They should be very wary. Obama is motivating the Democratic Congress to do the people’s work, working through the arduous process of passing comprehensive healthcare reform. The Republicans have not, however, apparently, been considering what might happen if healthcare reform comes to a full vote in both houses and they vote against it.

Essentially, the Republican party will have gleefully declared the irrelevance of its members to the process of effective and responsible service, with the added vulnerability of having opposed something that is a solution to a life or death quality of life problem for millions. Reports this year found that over a two-year period —2005-2007— more than one-third of the American population spent at least some time with no health insurance coverage.

Voting against a solution to that problem, however imperfect the solution, is to openly oppose an improvement to the wellbeing and household security of that one-third of the population. Today’s younger generation is projected to face a situation, without action to reform the system, in which half will spend significant time without insurance. The Republicans hope that generation will never hear that news, even if it comes to pass, because their stiff opposition to any of the pragmatist solutions that would rescue them from such risk could lose them that gneratiim’s support.

Personal bankruptcies are at an all-time high, with unprecedented numbers owing in part to the massive and escalating costs of healthcare — as much as 65%. How many of those families will base their vote in 2010, 2012, and beyond, on the experience of having one of the two major parties treat them like their travails and losses are of no importance whatsoever, or even a green light to malign them?

Democratic party supporters and those who support meaningful healthcare reform should and will begin organizing public awareness of the healthcare no-vote. It’s not hard to imagine enthusiastic young supporters of the Democratic agenda, motivated by Obama’s call to action and a generational shift that has seen interest in public service, volunteering and online networking, economic hard times and chronic vulnerability to the flaws of the health insurance system, decrying Republican no-voters for “voting to deny your children protection from the insurance cartel”.

The modern Republican party has made its way lying down with heavily monied interests, relying on large donations almost exclusively to fund it’s campaigns, and therefor doing the bidding of some of the least savory elements of mainstream society. It’s hard to imagine the party won’t have learned from Obama that you need to reach, take seriously, listen to and mobilize small donors and new voters, but then the Republican National Committee just launched its new website with no Spanish-language translation, just as momentum starts gathering for a new round of debate on immigration reform.

Is the GOP so reckless in its treatment of these very real problems of real Americans, because it’s out of touch? Maybe. But the party must worry more about the other interpretation that is more tempting to young, idealistic voters: that the Republican party is cynically calculating that it can deliberately undermine the interests of so many millions without them ever noticing. The uniform no-vote says that one of these two interpretations is true, and that will be a gift to the massive grassroots organizing of Democratic supporters in search of new voters.

For instance, should Semenya be weaker than she is, if she were “fully” female? Is that idea in itself not demeaning to women? Is there even a specific provision in international sporting regulations that requires women to be notably weaker than or slower than men? Semenya was born female and has always been treated like a girl, but now the argument is that her body developed in such a way that she is too powerful, too strong, too fast, to be a woman.

The question is fundamental to the very structure of organized sports, and goes far beyond the question of gender. For instance: it is easy to understand why it is wrong that one athlete use a “performance-enhancing” substance that is banned, and that should not be tolerated. Uppers, steroids and human growth hormone, are dangerous to athletes and harm the physical and spiritual quality of competition.

But the logic of the Semenya question is very different: if she suffers from a naturally occurring condition, and her body is as it is through no direct action of her own, is barring her from competition not comparable to excluding athletes whose legs are too long, or whose muscles have too much ease with fast-twitch reflex? How can one determine who is too naturally advantaged to compete?

In American football, there are running backs, wide receivers and defensive backs that can run two or even three times faster than some of the stockier linemen on the field. Is this not “an unfair advantage” over those players that might have to chase them? Is a team not buying its way into victory if it contracts a world-class sprinter (like Herschel Walker or Bo Jackson) to compete against opponents whose defensive linemen might be overweight and sluggish?

It would be hard to make such an argument, certainly. And there are examples of why that kind of reasoning is flawed, even where the two athletes being compared are in fact performing the same competitive function (running the same race, for instance, instead of playing two different roles on a football field). Tiger Woods was once “supernatural”, “unbeatable”, until a new generation of players emerged, and some of the veterans adapted their game; now there is more competition, at a higher level.

The Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, were thought to be not only dominant, winning nearly every grand slam for years, they were said to have an “unfair advantage”, because they were “bigger” and “stronger” than female tennis players traditionally were. (There was clearly an element of racial bias in some of that criticism, but it was also fundamentally untrue — their advantage came with skill, precision, power [which in tennis means smooth strokes making solid contact] and hard work.)

It turns out, they are extremely good, but also fallible, mortal, and not at all invincible. Players who played differently, or adapted their games to compete, were able to compete at a higher level, and women’s tennis has improved dramatically over the last 12 years. Some players are bigger and more powerful, or simply better athletes, able to run faster and play longer, but some have just become more precise, more resilient, learned how to “counter-punch”.

Though specific content from Semenya’s tests has not been made public, reports about the gender identification exams she underwent suggest she does not have a uterus or ovaries and that she may have internal glands like male testicles producing an inordinate amount of testosterone, as compared to the average woman. It is suggested this means she might be all or part male.

Those who challenge Semenya’s right to compete in the international track-and-field women’s division argue that these biological variations make her not adequately female to participate. This particular question may never have been asked in so deliberate, so comprehensive, so problematic and so judicious an environment before, and how to assign Semenya to one category or another may indeed be a task for which international sporting organizations are not philosophically or legally sophisticated enough.

Part of the problem with the “science” of these gender tests is that they don’t give any scientific assessment of the actual health or competitive impact of Semenya’s condition. While certain tests can determine hormone levels, can even determine if those levels are biologically inborn or not, can determine if she has glands that more closely resemble testicles or ovaries, located inside her body, it is not clear that any of those findings gives “scientific proof” of gender.

That question aside, the tests also provide little to no information on the overall metabolic impact of Semenya’s condition: has she had to struggle with physical difficulties related to this condition? has it impacted the way in which her body metabolizes certain nutrients? In effect, has her condition made it necessary for her to work harder or not?

Unless the testing she has been forced to undergo is able to decide whether or not her performance is based on hard work or not, there is no way whatsoever to even begin to judge “fairness”. And there exists the very real problem of Caster Semenya’s basic rights. South Africa has threatened to take the issue to an international human rights tribunal, and says it will use all possible legal avenues to defend its champion athlete.

Some reports suggest that the IAAF rules, which govern international track-and-field competition, would allow Semenya to compete anyway, if “her condition was treated”, but of course, it remains to be determined what the nature of that “condition” is, and what sort of treatment would make her body comparable enough to the average female athlete’s body to make her eligible for competition.

That point, again, may open a legal and ethical Pandora’s Box, which might call into question what is considered to be a “fair” or an “unfair” naturally occurring physique. Should basketball players not be allowed to be taller than 6’10″? Why not 6’9″ or 6’11″? Who should be excluded, and on what grounds? Is world class athletics supposed to be a competition among the average, or among the extraordinary? Or is that too simplistic?

All in all, the question of who is Caster Semenya and what rights does she have is a human riddle as deep and perplexing as any other. It is impossible to assign a single identity to a person, especially if the proposed task is to first identify an inborn essence and then illustrate proofs of that essence in the individual’s behavior. Ethically, this is a dangerous game, because it allows for assigning different values to different people, stratifying rights and leading to a justification for bias or segregation.

In South Africa, such an approach to the ethics of fairness is, perhaps more than anywhere else, offensive, to say the least. Semenya’s ethical responsibilities and her ethical status should not be judged based on a hormone test, but on her choices and her actions. If she has not committed deliberate acts to cheat or to seize an unfair advantage, then how can she be banned from something just for being better than everyone else?

If she has flagrantly violated fundamental and established existing rules of fair play, if she has somehow sought to game the system, then one can see there is room for some sanction. But the feeling seems to be that she is a hapless victim who fell into this problem through no fault of her own. The ethical bind is not one of her own making or which should hold her fate in its grip, but rather one that pertains to us all, that comments on the rights of all people, as people.

Any new ethical rationale invented to apply specifically to her case will have to be broadened and will apply to others, so getting it right isn’t just about Semenya’s gender categorization according to conventional science… it’s about what kind of questions we want athletes to answer, and how, before being allowed to compete… it’s about whether we want global society to organize itself around an idea of “fair play” that disqualifies certain people from  participation, based solely on their uniqueness.

Socio-economic barriers to such free flow of information are just another kind of information control that establishes dangerous demographic stratification into privileged and marginalized groups. Governments across the world are using web filtering technologies to censor the information available to their citizens and crack down on dissent.

In China, in Iran, in Cuba, aggressive web filtering measures and electronic spying technology have been used to prevent the spread of information unfavorable to the government leadership, to obscure corruption, and to hunt and persecute members of a would-be democratic opposition. In China, web filtering censorship has perhaps reached its zenith, with major multinationals collaborating in the “Great Firewall of China”.

Web searches routinely rule out links that contain information banned by the government, and the government has explored barring any website not entirely in Mandarin from being viewed inside China. Talk of the parallel Chinese internet has given way to concerns the government has opted for a technologically more realistic total filtering program.

“Cyber dissidents” are now an entirely new area of press targeted by government censors and security forces. In China and Iran, cyber dissidents are jailed simply for linking to materials that the government has sought to keep away from the public eye. Iran’s government has repeatedly shut down opposition websites in order to prevent democratic assembly, to cover up violence against civilians or to obscure challenges to official diktat.

China recently delayed plans to implement a draconian filtering system based on a new “green dam” software platform. The government is believed to have been taken aback by the broad-based and persistent expressions of anger over the plans, as the nation’s population continues to move into contact with the online medium and is demanding more transparency.

But Pres. Hu Jintao came to office promising a “smokeless war” against the press and cyber dissidents, and China has been criticized across the world for efforts to manipulate the information made available to its citizens, including distortions of the unrest a year ago in Tibet and Sichuan and now in Xinjiang, which many say could foment violence against people of Tibetan or Uighur ethnicity, depending on the case.

Efforts to use internet filtering to cover up the massacre of unarmed civilians at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 are part of that ongoing war against the free press. The Beijing government fears acknowledging what took place there could delegitimize the current regime and sow political unrest. Pro-democracy advocates say that like any government in a free democracy, China’s government could acknowledge its mistakes, promote electoral reform, and liberalize its political process, without destabilizing the country.

In remote regions like Darfur in western Sudan or North Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, conditions of extreme danger for aid workers and violence against journalists means information filters very slowly through the population, worsening already catastrophic situations of persistent conflict and human suffering.

Violence against women in Darfur is persistent in part owing to the fact that Darfuri women have virtually no access to information distribution systems. They are almost never able to report crimes against them to any public authority or international group. And medical service workers are often unable to locate people in need of help, as the remote region is plagued by lack of communicative media.

There is also concern about the effects of internet usage on the development of human cognitive abilities. Social cognitive structures are thought to be directly affected by use of communicative media, and the internet as achieved fundamental alterations in the communicative structure of society; facing that reality, it must be a universal right of all people to participate in the direction and development of that medium in reference to their own daily lives.

In May, I reported on this for The Hot Spring Network:

“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Internet not only shapes itself to the mind but shapes the mind to itself”, writes Ana Menéndez in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine.

What can we do to impede the erosion of some of our most prized social-intellectual habits of mind, rooted in organic brain structure and in social networking (from campfire to empire, parliament to newsprint, to Twitter and The Hot Spring Network), while taking advantage of the power of the web?

The internet and attendant communications technologies have a visible decentralizing effectthat enhances the democratic influence average people can exert in the public sphere. In the US election of 2008, that was evident in online information sharing and organizing. In the Spanish election of 2004, it was evident in the popular outcry that was so ably communicated by sms, that helped uncover a government disinformation campaign.

Clay Sharky, of the TED initiative, explains in a video address how social networking services and a new generation of web applications and smart phones, are coming together to empower individuals across the world and bring about the end of “top-down” controls in the political sphere. This effect is operating even in authoritarian societies, where in some cases the best information available comes from individuals posting anecdotal reports online.

Perhaps the world’s most developed and advanced campaign for net neutrality, or legal constraints on internet service providers’ (ISP) ability to plan or carry out systematic filtering of content, has taken root in the US. Motivated by a fierce defense of First Amendment rights and an understanding of the democratizing effects of open flows of information, the net neutrality movement has won important victories both in Congress andamong federal regulators.

In March 2008, I reported for Cafe Sentido that “We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society.” But that moment is being met with stepped up efforts by governments and businesses to control the freedom of ordinary people to access and control information.

Such efforts are a direct assault on democratic freedoms, and measurably impede the ability of people to gather information related to risks to their health or safety or to orchestrate the dissemination of information that may favor their social, economic or ideological interests. As the US Bill of Rights‘ commitment to a first-order freedom of the press shows, all other democratic rights are built on the foundation of a free and independent media culture. So access to the web must begin to be treated as a basic measure of human rights everywhere.

Follow these links for more information on:

• Press Freedom & Persecution of Journalists
• Net Neutrality & Internet Freedoms
• Human Rights & Democratic Freedoms

The idea of the ‘automatic’ in human affairs is an extremely dangerous fallacy —l’automaticité as a functional problem in French ethical and/or political philosophy. It presumes to be able to rule out nearly all human elements of any relationship: free choice, and by extension human error, the interrelationship of people in a community, or across a market. It dehumanizes for the sake of intellectual convenience, or in the case of banks, for the convenience of using accounting methods that ignore risk.

Though the ‘marketplace’ is the most efficient way of turning a sum of money into more than it started out being, and the marketplace is made up of human beings with human relationships, subject to the whims of timing, collective direction, the emotional cascades that dominate trends in trading and the rules set forth by major institutions (like the banks), the banks have sought to siphon as much wealth as possible out of the marketplace, while totally disregarding the humanity of the millions of players whose lives become the source of their profits.

So what’s the solution? Isn’t the automaticity of repayment part of what motivates banks to lend freely, as they have over the last decade? And aren’t the banks reminding us, day after day, by way of indirect protests against legislative action, complaints about the stifling effects of regulation, and over the last year their relentless devotion to the rigors of the not-lending marketplace, that they need such added motivation to do what it is that most behooves banks, which is to lend and hold debt as future income? (Why deprive ourselves of future income by falsely claiming it as past income?)

What can be done to make an institution founded on lending break its apparent addiction to not lending? The answer just might be in treating people like people, building human relationships that are not authoritarian in their zeal or fictional in their assumptions. The legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by Pres. Obama, in May, known as the Credit Card-holders’ Bill of Rights or the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, sought to make those ‘adjustments’ that would require more human relations between banks and borrowers, but it is just a start.

It should be noted, the entire nation has colluded in the grand delusion, letting the banks pretend that by making a loan and selling the loan, somehow the same profits it acquired would also be acquired by the buyers of the loan, and the borrowers would also locate the needed additional wealth to compensate everyone, in the time allotted. That conceptualization of lending and wealth-generation allowed for the delusion that new money could be made almost out of thin air, just by willing it.

A loan became a “product”, and the product could then be sold, over the counter, and morph from wealth projected to product sold to new wealth generated, eventually becoming an “engine” of economic growth. But with such a high percentage of all loans falling into this category of renamed, rehashed, and re-imagined value bases, the “engine” effect was getting too much like an effect and less and less like a genuine engine producing substantive thrust.

The idea of wealth replaced actual wealth. There was a bubble. There was a correction. We are living in the aftermath of the correction. But it is necessary to understand how widespread this financial market bubble was and what philosophy about the creation of wealth allowed for it to get so far beyond sustainable, or substantiable, expansion. The idea that by way of repackaging debt, new wealth would automatically emerge, underpinned an entire philosophy about how banking could be something new, something different, a break from the past.

But it was not the past from which these innovative finances were breaking; it was reality, the measure of the concrete, the measurable, the comprehensible. Money is abstract enough as it is: paper or coin that represents value, formerly backed by silver or gold, now just a currency with value against other currencies. So to craft whole new terrains of complex abstraction, within which money appears to do amazing new things, perform new functions, is to stretch the bounds of lived reality.

Here’s another way to look at it. Banks are required, at least in the US, to keep a certain amount of capital in reserve, to guard against losses and cover obligations to pay out withdrawals to account-holders. In the process of assessing the fallout of the 2008 credit freeze, banks that were taking money from the federal government were found to have inadequate capital in reserve: they had been using investments, bundled assets and projected earnings as “capital in reserve”, which they were not.

This fictionalization of the banking business has many causes, over many years, and cannot be attributed to a single individual, a single idea, or any one point of departure. But at some point, innovative thinking and the generation of valuable financial derivatives morphed into a fictionalization of value, in which there simply was not and could not be enough value generated, in a short enough period of time, to sustain the claims of value being made by those institutions generating and selling off the bundled assets, derivatives and exotics.

So, we can say, the fiction of automatic wealth is bankrupting the US. Yes, even today, even as we are in recovery. Because fictionalized finances found their way into the long-term investment strategies of major institutions, including state governments. California is now broke. Banks have refused to continue accepting IOUs from the state, and the state government now has to shut down one day a week. California, the world’s 5th largest economy, lost billions when the markets seized up and hemorrhaged wealth last year.

It is the second time in a decade that California fell head over heels into a massive swindle. The Enron debacle nearly bankrupted the state, because the power-trading giant had allegedly colluded with other power companies in California to fix prices, forcing the governor to sign an agreement to buy power at many times market rates for up to ten years. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to power in the wake of that collapse, and now the end of his second term is seeing another collapse, brought on by huge losses caused by a financial system whose claims of real value were simply not real.

The entangling of state pensions plans and other long-term investments with the esoteric workings of the financial system is a natural consequence of a mindset in which every player has a right to earn, and to profit, via financial investment. The problem is, someone generally has to lose wealth in order for someone else to gain substantially, so the more players involved, the more risk —one might think— that more players will wind up losing. Creative strategies have to be adopted to prevent this, or at least to make it look like it will not occur.

The math might change altogether. A 30-year mortgage, which may or may not ever be repaid at its highest projected value, is counted as an asset. The lender claims to in fact hold that wealth now. $500,000 was just paid out, but in fact, the bank will claim to hold the $500,000, plus all the accumulated future interest. It does not, in fact, have the money, but it says it does. And it makes this questionable logic look viable by selling the debt.

With most commodities, this works, because the risk of lower value is taken on by the buyer, and such is the speculation that comes with buying and selling commodities. At some point, there will be a buyer who has to know the risk is mounting and he may never see a higher price than he paid. But with debt, the value of the loan is fixed: the borrower will not in fact pay more than the highest amount allowable under the loan agreement.

So once the bank sells the debt at the highest price it can, the buyer is very likely never to see a higher price or a return on investment. To get around this, debt holdings were “bundled”. Or rather, they were fragmented, then recombined. So the $500,000 plus interest becomes 5,000 $100 values, each with potential accumulated interest, and each with a speculative price that might actually go up. The money multiplies, and the buyer has some confidence that this speculative commodity will in fact yield a higher price than what he pays for it.

But the problem remains the same: the underlying loan will never be worth more than the monetary value assigned to it in the initial loan agreement. At some point, someone somewhere will be holding debt, which they “bought” at a very high price, which will either be repaid at the initial agreed (lower) value, or not be repaid at all, because in fact the wealth necessary for the borrower to successfully repay the loan never materialized at all.

Imagine this happening hundreds of thousands of times across the financial system, then millions, over several years. Imagine people with fixed-rate mortgages, able to repay, refinancing their homes in order to get access to more wealth, buying into new loans that work in this way, so that a majority of all loans were in fact of this kind. Banks were long past the critical mass on unsustainable debt when the house of cards started to wobble last summer.

What happened between the spring and the fall of 2008 was that a scenario some economists had predicted for years actually became apparent and apparently inevitable: there simply was not enough real wealth in the world to sustain the claims of value being made by the financial sector as a whole: too many outstanding mortgages were in fact unpayable as it was, let alone in a world where repayment depends on a financial system with exorbitant growth levels and where wages are expanding too slowly —actually declining by $2,000 per household from 2000 to 2008— and cost of living skyrocketing — namely food, fuel, healthcare and credit.

We are still working our way out of the labyrinth of that fictionalized financial world. But it’s important to recognize the underlying big picture conceptualizations of wealth that led to the mess we are in. The idea that wealth can automatically materialize from cunning manipulations, or even from what might be essentially nothing more than a shift in vocabulary, is dangerous and must be guarded against.

Automaticity is a tempting idea: it periodically takes hold of and distorts entire political systems. It is the logic behind building ever more destructive weapons —logic that the use of brute force will automatically compel our enemies to respond as we wish— and of prejudice of all kinds —if a stereotype can be applied to an entire group, then why not pin the blame for all our ills on that group—, and so the logic of automaticity is at the root of some of the most massive and widespread suffering in human history.

In banking, it has led to millions of bankruptcies and home foreclosures, millions of layoffs, a frozen credit industry. A lack of government response may have allowed the nation to slide into a long economic depression, by many economists’ forecasts. So the lesson has to be: wealth is not generated automatically by any flip of the wrist, by any sleight of hand, by any cunning financial innovation; it emerges, over time, from real evolutions within the economy as a whole, and has to correspond to measurable real-world value.

Banks are no more entitled to an automatic unending expansion of the wealth they hold or claim to hold than is any one individual. Banks are no more virtuous than any borrower, when they make claims about future wealth projections. The virtue is in the human element, which is expressed by the measurable wealth construct, the figures that are not purely figurative but actually correspond to lived reality.

We must remember that banks are made up of human beings, just as the market landscape of borrowers and investors is made up of human beings. Ideas are tools we use to serve our purposes, but they cannot be bought and sold independent of the human world in which they function; innovative financial instruments must operate on the human scale, so that investors know they are not handing over real wealth in exchange for unsustainable wealth claims.

Values, if those who camp along this stretch of the ideological spectrum have any allegiance to them, must always come after and be subsumed by a regime of dark and cynical manipulations. To what end? To prove that one is dark and cynical enough to be feared. This is the adolescent part of their understanding of Machiavelli — whose philosophy we will not treat in detail here. They claim to know how to be better than the brutes, thugs and villains, by imitating them.

As The Economist reported in its 11 April 2009 edition:

On April 5th in Prague, Mr Obama reiterated a campaign promise to hold talks with Russia to reduce both American and Russian nuclear stockpiles, to push for a global nuclear test ban and to set up an international nuclear fuel bank to help with peaceful nuclear-energy programmes. The same day, North Korea, which has already made at least one illegal nuclear bomb, fired a test missile over Japan.

Though the missile crashed into the sea, many Republicans think it illuminated Mr Obama’s naiveté.

Of course they do. And Newt is one of them. He has to be shocked and appalled at the irresponsible hopefulness of anyone who would dare to deliberately fashion a plan aimed at achieving the optimum outcome, because he is operating on the assumption that anything worth doing can be undone by the brute force of those with ill will. This is the real root of this aspirational pseudo-realism, the false claim that one can know future outcomes simply by betting on the worst actors.

This sort of quasi-cynic/quasi-conservative would-be ideologue is addicted to political attitudes of that kind. They indulge, almost as part of their platform, the desire to witness the naïveté of their rivals, which they believe they can then use to attack those rivals as weak. This passion stands in for solid policy formulations. So their protests must be immediate, shrill and filled with disdain and either/or absolutism. Absolutism equals strength, vision equals weakness, in this sad outlook.

But let’s be serious about the meaning of strength and the meaning of weakness. Policies based on a dogmatic commitment to paranoia are capitulation to the worst of the worst. They demonstrate weakness in terms of intellectual creativity, military cunning and the application of global influence.

To put it another way, it is not a sign of higher intelligence to think Saddam Hussein is a thug, so let’s be thugs; Kim Jong-il lives ‘on the dark side’, so we have to ‘go to the dark side’; al-Qaeda wants to annihilate us, therefore they are powerful enough to annihilate us. Cogent thought and responsible action can occur, even in the emotional area of confronting hostile opponents; to go without it is not a sign of strength, but of weakness.

The strong are able to treat failed provocations as what they are —desperate attempts to puff up one’s ego, or one’s public image—, and understanding them as such, do serious things to deal with serious problems. That Gingrich is aligning himself with the Cheney model of foreign policy, where talks-equals-weakness follow-my-orders diplomacy stands in for responsible efforts to achieve positive outcomes, is a sign he seeks to use the brutality and villainy of rogue states as a political weapon against his own fellow Americans in the political sphere.

Not only is the “naïveté” attack on Obama a sign of moral impotence and intellectual weakness, it is a sign of a will to attack one’s own nation and its values, in favor of elevating the game-plan and the methods of the world’s worst. Gingrich appears to be adopting that philosophy where the danger “out there” trumps all considerations about better values or the possibility of “defending democracy” by standing by it.

It is the “axis-of-evil” mentality, the conjuring of fictional dark alliances against freedom, the adolescent posturing of all-gunboat-diplomacy all-the-time foreign policy, that empowers and elevates Kim Jong-il, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the Taliban, and others whose own colossal failures and detachment from reality already demonstrate their long-term inviability.

The cynicism of these shrill voices is aspirational. They want to see bad outcomes to demonstrate the need for less optimal and less well-thought practical solutions, because they seek to capitalize politically on such failures. The aspirational cynicism of adolescent thinkers like Newt Gingrich is itself a dangerous naïveté, because it assumes: 1) there is no adverse consequence to siding with the logic or the m.o. of the enemy and playing politics with serious efforts at disarmament, and 2) that even in expressing such colossal weakness as to hurl a rocket into the sea and lie about it, somehow the less powerful is actually the more.

The aspirational cynicism of Gingrich, Cheney, Frum and others —diverse as some of their policy positions may be on specifics— is rooted in an inability to think seriously about how you out-smart the logic of primitive thuggery. It is naïve and dangerous in the extreme, because it would cast aside all the best and most effective qualities of American democracy, in service of a perverse fealty to the many ineptitudes of isolated rogue states.

North Korea has given the world the clearest evidence of its weakness, and made clear the power inherent in offering talks. Wayward enough to threaten far more powerful states, lost and incapable enough to drop an 0rbit-bound rocket into the sea, with the whole world watching, when it could have gained diplomatically by not launching, the hermit regime has shown its teeth, half of them missing and the others dulled by ideological grinding.

The president of the United States knows what was happening and understands all of this, and he —unlike his critics— has the personal fortitude and the confidence in American power to press for a global regime of disarmament. Smart enough to note that any reasonable timetable for global denuclearization might be beyond his old age, he knows that credibility is, well, more credible than unsubstantiated threats and puerile tug-of-war mind games with unstable regimes.

So, the Gingrich plan for governing appears to be to complain, to imitate the enemy, take weakness as strength and strength as weakness, undermine one’s own nation’s democratic ideals and practical security goals, and dance around the realities of the world like a peacock who thinks his tail feathers are more relevant than whether or not his grandchildren die in a mushroom cloud his own policies helped to generate.

Obama’s call for a world free of nuclear weapons is not “dangerous” as Gingrich suggests, because he has not proposed that the US nuclear deterrent be eliminated while any rival nuclear power remains. It is part of a pragmatic approach to solving horrible problems: get started, do good work, serve the interests of democracy, get everyone else into a committed, transparent and effective process, and try to make the world work without forcing or risking mass death.

That is a plan. It involves pushing for ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a new round of strategic arms reduction with the Russian Federation, serious action —secret, or not so secret— to secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal against Taliban takeover, and a globally backed, sharp-toothed regime capable of preventing nuclear proliferation via espionage or the black market.

Should we seriously bother to compare this with the bold idea that is let’s not talk to them? Not talking to a rogue regime about curbing its rogue behavior is capitulation. It is the best way to permit acquisition of the world’s worst weapons, granting them as much time as they need to continue working not only to acquire the weapons, but to hide the facilities and/or fashion adequate defenses against airstrikes.

So, while Barack Obama seeks to rally world leaders to a new era of nuclear disarmament, Gingrich adopts the failed “hard power” dogma of the American Enterprise Institute’s favorites, like Dick Cheney and David Frum. They would have us do nothing, sit back and watch while the risk of catastrophic mass death advances and escalates, as it has since the year 2000.

What we have to consider most seriously is, given this demonstrated will to take zero serious measures to prevent proliferation —we can’t credit Cheney or Gingrich for the Bush era 6-party talks with North Korea or Qadhafi’s voluntary negotiated disarming—, along with the willingness to use extreme force to face phantom menaces, whether we want someone of the Cheney mentality to have any proximity to nuclear weapons or to WMD policy, whether he wears American, Iranian, Pakistani or Korean dress.

• Originally published 8 May 2009, at CafeSentido.com

When David Frum writes about why the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is not only “impossible” but also “dangerous”, he does so with two major obstacles to credibility: 1. he is arguing for the policies of an administration in which he served; 2. he is arguing that he can prove a negative (claiming to know what will never come to pass, what can never be expected from comprehensive global negotiations, the development of surveillance and inspections technologies, the enticements of a truly global regime of denuclearization).

It is astounding that Frum is so convinced of his own clarity of vision so far into the future. That is, of course, unless we understand that for the ideology Frum has long preached and defended, it is gospel that a cynical outlook can be trusted, whereas a hopeful outlook is reckless gibberish. The problem is, and many of Frum’s colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute would be well-served to look inward on this point: cynicism is not an oracle, and it does not tell the future; it is just another formula for thought, which provides no actual evidence of anything.

Cynicism often lends itself to the construction of intellectually convenient, overly facile descriptions of future events, which —bolstered by the impassioned worries and self-promotion of the cynic, the anti-prophet— quickly assume an air of prophetic certainty. Buoyed by the psychological satisfaction of carrying prophetic certainty within, the cynic then commits more and more fully to the proclamation of unshakeable doctrines about the future, based on bad-faith arguments and a passion for the despairing global outlook.

(He is known, of course, for delivering the “axis of evil” idea to George W. Bush as “axis of hatred”, again a phrase rooted in the presumption of cynical omniscience. Look at how gleefully that rhetoric was put to the task of describing, threatening and invading a country, about whom the most important claims were utterly false. This kind of zealous cynicism can get us into trouble; that much we know.)

We can thank Mr. Frum for informing us of how ideal the most recent theoretical developments in nuclear weapons technology are. Quoting:

These new weapons, on a new generation of missiles, could overwhelmingly deter any potential nuclear aggressor, while all but eliminating the risk of nuclear accident. Unlike current weapons, they do not need frequent refreshment of their nuclear core. They present near-zero risk of a radioactive leak. And they cannot be detonated by accident: According to one expert, these next-generation weapons could be loaded into a cannon and fired at a wall at four times the speed of sound without risk of unintended explosion.

“Sounds good” he writes. It does. It sounds beautiful, enticing, irresistible. The ingenuity of advanced human sciences have achieved perfection in technology. But this is where we have to be careful to remember that the cynic does not trust rosy predictions. Or does he? When he represents the American Enterprise Institute, the neo-conservative movement or the planning of war in Iraq, he often does: he uses the cynic’s claim to omniscience to rule out all dissent, then uses the powers of his assumption about the absolute fallibility of the outside world to adopt the most seductive rose-tinted expectations imaginable.

What Frum does not explain is the following:

1. Fissile material, being radioactive, must deteriorate (all radioactive materials have a “half-life”, due to complex entropy inherent in the physics of radioactivity; that half-life, the time after which the level of radioactivity is half what it was initially, is measurable and does not vary), but David Frum professes to know that nuclear scientists have successfully thwarted the universal phenomenon of entropy (the release of energy from a closed system to the surrounding environment).

2. While testing these special new nuclear devices sounds simple enough, they need to be tested somewhere, releasing a massive amount of radiation into the atmosphere, and such tests tend to provoke a militant response; they are the signal that an arms race is underway, and other nations will respond accordingly. Again, in his ignoring this problem completely, we find the willing naïveté with which Frum fuses his cynical outlook to get rosy prophetic visions.

3. He also gives us no reason whatsoever to believe that he is using sources linked to real science, just makes claims about what “one expert” has told him. It is attractive to think that by securing nuclear weapons against accidental explosion we prevent the threat of their being detonated, but once we have them, we have to deal with the appetites of human beings who have control over them. The human failsafe mechanism would still be required.

4. He does note that “President Obama did not exactly say that he would never test one of the new warheads”, adding”But he sure raised some fierce political difficulties for himself if he ever did want to test.” But he ignores completely the fact that Obama said he knows the lofty goal of global denuclearization may likely not be achieved in his lifetime (that’s 30 to 40 more years), so while he’s pressing to achieve a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, he may not be rushing to disarm.

Frum also conveniently ignores the fact that those “fierce political difficulties” related to testing a nuclear weapon aren’t necessarily the result of Obama’s favoring a ban. The reason no new devices have been tested by the US since 1992 is that the public wants to move beyond the threat of nuclear holocaust. With the Cold War ended, the US public took a strong position against the continued advancement of nuclear weapons, period.

So, we are left to consider whether or not —despite Frum’s clumsy way of using a blindly cynical approach to geo-politics in order to fashion a utopian vision of America’s nuclear future—

it is true that aspiring to the elimination of nuclear weapons is a dangerous proposition. Again, the only justifiable basis for this claim is to assume that the US intends to discard its weapons willy-nilly, without any collaboration from the world’s other nuclear powers to ensure that all weapons are phased out and no one can acquire the technology to build new ones.

Aside from its value as a genuine example of the absurd, how could Frum actually believe that? It will not be for Pres. Obama to see his goal of a nuclear-weapons-free world through; it will be for him to build the necessary diplomatic and strategic relationships capable of starting the world down that road. And those relationships can only be of benefit for the long-term security interests of a world that would rather not see itself obliterated by senseless allegiance to weapons that serve no moral purpose and whose use does not fit within any of our laws.

We must also take very seriously the logical and moral problems inherent in any position that promotes the advancement or the permanent commitment to these weapons, the very same weapons that Frum’s old boss considered the ultimate manifestation of evil in the world (at least the illusory Iraqi version of them). That administration championed its right to invade a nation to prevent its using WMD, but actively used depleted uranium shells and pronounced its intention to create new “mini-nukes” to be used on conventional targets in non-nuclear-armed states that posed only a “potential future threat”.

It is the clumsy intellectual acrobatics of the people David Frum has chosen to surround himself with that seems most irresponsible and “dangerous” in all of this. To wage war on someone for the very thing one is claiming the right to do is to exhibit total moral and intellectual bankruptcy. To claim that one must use the world’s worst weapons as a deterrent against the horrors of the human world, because the human world in its infinite perfection has conquered nature and created failsafe nukes, is just another example of that reckless use of intellect.

Mr. Frum is likely proud of himself for finding a way to put into words the insane accusation that Obama wants Iran to develop the bomb (he has been very adamant in his opposition to this and is already coordinating world leaders to prevent it). He is proud of this, because his intention is to serve a partisan argument and defend the pro-nuclear policies of the administration he served.

And he is likely also very proud of himself for finding a way to argue that some nukes are good nukes and we can have them and also be safe. Very cozy. But his argument ignores the most serious issues involved in nuclear proliferation; it is dangerous politics he is playing with these words, and he offers them, because he can’t come up with anything better.

Soft power works, because one is able to use the social force of virtue —rooted in actual qualities and demonstrable value to those concerned— and because one shows proof of being closer to shared goals than the other party, leading the other party to follow one’s lead.

Obama has demonstrated an incredible ability for a victorious politician: forgiveness. His magnanimity is, whether he intends it to be or not, an exceedingly valuable asset to him, not just in terms of public image, but because he wields power through it, and that leverage is not missed by those he is negotiating with. Imagine the awe his show of mercy to Joe Lieberman must inspire in the vigilant eyes of the fallen leaders of the Republican party’s aspirational one-party government.

They were terrified of letting one inch slip to their opponents; this man is strong enough to be generous, politically. That means he can win favor with enemies, listen to a bewildering array of intelligent concepts and proposals, and rely on his judgment, not the maneuverings of party minions, to select, adopt and enact the best and most effective. This is the position leaders of all kinds most aspire to be in, and he is reminding them from day one that he is already there.

Is it “soft power” or “3d diplomacy” —diplomacy, development, defense—, is it “smart power”, or “principled pragmatism”? There is really no need to put a label on it, because for the sake of historical argument, we can call it the Obama way: push your friend and rivals alike to adopt bold new ideas that focus on solutions in stead of ideology; be courageous enough to tackle all of the toughest issues at once; use the levers of power to your advantage, but listen to dissent and allow for crafted solutions that broaden support for your strategy.

This is the kind of unrelenting soft power that has allowed Barack Obama to continue winning an historically broad base of support, even as he takes positions that other presidents would have seen as controversial, and battles Congress for leadership in the game of national policy rhetoric.

As in the campaign, Obama’s style of governing owes much to his prowess at framing the debate within a vocabulary rooted in his ideas. Everyone is speaking his language, so inevitably, the final verdict will be rooted in his principles, even if he has to give up some ground to get the most salient projects passed.

Much has been made of his “capitulating” on renewal of the assault weapons ban… the problem is, it wasn’t his ban, it wasn’t a priority to begin with, and Congress (unbelievably) is unwilling to pass it. Despite a severe rash of mass killings and spreading gun violence, despite evidenced that American gun-shop owners have been ferrying high-powered assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels, Congress is afraid of the gun lobby.

It is not for a president with major reforms ahead to pick a fight in which his allies are few and the public’s view of the issue is so severely skewed by relentless propaganda from a commercially-interested lobby. Every time the GOP leadership comes out in support of weapons that kill children, it gets harder for them to sustain any credibility, and the question of a “fight” on gun control seems to dim.

There may come a time, but using power wisely means letting people have their say, and for now, Congress says gun control will be a political bloodbath. Obama has been very adroit, throughout his rise, at letting hostile opponents sabotage themselves, letting John McCain make nitwit pronouncements on economic policy for instance, letting the Republicans propose a pointless tax-cut-for-the-wealthy budget even as they claim they are now suddenly populist.

With each round of renewed idiocy in the sort of attack levied against him, his pragmatist agenda and his personal standing are elevated. His political capital expands as his political enemies squander their own credibility in unfounded or illogical attacks. His “record budget” is adequately explained when the Republicans produce a faux budget with just as large a deficit, but no plans for recovery, and Obama announces a deliberative process to find record spending cuts, pointing out that Bush’s spending was even higher, he just excluded the wars from his budget.

It is hard for the Republican party to grasp how this kind of exercise of authority works: using moral authority to support solution-oriented policies, instead of the bully pulpit to ram ideological concessions down people’s throats; using carefully worded policy-speak to re-frame the entire scope of debate on a given issue, forcing even opponents into a debate within one’s vocabulary, i.e. winning the debate before it begins; listening to one’s opponents, even harvesting workable ideas from their agenda, but using those ideas to bolster one’s own position.

It is incomprehensible to seasoned Washington strategists that Obama is not using his high approval ratings and his bold agenda to bludgeon beleaguered Republicans to death in a campaign of character assassination and scorched-earth attacks. But Obama’s special quality of governing from balance and confidence is rooted in his belief that while the others may waste their energy on such games, actually governing effectively will always beat them. He intends to “lap” the Republicans over and over again, by getting things done, and so far, it has worked to an historic degree.

Know your enemy’s flaws, and avoid exhibiting them yourself. He is well aware of how toxic the Republican party’s vicious blood-and-guts politicking has been; he has seen Gingrich and DeLay go down in infamy; Rove’s name is synonymous with “liar” and Cheney is seen as a man so obsessed with strength that no principle and no ethics can contain his ambition.

You will notice that Obama exhibits none of these qualities, because he understands them to be a waste of time. If one wants to achieve important improvements to the quality of life of real people, the work is hard and the negotiations may be bitter, but open combat with one’s most bitter rivals is not an effective way to get there.

Obama’s way of relentlessly releasing new ideas and making much needed policy changes, always in line with his promises of reform oriented toward expanding transparency and ridding government of entrenched monied interests, has left the Republican party reeling. They keep waiting for something they can attack him for, on an all-day everyday basis, for weeks, and the struggle has left them looking like the party of “zero ideas” as one of their own recently confessed.

If we are to understand the “preternatural calm” or the legendary poise that was so often spoken of during the campaign, we have to take seriously Obama’s frequent admission that the campaign “was never about me”, that he was in it because the people needed someone to work for them. His focus is not on accumulating wealth and power, or is it on serving interests that have built him into an institution over several decades: it’s on doing the work he promised to do, and answering to the many millions who made his power base so genuinely grassroots.

Government of the people, by the people and for the people: Obama is qualified to use his own ideas and his own principles to effect this sort of government, because he was wide open about his policy proposals and his agenda from day one. He announced his bold reform initiatives over two years ago. His ideas were unpacked and deconstructed in the public eye, and he won sweeping support from voters to carry out his agenda. His soft-power strategy is far from weak; it is the manifestation of a deep reserve of political strength and commitment to effective reform.

Allowing for non-identified EMR sharing across the system creates a universal pool of data in which drug side-effects, treatment failure or success rates, disease history, specific organ damage or healing, and all sorts of incidence of drug interactions and health specifics can be cross-referenced, spurring a massive amount of data-rooted research and improving quality of care and treatment success rates.

Pres. Obama has consistently touted the potential for a widespread or even national standard of EMR to help spur innovation and bring down healthcare costs, but the issue has been very little explored by mainstream media and has been consistently opposed by some critics who fear “nationalized healthcare”. The first thing we must understand in exploring EMR and its potential is that it does not mean a nationalization of healthcare.

Unbelievably, a provision in economic recovery legislation signed into law by Pres. Obama was vehemently opposed by some in the opposition on the grounds that EMR would bring about a situation in which the government “punishes” doctors who don’t comply with federal mandates. No such punitive measures were in the bill and no specific mandates for doctors either.

But it’s worth considering the degree to which the private insurance industry, so committed to its right to deny treatment, does actually take punitive measures against doctors who don’t comply with its demands. EMR can be a great efficiency booster for healthcare in general, and could actually be part of the all-important process of reducing the urge of insurers to spend money denying treatment.

But the burden to practitioners is a serious concern, so an effective EMR standard should require as little work as possible for doctors and nurses, ideally zero additional clerical work. Medical professionals should not be able to notice the “labor” involved in EMR upkeep. The best way to achieve this is to make sure the best possible tools are used universally to make EMR upkeep equivalent to or simpler than paper-record upkeep.

A letter-sized e-paper tablet touchscreen device would be ideal for fluid management of medical records in a new EMR universal standard. A flexible full-size letter-format touchscreen could be easily folded into a doctor’s pocket, taken out at any time for on-screen chart updates, and linked to an onsite or remote server that synchronizes with a universal EMR database in which all personal patient information is filtered out but medical data is stored.

Individual patient records could be accessed through the system as well, in order to maximize the delivery of relevant patient history to any doctor across the system, when needed. This would optimize the quality and precision of patient care choices, preventing unnecessary complications, reducing the incidence of human error and addressing health problems with the optimal course of treatment, ideally also reducing the number of interventions required and the long-term costs over time.

Privacy protection and the banning of data sale or resale are absolute essentials. The system must be informational and function-centered, free and open to the public as well. The benefits to be derived from opening non-identifiable pooled medical data to independent analysis are vast: speeding innovation, judging quality of care, and creating fact-based statistical analyses, not best-guess synthetic limited-pool studies (using either perfectly healthy, one-malady-only or terminally ill patients, to the exclusion of anyone reflecting a more common complex of health issues).

The EMR research database would be open and never, under any circumstances, searchable by individual patient or specific treatment centers. Personal medical records would be part of a sealed atomized patient-specific database accessible only by doctors or medical professionals authorized by virtue of providing actual treatment to that patient, in the moment or in consultation with other physicians.

Separately, an evolutionary quality of care effect could be achieved, if success rates for certain types of treatment were available in relation to specific treatment facilities. This database might need to be less wide-open, perhaps with peer-review and a kind of official rating system, so doctors are not pressured to withold information or buck or trick the system.

If this 3rd function of EMR could be implemented with optimum effectiveness and benefit to all involved, then the best centers would be elevated for their successes and others would be forced to learn from them and improve their care or else change specialty or close. Ideally, this would eliminate substandard care, and therefore medical errors, excessive complications and other costly inefficiencies.

EMR can also allow for better-targeted monitoring of individual health, even in cases requiring constant targeted screening. One of the main reasons for prolonged hospital care is continuous monitoring, doctor-assessed dosing and crisis response times. EMR can allow for far more effective at-home monitoring, reducing hospital stays, optimizing IC-use and helping to limit the overburdening of skilled healthcare professionals, thus bringing down costs.

The question now about EMR is how to make a viable national system of electronic medical records function for the benefit of everyone. First would be getting everyone covered. Second would be incentivizing the relevant technologies. Third would be showing doctors a real benefit to their own workflow and quality of care.

Then comes the big task of making sure the system works as intended: allowing patients’ medical records to arrive as they do or before, with no effort required of patients or patients’ prior doctors in the moment of record retrieval… protecting patient privacy to 100% effectiveness… allowing the pooling of non-identifying medical data across the system… and using EMR to improve quality of care and treatment options, and in the process, save and prolong lives.

• As part of The Hot Spring’s Intellectual Property Preserve, this article contains some ideas that are more proposals than reporting. If you would like to collaborate with the author or seek further information for a potential partnership regarding the implementation of some of these ideas, please contact The Hot Spring at: think.media@casavaria.com

The problem is severe enough that neary 50 million people are without healthcare coverage, and another many millions are underinsured, not guaranteed to have necessary treatments covered, for one reason or another. Some blame malpractice insurance costs, some blame pharmaceutical drug costs, some blame malpractice lawsuits, some blame greedy insurers, greedy doctors, or stingy public-funding programs. And they are all right. But the one group that is not ripping anyone off and that has no interest in costs continuing to escalate, is the average patient.

Others fall into the category of innocents, but we have to recognize that the average person has zerocontrol over these egregious failings of the system and does not want to see them prolonged. Now, how to do we get everyone covered, and how to we bring down costs? Both of these things have to happen, if the system is to work for everyone and be solvent, whether it is majority private, majority public, or one or the other entirely.

1. The first thing that will help us on both these points is to recognize how they are connected. If we get everyone covered, costs will come down. Why? Because risk is spread over a broader population. And because healthcare providers know they will be paid, which keeps prices more reasonable, more relevant to supply and demand and not distorted by the chaos of a failed system.

2. Getting everyone covered requires mandates. Someone has to be forced to follow a new regulation. Insurers have to be barred from denying coverage, period. It may be necessary to mandate that individuals and/or businesses pay to be covered.

3. There will have to be government assistance, because the laws of the marketplace dictate that what people cannot afford, they will avoid, like paying exorbitant insurance costs, “reset” adjustable rate mortgages or high-interest credit cards. Subsidizing individuals’ and/or small businesses’ purchase of health insurance, to ensure that everyone is covered, will help lower costs; it is not money wasted, and it is NOT “socialism”.

4. Healthcare spending is an investment. Whether it’s public money or private, spending now to make sure healthcare works for everyone is cost-effective, because it prevents massive entitlement programs from spinning out of control and bankrupting our economy, in the medium to long-term.

5. The First Amendment must stand. (It may be surprising that this is relevant, but it is.) The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” We cannot strip citizens of their existing right to sue, and we cannot pass laws saying citizens don’t have a right to be heard in court on a given issue. That is not the solution. Laws that limit or dictate the forum for resolving negligence claims, as a matter of definition, “abridge” the right to seek redress for grievances, so the issue of “damages” claims needs to be dealt with elsewhere.

There are important reasons why the First Amendment maintains not ony the vitality of our democracy, but also the ability of our population to adjust to change, correct the mistakes of the powerful and engineer a better future. Lessened redress for grievances means more impunity, and that can be measured in losses we are not likely prepared to stomach. We need to remember that each of the rights embodied in the Bill of Rights has a unique function in allowing citizens to exercise control over government policy or action. If there is an abundance of grievance claims, then perhaps the system is in grave disarray. Burying the claims does not fix the problem.

6. The law of the marketplace would be that only by expanding your insuree pool can you really minimize risk in a true insurance company. To rule out providing insurance means you are not an insurance company, but something else. One way to reduce medical malpractice claims is to reduce the insurers’ ability to deny treatment, a practice which can lead to complications, mistakes, chronic inefficiencies in the system that invite further lawsuits. Lawsuits, of course, also incentivize extreme “caution” and impede doctors’ ability to make fair judgments in some cases. First reduce denial of treatment, then worry about whether damages need to be capped.

7.  Drug costs must be reasonable. This may have to be legislated, with or without consent from the drug companies. They say they need high prices to fund research, but research funding can come from the taxpayer, from private institutions, or from tax incentives for research. And in fact, it often does already. The drug companies tend to spend more money on marketing than on research. It can also be mandated that any enterprise that sells drugs devote a certain percentage of its revenue to research (not counting market research).

The situation is literally out of control, with one after another major corporate interest, including insurers, calling for some kind of reform that will reduce costs, make a sustainable business model more possible and not provoke the ire of the masses (as expressed through Congress and the courts).

8. If we use market dynamics to price healthcare, having also applied the 7 preceding points, then there must be significant attractive incentives for those providers who do the best job getting quality treatment for their contributors. A system well-planned is not patchwork, but applicable and effective, even if it looks like patchwork.

It is ill-thought to split the debate between the irrationally simple “single-payer” paradigm and the recklessly haphazard all-private extreme. Neither is realistic and neither is in practice or near viable in the US market. Neither serves any purpose but to stoke ideological extremism on this issue and delay the crafting of a serious solution. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people die from medical mistakes, undertreatment or lack of coverage.

Now that costs are crippling institutions at all levels, and the economic downturn and unwillingness of banks to lend, have converged to illustrate how functioning universal healthcare coverage is a mutual interest of major corporations, insurers, government and the people, we can agree on a starting point: it is necessary to make health insurance coverage, in one form or another, available to everyone; once we accept that, we can find ways to do it that are both cost-effective and sustainable for all stakeholders.

Caramel is a film about women and about Lebanon, but it is not strictly or exclusively that; there is something that goes more directly to the core of what makes any of us what we are. Longing, and the problem of how to reach out for what makes us feel, without betraying our surroundings or ourselves, is central to the story Labaki tells in Caramel.

We never learn what situation any of the characters individually lives as a result of the political and military conflict the nation of Lebanon experienced, though we find one character after another facing the problem of longing for something —an intangible, a human bond, the fact of being understood and loved by another person— not so easy to find in their surroundings.

Layale, the character Labaki herself plays, is torn between a life she is living, as a result of desiring perhaps too deeply a love that cannot be what she wants it to be, and the life she would make for herself, had she the choice. Each of the other characters mirrors this experience in some way, though each story is different, and each is faced with her own process of self discovery.

Constructing her narrative this way allows the first-time feature-film director to perform an impressive balancing act: she can reveal the pressures and split loyalties experienced by women in this culture, while also revealing the fact that this is a culture fed into by long traditions from competing broader models of civilization, without exploring political conflict at all.

She is also able to reveal the personal pressures and cultural tensions experienced by each character without telling us exactly where they originate. This also allows her to tell us a story that is at once uniquely Lebanese and fluidly universal, in its simplicity and in its emotional poignancy. The characters whose story is opened up to us may live next door, or may be men in our lives instead of women, or may be any of the viewers.

This is not just another film about something human which becomes resonant for all who see it. Some people may relate more than others and it doesn’t really pretend to be universal. But the artistry with which Nadine Labaki colors the lives of the characters in her story, the richness of feeling and the close-to-surface deep emotion made apparent, give us the chance to travel with her to a place we may never have been, into the inner sanctum of a private sphere that has much to tell us about ourselves.

One could be forgiven for arguing that her approach deliberately excludes the controversial, the ideological or the sectarian, that it deliberately avoids making any but the most vague comment on the violent political crisis by which her country is besieged. And that is because she has made a conscious choice to forego such a narrative, opting instead to highlight the non-political, non-ideological, non-sectarian humanity lived by her characters in a world just as real as any those more abstract big-picture considerations, or maybe more real.

Caramel will not give us the answer to personal stresses, nor to finding love, nor to generations’ old political conflicts. But it will do what it was intended, I believe, to do: provide us with a glimpse of how human beings deal with emptiness, longing and the search for warmth in a world where for one reason or another, these things are hard to come by. And that is a worthy contribution to any discussion of life in Lebanon, or the region, or this world.