Dear President Obama,
This week, in the op-ed section of the Los Angeles times, George McGovern wrote an editorial about our war in Iraq and the one that is still continuing in Afghanistan and possibly spreading into Pakistan. He wants us to pull out of that area completely and immediately. I agree.
As it happens I grew up in the Middle East and know the nature of the tribal and religious sects in that area. I have not been to Afghanistan but my father was all over that area as a New York Times correspondent in the sixties. I was there for three years with my family and returned to Beirut for college from 1970 to 1975. I know first hand how the different religious and
sectarian factions think and compete for power. We are not going to change any of that. It is a fight as old as Jerusalem.
I agree with Senator McGovern that we should not be fighting there. It is nothing we can win. We have spent six years teaching the Iraqi people how to manage their country. It is time to leave. The costly lesson must end now. “Khrallas!” as they say there. The word is a mixture of “finish” and “stop.”
As for Afghanistan, it will indeed be your Vietnam, as Senator Kerry communicated yesterday, along with a soldier home from duty in there in Afghanistan. He said that combat in that stark landscape is like “fighting ghosts” because they never see their enemy.
As Mr. McGovern says, “Why have you adopted most of Bush’s formula for dragging out the war?” The fixation Americans have on Al Quaida is psychotic and miopic. There are many anti-American groups there and elsewhere. There will always be. If thousands of American troops go into those Afghan mountains it will be slaughter for many on both sides. You will just encourage more insurgents to join the militants in the caves. Why are you insisting on it?
Pull out completely. You and your staff should work diplomatically to receive accurate intel from the countries that harbor (against their will, by the way) terrorists and make sure the anti-American groups are well contained and observed closely. Just use the considerable resources in the area already. We have to surround any place they are operating from,
contain them, maintain a close watch on them and their movements. Please don’t use our men to go in those treacherous mountains.
President Obama, I’m wondering if you have been brainwashed into thinking we need to continue a war there in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are the commanders of the Armed Forces controlling you as they did President Bush? If so, I am extremely disappointed. You are still allowing Americans to die every day in Iraq (and probably other places) and killing civilians
by the dozens. I am shocked that you are allowing this to continue.
Please try to do the right thing. Save all those lives that will end there in the next few years. Bring our troops home, please.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Brady Woods
Friday, April 24, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
The Butterfly Effect
The idea that one butterfly could eventually have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent historic events seems first to have appeared in a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about time travel (see Literature and print here) although Edward Lorenz made the term popular (see below). Lorenz noted in a publication for the New York Academy of Sciences that "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever." Later speeches and papers by Lorenz used the more poetic butterfly. According to Lorenz, upon failing to provide a title for a talk he was to present at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, Philip Merilees concocted "Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" as a title for the talk.
P.S. The term "butterfly effect" itself is related to the work of Edward Lorenz, and is based in Chaos Theory and sensitive dependence on initial conditions, first described in the literature by Jacques Hadamard in 1890[1] and popularized by Pierre Duhem's 1906 book.
P.S. The term "butterfly effect" itself is related to the work of Edward Lorenz, and is based in Chaos Theory and sensitive dependence on initial conditions, first described in the literature by Jacques Hadamard in 1890[1] and popularized by Pierre Duhem's 1906 book.
Why Are We The Boss of the World?
April 5, 2009
To the New York Times -
re bossing the world nations, as in telling N Korea they can’t develop
nuclear weapons:
Now, wait just a minute. I may be naive and simple minded but , to me, telling other countries, such as North Korea and Iran, not to build missiles and bombs seems presumptuous and possibly causing rancor enough so that they defy us. President Obama is doing a great job and I am very happy he is President. On this subject, however, he is towing an old line that has gotten us nowhere.
We ourselves have nuclear weapons as do several other countries. Is that the credentials to boss everyone else around telling them what they can’t develop missiles or nuclear power? Yes, I know this was a United Nations treaty but wasn’t that agreed upon back in the cave era?
Time to be real. Use diplomacy to make friends who won’t attack us.
The Nato countries should rewrite their agenda. The Alliance should use international forces to keep nuclear nations from doing anything aggressive. The US must come to terms with the fact that we have little credibility after attacking and ruining Iraq.
Please tell me why we, Americans, have the right to tell other countries how to live in this big bad world?
To the New York Times -
re bossing the world nations, as in telling N Korea they can’t develop
nuclear weapons:
Now, wait just a minute. I may be naive and simple minded but , to me, telling other countries, such as North Korea and Iran, not to build missiles and bombs seems presumptuous and possibly causing rancor enough so that they defy us. President Obama is doing a great job and I am very happy he is President. On this subject, however, he is towing an old line that has gotten us nowhere.
We ourselves have nuclear weapons as do several other countries. Is that the credentials to boss everyone else around telling them what they can’t develop missiles or nuclear power? Yes, I know this was a United Nations treaty but wasn’t that agreed upon back in the cave era?
Time to be real. Use diplomacy to make friends who won’t attack us.
The Nato countries should rewrite their agenda. The Alliance should use international forces to keep nuclear nations from doing anything aggressive. The US must come to terms with the fact that we have little credibility after attacking and ruining Iraq.
Please tell me why we, Americans, have the right to tell other countries how to live in this big bad world?
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Response to Greed or Stupidity, D. Brooks, New York Times
April 3, 2009
My letter to David Brooks, of the New York Times, about his editorial “Greed and Stupidity”:
Dear Mr. Brooks,
You put the entire picture of the causes of our financial crisis or collapse very succinctly. I really appreciate that. The complicated nature of it all explains why Americans and the new President are
having a difficult time figuring out what to do. They are still looking for a formulaic explanation, as if there is a recipe and they left out an important ingredient. In a way they are right. The recipe included responsibility and integrity but I guess they thought that was
optional.
From the editorial by David Brooks - NY Times - 4-3-09:
The best single encapsulation of the greed narrative is an essay called “The Quiet Coup,” by Simon Johnson, (former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund or IMF) in The Atlantic.
Mr. Johnson says:
“The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says Johnson, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak
freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true
depression, we’re running out of time.”
Johnson begins with a trend. Between 1973 and 1985, the
U.S. financial sector accounted for about 16 percent of domestic
corporate profits. In the 1990s, it ranged from 21 percent to 30 percent. This decade, it soared to 41 percent. In other words, Wall Street got huge. As it got huge, its prestige grew. Its compensation packages grew. Its political power grew as well. Wall Street and Washington merged as a flow of investment bankers went down to the White House and the Treasury Department.
The second and, to me, more persuasive theory revolves around ignorance and uncertainty. The primary problem is not the greed of a giant oligarchy. It’s that overconfident bankers didn’t know what they were doing. They thought they had these sophisticated tools to reduce risk. But when big events — like the rise of China — fundamentally altered the world economy, their tools were worse than useless.
Many writers have described elements of this intellectual
hubris. Amar Bhidé has described the fallacy of diversification.
Bankers thought that if they bundled slices of many assets into
giant packages then they didn’t have to perform due diligence on each one. ...the formula that gave finance whizzes the illusion that they could accurately calculate risks.
In Wired, Felix Salmon described the false lure of the Gaussian copula function, the formula that gave finance whizzes the illusion that they could accurately calculate risks. Still, one has to choose a guiding theory. To my mind, we didn’t get into this crisis because
inbred oligarchs grabbed power. We got into it because arrogant
traders around the world were playing a high-stakes game they
didn’t understand.
We should return to the day when banks were focused institutions — when savings banks, insurance companies, brokerages and investment banks lived separate lives. We can agree on that reform.
Again, from Johnson at the Atlantic:
“Typically, these countries (those that go to the IMF for help)
are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks... ......With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced
to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah.”
There is a “disturbing similarity” to a banana republic in our
own crisis: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the
inevitable collapse.”
In wrapping up Mr. Brooks comments and those of my other sources for the essay above, it is obvious that strict regulation is
necessary and obligatory now, for the banking industry and other
financial institutions. That is clear. Whether or not this President
can do enough remains to be seen.
My letter to David Brooks, of the New York Times, about his editorial “Greed and Stupidity”:
Dear Mr. Brooks,
You put the entire picture of the causes of our financial crisis or collapse very succinctly. I really appreciate that. The complicated nature of it all explains why Americans and the new President are
having a difficult time figuring out what to do. They are still looking for a formulaic explanation, as if there is a recipe and they left out an important ingredient. In a way they are right. The recipe included responsibility and integrity but I guess they thought that was
optional.
From the editorial by David Brooks - NY Times - 4-3-09:
The best single encapsulation of the greed narrative is an essay called “The Quiet Coup,” by Simon Johnson, (former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund or IMF) in The Atlantic.
Mr. Johnson says:
“The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says Johnson, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak
freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true
depression, we’re running out of time.”
Johnson begins with a trend. Between 1973 and 1985, the
U.S. financial sector accounted for about 16 percent of domestic
corporate profits. In the 1990s, it ranged from 21 percent to 30 percent. This decade, it soared to 41 percent. In other words, Wall Street got huge. As it got huge, its prestige grew. Its compensation packages grew. Its political power grew as well. Wall Street and Washington merged as a flow of investment bankers went down to the White House and the Treasury Department.
The second and, to me, more persuasive theory revolves around ignorance and uncertainty. The primary problem is not the greed of a giant oligarchy. It’s that overconfident bankers didn’t know what they were doing. They thought they had these sophisticated tools to reduce risk. But when big events — like the rise of China — fundamentally altered the world economy, their tools were worse than useless.
Many writers have described elements of this intellectual
hubris. Amar Bhidé has described the fallacy of diversification.
Bankers thought that if they bundled slices of many assets into
giant packages then they didn’t have to perform due diligence on each one. ...the formula that gave finance whizzes the illusion that they could accurately calculate risks.
In Wired, Felix Salmon described the false lure of the Gaussian copula function, the formula that gave finance whizzes the illusion that they could accurately calculate risks. Still, one has to choose a guiding theory. To my mind, we didn’t get into this crisis because
inbred oligarchs grabbed power. We got into it because arrogant
traders around the world were playing a high-stakes game they
didn’t understand.
We should return to the day when banks were focused institutions — when savings banks, insurance companies, brokerages and investment banks lived separate lives. We can agree on that reform.
Again, from Johnson at the Atlantic:
“Typically, these countries (those that go to the IMF for help)
are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks... ......With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced
to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah.”
There is a “disturbing similarity” to a banana republic in our
own crisis: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the
inevitable collapse.”
In wrapping up Mr. Brooks comments and those of my other sources for the essay above, it is obvious that strict regulation is
necessary and obligatory now, for the banking industry and other
financial institutions. That is clear. Whether or not this President
can do enough remains to be seen.
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