Budget cuts and lost leadership in science

For the proud people who have slashed the budget of the National Institute of Health, which has traditionally supplied funding for many a science researcher, there's a sad consequence. I was doing some research on bladder cancer today and found that most of the new publications in this field, the latest research, is coming out of...China. Yup.

Most global pharmaceutical companies won't allow the use of publications from Asia to support their promotions in the US, presumably because they're substandard. I am starting to question that. From what I saw today of the latest research in science and medicine, the future is not owned by the US anymore.

Is boosting incomes for the top 1% of earners (their incomes recently doubled under the Republicans, while everyone else's went down) and helping Wall Street pay record bonuses during its financial crisis really more important than funding science research? Is allowing GE to pay no income tax and even receive a massive tax refund from American taxpayers anything short of stupid? What happened to representative government, one person one vote? Lobbyists have enough money to corrupt our government, and slowly eliminate any semblance of a democracy over here.

We are watching the decline of America, like Rome, falling from within.

Changing world of Japan: Part 1

Hokkaido, Japan, November 2010.

What a changed country. Wow. I’ve been in Sapporo a week now. It still has the warmth, the womb-like gentleness, the socially engrained nervousness, the wonderful but never-spicy food, the clean streets that have no garbage cans, the employees of almost any business hustling around in a way that would make you look like a brown-noser in the US. All that’s still here. But the money is gone.

I was at a coin laundry today and checked out a store nearby, selling used household goods. Used! I don’t remember anything like this when I was in Japan 12 years ago, especially for clothing. But there they were, racks of winter coats for $5, yukatas for $4, even shoes. Old stereos, broken down acoustic guitars, plates, kitchen storage units, gloves, it was all there for sale, cheap. Some traditions of Japan remained as it all seemed far cleaner that you’d find in a Salvation Army or other second-hand shops in the US.

I talked with a guy at the laundry about how shocked I was to see this and he said that “recycle shops” started coming into Sapporo about 3 years ago. Nothing new in the US, where we’ve always bought and sold stuff that was used. But in Japan? When people bought new stuff, the old went out on the street. Many of my contemporaries in the 1990s furnished their abodes with VCRs, TVs, video cameras, rice cookers, heaters, etc from the street. Me, too. Perfectly good stuff that no one has enough space to store in Japan so on the street it goes. There was an enterprising foreigner who drove a truck around on garbage days and picked up perfectly good used stuff and sold it from a store, mostly to foreigners I think. No one else was doing it and he had no competition as far as I remember. It just didn’t exist in Japan 12 years ago.

There was an antique-oriented outdoor flea market in Tokyo. Among 100-year-old scrolls and carvings and such, it sold used kimonos and yukatas, again, mostly to foreigners I think. They were as low as $10, and the kind that often cost $1000-$5000 new but were of no use after the special occasion they were made for was over. Why so cheap? The spirit of the person who wore them was still in the clothes, is what I was told. But now? They even have shoe stores selling used shoes. A lot of them. The guy I was talking to said that there were many, many stores selling used items now. The economy has gotten so bad over here that even cultural taboos about wearing someone else’s clothing are disappearing? Wow.

Speaking of disappearing, I stopped by the Sapporo museum of modern art today and saw an incredible exhibit by a Hokkaido artist named Norihiro Nakae. It was called “Beyond Time” and consisted of just 3 main installations that really hit me with their depth. Apparently he felt that the “spirit” of Hokkaido has pretty much disappeared, and gone up to the stars somewhere. And that we need to listen to the spirits of people who have come before us, that they have something to say. Remember what a plaster cast looks like of your teeth? He used about 3,500 of them, given to him by a dentist friend, all of them painted black. So personal, so undeniably individual and human, every single set of teeth different from the one beside it. And an implied sense of death, as natural. There were also huge 30-foot-high square-ish wooden spikes, also painted black, reaching toward the sky. Toward the stars. A few fake mummies in muted but colorful wrappings lay scattered about. The lights would come up about every 20 seconds or so, and then dim back down. It felt so tangible, like something in this world is changing, truly, and that maybe a certain kind of spirit is dying. With a new sense of the world coming into being?

The lights coming up and down really felt like the light of each person’s life, so temporary, so brief, on this planet. And at a time when structures of what we have come to accept as normal in our era, are failing left and right big time. Things we take for granted in terms of money and government and employment are hardly stable, and maybe about to become dramatically more unstable. Truly disappearing before our eyes to make room for something unknowable, something truly new.

I was talking with an old friend on the phone about the recent currency wars, with China using its clout to make the yen too strong for Japanese goods to compete with Chinese goods, and the dollar too weak to remain the world currency much longer. You feel it every time you buy something over here. The prices are generally cheaper than they were 12 years ago (unlike prices in the US!), but the exchange rate to the dollar into yen is awful, the worst in 20 years. The deflation balances most of this out, so it’s still reasonable to eat a meal or stay at a hot spring resort. But the lower sticker price is weird to see. And kind of unsettling, actually.

In case you didn’t know, I’m in Japan for 5 weeks with a show from NYC. I’m mostly doing sound, mixing 6 singers and a piano for an Irving Berlin song and dance revue. It’s excellent, by the way. Great singers, dancers, and actors, every one of them, the archetypical Broadway “triple threat.” One friend said maybe that’s what people over here need right now, something happy. Like people needed Fred Astaire movies about the ultra rich in the 1930s?

Talk about investing in gold seems to have spread to many circles, including actors. Maybe a sense of doubt in any currency at all is gaining steam. If this accelerates to panic level and currencies lose their value worldwide the way the deutschmark did before WWII, our current systems of trade break down. As would civilized behavior in obtaining the goods needed for survival on a day-to-day basis. Buying a gun isn’t a solution because you can’t defend against hordes of desperate people who also have guns. Joining an army for shared protection from others, almost like warring tribes in the era of cave men, seems the inevitable conclusion for survival if society truly does break down.

Actually, all this doom and gloom talk seems like just another way of speaking about an old world falling away, and a new world emerging. Which does seem inevitable to me, as well as the current structures fighting to keep their status quo alive for as long as possible. Nakae’s sculpture installations seemed to speak to this in some strange way and it’s still rattling through my brain. There was something very deep he tapped into, and I think I tapped in when I saw it. And if this is just the paranoid ramblings of a lost person who is just not plugged into his own life enough in November 2010, I will be very happy. But it does not feel that way right now. Time to buy gold?

futurists data, plus a rant on big biz vs democracy

This is a rant from an email I sent to a friend in Japan. He wanted to use parts of it in his newletter at www.jasonkelly.com so I thought, okay, I guess it's time to become a blogger! Here we go...

...Oh yes, life still happens, although i have a growing ominous feeling. Before the crash of 2008 Saatchi had hired a couple of futurists to talk about trends. They do all their own research, don't use the media or the government. They told us the financial world would melt down and it would start with subprime. They told us stocks would follow suit. They told us a lot of things that seemed so outrageous when the Dow was at 13 or 14k that most of us just emerged from their presentation a little shaken but took no action. They were dead right. Their final conclusion was about the new American, the new normal, if you will. They said that the things we take for granted now, like a 5-day work week, 2 weeks vacation, pensions, etc will be gone. Gone. That the new normal will include working several jobs just to survive, including weekends, and no paid vacations. I hope they are wrong about that, but as the financial collapse
seems to be more and more inevitable, they might be right.

I hate to think in terms of survivalist tactics, but it's hard not to if you think ahead too much. I have faith in the inventiveness and flexibility of Americans, in particular, to adapt and thrive and invent in any condition. But the repression of big biz is making America less and less a place of innovation, and more and more a place like the England of land barons and serfs that the first American's came from. 4 holding companies for nearly all the ad agencies in the world? Less than 10 media organizations (rather than over 100)? The consolidation list goes on and on. I see Obama fighting so hard for so many right things for this country, but the size and scale of biz influence are so gargantuan that government becomes irrelevant, and with it, so do the principles of government, be they democracy or otherwise. The disruption of humanity is mostly irrelevant because they are here to make $, because that's how they live and grow, or die.

There doesn't seem to be any middle ground, any steady state, like there was for centuries. Everything is either growing or dying, and at a much faster pace than we can imagine. Even my industry. I am so glad to have gotten out of print work and into digital, because it's growing and print is dying. The ipad and other innovations are hurrying that transition. And this is happening in every aspect of the planet. My hope is that the efforts Obama is making to encourage investment in clean energy (do we really need to give big oil tax credits, for cris sake??!!) and innovate healthcare and so many other things don't meet the fate of low incentive and therefore low innovation and efficiency (like the post office). It's a slippery issue, because if you let biz do what they do, they will innovate most of humanity into a lower quality of life, as seen since the big deregulation swing started by Reagan. The mafia is very profitable because it does not answer to regulations. But is it innovative? Does it contribute to society? About as much as the Microsoft stranglehold that started with buying all the competition, to eliminate them. Apple is doing the same thing, by the way. Lala.com was a nice alternative to itunes that I liked and it was growing like crazy. Apple bought them. Apple closed them down last month. Same tactics.

I think it's the downfall of capitalism that biz can get so big that it can buy it's way out of competition, regulations, antitrust laws and such. Wait till you see what happens when AT&T, Verizon and Comcast decide that movies not made by one of their subsidiaries (Disney, Sony, etc) aren't going to be as accessible as their content. No distribution equals no competition. Or maybe "limited" just for appearances. They are posturing to do exactly this and now control 70% of internet access in the US. Nancy (woman I've been dating who is head of government relations for SAG) has been working with Obama and lobbyists to try and keep net neutrality and such. But what happens when biz gets too big, is that they're simply outspent.

Everyone is so against government regulation, but they seem to forget what happens when you have industry regulation. Oil killed innovation in alternative energy. A judge just ruled that the moratorium on drilling until a safety study is complete is wrong, and many Republicans are back to drill, baby, drill. Yes to short-term $, not vision. Ever seen "Who killed the electric car?"? Great documentary from 15 years ago, and the same forces are there, and even stronger. Fast Food nation spells it out sooooo clearly, as well.

I don't know, man, we live in interesting times, and a big readjustment seems like it's in the making. Buying property is maybe the only sane thing to do. But I don't think anything or anyone is safe, to tell you the truth. Once we all see that fact, maybe there's hope. But right now, let's catch more tuna because they'll be gone tomorrow is the attitude. The self-reliant individualistic mantra has run it's course in some aspect anyway. Or maybe it just needs modification for our interdependency.