9/11/2005
A September 11 Note: Dr. Kaufman and Our Society

It seems that people that I have respected for many a year as experts who allow me, a curious mind, to avoid studying every field from the base, are variants of Dr. Kaufman. Anyone exposed to body snatchers or mind snatchers in the movie or in Jack Finney's novel or in Practical Speculation could come to similar conclusions about trading. Experiencing the darker hours of the markets with hope, sanity and analysis that penetrates the point of immediate or mid-course correction brings themes that can boost our joy of life. The antithesis of giving up to despair and to laziness starts from probing constantly whom to trust and why.

Political life is generally carried out by people who accept mediocrity as a way of life. But as the cost of consulting doctors who cannot be trusted is getting higher and higher (management and leadership mistakes cut into our right to enjoy the joy of life and fellow humans) we must take a second look at the people who have maintained higher standards of concern and professionalism. Somehow, I have been finding more Dr. Kaufmans now than ever before:

1. Paul Volcker, with a budget of $34 mm to impartially pursue the case of Humanity vs "UN As It Is," could not obtain even half of the key relevant UN documents; or rather, perhaps he avoided them.  When one writes a correcting/formative report, the difference and logical order between data, findings, conclusions are fairly regimented. Only when such logic is present will serious evaluators, arbitrators and policy formulators offer recommendations. Truly caring and aware doctors offer recommendations -- let alone their own reflections -- to others only when they have examined their own methodology and integrity. I have found it always necessary to check first if the order and degrees of influence and causality are fairly lucid, as policy recommendations must allow for more options for correcting moves than those recorded -- options that may be backed by better reasons. Serious organizations must be able to see/examine findings and conclusions before judging what is necessary or sufficient. Much of what I have seen in the past seven years in these UN reports suggest a clear mixing of this critical order and caring "regime of inquiry." Ideological bias toward treating the Secretary General and his selected style of management as a necessary evil is wrong. It's even worse to eliminate any conclusions that suggest that he has been carrying an irresponsible, overly formalistic and hence insensitive overseeing of the UN's financial and managerial focus ever since he was appointed. He is most probably more personally guilty in kinship-related profit than data that has reached the public would suggest. The same data applied to anyone else would have led to more-negative conclusions and therefore due judgment and recommendations. The effectiveness of an organization created to help governments more rationally manage earth is at stake. An ideology devoted to saving the leader and the organization "as-is," baby and bathwater -- typical of the U.S. Association for the UN whereof Volcker is a member -- does not allow for the snatching to stop. Clearly, snatching in the global community has been evolving for most of its organized existence and now apparently has taken over the available doctor, Volcker. We still urgently await a Miles who can take a look at the option of cutting a global government to a size consistent with function.
2. In the New Orleans/Gulf Coast disaster. it appears that FEMA's clear lack of preparation is taken much too lightly in too many circles. The very same disaster, the levees' breakdown, could have been caused not by Mother Nature but by a crook in search of glory, or a moderately informed terrorist with a budget of less than $100k. This type of reasoning was anchored, I thought, in the background of putting FEMA under the Department of Homeland Security. Is it not one of the first links to be thought about? Nature may strike again and again, even during this season. So, the focus on "let's resolve it now," while of course mandatory and reasonable, begs these questions:
   • What about future events, in terms of learning from past mistakes and coming up with a systematic plan for scheduling timing and resources, instead of handling the job in the manner of a busy fire department?
   • What about the other eight to twelve geographical areas in the three U.S. ocean exposures vulnerable to similar events presumed less likely but not significantly less probable?
   • How can local, state and municipal decision-makers act responsibly as first responders in a caring magnitude that would justify some residents' reliance on them when even the briefest scan of the history to date shows reckless laziness in following past well-intentioned and fairly inclusive planning?

   The type of mental closure in the face of looming and happening disaster is first-stage snatching. The kind of education, set of manifest skills and preparation are evidently the most minimal among the leading seven officials in FEMA, excluding the Vice Admiral who is in charge in NO as of very recently. The idea that the current FEMA director, Brown, will serve better when he is in DC rather than in NO must be explained by sheer snatching even in DC itself. Brown's concept of urgency and coordination as elucidated in NO can only insure that he will help more U.S. regions to be expertly macro-mismanaged and that the lack of awareness between and among local, regional and federal agencies will continue to be so beautifully orchestrated that disaster will be the only option. My puzzlement with this case of engineering more disasters and the curious presidential judgment in keeping Brown at FEMA must be extended to other administrations and all previous FEMA leaders, as they all did so magnificently well in keeping us more alert by making us realize that we cannot trust them, nor should we have, even in the most obvious responsibilities. Mind snatching and body snatching is no longer a single community issue as it was in the novel. It is a country issue.

3. There is increasing evidence at the poles and on the coastlines that the heating of earth is more problematic and perhaps linear, as opposed to cyclical or slow, than previously thought, and that it may have contributed to the causal background of the recent Gulf Coast and Southern Asia disasters. Reading the Kyoto Protocol and recent background papers, and seeing how data has been dealt with, suggests that the doctors have not been reaching reasonable conclusions in the past six years, or maybe even longer -- and worse, that a mechanism is lacking for drawing conclusions from the data from the Asian tsunami, Kyushu Taifuns and Hurricane Katrina. Conclusions and policy must be more faulty than we thought possible (at least some of us).
4. The 9/11 Commission's recommendations -- e.g., the appointment of a single person to oversee the 18-plus intelligence agencies, the conclusions resulting from the lack of responsible treatment of the complex themes of the interaction between terror and natural disaster, the almost as amateurish treatments of data in the subreport on terrorist finance, and the sudden reappearance of the Able Danger syndromes --- suggest that some brilliant minds failed fairly consistently. Can it be that their minds were taken by pods (or Potts, as Yiddish speakers would suspect) quite long ago?

Responsible management must always consider second-order consequences. Iraq is another case in point. Political management should not be an exception when the stakes in democracy are so exacting. Just as traders must study market disasters to do better, those who care for people must do likewise. They could emulate individuals like Mark Sloan who, faced with government helplessness in New Orleans, created a response system of individuals who care for mutual improvement at the community level, just as Benjamin Franklin and our Chair's Junto deserve appreciation for moving the local community away from snatching by mental laziness, disaster and evil pods. Perhaps it should dawn on us all that the mediocrity of government has reached such a low that a very much more libertarian influence on reconstructing politics locally, nationally and globally is critical for survival. The snatchers and/or their mentality should be sent to the planet that mentally they have already populated for centuries so that they cannot condition us to more passivity. The continuous and devastating effects on our future must find different doctors and different medicine, preferably soonest.

We all are Miles and Becky and have no right to waste ourselves.

"Terrorism and the Markets -- Is This the Solution?" (Aug. 24 interview of Yossi Ben-Dak by Dave Goodboy)