Centerfield

A friend of mine always got angry with me when I told him that the Democrats were as corrupt as the Republicans. That the people of Louisiana would re-elect Jefferson is a disgrace to their state. And if the Democrats will not throw him out of the Chamber because of his clear ethics violations, or at least completely marginalize him, their election platform is meaningless.

Feh.

I think the Dems need to seat him. He legitimately won re-election. Unless you can find violations of the campaign laws, he won. Now, once you seat him, you need to marginalize him just like Jon said. As soon as the guilty verdict comes down, then you need to remove him. I know you left-leaners out there may not want to hear this, but it does say something for the GOP that the 'ethically challenged' on their side of the aisle resigned, and Jefferson ran -and won- again.

He can sit next to Alcee Hastings. Maybe they can share a condo.

RE: Rahm Emmanuel. Are we surprised that they held onto them for "timely" use, or that Emmanuel's excuses sound as if he cribbed them directly from Denny Hastert's teleprompter?

It just goes to show you how hollow the Democrat's "culture of corruption" campaign slogan was.

Meet the new boss...Same as the old boss.

Meet the new boss...Same as the old boss.

Yep. Why CPD is a fairly useless endeavor unless you're comparing one candidate to another for voting purposes.

Political parties aren't corrupt, people are corrupt. Establish a "centrist" party, it would soon also be filled with its fair share of crooked politicians.

Yep.

people are corrupt..

I would disagree to an extent... I think the system, rather than the people in it, is the problem.

Yep. It's the worst system ever invented, except for all the others.

Seriously, there has never been a political system devoid of corruption. Nor is there likely to be one, given that the nature of politics inherently involves the "division of spoils."

Chicken or egg? The people ARE the system. No system is perfect. Then you add human temptation, greed, venality, and so on, and what do you get?

Unless we fundamentally change human nature, any political system will include corruption. All of the stories about political corruption are stories about human nature, character flaws, temptation, power, and so on.

Power corrupts. This saying isn't about systems, it's about what power does to people.

Perhaps the organizational patterns of human behavior are emergent. Like convection cells in heated water, the human system increases in spontaneous complexity as energy increases and the social dynmaic is pushed further from equilibrium.

The degree we keep from going back to a dark age will depend on the unprecedented degree we must cooperate, otherwise instability will produce undesirable consequences and entropy takes over. This stable progress of human self-organizing requires unique enforcement/punishment and the recognition of serious mutual self-interests. Sometimes terrible events bring this about. It is our present negligence to limit negative contributors to disorder that limits our progress, not petty corruption.

We will fundamentally change when the price of freeloading and beligerency becomes critical and our neglect shatters our complacency. The global system to prevent conflict is being destroyed by the corruption and subversion of ideology. This is more pathology than greed. Our human flaws are not the reason we resist virtue. The responsibilities of virtue are too great.

In Rock and Roll its called "carrying the weight", kind of the prerequisite for "one love". Mullahs on the move.

Love the protest in Iran today. Sheehan is arrested. Reyes doesn't know that AQ is a Sunni organization, Hamas commits terror in a growing civil war, The Iran Holocaust Debate in Tehran opens. Great start to the week......

Perhaps the organizational patterns of human behavior are emergent.

Perhaps. I think that the notion of "emergent properties" is an important and useful idea to understand. However, used carelessly it has the sometimes negative effect of fostering mysticism.

I think a better (but less hopeful) idea to apply to human systems to explain their behavior is entropy.

Entropy change has often been defined as a change to a more disordered state at a microscopic level.

Entropy in thermodynamics refers to idea that within some small closed operating universe, some energy will always be lost to heat. Philosophically speaking, the idea is that as a closed system ages and/or becomes more complex, it becomes ever less efficient and loses more and more energy in inefficient ways. It's an idea related to the common blogosphere complaint that, say, a debate has generated more heat than light.

The simple answer is that sometimes old systems really are best served by complete replacement. In such cases, there is often a debate over whether the new system ought to refocus on core needs and values to be simple and robust, or instead be designed to better meet the newer and expanded needs that the old system had evolved to deal with.

Life is an open system. As long as the Sun pours in energy to Earth, we do not follow classical thermodynamics. Life is, as some have coined, "an Autipoietic” process. I am referring to Maturana and Verela, particularly the stress placed on structural coupling. Life is almost an open defiance of entropy. Living systems pushed far from equilibrium by a source of energy form spontaneous and more complex patterns of self-organization. And who says self-organizing and self-referentiality is not an inherent attribute of the physical universe? Life skirts the classical philosophy of entropy, and hence, we are still alive. See Eigen and Progogine for the chemical events that spawned the first autopoietic systems.. This is old stuff….see Fritjof Capra’s Web of Life.

In living systems, parts and functions can change and run down, but the web of organization remains and is renewed. Evolution does not depict increasing disorganization Brian. Life is an open system and it is quite possible that the new patterns of globalization will emerge as we are pushed further from equilibrium.

This deeper lesson of what life is, ought to shine some light of how we get to where we are going. Nature is chaos, not disorder or order, but a unique kind of order where a blog in NY can change the weather in Beijing. LOL.

Here we see a nation with abundant oil revenues harnessing the power of nuclear energy
while organizing its hegemony and social order from a combination of religious fundamentalism and anti-Semitism. Another committee?

The West is still woven into the Cold War fabric which doesn’t seem quite over. There is a real fear of a US vacuum among allies that count. This event has made nuclear WMD a tool of terrorism.

After six years of Bush, I am amazed we have finally learned to put qualified people in critical places. Again, Tully, kudos Reyes is a breath of fresh air coming from the “most ethical Congress ever!”.

I wouldn’t doubt the final script is being written about now in bunkers half way around the world. The best one might hope is that those willing are not ill-prepared or are prevented from averting hegemonic suicide. There seems little will in the West even to track the financial resources of terrorists. I guess for the moment, there is no reason to listen to any General Alarm

Pushed far from the point of equilibrium, new patterns of self-organization emerge creating novel adaptation and complexity. When they don't a branch may be broken and a new order begin again closer to equilbrium. Somehow, we must reconcile liberty with security, privacy with self-defense. The Digital Age will most likely show us the interface to the next step. Already the internet has affected the behavior of humanity.

Soon connectivity and convergence will have an impact. In War and Peace however, we will continue to be driven by self-preservation. New technologies, new conviction and resolve, new fears, and new connections of global self-interest can emerge that will offer a kinder means of self-preservation. Whether we exploit this “emerge”ncy is another question.

Autopoiesis is the term....sorry for the typo in the above post. It is spelled autopoietic and has little to do with poetry.

time is running out

Self-organizing principles are not always self-evident.

Saudis will back AQ in Iraq?

Life is an open system.

I was speaking more of political systems, which tend towards stasis.

But while life is theoretically an open system, it's an open question as to how true this is or will be in practice. Many folks like to think that human life in not fgoing to be forever trapped here on the largely closed system of Earth, faced with a finite space into which to try to accomodate endless growth.

But time and investigation may lkead us to discovewr further bounds on human aspiration such that we may be forced to regard Earth as closed system for all intents and purposes. When I say this, I am speaking only of the physical concept of having a finite space which no human individuals can physically escape.

Philosophical and spiritual space, on the other hand, exists as a function of our infinite mental conceptualizations, so I'm not interested in debating the poetical or philosphical aspects of how open "life" is. I'll stick with the discussion one can have with known physical quantities.

Brian,
This is an important point so I'll belabor it once more. First, we are living systems. All we know is life. Our perceptions and cognitions are based in a living system composed of organic structures supplied indirectly by a free supply of energy.. Such a bio-system is an open system. We renew dead skin, we reproduce, and we expand our potential energy.

Life has never died since it was first created on Earth. Individual cells and organism may die, but the process of life has never been broken. What a living process is, has been described as autopoietic, which has nothing to do with poetic. A dynamic, circular and recursive system such as life or other similar chemical systems, when pushed further from equilibrium, produce new patterns of self-organization (almost, but not quite miraculously). This is why complexity seems to grow and why some point to this as God's hand. How could such complexity and self-organization happen? It is a physical phenomenon of open systems. Obviously, classical thermodynamics doesn’t refute this possibility. Such open systems may be quite rare, or more ubiquitous than we think.

The sun pours in energy and we use that free power to bootstrap our way to increasing complexity and adaptation. An example would be our present ability to change our genes outside of Darwinian mechanics; -an unbelievable event in universal evolution. There is nothing tautological in this. Space and energy must contain characteristics of self-organization and self-referentiality. One could call this primal consciousness, but again, one not need be mystical. There is no duality here.

To be more consistent with today’s science, religion might consider stopping their suggesting that God is immaterial. The modern concept of materiality is so vague (see dark matter) to begin with, that I do not see the logic in such characterizations.

So in short, if we focus on the essential qualities of life as elaborated by Capra’s discourse on autopoiesis, we find ample reason to hope that new means of organization and adjusted equilibrium will occur as we harness unprecedented power amidst tension pushing us far from our initial equilibrium. This does seem like what is happening with the world. This creating “new order” happens in chaos. There are no purely random human activities on a large scale, nor perfectly ordered states on the macro-level. We are fractilian, emerging and barely able to focus on self-awareness for more than a few minutes before we "react" or "associate". I think today’s evolutionary theory presents us with hope and many examples. It shows us through its synergy, ecology, and cooperation how fitness and adaptation can be increased.

Unfortunately, cooperation on a large scale is difficult for life when individuals have risen to the stage of higher life forms and are more independent or autonomous. The key is enforcement of “rules” and those important genes that allow us to choose to accept the idea of punishment in the interest of the group. This is a novel adaptation.

“The one is more important than the many” still rings in Trekkies' ears. One can't forget however, that love is altruistic (It doesn’t really exist in Skinner’s world) and is connected to justice. Try doing something unjust to someone's loved one and see what happens. Witness Iraq.

I find the metaphor of classical entropy often used to explain how America or the West will run down and fold through friction. This usual ignores the qualitative difference between life and non-living phenomena. It doesn't really happen that way to humans. It may seem like we are just running down and then we die, but the limits on longevity seems to be placed on us because of our human group dynamics. Regeneration is a dormant genetic possession of most vertebrates. Today, humanity has indeed entered a new historical moment. We can change or redirect our genes outside of reproductive recombination. Inf*rmation can be passed horizontally across living lines of individuals.

Life still holds the greatest secrets and models for our continued progress. This is true in life's lessons as applied to politics. Life hasn’t been defeated since it began more than three billion years ago. Now that is a resume to run on. "Life the ultimate incumbency".

On another note, if I were GOP spinners I would be looking down the road a bit.

I wish Bobby would comment on whether the military really backs "doubling down" in Iraq. Maybe McCain is on to something. It seems like increasing our military might happen and the first additional soldiers, part of increasing the number in Iraq.

the sectarian divide