stargeek
SATURDAY ODDS & ENDSSATURDAY
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 Four interesting or useful remainders for the week: NY Times Ombudsman Calls for Curtailing "Unnamed Sources": There are situations, says Daniel Okrent, when it's essential to cite such sources to get important news out without blowing the source's cover, but when they're cited to explain Barbra Streisand's insistence on scattered rose petals on her hotel bathroom floor, it's being abused. Okrent says three key ways to stop the abuse are (a) don't allow sources to remain unnamed if the story isn't important, (b) advise the source that if it turns out his story is false, his identity will be revealed, and (c) explain to readers the motivation of the source for remaining anonymous, so the reader can judge their credibility accordingly. It's a bold plan to reduce media spin. Japanese Inventor Plans "Invisible Walls": I reported last year on an invention that would allow those living in cramped space or with poor views or no windows, to use computer technology to create a false window. Susumu Tachi's invention works by "projecting an image onto itself of what is behind it", and has already been applied to clothing to make the wearer appear invisible. I think this is fertile ground for open space collaboration -- the opportunities of this technology for making people's life better are enormous. Absolutely critical is ensuring that the innovations that come from it are affordable. Nationalmaster Automatically Graphs Over 4000 Geographic Statistics: This unique resource produces a world map or other chart that illustrates data from crime rates to grain exports. The map above is an example, showing gas prices: Bright green $1.50-$2.00/litre, dark green $1.00-$1.50/litre, dark blue $0.70-$1.00/litre, bright blue $0.03-$0.70/litre. Multiply by about 4 to convert to price per gallon. Turkmenistan is $0.03/litre, Uruguay is $1.95/litre. Average is $0.88/litre. Tiny URL: This free resource can reduce long URLs to manageable size. Especially useful for newspaper article URLs that seem to go on for pages, and especially if you're sending them in a text e-mail, so line breaks don't split them in two. Best way to use it is to put the TinyURL maker on your browser toolbar, so you can just click on it when you're on a page with a long URL, instead of copying the long URL. Instructions on how to do this are on the main TinyURL page. |
 Why
Americans Can't Laugh at American CultureJust about everyone in the world laughs at themselves, their own cultural stereotypes. Canadians are famous for it (Great White North, Due South etc.) and European literature is full of self-parody (Don Quixote, Monty Python). By contrast, American comedy is always at the expense of minorities or fools (or, toxically, the two combined in one, the essense of racist humour). Asia Times author Spengler provides further examples, and then goes on to note more seriously the implications of this humourlessness on American international relations and cultural insensitivity: America cannot understand the
culture of other nations, because it has no culture of its own. In my
November 25 essay I stated the same idea in a different way, namely,
that the American tragedy is the incapacity of Americans to understand
the tragedy of other peoples. Is America condemned forever to win the
war and lose the peace? Will the force of American arms always roll
the
stone uphill like Sisyphus, while the weakness of American diplomacy
always sends it crashing down again? Is there some link between this
tragic pattern of American history, and the way Americans see (or fail
to see) the world - that is, American culture?  Berkeley Breathed Saves Cats & Dogs The new book by Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County, Outland), called Flawed Dogs, helps support shelter animals, and asks you to help too. Our rescue dog Chelsea agrees. But where is the new promised weekly Breathed cartoon, Opus? Immigrating to Ontario This is an example of a great public sector site. A collaboration of several social service organizations with government funding, this is a great, advertising and hype-free list of everything the new immigrant to Ontario needs to know. Imagine if this had been privatized (big yellow ads for sleazy immigration lawyers, fly-by-night moving companies etc). Just funny, from David Chess via Wood's Lot "In the future, everyone will be married to Britney Spears for fifteen minutes." What Business Leaders Think of You Dave Johnson's Seeing the Forest has become one of my must-reads. He has a knack for succinctly summarizing some very long and profound articles in a few words, and his reading breadth is enormous. The link above quoting business leaders as calling for employee sacrifices (longer hours, fewer benefits, lower wages) and for an end to the 'sense of entitlement' to a salary, may be astonishing to some, but doesn't surprise me in the least. There's a follow-up by guest blogger John Emerson about how the Republicans are conning Americans into believing they are better off than they really are by giving them a little personal cash instead of a lot of public services. Bush in 30 Seconds Watch the 15 finalists for the Bush in 30 Seconds moveon.org ad contest. Be patient waiting for them to download -- it's worth the wait. They'll send a chill down your spine. At least a half dozen deserve to get aired. |
 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
 Two weeks ago I reported on the upcoming June 28 Canadian election, and predicted that there would be a Liberal minority government, with the NDP holding the balance of power. Since then, groupthink has taken hold, and the anger that many Canadians feel about the incompetence of the federal Liberals to detect either wasteful spending or the 'sponsorship' fraud by some government workers, plus the anger of many Ontarians about the new Provincial Liberal government's reneging on promises to avoid tax increases, has led another 8% of Canadians to vow not to re-elect them. This 8% swing has been predominantly older men in Ontario, who seem unwilling to believe that the Conservatives are as right-wing as Liberal Prime Minister Martin has portrayed them, and younger people, whose support for the Green Party has significantly increased. The province-by-province projections now stand as follows -- 155 of the 308 seats are needed for a majority:
Next week we'll hear the all-important leader debates, but they are likely to change nothing. The Conservatives are muzzling their own right-wing extremists, who are virulently anti-abortion, gay-hating, anti-gun control, anti-immigation, pro closer ties with the US, anti-Kyoto accord, and militaristic (Stephen Harper, the new Conservative leader and former head of a Western separatist party, wanted Canada in the Iraq war). The Conservative strategists are determined to portray Harper as a moderate, despite the fact that he is on record as having taken right-wing positions on many social, economic and environmental position. If this sounds a lot like Dubya, and the spin doctor white-washing of his extremism reminds you of 'compassionate conservatism' in 2000, it should, because the tactics are the same -- say anything to get elected, and then trot out the real agenda of the people who paid for the campaign. But it's even more frightening than that. Small-c conservatives make up only 30% of Canadians, and the capital-c Conservatives are already above that point, with some of their voters coming from angry liberals. But if the figures above don't change, the Conservatives will get 38% of the seats with 33% of the vote. And the Bloc Québecois, the Québec separatist party that runs candidates only in that province, will get 19% of the seats with only 11% of the vote. Add them together and you get a distortion almost identical to what happened in the US in 2000, where Dubya 'won' with only 46% of the popular vote. If the Conservatives and Bloc combine their seats in a strange-bedfellows anti-federalist coalition, they'll have 57% of the seats with only 44% of the votes, while liberal-centrist parties will have only 43% of the seats, even though they will have received 56% of the votes. There is no other coalition that would have enough seats to form a government. Problem is, this coalition won't hold for more than a few months. The Bloc is a left-wing, Francophone party, liberal on all social, economic and environmental issues. The Conservatives have diametrically-opposed views on every issue but one: their dislike of federalism. The cost of Bloc support would be to grant Québec limited sovereignty, kind of 'independence light'. The very idea of this is repugnant to core Western Conservatives. And the Bloc has already said that it would not support any Conservative government that tried to recriminalize abortion, and has made it clear that it would not tolerate abandoning Canada's support for the Kyoto Accord, or anti-gay laws, both of which are bedrock principles of the Western Conservatives. And Ontario Conservatives would quickly cross the floor to the Liberals to save their political skin if the Bush-style right-wing social agenda of the Western Conservatives was trotted out. The role of the media in the final two weeks of the campaign will be interesting. Conservative media are likely to present Harper as the 'heir-apparent', the surprise winner and a fresh new face for Canada. Liberal media will be torn over whether to simply relate the campaign stories as they are spun out by the parties, or to go behind the scenes and surface what Harper has said, in writing, in past, on many issues he is now trying to paint himself as moderate on. The current Liberal campaign has attempted to do just that, but it has backfired, being portrayed as negative 'US-style' electioneering, sour grapes or desperation politics, so the liberal media could be subject to similar admonishments if they get proccupied with the 'secret agenda' of the Conservatives. But media being what they are, expect Harper, the new frontrunner, to face increasing heat over unanswered questions from his decidedly non-moderate past. Not to mention some of his decidedly wacko neophyte candidates. So what do I think will happen? The Conservatives will win a small plurality, and have to either form a coalition with, or try to manage with the tacit support of, the Bloc Québecois. Paul Martin will resign right after the election, and the Liberals will choose a new leader not tainted by the recent scandals. The Conservatives will start to self-destruct right after the election, with hard-line right-wingers expelled or resigning, and moderates crossing the floor to the Liberals, especially after it selects a new leader. The new government will last 3-6 months, accomplish nothing, and fall when the Bloc Québecois withdraws its support. Then we'll have another election, and perhaps even a third, until the 70% of Canadians with moderate-to-liberal social and political views get a government they can live with. Ontario and Québec have 60% of Canada's population, and no party has ever successfully governed the country without healthy support from both provinces. Stephen Harper is on record as opposing bilingualism, although he is now waffling on what his precise position on this is, which makes him unelectable in Québec. And his previously stated positions on many other issues will, if they become widely known, make him unelectable anywhere. It's going to be messy, and stay that way for quite awhile. And if the Martin Liberals hadn't been so politically stupid, it could all have been avoided. Cartoon by Tom Cheney -- buy his stuff at Cartoon Bank. |
This
is the first of five
articles in a series that will be published intermittently this month.
This article summarizes what I believe were the most important ideas
of
2003 in the world of blogs and blogging. The other articles in
the
series will propose the most
important ideas of the year in:
BLOGS & BLOGGING -- THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003  During the year, the blogosphere doubled in size, and began to mature into a true alternative medium for information and connection. My nominations for the most important ideas of the year* in blogs & blogging are:
* Yes, I know some of these ideas are themselves not new this year. There is nothing new under the sun. But I would argue that the application and implications of these ideas were first manifest some time in 2003 |
 We went out for a delicious dinner last night at a wonderful, and completely packed, restaurant in downtown Toronto (it's called Mildred Pierce, for those who live in the area), and spent some of the time unobtrusively eavesdropping on the conversations at nearby tables. The discussions, much like the one at our own table, vacillated between the very personal (who's dating who, personal anecdotes) and the impersonal (entertainment, sports, weather). But not a single word was uttered about politics: Nothing about Canadian politics (collapse of the right), Ontario politics (health care and education strikes threatened), Toronto politics ('new deal' for cities in peril), US politics (Bush/Kerry), or international politics (Iraq etc.) Not a word. This was a Sunday night so there were no obvious business reasons for steering away from the subject. It just never came up. And it occurred to me that at our annual neighbourhood BBQ on Saturday night no one talked about politics either. Is politics just too boring in Canada or has it become tacitly PI to talk about them, because of the political polarization that seems to be happening everywhere? Is the left-right gulf getting too wide to even try to broach in 'decent conversation'? I appreciate that there is less urgency about politics here in Canada than there is in the US, at least. The election here is over. And I'm told that at least 40% of Americans know personally at least one person on active duty in the Mideast, and that, I would expect, would probably make it a more likely topic of conversation. But some of my American readers tell me that talking about politics in face-to-face conversations is just too uncomfortable for them these days as well -- too likely to lead to arguments. So outside of political rallies and other meetings of like minds they don't talk about it much either. What does this mean? First, it means the end of true political debate -- I don't mean those phony, scripted events where politicians roll out their rehearsed one-liners, I'm talking about articulate exchange of political views and information between real people. If you don't talk with others about politics, how do you form your viewpoints and where do you get your information? From attack ads? I don't think so -- maybe I'm naive but I don't think they work; most people know when they're being manipulated, and won't fall for it. From radio talk shows or editorials or blogs? Most of them are only for people who have already formed an unwavering political opinion on everything, and are merely looking for reassurance and justification for their belief. From television news and the print media? There isn't enough information content in the sound bites and newswire rehashes in most of them to allow an informed decision or point of view on anything. It seems to me that, on almost any political issue, 50% or more of the population is completely disengaged -- even if they care, they don't think anything they do or say or feel will have any impact, so they can't be bothered to voice, or sometimes even form, any strong opinion on it. And the rest are in two, polarized camps, each believing that the other is irrational or immoral or misinformed, hopelessly so, so that meaningful discussion with the 'other side' or with the disengaged majority is impossible or fruitless. So except for the one-way palaver from the political flaks and political advertisers and partisans and oversimplifying mainstream media, there is no political information flow. And there is no discourse, no exchange of ideas or views, no balanced presentation of opposing views, no true political conversation. Because what purpose would it serve? I see an astonishing paradox in modern society -- in an era with unprecedented access to information, most people are ignorant of even the basic facts on most political issues, from the connection between 9/11 and Saddam, to the causes and implications of global warming, to the political situation in Sudan and Venezuela and Chechnya< /a> (not to mention parts of the world less in the news), to the numerous ecological and humanitarian crises that everyone from the Union of Concerned Scientists to Amnesty International is shouting about. Why are so many so ignorant? I think because they choose to be uninformed. Why? Perhaps either because they they can't relate to the issue, or because they don't think there's any point in getting stressed about issues they feel they can do nothing personally about. So you end up in a vicious cycle: The less people know about a subject, the less inclined it is to come up in conversation, so the media conclude there is no interest in it, so they don't cover it, so people know even less. And if they do know about it but feel helpless or disinclined to do anything about it, they don't share their knowledge with others, and eventually with enough indifference the situation gets worse and the solutions become more intractable so people feel even more helpless and disinclined to try to do anything. Political disengagement is infectious, and it's reached epidemic proportions, especially among the young. All of this supports Richard Manning's argument in Against the Grain that politics was and is designed to protect and entrench the status quo. As a result, nothing pleases those with power and money and influence more than massive political indifference and disengagement -- what Gene McCarthy in the 1960s during the fight against the Vietnam War called 'acedia' -- a Greek word meaning spiritual torpor, lack of care, apathy and inactivity in the practice of virtue. Unlike the 1960's, the numbers of politically disengaged is inversely proportional to the age bracket -- it is the young who I love so much and have such great hopes for who are least engaged in the political process, who infect each other with their indifference to global issues. But I don't think it's that they don't care. Most of the young people I know are overwhelmed and intimidated by how much those of us who are politically active know about global issues. My teenage granddaughter has read my blog, but says she "doesn't understand it". The young focus their energies and their passion instead on issues in their own networks, local things, things that they can do something about. We need to show them the way to do more. We, who have been in the streets, need to reach out to the young and not-so-young who have given up on the political process (often before they began), and stop drowning them in facts and laying guilt trips on them and filling them up with bad news and instead:
The real 'swing voters' are the ones who have never voted before and don't expect to vote in future. Rhetoric won't bring them to the polls. If we can 'activate' them, then conversations about politics will no longer be politically incorrect, and political activism will spread like a virus. As those who fought against the Vietnam War can tell you, political activism is as infectious as political apathy. The defenders of the status quo will be shaking in their boots. And then the revolution we all need, the revolution to save the world, can begin. Cartoon by the incomparable Robert Mankoff (from the New Yorker, of course) |
 Things are usually the way they are for a reason.
But there are few situations in the world that appear, from a
distance,
as unreasonable as the war between Israel and Palestine, a war that
has
been going on, in essence, without let-up for more than half a
century.
At one point the efforts to reach a peace settlement got so close to
success that the negotiators on each side received Nobel Peace prizes
for their efforts. But the dream didn't last, and for reasons we
couldn't fathom, the cycle of bloodshed, escalation and retaliation
cranked up again and is now at firestorm levels, threatening to push
the entire Mideast into even more cataclysmic violence.The reason we couldn't fathom this, is because we've never lived there, never walked a mile in their shoes. In The New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Goldberg provides us with an excellent proxy for such an experience, as he crisscrosses the area, from Israel's "ideologues of aggressive settlement" to Palestinian mothers teaching their children the honour of death in the holy war against the Jews, describing what he sees and what he hears from those in power, and from those who have nothing. It is a gut-wrenching, depressing journey. You'll need to buy the May 31 edition to read it, and I would recommend it highly. Alternatively, you can listen to Goldberg summarize his findings, along with a slide show of photos by Gilles Peress, here. One of those photos, of a Palestinian woman peering through a temporary gap in the new Israeli Separation Wall, is reproduced above. Goldberg makes no secret of his personal view of all this: The
leaders of the Jewish national-religious camp do not adhere to
observable reality, They exist in the glorious Jewish past and in the
messianic future but not in the reality of today, in which Jewish
soldiers give their lives to protect settlements; in which
Palestinians
live and die at checkpoints; in which Israel is becoming a pariah
among
the nations; and in which Israel may one day cease to exist as a
democratic Jewish state.
[Michael Tarazi, legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team says] "Settlements are the vanguard of binationalism" -- a single state that would soon have an Arab majority. "I don't care if they build more. The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state."... "We have to look at the way the South Africans did it. The world is increasingly intolerant of the Zionist idea. We have to capture the imagination of the world. We have to make this an argument about apartheid." The view of the moderate majority on both sides is that the best of a sorry lot of options is to have Israel dismantle the settlements and withdraw from the pathetic Gaza Strip and the volatile West Bank, to the so-called Green Line, the UN-brokered treaty line after the last "official" war. But that majority view is very fragile, and violently opposed by a significant minority on both sides. The settlements in the occupied territories are the flash-point, where hugely outnumbered Jews, many of them vehemently anti-Arab, provocative, and uncompromising, are surrounded by largely militant Palestinians ready to lay down their lives to reclaim "their homeland", and protected by an Israeli army that has ceased being protectors and become an army of occupation, many of whom are all too willing to demonstrate violently which side they support, as Goldberg reports. There are no good guys and bad guys in this war, and every confrontation, of which there are thousands, at every checkpoint, every attack by Arab militants (many of them children), every razing of Palestinian homes to make way for more Iraqi settlements, every suicide bombing, radicalizes both sides and renders the position of the moderate majority untenable. The extremists on both sides, outnumbered though they may be, are firmly in control of the political agenda, and their every provocative act strengthens their position rather than ostracizing them. The "ideologues of aggressive settlement" on the Israeli side, and especially in the settlements, largely believe that all of the occupied territories are theirs by divine right, and that it is the will of God that all Arabs be expelled from their holy land in its entirety -- that, as their website says, "There is no Palestine". And the militants and zealots on the Palestinian side, among the poorest and most destitute people on the face of the Earth, and with one of the highest birth rates, state categorically that they would not stop fighting if Israel withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank, but would merely be encouraged to continue the war until all Jews were extinguished from their holy land. The rabidly intolerant have the will and the ready means to scuttle every attempt at compromise, to embarrass moderates, to incite violence and then say "I told you so." There is nothing particularly unique in this, of course. Many of the tribal wars in Africa, the ethnic wars in the Balkan states, and the insane religious war in Northern Ireland, exhibit the same shameful, and shameless, pattern of violence and intransigence. The next, inevitable attack by Islamic fundamentalists on US soil will surely produce the same knee-jerk result in the US, and launch another war to treat the symptoms and exacerbate the disease. Ariel Sharon, less moderate than most but less extreme than the extremists, has taken an impossible 'middle' course sure to satisfy no one: Withdraw from Gaza, kind of (there are a host of conditions that render the withdrawal largely a joke to Palestinians), and bulldoze Palestinian homes to build a mammoth wall, not along the Green Line but deep inside the West Bank to "protect" the Jewish settlements, which are everywhere, not just in the border areas. The partisan, bipartisan support he has received in the US shows how little America's leaders understand the realities of the area's politics. As I've said before, the only answer, and it will take decades, perhaps centuries to achieve, is to deal with the underlying humanitarian issues, to give Palestinians a reason to value peace, "something to lose", and help them build infrastructure and educational institutions, and a future to believe in. Poverty, ignorance and inequality, not religious and ethnic hatred, are the real enemies of peace. It doesn't matter whether the area is partitioned into two states, fairly or unfairly, or made into a single apartheid state. Things are the way they are for a reason, and in Israel-Palestine the reason is entrenched, and there is no short-term answer. No matter who represents the two sides, there will be decades of violence, war, and bloodshed to come, and it is inexcusable and ignorant of those of us who don't live there to take sides for cynical political gain. Let us instead -- as we should be doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other areas we have recklessly meddled in, in the absurd and arrogant belief that we understand the problems and have all the answers -- let us instead invest in infrastructure, in education, in building a better world even as the zealous minorities try to tear it apart. The founders of the religions we all claim to believe in would surely understand, and nod in assent. |
 Dave
Snowden has a lot of nerve. The founder of the IBM Cynefin Centre
doesn't stop at saying that collecting 'best practices' and most other
accepted Knowledge Management activities are largely fruitless (he
makes an exception for standard practices in highly prescriptive jobs,
and proven, authorized practices in high-risk and high-security
situations). He is almost as disdainful of many of the idealistic
goals
of Personal Knowledge Management -- helping front-line workers to do
their jobs more simply and effectively and to find experts they can
draw on and network with. If the tools to do PKM aren't adequate, he
maintains, the answer is to create better tools, not show people how
to
use deficient ones (and creating tools is IT's job, not KM's). One of
the things he thinks KM should be doing is helping management
understand and lead their organizations more effectively. Management
is, after all, the group paying for organizations' KM activities, and
a
group that is, in most organizations, far from happy with what KM has
delivered. Snowden argues that the best way for KM to help management
is to be a kind of 'cultural anthropologist' in the organization you
are working in or advising. One of the ways anthropologists study and understand tribes is by listening to and gathering stories. Analogously, Snowden says, it's important that KM people get out and spend time on the front lines really understanding what the organization's real stories are -- not the ones that appear in the mission statement or the company newsletter, which say what management wishes the company culture was, but the peer-to-peer stories that truly define the organizational culture, drive what people really believe and do and how they act, and make the company, for better and for worse, what it truly is. To gather those stories, you must be as honest as an anthropologist, not try to do it surreptitiously, because people only tell the real stories to people who have gained and earned their trust. Snowden has developed very sophisticated and rigorous processes for doing so, which he details in his 'masterclass' called Using Narrative in Organisational Change,, which you can now buy on CD-ROM. In Thomas King's book The Truth About Stories, King argues that if you want to change a culture, you need to change its story, because that's all a culture is. I don't know that Snowden would disagree, but he would argue, I think, that changing an organization's real stories is not so easy. That's why mission statements don't work -- they're wishful thinking, myths that management would like to believe everyone buys and is motivated by, but really aren't. If you're in management, he says, you don't change the stories, he says, you understand them, then you act on them, and then you make them your own, retelling them in your own way so that you show the people in the front lines of the organization that you understand the real culture of the organization (and the real problems of front-line workers). In so doing you harness the astonishing power of 'true' stories. Snowden is acutely aware of the overt class distinctions in Britain that make trust, and hence collecting stories, hard to achieve. While some of us in Europe and North America might argue that our class distinctions are not as formidable barriers as they are in the UK, I think this would be a mistake. Americans, I have observed, make a great effort to pretend that class distinctions don't exist or are permeable, by allowing everyone to use first names, for example, when in fact the hierarchies are at least as strict as they are in the UK. The only real difference is that the determinants and clues of status are subtler -- a bit more tied to wealth and the circles you move in and a bit less pre-determined by heredity. But trust is still deepest peer-to-peer and extremely hard to earn and sustain between management (or their henchman consultants and head-office lackeys) and front-line people. That is perhaps why management is in a constant quandary over decentralizing -- it clearly improves productivity, innovativeness, morale and work effectiveness, but it allows people that management doesn't really trust more control and autonomy, and perhaps even allows them to develop -- heaven forbid -- their own organizational culture. The reality, as Snowden argues, is that management is never in charge of organizational culture, that people behave the way they do partly because they've learned it's the most effective way to do their unique job and partly in their own self-interest, and not because it's in the procedure manual or the role description or aligned with the mission statement or the strategic plan. Once you have collected the true stories in an unbiased manner (Snowden carefully explains how to remove bias, so you don't get 'fed' just what you want to hear or put your own personal 'spin' on the story), the next step is to act on them. Stories tell management important information about what works, and, more importantly, what doesn't work, in the organization. A lot of stories are about how people have solved problems that management hasn't addressed, or which management has in fact created. These are often very comical or very heroic stories that not only have important messages for management, but illustrate exemplary behaviour that management may not realize it's not rewarding, or actually inhibiting. It is critical, Snowden says, to make sure you understand the stories, and to collect and organize and ponder a lot of stories, before charging in and making changes that misconstrue the organizational culture, impede rather than help, and destroy forever the trust that the story-gatherer built up to capture this critical information. And finally, once management has acted carefully and conscientiously on the learnings from the stories, they can actually make these stories their own, not by retelling them in the same words and context as they heard them (that would be disingenuous, a form of intellectual property theft), and not by appropriating them and making models and heroes of their protagonists (that could make the poor protagonists look like head office plants), but by conveying the same messages and lessons with stories from their own personal work context. Crafting such stories is a complex, rigorous and skillful process, and explaining this process takes up much of Snowden's 'masterclass' time. There are different types of stories, like fables, myths and viruses, each with a different purpose and different construction (the course provides templates of each). Even more important is the testing of stories by telling and having others retell them until they are perfected. The impact of an executive telling employees a real story about the organization, credibly and powerfully, can be profound, even transformational. Just imagine -- instead of the boss telling his/her people what to do, and evaluating them on his/her perception of their 'performance' in doing so, picture the boss explaining that he/she understood exactly why his/her people were doing what they were doing, and offering constructive ideas on how management could make the employee's job easier and more effective. Management supporting the staff instead of the other way around. Hey, I know it's a 90s idea and is out of fashion again these days, but stories, properly collected and interpreted by trained KM practitioners, can make it possible. I hope Dave won't object to my sharing one of his stories to illustrate this -- it's hard to write about stories without at least one example. He describes a group of public service utility workers who are subjected to a consultant's efficiency review, which leads to them being given fewer work breaks and being given networked PCs to allow them to save time travelling into the office for paperwork between jobs. What the consultant didn't realize (and what the careful collection of stories finally revealed) was that these workers shared vital information about how to do their jobs properly during these work breaks and office visits, and this information either couldn't (because it's highly contextual and needs conversation to convey effectively) or wouldn't (because of the lack of trust of how stuff posted publicly might be used by management) be captured in databases or messages on their new PCs. So the workers found a surreptitious place for unofficial work breaks and a surreptitious place for 'offline' documentation of information they wanted to share with peers, 'working around' the consultant's well-meaning but wrong-headed and dysfunctional change proposals. [Dave makes this into a long and wonderful story with a brilliant punch line, a resolution in which management finally learns from this mistake and turns it to astonishing advantage, and since I'm not telling a story here, I won't spoil it -- get the CD-ROM to hear the story completely and properly.] But the point is that the organizational culture is what it is, and usually for a good reason, and it's vital to understand that culture by collecting the stories that reveal it, before you try to change processes or behaviour, or the change effort will inevitably fail, as almost every organizational change effort does. I got out of the KM business last December, and since then I've toyed with the idea of becoming a new-age KM or PKM consultant, but then decided I'd had enough of this well-intentioned but endlessly-struggling discipline. But I recognize that there's still important KM work that could and should be done. While I agree that PKM needs better tools much more than it needs process improvement consulting, I still think there is much promise in Personal Productivity Improvement as an offshoot of KM. And now Dave has convinced me that the exercise of capturing and interpreting and acting on an organization's real stories would be worthwhile, especially for large organizations. But I think calling it Cultural Anthropology or Story-Gathering is a non-starter -- try to sell CEOs something with that woolly a name these days and you'll starve. What could we call it that would be accurate and still compelling to CEOs who don't, yet, get what it's all about? |
 As you may know, I've been maintaining (manually) detailed tables of contents of my blog posts (one per blog 'category') since I started. They're a bit clumsy, but they get a fair bit of traffic so I know people are using them. Right now they exist as six 'stories' and I thought it might be interesting to try to put them together into a single, interactive index. I'm competent in neither HTML nor Radio's 'outlining' function (I confess I don't even know how to use anchors properly -- the twisties below and the links in the graphic above don't work, and links below should really take you to the specific subcategory within the table of contents), so I can't make it pretty or functional, but you can get the idea of how it might work:  BLOGS
& BLOGGING:BUSINESSSocial
Networking
Blogs in Business Knowledge Management & Learning Innovation Entrepreneurship New Collaborative Enterprise Advice for Knowledge Workers ARTS
& SCIENCESLiterature, Language, Communication
Stories and Narrative The Arts Sciences & Social Sciences Technology Miscellaneous Posts ENVIRONMENTAL
PHILOSOPHYHow to Save the World
New Collaborative Enterprise Other Environmental Articles Overpopulation Animal Rights Activism Environmental & Social Economics & Law Stories and Narrative Other Philosophical Articles POLITICS
& ECONOMICSLiberty,
Democracy and the World
The Bush Regime & US Politics Globalization, Corporatism, Free Trade Governance & the Political Process Economics Environmental & Social Economics & Law The Education System Canadian Politics Iraq & the Mideast CREATIVE
WORKSMy six categories have a total of 40 subcategories, of which five (Blogs in Business, Technology, Stories & Narrative, New Collaborative Enterprise, and Environmental & Social Economics & Law) overlap categories and hence appear under two categories each. The ten most popular subcategories (most linked, and most commented-on) are shown in bold. This taxonomy is essentially the same one I use for my filing cabinet tabs and for my My Documents subfolders, except that they omit the 'housekeeping' type tabs and subfolders that house my background papers, messages and private and personal records. I am not offering this as any kind of framework for a 'universal' taxonomy. In fact, I've been adamant that any personal content management system needs to allow us to index our documents and messages any way we want, our way, at whatever level of granularity works best for each individual. Universal taxonomies just don't work. But if we think of a blog as the 'public area' of our personal content, the shareable part of our personal 'filing cabinet', I thought it might make an interesting case study in how we might best 'present' each individual's publicly-available 'stuff' for effective browsing by others. I see the blog, and at a broader level the 'tabs' of our personal content management system, our 'filing cabinet', as nothing more than 'addresses' or destinations to send content to. So although Microsoft would have us believe that 'saving' a document or message, 'sending' a document or message to someone else, and 'publishing' a document or message to a blog or website, are three fundamentally different functions and applications, I see them as conceptually indistinguishable -- they're all actions that move content from one specific space to another. That's why I have proposed a single, intuitive Workspace Manipulation and Document Annotation tool to replace virtually every application users have on their PCs today, a tool that would finally make PCs accessible to the billions of technologically challenged among us. But I digress... I can envision the Interactive Blog Table of Contents working in one of two ways:
Ultimately, I can see the development of an invisible (to the user) 'metadata layer', which would take our preferred organization of our personal stuff and translate it into some universal standard, and then as needed into each reader's personal organization of his/her content, so that for example if Jon Husband wants to browse my publicly permissioned content, he won't see it organized as I have, above, but will instead see it automatically reorganized and relabelled using his personal taxonomy and nomenclature. I believe this 'metadata' layer development will be one of the most interesting and important technology challenges of this century. In the meantime, if there's sufficient interest, I'll buckle down and learn enough HTML and Outlining to implement either solution (1) or (2) above for my blog. |
 Last year I waded through Jeremy Rifkin's The Hydrogen Economy and wrote a blog post that explained what's promising about hydrogen as a fuel, and its two major drawbacks. I used two charts, reproduced here, to explain how it works and what's holding it back. The chart above shows the energy economy we have today. Red boxes are non-renewable, polluting and environmentally damaging energy sources and green ones are clean and renewable. Whether we use hydrocarbon fuels or electricity to light, heat and cool our homes, it's likely that non-renewable, damaging sources are producing it. Our cars likewise burn fossil fuels, and although hybrid cars are certainly an improvement, they still depend on fossil fuels to create ('reform') the hydrogen that the fuel cells convert into electricity. The chart below shows the energy economy in twenty years, if we can solve the two major dilemmas of the hydrogen economy.  Under this scenario, hydrocarbons are replaced by solar, wind and other renewable, non-polluting, non-damaging energy sources. The central hydro utility is replaced by a local energy co-op, which produces energy for your community from its own solar collectors, wind turbines etc. The compressed hydrogen used to power next-generation pure hydrogen vehicles is produced from some of this electricity, and distributed through local service stations. The excess electricity produced by these cars can be used to provide light, heat and cooling to the home or sold back to the local energy co-op. The cars themselves will have no engine, no pedals, clutch or gearshift, make no noise and produce no harmful exhaust. The entire process will require no burning, no pollution, and no grid at the mercy of multinationals and sheikhs. What are the two catches? First, the current cost of electricity produced from non-renewable sources is very expensive, and the process is cumbersome and not yet terribly efficient. Even more problematic is the $100 billion cost of building the infrastructure to generate, distribute and store the electricity and hydrogen, obsolescing a comparable amount of existing energy infrastructure, and probably causing some consternation to and resistance from the owners of that infrastructure.  Yesterday the University of New South Wales
predicted that by 2010 a new generation of photovoltaic
'harvesters' based on titanium dioxide ceramics will both collect
solar energy and
use that energy to produce compressed hydrogen from water. A 10m
square
array, such as that depicted at right, mounted on just half the
households in a sun-rich country like Australia, could produce the
entire country's energy.This would allow an even more distributed, decentralized model than that depicted above: With each household able to produce its own energy, the local energy co-op might be nothing more than a virtual market, and the need for local service stations selling or even producing compressed hydrogen would be obviated. We'd all change from consuming to producing energy. The university has even higher hopes for the titanium dioxide technology behind this advance: They believe it will allow innovations in other areas such as "water purification, anti-viral and bacteriacidal coatings on hospital clothing and surfaces, self-cleaning glasses, and anti-pollution surfaces on buildings and roads". Anyone know anything about titanium? I know it's a metal, but is it plentiful and easy and clean to extract? Is it recyclable? Durable? Toxic in landfill sites? I sense a bit of grandstanding and breast-beating by UNSW here. Is there another catch they're not telling us about? |
(Warning: some financial math ahead.) A Ponzi scheme, named after its early 20th century inventor Carlo Ponzi, is a form of pyramid scheme. Basically it involves selling a nearly worthless security to a small group of investors, with the promise of great returns if they promote the security to more investors, and so on, ideally, forever. Like any pyramid scheme or chain letter, of course, it eventually collapses when it runs out of suckers. The first ones in get rich, and the last ones in (much greater in number) get shafted. As we all know, the stock market is focused on the short term, and fluctuates wildly in response to a single quarter's earnings, external economic events, even rumour. If you look at it holistically and long-term, however, it has all the markings of a century-long Ponzi scheme, the most lucrative, and potentially most devastating, in history. Let's take a look at the US S&P 500 as a surrogate for the entire stock market, the entire market for equity securities of listed public corporations. The index goes back to 1917, but was revamped in the 1940s and recalibrated so that the index for the average of 1941-43 was 10. It slowly rose to 100 over the next 50 years, and then to 1000 over the next 12 years. This broad index earned, in 2003, about $55 per average share of the component securities, using GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles). So at its current level of about 1100, it has a P/E (price-to-earnings) ratio of about 20. That means investors are willing to pay $1100 now for a share that will theoretically 'pay back' $55 next year, and hopefully successively more in future years, to justify the 'present value' of $1100. To think of ir another way, it's like a bank charging you $55 this year, $65, say, next year, and so on for at least 50 years, as 'interest' on a loan of $1100. The 5% interest in the first year isn't very attractive for such a risky 'loan', but since future 'interest' will be dependent on (hopefully rising) earnings, there is the prospect of a very lucrative return eventually. So the S&P 500, like all equities, is said to 'discount expected future cash flows'. A general rule of thumb says that the P/E ratio approximates the annual expected growth in earnings, so that means the investor in the market is expecting earnings to grow by close to 20% each year, essentially forever. How is that possible? Well, it isn't. Earnings grow because (a) prices increase, (b) costs decrease, and/or (c) volume increases. In a 'free' market economy, prices are determined (theoretically, now) by competition -- new competitors will enter the market, and/or existing competitors will adjust their prices, to the point that their return on invested capital is just high enough to justify the investment risk. That level, in a low-inflation economy where the alternative 'risk-free' investment in GICs and bonds is only 2%, is roughly a modest 7%, with the extra 5% compensating the investor for the risk implicit in equities. And, in the long run, volume can't increase -- there's only so much market for anything, and once it's saturated, earnings should therefore level off at a flat rate. Let's suppose we've more or less reached that state now. Let's also set aside the fact that the $55 earned last year by the average share is likely considerably inflated -- there are undoubtedly some more undetected Enron-type exaggerations out there in some of these 500 companies, and GAAP allows capitalization of stock options and other near-fraudulent practices that significantly overstate 'true' earnings. Is the $55 a fair return on investment in these companies? To answer that question we need to calculate what the investment is. According to the S&P, this $55 represents a 17% return on investment. In other words, the net assets or 'book' value of the average share is $55/17% or about $325. We already indicated that a reasonable return, given the risk, was 7%, which on $325 would be about $22 per share. Why are stocks earnings $55 per share when in a 'free' market they should only be earning $22? To answer this we need to look at the three components that make up ROI (or more correctly, return on equity -- ROE). These three components are: Margin (profit/sales), Turnover (sales/assets), and Leverage (assets/equity). Leverage can be inflated by excessive borrowing, which companies can get away with in times of low interest, but which boomerang when interest rates spike. Leverage can also be inflated by stock buy-backs, where the company essentially uses excess cash flow to buy back its own stock and hence increase the value per share of the remaining stock -- but this is a form of cannibalization, and leads to the same imbalance between debt and equity. Neither is sustainable. Turnover can be increased by lowering inventories, factoring and off-balance-sheet financing, but ultimately tops out -- you need to have a certain amount of money tied up one way or another in assets to be able to run an effective business. So you're left with Margin, which ultimately is the only explanation for the enormous ROE of $55/share, when in a free competitive market someone should be willing to accept $22/share. The truth is that the market, and big corporations, are far from efficient. Many industries are heavily subsidized by governments to the tune of billions of dollars in kickbacks -- er, I mean, support payments -- per year. Big corporations also work as oligopolies to prevent smaller companies from entering their markets and charging more reasonable prices for their products. We, the consumers, are in fact paying $55 for goods and services that could be sold for $22 and would still provide the corporations with a very reasonable return. If and when government subsidies end, oligopolies are broken up, and the market for goods and services truly becomes free and open, the S&P 500 should then generate $22/share each year, a 7% ROE, still an attractive return in a low-inflation economy. So we have a number of factors at work, conspiring to drive up stock prices in the unsustainable illusion that double-digit growth can and will continue forever, or at least until we're dead and it isn't our problem anymore. We have big corporations earning exorbitant returns, two and one half times a reasonable level given the risk, paid for by the taxpayer and consumer (the same people who then take what's left of their meagre paychecks and invest it, with insane trust in the brokers' unsustainable recommendations, in the stock market). And we have a P/E ratio that is already assuming that these wildly inflated, taxpayer subsidized, price-gouging levels of profit will continue to rise even further, at close to 20% per year, forever. Voilà, Ponzi scheme, par excellence. Let's do the math. Take the $22 per share that big corporations should be earning per share in a properly regulated and open market. Acknowledge that the assumption that these earnings are going to grow in the future, when markets are saturated, consumers, corporations and governments are already buckling under grotesque and unprecedented debt loads and cannot afford to buy or pay more than they already are. Discount that annual stream of $22 of earnings for 50 years at a reasonable 7% discount rate. Know what you get for the fair value of the S&P 500 with these calculations? About 300. That is what, when you strip out the growth hype, the subsidies, the price-gouging, and the unsupportable P/E valuation, the S&P 500 should be trading at. Not 1100. Eventually the Ponzi scheme will collapse. There may yet be time to con yet more foolish investors into believing that it will rise from 1100 to 1500 to 2000 or 5000 or higher, and if investors can be duped into believing that's what shares are worth, that's what they'll trade at. This scheme has been running for a century, and made many people millionnaires. But eventually we, or our children or grandchildren, will realize that the S&P 500 should be at 300, and since stocks always trade at what people think they're worth, that's where the S&P 500 will end up. The millions left holding the bag will lose most of their life savings, their pensions, everything. (Oh, and if you change the assumptions about inflation and interest rates, the above valuation doesn't change. Future values and discount rates both go up proportionally, so the inflation-adjusted present value stays the same.) Even the brokers can see the writing on the wall. They will now try to convince you that by wise investing you can 'outperform the market' by buying low and selling high, even if the market is ultimately doomed to do no better than go sideways. This is another great variant on a Ponzi scheme. It's the stuff that has hooked the new breed of gambling addicts called 'day traders'. For every investor whose holdings 'outperform the market' there will be, of course, at least one loser. But the magic of Ponzi is that it's always the other guy, the next guy, the not smart enough guy, who will get burned. You'd be better to play slot machines or buy lottery tickets -- at least the potential payout isn't overstated by 250%. In addition to the perpetual-growth Ponzi scheme, and the 'outperform the market' con, brokers also make scads of money from IPOs -- initial public offerings. As James Surowiecki has elegantly pointed out, the IPO is a scam by which an aptly-named 'syndicate' of investment firms ('underwriters') buy a mass of shares from the company 'going public', at about half the price per share they know they can flog them to gullible investors, many of whom rely on these very brokers for investment advice. They then dump their shares on these investors, knowing that the price will promptly drop back close to the IPO price. The underwriting brokers get rich, and the unsuspecting customers get burned. That's the reason Surowiecki and others, most recently Lawrence Fisher in yesterday's excellent analysis over at our mother ship Salon.com, have urged Google, potentially the most lucrative IPO of all time, to screw the brokers and either sell all the shares directly to the public by auction, or, even better, not to go public at all, and save the delirious investors the grief they will suffer when they find out Google has no direct line to God, and hence isn't worth a million dollars a share. Eventually we, or our descendents, will learn (or have no choice but) to 'just say no' to dysfunctional stock markets and all the evils they breed. Until then, we'll continue to be addicted to short-term thinking, the illusion of perpetual growth, paying too much for everything we buy, subsidizing public companies with our taxpayer dollars, downsizing and outsourcing and offshoring as 'productivity enhancement', and putting up with the atrocious greed, corruption and devastation of insatiable global corporations that pull the strings of politicians like puppeteers, all in the name of 'maximizing shareholder value'. It's addictive gambling with a staggering cost, it's insane, and it's fraud. |
 One of my peers in the badly-named discipline of Knowledge Management is IBM's complexity guru, Dave Snowden. Last year Dave wrote a paper entitled Managi ng for Serendipity, which I really enjoyed. Dave appears to share my disdain for the context-free capture and 'codification' of people's business knowledge in massive 'knowledge bases' just in case someone else might be able to benefit from that knowledge sometime in the future (assuming they can find it). Dave's paper explains how senseless this expensive exercise is. I have outlined in my Personal Knowledge Management articles why I think Knowledge Management energies would be much more effectively spent (1) developing social networking applications and competencies, and (2) developing personal content management applications and competencies, focused on the specific, individual needs of the organization's front-line knowledge workers. In the above-mentioned article, Dave asks the question: If capturing 'best practices' and similar context-deficient knowledge in central repositories is, except in limited cases*, ill-advised, what if anything should organizations be collecting in centralized 'knowledge bases' and what centrally-coordinated programs should be used to encourage learning and knowledge transfer? He suggests three possibilities:
* Dave acknowledges the value of 'best practices' in internet payment systems and safety procedures in a nuclear power plant, for example. |
 Schadenfreude. It's a German word that literally means "joy from damage". It refers to the perverse pleasure we take in observing or hearing about the misfortunes of others. That pleasure seems to be enhanced by talking about it with others -- gossip would be empty without it, and when we hear about a disaster, like the horrendous catastrophe of this week's Asian earthquake and tsunami, we have an almost instinctive need to share the news with others. If you don't think it's pleasure we feel in these situations, here are some more examples:
Writer Valerie Weaver-Zercher suggests< /a> what may be behind this is our dual need to see others as needy (which plays to the nurturer in us) and to see ourselves as not needy (which plays to our egos, and our feelings of learned helplessness). She calls this the "head-shaking syndrome". Some writers say it reflects a subliminal (or not-so-subliminal) desire for revenge against those we feel have wronged us or shown us up in some way. I confess I'm like Calvin's Dad in the cartoon above: I don't get it, though I recognize it seems to drive an enormous amount of human behaviour and activity. I loathe reality TV and the plethora of programs and films that wallow in human misery and suffering. I love games, and play to win, but afterwards I feel badly for the 'losers', and it is the social and learning aspect, rather than the competitive aspect, that I enjoy: I would get as much, if not more, pleasure from a collaborative social activity that everybody 'won'. I find comedy that ridicules and humiliates people to be pathetic and exploitative, not funny at all. And although I have been predicting a growing cascade of social, economic and ecological catastrophes, I will get no pleasure from being proved correct. I change the station when news comes on about disasters, crimes, and the undoing of celebrities: If there's nothing I can do about these things, to me it seems merely morbid to dwell on them. Can someone please explain to me how these things are pleasurable, or even cathartic? What perverse joy can anyone get watching people eat worms, women screaming at the loss of a child, athletes and film stars humiliated, losers of card games groan, or stand-ups reveal grotesque embarrassments from their past? Taking joy from these things seems deranged to me, evidence of great mental distress and anguish, or at best a bizarre, reality-detached ennui. But I will admit to a strange desire to spread bad news about others (though only if I know the news to be true -- I don't traffic in rumour). I don't know what's behind this. Maybe it's my natural pessimism, an opportunity to say 'I told you so', to warn people: If John and Mary are breaking up, we should all be alarmed -- maybe all marriages are doomed, or maybe monogamy itself is unnatural, unsustainable, and Tom Robbins' warning of the staggering difficulty of 'making love last' needs to be heeded. If Frank lost his job, perhaps this shows that all business hierarchies are fragile, uncaring, poised to destroy the lives of those who rely on them and allow them to continue. If Bill took his own life, maybe he's the brave one, the harbinger of the future, the canary in the coal mineshaft. I love to learn, to attach meaning to things, and bad news seems to call out for explanation, for interpretation of meaning. Why would our amazing planet be designed to suddenly shudder, and drown millions of her creatures in a tidal wave of misery, and destroy the joyous lives of tens of millions of others? What possible reason could there be for such cruelty, such devastation? Someone, please, stop telling me how many died, and instead tell me why? |
 I've written twice before about suicide, and a new 'advice column' in Salon.com has provoked me to write about it again. The gist of my earlier articles:
Sentimentalizing
suicide only encourages others who, weak-minded, pained, lacking the
ability to see how foolish and wrong it is, might succeed all too well
in their feeble attempts. What fucking gall, Mr. Tennis -- and
such cruel and inflammatory language. Those who commit suicide are not
weak-minded, and if this 'advice columnist' had the faintest inkling
what it is like to live with suicidal depression he would know better.
And who the hell does he think he is to judge the actions of someone
he
has never met as 'foolish and wrong'? When they go by suicide, they leave us in an insult of dust. Mr. Tennis should also know that suicide is almost never an 'insult' to anyone. It is an act of desperation, usually after years of unimaginable suffering, to escape a living hell that the victim -- yes, victim -- can no longer bear. It usually has nothing to do with anyone else, so the last thing it is is an insult to others. To counsel people, especially people in pain after an unexpected and shocking loss, to hate and blame the deceased is an affront to human dignity, an abuse of trust, and an offense to the memory of someone who was a victim, not a 'murderer'. There is a perverse character flaw in some people to always assuage grief by transferring it to anger and blame. Grief is internal, and it can eat you alive. Anger and blame are externally focused. They are much easier emotions to handle. And in some cases -- like rechanneling the grief over 9/11 into anger at Osama bin Ladin -- such transferance is quite rational. But although the exploitative 'vengeance' religions would have you believe otherwise, when people suffer and die there is often no one to blame, no one to get angry at. And reaching closure, like dealing with grief, is an internal process. It is about personally coming to grips with loss, with the realization that the toxic 'what might have been' is irrelevant, a fiction, closed. It is a slow, painful healing process. And it is a process best undertaken honestly. Using some cheap trick like transferring the pain to anger and blame of a phony straw man merely perverts and delays the process, and stirs up inappropriate emotions that can only confuse and inflame, not heal. Some advice, we're better off without. |
 Sudan has a great deal in common with Afghanistan. Both countries are horrendously overpopulated relative to their carrying capacity, and have exploding populations -- Sudan's population of 40 million people is doubling every 25 years and that rate is not slowing, raising the spectre of its population topping a half billion by the end of the century. Both Sudan and Afghanistan are also desperately poor, with only 7% of Sudan's land and 12% of Afghanistan's capable of supporting agriculture. What's worse, over-farming, over-grazing and global warming are producing chronic drought, which in turn causes massive famine and desertification. Encroaching desert has already halved arable land in Afghanistan since 1975, and the same phenomenon is happening in Sudan. Both countries have long legacies of brutal and repressive dictatorships, foreign occupation, savage and interminable civil war, lawlessness, genocide and, in the case of Sudan, slavery. And both countries provided safe harbour for Osama bin Laden. What is happening now in the Western Sudanese provinces of Darfur is merely a continuation of a centuries-long legacy of misery, poverty, conflict and violence. In this week's New Yorker Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power reports from Darfur, with first-person interviews with government and rebel leaders and the victims caught eternally in the middle. Some of the information she reveals in telling the agonizing story of this impoverished and hopeless nation:
|