Three Sigma Systems

Over the years I have had ongoing discussion with my friend and colleague, John S. Dowd about Israel’s plight in the Middle East. He argues that Israel’s miliary responses to the threats that surround her are only making her situation worse as world opinion increasingly sides with the plight of the Palestinians. I argue that Israeli concessions and accommodations with various national, tribal, and extra-legal interests will never appease all or even most of her adversaries, at least some of who who will never relent until the Jews are “driven into the sea”.

I contend that, at its root, of the Israeli conundrum is not about Middle East real estate. It is about the historical events, predominantly European, that led to the creation of Israel itself. It is about a 2000 year history of anti-Semitism in which the Jew was cast as the “other”. This protracted real-world passion play provided the impetus and legitimacy for the ongoing exclusion and brutalization of Jews in Diaspora throughout the Christian world and culminated amid the ashes of the Holocaust and creation of the Jewish state of Israel. The Jews and the state of Israel are not just one more case of the illogical or problematic drawing of national boundaries by which one group gains more and another group gains less. The creation of the state of Israel was a Christian attempt  to compartmentalize the real consequences of the Jew’s role as “other” in the mythic narrative of Christianity.

John sent me a link to a series of conversations between Christopher Hitchens, the noted atheist-intellectual, and Atlantic Magazine writer, Jeff Goldberg. Hitchens’ facile thought process succeeds in making some key points that have been particulary difficult for me. If you are interested in the process by which consciousness is constructed as well as the problems of the Middle East, you should find it interesting. Note that the interview is published in segments so you will need to click additional links to hear them all.

My reply to John after viewing the interviews, follows the video link.

John,

Interesting (and a bit gut wrenching). On the whole I have not been a great fan of Hitchens, if only because his arguments, with which I tend to agree, leave off where I begin. Read more…

In a recent interview conducted at the University of Oregon, Seymour Hersh (no relation), a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist who writes for the NYT and New Yorker, invokes the Quaker wisdom that the moral imperative of the journalist is to “speak truth to power”. As I see it, the Quakerism applies to more than just journalists.

Hersh goes on to discuss two subjects of great interest to me: the myth of objectivity and the reality of our futile wars of adventure that prove most tragically, that we do not learn from history! I see his comments against a backdrop of ideologues and fools battling over petty self-interests in which we become caught up in deadly games of lies and deceits that render us helpless in solving the problems that threaten our survival as a nation and a species.

For a breath of fresh air, watch and listen to this interview.

NTY – “U.S. Economic Growth Slowed to 2.4% Rate in 2nd Quarter“

• The United States economy expanded at an annual rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter, after expanding a revised 3.7 percent in the previous three months.
• Nonresidential fixed investment…was a key driver of growth in the second quarter, rocketing up at an annual rate of 17 percent.
• Consumer spending… a leading indicator of a recovery in part because it accounts for such a large share of the economy, has been leveling off. It grew at an annual rate of 1.6 percent in the second quarter, after an annual increase of 1.9 percent in the previous quarter.
• The personal savings rate in the second quarter was estimated to have been 6.2 percent.
• Imports spiked at an annual rate of 28.8 percent, the biggest jump in a quarter-century, compared with an annual increase of 10.3 percent in exports.
• Government spending shot up more than many anticipated, growing at an annual rate of 4.4 percent after a decline of 1.6 percent in the first quarter.
• Residential fixed investment spending on items like new homes grew at an annual pace of 27.9 percent in the second quarter. “This will almost certainly reverse hard next quarter,”
• Many economists to believe the recession that began in December 2007 is technically over… [but] The nation’s unemployment rate continues to linger just below 10 percent [and] Some forecasters have predicted even slower growth in the second half of the year, perhaps close to an annual rate of 1.5 percent.

“Given how weak the labor market is, how long we’ve been without real growth, the rest of this year is probably still going to feel like a recession,” said Prajakta Bhide, a research analyst for the United States economy at Roubini Global Economics. “It’s still positive growth — rather than contraction — but it’s going to be very, very protracted.”

Huh!?

So what do all these gyrating numbers — these supposed course indicators  — really mean?

The book “The Heart of the Sea” tells the story of the whaling ship Essex. Along with other whalers of the day, the entrepreneurial spirit led the captain and crew of the Essex to take ever greater risks in order to find and harvest the diminishing population of profitable whales.  On November 20, 1820, while killing the members of a sperm whale pod they located some 2000 miles west of the coast of South America, a member of the pod turned and rammed the Essex twice, breaking the ship’s back and sending her to the bottom. Regrettably, in their enthusiasm for the hunt for profits, the ship’s lifeboats were under-provisioned and neglected, as were any contingency plans should the complement’s adventures go awry.

The officers and crew of the Essex were competent sailors but in their recklessness, they became cast adrift in a situation in which the course indicators that had served them well in the past —- their charts, their ship’s performance characteristics, and their count of whales rendered — no longer applied. In their quest to profit their quarry had turned against them, transforming their intention to profit into a problem of survival.

During the three months that followed, the officers and crew of the Essex struggled to keep their lifeboats afloat and to divine some course of action that would take them to safety. As their situation grew more dire they repeatedly changed their plans, sometimes going this way and sometimes that. The numbers that had guided them in the past were no longer reliable in their new circumstance and in their final calculations they came to see their only salvation as cannibalism. By the time the last of the eight survivors from the original compliment of twenty-one were rescued on April 5, 1821, they had consumed the corpses of seven of the fellows.

It seems to me that in our obsessive drive to profit by entrepreneurship, we take ever greater risks in the interest of profits. As our harvests threaten to become diminished we reach ever farther for resources and markets that can be profitably exploited.

In some cases our folly comes in the form of our over reaching belief in our technologies of which the BP oil spill on but one small example. A confusion of senseless numbers continues to proliferate in that event. The confusion of numbers associated with climate change provides another indicator that we treading uncharted waters.

More significantly is the confusion of numbers that flow from our entrepreneurial adventurism around the world. We should not be surprised when the whales we have been hunting turn against us in an effort to break the back of our predatory ships. Osama Bin Laden is just one example of the ever increasing number of  whales who are turning against us in defense of their pods.

What the numbers tell me is that although we still imagine ourselves as noble hunters, ranging widely aboard a stout and well armed ships, we are actually already in the lifeboats, sizing up our shipmates for dinner.

Jeremy Rifkin gives a provocative lecture, supported by some entertaining graphics, in which he asserts that the human species is essentially defined by it empathic powers.

In other words, the process of evolution has selected for human nature that “feels” with others and thereby enables us to bridge the physical boundaries between individuals. The faculty of empathy allows us to synchronize our actions in dance, music, conversation, and in building in infinitely creative ways. We humans, as a whole, have survived 50,000 years because we have, for the bulk of that time, behaved in a manner that made us effectively greater than the sum of our parts.

I am largely in agreement with Rifkin. Our penchant for constructing the world though knowledge is based in our empathic interactions with one another. Our very consciousness depends upon our ability to share symbols and experience shared feeling about our constructs.

So why have we come to embrace the “scientific” ideas proffered by social Darwinism, that the nature of the human condition is rooted in every man for himself? The answer to this mystery is as simple as “follow the money”. Who stands to gain from this false science?

Rifkin’s thesis is that we must make an effort to organize our society in a manner that promotes empathy. It may be even simpler than that. Maybe all we need do is systematically remove the obstacles that have been placed in the way of doing what we do most naturally.

Thanks to John Dowd, who called this link to my attention, along with his comment: “You will like this.  I’m not buying it, but you will agree with it.”

He was right. I do like it!

CNN Money.com, June 26, 2010, Consumer Confidence News:

“Economists pay close attention to measures of consumer confidence as a proxy for consumer spending, which drives the bulk of the U.S. economy.

Wikipedia, Confidence Trick (Game):

A confidence trick or confidence game (also known as a bunko, con, flim flam, gaffle, grift, hustle, scam, scheme, swindle or bamboozle) is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. The victim is known as the mark, the trickster is called a confidence man, con man, confidence trickster, or con artist, and any accomplices are known as shills. Confidence men or women exploit human characteristics such as greed and dishonesty, and have victimized individuals from all walks of life.

Shills, also known as accomplices, help manipulate the mark into accepting the con man’s plan. In a traditional confidence trick, the mark is led to believe that he will be able to win money or some other prize by doing some task. The accomplices may pretend to be strangers who have benefited from performing the task in the past.

CNN Money.com, July 7, 2010 Ask the Expert (aka Ask the Shill),

Turning $200,000 into $800,000… [I]nvolves nothing more than some simple math. The kind of gain you’re shooting for requires a 6% annualized return, assuming you’ll reinvest your gains each year and that those gains will also earn 6% a year. ]T]o earn 6% annualized you don’t have to actually get 6% year in and year out. You could earn(?) more in some years and less in others. So, for brevity’s sake, to use an example over a three-year span, earning 10% one year, -2% the following year and 10.5% the next year would also work. The key word here is “potential.” When you invest in stocks and bonds, you may do spectacularly well some years (a 50-50 mix of equities and bonds earned 17.4% in 2009), fare poorly in others (the same blend lost 16.4% in 2008) and get so-so returns in yet other years (4.3% in 2005). You’ll find that you can significantly increase your odds of reaching your goal by investing more aggressively. For example, the odds of having $800,000 in 24 years jump to 31% if you invest 70% in stocks and 30% in bonds, and your upside also climbs significantly. There’s a 10% chance that you’ll have at least $1.3 million.

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH!

How to Beat the Con

A greedy or dishonest mark may attempt to out-cheat the con artist, only to discover that he or she has been manipulated into losing from the very beginning. This is such a general principle in confidence tricks that there is a saying among con men that “you can’t cheat an honest man”.

Who is the enemy?

So McChrystal is out and Preteaus is in! It looks like Obama and I were on the same wavelength. It was the only tactical maneuver possible under the circumstances, but the strategic problems still loom large, and given our “accomplishments” thus far, they may be intractable. Time, which is required to heal all wounds, is not on our side.

We need to examine the track record or our “accomplishments” if we want to understand how we got into this mess and how we can begin digging out.

1. We lifted the Taliban to power, by way of the Mujahideen as our proxy warriors in our battle with the USSR. We armed them. We trained them. (See “Charlie Wilson’s War” for Hollywood version of this story.)

2. Following the defeat of the Soviet invaders, the Taliban coalesced  and exercised authority throughout Afghanistan and were qute popular with the Afghan people. They restored order, built roads, quashed reliance on opium, and organized and provided schools and other social services, and were supported for several years by the U.S. It is true that they were a bit strict — sort of like towns dominated by fundamentalist Christians in Bible-Belt America — but they did bring order to a people who had been brutalized by the Soviet military machine and thereafter by inter-tribal warfare.

3. Having “achieved” our objectives with respect to the USSR, the US reneged on promises of assistance and squandered away the ties and influence that had been built with the Taliban and the Afghan people in general, for economic rather than ideological reasons. There’s no oil in Afghanistan.

4. Al-Qaida was no more than a blip on the Taliban radar prior to our invasion of Afghanistan. The evidence indicates that the Taliban had little interest and no part in the agenda of Bin Ladin and his small group of jihadists bent on avenging the US presence in the Saudi Arabian holy land during the Gulf War.

5. Had we kept our eye on the al-Qaida ball circa WT Center I (1993) prior to our invasion of Afghanistan, there was very little preventing us from using intelligence and covert ops to systematically undermine them in concert with allies. A few intelligence agents did keep their eye o the ball, and several opportunities to dismantle him and his group out were missed. But both Clinton and Bush II were frying other fish ($$). Surprise, surprise when the 911 attacks actually stung us!

6. During our inglorious post-911 invasion of Afghanistan, which was in itself mostly political posturing designed to appease US public opinion that we “do something” to get the bad guys, we attempted to repeat our anti-Soviet proxy strategy, this time by recruiting the Taliban’s enemies, the “Northern Alliance”, to unseat the Taliban who were supposedly allied with al-Qaida. The narrative of al-Qaida = Taliban was a contrivance of the same sort used in the Iraq invasion that claimed Saddam = al-Qaida. Although these equations were dubious in the extreme, they did provide a justification for “shock and awe”, spending billions and putting American youngsters in harm’s way.

7. As was the case with Iraq, we transmuted the identity of our adversaries from a small group of dangerous radicals into a wider theater of military conflict involving not only the Taliban, but the whole of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and ideologically, Muslim populations throughout the region and the world. To this day, it remains very unclear as to why we are leveling cities made of mud, who we are supposed to be killing and why they need to be dead.

8. From the beginning, we have resorted to using proxies to fight our battles and then we discard the proxies and resort to massive military theater ops designed to use our throw weight to subjugate whole populations while minimizing loss of US lives at the cost of necessary ”collateral” damage. By trying to MAXIMIZE our ROI rather than by optimizing the complex interactions between peoples and cultures, we have failed utterly to understand the true nature of our enemy, and in doing so, we have created exponentially more enemies and made it impossible for us to devise effective methods for confronting the initial threats.

Simply put, our methods, designed to shock and awe the world into submission to our values, our interests, and our rage, have magnified our problems a thousand-fold and even if we come to the realization of our foolishness, we cannot simply change the channel. Nevertheless, pressing on with bigger guns and more massive military ops will only multiply our enemies, intensify their resistance, and dig our hole deeper.

Sadly, along with his predecessors, President Obama has fallen into the trap, laid in large part by the US military that cleaves to Clausewitzian doctrine that eschews intelligence; built upon relationships of shared interest, and espouses military might as the most effective means of extension of political will. Give people a really cool hammer and everything looks like a nail. But the nature of today’s enemies, who though small in number, have the means to turn our own inventions back against us and do us great harm, does not lend itself to this 19th Century doctrine of “a bigger hammer”.

My solution to our problem:

Step one to reversing our problem-amplification system is to withdraw from the situation that makes us “fact-on-the-ground” invaders. Only then can we begin to rebuild the relationships, resources and means needed to address substantive threats posed by enemies who have no clear national alignments or central authority.

We must address a decentralized threat with a decentralized solution.

NOTE: This entry has been updated to more accurately reflect the sequence of events involving our role in arming and supporting the loosely organized alliance of Mujahideen freedom fighters and subsequent rise of the Taliban as a religious-civil authority in the otherwise lawless expanses of Afghanistan. Tip of the hat to John Dowd.

In news that should not come as news, Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone magazine submits to readers his article, “Runaway General“, in which he profiles Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan — a movie star blood-and-guts warrior “…who prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else) — shows, in his leaked “candid moments”, nothing but contempt for his weak-kneed and waffling Commander-in-Chief, President Barack Obama.

War Dog

It doesn’t take much effort to surmise that the only weak-kneed and waffling coward in this tragic play is Gen. McChrystal himself, who is scrambling to spin his losing game plan by blaming the Obama administration.

From the very beginning, Obama was faced with an impossible never-ending, never end-able, “War on Terrorism” with a front-line drawn in the deserts and mountains of the mythically unconquerable Afghanistan. Then McChrystal blindsided Obama with his leaked report and speech asserting that, “If we didn’t send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of ‘mission failure’.”

“The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president’s ass.”

If the “mission” was to pacify the tribes of Afghanistan and make them our allies with our big stick military might and our carrot of dollars, we were doomed to failure from the outset. As anyone who has spent time in Afghanistan knows, outside of Kabul the tribal people of Afghanistan are not motivated by fear and greed, although they will take money when offered and hide from bombs when dropped, they are guided by honor, loyalty, and revenge.

“As Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. “The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.”

So the ambitious Gen. McChrystal, born and bred to be an attack dog, has been barking up the wrong tree since day one, and now, having realized this, he is barking up another tree with easier pray, attacking his nation’s leadership on the sly.

As I have written time and time again in this blog (e.g. Dancing in Afghanistan), we have been traveling a hopeless path toward self-destruction in Afghanistan. The generals are wrong and Obama is wrong to listen to them. We continue to dig the hole we have been digging still deeper, and we will be lucky if instead of being buried in it, we manage to crawl out and get on with more important matters than converting Muslims to our somewhat dubious way of looking at the world.

Obama should fire McChrystal with great fanfare and then work out a method for calling off the dogs of war against, against — who is we’re supposed to be fighting?. Muslims? Afghans? The Taliban? The Karzai government? Ourselves? I don’t think anyone knows for sure, and certainly not Gen. McChrystal.

Obama needs to find Osama bin Laden and kill him three times. He needs to stop killing Afghan and Pakistani innocents, even if they are just collateral damage. He needs to stop alienating every Muslim on the planet so that maybe they will be willing help us thwart the fanatic terrorists from all religions and walks of life who actually pose a threat. Getting down to basics, he needs to curb the oil barons who have addicted us to oil, embroiled us in wars of adventure in the Middle East and enraged those populations, poisoned our oceans and coastlines, polluted our water and skies, changed our climate and enshrined greed as the noblest of human callings.

My action plan for Obama:

This is actually an opportunity for Obama to dig himself out from the deadfall we are trapped in. With great fanfare, he should fire the  McChrystal, who deserves it in spades (Truman-esque). Next, he should order Gen. Preteaus, the warrior’s warrior, to the Afghan theater to hold the fort until a new plan can be devised. Then he should implement a plan to draw down conventional forces, start building a narrative that makes some sense of the debacle, and build up on-the-ground intelligence and covert ops in the region so that he can get after the guys that are actually plotting against the U. S.

In his NTY column yesterday,”That ’30s Feeling“ Paul Krugman confesses that he is getting that old familir feeling.

“[H]ere in Germany, a few scholars see parallels to the policies of Heinrich Brüning, the chancellor from 1930 to 1932, whose devotion to financial orthodoxy ended up sealing the doom of the Weimar Republic.”

Kurgman is worried about a deepening recession. I worry that things are much worse than an economic slowdown.

Krugman’s old familiar feeling is not history repeating itself. It is stupidity repeating itself.

Our current situation cannot be mapped onto the events that led up to the debacle of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Although our capacity for stupidity remains basically the same, back then our primitive technologies limited our capacity for self-destruction to a mere 48 million people.

Just think about the differences between the Weimar Republic, circa 1930,  and the Obama Republic, circa 2010.. Back then, we were just messing around. We had no nuclear arsenals, bunker busting missiles, or remote controlled Predator aircraft. Satellite communications and Global Positioning Systems hadn’t even been thought of yet. Truly massive global corporations were just a twinkle in the eye of oligarchs. Why we couldn’t even drill for oil in a wet spot much less the abyssal depths of the sea. Global warming hadn’t even entered discussion back then. Come to think of it, there were just 2 billion people on the planet back then, while today that number has risen to 7 billion!

No, you can’t map today’s events onto those of the 1930’s and 1940’s, but you can map human stupidity onto our current situation.

Consider these ideas for example.

• What’s natural is good. Greed is natural and therefore good. Hooray for greed!

• By countervailing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the method that best serves greed is profit, by which you minimize what you put into the system and maximize what you take out of the system. Boo to the Second Law of Thermodynamics!

• To profit more, an ever-increasing number of people must receive less from the system so that some can receive more from the system. Hooray for people who get less and less!

• The wealth and profit of a nation is best measured in GDP even if the 95% of the GDP of a nation of 350 million accrues to just 10% of those millions. Hooray for GDP!

• The business of profiting can only flourish without limits. The resources and markets of the world must be laid open to exploitation and anyone who resists is counterinsurgent. Boo to counterinsurgents!

• The problems of the world are always caused by “others” who get in the way of profits, including but not limited to; Latino immigrants, Chinese commies, Muslims, black-skinned people, Israeli Jews, homosexuals, socialists and socialist-minded liberals. These miscreants are all counterinsurgents who need an attitude adjustment. Boo to Others!

• Those who profit are good and true and beautiful. Those who suffer and have less are genetically flawed. Someday, the human genome project will lead to solutions to this problem… for a profit, of course. Hooray for the super-race!

Oops! Sorry, I misspoke. I didn’t mean to say super-race, I meant to say hooray for goodness, truth, and The American Way. We’re all for that, right?

Clive Crook, senior editor of The Atlantic, opened his commentary today with, “Obama’s address was surprisingly bad“, and closed with the following observation.

“He (Obama) looked nervous too, don’t you think? It was an unconfident performance. He moved his hands too much. He did not look strong. It was a bad night for his presidency, and he would have been wise to give no speech rather than this speech.”

Here’s what I saw in the man.

Obama on BP from the Oval Office

What struck me most powerfully while watching his speech was a sense that the 48 years-young Obama’s sense of cool self-confident composure is on the verge of a collapse under the weight of impotence. Our audaciously hopeful young leader is coming to the awareness that the presidency of the United States of America is NOT the most powerful position on earth. Neither he nor we-the-people, through his agency as our elected leader, are in control of the ship.

Since the years following World War II, when America was at the height of her global military power, political influence, and moral authority, our nation has been transformed by the success of her economic dominance, into a host nation for the world’s most powerful corporate oligarchies. As the wealth of the nation has been transmuted into the wealth of amoral corporations and their profit motivated shareholders, the power of the presidency and body politic, have become powerless handmaidens to Corporate interests.

In watching the most recent tit-for-tat between BP’s CEO and our president, it became clear to me that it is not that corporatist leadership is smarter, more competent or more right than Obama. It is that in their single-minded voraciousness, they are simply more powerful than Obama and the instruments of government at his command. BP’s Hayward doesn’t lie and cheat out of malice. He lies and cheats because that’s his job. BP exists to produce profit and nothing more than that enters into the calculus of his actions.

BP CEO Hayward

Obama’s audaciousness filled us with the hope that our nation might be steered back onto to a course shaped by our moral compass that embraces compassion for our fellows, environmental responsibility, parsimony, patriotism, and a vision for a better future, but each time he has attempted to wrest the helm from corporate oligarchies, he has been undermined, beaten down and rendered ineffectual by the machinations and maneuverings of oligarchical power.

• Underlying the un-winnable wars of adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the corporate desire to achieve military and political hegemony in the Middle East. Among the most powerful of motives was the desire to make the region safe for exploitation by corporate America. While young Americans have been dying in combat and mercenary corporations have been profiting from government contracts, Obama’s high-minded plans for withdrawal from both theaters of action are already hopelessly mired in equivocation.

• Underlying the economic debacle that Obama inherited from the previous administration’s anti-regulatory polices — the only good government is a dead government — are the unbridled money changing schemes of large corporate interests seeking to leverage the vig and by producing nothing, increase profits at an ever-increasing rate. At every turn, Obama’s efforts to redistribute wealth, rebuild the middle-class and re-regulate corporate greed, have been gutted of substance. His accomplishments have consisted principally of paying a dollar for every nickel won.

• Underlying our rapidly collapsing healthcare system, are the corporate entities that harvest their wealth by acting as middlemen between the essential healthcare needs of the American people and the resources needed to meet those needs. In the face of corporate power, Obama’s healthcare accomplishments have been reduced to shuffling chairs on the Titanic while locking the middlemen even more tightly into the system by which their profits come before American lives.

• Underlying the current BP gusher that threatens our nation and the world’s environment, is corporate willingness, in pursuit of short term gains for shareholders, to turn a blind eye to devastating long-term risks that accrue to the public. Obama’s response reflects the fact that he, like the rest of us, is hostage to the big oil corporations who provide the gunk that turns the wheels of industry. He can no more unchain the American economy from big oil than plug the hole 5000 feet below the surface of the ocean.

In yesterday’s Oval Office speech, I saw a man who is much less hopeful now than before. Young Obama finds himself trapped and impotent against the forces of oligarchy that wield their wealth and power with the single-minded will of ruthless battlefield generals. What he has been unable to address with sufficient audaciousness is that a war is raging right here and right now. It is a war between the innate, mindless greed of powerful corporate oligarchies and the people’s moral authority to do what is necessary to make our nation and the world, a better place.

My sense is that, at this moment, we are adrift in the abyss.

Those of a liberal mind are appalled and morally offended by Israel’s militant intransigence in the face of hostile acts by its neighbors. For the most part, their solutions suggest that Israel must adopt a more peaceful and passive approach to accommodating the aspirations of its neighbors. Their recommendation is for the Israelis to seek a series of stepping-stone solutions by which to achieve a final solution. Give a little, get a lot.

Stepping-stones to where?

In Germany during the 1930’s and throughout Europe as a whole during the 1940’s, there were numerous stepping-stone “solutions” to what was called, the “Jewish problem”:

• Stop gathering
• No flags
• Relinquish national service
• Relinquish citizenship
• Stop shopping at non-Jewish businesses
• Stop teaching
• Relinquish professional activities
• Stop fraternizing with non-Jews
• Wear identification badges and carry “papers”
• Relinquish personal property
• Move residences to areas within prescribed borders
• Stop complaining, no protection of law, no right of habeas corpus, no self-defense
• Relocate to “work” camps

The world outside of Europe stood by and watched as the Jews, little by little, took all of the steps “recommended” as solutions, and when these were not enough, the world stood by while the Germans and complicitous others implemented their Final Solution. Six million Jewish men, women, and children, give or take, obediently marched into gas chambers disguised as showers.

Fifty-five years later, the Jews that survived the Holocaust have moved and set up shop in a tiny region of the Middle-East ceded to them by the world community as another “solution”. Today, five and one half million Jews live closely surrounded by half a billion people who have also declared their intention to implement their own version of a “Final Solution”. By various and sundry means, these people have been diligently and consistently trying to work their Final Solution since 1948.

The difference between the 30’s and 40’s and now is that the Jews have learned through the bitterest of experience that the little by little “solutions” offered by people are often just stepping-stones to someones Final Solution.

The harsh reality of life is that sometimes when you are outnumbered and surrounded, with your back to a wall, the only possible solution when confronted by those who openly profess a desire to destroy you, is a strong and even peremptory offense.

As recent history demonstrated with absolute clarity, the alternative is death, little by little. From this experience comes the resolve, “never again”.

There was a young lady of Niger

Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;

They returned from the ride

With the lady inside,

And the smile on the face of the tiger.

Pretty much everyone agrees that the driving principle behind private enterprise is profit. Financial profit measured in the coin of the realm, is the common denominator that unifies entrepreneur, executive, and shareholder into a cold and heartless logic of avarice. What economists call the “efficiency of the marketplace” is the same as the efficiency of the jungle predator that stalks and kills its prey unhindered by reflection, compassion, or loyalty. We have come to believe that private enterprise is the perfect killing machine that, when put to some purpose, will do what it does in the most efficient and profitable manner possible.

Born only 150 years ago, the oil hunting-killing beast has grown larger and more efficient at an exponentially increasing rate. Today, BP and other “supermajors” are the largest and most voracious beasts in the jungle. In the quest for more oil, they alone possess the means to hunt and kill oil in the most remote and inaccessible regions of the planet “down there”. In their single minded quest for more, all other concerns are superfluous. Sucking up oil is their nature and we have become powerless to rein them in, even when their depredations threaten to destroy the southern coast of the United States and possibly, much more.

The public enterprise of space travel began about 60 yeas ago. Now President Obama is ceding space exploration to private enterprise. He wants to create a single-mindedly, efficient beast to serve us in the business of exploring and exploiting the heavens. As we become increasingly dependent on space travel technology for crucial activities such as communications, navigation, defense, and as yet unimagined projects, that technology will be the property of the beasts of private enterprise, and as with BP “down there”, when we need most to go “out there”, we will be forced to turn to these single-minded and heatless beasts.

The information highway was born only about 35 years ago. . The Internet is fast becoming the neural-network of a global mind. The bastard child of public and private enterprise, its fate is in the balance. If we cede our minds “in here” to the beasts of private enterprise, they will hold the keys to our global mind, and it will be to them that we will have to turn when the challenges before us demand that we apply our minds “in here” most keenly.

The fanciful idea behind unfettered free markets and private enterprise — Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” —  is the law of the jungle, in which we imagine that we can ride on the back of perfect predators, unchained from public regulation and common purpose. Before giving away the keys to “down there”, “up there”, and “in here”, be sure and check to see who’s smiling.

Update

My cyber-friend and colleague, John Hunter, proprietor and author of the “Curious Cat” Blog and commenter on this post, led me to one of his earlier posts that cited an article addressing the problem of riding tigers quite well.

In 2002, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize laureate, wrote about Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” in is article “There is no invisible hand“. The title says it all. In an amusing twist, Stiglitz opines about the rise ideology of free-market fundamentalism in graduate schools:

“Is it because economics as a discipline attracts individuals who are, by nature, more selfish, or is it because economics helps shape individuals, making them more selfish?”

The answer of course, is that clockwork models of human behavior are attractive to even the most clever of minds. The meshing of gears provides a great substitute for responsible thought and action. Such nonsense was pioneered and exploited by Astrologists and Numerologists. Today we call it “Economics”. Same scam, different name.

Thanks to Hunter and Stiglitz for trying to wipe the smile off the tiger’s face.

It should come as no surprise that apocalyptic thinking is pretty much ground into my psyche. I was raised during the 50’s and 60’s, so my formative years were punctuated by air raid sirens, duck-and-cover drills, bomb shelters, and dread of nuclear winter.

Miraculously, we have not annihilated ourselves in a nuclear holocaust; at least not yet. Maybe our powers of reason are actually sufficient to avert outright suicide after all, but it looks as though the power of our greed may do the job anyway.

In our quest for more of just about everything and anything, it seems that we are now taking go-for-broke risks in which the whole human enterprise is on the line. If people have a hard time wrapping their minds around the evidence of global climate change, they should have have no problem grasping the scope and long term implications of the runaway oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Even if the “top kill” works, we have sealed the fate of the entire southeastern coast of the United States for generations to come. The wasteland created by the melt -down of the Chernobyl nuclear “facilities” was nothing by comparison.

The current state of our tampering — our greed and hubris — has us on the brink of self-destruction a thousand times over. Will we do ourselves in by blowing ourselves up or by poising our skies and oceans or by creating microbes that are invulnerable to our medicines or by …?

Although the precise mechanism by which we will precipitate our own demise cannot be predicted, if we continue on our current course, that outcome is 100% certain.

It’s well passed time for a change we can believe in!

There’s no mystery behind our economic, social, environmental, and personal crises. When  you build a house of cards you can be certain that it will always fall sooner or later. To avert disaster we must accept this one fact of life, and take it into account in our every action.

All living creatures behave in a manner that shapes the world about them to better suit their survival needs. Beavers build dams, termites build mounds, birds build nests,  and so on with all life. With the exception of human beings, these shaping behaviors are a product of evolution, in which the limits of each genetically determined variety of behavior is tested in practice. If a behavior does not work, its practitioners do not prosper and they and their potential progeny disappear form the face of the planet. Read more…

NYT, “The Measure of a Disaster“, May 21, 2010 – This oil spill is said to be mostly “sheen,” which means a layer less than one-three-thousandth the thickness of a hair, visible only because it causes mirror-like reflection of light or radar energy.

AP, December 21, 2012 - As BP Oil continues its efforts to stem the flow of oil it triggered in a deep-water drilling accident in April of 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico, drought conditions have now reached a global scale.

Precipitation rates have dwindled to less than 10% of normal for all regions reporting this month, said NOAA meteorologist Kevin Goodweather.

“Cloud formations have become a rarity as atmospheric moisture has virtually disappeared”, said Goodweather.

Across the planet, fresh water reserves in the world largest lakes and reservoirs have been depleted at a rate that was unpredicted just a short year ago. The rapidity of depletion was explained at first in terms of  irrigation and poor water management, but later scientists determined that without adequate precipitation, what climatologists are now calling “dry-air super evaporation”, is making short work of global fresh water reserves.

Although run-of-the-mill famines took a serious toll on equatorial populations during 2011, sudden mass die-offs offs of living organisms around the globe, including humans, only started about a month ago, as fresh water has been disappearing at an alarming rate. Read more…

Why has the United States become a nation who’s political body politic has become dominated by greedy and self-absorbed misanthropes? The answer is in the numbers and the history. According to Gallup, almost 50% of all American’s of voting age (18 years) are over 50 years old. These voters are the “Baby Boomers” and they have dominated the national demographic landscape since the halcyon days of post WWII America.

The Boomers were conceived and raised in a United States that by default,  came to dominate the post-WWII world with industrial and military might. With our shores unsullied by the ravages of world war and our industries intact and unchallenged, the Boomers plopped into the scene on the back of a plan for rebuilding Europe and Japan as client nations and for the defense of the “free world” against the godless “Reds”. In their most formative years, Boomers were indoctrinated in the self-evident belief that they were the shinning embodiment of truth, justice, and freedom, otherwise know as “The American Way”.

When you are born and raised in such a historical circumstance, your sense of self-righteousness and personal entitlement become etched into the bedrock of your being. If “Conservative”, you see you mission as a defender to the American Way. If “Liberal”, you see yourself as a font of enlightenment and the bearer of goodness to the downtrodden and uneducated. Either way, the Boomers were born to be right and put upon this earth to save the world with their global Marshal Plan.

The Boomer’s “plan” for the world underwent numerous revisions that paralleled their age. Let’s take ride down Boomer Lane. Read more…