Is the President a Dry Drunk?

By: Dana Blankenhorn

It’s a tough question that grew more urgent to me yesterday, when I watched George W. Bush comparing Iraq to World War II while New Orleans sank under Lake Pontchartrain.

If you look at the article on the syndrome posted at About.Com, the answer would have to be "no." The article states tha the "dry drunk" has never gotten through the grieving process in the loss of alcohol, and recommends several steps toward recovery, which Bush seems to have engaged in:

Develop a hobby.

Get healthy.

Improve your mind.

Spend time with your family.

But in his book "Bush on the Couch," Dr. Justin Frank insists he is just that, and more. He blames his mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush, calling her emotionally distant, and says the death of his sister Robin triggered things.

The untreated alcoholic who has simply stopped drinking treats anxiety as an enemy, and with good reason: He is often more challenged by anxiety because he has lost his time-tested means of numbing its sting…Bush manages his anxiety through his inflexible daily routines… But when routines fail, denial kicks in as the treatment of choice to manage the potential development of internal chaos.

The President’s August stands as a great example of denial and routine. He abandoned his Crawford vacation when directly challenged by Cindy Sheehan’s "Camp Casey," and then we had the San Diego trip, where he spread the delusional idea that the Iraq War (where citizens have not been asked to sacrifice) is a precise analogue of World War II (where it was demanded of everyone).

In an interview for Capitol Hill Blue, Frank calls Bush a bully who is driven by fear, and says this is part-and-parcel of the syndrome.

"The pattern of blame and denial, which recovering alcoholics work so hard to break, seems to be ingrained in the alcoholic personality; it's rarely limited to his or her drinking," he says. "The habit of placing blame and denying responsibility is so prevalent in George W. Bush's personal history that it is apparently triggered by even the mildest threat."

In his book, Dr. Frank also speculates that Bush sometimes drinks, but without evidence I have to consider that a spurious charge, over-the-top.

The charge is not new. In the liberal press, Katherine Van Wormer made it in 2002, at the height of Bush’s popularity, and treated it as old news. Malachy McCourt went further in his short 2004 book, Bush Lies in State, saying he’s still an alcoholic:

Unfortunately, the charge has yet to be taken-up by conservatives and, as a result, it has not been given any credence by the mainstream media.

However the idea of Bush as a dry drunk is flowing increasingly through the blogosphere, becoming a meme. Here it is and here it is and here it is again. (Want more? Here.)

Many, many stories that networks and big newspapers didn’t want covered have become common currency in the last few years, driven by the demands of ordinary bloggers.

Will this be another one?

Dana Blankenhorn dana@a-clue.com
Mooreslore Blog
ZDNet OpenSource
Editor: voic.us, A-Clue.Com

Sample postings from members' blogs

David Isenberg post a comment on Bush on his isen.blog.

And Dana Blankenhorn has posted this about The Big One on his Corante blog.

More as they come in.

Thanks,

Jock

Can the Democratic party evolve?

Daniel C. Dennett's "Show me the Science" op-ed, published in the August 28th edition of the NY Times, perfectly defines evolution as a powerful, goal seeking [heuristic], approach to life: life, not death. Contrast this with the item about getting advice on living from the web site of Ayatollah Sistani: a very rigid rule-based [algorithmic] approach to living. But, to give the West its due, there are many examples of rules dominated approaches to life that enshrine hierarchy and privilege in a the West's top-down, hub and spoke organizational model.

The clash of these two basic world views, rules vs goals, is tectonic in nature. The goal seeking I talk about only has principles that describe a general means towards an abstract objective, such as justice as fairness, but does not specify one right answer.

The real problem is rule-based solutions, because the rules encode the possibility of a one right answer approach. See for, example, how the FCC's algorithmic approach to spectrum management compares to the goal seeking approach in Open Spectrum and cognitive SDRs [Software Defined Radios].

Or look at the US Constitution. It is largely a set of principles for working towards the goal of democratic self government. It is not a cook book of rigid rules.

Or the "scientific method" is a set of principles for seeking the goal of reducing the imperfections in our knowledge of how the world works. These are all examples of heuristic goal seeking -- but NOT of suggesting there is one right answer, which, btw, imperfect knowledge makes impossible to know in the first case.

So the principles that guide heuristic goal seeking acknowledge the impossibility of one right answer for all time but not the possibility of reducing the imperfection of our knowledge.

Now if only the Democratic party could articulate a true goal seeking politics of Justice as Fairness for we the people, they might find a way to escape from what Frank Rich so aptly describes in his essay of August 28th in the NY Times: the utter irrelevance and intellectual bankruptcy of today's Democratic party. See "The Vietnamization of Bush's Vacation" - Section 4, page 10,.

The Democrats have a huge opportunity to evolve into a vibrant party of exciting ideas and values. Why don't they? Internet architecture and peer-to-peer applications are clear examples of new ways to look at the world, how it works, and how human activities might be better organized.

Is it possible we could once again have a true two party system? Could there be a future where the GOP is the retrograde, hub and spoke, rules based party of the money, on the one hand, and the new Democratic party is the peer-to-peer party of the people on the other. Could the future offer us a real choice between a party of the old guard plutocracy promoting personal gain to the exclusion of the commons v.s. the party of the people supporting both the commons and private wealth?

The dots are there, all we Democrats have to do is start to connect them.

Broadband Perspectives

It's the applications enabled by the connection’s quality

Not everything can be photographed in natural light. In photography, you can set up a camera in a very dark room and leave the lens wide open for ever and get zero exposure on the negative if the number of photons falling on the film per unit of time is below some threshold. This has a fancy name: Reciprocity Failure - which describes certain non-linear aspects of film's response to light levels.

Well wireless bits are just electromagnetic photons. So, by analogy, if not enough bits are available per unit of time, some things are simply impossible. The "exposure" is never realized and is meaningless.

Consider, if you will, the situation in the Pacific island Kingdom of Tonga. On Tonga it costs a local ISP about $13K per month for a link that provides 2 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up - with the increased latency of a geosynchronous satellite connection as opposed to a terrestrial connection. An islander will pay about $2,500 per month US for 512 Kbps down/128 Kbps up. With this very limited capacity, how realistic is it to expect that people living on Tonga will find it “normal” to work with applications that use large files, such as the Democracy Now files mentioned below? The flow of bits as electromagnetic photons, combined with their substantial latency, is such that it prevents the islanders from benefiting from modern applications running on high capacity, high quality connections.

Note: Latency is another dimension of a network that must be taken into consideration when evaluating the sorts of applications a connection can support. Some readers will remember the “latency” that made overseas calls so interesting in the past. Others may have experienced problems introduced by latency in VoIP conversations. The latency dimension is usually overlooked in discussions of the quality of a connection. In general, the lower the latency in a packet switched network, the higher the quality. Too often all that is discussed is the cost of a connection and the bandwidth of a connection. To keep this brief note simpler, latency is not further considered here. It needs to be more fully addressed in another paper.

To explore the implications of very large files, we can look into Democracy Now's new recommendation that the members of their network use bittorrent/Azureus to down load the daily TV show they produce. These are about 700 megabyte files in high definition AVI format -- not simple video postage stamps ala Rocketboom.

Now, ideally it would take less than 1 hour to download a one hour TV show. In an ideal world, a connection with Comcast’s best 6 Mbps capacity would theoretically take about 16 minutes to FTP a 700 megabyte Democracy Now show file. In the non ideal real world the times would be longer. This strongly suggest that one of Verizon's new $15.00/mo 768 Kbps connections [.768 Mbps] could take at least 7.8X longer, or just over 2 hours FTP this same file.

By way of comparison, and as a competition check, it is worth pointing out that today a citizen of Hong Kong, with a readily available connection with 1 Gbps capacity, could, theoretically, FTP this same 700 MB file in less than 6 seconds - 167X faster than a Comcast customer in the US.

The fact of the matter is that these ideal performance are rare indeed. But for the purposes of this paper they serve to create a reasonable apples to apples comparison. Note: P-2-P distribution solutions eliminate the bottlenecks created by very limited numbers of FTP file servers, but the many variables that make P-2-P effective also make comparisons very hard. Thus I used FTP as a source of base line comparisons.

All in all, this means that a connections with a capacity of 768 Kbps is 7.8X more difficult than a connection with a capacity of 6 Mbps. And that this same 6 Mbps capacity is 167X less responsive than the capacity of a 1 Gbps connection in Hong Kong. This makes working with large files a difficult choice for the citizen of Tonga, a possibility for a citizen of America, and a no brainer in Hong Kong. Thus the capacity of our connections to send and receive bits can be a barrier to applications, such as the Democracy Now program, that assume large file capacities --or it can be an enabler. Is this justice as fairness for all? Do we wish to institutionalize the notion that some of us are more equal than the others of us? What else? What other applications does too little capacity, or too much latency, render too difficult and thus meaningless?

What do we want for our citizens? The best platform possible or should we be willing to ask them to settle for 1/167th of what our competitors have to work with?

Given the above, how should we properly define the term broadband? What is the capacity/latency threshold below which a connection is not considered to be broadband? I suggest that the lowest threshold is 10 Mbps. To be competitive on the global stage, we should consider a threshold of at least 100 Mbps, if not 1 Gbps.

This leads to the following thought experiment. Ask yourself how many megabytes per day a modern and well connected participant in a network of the near future might want to download per day on average. 700 megabytes of Democracy Now + X megabytes of Podcasts + Y megabytes of vidcasts + Z megabytes of what ever else was of interest PLUS all of the megabytes of our creations we wish to share with others. And all of this needs to be downloaded/uploaded in some reasonable amount of our time. The question is, what is reasonable? What will give us a robust platform for a sustainable economy in a networked world economy?

This thought experiment suggest that our average, actively engaged, networked citizen might well require at least 100 Mbps of capacity just for openers. Consider the case in Tonga where 512 Kbps of capacity downstream costs about $2500 per month. Consider, then, the case in Japan, and else where, where 100 Mbps of capacity is becoming the norm. Does Boston want to be like Tonga or does Boston want to be more competitive than the offerings in Japan, Hong Kong etc? It makes a real difference as to the applications that can be supported in a meaningful way.

Here, for example, are some current prices in Hong Kong. They offer an interesting perspective of what is possible today in a competitive environment:

1 Gbps [symmetrical] @ $215 US/mo = $0.22 per Mbps

100 Mbps [symmetrical] @ $34 US/mo = $0.34 / Mbps

10 Mbps [symmetrical] @ $16 / mo. = $1.60 / Mbps

Or more generally:

The Kingdom of Tonga: Consumer rate is $4883 per 1 Mbps [asymmetrical] for .512 Mbps of capacity = 533X more costly than U.S;

U.S.: (Comcast) consumer rate is $9.17 per 1 Mbps for 6 Mbps of capacity = 42X more costly than Hong Kong

Hong Kong: Consumer rate is $0.22 per 1 Mbps [symmetrical] for 1 Gbps of capacity. This is a stunning 167X performance advantage over Comcast’s best current offering - for under 4X the cost [$55 vs $215].

If we pay more for less in Boston, can we truly claim to be world leader in connectivity? Today a person living in Boston with a 6 Mbps connection is enjoying a capacity that is about 12X greater than that enjoyed by an islander on Tonga, but is only 1/167 of the capacity available in Hong Kong. The fact is that a premium consumer grade connection capacity in Boston is a lot closer to the conditions in the Kingdom of Tonga than those in Hong Kong.

Note: It does not matter what approach a society takes to offer their citizens truly Big Broadband capacities. The fact is that these real world capacities are the realities we have to compete with today and going forward. How they are provisioned does not alter the fact that they set the bar for competition in the network of interconnected modern societies, their markets and their commons.

There are further interesting implications.

1] How much back haul would be required to support 1 million users each with 100 Mbps of symmetrical capacity? With 1Gbps of symmetrical capacity? And what would the latency of these connections be?

2] In a P-2-P one-for-all-and-all-for-one environment each person increases his or her assets per download but also uploads 120% to 150% of what they download [share ratio of 1.2 - 1.5] as their contribution back to the commons [Cooperative gain]. What, then, are the implications for the demands on the infrastructure for the distribution of bits in this quantity within a 24 hour time frame? Currently, the cable companies have no idea what the upper limit on upstream demand is. We suspect they are afraid to discover what the answer is.

3] The above illustrates that it is already possible today to integrate our drives for creating community with our drives for increasing our private wealth. We can do this now in such a way that the integration is greater than the sum of the parts. This cooperative gain creates the value that will drive our future economy. This is also the cooperative gain that B. Franklin saw as the means to creating and sustaining a middle class.

All of this demonstrates why it is important that American cities, towns and counties use Buckminster Fuller's concept of Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science as they consider the best set of principals that will guide them towards the goals implied by the vision above.

Just what sort of heuristic, First Mile Out, P-2-P, low latency , mesh network, supported by what kind of Cognitive Software Defined Radios, should we be anticipating? Will we be ready for 1 Gbps WiFi capacity? It is on the horizon. Or rather, what sort of principals will allow us to grow into the above anticipated vision?

Now how do we get our elected officials -- and their advisors -- to understand all of this?

Bush Approval Rating: 36% - and falling

The unravelling of Bush world is gathering momentum.

President George W. Bush's 36% approval rating in the most recent, August 22, American Research Group, Inc. polls, is lower than President Nixon's 39% rating at the time of Watergate! Yet this is NOT being covered by the Main Stream Media.

Clearly the tide is turning against Bush. The great and patient American people are showing that they no longer approve of Bush and his polices. Most interestingly, he has lost the undecided voters:

Among Independents (28% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 21% approve and 72% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job as president.

Be sure to scroll down on the report and look at the historical polling data to see the trend: increasing dissatisfaction and falling confidence in President Bush.

See also: Demonizing Dissent and Salon's Bush's new Iraq push: Editorials say don't bother

Two questions:

1] Why is this not front page news? Especially since in supports the criticism of Bush coming from Cindy Sheehan and the GOP's own Senator Hagel?

-- In Fulbright's footsteps: By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist - August 24, 2005

On Sunday, Hagel moved a step closer to Fulbright. On ABC's ''This Week," he said, ''We're locked into a bogged down problem, not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."

''Stay the course is not a policy," Hagel said, adding: ''I think by any standard when you analyze two and a half years in Iraq where we have put in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost almost 1,900 Americans, over 14,000 wounded, electricity production down, oil production down -- any measurement, any standard you apply to this, we're not winning."

Hagel, the second-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, has been building to this ever since it was clear that weapons of mass destruction would never be found in Iraq. In September 2003, Hagel said the Bush administration ''did a miserable job of planning for a post-Saddam Iraq. They treated many in Congress, most of the Congress, like a nuisance."

In May 2004, he noted with dismay how the committee chairman, Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, was left out of foreign policy planning. This summer Hagel told US News and World Report: ''The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

2] Where is the expression of the alternative and affirmative vision that fills the void created by the collapse of the public's trust and faith in President Bush? Where are the responsible "adults" who will tell us the truth and not, as Pual Krugman writes, "prettify history"?

But we aren't doing the country a favor when we present recent history in a way that makes our system look better than it is. Sometimes the public needs to hear unpleasant truths, even if those truths make them feel worse about their country.

Not to be coy: election 2000 may be receding into the past, but the Iraq war isn't. As the truth about the origins of that war comes out, there may be a temptation, once again, to prettify the story. The American people deserve better.

The Democratic party, stuck in the 20th century, is missing in action -- just when we need their leadership the most.

We've Been Lied to. Big Time. For a Long Time

The first really big lie after the Civil War was in 1886. As Thom Hartman writes in his book Unequal Protection:

Because of a mistaken interpretation of a Supreme Court reporter's notes in an 1886 railroad tax case, corporations are now legally considered "persons," equal to humans and entitled to many of the same protections guaranteed only to humans by the Bill of Rights - a clear contradiction of the intent of the Founders of the United States. The results of this "corporate personhood" have been:

* Unequal taxes
* Unequal privacy
* Unequal wealth
* Unequal trade
* Unequal media
* Unequal regulation
* Unequal responsibility for crime
* Unequal protection from risk
* Unequal citizenship and access to the commons

Oddly enough, this corporate personhood had been sought by the rail roads for many years. Unsurprisingly, the court reporter who inserted the big lie into the record was a former rail road baron.

This lie was the product of greed and a blindness to what Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin saw as an essential condition for a successful modern society: the integration of our inherent drives for community with our inherent drive to individual achievement into something far greater than the sum of the parts. Franklin's strong belief in this can be deduced from his creation of the Junto Club in 1727 and from the fact that he intentionally did not patent his inventions of the bifocal, the metal stove, nor the lightning rod.

Isaacson writes in his excellent biography of Franklin that Smith "cited Frankin's tract [Obervations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751) in his 1776 classic, The Wealth of Nations ... " {page 150}]. We also know from Isaacson that Franklin and Smith met at least twice in Scotland. They met first in 1759 [page 196] and again in Edinburgh in the summer of 1771. Smith "reportedly showed him some early chapters of the Wealth of Nations that he was then writing" [Isaacson, page 261]. How did Franklin influence Smith? Did he slyly persuade Smith to address his Wealth of Nations to the audience of the Junto and the rising artisan class in the colonies?

What Smith and Franklin appear to have understood is that a society in which either the market or the commons is valued alone is, in fact, pathological. One without the other leads to bizarre behaviors which reasonablely quickly lead to a collapse. The history of the Soviet Union comes to mind. The history of the United States may yet prove the inadequacy of a monomaniacal focus on the market and the bottom line to the exclusion of the commons.

The big lie of 1886, which set the stage, has been followed by a number of other whoppers. It started the conditioning that lulled us into accepting these false stories that are opposed to our best interests and are inimical to Democracy.

1]The WTO -- See The Yes Men if you want a hilarious illustration of this. This, of course, has been an equal opportunity false story told by both the Republicans and the Democrats.

2] Election Frauds committed to perpetuate and secure the profit only view of the world for the benefit of the plutocracy and the detriment of the many;

3] Bush's alternate reality, not fact based, stories on Global Warming, Energy Independence, Environmental Protection [Clear Skies anyone? Healthy Forests Restoration Act?] and Education [No Child Left Behind] are but a few examples of the lies we the people have been told in the name of the distorted corporate view of the world.

4] And the Grand Whopper of all of the Bush Corp. lies, the falsehoods told to justify Bush's optional and unprovoked invasion of Iraq, as revealed by the Downing Street Memos.

The great challenge to us is to NOT throw the babies out with the wash water. If we are to recover our democratic traditions and secure our future, we will need to have both a healthy market and a healthy commons. It would be serious error to see the natural tension between the drive to build private wealth with the drive to create a brilliant commons as a binary choice. To replace our current single minded focus on the market with a single minded focus on the commons would be a terrible mistake with predictably negative and distorted results.

The question is, once we expose the lies we have been seduced with, how will we reinvigorate the vision of Franklin [and Smith?] that a strong Democracy depends upon a strong middle class, emerging from a well integrated and dynamically balanced system of commons and market?

Do we have what it takes to look in the mirror and admit we have been seduced by lies and abandoned by the liars? Can we handle the pain and conflict of that wrenching cognitive dissonance? We must find that courage if we want to reclaim our birthright: a strong and vibrant democracy for, by and of we the people.

No Paper Trail Left Behind:

Cross posted from Project Censored:

The Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election

By Dennis Loo, Ph.D.
Cal Poly Pomona
ddloo@csupomona.edu

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." (Through the Looking Glass)

In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2, 2004 presidential election, you must also believe all of the following extremely improbable or outright impossible things.(1)

The post then goes on to list 18 items that are in fact completely unbelievable. And then continues with:

The Emperor (and the Electoral Process) Have No Clothes

The preceding list recounts only some of the irregularities in the 2004 election since it ignores the scores of instances of voter disenfranchisement that assumed many different forms (e.g., banning black voters in Florida who had either been convicted of a felony previously or who were “inadvertently” placed on the felons list by mistake, while not banning convicted Latino felons(14); providing extraordinarily few voting machines in predominately Democratic precincts in Ohio; disallowing Ohio voters, for the first time, from voting in any precinct when they were unable to find their assigned precincts to vote in; and so on). A plethora of reasons clearly exists to conclude that widespread and historic levels of fraud were committed in this election.

Indeed, any one of the above highly improbables and utterly impossibles should have led to a thorough investigation into the results. Taken as a whole, this list points overwhelmingly to fraud. The jarring strangeness of the results and the ubiquity of complaints from voters (e.g., those who voted for Kerry and then saw to their shock the machine record their votes as being for Bush), require some kind of explanation, or the legitimacy of elections and of the presidency would be imperiled.

The explanations from public officials and major media came in three forms. First, exit polls, not the official tallies, were labeled spectacularly wrong. Second, the so-called “moral values” voters expressed in the now ubiquitous “red state/blue state” formula, were offered as the underlying reason for Bush’s triumph. And third, people who brought forth any of the evidence of fraud were dismissed as “spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists” while mainstream media censored the vast majority of the evidence of fraud so that most Americans to this day have never heard a fraction of what was amiss. I will discuss each of these three responses, followed by a discussion of the role of electronic voting machines in the 2002 elections that presaged the 2004 election irregularities, and then wrap up with a discussion of these events’ significance taken as a whole.

Read the whole of this excellent essay at: http://tinyurl.com/7nbct

The Emperor is Naked!

By: Dana Blankenhorn

Cindy Sheehan has been able to demonstrate just how naked the Emperor is, and how naked the Empire is.

No one else could, because everyone else was afraid. Howard Dean said "we broke it, we own it." John Kerry supported it and couldn't back away from it.

This is how Democrats felt forced to respond, because they'd been stuck into a political wilderness for a generation by Vietnam. They were afraid to equate Iraq with Vietnam, fearing political wilderness, fearing the chains that had bound liberalism and the cause of human rights for a generation.

Well, Cindy Sheehan broke through that fear. She lost her son. It transformed her. (It didn't transform her husband or her other kids, but everyone's journey is different.)

By putting that transformation in our face, and in the face of George W. Bush, she is making a change in us. Damn the past, damn the present, our kids are dying. The Emperor and Empire really are naked.

There is no way at this point for the Emperor to appear clothed again, and his supporters know it.

That's why they're acting as they are toward Sheehan. It's like the crowd in the story, at first. Of course the Emperor's New Clothes are beautiful. You're just a stupid little boy. You just can't see the big picture. Stupid. Little. Boy.

Stupid Little Boy, says Cindy Sheehan? Look at him, look at the Little Boy. Look at Casey. You call him Stupid, you call me Stupid?

Maybe we were. We were stupid because we believed in you. And look at what it's gotten us. My son is dead! And this is no fairy tale.

Khattam-Shud. The end, no more. You said that to him. I say that to you. The end to the past, the end to the Empire, the end to the fear.

You see, we have to get past Vietnam in order to deal with Iraq. The whole 2004 campaign was a failure on that score. God, the Democrats wound up nominating a decorated Vietnam veteran -- a veteran of the War and the War Against the War -- creating a campaign that fought that war (and that War Against The War) all over again. With the same result as before. History wasted on irrelevancy.

The clothes of the Emperor, you see, are based on a powerful magic called Denial. Denial that Vietnam was deservedly lost, necessarily lost, fairly lost. It was those others, you see -- the press, the pundits, the academics, the kids, the peaceniks, the hippies, the Hollywood elites -- they stabbed us in the back, like the Jews did to Germany in World War I.

The Empire is a fight by Denial against those enemies. We walked right into it. We deserved to lose.

We went right after their thick metaphysical armor. It takes a different, more powerful magic, a magic of today, to make that armor disappear, so people see the naked truth.

Cindy Sheehan has that magic. It is in the face of her son. Her dead son. Our dead son. Our dead sons, and daughters. And others’ as well.

My stand on all this is simple. Acknowledge International Law. Give Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the whole lot, to the International Court of Criminal Justice. Throw our entire nation on the mercy of that honorable court. We can no longer sort it out -- let others more dispassionate have at it.

And get out. We've lost. We were the Bad Guys in this one. We ran the Blitzkrieg and got the Resistance. We are worse than Saddam, worse than Osama. Never liberators, always Empire Builders. Imperialists. We have met the real Evil Doers and it is us.

That's the truth. It’s the hard truth everyone was afraid to see, and say, until now.

And the truth shall make you free.

May our country not pull the whole temple down on its head before it understands that, and acts. Already the pillars of oil drums are trembling, the roof of dollars over our heads is coming down.

The Emperor is Naked! The Empire is a Lie!

Dana Blankenhorn dana@a-clue.com
Mooreslore Blog/
ZDNet OpenSource
Editor: voic.us & A-Clue.Com

Cindy Sheehan, War, and Denial

Texan Jon Lebkowsky has a fine post over on his blog:

August 16, 2005
Cindy Sheehan, War, and Denial

Politicos and activists working overtime were unsuccessful in penetrating national denial about the nature and causes of the war in Iraq, but a single determined mother, driven by grief and a growing sense that something's not right, seems to be having an effect, despite attempts by (I'll say this tactfully) her critics to undermine her credibility. What Christopher Hitchens refers to as dreary sentimental nonsense is interpreted differently by Sheehan's many supporters, perhaps as an awakening of American conscience. Almost 1500 Americans have died in combat since the war begin in March 2003. The war was actually an American invasion of another country, which should have been shocking in itself, and it was justified by a lie (Sadaam's weapons of mass destruction), which definitely should have been shocking... and some were indeed shocked, a few asked hard questions about the war, but it seemed to fade into the background noise behind more compelling issues... whether Scott Peterson killed his wife Laci, whether Michael Jackson molested children at Neverland Ranch, whether athletes were pumping steroids, whether Brad left Jennifer for Angelina....

Snip --------

Francis Perkins: Cooperation and Mutuality in 1935

The 70th anniversary of Social Security is fast upon us. I recommend that you go to the link below to NPR's On Point radio show for a very interesting segment on the origins of Social Security. Click on "Closing Segment" Then scroll down to the Closing Segment to listen to Francis Perkins, the first woman Cabinet member, in a 1935 talk on the need for cooperation and mutuality to protect all of us from the unknown vagaries of the market.

The history, the context, of her achievement is fascinating.

Today's political leaders appear to be leading the forces that reject cooperation and mutuality as an organic part of American culture [Social Security, Social safety nets, etc].

On the other hand, those of use who look at the world from the perspective of citizens who are peers acting in their roles as members and participants of networks based on Internet principals see things quite differently.

Can it be that the fundamental conflict on Social Security is really about the validity and appropriateness of a world view that makes cooperation and mutuality a core principal?

Consider that more than a few economists and regulators insist that the term "consumer" is the correct term when talking about members of online networks. They flat out reject the term "citizen". Perhaps this is because they have never used a bittorrent client like Azureus which reminds you, as a function of the software, when you quit an upload if your share ratio is less than 1! Not having experienced this modern instance of "cooperation and mutuality" they are unable to understand the benefit of running your share ratio up to 1.2 or higher, but not necessarily above 1.5. Could it be that they have no idea what a "share ratio" is? Could it be that they have no idea how to monetize this cooperative gain from collective action? Could it be that they have forgotten that if is as important to build the common good as it is to build private wealth?

Perhaps they would find it instructive to use Azureus to legally download, and then VLC to watch, edge created content such as the film Star Wars Revelations and the series The.Scene.

Francis Perkins understood the value of cooperation and mutuality in 1935. Benjamin Franklin understood this in 1727. What do and an organic aspect of our culturewe have to do to once again restore this as a fundamental principal of our democracy?

Globalisation is an Anomaly and Its Time is Running Out

Here is an interesting post over on Common Dreams

Cheap energy and relative peace helped create a false doctrine by James Howard Kunstler
Published on Thursday, August 4, 2005 by the Guardian (UK)

The big yammer these days in the United States is to the effect that globalisation is here to stay: it's wonderful, get used to it. The chief cheerleader for this point of view is Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times and author of The World Is Flat. The seemingly unanimous embrace of this idea in the power circles of America is a marvellous illustration of the madness of crowds, for nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that globalisation is now a permanent fixture of the human condition.

...

Viewed through this lens, the sunset of the current phase of globalisation seems dreadfully close to the horizon. The American public has enjoyed the fiesta, but the blue-light special orgy of easy motoring, limitless air-conditioning, and super-cheap products made by factory slaves far far away is about to close down. Globalisation is finished. The world is about to become a larger place again.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

Political Network Topologies

How do we understand politics? In some recent discussions I’ve been in, I am finding two popular models. One is of the citizen as consumer. The campaign manufactures political material for the citizen to consume. The goal of the campaign is to get citizens to consume more of your ‘stuff’ than your opponents’. The cynical can find less polite words to use than ‘stuff’. This can lead to great discussions about marketing, advertising and branding. However, it doesn’t do much for democracy.

Another model that is popular these days is that of the family, the political leader as strong father or nurturing mother. This too is paternalistic, or maternalistic, and doesn’t do much for democracy either.

In response to the second model, I wrote a suggestion that perhaps we need to the sassy big brother model of family politics, “Enough! Just grow up already!”. To me, that is a way of understanding the line from Gov. Dean that I often quote, “The biggest lie people like me tell people like you is that if you vote for me, I’ll solve all your problems. The truth is, you have the power.”

So, what is this power that Gov. Dean has suggested that we have? Perhaps a better model of understanding political power is to look at networks. I am currently reading Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications” by Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarfeld. It was published in 1955 and draws heavily on research done on how people formed their opinions in the 1940 presidential election.

The flow of information from the mass media and the importance of personal discussions that are outlined there are very similar to discussions about mass media and personal discussions today. Blogs are just a new way of doing what people have done for ages.

How do we understand the role of blogs, mailing lists, discussions at the beauty parlor, and so on? It seems as if a useful model isn’t consumers or children in some family, but nodes in a network. Yes, there are some people that are satisfied to simply receive information and act on it in the voting booth. These people are the consumers or the children. From a network perspective, they are the leaf nodes, receiving information and acting upon it, but having very limited power.

The more interesting nodes in complicated networks are the connectors, those nodes that receive information, process it, and pass information on to other nodes. These are the nodes that have grown up already, that have the power, and are truly promoting democracy. As they grow, they establish more connections and become more influential.

So, if we are interested in promoting Greater Democracy and moving past broadcast politics, perhaps we should spend less time talking about framing the message or the exact content of the message, and instead help build a stronger mesh of interconnected nodes in a political network topology.

Democracy can only be created, not consumed

Citizens are NOT consumers of Democracy. The FCC's last two chairmen have referred to we the people as being mere one dimensional consumers. For a recent example, see David Isenberg's comments on FCC Chairman Martin's new The Four Internet Freedoms.

The essential and fundamental objection to the Martin's suggestion that we are not citizens, but only mere consumers, is that it is totally anti-democratic and contrary to the spirit of America's founding principles.

Democracy is a process of continuous creation by citizens practicing self government. It is not a product from a 3rd party to be consumed. Thus, to relegate citizens to the status of simple consumers, is to attack the very foundation of our experiment in democracy. Democracy can only be kept alive if we citizens are engaged daily in its production.

I suspect, also, that the citizens who work daily to create and share democracy function as what we might today call a distributed peer to peer network that is subject to both Reed's and Metcalf's laws: The more who participate, the greater the value of the network.

I am first and fore most a citizen who is actively engaged in the creation and distribution of democracy. I am a consumer of commodities and celebrity last and least. To this end, I recommend that we all reconsider Benj. Franklin's Junto Club of 1727 as a model within which the commons and the market work together so that each may thrive. Note that Franklin, in order to support the commons, did NOT patent his lightening rod, his invention of bifocals, nor his metal stove.

Humbug to the small minds at the FCC who pursue a goal to impose upon us citizens, in all of our many dimensions, the corporate view of the world as created and delimited by unregulated free market capitalism, driven principally by consumerism and celebrity.

Consider, if you will, that the principles of democracy, as spelled out by the Founders, create a goal seeking, or heuristic, operating system which supports the various applications of our society. Sample applications running on top to the Founding OS might be: market capitalism, the commons, education, social safety net, environmental stewardship, religion and so forth.

Martin's mistake, and the mistake made by the far right ideologues, is to suggest that unregulated free market capitalism is the Operation System, rather than but one of many applications. Capitalism, like Java, needs to operate in a carefully bounded sand box. In Adam Smith's view, this sandbox was defined and controlled by the norms and values of middle class Victorian society. Smith never intended his vision to exist in the wild outside of the sandbox, unregulated and unfettered. Such a condition would be pathological, as we are seeing for ourselves today.

The question today, then, is what is a modern re-statement of the Founding OS and the role of we the people in re-creating democracy every day? What is the 21st century vision that yields this re-statement of the principals of democracy? Such a statement would starkly reveal the poverty of the misguided notion that market capitalism is more than an application. It is not, and never can be, the primary and superior operating principle for an experiment in democratic self governance.

Democrats, where are you?