(For episodes one and two see here and here respectively.)#

As an addition to my recent stroke of luck, my car was broken into tonight. I didn't have much but they took my stereo and my cassette player/recorder. I'm just bummed that I lost my last FLP tape.#

On the third episode of The Whole Wide World with Christopher Lydon, Peter Sellars was interviewed about a play he was putting on and the situation around the world for refugees.#

(The MP3s might be broken, I can send them to you if so. But there is a transcript available.)

The play he talks about seems like it would be awesome...

PS: The staging of this play is very, very, very simple: you just have to sit there for 90 minutes while nothing happens…and people stand at microphones…and talk…and you have to listen. And it is just a giant exercise in listening and concentration, and it goes very slowly. It is not entertaining; it is maddening for the audience; it breaks every bone in their body and forces it to be reset. And it is unendurable but, you know, like any 12 step program, [it is] eventually liberating…

And he wonders why people aren't listening?

When Chris asks him if there is a modern analogy of the kinship of the play (the play is set in ancient Greece and is about a group of refugees that Athens takes in and protects because they are their kin,) he replies with something that baffles the mind:

PS: Well, when Iolaus says that, you know, "I carried Hercules' shield on the bloody expedition to bring back the Amazon queen's belt, and Hercules, as everybody knows, saved your father from the moated depths of hell," the whole question of what we did so that you people could have something…I think, you know, in a very, very simple way, you know, the White House in Washington, DC, was built by slaves, the US Capitol Building was built…two thirds of the laborers were slaves. Their masters were paid five dollars a day for their labor; they were paid nothing. If you ask, "How did we get here?" ask who picked the strawberry on your strawberry shortcake tonight, ask who made our underwear in Bangladesh or Honduras, ask which Chinese prisoners made the shoes on your feet, just ask who did what they did so you can be who you are and have what you have, and then say can we live in some sense of reciprocal obligation. And right now that is the reality of a globalized, interpenetrated world. And we only want it to go one way, and that is a big mistake, because globalization is two-way, and that means we have to figure out how to share. We have taken a whole lot from everywhere and, at the moment, a lot of people have done extraordinary things so that we can enjoy our prosperity. That prosperity needs to be the world's prosperity, and that's the first step of the kinship of immigration. You know, we're very happy for global capital to move with no borders and, suddenly, we are stopping every human being at every border. And what most societies live with around the world, which is a non-cash economy, where the economy is sustained by giving of gifts, and what people owe each other is based on exchange. One of the things we did was we said, "I'm paying for this, so I don't want to know who made it; I don't want to know what they went through — I just bought it, that's all I need to know is this transaction," but in fact every single thing in our lives has a big chain of transactions behind that transaction and that's the karma that's coming into your life and that you're part of, and you can recognize it or not, but it's a whole lot healthier to recognize it and, again, imagine what it is that we can offer in return. And, I think, as Iolaus says, "In return, what we're asking you is not to be betrayed, not to be given back into the hands of our enemies. We have made these sacrifices so that you can be the most prosperous country on the face of the earth; now we're asking you not to betray us."

I'm very confused by what people like this think globalization (the subject of The Whole Wide World) and trade really are. For example, he seems to think that other countries get nothing from trading with the United States (or "the West") -- but if that were the case why would they do it? They get what ever money or goods were traded at the quantity that they agreed on.

I'm a bit appalled that this guy is seen as insightful. Listen/read the whole thing for many great examples of how he knows what is best for the world and everyone else (particularly those Americans) has no clue, because they don't even think.

On the fourth episode of The Whole Wide World with Christopher Lydon, Chris talks to Yo-Yo Ma about his work and cultural connection. Very good.#

On the fifth episode of The Whole Wide World with Christopher Lydon, Chris talks to a number of scientists and activists about food, from quality to production to consequences.#

Michael Pollen says something very interesting about how cows in factory farms differ so much from others:

MP: Oddly enough, the way we grow a hamburger in this country does involve a lot of fossil fuel. Now how should this be? I was kind of amazed to find that we have this animal that's brilliantly designed by nature to digest grass, that is a terrific kind of solar system. You know the sun feeds the grass, and the grass feeds the cow, and the cow feeds the human. So this system works pretty well, and it's very sustainable. But, it doesn't work fast enough or the capitalist system, which is always trying to make a cow reach its slaughter weight as fast as possible. If you keep a cow on grass, it takes maybe two years to get it up there. But that's not quick enough. So what do you do? Well, to get it down to fourteen months, which is what we have it down to, to bring a cow to slaughter…if you feed them on corn, they will grow a lot more quickly, because it's a more high-energy food; corn is really cheap. Now why is corn so cheap? Well, partly 'cause it's subsidized, partly because we grow it with fertilizer that is made from, mostly from natural gas. It can also be made from fuel, from diesel or anything else, and that's where you get all that fossil fuel going into the cow. It's first fed to the corn. And so we've taken this system that is essentially…was a solar-driven, grass-based system of producing a hamburger, or any other piece of meat, and we've turned it into another gas guzzler [...]

And earlier he talked about the consequences of McDonalds' requirements on potato farmers.

One of the things lying underneath most of the speakers was the issues of biodiversity and water supply.

Guests: Jared Diamond, Kevin Cleaver, Vandana Shiva, E.O. Wilson, Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben, and Sandra Postel

E. O. Wilson is optimistic because, "when all else fails, men turn to reason."

On the sixth episode of The Whole Wide World with Christopher Lydon, Chris interviews a few writers about globalization and what they think about it.#

All these people were incredibly interesting.

Amin Maalouf wants to see group identification disappear, particularly of a religious variety and he says this:

AM: [Spain] was an area where three religions met at one point of history: Christians, Muslims, and Jews built something together. Of course there were tensions; of course it was never paradise on earth. But still they built a worthy civilization together, each one with its own cultural flavor. And for me it's a mythical time. Sometimes many events come at the same moment, and the year 1492 is one of those years, because it's the year of the discovery of America. It's also the year when the Arabs and Jews were expelled together…and I love that idea. And at the same time it was the year — because of those expulsions — the time when the intermingling between those cultures stopped.

And Chris describes part of one his books that sounds amazing:

CL: There's a wonderful close of your book about identity; it brought tears to my eyes the first time I read it. You said most authors finish a book hoping it will be read forever. Your hope was that your grandson — perhaps growing up, and finding it one day by chance on the family bookshelves — would look through the pages, read a passage or two, then put it back in the dusty corner where he found it, shrugging his shoulders, and marveling that, in his grandfather's day, such things still needed to be said.

 

Azar Nafisi, an Iranian teacher who had a secret reading club in the past, talks about why Lolita was so popular at that time in her group.

AN: They called "Lolita" immoral, but after the Islamists took over Iran, they changed all the laws related to women, and they lowered the age of marriage from 18 to nine (plus the fact that, of course, they reintroduced polygamy and all sorts of good stuff like that). So, for me "Lolita" was confiscation of one individual's life by another. Humbert Humbert is living this illusion about his childhood love, Annabelle, who has died, you know, two decades ago, almost. And he…in "Lolita," he tries to rediscover Annabelle, and he tries to stop Lolita's life and impose his own dream on Lolita, and he destroys her and ultimately himself. This is what totalitarian societies do to their people: they confiscate the reality of their life; they want them to become the object of their dreams. And Lolita became for us very relevant.

 

Amitav Ghosh is an Indian who speaks a great deal about the evils of Empire. (I wonder if he will come up in the next episode with Niall Ferguson.) One of the things that he expresses a great amount is the complete dominance of Europe in the world:

Imagine yourself to be a historian from Mars, you know, who arrives on the planet Earth, you know, and looks at the history of planet Earth. How would you read its history? What…500 years ago, a small group of people from a small island began to expand outwards. Today, in effect, they control really three continents. And it's an extraordinary thing this, I mean, this amazing sort of global Diaspora, and there's no word for it. So, you know, if you look at this phenomenon, which is perfectly self-evident to people everywhere in the world, you know, that this group of Anglophone countries really has in some sense shouldered the responsibility for running the world.

He says that the idea of Empire is that is recreates the whole wide world in a particular kind of vision. One of the most persuasive arguments I've heard, he doesn't go for common shortcuts that makes others look ridiculous.

His comparison of Osama bin Laden, Pol Pot, and self-hatred is amazing.

The fifth episode of The Whole Wide World with Christopher Lydon was a live episode where Chris moderated between Amy Chua and Niall Ferguson, along with a few callers.#

Hearing Niall, whom I've only read, was very nice and the two of them really go at each other in a nice way. There's no transcript though, so you'll have to listen and it's tough to quote.

One of the interesting things that Niall brings up is about Halliburton. He says that if they are benefiting so much from the war in Iraq or George Bush's presidency than their stock price does not reflect this. At the beginning of 2002, it was the lowest it had been since 1994 ($15) and it is barely creeping back (only at $30) to its ten year high ($60) that occurred in 1998--during the Clinton years. (These numbers should be taken with inflationary salt.)

Christopher Lydon interviewed with Tim Berners-Lee last week.#

The interview is very interesting, and Chris' teaser gives a great peek at how it goes:

The Web is not, first, what Tim Berners-Lee thought he was designing in the early '90s: a collaborative medium for researchers working together at a distance. That part, for a variety of technical and legal reasons, just didn't work. Neither is the Web a superhighway of anything, if the highway motif makes you think of concrete, steel, and fixed routes to anywhere. The Web is not, and must never be, the avenue of a monoculture. It is not the outline of a universal brain that will reduce human beings to mere neurons in a Global Mind. It is not a monument to the "Me Decade." That is, it's not all about expressive blogging. Or rather: it's equally about listening and learning. It is about them as much as it's about us. It is not, he insists, a structure. It is not an active agent--even as it kicks into the cultural and political life of the United States in the presidential decision year of 2004.

I find it interesting how very hands-off Tim Berners-Lee is and intent on making sure no one will compare him to Al Gore or someone interested in turning a medium into a power structure.

When Chris asks about how the Web is changing politics and interactions between people, Tim says:

Let's not say the Web is changing these things. Society is doing it. People are changing the world, and they may be using the Web to do it. We shouldn't "tune" the Web for a particular structure.

Which leads to a discussion about what the Web was originally to do as TBL at first conceived it:

The idea was that hypertext would be a way of working together where a trace would be created that others could follow.

One that he seems to be very interested in is using the Web in a true read/write way--being able to annotate any resource you come across.

Talkback is a poor man's annotation system. We want a more comprehensive system in the future.

[...]

Love to see people use the web to hold people accountable... like adding annotations.

I think this is a fantastic vision as well. But there are some problems with it as it has been implemented so far: You can't directly annotate, independent of another person.

It seems to me there are 4 strategies for annotation today:

1. Not allowing people to annotate your work. (The dominate way, like #2 but you never link anything.)
2. Personally screening annotations and then providing links to then. (When I write about your page and then email you about it. And if you don't link me, there's always Technorati.)
3. TrackBack
4. Comments. (Problems: You can delete comments and they dilute the annotator's internet presence.)

The problem with TrackBack and Comments that personal screening solves is that of spam. How do you know where it's really a quality annotation?

I think that the goal of Annotea is to solve this problem and have reputations of annotators and annotation servers. Now, if only more web browsers would turn into web clients, like Amaya.

An interesting comment that he makes is about the potential for information overload that the Web exposes us to:

Some people wonder that if because the web allows them to read anything, does that they should read everything?

And then ties this to the vision of a grand participatory democracy:

We can't completely participate, but we can shift the balance between delegation and participation.

Basically, because we have to have real lives we can't all sit around being participants in a democracy all the time. At some point you need to delegate.

Richard MacManus writes about this interview as well.#

When Lydon asked him why he created the Web back in the late 80's/early 90's, Berners-Lee said he felt there was "a need to write where you can read". He initially designed it to be a "collaborative medium", but it's real impact has been as a "publication medium". A word he used a few times was "annotate" and one point in particular stood out here: that we should be able to annotate the Web in order to "make people accountable". TBL used the example of US politics, which he felt needed to improve its accountability. He suggested that the Web could enable the public to annotate what public figures say and evolve discussions around that. This reminded me of the W3C's read/write web browser, Amaya, which I've blogged about in the past. Amaya is one of the great missed opportunities of the Web, IMHO. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has roughly 95% of the market, yet it can only read Web content - it can't be used towrite it.

And:

My favourite part of the TBL interview was when he said that blogging *should* be two-way. One should express oneself (=WRITE), but also listen to feedback (=READ). Berners-Lee thought that blogging has done exceedingly well to provide mechanisms for gathering and listening to feedback. But he wants people on the Web in general (and I'm hereby employing this concept to blogging specifically) to make a conscious effort to not constrain themselves to a rose-coloured view of the world. That is, don't become trapped in a self-reinforcing social group, that only links to and reads content belonging to other members of your group. Listen to other bloggers, listen to *all* the blogosphere.

Christopher Lydon interviews Gore Vidal.#

Gore Vidal can't be taken straight, but it's hard as well to shake his scathing contempt. His heroes in conversation turn out to be General U. S. Grant--for writing in his celebrated memoirs that our Civil War was God's judgment and retribution for the cruel folly of our war on Mexico; Benjamin Franklin--for forseeing the corruption of the people; and John Quincy Adams--for the Munroe Doctrine and his warning not to "seek out monsters to destroy" in the world.

Of the living, Vidal speaks nothing but evil. "The cheerleader from Andover" is the worst of a very bad lot. Howard Dean "assessed the unpopularity of the war, but you can't just do anger at the war. For a second act, why not restore the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? Take your stand on the recovery of our liberties." Wesley Clark's resume is too long: "I don't like these men of great accomplishment who've accomplished nothing, and who mean nothing." Of Dennis Kucinich: "The hair is deplorable... but it's the only negative thing I can say about him."

The sum of it all is the vanity of Marlowe's Tamburlaine. "I think: 'Is it not passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis?' This is what you're up against. It's just ambition. King-of-the-Castle is what they're playing. Well, I want a better castle, suitable for a better king. So this system isn't going to give it to us."

He refers to some great quotes of the forefathers of the nation. I think this one was one of the Adams.

America is not a Paladin to go fight for causes across the glober - if it did it would lose its soul and become a dictator of the world.

And George Washington,

Nations should not have friends or enemies, only interests, and they should be concerned with protecting them.

Vidal says some amazing things about the candidates for 2004,

The men don't matter themselves, it is where they got their money that matters.

Christopher Lydon interviews Dick Morris on the transformation of modern politics.#

Dick Morris actually trumps Joe Trippi with Internet bullishness. "The essence of the Internet," he said, "is not that it provides a new set of eyes and ears, but that it gives the voters a mouth, which they've never had in the media. The impact of that is absolutely historic."

But Morris makes it a mighty Republican tool in 2004, especially in the hands of Karl Rove, a direct-mail master. With email, Rove simply saves the postage. "Let's remember," Morris observed, "that the Internet is more male than female, more right-wing than left-wing, more upscale than downscale." The vast right-wing conspiracy which grew up outside the mainstream media is savvy now about spontaneous on-line community building. Not all the grassroots on the right are Astroturf. "The Republican base is seething with activity," Morris said. "Also, c'mon, you can't think of any community that is better connected, and better wired to itself, than the religious community. There are all kinds of prayer groups around the country, and the fact is that people who attend church regularly vote Republican by 2 to 1, and those who don't vote Democratic by 2 to 1. The gay marriage issue is going to accentuate that divide. So I think this kind of viral bottom-up growth (which is what the Internet is all about) will be as much Republican as Democratic."

It was a great interview, Dick is a smart guy who covers all the bases and believes that this is a transformation but is still honest about the possibility that this will just form a new oligarchy on the Internet if we don't pay attention to how the change happens.

Via David Weinberger is Britt Blaser who comments on the interview...

Dick Morris is another visionary and Bill Clinton's indispensable political guide until he was forced out of the White House by his own Clintonesque scandal, got religion, went on Fox News and started vote.com. As you'd expect from a Clinton confidante, he understands the detailed history of what works and fails in Presidential politics. In the current Chris Lydon interview, Morris tells us that the Internet is bigger than we have imagined in politics as in everything else, and that the Dean campaign has changed politics forever by routing around the cynical mechanisms the DNC designed into the primary system this cycle...

...and that Howard Dean is dead meat.