Harnessing the power of the word "Clean"

For the past few months my physical and mental space have been occupied almost exclusively by the global campaign to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and create a clean energy economy. So I haven't written anything, especially on a subject so dependent on science (that is too complicated and technical for me to have a worthwhile opinion on) as is climate change. However, here is my bit.

Our planet's climate is changing. Everyone over 5 years old agrees with that fact. The scandalous question is: "Why is our climate changing?"

Because of the Industrial Revolution? Natural planetary cycles? Does it really matter since the planet is only 6,000 year old and the rapture is coming?

There are only two real possible answers; one is the worst-case scenario and the other is the better but equally unfortunate scenario:

A) The first is that indeed, mankind has completely hijacked the evolutionary process of Earth and thrown it into a cataclysmic extinction level event spiral after a century and a half of unrestricted planetary poisoning through relentless heavy industrial production and warfare.

B) The second scenario absolves us of the blame, but leaves us with many of the same problems. The planet is undergoing one of its many multi-millenary cycles that shifts the status quo in favor of some species and forces mass adaptation to changing habitats- see the Ice Age. The only difference is that now, the process is slightly quickened by human activity- not much to worry about since something similar would happen anyway.

Either way, the human species will face the same challenges: Major shifts in agriculture, mostly affecting developing or undeveloped geographical areas. The poorest parts of the world do not have access to technology intensive agriculture (whatever its merits or entrapments may be, food is food); therefore these areas will be the most vulnerable to socio-political and economic unrest. This means more refugees, human rights abuses and disruption of trade- not to mention the opportunity cost of closed and/or chaotic markets. Concurrently an inevitable decrease in the quality of life of all people would be plainly visible- water is a precious commodity in many parts of the world already and is a basic common denominator example.

Throughout history, revolutions in production have been made possible by social crisis and these revolutions are the motor behind the technological progress of human society- once again, all strive toward efficiency. Fossil fuels are owed an immeasurable debt by humankind, for bringing us all the luxury and comforts of modern western civilization. Fossil fuels are owed due regard for bringing humankind to the point where such energy is anachronistic. Fossil fuels depend on combustion, wasting tremendous amounts of energy. The byproducts of these reactions are toxic- millions of Americans suffer yearly from respiratory, cardiovascular diseases and of course- cancer. Fossil fuels have made American intervention in foreign countries a matter of policy, even when such action was detrimental to all involved. That is expensive energy.

A truly advanced society, in terms of technology and social philosophy, thrives off of the natural cycles of the host planet, solar system, etc... We are gaining the ability to harness geothermal, tidal flux, wind and solar energy, battery technology has also made tremendous advances in recent years. A world power cannot afford to miss out on the energy revolution and the interest groups trying to forestall these natural evolutions in human capability are in the kindest of terms: unpatriotic.

The current economic crisis is the perfect time to look for new production methods and items, train millions of new workers, create new markets and expand the scope of international cooperation.
After all, Reagan himself pointed out that we needed a threat greater than any ideology or country to unite humankind.
So yes, it is time to end the wars and start the biggest overseas contingency operation of all- the global clean energy leap.

"Once in a Century"

THE SKY IS FALLING! On some, on others... not so much. Many have debated whether or not there is a recession- in America, abroad or both. Certainly, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG this week many agree that there is a crisis of some sort. I am particularly fond of President Bush's choice of words: painful adjustments.

The choice of words is, I feel, very apt. Certainly, the sky will continue to float above. Certainly, the economy will persevere. Most importantly, crises are a great time to make a fortune and/or enact systemic "painful adjustments". The process may, quite reasonably, sound fearful. However, there is a long tradition of crisis driven change. One may argue that this is a reactionary approach, commentators on the current situation have referred to the management system as being "defensive". Realistically, or optimistically, we should regard this "once in a century" breakdown as an opportunity to put in place much needed reforms.

Our economic system, as leftist critics have justly observed for a long time, has been based around a non-productive consumerist paradigm. We, as a nation and state, have borrowed huge amounts of capital and invested it in artificial economic constructions that would provide short term profits through the speculation of market bubbles. Bubbles are indeed meant to be speculated, but not lived in. We know this from the long series of similar 'catastrophes' throughout our economic history. Having restructured our economy toward the fabled service-sector, we ceased to produce. When international loans are given to third-world economies those countries are expected, at times naively, to invest them in infrastructure and industry- sectors that are productive. In a period where blind consumerism has reached a critical point of environmental destruction and separation from the real world problems of other nations, it is only natural that there be an adjustment.

In Europe such adjustments have been part of the blueprinting process through the 90's. Cheap energy, recycling, so called "alternative lifestyles" are not eccentric attitudes but at least pursued goals and public policy if not concrete fact. European countries have had to deal with financial market restructuring due to the integration project. In America we act on the motto "don't fix what ain't broke" (if it's squeaky, buy a new one). Such as in the face of technological advancement, we waited for our Pearl Harbor in order to enact the Patriot Act to update our security systems (the appropriateness of this legislation is debatable regarding certain portions).

The trend has been to centralize authority, to increase regulatory authority and to heighten the Executive's role during the Bush Administration. The Financial Regulatory Reform project, begun in March of 2007, previewed one year later and enacted during the next administration is modeled partly on the UK's reforms and follows the above trend. Establishing a tripartite bureaucracy that would hold the reigns of American finances under control, in a manner most likely similar to our national defense organisms, it would have been unpalatable before this week. After a number of billions of dollars are lost, reform sounds rather tasty. So the Democrats revamp their cry for reform and regulation and the Republicans stumble between constituency key-words.

Palin's war-cry is "let's shake things up", a phrase patently stomach churning to anyone with a vested interest in order and prosperity during transitional eras. The populist message does not imply anything concrete, while McCain's own stance on market reform is confusing, thusly irrelevant. To our comfort, the bureaucracy has been working for at least a year on Financial Regulatory Reform and things will be settled. For now, heads are falling. This is progressive, because others are picking up the pieces, merging- and growing bigger. The US government has essentially nationalized a number of the country's largest financial institutions. While this sounds bad from the classical liberal standpoint, it isn't... necessarily.

We are once more in a period of Cold War. This time, the parties involved may be divided in between Authoritarian Capitalism and Corporate Democracies. Authoritarian Capitalism is exemplified by Putin's Russia and post-Nixon China (especially as experienced today). On a side-note, I might add that this term resembles the economic structure of Fascism, centrally coordinated/privately operated. The Corporate Democracy is a modern, capitalist reinvention of the Greek city-state. Based on functional efficiency, ruled by the landed-citizenry, representative of its component parts. Efficiency is profit, the parts are the stock-holders, the elite are the members of the board. This body is transnational with expansionist tendencies. These may seem like built-in self-destruct mechanisms, but at the dawn of the Green era there is the opportunity to reform the fundamental "greed" paradigms that have defined these organisms. A corporation that makes its profit from the existence of a river cannot, as an organism interested in its own survival, destroy the said river. We therefore are gaining the concept of "corporate responsibility". The business model will serve as a form of new self-governing entities, as cells of larger bodies (e.g. EU, NAFTA, ASEAN). I have no doubt that we will see 'corporate cities' within a few decades, similar in some ways to parts of Silicon Valley.

The death of the dinosaurs will allow for the birth of new reptiles. I am eager to observe the amount of foreign direct investment that will arrive at Wall Street's gates, in a fashion similar to that of Barclay's late and strategic acquisition of North American departments of Lehman Brothers. The nationalized elements (AIG, Sterns, McFannie) of the economy will, as has already been announced, be sold on the market. Will sovereign funds bite? The US dollar is low, assets are cheap. Who will become, even more, vested in the welfare of the American economy?

The game is afoot, my dear Watson.

Emergence of the Lost Word

"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

From the primordial energy extant before the Big Bang, we can imagine an emergent system, within which Deity is the primal unit that is giving impulse through the Word or Bang. The interactions of energy, which is neither created nor destroyed, but may be communicated, form extropic patterns. The tendency of a system is to create order from, apparent, chaos.

The dynamics within a system impose on its constitutive elements a process of rising efficiency in the communication of information. Thus solutions appear, ironically, in an entropic fashion. Of course, we may easily get lost in an epistemological discussion regarding our capacity to understand extremely complex systems, implicitly rendering the concepts of order and disorder unusable. It appears, prima facie, that unstable systems tend toward stabilization and stable systems tend toward destabilization. In this light we can observe solar systems and empires as being analogous with the human body and fundamental chemical bonds.

Human activity is characterized by continual striving toward streamlining the transmission of information. From oral tradition to the written word and the lightning fast access of online journal databases. To the improvement in electric transmission, from copper to silicon. Of resource management, from the hunter/gatherer social groups to capitalism's emphasis on profit margin which is essentially a base measure of transaction efficiency.The underlying goal is to transmit energy, or information, in loss less format through the fastest channel. That would be materialized order, if you will- a type of teleportation. However, even with teleportation, while we may 'print' the photon's data into another space, the original photon is lost- destabilized and transformed.

So, can we ever reach a perfect point of communication?
Can a parent teach the child to avoid all the errors of our ancestors?
Much like how a child is not an androgynous clone of its parents, but instead is a complex system with inherited genetic elements as well as proper unique emergent incongruities and mutations, communication is ipso facto incomplete. The very imperfection in the transmission of the Word, absorbed and altered by the matter through which it passes, allows for adaptation. Entropy and extropy are mutually dependent dynamics, as symbiotic as any other contrast.

Thus, while we must strive for the betterment of our world, we must not lose sight of the fact that progress is made possible by the obstacles opposed to it. We should embrace these as givers of strength. The dialectic processes observed on the micro and macro levels are the fundamental impulses that allow innovation. The entropy of the sub-system gives birth to order in the whole...

On What is Folly in Times of Love and War

Entangled in a new abstract war, that was announced at its beginning to be an experiment in a new type of warfare, we in the West are left wandering and lost in the forest of our own rhetoric. This historical period's scare is Terrorism, or the Insurgent. But, who are the Insurgents, and why are they terrorizing? The US military defines an insurgency as an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict. The Iraqi insurgency is being linked by the Bush Administration to Al Qaeda in order to tie it in to the worldwide "War on Terror". Accepting this proposed paradigm, we must assume that we are not dealing with an Iraqi Insurgency, but a Global Insurgency.
After the capitulation of Communism in the late 1980's we, perhaps naively, hoped that a new framework of international relations could replace Cold War polarities. Maybe our mistake was to buy into the concept of Pax Americana. As American citizens we often make two, optimistic but fundamentally mistaken, assumptions about our national historical patrimony. The first is the nostalgia for the lost American Isolationism- a preposterous idea, infirmed by everything from the extension of the thirteen colonies through Manifest Destiny to the Monroe Doctrine. The second is that if not we then at least our ancestors lived in the Land of Liberty, in Freedom. The reality is that like every other nation, ours too bathes in the blood and oppression of millions of human souls. We have massacred the indigenous population of the American continent, enslaved the people of Africa, burned witches, blacklisted artists and murdered progressive leaders, etc... The noble ideals enshrined in the common mythology of our foundation, as a People and Nation, are not declarations of fact but Goals that we aspire to achieve. The pyramid is left unfinished not because the laborers abandoned their work, but because their work is never ending. We are bound by our mortal weakness and can only be elevated by the breaking of our mental boundaries.
So while the post-Soviet Era may have lead into a global structure moved by a type of combustion engine (still not that efficient and rather volatile), Capitalism, we began thinking that, just maybe, we like Marx can speed up history provided we add some force to the existent inertia. We pushed aggressively, in all directions. Demanding that the Knight in Shining Armor be given Lord's Right over the Markets of all nations, our companies should have unrestricted access. We coupled business liberalism with a type of democratic proselytizing that bore resemblance to the Christian fundamentalist bombing of an abortion clinic. Is it surprising that segments of the human race feel threatened by these developments? No and sadly they may even be justified.
A core concept of the American philosophy and of Christian tradition is that one may and should lead through example. One should empower and perfect the self before attempting to transform the world. Looking at our society we must notice our mutual alienation, the abandoning of fundamental values in exchange for nominal gain, foods marketed toward the underprivileged sections of society that are more akin to poison than to nutrition. The permanent assault on the human brain through media. Social structures built around family descendance, tribal loyalty and religious faith cannot be expected to welcome the social model that we accept in Western society. This does not however mean that traditional societies have no place in Globalization, or even Capitalism.
While it is common to accuse Islam of intolerance, we must remember that their very conception of the self and world is being assaulted by our actions- we expect human rights, democracy, market-capitalism and justice to be uniformly modeled after our own style, and our investment and trade deals often underlie these political motifs. Fundamentally this attitude is counterproductive; different situations require different solutions, and different societies follow different paths to the peak of the mountain. 'Shock and awe' policies do not fulfill the promise of propaganda meant to win hearts and minds, our media war is completely eclipsed by the meat-grinder that was set up in Iraq. Instead of convincing the world's reactionaries that our values are positive, we prove through our actions that we are the true enemy. If your brother was abducted and tortured by the intelligence services of another state after a bomb was dropped on your grandmother's house, would you not dedicate your life to avenging the injustices perpetrated on your loved ones?
I often wonder, could we have bought Saddam out? Like, had given him 20 billion US dollars to leave and settle on a fantasy island. I feel like that would have been a capitalist solution. The US will have a new poster-child next year, we should use that PR coup to get back to what we do best: marketing lifestyles. Let's market Freedom, Democracy and Responsible Capitalism, to ourselves, our leaders and our enemies. We have let ourselves slip too far in the direction of a police state, just when we could finally reach closer to an ideal. Progress has given us the tools for a Utopia, but the dystopias of Orwell and Huxley are increasingly descriptive of our daily experience. Let's not waste 200 years of hard labor and suffering. Let our compassion and love bury our enemies and resurrect them as the closest of friends, this only will overwhelm the obstacles we place before us.

My Brother's Keeper

We share the same mental and physical space. Neurons firing in the same body, sending our currents across the Earth's body in ever increasing amounts at higher velocities.
Apparent chaos gives birth to the functional conception of individuality.
I think I am, therefore I am separate.
We are deluding ourselves into non-cooperative games by mutually assured distraction. A series of petty struggles have defined the history of our species and have led, self-evidently, to our current state of existence. One may argue that this dialectic process has been, by military necessity, a central incentive in the progress of humanity.
Doubtlessly we benefit from the cumulative advancements of human knowledge. The Age of Reason has coupled with Commercialism and bore the triplets named Comfort, Leisure and Waste. While the latter is an indicator of our inefficiency in the conversion of work into energy, the luxury of Western civilization allows its members the unique opportunity to lay down the tools of oppression, that have been so necessary in the maintenance of the pre-Information Age's social structure, and embrace universal cooperation as the rational subsequent stage of our evolutionary process.
It has been found that players in Prisoner's Dilemma models will generally follow the selfish, but somewhat safe, route of betraying their partner. However, players with prior experience become more likely to play cooperatively, thus maximizing their gain. Perhaps the time has come to accept our national, individual and global histories- to stop creating common myths in order to achieve community and to simply accept our mistakes and common fate to overcome our fears. Systematically behaving as teenagers we assume that our mastery of reason is impregnable, our decisions irrefutable.
Yet, we rely on coercion and combustion engines, understand our social roles through the lens of sitcom screenwriters and our self-image is designed by advertisers. We strive for death, numbing the sensations of everyday life with pharmaceuticals. In our vehement rejection of the inevitability of Death we deny the blessing of Life and become the very champions of death through our unwillingness to live happy, fulfilling lives. We accept mediocre roles, sure that we are incapable and undeserving of something better. In rejecting our natural inclinations we inhibit, a priori, the fulfillment of our creative potential resulting in a net loss for our civilization.
Thomas Hobbes argued that the good of the elite depends on the overall prosperity of society as a whole, in this he was right. We are a big dysfunctional family and while we refuse to take care of each other, we will continue to suffer at the hands of our own ignorance. As children of this empire, we have the historical opportunity to enfranchise those less fortunate- if only we accept our co-dependence.


Know Thyself and Take Responsibility