It appears that the BP Deepwater Horizon is finally contained. However, my blog, which is similar to that disaster in that I continue to pump hundreds of millions of gallons of Lutheran Surrealist ink into the blogosphere and there seems no likelihood of capping the monster -- is still going.
The BP disaster will still be felt by the grandchildren of our grandchildren.
Will this blog continue to poison minds with its strange mixture of the avant-garde and religious faith?
Many think those two are like oil and water. I say they are the same thing, and that Jesus was the first and greatest member of the avant-garde, the avatar of avatars for all contemporary avant-garde thought. He is also the avatar of avatars for all contemporary conservative thought. The extreme conservatives as in conservationist, and the extreme avant-garde as in progressive, come together in Lutheran Surrealism to form a one-two punch that no one understands, and yet, is there, like Christ, more or less permanently.
While the BP spill was therefore a passing phenomenon, Lutheran surrealism is not really of any one time, or any one place. It is everywhere and nowhere.
It is something and nothing.
I didn't get enough sleep last night.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
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The BP disaster will still be felt by the grandchildren of our grandchildren.
Really? Who still feels the valdez? The 1979 gulf spill that took 10 months to clean up?
What event from five generations ago still resonates today? Certainly no environmental ones.
I find it difficult to react to GM's remarks with anything like equanimity. I suppose that equating the lack of knowledge to to knowledge of lack is the new Republican normal, but there is really no excuse for it.
Who still feels the valdez?
I read several articles this week about lasting environmental impacts of the Exxon Valdez example. Simply go to news.google.com, and type in "Exxon Valdez." Of course, the BP disaster has renewed interest in the Valdez accident, and with it, contemporary ecological assessments of Prince William Sound have made the front pages again.
The short version is that the conditions of Prince William Sound do not break down oil quickly. There's little oil visible where the sun shines (and this is causal, because sunlight drives off volatiles, and its warming effect makes life easier for bacteria that break down oil), but simply turning over a shovel full of dirt on the impacted areas turns up oil, not just to the eye, but also to the nose.
The 1979 gulf spill that took 10 months to clean up?
This is a reference to the Ixtoc I spill, the closest model we have to the BP spill. The main difference is likely one of depth, as the BP well was much, much deeper. Again, I've read articles in the past day of current ecological assessments of the Ixtoc I impacted areas. And it is not subtle. Tidewater mangrove forests are distinctly thinner, and have openings not found in virgin mangrove forests. Again, turning a shovel in the openings reveals oil. And this is in an environment in which natural oil seeps are a significant reality, and the overall ecosystem is better able to handle oil as a result. A major question, though, is whether or not there is a buffering capacity, and if so, whether or not it has rebounded from Ixtoc I. Time, not ideologically fueled ignorance, will tell.
What event from five generations ago still resonates today? Certainly no environmental ones
Check out Wiki: List of Environmental Disasters
The Dust Bowl. The Aral Sea. Introduction of Nile Perch into Lake Victoria. Love Canal. Introduction of CFC's into the atmosphere. Niger Delta oil industry contamination. Bikini Island.
These seem pretty well known. There are a few that aren't on the list that surprised me a bit. Red Gate Woods. Chaco Canyon. DDT concentration and top-level predators. Mine tailings, especially when arsenic was used (e.g., in silver mining) or concentrated (in coal mining). Gruinard (anthrax) island. Lead poisoning of waterfowl due to the use of lead shot. Increased rates of cancer in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unexploded ordnance from Ypres, the Somme. To say nothing of the WWII axis and allied bombing campaigns. Over-allocation of water from the Colorado River. Lead drinking vessels, lead water pipes, from Rome through today.
And moreover, there are a whole bunch of more recent ecological disasters that aren't going away anytime soon. Enrico Fermi. Three Mile Island. Bhophal. Chernobyl. Heavy metal poison associated with electronics recycling. Radiation release associated with decommissioned reactors, especially Soviet submarines.
We are called by God to be caretakers of this world. Stewards. Perhaps because I am so named, I hear that call more clearly. But let me say this as clearly and faithful as I can: we are accountable to God for the ecological damage we do, or which is done on our behalf. I don't expect willful ignorance will be much of a defense at the last judgment.
I remember being on the Gulf coast when I was 5 or 6 and my friend's younger sister was eating oil on the beach.
I think it'll be felt by people for the next few years, especially fishermen and whatnot I s'pose.
But it won't be a century's worth of calamity.
The present is not as important as we think it is.
I remember being on the Gulf coast when I was 5 or 6 and my friend's younger sister was eating oil on the beach.
I think it'll be felt by people for the next few years, especially fishermen and whatnot I s'pose.
But it won't be a century's worth of calamity.
The present is not as important as we think it is.
Brett: thanks. That's what I meant.
Also, stu, I don't see any of those disasters being 150 years old. Maybe we'll still feel the repercussions of the dust bowl in 70 years. Maybe.
The world gets over it. You should too.
And were Florida not a closed primary state, I'd be registered nothing, thank you.
stu, of course I agree that Christians and other faithful are charged with good stewardship of the Creation; that goes without saying.
Nevertheless--as you probably agree--we must also, of course, try to balance ecological integrity with the development of natural and technological resources necessary for sustained and increasingly prosperous human life.
Now of course the list of presumably man-made disasters you listed vary considerably in degrees of group or individual culpability and preventability (perhaps the "disaster" you listed as "Enrico Fermi"--why not "Albert Einstein," too, while you're at it?--might be shared by EF's parents or even their parents or . . .--but perhaps the EF inclusion was only a jest!).
And perhaps you might just have conveniently grouped your disaster list under the broader rubric "Industrial Revolution" and called this event's promoters to account for the resulting increases in world population and population longevity. Or perhaps again, and even more inclusively (considering the effects of Roman use of lead piping and lead salts for preserving wine--still a controversial issue among suggested reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire), just, well, "human technology."
Then again, to be even more inclusive--acknowledging your more prophetic vein--perhaps we might add a few other disasters, say, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the volcanic Krakatoa explosion of
1883, the 2004 catastrophic South East Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, etc., all and more perhaps as manifestations of God's wrath for human presumption (you did, to your credit, include the climactically disastrous onset of the 1930s US Dust Bowl--hardly a man-made disaster).
And finally, considering your initial remarks about Repubs' supposedly willful ignorance of ecological integrity, and in light of your eschatologically fraught conclusion, can we expect an en masse return of repentant believers to the economically crippling policies of the Obama regime as they quake before the the spectre of the Last Judgement that threatens to deliver them over to eternal fire and ever-last-ing pain?
GM,
I misread 5 generations as 50 years. My apology. Although I'll note that you've pushed the starting point back to a point where humanity's ability to damage the environment was trivial compared to today.
Several of the disasters I cited are more than 150 years old. Chaco Canyon. The use of cyanide (I mistakenly cited arsenic) in refining silver ore. A fossil fuel energy economy that is causing large-scale ecological damage via global warming.
And it seems equally likely that some of our biggest ecological disasters (Chernobyl, Bhopal) will be continuing concerns 150 years from now, and you're engaging in a false equivalence by equating today's biggest screw-ups with those of the 1860's.
As for the BP disaster, trying to pass this off as a 10 month phenomenon is playing polly-anna. Just because the beaches are clean doesn't mean that the marine ecology is healthy.
The Gulf does have substantial recuperative powers, especially when it comes to oil. I suspect that damage will be detectable in a 150 years, but that for most human purposes, this is a crisis that will work itself out over the next 5 years.
But there is a problem with the destruction of livelihoods, and with it additional damage to a distinctive subculture that is already under tremendous stress. The notion that BP will make the coast whole can't be taken seriously. Sure, the captains of fishing boats, the capitalists of that small economy, will be able to document their loses, and receive restitution. But their crews? Or the guy who used to wash dishes or wait tables at a restaurant at a Gulf resort? His unemployment insurance just got cut.
But you're happy sweeping this all under the rug.
JADL,
Now of course the list of presumably man-made disasters you listed vary considerably in degrees of group or individual culpability and preventability (perhaps the "disaster" you listed as "Enrico Fermi"--why not "Albert Einstein," too, while you're at it?--might be shared by EF's parents or even their parents or . . .--but perhaps the EF inclusion was only a jest!).
The reference was to the Enrico Fermi nuclear generating station, which suffered a partial fuel melt-down in '66, an accident that was worse (in the sense that it came closer to criticality) than TMI, but not as bad as Chernobyl.
I am concerned that the intensity with which modern society exploits resources is not sustainable, and that population increases incur ever larger risks, and ever more pressure to cut corners. But I don't view technology as intrinsically evil, although some manifestations of technology deserve to be characterized that way.
Natural phenomenon are a different matter. I take Polkinghorne's stance here. Interesting folks like us can't evolve on safe planets. Ours is not a safe planet.
Let me question your take on the dust bowl. Climate variation (rather than change, proper) was involved, but a big part of the problem was the human use of marginal lands, and the technologies used to exploit them.
And I simply disagree with your assessment that Obama's policies have been economically crippling. I do believe, along with most economists, that the stimulus should have been bigger, but I think he did as much as was possible politically. And I see HCR and Finance Reform as a big steps in the right direction of ensuring the long-term viability of our economy, rather that simply trying to get it to produce as much as possible for eight years, irregardless of the consequences for later (which is a reasonably decent way of describing Reagan's and GWB's economic policies).
As for true believers, they'll believe what they want, as they always have.
It's funny how in the Venn diagram I agree with Stu on some issues (I'm basically green, and it's all I can do to not join PETA, -- the only thing I hate about them is that they too often endorse terrorism and bullying!).
But I appreciate and LARGELY endorse their viewpoint.
(I love animals, but hate PETS.)
I think the environment HAS to be maintained.
With the Catholics I am there on many issues, such as no gay ordination, and also, holding to no abortions.
With some denominations I like this, and some I like that.
With the Creationist thing, I am still studying the problem.
The ELCA was a pretty good synod until they passed the gay ordination thing (pretty soon they would start sending pastors, but this was the nose in the tent notion, after which they would increasingly bully, until you had two gay pastors in every congregations, and not a chicken in the pot).
Many are leaving the Lutheran church over this, but it's not as big a number as was expected, but it seems that suddenly this summer the number of votes is accelerating, so perhaps by Christmas the thing will be out of control.
You have to have a two-thirds vote to get out, so to lose five percent of congregations means that maybe 50% of the remaining congregations are unhappy, but don't have the numbers to secede?
Here's a bit from some liberal Lutheran blog:
"As of June 30, the Office of the Secretary has been advised that 462 congregations have taken first votes to terminate their relationship with the ELCA (some congregations have taken more than one first vote). Of these 462 congregations that have taken first votes, 312 passed and 150 failed. Synods also have informed the Office of the Secretary that 196 congregations have taken a second vote, 185 of which passed and 11 failed. (The numbers previously reported on June 3 for second votes contained an error; the correct number of failed second votes as of June 3 should have been 10, not 21. Thus, the number of second votes that passed as of June 3 should have been 151, not 140.)"
at any rate, on the environmental issue, I'm still with Stu, and on the artistic freedom front, I'm still with what used to be the avant-garde (now turning toward a cultural revolution type assessment of culture, sadly).
stu, thanks for clarifying the your reference to '66 Enrico Fermi (i.e., EF 1, as opposed to 2 or 3)) nuclear station incident, though your comparison of this "disaster" in which apparently none were injured and no radioactive material was released as "not as bad as the Chernobyl disaster" seems rather a meiotic tour de faiblesse (not unlike your ironically litotic "irregardless"?).
As for the Dust Bowl phenomenon in the 1930s, as you say, seems rightly characterised as a concatenation of cyclic climatic (sorry for my earlier typo "climactic") variation and 1930s regional farming practices; that's not to say, however, that the same practices are employed today and would be in future, given this retrospective analysis. But then perhaps such follies do persist, such as depriving San Joaquin Valley, California growers (who supply so much of the country's produce) of adequate water supplies to protect a tiny indigenous smelt.
And predictably, I disagree with your disagreement with my disagreement with the Obama regime on the economy; and I'm sceptical about your claim that "most economists" think the first Obama "stimulus" (et al) should have been much larger (excepting of course Paul Krugman in his routinely histrionic "polemiads") and that they also concur with Obama's unprovable claims that he rescued the country from financial disaster. Much of the "stimulus" spoils voted by Obama's Congress went to favoured constituencies such as government employees, organised labour and corporations that contribute heavily to Dems.
Still, though politics divide us, I hope your holiday was pleasant; it does seem to have restored your polemical vigour.
JADL,
stu, thanks for clarifying the your reference to '66 Enrico Fermi (i.e., EF 1, as opposed to 2 or 3)) nuclear station incident, though your comparison of this "disaster" in which apparently none were injured and no radioactive material was released as "not as bad as the Chernobyl disaster" seems rather a meiotic tour de faiblesse
I've read histories claiming that EF 1 came close to a meltdown sufficient to breach containment. Had it done so, it would have been cataclysmic in its ecological impact. It is worth remembering that EF 1 was liquid sodium cooled, which meant that had their been a containment breach, all of the fuel would likely have been vaporized. This would have been far worse than Chernobyl. We got lucky. I believe that in the context of this particular debate, it is appropriate to consider what it would have meant not to have been lucky, because we seem determined as a species to roll these dice many more times.
As it was, I defined the severity of an accident in terms of closeness to criticality, and I believe that my rankings of the accidents are correct by this metric.
Still, though politics divide us, I hope your holiday was pleasant; it does seem to have restored your polemical vigour.
Indeed. Getting to see the kids was great. I even got to brew a batch of beer with my daughter & her husband. It was still fermenting when I left, so I'll have to enjoy it vicariously. If it's any good, there won't be any left by the time I get out there again.
BO himself uses race, gender, and class as his sole understanding of the problems of the world.
If BP were to present a black woman dwarf with a handicap as their CEO, Obama would not be able to talk about kicking her butt.
Instead, he would talk about empathy, and how we have to never blame, but only try to understand.
BP should get their entire upper echelon to match BO's justice framework in which the only people who are ever guilty of anything are white men.
They should definitely get rid of the Norwegian dude, and fill his place with a black gender-bending dwarf in a wheelchair.
Compared to the fish, and the largely white fishing fleet in the Louisiana area, BO will sympathize entirely with the black dwarf.
It's that simple, if they want to contain costs.
If they keep presenting BP as a British firm with white men in control, BO will empty to completely level the company.
Kirby,
BO himself uses race, gender, and class as his sole understanding of the problems of the world.
This is not true. I suggest that you go back and read his speech on race, given during the campaign.
Let me provide a constructive refutation.
Undoubtedly, Mr. Obama has a more diverse cabinet than of his predecessors, and he has made more diverse appointments generally. But to get from here to a claim that he understands the world only in RGC terms is ill-founded. One could just as well accuse his predecessors of token appointments to minorities. I don't believe either.
Let's consider GWB for a moment. He made diverse appointments w.r.t. race and gender. This was much more than a token effort, for which he deserves praise. I suspect you'd accept the principle that GWB sought the people he felt were most qualified. Therefore, it seems to me, that you're committed to accepting the principle that the most qualified person for cabinet positions (to chose a particularly visible example) is not necessarily a white male.
Having gone this far, it seems reasonable to ask whether BHO's cabinet choices have been substantially more diverse than GWB's. Not really. GWB made a total of 33 cabinet appointments, 9 to minorities. BHO has made 19 cabinet appointments, 7 to minorities. That's 29% vs. 36%. GWB made 6 of 31 appointments to women, whereas BHO has made 5 of 19. That's 19% vs. 26%. So... Mr. Obama seems to be 7% more diverse in his choices than GWB. I think this is a problem for anyone who claims that either is racist or genderist, don't you?
The ball's back in your court.
Ok, a good hard shot.
I don't think GWB cared about race and gender, but he knew that the left did. He put Condi Rice in a high and visible position partially to deflect criticism from the left.
She was ALSO highly qualified.
Obama brought in Van Jones because they thought alike. I don't think he cares straight up whether the czar or appointment is one color or gender, but they have to have similar Maoist sensibility to his own which is to create a sea-change in terms of the perception of race and gender as the central problem of our time.
I think it was A central problem of the 1950s to 1970s.
At this point the real problem is to find universal standards of quality and legality that help all societies prosper over the long term.
Getting the best out of minorities and women is PART of that overall problem, but simply getting them INTO positions for which they are not qualified is problematic, and leads to a general breakdown of the system.
Michael Steele, for instance, is black, and the Republicans, copying the left, put him up there as a figurehead. He is however not as smart as he needs to be, not quite as devoted to high-quality and high-morality as he needs to be, and the effect is becoming disastrous.
Similar problems have occurred in other industries where quantity of a certain kind of person has become a goal.
Sotomayor is not the most highly qualified legal thinker in America.
She is not a moron.
But she is not the best.
Kagan is also not the best.
Kagan is not a moron.
But neither one will ever say anything that taps into the deep issues of American morality, and defined it for one and all. That should be what a Supreme Court Justice does. Neither one will EVER be able to do that.
They haven't done it yet. They won't do it in the future.
They are mediocre.
The Republicans are also looking for quantities of women to throw up in the face of the gender battle the nation has been through. Palin has certain qualities, but her mind isn't engineered very closely so that she can match her statements to reality. She's better than McCain, who's worn out, and her idea of death panels was brilliant, and brought out the paranoia that besets white men throughout the country as they correctly perceive they are being replaced on a quantitative basis, and the qualitative aspects of character and judgement are being thrown aside.
It's a bit like the death panels that the Nazis developed.
Palin lit on something.
She's fierce, and she's quite good-looking.
GWB was also fierce, and good-looking.
BO is also fierce, and good-looking.
And they are all scapegoating the other side, and not looking enough at quality, and simply wanting instead a quick result, a fast turn-around.
Continued:
We need a deeper kind of mind who can think about quality, and can utter qualitative statements of the kind that Lincoln could make. The kind that could make you cry at their aptness and their moral beauty.
Instead we have a bunch of quick turn-around lunatics. RGC is their mantra, and quantitative measures are their rallying cry.
We have to instead think about quality.
Condoleeza Rice was qualitatively superior to anyone that Obama has appointed.
Watch a YouTube of her playing the piano. This is a person who can think clearly, and can get small beautiful effects from the piano.
Most of Obama's appointments, and his idiotic spokesman Gibbs, are flat and dull, crushing bores, with no finesse and no grace, who can't do anything but squeak mindlessly.
Obama's not much better. In the long run, he will not contribute anything to American society. His mind isn't good enough. I read his autobiographies, and they suck. There's no high quality writing or thought in either book.
He's not capable of this. he ducks every real issue, and runs for cover.
The left crows because they got ONE of their own in. But he sucks.
Or he's mediocre.
(If you take Lincoln as high quality. Lincoln not only took on tough issues, but came to good conclusions. Obama avoids difficult issues, and can't lead on any topic. He doesn't even really know what he thinks about anything.)
He goofs everything up. Crowley was his one good diplomatic act, and it was he who screwed it all up in the first place. I give him credit for the beer picnic, though he did wipe his greasy peanut fingers on his pants leg even though napkins were provided.
Obama is not constitutionally capable of the Gettysburg Address.
Lincoln made many speeches that were that good.
People who saw him came away thinking they had seen St. Paul.
Obama is a disappointment, a number.
We need to think about quality, and forget about quantity. Can you think of anyone that Obama has appointed who can do anything as gracefully as Condoleeza Rice can play the piano? To me, they're all hacks, and jerks. His vice president is nothing more than a hack and a jerk.
Ball's back in your court. Note that I've moved the parameters from quantity to quality. that's difficult to assess, and we might disagree, but I don't think we really will. Quantity is easier to measure.
But I think everyone knows that Shakespeare is qualitatively superior to a hack like Toni Morrison. Everyone knows quality when we see it. Condoleeza Rice was/is the real thing.
If you dispute that, then we may have problems, Houston.
but even you have disputed this Arne fellow from your campus.
Obama has real problems understanding what quality is. He can't get it right.
Even his wife is a problem. Every time she speaks she makes a mistake. She's now been shuffled off to one side and we never see her. It's because she's a huge liability to him whenever she speaks.
We're going to have to listen to his idiotic Supreme Court justices for decades to come. Neither one will ever make a sound decision that satisfies everyone. They are just biased fools.
I hope others will think about the quality issue here. I find Gibbs absolutely horrifying in every way. Visually, he's a mess. Secondly, he speaks very poorly. He's fish paste. Every time he speaks he makes blunder after blunder, getting everyone on the right and center less and less happy with the presidency, and peeling off more and more of the left as well.
Has Obama ever had a single quality association? Rezko? Wright? Ayers? He seems to pick bounders to associate with, and to appoint to high positions.
And yet, Kirby, you still believe in democratic republicanism, even though you can so clearly see its results.
An aristocratic monarchy would never have let any of the current leadership of America lead a grocery line, let alone a government.
Kirby,
I don't think GWB cared about race and gender, but he knew that the left did. He put Condi Rice in a high and visible position partially to deflect criticism from the left.
OK. So it is now your contention that GWB was an appeaser of the left?! This is ridiculous. You know as well as I do that GWB took a particular joy in tweaking the left.
GWB picked Rice because of her qualifications, because she held a compatible view of US foreign relations, and because she'd served in a significant role in the GHWB administration (she was Scowcroft's advisor on Soviet affairs, and Scowcroft was GHWB's National Security Advisor). It's important to remember that Rice's appointment as National Security Advisor was pre-9/11, and that Bush (like Rice) viewed the world at that time through a cold-war lens.
So I see in this a mixture of competence and cronyism, i.e., management as usual, and without evidence of racial (or gender) triangulation. This, unless you believe that Scowcroft's original choice was made to appease GHWB's opponents on the left. This is about as coherent and plausible as the birther theories.
Obama brought in Van Jones because they thought alike.
Obama brought in Van Jones because he was a leading proponent of "a green economy," and he was also a founder of "color of change," a political web site focused on issues of the African-American community that was a pretty big deal during the late GWB administration. It's a matter of public record that Jones was affiliated with a group (STORM) that viewed itself as revolutionary and Marxist. Of course, the founding fathers were revolutionaries too.
I don't think he cares straight up whether the czar or appointment is one color or gender, but they have to have similar Maoist sensibility to his own which is to create a sea-change in terms of the perception of race and gender as the central problem of our time.
Nonsense. Explain Tim Geithner, or Robert Gates on this basis. You can't, but so much for your universal "must." And these are just the first two names, hardly an exhaustive list. Look at the cabinet appointments! Shinseki a Maoist?! Steven Chu?! Tom Vilsack?!!
(continued...)
...
Sotomayor is not the most highly qualified legal thinker in America.
There never was an era in which Supreme Court nominations were based simply on some notion of "most highly qualified" absent political consideration. Presidents generally chose Supreme Court nominees from those judged "well qualified" by the Bar Association, but also for compatibility with their particular political views. Sotomayor was judged unanimously by the Bar Association's rating committee. I don't see her appointment as being qualitatively different from Roberts or Alito (to say nothing of Thomas). Elections have consequences, as GWB was so fond of saying, and one of the consequences of electing a left-center politician like Obama is going to be that he choses Supreme Court nominees who he believes have similar views politically.
Kagan is also not the best.
Kagan is a mirror image of William Rehnquist. Both clerked for Supreme Court justices. Both were appointed by Presidents of their party to the Office of Legal Council. Neither served as a judge prior to being nominated for the Supreme Court. Both had political views that were generally compatible with the President who nominated them. There's nothing insidious or remarkable about any of these appointments.
Condoleeza Rice was qualitatively superior to anyone that Obama has appointed.
An opinion. Not one that I concur with, but it's hard to see how to engage the question objectively.
One of the characteristics of BHO that you're not accounting for is the extent to which he's bought into the thesis so vigorously advocated by Goodwin in "Team of Rivals," a biography of Lincoln. Goodwin claimed that much of the strength of the Lincoln administration came from Lincoln's willingness to bring former political enemies into his administration. Obama has tried to do likewise, c.f., Biden, Hillary Clinton, and also (nodding to the R's) in his retention of Gates as Sec. Def.
GM, a one-party monarchy would be far worse than the people's choice as chosen through an election. What you have in N. Korea is the equivalent of monarchical one-family rule. It's an absolute disaster if the family is bad enough. We have something similar with the Bushes and the Kennedys but even they have to go through a certain vetting process and are only in for eight years at most. Plus, we all have guns if it gets bad enough (not that I advocate using them EVER). I might change that opinion if I lived in N. Korea, however.
That Kim guy could use a shotgun blast. I grant that I love looking up the mass spectacles he puts on, and I was surprised by the quality of the N. Korean soccer team this year. Still, I don't think famine is worth it.
Stu, can you find anyone in the current administration with ANY significant artistic talent?
Rehnquist could paint (he loved to paint).
Condi could play the piano.
It's arguable in the long run whether we like a given policy, and how well it's been done. If I could get this back to the artistic sphere I could be on more certain ground in terms of my judgement of the general ability of a given pol.
Kagan has no fashion sense.
Sotomayor's hair is a disaster.
Can either of them write a poem, or say anything funny?
Lincoln's great qualities may have been linked to his ability to incorporate opposition, and to ask Grant to tip his hat to Lee, so as to take the sting out of defeat so that any rankling bitterness would be assuaged.
However, his prose is immortal.
Obama's is temporary, and not any good.
Obama will never write anything that's the equivalent of the G. Address.
It's hard to evaluate Bush vs. Obama. They're both duffers. Have they ever played a game of golf against one another? I'd put my money on W.
Like you say, it's difficult to evaluate people from the opposite side, and there are considerations of opinion that have to do with how close they are to getting us to our own goals.
When they move against our goals, it's hard not to evaluate them negatively.
Still, I think condi Rice and Colin Powell were good real bets for Bush. He liked to tweak the left, but he also dealt quite well with all kinds of leftists and was nice to them in person.
Obama pretends to talk to the right, but he doesn't even listen. This, again, is an opinion. But there isn't anything like a fact when it comes to our own values, or who can come close to making them happen.
I see Obama's ilk as mostly made of gangsters and terrorists with hardly an eyeball to pass around between them. They are like the twisted hags of Greek myth, who have just the one eyeball.
That eyeball is quantitative, and has to do with race, gender, and class.
Brett says it isn't.
I say it is.
Is.
Isn't.
Obama talked about it all the time in his own code. He's still doing it by FIRST Hispanic woman on the court, and so on.
What we need is quality.
How can we evaluate quality? First, we ought to at least TALK ABOUT THAT, rather than about first this, first that.
Kirby,
Stu, can you find anyone in the current administration with ANY significant artistic talent?
I don't believe that "significant artistic talent" is a reasonable proxy for "quality." That said, Steven Chu is a Nobel Laureate in physics. Whether this qualifies as "artistic talent" is arguable, but whether it qualifies as "quality" is not. Eric Shinseki was a four-star general. This doesn't seem particularly artistic, but it is indicative of quality.
Rehnquist could paint (he loved to paint).
So did Hitler. This is by no means an effort to equate the two, but it is an effort to point out how ridiculous your "Nero test" for quality in government really is. Indeed, it seems to me that artists and cardiologists are the only populations that are consistently even more ego-centric than politicians, and I doubt that ego-centricity is correlated positively with good government.
Let me propose a reality test. Would you have viewed Jimmy Carter more favorably if he'd have appointed Allen Ginsberg as Secretary of HHS?
Still, I think condi Rice and Colin Powell were good real bets for Bush.
I think that Powell could have been appointed by administrations from either party. This is generally true of generals who have made it senior positions, because they've generally had to survive multiple administrations, and so tend to be publicly apolitical. Indeed, I've long thought that one of the greatest sins of the GWB administration was in having Powell front for them at the UN in the lead-up to the second Gulf war. There is no question that this ultimately destroyed Powell's credibility, and his political career with it.
I'm ambivalent w.r.t. Rice. There's no denying that she's smart, but it seems to me that she was one war behind (i.e., cold war vs. war on terror), and this cost us dearly in the lead-up to 9/11. Clinton's people were far more focussed on terrorism going out than Bush's people were going in, and Bush's people were emphatic in refusing to learn from them.
Obama pretends to talk to the right, but he doesn't even listen.
So explain why the HCR plan is widely known as "Romney-care." It seems to me that Obama's instincts are to be a conciliator, but this doesn't work so well when your opponents are playing a scorched earth strategy. He's given the R's far more voice in shaping policy than GWB ever gave the D's, but he's not getting the votes. The thing is, this argument on the right that Obama isn't listening could become a self-fulfilling prophesy. I live in hope.
Shinseki and Chu were not previously on my radar. I googled both. Nobel Laureate in literature doesn't mean much to me. It's usually a hack who illustrates some temporary fad. No one I would care about has ever won it, or even come close.
Toni Morrison won it.
She's a lousy writer, but she illustrates the RGC preoccupations that many people think are sufficient for understanding today's world.
Back in the day Romain Rolland won it. He was a pacifist and he started the Red Cross. It's often the extra-literary aspects of a person's work that earn them the prize.
They illustrate some fad or another.
I assume the same is true in math or science.
Quality is very difficult to understand.
Winning prizes, at least in literature, is usually a sure sign that the writer hasn't got any specifically literary qualities, but has either cashed in on RGC, or some other problematic distinction. Maybe they are dying of cancer. Maybe they under an unpopular regime.
Quality is rarely discussed in literature. Most people today think it doesn't exist.
I say it does, but then I recognize that there are a lot of lumpheads in the discipline who wouldn't know or care anything about it, but would nominate instead something that pushed their scrum a little closer to some finish line.
Kirby,
As far as I know, Nobel Prizes in the basic sciences are given to scholars of exceptional merit, and usually decades after the work for which they are honored, long enough to make reasonable inferences about lasting impact. This isn't to say that there are no politics at play in the selection committee, but the notion of a "weak Nobel" in the basic sciences is nearly an oxymoron.
Chu is a serious scientist, and I'm not aware of anyone qualified to assess him who has suggested otherwise.
As for Mathematics, there is no Nobel, an omission that exercises mathematicians greatly, and is the basis of a shaggy dog story that mathematicians tell their students in which Nobel declined to create an award in mathematics because the leading mathematician of his day was having an affair with his wife, and he wouldn't have wanted his prize to advantage the man.
The mathematical community has created its own award, the Fields Medal, which is often viewed as a Nobel equivalent.
Chu was apparently assigned by Obama to assist BP in the Deepwater Horizon spill. He bit off more (perhaps) than he could chew.
I've heard of the Fields Awards because I read A Beautiful Mind.
They are also mentioned in the film about the math wizard who worked as a janitor at Harvard. In that film there was at least the lurking assessment of the mathematicians at Harvard that more than a little Machiavellian insularity was used to keep down good outsider mathematicians.
Something like the Salieri complex that killed Mozart.
I suppose that's a normal part of human behavior.
In literature, I think it's the norm for people to join up in cartels and attempt to suppress quality writers in order to push themselves and their friends. It's probably characteristic of the field.
I assume that the same thing happens in the army, and in the other services, in politics, and in every other area of human endeavor from Little League through MLB.
What you see at the top therefore are not necessarily the best of any area of inquiry, but those who survived the process.
Just to give an example of shady winnowing in Hollywood: Nick Cage is the nephew of Coppola.
Does this mean that there might have been a better actor who would have arrived at the top of the profession if everyone started at the same starting line?
Probably.
Does it then imply that in the interests of absolute equality, there should be no preferences for those who already have a leg up?
I don't think so, because I think that always creates new inequalities, new imbalances, new hierarchies of winnowing that are just as savagely intent on tilting the process toward one's own group, whether perceived as family, friends, or race, gender, and class.
Kirby,
It looks as if your universalizing my model of political appointments, in which cronyism as well as competence plays an important roll.
I don't disagree, so let's think a bit more deeply about those personal networks that cronyism builds upon. Larger networks give you a better chance that the best person you know is good enough.
In this regard, I think that establishment types (like GWB) have a lot of connectivity, but so to do academic types (like BHO). Of course, what this means is that establishment types tend to be connected to other establishment types, and academic types tend to be connected to other academic types. Hence, the "didn't we see all of these people before in the GHWB administration" feel of the GWB administration, and the distinctly more academic feel of the BHO administration.
Turning this back to the current question, it is hardly surprising that the people that BHO networks with is a more diverse group than those that GWB (let alone GHWB) networked with. This is not a criticism of GWB, as I hope my earlier remarks make clear. Indeed, I think there's a generational break somewhere between GHWB and GWB that is much more significant than the racial differences between GWB and BHO in this regard.
But doesn't this (again) undermine your view that BHO sees the world through the lens of race, gender, and class? Inevitably, he sees the world through his own eyes, and he looks to people he knows to fill leadership positions. Just like GWB did. The differences in the diversity of outcomes is simply a reflection of differences in the diversity of their respective pools.
Stu, well, that's a good theory and it seems to fit the facts.
I think someone more aware of industry would be better for jobs.
This may be the Achilles heel of the BO administration: that the creation of jobs has to do with demonstrably qualitative products that people want to buy.
Obama has never worked in such a sphere, so he may not know much about the Beming process, or the kinds of things that industry leaders want.
It would be good to get someone in who is more aware of these things if we want to turn this rig around.
I guess if I think about the pool a person will bring with them, I'd say Romney, from that perspective, would be best?
We really need someone who knows something about industry -- and business. It's almost desperate.
Business is the business of America, as Calvin said, back when the economy was growing in leaps, but also in bounds.
We need that. But we don't need enormous and catastrophic mistakes in the wells near the sensitive ocean life.
So we're not just voting for a person. We're voting for a pool of connections, as well.
I happen to love academia and academics, and to not know much at all about industry. But without industry, everything is going to shrink all across America.
Obama tends to know a lot of activists inside and outside of academia.
It's like a plague of academic activists now. Oh lord. Two more of them on the SCOTUS.
Kirby,
Obama has never worked in such a sphere, so he may not know much about the Beming process, or the kinds of things that industry leaders want.
Let me take issue with the notion that giving industry leaders what they want is necessarily good for industry, let alone the country. This isn't to say that I believe that damaging industry is a good idea, but rather that I believe that industry leaders have proven to be too short-sighted to be relied upon.
Let's take some particulars.
A current source of much grief, both in industry and state governments, has been systematic underfunding of pensions. It's proven far to easy to improve today's bottom line by underfunding pensions, and leaving the resulting problems to your successors. Doing what GM's leaders wanted to do in the 60's and 70's has a lot to do with the GM's recent near-death experience. Likewise, weaknesses in regulation of the financial sector (which the financial sector wanted) lead to systemic risk and widespread losses during the recent collapse. The federal government, through Social Security, has done much better. This isn't to say that Social Security is without issues, just that those issues are manageable in comparison.
The energy economy of this country (and indeed, world) is another huge problem. Fossil fuel reserves are not infinite, and indeed there's evidence that we've expended about 1/2 of the economically exploitably petroleum reserves of the planet, at great ecological cost (considering not only prompt ecological damage as in the Gulf, China, and Nigeria, but also delayed damage through greenhouse gas induced climate change). A sensible strategy for our country would be to be making massive investments in green energy, as for example, T. Boone Pickens is currently doing with wind energy. It seems to me that the oil barons in the GHWB and GWB administrations bent national policy to pursue the interests of oil sector, but in characteristically short-term ways.
It seems to me that we are much better served by a national government that is prepared to take a longer-term view, and which sees its responsibilities in multi-generational terms, rather than simply maximizing next-quarter's bonus terms.
And this is where I think we have an agreement, and stand a bit apart from JADL. He presented ecological damage vs. current economic activity in terms of a tradeoff. I'd argue, and I expect you'd agree, that maintaining the quality of the environment—doing no long term damage—is a constraint, not a tradeoff, because it is only by preserving the environment in the long term that we can make possible the long-term prosperity of our descendants.
I agree with this, which doesn't exactly forward the conversation, Stu.
Can't you be a little more vexing?
Kirby,
I agree with this, which doesn't exactly forward the conversation, Stu.
Can't you be a little more vexing?
I can always be more vexing. The question is whether or not by doing so I advance my conversational goals, which are to understand, to be understood, to support sound reasoning, and to reach agreement in good faith when possible.
But let me turn this back around in a direction that you might find satisfyingly vexing.
I believe that what BHO is trying to accomplish is in the interest of the long-term health of the country. Health care exemplifies this. Health care costs have been expanding explosively, and de facto the federal government ends up with the bill every time someone can't pay. HCR mandates insurance for everyone, which should largely take the feds off of the hook. But it also puts into place cost controls that should hold down the cost for everyone. After all, the cost to the economy of health care is the cost of health care, irrespective of who actually bears that cost. In effect, BHO was saying, "we have to account for the costs of health care honestly." There are always going to be winners, losers, and uncertainty when the legal environment changes, and moreover we've become accustomed to short-term fixes, so the political price of attempting a long-term fix is large. Obama paid that price. HCR was a large solid step in the direction of a long-term fix. I wouldn't argue that it's there yet, but politically, this was huge. And I'll note, a step in the direction that both Democratic and Republican administrations have been trying to make since the Teddy Roosevelt administration.
Likewise, BHO has tried mightily to detoxify an incredibly toxic political environment, but it's been a one-man dance. Let me put it this way. The Republicans seem to have bet their brand on labeling Obama as a socialist-marxist-communist, but having done so, they can't very well cooperate with him, can they? Otherwise, they're cooperating with socialists, marxists, etc., a seemingly self-evident step of logic they forgot until the teabaggers reminded them.
It's as if the mainstream of the Democratic party was out there condemning the Republicans as nothing more than corrupt fascist hacks who want to get back into government so that they can go back to raping the treasury through rigged no-bid contracts. That would, in fact, be a far more accurate characterization of R's than the R's characterization of the D's. But that's not how the mainstream D's characterize the R's today. Instead, they refer to "the party of no," and condemn the R's for "not having any ideas," rather than for being corrupt fascists. Do you see the difference? You can work with people who don't have ideas, but you can't work with fascists or communists, at least not in this country.
This is not a situation where the blame for our current political deadlock is symmetric. The blame lies almost entirely with the Republican party. That's the truth. But is it vexing?
Kirby, I see what you mean now: You really didn't get enough sleep. LOL
Stu, that's your truth. If this is Obama's truth, why doesn't he just say so? If he'd ever explain himself as clearly as you do for him, I'd be for him.
but I suspect that he is a communist of some kind, and wants a long-term changeover that destroys the private sector and puts him or his ilk in charge of what's left of the economy.
I think he's confusing quality and equality, and making all kinds of other mental gaffes, too.
He is pretty smooth on his feet, but I don't think he thinks well.
You think well.
He doesn't.
You are not him.
If you were president, I'd have problems with what you were doing, but at least I could understand what it was that you were doing.
I have no idea who or what Obama is.
I don't think he does, either.
Is he at least post-racial?
Not really.
Not so vexing, stu, as laughable when you say that it's "far more accurate" to say that the Republicans are "nothing more than corrupt fascist hacks who want to get back into government so they can go back to raping the treasury through rigged no-bid contracts." Or that the blame for what you call "the current political deadlock" lies "almost entirely with the Republican party." Ostensibly negative examples of overheated or "vexing" rhetoric, they are, at bottom, just cheap scapegoating insinuations of the sort you've often said damage one's rhetorical integrity. Primo "Daily Worker" boilerplate, though--kinds of stuff I've heard for years issuing forth from faculty lounge wing-chairs.
Of course Republicans have "ideas" and have presented them as alternatives to the Obama regime's and Congressional Democrats' schemes for concentrating federal government power and bureaucratic prerogative while ensuring that they can harvest enough votes from favoured dependent groups to sustain their current dominance. Trouble is for the Democrats, that their false scapegoating routine is playing ever-less well with the voters on a number of key issues. It's my hope that the fall elections will prove the "scandal" ("skandalon" or "stumbling block") we need to help reverse the current statist and redistriubutionist orgy in Washington, D.C.
The BP oil spill could have happened on anyone's watch.
If I had been President at the time, I'd have called in the top five BP executives, and read them the riot act: Either you spend whatever it takes to fix this mess, or all your future leases and contracts in this hemisphere are toast.
They would have fixed the problem in two weeks, instead of dithering about and "trying things" they knew were cheaper in the short run (if they worked).
Our continental shelf drilling technology is still in its infancy. It may remain immature and undeveloped, if we allow it to remain so. That is our choice. Are we likely to do so? Yes.
Because people are stupid. Like the recently passed financial regulation legislation, the "fix" will only go half-way, and it will be business as usual within a couple of years. People want oil more than they want to feel responsible--or actually to live their platitudes out in real life.
Our inability--or refusal--to acknowledge this hypocrisy is what makes unbridled exploitation possible. Underneath all our vaunted ethical well-meaning poses, we're just ninnies.
Kirby,
If this is Obama's truth, why doesn't he just say so? If he'd ever explain himself as clearly as you do for him, I'd be for him.
I believe he has said so, and my representation of his goals and motivations is merely a reflection of what he's said with at least as much clarity and force. The disconnect here is that I don't think you're listening to what he's saying, instead, you're putting filters on him that you're not putting on me.
There is an epistemological issue here. You believe that Obama is a socialist-marxist-communist, and therefore that he cannot be trusted to tell the truth. And this is a filter that you apply to everything he says. You can find some positive evidence for this in that his words and deeds are not always perfectly aligned—something that is true of all of us, but seems all the more insidious to you given your filter. But is it possible in principle to find evidence against the proposition? Not so long as you interpret the evidence of his words through the proposition itself.
Kim Jong il is not an aristocrat.
He is a democratic despot.
There is a vas deferens between the two.
GM,
Kim Jong il is not an aristocrat.
He is a democratic despot.
I cordially disagree. Kim Jong-Il is a psychopath and a military dictator. Trying to draw him in as a example in an argument between democrats and aristocratic monarchists is an exercise in irrelevance.
There is a vas deferens between the two.
Hilarious! But honestly, I identify Jong-Il with a place further down stream. That's right, he's a ...
The kims or jongs or ils came to power via a peoples revolution. Tyranny is the child of all democracies, stu.
GM,
Tyranny is the child of all democracies, stu.
Color me skeptical.
I think it might be fairer to say that tyranny is the child of all forms of human organization. I'll note that the Declaration of Independence uses "tyrant" or "tyranny" to describe King George III and his government four times. Whether it does so justly or not is a fair question, but in this, it belongs with the Magna Carta and many other witnesses to the tyranny of monarchies.
If tyranny in human affairs is a universal, then the pragmatic question is necessarily one of degree, and the right philosophical stance is the engineer's notion of tradeoffs rather than the theologian's notion of absolute right and wrong.
But if we put the question on a relative rather than an absolute basis, I believe that democracies are the cause of less tyranny than monarchies, if only because they contain within themselves mechanisms to remove tyrants by peaceable means, and so those who are tyrants generally are removed in time, and many who might have become tyrants absent this threat are dissuaded. Monarchies do not have this safety mechanism.
The problematic cases come when demagogues lead people away from democracies, into totalitarian systems, as happened with Hitler. In that case, the Weimar Republic was a weak democracy, and condemned in the minds of the German people of its era by its association with the Treaty of Versailles. Our history of democracy is much more stable, and a transition to totalitarian government less likely. As for Kim Il-Sung and the foundation of the modern state of North Korea, calling it a "people's revolution" buys into North Korean propaganda. Its foundations were in understandably violent resistance to the Japanese, through a militarized nationalist revolutionary movement that had much popular support, but which was never a multi-party democracy in polity.
Let me suggest that the realm of ecclesiastical government, where many of the same issues present, is an interesting model. The Roman Catholic Church is organized as a non-hereditary monarchy, with the Bishops as Princes (and they are so often called), and the Pope as King. As a non-hereditary monarchy, there is more of an opportunity for men of merit to reach high rank than in hereditary monarchies, so this is something of an ideal case for your side. One the other hand, most Protestant churches have a more democratic (I might almost say collegial) polity. There are certainly strengths and weaknesses in both models, yet, as it happens, both of us belong to Protestant (i.e., much more democratic) confessions. Indeed, if I understand your religious commitments correctly, your church is much more at the pure, local, democratic ideal, than mine, which is more of a two-class (ordained,lay) republic, with major executive roles reserved to the ordained class.
So let me ask the following question in all sincerity: if you truly believe that monarchies are so great, why aren't you Catholic?
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