The Five Mile Per Hour Lifestyle

I threw my hands in the air, saluting the morning sun. A giant sunflower rose on the end of a cherry picker's boom. Jack Johnson played quietly, the people listened in peace. It was incredibly slow, unrushed, the other side of the planet from hurried. Just another sunrise over the salt flats of Black Rock City, Nevada -- the crescent moon city that is Burning Man.

This experiment in "radical self-reliance" immerses you in the most extreme conditions of beating sun and blowing sand, testing your patience and growing your humility. Money does not exist. The only things sold are coffee and ice, both as public health measures. You gotta have cold beers for the thirsty and medication for the caffeine addicts after all.

When everything's free, the richest are those who give the most. My first day out I needed a vital part for my bike, and found someone who had exactly what I needed -- all ready to go. We traded stories along the way and had a delicious breakfast of hot-off-the-griddle pancakes. We hit the spot and he gives it with pleasure. I ask, he answers. It's all just common courtesy on the playa.

You spend your days in this sort of social trade. Schmoozing with the pilots at the airport to get a fly above the city. There are no commercials or price tags to tell you how to act, just the spirit of compliment barter, the haggling of the taller tale. When everything's free, the richest are those who give the most.

Ceremony and ritual here are not bound by the holy books of yesterday. Find the artist-prophet-genius within you. I promise it's there in everyone, dying to crack out to invent ceremony continuously, to make the space around you sacred through an approach of respect.

When everything's free you spend an afternoon building a Mayan pyramid out of adobe bricks. Bricks you formed yourself from water and sifted dust. Another apprentice teaches you how to knead clay out of this crusty piece of earth, how to run a wire through the block to form sheets of clay that will be knifed into bricks with a ruler.

The alchemical solvent that makes this all possible is water, a precious fount of life in the desert. The stuff that keeps us from drying out to raisins -- Keep the pee clear and copious, kids! -- the stuff that glues dirt together so you can build with it. We should be careful with our earth's limited water, we don't want the whole planet to turn to desert, trust me.

You learn to trust yourself and your friends. You cement your most special relationships with love refined in the fire of the desert. You go to sleep utterly and blissfully exhausted every night, voice ragged from a long night of tribal storytelling, nodding heads, and smiling mouths. You spend a week devouring the world at a very slow pace.

Hundred Mile an Hour Lifestyle

Breezing over oceans of image memes -- ima-memes
Hipster couture.
Rand Viking the Norse God. The cold inner fire of exploration.
The Nike symbol you've got plastered over your mindxperience.
The Totem OverAll.
Look at the major path through a city of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and see what you see -- People Buzzing.

ADD/ADHD and Neuroliberty

Millions of kids across the country are being medicated out of their excitement, tranquilized for their energy, and denied the right to wear themselves out naturally by bouncing and playing. I'm talking about the increasing number of children being diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD/ADHD), a pathology originally invented for children who have a hard time sitting still in class, but which is now being applied to adults too. Our society's habit of medicalizing everything and looking for magic pills to fix all our ills has made this vaguely defined "disease" a huge industry.

The drug companies have already saturated our schools so now they're after adults who have problems with procrastination, "wrapping up the final details of a project," or "remembering appointments or obligations." Doesn't that sound like, um, just about everybody? These quotes come from a simple self-diagnosis screener on a site called Adult ADD. What is it? built by the maker of an ADD drug called Strattera. The site is the first sponsored link to pop up when you type "ADD" or "ADHD" into Google. Looks like there's finally a solution for to my infrequent blogging!

The real attention deficit is the lack of attention from dysfunctional parents and schools. Kids need to run themselves ragged on soccer fields with mom or dad, not sit in front of PlayStation all day everyday. Schools need to stop cutting PhysEd, music, and dance programs where kids can use their bodies and start firing the vampire paper-shuffling educrats instead. Everyone needs to stop stigmatizing kids by telling them self-fulfilling prophecies about their inability to concentrate. We lower expecations by diagnosing them with a nonexistent disease.
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Further thought branches:

AbleChild: Parents for Label and Drug Free Education consists of a growing number of parents outraged over both the subjective labeling (ADHD, ADD, OCD, ODD) and pervasive drugging of our children.

An interview with Wrye Sententia (cool nom de plume for brain freedom activism huh?) from The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics:

I read that Ritalin is the most popular drug on college campuses today as adult students are finding it an excellent study aid. [See "Academic Doping"] I’m not sure what this says about how society will cope with new generations of overachievers rather than more legendary generations of slackers, but maybe it’s for the best — at least it is for the GDP....this is what stimulant drugs for children are aimed at, what I like to call cubicle consciousness. I was just talking today with a neighbor who’s 12 year-old son has trouble concentrating in school and is being called a "borderline case" — which in his case, means that because his parents refuse to place him on prescription stimulants, he is repeatedly tested for learning disabilities and alternately scores "genius potential" and "diagnosed ADHD". Surprise, surprise! Either the diagnostic test or the school system is failing him. [Emphasis mine]

Thomas Szasz (author of The Myth of Mental Illness) reminds us that "psychiatrists have always used diagnostic terms to stigmatize and control people -- for example:

* black slaves who ran away to freedom suffered from drapetomania;
* women who rebelled against being controlled by men suffered from hysteria;
* until only a few years ago, men and women who engaged in sexual acts with members of their own sex suffered from the dread disease of homosexuality.

Kundalini Hollywood

Kundalini yoga is Kinetic yoga. Forget gentle flow, it's more like force and quick-panting- fire-breath. Seemed like a kind of calisthenics -- lots of arm cirlces and reaches in a rapid tempo. All the quick breathing warms the body. Repetition brings agony, but forget that and concentrate on moving. "Don't worry, your arms won't fall off," says the youth yogi, and they don't.

Throwing your arms around generates serious leverage and tons of momentum. Muscles have to stabilize and resist that. Clench up the abs and the sex, and get one powerful core. You shouldn't step under a wreckingball of hands thrown from above the head. But you should do it to rip the shoulders and back.

Definitely new things learned to add to my own practic. Collect the stuff that works and put it to work.

Open Mike Night: The New(Old) Church

They passed around a plate at the poetry reading tonight. If the words rose to prophecy, if the laughs shook your soul, if the images blasted the scales off your jaded eyes, please put in a $5 bill, not a crumpled $1.

This must be how religions begin. Talented words spawn an urge to creative action in the pilgrims. The words give faith that even if one's own Work In Progress never reaches Masterpiece, the process will purify and uplift us.

The action required of us today is to push our stories back upstream, up towards the media gods of Mt. Hollywood. Pick up your keyboard and camera because their divinity is ours.

Think Haiku

I need to let myself write short posts. Prune the tree of infinite possibilties, unplug my brain's multiplicity module, and think more haiku.

The Present-Future is Hypercompetitive

I hate monopolists. I despise them with every ounce of my being. I want nothing more than the complete freedom of every human person on earth. But when I talk about my laissez-faire tendencies I'm immediately met with one argument from my lefty anti-capitalist friends. Markets tend towards nasty monopolies that exploit the poor and brutalize the poor worker-consumer.

The government's job is to flick those robber baron cappies off their peak perches of power. Me ontheotherhand think enterprenurial competitors are happy to do that anyway. Google and Linux seem perfectly able to gobble Microsoft's market share. The same with Amazon and Wal-Mart. People are afraid to look the future in the eye for what it is: hypercompetitive.

Why I Voted for the Stem Cell Initiative: Supersimple Ethics

Opponents of stem cell research would like the rest of us to believe that their objections to the burgeoning field are purely scientific. "Embryonic stem cells have not created a single useful human therapy," they protest. It looks like that tired excuse is on its last legs. A researcher at the Christopher Reeve Research Center at UC-Irvine has made paralyzed rats walk by injecting human stem cells into their crushed spinal cords. Human trials are expected in 2006. Considering researchers have only been working with these cells since 1998, I think this qualifies as excellent progress.

Obviously, the fight against the use of human stem cells is not about science, but rather about the issue of aborting early-stage human embryos, an issue of morals and ethics. A long discussion on this issue with my great uncle, a priest and monsignor in the Catholic Church, on Christmas has made me want to clarify my position on this issue a bit more. But first, a little background on personal experiences that have brought me to where I am.

In the spring of 2002, six members of my residential life team from USC were in a brutal car accident on the Santa Monica Freeway. Stalled in the fast lane behind a car out of gas, they were rearended at high speed. Injuries in the car ranged from bumps and minor fractures to punctured lungs and torn spleens. My good friend R. was paralyzed from the chest down. I spent an interminable, delirious, and nightmarish night in Cedars-Sinai Hospital watching one of the greatest givers of joy and sunshine in my life, a model of goodness and humor, lie motionless on an ER examining table. I watched heavy-handed neurologist prick her sides, checking for feeling. "Feel that? Feel that? Feel that?" "Ow!" Then he marked her with a sharpie. I cried in the waiting room.

When I voted for the California Stem Cell Initiative, I voted for my friend, R. I voted for therapies that might help her walk again. Maybe I left some potential people -- those embryos harvested for research -- out in the cold. Those little balls of cells don't enter into my moral calculus, though.

This was a case where I tried to use the supersimple basis of all ethics: the golden rule. I chose to use the "strong" version of the rule -- not "Treat others as you wish to be treated" but "Treat others as they wish to be treated." The corollary of the strong golden rule is that one should be able to trade places with the person affected by an action one takes. I couldn't trade places with R. if I had voted "No." I couldn't cut off a promising avenue of research because of our cultural hangups about abortion. I wouldn't want to trade places with her if my vote helped defeat an initiative that might cure her/my paralysis.

On the other hand, trading places with an undeveloped embryo is logically impossible. I have an independent mind-body embedded in an environment of friends and work and sights and sounds. An embryo has no sense organs, no mind, and no existence independent of its mother. It's basically an organ of the mother. I can't put myself in an embryo's shoes because it has no shoes.

We must pursue all types of stem cell research -- embryonic, adult, umbilical, etc. -- simultaneously. We must cure my friend R. and hundreds of thousands like her.

Rocking the Education System

The way we organize and perform education in this country is broken. Generations of rules and habits have split knowledge up into little bits. We examine pebbles instead of rocky beach landscapes. Words on a page put real-lived-life into cozy genealogical compartments. Human touch is taxonomized into a dim gray cloud of abstractions.

Now when our teaching methods crush our natural learning instincts only a radical departure, a complete reorganization of the institutions can equip our young and old learners with the tools they need to remake the world and earn a living in a competitive world. And I think it can happen. My solution? Just walk away and let the dinosaurs die. Build up an alternative educational infrastructure and let the old wither away. Home schoolers are doing it and indie consultant-entrepreneurs too. It's time we let the kids go.

Smash the strangling grip of teachers unions. Give kids and their parents universal education vouchers and the right to choose so that schools join the modern innovation economy. Refocus on modern rhetoric: the business plan, the scientific paper, the flash animation, the google search, the cold call, and the op-ed. Chase goals and projects like figuring out how a car works by building one. Let students learn about cities by designing and gaining approvals for a mock real estate development.

In the movie School of Rock, a group of prep school kids joins a washed up slacker rock musician (the hilarious Jack Black) to put together a rock band. For four weeks that's all they do. Social studies is replaced with the complicated cultural history of rock music's development. Figures like Hendrix, Marley, and Johnny Ramone are recognized as the heroes they are in the modern epic struggles against colonial oppression, warmongering, and the rest of society's reactionary squares. After studying the complicated family tree of psychedelic rock to punk, the kids spend the rest of the day playing and writing music. Kids that can't sing or play an instrument get security detail or take over management and promotion duties. No one fails this class because it's impossible. Each child gets to play on their own strengths.

This is an integrated method of education where the bodily skills of singing and dancing and playing are not divorced from the intellectual requirements of understanding the flow of history or the logistical acumen of producing entertainment for consumption. This can work with any subject. Let's return to my mention of a mock real estate development for another example.

The class could design and develop an apartment building over shops or a public library with an attached skate park. They'd have to go through all the approvals, fill out the bureaucratic forms for building permits, and understand the importance of how contracts govern business relationships. Daily debates could examine how we should balance local ecology, wildlife habitat, and farmland with new homes, auto malls, and big box stores. Kids are natural dreamers that can help us develop integral visions of pomo-prosperity that harmonize human2human and human2earth interactions. With the NIMBY's locked in ugly battles with the evil black-suited real estate developers, I think kids can help break the logjam of how we can build human settlements -- i.e. we can drink 3 minute lattes and still have safe spawning grounds for salmon.

Kids are given schizophrenia by splitting the school work day indiscriminately -- 40 minutes here, half hour for lunch, and another 90 minutes there. Hustling them about in hallways, burdening them with piles of meaningless textbooks, we deprive them of the natural process of discovery. Big brained mammals like us learn automatically. We learn language and how to tie our shoes from imitation and adaptation without the slightest effort while subjects like mathematics come with fatal difficulties -- mostly because its teaching is utterly divorced from the natural-sensate world.

Project- and team-based education that concentrates on a single enterprise like a battle of the bands or a real estate development can help stop the unnecessary atomization of knowledge. Projects return the pleasures of craft and vocation to complex knowledge domains like entertainment and city building. The webworld prizes connections and integration, it's time our education system did the same.

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Inspired by 21st Century College: An Outline, the ideas of Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson, Buckminster Fuller, and many long conversations with Ket.

UPDATE: I thought this list of the top 1,000 things to know from marketing guru Seth Godin was pretty cool. We've got some good overlap.

A Picture Stops a Thousand Lawsuits

Designing graphics to convey a complicated idea about the urban experience in real three-dimensional space is a non-trivial task. Information designers that can tell a simple story about how the built environment effects our lifestyles and moods. Not in my backyard has disabled us from making intelligent choices about the places we live and work. Public conversations have become split into absurd positions pitting imagined evil black suited real estate developers versus nature, mom and apple pie. They can only be resolved in endless lawsuits. Why not concentrate on building beautiful places?

The animation comes from City Comforts Blog, a site that examines the best solutions for living well in cities. How do you "read" this graphic? What does it say to you about the world? Look at the little person, surrounded by cars or framed between building or street. Where do you cars belong in our hierarchy of needs? Out front or in the back? Or should we eliminate cars altogether like my friend, Ket ("parking lots are stupid. silly humans.") might like?

There's no right answers to these questions. But the strength of the graphic is that it helps you start asking questions about how the new apartment building or Wal-Mart Supercenter will change your neighborhood. It offers a shared reference point to base rational public discussion and decisions on.

Now there's no denying numerous benefits to both layouts. The suburban design gives first dibs to people in cars and the urban one to people on foot. But both are about people. Cars are both peaceful individual enclaves and makers of aggression and separation. Driving is fast and convenient -- point-to-point, no transfers, no waiting, no walking. Indoor air conditioned place to air conditioned place, cars are comfortable and efficient ways to get around.

Walking gets our hearts pumping and slows things down so that our senses can gorge on falling cherry blossoms and the smell of coffee on a sunny sidewalk day. I think people want the sensual city of walking and the speed city of driving in its convenience and comfort. There are design solutions that can incorporate both.

Our cities are constantly remade. Hollywood yuppies disguised as starving artists displace the poor from gritty downtown industrial districts. Farmland and forests get gobbled up by sprawl. We can make choices about how that happens. Talking about the choices we have in our landscape in flux is made smarter and easier by graphics like David Sucher's. It allows us to sidestep confusion, obstructionism, and name calling so we can concentrate on building great collaborative cities.

Living Fearlessly

I'm not sure why I've been psyched out of blogging lately. Letting fear get in the way of the stories I want to tell I think. I've left the cacophony of opinions, observations, arguments, love and hate that make me up all swallowed up and snuffed out. Not lacking desire but choosing inaction. My lack of posting nags my mind. I think "I really should be writing" while I distract myself with reading and blogsurfing. I entertain myself watching thoughts dance and play and then flitter away like dead leaves in the wind. I suffocate myself with online information overload the way others do with television. Detached and passive as a sponge I float over life bemused, inspired without perspiring. Dabbling in puzzle and curiosity to avoid direction. I want to stop planning and start improvising. I want to let flow flow and stop overthinking and over-researching everything to death. Viva la spontaneous post.

Marijuana Activist Marc Emery Free, For Now

Marc Emery, a public example of the cruelty surrounding marijuana incarceration, is again free after a 61 day jail sentence for passing a joint (first discussed on this blog here). The video "Welcome Home Marc!" shows a leader energized by the sacrifice he made for the movement to stop the oppression of pot people in Canada. All the great freedom movements have required a charismatic leader to be jailed to energize the populace and bring the oppressors' cruel actions into public ridicule and outrage. Nelson Mandela spent 28 years behind bars to fight apartheid in South Africa, Gandhi pursued debilitating hunger strikes for Indian independence, and Marc Emery wrote inspiring blog entries (like here and here) condemning Ashcroft his henchman, the prison guard unions, and the corrupt cops and the drug lords they feed off, for what they are: evil.

That's right, the War on Some Drugs is completely, unequivocally evil, a human rights disaster, and a phenomenal waste of money. Conservatives like George "Axis of Evil" Bush and Ronald "Evil Empire" Reagan brought evil back into our politically correct public lexicon. So when I look at the destruction of families; the monopoly profits for terrorists and organized crime; the street wars that pit kids with AK-47's and RPG's against the police in destructive competitions of brutality; AIDS, cancer, and chronic pain patients imprisoned for using the only medicine that brings them relief, I can find no other word for it but evil, irredeemable, hideous, hypocritic evil.

War without end, without an exit strategy or hope for victory can bring nothing but tragedies like this one:

Quadriplegic man dies while jailed for pot possession
Jonathan Magbie, a 27-year old quadriplegic resident of Maryland, died in a Washington DC jail on September 24, after being sentenced to 10 days imprisonment for possession of marijuana.

The marijuana conviction was a first offence for Magbie, who was paralyzed from the neck down at age 4 after his school bus was hit by a drunk driver. Since then Magbie had been under almost constant nursing care, and got around on a chin-operated wheelchair. (A year after his injury, a young Magbie had met President Ronald Reagan during a White House ceremony commemorating National Respiratory Therapy Week.)

[Read the whole thing and don't forget the Washington Post articles.]

Can we not see this for the insanity it is? Are quadripalegics true threats to our safety or are they greater threats to the puritanical status quo? The War on Some Drugs is the lastest in a series of government efforts to eliminate minorities and freethinkers, to consolidate power and squelch dissent. There were the witch trials in Europe that destroyed centuries of herbal healing knowledge, the Nazi death camps for Jews, the concentration of Native Americans in reservations, and black slavery in service to the idle agro-aristocracy. All demonized peaceful, productive people in the service of wicked ideologies.

We must choose a model of public safety and health over the vindictive moralism of our current "punish the sinners" model. We must practice the same judicial forgiveness we extend to repeat alcohol abusers and drunk drivers to those who abuse marijuana, and leave the responsible consumers of the plant alone. Marc Emery is free, for now. He speaks for us. Let us speak for him, for freedom, and for peace.

Spellbound by Learning

Grab hold of your education because no one will do it for you. That's the central message of the documentary Spellbound (trailer) that tracks eight young Americans from their homes in tough urban neighborhoods and beach houses to the National Spelling Bee. They make up the entire continuum of American culture -- one the daughter of illegal immigrants in South Texas, another from trailer park rural Missouri, another the daughter of elite parents in New Haven, Conn., the college home of both our presidential candidates, Yale. They vary in privilege but none lack a hunger for learning, competitive spirit or strong encouragement from parents and teachers.

Poring over word lists in a trance, the young spellers train maniacally, like elite brain athletes. One of the kids, Neal Kadakia, had the benefits of obsessively loving Indian parents and an elite education in posh San Clemente, CA. His father stressed meditation and concentration and rigorous training methods with computers and spelling coaches. Others made due with unabridged dictionaries, notebooks, and self-authored crossword puzzles. Whatever their resource levels, the kids had a passion to work at something and get better. They provide many lessons for the rest of the world's youth.

If you don't like spelling, race souped up Civics. Design t-shirts and mouse pads and sell them on Cafe Press. If you're bored, challenge yourself more. Write your own story every day and make it heroic because anyone can erect mind obstacles and cage their hopes, but only heroes can chill, take a deep breath, and go do it anyway. Don't give into those who want to crush your secret passions. Harness the energy you find in people or books or knitting and get some extra miles out of your brain. Feed your hungry desires. Seek out the support you need. Encourage the people around you because everyone needs a team of coaches. Reach out, strive, believe.

The spelling bee hopefuls face difficult challenges in learning all the many sides English, but they come out with a better understanding of how to operate in a complicated landscape. English routinely poaches other languages for useful words like umbrella and burrito and is thus an amazing entry to the world of overlap and borrowing that drive value in today's global economy. Foreign luxuries like coffee and tobacco used to evoke mystery and power the way brand names like Mercedes and Louis Vuitton do today. Science and medicine fill books with jargon based on Latin and Greek. English is a chaotic mishmash, a cosmopolitan city of global cultural interchange, today's lingua franca -- a language for all. The ones that learn to keep up with it in all its global expressions will have incredible advantages.

A little while back Dan Sherman asked, "What's your immigrant story?" How did you sacrifice to overcome adversity? How did you push yourself and those around you harder? What desert did you cross without enough water? Each Spellbound kid had her own story of immigration, ignoring teasing "cool kids" or the dangers of the ghetto to find peace in themselves and their unique abilities. You are your own worst enemy if you don't invest in yourself.

NeoJob: Art Enabler

Art Answers helps artists expand their repertoire from putting paint on a canvas to more complicated stuff like fire-blowing sculptures or complicated video projection schemes. Artists can concentrate on dreaming up new art, not geeky implementation details. With the growth of elaborate spectacles at opening ceremonies, Cirque du Soleil shows, and theme parks, art enablers and entertainment engineers that can meld technical knowledge with artistic vision wil be in high demand. And people wonder what's going to replace all the crappy code monkey jobs going to India. Do you want to be a Dilbert or a DaVinci?

Taking My Dad's Consulting Business to the Next Level with a Blog

My dad took the plunge a year ago and started his own independent consulting business, called Building Commissioning. According to his site, commissioning is "The quality control component added to the design and construction process that ensures that new buildings operate the way that their owners intended." Basically, he debugs buildings. The unique proposition is that the design and building process works better when it's transparent, when the major players are held accountable for their decisions by an impartial third party. It's relatively new concept for the industry and therefore requires a lot of client education, which is why I think he could really benefit from starting a blog.

Gapingvoid megablogger Hugh Macleod thinks the function of companies is to be "idea amplifiers." The best way to inject your voice into the market conversation is with a focused and insightful blog about how you add value to a client's assets.

Blogs are funny things. Say something smart, people pay attention. Say something dumb, you're ignored... Regular blogging can help train you to better discern between to discern between smart and dumb. Makes it easier to extend this to the rest of one's business.

Perfect! My dad is in the business of discerning dumb stuff in the design and construction of buildings. A blog allows him to tell the stories of how his clients save money when he roots out the numbskull shortcuts that design engineers and contractors use. And he has tons of stories to tell, he's been in the HVAC and district energy engineering field for years. Every job is a post. Every new story about commissioning's vital importance in green building is a post.

The best thing is, nobody else is doing it! (There's only a couple blogs that I could find that come close: ACCABuzz, HVAC Planet, and EnviroPundit.) He could become the expert blogger on the field, building reputation, trust, and visibility. Already some companies are requiring job applicants to be bloggers. Shouldn't we expect clients trying to hire a consultant to do the same? And this trend can only increase.

Other suggestions for building an online identity for his firm? Buy some AdWords. Think about revamping the website with dirt cheap services from international designers on Design Outpost or Elance (or go all out and hire the amazing Sekimori). Check out some of the sites that promote blogs for business use like The Big Blog Company, BusinessLogs, and Business Blog Consulting. Subscribe to these and other webfeeds using Bloglines. Create custom feeds with Yahoo News Search and Blogdigger for phrases that you'd like to write posts on like "green building."

I know that I love talking about my dad's business with him. I'm sure lots of potential clients would like to get in on the conversation.

Linkosity: Blogumentary, Little Robots, and Iraq

It's a blog post, it's a documentary, it's a blogumentary on the history of blogs. Essential viewing for those who've just discovered this powerful new medium.

Turns out the Bushies gave Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi some help in writing his upbeat speech to Congress and Dianne Feinstein is pissed.

Looking for today's avant-garde? Try Björk's trippy music videos.

A US Army Civil Affairs officer faces jail time for saying: "Ideology and idealism will never trump history and reality."

New robots to swim through your bloodstream and crawl through your intestines. Fantastic Voyage Ahead!

Why Evangelical Christians should not vote for Bush.

Katinka Matson makes unbelievable images of flowers (like the above water lily) with a flatbed scanner.

The Bush-Kerry Debate Recalls Galileo vs. the Church

The debate hinged on of whether you should lead by facts or faith. The President chooses to ignore the deteriorating situation on the ground in Iraq, Kerry wants to incorporate actual data (1,000 dead, expanding insurgency, etc.) into a revised plan.

The debate hinged on of whether you should lead by facts or faith. The President chooses to ignore the deteriorating situation on the ground in Iraq, Kerry wants to incorporate actual data (1,000 dead, expanding insurgency, etc.) into a revised plan.

Bush plays the High Priest preaching a gospel of moral certainty. Other countries must follow our holy "doctrine." He repeats the ritual mantra of "staying on the offense" and the congregation nod their heads solemnly. Standing like a king over his podium, Bush declares, "I know how the world works." He forgets blowing up innocent children tends to piss people off. Every father that loses a child in this way becomes a soldier for Al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgency. Families receiving a son or daughter in a flag covered casket wonder, "Are we doing more harm than good in Iraq?" But doubt does not enter into the liturgy of liberation and redemption played out on Fox News. His appeal is based purely on faith and emotion. But now even our few allies are losing faith. Thailand, Spain, Honduras, Norway, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Singapore have all abandoned ship.

John Kerry plays the part of scholar warrior, unafraid to point out the facts and present an alternative plan. He's Galileo to Bush's Pope. He won't allow dogmatic arrogance to prevent us from building a true coalition that should include troops from our Muslim allies like Turkey and Egypt, Security Council members like China and Russia, and other regional players like Pakistan and India. He understands a president is not just a commander-in-chief but also a diplomat-in-chief.

Kerry's said our policies must pass the "global test." This doesn't mean outsourcing our foreign policy to Geneva or Brussels but it does mean international problems (rogue regimes, WMD, terror, etc.) need international solutions. The UN is far from perfect. The corrupt system of kickbacks and corruption in the Oil for Food program is but one example. But it is the one international institution that cannot be accused of imperialism. Iraqis had no hand in the liberation of their country and are now forming a national identity in opposition to us, the occupiers, as I discussed here. Kerry can do the work to get blue helmets on the ground in Iraq. We must transition from "occupation" to "peacekeeping."

Real leaders don't stick with plans that are failing. Real leaders don't let the true target escape into the mountains of Pakistan or North Korea to quadruple its nuclear weapons capability. Real leaders don't ignore facts because they don't fit into his ideological boxes. Bush can't invoke infallibility to cover up his "colossal error[s] of judgment" and no amount of iron will or blind faith will change that. Kerry offers an alternative. We're going to see another very tight election and more good debates like last night's.

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UPDATE -- Some excellent related articles:

Tales from the Bushiverse: What the debates tell us about the president's psyche. By Julian Sanchez, one of my favorite writers at one of my favorite magazines, Reason.

Camille Paglia [ed. What a brilliant bitch!] returns to cast a withering eye on Clark ("what a phony!"), Kerry ("the hair!"), Madonna ("a monster"), bloggers -- and the "delusional narcissists" in the White House who led an out-of-his-depth president into a disastrous war. From Oct-03 Salon.

Dubai: The Middle East's New City on a Hill

Running out of beachfront? Build more. That's what Dubai's doing to keep up with demand for beach houses for European vacationers like David Beckham. Dubai, a member of the United Arab Emirates, realizes oil won't last forever, so it's diversifying into tourism, media, knowledge work, and finance. Dubai is an alternative to the corruption and fundamentalism that plagues Middle Eastern governments. According to July's Wired, Dubai is The Road to Tech Mecca:

Using its short-lived oil wealth, the emirate has built "free zones," areas earmarked for economic liberalization, technological innovation, and political transparency. Among these, three sprawling industrial parks stand out. The first, Internet City, is a bid to make Dubai the Arab world's IT hub. Next is the International Financial Center, a stock market headquarters meant to match Hong Kong's, London's, and New York's, and to trump the region's 13 other exchanges. And there is Media City, home to Al Arabiya, which aspires to replace Cairo as the Middle East's media capital while broadcasting the emirate's vision of openness across the area.

With its gilded hotels and oil wells, Dubai isn't so much a city as an idea - one that can spread and revive its neighbors, just as Dubai has revived a creed that has long driven Arab history: Not Islam. Commerce.

Rather than sending young Americans to die in the desert, we should be encouraging natural human ingenuity in the Middle East. Companies that have set up shop in Dubai, including Dell, HP, Microsoft, and Oracle, are engaging in a positive diplomacy of peace by transferring technology and resources to the region.

Employing force and humiliation in our Middle East policies inflames anti-Americanism and does not serve our long term interests in the region. We lose the battle of credibility with Bin Ladenism when moderate Muslims equate America's violent methods with our peaceful traditions of free enterprise and self-reliant local governance.

True liberation in the Middle East requires what Walid Phares and Robert Rabil call a "resistance myth," their term for epic stories that inspire national pride and solidarity, like the Boston Tea Party in America or the Amritsar Massacre in India. These events help a young country solidify around a common identity so that a civil society of trust may develop. New democracies require participation and voice, not statue toppling and looting. The danger in Iraq is that

In the absence of a shared identity of resistance, religious solidarity could easily become the basis for many anti-Western Iraqis to create a new identity based on fighting the coalition. This explains the appeal of Muqtada al-Sadr's movement to radical Iraqi Sunnis and shatters the view that Sunnis will not collaborate with insurgent Shiites, and vice versa. Herein lies the danger for the U.S., especially if hostility against coalition forces becomes synonymous with a rehabilitation of Iraqi pride.

I'd rather the Iraqis rehabilitate their pride by beating the pants off slow-moving Western corporations. They too could set up free zones and luscious beach resorts.

The Muslim world wants to compete and can, if we let them. In a previous post, I discussed two Muslim-oriented brands, Mecca Cola and Halal Chicken, that plan to compete with Coca-Cola and KFC on a global scale. Competition can be the force that invigorates a resistance myth. Forget Vegas and Paris, in Dubailand we've got championship golf courses and perfect waves.

Sure, chasing after BMWs and iPods might taint the purity of pre-modern Muslim culture, but is that really such a bad thing when compared to harsh Sharia-law penalties like cutting off the hands of thieves? Are the bare mid-riffs of sexy Arab pop stars worse than caging the self-expression of women under an anonymous burka?

Let's stop the horrors of dismembered civilians in the streets of Falluja and Baghdad. Taking Dubai as a model of openness, we can refocus our efforts on investing in transparency and markets all across the Middle East.

Cub Scout Popcorn

Cub Scout Popcorn takes specialty popcorn sales to a new level with a simple online store featuring a cute blog post about the group's sales training skits. Barriers to building fund raising sites like this are disappearing. With some help from one web-savvy dad, payment processing by eBay currency PayPal, and blogging software like MovableType, these kids are learning the technologies that will drive their future careers. Kids can adapt to the economy of the future if we let them play with the right tools. And as an Eagle Scout that used to dread selling popcorn door to door, I can tell you spamming friends and relatives to a simple online store is a major step forward.

Logos are the New Tea Leaves

Brand names have added diversity to our vocabularies for years -- think of new verbs like "google" as in "I googled that creep at the bar and it turns out he really does own a startup dog resort" -- but now advertising sages are using brand association data to help predict the election. Who needs tarot and astrology when you've got state-of-the-art psychographic data for political fortunetelling?

Among undecided voters: Kerry appears to have the advantage because undecided voters tend to associate him with certain brands based more on their positive than their negative attributes: Apple is "young" and "hip", Target offers "value for everyone", Starbuck's is "young" (but also "elite"), but on the negative side, BMW is "expensive"

The BMW association will turn out to be the most harmful for Kerry. The freeways of coastal Blue States are clogged with luxury German engineering, but the vast blanket of Middle America Red States find it hard to connect with the French-looking liberal Massachusetts senator schussing down the ski slopes of Sun Valley or windsurfing off the coast of Nantucket. While both candidates come from equally aristocratic backgrounds, Bush has the monopoly on down-home swagger and the plain talk that gives him such mass appeal.

Bush is associated with the positive attributes of established mainstay brands like Bud Light, IBM and Ford ("reliable", "humble", "heritage", "solid")....Samuel Adams is "trustworthy" and "patriotic"

Bush's association with a mantra used to avoid consumer options overload -- "Sam Adams, Always a Good Choice" -- may override the Kerry-Apple urge to "Think Different" in this election. Most consumers won't pore over a listing of two hundred imported beers, preferring the Sam Adams "good enough" option. Most voters won't seek the facts about the nonexistent connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda or our spiraling deficits. Voter laziness plus Kerry's dismal charisma factor equals most voters sticking with the status quo.