What must be said…loudly…to politicians

Do your job. Make the government work effectively and with luck efficiently.  Do your job. Repair what needs to be fixed, as in roads and bridges; pass a functioning budget; and follow the expert guidance of the commissions that you funded (such as reducing the size of staff).  Do your job. All other issues are peripheral – nice to help your popularity but not relevant if the government continues to malfunction.

Most experts in risk tell us that the number one long term risk in the US is continued dysfunctional government at all levels.  We all have to tell them to focus on the basics, or get out.

And it is time to get everyone to vote.

Acknowledging deep personal failure

I finally have to confront my own long term philosophical absolute failure, and share it.

1) Over time I am aware that I am extremely antiwar.  It makes no sense to kill so many people and destroy so much in commitment of life and treasure that most often has no result.  Yet we are fighting non-stop wars, and forward contracting for ten years for more war, while politicians cry for even more.

2) I work on economic development and progress in general, whether infrastructure or human capital.  Yet all around us the economic drivers of growth are in decline and neglected; and in place we have destruction and decay; while those responsible fritter away time on things none of their business.

3) Fifty years ago we worked hard, protested, and even marched against tribalism.  We devoted months and years of our lives to stop absolute adherence to tribal groups and practices like apartheid. Yet now everyone seems to cluster to tribal instincts – cultural, racial, or belief systems – and apartheid is back.

4) At the end of the day I am a bit of a humanitarian, recognizing that how people treat people matters. Yet everywhere we look we humans are practicing man’s inhumanity to fellow man. Somehow the simple delineation of what is right and what is wrong has gotten lost in cognitive capture.

I can’t watch the television news and commentary.  I cannot read short form articles.  I am a failure.

Remembrances of things past

We are a long distance from Swann’s Way in years, in attitudes, and in wear and tear. Events trigger echoes from our personal histories – it is wonderfully self-indulgent.  I find that the recollections are stream of consciousness, just like Proust, and filled with time traps where it is easy to get lost.  I do.

Although time has calcified dominant views, and as someone who really prefers plants and animals to humans the switch to autumnal colors and smells is better fodder for daydreaming. Later sunrises reveal and confirm Spinoza’s pantheism so we can carry on and grow older with no grace whatsoever.  I would surely prefer starting and finishing each day floating in fall tranquility, but everything intrudes.

The animals do not drive vehicles.  The trees and plants do not operate bulldozers, whose backup signals reverberate all day long for extraordinary distances even in the countryside.  The garden is not self-absorbed and tribal, but humans are. Perhaps we are all destined to be reclusive.

The Singular, if understated, message from the Fed

September meeting, announcements, analysis and reactions focused on the technical details; but I heard one clear message – the growth and normalization of the U.S. economy is confounded by the behavior of the U.S. Congress. Without fiscal participation, monetary policy is at best constrained.

Yellen’s statement merely referenced the situation, but all manner of historical comparisons remind us that some level of fiscal stimulus gives monetary policy leverage for growth.  We have conflict, sequester, no energy policy, little attention to infrastructure, and a budget process overwhelmed with peripheral discussions and not economics. The Fed is forced to the sidelines.

Few if any of the political candidates offer hope to change the impasse.  The message now is clearer than ever --  the U.S. needs an entirely new cast of characters in politics.  Perhaps professionals who care about more than their own electoral success.

Garden September cleanup –TRASH your tomato plants!

It may be a little more work, but please take the time to pull out your tomato plants and put them in the trash --  no mowing, no composting, and no burning (incineration, maybe, if you have no airborne ashes).

The reason is a family of diseases generally referred to as blight.  The source is a set of spores in the soil and plants, and the effects emerge next year.  So please please please take the time to fully clean up plants and dead leaves and get them off your property.  Ask neighbors to do the same (blight is airborne).

Then plan your garden for next year to place your tomato plants in a different spot, and never near potatoes.  Everyone cleaning up will get rid of this stuff.   from Stimigo Farm.

Where did the Chinese hide China?

Six day trip to Beijing, with a pretty hard work schedule.  Have not been north of Shanghai for 17 years, and what I see is a shock – not the gentrification and terrific infrastructure, since I know the effort put in to ready the city for the Olympics.  China has disappeared from view. Even outside the Central Business District, you have to wander deep into the neighborhoods to find an outdoor barbeque or hoards  of street vendors.  I wanted to find a vegetable market, but I had too much work to do.  There are supermarkets now, and they are awful. I cannot help but think that the bureaucrats made one too many trips to Singapore about a dozen years ago and we a suffering the prophylactic result. I guess we should be happy that nobody in the town spits on the sidewalk anymore, but it is a welcome relief that everybody (men) still openly picks their nose.

The question we seldom ask

All the news stories – all the pathos that the twenty somethings roll out with their vocal fog at its most intense fill the airwaves.  Are we really desensitized to the 20 million refugees wandering across our television screens every evening because they are so far away?  After all the US has always taken in international refugees (70,000 – 100,000 and often to our country’s benefit) but compared to the German commitment to 800,000 (they really need the labor force) it is both small in number and clearly inadequate.

Do we have a humanitarian obligation – our country, our families, our communities?  Nobody wants to talk about it – we pay taxes and contribute to charities for that sort of moral compass resolution. Unfortunately one might say the American politicians (not you and I of course) precipitated all of this displacement with their war, excuse me, conflict instigation policies for the past two decades;  but that is beyond the point. There is a humanitarian need, no demand, right now that has paralyzed the West.

Our governments are on holiday, our churches are empty now so nobody hears, and our international organizations are swamped.  Not until each individual asks what their own personal obligation might be can progress be made.  For those who listen, let me debunk the argument that creating more refugee relief will generate more refugees – the migrating masses have nothing left at home.  The classic nonsense between economic migrants vs. refugees is moot with this event.  So is ignorance.