The sustainable future beckons: an all purpose metaphor

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photo credit to जरा खाजवा की डोक

For me this image is pure poetry, it suggests so many things about our world and even about our human nature: the smile of the driver, the people riding snug and dry in the cab, the no nonsense expression on the little bullock's face. Please feel free to write your own version. DS

Thomas Friedman and the hangman

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In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. Thomas Friedman - NYT

In older factories and, before them, on the farm, there were opportunities for almost everybody: the bright and the slow, the sociable and the awkward, the people with children and those without. All came to work unskilled, at first, and then slowly learned things, on the job, that made them more valuable. Especially in the mid-20th century, as manufacturing employment was rocketing toward its zenith, mistakes and disadvantages in childhood and adolescence did not foreclose adult opportunity. For most of U.S. history, most people had a slow and steady wind at their back, a combination of economic forces that didn’t make life easy but gave many of us little pushes forward that allowed us to earn a bit more every year. Over a lifetime, it all added up to a better sort of life than the one we were born into. That wind seems to be dying for a lot of Americans. What the country will be like without it is not quite clear. Adam Davidson - The Atlantic

The awkward fact about "average" people, or "average" anything for that matter is that there are so many of them... of "us" really, because most of us are average something, one way or another, intelligence, weight, height, sex appeal, you name it.... Anything that savagely attacks the "average" attacks the majority and the majority, barring massive police state repression and even then, will eventually fight back.

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.” George Soros quoted in the Daily Beast 

We are being told that we must be more competitive. What does that mean? Another quote from Tom Friedman's globalist panegyric, this time a paean to China.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ”

Friedman, of course thinks that this is just great, but I simply do not believe that Americans or Europeans would be willing to endure working conditions like that very long without revolting, except, perhaps, during the struggles of a world war. 

Suddenly Karl Marx of all people is reappearing in "polite" conversation and if you take a look at the following quotes taken at random and out of context and compare them with what you have read in the articles quoted above, you'll easily see why:

• Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
• Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
• The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
• The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
• (Free Trade) breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

So we are moving toward, or have moved to a society where even in developed countries increasingly a tiny minority lives very well and "average" people, by definition the majority, live badly, return to the living and working conditions of the days of Charles Dickens, conditions that took countless years and endless blood to meliorate... and even an "average" student of history will know that under such conditions revolutions happen.

I'm sorry to keep bringing the old boy up, but it was Lenin who said that a capitalist will sell you a rope on Friday that you are going to hang him with on Sunday... just to make a profit on Saturday... he can't help himself. Vladimir Ilych's mummy must be laughing his little wax head off when they turn out the lights in his tomb at night. DS

Barack Obama: a parenthesis between Bush and Gingrich?

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Who knew, in the exuberance of 2008, that America was electing an introvert? And that one who touched so many felt above the touchy-feely-gritty parts of politics? Maureen Dowd - New York Times

Why does Mitt Romney have money in the Caymans?
Christian Science Monitor

Gingrich is an unabashed egoist ("I think grandiose thoughts") who likes to compare himself to historic figures including Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle, the Duke of Wellington, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He might soon add Jesus Christ to that list because Gingrich has had more political resurrections this past year than the son of God. Ron Fournier - National Journal

Just writing the title of this post gave me the whim whams...We may actually be on the path to seeing Newt Gingrich sworn in as President of the United States of America. The idea is really hard to contemplate.

I think that Romney's tax returns will sink him with today's struggling middle class, the fact that he was born rich and has never invented anything and has only worked in the financial area -- combined with his methacrylate personality -- already has him in trouble, but the mere words "Cayman Islands" should be enough to send him spinning off into Cain-Bachmann-Huntsman, purgatory... And as for Florida, where Romney is supposed to win easily, Gingrich's observation that the Palestinians are an "invented people", should make him a favorite with Florida's many elderly Jewish retirees... he already seems to have the rednecks in his pocket... I'm waiting to see how he will pander to the Cuban community. As I see it Romney is toast...(things have come to such a pass that I hope I am wrong!).

Many people might say that Obama would find Gingrich an easier opponent than Romney, but I am not so sure. Both Obama and Romney are boring, reasonable men, men who will say just about anything that a boring reasonable man would say (Obama can't trot out all the "audacity of hope" stuff again, we've been there, done that)... Gingrich is a nut... and maybe a genuine nut is just what many troubled American people, hard in the grips of nihilism, are ready for now... Somebody that breaks the mold, who takes bullshit to a level where it becomes a liberating sincerity, whose phoniness is cut from whole cloth... That may be the message the voters are sending in this serial adulterer winning handily in a southern state chockablock with Bible-beating family values Evangelicals... Gingrich says phoney, absurd, weird things, but underneath all the pond scum there lurks something "real" about him. Horribly real for many of us, but "real" nonetheless.

And of course, there is always the chance that a third party candidate may appear and screw up all predictions. My reading is that a third party candidate would hurt Obama most... many of his most enthusiastic supporters in 2008 were thrill seekers, joy riders on the wave of hope and change... They might like another "The One", just for the ride.

Anything is possible at a time and in a country which is seriously considering giving Newt Gingrich a permit to open carry atomic weapons. DS

Goodbye to Etta James

Too many leaving too fast! DS

SOPA + PIPA (additional reading)

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If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Thomas Jefferson

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.(...) higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.
Karl Marx

As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the piracy of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.(...) “The problem for the content industry is they just don’t know how to mobilize people,” said John P. Feehery, a former House Republican leadership aide who previously worked at the motion picture association. “They have a small group of content makers, a few unions, whereas the Internet world, the social media world especially, can reach people in ways we never dreamed of before.” New York Times

When I was in junior high, I had this wonderful science teacher, Mr. Lazlo, a very vocational teacher who was always finding creative ways of teaching. He even let me turn in my homework in comic book form. I adored him.

One spring Mr. Lazlo brought an incubator to class filled with fertilized chicken eggs. Every day we would cut open one of the eggs and examine the development of the fetuses.

Day by day we saw the fascinating change from a clot of blood to something that looked more like a chicken.

Finally the day came for the surviving baby chicks to hatch.

Little holes began to appear in the shells as the chicks tried to peck their way out.

When the chicks were managing to get their heads free of the shell, Mr. Lazlo suggested that we help some of the chicks get out of the shell and let the others get out the best they could.

The ones we helped soon died. Apparently the act of getting out of the shell was a vital part of their development. DS

Iran's bomb... the bottom line

Here’s the bottom line: an Israeli attack unites Iran in fury, locks in the Islamic Republic for a generation, cements the Syrian regime, radicalizes the Arab world at a moment of delicate transition, ignites Hezbollah on the Lebanese border, boosts Hamas, endangers U.S. troops in the region, sparks terrorism, propels oil skyward, triggers a possible regional war, offers a lifeline to Iran just as Europe is about to stop buying its oil, adds a Persian to the Arab vendetta against Israel, and may at best set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions a couple of years. Roger Cohen - NYT

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The selling point of starving or beating Iran into submission is that if they had an atomic bomb they would use it to attack Israel, who has at least 200 such weapons. The idea being that Iran is planning to turn Israel, its Jewish inhabitants and a considerable number of Palestinian Muslims into a radioactive Auschwitz.

The Persians, though notably strict in their religious practice, are eminently rational. They are just as rational as Khrushchev's USSR. They would not start an atomic exchange that would mean the annihilation of their country. The biggest problem brought on by the Iranians having a bomb would be that all the other countries in the region would want one too.

An atomic-weaponized Middle East would not mean a nuclear free for all, but it would mean that Israel's and America's freedom of action to behave like a colonial power "punishing the natives", would be forever curtailed.

It would be impossible for the USA to encourage Israel to continue a war like the one against Hezbollah in 2006 until it "finished the the job" or to have invaded Iraq for that matter either.

With atomic weapons in the mix, any action by Israel that could remotely set off to a general war in the Middle East, one with even the remotest possibility of an atomic exchange, would have to be snuffed out at the first whiff of smoke.

Lobby or no lobby, the USA would have to keep Israel on a very tight leash and Israel and their lobby know that. This would certainly cramp Israel's style, and many Israelis would find that restraint intolerable and a significant number of the "best and the brightest" of Israel's technological elite, who could find work anywhere in the world on 24 hours notice, might possibly take their families and head out for safer climes.

The fear of not being able to sufficiently intimidate the Muslim population of the Middle East, not any fear of Israel's perishing in a nuclear holocaust, is at the bottom of America and Israel's drive to eliminate Iran's nuclear program. DS

Why do they suddenly quote Marx and Gramisci in the Financial Times?

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All of a sudden Karl Marx and Marxist thought are being talked about in the most unlikely places... like the Financial Times. Here is a sample that I identify a lot with from Gideon Rachman, the FT's chief foreign affairs commentator. Like Rachman, when I was a student I couldn't make any sense of Marx either.

"The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms will appear.” That statement from the Prison Notebooks of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci was a favourite of student Marxists when I was at university in the 1980s. Back then it struck me as portentous nonsense. But Gramsci’s observation does resonate now – in an age of ideological confusion. Gideon Rachman - Financial Times

It is a little like what Mark Twain said,

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

Commenting on Gideon's Gramsci quote, I would counter-quote with what Marx himself said on the transition from one historical period to another, something which so many of us feel is happening right now

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

Quite naturally, there are many people who believe that Marx's thinking is valueless because the Soviet Union collapsed in ruin and that Marx was to blame for it. They forget that Marx didn't create the Soviet Union, Lenin did that, using Marx as an intellectual tool. Where Marx said, not before "material conditions have matured in the womb of the old society itself", Lenin believed that the "new social order" could be delivered by Caesarian section. He was wrong and instead of the the moneyless, classless society that Marx vaguely predicted would succeed our system, Lenin gave birth to a sort of state capitalism, whose definition might have been the old soviet joke, "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".

Having said that, it is doubtful if the czarist regime could have ever industrialized Russia, defeated Nazi Germany and put the first man in space as Lenin's creation did. The irony of course being that the USSR's collapse made a perfect example of what Marx had said, that "new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself." Lenin's C-section revolution produced a rigid, dogmatic system that couldn't adapt to the post-industrial, information society trends. They were the ones that were "old". In the end they were brought down because their brand of "capitalism" was more fragile than ours, which as we are discovering now, doesn't mean that our system isn't also fragile.

In a sense we may be about to die of success, we may be spinning off the road, like a car in an ice storm. We like to think that our system is about "freedom" and democracy, but it is probably about consumption. We produce more and more stuff with fewer and fewer people; pay is stagnant for the mass of consumers, who can only stay in the game with credit, which has dried up. But it was grand while it lasted. That is what the soviet block never managed to do.

Here is a classic joke from the now defunct German Democratic Republic.

A man is walking home from work, when he sees a long line forming in front of a government store, he asks the people what they are in line for and they tell him "lemons"... Frantically he runs home, arriving much earlier than normal, and finds his wife in bed with his next door neighbor, confronting them furiously he shouts:

What are you doing here, don't you know that today they are selling lemons?

What brought the GDR down and the rest of Really Existing Socialism, including the USSR along with it, was not really people's chaffing under the repression of totalitarianism, but rather our system's miraculous ability to produce and distribute an infinite variety of affordable consumer goods, which their godless, planned economy couldn't. Free health care, social equality, guaranteed employment, good schools (Angela Merkel graduated from the University of Leipzig) and guaranteed housing couldn't compete with our cornucopia.

The essence of our system is a quite recent -- and never before in history achieved -- endless variety of things, many of them amazingly cheap, to choose from.  Think about it, you wander into a shopping mall looking to buy some deodorant and you'll be forced to choose between dozens of different brands at many different prices until you find exactly the one that suits your pocketbook or your "unique lifestyle" and image. You can eat your favorite fruit at any time of the year, flown in from the other side of the planet. This is freedom!

However it appears that we produce more and more with fewer  and fewer people and the majority's earning power has stagnated to the point where the newly impoverished would-be consumers can only pay to play by going deeply into debt. And now credit has dried up.

So Marx's idea expressed in "Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", was that when our system reached its full potential, its inner conflicts would cause it to collapse.

What would that "full potential" look like?

Maybe it would be interesting to look into the opinion of venture capitalists, after all they risk their money on predicting that future. I recently stumbled on an interesting one, Steve Jurvetson, who is a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson a firm with affiliate offices in more than 30 cities around the world and over $7 billion in capital commitments. The video I am featuring below comes from the Stanford Center for Professional Devopment, and in it Jurvetson speaks about the future. He is a very effective communicator and allthough a lot of what he says sounds like pure science fiction, it most certainly isn't. 

Jurvetson gave the lecture in the video below at Stanford back in 2009 and although it is an hour long, I think that anyone interested in where the world is heading should watch it carefully.  Even stop the video and go back and watch and listen to some parts more than once.

This is the Kurszweil chart that Jurvetson uses in his presentation.  I am putting here so that you can study it it in detail. DS