All Life Is Problem Solving

Why is there “a free lunch” in Congress? Why are there 180 Republican Amendments for the House Health care Reform legislation, but no guaranteed Republican votes? Why should members be able to get amendments to bills proposed in committee accepted without any commitment from themselves? What kind of negotiation process is that? Why doesn’t the […]

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For a long time now, progressives have been looking for lines in the sand. They’ve been trying to get progressive members of Congress to commit to vote no on any health care reform bill that doesn’t include a robust public option, and they’ve also been after the President to clearly state his unwillingness to sign […]

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Today the news of Walter Cronkite’s death reached me at the same time I heard about an exchange between Glenn Greenwald of Salon and Chuck Todd of NBC on torture investigations. The juxtaposition of these events, in such close proximity, highlighted for me the existential threat to American Democracy that we now face. Not from […]

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President Obama thinks that the best thing to do for an economy that has yet to turn around on jobs is to wait to see how the stimulus bill works, before seeking a second stimulus. This may seem reasonable, especially in the face of the widespread reports about opposition to a second stimulus from Republicans […]

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In this blog I continue my discussion of reflexivity by clarifying the differences between sequential and simultaneous reflexivity. If reflexivity is sequential, then the effects of our actions on the world and on our thinking at a later time, that is, “the interference” is sequential. Specifically, we cognize and come to an understanding of situation […]

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One of the concepts George Soros emphasizes the most is “reflexivity.” Here’s his presentation of the idea from The Age of Fallibility (pp. 6-7). ”On the one hand, we seek to understand our situation. I call this the cognitive function. On the other hand, we seek to make an impact on the world. I call […]

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George Soros has written a number of very interesting and influential books over the past 20 years including, among others: The Alchemy of Finance, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, The Age of Fallibility, and The Crash of 2008 and What It Means. All of these present and apply a conceptual framework he has worked with […]

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This talk by Jane Hamsher to Congressional Staffers on July 8th distills what this American fight for health care reform is about, and what is at stake. It also provides a good feel for the hard slogging that is going on to being forth a bill that will introduce real change and begin to break […]

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Again, it’s funny how US Administrations can’t simply admit error and then act accordingly. No, they have to try to persuade us that their error wasn’t really an error because of x, y, or z. President Obama has now tried to ”correct” Joe Biden’s statement about “misreading” the economy by saying that there was no […]

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It’s funny how US Administrations can’t simply admit error and then act accordingly. No they have to try to persuade us that that everyone else committed the error in question too. Remember, the Bush Administration’s insistence that no one could have anticipated an attack on high value US targets using hijacked airliners? The Bush Administration […]

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