Sky Blue Blog

I was skimming and paging through an old book of 25 years ago, Metamagical Themas, by Douglas Hofstadter. (Subtitle: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern.)

Hofstadter spends a sizable portion of his book discussing something called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and applying it to larger questions facing humankind. He calls himself a “homocentric,” which doesn’t have anything at all to do with sexual orientation. It means he hopes that humans get to play the long game in All Creation As We Know It, and not extinguish themselves first, evolutionarily speaking.

What the prisoner’s dilemma boils down to is a decision to “cooperate” or “defect.” It was discovered at the dawn of the Cold War Era by some guys at the Rand Corporation, wouldn’t you know. Suppose you and an accomplice commit a crime, for example, and you are being held in different cells. The prisoner’s dilemma is an iterative process where either of you can plead innocent or guilty to the authorities, in exchange for something, like squealing for reduction of punishment, or release for selling out and implicating others. It’s a payoff matrix in exchange for different choices, double-crossing or collusion. I’m sure that the police do this stuff all the time, for real.

Hofstadter and his friends applied the idea, in their heads, to larger-scale political economies, and come to the conclusion, during the Reagan Era, that the so-called “technological imperative” was driving the species to extinction. “Ever more horrendous weapons must be produced, simply because it is possible to produce them,” a friend writes Hofstadter. “Eventually they must be used, to justify the insane waste.”

In the global arms race, they decide, this iterative cycle self-selects for global political players who are Defectors rather than Cooperators, because Cooperators would be impeached, overthrown or assassinated. Dr. Strangelove rules.

I was contemplating this idea yesterday when I read about Russ Feingold’s bill that would require our own Department of Defense (DOD) to look again at weapons development programs at a high risk of failing. “At its peak, DOD had run up $296 billion on cost overruns on weapons procurement.” Turns out these futuristic systems were extremely half-baked in the planning, and are way over budget at a time when the economy is extremely fragile. Time to pull the plug. In this case, it appears to be a cycle of military industrial complex cooperators, wanting to stay in the game for the money flow, disguised as a commitment to pie-in-the-sky innovation. The emperor is always looking for new clothes, and there are any number of purveyors of invisible thread, of course. I suspect there’s been a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma playing out among billionaires, too. A Ponzi scheme is an iterative cycle that self-selects for Cooperators. Defectors know when to defect.

Hofstadter, in a chapter called “Sanity & Survival,” discusses magnetic domains - schools of fish that move in uncanny unison when a threat is sensed by one of them.

As Hofstadter says about magnetic domains, all at once a situation becomes polarized, and it causes a swing from up to down, on to off. So there’s a sudden bust after the boom. (Today they call this the Tipping Point, but it’s not a new idea.)

Such a thing, says the book, “can happen only if the country is polarized. Hmmmm.

Kudos to Philip Dray’s excellent Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen. (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). I wish I had known about it earlier. It came out a year and a half ago and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist book.

Green, green, it’s green they say.

Did I read correctly in Vanity Fair that Erik Prince has left Blackwater/Xe and now he wants to become a high school history teacher?

Would you want your high schooler learning civics from someone who believes literally in his destiny as a Christian Crusader and whose patriotic idea of capitalism includes operating an extralegal assassination service for the U.S. government off the books, if the press is to be believed.

I was reading the coverage from CNN and The Nation on how former employees accused Blackwater, under Prince, of using excessive force and engaging in gun-running. It wasn’t till I opened up the John Does’ testimony that I realized there were worse charges. One of them says Prince turned a profit by bringing weapons into Iraq on his private fleet of planes; and that executives for the firm intentionally deceived federal agencies, destroyed incriminating evidence of wrongdoing and perhaps even murdered people to shut them up. Prince, say the charges, knowingly employed men who had been involved in sex trafficking in Kosovo, and the Blackwater “Man Camp” allegedly employed child prostitutes to service guards.

You wouldn’t know it to look at the fresh, clean-cut Prince in the magazine.

He always reminds me of Oliver North. Not just the haircut, which as kids we called a “pineapple,” buzzed on the sides with a tuft on top hanging toward the forehead. He has the same look, open, earnest. I think he may have the same kind of secrets to impart.

The subject of “graymail” has come up in Scahill’s article in The Nation. Is Erik Prince saying just enough of what he knows - he is the proverbial man who knew too much - in Vanity Fair to convince the government not to prosecute?

Can they prosecute him, when he doesn’t work for Blackwater anymore, and the company has been re-invented as Xe?

It reminds me of the rebranding of Arthur Andersen after the scandal involving fradulent accounting practices for clients including Enron, Halliburton, Global Crossing, WorldCom. Seems so long ago and dwarfed by what has followed. I think it was a harbinger. Arthur Andersen ceased existence, morphed into “Accenture,” which has its own troubles these days with Tiger Woods.

The things Prince is talking about, and others are accusing Blackwater of, it seems to me, would create problems for the government because our nation’s intelligence laws clearly prohibit nasty things like human experimentation, covert action to influence U.S. political processes, public opinion, or media. It says right there in section 2.11 in “Prohibition on Assassination” that “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in or conspire to engage in assassination.” Full stop.

Prince’s web of companies, such as Blackwater, Greystone, and now Xe, have received over a billion dollars in working as a shadow/private government contractor, according to CNN. He has a security clearance.

So I’ve also been skimming through the the Bush-Era Executive orders amending Executive Order 12333, and there are some interesting remarks about the private sector and homeland security, such as permission to give clearances for access to classified information to those in the private sector with whom the employees of the Department of Homeland Security may seek to interact, ensuring all clearance and access determinations for those in the private sector with whom they interact, as well.

I wonder: Why is a company like Blackwater (and others) made up of former special forces types and run by a despotic rich man different from this group I read about today, Los Zetas, a group of former soldiers hired by Mexico’s most hideous gang boss to serve as bodyguards and hit men?

Outside regular legal channels, hired to take people out, trained for the military but used in ways not regulated by the nation’s usual mechanisms of justice or disclosure. In the case of the Mexican drug lords, Los Zetas are fighting over drug-smuggling routes into the U.S. rather than gun-smuggling overseas, but I see similarities.

How can the government prosecute people hired by the government without becoming involved in the fallout? Just because there’s a new Administration wouldn’t take away the national stain.

I just realized that a bunch of my old web site home pages are still on the server.

Reminds me why people write blogs.

The Jewel of Liberty

Conyers Report

Stung by a Dead Bee

Sequence of Events

All in the Family

There’s one more somewhere, I’ll have to look for it.

Trying to Revisit the Mission Statement, see left hand link. It’s a beautiful fall day out my window.

While driving through Texas on a recent research trip, I was trying to find a radio station with weather alerts, due to the incredibly sudden build-up out in West Texas of huge cloud formations. These clouds massed out of nowhere into astounding mushroom-shaped anvils, with a strong resemblance to thermo-nuclear explosions.

Scanning the FM dial, I noticed there didn’t seem to be a public-radio station around.  At least, I couldn’t find one. Funny, I thought, for a region with a campus as large as Texas Tech’s in Lubbock. Public radio seems to include frequent weather bulletins in the mix around the country, but no, nothing on the airwaves like that, more a smattering of religious, norteño music and farm-commodity stations. I found one non-religious talk station, and thought I’d hang there for the weather. Never came on.

I don’t usually listen to talk radio, so perhaps I’m naive about what it’s like, but I spent the better part of a half-hour on the road, watching the clouds gather menacingly while listening to some angry nut whale on the Obama administration for their temerity in suggesting a better health care system in the United States.

Of course, I understand people are showing up armed for the “discussions” going on out there. Geez.

However, just the morning before, I’d seen a telling graph in the newspaper ranking the U.S., France, Singapore, and the U.K. Our health care system had the biggest “circle” for cost - i.e., it was the most expensive - and had the worst performance on most other measures, including infant mortality. A sorry record to be sure. Something clearly needs to be done.

This talk jock had got onto a postal analogy, based on something Obama must have said - I missed the first part, but he had himself pretty wound up.  He simply could not believe anyone would bring up the U.S. Postal Service, for heaven’s sake, as an example of anything except government inefficiency, cost overruns and waste.

I happened to go to my local Post Office yesterday, to mail a book-on-tape (It arrived the next day) and so I asked the gentleman behind the counter, What is this all about?

Actually, what I asked him was a more specific question. I said: “Do UPS or Fedex have any services you know of that cost less than 50 cents?” He said no, he didn’t think so. I mentioned the radio host’s tirade. He informed me that the global package delivery companies don’t actually work the way the post office does.

“We have to go to every address,” he said. “If we only went to the addresses we wanted to, we’d be profitable.”  I also didn’t know that UPS and Fedex actually use the U.S. Postal Service to move some of their freight when it’s convenient for them, or so he told me.

It made me think about health care. I have been reading that the Mayo Clinic here in Minnesota is an exemplary case in point. Don’t get me wrong, I like and admire the Mayo, I’ve given them money. However, as a private non-profit in three locations - Rochester, Minn.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Scottsdale/Phoenix, Ariz – I’m suspicious when I hear that they can deliver better health care for less per person. I wonder, is that figure corrected for age distribution, race, past medical history, English-speaking? Isn’t there a difference in any service-based sector when you’re only in a few small- to mid-size cities away from the American northeast industrial corridor?

I mean, I’ve been to Rochester, and to some of the charming communities nearby, including the Amish farming area, and I can’t see comparing it in medical-needs terms to something like a downtown public-emergency medical research and training hospital in Queens.

Mayo doesn’t “go to every address,” right?  They treat rock stars and Saudi sheiks. They’re more Cedars-Sinai than UCLA Medical Center, which was the unfortunate comparison in the articles.

More about Mayo: I’m intrigued by the fact that George Bush’s former director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, has quietly landed there, joining the Mayo Board of Trustees. (When I was in Texas, I learned that Alberto Gonzales had landed there, in Lubbock, Texas, a far cry from Washington.)

Anyway, Elias Zerhouni is an Algerian immigrant who seems like a kind of businessman’s medical researcher.  A millionaire from inventing several radiological devices, he filled the vacant NIH post during a controversial period, because of the president’s dislike for such things as open stem cell research and research on sexual behaviors. Zerhouni was a man willing to tow an unpopular line - pardon the pun. stem. cell. line. Never mind!

“NIH provides an enormous opportunity for sustaining economic activity,” is a Zerhouni quote from a newspaper profile. A crackpot web site says he was a “notorious Pentagon yes-man on anthrax bio-defenses.”

My favorite quote today comes from a blogger I ran across recently who wrote, “We have met the enemy, and he is Us (and Them, too)”:

This guy, a self-proclaimed former Goldwater Republican from “when conservatism meant trusting in the creativity and initiative of individual human beings free to choose and act on their own,” is a researcher himself who charges that biomedical research has suffered after “a takeover of the Republican Party by a coalition of fundamentalist yahoos and multinational corporate profiteers.”

I love this quote: “The Republicans’ policies impact the public health in two ways: they have reduced available funds for research at a time when research dollars have the greatest potential ROI in history, and they have politicized science at many levels, subordinating objectivity to administration policy.”

Could it be that’s what all the concerted yelling at town halls is really about? Money and politics, as usual.

The League of Women Voters just freaked me out by reporting on the millions in lobbying fees paid by the pharmaceutical industry. I don’t know if you happened to read Bob Herbert’s column, This is Reform? on the sweetheart deal the Obama Administration has likely made with Big Pharma. Another recent NY Times piece showed “court documents provide a paper trail showing that Wyeth contracted with a medical communications company to outline articles, draft them and then solicit top physicians to sign their names, even though many of the doctors contributed little or no writing.”

To his credit, Zerhouni is against that kind of thing.

It is my belief that our personal knowledge of the technological changes taking place in medicine has lagged behind the discoveries, so we need good, objective coverage by people who understand biomedical research and how to challenge statistics. If the average Joe and Jane knew the truth of the matter, I suspect, what’s going on right now, they would be thrilled, appalled, excited, hopeful, and - as the movies said, “be very, very afraid.”

Amazing things are possible, on the horizon, but so are really awful ripoffs. We’ve had a decade of people focused on ROI - return on investment - in research. People have arrived in positions of authority in healthcare administration who think that’s what health care is all about. I for one find that worrying.

One of the rich, harebrained stunts of the G.W.Bush-Era Homeland Security domestic apparatus was the recruitment and training of transportation professionals to be on the lookout for terrorists. Recruited under the aegis of the American Trucking Association’s “Highway Watch”® program were commercial truck and bus drivers, highway maintenance crews and toll collectors, all deputized to call in and report anything they found suspicious out there on the road.

While the program may have had decent objectives - from providing alerts about wrecks and road hazards to reducing the risk of vehicles being used as weapons - even the Department of Homeland Security has admitted in an official report that things went awry with the program, which Time Magazine skewered quite delightfully in the story “Eyes and Ears of the Nation” (Sunday, June 27, 2004).

The truckers interviewed for the Time story, haulers of hazardous material across the forty-eight contiguous states, explained in the story, for example, how easy it was to spot “Islamics” on the road: One driver said “You can tell where they’re from. You can hear their accents. They’re not real clean people.” Others said things like, Look for their turbans.

“In the U.S., it’s almost always Sikhs who wear turbans, not Muslims. Last year a Sikh truck driver who was wearing a turban was shot twice while standing near his tractor-trailer in Phoenix, Ariz. He survived the attack, which police are investigating as a hate crime.”

Unfortunately, the targeted media criticism in 2004 had little effect. Within months, the DHS announced an additional $21 million to expand the program, designed to “link these well trained transportation professionals with first responders, law enforcement and the intelligence community.”

Part of that money was spent the following year to partner with the three largest school bus trade associations to create School Bus Watch, an anti-terrorism training program for school bus drivers. Give me a break!

Locally, Highway Watch types, primed to forestall anarchist violence, created a climate of fear that apparently helped demonize reporters and protesters at the Republican National Convention in the Twin Cities.

In all, DHS admits it spent $63 million on Highway Watch over the years without evaluating the program’s effectiveness or efficiency. In fact, DHS did not adequately coordinate oversight, which led to “poor prioritization of resources” by its own admission. Part of the problem was diffuse localization: It seems that contracts might have been awarded preferentially to states or districts of political types who sponsored the Trucking Industry Security Grant Program.

Participation certainly varied from state to state. Of the 800,000 total members, more than 80 percent were recruited through state trucking associations. In Georgia, for instance, from 2006 to early 2008 state law required all holders of a commercial driver’s license to enroll and receive training, which meant that Georgia Highway Watch members came to represent a hugely disproportionate part of the national enrollment. While the number of incidents reported by Georgia members was the highest in the nation, the percentage of drivers who called in incidents was among the lowest. That would give a comparative handful of Georgia truck drivers an inordinate amount of influence in deciding what might be a reportable national security incident, wouldn’t it? It might also make it hard to highlight any abuses of the program on the state or local level. (I don’t know, but is it coincidence that Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue was in 2007 appointed to our Homeland Security Advisory Council?)

An interesting story on the political dimension appeared on politico.com: See “Truckers’ anti-terror program ‘wasteful’ ” by Samuel Loewenberg (January 23, 2008). When Congress expanded Highway Watch’s mission and operations in 2004, it included a $2.3 million terrorism research center at Mississippi State University – a project backed by Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), a top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee. Highway Watch may have also contracted a small-town Kentucky call center - employing four fulltime and four part-time dedicated staff - at the urging of Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky).

Is this evidence of terror-favoritism or homeland earmarks? Hard to say from the DHS report, which cloaks its criticism in gauzy gov-speak, “DHS did not hold ATA to the original terms of the agreement largely because programmatic responsibility shifted between its components several times during the initial years of the program. Inconsistent responsibility for programmatic and fiduciary oversight hampered DHS’ ability to identify and address weaknesses in the program. In certain instances, DHS staff identified flaws in the program but under the terms of the cooperative agreement lacked authority to address them. Some DHS staff believed their limited authority led to unnecessary costs.”

Zz-z-zzzz. Critics say the money may have, in a no-bid contract kind of way, shifted from terrorism and security issues to promotion of the American Trucking Association. I seem to recall that Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff was involved with that group? Cheney has been developing a reputation for privatizing military-industrial expense in order to hide wasteful and inefficient spending from the eyes of regulators. Why not do the same with local policing in the name of national security?

Breaker, Breaker, Keeps on Truckin’

The future will hold change, but perhaps not an end to surveillance by Smokey and the Bandit. The American Trucking Associations’ Highway Watch program call center has shut down, but the Department of Homeland Security awarded a $15.5 million trucking security grant to a private Alexandria, Virginia, firm that sounds extremely high tech.

We may be moving toward an automated solution, a global Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) known as Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII). The basic premise here is that commercial vehicles and roadways will be more efficient and safer if they can all talk to each other via boxes in trucks that use a broadband wireless standard known as DSRC, or dedicated short-range communications.

A special variant of the WiFi 802.11 wireless standards, DSRC operates on a 5.850 to 5.925 GHz frequency, set aside by the FCC specifically for wireless communications between vehicles, or between vehicles and highway infrastructure.

According to Richard McDonough of the New York Dept. of Transportation, VII is just a pipeline, and the public and private sectors can decide what content passes through it (sure, if we know about it), including electronic screening, WIM (weigh-in-motion) information, emergency vehicle warnings (that is, traffic light changes for cops and other public servants), congestion data, border inspections, and … what else?

One citizen wants to know what happened with Highway Watch, state-by-state, in detail, and the privacy implications of what’s coming next.

I have seen so many changes, but the one I find most interesting lately is the way in which the tailored, social intelligence of the web has put us into mental boxes, cubicles of the mind.

These cubicles may not feel confining to us. We can decorate them with pictures of our family, our opinions and favorite charities, our favorite books - even those we’d like to read that we haven’t read yet - all evidence of our ostensibly separate personalities. They are cubicles all the same, and managers of this larger world of data can look down and in on us all the time. Let’s hope they’re friendly.

For example:

Working in the web world at the university, I saw a change, when many disparate web sites, not well maintained or organized, began to be replaced by a content management system much more like that in a multinational competitive business. It’s happening everywhere, so no big deal, but it’s a change we should be aware of.

I just ran across a web site about Oracle’s “Business Intelligence Suite” - note that middle word.

What it offers is a world of wonder in which “all levels of the organization can see information optimized for their role.” It’s unified and hot-pluggable. Mmm-mmm-MMM. Warm and fuzzy in its database relationships, it integrates with any data source, combining one-stop-shopping metadata across the enterprise and analytical applications for the lowest TCO.

Is that “total cost of operation”?

Say, what is “real-time predictive intelligence”?

How does that translate for the worker who only sees what management wants him or her to see, and whose computer keystrokes may be tracked to make sure that he or she is in compliance with human resource goals. You may wonder. Well, HR Analytics in the BI Suite offers four dashboards to reduce workforce costs, increase employee productivity, manage employee compensation, improve retention, and reduce “voluntary turnover.”

If it’s voluntary, why would you want to reduce it? (I don’t know, but I think that “voluntary turnover” means, in peoplespeak, “I don’t like it here, so I’m going to leave.”)

Other mysteries of wording concern the “drivers” of this uncanny phenomenon: “Understand drivers of employee turnover, proactively identify top performers who are likely being recruited by competitors, and reduce recruiting and involuntary termination costs.” How does that work exactly? How do you “proactively identify top performers who are likely being recruited by competitors” with your computer system? I’m interested. How does one find out?

Of course, this is on the micro level, but the macro level is equally inviting yet opaque.

Check out Oracle’s main website - and I’m just choosing Oracle because of their global reach - but you’ll find their clickable world map, which seems like it must be the opposite of a cubicle mentality. All these happy-sounding, integrated solutions!

The Oracle Embedded Technology Knowledge Zone, for example, sounds so organic and inclusive the way they describe it. “Welcome to the Oracle Embedded Technology Knowledge Zone! Use this zone to Connect with your peers, Participate in a variety of social networks, and Collaborate on business opportunities, all within the Oracle ecosystem.” Ecosystem is an interesting word, I think global capital markets do work that way.

I tend to notice verbs that have been capitalized for no reason: Connect. Participate. Collaborate. As my husband says, they pay people lots of money to come up with this kind of muscular yet reassuring rhetoric. Engage with Oracle. Build complete turnkey solutions. Enable unattended operation with self-management and automation. Say what?

I checked out the Go-to-Market Initiative - again the organic verbiage - and I clicked on Education, because I’m interested in that, and of course it asked me to enter my single sign-on user name and password. Oh, well, I guess that’s not in my “role.”

Anyway, here are some of the global embedded solution groups using Oracle products - just so you know, they tend to use the word “embed” a lot, just like the military:

• Aerospace and Defense
• Automotive
1. OEM
2. Supplier
• Chemicals
• Communications
• Consumer Goods
• Education and Research
1. Higher Education and Research
2. Primary and Secondary Education (K-12)
• Engineering and Construction
• Financial Services
1. Banking
2. Capital Markets
• Health Sciences
1. Life Sciences
2. Healthcare
• High Technology
1. Distribution
2. OEM: Complex Equipment
3. OEM: Consumer Electronics
4. Outsourced Manufacturing Services
5. Semiconductor
6. Software
• Industrial Manufacturing
1. Durable Goods
2. Heavy Equipment and Machinery Manufacturing
3. Industrial Products
• Insurance
• Media and Entertainment
• Natural Resources
1. Raw Materials Producers
2. Mining
3. Mill Products
• Oil and Gas
1. Upstream
2. Downstream
3. Clean Energy
• Professional Services
1. Business Services
2. Consulting Services
3. Legal Services
4. Staffing
• Public Sector
1. National and Local Government
2. Defense
3. Justice and Public Safety
• Retail
• Travel and Transportation
1. Airlines
2. Airports
3. Logistics Service Providers
• Utilities
1. Electricity
2. Natural Gas
3. Water
4. Waste Management

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that’s just about everything? If it’s working right, it may be all to the good, creating new efficiencies, but then why are we having a global financial crisis?

I’m probably old-fashioned, but it sounds a bit like The Eggplant That Ate Chicago to me?

One thing I noticed in Seattle, while I was there for the Organization of American Historians gathering and a day at the Green Festival, is that some of the city’s street newspaper boxes were dark and empty.

I knew why, of course.

Last month, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last paper issue, shifting entirely to the web. Of course this meant jobs for only twenty people rather than the 165 the paper used to employ, and a web site offering primarily commentary, advice and links to other news sites, rather than much original reporting.

But to see it!

The empty boxes on the streets reminded me of the foreclosure crisis, the empty houses selling at auction, while homelessness is on the rise. (I not only saw plenty of homeless there, but I also heard, in Seattle, about the tent cities rising in the urban margins, and thought about living in a tent in a place where it can rain for four months straight.)

To me, the reasons are much the same: speculation, shareholder profiteering.

So, the P.I. is gone. I myself worked for another Hearst paper in Los Angeles years ago - a fantastic, formative experience, great writers and editors. That paper went out of business decades ago, giving The Los Angeles Times more or less monopoly status. Of course, in recent years, the LA Times has had its own layoffs and drama.

No newspaper today is immune. The writing’s been on the wall forever. What’s to be done?

The Senate Commerce Committee, the Justice Department, and the FCC are all currently looking at the situation. Their interest is new, but the crisis of the Fourth Estate isn’t. The Rocky Mountain News closed two months ago, the list goes on and on and on.

The state of newspaper journalism in this country is so dismal some are considering becoming non-profit organizations. I signed up for the Media Reform Daily, to keep up with the news on the print and web media front, but lately the news is pretty grim. The American press needs some friends who understand the power of a free media in a democracy to create and maintain an informed citizenry.