Taking some time from silence, to post about the JFK Conference in Integral Theory.  In the Bay Area, so I have no excuse!

I fully hope and expect to meet lots of my online pals, in person.

Thanks to Bill for the heads-up.

A good article here, confronting the inane ways that the media analysts, personalities, and journalists, are handling Al Gore's book.

I'm not sure how much the confusing fuzz of media idiocy drives governmental policy. 

Mainly, I think, the media dysfunction allows bad policy to be cloaked, camoflaged, and stood by, far past the obviousness of the policy's bad effects.

Secondly, the media dysfunction can act as a enabler of trivia to disqualify policy (whether that policy is good or bad, trivia "about" that policy can act to disqualify it).

Is now clearly on display.   More silly Paris Hilton obsessions. 

From Al Gore's book:

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I'm not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hopes it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half the American people still believes that Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just unfortunate excess --- an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsession that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

Late in the summer of 2006, American news coverage was saturated with the bizarre false confession of a man who claimed to have been present at the death of JonBenet Ramsey --- the six-year-old beauty queen whose unsolved murder eleven years before was responsible for another long-running obsession. A few months prior to John Mark Karr's arrest in Bangkok, the disappearance of a high school senior in Aruba and the intensive search for her body and her presumed murderer consumed thousands of hours of television coverage. Both cases remain unsolved as of this writing, and neither had any appreciable impact on the fate of the Republic.

Like JonBenet Ramsey, O.J. has recently been back at the center of another fit of obsessive-compulsive news, when his hypothetical confession wasn't published and his interviews on television wasn't aired. This particular explosion of "news" was truncated only when a former television sitcom star used racist insults in a night club. And before that we focus on the "Runaway Bride" in Georgia. And before that there was the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy. And of course we can't forget Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole, Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch and married Katie Holmes, who gave birth to Suri. And Russell Crowe apparently threw a phone at a hotel concierge.

In early 2007, the wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death, embalming, and funeral plans and the legal wrangling over the paternity and custody of her child and disposition of her estate, served as yet another particularly bizarre example of the new priorities in America's news coverage.

And while American television watchers were collectively devoting a hundred million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness.

But of course, Al Gore is somehow a green post-modernist, empowering Karl Rove,being a Harvard grad, and all that.

Now clearly, I'm making fun.  I understand KW has a lot on his plate - he isn't an expert in a lot of fields. 

But his Integral Politics is clearly deeply deficient - so are there other integal analyses that are worthwhile, of the media situation?   The banality and obsessiveness of the 24/7 news networks, really isn't a left/right issue - it comes in for mutual condemnation. 

But what is the integral analysis?

So I biked into work today.  At around 8 AM, went into the gym to shower, prepare for work, and noticed that on the cable news channels, reporting about Paris Hilton.

And just now, 3 hours later, I go into a corner store to get a snack - I look up at the TV, and what is being reported on?

Paris Hilton.

3 hours later.

(Oh, by the way, Paris Hilton is out of jail, in case you haven't heard.  I didn't know she was in jail, but apparently she was, and now she is out.)

Which brings up, of course, the clear emptiness of current news reporting.  Entertainment, rather than worthwhile news. What entertains, rather than what informs.

It would be interesting to see an integral analysis of this.  The financial and economic analysis is straightforward - the news companies are focused on ratings, there is a ratings bump from entertainment related news, so the editors at the news channels allow 24/7 insipid coverage, dominated by corporate interests on substantial issues, and fluff the rest of the time.  Whatever gets the ratings up, within reason.

The real question then, is where straight economic analysis is placed within the integral context? 

Economic analysis focuses, interestingly enough, focuses on most everything BUT the I-dimension.   Mainly this type of analysis is IT and ITS focused, with a bit of WE analysis thrown in, for cultural dimensions. 

My one sentence analysis of the shallowness of news is mainly an "externalist" rendering of the situation, with rational actors in the news divisions acting in a behavioristic fashion, in pursuit of those ratings bumps.  With the product then produced by that process being shallow tripe.

It would be great to see a bit more of this in integral-land, with a focus on the reciprocity between the individual and cultural factors, that move in interdependence with the IT economic "hard" factors (actual resources),  and ITS legal and economic structures that are in place.

It seems to me that Wilber talks about the external factors, only to abandon them in "inner" cultural and personal factors, when push comes to shove.

"The single greatest problem was stated this way.  When green attacks orange, amber wins.  And believe me, amber is winning, just ask Karl Rove.  Despite a democratic victory here or there, the ranks of voters have downshifted towards amber, unmistakably and strongly.  All of this thanks to the likes of green Harvard, which has finally succeeded in deconstructing it's own deconstructionists"

I would say that the hollowing out of news reporting, does downshift power towards amber.  The prizing of vapid fame over important issues means, that in the main news world, important information doesn't get reported until it bites "the people" in the rear-end.  Too late to do anything about it.

But how is that "green attacking orange?"  The externalist factors I describe above - the search for ratings - account for the dumbing down of the news.    That isn't green, correct?

This is why Wilber's analysis fails so badly - so incredibly, awfully badly - on this point.   "Green" because a magic talisman of sorts, the boogieman, to not actually engage what is happening in the "real world".

If true, this is actually good news.

The static-character research is typically based on a definition of personality comprising five features, called the five-factor model, including openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

While these factors are important to a person's character, Dweck argues they aren't the definitive word, and results generated from the model could be missing subtle, yet critical, aspects of personality. She will present her research this week at an annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Washington, D.C.

"My point is that there's a really big in-between area that they don't talk about, and these are the crucial beliefs that people develop as they grow and learn," Dweck told LiveScience in a telephone interview.

From the always must-read Integral Options.  Bill is simply a monster (in a good way), both physically and in terms of his prodigious blog output, as well as his constantly valuable speedlinking.

The rest of us simply are not worthy.  But I'm cool with that.

I was looking briefly at this article in Time today - The Last Temptation of Al Gore - and then referring back to the Integral Politics in Brief tract I linked to earlier today.

Here's a quote from the Time article:

The Assault on Reason will be hailed and condemned as Gore's return to political combat. But at heart, it is a patient, meticulous examination of how the participatory democracy envisioned by our founders has gone awry—how the American marketplace of ideas has gradually devolved into a home-shopping network of 30-second ads and mall-tested phrases, a huckster's paradise that sells simulated participation to a public that has all but lost the ability to engage. Gore builds his argument from deep drafts of political and social history and trenchant bits of information theory, media criticism, computer science and neurobiology, and reading him is by turns exhausting and exhilarating. One moment he is lecturing you about something you think you know pretty well, and the next moment he's making a connection you had never considered. The associative leaps are dazzling, but what will stoke the Democratic faithful are his successive chapters on the Iraq war, each one strafing the Administration for a different set of misdeeds: exploiting the politics of fear, misusing the politics of faith, misleading the American people, throwing out the checks and balances at the heart of our democracy, undermining the national security and degrading the nation's image in the world. For anyone who stepped into the Oval Office now and tried to end the war, he says, "it would be like grabbing the wheel of a car that's in mid-skid. You're just trying to work the wheel to see what pulls you out of it." But the mess we're in can't be blamed solely on the President or the Vice President or the post-9/11 distortion field that muzzled the media, immobilized Congress and magnified Executive power. "I think this started before 9/11, and I think it's continued long after the penumbra of 9/11 became less dominant," he says. "I think it is part of a larger shift driven by powerful forces"—print giving way to television as our dominant medium for examining ideas, television acting on our brains in ways that scientists are just beginning to unlock. As such, it's not the sort of problem that legislation is going to fix. Gore hopes that the Internet, which is so good at inviting people back into the conversation, will be the key to restoring American democracy. "It's going to take time," he says. "After all, we've been veering off course for a while."

Now first off, I'm going to buy the new Gore book, An assault on reason - but take the paragraph above DESCRIBING Gore's book, and compare it to the shallow analysis given by Wilber above. (And again, I'll have more on this later.)

Which sounds deeper, more true, more resonant, more attendant to the facts as they are happening, not generalizations that fit a theory?

Ken Wilber has been publishing stuff on Integral Politics.  This is recent on the subject.

I've read through page 25. 

I must say, I'm underwhelmed.   Three points -

a.  Ken can't seem to write "lingo" very well.  Very stilted, cardboard, and silly, all of the people, and all of the dialogue between people.
b.  The bringing in of integral theory, seems to be acting as a sort of deus ex machina.  The concepts and explanations are brought in, but aren't actually hooked up with any real time practicalities. 
c.  Left and right are reduced to generalities that are basically content free.  This is then expanded into the typical integral rap - levels and lines, etc.  But nothing really to sink one's teeth into, outside of the integral concepts.


For example, there is exactly ONE reference to power, almost as an aside, when referencing Nietzsche. 

Probably the only reference to any current situation (and I'm skimming now) is this quote:  "The single greatest problem was stated this way.  When green attacks orange, amber wins.  And believe me, amber is winning, just ask Karl Rove.  Despite a democratic victory here or there, the ranks of voters have downshifted towards amber, unmistakably and strongly.  All of this thanks to the likes of green Harvard, which has finally succeeded in deconstructing it's own deconstructionists."

Umm...Harvard?  That's the problem?  That caused Karl Rove?


There's quite a lot of undisciplined thinking in this piece, that I've read so far.  Really, you get better analysis at the smarter liberal and conservative blogs, frankly.

I hate to say it, but this type of piece is nothing so much as...silly.  I don't even find much to be outraged about, as the piece is so clearly lacking in any substantive content, it could have been written by a particularly bright, 1st year political science student, exploring integral concepts.

I'm again skimming (this is realtime, I'm reading then writing), and it looks to get a little better towards the end.  A few more distinctions brought in, that are useful.  What do other people think of this piece?

Better judgment that The Secret, certainly.

This Bill Moyers interview with Jon Stewart is very illuminating, on a lot of levels.

For one, he truly continues a level of self-depracation of what he does, that I find admirable.
Two, his general analysis, say, of the Gonzales administration, is very right on. 
Three, regarding Virginia Tech - near the end of this interview with Bill Moyers, there is a segment showing Stewart interviewing Allawi, and commenting on the fact that, in Iraq, there is a Virginia Tech massacre, "every day".  In that, this is similar to my thoughts on the subject.

Worth watching.

I haven't written anything on Virginia Tech.  The truth is, for, me, I've been, choosing, in a way, to hear about massacres for the last 4 years. 

I have an RSS feed for Iraq Coalition Casualities.  It brings all the updates to the "news" portion, on the right side.  (The feed is down below).

As such, for the past 4 years, I've gotten messages of new bombings, mass graves, etc, filling up my Reader, on a daily basis.

And actually, within a week, the number of casualties in Iraq were 10 times the number of people killed due to violence, than were killed in the VA Tech massacre.  And 11 american troops on Apirl 23rd.

Maybe I should stop receiving the feed?

I can't help but view this, as simply another tragedy, yes, horrible, and yes, deeply sad.  I can't make it "bigger" than tragedies that happen across the globe, or more meaningful than those either.

In this sense, it seems I am clearly in the minority.   Even in integral circles.   

Nevertheless, that is what is noticed, from this perspective, and this pair of eyes.

Actually, a link to another group which has cooperated with Al-Queda, but a lot of these  Pakistan/Afghanistan Islamic groups exchange people, information and resources.

Here is the article. Notable quote:

A three-tier security ring has been thrown around the 72-year-old Buddhist head, who lives at Dharamsala, in the Himalayan foothills, Indian police spokesman Prem Lal said.

All those approaching the exiled Tibetan chief will be closely watched by highly trained Tibetan security guards as well as heavily armed deployments of Indian police.

Visitors are being body-searched before being allowed to approach him.

This makes me incredibly sad, but it's part and parcel of the age.  

And then it brings up, of course, how non-violence may be an inappropriate response, to determined aggression.   We knew this of course, simply from China's extermination of the Tibetans as a separate people, over the last 50 years.

Thanks to Matthew Dallman for the link.

The National Review article, throughout, conflates priests practices Buddhism, with people who are primarily Buddhist, but acting out of nationalism - but the main point still remains that in certain situations, even practicing buddhist priets have responded to force, with force.

Shades of Apple/PC, but the Zaadz guy is even cooler.

Definitely a funny ad.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. 

But a good article here on, how easy it is to set up a blog community, and then the inevitable questions regarding how to manage membership in multiple communities.

The quote: 

Any whoozit with a hundred bucks can install an elgg or a drupal or a moodle or a wiki and spam the bloggosphere saying that “this is the new community… supporting (insert obscure bit of cartilage on the long tail here)” We are increasingly collaborative, increasingly involved in collaboration… We are members of our banking sites, our research sites our community sites our schools our communities of practice…

From Plenty Magazine:

3000 square foot home
Hydrogen run car
Hydrogen run golf car

And only 500K to build.

Shoot, in the San Francisco, you can't find a studio apartment with 750 square feet, under 500K.

This image certainly isn't a very integral way to spend your money, is it?

From the New York Times, on the cost of the Iraq War.

Read this Tricycle post to find out why.

Noticed this at Blogmandu.