Feature of the week
Christie Whitman, the ex-EPA chief under Bush, is making news as yet another disaffected Republican moderate. In her honor, let’s all check out our Republican Moderates Appreciation page. I expect that she’s probably said something worth quoting, so I’ll add looking for it to my weekend todo list.
01.15.05 @ 10:27 PM EDT [link]

What Century Did You Say it Was?
“I am not amused by this 21st Century. I want to take it back for a full refund, and can I have a real one, please?” Charles Stross, Science Fiction Author. Not too long ago I picked up a cool book in a used bookstore. Published in the Sixties, and clearly inspired by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, it was an anthology of stories about life at the turn of the Millennium. It was pretty much what you’d expect as an extrapolation of the Sixties, heavy on rocket travel just as that decade’s inspiration to teens like me was the Dawn of the Space Age. I was even lined up to go to the Georgia Tech School of Aerospace Engineering, but took the Academy appointment instead (good thing or I’d probably be sleeping on park benches). Let’s not give up on citizen space flight, though – maybe Space Ship One will come through. In any case – even if the rocketry part of the Year 2000 didn’t happen, lots of really cool devices have popped up in its place. Back in the Sixties, would I ever imagine that I’d one day be working up musings on a slim laptop holding billions of characters of data that I would then post in a form instantly available to millions around the globe who could find these musings simply by coming up a few words expressing their general interest in the topics of my musings? I don’t remember that thought ever occurring. Or that I’d be wearing headphones that act like a mute button for the outside world, or I’d be able to listen to every album I owned from a device the size of a seashell? (I’m thinking of the time, as the original space cadet, I lugged my LP record collection around Europe). Or that I’d carry a phone around on my belt that allows me to dial ten years worth of contacts with just a few keystrokes, and even check out how popular my latest musings have been? So if all these cool toys, why do I feel exactly like Stross, that we need to return our substandard real-life 21st Century to sender? It’s simple. In decades of imagining life in the new century, we all assumed that there would be advancements in society beyond cool new toys. Instead, society has been moving backwards since George W. Bush was sworn in! Let’s pick just one example, the personal hot button that recurring readers of these musings doubtless cringe at when it pops up yet again: fiscal policies. We’re in fact back to the 16th century, when governments did things that we now know to be foolish debasement of their currencies. The bottom line is that I thought that when we clicked over to a new century the number would be going up, not down! In fact, maybe I should start running the dates on the site backwards!
01.15.05 @ 09:38 AM EDT [link]

Paper Training
I had a New York City moment the other day coming out onto 7th Avenue from Penn Station, when I was handed a freebie copy of the New York Sun as a promotion. I hadn’t gotten around to checking out this particular masthead, so when I hit the subway and settled in with my headphones I took a look. That’s when I had the NYC moment. First some background. Rush keeps talking about the “mainstream liberal media,” and what could be more mainstream than newspapers? Yet every paper I’m exposed to in this, the bluest city in the bluest state, is a Right Wing Rag (RWR). Am I exaggerating? Let’s make this a fact-based analysis by itemizing the instances. On the one hand, there is the New York Times, my personal paper of record since my Academy days. (As an aside, I wonder if it’s still delivered to cadets, considering the politicization of the military that’s happened since I was at the rockbound highland home? I’ll have to ask my niece, a cadet. N., if you’re reading this, shoot me an email). Anyway, I consider the NYT to be a moderate to left (MTL) paper, which obviously does not conform to the Rush party line labeling of XL, but there it is. On the other side is every other paper you can lay your hands on in the Big Apple. They are, in no particular order, the Wall Street Journal, most definitely a RWR. Then there’s the Daily News, which was once a working man’s paper. Truman once said that any working man who voted against the Democratic Party needed to have his head examined. What a quaint idea! Alas, the allure of fiscal free lunch and military antics as a spectator sport has captured the NYC everyman. Ditto (or maybe I should say Dittohead) for the New York Post. Indeed, all I need to say is that the NY Post is put out by the same crowd responsible for Fox News. (As another aside, I should make it very clear that I’m not expanding RWR coffers by paying for any of these papers. I read them for free while getting a shine at lunch or when they’re left on the train and I’m already done tapping away for the trip.) Then there are the freebie papers. They’re not only pseudo-freebie like the News or the Post, so ubiquitous that you’d be almost crazy to buy your own copy. The freebies are really freebie – you couldn’t pay for them even if you wanted to, something I told the Sarah Jessica Parker look-alike who, on the subway yesterday, asked where she could buy my paper (come to think of it, maybe it was her. How else could an upscale Upper East Side New Yorker not know about freebie papers unless they are a celebrity who rarely hits mass transit anymore? And that paper had a picture of SJP, didn’t it?). Anyway, the freebies – Metro and AM New York, aren’t really substantive enough to have a political point of view. They instead rotate through guest columnists. This might seem on the surface to be a policy that would result in balance. Unfortunately, because the RW columnists are always on message as Bush apologists, and the “equal time” columnists write about pretty much anything they want, the net political slant of the freebies is Skewed Right (SR). So in the bluest of the blue the odds are one MTL paper opposed by 4 RWR and 2 SR. If only there was a liberal bias in NYC papers! Of course, if there were, I might be spending the trip reading them rather than tapping away like I am right now.
01.13.05 @ 07:48 PM EDT [link]

An Immortal Country Inhabited by Immoral Mortal Citizens
First, repeat the title ten times fast. Thus mentally limbered up, consider that the Bush Administration has been approaching the question of long-range budget forecasting for Social Security as if the country is a kind of immortal person. For example, you see words like “we” and “our” in connection to paying and owing money far into the future, a time when most of the people using the word will be dead. For example, Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols recently said “America's taxpayers deserve, and our future economic prosperity demands, a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system.” For extra credit, listen up to Administration mouthpieces for your own examples – it won’t take long. Talking about the future in terms of “we” and “our” is fine, as far as it goes. One thing “we” don’t want to forget, however, is that thinking of the country as an immortal entity that can make long-term plans is at best an imperfect abstraction. A better representation of reality is that the country is a collection of living but mortal citizens split across all age groups. It is important to note this distinction because planning decisions that seem perfectly reasonable for individual persons have moral implications when applied across multiple generations. For example, a person can make the decision to defer gratification in the hope of a better situation later. As an academy graduate, I certainly understand the concept of deferred gratification! Conversely, a person can make the decision to “make hay while the sun shines,” by spending now to enjoy life better now. Vacation is a good example. You could defer vacation trips to save for retirement, and certainly want to save some money for retirement, but would likely be less able to enjoy it then. In both cases the specter of mortality looms. You don’t want to defer gratification too long because the clock is ticking. The clock doesn’t tick for countries and other immortal legal entities. If a country decides to make hay while the sun shines, it is future generations that pay the price, not the citizens having the fun. This of course is exactly what’s happening in Bushonomics. Financial proposals are being couched with phrases like “dealing with problems now rather than in the future” with solutions that shift the burden from now into the future. For example, the Bush team has been floating the idea of big-time borrowing to fund the transition to Social Security accounts. Who will be making big-time payments to pay back this big-time borrowing? The same citizens socked with redeeming the so-called Social Security Trust Fund to pay for boomer retirement, who also happen to be the same citizens paying interest and principal on the mega-debt inherited from the boomers, and who also happen to be fewer in number than the boomers they’re supporting in retirement. They’ll also live in a world from which the boomers have subtracted a certain percentage of Earth’s finite, irreplaceable resources. It reminds me of those split personality stories, where the responsible personality wakes up to find that his playboy alter ego has been up all night drinking, running up the credit card, and getting into fights. The responsible personality then has to go to work nodding off, hung over, and black and blue. Come to think of it, this is the perfect analogy for what’s in line for our children and grandchildren!
01.12.05 @ 08:09 PM EDT [link]

Runes in the Ruins of the Angry Norse Dittoheads
Note – all of the persons in this story are real (ancient and modern). The names of the modern are changed to make them funnier. Setting: 1408, Hvalsey Church, North Settlement, Norse Greenland, the wedding of Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Bjornsdottir. The official witnesses are Brand Halldorstson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson. (All real people from the real wedding so far). Officiating at the wedding is Bishop Ruhsh, affectionately known as “Ruhsh the Fat” from his special fondness for honey mead (and, to be truthful, any pain-relieving substance he can get his hands on). As we open our story, Father Ruhsh stands to deliver the wedding homily. “Norsemen and ladies, today we celebrate two blessed events. First, of course, the union of Thorstein and Sigrid, but today is also the tenth anniversary of that fateful day the skraelings, the wretches, finally gave in to our demands to “love our Greenland Norse ways or leave them.” Good riddance to those who would have had us abandon the paths of righteousness and right thinking in favor of the degenerate ways of the heathen Inuit! Imagine if the skraelings had had their way. Instead of our traditional beef wedding feast we’d be celebrating with heathen ringed seals and fish! Can you imagine anything more blasphemous, not to say disgusting? Instead of candles we’d be burning heathen blubber. Gone would be the evening bonfire. How would our men and women meet, stumbling around in the dark? We have a right to be proud that we have not compromised the traditional Norse way of life! What could be more important than maintaining traditional values? Imagine curtailing the summer walrus hunt! Without tusks, how could we trade for the essentials of traditional Norse culture? Where would we get our bells, stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, clerical robes, and jewelry for weddings? What would they have had us do instead? Send out our ships for lumber? Can you imagine what would happen to our economy? How could the skraelings possibly say that Norse people, living in the traditional Norse way, could destroy all of the bounty around us? We couldn't destroy it if we wanted to, my fellow Norsemen. That's the ridiculous thing. Just as we can't create any of this, the absolute overwhelming incomprehensible awe of Creation makes it a simple transition to believing that what these skraelings said was absolute bunk, because they assigned to us the power of Creation and destruction. They assigned us powers we don't have. They assigned us abilities we'll never have, and the idea that we can, by living our lives given what was created for us? We use nothing but what was created for us. We have not invented anything that wasn't here for us to find. We haven't gone out and found a poison that wasn't placed for us here to find. We haven't done one thing that is unique or original, and yet the skraelings wanted us to believe that our very existence -- and we are part of Creation and we're at the top of the Creation chain -- our very existence leads to the destruction of Norse Greenland. It just doesn't hold water. It literally doesn't hold water unless you live in this constant cycle of doom and gloom, and believe that the worst is just around the corner every day, and that's what these people told us, those militant skraelings: ‘The worst is just the around the corner.’” Postscript: a few years later, every one of the participants in the Olafsson/Bjornsdottir wedding was dead. In their final days they consumed their calves and their pets. True and faithful Norse to the end, they never defiled their bodies by partaking of Greenland’s plentiful stocks of fish.
01.11.05 @ 08:38 PM EDT [link]

Where They Went Wrong
Lately I’ve been thinking about that Norse colony in Greenland where everyone starved to death even while they were adhering to their non-sustainable lifestyle right up to the bitter end. We covered this in the entry on December 29 in Greenland Paradise Lost. There must be a real story in how that played out, a story now likely lost to the ages. Here’s how I imagine it happened. I picture a series of wise, farsighted leaders, like our Abe, Teddy, and Ike. They recognized that the resources on which their little society depended were being depleted. It would not have been hard. In the case of the Greenland Norse, the problem was their inflexibility towards maintaining the standard of living enjoyed by their immediate ancestors in an environment to fragile to sustain it. Specifically, they equated livestock with wealth, and livestock required clearing of forests. They also chopped down forests for fuel, structures, and cultural objects. They also could see that their Inuit neighbors had a different lifestyle, and that it was not declining. In particular, Inuit consumed the plentiful fish of Greenland that the Norse distained to the point of starvation. Thus the root of their failure was cultural inflexibility. I imagine that they set in motion programs that might have saved them. I can then imagine the resistance that would arise from those who had gained wealth pursuing the old ways. This resistance would have been based on exactly the same issues on which Dittohead resistance to environmentalism is founded: fear of economic impact (in other words, greed), coveting of the lifestyle of earlier generations who were not faced with limits, (in other words, envy), and a feeling that the laws of man and God alike ordained their right to a particular way of life (in other words, entitlement). Tomorrow let’s have some fun with how this might have played out.
01.10.05 @ 08:22 PM EDT [link]