Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: October 2017 Page 3 of 4

The Growing Puerto Rico Disaster

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On October 11, 2017

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The number of people without power on the Island is increasing, not decreasing, up 6% from yesterday, to 90%. A third of the island doesn’t have running water. Half the people don’t have cell phone coverage.

Aid has been slow and largely ineffective. There is reason to be worried about disease outbreaks, and medical care is severely handicapped.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rico has a massive debt overhang, and is crippled by it.Trump has suggested a 4.9 billion dollar bridging loan to help them over. The people who actually hold Puerto Rico’s debts, of course, have not been forgiving. They weren’t forgiving to Argentina, or to the Congo, and they aren’t going to be forgiving to Puerto Rico.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

The disaster relief has been bungled. It shouldn’t primarily be a matter of money in any case; the island should be flooded by work crews from all over the US with the materials they need to do the repairs, and the necessary heavy equipment to clear blockages, while large airlift is used to get to areas that are more remote.

This is a logistical exercise, the US has the capacity, and the US has chosen not to use the capacity. It is that simple.

As for the debt, most of it should simply be forgiven. The US government has the ability to do that.

We have a weird idea that debt is sacrosanct in our society, an idea which is totally out of whack with what makes good societies or good economies.

Good economies are based on easy debt forgiveness. People who lend money have a responsibility to not over-lend, and if they do, they deserve to lose their money. If you lend money to deadbeat Uncle Bob, you don’t expect to get it back. If you lend money to someone already in hock to three other loan sharks, well, you’re probably not getting that money back.

Excessive debt cripples people and economies, making them unproductive. Easy bankruptcy removes the debt so they can move on, and it also removes lending ability from people who have proven they have bad judgment about to whom they should lend.

Easy bankruptcy doesn’t mean “keep everything,” but it does mean keep everything necessary for economic and personal viability. In personal terms, tools a primary residence, a car, and so on. In government terms, all the lands, buildings, equipment, and so on required for the government to do its job.

Puerto Rico is an economic cripple. It doesn’t have the resources to fix itself, DC refuses to send sufficient help, and more debt isn’t going to fix its problems–any more than more debt has helped Greece.

Pathetic.

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Fundraiser Update: C. 6K Raised, 1st Goal Reached

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On October 10, 2017

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This year’s fundraiser has raised $5,995. Call it 6K.

In general, I’ll write more the more I raise, it tells me how much I should prioritize writing, since I must eat and so on.

But this year it’s also about putting together a collection of the old, good, fundamental articles (which is why I’ve featured some of them over the last two weeks), with prefaces (why I wrote them) and closing remarks (how they hold up, how they relate to other articles.)

Six thousand puts us at the first threshold.

Goal thresholds are as follows:

  • $6,000—12 articles with commentary, an introduction and concluding remarks.
  • $7,000—2 more articles.
  • $8,000—2 more articles.
  • $9,000—A new article on how to design a stable, fair, kind & prosperous government
  • $10,000 – A new article on how to evaluate personal risk in the events to come.

If you value my writing and can give without hardship, I hope you will. If, on the other hand, rent, food or medical expenses are pressing you, please don’t give.

It’s been lovely writing for you all these years, and there’s still important articles to write, along with the occasional commentary on current affairs.

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Note: bitcoin, litecoin, and ethereum wallets are listed at the bottom of the donation page.

France Ends Freedom

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On October 9, 2017

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The terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, but if they did, well, they’d stop attacking France.

Fifty seven percent of the French approve, according to a poll.

It takes so very little to get people to give up their freedom. Find an enemy, have a few atrocities, and they’ll squeal for you to take it from them. Shades of Goerring’s comment on how easy it is to get citizens to line up behind wars.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Such laws as France has passed, will be used against others. The anti-terrorism laws in the US have been used vigorously against environmental protestors, including entirely peaceful ones.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Centuries ago Machiavelli observed that some peoples lacked sufficient virtue for freedom. They could only be ruled by despots. Increasingly, the West has shown that they have fallen into this class.

While the young are quite good on issues of economic fairness (out of self interest), they are not particularly good on most civil liberties, so we cannot be sure that the tide moving through the Anglo-West, towards more equal economic arrangements and less corporate control will necessarily push back on civil liberties abuses.

Humans didn’t evolve to live in large societies. We are terrible at it, and our decision-making heuristics are not capable of handling it. We cannot evaluate threats properly, our enlarged senses of identity (like nationalism and ethnic identification) are easily hijacked and usually we are unable to change our minds about anything important once we become an adult unless there is a catastrophe which personally devastates us, and when there is, we simply pick up (as Friedman noted) whatever ideas are around, rather than think critically.

And so, so much for Liberte.

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How to Meditate 101

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On October 8, 2017

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Odin with the ravens Thought and Memory

I get questions on this, so here it is. This is basic concentration meditation (Shamatha) but it will lead to insights.

Try to do it regularly. If you can do only five minutes, that’s fine, but push towards an hour to to two hours a day. Treat it like exercise, you’re training your mind, just like you’d train your body.

Step One: Choose an object of attention. Standard Buddhist is your breath. Standard Hindu is a mantra – words you speak or think (move towards thinking them) while paying attention to the sound of them. If you use a mantra it should be something emotionally neutral or unalloyed positive (don’t meditate on God, say, if you fear going to hell).

I suggest breath, but some mantras are:

  • “Roots” (an emotionally neutral word)
  • Om Mani Padme Hum
  • Om Nama Shivaya
  • Om Ah Bee Lah Hung Chit (Vairocana mantra)

If you use a mantra, you should do so with the breath. One syllable or word should be said or thought on the exhale or inhale.

If you use the breath, attention stays on the negative part of it–when you’re not breathing.

Step Two: Intend to notice when you are no longer paying attention to the object of attention.

Step Three: Put your attention lightly on the objection of attention.

Step Four: At some point, you will notice that you are not paying attention to the object. Pat yourself on the back for noticing that you aren’t paying attention the breath. Be pleased. Then:

  • Look at whatever you’re now paying attention to, appreciate it for a second or two without judgment, then think to yourself either “this isn’t important,” or “I’ll deal with this after meditating”.
  • Move your attention back to your object of attention.

REPEAT

Do this for either as long as you can stand to, or a predetermined time (set an alarm).

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Notes:

You should do this with your spine straight. You can sit on the ground, in a stiff backed chair, on lie on your side with  your knees drawn up. Sitting without support has the advantage that if you start to fall asleep, falling will make you wake up. That said, due to illness I did almost all my meditation lying flat on my back for years, which is not how you’re supposed to do it. It isn’t as important as doing it.

This style of meditation is training your meta-attention: Training you to notice when you have stopped paying attention to the object of attention. You can do it with any object of attention: homework, your little finger, staring at a fire, watching a boring presentation, work you’d rather not do, the feeling of the position of your body as you walk, etc.

So you can do it during your daily life if you wish. Just decide what you should be paying attention to, intend to notice when you stop, be pleased that you notice, decide that whatever grabbed your attention isn’t important or can wait, and go back to your original object of attention.

Eventually you will get to the point where you rarely lose attention on your chosen object, at that point you’re actually pretty accomplished, but there’s further to go. At that point (or if you’re interested), the best book I’ve read on this style of meditation is The Mind Illuminated, by Culdassa.

This sort of meditation will lead to important insights about your mind, as well, by the way: how it works, who you are, and so on. It’s not unalloyed “concentration,” it includes insight.

Enjoy. (If this is popular enough, I’ll do a second article on how to improve your ability to concentrate.)

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The Destruction of the Third World

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On October 7, 2017

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The first thing to understand is this: 3rd world GDP growth in the post-war liberal period (roughly 46-68 or so), was good.  It was above population growth in most cases.  That changed around about the time OPEC grabbed the West by short and curlies, squeezed and wound up with tons of money they didn’t know what to do with.  This is an act in three parts:

ACT 1: Banks Loan Money to Third World Countries

Lots and lots of it. The pitch is this: we know how to develop countries. You’ll borrow this money, invest in development and have more than enough money to pay off the loans. Except that they didn’t know how to develop countries and even those countries in which the leaders didn’t steal the money, the loans grew faster than the tax base, leaving governments less and less able to administer their own countries.

ACT II: Money, Money, Money and Cash Crops

So, you need $.  Foreign dollars.  How do you get them?  You could do what Japan, Korea, the United States and Britain all did, and develop real industry behind trade barriers, of course, but that’s not what the experts are telling you to do.  What they’re saying is “you have a competitive advantage in certain commodities: cash crops and maybe minerals. You should work on that.”

Most cash crops are best grown on plantations, so if you want to move your economy to cash crops, you have to move the subsistence farmers off their land.  That means they will go to the cities and need food that you no longer grow (since you’re growing cash crops to sell to Westerners.)  But hey, that’s ok, because with all the foreign currency you’ll be getting from bananas, coffee and so on, you’ll be able to buy that food from Europe and America and Canada.  Right?  Right!

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Except that everyone is getting this advice, and everyone is growing more cash crops, and the price drops through the floor and you have a thirty year commodities depression.  You can’t feed the people you’ve shoved off the land without taking more loans; there are no jobs for those people, so now instead of self-supporting peasants you’ve got a huge amount of people in slums.  But, on the bright side, while not enough hard currency has been created to develop, or even stay ahead of your loans, enough exists so that the leaders can get rich; the West can sell grain to you; and you can buy overpriced military gear from the West.  Win!  For everyone except about 90% of your population.

ACT III: The IMF

The above was standard IMF and World Bank advice, of course.  Don’t let anyone tell you that the World Bank or IMF want a country to develop; their actions say otherwise.  What they do need to do is push neo-liberal doctrine.  So, now that your country is vastly in debt and can’t feed itself without foreign food which must be bought in hard currency, the IMF says “well, we could give you more money, BUT”.

The but is that they want you to stop subsidies of food and let food prices float.  Then they want you to reduce tariffs on goods, even though tariffs are a huge source of tax revenue, because your government is crippled and your people have tiny incomes, so you really don’t have the ability to tax them.  Then they want you to open up your economy to foreigners buying it up, so foreigners can own every part of your economy worth having (anything that generates hard currency, basically.)

FINIS

After all this your country is a basket case.

Win, Win, Lose.

(This was the great commodities depression. It ends about 1998, but the vast debt overhang remains in most cases.)

Originally published October 10, 2014. I can’t write this any more succinctly than this.

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Ends Versus Means

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On October 6, 2017

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You want something.

You have to do things to get that something.

Because most of our ends are never-ending: money, happiness, sex, love, and so on, including at the social level, means quickly become as important as ends.

If we want a prosperous society, say, we must keep creating that prosperous society, day in and day out. Even if we were to one day reach a society which was prosperous enough for everyone (possible in principle), that day does not allow rest: the crops must still be planted, new goods and services created, all of it must be brought to the people who need it.

(Note that I don’t say “brought to market”, because markets are only one way of distributing what people need.)

So HOW you are creating a prosperous society matters. The means by which you create the society are the actual daily life of the society.

If your means include poisoning the water table or degrading the quality of the soil, for example, your means are destroying your prosperity in the long term.

If your means include damaging the ecosystem to the point of collapse, your means are destroying prosperity in the long term.

If your means include changing the climate system in ways which will lead to sea level rises, changes in rainfall patters and so on, your means are destroying prosperity in the long term.

If your means include using aquifer water far faster than it is replaced, then your emans are are destroying prosperity in the long term.

If your means include dumping vast amounts of largely non-bio-degradable substances (plastic, among others) into the environment, your means are destroying prosperity in the long term.

And one day, the long term becomes the short term, and another day the short term becomes today.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

All means are, in effect, systems.  A system which does not make both people and the world better will destroy its own ends.

If a system is meant to create prosperity, but the means by which it creates prosperity destroy the basis of prosperity, then that system is is not a good one.

Beyond the obvious physical issues, such as the environmental issues discussed above, there is pollution of people.

Greed and selfishness are bad. They are bad because they make people bad people.  Our current system runs on greed and selfishness. If you have a lot of money, you have responded to monetary incentives, and in most cases (yes, you’re the exception) that degrades you as a person. Innumerable studies show that the more money someone has, the less empathy and compassion they have, the more cruel they are and the less they help other people proportionate to their means.

A means of “be greedy and selfish” creates a people who suck to be around, and who cannot actually deal with any of the other problems created by the system, such as all those listed above, because they have been trained, by their everyday life, to be selfish and greedy.

Further, all systems fail. No system works all the time. When a system has good means, if it fails, it still does good. If it has bad means, and it fails, it just does evil.

Your means are as important as your ends, and means which work in the short run, often have long run consequences which are absolutely terrible.

This is, by the way, as true in one’s personal life as in the structure of society.

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Social Facts Rule Your Life

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On October 5, 2017

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The world is human. Most humans live in cities, artificial environments created by us. We walk on streets laid out by humans, work and sleep and cook in buildings, drive in cars or take buses, trains and planes. We talk on cell phones and use the internet. Even those who live in the country live on land which has been altered by agriculture and the pasturing of animals domesticated by humans. The farmer grows wheat which was bred over millenia (or genetically altered recently). The farmer raises animals humans have been raising for thousands of years. We eat the meat of cows and pigs and chicken, we dine on rice or wheat or vegetables we have tended for millenia and which we have bred to suit us.

As individuals, we did not create almost any part of this physical world. We did not invent the techniques for caring for domesticated animals, growing vegetables, or making smart phones.

We live in a physical world created by humans, many of whom are dead. Human life is human in a way that animal life is not animal. Animals have an effect on the environment, but it is minor compared to what humans have done to the world.

And this is just the physical side of the world. Just as important is the world of ideas, of social facts.

Look at the words you are reading right now. You didn’t invent writing, typing, any of these words, or language itself. You spend your life thinking most of your thoughts in a language or languages created by humans, for humans, and mostly by dead humans.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

You almost certainly receive your daily food in exchange for something called money which is probably either plastic woven to look like paper or electronic bits. Money has no intrinsic value, a million dollars in the middle of Antarctica would do nothing for you, most money isn’t even paper any more; you couldn’t even burn it for heat. Yet most of us spend most of our waking days working for someone who gives us “money” and exchange it for most everything else we want.

In times of war and famine, money may lose most of its value. Food, cigarettes, or sex may be worth more. Money’s value is a social fact.

When someone is killed by another human being, whether it was murder or not is a social fact. In war, if a soldier kills someone it is probably not murder. If the state is executing someone it is not murder. When police kill someone it is usually not considered murder. Social facts.

The quality and amount of health care provided to individuals is a social fact. It depends on where they live. In some countries, it depends on how much money they have. In other countries, it depends on how much power they have.

The amount of melanin in someone’s skin is a physical fact. That having a “black” name in America leads to half the interview requests for an identical resume compared to someone with a “white” name is a social fact(x).

Cannabis is almost certainly less physically harmful than tobacco or alcohol, but selling or possessing cannabis is far more likely to get you thrown in jail. In the US, during alcohol prohibition, this was not true. Alcohol is alcohol, its legal status is a social fact.

Social facts rule most of your life. They are layered on top of physical facts and tell you how to understand those facts, and how to act towards them. There are few more consequential decisions than “When should I kill someone?” or “When should someone receive health care and how good should it be? or “Should I hire someone and for how much?”

Not all ideas are social facts. You may believe something “ought” to be true, but often other people do not agree. You think your girlfriend shouldn’t cheat, she doesn’t agree, the state doesn’t care. But if you act on that idea, and so do other people, it’s a social fact. They may call her a cheater, ostracize her, and so on. If no one acts on it, it is not a social fact.

A gang or mafia may believe that their members shouldn’t inform, and they may enforce this as best they can, but obviously the state does not. It is still a social fact if they can make it one, however.

You may also believe in ideas which are contrary to the ideas currently enforced by the state or other people. Perhaps you do not believe in intellectual property. Perhaps you think confessions obtained by torture shouldn’t be used in criminal proceedings. Perhaps you believe that women should or shouldn’t be able to have abortions.

These ideas may fall short of being social facts if no one acts on them. They are just ideas about how the world “ought” to be.

But while social facts are not just ideas, they are still ideas. Unlike the rules of the material universe, they can be changed.

And because they rule our lives, and our societies are built upon them, to change social facts is to change everything.

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On Vegas, Shootings, and Gun Control

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On October 3, 2017

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This is the first mass shooting where I’ve actually been to the place it happened. I’ve walked the strip often.

A society like the US will have these sorts of events (just as China has knife attacks), but they could be made a lot less deadly with a few simple steps.

  1. No automatic or semi-automatic long arms. Bolt, pump, or lever action.
  2. Small magazines.
  3. Handguns limited to revolvers, for everyone, including police.

This isn’t rocket surgery. Other countries have dealt with this problem. America is no longer a wild country, there are certainly rural types who need guns, but they don’t need automatic or semi-automatic weapons.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

I grew up among gun owners: foresters and farmers, people who lived rural or even howling wilderness. Canada has a LOT of howling wilderness left.

None of them, some of the hardest outdoorsmen you can imagine, felt the need for more than a couple bolt action rifles and a couple shotguns (20- and 12-gauge). That’s all you need for dealing with animals and hunting. There’s a place for high-caliber revolvers in certain types of very thick bush (for dealing with bears), and I’m given to understand snake pistols are useful in parts of the US, but you can get by without them, and most did.

Of course, a determined person will find a way to kill (I am surprised that it took so long before people started crashing motor vehicles into crowds), but there are ways to make it harder and reduce the likely deadliness.

Those ways, ironically, involve less loss of real freedom. Why not simply make the guns unavailable instead of having 24/7 surveillance.

America’s not quite ready for this yet, but I think within the next ten years or so the tide will change on this, along with a lot of other things.

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