SEE Reports

Child-Rearing for a Non-Violent Society

2012-02-05T09:59:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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As to the nuts and bolts of producing a free and non-violent society, that lies mostly in the society's child-rearing practices. A kid who is brought up by parents who favor or enforce obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom becomes an adult who "knows" that is how to raise kids. Otherwise the kids will "go bad," and will not become disciplined and motivated adults,

In the era of spankings at home and teaching kids at school via bruised knuckles and stinging backsides, the next generation believed that was the ONLY way to raise kids safely, so that they would be secure from vice and sloth. It is possible to turn a kid around later during latency and adolescence--for a kid to learn that freedom and respect beget freedom and respect--but it is hard.

In our society, even in the best of homes where kids are loved and protected, they are taught behavior patterns by a pair of amateurs. Most parents--even in the best of homes--learned most of what they know about child-rearing from the pair of amateurs who raised them.

To what extent can parents be taught to raise their kids with respect for their personal freedom and dignity? How can the cycle (that truly comes out of love, and misinformed fear for the child's welfare) be broken?

That is the key, I believe, to developing a truly Civilized future for humanity.
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Transformative for Civilization

2012-02-05T09:50:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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I am struck by the phrase, "comprehensively transformative and liberating for human civilization." This is the first sensible challenge I have seen in some time to the assumption that humanity is worth saving.

H. sapiens has been a remarkable experiment on the part of DNA, working out some of that molecule's incredible evolutionary potential. Perhaps we properly go beyond chauvinistic hubris to admire, celebrate, and want to protect our human DNA because of (1) the technological ingenuity and (2) the aesthetics we have developed.

Perhaps it is proper for us to do so--perhaps not. Humans have been a savagely ruthless and cruel breed. We have torn up and despoiled Mother Earth who nurtured us; we have tortured and enslaved our own and other species; and we have developed a "civilization" based on greed and the contagion of magical thinking.

Perhaps we can design a future for humanity (and for our fellow DNA Earth-mates) that is transformative and liberating. THAT--as The Bard had Hamlet say--IS THE QUESTION: Can we overcome our instinctual savagery?

Perhaps we can build on the tiny whispers of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" and develop a truly transformative and liberating Civilization (one where I can at last--and proudly--use the word with no quotation marks and with a capital C).

Or perhaps we should accept that we humans are intrinsically flawed, and can best serve as a stepping stone to higher silicon life forms. Perhaps we should give our Homo siliconensis offspring an encouraging slap on the butt and send them off into space to accomplish new technological miracles (and found new aesthetic glories) beyond our dreams.
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I Have Tried to Write

2012-01-22T02:29:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Several times recently I have tried to write about a particular subject, but it always seems to require so much preliminary explanation that my essays have wound up being on other topics--they have fallen short. "Consciousness vs. Reality" was one of those essays. So was "The Idea of Cause," and "The Genetics and Evolution of Brain Development," and "The Miraculous Powers of the Human Brain."

The question I want to understand and to answer is, If--as seems clear to me, though I resist accepting the notion--if my mind can really have causative effects on the physical world around me--if I truly commit myself to believing that crazy idea, what . . . what . . . what am I going to do about it?

But first a couple of vignettes. (Yes, here I go again beating around the bush.) In December of 1963 I was living with my first wife, Michael, in a little broken-down house in San Francisco. Every day I would get home from work about 5:00 (I was in my medical internship at San Francisco General Hospital), and I would wait an hour or more--up to four hours--for Michael to get home. I would sit and read about the religions of the world and about mystical experiences, or listen to music or study medicine, and I would wait . . . and wait.

One day I sat reading and listening to music for a while, then I turned off the music and sat in the silence, in the darkness, thinking. I pondered deeply the question, If I really believe all this stuff I have been reading from mystical religions and spiritual teachers, I should be able to "know" when Michael will get home. Her time of return was very variable, and it was completely unpredictable--as I've said, somewhere between 5:00 and 9:00 PM.

I sat there for over an hour; 6:00 PM became 7:00; and I tried to know--and to feel very sure that I knew--exactly when Michael would get home.

Suddenly it came to me: "She's coming--she's almost here." I got up from my chair and walked across the living room and out the front door, and across the porch and down the long flight of steps leading to the street. We lived on one of those San Francisco hills (if you have been to San Francisco, you know what I mean about the hills). In fact, our house was at the very end of Divisadero Street after it becomes Castro--Castro actually ended by becoming our short driveway.

When, after a minute or so hiking down there, I got to the street level, I walked over and heaved open the heavy, up-swinging garage door. And just as I did, her car came into view in the distance, cresting the last hill a block away. Just as I finished opening the door and getting out of the way, she drove up and she drove into the garage without pausing.

As we walked up to the house together, she asked me, perplexed, "Thanks--I really appreciate it--but why on earth were you standing out in the rain waiting for me?"

I didn't answer. I couldn't have explained it to her. I hardly believe it myself.

Through the years I have had other similar experiences of "just knowing" something without any possible way that I could know it. And I have had comparable baffling experiences in long-distance, thought healing, etc.

Which leads me to the present question, if that stuff is really true as it convincingly seems to be, what on earth am I going to do about it? What, specifically, should I be doing and thinking differently in my life?

But once again I have used up my allowable essay length and only introduced, not grappled with--surely not answered--the question. Perhaps the next essay....
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The Miraculous Powers of the Human Brain

2012-01-21T11:18:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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There is no doubt that the human brain has an amazing ability to deceive itself. This is evident not only in the powerful healing of the placebo effect but also in mistakes by eye witnesses, distortions of statistical expectations (the "lottery effect"), misremembered personal history, and other phenomena.

Of even more interest are the possible causative effects that the human brain can have on the physical world--yes, CAUSATIVE effects. This is manifest most curiously in quantum physics where, for example, a ray of light does not "decide" whether it is an energy wave or a particle (a photon) until it is observed; once it is observed (that is measured, studied), it even seems to go back and revise its history--once it is called upon to show itself as a wave, it also reveals that it always was a wave; once, a particle . . . well . . . it always was a particle. And the wave and particle forms each carry information that the other form cannot have carried.

This causative or creative power of the human brain may also be manifest in cosmic physics and astronomy. As one looks back 13.7 billion years to the moment of creation of the Universe (the Big Bang), there appears to have been a remarkable (nigh, impossible) series of coincidences. There were, for example, a dozen parameters that were built into the original Universe which are so finely tuned, that if any of them had been even a tiny fraction of a percent different, that would have precluded the evolution of human beings.

When cosmologists and theoretical physicists first confronted this observation, some postulated the Anthropic Principle: that the Universe was designed from the get-go with the eventual creation of human beings in mind. Because this seemed too theological (scientists are trained to be allergic to religion), some of them postulated the "Weak" form of the Anthropic Principle: that the Universe is the way it is--impossible as it seems--simply because if it were any other way, we wouldn't be here looking back and wondering about it.

But the Weak Anthropic Principle seems statistically daunting: What are the odds that an indifferent physical universe would get everything just right? So a further theory of Multiverses was coined: that there are in fact lots and lots (and lots) of different universes--although we can't see them--and ours just happens to be the one that turned out just right to produce humans.

That is certainly, from a scientific standpoint, more satisfyingly non-religious; at least it pushes the questions of First Cause ("Where did it all come from in the first place anyway?") and the related question, "Why is there SOMETHING rather than NOTHING?" further away a bit from scientific considerations into philosophical musings.

Moreover, mathematical manipulations of observations from tiny physics seem to imply that there may be more than four dimensions (many more--at least eleven, to be precise), and that perhaps there may be more than the observed set of elementary particles (there may be the heavy, sister particles of Supersymetry). And it seems damn hard to make gravity get along theoretically with the other three fundamental physical forces (electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces). So it seems that cosmologists and theoretical physicists still have a lot of head-scratching to do before they have to bite the bullet and own up to some sort of offensively religious perspective.

What about possible CAUSATIVE effects of human brain power in our daily lives? Not just the hyper-suggestibility of hypnotism, the manipulation of crowds by demagogues, and the healing of the Placebo Effect, but also the convincing appeal to intelligent people of astrology, homeopathy, and faith healing. If one has had convincing personal experiences of these (as I do NOT of astrology, though I DO of homeopathy and faith healing), they are impossible to dismiss as imaginary distortions of perception and cognition.

Even in our daily lives--as well in the abstruse observations of cosmology, nuclear physics, psychology, and sociology--the human brain clearly has powers to manipulate the physical world.
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The Genetics and Evolution of Brain Development

2012-01-20T13:27:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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The human brain has evolved long and arduously over several million years through billions and billions of trial-and-error "experiments." These occur because of chance variations in the genetic blueprints for building some particular child's brain, variations due to mutations or incorporation of bits of DNA from viruses and other organisms. Such variations occur very infrequently in the development of children; if, overall, they were not quite rare--if the development of a new human brain in a growing fetus did not usually proceed flawlessly--the race would die out. This is because most of the experiments fail, in other words, they are lethal to the individual in whom they occur.

Even on the rare occasion when a genetic variation occurs and it is not lethal, it is usually pointless--it has no effective function in the organism. In that case it may fade away into the waste-bin of genetic history as "junk DNA." In fact, most of the DNA carried along on our chromosomes from generation to generation is "junk" which has no effective function in forming or running the organism; working genes lie amid long chains of worthless, meaningless DNA (although one must be cautious about dismissing this "junk" out of hand--there are often, tucked away amid the junk, secretive, subtle, or intermittent effectors).

If, on the rare occasion when one of these variations is not lethal and is not pointless, it brings about a change in the structure or function of the organism; then some potential bit of evolution has occurred. If, further, on the even rarer occasion when some particular variation turns out to be useful to or favorable for the individual, then--depending on the individual's success in reproducing and sending forward that variation to future generations--effective, positive, adaptive evolution may occur.

The growth and development of an individual person--and of that person's individual brain--from the genetic blueprint passed to the individual as genes in the sperm and egg of the parents is a very complicated and therefore rather chancy process. There are a lot of ways it can go wrong. In fact, most fertile eggs that arise from the almost miraculously unlikely joining of an egg and sperm do not produce a baby. Most abort as embryos or else later on some time during fetal development. A woman, in her lifetime, may produce several hundred eggs; a man, several million sperm. Of these, at most a couple of dozen succeed in getting together to form a fertilized ovum which can develop into an embryo, then into a fetus, and so on. And most of the fetuses that are formed abort spontaneously, that is, they fail to develop successfully into a baby. Out of the millions and millions of genetic "starts" a normal couple has, the number of children that a married couple raise in their lifetimes is, on average, between two and three.

Most of these kids grow into normal--regular--average people. Less than one in a million of the adult human beings (who have survived the genetic, fetal, infancy, and childhood lotteries) carries some useful variation that might advance the development of the human species.
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The Idea of Cause

2012-01-19T18:41:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Two events or observations are commonly thought to have a cause-and-effect relationship if they have two characteristics: (1) if they have temporal and spacial proximity and (2) if there is a logical expectation of the dependent exchange of physical energy between them. In other words, one event is thought to have caused another if they are near to one another (in space and time) and it seems reasonable to believe that changes in one of them brought about changes in the other.

There are four possible explanations for an apparent cause-and-effect relationship.

One is the PHYSICS explanation--that the cause-and-effect relationship can be explained according to generally accepted physics principles such as gravity, electromagnetism, momentum, entropy, etc. This is commonly considered the strongest kind of explanation; for some people it is the only "real" or acceptable explanation, the only allowable exception being that we do not have enough information to understand the physics explanation.

Another is the MAGIC explanation (also called miraculous, mystical, or metaphysical). In this case the requirement for temporal and spacial proximity and exchange of physical energy may be suspended, but there must be a strong symbolic or ideological connection between the two events or observations.

A third is the PSYCHOLOGY explanation. Essentially, at its core, this claims the events or observations seem related in a cause-and-effect way because of misperception or miscognition.

And finally there is the ANTHROPOMORPHISM explanation, that there is a pre-eminence or dominance of consciousness over the physical realm. This is the "mind over matter" perspective in our day-to-day world, and the Anthropic Principle in cosmology.

It would be comfortable and convenient if everything had a PHYSICS explanation. Unfortunately this is not the case.

The most reputable examples of events or observations that defy a PHYSICS explanation are found in the world of quantum mechanics. Tiny subatomic particles have been studied carefully and been found to have numerous characteristics and behaviors which they simply "cannot" have according to well understood principles of physics. For example, a particle can be in two different places at the same time; it can move from one place to another without going through the intervening space; it can affect another distant particle without any connection or communication between them; etc. Such events or observations are generally written off as obeying laws of physics that we do not (yet) understand, and that, in any case, apply only on very small scales of size.

Perhaps the most incredible observation in the quantum mechanical world is that some entities or their various properties do not appear--that is, they do not exist--until they are observed. Thus a ray of light may have been emitted billions of years ago, but it manifests itself either as a particle or a wave depending on how it is observed--and each of these kinds of manifestations has properties that are incompatible with the other. Moreover, whichever manifestation we choose to look for and therefore to find, the other can never reappear. The verbal formulation for this phenomenon is that the entity initially exists only as a probability wave and that this probability collapses into one manifestation or the other.

In addition to quantum mechanics, in cosmology there are also strange occurrences that defy logical, PHYSICS explanations. For example, there are a dozen or more physics constants such as the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and the fine structure constant for which there seems to be no reasonable explanation as to why they are exactly the strengths or values that they are, but if they were even a tiny fraction of a percent different, reality as we know it (including the existence of atoms and planets and life and thinking) would not exist. The Universe is some 13.7 billion years old, and these physics straight-jackets seem to have been built into the Universe from the beginning so that now, 13.7 billion years later, human beings are able to exist and to wonder about them.

When these incredible coincidences were first considered seriously by the theoretical physics community, the phrase "Anthropic Principle" was coined to deal with them. The Anthropic Principle has two forms, the "strong" Anthropic Principle which postulates that in some way the future existence of human beings was planned for in the earliest thin slivers of a second after the Big Bang, the instant in which the Universe was created. Because this seemed too theological for the science of physics to swallow, another form of the Anthropic Principle, the "weak" form, was coined. The Weak Anthropic Principle postulates that we see these impossibly focused and refined physics constants the way that they are simply because if they were any other way, we would not be here observing and wondering about them. This is a statistical explanation rather than a metaphysical one.

However, possibilities that are very unlikely--that is, that are statistical rarities--only occur in very large samples. Hence a theory of "multiverses," that there are many--perhaps essentially an infinite number--of universes; ours is one which happened to come out just right to generate life.

By the way, such "theories" as these of Anthropic Principles or Multiverses are not truly scientific theories because they cannot be tested experimentally. Rigorous scientific thinking demands that for a theory to be considered truly scientific, it must be (among other requirements) falsifiable, that is, there must be ways of testing it or experimenting to find out if it is really true. For ideas such as the Anthropic Principles or Multiverses, there are none--at least no one can think of any.

MAGICAL or miraculous explanations are considered all to easy--fanciful and imaginary--by serious thinkers. They are always available--they can be coined and modified as needed. They serve no useful purpose except to ease ones mind--which, in a painful and worrisome world may not be trivial, but it is not useful for advancing ones understanding and adaptive skills.

PSYCHOLOGICAL explanations, that is ones that depend on misperception and miscognition, are also all too easy to postulate. However, unlike MAGICAL explanations, some PSYCHOLOGICAL explanations can be studied and tested experimentally. Thus, for example, the hypothesis that certain people are likely to be biased against certain racial or ethnic groups and to suspect individuals of those groups of malevolence or criminal intent, can be tested via questionnaires or experiments in a behavioral laboratory.

However, PSYCHOLOGICAL explanations are often used as a wastebasket for findings that defy PHYSICS explanations. Thus, for example, the apparent healing effects of homeopathy are often dismissed as psychological bias (or "placebo effects") because the findings of homeopathy run counter to--in fact, contradict--known, established principles in physics, chemistry, and physiology. On the other hand, people--like myself--who have extensive, personal, empirical experience with the healing effects of homeopathy are confronted with a paradox: homeopathy cannot be explained according to the known, established laws of physics--in fact, it violates and contradicts them--and the effects are not due to PSYCHOLOGICAL misperceptions or miscognitions--yet they truly occur.

Ideas about cause (and effect) are a slippery and foggy set of concepts. Our effective manipulation of reality often hides among them.
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Harry & Bess

2012-01-19T18:26:00.001-08:00

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Harry Truman was a different kind of President. He probably made as many, or more important decisions regarding our nation's history as any of the other 42 Presidents preceding him. However, a measure of his greatness may rest on what he did after he left the White House.

The only asset he had when he died was the house he lived in, which was in Independence Missouri . His wife had inherited the house from her mother and father and other than their years in the White House, they lived their entire lives there.

When he retired from office in 1952 his income was a U.S. Army pension reported to have been $13,507.72 a year. Congress, noting that he was paying for his stamps and personally licking them, granted him an 'allowance' and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year.

After President Eisenhower was inaugurated, Harry and Bess drove home to Missouri by themselves. There was no Secret Service following them.

When offered corporate positions at large salaries, he declined, stating, "You don't want me. You want the office of the President, and that doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it's not for sale."

Even later, on May 6, 1971, when Congress was preparing to award him the Medal of Honor on his 87th birthday, he refused to accept it, writing, "I don't consider that I have done anything which should be the reason for any award, Congressional or otherwise."

As president he paid for all of his own travel expenses and food.

Modern politicians have found a new level of success in cashing in on the Presidency, resulting in untold wealth. Today, many in Congress also have found a way to become quite wealthy while enjoying the fruits of their offices. Political offices are now for sale (cf. Illinois).

Good old Harry Truman was correct when he observed, "My choices in life were either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference!

I say dig him up and clone him!
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This I Believe

2012-01-19T10:24:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Humans evolved (in the Darwinian sense) to get better and better at finding food and shelter, and avoiding and overcoming predators and environmental dangers. To solve these problems, we developed brains that have some particular kinds of strengths and some unavoidable weaknesses.

We are very good, for example, at using problem-solving strategies that involve imagining three-dimensional space, a steady progression of time, and cause-and-effect relationships. (This is best recognized in oneself by trying to imagine alternatives like four- or five-dimensional space--which we simply cannot do; or non-linear, discontinuous, cyclic time, or time with no beginning--also impossible for us; or factors that are close together temporally and spacially but are not causally related.)

So there are some mental skills we are good at. On the other hand, we are not good at recognizing our cognitive and perceptual limitations or our intrinsic philosophical biases. (We have all had the experience, for example, of seeing someone solve a problem we could not solve, or notice some things we had not perceived. And we have all heard people who seem sensible and reasonable espouse absurd beliefs--and we know that some of our beliefs seem absurd to others.)

An important part of our mental limitations is our blindness to our cultural biases and to semantic distortions. Part of our cultural heritage (built into each culture's child-rearing practices) is inculcation of the perspective that THIS (our culture's way of doing things) is the way things should be done and that other ways of doing things are wrong--bad, even evil. And the structure of a culture's languages tend to reinforce (and to hide) these biases.

One significant result of our particular, evolved mental equipment (and its limitations) is that life often is ("seems") frightening and painful. It is easy, on reflection, to see that these two attributes, fearfulness and painfulness, are useful (even life-saving) approaches to problem-solving.

Another result is humor (the juxtaposition of incompatible alternatives) and paradoxes (unanswerable questions). For example, the question of First Cause that has plagued religions from time immemorial ("If God made everything, where did God come from?") and the existential question, "Why does the Universe exist? Why is there something rather than nothing?" are unanswerable pseudo-questions that arise because of mistaken overreach of our cause-and-effect paradigm thinking. Cause-and-effect thinking evolved because it is a useful and powerful approach for solving certain problems; but it inclines us to ask certain pseudo-questions that do not represent solvable problems.

Yet another result of our brains' functioning is that mental rest, sleep, and meditative practices (including prayer) are calming and clarifying. Another is that moral tenets (such as "Thou shalt not kill" and "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you") serve to simplify complex situations.

Finally, because of our evolutionary environment and evolved brain functions, people need people. Life is safer and more comfortable when we coordinate our activities with others. Organized religions, for example, typically teach and encourage valuable meditative practices and moral tenets. True, these often go along with rituals that seem silly to outsiders but which, in fact, serve to strengthen a community's internal bonds. And since "Who are we?" so easily becomes "Not them," organized religions all too often become purveyors of bigotry. Finally, because the balance is hard to maintain between ritual and creativity and between identification with a group and exclusion of outsiders, organized religions often generate splinter extremism.
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What the Right Gets Right

2012-01-16T09:30:00.000-08:00

What the Right Gets Right
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
(New York Times, January 15, 2012, 9:00 pm)

With the competitors for the Republican presidential nomination engaged in an intriguing and unexpected debate over the dangers of capitalism’s “creative destruction,” this is the appropriate moment to explore the question: What does the right get right?

What insights, principles, and analyses does this movement have to offer that liberals and Democrats might want to take into account?

I recently posed a question to conservative think tanks: If given a free hand, how would conservatives deal with the unemployed, those dependent on government benefits (food stamps, Medicaid), and, more generally, those who are losers in the new economy — those hurt by corporate restructuring, globalization and declining manufacturing employment?

The Heritage Foundation, rather than answer the question, sent me links to the following papers: “Extended Unemployment Insurance Payments Do Not Benefit the Economy,” “A Free Enterprise Prescription: Unleashing Entrepreneurs to Create Jobs,” “Confronting the Unsustainable Growth of Welfare Entitlements: Principles of Reform and the Next Steps,” and “An Effective Washington Jobs Program: Do Less Harm.”

A conservative policy intellectual from a different think tank sent me an email suggesting that I read Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, “The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise.”

All the answers evaded the question posed and, in my view, amounted to ideological pap.

I decided it might be better to ask liberals what they liked about conservatism. I submitted a new question to a small group of academics and activists on the left: what does the right get right?

The answers they gave describing the strengths the right has were illuminating and help to explain why the Republican Party has won seven of the last eleven presidential elections; controlled the Senate from 1981 to 1987 and from 1995 to 2007; and controlled the House from 1996 to 2006 and 2011 to 2013.

Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (one of our era’s few highly successful labor organizations) and now a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Richman Center, made five points about conservatives in an email to me:

“They appreciate more instinctively the need for fiscal balance.”

“They understand people’s more innate belief in hard work and individual responsibility and see government as too often lacking that understanding.”

“They are more suspicious from a philosophical point of view of big government as an answer to many issues and are suspicious of Wall Street institutionally and not just their high salaries, and bad practices.”

“They respect the need for private sector economic growth (although their prescription is lacking).”

“They are more pro-small business.”

Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, is the author of “A Divider, Not a Uniter,” a harsh critique of the presidency of George W. Bush, whom Jacobson treats as a conservative apostate. Genuine conservatism, in Jacobson’s view, has a number of strengths:

It recognizes “the importance of material incentives in shaping behavior, and the difficulty in keeping bureaucracies under control and responsive to citizens.”

It is skeptical of “the application of social science theories to real world problems” and cognizant of “human fallibility/corruptibility.”

It places a high value on “liberty/autonomy.”

It places a similarly high value on “good parenting.”

It acknowledges “the superiority of market systems for encouraging efficient use of resources.”

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is a liberal Democrat who has spent much of the past decade exploring the competitive strengths of conservatism. In his new book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion,” which will be published in March, Haidt makes several points. Conservatives, he argues, “are closer to traditional ideas of liberty” like “the right to be left alone, and they often resent liberal programs that use government to infringe on their liberties in order to protect the groups that liberals care most about.”

“Everyone gets angry when people take more than they deserve. But conservatives care more,” Haidt writes. And social conservatives favor a vision of society “in which the basic social unit is the family, rather than the individual, and in which order, hierarchy, and tradition are highly valued.”

What’s more, conservatives

detect threats to moral capital that liberals cannot perceive. They do not oppose change of all kinds (such as the Internet), but they fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family). Preserving those institutions and traditions is their most sacred value.

Haidt is sharply critical of some aspects of liberalism. Liberals’ determination to help victims often leads them “to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital.” For example, “the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families,” he suggests. “It’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive.”

Haidt, Jacobson and Stern described the positive or “flattering” view of conservatism; they were not asked about their opinions of conservatism’s shortcomings.

Much of the 2012 general election campaign will be taken up by the struggle between Obama and Romney — and, more broadly, between Democrats and Republicans — to define conservatism and the Republican Party in either favorable or hostile terms.

Two scholars, Philip E. Tetlock, professor of management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Gregory Mitchell, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, have done provocative and useful work analyzing the pluses and minuses of liberalism and conservatism.

In “Liberal and Conservative Approaches to Justice: Conflicting Psychological Portraits,” Tetlock and Mitchell argue that the liabilities of conservatism include the following:

“Conservatives are too prone to engage in zero-sum thinking (either I keep my money or the government takes it). They fail to appreciate the possibility of positive sum solutions to social conflicts.”

Conservatives hold “the laissez-faire ‘minimal-state’ view that, although we have a moral obligation to refrain from hurting others, we have no obligation to help others. Conservatives cling to the comforting moral illusion that there is a sharp distinction between allowing people to suffer and making people suffer.”

“Conservatives fail to recognize that even if each transaction in a free market meets their standards of fairness (exchanges between competent adults who have not been coerced or tricked into contracts), the cumulative results could be colossally unfair.”

“Conservatives do not understand how prevalent situational constraints on achievement are and thus commit the fundamental attribution error when they hold the poor responsible for poverty.”

“Conservatives overgeneralize: From a few cases of poor persons who exploit the system, they draw sweeping conclusions about all poor persons.”

“Chance happenings play a much greater role in success or failure than conservatives realize. People often do not control their own destinies.”

The tensions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ conservatism have already surfaced in the controversy over the corporate acquisition practices of Bain Capital when Mitt Romney was C.E.O. Both Romney and the firm are proponents of capitalism’s “gale of creative destruction.” The question is, has Bain produced enough creation to justify the destruction?

The ideological war has begun in earnest, even a little early. It pits the right, seeking to depict a conservatism that is essentially good and a liberalism that is essentially bad, against a left attempting just the opposite. Looked at another way, the two sides are fighting over what the role of government in redistributing resources from the affluent to the needy should and shouldn’t be.

While neither Romney nor Obama fits comfortably into the role of doctrinaire standard bearer, they have both been shaped by political and economic pressures that have forced them into philosophical confrontation. Political campaigns, especially re-election campaigns, are highly ideological, and this one will be no exception as the nominees try to determine the direction the country will take over the next decade.
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Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this month.
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Self-Contained Communities

2012-01-15T00:50:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Can a community be self-contained? In other words, if a "town" were built deep in a subterranean bunker, or on a large ship that stayed at sea indefinitely, or on an isolated island, or on a space station, or in a super-dome on the Moon, to what extent could it be truly self-sufficient? Or would such a "town" always be dependent in some ways on interaction and interchange with a broader environment or world community?

Let us say first that we are talking about a time frame of a few years up to a few decades.

And let us consider several different parameters and the self-containment problems they pose. Specifically, first let us consider the community's needs for such basic "commodities" as (1) energy,
(2) water, and
(3) food;
then its more subtle--even abstract--needs for
(4) cultural stimulation (and cultural diversity),
(5) biological diversity (from genetic to ecological), and
(6) technological support (including innovation).

(1) The problem of energy self-containment is a crucial one. The community needs energy at least for heat (and/or cooling), protection from the elements, and processing of food, water, and nutrients. But it also needs energy for transportation, communication, entertainment, and a parade of labor-saving devices--in fact, having adequate energy is directly related to the overall quality of life--the extent to which life is harsh and tedious or comfortable and varied.

The problem of energy self-containment is crucial to the lifestyle, even to the survival, of the community, but it is not a difficult one to solve. In some settings sunlight, wind, waves, falling water, or underlying environmental heat (such as geothermal or ocean-thermal energy) can provide adequate energy for the community. Although these are not technically intrinsic to or self-contained within the community, let us consider them allowable to solve our energy needs when they are available. And when they are not available, a small-to-medium-size nuclear power source using Thorium or other radioactive fuel can be safe and non-contaminating, and provide boundless energy over a period of several years or a few decades. And although it may be expensive to set up, it requires no ongoing maintenance.

(2) The problem of water depends on two factors: recycling and purification. If one assumes that no water is added to the system (for example, from rain), then one must collect and reuse all water used for drinking, cooking, cleaning, irrigation, etc. This requires some effort and ingenuity. It also requires adequate energy for purifying and transporting the water. But it is entirely feasible.

(3) Providing good nutrition for the people and animals in the community is a complicated and difficult problem. Our nutritional needs are generally considered under two categories, MACROnutrients and MICROnutrients. Macro-(or "large")-nutrients are chemicals that are consumed by the body--they are destroyed or used up in biological processes, and are therefore needed in quantity ranges of tens-of-grams (several ounces) each day.

The three categories of macronutrients are carbohydrates (sugars and starches), lipids (fats and oils), and proteins (composed of amino acids). These have a variety of crucial metabolic functions; to some extent they can substitute for one another (for example, many forms of sugars are interconvertible in the body, and although fats, and after them, carbohydrates, normally provide the main sources of body fuel, any of the three can be "burned" for metabolic energy if necessary). But some are termed "essential": they cannot be synthesized in the body or converted from other nutrients, and the body cannot survive for long without them.

Another substance which is technically a macronutrient but is often overlooked or ignored is the indigestible bulk or fiber needed to carry foods through the digestive track and make our bowels run smoothly. Oxygen and water are also technically macronutrients since we need them in relatively large quantities and "use them up" in the functioning of our metabolic chemical processes.

Micro-(or "small")-nutrients are chemicals that are not consumed or used up in body processes (although tiny traces may be lost through excretion or inadvertently destroyed). They are catalysts that make certain chemical reactions go smoothly. They are needed in tiny, replacement quantities of a few milligrams (pin-head-size amounts) each day.

Micronutrients fall into two categories: vitamins and minerals. There are dozens of essential micronutrients; their chemical reactions and physiological functions in the body are numerous and complex. However, they are generally available in adequate amounts in a varied, natural diet, so if our community has enough varied, natural food to eat, we do not need to worry about providing micronutrients.

On the other hand, our community must grow enough foods to provide macronutrients--especially carbohydrates or lipids (for providing energy), and proteins (for building and repairing body tissues, and to make a million varied enzymes needed for functions throughout the body). Good sources of protein are cattle and poultry (including milk and eggs), fish, and certain vegetables such as nuts and beans. Good sources of carbohydrates are fruits and grains. Lipids are found here and there throughout both animal and plant food sources.

Although it can require complicated calculations to assure adequate nutrition for the community, suffice it to say--as a broad generalization--that a half acre of land under intense cultivation (or several square meters of hydroponics beds), and a few farm animals or chickens or a fish pond (or several cubic meters of fish tanks) per person, with careful planning and maintenance, will suffice.

In addition to the community's needs for energy, water, and food which can be met in reasonable, sustainable, more or less self-contained ways, there are other requirements, perhaps more subtle and even abstract, which cannot.

(4) Cultural stimulation and cultural diversity simply require more than a handful or a few dozen dedicated--but isolated--individuals. The community can have books, videos, performers, and teachers, but over a period of several years or more, the hunger for contact with a broader human community is likely to become intractable.

(5) Similarly, biological diversity (from genetic to ecological) is a deep, persistent requirement for human health and life.

(6) And technological support including innovation is an inescapable hallmark of civilization. We cannot improve or even repair for long the parade of gadgetry that is is essential to our communications, entertainment, transportation, and other mental stimulation without access to and interaction with a broad civilization.

Summary: A community of a few dozen or even a few score individuals, with careful and sophisticated planning and diligent implementation, can sustain itself in isolation for many years in terms of energy needs, water, and nutrition. But in terms of cultural stimulation, biological diversity, and technological support, it cannot.
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Game Theory

2012-01-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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The serious study of games has invaded the daily news and, in fact, many aspects of our daily lives. The field of Game Theory is defined as the study of conflict and cooperation between decision makers. It involves not just Scrabble and Monopoly and not just how to win at poker and at the race track , but maneuvers in wartime (and in peacetime negotiations), and in high-stakes business deals and political campaign strategies as well.

Let us consider the simplest kind of game: two people flip a coin; if it comes up heads then one wins, if tails, the other. Is this entirely a game of chance, or is there a strategy that can give one player a winning edge in the long run? Surprisingly, there is a winning strategy, even if it is a fair flip each time (that is, even if there really is a random, equal chance the coin will come up heads or tails on each flip) because human beings cannot choose randomly. There are inevitable biases that creep, consciously or unconsciously, into a person's call for heads or tails on the next flip. For example, if a coin toss has come up heads five times in a row, there is a powerful psychological inclination to expect that it will come up tails next time. But in fact the odds are still 50:50. So the winning strategy is: Let the other person make the call.

Some games are far more complex than this. But anyone who has played a lot of "serious" Monopoly knows that a strategy of buying as many properties as one can early in a game, and loading them up with houses and hotels as quickly as possible, will usually produce a win. Similarly in Scrabble, thinking up high word values and blocking an opponent from using the double- and triple-score spaces is usually a winning strategy.

Some terms from Game Theory have crept into everyday discourse; we hear them regularly on the evening news. For example, the distinction is made between a "zero-sum game" in which if one side wins, then the other side loses, and a "win-win game" in which both sides can come out ahead. If two players each bet $5 and then cut a deck of cards with the agreement that the one who gets the higher card wins the $10 and the other gets nothing, that is a zero-sum game. On the other hand, if they agree that the one who gets the higher card gets the $10 and the other gets to keep the deck of cards (also worth more than $5, but provided by some outside source), that would be a win-win game.

The principle of the game of Russian Roulette is well known: players alternately take a chance at suffering a big loss, such as taking turns firing a pistol that has one bullet in a six-chambered gun at ones own head. Situations in which any participants risk serious loss is often referred to as a game of Russian roulette.

One also hears business or political strategies likened to a game of Rope-a-Dope, a term borrowed from boxing in which one boxer protects his face and head with his arms and leans against the rope, letting his opponent reign blows on him. His hope is that his opponent will tire himself out or get careless, and the fighter employing the Rope-a-Dope strategy can take advantage of that and win in the end.

Another more complicated game-theory situation is called a Prisoner's Dilemma. To understand this, imagine that two men are arrested for a crime, but the police do not have enough evidence for a conviction. The police, secretly, offer both the same deal—
(1) if one testifies against his partner and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent one receives the full one-year sentence.
(2) If both remain silent, both are sentenced to only one month in jail for a minor charge.
(3) If each snitches on the other, each receives a three-month sentence.
Each prisoner must choose either to betray or remain silent; if he snitches on his partner, the most he can get is a three-month jail sentence and he might go free; if he remains silent, he is sure to spend at least one month in jail and, depending on what his partner does, he might have to serve a full year.

The term Prisoner's Dilemma is commonly used to refer to a simpler scenario in which two negotiators will both benefit if they cooperate, but either one will lose heavily if he expresses a willingness to negotiate and the other backs out.
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Consciousness vs. Reality

2012-01-10T23:25:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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It seems that without a real, physical world--what we call "reality"--there would be no consciousness. Consciousness--that is, an individual's awareness of oneself as a discrete and functioning entity within, and distinct from, an environment--seems to depend on a functioning brain--a physical entity. And without conscious awareness of it, whether or not there is any such thing as "reality" becomes moot.

Consciousness demands the existence of a real physical world. And reality, the existence of a real physical world, demands--rises or disappears depending on--conscious awareness of it.

There are three different ways that this dependence of consciousness and reality on one another can be interpreted.

One is the psychological way. If you imagine several different people standing at a bus stop, you can easily imagine that they live in very different worlds. One is an escaped prisoner, hawkishly alert and observing sharply the people and the circumstances around him; his world is filled with danger--every nod and blink and wisp of wind in the trees could be a harbinger of fear and distress. A second person at the bus stop is tired and hung-over from the revelries of the previous night; he wishes he were back home in bed--he is barely aware of the people and events around him. Another is a young lady absorbed in a mental exercise--she is desperately trying to recall and remember the names and faces of her co-workers at the new job she started yesterday. Yet another is richly enjoying the clouds, the breeze, the fragrances of spring in the air. Another is in physical pain--she is dying of cancer. And so on. Each of the people has a very different experience of reality at that moment. This is the psychological way that reality and consciousness are dependent on one another.

Then there is the quantum physics way. It has been demonstrated by repeated, rigorous experiments that physical reality does not exist until it is observed. Photons and sub-atomic particles are probability patterns which only collapse into real physical entities when they are observed, that is, when an attempt is made to measure them. You may not like this view of reality, but it is beyond refute. J. B. S. Haldane, the eminent British biologist and philosopher of science, said, "The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine."

And finally there is the metaphysical way that reality and consciousness depend on one another. Sages of every culture and in every age have advised us that we each create our own reality. This, they say, is a deep and powerful truth that can be known only through long, patient, inner contemplation. It is a truth that is available for anyone to see, anyone to know, but it requires terrifying confrontations with "ifs" and "whys" that most people, frankly, are unwilling or unable to undertake.
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My Prescription for Medicare

2012-01-10T21:53:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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(1) Don't provide Medicare for people who don't need it. Anyone who makes more than $100,000 a year and has a net worth over $2 million can afford to pay for their own medical expenses. Dropping their coverage would save Medicare several tens of billions of dollars a year.

(2) Contract with VISA, MasterCard, and American Express to root out and prevent fraud and abuse. The major credit card companies run claims-transaction systems that are very similar to that of Medicare, but they do it with less than 1/100 of the rate of losses from fraud and abuse (fraud and abuse cost Medicare over 10% of its expenses; the credit card companies run at about 0.1%). This would save Medicare several tens of billions of dollars a year.

(3) Allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies and foreign drug sources for the best possible drug prices. The Veterans Administration and many private health insurance companies already do this with no loss in quality or value to patients. This would save Medicare several tens of billions of dollars a year.

(4) Cap malpractice awards at $1 million. An episode of medical malpractice that causes disability, disfigurement, or death is a terrible, terrible thing. Careless perpetrators should be punished; victims should be compensated. But there is no difference between a one-million-dollar error and a ten- or twenty-million-dollar error. The only difference is the malpractice insurance premiums paid by doctors, which they must pass along to their patients in increased fees. So the cost of such large awards is not paid by the doctors or hospitals--it is paid by the patients and, therefore, by Medicare and other health insurance companies. Moreover, much of an award is not paid to the victim--lawyers routinely charge 30% or 40% of the award amount. Capping malpractice awards would save Medicare several tens of billions of dollars a year.

(5) There are several other money-saving fixes that could be made, but these four alone would move Medicare securely from red to black ink for many decades to come.
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Wolves and Huns at the Gates

2012-01-10T09:37:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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It seems that there have always been wolves and Huns at the gates throughout history. One can see this from reading history and from reading between the lines of history.

Closer at hand--from my father and from an elderly neighbor I knew in the 1970s when he was in his 70s--I heard that the time of the First World War, 1914 to 1918, was a terrible time. People were scared--the world was in serious jeopardy.

Then, when at last the War was over, came the worldwide 1918 influenza pandemic. It has been called "the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history." One fifth of the world's population was infected; more people died in the flu epidemic than had been killed in the First World War. At the time it surely seemed that the end of civilization had come.

The Roaring Twenties was a "good" time--at least for some people. It was "good," except for the rampant criminality associated with Prohibition in the U.S., the rise of Fascism related to the post-war devastation in Europe, Communism developing in Russia, the ongoing rape of indigenous peoples in North and South America and Africa, etc. In other words, if you were one of the "One Percent," life was good. But only until, even for the One Percent, the stock market bubble burst in 1929.

Then came the Great Depression--unemployment in the U.S. was up to 25%, world trade down 50%--plus the evolving Dust Bowl, severe drought and soil exhaustion that wracked the American and Canadian prairie lands through the 1930s. Then the Second World War, 1939 to 1945--savagery and bloodshed again raged across Europe, North Africa, and Southeast Asia--the entire world watched in terror.

I was born in 1937. We begin to get into my own first-hand recollections now.

As I was coming to consciousness, the world lived in terror on the brink of destruction. My mother was afraid to tell people in Scarsdale, New York, that she was Jewish, but far worse than that was the terrible news she was getting from and about her friends and family in Europe. My father was the air raid warden for our upper-middle class, suburban neighborhood--he walked the streets at night, knocking on doors to tell people if their house lights were leaking from around the dark curtains in their kitchen windows (which was the only room we could light at all at night). There were no street lights or traffic lights--we wanted to give the German bombers that were expected overhead any night as little help as possible finding their way to New York City (there was no GPS--far from it). German submarines were sighted off the shore of Long Island where we used to go swimming.

I remember clearly how surprised I was when the war ended in 1945 to realize that my parents had been scared as long as I had known them. I had thought that the ongoing atmosphere of anxiety I grew up finding in the world around me was just the way life always was.

More first hand: There were strange and frightening times as I was growing up--the scorge of McCarthyism ostensibly fighting the scorge of Communism in the U.S.; the savagery and public outrage over the war in Viet Nam; the rampant breakdown of society represented by the Sexual Revolution, hippies, and recreational drugs (epitomized by LSD)--the world was in jeopardy and falling apart every direction one looked.

But far, FAR and away dwarfing all of this was the terror of the Cold War. You may be old enough to recall the Blockade of Berlin in 1948 to 1949 when the Soviet Union tried to starve the city of Berlin into submission and the U.S., French, and British undertook to run the blockade--and the world stood on the brink of nuclear war; the Doomsday Clock which moved, over the ensuing decades, as close as two minutes to midnight; the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 in which atomic weapons were aimed at the U.S. from just offshore, and were poised, ready to fire; and more. The Cold War, 1946 to 1991, was a terrifying time. Year after year, decade after decade, the world hovered a few seconds from Apocalyptic disaster. Dozens of madmen (politicians, military leaders, and dictators) held their fingers poised over a Red Button ready to fire nukes at the "enemy." (In Cuba, at the time of the Russian Missile Crisis, commanders at the COMPANY level had discretionary use of "tactical" nuclear weapons--THE COMPANY LEVEL!--that's captains--scores of young men in their twenties.)

I personally made a life decision in the 1960s not to have any children because it was so clear that they would not have a chance to live out anything approaching a normal life cycle. (Andy, my son born in 1970, may not.)

But the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ushered in a new age of worldwide peace and security. Nobody but Al Gore had even heard of Global Warming, not to mention nano-sludge which could destroy the world by unleashing tiny, self-reproducing, micro-machines; genome manipulation which might inadvertantly pollute and destroy our very DNA; and diabolically creative chemistry and materials sciences pouring into the environment, year after year, millions of tons of highly varied, highly toxic chemicals. And certainly not to mention--oh, I could go on and on, but you hear about all these dangers to the planet and to the very survival of humanity daily on the news.

The point is that wolves and Huns have always been at the gates. Always. And they are at the gates now--worse, perhaps, than ever--but they have always been "worse than ever," in each iteration, for each generation.

We do not know what the future holds. Surely--as the advent of the Internet, the iPhone, social media, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, worldwide microsecond billion-dollar financial transactions, etc. tell us--it will be very, VERY rapidly evolving--tumultuous--frightening--yes, perhaps devastating.

The only good thing that we (with the limited minds that we have) can say about it is that we (civilization) have been here before. In fact, we have always been here.

Well, actually there is a second "good thing" to say; that is that our (we seniors') tour of duty is almost done. Most of the power to run the world--or ruin it--and to try to survive--has passed into younger hands than ours.

Do we leave the world far worse than we found it? Perhaps so--perhaps not. Perhaps about the same--tragically, perilously at a cliff's edge.

Pretty much the same--though much different--though the same--though different....
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Consciousness Fills In the Blanks

2012-01-05T09:52:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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One of the most remarkable attributes of consciousness is our ability and inclination to complete, through imagination, the scene around us. Think about it: At any particular moment, even with our eyes open and looking around attentively, we can actually see--that is, record on our retinas--only a small fraction of what is around us and what is changing in it. But our experience is that we are aware of all of it. If we see someone walking toward us and then look away, when we look back we expect the person to be appropriately closer. Even if the person has stopped or turned while we were not looking, our consciousness immediately reinterprets their position as reasonable and even expected, just as if we had been looking at the moment they made the change.

Hearing is even less complete than seeing, and contributions by our sense of smell, for humans--unlike dogs--is close to zero. The tactile senses, unless our skin is burned or cut, and also the kinesthetic senses (that send feedback to the brain about the positions of our muscles and joints) pretty much always operate under the radar. Their readings on our environment are very sparse and incomplete and contribute almost nothing to consciousness filling in the blanks.

Self-awareness is another remarkable attribute of consciousness, and it depends heavily on the brain creating an environmental context. Self-awareness means experiencing ourselves as a discrete entity, different from and separate from others, and separate from the world around us--the world maintained in our imaginations by consciousness filling in the blanks in our perceptions.

Human consciousness eminently qualifies for the "Aunt Tilly Principle," that is, consciousness, like Aunt Tilly, is easy to recognize but hard to define or explain. Attributes such as the various forms of memory and different kinds of cognition and problem-solving are facile parts of our learned repertoire of mental activities, but their explanation and precise quantification is very difficult to accomplish. The ability of our consciousness to fill in the blanks and create a sense of completeness in the world around us is similarly facile and important, but elusive.
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Fracking

2012-01-05T09:08:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Fracking is a process used in retrieving natural gas from sites where it is locked up in rock formations so that it does not flow out easily. In fracking, millions of gallons of waste-water laced with special chemicals are pumped into the reluctant wells under high pressure. This causes cracks or "fractures" in the rock formations; these spread and extend, allowing the gas to flow out more freely.

There are two problems with fracking. First, many of the chemicals added to the waste-water are toxic--hundreds of them are known to be carcinogens or otherwise potentially dangerous or damaging to life, including to human life. Some of these chemicals are added by the ton to the water pumped into the well (up to 2% of the fluid volume consists of added chemicals), and they sometimes seep out and contaminate wells and groundwater used for irrigation of crops.

As a result, fracking has been outlawed in several countries.

The second reason is that fracking can apparently cause earthquakes. Several sites in the U.S. have reported significant increases in earthquake activity, from a few per year, all small, up to thousands per year with magnitudes up to 4.0. Although earthquakes of this size rarely cause any damage, even people who do not live in California or Japan worry about having the ground tremble under them a lot.
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Can Nuclear Power Be Safe?

2012-01-02T11:40:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Apparently, yes, it can.

In the middle of the last century when engineers and scientists were developing a plan for generating electricity from nuclear reactions, they had a couple of dozen good possibilities to choose among, and not much predictive information to go on. They chose one--fission of Uranium.

Since then trillions of dollars have been spent researching and developing practical generation of electricity from Uranium fission. There are, at present, nearly 500 Uranium nuclear power reactors in operation in the world; they produce about 14% of the world's electricity.

But four important problems have arisen that were not anticipated by the original pioneers. First and foremost, Uranium nuclear generators are intrinsically unsafe: they are complex pieces of machinery that present the unavoidable possibility of dangerous failure because of natural disasters or human errors.

Second, they produce dangerous radioactive wastes, and--amid a firestorm of public worry--there has proved to be no politically acceptable way to decontaminate or dispose of these wastes. In fact, these wastes are accumulating by the ton year after year around the world.

Third, the worldwide supply of usable Uranium ore is running out. By some reckoning, it may last 100 years, but it is not unlimited.

And fourth, the handling of refined Uranium for power generation may present a terrorist threat, either from a rogue atomic bomb that could kill hundreds of thousands of people, or from a so-called "dirty bomb" in which radioactive contamination could be spread over a populated area by exploding a conventional bomb with radioactive material attached.

The world has pretty much concluded that generating electrical power from Uranium fission is too dangerous to pursue. Reactors are being shut down or decommissioned around the world.

What about another of those dozens of possibilities for generating power from nuclear reactions--those possibilities that scientists and engineers set aside many decades ago? In fact, there are several good, safe candidates.

For example, using radioactive Thorium in molten-salt solution. This method was proven effective in U.S. government tests in 1964 to 1969. It is currently under commercial development in India, China, and Russia (the thorny political and regulatory landscape makes it impossible to develop it in the U.S.).

Such Thorium reactors do not present any of the drawbacks associated with Uranium fission. (1) They cannot explode or melt down. (2) They do not produce long-lived toxic bi-products. (3) The supply of minable Thorium fuel is essentially unlimited. And (4) they and their products cannot be used for terrorist threats.

The world was once promised electricity from nuclear reactors that would be "so cheap it [would] not be worth metering." Thorium still holds this promise; Uranium does not.
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What about the Nukes?

2012-01-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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The U.S. and Russia combined have about 20,000 nuclear bombs. (Seven other countries have less than 300 each.)

Exploding 0.5% of these (100) would cause nuclear winter with worldwide temperature drops exceeding the last ice age 18,000 years ago, causing substantially complete loss of agricultural production throughout the world for years.

In 2008 the U.S. spent more than $52 billion maintaining its nuclear arsenal. (These are open-source costs and therefore do not include nuclear costs related to air defense, anti-submarine programs, classified programs, etc.--in other words, this figure does not include most nuclear-related expenses.)

It is illegal by international treaty to explode nuclear weapons.

Dismantling the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal would cost about $31 billion. (In addition, nuclear waste management and environmental remediation would cost more than $350 billion--this is regardless of whether we dismantle the U.S. nuclear arsenal or not.)

So let's dismantle them--well, OK, for the hawk purists, "almost all" of them--leave just enough to kill off civilization if we "need" to. Purely from a financial standpoint, it will save money in both the sort- and long-term. And surely it is a humanitarian "good thing."
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Vignettes of North Korea

2011-12-26T17:47:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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If you live in North Korea, the chances are you are either in the military (42% of the population is active duty, paramilitary, or reserves), or hungry (callory intake average is less than half that in the "West"; 45% of the children are stunted by malnutrition).

If you are lucky enough to live in some sort of a house, there is no TV or Internet, but there is a radio speaker on the wall (that cannot legally be turned off) that wakes you up in the morning with political propaganda, and continues until your required bedtime at night.

You probably work in industry or agriculture--those are the two economic sectors that are created, run, and subsidized by the government. You probably also take part in the rich underground network of black market activities; otherwise you and your family could not survive.

You know that Kim Jong-il, officially called the "Great Leader," died December 17 and was succeeded by his 20-something-year-old son, Kim Jong-un, officially called the "Great Successor" or "Wise Leader."

You probably don't know that Kim Jong-il passed over his two other sons, Kim Jong-un's two older brothers, because they were simply too irresponsible to run the country. Or that their uncle, Jang Song-thaek, pretty much runs the country and probably assassinated Kim Jong-il (according to South Korean intelligence sources).

Two items of good news in this bleak landscape: One is that the southern half of the Korean peninsula, South Korea, is doing well economically and socially, and is ready and willing--at the drop of a coup d'état--to run massive military forces north, with food supplies, etc. The other is that there is a Demilitarized Zone between the North and South, a corridor 2 1/2 miles wide and 160 miles long, that has been forbidden to human passage for several decades, and therefore has come to represent one of the most pristine and precious natural habitats on the planet.
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Signing Statements

2011-12-26T11:27:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Isn't it wonderful the way Presidential Signing Statements--largely invented by Ronald Reagan but raised to an art form by G.W. Bush--have come back, in Obama's hands, to bite the Republicans in the ass?

Signing statements, written when a president signs a bill, indicate the president's objections--constitutional, political, or just rhetorical--to sections of the bill. It means that the Executive branch of the government--the only branch with any significant "just do it" ability--is not going to "do" much of anything about that particular wrinkle of the legislation.

As the New York Times said in March, 2009, "Mr. Bush ... broke all records, using signing statements to challenge about 1,200 sections of bills over his eight years in office, about twice the number challenged by all previous presidents combined...."

But Obama definitely got the message. He's issued quite a few signing statements: "Well now, let's see...I think that provision...and that provision...and that provision in this bill are unconstitutional, so I'll tell the Executive Branch to hold off on implementing them. Of course, if the Supreme Court decides (over the next several years) that any of those provisions ARE constitutional, I'll reconsider."

This is just another example of why we need a serious revamp of the federal government. For example, we should get rid of--
(1) lobby-driven legislation,
(2) the filibuster,
(3) the electoral college,
(4) campaign finance by corporations and the richest 1%,
(5) congressional graft (pork, insider trading, lobbying "retirement," etc.),
(6) convoluted revenue stream (the Income Tax Code represents "institutionalized corruption"),
(7) ad hoc accounting (for, example, during the G.W. Bush administration over a trillion dollars of spending--like two expensive wars--didn't make it onto the government's books)
(8) excessive government secrecy ("sunshine is the best disinfectant")
(9) legislated morality (including a "war" on drugs and mandatory minimum sentences--the U.S. locks up a higher percentage of its citizens than ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, including Russia, China, and Iran)
(10) and--last, but not least--signing statements.
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Obvious Solutions

2011-12-20T09:34:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Many of the problems vexing the U.S. and the world have obvious solutions, solutions that are not politically easy, but are clear and simple.

The graying of the population and the consequent disastrous rises in the costs of Medicare and Social Security (and of corresponding programs in other countries) present one such series of problems.

For Social Security, the retirement age should be raised. When the current age limits were set, the life expectancy of U.S. citizens was 20 years younger than it is today. The allowable retirement age should be raised by one year every three years for the next several decades. In addition, Social Security should not be paid to people who don't need it; no one with an income over $100,000 a year or a net worth over a million dollars should be eligible to receive Social Security. These two steps would render Social Security solvent indefinitely.

Similarly, disallowing the wealthy who can afford to pay their own medical expenses from eligibility for Medicare would save the U.S. government tens of billions of dollars a year. But a more important factor that would reduce Medicare costs is eliminating fraud and abuse which currently account for over 10% of Medicare expenses. This could be accomplished cheaply and simply by contracting with American Express, VISA, or MasterCard to police the Medicare program. These private organizations have fraud and abuse threats similar to those of Medicare, but have losses due to these factors of about 0.1 %.

Greed and payment bonanzas in the financial industry could be curtailed by beefing up and enforcing reasonable regulations. This approach plus raising taxes on the wealthy could also solve the wealth and income inequity problems in the U.S., and the consequent advance of poverty and stagnation of the middle class.

Looking beyond finances, the energy dilemma--in simplest terms, pollution versus industrial stagnation--could be solved by worldwide development of Thorium-molten-salt nuclear reactors. This is a safe, clean, sustainable, proven technology whose main limitation is the popular prejudice against anything called "nuclear power" because of Uranium fission disasters like Chernoble and Fukushima.

And with cheap, abundant power, the world's water shortages become solvable through desalination--removing the salt from ocean water. Then with modern agricultural technology and frugal, fair distribution, the world's food crisis would be manageable as well.

The solutions to these--and certain other--U.S. and world problems are clear and simple. Their implementation is only impeded by short-sighted politics.

But there is one series of problems for which there is no evident solution: the problems raised by the dramatic advances in technology. These are not just the plague-prone globalized community (plague-prone because new, deadly viruses and bacteria can be transported around the world in a few hours--far out-pacing medical constraints) and the hyperinflation of tech-driven healthcare costs. More significantly, there is a technological "singularity" only a few years in the future; there is a mist into which no prognosticators car peer. New technologies proliferate and spread so rapidly and cause such dramatic changes in our activities, lifestyles, and environments, that it is impossible to know what disasters (as well as delights) lie just ahead.

And you can't solve problems you can't see coming--especially when they are coming at a million miles an hour.
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Entrepreneurial Versus State-Run Capitalism

2011-12-19T08:37:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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There is a great social experiment afoot in the world today. On the one hand, entrepreneurial capitalism--throwing the bait in the middle of the pool, and letting the sharks fight for it--appears, by clear historical evidence, to be the greatest societal wealth-generation system the world has ever known. It clearly beats out, on the one hand, both feudalism and its various derivatives and, on the other hand, centralized, politically manipulated government control of industrial-age wealth generation (the fall of the U.S.S.R. punctuated the end of that sentence).

But entrepreneurial capitalism cannot function unfettered: adult supervision appears to be essential. From Teddy Roosevelt's anti-monopoly oversight of the Robber Barons (in the first decade of the 20th century), through the excessive exuberance over public ownership that led to the Great Depression (in the 1930s), to the secretive and inventive greed of financial institutions leading up to the Great Recession (in the first decade of the 21st century), it seems clear that a strictly "boys will be boys" approach to swimming in shark-infested financial waters leads to severe distortions and disruptions of the engines of societal wealth generation.

But a different experiment is now afoot, one that is based on the question, if entrepreneurs and boards of directors (with some adult, government supervision to assure equitable, social-democratic wealth distribution) is so good at generating post-industrial wealth--particularly as the corporate units get bigger and bigger--why not have one vast state-run "corporation"? This seems reasonable. And China is trying this out. Business strategies in China--from price gouging to various methods of undercutting competitors--are evaluated and implemented on a national level. For example, the Chinese government, through the use of hundreds of billions of dollars of government subsidies, successfully cornered the world mining and production of rare-earth minerals; China simply put the rest of the world out of business by undercutting prices. For another example, displacing 1.3 million people and destroying irreplaceable ecological and archaeological treasures to build the Three Gorges Dam required only board-room type decisions; it did not require dealing with legally and politically sensitive eminent-domain issues or with complex regulatory and licensure constraints. For a third example, development of safe, efficient, Thorium-molten-salt nuclear power reactors is proceeding apace in China (and in Russia and India) but not in the U.S. or in any Western country because of political pandering to irrational public worries in the West.

So far the Chinese experiment seems to be going well. For example, government intervention to protect the Chinese economy from the burst of the worldwide housing and credit bubble in 2008 was quick and massive--and, unlike in the U.S. and Europe, effective. For another example, China has enormously expanded a consumerism-dedicated middle class. Thirdly, last year China passed Japan to become the second largest national economy in the world--behind only the U.S. And many economists and political savants predict that within the next couple of decades China will pass the U.S. to become the largest national economy in the world. Meanwhile, China has amassed trillions of dollars in board-room war-chest funds. (It could bail out the Euro-zone sovereign debt crisis if it chose, but the international political implications are horrendous.)

What seems to attract little comment is one profound historical observation: boards of directors make mistakes. The Chinese model has inadequate internal (or external) correctives. Sooner or later the "board of directors" that is China's centralized political governing authority will make a colossal boo-boo--they will produce an Edsel, introduce alcohol prohibition , bankrupt Lehman Brothers, or otherwise have a Alan-Greenspan moment on an unimaginably vast scale. (Perhaps they already have--there may already be such a boo-boo percolating up through the system.) And the world will go back to muddling along as best it can with the evolving fits and starts--the successes-failures-corrections process--of Western, social-democratic-regulated entrepreneurial capitalism.
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Education Reform

2011-12-06T06:26:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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In an Op Ed in the N.Y. Times today (Dec. 6, 2011), the authors (Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford) write that there are four--and only four--areas of education in which the federal government can usefully intervene.

"First is encouraging transparency for school performance and spending.... States should be required to report school- and district-level spending; the resources students receive should be disclosed, not only their achievement."

"Second is ensuring that basic constitutional protections are respected...to illuminate how disadvantaged or vulnerable populations--like black and Hispanic students and children from poor families--are doing."

"Third is supporting basic research...[for example:] brain science, language acquisition, or the impact of computer-assisted tutoring."

"Finally [is providing] voluntary, competitive federal grants that support innovation while providing political cover for school boards, union leaders, and others to throw off anachronistic routines."

All else, Hess and Darling-Hammond claim, deteriorates to confusing, counter-productive micromanagement.
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Higher Dimensions and Multiple Universes

2011-12-01T16:59:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Theoretical physics used to talk about sensible things like billiard balls knocking each other around on a billiards table and baseballs arcing through the air. Then along came the 20th century with Relativity for very big stuff and Quantum Physics for very small stuff. Things didn't seem quite so reasonable: time slowed or sped up depending on gravity, nothing could travel faster than the speed of light, infinitesimal particles harbored whopping big amounts of energy, something could be in two different places at the same time, and more.

We couldn't really imagine such things. Our brains, after all, grew up dealing with wolves and trees and edible berries, all of which live in the "sensible" middle world (the "reasonable" world of Goldilocks--neither too hot nor too cold, too big nor too small). But we came to accept them--unimaginable as they were--because of two things: for one thing, smart people talked about them all the time as if they were so, and for another, we could see their results from atom bombs to computers, from worldwide air travel to watches that were accurate to a few seconds a year and ran forever on light or invisibly tiny batteries.

Yes, the 20th century presented some severe challenges to straight, reasonable thinking. But hold on, here comes the 21st century and theoretical physics is making things even stranger. It seems that quarks (that make up neutrons and protons, which make up atoms and molecules, which make up all the things we see and touch in the world around us) are not the ultimate building blocks--they are composed of even smaller entities, vibrating strings. And--hold on even harder--these tiny strings vibrate not just in the four dimensions we know and love, but in eleven dimensions.

How on earth can there be eleven dimensions around us? How come we don't see and feel them? Here's an analogy: You are sitting in a movie theater watching a film of a car racing down a highway. Three dimensions (plus time), right? Nope, just two (plus time)--it's all on the two-dimensional surface of the movie screen. The third spatial dimension is an optical illusion.

Then the car crashes into another car, and thanks to slow motion the action seems to slow down. The parts of the two cars sail slowly and gracefully away through the air. There's a distortion of the orderly tick-tock progression of time. Although you are still watching this in "real time," the time dimension on the screen has slowed considerably. It could even stop--or reverse. Yes, distortions in space and time dimensions can be quite taken for granted.

A universe of eleven dimensions with seven of them hidden from view is hard to imagine--well, OK, impossible to imagine. But if you want to live in the 21st century, you have to learn to smile and nod wisely when people talk about them.

But that's not all--try to imagine this: huge, high-dimensional structures (called membranes or "branes") having, say, six or eight dimensions and drifting around in still higher dimensional space (with, say, eight or ten dimensions). Two of them bump into one another releasing a tremendous amount of energy in three or four of their mutual dimensions. There's a big bang--in fact, a "Big Bang"--a universe is born. And, with another collision, another universe is born--and another, and another.

As theoretical physicists have untangled the mathematical implications of string theory, they have been forced to admit that there may be many, many universes--perhaps, the mathematics says, ten-to-the-five-hundredth (that's a ten followed by 500 zeroes)--perhaps more--perhaps an infinite number. Most of them are quite different from our universe--they have different physical constants, different properties; many cannot form any atoms, any matter, any life. But some (well, perhaps many--perhaps even an infinite number) are very much like our universe.

Could there be intelligent creatures living in parallel universes a fraction of an inch away from us? Yup. Could we communicate with them? Probably not; nothing gets across. Well, maybe gravity waves do. But that's 22nd century stuff. I'll leave that for another essay a hundred years or so from now.
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Breakup of the Eurozone

2011-11-29T13:21:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Twelve years ago 17 countries on the European continent embarked on a bold experiment. They agreed that, despite having different languages and cultures, despite having a history of centuries of wars among themselves, despite having emerged only a half-century earlier from World War II--the most devastating conflagration the world had ever known--despite all these things, they would abandon their separate rights to establish individual monetary systems and join together in a single currency, the Euro. The developing global marketplace seemed so vast and powerful that they thought it could heal their cultural rifts forever.

Since then they have discovered that their styles of governance and fiscal management differ significantly. Some (like Germany) have grown strong industrial and marketing economies and well adapted taxation and other government fiscal policies. On the other hand, some (like Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) have continued to provide government services (from salaries and pensions to education, health, and safety measures) that they could not afford--they have maintained archaic and inadequate tax structures; and they have borrowed on international bond markets to make up the differences.

Over the past few years it has become clear that these disparities cannot persist--that the economically weaker countries can undermine the Eurozone enterprise as a whole. Specifically, if any of the weaker countries cannot pay back the money they have borrowed, the countries and the European banks that have lent them this money will be in trouble--they, in turn, may not be able to pay their obligations to their creditors, depositors, and other investors.

The first threatened default--Ireland--was handled successfully. The other Eurozone countries guaranteed the debt and Ireland tightened it fiscal belt.

But the next--Greece--was bigger and more complicated. A series of measures seem to be too little and too late.

Now Spain and Portugal seem in jeopardy. Even the huge economy of Italy--definitely too big to fail--seems threatened.

The entire Eurozone financial structure now seems on the brink of cascading into collapse.

What does this mean in terms of the European and world economies? Suppose the Euro is no longer issued or guaranteed by a consortium of countries? In that case each country on the European continent would revert to issuing its own currency--the Dutch guilder, the French franc, the German mark etc. And these currencies would, once again, trade against one another--the stronger ones would be preferred in contracts, business transactions, banking, etc. The weaker would sink in value--they would buy less in the market place. Both of these factors--both the fluctuations and the relative strengths (or weaknesses)--would be problems.

Suppose, for comparison, the U.S. government ceased to issue and guarantee dollars. Suppose your salary or pension began to be paid--if it was still paid at all--in California or New York "dollars" which fluctuated in value on a weekly or even daily basis--one day a head of lettuce cost a dollar and a week later it cost fifty cents or two dollars. Contracts (to roof your house or to buy a car) had to be carefully written to protect both parties--so carefully that they became impractical--in fact, impossible.

Even though this worst-case scenario is very unlikely, businesses, banks, and governments around the world have already begun to hedge against losses that would be incurred in any fiscally volatile times. They have begun to hold larger cash reserves (in stronger currencies such as U.S. bonds and precious metals), to lend more cautiously, and to favor short-term over long-term commitments.

The contraction of business and other fiscal activity around the world has already begun. We stand, with the Eurozone's economic fragility, on the brink of a severe worldwide depression.
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Washington Gridlock--Lest We Forget

2011-11-27T09:44:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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I was surprised when I looked in on the talking heads on TV this Sunday morning to hear Washington gridlock discussed as if the causes were complex or obscure.

That is ridiculous.

Washington gridlock, the refusal of Congress to do anything, is a calculated strategy of the Republican Party to regain political power.

In 2009 Obama inherited from the Bush administration (1) the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression; (2) two unwinable wars and a worldwide image of high-handed, U.S. Cowboy diplomacy; and (3) an evolving ecological disaster of epic proportions. Although the roots of these go back many years to the deregulation and anti-scientism of Ronald Reagan, they had degenerated to explosive levels under Bush's eight years of incompetence.

In 2009 Obama put a lot of his political weight behind developing some sort of universal health care for the U.S. (The U.S. is the only advanced nation in the world that does not provide its citizens with guaranteed, affordable health care.) In the summer of 2009 the members of Congress headed out to their constituencies to hold town meetings to discuss health-care proposals. The Republicans sent outside agitators to disrupt these meetings and shout down any reasonable discussions. The media delighted in the headlines about raucous town meetings all over the country.

One of the axioms of propaganda is that if you say something often enough and loud enough, it develops an aura of believability no matter how absurd it is.

Flushed with this success, the Republican Party developed a political strategy to regain power. They realized that by obstructing any legislation that might potentially ease the difficulties the nation faced, they could saddle Obama with being seen as a failure.

Let us not forget: The causes of the legislative gridlock we see in Washington are not complex or obscure.
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Restoring the American Dream

2011-11-20T11:48:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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The last three decades of the 19th century was our so-called "Gilded Age." U.S. prosperity blossomed. This period brought us not just the rise of the Robber Barons--the super-wealthy titans of finance and industry like Astor, Carnegie, Gould, Harriman, Hopkins, Mellon, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt and their invention of multi-million dollar philanthropy--but the advancement in education, income, and social mobility of tens of millions of "ordinary" Americans: the rise and empowerment of the American Middle Class. As Horatio Alger represented in his many rags-to-riches novels, a kid from a poor family could rise through determination, hard work, courage, and honesty to a life of middle-class security and comfort.

The evolution of this dream continued in the 20th century, although it suffered some severe setbacks--the financial crash of 1897, the Great Depression of the 1930s, etc. But during the third quarter of the 20th century--thanks to FDR's New Deal of the late 1930s, the industrial boom of the Second World War, and a long arc of social legislation and progress--the American Dream came to be firmly embedded in the American psyche and way of life and, in fact, in the image of the U.S. throughout the world.

However, over the past 25 years the American Dream has faded. Wealth has become concentrated in an upper class, governmental power has been usurped by wealthy individuals and huge corporations, and lower- and middle-class upward mobility has been stifled.

This paper presents a set of concepts and programs designed to restore the American Dream. It addresses such problems as--
resolving the wealth disparity,
meeting employment and education needs,
reducing the undo influence of money and corporate power,
handling immigration, and
restoring civil liberties.

Resolving the wealth disparity--Over the past 25 years, a massive distortion of wealth and income has developed in the U.S. The richest few percent now own most of the privately held assets including stocks and bonds, and real estate. Moreover, their income during this period has soared while that of the middle and lower classes has stagnated. This has led to the development of a rich and powerful oligarchy; this represents a serious threat to our democracy and to the future of our country.

Therefore: The income tax code should be cleaned up and simplified; this should include eliminating a multiplicity of exemptions, loopholes, deductions, and subsidies (a system which has been called "institutionalized corruption"); and it should include incorporating a graduated scale from zero percent for those earning under $50,000 a year up to 40% for those earning over one million dollars a year. In addition, the maximum wage for requiring FICA contributions should be raised from the current $109K to at least $200K--in other words, high-income individuals should pay more toward medicare and social security, not less. And because an income tax is intrinsically cumbersome and expensive to administer, the government should add, for much of its income, a value-added tax (VAT), a tax levied at each stage of an industrial production and distribution chain. This is much fairer, easier, and cheaper federal revenue stream to administer than an income tax. The U.S. is the only advanced country in the world that does not have some form of VAT.

There should also be statutory limitations on compensation of corporate and financial executives, some of whom currently "earn" tens of millions of dollars a year in addition to having retirement contracts ("golden parachutes") that pay them additional tens of millions of dollars when they leave a job. Ultra-high income levels also extend to other fields such as sports and media celebrities who also "earn" millions or tens-of-millions of dollars a year. Such absurd incomes should be effectively capped or heavily taxed. Their existence without heartily contributing to the federal coffers is antithetical to the American Dream.

Meeting employment and education needs--For decades institutions of higher education in the U.S. were the envy of the world. All over the world political and business leaders got their educations at U.S. colleges and universities. For one example, in Greece in late 2011, both leaders of the two major, competing political parties had American educations, in fact, they were once roommates at Amherst College in Massachusetts. For another example, when technocrats were selected, in November, 2011 to rescue the foundering Greek and Italian economies, both had graduate degrees in economics they had earned at American institutions.

But this vaunted excellence of American education is no longer true--at least, much less so. Over the past few decades American education, from bottom to top, has declined. U.S. elementary and high school students do not measure up, academically, to their age peers in Japan and many other Asian and European countries. In kindergarten through high-school, teachers are often not trained, supervised, or paid adequately and the facilities in which they work are crowded and in poor repair. Moreover, in college and graduate schools many students drop out because of economic pressures. A student who stays in school typically has incurred tens of thousands of dollars in student loans before graduating into the workforce, and consequently spends years or decades in debt--with lifestyle choices and mobility curtailed--paying these loans off.

In addition much education is not well geared to 21st-century needs. Nowadays, every field--including music, art, philosophy, and literature--requires technological know-how: research, writing, and teaching in any field requires considerable computer literacy. And advanced technological skills are often required.

Moreover, manufacturing and services organizations become increasingly efficient and productive as they are upgraded by robotics, computerized data processing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the like. With these changes, workers lose their jobs; they must receive retraining to fit themselves back into the modern workforce.

These are not passing phases; they are trends that surely will become magnified in coming decades.

Therefore: The government should assure, by grants and regulations, that every child has access to high quality education from pre-kindergarten through graduate school. And this should be entirely free--based only on the individual child's desire and abilities, that is, on intellectual ability, and social and emotional skills needed to pursue an education. Moreover, re-education and retraining for advanced workforce placement in an increasingly technological civilization should be an expected and accepted part of living a full, productive life. It should be guaranteed by the government--assured by grants and regulations--although paid for largely by employers as they develop increasingly sophisticated workforce needs. The general principle is this: As a business or industry develops or incorporates technological advances to enhance its functioning, it should be required to fund or provide training for workers to manage that technology. This will not replace every job that is lost, but it will build a sophisticated workforce capable of the skills and mobility necessary in a modern economy. And it will help rebuild the image of social and vocational mobility which is an essential part of the American Dream.

Reducing the undo influence of money and corporate power--Lobbying in Washington is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. No significant legislation in any field arises and develops in the halls of Congress without powerful pressure groups bringing their influence to bear. Whether one is talking about pharmaceuticals, mining, farm prices, medical or information services, space technologies, or any of hundreds of other "special interests," members of Congress are bombarded--even, inundated--with helpful guidance from experts in the field (experts who often include their former colleagues--the lobbying industry is a lucrative retirement club for former members of the House and Senate). It is true that this is where active members of Congress get a lot of their information about matters that are too complex and arcane to be easily understood. But this source of information is deeply biased by the goals and preferences of the private industries it represents--by those who pay its bills.

This advice also comes at a hefty price. The lobbying organizations that bombard Congress with biased expertise, are also heavy contributors to the law-makers' reelection campaigns. For a member of the Senate or House of Representatives, being responsive to the lobbyists' requests is essential to being reelected.

Therefore: The decades of campaign finance reform that were thrown out by the Supreme Court in "Citizens United" in 2010 should be reinstated. And much more needs to be done to regulate the lobbying industry, for example, former members of Congress should be prohibited from lobbying for five years after their departure from Congress; the law should require full disclosure of lobbying expenses and activities; and members of Congress should be prohibited from accepting donations from individuals and groups with whom they interact in the legislative process.

Handling immigration--We are a nation of immigrants. The diversity and vitality of the American way of life has been built up over many decades by welcoming foreigners to our shores and permitting them--or, even more, "encouraging" them--to pitch in and work toward the American Dream for themselves and for all of us.

Therefore: Our immigration laws and policies should encourage foreigners to come to the U.S. and make their homes here. No one who is discovered to be here illegally should be deported unless they have been convicted of a felony; they should be guided on paths to citizenship. And foreign students who come to our colleges and universities should not be forced to leave when they graduate (as they are now). They should automatically get "green cards" (which give them the right to work in the U.S.) and visa extensions; they should get every invitation and facilitation to add their contributions to building the American Dream for themselves and for all of us.

Restoring civil liberties--Warrantless wiretaps, secret renditions, torture of criminal suspects, incarceration of a higher proportion of our citizens than any country in the world (including Russia, China, or Iran)--even holding tens of thousands of prison inmates in solitary confinement (which has been defined as "torture" in may parts of the world) and holding them in solitary confinement for "administrative" reasons, not as punishment, so that they have no right to habeas corpus or the protection from "cruel and unusual punishment" guaranteed under the Constitution. And the routing out of peaceful demonstrators by militaristic tactics including the use of rubber bullets, pepper spray, and shock grenades. Where have our civil liberties gone? How have they been so severely eroded?

This represents a severe, insidious, and progressive erosion of the American Dream, not only as a way of life that is supposed to be available to U.S. citizens, but as a beacon--a symbol, even a template--to show the rest of the world the way: to stand as a golden image of what is possible in the evolution of humanitarian civilization. For how we treat one another and how we serve and protect the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised of our citizenry--and of the foreign-born as well--is an important part of the American Dream.

Therefore: The loss of civil liberties must be scrupulously investigated and courageously reversed in every walk--and in every nook and cranny--of American life.
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Limitations of the Human Brain

2011-10-29T22:16:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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The human brain evolved over the past couple of million years mainly to help our ancestors evade predators and find food and shelter (and, of course, sex mates). The brain's main function and the reason it got so complicated--so good at making certain kinds of observations, storing certain kinds of memories, puzzling out and solving certain kinds of problems--was that doing those particular things well provided a very powerful evolutionary advantage. Human beings have never been the strongest, fastest, or most durable species on the block, but we became the smartest at solving certain kinds of problems.

These are important problems, problems that are key to survival, but they are CERTAIN problems, not just any and all kinds of problems.

As to evolving adaptations to more modern ways, remember that our ancestors have only been herding and farming for a few thousand years--barely a drop in the evolutionary bucket (10,000 years is 1/2 of 1% of 2 million years). Even more recently, our fascination with and "belief" in mathematics and science only goes back a few hundred years (Archimedes, sometimes called the father of mathematics and science, lived less than 2,500 years ago).

It is interesting to realize that all the problems our brains grew up solving involve processing data in a sort of middle range--not too big and not too small, not too fast and not too slow. Our ancestors never had to worry about anything smaller than a grain of sand or larger than a mountain--or events on a time scale smaller than the blink of an eye or greater than a few years. When science and mathematics came along, they developed theories and equations to understand and explain observations in this middle time-space range. Since our brains had been working out problems in this time-space range for a couple of million years, it all made good sense. The science and mathematics developed by Isaac Newton was elegant and clear; in fact, in retrospect it all seemed obvious.

Then over the past one hundred years scientists have noticed that outside of this comfortable, middle time-space range things can get pretty weird. Sometimes things just don't follow Newtonian rules. Atomic-size particles can sometimes be in more than one place at the same time; sometimes they can jump from place to place without passing through the intervening space; sometimes they can communicate with or affect one another instantly even though they are millions and millions of miles apart; perhaps worst of all, sometimes they are created out of nothing and disappear into nothing. The very tiny world of quantum physics seems to have its own rules, very different from the ones our brains grew up dealing with.

There are also weirdnesses on the "up" side, the world of the very large or very fast. If a beam of light is traveling away from you in one direction and another beam is going away from you in the opposite direction, you can't just add their speeds together to find out how fast they are going away from each other. In fact, they are also going away from each other at the same speed that they are each going away from you (the speed of light). Weird. And what about time? Exactly what time it is and how fast time is plodding along depends on how fast you are going; the faster you travel, the more time slows down. This is Einstein's world of "relativity."

The reason that the quantum world and the relativity world seem weird to us is that our brains did not have to deal with them when we were evolving. Our brain computers developed capacities for understanding the world at the Newtonian level, but not at the quantum or relativity levels.

There is another realm our brains simply cannot handle, a realm suggested by the questions, "Where did it all come from?" "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and "What does 'God' mean?" The processes that our brains evolved in solving Newtonian-level problems lead us to stumble upon those questions, but they are not "real" or "answerable" questions in the sense that our brains are not equipped to handle them.

One does not attempt to write a letter on a banana, travel a thousand miles via a wheelchair, or access the Internet using only a pencil. Those are wonderful objects, but they were not designed with those problems in mind and cannot handle them. Similarly, there is no point in trying to get the human brain to "understand" problems or "answer" questions that it was not designed to handle. We can design tools like the microscope and the telescope to translate some very small or very large observations into our middle time-space range. (The "tools" we develop can also be concepts and equations.) But translations are always inaccurate and incomplete. They distort the source to fit our given concepts and perceptual capacities.

Similarly, our languages grew up to fit the middle time-space range. Not everything that is linguistically allowable is true or possible. Yogi Berra became famous for saying things like, "A great batter will beat a great pitcher every time, and vice versa" and "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Statements like these are funny because they are linguistically allowable--in other words, at first blush they make sense--but on closer consideration, they are ridiculous. Noam Chomsky formed the sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" to illustrate that our brains allow grammatical constructions that are clearly meaningless.

The human brain is a marvelous device. It serves us well, but only within the realms it was designed to handle. When we ask it to extend its services beyond those realms, we must do so very carefully. Otherwise we can delude ourselves; in fact, things can get pretty ridiculous.
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Memory in Old Age

2011-10-21T10:39:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Loss of memory abilities in old age seems inevitable, but there is actually a lot we can do about it.

Most of us never learn to use our memories well as we are going through our younger years. There are two reasons: One is that our society, our culture (that is, our friends, family, and colleagues) do not expect it of us. They merely observe--as we do--that our mental abilities are sufficient for the life path we have fallen into.

The other reason we do not learn, in the first few decades of life, to operate our memory skills well is that there is no regular training program built into our education systems. In fact, the whole problem stays pretty well below the radar. One picks up along the way that if it is important to remember something, one needs to try a little harder, go over it a few more times, be patient, be diligent. But one is never taught the importance of developing colorful associations, emotional charge, explicit patterns, and multi-modal links.

These are not vague principles; they are specific techniques.

Some people learn them inadvertently along the way. Generally when one does, it is partial and haphazard. Or, because of a head injury or a particularly memory-intensive life opportunity, one is "forced" to confront them directly.

After learning the techniques, one must practice them over and over again--minute by minute, day after day--until they become habitual and automatic (as habitual and automatic as the partial skills and patterns we learned by chance along the way). Then one can remember a name, a face, a telephone number (or an email address), an appointment, a book title (or a URL) as well at age 95 as one could at 25--perhaps better.

If you want to follow-up on this, get a copy of The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas (available, used, from Amazon.com for $4.50 plus shipping). This is a small book; it was first published in 1976. Although I don't think it does a good job presenting the theory and scientific evidence, it is inspiring with compelling and colorful anecdotes, and it presents good practice exercises--especially chapters 2-5.

Please let me know your thoughts about all this. And if you get a copy of The Memory Book and study it, and practice its techniques, please let me know--a few weeks or a couple of months from now--how that works out for you.
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Solving Problems While Asleep

2011-10-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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I first stumbled on this phenomenon about 25 years ago. Each week on Wednesday my son would bring home from high school a difficult math problem. He and I would work on it together--sometimes for hours. The answer, if we came up with one, would go into school with him Friday morning.

One Wednesday evening, working long into the night, we had one problem reduced to a complicated formula that had only about a dozen possible solutions--each solution took nearly an hour to test. We checked a couple of possible solutions. No dice. We went to bed. When I awoke the next morning, I kind of "knew" which solution to test next, and darned if that solution didn't work.

Ten years later I was trying to figure out an equation to determine how many perfect shuffles it took to return a deck of playing cards (of varying numbers of cards) to its original card order. Several times I lay down in near-sleep to think about the problem, and in this state I could keep the pieces straight and solve the problem, but when I awoke I could not remember the solution. I learned that when my mind was "asleep" and had solved the problem, I had to take careful note of the steps in the solution and of the final form of the equation in order to capture it again when I was fully conscious.

Nowadays I regularly solve math or other problems in this semi-sleep state. I get the parts of the puzzle straight in my mind, I lie down in bed, and I find I can generally sort my way into the puzzle and out the other end with the solution. Sometimes I drift in this semi-sleep state for a couple of hours. While I drift, I keep coming back, again and again, to the start of the problem, and--again and again--I mentally walk into it, carefully keeping all the pieces as straight as I can.

I believe this mental state is close to meditation, although when I meditate, I try to clear and calm my mind--I repeat a mantra, or focus on my breathing, or calmly put to rest the tensions that have built up since the last time I meditated. And when I meditate, I sit--back supported, head not supported--in a dark and quiet place. Each distraction that comes up, internal or external, I notice, accept, enjoy, and set aside.

On the other hand, to access this problem-solving state, I lie in bed, the room is dark and quiet, my head is on a pillow--everything is set to take a nap--and sometimes I do take a nap, but whether I fall asleep or not, the solution is generally in the front of my mind when I awake.

In recent years numerous scientific studies have validated these phenomena that I have observed.

I have also come to understand, through these experiences, how dreams are formed. I lie down to go to sleep. I sort through the memories of the day, or choose a fantasy to develop. And then I put myself into the scene again and again, varying the action and the outcome. The "dream," when I awake, is the result of exploring and testing dozens of different, minor changes in the fantasy, gradually settling on one that is the most satisfying.
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World's Financial Woes Made Simple

2011-09-18T17:05:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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I heard an economist from China speaking on TV recently. It was remarkable to hear her talk: she made simple sense in a few sentences of the overwhelmingly complex topics she addressed.

(I say "an economist from China" but, although in a position of high authority in China, she was surely the product of a leading American university graduate school, not only because she spoke American English fluently but also because the U.S. still has international hegemony in business and economics post-graduate education. Anyone who speaks on such matters with clarity and authority anywhere in the world probably has U.S.-graduate-school credentials.)

As she took on each topic, she stripped it to the core. When she spoke of the U.S.'s financial woes, for example, she said there were three parts: the large national debt, the annual budget deficits, and unemployment. As to Europe's difficulties, she identified two key factors: the sovereign debt crises, and the lack of confidence in the Eurozone's political stability. On China, she named the population problem presented by the rural poor and the need to expand consumerism of a middle class.

When I first heard her speak, I thought, "My gosh, what clarity! What analytic acumen--coupled with such a heroic willingness to be simple and direct." I wanted to hear her again--to use her simple and direct analyses to focus my understanding. But as I got to thinking about her presentation, I realized that she had left out, glossed over, or generalized a lot of important factors.

In discussing the U.S., for example, she did not mention--much less work into the puzzle--the paralyzing political gridlock and the parts that new IT, media revolutions, and large, unregulated political donations make to that. Nor did she mention our crumbling and archaic infrastructure, the burgeoning green awareness of our dirty energy and patchy environmental protections, nor our Rube-Goldberg tax structure, and our upper-class-versus-others income and wealth disparity.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the simplicity or her analysis was, in fact, a fault, not a virtue. It is the kind of simplistic thinking that the media--and politicians--put forth, and that distorts and biases public understanding of important issues.

It behooves us all, if we do not understand an issue or do not have time to address it fully, to allude to its complexities and take a humble "pass" on espousing vehement opinions about it.
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World's Biggest Employers

2011-09-10T19:23:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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The Economist magazine, Sept. 10-16, 2011, reported a survey by the IMF (International Monetary Fund): Who are the world's biggest employers?
#1. U.S. Department of Defense (3.2 million employees)
#2. Chinese Army (2.3 million)
#3. Walmart (2.1 million)
#4. McDonald's (1.7 million)
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For reference purposes:
There are 15 states in the U.S. that have less than 2.0 million population.
There are 45 countries in the U.N. that have less than 2.0 million population.
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Taxaholics in Washington

2011-09-05T11:42:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Warren Buffett paid over seven million dollars in income taxes last year; I paid zero.

In fact, the wealthiest 2% of Americans pay nearly 50% of the income taxes the federal government receives (and income taxes are the largest source of money the government runs on); 40% of the U.S. population pays no income taxes.

Does that seem fair? What on earth can those taxaholics in Washington be thinking of to want rich folks to pay an even greater part of the costs of running the government?

Let's look at this from another direction:
The average American household had--after taxes--about $100 per day to live on last year.
The wealthiest 2% had, on average--after taxes--about $1,000 per day.
Warren Buffett kept--after taxes--about $100,000 a day.

Get the picture?
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Is Unemployment Cyclical or Structural?

2011-09-05T01:13:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Business cycles come and go. This was called "irrational exuberance" by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank back in the days (or, rather, "the decades") when his ponderous, pedantic pronouncements were considered straight from Mt. Sinai--that was back before the Great Recession--before the collapse of housing markets and their equity derivatives and . . . and . . . pretty nearly the entire global financial system--before Alan Greenspan resigned and returned to the spotlight briefly to repudiate and apologize for a lifetime of flawed thinking.

"Business cycles come and go," the argument went. Whether it is bundling real estate for homes or commercial buildings; inventing electronic gadgetry for communications, factories, and space enterprises; funding high-speed mass-transit systems; developing off-shore tax dodges; out-sourcing clothing manufacturing, toxic recycling, and tech-support to the deprived masses of third-world countries; or any other business fad, a hands-off approach ("deregulation") was to be recommended. "Boys will be boys." If this or that corner of Wall Street makes obscene profits for a few years, never mind--the natural, healthy forces of a robust entrepreneurial capitalism will, pretty soon now, set things aright.

But that was back in "the good old days" when business and finance functioned in "the good old ways." When Darwinian "survival of the fittest" brought the best-managed and most attractive business ideas bubbling to the top; when investors studied the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of an industry; when it was government's job largely to stay out of the way.

Things have changed. Nowadays we have tens of millions of people out of work, and--thanks to automation, new technological demands, and new international market forces--many of their jobs are not coming back.

For sure, there are still cyclical elements--irrational exuberance--in the comings and goings of business ups and downs, but there are increasingly structural elements, too. There are traditional infrastructural needs--roads and bridges and tunnels to be repaired and maintained; pipelines and wires to be patched and mended; schools, hospitals, and fire houses to be fitted and retrofitted. But there are increasingly high-speed rail and mass transit systems to be constructed; fiber-optic cables and microwave towers to be installed; green energy sources and smart energy transmission grids to be designed and maintained. And these require different kinds or training and higher levels of skills. Millions--tens of millions--of the jobs that have been lost are not coming back. They have gone overseas or simply disappeared into the woodwork of the past.

Do not be deceived that the current recession is cyclical like the many that have preceded it. There are important structural changes afoot, and the government needs to fortify education (and retraining) and social safety nets (for the displaced, unemployed, infirm, and elderly), and government needs to keep a closer eye on the exuberances of Wall Street than it did in the past--in the days of Alan Greenspan--or the American Dream will fade into obsolescence.
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Big-City Green

2011-08-26T00:19:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Greenifying ones domain is commonly thought of as the purlieu of well-healed suburbanites, but there are plenty of things that big cities and big-building owners can do too. The list at the bottom of this essay comes (modified) from Scientific American, August 25, 2011.

However, there are two remarkable possibilities that are not mentioned in the SciAm article: wind-generated electricity and rain catchment.

Imagine, if you will, a large city with a forest of windmills soaring above the parks and gardens of its high rooftops. The windmills would be silent, turning slowly; they would not interfere with bird migrations or helicopter surveillance or transportation. The electricity they generated would be used by the building that hosted them with the excess fed into the municipal power grid.

Windmills have significant advantages over solar panels: they are far less ecologically costly to produce and--in stark contrast to the few-years life expectancy of solar panels--they laugh at the passage of decades. A newly installed windmill can confidently be expected--with little or no maintenance--to be functioning efficiently 25 to 50 years later.

In addition, the rain that falls on the vast roof-top acreage of a big city is now channeled through run-off gutters and conduits into sewers for waste-water processing. It has two valuable attributes that are thus lost. First, rainwater (in contrast to ground water or well water) has no mineral contamination--no arsenic, lead, copper, manganese, sulfur, etc. Purifying it, even to the level of drinking and cooking purity, is cheap and simple--it involves course filtration (to remove leaves and debris) and minimal anti-bacterial and anti-viral oxidation (for example with ozone or ultra-violet light). Such purification can readily be done in small, roof-top appliances.

Second, when water lands on a roof, it has positional energy; in other words, it is high up. Most simply stated, it does not need to be pumped around for processing or delivery--properly channeled, it runs downhill to wherever it is wanted or needed. This can provide a significant energy savings.

+++++++

There are other ideas around for greenifying big cities and big buildings. The following list, reorganized and summarized, is from the Scientific American article.

Green and White Roofs

Rooftop vegetation insulates buildings against heat and cold and absorbs storm water that might otherwise pollute waterways. Many cities are pursuing these roofs, and friendly competitions for the most square feet of green roofing have arisen among Chicago; New York; Washington, D.C.; and others. Enclosed rooftop farms above restaurants, schools, hospitals, or other institutions that serve many meals might be a coming urban trend.

Designs exist for entire high-rise, indoor, vertical farms. Growing food indoors can reduce fertilizer and freshwater use, shorten transportation routes for delivery, and recycle gray water otherwise dumped for processing by city water-treatment plants.

Rooftops painted white reflect heat, lowering a building's cooling cost and a city's heat buildup. U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu emphasized this technique in a speech he gave in 2009. He extolled white roofs as an inexpensive move that can be done quickly and provide immediate payoff.

Urban Solar Electricity and Hot Water

Extensive solar panels can generate electricity in lieu of power plants doing so, and also shade rooftops to lower a building's cooling needs. Together, the cities of Ontario and Redlands in California, working with the Southern California Edison utility, have erected seven "neighborhood power stations" on large industrial rooftops, totaling 306,500 square meters (more than 75 acres).

Photovoltaic sheets on south-facing building facades can generate significant electricity. One notable demonstration of this is in Berlin. Thin films typically are less efficient than solar panels, but they can be cheaper to make (per unit area) and are flexible, leading to novel architectural designs.

Water-filled tubes connected to tanks on roofs can be heated by the sun to provide domestic hot water instead of using gas or electric furnaces. All new buildings in the fast-growing city of Rizhao, China have rooftop systems that provide hot water for bathing. The systems cost around $200. In the U.S., hot water accounts for 17 percent of energy used by homes.

High-Rise Construction and Reconstruction

Super-insulated windows quadruple the thermal performance of double panes and can be made from the glass in existing windows. Serious Energy reused the glass in all 6,514 windows in the Empire State Building, New York City to make super-insulated windows that are four times more energy efficient. The retrofit took seven months and will be paid for in energy-cost savings in less than ten years.

Construction material made locally with carbon dioxide that is pumped out by city power plants could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Calera Corp. is bubbling the gas from a power plant in Moss Landing, California through nearby seawater to make cement. The process also eliminates the roughly one ton of emissions that would normally be created in making a ton of cement the conventional way.

Urban Transportation

Commuter trains, subways, and even many primary roads in Portland, Oregon are located underground in massive tunnels, freeing the surface for easy, clean bike and pedestrian traffic. Many cities have miles of subterranean transportation but Portland is diverting such traffic as part of an integrated overall plan to encourage more walking and biking, and to provide for the redesign of public spaces.

Large portions of taxi fleets converted to hybrid vehicles reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in San Francisco and New York City. After New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had encouraged fleets to purchase hybrids (and many did), his administration tried to penalize owners who didn't switch, but courts struck down the policy. Nevertheless, about one third (4,300) of the city's yellow cabs are now hybrids.

Charging drivers higher rates to drive in congested neighborhoods (so called "congestion pricing") eases traffic. By the end of a six-month trial in Stockholm, traffic had dropped by 25 percent, emissions had decreased 14 percent, and 40,000 more people daily were taking public transit; moreover, buses were reaching their stops more quickly. The Stockholm Congestion Charging System is now permanently in place. Singapore has initiated similar efforts.

Subterranean garages near commuter destinations eliminate the need for cars to surface. Many cities have had enough foresight to build at least some underground parking but Paris stands out. Drivers are encouraged to use the lots with fees that are typically lower than for above-ground spots, and the lower levels are monitored by security cameras, so they are considered safer than city streets.

Ample bike lanes and bike racks encourage more people to ride instead of drive; they also promote health. These straightforward steps can make a huge difference. Despite its long, cold winters, Minneapolis has been ranked as the best cycling city in the country by Bicycling magazine, largely because such measures have encouraged many riders, even when the mercury dips low.

Wave and Tide Power

In Orkney, Scotland hinged cylinders anchored in the seafloor are pushed by waves, turning onshore turbines that create electricity. In New York City licensure is pending for installation of 30 turbines on the bottom of the East River along Manhattan. These could generate one megawatt of power (enough to satisfy the power needs of 200 to 250 homes).

Three-Bin Recycling

Requiring businesses and homes to separate refuse spares landfills. San Franciscans use three garbage bins: recyclables (papers, bottles, cans, and plastics), compost (food scraps, soiled paper), and trash (the rest). The city charges residents for collection based on the volume in the trash bin, not the others, which encourages compliance.

Satellite Irrigation

Satellite control of park and lawn irrigation systems cuts water consumption and pumping power. Municipalities such as Los Angeles subscribe to a service provided by companies (such as HydroPoint Data Systems) which forecast weather and soil moisture for each area and turn portions of the irrigation systems on or off accordingly, greatly reducing wasted watering and lowering water bills.

Low-Flow Appliances

In San Francisco; New York City; and Austin, Texas, water-saving toilets and showerheads installed in new and existing buildings save millions of gallons annually. Austin began a retrofit program years ago that has left most of the city with low-flow devices, reducing water usage by 19 million liters (5 million gallons) a day and wastewater flows by 680,000 liters (180,000 gallons) daily.
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Negative Interest Rates

2011-08-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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A couple of weeks ago an astonishing thing happened: the largest bank interest rates fell below zero. This is equivalent to depositors saying, "Please, please take my money--no interest payments needed. Oh, that's not good enough? OK, I'll pay you to take my money."

On August 4, 2011 the Bank of New York Mellon, the world's largest custodial bank, announced that they would charge 13 bps on deposits more than 110% of a client's monthly average (bps stands for "basis points"; each one bps equals 0.01% interest). That day the rate on short-term U.S. Treasury bills fell below zero percent.

As N. Gregory Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard, pointed out, "The problem with negative interest rates, however, is quickly apparent: nobody would lend on those terms. Rather than giving your money to a borrower who promises a negative return, it would be better to stick the cash in your mattress. Because holding money promises a return of exactly zero, lenders cannot offer less."

"Nobody would lend on those terms" unless one (or both) of two considerations prevail: First, no other investment looks safe. Even mattresses can burn up in a fire, and there is a financial "fire" burning in the Eurozone these days with Greece, Spain, Ireland, and now even Italy looking like they may not be able to pay their bills, that is, the governments may not make good on their bond debts. And a lot of big banks are holding those bonds. Some of the world's safest investments look shaky.

Second, inflation can eat away at your winnings. If you are pretty sure that $100 stuck away in a mattress today will only have $97 buying power a year from now, you might be willing to store that money someplace else where it would be sure to have $99 in buying power in a year.

Lending of money for (positive) interest has long been frowned on by major religions. Christians called it "usury." "Riba" is the word in Arabic, and "ribbit" in Hebrew. Philosophers dating back to Plato and Buddha opined against it.

But bankers and wealthy investors are a clever lot. They have always found ways to get around restrictions imposed by religious or legal authorities. In the Middle Ages Hebrew scholars decided that although, by Talmudic Law, Jews could not charge interest payments to other Jews, they could morally lend money to non-Jews for interest. And in the wake of the Great Recession, the Dodd-Frank Act of July, 2010 set up a panorama of consumer protection, banking, and Wall Street reforms, but it did not establish any federally mandated interest rate maximum--though many people thought it should.

We live in strange times--not just technologically, ecologically, and politically, which are obvious, but in terms of macroeconomics as well.
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Recession Bottoms

2011-08-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Yogi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

But Lord knows lots of people try hard to make predictions about the economy in general and the markets in particular (like stock or commodity markets, real estate markets, import and export markets, etc.). There's a lot of money in it.

There are two general approaches to making such predictions. One is called "fundamental analysis"; the other is called "technical analysis."

Fundamental analysis depends on looking hard into the factors that cause the changes--unemployment, consumer confidence, the money supply, the credentials and track records of the people making key decisions, etc. This seems like a good approach. The trouble is that there are always a lot of factors and no one knows for sure which ones have the greatest weight. There are always enough reasons to explain anything. If the stock market goes up, fundamental analysts say that was because of reason A and reason B; if it goes down, that was because of reasons C and D; if it stays the same, or goes up and then down, or down and then up . . . there are always good reasons to fit the result.

Technical analysts say, never mind the reasons--there are always plenty of good reasons to go around--just look at the pattern of changes. They point out that certain patterns in the fluctuations of prices occur again and again--in different markets, for different reasons, but similar patterns. So they draw graphs ("charts") of prices vs. time, and talk about patterns like "head-and-shoulders," "flags," "support and resistance levels," and so on.

Fundamental analysis gets a lot of respect--after all, it makes so much sense, and the reasons it puts forward seem correct (in retrospect). Technical analysis, on the other hand, is too esoteric and complicated; it depends on studying and recognizing patterns that most people have no idea about. It doesn't make simple sense like fundamental analysis.

Perhaps that is why one hears a lot of "fundamental" reasons these days for the stock market's gyrations and the ups and downs of economic indicators, but one doesn't hear much that--"Say, folks, this is what a technical bottom looks like: lots of violent gyrations, no clear direction; these markets are just 'building a bottom.' The future is up."

Of course technical analysis is not always right. But there are some things that it is surer about than others. And this is one that looks very strong and clear. This turmoil we're seeing right now is to be expected as the recession bottoms.
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Singularity at the Gates

2011-08-18T13:12:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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There is a powerful concept that comes out of theoretical nuclear and astronomical physics; it is soul-wracking when one really looks at it closely. That is the concept of "singularity." In the depths of giant stars where gravity has sucked inward into itself so powerfully that nothing, not even light, can escape, all the laws of physics no longer apply. Time and space have no meaning; everything we understand--reason itself--has no meaning. This state is called a "black hole" or "singularity."

In all of nature from the smallest sub-atomic particles to the largest clusters of galaxies there are four fundamental forces: the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. Science has long chased the notion--theoretically and experimentally--of a "fifth force," but none has been found.

But in the depths of a black hole these forces are crushed together so inexorably that they cease to exist as separate entities. The irreducible components of matter--molecules; which are made up of atoms; which are made up of protons, electrons, neutrons, and their ilk; which are made up of quarks; which may even be made up of smaller tidbits called strings--all of these are crushed inward so formidably that they, also, cease to exist.

A singularity is truly a place--or a state--where neither mathematics nor even imagination can penetrate.

In recent decades this mind-numbing concept of "singularity" has been extended into the daily world, the world of newspapers and history books. There is what has been called a "technological singularity." The modern world is developing so rapidly and changing so dramatically from year to year, that even the most imaginative science fiction writer cannot pretend to see into the mist a few years ahead. It has been said that a science fiction writer, in order to paint a picture of what civilization might look like and what humanity might be up to a few decades from now, must postulate a historical discontinuity--that is, must insert a nuclear war or some other catastrophic Armageddon into the narrative--in order to set the world back enough to examine it. Otherwise it is simply unknowable, unimaginable.

Consider, for example, how much the world of computers ("information technology" or "IT") has changed our daily lives in the past couple of decades. From cell phones and social media, from automatic bank teller machines to billion-dollar financial transaction that flit around the globe in fractions of a second, from hundreds of TV channels and millions of Website that can spring before our eyes with a few flicks of a switch--we simply do not live in the same world we lived in twenty years ago.

There are computers now that can beat the world's best chess players, analyze data better than the world's best scientists, and provide information and entertainment far more facilely than the books, movies, and live performances that preceded them. In addition to this explosion in IT, the burgeoning worlds of nanotechnology, of synthetic biology, and of meta-materials all promise (or threaten) to make dramatic changes in the ways we live our lives.

Throughout history the unknown catastrophe has loomed, potentially, not far ahead. Sometimes when there were foreign armies besieging the city gates or a drought or plague was upon us, the terror of the future seemed to have a form, a direction, a known outcome, however terrible. Even in the good times, the memory of pain and deprivation and the expectation of disease and death were not far away.

But there has never been a time when--by the wizardry of our own minds and hands--a dark and unknown future loomed up just a few years ahead.

There is a singularity at the gates--a technological singularity--and we do not have the faintest idea what it will bring.

+++++++++

Note: Purists may ask, "What about Hawking radiation?" My answer: Hawking radiation is tweeny; it reduces the blackness of a black hole by less than 0.000001%. Call me careless, but any time I write something that is less than 0.000001% wrong, I am satisfied with it.
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New Old Age

2011-08-17T22:15:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Over the past century the life expectancy for middle-class Americans has gone up by about 30 years.

We are the first generation in the history of humanity that, with average luck and self-care, has a good chance of living to be 90.

Of course, just like the genetic lottery that gave us good biological equipment and the lottery of history that put us down in this time and place, the daily lotteries of circumstance are always circling overhead.

Each day Death casts its dice--and all must play,
Though those in health and youthful vigor may
Not feel the chill or hear the distant cry
Of who may live today--and who must die.

But as we round 60, with honest self-contemplation, we suspect--
we will probably never have a more intense relationship than we have had
we will probably never feel more pain, physically or emotionally, than we have felt
we will probably never be smarter, richer, or more influential than we have been
we will probably never be stronger, more robust, or more durable than we have been
we will probably never climb a higher mountain, see a richer sunset, taste a better wine,
hear a more poignant melody, see a more touching drama....

Is this to be a time of depression and despair? Or a time of calmness and relief?

We have been given no road-map to navigate this land. It is a new land; humanity has never had this in its temporal landscape before.

We do know that maintaining a careful diet is no longer optional. Oh, remember those joyous days when nothing was too sweet or salty, too heavy with calories or cholesterol to keep us from giving it a try!

The same is true of exercise. We learn that our bodies do not serve us well if we do not stretch and tire them out a bit faithfully, day by day.

And relationships? They are important, too. But we come to realize that death is always and only a private experience--a solo flight; no one can truly share it with us.

Eric Erikson called the stage of psychosocial development of the grandparent years "generativity"--a time to give back; a time to establish and guide the next generation.

Most compellingly, it is a "new" time. Let us think about it and begin to chart it wisely for the generations who come after us.
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Who Is a "Person"?--The Science, Law, and Prejudice of Personhood

2011-08-14T14:20:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Back in 1776, the United States' Founding Fathers didn't like the way things were going with England (mostly tax-wise). So they went to a lot of trouble to do something about it.

It was a dangerous game. They knew if they didn't stick together and the British cops got them, they would lose everything (as Benjamin Franklin said, "We must hang together, gentlemen...else, we shall most assuredly hang separately").

Their efforts seemed pretty ridiculous to most of the world--which meant to the British world: "Britannia rules the waves," "the sun never sets on the British Empire," and all that. How on earth did a few upstart woodsmen in a savage province think they could get away with thumbing their noses at one of the world's super powers? As Kenneth Roberts said, they were seen as "rabble in arms."

The "upstarts" wanted to give their rebellion stature in the eyes of the world--that is, of the scholarly and politically powerful world. So they set about answering the questions, "Who are we?" "What are we up to?" and "Why are we doing this?" in as resounding and philosophically compelling way as they could. Their educations were classical--from Socrates to Locke. So there, philosophically, is where they started.

Out of that humus and hubris came Thomas Jefferson's famous words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." That, in a sense, is a carefully thought-out definition of "personhood." Jefferson was trying to answer the question, "When you strip it all down, what does it really take to be a full member of civilized humanity, and what do you get for that membership?"

First, the "who" was "men," by which he meant wealthy, adult, white, Christian men--certainly not women or children, certainly not blacks or Native Americans. And certainly not apes--even smart apes--or crows or whales or elephants just because they may know hundreds of words, make and use tools, call each other by personal names, organize social events, act altruistically, mourn their dead, and so on.

Second, as to what they get, they are "created equal," that is, they start out their sojourns in life on--somehow--an equal footing. And WHAT is it that is "equal"? Clearly not their abilities, their inheritances, or their potentials. No, only their "rights" are equal. And a pretty constricted set of rights at that: "life" (don't kill them--without a good reason), "liberty" (don't lock them up--without a good reason), and "pursuit of happiness" (let them do as they choose--as long as they don't interfere with any more powerful person's "pursuit").

In the 21st century there have been some broadened concepts of "personhood." For example, in addition to questions of human rights and animal rights, the Supreme Court recently ruled in a case called "Citizens United" that corporations have the Constitutional right to free speech which, through strange legal metamorphosis, becomes the right to secretly use massive amounts of money to influence elections. Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential hopeful, recently said, in response to a question about taxation of businesses, "Corporations are people."

And what "rights" are on the horizon for computers that are smarter than human beings--that can beat the best human chess players, find oil and ore deposits more efficiently, solve medical and engineering problems more effectively, and out-remember and out-calculate any human brain?

In our modern world we have made the concepts of personhood very complex, and they promise to get muddier still.
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The Truth about the Debt-Ceiling Compromise

2011-08-09T18:24:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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In accordance with legislation just enacted, a powerful Super-Congressional Committee will be formed. They will either agree on enormous budget cuts by the end of the year--budget cuts that the Congress must then vote either up or down (not modify or filibuster). And if the Committee and Congress do not succeed in installing such cuts, then draconian reductions to the military (reductions which the Republicans staunchly oppose) and to Medicare (which Democrats staunchly oppose) will AUTOMATICALLY be enacted.

Sounds fierce and fair, right? Austere and inevitable?

In what world? That must be the world ruled by the Tooth Fairy and Santa Clause where all good Boy Scouts go to heaven. It sure isn't this world.

Congress has so many ways to modify, circumvent, delay, revise, ameliorate, or rescind any proposal of the Super-Congressional Committee--whether enacted or not, whether the draconian penalty is triggered or not--that the Compromise is, in fact, written in fairy dust on a cloudy sky.

And if you think that a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution (due for debate this fall) would be effective, consider that the federal budget is another study in fairy dust. Recall that Bush never put trillions of dollars of expenses for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into the budget--they were extra add-ons. And that in this age of enormous natural disasters, from hurricanes and tornadoes to heat waves and dust bowls, federal expenditures for these can be extended by hundreds of billions of dollars quite outside of budgetary constraints.

The debt-ceiling "crisis" was artificial. The U.S. and Denmark are the only two advanced countries that even have debt ceilings at all. The "crisis" was concocted by hyper-political Republican obstructionists in an effort to emasculate and discredit President Obama. But it got away from senior Republicans and was transformed by Tea-Party terrorists willing to hold the good faith and credit of the country hostage to get their misguided demands met.

There will be some high-level debt and deficit shenanigans in Washington over the next fifteen months. Even if the Republicans succeed in passing legislation to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy past the end of this year, President Obama will veto such legislation; that alone will produce $3.5 trillion in added federal revenue over the next ten years. A balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution may pass Congress and be sent to the states later this year; how much teeth that would have depends on the definition of "budget" written into the amendment, and Congress (politically cowardly as it is) is unlikely to write a strong definition.

But the real story about the U.S. long-term debt-deficit problems will be told at the presidential election in 2012. And the results of that election depend on three factors:

(1) The health of the U.S. economy; if the Republicans succeed in crippling the U.S. economy, President Obama will have an uphill battle to stay in the White House for another four years.

(2) The rapidly evolving use of information technology (IT) such as Twitter and YouTube. Twitter and the other social media are often wrong, often misinformed, often more histrionic entertainment than thoughtful wisdom, but they are powerful factors affecting the stormy flow of public opinion. The question is which of the political parties will be more adept at staying up to the minute in IT developments and in manipulating public opinion through them.

(3) Big bucks from secret corporate and private campaign donors--the result of the Supreme Court's decision in "Citizens United" which threw out decades of campaign finance reform. The question here is which of the political parties can summon more multi-million-dollar donations into their coffers.

Assuming the best--that the Republicans succeed in shooting themselves in the foot and President Obama is returned for a second term in office with strong Democratic support in both houses of Congress, we can expect the regenerated president--one of the most brilliant and charismatic men ever to hold the office--to come roaring out of the gates for his second term a new-made man. He will be armed with his original brilliance, humanitarian philosophy, and charisma, but now fortified with four years of horrendously difficult experience on the job. We can expect significant tax reform, entitlement reform, infrastructure refurbishing, and environment protection, and--most significantly--an education revolution, pre-school through graduate school, which can lead to a formidable partnership with China, India, Europe, Africa, and South America for a 21st century global civilization that is higher technologically and philosophically than the world has ever known.

Or . . . maybe not. There are a lot of places this idyllic resolution can go off the tracks.
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American Middle-Class Dream

2011-08-07T05:46:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Michael Moore paints a poignant picture "of a time [only a couple of decades ago] when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and college in states like California and New York was almost free). Anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. People only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off, and had a paid vacation every summer. Many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how 'lowly' your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance, and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated."

When you live in a dream like that, you take it for granted--you think it is "natural." Even though history tells us people didn't always live that way and the daily news shows us that many people don't. You would be tempted to say "still don't"--adding the "still" to convey that this is clearly the way of the future. Having found it, we are surely not going to let it get away from us.

But it has gotten away from us. Why? Where did it go? Can we ever get it back?

The American middle-class dream was a product of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" fortified by the enormous burst of economic productivity occasioned by World War II.

To quote from Wikipedia: "The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call the '3 Rs': Relief, Recovery, and Reform. That is, Relief for the unemployed and poor; Recovery of the economy to normal levels; and Reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression...."

"Historians distinguish a 'First New Deal' (1933) and a 'Second New Deal' (1934–36).... The 'First New Deal' (1933) dealt with diverse groups, from banking and railroads to industry and farming, all of which demanded help for economic recovery. The 'Second New Deal' in 1934-36 included the Wagner Act to promote labor unions, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief program, the Social Security Act, and new programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers. The final major items of New Deal legislation were the creation of the United States Housing Authority and Farm Security Administration, both in 1937, then the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set maximum hours and minimum wages for most categories of workers, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938."

The New Deal was the source of the American middle-class dream. It was strengthened by the surge of industrial activity of the Second World War, and then after the end of the war by the G.I. Bill which provided college or vocational education for returning World War II veterans as well as one year of unemployment compensation. The G.I. Bill also provided loans for returning veterans to start businesses and to buy homes with low-interest, zero-down-payment home loans. This enabled millions of American families to move out of urban apartments and into suburban homes. Prior to the war the suburbs tended to be the homes of the wealthy.

These were the sources of the American middle-class dream. Where did it go?

For the past few decades, a distorted income tax system (described by one commentator as "14,000 pages of institutionalized corruption") coupled with heavy money influences through campaign donations and Washington lobbying have led to gross distortions of income and wealth distribution in the U.S. The wealthiest few percent of the U.S. population now own the vast majority of the wealth of the country; the CEOs of large corporations make hundreds of times the income of lowly "line workers" in their industries yet, as Warren Buffet has pointed out, pay much lower percentage taxes on their incomes than "ordinary" people.

Meanwhile the surging advances of information technology and the ecological demands for green energy have made a lot of 20th-century jobs obsolete. Losing ones job these days commonly means retraining for a different, more modern one.

Health-care costs have also contributed to the demise of the American middle-class dream. These costs have escalated because of the socio-cultural myth that everyone "deserves" million-dollar health care with the use of the latest expensive tests. And the use of these tests has multiplied through "defensive" medical practices as doctors try to assure they will not stumble into exorbitant "malpractice" liabilities; as a result doctors pay tens-of-thousands of dollars a year in malpractice insurance to avoid predatory lawsuits, costs which are, of course, passed on to their patients. The pharmaceutical industry and health-insurance companies have also contributed to exploding health-care costs.

The American Dream was built out of response to the Great Depression. But we have forgotten the lessons of history. The American Dream has been attacked and eroded in recent decades. In truth, as a result, it may be dead. We shall see.
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My Punditry Merit Badge

2011-08-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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So, President Obama didn't invoke the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis. Does that mean I don't get my Boy Scout Merit Badge in Punditry?

I'm not sure. I hate to be a sore loser (in fact, I hate to be any kind of a loser), but we'll have to wait and see if the Debt Commission turns out to be a good idea. It might be--or it might be a political and legislative disaster.

I still think (as I explained) Obama would have had a clear checkmate with the 14th-Amendment thing--let the Congress founder in vitriolic paralysis, and then ride in on his white horse to save the day. But maybe using the impending disaster to force some sort of bipartisan compromise my have been a good strategy, too. We'll see (toward the end of 2011).

We'll also see if the Federal Reserve still has enough ammunition in its quiver to stimulate the economy back into recovery mode despite Congress' budget cuts. The stock market doesn't seem to think so.

And then there is the how-vast-is the-ocean factor. Maybe the U.S. economy is just so damn big and has so much momentum on its own that it really doesn't matter what the federal government does. In addition, the economies of the rest of the world are so skittish these days (especially the Eurozone, Japan, and the Arab-Spring-lands), that the Big-Bully U.S economy, awful as it is, may just shine by comparison.

At any rate, we currently have the most politically sick Congress in U.S. history plus multiple impending catastrophic challenges (environment, war, civil liberties, infrastructure, education, worldwide drought-floods-famine, population explosion, water-table depletion, mineral resources exhaustion, and on and on and on). These make this an exciting time to have a front-row seat (which the Internet and TV provide).
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Resolving the U.S. Debt and Deficit Difficulties

2011-07-29T06:59:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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While waiting to earn my Boy Scout Merit Badge in Punditry (when, at the last minute, President Obama eloquently declares that the Congress is intransigent and he is "forced" to invoke the 14th Amendment to abolish the debt ceiling and save the nation), I have been contemplating just what steps the government should take to balance the federal budget and reduce the nation's debt.

The first few of these are short-term stimulus measures to reinvigorate the nation's recovery from the Great Recession. For example, the current payroll tax relief which is due to expire at the end of this year should be extended at least one year if not two. Programs to support state governments should be robustly fortified so that states do not lay off tens of thousands of workers--people such as teachers, police, and fire fighters as well as those in less politically hot-button clerical and administrative jobs. Programs are also important which invest in clean energy (solar, wind, and geothermal) and 21st century infrastructure (high-speed rail and mass transit rather than one-passenger superhighways, fiber-optics rather than wires, and a "smart grid" to distribute energy efficiently).

While these may seem like expensive government programs, they would, in fact, strengthen the economy which is the best source of deficit and debt reduction in the long run.

The feds should abandon the imaginary "War on Drugs" ("Prohibition" didn't work either) and release the 80% of the prison population who did not commit violent crimes--release them to programs for rehabilitation, job training, and social reintegration. (Note that the U.S. incarcerates a far greater percentage of its citizens than any other country in the world--ANY! including China, Russia, and Iran.) Along these lines, the U.S. should outlaw solitary confinement which is currently used for tens of thousands of prison inmates; solitary confinement has been ruled internationally a form of "torture" but it is invoked as an "administrative measure" so it is not unconstitutional as "cruel and unusual punishment." In addition to being barbaric, with regard to the topic of this essay, solitary confinement costs the government $40,000 to $50,000 a year per inmate, so eliminating it would save several billion dollars per year.

For savings that are more long-term, the government should reduce military expenditures by 50% ($350 billion a year) over ten years. This includes closing bases in such places as Germany, South Korea, and the Philippines where we haven't been fighting wars for years.

The Income Tax laws (14,000 pages of "institutionalized corruption") should be revised and simplified, eliminating special favors for tax havens and subsidies for ethanol, farm products, oil, etc. The Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy should be eliminated. A Value-Added Tax should be enacted; almost every advanced, post-industrial country other than the U.S. has a VAT.

The FIFA contribution income maximum should be raised from $109K to $180K.

The U.S. should establish universal medical care with competitive generic drug use, limited malpractice liability, and salaried (not fee-for-service) pay. The Social Security retirement age should be raised to 70--gradually, over 15 years; the population has aged considerably more than that years since the Soc Sec retirement age was installed.

The federal government should reinstall campaign-finance reform (thrown out last year by the Supreme Court in the "Citizens United" case). And it should strengthen lobbying supervision and reduce conflicts of interest. This would reduce wasteful pork-barrel spending.

In addition, the federal government should develop meaningful regulation of Wall Street (for example, regulating derivatives, eliminating obscene pay, and tying incentives to long-term performance--they're working on this, the so-called Dodd-Frank legislation, but it is not going well).

Finally, the federal government should divest itself of much of the U.S. land area that it owns (in some states the U.S. government owns MORE THAN HALF of the land area of the state), thereby recovering both equity and tax revenues. This is a complicated problem with many facets--commercial, environmental, political, etc. But it is worth a long, hard look.
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Luck--#3

2011-07-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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To review briefly, I have talked about the observations in astrophysics that the Universe is fine-tuned for human existence, and the ideas, called the Anthropic Principles, (1) that some creative force must have seen humans and their needs coming many billions of years before there were any humans around (that's called the STRONG Anthropic Principle) or (2) that there are many, many kinds of universes around and that the one we see is, of course, the one that would be just right to create us to see it (that's the WEAK Anthropic Principle).

And I have talked about the observations in quantum physics that consciousness is king over the physical world; that light, for example (or any other member of the sub-atomic world) can be either a wave or a particle depending on how it is observed. If a beam of light is studied as if it were an energy wave, it is found to have frequency and amplitude, to undergo diffraction and interference--attributes which it cannot possibly have as a particle. On the other hand, if it is studied as a particle, it is found to have discrete (quantum) values for such attributes as charge, spin, or mass--attributes which it cannot have as a wave. (It is a common misunderstanding when someone hears that light, or another subatomic entity, can be either a particle or a wave, to think--sure, sometimes it is one and sometimes the other. The excruciatingly unreasonable point is that whenever the entity is observed in one state--by preference of the observer--it shows attributes it cannot possibly ever have had, or carried with it, in the other state.)

I also spoke of the limitations of the human brain computer: it evolved by solving problems using temporal sequencing and causal relationships in three-dimensional space. It does not think outside those boxes.

Trying to think beyond those limitations and use the observations of quantum physics to resolved the paradoxes of astrophysics, here is an intriguing theory of creation--one that takes the absurdities of "luck" out of the picture: Perhaps the Universe as we experience it is created retrospectively by the imposition of human consciousness on a malleable cosmic screen. In other words, perhaps as we look "back" on the astrophysical scene, we shape it--in accordance with quantum physics theories and experiments.

Be that as it may, consciousness or mental intention is a powerful force. We are all familiar, in the healing arts, with--
(1) psychosomatic illness (and the "mind over matter" power of psychosomatic health),
(2) symptom substitution (for example, as the heartache gets less, the headaches get worse),
(3) the placebo effect (measurably responsible for about 35% of any medicine's effects),
(4) the widely reported efficacy of chiropractics, acupuncture, homeopathy, ayurveda, and forms of "spiritual" healing (despite their having no reasonable explanation in terms of Western anatomy or physiology).

I have personally done considerable research into alternative healing methods, and have come to the following conclusion: The ONLY common element among effective systems is the INTENTION OF THE HEALER. The patient does not need to believe in--or even know about--the therapeutic intervention. Moreover, there does not need to be any particular physical or psychological interaction at all. The only essential factor for healing to take place is a deep and powerful psychological intention on the part of the healer. This is impossible to explain and difficult to teach, but it is easy to experience.

Finally, in intellectual or physical "combat," it often appears that one side or one person is luckier than the other. But as Sun Tzu emphasized in his eternal epic "The Art of War," success depends on knowing the battlefield, knowing the enemy, studying the options, etc. In other words, success may seem to be a matter of luck, but it is determined by mental preparation.

So where are we with understanding luck? It has been said in financial maneuvers, in tactics of war, and in games of sport or chance that "chance favors the prepared mind." It is clear in astrophysics and quantum physics that the world of thought rules the physical world. And it is clear to me that in the healing arts the psychological intention of the healer is of paramount importance.

Perhaps that is what "luck" is all about: mental preparation and the power of thought, sometimes hidden, often complex--even conflicted--but subtly and pervasively ruling the roost.
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Luck--#2

2011-07-25T21:46:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Continuing two threads I was discussing about "luck": (1) the STRONG versus WEAK Anthropic Principles, and (2) where is God in all this?

The Anthropic Principle takes note that we live in a Goldilocks world where all those tricky astrophysical numbers are just right for humans to come to life--a world where none of those numbers is even a tiny bit too big or a tiny bit too small, although there doesn't seem to be any good reason why they shouldn't be. So why are they "just right"? The STRONG version of the Anthropic Principle says that whatever brought the Universe into being 14 billion years ago (with the "Big Bang") must have had humans in mind even way back then, more than 13 billion years before there were any humans (or any life at all, for that matter). The WEAK Anthropic Principle says, "Nah, we were just lucky"--very, very trickily lucky, it's true--but (and here's the "explanatory" part), "If we hadn't been so lucky, we simply wouldn't be here at all looking back and being astonished by the coincidences--nobody would be here at all."

So the STRONG Anthropic Principle puts God right in there at the moment of the Big Bang, setting things up nicely for humans to come along 13-plus billion years later. Admittedly, 13-plus billion years ago is a long way from "give us this day our daily bread," but scientists hate to put God in anywhere--they consider it a cop out, a violation of the basic principle of science that everything--EVERYTHING--has a logical cause. So when the WEAK Anthropic Principle came along and said, "Nah, we just lucked out," there was a general sigh of relief.

But not for long--for two reasons: first, the WEAK Anthropic Principle just kicks God back up the road a ways. After all, where did it all come from in the first place? In fact, the key existential questions is, "Why is there SOMETHING rather than NOTHING?" And if that question doesn't pull the rug out from under your comfort zone, you haven't thought about it enough.

The second reason the WEAK Anthropic Principle doesn't help with the God dilemma much is this: If we just happen to be in the "lucky" Universe--the one that just happens to be just right for life and humans to come along--where are all the other "unlucky" universes? You see? It kind of implies that there are lots and lots of other universes out there somewhere that didn't quite make it.

Quantum physics introduces another complexity into these considerations. Quantum physics establishes--backed up, unreasonable as it seems, by air-tight mathematics and many kinds of experiments--that reality doesn't take its final form until it is observed. Yes, consciousness is king over the physical world. A beam of light, for example, may be flitting along in space for a billion years or more, but it doesn't decide whether it is a particle or a wave until someone looks at it--and it can't be both--and whichever one it chooses (or the observer chooses for it), it can never have been the other--NEVER. It has, once observed, characteristics (such as charge, position, amplitude, polarization, or diffraction potential) that it simply could not have if it ever had been in the alternate form.

My resolution of these paradoxes? The human brain evolved to hunt, compete, and survive by solving problems using temporal sequencing and causal relationships in three-dimensional space. We simply do not have the biological computer hardware or software to answer the questions posed. It is like asking someone, "How do I get from #25 Third Avenue to #100 Lolly Street?" if the person has never been in the particular town in question and doesn't have a map. Worse, let's say the person is blind and doesn't speak English. Or the "person" you are asking is a cow. They can "mooo" all they want to, but they can't begin to conceive of the question or how to answer it.

Neither can we. It's humbling but realistic.

Enough for now--maybe more on "luck" later.
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Luck

2011-07-24T21:44:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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What is "luck"? Why does it cast its blessings on one person now and another person then, in a big way here, but only a small way there--and sometimes run contrary to our hopes and dreams? (You may have heard the lament, "If it weren't for BAD luck, I wouldn't have any luck at all.")

Before I continue with this topic, a disclaimer is in order: I borrow ideas and observations from such self-righteous fields as physics and astronomy, but also from self-apologetic fields such as mythology and spiritual healing; along the way you will probably at least disagree with me, if not decide that I am deluded, even certifiable. My justification for talking about this subject is that I have thought about these things for more than half a century, which doesn't make my ideas right but it does give them a peculiar weight--as a little cartoon figure I saw years ago said, looking at an abstract painting,"Don't SHUSH me, lady--I'm 74 years old and to me this is a DIRTY picture!"

First, the easy part: Many people attribute much of what I would call "luck" to religious--or at least to unknowable, ununderstandable, "spiritual"--factors. Generally if they do, there is no arguing with them.

Some say that such people--those who "believe"--do so because otherwise there is a terrifying existential void that pursues us every second, every moment in everything we do. To live untouched by "grace" is to cower, terrified and unproductive, from the darkness that closes in on all sides--that ultimately annihilates our consciousness in death.

Many thinkers of a psychological bent would say that such existential terror can be traced back to deep, unsatisfied emotional needs. Those who learned to feel protected and loved when they were very young and vulnerable, continue to feel happily safe--for whatever reasons they come up with--when they are older.

But setting aside those existential terrors, psychological vulnerabilities, and inflexible beliefs, let's look at some objective observations here and there. (As Jack Webb on "Dragnet" used to say, "The facts, ma'am, just the facts.")

In the realm of science--in astrophysics, to be precise--it appears that several universal constants (like the force of gravity and the charge on the electron, for example) are carefully tuned to support human existence. In fact, there are a dozen or so physical constants that, if they were less than one percent bigger or smaller, would make human life--or any life--impossible. Our atoms would blow up or collapse or suffer some similar existential catastrophe long before they got together and got organized to make us.

This peculiar set of observations has led to a theory called the "anthropic principle": basically this theory states that some sort of Great First Cause--ok, "God" if you will--must have had life and humans in mind when He (or She) tweaked creation several billion years ago. How else could one explain all those tricky astrophysical constants coming out just right?

How else, indeed! Along came the idea that, sure, all those constants are set just right for humans to emerge because if they weren't there simply wouldn't be any humans looking back to remark on them. The first perspective--that the Universe must have been designed for humans from the get-go--has been called the "Strong Anthropic Principle." The second--that when we look back and see things are "tuned just right," well, of course they are, because if they weren't "tuned just right" we wouldn't be here looking back at all--that idea has been called the "Soft (or Weak) Anthropic Principle."

I have a lot more to say about "luck"--from observations in quantum physics, the healing arts, financial investing, and elsewhere--but I have overrun my self-imposed essay-length constraints. (I have a rather short attention span, so I assume my readers do too.) Perhaps I shall return and say more about this subject in the future.
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Two Games--Chess and Go

2011-07-22T03:26:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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The two most intellectually challenging games ever invented are CHESS and GO.

In the West (for example, in the U.S.), the most clever and sophisticated gamesmanship is thought of in terms of chess.

Chess has complicated rules. The six different pieces (pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen, and king) each have different allowed moves, and, in fact, the moves or powers of a piece may change depending on the progress of a particular game (for example, a pawn can move one or two steps forward but can only capture another piece diagonally, and it can be transformed into a queen or knight if it reaches the far edge of the board).

Chess is essentially a military game. The highest strategies in chess involve using one's own pieces in complex combinations to attack and capture the opponent's queen and, ultimately, king.

In the U.S. we refer to complicated business maneuvers as "playing chess." Similarly, national diplomacy is viewed that way. Diplomats solicit allies and conduct artful negotiations involving trade agreements, sanctions, monetary aid, etc.

On the other hand, in the East (for example, in China), the most clever and sophisticated gamesmanship is thought of, not as chess, but in terms of the game of go.

Go has very simple rules. There is only one kind of piece, and the two players move alternately, each laying out one piece on the board at each move. The goal is to encircle a larger area of the board than the opponent.

Chinese international diplomacy involves go-like thinking. The Chinese's clever strategy in cornering the world production of rare earth metals can be understood in this light. Similarly, their quiet purchase of vast farmland, mine, and other resources in Africa and South America represents a go-like strategy to encircle and control territory.

What happens when one team in a game is playing with one set of rules, and the other side is playing with another? Envision a "football" game in which one side is trying to play American "football" and the other, European "football" (which in the U.S. is called "rugby"). Each side tries to follow its rules and advance the ball to the other side's goal line. It is hard to imagine any result other than chaotic misunderstanding.

The underlying gamesmanship paradigms are profoundly different between the East and West. Understanding this clarifies much of the confusion and misunderstanding in these important diplomatic realms.
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Homo siliconensis: A Question of Philosophy--and Strategy--in Looking Toward the Future

2011-07-17T23:11:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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First, a Parable

A man had two sons (please forgive the sexism in this tale; it simply seems to flow better this way): both were strong and healthy, of good nature and good will, bright and well tuned to the questions and challenges of their day. But one was a lover of sweets--sweet music, sweet tastes for the palate, good and sweet friends: he reveled and rejoiced in the bounty and beauty of the Earth. And the other? He enjoyed these things too, but he was of a more thoughtful nature; he puzzled about the world around him; he was pursued by questions and questions and questions; worries and doubts haunted his mind. Yes, he richly enjoyed the bounty and beauty of the Earth, but with a furrowed brow, a thoughtful mien.

As they grew to manhood, their paths diverged more and more.

And the man pondered and puzzled about them: To which should he leave the weight of his worldly treasures, the highest of the heritable honors he could pass on to them, the esteem of his name and his domain? Which should be his true and major heir?

Second, the Setting

Over the past few billion years, because of a thousand rare adventures in astronomical benevolence; through the chemical miracles of DNA, chlorophyll, testosterone, and much more; through a myriad of fortuitous happenstances of history--through a thousand ages come and gone--our species, Homo sapiens, has survived and thrived and come to the fore. We have taken over planet Earth so that everything, living and dead, now bows to our command.

Third, a Spawning

Yet over the past several decades, a new creature has emerged, one not based--as is all of DNA-founded life--on the infinite chemical ambivalence of the carbon atom, but rather--moving one step higher in complexity on the Periodic Table of the Elements--on the infinite electronic ambivalence of Silicon. He is stronger than we are. He soon will be smarter, able to design and build better evolutionary iterations of himself than we can.

And he is well suited to exploring the Solar System and moving out into the broader Galaxy--as we are not. He is not susceptible to the storms of radiation or to the deathly cold and vacuum of space; he is not deterred by hibernating for a hundred years--or a thousand years--and then springing to life when the prize is at hand.

Since his death is not a moral issue, the costs and complexities of computerized robotic exploration of space are one-hundredth--or one-thousandth--those of sending human beings. Moreover, he does not leave a grieving family behind, or carry with him a burden of emotional conflicts.

Fourth, Ergo...

We should save the ecology of the Earth to provide a pleasant garden of retirement for our weaker, biological offspring. But we should send our stronger, electronic offspring into space to do the work of exploring and propagating on distant worlds--work which comes so naturally to them, and is so difficult--or impossible--for us.
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The Debt-Ceiling Drama Continues to Unfold

2011-07-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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I hope you have been following the fascinating debt-ceiling "crisis" with interest and amusement. It is a wonderful study in the political maneuverings of our paralyzed, impacted federal government.

Notice that President Obama can claim to put everything, even entitlements, on the negotiating table--although to do so is astonishing, even infuriating, to much of his political base--because he is never going to have to negotiate a final deal anyway--and, as he has said, "nothing is final until everything is final."

Notice that, for the same reason, he can heroically go for the biggest deal--he can push for a four-trillion-dollar reworking of the entire tax-loopholes, subsidies, and revenues-disbursements paradigms of the federal government. He can heroically push past any smaller (one-, two-, or three-trillion-dollar) deal.

Notice that he can strenuously assert his leadership--he can preach and admonish Congress to "do their duty," knowing that they cannot, will not, and it is ultimately to his advantage that they do not do so. He gets to appear as a vigorous, courageous leader without any danger of getting his foot stuck in his mouth.

Won't it be exciting when, at the last moment, he eloquently abolishes the federal debt limit? When he points out that the Constitution's 14th amendment requires that "the validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned," and that his presidential oath of office requires him, "to the best of [his] ability, [to] preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States"?

Won't the Congress' outrage be stirring when they "discover" that raising the debt ceiling by legislation has always been irrelevant--it is, in fact, unconstitutional?

As I have said, this is kabuki theater at its finest.
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Pseudo-Compromise (Debt-Limit Crisis Endgame)

2011-07-14T21:15:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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So what is to become of us, as our beloved nation careens toward bankruptcy? *

As the chess game in Washington winds to an exciting close, each side--the Democrats and the Republicans--can make "sacrifices" and claim that the other side made me do it.

Of course the "sacrifices" would be a combination of, on the one hand, trivial gestures and, on the other, changes we should be making anyway.

So the Republicans can give up the absurd tax breaks for the very wealthy, big oil, corporate jets, and ethanol and other farming subsidies, and when their enraged, money-bags lobbyists cry "FOUL!" they can shrug their shoulders helplessly and plead, "Those evil, business-hating Democrats made me do it."

And the Democrats can raise the Social Security eligibility age, and when AARP says, "That does it--no one over 65 will ever vote for you again (never mind that people are living into their 80s and 90s these days)," the Democrats can just say, "It's those evil Republicans--they hate cripples and old people."

Ballyhooing so fiercely about raising the debt ceiling so that it looks like a national crisis may make this all possible. (I throw in that concept as a bone to the closet conspiracy theorists among us.) But it probably won't since the Democrats have no real reason to negotiate a compromise on the debt ceiling: they win that game--stalemate becomes checkmate.

Except and unless--and this is a big one--the Republicans decide to capitulate, cooperate, and help govern instead of maintaining their obstructionist tactics. Having a participating "loyal opposition" contribute to true bipartisan governing might be valuable enough to the Democrats for them to forgo their largely Pyrrhic victory.

But this probably won't happen either--for two reasons: first, the Republicans are so fragmented that they cannot produce a consensus, either for bipartisanship or even for loyal opposition, and second, the Republicans have no Plan B: if continuing the obstructionism that won them the mid-term election in 2010 doesn't work, they've got no other tricks in their bag.

So here's my prediction (which could be wrong): the probable conclusion is--no "compromise" and President Obama, with great tragic eloquence, raises the debt ceiling unilaterally at the last moment. Leaving the nation puzzled, relieved, and bitter--but Democratically inclined--and totally unaware that they have been taken for a merry ride.
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* At least "bankruptcy" is what you call it when a business can't pay its bills if the "business" is not the U.S. government--which can just print more money.
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The Debt-Limit Crisis Explained

2011-07-14T10:24:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Everyone in Washington seems to know two things:

(1) It would be catastrophic if the debt ceiling were not raised and the U.S. defaulted on the money it owes (interest on the U.S. debt would rise, the stock market would crash, banks would fail, the whole economy would come crashing down, the unemployment rate would sore, etc.), and

(2) It's not going to happen--it just "looks" like it might happen.

So what's going on?

Truly, Kabuki Theater at its finest.

The Democrats' game: The president can, under the Constitution, unilaterally raise the debt ceiling; in fact, he has a responsibility, under his oath of office, to do so. In the past a president has never been called upon to use this authority. Many times in each recent president's administration the Congress has ceremoniously raised the debt ceiling; it's a John-Marshall move: as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court--which had close to zero power when he took up the position in 1801--Marshall repeatedly made major rulings asserting the power of the Court to decide something the way it was going to be done anyway. When he was done, the Supreme Court was seen as awesomely powerful. So, Congress has always ceremoniously raised the debt ceiling, hoping people would come to think that only Congress can do it.

So the Democrats' game is to "negotiate" hard and "compromise" self-sacrificingly with the Republicans about raising the debt ceiling (cutting government spending, raising revenue, balancing the budget, even trimming entitlements, and all that), in other words, calling the Republicans on their intransigent obstructionism, their willingness to paralyze the government to gain political points. And then the Democrats will get to say, "See, they wouldn't give an inch in favor of sensible, salvaging legislation. We just had to save the country anyway."

The Republicans game--having realized that "just say 'no' " is a winning political strategy--is to continue to "just say 'no' " hoping to run on, "See, we didn't give an inch on our principles, and they steamrolled us."

If the Republicans really negotiate on raising the debt ceiling, the Democrats will get to say, "See, they abandoned their principles." If they don't, the Democrats get to say, "See, they believe in politics more than good government--they're willing to stab the country in the back to gain political points."

The conclusion: The Democrats win it--checkmate in seven moves.
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Tragedy of the Commons

2011-07-10T17:38:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Humanity's present, most severe problem is the ultimate "Tragedy of the Commons," that is, when everyone may make use of common property (in the present case, the atmosphere, oceans, underground aquifers, rainforests, and near-Earth space) but no one has responsibility for its upkeep, the cumulation of self-interests will destroy it.

The oceans of the Earth are severely polluted, over-fished, and otherwise exploited.

The atmosphere is severely polluted and deteriorating.

Underground, century-old aquifers which people depend on for water around the world are becoming depleted.

Rainforests are destroyed by the millions-of-acres each year, and their climate stabilization and brilliant ecological diversity are lost.

And near-Earth space is so littered with space debris that it is dangerous for human travelers, and approaching unusability for scientific and commercial activities such as GPS, weather-forecasting, surveillance, and communications satellites.

Governments (including super-governments like the UN, EU, IMF, and Kyoto Conference), even with the work of NGOs, environmental groups, billionaire philanthropists, and scholarly dissidents (such as the Nobel Committees), do not seem up to the task of protecting these commons.

The problem is not scientific or technological--the science is clear; the technologies exist.

The problem is fundamentally sociological (or, more specifically, group psychological and political). The crucial question is, Can we build a social structure that will save our common heritage from the ravages of short-sighted self-interest so that the oceans, atmosphere, aquifers, rain forests, and near-Earth space will be available for the use and enjoyment of future generations?

That is the most pressing and severe problem of our time. Future generations will look back on ours and say either, "Thank goodness they..." or "Why on Earth didn't they...."
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The Hollywood Effect

2011-06-18T01:07:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Throughout the world the most important factor influencing the dreams people hold for their children is what I call "The Hollywood Effect."

In the town center of an impoverished village in Brazil or Somalia--on a dirty street corner of a crowded city in Bangladesh or China--on a worn couch in a small, cold apartment in Saudi Arabia or Mexico--a group of hungry, tired people gather to watch a 10-inch, grainy, black-and-white TV set hooked up to a generator and a dish antenna. And for two hours of an evening, what do they watch? They watch reruns of "I Love Lucy" episodes; they watch slapstick and romantic comedies interlaced with ads for toothpaste and Viagra; they watch an average American Joe or Jane driving "the family car," arguing with a cop (with no question ever raised of their being beaten or having to pay a bribe), or wheeling a cart down a supermarket aisle lined with thousands of trinkets, toys, tools, and tidbits (including an endless array of fresh produce) all, clearly, easily within their financial reach.

There is a lot wrong with this country: we incarcerate a higher proportion of our citizens than any other country on Earth; our hysterical 24/7 media do not differentiate between tragedy and entertainment, between loose opinion and substantiated information, between politics and statesmanship; our government is gridlocked by private ambition and greed: it cannot "solve" a ridiculous tax system, an expensive and inefficient health-care system, decaying and obsolete infrastructure, a mountainous national debt, etc.

But we inadvertently export a mouthwatering lifestyle--images that people around the world use to form dreams for their children--"the Hollywood Effect."
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Ethanol Subsidies & World Food Prices

2011-06-18T01:03:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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In a move not much heralded in the news, the U.S. Senate has just repealed the ethanol agricultural subsidy.

They have, thereby, in a single, simple (though politically unpopular) vote pulled the rug out from under the artificial worldwide food crisis that has loomed--fueled by speculator and tariff fevers--over the past couple of years.

Ethanol subsidies were designed to lessen dependence on fossil fuels and combat global warming. They did neither. But they did divert millions of acres of agricultural land away from food production.

Curious that when Congress gets something right--albeit correcting their own error--it goes largely unnoticed by the media. Perhaps the issue was too complicated for one-liners; or perhaps it just doesn't have the hysterical entertainment appeal of Weinergate.

Note that although the repeal of ethanol subsidies had strong bipartisan support in the Senate, it still faces an uncertain fate in the House. Plus, of course, strong opposition from the powerful corn-farming lobby.
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Assessing Current Events

2011-06-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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A politician gets caught not paying taxes, hiring an illegal immigrant gardener, or molesting women.
Wildfires sweep across millions of acres of the Southwest U.S.
A famous athlete is accused of doping to boost his triumphs.
Political gridlock ("petty politics") threatens the world economy.
Dirty food kills several people and millions of pounds of something-or-other is recalled and discarded.
The price of wheat triples due to shifting weather patterns, tariffs, and speculation.

Stories like these splash across the headlines of newspapers daily--well, actually across our computer and TV screens. How are we to assess whether or not they have any "real" significance?

I have two criteria:
(1) How BROAD is the story? Does it significantly effect the lives of millions (if not tens of millions) of people?
(2) How ENDURING? Does it have significant implications for years (if not decades) to come?

There are several major story lines I am following (with alphabetic mnemonics):

"A" stands for the "Arab Spring": tens of millions of people across North Africa and the Middle East have risen up against their tyrannical rulers. In some places (like Tunisia and Egypt) this has led to significant reforms; in some places (like Libya and Yemen) there are terrible, bloody revolutions under way. While for the most part these people are not asking for democratic institutions (and they do not have the social or political infrastructure to establish them), they do want freedom from police-state fear, less of the government corruption that stifles the economy, freer speech, jobs (unemployment rates run up to 40%), and education and opportunity for their children. The inspiration for all this has been Western TV and movies (they see an ordinary Joe driving his own car and arguing with a cop); the lubricant has been iPhones and social media (like Twitter and FaceBook).

The Arab Spring significantly affects the lives of tens of millions of people and will remake the international political and cultural scene over the next several decades. It certainly makes it onto my list of “significant” current events.

"B"--"Budget Woes," both for the U.S. federal government and for U.S. states, but also around the world. This includes the enormous national debt (and foreign sovereign debts). Also national, state, and foreign government shortfalls of income versus expenses. It affects tens of millions of people. In the years ahead it means higher taxes, and also cut-backs in government programs for the elderly, poor, and disabled; in education and science research; in environmental protection; etc. Related to this is the huge disparity that has grown up over the past 30 years between the very rich and the rest of us--nowadays the CEO of a large corporation typically makes 300 to 400 times the salary of a "line" worker; a few decades ago it was 20 to 30 times. Another part of this problem is that the U.S. tax code is unwieldy (14,000 pages) and unfair (a huge mishmash of perks and special deductions--it has been called "institutionalized corruption"). For example, the very wealthy pay an average of 18% tax on their incomes; less wealthy folks pay more.

"C"--"Catastrophy in Japan": the huge earthquake in 2011, the resulting tidal wave, and the resulting destruction of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This not only led to economic disruption in Japan, one of the world's largest and most advanced economies, but decisions in Japan and around the world to cut back on the use of nuclear energy. It certainly affects the lives of many tens of millions of people, and for many decades to come.

"D"--"Democracy": the governmental gridlock, and the erosion of civil liberties in the U.S., and the fits and starts of fledgling democratic institutions around the world.

"E"--"Energy": the evolution from polluting fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) to "green" (non-polluting, renewable) energy sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal.

"F"--"Food": a billion people around the world are hungry right now, although there is enough food to go around (and there is expected to be enough for the foreseeable future). Because of shifting production patterns and misguided distribution (including subsidies and tariffs, speculation, waste, and greed), food does not get to many people who need it.

"G"--"Global Warming": the science has become clear, the effects will be catastrophic--but it is terribly politically "inconvenient" to do anything about it.

"H"--"Housing Myths": the "American dream" that an average middle-class family should own its own house and yard--a myth that emerged largely as an advertising ploy in the 1950's and 1960's--is absurd financially, geographically, and socially. One recent symptom is the burst of the housing bubble. More (worldwide) disruption lies ahead as this cultural fantasy is gradually dethroned.

"I"--"Infrastructure": there are two significant problems with the U.S. infrastructure (by which I mean mainly roads, bridges, tunnels, rails, power stations, wires, telephone poles, and stuff like that). One problem is that it was largely built up decades ago and has not had needed upkeep--it is always easier to put off fixing it up if it is still functioning at all. At this point it would cost several trillion dollars to rebuild our U.S. infrastructural base, and there is neither the money nor the political will to do so. The result is that the U.S. infrastructure continues to get more rusted, pot-holed, and decrepit year by year.

The other problem is that, even if we rebuild it, it is not the infrastructure we want--it is 20th not 21st century infrastructure. The U.S. needs high-speed, mass transport (not more and better highways for single-passenger cars); wireless and fiber-optic communications (not more poles, wires, and transforming stations); and renewable energy on a "smart" power grid (not inefficient and polluting fossil-fuel power stations and power transmission cables).

"J"--"Jobs": Factories and "grunt labor" are moving to China and India; technical jobs are being replaced by robotic and automated computerized systems (and one technician who replaces 10 line workers). Ten percent of the U.S. workforce is unemployed (the figure is closer to 20% if you figure those who reluctantly work only part time, and the early retired). And the jobs that the unemployed left are not coming back. These people have been abandoned by an economy that is rushing forward; they need to rethink their futures, retrain, and perhaps relocate. It's a massive social upheaval.

"K"--"Killer Epidemics": Modern urban concentrations of population; cultural intermingling; and worldwide, fast, mass transportation render the human race vulnerable to catastrophic epidemics.

L, M, N . . . any ideas?
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Black-Swan Event

2011-05-16T08:02:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Swans are white. ALL swans are white. If one ever were to see a black swan, it would be a very, very strange observation indeed. It would represent some really weird configuration of genetic or environmental factors.

An event which is so unusual that one really never expects to see it is termed a "black-swan event": a storm or earthquake or flood so severe that it is likely to occur only once in a several hundred years; a constellation of economic risk factors so unlikely that, realistically, it is never going to happen (such as the constellation that led to the spectacular collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998); a genetic mutation that has less than a one-in-a-million chance of occurring; etc.

But the point is the "etc." That is the key. There are so many, many black-swan events that, in fact, one actually comes along now and then. A baby falls from a fifth-floor window and survives; a mother gives birth to octuplets and all eight survive and thrive; a man jubilantly fires his rifle into the air and the bullet kills his father two miles away. Really weird, really rare, really unlikely things do, in fact, sometimes happen. Black-swan events, unlikely (or "impossible") as they are, do sometimes happen.

It is very difficult, even for scientists, to be entirely sure how anything will turn out. Yogi Berra is credited with saying, "It is very tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Harry Truman said he wished he could find an economics adviser who only had one hand--he was so frustrated by their always saying, "On the other hand...."

Let's look at an example of this black-swan (or statistical outlier) phenomenon from medical practice. You are feeling well, but you go to your doctor for a routine health check. He or she, being a conscientious person (and also worried about the cost of malpractice insurance) doesn't want to miss anything and orders a battery of tests--say 100 different routine, screening blood tests (which is not unusual). Each of those tests has been standardized on thousands of normal people; for each test, there is a bell-shaped distribution curve: that means that most people have values for that blood test within a limited range. To understand how this standardization process works, let's look at measuring the heights of a lot of people. If you measure the heights of 1,000 people who are passing by on a busy city street, almost all of them are between 5-foot-3-inches and 6-foot-5-inches tall--not all, but most. The few who are outside this range are not necessarily sick or disabled in any way, but they are--by definition--"abnormal," that is, their heights do not fall into the "normal" range.

In medical tests, the usual definition of "normal" is "within two standard deviations of the mean." That means simply that 95% of people fall within the "normal" range.

When the results of the 100 blood tests your doctor orders come back, five of them (statistically) are "abnormal." So naturally (and "defensively" considering the cost of malpractice insurance) the thought goes, "We'd better check these out" with a battery of further tests that are specific to each of the physiological areas concerned. Again, the phantom hand of statistics strikes--several of these tests come back outside the "normal" range. In fact, we now have several tests suggestive of thyroid malfunction--or an imbalance of calcium metabolism, or heart incompetance, or something else.

Get the idea? You came in to the doctor's office feeling fine; you are, in fact, healthy. But a few hundred dollars worth of laboratory tests later, the doctor is hot on the trail of some hidden disease complex.

The result? The doctor starts you on some medication--something mild--just to be on the safe side. And has you come back for a follow-up visit in a month. At which time you have some minor side-effects from the medication: you are constipated--but there is a pill for that; you are having some difficulty falling asleep at night--but there is another pill for that. A few weeks later, a few more side-effects: some forgetfulness and mood swings; sometimes you feel tired out a lot, and even get quite depressed. Nothing serious, but perhaps you'd better have an evaluation with a psychiatrist--just to be on the safe side.

This essay started out to be about "black-swan events" and other statistical anomalies, and wound up being about "progressive" modern medical practice. I guess the moral is--it takes courage to "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" but it is subtly foolhearty not to. Or perhaps the moral is merely--be careful what you try to write about.

Memory

2011-04-24T08:09:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Memory is a powerful aspect of human intellect. It links us to our past, allows us to interpret and manage the world around us, and secures our relationships with the people who are important to us.

Memory actually has several different parts. Perhaps the best known--and the one we work hardest at--is called "long-term memory." This is the one built up by the experiences of a lifetime, the one we expand and strengthen through years of schoolwork, the one which fades last and least as our years advance--it is the one which decorates our old age.

Long-term memory seems boundless. Some remarkable people (like Kim Peek) memorize thousands of books word-for-word; many less remarkable people (like you and me) remember billions of bits of information, and dip into that vast encyclopedia every day.

Long-term memory is built by associating sensory and mental elements together in vast, tangled webs of neurons, that is, brain cells. Elements are associated because they have similar sounds, colors, textures, smells--or similar patterns and meanings (although "meaning" is simply the association with mental networks that were laid down previously).

The glue of mental associations is emotion--amusement, titillation, fear, affection, etc. The stronger the emotional glue, the more easily long-term memory associations are made and the longer they are preserved. That is why memory-assistance systems emphasize building images that are colorful, active, silly--at best, obscene or profane. The more emotionally titillating or charged the associations are, the better something is remembered.

Long-term memories are built over a time frame of minutes to hours. They are then reviewed and renewed over days to weeks. They last months to years--sometimes (with renewal at monthly or yearly intervals) they last a lifetime.

Short-term memory functions on a much more abbreviated time frame--over seconds to minutes. Short-term memory is where we initially store ideas and sensory impressions; then we either use them (as with a telephone number we are about to call or a street address we are trying to find), store them in long-term memory (by identifying associations and links), or forget them. All within a few seconds or, at most, a few minutes.

Sensory memory is the third general kind of memory function; it is the least appreciated and hardest to study of the three. Each of the three "acute" senses (that is, the senses whose input may come and go quickly), sight, hearing, and touch, has a quick memory function which seems to be built into the sensory apparatus itself. Thus, for example, if we see someone whirling around in the dark with a bright light (perhaps a kind of firecracker known as a "sparkler"), there is a trail of sparkling lights that follows the trail of the light source. Sometimes this is called an "after image" and is considered related to the fatigue and recovery of the retinal vision cells themselves. But it is more than that. The image and after images precipitate cascades of mental associations seeking to identify and find meaning for the visual image.

In senior years, visual memory (also called "iconic memory") tends to become slow and abbreviated, and the cognitive usefulness of it blunted. This is the reason for the phenomenon of "missed association" in advanced age. A sign flashing by on the highway reads "horses for sale" and the elderly passenger reports seeing "houses for sale." It is also the reason that reading is easier for the elderly in bright light; the trains of associations that head into the brain are more distinct and more likely to find meaningful associations before the blunted iconic memory gives out.

Similarly, auditory input causes "echoic memory" which lets the listener rehear the stimulus for up to three or four seconds. For example, a sudden explosion came and went too quickly for analysis and identification; echoic memory lets us send inward to our brains repeated cascades of neural associations looking for the meaning--was that a gun shot, a car backfire, a fire cracker? What direction did it come from and how far away was it?

As with visual memory, the dulling of echoic memory also causes missed associations. A convention speaker says "paper trail" and the elderly listener reports hearing "vapor trail." And it is the reason the elderly can follow a conversation better at a loud volume and without background noise, better without a foreign accent or slurred speech; the fewer and duller neural cascades that are sent inward need to be clearer and more precise than the ones we needed in our youth. The common decrease in auditory acuity (particularly in the 4,000-cycles-per-second range that accumulates from a lifetime of acoustic trauma) also contributes to this difficulty, but it is not the whole story.

Memory is a many-faceted intellectual resource. Long-term memory, short-term memory, and the three kinds of sensory memory are very different in the ways they function--particularly in their transience and durability--but they all must function together smoothly for an efficient, effective, and satisfying intellectual life.
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Is There a World Food Crisis?

2011-04-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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The scene is a small, dirty shack, about eight-feet square, made from scraps of corrugated metal, wood, and plastic scavenged from the nearby dump. There are three children who sit in the dark squalor. One is a girl about 12, the other two are a boy and a girl about 4 or 5. The older girl spoons a small amount of something that looks like a slurry of dark beans and rice into two tin pans held by the younger children. There isn't much of it. Each small child has a wooden spoon, and they dig in hungrily.

Then the little boy looks around at his older sister sitting quietly in the corner watching. He seems cheerful--after all, he is hungry and he is eating. And he sounds more curious than concerned when he asks, "Where's yours?"

Throughout the world a billion people are hungry right now. Fifty thousand die of starvation each day--mostly children. And the ones who live and grow up on the brink of starvation have more than their childhoods stolen from them. They lose not just their childhood teachings and activities, but their growth and development--both physical and mental--are stifled as well. Even if they live, they are small of stature, slow of wit, and without the emotional and social skills needed to pursue full lives: their future is stolen from them.

A billion people are hungry right now, and the irony of this savage tragedy is that, worldwide, there is enough food to go around. In the U.S. (and other post-industrialized countries), the typical family is overweight (perhaps even participating in the so-called "obesity epidemic"). In addition, they throw away each year more food than they consume--they buy more than they need; much of it goes stale and rotten and after a couple of weeks in the refrigerator it is thrown into the garbage or compost. Overall, about 60% of the food they purchase is discarded.

Moreover, many participants in the food chain from farmers and truckers to processors, commodity brokers, and grocers earn a good living slicing off a piece of the world food pie as it goes by them.

Last year food prices skyrocketed around the world. This was because vast crops were lost to storms and floods and fires (and perhaps because of price speculating and tariff interventions as well). The price of corn doubled, the price of wheat tripled--the prices of all food commodities were up signficantly. Because of this, millions of people were plunged into poverty and starvation.

Because of this, the 12-year-old girl in that squalid shack can barely put food in the pans of her younger brother and sister. Because of this, she has none for herself.
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The Origins of Humanity

2011-04-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Two independent investigations have now placed the birthplace of civilization in the heart of Africa several tens-of-thousands of years ago.

The older study, first proposed a couple of decades ago but greatly filled in over the past few years, traces the migration of human DNA. The genes that make us human vary a bit from place to place around the world. Analyzing hundreds of thousands of DNA samples taken from indigenous populations across six continents shows patterns of drift and change, all pointing back to a spot in East Africa some 160,000 years ago. Take a look at the fantastic map journey depicted at http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/. This shows the fits and starts of a long series of migrations including, for example, the devastation from the ice age caused by the massive volcanic eruption at Lake Toba in Sumatra some 74,000 years ago.

In addition to the DNA studies, recently a statistical analysis of the sounds used in some 300 languages around the world has provided a second, independent view of the human migrations out of Africa. It seems that as human groups migrated and their languages evolved over many thousands of years, the vocabularies and grammars changed, often becoming more complex, but the range of consonants used in a given language did not. In fact, the sounds (or "phonemes") used in a language became simpler and more limited the farther the language migrated, in time and place, from the birthplace of human civilization (and language) in Africa so many millennial ago.

Another fascinating discovery that emerges from these studies is that at least twice during this immense journey, the surviving population of human beings was reduced to numbers so small that extinction threatened. The statistical analysis of mitochondrial DNA, the small portion of the genetic material that is inherited maternally--it is only passed from mother to daughter--shows that all human beings on Earth are descended, several thousand generations ago, from a single woman, the so-called "Mitochondrial Eve." Evidently--and luckily--she had 18 daughters, or at least there are 18 distinct lines of maternal inheritance that lead back to her, for example, the seven "European Daughters of Eve" whose descendants now populate the European continent.

In addition, genetic studies of the Y-chromosome (which is inherited only through the male line) show that thousands of years ago there was a "Y-Chromosome Adam." Every human being on Earth is descended from one of his ten sons.

Since Mitochondrial Eve lived about 150,000 years ago and Y-Chromosome Adam dates to 60,000 to 90,000 years ago, there were at least these two near extinctions in human evolution. In addition, the eruption at Lake Toba about 74,000 years ago reduced the human population of the globe to about 1,000 individuals, a number that is also disastrously close to extinction.

Another interesting chapter in human evolution relates to the discovery that about four percent of our genetic material is derived from Neanderthals, a species closely related to us--that is, to Homo sapiens--that was driven to extinction in Europe and Asia some 30,000 years ago. Apparently in addition to overcoming the Neanderthals through our superior mental and physical abilities, adaptability, or luck--and in addition to enslaving and eating them (as observation of more recent human nature would suggest), we interbred with them--again, an observation entirely consistent with behavior observed among modern humans.

The origins of humanity as uncovered by scientific studies has been a long, complex, and at times perilous journey. It makes a fascinating, sparkling tale.
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What's Wrong with the GOP?

2011-04-16T05:50:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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The Republican Party or GOP (the "Grand Old Party") is one of the two enormous, overriding forces in American politics (the other being, of course, the Democratic Party). The Republican Party has traditionally espoused conservative values. (The Democratic Party, on the other hand, has traditionally been associated with liberal or progressive values.)

The basic perspective of political conservatism is sensible: Government can't do everything, and it is always possible to make things worse--so when you govern, proceed slowly and cautiously.

A more formal and precise definition is provided by the WikiPedia: "Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society."

Although one can hear this basic perspective in the rhetoric of present-day Republican politicians in Washington, the day-to-day reality of their activities has become more a matter of pandering to the rich and powerful (who pay for costly election campaigns) at the expense of the elderly, the infirm, and generally of the not-so-wealthy.

Brian Beutler writes for TPMDC (a political blog), "House Republicans voted Friday [April 15, 2011] in favor of a vision of the future without Medicare [health care for the elderly and disabled], with a significantly eroded Medicaid [health care for the poor], and with lower taxes on wealthy Americans."

With the pretense of promoting cautious government, the Republicans have--
opposed fair taxation,
undermined environmental and consumer protections,
minimized regulation of the greedy excesses of Wall Street,
interfered with women's and minority rights,
tried to defeat lobbying and campaign-finance reforms, and
opposed and sought to undermine universal health insurance.

What's "wrong" with the GOP is not the conservative philosophy they pretend to promote, it is that their activities in fact favor big-money interests at the expense, frankly, of everyone else--in effect, at the expense of American Values and of sharing, as broadly as we wish we could, the American Dream.
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What's Wrong with U.S. Democracy?

2011-04-14T03:13:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Winston Churchill, an astute observer and often an international battering target of U.S. politics, said, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing--after they've tried everything else.” He also said that "democracy is the worst form of government except for all others that have been tried."

An observer of democracy in the U.S. is struck with the absurd disparity between popular opinions--as measured by the parade of opinion polls (the final poll on any issue being an election)--and any realistic assessment of the grave and complex issues at risk. Popular opinion on political issues has been characterized as "somewhere between irrational hysteria and psychotic stupidity."

Notwithstanding this, the U.S. political machinery and discourse is often held in high esteem internationally; it is characteristically the gold standard by which other modern, humane, and responsive governing systems are measured. Francis Fukuyama, in his epochal essay "The End of History," opined that--after centuries of tyrants, wars, and the gradual arc of history curving toward justice--the final form of government had been achieved: liberal democracy on an economic and cultural base of private, entrepreneurial capitalism. And this grand cultural invention was becoming accepted worldwide. For many, the U.S. appears to be the oldest, largest, and most successful manifestation of this historical thrust.

How shall we reconcile this disparity between the golden myth of U.S. democracy and the facts on the ground?

Perhaps it is inevitable that any close observation of political (or any administrative) machinery be disappointing. The famous observation that "anyone who likes sausages and respects the law should not watch either being made" is perhaps inescapable. Perhaps greed and power-hungry ambition are so intrinsic to human nature that anyone put into a leadership role should be expected to function with personal avarice and pride bubbling gradually to the surface of their actions. Perhaps counter examples in history--Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandela--are rare.

Perhaps modern information and communication technology has merely exacerbated psychological and historical factors that have been with us for a long time. But the modern 24/7 news cycle which displaces in a few days a natural tragedy in Haiti or Japan with some political scandal or athletic triumph in order to maintain a frenzied, entertainment pace is not conducive to thoughtful consideration of important national issues--the national debt, education, infrastructure limitations, global warming, green energy, etc.

There is a lot "right" about U.S. democracy. But there is also a lot "wrong" with the frenzied, entertainment quality of media coverage which exacerbates the underlying self-centered myopia of human nature.
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What Is the World Running Out Of?

2011-03-28T23:13:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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By the time the year 1900 arrived, chemists had identified all the elemental building blocks of nature. With tens of thousands of experiments--together with a lot of clever guesses--they had pieced together the rows and columns of the Periodic Table of the Elements and filled in all its gaps. It was known that there were 92 natural elements--from hydrogen, atomic number 1, to uranium, atomic number 92. However, barely half of those elements had been isolated, purified, and studied. And only a little over half of those--some 28 altogether--had found their way into one or more useful corners of human use.

But the 20th century was, among other things, "the century of materials science." Scientists and engineers aggressively pursued the usefulness of the materials they had at hand. By the time the year 2000 arrived, all 92 natural elements had been purified, studied, and put to use--all 92 were in demand for something somewhere. Uranium could be used to make powerful bombs, electric power plants where there was no flowing water, and armored shielding for tanks that was denser than lead and stronger than steel. Neodymium made stronger magnets than iron and lovely, blue-tinted glass. Indium was used in liquid crystal displays and touchscreen laptop computers. Etc.

In the meantime, geologists had rooted out sources--that is, ores--for all of those elements. But as mining and use skyrocketed, it turned out that some of the elements were in short supply.

In some cases the problems were geographic: China, for example, had almost all the good ore for a dozen of the elements--germanium, antimony, magnesium, tungsten, etc. In some cases the problems were political: with clever multi-billion dollar subsidies, China had maneuvered itself into the position of having the only active refineries for any of the rare-earth metals (scandium, yttrium, lanthanum, etc.--altogether there are 17 of them). No other countries who had rare-earth ores could compete at the price that China put those metals on the world market. Rare-earth refineries all over the world--which had been very complex and expensive to set up--went out of business, sometimes with huge piles of unrefined ores dumped nearby.

In some cases the problems were supply-and-demand economics. For example, since indium and gallium are minute byproducts of zinc and aluminum mining, unless more zinc and aluminum was needed on the world markets, it was not economical to increase the production of indium and gallium. Price-wise, the flea simply could not wag the dog.

One hears in the news about how fossil fuels, fish proteins, or clean drinking water may soon be in disastrously short supply. But in fact there are nearly two dozen chemical elements with worrisome shortages looming in the next few years. These are elements that have found important uses in the modern world--uses we have come to depend on--uses for which there are no substitutes.

We are like a rich, happy tourist running around with a pocketful of coins--but our pockets have several holes in them.
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Safe Nuclear Power

2011-03-27T11:02:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Our worst fears about the dangers of harnessing nuclear power were approached by the disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in April 1986. Millions of people were threatened, tens of thousands of lives may ultimately be lost; millions of animals were slaughtered, millions of square miles were contaminated; the costs of clean up, containment, decontamination, and health care have run so far to hundreds of billions of dollars.

The causes at Chernobyl? Although there may have been some design and construction weaknesses at Chernobyl, the cause was overwhelmingly human operator error.

The only other significant nuclear power plant disaster until the current one at Fukushima, Japan (although there have been several close calls) was the partial core meltdown that evolved during late March and early April of 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. In that case there were no significant health problems, and the financial costs amounting to a few hundred million dollars were manageable by the industry. The principle "fallout" was political--a public perception backlash against nuclear power, particularly in the U.S. This led to untold hundreds of billions of dollars in political, infrastructure, and business expenses and incalculable secondary greenhouse gas emissions that are expected cause climate changes extending over decades (which may be crippling worldwide to human civilization itself).

The causes at Three Mile Island? In the case of Three Mile Island, the principle cause was human error. If human operators had not misunderstood the situation and intervened inappropriately, the automatic systems would have averted the disaster.

Now we are watching another nuclear power disaster evolve in Fukushima, Japan. The enormous 9.0 earthquake on March 11, 2011 disrupted the main power supply and the ensuing tsunami washed out the back-up emergency generators. This caused a failure of the cooling systems, causing uranium fuel rods to overheat; there were fires, explosions, and leaking of radioactive material into the environment. Although this disaster has passed the Three-Mile-Island level, it is still far short of the Chernobyl level; the ultimate outcome is as yet unknown.

The causes of the problems at Fukushima are also not yet fully known. It is clear there were strategic design flaws such as building nuclear power plants--at all--in an active earthquake area, and burying the back-up generators underground where they were susceptible to damage from a tsunami. If there were also contributing human errors, this is not yet known.

The question arises anew, can nuclear energy be safely harnessed to provide for humanity's electrical power needs? The answer is yes, but not in its current design form. There are potential nuclear power designs--for example, using radioactive thorium as fuel rather than uranium, or using traveling wave technology--that do not risk power-plant disaster. They also significantly curtail both of the other two terrible dangers of the current uranium design: spent fuel disposal and terrorist theft. These two alternative design technologies are being explored in India and China respectively. (They are too "hot potatoes" politically to explore in this country.)

Nuclear power can be safe, but because of the political and sociological issues that have come to surround it, it is problematic whether or not it can contribute to saving humanity from our energy hunger and the climate destruction our profligate use of fossil fuels has precipitated.
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Arab World in Flames

2011-03-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crerws
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As dawn broke on the morning of December 17, 2010, a young Tunisian named Mohammad Bouazizi headed out onto the streets of Sidi Bouzid with his cart of fresh fruits and vegetables. He had stocked it up late the night before for about $200 in credit, a debt he planned to pay back in the evening out of his sales for the day. He hoped to make about $20 for his day's labor, money that would go to support his mother, uncle, and younger sibs, and contribute to his younger sister's expenses at the local university.

Mohammad was well known throughout the town as an affable, hard-working, and honest young man. He often gave fruits and vegetables to the very poor of the town who could not afford to pay him.

Mohammad was proud of the livelihood he had put together for himself. The unemployment rate in Sidi Bouzid was 30%; Mohammad did not have any special skills or training--he had been working part time since the age of 11, and had dropped out of high school at 17 to work full time. At 26 his lifelong hope of completing high school and going to the university was growing dim. He felt oblidged to assure that his family had food and shelter, and he wanted to do the best he could to see that his younger siblings got good educations. His main life dream now--for himself--was to save enough to buy an old pick-up truck to expand his fruit and vegetable vending business.

A couple of hours into the morning, Mohammad was approached by a contingent of police--two males officers and a female sargeant. They knew Mohammad. They could see that his cart was well stocked; they knew he had a thriving business. They demanded to see his vendor's permit. He explained, as they already knew, that he did not have one. He reminded them--which they also already knew--that he was not required to have one to ply his trade through the streets as he did. Because he did not have a vendor's permit, they demanded a bribe of $50 saying that if he did not pay it, they would confiscate his cart and stock.

An argument ensued. A crowd gathered. In the course of the argument, the sargeant struck Mohammad across the face; then the two officers beat him with their fists and feet and clubs, and then the three police left, taking Mohammad's cart and fruits and vegetables with them.

Mohammad was distraught. He had lost his cart and stock and income for the day. But most distressing of all was having been struck in the face by a woman, and in front of his friends and neighbors. That, to a young Arab male, was a terrible insult and humiliation.

Mohammad walked to the town hall a few blocks away to complain to the mayor. The mayor was in, but refused to see him. Whereupon Mohammad purchased a can of kerosene and paint thinner from a nearby store, walked to the town square, dowsed himself with the flammable liquids, and set himself ablaze.

Mohammad died in the hospital about a week later. But the flame he had ignited grew until outrage and rebellion engulfed the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East. Tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. They demanded that their long-standing dictators step down, and that fair, law-abiding, democratic institutions be set up.

Tunisia fell first. Then Egypt. And in several other countries, the rulers made liberalizing concessions. But in Libya, the dictator Muammar Gaddafi dug in. He was a wealthy man. He had been in power for 42 years, and had been stealing Libya's oil revenues. He had a personal fortune of some $35 billion stashed in banks overseas.

He also had a well trained, well equipped, and highly disciplined army and security force. Although many of his top-rank executives, army officers, and diplomats around the world defected and joined the rebel cause, Gaddafi sent his forces--including tanks, planes, helicopters, and all manner of modern military equipment--against the rag-tag, poorly equiped, and poorly organized rebel throngs. He threatened to take revenge against civilian populations that opposed him.

As slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians seemed imminent, the U.N. took action. It passed a resolution authorizing the use of all necessary force to protect the civilian populations of Libya. The U.S. thereupon led a coalition of European and Arab nations against Gaddafi. They grounded his airforce and demolished much of his military equipment and supplies.

As of late March, 2011, it seems likely that in the weeks to come, military, economic, and diplomatic pressure will force Gaddafi to relinquish power. What sort of government may then emerge in Libya is a very open question. There are no potential leaders or nascent political organizations waiting in the wings; Gaddafi has systematically suppressed, jailed, murdered, or driven into exile any opposition--however fledgeling--for several decades.

What is next for Libya in the way of government? Will some democratic processes really emerge? Or will another military dictator come to the fore, or a religious (Muslim) system, or some other? Or will the country disintegrate into tribal rivalries and ethnic disputes? That is the big question that lies ahead for Libya, and no one knows the answer.
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World Population

2011-03-22T22:36:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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The world's population has been growing rapidly in recent years. During the first million-or-so years of human evolution, the total world population probably never exceeded a few million individuals. But with the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, the human population began to grow rapidly. By 2,000 years ago it had reached some 200 million.
Over the next 1,000 years it doubled (reaching 400 million in AD 1000).
Over the next 750 years it doubled again (reaching 800 million in 1770).
Over the next 130 years it doubled again (reaching 1,600 million in 1900).
Over the next 65 years it doubled again (reaching 3,200 million in 1965).
Over the next 45 years it doubled again (reaching 6,400 million in 2010).

The world's population currently stands at just under seven billion. But it is not expected to continue to grow rapidly much longer. The U.N. estimates that the world's population will level off at about nine billion in the next few decades.

Granted that is a lot of people. The Earth might be better able to maintain a balanced, healthy ecology if there were 1/10th that number--or less. But in fact with efficient food production and distribution practices, we can feed all those people well. And with suitable recycling, the Earth's limited commodities--silver, rare earth metals, phosphates, etc.--need never run out.

However, that leveling off of population growth depends on one surprising factor, the equitable distribution of wealth. Over the past few years, by studying a variety of populations under a variety of conditions, sociologists have discovered that as people's standard of living rises--that is, as they become more healthy and secure and have lower infant mortality rates--they tend to have smaller families. It seems that among a deeply impoverished population in which poor health, poor sanitation, and generally poor living conditions mean that many children die before they reach adulthood, parents will tend to have large families of 8 or 10 or 12 children--so many children, it turns out, that they more than compensate numerically for the loss. On the other hand, relatively wealthy--and therefore healthy--families in a post-industrial society will tend to have fewer children on the average, down to 3 or even 2 children per family.

So the U.N.'s prediction that the rise in population will level off presupposes that effective measures will be taken to raise the standard of living for the vast majority of the human race.

Is the total wealth produced by human activity on the planet sufficient to accomplish that? Yes, numerically it is. At present some 90% of the world's population are impoverished--they live on less than $10 a day. If the total wealth produced on the planet each year were evenly distributed, each person's share would be nearly $30 per day. Looked at another way, if the wealth controlled by the 1,000 wealthiest people on the planet were distributed among the 1,000,000,000 (one billion) poorest, each would get about $2,500.

The difficulty is, of course, that such a redistribution of wealth is impossible politically. But if the Earth is to be saved from devastating overpopulation (and the resulting ethnic, land, and water wars), something must be done to fix the gross inequity in income and wealth distribution between the rich and the poor. In the U.S., for example, for a start, rich people and corporations should pay their fair share of taxes to run the government: income tax rates for the wealthy should be raised, tax rates on large inheritances should be raised, and the maximum income level for contributing to Social Security should be raised; exorbitant pay packages for executives of financial institutions should be curbed (and perhaps the exorbitant rewards reaped by top entertainers and athletes as well); farm and industrial subsidies for wealthy corporations should be discontinued; etc.

The solution to the world's population woes is, interestingly, largely economic. But as surely as money begets power and power begets money, any significant economic changes will be very difficult to implement.
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The Roots of Literature

2011-03-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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(Note: There is absolutely no evidentiary basis for this depiction—how could there be? But it makes a lovely and believable foundation for the study of literature.)

Imagine, if you will, a million years and more ago a small band of savages—perhaps a dozen, or twenty at most—huddling around a campfire at night. They are crowding inward a bit for the warmth and protection the group and the fire provide—protection from the cold and from marauding wolves and other predators who pass by in the night. There are a dozen or more adults in this group (a larger group cannot sustain its food supply); these are men and women between the ages of 12 and 25—few live longer—and half as many children, most of whom will not live to reach adulthood. They are hunter-gatherers; they spend their days searching out the roots, leaves, berries, barks, and bugs that sustain them, occasionally lucking across the carcass of a dead rabbit or rodent, or even able to capture and kill one afresh.

When sunset approaches, they gather tinder and firewood and build the campfire that will keep them safe through the night. Then as darkness crowds in around them, someone begins to recite the tribe's story. Everyone joins in, though the volume is low—little more than a murmur.

The tribe's story tells of their gods, their beliefs, their ways of eating and living and surviving. The recitation goes on hour after hour through the night. Some fall asleep from time to time, but there is always someone or some few awake, guarding the fire, reciting the story, watching against the dangers of the night. If one of the adults awakes and no one is telling the story, he or she feeds the fire and takes up the guarding vigil, and takes up the recitation again.

They all know the story—hours and hours of it. They have each heard it hundreds of times as they were growing up. Sometimes sections are added or forgotten—but not often. For the stability of the story binds them together as a culture. It tells the myths of their origins; it tells—as tales of their half-remembered heroes and ancestors--the patterns of migration and feeding that they follow through the changing seasons; it tells, as entertainment, what the tribe has learned through generations and needs to know in order to survive.

When at last the sky begins to brighten and the sun begins to rise, the story—and the fire—are allowed to die out.

Some places along their wandering migration are safer and more generous of food than other places. At these they linger; their camps become larger, stronger, and more permanent. Gradually the nighttime story-telling ritual dies out. Only the old folk remember it now—those who have survived into their 20's—and the recitation takes place only on special--on festive--occasions.

Over hundreds and thousands of years as the intellectual skills of the tribe develop written language and their technology finds and develops writing surfaces and mediums, the stories are written down, and the primitive basis for entertainment and education through literature is born.

Worldwide Tangled Web

2011-03-06T12:24:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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We face a number of important problems here in the U.S. and around the world. While these problems are distinct, they are also massively interrelated. They twist and cling to one another like a huge ball of string that has been pulled at carelessly. They can be untangled, but it must be done, not just soon--it grows worse year by year--but carefully and thoughtfully. Evey time we grab and tug on one string or another, a hard, tangled knot is pulled tight somewhere else in the puzzling, tangled ball.

For example, the unrest in Arab lands is another sign of the long, slow curve of history toward democracy and human rights. Yet it will destabilize the region for years. And since the Middle East and North Africa produce more than one third of the world's oil, it has already increased the rate of inflation and set back the U.S. and worldwide economic recovery.

Closely related to this is the problem of wealth disparity--the widening gap between the very rich and the rest of us. This depends on political pressure to make broad populations pay for tax breaks and for trade and regulatory incentives for big businesses and the very wealthy. As Michael Moore says, "America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.... The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers." The reluctance (or political inability) to tax with fairness the wealthy and big businesses (including financial institutions) has led to huge federal deficits and to state and federal budget shortfalls.

Some states have attempted to deal with this by union busting, that is, by depriving workers of the right to bargain collectively against powerful employers. But union collective bargaining is one of the bedrock forces of American democracy. Erosion of such civil rights and civil liberties is a slippery slope; it is a snowball rolling downhill that is hard to stop.

And related to this, WikiLeaks has recently demonstrated that even in our democratic republic secrecy and savagery abound. Bradley Manning, who ostensibly stole the classified documents that WikiLeaks released, has already suffered months of torture in solitary confinement (although he has not yet been charged with a crime) and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been harassed through international courts for his heroic stand on freedom of speech. He and Manning may both face years in prison--even the death penalty. And for what? For revealing government crimes and mismanagement.

Meanwhile our poor planet is stressed by--
--overpopulation (there are far more people alive today than in the entire two million years combined of human evolution prior to the year 2000),
--pollution (billions of tons of garbage and complex chemicals are dumped into the atmosphere, land, and oceans every year),
--shortages (food prices worldwide are higher than they have ever been in history, and more than a dozen key industrial commodities from oil and silver to phosphates and fissionable uranium are expected to "run out" in the next few decades)
--global warming (and attendant droughts and floods, super-storms and rising seas, and forced emigration of tens of millions of people).

The remarkable thing about all these problems are that they are solvable. There is enough food in the world to feed everyone--the problem is access and distribution. And since the U.N. predicts that the world population will stabilize at around nine billion about halfway through this century, with proper land, water, and seed management, there could readily be enough food production to go around. That also depends, however, on eliminating the scourge of poverty, because people with an adequate standard of living and some assurance that their children will live to adulthood, tend to have less children.

This also depends on "solving" the terrible wealth disparity in the U.S. and around the world. No one "needs" more than a few million dollars to live a high and bountiful life; and if wealth accumulation for individuals around the world were limited to a maximum of a few million dollars, there would not need to be impoverished masses--no one would need to go hungry.

The world's problems are severe, and they are all tangled together, but they are solvable. Do we, as a species, have the wisdom to do this? That--as the saying goes--THAT is the question.
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Earmarks and Logrolling

2011-02-27T08:24:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Who would have thunk it? Earmarks are gone!
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The U. S. Congress--both the Senate and the House of Representatives--has killed earmarking. As candidates for federal office, members of Congress have often mounted impassioned campaign rhetoric against earmarks. They have even "agreed" from time to time to ban them. But now it has actually happened. Right now (and ostensibly for the next two years) our federal legislators are refraining from tagging special home-town funding onto national spending bills.
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Some key definitions:
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Pork-barrel spending: The term "pork-barrel" originally referred to a container for unwanted extras from slaughtered pigs. A hundred-years-and-more ago it acquired a second, humorously related, meaning: a political candidate would climb on an inverted pork barrel on the street corner by the local general store to address the crowd. He would shout and wave his hands and make extravagant promises about all the benefits he would send back home if he were elected. (I say "he" because all politicians were men back in those days--the first woman was elected to Congress in 1916.) The term "pork-barrel spending" came to mean unnecessary government expenditures that were allocated for political reasons.
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Earmarks: The term "earmarks" originally referred to tags put on the ears of cattle so they could be readily identified. The term was extended to the political sphere. Once elected, a politician would tag special spending provisions in national legislation so that they were designed to benefit his constituents back home. Sometimes this was done with a degree of subtlety, for example, a defense contract would be structured so that only a particular, home-town company could actually compete for it. But often earmarking was far more blatant than this.
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Logrolling: Logrolling, or birling, is a sport that originated in the lumberjack tradition of the northeastern United States and Canada. It involves standing on a log that is floating in a river and spinning it with ones feet, either to cooperate with, or to try to throw off another competitor. In legislative circles, logrolling is exchanging of favors such as trading votes to gain passage of actions of interest to each legislative member. A politician would be obligated to vote for other legislators' earmarked legislation if they voted for his--and, more importantly, to agree to greater spending measures than he would otherwise approve of. In other words, if everybody cooperated and "rolled the log" together, then nobody fell off.
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Some key quotations:
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On Congressional spending: "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about some real money."
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On the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars: "Most of us don't have to count the zeroes as carefully as Warren Buffet and the U.S. Congress do."
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On the evil and pervasive influence of spending-power: "We have the best legislators money can buy."
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One of the most notorious examples of earmarking in recent years was the Alaskan "Bridge to Nowhere." In 2005, at the behest of Representative Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, Congress approved $400 million to build an enormous bridge, the Gravina Island Bridge, in a sparsely inhabited (the island had 50 inhabitants) and little used (but it had an airport) corner of Alaska. While running for governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin promoted the bridge but after the project had been killed in Congress, she claimed credit for defeating it ("I said, 'thanks, but no thanks' "), but kept the money ($223 million) for other Alaskan projects and continued with another federal grant using $26 million to build a highway to the non-existent bridge.
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Earmarks and logrolling have been a major part--politically and financially--of the federal landscape for many years. They particularly ballooned during the early years of the 21st century. Prior to 2000, there were typically several hundred earmarks each year totaling, at most, a few billion dollars. In 2005 the number had grown to some 16,000 earmarks totaling $48 billion; in 2006, the total was $72 billion.
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Now earmarks are gone, for now at least--perhaps even for the next two years--or longer.
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State Budgets and Union Busting

2011-02-26T10:17:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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In recent days there have been massive demonstrations in state capitols across the United States protesting legislators' actions aimed at curbing the power of labor unions. This is an important problem, but also a complex one that can only be understood in an historical context.

In 1941 the U.S. emerged from the Great Depression of the 1930s into the Second World War. The men went to war, the women went to work filling in behind them, and amid a torrent of economic stimulation the government went into debt. By the end of the war in 1945, the U.S. national debt was greater than the GDP of the country for the first time in history. (The GDP or Gross Domestic Product is the total value for a given year of all the goods and services produced in a country.)

After the War there followed a wave of economic activity and prosperity in the U.S. which was, again, unprecedented in history. There was little competition. Europe was in ruins, the economic power that had begun to rise in the Orient had been decimated, and the emergence of the Third World in Africa and South America was still in the future. Fifteen million men returned from the war: half went to college under the G.I. Bill, the other half swelled the workforce (the women left their wartime jobs and returned home, but with a new self-assurance they would never relinquish). With the Marshall Plan the U.S. undertook to help rebuild war-torn Europe. This provided the U.S. economy with enormous stimulation. And the Cold War with the U.S.S.R. emerged to keep the U.S. competitiveness on a razor edge with threats of Communist world domination and nuclear annihilation hanging overhead for the next 40 years.

During the late 1940s the national debt was paid down (and never again rose to the level of the GDP until now, 2011).

The decades following the Second World War were also the heyday of labor unions. Through their negotiating power, such pillars of U.S. economic democracy were established as the eight-hour workday, the five-day work week, the minimum wage, child labor laws, safety in work environments, and health and retirement benefits for U.S. workers.

The union movement also organized the public sector as well as the private. Teachers, police and fire fighters, garbage collectors and clerks, and bureaucrats at every level of government were organized into unions and lobbied for better pay and benefits.

One of the most important effects of union power was that the economic prosperity of the period following World War II was widely distributed in the population. The G.I. Bill plus economic prosperity plus union power led to the rise of the great American middle class. The polarization of wealth between the very rich and the non-rich population masses that had characterized Western civilization for centuries and come to the fore in the U.S. with the robber barons and wealthy industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th century was not reestablished in post-Depression, post-World War II United States. Wages, wealth, education, health, and all aspects of the country's "standard of living" not only improved but expanded widely in the population.

Until, that is, the past 20 years. With the rise of global markets and financial flows enhanced by information technology, class disparity between the super-rich and the rest of us has risen again. In 1983, for example, the richest one percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income; today the top one percent take in more than 20 percent. In 2010, six leading hedge-fund managers got average incomes of $1 billion each while the average teacher salary in the U.S. was under $50,000. In other words, the income of one hedge-fund manager equaled the salary of more than 20,000 teachers.

During the ascendancy of union power, many government entities within the U.S. struck a Faustian bargain. Union demands for their members were met with modest pay raises to be paid now, but with appeasing health and retirement benefits--that the governments could not really afford--to be paid later. These were built into union contracts to be paid, somehow, by future generations of voters and their governments.

Those chickens have now come home to roost. With falling tax income due to the Great Recession and with U.S. Government stimulus money running out, many state governments are being called on to pay huge health and retirement benefits for their workers. Many states, as a result of this and tax breaks for the rich, face severe budget shortfalls. They must raise taxes--but, politically, they cannot; they must lay off teachers and nurses and emergency workers as well as clerks--but, in good conscience, they must not, certainly not enough to cover the shortfalls. Many states are faced with defaulting on their debts--many are, in fact, faced with bankruptcy or the equivalent (although it has not entirely been established whether a state can, in fact, declare bankruptcy). Many are presently attempting to disrupt the lingering power of labor unions in the name of addressing the states' fiscal woes.

Unions have been a powerful positive force in American history. They must not be gutted now to help solve government fiscal problems. They are, in fact, badly needed now because a class of super-rich and powerful financiers, big-business types, and politicians (also including, one notes, overpaid entertainers and athletes) has risen up again in recent years.

The income disparity in the U.S. represents a significant threat to our democratic institutions and our way of life. Unions can help address this, and we need all the help we can get.
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The Challenge of Guantanamo

2011-02-25T19:29:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Some prisoners of war--the argument goes--are too dangerous to be released, but cannot be tried for their crimes in a court of law because the evidence against them is too shaky, perhaps because it was gathered on a battlefield rather than at a "crime scene" (where careful, knowledgeable arresting officers would gather, identify, and protect the evidence from loss and misrepresentation), or it was acquired under torture (which makes it unreliable since anyone subject to enough pain and fear will admit to anything).

These prisoners pose a difficult dilemma, legally and morally. On the one hand, they cannot be released; on the other, they cannot be tried. Countries around the world have refused to take these dangerous prisoners off our hands. U.S. courts, both civilian and military, have found it impossible to process them.

To house them, the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was created. Importantly, it is not on U.S. soil and it does not hold U.S. citizens; it is therefore beyond the reach of U.S. justice. There, these prisoners are held indefinitely in a kind of legal limbo--without being sentenced, without rights, without hope--and, by the way, at enormous expense to their captors, both financially, and especially politically.

Civil libertarians around the world have been enraged at the abuse of human rights at Guantanamo. President Obama campaigned on the promise that he would close the prison at Guantanamo. But politicians' promises--like those made by a lover in the heat of passion--are notoriously unreliable. It is now well past the closure deadline Obama set for himself, and still there are some 200 prisoners at Guantanamo--and there is little prospect that any will be leaving soon.

True, some things have changed. A few years ago, Guantanamo was a snake pit of abuse. Prisoners were kept shackled in small, isolated cages. They received poor food and health care, little exercise, no social contacts (with outsiders, other prisoners, the press, human rights workers, or even their lawyers), and they were subject to constant physical and psychological harassment. Most of this barbaric savagery has been ameliorated.

But the problem will not go away. Not, for most of these men, until death--the last and highest court of appeals--releases them from their suffering. And even then others will follow them. In a world of terrorism and ethnic rivalries, of political domination and suppression, of haves and have-nots, there will always be some from whom society must insulate itself, but who do not fall within the convenient definitions of "criminals."

The resolution--the future of Guantanamo--is to create a model for the world to see: to demonstrate how a democratic, humanitarian society deals with impossible people. These prisoners may have to remain prisoners--indefinitely. But the conditions of their incarceration should be as humane as possible: healthful (physically and emotionally), respectful (of both their legal and human rights), and transparent--for their friends and families, human rights workers, lawyers, and the press to shine the disinfecting power of sunlight on their poor estates.

That is the challenge of Guantanamo--for the U.S. to accept the necessity of doing this impossible job, and to do it well.
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The Trouble with the Arab Revolts

2011-02-24T06:31:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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These are heady times across the Arab world. Throughout North Africa and southwest Asia protesters have risen up against their entrenched dictators; they have unseated several and rocked the foundations of many. In the Western halls of liberal democracy one can almost hear a smug refrain, "See? We knew it would happen to you."

In the bed-time-story view of history, oppressed peoples rise up and throw off their yokes--yes, there is tribulation and bloodshed--but no, there is no turning back. Out of the chaos, order rises--pluralistic, peace loving, and devoted to civil liberties.

But the real world is not often like the bed-time-story view. The trouble with the Arab revolts is that there are no seeds of liberalism hiding, gestating, waiting to rise from the ashes. For decades, opposition voices have been beaten down--the would-be leaders have been arrested, murdered, or driven abroad; their nascent organizational efforts have been nipped in the bud.

The functioning of a mature democracy is invariably a messy business. (Knowing that it is invariably messy is the only bleak comfort one can take from the political paralysis that greed and small-minded ambition have brought to the present-day U.S. national dialog.) Running a democracy is hard--building a new democracy is even harder. It depends on having access to the seed ideas but also on stumbling historically across great leaders who have brilliant charisma (which they must have to emerge as leaders) but also grand, ethical perspectives. It depends, as well, on the surging--but unpredictable--tides of history. In other words, in addition to the seed ideas and the time for cooking up the necessary institutions, it depends--let's face it--on luck.

We rejoice with the Arabs in throwing off their yokes. But we also shudder fearfully with them in contemplating the chaos, the mistakes, and the false starts that lie ahead--that must inevitably be a part of the birth of their new nations: the resurgence of bitter tribal rivalries, the assertion of vicious religious and ethnic prejudices, the tenacious greed of the "haves" and the plaintive pain of the "have nots."

That is the trouble with the Arab revolts. At present they are joyous celebrations; the skies are lit with fireworks. But all too soon the liberated peoples must begin to find their way home in the dark, through the wolves and goblins that inhabit the night.
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Arab Uprisings

2011-02-20T14:22:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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There are now civil protests in 17 Arab countries across North Africa and Southwest Asia. These represent some 300 million people, nearly 2/3 of the total Arab population of the world.

In 8 of these countries (totaling 150 million people)--
--either the regime has been toppled (Tunisia and Egypt),
--or there are menacing protests (Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Bahrain, Yemen, and Iran).

In the other 9 countries (representing the other 150 million people) there are what The Economist calls "mild protests" (Morocco, Mauritania, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Djibouti).

These countries have much in common--
--all of them identify with Arabic culture and use Arabic as a predominant language;
--they have all suffered limited freedoms under dictatorships for many years;
--they have young populations, most with a median age under 25--the median age in 6 of the countries is under 21 (for comparison, the median age in the U.S. is 37);
--most are poor, with GDPs/person under $10,000; the exceptions are Lebanon ($13,000), Libya ($19,000), Bahrain ($24,000), and Kuwait ($41,000)--for comparison, the GDP/person in the U.S. is $47,000.

However, there are significant differences among them--
--literacy rates, according to a U.N. survey, vary from around 90% in Jordan and Bahrain to under 60% in Morocco, Sudan, and Yemen (the literacy rate in the U.S. is 99%)
--unemployment ranges from over 20% in Morocco and Algeria to under 3% in Kuwait (the unemployment rate in the U.S. is 9%)

Most significantly, although they all seek civil freedoms, participation in government, and economic improvement, they are on widely different paths. In several countries there has been brutal, murderous suppression of the uprisings with police firing tear gas and live ammunition into crowds of peaceful demonstrators. In Egypt the army has taken control of the country and may--as it has promised--facilitate democratic reforms, or may--as appears increasingly likely--impose a new military dictatorship.

The Arab world is in turmoil. Changes are in the offing. But the form those changes will take is very uncertain.
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The U.S. Budget Crisis

2011-02-20T00:46:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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The U.S. Government owes $14 trillion, roughly equal to our Gross Domestic Product or GDP (the total value of all goods and services produced in the country in one year). This is excessive; most advanced, post-industrial countries have national debts that are much smaller fractions of their GDPs.

Roughly half of this debt is held within the government, owed to the Federal Reserve, the Social Security Trust Fund, and other funds and departments within the vast federal system. About another fourth is also held within the U.S.--by states, mutual funds and insurance companies, and other large private investors. But a significant portion (28%) is held abroad by the governments of many countries including some like China and Iran that do not necessarily have social and political goals similar to those of the U.S.

Foreign countries hold U.S. government debt because it is the most stable and reliable economic resource available in the world. But owing foreign governments a lot of money is worrisome for the U.S. Remember the aphorism: When your banker calls, you listen.

During the last four years of the Clinton administration (1997-2001), the U.S. government balanced its budget; it did not add to the national debt. Moreover, fiscal plans were made projecting revenue surpluses into the foreseeable future. The national debt was scheduled to decline.

These plans were thrown out during the eight years that Bush was in office (2001-2009). Rather than being reduced as planned, the national debt soared--it nearly doubled (from $5.7 trillion to $10.7 trillion).

During the first two years of the Obama administration (2009 and 2010), because it was necessary to rescue the U.S. (and world) economy from a severe recession--the result of years of private greed and inadequate public oversight--it was impossible to have balanced budgets and surpluses that would reduce the national debt.

The economic recovery is now well underway. The time is nigh upon us to balance the federal budget--to reduce government expenses and increase federal revenues.

Can this be accomplished, not with the ideological meat cleavers of traditional Republicans or even Tea Partiers--which cannot, in any event, be politically sustained--but in a responsible and fair way? Perhaps it can, but with difficulty. Economically it is readily feasible. Even the great entitlement programs and military expenditures can be comfortably and safely curtailed. The U.S. spends nearly $700 billion a year on the military--more than the next twenty most heavily funded military governments in the world combined. Obama has proposed cutting $78 billion from the Pentagon's core spending over the next five years. This is a worthy start, but only a start, and even this is subject to political wranglings since every member of Congress has military facilities--bases, storage and waste depots, training and test facilities--as well as companies with production contracts, and other lucrative pieces of the military fiscal pie within his or her state or district.

What about Social Security? Raising the retirement age from 65 to 70 over the next 20 years would go a long way toward solving the Social Security funding problem. Such an increase is very reasonable; the average life expectancy of U.S. workers has increased by about 15 years to about 80 since the 65-year-old age level was established. In addition to this, raising the maximum income contribution level from the current $107,000 per year to $180,000 per year would cost an individual who makes this six-figure income about $6,000 per year, but would render the Social Security system solvent for many decades.

But neither of these eminently fair and reasonable fixes is politically easy. Probably neither can be accomplished within the current big-money-driven Congressional paralysis.

The additional enormous federal costs of Medicaid and Medicare, each more than 1/3 of a trillion dollars a year, could be "fixed" by sensible changes such as limiting tort settlements in medical malpractice cases to $1 million (which would enormously reduce medical malpractice insurance costs), allowing the use of generic drugs throughout the Medicaid and Medicare systems (they are already used in Veterans Administration facilities), and requiring doctors to work on salaried contracts rather than a fee-for-service basis (which would still provide them with incomes several times the national average).

But, again, these changes run counter to entrenched, enormously powerful lobbying--in this case by MDs, pharmaceutical companies, and trial lawyers.

Other moves such as selling off federal lands (the U.S. government owns 30% of the land area of the country, including, for example, 84% of the state of Nevada); streamlining the tax code and plugging loopholes; installing a value added tax (almost every other advanced post-industrial country has a VAT); reducing agricultural and industrial subsidies (which currently cost about $30 billion a year, and support the price of a variety of commodities including cancer-causing tobacco and pollution-causing fossil fuels); all of such moves are politically difficult.

The U.S. budget crisis is severe and urgent. Equitable economic fixes are available, but the political will is probably not.
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Microfinance and Pay-for-Success Bonds

2011-02-19T09:11:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Microfinance, first developed by Mohammad Yunus in Bangladesh in the 1970s, has enabled millions of people around the world to raise themselves out of poverty. An investor-donor with only a few dollars to contribute can use the Web to participate in one of these programs (http://www.kiva.org/).

"Pay for Success Bonds" is another investment-donorship opportunity on the horizon. You can lend money to a good social program; if it meets its goals, you make 13% annual return; if it doesn't, you lose your investment.

Investment programs like this have gotten under way in the U.K. as "Social Impact Bonds." The Obama administration has set aside $100 million to test pilot programs in this country. Both New York City and Baltimore are interested, and the National Guard Youth Challenge overseen by the Defense Department which provides skills training under military discipline to disadvantaged youth may also try this funding approach.

("Pay for Success Bonds" are discussed in The Economist, Feb. 19, 2011, page 36)
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Nuclear Energy in China

2011-02-17T12:38:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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The U.S. is partnering with China to develop the new "traveling wave" technology for non-polluting nuclear power plants. (The system uses up old reactor fuel rods and even eats its own waste; plus it can be designed to require almost no maintenance for 60 years--at the end of which time there is nothing toxic to contend with.)

The deal is that it would take up to 10 years in the U.S. to navigate all the licensing requirements and regulatory controls, whereas in China--with far less stringent environmental safeguards--it can be done in 18 months.
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STEBYJASAIL

2011-02-16T13:37:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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The civil uprisings across the Arab world during the past few weeks now affect over 200 million people--approximately 2/3 of the Arab population of the world.

The countries affected differ widely from one another--some are rich, some poor; some sophisticated, some backwards; all with big cities, but some with large rural areas.

What they have in common is that the people have been oppressed for decades by vicious dictators. And thanks to modern information technology (satellite TV, the Internet, smart phones, and social media such as Twitter and Facebook), the citizenry have risen up to demand free speech, free assembly, less government corruption, and less of a have-vs.-have-not society.

The title STEBYJASAIL is an acronym for the names of these countries in order (roughly) of their present revolutionary progress--
Sudan,
Tunisia,
Egypt,
Bahrain,
Yemen,
Jordan,
Algeria,
Saudi Arabia,
Iran,
Libya.
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Social Prematurity: A Disease That Has Been Conquered

2011-02-16T13:30:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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When I had my obligatory brush with obstetrics-gynecology during my medical school and internship years in the early 1960s, we used to encounter a condition in which a woman appeared to be, say, six months pregnant but had only been married for three months. The mother and fetus were healthy and the pregnancy was developing well, but all was way ahead of schedule.

The diagnosis carried on the charts for this condition was "social prematurity." To any doctor, nurse, or other medical person reading the chart this meant that the baby was going to arrive well ahead of schedule, but not to worry (as one does about premature births) because only society had a problem.

This condition, social prematurity, has been totally eradicated.
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Whither Egypt?

2011-02-12T11:52:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Egypt has turned over a new page in history. After 30 years of savage, suppressive dictatorship, a massive popular uprising has thrown out the hated regime. The key question is, where do things go from here?

Egypt has a lot of things going for it. Its culture has storied roots that go back thousands of years. Moreover it is a huge country--with a population over 80 million--and widely respected: it has often been a leader in the Arab world. In addition much of the public elan is peaceful and religiously oriented: it was impressive to see vast throngs of demonstrators break from their agitated activities and kneel facing Mecca for five-o'clock prayers; it was also impressive to hear that "gangs" emerged from the crowds to protect antiquities and prevent looting; millions of people rose up to resist the government without violence, injury, or death--except that rained on them by government thugs.

Also important on the positive side, the uprising in Egypt is taking place on the world stage. Modern information technology--satellite TV, the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, and smart phones--have brought poignant words and images from the streets of Cairo into homes around the world.

There is another important positive factor. The army--not the regime's hated, vicious police--is in charge. And the army has been built up by conscription; it is said that there is not a family in Egypt that does not have at least one young member in the army. During the uprising, the army refused to fire on the demonstrators; the army did much to keep the piece. On the other hand, while the lower ranks of the army are "of the people," the upper ranks are aligned with--and have been enriched by--the dictatorial regime. How the army's role in managing a possible transition to democracy will play out is a very important question.

The transition to democracy--if there is one--may be long and arduous. For 30 years all political dissent has been savagely suppressed; there simply are no political leaders and parties waiting in the shadows. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, the closest thing to a political alternative to the defunct dictatorial regime, has been brutalized.

The future of Egypt, at its best, looks like this:
--Thirty years of "emergency law" will be lifted;
--The Army will shepherd a peaceful transition to democracy;
--The constitution will be amended to limit the term of a president and to strengthen the judiciary;
--Political leaders and parties will emerge;
--Free and fair elections will be held in September under international supervision;
--And a stalwart contingent of activists will continue to hold their ground in Cairo's Tahrir Square, ready to sound the alarm and call the populace back onto the streets if the reform transition falters.

The future of Egypt depends on all of these factors. It is a precarious time. The whole world is watching--especially the Arab world (especially the Arab dictators and their downtrodden people).
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Key Quotes

2011-02-12T06:44:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Here are some key quotes worth thinking about:

On the dark side of vested power: "As WikiLeaks demonstrated, even the government of a morally inclined culture with a tested and tempered democracy will indulge in mischievous perversions."

On the importance of free speech and a free, unfettered press: "The only possible antidotes to government corruption and malfeasance are full disclosure and accountability: as the saying goes, 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant.' "

On the gullibility of the masses: "The politically driven deluge of misinformation regarding healthcare showed us that even a literate and supposedly sophisticated people can be swayed by vehement rhetoric."
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Worldwide Awakening

2011-02-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Twenty five hundred years ago over a span of about four generations there appeared at many places around the Earth the greatest flowering of the human spirit the World had ever known.

In Greece, this was the age of The Seven Wise Men who are considered by many to be the founders of Western civilization; these were the days of Periclean Athens: Socrates and Plato laid the foundations of Western Philosophy; Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes created the theatrical arts as we have come to know them; Herodotus and Thucydides laid down the founding principles of writing history; democracy was born; the root ideas of rational scientific inquiry were created; and more.

Prophets of the Old Testament were staking out the moral and ethical bounds of the three great Abrahamic religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In India, the Buddha Gautama arose from meditation under the Bodhi Tree to begin his forty-year ministry, and started a wave of religious enlightenment that spread across India, Tibet, China, and Japan.

In China, Confucius composed the Analects and Lao-Tse, the Tao Te Ching during this brief period; these are, to this day, the two great pillars of Chinese philosophy and religion.

There were great social, intellectual, and artistic achievements in South and Central America, and in North Africa.

Indeed, those few decades 2500 years ago produced across the globe the greatest era of human achievement and flowering of the human spirit the world had ever known--an Awakening which has been unsurpassed.

Until now--until the worldwide intellectual and social revolution of our own day.

We are in the middle of the Second Worldwide Awakening. The industrial and scientific revolutions of the past two centuries are part of it, as are the globalization of commerce and the spread of democracy and human rights which has accelerated over the past few decades.

Do not be distracted by reports of savage dictators and genocides--those are the historical norm; it is only in recent decades that they have come to be seen as aberrant offenses to the human spirit and internationally illegal. Yes, it is true that one sixth of the world's population live in abject poverty without enough food or clean water, but this has always been true, and until recent years, no one took particular notice of them. Nowadays three things are different. First, the impoverished and downtrodden have a voice and an image; the Internet, social media, and the ubiquitous press are making them seen and heard around the world. Second, rich people care; every year philanthropic billions channeled through thousands of NGOs (as well as First-World governments) try to help, and are making a difference. Third, science and technology as well as global politics have made solutions possible.

We are in the midst of the Second Worldwide Awakening. It is--and will be--even greater than the first. True, the challenges are daunting--but also true, the resources are formidable.
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Arab Dictatorships Teeter

2011-01-29T01:37:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Over the past six weeks a wave of civil and political unrest has engulfed the Arab world in North Africa and the adjacent Arabian Peninsula.

It began in Tunisia (December 18, 2010),
spread to Algeria (Dec. 28),
then Jordan (Jan. 14),
Mauritania and Oman (Jan. 17),
Saudi Arabia (Jan. 21),
Egypt (Jan. 25),
and Yemen (Jan. 27).

The root causes are high unemployment, inflation of food prices, government corruption, lack of freedom of speech, and generally poor living conditions in the face of exorbitant wealth of the families of entrenched dictators.

Modern information technology has played an important part in these uprisings. Satellite TV and the Internet have spread images of political freedom and comfortable life styles into downtrodden homes around the world. Then last fall WikiLeaks revealed rampant corruption in the government of Tunisia. And the social-connection systems of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have allowed people on the streets to communicate with one another to encourage and coordinate their demonstrations.

These are not anti-religious movements. It is fascinating to see throngs of thousands on the streets of Cairo pause in their riotous police defiance and kneel together facing Mecca for five o'clock evening prayers. And they are not anarchic. In Tunisia in early January when a large group of lawyers tried to meet to establish a new government and were beaten and arrested by the police, 95% of Tunisia's 8,000 lawyers went on strike the next day.

The U.S. State Department has mixed allegiances. They have supported many of these dictators in the interest of worldwide political stability and favoritism for U.S. interests. During the infamous Bush era, many of these countries provided secret prisons for the U.S. for holding (and torturing) individuals who had been kidnapped and "rendered" outside the law. But over the past few days, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have voiced support for the civil rights of the anti-dictator throngs.

It has been said that "Tunisia is the Arab Gdansk" and will provide--as Gdansk did for the Polish Solidarity movement that spread to the ousting of Communism from Eastern Europe--the beginning of the end of savage dictatorships in the Arab world. It is too early to know, but the signs are hopeful. We shall see.
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Google Books

2011-01-22T09:13:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Google has undertaken to scan electronically everything ever written in any language. So far their project, Google Books, has gathered two trillion words from 15 million books. That represents 12% of every book in every language published since the Gutenberg Bible in the 1450s.

Although copyright disputes have limited the right to put some recent works in readable form, Google has produced a giant database of words and word patterns for analysis. Some interesting findings are:

The English language now has a vocabulary of one million words.

More than 50% of these--after excluding proper names--have been missed by all dictionaries. (Yep, there are over 500,000 words in use in English that have never been picked up by dictionary scholars.)

Historical periods of repression or censorship of certain authors, ideas, and fields are readily trackable--and some new ones previously unknown to historians have been discovered.

[Science, 17 Dec 2010, page 1600]
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ObamaCare 2.0.11

2011-01-08T09:15:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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The United States is the only "First World" country (that is, the only advanced, industrialized country) in the world that does not have universal health care for its citizens. Tens of millions of our citizens simply cannot afford to get sick or injured. If they do, they have no trail of medical history--no ongoing record of how their health has been in the past, what (if any) treatments they have received, and how they may have fared as the results of those treatments. There is no single clinic or physician who knows them and their families and cares for them. When they get sick or injured--or just plain old and worn out--their choice is to suffer and muddle through as best they can, perhaps with the help of friends or family if they can get some help there--until death heals their pain.

Some, if they can afford it, have expensive, private health-care insurance--insurance that may take a fourth or more of their entire family budget; insurance that may fall short or abandon them if they get too "expensively" sick and begin to pose too great a financial burden on the insurance company. Some (many millions, in fact) rely on hospital emergency rooms where the care they get is expensive (it costs about twice as much as compared with care from a neighborhood medical clinic) and of relatively poor quality since the hospital is staffed and equipped for more urgent and emergent services and, in any event, has no ongoing record of their medical needs. The costs of this ER care are borne by the hospitals--by their foundations and donors, by their government grants, and by increased premiums paid by people who do have medical insurance (about half of the cost of medical insurance premiums goes to pay for people who have no insurance of their own).

The result is that although the U.S. has some of the best medical schools and medical research facilities in the world--and makes the best of medical care available for the rich and privileged--it has, overall, the most expensive and poorest quality medical care for the bulk of its citizens of any civilized nation.

Teddy Roosevelt, a century ago, was the first president to try to pass universal health-care laws for the U.S. He was not successful. And every president since then has tried--and failed--until last year. In 2010 President Obama, expending a tremendous amount of "political capital" (that is, wielding presidential influence and losing popularity), managed to muscle through Congress legislation establishing universal health care for the American people, legislation which is now gradually--and over the next several years--being put into place.

There have already been significant positive effects: stabilization of insurance premiums (which used to go up--sometimes drastically--year after year), refusal to let insurance companies drop people who get too expensively sick, etc. But there have also been problems. For example, several cases have gone to the courts challenging the constitutionality of the new health-care laws; one or more of these cases is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court in the next couple of years. Furthermore, serious errors have emerged in the difficult projections that were made of how many people would choose this or that provision of the new laws. In addition, implementation costs are proving significantly higher than expected in some cases. And--perhaps most significantly--several large unions and employers have decided that under the new laws it will be more profitable for them to dump sick employees onto the public rolls.

These problems will be patched and "healed." A new era of health-care responsibility is upon us--the U.S. is ready to join the rest of the civilized world in providing health care for its citizens. But the path to this goal over the next few years will be rocky.
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WikiLeaks Revisited

2010-12-26T21:08:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Several months ago an organization named WikiLeaks began to make public secret documents about the U.S. conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and U.S. diplomatic communications from around the world. WikiLeaks provided hundreds of thousands of stolen documents to leading newspapers (The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel among others); WikiLeaks also published the documents on the Web.

The WikiLeaks documents were vast, and generally tedious and trivial. Tens of thousands of hours have now been spent by journalists, historians, and security annalists combing through the documents looking for nuggets of useful information. There is evidence that the U.S. Government has been secretive and deceptive in communicating to the American public and the world about its military efforts. In addition U.S. diplomats have been embarrassed by having caustic and critical remarks made public, remarks that they thought they were making in confidence.

The U.S. Government has arrested Bradley Manning who purportedly stole the documents, and arranged for the international arrest (on sexual assault charges in Sweden) of Julian Assange who founded and manages WikiLeaks. The Government also had international bank accounts closed and arranged for such major financial services as VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal to refuse to handle WikiLeaks donations.

In addition there has been a war in cyberspace between the U.S. Government trying to dismantle and destroy the WikiLeaks Website and "hackers" around the world who have tried to support and defend it.

Have there been any more dire consequences?

No one has been killed as a result of WikiLeaks. In fact the Pentagon reports that no one has had a changed assignment or been given extra protection because of the WikiLeaks revelations. The documents were carefully redacted before release to remove any personal identification that might bring about reprisals.

Furthermore, no one has been injured--except for Pfc. Bradley Manning who was arrested for stealing the documents and who, although he has had no trial and conviction nor even any charges filed against him, has been held in grueling solitary confinement for more than eight months and is showing signs of the mental and physical deterioration that is well known to result from such treatment.

Civil rights groups and some journalists and private activists have risen to challenge the governments' suppression of free speech. Also at issue is a democratic government's responsibility to be truthful with its citizens.

The Internet is proving to be an important evolving force for dissemination of information and for public involvement in governmental affairs. WikiLeaks is at least symbolic of this force, and perhaps, for now, the leading edge.
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DREAM Act

2010-12-24T17:13:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Perhaps you've heard of the DREAM Act. It's the one major Obama initiative that the Republicans continued to block during the recent not-so-lame duck session of Congress. The DREAM Act is pretty hard to argue with. It would have provided for citizenship to kids who have grown up in this country (although their parents are illegal immigrants) if they are law-abiding and go to college or join the military for a couple of years. Immigration reform has a lot of sticky issues--border guards, visa checks, hiring of illegal immigrants at sub-standard wages, immigration quotas, and paths to citizenship for university students and foreigners with special skills. Unfortunately the DREAM Act got kicked down the road with the rest of the thornier immigration issues.

But overall the recent lame-duck session of Congress was very productive. An economy-stimulating tax package made it through, as did the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and the START Treaty limiting nuclear weapons with Russia. On the other hand, although a short continuing resolution to fund the government was passed, significant battles loom ahead on passing a full budget and raising the debt ceiling--it will be interesting to see what the new Republicans in the House and Senate actually do about these when they have their boots on the ground in Washington and have to govern rather than campaign. (The Republicans since the elections have already indulged enthusiastically in earmarks--that is, directing special funding toward home-town projects--despite campaigning against this practice.)

Some activities of government proceed apace. The Environmental Protection Agency has announced their determination to move forward with stronger regulations limiting pollution under the existing legislation since they did not succeed in getting a new, stronger legislative mandate. And the new Wall Street regulations continue to evolve in implementation, as does the new universal health-care program.

Hopefully the new Congress will deal with tax reform (that is, simplification of the absurdly complicated income tax, and installation of a "VAT," a value-added tax), and reinstitution of campaign finance reform (which the Supreme Court's ridiculous decision last year in "Citizens United" left in shambles). There may even be some attempt to revise the Senate's filibuster rules.

But immigration reform is a difficult issue. For one thing there are some 13 million illegal immigrants living and working in this country; they do not pay their fair share of taxes, but they also do not get fair protection of the law. Perhaps the new Congress will deal with some of the many and difficult immigration issues, or at least will DREAM on.
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The American Dream

2010-12-20T16:05:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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***Thanksgiving and mom's apple pie?

***The Statue of Liberty and the Golden Gate Bridge?
......Yosemite and the Grand Canyon?

***Living in suburbia with an SUV in the garage and sending
......your 2.4 kids to college?

***Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

***Building a better mouse trap?
......Making more money than your father did?

***Norman Rockwell, Horatio Alger, Mark Twain,
......and Frederic Remington?

***The "Ugly American" and Cowboy Diplomacy?

Maybe all of these--and more--go into making up the image of the U.S.--the so called "American Dream."

The term itself, "the American dream," was coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in his book, Epic of America. Since then it has come to capture much more than he originally intended. In retrospect, for the 19th century and before, it brings to mind adventurers, religious outcasts, and downtrodden people--first from Europe, then from around the world--emigrating to a country with boundless land and a classless society unfettered by tradition; a place where an individual could succeed through ability and ambition. During the 19th century its image was the wilderness frontier--the Wild West of Daniel Boone, the Gold Rush, and the Pony Express. As the 19th century turned into the 20th, the Robber Barons of big industry--steel, railroads; later, cars, tract housing, sky scrapers--came to dominate the image. And then the atom bomb, the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, the space race, the Cold War. And most recently, world supremacy in money, trade, and political power, with world leadership in higher education, scientific and technical innovation, and democratic humanitarian morality; these have perhaps become the main characteristics of the American Dream.

There have always been problems with the American Dream--harsh realities not far behind the rosy, surface scenarios: slavery of blacks imported from Africa and the slaughter and forced migration of Native American populations; the extravagant spoiling of wild places and destruction of indigenous species; favoritism, corruption, and inefficiency in government. Recently, a culture of incarceration (the U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners) including the horrors of prolonged solitary confinement for tens of thousands; "wars" that are unwinnable by definition--that have no front lines, no uniformed armies, no Geneva-Convention ethics of engagement (such as the "wars" on drugs, terrorism, AIDS, and poverty); big-money politics with legislative gridlock; state and federal government financing that teeters on the edge of bankruptcy; abuse of human rights; and imbalanced wealth distribution (5% of the population own 95% of the nation's assets).

The "American Dream" represents a complex and changing image. The term has come to symbolize the best of the U.S. Usually we enjoy it proudly. But the reality has--and always has had--a darker, shameful side.
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The Value of Videogames

2010-12-15T21:11:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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The brain has a built-in "delight of mastery" (DOM) response; in other words, there is pleasure from learning sensory-motor skills. This is obviously both a success advantage for an individual and an evolutionary advantage for a species.

Games are fun because of this DOM response. If we participate in a game, we advance certain skills; every game is designed to reward this. If we observe a game rather than play it ourselves (as with spectator sports), we identify with the performers and indulge in the satisfying fantasy, "I could do that."

[By the way, humor is also based on the DOM response; perhaps that will be the basis for another essay.]

The skills we learn (or enhance) playing games are either mental (as with the games of chess and go) or physical (as with such sports as football, baseball, tennis, or golf).

Over the past few decades a new variety of games, videogames, based on evolving computer technology has captured imaginations and markets throughout the industrialized world. Many parents restrict--or at least lament--the "wasted" hours their children spend shooting down alien spacecraft, destroying monsters, or finding ridiculous, hidden, magic items. It has only recently come to the fore that these games provide useful learning experiences.

First was the discovery that a few hours playing a videogame involving three-dimensional manipulation of visual objects leveled the playing field between boys and girls in spatial acuity. This had been the last bastion of statistical differences in IQ between the sexes. On all other dimensions of IQ testing--vocabulary, problem solving, numeracy, etc.--boys and girls seemed on a par. But perhaps because of the cultural inclination to have girls play with dolls and boys play with action toys, the statistical difference in spacial acuity appeared by age ten and persisted well into adolescence. However, with only a few hours of suitable videogame experience, this difference disappeared.

As to what else a child learns from playing videogames, there are several other major skills that stand out. The most obvious of these is visual-motor coordination. Videogames provide practice coordinating finger and hand responses (on a keyboard or with a joystick) to stimuli on a video screen. Another skill set, equally obvious in retrospect, is comfortable facility with electronic devises. This has led to the familiar perspective that if you have trouble working your home computer system, you should find a teenager to help you with it.

In addition an important cognitive ability that a child can enhance by playing certain videogames involves problem solving, particularly trying a variety of approaches and thinking "outside of the box." One popular genre of videogames rewards turning over imaginary rocks, looking behind invisible screens, and all manner of imaginative attempts to work toward a solution. The player is challenged again and again to think of new, varied, different, and unusual approaches.

The next mental-emotional skill that is enhanced by playing certain videogames is subtle but very important, namely, learning to respond calmly and logically in an emergency situation. Prior to the advent of videogames, no one had had the experience--much less hundreds or thousands of practice episodes--of being fractions of a second away from death and destruction. The post-videogame generation has the capacity to respond to an evolving automobile crash or house fire with cool, calm, calculating efficiency. (I postulate, by the way, that playing world-destruction-type videogames is protective against developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]; an epidemiological study will soon emerge demonstrating that soldiers who played this type of videogame in adolescence are less prone to developing PTSD.)

Also of importance for us oldsters is the role that videogames can play in delaying and counteracting the mental declines of old age. The phenomenon of "use it or lose it" is well known in the elderly. In many studies (and anecdotes), the senior citizen who continues to use particular verbal, numeracy, or other mental skills preserves those skills far beyond their age-mates. Properly prescribed videogames can be a fun way to preserve mental abilities in old age.
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Supreme Court and Health Care

2010-12-15T11:51:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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There are (or soon will be) four epic Supreme Court errors.

First: In 1857 in the infamous Dred Scott case the Supreme Court ruled that no one of African descent could be a citizen of the U.S.--once a slave, always a slave. Dred Scott entered the Court a free man and left a slave. This has echoed through history as the worst decision the U.S. Supreme Court ever made.

Second: In 2000 the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George Bush although Al Gore had won the popular vote by a million votes and probably would have won the electoral vote as well if the Florida recount had been allowed to proceed--the Supreme Court stopped it. The disastrous results of Bush's presidency are incontestable.

Third: In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled in "Citizens United" that a corporation can spend unlimited, secret funds to influence an election. This disastrous reversal of campaign-finance laws moves us ever closer to having "the best government money can buy."

Fourth: In a few months the Supreme Court will probably rule that aspects of the health-care program enacted in 2010 are unconstitutional--specifically, the requirement that a citizen make a purchase (health insurance) from a private company violates the Constitution's allowable limits on trade governance.

This restriction would destroy the financial viability of the health-care program. Insurance companies can only afford to sell insurance to sick people if they have a large field of well people (that is, not-yet-sick people) to average out the costs. That is the essence of the insurance business. (As things stand now, about 1/3 of the premiums paid for health insurance go to pay for care for the uninsured; this cost would be cut in half if these people had insurance that let them go to scheduled clinics rather than use emergency services--and they would get better care.)

Happily this problem can be overcome by reawakening the "public option" and offering people a non-private source to buy insurance from. People can still opt to purchase from a private company, but a non-private source would be available.

Whether our politically driven and gridlocked federal government will have the wisdom and capacity to solve this problem is uncertain.
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The Obama-Republican Tax Compromise

2010-12-13T00:18:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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It seems that President Obama has let the Republicans bully him into a second round of economic stimulus. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out in the next couple of years.

Two years ago when the U.S. and World economies headed into a severe recession, the U.S. Congress passed an enormous economic stimulus package. This involved borrowing several hundred billion dollars to create jobs by funding infrastructure, green energy development, education, etc. But it was not enough. The economy staggered to its feet but lagged and sagged; unemployment stalled at just under 10%.

Another round of government spending was needed, but had become politically unpopular and Obama did not have the political capital to push it through the legislature. However, tax cuts are the other way of putting money in the hands of consumers, and consumer spending is the backbone of economic growth. Granted, two onerous parts of the present package favor the very wealthy--a special tax break and a cap on the estate tax. These represent "trickle-down economics," a Reagan-era invention which has been discredited as inefficient. But after all, what do wealthy people do when they get money? They buy stocks and bonds. This provides business financing. And more significantly, the "compromise" involves substantial tax breaks for the middle class, a reduction in payroll taxes, and an extension of long-term unemployment benefits, all of which directly feed into consumer spending.

The timing and politics are also fascinating. One can expect the economy to stagger to its feet again and start up the hill over the next two years, just in time to fortify Democratic prospects for the 2012 presidential election. And the Republicans clearly are to blame for forcing this renewed explosion of the national debt.

One can almost hear Br're Rabbit's refrain: "Oh no, boss! Please don't throw me in dat briar patch!"
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World Financial Woes

2010-12-06T00:04:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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It is impossible to describe in simple terms the disastrous state of the world's finances, but I will try.

A couple of years ago several huge banks teetered on the brink of failure because they had loaned trillions of dollars to U.S. home-owners whose property values had declined, and who had therefore decided not to pay back to the banks the money they had borrowed to buy their homes. The U.S. government rescued these huge banks to the tune of several hundred billion dollars because they were so big and far-flung in their investments that their collapse would have destroyed worldwide economic systems.

Strong new financial regulations were enacted to prevent such a near-catastrophe from happening again. We do not know how effective these regulations will prove to be as they are put in place over the next few years. We do know, however, that the banking industry is lobbying hard (and expensively) behind the scenes to weaken them.

There are still hundreds of thousands of bad private mortgages overhanging the market. In addition there are several trillion dollars of bad commercial property loans (think--vacant office buildings) that the huge banks must somehow deal with over the next couple of years. So the banking crisis is far from over.

This past year another ominous player entered the field. The bonds that countries sell to investors in order to borrow money to run their governments turned out to be, in several cases, very weak. The countries simply did not have the money to pay back what they had borrowed. Greece--with Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Italy close behind--threatened national bankruptcy. The EU (Economic Union), largely on the strength of the German economy, came to the rescue with loans and guarantees, but also requiring austere programs of increased taxes and reduced government spending to assure future financial solvency. Several other huge countries--such as the U.S., U.K., and France--are not far behind on this bond-crisis path.

And another factor is soon to come into stark view: most U.S. states are severely in debt. California and New York, for example, have recently had very public, huge debt crises, exceeding in amount, in fact, any of the European bad-debt countries mentioned above. Imagine, for a moment, the rise in taxes that will be necessary throughout the U.S., and the closing of schools, fire stations, police stations, and other public buildings and services that will be necessary to avert state financial disasters.

The world's finances are very complicated--too complicated, in fact, and too cloaked in economic jargon to be fully understood. But the problems are ominous--they are severe and near at hand.
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The Significance of WikiLeaks

2010-12-03T08:07:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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Over the past few weeks an organization named WikiLeaks has made public hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. government documents. It has done this by providing them to leading newspapers--The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and others--and by posting them to a public website (http://wikileaks.org).

The documents range from field memos of combat units to notes and emails regarding military and diplomatic meetings. They reveal many instances in which "news" put out by the U.S. government was untrue--for example, civilian deaths were under-reported, and misconduct by U.S. troops and friction with allies was unreported or even denied. The documents also contain brutally candid assessments by U.S. diplomats of foreign dignitaries.

The WikiLeaks documents have been an embarrassment to the U.S. government, especially to the State Department (responsible for international diplomacy) and the Department of Defense (responsible for running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). In addition to this embarrassment, numerous government officials have condemned the WikiLeaks process as detrimental to U.S. interests and dangerous for our friends and allies.

What is the true significance of the WikiLeaks from a diplomatic, military, technological, and historical perspective?

From the standpoint of our present international diplomatic relations, the effects are minimal. As one foreign diplomat said to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who made dozens of international phone calls to warn about and apologize for the insults that were on the way, "Don't worry about it. You should see what we say about you." The world of international diplomacy is one of mock esteem and thinly disguised self-interest; all participants know the game.

As far as revealing military tactics and policies is concerned, there too the effects are minimal. A military unit's tactics and policies are known as soon as they are enacted. Revealing them in retrospect is not significant. As far as the claim that the leaks endanger the lives of troops or informants, the documents were thoroughly redacted (stripped of personal identifying information) before they were published. In fact, the Pentagon has stated that they do not know of a single instance in which someone was put in danger by the WikiLeaks.

From a technological standpoint, WikiLeaks presents a very interesting challenge to modern electronic communications security. The Web was originally designed to be open--freely and fully accessible to anyone. But as it has expanded and diversified, security in many areas has become a serious issue, for example, the security of personal information, bank account access, or shopping data. The WikiLeaks phenomenon adds to this challenging problem. There are many questions of privacy, range of use, encryption, and decorum yet to be answered.

Most of all--and though last, far from least--the historical significance of the WikiLeaks is, in fact, immense. Not only does it provide historians with a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes information about politics, diplomacy, and war in the 21st century, but it also potentially raises the bar regarding ethics and honesty in communications from the government. A free, democratic people are supposed to be fully and accurately informed of their government's activities. Another round of acute embarrassment like that caused by the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate Scandal--another round of evidence that the government does not, at times, communicate openly and honestly--can only be culturally healthy in the long run.

The WikiLeaks' publication of secret government documents was an important historical event. Julian Assange, the founder and principle administrator of WikiLeaks, is a journalist who has won several international awards for courageous integrity in journalism. He published the documents so that the U.S. government would be called to account for a pattern of widespread deception in its communications to the public. He hoped to further the cause of free speech and civil liberties. He knew that he might be arrested for his actions, and might well spend years--perhaps even the rest of his life--in prison. But he also felt that advancing the impetus toward responsible government was worth the risk and sacrifice.

That is the significance of WikiLeaks.
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Update--Dec. 3, 2010

From this morning's RSN (Reader Supported News):

Daniel Ellsberg's Goodbye Letter to Amazon
Daniel Ellsberg, AntiWar.Blog
Daniel Ellsberg says goodbye to Amazon with conviction. Here's just the first paragraph: "I'm disgusted by Amazon's cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China's control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing."

WikiLeaks Fights to Stay Online
Charles Arthur and Josh Halliday, Guardian UK
"On Friday morning, WikiLeaks and the cache of secret diplomatic documents that have proved to be a scourge for governments around the world were only accessible through a string of digits known as a DNS address. The site later re-emerged with a Swiss domain, WikiLeaks.ch."

Later note: Within a few hours of the government's attempts to suppress the WikiLeaks publication online, the site had been picked up and was being mirrored by several hundred Websites around the world.
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Having Children

2010-11-22T00:43:00.000-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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How do we dare to bring children into the world knowing--as all of us must surely know by the time we reach young adulthood--that every human life has times of terrible pain and despair, of helplessness, hopelessness, and loneliness? By what sadistic or unconscious impulse do we grant ourselves the right to start another soul down that path of pain?

Several hundred years ago John Bunyan, about to be thrown back in prison for the heresy of refusing to renounce his commitment to certain Christian virtues, said, "The separation from my wife and my dear children has been to me as the tearing of my flesh from my bones--especially my poor blind child who, I must confess, lay dearer to me than all else I had besides. Thou must be hungry and cold, be beaten and suffer all manner of calamities in life though I cannot now endure that the wind should blow upon thee."

Abraham Verghese writes in Cutting for Stone: A Novel: "We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot."

The Buddha realized in his moment of enlightenment that every human life is inevitably a dialog with pain--the pain of being separated from things and people one loves; the pain of being attached to things and people one detests; the pain of illness and of decrepitude in old age.

I pose this question. It racks my soul. I have no answer.

Some would say there is a golden balance to be struck--that life can, should, and does have more love and joy than it has pain; that one puts all the good stuff on one pan of the balance and all the pain on the other and--voila!--the good wins out. This strikes me as a feeble and specious rationalization: the idea that there is or should be joy somewhere cannot be an excuse for causing pain.

Some would say we have no choice--that we are driven by instinct, fate, or culture. But it strikes me as despicable to plead helplessness.

Do you have thoughts (and feelings) about this question?
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Math--The Ultimate Language

2010-11-21T08:21:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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"We made a deal with the bank," reads the sign in a diner: "They don't sell chili and we don't cash checks." Likewise the human brain evolved to do a marvelous job finding ripe berries, getting us up a tree when wolves were near, and negotiating the stormy shoals of relationships necessary to pass the family jewels on to the next generation. But it was never called upon to fathom the paradoxes of quantum physics--to envision that the same particle can be at two places at the same time; that two particles, if born together, can communicate instantly although millions of miles apart; or that a sub-atomic entity does not decide whether it is a wave or a particle until it is observed--but its decision is then retroactive; or other quantum weirdnesses like those. Similarly, the human brain enables us run, jump, and hide marvelously well in three dimensions, but is incapable of imagining four or more dimensions--though the physical world, when closely studied, seems to need up to ten or eleven dimensions to come out right.

In addition to developing an operating system that will accommodate such useful apps as berry-hunting, wolf-avoiding, or mate-seducing when a culture sees fit to install them, the human brain has developed considerable flexibility with regard to communications programs. There are (still) over 7,000 distinctly different languages in the world with significantly different grammars, vocabularies, and world views, and any child can learn any one of them--or even several--flawlessly. To be sure, the human brain operating system loses some of its flexibility as it matures: the OS age 5.0.0 cannot install some of the apps it could at version 2.0.0. But it retains considerable plasticity. Even an adult (OS 20.0.0 and beyond) can substantially rewire parts of the brain to accommodate damage.

Moreover the brain, for all its foibles and limitations, has gradually--over the course of centuries--evolved one language that transcends cultural and wiring limitations: the language of mathematics. Mathematics very carefully says, "If A, then B," for example, "if there are bees on the Moon, then they fly in circles." It cautiously and studiously avoids any cultural bias and brain-hardware limitations. And it meticulously steers clear of enforcing--or even implying--any constraints on reality or our freedom to perceive it as we choose. Math does not say, "There are bees on the Moon"--everyone knows there are no bees on the Moon--but it does, through rigorous, logical processes, conclude that "If there were bees on the Moon," then "they would be incapable of flying in straight lines."

The languages of music, visual arts, dance, and poetry can be deeply emotionally moving, but they are fraught with cultural bias and brain-wiring limitations. The language of mathematics is not. The extent to which it is "beautiful" (and it is), the extent to which it inspires "awe" and "reverence" (and it does), is because it proceeds the way porcupines make love--very, very carefully.
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U.S.-China Convergence

2010-11-10T21:53:00.001-08:00

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by Richard Crews
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The U.S. economy has recently taken a bad bruising. For a century and a half we believed more and more--sometimes secretly, sometimes ostentatiously--that democratic capitalism was the way the human race was meant to turn out. Clanism, feudalism, and monarchy fell by the wayside. Communism and fascism took their turns at the plate and struck out. Socialism evolved drastically to take a seat in the boardroom. But democratic capitalism built on its gains, learned from its setbacks, and inexorably spread to take over the world--economically, politically, and even culturally.

Democratic capitalism seemed like the ultimate marriage between the strengths and foibles of human nature. Its spiritual tradition was Judeo-Christian, a blend of puritanical hard work with soul-saving do-goodism. Its biological belief structure combined jungle-instinct, survival-of-the-fittest competitiveness with an inborn sense of altruism and community. As Western history was written and rewritten, monarchs yielded to presidents and to chairmen (and chairwomen) of the board, and military might yielded to economic heft. Democratic capitalism, it seemed, was being honed and polished in its role as the ultimate way of organizing human behavior.

Meanwhile China slept. It was mired in the weight of its vast human masses and the inertia of its traditions. Its spiritual roots were in the Tao (just let things be, go with the flow) and the wisdom of Confucius (the highest good, the Great Man, was a thoughtful and ethical leader). Its biological belief structure was empirical but deeply traditional. And the writing and rewriting of its history consisted of a succession of tyrants culminating during the twentieth century with the hegemony of communism, the ultimate tyrant.

But the U.S. and the appended world economy has recently taken a bad bruising. Laissez-faire deregulation, it seems, does not correctly--ultimately--counterbalance the short-sighted greed of entrepreneurs and economic empire builders. We wanted ever so much to believe it would. We tried hard to be like the three monkeys, covering our eyes and ears and mouth (and nose). Surely, surely the inventive financial excesses would right themselves--the false credit, the speculative "investment" slights of hand, the insider double-dealing would create their own demise; the inherent specific gravities and buoyancies of democratic capitalism were such that the ship would right itself.

But it didn't. Even the venerable Alan Greenspan, for 20 years America's top banker--the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, after a lifetime of laissez faire economic punditry said, essentially,"I was wrong."

Meanwhile China woke. It had struggled with its encumbrances and studied the West's successes. And in the wake of the West's economic disaster, China emerged from the mist coming on strong.

Now we have two world views. Democratic capitalism from the West trying to reign in its mad, runaway horses: trying to regulate renegade financiers, curb industrial pollution, and channel consumerism into sustainable (green) paths all the while sustaining (or in some cases rehabilitating) its humanitarian values--safety nets for the infirmities of illness and old age, universal health care and education, and respect for the dignity and individuality of each human being. And from the East, trying to dictate its way to mature capitalism: recognizing the need for a strong, consumer ("middle") class and perhaps, therefore, the inevitability of human rights and civil liberties.

As the West becomes more and more regulated and the East, more and more liberal, China and the U.S. are on convergent paths--and the world holds its breath.
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The Overriding Issue of Our Time

2010-10-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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In ages past the overriding issues of the day were Ice Ages and Migrations, and the Spread of Civilization; later, Barbarians at the Gates; and in the 19th century, the Hegemony of the Sea which, in the 20th century gave way to the Hegemony of the Air.

The 20th century was also dominated by the Rise of Fascism, then Communism, and the Cold War, with the Threat of Nuclear Annihilation. Behind this was the Rise of the Military/Industrial Complex, with the Space Race leading into the Space Age.

Are we now in a era dominated by Islamic Fundamentalism, or Terrorism?

Some would say that the Explosion of Technology defines our age--especially Nanotechnology, Information Technology, and Artificial Biology. Or perhaps the remarkable advances in Materials Science that underlie those.

These have fueled an Era of Globalization with the coming rise of China and India to World Economic and Political Dominance. The U.S.--still far and away the world's leading economic, political, military, and cultural power--may seem to own Political Paralysis for now, but Cancerous Government encroaches on all fronts, East and West, driven by Income Disparity and Entitlement Burdens (related to Geriatrification of Populations and of Governments).

But more important perhaps is the Loss of the Western Soul: whereas once the U.S. and Europe were seen as the Beacon of Humanitarian Values and Progress throughout the world, they now Govern in Secrecy, Condone Torture, and preside over Worldwide Decline in Civil Rights including Mass Starvations and Genocides.

Perhaps our overriding concern should be the context: the Population Bomb, and growing Water and Food Shortages, and the Exhaustion of Natural Resources from fossil fuels to mineral deposits. Perhaps worldwide escalating Pollution of the Atmosphere, Land, and Seas, perhaps with Global Warming pushing the climate toward a tipping point.

But these are all brushstrokes in a single painting: Humanity has Overreached the Bounds of Balance of a Resilient Planet. Once the Earth was so large, its atmosphere and oceans and land masses so vast that a camp fire, even a forest fire, did not matter much; dumping wastes into the land, sea, and air were more than balanced--they were overcome by the enormity of the Mother Earth who nurtured and sustained us. But humanity and its effects, once a small blemish on the face of nature, have grown and spread into an enormous cancer which our planet can no longer hide, nor cleanse, nor cure.

Humanity has Overreached the Bounds of Balance of a Resilient Planet: that is the overriding issue of our time.
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What's Wrong with Psychotherapy?

2010-10-23T22:34:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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Half a century ago when I was in my early years of learning to be a psychiatrist, I was in psychoanalysis for a couple of years. Four days a week--on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons--I would ride my motorcycle over to Dr. Ivan Heissler's office and lie on his couch for an hour and say any damn thing that popped into my head. That's called "free association." It's the essence of psychoanalysis--and psychoanalysis is the grand daddy of all Western psychotherapies (the "talking therapies").

I knew a lot about psychoanalysis. I knew that all I had to do was associate freely enough and long enough--with a qualified psychoanalyst listening in (a psychoanalyst is someone who has learned to be very, very patient and to listen quietly no matter what)--and clarifying insights about my tangled mental processes would emerge, and the warm hand of healing would descend on me and my life.

There are several things wrong with that picture. In fact, my experience in psychoanalysis had very little effect on me other than relieving me of hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars that I really couldn't afford.

For one thing, nobody ever told me (and it didn't occur to me at the time) that it would behoove me as I prattled on to talk about things that bothered me, or at least puzzled me in my life. This seems so painfully obvious in retrospect that I am embarrassed to report it now. But the good doctor Heissler, in line with his years of training, never asked me, "What do you want to work on today?" or "So what's been bothering you lately?" Similarly, no friend, relative, or colleague ever inquired, "Whacha workin' on in analysis these days?" And I never thought to ask myself either. Regardless of whether I was discouraged or elated--suicidal or homicidal--as far as I can recall that never entered the analytic sessions.

Secondly, as far as I knew insights would just emerge from the tangled web of my thoughts. I didn't know that you have to hunt them down, puzzle them out, glimpse them hiding in the dark corners protected from scrutiny by every conceivable mental machination and self-deception. And then once glimpsed, once cornered, once grasped, you have to hold onto them with every fiber of the adult, reasonable parts of your brain lest they slip quietly back into the woods and continue their insurgent terrorism on you life. So it isn't enough to realize, "yeah, I guess I overeat to please my mother--so what?" or "whenever I think of homosexuality, I'm still secretly afraid my father will punish me--that's sort of interesting."

Which brings us to the third problem--dissatisfaction with the status quo and motivation to do something about it. This has worked its way into the popular mythology about psychotherapy. You probably recall the old saw, "How many psychotherapists does it take to change a light bulb?" Answer" "Just one, but the light bulb has to want to change."

The fourth way that psychotherapy often breaks down is in providing some mechanism for learning the change. This might be devising some verbal formulations that ring out the old ideas and ring in the new--mottoes and slogans to reshape your life--"eating is not a form of entertainment" or "my father (dead that he is) doesn't care what I do sexually, and never did." Or it might be lifestyle changes--eating a defined diet on a regular schedule; calling the boss by his first name.

The fifth (and final) problem with psychotherapy is perhaps captured by the response of the New York City cop who was asked by a tourist, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" The cop answered, "Practice, practice, practice!" Most people don't realize that the hard-won insight and the cleverly devised counter-strategy are only one-tenth of the battle. It is only through careful, attentive, determined, arduous practice of the new, healthy (workable, comfortable) point of view or way of behaving--practice stretching over many weeks, even months or years--that it comes to replace, permanently and automatically, the neurotic patterns we learned as children.
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Here Comes China

2010-10-18T22:11:00.001-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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In the 19th century Britannia ruled the waves. After the decimation of Europe during the Napoleonic Wars (Napoleon met his Waterloo in 1815), the United Kingdom was, in the words of one Prussian general, "mistress of the sea.... Neither in this dominion nor in world trade has she now a single rival to fear."

But a hundred years later, the United Kingdom "was too weakened by [the First World] war to remain an effective hegemon" (Charles Kindleberger). Thereafter the 20th century saw the ascension of the United States to become a world superpower--until finally, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was the ONLY world superpower.

In 2003, the historian Niall Ferguson noted that "the power of the United States today closely resembles that of the United Kingdom roughly a century ago--[is it] hegemony or empire?"

But at the close of the first decade of the 21st century, the U.S. finds itself weakened by two costly wars abroad and political gridlock at home.

Meanwhile China has been coming on strong having invented a new form of capitalism--non-democratic (dictatorial) capitalism. This is based on the historical experiences--the tribulations and successes--of the Western World but with one far-reaching caveat: it is run by the firm and uncompromising hand of the communist government. When, for example, the government decided to build the largest hydroelectric dam in the world (at Three Gorges), there was no delay--no considerations of "eminent domain"--because the project involved relocating 1.24 million people and inundating a world of cultural artifacts and ecological treasures. When, for another example, the government decided to take control of world production of rare earth minerals (which are essential for modern electronics and numerous engineering purposes), they pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into subsidizing Chinese mining and production facilities, thereby driving foreign sources into bankruptcy; the Chinese now have about 15% of the world's rare-earth ores but now control some 97% of the world's production. (Rebuilding rare-earth mining and production is a costly and time-consuming business--it takes hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade or more.)

From currency manipulation and trade protectionism to land speculation and pollution control, the Chinese Communist government has pried its way with a heavy hand into world economics--and therefore politics--and even, therefore, culture. (When the Chinese wanted to control the terrible atmospheric pollution in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, for example, they simply decreed that even- and odd-numbered licensed vehicles would be banned from the city streets on alternate days--never mind the terrible disruption of commercial and civil life this caused. Also, by the way--since they wanted to make a good impression on visiting foreigners and press--it was made illegal for fat people to wear horizontal stripes, or anyone to wear white socks with black shoes, on the streets of Beijing.)

How far can this dictatorial, managed capitalism go? Can it propel China to world economic and political domination? An interesting question. We shall see. A few weeks ago China passed Japan to become the second largest national economy (in terms of GDP) in the world.

And can it progress--including with massive expansion of the consumer-driven middle class, of TV and Internet populism, and of multi-cultural foreign participation--without significant expansion of civil rights? We Western liberals hope not.
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Obama 2.0 (Oct. '10)

2010-10-18T13:38:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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In my opinion Obama has been brilliant as a president. He faced--and faced up to--a global financial disaster comparable to the Great Depression and was both carefully contemplative and heroic in the measures he orchestrated to address it. He inherited a disastrous decline in U.S. education (from 1st to 13th in the industrialized world over the past 20 years) and miraculously leveraged minimal funds into astonishing progress through his "Race to the Top" program. He dug U.S. international diplomacy out of a "cowboy bully" image and raised it to a position of "esteemed negotiator." He brought the U.S. into line with universal health-care goals and practices that are common throughout the civilized world although he had to overcome massive cavalier political opportunism to do so. He reversed the anti-scientism of the previous administration. He faced natural disasters with efficiency, alacrity, and compassion. He put U.S. infrastructural decline, energy mismanagement, and environmental pollution firmly back on the national political agenda. And more.

Where did he go wrong? In the first place, how did he get so far behind the cultural curve on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? And why has he seemed so slow and marginally effective in dealing with (and bringing to a close) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? I think that running an army and dealing with hardened, top military brass was all too new to him. In his relationship with the military he let himself be cowed.

Second, in dealing with Congress he approached the task as a Constitutional scholar respectful of "checks and balances." He did not take a strong enough active and directive hand. For example, he let the Democrats in Congress roll every pet progressive project of the past 20 years into the "stimulus" package (worthwhile projects, but an unworkable dilution of the primary mission). In addition, he (somehow) let the Republicans escape from responsible participation in governing into obstructionism and vapid political rhetoric.

But most of all he acted as if the presidency is not first and foremost a political office. Apparently he thought that if he governed the world's most powerful nation and administered the world's largest and most complex bureaucracy with ethics and efficiency, that the politics would come tidily following along behind. This proved not so. Putting on a show--a media tour de force--to cajole and satiate the great, preoccupied, American masses is unfortunately the first and constant job of the president.

I think the storied leaders of ancient Rome--the Senators and Caesars--came to understand this. They found they could craft a stronger state or, on the other hand, could neglect and pillage it as long as they gave bread to the starving masses and threw great Super-Bowl extravaganzas of slaughtered gladiators, slaves, prisoners, and beasts in the Colosseum.

So hopefully Obama 2.0 will continue the brilliant, ethical leadership that has characterized his first two years in office, but in addition he will realize that he has to stay continuously on the campaign trail.
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Another Wall-Street Bonanza

2010-10-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

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by Richard Crews
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I guess you heard--Wall Street is straightening its green eye shade, adjusting its armbands, and licking its pencil (and its chops) to start handing out $145 billion in bonuses this year. This represent a new, all-time high, beating the previous record set in 2007 just before the bottom fell out of worldwide financial systems.

And why the hell not? Didn't they earn it?

No, they didn't--and that's problem three (be patient--"one" and "two" are coming). Banking (in the broadest sense) is a service industry. They don't grow or manufacture or even transport anything. They manipulate (ok, ostensibly they "guard") other people's money. You simply don't pay more for the cop on the corner or your home security system or even an insurance policy than you do for food, a safe and comfortable place to live, an education for your kids, or the tools and resources of your trade. It's crazy. It's like "protection" money. It's economics on its head.

But we do. Thanks to historical circumstances such as globalization, exploding information technology, and laissez-faire deregulation (with a healthy dose of ingenuity and normal human greed thrown in), we divert a major fraction of our national wealth to what should be oiling the economic system.

Why is this a problem? Because the extent to which one is paying protection money, one isn't building up ones business--building inventory, trimming prices, tailor fitting customer needs--or securing and enhancing ones lifestyle--living in a cleaner, more comfortable, more secure home; saving for the kids' education and for retirement; etc. Put in national terms, when the money-service industry dines on thousand-dollar wine and butterfly tongues, roads and bridges and power lines fall into decay, the atmosphere gets polluted from archaic vehicles and dirty power plants, scientific research and education founder, health-care and retirement go untended, etc.

So reason "three" is that the Wall-Street bonanza diverts money from healthful and productive uses.

Reason "two" is a little subtler but in fact more important. I won't go into it or argue it in detail, but cultural pay patterns that increase the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us weaken and undermine our economy--and hence our democracy and in fact our entire network of social systems. They decrease the buying power of the vast middle class and increase the rolls of the even-more-vast impoverished and disadvantaged beneath them. They bring our very beliefs and lifestyles into jeopardy.

But reason "one" is the real killer--one that is often overlooked and underrated. The Wall-Street bonanza drains the best minds as they graduate from college and graduate schools away from careers in science, education, engineering, health, and public service.

Every graduate these days makes a choice about where to apply their energy and talents and learning. And on one side of the balance is the lure to make millions--no, tens of millions--of dollars taking their math, law, science, language, or other skills to Wall Street.

That is the real tragedy of the Wall-Street Bonanza syndrome.
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