Yep - GW Bush and Gang (including the rest of the neocon bunch now running for cover under the bushes) should be rounded up for sure!

They should be given a fair trial for the War Crimes and other monstrosities and incompetencies they have committed:

-- LIES to US citizens about those WMD's (remember those?) - to get them scared enough so that they would behave as sheeple;

-- LIES to US Congress to get hold of the trifling matter of $ 700 billion or so it took to play GW Bush's dirty little war games;

-- Outing Valerie Plame;

-- Assorted incompetencies ranging from Katrina (remember "You're doin' a great job, Brownie!"?) to NCLB to what-have-you - I challenge GW Bush, War Criminal, to produce real evidence of any one thing that he did honestly and competently during his 8-year tenure;

-- Cheating the Iraq war veterans of their dues;

-- Handing over no-tender contracts worth billsions to their friends and Halliburton, Blackwater, etc

-- Atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo;

(and much, much else)

If found guilty (and I for one see no chance at all that a fair and impartial trial will find any of them innocent), the whole loathsome bunch should be put on Guantanamo for the rest of their miserable lives.

The problems of free-trade, NAFTA, or whatever - all can definitely be handled through the use of common sense: Obama seems to be adequately supplied with that characteristic. (GW Bush only listened to the instructions he got daily from Jesus Christ Himself for all he did - as he himself proclaimed on more occasions than one, I believe).

-- GSC

There is some truth and utility in Malcolm Gladwell's explication of the apparent dichotomy of "Nature Vs. Nurture" (and there is also some truth and utility in Louis Bayard's critique of Gladwell as well) - but alas there is hardly any possibility of moving much further given the unsuitable language that both Gladwell and Bayard are using for the structures they are discussing.

Whoever (individual/group) would take the trouble to create for himself/herself/themselves what I call a 'One Page Management System' (OPMS)"Exploring the 'Nature Vs. Nurture' dichotomy") would clearly come to understand the following:

1. Nature is important (but not 'sufficient')

2. Nurture is very important (but that's not 'sufficient' either)

In this specific context of 'nature Vs. nurture', it really is a matter of understanding the very rich dyadic structure (using C.S. Peirce's terminology): nature+nurture - for convenience, we could refer to this as the dyad 'n+n'. (Using appropriate tools to discuss such structures, we will soon come to understand very clearly that there is no versus at all! Dyads are structures composed of two disparate parts that act together as a single 'system').

Here we confront a 'linguistic difficulty' of sorts: it is almost impossible in 'pure prose' to explore and clearly communicate about the complex interactions that are dynamically occurring in such structures. Using a small extension to our natural prose language that I call 'prose+structural graphics' (p+sg) [and that's exactly right - this is another dyad comprised of many rich and varied interactions].

There are a great many other dyads that spring to mind, for example brain+mind; man+woman; night+day; student+teacher; creator+destroyer; life+death; thesis+antithesis;...

Some of these dyads may turn out to be what (I think) Peirce referred to as 'silver dyads', i.e. dyads possessing some special power to help clarify and and explain the complex systems within which they act or function. (Of course, a great many dyads that we may think about may actually turn out to be not very useful or productive: I guess we could call them 'wooden dyads' - there's nothing 'official' about this terminology, by the way).

Apart from 'dyads', we also have structures called 'triads' - which are structures of three interlinked wholes, for example:

-- man+woman+child;

-- (for those who are religiously inclined): the holy trinity - by the way, this triad does not necessarily connote the Christian Trinity: the 'trimurti' has been a very familiar triadic concept of Hindu theology for millennia (as to how 'real' or 'effective' it is, I have no idea, just as I have no idea about the Christian Trinity;

-- creator+nurturer+destroyer;

-- GW Bush+Dick Cheney+Donald Rumsfeld (in my view a spectacularly loathsome, evil and truly disgusting triad);

... and so on...

It has been mathematically proven I believe that all larger structures than triads can be 'equivalently decomposed' into collections of triads; dyads; and 'monads' (a monad being a 'single unity' - I believe the terminology may go back to Descartes). [I must confess that I've never had the patience to wade through the 140-200 or more pages of that proof!]

However, I have always found the concepts of monads, dyads and triads to be extremely useful to help me arrive at an understanding of dilemmas such as 'nature Vs. nurture' - it turns out in most cases that there simply is NO VERSUS AT ALL!: there is just the most useful and powerful dyad: 'n+n' which you can actually 'work with' very productively (of course, given an appropriate language to do that)!

The renowned systems scientist, Professor John N. Warfield, has created a highly productive and useful way of communicating about the relationships between the factors in complex systems. (I've often written about Warfield's work in these letters at Salon. More information about Warfield's seminal contributions to systems science can be found at: http://www.jnwarfield.com; and at the "John N. Warfield Collection" of books, papers and presentations held at the library of George Mason University - see: http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaead/published/gmu/vifgm00008.tp).

Based on Warfield's work in systems science, there has developed a uniquely powerful generic aid to problem solving and decision making that I call the 'One Page Management System' (OPMS). The OPMS) enables any of us very easily to arrive at a usable and workable understanding of the complex interactions in dyads and triads (and yet more complex strctures).

In a later message to follow ("Understanding 'nature+nurture' - II") , I shall outline the various steps involved "Creating an OPMS". Those who'd like more information - along with access to some useful prototype software enabling easy creation of the structures that enable us to clearly understand interactions in complex systems may write to the undersigned at gs (underscore) chandy (at) yahoo (dot) com: I'm able to explain these complex intereactions that I'm talking about more effectively in p+sg, which are easily rendered in PowerPoint, for instance.

-- GSC