For 99 cents, sure...

From Lady Gaga's new album, Born This Way, which Amazon had on sale for 99 cents today, here is "The Edge of Glory."

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And here's to a new day tomorrow. :-D

Violence and political change

I finished all 483 pages of Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order today. What a great book! I highly recommend it if you're interested in human history and political, social, and economic development.

Given the scope of the book and the many millenia it spans, I don't feel up to the task of summarizing it right now. So I'll just share this quote on the role of violence in political change that I found interesting:

The ability of societies to innovate institutionally thus depends on whether they can neutralize existing political stakeholders holding vetoes over reform....

The stability of dysfunctional equilibria suggests one reason why violence has played such an important role in institutional innovation and reform. Violence is classically seen as the problem that politics seeks to solve, but sometimes violence is the only way to displace entrenched stakeholders who are blocking institutional change. The fear of violent death is a stronger emotion that the desire for material gain and is capable of motivating more far-reaching changes in behavior. We already noted ... that economic motives like the desire to put in place a large irrigation system were highly implausible causes of pristine state formation. Incessant tribal warfare or fear of conquest by better-organized groups is, by contrast, a very understandable reason why free and proud tribesmen might agree to live in a centralized state.

Fukuyama cites the disagreement over slavery in the U.S. as a conflict that "could not be solved under the Constitution and necessitated a war that claimed more than six hundred thousand American lives." And as a consequence, the power of the federal government expanded significantly.

He also makes the claim that accountability in political systems is not sufficient to support good governance, arguing that the emergence of modern liberal democracies requires "a relative balance of power between a cohesive state and an equally well-organized society that can defend its interests." While the rarity of that condition explains why the English parliamentary case is unique rather than typical, the increasingly free flow of ideas since the Industrial Revolution has allowed other nations to more readily borrow and adapt such institutions to their own needs. Still, the success of externally imposed nation building is limited by the degree to which a society can be mobilized on its own behalf...

For people who have a hard time listening...

From President Obama's AIPAC speech today:

“Let me repeat what I actually said on Thursday,” Mr. Obama said in firm tones at one point, “not what I was reported to have said.”

“I said that the United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

The president emphasized the “mutually agreed swaps,” then went into an elaboration of what he believes that means. Mr. Netanyahu, in his critique of Mr. Obama’s remarks, had ignored the “mutually agreed swaps” part of the president’s proposal.

“Since my position has been misrepresented several times, let me reaffirm what “1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” means,” Mr. Obama said. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. It is a well known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation. It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place over the last 44 years.”

“There was nothing particularly original in my proposal,” he said. “This basic framework for negotiations has long been the basis for discussions among the parties, including previous U.S. administrations.”

Some people are blogging; I am not

My web pal Sally recently sent me a couple of blogs to check out. One had this really intriguing cake recipe (Orange Olive Oil Cake with Salted Caramel Sauce) that I can't wait to try, and the other had a nice post about a trip to Bangkok which reminded me of my own visit there...

Reading both also reminded me that I haven't been writing much lately, which led me to pen this unlikely explanation in an email to Sally: "I've just been enjoying the turn of the season even as things remain the same in a brand new world." ;-)

Hard to believe...

That's it been five years.

Here's Mary J. Blige's "Be Without You" which was so much a part of my 2006 in San Francisco.

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Song for the day

Cher's "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me" from Burlesque.

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Cher has been re-inventing herself my whole life... and she still has the power to inspire me.

The New York Times had a good interview with her around the time Burlesque came out.

Rough times for new college grads

From the New York Times:

The median starting salary for students graduating from four-year colleges in 2009 and 2010 was $27,000, down from $30,000 for those who entered the work force in 2006 to 2008, according to a study released on Wednesday by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. That is a decline of 10 percent, even before taking inflation into account.

Of course, these are the lucky ones — the graduates who found a job. Among the members of the class of 2010, just 56 percent had held at least one job by this spring, when the survey was conducted. That compares with 90 percent of graduates from the classes of 2006 and 2007.

The beauty of physics and harmonic motion

So musical, even without accompaniment.

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Thanks to my co-worker Michael for passing this on...

On good government

I'm about halfway through Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order, one of the best books I've read in several years. Starting in prehistoric times, Fukuyama traces the development of political systems in cultures around the world including China, India, the Middle East, and Europe. One thing I'm really loving is how he integrates various disciplines such as evolutionary biology, economics, and comparative political science. The book has already led me to reconsider my notions about the historical role of religion and has dashed my hopes that the current Republican fixation on reducing taxes at any cost is a temporary aberration.

A quote on good government:

The rule of law and political accountability are desirable in their own right. Sometimes, they can get in the way of good, effective government, as when an Indian state is unable to make a decision on a major infrastructure project due to litigation and public protests, or when the U.S. Congress cannot bring itself to deal with pressing problems like entitlements due to the influence of lobbyists and interest groups.

But at other times rule of law and accountability are necessary to preserve good government. Under the right conditions, a strong authoritarian system can produce extremely effective government. Political systems need to be able to endure changing external conditions and changing leaders. The checks on state authority provided by rule of law and accountability serve to reduce the variance in governmental performance: they constrain the best governments, but they also prevent bad ones from spiraling out of control.

From what I've read so far, it's clear to me that we're in a period of "political decay." I think we could use a good psychohistorian right now...

Quote for the day

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

Quote for the day

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

-- Virginia Woolf

More Wikileaks irony

The power of the human mind to embrace the double standard is amazing. Case in point: Wikileaks.

First Julian Assange and his cohorts cried foul when information about the details of his alleged sex crimes were leaked to the press.

Now the news that Wikileaks makes it staff members sign an agreement that they won't reveal anything about the workings of Wikileaks and holds them liable for up to $20 million in damages.

I guess their motto is, "Information wants to be free (unless it's our information)."

Song of the day

The Killers' "The World That We Live In"

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Understanding our deficit

This chart puts in perspective the various contributors to the U.S. budget deficit... can you imagine if we actually took action on the factors that are driving the problem?

More here.

Song for this day

"Under the Ivy" by Kate Bush.

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Quotes for the day

"What happened Sunday sent a message: When we say we will never forget, we mean what we say."

"The fact of the matter is you will not see bin Laden walking on this Earth again."

-- President Obama

Thoughts on the world: 9/20/2001

I wrote this nine days after 9/11. Between the death of Osama bin Laden and the mood I've been in the past couple of weeks, re-posting it now seems appropriate.

“New” and “changed” are words getting a lot of use these days, as in “we’re living in a new world,” “the U.S. is facing a new kind of enemy,” and “life will forever be changed.” Tonight, though, I’m reminded that, in so many ways, life—and our world—is neither new nor changed.

I read an article this evening about a Neanderthal jawbone that had been recently discovered in France. The jawbone was missing almost all of its teeth and showed considerable bone damage. Because of the lack of teeth, the scientists who found it believe that this individual would have been almost totally unable to chew food and would have had great difficulty surviving independently. Further analysis showed that the jawbone’s owner had lived for at least six months while in this condition, and they concluded that the bone provides the earliest evidence of the human capacity for caring for others—that someone, or some group, was providing this injured or diseased individual with soft food. Perhaps fruit, perhaps food that been chopped or cooked, but likely more food than the individual could have gathered or prepared on his or her own.

Whether or not their theory about this nearly 200,000 year old jawbone is correct, somewhere along the way humans did, in fact, start caring for each other. Perhaps we are touched so much by the efforts of others in New York City, and the willingness of people around the world to give to the relief effort, because caring for one another has such ancient roots. We’ve grown accustomed to rushing through our busy lives and being disappointed by the perceived slights of those around us. And yet when we need each other the most, we’re there; we come through for each other. This past week, whether we looked to our families that we were born with, or the families that we’ve made, we found a depth of love and caring that too often we had forgotten was there. And when we watched those at the epicenter of September 11’s attack, we’re overwhelmed by the selflessness and heroism of those sifting through the rubble in search of survivors—men and women unwilling to abandon those who might still be alive, unwilling to leave behind the bodies of those already dead.

This week is not the first time this summer that I’ve thought about our connection with the past. In July I drove up the coast with a man named Eduardo. We ended up following the Russian River inland, and, stopping in Monte Rio, I was struck by the fact that with all of the technology that we’ve developed and the amusements we’ve built, people still go and simply sit in the water. Maybe the swimmers and bathers were trying to escape from the traffic and computers and phones of daily life. Or maybe when you really get down to it there’s nothing better than just soaking up the sun while staying cool in a river’s slow current. But either way, here they were: young and old; men and women; straight and gay. People enjoying themselves in the most basic way that you could imagine—sitting in the water.

How can we even begin to imagine how many people have done this through the centuries, the millennia? In a way it makes me laugh at the elaborate efforts that we go through to entertain ourselves. But it also comforts me, because it is a tie to our past, to our origins.

Continuity is a great source of security. When I first came out of the closet and began going to gay bars back in 1987, there were several individuals that quickly became fixtures in my world. The first few times I ventured out, I went alone, and it was sometimes scary to walk into that new environment. Somehow it was comforting seeing familiar faces, even when they belonged to people that I never met. There was a beautiful young man named Ronno who entered a wet jockey shorts contest on a Thursday night at the End Up. For two or three years afterward I saw him around town; those being the early years of the AIDS epidemic, seeing the same faces through the months was particularly reassuring. I remember thinking to myself, “As long as Ronno is around, things are okay. Life will be all right.”

As the years passed, I stopped seeing him around San Francisco. Life, somehow, continued. By then I had established a large circle of gay friends, and that familiar but unacquainted face in the crowd was no longer needed for my comfort. Even today, though, I catch myself making eye contact across a dance floor, or on the street, with someone whom I have never met. Sometimes we smile with some strange, shared recognition that we inhabit the same world; it isn’t necessary to connect beyond that.

Connecting without connecting…: another aspect of living in a herd. We’ve lived in groups for as long as we’ve been around as a species; no doubt it is the natural condition for us humans. I suspect that nothing really “new” has happened to us for quite a long time. So what is it for us to be living in a “new” or “changed” world?

When I look around me—and inside myself—the only thing I find that has really changed is… me. This week I feel a little older. I feel a little more for those around me, whether they are next door or across the world. And I feel much more of the desire to give something back to the world. That feeling extends beyond sending money to aid the survivors of those who have fallen; somehow that’s an inadequate response to the magnitude of this. I want to be a better person, mostly in small ways. I’ve found myself waving at firemen and policemen. I’m friendlier with the people who share the routine of my life, whether they are co-workers or salespeople or men and women on the street. My grand plans for my sabbatical have been tempered; maybe I can spend some of that time giving rather than just enjoying. Maybe the opportunity it provides is a chance to share and to learn rather than to just be free from work.

Strangely enough, tonight I found myself feeling happier. It’s been a long road this past year as I’ve learned to be single again; learned to live on my own and for myself, and I know I’m happier for having been successful at that. But I’m also happier this week because I feel more alive. I feel more connected with my friends and family and the others around me. I sense the timelessness of human existence that Walt Whitman spoke of when he asked, “What is it then between us? / What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?” I am reminded of the beauty of people simply living their lives; how the same things—good food, falling in love, the rhythm of music—continue to thrill us. I’m trying to be better and to figure out what I should learn from September 11.

And I know that if I saw Ronno on the street tomorrow, I would stop him and say, “hello.”

The war Osama Bin Laden was fighting

I totally subscribe to the idea that Osama bin Laden's true aim was to cripple America economically. From Ezra Klein:

For bin Laden ... success was not to be measured in body counts. It was to be measured in deficits, in borrowing costs, in investments we weren’t able to make in our country’s continued economic strength. And by those measures, bin Laden landed a lot of blows.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the price tag on the Iraq War alone will surpass $3 trillion. Afghanistan likely amounts to another trillion or two. Add in the build-up in homeland security spending since 9/11 and you’re looking at yet another trillion. And don’t forget the indirect costs of all this turmoil: The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then kept them low to combat skyrocketing oil prices, a byproduct of the war in Iraq. That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008.

Then there’s the post-9/11 slowdown in the economy, the time wasted in airports, the foregone returns on investments we didn’t make, the rise in oil prices as a result of the Iraq War, the cost of rebuilding Ground Zero, health care for the first responders and much, much more.

Making sense of it all

I thought Nicholas Kristof's thoughts on the aftermath of Osama bin Laden's death were fairly insightful.

And this post "Killing a Monster" about the reaction of several New York City Buddhists helped to clarify my own thinking about where I stand. I liked the notion that monsters don't exist independently of the world around them, and it was good to reflect on the idea that all of our actions have consequences. But this quote from Ganden Thurman of Tibet House spoke to the fact that we live in a real world... a world with constraints that we can't always overcome:

Buddhism is about improving the way we make choices. Sometimes one’s choices are limited.

What to say

Hearing the news tonight, I found myself wanting to honk my horn, to yell, to make noise. And, ultimately, to be around other people. Unlike 9/11, when I wanted nothing other than to be alone, Osama bin Laden's death was an occasion to be spent in the company of others... in public.

So I made my way to a bar, a friendly place where I knew I'd know people. To revel in the demise of a man who has embodied evil for the last ten years.

To those who don't understand the celebratory mood that has broken out around America tonight, know that it has to do with more than bin Laden's death. It's about release, a hope and desire, if even for a moment, that we might escape the tragedy, pain, and unexpected difficulties of the first decade of the 21st century. Tonight we want to believe that this has all been a false start; that life might have been different had not bin Laden sent those planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

We want to believe that it didn't have to be like this.

And so, for now, for tonight, I honked my horn, and I screamed in my car. And I'm glad that our Muslim president Barack Hussein Obama took out Osama bin Laden.

Humor for political junkies

Here are the speeches given at the White House Correspondents Dinner last night by President Obama and Seth Meyers from Saturday Night Live.

Obama enjoyed making fun of the "birther" sideshow, and both he and Meyers had a bunch of zingers for Donald Trump who was in attendance (his sense of humor didn't appear to be). Meyers' best joke of the night: "Donald Trump said recently he has a great relationship with the blacks, though unless The Blacks are a family of white people, I bet he's mistaken." (It's at the 13:45 mark in his speech.)

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