Creativity

Chapter 18 in my ongoing quest to meanderingly pedanticize the world.

I've been brooding over the nature of creativity since I noticed a disconnect between two different broad usages of the word. If I say Bob is creative, I can mean that he:

1. creates things.

or

2. is imaginative.

The first, I imagine, is closer to the roots of the word, but the second is much more common. If I tell you that I know a guy named Bob and that he's very creative, you would probably imagine somebody with unique style, an artist's flair for the new and different, and a certain unrealistic and colorful view on life. At least that's the image I get.

The interesting thing is that being creative in this way doesn't say anything about one's actual creation of anything. Engineers--not everyone's creative archetype--create things all the time, but colorful creative personalities might actually create nothing. I'm not arguing that this is in any way wrong--language can make whatever it wants out of the words we use--but the distinction is interesting because it shows how much we culturally evaluate creativity as an attitude or personality and not as a process of creation.

I came upon this disconnect while trying to label myself [a fantastic waste of time]. I have always felt a profound motivation to make things--music, photographs, drawings, snowflakes, model rockets, electronics, dams, forts, holes, gardens, websites, food, books, songs, code, solutions, essays, babies. But calling that "creativity" implies a lot of things which--regardless of whether they are true or not--have nothing to do with this creative impulse. So, I want a way to think of these two ideas--creation and imagination--independently.

I imagine there is a continuum of possible "amounts" of each of these two types of creativity which each person has. And I doubt they're correlated. And no doubt a large portion of the world's more successful artists, scientists, architects, musicians, chefs, engineers, lawyers, contractors, entrepreneurs, and criminals have decent amounts of both. I can't think of many situations where creativity wouldn't help performance, and it is basically a uniformly recognized [but soft] virtue.

Synthesizing these two ideas, we get creativity as a process of imagination motivating creation. This is probably what I would like the word creativity to express. Take, for example, the three processes of creation that I've noticed in my own life and by observation, with Bob as proxy. These represent the three general paths whereby a new thing can come into existence.

1. Inspiration lands in Bob's head. He follows it.

2. Bob has some good ideas. He uses talent, work, and time to stitch them together into something.

3. Bob sits down with no ideas but with a goal to make something. He forces it into existence with no particular inspiration, using only his skills and concerted effort.

It would be fair to say that, in a sense, the first path is the "higher" path. But there's nothing in essence wrong with the third approach--it just seems less likely to produce remarkable results. In fact, I imagine that the bulk of the creation that is done is of the third type; crank the stuff out because somebody will buy it, instead of sell it because it's worth buying. This Dell PC that I'm typing on right now is a result of that approach, so I shouldn't complain too loudly. That being said, the third path is less creative [by my definition].

Anybody who has made an effort to create has probably experienced each of these three states. You can't control inspiration [whatever that is] so if you're regularly driven to create something you'll use the third method at least some of the time. Brahms did--he threw away huge amounts of music that he didn't feel met his standards, a fact which many musicians bemoan but I am grateful for. So it's nothing to be ashamed of--unless your entire career is the mass production of forced-into-existence soulless pieces of corporate detritus. Then you should be ashamed [but you wouldn't have lasted this far into this post if that was you].

And what about the crucial element of creativity, uniqueness? It's essential to any of these three steps. If it's not original, it's not creation you're doing, it's mimicry. And don't get me wrong, mimicry has its place too--every band has its own sound [Beatles respectfully excepted]. But even to accomplish creation of the third kind requires something new. I like to remind myself often though that uniqueness is not a measure of creativity any more than sheer bulk of output is. Anybody can do something that has never been done before--I just picked my ear with a bottle of contact solution, balanced my salsa bowl on my cup and then blogged about it--but that doesn't mean it's an expression of creativity. I feel that this is the major trap that people fall into when they run out of inspiration: they replace it with idea-free experimentation [see: Wild Honey Pie].

There is no conclusion. But I feel like I understand creativity better--perhaps not in the cognitive sense but in the psychological sense. The best summation I can make is this:

Creativity is imagination which motivates creation. The more inspiration is involved the better the result. Creativity motivates experimentation and creates unique results, but does not come from them.

At last!

Wooo hoooo!

Killing in the name of

[by mandamommy and trogonpete]

From our perspective, there are two distinct questions pertaining to the Iraq war that are often lumped together.  The first is whether we were right to invade in the first place.  The second question is what we do now that we’re in.  We believe that the first question needs to be answered first, because it necessarily motivates the answer to the second question.

Invasion:

The original justification for invading Iraq is often cited this way:  Iraq seemed to be producing weapons of mass destruction.  The theory was that part of our war on terrorism included pre-emptive strikes against terrorists likely to attack the US. 

But the actual original justification predated 9/11 and had nothing to do with terrorism.  The neoconservative group Project for a New American Century [PNAC] sent a letter in 1998 to President Clinton urging a strategy aimed at “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”  The group believed in the establishing of an “American empire” and proposed that American dominance in the 21^st century should be maintained by "fight[ing] and decisively win[ning] multiple, simultaneous major theater wars."  The main goal of the group was to convince the government to invade Iraq. 

So who is the PNAC?  Well, you might have heard of Dick Cheney.  And Donald Rumsfeld.  And 15 other well-known names later part of the Bush administration.  Nearly everybody advising Bush after 9/11 were members of the PNAC, a group that had a clear and public agenda of bringing war to Iraq for the purpose of maintaining American “hegemony.”  These are the very same people who attempted to discredit the entire CIA after the intelligence agency proved that there was no WMD threat from Iraq. 

10 days after George Bush took office he instructed his staff to begin drawing up plans for an invasion of Iraq.

Additionally, it is now well documented that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld lied about the WMD’s and misled the American people about Iraq being part of the war on terror.  There were no WMD’s, and the administration knew it.  Again, this much is well documented [along with almost 1000 other lies told between 2001 and 2003 by the Bush administration about the threat Iraq posed to the US, according to the Center for Public Integrity].

As far as the war on terror was concerned, bin Laden and Saddam were enemies; Saddam represented the secular Islamic ideal so repugnant to fundamentalists like bin Laden, and Saddam considered bin Laden a—well, terrorist.  Additionally, there never was any possibility that Saddam was in the terrorism business—he was a cruel dictator, but he wasn’t interested in flying planes into American buildings.

But the administration said Saddam had WMD’s and that these WMD’s could be used as weapons of terror on American soil.  Donald Rumsfeld, as the Secretary of Defense, made it clear that what was at stake in Iraq was the potential for Saddam to repeat 9/11 but on a much larger scale.  Again, this is a deliberate lie; Saddam never had any connection to al Qaeda and had no interest in terror operations in the US. 

So we invaded Iraq.

The interesting footnote here is that many supporters of the war now cite how bad Saddam was and what a service we have done to the world in getting rid of him.  But what about Robert Mugabe?  What about Kim Jong-il? Than Shwe?  Hu Jintau?  Sayyid Ali Khamenei?  And there’s no way Saddam was worse than Omar al-Bashir.  Should we invade Zimbabwe, North Korea, Myanmar, China, Iran and Sudan in order to depose tyrants?  Is that our role?  If so, why aren’t we doing it?

We believe—as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—that we should “renounce war and proclaim peace.” [D&C 98:16]  War is justifiable only in cases when it is necessary to defend our families [Alma 43:47] and plausibly our rights and freedoms [akin to Alma 48:10].  War is also a purely defensive means of preservation [Alma 48:14] and even pre-emptive war is expressly forbidden, even in cases where a pre-emptive strike would prevent a terrorist  attack [3 Nephi 3:20-21].  Modern scriptures clearly forbid the invasion of Iraq and the prophesies concerning the failure of offensive endeavors are applicable. 

[Each of these scriptures pertains to a situation analogous to the position we were in; the saints in Missouri wanted to take the fight to their persecutors and the Lord forbad it, the Nephites wanted to pre-emptively attack the terrorist Gadianton robbers but were forbidden.  We believe that the inclusion of these councils in the scriptures is very strong council for us and pertains to our government as well.]

This is an unjust war, founded on a thousand lies and violating basic morality.

The immorality of the invasion is key to the discussion about what we do now:

A much more complicated question is what we should do now that we’re in Iraq.  It is very important at this time to step back and admit that nobody—nobody anywhere—has any idea what the future holds.  The military experts told us the war would be quick, painless and easy.  They were wrong.  The civilian experts said the surge would only exacerbate the violence.  They were wrong.  So any time a politician says something like “setting a timetable will plunge Iraq into a civil war” or “the fighting will never continue as long as we’re there,” we shouldn’t believe it for a second.  The truth is that nobody knows and even the best analysis is a guess.

Politicians also like to talk about “winning” and “losing” the war.  This is pure propaganda.  It is meaningless.  In a sense, we have already lost: we lost over 4,000 American soldiers—significantly more than the number of civilians lost in 9/11—we lost our moral standing in the world, we lost trillions of dollars, we lost the opportunity to capture or kill the terrorists responsible for 9/11, we lost trust in our government, and our government lost the trust of the world.  We lost our national integrity.  We created a country full of destitute anti-American terrorists where once there was a country of poor repressed farmers.  A million Iraqis lost their lives.  Every day we stay we lose more.  The only metric of victory in a war like this one is preventing further losses.

This is where the immorality of the invasion comes to play.  Having losses does not imply a war is lost.  World War II was a victory in the sense that Hitler’s ambition at global domination was ended, and Americans had to pay dearly.  But when the cause that these troops are fighting for is an ignorant, arrogant global domination scheme dreamed up by a few radical ideologues in the government, when “dying in vain” becomes propaganda for dying for oil and power, when planning to save American lives is branded “unpatriotic” and “defeat,” then we have lost.  But neither Saddam Hussein nor Osama bin Laden beat us.  We just lost.

Still, it would be clearly irresponsible of America to just pack up and leave.  The infrastructure needs to be rebuilt.  We need to make sure the Iraqi army is competent enough to prevent a plunge into anarchy.  That’s why we need to stay.  But we must stop the bleeding as soon as possible.  This means setting a firm goal with the government of Iraq after which they will be on their own, then get out.  Every day we spend there the more we lose.  An open-ended policy seems foolish; with our tax dollars flowing into the country, what great motivation does the government of Iraq have to pick up the slack themselves?  With no carrot and no stick, the donkey ain’t moving. 

Of course we’re not experts.  We know very little and understand less.  But we do know that the invasion was wrong.  And that fact alone compels us to want out—the best way to repent, we believe, is to stop sinning.  That’s a good first step.

Deceit and ... Silliness

For anybody who may have doubted that Palin really buys the McCain campaign's garbage about the proximity of Russia to Alaska giving her foreign policy experience, there's this:

COURIC: You've cited Alaska's proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

PALIN: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land-- boundary that we have with-- Canada. It-- it's funny that a comment like that was-- kind of made to-- cari-- I don't know, you know? Reporters--

COURIC: Mock?

PALIN: Yeah, mocked, I guess that's the word, yeah.

COURIC: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.

PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our-- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia--

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.


By those qualifications, the governer of Missouri has foreign policy experience because the B2's used to bomb Iraq in 2003 flew out of an air base there. Again, she's claiming experience from what the military is doing in Alaska; it has nothing to do with her.

Read that carefully a couple times. It's disturbing.

Deceit and Outrage

Guy walks into a job interview. Interviewer asks if he feels he's sufficiently educated for the job.

GUY: "Well, I grew up in Oakland. Berkeley and Oakland are neighbors."

INTERVIEWER: "What knowledge did you obtain due to your proximity to Berkeley?"

GUY: "Oakland and Berkeley are neighbors, and there's even a hill in Oakland you can climb and actually see the Berkeley tower."

INTERVIEWER: "What knowledge does that give you?"

GUY: "Well, it means it's a small world."

Does he get the job? Of course not. Even if the job required no special schooling, the sheer audacity of the bald deceit involved in Guy's claim to education would disqualify him from any job in the eyes of a self-respecting interviewer. It's downright offensive. If Guy expected the interviewer to buy that, what does he think of the interviewer's intelligence? And can the interviewer expect him to be an honest employee?

Here's another story, even more ludicrous, you may have heard this one:

SARAH PALIN: "...And, Charlie, you're in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They're very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor."

CHARLES GIBSON, ABC NEWS: "What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?"

PALIN: "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."

GIBSON: "What insight does that give you into what they're doing in Georgia?"

PALIN: "Well, I'm giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia..."

Before you rush in and claim that these two stories are not perfectly analogous, let me say that you're right. Palin is much much worse than Guy. There is a decent probability that Guy, growing up in Oakland, benefited from some small cultural trickle-down from the [relatively] nearby university. It is even likely that Guy has been to Berkeley. But Palin has never seen Russia, she's never been there, she's never interacted with diplomats from there, she's never dealt with Russian-American common interests in the region, there is no Russian foreign policy trickle-down floating across the Bering Strait, and she surely hasn't picked up any clues to Russian motivations for the invasion of a small democracy 5,000 miles away. Guy was just trying to deceive the interviewer to get a job. Palin? The entire country.



Before I analyze her comments further, let me make one thing clear: I'm not currently interested in the question of whether Sarah Palin is qualified to be VP. What interests me is the culture of deceit in the McCain-Palin campaign that this story symbolizes. The campaign and even John McCain himself have repeated this exact same argument on national TV. This is not a poor choice of words by a candidate under duress; it is apparently a coordinated talking point within the campaign designed to convince voters that Palin is experienced enough in foreign affairs to be VP and, by extension, P. Yet it would be safe to claim that both Palin and McCain understand the deceit inherent in this claim; Palin certainly understands that she never interacted with Russia in any way as Governor of Alaska. But she apparently has no qualms feeding this story to the public. America hasn't seen somebody this comfortable deceiving us since... well, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

Let me be again be clear: I'm not accusing Palin of lying. I'm [re-]documenting her deceit. Let's analyze her claims in detail:

Start in Sarah Palin's hometown of Wasilla. Drive to Anchorage and board a plane. Fly 500 miles over completely uninhabited wilderness to the town of Nome on the remote western coast of Alaska. Hire [at great cost] a helicopter to fly 120 miles to Little Diomede, a small island in the middle of the Bering Strait. This is the only way to get to Little Diomede; it has no port and no airport, the population of about 170 Inupiat Eskimos isolated from the rest of the world but for a weekly mail helicopter and a single cargo barge each year. If you're lucky and the weather is good, you can now look west and see another island on the horizon. This is Big Diomede which, for historical technicalities, is actually part of Russia. Big Diomede has a permanent population of exactly zero. Beyond Big Diomede, over the Bering Sea, lies the Chukotka Autonomous region of Russia, with a population density of 0.18 per square mile; less than 1/6th that of Alaska, which is by far the least densely populated state in the country [Wyoming, the next lowest, has 5.4 citizens per square mile]. Chukotka is so remote that its large oil reserves and other resources are largely untapped. See this map: Alaska on the right, Little Diomede and Big Diomede in the middle, with Chukotka on the left.

Furthermore, Russia is so big that Wasilla is barely further from the business end of the country--Moscow--than Boston is, via a Great Circle route. You don't hear Mitt Romney touting his foreign policy experience because he was the governor of a state only 4,500 miles away from Moscow. In fact, to fly to Moscow from Anchorage requires flying down to the lower 48 and flying east over Europe. So Wasilla--in practical terms--is as far from the heart of Russia as any place you can find in the Northern Hemisphere.

The point is this: While it is technically true that it's possible to see part of Russia from an island in Alaska, this fact is irrelevant to Palin's foreign policy experience in the following ways:

1. Sarah Palin has neither seen Russia nor traveled to Russia

2. The region of Russia adjacent to Alaska has negligible strategic importance

3. Palin has never met with official Russian delegations

4. Alaska is functionally further from the Kremlin than almost anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere.

Unless foreign policy experience is acquired through some kind of bizarre geographically selective osmosis, Palin can claim exactly none due to her home state's proximity to Russia.

Some cite the fact that Palin was commander of the Alaska National Guard. Well, this is true, but any time National Guard troops are used for international issues they are federalized under command of national military leaders. The frequently-cited Alaskan National Guard troops in Iraq are not commanded by Sarah Palin. Executive experience [whatever that means, and why it's suddenly the only kind of applicable experience, is another question entirely] maybe, but foreign policy experience? Hardly.

Let me get back to the point. This little deceit is a microcosm of the McCain-Palin campaign. They have shown an epic degree of comfort with deceiving the American public for political gain. Sarah Palin and John McCain both know that there is exactly zero substance behind the some-Alaskans-can-see-a-remote-part-of-uninhabited-Russia-sometimes-and-therefore-the-Alaskan-Governer-is-experienced-in-foreign-affairs claim. When they use this argument, they are consciously trying to deceive the country. That is terrifying to me, as an American citizen. And, truth is, this isn't even close to the most egregious example of McCain-Palin deceit. Check any one of the non-partisan fact-checking sites like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com. It's shocking: full-up straight-faced pants-on-fire lies.

Having foreign policy experience with Russia may or may not be a legitimate mandatory qualification for VP candidates; I haven't argued either way. But the willful, persistent, coordinated deceit that the McCain-Palin campaign is willing to feed the American people signals a moral corruption and deep cynicism that profanes the offices they are running for. This isn't politics as usual, this is the politics of change: change from fibs, exaggerations and disinformation to dirty, filthy, brazen lies.

Ping

Ping!

Montebello

I backpacked solo in Montebello friday and saturday. The lighting was unreal due to a nearby fire. Here are a few of the several hundred pictures I took on friday. I hope you like California grass. Enjoy.


At about 5pm a large cloud of smoke covered the sun.


Count my aperture blades.









As the smoke patch cleared the normal gorgeous colors came out briefly.




One of the sweat-sucking little buggers.


















I think this is a white butterfly mariposa lily.











Bees were mobbing the soap plants.