Cyreenik Says
In mid-June word got out that The Rolling Stone would be publishing an article, The Runaway General, in which General Stanley McChrystal and staff members would be making disparaging remarks about the civilian leaders they had to deal with in the Obama administration, including President Obama.
Obama's reaction to that was to swiftly relieve McChrystal of his command and shortly thereafter to accept his resignation from the armed forces.
Clearly a blunder has occurred, but who made it?
This McChrystal incident resembles the Abu Ghraib photo incident of 2004 and the Air Force One flyby of the Statue of Liberty in 2009 in that whomever was making the choice to have these events recorded had no clue of the storm that would follow if they became public.
But why not? It seems so obvious after the fact.
These three are good examples of delusion thinking. Somehow the decision makers in all three cases did not see their actions in a context that would tell them what a storm they would produce in the American mainstream. They did not see that context because they were not living in that context, and hadn't for a long time. They were deluded.
Delusion is a valuable tool in the human thinking arsenal. It allows human beings to adapt to many different environments and lifestyles. People growing up on tropical beaches and Arctic Sea beaches do not feel the same way about going out on a winter's night. A young soldier living in Afghanistan does not experience the same rewards and threats that a college student in suburban America does. The people living in those different environments need to think and react differently. It helps survival a lot.
The dark side of delusion comes when thinking patterns are developed in one environment, then are applied to a different environment and they don't work well -- the old thinking bumps up against a new harsh reality and it doesn't work. Ouch! Time to learn about a new reality, and doing so can be a painful experience.
McChrystal and his staff, the Abu Ghraib soldiers, and Michael Jackson have now all been famously burned by applying their delusions to the wrong environment.
Blame this blunder on delusion.
...But that still leaves open the question, "Who is delusional?" In the short run it appears that McChrystal has been delusional. But he didn't get that way without reason, and there's nothing that says a delusion can't have lots of company.
This 3 July 10 BBC article, US defense chief Gates tightens military's media rules, outlines a predictable extension of the Blunder Chain that will come from the McChystal Blunder: Clamping down on media contact with the military. The Blunder this will become is that US citizens can't be responsible citizens making good choices if they aren't informed. Yes, there is the chronic issue of the damage caused by passing on military secrets. But this damage must be balanced against the damage caused by poor information flow in the complex social system war is in an Information Age society. If the society is going to make good choices, and support good choices, it needs lots of good information. The more complex the military system becomes, the more important passing around good information becomes compared to keeping things secret from the enemy.
A comparatively public example of a fiasco caused by keeping things too secret was the botched hostage rescue attempt by Jimmy Carter and the military in April 1980 during the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-81. The rescue force was kept so secret they couldn't get good weather reports from the conventional military infrastructure and ended up crashing some of the aircraft involved because of dust storms.
The Carter fiasco is an example of an acute problem caused by too much secrecy. There is also the chronic problem: The more the information flow is restricted in the military, the more this opens the door for future military incompetence, corruption, and even more delusion.
This 17 Jun 10 WSJ editorial, The United States of Throw the Bums Out by Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell, talks about America's growing dissatisfaction with incumbent politicians, and further how the Republicans seem to be gaining mostly because they are the not-Democrats. On the whole, it sounds like a pretty sorry state of affairs.
This state of affairs indicates a Time of Nutcases is coming upon us. It indicates a time of dissatisfaction with conventional solutions, and conventional leaders who are advocating those solutions. This is a time when change, big change, fast change, is in the works.
Because the community is stressed, and conventional leaders and programs are not relieving the stress, we are coming upon the Time for Nutcases. Over the next months-to-years we will experience a time when new leaders will emerge who have new ideas. Many of these new leaders are people who have for years been advocating ideas that were too crazy to be popular, but, now that the not-crazy ideas are not working, many of the crazy ideas will get their time in the sun.
These will be interesting times. A revolution is at hand that will be comparable to the Generation Gap revolution of the 1960's. This time, the generation of Americans, and people around the world, that grew up on cell phones and Internet is ready to get a voice, and that voice doesn't sound like any voice the leaders of today are talking in.
This is a Time of Nutcases because there will be a whole lot more experimenting than usual, and that means a lot more nutty ideas will be explored than usual. Overall, this will be very good, but it will be a scary ride and there will be dark sides. Hitler is the classic nutcase who brought with him a dark side. He was part of The Time of Nutcases that was the 1930's and 40's. The brighter side of that same Time of Nutcases was FDR, who brought America social security and a WWII victory. But the happy ending of that 1930's Era of Nutcases was, really, the Boomer Generation of the above-mention Generation Gap and the liberation of thinking that came in the 1960's... and it's own Time of Nutcases.
What will this upcoming Time of Nutcases bring? Who knows? But it will be an exciting mix of Good and Bad, Ugly and Beautiful, and in the end we will be living in an era with a new standard way of thinking about how we should relate to other people and this world we live in.
Japan suffered more than ten years of slow growth after its bubble burst in 1989. This era is often called Japan's Lost Decade. It happened in part because Japanese banks were slow to dispose of the toxic assets that became evident as the bubble burst and this impeded subsequent growth. According to this 14 Jun 10 WSJ article, Avoiding a Lost Decade for Economic Growth by Peter Eavis, the US banks are following in Japan's footsteps, in this case by not disposing of mortgages and other real estate, which keeps the pricing of real estate uncertain, which chills the market.
Update: A 26 Jul 10 WSJ article, Wells Wins in a Japan-Style Slump, wondering if the US is heading into a "Nippon Nightmare" and which banks will do well if it does.
Yup, this is sure shaping up to be a classic Panic and Blunder -- expect choices that are very expensive in the long run, but choices that sure seem like the right ideas at the time to those making the decision.
Here we have a first-of-its-kind and very scary situation. This situation is ripe for more Blunders. Expect more very expensive mistakes to be made before we get through this crisis.
For example, BP's credit rating at Fitch Ratings has submarined six notches in one day over the possibility of being forced to put 20 billion in escrow -- some kind of record as no one at the agency can recall when this kind of ratings dive has happened to a large non-financial company before. ...And this even though the escrow plan is not likely to be legal.
More evidence of the panic nature of this event. This Washington Post 17 Jun 10 article, GOP leaders forced Rep. Barton to retract apology to BP by Aaron Blake and Paul Kane, explains that congressman Joe Barton apologized to BP for the 20 billion dollar shakedown at a hearing he was conducting, then is forced to retract that apology or lose his committeeship. Here we have a "cool head" expressing his opinion and being vigorously censured for doing so. Yes, the emotions are running high, and we are in virgin territory in terms of US experience. This is still scaring people deeply, and the Blunders will continue.
This 15 Jun 10 WSJ editorial, Obama's Political Oil Fund, talks about the panic swirling around Washington concerning BP, and this 16 Jun 10 WSJ journal article, Multiple Realities Weigh on BP, talks about one of the consequences of that panic thinking on Wall Street.
...And yet more in this 17 Jun 10 WSJ editorial, Crude Politics, which explains that several engineers quoted as backing the drilling moratorium in the Interior Department recommendation in fact did not, and that the cost of the moratorium is going to be huge. At its end the article quotes Louisiana's Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph in referring to the drilling moratorium, "Mr. President, you were looking for someone's butt to kick. You're kicking ours."
... And still more media mob-shouting as Tony Hayward, the BP CEO, is roundly criticized for attending a yacht race with his son in this 19 Jun 10 New York Times article, BP Chief Draws Outrage for Attending Yacht Race.
And this 2 Jul 10 WSJ editorial, Why Is the Gulf Cleanup So Slow?, talks about how more cleanup could be done, but federal bureaucracy is standing in the way of letting foreign cleanup ships help, mustering more domestic skimmers from other locales, and letting local people build protective sand berms. The article wonders if this could be another flavor of Rahm Emanuel's tactic of not letting a serious crisis go to waste?
It has burst upon the media scene with suddenness. There are now ethnic riots, large masses of refugees, and killing violence in Kyrgyzstan. The violence indicates a blunder has occurred. What are its roots?
When the War on Terror started way back in 2002, the US needed a secure base from which to launch its attacks on terrorists in Afghanistan. Afghanistan itself could not offer an appropriate place and for reasons unknown to me neither could Pakistan. But, once again for reasons unknown to me, Kyrgyzstan could and it became a strategic location in the eyes of the US military. In this it is following in the footsteps of both Somalia and Pakistan -- Somalia was strategic during the Cold War as an offset to Ethiopia when it became Soviet-leaning after Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974, and Pakistan was strategic as an offset to India when it became Soviet-leaning after its independence from Britain in 1947.
In all of these cases, the US has paid money to the national government and tried to help the national government keep a lid on local unrest, and this has had a big influence on local affairs. The effect has been to give the national government more influence than it would have had if the US had not shown an interest. In Somalia's case, US and Soviet interest waned as the Cold War waned. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1989, and Somalia's military dictatorship dissolved in the 1990-91 time frame. What replaced it was a resurgence in the influence of local governments... a warlord era that goes on to this day, and this is why Somalia is often labeled a failed state. Pakistan is not considered a failed state, but it too constantly contends with strong tribal interests.
Could this failed state fate await Kyrgyzstan? As Afghanistan has proved decisively several times in the last couple centuries, national thinking is tough to mix with Central Asian geopolitics. If it wasn't strategic, this wouldn't matter. So, the question now becomes, "Is Kyrgyzstan still strategic?" If it is, then US, Russian and UN interests will spend big bucks to quell these riots and rebuild the national veneer. If not, welcome to the New North Afghanistan.
An article in the 11 Jun 10 New York Times, F.D.A. Faults Companies on Unapproved Genetic Tests, starts with "The FDA is cracking down on 23andMe and other companies that sell genetic tests directly to consumers. ...saying their tests are medical devices that must receive regulatory approval before they can be marketed."
Health care is a textbook example of The Curse of Being Important, and this is a perfect chapter. We have a new technology here that has great promise to better our lives, deepen our understanding of ourselves, and is not life-threatening, but the government still feels it must intervene, and the American community is likely to support that contention.
The other aspect of The Curse that this shows off is that small scale and low-cost endeavors are those that suffer worst when The Curse is strong. Part of what the FDA fears from these devices is Do-It-Yourself (DYI) medical diagnosing, on that grounds that medical diagnosing is something that should be done by qualified professionals, not by quacks and fortune-tellers.
Since prehistoric times medical care has always been an intensely emotional issue, which means there has always been a big market for emotionally pleasing solutions to health care problems. But times are changing, and the time when a great blooming of effective solutions coming from our better understanding of genetics and biology is about to come upon us.
But to really take advantage of the promises of these fields, we need to be actively trying to remove The Curse. If we don't, biology will deliver as much on its promise over the next few decades as nuclear power delivered on its promise in the decades after WWII... nearly nothing.
A 6 Jun 10 The Economist article, The men who stare at airline passengers, talks about the TSA's SPOT program. This is a program where TSA people are trained to spot trouble makers simply by looking at them. It is based on the work of Paul Ekman (also the basis for the TV series "Lie to Me") who no longer publishes in peer-reviewed journals "because they're read closely by scientists in countries that America considers to be threats."
Ummm...
Air travel has always suffered deeply from The Curse of Being Important. In its early days, from Kitty Hawk up to the 1960's, flying for most people was the stuff of dreams and jaunty heroes, and The Curse showed itself mostly as lots of chefs working on the broth.
But as air travel became a commodity way of moving from city to city, the nature of The Curse changed. As I have discussed in other columns one thing it came to need was a religious service for those who had to fly even though they were scared of flying. After 9-11 this need for faith, ritual and sacrifice was filled by the passenger inspection routines of the TSA. Letting that happen -- letting religion and security mix -- was a Blunder for the airlines.
The next round of Blunder is coming upon us now: Letting the government dictate how passengers should be treated, as outlined in this 2 June 10 New York Times article, U.S. Presses the Airlines to Satisfy the Traveler, by Susan Stellin.
There have always been dozens of lines of authority in the commercial air travel business. Airlines are one, airport owners are another. So are air traffic controllers, airplane designers, airplane maintainers, unions, uncounted regulatory agencies, and, since airlines and airports operate with a lot of debt, financiers. Add to this mix the media circus that comes to life every time there's a commercial airplane accident, and you see that the air travel process has a hefty amount of Curse to deal with.
With so many groups interested in the air travel process, and tax payers paying for so much of the process, it's not surprising that travelers these days get treated like ticket punches, not paying customers who need to be paid attention to. They are becoming like medical patients and college students, and being treated like them by their service providers.
This latest round of government patronizing simply shows how deep the disconnect has become between passengers and the air travel providers.
Don't expect the situation to get any better until two things happen:
o The lines of authority in the air travel business are streamlined.
o The air traveler foots more of the bill and the taxpayer foots less.
Update: This 9 Jul 10 ABC News article, Airlines Ground Thousands of Passengers to Avoid Tarmac Fines, describes how airlines are canceling more flights to avoid the hefty fines for tarmac delays. This is a no-surprise example of the Law of Unintended consequences. The airlines predicted this would happen, and it has. The only question now is: Who is happier that this is happening?
Update: More panic thinking on the airline situation. Now politicians are making political hay by making outrage statements, as reported in this 15 Jul 10 WSJ article, Lawmakers Consider Taxing Airlines' Fees. House Transportation Committee Chairman James Oberstar (D., Minn.) and Rep. Jerry Costello (D., Ill.) are calling for government taxes on the new airline fees. This may be feel good talk, and even become action, but is it going to make the airlines any more responsive to their passengers?
-- The End --