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Conserving Liberty

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After my post Friday on Speaker Ryan, at Barnes & Noble that night I found myself disrupted in my technology research by a couple railing on about public sector unions. The particular focus of their wrath were police unions that negotiated full-pay retirement packages starting at fifty. As is well known in the West, some officers exercise that option and then take another assignment elsewhere, effectively double-dipping.

Now I agree that this seems unethical, and you’d think that some legislator would find a way to define “retirement” as excluding “leaving to take work elsewhere.” And the six-figure salaries being quoted ($200K) don’t sound like the compensation expected by a beat cop. Again, you’d think that redefinition of terms would be beneficial. There does come a day when a man can’t chase down an eighteen-year-old any longer, but that doesn’t apply to those pushing figures around on spread-sheets.

What was astonishing to me, though, was the framing of the discussion that brought such outrage to the conversation. During the 2008 down-turn, because of the pension obligations, Pheonix couldn’t afford to hire officers to replace those taking early retirement. This was set against the context of civilians that lost their homes in the mortgage melt-down.

For some reason, the couple ranting against the police union seemed to feel that was the union’s fault. Really? Not the financial wizards on Wall Street that stole another $500 billion from the public purse? What gall, to redirect anger against corporate financial fraud against the unions that seek only to secure the survival of the middle class that lost their homes!

This is what drives me crazy about conservative business owners. They rail about regulation as though it’s a confiscatory plot by the poor. Yes, we have the onerous terms of Sorvanes-Oxley that put a CEO at risk of jail if the corporate annual reports contains false information – but that was motivated by Enron’s manipulation or energy markets in California. Yes, we have the Affordable Care Act that requires all employers of more than fifty to provide health-care benefits, but that’s against the context of insurance company manipulations that denied coverage to many with pre-existing or chronic health conditions. And yes, we have rising taxes on fossil fuels, but that reflects a race against time against temperature rises that threaten to wipe out civilization as we know it, a race that has been road-blocked by oil companies (led by the Koch Brothers) propagating fraudulent science in an attempt to prevent governmental action to stimulate replacement of fossil fuels with renewable sources.

Let me focus the point: did nobody in the business world know about these transgressions, some simply moral, but in the last case rising to the level of crimes against humanity? Where were your voices speaking in outrage? Or were you all among those business leaders celebrating the “success” of practices that allowed executives to build huge estates and buy private jets with the gains from stock options that transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from share-holders funds into personal bank accounts?

Corporate America benefits every day from the investment made by middle-class America in roads, schools, emergency services and governmental process. They provide a steady steam of educated employees. They ensure the free movement of goods and safe working conditions. Access to those benefits is not a right, it is a privilege. Securing great wealth from that system comes therefore with a responsibility: to raise your voice when your peers abuse the public trust. Do so, and you’ll find that a lot of regulation would go away, because the cost of cleaning up from long-running abuse would be modest compared to the benefits that accrue from a freely running economy.

Up in the Cloud

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Information Systems, the discipline of organizing computers and software resources to facilitate decision-making and collaboration, is undergoing a revolution. The opportunity is allowed by cheap data storage and high-speed networking. The necessity is driven by the unpredictability of demand and the threat of getting hacked. These factors have driven the construction of huge data and compute centers that allow users to focus on business solutions rather than the details of managing and protecting their data.

As a developer, this proposition is really attractive to me. I’m building a sensor network at home, and I’d like to capture the data without running a server full time. I’d also like to be able to draw upon back-end services such as web or database servers without having to install and maintain software that is designed for far more sophisticated operations.

The fundamental proposition of the cloud is to create an infrastructure that allows we as consumers to pay only for the data and software that we actually use. In concept, it’s similar to the shift from cooking on a wood-fired stove fed by the trees on our lot to cooking on an electric range. Once we shift to electricity, if we decide to open a restaurant, we don’t have to plan ahead ten years to be certain that we have enough wood, we just pay for more electricity. Similarly, if I want to develop a new solution for home heating control, I shouldn’t have to pay a huge amount of money for software licenses and computer hardware up front – that should be borne by the end-users. And, just as a chef probably doesn’t want to learn a lot about forestry, so I shouldn’t have to become an expert in administration of operating systems, databases and web servers. Cloud services promise to relieve me of that worry.

It was in part to assess the reality of that promise that I spent the last two days at Microsoft’s Cloud Road Show in Los Angeles. What I learned was that, while they pursue the large corporate customers, Microsoft is still a technology-driven company, and so they want to hear that they are also helping individual developers succeed.

But there were several amusing disconnects.

Satya Nadella took the helm at Microsoft following Steve Balmer’s debacles with Windows 8 and Nokia. Balmer was pursuing Apple’s vision of constructing a completely closed ecosystem of consumer devices and software. Nadella, head of the Azure cloud services effort, blew the top off of that plan, declaring that Microsoft would deliver solutions on any hardware and operating system that defined a viable market. Perversely, what I learned at the roadshow was that Microsoft is still very much committed to hardware, but not the kind of hardware you can carry on your person. Rather, it’s football fields stacked three-high with shipping containers full of server blades and disk drives, each facility drawing the power consumed by a small city. None of the containers belongs to a specific customer (actually the promise is that your data will be replicated across multiple containers). They are provisioned for aggregate demand of an entire region, running everything from a WordPress blog to global photo-sharing services such as Pinterest.

This scale drives Microsoft to pursue enterprise customers. This is a threat to established interests – large data centers are not an exportable resource, and so provide a secure and lucrative source of employment for their administrators. But that security comes with the pressure of being a bottleneck in the realization of others’ ambitions and a paranoid mind-set necessary to avoid becoming the latest major data-breach headline. The pitch made at the roadshow was that outsourcing those concerns to Microsoft should liberate IT professionals to solve business problems using the operations analysis software offered with the Azure platform.

To someone entering this magical realm, however, the possibilities are dizzying. At a session on business analytics, when asked what analysis package would be best to use for those looking to build custom algorithms, the response was “whatever tool your people are familiar with.” This might include R (preferred by statistics professionals) or Python (computer science graduates) or SQL (database developers). For someone looking to get established, that answer isn’t comforting.

But it reveals something else: Microsoft is no longer in the business of promoting a champion – they are confident that they have built the best tools in the world (Visual Studio, Office, Share Point, etc.). Their goal is to facilitate delivery of ideas to end customers. Microsoft also understands that means long-term maintenance of tightly coupled ecosystems where introduction of a malfunctioning algorithm can cost tens of millions of dollars, and viruses billions.

But what about the little guy? I raised this point in private after a number of sessions. My vision of the cloud is seeded by my sons’ experience in hacker communities, replete with “how-to” videos and open-source software modules. I see this as the great hope for the future of American innovation. If a living space designer in Idaho can source production of a table to a shop in Kentucky with a solid guarantee of supply and pricing comparable to mass-produced models, then we enter a world in which furniture showrooms are a thing of the past, and every person lives in a space designed for their specific needs. As a consumer, the time and money that once would have been spent driving around showrooms and buying high-end furniture is invested instead in a relationship with our designer (or meal planner, or social secretary).

Or how about a “name-your-price” tool for home budgeting? If you’ve got eighty dollars to spend on electricity this July, what should your thermostat setting be? How many loads of laundry can you run? How much TV can you watch? What would be the impact of switching from packaged meals to home-cooked? Can I pre-order the ingredients from the store? Allocate pickup and preparation time to my calendar?

Development of these kinds of solutions is not necessarily approachable at this time. The low-end service on Azure runs about $200 a month. From discussion, it appears that this is just about enough to run a Boy Scout Troop’s activity scheduling service. But I am certain that will change. Microsoft responded to the open-source “threat” by offering development tools and services for free to small teams. Their Azure IoT program allows one sensor to connect for free, with binary data storage at less than twenty dollars a month.

At breakfast on Wednesday, I shared some of these thoughts with a Microsoft solutions analyst focused on the entertainment industry. I ended the conversation with the admission that I had put on my “starry-eyed philosopher” personality. He smiled and replied “You’ve given me a lot to think about.” It was nice to spend some time with people that appreciate that.

Cliven Bundy: Occupy DuPont – Please!

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On January 6, the New York Times published a survey of the work of lawyer Rob Billott in uncovering the unrestricted spread of PFOA throughout the global environment. The breaking event in the investigation was a West Virginia cattle rancher who reported that DuPont was dumping a soapy substance into the river upstream of his ranch, and that since the dumping began, the cattle had manifested violent behavior, gross physical ailments and birth defects.

Filing a subpoena to obtain DuPont’s toxicological studies of the substance, Billott discovered that they had knowledge of its side effects for decades, but hid the information because it was “too risky” to replace the substance, which is used in the manufacturer of Teflon. Unfortunately, everyone who has ever used Teflon now has PFOA in their blood stream – as do fish, birds and animals throughout the world.

During the course of the litigation, state regulators refused to intervene to prevent open disposal of PFOA, to order DuPont to provide treatment for the water used by tens of thousands of people, or to order health studies of those exposed. The lawyers representing DuPont eventually rose to high office in the state even as the case evolved, and those agencies arbitrarily raised the safe drinking water level for PFOA in order to protect DuPont from regulation. When the EPA finally completed its analysis, the final drinking water limits were nearly 200 times lower than those adopted by the state.

The frightening thing about this case is that the EPA is only allowed to regulate chemicals for which it has evidence of toxicity. It has only ever banned the use of four chemicals, of more than 60,000 produced by the industry. Now it appears that the industry intentionally hides evidence of toxicity from regulators. We have absolutely no idea what we are being exposed to.

Note that not all companies are bad actors. When Monsanto first began selling PFOA to DuPont, it advised that the material should be incinerated. That DuPont chose to release it to the environment was their choice. That the substance is unusually resistance to degradation was not unknown to them.

DuPont’s response to these revelations is damning: DuPont has also chosen to litigate each personal damage case individually, rather than as a class. At the rate of litigation, almost all of the claimants will be dead when a trial date is set. DuPont is also planning a merger with Dow Chemical, and has taken the unusual step of spinning off their chemistry business as Chemours. This appears suspicious. Given the culture revealed by Billott’s litigation, I wouldn’t be surprised if PFOA was only the tip of the iceberg.

Give Me Liberty, and Forgive My Threats

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As I was studying Microsoft’s support for XML Paper Specification last week, for some reason I choose the Gettysburg address as lorem ipsum source material. Lincoln’s great address begins:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

It was not the first time that the proposition had been tested. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, Europe brought financial pressure on the new nation by refusing to extend credit to its merchants. That class also held a great deal of the debt for the war, and sought to avoid bankruptcy by passing hard credit terms on to subsistence farmers that previously settled their debt in goods. In Massachusetts, the farmers gathered together against the state militia in 1891 in an action known as Shay’s Rebellion, eventually forcing the merchants to relent. Similarly, grain farmers in the western territories rose in the Whiskey Rebellion in an attempt to force the repeal of a tax on whiskey, which served popularly as a means of concentrating grain for transport. It was repeated in the early 1900’s, when the coal mine owners brought in armed guards on rail cars to gun down striking workers.

The central question in all of these cases was how to balance personal property rights against the obligations of the nation to foster the security and survival of its citizens. Over time, the problem of survival has expanded from immediate threat to specific individuals or populations to include sustainability of the social system as a whole. Environmental legislation, financial regulation, immunization laws and social security taxes are all part of that expanded scope.

The appeal of liberty, however, is central to us as a people. Survival is not enough if it comes at the cost of leading lives without hope of meaningful personal accomplishment, and that requires the freedom to make our lives unique. Rules and regulations constraint our latitude. They force our lives into patterned molds.

At my current place of employment, during a cash crunch, the owner complained about the expense of “government” regulations that set minimum landscaping requirements. Walking later in the parking lot, I looked up at the hills, lined with high-end housing, and thought, “Well, that’s your ‘government’ – it’s your neighbors trying to protect the value of their housing.”

There is an essential difference between those that decry government regulation that frustrates their ambitions and those that face poverty and death due to regressive policies that sustain a privileged elite.

Among that elite are families that have title to use federal lands for private commerce. They pay fees to the Bureau of Land Management that monitors their usage to ensure that the land is not damaged or misused – for example, for gold mining rather than the allowed ranching.

We have in the news today two stories of ranchers facing governmental sanctions for misuse of their land rights. In Washington, the Hammond family set a fire to clear invasive brush that was impeding their cattle grazing. The fire spread to federal land, damaging the forest. The Hammonds, known for their support of charity, were given light sentences. Unfortunately, the terms did not meet minimum sentencing guidelines, and they are voluntarily surrendering themselves to serve up to four more years. The elder Hammond “hopes” that he still has a ranch upon his release.

In Nevada, the Bundy family runs a ranch on federal land, owing more than a million dollars in unpaid land use fees. Their response to Land Management actions to settle the arrears was to claim that federal ownership of the land was unconstitutional, and to call upon a posse of extremists from across the West to help them prevent the seizure of their cattle. Faced with a gang toting military assault-style weapons, the BLM backed off.

Emboldened by their victory, the Bundy family has intervened in the Hammond case, gathering a portion of their posse to seize a tourist center on federal land in Washington State.

The Bundy clan justifies its constitutional claims on a specific interpretation of the process used by the Western states to gain statehood. In that era, much of the West’s population was concentrated in cities. The states ceded control of the wild areas to federal control. The Bundy interpretation is that the federal government coerced the transfer of land. The rational interpretation is that the states did not have means to police the wild places, often occupied by hostile natives and outlaws, and so chose to ensure that management of the land was in federal hands, and so financed by the Eastern elites that were interested in securing the continent.

In the intervening years, the civilized West entered an epoch of regulated access sustained by usage fees. The cavalry forts were replaced by tourist centers and ranger stations. Perhaps too soon: the Bundy clan and their ilk are outlaws with modern weapons. Rather than threatened patriots seeking to ensure their voices are not forgotten in the halls of power, they are failed businessmen using the threat of violence to force others to support their privilege.

They should not be forgiven, and as Lincoln said, if they are not brought to heel, the very basis of our system of government is called into doubt.

Economic Nation Building

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The engineers at NASA have been warning for at least a decade that the constellation of junk orbiting the Earth is reaching critical levels. Beyond a certain point, the junk multiplies through collision with working satellites. I first became aware of this as a just-deserts illustration: a nation had launched a satellite with a loose wrench on board. When the satellite failed, they launched its replacement into the same orbit. Shortly after activation, the wrench, still in orbit, sheared through the boom that tethered the solar panel to the antenna.

NASA tracks space junk large enough to cause such incidents, and satellites commonly maneuver to stay out of their path. The job was made far harder when China, without notice to the international community, decided to demonstrate its ability to threaten global communications by blowing a satellite out of orbit. This was not done in a clever way, which would have been to destroy the satellite from higher orbit, pushing the fragments into the atmosphere. Instead, the Chinese destroyed the satellite from below, creating fully one third of our orbital space junk in a single incident.

This is only one example of a large number of similarly irrational incidents. When I stopped to chat with a Chinese co-worker one day, he was pulling his hair in exasperation. The pig farmers upstream from Shanghai had overbred, and many could not sell their stock. Rather than negotiating with their neighbors, they simply pushed the pigs into the river. Thousands of pig carcasses were floating through Shanghai to the ocean. The Three Gorges Dam, once seen as a manifestation of the efficiency of authoritarian rule, is a large open septic pit, filled with junk that is damaging the dam wall. More recently, we have the idiotic bulldozing of coral reefs in the South China Sea to create a landing strip to support Chinese claims to resource rights. The Obama Administration has chosen to thumb their nose, sailing naval vessels within the artificially created “territorial waters.”

When fighting a war to suppress authoritarian rule, we are confronted daily with death and destruction, and tend to bemoan the difficulty of nation building. The situation in China is a disaster in slow motion, but the fundamental problem is the same: where in Iraq the political preconditions for multi-party rule had not been established before Saddam’s ouster, in China the preconditions for a managed economy had not been established.

Foremost among these is a clear separation of economic, military and political spheres of influence. When Russian liberalized its economy, Western advisers recommended a distribution of state assets to the public. While the common share holder was generally defrauded of their ownership, the strategy did create a class of corporate ownership that can resist totalitarian excess. As Putin has fought to reassert totalitarian control, many of them have relocated to England, where Gazprom reportedly has headquarters in London.

No such separation exists in China. This means, for example, that when China realized that it could not divest itself of its US Treasury debt, and in fact had to continue to finance it to avoid watering down of its existing holdings, it choose to extend its global reach by repurposing consumer electronics technology received from the West for military applications.

Given our deep dependency on China for manufacturing of our electronics, it’s not clear how we are going to wriggle out of this situation. Industrial automation is one possibility – I am aware that Philips has resumed manufacturing of electric razors at a lights-out facility in the Netherlands. The maker movement pushed forward by hobbyists in America may spawn a flood of such innovations over the next generation.

More immediately, we have the Pacific Trade Pact, which allows companies to sue governments for unfair trade practices. I am hoping that this includes fair labor, industrial hygiene and environmental preservation as criteria. This removes the problem of jurisdiction faced by federal negotiators attempting to negotiate trade disputes involving multinational corporations. But the likely outcome will be to force China to reduce its cultural bias against foreign investment, with the result that labor and environmental justice will lose its focus.

And then there is the standard proposition of economic nation building: concentration of wealth drives competition for creative minds, which creates a population that lobbies for universal rights. The alternative, of course, is the creation of a privileged class that looks only to its own interests, as illustrated in The Hunger Games, or as actually existed in the European nobility that successfully suppressed capitalism through the use of royal monopolies until the monarchy in England was distracted by a long struggle over succession.

In Russia, the West is in some sense fortunate that Putin has chosen to cement his power through military aggression. We have prior experience in resisting that practice, primarily through the application of economic pressure. But China has carefully insulated itself from that pressure, while simultaneously reaping the profits from manufacturing operations relocated by cost-cutting multinationals that cannot be regulated by any single national government. Worse, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United hearing the ruled that corporate political spending is “free speech” came suspiciously close on the tail of revelations that China was funneling money into the American political process through our Chamber of Commerce. China’s trade surplus is being used to control our political decision making.

What worries me most about this situation is that the problem of nation building through military intervention is a subject of open dialog in our policy institutes. No such focus appears to exist for the theory, practice and dangers of economic nation building.

Hitler created a German boom by renouncing reparations during the Great Depression, and rode the authority granted by the German people into World War II. The rest of Europe did not recognize the threat he represented, and ultimately had no leverage over his conduct. China is creating growth by exploitation of the environment and workers, and has proceeded to military breast-beating. Do our leaders in government and industry recognize the potential threat, and what are they doing to ensure that we can reign in the Chinese ruling class?

Software and Agility

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Back in the ’80s, when the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) movement was gathering steam, surveys reported that half of all software projects failed. Even today, a significant number of developers report that they have never worked on a successful software project. I’ve written about the relationship between this problem and Moore’s law in the past, but hucksters selling cure-alls don’t have time to investigate root causes.

This is evident most often in comparisons of development methodologies. Historically, corporate America applied the “Waterfall Model”, a name coined by Winston Royce. Royce identified seven critical activities in software development: systems requirements, software requirements, analysis, design, implementation, verification and operation. The seven follow a definite chain of information dependencies, suggesting the “waterfall” analogy. But Royce himself observed that no project followed that sequence. There were all kinds of feedback loops from later stages to earlier stages.

What is astonishing to me is that later practitioners removed the first and last step. This tends to support amnesia about the evolution of the institutions that software developers support. Prior to World War II, most businesses were dominated by “tribal knowledge” of their operations. Goals were set from on high, but implementation was organic and often opaque. That changed in the 50s: confronted with the daunting logistics of WW II, the armed services formed a logistical planning office and trained practitioners. It was these men, including Robert McNamara, who went out and transformed the practices of corporate management in the 50s.

Thus the importance of the “systems requirements” stage of the waterfall process. Information systems were being injected into organizations whose theory of operation was vastly different from actual performance. Initial users of structured analysis, for example, discovered that many significant decisions were made by white-collar workers loitering around the water cooler, bypassing the hierarchical systems of reporting required by their organizational structure. Deploying an information system that enforced formal chains of authorization often disrupted that decision making, and organizations suffered as a result.

The common charge leveled against the Waterfall model is that the requirements are never right, and so attempts to build a fully integrated solution are doomed to fail. This has led to models, such as Agile and Lean software development, that promote continuous delivery of solutions to customers. But remember what supports that delivery: ubiquitous networking and standard software component models (including J2EE, Spring, SQL databases, and .NET) that allow pieces to be replaced dynamically while systems are operating. Those technologies didn’t exist when the waterfall model was proposed. And when they did arrive, proponents of the model immediately suggested a shift to “rapid prototyping” activities that would place working code before key end users as early in the project as possible. The expectation was that the politically fraught early stages of requirements discovery could then be avoided.

Actually, this might be possible at this point in time. Information systems provide instrumentation of operations to the degree that SAP now advertises the idea that they allow businesses to manifest a “soul.” Web service architectures allow modified applications to be presented to a trial population while the old application continues to run. Technology may now be capable of supporting continuous evolution of software solutions.

But removing the systems requirements stage of the process leaves this problem: where do requirements come from? Watching the manipulation of statistics by our presidential candidates, only the naive would believe that the same doesn’t occur in a corporate setting. Agile and Lean models that promise immediate satisfaction weaken the need for oversight of feature specification, perhaps opening the door to manipulation of application development in support of personal ambitions among the management team.

Control of such manipulation will be possible only when integrated design is possible – where the purpose of implementing a feature is shown in the context of a proposed operation. Currently that kind of design is not practiced – although Diagrammatic Programming has demonstrated its possibility.

In our current context, however, the wisdom of the CMM is still to be heeded. In a comment to an author pushing Agile over Waterfall development, I summarized the CMM’s five stages as follows:

  1. Define the boundary around your software process, and monitor and control the flow of artifacts across that boundary.
  2. Require that each developer describe his or her work practices.
  3. Get the developers to harmonize their practices.
  4. Create a database to capture the correlations between effort (3) and outcomes (1).
  5. Apply the experience captured in (4) to improve outcomes.

This is just good, sound, evidence-based management, and the author thanked me for explaining it to him. He had always thought of the CMM as a waterfall enforcement tool, rather than as management process.

And for those arguing “Waterfall” vs. “Agile” vs. “Lean”: if you don’t have CMM-based data to back up your claims, you should be clear that you’re really involved in shaking up organizational culture.

Hope for Climate Healing

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California governor Jerry Brown is in Paris this week at the climate change conference. Chris Hayes had him on All In on Wednesday night to talk about California’s efforts to combat climate change. In setting the stage, Chris pulled footage from his visit to the San Joaquin Valley earlier this year.

The statistics on both sides are daunting. As the world’s eighth largest economy, California’s dispersed population consumes huge amounts of gasoline. In seeking to reduce carbon emissions, the state has opted to install a large number of natural gas electricity plants, while also pursuing an aggressive push into renewables (wind, solar and geothermal). In general, its mild climate means that CO2 emissions are low, but it appears that major reductions are still decades away.

Brown trumpeted California’s efforts, citing the state as a global leader in climate change policy. But if this is the best that we can do, how can he hope that the talks in Paris will chart a path out of a century that is projected to end with a 10 F increase in global temperatures?

The major impact of that increase will be desertification. As in the Middle East, California is seeing the consequences of glacial retreat. At the edge of the glacial range, we still had large snow packs on the Sierras, and it was this store of water that allowed the $50 billion agricultural economy to operate through the dry summer months. As the climate warms, farmers have pumped our aquifers down by nearly fifty get. Drip irrigation systems are now being adopted to maintain production with reduced water resources, but if temperatures continue to rise, snow packs will continue to decrease. The survival of agriculture in California is tied to our depleted aquifers, which are not a renewable resource.

The consequences to the nation as a whole are daunting. The San Joaquin Valley produces 40% of America’s food.

When I rediscovered Cat Steven’s Moonshadow a few years ago, upon hearing Morning Has Broken for the first time in two decades, I found  myself filled with grief as the opening piano meditation unrolled. It climaxed with a vision as the man now called Yusuf sang these words:

Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven,
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass.

In the vision, I stood on the edge of the Sierra foothills in the Central Valley. The desiccated land, scoured by wind and rain, gave no purchase to life. A pair of naked feet waited, and then began to pace across the ground. Behind them, water and life flowed.

As a student at UC Berkeley, I was compelled by the confusion I experienced in interpreting political discourse to establish my own definitions for moral dialog. When I got around to “hope”, I settled on “a connection to a future in which love is at work for you.” There is two parts to that – one is accepting love, and the other is honoring it. The first requires that we recognize our need, the second requires that we respect the needs of others.

In his conversation with Chris, Governor Brown offered this subtle piece of insight: “Modernity is individualism plus oil.” Individualism implicitly violates the first requirement for hope – it holds that we do not need others. That is sustained by oil, which allows us to consume two hundred times as much energy as we can produce with our bodies. With mechanization, we all live as though we have two hundred slaves.

But the conventions of individualism also allow us to ignore the needs of others, not least the needs of the voiceless flora and fauna that sustain ecological stability. Our fossil fuel consumption has destabilized the biosphere that some know as Gaia.

In reading the Book of Revelation, in the golden bowls I see prophesied with exactitude the climate disasters that threaten our civilization. Obviously the feet in my dream are those of the savior. But in assessing the gap between individualism and the surrender to love, I find myself recalling the experience of Jesus upon his return to Nazareth. Mark summarized it as follows [NIV Mark 6:4-6]:

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.

How far will we fall before choosing to open our hearts to allow love to re-enter the world?

And you, Christians, the family he created: will you recognize him when he comes? Will you open your hearts and minds to him and – if not partaking of his burden – at least apprehend and so honor the strain and sorrow he bears as he heals with his flesh the great wound in the Tree of Life we have created in our monomaniacal pursuit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

Or will you sit back in your seats, thrilling to the amplified harmonies of your bards, consoled by the airy myths they unfold, and say with offense [NIV Mark 6:2]:

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him?“

San Bernardino

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Once again we are confronted with a massacre – the work of an unbalanced mind unable to manage confrontation without a resort to violence.

The gun lobby caters to these people – principally criminals, as most semi-automatic handguns are recovered at crime scenes. The NRA has fought against implementation of methods that would ensure traceability of weapons flow through criminal hands for just this reason – it is the life-blood of their industry. And then there are those terrorized by criminal activity, those confronted with a steady diet of shootings, whose self-esteem and self-confidence erode slowly, until they grasp at the tools of terror as a means of asserting themselves against a violent world.

The NRA mouthpieces believe that we should all buy a gun, and spend hundreds of hours at firing ranges maintaining our expertise in their use. The sane consider this and their mouths fall agape. I mean – what do we maintain a police force for? Why should the public invest its energy in mastery of arms when we can earn enough money in that time to pay others to protect us?

The only reason is because the NRA fosters a mentality of violence in a community that is vulnerable to a loss of self-control. It is precisely these people that should be denied access to guns.

Given the statistics – more than one mass shooting a day this year, with no incidents that I am aware of in which the shooter was brought down by a gun-toting citizen – it seems reasonable to conclude that those prone to violence are the only ones making use of their weapons. The statistics are even worse when we look at domestic violence and suicides. So why are we allowing the gun industry to sell weapons at all, for other than sporting purposes?

It is time to end this cycle of terror, where protection of the rights of gun owners is used to mask a systematic practice of funneling guns to those that should not be allowed to bear them – a practice that generates violence that is used to stimulate additional gun sales.

It’s like trying to cure the plague by giving people the plague. It’s insanity. Really, think about it: do we really want to live in a society in which the first thing we think about every time we leave the house is being prepared to kill someone else? Why do we insist on permitting conditions under which it is impossible for the police to relieve us of that burden?

Response to “Are Christianity and Capitalism Compatible?”

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Source post is here.

Thanks for the link back to my post.

A comment on the history of economics (see Nasar’s “The Grand Pursuit”), motivated primarily by the principle that just as we should not hold Christ responsible for all the terrible things done in his name, so we should not hold Adam Smith responsible for all the things done in his name.

At the beginning of the 19th century, economic thought was dominated by Malthus. The “dismal science” held that there was no escape from widespread poverty, because the growth of systems of production appeared incapable of keeping pace with population growth at the subsistence level. This meant that, no matter how freely owners distributed profits to the workers, population would continue to grow until poverty imposed a constraint on lifespan. This justified much of conservative thought of the era, which held that sustaining the institutions of the state in the face of ravenous poverty was essential, lest the entire body of humanity be reduced to barbarism

Capitalism found a way out of this dilemma, essentially by supplementing the productive capacity of individual workers with machinery. The upshot was that, while wages per piece produced fell (as decried by Marx), the cost of goods fell even faster. This instituted an era of enormous growth in the global standard of living and average life span.

Unfortunately, this boon comes largely from our harvest of the bounty of the Earth – in the West, each of us consumes energy equivalent to 200 man-years of labor. This has been indulged without a mind to sustainability, so it looks as though we are likely to return to Malthusian economic outcomes in the near future.

I would note that the economic practices of the early Christian communities did not focus on the mechanisms of production or the issues of sustainability. These were beyond the ken of all except the most sophisticated members of society. In fact, the Fall of Rome and the ensuing deurbanization and decay of the social order was so traumatic to the Church fathers that they spent the next 1500 years trying to reestablish the Roman Empire, which they saw as the first Christian nation and therefore “God’s kingdom on earth.”

So I would suggest that capitalism, with its hopeful, rational and scientific view of productive processes, is not incompatible with Christianity. We are still left with two problems to confront: maturity regarding procreative opportunity (each of us needs to ask “can I actually love a child into the future he/she deserves?” and discipline ourselves accordingly), and fairness in the distribution of wealth, which currently is seriously out of whack in America.

Working the Truth Out

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Among all the proofs of the efficacy of loving, none is more compelling to me than the existence of institutions of learning. I am one of the most favored and grateful recipients of the investment made by others in discovering and sharing the truth.

During my freshman year at UC Berkeley, my dorm roomie was a talented pianist named John Schmay. John would sit down at a piece of music and spin out a million notes in extemporaneous composition that wandered effortlessly across musical genres. He tried to tame the volcano within through meditation at a self-made Buddhist shrine. Inspired by that example, I turned within as well. As the year progressed, through meditation I had a series of conscious transitions, an opening of doors to ever larger realms of truth. I realize now that those transitions were facilitated by others, and reflected a judgment that I would be respectful in my navigation of those halls.

Since leaving the UC system (I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the first eight years of my professional life), I have tried my best to bring the gifts of truth into my work in the commercial world. It is an ongoing struggle. Our hierarchical corporate structure and the legal framework of property rights both support and sustain the exercise of tyranny. This is expressed in a psychology of management prerogatives that extend, in the most aggressive case, to the idea that a supervisor has a right to untrammeled access to the sources of truth in our minds. In my own case, access has been sought through appeals to lust and greed, and when those failed, through raw threat to my survival and the survival of those I love.

Of course, as one that has surrendered fully to Christ, this is all terribly wearisome. I don’t own the truth; I don’t control the truth that flows through me. Having been given the gift of wandering in it, perhaps to a greater degree than anyone now alive, I perceive that remit to be a jewel precious beyond measure, and something that death will not steal from me. It will only interrupt the process of living that allows truth to manifest itself in the world through me.

Paradoxically, upon realizing that none of the afore-mentioned inducements will gain access to the truth that reaches out through me, a subtle psychological shift occurs. Instead of negotiating an exchange of value, the world itself is raised as a threat to the survival of the truth in me. The assertion of authority is not one of merit, but rather a claim of allegiance from one providing protection. Of course, this is always the last resort of the tyrant. When they no longer can command weakness in their subjects, they manufacture enemies without.

What has been essential to me, in working through this resistance, is to recognize that it is not the specific individuals that concern the truth. They are merely attempts to manifest a pattern of relation that has engendered habits of thinking – just as I manifest a pattern of relation (unconditional love) and habits of thinking (a relentless plunging into the veils that hide the truth).

Having exhausted the resistance of ownership, in America the next barrier is the defense industry, the enormously voracious “protector of liberty.”

So last night I awoke to a dream of captivity to Jihadi John, the target of yesterday’s drone strike in Syria. As I was injected into the scenario, I firmly resisted the garb of a victim, instead asserting that I saw this as a demonstration that would undermine the rhetoric of fear. Firmly enmeshed in the illusion of captivity, I shared with the jihadists that I had never finished reading the Qur’an, and asked them to provide me an English translation. With that link established, I offered them the truth as I understood it, opening my heart to reveal the love that I have received, eclipsing in measure any claims of my worth.

In that moment there was a lifting away. Something gave way, an ancient predatory spirit that has roosted in the Middle East.

Gently I asserted to the jihadists, “Isn’t this the goal you desire?” Their affirmation spread throughout the region. I then became one with that spirit that watches the world from outside, gently guiding our hearts, spreading the hope that one day we will stop fearing the consequences of receiving it – foremost being the power that it brings to elaborate wills that are not yet strong enough to resist the self-tyranny that is our self-concern.

And to my countrymen, I then turned to ask, “Did you really believe that the truth needs protection?”

You can run but you can’t hide.

It is that which is.

We were/are/will be that which we were/are/will be.