Doggerel for Escalation.

A song for the war season. One critic, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that "This is great art, certainly, and of political import..."

"I Am Changing My Name To Lyndon"

[To the tune of “I’m changing my name to Chrysler” by Tom Paxton.]

[With many deep apologies to Tom Paxton. Some wide swaths of lyrics were stolen outright from him. Plagiarism, of course, is a crucial part of what Pete Seeger has called the "folk process."]

Oh, the price of gold is rising out of sight,
And GDP is in sorry shape tonight.
What charisma used to get us
Now won't get a head of lettuce.
No, my political future isn't bright.
But amidst the clouds I spot a shining ray,
I begin to glimpse a new and better way.
I’m finally getting traction,
Worked it down to the last fraction,
And it’s going into action here today:

Chorus:
I am changing my name to Lyndon,
In my White House down in Washington D.C.
I will tell that War-hawk salon,
That “what we did to Saigon
Would be perfectly acceptable to me.”
I am changing my name to Lyndon,
I am toeing the Wise Men’s Party Line.
When we blow a billion grand there,
And troops rush in without a pray’r,
Yes sir, they’ll be mine.

When the voters come screaming for my head,
Asking “why not health and welfare instead?”
They may try to yell and holler,
Since we wasted their last dollar.
As endless streams of Afghans turned up dead.
I’ll be glad to tell my troops what to do.
It’s a matter of a thousand lives or two.
It’s not mere colonization;
It’ll spread our civilization,
Makes me wish my terms number’d more than two.

Chorus.

Since the first amphibian crawled out of the slime,
We've been struggling in an unrelenting climb.
We were hardly up and walking
Before money started talking,
And contribut’d to campaigns all the time.
It's been that way a century or three;
Now it seems there is something new to me.
If you're a imperial Titanic
And your failure is gigantic,
The Pentagon will hang you on a tree.

Chorus.

Listening to the Past

In 1959 Senator Eugene McCarthy was chair of the Special Senate Committee on Unemployment, which held hearings outside of Washington and invited widespread testimony. "Although this committee considered the proposal to reduce work hours, it was not recommended because the committee members felt that other remedies ought to be tried first."

Thirty years later, McCarthy co-wrote a book with Bill McGaughey called Nonfinancial Economics: The Case for Shorter Hours of Work pointing out that the other, conventional remedies that were actually pursued had failed to arrest the steady upward creep of unemployment.

There was a note of pessimism to McCarthy and McGaughey's book in that they recognized that:

The main reason that leisure is in disrepute among Treasury Department officials is that they can't tax it. A proposal such as the shorter workweek, which would redistribute the burden of work and its income more evenly, would reduce the tax collector's take from a given volume of economic activity. Therefore, it cannot be.

When that simple truth is acknowledged, the whole debate about "jobs" takes on a different perspective. Or, as Larry Summers so eloquently put it, "It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that's not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work." Jobs? We don't have to show you any stinkin' jobs!

The first pandemic since 1968 - a timeline for 2009

2009 – November 29th. The virus is mutating. No need to worry….at least for now, says WHO.

2009 – November 29th. More than 1,000 deaths in the past week.

2009 – November 28th. Swine flu vaccination is vital (The Guardian)

2009 – November 25th. China expert warns of swine flu virus mutation. “China must be alert to any mutation or changes in the behavior of the H1N1 swine flu virus because the far deadlier H5N1 bird flu virus is endemic in the country…”



2009 – November 20th. The swine flu virus activity may have peaked in the U.S. and some European countries, while other countries report sharp increases.

2009 – November 17th. Novavax, Inc., announced it will begin studies in Mexico on a new vaccine against H1N1. Initially, about 1,000 people will participate.

2009 – November 12th. Headlines state CDC officials calculate over 4,000 deaths (as opposed to about 1,200 currently reported) are due to H1N1 flu.

2009 – October 25th. Obama declares a national pandemic emergency in the US

2009 – September 17th. The new H1N1 virus was also detected recently in turkeys in Chile, proving that it has the capacity to jump to birds, another potential source for reassortment. + “the CDC recently launched experiments in the agency’s labs [University of Maryland] in which they infected ferrets with both the new H1N1 virus and the highly lethal H5N1 avian flu virus to see if they might “reassort” to create a new hybrid…. Other experiments conducted so far suggest the new H1N1 virus isn’t terribly prone to doomsday changes. Viruses can change through either mutation of genetic material, or by reassorting with another flu virus. The new virus is lacking certain characteristics that would allow it to mutate to become more virulent, said Nancy Cox, chief of the CDC’s influenza division…[BUT] “Influenza is really unpredictable,” Cox said

2009 – July 30th. Military to Deploy on U.S. Soil to "Assist" with Pandemic Outbreak

2009 – June 23rd. Experts were concerned about how the flu was developing in Australia and South America, said Joerg Hacker, head of the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases. "It's possible the virus has mutated…. According to WHO’s latest figures, more than 230 people have been killed by the flu worldwide from 52,000 confirmed cases, mostly in the United States and Mexico.

2009 – June 11th. WHO declares the global flu outbreak a pandemic and given the highest possible alert level. This was the first pandemic on this level since 1968. WHO declares swine flu pandemic – “WHO chief Dr Margaret Chan said the move did not mean the virus was causing more severe illness or more deaths.” The last pandemic was in 1968 when a million people were killed… There is concern that the virus might mutate in the southern hemisphere over its winter and become more virulent, but there's no sign of that yet.

2009 – May 5th. Why the flu may turn deadly

2009 – May 1st. What scientists know about swine flu

2009 – April 29th. WHO raised the worldwide pandemic alert level to Phase 5 – pandemic imminent.

2009 – April 27th. Swine flu outbreak threatens pandemic. “In April both the WHO and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expressed serious concerns about this novel strain, because it apparently transmits from human to human, has had a relatively high mortality rate in Mexico, and because it has the potential to become a flu pandemic……The new strain is derived in part from human influenzavirus A (subtype H1N1), and in part from two strains of swine influenza as well as an avian influenza.”

2009 – April 17th. The first cases of the pandemic flu in the U.S. were reported in Southern California.

2009 – early in the year. Baxter pharmaceuticals is reported to have sent out a mix of two different live viruses in a flu vaccine.

2009 – February 19th. Novartis Pharmaceuticals of Basel, Switzerland worked with scientists at the U.S. Army Institute of Pathology ­ Ft. Detrick, Maryland, to create a "novel" strain of weaponized "influenza" virus by means of "reverse engineering" the deadly 1918 killer strain ­ ...Novartis applied for just such a patent on Nov. 4, 2005, and the U.S. Patent Office accepted this application and granted US 20090047353A1 for a "Split Influenza Vaccine with Adjuvants" on February 19, 2009.

Adam Smith on Too Big to Fail

"To restrain private people, it may be said, from receiving in payment the promissory notes of a banker for any sum, whether great or small, when they themselves are willing to receive them; or, to restrain a banker from issuing such notes, when all his neighbours are willing to accept of them, is a manifest violation of that natural liberty, which it is the proper business of law not to infringe, but to support. Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as of the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed."

TheMilitary-Industrial Complex from an Ecological Perspective

I found this wonderful article tonight. 20th Century history where humans inhabit the landscape as "detritovores":

"...When General Eisenhower, as retiring president, warned the American people to beware of unwarranted influence wielded by the military-industrial complex, it was presumably political and economic influence that he had in mind.

But the military-industrial complex was a vast conglomeration of occupational niches. As such, it wielded an altogether different (and even more insidious) kind of influence. The military-industrial complex helped perpetuate the illusion that we still had a carrying capacity surplus; it made it profitable for the living generation to extract and use up natural resources that might otherwise have been left for posterity. It absorbed for a while most of the excess labor force displaced by technological progress from older occupational niches that had been less dependent on drawing down reservoirs of exhaustible resources. It thus helped us believe that the Age of Exuberance could go on.

Nor was General Eisenhower alone in missing the ecological significance and over-emphasizing the political elements in the trends of' his time. His young, articulate, and sophisticated Bostonian successor launched a new administration with an inaugural address whose inspirational quality lay partly in its eloquent resolution of American ambivalence. If we wanted to maintain full employment, we dreaded achieving it by means of an arms race. Subtly, and with the gloss of' high idealism, John F. Kennedy reassured the nationwide television audience on that crisp, brilliant January day in 1961 that the temporary occupational niches of the military-industrial complex could be long-lasting and could be made more honorable than horrible. There was to be a "new Alliance for Progress," and we were to hope for emancipation from the "uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of' mankind's final war." But the conflict-bred niches would last, for "the trumpet summons us again . . . to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle year in and year out . . . against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself." Under both parties, the military-industrial complex enabled us to be preoccupied with matters that helped us ignore resource limits. It helped thereby to obscure the fact that population was expanding to fill niches that could not be permanent because they were founded upon drawing down prehistoric savings, exhaustible fossil energy stocks.

The human family, even if it were soon to stop growing, had committed itself to living beyond its means. Homo sapiens, as we saw in Chapter 9, was capable of transforming himself into new "quasi-species." By the Industrial Revolution humans had turned themselves into "detritovores," dependent on ravenous consumption of long-since accumulated organic remains, especially petroleum...."[1]

Industrialization: Prelude to Collapse
by William Catton
(Excerpt from Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change)
http://dieoff.org/page15.htm

Bad Policy, Bad Politics

Galbraith vs. Galbraith

Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His life, his politics, his economics p. 532-3: "In virtually every respect, from Galbraith's point of view, Humphrey-Hawkins represented the worst of liberal remedies... (Leon Keyserling was among the bill's most vocal proponents, because, as Galbraith quipped, it was 'all Keyserling and no Keynes.')... To Galbraith, Humphrey-Hawkins was a mistake from the start, not only bad policy but bad politics."

Jamie Galbraith, introducing Bruce Bartlett: "Bruce was a resolute supply-sider, having drafted the Kemp-Roth tax cuts. I was a resolute Keynesian, who had helped draft the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. His specialty was taxation, mine was monetary policy. We were both twenty-nine years old."

Keyserling vs. Keynes

Casebeer: "In your view was [the Black thirty-hour bill] a misguided approach to recovery?"

Keyserling: Yes, because I didn’t believe in sharing unemployment instead of creating jobs. The thirty-hour bill was an attempt to share unemployment by having a lot of people unemployed ten hours per week instead of a smaller number of people unemployed full time. My opposition to the shortened workweek has gone much further. When I was working closely with Walter Reuther many years later, when he was one of the main financial supporters of the Conference on Economic Progress, the labor movement started developing support for a shorter workweek, and Reuther asked me to help him oppose it. He said he just didn’t believe that the solution to the unemployment problem was shortening the workweek. He said we ought to have a shortening of the workweek only when we came to prefer more leisure rather than more work, and when we were productive enough to justify that, and our production needs were more fully met. But as an employment measure, he opposed it. Later, when we had so many recessions and so much unemployment, the labor pressure for a shorter workweek became so insistent even within the ClO, and later within the AFL-CIO, that Reuther stopped actively opposing it because it was futile, but he never actively supported it.

Keynes

"...the full employment policy by means of investment is only one particular application of an intellectual theorem. You can produce the result just as well by consuming more or working less. Personally I regard the investment policy as first aid. In U.S. it almost certainly will not do the trick. Less work is the ultimate solution (a 35 hour week in U.S. would do the trick now)."

"As the third phase comes into sight... say 10-15years after the end of the war, when investment demand is so far saturated that it cannot be brought up to the indicated level of savings without embarking upon wasteful and unnecessary enterprises... It becomes necessary to encourage wise consumption and discourage saving, --and to absorb some part of the unwanted surplus by increasing leisure, more holidays (which are a wonderfully good way of getting rid of money) and shorter hours."

Ike: September 23, 1952, the speech he didn't give

UPDATE, January 16, 2011: reposted at Ecological Headstand.

Ours is an age of interdependence. We all know this. We all know that no man and no nation can live alone.

So it is that all the problems we face—economic or political, domestic or international are intimately related. Last night In Cincinnati, I spoke to a great audience on the issues of war and peace; and in the course of that speech, I spoke of the grave menace of inflation.

Tonight, speaking to you mainly of inflation itself, I shall also be talking to you about war and peace. For, as you know, the inflation that afflicts our economy also affects the living standards and the political fate of nations all around the globe.

What I mean when I talk to you about inflation tonight is simply this: The continuing shrinkage of the buying power of our dollar.

The first fact about inflation is that it pervades every single aspect of our individual and national life. It aggravates the ceaseless struggle of the individual worker who feeds and clothes his family, no less than the global struggle to hold back the pressure of communism and the danger of war.

Secondly: I am going to state how the present Administration has let this peril grow to its dread size today.

Thirdly: I am going to state how the new Republican Administration will deal with the forces that are destroying the value of our dollar.

To begin with, it is not easy for any one of us to realize how close to him this peril is. To the casual eye, our economy looks as healthy and serene—and rewarding—as a stretch of rich Ohio farmland. But the eye that looks sharp and deep will find in this agreeable prospect a concealed minefield.

It is true that there is more money in existence, more being made today, than ever before in our history. But you know, just, as I know, that today's money simply doesn't go as far as the money we were paid in five years ago. Of course, everybody likes the comforting feeling of more money in his pocket, because it should mean that he is getting ahead. But today, we know that the comforting feeling is only an illusion. This illusion the Administration in Washington has systematically nourished and exploited for political gain for many years.

Here are some facts that will dispel the illusion:

The average American family had an income of $3550 in 1945. This average income had come up to $4800 by 1951. What did these higher earnings mean in the typical American home? Rising prices ate up nine tenths of the gain; rising taxes took the rest and a little more. The result: the family could actually buy less with its 1951 income than with its 1945 income.

This is a measure of the achievement of an Administration which loudly claims: Millions will vote for us—because "they never had it so good."

The peril, however, is not just of the present. Already it has begun to plunder our future. Individual plans for security in later years have shrivelled with the value of the money set aside. A $5000 policy written in 1945 has a purchasing power of only $3350 today. Pension plans have suffered the same fate, and so have savings accounts. If yours was an average family in 1945, you had savings of cash and securities of $430. Today that saying is worth only $300.

The Administration has so mismanaged our economy that in order to lose $130 in five years, a man needed only to deposit $430 in a savings account—and leave it there to waste away.

What a topsy-turvy triumph of an Administration whose press agents brag of its concern—of all things—for the American people's security.

Now all this strikes me with particular force for a particular reason. I have spent a number of years in western Europe, as you know, trying to help our friends there set their houses in order and in strength. I have seen these war-shaken countries grapple with terrible problems of shortages and prices. And, along with many other Americans, I have warned: You must strengthen your currencies, beat back inflation, set your economic affairs straight—or you will lose the battle with communism without a gun being fired.

How little we in our own United States have followed this sound course of action.

Clemenceau once said that war is too serious a matter to be left to the generals. Today someone might well say inflation is too critical a matter to be left to the politicians of expediency.

Now in what specific ways has the present Administration acted, or failed to act, so as to whittle away the purchasing power of the dollar? For here as in all great issues we face, the failures of the present Administration are the lessons of the next.

The inflation we suffer is not an accident; it is a policy. It is not, as the Administration would have us believe some queer and deadly kind of economic bacteria breathed into the atmosphere by Soviet communism.

This is the way a recent editorial in a great metropolitan newspaper put it: "Inflation is the calculated policy of the White House on the labor front, the fiscal front, the agricultural front." The point and purpose of this policy I have already indicated: to fool the people with a deceptive prosperity. The method is very simple: to give more people more money that is worth less.

The resort to "cheap money," like the resort to cheap politics, is not new. It is one of the oldest, most standard devices of a regime dedicated to perpetuating itself in power.

It is the mark of an Administration that cares more for the next election than for the next generation.

Back through the centuries, to the days of the Romans and beyond, governments have cheated their people by this simple process. It used to be called "coin-clipping." When feudal lords and local officials in the Middle Ages tried to make fortunes at clipping coins, they often ended by getting the severest punishment an outraged people could give, cutting off their hands.

We have a more humane and more effective remedy for today's coin-clipper—cutting them off from public office.

Now the weakness of the Democratic Party for "cheap" or "soft" money is well known. For the last 20 years, it has practiced this policy faithfully. Of late, it has given it a new twist: it is now called "controlled inflation." But this name does not mean what it says.

It really means inflation plus controls.

The way this policy has worked out is easy to describe. With one hand the Administration has been turning up the water pressure at the hydrant, while with the other hand it has been trying to check the water's flow. The Administration's controls over prices are nothing but weak stop-gaps. The really effective controls — those over money and credit—were ignored by the Administration. Resort to those controls would have paralysed their scheme to use "cheap money" for their own ends.

Now the Administration's liking for this idea of "useful inflation" confused even many of its own economists. A number of these men, angry or baffled—among them, Edwin Nourse and Marriner Eccles—resigned. Another result has been the spectacle of a struggle between the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department over our country's credit and money policies. What would happen to an airplane in flight if the pilot and the copilot fought over the controls?

With the end of Wor1d War II and the scarcity of goods for people to buy, the Nation faced the threat of rapidly rising prices. You did not have to be an economic expert to know that these prices would soar unless sound credit and money restraints were used. The Federal Reserve Board has power to impose such restraints. But under a Fair Deal Administration, the power of this independent agency was hamstrung.

The conflict between the economists of the Federal Reserve Board and the politicians in the Treasury has been costly for the American people. Here is a brief lesson in Fair Deal economics:

The Federal Reserve Board in the last seven years repeatedly wanted to tighten money control~—to strengthen money by credit restrictions. The Treasury until very recently, refused to go along. To restrict credit and raise interest rates, would have meant an increase in the interest paid on Government bonds. Otherwise Government bonds could not compete in the open market and their sale would fall off. Such an increase in interest rates might have cost the Treasury a maximum of two billion dollars annually in the post-war years. So—to save this two billion—the Treasury vetoed the controls, thereby promoting a postwar inflation that has raised the cost of our defense program by some 70 billion dollars.

Public arguments about economics often leave many of us hopelessly confused. There is a great temptation to conclude that it is all too complex and that no one can do anything about it.

But this is not the case. For the matter of the Administration's failure to fight inflation wisely is almost beyond partisan debate. A distinguished Democrat from the State of Illinois, Sen. Paul H. Douglas, described the Administration's policies in three words: "Lax, confused and imprudent."

Of the way the Administration faced the price and credit problems right, after World War II, Sen. Douglas has said bluntly:

"The failure to take, restraining measures promptly and the actual supplying of more than a billion dollars of additional bank reserves . . . was, in my judgment, a gross blunder which far outweighed any offsetting gains to the American economic system."

This is the record of how the Administration got us where we are. In the process, it has collected and spent in seven years more taxes than all 35 previous administrations put together through 156 years of national existence. That is quite a price to pay for the kind of economic leadership we have been getting!

How, then, do we go about repairing this damaged and reclaiming our future? How do we get out of this mess?

Here—as in foreign policy and most other areas—the blunders of the past are our soundest lessons for the future.

First of all: We must erase the pernicious Administration maxim that says, "Inflation is the best policy." Here—as in every field of our Government—. It is not too late to go back to the simple truth that honesty is he best policy. It means an end to cheapening money. It means remembering an injunction of that forgotten man of the Democrat Party, Thomas Jefferson: "If we can prevent government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy."

The next step—after we have a sane and honest economic program again—will be to carry it out efficiently. We shall not allow our Government agencies to fight at the expense of the American people. We shall create an atmosphere in which the Federal Reserve Board, as an independent agency, and the Treasury Department act not as political enemies, but as economic allies in the war upon inflation.

Next: The effective beginning of this war upon inflation must be an intelligent, planned attack on the spending program of our Federal Government.

Let us stop for a moment and see just what this means.

It means at the outset that businesslike methods must be applied to every program of the Federal Government to bring about efficiency and real savings.

We must, of course, meet the carrying charges on the national debt, fulfill our responsibilities to our veterans. Some other inescapable charges against the Federal tax dollar include the costs of Social Security and farm price supports. These are planks of the floor under our national well-being and money must be spent to maintain them. The danger is that the dry rot of inflation will eat still deeper into its planks.

These national programs urgently need the strength of a sound economy and a sound currency.

But today most of our dollars—2 out of every 3 in fact— are spent not on these programs, but on defense. Herein the area of greatest cost to the American taxpayer—I know that savings can be made. This does not mean slowing the speed or cutting the size of the rearmament program we need. No responsible citizen could foster such folly in today's world. it means subjecting all the Pentagon's costly operations to the scrutiny of business and professional examiners who can speak for the executive with expert knowledge.

I tell you this from my own experience: Informed, intelligent scrutiny of military spending can effect substantial savings in our huge defense program.

We must save those other sums, taken out of American pockets and bank accounts, that have for years bought nothing but governmental waste and corruption. How much this amounts to, we cannot know. We cannot expect the Administration to be eager to tell us.

But we can and will find ourselves, starting next January.

Now these simple steps:

Knocking down the Administration idol of cheap money, getting unified action from our economic agencies. And slicing the fat out of the Federal budget—these are serious, important beginnings in toughening our economy. It is clear that the major attack we make has to be on a front wider than just money and credit policies.

As I said at the outset: all our problems today are tied to one another, and none can be solved by itself. With tens of billions spent on armaments, another six to seven billion yearly on foreign aid, we see again that the soundness of our financial health at home depends on the soundness of our foreign policy.

The blunt truth is this: we cannot bear this huge burden indefinitely. We cannot—year after year, decade after decade— both maintain our standard of living, finance huge armaments, and help to rebuild economies of nations all around the globe. We cannot, in short, win the peace with foreign policy of drift, makeshift, and make-believe.

We must 'honestly face the fact that such a policy not only fails to secure the peace: it also places the hopes of the free world in jeopardy by the strain it puts on our economy., and by the confusion it creates in other lands.

There is in certain quarters the view that national prosperity depends on the production of armaments and that any reduction in arms output might biring on another recession. Does this mean, then that the continued failure of our foreign policy is the only way to pay for the failure of our fiscal policy? According to this way of thinking, the success of our foreign policy would mean a depression.

THERE is, of course, one answer to such an argument that the Administration on its record cannot give. That is a soundly conceived program of tax reduction, Such an approach would seek to fill the economic gap left when rearmament can be reduced. Tax reduction is a way to boost consumer buying power and to let the people spend their own money instead of the Government spending it for them. ft is a way to breathe new life into industries throttled by Federal sales or excise taxes. It Is a. way to open new opportunities to the genius of American businessmen and the skill of American labor. Here, too, is the way to give State and local governments—in need of help for long-delayed school projects and highway programs — a fairer share of the tax dollar.

Such an approach—tax reduction is an essential part of our program to achieve prosperity without war. To this theme I shall return more fully at a later time In this campaign.

I have confidence in the good sense and skill of leaders of American business and labor. Because of this confidence I cannot share in any forecast of economic doom. But my concern for America’s future is tOo keen for me to leave unchallenged those who boast our prosperity is sound and deeply rooted. Much as we wish that it were, there stirs in Americans today a haunting sense of insecurity.

Prosperity—like peace—is not just a skirmish, but a continuing campaign to be vigilantly waged.

Prosperity—like peace—cannot be won by policies that never rise above the level of playing by ear or of seeking votes.

Prosperity—like peace—cannot be won by a Government divided against Itself.

I remain hopeful of our future. The party, too long In I power—worn and weary in office—threatens Americans with bogeys from the past.

They offer to us Americans only one choice: the choice between today and yesterday. But that is not the choice we have. The true choice is between an uneasy today and a confident tomorrow that can be abundant and secure. [?] Americans will make that choice.

King of Hearts

Primitive Communism Or Anarchism In Tanzania?

The December 2009 issue of National Geographic has an article about a tribe I had never heard of before, one of the last hunter-gatherer groups in the world, the Hadza of northern Tanzania, now under pressure from outsiders to end their way of life. They are apparently very selfish, grabbing food without any sharing or order, and not particularly caring about each other too obviously, with someone just being thrown into a hole in the ground when they die without any ceremony. However, they do represent that vision of that primitive communisim/anarchism and all its idealized purity, although the author, Michael Finkel, may be romanticizing. Anyway, here is a quote from near the end of the article (p. 118)

There are things I envy about the Hadza -- mostly, how free they appear to be. Free from possessions. Free of most social duties. Free from religious strictures. Free from family responsibilities. Free from schedules, jobs, bosses, bills, taxes, laws, and money. Free from worry. Free to burp and fart without apology, to grab food and smoke and run shirtless through the thorns.

Have I Been Wrong About Iran And Nukes?

I have long argued going back to the old Maxspeak that US attitudes towards the Iranian nuclear program were hysterical, given the fatwa against nuclear weapons by its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. That they did not have a nuclear weapons program was long supported by the highly respected director of the IAEA, Mohammed ElBaradei. Now, his last act before stepping aside on Dec. 1 has been to censure Iran for secrecy in its program and pulling back from the agreement with the US I praised quite recently, with Russia, China, and India joining in on the censure. Have I been wrong all along on this?

Maybe, but maybe not. Juan Cole at http://www.juancole.com argues that Iran is still not actively pursuing nuclear weapons, but that there is a power struggle going on within it, with Khamenei on one side and the more militant Revolutionary Guard on the other, with the latter winning. He says they want the "Japan option," a "rapid breakout capability," but not actual weapons, and they are defeating Khamenei on this. It is their rise that explains the pullback of Iran from the agreement with Obama, which was negotiated by a personal representative of Khamenei, who has now been repudiated. None of this is good news, but it is also not the end of the world exactly either.

An Idiosyncratic Perspective on the Economy and Economics

I have completed the last part of my lecture and have edited it. I still hope to incorporate data on the defunding of higher education.

http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/files/2009/11/bss.pdf

Thoughts on the hacked climate change e-mail

One of the problems is that science has become politicized. Industries hire hacks (including scientists) to attack any science that does not meet their needs. Think of the Chamber of Commerce's recent call for economists to write a paper that will attack health care.

Under constant attack, scientists may feel the need to "play defense." Just like a football team that keeps its practices secret to prevent opponents from learning their plans, scientists may well become insular.

In this way, industry destroys good science, which should depend on sharing of information.

Encomium To The Bielefeld And Ancona Schools: A Way Forward In Macroeconomics?

Mark Thoma has linked to a post by Rajiv Sethi on the significance of nonlinear macrodynamic models derived from that of Richard Goodwin in 1951. I see this tradition linking with that from Minsky in two current schools of macroeconomic thought that I see as offering a wise way forward, the Bielefeld School and the related Ancona School. The former stresses "Keynes-Metzler-Goodwin" dynamics in such books as _Foundations for a Disequilibrium Theory of the Business Cycle: Qualitative Analysis and Quantitative Assessment_, 2005, Cambridge University Press, by Carl Chiarella, Peter Flaschel, and Reiner Franke, in the Foreword to which I coined the moniker "Bielefeld School," labeling it a species of Post Keynesianism, although some of them do not like that because of a perceived anti-math bias among some Post Keynesians. The "Ancona School" (a term I believe that I am neologizing here now) is exemplified by the recent book by Domenico Delli Gatti, Edoardo Gaffeo, Mauro Gallegati, Gianfranco Giulioni, and Antonio Palestrini, _Emergent Macroeconomics: An Agent-Based Approach to Business Fluctuations_, 2008, Springer. While the former school is somewhat more aggegated-oriented and the latter is more "bottom-up" agent-based oriented, they link through the University of Urbino where chaotician Laura Gardini, a sometime coauthor of Delli Gatti and Gallegati, has held conferences where they have interacted with Carl Chiarella, who has become involved with agent-based modeling of financial and economic markets. Both schools emphasize modeling nonlinear interactions between financial and real output markets.

The Bielefeld School is somewhat older, with most of its members being based elsewhere, but with much of the work in terms of numerous books and papers being done while those people have visited Bielefeld, where Peter Flaschel has been permanently based. Chiarella's main base is the University of Technology-Sydney while Franke is at the University of Bremen. Some others who have coauthored with this group include Willi Semmler who is halftime at Bielefeld and the New School (where mentor Duncan Foley is located), Toichiro Asada of Chuo University in Japan, Peter Skott of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (who provides a link to more conventional Post Keynesians such as Phil Arestis), and Rajiv Sethi himself, who was a grad student at Bielefeld for two years and has coauthored with Franke, among some others.

The key figure in the Ancona School is Mauro Gallegati, with all the authors of the above-mentioned book being his former grad students (I think) except for longtime coauthor Delli Gatti who is at Milan with Pasinetti, with both of them having worked with Minsky shortly before his death. Gallegati co-founded with Alan Kirman the Workshop on Economic Heterogeneous Interacting Agents (WEHIA, also known as ESHIA), which now has its own journal, the Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination. Besides his c0-founding role, Gallegati's home base in Ancona deserves the moniker for this school as the conferences of WEHIA for the first several of its years of existence took place there at the Universita di Politecnica de Marche (sp?), where Gallegati is based. He and Kirman and some others edited volumes of proceedings from those conferences, most of them published by Springer. Again, while these two schools have some differences in their approaches, I see them as closely related in methodology and general views, and some combination of the two looks to me to provide as good a view of what is going on now as we have, as well as a promising way forward in terms of research and understanding.

Pondering Panacea: "Who Farted?!!"

A perennial puzzle for advocates of work time reduction is the angry rejoinder that one is promoting a "panacea". The knee-jerk indictment flies off the pigeonhole shelf so fast and furious one has to duck to avoid being clobbered by ricocheting chunks of boilerplate. Elinor Ostrom et al. offer an explanation. "In the governance of human-environment interactions, a panacea refers to recommendations that a single governance-system blueprint (e.g., government ownership, privatization, community property) should be applied to all environmental problems...."

Advocates of panaceas make two false assumptions: (i) all problems, whether they are different challenges within a single resource system or across a diverse set of resources, are similar enough to be represented by a small class of formal models; and (ii) the set of preferences, the possible roles of information, and individual perceptions and reactions are assumed to be the same as those in developed Western market economies.

"As proponents of collaborative approaches to resource management," Conley and Moote were, "unnerved by the ways in which these processes have been portrayed as a cure-all." Now, who is most likely to portray collaborative approaches as a cure-all? The culprits are those who insist the loudest that the only solution is privatization... government regulation... or government ownership or spending.

Look again at those two false assumptions of the panacea peddlers: small class of formal models; preferences and reactions typified by market economy. The clue here is that the purveyors of the most stereotyped blueprint solutions have adopted the cry of "panacea!" as their first defence against any threatening non-orthodoxy. The model for that behavior is that of the flatulent school-boy who preemptively demands "who farted?!" as a strategy for asserting his innocence by alleging someone else's guilt. The corresponding conclusion can only be "he who smelled it, dealt it."

Temperatures rising - this time it's the H1N1 Pandemic

"....The interviewee asserted that doctors have provided professional assistance to patients, including those provided them with all the necessary drugs, which, however, did not lead to recovery. "It's an infection, which, when it enters the body can not handle: three days and people die," - she said. According to doctors, among the dead - three young people aged 26-27 years, one 11-year-old child and 40-year-old man. The employee also said the city polyclinic UNIAN that the most likely cause of death is some unknown virus. She noticed that, as a rule, for the entire period of the season increased risk of influenza in the region died of 1-2 persons. "Nobody knows anything" - she described the situation with the patients. She also expressed the view that the virus has an effect similar to AIDS, which weakens the immune system. "Something is killing immunity", - said the doctor.The employee called the local hospital and the inadequate diagnosis of the causes of deaths - "poslegrippovye complications", stressing that they may occur after a person was sick for some time. "Influenza can give a complication in the kidney, for example, but it later - after the disease" - she said...."[1]

A new strain of H1N1 influenza virus (swine flu) began in March this year. “Localized outbreaks of influenza-like illness (ILI) were detected in three areas initially in Mexico and soon after in the United States. Following the discovery of the new strain in the United States, its presence was quickly confirmed in multiple nations across several continents.”[2] In April 1,600 suspected cases were reported.


In early October an epidemic of a more lethal strain of H1N1 began in the western part of Ukraine. “The epidemic began in Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv … The services of the Ministry of Health delayed reaction to the obvious trends and threats have failed to take necessary preventive measures to reduce threats to life and health. Real assessment of the situation was given only 27-28 October, but the appropriate response measures were not adopted.” [3]

By early November the alarm in the Ukraine had been well and truly raised. In his address to the nation Victor Yushchenko stated: “ People are dying. The epidemic is killing doctors. This is absolutely unprecedented and inconceivable in the XXI century.” He asserted that there were three types of influenza currently spreading throughout the country, two kinds of seasonal flu and the H1N1 strain. This “may lead to the emergence of an even more aggressive new virus”, Yushchenko said [4]. Actual, although not declared martial law is instituted. The Ukrainian Health Minister Wasilij Kniazevicz is reported to have asked the country’s top prosecutor to open criminal proceedings against those who are opposed to the implementation of the mass flu vaccination campaign. President Victor Yushchenko announced the National Security and Defense Council [NSDC - a government body consisting of the president himself, the chairman of parliament, the prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko the head of the Security Service of Ukraine and other high ranking ministers] will become the supreme ruling authority. The NSDC was immediately instructed “to begin preventive and promotional work in areas where there is no epidemic”. Anyone that fails to comply with the NSDC will “result in application to the law enforcement authorities.” [5]

By the 10th November more than a million people in Ukraine had become infected. [6] The pandemic appears to have quickly spread to other parts of Europe. See map.

The mortality and morbidity statistics for this flu pandemic in the Ukraine appear to be significantly understated. Despite a very dramatic rise in the incidence of the disease, the death stats present a picture of a remarkably low and stable death rate. Further, mortality stats for this swine flu epidemic are notably lower in the Ukraine than they are in the US. Why? The Ukraine health facilities are very poor in comparison.

The H1NI virus is reported to be at a tipping point for lethality. Minor changes, such as a single change in one gene segment, can have major effects [7].

There's been no media coverage on this pandemic at all in the Australian media as far as I am aware.

[1] Post subject: Re: situation on Ukraine
PostPosted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 8:45 am
http://fluboard.rhizalabs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2474&start=20


[2] Swine flu outbreak threatens pandemic
27th April 2009.
http://www.scientistlive.com/European-Science-News/Medical/Swine_flu_outbreak_threatens_pandemic/22204/

[3] Read more: http://trancy.net/2009/11/01/november-1-ukraine-ua-situation-update/#ixzz0Y3fmmlNA
From: November 1. Ukraine UA Situation Update
http://trancy.net/2009/11/01/november-1-ukraine-ua-situation-update/

[4] President's address to the Ukrainian people on the occasion of flu epidemic in Ukraine
Press office of President Victor Yushchenko. 04.11.2009 19:00
http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/15609.html

[5] Actual, although not Declared MARTIAL LAW In Ukraine
* Posted by Jaro on November 8, 2009 at 3:39am in The Townhall
http://www.tcunation.com/forum/topics/actual-although-not-declared

[6] A million infected in Ukraine flu epidemic: minister
(AFP) – Nov 10, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5igljlXmqY49TbADWAZteRNljNEnQ

[7] niman
Post subject: Re: situation on Ukraine
PostPosted: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:49 pm
pw123 wrote:
So you are bascally implying that this is evidence that H1N1 and it's eight genomes has mutated into a more severe form. Increased virulence / lethality can involve one change on one gene segment. H1N1 is at a tipping point, and minor changes can have major effects.
www.twitter.com/hniman
See: http://fluboard.rhizalabs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2474&start=260