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".

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.

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.

Saw Peter post this at Zaadz:

“The report, from the World Institute for Development Economics Research at the UN University, says that the poorer half of the world’s population own barely 1% of global wealth.”

Then I saw this report on World Bank efforts to reduce poverty the last ten years:

Despite an intensified campaign against poverty, World Bank programs have failed to lift incomes in many poor countries over the past decade, leaving tens of millions of people suffering stagnating and even declining living standards, according to a report released Thursday by the bank's autonomous assessment arm.

Clearly, these two articles are related.   There has been a vast effort, on the part of the economic elites, to "grow the wealth" over the last several years.  But doing this, without paying attention to who benefits, simply makes sure the haves get more - in the article:

"For a sustained reduction in poverty over a period of time, it really pays to worry about both growth and distribution," said Vinod Thomas, director-general of the Independent Evaluation Group. "It has been a mistaken notion that you can grow first and worry about the distribution later."

There are also many social issues, that have to worked out internally, before economic use can be of aid.  You have to "pick your spots", so to speak, and take an integral, holistic, and pragmatic approach - paying attention not only to the economic picture, but the levels of consciousness and power distrubution, clan rivalries, etc - in a country.

This weekend, the effects of Typhoon Durian is assumed to have killed 1000 people in the Phillipines.

These type of tragedies, are simply pointless, given that smart infrastructure can mitigate the damage and death that comes from these type of natural disasters.

Take a look at this list of severe European windstorms.  Notice, as time progresses, the lesser number of deaths.  This is mainly due to stronger infrastructure, buildings, tolerance testing in architecture, canals for decent runoff, etc.

I simply cannot comprehend the type of value system that spends 3 billion on a destroyer, as well as other military boondoggles, when the opportunity exists to sow UNIVERSAL good will, by utilizing these funds for helping nations out with good infrastructure.

Perhaps that is naive - but I do believe that this creates both:

a. Goodwill
b. Economic partners that are more interested in productive commerce, than being a "bad" neighbor.

NOTE:  This of course doesn't mean that ALL the effects of natural disasters can be mitigated.  But some can. 

Of course, we see this same type of blindness with global warming - and the exact same poorer countries will suffer the worst effects.

Good World Changing Article on saving energy, using technologies we have - some decades old:

The world is ripe with efficiency opportunities. ("The low-hanging fruit," as Lovins puts it, "is mushing up around our ankles.") His Rocky Mountain Institute points out that in industrial settings, "there are abundant opportunities to save 70% to 90% of the energy and cost for lighting, fan, and pump systems; 50% for electric motors; and 60% in areas such as heating, cooling, office equipment, and appliances." In general, up to 75% of the electricity used in the U.S. today could be saved with efficiency measures that cost less than the electricity itself.

The post goes into how the incentives to adopt these measures, just aren't there - energy costs still are a low percent of overall costs, even at 70%.

If this becomes a priority, regulation would have to be adopted, for this to happen.

This is the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri:

This is not a case of someone being detained on a battlefield or even overseas, nor is it the case of someone who entered the country illegally. He was in the U.S. legally and was detained while sitting at home. And just as he was about to start his criminal trial, the President essentially cancelled the trial and ordered him detained indefinitely and incommunicado

Regarding legal issues, this is some of the impact of the Unlimited Detention and Torture Act (also known as the Military Commissions Act). 

A complete betrayal of the legal underpinnings of the Constitution.  A complete betrayal of any type of ethical system.

It looks like one of the first things Democrats will do, is attempt to address this law, removing or altering some of the more egregious elements.

Let's all pray for success in this.

Mainstream AP article here.

The must-read Jack Balkin article here:

The choice quote:

The bottom line is simple: The MCA preserves rights against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, but it severs these rights from any practical remedy.

This means, as a functional matter, there is no recourse for the innocently accused.  More:

There are many things that are deeply distressing about the Military Commissions Act of 2006. One of the most distressing is its deeply cynical attitude about law. The President has created a new regime in which he is a law unto himself on issues of prisoner interrogations. He decides whether he has violated the laws, and he decides whether to prosecute the people he in turn urges to break the law. And all the while he insists that everything he does is perfectly legal, because, the way the law is designed, there is no one with authority to disagree.

It is a travesty of law under the forms of law. It is the accumulation of executive, judicial, and legislative powers in a single branch and under a single individual.

It is the very essence of tyranny.

Also of note in the main article, is that a collection of religious groups were the protestors, in this case.

That shows one of the essential functions of a working religious or spiritual consciousness - the refusal to find acceptable degraded forms of treatment.

Of course they aren't calling it that.

Here is a deeply pessimistic take.

For myself, one of the  more interesting social observations, is the slow creep of authoritarianism. 

Some of this bill will be rejected by the Supreme Court, when applied - at least I believe so - nevertheless, a bad result.

As bad as a result as this bill is of the U.S. authoritarian movement - and it is a REALLY bad one - the effects of that movement are not restricted to the Republican party. 

The same type of effect shows up in the various "good for you" rules that make one cough up a drivers license when going into a building, or set an extensive tangle of rules for every manner of activity.

There are a lot of economic strands here as well, tying in the corporate plutocracy, to the emerging authoritarian wave.  Technology - nominally - acts as a restrainer on that wave - but in time acts as an enabler as well.

While we have to see the end result, the rush to tyranny seems well on its way.

The Senate, siding with President Bush shortly after he personally lobbied lawmakers at the Capitol, rejected a move Thursday by a leading Republican to allow terrorism suspects to challenge their imprisonment in court.

Of course, being able to challenge one's detention is the hallmark of habeas corpus.  I already have given the story of Meher Arar - a Canadian siezed wrongly, and then taken to Syria and tortured.

There is also the story of a United States citizen, Cyrus Kar, who was also held illegally.  Funny enough, Cyrus Kar is a former Navy Seal. 

If you look at the Wikipedia page for Cyrus Kar, you will note that:

On July 6, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a petition for habeas corpus on his behalf. On July 10, he was released from military custody.

So - having the ability to file Habeas Corpus is - guess what? useful and effective when wrongly imprisoned.   And yet, Bush wants to gut the possibility of a Cyrus Kar, or a Meher Arar - innocent men - to be able to challenge their detentions. 


Some other, much more knowledgeable legal opinions:

Tyranny:  Our Generation's Version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.  This quotes the NY Times editorial, which accounts the flaws of the piece:

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

Andrew Sullivan - no liberal he - also has a post titled, appropriately enough - Legalizing Tyranny.  Make sure to read the links from that story.


So there you have it. 

Of course, ANY version of integral would be against this.  Any version, and any ethical system - whether religious, or pragmatic, or stemming from any classical philosophies - would be against this.

And so should you be against this.

To shift the focus a bit - does anyone know how Wilber's philosophy locates the pursuit of power for power's sake?  I am assuming this is the old blue, now amber?  

One claim for Spiral Dyamics values, is that there is no "regression" in values.  That may be true individually - I'm still not positive - but at a society level, I'm not sure that holds.