consciousness not necessary for concepts

OCBBM | A further major confusion about consciousness is the belief that it is specifically and uniquely the place where concepts are formed. This is a very ancient idea: that we have various concrete conscious experiences and then put the similar ones together into a concept. This idea has even been the paradigm of a slew of experiments by psychologists who thought they were thus studying concept formation.

Max Muller, in one of his fascinating discussions in the last century, brought the problem to a point by asking, whoever saw a tree? “No one ever saw a tree, but only this or that fir tree, or oak tree, or apple tree . . . Tree, therefore, is a concept, and as such can never be seen or perceived by the senses.” [7] Particular trees alone were outside in the environment, and only in consciousness did the general concept of tree exist.

Now the relation between concepts and consciousness could have an extensive discussion. But let it suffice here simply to show that there is no necessary connection between them. When Muller says no one has ever seen a tree, he is mistaking what he knows about an object for the object itself. Every weary wayfarer after miles under the hot sun has seen a tree. So has every cat, squirrel, and chipmunk when chased by a dog. The bee has a concept of. a flower, the eagle a concept of a sheer-faced rocky ledge, as a nesting thrush has a concept of a crotch of upper branch awninged with green leaves. Concepts are simply classes of behaviorally equivalent things. Root concepts are prior to experience. They are fundamental to the aptic structures that allow behavior to occur at all.8 Indeed what Muller should have said was, no one has ever been conscious of a tree. For consciousness, indeed, not only is not the repository of concepts; it does not usually work with them at all! When we consciously think of a tree, we are indeed conscious of a particular tree, of the fir or the oak or the elm that grew beside our house, and let it stand for the concept, just as we can let a concept word stand for it as well. In fact, one of the great functions of language is to let the word stand for a concept, which is exactly what we do in writing or speaking about conceptual material. And we must do this because concepts are usually not in consciousness at all.

7. Max Muller, The Science of Though: (London: Longmans Green, 1887), 78-79. Eugenio Rignano in his The Psychology of Reasoning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923), p. 108f., makes a similar criticism to mine.

the mcgurk effect

Video - The McGurk effect is a compelling demonstration of how we all use visual speech information. The effect shows that we can't help but integrate visual speech into what we 'hear'.

consciousness not a copy of experience

OCBBM | Although the metaphor of the blank mind had been used in the writings ascribed to Aristotle, it is really only since John Locke thought of the mind as a tabula rasa in the seventeenth century that we have emphasized this recording aspect of consciousness, and thus see it crowded with memories that can be read over again in introspection. If Locke had lived in our time, he would have used the metaphor of a camera rather than a slate. But the idea is the same. And most people would protest emphatically that the chief function of consciousness is to store up experience, to copy it as a camera does, so that it can be reflected upon at some future time.

So it seems. But consider the following problems: Does the door of your room open from the right or the left? Which is your second longest finger? At a stoplight, is it the red or the green that is on top? How many teeth do you see when brushing your teeth? What letters are associated with what numbers on a telephone dial? If you are in a familiar room, without turning around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and then look.

I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so much previous attentive experience. If the familiar door suddenly opened the other way, if another finger suddenly grew longer, if the red light were differently placed, or you had an extra tooth, or the telephone were made differently, or a new window latch had been put on the window behind you, you would know it immediately, showing that you all along ‘knew’, but not consciously so. Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction between recognition and recall. What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge.

Experiments of this sort demonstrate that conscious memory is not a storing up of sensory images, as is sometimes thought. Only if you have at some time consciously noticed your finger lengths or your door, have at some time counted your teeth, though you have observed these things countless times, can you remember. Unless you have particularly noted what is on the wall or recently cleaned or painted it, you will be surprised at what you have left out. And introspect upon the matter. Did you not in each of these instances ask what must be there? Starting with ideas and reasoning, rather than with any image? Conscious retrospection is not the retrieval of images, but the retrieval of what you have been conscious of before, [5] and the reworking of these elements into rational or plausible patterns.

Let us demonstrate this in another way. Think, if you will, of when you entered the room you are now in and when you picked up this book. Introspect upon it and then ask the question: are the images of which you have copies the actual sensory fields as you came in and sat down and began reading? Don’t you have an image of yourself coming through one of the doors, perhaps even a bird’s-eye view of one of the entrances, and then perhaps vaguely see yourself sitting down and picking up the book? Things which you have never experienced except in this introspection! And can you retrieve the sound fields around the event? Or the cutaneous sensations as you sat, took the pressure off your feet, and opened this book? Of course, if you go on with your thinking you can also rearrange your imaginal retrospection such that you do indeed ‘see’ entering the room just as it might have been; and ‘hear’ the sound of the chair and the book opening, and ‘feel’ the skin sensations. But I suggest that this has a large element of created imagery - what we shall call narratizing a little later - of what the experience should be like, rather than what it actually was like.

Or introspect on when you last went swimming: I suspect you have an image of a seashore, lake, or pool which is largely a retrospection, but when it comes to yourself swimming, lo! like Nijinsky in his dance, you are seeing yourself swim, something that you have never observed at all! There is precious little of the actual sensations of swimming, the particular waterline across your face, the feel of the water against your skin, or to what extent your eyes were underwater as you turned your head to breathe. [6] Similarly, if you think of the last time you slept out of doors, went skating, or - if all else fails - did something that you regretted in public, you tend not to see, hear, or feel things as you actually experienced them, but rather to re-create them in objective terms, seeing yourself in the setting as if you were somebody else. Looking back into memory, then, is a great deal invention, seeing yourself as others see you. Memory is the medium of the must-have-been. Though I have no doubt that in any of these instances you could by inference invent a subjective view of the experience, even with the conviction that it was the actual memory.

5. See in this connection the discussion of Robert S. Woodworth in his Psychological Issues (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939 Ch. 7

6. An example taken from Donald Hobb’s provocative discussion, “The mind’s eye”, Psychology Today, 1961, 2.

consciousness not necessary for learning

OCBBM | A third important misconception of consciousness is that it is the basis for learning. Particularly for the long and illustrious series of Associationist psychologists through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, learning was a matter of ideas in consciousness being grouped by similarity, contiguity, or occasionally some other relationship. Nor did it matter whether we were speaking of a man or an animal; all learning was “profiting from experience” or ideas coming together in consciousness - as I said in the Introduction. And so contemporary common knowledge, without realizing quite why, has culturally inherited the notion that consciousness is necessary for learning.

The matter is somewhat complex. It is also unfortunately disfigured in psychology by a sometimes forbidding jargon, which is really an overgeneralization of the spinal-reflex terminology of the nineteenth century. But, for our purposes, we may consider the laboratory study of learning to have been of three central kinds, the learning of signals, skills, and solutions. Let us take up each in turn, asking the question, is consciousness necessary?

Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest example. If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person’s eye about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed.[9] Subjects who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learning report that it has no conscious component whatever. Indeed, consciousness, in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye blinks to try to assist the signal learning, blocks it from occurring.

In more everyday situations, the same simple associative learning can be shown to go on without any consciousness that it has occurred. If a distinct kind of music is played while you are eating a particularly delicious lunch, the next time you hear the music you will like its sounds slightly more and even have a little more saliva in your mouth. The music has become a signal for pleasure which mixes with your judgment. And the same is true for paintings.[10] Subjects who have gone through this kind of test in the laboratory, when asked why they liked the music or paintings better after lunch, could not say. They were not conscious they had learned anything. But the really interesting thing here is that if you know about the phenomenon beforehand and are conscious of the contingency between food and the music or painting, the learning does not occur. Again, consciousness actually reduces our earning abilities of this type, let alone not being necessary for them.

As we saw earlier in the performance of skills, so in the learning of skills, consciousness is indeed like a helpless spectator, having little to do. A simple experiment will demonstrate this fact. Take a coin in each hand and toss them both, crossing them in the air in such a way that each coin is caught by the opposite hand. This you can learn in a dozen trials. As you do, ask, are you conscious of everything you do? Is consciousness necessary at all? I think you will find that learning is much better described as being ‘organic’ rather than conscious. Consciousness takes you into the task, giving you the goal to be reached. But from then on, apart perhaps from fleeting neurotic concerns about your abilities at such tasks, it is as if the learning is done for you. Yet the nineteenth century, taking consciousness to be the whole architect of behavior, would have tried to explain such a task as consciously recognizing the good and bad motions, and by free choice repeating the former and dropping out the latter!

The learning of complex skills is no different in this respect. Typewriting has been extensively studied, it generally being agreed in the words of one experimenter “that all adaptations and short cuts in methods were unconsciously made, that is, fallen into by the learners quite unintentionally. The learners suddenly noticed that they were doing certain parts of the work in a new and better way.” [11]

In the coin-tossing experiment, you may have even discovered that consciousness if present impeded your learning. This is a very common finding in the learning of skills, just as we saw it was in their performance. Let the learning go on without your being too conscious of it, and it is all done more smoothly and efficiently. Sometimes too much so, for, in complex skills like typing, one may learn to consistently type ‘hte’ for ‘the’. The remedy is to reverse the process by consciously practicing the mistake ‘hte’, whereupon contrary to the usual idea of ‘practice makes perfect’, the mistake drops away - a phenomenon called negative practice.

In the common motor skills studied in the laboratory as well, such as complex pursuit-rotor systems or mirror-tracing, the subjects who are asked to be very conscious of their movements do worse. [12] And athletic trainers whom I have interviewed are unwittingly following such laboratory-proven principles when they urge their trainees not to think so much about what they are doing. The Zen exercise of learning archery is extremely explicit on this, advising the archer not to think of himself as drawing the bow and releasing the arrow, but releasing himself from the consciousness of what he is doing by letting the bow stretch itself and the arrow release itself from the fingers at the proper time.

Solution learning (or instrumental learning or operant conditioning) is a more complex case. Usually when one is acquiring some solution to a problem or some path to a goal, consciousness plays a very considerable role in setting up the problem in a certain way. But consciousness is not necessary. Instances can be shown in which a person has no consciousness whatever of either the goal he is seeking or the solution he is finding to achieve that goal.

Another simple experiment can demonstrate this. Ask someone to sit opposite you and to say words, as many words as he can think of, pausing two or three seconds after each of them for you to write them down. If after every plural noun (or adjective, or abstract word, or whatever you choose) you say “good” or “right” as you write it down, or simply “mmm-hmm” or smile, or repeat the plural word pleasantly, the frequency of plural nouns (or whatever) will increase significantly as he goes on saying words. The important thing here is that the subject is not aware that he is learning anything at all. [13] He is not conscious that he is trying to find a way to make you increase your encouraging remarks, or even of his solution to that problem. Every day, in all our conversations, we are constantly training and being trained by each other in this manner, and yet we are never conscious of it.

Such unconscious learning is not confined to verbal behavior. Members of a psychology class were asked to compliment any girl at the college wearing red. Within a week the cafeteria was a blaze of red (and friendliness), and none of the girls was aware of being influenced. Another class, a week after being told about unconscious learning and training, tried it on the professor. Every time he moved toward the right side of the lecture hall, they paid rapt attention and roared at his jokes. It is reported that they were almost able to train him right out the door, he remaining unaware of anything unusual. [14]

The critical problem with most of these studies is that if the subject decided beforehand to look for such contingencies, he would of course be conscious of what he was learning to do. One way to get around this is to use a behavioral response which is imperceptible to the subject. And this has been done, using a very small muscle in the thumb whose movements are imperceptible to us and can only be detected by an electrical recording apparatus. The subjects were told that the experiments were concerned with the effect of intermittent unpleasant noise combined with music upon muscle tension. Four electrodes were placed on their bodies, the only real one being the one over the small thumb muscle, the other three being dummy electrodes. The apparatus was so arranged that whenever the imperceptible thumb-muscle twitch was electrically detected, the unpleasant noise was stopped for 15 seconds if it was already sounding, or delayed for 15 seconds if was not turned on at the time of the twitch. In all subjects, the imperceptible thumb twitch that turned off the distressing noise increased in rate without the subjects’ being the slightest bit conscious that they were learning to turn off the unpleasant noise.

Thus, consciousness is not a necessary part of the learning process, and this is true whether it be the learning of signals, skills, or solutions. There is, of course, much more to say on this fascinating subject, for the whole thrust of contemporary research in behavior modification is along these lines. But, for the present, we have simply established that the older doctrine that conscious experience is the substrate of all learning is clearly and absolutely false. At this point, we can at least conclude that it is possible - possible I say - to conceive of human beings who are not conscious and yet can learn and solve problems

9. G. A. Kimble, “Conditioning as a function of the time between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1947, 37: 1-15.

10. These studies are those of Gregory Razran and are discussed on page 232 of his Mind in Evolution (Boston: Houghton Muffin, 1971). They are discussed critically in relation to the whole problem of unintentional learning by T. A. Ryan, Intentional Behavior (New York: Ronald Press, 1970), pp. 235-236.

11. W.F. Book, The Psychology of Skill, (New York: Gregg, 1925).

12. H.L. Waskom, “An experimental analysis of incentive and forced application and their effect upon learning,” Journal of Psychology, 1936, 2: 393-408.

13. J. Greenspoon, “The reinforcing effect of two spoken sounds on the frequency of two responses,” American Journal of Psychology, 1955, 68: 409-416. But there is considerable controversy here, particularly in the order and wording of postexperimental questions. There may even be a kind of tacit contract between subject and experimenter. See Robert Rosenthal, Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966). In this controversy, I presently agree with Postman that the learning occurs before the subject becomes conscious of the reinforcement contingency, and indeed that consciousness would not occur unless this had been so. L. Postman and L. Sassenrath, “The automatic action of verbal rewards and punishment,” Journal of General Psychology, 1961, 65: 109-136.

14. W. Lamnbert Gardiner, Psychology: A Story of a Search (Belmont, California:Brooks/Cole, 5970), p. 76.

consciousness not necessary for thinking

OCBBM | As we go from simple to more complicated aspects of mentality, we enter vaguer and vaguer territory, where the terms we use become more difficult to travel with. Thinking is certainly one of these. And to say that consciousness is not necessary for thinking makes us immediately bristle with protest. Surely thinking is the very heart and bone of consciousness! But let us go slowly here. What we would be referring to would be that type of free associating which might be called thinking-about or thinking-of, which, indeed, always seems to be fully surrounded and immersed in the image-peopled province of consciousness. But the matter is really not that clear at all.

Let us begin with the type of thinking that ends in a result to which may be predicated the terms right or wrong. That is what is commonly referred to as making judgments, and is very similar to one extreme of solution learning that we have discussed.

A simple experiment, so simple as to seem trivial, will bring us directly to the heart of the matter. Take any two unequal objects, such as a pen and pencil or two unequally filled glasses of water, and place them on the desk in front of you. Then partially closing your eyes to increase your attention to the task, pick up each one with the thumb and forefinger and judge which is heavier. Now introspect on everything you are doing. You will find your self conscious of the feel of the objects against the skin of your fingers, conscious of the slight downward pressure as you feel the weight of each, conscious of any protrubances on the sides of the objects, and so forth. And now the actual judging of which is heavier. Where is that? Lo! the very act of judgment that one object is heavier than the other is not conscious. It is somehow just given to you by your nervous system. If we call that process of judgment thinking, we are finding that such thinking is not conscious at all. A simple experiment, yes, but extremely important. It demolishes at once the entire tradition that such thought processes are. the structure of the conscious mind.

This type of experiment came to be studied extensively back at the beginning of this century in what came to be known as the Wurzburg School. It all began with a study by Karl Marbe in 1901, which was .very similar to the above, except that small weights were used. [16] The subject was asked to lift two weights in front of him, and place the one that was heavier in front of the experimenter, who was facing him. And it came as a startling discovery both to the experimenter himself and to his highly trained subjects, all of them introspective psychologists, that the process of judgment itself was never conscious. Physics and psychology always show interesting contrasts, and it is one of the ironies of science that the Marbe experiment, so simple as to seem silly, was to psychology what the so-difficult-to-set-up Michaelson-Morley experiment was to physics. Just as the latter proved that the ether, that substance supposed to exist throughout space, did not exist, so the weight-judgment experiment showed that judging, that supposed hallmark of consciousness, did not exist in consciousness at all.

But a complaint can be lodged here. Maybe in lifting the objects the judging was all happening so fast that we forgot it. After all, in introspecting we always have hundreds of words to describe what happens in a few seconds. (What an astonishing fact that is!) And our memory fades as to what just happened even as we are trying to express it. Perhaps this was what was occurring in Marbe’s experiment, and that type of thinking called judging could be found in consciousness, after all, if we could only remember.

This was the problem as Watt faced it a few years after Marbe. [17] To solve it, he used a different method, word associations. Nouns printed on cards were shown to the subject, who was to reply by uttering an associate word as quickly as he could. It was not free association, but what is technically called partially constrained: in different series the subject was required to associate to the visual word a superordinate (e.g., oak-tree), co-ordinate (oak-elm), or subordinate (oak-beam); or a whole (oak-forest), a part (oak-acorn), or another part of a common whole (oak-path). The nature of this task of constrained associations made it possible to divide the consciousness of it into four periods: the instructions as to which of the constraints it was to be (e.g., superordinate), the presentation of the stimulus noun (e.g., oak), the search for an appropriate association, and the spoken reply (e.g., tree). The introspecting observers were asked to confine themselves first to one period and then to another, and thus get a more accurate account of consciousness in each.

It was expected that the precision of this fractionation method would prove Marbe’s conclusions wrong, and that the consciousness of thinking would be found in Watt’s third period, the period of the search for the word that would suit the particular constrained association. But nothing of the sort happened. It was the third period that was introspectively blank. What seemed to be happening was that thinking was automatic and not really conscious once a stimulus word had been given, and, previous to that, the particular type of association demanded had been adequately understood by the observer. This was a remarkable result. Another way of saying it is that one does one’s thinking before one knows what one is to think about. The important part of the matter is the instruction, which allows the whole business to go off automatically. This I shall shorten to the term struction, by which I mean it to have the connotation of both instruction and construction. [18]

Thinking, then, is not conscious. Rather, it is an automatic process following a struction and the materials on which the struction is to operate.

But we do not have to stay with verbal associations; any type of problem will do, even those closer to voluntary actions. If I say to myself, I shall think about an oak in summer, that is a struction, and what I call thinking about is really a file of associated images cast up on the shores of my consciousness out of an unknown sea, just like the constrained associations in Watt’s experiment.

If we have the figures 6 and 2, divided by a vertical line, 6/2, the ideas produced by such a stimulus will be eight, four, or three, according to whether the struction prescribed is addition, subtraction, or division. The important thing is that the struction itself, the process of addition, subtraction, or division, disappears into the nervous system once it is given. But it is obviously there ‘in the mind’ since the same stimulus can result in any of three different responses. And that is something we are not in the least aware of, once it is put in motion.

Suppose we have a series of figures such as the following:What is the next figure in this series? How did you arrive at your answer? Once I have given you the struction, you automatically ‘see’ that it is to be another triangle. I submit that if you try to introspect on the process by which you came up with the answer you are not truly retrieving the processes involved, but inventing what you think they must have been by giving yourself another struction to that effect. In the task itself, all you were really conscious of was the struction, the figures before you on the page, and then the solution.

Nor is this different from the case of speech which I mentioned earlier. When we speak, we are not really conscious either of the search for words, or of putting the words together into phrases, or of putting the phrases into sentences. We are only conscious of the ongoing series of structions that we give ourselves, which then, automatically, without any consciousness whatever, result in speech. The speech itself we can be conscious of as it is produced if we wish, thus giving some feedback to result in further structions.

So we arrive at the position that the actual process of thinking, so usually thought to be the very life of consciousness, is not conscious at all and that only its preparation, its materials, and its end result are consciously perceived.

16. K. Marbe, Experimentell-Psychologische Untersuchungen uber das Urteil, eine Einleitung in die Logik (Leipzig: Emgelmann, 1901).

17. H.J. Wattt, “Experimentelle Beitrage zur einer Theorie des Denkens,” Archiv fur geschite der Psychologie, 1905, 4: 289-436.

18. The terms set, determining tendency, and struction need to be distinguished. A set is the more inclusive term, being an engaged aptic structure which in mammals can be ordered from a general limbic component of readiness to a specific cortical component of a determining tendency, the final part of which in humans is often a struction.

sphexishness

LATimes | The female sphex wasp will sting and paralyze a cricket, stash it in a hole in a tree and lay her eggs on it. When the eggs hatch, the baby wasps have fresh cricket to eat. But the mama sphex also has an internal rule. When she brings a cricket to the opening of the hole, she always goes inside for a look around before she drags it in. If an experimenter moves the cricket a few inches away while the sphex is in the hole, she will repeat the process, bringing the cricket back to the opening and going inside for a look. If the experimenter moves the cricket again, the wasp will repeat the behavior. Her internal rule calls for her to look in the hole before she drags the cricket inside, and that is what she will do. If the experimenter moves the cricket 40 times, the sphex will repeat the behavior 40 times. We don't know how many more times she would do it because the experimenters always give up.

It's fun to observe sphexishness in animals. The trick, of course, is to be able to recognize it in ourselves. What behaviors do we humans senselessly repeat over and over because of some unquestioned internal rule? What entirely avoidable loop of stupidity are we stuck in? Here are a few candidates:

We continue to think that Americans, no matter how crazy, should be able to buy guns, no matter how lethal. Columbine had no effect. Virginia Tech, no effect. Lunatic after lunatic, senseless murder after murder, nothing changes. Somebody like Jared Loughner, who doesn't appear to know whether he's afoot or on horseback, can wander into a sporting-goods store and stumble out with a semiautomatic weapon almost as easily as he can buy a sleeve of golf balls.

We continue to believe that business can regulate itself. Wall Street greedheads nearly blow up the world economy with their pointless, synthetic financial instruments, and we continue to believe that government regulation of financial markets would stifle innovation. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to try to fix the consequences of their most recent innovations, and yet we persist in the belief that regulating the industry would be un-American. We can't even summon the political will to pressure companies to reduce the salaries and bonuses of the most egregious malefactors.

We persist in throwing endless blood and treasure into the endless, pointless war on drugs. After 40 years, untold billions of dollars and countless lives wasted in prison, it's still easier for a teenager in Detroit to buy a bag of cocaine than a six-pack of beer. How much richer is organized crime as a result of the fact that drugs are illegal? How many children have been killed in this war?

We continue to believe — against all logic, all evidence and all experience — that giving money to the for-profit insurance industry is the way to provide healthcare for the poor and sick. There isn't enough money in healthcare for not-for-profit institutions to make a go of it, but adding a layer of investors to skim off the top will make it work.

We continue to believe in the fantasies of smart bombs, surgical strikes and limited wars.

And we continue to imagine that a government funded by corporate lobbyists and dedicated to no higher principle than lower taxes is going to be a guardian of the public interest.

These ideas are not working this time. They didn't work last time or the time before that. We have no idea why. And we all just stand here barking.

america's achilles heel; the mississipi river's old river control structure

wunderground | America has an Achilles' heel. It lies on a quiet, unpopulated stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, a few miles east of the tiny town of Simmesport. Rising up from the flat, wooded west flood plain of the Mississippi River tower four massive concrete and steel structures that would make a Pharaoh envious--the Army Corps' of Engineers greatest work, the billion-dollar Old River Control Structure. This marvel of modern civil engineering has, for fifty years, done what many thought impossible--impose man's will on the Mississippi River. Mark Twain, who captained a Mississippi river boat for many years, wrote in his book Life on the Mississippi, "ten thousand river commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or define it, cannot say to it "Go here," or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at." The great river wants to carve a new path to the Gulf of Mexico; only the Old River Control Structure keeps it at bay. Failure of the Old River Control Structure would be a severe blow to America's economy, interrupting a huge portion of our imports and exports that ship along the Mississippi River. Closure of the Mississippi to shipping would cost $295 million per day, said Gary LaGrange, executive director of the Port of New Orleans, during a news conference Thursday. The structure will receive its most severe test in its history in the coming two weeks, as the Mississippi River's greatest flood on record crests at a level never before seen.

the century of disasters

Slate | All of these things have the common feature of low probability and high consequence. They're "black swan" events. They're unpredictable in any practical sense. They're also things that ordinary people probably should not worry about on a daily basis. You can't fear the sun. You can't worry that a rock will fall out of the sky and smash the earth, or that the ground will open up and swallow you like a vitamin. A key element of maintaining one's sanity is knowing how to ignore risks that are highly improbable at any given point in time.

And yet in the coming century, these or other black swans will seem to occur with surprising frequency. There are several reasons for this. We have chosen to engineer the planet. We have built vast networks of technology. We have created systems that, in general, work very well, but are still vulnerable to catastrophic failures. It is harder and harder for any one person, institution, or agency to perceive all the interconnected elements of the technological society. Failures can cascade. There are unseen weak points in the network. Small failures can have broad consequences.
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Most importantly: We have more people, and more stuff, standing in the way of calamity. We're not suddenly having more earthquakes, but there are now 7 billion of us, a majority living in cities. In 1800, only Beijing could count a million inhabitants, but at last count there were 381 cities with at least 1 million people. Many are "megacities" in seismically hazardous places—Mexico City, Caracas, Tehran, and Kathmandu being among those with a lethal combination of weak infrastructure (unreinforced masonry buildings) and a shaky foundation.

Natural disasters will increasingly be accompanied by technological crises—and the other way around. In March, the Japan earthquake triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown. Last year, a technological failure on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico led to the environmental crisis of the oil spill. (I chronicle the Deepwater Horizon blowout and the ensuing crisis management in a new book: A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher.)

In both the Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima disasters, the safety systems weren't nearly as robust as the industries believed. In these technological accidents, there are hidden pathways for the gremlins to infiltrate the operation. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, a series of decisions by BP and its contractors led to a loss of well control—the initial blowout. The massive blowout preventer on the sea floor was equipped with a pair of pinchers known as blind shear rams. They were supposed to cut the drillpipe and shear the well. The forensic investigation indicated that the initial eruption of gas buckled the pipe and prevented the blind shear rams from getting a clean bite on it. So the "backup" plan—cut the pipe—was effectively eliminated in the initial event, the loss of well control.

Fukushima also had a backup plan that wasn't far enough back. The nuclear power plant had backup generators in case the grid went down. But the generators were on low ground, and were blasted by the tsunami. Without electricity, the power company had no way to cool the nuclear fuel rods. In a sense, it was a very simple problem: a power outage. Some modern reactors coming online have passive cooling systems for backups—they rely on gravity and evaporation to circulate the cooling water. Fist tap Nana.

volcanology: europe's ticking time bomb

Nature | It starts with a blast so strong that a column of ash and stone rockets 40 kilometres up into the stratosphere. The debris then drops to Earth, pelting the surface with boiling hot fragments of pumice and covering the ground with a thick layer of ash. Roofs crumble and vehicles grind to a halt. Yet the worst is still to come. Soon, avalanches of molten ash, pumice and gas roar down the slopes of the volcano, pulverizing buildings and burying everything in their path. Almost overnight, a packed metropolis becomes a volcanic wasteland.

This is Naples, Italy, in the throes of a cataclysmic eruption of Vesuvius — the volcano that destroyed the city of Pompeii in AD 79. The scenario may sound far-fetched, but in the wake of Japan's recent earthquake and tsunami, many areas are reassessing the risks from their own 'black swans', a term used to describe unlikely but potentially devastating disasters. And Naples stands out as particularly vulnerable, with a population of 3 million living in the shadow of Vesuvius.

The volcano has been eerily dormant since a small eruption in 1944, but recent studies suggest that Vesuvius could be more dangerous than previously assumed, which has prompted a vigorous debate about the risk and scale of future disasters. Local authorities face the difficult task of deciding how to protect a large population in the event of earthquakes and other signs heralding the volcano's reawakening. "There would be no modern precedent for an evacuation of this magnitude," says Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo at the Vesuvius Volcano Observatory in Naples. "This is why Vesuvius is the most dangerous volcano in the world."

The slumbering giant won't stay quiet forever. Seismic imaging studies have detected an unusual layer about 8–10 kilometres deep under the mountain's surface. Mastrolorenzo and his colleague Lucia Pappalardo interpret this layer as an active magma reservoir1, which could produce large-scale 'plinian'-style explosions — named after Pliny the Younger, who described the AD 79 eruption.

The first rumblings of activity at Vesuvius could come weeks to years before an eruption, but there might be little, if any, warning of the eruption itself. Pappalardo and Mastrolorenzo analysed the geochemistry of rock fragments from past eruptions, and found evidence that magma ascended rapidly — in just a few hours — from its deep chamber to the surface.

For many years the largest known eruption of Vesuvius was that of AD 79. But in 2006, Mastrolorenzo and Michael Sheridan at the University at Buffalo in New York described geological evidence for a much larger blast, about 3,800 years ago in the Bronze Age2. Fiery avalanches of ash and debris called pyroclastic flows travelled 20 kilometres and covered the whole of the area of present-day Naples. "The deposits right in the centre of Naples are 4 metres thick," says Sheridan. "Even a few inches would be enough to kill everyone."

the inevitable transcendency of science

cogitans | Most people reject the idea of science as 'the inevitable arbiter of human differences' because scientists themselves seem to be -are in general, afflicted by virtually any and every failing of 'the common man' -and accountably so in that thruout the world so far the scientist is heir to (a) the neonate ignorance of all mankind and (b) an environment (mental and physical) of at least some ignorance in science and at least some 'primitively pecking-order-based structure' -'no better than anyone else' in that sense. 'The inevitable transcendency of science' however, is another matter. As surely as 'deliberative capability is a machine that goes by itself', so too does natural selection advantage science (and the scientist) in the evolution and progression of the whole -superceding and vestigializing, in that respect, the 'intellectual' ambiguities and inconsistencies inherent the evolution of 'knowledge' out of neonate ignorance and pecking order by (successively) more formally logical constructions (-stem cell research eventually superceding the 'human-being' of fetuses, for example, regardless of 'god-based' government). -It is, simply and ineluctably, a matter (mankind surviving that long :-) of 'operational consequence of fact' (mathematics implicit) eventually but inevitably superceding 'operational consequence of less than fact' (below).

The life of the scientist today may be 'tainted' much as that of the common man -religion, ethnicity, politics, the political mechanics of his profession and making money for 'pecking-order-based expression' in particular, but he tends, in general and out of knowledge, to respect the inherency of 'the scientist furthering science above all else' -compromising, even, then, 'pecking-order-based expression' in that respect. -Where, further, this does not 'obtain', it is 'the nature of the advancing scientist' to see to it that it does (example) -genetic imperative and natural selection driving the whole:

(*n) Consider the situation of two scientists resolving a problem -the two, equal in every physical and mental respect except for being at an impasse over 'the proper resolution' of some immediate problem -P, in this particular case, literally imposing his 'resolution' upon N. N reflects upon this however, and thereby observes P's 'pecking order' to have suddenly become 'part of the problem'; N, in other words, suddenly knows more about the overall situation than P, thus whether he goes along with P or not in this case, he has actually acquired more knowledge than N -to 'an eventual besting of Ns and their pecking orders'. (-from Pecking Order, Competition and Institution ...)

-the advancing scientist, in effect, superceding 'the obstacle of his machine that-goes-by-itself deliberative capability' -only a matter of time then, as the artifactuality of pecking order and noumenalism 'vestigializes' under successive dirigiste heurism.

defusing the population bomb

LATimes | Forty years ago, early efforts to provide family-planning aid in developing countries ran aground when they became associated with coercive birth control programs such as China's one-baby policy and India's forced vasectomies. Such violations of human rights are not just unacceptable; they also are unnecessary. Surveys find that women in developing countries would choose smaller families if they had the means to do so.

Women who have no schooling give birth to an average of 4http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif.5 children; with just a year or more of schooling, the number drops to 3. As education increases, the number of births drops. Girls in Africa who receive some education will have fewer children and have them later in life. Their children will be healthier, and more educated as well.

Of course, foreign aid is of limited help in countries where religious beliefs or oppressive regimes make it all but impossible for women to exert control over any aspect of their lives. But as individual nations find it more difficult to provide for burgeoning populations in coming decades, there could be some surprising changes. In Iran, a campaign to increase the birthrate after the shah was deposed in the late 1970s — the legal age to marry was lowered to 9 — was reversed when the country struggled to find housing, employment and even enough water for a population that had nearly doubled in two decades. The new smaller-families campaign included birth control counseling before a couple could obtain a marriage license, and the birthrate plummeted to just above replacement level. More recently there have been calls to raise the number of births again.

The industrial world struggles with a different form of ambivalence about population growth. When birthrates in Japan and Italy fell to well below replacement levels, leaders were horrified and the Western news media reported it as terrible news. It's true that such a decline in birthrates presents a challenge: a smaller population of working-age people to support a larger population of retirees. Radical drops in birthrates and the subsequent aging of the population have presented formidable problems in some countries. But the situation is temporary; that smaller population will age in a few decades and become easier for future generations to support.

This much is certain: Nations cannot indefinitely produce larger and larger generations to support older ones. Humans may have the reproductive ability to keep raising their numbers, but the planet on which they do it is finite.

everything else is conversation...,

Video - Field dressing a rabbit, very quick and clean. (remember to cut back legs at the knees, inspect the liver for white spots, and don't waste any meat)

the fukushima plate

Fukushima Plate - In a society that sacrifices reason to profit, security becomes a luxury for those who can afford it.

The Fukushima Plate is an ordinary kitchen plate with built-in radioactive meter to visualize your food's level of contamination. It might become an indespensable tool of survival in the future. Fist tap Dale.

where is all that fukushima radiation going?

Video - Part 1 of 2 interview with environmental scientist and professional engineer Marco Kaltofen about his ongoing analysis of radioactive fallout from Fukushima.

Video - Part 1 of 2 interview with environmental scientist and professional engineer Marco Kaltofen about his ongoing analysis of radioactive fallout from Fukushima.

norsk institute zardoz server radiation forecasts

Video - NILU Forecasts off the Zardoz server showing EXTREMELY HIGH levels of Cesium, Xenon, and Iodine over the USA and Canada.

Video - Trailer for Zardoz directed by John Boorman starring Sean Connery.

fukushima this week

Fukushima - One Step Forward and Four Steps Back as Each Unit Challenged by New Problems from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Video - For the first time, the government gave permission for short visits so people could gather belongings and check on their properties. Meanwhile, a recent map of contamination released by Japan shows high levels of radiation well outside the evacuation zone.


Video - TEPCO released footage for the first time on Wednesday of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant Unit 3 reactor's spent fuel pool.

wait for it, wait for it.., REALLY?!?!?!?!?!

Telegraph | One of the reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant did suffer a nuclear meltdown, Japanese officials admitted for the first time today, describing a pool of molten fuel at the bottom of the reactor's containment vessel.

Engineers from the Tokyo Electric Power company (Tepco) entered the No.1 reactor at the end of last week for the first time and saw the top five feet or so of the core's 13ft-long fuel rods had been exposed to the air and melted down.

Previously, Tepco believed that the core of the reactor was submerged in enough water to keep it stable and that only 55 per cent of the core had been damaged.

Now the company is worried that the molten pool of radioactive fuel may have burned a hole through the bottom of the containment vessel, causing water to leak.

"We will have to revise our plans," said Junichi Matsumoto, a spokesman for Tepco. "We cannot deny the possibility that a hole in the pressure vessel caused water to leak".

Tepco has not clarified what other barriers there are to stop radioactive fuel leaking if the steel containment vessel has been breached. Greenpeace said the situation could escalate rapidly if "the lava melts through the vessel".

how psychedelics work in the brain

Dr. David Nichols from oliver hockenhull on Vimeo.

Dr.David Nichols, Purdue University, American pharmacologist and medicinal chemist.

Presently the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology at Purdue University, Nichols has worked in the field of psychoactive drugs since 1969.

He is the founding president of the Heffter Research Institute, named after German chemist and pharmacologist Arthur Heffter, who first discovered that mescaline was the active component in the peyote cactus.

the god of high places

DeclarationsofIndependence | Perhaps you are wondering how to recognize this God at work in the world right now. The truth is that he always hides in plain sight. Who has the view? Where is the pyramid? The thing to remember is that those with the view have the power to run the programs. Those with the view are always talking about sacrifice, but never sacrificing themselves. We have arrived at the point where the priests are global, which is one of the reasons why this time in history is so full of crisis and change. Are you catching what I'm throwing yet? Do you know who the priests are?

Well, if you're not catching it yet, I'll give you some more time to think about it while I break down the reasons that the priests are able to hide in plain sight. Think of the pyramid on a human scale, the way you get to the top is by crawling over the backs of everyone else. At the top of the pyramid, where the best view is, you are standing on the metaphorical shoulders of nearly everyone else in your structure. The real power of the priests is to build the consent of those that carry the burden as a matter of course. In the Aztec empire, the blood sacrifice was just a part of life, demanded by the Gods. The only way the priests could get to that position was by using the fear of the Gods to keep the rest of the pyramid in line. People of good moral and ethical conscience will simply say "That's just the way things are, we can't change the way things are."

This is the main reason that the God of High Places can rule a culture. Those who want the view will fight to get it, and even those that don't want the view will enforce the structure that allows it because they believe it's just a fact of nature. So, now it's time to expose the God of High Places. The God of the empty belly rules the market system at this point in time. His priests occupy the rooms in the skyscrapers across the world that the common folk can't get to. We serve at the leisure of the priests and their strange God, because we believe that the market is "just the way things are." Our sacrifice is just beginning in the Developed nations, but has been ongoing in the "developing" nations.

This global priesthood of elite worshipers has catapulted many to the highest view so far attainable in human culture. As the world struggles with economic downturn, the priest class consumes and attains a greater and greater share of the world's resources. We allow this to happen, because unconsciously we've been programmed to believe that the invisible hand of the market is a fact of nature. The truth is that the invisible hand belongs to the God of High Places and it is becoming more visible day by day. This is the hand that takes from the social safety net, and gives to the bank executives, it takes from the hungry children and gives to the commodity traders, it takes the shared resources of the Earth and gives in the form of ballooning bank statements to the elect. To the priesthood.

It's important to note that all of the elite are not of the priesthood, some get to the view through true force of character and world shaking ideas, but these people are the minority and do not call most of the shots. At the top of the pyramid, it is mostly blood and corruption, no matter how beautifully tailored the costumes are. The decisions that are made from that vantage point are geared towards two main directions. To keep the bottom of the pyramid from realizing how they're serving the top, while the bottom aspires for the same position, and to amass the resources of the world into the hands of the servants of the empty belly God. We are still his food, and will continue to be as long as the priests are successful in their main endeavors.

But the game is not over yet, and those that made the rules for the game fear greatly that we just decide as a people to stop playing. Let us figure out new ways to use the resources of the planet for the good of all, not just the few. Let us understand that we must work in balance with natural systems rather than at the expense of them. Let us understand that as the base of the pyramid, it is our own actions that support it. Let us look in the eye of the God of High Places and say, "I SEE YOU." Fist tap Dale.

harvesting organs from the poor

Bloomberg | Luis Picado’s mother remembers the day her son thought he had won the lottery. He came home to their tin-roofed cinder-block house in a Managua, Nicaragua, slum and said he’d found a way to escape poverty and start a new life in the United States.

An American man had promised to give Picado, a 23-year-old high school dropout who worked as a construction laborer, a job and an apartment in New York if he’d donate one of his kidneys. He jumped at the deal, his mother says.

Three weeks later, in May 2009, Picado came out of surgery at Managua’s Military Hospital, bleeding internally from the artery doctors had severed to remove his kidney, according to medical records. His mother, Elizabeth Tercero, got on her knees next to her son’s bed in the recovery room and prayed, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its June issue.

“I told my boy not to worry, that I would take care of him,” Tercero, 49, says. “But it was too late.” Picado bled to death as doctors tried to save him, according to a coroner’s report. “He was always chasing the American dream, and finally, it cost him his life,” she says.

Matthew Ryan, the American man, suffered a similar fate. Ryan, a 68-year-old retired bus company supervisor in New York, died two months after receiving Picado’s kidney in the same hospital.

Nicaraguan postmortem reports cited the transplant as a cause of death for both men. Prosecutors in Managua are now investigating whether anyone broke a Nicaraguan law that prohibits paying a donor for an organ.
Illicit Market

The two men were participants in a growing and illicit market for organ transplants that spans the globe. Every year, about 5,000 gravely ill people from countries including the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia pay others to donate an organ, says Francis Delmonico, a Harvard Medical School professor and surgeon. The practice is illegal in every country except Iran, Delmonico says.

Affluent, often desperately ill patients travel to countries such as Egypt, Peru and the Philippines, where poor people sell them their organs. In Latin America, the transplants are usually arranged by unlicensed brokers. They’re performed -- for fees -- by accredited surgeons, some of whom have trained at the world’s leading medical schools.

The global demand for organs far exceeds the available supply. In the U.S., 110,693 people are on waiting lists for organs, and fewer than 15,000 donors are found annually.

vine of the soul

Video - Vine of the Soul: Encounters with Ayahuasca: A Documentary

for those who didn't know....,

Systemwide, Blogger's been down the past two days and the content that went up yesterday got circular-filed by Google as part of its systemic restoration to a prior stable state.

anonymous is anyone who knows the rules

Guardian | When Anonymous first made big headlines in early 2008 with its protests against the Church of Scientology, dubbed Project Chanology, it was not yet apparent that Anonymous would be here to stay.

Three years later, Anonymous has not only gained a sizeable collection of adversaries and critics – including government agencies, IT security companies and digital rights advocacies who criticise its methods – it has also won scores of secret and not so secret admirers, especially among the highly social media literate, digital creative class.

The reputation of its members as defenders of truth and seekers of knowledge, digital avengers who cannot be lied to because they will hijack the emails of those who try, seems to strike a chord with many.

What has remained unclear is just who or what Anonymous is. Popular descriptions used in the media are those as a protest movement, a hacker community, or – merging the two – as a hacktivist group. Apart from an interest in the actual individuals behind the handle, a focus has been on whether or not Anonymous has a leader or central command structure which oversees and steers it actions.

While Anonymous claims the contrary – and some reports from "inside Anonymous" characterise it as a "stamping herd" of wary individuals – this suspicion does not subside. In mid-March, Gawker announced to have received chat logs from Anonymous' "secret war room", and evidence of "certain members doling out tasks, selecting targets, and even dressing down members who get out of line".


What has received less attention in the media is where Anonymous came from and what it is outside of ongoing activities such as last year's Operation Payback, which targeted companies that had cancelled their service to Wikileaks, or the current Operation Sony, which began as a consumer rights protest until Sony suggested Anonymous might have been behind the PlayStation Network hack (Anonymous denies this).

But these operations, and the fluctating number of individuals that engage in them at a time, are not identical with the collective identity of Anonymous, an identity that has been crafted in a collaborative effort and whose origins I am going to outline here. Fist tap Arnach

homeboy industries

LATimes | Lorenzo had a hard time concealing his nervousness. Standing in front of a large room packed with Boeing employees in late March, the tall, lanky African American gang member described the arc of his life. At 22, he had spent nearly a third of his life incarcerated.

Peering out of his round, black-rimmed glasses, he talked about his seven months at Homeboy Industries (the largest gang reentry program in the country), and about how he had moved quickly from the janitorial team to become an assistant in the accounting department. "I used to steal money," he said. "Now I'm counting it."

I had the honor of witnessing Lorenzo's seven-month journey from convict to accounting assistant, watching as he became the young man God had in mind when he made him. But despite his remarkable turnaround and the many things he had to offer an employer, Lorenzo's prospects for finding a job outside our program were dim.

Opportunities for second chances are few for people like Lorenzo. Homeboy Industries is about the only game in town. Most employers just aren't willing to look beyond the dumbest or worst thing someone has done.

Another "homie" recently came to me for help after, for the third time, he was let go from a job because his employer had discovered he'd done five years in prison. He told me the boss said, "You're one of our best workers, but we have to let you go." Then, with a desperate sadness, the young man added: "Damn, G. No one told me I'd be getting a life sentence of no work."

The business of second chances is everybody's business. We lose our right to be surprised that California has the highest recidivism rate in the country if we refuse to hire folks who have taken responsibility for their crimes and have done their time.

Even in this alarming economic climate, where the pool of prospective employees is larger than ever, we need to find the moral imperative as a society to secure places in our workforce for those who just need a chance to prove themselves. This can't be the concern only of a large gang rehab center; it must also be part of our collective response to keep our streets safe and our communities healthy.

europe is running a giant ponzi scheme

Financial Times | One of the pillars upon which the euro was established was the principle of “no bail-out”. When the sovereign debt crisis hit the eurozone this principle was ditched. As Greece, Ireland and Portugal were unable to service their unsustainable levels of debt, a mechanism was instituted to supply them with the financing necessary to service their obligations. This financing was provided, supposedly, in exchange for their implementing measures that would make their, now higher, debt burdens sustainable in the future. Yet the mode adopted to resolve the debt problems of countries in peripheral Europe is, apparently, to increase their level of debt. A case in point is the €78bn ($116bn) loan to Portugal. It is equivalent to more than 47 per cent of its gross domestic product in 2010, possibly increasing Portugal’s public debt to about 120 per cent of GDP.

It could be claimed that this mechanism is helping the countries involved since the official loans, although onerous, carry better conditions than the ones that need to be serviced. But the countries’ debts will increase (as a percentage of GDP the debts of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain are expected to be higher by the end of 2012 than at the start of the crisis). The share of debt owed to the official sector will also increase (in addition to the bond purchases by the European Central Bank, which reportedly owns 17 per cent of these countries’ bonds with a much higher percentage held as collateral).

Is this ongoing piling of debt an indication of imminent defaults? Probably, but not necessarily. An immediate default could result in major market commotion, given the high exposure of European banks to peripheral debt. Therefore, European governments are finding it more convenient to postpone the day of reckoning and continue throwing money into the peripheral countries, rather than face domestic financial disruption. Consequently, as long as European and international money (through the International Monetary Fund’s generous financing) is available, the game could go on.

It is based on the fiction that this is just a temporary liquidity problem and that the official financing helps the countries involved to make the reforms that will allow them to return to the voluntary market in normal conditions. In other words, the narrative is that the recipient countries could and would outgrow their debt. To “prove” this scenario is feasible several debt sustainability exercises are being dreamt up. But the fact is that this situation is only sustainable as long as additional amounts of money are available to continue the pretence.

Here is where this situation resembles a pyramid or a Ponzi scheme. Some of the original bondholders are being paid with the official loans that also finance the remaining primary deficits. When it turns out that countries cannot meet the austerity and structural conditions imposed on them, and therefore cannot return to the voluntary market, these loans will eventually be rolled over and enhanced by eurozone members and international organisations. This is Greece, not Chad: does anyone imagine the IMF will stop disbursing loans if performance criteria are not met? Moreover, this “public sector Ponzi scheme” is more flexible than a private one. In a private scheme, the pyramid collapses when you cannot find enough new investors willing to hand over their money so old investors can be paid. But in a public scheme such as this, the Ponzi scheme could, in theory, go on for ever. As long as it is financed with public money, the peripheral countries’ debt could continue to grow without a hypothetical limit.

But could it, really? The constraint is not financial, but political. We are starting to observe public opposition to financing this Ponzi scheme in its current form, but it could still have quite a way to go. It is apparent that, if not forced sooner by politics, the inevitable default will only be allowed to take place when the vast part of the European distressed debt is transferred from the private to the official sector. As in a pyramid scheme, it will be the last holder of the “asset” that takes the full loss. In this case, it will be the taxpayer that foots the bill, rather than the original bondholders that made the wrong investment decisions.

europe pressured to revise irish and greek "bailouts"

Reuters | The European Union is under pressure to renegotiate its financial bailouts of Ireland and Greece after an Irish minister said any concessions given to Athens should mean better terms for Dublin as well.

The 110-billion-euro ($157 billion) rescue of Greece, agreed in May last year, and the 85-billion-euro scheme for Ireland, put together in November, were meant to be the cornerstones of the euro zone's response to its sovereign debt crisis.

The fact that both may now be revised, in Greece's case perhaps radically, underlines how they so far have failed to convince markets that the problems are in hand, and suggests Europe may be on the hook to supply fresh aid for years to come.

Irish Minister for Energy Pat Rabbitte told state broadcaster RTE on Sunday he would like to see a rescheduling of the emergency loans extended to Ireland under the bailout by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

"Quite frankly the (interest) rate on Ireland must be reduced and in my own view the debt must also be rescheduled but that's another issue," Rabbitte said.

He said Ireland intended to continue negotiating improvements in the bailout terms throughout the scheme's three-year life.

Rabbitte said this would make sense in light of the situation in Greece. After a secretive meeting of top euro zone finance officials in Luxembourg on Friday night, Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the zone's finance ministers, said there was consensus that Greece needed a new plan.

"We think that Greece does need a further adjustment programme," Juncker said after talks with the finance ministers of Greece and the zone's biggest economies: Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

"This has to be discussed in detail and will be taken up at the next Eurogroup meeting on May 16," Juncker said, referring to a conference of finance ministers of all 17 euro zone states.

British finance minister George Osborne agreed on Sunday that Greece might need additional aid but said Britain, which is outside the euro zone, should not have to provide any. He acknowledged that markets doubted Greece could meet the requirements of its current rescue plan.

"The market is quite skeptical about that happening and I suspect a lot of my time over the next few weeks is going to be with other European finance ministers talking about how we try to help the Greeks get through this situation," he told the BBC.

OPTIONS
Any renegotiation of the financial terms or economic targets in the Greek and Irish schemes could complicate the rescue of Portugal, which last week became the third euro zone state to agree on an EU/IMF bailout.

Portugal's main political parties have committed themselves to supporting the 78-billion-euro plan after elections on June 5 produce a new government. But if Greece and Ireland are allowed to renegotiate their bailouts, it may be hard to deny Portugal the same opportunity if a future government in Lisbon decides that is necessary.

A revised Greek plan could include pushing further into the future the targets for Greece to cut its budget deficit, easing the terms of its emergency loans, and giving it additional money, EU official sources and analysts say.

should the irish do what the icelanders did?

Video - Pat Kenny interviewed Philippe Legrain, author of "Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis"

NEPKC | Voters in Iceland have rejected their government’s attempt to foist on them the costs of bailing out foreign creditors. Iceland’s oversized big banks had made bad loans throughout Euroland and when they failed uninsured depositors were on the hook. Governments in countries like the UK and the Netherlands bailed out their depositors and demand that Iceland reimburse them. However, Icelandic voters have now rejected that proposition twice. They feel they have suffered enough already from a financial crisis created by largely unregulated financial institutions that lent indiscriminately in foreign currency. Iceland does not use the euro and its tiny economy cannot be expected to cover all the euro-denominated debt run-up by private financial institutions. Those foolish foreigners who took risks by holding uninsured euro-denominated deposits in Icelandic banks with no access to a government back-stop in euros should take the loss. In my view, the voters have responded in a rational and responsible manner. After all, that is what market discipline and sovereignty are all about. If a saver does not like risks, she should hold only safe assets guaranteed by a sovereign power.

What about Ireland—which is now facing a similar situation—should its voters reject a taxpayer bailout of foreign creditors? Like Iceland, it faces a crushing debt because its government took on the liabilities of its oversized banks who also had lent indiscriminately throughout Euroland. However, unlike Iceland, Irish bank liabilities are denominated in the currency used in Ireland, the euro.

Ireland abandoned its sovereign currency when it joined the Euro. Effectively, it became like a US state—think Louisiana—within the EMU. This means it has little domestic policy space to use monetary or fiscal policy to deal with crisis. If we go back to 2005, Ireland’s government had the second lowest ratio of debt to GDP (national output or income) in the EU-15, with only Luxemberg having a lower debt ratio. The government paid an interest rate similar to that paid by the French and German governments; it had a strong AAA rating on its debt. In fact, it was running a huge government surplus of 2.5% of GDP (similar to that run by the Clinton administration in the late 1990s in the US).

Fast forward to this spring. The government deficit ratio was about 12.5% of GDP and credit default spreads on the government’s debt (equivalent to betting on default) reached almost 43 basis points over those of Germany, and it paid 6 percentage points higher to borrow than Germany did (on March 22 the spread on two year bonds hit a record 835 basis points—8.35 percentage points—over the rate on equivalent German debt).

Here’s the problem. There is a fundamental relation between economic growth and ability to pay interest to service debt. To be safe, a non-sovereign government should not pay an interest rate that significantly exceeds its growth rate. (A country that pegs its currency, operates a currency board, adopts a dollar standard, or adopts a foreign currency is by my definition “non-sovereign”.) If we compare Ireland today to the situation of Germany, because the Irish government pays 6 percentage points more, it needs to grow 6 percentage points faster than Germany does. To be sure this is a rough rule of thumb and there is some leeway. But the prospects for Ireland to grow that much faster than Germany—say 8 percent growth rate for Ireland versus 2 percent for Germany—approach a zero probability.

Indeed, the conventional way to generate government revenues needed to service debt is to cut government spending and raise taxes—which will only hurt Irish growth. Further, what Ireland needs is to increase the flow of euros in its favour through its foreign balance, i.e. by reducing imports and increasing exports to the EMU. The conventional prescription is slow domestic growth to reduce imports and enhance international competitiveness. This, too, further reduces domestic growth even further below the interest rate paid on government debt.

And that is precisely the plan adopted by Europe’s policy elite: the “Review of Labour Cost Competitiveness” released by Forfas on 29 October 2010 makes wage reduction its primary goal, while a report, “Ireland-Stability Programme Update”, was presented to the European Commission last month with a plan to “restore order to the public finances” through “an ambitious programme of structural reform” by increasing “competitiveness”. It is clear that the plan is to crush the economy to reduce living standards sufficiently to make Ireland a low-cost producer relative to the rest of Europe.

However, with the exception of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) recent economic data across the globe have not been good. That makes it harder for Ireland to export its way out of debt—which is the least painful path. I do not see alternatives means of earning the needed euros that are without substantial suffering. Yet, many other EU nations are in a similar situation (even if some are less dire)—and will be competing with Ireland’s rush to the bottom. This is not a battle Ireland is likely to win.

Unfortunately, slow growth of the economy usually means slow growth of tax revenue. It is fairly easy to imagine a scenario in which domestic austerity actually makes the budget deficit worse, which raises interest rates on government debt. A vicious cycle can be created, with debt service blowing up as growth continues to slow and interest rates rise with credit ratings agencies downgrading government debt.

What I am going to say next will sound quite controversial. Ireland transitioned from a government budget surplus of 2.5% of GDP to a deficit of 12.5% of GDP, which I am arguing is a disaster. The US government has had a nearly identical transformation (from 2.5% surplus in the late 1990s to a deficit near 12.5% of GDP today) but it faces no insolvency constraint and no default risk. The reason this is controversial is because we do face deficit hysteria in the US and a threat by credit ratings agencies to downgrade US government debt. Congress nearly refused to extend the self-imposed debt limit on the federal government—and it is still possible that the government might get shut down if Congress refuses to raise the limit in the future. So it might look like the US and Ireland are in a similar pickle.

But they are not. All problems in the US are self-imposed. Irish problems are largely imposed by “markets”—by market assessment that there is a very real chance of involuntary default. That is why Irish borrowing rates are rising, while US government interest rates actually fell (!) after the threatened downgrade. The only path to US default is political—failure of Congress to raise debt limits. The path to Irish default is “economic”—spiralling interest rates with low growth rates.

If Ireland had its own sovereign currency, the size of the government deficit or debt ratio would not be relevant to ability to pay. I will return to that below. But since Ireland gave up its currency in favour of the euro, it is not in the position of a USA or a Japan or a Turkey. It has far less domestic policy space—to run up budget deficits to boost growth, and to set low domestic interest rates. Nor can Ireland devalue the currency—the value of its euro is set at equal to the euro used throughout the EMU. As we have seen, crises in various EMU nations (Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland) do not cause the euro to depreciate. That might sound counterintuitive but what matters is that there are relatively safe havens for those who want to buy euro-denominated debt, such as Germany. The “periphery” nations have to pay big premiums over the interest rates paid by Germany—and the euro remains (too) strong.

But let us look at how Ireland got into this mess. As I mentioned earlier, Ireland was the “paragon of virtue” just 6 years ago—its total outstanding government debt was just 8 months of tax revenue (publicly held debt was only 21% of GDP) and it was actually running budget surpluses. Then the financial crisis hit. That would have worsened the budget balance significantly—and probably would have generated a budget deficit. However, the government chose to guarantee its banks—which were vastly oversized relative to the size of the economy. That “busted the budget” and generated the current problems. In important respects, Ireland reproduced the Icelandic problem, with similar results. As we know, the people of Iceland have recently voted to undo the bank bail-out.

The question is how Ireland might respond to the will of its voters. Any rational response should try to undo the mess created by guaranteeing bank debt.

A recent report by Finnish bank expert Peter Nyberg avoids naming names (by contrast, the US official report on the crisis—the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report does so) but says that guaranteeing the banks was based on “insufficient information”. Well, that information is now sufficient to conclude that the bail-out was a mistake. It needs to be unwound. The documents must be made public. The guilty need to be prosecuted. Funds need to be recovered. Guarantees of crooks need to be withdrawn.

The case for Ireland to withdraw guarantees of bank liabilities is even stronger than the case for Iceland. Iceland wanted to guarantee only the deposits of its domestic residents, while allowing banks to default on those held by foreigners. In the case of Ireland, foreign creditors held large sums of subordinated debt and uninsured deposits. For years they had received higher returns on those inherently risky claims; but when the chickens came home to roost, foreign governments like the UK and the Netherlands chose to bail-out these holders (in many cases, their banks were the holders). That is bad policy, but it was their choice. Obviously, it rewards excessive risk taking, that presumably was already once rewarded by high returns. But now those governments want the Irish government to reimburse them for their foolish policy.

I do not (yet) want to recommend outright default on government debt. Public hearings on the bail-outs need to be undertaken immediately to determine what role fraud played in creating the government debt crisis. I’m not a lawyer, but government actions based not just on “insufficient information” but rather on “fraudulently constructed information” need to be undone. Exactly how that will play out through the courts I cannot forecast. As for the foreign government claims, Ireland ought to welcome them to pursue their case in court. Their claims appear to me to be without merit—but one never knows how courts will rule. At the very least, Ireland could buy a lot of time by going to court.

Meanwhile, Ireland needs jobs. A universal job guarantee is the best approach. The jobs would pay basic wages and benefits with a goal to provide a living wage. It would take all comers—anyone ready and willing to work, regardless of education, training, or experience. Adapt the jobs to the workers—as the late Hyman Minsky said, “take the workers as they are” and work them up to their ability, and then enhance their ability through on the job training.

The program needs to be funded by the central government. Wages would be paid directly to the bank accounts of participants for working in the program. Some national government funding of non-wage costs could be provided. I would decentralize the program, to allow local governments and not-for-profit service organizations to organize projects.

Now here is the problem. A sovereign government with its own currency can always financially afford such a program. Ireland could fund such a program with its own sovereign currency. In current circumstances this is problematic because Ireland abandoned its currency in favour of a foreign currency, the euro.

The big advantage of a sovereign currency is that government can “afford” anything for sale in its own currency. To keep our analysis simple, government then spends through “keystrokes”, crediting bank accounts.

Before all the Zombie Zimbabwean hyperinflation warriors attack, let me say that too much government spending can be inflationary and can create pressures on the currency. But by design a job guarantee program only hires people who want to work because they cannot find higher paying jobs elsewhere. It sets a wage floor but does not drive wages up. As such, it can never cause hyperinflation—it hires “off the bottom” at the program fixed wage, only up to the point of full employment. It never drives the economy beyond full employment.

What is the best way to guarantee long-term stability for the Irish economy? Full employment with reasonable price stability—something a universal job guarantee program can deliver.

For a sovereign currency nation the interest rate is a policy variable and has no impact on solvency. Government can keep rates low (it sets the overnight rate directly, and can if it desires issue only short maturity bonds near to that rate) and pays interest through “keystrokes” by crediting bank accounts with interest. It can never run out of keystrokes so will never fail to make interest payments unless it chooses to do so for noneconomic reasons.

For Ireland, this is a very serious problem. It does not have a sovereign currency. It cannot control its borrowing rates, which are set in markets. Nominal interest rates should not exceed nominal GDP growth rates. But as we know, markets have pushed rates to 10%. For Ireland to service debt at 10% interest rates, it will need Chinese growth rates. That seems unlikely.

So how should the government deal with loan repayments to the EU? As I discussed, I would encourage the government to unwind its guarantees of bank debt. If this cannot be done, then Ireland must have a bail out and debt relief provided by the ECB or the EMU through some other entity. That is actually in the interest of the EMU since much of the bank debt guaranteed by Ireland’s government is held externally by EU banks. The last resort alternative is default on debt and possible expulsion from the EMU. That will be painful. There isn’t anything Ireland can be expected to do without support from the EU—except for default.

So Ireland can learn from the Icelandic example. Both are heavily indebted because their banks were far too large and made too many foreign loans. A difference is that Iceland still has its own currency; however its banks made loans in foreign currencies. But in important respects, so did Irish banks since the euro is a foreign currency from the perspective of Ireland. Iceland’s citizens are pressuring its government to undo the bail outs. Ireland’s population can learn by example.

The Irish voters should demand accountability of government, including investigation of the bail out of banks. Government should pursue debt relief on all fronts. Voters should resist austerity programs. If all else fails, they should demand either default or withdrawal from the EMU (in practice these probably amount to the same thing).

And they demand jobs at decent pay. A Universal Job Guarantee program either funded by a newly sovereign Irish government, or funded by the ECB or other EMU institution is necessary to help revive the economy and to relieve suffering caused by high unemployment.