Dis Connection

Because we are disconnected, we reverberate and distribute nearly innumerable problems throughout our system, in almost exponential fashion. Solve our disconnection, and we clear out legions of problems (although admittedly, we run the risk of creating a few more in the process—clearly, a risk worth taking).

Here’s just one small sample of how our disconnection—and our lack of seeing the effects of those disconnections—multiplies throughout our society while we address, if we address at all, things in a band- aid fashion because we see no connections: There are too many individuals in our highly individualistic society who feel out of place—or feel they have no place. After all, “you’re on your own, pal,” is what the culture says to them, despite any offers of help. Many turn to drugs, violence, escapism, or various forms of anti-social behavior. There’s ONE problem (actually a bunch, but we’re simplifying here).

Meanwhile, down south, we have spiraling (out of control?) violence from individuals and organizations vying to supply the illegal drugs that those disconnected up north want. We rail and rage when it affects our own non-drug involved citizens. We talk about “the border,” and “fighting the war on drugs,” and more useless verbiage while we spend our national treasure in foreign lands treading water at best, and maybe stirring up backlash and blowback. We spend money—ridiculous amounts of money we don’t have—on all sorts of things in isolation. We make little headway on, and we solve, none of them. Because we make no connections.

We ignore the desperate that we create as byproduct of our ways abroad. And then rage in frustration when those desperate lash out or seek to do us harm. The desperate are keenly susceptible to manipulative radicalization by the few—have we learned nothing from our own Western history how this can happen?

We like to spout how we don’t need to spend even a little money on “foreigners” (an increasingly fanciful notion in this highly interconnected and interdependent system and biosphere), while we spend enormous amounts on often heavy handed presences in foreign lands. Our willingness to bleed our increasingly phantom treasury in dubious ventures contrasts even more inanely with our unwillingness to actually invest in desperation-prevention. We spend untold billions in all sorts of immigration issues, let alone the billions more we spend on the “drug problem,” looking for more or better mops to sop up the water rather than shutting the faucets off.

Ask those who TRULY understand and study the immigration issue, and you will see that much of it can be ameliorated by connected and thoughtful policies, not emotional lashing outs.

Ask those who TRULY understand and study the drug issue, and you will see that it is largely a manifestation of other things, and if you don’t address those things, whatever you do about drugs is of marginal effect.

Examine your precepts America.

Denying Our Eyes About the New Normal

Do we have an economy built on lies, wealth transfer, and gross misallocation of resources?

David Stockman is too smart and too financial-savvy for the Wall Street ilk to fool. As he says in his most recently released interview with Peter Gorenstein, most of the job “gains” (so loudly trumpeted by Wall Street analysts) come from temporary or entry level jobs. But without true growth in the "base of the economy...where the high paying jobs exist," the economy will continue to struggle with "very, very slow growth."

"We've got a real income distribution problem in this economy," argues Stockman, "and it's getting worse, not better."

We can’t seem to face the truth—or the pain. 60% of the public say they are in favor of the tax cuts made and of the recent political deal made. They either have little clue or are in selfish denial about financial solvency. Now the engines of economics and history move another notch of the wheel clock forward to force us to face an agony we lacked the courage, the sacrifice, the vision, the focus to avoid. America’s fixation with thinking itself so special will explode in our faces if we keep putting off the hard work. That is nearly inevitable.

People will express outrage on talk tv and radio at the burden put on the future (and/or children and grandchildren), yet in the very next sentence express equal outrage that taxes are not cut across the board (including for billionaires).

You can’t have it both ways people.

If we continue on this path of doom, it will take us down, one disaster after another. We have too many other system-threatening problems to be behaving this foolishly.

Tinder and Brush

I see weakness nearly everywhere. All the tinder and brush waiting for a match.

I see workers who don’t share in their increase in productivity, and so their wages fall behind. And realize (too late for many) that debt to make up the difference is not a workable solution.

Point to a sector of the American economy that is doing well. All you will likely be able to point out are fossil fuels, agribusiness/food/drink, insurance, pharmaceuticals, chronic sick “care,” Wall Street finance, mining, waste “management,” software, computer systems design, accounting and tax preparation, “security,” and companies that have been granted (often generous) government contracts. A few dots in retail and services do well, but they stand out because they are the exceptions. How many of the above are what we can consider bedrock foundations of a sound economy (let alone ecology)? And governments? They are consumers, so they hardly count.

Even as the top corporations sit on mounds of cash, they continue to fire and downsize pay levels. Why do they do the things that are damaging long-term? Because they are owned by speculators and mutual funds and institutional investors from around the world who demand constant high projections of next quarter’s profits so that the stock price will go up. Delusionary, and unsustainable past anything but the short term, as it requires cuts in labor and cuts in the pay to that labor.

There is weakness. America needs to rejuvenate itself, to work on itself. It needs to address the things wrong, it needs to quit enfeebling its voice.

Because we have to really do the hard work. If we don’t, we are at best merely putting off a Depression for a while.

We have to do something about all this tinder and brush. We have made ourselves far too vulnerable to the slightest trigger. Let’s start working on foundations, to take away some of that vulnerability. The very process will start in motion the reversal, which can gain in speed over time as we build on the right things, just as our problems have gained in speed as we built on the wrong things.

Hoisting On Own Petard

It’s a tribute to us I suppose. We created a system that the world, and especially many of the real or potential rival powers, wanted to play in. No other power has really done that. Except maybe Rome.

Now that our greed, arrogance, and selfish stupidity have made us weak, they stand poised to beat us with that system.

My father always told me that the rich in this country largely care only for themselves and getting richer, and that they actually crave a new Depression and deflation. That they will bleed the country dry by their selfish and corrupt dealings, and then when the Depression that they have largely caused comes about, they will buy up everything (including labor) cheap to become the absolute masters of all.

I always thought the old man was paranoid. Now I’m not so sure.

The Bond Traders With Their Hands On The Train Whistle

Obama almost acts controlled. As David Stockman, Reagan’s former budget director, remarks, where is his fortitude? He should be saying to Congress: “If you send me a bill that extends tax cuts for billionaires and yet doesn’t deal with ending the deficits, it’s going to get vetoed.”

I should watch more of Fareed Zakaria’s GPS. I don’t agree with him all the time, and sometimes I strongly disagree with him, but I like his perspective because it is something other than strictly American. And I like it that he brings people on his show who will say uncomfortable things. Like Stockman, who is scathing on both parties.

As Stockman says, the Fed is playing a most dangerous and irresponsible game to avert reality, the reality that 30 years of debt-fueled binging have left the US financially and monetarily precariously fragile. If and when the bond traders of the world lose faith in the US fiscal process, the resulting sell off of US treasury bonds will be a catastrophe for US finances, forcing the Fed to raise interest rates and throw us into a Depression, or let it ride and watch government essentially implode.

Stockman also says these debt-fueled serial bubbles shifted wealth—the super-wealthy benefitted from them monstrously disproportionally. And he says that the previous party of fiscal restraint and responsibility, the Republican Party, shifted to tax cutting that became an ideology, even when it was demonstrated time and again that it didn’t work, but only shifted wealth upward and actually made deficits worse.

Stockman, who is writing a book on the financial crisis, says the panic was in Wall Street and the Treasury far more than anywhere else, and they showed who had the power, for they deceived us not only previously, but in what was ACTUALLY necessary to restore economic stability. The floodgates were released for them far past anything needed, and these floodgates meant they could return to their obscene profits and wealth transfer (they will hand out $144B in bonuses this year alone).

Anyone still in doubt about who has the real power? Still want to trust them? Believe it when they say the economy is recovering nicely?

Too, Well, Too

Things connect, and cascade. When a person is stressed, overburdened, working too much, not in control of much—that person is less tolerant, less considerate, of others. And so the person who needs a kind gesture doesn’t get one, the person who needs to get out of the parking lot can’t, the person who needs a friendly voice, to feel connected, receives only silence. And then that person transmits it along. And so it magnifies and extends throughout, a perverse butterfly effect. There is a price to be paid for our maniacal pace, our relentless push. This is a disconnected or mal-connected society with too great an emphasis on individualism or solely the nuclear family, and it is also a society where the fruits of labor often either never come or are withheld by economic, political, and social powers. We can mask it in various forms of escape or denial, but that does not change the reality. It is a subject for conversation perhaps we should have with and amongst ourselves.

Mississippi Turning

Watched a middle aged white woman wheel groceries out on a cart for a black mother and her young daughter. And no one thought anything about it apparently, except for the historian who smiled to himself at how wonderfully remarkable it was that this scene was so unremarkable.

The Invisible Train

Right now, the true size of our debt is about 15 times the official debt of $13 or so trillion. This is because Congress has labeled most of our liabilities something else to keep them off the books and somewhere (usually far) in the future. Social Security, Medicare, (and Medicaid in a way) were not corrected when we had the chance, but made instead massive Ponzi schemes.

As Professor Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University says, the International Monetary Fund and the Congressional Budget Office have both effectively declared the Unites States bankrupt or nearly so. To pay its obligations, the US must have, starting today, additional funding equal to the total present revenue of the whole federal government; every year we don’t adds that amount on to what is really our collective government credit card balance and necessitates even more obligation. To meet that total obligation, either we double taxation, or we mix some sort of increased taxation and reduced spending, since we obviously can’t cut spending to absolute 0. Of course, we could always ruin ourselves and print more money and cause runaway inflation that would destroy most all our systems. More realistically, we need to drastically simplify and restructure our taxation, health (not just “health care”), retirement, energy, and financial systems, all of which are messes and train wrecks in process. And that probably also means taking away some of the obligations within those systems, because the obligations as presently situated are neither realistic nor sustainable.

Spending more to “stimulate” the economy? Taxing less to “stimulate” the economy? Utter delusions, both of them, and promoted by those who don’t want you to realize they’ve screwed up. There ARE NO mostly painless “solutions” to what we’ve done. There is going to be pain. Deep pain. If we don’t want it to ruin us, we have to face up to it. NOW.

What Profiteth A Nation to Gain the Whole World And Then Die?

We do have steep geo-political risks in this world. But we now have unacceptable economic and ecological risks. In fact, on a weighting chart, we are all off-kilter. We are spending our wealth—more than our wealth, actually—to insure our national defense against much less likely threats to our very survival than the threats we have to those two FOUNDATIONS. Instead of spending so much time looking at the structure built on top, shouldn’t we be looking at what holds that structure up? Because what good does it do to quest for the best structure when all that supports it is cracking and giving way? We have been insanely off-focus.

Attempting to Reach Perfect Security Destroys Economic Foundation—Leaving No Security

We are spending $900B a year—that’s 30 percent of expenditures, but 52 percent of revenues (because we borrow and deficit spend)—on “Defense.” To “defend” our nation from what may sometimes seem just a couple thousand religious fanatics, a lot of whom are hiding in caves in Pakistan, and many of the rest we may be creating by policies of economic and political exploitation? And making a lot of American multinationals and contractors rich in the process? And forgetting that all that money for “Defense” was taken from the productive sectors of the economy (or worse, borrowed), because government isn’t itself an economic producer but is instead a consumer?

I say this not because we need to bash government anymore; nefarious forces have been doing that enough for their own immensely selfish and twisted reasons, and we do need government to reassert our will against them. And we do need to defend ourselves from real threats; they are out there. No, I say this because we need to do it far smarter, far less frivolously, and far more strategically, and in the process we need to face fiscal reality, something we are not doing by any relevant yardstick (or meter-stick, for the rest of the world who have jumped to the intuitively and scientifically superior metric).

Our Framers would be aghast at the size and decades we have had this much and this kind of military, and how much money we have spent. A few of the many reasons they and those who followed them shrunk the thing after every war before the 20th century was both its economic impact and its danger of warping the democratic process and foreign and domestic policy (the Framers were great students of history). While we may have had good reasons for making different decisions than they would have, we do not give ourselves the hard review. We have become too accepting of “how it is.”

We need a new strategic plan for the country, one that all people are aware of (at least in general) and behind, and we need to get cracking on implementing it. We have narrowly defined "defense" and "security" for far too long. It is time for a more holistic approach, one that recognizes that economics and environment are FOUNDATIONS of security. And maybe, just maybe, that also means thinking about the collective good.

Power Exercised

Notice how severely the true powers deal with anyone or anything that even remotely threatens their power: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39995283/ns/politics-decision_2010

Who gets elected matters little. Because they now know they will only STAY elected if they do not upset the moneyed controllers.

Democracy For the Few

Today, people are exercising “choice” that is often meaningless: Democrats who are reactive or fumbling, Republicans who are belligerent or obstructive, Tea Partiers who are mad with no plan. This mask-flipping sideshow will do little to impact the true powers who cynically feed it all. These true powers? The corporate and financial ‘elites,” and their allies. The sideshow is just that, a show. These “elites” have already put into place what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls “The Great Decoupling” of them from the rest of us. 75 percent of Americans make $50,000 or less (often a lot less), and those Americans have largely been abandoned by the elites who are at the top of the other 25%. Those elites love for you to get angry at politicians, and chuckle when you think that favoring one party over another will make much of a difference. It won’t, other than to make it worse in different ways.

So confident and seemingly secure in their power are they that they fully expect you to either 1) not understand what is happening, or 2) to comply out of fear, intimidation, or perceived helplessness. They blithely and uncaringly TELL you that high unemployment/low paying employment is a new structural reality beyond their (or anyone’s) control, and that globalized free market forces have permanently altered things and you can’t do anything about it.

It doesn’t take much examination to realize they are lying. This is a system they have moved into place and carefully manipulated. That system is a construct, not an inevitable fixture, and they are manipulating and perverting the market, not operating honestly in it. The laws, the interpretation of laws, and the interpreters of those laws, largely favor them, and they constantly work to keep it that way. Labor is increasingly commoditized and controlled, and they already control the capital and much of the choice land, plus many of the vital information avenues. Statistics are manipulated too, and a media they largely control or direct spouts those statistics as if they are real and meaningful.

We don’t have real capitalism here, we have Robber-Capitalism. After every demonstrated failure of that Robber-Capitalism (past Depressions of the late 1800s and 1930s especially), populist and progressive forces have moved for change. But they have not studied their enemy well, and so those forces have eventually faded. However, their enemy has studied THEM well, and learned from history, and now that enemy does the things necessary to deflect, gut, confuse, enfeeble, disorganize, dis-empower, divide, distract, misinform, unbalance, and depress those forces before they gather traction.

“We the People” are going to have get wiser in this fight.

The Long and Paralyzing Arrogance

Roman citizens often realized that things were bad, and unsustainable, but such are the stultifying aspects of perceiving one's place as being "on top," that the citizens did little to move for effective change. Many Romans took a view (perhaps willful delusion) that things would "somehow work themselves out," and that, after all, Rome had been on top for seemingly endless decades and would always be so.

And so, instead of facing squarely their society's challenges, they far too often gave themselves license to either retreat to leisure or fixate on sporting contests. And many were bought off by some measure of the dole, or even by empty promises and irrelevant ideologies.

Long before the barbarians knocked at the gate, they witnessed the transformation of Rome from within.

Piece One, Step Two

End subsidies. To soft drink makers, to fossil fuel companies, to financial “services” corporations, to agribusinesses. We are subsidizing our own destruction! It is bad enough that costs do not reflect reality, but we are PAYING them to get a good deal at our expense. Paying them to have tens of billions in profits!

Piece One, Step One

Tax restructuring.

We need to tax environmentally harming activities and products, and correspondingly, WE NEED TO REDUCE AND EVENTUALLY ELIMINATE TAXES ON INCOME, ESPECIALLY WAGE INCOME (thought that might get your attention). This would be a revenue neutral proposition in all likelihood.

We then need to tax health harming activities and products, and even societal harming activities and products. We need to do this for, among other reasons, to pay down our gargantuan debt that is choking us to death.

In short, we need to tax the things that are harmful and quit taxing the things that are beneficial. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan: If you want to have less of something, tax it; if you want to have more of something, un-tax it.

Right now, the market does not reflect the ecological or social costs of many things, hence skewing our decisions because we are either making them without correct information, or getting an apparently free ride. But those costs are borne by us regardless, just in an irrational and absurdly twisted and abusively wasteful manner.

So, step one of piece one is to gradually, but quickly, raise taxes to their true cost level on environmentally damaging things like oil, coal, etc. while correspondingly reducing income taxes. Making this a carbon tax is the easiest to understand and the easiest for the market to adjust to, unlike complex cap and trade systems which are wonky at best and subject to much more perversion. Making it a carbon tax also means that the most damaging things that produce more carbon, like coal, get taxed more, while less damaging things, like natural gas, get taxed less. You also then don’t have to get into expensive (and, once again, more easily perverted) systems of tax credits and the like. The market will do all that for you as it flows to what are the least costly alternatives once the true costs have been factored.

Got Courage?

The quote above is going to stay until we get off the present path. We CAN get off it, you know. It requires a decision to no longer live in denial, to, in my father's no mincing words, "get your head out of your ass."

Plan B 4.0 is an eminently doable, profoundly sensible, plan that restores hope to a world and its people that desperately need it. If you want to feel good about something, feel good about getting behind it. It is a turn away from the irrational road of doom we're on, and one toward a brighter future. We've got a lot of problems; if you want this civilization to have the opportunity to work on those problems, to have a chance, it needs this as a basis. Your children will thank you for working, really working, toward a definably brighter and sustainable future. You've been wanting to do that for a long time, haven't you? You'll feel good about it too.

Because that will mean a whole helluva lot more to you than any amount of material wealth or comfort or entertainment.

Plan B 4.0. Buy it. Read it. Talk about it with people, including YOUR local, state, and national leaders.

Because spectating on this one is a vote for the end of our civilization. The closing paragraph of the book states it inescapably:

“The choice is ours—yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over an economy that continues to destroy its natural support systems until it destroys itself, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that changes direction, moving the world onto a path of sustained progress. The choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.”

GET YOURS

There is a disturbing pattern across the nation: excessive individualism combined with denial. People think that if they can somehow beat the odds, and get THEIR money, THEIR job, THEIR house, THEIR retirement, etc., that all can be well with them. Utter delusion. Not only are they tied to a government that is going into a swirling Charybdis, but their society is heading for one all its own. You will not escape, citizen. If those “others” go down, i.e., if there is not enough hope and basic survivability of the general population, YOU AREN’T MAKING IT EITHER. You rely on them far more than you know. Everything from your food, to your house maintenance, to your car, to your infrastructure, to your clothing, and a whole lot else.

It would be ironic that we have become, at a time when it is harder than ever for the individual to get by (let alone flourish), so maniacally socialism-phobic that the cooperation we so urgently need is swallowed up in selfishness and divisiveness. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, however; I think it’s by design. It serves certain power centers for us to be this way, and for us to think there can be no other way.

Those who think that they don’t need to attempt to do anything or learn anything about what’s happening to this society: What good is it going to do you to get all your retirements lined up, get your house all set, get your future all planned, if the general population you rely on to support that future can’t make it, and more importantly, the government itself implodes in some fashion from unsustainability or external forces gain inordinate leverage?

Granted, the dogs and cats aren’t raining yet, but when someone can demonstrate to me how our present course can lead to anything but deep pain and perhaps ruin, I will lift my skeptical assessment. Relying on fortunate unforeseeable circumstance (pure wild dumb luck) is no rational prescription, but right now, that’s almost all there is, and that’s moronic.

If the extended recession really did drive great changes that extended much beyond coping, I would be encouraged. As of right now, there's not enough sign of that.

The Mixed Bag of AC

My great-grandfather told my father: "Air conditioning can be a great thing when a man can get some sleep because of it. A man can do a lot of work if he gets a good night's sleep."

Yes indeed. My great-grandfather, who may have provided bloodline inspiration for much of this writer's own life paths, was on to something. I will leave aside for now the part about getting a good night's sleep, and that (and why) we don't do enough of that anymore.

My thought here is about the air conditioning.

When air conditioning brings true relief from deeply stifling heat and/or humidity, or offers some protection from adverse air quality of one sort or another, air conditioning is serving a clearly and demonstrably good purpose. When it is merely providing slight additional comfort, and in the process insulating us in an artificial environment that divorces us even further from nature (or even just prevents us from breathing fresh air), it is doing us a disservice.

Or rather we are doing ourselves a disservice. We not only wimpify ourselves, but we also disconnect ourselves from what is "out there" and that we need to be a part of physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

So unless there's a compelling reason not to, open a window. Or better yet, take a walk. You might inspire others to do the same. The long road back from this artifical bubble life begins with just that. A single action.

Channeling, Denial, and Escape

The media, effectively controlled by only a few entities, channels the public discussion in a manner that those elites want. We don't really talk about the things that matter. We fight petty fights over our chairs on the Titanic.

Most people don't even think about this, and are in denial.

Those who do think about it join the group in denial and just escape into sports and entertainment. People feel: "Life has become unmanageable, so I am just going to carve out what brief happiness I can."

Is that what we want our children and children's children to ask about? "What were you doing when it went bad?" they will ask us. "What did you do to try to make it better or fight the good fight?" Do we really want to have to say to them..."Nothing"?

How About No Head Start?

Today, I am here to recommend the entire column of John Rosemond from 8/17/2010 (see at www.rosemond.com). It concerns America's fixation with preschooling, "getting a head start," and other general nonsense. Here's a sample, but the entire column should be mandatory reading for all Americans, not just parents:

"In the 1950s, prior to the onset of one failed education 'reform' initiative after
another, America's literacy rate was at an all-time high. It's interesting to note
that with rare exception we early Boomers were not taught to read until first grade.
Typically, our mothers made no effort whatsoever to teach us any literacy skills
during our preschool years. Rather, they taught us to pay attention to women and
do what women told us to do-the two skills most essential to early academic achievement."

Now, while it is important to teach respect for women, I might have some other things to say about his last statement there, but the overall thought seems golden to me.

Lack of Historical Sexual Perspective

In our quest to "save" our children (see another post here), we have lost perspective. A woman in CA is facing criminal charges for sex with two teenage boys. Historically, boys often "came of age" with older women.

Historically, it came down to puberty. When puberty arrived, it was no longer molestation, and certainly not a crime, for marriage, sex, childbirth, etc. to occur. Ever read the book Founding Mothers? Many of them were 14-16 years old, and often married to much older men to boot. And of course, one doesn't have to reach far in the Bible to find a 14 year old married to a much older man.

The age of the older one is not so much the issue, it is our fixation on "protecting" the younger one. We need all the protection in the world for those who have not entered puberty. We need less for those who have. Our laws and our system make little distinction.

This continues the pattern of how we do so many things that retard true maturity. It is almost like we are afraid for our children to grow up, or to transition to adults. Is it the desire for control? Wanting to have OUR form of love, to satisfy OUR form of the extended parental-child dependency? We are doing them no favors by being that way. Yes, it IS understandable to feel heartache that they grow up and transition out of their dependency and heavily interlinked stage, because we love them and want to spend precious time with them (which, in our time-maniacal culture, we probably do too little of, and so we are heavily laden with guilt and remorse). But it is selfish and harming to keep them in that stage too long.

People often say the words "they may be physically maturing, but they aren't mentally/emotionally ready." Nope, they probably aren't. Maturity responds to what is asked of it. In most respects, we aren't asking much. People of the 1700s matured fast because it was expected. They weren't babied, overprotected, or sheltered in some parental/societal artificial cocoon that disconnected them from reality.

Disorganized Religion

Anne Rice, the famous author of the wildly popular “Interview With A Vampire,” and other novels, says she is done with Christianity. "For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out," she said on her Facebook page this week. “I remain committed to Christ as always, but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else."

Her comments reminded me a bit of Edward Gibbon’s comments on the nature of early Christians, which has been romanticized by many, but who held (at least in the latter stages of the Roman Empire) many of the same qualities that Rice cites above.

With Christianity as organized religion facing stiff challenges from, among other things, materialism, time-mania, entertainment obsession, jadedness, disconnection, and apathy, not to mention questions about Biblical accuracy/applicability and a surging Islam, what is its likely future? Will its central tenets of the written example of Jesus remain, and the rest be modified or even discarded? Will it transform into something the present day would not recognize? Will it itself resurge? What is its likely progression through history? And what of the central monotheistic nature and connectedness of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which to an alien from another world would seem like one religion with 3 main divisions and many sub-divisions?

I’m not sure which, if any, of those questions can be addressed and in what fashion. They are just my musings for today! :)

I'm a Vet and I Lost It Yesterday

Yesterday, I was walking out of a store wearing a t-shirt with a military logo on it. An overweight girl and her apparent boyfriend, who was also overweight, were walking up to the store. They looked at my shirt and she asked me if I had ever been in the military. “Yes,” I replied, stopping. She then asked me if I had ever gone overseas, “to war.” “Yes,” I said again.

“I could never go and do all that,” she said. “Me, either,” her apparent boyfriend added.

This was the too-many-th time I had heard that from too many someones. “You’re not willing or able to defend your country!” I said in a loud voice, and walked off, muttering like some crazy coot: “We have become a degenerate people. Our ancestors would disown us.”

I know that not many serve these days (probably one of the problems), and that even those who might want to often don’t qualify for a host of reasons (another one of the problems). I suppose the girl and guy meant what they said as a sign of respect and awe, and that I became just a weird jerk to them by the way I acted. But those words they said have become a pattern I have heard far too much. People thank me and others for our service, and I appreciate their words, but they almost say it with a fearful relief that someone else did it, that at least someone COULD AND WOULD do it. People of all political stripes say they “love” their country, and they want to enjoy their “freedoms,” but “couldn’t imagine” doing what I and others have done. They don’t want to serve their country, and sure as hell couldn’t imagine defending it, especially not where they might be killed. With so few willing and able to defend this nation, how can we not be planting the seeds of our fall?

The Shinier Side of the Coin

As a historian as well as political scientist, I am aware (but perhaps not keenly enough!) that some things have certainly improved. Here’s my list of things that I will keep adding to as time goes on (readers’ additional suggestions welcomed!):

1. Regardless of covert prejudice, there is less overt prejudice in our society, and easier intermingling of people of all different races, creeds, colors, gender, etc., and with this toleration and even welcoming, more opportunities for those than before.

2. Much technology has made our lives potentially more convenient (whether we have filled that convenience with other things is another matter!).

3. The generational divide is not as keen (I am aware that there are some drawbacks to this as well).

4. Entertainment possibilities are greater than ever (same caveat as 3 above).

5. Varieties of food are greater than ever, and awareness and appreciation of those foods as well.

6. There are a LOT of good books and magazines (and blogs!) to read (whether there are a lot of GREAT books and magazines and blogs is a matter of taste).

7. Travel is more possible than ever.

8. There are lots more fun ways to keep fit.

9. Communication is easier than ever.

10. We know a lot more of what works and what doesn’t work.

11. Desired information is often easily at hand.

12. As a human race, we appear to be less warlike than we once were.

13. Air Conditioning (even though, interestingly enough, drawbacks here as well).

14. Conception Control (some think there can be drawbacks here as well).

Economists

From The Associated Press, 29 November 2009
“In 1982, as now, headlines were bleak. Many economists were forecasting a long, anemic recovery. The usual engines of job growth seemed idled. The U.S. was losing its industrial edge to an emerging Japan. People were hoarding gold. The downturn was called the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Sound familiar?
Yet all the grim warnings turned out to be misplaced. By 1984, the economy was humming. Reagan was re-elected in a landslide. One of the longest economic expansions in U.S. history was under way, lasting for nearly two decades — with a few bumps.
Right now, economic policymakers are unsure of the road ahead and they lack a good map.”

Their view hasn’t changed a great deal since then.

It is hard to say whether they, and their sycophantic media allies, really believe that, or that is just what they are SUPPOSED to say, to appear to be the calming voices of reason and perspective. What these maybe thinly informed or deceptively palliative folks do by this though, is give the perception of abysmal ignorance and appraisal abilities. Because still focusing on the “usual indicators” doesn’t take into account that we had relatively little debt and trade deficit at the start of the Reagan era. Now we’ve had nearly 30 years of MASSIVE debts, massive trade deficits, and misbalance of payments. We are appreciably weaker.

Here’s the conversation we’ll be hearing from new powers if we don’t deal with reality VERY soon, with big changes: “You arrogantly, ignorantly, and stupidly thought yourselves immune to economic reality. You weren’t. It might have been delayed, but now it is come. Twist in your misery; you brought it mostly on yourselves.”

Because these economists, who we have worshipped like they run some plainly predictive hard science that can deliver the manna, don’t really know (as they occasionally admit): Greenspan, Bernanke, none of them. It is not a science, and they are struggling in the semi-dark. We need to quit listening to them so much; we look a bit like superstitious ancients readily awaiting for the pantheistic cleric to deliver the pronouncement as he examines the entrails for clues! Virtually no one is out there questioning economists’ often faulty assumptions, and only a few question their predictions. These economists plug their figures into models with delusional assumptions, and then dismiss anything (like environmental or social impact) that can’t fit their model! And their prescriptions largely benefit the plutocrats only anyway, and merely placate briefly (at best) everyone else.

It’s not that they haven’t made great strides in many areas, they have. It’s that we’ve elevated them to quasi-godhood, and that’s wrong.

I have a fair amount of confidence in and respect for the pronouncements of many academic economists. I am deeply skeptical of the pronouncements of most corporate and even government economists. It all seems to me to come down to…who are they serving?

Gen Whatev, Empowered To Be Enfeebled

America, you have enfeebled your children. By doing everything for them, giving them everything they ask for, by “protecting” them from all possible harm, by organizing all their activities, by listening to what they think they want, by trying to be their friend before they are adults, by feeding them a diet of physical mush that degrades their bodies and their minds because you think they won’t eat anything else: You have gutted their ambition, weakened their energy, sown paralyzing or apathetic confusion, and addled their minds and bodies. You’ve made idle threats with undelivered consequences and given them endless second and third chances, disempowering their ability to become well-functioning adults. You’ve wanted to boost their self-esteem and make them feel like they accomplished something notable because they just showed up, but now the results of all you have done are coming home in overwhelming cascade.

I heard a keynote speaker at a recent education convention talk at length about how we the elders, the teachers, the parents, are going to HAVE to adapt to what our "customers," the children and students, want and how they want it. I have heard this theme endless times. “If only we can find out how they WANT to learn, we can adapt ourselves to them and their preferences, and so we will achieve success.”

The problem with that is that it is at most only partially so. Yes, we don’t need to be Neo-Luddites, with no adapting to new things of real possibility. But we also don’t need to be chasing shifting targets that don’t really much know where they’re going or how they can get there.

Parents and educators would do better to listen to people like John Rosemond and the authors of “Positive Discipline for Teenagers ,“ if they want to discern what really works from what is just more gnat-brained wasted time. The children and students who are the adults of tomorrow are yearning for our co-piloting, not our blind control or suppliant accommodation (neither of which work).

Gibbon

"The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste."

Teachers in Education

A teacher needs considerable "downtime" to recover mental and emotional
energies expended in teaching. Yet they don't get it. What they get
instead are endless administrative requirements to "set goals and track
progress," "manage student attendance, tracking, and performance," and
"justify initiatives and assess each course," not to mention the load of
endless committees, emails, phone calls, meetings, student advising, and on
and on, all piled on to other miscellaneous administrative "requirements" that have nothing to do with teaching.