First, quick reply to your scrivenings! Ah, so you are starting to agree with historians’ observations about how things and people often follow similar patterns! :) And fear not (as if you would have any reason, lol), plenty of windbaggage at the ready!
In his book, Obama lamented that in politics, one’s words are distorted, motives suspect, you get beholden to money, and you run afoul of traps set by the media. The unscrupulous deceive and manipulate public opinion.
That awareness didn’t seem to "prepare him none," in the words of some. Time and again, we are going to compare the Obama of his book and the Obama in office and wonder not just if they are the same person, but how his advanced knowledge of things hasn’t seemed to help him all that much.
“Please stay who you are, they will say to me. Please don’t disappoint us.” Obama 102. Like McCain his opponent, Obama fails on both counts.
An indication of the war on government is this: for six to eight years, we had tax cuts with no meaningful spending cuts—from a president and Congress that were Republican (the supposed party of spending cuts). The results were gigantic deficits and national debt. “What is clear is that the sea of red ink has made it more difficult for future administrations to initiate any new investments to address the economic challenges of globalization or to strengthen America’s social safety net.” Obama 148. Precisely. The government is the enemy; no new investments are desired. There is near-constant promotion of an anti-government message.
But he’s right in seeing the trend: “It will mean a nation even more stratified economically and socially than it currently is: one in which an increasingly prosperous knowledge class, living in exclusive enclaves, will be able to purchase whatever they want in the marketplace—private schools, private health care, private security, and private jets—while a growing number of their fellow citizens are consigned to low-paying service jobs, vulnerable to dislocation, pressed to work longer hours, dependent on an underfunded, overburdened, and underperforming public sector for their health care, their retirement, and their children’s educations. It will mean an America in which we continue to mortgage our assets to foreign lenders and expose ourselves to the whims of oil producers; an America in which we underinvest in the basic scientific research and workforce training that will determine our long-term economic prospects and neglect potential environmental crises. It will mean an America that’s more politically polarized and more politically unstable, as economic frustration boils over and leads people to turn on each other.” Obama 148
What happened to that smart guy? And it goes along with what you just wrote about haves and have nots.
Obama points out the benefits of globalization to American consumers, and the perils to American employees. It’s this latter facet that is problematic. Were it just competitiveness, the argument of the “free market above all” crowd might have more merit. But as we’ve seen, often this is a smokescreen for companies to exploit workers for sheer greed here, let alone abroad. The companies, and their investors, enjoy all the benefits of the workers’ productivity; the workers’ virtually none. One doesn’t have to be Marxian to see the wrongness in that.
The assumption is “that any government intrusion into the magical workings of the market…necessarily undermines private enterprise and inhibits economic growth. The bankruptcy of communism and socialism as alternative means of economic organization has only reinforced this assumption.” Obama 150 Yet government builds the infrastructure and trains the workforce, two foundations for economic growth. “The Hoover Dam, the TVA, the interstate highway system, the Internet, the Human Genome Project—time and again, government investment has helped pave the way for an explosion of private economic activity. And through the creation of a system of public schools and institutions of higher education, as well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions, government has helped provide individuals the tools to adapt and innovate in a climate of constant technological change.” Obama 152-153
“Aside from making needed investments that private enterprise can’t or won’t make on its own, an active national government has also been indispensable in dealing with market failures—those recurring snags in any capitalist system that either inhibit the efficient workings of the market or result in harm to the public.” Obama 153 He goes on to say that “people who are hungry, people who are out of a job, are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” So government also “regulates the marketplace and protects labor from chronic deprivation.” Obama 155
“We don’t have to choose between an oppressive, government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism…Like those who came before us, we should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility. And we can be guided throughout by Lincoln’s simple maxim: that we will do collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as well or at all individually and privately. In other words, we should be guided by what works.” Obama 158-9
Litany of Half-Truths: Across the developed world, we often see crisis. With many of those countries having adopted, partially or mostly, the Chicago-School economic ideology, they are caught in a bind. Yes, the size and structure of their governments are too draining on resources, having forgotten the central maxim that governments only consume, they don’t produce, and that unless government is directly supporting research, education, infrastructure, etc. that undergird economics, government should be careful about what is “necessary” to spend. But the other side of this tarnished coin is that the wealthy, by manipulating tax laws, international movement of money (and sheltering), and other clever evasions and refusals to provide funds (indeed, to only increase wealth transfer upward), government’s truly needed avenues go unfunded and deep debts are accumulated. Not to mention government has little to no fiscal wherewithal to actually regulate and rein in the wealthy who are inflicting this phenomenon on the various societies. Additional clever undercutting of international cooperation on these fronts further serves the purposes of this commonly focused, common fiscal-languaged (and trained and educated) wealthy “elite.”
More, plenty more, coming up on Obama’s often insightful and thoughtful words and their relation (and not!) to the world at large.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
The Brevity Precedent
Professor J,
Beck does put out a lot quickly, but this book was a bit different than his others which seem to be full of information that can be accessed quickly in bite size portions combined with plenty of pictures and remind me of dumbed down textbooks. The title, Broke makes sense but how does it further dialogue and understanding to entitle a book, Arguing With Idiots? His new book with Dr. Keith Ablow seems a bit of a deviation (and not the kind some of Beck's critics are having a field day with over the cover) but I can't comment on it since I haven't read it.
One more detail my daughter added to that sociology exercise was that there wasn't a smattering of people all along the way from where they started. There were, quite clearly, only the "haves" and the "have nots".
"Superior ages." While I don't like it, I can't argue. So yes, good term. :)
As you've thrown in a bit of Paine, I'll add this quote. He's outlining "all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation" but I thought I recognized some of these folks:
Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who cannot see; prejudiced men, who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent, than all the other three.
How little PEOPLE change over time, no matter what else may. Taking out the distinction "European" we could use his complete quote, as is, for much of what we see today. There is truly "nothing new under the sun" it seems.
Please forgive my actual brevity (though no one pleaded for it...that I know of). I have no doubt that you stand ready to launch full tilt into the Obama discussion and while my attention is diverted at the moment by brushing up on my Italian and thoughts of gods and heroes, I'm going to let you wax professorial on it to your heart's content.
Thank goodness you are the windbag and I'm the --what was it -- mercifully appropriate word-length scrivener? ;)
Beck does put out a lot quickly, but this book was a bit different than his others which seem to be full of information that can be accessed quickly in bite size portions combined with plenty of pictures and remind me of dumbed down textbooks. The title, Broke makes sense but how does it further dialogue and understanding to entitle a book, Arguing With Idiots? His new book with Dr. Keith Ablow seems a bit of a deviation (and not the kind some of Beck's critics are having a field day with over the cover) but I can't comment on it since I haven't read it.
One more detail my daughter added to that sociology exercise was that there wasn't a smattering of people all along the way from where they started. There were, quite clearly, only the "haves" and the "have nots".
"Superior ages." While I don't like it, I can't argue. So yes, good term. :)
As you've thrown in a bit of Paine, I'll add this quote. He's outlining "all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation" but I thought I recognized some of these folks:
Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who cannot see; prejudiced men, who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent, than all the other three.
How little PEOPLE change over time, no matter what else may. Taking out the distinction "European" we could use his complete quote, as is, for much of what we see today. There is truly "nothing new under the sun" it seems.
Please forgive my actual brevity (though no one pleaded for it...that I know of). I have no doubt that you stand ready to launch full tilt into the Obama discussion and while my attention is diverted at the moment by brushing up on my Italian and thoughts of gods and heroes, I'm going to let you wax professorial on it to your heart's content.
Thank goodness you are the windbag and I'm the --what was it -- mercifully appropriate word-length scrivener? ;)
Monday, February 21, 2011
Precedent's Day
Madame M,
Urgent message? Perhaps. But the books he puts out tend to have the same theme, and come with rapid regularity.
I agree with you that the global warming “crowd” did a poor job of framing the debate. No one should fear questions; they should welcome them. And things have certainly been too politicized, and hypocrites there have been aplenty. Catastrophic imagery has become a distraction, especially as future prediction (especially as to timing) is an inexact science in the best of circumstances. But if we have lost any sense of delayed gratification, of continued focus, or willingness to confront reality (having just got back from Washington, that unwillingness is all too fresh to me), that bodes ill.
And yes, if we could reframe the issue, it would serve us all much better. Ray Bradbury once wrote a story called “The Toynbee Convector” which makes this point well. The certainties or uncertainties of climate change have never been central for me: what we are now doing is unsustainable regardless, and we need to change that humanely, or ecological and economic realities will change it harshly.
Moving on to “Baggage,” yes, other than Beck and Paul, few in the large public eye are willing to say America can fail. Like those trapped in a faerie court, we have become willing prisoners of our own illusions and delusions. Yet I do so hope Beck truly and passionately loves this country and wants to help rescue it from its path of doom.
If he thinks that “everyone” has been taught/brainwashed by a media and liberal educators, well, even if that was the case, they certainly haven’t been taught very well, because they “know” very little and they act even less in line with it.
My father once told me: “Never fear the intelligentsia; they really think. Fear the near-intelligentsia, those who think they think.” I do hope GB is not one of the latter; my mind’s still open on the subject!
Your daughter’s experience in sociology class: the decline of so much is wrapped up in that. How ironic that we have so many opportunities and yet we do little.
And you subversive you! My son would be so thrilled to know that someone of our superior ages [good term? ;)] would “fight the man” in some fashion. Being the little rebel can be fun!
I agree with you on your ideas about education, and this educator is willing to let yours be the last word for now from us on the subject! :)
Yes, I agree (mostly) about including the original Common Sense, although I again agree with a fellow teacher that Beck has ironically conflated or misconstrued a great deal about its author. For example, Thomas Paine was one of the earliest advocates of progressive taxation, even drawing up tables and rates. He was also the first published proponent of the estate tax in America. He didn’t like poverty and extreme financial inequality (he supported a federally directed minimum wage, for example). In Agrarian Justice he sought to remedy those by taxing the wealthy to give jobs and “grants” to young people (he also vaguely alludes to this in Common Sense). Both he and Jefferson strongly favored tax-supported public education, passionately feeling it a necessity in achieving an educated voting population and eventually eliminating the poor as a class. Paine also supported the establishment of, and US participation in (back then, we weren’t “leading” much of anything), global organizations to help solve international problems and avoid wars.
Beck might be criticized by some as being able to crank out frequent (and monetarily rewarding) books only by referencing or incorporating the words and thoughts (and even works such as Paine’s) of others. That is of smaller concern to me. I am indebted to Beck for helping me to remember, by his including Paine’s Common Sense inside Beck’s own book, the keen insight, historical knowledge, and eminent sense of Thomas Paine. Paine reminds us that frequent elections can help assure that the people’s representatives do not get far from their fellow electors. Of course, our modern politics has subverted that quite a bit, with the revolving door of representative to corporation (or lobbyist) being far too frequent, but the idea is valid.
I must point out that Paine had his own biases that sometimes diminished his great vision a little. He didn’t like that the House of Commons and King each checked each other a bit, and yet our Framers took this kernel of an idea when creating our own legislative and executive systems.
“The state of a king shuts him off from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly” in Paine’s words. Every president of the modern era has remarked on this phenomenon.
Paine, in Common Sense: “Should a thought so fatal and unmanly possess the colonies in the present contest, the name of ancestors will be remembered by future generations with detestation.” Would that this thought would and could drive us now.
In Paine’s words, the proud and foolish glory in their little distinctions while the wise lament the lack of union. “From the errors of other nations let us learn wisdom.” We have seen that a king’s rule and hereditary successors open the doors to foolish, wicked, and improper decisions, and plutocracies of inherited wealth are the same. But we aren’t paying enough attention, are we?
Some other good Paine-isms:
“Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society.”
“Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.”
“When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.”
We must guard against the time when we have “eaten out the virtue.”
Until we make the hard choices and begin the painful work, we will feel, in Paine’s words, “like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity.”
No really, Obama up soon! :)
Urgent message? Perhaps. But the books he puts out tend to have the same theme, and come with rapid regularity.
I agree with you that the global warming “crowd” did a poor job of framing the debate. No one should fear questions; they should welcome them. And things have certainly been too politicized, and hypocrites there have been aplenty. Catastrophic imagery has become a distraction, especially as future prediction (especially as to timing) is an inexact science in the best of circumstances. But if we have lost any sense of delayed gratification, of continued focus, or willingness to confront reality (having just got back from Washington, that unwillingness is all too fresh to me), that bodes ill.
And yes, if we could reframe the issue, it would serve us all much better. Ray Bradbury once wrote a story called “The Toynbee Convector” which makes this point well. The certainties or uncertainties of climate change have never been central for me: what we are now doing is unsustainable regardless, and we need to change that humanely, or ecological and economic realities will change it harshly.
Moving on to “Baggage,” yes, other than Beck and Paul, few in the large public eye are willing to say America can fail. Like those trapped in a faerie court, we have become willing prisoners of our own illusions and delusions. Yet I do so hope Beck truly and passionately loves this country and wants to help rescue it from its path of doom.
If he thinks that “everyone” has been taught/brainwashed by a media and liberal educators, well, even if that was the case, they certainly haven’t been taught very well, because they “know” very little and they act even less in line with it.
My father once told me: “Never fear the intelligentsia; they really think. Fear the near-intelligentsia, those who think they think.” I do hope GB is not one of the latter; my mind’s still open on the subject!
Your daughter’s experience in sociology class: the decline of so much is wrapped up in that. How ironic that we have so many opportunities and yet we do little.
And you subversive you! My son would be so thrilled to know that someone of our superior ages [good term? ;)] would “fight the man” in some fashion. Being the little rebel can be fun!
I agree with you on your ideas about education, and this educator is willing to let yours be the last word for now from us on the subject! :)
Yes, I agree (mostly) about including the original Common Sense, although I again agree with a fellow teacher that Beck has ironically conflated or misconstrued a great deal about its author. For example, Thomas Paine was one of the earliest advocates of progressive taxation, even drawing up tables and rates. He was also the first published proponent of the estate tax in America. He didn’t like poverty and extreme financial inequality (he supported a federally directed minimum wage, for example). In Agrarian Justice he sought to remedy those by taxing the wealthy to give jobs and “grants” to young people (he also vaguely alludes to this in Common Sense). Both he and Jefferson strongly favored tax-supported public education, passionately feeling it a necessity in achieving an educated voting population and eventually eliminating the poor as a class. Paine also supported the establishment of, and US participation in (back then, we weren’t “leading” much of anything), global organizations to help solve international problems and avoid wars.
Beck might be criticized by some as being able to crank out frequent (and monetarily rewarding) books only by referencing or incorporating the words and thoughts (and even works such as Paine’s) of others. That is of smaller concern to me. I am indebted to Beck for helping me to remember, by his including Paine’s Common Sense inside Beck’s own book, the keen insight, historical knowledge, and eminent sense of Thomas Paine. Paine reminds us that frequent elections can help assure that the people’s representatives do not get far from their fellow electors. Of course, our modern politics has subverted that quite a bit, with the revolving door of representative to corporation (or lobbyist) being far too frequent, but the idea is valid.
I must point out that Paine had his own biases that sometimes diminished his great vision a little. He didn’t like that the House of Commons and King each checked each other a bit, and yet our Framers took this kernel of an idea when creating our own legislative and executive systems.
“The state of a king shuts him off from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly” in Paine’s words. Every president of the modern era has remarked on this phenomenon.
Paine, in Common Sense: “Should a thought so fatal and unmanly possess the colonies in the present contest, the name of ancestors will be remembered by future generations with detestation.” Would that this thought would and could drive us now.
In Paine’s words, the proud and foolish glory in their little distinctions while the wise lament the lack of union. “From the errors of other nations let us learn wisdom.” We have seen that a king’s rule and hereditary successors open the doors to foolish, wicked, and improper decisions, and plutocracies of inherited wealth are the same. But we aren’t paying enough attention, are we?
Some other good Paine-isms:
“Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society.”
“Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.”
“When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.”
We must guard against the time when we have “eaten out the virtue.”
Until we make the hard choices and begin the painful work, we will feel, in Paine’s words, “like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity.”
No really, Obama up soon! :)
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Baggage Check
Professor J,
Now let's see, where were we? Ah yes, Glenn Beck on environmental issues.
I'll say that overall I agree with you. Beck does a lousy job of backing up any of his claims. He'd have gained a lot more credibility for something more thought out and with any research he'd done end noted. I got the feeling that he felt the message (of the entire book) urgent and rushed to publish. He does a poor job of making his point, at least for anyone who is likely to want to know exactly what his sources were. It reads as a bit of a rant.
He makes it clear he doesn't believe in global warming and thinks it's a scam. I think he makes a huge mistake in not allowing for the possibility that he may be wrong. On the other hand here's where I think the global warming crowd messed up early on and brought some problems on themselves:
Framing the discussion in such a way as to ask people to put lots of faith in current available data and how it's interpreted, claiming the debate over, and treating anyone with questions like knuckle dragging neanderthals for questioning the science. Yet, what do scientists do? They question existing science all the time. Questioning is not the same thing however as forming an opinion, then rejecting whatever evidence may present itself (which is what I think we see are likely seeing with GB) or continuing to argue and delay for one's own selfish purposes (what we see with oil companies). But legitimate questions and concerns--why would that bother anyone?
Having Al Gore as the messenger (though not alone he's gotten the most attention and is certainly the "face" of global warming) made it a political issue which it needn't be. His cause would probably be further down the road if someone outside of partisan politics had led the charge. It would have garnered less attention, but what attention there was would probably have been more positive and opinions and attitudes on the issue would not have fallen along party lines so clearly. (I know we shouldn't judge the message by the messenger, but in this case he seems to detract attention away from the message.)
The hypocrisy of many including AG make it hard for them to be taken seriously. Their personal lifestyles in many cases aren't very good examples. People pay attention to behavior and if the guy who wants the rest of us to be so concerned can't adjust...
Too much focus on catastrophic ideas and imagery. It seems like a good idea to galvanize support but when people feel the problems are beyond them and answers are too complex and will need to be solved over the long term (we are such a short sighted culture) they lose interest or feel defeated and give up. The same attitudes prevail even when the choices are individual ones like finances or healthy lifestyle choices. People often cannot behave with the future in mind even when change in behavior would benefit them personally and directly. We are a people that has lost any sense of delayed gratification, people need to know that there can be some immediate benefit or at least intrinsic value in change or sacrifice.
Demanding ideological group think before we can take action. Let the global warming doubters doubt. If they exhibit the behavior you want who cares if they do it for environmental, economic, health or some other reason? You wrote:
Look at what is best, what we really want. Don’t we want clean air, water, food? Don’t we want a nature that doesn’t have to adapt so rapidly? Don’t we prefer forests to erosion, loss of agricultural soil, mudslides, choking fires, and the violent desperation that comes from poverty and scarcity of ecological resources?
This is the way to re-frame the debate. It's more than just semantics. It is saying that there are reasons that we all share to do the hard things without attacking anyone who still has questions and doubts. People are going to be more easily convinced that water, air, and soil need to be cared for and that resources need certain protections . It also lets the environmentalists off the hook for constantly defending the global warming/climate change theory (which they've spent a lot of time doing this winter) and in the event that evidence in the future should arise that disproves it, no harm is done as they could point out that it hadn't been their main focus anyway.
The question you want people to ask isn't about whether or not any of the weather is caused by ongoing climate change but as you point out whether or not any of what we are doing now is sustainable.
The Baggage:
I'll start where you ended and agree with you that overall people do tend to love him or hate him. Personally I like him and for all the positive things about him that you indicated but more so because up until recently he was the only one saying some of those things (Who else besides perhaps Ron Paul is saying America can fail?). If you can't quite figure him out it's probably because he is (like all of us) a work in progress. I love his passion. (Though I admit I often cringe and think, "Oh, don't say THAT.") Give me a passionate person to disagree with over apathy any day. I have a feeling his (perceived) sincerity is the real secret to his success. People are starving for someone who will show they care and enough for tears to well up in a man's eyes when he talks about his love of country and protecting liberty for the next generation? Oh yeah, I'm a sucker for that.
I'm guessing his slanted reading list is due to his feeling that everyone has been taught and has repeatedly heard the other side. He thinks the media and those pesky professors ;) have been taking care of that. He's trying to bring what he sees as balance, though people in the center, shying away from both extremes, may disagree. He isn't trying to give both sides and I never got the feeling he was leading the reader to think he was. As I've said before he does instruct people not to listen to him or believe him but to do their own research and come to their own conclusions.
He often disparages himself with a self deprecating humor ("I'm just a (pick one) rodeo clown, alcoholic, self educated DJ."). I haven't figured out if he says those things out of humility and a desire to be honest or so he can hide behind them when he and his ideas are strongly criticized. If it's the latter then this housewife takes issue with it for obvious reasons.
Beck often criticizes the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which he paints in a sinister light. It's another case, as some of the ones that you point out, where he seems blinded by his revulsion for certain individuals or ideas. He has a problem with the (fairly unintrusive) behavior altering methods suggested in the book, but never acknowledges how corporations use these same tactics ( e.g., product placement) and far more powerful ones to influence behavior of consumers all the time. Why in the world does he think all those companies spend millions on advertising every year?
The voucher system is not a thorough solution and neither are lots of other similar things put into action like charter schools. Sometimes there is individual success but not widespread. The kids who are successful generally have parents who are involved and concerned and who are going to see to it that their children are educated, no matter what kind of system is in place even if it means taking up the slack at home. It is the children who lack parental support and involvement who are cast aside and need the most help.
My daughter's college sociology class once did an interesting exercise, you may be familiar with. The professor took them outside, had them line up and he read a series of questions like did they have more than a particular number of books in their home, had they traveled, had they been to museums, plays, etc. They were to take a step for every question they could say yes to. At the end they were told to look around. The disparity was shocking and eye opening to her. She didn't relate this story to me and wonder where were the teachers of all those people so far behind her. She asked, "What were their PARENTS doing for 18 years?" Add to that the lack of trust between people now and it is probably harder for a concerned teacher, coach, or neighbor to step in now and take up the slack. The problems run deep and wide.
Home schooling (again): Thorny doesn't begin to describe! Your comment "Often superior, it can also be both a contributing cause and contributing effect of our lack of community" may be true in some ways. Though I'm not sure that children are more community minded placed together in classrooms all day with their peers having contact with a handful of adults in authority than they are when they are out and about in that community between lessons, at the bank, the grocery, doing volunteer work, etc. The "socialization" issue is discussed ad nauseum at home school conferences and meetings. Parents constantly worry over how much is enough not to mention how much is too much. Like methods and curriculum there isn't any pat answer that will suit every child, family, community.
I've seen HS parents whose methods and tenacity I envied and I've seen some doing it so badly it caused me to think their children should be in school. It has a lot of built in problems when compared to traditional schooling (which of course has its own). Teachers for instance tend to teach subjects they are passionate about. A child in a school setting is likely getting a math teacher who loves math, a science teacher who is passionate about science, etc. Parents taking on the role are naturally going to be less enthusiastic about some subjects than others and it's necessary at times to fill the gap with tutoring, co-ops and the like, which most people do now. Seeking out help used to feel a bit risky. Early on we were all afraid someone might report us when the laws were less favorable, today it is far less isolating.
Personally I thought it was more fun when it felt somewhat subversive. ;)
There isn't going to be a perfect system for educating every child any more than there is going to be a perfect curriculum for every subject, but we could certainly do better. I'd like to see more choice, the money attached to the child (as in our previously discussed Belgium model), and apprentice programs for students whose interests don't necessarily require college. I think in many ways the attitude that everyone needs to go to college has had negative repercussions.
I also think we waste an unbelievable amount of talent in our communities. Some subjects that get foisted off on coaches who are reluctant to teach them like economics or health could easily be taught by retired professionals in finance or medicine. People are retiring and then living many years and I'll bet if helpful programs were in place to ease the process lots of them would flock to the aid of kids in their communities to teach subjects they are passionate about and have years of experience in.
I thought it was an interesting idea to include the original Common Sense, thereby putting it into the hands of many people, who had perhaps, never read it.
Now let's see, where were we? Ah yes, Glenn Beck on environmental issues.
I'll say that overall I agree with you. Beck does a lousy job of backing up any of his claims. He'd have gained a lot more credibility for something more thought out and with any research he'd done end noted. I got the feeling that he felt the message (of the entire book) urgent and rushed to publish. He does a poor job of making his point, at least for anyone who is likely to want to know exactly what his sources were. It reads as a bit of a rant.
He makes it clear he doesn't believe in global warming and thinks it's a scam. I think he makes a huge mistake in not allowing for the possibility that he may be wrong. On the other hand here's where I think the global warming crowd messed up early on and brought some problems on themselves:
Framing the discussion in such a way as to ask people to put lots of faith in current available data and how it's interpreted, claiming the debate over, and treating anyone with questions like knuckle dragging neanderthals for questioning the science. Yet, what do scientists do? They question existing science all the time. Questioning is not the same thing however as forming an opinion, then rejecting whatever evidence may present itself (which is what I think we see are likely seeing with GB) or continuing to argue and delay for one's own selfish purposes (what we see with oil companies). But legitimate questions and concerns--why would that bother anyone?
Having Al Gore as the messenger (though not alone he's gotten the most attention and is certainly the "face" of global warming) made it a political issue which it needn't be. His cause would probably be further down the road if someone outside of partisan politics had led the charge. It would have garnered less attention, but what attention there was would probably have been more positive and opinions and attitudes on the issue would not have fallen along party lines so clearly. (I know we shouldn't judge the message by the messenger, but in this case he seems to detract attention away from the message.)
The hypocrisy of many including AG make it hard for them to be taken seriously. Their personal lifestyles in many cases aren't very good examples. People pay attention to behavior and if the guy who wants the rest of us to be so concerned can't adjust...
Too much focus on catastrophic ideas and imagery. It seems like a good idea to galvanize support but when people feel the problems are beyond them and answers are too complex and will need to be solved over the long term (we are such a short sighted culture) they lose interest or feel defeated and give up. The same attitudes prevail even when the choices are individual ones like finances or healthy lifestyle choices. People often cannot behave with the future in mind even when change in behavior would benefit them personally and directly. We are a people that has lost any sense of delayed gratification, people need to know that there can be some immediate benefit or at least intrinsic value in change or sacrifice.
Demanding ideological group think before we can take action. Let the global warming doubters doubt. If they exhibit the behavior you want who cares if they do it for environmental, economic, health or some other reason? You wrote:
Look at what is best, what we really want. Don’t we want clean air, water, food? Don’t we want a nature that doesn’t have to adapt so rapidly? Don’t we prefer forests to erosion, loss of agricultural soil, mudslides, choking fires, and the violent desperation that comes from poverty and scarcity of ecological resources?
This is the way to re-frame the debate. It's more than just semantics. It is saying that there are reasons that we all share to do the hard things without attacking anyone who still has questions and doubts. People are going to be more easily convinced that water, air, and soil need to be cared for and that resources need certain protections . It also lets the environmentalists off the hook for constantly defending the global warming/climate change theory (which they've spent a lot of time doing this winter) and in the event that evidence in the future should arise that disproves it, no harm is done as they could point out that it hadn't been their main focus anyway.
The question you want people to ask isn't about whether or not any of the weather is caused by ongoing climate change but as you point out whether or not any of what we are doing now is sustainable.
The Baggage:
I'll start where you ended and agree with you that overall people do tend to love him or hate him. Personally I like him and for all the positive things about him that you indicated but more so because up until recently he was the only one saying some of those things (Who else besides perhaps Ron Paul is saying America can fail?). If you can't quite figure him out it's probably because he is (like all of us) a work in progress. I love his passion. (Though I admit I often cringe and think, "Oh, don't say THAT.") Give me a passionate person to disagree with over apathy any day. I have a feeling his (perceived) sincerity is the real secret to his success. People are starving for someone who will show they care and enough for tears to well up in a man's eyes when he talks about his love of country and protecting liberty for the next generation? Oh yeah, I'm a sucker for that.
I'm guessing his slanted reading list is due to his feeling that everyone has been taught and has repeatedly heard the other side. He thinks the media and those pesky professors ;) have been taking care of that. He's trying to bring what he sees as balance, though people in the center, shying away from both extremes, may disagree. He isn't trying to give both sides and I never got the feeling he was leading the reader to think he was. As I've said before he does instruct people not to listen to him or believe him but to do their own research and come to their own conclusions.
He often disparages himself with a self deprecating humor ("I'm just a (pick one) rodeo clown, alcoholic, self educated DJ."). I haven't figured out if he says those things out of humility and a desire to be honest or so he can hide behind them when he and his ideas are strongly criticized. If it's the latter then this housewife takes issue with it for obvious reasons.
Beck often criticizes the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which he paints in a sinister light. It's another case, as some of the ones that you point out, where he seems blinded by his revulsion for certain individuals or ideas. He has a problem with the (fairly unintrusive) behavior altering methods suggested in the book, but never acknowledges how corporations use these same tactics ( e.g., product placement) and far more powerful ones to influence behavior of consumers all the time. Why in the world does he think all those companies spend millions on advertising every year?
The voucher system is not a thorough solution and neither are lots of other similar things put into action like charter schools. Sometimes there is individual success but not widespread. The kids who are successful generally have parents who are involved and concerned and who are going to see to it that their children are educated, no matter what kind of system is in place even if it means taking up the slack at home. It is the children who lack parental support and involvement who are cast aside and need the most help.
My daughter's college sociology class once did an interesting exercise, you may be familiar with. The professor took them outside, had them line up and he read a series of questions like did they have more than a particular number of books in their home, had they traveled, had they been to museums, plays, etc. They were to take a step for every question they could say yes to. At the end they were told to look around. The disparity was shocking and eye opening to her. She didn't relate this story to me and wonder where were the teachers of all those people so far behind her. She asked, "What were their PARENTS doing for 18 years?" Add to that the lack of trust between people now and it is probably harder for a concerned teacher, coach, or neighbor to step in now and take up the slack. The problems run deep and wide.
Home schooling (again): Thorny doesn't begin to describe! Your comment "Often superior, it can also be both a contributing cause and contributing effect of our lack of community" may be true in some ways. Though I'm not sure that children are more community minded placed together in classrooms all day with their peers having contact with a handful of adults in authority than they are when they are out and about in that community between lessons, at the bank, the grocery, doing volunteer work, etc. The "socialization" issue is discussed ad nauseum at home school conferences and meetings. Parents constantly worry over how much is enough not to mention how much is too much. Like methods and curriculum there isn't any pat answer that will suit every child, family, community.
I've seen HS parents whose methods and tenacity I envied and I've seen some doing it so badly it caused me to think their children should be in school. It has a lot of built in problems when compared to traditional schooling (which of course has its own). Teachers for instance tend to teach subjects they are passionate about. A child in a school setting is likely getting a math teacher who loves math, a science teacher who is passionate about science, etc. Parents taking on the role are naturally going to be less enthusiastic about some subjects than others and it's necessary at times to fill the gap with tutoring, co-ops and the like, which most people do now. Seeking out help used to feel a bit risky. Early on we were all afraid someone might report us when the laws were less favorable, today it is far less isolating.
Personally I thought it was more fun when it felt somewhat subversive. ;)
There isn't going to be a perfect system for educating every child any more than there is going to be a perfect curriculum for every subject, but we could certainly do better. I'd like to see more choice, the money attached to the child (as in our previously discussed Belgium model), and apprentice programs for students whose interests don't necessarily require college. I think in many ways the attitude that everyone needs to go to college has had negative repercussions.
I also think we waste an unbelievable amount of talent in our communities. Some subjects that get foisted off on coaches who are reluctant to teach them like economics or health could easily be taught by retired professionals in finance or medicine. People are retiring and then living many years and I'll bet if helpful programs were in place to ease the process lots of them would flock to the aid of kids in their communities to teach subjects they are passionate about and have years of experience in.
I thought it was an interesting idea to include the original Common Sense, thereby putting it into the hands of many people, who had perhaps, never read it.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Mixed Baggage
Beck gets no argument from me when he quotes African-American tennis great Arthur Ashe as saying that we have lost our dignity and morality, that now, “instead of settling on what’s right, or just, or moral, the idea is to get even.” And Beck’s prescription to address things gets ready agreement from me: “Good families require good parents. Good communities require good neighbors. And good countries require good citizens.” (Beck 97)
Beck goes on to criticize Obama for granting compensation to the AmeriCorps participants. While in his view that detracts from volunteerism, and it may, there is something else to say as well: Maybe economic straits for those people are so dire, that they need the boost. Many of them are not privileged kids of middle or upper class families, but near-destitute denizens of lower class communities.
I applaud Beck for criticizing both those who kill in the name of religion and those who, like Stalin and Hitler, kill for themselves. I also like his reminding me of Ben Franklin saying “that the most acceptable service we render to Him (God) is in doing good to his other children.” (98)
I don’t follow his reasoning that “Progressives” want religions at each other’s throats. And even if it were true, it doesn’t seem a possibility except for maybe Muslims vs. everyone else. And if that is the case, once again, why would Progressives want that? And “religions must be harnessed by the state or destroyed.” What and where is he getting that?
Beck says Americans do not know their history, and he is right, but he too often doesn’t know his all that well either. I agree here with sentiments of another teacher I read: Un-democratic conditions led to the desire of Americans for progressive reforms. American history largely agrees with Beck that progressives shaped America into the country that it is, or at least was. A once thriving middle class, with reasonably safe food and water, no child labor, forty hour average workweeks, etc.—yes, those were Progressive initiatives. If Beck wants to dismiss Progressives and their accomplishments and return fully to life under Presidents McKinley or Harding, with robber barons running the economy and the atrocious work conditions and products chronicled by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, he’s no friend of the people.
I agree wholeheartedly with him that we must be on constant vigilance about the fundamental that our rights come from God, not from government. And that we need to remember we create the government by lending it our rights. And I think those things have been diluted since the National Security State arose, but it’s not at all clear to me that Progressivism is A prime reason for the dilution, let alone THE prime reason. While I agree with Beck (and Rosemond) that Americans have too often (and foolishly) abandoned common sense in favor of the opinions of asinine “experts,” it’s not clear to me that there is or was an overriding Progressive theme to all or even most of it.
Beck’s ascribing of Obama’s desire for the Golden Rule, for “dignity and respect for those who share this brief moment on Earth,” as a wish for state repression of some sort, seems wholly non-sequitir. I get his inordinate fear of excessive do-gooder-ism; I don’t get the connections when they go beyond that, especially when the state is so very weak now in comparison to corporate power.
Beck muddies things repeatedly. I applaud his saying we cannot preach tolerance and practice its opposite. I agree fully that a virtuous people are necessary for freedom to stay, and that people should regulate their behavior. I nod strongly when he says that hate and greed must be battled. But then he gets into self-sufficiency and his logic doesn’t flow. And then I am back to nodding again that freedom is such a precious thing, and our Framers were scared to death for us, because EVERY democracy and every republic had fallen back into tyranny at some point.
Beck says to leave whatever political party you belong to and focus on people. Agreed. He’s obviously read George Washington’s views on the subject.
I shout hooray for Beck’s call for us to educate ourselves.
I have great respect for the man in saying people should reject violent revolution, for his reading of history is sound: it is a bloody and uncontrollable path that rarely comes to a good end. The battlefront, he says, is ideas, and our weapons the rule of law, values, and our founding documents. I almost entirely agree.
I echo his words that one day we will face our children and grandchildren and they will ask us: what was more important than freedom? Homes and lifestyles and debts? They will turn away in disgust from us, and perhaps look out on a landscape where foreign and domestic creditors/masters force them into reward-less toil.
Oh yes, Glenn Beck, we do all know that something isn’t right. The courage to change. We need it.
Beck’s 9.12 Project generally seems a good one. 9 principles, and 12 values, and clever numbering to match up with his view that the day after 9/11 we were a better country than we have been in a great number of years. I loudly clap for his call for we Americans to learn more about our country and its history. And I clap just as loudly for his call for more personal freedom and responsibility.
He advocates a lot of things. Like Generation America, an organization he wholeheartedly endorses. An organization which says it is APPALLED that the oil industry may lose billions of dollars in subsidies and tax incentives. And Beck himself is so polemic about the new health care law that he resorts to trashing it by saying Medicare will go up in it for seniors, which is why seniors should oppose the law. Beck seems of two faces; he undoubtedly knows that the rise in Medicare costs is a reflection of reality regardless of what happens or doesn’t happen or what bill got passed or didn’t, and he conveniently leaves out that the majority of seniors who rely on Medicare won’t see much of an increase in costs at all; it’s the wealthier ones who will see a few hundred dollars per year difference, a few thousand for the very top wealthy. Yet he implies that the rise is on all seniors, instead of a very small group. Regardless of whether one agrees with the wealthy few paying more than the modest or poor many, Beck is being deceptive in not making the distinction. And independent analysts say that to keep Medicare solvent, something had (and still needs more) to happen. The new bill goes a good ways toward restoring solvency, although without some check on care costs, it will do little to really solve the flawed underlying premise (too high a demand on services from a too sick group) or that cost savings projections are not realistic given how doctors will not lower fees to that level, and often even can’t and stay in business.
I have diminished respect for Beck’s suggested reading list. It is a skewed list, designed to lead someone to accept without question certain precepts, certain perceptions, and certain dogma. I would have been more impressed if it had been balanced. Where are the books about being anti-neocon, which Beck claims in passing? Right now, the books are polemically anti-liberal/progressive only, with only a few being scholarly. Book listings from Thomas Frank, John Dean, David Cay Johnson, Paul Krugman, Jacob Hacker, Noam Chomsky would have given the book balance, although perhaps not coherence, but Beck even left out the harder to classify works of Daniel Kurtzman, Thom Hartman, Wendell Potter, and Arianna Huffington. And Beck’s list of sources is not very impressive and would not pass scholarly muster—at best it is selective, at worst it is slanted.
Beck’s book, like Obama’s, is well written in the readability sense. In each of the books you see the hand of a lawyer (Beck’s co-writer, Joseph Kerry; Obama, of course, is a lawyer) used to writing in crisp and relatively clear prose, in addition to strong reviewers and editors.
Beck blames unions and pensions of teachers, firefighters and policemen, that they are an entitlement. No, they were effectively defunded because those with the means stopped contributing TO society, and those with the strong hands and backs stopped laboring and started to be entitled. Beck blames only the one and not the other. It is deceptive.
Beck’s sources are more than just occasionally not very rigorous either. While he is to be applauded for pointing out inconsistency and hypocrisy of many in politics and decision making, the gaps in his sources point too much to slanting the argument. Examples: Goldberg’s book has been heavily criticized, rightly so in my opinion, for being so slanted and gap filled as to be classified at best a polemic. Focusing on Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s egregious excesses is good, but where are the articles about Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup? Curious but laudatory that he would mention Kohn’s book, for pre-eminent among those persecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts (another odious anti-Constitution period) was none other than the socialist Eugene Debs.
Milloy’s book raises a few valid points, but is so awash in skewed and narrow positioning while avoiding everything to the contrary, that it borders on deception. As the Guardian newspaper wrote on 19th September 2006:
"Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests."
Pestritto and Atto’s book puts Beck on more solid ground. It has a lot of solid scholarly things in it, and rightly calls into question a number of things on Progressivism, although not necessarily always to the extent that Beck infers. Rasmussen in his book, while his leanings are clearly a certain way, and he has received funding from that direction as well, is careful to use correct methodology in his polling. The Democrats would have been wise to listen to his data. Rehnquist’s book raises valid questions on our Constitutional rights in times of crisis. Schlae’s book is not groundbreaking as it is often made out to be, but does offer some mild corrective to a few commonly held assumptions. Since I am only part way through it, I will refrain from commenting on it to much further extent, but the supposedly revelatory determination that the New Deal did not end the Depression is not revelatory at all and has been common knowledge among economists and historians for a long time.
The Economist article on simplifying and flattening taxes is a good one, and gives the primary benefit—simplicity increases acceptance and compliance. Right now, the wealthy manipulate the tax system to avoid what progressive taxation is supposed to accomplish: fairness. With the wealthy avoiding taxation, they are actually paying LESS than many in the lower brackets. (By the way, the date of the article citation is off by 2 days). The Skousen book is in some respects a mixed bag, with some potentially incorrect inferences, but overall, the book is a good treatment of why we should value what we have in freedom and form of government. Smith’s FDR book, and Pestritto’s Wilson, I have not read, but both come recommended by American history specialists. Sowell’s book is disappointing. While I like Sowell in many respects, and he does lay out many worthwhile points, he draws conclusions which are at best incomplete, and probably lopsided. The Williams article is correct on the face, but his and Beck’s interpretation of the facts can be disagreed with.
Beck’s criticisms of Chavez betray over-simplicity. Yes, the gullible and ostrich-headed of Hollywood have become too infatuated with him and have ignored some troubling excesses, but the crowd on the other side of the political pole have dismissed him outright because he skewers a lot of sacred cows and dares to frequently point out that the emperor is not only naked but often repressive. Chavez, for all his many drawbacks and power-hunger, holds genuine appeal among a majority of working class Venezuelans because he has stood up for them.
Some of Beck’s sources curiously undermine his argument some, such as the Business Week article on health care, the Peter Singer cite, and the Tapper article, all of which paint a fuller picture than initially intimated, so I don’t know if his staff just threw some things in there to give it bulk and the appearance of solidity ,or if it is something I am missing.
I fiercely agree with Beck’s poorly expressed lament that we have lost sight of what we were supposed to be about: limited government, where individual states are mostly sovereign, government is decentralized, and individuals bear personal responsibility for their actions. And our Federal commons is effectively broke because everyone takes and tries to avoid contributing.
Beck’s interpretation of data is occasionally odd, or even skewed. Positions, definitions, results, etc. are often distorted. Frankly, it became annoying seeing partial truth, agreeing with it, and then filling in the (deliberate?) gaps. Like vouchers. Washington DC’s education and government systems are a Congressionally fumbled mess. The vouchers were not uniform. They would have abandoned large numbers, a phenomenon of “ignore the rest” all too common in such “solutions.” The Executive branch is minimally involved in the Washington DC educational issue, btw.
Beck touches on some hard things. Home schooling, for example, is a thorny issue. Often superior, it can also be both a contributing cause and contributing effect of our lack of community. Yet it is also a reaction to failures on multiple levels, of both education and society itself. We have a lack of sense of responsibility to state, nation, and public welfare.
But I agree we need far fewer professional bureaucrats in education. As for education in general, Beck is too simplistic about money. Teachers and students don’t get the money, even when there is some, which in resource-starved America, often isn’t the case. “More teachers who care” implies that people get into poorly compensated, overburdened teaching because…they DON’T CARE? Beck is wildly off on that one. And Beck offers no alternative proposals for how education should be carried out.
Yes Beck, we deserve derision for bigger/more, for, despite generally having smaller families, wanting bigger homes.
“Right combination of public opinion and judicial appointees” (Beck 95) is classic doublespeak nonsense.
Other sources are good as far as they go, but inferences are simply undemonstrated. FDR rightly takes a lot of criticism (from me too, especially for the latter years of his presidency), but the inferences that his programs were ALL failures because they did not lower unemployment significantly is non-sequitir. It is just as easily the case that they prevented deeper unemployment, and their public psychology stabilizing value goes unevaluated by these works.
I and another teacher agree that Beck has made some serious omissions. On page 17, for example, Beck paraphrases the well-known “You can’t save the poor by destroying the rich” quote from Reverend William J. H. Boetcke, and yet doesn’t give credit. This professor would call that plagiarism.
On page 61, Beck paraphrases Barry Goldwater’s (some attribute it to Gerald Ford) quote, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have,” and again he doesn’t even give the original speaker credit.
Beck is dismissive of any evidence that disagrees with him, and loose with his own evidence. When one digs deeper, it is not quite, and sometimes not at all, as Beck claims. So why do it? Is he just a moneymaker preying on the ideologically susceptible, as the non-ideological but cynical say? Does he prey on people’s ignorance in neo-conservative fear-mongering? Is he a stooge of Rupert Murdoch, a hit man of talented proportions, as his detractors claim? Or does he merely believe in doing well while doing what he believes in, which apparently is to take down government? Or is he really a patriot that, while you may disagree with him, honestly loves his country and wants us to wake up and be THE PEOPLE so eloquently written of by our Framers? I have read Beck, watched Beck, and I still don’t know; maybe he is a convoluted, somewhat schizophrenic, mix of all that. People do seem to either love him, or despise him and dismiss him.
I have to disqualify some of Beck for the reasons given above, and he deserves strong criticism for much of the rest, but he also deserves strong credit for the remainder. Mixed bag!
Obama, you’re up soon! :)
Beck goes on to criticize Obama for granting compensation to the AmeriCorps participants. While in his view that detracts from volunteerism, and it may, there is something else to say as well: Maybe economic straits for those people are so dire, that they need the boost. Many of them are not privileged kids of middle or upper class families, but near-destitute denizens of lower class communities.
I applaud Beck for criticizing both those who kill in the name of religion and those who, like Stalin and Hitler, kill for themselves. I also like his reminding me of Ben Franklin saying “that the most acceptable service we render to Him (God) is in doing good to his other children.” (98)
I don’t follow his reasoning that “Progressives” want religions at each other’s throats. And even if it were true, it doesn’t seem a possibility except for maybe Muslims vs. everyone else. And if that is the case, once again, why would Progressives want that? And “religions must be harnessed by the state or destroyed.” What and where is he getting that?
Beck says Americans do not know their history, and he is right, but he too often doesn’t know his all that well either. I agree here with sentiments of another teacher I read: Un-democratic conditions led to the desire of Americans for progressive reforms. American history largely agrees with Beck that progressives shaped America into the country that it is, or at least was. A once thriving middle class, with reasonably safe food and water, no child labor, forty hour average workweeks, etc.—yes, those were Progressive initiatives. If Beck wants to dismiss Progressives and their accomplishments and return fully to life under Presidents McKinley or Harding, with robber barons running the economy and the atrocious work conditions and products chronicled by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, he’s no friend of the people.
I agree wholeheartedly with him that we must be on constant vigilance about the fundamental that our rights come from God, not from government. And that we need to remember we create the government by lending it our rights. And I think those things have been diluted since the National Security State arose, but it’s not at all clear to me that Progressivism is A prime reason for the dilution, let alone THE prime reason. While I agree with Beck (and Rosemond) that Americans have too often (and foolishly) abandoned common sense in favor of the opinions of asinine “experts,” it’s not clear to me that there is or was an overriding Progressive theme to all or even most of it.
Beck’s ascribing of Obama’s desire for the Golden Rule, for “dignity and respect for those who share this brief moment on Earth,” as a wish for state repression of some sort, seems wholly non-sequitir. I get his inordinate fear of excessive do-gooder-ism; I don’t get the connections when they go beyond that, especially when the state is so very weak now in comparison to corporate power.
Beck muddies things repeatedly. I applaud his saying we cannot preach tolerance and practice its opposite. I agree fully that a virtuous people are necessary for freedom to stay, and that people should regulate their behavior. I nod strongly when he says that hate and greed must be battled. But then he gets into self-sufficiency and his logic doesn’t flow. And then I am back to nodding again that freedom is such a precious thing, and our Framers were scared to death for us, because EVERY democracy and every republic had fallen back into tyranny at some point.
Beck says to leave whatever political party you belong to and focus on people. Agreed. He’s obviously read George Washington’s views on the subject.
I shout hooray for Beck’s call for us to educate ourselves.
I have great respect for the man in saying people should reject violent revolution, for his reading of history is sound: it is a bloody and uncontrollable path that rarely comes to a good end. The battlefront, he says, is ideas, and our weapons the rule of law, values, and our founding documents. I almost entirely agree.
I echo his words that one day we will face our children and grandchildren and they will ask us: what was more important than freedom? Homes and lifestyles and debts? They will turn away in disgust from us, and perhaps look out on a landscape where foreign and domestic creditors/masters force them into reward-less toil.
Oh yes, Glenn Beck, we do all know that something isn’t right. The courage to change. We need it.
Beck’s 9.12 Project generally seems a good one. 9 principles, and 12 values, and clever numbering to match up with his view that the day after 9/11 we were a better country than we have been in a great number of years. I loudly clap for his call for we Americans to learn more about our country and its history. And I clap just as loudly for his call for more personal freedom and responsibility.
He advocates a lot of things. Like Generation America, an organization he wholeheartedly endorses. An organization which says it is APPALLED that the oil industry may lose billions of dollars in subsidies and tax incentives. And Beck himself is so polemic about the new health care law that he resorts to trashing it by saying Medicare will go up in it for seniors, which is why seniors should oppose the law. Beck seems of two faces; he undoubtedly knows that the rise in Medicare costs is a reflection of reality regardless of what happens or doesn’t happen or what bill got passed or didn’t, and he conveniently leaves out that the majority of seniors who rely on Medicare won’t see much of an increase in costs at all; it’s the wealthier ones who will see a few hundred dollars per year difference, a few thousand for the very top wealthy. Yet he implies that the rise is on all seniors, instead of a very small group. Regardless of whether one agrees with the wealthy few paying more than the modest or poor many, Beck is being deceptive in not making the distinction. And independent analysts say that to keep Medicare solvent, something had (and still needs more) to happen. The new bill goes a good ways toward restoring solvency, although without some check on care costs, it will do little to really solve the flawed underlying premise (too high a demand on services from a too sick group) or that cost savings projections are not realistic given how doctors will not lower fees to that level, and often even can’t and stay in business.
I have diminished respect for Beck’s suggested reading list. It is a skewed list, designed to lead someone to accept without question certain precepts, certain perceptions, and certain dogma. I would have been more impressed if it had been balanced. Where are the books about being anti-neocon, which Beck claims in passing? Right now, the books are polemically anti-liberal/progressive only, with only a few being scholarly. Book listings from Thomas Frank, John Dean, David Cay Johnson, Paul Krugman, Jacob Hacker, Noam Chomsky would have given the book balance, although perhaps not coherence, but Beck even left out the harder to classify works of Daniel Kurtzman, Thom Hartman, Wendell Potter, and Arianna Huffington. And Beck’s list of sources is not very impressive and would not pass scholarly muster—at best it is selective, at worst it is slanted.
Beck’s book, like Obama’s, is well written in the readability sense. In each of the books you see the hand of a lawyer (Beck’s co-writer, Joseph Kerry; Obama, of course, is a lawyer) used to writing in crisp and relatively clear prose, in addition to strong reviewers and editors.
Beck blames unions and pensions of teachers, firefighters and policemen, that they are an entitlement. No, they were effectively defunded because those with the means stopped contributing TO society, and those with the strong hands and backs stopped laboring and started to be entitled. Beck blames only the one and not the other. It is deceptive.
Beck’s sources are more than just occasionally not very rigorous either. While he is to be applauded for pointing out inconsistency and hypocrisy of many in politics and decision making, the gaps in his sources point too much to slanting the argument. Examples: Goldberg’s book has been heavily criticized, rightly so in my opinion, for being so slanted and gap filled as to be classified at best a polemic. Focusing on Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s egregious excesses is good, but where are the articles about Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup? Curious but laudatory that he would mention Kohn’s book, for pre-eminent among those persecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts (another odious anti-Constitution period) was none other than the socialist Eugene Debs.
Milloy’s book raises a few valid points, but is so awash in skewed and narrow positioning while avoiding everything to the contrary, that it borders on deception. As the Guardian newspaper wrote on 19th September 2006:
"Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests."
Pestritto and Atto’s book puts Beck on more solid ground. It has a lot of solid scholarly things in it, and rightly calls into question a number of things on Progressivism, although not necessarily always to the extent that Beck infers. Rasmussen in his book, while his leanings are clearly a certain way, and he has received funding from that direction as well, is careful to use correct methodology in his polling. The Democrats would have been wise to listen to his data. Rehnquist’s book raises valid questions on our Constitutional rights in times of crisis. Schlae’s book is not groundbreaking as it is often made out to be, but does offer some mild corrective to a few commonly held assumptions. Since I am only part way through it, I will refrain from commenting on it to much further extent, but the supposedly revelatory determination that the New Deal did not end the Depression is not revelatory at all and has been common knowledge among economists and historians for a long time.
The Economist article on simplifying and flattening taxes is a good one, and gives the primary benefit—simplicity increases acceptance and compliance. Right now, the wealthy manipulate the tax system to avoid what progressive taxation is supposed to accomplish: fairness. With the wealthy avoiding taxation, they are actually paying LESS than many in the lower brackets. (By the way, the date of the article citation is off by 2 days). The Skousen book is in some respects a mixed bag, with some potentially incorrect inferences, but overall, the book is a good treatment of why we should value what we have in freedom and form of government. Smith’s FDR book, and Pestritto’s Wilson, I have not read, but both come recommended by American history specialists. Sowell’s book is disappointing. While I like Sowell in many respects, and he does lay out many worthwhile points, he draws conclusions which are at best incomplete, and probably lopsided. The Williams article is correct on the face, but his and Beck’s interpretation of the facts can be disagreed with.
Beck’s criticisms of Chavez betray over-simplicity. Yes, the gullible and ostrich-headed of Hollywood have become too infatuated with him and have ignored some troubling excesses, but the crowd on the other side of the political pole have dismissed him outright because he skewers a lot of sacred cows and dares to frequently point out that the emperor is not only naked but often repressive. Chavez, for all his many drawbacks and power-hunger, holds genuine appeal among a majority of working class Venezuelans because he has stood up for them.
Some of Beck’s sources curiously undermine his argument some, such as the Business Week article on health care, the Peter Singer cite, and the Tapper article, all of which paint a fuller picture than initially intimated, so I don’t know if his staff just threw some things in there to give it bulk and the appearance of solidity ,or if it is something I am missing.
I fiercely agree with Beck’s poorly expressed lament that we have lost sight of what we were supposed to be about: limited government, where individual states are mostly sovereign, government is decentralized, and individuals bear personal responsibility for their actions. And our Federal commons is effectively broke because everyone takes and tries to avoid contributing.
Beck’s interpretation of data is occasionally odd, or even skewed. Positions, definitions, results, etc. are often distorted. Frankly, it became annoying seeing partial truth, agreeing with it, and then filling in the (deliberate?) gaps. Like vouchers. Washington DC’s education and government systems are a Congressionally fumbled mess. The vouchers were not uniform. They would have abandoned large numbers, a phenomenon of “ignore the rest” all too common in such “solutions.” The Executive branch is minimally involved in the Washington DC educational issue, btw.
Beck touches on some hard things. Home schooling, for example, is a thorny issue. Often superior, it can also be both a contributing cause and contributing effect of our lack of community. Yet it is also a reaction to failures on multiple levels, of both education and society itself. We have a lack of sense of responsibility to state, nation, and public welfare.
But I agree we need far fewer professional bureaucrats in education. As for education in general, Beck is too simplistic about money. Teachers and students don’t get the money, even when there is some, which in resource-starved America, often isn’t the case. “More teachers who care” implies that people get into poorly compensated, overburdened teaching because…they DON’T CARE? Beck is wildly off on that one. And Beck offers no alternative proposals for how education should be carried out.
Yes Beck, we deserve derision for bigger/more, for, despite generally having smaller families, wanting bigger homes.
“Right combination of public opinion and judicial appointees” (Beck 95) is classic doublespeak nonsense.
Other sources are good as far as they go, but inferences are simply undemonstrated. FDR rightly takes a lot of criticism (from me too, especially for the latter years of his presidency), but the inferences that his programs were ALL failures because they did not lower unemployment significantly is non-sequitir. It is just as easily the case that they prevented deeper unemployment, and their public psychology stabilizing value goes unevaluated by these works.
I and another teacher agree that Beck has made some serious omissions. On page 17, for example, Beck paraphrases the well-known “You can’t save the poor by destroying the rich” quote from Reverend William J. H. Boetcke, and yet doesn’t give credit. This professor would call that plagiarism.
On page 61, Beck paraphrases Barry Goldwater’s (some attribute it to Gerald Ford) quote, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have,” and again he doesn’t even give the original speaker credit.
Beck is dismissive of any evidence that disagrees with him, and loose with his own evidence. When one digs deeper, it is not quite, and sometimes not at all, as Beck claims. So why do it? Is he just a moneymaker preying on the ideologically susceptible, as the non-ideological but cynical say? Does he prey on people’s ignorance in neo-conservative fear-mongering? Is he a stooge of Rupert Murdoch, a hit man of talented proportions, as his detractors claim? Or does he merely believe in doing well while doing what he believes in, which apparently is to take down government? Or is he really a patriot that, while you may disagree with him, honestly loves his country and wants us to wake up and be THE PEOPLE so eloquently written of by our Framers? I have read Beck, watched Beck, and I still don’t know; maybe he is a convoluted, somewhat schizophrenic, mix of all that. People do seem to either love him, or despise him and dismiss him.
I have to disqualify some of Beck for the reasons given above, and he deserves strong criticism for much of the rest, but he also deserves strong credit for the remainder. Mixed bag!
Obama, you’re up soon! :)
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Eco-Echo
Our sustainability minded professor is gallivanting again. When he returns the dialogue will resume. The previous post is directed more to our readers in general than to me so what few comments I have to add to this post I'll include next time. I currently have my hands full dealing with the usually rare (though not so much this year) southern snowstorm.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Eco-Becky
Beck dismisses environmental problems out of hand, which is ostrich-holed. While what he calls “progressives” do often reach too much for the government lever in addressing real environmental issues, and overlook simpler and more market based solutions, that doesn’t wave away environmental reality.
And Beck’s condemnation of TR locking away federal public lands from business and individual private interests’ “rights” to them: what is it exactly that Beck is arguing here? That there is no collective good? That private interests have an inalienable right to exploit public lands?
Beck’s assertion (69) that car companies have been “seriously” experimenting with hydrogen-based fuels since the 1970s? Whatever data he has for that, it is not supplied, and would in any case disagree with all independent researcher data I am aware of.
Beck says that jobs are sacrificed and factories closed for the greater good of stopping pollution, which he intimates is a bad thing, but says little about when jobs are sacrificed and factories closed merely because corporations want more profit. He’s also incensed at being told that “we can’t drill for oil, develop nuclear power, or burn clean coal because of the environmental impacts.” 70. All three of those—drilling, nuclear power, and “clean” coal—are phantoms conjured up to inflame the status quo faithful. Most drilling IS allowed, but even if ALL drilling were allowed, America doesn’t have the oil reserves to satisfy anywhere near its demand—it has maybe 3% of the world’s total reserves. For a nation that consumes 25% of the world’s supply. Nuclear power, even if considerable challenges of design, cost, and shortages of specialized technicians and workers could be overcome, would still be fraught with so many perils of safety and vulnerability to terrorists, not to mention the presently unsolvable radioactive disposal problem, that it is merely another vehicle to distract us and make certain companies rich in the process. “Clean” coal doesn’t really exist in anything practical, its design prospects are highly dubious to say the least, and it is so costly in comparison to alternatives that one can easily see the strands of the coal industry behind the false “push” behind it.
Beck either doesn’t do his research, or does just enough slim canvassing to find something to confirm some inherent bias he has.
For instance, Beck blasts certain environmental “knowledge.” Some of that knowledge does deserve criticism. But criticism with a laser, not a shotgun. Here’s an example of the laser: Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario has said: "The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”
Yep, the IPCC got egg on its face for some citation screw-ups and other things, and its fixing of a year turned out to be off by a wide margin (that’s science checking itself). Yet hacked emails taken out of context turned out to be much ado about little. And all of that did not change the fact, recognized by nearly all geologists and climatologists, that the Himalayan glaciers are melting, at a geologically enormously fast rate. In fact, most glacier packs are melting. Some may halt or even reverse for a few years, but the overall trend is one of retreat. This has been a pattern for a fairly long period of time, although the Tibetan plateau has been hard to pin down because of its variance, which in some respects means that much of the retreat of glaciers there has long been a mostly natural phenomenon . What has alarmed scientists are the rates of change globally relatively recently. What is even more disturbing is the cracking and melting inside some of the glaciers. The world has been focused on the glacier snouts without much attention to the inside, which tells a more complete story than just the tip. Total mass gain or loss is more relevant—a glacier can appear to stand still for long periods of time when it is actually sublimating (melting inside). The “don’t believe in global warming” crowd made inaccurate statements and inferences from the IPCC’s inaccurate statements and inferences (inaccuracies that did not refute overall trends). To what purpose? To sew enough confusion that people stop being concerned? Who does that serve?
We insure our lives, our homes, and our national defense against much less likely threats, and against threats which are much less catastrophic in their consequences. Yet we don’t want to insure for the possibility, let alone any probability. We want to court catastrophic risk. The problem with that is that if you are wrong, it is too late to correct. Even damage control might be out of the question by then.
How insane would one say we would be to wait 3 centuries to say with no qualifiers: “We now have long-term data proving global warming started 300 years ago.”
Because our data and our understanding are both incomplete does not give us license to blithely dismiss man-made effects. Peel back the emotions and the preferences for not having to change. Peel back the agendas that some in the man-made changes community have. Look at what is best, what we really want. Don’t we want clean air, water, food? Don’t we want a nature that doesn’t have to adapt so rapidly? Don’t we prefer forests to erosion, loss of agricultural soil, mudslides, choking fires, and the violent desperation that comes from poverty and scarcity of ecological resources?
Beck makes blanket statements of “increased ice formations at the southern polar cap.” Yep, the eastern polar cap has been relatively stable and may even have increased a slight bit. The western polar cap has been the opposite. Does he not see that or is there something else to all his selectivity? It is this inability or unwillingness to recognize complexity that is so disturbing.
Beck is right to point out the hypocrisy of others, and they deserve a lot of the lambasting he gives them, with their championing of energy efficient things that in turn pollute (a nasty and frequent occurrence in far too many trumpeted “solutions”). And the infuriating, half-blind nanny state, itself propelled along by utterly self-serving special interests and their pet congressmen, deserves his scathing wrath. But this is one of the frustrating things about Beck: he recognizes hypocrisy in others but not in himself. He decries “smart-growth” as a supply and demand contravention, when in fact the system itself is a narrow and artificial one, where ecological, societal, and hidden economic costs do not make it into individual decision making, let alone communal.
Beck speaks out against Michael Moore’s mandate-granting hyperbole, but is silent about (and was silent) when George Bush uttered similar words in 2004.
Beck also conflates individual responsibility and communal responsibility. The one rarely can impact ecology in general; the other can immensely. Comparing the two has some usefulness, but Beck has bent it to serve his own purpose.
Weather and short-term trends are not what point to or away from climate (long-term) changes. Beck cites WEATHER data about some temporary halt in arctic ice cap melting, and yet can’t get his stats right: “In September of 2007, there was a 25 percent reduction in the usual minimum arctic ice cover…In the two years since, nearly all the ice has returned.” In fact, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Arctic sea ice to be 39 percent below the long-term average for September 2007, and September is when the area of ice is lowest each year. In September 2009, the ice was 24 percent below the long-term average. His figures don’t hold up, and because they are about complex things, most people don’t check his facts. Indeed, he sounds more like one of Exxon-Mobil’s previously clandestinely (but now exposed) funded climate change “contrarians.”
The earth has all sorts of built-in correctives. It will likely eventually adjust and correct itself to whatever happens. The question then becomes, does human civilization survive in any presently recognizable form?
As for the global cooling speculation in the 70s that Michael Crichton (and Beck, among others) have lambasted so severely recently: much of the hype came from a media that understood little and misinterpreted much. The rest came from wholly inadequate climate models and very primitive understandings of climate. Scientists had poor data, and did not know what to make of what they had. When geologists said that an ice age (whether major or minor) is coming “soon,” geologists, who think in long periods of time, mean centuries at a minimum, and millennia in probability, but journalists did not seek to clarify. And that slow pull toward an ice age IS almost certainly the long-term trend. Most recent global cooling data turned out to be wrong or misinterpreted, but some was correct, and indeed, while the rest of the planet heats up, there are pockets that do not. This is a phenomenon that has occurred throughout history, and is still partially unexplained.
Yet what do we do then about things which are unmistakably apparent to those who have actually been there? Do we ignore like past failed civilizations? Ah, well, they had somewhere to go when they failed. We…don’t. In Lester Brown’s words:
“The signs that our civilization is in trouble are multiplying. During most of the 6,000 years since civilization began we lived on the sustainable yield of the earth’s natural systems. But in recent decades humanity has overshot the level that those systems can sustain.
We are liquidating the earth’s natural assets to fuel our consumption. Half of us live in countries where water tables are falling and wells are going dry. Soil erosion exceeds soil formation on one third of the world’s cropland, draining the land of its fertility. The world’s ever-growing herds of cattle, sheep, and goats are converting vast stretches of grassland to desert. Forests are shrinking by 13 million acres per year as we clear land for agriculture and cut trees for lumber and paper. Four fifths of oceanic fisheries are being fished at capacity or overfished and headed for collapse. In system after system, demand is overshooting supply.
Meanwhile, with our massive burning of fossil fuels, what if we are overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide (CO2), pushing the earth’s temperature ever higher, as it certainly appears? This in turn could likely be what is generating the more frequent and more extreme climatic events, including crop-withering heat waves, more intense droughts, more severe floods, and more destructive storms.”
That is the MILD, carefully toned down version, folks. Time for Homo Sapiens Sapiens to live up to its species title.
And Beck’s condemnation of TR locking away federal public lands from business and individual private interests’ “rights” to them: what is it exactly that Beck is arguing here? That there is no collective good? That private interests have an inalienable right to exploit public lands?
Beck’s assertion (69) that car companies have been “seriously” experimenting with hydrogen-based fuels since the 1970s? Whatever data he has for that, it is not supplied, and would in any case disagree with all independent researcher data I am aware of.
Beck says that jobs are sacrificed and factories closed for the greater good of stopping pollution, which he intimates is a bad thing, but says little about when jobs are sacrificed and factories closed merely because corporations want more profit. He’s also incensed at being told that “we can’t drill for oil, develop nuclear power, or burn clean coal because of the environmental impacts.” 70. All three of those—drilling, nuclear power, and “clean” coal—are phantoms conjured up to inflame the status quo faithful. Most drilling IS allowed, but even if ALL drilling were allowed, America doesn’t have the oil reserves to satisfy anywhere near its demand—it has maybe 3% of the world’s total reserves. For a nation that consumes 25% of the world’s supply. Nuclear power, even if considerable challenges of design, cost, and shortages of specialized technicians and workers could be overcome, would still be fraught with so many perils of safety and vulnerability to terrorists, not to mention the presently unsolvable radioactive disposal problem, that it is merely another vehicle to distract us and make certain companies rich in the process. “Clean” coal doesn’t really exist in anything practical, its design prospects are highly dubious to say the least, and it is so costly in comparison to alternatives that one can easily see the strands of the coal industry behind the false “push” behind it.
Beck either doesn’t do his research, or does just enough slim canvassing to find something to confirm some inherent bias he has.
For instance, Beck blasts certain environmental “knowledge.” Some of that knowledge does deserve criticism. But criticism with a laser, not a shotgun. Here’s an example of the laser: Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario has said: "The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”
Yep, the IPCC got egg on its face for some citation screw-ups and other things, and its fixing of a year turned out to be off by a wide margin (that’s science checking itself). Yet hacked emails taken out of context turned out to be much ado about little. And all of that did not change the fact, recognized by nearly all geologists and climatologists, that the Himalayan glaciers are melting, at a geologically enormously fast rate. In fact, most glacier packs are melting. Some may halt or even reverse for a few years, but the overall trend is one of retreat. This has been a pattern for a fairly long period of time, although the Tibetan plateau has been hard to pin down because of its variance, which in some respects means that much of the retreat of glaciers there has long been a mostly natural phenomenon . What has alarmed scientists are the rates of change globally relatively recently. What is even more disturbing is the cracking and melting inside some of the glaciers. The world has been focused on the glacier snouts without much attention to the inside, which tells a more complete story than just the tip. Total mass gain or loss is more relevant—a glacier can appear to stand still for long periods of time when it is actually sublimating (melting inside). The “don’t believe in global warming” crowd made inaccurate statements and inferences from the IPCC’s inaccurate statements and inferences (inaccuracies that did not refute overall trends). To what purpose? To sew enough confusion that people stop being concerned? Who does that serve?
We insure our lives, our homes, and our national defense against much less likely threats, and against threats which are much less catastrophic in their consequences. Yet we don’t want to insure for the possibility, let alone any probability. We want to court catastrophic risk. The problem with that is that if you are wrong, it is too late to correct. Even damage control might be out of the question by then.
How insane would one say we would be to wait 3 centuries to say with no qualifiers: “We now have long-term data proving global warming started 300 years ago.”
Because our data and our understanding are both incomplete does not give us license to blithely dismiss man-made effects. Peel back the emotions and the preferences for not having to change. Peel back the agendas that some in the man-made changes community have. Look at what is best, what we really want. Don’t we want clean air, water, food? Don’t we want a nature that doesn’t have to adapt so rapidly? Don’t we prefer forests to erosion, loss of agricultural soil, mudslides, choking fires, and the violent desperation that comes from poverty and scarcity of ecological resources?
Beck makes blanket statements of “increased ice formations at the southern polar cap.” Yep, the eastern polar cap has been relatively stable and may even have increased a slight bit. The western polar cap has been the opposite. Does he not see that or is there something else to all his selectivity? It is this inability or unwillingness to recognize complexity that is so disturbing.
Beck is right to point out the hypocrisy of others, and they deserve a lot of the lambasting he gives them, with their championing of energy efficient things that in turn pollute (a nasty and frequent occurrence in far too many trumpeted “solutions”). And the infuriating, half-blind nanny state, itself propelled along by utterly self-serving special interests and their pet congressmen, deserves his scathing wrath. But this is one of the frustrating things about Beck: he recognizes hypocrisy in others but not in himself. He decries “smart-growth” as a supply and demand contravention, when in fact the system itself is a narrow and artificial one, where ecological, societal, and hidden economic costs do not make it into individual decision making, let alone communal.
Beck speaks out against Michael Moore’s mandate-granting hyperbole, but is silent about (and was silent) when George Bush uttered similar words in 2004.
Beck also conflates individual responsibility and communal responsibility. The one rarely can impact ecology in general; the other can immensely. Comparing the two has some usefulness, but Beck has bent it to serve his own purpose.
Weather and short-term trends are not what point to or away from climate (long-term) changes. Beck cites WEATHER data about some temporary halt in arctic ice cap melting, and yet can’t get his stats right: “In September of 2007, there was a 25 percent reduction in the usual minimum arctic ice cover…In the two years since, nearly all the ice has returned.” In fact, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Arctic sea ice to be 39 percent below the long-term average for September 2007, and September is when the area of ice is lowest each year. In September 2009, the ice was 24 percent below the long-term average. His figures don’t hold up, and because they are about complex things, most people don’t check his facts. Indeed, he sounds more like one of Exxon-Mobil’s previously clandestinely (but now exposed) funded climate change “contrarians.”
The earth has all sorts of built-in correctives. It will likely eventually adjust and correct itself to whatever happens. The question then becomes, does human civilization survive in any presently recognizable form?
As for the global cooling speculation in the 70s that Michael Crichton (and Beck, among others) have lambasted so severely recently: much of the hype came from a media that understood little and misinterpreted much. The rest came from wholly inadequate climate models and very primitive understandings of climate. Scientists had poor data, and did not know what to make of what they had. When geologists said that an ice age (whether major or minor) is coming “soon,” geologists, who think in long periods of time, mean centuries at a minimum, and millennia in probability, but journalists did not seek to clarify. And that slow pull toward an ice age IS almost certainly the long-term trend. Most recent global cooling data turned out to be wrong or misinterpreted, but some was correct, and indeed, while the rest of the planet heats up, there are pockets that do not. This is a phenomenon that has occurred throughout history, and is still partially unexplained.
Yet what do we do then about things which are unmistakably apparent to those who have actually been there? Do we ignore like past failed civilizations? Ah, well, they had somewhere to go when they failed. We…don’t. In Lester Brown’s words:
“The signs that our civilization is in trouble are multiplying. During most of the 6,000 years since civilization began we lived on the sustainable yield of the earth’s natural systems. But in recent decades humanity has overshot the level that those systems can sustain.
We are liquidating the earth’s natural assets to fuel our consumption. Half of us live in countries where water tables are falling and wells are going dry. Soil erosion exceeds soil formation on one third of the world’s cropland, draining the land of its fertility. The world’s ever-growing herds of cattle, sheep, and goats are converting vast stretches of grassland to desert. Forests are shrinking by 13 million acres per year as we clear land for agriculture and cut trees for lumber and paper. Four fifths of oceanic fisheries are being fished at capacity or overfished and headed for collapse. In system after system, demand is overshooting supply.
Meanwhile, with our massive burning of fossil fuels, what if we are overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide (CO2), pushing the earth’s temperature ever higher, as it certainly appears? This in turn could likely be what is generating the more frequent and more extreme climatic events, including crop-withering heat waves, more intense droughts, more severe floods, and more destructive storms.”
That is the MILD, carefully toned down version, folks. Time for Homo Sapiens Sapiens to live up to its species title.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Dragons, HR, You Turns, and Other Items of Note
Ironic that our classics follower has left at the very time when you picked up the Roman staves in earnest. Gibbon believed strongly in the power, strength, and indeed, the ascendancy of Western culture, and did not strongly relate his writing to his present day. Today he would see a different picture. He would see his history being recast in a different mold, but the same essence. He would be appalled in so many ways; he would feel so very out of place. While not Cicero, he might even have adopted similar Cicero actions in trying to stave off the disintegration. But he would also be a bit out of sorts, perhaps, to see that it was Britain’s child, and not Britain herself, who had become the hollowed out colossus.
A point: your quote about the dangerous secret of wealth and weakness of the empire meant that Rome was wealthy from accumulated wealth (and some continuing wealth), but that it had become weak in defense. Meaning that the strong could take from them. And would.
To Understudy, colloquially expressed, but essentially correct! Your comments are most welcome anytime!
As to the horse, no, you’ve finished him off nicely. I will only clarify my agreement by saying that yes, it has been a gradual process. I just feel it is the decline of the general culture, of us not holding them accountable in the early stages, of the way WE transformed, that set the foundations for the process. It has been a mutually reinforcing degenerative feedback loop: “elites” do it, so it gives implicit permission for others to do it, either from example or resentment; the everyday person does not hold the “elites” accountable, thereby giving implicit permission to the elites in general, and so it spirals.
And willful weakness over time comes to collapse, as those who could save it instead become disillusioned, even disgusted, and many of them are only too happy to let it go or even help finish the system off. Unfortunately for the masses, whatever benefits that arise from this have historically come with bitter and destructive side effects.
We don’t have focus, and are manipulated not to. Few are paying attention to BP any longer, for example. Just like Exxon and countless other examples.
Like the satellite tv commercial, we are amusing ourselves while the problems of the world outside consume us, even while we consume the earth.
We cumulatively spend more money, time, effort, and are more proficient in analyzing the opponent’s defense in football than we are in analyzing our real-life adversaries. Spectacle. The lowest price Superbowl ticket runs $1200, and the entire week before it is consumed with preparation. People will drive a thousand miles, stay 100 miles away, go into debt, and pour time, talent, treasure, and energy into the…spectacle.
I’m not a killjoy. Entertainment can be enjoyable, and I enjoy watching sports with my friends. It’s when it comes at the cost of addressing the things that are killing our civilization, that it becomes a problem for me. A colossal one. And we are to blame. We have been the willing pawns of those who would divert us, and we have valued things that are illusion, and put no value on our true lives, our true society, our true foundations. And that is why they are snapping, cracking, crumbling.
The lower class—formerly called the working class, but that moniker is ill suited in too many cases of unemployment or underemployment because little or nothing of substance is there—is adapting, not rebelling. Inoculated just enough by the consumerist, escapist, entertainment spectacle society, their passivity serves the corporate masters and their government lackeys.
How complex are people and how can they change? The one who carried out the internment of Japanese-Americans that you mention? None other than then California Attorney General…Earl Warren. Later Chief Justice of the most liberal court this nation has ever had. And yet he insisted to the end that his actions about internment were the best considering the time.
On to more Beck soon!
A point: your quote about the dangerous secret of wealth and weakness of the empire meant that Rome was wealthy from accumulated wealth (and some continuing wealth), but that it had become weak in defense. Meaning that the strong could take from them. And would.
To Understudy, colloquially expressed, but essentially correct! Your comments are most welcome anytime!
As to the horse, no, you’ve finished him off nicely. I will only clarify my agreement by saying that yes, it has been a gradual process. I just feel it is the decline of the general culture, of us not holding them accountable in the early stages, of the way WE transformed, that set the foundations for the process. It has been a mutually reinforcing degenerative feedback loop: “elites” do it, so it gives implicit permission for others to do it, either from example or resentment; the everyday person does not hold the “elites” accountable, thereby giving implicit permission to the elites in general, and so it spirals.
And willful weakness over time comes to collapse, as those who could save it instead become disillusioned, even disgusted, and many of them are only too happy to let it go or even help finish the system off. Unfortunately for the masses, whatever benefits that arise from this have historically come with bitter and destructive side effects.
We don’t have focus, and are manipulated not to. Few are paying attention to BP any longer, for example. Just like Exxon and countless other examples.
Like the satellite tv commercial, we are amusing ourselves while the problems of the world outside consume us, even while we consume the earth.
We cumulatively spend more money, time, effort, and are more proficient in analyzing the opponent’s defense in football than we are in analyzing our real-life adversaries. Spectacle. The lowest price Superbowl ticket runs $1200, and the entire week before it is consumed with preparation. People will drive a thousand miles, stay 100 miles away, go into debt, and pour time, talent, treasure, and energy into the…spectacle.
I’m not a killjoy. Entertainment can be enjoyable, and I enjoy watching sports with my friends. It’s when it comes at the cost of addressing the things that are killing our civilization, that it becomes a problem for me. A colossal one. And we are to blame. We have been the willing pawns of those who would divert us, and we have valued things that are illusion, and put no value on our true lives, our true society, our true foundations. And that is why they are snapping, cracking, crumbling.
The lower class—formerly called the working class, but that moniker is ill suited in too many cases of unemployment or underemployment because little or nothing of substance is there—is adapting, not rebelling. Inoculated just enough by the consumerist, escapist, entertainment spectacle society, their passivity serves the corporate masters and their government lackeys.
How complex are people and how can they change? The one who carried out the internment of Japanese-Americans that you mention? None other than then California Attorney General…Earl Warren. Later Chief Justice of the most liberal court this nation has ever had. And yet he insisted to the end that his actions about internment were the best considering the time.
On to more Beck soon!
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
In the Meantime...
The Professor has been called away for a few days. In his absence I thought I'd post a response to a recent comment.
A reader made a lengthy critique on a recent post and in doing so has revealed the thinness of the scope of my analysis of who I hold accountable. My wording made it look as if I'm holding politicians solely responsible which isn't the case, though I do think them accountable for a great deal. The innumerable instances over time of the power seeking corrupt behavior by politicians I touched on has culminated with them having, at this point, very little power at all, as the reader points out. We as a nation get what we deserve for our inattention, laziness, and apathy which seems to be either the politician who gets into the game with a desire for money and power (today we might add celebrity) or the man or woman who sincerely hopes to change things for the better and arrives in office to find that the influence he hoped to have in fact lies elsewhere and he is for all practical purposes powerless beyond tinkering about the edges a bit.
But if we are to blame, instead of government, the giant multinationals then we must take a bit (or perhaps a lot) of blame on ourselves. We feed them. We are the ones who succumb to their advertising, waste our time on the entertainment they produce, and buy from them things we do not need with money we don't have. We buy and consume with little thought to the consequences of our actions. We have eschewed simplicity and become slaves to "our current commercial culture" and I'm afraid in doing so we've thrown away the lion's share of freedom with both hands. As I've said there is plenty of blame to go around and in the end we have, as a whole, brought it upon ourselves.
Perhaps America isn't ready to take on the role of empire proper, but I suspect citizens of a great many other nations would take the view that we've been making a pretty good go of it, albeit clumsily, for quite some time. Being deeply in debt to our rival makes confrontation difficult as we recently observed.
Under the current circumstances we don't "have the stomach for such a leader." But my fear is that given the right conditions, every nation does.
A reader made a lengthy critique on a recent post and in doing so has revealed the thinness of the scope of my analysis of who I hold accountable. My wording made it look as if I'm holding politicians solely responsible which isn't the case, though I do think them accountable for a great deal. The innumerable instances over time of the power seeking corrupt behavior by politicians I touched on has culminated with them having, at this point, very little power at all, as the reader points out. We as a nation get what we deserve for our inattention, laziness, and apathy which seems to be either the politician who gets into the game with a desire for money and power (today we might add celebrity) or the man or woman who sincerely hopes to change things for the better and arrives in office to find that the influence he hoped to have in fact lies elsewhere and he is for all practical purposes powerless beyond tinkering about the edges a bit.
But if we are to blame, instead of government, the giant multinationals then we must take a bit (or perhaps a lot) of blame on ourselves. We feed them. We are the ones who succumb to their advertising, waste our time on the entertainment they produce, and buy from them things we do not need with money we don't have. We buy and consume with little thought to the consequences of our actions. We have eschewed simplicity and become slaves to "our current commercial culture" and I'm afraid in doing so we've thrown away the lion's share of freedom with both hands. As I've said there is plenty of blame to go around and in the end we have, as a whole, brought it upon ourselves.
Perhaps America isn't ready to take on the role of empire proper, but I suspect citizens of a great many other nations would take the view that we've been making a pretty good go of it, albeit clumsily, for quite some time. Being deeply in debt to our rival makes confrontation difficult as we recently observed.
Under the current circumstances we don't "have the stomach for such a leader." But my fear is that given the right conditions, every nation does.
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