The Compulsive Explainer

We are still obsessed with recovery, with fixing things. But I think there comes a time when we have to realize that the situation cannot be fixed. The only solution is a personal one: we have to live in a world that we, and people like us, cannot fix.

This is not to say we should not support people who are trying to fix things, more power to them, but we should realize that they will probably fail. Some situations cannot be fixed.

This is the same attitude advocated by the Stoics. I have just ordered The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: Selections Annotated and Explained from Amazon. I need all the help I can get in understanding the world’s wisdom, since my own is so feeble.

I am opposed to the belief, beloved by many liberals, that a solution, often a Marxist one, exists. All we have to do is polish it up a little. Then the great and mighty will fall.
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Comment:

You may be right. The more we try to “fix” things, the more creative the crooks get. There is a fact when it comes to the law. No one can be prosecuted until they actually break the law no matter what kind of threats they make. By then, the damage has been done. It is up to each of us to protect what is ours the best we can.

People no longer write. I suspect this is because they no longer have much on their minds—and they want to write what little is left as quickly as possible.

Only a short while ago, two hundred years at the most, people did a lot of writing and reading, it was their favorite form of communication. But with a TV-induced attention span of only a few seconds, serious writing is impossible. All we have left is Instant Messaging and Twitter. Most blogs, which take a lot of time to write, have been abandoned in favor of instant awareness and instant gratification.

The speed of this change is startling. Back in the Fifties lovers still wrote each other long letters—every day—and expected the same. Now they just grab their cell phone.

This is not an improvement, in my opinion.
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Comment by James:

We belong to a generation which has been run over by technology like no other. I am not complaining. I enjoy many of the new developments. But I am depressed when I come across so many younger people who have an education which is radically different than mine. The average college grad can’t find the general location of any european capital on a map. He can’t name a single American writer from the 19th century nor can he say what years the second world war was fought. We haven’t only lost the economic comfort of the 50’s and 60’s, we have lost the culture too and that is a far more disturbing development.

Comment by Linda:

I think there is a revival of writing, not the kind we did in school, but journaling is making a big comeback. Even the kids at school are writing, they find it is a way to cope with their lives. A lot of good teachers are using it more now but kids back off because it is also part of the state tests.

I am reading another book. I have so many of them, ordered over the Internet, that many of them end up in the trash, or given away to anyone who will take them. The latest is Supercapitalism by Robert B. Reich.

At first I though it would straight to the garbage dump, but today a good breakfast put me in a better mood, and I thought I would give it another look. Chapter One is called The Not Quite Golden Age. It begins:

Roughly between 1945 and 1975, America struck a remarkable accommodation between capitalism and democracy…America became the exemplar of both political freedom and middle-class affluence.

He often quotes another hero of mine, John Kenneth Galbraith, who wrote The New Industrial State in 1968. They both point out that America had a mixed economy—while claiming to have pure capitalism. The government set up commissions to regulate commerce, such as the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Power Commission (pipelines and nuclear energy), Securities and Exchange Commission, the Farm Bureau (agribusiness), and the Federal Maritime Commission. (And the Federal Aviation Agency, that I worked for.) Regulation sought to weigh industry’s need for profits against the public’s need for safe, fair, and reliable service.

Large industries set up their own regulatory mechanisms to set standards and limit competition. As Galbraith said:

The large corporation must exercise control over what is sold. It must exercise control over what is supplied. It must replace the market with planning. The giant corporation of mid-century American had vast discretion and economic power.

As Charles Wilson of General Motors said, when he became Secretary of Defense: “What was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country.

In many cases, the industries involved manage to “capture” their regulators, but overall the system worked. I remember that era fondly: everything was cheap, including housing, and jobs were plentiful. American had reached its peak—although we didn’t know that at the time.

From New Scientist: Can university subjects reveal terrorists in the making?

At first this does not seem likely.

An MI5 report leaked to London newspaper The Guardian in August 2008 concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in the UK because there is “no single pathway to violent extremism” and that “it is not possible to draw up a typical profile of the ‘British terrorist’ as most are ‘demographically unremarkable’”.

The extraordinary lengths the German authorities went to after 9/11 to track down potential terrorists are a stark example of how useless profiling can be. They collected and analysed data on over 8 million individuals living in Germany. These people were categorised by demographic characteristics: male, aged 18 to 40; current or former student; Muslim; legally resident in Germany; and originating from one of 26 Islamic countries. With the help of these categories authorities whittled the 8 million down to just 1689 individuals, who were then investigated, one by one. All the real Islamic terrorists arrested in Germany through other investigations were not on the official “shortlist” and did not fit the profile.

But then the other shoe drops:

Does it follow, as some scholars now think, that anyone, given the right conditions and the wrong friendships, can end up joining a terrorist group? Not entirely. We found that engineers are three to four times as likely as other graduates to be present among the members of violent Islamic groups in the Muslim world since the 1970s.

The way they arrived at this conclusion was arduous, but they ended up with this:

So we are left with two hypotheses: either certain social conditions impinge more on engineers than on other graduates, or engineers are more likely to have certain personality traits that make radical Islamism more attractive to them. Our best guess is that the phenomenon derives from a combination of these two factors.

With engineers in the Middle East we have very intelligent, ambitious students who have found it difficult to find professional satisfaction, both individually and collectively in their desire to help their countries develop. Graduates of very selective degree programmes, they may have endured relatively greater frustration in a stagnant and authoritarian environment.

We reckon that something else is going on, something at the individual level, that is, relating to cognitive traits. According to polling data, engineering professors in the US are seven times as likely to be right-wing and religious as other academics, and similar biases apply to students. In 16 other countries we investigated, engineers seem to be no more right-wing or religious than the rest of the population, but the number of engineers combining both traits is unusually high. A lot of piecemeal evidence suggests that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers.

Humans have always been impressed by their own creations—probably too much so. The invention of the mechanical clock was one of those inventions. It convinced us that the world had its own internal logic, and to understand it, all you had to do was understand the “clockwork” inside it. Before, we assumed everything had its own “nature”. Heavy things wanted to fall downward, that was their nature. Now they had their own internal logic—which was not like our own internal logic at all—a shocking idea!

When mining engineers discovered that a vacuum would only pull up about 33 feet of water, scientists were hard put to explain it. The traditional explanation was that nature “abhorred a vacuum”. The explanation that air itself had weight and the weight of the atmosphere was only so much, was a hard to accept, even for scientists. The atmosphere to them was an abstract idea, not something they could replicate in the laboratory. But, like many scientific ideas, they gradually got used to it, because there was no better explanation.

Much, much later the pneumatic tire was invented, one of the most important inventions in history, and now we ride around on air pressure all the time, and think nothing of it—until we get a flat tire. The ancients would have been amazed. The compressibility of air was not part of its nature, to their way of thinking. But I digress, I started to talk about clockwork.

In my youth, the wristwatch was the latest man-made miracle, and the quality was specified by the number of “jewels” it had. These were low-friction metal/crystal bearings that improved its accuracy of its escape mechanism. The young of today have no idea what I am talking about here; they have never seen one of these in action. But it gave a watch the equivalent of a heart-beat. This was carried over into computers, which have a clock to time everything that goes on in them—only in this case it is another kind of crystal that vibrates much faster: millions of times a second.

We now have a new type of distributed clockwork universe: the Internet. And just like the mechanical clocks did, it rules our lives.

From Wikipedia.

In 2005, The New York Times obtained a 2,000-page United States Army report concerning the homicides of two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners by U.S. armed forces in 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (also Bagram Collection Point or B.C.P.) in Bagram, Afghanistan. The prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were chained to the ceiling and beaten, which caused their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners’ deaths were homicides.

Obama is working to close Guantanamo, but has said nothing about Bagram prison in Afghanistan. The US is spending $50m on a new prison for Bagram, housing more than 1,000 people – to add to the 600 who are already there.

On April 3 a Federal judge ruled that three detainees at Bagram may challenge their confinement before a U.S. court. The administration has appealed that ruling.

The easiest way to understand the events in Iran is to put them in context: the context of a Revolution. Open Democracy does just this in their article Iran: dialectic of revolution.

Americans are ambivalent towards revolutions: they usually try to suppress them, as in Haiti or Nicaragua, as a threat to American interests, usually business interests—or they may revert to their own revolutionary fervor, as when Time magazine billed Bush II as “an American revolutionary”—and then when we tried to make our own revolution to happen in Iraq. In general, we have a poor idea of how revolutions work, and we can learn from this article:

The larger truth is that Iran is repeating a pattern that all revolutionary regimes at some point have to acknowledge: namely, they establish their new “legitimacy” via an early display of “illegitimacy”, but this itself eventually creates fertile seeds for their own demise. Revolutions oppose and then acquire power; establish their surveillance mechanisms and repressive tools to preserve themselves, in the process winning a new swathe of adherents fired less by zeal than by material gain and the right to boss others; and purge and consume their own children.

This restates an old observation: that revolutions eat the own children. They end up being repressive themselves.

I read another artice about Iran recently, but unfortunately I forgot to bookmark it. It was probably another Open Democracy article, but their site is a mess and I cannot now locate it. Its observation was simple: there are two Iran’s: the rural and the urban. The rural’s are ignorant and easily manipulated. The urban are educated and sophisticated, and source of the current uprising.

This article hints at it:

“Two people”, who announce themselves in huge sociological differences - of appearance, affiliation, body-language, political slogans.

All we can do is stand back and let the Iranians decide their own future. Hopefully, they will end up doing a better job of governing themselves than we have in our own recent history.

I got this from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book Fooled by Randomness, Postscript, page 254.

He starts off by noticing something many other people have noticed: the higher up the corporate ladder, the lower the skills. They are empty suits. Why is this?

It is because top management is only paid on results—not on how they got those results (process). “Money talks”, we are told.

Those lower down on the ladder are judged by both process and results—in fact, owing to the repetitive nature of their efforts, their process converges rapidly to results.

Actions taken by the suits, by contrast, are almost never repetitive. Their main skill is in corporate politics, which usually does not translate into something useful when dealing with the outside world. All they have to do is do something when they are in power—it does not really matter what.

If they make the wrong decision, they end up modestly wealthy, but fired. If they make the right decision they end up extremely wealthy—and in a position to spin that roulette wheel again. If they make a series of right guesses, they will end up outrageously wealthy and everyone will consider them extremely wise—when they were only extremely lucky.

There is one other common occurrence that Taleb does not mention. What happens to a manager who can actually manage? He gets fired. The rest of the managers don’t want him around, he is unfair competition. I am not imagining this, I have seen it happen, more than once.

Preface

I’m not sure what to do with this. I got up early, sat down, and started typing like an robot possessed by a demon. Everything seemed to come together.

One result is clear: I will never work for a company again. Companies look at the blogs of prospective employees, and this posting will automatically eliminate me. Not that that was a likely probability, at 72 years of age—but if I were back in the States, I wouldn’t have much choice, lots of senior citizens back there are working for minimum wages in drug stores and the like.

I will post it and wait for the usual response, which will be: nothing.

——

This combination is killing America. It makes us fail, and makes us incapable of anything else. At one time this situation would have been unacceptable, but now we don’t even notice, and could care less.

First of all, upper management, as we call it, is dysfunctional. They do nothing, but get paid everything. They get outrageous “compensation packages”—whether they perform or not, which they almost never do. And everyone knows this cannot be changed. Which brings us to the second half of the combination: the passive employees who accept this condition. Both are locked into a death spiral going straight to hell.

I have been describing our “workplace”, the place that sets the pattern for the rest of our lives: some kind of organization, usually a large organization, usually a corporation. These function as totalitarian organizations—the worse thing imaginable—but we have become used to it—at least consciously. Unconsciously, we are rebelling against it, and destroying it—without any consciousness of what is going on. We have become a destructive unconscious society, a nation of nobodies.

I am in shock myself, after writing this, I can’t believe what I just wrote—but I am certain it is true, and it is probably the heart of our problem: at heart, we don’t exist. We have lost the most important thing any group or person has: their being. We have lost ourselves and become part of an amorphous undifferentiated mass. And this mass is incapable of changing itself. How could it? It doesn’t exist.

This pattern also applies to our government, and its relationship to us. We passively wait for it to take care of us, while it is busy taking care of itself—and its friends, the rest of the power structure.

This brings up the subject of Power (with a capital P), and our relationship to it. The relationship is simple and familiar: it has everything, we have nothing. Instead, we have merged with it and identify with it. We no longer exist: the ultimate thrill of the totalitarian subject. We are back in the Middle Ages—except the church has become the business world, the center of our world—the provider of jobs, something previously unknown in the human world; the modern equivalent of slavery.

From TED

Organ virtuoso Qi Zhang plays her electric rendering of “Ridiculous Fellows” from Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges” orchestral suite. It’s hard to believe a whole orchestra is not playing here. The organ has come a long way since Bach’s time.

You gotta see it.

We all have compliant memories, we can easily forget anything we want to, otherwise many of us would not have survived our childhoods. But it does seem some people are better at this than others.

Marcel Proust, in his novel In Search of Time Lost relates the story of the Monsieur de Norpois, a diplomat. Once, when he changed an opinion, and others questioned him about it, he was unable to recall his previous position. Proust explains:

Monsieur de Norpois was not lying. He had just forgotten. One forgets rather quickly what one has not thought about with depth, what has been dictated to you by imitation, by the passions surrounding you. These change, and with them so do your memories. Even more than diplomats, politicians do not remember opinions they had at some point in their lives and their fibbings are more attributable to an excess of ambition than a lack of memory.

History can be useful, it can tell us why some things in the present world are so strange. These are probably holdovers from the past that are still affecting us without our knowledge of them. This is especially true of religion, because religion is often a combination of new beliefs and old beliefs, mixed together at random. Modern Christianity still has remnants of Zoroastrianism, for example: a white dove represents Peace and/or the Holy Ghost—but I do not want to go into that now.

I am reading Steven Sharpin’s The Scientific Revolution, a history of the scientific worldview. His first sentence is a classic:

There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.

In 1611 Galileo observed spots on the sun. According to the prevailing astronomical beliefs, this was impossible. All celestial objects were pure, based on the reasoning of Aristotle. Heavenly bodies were made of different stuff than earthly bodies, an incorruptible sort of matter, subject to different principles. They were not subject to gravity (Newton would discover this later); and each were held in place by their own celestial sphere—one for the moon, the sun, each of the planets, and one for the outer stars—and each of these rotated independently—the Ptolemaic cosmos.

This sounds strange to us now, but even stranger was their attitude towards the earth, the center of this world:

The filth and mire of the world, the worst, lowest, most life less part of the universe, the bottom story of the house. Or: the vileness of our earth, because it consists of a more sordid and base matter than any other part of the world; and therefore must be situated in the centre, at the greatest distance from those incorruptible bodies, the heavens.

Moreover, after Adam and Eve’s fall, human senses were defiled and the possibilities of human knowledge were understood to be severely limited.

Nothing could illustrate better the difference between the medieval worldview and the modern one. We are now used to the modern variety—we are used to change, maybe too much so, and cannot appreciate a static worldview. Bear in mind that this culture had existed for over a thousand years—and still exists as the substrate for Latin American culture. We cannot imagine the shock this new worldview must have had in its time—or, for others, the exhilaration it caused.

From Eurasianet.org

A source familiar with the thinking of decision-makers in state agencies that have strong ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said there is a sense among hardliners that a shoe is about to drop. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — Iran’s savviest political operator and an arch-enemy of Ayatollah Khamenei’s — has kept out of the public spotlight since the rigged June 12 presidential election triggered the political crisis. The widespread belief is that Rafsanjani has been in the holy city of Qom, working to assemble a religious and political coalition to topple the supreme leader and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
…
Ayatollah Khamenei now has a very big image problem among influential Shi’a clergymen. Over the course of the political crisis, stretching back to the days leading up to the election, Rafsanjani has succeeded in knocking the supreme leader off his pedestal by revealing Ayatollah Khamenei to be a political partisan rather than an above-the-fray spiritual leader. In other words, the supreme leader has become a divider, not a uniter.

Now that Ayatollah Khamenei has become inexorably connected to Ahmadinejad’s power grab, many clerics are coming around to the idea that the current system needs to be changed. Among those who are now believed to be arrayed against Ayatollah Khamenei is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shi’a cleric in neighboring Iraq. Rafsanjani is known to have met with Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani’s representative in Iran, Javad Shahrestani.

A reformist website, Rooyeh, reported that Rafsanjani already had the support of nearly a majority of the Assembly of Experts, a body that constitutionally has the power to remove Ayatollah Khamenei. The report also indicated that Rafsanjani’s lobbying efforts were continuing to bring more clerics over to his side. Rafsanjani’s aim, the website added, is the establishment of a leadership council, comprising of three or more top religious leaders, to replace the institution of supreme leader. Shortly after it posted the report on Rafsanjani’s efforts to establish a new collective leadership, government officials pulled the plug on Rooyeh.
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To a certain degree, hardliners now find themselves caught in a cycle of doom: they must crack down on protesters if they are to have any chance of retaining power, but doing so only causes more and more clerics to align against them.
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Personally, I have been wondering much the same thing. Islam believes in the rule of law: their law, of course, but still a law with some fine features. It’s about time it was applied.

From the NY Review: Divided Iran on the Eve

While external observers perceive the struggle in Iran between conservatives and moderates in political terms, the Islamic Republic’s conflicting ideological currents also find expression in the age-old rhetoric of the apocalypse, which originated in the region more than two thousand years ago.

One of the books being reviewed is Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi’ism by Abbas Amanat. All quotes here are about that book.

During the past decade the Jamkaran mosque near Qom in Iran has become one of the most visited Shiite shrines, rivaling Karbala and Kufa in Iraq as pilgrim destinations. Here thousands of believers pray for intercessions to their messiah—the Mahdi or Twelfth Imam—whose return they believe to be imminent. Written petitions are placed in the “well of the Lord of the Age,” from which many believe the imam will emerge to bring about universal justice and peace. Six months after his surprise election to the Iranian presidency in June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted that this momentous eschatological event would occur within two years. With the turmoil in neighboring Iraq, where Shiites continue to be attacked by Sunni extremists, expectations for the return retain their appeal.

Unlike many academics, Amanat, a professor of history at Yale, is willing to venture into regions outside his specialty of Iranian studies, which makes his book particularly valuable, as it is informed by the knowledge—all too rare among Islamicists—that Islam is one variant in a cluster of religions rather than a subject to be treated on its own. Messianic expectations are fundamental to all the West Asian religions, articulating forces that are both dynamic and dangerous:

The vast number of visitors to Jamkaran demonstrates the resurgence of interest in the Mahdi among Iranians of all classes—including the affluent middle classes in the capital—and the triumph of the Islamic Republic in capitalizing on symbols of public piety.

Although these symbols, such as the Jamkaran shrine, are specific to Shiism, their appeal—not to mention their mobilizing power—is universal. As Amanat points out, apocalyptic movements have been motors of religious change throughout history. Christian origins are inseparable from the spirit of apocalypticism that consumed the Judeo-Hellenistic world in late antiquity. Muhammad’s early mission cannot be explained without reference to the “apocalyptic admonitions, the foreseen calamities, and the terror of the Day of Judgement, apparent in the early suras [chapters] of the Qu’ran.” Later examples—to name but a few—include Martin Luther’s call for reforming the Catholic Church and Sabbatai Zevi’s claim in the seventeenth century to be the Jewish messiah. The Mormon church, the most successful of the new American religions, was born in the millennial frenzy that swept through the “Burnt-Over District” of upstate New York in the 1830s. Amanat sees all these as conscious attempts to fulfill messianic visions conceived on the ancient models preserved in Zoroastrian and biblical scriptures.

In a brief but masterful compression of insights gained from readings of Norman Cohn, founding father of millennial studies, and other scholars in the field, Amanat reviews the dynamics of apocalyptic histories. On the positive side the anticipation of imminent divine judgment can be translated into a message of social justice, with individual choice replacing dogmas handed down by ancestors, tribes, or communities. Historically, apocalyptic movements tend to be socially inclusive, appealing especially to the deprived, marginalized, and dispossessed. The negative side is the demonization of perceived enemies in a world where the People of God—the saved remnant of humanity—see themselves as the sole bearers of divine wisdom or knowledge. The utopian project of realizing paradise—when the messiah’s followers choose to enact the millennial scenario in real historical time—may be as devastating as the earthquakes, fires, plagues, and wars of apocalyptic imaginings.

I can certainly relate to all of this. I was raised a Mormon and the Elders confidently expected the Coming of Zion, as they put it.

I have a book Jesus Apoclyptic Prophet of the New Millinnium by Bart. D. Ehrman. He does the best job I have seen in uncovering the historical Jesus. He concludes we know little about him, except he was an Apocalyptic prophet. The early Christians believed that the Second Coming was immanent, within their lifetimes. Any objective reader of the New Testament can see this, although it was ignored by later Christians.

The evangelicals in their campground near my house certainly believe this, and make a huge racket in their excitement.

That the Shi’ite believe in it also shows how small the world is.

What follows is a direct lift from Kevin Baker’s article in July 2009 Harper’s Magazine:

Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. At home or abroad, he invariably appears to be the only adult in the room, the first American president in at least forty years to convey any gravitas. Even the most liberal of voters are finding it hard to believe they managed to elect this man to be their president.

It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression, catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of Guantnamo, a floundering education system.

Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—to seize the radical moment at hand.

Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done.

He then goes on to compare Obama’s situation with the situation facing Herbert Hoover when he became president at the beginning of the depression. He does this brilliantly:

Hoover, as the historian David M. Kennedy writes, had shown “himself capable of the most pragmatic, far-reaching, economic heterodoxy,” a trait that “would in the end carry him and the country into uncharted economic and political territory.” New Dealer Rexford Tugwell would, many years later, claim that “practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” Indeed, “Hoover had wanted—and had said clearly enough that he wanted—nearly all the changes now brought under the New Deal label.”

Tugwell’s appraisal, though considerably exaggerated, nonetheless testifies to the boldness of Hoover’s program. The only problem was that it did not work. The nation’s credit system still would not thaw, banks kept falling like dominoes, unemployment rates and human suffering continued to rise. For all of his willingness to break with precedent and intervene directly in the economy, Hoover remained unable to turn his back fully on what Kennedy describes as the prevailing “legacy of perception and understanding of economic theory.”
…
Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenets he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required.

Such a transformation would have required a mental suppleness that was simply not in the makeup of this fabulously successful scientist and self-made businessman. And it was this inability to radically alter his thinking that, ultimately, distinguished Hoover from Franklin Roosevelt. FDR was by no means the rigorous thinker that Hoover was, and many observers then and since have accused him of having no fixed principles whatsoever. And yet it was Roosevelt, the Great Improviser, who was able to patch and borrow and fudge his way to solutions not only to the Depression but also to sustained prosperity and democracy. It was FDR, brought up with the entitled, patronizing worldview of a Hudson Valley aristocrat, who was able to overcome attachments to all classes, all theories. It was Roosevelt who understood the imperfections, the rough-and-tumble of politics. The programs of the First and Second New Deals were a hodgepodge of ideologies—which is precisely why they worked. The innovations they brought about, however sloppily, were the core of twentieth-century American liberalism in that they reflected the complex ever-changing realities of the modern world.
…
Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past—without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.

President Obama, to be fair, seems to be even more alone than Hoover was in facing the emergency at hand. The most appalling aspect of the present crisis has been the utter fecklessness of the American elite in failing to confront it. From both the private and public sectors, across the entire political spectrum, the lack of both will and new ideas has been stunning.
…
But for the moment, just like another very good man, Barack Obama is moving prudently, carefully, reasonably toward disaster.

I have copied too much of this fine article. I urge you to buy the magazine. But to be perfectly truthful, I know what the response of most Americans will be: “Duh.” They can’t believe America the Beautiful would ever fail.

Everyone must discover for himself what kind of world he lives in. 300 years ago the world was trying for something like this:

A desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up by a world view increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or tradition.

This is a definition of the Enlightenment, taken from Wikipedia. We still like to think of ourselves as enlightened people, but this is just one of our many illusions. We have become religious people again, and have little interest in science—only in technology.

I am indebted to Popper, and his book The Open Society and It’s Enemies for the ideas behind this posting. He wrote this book in 1945, while in exile in New Zealand, and considered it part of the war effort. It was an attempt to prevent another takeover by totalitarianism, similar to the Third Reich. As events would show in the last half of that century, he failed. The forces against reason are too strong—and that is one of the basic facts of our time—something I have discovered for myself.

This is part of another subject: the decline of the West, especially of America. This is something else we need to recognize—but usually don’t.

We have discovered that reason alone is not adequate. It can easily be overridden by the emotions, and usually is. The logical way to cope with this is to simply recognize the problem and guard against it in our individual lives. But few people are interested in this, and once a majority loose their interest in using reason to solve their social problems, the society as a whole ceases to function as a modern society.

From the Montana Newstation

An application for employment by the city of Bozeman Montana states:

“Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.,” the City form states. There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.

From the UK Telegraph

Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic “shrink to survive” proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

“The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we’re all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way,” said Mr Kildee. “Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.”

I need to keep this firmly in mind: things that are obvious to me may not be to others. It may be right in front of their noses, but they cannot see it. This contradicts the Greek notion that the facts were available to everyone—all Socrates had to do was point them out to his listeners. He was living in a time when such discussions were possible, but he still had to drink the Hemlock—for corrupting the youth, the oldest charge in the book.

Lesson Four in my course on Chaos Theory is entitled: Chaos found and lost again. The previous lessons were about Newton and his clockwork universe. After Newton, chaos appeared impossible. The world appeared completely deterministic. Even our God, the God of Newton, who was a extremely religious man, worked through case and effect. What else could he do?

When Poincaré discovered Chaos in 1885, he was shocked, and he did not push his discovery because he knew instinctively that the world was not ready for it. For 70 years it was forgotten. Scientists are only humans, after all, and it is a deeply shocking idea.

Even today, most do not accept it. When pushed, they are forced to admit that it is a recognized theory, after all they have heard of it—but they do not believe in it. Newton’s God still rules.

This has always been the case, with very few exceptions. But they are trying to convince us that they have changed.

From the Washington Post: US accepts blame for deaths of 26 Afghan civilians. Cross-reference this with my recent posting The Situation in Afghanistan.

What happened was common enough: our military got excited and killed a bunch of civilians. This has been going on ever since our occupation of the Philippines: our troops go crazy and kill everyone in sight. Their training emphasizes kill, kill kill, but says nothing about think, think, think. That is the last thing they want them to do. If some innocent civilians get killed, that can easily be covered up. Even if the case ends up in a civilian court, they will “support the troops”.

From the article:

The United States accidentally killed an estimated 26 Afghan civilians last month when a warplane did not strictly adhere to rules for bombing, the U.S. military concluded in a report that recommends even tighter controls to limit deaths that risk turning Afghans against the U.S war effort.

“The inability to discern the presence of civilians and assess the potential collateral damage of those strikes is inconsistent with the U.S. government’s objective of providing security and safety for the Afghan people,” the report prepared by U.S. Central Command said.

Three U.S. airstrikes conducted after dark near the close of the chaotic fight in the western Farah province probably accounted for the civilian deaths, according to the report released Friday. It contained only mild criticism of the B-1 bomber crew involved, however, and the nation’s top military official has already said there is no reason to punish any U.S. personnel.

This says nothing about how the decision to bomb is made, but it implies that such a process exists. An airplane, whether manned or not, has a very limited knowledge of the situation below. It depends entirely on people on the ground for information. Usually, this information is defective, if it even exists. It is often provided by people with their own agendas, who are happy to see their enemies destroyed—even if they are no danger to American troops.

In one previous case an American gun ship fired on a wedding celebration, which customarily involves the firing of guns. It claimed it was being fired on. But when ground troops showed up the next morning all they found was small pieces of people everywhere—and no remains of an anti-aircraft gun.

I want to say that not all military personnel are stupid. Some of them are very bright. In the first part of the Iraq war, for example, some American troops found themselves surrounded by hostile Iraqis. Their commander ordered them to drop down on one knee to look less threatening. The crowd cooled off and no one was hurt. But these guys are the exceptions that prove the rule: military intelligence is an oxymoron.

The time when there were military solutions to political problems, always a dubious proposition, is long past.