More Notes from a Small Town Republican Meeting in Texas – October 2013

This is the fourth installment in a series of posts describing my experiences at a small town Republican meeting in Texas. Previous posts are available below. I try to present a neutral view while just reporting what was said, but I don’t always succeed.

This time the local Democrat and Republican meetings happen to fall on the same day, so I went to parts of both meetings. There were some interesting points of contrast. First, a quirky little thing I noticed is that the Democrats were much more willing to express their identity and views with bumper stickers, while the Republicans had very few bumper stickers. (Anyone want to offer an explanation of this phenomenon?) The Democrats were also more optimistic and lively. They talked quite a bit about the next Texas governor’s race and the leading Democratic candidate Wendy Davis, even though she is still a long shot to win the election. By contrast, the Republicans were much more subdued. This is consistent with a recent survey of Republican beliefs about the state of the country which listed the three most common words they used as “worried, concerned, and scared”. They didn’t mention the upcoming governor’s election even once during the meeting.

The only time national issues came up was during some pre-meeting discussion in the audience. One person felt compelled to share his belief that the country is getting close to the point where millions of people will march on Washington DC to throw Obama out of office. He was sure that Obama will declare martial law and try to use the military to protect himself when this happens, but “there are more of us than there are of them”.

Outside of such discussions there was little other talk of national politics, not even of Obamacare, which surprised me given the obsession with it at previous meetings. It was also surprising because this meeting occurred during the emotional height of the debt ceiling negotiations in the US Congress. The main speaker at the Republican meeting was a state legislator who seemed to make it a point to avoid discussing the situation in Washington DC. Most of the discussion centered on Texas and local issues. This included taxes, the state budget, and of course water issues. There will be a proposition on the ballot soon in Texas to authorize spending $2 billion on water infrastructure and conservation. This was supported by all the members who spoke up. (By contrast, the Texas Tea Party is strongly against this measure, and generally despises the establishment Republicans like those present at this meeting.)

Local water board elections where a big issue, and they discussed the need to keep liberals off the water board. Some background: in Texas the state regulates the taking of water from rivers and lakes. However there is a long standing part of Texas political culture that says any person can pump as much water from their well on their property as they want, and no government agency had better try to interfere with that right. You can pretty much guess what has been happening to the level of water in Texas’ aquifers in the last few decades.

According to the stories told at the meeting, the liberal members on the local water boards have been sitting on hundreds of applications to drill wells without processing them, and in the long term they plan to put meters on private wells in order to monitor the amount of water used and eventually charge the well owner per gallon. The response from an audience member was “when they trespass on my property to put a meter on my well, if they manage to get past my Rottweiler they’ll have to deal with by ‘45’ “. Obviously they were strongly against changing this part of the Texas political culture regarding water rights.

One of the other interesting topics discussed was increasing the support for vehicles being fueled by natural gas. There was also support for an interesting new proposal for underground aquifer storage and recovery of water instead of the above ground reservoirs which lose a lot of water to evaporation during Texas summers.

Finally, there was a familiar commentary on how it’s been proven that non-profit charities do a better job at providing food and health care to poor people than the government. It was recommended that people read the speech “Not Yours to Give” by Davy Crockett, in which he explains why it is not the government’s job to spend money on charity (Note: I looked this up, and it turns out the speech was almost certainly a fabrication by the author of a Davy Crocket biography).

More Notes from a Small Town Republican Meeting in Texas – Aug 2013

This is the third installment in a series of posts describing my experiences at a small town Republican meeting in Texas. Previous posts are available here and here. I try to present a neutral view while just reporting what was said, but I don’t always succeed.

This meeting occurred in August during the congressional break, and our local representative from the US House was the guest speaker. Like all such meetings, it started with pledges to the American and Texas flags. The opening prayer started with “We thank you Lord for this great country and its current leaders…” which was a phrase I didn’t expect. Various Republican candidates for local offices then introducing themselves and gave a 2 minute stump speech. I was actually impressed that they all discussed their experience and qualifications and avoided partisan ideology.

Our US congressman started his speech with a joke -“Redistricting is a sport in Texas”, which has some truth to it. That was followed by feeding red meat to a hungry audience. The basic outline of his talk was “obamacare, socialism, obamacare, impeachment, obamacare”. His priority on obamacare was to completely defund it, and then don’t replace it with anything else. In his view, our health care system was doing just fine until Obama tried to introduce socialized medicine. We need to get government completely out of health care and let the free market do its job.

An interesting moment occurred later during audience questions when a woman described herself as a moderate and asked him to consider something between all and nothing. Her husband is a cancer survivor and couldn’t get private insurance before obamacare because of that pre-existing condition. The congressman’s response was that government still needed to get out of health care and maybe we just needed to tweak the private market a little to handle such cases. I thanked the women afterwards for speaking up since I’m also a cancer survivor.

He was in favor of not raising the debt ceiling this fall unless obamacare was defunded, even if that meant the government would be shut down or default on its obligations. There audience cheered when he said that. He described their plan as having Congress pass a bill that gave Obama everything he wanted except funding for obamacare. Then if Obama vetoes it, the public will put all the blame on him for shutting down the government.

In terms of getting the economy moving again, his answer was to cut all tax rates including corporate taxes and the capital gains tax. Obama has already tried socialist solutions to help the economy and they didn’t work, and now he’s busy pitting people against each other as his next plan. He was mad at Obama for taking money from our military and instead sending it to those people on welfare. He stated that without a dominant US military the world would implode. On energy, he was for “all the above” (i.e. pursue all sources of energy). The government should get completely out of the energy business though. The government only has 3 legitimate functions: collect taxes, defend our borders, and manage our infrastructure. The topic of climate change didn’t come up.

The congressman described his platform priorities as: lower taxes, smaller government, defend our borders, the 10th amendment, and always stand with Israel. (The 10th amendment is a “states rights” thing). He was for independence instead of dependence. He was guided by the Constitution, his conscious, and the Bible. He also said that as grownups we will need to plant some trees that we will never stand under.

He defended his vote in support of the Ryan budget after an audience member complained that it didn’t cut spending enough. He also stated “I’m willing to negotiate on the budget, but I won’t compromise my core values, which are no tax increases and a strong military”. “Obama has broken every rule, why not impeach him?” an audience member asked. His response: impeachment papers have already been drawn up and we’re waiting for the right time to introduce them. They may take too long to go through the system to be effective though. When someone expressed concern over NSA spying, he said we need to reign in the NSA and go back to the Patriot Act.

A restaurant owner spoke up and said we desperately need a guest worker program, but not amnesty. Response from the Congressman: border security is a more important first priority. One audience member stated that the reason for the lower Republican vote in 2012 wasn’t bad policies, it was because (1) we didn’t run a true conservative candidate, and (2) we ran a Mormon and many Christians stayed home and refused to vote for him. The congressman responded that if we’re still upset about the 2012 elections we need to get over it. Focus on the 2014 elections; they may be the most important ones of our lives.

Fort Hood is in the congressman’s district, and he was upset that Obama labeled the shootings there as “workplace violence” instead of terrorism. There is a bill in Congress to label these as a terrorist act, which would mean those who were injured could receive additional financial aid and possibly a Purple Heart medal.

One audience member expressed concern about Obama signing “that UN gun thing”. The congressman’s response was that we don’t need to sign ANY UN treaty, and he will make sure that never happens.

As a final statement intended to inspire the crowd, he quoted Will Rogers - “Don't look back 'cause we ain't headed that way.” He apparently did not think there was any irony involved here.

Notes From a Small Town Republican Meeting in Texas Shortly after the 2012 Election

A few days after the election in November, I went to the local county Republican meeting. It was a small town gathering near Austin Texas, just far enough outside of Austin to qualify as a representative small town in rural Texas. Here is a description of what I observed that night. My intention is not to poke fun at anyone in a mean spirited way, but to try to present some honest observations. I can’t claim to be completely successful at all times, but I tried.

There was a real sense of gloom in the discussion before the meeting. Paraphrasing typical comments:

"I've lived through bad presidents and bad congresses, but I've never seen anything as bad as this. I don't know how we're going to get through these next 4 years."

“It's going to take millions of people learning hard lessons from the mistake they've made.”

“We need to be more conservative in these tough times”

“We lost because there were obviously there are more takers than producers.”

“We lost some local races because liberal PACs outspent us 10:1”

They saw this election as a “mistake” that can eventually be corrected and then things will return to normal. Nobody suggested that it was as a signal of some sort of permanent change. Interestingly Romney's name was not mentioned once. Republican/ Democrats were only rarely mentioned. It was all about the battle between liberals and conservatives. I also observed that the term "conservative" seemed to have evolve from defining a collection of political views, into something that was roughly synonymous with righteousness and strength of moral character. In such a view, there was no such thing as a balanced conservatism - being more conservative was ALWAYS better.

The meeting was opened in the usual way with a prayer, pledge to the American flag, followed by a pledge to the Texas flag. A local Republican county commissioner then gave a report on various local county issues: roads, taxes, emergency preparedness plans, and of course water issues. He came across as very experienced and knowledgeable, and motivated by a desire to do what’s best for the county without a hint of partisan politics appearing in his talk.

The Republican Texas State Representative from that area then gave his view on issues and priorities for the coming state congressional session. He supported what I found to be an interesting mix of ideas:

• Clamping down on immigration
• Tort reform - "looser pays" legislation
• Drug testing for welfare recipients
• Our schools needing more focus on vocational training and less on standardized testing. Vocational classes have been canceled over the need to focus too much time and funds on test preparation.
• Addressing our long term water needs. This includes building more reservoirs, as well as investigating “aquifer storage”, which involves pumping water back down into underground aquifers. It turns out that the city of Austin looses more water from evaporation from its reservoirs than the city actually uses. (This idea was new for me, and quite interesting)
• Improving our transportation infrastructure
• He also supported legislation to give people rights to carry guns on school grounds, including grade schools and high schools. This would only apply to adults with gun permits. His explanation was that churches sometimes worship at schools on weekends, and people need the right to defend themselves during church services because Christians are being increasingly persecuted.

The meeting then ended with a long lecture on socialism. The speaker was very sincere and gave a very well prepared talk. He had apparently migrated to the U.S. from an eastern European country when he was young. (This is where it becomes difficult for me to remain completely objective and avoid giving a biased and perhaps somewhat sarcastic view based on the selection of key points that I chose to include. I will say I found the talk entertaining. )

The Threat of Socialism:

• Capitalism is clearly based on Christian principles
• Socialism is the government control over means of production. The most socialistic agency in our current government is the EPA.

Here are the plans being used to introduce socialism into our society

• First corrupt our culture, starting at the universities
• Then the press and entertainment
• Finally destroy Christianity though liberal teachers at seminaries

Howard Zinn was singled out as being one of the most corrupting influences around because his books are corrupting US history. He is teaching our children that the U.S. did bad things at times, reducing the pride we have in our nation. This is a major problem, because it's very important for citizens to maintain their pride in America.

The real goal of the Obama administration is a “one world government” that takes away our guns.

The main groups working for socialism include: civil rights groups, feminists, the gay pride movement, environmentalists,liberal churches, organized labor, esp. the AFL-CIO, the far left radical liberals including Obama and Hillary, and of course the National Education Association.

The end result of socialism in Europe is the Muslims moving in and establishing sharia law. That's our future too, and George Soros is funding this. We may say that couldn't happen here, but they said the same thing in Europe, and it's happening now.

(End of lecture)

I don’t know to what extent the audience agreed with everything the speaker said, but they did give him a standing ovation after his talk.

A final observation: In my estimation these are not tea party people. They are run-of-the-mill mainstream small town Republicans. I've been to Texas tea party meeting. The Texas tea party folks despise the type of mainstream establishment Republican Party members gathered here for being too moderate in their views and actions.

Yochai Benkler on the new open-source economics

In this TED Talk given back in 2005, Yochai Benkler talked about how the development of "social production" is the long term shift caused by the Internet. Examples of this include

• Linux - note that 70% of critical web servers are controlled by Linux
  
• Wikipedia (of course)
  
• Google - in the sense that they have esentially outsourced the decision of what is relevant to the web community as a whole in its page rank algorithm.
  
• Seti@home - which was for a time the most powerful supercomputer cluster in the world
  

Why is this happening? Yochai says that for the first time in history, the capital for generating and distributing information is cheaply available to everyone. Previously it was too expensive to have decentralized production. What we're seeing now is the emergence of social sharing and exchange that in some contexts it is more efficient than markets or firms. It is sustainable and growing fast.

Yochai also makes the amusing observation that money is not the greatest motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you do not increase the chances of being invited back. If the dinner example is not obvious, think of sex.

The biggest disagreement I have with his view is that this is not the first time this is happening. Open source collaboration is in fact the fundamental operating model of the scientific method. Applied science and engineering is often done for economic profit and protected by patents. Basic research however is freely shared with everyone, and done more for social status and personal enjoyment than to achieve large monetary gains.

David Korten message to the Occupy Wall Street movement

David Korten, an economist, author, and former Professor of the Harvard Business School, was asked why the Occupy Wall Street movement is striking such a strong chord with such a broad base of our society.  He replied with some verysobering words "The problem is deeply structural.  There's not going to be an economic recovery, and the politicians are not going to take the actions that are necessary.   The leadership is only going to come from the people".  To the protesters he would like to say "The future depends on you.  Have the courage, the world is watching"

He also points out that the income of the middle class has been declining for some time.  We should note that this has been masked for the last two decades by the rise of two income families and a huge increase in personal debt.  These coping mechanisms have reached their limit though, which suggests that we are not going to return to the way things used to be.  Perhaps some people are beginning to realize this.  For others, this goes against their economic ideology and that makes it very hard to accept. 

Let's End the Hero Worship of Steve Jobs

Roles models can be a good thing to have. Hero worship can be problematic though. Now that the hero worship of Steve Jobs has died down, let me offer a different perspective. In reality, Steve Jobs sometimes acted like a jerk in his personal life, he abused and mistreated his fellow employees, and he has no public record of ever donating any of his massive wealth to charity. He didn’t invent much of what Apple is known for. The mouse, graphic interface, MP3 song player, smart phone, and tablet computer were all first introduced by other companies. Steve Jobs – no, make that the engineers at Apple, took those innovations and produced better versions of them. Steve Jobs never embraced the open source movement, and Apple remains one of the prime examples of complete corporate control over anything having to do with their products.


As far as Steve Jobs changing the world – really? In any way that qualifies as important? When the long term history of the computer industry is written, his impact will be much small than someone like Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web and then refused to patent it so that it could be more widely shared in an open manner by everyone. Or what about another serious role model who recently died, Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. She was personally responsible for starting major environmental and women’s rights movements in Africa, movements that have been causing major improvements in the lives of people all over Africa. When CEOs become more idolized then these people, you again have to question the priorities of our culture.

The fact that Steve Jobs’ death was announced by Apple Corp., and not by his family or friends, should be something that strikes people as strange and a little sad.

Thoughts on the Evolution of Life on Earth

I recently attended a book discussion of "Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins.  The book is an excellent discussion of the evolutionary history of life on earth and how different species are related.  As the discussion developed, several people repeated the theme brought up in the book that humankind is NOT in any reasonable sense the "culmination of the evolutionary process". 

Part of the argument for this is that evolution is not directed towards a specific goal.  If you were to replay the tape of evolution starting with just minor changes, it is very unlikely that it would end up producing the human race again.  We are a somewhat random production of evolution.  There is a good argument that evolution would have probably produced some sort of intelligent creatures at some point.  After all, it also produced dolphins, parrots, and squids - three other species that show some signs of developing reasonable intelligence.  Whether it would have produced any species that had the physical ability to grow much larger brains, plus the physical dexterity to manipulate tools easily, and that lived in an ecological niche that was suitable for developing advanced societies similar to humans is an open question.  Perhaps most species that evolve some advanced intelligence end up limited by physical factors from taking that next step of creating advanced technological societies (?)

It occurred to me that we are not the "culmination of the evolutionary process" in a different sense though.  Life has been evolving on Earth for maybe 3.5 billion years.  We are probably only somewhere near the midpoint in the history of life on Earth.  In fact, since evolution appears to be speeding up (both biologically as well as culturally), we are probably still early in the "story of events" in the evolutionary development of life on Earth. 

This is something to think about that perhaps makes you a little more excited and humble at the same time.  It's also an excellent example of what some people refer to as the "feelings of awe and spiritual wonder" produced by a fuller scientific understanding of the universe around us and our place in it.

Just How Inefficient is Our Society?

I was listening to a conversation about efficiency in the U.S. economy the other day. It’s actually amazing how far below our actual capabilities we are right now when you stop and think about it. I’m thinking in terms of fully utilizing our human resources.

I recently spent 11 months unemployed. I went from being an experienced and productive computer engineer to someone who produced zero net contribution to our economy for those months. I worked hard every day, but that effort was devoted to my job search routine, filling out job applications, preparing for interviews, etc. (I also did volunteer work and spent more time with my family, but I’m not counting that here.) Fortunately I have a job that allows me to be productive again, but when I look back at that time I spent unemployed I shake my head at the waste of time and effort that could have been put to much better use.

Today we have about 10% of our workforce in this situation – representing maybe a 10% waste in our productivity.  It’s hard to estimate what portion of the potential workforce is not counted in that number because they have given up or see no opportunity for a meaningful job. Some people estimate that the real number when these people are taken into account is closer to 20%. Then add a few percent more cover the people currently in prison. We can argue about adding the number of people in the military to this amount too, but that’s a relatively small number compared to other factors.

The next big factor, and potentially the biggest factor of all, is the number of people underemployed. These are people who are working at jobs that, for whatever reason, do not allow them to fully contribute to society what they are capable of. By the time you add all these factors in, our human workforce as a group is almost certainly contributing less than half of what they are capable of.

You could spend considerable time debating what portion of this is due to personal choices, cultural factors, or inefficiencies in the market. I don’t know the correct answer here. I’m sure of two things though: (1) We as a society are doing a fraction of what we are capable of and there’s room for considerable improvement, and (2) we are in a situation where there’s a considerable need for that extra human potential to solve a growing list of problems.

Relativity Denial Returns

When I was much younger, I recall that refuting the Theory of Relativity was a favorite pastime of various crackpots and clowns. The Nazis even derided it by referred to it as foolish “jewish science” and obviously inferior to proper “aryan science”. (Einstein was a Jewish German if you didn’t know). In reality, most aspects of Relativity have been experimentally confirmed, some in extreme detail. The current GPS system even has to take into account the effect of relativity in order to achieve the accuracy it does.

In more recent years, the attention of the crackpots seems to have become focused on refuting evolution and more recently global climate change. Have people given up battling against the Theory of Relativity?

Thanks to a recent article on Talking Points Memo, I found out that the answer is a definite “no”. Conservapedia (the alternative to the reality based and thus liberally biased Wikipedia) has a detailed article on Relativity. It’s initial criticism states that “…unlike most of physics, the theories of relativity consist of complex mathematical equations relying on several hypotheses.”

It gets worse. It’s accompanying article Counterexamples to Relativity describes Relativity as “heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world”. It states that Relativity denies action at a distance, which clearly contradict the miracles that Jesus performed according to the Bible, so Relativity must be wrong.

The closing arguments in the original Conservapedia article include the following whopper of a paragraph:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to abortion. As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments. Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common. Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.

Relativity denialism appears to be more alive and well than I thought, and the battle against science continues. By the way, the main contributor to the Conservapedia articles on Relativity was Andy Schlafly, son of the right wing activist Phylis Schlafly.

The End of Democracy As We Know It? - Part 1

I’ve spent some time reading and thinking about the recent Supreme Court Decision involving Citizens United. I’m not one to typically give in to rash statements, but this does seem to put in place the mechanism for the almost complete control of our government by wealthy corporations. We already have a situation where Rupert Murdoch and his FOX network effectively set much of the strategy for the Republican Party. Alumni from Goldman Sachs have a dominating influence on Obama’s financial policy. And both parties are heavily influenced by corporate donations and lobbyist. This ruling enables the takeover to be complete.

The first shoe to drop was the end of the Fairness Doctrine. This Supreme Court decision was the other shoe. I don’t claim that corporations will completely decide who will win elections. Rather, in practice they will have more like a veto power over candidates they don’t like thanks to the ability to unleash tremendous negative advertising campaigns, and a similar veto power over legislation they don’t like. Special interest will now be in a position to effectively prevent any change that will negatively impact them, regardless of the long term benefits to society as a whole. The long term impacts of this are quite substantial as we enter a period of rapid changes in the global society.

If that isn’t troubling enough, consider this: The ruling apparently applies to foreign based corporations too. There’s some uncertainty over this, but my understanding is that foreign corporations can now spend unlimited amounts of money to influence American elections just like US based corporations.

What can be done to fix this situation? There is a lot of focus on creating a new constitutional amendment that will explicitly state that corporations are not people and do not share in the same rights as people. I fear this is a misguided effort to focus on. First, it will take many years and has only a small chance of actually passing in the end. More importantly though, I don’t think it will actually cause the changes people are hoping for. It is my understanding that the Supreme Court decision is not based on the view that corporations are people. Instead, it is based on the argument that people have the right to organize in groups and speak out on political issues, whether those groups are non-profit organizations, labor unions, or corporations.

The real problem here, and the one we need to address to fix things, is that concentrations of money can have a significant influence on our government process. The idea that very wealthy individuals can exercise excessive influence on our government is also a problem that tends to get overlooked. I’ll give some thoughts on possible ways to address this in my next post.

A Green 2010 Conference and the Status of the Green Economy

I recently attended the “Green 2010” conference at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook NY. It was the latest in a series of regular conferences dealing with the status of the “Green Economy” in upstate New York. The conference as a whole shed some interesting light on the current status of green jobs, education, and attitudes that probably apply across much of the nation.

The first observation was that the conference was well attended – a sellout crowd of about 150 people by my estimate. The crowd consisted of a wide spectrum of ages, from high school students to senior citizens. Certainly there was a strong interest in the green economy, which should not come as a surprise given the current state of the rest of the economy in upstate NY. There were several non-profit organizations trying their best to bring green jobs, and solar technology in particular, into the area. Given that there are many groups trying to do the same thing all across the country, you have to wonder how much any given area can rely on this as a big driver of future growth in their local economy. While the dream of becoming a national center for green technology is not realistic in most cases, it can be argued that the transformation to a non-carbon economy will have such a pervasive impact on society in the next few decades that there will be plenty of work to go around. The goal is to not be left out entirely.

There was a good deal of progress in education and training for green technology jobs in the community colleges and local trade school institutions. Unfortunately, even the people running these programs had to admit that at this time there were very few jobs available for the graduates of such programs. The region already has more people trained to install solar panels than the job market can support.

Clearly the most discouraging comments had to do with environmental education in general. Everyone was used to hearing that students in America were falling well behind other advanced countries in terms of math and science education. I terms of knowledge about the environment though, we are falling behind many thirds world countries too. I’m talking about very basic knowledge here – such as explaining the steps necessary for water in the ocean to end up falling as rain on the land. The majority of American grade school students could not answer this properly. Worse yet, the racial gap within American society on this topic seemed to be even bigger than with other subjects. White and Asian groups did comparatively well, but black and Hispanic groups really struggled. This racial difference even showed up in graduate studies. Based on the lack of minorities getting PhDs in environmental studies, this seemed to be one of the most segregated of all major subjects in our universities. Indeed, I took a quick informal look around at the conference attendees and found two African Americans, no Hispanics, and no Asians. The excellent work of Van Jones notwithstanding, environmental issues often seem to remain a narrow and almost cliquish concern of the white middle and upper classes. There is much work to been done.

Effects of Technology on the Events in Iran

A very interesting question that many people are watching closely "How will the internet and modern technology change the course of what happens in Iran?" More and more videos of the street marches and the violence are appearing on YouTube. One of the most famous has become the video of a young girl named "Neda" dying on the street after being shot by a sniper. This generates anger in the population, not fear. Modern communication technology is so far being used more successfully to organize than to control.

As Radley Balko writes on his blog:

Government has been murdering its own citizens for as long as we’ve had government, particularly when the people begin to pose a threat to those in power. The difference is that now, the entire world is watching. Iran’s brutality is on display for everyone to see, archived for history, in a way that we didn’t have even in Tiananmen, and haven’t had for most of human history. That, at least, is progress.

Has the methodology of political movements around the world undergone a major change?

Making Higher Education Sustainable

Among the many things I expect to see undergo a significant change in the next decade or so is higher education. Our universities are actually based on a model that was developed in the middle ages. At that time, any subject being studied would undergo little change during your lifetime. Considering your education "complete" after a few years of intense study was realistic in the middle ages, but it's far from realistic now.

A university education was once considered common only for people from very well off families. Now it's a necessity to achieve even a middle class lifestyle. Yet the costs are often still structured to be unaffordable to all but those students from wealthy families. And the costs continue to rise at an alarming rate.

Something has to change - the current situation is unsustainable. Education must be restructured to be available throughout an adult's life at affordable rates. Like it or not, technology will need to have an impact on the way classes are taught in order to achieve this.

I'm glad to report that this change is actually starting to happen. The Christian Science Monitor has a wonderful article on the movement to OpenCourseWare, universities putting their course content online for free. The movement started in 2003 when MIT put 500 courses online. Now they have over 1800 online courses, all available for free (You still need to pay ~$45,000 a year to get an official MIT degree though). More than 200 colleges and universities have followed suite and offer course contents online. These are early developments that will likely radically change higher education by the time this finishes playing out.

Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web

I just watched a TED Talk by Tim Burners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. His main point was that the current Web was mainly a collection of linked documents, and what we need to do next is transform it into a collection of linked data. Once a major portion of our data becomes freely available on the web, it will start generating major social benefits.

Tim mentions two items that resonated with me. First, ALL government data should be freely available on the Web. After all, we paid for it, and we should rightly claim free access to it. (There may be some exceptions, such as personal data of government employees, but this is a relatively small portion of the government data). It seems to me that in a truly free open society, the "Freedom of Information" act should become almost obsolete since everything that it would have been used for in the past is now readily available. That would be a wonderful principle for the Obama administration to follow.

The second issue is medical data. Three years ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. We caught it early and now I'm cured, but it is a much more common problem than many people realize. One thing that really surprised me is that I was not asked to fill out any survey on my lifestyle or exposure to various chemicals. It would seem to me that such detailed background data should be collected about everyone who has a major disease and made available to researchers looking for common links. This is just one example of data that should be on the web. In this case it has potential for major health benefits if links can be established to various things that increase the risk of a disease.

There are two interesting items that Tim Berners-Lee did not mention about the future of the web. First, it is establishing new business models. Old ones, such as newspapers and the music recording industry are having to make substantial changes to survive. Significant new developments, specifically the open source software movement and Wikipedia could not have been predicted by any business model analysis before they happened. Yet they are becoming increasingly important.

The second unforeseen development is the use of the web for organizing mass social movements. Moveon.org and various other political movements are examples of this. Allowing groups of people to come together and organize in ways that were previously impractical may be one of the most profound impacts of the web in the long run.

The Key Assets of Our Society

Dmitry Orlov wrote an interesting comparison of how much better the former USSR was prepared for a financial collapse than the current USA is. In short, much of the USSR was already functioning closer to a subsistence economy, with people making due with what could be supplied locally instead of relying almost completely on a complex interconnected national economy. Additionally, the USSR had large oil supplies that could be exported to relatively rich and financially stable neighboring countries in order to help finance its recovery recovery. As the USA undergoes a financial crisis, it doesn't have that luxury of unaffected rich stable neighboring economies to help pull it out.

While this report paints a rather pessimistic picture, I think the author misses some fundamental differences between the former USSR and the current USA. First and foremost, we have a collection of what is probably the largest, most creative, best educated, and most motivated group of civic and entrepreneurial leaders that ever existed. We have a culture that enables and even encourages a massive grass roots campaign to rebuild a new and revitalized economy. We have communications systems that enables rapid organizing and sharing of information on a level that is order of magnitudes greater than anything we had in the past . Nothing like this ever existed in the former USSR, or it could be argued anywhere else at any other time in history. Finally, though our leadership in Washington cannot act as a messiah to deliver us from all our problems, we are fortunate at this critical time to have some of the best new leadership for responding to these new problems that we've had in many decades.

Van Jones, a Yale educated lawyer and social activists, has been leading a grass roots drive to spur an economic rebuilding based on environmentally sustainable green jobs for many years now. When he was first asked if there would be a role for him in the Obama administration, he just laughed at the absurdity of the thought of himself being in a formal government position. Earlier this month he was officially appointed as a Special Advisor at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. This is an example of why there is some long term hope for building a new revitalized economy despite the prevailing short term pessimism.

The Great Disruption is Here

In what could be a landmark description of what is happening, Thomas Friedman wrote a fascinating column on March 7th in which he speculates on the question:

What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

While this is certainly not a new theme, to see it so well expressed in a national newspaper op-ed represents a major step forward in our culture's attitude about the current situation in our society. It may be a key part of a growing rallying cry around the need for dramatic social change. He goes on to quote a number of experts, including Paul Gilding, an Australian environmental business expert, who coined a term for this period as “The Great Disruption.”

Thomas Friedman finishes by saying that both he and Paul Gilding are somewhat optimistic about our future given the changes that are starting to happen. As Gilding says, “When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history.” I'll add that in terms of a great transformation starting in 2008, let's not forget the single biggest transformative event of all that year, the November elections.

Pew Research on Evolution and Religion

The Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life recently published an interesting article on the public attitudes towards evolution among various religious groups. Interestingly, the religion with the greatest acceptance of evolution was Buddhism at 81%. Unitarian Universalism was not listed in the groups of religions, but I suspect they may be even higher because of the emphasis they put on science and reason. The lowest group listed? Jehovah's Witnesses at 8%. The article also listed a number of other useful links to related resources.

People often ask "Is evolution a theory or a fact?" It's confusing because it's actually both. It is considered to be an observed fact from the fossil evidence that life started out as a comparatively small number of simpler forms, and over time gradually evolved into a larger number of forms including some of which are very complex. There have now been a number of cases where the evolution of new species in nature have actually been observed over the course of many decades.

However, the explanation of how this happens, natural selection operating on random genetic changes, is the theory part of evolution. This theory is very well supported by the evidence and is about as well confirmed as the theory of gravity. Yet it continues to generate a great deal of conflict in the public sector because of it's theological implications. Unfortunately, I don't see this conflict being reduced anytime in the near future. According to the Pew research, only 48% of the US population accepts evolution as the most likely explanation of the origins of life on earth. Other polls suggest that this number has actually been declining over the last two decades or so. This is an indication of how much trouble people will have adjusting to the rapidly changing understanding of the world brought on by the exponential growth in scientific knowledge and technology.

Are we really any poorer now? - part 2

In my previous append, I talked about how relationships and trust are an important part of the economy. These are things of value - economic assets just as real as factories and tools. Many of these relationships are formalized in our financial institutions, and their breakdown is directly related to the breakdown of these relationships in our economy.

Another vitally important asset in society is the attitude of people. Do people have confidence in their ability, and confidence that putting in some hard work will pay off? Or is a sense of despair and hopelessness prevalent? The general public attitude can have a tremendous impact on economic well being and growth. But attitude is something that must be built up over time. When it is damaged, as it seems to be now, it takes time to mend.

I don't want to leave this topic with the implication that our society and economy are falling apart. That would be falling into the trap of viewing all value in monetary terms. In reality many of the other components of our society are still doing quite well. I'm not aware of any data showing a significant decline in relationships between families and friends, or in the strength of churches or other civic organizations. Non-profit donations are down, and that will hurt many of them, but for the most part our non-profit infrastructure continues to do good work. Our health care and education sectors are holding together and most people still have access to them. Looking around where I live, I still have the impression that our communities are still strong and providing many of the non-monetary benefits that they were doing last time this year. If anything, for many people the hope and trust in government has increased considerably since last year. Many things of value in our society have been little impacted by the current economic slowdown.

Growing Conflict Between Science and Fundamentalist Religion

There may be little or no conflict between science and some religions. I'm a member of a local Unitarian Universalists congregation and I personally don't see any conflict between the teaching of that religion and science. However, there are some real and undeniable conflicts between science and some of the more fundamentalist religions. The conflict over accepting the facts of evolution is one of the more well known examples. But this is just a warm-up to the new conflicts starting to surface regarding the mind and morals.

Before Darwin, the existence of complex living things was one of the best arguments for the existence of a supernatural creator that directly intervened in the world. Once evolution was understood, we now know that complex life can be explained without the need of such a supernatural creator. This argument has been replaced by the existence of the conscious intelligent human mind in general, and our moral system in particular, as the remaining best argument for the existence of a supernatural creator. As we understand more and more about the physical basis for how the mind operates, this has generated a growing backlash by religious fundamentalists who assert that the mind is some sort supernatural thing separate from the physical brain. A good summary of this movement was recently provided in an article in New Scientist Magazine titled Creationists declare war over the brain

Going beyond the basis for consciousness, there is a large amount of progress being made in the last few decades understanding how human morals can naturally arise and how many of our moral "feelings" actually have their basis in our physical brains and were produced by evolutionary processes. Progressive religions will be able to deal with this just as they came to terms with evolution. But it is even more damaging to the claims of fundamentalist religions than evolution itself, and they would probably be fighting against this even stronger than evolution if they fully understood the scientific progress being made in this area. I expect that it will be only a mater of time before the science vs. fundamentalist religion conflicts shifts to focus on the natural basis of consciousness and morals.

Preaching Politics form Church Pulpits

I’ll argue that one of the greatest innovations in government that made America so successful was the notion of separation of church and state. In our current version of that, religious organizations can get involved in promoting causes, but should stay out of party politics and elections. This may be challenged soon.

The socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to endorse political candidates from their pulpits Sept. 28, in defiance of IRS rules. Click here for an article on this.

Personally I think partisan political campaigning from the pulpit would be an absolute disaster for both religions and our political process. Democracy is supposed to be about building consensus through debate, discussions, and compromise. Admittedly it doesn't always work quite that way, and we suffer whenever such failures occur. But if religious leaders start routinely preaching that it is immoral and a sin to vote for a specific candidate, and that it is your moral duty to support some other one, than rational debate, discussion, and compromise get thrown out the window. Who would want to support listening to and compromising with "evil"? A more preferred view would be to do everything possible to defeat "evil", with the ends justifying the means in such an important struggle. Such extreme demonization of people in the political process is where I think this will quickly lead.

I also think that political parties and lobbying groups would start putting considerably more pressure on religious organizations to support them, with funds flowing to those who are willing to adjust their stances to match those of the political parties. Congregations would become scenes of bitter disputes and end up highly polarized, and in the end many would become branches of other political organizations. Are you worried about corporations controlling the government? Then you should be really scared about giving them the motivation to start controlling religions too. It's not a good circumstance for promoting the spiritual development of the membership of religious congregations.

Someone once said that when it comes to politics, religions work best when they are "outside forces" acting as checks and balances and providing independent moral direction to the political process. I completely agree. I think the historical record supports this too.

Keep in mind that religious leaders are free under law to say anything they want, including from the pulpit. It's just that if they want to keep the tax breaks of a non-profit non-political group they need to follow the tax rules.

I am getting concerned that there could be a major movement to change this though, especially after watching how religious groups influenced the selection of Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential candidates recently. I would hope that there would be a strong backlash against this from many religious and secular organizations.