Integrated Man

Ridin' to the City on Acela

If I were poetically or musically gifted, this blog would glide to the cadence of Arlo Guthrie's 'Ridin On The City of New Orleans'. But I'm not so gifted, so you're stuck with my stilted prose. 

Nonetheless my recent ride to New York City from New Haven on Amtrak's Acela summoned the same wistful, mournful tones of Guthrie's ballad, with perhaps a touch of irony borrowed from Peggy Lee's 'Is That All There Is?'.

Swiftboating Climate Change

The assassins are about.  They're gunning for the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and their weapon of choice is a 60 megabyte down-loadable file, courtesy of Murdock's Wall Street Journal, of hacked correspondence from the server of the University of East Anglia. Correspondence goes back thirteen years. 

I have not read any of the items, nor do I intend to.  The news stories reveal little of surprise or interest. It's not news that universities have in their midst high-strung personalities whose egos too often overwhelm their intelligence and professionalism, not unlike business and government. Nor is it surprising that researcher's might be tempted to cleanse the data of those pesky little anomalies that introduce niggling little doubts about their pet hypothesis, not unlike business and government.  Nor is it surprising that Climate Change True Believers would want to exclude Deniers from the debate, much as Deniers have wanted squelch advocates.  None of this is news, and none of it required an electronic breaking and entering to reveal known and knowable flaws in the debate. But one senses the fit and feel of another Swift-boat assault on the truth by the forces of ignorance and deceit, with the Birthers, the Tea-Partiers and the Palinista's bringing up the rear.  The timing of this so close to the beginning of the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen is more than suspect.

Pull the Plug; Walk Away

Concerted Procrastination is an accepted and well worn decision-making practice among senior executives in all venues -- government, business, NPOs.  The theory is that, if you can wait long enough, difficult problems will resolve themselves when all options have been reduced to the worst one by default.  Then the 'decision' is inevitable, and often unarguable.

I,too, though not a senior executive by any means, have practiced it on occasion, most recently in relation to forming my personal opinion on the efficacy of the Government assisting the US auto industry to a soft landing.

Capitalist Papers 2 - Corpocracy and Agency

Capitalism has been a vehicle for vastly improving and advancing the human condition.  But no system is perfect, and Capitalism's flaws are becoming progressively more apparent. While it is unlikely to collapse as dramatically as Soviet styled Communism, neither is it likely to survive in its current mode. 

However, before I delve deeper into this subject, perhaps it would be useful to separate Capitalism from some of its philosophical underpinnings that are as vital to a democracy as to a Capitalist paradigm of economic enterprise.

The Odd Couple

A few weeks ago T. Boone Pickens unveiled his energy plan to deal with our oil addiction.  At the same time, Al Gore put forth his own prescription for the energy crisis, apparently coming to the realization that the energy crisis will drive the climate crisis, because we will respond to the energy crisis by any means necessary, even at the risk of the climate.  Neither readily embraced the other's position, though both are apparently singing from the same hymnal.

Sometimes it's good to be wrong

Sometimes its good to be wrong.

Sometimes it doesn't make a difference.

Or, to borrow a title from one of the skits of the political satirists Fireside Theater: "How Can You Be In Two Places at Once, When You're Really Nowhere At All?"

Reality - The First Speed Bump on the Way to Green

I try not to go to the Connecticut State Legislature more than once a year.  When I do so, it is only because my frustration with the status quo exceeds my frustration in watching how we struggle to make progress through the legislative process.  Nor is Connecticut unique by any means. 

But there I was on February 27th, endeavoring to testify on Raised Bill 5600, Section 3, regarding a proposal to study the impacts of Climate Change on Connecticut; a bill similar, but inferior to, Bill 1432, Section 3 of last year which suffered death by calendar at the end of the legislative session.

Convergence

The New York Times’ editorial of Feb. 23^rd, “Before the Next Bridge Falls”, fell short of the mark. It focused on one issue, largely ignoring two other related issues and a fourth which encompasses all three.

We are facing a convergence of three paradigms, wrapped in a fourth. Infrastructure, climate change and constrained energy are proceeding along seemingly parallel lines, but will converge in time, and vary by place. How we deal with them will be a combination of our perception of their interrelationships, and a fourth paradigm, demographic-driven economics.

Inconvenient Truths, Asymmetric Response and Unintended Consequences

I have often thought that the most valuable contribution of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, was its title.  Although it spoke specifically to Climate Change and our unwillingness to face its multifaceted implications, there are many inconvenient truths in our lives, and our unwillingness to address them directly accounts for many of the problems we face. 

Take Iraq for example. 

Binary Thinking

Show me an issue that is framed in terms of two options: A or B, black or white, blue or red, left or right,...
...and, nine times out of ten, I'll show you a dysfunctional dialog.  There is almost always a third choice, if not a fourth, fifth, sixth..., simply because:

1.   rarely does one person or side have all the answers to any issue; and

2.   if they did, rarely would society embrace it.

Yet we persist in couching issues in this context, and we persist in pursuing seriously flawed policies, if we survive gridlock.