Integrated Man

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.

Georgia on My Mind

Cast a stone into the water and watch the ripples spread.  Russia's incursion into Georgia is such an event. Georgia just got stoned, and we will feel the ripples.  It is not just Georgia that is profoundly affected by this event.  It's not even the Ukraine, and Belorussia, and Finland, and Estonia and Lithuania, and Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, and all the other 'stans which are the remnants of the old Soviet empire. It's not even Poland which just signed a treaty to allow us to deploy anti ballistic missiles on its soil, and received a threat of nuclear attack from the Russian high command in response.

Capitalist Papers 1 - Random Reflections on the Decline of Capitalism

This quote from the Wall Street Journal of 2008, April 3:
   

"BEIJING -- China's business establishment poses a bigger obstacle to the country's financial-sector reform agenda than the global market upheaval, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Thursday.

Mr. Paulson also called on the Chinese government to ease access to clean technology and confront the "daunting" task of improving energy consumption and the environment. 

I think that reform never moves in a straight line, and I think the biggest threat to more reform in China is the strong domestic industry that doesn't want competition," Mr. Paulson told reporters traveling with him on a two-day trip to Beijing."
        "Paulson Says Chinese Big Business Threatens Reform Agenda"

My first reaction was to conclude that Secretary Paulson had redefined the lower depths of chutzpah.  My more charitable side allowed that he must have been suffering from jet lag, and thought he was still in New York.

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.

"Just give me the facts, Ma'am"

2008/01/04

Remember that line, delivered by the granite-faced Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet?  Probably not if you're under 50 years old, but it comes to mind whenever I listen to debates on energy or the environment or the economy or globalization or (you name it) these days.  The first challenge is not in assessing the information, but assessing the individual who is conveying it.

In the civic arena there is a spectrum of participants in the public discourse on critical issues. True Believers, a term popularized if not coined by the late longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer, embrace an issue as an absolute, unquestionable truth. Theirs is often an emotional attachment, often bordering on the irrational.  Advocates may embrace the same issue, but based on fact and logic and with sufficient detachment that they will modify or even end their commitment if presented with compelling countervailing fact or logic.  Their opposite number is the Skeptic, who does not accept the prevailing conclusion, but is open to persuasion to change based on compelling fact or logic . And finally, there is the Cynic; often confused with the Skeptic, but distinguished by being impervious to reason or logic and therefore the polar opposite of the True Believer.

2007/11/04 Random Reflections on...voting our conscience

....Obama,
....Breaking the Hillary Lock
....Breaking the Guiliani Lock
....The Walmart Way

*   *   *
During this week's Democratic Presidential Candidate debates, Barach Obama declared his willingness to meet face to face with the Iranian leadership to find a resolution to our issues.   No doubt some people will call this approach naive.  Some people will call this approach weak.  Some people will call it pointless because the Iranians are too stubborn and close-minded to negotiate anything with anything but a bomb.  They're not like our President!  I have a slightly different take.

It Is About Oil. Thank you, Mr. Greenspan

One of the unexpected gifts of Mr. Greenspan’s book and supporting promotional tour was his public acknowledgment that the Iraq war was in fact all about oil. While his  rationale for arriving at that conclusion seemed a bit flaky for one of his renowned analytic abilities, his acknowledgment of what many of us have believed to be true from the beginning gives substance to what has heretofore been accountable only to justifiable, but not verifiable, cynicism.

America and Its Place in the World: Thirty Years

Events are gradually accumulating which confirm that the United States faces a future disturbingly  different from its past.  At this time, that is a projection and not a prophecy.  But, to the extent that our business and governmental leaders fail to perceive this prospect and respond to it, it will indeed become prophetic, and with profound personal consequences.  The Sub-Prime dilemma we are now working through could in many ways be a harbinger of future events.

Let us put the situation in context by comparing the United States of this century with our circumstances in the prior century.