27 April 2008

I. There is a general sense of resignation and 'giving up' rather than perseverance to correct the situation/trail of mistakes (and corruption):

1) Marcus W. Brauchli, a former foreing correspondent with Dow Jones since 1984, is expected to resign as the top-ranking editor of The Wall Street Journal after less than a year on the job and despite the fact that he is "well liked and respected" by his colleagues (Richard Perez-Pena, "Wall St. Journal Editor Expected to Resign," The New York Times, 22 April 2008).

2) Despite more than six years trying to overhaul "an antiquated agency with a history of corruption, inefficiency and missing records, while coping with a building boom that stretched the department to the limits of its resources," Buildings Commissioner Patricia J. Lancaster resigned from her position (Charles V. Bagli, "New York Buildings Commissioner Resigns," The New York Times, 23 April 2008).

3) After surviving corruption scandals and a bribery conviction in the 1990s, Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee, indicted on tax evasion charges, resigned along with his son, Lee Jae-yong (he was an executive at Samsung Electronics) (Choe Sang-hun, "Samsung Chairman Resigns," The New York Times, 23 April 2008).

II. Equally, there is a rise in the obliteration of quality. Case in point, e-books:

Apparently, self-professed "most published author in the history of the planet" Philip M. Parker, has compiled roughly 200K books through "computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject - broad or obscure - and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres...of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one" through Amazon.com (Noam Cohen, "He Wrote 200,000 Books (But Computers Did Some of the Work)," The New York Times, 14 April 2008).

David Pascoe, an unfortunate purchaser of one of Parker's books on rosacea, complained that the book offered such generic information that if a person is "good at the Internet, this book is useless."

For Parker even to imagine himself an author would be the greatest fallacy and for him to entertain the notion that the computer can replace the author is nothing short of absurdity.

To Parker: thank you for the trash. Nice to know you developed an algorithm to degrade further the quality of American 'literature'.

Wait, it gets better.

III. As a 'snowball' to the sense of resignation and obliteration of quality, the world is facing a global food crisis akin to the one it faced at the end of WWII:

In a very poignant opening to his article on hunger riots in Haiti, Marc Lacey states:

"Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti's presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country's prime minister packing" (Marc Lacey, "Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger," The New York Times, 18 April 2008).

Since the end of 2006, global food prices have increased about 45% "turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures."

According to the World Bank, food prices have risen by 83% in three years (David Stringer, "Global food crisis poses unpalatable options," The Seattle Times & The Associated Press, 23 April 2008).

To offset the crisis, Pakistan already has a system of ration cards for subsidized wheat in place. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the rising food costs "threaten to cancel strides made toward...cutting world poverty in half by 2015." Furthermore, because biofuel leads to the destruction of forests and takes up arable land for food crops, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for the urgent re-examination of biofuel production.

IV. Add the above three to this latest finding:

That only WWII was costlier than the Iraq war, estimated by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University public finance Professor Laura Bilmes to be $3 trillion (Zachary Coile, "Only World War II was costlier than Iraq war," San Francisco Chronicle, 18 March 2008).

In light of the global food crisis, it is very difficult to understand how Stiglitz could possibly and justifiably state of the Iraq war costs: "We are a rich country, and we can, in some sense, afford it. It's not going to bankrupt us."

Stunning indelicacy, to say the least.

So what do the above four issues have in common?

Loops.

It is all about the loops.

Negative Feedback Loops (NFLs), Positive Feedback Loops (PFLs), and the conscious decision of which to feed, flourish, or fumble.

It seems we are engaging in too many NFLs and not enough PFLs.

This is not news.

However, what is noteworthy is the toll and havoc our decision is reaking on our life, our future, and our basic survival.  It takes just as much energy to feed the negative as it does the positive, so when given which side to invest in, why not choose the latter?  Time and again, the world amazes, as we continue to partake in the negative, blindly asking for the one dish we have once been served...

...as if by blind herdism.

Of hyphenation, potentiality, and the present offerings of electronically mediated transcendence, there is just no excuse...

Of choices, how quickly we run to bankrupt ourselves!