Three Sigma Systems

NYT 8/31/2010 – Trapped Chilean Miners Forge Refuge

“…at 62 years old, Mr. Gómez is the oldest of the 33 miners trapped nearly half a mile underground here and has become the spiritual guide to his men…” Aside from Mr. Gómez, there is Luis Urzúa, the 54-year-old shift leader who organizes their work assignments, is helping to map the path of their rescue hole…”

I can think of no situation more likely to reduce a human being into a whimpering terrified animal greater than that of being buried alive almost 3000 feet underground. Given the generally accepted view of the economics of human nature we should expect initial panic to give way to a King Rat scenario in which the strong prey upon the weak and thereafter, even the strongest give in to the paralysis of terror and hopelessness.

But nothing of the sort is happening among the 33 Chilean miners trapped a half mile below the surface of the earth. What is happening is that these desperate men are acting out their human nature, which is to confront the challenges that life has placed before them with purpose and method. Given the problem they face, they have created a leadership hierarchy that defers to the wisdom of the eldest among them (Joseph Campbell’s “Gray Beards”). These elders have embraced the task assigned to them by willing followers, of focusing the group’s thoughts, deliberations and actions in ways that help them survive.

This self-organizing principle, in which human beings come together to confront the challenges that life puts before them with shared purpose and method is the essence of human nature. Over the millennia the forces of natural selection have built this modus operandi into our genome. This is what human beings do naturally —-unless that is, they are constantly bombarded with messages that intentionally obfuscate the nature of the challenges they face and systematically promote fear and loathing among them.

The misguided “sciences” of psychology  and economics base their sales pitch about human nature on the idea that humans function as economically self-interested individuals. But the economics of human existence are meaningless when regarded in terms of individuals. It is only in terms of our relations with one another in addressing life’s challenges, that human survival becomes possible. Then again, as Dr. W. E. Deming was fond of saying, “Survival is not mandatory”.

Current events should make it abundantly clear that the human race is in no less dire straights then the Chilean Miners buried deep in the earth. We need to stop listening to the “King Rat” claptrap that’s being dished-out in generous portions and come to grips with the challenges that life is putting before us. Once we do that, all that remains is for us to do what comes naturally.

A few days ago I sailed Songline down the California coast with the help of a few friends.

It was cold and windy and confused steel-gray seas heaved our bows this way then that.

For three days we helmed our little ship down each big wave with a rumbling whoosh and a seething sigh.

Hour after hour the miles rolled away under our keel. Whoosh then sigh. Whoosh then sigh.

For a few short days we four became one crew aboard a tiny wind machine, synchronized with the relentless rhythms of the sea,

Whoosh then sigh.

Now I am in port again and listening to news of Glenn Beck’s rally for God and country. No Whoosh. All sigh.

In today/s NYT Economix, Princeton economics professor. Uwe E. Reinhardt, demonstrates that the economist’s beloved idea of”efficiency” is more capable of creating misery for the greatest number of people than happiness.

“Efficiency is the seemingly value-free standard economists use when they make the case for particular policies — say, free trade, more liberal immigration policies, cap-and-trade policies on environmental pollution, the all-volunteer army or congestion tolls. The concept of efficiency is used to justify a reliance on free-market principles, rather than the government, to organize the health care sector, or to make recommendations on taxation, government spending and monetary policy.”

If your read his article carefully, you will see that his explanation drives a stake through the heart of the vampirish beliefs that are driving us toward ruination.

I have on previous occasions discussed what I call the myth of efficiency. The so-called “science” of economics is built upon the idea that human beings will seek out the most “efficient” means to fullfil their needs and desires — to achieve maximum happiness. In other words, economists begin with the assumption that individual actors will seek to minimize their investment of personal resources and maximize their return. From this we get the notion that all human behavior is driven by a natural “profit motive”.

Challenging the economist’s view of the human drive for “efficiency” is a difficult proposition if only because you and I see day-in and day-out, that most, if not all, of the people we deal with seem to act in exactly that way. The evidence of our senses tells us that others can only be trusted to do what they believe will produce for them, the greatest gain. So pervasive is our belief in the economist’s blood-sucking axiom of human behavior, that it is often extended to include our relations with those closest to us. We regard our spouse with cautious suspicion. We expect that our children will engage in duplicity to get what they want. We lay awake at night wondering which child our parents most favored.

And, given the evidence of our senses, are we not required to respond in kind?

“What a world, what a world”,  said the Wicked Witch of the East.

The question we need to ask ourselves is if  ”efficient”  blood-sucking is the way of the world as it “is” or if it is the way of the world as we “make it”?

A world of people seeking the greatest efficiency, which Reinhardt casts in terms seeking optimums, tends to produce misery in greater proportions because those who suck more blood must do so at a cost to others, and in doing so, successful blood-suckers acquire a vested interest in perpetuating the myth of efficiency that keeps them sucking large.

Perpetuating the myth is not as difficult as it sounds. For the religiously minded, God’s grace will do. For those who prefer science, the discipline of economics seems “logical”. And for those who prefer more practical reasons, differentials in reward and remuneration — doggie bon-bons — are powerful myth-sustaining incentives.

Wait a minute, you say, doesn’t the fact that differential rewards motivate belief  prove of the economist’s theory?

No more nor less than than the observation that dependence on a daily regime of heroin drives a person to the happiness of  self-annihilation.

It is no surprise that we see vampires everywhere about us. From the day our children are born, we hover over them in training and judgement, lest they be weaker than other vampires. Then we send them off to schools in which the blood-letting is reinforced by grading on a curve. We pit children against children and children against teachers. And once school is out, we divide workers against workers and workers against bosses and neighbors against neighbors. All the world is made a blood-bath of suckers and suckees.

All of this self-made reality seems to us, the natural order of things, and we cleave to it as if it was the word of God Herself. Until that is, we actually need to address tasks of deadly importance.

When we train our young to fight our wars, in which we want to suck the blood of others, or keep others from sucking our blood, we happily do a turn about. We train those who will engage in the most difficult and deadly of enterprises to work together. We teach them that each depends on the others. We teach them to trust one another and to trust those assigned to coordinate and lead. An army of vampires who devour one another just won’t cut it!

So now we find a very different idea of efficiency in which mutual trust and collaboration take precedence over individual self interest.

So it stands to reason that if we can create armies of selfless fighters to tackle the greatest of challenges, then the economist’s vampirish “instincts”, if they exist at all, do not determine our modes of behavior after all. It seems that our human nature is what we chose to make it.

(Now that I think about it, the movie “Daybreakers” was quite clever.)

Slater OR Orr?

NYT, August 9 2010 – “Fed-Up Flight Attendant Makes Sliding Exit“

After a dispute with a passenger who stood to fetch luggage too soon on a full flight just in from Pittsburgh, Mr. Slater, 38 and a career flight attendant, got on the public-address intercom and let loose a string of invective. Then, the authorities said, he pulled the lever that activates the emergency-evacuation chute and slid down, making a dramatic exit not only from the plane but, one imagines, also from his airline career.

We know he’s crazy because he didn’t ask.

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.”

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

Been there, done that!

NYT, August 2, 2010 – “F.B.I., Challenging Use of Seal, Gets Back a Primer on the Law”
The bureau wrote a letter in July to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, demanding that it take down an image of the F.B.I. seal accompanying an article on the bureau, and threatened litigation: “Failure to comply may result in further legal action.”

What sets human beings apart from all other creatures is their penchant for investing inanimate things with transcendent power. In the early going the behavior of prehistoric man was shaped by animistic beliefs in which symbolic power was vested in the things of nature. Inspired by cautionary tales about the consequences of hubris, told and retold generation after generation, mountains, plants and animals, the clouds and the stars, where all vested with the powers of prediction, retribution, and forgiveness. These symbols served to shape man’s relation with nature into a moral whole that actually worked!

Incessantly innovative, it did not take a very big leap for animistic man to begin manufacturing his own transcendent symbols. These man-made symbols were also vested with power, but not the power of the natural world, but rather the power of men. Man’s MANufacturing of symbols marked the beginning of history, in which symbolic artifacts came to signify, legitimize and sanction differentials between human beings.

The symbolic power of manufactured artifacts — shamanic trinkets, totems, religious paraphernalia, badges, cash money, numbered accounts, and WMDs for example —  does not reside in the real and practical use of these artifacts, powerful though such use may be, but in imagined meanings experienced as inhering in these objects.  Once such objects become vested with meaning, their intrinsic meanings convey power to those who are able to possess and monopolize them. By this means, their possessors become able to exert dominion over others merely by displaying such objects. It stands to reason that if these manufactured symbolic objects can be readily reproduced by unauthorized agents, the system by which possessors exercise power and control over others is in serous danger of collapse.

The great revolution of the 21st Century is the ability to reproduce symbolic artifacts with great accuracy and ease, and to disseminate them at little cost. This is why for example, the U.S. Treasury has gone to such great lengths to protect the powers vested in our currency against high quality copying machines — an exercise in futility as Bernie Madoff proved and Goldman-Sachs continues to prove. It is likely that, in our digital age, the horses have already left the barn. Today the symbolic artifacts that embody power are readily counterfeited.  A fake Rolex and a fancy car purchased on no-down-payment credit can open locked doors. Need the powers of a Ph.D degree? Try here. Want to wield the priest’s cross? Go here. Want to flaunt the emblem of a United States Senator? Talk to Mr. Green. Need to instill fear and loathing with an FBI badge? Go here.

For better or worse, the legitimized power that resides in manufactured artifcats is fast becoming obsoleted into meaningless gibberish by technology. In a new age of constant con, the symbolic power that is generated by virtue of shared meanings invested in manufactured artifacts, can no longer be trusted. Perhaps we are in need of a new paradigm by which to organize our relations. Maybe there is a way to move forward towards a system of shared-meanings vested on our creative powers rather than in mystical objects of our own manufacture.  Such a system would not be built upon our belief in the power of our artifacts but upon the power of our responsible relations with others. This idea is not really all that novel.

Do you remember a few months back, when the U.S. media was busily burying Toyota’s reputation as the be-all and end-all of automotive quality? To me, the media’s myth-busting paroxysms came off more like a witch-hunt than investigative journalism. Now that their fear-mongering Toyota-bashing is no longer in the headlines comes this from NHTSA, who have been carefully investigating Toyota unintended acceleration reports.

“The early results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyotas and Lexuses surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes.”

And,

“In spite of our investigations, we have not actually been able yet to find a defect” in electronic throttle-control systems, Mr. Smith told the scientific panel, which is looking into potential causes of sudden acceleration.

In the wake of the great Toyota panic of 2010, Toyota’s senior managers have tearfully apologized in public and Toyota’s engineers have created numerous fixes for problems still not found. As of February of 2010, Toyota estimated that their cost for recalls and lost sales at about two billion dollars.

In past posts on this blog I have expressed my feeling that there was a hidden agenda designed to play on the xenophobic tendencies of a declining nation that has squandered its edge in quality manufacturing and is now trying to claw its way back, not by rededicating itself to creating great products, but by denigrating its competition.

As I have said before, Toyota is just another automaker in business to make a profit. Their products are far from prefect, but have thus far been much better than anything produced by U. S. automakers. To begin to understand why this is the case we need only study Toyota’s corporate response to the media witch-hunt. Rather than dig their heels in with denials and blame-shifting (see BP oil spill), they bowed, apologized, bent with the wind and went on about the business of improving their products. Their response reflected what has come to be known as “The Toyota Way”. Meanwhile GM, having learned nothing, is giving lip services to digging itself out of the grave it dug itself into with a taxpayer funded sham product called the Volt (see NYT “G.M.’s Electric Lemon“)

No design is perfect and the imperfect design of Toyota vehicles certainly contributed to crashes. After all, if the operator of a vehicle can accidentally apply the gas rather than the brake, the gas-pedal next to the brake-pedal design could stand improvement. But the two billion dollar rush to judgement in the media was most certainly fueled by a desire to take the number-one automaker in the world (not made in America) down a few notches rather than a legitimate concern for product safety.

This is the same con as the one being used by the Republican Party in the U.S.  Rather than earn the respect and loyalty of customer-audiences by creating great product and improving it continuously, the Republican party spends all their effort attacking the other party’s products. This method has the benefits of being cheap, requiring no thought, and by creating nothing, immunizing it perpetrators from responsibility for their (not) products.

But there’s a downside to this technique as well, and I am not defending Toyota. I am attacking the con-artistry of U.S. business interests and media lackeys and more importantly, the gullibility of American audiences who mistake creating nothing for doing something. People who are lost in the funhouse had better wake up soon. These con-artists are shoveling dirt into our grave faster than we can dig ourselves out!

Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.

T. S. Eliot, “The Cocktail Party”

To love and be loved and to hate and be hated are two sides of the coinage that makes us real. Love and hate do not exist on a quantifiable continuum. We do not love a little less or more nor do we hate by degrees, inches, or yards. Our experience of love and hate makes us real because, at great risk to our “self”, we give ourselves over to the others we love and hate and allow them to become a part of ourselves. Loving and hating is being and becoming.

It may be that half the harm that is done in the world comes from the hate that is the flip-side of love but the other half most certainly comes from that absence of either that attends our futile, risk-averse struggle to think well of ourselves by measures of gain.

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.

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”.

In a worthy July 4th NYT blog entry, “Friendship in an Age of Economics“, Todd May , a professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, gives himself over to some rather random thoughts on the nature of friendship. He draws upon Aristotle’s classification of relationships — those of pleasure, those of utility, and those that are true — and concludes of the true that:

We might say of friendships that they are a matter not of diversion or of return but of meaning.

May’s “true friends”, are those who sit by his bedside without clear ulterior motive. These friends have a purity of motive that makes their friendship more complete. He quotes John Berger:

“We were not somewhere between success and failure; we were elsewhere.” To be able to sit by the bed of another, watching him sleep, waiting for nothing else, is to understand where else we might be.”

Friendship is the wellspring of meaning. Our friends are the ones who are there with us over time. They are the ones who provide us with the looking-glass by which we come to possess a sense of who we are as we do the same for them. Friends are those who continue to feel “you” and make you, for better and for worse, amidst the ebb and flow of ever-changing events. Friends are there with you, renewing you constantly, and you are likewise, there with them,

I have decided that it is not motive that determines the  nature of friendship, it is time. Friendship is a sustained jam session of call-and-response. Friends are the partners who make up your friendscape. They are there with you time and time again, creating you as you create them.

Without friends, our sense of participation  —- our sense that we mean something — fades away. This fading is called loneliness, and in my experience there is too much of that in our culture of self-justification, self-aggrandizement, self-esteem, and solo performances.

In an age of rationally motivated economic self-interest, friendship is under continual assault, in part because we are indoctrinated with the idea of motivation and in part because we have built a society of predation rather than collaboration.

To experience friendship requires that we accept others for who they are — we let it be. The obstacles to friendship are in our minds as well as in the nature of our “caveat emptor” economic relations. We have engineered a society of lonely self-interest.

Paul Krugman is not sleeping well. He is dreaming about the dragon at the gate. His column today predicts “The Third Depression” in which a deflationary spiral leads to prolonged unemployment that will relegate millions of young Americans to lives of hopelessness — a generation of the hopeless.

Krugman is a classic “liberal Capitalist”. His vision is one in which market  forces are the natural order of things, but that we must manage that order to avoid undesirable excesses. In the current situation, he believes, government must redistribute wealth in order to keep the market system alive. The medicine he prescribes makes perfect sense as far as it goes. It’s the back to normal part that haunts my dreams.

It seems to me that there are two ways of looking at our situation. Either we view the law of the jungle as natural and desirable, but exercise constant vigilance to hold the voracious beasts of the jungle at bay, or we rid the jungle of the voracious beasts by finding another way to keep everyone safe, happy and well fed.

I am reminded of the villagers who invited a fierce dragon to reside in a cave near the village gates in exchange for his protection and largess. Once ensconced in the cave, the dragon began making demands that the villagers set aside a dragon’s portion of their harvest in exchange for services rendered. To the villagers’ dismay, a vicious cycle ensued. As the villagers and the dragon prospered, the dragon’s appetite grew ever greater. With each passing year the dragon grew bigger and stronger and still more hungry. Soon, even the gratuitous sacrifice of the village’s young and innocent virgins was not enough to sate his hunger and temper his predacious instincts.

Given the dragon’s nature, many villagers realized that the day had come when they must slay the dragon or both the villagers and the dragon would die. When faced with this unpleasant prediction, the majority of villagers remained reluctant to undertake such a perilous task, preferring instead to round up more virgins.

And so it goes.

Merlin is an old time master. He can appear either as an old man with a long gray beard or as a young child, and it’s an important motif that appears in many, many mythologies You see childhood and age are eternal conditions. Between childhood and old age you live in a historically conditioned reality. In mid-life you are doing the jobs of your society. These are all historically conditioned roles, so people in midlife are culture bound. They are bound to their cultures.

The child — and there’s really only one child in the world — is a new and spontaneous living organism. When old age comes, we have done our bumping into this and that and all problems of the world. Our bumpers fall off. Our headlight go out. But looking across the great curve of a lifetime we have infancy and old age …. and so the one who can guide us in terms of transcendent rather than simply historical wisdom, is either the old man or the child.

Transcribed from Joesph Campbell lecture, “Power of Myth, the Grail Legend”

I have just finished reading “Why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan” in the New Statesman. The article, by William Dalrymple, is the most definitive contemporary analysis of our doomed military enterprise in that far off land, that I have read up to this point.

One element of the story grabbed my attention. The tribal people of Afghanistan look to their gray-beards for insight and direction in their struggles with adversity. The author writes.

“The following morning in Jalalabad, we went to a jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, to which the grey-beards of Gandamak had come under a flag of truce to discuss what had happened the day before.”

I have traveled a great deal of the world, including Afghanistan, and I have come to appreciate the way in which some cultures value the wise counsel of their gray-beards — their Merlins. In our society, the culture-bound calculus of loss and profit has supplanted the transcendent wisdom that comes with age (we only need ask). We tally our winnings in a zero-sum game of profit and loss rather than value the quality of our lives as responsible and honorable members of an enduring community of fellow humans.

When gray-beard Dr. W. E. Deming was asked about methods for becoming successful, he always answered, “By what measure?”

Although I can find no authoritative figures for our NATO solider-to-Muslim kill ratio, one blogger estimates it at least 30 to 1, but probably much higher, he says. These numbers are quite profitable and one would think that our adversaries and their families would be ready to give up the fight, but it seems that our adversaries are using different accounting methods.

Where are our gray-beards when we need them?

In his NYT column today, “The Renminbi Runaround“, economist Krugman complains that the Chinese are playing unfair currency games.

“China’s exchange-rate policy is neither complicated nor unprecedented, except for its sheer scale. It’s a classic example of a government keeping the foreign-currency value of its money artificially low by selling its own currency and buying foreign currency.”

I like Krugman as much as I can like anyone who subscribes to the nonsense called economic theory. But the fact is that Paul is lost the funhouse. China has learned from us that the way to win the game is to manipulate the vig. In a reality that places profit as the highest calling, why waste energy creating something of value when you can churn money and con the other guy into making you rich? A sense of fair markets has nothing to do with making a profit. Just ask any whiz kid working on Wall Street.

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.