Lately I have been giving a lot of thought to Matthew 31:32. I know you know the verses but in the NIV Bible it goes: 31. And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. 32. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks a word against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or the age to come.

I have heard this portion of the Gospel preached a variety of ways. Most preachers find this passage rather tricky. It seems to say, as various passages in John do (John 5:22, 8:15 and 12:47), that Jesus is not a judgmental figure. In these passages, Jesus states rather directly that He is here to save the world not to judge it. Of course, in John 9:39 Jesus seems to contradict all this when He says “For judgment I am come into this world…” However, Biblical scholars claim that the operative word in the Greek is krima, meaning decision, not the judicial words kisis or krino as used in the passages in John 5, 8 and 12. In the context of John 9:39, Jesus may be saying He is here for mankind to hear his words, observe his deeds and make a decision about Him, not He about us.

Given this point of view, I am beginning to develop a theological notion, very Anglican as it happens, that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is not cursing the Spirit’s name or failing to listen to it so much as it is using it for evil.

One has to be ever alert to the possibility that one’s cultural biases misinform his or her religious beliefs. And, I admit, this notion that blasphemy, as it relates to the Holy Spirit is best defined as misappropriation of the Spirit, does fit nicely with my notion of the world.

Anglicans/Episcopalians have, as the basis of their institutional memory, the viciousness of the English Civil War back in the 1500s and 1600s. It was a terrible time and one in which armies of the King and armies of the commoners, waged a war fueled by the Holy Spirit. During this war, it was a common occurrence for one side or the other to murder every man, woman and child in a village or lay waste to an entire county, all at the express, certain direction of the Holy Spirit. This experience led the Anglican tradition to defend itself against too much Holy Spirit by sticking to a liturgy that would put God to sleep. Likewise, a priest too gifted with language and the ability to move a congregation through his or her sermons is generally viewed with suspicion. (This cultural by product of the English Civil War is why the Episcopalians always get to the restaurant buffet at the club long before the Baptists.)

In our world today, religious folk of all faiths and denominations yearn for certainty. The world is a very ambiguous place, full of uncertainty and dangerous ideas, and real physical dangers as well. Indeed, if one allows him or herself to think overly long on this ambiguity it can become both terrifying and immobilizing.

For this reason, I think there are some men and women of all faiths, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Animists, Zoroastrians, you name it, who tend to flock to their religion out of a craving for certainty, not for any religious enlightenment.

All the founding figures of the world’s great religions recognized this paradox, That is, people flocking to their standard for temporal comfort, not for enlightenment. This paradox is both fundamental and dangerous. It is fundamental for it allows a  religion to speak to a temporal need of its people. It is dangerous because it offers a powerful means of controlling men’s minds.

The more I think on it, the more I am coming around to the notion that the only unforgivable sin is the misappropriation of the Holy Spirit for the purpose of perpetuating evil. Whether that evil is as simple as the use of the Spirit to justify exclusion from the flock persons different from ourselves or something more horrific such as exhorting a vulnerable young man or woman to blow him or herself up in order to spread terror in the population of an enemy or some truly God-awful crime against humanity like the destruction of an entire city, this is the definition of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

From my cursory understanding of history, it seems to me that the purveyors of the Holy Spirit for the purpose of evil are most active in historical times of transition. That is, when the old order is waning and a new, undefined order is emerging. This was certainly true in the England of the Civil War and it is certainly true in the Islamic world today.

I do not think the medieval minds of the Mullahs care a whit about “our freedoms,” much less hate us for them. I believe they hate us because the global society in which we live comes wrapped in a technological package that defies the established order. The Googles and CNNs of the world make it impossible for us or them not to know how everybody else lives. It makes it impossible to control the flow of information so everyone in their societies knows about “our freedoms” and it creates a roiling uncertainty inside their cultures. This is what “they” hate and we merely personify it.

Likewise, many of our own people do not understand the economic forces that are torturing so many of us. We do not understand why the old institutions that used to provide for us are no longer working. This, added to the apparent irrational desire to kill us all by certain elements of Islam, is roiling our culture with uncertainty as well. This roiling makes us easy marks for those who do not shrink from misappropriating the Holy Spirit.

This is a fertile environment for blasphemers of the Holy Spirit.

More so, even, than legislative bodies that, granted, are pretty much open markets of moneyed political influence, auctions are where government and economics merge. Legislative bodies always have been and always will be subject to influence from the wealthy and the powerful. Nevertheless, in a legislature the decision does not always go to the highest bidder, sometimes it does, but not always. Usually, the legislative winner is the side with the more skillful and politically connected lobbyists and legislative allies. While money can buy both skillful lobbyists and legislative allies, securing these allegiances does not generally involve open bidding.

At a foreclosure auction, and other similar liquidation asset auctions, society resets market prices, establishes a floor on falling values, at least a temporary floor until the next stage down — should one come — comes and does so. The role is absolutely vital to a continuing, functional free market system. Such auctions are also the epicenter of emotional pain as bad as any outside the funeral home.

I have heard the free enterprise system of markets described as an ongoing revolution that allows a society to continuously overthrow old elites and replace them with new elites without the use of a guillotine or cannon. If that is so, it goes a long way toward justifying all the system’s abuses. Foreclosure and liquidation auctions are one such mechanism that provides untold emotional, spiritual and economic abuse to those who lose their property. Yet, such auctions are essential to any chance the continuous, nonviolent revolution that is the free market has to function and muddle through economic downturns and contractions.

The hardest and most painful action an economy has to take is resetting prices to reflect new, relative values in money terms. Whether an economy’s asset values are inflating or deflating, some mechanism for resetting the floor and the ceiling must be established.  In a demand economy foreclosure and liquidation auctions serve this function, as opposed to a command economy where some central authority attempts to play this role.

Like any market, foreclosure auctions have their regular players. Some of these are the lawyers who represent the creditors, sometimes the debtor, paralegals who play administrative and functionary roles bidding for creditor, bottom feeders, people who work the foreclosure lists looking for bargains to buy by bidding slightly more than the creditor and others. These auctions also have people who come hoping to buy out the creditor’s interest so the original property owner may stay in place by having a friend or family member bid and win.

This last category of auction participant doesn’t always show up. In fact, they are rarely in attendance. However, when one such does show, the emotional tension is something tangible.

The professionals deal with these nonprofessional bidders hoping to retain the property for a family member in a variety of different ways. Most bidders for the creditors submit one bid, usually the amount owed plus certain fees associated with the foreclosure procedure. If someone else bids slightly higher, such creditor representatives let it go. Sometimes though, you will witness a truly sadistic creditor representative who will start low, eliciting slightly higher bids, in one iteration of bids after the other, from those trying to retain the property

In such cases, the family trying to retain the property will go through several stages of emotion. At first, the family will believe there is a chance they will get the property back at a cost much les than they owed. Later, once it is obvious the creditor representative is merely playing, the family will get angry. Later still, as the bidding drags on, ever higher, the anger will turn to fear and remorse.

Based solely upon the facial expressions of creditor representatives using this technique, this part, the part where remorse and despair among the family trying to retain the property becomes obvious on their faces and in their private conversation, is the time the sadistic creditor representative lives for. It is clear they enjoy this. I suppose it relieves the boredom of an otherwise routine procedure.

It is, for the otherwise disinterested observer, a remarkably painful thing to watch. I doubt there is anything to be done about it without doing harm to an essential economic mechanism. Perhaps citizens could be dispatched to observe and when this kind of behavior is noted, it could then be exposed to the public with the creditor representative identified and the bank he or she works for (the most egregious example I have ever observed is a woman) held up to public scorn for inflicting unnecessary pain to the economy’s victims. Perhaps after some public exposure banks would decline to employ sadists, perhaps the sadists themselves would decide to stop the practice.

Front loading costs and back loading benefits is something that is only done, in normal legislative processes, when you raise taxes, which this package will do. It will raise taxes directly on those making more than $250,000 per year. Beyond that, it will raise health care costs on almost everybody, eliminate coverage, in the short term, for tens of millions and will do so almost immediately.

It does this without imposing any real competition in the market place, making an efficient market, always improbable in health care finance, almost impossible. Not only does it not offer a public option for health insurance, it doesn’t do anything of significance to increase competition from other potential private sector providers.

It does give further economic advantages to the narrow cabal of health insurance providers. By doing so, it virtually assures these companies of an even larger percentage take from health care costs without their having to do anything of value to earn it.

I have read that there may be a last minute insertion of a public option plan into the bill. I have read that this may take the form of allowing individuals to enroll in Medicare without regard to the person’s age. If this is so, it would make a real difference in my opinion of the bill. However, I have also read that this is not so and that the votes to get this done, even if it were to be attempted, are not there. I have also read that the President opposes any public option, even if the votes are there, because he has promised the health insurance companies he will not allow it to happen in return for their allowing something to pass.

If the new law stays as it is currently proposed, I believe I am watching the suicide of the Democratic Party. The idea that the President and the Democratic controlled Congress would sell out the American people to the band of vultures and parasites that comprise the health insurance industry is unthinkable. It is unthinkable because the President, and the Congress, ran on the promise that they would fix the health care finance mess. For them to be so callously deceitful, by trying to foist this cynical mess on to us, speaks more eloquently than anything else they could say about the disrespect they feel for us, and the contempt they hold for us.

All that is very bad. However, what is far worse is the foolishness of it. People don’t particularly mind being led by scoundrels as long as the scoundrels are reasonably intelligent about things. The President and his Congress do not appear to be very artful or intelligent in the manner of their approach.

This bill is very bad in its opening years. The argument for it, that it somehow will be worth the suffering if we just all hang on until the end of the fourth year of its implementation, is specious. It is so bad in the opening years there will be no full implementation.

All the opposition to government involvement to health care financing has to do now is come up with something only slightly better than the horrid mess Obama has given us (assuming it passes). Using a combination of tax incentives and legal adjustments, it will not be hard to develop a “private sector” alternative that will be so much more attractive, especially in the initial years, than the proposed legislation. Democrats that survive the fall election will happily support a “market” alternative.

I am very sad to see this happen. I believe passing this law and claiming it means real health care finance reform will break the centuries old bond between the American people and the Democratic Party. The party is the oldest continuously operated political party in the world. Maybe it has lived so long it cannot remember that it is better to lose while standing for something than it is to pass something just so you can claim a victory.

It is said that failure to pass something that can be called health care reform, even if it is crap, will mean the end of the Obama Presidency. If what we have seen so far of Obama’s leadership is what we can look forward to, the end of it cannot come soon enough.

White Democrats would suffer due to the lose of reliable, black voting populations in their districts, if the white population was too small or the black population too large. The thinking then was a Southern Democrat needed about twenty-five to thirty five percent of his or her district to be black in order to win against a Republican in the general election. If the black population was any greater than thirty-five percent then the white Democrat risked losing to a black in the primary. The thinking was, of course, the black winning a primary in a minority black district would be easy for a Republican to beat in the general election because whites would not vote for him.

By concentrating African-American populations into black majority districts, black populations in surrounding white majority districts were reduced to fifteen or less percent. This tended to make a district unwinnable for any Democrat, black or white.

Even though this strategy meant an almost inevitable takeover of legislatures by Republican majorities, blacks were eager for the opportunity to represent themselves instead of through a white representative or senator.

Further, since the combination of Republicans serving in the various legislatures and elected African-American Democrats constituted a majority of House and Senate members in many legislatures, the black Democrats and the white Republicans had the votes to get this done.

It took two censuses to accomplish this in most of the Southern states but, for the most part, it worked.

I say it took two censuses because every ten years all legislatures have to redistrict based upon the population as reflected in the most recent census. This means, starting around two years from now, every state is going to begin the redistricting process all over again.

For several reasons, I think this time around offers an opportunity to swing things back around. However, none of these reasons are automatic. To succeed, Democrats will have to work as a real political party, something that rarely ever happens. Also, the current trend within the Republican Party, where increased pressure is coming to bear upon the unholy coalition forged in the Reagan years between the social conservative Republicans, the country club Republicans and the libertarian Republicans, will have to continue.

The reasons I believe there is such a huge opportunity for Democrats are: 1) the new census will show surprising growth of Hispanics within the core Southern states, what was once called the “cotton South.” 2) The very conservative members of the right are denouncing the census and urging conservatives to under report themselves, skew the data by misrepresenting their circumstances demographically, economically and socially. 3) Republicans are splintering, making contested primaries between the various philosophical factions of the Party increasingly probable. 4) The accelerating separation between rich and poor, due, at least in part, to the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy class via the federal financial system bailout, will make a populist appeal to “Reagan Democrats” viable.

The first of these reasons is demographic. The population of minorities is growing at a faster rate than the white population. This has been going on for some time. The white population of the South is being out bred and out paced by in migration. It is unlikely anything will happen to change this trend in the next ten years or so.

Even if many in the expanded Hispanic population are not registered to vote or registerable, their presence is important. Redistricting will be based, in large part, upon the relative size of various demographic populations. Due to the continued importance of the Voting Rights Act, and its pre-clearance requirement, the ethnic characteristics of populations within a community will have great importance.

Likewise, in the region as a whole, African-American populations are also growing, in percentage terms, compared with the white populations. White immigration has been comprised of a larger percentage of older, retirement-aged persons. In the past, this has tended to offset the larger over all growth rates of minorities because these older people are more prone to vote.

The massive wave of retiring baby boomers and their parents has largely been absorbed. As this age group of white people migrating into the region slacks off, the advantage the white population has held due to this age group’s greater rate of voting will also decline.

The second reason is cultural. There is an element of the right wing in the United States that mistrusts everything government does. This means that the people most likely to shirk the responsibility to accurately report the census information are people of conservative orientation and Hispanics who generally fear government. This will result in both Hispanics and middle and lower income whites being underreported. Underreporting of Hispanics is more or less traditional and expected. The demographers have means to test for this and will adjust numbers within the Hispanic community to reflect this anomaly. The underreporting within the white community is less a cultural statement than a political one. As such, correcting for this underreporting is much more problematic and could result in significant underreporting.

The third reason may be the most critical one relating to hopes for Democrats to affect changes to district lines that will be favorable to them. Because Republican leaders have to worry at least as much about challenges from some other philosophical wing within the Republican Party as they do challenges from the Democrats in a general election, not only will those leaders have to be sure to include the proper demographics, white people, within their districts, they will have to be the right kind of white people.

Republicans who have served the nation, their state and their party for decades are, all of a sudden, being attacked as Republicans in name only (RINO). Often these attacks are over the most trivial of issues but take on such significance because they indicate an individual’s allegiance to one right-wing philosophy or another. As often as not, in such cases, issues of critical state-wide importance are rendered unimportant. Often such issues are about style as much as they are of substance. Style perceptions, once established, are very difficult to changes.

This is why, so called RINOs, who often hold the positions within the legislature of most power due to seniority, will have to have their districts drawn with great care to exclude certain Republican voters and include certain others. Economic and educational level tests will be increasingly important to many of these Republican leaders. For this reason it may prove less difficult to break up natural Republican strongholds as long-time Republican officials design safe districts for themselves.

The final change is economic. As more and more white, conservative voters are forced out of the middle class by the great wealth transfer, they will be less and less concerned with typical Republican issues of lower taxes and national defense. If Democrats do a half-way competent job, not something that can be assumed, traditional Republican hostility to social services will come to be less of an attractive draw to these white voters.  This will prove particularly true as these people see the rich continue to get richer and the poor poorer.

Of course, there is no certainty that the Democratic progressives will exploit this economic unrest. Indeed, it could well be that populist Republicans, shouting about immigration, Obama socialism and who knows what all will capture this vote before it leaves the fold. However, since the populist rhetoric required to reach and hold this group will be in tension with corporate values and ambitions, this group is definitely in play.

Now is the time to begin working on this. It requires a five-step process. First, some progressive organization has to develop the capacity to do the legal and demographic work required to produce qualified plans that result in progressive majorities. This group needs to then create the technical and political staff required to accomplish the required work.

The second step will require developing a good profile of who the progressive voters in a given state are and where do they live. Included in this is identification of exactly what the progressive issues are within a given state.

The third step requires a good working relationship with progressive/Democratic members of the various legislatures who can guide the redistricting process from the inside. This will require political savvy and the ability to anticipate the needs of the Republican leadership and create redistricting plans that meet legal tests and satisfy their needs while creating more winnable progressive districts.

Fourth, someone has to handle the required PR needed to frame the subject in terms favorable to progressive interests. Someone has to make it as easy as possible for members of the various legislatures to vote for a progressive-friendly plan. This PR program should begin as soon as the voters and issues have been identified and should continue throughout the redistricting process.

Fifth, whatever redistricting plan is adopted has to withstand a rigorous legal test before the US Justice Department and, perhaps, in the federal courts. Someone has to develop and deploy the legal expertise to defend any favorable redistricting plan and attack any unfavorable one.

Executing these five steps will take every minute of the two years left to accomplish it. It will be interesting to see if anybody attempts it.

Owing to a misspent youth, I have been tangentially involved with two legislative redistricting efforts and closely observed a third one. I have never noticed any meaningful progressive effort to assist and/or defend progressive interests in any of the three.

This year things have never looked better for progressives making serious improvements to this process. Political, demographic and cultural elements are coming together to make such change probable if the effort is made.

Altshuller’s incisive breakthrough was to notice that all technical systems had certain things in common that both allowed them to work and, in other circumstances, prohibited them from doing so. He developed a formula for analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of technical systems and then put forth principles by which improvements to a given technical system could be identified and developed. He then derived forty “keys” to technical innovation. These were based, in part, upon an analysis of the improvements made to existing technical systems filed in the patent office. An example of one such key involves replacing a mechanical system with an electronic system or some other device, such as an optical system.

Altshuller developed a manual for how to invent an improvement to just about any technical system known to man. It is called TRIZ, which is an abbreviation for the Russian words for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. Many major corporations now use the expanded principles of TRIZ to construct “patent fences” around the proprietary technology important to their production. A patent fence is built by making as many incremental improvements to your own, as well as others, intellectual property. These incremental improvements fence off challenges other corporations and individuals might make to commercially viable technical improvements. When you read about the current patent wars raging among the elite of the information technology world, Apple, Google, Microsoft, HP and others, much of it relates to these fences.

Technically and commercially, this is really important stuff. A corporation’s capacity to competitively produce core products could hinge upon whether it owns or has affordable access to the technical rights required. Further, the same applies to your competition. While anti-trust laws prohibit undue gouging by a competitor that owns some valuable technical intellectual property, it is always better, as they say in west Texas, to be at the top of the irrigation ditch with a shovel than at the bottom of the ditch with a lawyer.

I believe that Altshuller’s work has been responsible for much of the innovation, worldwide, that is keeping our society in constant change. Without TRIZ emerging on the scene when it did, it is likely the innovations required by the international space programs would have been much delayed. Likewise, the innovations in information technology that was given birth by the efforts at space exploration may have been a very long time in coming without TRIZ and other systems of technical innovation like it.

TRIZ makes public declarations, such as President Kennedy’s that we would put a man on the moon and bring him back by the end of the decade of the 1960s, a high probability. TRIZ also makes the concept of energy independence and greater dependence upon clean, renewable energy entirely feasible. However, such major breakthroughs are only possible when government, major corporations or both make such a goal a priority. Only when the massive amounts of applied research funding are made available for such a well defined technical goal can economy changing, culture changing technical advances be made.

Invention and innovation are no longer always accidental. Now they can be purposeful if we want them to be.

The difference between the employee layoffs then and those projected for the coming years is those job losses were primarily due to cyclical economic events and these to come are due primarily to structural economic events. The layoffs of the seventies were due to a series of recessions, the layoffs of the teens will be due to fundamental shifts in the economic structure of the nation and the world.

There is evidence that the steep recession we are experiencing is nearing an end, may, technically, already be over. While there are many, myself among them, who do not believe we have seen the worst, it is entirely possible, as a society, we have. Even so, there are three reasons why no one should expect a massive influx of new, real dollars into the coffers of state government once the economy rebounds.

First, it is unlikely any new foundational tax source will be available at either the state or local government level. There are such tax sources available, local income tax for instance, but the political possibility of the state giving local government the right to levy such a tax is near zero. In the absence of such a new foundational tax source, revenue increases, if they come at all, will only be incremental increases such as may result from an increase in the tax on cigarettes. Whether these incremental increases are targeted to a specific use or thrown into the General Fund is less material than the fact that none of them, individually or collectively, will make a significant difference to an attempt to restore across the board historic funding levels of state agencies.

It is conceivable that the state could affect a significant increase in revenue from elimination of billions of dollars of sales and use tax exemptions. However, these exemptions are in place because powerful special interest groups want them. This ongoing support for the status quo would indicate any really significant elimination of these exemptions is politically unlikely.

The second reason it is unlikely any massive restoration of funding will occur is demands made by higher priority needs. It is a very real possibility that the federal government will enact some sort of national sales tax, probably a value added tax. However, if this is done, it will be done out of sheer necessity brought on by the enormous debt we have taken on.

The current “War on Terror” will not end soon. Our allies in Europe and the Far East have begun to drop out, indicating their willingness for us to carry on with our Mideast and Central Asian allies. This, of course, means much of the blood and all of the treasure expended will be ours, for our Asia allies and Israel cannot continue unless we pay for it.

Between the cost of this “Long War” and the debt service on the national debt, there will be little new money for social programs or to send to the states for infrastructure, education and other traditional causes of contributions from the federal government to the states and municipalities. These pressing, survival issues will absorb the vast revenues received from any new foundational tax levied at the federal level.

Make no mistake, these two issues are critical to the survival of the nation and of all the nation states of the west and the “modern” world. If we fail to win the Long War, the consequences are the drastic modification of culture and the death of civil liberties.

The Long War will be a war of attrition, not a clearly marked point of demarcation where one side formally surrenders to another. It is nothing less than a global civil war being waged between people who have a modern mentality and those who have a medieval mentality. Both the armed resources and the core belief system have to dissipate before one side loses. As such, it is a war that cannot be lost. To win it, it must be paid for.

There is no point in arguing whether it is a war that should have been fought. It is too late for that. It now has to be fought and it has to be won. Winning means exhausting the other side’s ability and willingness to fight. This will be dehumanizing and it will be expensive.

The third reason there will be no extra money for a while is the national debt. Paying for the national debt will also be a necessity. Failure to meet our national obligations or to attempt to meet them by inflating the currency, artificially reducing the principal and trying to pay it before the interest rates overwhelm us, is folly. The predictable result of either course will be the perversion of the financial system of the world. The terrible century the Argentines lived through in the 1900s will be the fate of the world if the United States does not meet its obligations and do so in real money. Failure simply cannot be an option unless we are willing to destabilize ourselves and everybody else.

I believe this abiding crisis offers public sector managers and employees an unprecedented opportunity, if they want to seize it. While it is nonsense to spout platitudes such as, ‘government ought to be run like a business,’ running a business is at least an order of magnitude less complicated than running a government, there are things public sector managers can learn from their private sector counterparts.

As I see it, there are three areas where government could adjust itself and reap significant coat efficiencies. These are: intelligent use of quantifiable analysis, structural adjustments and centralization of certain core administrative functions.

The late Robert McNamara is infamous for his idiotic decision to determine the appropriate number of bullets soldiers in the field should be allowed for any single fire fight. Consequently, since McNamara based his numbers on averages, soldiers either ran out or finished with too many. I think any soldier would tell you it is never an embarrassment to end a fire fight with too many bullets left over. On the other hand, it is frequently, remarkably so, deadly to run out of bullets before the party is over.

Partially as a consequence of this lesson from Vietnam, quantifying government processes fell into disfavor. That is too bad. There are many functions of government that are no different from similar functions in the private sector. Quantifiable analysis of such functions is possible and desirable.

Without getting into massive governmental restructuring, it would be possible to devise incentives for public sector managers and employees to identify functions that can be analyzed by quantitative means and outputs evaluated using those means. Further, incentives can be put into place that will lead managers and employees to reduce the personnel and other costs associated with delivering the services, lending themselves to quantifiable analysis.

Of course, reduction in costs is not the only, or even the primary, criteria; delivery of quality services to the citizenry is. So, any cost reductions resulting from quantitative analysis and incentives must also be evaluated to demonstrate that no service quality reductions occur.

These kinds of management incentives and analytical tools have to be utilized or severe and unacceptable service level deterioration will be inevitable. Fair or not, public sector managers and employees are going to have to elevate their game if service levels are going to be maintained in the coming years of financial deprivation.

Another thing that will be a must is to restructure the institutional form of service delivery. Governmental restructuring has never lived up to its promises. However, some streamlining of service delivery that is institutional not managerial is going to be necessary. Such streamlining could include everything from imposing incarceration responsibilities on families of certain criminals to lessen the cost to the taxpayers. Other potential structural changes could involve limiting penalties for non-violent crimes, including wholesale elimination of criminal penalties for drug possession, licensing, taxing and regulation of the sale of controlled substances. Another potential cost saving mechanism would be to extend the public school education responsibility to two years of post secondary education. By adding two years, the first two years of college, to high school, tens of millions of dollars of higher education annual costs could be eliminated. College campuses would then become the lair of upperclassmen and graduate students. There are many such cost saving structural modifications that are available.

Most such structural changes are politically prohibited by strong cultural and emotional biases to the contrary. However, failure to identify these required changes and take them on will mean more and more service level compromises and the accelerated destruction of governmental efficiency.

A final source of governmental management that could save significant funds is centralization of certain support functions. It is popular to speak of consolidating information services into one giant IT service center. I do not think that is practical or workable. On the other hand, while various government agencies need independent data and communications centers and the staff to run them, certain functions can be centralized, even in information sensitive areas. There is no reason there cannot be a central hardware and software maintenance service. Third party maintenance service is pretty much standard fare, even in government agencies. Consolidating and centralizing maintenance functions would bring the massive purchasing power of the state to bear on providers of such services. Whether the service was privatized or handled in house, the saving could result in tens of millions of dollars every year with no diminution in service levels. In fact, in this instance, service levels at smaller agencies and political subdivisions could be markedly improved.

There are many other potential cost benefits of centralization of certain core administrative functions. Again, for the most part emotional and territorial concerns prevent these from happening and, again, this may prove a luxury government can no longer afford.

The coming decade will be a trying and exciting time for public servants. The limited resources available can be an opportunity for meaningful change designed to insure the public is served or it can be a long period of deterioration and lost morale. Either way, it will not be easy. However, if the public sector chooses the former rather than the latter it will be rewarding.

Making up Iunctian Theory has been a real treat as it allows me to surrender to the fantasy world of theoretical physics. This activity is, of course, entirely useless but it does help in understanding some of the ‘logic’ I occasionally encounter in the public forums on the net.

All that aside, I am attempting to write this novel as a crude, crude in more meanings than one, example of 3D Lit. That in itself is a very exciting exercise. I find that there is an opportunity, should I choose to pursue it, in every sentence to establish links to various internet sites that will elucidate whatever the characters are discussing. I also find there are endless opportunities to embed product placement for some product or other.

It occurs to me that this kind of product placement could be a portion of the answer to the question, how do we make  digital publishing pay? Just as Google and other search engines make big bucks from click through advertising, so could publishers and authors of digital books. Indeed, depending upon the strictures of journalistic ethics, it can be a fine source for revenue for journals such as this one or digital news sources of all kinds. (I am not sure any such thing as journalistic ethics exists, but I am broad minded enough to accept that it may. If such things do exist, they could be a difficulty in product placement within the body of an article. Even so, as long as a specific product was not mentioned in the article, but was referred to only in generic terms, links to paying advertisers could be kosher.)

Imagine, if you will, the revenue potential from producers of specialty foods, free range chickens for instance, if their product is embedded in the recipes of a popular cookbook or a popular magazine article consisting of cooking lore and recipes. Likewise, ads for field binoculars within the body of the text popular with birding folk could prove profitable to both publisher and manufacturer. Ads in a book on growing ornamentals for fertilizers and/or tools specially designed for the fully addicted gardener might also earn boodles and boodles of bucks.

For advertisers of specialty products known to and of no interest to anybody not virtually deranged with a passionate interest in some arcane pastime, reaching the population of the deranged without wasting money and time on the vast population of the disinterested is a dream. Readers of single interest books are such people. Such books have the additional virtue that no one outside the population of the deranged will be caught dead reading such a book. Therefore, ads in such books will only be read by somebody who is a qualified candidate to buy, say, a garden manure spreader designed for urban, amateur horticulturalists interested only in the purest of organic farming techniques.

Using a combination of a placement fee and click through fees, based upon frequency of views and the popularity of the book in question, will be an extremely cost effective communication channel for producers of specialty products. For publishers and authors of such narrow interest books, the revenue from product placement ads could exceed the revenue from book sales and do so by many multiples.

While it is much easier to see how 3D Lit can accommodate product placement within the confines of a digital book, I believe it can be cost effective in a print environment as well. Advancements in memory storage and retrieval and in flat screen paper film/screens have been such it is now possible to mass produce such embedded screens and digitized video such that advertisers can do the same thing in a printed book. I am not certain how click through revenue can be accounted for with the accuracy available in a digital book. This potential limitation may require a different costing strategy but need not prohibit the potential for meaningful product placement revenue.

As more and more people move from printed books to fully mobile digital devices, the limitations on product placement in the printed environment may become a moot point. In fact, if this revenue source works the way I think it may, the potential for more and more authors on more and more narrow, even arcane, subject matters to publish profitably will further drive content produced away from print into digital environments.

Soon I will have sample chapters of Einstein available on a dedicated web site. I have not sold any product placement ads. This is being done as an experiment, pure in intent and execution. It will stay that way, unless, of course, the book takes off. In which case I will happily sell any spots any buyer may want.

CereProc went beyond capturing Ebert’s distinct sound. The electronic device was trained to incorporate the inflecton and general attitude of the man. In short, it captured his verbal style, a large part of what made his commentary valuable and marketable.

In today’s Wired.com an article reports that North Carolina-based Zenph Sound Innovations has developed the process by which the musical style of deceased (and, presumably, still living) artists can be replicated. Such replication can be applied to the old standards of former artists or to works they, in their lifetimes, never recorded or preformed. The article postulates Jimi Hendrix covering a work of Lady Gaga’s. I would like to hear Jimi’s take on the Hallelujah Chorus or, maybe, Janis Joplin’s version of a Verdi aria.

Such wishing and thinking aside, these new articles bring up an interesting point. Are stylings generally thought to be uniquely the property of a particular artist, whether musical stylings, verbal stylings, written stylings, whatever, private property?

There are a lot of variations on this theme. When Coke and Pepsi used dead performers, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, etc. in their commercials by superimposing clips from old movies and videos in the body of the commercials, royalties were paid to the estates of those artists or whoever held the rights to those old properties. However, in those cases, the images and the dialog were lifted from the intellectual property of somebody. Those various somebodies had to be compensated and they had to give permission.

What will stop a commercial from employing an electronically synthesized voice of a distinctive and well known personality? Particularly, what will stop you if the voice is similar to the point of being unmistakable but slightly different? How much variation will be required to make it legal, if, in fact, there is anything illegal about appropriating a style of presentation? Is a style of presentation protected property in the first place? Indeed, how can you even define a given style well enough for it to have any legal meaning?

Adding style replication or cloning to the array of synthetic tools available to film and video makers conjures the potential for entire feature films being made starring actors and actresses, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, you name it, long dead.

This also begs an operational question facing new authors everyday. It is very difficult for a new author to break into the public consciousness and find his or her audience. In part, this difficulty is a result of the comfort and attraction readers have to familiar writers. What will happen if movie audiences want to stick with Cary Grant’s style? Does this mean we have seen our last new George Clooney? Will actors be forced to don the blue suit and electrodes and persona and act in the style of Cary?

The legal and operational implications of style cloning are fascinating. It will be interesting to see how this begins to resolve itself.

At least ten thousand years ago, perhaps many tens of thousands beyond that, people began to scratch out images and other symbols onto manufactured articles such as clay tablets, crafted walls in public places, carved stones and so forth. These messages both utilized manufactured media and , generally, used more sophisticated symbology allowing a more complex and/or precise story or message to be conveyed to the reader.

Five or six thousand years ago, some societies began to develop forms of papyrus. The papyrus was formed into scrolls on which symbols were drawn using some manufactured stain or ink. Somewhat later, true paper was developed and used, first as scrolls then, hundreds of years on, in a recognizable book form.

In the west, it was only around five hundred years ago that moveable type forced a movement of the written word onto the modern book form. Books are now used to convey messages in all the static forms of symbology known to man.

Around fifty years ago the written word and other forms of symbology began to be created, stored, retrieved and read in digital forms using electronic devices. Of course, some electronic forms of symbology had been around for many decades prior to this but, for the most part, digital symbology recognizable to most literate humans began in the late 1940′s, early 1950′s.

From this time line, admittedly a highly debatable time line, two things are obvious. One, in the entire history of the written word/symbol, only four or five changes in the primary media of messaging have taken place. Two, the period of time between these shifts is shrinking dramatically. These periods of time have gone from perhaps hundreds of thousands of years between the advent of using the face of the earth to using manufactured surfaces to lesser intervals between subsequent shifts. Perhaps, it took another five to thirty thousand years to go from crude manufactured surfaces to papyrus and paper. Perhaps it took yet another five to ten thousand years to get from paper and ink entries by hand to the use of moveable type in a modern book format. Maybe another five hundred years to move from the printed book to digital formats.

Of course, digital formatting is not yet the primary media for presenting the written word. It may never be. However, in all likelihood, digital formats will very shortly be the primary presentation format. In only a generation or two hence the printed book may go the way of the clay tablet and the scroll.

Even so, the book will never go completely away. Just as mural graffiti keeps the media of the cave painting alive and billboards are nothing more than modern versions of ancient Egyptian wall writings, no form of symbolic media has ever fallen completely out of use.

Chances are some form of digital media will become the primary media for everyday transmission of written symbology, including written language. But, just as the book is used to convey every form of human symbology, at least every form of stationary symbology, digital formats are evolving that will make room for all kinds of, including animated symbology.

What the new vook (a proffered new word, not of my invention, incorporating the concept of a traditional book that includes other media such as video and audio messaging) will look like is not, at this point, known. It takes a while for the general public to achieve literacy in new symbolic communications’ techniques. Just as ubiquitous human literacy is only a few centuries old it may be many, many years before the general public is comfortable with the many possibilities of new literary forms and formats.

One obvious opportunity that should not over tax the general reader of a digital vook is to make footnotes in nonfiction works, and other written works, immediately referable through links to the cited source documents. This is a basic example of three-dimensional literature. That is, allowing the reader to look into the creation of a work by exploring the sources from which it springs. If a reader has access to a good library, this option is already available to him or her by checking out the source documents and comparing them to the way an author portrays these works in his work. Within a digital vook, these sources can and should be linked so immediate access is available to the reader. Indeed, I cannot understand why such active links are not required in all scholarly work presented for peer review today.

In fiction works achieving true three-dimensionality may be somewhat more complicated. This additional complication is due, in part, to the fact that it can take so many different forms. On the one hand, historical fiction can make use of active links offering historical legitimacy to the reader who desires it. Such links would act in much the same way as they would in a nonfiction work of history. Beyond that, layers of story can be arranged within a digital vook so that, in much the same way, varying layers and levels of an interactive game grow more complex as a player advances from level to level, the story’s layers can provide incremental complexity depending upon the sophistication and tastes of the individual reader.

J. K. Rowling did something very much like this by increasing the literary complexity and the social complexity of her stories, aging them along with the increased maturity of her core readers. If a child began his or her engagement with the world of wizardry at the age of ten, by the time the reader finished the final book when he or she was in the late teens or early twenties, the maturity of the language and the story concepts and plots had kept pace with the age, interests and tastes of the child.

Three-dimensional literature could be possible within a single vook using layersbook of digital print. Complexity of plot, concepts and characterizations can be matured within various levels of the vook offering different experiences to different readers, or the same reader revisiting a work at a later age, using the same essential story line.

Yet another potential of third dimensional literature could be the full integration of more than one medium within the vook. Creators are now free to utilize the form of communication best suited for a specific idea or message. If a scene is best communicated as a video play, that can be done within a digital vook and fully integrated into the work. In much the same way as graphic novels use drawings as well as language to convey a single message, within a digital vook still, and animated images can be used along with the written and spoken word to reinforce each others conveyance of a single message.

Of course, this mixing of media can be troublesome. In much the same way that an actor breaking out in song during spoken dialog is frequently awkward, switching from video to the written word and vice versa can also be very awkward. Nevertheless, the digital vook format makes new synergistic creations possible if the creator possesses the talent to pull it off.

Another potential form of third dimensional nonfiction is as simple as embedding material that enhances the story in the body of the work through the use of links. Persons writing new age literature may need to link to web sites that elaborate on the concepts and beliefs of the characters within the story. Links to recipes, mathematical formula, obscure philosophy, etc, can be embedded within the text. Such embellishments could be used to add “flavor” to the personalities of characters within the story. Perhaps puzzles either added as links or embedded within the language of the text that suggest links but do not overtly offer them is yet another means of adding a third dimension to a nonfiction work. If, as was done for Klingon in Star Trek and the language in Avatar, a new language is created in a work of science fiction, verbal translators can be embedded in the digital format.

I do not know which, if any, of these third dimensional mechanisms authors will utilize in the future. Certainly some of them, or others like them will be used. They will enrich literature and, as they grow in popularity, they will accelerate the movement away from printed books to digital formats.

For many, if not most citizens, regardless of how they feel about the issue, the answer will come in a few weeks. It will be determined by whether or not the Congress can pass something that remotely resembles health care reform. It doesn’t matter whether it is what the country needs in the way of health care reform. It matters now only that it appear to be health care reform.

I was not for President Obama during the primaries. However, like all Americans, save, maybe, the Limbaugh insaniacs, I was caught up in the wonder of his election and was certain he would be a good president, maybe even a great one. I now hope that he proves to be at least an adequately mediocre one.

He arrived in office with huge majorities in both houses of Congress. He was extraordinarily popular and enjoyed the good will of vast majorities of Republicans as well as Democrats and independents. His opposition, save a few crazies, were cowed into silence and/or ineffectual bitching. The path to a historic “one hundred days” was open. Had the President come to town having some idea of what he wanted to accomplish he could have achieved much of it in the first months of his administration. Had he chosen to do so, he could have accomplished a great deal before his political opposition could regroup and revive.

Unfortunately, accept for implementing the bidding of the Wall Street bankers, President Obama did nothing during this time. He refused to lead and allowed the nation to drift and the far right to become relevant again.

The far right did not become relevant because they proposed ideas that will work. Nor did they reassert their political potency with new ideas for dealing with the nation’s ills. They were able to reassert themselves because they took hard, rigid stands that, juxtaposed to the dithering of President Obama, made them appear to be leaders.

I hear there is a great deal of anger among Congressional Democrats, anger aimed at the President. That anger is fully justifiable. The President has led his party into a proverbial “box canyon.” The Party is faced now with the necessity of voting for a health care reform bill that may not be a reform bill. For many people, a new health care bill may make things much worse than they are now. At best, the universal benefits to be gained from whatever the Congress can pass and send to the President (There is no certainty the Congress can pass anything.) will not take effect for many years while the costs associated with provision of those benefits will begin almost immediately.

The President has sent the Congressional Democrats into this “box canyon” where they have a choice of passing nothing — this will result in the Party fighting the midterm election with a track record of incompetence — and passing a major reform that appears, at least, to do far more harm than good.

The Democratic Party has been brought to this place, this altar of non-partisanship, to be sacrificed, slaughtered like a fatted calf.

The single thing George Bush understood that absolutely eludes President Obama is the impossibility of being a non-partisan President. If you are a Senator or Congressman you can, occasionally, cast non-partisan votes on this or that issue. You can do this because you are only one of many who are your equal in constitutional authority. If you are the president, you are THE President. Unless a President is schizophrenic, being only one human, he or she is partisan in whatever decision is made, for that decision becomes the President’s policy. Further, Congress cannot lead the nation, only the President can do that. If a President refuses to lead, particularly if he refuses to do so on the primary issue, the defining issue of his administration, he is lost and the nation drifts.

It is perfectly OK for a president to lose. It is not OK for the President to abdicate leadership. President Obama, has repeatedly refused to lead this nation on the marquee issue of health care reform. This is all the more troubling as it was he who made health care the marquee issue. Having done so, President Obama had an obligation to the nation and to history to define what health care reform is and demand its adoption as law. He need not succeed. He could lose and not be lost. What he could not do, but has done anyway, is dither. He could not ask Congress to define the issue, allowing commercial interests and his opposition to define it, or in this case, bog it down in fuzzy definitions and irrelevancies. Yet, this is precisely what the president has done.

I do not know whether there is time for the President to grow into his job. Much the same sort of overawed dithering happened in the early days of President Carters and President Clinton’s administrations. In President Carter’s case, he was never able to recover. In President Clinton’s case, he was.

I am somewhat despondent. President Obama seems much more reflective and prone to over think things, like President Carter. He does not appear to possess that almost feral instinct that saved Clinton.

I hope this is wrong. I hope he will understand the lesson of Clinton’s ride to Israel on Air Force One. President Clinton imposed a strict policy of requiring Newt Gingrich to stay in his seat. On that trip, in the middle of the budget crisis that shut down large parts of the government, President Clinton behaved as the President and imposed his will on the Speaker. All Speaker Gingrich could do was whine to the public about the treatment making himself look silly and self important and Clinton look Presidential.

President Obama cannot afford any more embarrassing episodes like the “health care summit.” He succeeded only in elevating the Republicans in the eyes of the public and diminishing himself and the Presidency. Whatever the President chooses to do now, he needs to announce it and proceed. Whoever in his own Party or any other wants to come along may do so but President Obama must lead.

There is nothing to be gained by worrying about all the power President Obama has squandered. The world is a dangerous place. The United States needs a President.

The article points out, as a by product of the major theme of the piece, that the internet is a major force breaking down this barrier. While there is a great deal of truth in that contention, it is also true that the internet, by virtue of its “narrowcasting” ability; that is, its ability to allow small groups of like minded individuals to “find” each other and create sites dedicated to a narrow interest, the technology also sets a powerful countervailing force in motion. Namely, the internet allows people to find and associate with a group, or groups, each of which has only one, narrow area of interest.

This possibility can, and has, unleashed a historically unparalleled opportunity for people motivated by specific passions to contact one another and maintain ongoing communications. In doing so, like minded persons can and do develop a digital community of interest. In the earliest days of the internet these communities of interest evolved, almost immediately, among aficionados of this still new medium of communications. This rapid evolution of specialized communities of interest testifies powerfully to the demand for these kinds of connections.

Either through avatars or an individual separating his or her interest between different web based communities, individuals do make constant attempts to separate some of their interests from the view of the wider community. So, while I do not dispute the contention in the Robinson article that younger people do not perceive the need for separation between what is public from what is private and, by extension, what is personal from what is business, I believe the urge for this separation remains, in some degree, in all people.

As the younger set ages and the perceived costs of a failure to separate certain interests from common knowledge grows greater, they too will impose, or attempt to impose, just such separations. While it is true that my children, having grown up with the internet, are far more comfortable with its amazing capacity to expose you in ways heretofore unimagined, that may prove to be as much a function of the view point of the young versus the view point of the older person as it is from any inured comfort gleaned from familiarity with technology. They may find that their opinions about what is, and should remain, private will evolve as they grow older.

I do not know anyone in my general age cohort who does not look back on his or her life without remembered moments of embarrassment, shame, regret and/or the deliciously thrilling sense of having “gotten away with it.” I did not live a particularly licentious youth. But, even I, as pedestrian a life as I have led, have moments from my past that, had there been video cameras built into handheld pocket telephones and anything like the internet upon which any resulting images could be immediately and internationally published, would have been hard to explain to a teenager in need of discipline.

Even relatively public acts, such as one might see at any decently rowdy fraternity party, if captured in images available now, some forty years later, could not only undermine a parent’s moral authority but could easily derail a Supreme Court nomination. When I have mentioned this concern to one or another of my children the standard response, aside from the fact that none of them are attorneys and will never be nominated to the Supreme Court, is that since everybody will have that sort of thing hanging over them, the force and effect of such stuff will be blunted.

Perhaps, that is so. If it proves to be that all of us are to be an open book with all peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies and perversions public, then that may be a good thing. We are, all of us, human, and such a society would surely demonstrate that. All too often, serious decisions are reduced to trivial matters that may have happened long ago and have nothing to do with the character and ability of someone today. Maybe a society in which everybody’s warts and special desires are known would be a society in which such decisions could not be made on the basis of trivialities, old or new.

However, it may well be that openness will not fall evenly upon everyone and some will come through less scarred than others. Those emerging less scarred may not be so because they desired or experienced less than those “caught” in the glare of the world wide web.

If this proves to be the case, I am reminded of the reputed quote from Teddy Roosevelt who, when president and upon being urged to nominate someone to high federal office who had been indicted for something or other, raised the indictment as an objection to the action. “But, Mr. President,” Roosevelt’s advisors are alleged to have replied, “that was a long time ago and he was never convicted. And, he is a big supporter. We owe him.”

To this appeal Roosevelt is reputed to have said, “Very well, put him on the list and I will consider him after we have disposed of all the unindicted applicants.”

Like Teddy, there may be many, now and in the future, who will put anyone “caught in the web” on the list right behind all those who were not caught.

It is not simply the time bomb potential of a documented youthful indiscretion. What about all us everyday old aged perverts? And, you don’t even have to be a pervert. You can just be a serious professional with a frivolous, private interest you would prefer stayed private. If you happen to be such a person and are active on the internet, then you have, or should have some concern.

There are companies out there, trolling the internet, trying, and succeeding to a remarkable degree, to match up separate internet personas as being different personality facets of the same individual. Employment recruitment firms sometimes utilize such services. Likewise, competitors in business may attempt to gain some commercial advantage from such information. Regardless, this sort of research can hurt you.

It can hurt you even if it is not true. Particularly in a closed information system, like an employment search, to which the “victim” may never have access to the “finding” presented or know why he or she was passed over for a particular opportunity (unlike a credit report the findings of which are generally available to the subject of the findings), false information is as damaging, if not more damaging, than something real.

There two countervailing forces are at work. One is the instant leveling of barriers to privacy inherent in the technology. The other is the unparalleled opportunity to connect with small numbers of like minded folk sharing a narrow, even very narrow, common interest. This is a major by product of the new technology that directly affects everybody. It is one that may soon require each of us to develop a conscious coping strategy.

Let’s face it. We all have a bit of Mr. Hyde in us. The question is, do we trust society at large to see us in that role?

Companies such as Cisco, IBM, Tanberg, AT&T, to name a few, have recently reported banner results. All have changed future forecasts to reflect the dramatically improved commercial environment they occupy. Other companies, those that use rather than make the technology infrastructure products, are, in many cases, also reporting improved financial conditions. However, these user companies are not doing anywhere near as well as the provider companies and the users are also reporting dramatic investments in technology to improve production productivity.

For example, many user companies are expanding their capacity for teleconferencing so that travel costs are curtailed. In a survey conducted by Research Now companies all over the world had recently expanded their capabilities in the video conferencing area or were actively planning to do so within the next eighteen to twenty-four months.

While that is happening, companies like Amazon, Apple, RIM, Google, Sony and a host of smaller players are revolutionizing the delivery of traditional forms of print, voice and video communications. The impact of these companies has ceased to be merely device and/or consumer electronics oriented. Devices such as the Kindle, iPhone, Blackberry, Android systems, E-reader series, iPad and so forth are working profound changes on the way commercial and personal communications take place. These changes in communications are, in turn, working profound changes on the production, distribution, marketing, sales and management of a wide variety of industries, whether these industries are communications businesses or something else. These changes are so far reaching, ongoing and evolutionary that possession and use of these devices is as much part of the technology infrastructure for current and future business operations as the massive switches, servers and transmission pipelines are.

What was once believed to be the “latest craze,” a mere gimmick, has now become an integral component part of a company’s operational infrastructure. Companies such as Itekka are offering products that result in true paperless billing for professional services, such as legal services, through the use of smart phone platforms. Once multi purpose tablets such as iPad are ubiquitous in the market such billing apps will be combined with library and research apps, video conferencing apps, logistical management apps, and on and on until business operations will be impossible without immediate, pervasive access to such tablets.

In much the same way that calculators drove out slide rules for complex mathematical calculations and then drove away the need to memorize multiplication tables, tablets will drive away the need to memorize much of the minutia of knowledge” related to a wide variety of professional as well as commercial business. In fact, professionals who focus more on how to use the technology in the furtherance of their professional service will be far better providers of these services than those who adhere to the old ways of memorization. By whom would you prefer to be treated, a doctor who has the entire medical knowledge of mankind at his or her finger tips and knows how to access, evaluate and apply that knowledge or a doctor who only knows whatever it is he or she has memorized?

It has been said that all professions have in common the following four components: 1) a body of knowledge, 2) a procedure for recovering and using that knowledge, 3) a social service imperative and 4) professional judgment governing the use of that knowledge. Knowledge, procedure, service and judgment, these are the four foundations of any profession.

In the medical profession the body of knowledge is extensive understanding of the human body and mind and the various maladies that befall us, and what can be done about these maladies. The procedure is the diagnostic procedure, the vow to do no harm and attempt always to alleviate human suffering without playing God is the service creed and judgment is the wisdom to know how to do all that. In the legal profession knowledge relates to what the law says and how it has been applied in the past and is likely to be applied in the future, the right of every person to competent advocacy as a pillar of justice is the service creed, precedent, rules of evidence and so on is the procedure and wisdom to govern all that, wisdom born of practice and experience, is the judgment component.

Every profession, science, engineering, social work, you name it, excepting, of course, politics and journalism, complies with these standards. (Politics and journalism, having no standards, are exempt.) As each is built upon a foundation of knowledge and knowledge, and the access to it, is the very thing technology offers in the most abundant array, every profession will be dependent upon the new emergent technological infrastructure. (Again, since neither politicians nor journalists ever need or use actual knowledge, these “professions” are exempt.)

In our medical example, there already exist diagnostic engines that take input in the form of symptoms and release as output possible maladies that might be the cause. Likewise, there are already transmission systems that allow doctors specializing in a given disease or other to remotely consult with medical personnel on the scene.  When 3G and 4G and/or WiMax systems are ubiquitous, dedicated infrastructure will no longer be required to allow medical personnel “on the ground” to consult with the best practitioners in the field, wherever they may be. This will not eliminate the requirement for specialized knowledge, judgment or a sense of service but it will change the set of skills and knowledge required for competence.

Similar arguments can be made for every other profession that, if those arguments are accurate, will change the skill set and knowledge base required of every profession.

As most of you may know, Amazon’s e-reader has been the breakout hit of the digital devices allowing consumers to download and read books, magazines and newspapers. Publishers of all three types of print media have developed a love/hate relationship with the online retailing giant. The love part relates to the ease and lack of expense related to publishing and distributing over the Kindle system. My in -house publishing firm, viscerality.com, publishes over the Kindle system and it is very simple.

The hate part of this relationship involves two primary issues. The first of these issues is immediate and pressing. Amazon has always insisted on a set maximum price, $9.99, for copyright protected books, and a specified split of the resulting revenue between Amazon and the customer.

The second issue rankling the publishers is the clear ability of Amazon and other online publishing systems, smashwords.com, Apple, Sony, etc., to offer authors a means of freeing themselves from the gatekeeper role publishers have played since the inception of print media. It is this second, latent, matter hanging over publishers that is the most worrisome, if not the most pressing.

The Wired.com article analyzed Amazon’s recent capitulation to Macmillan over the pricing issue and, perhaps, though details between the companies related to revenue sharing are not public information, the percentages shared by the parties to a sale. The article declares that “content is king” in the book publishing business.

The fact is, content has always been king and, the Monkies not withstanding, in all probability, always will be. Ted Turner, the Atlanta media mogul and billionaire, demonstrated this truth many decades ago when, against all advice to the contrary, he continually purchased content ownership to give his cable channels a leg up on competition. He began with purchasing pro sports teams, the Atlanta Hawks and Braves, and “selling” his station’s exclusive broadcast rights to the games. In a huge gamble, Turner borrowed heavily at junk bond interest rates to purchase several movie studio archives and formed exclusive movie channels showing old movies contained in the acquisitions’ vaults.

This last big gamble almost broke him before it catapulted him into such a strong position of wealth he was able to invent the 24-hour news channel known as CNN. At first, this gamble was derided, called the chicken noodle network, until the international political policy wonks became addicted to it. CNN, it is said, was the only clear winner of the first Gulf War.

While Turner’s media empire is one clear example of content being king, the entire publishing industry made that point perfectly clear centuries before Ted came along. Publishers took control away from printers early in the history of print media by the two pronged approach of, first, taking some of the front-end risk away from the author who, in return, gratefully offered up some of his or her economic rights to the creative work. The second prong was the slow creation of the legal concept of “intellectual property.” Prior to Johannes Gutenberg there was no such thing as intellectual property rights. There was no need for it. Any invention or other creative act immediately entered the public domain as soon as someone figured out how to copy it. Publishers invented intellectual property, not the creative property itself, but the legal concept of it.

Publishers did this magnificent thing to protect their economic interest in investments in published works. The fact that it was a purely selfish act doesn’t take away from the fact that it was the single greatest legal invention, rivaled only by the stock company, devised by the mind of man since Hammurabi. That single selfish impulse is the very thing that has driven the explosive outburst of creativity in western civilization. It is the primary driver that has now spread that creative explosion worldwide.

How odd it is that the two parties in the Amazon/Macmillan dispute are both betting on the same thing. Both are betting that content is and always will be king. All the e-reader companies are betting the same way. All the publishers are also betting the same way.

The e-reader platforms/distributors, Amazon, Apple, etc., are all making nice to the publishers now but they all believe the day will come when publishers will fade into marketing and/or editing companies and authors will no longer need them. The e-reader platform companies believe the day will come when established media “stars,” the Dan Browns and the Stephen Kings and the J. K. Rowlings of the world, will wake up and say to themselves, “I don’t need a publisher. My audience knows my work. If I just tell them where to look they will find me.”

And it may not be limited to superstar novelists. What would a Maureen Dowd mean to the market penetration of an online journal of opinion, such as www.likethedew.com? How about a Krugman or Friedman, well not Friedman, or Rich, now that the NY Times has made them famous? These guys, and many others besides could cut their own deal with an online journal. Any one of these guys could wrangle huge percentages of ad and gimcrack revenue in return for the site visits they would generate.

Hell, in return for the exposure, writers like myself might even pay, assuming I had any money, for the opportunity to be positioned on a page with one or more of these established opinionators. How else am I going to have my stuff in front of millions of potential readers on a regular basis?

The same may become true of a Tina Fey. Why should she make payments on the mortgage for a dead weight Harvard MBA type whose last original idea died in the womb of his constricted brain? Ms. Fey has an audience. She could easily set up her own “network” sending signal directly to desktops, TVs and iPad like devices without the aid of any MBA of any linage.

Macmillan, NBC, the NY Times and all the other “publishers” are betting creative types will not leave them. Maybe they are right. It takes a good bit of creativity to plan a successful marketing plan for a creative work. In fact, it takes a good bit of creativity to develop a bad marketing plan.

It also takes up front cash to “publish” and market creative works as well as to distribute these works to traditional channels. None of these channels are going to go away immediately and, maybe, some of them not ever. Further, when the old talent dies and/or dries up, and old talent always does do one of the other or both, without “publishers,” how does the new blood get in front of an audience?

So, maybe it is a dicey bet either way right now. However, if I was primarily a publisher I would be a bit more worried than the platform/distribution guys. Recall the old “studio system” that once dominated the movie industry. Back in the day, no matter how big a star, if you didn’t tow the company line the studio system that made you could and would and, on occasion, did, break you.

Long after the technology was in place for independents to rise up and kick the old barons aside, the studio system remained in place. It wasn’t until some of the really big stars, Burt Lancaster comes to mind, in the late sixties and early fifties, had enough money, influence and moxie to take on the system and beat it on a semi regular basis. Even today, huge studio companies are still alive and remain the only entities willing and able to take on the really big money risks.

Still, for all electronic media, movies included, it yet remains early days. The entire situation is still evolving. The bet remains that content is king. The only point of confusion is who will control the king. The Googles, Amazons, Apples and other platform distribution guys of the world think, eventually, the creators will have control. The platform guys also believe these creators are a far more malleable bunch to work with than the publisher/producer hard asses. The producer/publishers of the world believe the creative types are always going to prefer creating and leaving the up-front risk and nitty-gritty of business to them.

Could be they are both right. Evolution is a bitch.

My friend quoted a bond trader, Bill Gross of PIMCO, as saying these orthodoxies are: 1) the Keynesian notion of deficit financing of domestic programs and 2) the JFK/Reagan belief in tax cuts as primary stimulus and all around economic and political elixir. My friend went on to say that Gross did not believe either of these “orthodoxies” was particularly helpful in our current situation.

My friend went further by positing the questions contained below. I have posted the questions, along with my answers. I hope you will give these some thought and grace us with your answers as well.

I am in hopes of hearing from Brenden on these matters. In the spirit of this hope, I hasten to say, Brenden, I believe you are real.* Unlike some, I do not believe you are but a shadow, cast by nefarious forces of the far right in order to confuse and darken our little corner of paradise. So, have at it if you will.

The questions as presented to me, and others, by Walter Ralph Steven Meigs, III, of the Mobile Meigs’:

What do you guys think?

The short answer to this question is I am not sure what I think.

The longer answer is I suspect the question is too narrowly defined, in that it relates to whatever role government should be playing. At least part of what is happening has nothing to do with inflation, debt policies, taxation, domestic spending, etc. At least part of the current kerfuffle can be attributed to the vast changes being wrought in business, economics and culture by rapid technological changes. This change has impacts that cannot be overstated. The means of communications, logistics, access to information, the avenues for deal making and execution and almost everything else are being changed by emergent technologies in ways nobody fully understands.

Another part of what is happening is increased demand for traditional commodities. New industrial societies are making demands on these resources and increasing the competition for them. This is more than an inflation problem as this is not so much a devaluation of money as it is an increasing value of the commodity itself.

I know, I know, either way money is worth less than it was and an economist will call that inflation. However, it is not inflation brought on by government fiscal and monetary policy so much as it is another (like the emergent technologies) fundamental, structural change in world commerce and economics. As such, the two economic “orthodoxies” discussed aren’t particularly pertinent to the matter.

What do you think the new orthodoxy should be?

If my belief, that our current economic situation is due to fundamental, structural changes in commerce more than any set of government policies, is correct, then governments have to hunker down and fund the essentials and not fund the non-essentials. During the transition from the “old economy” to the “new economy” (that is, from the old equilibrium to the new one) governments have to attempt to curb all their excesses whether those are debt, military adventurism, inflation or whatever.

Beyond believing that the Paulson plan of saving the banks first was a big mistake, I don’t really know what is essential and what isn’t. The various governments are going to have to sort that out for themselves. What is very clear is that the U S debt structure is not sustainable policy and has not been for a very long time. The long term trade policy is also unsustainable. Perhaps the commitment to domestic social services is unsustainable. It is almost certainly true that our current commitment to be the world’s policeman is unsustainable. Which, among these and other public policy commitments, we cut loose and which we keep is a decision our society, and every other society on the planet, is going to have to make. We are always in the process of making decisions like this. If we fail to continue to do so by cutting loose enough of these commitments to make a difference to our debt we will soon be a failed experiment in governance.

Likewise, if we adopt a policy of significant tax cuts without something on the order of three or four to one spending reductions to go along with the cuts, that too will prove fatally irresponsible.

Finally, in answer to this question, I believe no orthodoxy is always preferable to any orthodoxy. Orthodoxies are a convenient barrier between humans and the requirement that we think.

Are we in a vaguely analogous situation to Jefferson’s assessment of slavery–afraid to continue to hold the wolf by the ears and afraid to let go?

When the fundamentals of a society’s commerce and economy shift it is almost always the case that the “elites” of the old equilibrium lack the imagination to see beyond the abyss. They can, like Mr. Jefferson, see the looming disaster but cannot see what lies beyond. They usually solve this problem by starting a war with someone. The war usually results in some sort of imposed fundamental change and society buries its dead and moves on.

To this extent, the proposed analogy has meaning. When President Carter freed capital to flow in and between nations pretty much free of government interference (a major step in the nation’s long standing export replacement policy, sometimes called “free trade”) it made a big difference in the entire financial structure of the planet. The repercussions of this decision have not yet fully played out. It may well be that the old equilibrium’s structure based on “money centers” like New York, may be obsolete. Whether they are or aren’t, the financial structure of the Earth is not yet resettled from the great unbundling of money movement from government regulation.

If I am right about that then your analogy is spot on. The great viziers of money, the Paulsons and the Geithners and the Bernankes of this world are either lying to us or to themselves and us or are simply clueless.

If they are, as I suspect, clueless, then they, like Mr. Jefferson, can see the dark wall of the hurricane coming but cannot see what is on the other side.

Have we inflated our economy so much that we cannot chance market forces taking over?

Whatever is to come, it will be less painful with a stable dollar than it will be with an unstable dollar. That said I don’t believe there is any panacea in “market forces.” If left unregulated, market forces move toward some sort of stabilization that is tantamount to monopolies and or flat out rigged business. People on the political right use the term “market forces” as if it was some magic talisman. It is a phrase that has no meaning other than a sham.

Is Obama’s freeze proposal a good idea or populist piffle and pablum?

Probably it is neither. It is a step toward making the decision about what to cut loose and what to keep. Since it will only result in a 250 billion dollar saving and not before 2020, it isn’t even that big of a step.

* Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, it must be admitted that I also still believe in Santa Clause.

However, in the commentary he published in yesterday’s salon.com, I think he got it entirely wrong. In his article, he praised Senator Harry Reid, D-Nevada. He praised the senator, in essence, for being kind, patient, thoughtful and, presumably, solvent. All of these virtues are just swell. Unfortunately, none of these virtues are very useful if you want to be a political leader in a rough and tumble arena.

I suspect you could assign the same list of virtues to our president. How he could be that way and have survived the politics of Chicago is beyond me but it is increasingly apparent that he did just that.

I think the “let’s us just all get along” philosophy the president has taken toward his domestic detractors is an example of these sterling qualities. I also think this comes across as political incompetence.

Maybe the president or, at least, some of his subordinates recognize this tendency. Maybe that is why, all of a sudden, the U S State Department rose up upon its mighty haunches and made a clear statement of policy about something. Of all things, the department decided to draw a line in the sand over a “free” internet.

Internet freedom, that is, uncensored internet access for everyone, is now official, front burner, U S foreign policy. The State Department has announced a major expanded policy statement by Secretary Clinton declaring that free access to all internet content amounts to a basic human right.

Of course, by “free” the United States does not mean monetarily free. It means free of censorship, once one manages to get on line. Still, this is quite a step. I would like to think it illustrates that the folk in D. C. have figured out that the internet is a major weapon, effective in the fight against lingering pockets of medieval thought.

A Reuters’ report published today in Wired.com claims that Secretary Clinton’s announced address for later today “could be seen as throwing down the gauntlet” to the Chinese. While this observation was not attributed to anyone in particular, it is the sort of behind the scenes statement officials, or their subordinates, leak to the press to fortify the weight of their words without being directly offensive to the target. In this case the Chinese.

There is an awful lot at stake here. Internet based commerce and internet based foreign policy are two spheres, one commercial and the other political, in which the U S believes it has real advantages over the rest of the world. These policy areas are now so important either could be the flash point for larger breakdowns in international commerce and/or national alignment. Yet, knowing the potential dangers, Washington doesn’t really have any choice.

Washington lacks choice because as a weapon to destabilize our enemies, the internet is without peer. It is also mind-bendingly cost efficient. It is virtually free and is fueled by the creative power of the west and the latent creative power of the Middle East and the Far East.

This policy statement could also, eventually, have real impact on domestic politics. As the president continues to dither and blither all his political capital away, Secretary Clinton’s strong technology initiative stands in some considerable contrast.

Of course, the Chinese may not blink. They figure out some way to bring financial pressure on us, perhaps through their ownership of much of our debt, and do so without plunging themselves into political and financial chaos, the secretary’s initiative could begin to look like a liability.

However, if you ignore the possibility of worst case planning, and her initiative does back the Chinese down, this will be a great feather in the Obama administration’s cap and should prove very popular. It could be something to take the focus off the domestic policy fiasco.

And, make no mistake, the president needs all the help he can get about now. It is almost impossible to construct a scenario where his “community organizer” style of leadership is not the primary reason we do not and will not get any meaningful, beneficial health care package out of Congress this year.

The president began this effort less than a year ago. He was armed with overwhelming public support, huge majorities in Congress and a cowed opposition. He then began to piss. He continued to do so throughout the spring, the summer and the fall. A larger, mightier, political bladder has never been seen in our lifetime. Unfortunately, the steady stream ran out in MA this week. The president’s bladder is now dry.

During this political urinary exercise, the president has revealed himself to be both a thorough and timid man whose desire to “find consensus” trumps his will to lead. I once heard it said that to declare for governor of Alabama was the political equivalent of mounting a table in a crowded and rowdy bar and declaring yourself the “toughest, meanest son of a bitch in the place.” Whatever you may say about George Bush, he understood that was true of being president as well. Bill Clinton, as Newt Gingrich discovered on an airplane trip to Israel, understood that also. Barack Obama does not. Jimmy Carter, God bless him, never did either.

Maybe it is possible that the president will learn from the health care debacle. Maybe he will grow up and into the job. I do hope so. However, that is what I hope. What I think is that Jim DeMint got it right. The failure of the health care bill is Obama’s Waterloo. I suspect it is the Democratic Party’s as well.

After watching the pitiful and disgraceful conduct of the Democratic Party Congressional leadership on almost every issue it has faced since they took over in 2006, it is hard to imagine how they will ever have a descension of political testicles. While I have some respect for Speaker Pelosi, I am utterly dismayed at the rest of the passive putters that make up the Senate and House leadership.

Watching the Senate race in MA I am left wondering if, in fact, the Democratic Party has anything left to offer the nation. I am left to wonder if, even given a huge endorsement by the electorate in the last election, is there anything the Democrats stand for, anything at all?