I’ve been greatly enjoying my monthly newsletters from FLOW, because these guys are genuinely committed to exploring the reconciliation between liberal values (of personal development, generosity, community, and peace) and free markets.

Below is their latest, from CEO Michael Strong. Other than perhaps his analysis of Mac vs. PC I find this to be a very stimulating and incisive discussion of the relevant topics.

Dear FLOW Members,

One of our most powerful instincts is that those who contribute the most to a community should be rewarded the most. From this perspective, it has always been a source of great consternation that educators and healers are often poorly paid, while other individuals whose contribution to the public good are more dubious may be highly paid. For many of us, our sense of justice is constantly violated by this obvious inequity. For much of the last century, “capitalism” was blamed for this state of affairs.

I know a dedicated, hard-working Montessori teacher approaching fifty with no pension, barely able to pay her bills, whose school may be going bankrupt, leaving her unemployed. I once calculated that Montessori teachers sacrifice about a million dollars in lifetime earnings, relative to public school teachers, in order to pursue their vocation.

In another direction, I know the CEO of a large yoga business, a highly professional businessman who once led his family’s multi-million dollar jewelry business, who struggles with the challenge of paying his yoga teachers well.

What to do? There are those who would legislate more government funding for educators and medical professionals, in various ways. But precisely because the vast majority of Montessori educators and yoga teachers practice their arts outside government-legitimized channels, such legislation would not help them at all. Indeed, sometimes government-mandated education and health care reduces the opportunities for alternative practitioners. Montessori educators, for instance, often campaign against government-mandated pre-school, because by supplying free government pre-school such programs would probably put the vast majority of Montessori schools, most of which are private, out of business.

One could, of course, declare that all alternative education and healing are appropriately marginalized, and with issues as urgent as education and health care the last thing that we need to worry about are alternatives outside the mainstream (though both Montessori education and yoga are creeping towards the mainstream).

For those of us who do find value in alternative education and health care, and for those of us who are simply committed to innovation and to individuality, this perspective is profoundly unsatisfying. I don’t want my options for myself and my family to be limited to those legitimatized by the custodial state.

Moreover, a strong case can be made that there are severe weaknesses in the “establishment” education and health care systems. This does not mean that there are not some things that they do well, but it seems premature, to say the least, to reduce the amount of innovation that is possible in the most important realms of human life.

One of the statistics that has long interested me is the fact that about three-quarters of health care costs in the U.S. are attributable to chronic diseases: heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes leading the way. The single most powerful way to reduce the incidence of all of these diseases, and their associated costs, are lifestyle changes (The most lethal cancer by a large margin continues to be lung cancer, largely due to smoking). In addition, most accidents, the largest source of death among young people, are due to lifestyle choices, among them drinking and driving. Separate from both the costs of chronic diseases and the costs of accidents are the costs associated with addiction per se. The epidemic of obesity results in all health care problems become more frequent, more deadly, and costlier to treat. Added together, the overall health costs of bad habits may well exceed 80-90% of our health care costs, somewhere between $1.2 - $1.4 trillion per year, more than double what we spend on all K-12 education in the U.S., more than the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa.

As an educator, I was always more concerned with the school’s culture than I was with academics per se; it is a profound mistake to force schools to focus directly on test scores and ignore all other aspects of life. My explicit goal was to develop positive habits and attitudes among the students in my care. The best “alternative” or “holistic” educators and health care practitioners are often profoundly focused on habits and lifestyle choices, as are many of the best traditional educators and health care practitioners. But we have created institutions that penalize such a focus rather than reward such a focus.

I have often looked at the $1.2 trillion or so in health care costs due to our bad habits and wondered how that massive amount of wealth could be redirected towards those educators and health care providers that support the development of good habits. It is a well-documented fact that cultural variables are more important determinants of health than are education, income, or access to health care. At a given level of income, Asian-Americans and Hispanic-Americans tend to have better health than Euro-Americans, who in turn tend to have better health than African-Americans and Native Americans. Hispanic Americans from Mexico are healthiest when they first immigrate to the U.S., and gradually regress closer towards the national average the longer they live here. Mormons are significantly healthier than the rest of us. If we could all be Asian, Hispanic-fresh from Mexico, or Mormon, health care costs might instantly drop by nearly a trillion dollars.

What if some educators or health care practitioners were actually effective at helping us cultivate better habits? In principal, our insurance costs should decrease. There are already insurance discounts for non-smokers in health insurance and for good students in auto insurance. If an insurance company knew that students from a particular educational program, or practitioners of a particular kind of yoga or martial art or whatever had reliably better health statistics, they could provide significant discounts to the individuals who were associated with such healthy practices. If the discounts were significant enough, those organizations and individuals who were consistently able to improve health habits could increase their rates, and pay their professionals more highly. Ultimately high-quality preventative care, with highly paid professionals providing such care, would become a reality.

Most of the alternative educators and health care professionals I know believe that, in fact, they are more effective at imparting good habits and lifestyle changes than are most mainstream sources of education and health care. The mainstream would counter that there is inadequate research evidence of this fact. And so the Montessorians and yoga teachers and others patiently work to try to obtain funding for research to prove that what they are doing has some measurable value. Most of them hope to become legitimate in the eyes of the establishment so that they can receive some of the establishment funding.

In the world of personal computing, for nearly thirty years now there has been a virulent argument between supporters of Macintoshes and supporters of Microsoft PCs. On the basis of cost and measurable performance, Microsoft PCs are almost always a better buy than are Macs. On the basis of quantifiable evidence, Macs lost long ago. And yet Macs have retained their position on the leading edge, inspiring millions of enthusiasts even while Microsoft continues to imitate elements of cutting-edge Mac design.

Insofar as improvements in our quality of life are not easily measured, it is a mistake to await double-blind research evidence and government approval before allowing such innovations to receive support. Insofar as the worlds of education and health care are heavily regulated and have been for the past hundred years, the vast majority of potential innovations in our quality of life have remained stillborn during this period.

Entrepreneurs bet their lives on unproven visions. If it were legal to do so, more entrepreneurs would bet their lives on delivering education and health care that changed habits and improved quality of life and, most importantly, health insurance that monetized the value of those improved habits. Some of those, using unproven technologies, would become wealthy and provide new and better ways of living to millions of people. We should have education and health care chains that are far more powerful than Apple and Whole Foods Market, bringing new and better ways of living to millions. Ultimately, once these markets in happiness and well-being have been legalized, we will see all of the capital and talent that we now see flowing into technology and finance flowing into education and health care. And great educators and holistic health care practitioners will become highly paid, highly respected members of our society. In this sense we need more capitalism, not less, in order to create an ever-improving quality of life for everyone in our society.

Newsweek Magazine recently named Moreno Valley High School (MVHS), of Angel Fire, New Mexico, the 51st best public high school in the U.S. based on the number of students who take Advanced Placement (AP) exams. The first year I founded the school none of the students had taken an AP test and a local college professor told me point blank that northern New Mexican students were not capable of passing AP tests. The second year of the school we were ranked the 147th best in the nation, the third year 36th best, and now 51st best, with AP passing rates more than double the national average. Most of the schools ranked more highly than MVHS are either wealthy suburban schools in elite enclaves or they are magnet schools that gather the best and the brightest from an entire city. Given the demographic profile of the school, it has consistently been one of the highest performing schools three years in a row.

I know exactly how to replicate this performance and had wanted to create a chain of these schools across the country. But I was forced out of the school due to the fact that I had never had an administrator’s license. There is no research evidence showing that the “methods” that I used produce these results – because the devil is in the details. I got into the business of starting schools because I realized I had to design every aspect of the school in order to ensure these results. It is not a matter of a “method” resulting in “replicable results.” It is the matter of individual vision manifest in a unique organization leading to outstanding results. Government-controlled institutions can never support the cultivation of thousands of individual visions resulting in unique organizations leading to outstanding results.

Through economic freedom based on rule of law and secure property rights, war and poverty can become a thing of the past around the world. Through property rights solutions to tragedy of the commons problems, we can create an environmentally sustainable world. And by legalizing markets in happiness and well-being, we can create a lively, innovative industry in health and learning, happiness and well-being, that will result in a continuously improving quality of life for all nine billion human beings in the 21st century.

Towards life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,

Michael Strong
CEO & Chief Visionary Officer
FLOW, Inc.

If you find this kind of analysis interesting, I encourage you check out their web site and sign up to receive their newsletter yourself.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve become very intrigued lately by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s concept of “conscious capitalism” (link to PDF essay).

A few days ago, Justin Fox from Time Magazine published a lengthy interview with Mackey and his college housemate Kip Tindell — who, as it happens, is the CEO of the Container Store, which is similarly prosperous and also run by a very similar business philosophy.

Year after year, Fortune magazine consistently rates their two companies as among the best companies in the world for which to work.

Here’s a good quote from Mackey, from the Time interview, that sort of sums up Mackey’s business philosophy:

First of all, Milton Friedman is one of my personal heroes, so I don’t want to trash Milton Friedman. But he had a mechanistic view of business–it’s like a factory that you bring inputs in, capital and labor, and you mix them together and out spits profits, and that’s the reason business is created. That’s how he would think about it.

It’s true that what Kip and I do also does create the best or maximum long-term shareholder value, but that’s not the reason we do it. If that was the reason we did it, we probably wouldn’t be as successful at it. The whole idea is to create an organization where all of the stakeholders are flourishing at the same time. Or in a very simple, simplistic model, which I teach our team members, the purpose of management is to make sure that the team members are well-trained and they’re happy in their work. If they’re happy in their work, then that’s going to result in good customer service and happy customers. If the customers are happy, then the business is going to flourish and the investors will be happy.

So you get this virtuous circle, and you can add the suppliers in because they have to be flourishing as well. It’s this idea that everyone is creating with the business voluntarily, and they all need to simultaneously flourish. And if they do, the business will prosper. And that will maximize long-term shareholder value.

It’s not a strategy to maximize shareholder value. It’s not the reason we’re doing it. The reason we’re doing it is because we want all of the stakeholders to flourish. Where I differed with him was what was the purpose of the business and why it really existed. He couldn’t conceive that it would exist for any other reason than to maximize shareholder value. And once he understood that this does maximize shareholder value, he said, “Oh, we agree.” I said, “No, we don’t agree because that’s not the purpose of the business.” And that’s where we never could quite sync up.

And Tindell says a short bit later:

I mean, we were joking at a gathering that we had this past summer that even the lawyers and bankers kind of get into the act. They’re so philosophically proud of the way your organization is governed that they kind of get into the conspiracy and feel somehow a part of it and do things that wouldn’t ordinarily take place.

I’m not quite nailing that description, but there’s a harmonic effort that takes place, like a chorus is so much more beautiful than a single voice. These people are all interconnected. And it not only provides a higher return to each of them–compensation for the employees, return for the shareholders, this creative crafting of a mutually beneficial relationship from the vendors–but it enriches the lives of those people, too, as crazy as that sounds.

So that’s when business starts transcending into sort of an emotional response. It’s fun. It’s passionate. People love Whole Foods. They love the Container Store. And it’s very satisfying to not just us but everybody that works there and everybody that shops there.

Fascinating. Read the full interview for much more about these two creative, intelligent gentlemen.

I keep thinking there’s something important for Objectivists to learn, here.

At a recent talk I saw him give in Austin, Mackey made an interesting statement to the effect that “Profits are like happiness — if you aim for it directly, you’re more likely to miss. But if you aim for the underlying values that make it possible, you get the big payoff.”

I do wonder whether Ayn Rand is guilty of encouraging people to aim a little too “directly” at happiness rather than understanding just how fully happiness comes through caring relationships, radical self-acceptance, and personal generosity.

True to form, many Objectivists and free marketers criticize Mackey’s approach to maximizing stakeholder value (rather than just shareholder value) because it’s not aimed directly at maximizing corporate profits.

My own sympathies, though, are increasingly with Mackey. I think his company, and his life — he looks to me like a happy, actualized man, from what I can tell — provide good testimony on behalf of his approach.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

I’m selling my car. Drives extremely smooth and I rather like it, but we’re moving to Reno on July 1st and we only want to bring one of our cars with us.

From my CraigsList ad:

$7,000 — or best offer. We’re moving out of state and we need to sell this car (which has been our second car) by June 28th to avoid having to transport it! Dark metallic green. Custom rims with low-profile tires. 98K miles, sunroof, ice-cold A/C, auto transmission, auto locks, auto windows, CD player, tinted windows. Upholstery is in excellent condition. Very clean inside and out. Garage kept. Diligently maintained. Just back from quarterly 73-point inspection and made all suggested repairs. Has fresh brake pads, rotors, & calipers.

Paid $8,400 for it a couple years ago — and barely driven it since.

UPDATE: SOLD, to the single dad with one lucky high-school-aged daughter.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Kathy and I have been watching HBO’s mini-series John Adams lately, and it’s terrific.

I particularly like the plain-spokenness and integrity of those intelligent men who were involved in founding the United States of America.

Paul Giamatti, who plays John Adams, brings a wonderful sensibility to his role. Had Adams been played by someone less geeky — someone more charismatic, like Daniel Day Lewis or Tom Cruise — I believe the story would have been far less meaningful.

Giamatti’s performance makes it clear that Adams was no Obama-style rock-star; he was a more ordinary, though clearly intelligent, man who stood at a crossroads in history and understood the challenge before him, to which he must rise personally.

One week soon, I hope to write a review of this miniseries for the Atlasphere.

On a semi-related note, something about the video below reminds me of the sort of no-bullshit address that could have been delivered, on a completely different subject, to Congress in the late 1700s.

(h/t Jordan Zimmerman for the video)

UPDATE: On the other hand, here’s a pretty good smackdown from commenter “myseed” over at LiveJournal:

If it’s just a rights issue, I understand, but most of his argument seems to be bitching about CFLs themselves...nevermind the fact we’ve been surrounded by fluorescent, mercury-filled bulbs for years with all the same “restrictions” he’s described. We’ve just gotten more terrified of litigation as a society, so this is the first time it’s all being spelled out. He’s acting like the fact that he is seeing the warnings for the first time means they’re new.

And half of the “procedure” he outlined would be the same for regular incandescent bulbs, since it was dealing with how to pick up broken glass and store it such that no one gets injured. And as far as I know, EPA guidelines for disposal of objects are not “laws” and are never enforced — they are just guidelines. No one stops us from throwing out our alkaline batteries, which we shouldn’t do.

And made in China? So what, so is everything else and has been for years. If he really doesn’t like it, why doesn’t he try and get someone to build a factory for the bulbs in Texas? Photo fading? All light fades photos, even incandescents it’s the amount of UV that you need to monitor, and you can get CFLs with different degrees of UV emission. And as for the expense, you pay for the bulb many times over in life span and reduced energy costs — even if they only get to half of their expected lifespan. (As long as you don’t break them...then it is too bad about the mercury.) Then there’s his “pollute the landfill, of all things” comment, which is a whole other discussion.

Kind of a silly argument all around, so narrowly focused on details that he fails to make the legitimate argument he could have about freedom of choice and governmental reach.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

I enjoyed this interview with Michael Strong on Socratic Practice in education. The interviewer, by the way, is from the same Francisco Marroquin University that we noted recently at the Atlasphere, for their pro-freedom political views.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Over the past 60 years, no matter how much federal tax RATES have been raised or lowered, tax REVENUES have remained at about 19% of GDP:

The chart nearby, updating the evidence to 2007, confirms Hauser’s Law. The federal tax “yield” (revenues divided by GDP) has remained close to 19.5%, even as the top tax bracket was brought down from 91% to the present 35%. This is what scientists call an “independence theorem,” and it cuts the Gordian Knot of tax policy debate.

The data show that the tax yield has been independent of marginal tax rates over this period, but tax revenue is directly proportional to GDP. So if we want to increase tax revenue, we need to increase GDP.

What happens if we instead raise tax rates? Economists of all persuasions accept that a tax rate hike will reduce GDP, in which case Hauser’s Law says it will also lower tax revenue. That’s a highly inconvenient truth for redistributive tax policy, and it flies in the face of deeply felt beliefs about social justice. It would surely be unpopular today with those presidential candidates who plan to raise tax rates on the rich — if they knew about it.

Read the full article in the Wall Street Journal for more.

(h/t Chris Rasch)

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

This is terrific!

I have (and love) We the Living’s album Heights of the Heavens — which gets a strong 4 out of 5 stars, in my book — and would enjoy seeing them record more acoustic pieces.

Roney and his band-mates are huge fans of Atlas Shrugged, incidentally.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Will Wilkinson — whom some of you may know by virtue of his attendance at some Objectivist seminars in the 1990s — has some clever commentary over at American Public Radio: Keep complaining about the economy.

What I want to know is, how do they manage to make everyone on public radio sound so unfailingly BOOKISH? You know the sound I’m talking about. Do they make them drink a special concoction before they start rolling the tapes, or...?

(h/t Farsam)

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

“To most of us, Iraq is an abstraction that, at best, vaguely resembles reality on the ground. A new book by Michael Yon, however, reveals the real Iraq — and why we face a moment of truth of historic proportions.”

From an excellent new article by Michael Totten at the Atlasphere:

Iraq is where ideologies go to die.

Arab nationalism, Baathism, anti-Americanism, al-Qaidism, Donald Rumsfeldism, and Moqtada al-Sadrism have either died there or are dying.

Conventional liberal opinion, more or less correct about the foundering American war effort from 2004 to 2006, has been severely bloodied — along with Iraq’s worst insurgent groups and militias — by General David Petraeus’s leadership of the American troop surge.

Even post-9/11 fear of Islam has proven unsustainable for those who regularly interact with ordinary Iraqis.

Keep reading...

Read the full article to learn why the next year will have a dramatic impact on the fate of the Middle East.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

A friend pointed me to the very interesting article “Lotus Therapy” in today’s NY Times, which discusses the current state of the research, pro and con, on mindfulness as a clinical intervention.

Criticisms of mindfulness are particularly interesting to me, partly because I experience mindfulness, at root, to be a simple increase in awareness — and not even at the “synthetic” level of thought, but rather at the even more basic level of perception.

Since the practice of mindfulness is virtually synonymous with an increase in perception, or elementary awareness, I often find myself wondering, “How on earth can raising awareness be bad?”

So that is, perhaps, a philosophical bias I bring to the table, from the outset — I don’t understand how awareness can be bad. Ever. Not in principle, as a way of living.

Occasionally I get the impression that mindfulness is being criticized because the critic has something akin to a religious phobia, and their criticisms of mindfulness are just a by-product of that, since mindfulness therapies are derived, historically, from Buddhism.

I get that vibe, for example, in this quote from critic Scott Lilienfield in the article:

“What concerns me is the hype, the talk about changing the world, this allure of the guru that the field of psychotherapy has a tendency to cultivate.”

I personally attended a training in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (the gold standard in mindfulness as a clinical intervention) and I don’t recall anything about gurus or changing the world. If anything, the approach being taught seemed systematically stripped of it cultural underpinnings in Buddhism and the various Zen traditions from which it originated.

So I wonder where this concern of his is coming from; does it relate to the empirical treatments being offered, or is it something he picked up elsewhere?

Also, sometimes people criticize mindfulness meditation because they do not recognize the difference between mindfulness meditation (which involves increasing one’s awareness of reality) and transcendental meditation (which involves entering a trance and, essentially, temporarily decreasing one’s contact with reality).

The latter was quite popular, and controversial, in the 1970s, but is fundamentally dissimilar from mindfulness meditation.

On the other hand, there are certain criticisms of mindfulness that appear to have undeniable empirical merit — assuming the results upon which they’re based can be taken at face value:

A case in point is mindfulness-based therapy to prevent a relapse into depression. The treatment significantly reduced the risk of relapse in people who have had three or more episodes of depression. But it may have had the opposite effect on people who had one or two previous episodes, two studies suggest.

Why would mindfulness help people with three or more episodes, but hurt people with two or fewer?

Understanding the dynamics involved, it seems to me, could do much to increase our grasp of the human mind, as well as mindfulness therapies.

Could it be that, for patients with two or fewer episodes, the mind’s natural defense mechanisms are more safe or useful, at least in the short term, than an increase in awareness?

I would enjoy hearing theories from anyone with some grasp of the dynamics involved, and preferably some first-hand personal experience with mindfulness practice.

Why would mindfulness — even when removed entirely from any religious trappings — help certain patients, while hurting others?

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

I had a dream recently where I went down a rabbit hole and found a people true to themselves.

I wrote down the dream, and one day may share it here. In the interim, here’s one passage that particularly intrigued me:

The community itself was a conscious exercise in trueness. When someone stole, for example, no one got upset, least of all the person who had been stolen from. When the thief had what he needed, the experience of being a thief, he would return whatever had been stolen because he no longer needed it. And no one was surprised, least of all the thief.

This passage came to mind tonight when Kathy and I watched the movie Lars and the Real Girl. (Thanks to Austen for the recommendation. I just added to my list of favorite movies.)

The premise of the story is that Lars, an intensely shy man in his 30s, finally finds his first girlfriend. And she’s a sex doll.

Thing is, while everyone around him is (initially) mortified, and we in the audience are chuckling uncontrollably, Lars is perfectly serious. This is his girlfriend and you quickly get the sense he’s not, um, fooling around.

Like the community in my dream, Lars’s family and friends let him have his illusion. They accept his girlfriend as one of their own. She attends church, she visits the doctor/psychologist with Lars, and all the girls help get her a better haircut.

The movie is dreamy and surreal — but plenty profound, in its own way.

It left me with the thought: What would it be like if we all really did let people have their illusions?

What would happen if, instead of trying to persuade someone to our perspective — religiously, politically, personally, or otherwise — we simply supported them in doing and believing ... whatever they seem to need right now.

Would the Scientologists and Moonies just grow increasingly irrational? Or might they come live with greater integrity (whatever that means for them) in their own time?

What happens when we no longer needed our illusions? What if the felt need to change another person is an illusion itself?

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

This is a guest post by reader Russ Corwin.

I’ve enjoyed reading this thread (“On appreciating military service, even in Iraq”) as it has developed and before I comment I want to say that I consider Joe Duarte and Josh Zader both to be friends.

I have a great deal of respect for the intellect and devotion to Liberty of both men. I also want to thank Josh for providing a forum where rational people can have discussions like these and share ideas.

I am currently in the 55th Week of my second tour here in Iraq. I first came as a ground Soldier with the 4th Infantry Division in April of 2003 and am currently here flying scout/attack helicopters with the Surge force that came over in early May of 2007. Having seen Iraq from both the ground and the air over the course of 5 years, I believe I have a pretty broad perspective of the conflict as a whole.

I interact with Soldiers of all ranks and all branches on a regular basis, and I’d like to say a few things in response to the different arguments that Joe and Josh have made, accepting Joe’s offer: “On motivation, it might help to talk to people you know who served in the Army or Marines recently, especially people like us (Objectivists, secularists, smart people).” Meeting 2 of those 3 qualities was enough to push me into this conversation.

Clearly, being so intimately connected with the war, my thoughts about it are undeniably impacted by the act of participation. As human beings, I think Joe’s point of rationalization on the part of some Soldiers is simply a psychological statement of fact.

Not all Soldiers are well-educated. Not all Soldiers could even engage in an erudite discussion over why we invaded Iraq and the changing justification over the past 5 years. Hell, some were only 13 when I first crossed the border.

When a family member of a fallen Soldier says “He died defending our freedom,” is part of that a rationalization to ease the pain of the loss? Perhaps. People rationalize all the time about difficult events in their lives ... maybe suggesting when a loved one dies that “they’re in a better place” or that “things happen for a reason.” I ‘get’ Joe’s assertion that Soldiers and their families make these kinds of rationalizations and it likely holds some merit.

At the same time, however, I think that Joe dismisses a much larger portion of the military than he realizes as being unintelligent, irrational, and blindly devoted to some intangible idea that we’re defending freedom simply by being in the military. Quote: “I’m tired of hearing the same craziness over and over by military people, their families, and politicians. The line: He or she or they are ‘defending our freedom’ by A) Simply being in the military B) Serving in Iraq.”

Iraq aside for a moment, part of what separates the U.S. military from others around the world is that it is professional, focused, and meticulous in how it prepares for war. You don’t just wake up one day and say “Hey look...now we have a just war on our hands, it’s time to go fight and defend freedom” and all of a sudden become a well-trained, disciplined, and professional fighting force that can expect to emerge victorious. It takes constant dedication to being prepared for that day when it comes.

There was no looming threat on the horizon when I first donned a uniform in 1995, or even when I went to Ranger School in 1999. Even during times of peace, to not prepare for war would be irresponsible if one were truly dedicated to defending freedom. The fact that we have a military that nobody wants to have to face in combat is in itself a deterrent.

So yes, people are defending freedom simply by being in the military, by being an active part of that deterrent. I tip my hat to anybody who has served in any capacity, during a time or war or not. We have a saying in the military: “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” It is a crude and simple way of expressing the fact that it is constant training and dedication to your craft that will enable you to be victorious if and when the time to fight comes.

Many people prior to 2003 had served years in the military without ever having the opportunity to actually use the skills they had worked so hard to master. This doesn’t mean they cared any less nor done any less to “defend freedom.”

Moving on to Iraq, there are clearly many arguments that can rationally be made both in support of the war and against it considering the changing justifications, the mismanagement of the war in many areas, and the general handling of the war in every way from logistics, to manpower, to counterinsurgency strategy. Books can be written on all of the rationalizing for the continuation and justification for the war and it makes little sense to rehash them here.

Some reasons obviously have more validity than others, whether we’re talking about removing dictators, establishing a buffer between Iran and Israel, creating relatively moderate governments on either side of Iran, establishing the basic fundamentals of self-rule and representative government for the first time here, etc.

There are great arguments for and against these ancillary reasons and others, both for the near term and long term security of the United States. To ignore the long term effects of this war on our own future security is to be severely short sighted.

As I understand the discussion at hand however, between Joe and Josh, we’re specifically talking about the initial reason and justification for invading Iraq and more specifically, how the Soldiers perceive their role in this conflict. I don’t want to add fuel to this fire by trying to convince you that the war was an intervention to prevent the marriage of capability and intent. Rather, I want to touch on a few of Joe’s points.

Joe says, “1) Your rendition of the more interesting arguments for the war strike me as arguments only accessible to people who inhabit a particular part of the blogosphere. No one knows who Stephen Den Beste is — certainly the majority of soldiers don’t. The elaborate, strategic argument for the war is not something I would expect most enlistees to be aware of, or motivated by.”

This is probably true. Most enlistees likely don’t understand the strategic argument for the war.

To say this however, as though it is a reason to dismiss their character or to discount their belief in what they are doing is tantamount to rejecting that people can fit a certain profile: That they inherently understand the nature of what they’re doing and believe in it though they may not be intellectually deep enough to articulate it or explain why they believe it is important. People like Eddie Willers.

And because they may not be able to write a multi-paragraph, philosophical rationale for why they’re doing what they do, it gets over-simplified to “defending freedom.” This is not dissimilar to the manner in which the American system of government gets over-simplified and mislabeled as Democracy by most Americans when we know that it is not technically a “Democracy”.

The inability to present a philosophical argument for why they fight does not necessarily negate the passion and core beliefs that drive what they do.

Joe’s #2... “2) Most soldiers don’t actually choose to serve in Iraq, which cuts away the issue of their motivation for doing so. That is, they don’t doubly choose to serve in the military and specifically to serve in Iraq. Some who have enlisted in the last couple of years might have had some designs on it, but those involved in the initial invasion wouldn’t have. People who enlist in the military mostly do so for all sorts of mundane reasons that have nothing to do with elaborate strategic arguments for installing democracy in the Middle East. Officers might be different, but we are talking about the regular soldier, I think.”

I have pretty thick skin, but I don’t like the use of the word “mundane” in describing the reasons why people enlist in the military. Certainly, some people have mundane reasons for joining, but to say that we “mostly” do it for mundane reasons is both inaccurate and demeaning.

If anything, I think people mostly enlist for idealistic, romantic, or pragmatic reasons. Personally, maybe I watched Red Dawn too many times as a kid or fought too many invisible communists and fascists in my backyard. I certainly didn’t join for mundane reasons and I don’t think that most people do.

Regardless, having been one of those involved in the initial invasion, I can tell you that I absolutely believed in what I was doing and I was happy to come, as were an overwhelming majority of the guys that I served with. I wouldn’t dare speak for all Soldiers, but I can say that most of the ones I knew and interacted with felt and thought the same way I did.

Joe’s #3... “3) Many of our justifications for doing something are biased and formulated after the fact. Sometimes people will rationalize whatever it is that they happen to be doing. For example, if you approached a soldier who is currently serving in Iraq and gave him the Den Beste rationale for the war, he might very readily embrace it from then on and characterize it as his motivation for being there in the first place. No one wants to be part of a pointless or destructive enterprise, and people often embrace better rationales for their involvement.”

I think I’ve already hit on rationalization enough and I think you make a valid point here about personal psychological justification in general. Again, however, I think that you mischaracterize this as the majority of Soldiers when my experience with them has been that this is in fact a much smaller minority.

Joe’s #4... “A small minority of soldiers might have been motivated by the kind of argument for the war you have in mind, and consciously chose to serve in Iraq for that reason. In that case, I would respect their choice, but I would still see the underlying argument as incredibly weak and arrogant. I’m now sensitive to the fundamental strangeness of the idea of invading and occupying far away countries for reasons unrelated to immediate defense. A few years ago, I would have felt differently.”

I appreciate the acknowledgement that some of us did actually make a rational decision to do what we do, that we consciously weigh all of the factors and act in the way that we see most appropriate for us in accordance with our fundamental values. I would still argue though, that the small minority referenced is not as small as you may presume.

I know that the kind of people who would read this exchange or otherwise engage in discussions like these in places like this are, at their core, coming from the same place. I know that Joe and Josh are both dedicated to Liberty, Freedom, Individualism, Capitalism, etc. I know that you both love America.

I know that we hold the same general belief that the use of Force should be the last option and that the purpose of the Military is to defend the freedoms and way of life that we cherish here — not to invade countries with a design to dominate the world and its resources, or to otherwise initiate force for any other purpose than defense.

Determining when something is actually a “threat,” how imminent it is and how viable it is — this is where reasonable people can disagree, and where we clearly do here.

This discussion over whether or not Iraq was a threat that warranted military action is a legitimate debate to have. I think that it was the correct action to take given the information we had at the time and I would enjoy a discussion on this the next time I see you Joe.

I’m sure that we will be using the same fundamental values to debate different positions based on an analysis that led to different conclusions on the “threat.”

I just ask here that you give us (Soldiers) a little more credit. Many of us, not a small minority, actually do talk about these things, even while here in Iraq. We discuss the pros and cons of action and inaction, of mistakes and triumphs, of missteps along the way, of how all of this is represented and misrepresented in the media, and the intelligence failures that led to the determination that an invasion was necessary.

Many of us are aware of the basic psychological need for justification and rationalization and I think that you made a valid point for those less capable of understanding why they are here.

At the same time, simply because many 18–21 year old Soldiers are not as well-educated or well-spoken, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their intuitive belief that what they are doing is right is somehow misguided because they oversimplify it by saying they’re “defending freedom.”

Because families are grief stricken and don’t have the words to justify why their son or daughter went to war doesn’t mean they should be mocked or dismissed when they over-simplify it by saying that he or she died “defending freedom.”

I’m not so blind as to say that I can ever fully remove the personal attachment that I have to this mission. Having seen first hand all that has been given and all that has been achieved over the course of the past 5 years, I admit that it is hard to be completely objective when talking about the war.

Just know that there are many of us here who do believe that we are doing something good and that it absolutely is tied to the long-term security of the United States. Joe — email me soon, it’s been too long buddy. Josh — thanks for the opportunity to post this here.

Captain Russ Corwin
3-17 Cavalry
Baghdad, Iraq

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

As many of you know, over the past couple years I’ve become increasingly interested in the teachings of Adyashanti, Jed McKenna, and the like.

Jon Bernie is one of Adya’s friends and colleagues. I met him briefly and attended one of his satsangs (sitting & teaching events) last time I was in San Francisco.

Below is a brief teaching he sent out to his an announcement list. (Thanks to Marsh for the forward.)

I think it’s a well-expressed encapsulation of this perspective. You might find it worth contemplating if you’re open to this sort of thing.

For those of you new to this perspective, there’s plenty of “poetry” here: It’s not so much to think about; the trick is to feel its actual meaning in your lived experience. Your mileage may vary.

“Karmic arisings,” by the way, can be loosely translated as “the difficult things that come up in your experience.”

To awaken is to dissolve in one place and simultaneously appear everywhere. Awakening can also be called being presence, being energy. Karmic arisings, whatever their nature, are fuel for dissolving. So rather than resisting, or fighting, or arguing with what is — instead of all that, simply accept what is. Receive what is, allow what is. Become what is.

Now there’s no separation between perceiver and perception — there’s simply being perception. There’s just listening, just observing, just feeling. There’s just thinking. And you allow this gestation to happen, you allow this growth, as painful — or ecstatic! — as it might be.

The good news is you don’t have to understand how it works for it to work. Being here is enough. All you have to do is learn to allow yourself to cook. To be dissolved into light. To appear everywhere simultaneously. That is freedom.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

In the article “Is John Yoo a Monster?” Esquire magazine provides a lovely, intimate look at the man who played the single biggest role in shaping the Bush administration’s policies on torture.

One thing I like about the article is that I would use the words “lovely, intimate look” and “policies on torture” in the same sentence while describing it. Such beautiful extremes, there — the kind of paradox that might smash preconceptions, forcing us to arrive at fresh conclusions.

Some background about the guy:

At Steve’s Korean B.B.Q., Yoo talks about his parents. They were teenagers during the Korean War, a serious pair who both became doctors and moved to the U. S. out of gratitude and a love of democracy. “They saw the United States as saving their country, and I agree with them,” he says. “It did save their country. And then it let people in. It was extraordinarily generous. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the generosity of the United States.”

He grew up in the elite Main Line area of Philadelphia and went to a prep school where he wore a suit and tie and learned Greek and Latin. He seems to have been a natural-born conservative, attracted even as a teenager to Ronald Reagan’s message of anticommunism, low taxes, and small government, values that resonated with the immigrant dream of personal freedom. But he was never angry or righteous about it. “He was completely open and tolerant of everyone,” says Gordon Getter, a prep-school classmate. “He had a genuine sense of humor,” says Thomas Schwartz, one of his professors at Harvard. “He would argue and people would get mad at him, but he never seemed to take it personally.”

Of further interest:

He turns out to have lots of unexpected quirks. He’s pro-choice. He thinks flag burning is a legitimate form of free speech. He thinks the government is “wasting a lot of resources” in the war on drugs. He thinks the phrase “war on terror” is misleading political rhetoric. He’s cowriting an article that makes a conservative case for gay marriage. “Our argument is, the state should just stay out of these things, because it doesn’t hurt anybody.” And he’s definitely alarmed by the more theocratic Republicans. “When Mike Huckabee says he wants to amend the Constitution so that it’s consistent with God’s law, that scares the bejesus out of me.”

I like this man.

This is the man whom the President of the United States hired to provide real-time legal advice — in effect, to predict what the Supreme Court would say, and do it fast enough that the President could make immediate national security decisions.

That’s a tough job.

I’m half-way through the full article so far, and enjoying it immensely. This is journalism at its best: intimate and thought-provoking.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

I had a fantastic time in Los Angeles this past weekend.

I spent Thursday and Friday nights with Kylae, collaborating on a delicious batch of chilaca bowls, decimating the Santa Monica stairs, and reflecting together on life, love, and how to make it through those rougher spells.

Saturday afternoon, I drove to Belvedere Junior High School, where my grandfather, Walter Zabriskie, had been principal in the 1960s. His former students had asked if he could attend their reunion. And by virtue of the fact that he has lived to the age of ninety-eight, his answer could be “yes”!

Even though Belvedere is a junior high, its students from the 1960s hold periodic reunions because they feel about their junior-high years the way many people come to feel about high school.

The way they tell it, this was largely due to their excellent principal and staff. So they presented my grandfather with this fantastic plaque:

This morning I uploaded my best photos from the reunion into my Flickr account.

After the reunion, I headed to the Ogdorm for a quick nap in Rebecca’s delightfully-appointed room and then a building-wide party with what must’ve been more than 100 of the most interesting people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting in such a short period of time: Phil, Bob, Troy, Reichart, and so many more.

I am not usually much of a party person, but this one had too many interesting people for me to pull myself away. I fell sleep at 5:00 a.m.

On Sunday morning I recovered to the best of my ability and rode with Andrew to a jazz piano lesson he was teaching in Hermosa Beach. We returned in time for lunch with wookie-philosopher Luka, but regrettably missed Shapiro, who unlike the rest of us has a real schedule to keep thankyouverymuch.

Sunday evening, Andrew, Rebecca, Paul, and I joined Reichart and company on a Hike the Geek trek up the aptly-nicknamed “ass buster” trail. I probably needed to buy new running shoes already, but now they’re covered in dust.

Paul took the above photo during the hike. Monday morning, he and I spontaneously took a quick road trip to see Zibby (my grandfather) again before I had to catch my plane Monday afternoon.

I am reminded just how inspiring and rejuvenating it is to spend time with quality friends.

To all of you whom I was able to meet and spend time with during my trip — thank you! I hope to be back soon. With so many good people in one place, it will be hard to stay away.

Today I’ll be re-adjusting to being back home, including plenty of meditation, and getting back into the swing of things with work and the various web development projects on my plate.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

In response to Joe Duarte’s rant against serving in Iraq in order to promote American freedom — “The idea that Iraq was ever a threat to Americans’ freedoms is both hilarious and revolting...” — I posted the following.

I don’t recall anyone arguing that Iraq was a threat, but [see correction below] I certainly remember some extremely articulate arguments to the effect that installing democracy in Iraq could, over the long-term, have a significant effect on reducing the growth of terrorism.

Not because Iraq itself was ever a hotbed of terrorism, but because installing democracy in a major country in the heart of Mesopotamia would inevitably cause the citizens in neighboring countries to begin campaigning for greater democratic freedoms themselves.

And unlike the petty theocratic dictatorships throughout most of the Middle East, democracies very rarely breed anything resembling terrorism.

In other words, Iraq was part of a long-term strategy, not a short-term fix or act of retaliation or self-defense.

For this reason, many Americans (including those who volunteer in the military) do believe their service in Iraq is in the cause of freedom.

You may disagree with them, and perhaps for very good reasons, but I don’t think you can fairly accuse them of latching onto false bromides — which seems to be the gist of your argument.

The fact that you see Iraq as a “stupid, stupid war” doesn’t mean that your perspective on the path to American freedom obviates their own perspective.

Note, please, that I’m not arguing here for or against the war in Iraq. I’m making a different point.

I’m saying: The fact you personally disagree with or disapprove of the war, does not mean those who are volunteering to fight it are not sincerely motivated by the honorable promotion of American freedoms.

I happen to appreciate their efforts and their motivations even though I often find myself having conflicted feelings about the war itself.

UPDATE: Actually, now I do recall the official arguments that Iraq posted a threat to world peace (weapons of mass destruction and all that) but I never personally saw those arguments as the more compelling ones in favor of the war, for the reasons Stephen den Beste illuminates very clearly.

Second update: (May 10) Joe felt my initial one-sentence summary of his position (”...Joe Duarte’s rant against joining the military and serving in Iraq to promote freedom...”) was a potential mischaracterization, depending on how the conjunction was read. He’s right. So I’ve updated it above with what I hope would be more clear.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Wow, Reason.tv is doing some excellent work, here.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

(h/t Instapundit)

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

If you like music in the vein of Sarah McLachlan or Norah Jones, you simply must check out the music of a young musician named Tristan Prettyman.

I discovered her two albums Twentythree (2005) and Hello (2008) a few days ago, and I can’t stop listening.

Highly, highly recommended.

She’s a bit more country than Sarah, and a bit less hokey-folksy than Norah Jones. But she gives great melody with a terrific voice. (Oops, did I just say that?) She actually does a dead-ringer for Norah in the song “Blindfold.”

If you do give her a listen, I would enjoy hearing what you think.

Amazon makes it easy to sample all her songs, but a good one to start with is “Always Feel This Way” from the album Twentythree.

Tristan Prettyman

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

I am fascinated by what Best Buy has done:

[W]hen Hance participates in a morning teleconference with his co-workers or in-house clients, he sometimes is calling in via cell phone from his fishing boat on a lake or from the woods where he’s spent the hours since dawn stalking wild turkeys. “No one at Best Buy really knows where I am,” he explains. “Nor do they really care.”

Gone are the days when Hance needed to spend morning until night seated in a cubicle surrounded by papers and charts he’d carefully arranged to ensure that co-workers and bosses who peeked in would see he was hard at work. At Best Buy, he’s free to set his own schedule, to work wherever he wants—whether it’s a desk at headquarters or a table in a coffee shop—and whatever days and hours he chooses.

“It used to be that I had to schedule my life around my work,” he says. “Now, I schedule my work around my life.”

Welcome to Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, a radical experiment whose aim is to reshape the corporate workplace, achieve an unparalleled degree of work/life balance and redefine the very nature of work itself. In ROWE, most of the rules, restrictions and expectations within which corporate workers traditionally labor—such as keeping regular hours and showing up at the office each morning—are discarded.

The results?

And more important from a business standpoint, there are some financial payoffs. CultureRx does the math this way: The per-employee cost of turnover is $102,000, and ROWE teams have 3.2 percent less voluntary turnover than non-ROWE teams. So once Best Buy’s 4,000-person headquarters is completely converted to ROWE, the company stands to save about $13 million a year in replacement costs. Also, when workers switch to ROWE, their productivity jumps by 35 percent.

“Basically, we’re rewiring people’s brains, getting rid of an old belief system from the 1950s that is no longer relevant to the technologically advanced business world we have now,” Thompson says. “We want people to stop thinking of work as someplace you go to, five days a week from 8 to 5, and start thinking of work as something you do.”

Amazing.

After college, I remember arguing with one of my bosses about his rules for taking bathroom breaks, which I found completely ridiculous.

He told me I was one of his more promising employees. “I feel like I’m in high school again,” I told him.

He just looked at me blankly — and so I confirmed that the resignation I had just tendered was indeed for real.

Treat your employees like teenagers, and the adults will have to leave, sooner or later.

Today, of course, I have complete flexibility, since my wife and I own our own company, Zoom Strategies.

But the idea that certain companies (or a large corporation, in this case) have begun offering this kind of flexibility to their employees ... strikes me as an incredibly healthy sign about our culture.

Read the full article for much more: “Throwing Out the Rules of Work.”

(h/t Marsh for the link)

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.

This quote from Abraham Lincoln does an excellent job of distilling the difference between “negative” and “positive” rights, and the implications of each:

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word, we do not mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty.

Nathan Griffith (with whom I attended junior high school in the mid-80s) brought this quote to my attention several years ago — and I’m very glad he did.

Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.