In late November and early December, my colleagues and I were working at collecting information from the 1,500 organizations that comprise the Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP).  We work with organizers that are the contact person for their organization, mostly through email, occasionally by phone.  For me, it averages out to my talking to each person that I work with maybe once or twice a year.  There are several hundred people that I work with.

Those mostly fairly tenuous relationships resulted in our being able to accumulate 100 actions protesting the Obama escalation of Afghanistan, while keeping the 1,500 organizations apprised of the growing number of actions.  Just after the December 1 and 2 actions, I got a call from a North Carolina organizer wanting to know how we were different from United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which had limited resources and was not able to organize around the escalation protests, other than sending out emails.  I responded that PJEP is sort of like a national organization’s outreach, communications and technology departments.  PJEP involves itself in no content creation or leadership articulation of the issues.  PJEP is mostly just process, process seeking to empower the actions and projects created by small, local organizations.  PJEP does not initiate or articulate.  We empower and encourage.

Empowering and encouraging involves access to and distribution of high quality information.  The closer to consensus reality we are, the better we’re able to perform our job of mapping out the landscape to achieve goals.  PJEP, by simply being in contact with 1,500 organizations, able to retrieve from them information on what exactly they are doing, allows us to share that information, empowering activists with knowledge of their place in the larger whole.  For example, speakers at local events could state with confidence that over 100 cities around the country were protesting a government decision.  Groups are not acting in isolation.

Just before the protests, one of the places I searched for high quality information was Twitter.  Conducting a number of different searches, such as “Afghanistan protest” or “escalation protest” or just “#protest” or “#Afghanistan,” I was shocked to discover there was very little activity around the 100 emerging protests across the country.  One activist posted his frustration with finding any information regarding the protests on Twitter.  That got more retweets than any protest posting.

Concluding that the protests were not generating heated conversations among youth, it was easy to predict, early December 1, that attendance across the country would be low, with mostly the usual older folks.  Indeed, that was the case.  The largest of the 100 demonstrations was in Chicago, with about 450 in attendance.  The folks in Chicago all considered this a healthy turnout.  I received many emails from organizers in other states that were disappointed by the low attendance.

Chicago was the very first city in the country to post that an action would occur at 5:00 p.m. the evening after the announcement.  Organizers worked hard to create the event, led by Andy Thayer, whose leadership has become integral to almost all Chicago Left mass demonstrations.  Chicago also has almost every Left organization on a single organizational listserve.  This dramatically speeds up the time it takes to put a spontaneous project together.  Most cities don’t display as much cooperation among organizations as Chicago does.  Then again, most cities don’t have activists like Andy Thayer.  Andy doesn’t only take responsibility for doing what other activists don’t step up to do, but he executes those things with efficiency, professionalism and a creative flare.

How could other cities have encouraged larger numbers to attend their 100 demonstrations?  Chicago was a unique situation.  Though Twitter was not engaged, Andy relied upon Facebook extensively, even posting links to the other demonstrations around the country from his Facebook page.  A heavier reliance upon social media like Facebook by other city demonstrations might have had a positive effect.

Still, I don’t think the low numbers around the country were about what organizers could have done differently.  Activists that worked hard for Obama mostly did not show.  This included many faith-based, union and African-American activists.  Clearly, youth mostly were not engaged.  That leaves me wondering what youth in the United States would be inclined to twitter about as regards political change.  Furious Twitter activity around the Iran elections engaged a massive number of Americans.  The Afghanistan escalation jolted few.

What in America would compel a powerful Twitter response?

For several months now, the Republicans have been seeking to find a way to demonize the Obama Administration, experimenting with the words “socialist” and “fascist” to see which word seems more powerful at evoking fear.

“Fascist” suggests a one-party government controlled by a small elite, often with close ties to specific corporations.  Fascism is often characterized by an atmosphere composed of fear and reprisal.

“Socialist” seems to imply a government focused on the group instead of the individual, denying individuals their desire to do as they please while seeking ways to make the less economically advantaged individuals within the group more secure.  Implied is the denigration of individual rights.

In both cases, there is the implied “in” group and “out” group.  Republicans are seeking ways to have people who identify with being the out group identify with Republicans, who identify themselves as the out group.  Regarding fascism, Republicans work the meme that Democrats are in total control.  Declaring socialism, they imply that the individual has lost all ability to achieve success.

Republicans and Democrats are mirror images of each other in many ways, particularly as regards the military, military contracts, lobbying-based government, foreign relations and both parties agreeing on how…

Through the last four American administrations, the American financial system has been designed to be nontransparent to encourage the growth of unique investment vehicles. Lessons learned and legislated in the 1930s were unlearned and rewritten in an atmosphere hailing “free markets” as if that was something different from Social Darwinism. Increased stratification was the result. Evidently the embrace of supply side economics in the 1980s wasn’t alone enough to tell us we’d crossed a line suggesting that the merger of mythology and economics was not a good idea.

Kings of old were able to afford the best in entertainment, which included frequent visits from the most talented storytellers. Today we have to merely turn on the TV to experience finely crafted tales. One thing has changed. The powerful today hire wordsmiths to design tapestries of tales that support their controlling the looms of power, which they call free markets, when the markets are only free on TV.

Free markets are free of government oversight, free of transparency, free of union intervention, free of accountability, free of the social costs of equal pay for women and day care, free of safety constraints, free of the costs of environmental destruction and often…

Our uniqueness as a species may have more to do with our choice not to decide upon a specific mating strategy than those many other things that we believe are peculiarly human.

We observe the manifestation of heterochrony in society, neoteny and its reverse, through the two social structures that seem to manifest these two evolutionary trajectories. Neotenous, cooperative males and commanding, accelerating females reveal themselves in matrifocal or matristic social structures. A social structure with commanding, accelerated males and cooperative females inclines toward patriarchy or a patrifocal orientation.

Matrifocal and patrifocal social structures come with either commanding, high-testosterone males mating with cooperative, low-testosterone females or cooperative, low-testosterone males pairing with commanding, high-testosterone females.

Over time, in a matrifocal context, with males focused on artistic exhibition as opposed to hierarchical display, society mirrors the hormonal constellation of the cooperative males and commanding females, revealing a constellation of features characteristic of matrilineal, matristic or partnership societies. Society evolves in particular fashions with the female choosing her mate.

In a patrifocal context, with males striving for hierarchical ascendancy, offering enhanced procreation opportunities, with females cooperating with the winners, society mirrors the hormonal constellation of commanding males and cooperative females manifesting in a…

Among evolutionary biologists, there is an ongoing argument revolving around the specific location or levels among hierarchies of animals (gene, individual, group, species, multispecies community, etc.) where evolution most powerfully occurs. Richard Dawkins and the reductionist sociobiologists focus on the gene as the central station where selection has its greatest impact. Dawkins advocates suggest that no train leaves the station, no gene lives to procreate, that hasn’t first been provided clearance by an environment. Good genes can carry many passengers, many individuals that profit by owning them, and it is the genes that decide how individuals evolve.

Stephen J. Gould was Dawkins’ opposite. Instead of suggesting that evolution occurs at a single location, Gould argued that evolution was influenced by selection at multiple levels at the same time. Biologists often have a favorite scale of selective influence. Classically, evolution was believed to occur at the scale of the individual.

This argument is not an arcane argument. Recent discussions in evolutionary developmental biology focus on the influence of the environment on the individual before and after birth. A consensus is emerging that the environment does not just influence evolution by killing individuals that can’t compete, but that the environment helps install…

Integrally entwined in a political movement are the specific ways the movement’s practitioners engage in process and issue execution or how things get done and what gets focused on. The degree of congruency between processes used and issues emphasized has everything to do with political success.

The contemporary Right has a process characterized by an allegiance to the belief that the ends justify the means. Though this belief would seem to suggest that the issues are so important that any action justifies the goal, the opposite is true. What is occurring is that an emphasis is being placed upon process over the goal. Right Wing process, as it is mediated through its most heralded practitioners Lee, Atwater and Rove, is about success by any means that work. Being on top is the core principle of the Right Wing. Right Wing ideology has less to do with its various issues. The Right Wing is about winning. And so, the Right has been deeply process-oriented, a process congruent with its behavior, though we’ve often believed that it was the specific issues that were central to Right Wing core values. The issues, supporting corporations, supporting male control of the female body, supporting wealth…

“Humans and chimps are almost identical in structural gens, yet differ markedly in form and behavior. This paradox can be resolved by invoking a small genetic difference with profound effects—alterations in the regulatory system that slow down the general rate of development in humans. Heterochronic changes are regulatory changes; they require only an alteration in the timing of features already present.” (Gould, S.J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge: Belknap Press. p. 9)

Monkeying with our regulatory system evidently helped make us what we are. By engaging in neoteny, or the prolonging of infant states into the adults of descendants, we have evolved ourselves large brains, small jaws, a proclivity to wonder, a compulsion to play and an inclination to be dependent. Altering regulatory systems can have profound positive effects if creativity is your goal.

With the economy quivering on a brink, there has been no small amount of talk about the effects of the last generation’s adjustments in the regulatory system of the American economy. Much discussed is how much freedom large corporations are allowed and if transparency and accountability are necessary if large corporations prefer they not have to be so constrained. Social Darwinism has a new name. Free…

Some historians of culture have hypothesized that the great flood stories surfacing as early as the Sumarian Gilgamesh epic and later in the Old Testament are the written traces left from thousands of years of oral traditions describing an actual event. The event would be the creation of the Black Sea, when the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus and created in a geologic nanosecond a huge, new body of water. That geologic moment has been estimated to have lasted perhaps 2 years, the time it took to fill a basin formerly populated by thriving land based ecosystems and, so the story goes, human beings.

Radio and television, democratizing forces before co-option by corporations, offered an experience of the commons. Though these were one-to-many communications, content often served the many instead of the few. There was a shift as the few successfully guided the message of media to be about how profits could be best achieved.

Radio and television learned to encourage a common frame of reference–a personality-based consumer culture–that offered none of the experience of the commons. Producer/advertiser and consumer formed an exhibition/evaluation feedback loop, not unlike the dynamics of runaway sexual selection. Producers/advertisers created mountains of consumables as consumers…

There is this strange way that the abandonment of all rules, ethics and morals is featured by both the enlightened, spiritually accomplished master and neo-conservative, capitalist elite. We as a society are walking both paths. It has to do with an understanding that everything is relative.

Several years ago I ended up at a Leo Burnett executive’s Christmas party in the home of the head of that agency. Our daughter was part of a small high school choral ensemble with the CEO’s son, Phil. Marcia and I had known Phil for maybe ten years. A high school student, Phil was training me in his spare time to design websites. I was starting a business in web design. Marcia and I were offered the opportunity to listen/watch the performance. The music was charming and beautiful.

Still, it felt creepy. But as is usually the case in social situations where I feel foreign to the scene, I concentrated on the food. In the room were some of the most creative people in the United States, artists dedicated to the craft of message-making to accomplish corporate goals. The chorus began singing, beginning with the number “Let It Snow.” At the conclusion of the…

When the first stories were told, perhaps they were gestured as in charades. Maybe the stories were danced. At some point, the listeners or audience began to create pictures in response to the gestures, dances or words. From the start, it would have been vital to differentiate the possible from the real, the imaginary from the what really happened, what was desired from what occurred.

I expect those folks that had difficulty telling the imaginary from the sense-based world did not often live to procreate. The transition to a gesture or oral language that was grounded in a fertile imagination was no doubt difficult for many. Imagine a civilization of two- and three-year-olds.

In high school gym class, the boys attending the swimming unit at New Trier were all required to swim laps naked. We showered before class, jumped into the pool with no suits and proceeded to paddle back and forth with no clothes on. The school didn’t have to pay for suits and laundry. It was humiliating. It was what it was.

Mr. Robertson was the swim coach and the tyrant of the New Trier pool. Mr. Wolf was his assistant. Their barked commands echoed around the cement,…

Transparency is not much embraced by the economic powers that be. Corporations and the agencies of government that represent their interests have been pushing hard for opaque economic governance for more than 30 years. It’s easier to perform the tricks of the trade when you control the stage.

“Deregulation” is the word used to suggest the benefits of letting corporations make money without the burden of accountability. We’ve gone about as far as deregulation can carry us. The federal government has been replaced by corporate representatives. Having legislated that corporations can do what they feel is best for corporations and the country, corporations have decided what is best for them is to control the country. Not a big surprise there.

Having deregulated transparency, we’ve obfuscated the reality that more knowledge is a good thing. Watching the dissolution of the economy, we’re realizing again the benefits of keeping government and corporations separate. We went through this struggle early in the preceding century.

My colleagues and I design network and coalition structures. This work goes with the territory of preparing web applications that manage the business and communications of networks and coalitions. One of the blessings of the new online communications technologies…

Perhaps I was six or seven years old. I’m not sure. It was at the Standard Club in downtown Chicago around 1960. There was a magic show for the children while the adults socialized. I was sitting on the floor with the other kids watching the magician pull rabbits out of hats. I was terrified. I was terrified I’d be called upon to assist after it became clear he was picking kids to help. I’d made a strategic blunder by sitting toward the front. Show over, I was deeply relieved I’d made it through without having to stand in front of all the sitting kids and risking being laughed at for being stupid.

I loathed front rows. My goal in groups was to be invisible.

My grandparents were members of country clubs and the downtown Standard Club. My mother’s mom and her husband lived in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side and so traveled to Ravisloe in the southern suburbs to relax with friends. Dad’s parents lived in the northern suburb of Glencoe and frequently took my sisters and me to Lake Shore Country Club farther north down Sheridan Road. Lake Shore Country Club had a swimming pool and a…