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The other day I was contacted by one of Frans Johansson’s people, Kristian Ribberström who blogs at Stories From the Intersection and he asked me, as I have blogged on The Medici Effect a number of times, to mention the upcoming The Medici Summit on innovation and creativity to my readers. A description by Johansson:

“It is also high-noon time for me to announce what promises to be an amazing event! The Medici Summit on March 3^rd and 4^th next year will be unusual in its structure, exciting, inspiring and just plain fun. It is now open for registration and I am really very excited about this. It has long been a desire of mine to put together a conference that mimics the Medici Effect where people can come in with their own ideas and leave with those ideas recombined with someone else’s. There will be awesome speakers and plenty of opportunity to connect with others (some of them will be surprises and are not outlined exactly in the schedule). Very, very excited about this one! It is open for registration right now so head over there and register“

This year, Mrs. Zen and I hosted Christmas Eve for my relations. Though it was not a maximum possible turnout for a variety of reasons it was still a significant affair as Mrs. Zen believes in a good presentation and a menu cooked from scratch ( as a result, we entertain maybe once every three or four years – LOL!). A festive time was had by all. Or…possibly except one.

As it turns out, a gift was left behind. Or more correctly, abandoned. It appears to be a kind of sweater, perhaps one worn by an upscale shepherd or by a Scottish noble in Braveheart. To augment this woolen tunic, the gift-giver guiltily included an off-brand colonge of some kind, one marketed to young urban men of limited means who make a point to wear baggy jeans that sit low on their posterior so as to reveal a large portion of their underpants (I suspect a re-gifting on this aspect).

We have polled everyone in attendance and no one will cop to having received this interesting juxtaposition of merchandise. Or to have given it either. Whoever received it had the foresight (or anxious sense of shame) to have methodically  peeled off the incriminating gift tag before slinking away into the night.

Is it just me or is this some kind of common holiday hazard ?

Blogfriend Charles Cameron left the following comment on my knowledge expertise post but I’m promoting it here ( while I munch a quick bite to eat and digest his remarks) because it will resonate with the interests of a number of my other readers.

I’ll update later tonight with a response:

“I’d like to propose that the reason, as you say, that “a space in which people from diverse fields of expertise can get together to exchange ideas” is so powerful isn’t because the more “people” the merrier – its because the more “diverse fields” the merrier.

Each new expert, if expert in one field, brings one new family of “frames” together, and it is the viewing of the known facts (and occasional anomalies) in new frames that provides the unexpected glimpses.  So that in fact the most useful expertise would be in (almost content free) frames – in knowing a wide variety of angles from which to look at each situation.

But I’d like to take this farther, and then deeper.

I’m speaking of frames, but those are fairly easily gathered by a decent collector, since they don’t on the whole challenge people’s existing emotions – the assumptions which exemplify our worldviews, to which we tend to be emotionally attached, are harder to get at – and deeper still there the archetypes in which our entire sense of reality is anchored, shifts in which, like psychedelic drug experiences, shake us to the foundations.

For a practical minded child of the enlightenment to question some position proposed by John Cain or Hillary Clinton is not too difficult. To admit one’s own foolishness after offering unwanted though well-intentioned advice to a confirmed alcoholic is harder. But to question the law of cause and effect as commonly understood seems, well, suicidal.

And yet that’s what, for instance, al-Ghazali did, and the Islamic world is still halfway of the opinion that he is right.  As an author under the pseudonym Spengler put it in a recent article for Asia Times:

There are no intermediate causes, in the sense of laws of nature. Mars traverses an ellipse around the sun not because God has instituted laws of motion that require Mars to traverse an ellipse, but because Allah at every instant directs the angular velocity of Mars. … Allah is everywhere doing everything at all times. He sets the spin on every electron, measures the jump of every flea, the frequency of every sneeze.

That’s a hard one for us to swallow, as is the neo-Platonist view – popular with Marcilio Ficino, the leading light of the Platonic Academy in Medici Florence – expressed here by Plotinus, (and echoed by Shakespeare in a familiar phrase):

Men directing their weapons against each other- under doom of death yet neatly lined up to fight as in the pyrrhic sword-dances of their sport – this is enough to tell us that all human intentions are but play, that death is nothing terrible, that to die in a war or in a fight is but to taste a little beforehand what old age has in store, to go away earlier and come back the sooner. … Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing.

These views – that all the world’s a play, that each sparrow falling, each arrow or bullet fired, each airplane tilted towards a distant tower is held between the fingers of a God – they seem unnatural to us, they are foreign, medieval we c all them, archaic even – and yet the hold some terrible compulsion for us, they are the stuff of dreams, and for those whose “niveau mentale” is less firmly fixed in the twenty-first century and its certainties, they can unleash a fervor we find it hard to understand.

My point in quoting al-Ghazali and Plotinus is to show, as Erich Auerbach showed in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, that realities at odds with what seems like reality to us have significant histories and can inspire powerful emotions and impassioned acts that leave our western speculative imaginations standing in their dust.

The warfare of the Aztecs, the berserkers seeking Valhalla, and most significantly today, the Islamists seeking martyrdom – these are not “rational actors” in a sense that tweaking our Prisoners Dilemma tables will not address.

To know them, we must think not merely our of the box but out of boxes, take not just the road less traveled but a path so overgrown a machete is required to cut it, and no one can say whether it was a path before, or is new found land, a haunt of owls or badgers, or an habitation of ghosts… a trackless track as zen might call it, crossing the Cartesian rift between brain and mind, passing between real and imaginal, fact and myth, story and history as easily as we might pass between Colorado and Wyoming.

All this requires a sort of intellectual courage … and a poetic / archaic cast of mind.

Well, that’s one end of an Ariadne’s thread…

I hope to follow the thread deeper into the labyrinth in upcoming posts.”

Cheryl “CKR” Rofer of Whirledview, who initiated the Nuclear Policy “Blog Tank” challenge, skillfully brought the series to a summative conclusion with a second round-up and then a consensus post. I’d like to take a moment to look at both posts by CKR:

“The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy – Pulling It Together”

“The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy – The Consensus Statement”

While I have previously linked to the contributions from Dave Schuler and Charles Cameron, Cheryl’s first post above featured several other bloggers to whom I would like to draw attention with a brief excerpt:

Cernig – “America’s Nuclear Policy

“I’ve written before that trying to apply the Cold War assumptions of nuclear retaliation to assymetrical stateless actors is like running with nuclear scissors. it’s far more likely that you’ll fall and injure yourself or some innocent in a messy way than accidentally stab the one murderer in a crowd.

Jason suggests a posture based around a minimum deterrent force, I assume involving only a couple of hundred warheads, “prioritizing deployment on submarines which are impervious to any comprehensive first strike or pre-emptive attack.” I think that’s a good first step but would then move on to a “Virtual Swords” concept as explained by Jeffrey Lewis. Dr Lewis quotes an article from a friend of his which notes this isn’t a new idea”

PoliGazette – “Of Linus and Nuclear Weapons”

“So the fundamental question that must begin the debate over a post-Cold War nuclear weapons policy in the U.S. is: Can nuclear weapons enhance U.S. security, and if so, how? General Lee Butler, retired former commander of the United States’ nuclear weapons forces, has a surprising answer: Nuclear weapons in actuality provide very limited contributions to U.S. national security. The reason is that nuclear weapons are politically and militarily virtually unusable.”

Wampum – “Packages and Packaging”

“First, the point made by John Kerry in 2004 remains — the greatest threat to the United States (as well as Japan, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, Europe, Canada, and the Russian Federation) is the risk that the existing stockpiles of devices and fissile materials will eventually be re-purposed, and the better policy is to allocate resources nominally reducing that risk model, up to and including unilateral partial disarmament. The alternative “single weapon” risk model was articulated in the same debate by George W. Bush, and independently by Peter Daou’s sometime employers, Mssrs. Ted Turner, Sam Nunn, Warren Buffett and others, and without loss of generality, by the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator proponents.

Restated, the greatest quantifiable risk has no agency, and cannot be “deterred” or engaged in human discourse. It is rust. Sensor failure. False alarm. The next greatest quantifiable risk has agency, but also cannot be “deterred” or engaged in political discourse. It is covert or overt expropriation of devices or fissiles. Restated, it is sensor and inventory control failure”

 Rofer did an excellent job summing up the consensus points in a discussion of nuclear weapons policy that featured bloggers with a wide spread of political and philosophical positions:

“Overview
The bloggers who have contributed to this blog-tank range in views across the center of the political and hawkishness spectra. Nonetheless, we have achieved a fair degree of consensus.

Nuclear weapons strategy is part of a broader US military and international relations strategy, but it can be discussed by itself. To some degree, development of all these levels of strategy is iterative.

We need to identify short-term and long-term goals and give each its appropriate place. While abolition of nuclear weapons may be a long-term goal, making it too immediate can be counterproductive.

Nuclear weapons have a paradoxical relationship to power. They cannot be used, but their threat is potent. If a nation is tied too closely to a requirement to retaliate, its options may in fact be limited.

Nations that have nuclear weapons want to preserve their exclusivity, but that desire may increase the valuation of nuclear weapons by other nations.”

Read the rest here.

A further comment, on Cheryl’s “Blog Tank” concept. Her format was important in its’ own right:

 This experience is one that bears repeating; and similar things have been called for by others, notably Michael Tanji who is part of the effort by Threatswatch.org to become a “Think Tank 2.0“. The blogosphere, for it’s many faults and idiosyncratic subculture, has matured to the point that there are enough experts and gifted amateurs that a person could probably organize an impressive intellectual “swarm” on nearly any topic under the sun in fairly short order. Just by asking folks of intelligence and goodwill to help.

To paraphrase an old revolutionary, brainpower is lying in the streets for the taking.

I noticed today that the spam filter had caught some legitimate comments that should have simply been held for moderation due to having more than two links embedded.

For those who have not seen their comment appear,  you have my apology and  can rest assured that I did not delete or censor you. If it happens in the future, drop me a note so I can mark you as “not spam” in the filter plug-in.