HERE IS WHAT I THINK

The War on Terror

2010-01-28T23:40:00.007-05:00

We are testudines testa sua inclusi, like so many tortoises in our shells, safely defended by an angry sea, as a wall on all sides.

-Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.

...

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."

...

He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

-Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

crumenimulga natio

2010-01-28T23:28:00.004-05:00

[a purse-milking nation]

"That the state was like a sick body which had lately taken physic, whose humors are not yet settled, and weakened so much by purging, that nothing was left but melancholy."

-Hippolytus

The Audacity of Hope

2010-01-28T23:17:00.004-05:00

Can hope—desire—be dangerous?

Qui cupiet, metuet quoque porro,
Qui metuens vivit, liber mihi non erit unquam.

[Who hath desires must ever fearful be;
Who lives in fear cannot be counted free.]

-Lactantius

Desire to gain portends the fear to loose. So does well-meant liberalism lead to a certain perverse conservatism: prisoners of of our ambition, of our acquisition.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

-Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Through a glass, darkly

2010-01-28T23:07:00.004-05:00

Why do we condemn the Bill Clintons, the John Edwards, the Tiger Woods of the world? Why do we Americans (prudish so) hold our celebrities so lofty in moral expectation?

For princes are the glass, the school, the book,
Where subjects' eyes do learn, do read, do look,

Velocius et citius nos
Corrumpunt vitiorum exempla domestica, magnis
Cum subeant animos auctoribus.
[Domestic examples of vice corrupt us more swiftly
and sooner, when in stirring our passions they
are backed by the example of the great.]

-Antigonus

Examples of the great
Are great enablers.

Semantics in the Sino-American Relationship

2009-11-12T17:18:00.009-05:00

"Watch yer mouth, son!"

Next week, when President Obama arrives in Beijing, he will represent a nation that maintains "positive, cooperative and comprehensive" ties with the Middle Kingdom (the official jointly-agreed-upon characterization in Beijing and the Beltway).

This is in marked difference to the Nixon-era "tacit allies [against the Soviet Union]" and the George W. Bush-era "strategic competitors." Bush had also described the relationship as "candid," but Beijing has shied away from suggestions that the two powers might criticize each other publicly.

Don't rush to cynicism—this Confucian-inspired attitude reflects the existential importance of face-saving and respect between two mutually-dependent behemoths. He is recorded in the Analects 2,500 years ago as explaining the importance of language to statecraft:

There must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above all things. If names are not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried to success.

What words will President Obama, known above all things for his rhetorical flourishes, use next week? Town hall-style meetings have presented the administration with some of its toughest domestic criticism over fiscal policy and health care reform. What happens 7,000 miles away, when he faces a hot seat in a heavily mediated town hall with students in Shanghai? And what of his steps through the ancient tradition of Forbidden City diplomacy in Beijing, where slight breaches of nuanced ritual have lost many a foreign emissary life and limb?

Perhaps Obama was a little too candid with his words as a young senator in Illinois:

They're neither our enemy, nor our friend. They're competitors.

Ouch.

According to Orville Schell, China specialist with the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, "We Americans don't do ritual very well. We don't take it seriously. For the Chinese, it is all-important."

Perhaps it would be indeed be prudent to parse our words toward a "strategic competitor" which holds $1 trillion in American debt; which is our most important trading partner; which maintains a nuclear stockpile of hundreds and the world's largest army; which maintains intimate ties with trouble spots North Korea, Pakistan, Iran and Sudan; which has held crucial veto power on the U.N. Security Council since 1979; and which may likely eclipse us in economic and geostrategic power within our lifetimes.

The Gossip, by Norman Rockwell

Little known fact: It is official U.S. policy since President Nixon signed the Shanghai Communique in 1972 that Taiwan is actually part of the People's Republic of China. There are only 22 (mostly tiny) countries that diplomatically recognize Taiwan as a separate nation—the United States is not one of them. The "Taiwanese Embassy" in the United States is officially known as the "Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States," even though its web domain is "www.taiwanembassy.org/US." Taiwan, which self-identifies as the "Republic of China," is known widely as "Chinese Taipei" in international sporting events (like the 2008 Beijing Olympics) and some international organizations, per People's Republic of China pressure.

From Wikipedia:

Both sides agree to use the English name "Chinese Taipei". This is possible because of the ambiguity of the English word "Chinese". In 1979, the International Olympic Committee passed a resolution in Nagoya, Japan, restoring the rights of the Chinese Olympic Committee within the IOC, meanwhile renaming the Taipei-based Olympic Committee "Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee". Since then, and until 1989 the PRC translated "Chinese Taipei" as "Zhongguo Taipei" (simplified Chinese: 中国台北, traditional Chinese: 中國臺北, hanyu pinyin: Zhōngguó Táiběi), connoting that Taipei is a part of the Chinese state. By contrast, the Republic of China government translated it as "Zhonghua Taipei" (traditional Chinese: 中華台北 or 中華臺北, Hanyu Pinyin: Zhōnghuá Táiběi) in Chinese, which references the term "China" as the cultural or ethnic entity, rather than the state.

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"If names are not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things..."

Last Words from Death Penalty Inmates

2009-11-11T16:59:00.013-05:00

John Allen Muhammad, AKA "The DC Sniper," who was put to death today in Virginia by lethal injection. He declined a last statement. I remember ducking behind the pumps while gassing my car during his three-week-long 2002 shooting spree—I was legitimately afraid. We all were. The murders were so random, disembodied violence aimed at the most normal moments in our daily routines. Family members of the ten victims crammed into a small viewing room in the execution chamber of Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia...

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This post expresses no opinion about the death penalty—because I have none. It merely tries to humanize one of the many heavy and complex matters that have become mere "issues" in the 24-hour news cycle.

These last statements from death row inmates, on the verge of execution, are posted on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice website here.

Yes I do. I know ya'lls pain, believe me I shed plenty of tears behind Carlos. Carlos was my friend. I didn't murder him. This what is happening right now is an injustice. This doesn't solve anything. This will not bring back Carlos. Ya'll fought real hard here to prove my innocence. This is only the beginning. I love each and everyone dearly. Dre My queen. I love you. Yaws, Junie I love yall. Stay strong, continue to fight. They are fixing to pump my veins with a lethal drug the American Veterinary Association won't even allow to be used on dogs. I say I am worse off than a dog. They want to kill me for this; I am not the man that did this. Fight on. I will see ya'll again. That's all I can say. -Reginald Blanton, Executed October 27, 2009

On 4/13/2000 in San Antonio, Blanton and one co-defendant shot and killed a 20 year old Hispanic male in his apartment. Blanton took jewelry from the victim which was later pawned for $79. He was 18. He was executed 10 years later, at the age of 28.

The Polunsky dungeon should be compared with the Death Row Community as existing not living. Why do I say this, the Death Row is full of isolated hearts and suppressed minds. We are filled with love looking for affection and a way to understand. I am a Death Row resident of the Polunsky dungeon. Why does my heart ache. We want pleasure love and satisfaction. It. The walls of darkness crushed in on me. Life without meaning is life without purpose. But the solace within the Polunsky dungeon, the unforgivesness within society, the church Pastors and Christians. It is terrifying. Does anyone care or who I am. Can you feel me people. The Polunsky dungeon is what I call the pit of hopelessness. The terrfying thing is the US is the only place, country that is the only civilized country that is free that says it will stop murder and enable justice. I ask each of you to lift up your voices to demand an end to the Death Penalty. If we live, we live to the Lord. If we die we die to the Lord. Christ rose again, in Jesus name. Bye Aunt Helen, Luise, Joanna and to all the rest of yall. You may proceed Warden. [began singing] -Johnny Johnson, Executed February 2, 2009

What did he do? Here's the report. (Hint: He's a less-than-ideal voice for the anti-death penalty lobby).

Is the mic on? My only statement is that no cases have ever tried have been error free. Those are my words. No cases are error free. You may proceed Warden. -Dale Devon Scheanette, Executed February 10, 2009

On 12/24/1996, in Arlington, Texas, Scheanette sexually assaulted and strangled a 22 year old black female, resulting in her death.

Yes, nothing I can say can change the past. I am asking for forgiveness. Saying sorry is not going to change anything. I hope one day you can find peace. I am sorry for all of the pain that I have caused you for all those years. There is nothing else I can say, that can help you.

Mija, I love you. Sis, Cynthia, and Sandy, keep on going and it will be O.K. I am sorry to put you through this as well. I can't change the past. I hope you find peace and know that I love you. I am sorry. I am sorry and I can't change it. -David Martinez, Executed February 10, 2009

Mr. Martinez was charged with beating his wife and their 14-year-old son to death with a baseball bat.

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...led into the chamber in denim and flip-flops, John Allen Muhammad was injected with a series of lethal drugs beginning at 9:06 p.m. and he was pronounced dead at 9:11 p.m. Bob Meyers, whose brother, Dean H. Meyers, 53, was gunned down Oct. 9 at a Prince William County gas station said, "There are no winners here. We are not celebrating. It was a sad day for everyone."

Love as a Verb

2009-11-02T13:59:00.015-05:00

On the Dao, "Loving" over "Love," and the Gerundal Nature of Happiness...

The entire venerable canon of 5,000 years worth of Chinese religious philosophy could be reduced to a single syllable—

Dao (道)

Translators have had trouble with this word. They usually translate 道 into English as "the Way."

The confusion stems from the fact that in Mandarin Chinese there is no distinction between nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc. as there are in most Indo-European languages. The same word often means a ____ (noun), to ____ (verb), ____-ing (gerund), ____-ingly (adverb), etc.

The same written character 道, for example, means variously:

direction / way / road / path / principle / truth / morality / reason / skill / method / Dao (of Daoism) / to say / to speak / to talk / classifier for long thin stretches, rivers, roads etc / province of Korea (do 도)/ former province of Japan (dō)

The Daoist concept of Dao is neither noun, nor verb, nor adjective--but something that both encompasses and transcends grammatical category. Translating it into English as the abstract noun "the Way," however, tends to give precedence of the noun over the active verb aspects of 道. A more accurate, but ungainly, translation might be "Way-ing." The verbification of nouns in a gerundal "-ing" is the closest that English gets to this "active noun" state.

OK, so what?

Consider the following cliche:

"Love conquers all."

Everyone who reads this with the jaundiced eye of the early 21st Century (half-)knows it's a farce. With divorce rates pushing 60%, financial disaster and unemployment putting strains on relationships, and a Millennial Generation putting off marriage later and later, love clearly doesn't conquer all.

In the phrase "Love conquers all," the word "Love" serves as a subject noun. "Conquers" is the verb, and "all" the direct object of the verb. "Love" is an abstract noun, meaning it's meaning is already elusive, yet universalized. There is only one Love, and yet we are all expected to approach it from individual, subjective angles in the messy realm of romantic reality.

The abstract noun "Love" has been written about endlessly over the eons, and yet who can really explain it to the uninitiated? Like most abstract nouns ("courage," "integrity," "good," "evil," "hope," "change"), "Love" is impossible to codify. We approach the Platonic Form of Love from very divergent angles, all the while unsure whether such an objective and eternal Platonic Form of Love exists. Does Evil exist? Does Good exist? We wonder.

Furthermore, our contemporary ideas of Love and romantic marriage are actually quite new. It was only in the last two centuries that young Western people set out on the journey of finding "the One." You would look for a perfect match, for "compatibility," and then enter a long courtship (designed to reveal or disprove said compatibility), before sealing the deal with marriage. Keep in mind that this approach was compatible with the dominant 18th and 19th Century zeitgeist of rational progress, of the perfectibility of human life through applied reason. Dating/courtship was/is as a "scientific trial," with Love as the "hypothesis," and having weathered the double-blind trials of dating, Love would transition through Theory to Law (marriage).

"Cindy, we've been 'hooking up' for some months now. I'd like to take it to the next level—and ask you out on a date."

Since then, we've been a bit disappointed by this naive faith in the transcendental potential of pure, scientific reason. As well, we've had a rather severe hangover from the 19th Century iteration of romantic marriage. High divorce rates, rampant adultery, and a multibillion-dollar marriage therapy and self-help industry portend this restiveness.

We now "shop" to "purchase" the perfect mate, just as we'd compare the labels of cereal boxes in the supermarket. Just as the salesmen in an electronic store assures us that we'll get years of bliss out of our "state-of-the-art" flatscreen television (which is immediately woefully obsolete the minute it exists the showroom), so too does the modern Romance Establishment assure us that with enough (expensive) dating, an (expensive) extravagant enough wedding, further consumer purchases of (expensive) gifts for holidays, and (expensive) couples therapy sessions, we'll be happy perpetually. If it doesn't work out, it's because you purchased a lemon. Divorce—despite its heavy emotional and financial toll—is the answer. Don't worry though, there are (expensive) lawyers for that.

Now, there's even talk of the "starter marriage," with planned obsolescence contained in its very design. Laboring under the rusted illusion of "till death do we part," we instead lease-to-buy. Nobody has ever achieved eternal bliss from a consumer purchase at the mall, and we're all quite accustomed to "shopper's guilt." Why then, do we think applying the same logic to Love will assure eternal romantic bliss? Why do we so quickly ignore the other (true) cliche that "marriage takes work"? Why do we believe in the shocking improbable notion that "the perfect match" exists, that we will find that match out of 6.96 billion people in a romantically active window of 5-15 years (despite limits of time and geographic distance), and that initial match will effortlessly weather the seasons of one's life without any maintenance?

Even the man who loves his vintage 1970 Dodge Charger has to (and loves to) spend hours maintaining it in the garage every weekend. This is known in the common parlance as a "labor of love." This vintage auto enthusiast loves his car, labors out of love to maintain it, and remains ever-in-love with its well-oiled engine. Let us not disregard this man's sincere affection for this object. His is the same love a gardener feels for his garden or an artist for his canvas. His relationship to his car is categorically different to the recent-purchaser-of-the-top-of-the-line-flatscreen's. And, in his approach, we get closer to the idea of the Dao of Loving.

Loving—hard!

Let's consider that we've asked the wrong question about Love. We may never know what "Love" is (if it exists as such), but most of us are quite familiar with what "loving" is, what it is "to love." We know it when we experience it.

So, let us amend the aforementioned cliche to this:

"Loving conquers all."

Again, we return to that magic "-ing"—the gerund. The gerund is both abstract noun and verb. It is both active and static. It is both existent and emerging. The gerund is a process. Dare we say the gerund is the true nature of "the Way?"

If "Love" fails more often than not to overcome the more mundane challenges of personal finance, career, day-to-day dispute, cultural difference, friends and extended family, perhaps it is "loving" that is really the panacea for our ills of loneliness and strife?

The dictionary defines "loving" as the following:

feeling or showing love / warmly affectionate / fond [ex: loving glances]

"Loving" is both a adjectival result ("warmly affectionate" and "fond") and a verbal means ("feeling or showing love"). When you are "loving," therefore, you become "loving." What paradoxical magic!

For a concrete example of what Loving looks like day-to-day, consult this excellent piece in The New York Times Magazine on the Obamas's marriage.
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I hope you've loved this post, readers, because I've loved writing it.

Living With SAUCE!

2009-10-28T20:18:00.022-04:00

"The Sauce." This is what I call it. But the idea of it has always existed...

And perhaps the best explication for it was penned over two millenia ago, from a man far wiser than I. Known as "Laozi" (literally "the old master"), the identity of this anonymous sage remains clouded in mystery. Even so, his work, the Dao De Jing, continues to be the most beloved export of Chinese thought, having been translated into forty versions in English alone. I will therefore lean on him heavily for this little Sauce-themed essay.

So what is this Sauce? And what is its usefulness for successful (saucy) living?

Closely related to Luke Skywalker's Force, Austin Power's Mojo, Rhonda Byrne's Secret or Laozi's Dao--the Sauce is a source, the soil from which all else grows. Till and cultivate the Sauce, and allow fields to spring from it. Succeeding with the Sauce means succeeding effortlessly.

Success with Sauce means not aiming directly for the reward. There is no victory in sport without practice. There is no practice without the love of the game. The love of the game, therefore, is what brings victory. In Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, he talks of excellence in anything as taking 10,000 hours of practice. Anyone who's endured music lessons against their will knows that the far-off specter of concert pianist-dom is not enough to carry you through 10,000 grueling and repetitive sessions with a dictatorial tutor. Having the Sauce means loving the 10,000 hours you spend on your passion, without thought of ambition—and then reaping success anyway. You can't fake it, either. A hack simply won't last those 10,000 hours.

Therefore the sage accomplishes things by doing nothing.

(Laozi, Dao De Jing, 2:11)

Friendship with Sauce means investing in your companions—as an investment in yourself. Friendship as competition is a race to the bottom. Friendship without cooperation is a wretched scramble over the scraps of life. Your friends and family are your assets, and the more you consider them and treat them that way, the more valuable assets they become.

The sage does not hoard,
The more he uses on behalf of others,
The more he has himself.
And the more he gives to others,
The more comes back to him.

(Laozi, Dao De Jing, 81:7-11)

Loving with Sauce means not aiming to get the girl/boy. The object of your desire is best seduced, rather than pursued. And what is the most attractive quality in another person? Passion—someone who's doing something. True love is two sets of eyes on the same star.

In being acted upon, it is harmed;
And in being grasped, it is lost.

(Laozi, Dao De Jing, 29:5-6)

Leading with Sauce means a soft touch. It means standing aside and allowing the potential energies of your team to become kinetic. It means applying just as much force as is needed—no more, no less. The leader neither neglects, nor burdens his team.

This man of wisdom
Concerns himself with under-acting
And applies the lesson
Of the word unspoken,
That all the ten thousand things may come forth
Without his direction,
Live through their lives
Without his possession,
And act of themselves
Unbeholden to him.
To the work he completes
He lays down no claim.
And this has everything to do
With why his claim always holds true.

(Laozi, Dao De Jing, 2:12-25)

Leadership with Sauce is also humble. It can afford to be, because credit comes readily when it is neither demanded nor yearned for. When the leader gives credit easily, the led loose nothing in praising.

Possess little so as to acquire;
To possess much is to be perplexed.
Therefore the sage, by embracing the One,
Becomes a model for the world.
By not showing himself,
He becomes illustrious.
By not being self-important,
He becomes prominent.
By not being given to self-praise,
He is given credit.
By not promoting himself,
He endures for long.
If one wants to be ahead of the people,
One must, in using one's person, remain behind them.
Therefore the world finds joy in praising him, without wearying of it.
And because he contends with no one,
There is no one in the world who can contend with him.

(Laozi, Dao De Jing, 22:5-13; 66:12-15)

Entrepreneurship with Sauce means allowing oneself to be empty. What substance does the entrepreneur add? Nothing! The entrepreneur merely provides the crux where things meet. The entrepreneur invites things together, so that they are rendered greater than the sum of their parts. He is the host, not the party. The entrepreneur finds that everything that is needed already exists. He merely provides a setting for them to fill.

Thirty spokes conjoin in one hub,
there being nothing in between,
the cart is useful.
Clay is molded to form a vessel;
there being nothing inside,
the vessel is useful.
Doors and windows are carved out to make a room:
there being nothing within,
the room is useful.
Thus, with something one gets advantage,
While in nothing one gets usefulness.

(Laozi, Dao De Jing, 11:1-11)

Society with Sauce means nurturing a community. Before a community exists, its members have existed. The social entrepreneur merely unites and nurtures them. He does not interfere. He is the catalyst, but allows the reaction to occur as it will.

Give life to things, rear them,
Give them life but without possessing them,
Perform without obligating,
Preside without controlling:
Such is the meaning of "hidden power."

(Laozi, Dao De Jing, 10:13-17)

Vision with Sauce means standing back to see what's in front of you. The finest artist merely recreates what is there. Preconceived notions stymie creativity, blind you to new opportunities and prevent vital retooling of ideas once implemented. Having vision means listening to different perspectives from different people.

For your vision to reach all quarters
Must you not be unknowing?

(Laozi, Dao De Jing, 10:11-12)

Sustainability with Sauce means prioritizing endurance over power. A bicep trained only in anaerobic exercise with have greater strength, but will exhaust itself completely within minutes. The marathon runner's sinewy musculature, on the other hand, can hold enough metabolic fuel for over 20 miles. The 1990s witnessed countless flash-in-the-pan dot-coms—initially impressive, but ephemeral. Those that survived found that persistence was far more important than intelligence. The social ills of our time are deep and profound, and cannot be cured by band-aid solutions. Thomas Edison's cliche "Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration” still holds.

Hence the strong and true keep commitment,
Stay with the kernel that's real,
And shun flowery adornment.

(Laozi, Dao De Jing, 38:28-31)

How can it be that the Sauce is the secret to happiness, friendship, love, success, innovation, sustainability and societal betterment? The Sauce is itself the inexhaustible source of all positive outcomes. Positivity breeds positivity. Trust breeds trust. Love breeds love. Success breeds success. There is no limit to the iterative power of this dynamic, once it is set into motion. You can Pay it Forward forever...

Aim for the common Means—not the End—and you too with be Living with Sauce.

The Dao is empty.
It may be used without every being exhausted.
Fathomless, it seems to be the ancestor of all things.

(Laozi, Dao De Jing, 10:1-11)

On Pineapples and Philosophy

2009-07-09T20:14:00.014-04:00

I've been reading the following new book on the Metro, and it inspired a Grand Unified Theory of Pineapples and the Human Condition, that I think you may appreciate, dear reader...

Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones

Gary Y. Okihiro's book tells all about the roots of the pineapple in southern Brazil/Argentina/Paraguay, it's transplantation to 17th Century European hothouses as a symbol of empire and luxury, and its re-transplantation to the imperial perimeters, where it finally hit Hawaii with a bang at the turn of the 20th Century, just after the U.S. had (fraudulently) annexed the islands. The author, who's Japanese, uses the pineapple as a narrative vehicle for the plantation economies of the tropical empires, and the relationship between the temperate, imperial, masculine, civilized West and the exotic, tropical/semi-tropical, feminized, Oriental East. Reading the history, it's rather hard to imagine how modern (indigenous) Hawaiians could ever consider themselves "Americans."

* * *

This is just one, very evocative glimpse into the Howard Zinn People's History of the United States-style of revisionist history. And as I read such things, I'm torn very deeply between the nasty, triumphalist, pro-imperial, White Power, Exceptionalist American, Manifest Destiny attitude, and horror at the dehumanizing, genocidal, exploitative barbarity that went into making Europe and the United States what it is today. Every splendorous aspect of the West was largely hacked through and pillaged from the East. The United States was settled through genocide, built by slaves and coolies, and expanded over top of indigenous peoples from Puerto Rico to the Pacific Rim. And then I found myself thinking back to the "Thank goodness we fucked the Hawaiians! Those islands make a perfect forward-base in Asia! Think of how we could have defeated the Japanese without a flotilla of islands like that dotted along the way. And won't all our Oceanic possessions make it hard for a rising China to dominate the Pacific!"

And that, pretty much, is the irreconcilable fact about America. I have it within my very DNA: 1/8 Native American blood. So, that means I'm a product of the very violence that "tamed" the New World. I'm sure the native woman who married my white relative was very enamored with him and all that, but I'm also pretty sure than his relatives had aided and abetted the slaughter and disenfranchisement of hers. My last name, "Greene" hearkens back to the very founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia. From there, my father's family migrated up to north-central Virginia, where they lend their name to a crappy little county there. Now, funnily enough, there are an awful lot of black Greenes around here too. Black people often ask me if I'm part black. It's good they don't know the real reason I share a last name with many of them in the mid-Atlantic region. It was common practice for plantation owners to extend their last names to slaves on legal documents.

The Israelites slaughtered the Canaanites because God had granted them the Promised Land of Israel. Today, their decedents oppress the Palestinians to get access to the same land. Every empire in history--and every civilization for that matter--was forged at the murderous expense of someone else (usually the more peaceable and civilized of the two). Today, even, we are supposedly "post-colonial," but the relations between the core and the periphery are the same, little more than the plantation economies of the 19th Century. The core strip-mines the periphery for resources and cheap labor, while tying its economies into dependent organs of the core, and undermining local industries. Peripheral people are consigned to wage-slavery to the capital-rich core. Sometimes they migrate to the core, and become it's loathed, second-class immigrants. Other times, they turn inward to exploit their countrymen, to becomes demi-cores themselves within their peripheral society.

Within the core, you see, there is a mini-periphery and mini-core. The latter have resources to weather even economic crises like the one they have now just reaped. Their record portfolio growth comes at the expense of their peripheral peers' economic prospects. At one time, the agents of the colonial core would call upon the government to stamp out political risks to their enterprises. Calling in the marines was the Turn-of-the-Century equivalent of requesting a Big Three bailout. The risks firms now undertake are tacitly guaranteed by the government, meaning profits from risk are private, while losses from risk are public (coming from tax revenue, or borrowed against public debt) when the Treasury and FDIC shore up failed banks and "toxic assets." In the aftermath of the Bush-Obama financial crisis recovery stimulus plan, we've seen trillions poured into the same banks that created the crisis in the first place, managed by the same banker ilk that oversaw the prelude to the crisis, without the requirement to alter in any way the management of those funds, or even Congressional oversight over the Department of the Treasury's TARP billions, or the secretive Fed's trillions-large portfolio. Regulation, which has even been supported by the financial industry itself, has gone nowhere. This, after even the most basic regulations were successively rolled back under Reagan, Bush the Elder and Clinton. If that free-for-all regulation regime hadn't have been born, there's no way AIG, an insurance company, would now have the dubious distinction of requiring the biggest government bailout in economic history for financial adventurism. In short, the American taxpayer--you and I--are bankrolling the speculative adventures of a couple of highly-paid frauds, whose claims of record profits don't even hold up over time scales of longer than five years (an investor in U.S. Treasury bonds would have witnessed a higher yield over any combination of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, hedge funds, etc. over the past 30 years--none of which were even profitable over the long term, when you account for inflation or financial services fees).

Does this sound Marxist? No, I'm not advocating a revolution on behalf of socialism here. My specific grievance is against the core-periphery corporatism that has displaced capitalism. The entire financial industry, considered since the Great Depression "too big to fail" is now not capitalist. It is insured and underwritten by the U.S. Government, and by extension, the taxpayer. There is no risk in taking risks, when you have a corporate safety net. Therefore, "irrational exuberance" is not only rewarded, by encouraged, structurally. The CEO A who makes 15% profits per year for five years for his investors, even at the almost certain risk of bubble collapse and the subsequent eradication of all that accrued value, is considered successful. The CEO B who makes a conservative, but sustainable, 8% a year, will be ousted for "under-performing" relative to his competition. Perhaps he can say, "I told you so" after the market crashes, and his conservative line is seemingly vindicated, but meanwhile CEO A may be tapped to be the Counsel of Economic Advisers to the president. (This is not hypothetical, every major member of President Obama's economic team is an alumnus of Wall Street). The thing about firms is that they can go bankrupt with little consequence to the major players. When people, however, go bankrupt, their credit is ruined for seven years (their student loans, and many other financial obligations, will remain, however, owing to recent bankruptcy "reforms"). Small, peripheral countries suffer a similarly dire fate when they go bankrupt (think Argentina or Iceland). But nobody's going to let the core U.S. Government go bankrupt, even as it sops up greater and greater shares of public debt. The ill effects will only be felt by the most peripheral members of society--in the form of foreclosed houses, bankruptcy, bad credit scores, debilitating credit card debt, higher tax burdens, and diminished employment opportunities. The little share of capital investment the peripherals have--their retirements and pensions--were all floating atop the foam of "market value." They are now decimated. Their real money, earned through wages, was transformed into virtual "value," and then rendered valueless by the crash. If the Republicans had had their way during the call to privatize Social Security, the same would have been true there. So, normal folks like me labor our entire lives in jobs we hate, in favor of a tacit economic agreement: Work hard, save away towards old age and your childrens' education, and you will receive not only the fruits of consumerism, but the Shangri La of independence at the end of the rainbow--Retirement. And now, normal folks about a half-century older than me have realized that they chased the toy rabbit of wage-labor and consumerist satisfaction for their entire lives, only to see their 401K, mutual funds and college savings decimated. Bait and switch. "Well, of course, we were trying to inject more growth into the fund!" says the California state pension fund manager (having been swindled himself by a Madoff pyramid scheme).

Well, guess what? Somebody profited from all that. The value, though diminished, has been consolidated closer to the core. Goldman Sachs has posted record profits this year. Madoff made billions before he was caught (who else like him hasn't been caught?). Shorts, hedges, options--the financial world has devised all sorts of arcane products to ensure that somebody's loss is their gain. The author of Black Swan made his first stack betting that the market would tank in 1983. Others' misfortune equaled his gain. At least there was something roguish about Mr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He's warned us all since about the inherent and unexpected volatilities in the market. But what of the Goldmans, who publicly assured everyone that the "market fundamentals were sound" while busily stocking up options against what they knew to be a creaking real estate market edifice?

All the normal guys, the unsophisticated ones who believed the government when it told them that home ownership was the soundest investment, and a moral good--no matter the terms. All those Joe Sixpacks who purchased interest-only mortgages, with the federal government's blessing, assured that there was no way the value of their house would go down. "Flip it!" became the mantra, "Think of a house as an investment!" The home was your "nest egg," a lock box impervious to the insecurities of modern life. Well, those guys were foreclosed on, and every cent they put into their mortgage is lost. One of them lived next to my parents. The bank sent some goons to throw all his stuff into the rainy front yard. He is 67 and lived alone and quiet on a polite block of the planned urbanist utopia of Columbia, Maryland. He is now homeless.

The pineapple guy likes to gender this line of thinking, so let's carry the core-periphery, colonialist duality to its logical conclusion. As John Lennon and Yoko Ono once sang, "Woman is the Nigger of the World," so this violent "progress" even cuts to the very core of gender relations, with male advancement dependent upon the subjugation of women. How could Great Men do things if they had no woman to tend house and care for children? And when Great Men do things (war, etc.) who suffers the most?

Great Men, macho men, they have manned the helm of colonialism and capitalism. Both activities required and rewarded the adventurism, risk-taking, monomaniacal focus, and fetishistic longing that are the hallmarks of the testosterone-fueled Ubermenschen. The "spirited" Westerner, extolled since the Greeks, is this manly man. The feminized, moist, soft, fecund, irrational East is a maiden awaiting the seed of his loins--material, intellectual, spiritual and sexual. Polytheistic paganism would be supplanted by male-linear monotheism. Communalism would be supplanted by possession and ownership. Blooming chaos would be tamed by classical formalism. Organic polyculture would be disciplined into artificial monoculture. The Western Man would penetrate, possess and domesticate the entire body of Mother Earth--as was written in Genesis (by a man, or men, on behalf of the Meta-Man: God). And they did. Almost every fertile inch of the earth's surface is tamed, formed and exploited according to the needs, tastes and desires of Man. He has implanted her with the same rapacity as the monarchs of yore implanted their wives and mistresses, solely to render sons. And as with King Henry VIII, non-productive wombs were merely cast aside or put to the sword.

(Andrea Dworkin: Not Hot)

In the bedroom, inequalities are considered normal, even necessary. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin argued that all heterosexual sex was rape, and inherently violent, involving as it does, literal penetration. We should take her view with a grain of salt, coming as it did form an (astoundingly ugly) former prostitute. However, let us consider how it is normal practice to prioritize fellatio over cunnilingus, especially in macho cultures. Furthermore, it is quite normal if a woman never reaches climax, but quite unacceptable if a man "doesn't finish." The male orgasm is the period on the end of coitus, for obvious reasons. Once again, we have a core of the sexual union--the penis. Because the man's pleasure centers are very discreetly centered around the nerve-heavy glans, he is understandably phallocentric in his sexual approach. The erection and its decline are the opening and closing acts of this play, with the male climax as...well...the climax. Female stimulation is considered an enabling factor to the male's business, merely for lubricating his approach. The pleasure sounds of the female are themselves rendered as fetish, merely an encouragement to enrich erotic appeal for the man (he is usually silent). Most often too, a sexually-sophisticated woman will offer herself in whatever position the man prefers, to his delight. ("Take me" "How do you want me?" "Have you way with me") -- these exhortations are highly erotic.

Such language renders the female as an object to be possessed. We've been well-trained at the apex of consumer capitalism to crave and even require the possession of many objects. Marketers present them as fetishes, objects for worship imbued with otherworldly power. They enhance our prestige in the eyes of others, and even promise to confer upon us desired identities. Men--especially risk-taking, testosterone-infused Alpha Males--crave polygamous sex, while demanding and enforcing (often violently) the fidelity of their partner(s). There is no male equivalent of the word "mistress." There is also no female equivalent for "cuckold." Loosing ones possessions, in the form of being cuckolded, is emotionally damaging for men because of the co-current loss of prestige. It is as traumatic as being forced to relinquish colonial possessions. Just ask France.

Before the pill, women shouldered totally the omnipresent risk of pregnancy, and the often-mortal risks of childbirth. Think of how risky sex was for premodern woman. Between STD (which are tellingly referred to also as "venereal," but not "penile," disease), cancers, pregnancy, death in childbirth, permanent injury and death for genital mutilation, rape, unwanted pseudo-rape from husbands, etc., one wonders how in the world sex could have ever been enjoyable for women. All this stuff remains common practice in much of the developing world, not to mention in the peripheral sectors of our own, enlightened First World.

Males depend on the possession of women, not just for prestige and enjoyment, but for their very health--just as the colonial core depends on its periphery for sustenance. Studies have shown that men who marry young live significantly longer, while their younger wives live significantly shorter lives. Men are not as social as women, and with age they grow less so. Thus, it is extremely important to a whole variety of health indicators that older men be married. Study after study has shown that frequent and regular orgasm from sex reduces dramatically the incidence of chronic diseases among men.

Dependency upon women, like the core's dependency on its peripheral colonies, has always caused anxiety, however. "No man is an island," as the saying goes, but it should be equally said that man needs his islands. From childhood, boys are taunted for their dependence on the feminine ("Mama's boy!"). Later on, male peers jeer at their peers who "are whipped" by their girlfriends. As adults, the bourgeois professional jokes wearily about his wife: "Women--can't live with them, can't live without them." Indeed, the male core both loathes/fears his female colonial possessions, and requires them in order to thrive. The declining labor pools of the West require immigrants, and yet their fear their invasive, alien "horde." The tropics held fascination for the Westerner, seeming as a primordial Paradise, but they were deadly to the touch, full of unknown diseases and unseen dangers (like the vagina, perhaps). In order to be exploited without danger, the tropics--like women--had to be sanitized and domesticated.

The pineapple--all lavish, spiny exoticism--was re-presented as a healthful, versatile and sanitary product by colonial Europeans. The tropics were penetrated, dominated and sanitized literally and figuratively (by cutting back jungle, draining swamps and replacing the native fauna with uniform rows of monoculture cash crops). The tropics and their fruit were packaged, labeled and sold to the specifications of the core. Woman too was scrubbed, exfoliated, shaved, plucked, sealed with tampons, sprayed all over with "personal care products," rouged over, and distanced from the Earth on ungainly heels--sanitized. We take both for granted today, so that any reversal would seem "unnatural."

Unity and Order. The Celestial Kingdom. Platonic Forms. Heaven on Earth. All roads leading to Rome--from the periphery to the core. The centralized, unified, synthetic, sanitary, monadal, masculine Core. A reverse Big Bang sucking all of messy Reality into a neat, comprehensible singularity: God.

Have you ever seen true, virgin Nature in all its dark, womb-like glory? Have you ever seen an unaltered woman? The word for it is "grotesque," which comes from the same Latin word for "grotto," meaning a small cave or hollow. The finest remaining example of ancient grottesche--that extravagant form of Roman art--was discovered by a 14th Century audience in the Domus Aurea palace complex of Emperor Nero, corridors of lavish fresco overgrown and buried by Nature. Beauty buried within Nature--grotesque. As modern peoples of the core, we are both repelled and strangely drawn to the grotesque. It retains some primordial erotic edge. We hear the Call of Nature within it. Its savage, musky aroma quickens the heart. We can be caught in its full throes for a while. And yet afterward, we are ashamed. We wince, blush and turn away. Afterward, we reject. We reject the feminine. We reject the Earth. We reject ourselves.

Everything in life is a zero-sum game, and it's simply not reconcilable. The word "fallacy" is based on the same Greek root as "fascinate" and "phallus." The only way reconcile these irreconcilables to ignore reality, or practice hypocrisies. As a thinking, Western man, I too am culpable. And I do love a good pineapple.

Of Busboys and Poets

2009-06-17T14:13:00.002-04:00

From the continuing series, Articles My Editor Eviscerates Beyond All Reasonable Limits, or Else Won't Print At All...

Derrick Weston Brown pulls back his shoulder-length dreadlocks, clears his throat and introduces the U Street Poetry Jam: “Attention attention, the mic is now, and ever shall be open…Next up to the mic is you and you and you…” Freestylers, classical pianists, and artists heed his summons. A hushed audience of diverse faces follows the stage, overlooked by sepia portraits of Gandhi, Duke Ellington, and Ralph Nader. This is the Langston Room, the soul of the massive restaurant, bar, coffee shop and events space known as Busboys and Poets.

* * *

In 2005, Anas "Andy" Shallal, an Iraqi-American “artist, activist and restaurateur,” opened Busboys and Poets, hoping to establish a meeting place that would conjure the unique legacy of Washington, DC's U Street corridor, once known as “Black Broadway.”

A haven to haven to black musicians, entertainers and entrepreneurs in the 1950’s, U Street was immolated by the violent race riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. For an entire generation, the community was a ruin, and King’s legacy seemed burned to ashes with it.

“In the 1980s, this community was devastated by Reaganomics and crack cocaine,” said Law, “the transformation since has been incredible.” Like many other native residents, he experienced firsthand the double-edged effect of gentrification: “We had to move out to Maryland because it got so expensive, but I can still feel something special when I walk around this neighborhood.”

“Andy rooted this place in societal justice,” Maurice Chase, a Busboys manager, said of it’s founder. There are no titles among the management, and everything is decided by consensus. The staff files through the sofas and comfy chairs of the “community space,” displaying tattoos and piercings. After explaining the “biodynamic wine” and vegan desert selections featured on the menu, my Mohawked server Akon pointed to a series of murals he’d painted on the wall behind us. Between courses, I pursued the socially aware books in the in-house library run by the non-profit Teaching for Change.

And what of the name? It is in tribute to Langston Hughes, who was working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in the 1930s, when he slipped three of his poems to a patron. The guest was famous wordsmith Vachel Lindsay, who proclaimed in the papers the next day his discovery of a “Negro busboy poet.” The rest is history.

My own Salvadorian busboy Juan demurred on offering me any of his creative wares. However, Derrick Weston Brown, Busboys’ “poet-in-residence,” can be found in a corner of the library, scribbling prose, travel plans, and booking schedules in three Moleskin notebooks.

“Busboys is a community space for events that just happens to have food,” said Brown, “It’s like everybody’s living room.” Indeed, patrons come to find their muse, not for outstanding dining. Heavy in social awareness, the food and drink is regrettably rather light on quality.

You don’t find yourself minding, though—you’re steeped in a truly a magical space. The neighborhood’s recent flowering may draw upon a segregated past, but it looks forward to an idealistic future. Perhaps nowhere else can you find such an easy mingling of the many tribes of the District. “On election day, this place was packed every different type of person you can imagine—homeless people, professionals, college students—all silently watching the TV,” said Chase, “They were all unified.”

And whither the politicians whom they watched? “Politicians try to stay away from political spaces,” said Law. Though the president famously favors Ben’s Chili Bowl up the street, you’d be hard-pressed to spot any lawmakers or their staff here. “I can only think of one time I saw many conservatives here,” said Chase, adding, “This is a big spot for gays and lesbians.”

Busboys demonstrates too that a truly communal space is a promise, not a guarantee. “Last Saturday, the Beltway Atheists came in just as the Washington Catholic Archdiocese was hosting an event on atheism in the Langston Room,” said Law, “I tried so hard to get them together, but it didn’t work out.”

Here, Martin Luther King’s dream resonates still. On inauguration day, the streets outside erupted with an outpouring of hope. A pillar of the neighborhood for four years now, Busboys and Poets is holding an Obama-age America to its word—can you make your hope a reality over the next four?

* * *

It’s Thursday night again, and Brown smiles widely behind a microphone: “Calling all virgins to the mic. No sacrifices on this here stage. It’s all about gentleness and we will be gentle. The mic is now open…”

Rahm Emanuel: Spotted Eating Fish

2009-05-27T15:02:00.002-04:00

From the syndicated series of Stuff My Editor Won't Print, Vol. 1:

The scene is familiar to Georgetown residents. Black SUV--with or without police escort--parallel parks in front of Cafe Milano, Morton's Steakhouse, Clyde's of Georgetown, etc. Secret Service scouts the place, and then the power meal begins. The neighborhood prides itself on being imperiously nonplussed by all this bother.

Rahm Emanuel has a Bonapartian air about him, from his diminutive size to the larger-than-life intensity whirring through his stride. Even so, few in the Euro-cool interior of Georgetown's Hook restaurant were aware that they were rubbing blazers with one of the most influential men in the Free World. "Oh, comeon, that's Rahm Emanuel--he's controversial," one diner cajoled his blank-eyed companions.

Dave Chappelle's frequent visits make a much bigger scene. The last time the comedian dined at Hook, it was with comedian Anthony Brown and a "Sheikh Ahmed"--leaving a $5,000 tab and the distinct impression among management that they'd taken a mid-course break to "hot-box" the Sheikh's freshly-bought Mercedes SLK. ("I'm rich, bitch!")

Rahm is a stoic, taking decaf over Dom Pérignon.

"I want to see this economy producing things again, investing in things again," Rahm proclaimed over a plate of pan-seared Barramundi. Indeed, so too would Hook's Executive Chef Jonathan Seningen. Since 2006, the Maryland Eastern Shore native has been leading Hook to the vanguard of the sustainable seafood trend, sourcing his fish and produce from local farmers and fishermen in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania (Rahm's Barramundi, native to Australia, was sourced from an environmentally-friendly fish farm in western Massachusetts). Right across M Street, Clyde's of Georgetown has been partnering with local farmers since the 1970s. Hook's menu changes every day to reflect whatever sustainable fish are in season and available (so far, over 100 different varieties), and both restaurants offer a constantly-changing assortment of seasonal offerings. No word yet whether Michelle Obama's White House victory tomatoes will make it into Rahm's next meal.

Secret Service Agent Cliff Johnson kept one eye on his mark, the other on his Blackberry, and his fork in a plate of less fancy, but still "sustainable," popcorn shrimp from Hook-owned Tackle Box. When asked who Rahm's two companions were, he shrugged: "I have no idea, my Blackberry just says 'dinner with Steve,'" adding, "Obama's shuffled his cabinet so much in the past month, you'll have to catch me in four years before I can remember them all." He then turned back to deliver more war stories to his giddy audience of sous chef and manager.

At 9:30, Rahm apologized to "Steve" and his companion for having to leave early, and was escorted by his head-taller security detail back into the night-black SUV from whence he came--to get on making this economy produce things again.

Life as a Succession of Tweets

2009-04-06T01:47:00.012-04:00

Okay, okay, so maybe we're headed down a road toward mindless, self-obsessed lives where every event is reduced to words and camera angles...

(Or tweets)

...Every moment imagined through the lens of a cinematographer...

(Or through your Facebook Newsfeed)

...Every funny or sad remark scribbled down for sale at the first opportunity...

(Which present themselves often, since you have both Twitter and Facebook Mobile on your Blackberry or iPhone)

...A world Socrates couldn't imagine, where people would examine their lives, but only in terms of movie and paperback potential. Where a story no longer follows as a result of an experience. Now the experience happens in order to generate a story. Sort of like when you suggest: 'Lets not but say we did.' The story--the product you can sell--becomes more important than the actual event.

These excerpts are pulled from Chuck Palahniuk's (Fight Club) collection of true stories Stranger than Fiction, specifically from the article "You Are Here." He's cast his lens on the hopeful masses at the Midwest Writers Conference (or Writers of Southern California Conference or the Georgia State Writers Conference) trying to hawk off their painful/inspiring stories to book publishers-slash-movie producers. This was the 1990s' brand of narcissism.

Now we have Twitter. As easy as it was back then to produce a "best of" NFL highlights of your life, "organizing and making all that flotsam and jetsam make sense," now it's even easier.

The last five years of your life (assuming you were an early-adopter) have been chronologically sorted for you on Facebook--you can scroll through the photos like a researcher flipping through reams of microfilm. You can look back on your bygone youth, and sigh with a bittersweet mix of nostalgic longing ("Besides, all our best adventures seem to be behind us.")

Everyone else can too. In a few minutes, I can keep pressing "next" until I've digested your entire life story, 1,000 words at a time. Bam! I know you as fast as it takes to scan your "About Me" section ("...loves Pulp Fiction and Winston Churchill quotes--me too!")

But not so fast! Recall that everything here has been packaged for the marketplace. Yes, this is not a profile page of 21-year-old John Doe, it is John Doe™. If John is savvy, he's framed his page to achieve a desired brand image, with maximum market penetration. If John is really savvy, he knows that pictures make the cyber-man. If John is really really savvy, he knows that it never happened if its not snapped and uploaded by his peer paparazzi the next day. So what does John Doe do?

Now the experience happens in order to generate a story.

John consciously pushes for that optimal crazy-sexy-cool moment, captured with impeccable timing (or luck) by a Sony Cyber-shot®. And that moment, that experience, is transformed into a profile picture. It is a highlight. It is a hot commodity now in the Economy of Attention. It was the whole purpose of the experience in the first place. Will it go viral? Will John get his 15 seconds of fame (15 minutes being a tad bit ambitious in the age of 140-word character limits).

If the ploy is successful, John will get the attention he craves. To what end? Perhaps in the beginning it was to enhance his actual, flesh-and-blood social life. These days, though, its an end in itself. Why get laid when all you need is to have everyone think you're getting laid? These days, one's social life apotheosizes to the level of Facebook hyperreality, or reality by proxy.

Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. It is the simulation of something which never really existed. - Jean Baudrillard

Facebook is all appearance, a fast-food social life. No matter how many Facebook status updates, wall posts, messages, pokes, comments, or counter-comments you ingest, you aren't sustained. You don't get that essential holistic effect achieved by a good lunchtime conversation, or a hug, (or actually getting laid).

Twittering then is fast-food self-expression. Doubtless, each medium has its own elegant forms of mastery, and the inguistic economy of the "tweet" no doubt challenges the writer (viz haikus). However, the sheer volume and ease of Twitter publishing cheapens the output. Even worse, the medium is invading our everyday speech and thought.

When people start to think and communicate in texts and tweets over exchange and expression, well... it will be the sort of revolution that won't be televised, but it will be archived (on Ashburn- and Santa Clara-based internet servers).

Romantic Comedies: Porn for Women

2009-01-13T03:57:00.001-05:00

I've been saying this for years:

"Romantic Comedies are Making Kids Miserable"

I will address the narrative fallacies of the romantic comedy genre, but first let me first shortly examine its male equivalent--pornography (slightly NSFW)...

Young men, from early adolescence on, are socialized for years on a steady diet of pornography, rendered easily accessible today via the internet. The imagery and archetypal mythology of pornography is tied inextricably to the male's sexuality, through years of Pavlovian conditioning. Each exposure is rewarded with orgasm, just as the experimental chimp is rewarded with banana when a certain button is hit. This, over time, forges robust connection between the pleasure-impulse and the particular semiotics of pornographic film. This must obviously color young mens' impressions of their female companions and of their sexuality, with predictable results.

The (often-cretinous) male lead in a porn plot is rapaciously pursued by one of the Cum-Craving Sluts! The sex act is decontextualized, and rendered as a predictable given, once an appealing young woman-object enters the orbit of the male lead (and by projection, the viewer). Erotic display, foreplay, and oral sex are rendered primarily for his benefit, and theatrical orgasmic gesticulations will erupt immediately from the woman-object without any obvious connection to actual pleasure or orgasms experienced by her. Her role is to project signals of the process of orgasm with suitable duration and intensity for him to achieve the event of his own orgasm. The sexual solipsism is breached only by occasional encouragements mechanically projected by the woman-object (usually along the lines of "Oh yeah, f*ck me harder!"). Since the characters usually enter the scene as strangers, and leave as such, there is little, if any room, for mutual sexual communication and exploration. Nor is this desirable.

Focus is given at the climactic moment to the male orgasm, emphasized by the visual emphasis of the "cumshot." Most often, orgasm is experienced by the male lead as a completely isolated experience, him having "pulled out" prior to ejaculation, and usually seizing the erotic reigns at the climactic moment (literally) with his own hands. The male does not touch the woman-object at the crescendo of orgasm, except by the propulsion of his ejaculate onto her supplicate body as a violent projectile.

Thus, the male lead subject seizes agency as the cause of his own orgasm. Never is he vulnerable or beholden to the woman-object. He has given, but "owes" for nothing (having facilitated his own orgasm). There is no post-coital embrace. The scene ends abruptly. The sex act remains decontextualized, an event unmoored from past or future. There are no consequences--emotional, spiritual, or physical--for either participant.

* * *

Nothing new; straight out of anti-porn feminist theory. What is less acknowledged is the malicious role the romantic comedy genre plays upon the romantic development of the adolescent female. As with porn, archetypal characters are presented as unrealistic stereotypes, designed to cheaply salve the audience's emotional impulses more than to reflect accurately real-life experience.

The male archetypal subject in porn is actively pursued by his fantasy woman-object, so too is the female romantic comedy archetypal subject wooed without obvious cause or merit. Her desirability is a given. The test of his worthiness is what grants the plot its narrative tension. He must along atone for his faults, labor against fate, and summon his sincerity for them to live happily ever after. Her agency is reduced to passive observation and judgment of his behavior. Her character is amoral, since it is not her redemption, but his which is a necessary prerequisite for romantic realization. The female lead is thus shorn of moral agency, and thus responsibility.

This leads to the Little Princess Complex--pretty girls can do no wrong. Also, it presupposes the Boys Will Be Boys Complex--cute boys are boisterous by nature, but ultimately endearing in their incorrigibility. The Little Princes Complex dehumanizes the female in two ways: by reducing her to her mere aesthetic value as a romantic object, and by absolving her of the need and ability for moral responsibility. The Boys Will Be Boys Complex grants the male more space for moral agency, characterization, and humanity, but still reduces him in an essential way.

Firstly, he is guilty until proven innocent, and cannot hold his female jury to the same standard applied to him. Secondly, in the end his moral conduct is immaterial. In a temporal twist on Christian mythology, his salvation is found in her grace. He must prove his love for her, more than he must prove his uprightness, and then she will extend her grace to him. Happily ever after...

History does not exist for the characters in romantic comedies. All actions are forgiven once tension has served its narrative purpose, and all morality and practicality are sublimated to the teleology of Plot. The characters are prisons of our agenda for them: love or else! Their romantic connection is not born of mutual empathy or inner experience, but rather of a narrative fait accompli. Their duty is not of romantic edification, but rather to reconcile themselves to the fate rendered to them. This presupposes of course that the pairing was "natural" all along.

Certainly, sticking one's head in the ground to glaring deficiencies in the connections born of modern romance--characterized often by capriciously random encounters or mere convenience--does not offer promise as a long-term romantic strategy. Furthermore, the implication that only one party with have to "work at it" is bound to lead to heartache and resentment. Lastly, the alluring conception of human beings as emotional tabula rasas--impervious to past slights and patient in the wake of pain--is dangerously naive.

Most perilous, however, is the tragic-ironic place where the two media--porn and romantic comedy--meet. Their messages are diametrically opposed. Each partner will expect his/her opposite to play supplicant. Neither acknowledges their own personal moral responsibility. Furthermore, the two media divorce the two concepts of romance and sex into gendered spheres. Each becomes the total dominion of its respective gender. Sex belongs to men and is defined by them. Romance to women. Incongruity characterizes both. The connection between sex and romance is broken, and the different but complimentary roles played by the two genders in each sphere is disregarded in favor of a schizophrenic dualism.

With a whole generation of young men coming up convinced that the only proper connection with a woman is "doggy-style," and with their female peers wondering why their boyfriends don't take the night-flight from Paris just to ask how they're feeling, it's little wonder that...

Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus

BONUS! Free yourself from the grip of The Porn Machine (via N+1)

Yoga, Official Mystic Activity of Late Capitalism

2009-01-11T23:42:00.001-05:00

yo⋅ga [yoh-guh] - noun: A ritual and regimen involving svelte blonds in stretchy black pants, tank tops, and roll-up rubber mats. It emphasizes breathing and flexibility. Great for stress. Everybody who does it seems skinny. Involves vague feelings of eco-consciousness, too.

Yep, lots of sex appeal in yoga.

I'll go out on a limb here and argue that the majority of yoga enthusiasts in trendy urban neighborhoods have never heard of the concept of Hatha Yoga--or of Yogi Swatmarama, its 15th Century originator. This is what most Westerners think of as "yoga." Yogi Swatmarama originally conceived of his physical regimen as a preparation for long periods of meditation, "a stairway to the heights of Raja Yoga" (enlightenment through meditation). In other words, "yoga" (as commonly mis-understood) is a means to a means to an end. It prepares the body in order to make possible the meditation that will itself make possible the eventual enlightenment.

Non-believers doing yoga to get skinny is kind of like appropriating the bend-and-kneel Islamic prayer to tone your buns and a thighs.

"Allaahu Akbar! Feel the burn!"

Ok fine, say our bendy patrons of lulumon atheltica ("a yoga-inspired athletic apparel company with over 100 locations in Canada, the United States, Australia and Hong Kong"), maybe our interests veer more towards the yuppie than the yogic. What's the harm? You can loose weight, "increase your range of motion," and purge all the stresses of modern living!

Here's the thing--all you mystical weekend warriors looking to get "Stronger, Better, Wiser, Lighter! ☮"--you have wrapped your pliable thighs in a tight embrace of the very source of your angst and malaise.

Yes, the moment you debited a hundred dollars to your Visa for that 100% recycled post-consumer content yoga mat, you lost it. When you entered that air-conditioned, hermetically-sealed, Windex-scrubbed glass box of a yoga studio, you lost it. When you looked around you and meditated either on how super-skinny you already are, or should be, you lost it. When you strutted your way to be seen purchasing an organic açaí protein smoothy, you lost it. And when you told all your friends how yoga has totally changed your life, you did so wafting a subtle air of faux humility barely able to cloud the self-righteous avarice of the fab yogic elect--and you lost it.

But now, after an hour of heavy breathing and narcissism, cells bathed in oxygen and antioxidants, you're feeling pretty good. These days, you simply have to come back every week, or every other day, to "decompress."

And you might be addicted to therapy. Or maybe even heroin, too.

"For the love of God, I neeeed to perform the down dog pose!"

After each respective dosage of therapy, yoga or heroin, you'll feel pretty good (in the case of the latter two, you'll feel pretty slim, too). But then after a while, the Crisis creeps back into your life. Sobriety makes you feel frazzled again. Threadbare. Stressed. So, you head back to the studio to sweat a little--to wash out your soul like you wash your clothes. But there is no solution, only maintenance.

Oh ye bendy Seekers, realize that yoga is the new Opium of the Masses! That old-time religion was just too involving, it turns out. Plus, it didn't do much for those embarrassing love handles. So why not distill some Hindu wisdom, containing the highest possible concentration of marketable content? A 90 Proof shot of spirituality. A high-potency multivitamin for the soul.

In shooting up just enough therapy into your beleaguered veins, you've perpetuated your spiritual demise. In making a creeping madness "manageable," you've assured the insanity's ultimate success. All that stress that you pursue yoga to expurgate is normalized and its ultimate cause ignored. It is responded to like a routine hunger easily satiated by a nice lunch.

Even worse, you've intensified the Crisis by becoming even more of a consumer--of yoga, its image (spiritual skinniness!), and related "essentials" (Nike Dri-Fit™ high-performance tank!). But your life remains, as in the suburban dystopia of Revolutionary Road, filled with "hopeless emptiness." An existential drift sweetened just enough with an relentless torrent of consumer items and experiences, of which yoga is just another example. By cheapening yoga with consumerist commodification, you've vexed another route of potential escape (what the old-time Yogis called moksha) for yourself and others.

The word "yoga" was derived from the Sandskrit yuj, meaning "to control." Ask yourself, the next time you are standing in line for salads with a flock of other identically-attired Yuppie Yoginis, just who is controlling whom?

Blue Gold, Revisited

2008-11-13T03:19:00.000-05:00

An article in New Scientist about the emerging importance of aquifers as freshwater sources, the potential for conflict when such aquifers cross national boundaries, and a new UNESCO map of underground water worldwide.

Migration as Development, Revisited

2008-11-13T02:32:00.000-05:00

The Economist on urbanization, migration, and development.

Short version: The world is getting more urbanized. Cities grow larger because they provide economic benefits. Governments can capitalize on the benefits of boom towns by linking them infrastructurally with lagging areas, to facilitate migration from rural poverty (as China is scrambling to do in its impoverished west).

On Cocaine and Kazaa

2008-11-12T12:39:00.001-05:00

Fascinating article in Wired about the true nature of the "shadow internet" of media piracy.

Short version: It's not a "sharing network," but rather a highly sophisticated, hierarchical distribution network modeled on criminal narcotic syndicates. And it has the power to change media distribution forever.

Speed and the Modern Condition

2008-11-07T13:20:00.000-05:00

"I wanted to freeze time. I wanted to savor that moment, to live in that moment for a week. But I couldn't stop it, only slow it." --Cashback (2006)

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting...In existential mathematics, the experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting." --Milan Kundera, Slowness (1995)

Today, by serendipitous circumstance, I delved into two excellent, and complementary works of art. One a movie. The other a novel.

Speed and modernity. It is a subject that has enthralled artists since the early 20th Century, when the pace of the human condition suddenly accelerated with the first sputtering automobiles, and the realization of the elusive dream of heavier-than-air flight in Kitty Hawk, NC.

Geography was flattened and foreshortened. Man's reach broadened. His pace quickened. The future grew closer. The past further away. Time, always relative, became shorter. And so too, did memory...

Is this why we continue to stumble into the same mistakes, over and over? Can we slow life down for a moment, to reflect, to remember? Hopefully we can, because our future depends on it.

"The bad news is that time flies. The good news... is that you're the pilot." --Cashback (2006)

Markets and the Crisis of Knowledge

2008-11-06T18:45:00.000-05:00

The New Yorker has an interesting article today on why the current financial market is similar to postmodern literature criticism. Short answer: market value (especially "mark-to-market" valuation) is as elusive as meaning in deconstructionism.

Aha! We all knew this was really a crisis of epistemology, didn't we? How do we know what we know? How can you determine value when it is merely what the market determines it is at any given time? This is not "objective value," but rather perceived value.

But lo! There's no difference! Value is always perceived.

There exists no objective value of gold. Yes, it has historically been prized by some cultures for its luster and malleability. But mostly, its value has been high because of its status (socially-constructed) as a luxury metal. The price of gold has risen and fallen not according to some price equilibrium reflecting its underlying objective value. Supply and demand curves can explain the current price, but even the economic law of supply and demand equilibrium leaves out a glaring unexplained factor. Why is gold demanded at a certain level at a certain time? What sets the demand curve?

And, since the demand and supply curves are reflexive, in that a change in one changes the other, even the supply is dependent upon the mysterious origin of demand. There is a certain amount of gold in the ground. Only the gold that people take the trouble to dig up will enter the marketplace as supply. The gold producers will only dig up this gold if the market price they can expect will make that enterprise profitable. If the price is high, they will dig deeper and deeper, willing to spend more and more on extraction of ever-more-elusive deposits. Since the gold ingots sitting in veins of exposed rocks are much cheaper to collect than gold buried miles under the ground, there are diminishing returns to scale in a given source. How deep the producer goes hits its limit when it costs more to extract that last marginal unit of gold than the gold will sell for back on the surface.

The same principle applies to oil. We'll "run out" of oil long before the actual petroleum deposits are exhausted. The deepest, dirtiest, hardest-to-get-at oil will sit down in its geological tank because it is economically unextractable. To do so wouldn't be worth the trouble, since you'd loose money. On the other hand, what are considered economically-extractable reserves expand with the market price of oil. Nobody considered the billions of barrels-worth of oil in the tar sands of Alberta until oil prices started approaching triple digits.

In short, though the interaction of supply and demand does predictably give rise to price, the whole dynamic cannot be considered scientific (or objective), since subjective demand is the root of supply, price, and market value.

This is the realm of psychology. The consumer demands gold (rather than silver, platinum, titanium, or stainless steel) for subjective reasons of perceived value. This perception of consumer utility is affected by economic conditions, personal taste, trends, Divine Influence, solar flare activity, and TMZ.com. Furthermore, the dynamic of a trend presupposes that the perceptions of other consumers have a compounding effect for the perceived value among all consumers. As more and more consumers desire the new "hot" good, their collective perception of increasing value creates a positive feedback loop, with the perceived values of individual consumers and the market value (derived from all consumers) expanding co-currently.

Even more removed from a hypothetical underlying value of gold is the precious metals investor. The gold he buys and sells he likely never sees, nor uses for his own consumption. The consumer utility derived from a certain quantity of the metal does not concern him directly. To him, the certificate of ownership of the gold is merely itself a tradeable commodity. The value of his ownership of the share of gold is twice-removed from the gold itself. And, too, like the consumer who fosters his own perceived value of gold, the gold investor perceives that the gold share has a certain value--which is socially-constructed. He is betting that other people think or will think that gold share is worth more than he does. In other words, he is exercising his theory of mind.

Again, we see that the behavior of an individual is related reflexively to the behavior of the market (being merely the sum of a group of individuals). By buying a share of gold, the investor himself has increased the value of that share. His perception of the value of that share--and his willingness to act on that perception--has in turn increased the market value of that share. If on balance, the other investors engaged in the market have the same perception of value of a gold share, they too will buy in. At the aggregate, their collective behavior shifts the stock price upward (if the net volume of trading is in a buy direction).

That last parenthetical is important, since one or a few participants (a hedge fund, for example) can drive the stock price up (or down) by merely buying a very high volume of the stock (or conversely, by betting against it by shorting it). Even if the minority of traders perceive that the shares are worth less, the sheer weight of high-volume purchasing can drive the market value upward. And with that, the smaller investors can respond to the gravity of the handful of high-volume investors by upgrading their perception of the stock's value. Like planets around a massive star, they are drawn into the orbit of trading behavior. This was seen in full effect when the infamous David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital publicly shorted Lehman Brothers, hastening that troubled investment banks demise (and arguably precipitating the entire financial crisis of late).

But wait, we can take this further... Merely the expectation that there will be a high volume of buying can be enough to convince traders to buy. Say, for example, Fast Money shouts to its audience one day that gold is a "must-buy." Odds are, the market price of gold will shoot up, as viewers rush to buy gold as low as possible before all the other people want to buy. At the tail end, some unlucky sap will be the last to the feeding frenzy, buying gold at a high higher than other people are willing to pay. This will then be the peak, when the market value of gold shares reaches its peak. People will stop buying, because they know that nobody else will be willing to pay more than the peak price (thus, they wont be able to sell profitably). The perception of value drops among individual traders, and so then does the market price. Fast Money goes on the next day saying gold is a "sell" now, and that silver has the best capacity for growth. And the process continues ad infinitum.

This is why market value is so volatile. Market value is reflexive and self-referential.
Market value is the aggregated future expected value of the current perceived value among investors of the future expected value of a firm or industry derived from the future expected value of all consumers toward its goods or services, determined in turn by individual consumers from the current perceived value among other consumers, which is determined by those other consumers from the future expected value among other consumers, etc. Any questions?

Moral of the story: Every market entrant acts according to perceived values, which are socially-constructed. Their actions arising from their perceptions cannot be decoupled from the effects of their actions, which cannot be decoupled from their perceptions of those effects and subsequent actions. Perceptions and realities are inextricably-intertwined and reflexive. This leads to a crisis of understanding among market participants, since observing and acting upon those observations shifts the observed market, rendering the original observation obsolete. Even the shared observations of non-market participants affect the market. Thus, there cannot be any objective observation of the market. There cannot be any knowledge about the market. Market participants are mired in an epistemological Catch-22. The blind leading the blind...

What Happens When a Country Goes Bankrupt

2008-11-06T16:02:00.000-05:00

A must-read glimpse into the heady future that awaits the many countries across the globe currently facing bankruptcy, and the effects for the rest of us (via SpiegelOnline).

Hint: The author has chosen to rename the erstwhile "emerging markets" darlings to the more tepid nomenclature: "threshold markets."

Could we have reached the end of double-digit growth in these eager young upstarts?

At least one economist foresees a hard landing for China (via NakedCapitalism).

The Army's Spooky Paranormal Research

2008-11-06T15:36:00.000-05:00

Via DefenseTech...

It's like something out of "The Terminator." Self-aware virtual humans, regenerating body parts on "nano-scaffolding," mind controlled weapons - all the stuff of movie robots, comic heroes and otherworldly tomes.

But for some, this kind of higher-than-high tech is as real as life and death.

Dr. John Parmentola, Director of Research and Laboratory Management with the Army's science and technology office, told military bloggers Nov. 3 that the Army is "making science fiction into reality" by creating realistic holographic images, generating virtual humans and diving into quantum computing.

....

Obama Wins! And the Villagers Rejoiced...

2008-11-05T16:40:00.000-05:00

The change cometh...

The magnitude of this election is obvious, but you should've seen the effects on the street...

On 14th and U Street (downtown Washington, DC), up through and past 3am, there was a crowd of perhaps 2000+ people, laughing, cheering, high-fiving, hugging, and just staring in disbelief at the suddenly-new world having now unfolded before their eyes. There were drummer circles, with bustling rings of embrace swaying and flowing outward. There was a crew dancing on top of a bus-stop, waving a Kenyan and American flag. There was every race, background, age, and creed. There were young U Street blacks, Georgetown preppies, aging Counter Culture hippies, and downtown professionals with vestigal ties still hanging around their necks--artifacts of the old Dark Age when peope still had to go to work and worry about day-to-day realities.

Today, everything was new.

The most striking thing was the spontaneous, un-selfconscious, exhuberant outpouring of pure joy. People hugged total strangers. Black and white embraced on the same corner of the fiery and ruinous race riots a generation ago. There was none of the normal, unspoken awkwardness and hesitation between them. It was surreal.

Cars careened through the street, with revelers clinging precariously out the windows and sunroofs. Every driver, including my cabbie, navigated the carnival with his hand rapping horn to the beat of the onlookers. Its a wonder to me that many of these swerving celebrations on wheels didn't plow into crowds of the chaos. The police, normally triggerhappy to pile such madness into paddy-wagons, merely looked on with a mix of shock and bemusement.

Tomorrow, the afterglow begins to fade. Reality sets in once again. Those people in ties did have to go back to work, after all. Hanging out of a moving car or dancing on a lightpole will once again be illegal. Distance will once again set in between strangers. Obama will have to live up to his reputation as Holy Savior Return'd to the Earth.

But the memory will remain. And, after holding its breath for eight long, dark years, America can try once again to be its old, hopeful, naive, and amazing self...

Toxic Waste-Gobbling Superworms from Space!

2008-11-02T18:41:00.000-05:00

...ok, not from space. From the United Kingdom. But they do eat toxic waste. A boon to Superfund?

Notebook Sales Surpass PC Sales

2008-11-02T00:16:00.000-04:00

For the first time, notebook computer sales have surpassed PC sales in the United States this quarter.

Middle East Meltdown

2008-10-22T14:32:00.001-04:00

Atoms for Peace

As if the Middle East wasn't already in a whole mess a' trouble, them Iranians done 'n introduced nu-cu-lar bombs into it. Well, actually, Israel already did that a generation ago, but don't tell anybody.

So now everyone from Egypt, to Saudi Arabia, to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to Yemen is now lining up to join the nuclear club (with American aid and blessing). What is a non-proliferation regime to do?

Researchers at MIT have been partnering with the UAE to develop civilian nuclear plants that are less susceptible to having fissile material stolen by terrorists and other baddies. The UAE's nuclear strategy is to import fuel from abroad, thus avoiding weapons grade material being available for sticky fingers within the Emirates. These new plants under development would also require refueling far less often, reducing the opportunity for theft en route.

Will it be enough? Let's hope so, because the Gulf is inevitably going to be a nuclear club. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty does not prohibit the development of civilian nuclear power, and explicitly recognizes the right of all sovereign nations to pursue the peaceful atom as long as they can demonstrate that their nuclear programs are not being used for the development of nuclear weapons.

So why would the most oil and natural gas rich countries on Earth want or need to pursue nuclear power? Is civilian nuclear power really just a cover to acquire the capacity to blow each other to smithereens? Maybe, but there are perfectly rational and pressing motivations at work here, too.

First off, oil and natural gas do not equal electricity. Iran, in particular, has an acute electricity shortage, owing to a lack of capitalization in its energy infrastructure (owing in turn to the three decades of embargoes placed on it by the United States). To transform these gallons into gigawatts requires the costly, technologically-advanced, sometimes decade-long construction of gas-fired turbine plants and the like.

Secondly, oil and natural gas-fired plants are dirty and inefficient. Before you scoff at the environmentalist motives of villainous oil sheikhs, consider this: Iran (Axis of Evil Member #2) currently has the highest percentage of domestic energy in the region produced from renewable sources, primarily hydroelectric dams. This year, that dependence on hydroelectric led to rolling blackouts during a severe drought. The UAE, in particular, is developing unprecedented efforts to groom clean energy systems and technologies, to turn back the clock on some of the most concentrated air pollution problems in the world. Tehran, too, with some of the worst traffic and air pollution of any world metropolis, is concerned about developing cleaner energy alternatives. In part, this is a recognition that oil is a one-time geological gift, and the oil-rich nations of the Middle East must plan for the post-oil era. Also, there is the need to keep up appearances for the newly environmentalist nations (and customers) of the West.

Thirdly, oil-producing countries want to save as much oil as they can for export. In many Middle Eastern nations, like Iran, Egypt and Yemen, gasoline is heavily subsidized by the government. Selling fossil fuels domestically--either refined as gasoline, or for use for electricity generation--is an extremely unprofitable enterprise. These resources fetch a much higher price on the market-driven global exchanges. More to the point, rents on fossil fuels are the primary if not the sole source of copious government revenues in these nations. Each barrel of oil diverted from export toward the needs of domestic electricity generation is another bale of petrodollars swiped from government coffers. Iran, in particular, is loathe to divert its oil and natural gas production towards domestic electricity requirements because fossil fuels are its primary exports and a valuable contributor to its current account and government revenue (owing again to the restrictions of American oil embargoes). With plentiful capital available for investment in nuclear infrastructure, petro-states are jumping at the chance to produce as much domestic electricity as possible with nuclear power.

Lastly, and perhaps most vitally, the truly finite resource in the Middle East (and increasingly worldwide) is fresh water. The Gulf States of Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE have almost entirely exhausted their freshwater aquifers. Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Syria all quibble over the Jordan River as their sole source. In a region not known for its rainstorms, the only option for fast-growing populations straining modest water reserves is desalinization of sea water. Desalinization is an extremely energy-intensive process, requiring massive and consistent imputs of electricity. Nuclear energy fits the bill perfectly.

Indians in Space!

2008-10-21T22:37:00.000-04:00

"You haven't lived until you've done the Karma Sutra in Zero-G, baby!"

That's right, India's headed to the Moon!

...And that's not all! The Indian Space Research Organisation (or Bhāratīya Antariksh Anusandhān Sangaṭn, for short) hopes to land a motorized rover on the moon in 2010 or 2011. A real life astronaut might get thrown into the atmosphere on an Indian rocket by 2014 (Punjabi Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian in space when hitched a ride with the Russians in 1984). So, who'll be the first Asians on the moon for the Space Race Part II?

An early foray into South Asian spaceflight: Vishnu and Lakshmi riding Garuda, the Hindu patron deity of flight.

Any why? The London Telegraph's Andrew McKie puts it best:

But why would any country not be proud of attempting to add to our knowledge of the universe? For any nation, launching a rocket should not be seen as an exercise in pointless one-upmanship, but as perhaps the ultimate expression of optimism, ingenuity, bravery, and rational, long-term planning for the future. The West would do well to recover some of these qualities, which seem now to be attributes of Asian countries.

Scenarios Are Stupid

2008-10-21T16:38:00.002-04:00

From the homophonic doppelganger of my own eponymous blog (sans the surname suffix "-e"), comes a report from Green Futures on the six possible forecasts for climate change that could come to fruition within this generation: "New Years Day 2030." These reports get a lot of coverage when they come out, because they give rise to snappy headlines like "Special report: How our economy is killing the Earth" (New Scientist). But how accurate are they, and are they useful?

This Green Futures report employs a very common technique that futurists use, known as "scenario building." Just like any good storyteller, a futurist knows that a narrative makes his point more evocative and memorable to the human ear, reared as it is on thousands of years of oral tradition. The potential scenarios are laid out for the audience, with one or more worst cases added (if we continue to disregard all that is holy, we're f*cked), one or more best cases added (if only you'd listen to me, things would be just peachy), and a "control" case (if everything continues as it has with no surprises, this should happen).

"Tell me, Spirit--how can I save money on my car insurance?"

The scenarios are not predictions, since that implies that the futurist knows with certainty what will happen (it definitely will rain tomorrow). They may or may not be forecasts, which like weather forecasts, are probability-based (there is a 60% chance of rain tomorrow).

The two most common applications of scenario-making are for climate change models and "peak oil" scenarios. The latter purports to determine when we will (or have) likely reached peak oil production, and when oil supplies will begin to dwindle. Such reports come annually from a variety of think-tanks, NGOs, governments, and oil companies themselves. There is even a (dubious-looking) Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. The very practice of scenario-making was developed early on by Shell Oil, through the efforts of in-house futurists like Jeroen van der Veer, and are still produced every three years. The IEA produces several annual reports, such as the World Energy Outlook and Energy Technology Perspectives. The US Department of Energy produces its own annual Annual Energy Outlook. These reports have been quite variable in their accuracy over time.

The former, climate change, has fared no better. Global warming remains contentious in the public forum because climate change models have also proven to be fickle. The majority of mainstream scientists agree that climate change is a reality, and that it at least has some man-made causation. However, nailing how much and when is quite difficult. Extrapolating from current trends ("if we continue to pump this amount of CO2 into the air and the temperature rises this much per year, the earth will be X-percentage warmer in 25 years") is misleading. It disregards the fact that certain tipping points, once reached, could accelerate or decelerate trends, transforming geometric growth into exponential growth overnight.

Raising the temperature just a few degrees, for example, could melt enough polar ice to release a catastrophic amount of embedded methane from the ocean bed into the atmosphere, creating a catalytic negative feedback cycle of warming. This is known as the "Clathrate gun hypothesis," and as a theory is far from uncontroversial. Even so, it's just one example of the unforeseen variables that must be included into a model that seeks to project trends in something as complex as the global climate.

Here, we see a model for the cyclical movement of bullshit into the atmosphere.

For that matter, a current or future technical advance could just turn back the clock on climate change. Fusion nuclear power has been hanging on the edge of science for a half-century, promising endless wells of energy too cheap to meter, with no radioactive waste. Some ambitious folks in southern France think they might just be a decade away from this elusive wonder. But, we just don't know. Who predicted penicillin, the internet, or iPods? And just where are our damn rocket packs? Trying to factor disruptive technologies, paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries, or socio-political revolutions into future scenarios is fraught with error.

We've employed webcams for slightly different purposes than the Edwardians foresaw...

There is another, perhaps more important problem with scenario-making as a futurist methodology. Scenarios are narratives, and just like any story, they are the product of their author's biases and motives. It is no coincidence that energy scenarios from oil companies, governments, NGOs, and environmentalists carry wildly divergent conclusions. Depending on how optimistic or pessimistic the author is; what variables he chooses to include, emphasize, or deemphasize; or what givens are taken for granted (for example, there is a wide spectrum of opinion on how much oil is actually in the ground today), conclusions can be wildly different. There are the left-field theorists who question whether oil is really a limited resource after all. Each of these theories is inherently political, seeking as it does to affect public opinion, and by extension, public policy.

Scenario-makers, like science fiction authors or Utopians, seek to affect the behavior of their audience by piquing their imagination. One should be wary of the motives of both futurist Jerimiahs and Pollyannas. The only certainty about the future is that it's coming--anyone who tells you what will happen is either God or lying.

Voicemail is so Passe

2008-10-21T15:29:00.000-04:00

"Man, I hate checking my voicemail..."

"Think Before You Voicemail" (TechCruch)

"Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back." Word.

The urban eco-commute of the future

2008-10-21T00:35:00.000-04:00

Equal parts bicycle and moped,

Equal parts thrifty and stylish,

Equal parts eco-conscious and fashion-conscious...

...just like everything else in the Green Movement.

Ok, ok. I'm not gonna pretend I don't really want one.

$3,500 @ Derringer Cycles

Amtrack Back on the Rails

2008-10-20T19:34:00.000-04:00

"I think I can, I think I can...finally turn a profit..."

Last year, I forecast that the increasing price of fuel would railroad America back to its 19th Century embrace of the train.

In yet another sign of the times, Amtrack has received its first commitment of Federal funds since 2002. Meanwhile, ridership has been up 10% since last year.

So get back on track with the cool kids and ride the rail, Joe Biden does.

"I LOVE AMTRACK!"

New World Order Part Deux at Hand?

2008-10-20T19:23:00.000-04:00

"Hey Georgie, forget about that whole Iraq War thing--let's be friends."

Will George Bush and the next American president (yes, by that I mean The Obaminator) go along with a "Bretton Woods II" that would do for the world financial order what the original Bretton Woods did for global monetary and trade policy?

Will this take an individualist, free-market American flavor like the first, or swing closer to the European Dream of a multipolar world based on communalism, sustainability, and human rights?

You Can't Read this Year's Nobel Prize Winner

2008-10-20T18:54:00.000-04:00

His name is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. He's almost entirely unknown and unavailable in the Anglosphere. Good luck finding any of his books on Amazon.

Except this one.

Is Mr. Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Nobel Committee, right in charging Americans with "insularity" and "ignorance" about world literature? Or has the Nobel Committee just continued to bend over backwards to exclude American writers (there have only been three in the last 52 years, with the last being Toni Morrison in 1993).

"Ain't never heared of no John-Mary Lay-Cleeezo, stranger..."

The Men's Lib Movement

2008-10-20T18:30:00.000-04:00

Men of the future will be able to compliment each other on their sparkling eyes, well-manicured fingers, and supple new-gym-membership-fed muscles without shame!

"Your testicles are terrific"

Grand Paean to the Blog...

2008-10-20T18:15:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic (which has a spiffy new makeover) tells us...

Why I Blog

"...the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks."

Point taken, reader.

Links of the Day: October 20

2008-10-20T17:58:00.000-04:00

Why the American appeal of the road hog displays contradictory individualism and conformity--speaking of which, despite political orientation or societal relation to the white colonial power structure, we're all postmodernists now, so keep on reading the written medium de jure of the deconstructed world we hath wrought: the blog .

I only play analog, dude...

2008-09-15T11:36:00.000-04:00

From the ongoing "Hey dude, check out this link" email correspondence between Mr. Geoff Greene and Sheikh Khalil Hibri...

- - -

The link of the day today was an interesting aside in The Wall Street Journal (hidden under the apocalyptic Fall of the House of Lehman Brothers headlines) about the surprising jump in vinyl LP sales of late:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122126199207430275.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

It's disappointing to me, however, that they didn't bother to explicate this phenomenon a bit. Older album buyers have been driving the only growth in the industry for years now, sopping up Beatles and Rod Stewart titles as quickly as their blue Viagra pills. Is this a phenomenon of the old?

Or, is this an expression of a new vitality in the DJ business, with the "commodification" of music that the internet has spawned ironically fueling a new curiosity of the existing musical canon and media--and a retrograde desire for authenticity. Would I have learned to love Blondie or Janis Joplin without the internet? Perhaps, but Google and free MP3 downloads allow for a much lazier pursuit of discovery than the old system of album sifting in the dusty backs of offbeat record stores. In the age of the internet, everyone can be an enthusiast, and change their enthusiasms by the week. If this phenomenon is widespread, then the internet utopians are right and the litigation-happy record companies are painfully wrong--the banal proliferation of piracy may be actually sparking consumer interest in legitimately-purchased media, both old and new.

Perhaps even the vision that the article insinuates could be true. That there is a Romantic backlash against the ethereality of digital media. You can't see or touch the zeros and ones encoded on a CD, hard drive, iPod, or internet server. Even the fast-dying CD is not as much of a fetish object as the vinyl record, with its physical groves lending a satisfying causality to the medium (the hand-crank gramophone is the ultimate expression of this elegant causality of form and function--the flow of the needle bobbing over the undulating sea of groves, singing out through the honeysuckle-flower of the amplifying horn). Why else would people be turning out in ever greater numbers to spend $30 (or $3000) to see their artists performs live (even when "live" means lip-synching or pressing "enter" on the stage laptop)? This could be the musical equivalent of the "Whole Foods" phenomenon, the luxury status of "natural fiber" clothing, "green" household products, and the long and surprising endurance of bibliophilia in the wake of ebooks and Kindle.

We're all grasping for authenticity, for the dirt-in-your-fingernails Reality our ancestors supposedly enjoyed. The alienation from our world has gotten so bad that even copies of Reality, the mere simulacra of a vital primary exposure to life, strike us as relatively authentic and true. Compared to the HD-broadcast ersatz, the hyperreal Spectacle, the celebrity-cult Kabuki theater that is 21st-Century modernity, it certainly is.

If analog is only a copy, then at least it is the Master Copy. The analog LP is the signed first edition to digital's mass market paperback. Once it is stripped into a naked stream of zeros and ones, its tarnished by cheap and easy proliferation. The virgin is deflowered and reduced to a two-minute cumshot on YouPorn. Everyone booger-eating hack can have the new Radiohead album, downloading it literally for free from the comfort of their mother's basement. But, only the choice elect will have the enthusiast's $80 edition...

Which all makes me absolutely certain that I've been missing out on valuable cool points by not placing a gramaphone next to my Royal 10 typewriter, antebellum loveseat, and 100% organic kitchen. For shame!

P.S. I would suggest that the folks at Stuff White People Like add music-nerd record collecting to their anthropological findings...

American married couples try to bring sexy back...

2008-06-10T13:18:00.001-04:00

"Quiet, dear, the kids will hear us..."

If you are American, and are to get married, it is your statistical destiny to have sex with your spouse only about once a week (every 5.5 days, to be precise).

If you are a hormone-drunk 18-year-old newlywed, your average is marginally better (every four-and-a-half days).

Why not make a New Year's resolution to get down with your (worse) half every day for the next year?

These couples did.

Oranges 2.0

2008-06-10T13:05:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the long delay in blogging, folks, but Greene Futures will be online regularly henceforth...I promise.

Cezanne's "Pommes et oranges" (1899) -- Fast food?

From Harper's Weekly (a very entertaining email digest produced by Harper's magazine):

"For the third year in a row, the consumption of oranges in Britain declined because people were too busy to peel the rind off the fruit."

Geoff Greene's Genius Idea No. 83:

Develop GM oranges who's peels come off as easily as those of a tangerine. Because--admit it-- oranges are a pain to peel for we people on the go. This could do for oranges what Yoplait's Go-GURT did for yogurt...

Wireless Tribalism

2008-04-11T15:27:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, I encountered Philip Carl Salzman's new book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, in which he asserts convincingly that it is tribalism, and not Islam, which is the primary determinate of the modern society and culture of the Middle East. Serendipitous then that from the newest issue of the The Economist comes the suggestion of a return to tribalism for all of us. This neo-tribalism will not be laced together through bonds of blood, but rather through wireless networks.

"My TomTom says veer left, camel!

As the article notes, the "car was not just a faster horse," and indeed the advent of the wireless phone, laptop (and toaster) are not just speedier editions of the same. That the wireless world is a "revolution" is cliched through use and familiarity, so that we have forgotten just how strange it is to be able to walk down the streets of DC chatting to a friend in Paris. Or how revolutionary it is to be able to tap a few commands into the touch screen of your iPhone to Google a restaurant review, book a reservation, and then MapQuest your way there.

Culturally, the wireless revolution has reversed many of the fruits of the automobile revolution. Whereas the car--and the suburb--separated the temporal spaces of "work" and "home," wireless technology has squashed them together again. Don't believe it? Try to go on vacation without checking your email.

"God, this Blackberry outage is killing me..."

The ability to access people and information everywhere gives you more freedom, but also imposes a sort of slavery. A slavery I've alluded to with the "Facebook Panopticon" here earlier. There is no excuse now not to constantly be within email and mobile phone contact. Not answering your phone is now an intentional act, with social repercussions. Organizations--colleges, businesses, and even governments--consider email a legal form of communication, and are increasingly under a de facto requirement that you check your email daily, if not hourly. Again, failure to respond is intentional and has social, and even legal, repercussions.

This is the slavery of constant connectivity. Like a Brittany fleeing from the paparazzi, you can never escape the surveillance of friends, family, coworkers, bosses, and even strangers. You are now a member of a wireless tribe. Not rooted in clan or space, but tied inextricably to each other the world over.

Like all tribes, it imposes upon its members rigid standards and mores of behavior and identity. One wireless misstep: one accidentally forwarded email, unanswered text message or phone faux paux can reverberate throughout the clan, causing gossip, heartbreak, unrest, war and exile.

Think you've fooled your boss by taking out sick? Thanks to your cell phone's GPS, he knows you were at the golf course instead. Maybe you'll think twice before you take your mistress out to dinner when there are thousands of citizen journalists armed with cell phone cameras. Or perhaps you'd better password protect your wireless network at home, before a sidewalk dweller leeches that sex tape from your hard drive. Only a matter of time before those little RFID chips gain access to your very thoughts...

Go West, Young Man!

2008-03-31T13:43:00.000-04:00

Moses and his weary Chosen tromping through the desert toward Canaan, Puritans in moldy ships sailing to the New American Israel, Conestoga-wagoning Homesteaders heading to Oklahoma, Dust Bowl "Oakies" headed further to California--now supplanted alongside the Napa vines by Mexicans and Ecuadorians. To pack up your life onto the back of your donkey or Datsun in search of greener pastures is a story as old as humanity itself. It is how restless and hungry little Homo Sapiens wandered out of Kenya and Ethiopia to colonize every corner of the earth in the first place.

"Darling, the banana harvest has not been kind this year. Time to pack up and head north..."

But yet, economists seem to ignore the phenomenon of migration when computing Gross Domestic Product. Yes, unconstrained labor, like capital, will tend to flow across national boundaries in Ricardian economics. What wages do return to the motherland are considered in the macroeconomic financial account as transfers. However, why does the Cuban cease to be a Cuban once he leaves Cuba? When a large portion of his wages return to Cuba in the form of remittances to family members, when he retains a dominant Cuban identity and culture in exile and when he is connected to home via overlapping layers of telecommunication?

Under the conventional macroeconomic model, a country becomes less developed when its citizens find a better life elsewhere. Why not instead think of migration as development? Why not measure the Gross Domestic Product per natural? Count the children of a nation no matter where they tread. The Internal Revenue Service of the United States does implicitly, at least, by charging expatriate American citizens income tax.

Measuring GDP and GNI per natural instead of per resident is the idea proposed by Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett at the Center for Global Development in their recently-published paper Income Per Natural: Measuring Development as if People Mattered More Than Places. According to the two economists, "almost 43 million people live in a group of countries whose income per natural collectively is 50 percent higher than GDP per resident."

Over a decade between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, China pulled 130 million people out of poverty, the largest single leap in human welfare in history. This was achieved almost entirely by allowing migration from the impoverished western interior to the bustling coastline cities. The Chinese diaspora continues to form the backbone of the South East Asian economies (and have for centuries), inextricably linked in a tight, informal network with the Middle Kingdom. Singapore, for example, is majority Chinese, with a Sino-Singaporean population of 3.5 million.

There are currently four times as many Lebanese people outside Lebanon than inside (there are two-and-a-half times as many Lebanese in Brazil, in fact, than in Beirut). Young Arab men from all over the Middle East flock to Saudi Arabia to earn the nest egg required for an apartment, satellite television and marriage. Only 20 percent of the population of the "United Arab Emirate" of Dubai, meanwhile, is Arab (the most common colloquial languages are English, Hindi and Urdu).

It goes without saying that migrant labor in the United States is an essential source of welfare for Hispanics across the Americas. In 2006, Latin America hosted a flow of remittances totaling $63 billion (exceeding the combined total of all Foreign Direct Investment and Overseas Development Assistance to the region). For the communities who depend upon these wire transfers, the industry of their countrymen is certainly a palpable factor in their gross national welfare.

Clemins and Pritchett conclude their paper with an intriguing meditation:

The bottom line: migration is one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development.

The Art of the Future Uses Lead-Based Paint

2008-03-26T01:22:00.001-04:00

"Mao," Andy Warhol, 1972 (the same year as Nixon's famed Beijing visit)

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have. - Andy Warhol

At the apex of his career, Andy Warhol, that most famous of pop artists, was enlisting the help of dozens of assistants at his studio ("The Factory") to crank out copy after copy of his iconic silk-screen prints. It was the very reproducibility of his work which formed the statement of his oeuvre. He would furiously roll out variated prints--sometimes hundreds--in every different shade of vivid Technicolor, of Hollywood dons and divas, of shrill crimes stories and gory tragedies, of the wide-eyed imagery of the American imagination. He would feed the vast maw of celebrity and sensationalism with every imaginable perspective of every glowing little interest to fall before the eyes of a rabid and adoring audience public.

In fact, it was the interchangeability of the artist himself which Warhol implied with his famous quote: "Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." He had shown the world that even an "ugly Polish queer from the Midwest" (of negligible formal talent) could ensconce himself within the iridescence of New York City and its most beautiful people. Today, the image of Warhol, like his multicolored prints of Marilyn Monroe, has outshone and outlasted its subject.

What do we then make of Shenzhen, in southern China’s Guangdong province? A former fishing village, Shenzhen was chosen as the first of the country’s Special Economic Zones by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Today, this gushing city of eight million is the fountainhead of most reproduced art in the world. For less than $100, the global art consumer can commission a Rembrandt, Monet or Jasper Johns--or just a oil-painted copy of their graduation photo. It will be available at the doorstep of their similarly-reproduced colonial, Cape Cod or Tudor-style 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath. A copy of a copy....

Photo Credit: Spiegel Online

According to the UN, bulk US imports of Chinese oil paintings totaled over $64 million dollars in 2006, more than double the figure recorded two years earlier.

Are these millions of stretched canvases the ultimate realization of Warhol's postmodern dream, or are they a travesty of the artistic process? Wretched bastard children of automatons laboring away for 12-hour-days in sweatshop "art factories," as if they were sewing Nike's or lead-painted toys?

Photo Credit: Spiegel Online

And what do we make of the buyers of such paintings? Do they consider these works of human hands "art?" Though aforementioned figure $64 million worth of reproduced paintings shipped to American living rooms and hotel lobbies seems large, it's dwarfed by the price of a single painting, Jasper John's 1959 False Start, which sold for a record $80 million that same year.

Would anyone be willing to spend $80 million on a modern, original Chinese work (i.e. not a copy of Flemish realism or a porcelain vase dating from the Ming Dynasty)?

"What crap, this will never sell, Kim! The client wanted a Mona Lisa with her face on it...and for God's sake, make her look thin, man!"

I have an inkling that that will have much to do with the relative socioeconomic power and international standing to which China can lay claim to at point of sale. Perhaps the delicate brush-strokes, and graceful minimalism of the Middle Kingdom's indigenous style will demand their own dominant cache in years hence. Perhaps Chinese art will go the way of Japanese auto manufacture: from cheap, inferior knock-offs of Western designs, onward to internationally-acknowledged standards of excellence.

Since fashion is art now, and Chinese is in fashion, I could make a lot of money. -Andy Warhol, 1971 (one year before his "Mao" print series)

Hee-Haw! Wi-Fi Headin' Out to the Country

2008-03-23T00:59:00.000-04:00

Intel has developed a long-distance Wi-Fi platform, Intel (r) Rural Connectivity, allowing a wireless internet signal of roughly 10 megabits-per-second to hopscotch its way between nods 60 miles apart. From a city edge, internet connectivity can be projected far out into the countryside cheaply, and with minimal fuss. Each of the transmission towers can run on a mere six watts of electricity, allowing them to be independently solar powered.

(Far superior to previously existing Wi-Fi boosting technology)

From the Intel blog article:
One of the research projects connected rural villages in India with the Aravind Eye clinic to provide medical eye exams via the wireless antenna relay system. In Panama, it is bringing the interent (sic) to a remote village in the rain forest.

Click here for a geekier technical analysis from Daily Wireless blog.

Implication: Practical and economically feasible internet connectivity for users both in the developing world, and the rural corners of developed nations like the United States to address the severe rural/urban broadband internet divide.

More from Generation Distraction

2008-03-12T11:46:00.000-04:00

Serendipitously, just happened upon this piece by The Boston Globe's Carolyn Y. Johnson, which explores the ennui of Generation Distraction, arguing that "boredom is essential for creativity" and that the quick and easy access to stimuli is the mental equivalent of the overabundance of calories that has lead to the obesity epidemic. It seems our "mental fatness" is clogging our arteries of innovative endeavor, after all. "The most creative people...are known to have the greatest toleration for long periods of uncertainty and boredom." She summons the patron saint of boredom, Marcel Proust, to elucidate the edifying power of idleness:

Dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake," Proust wrote. "And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory... I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.

"I'm not bored, I'm profound"

Kathleen Cumiskey, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island, is quoted echoing my metaphor to drug addiction: "Our society is perpetually anxious, and a way to alleviate the anxiety is to delve into something that's very within our control, pleasurable, and fun. . . .It feels like it has all the makings of addiction." Paradoxically, the more stimuli people receive to alleviative boredom (email, Facebook updates, funny videos), "people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy, flitting from one activity to the next." Jerome C. Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness suggests a dosage of boredom shock therapy, to reacquaint the patient with "a comfort level with not being linked in and engaged and stimulated every second."

So, Generation Y, I prescribe that you sit down on a park bench outside for two hours ruminating on the petals of a nearby flower, and call me in the morning.

Or, maybe just read The Affected Provincial's Companion.

Talkin’ Bout My Generation

2008-03-11T15:29:00.000-04:00

Forget the nomenclature of “Generation Y,” the “Echo Boom,” the “Internet Generation (iGen)” or the “Millenials,” my generation is Generation Distraction. We are they born between the years 1980 and 1990. Reared amongst cell phone chatter, SMS, Facebook wall posts, Twitter updates, AOL instant messages, MySpace messages, blog updates, and 700 channels of glowing digital cable. A vast churning stream of flickering, buzzing, shouting, singing, pinging assaults our eyes and ears at all hours of the day and night. Like newborns victims of fetal alcohol syndrome, we’ve become so bathed in this plenum of media and communication that any abrupt break triggers instant withdrawal. Witness the life-threatening Blackberry blackout last month.

Is there a codeine for the media fiend?

I was close enough to the 1980 end of my generational spectrum to see Generation Distraction to become deeply and inextricably linked to a nascent early-internet culture. The World Wide Web inaugurated the “internet superhighway” (my how quaint that term seems today!) in the late 1980s, and the Mosaic browser kicked off the mass-consumption of the Internet in 1993. Came AOL in 1991; Yahoo, Amazon.com and eBay in 1995; AOL Instant Messaging in 1997, MySpace in 1998, and finally Google in 1999. “The Facebook” launched in 2004, with my alma matter Georgetown being among the first outlets. In college, Facebook so permeated the social sphere that whole nights out were given purpose through the quest for a funny-awesome-sexy profile picture to be uploaded the following Sunday morning (or early afternoon, rather).

Yes, today, Generation Distraction not only consumes every available hour through various media of telecommunication, but we sort and define our very lives and identities through them.

Who am I? I am Geoffrey Daniel Greene, and I’m friends with (…), I like (…) genre of music, I’ve read the following books (…), my favorite TV show is (…), I support (…) for president, I think this link of (…) is funny, last weekend I was at (…) party—here are the pictures… But, then again, are all these things true in real life? I have, after all, carefully crafted my online persona for certain ends.

“Maybe I hated Ulysses, but I want to seem smart, and I know that cute girl from my literature theory course is watching. Better put up a profile picture of me with two girls, it will make me look desired. I hope my ex isn’t checking my profile these days, she’ll leave another snarky wall post. Better block her. But what if she finds out I blocked her? Oh damn, wasn’t I supposed to be writing my paper?”

Instead of facilitating “social networking,” the social network technologies themselves are the end. You don’t Facebook to socialize, you socialize to Facebook. Everything you do is documented, uploaded, and given instant feedback. The number of friends one tallies; the frequency of messages, posts, and comments; the intangible “cred” garnered through one’s online personality—these are the social currency that we desperately accrue. You are being watched, but not just by The Government. In the sequel to Orwell’s dysptopic dream, you are watched not by Big Brother, but by your peers. You voluntarily and desperately submit to constant surveillance and judgment. Thus is Generation Distraction also known by its other avatar, Generation Panopticon.

“Panopticon” referring to English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's 1785 prison design allowing an observer to observe (“-opticon”) all (“pan-“) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." In the parallel life of Facebook, you are aware of being watched, but the magic is you can never tell by whom. You are judged and sorted hierarchically instantly and decisively, but it’s not clear who populates your jury. It’s vitally important to “win,” however. The Economy of Attention--discussed earlier here--values “eye-hours” above all things, and he who garners the greatest share of a discrete amount of attention is the “richest.”

Bentham's “Panopticon” design

Obviously, there is a sizable dark side to Generation Distraction. Ironically, the overdose of communication has suffocated our communication ability itself. Flooding our receptors with stimuli has deadened their sensitivity. Generation Y is widely reported by managers to be deficient at workplace communication, suffering especially poorly from deplorable writing ability, nonexistent spelling, and whimsical notions of grammar. Nor does this end at the page. Face-to-face contact has ironically been rendered rather quaint by the efficiencies and global reach of personal communication technologies. Generation Panopticon is very comfortable with the reciprocal surveillance of watching and being watched—from a distance.

Do an experiment. Sit down several of your favorite Generation Y members in a room…without a television or a computer. See what happens. (Clue: awkward silence and fidgeting immediately set in). On a long enough time scale, your chosen group will begin to whip cell phones out of their pockets like asthma inhalers for a Content fix. Then they will carry on phone conversations in the hallway or Google sports stats on their iPhone, en lieu of facing the terrifying intimacy of a room full of fleshed people and no screens.

(If aliens visit earth tomorrow, they might assume that the tiny black things we hold tightly over our ears whenever we're walking are protective earmuffs, intended to shield the delicate inner ear from the elements)

The only solution a sudden and unexpected drought of digital Content is liberal portions of light beer (or weed) to deaden the pain of withdrawal from Content. Even then, what conversations transpire will inevitably veer to Grey’s Anatomy or the last funny YouTube video watched. Again, the plenum of Content has among my generation completely replaced actual interpersonal experience with vicarious media representation and disembodied communication.

This inability to converse obviously makes dating difficult, and that practice seems to have subsided as well—with reverberative effects to rates of marriage and childbearing. I wonder too how my generation will handle the challenges of creativity and innovation. If you are under constant reciprocal surveillance, and constantly consumed with the requirements of instant peer validation, how can you truly create something unique and revolutionary? How will you have the space to develop as an individual when you are diluted in a soup of impersonal co-dependency? Will the omnipresent Facebook Panopticon be an even more efficient tool for enforcing conformity than centralized Big Brother? Will this generation inherit an America that has lost its unique character as a nation of kooky basement tinkerers and cultural revolutionaries?

Why Muslim-Christian Understanding is Stupid

2008-03-08T14:55:00.000-05:00

Georgetown University, like many other religiously concerned academies across the nation, has taken up the standard of “interreligious dialogue,” in a well-intentioned effort to heal the theological rift that supposedly divides our world. There is a well-funded Muslim-Christian Understanding program, which offers undergraduates a certificate once they've proven to understand Muslims and Christians sufficiently.

As the standard line goes, ethnic and religious conflict are the new fault lines inherited by the 21st Century, threatening the very success of globalization and harmonious interconnectedness. This threat crops up in the acrimony between the Jews and the Muslims in the Holy Land, the Hindus and the Muslims in Kashmir, or the Christians and the Muslims in the Philippines, Nigeria, Chechnya, Bosnia, Lebanon, and countless other worldwide flashpoints. Furthermore, as evinced by the previous sentence, this “clash of civilizations” usually falls into the template of Muslims vs. (insert any other religion here).

A Manichean struggle exists between two diametrically opposed forces. Such framing is similar to the Cold War framing of free capitalist democracy vs. International Communism. And indeed, in the War on Terror, the forces of Islam have inherited the dark mantel of the Bolsheviks as the new enemies of freedom. This new Enemy has many now-familiar names: al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamo-Fascism, etc. Conversely, in the Muslim world, this duality is now embraced in reverse, with the standard of Islam as the Good, and the Other (Zionism, the Great Satan, etc.) as the Evil.

Which brings us back to “Muslim-Christian dialogue.” It is an effort by progressive religious authorities and intellectuals to bridge this bipolar divide. If only the two faiths could understand and empathize with each other, then peace would reign. If only Christendom understood that Jesus is the second most important prophet in Islam. If only the Muslim umma recognized its common pan-Mediterranean history with European Christianity. If only Westerners knew what contributions to the “Western” arts and sciences Medieval Islam made, how the Andalusian scholars preserved the works of Plato and Aristotle to reintroduce Dark Age Europe to its own Greek heritage. If only all three Abrahamic faiths would recognize their common God and patriarchs. Jews and Muslims alike consider Ishmael the father of the Arab people, and his brother Isaac the father of the Jewish people. Could not the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions exist side-by-side as brothers—distinct, yet tied by blood?

Yes, they could! Once the Archbishop of Canterbury and the erudite ulama at Cairo’s al-Azhar Madrassa offered up enough “understanding,” coexistence will be magically achieved...

This project is a failure for two reasons. First, and most importantly, it acknowledges and internalizes the fiction of the aforementioned “clash of civilizations.” Notions of difference are socially constructed, and change over time. Religion, much like race, takes on very different identities, depending upon how it is framed. Secondly, it labors under the fallacy that people hate each other for academic theological reasons—reasons that can be reconciled through civil debate and “understanding.”

Kosovo is now the seventh nation wrenched from the ashes of the former Yugoslavia. Less than a generation ago, Kosovars, Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Slovenians, Montenegrins, and Macedonians simply self-identified as “Yugoslavs.” There was very little religion to be seen amongst Tito’s citizens. Then, in the mid-1990s with Tito and the Soviet Union a distant memory, they all miraculously became sorted as Muslim “Bosnians,” Catholic “Croats,” and Orthodox “Serbs.” Some politicians rose using ethnic power bases and decided that each newly-coined group needed its own land. Some European diplomats agreed and immediately gave their official recognition to the breakaway nations. Lines were drawn on paper, and labeled with their proper ethno-religious label. In Bosnia would go the Muslims, in Croatia would go the Catholics, and in Serbia would go the Orthodox. But, as it turned out, there were some Serbs in Bosnia, some Bosnians in Croatia, and a bunch of Albanians in Serbian Kosovo. The rest is history. Suffice to say, there weren't many Bosnians shouting "Allahu Akbar" or Serbs with giant Crusader crosses in that particular conflict. The crucible of killing in among the southern Slavs was only religious in the nominal sense, and theological understanding will be unlikely to extinguish the still-smoldering landscape.

For over a century under British colonial rule, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians were “Indians.” Then, miraculously during the 1940s, they became Muslim “Pakistanis” and Hindu “Indians.” Later, in 1971, “East Pakistanis” magically became “Bangladeshis.” Never mind that “Hindu” India had more Muslims than “Muslim” Pakistan (India has the third highest number of Muslims of any other nation on earth, except Indonesia and Pakistan). In 1948, a line was drawn on paper, about two million people were slaughtered in the mad dash to find their way into their proper new religio-national space. Six decades hence, Muslims and Hindus take turns burning whole trains full of innocent people to death. Perhaps the two groups could reach common ground over their mutual love of setting commuters on fire.

Almost all of Iraq’s Christians—and most other religious minorities—have suddenly since 2003 found that their millennia of lineage in the Fertile Crescent doesn’t matter anymore. People who were all Iraqis in 2002 are now Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, Kurdish, etc. Lines are being drawn in paper and in blood, and hundreds of thousands are now casualties of the new scramble for classification and power. Was this a failure of “dialogue?” Did the Sunnis and Shi’a live in relative peace for twelve centuries in Iraq through theological discussion? Or perhaps, was theological debate the very culprit for perceived difference and resulting strife?

In the United States, we think of people with light skin as “white.” At the turn of the century, Irish immigrants were “black.” The term “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) is a carry-over from the age when “Catholic” was a derogatory “racial” category, used pejoratively like “Jew” often still is. Polish people were “Pollocks,” Ukranians were “Bohunks,” Germans were “Krauts,” Italians were “Wops,” Jews were “Kikes,” and Canadians were “Canucks.” Did we heal these rifts by having Catholic-Protestant dialogue? Did the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope call a symposium?

The truth of the matter is that most Christians haven’t read the Bible, even those who attend weekly Church. It’s pretty darn long. A large proportion hasn’t skimmed more than a few pages. If asked, they would completely fail to explain the nuances of the Holy Trinity, the degree of divinity and humanity constituting the identity of the Christ, the relative importance of faith verses good works, the relationship between Original Sin and Divine Grace, or the weight given to free will and determinism. Do most Christians know that women should wear a hijab-like veil in church?

The Qur’an is just as long, and perhaps more opaque to the untrained eye. It has no traditional narrative format, parts seem contradictory, its revelatory maxims often shift according to when they were received by the Prophet (the prohibition against drinking alcohol is only the most interesting example). For this reason, the reader can cherry-pick the Qur’an as a work of peace or of war, see Allah as a God of stern punishment or tender grace, and frame their relationship with other faiths as being between the common dhimmi (“Peoples of the Book”), or the arch-enemy kuffir (“refuser”) who must be converted or slain.

Open the Old Testament and randomly point to a passage. If you do this enough, you will eventually find something very troubling. Perhaps a passage filled with Divinely-sanctioned genocide, incest, rape, or a whole host of other subjects that tend not to make it into sermons at Church or Temple.

So where does a through understanding of these texts leave us? Will a rich Lebanese Maronite Christian banker really get along with his Shi’ite unemployed neighbor because they both like Jesus? Will the fact that both trace their religious ancestry to Abraham help the young Hezbollah fighter to reapproach with the radical Zionist settler? Will the Pat Robertson suddenly change his tone toward the Muslim enemy if her knew that the Bible and the Qur’an both sanction polygamy?

Whenever I mention Pakistan or Pakistanis to my mother, she drifts to the same warm impression she has of a Pakistani co-worker she’s enjoyed working with for years at her college. With a smile, she eagerly relates what intelligence and integrity he has. She’s never been to Pakistan, knows almost nothing about it, knows even less about its majority-Muslim religion, and this co-worker is just about the only Pakistani she has ever known. But for the rest of her life, perhaps, she’ll associate Pakistan and its sons and daughters with positive notions of “intelligence” and “integrity.” In this way, she’s like most Beiruti shopkeepers, Indian farmers, and Iraqi lawyers. Until all the politicians and academics stepped in to tell them what to think about certain people, their neighbor was simply the simple man with the charming smile, who’s daughter went to school with theirs, and who’s wife made great hummus.

This, and not academic dialogues, is how people have understood and related to each other since the beginning. And so it shall be for the future.

Capitalism≠Democracy

2008-02-13T14:04:00.001-05:00

This week, I've been waist deep in a project on undemocratic capitalism...

In somewhat unrelated news, lighting struck the world's biggest Jesus yesterday. More on Brazil below...

To that end, I've reveled in a mass of indicators on a gargantuan Excel spreadsheet from various sources for economic, financial, and democratic indicators. I've only scratched the surface, and already some pretty delicious revelations. Firstly, among the commonly-referred to BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), there is no data to support the conventional thesis that democracy breeds GDP growth (neither net GDP nor per capita). I measured democratization according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index.

Economist Intelligence Unit's 2007 Democracy Index Map (lighter blue indicates higher democracy)

In fact, within this group, the non-democratic states (Russia and China) edged out the democratic states (Brazil and India) in growth, both net and per capita. There is no correlation between degree of democratization and level of economic freedom either (as measured by the Heritage Foundations Economic Freedom Index). Nor is there a strong connection between economic freedom and growth, since all four registered in toward the bottom of all nations in terms of economic freedom.

Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index Map (darker blue indicates higher economic freedom)

There does, however, seem to be a correlation between poverty rates (self-reported, and thus somewhat unreliable) and the UN Human Development Index, and democratization. I'm still working on crunching the Gini Coefficient for economic inequality, but I have an inkling I'll find no real correlation between democracy and economic equality. If that turns out to be the case, this will all make for a true bombshell.

I next examined the "Next Eleven" (N-11) economies (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam) which were slated in 2005 by Goldman Sachs to be the next nodes of emerging market high-growth.

These nations ranked even lower than the BRICs in terms to democratization. Shockingly, among the N-11s, the more-nuanced correlation between lack of democracy and GDP growth was far more pronounced. The "authoritarian regimes" of Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Vietnam together clocked rates 5.05% higher net GDP growth than the "flawed democracies" of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines and South Korea (the "hybrid regime" of Turkey fit in the middle, but didn't skew the rates toward either camp since its indicators were all almost exactly average). However, the democratic states did beat out the un-democratic states in per capita GDP growth (by 3.58 %). Perhaps then we have a wash here. Again, with static analysis of the Gini Coefficient, it will become clear whether this translates into higher degrees of economic equality among the democracies.

World map of Gini Coefficient for 2007/2008 (a lower Gini Coefficient correlates with a lower inequality, with yellow nations having the lowest inequality and fushia nations having the highest). Data source: United Nations Human Development Report 2007-2008.

Fascinatingly, the democratic states among the N-11 did show a strong correlation between democracy and growth in economic freedom, but one counter to conventional thinking. The un-democratic regimes grew an average of 5.5 percent over the last decade in the Economic Freedom Index, compared to the democratic regimes, which declined 3.9 percent in economic freedom. Bangladesh and Indonesia declined the most sharply, falling 7.1 and 9.5 percent respectively. The strongest increase in economic freedom was witnessed in the least democratic state among the N-11, Vietnam, with a 9.4 percent increase (albeit from a low starting point).

Next, I've moved to a master spreadsheet of every economy in the world with reliable data (161 at present). Last night I finished entering the indicators for the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, Freedom House's Freedom in the World Survey Combined Freedom Status (for 1996-2006), the Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index (for 1996-2008), and UN Net GDP Growth Rates (for 1996-2006). Remaining is to enter the UN and/or World Bank Per Capita GDP Growth Rates, the Gini Coefficient, the Transparency International World Corruption Index, and the UN Human Development Index. After I crunch all those, looking for linear relationships, I'm going to tease out trends within subcategories--by region, religion, labor force, and energy-exporter vs. non-energy-exporter. I'll publish my findings tomorrow.

On of the hypotheses I hope to test is the "Dutch disease" thesis holding that economies (like Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and the Gulf states) reliant upon energy exports for their economic growth will tend to suffer from stunted democratization.

Map of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Algeria, Angola, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and Ecuador)

If a more labor-intensive export-led economy like China's spreads the fruits of its growth more widely than a non-labor-intensive export-led economy like Saudi Arabia, then perhaps we'll see a much more rapid journey toward democracy in the Middle Kingdom. Perhaps it will even surpass Russia, reliant as it is today on a rentier economy, and state-led energy export for its economic growth. China shares many characteristics with the Four Asian Tigers of the 1960s and 70s (export-driven growth, high US Treasury Bond holdings, favorable balance of trade, high domestic savings rates, cheap-but-educated labor force, sustained double-digit GDP growth, trade with industrialized nations, etc.). Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia all transitioned toward democracy from authoritarian regimes along a very similar path.

I'm foreseeing a picture wherein the development model works best as it goes through incremental states of political-economy. At first, there is authoritarianism, providing the stability and cohesion necessary to till a infrastructural and macro-economic soil fertile for growth. However, within this authoritarian framework, there is rule of law, economic freedom, and declining corruption. The citizens have legal and economic freedom, but not yet political or civil freedom. As the economic fundamentals are set into place, growth occurs rapidly. The industries responsible for the growth should be labor-intensive and value-added (raw commodity exports won't do the trick), employing the citizenry, giving them "ownership" of the growth, and avoiding the great hoarding of the wealth into government coffers or into the hands of oligarchs (avoiding "Dutch disease"). Entrepreneurship is encouraged, a middle class arises, and the economy becomes increasingly diversified. Thus does a professional citizen class arise: self-sufficient, economically independent, with a stake in the political-economy of the nation. Once this occurs, associative freedom can and does liberalize, allowing these professional stake-holders to inherit the reigns first of civil society and then political society. This is where populism goes astray, allowing too much power in the hands of a mob of people who neither have the stake-holder mentality nor the education and independent means to progress beyond zero-sum identity politics.

This is the path I can foresee for China especially. I think the Beijing government have been responsible stewards, avoiding and attempting to stem the corruption of the provinces (and leaving party leaders who line their pockets hanging from the gallows). They've invested wisely in infrastructure, and allowed metropolitan clusters along the coast to thrive autonomously. They've avoided smothering this growth through either burdensome taxation or statism, but China does not share the same levels of economic freedom that characterized the Four Asian Tigers (and the trend has been static for the past decade, even declining slightly by 0.3% from 1998 levels). Then again, neither do the other BRICs, and the N-11s measure lower than average. A middle class that is projected to be double the population of the United States by 2015 has arisen, and they've been cautious stake-holders in the growth. Beijing has allowed a transition of an enormous number out of poverty in the interior to prosperity on the coast, without allowing the floodgates to open too wide (leading to the urban poverty of so many other Third World slum cities like Lagos). Chinese people have a domestic savings rate of a whopping 50% (large stores of domestic capital liquidity), the government has sizable U.S. Treasury Bond holdings, a very favorable balance of trade (even despite its voracious appetite for energy and raw commodities imports), counts industrialized nations as its largest trading partners, and has reported double-digit growth for the past decade. Once more, its pursued a increasingly popular non-interventionist "just business" strategy in foreign affairs. If the Asian Tiger model is any indication, Chinese Democracy will not just be the title of the upcoming Guns N' Roses album.

Stay tuned...

Fighting the Terrorists with Wikipedia

2008-02-06T11:42:00.000-05:00

We kicked off this year with a very successful joint DC-area Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP)-World Future Society (WFS) meeting at the Embassy Suites in Friendship Heights on January 28. And a strange thing happened.... men and women, young and old, of grey flannel suites and scraggly beards, of the World Bank and Booz Allen--all furtively mingling over turkey half-subs and mini bottles of Canada Dry. After brief opening remarks by SCIP President, August Jackson, and our own Eric Garland, WFS President, the crowd was drawn into the web 2.0 gospel of CIA "evangelist" Sean Dennehy. Mr. Dennehy is the chief of development for the Agency's Intellipedia project, using a Wiki platform to share intelligence throughout the Agency.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the spooks have their own Wikipedia, and it is wicked cool.

Imagine if you will, an agent at "The Farm" in York County, Virginia, by the name of Austin Powers. He uploads Intellipedia, desperate to find out the latest intelligence on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's choice of undergarments. Thankfully, secret agent Jack Bauer has just tapped an asset in the upper Amazon jungle, a certain Gap sales associate known only as Kevin. Instantly, agent Bauer uploads the vital secrets he's garnered from asset Kevin via satellite Blackberry to Intellipedia. As Powers scrolls down the "Fidel Castro" article, he finds just what he was looking for: "Castro is known to favor red briefs (he finds them 'revolutionary'), having raided the entire store supply during a super-sweet 50% off sale last Saturday. In other news, Castro totally kicked Hugo Chávez's butt in Wii Tennis yesterday..." Just then, agent Bond intercedes on the edit page from a hotel in downtown Buenos Aires. He's just gotten word that Castro has unexpectedly switched to white skivvies, according to hot info from a Havana laundry worker named Mirta de Jesus. A lively discussion and weighing of evidence occurs in the discussion section. Dozens of agents from all corners of the globe are involved. Later that afternoon, it finally comes to light that Casto was quite tired of Mirta accidentally bleaching all his favored red underpants, turning them an embarrassing shade of pink. Thus, to avoid such faux pas, he has acceded to white briefs. Case closed.

Synergy! Suddenly the entire collective memory of the Agency could be available at the fingertips of any agent anywhere in the world. Instead of having disconnected pieces of information languishing on thousands of different hard drives or allowing actionable intelligence to rot on the vine in the field, there is now the promise of collaborative information woven together on a single, universally accessible platform.

The thing that shocked and intrigued the crowd the most was the fundamental sea-change we had now undergone. The CIA, most secretive of all organs of American governance, most jealous guardian of privileged information, had now embraced a collaborative technology that rewarded sharing rather than hoarding. Furthermore, perhaps uncharacteristically for a government program, the Intellipedia project was not forced on agents from above. It was fed into the system, to be adopted by individuals if and when they found it useful. It's spectacularly successful, reaching high levels of penetration throughout not just the CIA, but the NSA, Army Intelligence, etc. And guess what, the most prolific poster to Intellipedia is 67-years-old.

If the people who depend on information as their major weapon against the enemies of the United States think a Wiki is good enough for them, why not you?

Greene on Green

2008-01-26T20:51:00.000-05:00

For Immediate Release:

"Geoff Greene of Greene Futures announced today that he will be transitioning toward a carbon-neutral blogging model, by hooking his MacBook Pro to a Voltaic Systems solar-panel backpack for clean energy, and buying carbon offsets to reduce the ecological impact of his Blogger server space..."

Well, not really.

But it sounds quite familiar, eh? Yes, everyone from British Petroleum ("What size is your footprint?") to the Miami Beach Marina Sailfish Tournament ("The world's first carbon-neutral fishing tournament") are jumping on the green-wagon. Great news, right?

"Man, Billy-Bob, ice fishing just ain't the same, what with global warming 'n' all..."

Ladies and gentlemen, if I hear another beaming reference to eco/green/clean/organic shoes, toothbrushes or lawn gnomes, I may become green with nausea. And not because my name is Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma and consider global climate change the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

No, it boils down to the fact that a pig with lipstick on is still a pig. And just the same, slapping the label "green" on any good or service you durn-well please merely causes apathy and cynicism among consumers.

"'Well BP, I'm gonna need a few more drinks to become
convinced that you really care about the environment"

The environmental marketing company TerraChoice came out with a study last month called the The Six Sins of Greenwashing, which asserts that a full 99% of 1,018 common consumer products are guilty of "greenwashing." That is, these products are far more style than substance, marketing to the consumer the image of environmental consciousness and health without any substantial evidentiary basis. Enviromedia Social Marketing's Greenwashing Index catalogs such "sinners" by having users post and rate ads according to the Index, very similar to TerraChoices's Six Sins metric. Thusly, does a web 2.0 tool apply consumer pressure via social networking in an attempt to keep companies honest.

This is not merely an image issue, either. TerraChoice, in its study, judged the products in question according to existing Federal Trade Commission false advertising regulations guidlines, as well as parallel regulations in all 50 states. In the early 1990s, the combination of muckraking journalists and a regulatory crackdown deflated the last incarnation of this green business trend. At that time, the FTC cracked down on several purveyors and in 1990 A task force of state attorneys general, headed by Minnesota's, Hubert H. Humphrey III, held hearings and issued two reports with new guidelines. The result was a cooling effect on both the producers and on consumer perception of green business that lingers to this day. Might the same occur once again?

Consumers (such as myself) are overtired of hearing green claims shoved down their throats from all angles. Canadian market research company Ipsos Reid published a report last October finding that 70% of Americans and 65% of Canadians say green labeling is "just a marketing tactic."

EcoAlign's 2007 EcoPinion Survey found among the 54% of consumers who haven’t already adopted green technology, they perceive it to be “ugly,” “expensive,” and “difficult to understand and maintain.” In other words, potential converts are quite skeptical, and have generally negative feelings towards green products and services.

According to IBM Global Business Services' Plugging in the Consumer: Innovating utility business models for the future (2007), only 15% of Americans have quantified their “carbon footprint,” despite widespread attention given to the fad.

Even green energy, the most talked-about and well-financed wing of the green business movement, still leaves consumers scratching their heads. According to the same 2007 EcoPinion Survey, 30% of consumers don’t know what “clean energy” is at all. Only 13% of the studied think energy efficiency has to do with saving money or cutting down on fuel costs.

What does this all mean for you?

Transition to green business for pure marketing value is a waste of time and money. Consumers are confused and skeptical. Worse still, you may likely incur the regulatory wrath of Uncle Sam (or "the Governator").

If you do do it, it should be for cold hard dollars and cents. You can witness dramatic savings in production, operation and distribution costs through increases in efficiency and decreases in waste. Ernst & Young speculates that rising energy costs and efficiency will drive the green business trend. When energy costs rise--and $100/barrel oil is only the beginning--so do the competitive advantages of efficiency. Furthermore, you can reap opportunity for growth if you are the first to a developing market. Guess who the richest man in China is right now? None other that Shi Zhengrong of Suntech Power, who made his billions by selling cheap solar panels worldwide.

Don't even include your marketing department. Leave this one to the bean counters and the engineers. The "boy who cried wolf effect" assures that even the most sincere and substantial efforts will be viewed with skepticism if you market them to forcibly. The type of consumers whom you can impress through your efforts are information-savvy, and will discover what you've done themselves. Be nuanced, and allow your actions (not words) to matriculate through the infosphere via word-of-mouth and third-party reports (newspapers, magazines, television shows and blogs).

So remember, aspiring enterprise environmentalists, get real before you go green!

Hoya Philosopher-Kings: Epologue

2008-01-25T12:41:00.000-05:00

In retrospect, getting dragged into an email flame war with right-wing talk-radio host John Ziegler was not only juvenile, but completely irrelevant to the purpose of Greene Futures. Many apologies to my wonderful readers especially, but also to Mr. Ziegler. He is what he is, and is entitled to his opinions, no matter how bigoted I consider them. And Greene Futures is certainly not the place to seek for monsters to destroy.

Thusly, in the future, Greene Futures will be resolutely dedicated to the future. Leave the politicking to the present.

Best regards,

Geoff Greene

Hoya Philosopher-Kings

2008-01-23T12:50:00.001-05:00

Today's entry is addressed primarily to my alumni peers, but will be of interest to anyone interested in what leaders and ideas emerge from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, former stomping ground of President William Jefferson Clinton, and many other Future Leaders of the Free World:

The Atlantic Monthly, which in my humble opinion is one of the two top magazines in the United States (standing shoulder-to-shoulder with The New Yorker), just opened its website to non-subscribers, as well as its archives back to its genesis as an abolitionist paper in the mid-19th Century. Here is a very interesting 2005 article about fellow Hoya and (former) radio host John Ziegler, which gives an enlightening glimpse into the world of right-wing talk radio:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200504/wallace

That being a medium that the more liberal populace is only vaguely aware, and totally unacquainted with directly. However, in its aggregate, this crackling chorus of immigrant-bashing, "Islamo-fascism" rabble-rousing, Bible-thumping, shout-you-out-of-the-room "straight talk" is the bass-line of propaganda which delivers a pre-chewed spoonful of opinions to half of the electorate every morning. The faithfully regurgitated refrain "Rush [Limbaugh] is right" is code for the unquestioning fervor with which devotees of these modern-day Joseph Goebbels demure to he loudest voice they can find on the AM spectrum. Concerning Mr. Ziegler, it is interesting to consider how a "recovering Catholic" who studied government and philosophy on the Hilltop would court an opinion of "the Arab world" as follows:

"We're not perfect, we suck a lot of the time, but we are better as a people, as a culture, and as a society than they are, and we need to recognize that, so that we can possibly even begin to deal with the evil that we are facing."

Now, Mr. Ziegler graduated in 1989. I wonder how many Georgetown graduates have carried such zealous ideas into the seats of power from that era, and how many might exit Healy Gates thinking the same today? Does a Catholic institution, which is based upon the continuing Vatican ideology of the "One True Church," encourage such feelings of cultural supremacy? Has this the oldest university in Washington, DC, which traces its genesis to the birth of the Constitution in 1789, inherited and fostered the old Puritan conception of the "New American Israel" carrying out God's Divine Plan in the world?

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), influential American Puritan, Salem Witch Trial rabble-rouser, and author of Theopolis Americana: An Essay on the Golden Street of the Holy City and The Negro Christianized: An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity (PDF).

The pedagogy of the government department--if it includes references to "the Arab world" at all--tends to do so through the prism of terrorism or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (i.e. lumping the region with Africa as a land of unremitting and irrational ancient violence). Philosophy courses too include mainly Plato, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. but only peripheral coverage of "Eastern philosophy" (and only then with a quick and dirty gloss). Don't believe me, check the Spring 2008 course listing for yourself. Browse too the government department offerings, and notice the consistent theme of "security" among almost all courses concerning Asia, Africa or the Middle East. In fairness, the School of Foreign Service (which does not house Mr. Ziegler's government or philosophy majors) offers several more nuanced courses--to those who seek them.

This is what all Arabs look like, even when showering.

Would the average undergraduate take a course on the great Islamic philosophers, or appreciate the pan-Mediterranean development of what we now consider to be "Western" thought? Where would men like John Ziegler learn that while the post-Roman European continent effectively lost literacy for a full millennium, the Islamic and Jewish scholars of the umma preserved the works of Aristotle and his ancient Greek contemporaries? Where would they learn that until the 18th Century, China far outshone Europe in wealth, power and influence? Where might they connect the half-century of violence in the Middle East with the exploitative and ideologically-blinded 20th Century foreign policies of Great Britain, France, Russia, Israel and the United States?

Where might you take a course that teaches that the world outside the United States and Europe is filled with real-live human beings who work, get married, have children, fear war, pine for peace, eat McDonalds, faithfully tune in to Oprah, and are likely be crying to Atonement ("the most achingly romantic movie since Titanic!") on bootleg DVD as we speak.

For every "Arabist" who steps across the Georgetown stage to inherit the world, there are two security studies graduates who view the "Islamo-Confucian" world (an actual Samuel Huntington neologism from his 1993 article-cum-book The Clash of Civilizations) as a dreamworld of wealth and war. Enticing for her Eastern riches, but alien and somehow unrecognizable. And so these people are more than happy to spread a condescending hand to the "more-rational" few that can be found among the Oriental mass, sending money, advice, and arms to our men in the Jordans, Egypts, Moroccos, Saudis, Bahrains, Pakistans, Japans, South Koreas and Taiwans of the world. Even these--our "friends"--are merely children in our foreign policy family. They are given a yearly allowance of foreign direct aid, and expected to jump when told. As Mr. Ziegler stated (with refreshing candor, at least), "we are better as a people, as a culture, and as a society," and only we can deserve the responsibility of democracy. Thus, it is no coincidence that our primary allies in the Arab world are monarchies and dictatorships, and our nominal enemies are in the more democratic elements in the area (Iran, Yemen, Lebanon and Palestine). In the global Platonic Republic, the United States comprises the philosopher-kings and warriors of the guardian class, along with the elites of our client states acting as middle-management. The oil fields and trinket factories of the East are populated by the inferior producer class who's role it is to create wealth to support the guardian class, but who lack the ability and education to direct their own destiny.

I don't perceive that a standard Georgetown education would do anything to contradict this worldview. If anything, I've believed that Georgetown's self-aware role is to educate the American philosopher-kings, as well as their viceroy elites abroad. My Jordanian friend offered me the (apocryphal) anecdote yesterday that half his country's Parliament was educated at Georgetown. Crown Prince Abdullah II, for one, achieved a School of Foreign Service master's degree in 1987. Our many international students, past and present, comprise a laundry list of elite children from all corners of the globe--they who have the capacity to shell out $45,000 cash per year.

It is not my intent to monger conspiracies, rail against the "Illumniati cabal" directing the world or to indulge in anti-American self-loathing. I will argue fiercely to anyone that among the practical options, the United States is the least-bad guardian of the world. Nor do I blame Georgetown solely for the propagation of unfortunate beliefs among its students. I sought out and found there a wellspring of elucidating knowledge and empathy for the global human condition. But for many, if not most, of my peers, the promise of such enlightenment was lost. For them, the highest opportunity lies in an investment bank.

I don't buy that "we are better as a people." Furthermore, it seems to me that such thought is self-defeating and contrary to the interest of American leadership. I've bemoaned the foolish pride and bravado superiority that has led us into fiascoes like Iraq, that leads us to support Israel in starving the Gazans in the midst of a Middle East peace process. I've lamented how those who would sort the world into a hierarchy of humanity have both undervalued the worth of innocent lives and underestimated the potential of our competitors and enemies. It is not only long-suffering civilians in Baghdad and Gaza whom we hurt, but also our ambitions and our selves.

That great Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas once said "inordinate self-love is the cause of every sin," and certainly our recent experience would seem to bear that out. Can we learn to practice humility as well as forthrightness? Can we lead by example rather than by force? Or will we become the next Soviet Union, treating the world as a canvas for our ideology rather than a vast land ripe with hope? These values will determine the future of American leadership, and academies like Georgetown determine what values these leaders will embody. Leaders who truly embody the Jesuit promise hold true to both the Ignatian ideals of "men for others" and "men with others." It is the latter that differentiates the loved from the feared.

America: The Future is Bleak

2008-01-11T22:26:00.000-05:00

I am not bullish on the macroeconomic future of the United States. Let us cast aside issues of which party will win the presidency next November (though I will go on record to state that it will certainly by the Democrats). Let us pay no mind to the "political issues" of our age: healthcare, taxes, Iraq, terrorism, etc. No, travel along with me for a moment down to the sub-dermal layer of our society's future... Down to the fundamentals. The meat and potatoes of our destiny.

1) America is a free-market capitalist society, with some socialist elements (the Postal Service, utilities, roads, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, etc.).

2) The logic of capitalism is one of infinite growth. All present investments of capital are made with the expectation that the future will witness a larger market to consume the products of the capital inputs. Otherwise, there can be no profit off these capital investments, and rational investors will not apply resources toward them.

3) Ergo, unless the United States' economy is growing, capital will dry up, leaving businesses and consumers with fewer and more restrictive choices for borrowing. Without such ability to take on debt under reasonable conditions, entrepreneurial opportunities will be left to wither on the vine, potential homeowners will not have access to mortgages and homes, and even established businesses will have difficulty mustering the capital to invest in innovation, growth and expansion. Only those economic actors which have sizable amounts of cash saved will be able to finance such expenditures. Considering the savings rate for Americans now hovers consistently at 2% (down from 10-12% a generation ago), this cashflow is impossible for the average consumer. With few exceptions, businesses, especially small businesses, lack the luxury of slapping cash on the barrel for capital outlays. Thus, without cheap and easy capital to fuel it, the economy could "run out of gas."

4) Which brings us to our next point. The American economy is an energy-hungry one. This is evident to anyone who drives to work in the morning. Americans have few attractive alternatives for transportation to the internal combustion-powered car. Only two cities, New York and Washington, DC, offer public transportation systems for commuters attractive enough to display wide usage. Domestic shipment is reliant upon trucking, domestic and international travel rely upon air travel, and the vast majority of electricity generation in the nation emerges from coal, natural gas, gasoline, and oil-fired plants.

5) Every industrial economy relies upon energy inputs for economic output. The relationship between the units of energy required for every unit of GDP is referred to as energy intensity. The United States has a higher energy intensity (more energy required for each unit of GDP) than Japan, most of the nations of Europe, China and India. With only 3% of the world's people, the US is responsible for a quarter of world resource consumption. This is partly due to the geographic difference between the smaller, more densely populated economies of Japan and the European nations, and the larger, more disparate demographic of the United States (making transportation costs more of a factor). More than 80% of the economic output of the United States is produced in urban zones, and this is consistent among other well-developed nations. This due to the "clustering effect" of reduced transportation costs from density, university research-innovation pipelines, more educated pools of talent, cross-over between firms and industries, etc. However, this geographic difference cannot account for all the disparity, because the Netherlands actually suffer a higher energy intensity than the United States, and India and China are large nations as well (albeit with much more dense populations). The important point here is that the United States requires relatively more energy for every incremental increase in economic output than most other well-developed nations. Furthermore, because Americans have few attractive alternatives to cars for transportation, gasoline is a very inelastic good. In other words, gasoline, like food, is an essential good to Americans, and prices do not affect consumption patterns very much. This is born out by the fact that Americans have not significantly reduced their driving habits, despite spiraling oil prices. Energy costs, from the pump to the thermostat, merely eat up more of the American consumer's income.

6) For this reason, the United States is much more susceptible economically to rising energy costs than its global competitor nations. This is exacerbated by the continued weakness of the US Dollar. Consumers shopping for oil at the world price will have more buying power with the British Pound, Euro, or even Canadian Loonie, relative to the US Dollar.

7) This in the midst of the American housing crisis, which is already putting tremendous strain on the American financial system. More and more signs are emerging of an imminent recession in 2008, with the weak employment numbers this week only being the most recent. If world oil prices continue to increase to and above $100/barrel, the flagging American economy is kicked as it is down.

8) Though I've instructed us to lay aside the political issue of Iraq for a moment here, it will play into this scenario in important ways. Aside from the obvious human costs and geopolitical turmoil resulting from the conflict, estimates for its economic cost have ranged from $1-1.5 trillion. The tremendous outlay by the federal government for a war that is costing $1 billion a day is not being financed by taxpayer monies. It is instead being thrown on top the already tremendous federal debt. This debt is contributing to the weak dollar, increasing economic risk, and a strained regime that requires continued confidence among foreign central banks to continue buying up more debt through US treasury bonds. Furthermore, this debt has merely borrowed against the future, with the requirement that it be paid back eventually. The electorate faces talk of a looming Social Security crisis with mass Baby Boomer retirement, plans for universal healthcare, chronic homeland security costs, an inflating defense department budget, and bleeding sores in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unless the economy grows appreciably in future years--and tax revenues increase substantially from present levels--the government will be hard-pressed to pay its debts while addressing the expensive concerns of Baby Boomer retirement, healthcare woes and the War on Terror.

9) If the primary owners of America's national debt in Japan, China, Britain, and the oil-exporting nations decide that the United States is a credit risk, they will cease to finance more government debt. Furthermore, the flagging dollar may likely convince more and more nations to reduce their dollar reserves in favor of the Euro, or a basket of currencies. Without enjoying the unique status of the world reserve currency, the dollar will continue to grow weaker. Thus, imports, and energy imports, most importantly, would grow increasingly expensive for Americans.

10) Beyond all the slogans for reducing our reliance on oil imports, increasing energy independence, and moving past the fossil fuel economy, any significant changes will be costly and take several decades. Infrastructural projects to give consumers and businesses transportation options beyond automobiles will take political will, many years, and many more billions. Furthermore, technologies to make solar or wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels for energy are years off. The "hydrogen economy," if it ever materializes, will take decades to develop proper distribution infrastructure, cost-competitive vehicle offerings, and a cost-effective method of sustainable hydrogen generation. Right now, the vast majority of hydrogen is derived by burning fossil fuels. Similarly, ethanol and biodiesel production right now consumes far more energy than it produces. Since modern agriculture requires chemical fertilizers derived from oil, ethanol producers are literally "growing oil with oil." Since electricity is mostly generated from coal, oil, and gas-fired plants, this offers no way out of the fossil fuel trap. Nuclear plants take over a decade to build, face severe "not in my back yard" opposition, present safety and security concerns, and their electricity is far from "too cheap to meter." The price of natural gas has been increasing right along with world oil prices, and will likely soon be organized into a global market (meaning increasing world demand will bear even more heavily on price domestically). There now exists no viable alternative to gasoline that can match its cost-effectiveness, energy density, and portability.

11) China, home to a quarter of the world's people, has grown 9% per year for the past decade, and shows no signs of slowing. It's average household savings rate is a massive 30%, it is a global creditor rather than a debtor nation, and it shoulders no costly wars or overseas military commitments. The United States spends 48% of all world military spending, almost as much as every other nation combined. China only shoulders a seventh this cost for its military. With endless growth, no debt burden, small military expenditures, and easy sources of domestic capital, China is on increasingly good footing relative to the United States.

Implications: What Does All This Mean?

1) America is a big and self-sufficient enough economy that increased import prices from a weak dollar do not matter much per se. However, increased oil import prices do matter--a lot. As oil gets more expensive from increased world demand, peaking supply, refinery undercapacity, and the weak buying power of the US Dollar, the economy will suffer.

2) Until we are able to transition to a more sustainability energy regime beyond fossil fuels (a generation or more hence), the fossil fuel crunch will hurt the United States, and hurt it more than most other industrialized nations.

3) Transportation costs for both businesses and consumers will be a major and increasing percentage of spending. Finding ways to reduce transportation costs will be decisive. Expect the suburban sprawl of the past half century to begin to reverse, as businesses and consumers realize the benefits of density for energy cost reductions. Workers will choose to live closer to their places of work, and to telecommute more often. Political pressure for light rail options will increase. Also, expect the benefits of the aforementioned clustering to increase, drawing more firms toward metropolitan areas, despite the higher real estate costs.

4) The 20th Century shift from rail to trucking in domestic shipment will also begin to reverse, with the energy efficiency of rail preferred over diesel-thirsty trucking. As demand for rail shipment increases, more investment from the public and private sectors will be forthcoming, increasing the versatility and convenience of rail, and decreasing its cost further. This positive feedback loop will ensure the primacy of rail in domestic shipping.

5) Container shipping will be more and more preferred for international applications, over air shipping, which will only grow more costly. A high premium on fast international shipping will call into question the feasibility of the Just in Time (JIT) inventory strategy pioneered by Toyota and in wide use in global business today. Warehousing costs, though significant, will be more and more preferable to even more significant air shipment costs. Improved inventory models may reduce this problem, but in general the paradigm of expensive real estate and relatively cheap transportation will begin to tilt back in favor of real estate.

6) Economies that can increase their energy intensity will win in the world economy. As energy costs increase, those who can eek out more GDP growth on less energy input will enjoy competitive advantage. For now, this confers much advantage to European and Japanese firms relative to American ones. There are many more variables at play, so this is not to suggest that America will be left behind. However, it will occupy a less competitive position relatively than it has.

7) The United States will face an inevitable and painful day of fiscal reckoning within the next decade. With birthrates declining, the workforce aging, and a glut of Baby Boomers entering their winter years, Social Security outlays will be gigantic. Furthermore, there will be fewer and fewer productive workers feeding into the system for every non-productive retired person drawing from the pot. This problem is far more pronounced in Japan, Singapore, and Europe, where birthrates have now dropped to as low as half the replacement rate (the births per woman required to maintain the population steady). In the US, this fiscal crisis will be compounded by the problem of healthcare (which will be very expensive whether the system is universal or not), the massive federal deficit and debt, and a slowing economy. Furthermore, if the dollar is foresaken as the world reserve currency, and central bankers and investors loose confidence in America's economic future, capital will dry up in a negative feedback loop. With potential sources of capital not forthcoming (from either non-saving American citizens or risk-averse central banks and foreign investors), and with a recessionary economy and large fiscal commitments, the federal government will either have to raise taxes (inflaming the economic distress) or cut back on services to close up the deficit and begin paying back the principal and interest on the national debt.

8) All-in-all, you might want to either demand to your boss that you get paid in Euros, move to Canada, or invest a sizeable portion of your pension or 401K in global markets.

Google Maps

2007-12-21T15:05:00.000-05:00

View Larger Map

Today's Official Lunch Break Activity, and the latest event in my love affair with all things Google, is figuring out "How to Use Google Maps to Win Friends and Influence People." So far I've got this spiffy little offering showing the geographic location of my day job at Competitive Futures, Inc.

Tomorrow, (a well-mapped version of) the world!

The Subprime Mortgage Fiasco

2007-12-20T11:29:00.000-05:00

The most cogent analysis of the recent subprime mortgage fiasco I've yet heard. You'll laugh before you cry.

The Real "Kingdom of Heaven"

2007-12-18T20:04:00.000-05:00

The Kingdom may have been a dud, but its introductory credits hosted one of the most cogent and engaging summations of Saudi-American relations every presented. So, put aside two minutes of your life, and discover what the War on Terror, $3/gallon gasoline, and young women being sentenced to six months jail and 200 lashes for the crime of being raped all mean.

So, just what does the future of Saudi-American relations hold? Recently, veteran petrochemical expert and Georgetown University scholar Dr. Jean-François Seznec maintained to me that Saudi Arabia would supplant Germany as the world's largest chemical exporter by 2015. It's well-known that the Kingdom has the world's largest known reserves of crude oil by far. As the above short points out, the United States will be the world's largest oil consumer for some time. Though Saudi Arabia is not the largest exporter to the United States (contrary to popular belief, that honor falls to Canada), it's 14 percent share is significant. Even so, as Rachel Bronson argued last year in The Washington Post, the relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia more closely resemble that which it maintains with Jordan. Forged and strengthened during the Cold War for the common cause against Communism, the diplomatic ties are more strategic than economic. But, whether for trade or for common cause, the Saudi-American alliance has proven durable.

Clouds loom on the horizon, however. Osama bin Laden, born in Yemen, but reared in Saudi Arabia, is only the most visible manifestation of the discontent with the House of Saud. Long before the September 11th attacks, bin Laden had declared war on the decadent royal family for chummy relations with the West. Fifteen of the nineteen September 11th hijackers were Saudi nationals. Saudis flocked to the jihad being waged against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s, forming the brunt of bin Laden's "Afghan Arabs." They comprise a large percentage of the foreign insurgent fighters in Iraq today.

Ironically, the anti-Communist stance of the royal family and the Cold War United States may have midwifed the current breed of Muslim extremism rife in the Kingdom today. At the time, the best way to deflect atheistic anti-Communism seemed to be to encourage the nascent religious movements then metathesizing in Saudi Arabia and Nasser's Egypt. It was only with the arresting surprise of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that Muslim activists were re-labeled as the enemy. And remember, during the subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA actively armed and financed the Mujahideen "freedom fighters," including Bin Laden's "Afghan Arabs." They (now known as the Taliban) would later use the very same RPGs delivered to them by the U.S. Government against NATO forces a decade later.

Reagan dedicates the Shuttle Columbia to Mujahideen freedom fighters:

Both the Saudis and their American allies must face the bitter harvest of these past choices today. A third of Saudi Arabia's young men (aged 20-24) are unemployed. Saudi Arabia has one of the world's fastest growing population rates, ballooning six-fold since 1960. This is the so-called "oil baby boom" who is now emerging into adulthood. A glut of young, and often-unemployed Saudis is restless about the inordinate level of wealth concentrated among the thousands of members of the royal line, bitter at the ubiquity of foreign expatriate labor which dominates the economy (foreigners make up a third of the Saudi population), inflamed by their leadership's tacit complicity in the American invasion of Iraq, and restless under the weight of a corrupt and moribund regime. As the Saudis with box cutters on September 11th demonstrated, these disaffected young can be dangerously fertile ground for terrorist recruitment.

Will the Saudi regime stand? What kind of economic and geopolitical fallout would result from the regime's collapse? Short of that, can the alliance be maintained in the wake of popular outcry both in the United States and Saudi Arabia?

See the newest World Economic Forum scenario on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates here. Also, read Dr. Seznec's intelligent interview on his love-hate relationship with Saudi Arabia, and his recent article in Foreign Policy concerning Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz's surprising reforms.

New Site Feed

2007-12-17T14:49:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed that we've added automatically updating RSS feeds (what is RSS?) above and to the right column of the Greene Futures blog. The box at the top of this column is a widget which projects the articles we pick to share from our own Google Reader RSS subscriptions. With it, we will publish the most important and interesting pieces from our daily reading (encompassing 1000+ articles daily from 304 independent outlets, including news articles, blog posts, journal offerings, new books, and published reports). Greene Future's regular sources are listed to the bottom right-hand side of the blog. We spend hours every day combing through this mountain of information, running the gamut of world news, foreign affairs, trends, energy developments, scientific findings, technological innovations, environmental issues, business events and economic ramifications.

But for you, dear reader, we provide fertile seeds sorted from the chaff. Meaty, actionable intelligence wrestled from a tangle of information overload.

This is just one step in a series to make this site the most useful depot for its readers in all things related to future trends. There exists no satisfactory list of all the news outlets, futurist thinkers and analysis sources to date. It's a full-time job attempting to track down all the little bits of evidence from every corner of the information sphere, and an even more intimidating task groping toward some understanding of what it all means.

Please make sure and subscribe to the Greene Futures blog feed (click here to subscribe). It will allow you to automatically stay abreast of news, analysis and updates from Greene Futures through your favored RSS Reader (Google Reader, My Yahoo RSS, RSS Reader, etc.). And if you frankly have no idea what I've been talking about with all this RSS nonsense, check out the video below:

The Future of Luxury

2007-12-06T11:21:00.000-05:00

A house in Belgrave Square will soon go on sale for £90million (which is approximately $900 gazillion, for those of you following the plummeting US Dollar). But this doesn’t even set the record for London real estate. That honor goes to a Qatar sheik, who paid £100 million for a Hyde Park penthouse. Speaking of English real estate, the Beckhams have perhaps set the record for most expensive tree house, wrangling with local zoning authorities to get permission for their children to tromp about in a $187,000 lux-fort.

But don’t worry, you too can have a “luxury” tree fort, too (for $50,000 from Neiman Marcus), which brings us to our theme of the day: mass luxury. What does luxury mean in the 21st Century? When all the rest of us can feasibly afford bejeweled iPhones, snakeskin Razr mobiles, golden Zunes, and blingin’ MacBooks, what’s exclusive anymore? A MacLaren baby stroller? No way, every Volvo-driving mom in the suburbs has one of those. How about a bullet-proof baby stroller?

(Disclaimer: Don't worry, no babies are harmed in the recording of this YouTube video, but it is the most insane thing you've ever seen)

Even luxury objects themselves have taken on characteristics of popular culture, kitch and camp. Witness the $100,000 Pepsi can, glam Mr. Potato Head, diamond Christmas tree (Steven Quick jeweler will make you a gold one), and Big Boi's $50,000 diamond-set Nike Air Force Ones.

Spending even astronomical amounts of cash isn’t even any guarantee. Perhaps luxury is experiences? A $20 million vacation to space, anyone? Want even more cache? How about a $30 million trip to the moon, care of Google? Even the new owner of the record $7.3 million vintage Rolls-Royce can’t drive there.

But then again, any crass lout among the nouveaux (ultra) riche can buy their way into such upper-echelon markers. Last year, the number of world billionaires grew by 35 percent, and the number of world millionaire households grew 16 percent to 9.6 million. What’s an aspiring magnate to do when just everyone is eating Yves Saint Laurent designer caviar?

Perhaps material luxury is so 20th Century, to be left behind with all the other gauche manifestations of conspicuous consumption? The traditional luxury industry may just be terrible for the environment. Perhaps the new luxury is conspicuous giving? Is saving the planet the newest status symbol? Certainly if the organic ubiquity of Whole Foods, celebrities smugly wielding hybrid Priuses, and haut eco-couture are any indication, then new exclusivity is the vanguard of conscience. No one can cast you the evil eye when your millions are preserving delicate rainforest ecosystems.

Maybe the only true luxury anymore is attention. Unlike diamond Mr. Potato Heads and rocket flights to the moon, attention truly is limited by the number of eyes and ears to fall upon every one of us jockeying frantically for their favor. So, help me feel luxurious, dear reader, and read on!

-For another interesting meditation on the future of luxury, check out my colleague Eric Garland's newest cover story in The Futurist magazine, "The Experience Economy: The High Life of Tomorrow."

James Howard Kunstler: F*ck the Suburbs

2007-12-05T00:56:00.000-05:00

James Howard Kunstler, author of Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape is angry. Nay, he's foaming at the mouth, slathering rollicking obscenities, spitting fierce vitriolic diatribes lambasting the evil cancer that is the late 20th Century American suburb. Watch him in a TED Conference video, "The Tragedy of Suburbia"

Why move away from the suburbs? Well, they're isolating, with few public spaces, helping to lead to a marked decline of social capital in the United States. Such a social disintegration may be threatening the vigorous associative spirit that De Tocqueville praised in his famous study of American democracy. Once more, the sprawl and lack of public transportation in traditional suburbs makes for constant driving, long commutes, heavy energy use, rampant air pollution and carbon emissions, and the destruction of both open spaces and farm areas. In an age where $3 gas seems like a deal, perhaps the suburbs born from cheap and plentiful oil in the 1950s have reached their obsolescence?

So what will it take to turn this:

Into this?

At least we have some good examples to work from. Here's a list of the most livable cities internationally, according to the (excellent new London-based magazine) Monocle. The only city in the United States given a nod is Honolulu, "a truly global city." And Mercer Human Resource Consulting provides their own list of top 100 cities most desired by "expatriate executives." Zurich again makes an appearance at the top, followed by Geneva, Vancouver and Vienna. Almost all the desirable cities are European, with Honolulu again ranking top for the United States (but only 27th internationally). Generally, German and Swiss cities are top picks.

As for American suburbs, the new urbanism movement has provided some outstanding examples of livable suburbs: The Irvine Ranch planned community in Orange County, Columbia in Maryland, and The Woodlands north of Houston.

William McDonough and Cradle to Cradle

2007-12-03T20:11:00.000-05:00

William McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle, is the most intelligent voice in the clean tech movement right now. In 1999, Time Magazine recognized him as a "hero of the planet." His book itself is published on Durabook "paper," constructed of a paper-like plastic that can be recycled without loosing structural integrity, and is waterproof, to boot (as seen above). McDonough's day-job is as founder of William McDonough + Partners, a leading architectural firm. He's designed the world's largest grass roof (10.4 acres) for a Ford Motor Company plant in Dearborn, Michigan. On the first day, the plant saved Ford $35 million dollars in operating costs. McDonough has been contracted by the Chinese government to build 12 entire cities along the Cradle to Cradle model. If this makes enough business sense to woo billions of dollars from the stereotypically un-environmental Ford Motor Company and People's Republic of China, might it be good enough for you?

His Cradle to Cradle innovation is to imagine a "technological metabolism" modeled upon the "biological metabolism" which we're all well-familiar. There is no waste in nature, dead animals and plants are broken down and turned into nutrients for the soil (even rocks and metal become the iron, zinc, magnesium "minerals" in our dinner). Waste=Food. Materials are then not created and then thrown away, they are constructed, broken down and re-constructed in an sustainable, wasteless circuit. Traditional recycling, on the other hand, is mere "downcycling" because the papers and plastics that are recycled become lower and lower quality with each recycling until they are useless and are thrown into landfills anyway. The recycling process itself is often more polluting that simply making a new plastic bottle. Why not make goods that can be created, destroyed, and then recreated, without any waste? Why not design them that way from the start? It saves materials, and therefore money. The trees are happy, and so are the accountants.

Watch him speak to the TED Conference in 2005:

Welcome to Greene Futures

2007-12-02T19:40:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Greene Futures, a forum to explore and harness watershed events, important movements and future trends.

The pace of change, the level of advance and the sheer unimaginable volume of information available to billions of eyes and ears unfolds toward us today in a dizzying torrent. And no one--Cincinnati office worker, Nicaraguan fruit farmer, Wall Street venture capitalist or Darfur refugee--is immune to the immense and often confusing undercurrents pulling inexorably into tomorrow.

How can you plan a life with blind doubt about what tomorrow will bring? How can you build a house without knowing what the housing market brings, structure your investment portfolio with no inkling of the next big thing, create laws without understanding their effects or venture to feed the world's poor without knowing how? Our decisions now not only build upon or hedge against what tomorrow will bring--wise action now creates desired futures.

It is the humble project of Greene Futures to wield the most powerful tool available to human beings--information--to both anticipate and thrive from the future. Information, like any tool, can be winnowed from crude beginnings into a fine precision instrument. We aim to hack through the bramble of words and pictures that assault us daily, in order to emerge with strategic intelligence. Guidance you can use now. Direction to give you a superior edge, to help you thrive. Power to emerge from the fray of the fast and furious, to reign high in a globalized world.

Foresight and relevance. Ability and opportunity. Wisdom and conscience.

Let the conversation begin...