Society « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Monday, June 2, 2008

Personal Reflections ... Society ...

I recently had occasion to meet-up with some former co-workers from the non-profit community agency that I worked for back in the 1990s. The Catholic priest who founded the organization was celebrating his almost-50th anniversary of ordination, and his underlings were nice enough to include me on the invitation list. Actually, there weren’t all that many people that I remembered, and those I did know were often ex-employees themselves. Nonetheless, I was still glad that I went. (The priest-in-question considers himself to be a pro-black community activist; but no, he didn’t perform any anti-Hilary tirades, a la Father Pfleger. Still, the African nuns who serve at his parish had an interesting little dance step that they perform when marching up the aisle, so there was some entertainment after all.)

Perhaps the most interesting comment that I received was from a fellow about my age who still works for this agency. He is a fairly well-known community activist within the agency’s service area, and not long ago he began dabbling with politics by running for and being elected to the city school board. Unfortunately, he recently ran for a second term and was defeated. Some of the local political power factions put together a block of candidates that did not include him. He was no doubt hoping that his boss and his agency would rally to support him, given the fairly large number of people that the agency-in-question serves each day.

But I got the feeling during my brief conversation with the community activist that his boss (the priest) decided not to get in the way of the powers that be. No doubt the agency needs their cooperation in matters such as tax collection leniency and unused land sales and grant funding assistance. The activist’s disappointment and disillusionment was rather clear when I told him that I was hoping to become involved again with a community-based outreach agency at some point (I went over to a governmental law enforcement agency in 2001). Only two or three years ago, the same fellow was encouraging me to consider returning to the non-profit fold (unfortunately, pension considerations and financial support commitments to an aging parent make that idea impractical at present). But yesterday, when I expressed such interest, his fact took on a grave expression, and he said “be v-v-v-e-e-e-r-r-r-y-y-y careful”.

Ah yes, good old “burn out”. Today, when I got back to my insignificant little desk job in the law enforcement world, I didn’t feel so bad about it. I guess that you have to just make the best of things where ever you are, whatever the cards you’ve been dealt. And actually, I’m not totally giving up on the non-profit world. The government gives me a fair amount of vacation time, and I might eventually start using some of that to do part-time work in “the community”. That’s perhaps one reason why it’s good for me to stay in touch with my former non-profit colleagues. Like many of them, I experienced burn-out, but maybe I’ll eventually get past it. And I’m sure that my community activist colleague will also get past his.

As Governor Schwarzenegger once said (before he was Governor): I’LL BE BACK.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:54 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Sunday, May 18, 2008

◊ The Millenial Monists — Where Are They Going?

Brain / Mind ... Philosophy ... Society ...

Being an old guy, one of those Baby Boomers, I haven’t been very interested in YouTube. But last week I decided to check out a link to YT that I happened to run across during a Google search; it regarded property dualism. Well, I’m definitely interested in the mind versus body debate, so I had to have a look. It turns out that there are a slew of little videos that discuss the dualist versus physicalist issues regarding the mind. Just about all of them were made (and usually narrated) by young people, probably recent college or grad students. I’m pleasantly surprised to see such interest in the question. Most people my age seem pretty brain-dead about it; the prevailing attitude is “conscious, yea, I’m conscious, I’ve got a mind, so what’s the problem?” But the colleges appear to be doing a good job in “raising consciousness” regarding the brain versus soul question; they are getting the Millennium Generation interested in what I think is a really important moral and philosophical question. But, read on . . .

As expected, most of the videos and most of the responding comments sympathize with physicalist monism. That is the ‘flavor of the day’ in academia, and the students are mostly taking the bate. No big surprise there. (There is one intelligent young YouTube contrarian who is actually defending substance dualism and theism! Hang in there,npage85.) I came across a rather cynical and rather enjoyable goof on dualism contributed by one Hurley41, and I recommend it for the humor. It starts out by trashing Descartes (oh, what a new idea!), but then shifts to a mock-religious conversion film, with stories of how dualism miraculously changes lives. Playing in the background is that familiar, cloying piano “Muzak”, the kind we old Boomers hear these days on radio commercials for cancer care centers and nursing homes. Well done, Hurley41! I definitely got a chuckle out of it.

Still, I’m a bit disturbed by this trend. The Millennium Generation is the upcoming wave, the people who will be running this country in another 20 years. The college-educated component of this generation (a significant part of Barack Obama’s wave of support, incidentally) is being taught that we are nothing but machines; cool machines like laptops and ipod’s, but machines nonetheless. They have gained the impression that neuroscience has closed the book on the last refuge of “human mystery”, i.e. the conscious mind. It appears that the Enlightenment and the info tech revolution have finally triumphed. My point is that this is going to have a big effect on American society over the next 30 or 40 years, just as the Baby Boom, with its wacky ideas and hypocrisies (think Bill Clinton), owned the 1980s and 1990s (and is still warping the 00’s).

For one thing, forget about religion and standard theistic beliefs; these kids have been inoculated against it! (Not that the Baby Boom crowd was very big on it either.) The only people who will go to church will be the working class and service industry crowd, i.e. the high school students and community college grads who never took a philosophy or neurobiology course. This split won’t be apparent only in church; it’s going to ripple through all of our social institutions. It’s going to be the techno-Enlightenment crowd versus the old-school class everywhere you look, in the workplace, in our schools, in restaurants and recreation places, in politics, in where and how we live, etc.

In sum, America is going to have a CLASS PROBLEM. There’s going to be less and less common ground between the old-school class and the “Neural Buddhists”, as NY Times columnist David Brooks recently called them (Brooks also calls them “bobo’s”, i.e. bourgeois bohemians; and he admits that he’s talking about himself). See my May 15 blog entry (below) for a cite to his article, and for more YouTube discoveries. The Baby Boomers started this trend, and the Millennium crowd is going to take it all the way. There will be two Americas; they will be interspersed geographically, but worlds apart in thinking, in needs and wants, and in political demands.

The current split between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton supporters is a good clue to the future. But I really shouldn’t call it “good” — actually it’s rather ominous. America is not going to have the kind of unity that got it through the crises of the 20th Century, i.e. two world wars and a cold war. It appeared that America was coming back together after 9-11, but that turned out not to be much more than flag waving. The US is going to face both military and economic challenges from a slew of opponents out there, including Iran, the BRIC alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China), al Qaeda, etc. Then throw in global warming and natural resource depletion (I’m still waiting for market forces to break the rise of oil prices), and — well, something is going to crack. America will survive, but as to whether it can continue to pull off the “Triple Crown” (guess I’m thinking about those horse races going on this time of year) of being the world’s strongest, richest and most free nation in the world — well, that is the million-dollar question.

I’m not sure what the Millennium Generation believes in. They appear to be taught not to believe in anything at all (or too much at once, as Barack Obama with his slick rhetoric has proved). As with most things, the medicine of skepticism can be helpful (e.g., it helps combat superstitions and irrational prejudices), but an overdose can do much harm. Dualism, for all its problems, does leave a wide berth for sanctity and human dignity (when intelligently presented). I’ve cast my lot with those few who argue that mental dualism has not been ruled out by the evidence, and should remain in play as an acceptable line of thought. The academic world today gives dualism a quick nod, but then highlights the glories of quasi-rational, monistic scientism. Sure, this keeps people from thinking about driving 767’s into office towers (mostly the people who weren’t going to think about that anyway). But it is also a huge social experiment that few outside of academia are presently aware of; and I can’t help but wonder if it’s going to backfire.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 12:53 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, May 11, 2008

◊ Beam me up, Scotty, for some dialog . . .

Philosophy ... Society ...

I’m currently reading a book by David Bohm and David Peat (Science, Order and Creativity), which is mostly a collection of interesting thoughts from the 1980’s. One of those interesting thoughts regards the distinction between discussion and dialogue regarding positions on important social issues.

Discussion is mostly what we do here in America today; i.e., we make up our minds and enter into discussions with people having different opinions. Those discussions are meant to either browbeat the other side into giving in and accepting our own ideas, or finding a compromise whereby each side gets something (as much as possible), but also accepts some dissatisfaction. The underlying assumption is that both sides stick by their guns. By contrast, dialogue is to enter into talks with an open mind about why the other side disagrees with you, with a willingness to listen and maybe change your opinion if your opponent has a good point. Unfortunately, that’s not the American way. We have way too much discussion and way too little dialogue here, especially in our politics. But ain’t that America.

Here’s another random thought regarding a philosophic issue stemming from science fiction, i.e. the Star Trek stories. In the various versions of Star Trek, people can be instantly “beamed up” from one point to another using a teletransporter device. This is a few centuries in the future, remember. I was never bothered by this idea, but after reading some philosopher’s comments about it, I now am. Not that it’s a real issue; the actual technology to teletransport people is hardly even imaginable right now. But still, the transporter concept touches on some underlying issues regarding who we are and what our lives and self-identities represent.

The big question about the teletransporter is this: is that really you at the other end after the process is over? Or did you die in the process, with some bogus copy of you being created? And even if the copy was perfect, is that still really you? There are various interpretations about how the teletransporter would work; in one interpretation, all of the sub-atomic particles that make up your body would be transported at near the speed of light to a re-assembly point. So, the re-composed body is made of exactly the same stuff. That sounds comforting. But still, in the scrambling process, you actually stopped living; you were dead for a few instants. But then again, a lot of people have been dead temporarily but revived after some trauma.

It sounds to me as though the human identity would survive the Star Trek transporter process, IF all of your experiences up to the micro-second of transport were captured and conveyed to the reassembled body on the other planet (or where ever); and if your exact stuff went down in the “beam”. Now what if that varied? What if the stuff you were made of prior to teletransport were thrown away, and you were reassembled with identical particles from where you landed? That makes me feel a little more queezy; but OK, so long as the copy on the other side were perfect, no real problem. I mean, we change our atomic composition every day by some percent. No one stays exactly the same in physical makeup.

Next possible problem: what if the transport problem scanned you about a half second or so before you lost consciousness, and then re-assembled you using that scan information? The “you” in the transporter room went on living for another half second or so before you were scrambled out of existence. The copy that was built on the planet Zarcon didn’t catch what you might have thought or felt in that final half-second. So, were you killed? Or was a little bit of you killed? Are you still comfortable that the teletransported copy of you would really be you? And what if the machine had a little stall, and you went on living for a minute or two — would you want to hit a red-button and stop the whole process before being atomically dismembered?

And then of course there are some wacky possibilities that could occur if the machine further malfunctions. What if the machine copies you and reassembles a living copy of you down on Zarcon, but fails to scramble the original you? So now there are two of you, having the same memories, the same identity, the same jobs, the same families, the same wife . . . but who is the real you? Figure that one out.

(And yes, there was a Star Trek TNG episode called “Second Chances” where Riker had been beamed up from a planet years ago but the original on the planet survived. And the planet-refuge was later recovered by the Enterprise, and thus had to deal with the beamed-up version of Riker.)

For now, we have bigger problems to worry about, like $5 a gallon gas and $1.50 a pound rice. But still, for a true geek like me, it’s an interesting little diversion. So beam me up, Scotty. And I’ll see you on the other side.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:55 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, April 5, 2008

◊ Hilary broke, the Greek afterlife, and a Woman’s wisdom

Politics ... Religion ... Society ...

Here are three items that came across my desk (or computer screen) over the past few days. They all seem to make a lot of sense, so I thought that I would share them with the small (very small!) handful of people who pay attention to this page.

Number One: Hilary Clinton will quit because she’s running out of money. The Democrats fell in love with Obama, and thus most of the money is going his way. And money talks. Hilary will thus fold soon, perhaps right after the North Carolina primary in early May. She is being outspent by Obama by 3 to 1 in Pennsylvania, and will thus be robbed of the big 10 point plus win that she needs there to stay viable. (Not entirely certain that she will win at all now, given the current trends in the pre-primary polls!) All that will be needed after that will be Clinton’s poor showing in NC; she may not even break 40%, if the current polls are accurate. The cash spigot totally goes dry for her at that point, and she finally reads the handwriting. Obama thus becomes the political “Black Swan” of the 2008 primary season (those of you familiar with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book know that this is NOT a racial reference; but the irony can’t help but be noted). We shall see if he can take his swan feathers all the way to the White House; I myself think it’s going to be another 2000 election, a real squeeker.

Number Two: Contrary to what most Christians think (and perhaps Muslims too), Jesus of Nazareth did NOT preach that we have immortal souls. That was mainly a Greek notion that was folded into Christian doctrine at a later time. Jesus, like many Jews at the time, believed in the possible resurrection of the body here on earth (but not all Jews, recall the Sauducees). But this was the physical body, not the ethereal soul. Jewish doctrine was rather quiet as to what happens to that body after that resurrection; could you die again? They really didn’t say. In the decades following Jesus’ death, the notion of resurrection was eventually tweaked into “eternal / everlasting life”, as evidenced in the Gospel of John.

But again, the Johnine notion did not necessarily envision eternal life as “spirits in heaven”; it was probably eternal life in the “new kingdom” here on earth, which would be brought forth at the Second Coming. Only a century or so later, when it was pretty clear that Christ wasn’t coming back any time soon, did the Greek notions of spirits in heaven start becoming official doctrine in the Christian Churches. Most Christians don’t appreciate just how Greek their beliefs are, and how much Jesus himself would disagree with them if he could be brought back somehow by science.

Number Three: Here’s a quote from letter to the editor found in the recent Atlantic Monthly, from a woman responding to an article about making compromises in finding a husband:

We women like to imagine ourselves as goddesses who are worthy of a man’s total worship and devotion, and we are incensed when he fails to give us that. Unfortunately, we get bed hair, body odor, wrinkles, thickness in the middle, and bad attitudes. We would not easily excuse such things in men, yet we expect men to overlook them in us.

My goodness, the voice of reason calling out in the desert! To be fair, I have to admit that men have such traits, in droves. But that’s all been said a million times about them (us, given that I’m a guy). Finally, some balance! Too bad that the writer, a Mrs. Parkhurst from Franklin, Indiana, is a MRS. She sounds like my kind of gal! I.e., very lucid, very insightful, very honest, very fair. A common-sense kind of woman. No surprise that she’s married!

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:43 pm Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, April 3, 2008

◊ Capital Attitude Changes Needed?

Politics ... Society ...

Back when I was taking classes for my masters degree in economics, one of the recurring themes in my studies was that investment capital was a good thing, a really good thing. Savings and capital allowed the economy to make itself better, to make itself grow. Free-market interest rate mechanisms would make sure that this capital was fully allocated and was concentrated in the places where the most good would be done. Sure, there might still be a minor role for the government, in making sure that enough information was available to help the markets run smoothly. And every now and then it could assist by keeping a “disequilibrium” from getting out of hand, e.g. stock crashes, runs on banks, and panicky halts in lending. But that was the exception, not the rule; the rule was that capital and the free market were the king and queen of the economy.

That’s what I was taught. So I can’t help but scratch my head at what’s going on today. There’s plenty of capital out there; interest rates are very low. Perhaps there’s more than enough capital than can be usefully used. But more significantly, capital these days is VERY restless. Investors seem to desire extremely short time horizons; not many have the faith to park their funds with a corporation or lend to a government or real estate developer for a long period. I see this as crisis of faith in the future; when general trust in the world starts receding, the mantra becomes ‘be ready to get out quick’!

But, you might ask, if that is true, then why aren’t long term rates much higher than short-term rates right now? On first blush, the fact that 20 year rates aren’t all that much higher than 10 year rates, and that the same holds on down through 5 and 2 and 1 year rates, all seems to disconfirm my hypothesis here. But actually, the capital economy today is largely controlled by big corporations and financial institutions with “interlocked leadership”; this common leadership seems to know not to even ask for 20 or 30 year investment terms anymore. The demand and supply for loans and investments are mostly concentrated on the short-term side.

What about the mortgage market? Isn’t that a long-term affair (typically 30 years)? The only thing that allows (or shall I say “allowed”) the mortgage markets to continue are all of those crazy bundling devices that allow such loans to be tossed back and forth between investors and financial firms like a hot potato. Long gone are the days of the town bank having enough faith in its community and its customers to hold a home loan for two-thirds of an average Joe’s working life.

So, just what is all of this short-term thinking getting us, i.e. the millions and millions of small people who were promised “the magic of the market” back in the 1980s in return for allowing government regulation in the financial, transportation, energy and communication fields to be decimated? (As opposed to modernized, which clearly was needed.) Well, we had the dot-com stock boom and bust of the late 1990s; but that really didn’t do much damage. But then the waves of restless capital that once chased internet fortunes turned to real estate. So then housing prices boomed, which made a lot of people feel good and fueled consumer spending; but it also had the effect of putting home ownership out of reach for much of the working class.

Oh, but never fear! The newly-deregulated financial market rode to the rescue with all sorts of crazy new mortgage products that would allow people who weren’t so wealthy to become property owners. It’s just too bad that those people couldn’t afford high-priced lawyers and financial advisers, and thus couldn’t have understood all of the fine print on the papers they signed. Now they are finding out that their deals weren’t so good after all, and a lot of them aren’t going to be able to keep their homes. And even those who CAN keep them will have to cut back on spending, which finally puts the brakes on the retail sector. And thus more and more people will be out of work over the next year. Let’s just hope this will be another self-correcting recession.

So, the restless capital demon has finally been driven from the real estate market by Bernacke and our other financial exorcists. But it is not dead; it has now invaded the commodities markets! Instead re-gaining faith and settling for long-term investments into American industry and government (and perhaps also responsible home-owners and real-estate developers), the capitalists continue their short-term craze, with “plays” in futures contracts for crude oil, copper, lead, wheat, soybeans, rice, corn, etc. And thus, oil prices have soared along with food prices. It’s bad enough to be paying $3 plus for gasoline, but this capital demon is now messing with our stomachs!

Well, given the obesity rates here in the USA, a lot of people could reasonably make up for increased food prices by reducing their consumption. But the food market is world-wide, and commodity speculation in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange may well mean that a family in west Africa or Bangladesh or Haiti isn’t going to get enough calories to stay healthy and productive. So, the short-term “liquidity” craze is really taking a nasty turn here. Try telling a starving family about “the magic of the market”, how everyone “on average” is better off for it.

The overall trend behind all of this is a real problem. Consider one more point if you would. Global warming is going to require a lot of big, long-term investments to be made if our current standards of living are to be maintained. E.g., power plant operators will have to build expensive gas capture systems as to keep carbon dioxide from reaching the air; they will have to pump it underground or some such place. These expensive investments are going to require a lot of capital. Is that capital going to be adequately provided at reasonable prices (i.e., interest rate levels) by today’s “hot-potato” / super-liquidity financing systems?

I wish that I had a solution. But it’s not really something that the government can fix through a new law or regulation or agency. The real solution is a change in attitude, especially amidst the rich, i.e. the people who hold own and manage most of the capital. (Although increasing taxes on the rich and using that money for infrastructure investments, e.g. better roads, transit systems, schools, scientific research, etc. might help a bit.) Only if they calm down and start putting their faith in the long-term prospects for our economy and our nation — and back up that faith with their bucks — will this evil spell be broken. If not, then we ain’t seen nothing yet; the horsemen of economic apocalypse will ride on into the night!

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:21 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, March 30, 2008

◊ Easter Moon Jesus, semi-Buddhist?

Religion ... Society ...

The great Christian celebration of Easter was last week. (As necessitated by the cycles of the moon; per medieval tradition, Easter is scheduled for the first weekend in Spring when there is a full moon. The moon symbolically reflects the light of the sun, just as Jesus “the son” reflects the greatness of God “the father”.) This got me to thinking again about “the man from Galilee”. Between 1997 and 2004 I put some time into studying the life and times of Jesus from a historical perspective. You can read the result of my intellectual journey here. In a nutshell, I was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith and I still have a lot of regard for it. However, my studies convinced me that Jesus was not “The Christ”, a God-man sent from above to save humankind from its sins. I could no longer participate in services at a Catholic church (or any other Christian church) offering supplications to Christ as Lord and Savior. Ritual and community are good and necessary things to me, but words and ideas also are important – actually, they are sacred, more sacred than ancient mythology.

However, as I have said before, I have not given up on the idea of God. And since Jesus, even as an historical figure, was very interested in God, I thus remain interested in Jesus. So I got out the New Testament again and took another look. Yes, I know that the fab four (Mark, Matthew, Luke and John) do not offer objective historical accounts of what Jesus said and did. I realize that these books were originally written with religious interests in mind, and were later modified by those with further religious interests (i.e., during the formative stages of the non-Jewish Christian Church). But I remain convinced that something of “the real Jesus” can be gleaned through a cautious reading of the Gospels. So over the past few days I’ve been skimming through Biblical chapter and verse (not very cautiously, admittedly), refreshing my memory and looking for new insights.

Well, I can’t say that I’ve had any stupendous new insights; no big light bulbs went on inside my head. But in trying to draw a unified mental picture of Jesus, it struck me just how difficult this really is (and not just because I’m picking from four different writings, five if you count the “Q source” within Matthew and Luke, each of which have multiple authors and redactors). Jesus sometimes sounds like a modern humanist, with his healings and his outreach to the downtrodden and powerless. Even though his methods (e.g., exorcising evil spirits) are based on ancient superstitions, his intentions certainly seemed good. And his overriding mission, i.e. to bring on the apocalyptic revolution, to trigger the coming of God’s kingdom to the dusty soils of Palestine, can be viewed in much the same light. Jesus most certainly was on a mission, a mission to bring forth a world of love and justice, a world where the suffering of the poor and the powerless would be ended.

But then again, there remains the judgmental side of Jesus. That’s the side that many modern people have a hard time with. Jesus clearly did believe that people were ultimately good or evil; a person could make it into the new paradise-like “Kingdom of God”, or be banished to punishment followed by oblivion. He did have some toleration for good people doing bad things, so long as they were willing to be “washed” of their sins in baptism. But his world view assumed that some folk were just plain beyond repair.

This is a question that remains unresolved today. Most of us know ourselves to be mixtures of good and bad, strongly influenced by conditions around us. But can we say that some humans are inherently evil, with no chance of redemption? Yes, history certainly does present many candidates. But the ‘inherently evil’ paradigm seems to deny that every human was created by God and remains God’s child. The old-tyme religion folk would say that God gives everyone free will, and if you use that free will to side with the Devil or the anti-Christ, then God no longer wants anything to do with you. (E.g., in more than one parable, Jesus talks about “not knowing” those who fail to do God’s will but then cry to God when a time of crisis comes). But then what happens to God’s infinite qualities? What happens to infinite love, wisdom and patience? Most human parents, by contrast, manage to hold out hope for a child who has gone far astray; even a homicidal sociopath sometimes has a mother who is still praying for his redemption ….

Here’s where I think that the Buddhists have the better paradigm (even though they ironically don’t have a God, or certainly not one in the Christian sense). In their inscrutable eastern wisdom, they seem to recognize that life is short, tough, and confusing. Not everyone has enough time to get in tune with the eternal truths. So they envision a metaphysics allowing souls to recycle through multiple earthly lives, until the great truths are finally assimilated. (Interestingly, however, this may be an historical Buddhist accretion; the Buddha himself did not emphasize the reincarnation of inner spirits). Only then can they reach the final state of unity with the celestial buddhas in Nirvana (again, this isn’t necessarily the Buddha’s teaching); or delay that final state so as to do some positive work advocating for those still locked in the cycles of earthly suffering (as “Bodhivistas”).

I myself am not a Buddhist; there are too many things about their system that I find unedifying (like the annihilation of self-awareness through awareness meditation). But if God really so loved the world, I think that He or She would be willing to consider some arrangements other than the heaven-or-hell paradigm of old fashioned Christianity (which really originated in Persian Zoroastrianism). I would think that God is big enough to use a good idea where ever it comes from, even if from a bunch of meditating, no-self atheists!

AFTERWORD: When you talk about Jesus, you might as well talk about Elvis. Elvis Costello, that is. The other day I got to thinking about his tunes from the late 70s and early 80s, so I went on Amazon and bought five or six Costello MP3 files. (I’m not getting paid to shill for Amazon, but I think it’s great how they now sell plain old, no-hassle MP3 files, and not those stupid WMA’s that everyone else sells that are set to blow if you rename them or whatever). ‘Twas good to hear that old Elvis cynicism again. It still sounds fresh, thirty years later. Just about as good as any other music coming out these days.

Thirty years, that’s hard to believe. When I was a kid and I first started getting interested in radio and pop-rock music (on WABC-AM), if you wanted to listen to thirty year old music, that would put you in the Great Depression! The music would be totally different; big band, swing, jazz, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, that kind of stuff.

Today, it seems as though thirty years old music isn’t necessarily antiquated; on the rock stations that I listen to (WDHA-FM, WXRK “K-Rock”, WAXQ “Q104”, and the new WRXP-FM), you still hear really old stuff from Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, the Stones, etc. mixed in with Linkin Park and the Foo Fighters and Saliva. You might even hear Elvis’s “Radio” every once in a blue moon. Too bad that they forgot about his other great stuff, like “The Angels Want To Wear My Red Shoes” or “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding”. I recommend the following YouTube clip of Costello performing “Waiting for the End of the World”. That clip is from 1978, thirty years ago. And think about it – the song title also applies in the other direction, to the early Christian Church two thousand years ago! And let’s not forget about “Miracle Man”. Damn that Elvis, he’s good!

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:23 am Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Monday, March 17, 2008

◊ The Economy As Mud Wrestling Pit

Economics/Business ... Society ...

Are you finding it hard to understand what’s going on with our economy right now? I am. Some things are certain — a lot of people who bought houses won’t be able to keep them; the stock market is down; gasoline and food prices are shooting up; a big financial firm just went out of business; the US dollar doesn’t buy much overseas right now; and a lot of people will get some free pocket change from the government shortly. That much we know.

But what’s coming over the horizon? Many economists and business people are worried. They hope it won’t be much worse than a year of slow business and a few hundred thousand extra people temporarily out of work. They hope nothing fundamental is changing and no real damage was done to the system. They hope that by next year the stock market will be up, the dollar will be up, employment will be up, gas prices will be down, and we’ll all be happy with our new President.

But what if there is real damage to the underlying structures on which the economy depends? One essential element in the mechanics of a successful economy is trust. Without trust, people stop trading and transacting, everyone gets defensive, and in the end a lot of people become poorer for it (usually those who already weren’t doing so great). For better or for worse, borrowed money is the grease that makes an economy run. Borrowed money stays “greasy” (in the economic sense) so long as everyone trusts that a loan will be repaid more or less on schedule. When that trust starts to fade, the grease starts to dry up and the economic machinery starts to grind and slow down.

For instance, student loans depend upon a complex financial system which is being thrown out of kilter by the crisis. It’s possible that fewer loans will be made to perspective students over the coming year, meaning that fewer kids will get to college, which immediately starts impacting the colleges and the textbook publishers. And those kids who were forced to delay or avoid college will earn less over their working lives, meaning that the government will get less tax revenue, Wal Mart will sell fewer home entertainment systems, etc. This is all just for one type of loan. Think about the effect of car loans, construction loans, credit card debt, working capital loans, etc. So, the lack of available loans has significant and long-term impact on economic activity.

You’d think that the people who invest and borrow millions of dollars each day would be careful (i.e, “trustworthy”) about what they’re doing. Obviously they weren’t. One of the bottom lines (or near-bottom lines) is that too much debt has been issued in the last couple of years, and that not all of it is going to be paid back. So just who is going to get stuck with the bill? And just how much is the economy going to suffer because of it?

The economy obviously has to slow down — all that delusional lending sped it up too much. However, economic things always tend to go too far one way and then too far the other. What will be the side effects? Someone is going to have to become poorer. But who? In a better world, we could all just agree to share the bill according to our ability, learn a lesson and get on with revitalizing things. But this is America, and thus there’s going to be a lot of political wrangling about it. The rich don’t want to become less rich, and they have the resources to fight the hardest. And it all just makes things worse.

I have a dog in this fight. I’m trying to save and invest so as to retire by age 66. My retirement plan isn’t luxurious; hopefully I’ll have the equivalent of $30K a year to spend after taxes (but before health costs). I could get by comfortably in a small-town apartment for 15 years or so, as long as I don’t plan on taking annual cruises and trips to Europe. But if the economy goes haywire for a decade, then my plan is toast. And so are a lot of other peoples’. But ain’t that America, as John Mellencamp says . . . . the America in which we’ve put our trust. My grandparents and parents put their trust in our country, and they did fairly well by it. But since then, someone turned our nation into a casino and a mud wrestling pit!

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:32 pm Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

◊ Girlwatcher Blues (but still like Hilary for Prez)

Personal Reflections ... Politics ... Society ...

There’s a little piece in the March Atlantic Magazine regarding a U.S. Bureau of Labor study showing that overweight women have and are facing increased employment discrimination. Over the past 25 years, men and women of all ages and races have been getting heavier, and at the same time the discrimination against overweight women, in terms of salary differences, seems also to be increasing.

What also captured my eye is a bar chart that went with the article (using data from the study). This chart purports to show that between 1981 and 2000, the percentage of white working-age women who are either overweight or obese rose from 12.6 percent to 50.4 percent. I.e., from one-in-eight to one-in-two. If that is true, it is quite astonishing. But I didn’t think it was accurate. To check, I took a look at a report called “Health, United States, 2007”, published by the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. Table 74 of that report shows that in the 1976-1980 period, 38.7% of white women age 20 to 74 were overweight or obese; in the 2000-2004 period, this went up to 61.4%. That’s still a huge jump, and shows the current situation to be even worse than the Atlantic numbers (6 in 10 overweight versus 5 in 10). But it’s still not a fat revolution, as the study stats would imply.

There certainly is a health crisis lurking behind all of this, as excess weight correlates with an increased risk of diabetes, cardiovascular conditions and muscular-skeletal problems, from what I’ve read (and what I’ve seen in my own family). From an aesthetic point of view, I also find this regrettable. Every guy has his tastes in women; some guys like the Rubenesque figure and probably welcome the trend. But I myself like the tall thin type best – that is, from the shallow perspective of appearance. I’m mature enough to know that true human worth goes way beyond looks; still, I’m still entitled to what I find most immediately pleasing regarding body appearances. A little bit of ‘girlwatching’ doesn’t hurt anyone.

Sticking with the looks-only perspective, it’s no secret that most guys find women in their 20’s and early 30’s to be the most aesthetically pleasing. That’s just nature at work; most men have enough brainpower to realize that true friendships and relationships depend upon much more than surface appearances. But nevertheless, even the most enlightened guy can Platonically admire what nature does with reproduction-age females. So, perhaps the most disturbing statistical trend for we girlwatchers is what has happened to the 20-34 year old cohort of females; in the 1960-1962 period, only 21.2% of such women were overweight or obese; in the 2000-2004 period, that number went to 51.6%. My goodness, McDonalds and Hagen-Daz and ADM (with all of that unhealthy corn syrup they crank out) are trying to kill off girlwatching in America!

Just to show that I’m not being totally chauvinistic here, I’ll leave behind a link to an article that I just read on the New York Magazine web site regarding the differences between Obama and Hilary. Actually, I’ll link to the last page of that article, which sums things up very nicely. To paraphrase it, Hilary is the practical choice, the choice which assumes that politics in Washington and the world at large are nasty and are going to stay nasty. Obama reflects the assumption that through American good will and idealism, the world of nations and the world of politics can become kinder and gentler. Right now, the Obama point of view seems to be winning, and in a lot of ways, that’s a good thing. But I just don’t think that the world is ready for Obama’s paradigm; or, said another way, Obama is just not ready for the real world’s paradigm. His speeches sound like wishful thinking to me. But McCain and the GOP are just too pessimistic about the human race. I still think that Hilary, however uninspiring politically (and not much from the girlwatching perspective either), is the right mix, the best you can do. I still hope she can pull out of her tailspin.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 4:14 pm Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, February 9, 2008

◊ Suburban Slums of the Future

Society ...

There’s an interesting article in the March Atlantic Magazine which speculates that in 20 years, a lot of today’s posh suburban developments in the exurban fringes could become low-income slum communities (“The Next Slum?” by Christopher Leinberger). The subprime mortgage crisis may have set in motion a process powered by a series of underlying demographic and economic factors, a process that may leave the cities and inner suburbs better off and the exurbs and their McMansions much worse. It would be hard today to imagine gangs, drug dealing, and vinyl-clad estate houses split up into tenements out along the Interstates and outer-beltways, but perhaps in 20 years the suburban-fringe paradises of today will become tomorrow’s nightmares. Stranger things have happened within the context of decades.

This made me thing of a song that I just bought and downloaded from the new Amazon MP3 site. I’m not getting paid to plug for Amazon, but I will give them credit for not requiring that you download their special software to buy their music. All of the other major digital music sites seem to require that, and personally I don’t like it. Who knows what their software is doing that you’re not aware of. My computer and its registry are cluttered enough as it is without needing a special application for every site that I do business with.

Anyway, the song I’m referring to is Cashman & West’s “American City Suite”, from 1972. It’s a lament about the decline and decay of urban neighborhood life in New York City that took place back in the 60’s. American City Suite is actually a rather touching and underrated tune; there’s some real emotion in it. It got some airplay for a few months after it was released, but has gone entirely unnoticed since then. Nice that Amazon decided to list it (I think that MSN also has it). Here we are, about 40 years later, and maybe those urban neighborhoods are coming back. And perhaps the suburbs (the outer ones, anyway) are going to experience the social decline that they previously caused in the cities, what Cashman & West sang about. It makes you wonder if Terry Cashman is thinking about writing a new version lamenting the end of the McMansion / SUV dream.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:30 pm Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

◊ Competition — a Bit Overrated?

Society ...

I’m not a huge football fan, but since I live in the New York area, I couldn’t help but get swept up in the enthusiasm for the underdog NY Giants over the past few weeks. What a great comeback from a team that barely made the playoffs. They came back to knock off three powerhouse teams, and then beat the mightiest of the mighty, the previously undefeated New England Patriots, in the Superbowl. This year’s Superbowl finally earned its name. And the NFC playoff game in Green Bay was also a classic, being played in minus 3 degree weather (an “IceBowl”, as some have called it) and won in overtime with a dramatic field goal right after the kicker had blown two easier attempts. That was probably the one NFL football game that I’ll always remember.

Being a reflective sort of chap, however, I’ll not dwell too long on the athletic and spiritual achievements of the Giants over the past 6 weeks (as well as financial ones), great though they were. Instead, I’d like to ponder two social themes that are quite prominent in a football game, especially a high-powered, big-money game like the NFL. Those themes are competition and cooperation. Professional football is mix of both. There’s plenty of competition on every level; competition to win the game, competition between players to make the team, competition for TV ratings, etc. There must also be a lot of cooperation. E.g., cooperation between team players throughout the game; cooperation of teams with the rules of the game, and with the decisions of the referees; cooperation with the fans, who pay good money to watch; cooperation with the capitalist and governmental institutions who provide and maintain a stadium, provide traffic control for the crowds, sell commercial air time on the media, provide for a team’s logistic needs (uniforms, travel, game scheduling, training facilities), etc. Although the main point of an NFL game is to win and to make money in a capitalist economy, there is plenty of cooperation going on behind the scenes.

For me, though, it’s sad that competition is king here, and cooperation is the handmaiden working in the shadows. Football says a lot about our social priorities and assumptions. My second grade teacher told me and my parents that I was “different”. Part of the difference that she was referring to, I believe, regards my unwillingness to just accept things. Not that I’m any great rebel, but I think that I was born with an instinctual ability to notice and question things that many others take for granted. One of those things is competition; back in grammar school I knew early on that we were being encouraged to compete with each other, because that’s just how life in America is. But why is that, I wanted to know. No one had a good answer. Just shut up and take your lumps in dodgeball and ‘steal the bacon’.

I still wonder why we have to be so competitive. The Ayn Rand capitalist theory is that competition brings out the best in us. If we didn’t have to compete, if our needs for security were met, we’d all be lazy. Such laziness would eventually lead to rampant poverty and social collapse. Competition makes things as good as they are. Even the losers are better off in the long run because of it.

And yet I wonder. Is that really the main choice for us human beings? Competition versus laziness? That sure seems to be what we assume here in the USA. Cooperation is just a side-effect that’s sometimes necessary to enhance competition. It’s like that with mother nature herself. Families are the bastions of cooperation, but only such that each family can better compete for money, land, and opportunities for their children; this applies to almost all creatures. Putting competition first is in our nature.

But do we have to be slaves to mother nature? Isn’t it the human heritage to do something different, based on our ability to reason? My reasoning would say that cooperation is the better part. I would envision a human race where cooperation is king, where people truly strive to cooperate, where cooperation brings out everyone’s best. Yes, some competition would still be necessary; I myself enjoy having a choice of supermarkets and department stores to go to. And yes, competition makes the NFL so occasionally entertaining (but only occasionally; most football games are pretty boring to me). So why can’t we all assume that it’s cooperation that can make us better off; on every level, even to the level of nations deciding how to split up land, oil, seaways, water, minerals, wealth, etc.

Yea, I know, we’re a long, long way from that here on Planet Earth. For now, the most significant manifestation of international competition, i.e. war, continues on and on. We’ve kept it out of America for a long time now, although 9-11 showed that it could come back. Yes, I do look at (pseudo) Islamic radical jihad and al Qaeda as an exercise in competition, in the same vein with capitalist, species evolution, the “magic of the market”, and conservative politics. Imagine if we could turn down the competition instinct and do away with war. Imagine all the economic resources that would be freed up for better uses if the many nations of the world stopped building and buying jet fighter planes and tanks and destroyers and missiles and machine guns. Despite all of the wealth created by economic competition, there is also a huge economic drag created by military competition. When you balance these factors, is the average citizen of this world better or worse off?

I still think that humankind could make it different; we could make cooperation the prime directive, without losing our iPods and all of the magic that we saw from the NY Giants over the past few weeks. But that will probably take centuries of time and many more hard lessons. I won’t live to see it, but I’d like to think that every dream of a better world somehow helps.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:24 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

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