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Tuesday, November 18, 2003 |
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Posted here Tuesday, November 18, 2003 at 12:31:14 PM  Kurtzweil
As I mentioned, there are voices arguing for broad-based relinquishment of technology. Bill McKibben, the environmentalist who was one of the first to warn against global warming, takes the position that "environmentalists must now grapple squarely with the idea of a world that has enough wealth and enough technological capability, and should not pursue more." In my view, that position ignores the extensive suffering that remains in the human world, which we will be in a position to alleviate through continued technological progress. Most important, we need to understand that these technologies are advancing on hundreds of fronts, rendering relinquishment completely ineffectual as a strategy. As uncomfortable as it may be, we have no choice but to prepare the defenses.
http://www.cio.com/archive/092203/kurzweil.html
Comment: what has to be seen here is the mix of large scale consequnces and
fragile thinking. Major decisions are being made with this language. But he
avoids things like a narrow interested business community and narrow career
interests among scientists. Also GNR is forcing us towards a more security
driven Hobbesian world. |
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Posted here Tuesday, November 18, 2003 at 12:31:11 PM This issue of the NewYork review of books. The Vanishing Case for War False Promises Who Murdered Daniel Pearl? Hate Putin's Trap ******** |
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Posted here Tuesday, November 18, 2003 at 12:31:00 PM Mini essay
In the last few days I led a workshop exploring the language of the left and the right. Somewhat like Lakoff, yet different. The basic idea was to explore what is in the minds of republicans. I will use the "left" and the "right" in the most conventional way though we discovered that the best way to figure out who is which had to do with who you are comfortable with more than any specific items of belief or policy.
The first thing we noticed was the difficulty those among the more progressives had in entering compassionately into imagining what the right were actually thinking about.
The first conclusion to emerge was that the left sees the right as being in favor of big business and big military, while the right sees the left as in favor of big bureaucracy and big government. Both are actually more or less against bigness, but project it's negative aspects onto the other. They cancel each other out and bigness wins. Each side is much more intent on seeing the dangers and feelings of the negative of the other than of exploring the consequences of their own sense of the positive of bigness.
As we struggled to understand this the second conclusion emerged , which was that the left sees the ideology of the right but seems afraid to explore it's emotional base, which seems mostly the fear of change, fear of bigness, and fear of tyranny, and a desire for relationships and community. The left also has an ideology and an emotional base. The problem is the emotional base of the left is actually very similar to the emotional base of the right. While the left has a slight tendency to prefer technology, internationalism, and urban life, the core on the left is a fear the direction the world is going, fear of tyranny, and a desire for community and family.
Our understanding was that the fear on the left to enter compassionatly into the minds on the right was motivated by the fear that they might discover, through exploring the emotional basis of the right, that their own emotional basis undermined their left ideological commitments to globalization, technology, and what we could call the policy or planning imperative.
The result is, to put it in a caricature about half of the right favors big business and military, and half does not. About half of the left favors big business, especially the technological and entrepreneurial side, and half does not. The result is that bigness, which requires that big business government and military work together wins, and it is this winning which makes about half on each side extremely nervous. Each of course sees the media has totally dominated by the other which is a reflection that the media categories are not working well for anybody. They characterize the negative of the other without discovering the positive of one's own.
In this context the candidates on the other side are seen as irrational and dangerous. All the current candidates continue the ideological polarization and fail to break through to a more common understanding of why so many people are so afraid.
It might be that what we could call the thermodynamics of the whole system favors the emergence of centralized business and government, and their alignment, and that the political struggles which seems so important may come down to the right's tendency to prefer unilateralism in order to preserve American dominance of the whole system trends, and the fear that it's internationalization simply speeds up and makes it even more inevitable and remote.
This workshop was part of a larger effort at exploring the situation in a number of countries. For example in Nigeria, Nepal, and India it was clear that the major dynamics are taking resources and power from the periphery towards the center and leaving the periphery relatively impoverished both in leadership and resources. While there is some argument, many feel that the same dynamic is happening in the United States. If this dynamic is as universal as it appears to be, the international system, whether in economics, politics, environment, or quality of life, is clearly heading for trouble and no wonder so many people are afraid. If this is the key dynamic, what does a political leader choose to stand for? Implicitly he or she will be seen as supporting this trend. It seems very unlikely that any leader can pull away significantly from this mainstream, even though it is more a mainstream of power and money than it is of people.
Is it possible to try and help a leader put together new model of what is
positive about globalization, technology and business and bring out in the
open the deeper fears and concerns that motivate people's projections and
angers? |
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Posted here Tuesday, November 18, 2003 at 12:30:57 PM Title: Saturday, November 08, 2003 5:12:34 PM Foreign Affairs - November/December 2003 Text: That Was Then: Allen W. Dulles on the Occupation of Germany Allen W. Dulles U.S. troops on conquered territory, infrastructure in ruins, international squabbling over reconstruction: a window onto occupied Germany seven months after V-E Day, when progress was still unsteady and Europe's future hung in the balance. Read The Privatization of Foreign Aid: Reassessing National Largesse Carol C. Adelman Critics have long derided the U.S. government for stinginess in international giving. But such charges miss the point. Today, it is private funds that make the difference in poor countries, and here the United States leads the pack. Read The Case for Cultural Diplomacy: Engaging Foreign Audiences Helena K. Finn To fight foreign extremism, Washington must remember that winning hearts and minds is just as important as battlefield victories. Military force will not do it alone: the United States must offer desperate youth abroad a compelling ideological alternative. Read Preview China's New Diplomacy Evan S. Medeiros and M. Taylor Fravel The recent crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons has had at least one unexpected aspect: the crucial -- and highly effective -- intervention of Beijing. China's steady diplomacy is a sign of how much things have changed in the country, which has long avoided most international affairs. Recently, China has begun to embrace regional and global institutions it once shunned and take on the responsibilities that come with great-power status. Just what the results of Beijing's new sophistication will be remains to be seen; but Asia, and the world, will never be the same. Read China Takes Off David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale China has achieved stunning economic progress since the 1970s, thanks to aggressive liberalization, a commitment to exporting high-tech goods, and a massive injection of foreign investment. Although this unprecedented success is understandably unnerving to China's neighbors and trading partners, it should not be cause for worry; China, the United States, and the rest of the world still have lots of business to do. Read Preview Should Hezbollah Be Next? Daniel Byman The radical Lebanese Shi'ite movement Hezbollah is fomenting violence in post-war Iraq and fanning the flames of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its bloody track record makes it a natural target in the war on terror. But Washington's only option is to confront Hezbollah indirectly: by getting its backers, Syria and Iran, to help change its focus from militancy to politics. Read Preview Reinventing the West Dominique Moïsi During the Cold War, the ever-present Soviet threat helped keep the West united. More recently, however, attempts to mend the transatlantic rift by pointing to present dangers have only deepened the cultural divide. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic must accept that "the West" has now split into European and American halves. But both sides still need each other -- now more than ever. Read Preview Japan's New Nationalism Eugene A. Matthews Ever since World War II, the slightest sign of nationalism in Japan has been widely denounced, at home and abroad. Recently, however, discussions that were once taboo -- including whether to rearm or even develop nuclear weapons -- have moved into the Japanese mainstream. Yet the country's critics need not be alarmed; a little healthy nationalism may be just what Japan, with its faltering economy, needs most. Read Preview America's Imperial Dilemma Dimitri K. Simes The United States increasingly looks, walks, and talks like an empire. It should therefore heed the lessons of its predecessors, exercising strong and determined global leadership. At the same time, it must avoid the temptation to meddle when American interests are not at stake. This means, among other things, dropping the doctrine of universal democracy promotion. Read Preview The Next Prize Daniel Yergin and Michael Stoppard The emerging global market in natural gas has the potential to meet rising demand for electricity worldwide. The United States' own gas supplies are dwindling, but elsewhere vast, unexploited resources are becoming ever more accessible now that gas can be liquefied, shipped, and used efficiently. New energy linkages will create new risks, but none that cannot be managed through proper diversification. Read Preview The Baby Trade Ethan B. Kapstein The international adoption trade is booming, as more families in the West adopt more babies from developing countries. But it has spawned a sordid black market as well, in which children are bought or abducted and sold. The best way to stop the trafficking is not to ban adoptions from countries that tolerate corrupt rings, but to strengthen the underdeveloped multilateral legal regime that regulates adoptions around the planet. Read Preview Clinton's Strong Defense Legacy Michael O'Hanlon Conventional wisdom holds that Bill Clinton presided over a disastrous downsizing of the U.S. military. But this claim is wrong. In fact, Clinton's Pentagon maintained high levels of readiness and enacted a bold military modernization program that bore fruit in Bosnia and Kosovo -- and in Afghanistan and Iraq. Read Preview Being Yasir Arafat: A Portrait of Palestine's President Glenn E. Robinson Two Israeli studies of the polarizing Palestinian leader don't shed much light on their subject. But they do make clear why his time may be past. Read Remaking the World: Bush and the Neoconservatives Joshua Micah Marshall Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay take stock of the Bush revolution in foreign affairs. The neocons have been running the show -- and we're all now paying the price. Read The Other 9/11: The United States and Chile, 1973 Kenneth Maxwell Thirty years after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, The Pinochet File, a "dossier" of declassified documents, lays out the true U.S. role. Read Comment: The Oficial view of the establishment is that Bush is off. What happens next? Does dad come out in the open with criticism? When will big corporations realize that the Bush narrowness serves only a hdnful of old line or old style companies, not productive companies but greviously exploitative ones? From: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/current/ _____ Title: Saturday, November 08, 2003 4:45:16 PM Text: The following is a transcript of the speech delivered by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski on Oct. 28 at New American Strategies for Security and Peace, a conference co-sponsored by the Prospect in Washington, D.C. The speech followed an introduction by David Aaron, a former deputy national security adviser Comment: important to read. Like his book of about 1997 on eurasia. From: http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/webfeatures/2003/10/brzezinski-z-10-3 1.html
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Posted here Tuesday, November 18, 2003 at 12:30:54 PM Overheard
Belarus is led by President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and is, according to the Transparency International corruption watchdog, the least corrupt state in the CIS in 53rd place out of 133 countries (where 1st is the least corrupt). Why? Because Lukashenka has not allowed "economic reform" to take place and therefore no group of oligarchs have arisen who could then undertake "state capture."
http://www.rferl.org/corruptionwatch/
Comment: for those who don't agree that money is buying states.
** Job Growth Picks Up in October
By Dean Baker November 7, 2003
AVERAGE HOURLY WAGES HAVE GROWN AT JUST A 1.7 PERCENT ANNUAL RATE OVER THE LAST QUARTER.
The economy added 126,000 jobs in October, the third consecutive month of job growth. At the same time, the unemployment rate edged down to 6.0 percent, with most demographic groups showing little change in their employment situation.
While the October job growth is modest compared to the 300,000 monthly gains seen in the late nineties boom, it brings the gain over the last three months to 286,000, the best performance since the recession began. Part of this picture is substantial upward revisions to prior months' data. The data for August, which originally showed a loss of 93,000 jobs, has been revised to now show a gain of 35,000 in this report.
The job gains are almost entirely in the service producing sector, as the manufacturing sector continues to shed jobs, albeit at a somewhat slower pace. Manufacturing lost another 24,000 jobs in October, and 91,000 over the last three months. These declines were fairly evenly spread across industries.
Retail trade, professional and business services, and education and health services have been the big job gainers over this period. Retail trade added 30,000 jobs in October and 57,000 over the last three months. The professional and business services category added 43,000 jobs in October and 104,000 over the last three months. Education and health added 56,000 in October and 138,000 since July. Within these sectors, temporary help is showing respectable growth, adding 55,000 jobs since July, and private education services have added an extraordinary 61,000 jobs over this period.
While the record of three months of job gains, even modest ones, is encouraging, two other items in the establishment data are less promising. The average workweek only edged up slightly from a very low level of 33.7 hours in September to 33.8 hours in October. Manufacturing showed no change, and only utilities showed a large, presumably weather related, increase. This indicates firms are not seeing much demand for additional labor and are therefore unlikely to pick up the pace of hiring any time soon.
The other discouraging factor is the evidence of a further weakening of wage growth. The average hourly wage grew at just a 1.7 percent annual rate between the three months ending in July and the most recent three month period. This means that wages are not even keeping pace with inflation. This is likely to dampen consumption growth in future months. ..The unemployment rate among black teens rose to 37.2 percent from 32.8 percent in September.
There continues to be a high percentage of long-term unemployed and the percentage of unemployment attributable to people voluntarily leaving their jobs fell to 8.8 percent, the lowest level since the recession began. This indicates that workers are not confident about their labor market prospects. Job gains remain heavily concentrated among older workers, with 77.1 percent of the reported growth in employment coming among people over age 55. While this report provides some positive news, it is far from clear that it indicates a healthy recovery is underway. The tax cut and mortgage refinancing driven growth of the third quarter was concentrated in July and August, with consumption already falling back by September, so any job growth driven by this boom should already be in place. The weak growth in hours indicates little pent- up hiring pressure. Data on car sales and chain store sales for October suggest that consumption growth is continuing at a much more modest pace. With real wages likely falling it is not clear what will sustain the economy in future months.
Comment: further evidence about the economy.
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Imagine if no fist class letters got deliverd. If someone sends you a first class, what is the confidence that it will arrive, and that you will look for it? http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/domestic-finance/usps/
** Here is a good article by Robert Fisk on the latest spin on the Middle East that we are there to promote democracy.
http://www.bestofdesign.co.uk/antiwarblog/archives/000079.html
November 08, 2003 Robert Fisk: How we denied democracy to the Middle East By Robert Fisk
8 November 2003 The Independent
We created this place, weaned the grotesque dictators. And we expect the Arabs to trust Bush's promise? It gets weirder and weirder. As his helicopters are falling out of the sky over Iraq, President Bush tells us things are getting even better. The more we succeed, he says, the deadlier the attacks will become. Thank God the Americans now have a few - a very few - brave journalists, like Maureen Dowd, to explain what is happening. The worse things are, the better they get. Iraq's wartime information minister, "Comical Ali", had nothing on this; he claimed the Americans weren't in Baghdad when we could see their tanks. Bush claims he's going to introduce democracy in the Middle East when his soldiers are facing more than resistance in Iraq. They are facing an insurrection. So let's take a look at the latest lies. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe," he told us on Thursday. "Because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." Well said, Sir. George Bush Jr sounds almost as convincing as, well, Tony Blair. It's all a lie. "We" - the West, Europe, America - never "excused and accommodated" lack of freedom. We endorsed lack of freedom. We created it in the Middle East and supported it.
When Colonel Ghaddafi took over Libya, the Foreign Office thought him a much sprightlier figure than King Idriss. We supported the Egyptian generals (aka Gamal Abdul Nasser) when they originally kicked out King Farouk. We - the Brits - created the Hashemite Kingdom in Jordan. We - the Brits - put a Hashemite King on the throne of Iraq. And when the Baath party took over from the monarchy in Baghdad, the CIA obligingly handed Saddam's mates the names of all senior communist party members so they could be liquidated.
The Brits created all those worthy sheikhdoms in the Gulf. Kuwait was our doing; Saudi Arabia was ultimately a joint Anglo-US project, the United Arab Emirates (formerly the Trucial State) etc. But when Iran decided in the 1950s that it preferred Mohammed Mossadeq's democratic rule to the Shah's, the CIA's Kim Roosevelt, with Colonel "Monty" Woodhouse of MI6, overthrew democracy in Iran. Now President Bush demands the same "democracy" in present-day Iran and says we merely "excused and accommodated" the loathsome US-supported Shah's regime.
Now let's have another linguistic analysis of Mr Bush's words. "The failure
of Iraqi democracy," he told us two days ago, "would embolden terrorists
around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish
the hopes of millions in the region." Here's another take: the failure of
the Bush administration to control Israel's settlement-building on Arab land
would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American
people and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Now that would be
more like it. But no. President Bush thinks Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon is "a man of peace". |
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Posted here Tuesday, November 18, 2003 at 12:30:43 PM Title: Saturday, November 08, 2003 4:39:18 PM FOXNews.com - Politics - Raw Data: Dem Memo on Iraq Intel Text: Following is the text of a memo written by a Democrat on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that suggests how to make the greatest gain off of intelligence data leading to the war against Iraq. The memo was obtained by Fox News. Comment: worth reading the original to see how much it is reasonable strategy, nothing clandestine about it. From: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,102258,00.html _____ Title: Thursday, November 06, 2003 10:15:31 AM Outsourcing and the war on complexity - TechUpdate - ZDNet Text: Outsourcing and the war on complexity By David Berlind November 5, 2003 Forward inFormat for In a recent survey of ZDNet's audience, more readers indicated a proclivity to outsource their IT than ever before. Aside from dealing with the controversial implications to the careers of their domestic IT personnel who may be left with no place to park their skill sets, CIOs and senior IT executives are learning that navigating the world of outsourcing is more like a fine art than an every-day business decision: It's a fine art that United Nations Development Programme CIO Norman "Sandy" Sanders is well along the way to mastering. Comment: the issue of complexity is wealth absorbing as well as wealth creating. the balance is important. From: http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/fine_art_of_outsourcing. html _____ Title: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 6:39:19 PM The 'mouse' that caused an uproar in China | csmonitor.com Text: China hands describe a tension between what Chinese authorities say is necessary to keep stability in a large and developing country and what intelligent, often urban and educated Chinese will accept as limits to their speech and expression. In the kinder reading, many officials, particularly those under 60, say privately that the rules governing free expression must change; but they look for a gradual solution. They and their offspring, many of whom are educated in the West, may even have sharp disagreements with the current limits of acceptable expression and diverse opinion. In this view, free expression in China is improving. In the less kind reading, the Chinese security and police are regularly told to crack down. There may be exceptions, as when the daughter or son of a high party member or rich family gets in trouble; or when there are excesses of youth. But these are exceptions. The rest - labor activists, upstart college students, journalists, writers, intellectuals, professors, dissidents, religious believers with too much spunk, those who stand out in a too-public fashion or attract too much attention - are warned, or arrested. In this reading of China, free expression is not improving in the short- and midterm. Despite some changes of style, more arrests are taking place, and ordinary Chinese are still strictly censoring themselves. Comment:
From: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1106/p01s04-woap.html _____ Title: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 1:04:56 PM Op-Ed Columnist: This Can't Go On Text: Just as the federal government is in no immediate danger of running out of money, our forces in Iraq are in no danger of outright defeat. But in both cases, current policies appear to be unsustainable: we can't go on like this indefinitely. And things that can't go on forever, don't. Comment: Are there otehr sides to these two stories. I beleive there are. From: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/04KRUG.html _____ Title: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 1:04:12 PM Op-Ed Columnist: This Can't Go On Text: In September the Congressional Budget Office analyzed how many U.S. soldiers could be kept in Iraq without extending tours beyond one year. The conclusion was that force levels would have to start dropping rapidly about five months from now, and that the forces in Iraq and Kuwait would eventually have to shrink by almost two-thirds. As the report explains, the Pentagon can use various expedients to maintain a larger force in Iraq, but all of these expedients would threaten to undermine our military readiness. Comment:
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/04KRUG.html _____ Title: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 1:03:37 PM Op-Ed Columnist: This Can't Go On Text: and there will eventually be a day of reckoning. As Bill Gross of Pimco, the giant bond manager, says, "Sooner, perhaps later, our Asian creditors will wake up and smell the coffee." (Yes, the federal budget and the value of the dollar now depend on huge purchases of Treasury bills by the governments of Japan and China.) When they do, he predicts "higher import costs, a cutback in spending on cheap foreign goods, rising inflation, perhaps chaotic financial markets, a lower standard of living." Something to look forward to. Comment:
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/04KRUG.html _____ Title: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 1:03:15 PM Op-Ed Columnist: This Can't Go On Text: The prime example I have hammered on in this column is, of course, the federal budget. Realistic budget projections say that current policies aren't remotely sustainable. For example, a month ago a joint report of the Committee for Economic Development (a business group), the bipartisan Concord Coalition and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that under current policies, federal debt would rise by $5 trillion over the next decade. And then baby boomers will start collecting benefits, and our debt will really explode. Comment:
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/04KRUG.html
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Last update: 6/15/2004; 2:20:54 PM .
