Non-Being and Destructiveness

"To be or not to be; that is the question.", said Hamlet. But he could also have said "To create or destroy; that is the question." They amount to the same thing, because being, or  individuation, is a creative act that every person has to perform for himself - or not. The simplest choice is often simply not to be - to abdicate responsibility for our most important responsibility, simply because this is what our society demands.

In a previous posting I said our society was evil, and people thought I was using unnecessarily harsh language. But any society that destroys its members and itself, and probably other societies too, is evil - the worst kind of evil.

At this point, I may be getting a lot of blank looks that say "What the hell are you talking about, crazy?" This is because the idea of a self has been forgotten - one of the basic ideas that formed the modern world. The post-modern world has waged war on this idea, along with other modern ideas - and it has won, without even much of a fight. We are returning a high-tech version of the medieval world. To see what this will be like, we only have to look at China, who is far ahead of us this way.

You may respond by noting how successful the Chinese economy has been. True, and if that is the only criteria: to be a rich totalitarian state, that is the way to go. We are pretty far along that road ourselves. There is only one catch: the loss of the self - and, as it turns out, the loss of the earth itself. It amounts to the same thing.

Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Disappear?

Scientific American

Bacteria, viruses and fungi have been primarily cast as the villains in the battle for better human health. But a growing community of researchers is sounding the warning that many of these microscopic guests are really ancient allies. 

Having evolved along with the human species, most of the miniscule beasties that live in and on us are actually helping to keep us healthy, just as our well-being promotes theirs. In fact, some researchers think of our bodies as superorganisms, rather than one organism teeming with hordes of subordinate invertebrates.

I find this interesting, so interesting that I subscribed to Scientific American again: to the tune of nearly fifty dollars. I was just congratulating myself on my solid bank balance, but there have been so many post-Christmas sales that I cannot resist, it is going away fast.

The Loss of Financial Independence

Financial independence was what attracted many young men from the Mid-West back to farming after WWII. They wanted to be their own boss; and they thought this right was part of what being an American was. They found out, to their sorrow, that this was no longer the case. America was no longer a land of the free, it was a land of the organization, where the individual was no longer important.

A more shocking state of affairs cannot be imagined - but something even more shocking accompanied this change: nobody noticed it was happening. Most loved this new state of affairs, tailor-fit for nobodies. The previous state of affairs, I hardly need say, was made for somebodies - the strong, proud, people who made America in the first place - who were also financially independent.

I can hear your objection now: "The world has changed in the last two hundred years. What is needed now are persons who can fit into our modern life-style. If this causes some loss of independence, so be it. The world moves on, and people have to move with it, whether they like it or not."

What you are saying is exactly what I am saying: the individual is no longer important. And the very notion of this kind of person, who is interested in the Common Good, now seems quaint and unrealistic.

In his place is the person who is only in it for himself, and the Devil damn the hindmost.

The Government should be making software components

The government should be in the business of doing things that are not profitable, but useful - for example, roads.

The first roads were toll roads, modeled after the canals and railroads. But what was needed were roads that went everywhere. So wagon tracks, going everywhere, developed naturally and farmers prospered. Unfortunately, roads in some areas, such as swampy land, were too expense for local resources to build, so people demanded the government build them. The government, eager to expand the economy, complied. The Government, especially the Federal government, took responsibility for the economy - and this was the major reason for the Federal government in the first place. A loose confederation of states wasn't cutting it.

This trend accelerated greatly after the automobile - which had to have good roads. This culminated in our superhighway network - very expensive, but no one questions its value. Good roads are one factor that separates the developed countries from the undeveloped ones: they have a developed physical infrastructure.

Backward countries have no idea what an infrastructure is - and no idea about how to get one, because they have not first developed a modern cultural infrastructure - on which everything else depends. As I have said before, over and over, the development of a modern world in Northern Europe and North America, was painful and violent, and will probably not be repeated.

But we can help the advanced world we have already by using our smarts, and developing our strong point: software - on which the global economy and the Internet depends. Relying on the private sector to do this for us is not going to work, because the basic work, the basic research, in which everything else depends, is not compatible with the profit motive.

The people who do this are motivated solely by the desire to do good work - and giving it away free for others to use and improve. Once these tools are available, companies can jump right in and use them - in clever ways no one dreamed of - but the basic tools have to be available first.

In other words, the government can jump-start new industries by giving it new tools to use.

Other areas are badly in need of some basic research also: for example economics, which still exists in a dark ages of its own.

America is a big country, and needs a big government - not a small one. But we seem intent on destroying it - and ourselves.

Abandoning Windylane

Windylane was the family homestead my folks set up in Mother's home town of Nauvoo, Illinois. We moved there in 1947 when I was 11. It was a beautiful little town at the time, completely undeveloped, consisting of many small fruit farms nestled in a bend of the Mississippi River. We bought two acres right on the river, and converted a barn located on the riverbank into a cabin for us to live in during the summer. We used to sit on the porch of our cabin in the evenings and watch the Burlington Zephyr go up the other side of the river, about 9 in the evening, this was our signal to go to bed. It was quiet, peaceful - and cheap. Now all gone completely.

Mom and Dad called our property, which was mostly weeds, Windylane, because of the lane coming into the property from the gravel road the City owned, and had great plans for it. Windylane was going to last forever - and it would be part of the American Dream. Like the rest of the American Dream, it was eventually abandoned and forgotten - but I am getting ahead of my story. 

America in the Forties was something the young of today would not recognize, and I have a hard time remembering it myself. We had just won WWII, the biggest event in American history, and we were the most powerful nation in the history of the world. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and all that power went to our heads. We didn't realize this at the time, of course, we just rushed into the future, the glorious future, like the devil was behind us. Which in a sense it was: the Great Depression, which was remembered all too well. Windylane was going to be part of that future. 

Someone published a book at the time that purported to show how a family could be self-sufficient on three acres of land: growing their own food and raising their own livestock. And actually, there were still people living in Nauvoo at the time, who were doing just that: living all year on the money they made during the fruit-picking season. As a matter of fact, there are people still doing that down here in Central America. The Orosi Valley is full of them now picking coffee, many of them indigenous people, the women wearing their traditional dresses, and some from Nicaragua. They are very poor people.  

American was full of poor people too - after the Depression, but being poor was not considered a disgrace, it was so common. But you were expected to work your way out of it. After the war, this was easy. Good-paying jobs were plentiful, and a college education was cheap: like many others, I worked my way through college - and then had my pick of jobs. Real Estate was booming and my family, like many others, made their family fortune by simply owning some valuable property. Nauvoo was quickly filled with people with their savings from the War, buying up property. My extended family, including my mother's mother, and my mother's sister's family, the Ourths, who bought an old farm just down the river, were part of this land rush. Everyone assumed that small businesses, including above all the family farm, would continue to be profitable and useful. 

No one realized that the small business world, including above all family farm, was doomed, and would soon disappear. I felt, at the time, this was a great American tragedy, but I seemed to be the only one who felt this way. No one else noticed, and to this day, they steadfastly ignore this disappearance of a whole way of life - preferring to believe in an illusion: the Great American Dream - which to me seems more like a nightmare. But who am I? A nobody exiled to Costa Rica, sitting at his laptop, pecking away. But once again, I am getting ahead of my story.

I am having trouble remembering just what went on in the Fifties and Sixties, partly because I had left home to find my way in the world - there was obviously no future for me in Nauvoo or Windlylane. Dad had built up a nice little business making whole wheat flour, and a whole wheat bakery with lots of baked goods people liked, and he employed a couple of local women, who were grateful for the jobs. Nauvoo was hardly the ideal place for a business like this, but business, especially on weekends, when people came out for the scenic drive along the River, was brisk. Then for some strange reason, the Folks decided to abandon Windylane and sell the house, for a nice profit, and the business - and retire to Mexico.

Later, they said this was because of Dad's failing health. But as I recall, Dad's health wasn't so bad at the time. I think they just noticed the obvious: that the small business world was over. My Uncle Arnold had died earlier, from trying to run his family farm, and other farms were failing all over. All the other small businesses in Nauvoo were failing too. They saw it was time to cash out and get out. You couldn't live on dreams - including the dream of Windylane. 

The Uygurs of China

The American Media is almost useless when reporting on events outside the US. It knows Americans have no interest in this, and so it tells them what they want to hear - which is almost nothing. In the case of news from China, it seems like the Chinese media is looking over their shoulder, telling them what to write - which is natural, because American and China have similar objectives: global hegemony. We are busy scratching each other's backs - while pretending to be competitors. American business has invested so heavily in China, it is practically the same economy. This is not so say there are not conflicts, there certainly are, but the confluences are greater. 

Both have large militaries. The US uses them mainly outside its borders, because it see its enemies out there. China uses them inside its borders, because it sees its enemies in here. But other than that, the methods are similar: ruthless suppression. The National Geographic has an excellent article on the Uygurs in its December issue - which is not online yet - perhaps because it is politically sensitive: it offends an important ally: China. 

The story is entitled The Other Tibet, because it highlights the similarities between the two conflicts. Indigenous populations are being suppressed by China and heavy Chinese immigration is swamping their culture. I have even seen this on the Caribbean coasts of Costa Rica and Nicaragua: heavy Hispanic immigration has swamped the Black, English-speaking culture entirely. The local resources, seafood and lumber, are being exploited ruthlessly. 

As always, a map is essential for understanding what is going on, and the Geographic maps, as always, are excellent. See the one on page 42-43. This territory is critical, located as it is between China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan (central Asia), and Russia. It contains much of China's coal, oil, and gas, and construction is booming. The Uygurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) are fast being overwhelmed; they don't like it; and some of them are fighting back. That's the story in a nutshell. 

Produce more, consume more, produce more

This is the basis of our economy: more and more affluence, more and more money sloshing around. The more money people have, the happier they will be. And happiness is what it is all about. 

And there is now way out of this vicious circle. We are locked in until some limiting factor, or factors, brings on an economic collapse. The reasoning is simple: nothing can grow forever, eventually it runs out of resources. Everybody agrees, but insists that we are nowhere near this limit. CO2 levels, they will insist, are nowhere near their limit - and trying to limit them is foolish.

I think they are locked into an eternal growth pattern, and feel they are now free of the limits imposed by Nature. They have become super-natural beings - and they like being that way. In fact, when a society reaches this stage, when it feels it is all-powerful, it is already on the way down. 

We can No Longer Work Together

One of the marks of a great society is its ability to accomplish great tasks - and this means the ability of many people to work together. When this ability is lost, the society disappears - perhaps leaving its monuments behind, such as the Great Pyramids - and perhaps nothing at all. Since most of our accomplishments are now digital and require digital storage, most of these digits will probably disappear with us, like the marks of footprints in the sands of time. Recovery will be impossible.

Looking at the economic mess we are in, we should be able to back off and say "We can all figure this out together" - or as our Founding Fathers once said "Let us reason together." But such an idea never crosses our minds, because togetherness or reasonableness, no longer exist for us. We expect someone else to take care of us, we want someone else to be in power, in control. And sure enough, these someones have appeared, behind their facades, taking care of themselves, while pretending to take care of us. And we rejoice - and at the same time, wonder what happened to all our wealth. 

The mere idea of anything like central planning and control gives us the willies. So we have a series of bubbles, each more serious than the last, taking us straight down the road to hell - when we think we are going to heaven. 

We can't tell the difference. 

How to see the Real World

Take a local bus through the back country of an undeveloped country. I will never forget a trip I did like this in the hill country of Guatemala. I got on the bus by mistake, thinking it was an express bus to the capital of the state. Instead, it went straight into the jungle, picking up all kinds of things: people (of course), but also the goods they were taking to the market, their pigs and their chickens, and other assorted small fry.

The smells were pungent, since no one bothered to bathe. These were mostly the mountain Maya, a colorful people - and I don't mean that figuratively. The women wear the loudest, most contrasting colors they can find. And they take a delight in their handicrafts: mainly their weaving using back-strap looms. You will see little girls with their toy looms fastened behind their backs, banging away with their shuttles, with complete seriousness.

These people knew how to live - the same way they had for centuries. Unfortunately, their way of life would be abruptly terminated by a genocide against them by a Christian government fully supported and equipped by our government - but that is another story - and one Americans don't want to hear.

Yesterday, I went on a local bus to Cervantes, a small town not far away, just to see what it was like. Orosi is getting noisy, and I am considering other possibilities. Sitting at the bus stop in Cervantes, waiting for a bus to come back on, I realized I was in another world, with entirely different values: local values. They were unfamiliar with the values of the modern world, which has influenced their central government, producing a more-or-less welfare state. Out there, you and your family were on your own, and it was dog eat dog - a medieval world.

The same kind of world we are going back to.

Let's abolish the U.S. Senate

Sarasota Herald Tribune

Resolved that the U.S. Senate is not serving the people well and should be abolished.

The Senate is the result of a compromise in drawing up the Constitution, between the larger states which wanted a legislative body based on population and the smaller states which wanted a legislative body with an equal number of members from each state. So we got both, and on balance, it was worth creating a Senate to gain a Constitution.

But, it has become a very serious threat to our ability to meet the constitutional mandate to "establish justice, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

And while we're at it, abolish the Electoral College too. Reforms like this seem to be in the air: check this Google search page. They would make good Christmas presents to ourselves.

But Santa, all-powerful as he is, couldn't pull this off. We would have to do it - and that is impossible. Americans should make a New Year's resolution: not to do anything, but to understand why we cannot do anything.

A Mathematical View of the World

A mathematical view of the world is one of the foundations of science. But our increasing disinterest in, and our deplorable skills in, this science is part of our rejection in science in general. We are only interested in being entertained, and math does not entertain us. As I see it, this is part of a general cultural decline: Poetry does not entertain us either.

This morning I looked at my stack of books to see which ones I could throw away. I would dearly love a library where I could keep all my books forever, but my nomadic life style does not allow this. My eye fell on a bright yellow book:The (Mis)Behavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot. It said it had a new preface on the financial crisis, so I turned to that. It starts off with:

The world-wide market crash of Autumn 2008 has many causes: greedy bankers, lax regulators, and gullible investors, to name a few. But there was also a less-obvious cause: our all-too-limited understanding of how markets work, how prices move, and how risks evolve...

Of course, the fundamental cause of the crash was purely human: over-optimism. The subprime mortgages that undermined our great banks were written on the false assumption that what had been seen before would, more or less, persist into the future: housing prices would keep rising, default rate would say within a forecast range, hedging strategies that worked hitherto would keep on working. That kind of thinking has led to every financial bubble in history - from tulips in seventeenth-century Holland to dot-coms in late-twentieth-century America.

But the 2007/08 credit crisis was magnified by an phenomenon new to our generation: an over-confidence in our understanding of the markets, as reflected by the industry's increasingly sophisticated computer models.

He goes on to say:

When studying markets, it is the supposedly aberrant situation that provides the greatest insight and threat. Biologists know that studying disease helps us to understand the human body. Physicists collide high-energy particles to understand ordinary matter. Meteorologists study hurricanes to forcast the local weather. And economists? Well, by comparison they are a curiously incurious lot.

We urge change. Financial economics, as a discipline, is where chemistry was in the sixteenth century; a messy compendium of proven know-how, misty folk-wisdom, unexamined assumptions, and grandiose speculation. Most of it focuses on practical aims, such as making money or avoiding loss for whoever is paying for the research, whether a bank or a government. While there is nothing wrong with that, it does mean that the flow of scientific information is sharply curtailed by self-interest. A bank in which the research department thinks it has discovered something new and useful will not share it with anyone else. Being focused on profit, not knowledge, it is unlikely to fund fundamental research.

What is needed is a Project Apollo for economics - a sizable, coordinated effort to advance human knowledge.

Without that knowledge we are doomed.

This book was mostly ignored, so he wrote The Black Swan, intended for the general public. In his home page he says he has now given up on trying to educate anyone:

Bernanke's farce was not a cause, but a nauseating trigger: I have more important things to do than keep throwing pearls before swine.

You may note that I am back to using Blogger.com for this posting. I have floundered all over the place: WordPress and TypePad have both let me down. I seem to be stuck with Google for almost everything. I would rather not get into bed with a giant, but war makes strange bedfellows.

ADHD

My youngest sister mentioned this in a recent email. She was having a hard time coping with it--in others. I didn't even know what it meant. So I looked it up on Wikipedia. Then I went on with my breakfast. I didn't think it applied much to Costa Rica, where I live now.

Then it came to me that it did--I know people down here that act that way. One of them is a gringo who is always bragging about his money-making projects--whether you want to hear about them or not. They always have a fantastic future, even though his many projects in the past have always fizzled. He is hyperactive this way, although I never categorized him this way before. I just thought he was a loud-mouth.

And I know a young Tico who cannot pay attention to his business, which really needs it, but has grand plans to become all kinds of things: a opera singer, a ballet dancer, or an actor. If he were still an adolescent, this would be understandable, but he isn't. He takes after his mother, who is also flits from one obsession to the other, never settling down.

The Role of Companies in America's Golden Age

I am still reading Supercapitalism. As I mentioned before Robert B. Reich considers the period between 1945 and 1975 to be America's not quite golden age—and I agreed. Economically is was golden, but socially it was unpleasant with Senator McCarthy (who my father approved of, except for his bad manners) and the start of the Cold War.

He refers to the book The Modern Corporation and Private Property, published in 1932. It noted that top executives of America's giant companies were not even accountable to their own shareholders and operated their companies in their own interest. The solution, the authors said, was to make these executives responsible to a broad range of interests: investors, employees, consumers, and the general public. According to him, this actually happened:

Sitting atop America's largest corporations were men who repeatedly stated that their job was to balance the needs of everyone affected by the corporation. “The job of management.” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address that typified what other chief executives were saying, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the variously affected interest groups...Fortune lectured its executive readers on their duty to maintain a broad national perspective: “To take the professional point of view, the executive must adopt a detached, reserved attitude toward the opportunities and tactics of the moment. He must become an industrial statesman.”

These business leaders could afford to be corporate statesman—acting, in their view, for the betterment of the nation rather than strictly for the benefit of their own consumers and shareholders—because the oligopolistic system allowed them the license to be statesmen. Just as they could grant their blue-collar workers generous wages and benefits without any worry that a competitor would undercut them, they could go to Washington and advocate the Marshal Plan without concern that a rival would steal away market share while their attention was elsewhere.

He finishes this chapter with these words:

Then something happened that changed everything: America and the world got on the road to supercapitalism.

Endocrine Disruptors

From the New York Times: Nicholas D. Kristof

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.

Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.

These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

Investigators Suspect Computers Doomed Air France Jet

From the Wall Street Journal

Aviation investigators, running out of time to find the "black boxes" with key information on the crash of Air France Flight 447, suspect a rapid chain of computer and equipment malfunctions stripped the crew of automation today's pilots typically rely on to control a big jetliner.

Based on initial physical evidence and information from automatic maintenance messages sent by the aircraft, these people said, the plane bucked through heavy turbulence created by a thunderstorm without the full protection of its flight-control systems -- safeguards that experts say pilots now often take for granted.

Relying on backup instruments, the Air France pilots apparently struggled to restart flight-management computers even as their plane may have begun breaking up from excessive speed, according to theories developed by investigators.

The New Economy has Destroyed Middle-Class Values

One of these values is the career. The young are no longer interested in one, and the those that have persevered, and accumulated huge college loans, are not happy with the result. They are exploited almost as badly as the factory workers were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. They are well-paid, by comparison, but they are only part of the machinery, which is constantly being improved. As in the Red Queen's world, they have to run to stay in one place.

They are only valued for what they can produce. As one software manager from Microsoft once told me: “They have to produce a lot of high-quality work.” She added that she had demanded that they work on Saturdays, to meet a current crisis. This is is not uncommon in the software world; they sometimes work for days at a time with no sleep, right through the holidays. As another friend told me: “The things you have to do in a startup shorten your life”. After devoting their lives to the company, they get replaced by younger blood when they can no longer keep up the pace. They can always find someone who is smarter and harder-working than they are. To put it bluntly: you gotta kiss ass and eat shit. But I see I have digressed.

I should define some terms. In the title I spoke of the new economy, one that is dominated by the financial industry instead of manufacturing. It is also devoted to a free market, with no social controls of any kind. In other words neoliberalism, but I hesitate to use that term because Americans have no idea what it means—and refuse to acknowledge its existence.

In America, we also speak of the middle-class. In Europe this is referred to in French: the bourgeoisie. Americans are uncomfortable with the term; it is too high-brow for them, and their plain ways of thinking.

I defined these terms so you could understand the following excerpts from False Dawn, by John Gray, a professor at the London School of Economics, where George Soros studied too. We like to think of George as one of our own, but he most definitely is not; he is just another shark swimming where the feeding is best—but one with keen intellectual interests.

To read the following, you will have tolerate some academic language, of the British variety. But it won't kill you. Grit your teeth, and plow on.

Amongst the human needs that free markets neglect are the needs for security and social identity that used to be met by the vocational structures of bourgeois society. A contradiction has emerged between the preconditions of an intact bourgeois civilization and the imperatives of global capitalism. The chronic insecurities of late modern capitalism, especially it most virulent free-market variants, corrode some of the central institutions and values of bourgeois life.

The most notable of these social institutions may be that of the career. In traditional bourgeois societies, most middle-class people could reasonably expect to spend their working lives in a single vocation. Few can now harbor any such hope. (Some American career councilors even recommend a career change every six years. My note.) The deeper effect of economic insecurity is to make the very idea of a career redundant.

In the lives of a working majority, an old-fashioned career in which professional seniority tracks the normal life cycle is barely a memory. The post-war trend to embourgeoisment is being reversed, and working people are being in some degree re-proletarianized.

Although de-bourgeoisification may have advanced furthest in the US, economic insecurity is increasing in nearly all the world's economies. This is partly a side-effect of global free markets, whose workings mimic Gresham's Law (which states that bad money drives out good) by making socially responsible varieties of capitalism progressively less sustainable. World-wide mobility of capital and production triggers a “race to the bottom” in which the more humane capitalist economies are compelled to deregulate and trim back taxes and welfare provisions.

Gray is saying some dynamite stuff here. It's too bad we don't read him—especially Obama's economic advisors. If they really understood him, they might really save America—instead of just pretending to.