Sunday, June 29, 2014

Open hearts, Open minds
It is easy (and powerful people make it easier) to fall into a the heartless and mind-numbing trap where we only interact with people like ourselves, nodding appreciatively at our own ideas being repeated back to us with great passion.


If this cartoon made you feel like we need to interact more with people unlike ourselves, good.  If the cartoon made you pause, maybe the one below will do the job for you and cause others to pause and rethink.


Monday, June 23, 2014

Conservative Columnist Robert Samuelson On the CEO Aristocracy
In 1980 CEO compensation was 30 times what a typical worker earned.  Today it is 300 times.  While stock prices have gone up during the same period, according to this conservative economic journalist "little of the gains reflect better management."  This is a short article worth reading.  He concludes with this...

"Americans dislike aristocracy.  Unless companies can find a more restrained pay system, they risk an anti-capitalist backlash.  That is the ultimate danger."

I agree that this risk exists, but I wonder if there is not plenty of danger already in play for the millions of American working families whose real wages have stagnated since 1979, while increased worker productivity has generated explosive profits for the 1/3 of the 1 percent who are CEOs.



Saturday, June 21, 2014

When We Wonder Why
The British spend $3,400 and we spend $8,500 per person for health care…and the British system ranks #1 in quality…we ranked last.

The US is currently wobbling under the cumulative weight of a $17 trillion dollar national debt.  No one thinks this is a good thing, but it seems most of us think all sorts of things about this situation that completely miss the mark.

For instance, we have been steadily moving in the right direction, but opinion polls show an overwhelming number of us are not seeing this.  Our annual deficit (that creates the debt, one year at a time) peaked in 2009 as a result of the bank-driven near collapse of the economy and has been reduced by more than 50% this year…and it will be still lower next year. 

Polling data also shows that, while concerned, we remain both unwilling to cut programs and unwilling to raise taxes…the two steps we need to take if we want to increase the pace of moving in the right direction.  In fact, we only agree on one way to reduce the debt: reduce foreign aid.  Unfortunately, xenophobes have persuaded us that foreign aid is as much as 28% of our expenditures, when it is actually less than 1%, so that even eliminating foreign aid will have no impact on the debt.

When we wonder why so many of us are so misinformed, there are many culprits:  consumer culture saturating communication channels with a public pedagogy that encourages us to ignore science and forget our own history, our longstanding tendency to conflate irresponsibility with freedom, and elites willing to shamelessly mislead us…like our former Vice President Cheney did yet again this past week.

Cheney blamed our current president for the chaos in Iraq, because our current president implemented the withdrawal plan Cheney’s administration negotiated and signed, attempting to re-write history to erase his own errors that brought us to war in Iraq in the first place.  EJ Dionne reminds us…

On March 16, 2003, just days before the war started, Cheney sat down with the late Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press for what still stands as the most revealing of the prewar interviews. Cheney was adamant that “to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.”

A Rand study commissioned by Cheney found that more than 2 million American soldiers fought in the Iraq and Afganistan.

“We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” he famously said, and proceeded to play down the very sectarian divisions that are plaguing the country now.

Think about exactly how wrong this statement is now and that, at the time, it is difficult to imagine anyone believing this statement to be true.  Meaning our VP was willing to simply lie to put our young men and women in harm’s way with no exit strategy or plan for how it might advance our national interest.  Fellow Republican, Rand Paul, claims that the billion dollar, no-bid, contracts Halliburton received for the war are the reason Cheney chose to ‘snooker’ the American public.

Russert asked: “And you are convinced the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites will come together in a democracy?” Cheney replied quickly: “They have so far.”

Since we have to assume Cheney is not stupid and he understands the politics of the Middle East, this comment can only be interpreted as another willful effort to mislead, and to put millions of American lives at risk for decades in the process.

Ah yes, regime change would work out just fine — better than fine. “Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad,” Cheney had told the Veterans of Foreign Wars seven months earlier. “Moderates throughout the region would take heart.” Plus a bonus: “Our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.” This was the war that would cure all that ailed us.

Thanks to the Cheney op-ed, we can see how Obama’s hawkish critics are out to create a double standard. Whenever they are called out for how mistaken they were about Iraq in the first place, they piously lecture against “relitigating the past” and say we must instead look forward. At the same time, many of them feel perfectly free to trash the president in extreme and even vile terms.


Friday, June 20, 2014

Let's have an honest debate
Lt. Governor Mary Taylor, who has a history of misleading us on the ACA (see PolitifactOhio story at the link, finding her claims to be 'mostly false').

That same Mary Taylor put out a press release in August of 2013 to announce to Ohio residents that the cost of health insurance would go up 41% in the state as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

Headline news at the time, despite her documented struggle with accuracy on this subject.

Today, we know that the cost of obtaining health insurance has dropped nearly 50% for Ohio residents, as a result of Obamacare. But, the story was buried in section B of the hard copy paper and does not even appear in the online newspaper.

Nationwide, 8 million Americans have signed up for PRIVATE health insurance through the ACA exchanges.  Those receiving subsidies are paying an average of $82 per month, which is one-fourth what they would have paid without the ACA.

Why is this not also headline news? 

Why does Mary Taylor want to sabotage our debates about health insurance?





Saturday, June 14, 2014


Happy Father's Day 2014 Dad



You and Mom are the foundation of everything that matters



We love you Dad, beyond words, beyond pictures, just the way you are…
Thanks…appreciation and love…to the richest man in town!

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

The Art of Focus and Creativity
David Brooks reminds us we are not alone in experiencing how challenging it is to learn (and find time and space) to concentrate and focus. 

This is just one reason to learn to mediate, to exercise regularly, go for long walks with your dog, to pray…or otherwise carve out time to just be quiet and alone and able to focus on doing what you are doing at that time and nothing else. 

Like the Zen monk whose response to what is the path to enlightenment was “when I eat my rice, I eat my rice; when I wash my bowl, I wash my bowl.”



The Art of Focus
David Brooks, New York Times, June 3, 2014

Like everyone else, I am losing the attention war. I toggle over to my emails when I should be working. I text when I should be paying attention to the people in front of me. I spend hours looking at mildly diverting stuff on YouTube. (“Look, there’s a bunch of guys who can play ‘Billie Jean’ on beer bottles!”)

And, like everyone else, I’ve nodded along with the prohibition sermons imploring me to limit my information diet. Stop multitasking! Turn off the devices at least once a week!

And, like everyone else, these sermons have had no effect. Many of us lead lives of distraction, unable to focus on what we know we should focus on. According to a survey reported in an Op-Ed article on Sunday in The Times by Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath, 66 percent of workers aren’t able to focus on one thing at a time. Seventy percent of employees don’t have regular time for creative or strategic thinking while at work.

Since the prohibition sermons don’t work, I wonder if we might be able to copy some of the techniques used by the creatures who are phenomenally good at learning things: children.
I recently stumbled across an interview in The Paris Review with Adam Phillips, who was a child psychologist for many years. First, Phillips says, in order to pursue their intellectual adventures, children need a secure social base:

“There’s something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can ‘forget yourself’ and absorb yourself, in a book, say.”

Second, before they can throw themselves into their obsessions, children are propelled by desires so powerful that they can be frightening. “One of the things that is interesting about children is how much appetite they have,” Phillips observes. “How much appetite they have — but also how conflicted they can be about their appetites. Anybody who’s got young children ... will remember that children are incredibly picky about their food. ...

“One of the things it means is there’s something very frightening about one’s appetite. So that one is trying to contain a voraciousness in a very specific, limited, narrowed way. ... .An appetite is fearful because it connects you with the world in very unpredictable ways. ... Everybody is dealing with how much of their own alivenesss they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.”

Learning to focus and concentrate is not only challenging because we live in a world designed to distract us with the trivial (see below—say no to trivial distractions), but also because learning anything means leaving our comfort zones, rejecting the familiar safety of our ‘default’ self-centeredness and all-knowingness to be curious again, to re-open to seeing the world with wonder and experiencing our own lives directly and with great uncertainty.

Third, children are not burdened by excessive self-consciousness: “As young children, we listen to adults talking before we understand what they’re saying. And that’s, after all, where we start — we start in a position of not getting it.” Children are used to living an emotional richness that can’t be captured in words. They don’t worry about trying to organize their lives into neat little narratives. Their experience of life is more direct because they spend less time on interfering thoughts about themselves.

The lesson from childhood, then, is that if you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say “no” to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say “yes” to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.

win the war for attention  is an idea worth thinking about.

We know that advertisers are highlight paid PR experts dedicated to capturing our attention.
Upon reflection we also know that these same skills are used by candidates and elected officials…as they also struggle to capture our attention.

So, Brooks’ insight here about an internal struggle over our own attention can be usefully connected to external forces also vying for our attention. 

Brooks focuses on the external forces in social media and consumer culture, but we can productively extend this to include the larger elite struggles to capture our attention…in order to mobilize us in support of their product, candidate, legislation, or whatever particular conflict they want us to focus on.

Elites are struggling to win the war for our attention, because expanding the scope of one conflict crowds out other conflicts on the public policy agenda and changes the attentive audiences, publics, constituencies (changes who is paying attention and what we are paying attention to) and this has a powerful impact on the outcome of conflicts…on what happens in politics. 

David Brooks draws our attention to the fact that there is also an internal struggle to grab our attention, a struggle to either
·        concede control over our attention—over choosing what we will think about—to others, by unconsciously and unthinkingly accepting ‘what we will think about’ as determined for us, as not our own choice…
·        OR we can learn to choose what we want to think about, what we want to pay attention to, what we want to devote our time and energy to engaging with today and throughout our lives... 

We win this war, internally and collectively, by saying no to trivial distractions, sometimes put there on purpose—designed to distract us, designed to dissipate public energies by focusing us on more trivial concerns, instead of focusing on more important concerns.

Sometimes because focusing on these more important concerns will mean paying attention to corruption or greed or failed leadership among elites…and focusing on the ‘trivial-by-design’ often leads consumes and frustrates non-elites in divisive battles with each other that merely confirm our power-poor status.

Instead, say yes what we decide ought to be important, what we can all become passionate about, and let that scary but wonder-filled passionate adventure ‘crowd out’ the branded information created to distract us from becoming leaders in our own lives.

The way to discover a terrifying longing is to liberate yourself from the self-censoring labels you began to tell yourself over the course of your mis-education. These formulas are stultifying, Phillips argues: “You can only recover your appetite, and appetites, if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself. Because the point of knowing oneself is to contain one’s anxieties about appetite.”

We need to be able to suspend our judgment, suspend our beliefs and values, long enough to engage seriously with alternative perspectives and competing ideas…if we want to understand both our own and these other ideas…and if we want to learn and progress and solve problems. 

Brooks is coming at this from an individual level to point out that, as we grow older, our efforts to find ourselves can turn into obstacles to our own creativity…and for our purposes here, an obstacle to learning how to focus and concentrate on a scholarly text, to dig into someone else’s argument so deeply that you can explain it and defend it as well as the author herself might.

When we learn to do this, then we are learning and expanding our intellectual tool box…in scholarly conversations, through conflict as the crucible, by confronting our own and other’s confusions and the inescapable uncertainty of seriously and thoughtfully engaging with real world problems.

Thus: Focus on the external objects of fascination, not on who you think you are. Find people with overlapping obsessions. Don’t structure your encounters with them the way people do today, through brainstorming sessions (those don’t work) or through conferences with projection screens.

Instead look at the way children learn in groups. They make discoveries alone, but bring their treasures to the group. Then the group crowds around and hashes it out. In conversation, conflict, confusion and uncertainty can be metabolized and digested through somebody else. If the group sets a specific problem for itself, and then sets a tight deadline to come up with answers, the free digression of conversation will provide occasions in which people are surprised by their own minds.

The information universe tempts you with mildly pleasant but ultimately numbing diversions. The only way to stay fully alive is to dive down to your obsessions six fathoms deep. Down there it’s possible to make progress toward fulfilling your terrifying longing, which is the experience that produces the joy.

To go this editorial on the New York Times page: