Brain Candy

What does James Madison have to do with Richard II? Let's do a little stretching without a yoga matt.

The Aspen Institute has a local community seminar series called "Athens to Aspen". This year's offering is The Enlightenment, Shakespeare and the American Democratic Experiment.

Leaping right into the deep end with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments… and then plunging right into the mother lode "Wealth of Nations" ... followed by Benjamin Franklin's Principles of Trade "It is in vain imagination that we exist only for ourselves…. "

Which led me straight to Matt Ridley's TED talk "When Ideas Have Sex"

What a tempting thought, the Darwinian Free Market … turning Adam Smith's trickle down into a global bottoms up with the aid of the internet. It's still elitist- you just need a smart phone.

...but is prosperity Justice and is Justice something which humans need to survive? How enlightened is Self Interest?  Can you legislate morality? Do we ever legislate anything other than morality? Does our moral compass change over time? The morality of 17th century Europe would have burned me as a witch. Does the moral compass change due to Culture? The morality of ISIL wouldn't be great for me either.

We're snapped back with reading #3 The Angostura Address by Simón Bolivar and the timeless "A corrupt people can indeed attain freedom but lose it at once." followed by Rousseau's "Freedom is a succulent food but hard to digest" How well Rousseau would have recognized the Arab Spring and how well Robespierre would have recognized ISIL.  Bolivar sets his sights on "the practice of justice is the practice of freedom" and how exactly do we insure Justice? Is Bolivar's Hereditary Senate a college of Cardinals? Do we put Jesuits in charge?  Is an educated bureaucrat the salvation of our souls?  Pope Francis seems to be doing a better job than many of his predecessors. That's a whole different take on "laissez-faire" it's let the synod argue but make the debate transparent- publish the names and let them stand up in a strong wind.

Which leads us nicely into Madison and the Federalist Papers where Madison outlines how to keep Justice in the Republic by distributing power into the hands of the many. The more power is chopped up into small bits and in different hands the more those hands will have to cooperate to achieve a common goal.  It's a nice turn on a core principle of monarchy- keep the Barons poor and occupied and you'll keep the power. It's great until those Barons cooperate and write up a Magna Carta.

Madison is a fascinating character. Jeff Rosen gave a great lecture on the Constitutional Convention at this year's Aspen Ideas:

Back to divide and conquer…a more modern riff on this is Elizabeth Pisani's Indonesia where local "democratic sultanates" keep their autonomy. They keep autonomy because, according to Pisani, they don't have constant oversight from "big government" in Jakarta.  This also echoes back to Bolivar's caution about culture our virtues may be cross cultural but the way we get there certainly has a distinct flavor. 

Can the altruism at the core of Eastern philosophy translate into localized democracy? Damn, that's about as Utopian as you can get in 2014. 

What does Laissez-Faire have to do with Justice? Who's willing to run that experiment .. wait… maybe we are in the middle of that experiment right now.

What does Madison have to do with Richard II? Oh, so much, so very very much. For desert we have a treat.

This is definitely more fun than washing dishes.


The seminar is moderated by Todd Breyfogle, Alexis Diaz, and Stephen Holley.

The Ants March on...

Colin Fletcher is one of my favorite authors. His book "The Man Who Walked Through Time" is probably the best known. It tells the story of his solo walk the length of Grand Canyon National Park. That's not the book which haunts my memory. The one image I think of most is from his book "The Winds of Mara" where he returns to the Kenya of his youth.  There is a moment where he watches ants cross a dirt road. Time stops and the ants march on. The world of human cares fade and the ants march on. Of all the things which have changed since he last walked the Mara this has not, the ants march on.

September 11, 2001 I was on the ranch in Colorado. A short 2 weeks before I'd been in a yellow cab under the World Trade Center riding back to Greenwich Village. We were just finishing a Studio launch for a new network on Bond Street. It was scheduled to go live September 11.  

I, like millions of other Americans, watched the plane hit the second Tower on TV. Like millions of other Americans I saw the film of the Towers falling, over and over again. I spent that week trying to stay in contact with my friends on the East Coast, particularly those who lived in New York. The internet proved the best way to do this which meant I was spending a lot of early morning hours in the Studio.

While walking back from the Studio to the House I saw a line of ants.  It was a beautiful blue fall day with a silent sky.  I stopped. I crouched down and stared at the steady stream. The words rang in my head "The ants don't know that the world has changed forever." 

The second movie at Mountainfilm last evening was "Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden" It's a film about CIA Analysts and Operatives.  Greg Barker must have done a jig when he found Marty Martin, the camera loves him. Reality Show producers worldwide would line up to get Mr. Martin. The "sisterhood" of Analysts were far more compelling although I'm pretty sure "wrangling" them would be like wrangling a room full of Many Patinkin clones. The breakthrough moment was when they recognized the sequencing of seemingly unrelated events revealed an underlying organization, a bureaucracy of terrorism. My favorite line has to be "How can you connect the dots when the whole page is black?"

It's been an interesting summer in Aspen for connecting dots. It started out with Thomas Friedman and Solly Granatstein talking at The Aspen Ideas Festival about their Showtime series "Years of Living Dangerously"

It's basic premise is that climate change leads to revolution. Their argument is the Arab Spring was fueled by the price of bread. There is little question that throughout history climate change has precipitated regime change. 

This was closely followed by the Aspen Security Forum at the Aspen Institute. There was even a session on "Manhunt".  The Security Forum revolved mostly around NSA issues and how 9/11 had shoved us into this policy of gulping mega data. However, the most intriguing session may have been the one on Africom with General Carter Ham who stated that Africom wasn't seen as a military command, until Libya. During the Q&A he elaborated that even though our intelligence gathering and drone ability is the most requested US contribution from local governments our strategic intelligence gathering gets a  "C+" and he stated  "We have to listen first.. we can't carry.. an attitude..we gain as much as we give..." followed by "If you're in search of stability... you may need to bring veterinarians." With a "C+" analysis giving drones their targets, yep I'd rather send out veterinarians.

The icing on the cake was the Aspen Institute's McCloskey Speaker Series with Condoleezza Rice and Raj Shah discussing the state of the Department of State. Podcast

Honestly I never expected to hear "humanitarian work is not separate from political stability" or "subsistence agriculture is at the heart of rebellion" in this talk but it was there. The nod to poverty as an incubator for violence was soon submerged under the old carrot stick standby of "military and economic aid" being the heart of US foreign policy. It all sounded very Cold War and Domino theory Military Advisors. There was a general wariness leaking around the edges of the discussion whenever it touched on the Arab Spring. That's unfamiliar territory.

Which brings me back to 2011. Take a close look at the picture- above the "D" in TED... really closely... you will see a handmade sign in English held by one of the people in Tahrir Square during the protests of 2011. It reads "America  F***  your  Aid" Mr. Khanfar was the one who provided a number of images for his speech. Our projection designer is the one who scaled this one and he *swears* he didn't see the juxtaposition.

 

This was one of the most extraordinary TED talks I've ever seen. 

Wadah Khanfar head  of  Al Jazeera TV talking in February of 2011

 I thought of Wadah Khanfar when I listened to the last words of "Manhunt" which bluntly stated ".... hope that you never have to fight an enemy who has no respect for human life." Whatever ride the documentary had taken me on- whatever admiration I may have had for the tenacity of the Analysts or the dedication of the CIA Operatives, it was wiped out in that last sentence. I had just watched a documentary where torture and invasion was justified. I had just watched a movie where the escalation from 19 drone attacks a month to 300 drone attacks was seen as a something "overenthusiastic" a bit of a runaway train which was a direct response to a ruthless enemy.  The fact that this bred more terrorists was seen as a regrettable and unforeseeable side effect. 

Yet it was only "the enemy" who disrespected human life? 

Really? 

The ants march on, and so do we.

Deja Vu Definitions

This might sound familiar to you "That depends on what the meaning of is is."

If not, here's a little US recent history for you...

Aspen Public Radio is great, they do broadcasts of all sorts of local events and this morning it was a panel from the Aspen Institute Security Forum.

A very impressive panel.

Adm. Dennis Blair (Ret.), Former Director of National Intelligence

Amb. John Negroponte, Former Director of National Intelligence; Vice
Chairman, McLarty Associates

MODERATOR: Barton Gellman, Contributing Editor At Large, TIME

The topic was "Mission Accomplished? Has the Intelligence Community Connected All the Dots?"

Which, of course was the one question no-one answered. What everyone centered on was the NSA and Prism and of course things got a little bit like Ionesco.. since I was only listening on the radio I have no idea who was saying what but the absurdity was not lost because if *any* one of these guys said this it would be equally abstruse.

"I think you're misusing the word 'collect'..storing under a court order is an entirely different thing... "

No, not really, you're making a request which can't be refused and you're crunching all that data. Privacy at that point is moot. You're in the hands of the analyst. 

Having just listened how arcane our computer system is when figuring out the Army payroll this does not make me feel confident. In fact it makes me feel pretty apprehensive. Oddly I don't mind personal information being spread around like marmalade in a Agatha Christie breakfast scene. What I do mind is how someone might misinterpret that data and shower me with the full force of the Patriot Act .

It's not that I distrust the Government it's that I have no confidence in the Government's ability to be human. Especially when you have the people in charge of all that data crunching getting all fussy about the difference between "collect" and "store".

The big driver behind this (as far as I can tell from the Forum- since it is constantly repeated) is that "if companies are gathering this data for their marketing why can't we collect it for intelligence purposes?"

Simple answer, because trying to sell me a viagra is very different than renditioning me to a bottomless pit. I get ads for viagra all the time. I'm not in the market for it. I will never be in the market for it. The charitable conclusion is that data hasn't been analyzed correctly. What happens when the analysis goes awry with the NSA? Do I then get an overnight delivery of an orange jumpsuit and a "ride" to Guantanamo?

Here's the difficult part, I believe in the need for "intelligence". I believe that the meta data can lead to stopping real and present dangers to civilians. But damn, the way it's being parsed? No, that I have no faith in whatsoever. It's an Art and there are very few Artists who thrive in a bureaucratic environment.

In fact I'd hazard a guess that there isn't an Artist alive who would make it through an HR interview.

The other recurring themes at the Security Forum are that the sequester is squeezing the intelligence budget and that you lose a vital element of secrecy whenever you have oversight. Great, less money, less oversight, more data...and absolutely no answer to "have we connected the dots?" Normally, if the question isn't answered it's because the answer isn't one you want to hear.

If you want to watch some of this live it's being streamed by aspeninstitute.org