Author: John Gordon

Via Economix, the Congressional Research Service report on proposed causes of the “financial crisis” (pdf). They have a long list of candidate contributing factors, several of my 2/2009 items make the list.

My April 2010 list is much shorter — in recent times I’ve stepped back from the intermediate causes and looked to global economic transformation (China, India) and information technology as the true root causes of current and, I expect, ongoing, instability.

The CRS list isn’t terribly interesting. They’ve basically rounded up all the suspects.

John Gruber is a fan of the Apple-Google war …

Daring Fireball: Post-I/O Thoughts 

… It’s exciting, vicious, fun to watch, and ultimately should prove to be excellent news for consumers. Competition drives innovation and innovation raises the bar for everyone. And the bar, for smartphones, is rising quickly.

Like any great rivalry, there are striking differences between the two competitors. Apple and Google are jostling to shift the comparison between the two platforms to their very different strengths. Apple’s strengths: user experience, design, consistency. Google’s strengths: the cloud, variety, permissiveness..

Me? Not so much.

I have made two big vendor bets for my family and me in the past decade. Yes, Google and Apple. Google made me smarter, Apple provided us a relatively hassle free personal computing solution. When I bought my 3G iPhone I experienced the perfect union of the technology giants of 2007.

Then it all came apart. The Apple-Google war sucks. There’s nothing fun about it for me.

I have large Apple investments, but if I were single I’d go with Google, drop the iPhone, and run Chrome on my Macs. Yes, I love the elegance of the iPhone, but Google delivers the services I really need for my mobile life – and to be personally productive. Google is sometimes a bit evil, but Apple is the Singapore of computing. Efficient, but ultimately tyrannical.  Bereft of Google, Apple is now running with Facebook. Talk about embracing the Dark Side of the Force.

I’m not single though. I have three children, one dog, and today’s my 24th wedding anniversary. Google does not get families, Google does not, not, not get children. (I think the Gmail EULA has a teen or young adult age cutoff.) I could live with the rough edges of the gPhone (though my dental grinding would be expensive), but my family could not.

There’s no way I’m supporting two platforms. Apple’s FairPlay DRM allows up to five users per app or product — we’re a family of five. That’s a big advantage for Apple.

So I can’t leave Apple. On the other hand, I can’t live without Google and Apple’s boy-toy Facebook is a bizarro clone of 1990s Microsoft.

So I get hit from both sides. Each time I use Google’s crummy, miserable, slow, balky HTML 5 web 2.0 Google Voice app I take a bullet. (Gruber sings the praise of iPhone web apps. I bet he doesn’t use Google Voice on the iPhone.)

I don’t have a solution. Anyone wanna find a bar with bad country music and drink bad whiskey?

Imagine that Drexler’sengines of creation were real. Imagine we all had devices that could make diamonds, phones, cars and the like on demand. All we needed were some raw materials and energy.

This would be disruptive. DeBeers wouldn’t last the day. Economies would collapse. Hellfire would rain down.

Eventually, however, I suspect our complex adaptive world would return to a balance. A new generation of improved replicators would replace the old ones. The new ones would come with controls that made it, for example, impossible to replicate currency. Civilization wants to survive.

We saw this with VCRs. The first recorders were amazing at capturing movies, but later generation devices incorporated “macrovision” copy protection. Recording features became less common, VCRs became largely playback devices. The rebel was subverted.

We’re seeing it now with the digital replicators of our era. First generation devices made perfect copies of CDs and even DVDs. Slowly, however, the market is moving from general purpose computers with computers that won’t replicate some DRMd video to iPad-style “curated computing“. Surprise — the iPad won’t rip a DVD. It won’t even rip a CD. (If record companies aren’t buying 2nd hand CDs and destroying them they deserve to perish.)

In 20 years, it will be fairly hard to replicate many things. In a world with limited local storage, you may find your purloined media won’t survive long in the cloud. The system is strong, It wants to live.

If you think about DRM, a lot of things make sense. Why are Apple so virulently opposed to Flash [1]? Why is Adobe dissembling when they say Flash is open (they published the specs)? Because the video codecs in Flash are not nearly as important as the DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology in Flash. That is most assuredly not open; it’s as closed as Apple’s FairPlay. What’s Google up to with Google TV and their app stores? Check out the DRM to understand. Why are Hulu and Netflix reluctant to sign on the iPad? Because they’d have to substitute FlashDRM for FairPlay. That means Apple would own them.

This battle will rage for a time, but in 20 years it will be largely forgotten — and the digital replicators will have been tamed. Resistance is futile.

See also:

• Gordon’s Notes: The limits to DRM: my new car stereo (in 2007 I was still resisting)

[1] Personally, like virtually all Mac geeks, I despise Flash and consider Adobe to be as decrepit as Microsoft. I agreed with pretty much everything Jobs wrote about Flash in his open letter. I think, however, that even if none of those things were true Apple would be at war with Adobe. Part of Jobs evil genius is that he’s a master magician — he distracts with one hand while he moves with the other.

—My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

The more humans you know, the harder it is to imagine that civilization can endure. Billions of consumers. Environmental collapse. Climate change. Peak Oil. China’s gender wars. The falling cost of havoc. The GOP. Skynet, sooner or later.

It looks hopeless, but on the other hand it’s been 58 years since the first fusion weapon was detonated – and we’re still here. That’s surprising.

It’s not just technology that we’ve survived. It seems impossible that democracies can manage their finances, but they do …

Adam Smith’s Money World – Onc is not Enough

… Greece has its debt bail-out, or appears to have, but there’s still that riot-inducing issue of government budget cuts. Is it even feasible for a government to cut its budget by as much as the International Monetary Fund has demanded of Greece? Yes it is very possible — all too possible, in fact — according to the IMF’s own study. In the past three decades there have been at least nine instances in which developed nations have cut their structural deficits by at least 10 percent of GDP…

It’s true that some nations do better than others, but it’s impressive that, faced with doom, even troubled nations like Greece and the US draw back. For example, to our great shame we reelected George W Bush and Richard Cheney. We did not, however, elect John McCain (now sadly demented) and Sarah Palin.

How does reason emerge from chaos?

We don’t know, but many suspect it has something to do with the properties of a complex adaptive system. In our case it’s a system built of economics and politics and the noise of the disconnected and, perhaps, the cumulative influence of the rational individual. It’s a system that is self-sustaining, a system that “wants to live”.

The system is hard to measure, but it’s strong. It’s also a fractal response — just as civilization is surprisingly robust, so too are its components. Consider the digital economy. Perfect, near zero cost replication was very disruptive — but the systems is responding. The iPad, the Flash wars, Google TV, “curated computing” — it’s all about the system responding to the disruption. It’s all about the Digital Rights Management (DRM). Of which I will say more …

—My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

I’ve written about several issues with cloud apps. Here’s a novel one.

Organlegging was Larry Niven’s 1970s term for trafficking in human organs. Gibson’s fiction, including the fabulous (1984!!) Neuromancer, featured Chinese organ shops. Cross organlegging with Neuromancer and fast forward to 2010.

How do people not raised on science fiction get their head around the modern world? It’s really a disability of sorts.

Since my 2006 organ trade post (see also) the market has continued to mature …

Blood & Treasure- the liver trade

… Type in Baidu and search for “looking for liver, kidney” and so on words, tens of thousands of results show up, including QQ numbers*, cell phone numbers, some even operate like a company. They not only look for people willing to sell their livers and kidneys, at the same time they also advertise to provide livers and kidneys that match the patients. Reporter contacted number of organ trading brokers and found that they had a clear set of requirements, and the business also formed “one shop stop” service…

Liver segment and single kidney donation is usually survivable.

Is anyone in the US paying attention?

No, I didn’t think so.

* tencent QQ

… is the most popular free instant messaging computer program in Mainland China, and has over 856.2 million users. In April 2010, QQ.com ranked 10th overall in Alexa’s internet rankings. The program is maintained by Tencent Holdings Limited (HKEX: 0700), owned in part by Naspers…

I’d never learn this stuff if I didn’t have my Chinese-focused blogs to read. The mainstream media is hopelessly lost.

Update: After posting this, I revisited a link in my 2006 post to a 2004 NYT article. There I found mention of “Organs Watch” – an organization tracking the global organ trade. The web site, however is “under construction“; the notice refers to an August 2009 update that never happened. Nancy Scheper-Hughes led Organs Watch, but the last news of her is from 2008. Reading between the lines of the Wikipedia article, I wonder if she might have gone a bit off the rails (“Israel” and “tentacles” in the same sentence is a bit of a red light). She was still teaching at Berkeley in Fall 2009.

Zimmer tells us we’ll be able to recognize the human era by the sedimentary evidence of ocean acidification and mass extinction.

Paul Krugman is a fan of behavioral economics. He’s also fabulously well read, he must have read some anthropology, history, and political science at some point in his life. At heart though, Krugman is an economist. It’s hard for an economist to escape the prejudice that humans are fundamentally rational self-interest optimizers. It’s baked into their culture.

Alas, humans are only partly rational part of the time*. Obama, like every politician, knows this in a deep way. That’s why he ignores Krugman’s political advice.

Krugman can learn though. I’ve read him religiously since he became a byte-stained wretch, and he’s changing. He’s learning politics (emphases mine) …

Krugman – The G.O.P. – Going to Extreme – NYTimes.com

… Right-wing extremism may be the same as it ever was, but it clearly has more adherents now than it did a couple of years ago. Why? It may have a lot to do with a troubled economy.

True, that’s not how it was supposed to work. When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers — myself included — expected a political shift to the left. After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In retrospect, however, this was naïve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments — and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right.

That’s the message of a recent paper by the economists Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner, who find a striking correlation between economic performance and political extremism in advanced nations: in both America and Europe, periods of low economic growth tend to be associated with a rising vote for right-wing and nationalist political parties. The rise of the Tea Party, in other words, was exactly what we should have expected in the wake of the economic crisis…

Better late than never. The new Krugman will be even more interesting than the old one was.

* I suspect on average, over time, the system in which we are embedded is more rational than it seems, but that’s another post. (Yes, sounds like “psychohistory”, and, yes, Krugman, like me, grew up on Asimov.)

Jean-Louis Gassée blogs on Monday Note. He’s been doing it since Feb 4, 2008.

Gassée has done many things, but he’s best known for having been Apple’s CEO for a time. These days he’s a VC “general partner”. It’s safe to assume he’s rich beyond my paltry dreams of avarice. Why does he bother writing a not-terribly-famous blog? I don’t think it’s for the adword revenue.

My best guess is that he’s helping out the blog’s co-author, and that he writes for love. Alas for those who write to live, his free stuff is better than the best of the WSJ. Such is the curse of early 21st century journalism.

Today he takes on the Google-Microsoft cloud apps war. It’s fantastic stuff (emphases mine) …

Cloud 2.0 – Monday Note

… Last year, Microsoft’s total sales were $58B, down 3% from 2008 … Note the Operating Profit, 35%. The company spends 15% of its revenue in R&D and 28% in Sales, Marketing and General Administration….

… Compare this to Apple’s 29.5% Operating Profit, 3% R&D, and 9% SG&A [selling, general and administrative expense] with a comparable revenue level, in the $50B to $60B range annually…

… Microsoft’s Net Income is 25% of revenue, Apple’s is 22%….

… Microsoft Office represented 90% of the $19B Business Division sales, with a nice 64% Operating Profit … Roughly 60% of all Microsoft’s profits come from Office and a little more than 53% from Windows OS licenses (or what MS calls its “Client” business):

So… Office + Windows, 60% + 50% = 110% of Microsoft’s Operating Profit? The math is complicated by the losses in something called “Corporate-Level Activity”… …and, more importantly, by the hefty 73% operating loss in the company’s Online Services Business:

If I’m interpreting Gassée’s writing correctly, Apple’s numbers are only comparable to Microsoft’s because Microsoft “wastes” a huge percentage of revenue. Microsoft’s R&D percent spend is 5 times Apple’s and Microsoft spends 3 times as much on selling, general and administrative expense – not to mention “corporate-level activity”. If Microsoft were as stingy as Apple, their profits would be mind-blowing. Microsoft Office is a money-factory.

I’m reminded of an old Cringely column, in which he opined that Microsoft could have any profit number it wanted to have.

Gassée continues from numbers to user experience, saying the same things I’ve whined about but that, honestly, I never see mentioned anywhere else

.. Google Apps aren’t Office killers. I’ve been using Gmail in both the free and paid-for accounts. The basic email functions work well, but managing contacts is awful. (Months ago, I heard Google had an internal project called Contacts Don’t Suck. I’m still waiting.)…

… I’ve tried to use Google Docs to write, share, and edit these Monday Notes. Failure. Compared to any word processor, Google Docs feels clunky and constrained, and hyperlinks die when you download the document…

… Google Apps aren’t “there” yet. They’re still clunky, to say nothing of managing the “stuff behind the desk”. They’ve been quickly upgraded–perhaps too quickly– at the expense of the user experience. If managing Google Apps is as complicated as running an Office DVD install program, an important part of the Google theory falls apart. We see the trumpeted announcements of large organizations and governments that have turned to Google Apps, but what we don’t see is a courageous journalist going back to the proud early adopters a year later to tell us what actually transpired.

So why is it that only cranks like me and outliers like Gassée ever point out where Google fails? It’s a bit hallucinatory. Gmail’s contacts function has been terrible for years (starting with the weirdly isolated link to “contacts” in Gmail). Google Docs are still very weak (though about to move up a notch), and things are worse when you look at the channel confusion around Blogger, Google Doc, Buzz and Google Sites.

Really, I do love a lot about Google, but they have to give up on the idea that good design is emergent.

Go and read his Cloud 2.0 post and the “related columns” he references at the end. Don’t forget to marvel at the strange age we live in, where some of the best journalism is done for love*.

* P.S. As a bone to the pros, Gassée drops a broad hint on how they could write something interesting – go to the early adopters of Google Apps and tell us what happened.

TIDBits publishes a terrific extended essay on digital photo post-processing.

These are the AdSense AdWords that show up in the full text feed:

Note the spiffy “next” buttons for more of the same.

WTF?

This is the best Google can do? That post had abundant material for analysis, not to mention the TIDBits URL. At least put in ads for Mac related goods.

Something’s broken. I hope for the sake of Google’s shareholders it’s just a transient glitch.

Charles Stross is in good form with an essay on the post-PC world. It’s the world we’ve been expecting since Netscape Constellation (1996) and Larry Ellison’s proto-netbook (1995). That world became real for me in 2007 (yes, it was that long ago) with the iPhone and in 2008 with the Target netbook [1].

I agree with almost everything he wrote, with one big exception….

… Moreover, the PC revolution has saturated the market at any accessible price point. That is, anyone who needs and can afford a PC has now got one…

Uhhh, no. PCs are not cheap. Not at all. The iPad is cheap [3], but PCs are very expensive.

Yes, you can buy a “PC” for a pittance. It makes a crummy boat anchor though. If you want it to do something useful you need to buy internet service. Where I live that’s about $600 a year – year after year. Unless you bought a Mac, or are geek enough to go without, you need to buy antiviral software. In theory you also need to $150 or so for Microsoft Office. And good luck with backup.

But that’s not the real cost.

The real cost is that you need an IQ-equivalent of 110 or higher, and a love of debugging and troubleshooting. For most of the population, that’s absolutely unaffordable.

PCs are very, very, expensive. The iPad 2.0, or its rivals to come, can be the poor person’s computer [4].

So Charlie got this one point wrong – but it only strengthens his overall argument. My four month old quad core iMac running 10.6 is an anachronism [2]. Its era is passing. Welcome to the third era of the personal computer.

[1] I thought things would blow up in 2009. Didn’t happen! Microsoft dropped the price of XP to about nothing and crawled back enough control of the netbook to stun the market (same thing they did with Palm in the 90s by the way). It’s still going to happen, but that’s not the first time I’ve been wrong on transition times. I’ve since learned to take my time estimates for technology transitions and triple them.

[2] Charlie also omits the role Digital Rights Management (DRM) plays in driving this transition. DRM is one of the reason there’s so much good software being produced for the iPhone. Your CDs may be worth money some day.

[3] Not least because of the pay-as-you-go capped data plan. That’s as big a deal as the device. Yes, I know iPad’s require a PC-as-peripheral, but that will change within the year.

[4] Of course that’s what the original Mac was – the “computer for the rest of us”. Closed architecture. All applications were to be vetted by Apple. Strict UI standards. Heavy investments in usability and design. Single button mouse. It worked too – it really was easy to use. Much easier to use than OS X. Almost as easy to use as the iPad. History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it spirals.

When Sarah Palin bloviates, the media goes mad. When a South Korean military vessel blows up, perhaps from a North Korean missile, things get very quiet.

This is a good thing. Evidently the prospect of WW III does concentrate minds. It’s a sign that our legislators aren’t as stupid as they look.

A recent BBC summary outlines the current public analysis…

BBC News – Seoul’s dilemma over sunken warship

The 26 March sinking of the Cheonan, with 40 lives lost and six men still missing, is certainly a South Korean military disaster…

… The shattered wreck of the 1,200-tonne gunboat has now been winched to the surface, in two pieces, and is being examined at a naval dockyard.

The investigation team includes American, Australian, Swedish and British experts, in part, to ensure that its conclusions are seen as free from South Korean political influence.

… suspicion is mounting, with South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae-young concluding that a torpedo attack is among the "most likely" causes.

… "If it’s a torpedo firing then that’s about as big a thing as you can do short of rolling across the border," he told me. "Unless you have a desire to start World War III then you don’t do it…

… If it is shown to be a torpedo that hit the Cheonan, then perhaps it can be seen as retaliation for the fact that North Korea is reported to have come off worse in the most recent naval skirmish.

Or maybe it was an attempt to rally the military around the leadership of the ailing Kim Jong-il, reportedly trying to manage a difficult transition of power to his youngest son.

But others have suggested that it might be the military acting alone, a sign of a dangerous shift in the balance of power inside North Korea, and a far more worrying prospect.

So the options are …

• North Korea’s leadership is insane
• North Korea’s military is insane
• It’s a freak accident with an impossibly ancient mine

The last is unlikely, the first two are discouraging. I wonder, just based on watching humans for a while, if there isn’t a fourth explanation.

An accident. A blunder. A screw-up.

Remember when the US shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing 290 civilians? No, that wasn’t US military policy. It was a screw-up.

We now know how crummy the Soviet military infrastructure was before the collapse of the USSR. It’s likely that North Korea’s is in much worse shape. It’s likely their submariners are desperate and ill-trained. it’s a setup for an accident, or for a crazed officer to do something very stupid.

Would the submarine officers confess to having screwed up? In North Korea that would probably be a death sentence – or worse.

My money is on blunder.

Now it’s all about China, which has huge investments in North Korea. It’s all about whether China will decide that North Korea has to end, and, if so, on what terms and timeline.

To the right of us – Greece, Portugal, Spain and perhaps Italy and Ireland (GPSII):

How Reversible Is The Euro- – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com

For a long time my view on the euro has been that it may well have been a mistake, but that bygones were bygones — it could not be undone…

…but what if the bank runs and financial crisis happen anyway? In that case the marginal cost of leaving falls dramatically, and in fact the decision may effectively be taken out of policymakers’ hands…

…if Greece is in effect forced out of the euro, what happens to other shaky members?

I think I’ll go hide under the table now.

and to the left of us – China:

Andy Xie – I’ll Tell You When Chinese Bubble Is About to Burst – Credit Writedowns

“My maid just asked for leave,” a friend in Beijing told me recently. “She’s rushing home to buy property. I suggested she borrow 70 percent, so she could cap the loss.”

Sigh. It’s not over. Act I was the NASDAQ (remember the NASDAQ?) tech bubble. Act II was the property/asset bubble. Act III takes place in Europe and China.

It really does feel like a world of hurt down here, and we haven’t even hit Peak Oil (but it’s on the way.)

We all wonder why. Why now? A year ago I made up my personal list of 10 contributing causes (Feb 09) and, recently, I wrote up one way out of America’s particular set of challenges.

Since then I’ve been chipping at the list, looking for the cause of the cause of the cause (etc – go too deep and it’s all entropy). Sure we’ve got above average corruption and economic financialization, but those tendencies have always been with us. This feels like something novel, something that, in modern times, has come along every century or so. (In deep history every 2,000 years or so.)

I’m nominating two independent but self-reinforcing causes – information technology (IT) and the Rise of China and India (RCI, aka globalization).

The Rise of China and India (RCI) has been like strapping a jet engine with a buggy throttle onto a dune buggy. We can go real fast, but we can also get airborne – without wings. Think about the disruption of German unification – and multiply than ten thousand times.

RCI would probably have caused a Great Recession even without any technological transformations.

Except we have had  technological transformation – and it’s far from over. I don’t think we can understand what IT has done to our world – we’re too embedded in the change and too much of it is invisible. When the cost of transportation fell dramatically we could see the railroad tracks. When the cost of information generation and communication fell by a thousandfold it was invisible.

The IT transformation is not stopping. If anything, it’s accelerating. There are more than 350 million mobile phone subscriptions in Africa.

Think about that for a minute.

In five years Africa will have at least 500 million 2010 iPhone/Droid interconnected equivalent devices, and Google’s sentence-salad English/China translation will probably work. I’m still thinking we miss Kurzweil’s 2045 catastrophe, but the prelude will be rough enough.

RCI and IT (RCIIT?) Alone each would have thrown the world for a loop. Together they’ve put us into an entirely new level of future shock.

We might as well get used to it.

Charlie Stross has been writing a series of enlightening posts about the fiction industry. Today, after a volcano extended killer road trip, he unloads on the joys of being a professional writer …

… I’d like to point you at this 2005 paper by the Author’s License and Collecting Society, titled “What are Words Worth?, describing the findings of a study organized by the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM)I, Bournemouth University. ..

… In addition to being a wildly unstable, lonely occupation with an insane income spread, there are other drawbacks to being a writer. Many American writers are forced to rely on a day job, or a spouse with a day job, for health insurance: health insurance for the self-employed is prohibitively expensive, especially for the self-employed poor. Those who don’t have a job that provides healthcare, or a partner with family benefits, are never more than one accident away from bankruptcy. As the median age for publishing a first novel is around 34 because it takes a lot of life experience before you know enough to write something worth publishing, most authors are in the age range 34-70 — old enough that they’re likely to develop chronic health conditions or need expensive treatments. (To be fair, it’s not just authors who get the short end of this particular shitty stick: I suspect the US health insurance industry is actively suppressive of entrepreneurial start-up ventures by older folks in general.)…

…So here’s the truth about the writing lifestyle: it sucks. It is an unstable occupation for self-employed middle-aged entrepreneurs. Average age on entry is around 34, but you can’t get health insurance (if you’re American)…. As a business, it’s a dead-end: you can’t generally expand by taking on employees, and the number of author start-ups where the founders have IPOd and cashed out can be counted on the fingers of a double-amputee’s hands…

A few weeks ago I said Farewell Palm. Now HP has paid $1.2 billion in cash to acquire Palm ($5.70 a share).

It’s good news for those who bought Palm stock in the past few weeks, but it’s no reason to consider buying a PalmOS device. Whatever Palm was yesterday, it’s now being digested by a very average large publicly traded company. Palm is now HP.

An average PTC like HP can compete effectively against other clumsy but powerful PTCs like IBM, Dell, RIM, and Microsoft. HP is capable of turning out devices that are every bit as good as Windows Mobile phones of 2008.

Except it’s not 2008, and the competition is not RIM or Microsoft or Dell. The competition is Google and Apple.

Google and Apple are also publicly traded companies. They are not typical however. They are very deviant. Google has an underestimated two tier ownership structure that gives great power to its founders. Apple has Steve Jobs, who in addition to being an insane genius with mind-control powers is also Apple’s founder and has cult like authority over the company and its shareholders. Both Google and Apple behave like privately held companies with public money.

Palm is still dead. I don’t know why HP did this deal. Maybe it was all IP, but they paid a lot for IP. I think they hope to stay in the only game in town. It won’t work; there’s no room for them at the table.

This is about Google and Apple. Microsoft will take 3rd place. RIM will fall by the wayside within three years. HP won’t last a year. They can’t compete.

I’ve noted that the iPad will be a computer for people who are poor. I’ve predicted that Apple will turn on Facebook (their friend today, but so was Google, once). I’ve noted that MobileMe more closely resembles OS X server than it does Google Apps.

Act One: Obama and the the Middle East

Cohen – Beating the Mideast’s Black Hole – NYTimes.com

…. That meeting concluded with Mitchell saying: “You asked if I think Netanyahu is serious. They ask the same question. You are an expert on Palestinian and Israeli politics. They are the same. But no one in the world knows American politics better than me, and this I will say. There has never been in the White House a president that is so committed on this issue, including Clinton who is a personal friend, and there will never be, at least not in the lifetime of anyone in this room.” …

Act Two: Obama: Transportation and transparency

In the Obama administration, there’s an official blog from the Department of Transportation with with a post about bike and pedestrian infrastructure highlighting a March 15 policy statement on bicycle and pedestrian accommodation:

… The establishment of well-connected walking and bicycling networks is an important component for livable communities, and their design should be a part of Federal-aid project developments. … transportation agencies should plan, fund, and implement improvements to their walking and bicycling networks, including linkages to transit…

… transportation agencies should give the same priority to walking and bicycling as is given to other transportation modes. Walking and bicycling should not be an afterthought in roadway design

… children should have safe and convenient options for walking or bicycling to school and parks..

… DOT encourages bicycle and pedestrian accommodation on bridge projects including facilities on limited-access bridges with connections to streets or paths… 

..Current maintenance provisions require pedestrian facilities built with Federal funds to be maintained in the same manner as other roadway assets. State Agencies have generally established levels of service on various routes especially as related to snow and ice events…

… The Secretary shall not approve any project or take any regulatory action under this title that will result in the severance of an existing major route or have significant adverse impact on the safety for nonmotorized transportation traffic and light motorcycles, unless such project or regulatory action provides for a reasonable alternate route or such a route exists.” 23 U.S.C. 109(m)….

There is a difference between Obama and the GOP alternative. A vast, huge, multifaceted, every day in every way difference.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is a willing servant of Rupert Murdoch, owner operator of the Wall Street Journal and Fox news.

Melvyn and Shula do not have the best chemistry in during the In Our Time program The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation. I can see why Melvyn was peevish, but it’s a bit of a shame. I’m sympathetic to Marks’ notion that the emergence of Shaka Zulu was more chance than destiny; a contingent result of swirling change and disruption driven, fundamentally, by the technologies of innovative agriculture and consequent rapid population growth and Malthusian collapse.

That, however, was too much subtlety for 15 minutes of Shaka, for there was a lot of ground to cover in one 48 minute program. Even in this quick overview it’s clear the history of the consequent fallings and risings of the Boer, Zulu, and British is immensely complex, full of chance and personality and mostly unknown.

So it is with history. Endless stories, of which we know only a tiny number. There must be many more, perhaps more grand and sad than any we know, lost in deep time.

Lost, but, in a sense, not unknown. History is fractal. The stories we know in detail are similar to those we know in outline are similar to those we know in myth, and are very likely similar to those we don’t know at all. If we are wise enough to realize that history is fractal, we can study closely the history we know and learn universal truths. If we are foolish enough to believe our stories are unique, we walk the path of willful ignorance.