"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Generation Gaps

Markos has posted one of his longest and most interesting blog's in a while. Coming off some lefty get together -- I don't even know which one, that's how out of it I am -- he writes Half-baked observations of a VLWC conference. VLWC stands for Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, and it's a bit of a joke. Here are my favorite paragraphs:

So there were the crazies, some of them in leadership positions of fairly prominent organizations. Fucking obnoxious, and clearly a reason why our side can seem out of touch.

But there was another wierd dynamic at play -- this one generational. There were leaders, all of them older, of extremely prominent liberal interest groups. We're talking labor, environmental, economic justice, things like that. And some of them were genuinely awesome.

But there was a large contingent of them that were obsessed with one thing -- their pet issue. It was about them, them, them. Why wasn't their issue being addressed? Did they have to stay in some meeting if their issue wasn't being discussed? Etc.

Wow! Their self-centerdness and lack of interest in working together (unless it revolved around their issue) was breathtaking.

On the other hand, most of the younger activists at this retreat ran community-style groups. They weren't focused on any single issue, but on using the collective force of their communities to bear pressure on various issues.

That's something I've been seeing and feeling for over a year. I would add that in addition to being more community-centric, younger activists are more outcome oriented. What's the point of being a community pillar if you're not capable of bringing home the bacon. "What is effective?" is a question I've heard thrown around quite a lot lately.

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Small World

I'm here at Fix cafe in (has it jumped the shark yet?) Billyburg. I'm sitting across from Julia's good buddy Karena who's blogging for Cinematical, and I just bumped in to Katelyn Keough, of the (in)famous Alaska Keoughs. And then (like 5 minutes later) I got an IM from Phil Logerfo (a.k.a. Phantom Phil) and he's sitting across the room.

I tend to actually like the small-world vibe. It's an essential part of making life work in New York City. This is one of the most populous metropolis in the world, but also one of the most dense, and thanks to a first-rate transportation network one of the most widely traveled. What that means in practice is that though you swim through strangers, you see familiar faces all over as you hit the same hubs, nodes, and scheduled crossings week after week. This makes for a much more palpable sense of community than you can get in any sub-urban, let alone ex-urban setting.

Just another reason why this is one of the best cities in the world.

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Google Maps Strikes Again

Very cool use of arield photography. Shazam!

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Kos Rocks The MFA T-Shirt

Even though I'm on my way out of the MFA sphere of influence, I have to say I'm a little proud of this:

Kos w/MFA shirt

That's Mr. Markos on C-Span. I haven't yet watched it, but you can grab a link off this diary.

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Kos Rocks The MFA T-Shirt

Even though I'm on my way out of the MFA sphere of influence, I have to say I'm a little proud of this:

Kos w/MFA shirt

That's Mr. Markos on C-Span. I haven't yet watched it, but you can grab a link off this diary.

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The Seventh Sign

On a scale of Huckapoo to Prussian Blue, how deeply fucked up is US culture? Don't have a clue what I'm asking? Get clued here.

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YeeeHaw!

You're all clear kid!

This month I will complete repayment of my first student loan, a non-federal $2,000 emergency spot I had to pick up from Citibank my last semester when NYU was jerking me around because I was an RA and I was graduating early. This only lowers my monthly bill by about twenty bucks, but it's psychologically a big hurdle to clear.

Overall, I am about halfway free from my student loans, which feels like something of an accomplishment. It's a long way from financial stability (or "success," though I'm still pretty un-motivated to go out and amass lucre) but it's kind of nice to be able to knock one debt off my list.

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Krugman on Health Care

My favorite Princeton Economist is back from vacation and stepping up to the plate over at the times with the first in a series of columns on the state of health care in the US:

To get effective reform, however, we'll need to shed some preconceptions - in particular, the ideologically driven belief that government is always the problem and market competition is always the solution.

If we can drive that notion home, we'll be halfway there, and it will get people thinking freely and creatively about all sorts of other things.

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Help Me Organize

How would you like this site presented to you? What do you like reading? I'm starting to think seriously and long-term-ish about what I want to do with my writing, and I realize I know very little about my audience. I think maybe 500 people or so read this page semi-regularly. What are you coming for?

I'm going to keep this at the top of the page for a while. Leave comments here or contact me anonymously.

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Thomas Friedman, Welcome To The Real World

The moustached-man at the Times, five years behind as usual, drops a witty title and a pretty decent summation of what's really going on with Globalization: It's a Flat World, After All.

...the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that gives it its unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally?
...
When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.

The piece is worth reading if you're new to the idea that the American economy is in enormous peril becuase we're really no smarter than anyone else and the labor market for intelectual products (engineering, analysis, digital culture) is truly being globalized. Friedman still isn't hip to open source, and doesn't seem to understand that this shift in how the world works is going to substantially change the role of nation-states going forward, but he's got the basic points right. Give him another 5 years and I'm sure he'll catch on to the rest.

He also has some very good advice for national poliitcs:

Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It requires a president who can summon the nation to work harder, get smarter, attract more young women and men to science and engineering and build the broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help every American become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.

And some stern advice for parents:

We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living.

The problem here is that Americans already work too hard for too little. If we want to maintain, let alone advance, our standard of living in the 21st Century, we need to work on strengthening our local economies.

I'm fine to play on the global market, but not everyone can do it, nor will everyone ever be able to. For those who can't, having a vibrant local economy with lots of opportunities for small business, craft production, and livable wages for service-sector work is the only viable alternative. For those of us who can compete globally, our task is to get as much value as we can for our time, and driving as much of that as possible back into our own communities.

Simply urging the USA to bear down and grind out more engineers isn't a real solution for the 21st Century. It's a beginning, but for this country to pull though we're going to have to dig a little deeper. We need to start looking beyond material acumulation as a prime metric for "standard of living." We need to start looking at developing a way of life and a set of values that create more enjoyment while consuming less energy. We need to figure out how to live better and work smarter, not just harder.

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