The Little State With a Big Mess

[ed. This is a story that will likely engulf many other states and municipalities soon, involving the legal validity of contractual obligations (and the potential suffering pensioners are likely to face)  vs. political can-kicking over decades of budget and labor negotiations, unrealistic expectations for return on investments (8.25 percent?), and protection of bond holders at all costs.] 

by Mary Williams Walsh, NY Times

On the night of Sept. 8, Gina M. Raimondo, a financier by trade, rolled up here with news no one wanted to hear: Rhode Island, she declared, was going broke.

Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow. But if current trends held, Ms. Raimondo warned, the Ocean State would soon look like Athens on the Narragansett: undersized and overextended. Its economy would wither. Jobs would vanish. The state would be hollowed out.  (...)

After decades of drift, denial and inaction, Rhode Island’s $14.8 billion pension system is in crisis. Ten cents of every state tax dollar now goes to retired public workers. Before long, Ms. Raimondo has been cautioning in whistle-stops here and across the state, that figure will climb perilously toward 20 cents. But the scary thing is that no one really knows. The Providence Journal recently tried to count all the municipal pension plans outside the state system and stopped at 155, conceding that it might have missed some. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission is asking questions, including the big one: Are these numbers for real?

“We’re in the fight of our lives for the future of this state,” Ms. Raimondo said in a recent interview. And if the fight is lost? “Either the pension fund runs out of money or cities go bankrupt.”

All of this might seem small in the scheme of national affairs. After all, this is Little Rhody (population: 1,052,567). But the nightmare scenario is that Ms. Raimondo has seen the future of America, and it is Rhode Island. As Wall Street fixates on the financial disaster in Greece, a fiscal wreck is playing out right here. And the odds are that it won’t be the last. Before this is over, many Americans may be forced to rethink what government means at the state and local level.

Economists have talked endlessly about a financial reckoning for the United States, of a moment in the not-so-far-away when the nation’s profligate ways catch up with it. But for Rhode Island, that moment is now. The state has moved to safeguard its bond investors, to avoid being locked out of the credit markets. Last week, the General Assembly went into special session and proposed rolling back benefits for public employees, including those who have already retired. Whether the plan will succeed is anyone’s guess.

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Illustration: Tim Durning

Maki, Haku, 1924-2000
Work 74-51
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Domino Effect (by fatheed)
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Facebook’s Gone Rogue

[ed.  Pretty much sums up my reasons for dropping out of FB.  After a while I couldn't keep up with all the 'enhancements' Facebook kept implementing.  So, I decided the best way to accomplish what I wanted to do i.e. share things that I find interesting, was to start this blog.  Now friends can stop by if they want to, and I don't have to plaster everybody's walls with posts.  It's much better and I don't need to rely on an intermediary with an evolving and confusing agenda.  Still, the Facebook experience is worthwhile, if only to better understand how social media functions these days.]   

by Ryan Singel, Wired

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if you didn’t really want to keep up with them.

Soon everybody — including your uncle Louie and that guy you hated from your last job — had a profile.

And Facebook realized it owned the network.

Then Facebook decided to turn “your” profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.

So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

This includes your music preferences, employment information, reading preferences, schools, etc. All the things that make up your profile. They all must be public — and linked to public pages for each of those bits of info — or you don’t get them at all. That’s hardly a choice, and the whole system is maddeningly complex.

Simultaneously, the company began shipping your profile information off pre-emptively to Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft — so that if you show up there while already logged into Facebook, the sites can “personalize” your experience when you show up. You can try to opt out after the fact, but you’ll need a master’s in Facebook bureaucracy to stop it permanently.

Care to write a status update to your friends? Facebook sets the default for those messages to be published to the entire internet through direct funnels to the net’s top search engines. You can use a dropdown field to restrict your publishing, but it’s seemingly too hard for Facebook to actually remember that’s what you do. (Google Buzz, for all the criticism it has taken, remembers your setting from your last post and uses that as the new default.)

Now, say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show up on the FBI or CIA page.

Then there’s the new Facebook “Like” button littering the internet. It’s a great idea, in theory — but it’s completely tied to your Facebook account, and you have no control over how it is used. (No, you can’t like something and not have it be totally public.)

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The Waterboys

And I will stroll the merry way and jump the hedges first
And I will drink the clear clean water for to quench my thirst
And I shall watch the ferry-boats and they’ll get high
On a blue ocean, against tomorrow’s sky

And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
And I will never grow so old again
Oh sweet thing, sweet thing
My, my, my, my, my sweet thing

And I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry
Hey, it’s me! I’m dynamite and I don’t know why
And you shall take me warm in your arms again
And I will not remember that I ever felt the pain

And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
And never ever ever ever ever get so old again

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The Road to Melville

Even though I hadn’t read a word of it, I grew up hating Moby-Dick. My father was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh with a specialty in American maritime literature, and that big, battle-scarred book came to represent everything I resented about his job: all the hours he spent in his attic study, relentlessly reading and writing, more often than not with Moby-Dick spread out before him.

Sometimes he even dared talk about the novel, inevitably in an excited, reverential tone that only exasperated me all the more. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school, when my English teacher made it clear that I had no choice in the matter, that I finally read Moby-Dick . I soon found myself in the worst position an adolescent male can ever know: having to admit that maybe, just maybe, his father had been right all along.

The voice of Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, caught me completely by surprise. I had expected to be bored to death, but Ishmael sounded like the best friend I had not yet managed to find. Thirty-seven years later, after reading Moby-Dick cover to cover at least a dozen times, I still count Ishmael as a beloved soulmate and spiritual adviser. Not only is he funny, wise, and bighearted, he is the consummate survivor, for it is he and he alone who lives to tell about Ahab’s encounter with the White Whale. For me, Moby-Dick is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual—the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century. (...)

Melville’s intense imaginative engagement with these forces of turmoil and change meant that the novel he wrote and re-wrote over the course of a year beginning in September 1850 would be about much more than a whaling voyage to the Pacific. Indeed, contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that had contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 and were about to precipitate a civil war in 1861, and that have continued to drive this country’s ever contentious march across 160 years, up through the current “war on terror.” This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations of readers have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or, closer to our own day, as a profit-mad, deep-drilling oil company in 2010, or as one of several power-crazed Middle Eastern dictators in 2011.

The irony is that when Moby-Dick was first published, in the fall of 1851, virtually no one, except for the author to whom the novel was dedicated, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his wife, Sophia, seems to have taken much notice. By the time of Melville’s death, in 1891, Moby-Dick had sold a grand total of 3,715 copies—a third of the total that his first novel, Typee, had sold. It wasn’t until after World War I that what had begun as a few belated plaudits became a virtual tidal wave of praise. There were still some naysayers (Joseph Conrad ridiculed Moby-Dick for its romantic, overblown prose), but the vast majority of writers who first encountered the book were stunned and deeply influenced by how Melville conveyed the specifics of a past world even as he communicated an unmatched sense of what it is like, in any age, to be alive. What Moby-Dick had needed, it turned out, was space—the distance required for its themes and images to resonate, unfettered by the passions that had inspired them. Once free of its own time, the novel was on its way to becoming the seemingly timeless source of meaning that it is today.

By Nathaniel Philbrick, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Illustration: Moby-Dick and Ahab, Claus Hoie, 1911- Norwegian/American

Robert Sapolsky: The Uniqueness of Being Human

[ed.  Fascinating lecture, and Mr. Sapolsky is an engaging speaker.  I know it's long, but there are a lot of interesting things here.]

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Not So Fast

 by Spencer Ackerman, Wired 

President Obama announced on Friday that all 41,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq will return home by December 31. “That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end,” he said. Don’t believe him.

Now: it’s a big deal that all U.S. troops are coming home. For much of the year, the military, fearful of Iranian influence, has sought a residual presence in Iraq of several thousand troops. But arduous negotiations with the Iraqi government about keeping a residual force stalled over the Iraqis’ reluctance to provide them with legal immunity.

But the fact is America’s military efforts in Iraq aren’t coming to an end. They are instead entering a new phase. On January 1, 2012, the State Department will command a hired army of about 5,500 security contractors, all to protect the largest U.S. diplomatic presence anywhere overseas.  (...)

That means no one outside the State Department knows how its contractors will behave as they ferry over 10,000 U.S. State Department employees throughout Iraq — which, in case anyone has forgotten, is still a war zone. Since Iraq wouldn’t grant legal immunity to U.S. troops, it is unlikely to grant it to U.S. contractors, particularly in the heat and anger of an accident resulting in the loss of Iraqi life.

It’s a situation with the potential for diplomatic disaster. And it’s being managed by an organization with no experience running the tight command structure that makes armies cohesive and effective.

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Living the crisis in Greece.  Dimitra Tzanos

Friday Book Club - I Want My Hat Back

[ed.  I haven't read this yet and am just waiting for the right person to give it to.  I quite enjoy Jon Klassen's illustrations.]

...speaking of great children’s books, everything you have read or heard about Jon Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back is true.

The book is funny, gorgeous, and perfect — an instant classic if ever there was one. Beautiful minimalist art and smart, funny writing.

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How New Science Is Revealing the Power of Meditation and Prayer

by Steve Volk

(...)  Robert’s goal was to reach a bliss that humans have been chasing, and finding, for thousands of years: the transcendent experience. In this condition, the human mind, normally so noisy with the worries of the day, quiets to a hush. Time and space drop away. The meditator feels one with the universe—every atom of every body, all part of his body. For centuries, mystics have described this root experience in varying terms, and in metaphorical language. The “ecstasy of unity,” as Edgar Mitchell put it in the previous chapter, is both real and ineffable—an experience beyond words.

Newberg waited for an hour, unsure if the plan would work, and then—he felt it: a small tug on the length of twine running between him and Robert. This was the signal Robert was to give just before he reached the state Newberg wanted to study. Newberg waited a few beats, allowing Robert to achieve whatever nirvana he’d won for himself, then jumped into action. He opened the door between him and Robert and injected the intravenous line with a radioactive tracer. If the injection was precisely timed, the tracer would document the blood flow patterns in Robert’s brain at the moment his meditation reached its peak.

Rousing Robert from his meditation, Newberg then hustled him to a room in the Nuclear Medicine Department. He laid him down on a long metal table and slid him under a huge, high-tech SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Temography) camera, designed to detect radioactive emissions.

Newberg didn’t know whether this part of the experiment would work. No one had ever tried this before. But the results were all he could reasonably have wanted. Looking over the SPECT scan, Newberg could see that the areas of Robert’s brain associated with judging distances, angles, and depths—in short, his position in space—had gone whisper-quiet. During normal consciousness, this area—the posterior superior parietal lobe—lights up on a SPECT scan with the furious red of active blood flow. This part of our brain has a lot of work to do. It keeps us from running into walls and missing the chairs we intend to sit in. Even when we’re still, in fact, this area of the brain remains active: always aware of which parts of our body are in contact with the chair, and which are floating in space; how far away the water glass sits on the table, and how high. But in Robert, during the peak of his meditation, the blazing red turned cool green and blue. The suggestion was obvious: Robert felt himself become one with the universe because the part of his brain that tells him where his body begins and the objects around him end pretty much shut down.

Newberg studied eight Tibetan meditators and took similar pictures. Then he moved on to Franciscan nuns, who practice a form of meditation called “Christian centering prayer.” A new field of science was born. And as Newberg accumulated data, he made an important finding: “The altered states of mind [our subjects] described as the absorption of the self into something larger were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple, wishful thinking,” writes Newberg in Why God Won’t Go Away, “but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events, which, while unusual, are not outside the range of normal brain function.”

In short, the world’s mystics have not been kidding themselves—or crazy. But what did this say, if anything, about God or spirituality?

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The Re-Birth of Cool

[ed. Definitely click on the Reid Miles link to get an eye-opening perspective on this amazing artist's career.] 

Hi-Fi from bante on Vimeo.

Back in 2009, Blue Note Records, the influential jazz label, was celebrating its 70th anniversary. And The Bella Vista Social Pub, looking to promote its own summer jazz concerts in Siena, Tuscany, came up with a smart idea. Why not pay tribute to Blue Note (and promote the Italian concert series) by animating the cool cover designs that graced Blue Note albums during its heyday. These cover designs were the work of Reid Miles, a graphic designer who moved from Esquire magazine to Blue Note around 1955, then designed hundreds of aura-creating covers until he left the label in 1967. The animated video above, called Hi-Fi, brings Miles’ work back to life. Graphicology has more on the nostalgia-inducing clip here.

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Bitter Brew

by Michael Idov, Slate

You know that charming little cafe on New York's Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business—where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.

I never realized how ubiquitous the dream of opening a small coffeehouse was until I fell under its spell myself. Friends' eyes misted over when my wife and I would excitedly recite our concept ("Vienna roast from Vienna! It's lighter and sweeter than bitter Italian espresso—no need to drown it in milk!"). It seemed that just about every boho-professional couple had indulged in this fantasy at some point or another.

The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one's own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they're going to lose a lot of it.

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Billions and Billions

What is the limit to population growth?

by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker

Sometime on October 31st, the world’s population will hit seven billion. The baby who does the trick will most likely appear in India, where the number of births per minute—fifty-one—is higher than in any other nation. But he or she could also be born in China—the world’s most populous country—or in a fast-growing nation like Nigeria or Guatemala or, really, anywhere. The idea that a particular child will on a particular day bring the global population to a particular number is, of course, a fiction; nobody can say, within tens of millions, how many people there are on earth at any given time. The United Nations Population Fund has picked October 31st as its best estimate. That this date is Halloween is presumably just a coincidence.

Depending on how you look at things, it has taken humanity a long time to reach this landmark, or practically no time at all. Around ten thousand years ago, there were maybe five million people on earth. By the time of the First Dynasty in Egypt, the number was up to about fifteen million, and by the time of the birth of Christ it had climbed to somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred million. Global population finally reached a billion around 1800, just a couple of years after Thomas Malthus published his famous essay warning that human numbers would always be held in check by war, pestilence, or “inevitable famine.”

In a distinctly un-Malthusian fashion, population then took off. It hit two billion in the nineteen-twenties, and was three billion by 1960. In 1968, when Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” predicting the imminent deaths of hundreds of millions of people from starvation, it stood at around three and a half billion; since then, it has been growing at the rate of a billion people every twelve or thirteen years. According to the United Nations, it reached six billion on October 12, 1999. (A baby boy born in Sarajevo, Adnan Mević, was, for symbolic purposes, designated the world’s six-billionth person and greeted at the hospital by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.) For large and slow-to-reproduce mammals like humans, such a growth curve is, to put it mildly, unusual. Edward O. Wilson has called “the pattern of human population growth” in the twentieth century “more bacterial than primate.”

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Illustration: Tom Bachtell

Tombstone Generator

[ed.  Perhaps you're the kind of person that doesn't like to leave anything to chance - like letting your loved ones come up with a suitable inscription for your headstone (they'll be too busy fighting over your will).  So, just in time for Halloween - your own personal Tombstone Generator.]

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Thanks GS