Bobby Jindal's "Parlor Games"

Last night the Republicans held their Lincoln Day dinner in Des Moines. Chris Good was there covering the story for ABC News. Apparently he decided to confront Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal with the same question that managed to get Florida Governor Jeb Bush to fumble: Knowing what we now know, was the decision to go to war in Iraq a good idea? Jindal dodged the question, dismissing the consideration of such hypotheses as "parlor games." In doing so, he may have earned himself poster-child status in representing our prevailing culture that seems to lives by the motto "Ignorant of history and proud of it."

Put another way, Jindal appears to assign little value to a critical question:

How did we get where we are?

Whether "where we are" is particularly good or really bad (which seems to be the case at present); we need to deal with the present with some frame of reference other than "shit happens." If Jindal's were an isolated voice that could be ignored when cooler heads prevail, then his reinforcement of our willful ignorance of history could be dismissed as a statistical outlier. Unfortunately, he is more likely right there in the center of a statistical norm; and, if, as a culture, we dismiss as a "parlor game" the need to reflect on how we got ourselves into our present mess, then it is likely that the next mess will come soon and with even greater impact.

Mata Hari Wants to Friend You

The following showed up this morning on Al Jazeera English through their wire service sources:

Iranian hackers set up fake Facebook accounts and tried to befriend US and Western officials in an effort to spy on them, an internet security firm has said.

The hackers created fake personas and populated their profiles with fictitious personal content, and then tried to befriend targets, the Reuters news agency reported.

Targets are believed to include a US navy admiral, politicians, ambassadors, lobbyists and officials from several other countries including the UK and Saudi Arabia, according to the internet firm, iSight Partners.

Is anyone surprised that social software should turn out to provide a new layer of efficiency for some of the oldest spycraft techniques?

Recovering the Progressive Agenda

The article “Where Do We Go from Here?” by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells in the current (January 13) issue of The New York Review appears to have been completed on December 16, a good half month before the House gavel was passed and the Tea Party first flexed its muscles by requesting a reading of the Constitution (from which passages not to their liking were omitted).  Nevertheless, since the sabers have begun to rattle over undoing health care reform, the question posed by this article is extremely timely.  My personal feeling is that we need to revive what I have previously called “the Neustadt-May thinking-in-time approach to dealing with crisis situations,” which begins by asking of the particular crisis situation “How did we get into this mess?”  Fortunately, Krugman and Wells use their final paragraph to provide a way to think about this question:

In 2008, progressives fell for the fantasy of hope and change on the cheap; they believed Obama’s promise that the reforms America needed could float through on a tide of bipartisan reconciliation. It was not to be, and clinging to that illusion will only lead to more defeats. If progressives want to rebound, they’ll have to fight.

I am not sure I would agree with that “on the cheap” qualifier;  but I definitely endorse the use of the noun “fantasy.”  On the day after the last Election Day, I was not so polite.  I described those progressives as “the deluded masses who rallied behind Barack Obama blinded by a vision of secular Messianism;”  and I see no reason to soften my tone.  Indeed, that sharper tone is the one that now advocates serious attention to the key recommendation made by Krugman and Wells:

Democrats need to make it clear that if Obama isn’t going to be the leader of the Democratic agenda—and all indications are that he can’t or won’t—they will advance that agenda anyway, with or without his help. They have to be ready to delink their political fate from Obama, and make it clear that they won’t tolerate further undermining of their goals by deluded calls for bipartisanship. Progressive groups—MoveOn, for example—helped put Obama in office by mobilizing their members and followers through a variety of organizational strategies, including use of the Internet. They did so only to be ignored and dismissed once the 2008 election was won, and now they need to be revived.

One way to approach this recommendation is by revisiting my “favorite from Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies,” which is “Go to an extreme, come part way back.”  We need leadership in both the House and Senate smart enough to recognize that you start by trying to go for all the marbles, because only then do you have the best chance of getting the ones you really want.  Fortunately, we have members of both legislative bodies who are not afraid of this bold strategy and can hang tough over just how far they are willing to concede “part way back.”  These members were the heroes of the debate over health care reform;  and, if they did not prevail, they at least held out a more realistic hope of getting something done than Barack Obama ever did.

If we really want to take Krugman and Wells seriously, then we need to make sure that such legislators are not sidelined.  On the Senate side we need to recognize someone like Bernie Sanders, who is never afraid to ask uncomfortable questions about who the beneficiaries really are and why those who deserve to benefit are being ignored.  Over in the House I would suggest that we have a “dynamic duo” in Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich, both of whom I recognized back in my chutzpah awarding days.  I have to confess that I figured I had better check the list on Wikipedia of the current membership of the House to make sure that those I have just recommended still had Congressional seats.  It was nice to see that Kaptur and Kucinich had consecutive entries under Ohio, 9 and 10;  and it was all the more amusing that they follow John Boehner in position 8.  To hijack Obama’s campaign rhetoric, yes, we can make sure that our voices get heard;  but let’s make sure we find the right people in Washington to speak for us!

The Passion of Farfur According to Hamas

In many ways Farfur was a symbol of Hamas' defiance of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that culminated in a separation of Hamas-led Gaza from West Bank territories governed by the PA. Through the very name of their television program, Tomorrow's Pioneers, the Hamas-affiliated al-Aqsa channel set the tone with Saraa, their little girl host, serving as interlocutor for an obvious Mickey Mouse clone (complete with high-pitched voice) spouting propaganda while taking telephone calls from viewers. When the Palestinian Authority tried to pull the program off the air, Farfur demonstrated where the real authority lay in Gaza long before the case was finalized by the recent militant bloodshed. So perhaps Farfur was the avant garde agent provocateur in the Hamas effort to separate Gaza from the Palestinian Authority.

If this was the case, then it was time for Farfur to exit the stage. According to the BBC, al-Aqsa achieved this through one last tirade of hate-filled rhetoric:

The Hamas-affiliated al-Aqsa channel aired the last episode on Friday, showing the character, Farfur, being beaten to death by an "Israeli agent".

"Farfur was martyred defending his land," said the show's presenter Saraa.

At least his ending was more consistent that the efforts to spell his name in the Latin alphabet, where "Farfour" is an equally valid spelling! Indeed, at least one story filed by Nidal al-Mughrabi included both spellings! However, the spelling of the signifier hardly matters when what is signified is such vicious discrimination and hatred. One can only wonder what al-Aqsa next plans to show to its viewers.

Trying to Confront the Nature of Experience

Every now and then I read something on confused of calcutta that really disconcerts me. Often this just leaves me depressed for the rest of the day (if not longer). Every now and then, however, I find myself provoked into trying to tease out just what was bugging me; and, if I am lucky, I figure out a way to start making lemonade out of the lemons. This seems to have been the case with JP Rangaswamy's recent observation about technology adoption:

Everything changes. Now one of the changes that has intrigued me this past decade is in the nature of the technology adoption curve. Simply put, for most of my life, I was used to a particular adoption curve. In order to experiment with emerging technologies, you had to be 28-40, a high-achieving professional, working for a company in aerospace, defence, high-end manufacturing or investment banking. Before 28 you didn’t have the seniority, after 40 you were past experimenting and having fun, you spent all your time in the paranoid timewasting that characterises so much of large-organisation behaviour.

All that changed with Generation M. The pyramid sort of inverted overnight, as the mobile multitasking multimedia generation caught hold of life in their inimitable way. Now it’s the 14-25 year old who first gets to play.

Now I have to confess that I am about as skeptical about Generation M as I was about a year ago when I wrote my "Generation M Goes to Work?" post on my last blog. This time, however, JP seems to have provoked me into thinking more about age itself. One of my conclusions is that, whatever the age numbers may be for technology adoption, I still subscribe to Mark Twain's aphorism about how our appreciation of age (his father in his case) advances along with the years we have lived. However, while Twain made his remark with a certain sense of comfortable satisfaction with the aging process, I see more of a "tragic sense of being."

Consider the hypothesis that, in Heidegerrian language, we only really begin to appreciate our experiences of being-in-the-world once we have progressed beyond the age of 40. I would argue that this is the case because of all that biological evidence that addresses how past experiences bias present perceptions; and, in the way we tend to live today, 40 is about the age by which we have accumulated an experience base with a fair amount of both breadth and depth. As the above quotation points out, however, it is also the age at which we leave the "fun of the trenches" and succumb to the more deadening aspects of the workplace.

At this point it is really tempting to invoke the concept of "wisdom;" but I need to avoid that temptation because of the ways in which the noun-games that have been brought on by knowledge management frenzy have robbed most of our common-sense vocabulary of all of its meaning. Let me, instead, continue with the vocabulary I was using in the last paragraph and suggest that, for all the claptrap that grew up along with knowledge management faddism, we still do not really comprehend the nature of that experience base at the level of either the individual or any of the communities in which that individual is embedded; and, since we understand it so poorly, we are equally inadequate in our efforts to leverage it, to engage the past as a valuable resource when confronting the issues of the present.

These paragraphs were initially provoked because the paragraphs quoted above then led to some musing about examining Facebook usage data.

I’m going to try and cut and paste the list of current applications in Facebook Platforms:

• All (1097)
• Alerts (65)
• Business (34)
• Chat (43)
• Classified (27)
• Dating (46)
• Education (66)
• Events (37)
• Fashion (25)
• File Sharing (24)
• Food and Drink (32)
• Gaming (138)
• Just for Fun (458)
• Messaging (84)
• Mobile (26)
• Money (28)
• Music (70)
• Photo (70)
• Politics (33)
• Sports (42)
• Travel (40)
• Utility (165)
• Video (67)

I think there’s a big lesson for us all in the data presented above. Just For Fun leads, then comes Utility some way behind, then comes Gaming. Music, Photo, Video and Messaging bunch up a little later, and Business is around half the size of any one of those.

I’m sure someone can write an app that plots the movement of numbers in each of these classifications over time, or make it possible for someone else to do it. Any views, Dave? Enjoying your travels?

Now this is the supply side. What would be even more interesting is the demand side and how that behaves across these classifications? How many people are using applications in each classification? I accept there is risk of misclassification or fuzzy overlaps, but I am not looking for exact sciences here, I think the trend information is good enough.

I find this an interesting intellectual exercise; but, amateur anthropologist that I am, I believe very strongly that supply-and-demand data need to be gathered and examined at both the microlevel and the macrolevel (which the above quotation has used as a point of departure). Furthermore, as the quotation suggests, both of these levels need to be analyzed diachronically, that is, attending to how they unfold in time, rather than how any “instance-snapshot” looks. This could lead us in a profoundly new direction, because while databases and "knowledge bases" may have failed us in our attempt to achieve a better understanding of personal experiences, the right mix of macroanalysis and microanalysis of behavior in a rich social environment like Facebook may yield more viable results, both in enhancing our understanding and enabling those experiences to be leveraged in present behavior. Perhaps I am being too optimistic about how much of the human condition we can ultimately grasp, but I think that the first steps in blazing this particular trail deserve serious attention!

Hanging Tough Pays Off

My favorite from Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies (this one is in the 1996 fourth edition) is "Go to an extreme, come part way back." It looks as if it may be Paul Wolfowitz' favorite, too! If the terms he set for his departure from the World Bank were extreme enough to warrant consideration for a second Chutzpah Award, it would appear that he did not have to come back very far. Al Jazeera English has provided a nice summary of how this affair was finally resolved:

Paul Wolfowitz has said he will resign as World Bank president at the end of June, ending a protracted battle over his leadership sparked by a promotion he arranged for his girlfriend.

The bank's board said it accepted that Wolfowitz had acted "in good faith" and acknowledged that "a number of mistakes were made by a number of individuals".

"He assured us that he acted ethically and in good faith ... and we accept that," it said.

The board said it was "grateful to Mr Wolfowitz for his service at the bank", adding that "much has been achieved in the last two years" – a move condemned by the bank's staff association.

Wolfowitz, 63, said he was pleased the board "accepted my assurance that I acted ... in what I believed were the best interests of the institution, including protecting the rights of a valued staff member".
Now, he said, it was in the best interest of the board that its mission "be carried forward under new leadership".

However, this is far from an and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after ending, at least from the World Bank's point of view:

The board said it was clear that "a number of mistakes were made by a number of individuals in handling the matter under consideration" and that there was a "need to review the governance framework of the World Bank Group, including the role as well as procedural and other aspects of the ethics committee".

In other words the World Bank seems to have concluded by closing the barn door after the horse was stolen, while Wolfowitz can enjoy the benefits of holding to his extreme position. Nevertheless, out of a sense that the award should be distributed fairly across the sample set, rather than concentrating on any single individual, I have decided that this weeks award should remain in the hands (so to speak) of the sex offenders.

Farfur Questions the "Authority" of the Palestinian Authority

It would appear that Friday is still Farfur day on Al-Aqsa Television. Nidal al-Mughrabi, who yesterday submitted the Reuters story about a unified Hamas-Fatah police force in Gaza, today reported for Reuters that Al-Aqsa Television has decided to defy the injunction by Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti to suspend broadcast of Tomorrow's Pioneers. Indeed, if Barghouti's move was an attempt to call a "time out" for reviewing the content, then Al-Aqsa Television made a point of letting the viewers of Tomorrow's Pioneers know that it was still business as usual:

During one of the skits, Farfur told young viewers that he aspired to be like the slain spiritual leaders of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

A young girl, who identified herself as Amani, called in to the show to sing a popular Hamas song.

"Jerusalem we are coming. We will not rest and we will not be humiliated," Amani sang as Farfour danced on a stage decorated with drawings, including one of a rocket.

This continuity was further confirmed at the executive level of Al-Aqsa Television:

Fathi Hammad, chairman of Al-Aqsa Television, defended the show: "It does not violate any moral or professional standard," he told a Hamas Web site, adding it would not be withdrawn or its content changed.

Meanwhile, it appears that Ismail Haniyeh is continuing to keep silent on this matter. He is obviously in an extremely awkward position. Al-Aqsa Television is supposed to be the "media voice" of the party he leads; but, while he has been trying to put a lot of effort into convincing both his President and the rest of the world that Hamas wants to see a unified Palestinian government, Al-Aqsa continues to preach the very sort of militant defiance that troubles just about anyone search for a path towards peace in the Middle East. What is at stake is the legitimacy of Haniyeh's voice in any future conversations about Palestine and the Middle East in general; and, unfortunately, keeping silent about Farfur is probably not going to be an effective strategy for shoring up that legitimacy.

Ismail Haniyeh: The Dog that did not Bark in the Night?

I know what you must be thinking: Here is a story unfolding in which Hamas is represented by a cartoon mouse, and then I go and invoke the cat metaphor for Fatah. Where's the dog? Even we overlook the culturally sensitive connotations of these animals (which we do at great risk), then it is becoming apparent that, as far as Hamas policy is concerned, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh may be an example of Conan Doyle's dog that did not bark in the night. After all, by the usual rules of parliamentary politics, if Haniyeh is Prime Minister, then he is his party's chosen leader; so one might think that, if Hamas does something like air a television program on its own station that sparks enough international attention to get silenced by the Information Minister, then the party leader ought to know about it and be prepared to comment. One might interpret his silence as an endorsement of the unity government, placing the interest of the Information Minister before the interests of his own party. We may have evidence of that endorsement in a story that Nidal al-Mughrabi just filed for Reuters. Here is his lead:

Palestinian police began deploying in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday under a security plan that political factions hoped would bolster a coalition government by curbing internal violence.

Security men from both the dominant Islamist Hamas and the more moderate Fatah faction, having often traded fire in recent months of infighting, were expected to fan out together through the troubled territory within 48 hours, an official said.

The deployment was ordered by President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, who set up a unity government in March hoping to stem the spiraling chaos and soften a Western aid embargo on the Palestinian Authority.

If one wants to read this optimistically, then it indicates that Haniyeh has decided that securing peace in Gaza through a "unity" police force is more important than a propagandizing cartoon mouse. This could be a good bet. If peace really can be restored, its residents may well be inclined to ignore militant propaganda on the grounds that it would only upset an apple-cart that had finally been righted after considerable time, effort, and pain. If that happens, then Hamas may feel more obliged to pursue its social welfare agenda, on the basis of which its candidates like Haniyeh were elected, and put militant jihad on the back burner, if not forget about it.

By the way, in the interest of sorting out the "sides," this unity police force will take its orders from the Interior Ministry; and the Interior Minister, Khaled Abu Hilal, is an independent, unaffiliated with either Fatah or Hamas. He is also not barking right now. I can understand that: He has to think about more important things, like the effective management of his new police force!

Palestenian Authority Cat Gets Farfur's Tongue

It is unclear how long Tomorrow's Pioneers, the al-Aqsa children's television program featuring Farfur, an "appropriation" of Mickey Mouse, was on the air. The SPIEGEL ONLINE story that I previously cited simply reported that it "airs each Friday." However, once news of Farfur hit the international media, the Palestinian Authority reacted almost immediately to suspend his program. According to Associated Press writer Mohammed Daraghmeh, "Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti [whom I believe is a member of Fatah] said the character - a giant black-and-white rodent with a high-pitched voice - represented a 'mistaken approach' to the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation." (Fatah, by the way, has its own television station, the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation.)

This is unlikely to be the end of the story. If anything, it indicates that the separation between Fatah and Hamas is as wide as ever, whatever attempts have been made to form a "unity government." Of course here in the United States we are used to different television channels representing different (often extreme) points of view; and we know that each of those channels is sustained by having its own substantial viewing audience. However, the question that remains in Gaza is whether or not Farfur's approach was "mistaken" or just violently opposed to the views of the Information Minister. If this sort of thing were to happen in the United States, it would probably not be resolved until it had been addressed by our judiciary system. In Palestine, on the other hand, it is unclear whether the legal foundation for judicial decisions is firm enough yet, meaning that this latest instantiation of an ideological disagreement between Fatah and Hamas could go the way of past disagreements (and serve both parties just as poorly as in those past disagreements).

In other words Farfur is only a symptom, however distasteful, of a disease that may yet be fatal to Palestinian nationalism: the failure to develop a system of governance that will satisfy both the Palestinian public and the global community to which Palestine strives to belong. This is not to recommend that nations with greater governmental experience should be applying that experience in the form of suggestions to the Palestinian authority. The United States had no such assistance and still managed to come up with a relatively robust solution. On the other hand it does seem as if those other nations, whether they represent the Western or the Islamic world, seem so nervous about the future of Palestine that they cannot help but "get in the way," concerned about whether their own interests are in jeopardy. Most likely, however, "getting in the way" is the worst thing to do; but, in a world where everything is now happening at "Internet speed," it is virtually impossible to counsel patience in the face of critical events.

Farfur Power

I heard this story on my XM feed of the BBC World Service this morning, but SPIEGEL ONLINE has a much more thorough account that includes video excerpts, which were posted on YouTube, apparently by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). SPIEGEL ONLINE also had the advantage of a headline calculated to attract further reading: "The Islamist Mouseketeers: Hamas Mickey Mouse Teaches Jihad." Also, check out the category classification, either in the URL or at the top of the Web page: Zeitgeist! If I may be allowed bilingual indulgence, this is definitely a case where the German language has the bon mot!

Here is the basic story:

A children's show which airs each Friday on al-Aqsa television, a station run by Hamas which broadcasts in the Palestinian Territories, now employs a singing, squeaking, dancing mouse named Farfour to connect with young viewers. But despite having a name that means "butterfly," Farfour is clearly a Mickey Mouse rip-off. The only difference being that this rodent is doing his best to transform show viewers into rifle-toting Islamist Mouseketeers.

"Connect" is definitely an appropriate verb. Approximately half of the PMW video involves Palestinian kids (aged ten and eleven, as I recall) phoning in to recite the jihadist rhetoric to Farfur and Saraa, the little girl who hosts the program. One of them even sings a song about returning to Jerusalem to which Farfur dances while listening on the phone. Farfur himself basically delivers the same rhetorical style that we have encountered in previous reports from the Middle East, just in a higher-pitched voice.

None of this should be a surprise. All of the pioneers of movie cartoons, including Disney, Warner, and the Popeye crew, knew that they had a powerful instrument of propaganda and used it to great advantage during the Second World War with the blessings of our Government, who wanted nothing more than everyone "doing their part." Indeed, my own generation learned at lot about that war, because those cartoons were being shown on the television programs we were watching in the Fifties. However, Disney was the one who took the game to the next level, turning his propaganda engine to the promotion of Disneyland, his first move in building the next generation media empire. Looking back on it all, I would even say that kids were more hooked on their evening fix from The Mickey Mouse Club than the Nazis could have expected from the kids they had recruited into the Hitler Youth! Faced with the prospect of confronting an opposing propaganda engine, driven by a bizarre mix of faith and geopolitics and generously financed by organizations such as AIPAC, it made perfect sense for Hamas to make its own move on the propaganda front.

Nevertheless, the more important story cannot be written yet. Hamas already has considerable popular support. This has earned them legitimate positions in the current Palestinian government in spite of any efforts to "refuse to recognize" them. Why, then, have they made this particular propaganda move? Are they sustaining that popular support by cultivating the future electorate, or are they following the Nazi strategy based on the principle that today's youth will constitute tomorrow's army? Is rote memorization of Qur'an in a madrasah giving way, as a strategy for recruiting terrorists, to singing along with Farfur? This is an opportunity for intelligence analysis that might not go "by the book" in current Homeland Security operations; but, for those of us with a strong sense of history, it is certainly an opportunity for reflection! At the very least this is a sign of just how turbulent the current transitional period for Palestinian interests is; and, as I observed yesterday, hypotheses about where the trends are in such turbulent times usually turn out to be false!

The Technician Versus the Venture Capitalist

I continue to worry about the blinders that cultures wear that inhibit just about any chance of their communicating with other cultures, even in the face of the persuasive arguments set forth by the likes of Isaiah Berlin, Anthony Appiah, and Jürgen Habermas. These blinders inhibit conversation on just about any topic, even those of critical global importance. One of the most important topics right now is the climate crisis. Yet, whatever Habermas may tell us about the need for enlightened understanding, it would appear that heated disputation occupies most of the spotlight.

The "heat," of course, comes from what I have called "'points of friction' across social boundaries;" and those points of friction constitute a fact of life in the social world. In fact, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argued, in her appropriately-titled book, Friction, they can be a source of innovation as readily as a source of conflict. What will result from the friction can rarely be predicted, but often it helps to have a better understanding of those points that are actually bumping into each other.

On February 15 Pacific Gas and Electric, along with the MIT Club of Northern California, organized a forum on the topic of solar technology. This forum turned into a prime example of heated disputation; and, unfortunately, when we start to tease out the "story behind the story," we discover that this particular source of friction is unlikely to turn into a source of innovation. The specific points of friction that bumped into each other were Vinod Khosla, who can probably be described fairly as one of the most influential venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and Hermann Scheer, whose early resume presents a background of qualifications for dealing with both technical and social issues:

Born in 1944, Hermann Scheer graduated from highschool in 1964. He attended the Officers School of the German Federal Army from 1964 to 1966, serving as lieutenant during 1966-67. Hermann studied economics, sociology, political science and public law between 1967 and 1972 at the University of Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin. He received his PhD in Economic and Social Science in 1972. Dr Scheer was appointed Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart in the Faculty of Economics, 1972-76. He worked as system analysts at the German Nuclear Research Center from 1976-1980.

To understand the origins of the friction, we should first recognize that any event sponsored by Pacific Gas and Electric will have, as its first priority, the business of energy. To warp my recently-cited Mencken adage, no one ever rose through the ranks of an energy company by obsessing over the consequences of a clearly sound business decision. (When the energy companies put out those advertisements that try to convince you otherwise by showing really cool nature footage, it helps to remember another adage: Whenever anyone says, "It's not about the money;" you know it's about the money!) So, when we read about what happened at this forum, we should put aside anything Al Gore may be trying to tell us about the future of the planet and recognize that this was a discussion about making good business decisions.

In that context Khosla, with his reputation for making some of the best business decisions in the history of Silicon Valley, was perfect for the forum. The fly in the ointment was Scheer, whose combination of technical and social expertise has earned him a seat in the German parliament, where he now feels more beholden to the German public than to any business institution. Thus, the heated dispute that ensued was not so much about energy policy as it was about the classic question of whether an enterprise is more accountable to its customers than it is to its shareholders, with Scheer serving as advocate for the customer and Khosla assuming the role of "shareholder par excellence."

The good news is that the debate has spilled over from verbal exchanges to text; and CNET News.com has provided a "venue" for the resulting texts. Khosla provided his position statement last week. His rhetorical strategy was to frame the argument as one between environmentalists and pragmatists. Personally, I think this put him in a weak position, since everything else he said then begged the question, "Pragmatic for whom?" After all, this would not have been the first time in history where what was pragmatic for the shareholders was not at all pragmatic (and perhaps even damaging) to the customers! This forced Scheer into the position of defending his own pragmatism from the customers' point of view, and that is basically what he did in responding to Khosla this morning.

Since, in this particular situation, I feel I am more of a customer (of Pacific Gas and Electric, mind you) than a shareholder (since I have no direct investment in any energy company but I know that the energy sector is covered in many of the funds whose shares I hold), my sympathies tend towards Scheer's arguments. Nevertheless, I fear that Scheer has not really grasped that the playing field for this argument is not one of "technology facts." Scheer can throw as many of those facts as he likes a Khosla, and he can even back many of them up with sound economic figures. However, he never really recognizes that these are not necessarily the criteria for making those good business decisions; so I doubt that he will score any significant points against Khosla. The real problem, however, is, as I observed above, that, while their differing contextual assumptions could complement each other in innovative ways, both parties are so intensely invested in their own contexts that this is unlikely to happen.

I would like to conclude by not trying to reduce this to a four-legs-good-two-legs-bad situation, pitting "two-legged" business decisions against "four-legged" public policy. I am a firm believer that sensible business decisions played a strong role in breaking the oppressions of apartheid in South Africa at the end of the Eighties. I am more concerned with that metaphor of cultural blinders that I invoked at the start of this post. Yes, the interests of the general public are in opposition to the interests of the shareholders; but, if that opposition is now cutting off any possibility of conversation, then we are in really deep yogurt. Furthermore, if the climate continues to change the way many of the models are predicting, a large number of us, shareholders included, may soon find ourselves in very deep water!