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.)

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!

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.

AP Story: Bernanke: Fed to hold off on steps to aid recovery.

There is a general consensus today that in the upcoming elections the economy trumps all of the cultural issues that have long divided liberals and conservatives. On one extreme of the debate are those who believe that in the midst of our economic crisis, we must commit to spending whatever resources we possess, even borrowing more as needed, in order to restore our economy to a balanced forward motion. On the other extreme are those who say that we must harbor our resources, cut our expenditures and bide our time so that the economy can restore itself to its natural balance and growth.

Let me recount an experience I had that might help you decide which course of action you should support.

As readers of this blog know, I am an avid and lifelong sailor. Sailing is all about balancing natural forces through a process of continuous feedback and control. It is like walking a tightrope in which the enormous and impersonal natural forces of wind and sea can be turned to the seafarer’s advantage by finding and managing a dynamic balance point between those forces that enables forward progress.

At sea it is the situation that determines how the sailor selects a strategy. When the boat is in balance, only very small adjustments are needed to keep it on course and safely moving forward, but once the system becomes unbalanced, the conservatism of small adjustments is no longer sufficient. and more dramatic tactics become necessary.

Some years ago I was doing a solo race that took me some miles off the coast of Santa Cruz, California and well out of sight of other boats. On the upwind leg of the race things worked quite well, but then came the time to turn downwind and set the spinnaker. I clipped into a safety line and as I moved to the bow to hoist the sail an unexpected wave struck the side of the boat and I was thrown overboard into the cold waters of Monterey bay.

Although I had given thought to the possibility of going overboard and had taken the precaution of using a safety harness that clipped me to the boat, I was unprepared for the chaos that ensued once I was in the water and no longer controlling a balanced boat.

At first I wasn’t very worried. I was firmly tethered to the boat. All I needed to do was to get back onto the boat, retake control, and start racing again. But it wasn’t as simple as I had imagined.

To begin with, the boat began to oscillate out of control. First it would right itself because of the weight in the keel. Once righted, the partially hoisted spinnaker would fill with wind and violently knock the boat down again. The effect of these uncontrolled oscillations was to produce a zig-zag motion that dragged me through the water.

My plan had been to use the step at the back of the boat to get back aboard, but each time a tried to use the step, the violent motion of the boat pulled me back down into the water. After several tries I realized that my exertions, along with the cold water, were quickly sapping my strength. I also knew that in the Monterey Bay waters, hypothermia would start killing me after about 20 minutes of immersion.

It then dawned on me that my plan for recovering control of my boat had become untenable. My conservative strategy would be to ball my self up to save my body heat in the hope that, given more time, some external forces would solve my problem. My liberal option was to carefully devise an alternate plan and expend my rapidly waning resources on one go-for-broke effort at self-rescue.

Obviously, I survived that day and now I leave it to you to figure out which approach I used.

In retrospect, my brush with death at sea was a learning experience.

1. I have stopped racing sailboats alone. There is risk enough in putting to sea in small boats.

2. I now have a better understanding the dynamics of being thrown overboard and have created controls that I hope will work better should I ever be in that position again.

3. I know that my mitigation of risk will help make me a safer sailor but I also know that risk can never be eliminated. Sometimes loss of control will create situations in which one must one must go-for-broke to avert disaster.

Solo risk taking, the idea that unmanaged external forces will keep things balanced, belief that you can always be in control, and belief that you can predict all eventualities and devise foolproof methods of self-rescue, are all symptomatic of the thinking that got us into our current economic circumstance. How to go about rescuing ourselves from our delusions is not a matter belief. It is a practical matter that requires a sober estimation of our current situation.

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?

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.

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.

Update: Sailor Abby Sunderland found safe in Indian Ocean

(Reuters) – A 16-year-old California girl trying to sail solo around the world is safe and well after a massive search and rescue was launched in the Indian Ocean when she triggered distress signals, her parents and Australian authorities said Friday.

I am delighted that Abby has been found aboard her dismasted boat and is unharmed. With the immediate crisis over, I wonder how many people will take the lesson to heart. When Vendée Globe racers disappear, we can all accept the fact that having passed the age of majority, the sailors paid their money and took their chances, but in the case of a 16 year-olds, we should be asking ourselves who is really making the decisions that put them in harm’s way.

Like many sailing addicts, I was one of those kids who dreamed of sailing around the world when I was 13 years old and took a very big interest in the 16 year-old, Robin Lee Graham, who with the help of his father, outfitted a Lapworth 24 and set sail around the world. At the time I thought it was the greatest idea imaginable. But something I can’t quite explain, made Graham’s adventure seem different. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. The following forum post by maxingout in 2008 captures my feeling.

“Robin Lee Graham inspired me do to my own circumnavigation. The National Geographic articles implanted the dream in my mind, and there was no escape. It’s interesting how, every once in a while, people pop up out of nowhere and influence thousands of lives around the world. Joshua Slocum, Harry Pidgeon, and Robin Lee Graham are good examples.

We live in a day of extreme sports and well-financed adventures. The high performance extreme sportsmen of today discourage me rather than inspire me, because most of what they do are stunts (often highly risky). I don’t aspire to follow in their footsteps, and I have no desire to emulate what they do.

This age of brinksmanship is at the opposite end of the spectrum from people like Slocum, Pidgeon, and Graham. They went about their business in average boats with minimal resources, and they had an excellent adventure. Most of all, they inspired me because what they were doing wasn’t extreme. Their dreams were in the realm of possibility in my own life. One of my favorite quotes from singlehanded circumnavigator, Harry Pidgeon is: “I avoided adventure as much as possible. Just the same, any landsman who builds his own vessel and sails alone around the world will certainly meet with some adventures, so I shall offer no apology for my voyage. Those days were the freest and happiest of my life.”

Long live those sailors who inspire ordinary people to live their dreams.”

Can a clear line be drawn between Robin Lee Graham’s project and Abby Sunderland’s? Probably not. There are many reasons why a 16 year-old may be thrown into the path of adversity and forced to rise to the occasion, but to purposely place a child into harm’s way seems a terrible violation of the trust a child places in an adult parent, guardian, or mentor. I took my own 12 year-old son on a sailing voyage that lasted almost six years — but my wife and I were with him.  When it came to passage-making, we “…avoided adventure as much as possible”. Our principal aim was to live as fully as possible in We-Space. As we prepared for departure there where some people who accused us of putting our son in harm’s way.

These are not easy questions to answer. I suppose it’s a matter of judgement, which is after all, a characteristics we attribute to adulthood.

Youngest sailor ever Abby Sunderland feared lost at sea after her crew lost contact with her.

“(Sixteen year-old solo sailor) Abby is approximately 500 miles north of the Antarctic Islands on her bid to become the youngest to circumnavigate the globe in a sailboat, solo.“

Where Abby is

Sixteen year old Abby Sunderland is alone, cut off, and in trouble, somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Her last reported position was midway between Australia and South Africa. Chances are good that she is alive as I write this, but she living at this moment, in the most remote and inhospitable environment imaginable. Terra firma or even ice, provide a purchase point for human habitation, but at sea there is only the hull of one’s tiny boat or still tinier, a rubber life raft, or nothing but the cold dark sea. The nearest rescue vessel is more than 40 hours away. Read more…

In today’s NTY article, A Disaster Reaches Beyond the Gulf Coast” got me to thinking about how the BP disaster that is currently unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico has placed the people of the region, and our nation at large, in a double-bind.

On one hand, the people of the region are confronted with the reality that profit hungry enterprises will despoil their environment for  generations to come, destroying everything in the region that makes life worth living. On the other hand, they are terrified that those same greedy enterprises will be stopped, causing them to lose the jobs, income, and cheap fuels that the activities of those greedy enterprises offer.

This is just one more example of the conundrum of Me-space versus We-space that is currently polarizing and paralyzing our nation.

Me-Space

ME-SPACE

Me-Space is a tiny place viewed by digging down to a narrow vantage point with “Me” at its center. The deeper I dig downward and pull inward, the tinier my Me-Space becomes. I divide my space again and again, until my “Me” stands alone, surrounded by alien”Me’s”. Me-Space is a place of danger and fear in which I build walls to protect who I am and what I possess from others who want to rob me of all that is rightfully mine. In Me-Space everyone who is not “Me” is a threat. I shutter my windows. I arm myself with guns and bullets and lies. I close my mind to subversive ideas. I dig-in, hunker down and defend my Me-Space.

WE-SPACE

WE-space

We-Space is a very large place that can only be seen when I climb upward to the highest and widest vantage point I can attain. The higher and wider my vantage point, the larger and more encompassing We-Space becomes.  The world seen from We-Space dwarfs me and my Me-Space with its impersonal immensity and awesome grandeur.  It is a world in which my puny “Me” can only survive and prosper as a member of “We”. In We-Space there are only the hopes and dreams “We” share and the possibilities “We” conceive as we confront the challenges the world puts in our path. It is a space that is anchored in a fundamental faith that human beings can prove themselves worthy so long as they continue their striving to climb ever-higher to see ever-wider.

Living in Me-Space leads with absolute certainty, downward toward greater loneliness, vulnerability and eventual oblivion. We-Space, on the other hand, offers no such promises. The fate of human beings remains ever uncertain. But in We-Space there is a universe of possibilities in which the challenges before us provide we human beings with ample opportunity to prove ourselves worthy .

BP Notes:

In Me-Space, the BP disaster as one in which I assign blame to alien “Me’s” who infringed on the rights of “Me”. In We-Space, I realize that the BP disaster is one that “We” made inevitable by lounging irresponsibly in Me-Space and allowing self-interested Me-Space profiteers to undertake risks that would at some point, inevitably despoil both Me-Space and We-Space.

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I really hope that Jeff Corriveau, the creator of the comic strip Deflocked, will forgive me for reproducing his strip that ran today in my local paper (Santa Cruz Sentinel). It was just too good to pass up. Depending on your point of view, letting free markets work could have a downside.