever dependent on the consumption of services rendered by so-called “experts”.
As we’ve had a global service economy for some time now, this dynamic of consumer-dependency is the sole reason upon which at least one researcher in a U.S. defense think tank was able to predict, well in advance of its occurrence, the dismantlement of the USSR into various consumer societies; that is, for the simple reason that the generation coming into dominance of the Soviet population were the demographic equivalent of our Baby Boomers, and they had all been schooled by the State. It mattered not that for P.E. the fourteen-year old boys and girls were required, at the same minute, across the empire, to practice grenade throwing. It was irrelevant that they were taught not to question their state, to revere the pioneers of Marxism and Leninism, and to memorize historical fiction as fact. None of that mattered.
What mattered was that they were the subjects of mass, compulsory, State schooling. And for that reason alone they already were, as children, a generation of sickeningly dependent service consumers. As are we.
Alex,
Let me be curt. The answers to you paragraphs 3 and 4 are: no, and no.
In reference to your first paragraph, military models — and also military modeling — CAN be excellent models for STRUCTURING the means of service delivery in public education. In the late-1950′s, who better than Hyman Rickover to construe the structure of delivery and the platforms of delivery within that structure, and consequently understand that they were fundamentally counterproductive? Yet he was incapable of transferring his true intellectual gift for that kind of thinking from his military experience to his efforts toward education “reform”. To re-form something is to change its form, its structure. But the admiral was incapable of perceiving (U.S. secondary) education’s form or structure, hence his failure at reform or restructuring. This, to me, is both inexplicable and inexpressibly tragic.
The second and last paragraphs need to be reconciled. Therein, you’re heading into deep theoretical territory, and it’s worth the trek, but I don’t think we could sustain, on this string, the number of back-and-forths we’d probably need to get it straightened out, your conflation of the factory model of education (input/output) and the important concept of commodification. Since I’m being curt to save us both time, you’d need to sort out which it is that is the product, “education” or the graduated pupil, and exactly what it is that’s being commodified, and HOW it relates to perceptions of necessity, such as the “need” for “measuring” the young for future academic success.
The U.S. Sup. Ct. has held that education “is not a right or a privilege, but rather is a duty imposed upon the individual in the interest of the State.”
The relationship of mass schooling to “materialism” is two-fold. First, the public schools fancy themselves devoid of any imposed metaphysical worldview. In fact, under the guise of this false notion of what educators like to call “pluralism”, the schools have barred all worldviews but their own: scientific naturalism, one very definite and very particular worldview, or metaphysical speculation, among many, the rest remaining locked outside the schoolhouse gate. So if you mean “materialism” in its strict, philosophical sense, then there’s your answer.
Second, if alternatively by “materialism” you mean consumerism — which is precisely the conflation and indifferentiation of needs and wants/desires — then through the process in part of the “commodification” of which you speak, ALL systems of mass schooling, regardless of their curricular content, prepare the young to be lifelong service consumers, ever dependent on the consumption of services rendered by so-called “experts”.
As we’ve had a global service economy for some time now, this dynamic of consumer-dependency is the sole reason upon which at least one researcher in a U.S. defense think tank was able to predict, well in advance of its occurrence, the dismantlement of the USSR into various consumer societies; that is, for the simple reason that the generation coming into dominance of the Soviet population were the demographic equivalent of our Baby Boomers, and they had all been schooled by the State. It mattered not that for P.E. the fourteen-year old boys and girls were required, at the same minute, across the empire, to practice grenade throwing. It was irrelevant that they were taught not to question their state, to revere the pioneers of Marxism and Leninism, and to memorize historical fiction as fact. None of that mattered.
What mattered was that they were the subjects of mass, compulsory, State schooling. And for that reason alone they already were, as children, a generation of sickeningly dependent service consumers. As are we.
I feel as though I’ve accidentally stumbled on a real gusher. Seriously, Hugo, this is fascinating stuff. And yes, likely beyond the scope of this thread.
One point you make seems especially vital, and that’s the idea that education is neither a right or a privilege. Rather, it is an obligation. I believe Plato was the first to observe that democracy’s greatest weakness was its requirement that every citizen with a vote also have a proper education – a practical consideration that presents enormous challanges.
In terms of the larger project here – exploring and defining a New Federalism – an angle on education seems essential.
I feel as though I’ve accidentally stumbled on a real gusher. Seriously, Hugo, this is fascinating stuff. And yes, likely beyond the scope of this thread.
One point you make seems especially vital, and that’s the idea that education is neither a right or a privilege. Rather, it is an obligation. I believe Plato was the first to observe that democracy’s greatest weakness was its requirement that every citizen with a vote also have a proper education – a practical consideration that presents enormous challanges.
In terms of the larger project here – exploring and defining a New Federalism – an angle on education seems essential.
Absolutely agree with your points, Alex, and enthusisastically with the last one.
You’re right, it was Plato, and his point was that the citizen-voter wannabe would have to demonstrate that he had such “education”. (That’s a really poor translation of Plato’s actual usage, which is in Greek, “paideia”, something quite different from “education”, of which Plato could not have had any concept; paideia is an ancient word meaning “culture”, so that to have paideia is to be cultured, whereas “education” in the meaning we give it is a very modern word, its Latin root, “educatio”, meaning breast feeding. Education, then, is at its root the usurpation by powerseeking men of the reproductive and nurturing power of women.) The beef of the Socratics was that this poll rerequirement had taken a small-time scam of the Sophists and had instantly legitimized the scam and turned it into a large-scale industry.
The Sophists were not themselves scholars or the makers of scholarly thought, theory, texts. They were more like palladin Henry Higgenses, who formed a guild but worked alone as culture-tutors. They got the idea for this business opportunity from rabbis, who they noticed were actual scholars and repositories of knowledge they could despense concerning an enduring “canon” of texts with which every person of their kind was to have at least some familiarity. Most importantly to the Sophists, they further noticed that the rabbinate was paid, and taken care of, and honored for this.
That looked to the Sophists as a great scam to emulate. So they went into business, small time, in Athens as private tutors to the sons of the rich, hawking as they went a haphazzard collection of texts they happened each to know something about and which they could claim were the canonical texts of Greek Civilization. Their pitch, essentially, was: “We have the canon without the mastery of which no Greek can truly claim to be cultured. For a fee we will ensure that you have mastered the canon, and will further certify in writing that, by gaining our mastery, you are a cultured citizen.” As in, “You can go vote now.”
The Senate’s law requiring “paideia” as a prerequisite for voting bestowed the official seal upon the concocted notion that there was a secular “canon” for Greek citizens, it placed the stamp of authority upon the very notion that someone could be certified as being cultured, and it effectively “canonized” the canon of the sophists. This was tantamount to giving the grifters both exclusive rights and a guaranteed, huge, clientele. It took the grifting pseudo-scholars not only to the bank, but to the best clubs and restaurants in town. They’d just struck oil. Not bad, for a gang of con men.
The Socratics despised everything about this, of course, most of their reasons being quite obvious. What may not be so apparent is that the Socratics abhorred the very notion that learning as memorization-of-text, could ever meet with anything but derisive laughter in Anthens. The idea of learning as mastery-of-information, they could see also, was repugnant. The learning they promoted was, learning better reasoning, learning to recognize and demonstrate false claims, learning to discern through disputation the more accurate of counter-claims, learning for the love of it, and learning that the learning most worth learning is that inalienable learning which is valued and cherished in itself. To the philosophers, texts existed to be reasoned over and disputed, without ever falling into the trap of absolutism; the texts did not exist to be frozen, unargued and undiscussible, subect to the professing of only one regime of their explication and nothing more.
The Sophist’s scheme to steal learning from the commons and hold it sequestered and hoarded and husbanded, only to be meted out for profit by a self-appointed professor standing as sole intercessor of the meaning, or rightness or wrongness, or greatness or feebleness of texts inviolate — THIS was the greatest causus belli for the Socratics.
Besides, the Socratics admired the rabbinate, and knew true scholars, true canonical texts, and true scholarly disputation when they saw it. They knew that the rabbis, unlike their opportunistic immitators, did their work for high purpose, and not for the basest of reasons, as with the Sophists and their flourishing family tree which grows through every crack in every formal pursuit of learning to this very time and place.
And besides, the Socratics, like their Jewish elders but for their own reasons and reasonings, were monotheists too. That’s why their master was tried and put to death. While the Sophists drank the finest wines, Socrates drank hemlock.
See how much there is in this story (see the writings of the late Intellectual historian Eric Voegelin) that informs what is “fundamentally” (from the fundament) and radically (from its root) screwed up with the structure and founding assumptions of our own system of piedureajucation? It’s pure sophistry, greased by, and greasing the palms in turn of, the Solons and the lobbyists for grifters and knaves.
Absolutely agree with your points, Alex, and enthusisastically with the last one.
You’re right, it was Plato, and his point was that the citizen-voter wannabe would have to demonstrate that he had such “education”. (That’s a really poor translation of Plato’s actual usage, which is in Greek, “paideia”, something quite different from “education”, of which Plato could not have had any concept; paideia is an ancient word meaning “culture”, so that to have paideia is to be cultured, whereas “education” in the meaning we give it is a very modern word, its Latin root, “educatio”, meaning breast feeding. Education, then, is at its root the usurpation by powerseeking men of the reproductive and nurturing power of women.) The beef of the Socratics was that this poll rerequirement had taken a small-time scam of the Sophists and had instantly legitimized the scam and turned it into a large-scale industry.
The Sophists were not themselves scholars or the makers of scholarly thought, theory, texts. They were more like palladin Henry Higgenses, who formed a guild but worked alone as culture-tutors. They got the idea for this business opportunity from rabbis, who they noticed were actual scholars and repositories of knowledge they could despense concerning an enduring “canon” of texts with which every person of their kind was to have at least some familiarity. Most importantly to the Sophists, they further noticed that the rabbinate was paid, and taken care of, and honored for this.
That looked to the Sophists as a great scam to emulate. So they went into business, small time, in Athens as private tutors to the sons of the rich, hawking as they went a haphazzard collection of texts they happened each to know something about and which they could claim were the canonical texts of Greek Civilization. Their pitch, essentially, was: “We have the canon without the mastery of which no Greek can truly claim to be cultured. For a fee we will ensure that you have mastered the canon, and will further certify in writing that, by gaining our mastery, you are a cultured citizen.” As in, “You can go vote now.”
The Senate’s law requiring “paideia” as a prerequisite for voting bestowed the official seal upon the concocted notion that there was a secular “canon” for Greek citizens, it placed the stamp of authority upon the very notion that someone could be certified as being cultured, and it effectively “canonized” the canon of the sophists. This was tantamount to giving the grifters both exclusive rights and a guaranteed, huge, clientele. It took the grifting pseudo-scholars not only to the bank, but to the best clubs and restaurants in town. They’d just struck oil. Not bad, for a gang of con men.
The Socratics despised everything about this, of course, most of their reasons being quite obvious. What may not be so apparent is that the Socratics abhorred the very notion that learning as memorization-of-text, could ever meet with anything but derisive laughter in Anthens. The idea of learning as mastery-of-information, they could see also, was repugnant. The learning they promoted was, learning better reasoning, learning to recognize and demonstrate false claims, learning to discern through disputation the more accurate of counter-claims, learning for the love of it, and learning that the learning most worth learning is that inalienable learning which is valued and cherished in itself. To the philosophers, texts existed to be reasoned over and disputed, without ever falling into the trap of absolutism; the texts did not exist to be frozen, unargued and undiscussible, subect to the professing of only one regime of their explication and nothing more.
The Sophist’s scheme to steal learning from the commons and hold it sequestered and hoarded and husbanded, only to be meted out for profit by a self-appointed professor standing as sole intercessor of the meaning, or rightness or wrongness, or greatness or feebleness of texts inviolate — THIS was the greatest causus belli for the Socratics.
Besides, the Socratics admired the rabbinate, and knew true scholars, true canonical texts, and true scholarly disputation when they saw it. They knew that the rabbis, unlike their opportunistic immitators, did their work for high purpose, and not for the basest of reasons, as with the Sophists and their flourishing family tree which grows through every crack in every formal pursuit of learning to this very time and place.
And besides, the Socratics, like their Jewish elders but for their own reasons and reasonings, were monotheists too. That’s why their master was tried and put to death. While the Sophists drank the finest wines, Socrates drank hemlock.
See how much there is in this story (see the writings of the late Intellectual historian Eric Voegelin) that informs what is “fundamentally” (from the fundament) and radically (from its root) screwed up with the structure and founding assumptions of our own system of piedureajucation? It’s pure sophistry, greased by, and greasing the palms in turn of, the Solons and the lobbyists for grifters and knaves.
Hugo put his finger directly on the right word: pedagogy. No Child Left behind is a disaster the like of which I’ve never seen before. Standardized testing is not artful teaching.
I’m the product of experiments in teaching from 1960 onward where educators were told to look for the brighter kids and make sure that they weren’t shelved into the normal pace of mass education. To be fair, it was 35 to 40 kids to a classroom in those days because our county and city were exploding with the influx of US Army and NASA engineers. Yet for the same cause, we got an unusual number of very good teachers who came with the Space Race. They were on the hunt for talent to cultivate and cultivate it they did. Some of you in Southern Cal got that same fortunate burst of Federal dollars spent on an adventure that required the finest minds, and where they went, artful teaching followed.
Pedagogy as the art of teaching, is the power word, not simply as the method. How to get a better more artful generations of teachers into our schools should be every parent’s top concern with their school system. It is the artful teachers who will provide the generative experiences, the ones that set a kid’s mind wandering down the paths where they can find their own answers, make their mistakes, and quit just taking tests well. Mine taught me to explore, not just consume, to never be afraid of being wrong, and to never be too proud of being right because there are always, thank goodness, things we just don’t know.
And that’s the fun of it and the thrill.
Hugo put his finger directly on the right word: pedagogy. No Child Left behind is a disaster the like of which I’ve never seen before. Standardized testing is not artful teaching.
I’m the product of experiments in teaching from 1960 onward where educators were told to look for the brighter kids and make sure that they weren’t shelved into the normal pace of mass education. To be fair, it was 35 to 40 kids to a classroom in those days because our county and city were exploding with the influx of US Army and NASA engineers. Yet for the same cause, we got an unusual number of very good teachers who came with the Space Race. They were on the hunt for talent to cultivate and cultivate it they did. Some of you in Southern Cal got that same fortunate burst of Federal dollars spent on an adventure that required the finest minds, and where they went, artful teaching followed.
Pedagogy as the art of teaching, is the power word, not simply as the method. How to get a better more artful generations of teachers into our schools should be every parent’s top concern with their school system. It is the artful teachers who will provide the generative experiences, the ones that set a kid’s mind wandering down the paths where they can find their own answers, make their mistakes, and quit just taking tests well. Mine taught me to explore, not just consume, to never be afraid of being wrong, and to never be too proud of being right because there are always, thank goodness, things we just don’t know.
And that’s the fun of it and the thrill.