A Necessary Departure from the Usual

When this site was first created, it involved examination of many issues other than those involving the performance of music. Over the last few years I have narrowed my focus, simply to keep my plate from getting too full. Nevertheless, I feel that the following opinion piece is one that deserves all the circulation it can get:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/free-market-deepen-coronavirus-crisis-200408122743522.html

Mind you, there is probably nothing in this article that cannot be found in the writings of Max Weber; but this particularly piece has the advantage of being less opaque!

Rating the Freshness of Food Purchases

I have to say that I have been relatively pleased with the alliance formed between KGO-TV (the ABC affiliate for the Bay Area) and Consumer Reports, particularly since the latter seems to have dropped the "lifetime" subscription as a reward for a donation I made many decades ago (reminding me a bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Nevertheless, I have always been skeptical about Consumer Reports articles about food and nutrition, since they would often base their findings on attributes that different from the criteria stressed by other concerned organizations, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Therefore, I have to question the value of today's report on the quality of fresh produce at different outlets. Regardless of the criteria behind the evaluations, the entire path that brings an item of produce to a customer's shopping bag is long, involved, and totally local. Thus, I have to wonder if, when a particular store is listed in operating out of a large number of states, the resulting rating is an averaging over all of those states or the result of examining only a few (or even one) of them. Even more problematic is that the ratings may have depended in when the outlets were evaluated, since it is not hard to imagine conditions changing radically from one week (or day) to the next.

These days my biggest concerns with inventory, fresh or processed, is how decisions are made. It is not hard to imagine that the large chains now relegate all such decisions to software. They all have had problems making ends meet since the economic downturn, meaning that they have all had to downsize, meaning that they probably let go of a good deal of "expert knowledge," letting some fast-talking consultant convince them that the knowledge would be "preserved" in the software. Indeed, I think we all have cause for concern that the expertise of a human evaluator may be out of the loop for just about any purchase of food made anywhere, with the possible exception of farmers' markets. Furthermore, I suspect that Google-informed consumers have less intuitive knowledge about when the food they buy may be contaminated or just spoiled. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders whether this all amounts to a skillfully calculated plot to "reduce the surplus population!"

Highway 61 Under Water?

I have to confess that my knowledge of the geography of the Southern states is weak.  So, when I see footage of the current flood damage on television, I have only a vague sense of the places where the footage has been shot.  However, there is one location down there that has nothing to do with either the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement that should resonate with anyone who believes in taking a broad view of music history.  This is the intersection of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where (legend has it) Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil and became the blues master that so many find inspirational.  I had to go to Wikipedia to find out that Clarksdale is in Coahoma County, which is one of the Mississippi counties that sits on the Mississippi River.  Thus, it did not surprise me to read Robert Lee Long’s report in the Desoto Times Tribune that Coahoma County had been declared eligible to receive Federal disaster assistance.  My guess, however, is that Clarksdale is far enough inland that its famous intersection was never threatened.  Does the Devil still hang out there;  and was he protecting it (and Clarksdale as part of the bargain)?

A Reality Check in the Face of CHUTZPAH

I doubt that yesterday's Chutzpah of the Week award had anything to do with the recent turn of events over the question of who will pay for the damages brought on by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) gas-line explosion in San Bruno. More likely it was just a matter of my voice being one among many, but I was still glad to be singing in this particular choir. Here are the lead paragraphs from this morning's story filed by Bob Egelko, Staff Writer for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said Tuesday that it would not take advantage of a utility-backed proposal that would saddle customers with uninsured costs from catastrophic fires to bill the public for last week's deadly San Bruno pipeline explosion.

However, PG&E did not rule out the possibility that its 6 million customers could be stuck with some of the bill. The utility said it will abide by the state's current system, under which regulators decide whether customers or utility shareholders must pay for fire damage that the company's insurance doesn't cover.

Note the phrasing in that first sentence. Yesterday's account at least implied that the proposal had been initiated by PG&E, but this was not the case. As Egelko observed in today's piece, the proposal had much earlier origins:

San Diego Gas & Electric Co. sponsored the current proposal in response to Southern California wildfires in 2007 that caused more than $1 billion in damage.

Furthermore, it turns out that PG&E has a "Division of Ratepayer Advocates," which has now issued a statement on behalf of Main Street:

A lawyer with the PUC's Division of Ratepayer Advocates, which represents consumer interests before the commission, said the division still opposes the utility proposal on wildfire costs.

"We don't think it is fair to ratepayers to be insurers of last resort," the attorney, Jack Stoddard, said after the hearing. Utility shareholders, he said, "have to have skin in the game," potentially exposing them to liability if the company neglects public safety.

This could, of course, be window dressing; and, when it comes to chutzpah, deeds definitely count for more than words. So I am not inclined to rescind yesterday's award. It would do better to display it prominently in the PG&E Board Room as decision-making continues over just what this utility company will be doing about the damage it has done and its potential for causing further damage.

Catastrophe CHUTZPAH

Because I encountered news of the firestorm that ensued in San Bruno as a result of the explosion of a Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) gas line on the BBC, I figure that this deserves to be treated as far more than a local story. For that reason, while it is early in the week, I have decided that it is now time to present a Chutzpah of the Week award to PG&E. The reason can be found in a story filed today by Bob Egelko, Staff Writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Here is his lead summary:

State regulators will take their first look today at a proposal backed by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. that would require customers to pay all costs of catastrophic fires, such as last week's gas-line explosion in San Bruno, that exceed a utility's insurance coverage.

It's not clear whether the plan, if approved by the state Public Utilities Commission, would trigger a PG&E rate increase to help pay the utility's cost from Thursday's disaster. In a filing Monday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the utility said it has $992 million in fire insurance and a $10 million deductible, and "believes that most of the costs related to the San Bruno event will be covered."

Even if the company has enough insurance, however, the proposal would make rate hikes more likely if PG&E caused fires in the near future.

The best response to this so far is a comment from a reader with the handle solomon_grundy:

So PG&E and shareholders receive the profit from cutting corners on infrastructure, and its customers assume the liability. Sweet!

Once again it all comes down to the battle between Main Street and Wall Street, except that anyone who has seen the footage on television knows that, in this case, there is now a honking big crater where Main Street used to be; and yet, crater or not crater, Main Street (or what is left of it), may have to foot part of the bill for PG&E expenses in repairing all that damage. Isn't capitalism wonderful? Think of the Chutzpah of the Week award as a preemptive salvo at the Public Utilities Commission as they decide on how to respond to the PG&E proposal!

Pandemic CHUTZPAH

It looks like I can thank Laura Flanders for directing me towards the leading candidate for this week's Chutzpah of the Week award. She is (among many other things) one of the contributors to The Notion, which is a collective blog site maintained by The Nation. Her post this morning speaks for itself in language that is as clear as it is compelling:

The Swiss drug company Novartis will not give free vaccines against H1N1 flu to poor countries -- it will only consider discounts.

Novartis's refusal comes in the wake of a request from the Director General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Margaret Chan, who has called for drug companies to show solidarity with poor countries as they develop vaccines against the H1NI or "swine flu" pandemic.

Just by way of reminder, H1N1 has infected around 30,000 people globally, mostly in North America, though there have been a few deaths outside Mexico and the United States. Europe suffered its first death on Sunday. The first has just been reported in Argentina.

Help the poor prevent a pandemic? Novartis said 'No'. That's Novartis --makers of Exedrin and Bufferin -- I guess they haven't made enough off those over-the-counter best-sellers.

"If you want to make production sustainable, you have to create financial incentives," explained Novartis Chief Executive Daniel Vasella.

By "financial incentives" he means the 'p' word: profits.

Spot the flaw in the profit-driven approach to health care? Anyone?

Financial incentives?

When a pandemic isn't incentive enough -- I'd say we have another 'p' word -- a problem.

Bearing in mind that the pharmaceutical industry is almost too easy a target for chutzpah accusations, this is such a clear example of warped priorities that it deserves to be singled out for recognition. By placing the interests of shareholders (presumably including himself) above the exigencies of dealing with a pandemic as effectively and rapidly as resources allow, Vasella has built up a "chutzpah reserve" that could easily see him through several awards. For now, however, I shall just live in the present, give him the award, and hope that he places it next to the computer monitor he uses to track the value of Novartis shares.

"… what will you do when the Communists take over?"

Last February, while examining the problems of mismanagement in the face of major disasters in China, I reviewed an old joke about Leonid Brezhnev concerning the displacement of Communism by consumerism. Viewed from the other end of the telescope here in the United States, we continue to experience the failure of attempts to reform a health care system overcome by consumerism on the grounds that any reform brings a threat of "socialism." However, regardless of the political labels that get thrown around, the bottom-line question for any governmental policy is whether or not the public good is being adequately served. From this point of view, a brief Reuters report from Beijing, filed last night, deserves to be read in its entirety:

Chinese children with AIDS, especially from rural families, are going without treatment because their families are too poor to afford it, despite a government policy of free treatment, an activist group said on Monday.

Some families don't even know AIDS treatment programs exist, it said.

"China has made great progress in the fight against AIDS, but far too many children are getting the wrong AIDS treatment," said Sara Davis, executive director of Asia Catalyst, which issued the report.

As many as 10,000 Chinese children may be HIV-positive, most because of botched blood transfusions or transmission from their mothers. They are concentrated in central Henan province, where the blood supply was contaminated in the 1990s, or in Yunnan province in the southwest, a hub for drug trafficking.

In 2005, 9,000 cases of children contracting HIV from their mothers were reported. Many children with AIDS die before the age of five, often undiagnosed.

Some live too far from hospitals and others have been turned away from hospitals and schools that fear contagion from AIDS patients.

China guarantees free drug treatment for AIDS, but many poor families cannot afford the associated fees or treatment for other diseases which may strike the weakened children.

The government provides generic versions of four drugs for front-line treatment, but many patients have developed resistance.

Asia Catalyst called for the Chinese government to "fill in the gaps" by extending coverage for additional medical costs, and providing cheaper second-line drugs.

One may ask rhetorically where the "public good" resides in this story. On the other hand we may also ask whether we can raise the it-can't-happen-here flag when the same question is applied to our own country's approach to "managed health care" (where the scare quotes apply primarily to that adjective "managed"). It is, to say the least, chilling to contemplate that, when it comes to what I have previously called "the reduce-the-surplus-population philosophy of Ebenezer Scrooge," the public health policies of China and the United States are closer than we may have wished to imagine.

The Bush Legacy Endures

When The Wire invoked the metaphor of a "new day" for a radical reformist shift in the power structure of the Baltimore Municipal Government, the ensuing narrative wasted no time in undoing that metaphor. As an assiduous student of the poetic wisdom of such narratives, I have subsequently taken a very jaundiced view of that metaphor, most recently with regard to our State Department (for which, incidentally, I have also appropriated the bowl of shit metaphor from The Wire). However, while the new Administration of Barack Obama may be making positive advances on our country's reputation in the global arena, there remains an Augean pile of dirty laundry left behind by George W. Bush on the domestic front; and our current economic mess is just the stuff at the top of the heap. Buried deep in that pile remains the disgrace of Hurricane Katrina. Not only may that be the blackest blot on the Bush escutcheon (particularly since it involves other members of the family); but also it is a "gift that keeps on giving" (or taking away, as the case may be), even as there are those today still trying to clean up the mess.

One of the more interesting clean-up efforts involves a claim made by six New Orleans homeowners that, in the words of Jon Wiener's recent post to The Notion, one of the blog sites for The Nation, the Army Corps of Engineers "failed to heed environmental laws in building and maintaining the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shortcut for large ships between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, which led to the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans during Katrina." Federal Judge Stanwood Duval will rule on this claim in a trial scheduled to begin on April 20. This will not be an easy case for the Judge; but it will be made more difficult by the possibility that the "well of evidence" has been poisoned. Worse yet, the poisoning can probably be traced back to the influence (if not direct actions) of the Bush Administration.

This is the basic story as Wiener reported it:

Louisiana State University is firing a leading hurricane scientist who was scheduled to testify as an expert witness in a case against the Army Corps of Engineers for their pre-Katrina work in New Orleans. Ivor van Heerden, who had been deputy director of LSU's Hurricane Center, says the school's former president, previously a Bush appointee, had earlier threatened to fire him if he testified.

Tenure exists, we are told, to protect the expression of views that are unpopular with the powerful. This is another case where the person who needed the protection of tenure didn't have it. LSU was able to fire van Heerden because he is an untenured Associate Research Professor.

Van Heerden was the leader of "Team Louisiana," the official independent state-funded investigation of the Katrina flooding. That panel found that the levee failures reflected poor design, bad science and shoddy engineering on the part of the Corps. The Bush Administration had held the levee failures were an "act of God."

When van Heerden was first asked to testify in spring 2007, he said in an interview Sunday with Harry Shearer on KCRW's "Le Show," LSU's then-president, Sean O'Keefe, told plaintiffs' attorneys that if van Heerden testified against the Corps he would be fired. O'Keefe had been appointed to high offices by both Presidents Bush – George W. Bush named him head of NASA in 2001, and George H. W. Bush had named him acting Secretary of the Air Force in 1992.

According to van Heerden, the LSU president said that "nobody from LSU was going to embarrass the Bush administration or upset the major Republican companies that benefit from Corps of Engineers contracts."

The second clause in that final quote is the real reminder of the extent to which the legacy of the Bush Administration is still with us. Whether or not this emerges as an embarrassment, the more important victims are those "major Republican companies that benefit from Corps of Engineers contracts;" and that is why New Orleans remains stuck in all that mud created by Katrina. The good news, however, is that van Heerden may still get his day in court. Whether or not he is an "expert witness," he can still be called to testify as a "fact witness;" so claims such as those van Heerden published in his book, The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why during Hurricane Katrina – the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist, may still be presented as evidentiary "facts" and subjected to cross-examination like any other such evidentiary facts. This trial may thus provide an excellent opportunity for van Heerden to rehearse his presentation, because he is likely to present it again in a second trial, which will decide, as Wiener put it, "a massive class action suit seeking hundreds of millions in damages from the Corps." The people of New Orleans will thus be facing quite a few days in court over the coming months. Let's hope that the decisions turn out in their favor.

Closing the Barn Door

The word is out on the cause of that railroad disaster in Southern California. Here is the Associated Press report as it appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site:

Train operators in California are now banned from cell phone use while on duty, under a temporary order by state regulators.

The California Public Utilities Commission unanimously passed an emergency order Thursday to ban the use of cell phones and other personal electronic devices while operating a train. It comes less than a week after a Southern California commuter train ran head-on into a freight train, killing 25 people and injuring more than 130 others.

Federal authorities confirmed that the Metrolink train engineer was text-messaging on his cell phone while on duty. Authorities say he ran a red light and slammed into the freight train in Chatsworth on Friday.

Thursday's order temporarily prohibits the use of cell phones by railroad employees on the job until the PUC determines whether the ban should be permanently adopted.

As Voltaire said in his Dictionnaire Philosophique:

Common sense is not so common.

Ironically, that sentence may be found in his dictionary entry for "self-love;" and that may reveal a deeper truth: Nothing obliterates our capacity for common sense as much as our own narcissism. Whether we are speaking or texting, is there any piece of technology that better embodies the extent of our narcissism than the cell phone? We have progressed to a state in which we feel our very identity is at peril without the reassurance that someone somewhere wants to receive what we have to say or text, regardless of whether that someone responds with anything other than the complementary attitude, which is, "It is now my turn to speak or text, so that my own identity will be served." Do we really have to go to such extraordinary lengths to prevent supposedly skilled workers from doing stupid things, or we should own up to the premise that our very population of skilled workers is being deteriorated by our culture of narcissism? I might propose a twelve-step program for narcissism; but first I have to answer this call on my cell phone!

Raining on China's Parade

In the latest issue of The New York Review, Orville Schell offers an interesting historical perspective on why the Olympics are so important to China:

A particularly important element in the formation of China's modern identity has been the legacy of the country's "humiliation" at the hands of foreigners, beginning with China's defeat in the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century and the shameful treatment of Chinese in America. The process reached an understandable high point with Japan's successful industrialization and subsequent invasion and occupation of China during World War II, which was in many ways psychologically more devastating than Western interventions, because Japan was an Asian power that had succeeded in modernizing, while China had failed.

In the early twentieth century, a new literature, with a new historical narrative to match, arose around the idea of bainian guochi, "100 years of national humiliation." By taking up its own victimization as a theme and making it a fundamental element in its evolving collective identity, China ensured that certain traits would express themselves again and again as it responded under stress to the outside world. Highlighting their country's history as a victim of foreign aggression led Chinese leaders to rely on what [Peter Hays] Gries calls "the moral authority of their past suffering." Indeed, China's suffering at the hands of foreigners became a badge of distinction, especially during the period in the 1960s in which non-Western countries vied with one another to appear the most "oppressed" by imperialism, and thus the most incipiently revolutionary.

From this point of view, the Olympics have provided China with a means to establish an identity no longer contaminated by the humiliation of foreigners and thus no longer viewed as an inferior in the global institutions of the world community (such as it is). Ironically, the most recent benefit to Chinese identity may have come with their combination of quick response and openness in the wake of the recent earthquake, particularly as a contrast to the disconcerting repressiveness of the Burmese response to its own catastrophe. This is not to apologize for all those factors (including my own Chutzpah of the Week award) that would tarnish China's reputation as the opening of the Olympics grows closer but simply to observe the role that national identity has played in the recent development of the country.

However, if what is ultimately at stake is a question of identity, then the perceptions of China's own population may count for more than the perception of the rest of the world; and, as Jamil Anderlini reported this morning for the Financial Times, those "internal" perceptions may be in jeopardy where world opinion had been most positive, among those earthquake victims. Here are the opening paragraphs of Anderlini's account:

Six weeks after China’s devastating earthquake in May, a group of volunteer social workers arrived in the rubble of Fuxin Number Two Primary School and started meeting parents of children killed when the school collapsed in the tremor.

At first they seemed like any of the other 1.3m Chinese citizens who rushed to the quake zone in the immediate aftermath in an unprecedented outpouring of civic involvement.

But some parents quickly decided something was wrong with this latest group of “volunteers”.

“We asked to see their identification, but they wouldn’t show it to us and although they were quite nice they kept telling us not to make trouble,” said one parent, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. He said the five volunteers repeatedly urged parents to stop demanding an investigation into why the school was so poorly built and why it collapsed in the May 12 quake when most of the buildings around it remained standing.

Many other parents were also suspicious of the opinionated social workers.

“They were definitely sent by the government to keep an eye on us and identify the troublemakers,” said one parent, who also asked not to be named.

This problem with "troublemakers" (which bears a strong resemblance to American concerns for "homeland security" in its "war against terror") may well have been yet another instance of covering up possible sources of "humiliation:"

The photograph of a government official kneeling before the angry, protesting parents from Fuxin Primary was published in Chinese media and quickly became a potent symbol of growing outrage over the 7,000 classrooms that collapsed.

Soon after the photo was published, security services broke up protests and the government banned reporting on the issue.

The crackdown contrasted sharply with the period following the tremor when citizens from all over the country travelled to the epicentre to offer their services.

They were spurred on by 24-hour television coverage as state-run media reported on a natural disaster for the first time in China’s history.

But while propaganda officials directed the media to hail the selfless spirit of the volunteers – with its echoes of the idealistic early years of Chinese communism – the government quietly closed off the opportunities for volunteer participation.

Partly for logistics reasons and partly out of an ingrained reflex to control all facets of public life the government quickly required all volunteers to register with the authorities and operate through an approved organisation. Soon it became clear that some types of volunteers were unwelcome.

One of these was a human rights campaigner, Huang Qi, who was arrested one month after the quake, for “possession of state secrets” after he made more than 10 trips to the quake zone carrying food, water and medicine to survivors.

During those trips he advised grieving parents, including those from Fuxin Primary, on how to pursue a legal campaign against the government and wrote about their grievances on www.64tianwang.com, his website.

Unfortunately for the Chinese government, this particular cat is now out of the bag. These aggrieved parents understand that questions of accountability should not be trumped by questions of national identity. It is not a question of whether or not one can take pride in a paternalistic approach to government; it is a question of whether or not that system honors the values of its citizens, particularly when those citizens are trying to exercise that "selfless spirit" that is so important to the nation's ideology. Converting the humiliation of a nation to the humiliation of the International Olympic Committee is one thing; trying to pull a fast one on those devastated by a natural catastrophe and then treating it as "business as usual," particularly at a time when the eyes of the entire world are directed at China, can hardly further the effort to recover from "100 years of humiliation."

The Return of the Hooverville

This morning, according to a recently filed BBC NEWS report, President George W. Bush tried to assure his audience at the Economic Club of New York that the economy is "basically sound" (quote from the BBC report, not necessarily the words of the President). Was it an editorial comment that the column of related links on the Web page featured a photograph of former Republican President Herbert Hoover? Bush seemed to know better than to echo Hoover's motto that "prosperity is just around the corner;" but I was less interested in his words than I was in a BBC video report, which I saw yesterday through my PBS feed, featuring a tent city in Ontario, California, built by those who had lost their homes as a result of the consequences of the mortgage crisis. I remembered that my father had told me about similar camps that had formed during Hoover's Great Depression. He said they were called "Hoovervilles;" so I was glad to see that there was a "Hooverville" entry in Wikipedia. Here is the basic description from that entry:

A Hooverville was the popular name for a shanty town, examples of which were found in many United States communities during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The word "Hooverville" derives from the name of the President of the United States at the beginning of the Depression, Herbert Hoover. They used Hoover's name because they were frustrated and disappointed with his involvement in the relief effort for the Depression.

These settlements were often formed in unpleasant neighborhoods or desolate areas and consisted of dozens or hundreds of shacks and tents that were temporary residences of those left unemployed and homeless by the Depression. People slept in anything from open piano crates to the ground. Authorities did not officially recognize these Hoovervilles and occasionally removed the occupants for technically trespassing on private lands, but they were frequently tolerated out of necessity.

Some of the men who were made to live in these conditions possessed building skills and were able to build their houses out of stone. Most people, however, resorted to building their residences out of box wood, cardboard, and any scraps of metal they could find. Some individuals even lived in sewer mains.

For the record the word also has an entry in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as "a shanty town."

Things are somewhat different this time, at least in Ontario. Andrea Bennett, Staff Writer for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin created an article for the newspaper's Web site last night (only a few hours after I saw the BBC video) that has dignified the camp with a proper noun: Tent City. Furthermore, that "grammatical escalation" is being accompanied by some degree of institutionalization by the city of Ontario:

A plan to control and secure Tent City, a homeless encampment that began with two dozen locals last summer and has since grown to about 400 people, was made public Thursday by city officials.

Mayor Paul Leon told homeless providers and volunteers that those who have ties to Ontario may stay at the camp, but all others must leave by Monday.

That's also when the homeless staying in tents or trailers on the city-owned site by L.A./Ontario International Airport will be divided into three groups: those known to be from the city, those who claim to be and everyone else.

Wristbands will be issued accordingly, said City Manager Greg Devereaux.

The last group has one week to go and will be provided transportation, if needed, to their cities of origin.

What struck me the most about the BBC video, however, was their focus on camp dwellers who could still take the camera crew back to show them the suburban house they used to own but could no longer keep because of escalating mortgage payments. Not all of them were victims of foreclosure. Some effected their own sale, but it was the loss sustained by that sale that meant that they were now living in a tent. (There were also those fortunate enough to be living out of a mobile home, but one such woman still declared that she did not want other members of her family to see how she was now living.)

That suburban culture had not yet emerged in the days of the Great Depression. Indeed, we have basically deluded ourselves into believing that homelessness is strictly an urban phenomenon, whether it involves the down-and-out living in a cardboard box over a heating outlet near Grand Central Station or families victimized by Hurricane Katrina. This demographic shift has transformed the Hooverville into the "Bushburb," the American suburban dream now turned into a nightmare by the greed-centered financial mismanagement of the current Administration. (I found the epithet "Bushville" through a Google search; but that search directed me to the blog run by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee. In that context I would prefer to stick to my own terminology!)

Will our President take the time to visit Tent City and see what is happening there without the mediation of a television camera? Will his parents pay such a visit, as they did to the New Orleans Superdome after the Katrina disaster? If so, I suspect it will be harder for Barbara to come out with another callous remark like that one about conditions for the Katrina victims being better than those they had at home! After all, these are suburbanites who used to be counted as part of the "base" for the Republican Party. Let us hope that, for all of the flaws that Bennett reported about it, the institutionalization of Tent City will include provisions for its residents to vote in November. If our electoral process is supposed to be, at least in spirit, about every voice being heard, then the State of California is obliged to make sure that those voices are not neglected!

I'm Not Alone (But I Don't Like the Company)!

The time stamp on yesterday's post indicates that I completed and filed it at 8:09 AM (Pacific Time). This was after John Bolton's appearance on Hannity & Colmes on Thursday. However, because I think the last time I spent more than 60 seconds with Fox News was several years ago in a Tokyo hotel room when I was trying to find any source of "straight news" in English, I did not know about Bolton's opportunity to reflect on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto until I read yesterday's account of it by Mike Aivaz and Nick Juliano for The Raw Story. If I read this account properly, then it would appear that Bolton and I are in the same camp when it comes to stray conspiracy theories: this was not (as I put it) a "pathology of contempt" but a "pathology of ignorance."

At this point, however, our ways depart, at least somewhat. From my perspective the ignorance resided in ill-considered actions towards the promotion of democracy in Pakistan (which, in the context of our more "visceral" goals of capturing Osama bin Laden and/or bringing down Al Qaeda, may, itself, have been an ill-considered goal). As Aivaz and Juliano reported, Bolton was concerned with a different context:

Bolton said the primary concern of the US needs to be the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. With Bhutto's death plunging the country into chaos, there is now a "very grave danger" the weapons will fall under control of radical Islamist militants within the Pakistani military.

"What we have now is a prescription for chaos," Bolton said.

Another foreign policy expert told RAW STORY Thursday that the death of the opposition leader likely has caused the so-called atomic "Doomsday Clock" to tick closer to midnight.

This distinction reveals what may be an interesting difference in decision-making strategy that may explain not only the ignorance leading up to the Bhutto tragedy but also Bolton's abrasive tenure at the United Nations, not to mention the more fundamental question of whether or not our "War on Terror" has been either legitimate or effective.

It all goes back to the distinction that Gore Vidal stressed in the wake of 9/11: The only way to view those attacks was a criminal acts. Since we are all reared on the "law" and "order" perspectives of crime prevention by our television viewing habits, we should all remember that the prosecution of a criminal act is grounded on three factors: means, motive, and opportunity. Bolton's reflection on Hannity & Colmes seems to indicate that he believes that any "War on Terror" should be based on "battles over means," so to speak. In terms of Republican ideology, this is slightly ironic, since it comes down to the principles behind gun control, but on a much larger scale that includes nuclear weapons. My own belief, which I have tried to write about in the past but never particularly clearly, is that we can only understand terrorism by viewing it through the lenses of motives: If we can undermine or disable the motives, the threat of those motivated to attack us will be reduced. (It is with a bit of trepidation that I suggest that just about every story about an Al Qaeda video I have seen, particularly those issued by bin Laden himself, are focused primarily on "messages of motive.")

Why is this distinction important? The answer resides in another one of my favorite themes, which I usually discuss when I am writing about technology. One can try to address the problem of means in the "objective world;" but problems of motive reside strictly in the "social world," with all the messiness it entails with regard to communicative actions. At the risk of being too reductive, Bolton came across as so disagreeable at the United Nations because his fixation on the objective world blinded him to all that messiness; and, as a result, his communicative actions just made our social relations in the global community messier. This is not to dismiss the value of an objective perspective (or, for that matter, the importance of means of access to nuclear and other dangerous weapons); it is to dismiss the view that the objective perspective is the only perspective, which seems to be a view that Bolton shares with most of the neoconservative community. Unfortunately, the mess we are now in is, more than anything else, a consequence of "a failure to communicate" (thank you, Paul Newman, not to mention Winston Churchill's remark at the White House on June 26, 1954: "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war"); and, if we persist in our dismissive attitude towards the importance of communicative actions, particularly where the social world is concerned, that mess will only get worse.

TIME is Out of Joint

Since I take so much pleasure in irony, there was at least one level in which, after having yesterday read Huffington Post blogger Russell Shaw write about the inevitability of Al Gore being this year's selection for Time magazine's Person of the Year, I could enjoy the Associated Press report that the selection was actually Vladimir Putin. What made the report interesting, of course, was not the selection but the reasoning behind the selection:

The nod went to the Russian leader because of Putin's "extraordinary feat of leadership in taking a country that was in chaos and bringing it stability," said Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor.

This one criterion overlooks many dimensions of Putin, which even Stengel could not ignore:

"He's the new czar of Russia and he's dangerous in the sense that he doesn't care about civil liberties, he doesn't care about free speech," Stengel said.

In other words, as Tom Lehrer put it about Werner von Braun, Putin is "a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience;" and expedience has worked very well in his favor.

So did Time speak for the rest of us? Did it ever? And, even if did, just what was it saying? Perhaps Gore was rejected for precisely the reasons that Shaw found him so inevitable. He has dedicated both his heart and his mind to getting out the word that the planet is in trouble and enjoining as many people in the world as he can to unite in reversing a dire trend. Putin, on the other hand, is perceived as the fixer. Gore warned about a chaos that is descending upon the entire world. Putin took the chaos that had engulfed Russia and returned stability "by any means necessary." I take this to mean that, at least at Time, solving problems is more important than understanding them, even if it means overlooking some of the less savory steps that lead to the solution.

Ideology and Expertise

I have not figured out whether it is good news or bad news that, in the wake of making our country an embarrassment in the global community (as was demonstrated most vividly last week in Bali), President Bush has appeared to shift his attention from international to national affairs. After all, I suspect that, if you were to just walk up to people on the street and ask them with what major national event they would associated our President, most of those folks would probably respond, "Hurricane Katrina." So when I read last night's Reuters report by John Crawley under the headline "Bush wants market solutions for U.S. airline delays," my immediate reaction was, "Can this turn into a mess worse than the impact of Katrina?"

Of course air travel is already a pretty awful mess, and there is nothing like a holiday to aggravate the mess. However, when things are at their worst, is it really the best time to experiment with market-based ideology? I cannot help but remember my history lessons about how both Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong tried to apply Communist ideology to agriculture and brought on famines that devastated their respective countries. It is all very well and good to think out of the box, as long as you remember that the operative word is "think!" Even Franklin Roosevelt, who believed that, in confronting the Great Depression, doing anything was better than doing nothing, did not try to attach ideological baggage to the things he tried.

The more fundamental question we need to ask, however, is just what Bush means by "market solutions" and what premises and consequences are associated with that meaning. Fortunately, Crawley has provided us with a few of Bush's own words:

The truth of the matter is, we need a more rational way of allocating gates among airlines.

There are any number of ways to pick apart this assertion. The most important is probably the premise it appears to embody that markets are rational. As far as I can tell, the only settings in which markets are rational are in economics textbooks; and, as more and more economists seem willing to acknowledge that markets are primarily phenomena of the social world, those textbooks are quickly fading out of fashion, if not out of print. Perhaps Bush really meant "efficient," rather than "rational." This is another favorite adjective for economists who prefer the cleanliness of mathematical models to the grubby realities of the social world; and isn't "throughput" the major concern of holiday travelers? Here, however, we have to remember that, particularly from the subjective (and not necessarily rational) perspective of the consumer, "effectiveness" may count for more than efficiency. The last time I raised this distinction, I was discussing the patient's-eye view of health care; but it is just as valid for the traveler's-eye viewpoint of airline operations.

In fairness, however, we should still see what sorts of proposals are on the table, regardless of the weakness of the premises (not to mention their potential consequences):

The Transportation Department has struggled to finalize details of its congestion plan for the New York region -- especially JFK -- after meeting stiff resistance from airlines and some members of Congress to centerpiece initiatives such as the administration-preferred plan that would make airlines pay a premium for flights during the busiest times of the day.

But regulators, according to aviation sources late on Monday, are coalescing around a plan that is to be announced on Wednesday by Transportation Secretary Mary Peters and would, over the longer term, manage capacity and competition by auctioning some takeoff and landing rights.

In the shorter term, the sources said, the government is expected to impose hourly flight caps at JFK for the summer of 2008.

It seems as if, between keyword advertising and eBay, auctioning has become the new hammer (pun intended), wielded by a small boy who sees everything as a nail. This may be due in part to the way in which it has provided mathematicians with new opportunities to experiment with models, even if those models are firmly ensconced in the objective world, safely protected from the messy details of the subjective and social worlds. The problem, of course, is that, when the models are used in a predictive capacity, their predictions are limited to the objective world, which is just not the world of holiday travelers.

I actually had my first taste of auction-based thinking at a talk that John Seely Brown gave in the auditorium of the (then) Xerox PARC Auditorium for an event sponsored by the Wharton School (one of those academic monuments to the objective world). Brown was extolling the virtues of low-level communications in highly distributed networks as an alternative to the hierarchy of a "classical" Weber-style bureaucracy. The example he chose to invoke was air traffic control, which, from the point of view of risk to loss of life and property, is a more critical problem than passenger throughput at airports. Brown suggested that the heavy cognitive load on air traffic controllers could be alleviated if every airplane could carry a software package that would enable individual planes to "bid" for the available landing slots at airports. Cynic that I am, I found the following voice ringing in my ears as I thought about this suggestion:

This is your Captain speaking. We hope you have enjoyed your non-stop flight from Los Angeles. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure a winning bid for a landing slot at Kennedy Airport. However, I am happy to report that we have won a bid for a slot at Logan International Airport outside Boston and will be landing there in about an hour.

While I am clearly serving this up as a joke, it also demonstrates what happens if we fail to think through narrative scenarios when we bury our heads too deep in the mathematics. We remember Hurricane Katrina (and associate it with President Bush) because, after the Gulf Coast was flooded by the elements, the entire nation (if not the world) was flooded with such narrative scenarios; and there was not the slightest thing funny about any of them. As I said in my second paragraph, the operative word behind trying to solve any problem is "think." Depression has become too much of a way of life in this country and the President is perceived as being far too detached from that depression for him to take on another problem and fail to think through those irritating details of premises and consequences.

Careless with Money, Careless with Language

Consider the following lead for a report from the belly of the beast of our nation's bureaucracy, filed by Associated Press Writers (yes, that is how they are identified on the byline; does that mean they are not reporters?) Frank Bass and Eileen Sullivan:

The Bush administration now acknowledges it is trying to recover nearly $500 million from people who improperly received federal aid money intended to help victims of two deadly hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, along the Gulf Coast two years ago. It said the amount may increase further.

"This is a moving target and not finite," said James McIntyre, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The government's newest estimate of improper aid represents $494 million FEMA paid to 134,000 people who were ineligible for the aid they received. More than half the money went to people who couldn't prove residency, according to FEMA figures. Overpayments and duplicate payments account for most of the remainder.

The amount had exceeded $500 million, but the agency wrote off nearly $27 million because of appeals or hardship waivers. The $500 million figure would represent nearly $1 of every $10 in government aid intended to help storm victims.

The news about the money is bad enough, but that turn of phrase by McIntyre just adds insult to injury. Does he really mean to assert that the amount of money misappropriated by FEMA is infinite? Given that the Federal Reserve does about as good a job as it can of making sure that there are never an infinite number of dollars in our currency system, we can safely assume that even the Katrina fiasco did not run up an infinite tab. No this is just another example of a bureaucrat trying to elevate his persona by elevating his language; and, consistent with just about every other Bush administration bureaucrat (including The Man himself) who opens his mouth to the press, the opposite effect always seems to ensue! It is not (as my Title may imply) that the careless handling of language is a symptom of the careless handling of finances (or, for that matter, vice versa). Rather, it is just that ours is a government that is careless in everything; and, like a muscle ache that only haunts us when it rains, we have become so used to the discomfort that we hardly notice it any more. Unfortunately, tolerating excessive carelessness in others is tantamount to an act of carelessness unto itself, whatever we may believe about loving our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart. If people get the government they deserve and ours is government of carelessness, what does that say about us?

Another Flaw in Keyword Advertising

One lesson I remember learning about advertising in my youth was that, whenever there was news of an accident involving an airplane, all airline commercials for the day would be canceled. Unfortunately, the rules of keyword advertising cannot grasp this simple rule. I thought about this when I read an Associated Press report on Yahoo! News that began with the following paragraph:

Two commercial pilots allegedly fell asleep on a flight between Baltimore and Denver, with one pilot waking up to "frantic" calls from air traffic controllers warning them they were approaching the airport at twice the speed allowed.

Most of the space on the Web page, immediately to the right of the next two paragraphs, was then taken up by an advertisement for Southwest Airlines! For me this was a reminder that using a keyword to trigger whether or not an advertisement is displayed along with a news item does not take into account whether or not the connotation of that keyword is positive or negative. Yes, the story turned out to be about an event that took place in March of 2004; but it is still not the sort of story that leads one to thing about air travel. Sometimes those meager humans who ran radio and television stations forty years ago could exercise better judgment than today's software for advertising placement!

Media Moguls can Say Stupid Things, Too!

In all fairness to Michael Bloomberg, he was probably speaking as a mayor, rather than the founder of a major successful media corporation, when, in response to the news that Police Detective James Zadroga may have been on drugs during those months when he was doing his job in the contaminated air at the 9/11 "ground zero" site, the current mayor of New York declared that "the science says this was not a hero." Has it ever been the business of science to define the concept of "hero" or characterize the nature of the heroic act? Is Bloomberg so dense that he can reject the social world (which is the only venue in which heroism can be meaningful) in favor of the objective world of science? Apparently, it is again necessary to invoke the spirit of Carl Gustav Jung, who was perceptive enough to recognize that "those heroes of olden time must have led a none too scrupulous life, and indeed not a single myth, Greek or otherwise, claims that they ever did anything else. All that beauty could revel in its existence only because there was as yet no penal code and no guardian of public morals." Whether as mayor or as media mogul, Bloomberg seems to be suffering from a significant case of limited reading matter!

Making Too Much of the Nobel Peace Prize

Don't get me wrong. I sympathize from the depth of my heart with the first paragraph of Joe Brewer's blog post on The Huffington Post yesterday afternoon:

The big story today is that the Nobel Peace Prize recognizes the climate crisis as a genuine threat to humanity. It now has official standing along with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, conflict in the Middle East, landmines, and poverty as something that causes harm to people within and beyond conflict zones.

Brewer then went on a moderate rant against the media for trying to turn this into a story about Al Gore getting into the Presidential race; and I sympathize with that rant, too. My problem is that, however big the story may be (even the right one), I find it hard to believe that it is going to have much impact, at least in our own country.

The issue is not "that the Nobel Peace Prize recognizes the climate crisis as a genuine threat to humanity." Rather, the issue is the question of whether this recognition will have any impact on those faith-based environmentalists that continue to dictate our country's policy. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the basic precept of faith-based environmentalism is that God provided the bounty of the Earth for Man to consume and enjoy. When that bounty runs out, God will take care of those who believe in Him; and the rest (presumably including myself) will have to fend for themselves. This concept did not originate with the current administration. It goes back at least to when James Watt ran the Department of the Interior under Ronald Reagan; and, as a policy, has changed very little (if at all) since then. Bush simply continued the principle with his conviction that accountability to God (or his interpretation thereof) was more important than accountability to the Kyoto Accord.

Confused about the Crater

The BBC did not help matters very much this morning by introducing their story on the "mystery crater" in Peru with an excerpt from the notorious adaptation of The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles into a you-are-there radio drama. However, this rather sensationalist approach confirmed the observation of one of their guests, which is that people, as a rule, tend to prefer catastrophic explanations, no matter how outlandish (such as an alien invasion), to the more ordinary (particularly if the explanation is even a bit more complicated). Indeed, the great value of this particular guest's contribution was the time he took to propose alternatives to the meteorite hypothesis. This is the one that most of the wire sources have adopted without considering alternatives, although, in compiling their own story from those sources, Al Jazeera at least had the good sense to describe the crater as "apparently made by a meteorite." However, the reason the BBC interview put so much time into alternative hypotheses is because of their guest's strong conviction that the chemical composition of a meteorite cannot intoxicate the atmosphere at the site of its landing.

One of the more viable alternatives has found its way onto the BBC NEWS Web site:

"Increasingly we think that people witnessed a fireball, which are not uncommon, went off to investigate and found a lake of sedimentary deposit, which may be full of smelly, methane rich organic matter," said Dr Caroline Smith, a meteorite expert at the London-based Natural History Museum.

"This has been mistaken for a crater."

Unfortunately, you would have had to heard the radio interview to apprehend the proper definition of fireball. The geography of Peru around this area is highly volcanic. Every now and then, rather than erupting, one of the volcanoes will just sort of "spit out" some of its molten contents. The result is called a fireball; and, as Dr. Smith observed, their trajectories are frequently observed. There was also a report on BBC World Service Television of bones having been found at the "crater" site (without saying whether the bones were human or of some other animal). The point is that, between the fireball and the site, they may have been a variety of sources of methane, which would then account for the toxic air quality.

This brings us to the "Q&A" page that BBC NEWS has now prepared, which explores this hypothesis and then pursues another interesting direction that was not covered on the radio interview:

What does a meteorite emit?

Meteorites do not in themselves let off any dangerous fumes. They can however expose rotting organic matter, and the air can be filled with methane, hydrogen sulphite and carbon dioxide.

But there is some debate as to whether this is a meteorite - or indeed an object from space - in the first place.

Some scientists are suggesting that people may have witnessed a fireball, set off to investigate, and found a lake of sedimentary deposit that was already there. The biological process here could mean that the kind of fumes listed above are also emitted.

Can these really make people feel so ill?

Intense smells, even those that are not particularly toxic, can make people feel poorly, while high levels of carbon dioxide mean people at the site may not be getting enough oxygen.

At a purely physiological level, walking some way with some trepidation as to what one might find could well have an impact on the body and produce feelings of nausea and dizziness, sensations which may be compounded by the fact that other people say they are suffering from the same complaint.

So could mass hysteria play a role?

Symptoms could well be caused in part by what is known as a Mass Sociogenic Illness (MSI).

There are countless examples of this through history and up to the present day.

Amid fears of a gas leak late last year for instance, dozens of British pupils were taken to hospital with nausea and other symptoms. However no gas or environmental cause was found, and doctors could establish nothing wrong with the children. It was ascribed to mass hysteria.

Meanwhile, the Belgian Coke scare of 1999 - when many said they fell sick after drinking contaminated cans - was also said to be an example of MSI when laboratory analysis showed levels of contamination were not high enough to cause any of the illnesses reported.

This brings us back to the Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which induced MSI with a vengeance. Even when the outlandish is not involved, the catastrophic still tends to trump the more innocuous. Perhaps there is a side of all of us that draws upon the media to provide us with a steady supply of victims, expecting the same novelty from acts of victimization that we expect from each new season of television programs. When we grow bored with too many stories of victims of exploitation (now that the mass media are finally waking up to this being the underlying story behind the subprime mortgage crisis), our self-indulgent appetites crave victims of "natural causes;" and the reporting of news has become a business of satisfying those cravings that is not particularly different from the junk food business.

Thinking about "This World:" Transcendence or Negligence?

On the surface it appears somewhat ironic that silence should figure so significantly on this day of memory in the United States while, at the same time, Osama bin Laden should use the occasion as an opportunity to release a 47-minute video eulogizing Walid al-Shehri, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, the first jet to crash into the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. In order to find perspective for that day when "everything changed," I found myself digging into al-Shehri's own words (thanks to translated passages provided by Al Jazeera English), where I found the following:

As for our own fortune, it is not in this world. And we are not competing with you for this world, because it does not equal in Allah's eyes the wing of a mosquito.

Yes, this is a typical example of that transcendent thinking without which martyrdom would not be possible; but is it not, also, a statement of negligence, if not denial, of "this world?" That being the case, do we not also find such negligence in an American policy that refused to honor the proposals of the Kyoto Agreement (one of the key points in the rhetoric of bin Laden's own recent video) or ratify the authority of the International Criminal Court? Were not both of these acts an assertion of the self-interests of the powerful over a few faltering steps, taken on a global scale, to deal with the pressing problems of "this world?" Is not the very foundation of faith-based policy one of a transcendence, which, when viewed by those of us who do not share the faith, just as easily interpreted as negligence? Walt Kelly was famous for saying, "We have met the enemy, and they is us." Have we the courage to acknowledge the parallels between our attacks on such abstract concepts as climate control and international justice and the more concrete attacks of 9/11/2001? If we have that courage, can we summon the will to bring about a course-change away from this continuing negligence of "this world?"

9/11/2001 was not the day when "everything changed." Things were already changing on Election Day of 2000, when those governed by faith alone began to chip away at those processes of our government that had been set in place by our Constitution. We were already witnessing the change in mind-set in the summer of 2001; but the only reactions to those changes were minor demonstrations that did not equal "the wing of a mosquito." Then nineteen terrorists applied their negligence of "this world" to implement a demonstration on a scale that exceeded "the wing of a mosquito" by an unthinkable magnitude. After 9/11/2001 we could no longer ignore a change that was already in the works. Unfortunately, we could be dissuaded from reflecting on it; and our government and media achieved that dissuasion with businesslike alacrity. Six years later it seems as if all capacity for reflection has been sapped from us. Yet faith-based terrorism derives its very strength from a similar suppression of reflective thinking, masquerading a brutal negligence of "this world" as transcendence. Both sides are stuck in the same muck. Only by extricating ourselves can we have the substantive grounds to prevail over the negligence that lies at the heart of terrorist convictions.