Dangerous Intersection

Senator Ted Kaufman stands out

Erich Vieth — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 02:33:41 +0000

Arianna Huffington has recognized the excellent work of Senator Ted Kaufman, who dares to comes out swinging against Wall Street.

In the last week alone, Kaufman has taken to the Senate floor to deliver two major — and blistering — speeches. The first was a masterful overview, offering chapter and verse on what led to the financial crisis and what, specifically, needs to be done to ensure that we “build a regulatory system that will endure for generations instead of one that will be laid bare by an even bigger crisis in perhaps just a few years or a decade’s time.” . . . . The great thing about Kaufman is that he isn’t afraid to use direct, pointed language, saying that “fraud and lawlessness were key ingredients” in the financial collapse. And he’s willing to name names: in his attack on derivatives, he called out Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers as key cheerleaders for unregulated derivatives markets . . .

But why is Kaufman speaking out against dysfunctional/corrupt Wall Street banks while most other senators are timid? The absence of money as a factor in his decision making.

Kaufman didn’t need to raise any money to become a senator — he was appointed. And he doesn’t need to raise any money for his reelection campaign — he’s not running. At 71, with a long, distinguished career in government under his belt, Kaufman is completely unencumbered by the need to curry favor and approach moneyed interests with his hat in his hand. So let’s all take a good look at Ted Kaufman. This is what it looks like when our representatives are not beholden to special interests, and are only serving the public interest.

Shut up and fly the plane

Erich Vieth — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:05:36 +0000

I agree with these observations by Patrick Smith, writing at Salon:

[T]here is an awful lot of yammering going on. There can be up to a half-dozen cabin P.A.s before your plane even reaches the runway, sometimes in multiple languages. Is this really necessary? To some of these announcements we grant a pass. Surely there’s nothing out of line about a brief welcome-aboard speech, for example, or other practical reminders. However, if there is one hideous and glaring example of excess, it has to be the pre-departure safety briefing. Is there anything more tedious? . . . With a pair of shears and some common sense, the average briefing could be trimmed to half its length, resulting in a lucid oration that people might actually listen to.

FCC disappointment on broadband

Erich Vieth — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:59:04 +0000

Tim Karr of Free Press reports that the FCC’s newly released broadband plan is severely lacking on some of the most pressing issues:

Judging from the back-slapping and high fives over at the FCC, you’d think that America’s Internet was sailing smoothly into the future. Think again.

With much fanfare on Tuesday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski delivered the National Broadband Plan to Congress, saying it will help make Internet access faster and cheaper for everyone in the United States. Getting more people connected to high-speed Internet — from the 65 percent currently online up to 90 percent of households by the year 2020 — is Job One, according to Genachowski.

There are a lot of good things in the plan’s 376 pages, including pledges to reform the Universal Service Fund and to re-allocate spectrum for broadband. But the plan glosses over some of thorniest problems plaguing U.S. Internet users: high prices, slow speeds and a lack of choices among providers.

Internet access in America is held captive by powerful phone and cable interests. And regardless of what the laissez-faire editors at the Wall Street Journal think, doing nothing to protect people from getting ripped off is not an option.

I haven’t yet reviewed the FCC plan, but this report concerns me–Free Press is a highly trusted source regarding media reform. Once again, it appears that the needs of individual citizens are about to take the back seat to corporate interests.

Amy Goodman talks health care and wars with Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich

Erich Vieth — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:59:12 +0000

Amy Goodman dedicated an entire hour to discuss health care and the ongoing U.S. wars with Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich (video below). It was an intense and insightful discussion–truly worth watching. As you might imagine, much of the discussion focused on Kucinich’s willingness to vote for Obama’s version of health care. As Kucinich made clear, however, the fact that he is voting for this bill does not mean he supports it. The bill essentially disgusts him, but he believe that voting no would be even worse. Amy Goodman injects the topic that Kucinich is facing massive pressure by his own party to get in line. As I mentioned at the top, the discussion is intense.

At about 45 minute mark, the topic turned to foreign policy. Ralph Nader asks how we can possibly “get the American people angry” regarding the war and corruption in Afghanistan. At the 50-minute mark, Dennis Kucinich discusses the actual costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He warns that war has become ordinary and acceptable to Americans, despite the homicidal actions of private contractors, despite the unimaginable costs and despite the lack of any meaningful objectives.

Mr. Nader argued (at minute 54) that President Obama has stifled dissent at his White House, just like President George W. Bush.

President Obama is like President Bush in this regard: he doesn’t receive dissenting groups in the White House. He froze out the single-payer advocates, including his longtime friend, Dr. Quentin Young, in Chicago, Illinois. And he’s freezing out dissenters, dissenting groups from meeting with him in the White House. They can’t get a meeting with him. He’s surrounded by warmongers. He’s surrounded by the military-industrial complex. But he won’t meet, for example, Veterans for Peace. He won’t meet Iraq Veterans Against the War. He won’t meet the student groups and the religious groups and the business groups and others who opposed the Iraq war back in 2003. What is he afraid of here?

You know, we’re supposed to have a new wave with the Obama administration. Instead, we have the same old—the same old same old. And I think the whole idea—just let me make this—the whole idea that Obama is for things, but they’re not practical—he’s for single payer, he really doesn’t like war, but, but, but. But he goes along, and he goes along. We have to have the American people give the White House a measure of political courage here, because it’s not going to come from inside the White House.

Juan Gonzales asked Ralph Nader why we aren’t seeing more demonstrations against these wasteful wars by the American people:

[During] the 2004 election with Kerry and Bush, the antiwar movement, most of the groups, gave Kerry a pass and broke off their mass demonstrations. It broke the momentum. Momentum is very important in mass demonstrations. Second, there are fewer people in Congress that these—the antiwar people can cling to. That’s a demoralization effect on people. And third, it costs a lot of money to put these demonstrations on, and there aren’t many super-rich antiwar Americans, like George Soros and others, who are putting some money to get the buses and get the demonstrations all over the country. And finally, the Washington Post, New York Times, they do not give adequate coverage to antiwar demonstrations, compared to the coverage they’ve been giving to the tea parties. Just check the column inches in the Washington Post covering the tea parties, compared to blocking out pro-Gaza, pro-Palestinian demonstrations, for example, when the Israelis invaded Gaza, or the upcoming demonstrations against the war. All of this demoralizes people. And they say, “What are we doing this for?” So, unfortunately, the political leaders are not leading, and the President is not leading.

On voluntourism

Erich Vieth — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:12:51 +0000

For those who want to spend their vacation volunteering their time in some far-off exotic place, Slate’s Sandy Stonesifer offers this thought:

There is no question that unless you have very specific skills to offer, an organization could do more good with the amount of money you will spend on travel, accommodations, and tourism than you could do during your weeklong visit.

Milgram redux

Erich Vieth — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:06:03 +0000

There’s a new French documentary based upon a faked French television show (”The Game of Death”). The “show” was based on the experiments Stanley Milgram conducted at Yale in the 1960’s.

On the TV show, the game consisted of one participant asking questions to another player locked inside a booth with an electrode hooked up to his or her wrist. Any wrong answer meant the first player had to push a lever that subjected the victim in the booth to electrical charges up to 460 volts as punishment.

The audience applauded and chanted “Punishment! Punishment! Punishment!” when the contestant inside the booth answered wrong.

The results were startling, just as they were in Milgram’s study: 80% of the contestants administered what they believed to be lethal electric shocks. BTW, it’s not clear whether the audience consisted entirely of stooges–I assume that all audience members were stooges and that they had been instructed to encourage the reckless behavior of the contestants (if not, the consistently terrible audience reaction was phenomenally more interesting to me than the behavior of the contestants).

Image by Matteo69 at Dreamstime.com (with permission)

The CNN reporter reporting on this French “show” was perplexed by the behavior of the contestants on this “show.” She was flummoxed by the contestant’s willingness to administer (what they believed to be) painful and apparently deadly shocks to innocent people. She quoted the show’s French producer: “People were willing to act against their own morals, their own principles when they were ordered to do something extreme by a source they they trust is legitimate.”

According to the CNN reporter, the lesson is that “even the most well-adjusted person can be swayed to act in horrendous ways if the situation leads them to it–that anyone is vulnerable to this.” The host of the CNN news show, Campbell Brown added, “I hope that’s not the case.”

But the evidence is ubiquitous that people will happily allow entire communities of other people to needlessly suffer and die. We tolerate mass death of millions of innocent people, including children, through starvation and malaria right here on planet Earth, even though we could substantially alleviate those disasters if we only acted. We tolerate and even cheer on wars that have no purpose relating to “freedom,” even though we know that using our terrifying weapons often takes the lives of numerous innocent human beings. We fail to guarantee a minimum safety net of health care for those who can’t afford it, resulting in more deaths. We tolerate thousands of institutions that are “schools” only in name rather than insisting on paying a bit more for first rate teachers–we know that these sad public “schools” are ruining lives, but most of us couldn’t care less (if we cared, would we be doing something about the situation? Consider too, these eight other ways to kill 3,000 people. How is it that we tolerate any of this? But we do tolerate needless suffering every day, most of it through our inaction. “The Game of Death” demonstrates (just as Milgram had earlier demonstrated) that people are also willing to hurt and kill through their one actions, not merely inactions. For the most part, however, I find this action/inaction distinction to be legalistic and distracting. Highly moral people don’t make this distinction when lives are on the line.

How can people on the “show” be so cruel? In my opinion, the Milgram study is a finding that relates to limited human attentional capacity. Our limited and rickety working memory can easily be filled with things (such as audience encouragement and the “authority figure” of a show host) which leaves little room for moral processing. Simply fill up our heads with TV, “the threat of terrorism,” or whatever, and we are willing to not attend to everything else. We are incredibly fallible beings. I would also suggest that Hannah Arendt’s concept of banality of evil illustrates this human vulnerability to attentional distraction. I explain my reasoning regarding human attention capacity in the context of Arendt’s work here.

Back to the “Game of Death”. . . Some of the contestants purportedly explained that the power of television made them do those horrendous things, but this claim confuses me. I suspect that the live audience served as a proxy for that “television audience” (there actually wasn’t any such audience, at least until the documentary came out). But assume that the live audience boo’d and hissed when shocks were administered, thereby working at cross-purposes with the show host. In such as case, I would assume that far fewer “lethal” shocks would have been administered. My belief, then, is that the fact that there was a television audience (even an imagined one) didn’t cause the contestants to act in any particular way. Rather, the effect of that audience depends on how that audience reacts. No research needs to be cited for the fact that we are social animals and that we feel immense pressure to do the things that are approved by others around us (though I will cite this famous study by Solomon Asch).

Some might find this sort of “show” bizarre, but I find it valuable, and I hope that the documentary reaches a wide audience. Humans cognition is a complex and conflicting bag of tricks, many of which work counter to others. That is one reason I have repeatedly stressed at this site that we should first and foremost think of humans as human animals, not the demigods . We desperately need the humility and the skepticism that usually comes with the acknowledgment that we are frail and fallible. Consider that when when humans are thinking least clearly, we are nonetheless capable of feeling certain that we are correct. We are a lot less competent than we’d like to believe. The French “show” is dramatic evidence that merely presenting an audience and an “authority figure” can severely inflict moral blindness. These two things blinded the contestants to the most basic rule morality: don’t needlessly hurt and kill others.

The more likely that human animals become consciously aware of their gaping cognitive and moral vulnerabilities (I consider these part and parcel), they are less likely to do great damage to other humans. Perhaps this show will remind us that we regularly need to exercise social skepticism and put on the moral brakes, even when those around us seem certain.

The so-called interview

Erich Vieth — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:02:07 +0000

I’m having a difficult time believing that FOX calls this an interview. The elephant in the room is that FOX and much of its audience want to believe that everything would be OK without any sort of health care reform. That assumption seemed to be driving the questioning. In the past few months, though, I’ve been meeting more and more people who are going without health insurance, which can lead to tragic foreclosures and bankruptcies. This situation is not tenable.

With regard to this frustrating interview, I do find some fault with President Barack Obama too. He’s claims both that we know what’s in the bill and that we’ll someday see what’s in the bill. And he speaks as though there is going to be a meaningful comment period. I’ll be watching to see how many hours tick by after passage of this bill, before the bill is rammed home at the White House. We’ll see how much input the citizens will have. And from what we suspect, the Obama bill will apparently be a huge gift to corporations that are gaming the health care system. But you wouldn’t know any of this based on the questions by this hack interviewer.

We desperately need to reform the health care system, though I think that most of that work, and much of the sacrifices will need to be incurred by individual Americans. The national debate thus frustrates me because it is, I think, fundamentally dishonest. We, the People need to take far better care of their bodies and quit expecting our (incredibly talented) health care professionals to bail us out of problems we create with our terrible eating habits and sedentary lifestyles. And we might need to better understand that more high-tech medicine does not necessarily lead to better for real-life health and mortality rates. Americans are dreaming to think that they can pay less and get the same or more of the same type of healthcare that they are currently consuming. Something’s gotta give. Maybe a lot of things gotta give.

Mostly, we need meaningful exchanges of information in order to improve health care delivery. We need civilized debate and straight talk. This “interview” was pathetic–I do put most of the blame on the shallow-minded sputtering “interviewer,” who came equipped mostly with barking points, rather than any interest in developing useful ideas. This session should be shown in journalism schools a an example of how not to conduct an interview. I’d never seen Bret Baier until this interview. I’d bet that he never again gets a chance to conduct any high profile interview. I really have to wonder about his objective going in, other than a dozen barking points.

Primer on positive psychology by Martin Seligman

Erich Vieth — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:36:45 +0000

Tonight I viewed Martin Seligman’s excellent 2004 TED lecture on positive psychology.

Seligman introduced his talk by bemoaning the many decades during which psychology utilized only the “disease model,” which he described as “Spot the loon.” Some good things came of it, of course. Sullivan mentions that we can now treat many psychological illnesses (admitted only a small percentage all of them) and we can sometimes make miserable people less miserable.

The disease model ignored normal people and high talent people, however. It also failed to help normal functioning people to become happier. Seligman carefully made the point that the skill set for avoiding dysfunction is dramatically different than the skills necessary for improving happiness. The concerns of positive psychology take over where the disease model left off. Positive psychology concerns both human strengths and human weaknesses. It includes building up the best things in life as well as preparing the worst. It includes helping to make the lives of normal people more fulfilling and nurturing talent (including genius). Positive psychology seeks to do all these things, to complement psychology’s traditional aim of healing pathology.

But what is happiness? Based on Seligman’s research, happiness comes in three flavors (the following is from Seligman’s website, Authentic Happiness, where you can take various self-tests at this site to determine your level of happiness):

First The Pleasant Life, consisting in having as many pleasures as possible and having the skills to amplify the pleasures. This is, of course, the only true kind of happiness on the Hollywood view. Second, The Good Life, which consists in knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life. Third, The Meaningful Life, which consists of using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are.

For another basic outline of these approaches, see here. Traditionally, the first of these three forms of happiness, Pleasant Life (also called “pleasant emotion”) was considered to be the entirety of happiness. Examples include social relationships, backrubs, a full stomach, orgasms, hobbies and entertainment. Pleasant Life activities invoke a form of happiness that consists of a “raw feeling” that is obvious–you know when it’s happening.

Pleasant Life feelings can be generated by spending time with others. Those who like to spend considerable time alone (I know one of them) have often been perceived as less happy. That characterization is not necessarily accurate, though, once we consider the two other basic forms of happiness.

Seligman mentions those seeking the first type of happiness, pleasant emotions, can amplify this state of positive affect by staying mindful of the situations that bring on that feeling. This form of happiness has several drawbacks, however. It is 50% heritable, meaning that you get it mostly from your parents, though you can tweak it a bit. It also “habituates rapidly.” This means that the feeling of positive affectivity is ephemeral–difficult to maintain. Seligman compares it to vanilla ice cream, which quickly loses its ability to maintain our interest after a few bites of it.

The second type of happiness, The Good Life (which Seligman also calls “the Life of Engagement”) is longer-lasting and deeper than the Pleasant Life. The hallmark of this second type of happiness is the ability to do something that draws upon your highest strengths to a degree that “time stops for you.” Seligman suggests that this feeling is what Aristotle explored when he discussed “Eudaimonia,” the Good Life. Csikszentmihalyi’s description of “flow” is also central to this aspect of happiness. When you achieve flow, you become “one with the music,” and you experience intense concentration.

The third type of happiness consists of The Meaningful Life. There is some overlap with The Good Life, in that to achieve this third form of happiness, you must be aware of your highest strengths, but you must also employ those strengths such that you “belong to and are in service of something larger than yourself.” To get a good jolt of this kind of happiness, Seligman suggests doing something philanthropic, which will cause long lasting happiness rather than the Pleasant Life activities, which normally run their course like a “square wave.” Another way to get a good boost of this third type of happiness is to write a testimonial of thanks to someone who has done something wonderful for you, and go read it to him or her.

If you want to feel deep and long-lasting happiness, then, pleasure is not enough. “Successfully pursuing pleasure does not necessarily lead to life satisfaction, but successfully pursuing the Good Life and the Meaningful Life does lead to higher life satisfaction.”

Placebos and magic

Erich Vieth — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:12:07 +0000

At TED, magician/comedian Eric Mead discusses “The Magic of the Placebo.” Based on the studies considering reports of patients, it turns out that needles injecting inert substances are more powerful than blue-colored pills containing inert substances, which are more powerful than white pills, which are more powerful than tablets. No active ingredient in any of these, yet we see predictable differences in the power of these “medicines.”

Belief is what makes placebos work. But YOU are not so naive as to be taken in by something with no active ingredient, right? If you’re squeamish about needles, you’ll find this talk extra-interesting.

After viewing this video, I saw the story-telling power of Hollywood in a new light.

Those death panels

Erich Vieth — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:44:51 +0000

At Salon, Joe Conason urges Democrats to push back when they are accused of creating “death panels” as part of health care reform:

The proper reply to “death panels” was that they already exist in the corporate bureaucracy of the insurance companies — and in the lobbying firms where reform that would save tens of thousands of lives annually has been killed every time.