and Kunstler will be vindicated in many of your worst case scenario assumptions. When the chaos of the American financial crisis can be felt in a place like Lake Toba, a place so insular and far, far out of the global mainstream it's crystal clear to me we are deeply, deeply fucked.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

For the elites, the rest of us don't exist. It's really that simple. This has been going on and will continue to go on as long as they can fool you with propaganda and buy the vote of your representatives, or intimidate you with either fear or threats.

we all be in trouble here lol and as my mom says 'you are gonna be put on a list Tina' :)

There are now millions of people on the list. We'll be in good company when they come for us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedman

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

He's one of the mega-rich. No wonder he says what he says - and despises labor rights and loves totalitarian 'efficient' China.

Reading his book on the flat world is being on an express to much of what SP says. It's a world with a frictionless surface of which we can all "potentially" partake.

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

Thank you from me, as well, Numerian. That does explain quite a bit of the jumbled, incoherent cobblestone of ideas we get from Friedman so frequently. He's not simply stupid, although of course that's part of the problem: he's also an enormously wealthy member of a capitalist elite who claims to speak for the layperson.

of the commercial real estate folks? What has he written about that?

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

Don't need a bailout. Commercial Owners have one. They can cram down their mortgages in bankruptcy, and do to keep the properties.

An option unavailable for homeowners, thanks to the mortgage banking industry, who lobbied against homewoners having a cramdown provision in the recent bankruptcy bill.

That is why the next few 6 months are among the most important in U.S. history.

;)

;)

How will the Friedmans ever manage to survive or put food on their family with only $20 million left in the bank?

Cottonwood Mall owner prospered until the real-estate dynasty switched business models.

The Wall Street Journal, By Robert Frank & Kris Hudson, December 27

Two board members of General Growth Properties Inc. marched into CEO John Bucksbaum's office to deliver a blunt message. It was time for him to resign.

An internal investigation showed that the Bucksbaum family trust had violated company policy by making private loans to two company officers and failing to inform the board. The departure of Bucksbaum -- whose father and uncle founded the giant mall owner 54 years ago -- would mark an end to the family's management control of the company.

"I accept the decision," Bucksbaum said, according to people briefed on the Oct. 24 meeting.

Yet the harm to the legacy and the fortune of the Bucksbaum family -- one of the richest and oldest real-estate dynasties in America -- had already been done. Aside from the loans, made to prevent a massive stock sell-off by executives, Bucksbaum and his deputies in recent years loaded the company with debts totaling more than $27 billion.

This ship has not only lost its rudder, navigation is kaput, too. The world is now in free fall. The only answer anyone has is cut rates to zero and print money as fast a possible. But the problem is how and where to deliver it. Obama's genius team is going to have to take a stab in the dark at it and hope that they are not only correct but quick enough to avoid the iceberg in the dark.

were those Americans who developed these things or foreigners working for Americans :D

we're all imports... what makes us "American" is that we stay ;-)

I forgot to add... Americans also invented the Web Browser, although not the web server. However, the Mosaic web browser is considered by most scholars to be the true turning point on the popularity of the web... so America can claim 75% ownership of the world wide web as an "American Innovation."

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

Is that most, not all, innovation comes from immigrants and first generation American's; they do the science and the engineering. The US innovation is the environment in which these immigrants could prosper but for some reason, the second generation is like every other kid in your high school and they do not seem to have that spark nearly as often; there are exceptions of course. Would we have succeeded with Apollo without Werner Von Braun (captured Nazi Rocket Designer)? No hydrogen bomb without Oppenheimer (first generation German educated in Europe). No Atomic bomb without Edward Teller (Hungarian immigrant educated in Europe). No Pauli Exclusion Principle without, well, Wolfgang Pauli (Austrian immigrant educated in Europe). Polio vaccine without Jonas Salk (first generation Russian) etc etc. All of this innovation is grinding to a halt though because the USA is fast becoming a place where even an immigrant cannot innovate as easily as in another country. BTW, I often wonder how many 2nd+ generation American born innovators are home schooled.

I'm not saying you're wrong... but I will say that my experience has been different.

Some of the smartest folks in college I knew were from small American towns, perhaps amongst the first of their family to go to college. They ran circles around the first and second generation Americans. They had better ideas, could interact better with their peers, and were (in general) more self-sufficient.

Perhaps the easiest test of your theory would be to take a look at the list of patents in the past 40 years, and count the number of generations. Although that would neglect innovations in a lot of computer science, where things move too quickly to patent.

Nevertheless... its an interesting hypothesis.

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

I think what I said before was oversimplifying.

Today's great innovators in the US are people like Bill Gates. To use his example, he did personally create some interesting technical innovations but his greatest contribution is creating Microsoft and in that he was as lucky as he was clever. His business cleverness turned the PC hardware into a commodity which is the reason you can buy a powerful $500 computer. Bill Gates was lucky to do this; being in the right place at the right time was a necessary ingredient. Perhaps this is the kind of innovation you are thinking of but this is not inventing atomic power or the theory of relativity. Computer science was invented by a Brit., Turing, not an American.

Another hint at what might be part of the problem is to take a look at IBM if you want some insight into what is going wrong in the US. IBM had a 64 bit RISC processor in the 1970's. Its still the heart of their AS400 computer. IBM had duel processors in the 1960's and 8 processor systems by the early 1980s. IBM invented the disk drive, liquid crystal technology, relational databases, and the list goes on and on but Bill Gates out maneuvered them on the business front and IBM lost its brilliance.

BTW I have some software patents. Ironically, I see them as holding America back and if left up to me would not get them. I am a second generation American on my Dad's side and first generation on my mom's. I do not count myself as the kind of innovator America is missing; there are lots of people like me.

My hypothesis about America's home grown inability to invent revolutionary new ideas is that American schools and the media are toxic; they steal children's dreams, twist them, and present those dreams back to the children but at that point the children no longer own them. We learn normality from our schools and media. What is a normal life? Our children march to school, marshal themselves at the given time in their classrooms. The regimentation of getting up in the morning, sitting in class rooms all day and getting out for a few extracurricular activities is normality; according to our schools. It makes sense when you consider the American work week but is it what we want our kids to think of as normal? What is normality according to the television? I will leave that to someone else to think about since I banned the TV from my home when my son was born.

To be fair, there are some important innovators born in the US every day; the inventor of polymerase chain reaction, Kary Mullis, came from rural N. Carolina and PCR is the kind of innovation that made the US a technology leader. Forget patents, this kind of innovation created the biotechnology industry.

Ironically, I sometimes wonder if the old model of University research and making those discoveries public domain is not better than what we have now: patents and secrets. Those European universities seeking out people like Albert Einstein after he published paper but originally could not even get admitted to a University and Srinivasa Ramanujan who flunked out of school in India brought their discoveries to light. It was Reagan who did in University research in the US as a public domain enterprise.

You could poll 100 "thought leaders" in 10 industries, and ask them for the top 10 innovations in the past 40 years. That would give you 1000 data points in 10 different industries. It should be easy to pick the top 100 innovations from that list.

Then, look into each innovation. Find out who the real brains are behind each one... find out where they went to school, who their parents are, etc.

I think you could learn a hell of a lot from such a study...

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

as if they were synonyms. They aren't. Innovations have taken place in insurgency, for example, that have reshaped modern warfare and caused the most powerful nation on the planet to shift on its axis to attempt to cope, but that innovation has nothing whatsoever to do with "inventions". Microcredit is innovation. Ten percent of Europe's trucking running on biodiesel years ago is innovation, but biodiesel is century-old technology.

Technology is not the only face of innovation, and the concept of "technological advance" is not interchangeable with the concept of "progress".

We're suckers for gadgets. Crazy for them. Blinded by them. We can have whole discussions about cool gadgets while millions of lives could be saved *using existing technology* to ensure clean water for villages in developing nations. Hard to give a rats ass about who invented a steenkin' computer language when we patently haven't stirred ourselves off our asses to innovate our way out of that when it's easily within our power.

Innovation doesn't simply lie in "inventing new things". It lies also in *using the existing in new ways*.

Turing is the inventor and Gates is the innovator; is that what you are saying? Therefore, there would be no innovation without the invention? On the other hand an invention is worthless without the innovator? I think you are confusing marketing with innovation. I would agree that inventing the diesel engine and bio-diesel are one kind of thing; America sucks at that. Putting the bio-diesel together with the diesel engine is something Americans would do as part of an enterprise.

I'm saying that "invention" is a subcategory of "innovation", and not always the most important one.

management, marketing and finance, in addition to science and technology.

America's leadership in management, marketing and finance fields is still pretty solid, if US leadership can survive the present meltdown. Right now the whole economic model is in the balance due this major F/U stemming from Reagan and Thatcher's Neoliberalism, which was derived from the Chicago School, chiefly Friedman (Milton) & Hayek. Friedman and Hayek's message was that unless the West adopted their view of unfettered market capitalism, totalitarian socialism would be the inevitable result. Thatcher, Reagan and their successors bought into that argument, which is why they are so committed to following it at all costs, even down the toilet.

Now the unfettered market system is melting down, and everything tied to it is spinning out of control. How this is going to shake out is anyone's guess.

WSJ: U.S. Woes Open Door for China

Wide body aircraft (the Boeing 747) first flew in commercailly 9/30/1968. Before the moon landing.
Concord prototype 001 was flying before the first moon landing.
Undersea cables are older than 100 years old. And were not a US invention.
All Major programming languages are descended from Algol, first designed and released from the University of Manchester, England.

Wide body aircraft (the Boeing 747) first flew in commercailly 9/30/1968. Before the moon landing.

Nope. That was the first test flight. It didn't fly commercially until they got all the kinks worked out, January 1970:

http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Aerospace/Boeing_747/Aero21.htm

That was a whole 6 months after the first Apollo moon landing. If you want to use your 1968 test flight date, then you should compare apples to apples. You'll have to compares against the first test flight of the first Apollo spacecraft: Jan 27, 1967... in which case, you're still wrong.

Undersea cables are older than 100 years old. And were not a US invention.

My bad... I'm not sure where I got that from...

All Major programming languages are descended from Algol, first designed and released from the University of Manchester, England.

Wrong on two counts.

First, that's like saying that the first computer was the GOLIATH, therefore all innovations in computer science should be considered British. Gimme a break... By that logic, Aristotle invented the iPod.

Second, even if your comparison was fair, both FORTRAN and Lisp are 100% American inventions that pre-date ALGOL, and were equally influential. SmallTalk was a 100% American invention that came after ALGOL, but was not a derivative. Modern languages are a blend of all 4. All languages that have routines and primitives should thank FORTRAN. All languages with tail-recursion and closures should thank Lisp. All languages with object-oriented features and loose typing should thank SmallTalk. ALGOL was influential on the creation of C, but so were many other languages... and don't forget that ALGOL is about 50% American, anyway.

Care to counter my list with a list of European innovations? Or do you prefer to nit-pick?

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

was name me on truly great thing that America has done since landing on the moon. You provide an excellent and refreshing list of important innovations, but not innovations I would consider in the truly 'great category.' And that's key to the point I was trying to make, that we just don't do 'great' things like we used to, but we still believe in the myth of our own greatness.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

I think my list has a good number of "great" things in it... and if not, I guess I need more information.

Can anybody name five "great" things that have happened since the moon landing?

I'm genuinely curious... the internet is the best one I can think of... which was an American invention. The web server was a British invention, but the web browser was 100% American... so I think its fair for America to claim 90% of that whole revolution...

If my list contains nothing "great," then I'm not sure what that would be. Maybe ridding the world of poverty, curing disease, and making technology more green. But in that case "greatness" by definition might require a global initiative. Such a thing will never get off the ground without social changes on a global level. There's no way any one country could or should do those all on their own.

In that case, civilization may have reached a point where no single country could ever do anything "great" ever again.

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

That's impressive. But you left out the push button automatic transmission in the 60's Ramblers;)

Top Ten Universities in the World (Times of London)
The Full Top Ten Universities List of Best Universities in the World

1. Harvard University (US)
2. Yale University (US)
3. University of Cambridge (UK)
4. University of Oxford (UK)
5. California Institute of Technology (US)
6. Imperial College London (UK)
7. University College London (UK)
8. University of Chicago (US)
9. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
10. Columbia University (US) (6 of 10)

Top 10: Life Sciences and Biomedicine - 7/10; Technology - 6/10; Social Sciences - 7/10; Arts & Humanities - 8/10. (10 min. Not bad for an INFP.)

We're not done, by a long shot. In fact, there's no excuse, other than our elected stooges, for us to stay in either an economic morass or foreign wars long with the citizen talent available.

However, in the popular arena of ideas and debate, we're bereft. Friedman is the exemplar of the decay of that dialog. There are any number of interesting and compelling people out there. They're simply not allowed to speak. It wouldn't be prudent. So we end up with the likes of Friedman. The wasteland of public life is even more pronounced in popular entertainment (a true embarrassment) and politics (but all of you know that).

...developing new technology without also producing something from those technologies is of little use.

Countries like Japan and China have made a good living taking (some would say stealing) American ideas and turning them into consumer products.

I did inhale.

...aspect of the issue (extremely closely related to BuddhaSixFour's previous below) is to what extent are the student body's of these institutions foreign sourced and to what extent are those foreign students sticking around in the country of the institution afterwards? (I, as a foreign student, left one of these institutions for home in preference to offers to stay and that seemed to be viewed by the denizens as perhaps the oddest thing I could have done - and they saw me do some things they viewed as damned peculiar, let me tell you.) Has the foreign - domestic student balance (particularly at the grad level) of the top tier universities changed over the past couple of decades (I think the answer here is tentatively yes), and particularly what have the implications of the post-9/11 policies been? (no clue here - out of the game for that period)

These institutions are definitely wellsprings of creativity, but they are affected by many, many factors and it is not clear to me that their historic role is going to continue in exactly the same vein. Not least, is the "talent" distribution such that the relationships between this top ten and the next, say, 300 have remained static?

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

I found a different one on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Universities

The top 20 Universities had 17 American ones, 2 British, and one Japanese...

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

Freidman's disease is a tumor that's metastisized. I covered the 2007 Chicago Auto Show where Mark Fields, Ford president of American operations, delivered a speech that attempted to square the circle of a new trendy buzzword -

"Simplexity."

You want to know what that means? So would everyone who was subjected to this sophomoric sophistry.

And there were Belgians, Dutch, Swedes, French, Germans aplenty, English, Irish, Scots and Welsh by the hundreds, Canadians (some), Ozzies, Kiwis, one or two Americans.

Just not many Americans. Americans travel after retirement, as there is a cultural "treadmill" they must get on. It's just a part of the culture.

correct when you write:

As for American elitism, unfortunately, it tends to get re-inforced when backpacking in the third world. Immediately, you are different. And your five dollars is worth 200 or even 500 of their dollars. Immediately you can stay in the best hotels, and with pocket change afford good meals, running water, fine liquor, and other stuff out of reach of most of the locals. So even with your backpack, you are not treading among equals when you ride the bus with them, I'm sorry to say.

And I do try to make that distinction in my rant above. Although probably not as well as you did.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

1. The AIPAC lobby and its acolytes.

2. The Religious Right lobby and their lackeys

talking about.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

That response struck about the same tone, Amos Anon, as I felt when reading Sean-Paul's rant; I think the list posted by bex of a subset of recent American innovations answers more than adequately the lack of empirical basis; the question that remains is the origin of the attitude.

Let me hazard a guess, since your very good post leaves the answer open.

In considering the reason for the persistence of a repressive political system, progressives are tempted to blame the intellectual powers of the masses. How could they allow this situation to continue? In my own case I am familiar with the adaptation of the Russian-speaking cultural area to the evident power of Western European science in the course of the nineteenth century.

One response, characteristic of Ivan Turgenev, was to say that Western Europe had the better way. The so-called Westernizers of the 1840s followed by the Nihilists of the 1860s and the Social Democrats -- the Marxists -- of the 1890s through the Revolution, had that general orientation.

The Slavophiles of the 1840s, the Populists of the 1860s and '70s, and the Social Revolutionaries of the turn of the century, reaffirmed the superiority of the Russian peasant's culture. They had the right idea: they could leap over all the mistakes Western Europe had made in its heartless adoption of the Industrial Revolution, if only they would realize their own power.

Peter Chaadaev (dates) published a magazine article in 1836 in which he denied that Russia even had a history, by which he meant an intellectual development. In response he was quite notoriously committed for some years to an insane asylum by the czar.

Afanasy Shchapov -- one of the earliest populists -- in 1863 complained that the Russians had never accomplished anything in astronomy.

Moving to Sean-Paul's own words, we note that he contrasts the 'good old days' when teachers were respected professionals (he fails to note their low pay) with, not the perhaps lower esteem right-wing "reformers" have for a now unionized group of educators, but with the badly-educated young people of today. There are quite a few other factors producing the young attitudes than the status of teachers; especially when the young people in question are those who travel abroad.

The lack of a logical chain of thought gives away the existence of something else at work than what is the ostensible object of Sean-Paul's post.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

(the movie).

Americans are what they are not due to genetics, but to the circumstance in which they are raised. I think Sean Paul' description is accurate.

I remember reading a piece by Mark Twain. A negro woman during times of slavery switched her son with that of her master, so her son would not get "sold down the river". Her son was only 1/16th black: the deception worked.

But her blood son became a tyrant, while the pure white child became a decent individual.

All a matter of how they were raised, not who they were.

We in America, and parts of Western Europe have been raised with distinct economic advantages over people in third world countries. Advantages we have come to accept as entitlements. In the last 3 generations we have done very little to deserve what we have.

I know I'm speaking in generalities, but the world has proven time and again that long term success of empires leads to moral and substantive decay of the populace. When I look around, that's what I see.

I did inhale.

to comment and opine on what I feel about America. I won't apologize for what I wrote. Did I over generalize? Sure. But on the whole I stand by what I said. And no, I don't take your comments personally. I would have been blogging for six years now if I didn't have (reasonably) thick skin.

But, as for the comment about slumming: you are wrong. Believe, I am not going to see 'how badly' other people live. I am here seeing 'how other people' live. There is a very real difference between what you call slumming and, well, as you said yourself, you haven't done much travel. When you have, well, shoot me an email and we'll talk then. If I wanted to see how badly people live I would have stayed in America and visited the ghettos and projects we have in our own country.

As for your comment about the American that rode his bike across Asia. Well, that's all great and good. But it doesn't do diddly squat to change the fact that out in the real world, Americans are outnumbered at least 25 to 1. Fact. Not fiction. And not wishful thinking.

Again, when you have done some real travel in the world, come back to me and we'll talk.

And please, don't take this personally. ;-)

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

however; I have to agree with SPK on this. As a long term American Expat living a modest lifestyle among Thai people in a non-tourist, non-farang (not an Expat enclave) village in central Thailand, I, at least have a pretty accurate picture of the real life of a culture, vastly different from the one I come from. I think I know exactly what SPK is doing and it ain't slumming.

Had little positive to say about the roman empire

My dear Syonia,

Do you recall the first words of Gibbons's book?
In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.
And from his second chapter, this representative passage:
If we turn our eyes towards the monarchies of Asia, we shall behold despotism in the centre, and weakness in the extremities; the collection of the revenue, or the administration of justice, enforced by the presence of an army; hostile barbarians established in the heart of the country, hereditary satraps usurping the dominion of the provinces, and subjects inclined to rebellion, though incapable of freedom. But the obedience of the Roman world was uniform, voluntary, and permanent. The vanquished nations, blended into one great people, resigned the hope, nay even the wish, of resuming their independence, and scarcely considered their own existence as distinct from the existence of Rome. The established authority of the emperors pervaded without an effort the wide extent of their dominions, and was exercised with the same facility on the banks of the Thames, or of the Nile, as on those of the Tiber. The legions were destined to serve against the public enemy, and the civil magistrate seldom required the aid of a military force. In this state of general security, the leisure as well as opulence both of the prince and people were devoted to improve and to adorn the Roman empire.
There's a lot more, but that ought to do.

It appears
Republicans => Insular, Ignorant, Anti-Science (falling behind)
Democrats => Insular, Less Ignorant, pro-science.

Americans are insular. Their young don't travel.
America is a cultural force. For the good?

The 30 year emergence of a ossified society? New. Destructive. And terminal, as Gibbon pointed out.

Sure, innovation is often correlated with investment and wealth creation.

The more sophisticated argument is that we've channeled 'innovation into the creation of wealth - almost untethered from real progress. So all the math wizzes go into writing programs that help manipulate currency arbitrage and make 'bets' pay off. This is a cost since they could have been developing new systems to abandon the 'rent' system of oil extraction. But innovating systems that will de-throne the entrenched (oil, media, etc) interests will not pay the big bucks."