magicalnet

Intangible Things

2009-03-11T05:14:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted, I know. The reason is simple, I couldn't think of anything worthwhile to say. It was there, but I was looking for the words to express it and couldn't find them. Well, here it is, expressed much better than I could of. I'm quoting from a blog, that is quoting from another blog that is quoting an article in the New York Times, that is full of quotes of rich people (and some no longer quite so rich people). How very 2009. Follow the links to see the sources. I might wish I were more clever, but frankly I don't think it could expressed any better. Least ways not by me. So here it is:

All Manias Leave Something Undervalued

Inquiring minds are taking a close look at point number five, A Revaluing of Intangible Assets in today's Five Things by Kevin Depew.

“It’s kind of funny, but I feel much more satisfied with the things money can’t buy, like the well-being of my family, I’m just not seeking happiness from material things any more”

New York Times, "Conspicuous consumption, a Casualty of Recession," March 9, 2009

If the 90s and most of the first half of the 2000s were about accumulating and displaying "wealth," the next decade will continue the mean reversion toward something altogether more austere, if not more sensible. Debt reduction and the rejection of (and guilt projection toward) materialism will continue as meditations on not just doing more with less, but doing less... period.

All manias leave something undervalued. What has been undervalued for a long time now - reflection, quietude and time, to name but a few of the things "money can't buy" - will now enter their own bull market, which entails a different ordering of priorities and a more challenging view of what it means to "possess wealth."

While this may seem refreshing and positive in the way I've oversimplified it, the difficulties we face going forward will lie in how capitalism seeks to commoditize things that are difficult to measure and quantify, and what mediums of exchange compete for primacy in the market for these intangibles.

More Times Excerpts

Carol Morgan, who teaches law at the University of Georgia and whose husband has a private law practice, said she felt a responsibility to cut needless spending. “That is probably something that is a prudent thing to do in any event, but particularly now I see it as the right thing, as the moral thing to do,” she said, adding that she also hoped to increase her charitable giving. “Before, extravagance and opulence was the aspiration, and if we can replace that with a desire to live more simply — replace that with time with family, or time for spirituality — what a positive outcome to a very negative situation.”

Kim Gatlin, a novelist who lives in Park Cities, in the Dallas area, said some of her friends had urged their husbands not to give them jewelry over the holidays. “They were like, you know, ‘There’s nothing I’m dying for right now — let’s just wait,’ ” she said. “It makes them feel like they’re participating, although they don’t contribute to the income stream.”

Even some of the very affluent said they were reluctant to be conspicuous in their spending.

“It’s disrespectful to the people who don’t have much to flaunt your wealth,” said Monica Dioda Hagedorn, 40, a lawyer in Atlanta who is married to an heir of the Scotts Miracle-Gro fortune. “I have plenty of dresses to last me 10 years.”

Craig Robinson, 34, a manager at a real estate investment firm in Atlanta, agreed, saying that he was not tempted to join those who were scooping up deals at department stores. “There’s one guy to the right of me showing me this great deal he got on his tie,” he said, “and there’s four guys to the left of me who got laid off and can’t find a job.”

It's tough to want to flaunt wealth when so much wealth has vanished.

45 Percent of World's Wealth Destroyed

The CEO of Blackstone says 45 percent of world's wealth destroyed.

"Between 40 and 45 percent of the world's wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half," Schwarzman told an audience at the Japan Society. "This is absolutely unprecedented in our lifetime."

Schwarzman said problems were then exacerbated by mark-to-market accounting rules. Those rules ask banks and other financial institutions to price assets at a value related to how they would be sold in the open market.

Mark-to-Market Scapegoat

Schwarzman and Blackstone are attempting to blame poor investment decisions on Mark-to-Market accounting.

I disagree.

It was the excessive leverage that destroyed Bear Stearns, Lehman, Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, etc., not mark to market rules, evil short sellers, or hedge fund bets via Credit Default Swaps as discussed in Is Debt the Lifeblood of the Economy?

Furthermore, the only way 45% of the world's wealth could vanish in a year is if it was a mirage in the first place. That wealth was perceived, not real, and it vanished right along with a forced reduction of leverage that is still underway.

Moreover, neither leverage nor earnings are coming back anytime soon because attitudes of banks towards lending and consumers towards borrowing and spending have changed for good.

Role Of Changing Attitudes

Changing attitudes are what Bernanke faces in his battle to inflate. Flaunting wealth is out. Frugality is in. I have been talking about frugality for quite some time. A Google search of this blog for the words Frugal, Frugality pulls up 88 instances (soon to be 89). I am quite sure this is not the end of it.

Memories of Consumer Recklessness

Let's review the pertinent snip from Peak Credit

That final wave of consumer recklessness created the exact conditions required for its own destruction. The housing bubble orgy was the last hurrah. It is not coming back and there will be no bigger bubble to replace it. Consumers and banks have both been burnt, and attitudes have changed.

It took nearly 80 years for people to get as reckless as they did in 1929. 80 years! Few are still alive that went through the great depression. No one listened to them. That is the nature of the game. The odds of a significant bout of inflation now are about the same as they were in 1929. Next to none.

Children whose parents are being destroyed by debt now, will keep those memories for a long time.

Those preaching inflation simply do not understand the role attitudes play on the the Fed's ability to inflate, nor do they understand the Fiat World Mathematical Model that also hinders the Fed's ability to inflate.

In the meantime, take one more look at the key sentence from "A Casualty of Recession" because this is what the Fed is fighting:

“It’s kind of funny, but I feel much more satisfied with the things money can’t buy, like the well-being of my family, I’m just not seeking happiness from material things any more.”

All manias leave something undervalued. In this case, that something has nothing to do with seeking happiness from material things.

Amen, brother. Can I get an Amen? Amen!

Still in the Long Now

2009-02-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

On a Friday night not that long ago, I attended a talk in San Francisco sponsored by the Long Now Foundation. The events of that night have stayed with me, appropriately enough. Looking around I wondered at the time if not the room was filled with a rather larger-than-normal complement of time-travelers. And I seem to keep going back there in my mind; the whole experience is quite fresh and well… “Now-ish”. The impetuous for this blog started that night... ahem, THIS night. Time is strange stuff.

Now, you may not have heard about The Long Now Foundation, but they are a sort of "Commonwealth Club" started by Stewart Brand; they host monthly speakers on topics concerning the long view of human betterment. I hadn't heard of them either until … uh… now, but if the name Stewart Brand sounds familiar it should... he's the one who was responsible for the Whole Earth Catalog. He apparently still lives on a houseboat of sorts in Sausalito. Who knew? Apparently he's been involved in lots of stuff which you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand but I digress.

The speaker this Friday night was Dimitry Orlov. His talk was provocative, witty, more than a little ominous and the full text of his talk available on his blog. I highly recommend it.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

As you can see right away from the text of the link it concerns in no small or timid way a view of our current situation which is a bit outside the normal consensus. Rest assured, he does have wonderful sense of humor and he's not at all tedious or shrill. However he does have a unique perspective which I believe is worth at the very least a quick skim.

Orlov's presentation consisted of his reading the text and as he is a rather literary sort of fellow, reading his text will give you a good sense of his thesis. An MP3 audio recording has been posted online here: http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

In the meantime, check this one out. Here is Jared Diamond speaking with Paul Solomon of PBS TV’s News Hour. Get this: it was published on that very same day, Friday the 13th of Feburary 2009. Sheesh. With such a long now, why do these guys cram it all into one day! Who ARE these guys anyway!

Perhaps even more interesting is that the video was never aired online, however it was aired on PBS radio (I heard it) and comes up in the search list (but not when you follow the link) on the PBS website. However, due to the magic of YouTube, here it is, while it lasts. Get it while it’s hot folks.

There’s a lot out there folks. There’s even a long version of his talk given at the …. wait for it ….. Long Now Foundation!

Now, how about that?

Into the year of the Earth Ox

2009-02-25T14:31:00.001-08:00

Welcome, everyone, to the year of the Ox. Female Earth Ox to be precise, but then that would be Earth Cow, wouldn’t it. Is that a Dzomo? Not sure.

Anyway, one thing is certain. The year of the Mouse is now officially over, so time to stop cowering and get on with it. And what a year we have ahead of us! Plenty of furrows needing tending; some appearing on brows, others more productively appearing elsewhere. What? You say you want to plant a garden but don’t have land? Well, truth be told, neither do I. Not yet anyway. Farming requires land, yes? Well, perhaps not necessarily.

Not everybody who worries about food security and is interested in doing something about it has access to plenty of land or money to buy land and necessary equipment. I was in this situation a few years ago and rather frustrated by it. Perhaps this story will give others some ideas, and I should note that touch the soil is a great source of information about the food system and efforts to transform it at all levels.

Interested?
Read the full article here

Ideas anyone? Buhler? Anyone?

Anyway, today’s a bit of a holiday, being the new year and all, tomorrow we’ll get back to where we’ve always been. That would be now.

Looking for love in all the wrong places

2009-02-24T10:53:00.000-08:00

OK there is this guy, and he’s lost his car keys. It is night and it’s dark and he’s painstakingly searching under a streetlight. A help stranger happens by and asks. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for my car keys”, he replies.

“Do you need some help?” the stranger asks.

“Why, that would be great, thanks!” And so the two patiently scour every inch of ground around the area. After a while, when it is clear that the keys are nowhere to be found, the stranger asks, “they don’t seem to be here anywhere, are you sure you lost the keys here?”

“Oh, no, the man cheerfully replies. I lost them in that alley over there.”

“Then why are we searching over here, under the light?” the stranger replies in exasperation. “Why don’t we search in the alley?”

“Are you crazy? It’s dark in the alley!”

It’s not enough to diligently search; we have to search where the answer lies, not where we want to search.

The answer and where it lies will come as no great shock or surprise. But first, as promised last time, something about money. Because that’s where we have been searching for some time.

What is money, anyway? After all there are lots of movies about “What is Love?” Why is it that nobody ever makes a movie about “What is Money?” Well guess what, someone did.

Check this out:

And now, a word from our sponsors …

2009-02-23T12:04:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I closed with the upbeat, albeit outrageous, remark that I think we’re going to be OK in the end. Well, who exactly do I mean by “we”? I certainly don’t mean that the shell of the egg is going to come though this intact. I am referring of course to the hatching chick that is going to be OK. I’ll get to talking about the chick in a bit, but first we need to understand the shell. And the shell is history; literally.

Remember Buckminster Fuller, Bucky for short? The geodesic dome was his claim to fame, but he spent his entire lifetime designing up futuristic versions of houses, cars and other stuff. In his heyday, the 60’s and 70’s, was famous for being famous in the way that celebrities often are. In the year he died, which was 1983, he published a short book called “The Grunch of Giants”, Grunch being his anacrym for GRoss UNiverse Cash Heist. Prescient, don’t you think?

Grunch was his summation of his view of the world and his valedictory to those who would inherit the coming collapse. It is sad and beautiful, prophetic and mistaken as only the words of the soon to die can be. It was also of course, completely ignored. Surprise, surprise.

Here's the book online: Grunch of Giants.

An excerpt. It’s a bit long, alas, and would be better if presented in a 11 minute video. (Anyone out there want to do it? Pretty please?). But I just can’t bear to cut any more; it is after all, a précis of 30,000 years of social development. The uncut version is chapter 3 of the book.

If a long post is not your style, just scroll down to the bottom, where you'll find a nice movie. But if you can handle it, it's worth the read.

[…]

One of my many-years-ago friends, long since deceased, was a giant, a member of the Morgan family. He said to me: "Bucky, I am very fond of you, so I am sorry to have to tell you that you will never be a success. You go around explaining in simple terms that which people have not been comprehending, when the first law of success is, 'Never make things simple when you can make them complicated.'"

So, despite his well-meaning advice, here I go explaining giants.

[…]

There is no historical record of religion founders who have been so bold as to assert that God had deeded land to anyone. History shows that religious leaders have, however, frequently complied with their king's instructions to plant a cross or other symbol of God's approval of their king's sword-accomplished vast lands-seizure and ownership-claiming.

Over thirty thousand years ago, these prehistoric horse-mounted "landowners" began expanding their territory northwardly and westwardly beyond the Himalayas into Mongolia and then ever westward into Europe.

[…]

Millennia after the first club-swinging Oriental horseman claimed land ownership, the man on the horse westbound from the Orient to Europe became helmeted and armored in metal. Due to the horses' weight-carrying limit and the penalty of weight on the horses' speed, the most effective of the horse and armored riders was, like the present-day jockey, the wiry, strong, little man. Inspection of the European museums' armor discloses the diminutive size of the most successful knights. The main significance of what we are learning is that, to the man on foot, the horse-mounted and armed men became a new and formidable "giant."

Because the armored knight required many helping hands to mount him and maintain his horses and arms, he had to have their goodwill and support lest his helpers overwhelm him when dismounted and encased in his armor. As a consequence, the little, wiry man in horse-mounted armor frequently became the champion of traveling bands of the little people. The little armored knight was more maneuverably effective than the armored giant when the latter's multi-folded weight overburdened his mount.

[…]

Squads of armed horsemen could protect caravans of goods-carrying horses, camels, and elephants along with human bearers. These caravans could transport the initially culture-evolved riches of the Orient westward to the ever more westwardly advancing frontiers of humanity, where the newly powerful cultures could acquire the historically recognized appurtenances of Oriental courts of power.

A new kind of wealth-making occurs historically with the invention and development of stoutly and heavily keeled, ribbed, and planked, high-seas-keeping, deep-bellied, and, in much later times, cannon-armed sailing ships.

[…]

The ship was, of course, a tool, but not a craft tool produced by one man. It was an industrial tool, mass-producible and operable only by large numbers of highly skilled craftsmen, metalworkers, woodworkers, sailcloth makers, rope-makers, iron chain- and anchor-makers, seasoned sailors, and the coordinated muscle of "all hands." The merchant ship was a wind-energized industry, a tool that could sail around the world and carry cargoes worth many fortunes to lands not containing the materials brought by the ships, which when integrated with the home-port-occurring materials produced real wealth of increased life-support for more and more people.

The building, rigging, and arming of such vessels and the production of the materials with which to build them, as well as the production of the food and other necessities to feed and clothe all those engaged in the shipbuilding, required an effectively powerful military authority able to command the full-time commitment of the work and skills of the large numbers of humans involved. It also called for the amassing of large sums of negotiable wealth. Preferably the negotiable wealth was in the form of trade-implementing precious metals and jewels, commercially acceptable around the world.

For ages earlier the negotiable wealth had been the efficiently demonstrable products of labor and its produce, the grains and the livestock. Of the latter, the protein amassed cattle constituted the most concentrated possible yet maneuverable realization of actual life-support wealth. Cattle were put up as collateral for the banker's loan of gold, silver, and copper coinage. When the voyage was successfully completed, the merchant-ship venturers repaid the banker and paid the banker his "interest" in the form of calves that had been interimly produced by the collateraled cattle. This was called "payment in kind"— kind being the kinder or "children" of the cattle. When bankers eliminated live cattle as collateral and dealt only in gold or silver, there were no gold coins being bred by gold coins as calves had been by cows, so interest was taken out of the capital gold by diminishing the equity of the borrower when he repaid his debt. The banker's interest was cut out of—that is, deducted from—the depositor's original "cap"-ital (head of cattle) stake.
[…]

The safe return of the merchant venturer's ships was so unpredictable as to constitute a capital investment of high risk but also of very high potential gain—most significantly a risk whose rewarding payoff might take several "crop" seasons to realize. The voyage might take several or even many years to complete. These risks in turn could be lessened by insurance.

As a consequence of all the foregoing, … a new and overwhelmingly greater form of invisible seagoing and land-strutting giants appeared on planet Earth. This was a legally contrived, abstract giant —"legal" because the physically uncontradictable "topsword" king decreed it was legal. Having the most favored privileges accorded real humans, the giant, abstract, corporate "man" is inventively created in 1390 in England. (The corporate "human" may have been invented in ancient Babylon to cover the potentates' voyaging venture, but we have as yet no written record of such.) "His" abstract name is the "Merchant Venturers Society." This composite man was formed by the king of England with a small group of his very powerful friends, who lorded over their king-deeded vastlands.

By royal prerogative, the venture-financing riskers could not be held liable for any losses of the venture. With limited liability, individuals might sue the company but not the human individuals who underwrote the venture If the enterprise failed and went bankrupt, its shareholders lost their ventured stake but were not to be held responsible in any way for its debts. The creditors of the company were the losers, and not the shareholders. Bankruptcy could reflect no credit stigma upon the companies' shareholders. The shareholders were held absolutely blameless for any misfortunes of their ships' crew or for damage caused by collision of their ship with another ship. If the ship and its cargo were lost, the shareholders lost their original shares, but no more. As long as the ship operated successfully, the shareholders shared its trading profits

Whether the ship was lost or not, the banker who loaned the gold for the merchant ship's trading held the life-support-producing lands and their cattle as collateral. Since many voyages ended in disaster, the banker occupied a long-time, steadily profitable position in the overall merchant venturing—and as yet does.

Naturally, the shareholder's limited-liability advantage, granted by sovereign decree, encouraged a swift expansion of such enterprises.

In 1522 Magellan's ship demonstrated that the world is not a laterally extended plane off the edge of which a ship might plunge, nor an ocean extended laterally to infinity from which there was no return. Magellan's ship's circumvoyaging proved that the Earth is a sphere—a closed system with enormous trade-monopolizing potentials. Laws of the land could not be enforced on the sea. The seagoers were outlaws—privateers or pirateers. The most powerful outlaws became the sovereigns of the ocean sea.

In 1580, Queen Elizabeth was the largest shareholder in Sir Francis Drake's merchant ship The Golden Hind. Naturally, the queen granted Drake's venture "legal" freedom from liability. After paying Elizabeth her conspicuously major share, Drake and his other shareholders each realized almost 5,000 percent profit on their risked capital.

Enthusiastic over her Golden Hind venture, in 1600 Queen Elizabeth chartered the limited-liability East India Company. This time the shareholders acquired shares in a fleet of ships, docks, and warehouses in both England and India—not shares in just one ship, as in the earlier "venturing."

Employing her sovereign power, Elizabeth limited the losses of its chartered riskers to their initial monetary or equivalent capital stakes, while continuing their right to receive their proportional profit dividends for as long as the venturing company might exist—in perpetuity.

Known later in England as "Ltd." (for "limited liability"), in France as "Societe en Commandite," in Germany as "Kommanditgesellschaft," and as "Corporation" under the U.S.A.'s "Inc." (for incorporated) status, this newborn abstract legal giant was to be treated as a human personality, empowered to do anything humans can do but also accredited to operate as an abstract, legal entity able to enter or leave any nation without a passport. As such it was able to employ millions of people and any amount of money, tools, buildings, and equipment, and to perform its giant acts anywhere about the oceanic world exclusively for the profit in perpetuity only of its shareholders.

[…]

The fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century rulers who instituted and empowered those abstract corporate giants were able to popularize their acts by celebrating the visual wealth of goods it brought to their country and to the political satisfaction of their many citizens. The profit to society was visibly distributed as the goods, services, museums, and public-place rarities the enterprising produced. The shareholders' dividend checks were invisibly distributed.

With the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the risk-capital powers backing the "British Empire" became the "Sovereigns of the Seas." Until that time the high-sea venturers had carried gold and silver as their trading medium. This induced world-around high-seas piracy. The behind-the scenes masters of the British Empire then invented the annual balance of trade" as a world-around bookkeeping system which kept its gold off the seas and instead, after the year-end tallying of the trade interactions, transferred the gold from one country's London vault to another country's London vault. This withdrew the gold from the seagoing pirate's reach. However, it brought many of the pirates into the financial districts of great cities.

Naturally, shareholding in Ltd. enterprise became increasingly attractive as an investment risk, but soon the monetary size of investment required for share participation grew beyond the acquisition means of all but the wealthy. Stock-exchange brokers, for their own convenience, imposed trading only in hundred-share "lots" or "blocks," which quickly raised the equity-purchasing increments to so great a price that only the very wealthy could any longer participate in such venture-sharing. The capital games' playing-rules "kept the pikers out," the original pikers being the on-foot, pike-bearing castle guards.

In the nineteenth century the limited-liability corporate venturing began not only putting its shipyard donkey engines' steam engines in ships, but also mounting them on steel wheels on rails and powering them out of the shipyards. Thus they began railroading heavy loads inland. This initiated new mass-production industry centers at inland water-power sites. For instance, industrial venturing underwrote water-wheel-driven mass-yardage cotton mill fabric production, preferably in such low-wage-paying countries as India. The annual balance-of-trade accounting brought about many obviously inequitable economic conditions, such as, for instance, India's burlap bag-makers working for a penny a day. It was the vast profits made on burlap bags so produced which financed the early-twentieth-century expansion of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S.A.

Such cotton and woolen fabric production-venturing was logically followed by thread and needles, pins, buttons, and small hardware mass-production moving-line ventures. With the introduction of electricity and the electricity-driven motor, industry began moving-line mass production of dollar watches, tin cans, safety razor blades, big-city clothing-production sweatshops, then bicycles, then motor cars. In World War I, it introduced steel steamship mass-production; in World War II, transoceanic aircraft mass-production; and, in the "cold," puppet-nation-waged war (World War III), extraterrestrial travel and transport, and mass-production of invisible mass-killingry potential.
[…]

As mass-capital-venturing flourished after World War I, General Foods Company absorbed many pre-World War I individually owned, independent mass-producers of canned and packaged food. General Electric acquired other successful electrical goods manufacturers. The growth of corporate venture activity was, however, at that time yet identified by unique product categories.

After World War II, "mergers and acquisitions" and outright "takeovers" agglomerated almost all successful industrial capital ventures, regardless of their class of produced goods and services. The great conglomerates found it more profitable, safer, and more credit-powerful to diversify their risking. The successful "biggies" became ever more gargantuan—for example, the Dupont chemical company's 1981 acquisition of Conoco, America's ninth largest oil company, for $7.57 billion, to form the seventh largest industrial corporation in the U.S. Because many of these conglomerations embraced all the national defense weaponry production, they "legally" qualified for guaranteed government "bailout" should their operation become financially "embarrassed" or debts unmeetable. The U S government's decade-ago bailout of Lockheed Aircraft or its multibillion-dollar guaranteed loan to private Chrysler Corporation (the government's military-tank producer) are the current outstanding examples.

The rise of the corporation, industrial capitalism and military conquest are all part of the shell. Like it or not, this is the world into which we born and it all most of us know. This is especially true of Americans, mostly true of the “developed” world (this is after all what “development” actually is), and these days pretty much everywhere else too, which is what “globalization” really means. If you buy your food and pay for your accommodation with money, or rely upon people who do, this means you.

Which brings us to another component we need to address: Money. We’ll do that next time. Until then, here’s a movie:

The crisis of credit

2009-02-22T05:54:00.000-08:00

"Der Vogel kämpft sich aus dem Ei. Das Ei ist die Welt. Wer geboren werden will, muss eine Welt zerstören. Der Vogel fliegt zu Gott. Der Gott heisst Abraxas."

(The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.) – Herman Hesse, “Demian” 1919.

Its been 30 years or more since I last looked into Herman Hesse. In that time I found Buddhism, and have had no need to seek for insights into the nature of truth and such in the writings of Victorian era Germans, but this quote has always stayed with me. And today, I think it’s worth dusting it off and putting it to use to describe what’s going on these days.

But first, what is going on? Simply put, the structures upon which we depend are falling apart and everyone who is paying even the least amount of attention is stunned. The part that has been getting the most attention lately is the credit crisis. In case you missed it, nobody has explained the so-called “Credit Crisis” as well as this guy. Check this out…

The credit crisis visualized

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

It's also available here on youtube.

If it’s all so simple, how is it that so many people are so surprised and confused? Well, some would suggest that powerful interests want them to be. But that’s not what I think. I think those who think of themselves as in control (and whom everyone else would probably agree are in control, and yes, I’m talking about you too President Obama) are even more in the dark then those with less stake in the system.

Here’s my two cents worth: It all comes down to the difference between the chick’s view of the egg and the shell’s view of the egg. To the shell, the integrity of the structure (which is remarkably robust, by the way) is everything. Its whole reason for being is to protect its fragile contents. The shell must be protected and every crack must be immediately patched, no matter the cost. The possibility that at some point in the near future it will cease to exist entirely is beyond heresy and borders on the criminally insane. To the chick, the shell has been its home for as long as it can remember, but now that the moment for it to hatch has arrived, the shell is just an annoying, temporary inconvenience.

The metaphor is as obvious as is the perennial appeal of Herman Hesse to adolescents and young adults. We all go through this process on the way to becoming adults and it’s not always an entirely pleasant experience. What is happening now is that the entire human experiment is going through a similar transition. We have been relying on variations of the same social structures for thousands of years and now they, along with the Holocene climate which made them possible, are breaking down under an assault that is as brutal as it is mathematically inescapable.

I know, I know. I can hear you thinking: “Whoa… that sounds like the 60’s!” Well, in the first place it was actually in most cases the 70’s, but yes, I agree it does. It’s taken me years to accept this conclusion myself, even though I’ve suspected it all my life. So if you’re having a bit of a problem with this idea, that’s ok. If you run away screaming and don’t come back, I understand that too, and it’s fine. If you want to argue and leave nasty comments, well, I understand and I’ll just delete them if they get out of hand, no problem there either.

But if you are like me and have a nagging feeling that something is going on, something rather threatening but perhaps momentous also, then stay tuned. In the next few weeks I’m going to walk slowly through the evidence as deliberately and thoughtfully as I can. It’s all out there on the web and has been out there for some time, and you may already have heard and seen most if not all of it already, and if that’s the case you might think this is just a waste of time, but wait.

I think we’re going to be OK in the end and I think I can prove it. So, I also think it’ll be worth your while to hear me out. But first, we need to look a little deeper into what is currently going on. There are several pieces to this puzzle and we’ll take them one at a time in the next series of posts.

Deliberate Serendipity

2009-02-20T21:04:00.000-08:00

I’d like to begin with a few words about growth. Where I live, in the United States, growth is our national religion. Although when it comes to growth in the economic sense, alas I have fallen from the pure faith. Restoring growth is job one, even our President says so. But growth has two meanings; one is inescapable and the other is impossible except in the short term. So it is important to distinguish between them.

If I have a few pounds of grain and am hungry, I might decide the grind that grain and make bread. If I have an ongoing need to eat, more grain I need for my immediate needs, and I have access to water and land, It might occur to me to plant some of the excess and raise a crop, turning a few of my surplus pounds of grain into many more pounds of grain over the course of a season. In fact, somebody better do this every year or we will all starve. This is the sort of growth that is inescapable.

Now suppose that this year I plant 1 square meter and next year I plant two. I begin to get excited about the possibility of becoming richer and richer; so the following year I plant four. If I continue on like this for say, 50 years or so, my little garden will “grow” to around 5.65E14 square meters. Only problem with my plan is that the land area of the Earth is around 5.21E14 square meters. Oops.

Now, I know, no one is saying we need to double every year. The “moderate” or “healthy” rate of growth that the US is desperately trying to reignite only doubles every 20 or 30 years. (Hint: divide 70 by the percentage of increase and you have a good approximation of the number of years it takes to double). So how long does it take my little square meter of wheat growing in size at the rate of 3.5% a year to cover the entire earth? About 988 years. Good thing I’m not Chinese. Their rate of growth was until recently around 11% and that would take only 350 years. Oh, and they’ve probably already got a bit more than 1 square meter under cultivation, don’t you think? Anyway, silly example, but you get the point, don’t you?

Still not convinced? OK, listen to this guy. He’s a PhD, a member of the House of Representatives, he’s a Republican AND he speaks the truth in plain language. That has GOT to be some kind of a record.

Ah, the fun with math! At this point we could all pat ourselves on the back and praise ourselves for being so smart (or having access to an excel worksheet). We could stand by and enjoy the show. We could, that is, if we had a death wish.

Our problem is that the economic system we depend upon to fulfill our daily requirements for food, shelter and everything else has allowed itself to become dependent on this second sort of growth when it is abundantly clear to any 8th grader (and most 6th graders, for that matter) that any compound growth curve goes parabolic sooner or later and collapses. And that “sooner or later” is… more or less … about now. Uh oh! Now what do we do?

Funny story my Lama once told me. Seems that there was this charming, but rather dim fellow who one day achieved his life’s ambition of visiting the Portola in Lhasa in Tibet. He spied a window and wanted to look out. He discovered that if he stood on his toes and twisted his body around just right he could manage to poke his head out the window. The unobstructed view of the city with the mountains in the distance was magnificent! Unfortunately, when he became tired and decided to retract his head he found he was stuck.

“Oh no!” He shouted. No one heard him. Being kind-hearted, if rather dim, he consoled himself thinking, “Well, now I may have to die. But at least I got the chance to die in Lhasa. I even got a chance to see such a magnificent view!” Fortunately before too long a stranger happened by -- or perhaps it was a friend, I forget. Anyway, this person, realizing what was going on asked, “How was it that you got yourself into this mess in the first place?”

“Well, I stood on my toes and twisted like this, and poked my head like…” and just like that he was free!

Standing on our toes and twisting around, poking our head out and becoming entranced by a magnificent view (or at least double digit returns on investment) is what got us into this mess, but we don’t have to die stuck. We can go back to the other way of thinking about growth, the kind that is NOT impossible.

But this is not going to be easy. We’ll need to be careful. We’ll need to be lucky. And we’ll need to help one another. We will need, for want of a better term, deliberate serendipity. And we’ll need to forget about being strangers. And be friends.

You gotta see this

2007-10-05T06:45:00.001-07:00

May you live in interesting times

2007-09-17T10:56:00.000-07:00

Like most people I suppose, I can’t remember the first time I heard of this “Chinese” curse. But only just the other day, I learned that it’s part of a triplet:

May you live in interesting times

May your name be known to the Emperor

May you find what you are looking for.

Quite by chance, I came across something I was looking for when I stumbled upon an extended interview with Scott Ritter on C-Span’s book TV and subsequently bought his new book Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement. As a one-time active, and once again becoming active, member of the peace movement I could not help experiencing a sharp pain at his devastating analysis of our current shortcomings. For a brief moment, I was tempted to retreat into defensiveness and consider the criticism unfair. But in the next moment, I remembered that “all is fair in love and war” and clearly this is both; his love for this country in general and for those who cherish her deepest virtues in particular, is abundantly clear. I want to thank him from the bottom of my heart for everything he has done, and particularly this latest courageous work on behalf of the truth.

Subsequent to reading the book, which points out among other things our near total absence of strategic thinking, I immediately began thinking about this need for a strategy and what it might be. Then Saturday afternoon, at a rally in Berkeley with Daniel Ellsberg and Barbara Lee, Michael Lerner spoke of his recent work. I had not heard him before, though like everyone else I had certainly heard of him.

His message was that addressing our need for security though dominating the world has to change. We must move to a strategy of establishing and maintaining our security through generosity.

Specifically, he advocated a “Global Marshall Plan” in which the US begins by dedicating 1% of GDP to address global needs such as poverty, hunger and climate change for each of the next 20 years; in time extending this to 5% of global GDP.

Googling “Global Marshall Plan” I found it’s an idea that first cropped up in Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance”. [First the “Information Superhighway” and now this, does that man think of everything! LOL]. Then, in March of 2006 a group of what appears in their photo to be 18 middle-aged middle-class Germans in Frankfort, launched an effort that is beginning to get some traction in Germany and the neighboring countries. The other prominent link on the Google search page was to the group headed by Michael Lerner, who is listed as an endorser of the German effort. However, it was on the German group’s website, that I came across an astonishing little quote that really got me thinking:

If everyone who was convinced of the need for change managed to persuade just one other person a year, the snowball effect would mean that in 33 years the entire population of the world would share a common ideal (for 233 = 8.5 billion).

Of course, we may not have enough time for such a leisurely pace. However, it’s beyond controversy that the potential power of an infectious idea is overwhelming.

In Waging Peace, Scott Ritter had the audacity to compare the search for peace to the Art of War. In this sprit, and not to be outdone, I’ll up the ante and compare the healing of the world to the spread of a disease. And as odious as it may appear at first glance, the metaphor of a virus a remarkably apt.

To succeed, the message must be airborne, in a word: short. It must slip past the natural defenses, it must seem familiar. It must bind to the receptor site, in other words it must be memorable. And it must turn in a way that breaches the boundary between the old and the new and liberating us from our private cells in which we are imprisoned.

Now more than ever, I am convinced that our real problem lies not our leader. Committing ourselves to acting, we may not change the world, but we will most certainly change what most deeply needs to be changed, ourselves. The Iraq Moratorium offers an opening in that regard. By taking off work without pay the third Friday of every month we are in effect sacrificing 5% of our own personal GDP to the cause and that’s a start. But to catch fire, we need an idea with as close to a 100% infection rate as possible.

We will know immediately when we have found what we are looking for. It doesn’t matter if we don’t get it right the first time or the ten-thousandth, for when we do it will be impossible to stop. In this search we are all, in our millions, the only laboratories the Earth has. We conduct this search when we talk to one another, and when we listen to one another. Please keep trying to find this message, and I will too.

The Shock Doctrine

2007-09-15T08:32:00.000-07:00

Illumination

2007-09-11T05:16:00.000-07:00

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; …

When Yeats wrote this, during the period between the two world wars, it was a dark time. One war had ended and in ending had sown the seeds for a new and more terrible sequel. Yet at that time, at the dawn of the roaring twenties in the US, a giddy, stunned populace saw the misty twilight as an invitation to revel. By mid-decade the party had spread to Europe. The decade long hangover that ensued, followed by nearly a decade of war, set in motion the consequences that haunt us still, and the shock that came upon us six years ago today was not the first, nor the last, in a series that have in retrospect clearly served the purposes, if not crafted for the purpose of, a cynical assault on democracy that has been going on our entire lives.

We have been wandering in a dim landscape and what we now so desperately need is the full light of day upon this twilight of half-perceived truths. In The Guardian, in an article entitled The shock doctrine Naomi Klein illuminates a central aspect of those truths:

In one of his most influential essays, [Milton] Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism's core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as "the shock doctrine". He observed that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change". When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the "tyranny of the status quo". A variation on Machiavelli's advice that "injuries" should be inflicted "all at once", this is one of Friedman's most lasting legacies.

Friedman first learned how to exploit a shock or crisis in the mid-70s, when he advised the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock after Pinochet's violent coup, but the country was also traumatized by hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy - tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation.

It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a "Chicago School" revolution, as so many of Pinochet's economists had studied under Friedman there. Friedman coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic "shock treatment". In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or "shock therapy", has been the method of choice.

[…]

The bottom line is that, for economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint, some sort of additional collective trauma has always been required. Friedman's economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy - the US under Reagan being the best example - but for the vision to be implemented in its complete form, authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian conditions are required.

[…]

Declassified CIA manuals explain how to break "resistant sources": create violent ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them. First, the senses are starved (with hoods, earplugs, shackles), then the body is bombarded with overwhelming stimulation (strobe lights, blaring music, beatings). The goal of this "softening-up" stage is to provoke a kind of hurricane in the mind, and it is in that state of shock that most prisoners give their interrogators whatever they want.

The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely. The original disaster - the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown - puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.

This is how in the aftermath of chaos, death and destruction, the seeds of greed, selfishness and their inevitable evolutionary goal, tyranny, have been deliberately sown. Predictably bountiful harvests have followed, and the lesson has not been lost on those who idolize such crops; nor could the peril be more obvious for those who for whatever reason do not worship at their altar.

Be that as it may, this is not the time for fear. It must be pointed out that this tactic is not always successful, and even when successful is not always successful for long. The Berlin wall fell, apartheid came to an end in South Africa, puppet dictatorships are falling like dominoes all across all of South America.

There is something in the human spirit that abhors slavery in whatever form it takes, and its exponents thrive only in chaos and twilight. So, this is my prayer for this sixth anniversary of 9/11: may we see clearly; and seeing clearly, may we learn how not to be afraid.

Paul Van Riper

2007-09-07T06:13:00.000-07:00

You couldn’t make this stuff up, or rather you could, but if you did folks would think you were being ridiculous. But this is a true story.

I first came across it in the comments to an article on CommonDreams.org about George Bush’s latest fly-by-night foray into Iraq to mug before the cameras and announce how we are winning and all, which is why, no doubt, he dare not fly into Baghdad, or in the light of day. It’s a good article, and I urge you to read it if you haven’t. But it’s easy to skip over the comments at the bottom, which is why I’d thought I’d point it out.

In one of the comments, an author named Giovanna describes a complex and fantastically expensive war game conducted by the US in July and August 2002 called Millennium Challenge 02 (MC02). In MC02, General Van Riper, former head of the Marine Corps University, was given the task of heading up “red team”, a supposedly rogue commander leading a group of rag-tag and poorly armed insurgents. At the cost of $250 million, its purpose was to validate the ultra-modern “network centric” model that was touted by its creators as the means by which the US would achieve global dominance with minimal casualties, at least US casualties. What happened next?

General Van Riper won, sinking 16 US naval vessels in the opening days of the war. Only after the naval ships were “re-floated” and the rules changed so that both sides were required to follow scripted actions were the “blue” (i.e. the United States) forces able to claim victory. For more, see the wikipedia entry or if you prefer try this tasty morsel at the Army Times.

Here’s what General Van Riper told Nova:

“I had a great deal of concern about the ideas that they were experimenting with in this particular exercise. I say that because I didn't think the ideas were intellectually worthy of being tested for that sort of money. Unfortunately, from where I sat, and I think I had a pretty good view, these ideas were never truly tested. Yet the conclusion drawn at the end of the exercise was that they had been and that they were worthy of adoption by our operating forces. I think they're very shallow. They are fundamentally flawed. They have no true intellectual content. And yet they're being, in my view, foisted on our operational commanders.”

So much for listening to the generals. I still hope it doesn’t happen, but for what its worth and for one more time: if being a criminal rogue regime, committing war crimes, including the ultimate war crime of planning and waging a war of aggression, killing millions of people, shutting down the world’s petroleum supplies and igniting a global firestorm unlikely to abate for decades isn’t enough of a reason not to attack Iran, try this one:

The verdict of the US Military’s most extensive and expensive research exercise on the subject to date is: we could very well lose.

Action

2007-09-06T05:01:00.000-07:00

15 days to go. On Friday, the 21^st of September, two weeks from tomorrow, the Iraq Moratorium begins. Of course, it’s about more than just Iraq, but it has to have a name and naming it for those who are suffering so enormously seems only fair, so Iraq Moratorium it is. Or if you prefer, in homage to our roots, The Moratorium.

Personally, however, it was Iran that pushed me over the edge, and I’m ashamed to say it but it’s the truth. Not that I didn’t strongly object to the invasion of Iraq, mind you, but like millions of others, I didn’t do all that much; largely because I didn’t see anything I could do would help. But the upcoming threatened war on Iran, a largely peaceful nation only trying to survive and now and again reaching out to help those suffering injustice; an unprovoked and possibly nuclear attack that will result in the deaths of millions and in all likelihood ignite war on a regional scale. That has forced me to reconsider.

And what I found is that we can make a difference. If we take action.

Let’s get one thing straight right now, action is not protest and it is not petitioning for the redress of grievance. Nor is it directed against anyone; even George Bush. Of course we want him to notice and certainly we want him to change his course, but the primary target, the one who gets changed, and the one who so desperately needs to be, is ourselves; changed from a nation of passive sheep into force which cannot be denied, not by him, and most especially not by us. That is why we must take action.

You see, the point is not “doing something that makes a difference.” Rarely do we have that luxury. But each and every time we take a deliberate action we are forced to confront ourselves and our fears. Who am I? What do I stand for? And: Will my friends disapprove? Will I make a fool of myself? Will I lose my job? Will I face government retaliation? Heady stuff that.

The question confronting us is not: Can what we do make a difference. It is: Who are we? Each of us must find the answer to this question for ourselves. And our dilemma is not that we cannot find the answer. It is can we can summon the courage to ask the question.

The consequences will not be pleasant if when we are stripped of our rights, our constitution a meaningless historical relic and our place in the world as the preeminent criminal rogue nation secured, the day comes when we are at last forced to admit that we did not live up to our vision of ourselves as a nation valuing truth and peace and freedom and democracy. On that day, whether we are victims or slaves or accomplices will be the least of our problems.

Contemplating action we confront who we are.

Taking action, we become what we do.

Why magicalnet?

2007-09-03T00:24:00.000-07:00

What is in a name anyway? Magicalnet is a name I’ve been using for awhile in various contexts. It has some Buddhist overtones, which I’m not going to go into. But in this context, there is a specific relevance I have in mind.

From A Force More Powerful by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall (pg 494):

Vaclav Havel … wrote a seminal essay, widely disseminated underground, called “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel argued that the confrontation between an authoritarian regime and its opposition took place first not on a material but on an existential level – and on that level, the power of the opposition was “the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society.” This potential did not rely on “soldiers of its own” but on “everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment… by the force of truth.” … Once the truth about the oppression is circulating in the public mind, it cannot be evaded.

Within America itself this oppression takes a number of forms. For those without money, legal residence, or education it can take obviously recognizable forms. For example America is number one in the world in the number of its citizens it jails. Public health is an oxymoron here, more like “You’re on your own”. But as egregious as this is, still the vast majority of Americans still have things pretty good as long as they don’t get sick, or get laid off, or something unexpected happens. Overt, actual oppression is still quite rare in most (or at least most “white”) neighborhoods.

Even so, although we speak and think as though we live in a democracy, we act as though we live in a dictatorship, and the cognitive dissonance takes its toll, arguably functioning as though it were a form of oppression. The people simply internalize their prison and attend to their own feeding and maintenance. Pretty slick, eh? Pinochet, eat your heart out! [For non-Americans, ignore that last sentence, it really doesn’t mean anything]

This magical net of mutual hallucination which we conjure around ourselves is never entirely true under the best of circumstances, but in this day and age and in this country, the illusion has drifted so far from any grounding in what is actually the case as to leave those caught with its web entirely in midair. People are starting to get airsick. We are all “living within the lie” and it has grown so fantastically terrible that vast numbers are apt to be “struck at any moment ... by the force of truth.”

For example, just this Saturday (and Saturday was such a busy day it seems), in Are We ‘Good Germans' Ed Ciaccio puts together a pretty good list of outrages that completely demolish any notion that America is a country that respects the rule of law, believes in freedom and justice, or has an even feeble grasp of the notion of basic human decency. But maybe folks missed that one. Be that as it may, nobody could have missed the propaganda promoting a strike on Iran which is at fever pitch and is entirely dependent upon transparent fabrications, gross exaggerations and outright lies. It seems this administration can’t even get their stories to line up with each other any more. There we are listening to a speech about how we are on the side of the angels, promoting peace, democracy and cheap tasty burgers, and in the next sentence our president is justifying torture or even threatening unprovoked nuclear war. You’d think people would notice something like that!

People pretend they don’t notice. They don’t WANT to notice. But they do notice. They can’t help it. And it tears holes in the prevailing web of conjured agreements about how things are.

This is what makes speaking the truth so powerful. Because, as Havel so astutely put it, “Once the truth about the oppression is circulating in the public mind, it cannot be evaded.” And seeing the net is the most powerful magic of all.

Once you see the illusion for what it is, you can never be the same, even if you try. I know. I tried. It didn’t work. I know other people who tried and it didn’t work for them either. Once you see what is going on, sooner or later you have to act. And that is also the truth.

But when will we act? That is the question that's keeping me up late tonight.

I can only pray we are not too late already.

Satyagraha

2007-09-02T22:47:00.000-07:00

I must confess, I have been away too long.

Years ago, I gave up everything. Not that I had all that much to give up, mind you, but nonetheless, such as I had I surrendered. Essentially homeless and penniless, I was one of a small band of brothers and sisters who maintained a 24 hour a day vigil and blockade on the railroad tracks of the Concord Naval Weapons station in California, near San Francisco. But that was then and that was long ago. Since then I have gathered the fruits of a modest life and found them, like everyone always does, closing around me like comfortable chains. And now I have to say how sorry I am. The bravest man I have ever met has given me the courage to face this demon of mine and I must make my peace with it before I continue.

To you in Iraq especially, with tears in my eyes and a throat that cannot speak, I want to say how very, very sorry I am that we Americans were not able to stop the horror that our government has inflicted upon you, and still inflicts. I don’t know if any of you will ever read this, but if there is a spirit of justice in this world, I pray to her that perhaps you might. And I accept whatever justice you would mete out to me for my, so far, feeble and inconsequential efforts on your behalf.

That is going to change now by the way. The feeble and inconsequential part. But I’m not done with my confession yet.

To all the people against whom we have waged war during my entire lifespan, I am so sorry. As it happens, I was born the year my government overthrew the government of Guatemala, I was conceived the year our government overthrew the elected government of Iran. While I was learning to talk my government was waging war in Korea. I came of age just as Vietnam was winding down. I was here trying to be a good person during all of that. But I was only a child and though I know now what a child can do, I did not know that then. So please consider this as a factor when you adjudge me for these crimes.

By the late eighties however, I did know what was going on and I had had enough. It was off to the tracks for me. And I think we did do some good. After that, for awhile I believed – because I wanted to believe – that we Americans had somewhat reformed. So I didn’t pay nearly close enough attention during the sanctions of the 90’s; yes I’m sorry for that too. The truth is I turned away for awhile, seeking I suppose a separate peace. For that I am guilty, but the time was not entirely wasted. I will try to turn what I have learned during that time to good account. We shall see.

So. Now here we are. Nine million dead and counting. World class global butchery on a Hitlerian scale. Yes, I have a lot to be sorry for.

Even the countries we did not attack, I find I must apologize to you too. For by creating such a powerful and criminal regime we have endangered the very principle of good government. With luck, we will at least serve some benefit by providing a bad example of what is to be avoided at all costs. Please, please I beg you everyone. Do not imitate our example! Clever liars are hard at work, so beware!

My goal with this blog is what Gandhi called Satyagraha, “Holding to the Truth”. I will speak the truth of what is happening here for as long as I am able. It’s not much but it’s all I can do. Perhaps it is the hardest, and the easiest, and the only thing that any of us can ever do.

And this is a start. The United States of America is a criminal regime, possibly the most evil but far and away the most powerful the world has ever seen, and so the most dangerous. If the world is to survive, and if America is to survive and recover her soul, she must be humbled. This is not the way I want it to be. But sadly, it is the way it is.

September 2, 2007

2007-09-02T21:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was an interesting day. Friends and friends of friends, we spent the afternoon remembering a fateful September 1^st 20 years ago, when at the Concord Naval Weapons Station a US Navy munitions train brutally assaulted a decorated war veteran and long-time peace activist. Brian lost his legs and lived to become a pillar of the renewed anti-war movement, the largest since the end of the Vietnam War; and weapons trains don’t run at Concord anymore. If you’re interested, there are stories here and here.

Against all odds the actions of that day and the actions that flowed from it stopped the war in its tracks, so to speak. Our actions gave hope to thousands who had damn little on their side, and that was arguably even more important. Our actions definitely worked magic on each of our lives. There is much to grieve in the horror of those days so many years ago, but so much more to celebrate. And if that was all there was to our little gathering, it would have been forever a memory of hearts full to overflowing, but nothing perhaps of interest outside our little group. But that was not all there was.

For the stark presence of our current plight intruded, with its echoes of another September 1^st, one 68 years ago. It has been clear for some time now how desperately George Bush longs to complete his trilogy of horror with a massive bombing campaign against Iran. Just today the Times of London carries a story of how the pending attack is designed to completely destroy the Iranian military, although from what we learned yesterday even this understates the size of the planned attack. Collectively we the people were unable to stop him launching his assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq and feelings of despair and grief inevitably arise.

Yet there is also reason to hope. George Bush is weaker now than ever before. With his previous adventures having soured into a full blown fiasco, key aides driven out in disgrace, a battered military on the brink of collapse, an economy on life support; only a madman would begin a war under these conditions against a country actually strong enough to fight back and against the councils of the departments of defense and state, the intelligence community, most of the barons of business and all of the nations of the world save one. Yet exactly that is his intention. And so we must ask ourselves, what do we do?

Ken mentioned the Iraq Moratorium. Immediately on hearing the word “Moratorium” Daniel lit up and told us a story. It went like this:

It was early October 1969, and Richard Nixon had not yet given up on winning the war in Vietnam. The situation was desperate and Nixon was desperate and he had seized on the idea of using nuclear weapons to bomb North Vietnam into submission. Directly and through intermediaries such as the Soviet ambassador he announced that “the train had left the station and was heading down the tracks,” a phrase too cute by half meant to convey an unshakable resolution. His intention was to prevail by bluff or if necessary through a limited demonstration of his awful might and so win the war that boots on the ground were so obviously losing.

Then, on October 15^th, that all changed. Two million people walked out of offices and classrooms across the country, vowing to repeat the action one month later, and every month for as long as it took. Nixon realized that such a massive display of civil disobedience would weaken his bluff and he might be forced to conduct an escalating series of bombings, with no clear certainty at which point the enemy would submit. And he realized that if two million were willing to walk out even before the campaign began, such an escalating series would trigger unprecedented reaction with unpredictable consequences.

Things did not get better right away; with Nixon denied his dramatic turnaround, the war dragged on. The invasions of Cambodia and Laos followed, later the Christmas bombings. And so for years, ordinary people had no idea how close the world had come to nuclear war in 1969. They could not know, and many still do not know, that moment was the turning of the tide. I learned this only yesterday. Maybe you just learned it too.

That moment has come round again, if we have the courage to seize it. It is inchoate and unformed; it is for us collectively to determine its nature. It is a simple thing really, and its genius is that it allows anyone and everyone to participate at whatever level they choose to become involved. Some may feel only able to war a black ribbon around their arm. Others, bolder, will be taking the day off work to rally and protest. Still others may wade into traffic banging pots and pans, snarling traffic and forcing people to confront the fact that all around us, as we go about our daily lives, millions of other lives no less precious than our own are being snuffed out, strangled, starved, poisoned and blown up so that we can relish our comforts.

Across this continuum as love overcomes fear a sense of responsibility is forged. And then the fire of courage is ignited: millions of people evaluating for themselves at which point they will say “this far and no further!” This is how a people give pause to a tyrant, this is why “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”. John did not go willingly to Runnymede, nor did Nixon or Botha or any other of the kings, presidents and dictators in between or since. They had no choice. This is our power.

And when you think about it, we don’t have any choice either. To live in silent acquiescence is to commit moral suicide, slowly, day by day, small doses of slow poison. To all my fellow citizens I say the time has come to take a stand. Act. Wear a black ribbon on Friday, September 21^st, and the third Friday every month, for as long as it takes. Do it for your conscience, do it for your country, do it for your God, do it for your children, do it for the people of the world. Do it for Frodo, if you must. But do it.

Tell your friends and family. Spread the word. And if and when you can… no, that’s not right, that’s not what I mean to say. What I mean to say is: If and when you must, do more.

- Diane Poole

diane@magicalnet.net