Moving On

It's been fun writing here over the past few months. I think I've learned a thing or two about blogging, and hopefully you've had fun reading some of my offbeat ideas. However, as time has gone on I've found that writing on Blogger has its limits, functionally and otherwise.

So Quantum Sense is moving over to Wordpress. The new blog has some handy dandy features - including a "tag cloud" (Ooooo) - and I look forward to developing it further.

Be sure to drop by!


Dave Higgins

Of Moles and Squeegee Men

Now that January 20th has come and gone, the Bush League has departed from DC like unruly guests who cleaned out the liquor cabinet and the wine cellar and generally trashed the place. As we start to pick up the pieces and straighten the furniture, a question persists: should we call the cops or should we just pretend it never happened?

Many of the DC regulars want to make pretend and "just get on with things." As Glenn Greenwald noted:

There are few viewpoints, if there are any, which trigger more fervent agreement across the political and media establishment than the view that George Bush, Dick Cheney and other top officials should not be criminally investigated, let alone prosecuted, for the various laws they have broken over the last eight years.

The reasoning for this "let bygones be bygones" comes in a variety of flavors. The Washington Post's Richard Cohen argued that the Devil (aka Osama bin Laden) made us forget ourselves and our constitution and begin jailing people without charges and then torturing them:

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.

Cohen's Post colleauge Ruth Marcus, on the other hand, strikes a pragmatic pose:

I'm coming to the conclusion that what's most crucial here is ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated. In the end, that may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right.

Mr. Greenwald is outraged by this attitude because the Justice Department continues to hound the lawyer-mole who first told a New York Times reporter about Bush's illegal NSA spying program. It certainly seems unfair to persecute an individual for revealing criminal and unconstitutional behavior at the same time pundits and politicians want to give the "evil doers" a free pass.

The New York Times' Frank Rich also supports investigation and possible prosecution, to regain our country's honor:

While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed.

Beyond the whole matter of being a nation of laws and all, Mr. Rich argues we need to address the problems of the past to gain guidance for the future:

But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.

Greenwald and Rich make strong points in favor of actually investigating what happened over the past eight years, and prosecuting those who broke the law. But their points are not the only - or even most - important reasons for investigation and prosecution. To understand what's at stake here, we need to remember the squeegee men.


Back in March of 1982, The Atlantic magazine featured an article by George Kelling and James Wilson, titled "Broken Windows." Kelling and Wilson argued that the perception of a social breakdown will lead to the reality of that breakdown:

...at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)

Kelling and Wilson wrote about experiments reported on by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who arranged to have apparently abandoned vehicles parked on streets in the Bronx, NY and Palo Alto, CA. While the time frames differed, the result was the same: both cars wound up being vandalized and destroyed. Kelling and Wilson wrote:

...vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that "no one cares."

This article eventually led to a then-new approach to community policing in which minor offenses were dealt with thoroughly, with the idea that by discouraging disorderly behavior there would be an increase in social order. The most famous - or notorious, depending on your point of view - case of this was in New York City, where Mayor Rudy Giuliani gained fame for such tactics as cracking down on squeegee men. This approach was eventually credited with a significant decline in the general crime rate in New York City.

It's common to believe that illegal or anti-social behavior is rooted in individual morality: good people behave in good ways, while bad people behave badly. But that's not necessarily so. As Kelling and Wilson (and others) have found, individual behavior is often influenced by how that individual sees others behave. If boundaries are pushed and nothing happens to the wrong-doers, then the threshold for anti-social or illegal behavior shifts. If someone vandalizes a car and nothing happens, soon others will follow suit. If one Wall Street firm games the system and nothing happens, you know it's only a matter of time before others start behaving the same way.

This is really nothing new. Who hasn't, as a child, tried to do something because "everyone else is doing it"? And who hasn't had their mother or father reply something to the effect: "If everyone else jumps off a cliff, are you going to jump off a cliff?" While we may tell ourselves that adults act differently, history (and the fashion industry) proves that our behavior frequently reflects that of those around us.

While it might be politically convenient to disregard any possible criminal behavior by members of the Bush administration, "letting bygone be bygones" will send a terrible message to the rest of our citizens - as well as the world. It will be saying "we don't care" about violations of our constitution, international law, and the fundamental idea of human decency.

Ruth Marcus may wish to disregard the particulars and just ensure "that these mistakes are not repeated." But by blithely ignoring them, we're likely to guarantee such behavior will someday return.

What Do Libertarian Farmers Grow?

Washington Post writer and blogger Joel Achenbach recently wrote a piece called "Inventing the Future" for his alumni publication. It's about a brainy fellow Princeton alum named Nathan Myhrvold, who according to Achenbach is brilliant in many areas - physics, software design, cooking, photography, etc. In his article, one quote by Myhrvold caught my attention:

“Broadly, overall, the way society works is emergent, and it is built on progress — it generally runs downhill toward something better,” Myhrvold says as we get deep into the philosophical weeds on all this stuff. The world is a better place now than it was 500 years ago, he declares. Driving that improvement is, he believes, technology. He’s an unabashed technophile. And he seems to have a strong libertarian streak.

A taste of that libertarian streak comes out a couple paragraphs later:

Many of the visionaries today talk of building a “sustainable” society, a word that seems to rile Myhrvold. “The most sustainable thing about human society is that we innovate,” he says. Later, he elaborates in an e-mail: “The answer is not to pine for a past golden age when things were better (there was no such place or time), but rather to ask how we can use more technology and innovation.” Change, he thinks, is intrinsic to our nature. The future will be different. Survival will not involve preservation of things as they existed before: It will require their creative destruction and replacement.

OK...first of all, I'd love to see a debate between Mr. Myhrvold (aka Mr. T - as in Technology) and James Kunstler (aka Mr. Doomed - as in "we all are..."). They both sound bright and opinionated, and they share an interest in predicting the future. But one expresses great optimism about technolgy and the future, while the other is generally very pessimistic. It would be a fun debate - in an intellectual "fight club" kind of way.

Beyond that, up to a point I agree with Mr. Myhrvold about society being emergent: the way a society is and the way people behave in it develops from the bottom up. However, I believe this is only a part of the picture.

I suspect Myhrvold's sense of emergence is at the heart of a lot of libertarian thought: "just get out of the way and let things emerge!" Libertarians apparently assume things exist in some vaguely positive state - sort of a social petri dish filled with a fertile growth medium. Given that neutral state, things will always work out for the best eventually. If and when they don't - like the current financial crisis - libertarians just write it off as "creative destruction."

There are indeed cases in which The Old must collapse in order for The New to come to fruition. (After all, that's one of the main ideas behind this blog and my website,) But as we've seen too often recently, destruction can often be a product of stupidity or greed rather than creativity.

What Myhrvold and other libertarians fail to recognize is the other side of the bottom-up nature of emergence. Things don't just emerge willy nilly out of nothing; they emerge in a context. The environment in which they exist will usually play a huge role in their outcome.

Take farming, for example. What a farmer grows and how successful he or she is in growing it will largely be determined by the context of his or her farm: the climate, the soil, water availability, general nature of the land, etc. Any farmer who tries to grow corn in the mountains of Colombia is likely to have as little success as one trying to grow coffee in Iowa.

Crops are an emergent phenomena; a farmer may plant the seeds, but then nature takes over. However, the farmer's success depends on him or her being mindful of the context of the farm and the crops that are most likely to thrive in it for a sustainable period of time. In addition, to get the most productive crop the farmer must keep in mind the specific needs - water, nutrition, etc. - of the crop over the course of the growing season. Otherwise, under/over-fertilization or a drought can have a serious effect on the yield of the crop.

In the same way, individuals and businesses exist within the context of human society. That society, in turn, exists within the larger context of the local and global physical environment. We are each a part of the world, not apart from it.

This may be easier to understand if we borrow an idea from modern science. Physics has found that at its most elementary level, matter is simultaneously an individual particle and part of a collective wave. It's dual-natured.

The same is true of people and businesses: we are not just a solitary individual or a part of the group. We are always both at the same time. It's just a matter of perception, like watching a crowd doing a "wave" in a packed stadium. You can watch the wave of humanity roll around the stadium or you can watch a person participate by standing up and then sitting down with those around them. But you can never see both at the same time.

The problem with libertarianism is that by always being focused on the individual it is blind to context. It's all particle and no wave. At that stadium, it would see a person getting up and sitting down; it wouldn't see the wave that individual was a part of. On Wall Street the focus was only on the success of individuals; there was no thought of the way the behavior of those individuals was damaging the financial system as a whole. No wonder so many "experts" were caught off guard by the inevitable collapse. They literally never saw it coming.

If a person tried to farm with a libertarian's blindness to context, they'd most likely lose the farm in short order. They would plant whatever they thought would be most profitable, regardless of its suitability for local climate and soil. Once planted, the crop would be at the mercy of the "invisible hand" of nature. Maybe it would rain, maybe it wouldn't; being averse to "regulatory meddling," it would be against libertarian ideology to alter the natural course of things by watering.

With a blindness to context and an aversion to "meddling," there's only one crop a libertarian would be likely to have by the end of a growing season: weeds.

Paranoia Strikes Deep

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
- Buffalo Springfield


I recently attended a seminar on information security hosted by the Hudson Valley chapter of ISACA. (One of the interesting things about ISACA is that many of its own members aren't really sure what "ISACA" stands for. For the record, it's "Information Systems Audit and Control Association, Inc." Of course, with the "Inc." it should really be ISACAI - but I digress.)

The featured speaker for this seminar was Gordon Smith of Canaudit, a company whose work revolves around information security matters. Mr. Smith came across as a jovial and dynamic speaker - albeit one a bit overly consumed with passion for his company's field. Over the course of his two-hour presentation, he regaled us with the many ways nefarious hackers - and worse - were scheming to attack our computers, networks, and cell phones and make merry sport with them.

He mentioned more than once that the laptop he used for his presentation had a triple-encrypted hard drive, as well as a special film over its screen to prevent people nearby from observing its contents. He noted that on occasions when he realized his laptop had been unsecured and out of his sight, he would subsequently wipe its hard drive and totally rebuild its contents.

Clearly, Mr. Smith walks the talk of his company. And I guess if you're going to be paranoid about stuff like that, you might as well build a successful business on it. But there were a few times when I wondered if Mr. Smith was not seeing the forest for the trees.

Early in his presentation, Mr. Smith went on a rant about Russia knocking the Republic of Georgia off the internet during last year's war over South Ossetia. He also talked about the Chinese eavesdropping on laptop computers Americans took with them to last year's Summer Olympics.

Putting 2 and 2 together, Mr. Smith somehow came up with 11. He compared Russia's alleged internet attack on Georgia with Hitler supposedly trying out the idea of Blitzkrieg on Poland before applying it to other fronts during World War II. Having laid this groundwork, Mr. Smith hypothesized that Russia and/or China were preparing to someday wage a cyberwar against the US.

While this was all rather compelling, it's not in synch with the facts in several key ways. Apparently, historians don't think the German attack on Poland was all that novel. And Russia's supposed attack on Georgia's online capabilities is apparently more a media fantasy than a reality.

But beyond that looms a larger question: given the way the world's large economies are interwoven today, why would one country with a large economy want to disable another? China, for example, has billions of dollars-worth of US Treasury notes. Its manufacturing economy is also hugely dependent on American consumers, which affects China's approach towards the US:

The dependence of the Chinese manufacturing industries on the US market has introduced a certain moderation in Chinese policies towards the US in strategic areas due to the Chinese anxiety to avoid unnecessary tensions in its relations with the US in matters such as Taiwan lest these tensions affect the trade, which is overwhelmingly in favour of China.

This is in line with Robert Wright's idea of a non-zero world, in which there can be "win-win" and "lose-lose" outcomes for nations. From this perspective, the claim that China or Russia are preparing to undertake a cyber-attack on the US sounds rather paranoid. Such an attack would severely damage their own economies. Why would they do that?

The other problem with Mr. Smith's presentation was that it focused heavily on the stratospheric level of technology - all the super high tech hacks and defenses that geeks love. He seemed to have little interest in the more mundane world of human foibles.

Take, for example, the case of Gary Sinnott, a Brit who decided to create a website to promote his hometown of Mildenhall. The only problem was that his website address, www.mildenhall.com, was very similar to the web address for a nearby U.S. Air Force base - www.mildenhall.af.mil. Apparently, a lot of American military folks were a bit lax in their emailing habits, and wackiness ensued.

We shouldn't minimize the importance of information security, and I'm sure that Gordon Smith is extremely knowledgeable about the field. But we need to also remember the real world, in which national behaviors can be shaped by their intertwined interests and where information can be insecure just because some people are nitwits.

Restoring Science - and Democracy

In a New York Times essay "Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy," Dennis Overbye ponders the significance of President Obama's inaugural promise to "restore science to its rightful place."

Overbye believes that "Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth." How do people find that truth?

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view.

He notes that these values are also integral to a properly functioning democracy, and observes:

It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.

President Obama's promise to "restore science" reflects a belief, shared by many prominent scientists, that the Bush administration frequently devalued or distorted scientific findings, especially when those findings conflicted with its political interests.

In other instances, Bush revealed an antipathy towards scientific values by supporting decidedly non-scientific theories like "intelligent design." While supporters of "intelligent design" describe it as a valid alternative theory to evolution, they can't seem to grasp the fact that ID is really a form of what Richard Feynman called "Cargo Cult Science."

When Feynman introduced the concept in a 1974 speech, he was arguing against bad scientific practices he'd observed in various studies in fields like education and psychology. In explaining what made them "bad," he compared them to cargo cults:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

So what's that essential ingredient of good science?

It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty -- a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid -- not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked -- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated...

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

It's hard to imagine any politician of any stripe embracing THAT kind of integrity in their daily political doings. In many ways politics is a lot like sales: there are objectives to be achieved - not the least of which is gaining and maintaining power - and politicians are inherently geared towards "closing the sale."

But if the Obama administration can at least revive a respect for science and its values, that would do more than help us confront problems in areas like medicine, energy and the environment. It could also be a start towards restoring democracy in America. As Overbye noted in his NY Times essay:

If we are not practicing good science, we probably aren’t practicing good democracy.

******** POSTSCRIPT ********

Stephen Colbert has his own unique take on this matter.

The Whole World's Watching

During the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, a common chant of protesters was "the whole world's watching." It was meant as a defiant warning to the cops confronting them: if the cops rioted - which they did - their actions would be seen on TV news around the world.

That was something of a novelty at the time - the idea that satellite communications had reached the point that images on TV could be beamed to other places. Of course, in today's metalinked world, their sense of global connection now seems as quaint as a Model T.

Back in early December I wrote about how the world has become smaller. At the time, a relevant example was how folks around the world responded to the election results. But this week's Presidential Inauguration has given us another look at this phenomena.

The NY Times report pointed to this global awareness:

Speaking directly to the millions who crowded around televisions across the world as much as to Americans, Mr. Obama said the United States was “ready to lead once more” despite the ravages of protracted wars and a depleted economy.

While noting that many around the world were thrilled with the new President, the Times noted that others had misgivings:

In the days leading up to the inauguration, many politicians, academics, opinion leaders and others spoke to correspondents of The New York Times around the world about Mr. Obama in terms verging on euphoria. But they also sounded warnings that the expectations were too high and that the world might discover that Mr. Obama is hemmed in by some of the unyielding realities that had frustrated his predecessor, compounded now by the worldwide recession and what it has done to diminish America’s reputation as a model of free-market prosperity.

Some reports on global reaction to the inauguration seemed more upbeat than others. The Washington Post offered glimpses of hope from places like Kenya:

"When people speak of Obama, we don't say he's Luo Obama," said Ogega, 27, referring to Obama's Kenyan ethnic group. "We say he's Kenyan. We hope he will help us see each other as Kenyans instead of certain tribes."

Not far away, Kadiro Ganemo, an Ethiopian immigrant, suggested that such hope stretches beyond Kenya.

"He's not just for Kenya -- he's for the whole world," said Ganemo, 28, who is not a student but joined the celebration because he didn't want to watch alone at home.

The BBC offered more circumspect reports, many from American rivals like Cuba, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Many of those reports reflected longstanding tensions and skepticism that have existed between America and other countries.

But the BBC's report from Indonesia revealed one way in which Barack Obama will be viewed differently than any previous American President. His multi-ethnic background, as well as his background growing up in different places around the world, may make him uniquely qualified for leading in today's shrinking world:

The ordinariness of Barack Obama's childhood here has impressed Indonesians. Many of them are sure that the four years he spent in Indonesia shaped his world view - that we are going to see very different American policies on Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East - a new approach, in fact, to the Muslim world.

He will be met with high expectations here - as elsewhere. And running through it all is a huge sense of pride, a feeling shared by many Indonesians that, as one man put it, Barack Obama "somehow belongs to us".

Nothing There

The Globe and Mail had a story last summer about an unusual work of "art" at a gallery in Halifax: a banana.

At first glance, it appears to be a forgotten part of someone's lunch. Perhaps set aside because it's still a bit green and not really ready to eat. But on closer look the passerby will notice a tag alongside the piece of fruit. The artist is identified as Michael Fernandes. The work is called Banana. The price is $2,500.

And there's a blue sticker, indicating that a buyer has put a hold on this work.

Actually, the exhibit consisted of 21 bananas. But only one banana was shown at a time: Fernandes changed bananas on an almost daily basis, going with gradually greener, less ripe bananas.

“I'm taking it back to green, before green it doesn't exist,” said the 64-year-old native of Trinidad, who lived near banana trees before immigrating to Canada in his teens. “The banana is temporal. We are also temporal, but we live as if we are not.”

That sounds deep, doesn't it? But what does the buyer get for their $2,500? It won't be the bananas, as Fernandes generally eats the banana he's replacing each day.

Instead, the buyer will be paying for the concept and will receive photos documenting the project. The buyer may also get press clippings or credit as patron if the project is staged again.

Great - documentation that you were dumb enough to spend $2,500 on a piece of fruit.

You might have the idea that this is something novel, that Mr. Fernandes is quite a sharp cookie for getting someone to plunk down $2,500 for the concept of a banana. A temporal banana, at that. This is pretty cutting edge, isn't it?

Well, maybe not. Check out what Time Magazine had to say at the time about Yoko Ono's 1971 exhibit - titled This Is Not Here - at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY:

Apple was an apple on a pedestal, two rows of flowerless flowerpots were titled Imagine the Flowers, and Iced Tea was a sizable T made of ice and melting fast. These and about 80 other treasures, executed or inspired by Yoko Ono, made up the show that opened at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y.

Ah yes, conceptual art. Oops! I mean Conceptual Art - when you're dealing with a Very Important School of Art, capitalization is important. Then again, Time noted "...proud Husband John Lennon, who celebrated his 31st birthday with the show's opening, noted—perhaps revealingly—that 'Yoko likes to call her work con art.'"

THIS is not THAT banana

I was involved in the local art scene in Syracuse back in the late 70's and early 80's, and had even had a photograph or two exhibited in group shows at the Everson. But I'd pretty much forgotten about "con art" until the recent holidays when I took my sister, visiting from Texas, over to Mass MOCA in North Adams, MA.

For those not with it, a MOCA is a Museum Of Contemporary Art. While I had heard of the one in Massachusetts (that's what the "Mass" stands for), they are all over the place - in LA, DC, Tuscon, Jacksonville...even Cleveland. As far as I know, none of them are part of a chain, like Home Depot or IHOP. I'm guessing somebody at some point just came up with a catchy and cryptic name for an art museum - something new! fun! with CAPS! - and everyone else just copied it.

The facilities for Mass MOCA are great: a complex of 19th century factory buildings that have been nicely renovated. Living in the northeast, you see such building complexes in any city of at least moderate size. The spaces inside, designed to be large enough to hold large machinery and many workers, are impressive. They are perfect for the monumental size of some of the, um, pieces on display.

I found some of the exhibits at Mass MOCA intriguing. Parts of Badlands were interesting and thought-provoking, dealing as they did with landscapes within the context of our world today. (Even aerial photos of toxic waste sites had an odd beauty to them.) Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China was also fascinating. Even after the recent extravaganza of the Beijing Olympics, much of China remains an enigma to us.

Then my sister and I walked into the big Sol LeWitt exhibit, and I felt like I'd stepped into Con Art Central. It was just wall after wall of geometric designs in different colors - all painted by someone other than LeWitt. For him, apparently, the idea was key. Everything else was secondary, to be handled by assistants. After a fairly quick stroll, I walked right back out again.

It's not that I don't get conceptual art. At least some of it has a whimsical, free-spirited inquisitiveness about it that can be refreshing. Sometimes it can be like rearranging the furniture in your mental living room: "Hmmm, I wonder how that would look from this perspective." As a pun-loving former English major, I also can find amusement in the wordplays present in some conceptual art. Yoko Ono's Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through (a sheet of Plexiglas) may not be a gut-buster, but it's mildly amusing.

What I object to about conceptual art is the pompous spin that often accompanies it. Take MASS MoCA Director Joseph C. Thompson's comments on the Lewitt show:

With this exhibition, Sol LeWitt has left an amazing gift for us all. Great art draws upon previous artists, but also contradicts and contravenes. And the most essential art argues for new ways of seeing, even as it is almost immediately absorbed into the work that surrounds and supersedes it. As I believe will be evident in this landmark exhibition, LeWitt’s wall drawings rise to those highest of standards. We look forward to having this amazing collection of works on long-term view as a sort of proton at the center of our museum around which our program of changing exhibitions and performances will orbit with even more energy.

Wow! A description like that just assures you the exhibit will be a hit in academic art departments everywhere! With words like "great," "essential" and "landmark," you might get the idea that Lewitt's work was right up there in Art Land with someone like Vincent Van Gogh. If it is, that doesn't say much for Art Land.

The most amazing exhibit of art I've ever seen was the Metropolitan Museum's Van Gogh at Arles. Seeing in person his work from that period left me in awe. Most people tend to hold something of themselves back in their art. There's a fine line between whole-heartedly following your creative muse and falling into insanity; most people play it safe. But in his paintings it was clear to me that Van Gogh held nothing back. I felt like I was seeing a man's soul itself brushed onto the canvas.


There are undoubtedly many in the art community, especially in academia, who have issues with Van Gogh's popularity among the masses - as well as that of others, like Monet or Picasso. They might accuse us of being "slaves to traditional representationism." (I have no idea what that means - I just made it up.) Or they might argue that our knowledge of the life of someone like Van Gogh colors our appreciation of his work; prejudiced by this knowledge, we can't view his work objectively.

Perhaps there is an element of truth to that. But what is also true is that, whether you know something about Van Gogh's life or not, there is a human quality to his work that is missing from most conceptual art. Whether it's the clever mind games or word plays, or whether it's the cerebral discourse on "contradicting and contravening" and such, conceptual art is basically a mental exercise. Rooted in academia, it is all head and no heart. Descartes once said "I think, therefore I am." For con art, the equivalent would be "I think, therefore I paint." (Or exhibit bananas...or Nothing Boxes.)

There is nothing inherently wrong with conceptual art, as long as you don't take it seriously. If you recognize that it is basically an intellectual visual exercise, it can be entertaining and informative.

But in its emotional detachment, such art has limited relevance to life in our interrelated Quantum world. Any alienation it may portray is merely a reflection of the alienation that comes from living exclusively in your head.

Anyone searching for meaning in conceptual art might just as well hang on to their checkbook and buy their bananas at a grocery store. Con art is purely mental cotton candy; there's no nourishment for the soul there.

A Tale of Two Flags

Sometimes images from a life-altering event can remain fresh even after 45 years. For me every January 9th brings back images from 1964, when I was a 6th grader living in Panama. That was when I saw the effects of my first political experience explode into the world news and leave 25 dead and many more injured.


I was purely a bit player - a crowd extra - in what led up to that day. The fact that I was only 11 years old at the time provided an element of farce to what transpired. One thing I learned from then was how quickly mindless fun and frivolity can turn to tragedy and fear.

Detailed historical accounts of the events of January 9th, 1964 - Martyrs' Day, as it's known in Panama - are readily available here, here and here.

In 1963 President Kennedy ordered that all American flags in the Canal Zone be accompanied by Panamanian flags, to acknowledge Panamanian sovereignty over the Canal Zone. This order wasn't popular with many Americans living in the Zone, who mistakenly felt it was really kind of an American colony. After President Kennedy's death, the Governor of the Canal Zone decreed that as of January 1st, 1964, American flags would not be flown over schools, post offices, cemeteries, etc., to avoid the aggravation of flying Panamanian flags there as well. It would turn out the Zonians weren't happy with that order either.

I was living in Panama because my father's American company had a warehouse there due to the canal. Because my parents didn't work for either the U.S. military or the Panama Canal Company, they paid a monthly tuition to send me and my sister to the American schools in the Zone. (It was believed easier to get into an American college from the American schools than from those in Panama, due to the American curriculum. This was why numerous Panamanian families who could afford it also sent their children to the Canal Zone schools.)

Shortly after we returned to school from Christmas break that year, I became aware of a growing restiveness among the Zonians: they were unhappy about the absence of the American flags from the usual places. The first demonstrations took place at Balboa High School, clearly visible across a green a few hundred yards from my elementary school. Along with the one on the flag pole, there were soon numerous American flags attached to parts of the school, waving in the tropical breezes.

The sentiment quickly spread and demonstrations broke out around the Canal Zone. One such demonstration took place at Ancon elementary school, the other elementary school on the Pacific side of the Zone. Bizarrely, it was reported the students there occupied the administration office (remember, these were elementary school kids), took a flag and ran it up the school flag pole.

At Balboa elementary school, we weren't quite that brazen. Or maybe the adults in charge were a little more...adult. But we did have lunchtime demonstrations, running up and down the playground waving flags that had magically arrived for us. (Actually, one of the suppliers was a Panamanian classmate named Ramon, who was a natural leader/instigator.) It was all very exciting and fun. So much fun, in fact, that after school we waved our American flags out of the windows of our school bus as we rode through the streets of Panama City to our homes.

Looking back, that was a clearly dumb and provocative thing to do. But what did we know? We were just kids caught up in the moment.

On the evening of January 9th, things came to a head. Panamanian students marched to Balboa High School, where they wanted to symbolically raise their flag and then take it back down and leave. Americans surrounding the flag pole resisted, a scuffle broke out, and the rest - as they say - is history.

For me, the specific chronology of what happened over the next few days has faded from memory. What remain fresh are fragments of memory. My parents had gone that night with friends to the Ft. Amador officer's club in the Zone. (As a WWII vet, my father qualified for membership and we went there often.) As news bulletins started breaking on the Canal Zone TV station and we gradually realized something was up, we began to wonder how and where they were. (Not really knowing what was happening, they wound up having to make a very circuitous route to find a safe way back across the Canal Zone border to Panama City - encountering a loaded convoy of armored personnel carriers in their journey. )

As I recall, the next morning my dad drove over to the border near Ancon to check out the destruction from the night before. One of the things he saw (which he later photographed) was at the burned out Pan-American building - apparently destroyed because it had "American" in its name. (The building was owned by a Panamanian.) On the side of the building someone had written in red paint "Johnson-you-kill-Kennedy Yankees Killers Go home Soberania O' Muerte!" ("Sovereignty or Death!") It was an interesting statement - Haiku-like - revealing an anger at Americans combined with a hinted sense of loss for the recently killed Kennedy. (Only 7 weeks before, Panamanians had widely mourned Kennedy's death.) It also reflected a certain Panamanian sense of how leadership succession might take place.


The rioting persisted for about 3 more days. During that time, we were confined to our apartment. NBC Monitor, a weekend radio show, reported Panamanians were going from house to house in Panama, dragging Americans out into the street and lynching them. (This turned out to be false, although we did occasionally see cars cruise down our street decked out with Panamanian flags and filled with angry young men.)

With little else to do (there weren't computers, iPods, video games, etc. back then, and the news was frightening), my family spent countless hours playing Rummy Royal, a board game my mom had gotten us for Christmas. Looking back, it was a peculiar time of crushing boredom and very real fear. It was awful. After the riots ended, we never wanted to look at that Rummy Royal game again.

History will show that the events of that weekend eventually led to the renegotiation of the Panama Canal treaty and the returning of the canal to Panama. The Zonian belief that they could preserve their illusory American colony from "foreign" interlopers blew up in their faces, eliminating their "homeland" instead.

The events of that time shaped me in a number of ways. How I - all of us, really - had gotten mindlessly swept up in the feelings of the crowd made me very leery of large group activities. Years later, when I attended the occasional anti-Vietnam war demonstration, I was always on my guard to avoid getting swept up in any kind of mob action. In retrospect, the events of January 1964 gave me my first awareness of the way individual and group behaviors can be intertwined.

I also developed a very ambivalent view of flags and flag waving. Make no mistake - growing up for seven years in Panama made me very appreciative of what it meant to be an American. I felt as if I had won a lottery of birth. But looking back, all the passion, death and destruction over flags just seemed like a terrible waste. This wasn't Iwo Jima, symbolically staking claim to land in the midst of a desperate war against tyranny. This was a bunch of Americans who had been too long away from their true homeland, caught up by a passionate moment into believing they could stake a claim to someone else's rightful land.

My ambivalence and discomfort with flag-waving remains to this day. The way everyone started displaying flags on their houses after 9/11 made me uneasy. I sensed again a rising tide of nationalism that could become unreasoning and dangerous. Looking back on what our country has done in the world since then, I feel a sense of disappointment and emptiness not unlike what I felt in 1964. Look at all the death and destruction that has been wrought, born from the idea that we might somehow redeem the greatness of America by waving our flag where ever we want.

I don't want to get preachy here, but I feel this needs to be said. America is not great because we can wave our flag in the face of other nations. Such actions only bring resentment and hatred.

America is great because of our ideals - as represented by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. America is great because even when our leadership differs tremendously on what course our country should take, the succession between leaders takes place through ballots instead of bullets. America is great because at our best, like President Kennedy, we sometimes inspire others with genuine hope and idealism. When we are at our best, many others around the world see us as truly a sweet land of liberty.

Sometimes, a seed of admiration for our idealism shows up in the most unlikely of places - like an angry message painted on the wall of a burned out building.

It's the peculiar fate of America that even with our military might, we are not geared to lead the world through coercion. We're not good at it and, deep down, the idea of empire makes us uncomfortable. Perhaps due to our rebellious origin, it's not in our national DNA. But we are very much geared to lead the world through inspiration.

It is now January, 2009; a new era beckons. It's time to return to our natural path.


=== Fair use for January 24, 1964 Life Magazine cover ===

The image of the Life magazine cover was taken from Wikipedia. Though this image is subject to copyright, its use is covered by the U.S. fair use laws, and the stricter requirements of Wikipedia's non-free content policies, because:

# It is a historically significant photo of an historical event
# It is of much lower resolution than the original. Copies made from it will be of very inferior quality.
# The photo is only being used for informational purposes.
# Its inclusion in the article adds significantly to the article because the photo and its historical significance are the object of discussion in the article.

===Photograph of Pan-Am building by Donald M. Higgins===

On Track to Saving Gas

According to Slate, there's a growing push to raise the Federal gas tax to reduce our dependence on foreign oil (and to combat global warming, though they don't get into that).

It's not too surprising to find an argument like this on a brainy site like Slate. But I was surprised to discover one of their article's links was to a "horsepower-addled car magazine editor" promoting the same idea.

Still more surprising was to find that, in skimming the comments section, many "horsepower-addled car magazine" readers actually seemed agreeable to the concept. I was struck by one entry in particular, by an apparently erudite commenter - "Trackaholic" - who argued for what I believe would be a wise approach to promoting fuel economy in our nation's vehicles:

I agree with DrCruelty: Change the CAFE rules from artificial limits placed on the Auto MFG's, to taxes/rebates geared toward the consumer. Change the "gas guzzler" tax on new vehicles to affect trucks as well as cars, and make it more progressive, so that more vehicles are affected. Provide incentives for people to get rid of old, inefficient vehicles and move into smaller cars with better mileage. Increase the tax on petrol to be more similar to the tax on deisel.

The overriding goal is to provide consumers an incentive to move towards more efficient vehicles and to make them think twice before purchasing something that they might not need. In the end, they still have the choice to buy a large truck or SUV, and they will still have the choice to buy a high powered sports car or sedan, and the auto MFG's will not have artificial constraints about trying to build a 35 MPG vehilce if everyone still wants to buy a truck.

Basically, encourage people from the bottom up, rather than trying to force them from the top down.

-TH

First, a couple of minor points:

1 - Whoever DrCruelty is, he didn't sound quite as erudite as Trackaholic. DrCruelty's suggestion was straightforward, but his argument was less developed: "Axe CAFE, tax gas."

2 - I'm not sure how one reaches the formulation that "TH"="Trackaholic." Or vice versa. And what is this "petrol" of which he speaks? In spite of his NASCAR-like nom de plume, is he really a Brit?

Nevertheless, I applaud the idea of replacing a top-down regulation of dubious effectiveness like CAFE with the bottom-up approach proposed by TH. This approach is very much in line with a basic facet of our quantum world.

Such an approach offers a number of pluses. It sets values (higher prices for gas and inefficient vehicles) that are aligned with our nation's interest (reducing dependence on foreign oil), while still giving individuals the freedom to drive whatever their hearts desire (and their wallets can afford). It also gives automakers a clearer and more consistent market environment to produce for - instead of one that swings wildly, salivating for SUV's one month and then hot for hybrids 6 months later.

Finally - and not a small thing - removing a cumbersome regulation of dubious effectiveness like CAFE will do away with one source of automotive agita for "horsepower-addled car pundits" (and scourges of the "nanny state") like Brock Yates. Not to worry - I'm sure they'll still find plenty of other things to get rev'd up about.

The Word from the Street

As I noted in my last post, times are hard these days for the mainstream media. But it’s not all a matter of digital change, greedy owners and shrinking balance sheets. There’s also the fact that many in the MSM don’t seem to have a handle on what’s going on.

Washington Post Columnist E.J. Dionne has a recent column titled “Coming Soon: The 21st Century,” in which he starts off by noting:

Social and political epochs rarely end precisely on schedules provided by calendars. Many historians date the end of Europe's 19th century to 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. What we call "The Sixties" in the United States, with its ethos of reform and protest, ended with Richard Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972 and the winding down of the Vietnam War.

In the same way, the outcome of this year's election means that 2009 will, finally, mark the beginning of the 21st century.

This is all well and good, as far as it goes. However, he never presents any clues as to how things will be different in 2009. Instead, he just catalogues a variety of ways in which the Bush administration has dealt with current problems – like terrorists and the financial markets – from an outdated 20th century perspective.

Meanwhile Mr. Dionnes’ fellow Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson - in “Humbled By Our Ignorance” - pursues a pastime popular these days among conservatives: basking in ignorance. When confronted with the massive failures of their governance, conservatives fiercely proclaim that the source of such failures was totally unpredictable.

For them, no one could have foreseen 9/11 (except for those warning bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States). No one could have known there were no WMDs in Iraq (except for the UN inspectors who made that point). No one could have known the levees would fail (except for engineers familiar with their limitations). And no one could have predicted that people preoccupied with maximizing profits rather than acting responsibly could bring the economy to its knees (except for economists like Paul Krugman who warned of impending disaster).

Apparently, to conservatives the idea they couldn’t predict what happened absolves them from responsibility for the failures they provoked. I guess being conservative means never having to say you’re sorry.

Contrary to Mr. Dionne, I would argue (as I often do) that the 21st century has been with us for some time. If we want to point to a particular event that defines a break from the 20th century, I would point to the development of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990’s. Up until that time it might have been said we were in the Information Age, but that information was generally controlled by powerful gatekeepers like the mainstream media.

Contrary to Mr. Samuelson, I would say that paying attention to what’s happening now – and borrowing some ideas from the science that has shaped our hyper-linked world – can enlighten us about the workings of current events. Ignorance is not inevitable.

An example of the 21st Century in action is presented by the brief article “The Tools Of Citizen Journalism.” It’s about Demotix -

...a London-based startup that allows users to upload pictures (and soon video) that are in turn sold to news outlets. The recent events around the Israel/Palestinian conflict were a perfect showcase of this type of user-generated content site (though, obviously, a tragic one).

This is just another example of how the source of information has changed. The mainstream media has limited space and time to devote to any of the many news topics today. But if you look for them, you’ll find all kinds of other sources that have emerged to give you an idea about what’s going on in places like Iraq and Wall Street .

There’s a great deal of concern these days about corporate control of the news media (for example, see here and here). This is indeed a serious problem – although some sound like prime candidates for the tinfoil hat brigade.

But compared to pre-web days, the mainstream media has much less control today over what we know about current events. And as long as the web is free to all the tide of content will continue to turn from a top-down model to one that is more bottom-up.

Ironically, the mainstream media will probably remain clueless about this shift for some time. Fortunately for them, Robert Samuelson can someday write a piece glorifying their ignorance.

******** POSTSCRIPT ********

Maybe not everyone in the MSM is clueless. Time has a piece by James Poniewozik - "An End, and a Beginning, for the Media" - that gets it right:

Like the car companies, individual media outlets will probably have to learn to be smaller. And they'll need to see their new-media "problems" as part of the solution. Internet users don't hate the media. In fact, when given the tools by something like Twitter or YouTube, they want to be the media. People want the vetted information the news media offer--and they want to riff on it, respond to it and even, as in Mumbai, add to it. Journalists should embrace that rather than futilely fight it.

This means offering users more ways of interacting, commenting and contributing. It means seeing new media not as the dumbing down of civilization but as a new way of telling stories and even finding stories. And it means recognizing that the audience is no longer passive--it wants and expects to participate, even as it wants help in making sense of the info deluge.