FFT

Unlike most people, Thomas Homer-Dixon doesn’t think today’s world economic crisis is very complicated. He thinks it’s very complex, which makes for a world of difference in understanding which government anti-recession programs will fail (most of them) and deciding which ones can help.
Homer-Dixon, who chairs a centre for global systems analysis at the University of Waterloo, is one of the world’s leading thinkers in the field of “complexity theory,” and the author of several international bestsellers, including The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down. He brings a missing dimension to thinking about remedies to the looming economic collapse that that’s so far been excluded from public and media debate. “If ever there was a case of experts not knowing what’s happening, it’s this economic crisis,” he says.
Hang in for the introductory lecture on Chaos Theory 101, and you’ll be able to follow and lead the economics debate in fresh ways.
Homer-Dixon is the first to admit he has no straight-ahead answers to a downturn that’s much more challenging that the Great Depression of the 1930s, to which it’s often unthinkingly compared. “We’ve never seen a collapse on this scale before in an environment of such enormous complexity and such a huge number of unk-unks,” he says, in a reference to the term used during his days working with Pentagon analysts who referred to unknown unknowns.
The way in which a relatively small proportion of mortgage defaults in one country during the fall of 2008 precipitated the collapse of a global economic house of cards expresses a telltale, if seemingly illogical, sign of complex systems in crisis – a very small cause leading to a very huge result, like the final grain of snow or shift of wind that produce a mountain avalanche.
But in Homer-Dixon’s view, that small cause, and even slightly bigger versions of that small cause – the breakdown of integrity in the global financial system, or the inequality that put home purchases beyond the reach of typical families, for example – is only a small part of an overall mix of “cascading failures.” His list of factors converging into a catastrophic perfect storm include intensified inequality, increased global warming, rising resource prices, and the “sheer productivity of capitalism – in many ways the deepest of all causes,” he says, since it produces chronic gluts in desperate search for markets. Together, they overloaded a rigid and “tightly coupled” global financial system that spread uncontrollable wildfires.
“Multiple stresses that reinforced each other” led to “a collapse of assets greater and faster” than anything witnessed during the simpler days of the Great Depression, he says. That’s why simplistic and one-dimensional rhetoric from politicians and pundits about fixing the problem, putting the pieces back together, and managing the crisis betrays a failure to understand what’s going down, he says. “Complex problems require complex solutions. It’s the law of requisite variety. We need a repertoire of responses as complex as the environment. “We must move from management to complex adaptation.”
Just as bodies under stress require core strength in the lower abdomen, economies and societies under shock require sources of core strength, what hip policy experts increasingly refer to as “robustness” and “resilience.” Government policy makers need to focus their view on the prize of supporting resilience in the population. Failure of governments to be on constant alert for the pitfalls of economic giantism or to be on guard for stresses in social resilience “is like not requiring cities to be earthquake-proof,” he says.
“Resilience means helping people to take care of themselves better in tough times,” rather than relying on specialization and expertise, he says, a guideline that puts a community’s ability to feed itself and care for each other at the top of his to-do list.
Here’s how I simplify Homer-Dixon’s analysis, in ways that he may or may not agree with.
When public money is used to keep enterprises afloat, the public has a right to demand that public benefits be spread among the general public. In my opinion, a longstanding (if best-kept secret) of Canadian employment insurance policy should be extended to all public enterprises and bailed-out private enterprises, including car companies and banks. Canada’s federal government allows workers at a company facing lay-offs to opt for everyone sharing the layoff by working a four day week, and everyone sharing the employment insurance by being covered on their one day a week of unemployment. This measure does not cost the employment insurance system a dime, since five people taking a payout for a day is the same as one person taking a payout for a week. It allows a workforce to stay intact for better times, maintains morale among workers and within a community, and protects younger workers with families, a group unlikely to enjoy high seniority.
This simple measure would abolish unemployment overnight, maintain purchasing power in the community, and buy people the time to become more resilient and self-reliant in their own lives, by gardening, cooking from scratch or insulating their walls, for example. It would even give people some time to sleep, the least acknowledged of the crucial determinants of health and well-being.
Only the epidemics of workaholism and every-man-for-himselfishism have kept this obvious low-pain remedy off the agenda for so long.
Having bolstered purchasing power in the community-at-large, the multiplier effect of that purchasing power needs to be captured for public benefit by requiring all government and publicly-bailed-out institutions to purchase local and local-sustainable food, recognizing that the food industry already produces almost as many jobs as the auto industry and can directly employ local people. Since one job for a local farmer commonly leads to five jobs producing farm inputs or off-farm processing, this doable measure is an employment bonanza that also yields major health and environmental benefits. This also fulfills Homer-Dixon’s call for self-reliant and unplugged systems that remove essentials of life from the vagaries of uncontrollable forces.
This depression does not have to hurt. Get beyond the complications into the complexity, and discover what Homer-Dixon calls “the upside to down.”

- Wayne Roberts

Which is why I wear a bike helmet...

I think if I lost my mind, I would go crazy (well, no duh, of course I'd be crazy if I had no mind - ha ha). But seriously, I think if I was to have a significant head injury, or a stroke, or early dementia, something that would seriously limit or eliminate my ability to reason, to remember, to express myself.... gosh, I would go mad. Having to go around and excuse myself because I couldn't explain myself well or remember things appropriately, or to have a goofy grin on my face all the time, because I wasn't able to distinguish sarcasm or ill-will from well-wishers, or to be unable to put together a sentence, let alone a recipe.... I think that would be worse than malignant metastatic cancer, to be honest.

FFT

When I think of Jesus, I think of the mystery of divine personality, the startling coalescence of contrarieties that I see in Him. He was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men, yet He spoke of coming on the clouds of heaven with the glory of God. He was so austere that evil spirits and demons cried out in terror at His coming, yet He was so genial and winsome and approachable that the children loved to play with Him and the little ones nestled in His arms. His presence at the innocent gaiety of a village wedding was like the presence of sunshine. No one was half so kind or compassionate to sinners, yet no one ever spoke such red hot scorching words about sin. A bruised reed He would not break, His whole life was love, yet on one occasion He demanded of the Pharisees how they were expected to escape the damnation of hell. He was a dreamer of dreams, and a seer of visions, yet for sheer stark realism, He has all of our self-styled realists soundly beaten. He was the servant of all, washing the disciples' feet, yet masterfully He strode into the Temple, and the hucksters and moneychangers fell over one another to get away in their mad rush from the fire they saw blazing in His eyes. He saved others, yet, at the last, Himself He did not save. There is nothing in history like the union of contrast which confronts us in the Gospels. The mystery of Jesus as steward is the mystery of divine personality.
- James Stewart

What next?

I was inspired today. I've been tugging at the ear of any number of mentors that have even dared cross my path to ask them, "What next? What next for me?". Now, I've had a multitude of different answers, depending on how well they know me, and, thankfully, offers for people to pray for me as well, which, I think, will be the most powerful determinant of all.
Today, I'd finagled my way into meeting with a world leader in an area I would certainly like to head into, and he advised me to stay put (argh!!!!), but.... also offered a way to enter into this new world. I have been tossing around ideas of more schooling, drastically changing my career trajectory, etc, but, though he'd never met me before in his life, actually advised me to do something that has been percolating around in my head for a while, though I'd never had a target to aim for specifically. Until today.
Now, I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to go about this, and I'm not entirely convinced I'll be good at it either. Actually, I think I'm more concerned, that having been trained in one particular specialized domain, that I may not be very good at most anything else, actually. Well, we shall see how that goes; in between all the other issues and things I participate in, this will be definitely a challenge. However, the suggestion resonates with me somehow. It certainly seems more appealing than going for a Master's degree...

I walk like I drive

I was musing on how we walk on sidewalks today. Not that this is a particularly new observation, but I find it interesting how we tend to walk on the right side of sidewalks. When trying to pass by slower moving people, we tend to walk by on their left, and then merge back onto the right side of the street. Furthermore, when we are passing oncoming pedestrians, we tend to pass each other on the left side.
In addition to this, when on escalators, standing people stay on the right, whereas walkers move on the left side of escalators.
This is particularly striking when you go to countries where they drive on the left side of the road; there, pedestrians walk in the exact opposite manner that I just described, and when you're walking by them, they get very confused when you try to walk by them on their left side.
This makes me wonder as to how we conditioned ourselves to walk like CARS! Humanity has walked on its own two feet for millennia, yet our conventions as to how to do so over the past century have been defined by machines. I find that disturbing, that we have modified our natural habits to be in harmony with the machinations of industry. I mean, not that we haven't sacrificed much already, but for something as natural and mindless as walking, it is odd how we have narrowed the expression of how we ambulate.
Perhaps, then, that Monty Python's famous "Silly Walk" sketch is not so much comedy as it is manifesto. A call to take back our own feet and to move in ways that please us, not in ways that simply conform to the miles of highways that our cars sit upon.

In stark contradiction to the last post...

If there is one thing I'm convinced of (though there are many), it is this: If it seems that the whole world is against you, and that everybody is hateful and wrong, and that nobody is being nice to you, and that everything is not going your way, I can only see one common denominator in all of this: YOU.
It is fatiguing to hear people rail about how their family, their employer, their medical providers, absolutely everyone is incompetent/ uncaring/ unreasonable/ etc, while they are the poor victims of everybody else's sadistic and heartless actions. How everything negative going on in their life is everybody else's fault, and they cannot accept any of the responsibility themselves. When it becomes that extreme, I can't help but point out that there is only one thread that binds it all together.
One of my patients, for whom my patience is starting to run thin, regularly comes in every few weeks to yell and rant at me how everybody is letting them down, how nobody is recognizing their needs, how we're all out to get them, medical personnel, friends and employer alike. How I am complicit in all of this, as I have not fixed all their myriad of problems, and have done 'absolutely nothing' to help them. Is there ever any point, that every time, I point out how they have refused to see consultants, how they have refused to take medications, how they have refused to do testing that others have suggested, how they have refused to participate in work rehabilitation, how they have refused to ever be just plain nice? After which, without fail, they state that their problems are actually mine to fix, and I am not taking my responsibility to fix their life seriously. Excuse me?
Let's be clear: I am not your babysitter. I am not your nanny. I am not your mommy. My job is not to fix your life for you when you have broken it yourself. I make strong suggestions and recommendations, and you can take it, or leave it. I will not fight you if you disagree with everything I say, but I certainly would question why you'd bother to keep coming back...

Disease and dis-ease are two different things...

I think I need to actually write this down: I liked being at work today. I'm only saying that because that's a fairly radical thing for me to say.
The only thing that leads me to say that particularly today is because I felt a bit more useful than I usually do. Let me try to explain: sure, a good portion of my job is to look at medical stuff, diagnose a problem, give somebody medicine or something that will make it go away, problem solved, whoopee. To me, that's a bit mechanical, a bit simplistic, a bit too square and logical.
What an even bigger chunk of my job involves is looking objectively at people's life circumstances and diagnose what's holding them back. That is to say, look at their relationships, their marriages, their work lives and point out what's really wrong with them. Now, it is frustrating to do this with individuals who, for various reasons are not able to listen or hear anything I have to say, let alone internalize it and do something productive with it. However, when it is with people who have the wherewithal to make some positive changes in their lives, and accept help to direct them to make good choices, then it's very satisfying.
I had a few of those today: a distraught wife, desperately unhappy in her marriage. A man being harassed by an ex, causing him great anxiety. A wife, struggling with the aftermath of her husband's affair. A woman deciding whether to continue her affair with a married man or not. A girl feeling guilty about break-up sex. And on and on it goes (and people wonder why I'm a bit cynical about how deliriously happy marriage can really be). And that was just today.
Helping clarify the underlying issues that resulted in the situations that they are in, that their situations are manifestations of other deeper needs in their lives, and watching a small lightbulb go off in their head, is satisfying. Sometimes it makes me feel a bit like Dr. Phil somehow. Well, like, the old Dr. Phil, not the current one. This is not to say that it's easy to implement life change at all, nor do I think it's as easy as swallowing a pill. However, it is nice to know that a lot of what I do doesn't involve pushing pills or opting for medical, physical explanations for dis-ease, in both body and soul...

Elegy

Some very good friends of mine were dealt a fairly devastating blow, being told that their child was, indeed, diagnosed with a significant developmental delay. It was not a particular surprise, as there had been much indication that there was much not right with the child for quite some time. Nonetheless, the finality and permanence of a diagnosis leads one down the path of an inexorable, unalterable future.
I don't know what to say; I cannot know what to say. I am sad for what future dreams and hopes they had counted on would happen, should happen, for normal, regular families. I am troubled about potential pictures of the future that this entails: for their relationship, for the needs of the whole family, for the child's future. I am sorry for the heartbreak and tears and questions that flow upwards, whose answers may seem eerily silent. I do know that this child is desperately loved and, though they may never know or appreciate it fully, could not have been found in a safer and caring place than in their parents' arms.
I must confess, I am struggling with, why them, of all the people in the world? There are so many additional factors to this story, that this seems like yet another nail in the cross that they have been called to bear. So very many nails, each piercing their hearts...

Musing on pomegranates

I've spent the past hour or so fumbling through a pomegranate. I still have another half to go. Yes, I'm eating a whole pomegranate for dinner - it takes so long to eat one, you hardly have the energy or desire to actually chew anything else afterwards.
I remember as a child being given a pomegranate, split between my sister and I, in order to keep us out of our mother's hair for an hour or so, as we took our grubby little fingers to pry out each small morsel of delight on hot summer days.
A pomegranate is a beautiful thing; a plump, rose-coloured urn, encasing millions of glistening rubies inside! Each piece of fruit, bursting with juice with a slightly crunchy core. Careful dissection of the paper-thin membranes, releasing even more treasure in each portion of pomegranate. Yum!

When it rains...

I don't think people seriously take into consideration, well, consideration for other people. I can see how, over time, if you receive very little consideration, you'll dish it out in much the same manner. It's only Thursday, but this week alone, I've already gotten a relatively real threat of being sued (which, being entirely frivolous and without basis, doesn't particularly bother me; if they would like to waste their money, they can go right ahead), was physically threatened by another patient and had to call 911 for police to escort them from the clinic. Super.
I suppose it comes with the territory - whenever you deal with other people, who make overwhelmingly ridiculous demands that you cannot fulfill, they get angry. Now, fortunately, the literature points to very few physician fatalities over the years (thank goodness), but, despite the relative respect and authority that they are granted, it is not uncommon for physicians to get verbally assaulted, spat upon, slapped and punched. I don't think people get the fact that when they do that, it makes it even more unlikely to have the physician want to help them.
I guess it's also like customer service; I would imagine if a customer is going ballistic on the phone, the customer service rep tunes out, and becomes even more unlikely to want to provide good customer service.
Same here; the likelihood I would actually want to help someone, instead of punching them in the face, when I've been threatened becomes vanishingly small.