The Compulsive Explainer

Tough Times are Good for Hollywood

Damned Pirates: Hollywood Sets $10 Billion Box Office Record

When times are bad, people console themselves with fantasies - created for them by the fantasy factory. This was true in the Great Depression, people went to the movies even if they didn't have enough to eat.

Despite these worries, neither the ever-increasing piracy rates nor the global recession could prevent Hollywood having its best year ever in 2009. With an estimated $10.6 billion in consumer spending at the US and Canadian box office, the movie industry will break the 2008 record by nearly a billion dollars.

In Costa Rica pirated movies are very common, and people can buy and rent them for very little. This strikes them as economic justice. Why should they help the rich get even richer?

No Interest in Reality

One of the characteristics of the modern world was its renewed interest in objective reality: the world that exists independently of the human world, which was largely invented by humans. People have always had an ambivalent attitude towards this reality. Early on, they decided they preferred their own reality, and set about creating it - mainly by creating their own language, an amazing invention. But they also created a host of supernatural beings, spirits, that inhabited everything and were responsible for its actions or qualities.

I can still sympathize with this shamanic way of looking at the world. I am aware that I am using a visual metaphor here: looking at the world; it is likely that tribal people primarily listened to their world (and to each other.) The visual emphasis came later, with writing. Anyone who has a deep interest in Nature or the Arts, has experienced this physical awe. 

However, it has its drawbacks: this imaginary world is not real. And if we take it too seriously, it can get us into trouble. The real world has no interest in our imaginary worlds; it plays by its own rules. We neglect these at our peril. In extreme cases, this can result in insanity which all can recognize. But subtle kinds of group insanity are common, and we call these religions - including many secular varieties, such as our current obsession with the office.

As I said, the modern world became interested in this objective world, something that the Greeks bequeathed to us, via the Romans. The ancient Chinese were also aware of it, and produced many inventions - including gunpowder, paper, and writing - but then lost interest in it. In the West this interest also produced Science and the Arts - and then the Industrial Revolution and Affluence. All this we are in great danger of losing - because we have lost interest in the reality outside of ourselves, and shifted our interest back to our own world with its wonderful fantasies.

In our case, this fantasy life has become institutionalized with its own technology: television. This has created its own world, which seems more real than the real world, and people live in that - having abandoned the real world and their real selves: their bodies and their minds.

I get exposed to an alternative view, the scientific view, when I watch my course on Black Matter and Black Energy. Here scientists are interested in a strange problem: most of the universe, about 95 percent of it, is some kind of strange stuff we can barely comprehend. We have been trained to think of science as some kind of wise all-knowing being that understands everything - or or is close to knowing everything. It is a shock to realize this is not true. But it is just as much a shock, for me, that these scientists are taking this problem so seriously. I feel like saying "What difference does it make, whether this stuff exists or not?"

But they have to know what is going on in the real world, which seems to be stranger than we ever imagined. The rest of the world, meanwhile, is turning its back on science. It was nice when it made them rich, but now that game is over, they are no longer interested in it. As far as they are concerned, the real world can go to hell.

Amy Goodman on Democracy Now

Truthdig: Robert Scheer interviews Amy Goodman

I am impressed with TruthDig, the new kid on the block. I think I will pay them my meager $10 a month, instead of Truthout, which seems to be fading.

While I favor writing, as you know, I also like sound and videos. On this video, I get to see Scheer and Goodman in action on camera, which is almost as good as seeing them in person. I'm impressed with both of them.

Goodman comes from a liberal New York Jewish family. Her mother and father used to attend meetings where only Hebrew was spoken, they knew Noam Chomsky well - as well as everybody else. I will start watching Democracy Now, a TV news program via the Internet, if my Tico Internet connection is up to it.

For you women-libbers (and I include myself in this category) - this gal is for you, for real!

The Moral Collapse of America

I'm surprised no one has disagreed with me that America is in a state of collapse. It has long been an item of faith that America is invincible, and any teaching that contradicts that view was unAmerican - the worst thing you could say about a person. It was like calling him a Communist back in the Fifties.

But life in America has moved on, and we are now a little more realistic. There have been so many little collapses, we have gotten used to them - and used to our loss of standing in the world. We pretend, for example, that a declining dollar is a good thing. This is not to say we have learned something, we often act like we haven't learned anything - and that is the supreme evidence that the collapse is much deeper and more serious that we realize.

Describing the technical details of our economic collapse would be difficult and controversial. But we can all agree on one thing: our moral collapse - we can all agree that strong morals are absolutely essential in every way, and we can all agree that our morals are in decay. We will not agree on what just what these decadent morals are. For some they are abortions and homosexuality.

However, the type of morality that worries me is simple and undeniable: the low state of business ethics. It used to be thought that the primary concern of a company was to stay in business, and if it could do that: to make money. But businesses now have been taken over by groups who manipulate them in their interest only, not in the interest of customers, investors, employees, the economy - or anything else. This is the lowest morality imaginable.

The end result is not hard to imagine: the collapse of another civilization.

MIT Invents new Voting System

MIT News: Cyrptographic Voting Debuts

A new system for ensuring accurate election tallies, which MIT researchers helped to develop, passed its first real-world test.

Last week, in Takoma Park, Md., a new cryptographic voting system that could ensure accurate vote counts was used for the first time in a real election. MIT’s Ron Rivest, the Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, helped develop the system and says he’s quite pleased with how the technology worked. Takoma Park’s city clerk, Jessie Carpenter, agrees that the trial “went very well.”

To minimize the disruption of existing voting procedures, the system, called Scantegrity II, was designed to work with ordinary optical-scan voting technology. Optical-scan voting — which has become the dominant technology in the United States since the 2000 presidential election — usually requires the voter to fill in bubbles printed on a ballot next to candidates’ names. With Scantegrity II, the voter instead uses a special pen to expose a code printed inside the bubble in invisible ink. Thereafter, the ballot is fed into an ordinary optical reader, which simply determines which bubbles have been darkened.

Any voter who’d later like to confirm her vote can simply jot down the code that’s in the exposed bubble, along with the ballot’s serial number, and take that information home. (In the Takoma Park election, voters could record their codes on cards stacked in the voting booths, which were printed with the names of the contested offices — mayor and city councilor.) The voter can then look up that serial number on the election commission’s website and confirm that it’s correlated with the code inside the bubble she marked. Although on the website, the code is never associated with the candidate’s name, Scantegrity ensures that if just 2 percent of voters confirm their codes, it’s statistically almost impossible for vote tampering to go undetected.

The problem, as always, is the voters, some of which do their best to mess up the system. Some refused to use the special marker pen, and used their own instead. This had been anticipated and caused no problem. More seriously, only 4 percent bothered to check to see if their vote had been properly tallied - the whole point of the system.

After the fact, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission added its useless verbiage. 

Meanwhile, Brazil has done a successful test of its computerized voting system (which uses Linux). You can read about it here (Google translation).

From Foreign Affairs

I keep getting the Foreign Affairs newsletter. Usually, I ignore them because they tend to represent the viewpoint of those in power. However, they sometimes disagree, as they did with the Bush/Cheney Iraq policy. Now they seem to be in a critical phase again.

There is some good stuff here, from some substantial people. You won't get this from watching the TV news.

There are two articles about the dollar, if you are interested in that, one about the economic crisis, which you should glance at, and one about Afghanistan, if you are interested in that.

The Dollar and the Deficits

Even as efforts to recover from the current crisis go forward, the United States should launch new policies to avoid large external deficits, balance the budget, and adapt to a global currency system less centered on the dollar. Although it will take a number of years to fully implement these measures, they should be initiated promptly both to bolster confidence in the recovery and to build the foundation for a sustainable U.S. economy over the long haul. This is not just an economic imperative but a foreign policy and national security one as well.

A first step is to recognize the dangers of standing pat. For example, the United States' trade and current account deficits have declined sharply over the last three years, but absent new policy action, they are likely to start climbing again, rising to record levels and far beyond. Or take the dollar. Its role as the dominant international currency has made it much easier for the United States to finance, and thus run up, large trade and current account deficits with the rest of the world over the past 30 years. These huge inflows of foreign capital, however, turned out to be an important cause of the current economic crisis, because they contributed to the low interest rates, excessive liquidity, and loose monetary policies that -- in combination with lax financial supervision -- brought on the overleveraging and underpricing of risk that produced the meltdown.

The Dollar Dilemma

Legions of pundits have argued that the dollar's status as an international currency has been damaged by the great credit crisis of 2007-9 -- and not a few have argued that the injury may prove fatal. The crisis certainly has not made the United States more attractive as a supplier of high-quality financial assets. It would be no surprise if the dysfunctionality of U.S. financial markets diminished the appetite of central banks for U.S. debt securities. A process of financial deglobalization has already begun, and it will mean less foreign financing for the United States' budget and balance-of-payments deficits. Meanwhile, the U.S. government will emit vast quantities of public debt for the foreseeable future. Together, these trends in supply and demand are a recipe for a significantly weaker dollar. And as central banks suffer capital losses on their outstanding dollar reserves, they will start considering alternatives.

This is especially likely because these trends are superimposed on an ongoing shift toward a more multipolar world. The growing importance of emerging markets has sharply reduced the United States' economic dominance, weakening the logic for why the dollar should constitute the largest part of central-bank reserves and be used to settle trade and financial transactions. 

The Great Crash, 2088

The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe. Over the medium term, Washington and European governments will have neither the resources nor the economic credibility to play the role in global affairs that they otherwise would have played. These weaknesses will eventually be repaired, but in the interim, they will accelerate trends that are shifting the world's center of gravity away from the United States.

A brutal recession is unfolding in the United States, Europe, and probably Japan -- a recession likely to be more harmful than the slump of 1981-82. The current financial crisis has deeply frightened consumers and businesses, and in response they have sharply retrenched. In addition, the usual recovery tools used by governments -- monetary and fiscal stimuli -- will be relatively ineffective under the circumstances.

The Art of Afghan Alliance Building

Abdul Rashid Dostum, a notoriously vicious Uzbek warlord -- once aligned with the communists, later with the anticommunist mujahideen, then with the terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and finally with the United States -- now calles himself a "man of peace." That was just months after Dostum had crammed hundreds of young Pashtun men who had fought for the Taliban, many of them wounded, into unventilated train cars in searing heat. Dozens of them died before arriving at their final destination: a grossly overcrowded prison in his stronghold in the northern province of Sheberghan. By then, Dostum had become Washington's new best friend.

Over five years ago, I argued in a Foreign Affairs essay ("Afghanistan Unbound," May/June 2004) that the windows of opportunity were closing for Afghanistan and that making allies of Afghans -- not military action -- would win what was then a losing war. I wrote then that the alliances the United States and its coalition partners had made with Afghan warlords, whose internecine fighting had killed 50,000 of their own people when they were last in power, were returning Afghanistan to its lawless and insecure pre-Taliban days.  Choosing to ignore the warlords' past crimes, I argued, would embolden them, instead of making them the good partners the West so naively believed they could be. Washington would not meet its goal of greater homeland security, and for Afghans, peace and prosperity would remain elusive.

Distributed Fascism

The words fascism or fascist are emotionally loaded, to say the least, being associated with Nazism. But at least Nazism was well-defined, being a political party at a particular time and place.

Whole books have been written trying to define what Fascism is - without much success. The Japanese version, for example, if that is what is was, was clearly different. But that has not stopped our Conservative Right from ranting about Islamofascism. It even has a Wikipedia entry:

The term Islamofascism is a controversial neologism which draws an analogy between the ideological characteristics of specific Islamist movements from the turn of the twenty-first century on, and a broad range of European fascist movements of the early twentieth century, neofascist movements, or totalitarianism.

It goes on to say

Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book.

Our Conservative Right had its leaders at one time or the other, Bush II, for example, but they all ended up in disgrace - fortunately for us! There has been no one great book either - except, of course for the Bible. This has been an diffuse movement - or, as I call it Distributed Fascism - using Internet terminology.

This has been its strength: fuzzy boundaries that overlap into many other areas - while keeping itself intact. This could only happen in an Internet era - where things like this happen all the time. Old identities, such as being a friend, have become fuzzy - as they are on Facebook. On Myspace, they even had a promotion where members could befriend a new model of car. 

Our language has been attacked and destroyed. No one knows what anything means anymore - except for new buzzwords which come and go with lightening speed. This is fertile ground for Distributed Fascism - ground it has made itself. 

I am trying to scare you here, to alert you to something that seems subtle - but is nothing more than old-fashioned ruthlessness in a new kind of clothing that makes it hard to see.

Americans Want to be Taken Care of

I did not read this in a book, and I did not make this up myself. Two of my American friends told me this in emails - right out, without me prompting them for it. I had been blogging about the American Media, and what Americans wanted from it - and they came right out and told me what Americans wanted: they wanted to be taken care of. This was their right, as people.

I hadn't expected this, although I had been thinking similar things: that Americans were helpless, that they were powerless - unflattering assessments, in general - but realistic assessments. It all fits in with another assessment I have made: that power has moved outward, from the people to what I call the power complex: the combination of power of all kinds: the large organizations we work for - which include the corporations, the military, the media and the educational establishment. The whole mess. 

This has been facilitated by the biggest social force in history: the Internet - which lets those who crave power get all the power they want. Everything they need is only as far away as their i-Phone. The result has been a return to a traditional society (such as the Middle Ages) - with modern appliances. The Global Village has arrived - but it is no paradise.

The key to the whole thing is a shift in power to large, amorphous organizations - which control everything - much as they did in feudal society, where everyone knew his place - usually someplace lower on the social scale. The peasant could feel secure because those above him were required to protect him in order to protect themselves - because he was more-or-less their property. 

The contemporary employee is not so well-off, because no one is looking out for him. He can be used and discarded when his usefulness is over. As a result, Americans have a deep need to belong, so they will be taken care of - by something, they are not sure what. But whatever it is, they are looking for it desperately.

The power complex, on the other hand, rejects the notion that it is supposed to take care of anyone. It is only interested in taking care of itself. So far it is getting away with this, and the people are left out in the cold. We will be fortunate if a form of fascism doesn't appear to take care of us, and make us powerful again. 

Let me balance this predominantly anti-business pitch with a video Building private-sector diplomacy: Public-relations expert Richard Edelman explores the new landscape of corporate reputation and trust. Business seems to be opening up.

The Way We Die Now

From the NY Times

PORTLAND, Ore. —– In the last days of her life, Annabel Kitzhaber had a decision to make: she could be the tissue-skinned woman in the hospital with the tubes and the needles, the meds and smells and the squawk of television. Or she could go home and finish the love story with the man she'd been married to for 65 years.

With his mother’s death in 2005, Kitzhaber lived the absurdities of the present system. Medicare would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests but would not pay $18 an hour for a non-hospice care giver to come into Annabel’s home and help her through her final days.

“The fundamental problem is that one percent of the population accounts for 35 percent of health care spending,” he said. “So the big question is not how we pay for health care, but what are we buying.”

He is not, he says, in favor of pulling the plug on granny. The culture of life should be paramount, he says, following the oath he took as a doctor. But Oregon, years ahead of the rest of the country, has talked and talked and talked about this taboo topic, and they’ve voted on it as well, in several forms. They found — in line with national studies — that most people want to die at home.

In addition, Oregon was the first state to allow terminally ill patients to take medications to end their lives. The fear was, Oregon would become a death magnet, drawing suicide tourists and put itself on a slope to euthanasia. But it has not worked out that way. Since the change in the law in 1997, only about 33 people a year with terminal illnesses have ended their lives by their own hand with a doctor’s prescription.

Overwhelmed by the High-Tech Corporate World

WWII changed everything: it introduced powerful new technologies (electronics, and therefore television) and powerful new organizations to capitalize on these: the power complex. This built a new America, which ruled the world - and also its own people.  

The people of the time (and this included me) were overwhelmed by these far-reaching changes and made sure they stayed out of sight. They were being devoured by their own inventions - their extensions, as McLuhan put it: their outside world. Their inside world, the world inside them, which had previously been all-important, had vanished. The outside world became all-powerful - and they adapted accordingly. 

But new technologies followed: computers, software, and the Internet. And they changed everything: the American power complex, which had been all-powerful, could not compete with new cultures, who used these new technologies more effectively to coordinate their attacks. 

Americans became paranoid, their way of life was under attack, that was clear. But they could not see that the attacker was technologies they had made themselves and could not use properly. Instead they attacked countries that we not a threat to them at all: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Meanwhile they were happily exporting their industries to China and buying Chinese goods on credit. As always, they were their own worst enemy.

The country of America is now being overwhelmed by other countries, mainly China, who have taken advantage of these new technologies to make themselves more powerful.