This rant by Bill McKibben is emblematic of the kind of slap-dash, free association that passes for smart commentary by global warming fanaticists. The author seeks to discredit those who would not readily assume that a series of recent severe weather events constitute evidence of climate change. By mocking those who would assert otherwise, McKibben is, in effect, arguing that recent torandos in Joplin, MO, and Tuscaloosa, AL, and the "enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that" are related events, and that the link is . . . (you guessed it) manmade global warming!
What a rube I must be. Here I've lived in the upper Midwest my entire life, and just assumed that tornadoes occur when air masses of certain temperature and barometric pressure collide. I also believed what I heard in statistics class about random, independent events seeming to come about in discernible patterns.
Until now, when people told me that "deaths come in threes," I would gently suggest to them that it just seems that way, given a never-ending string of deaths in our lives, and a vague idea of just how close those deaths would have to be in order to be related. If A dies on April 27, and B dies on May 22 (the span of time between Tuscaloosa and Joplin), are those deaths close enough to be part of the same tri-part event? Does that mean that C has to die on or before June 22? What if C doesn't die until July 15?
Some people see religious imagery in knots on trees, on rust stains on stone walls, and in the random designs "visible" on burnt toast.
As is typical in screeds posted by true believers, the facts get in the way of McKibben's thesis. McKibben points to 2011 tornadic activity as evidence that global warming is heating up the atmosphere. The problem is that there are HUNDREDS OF TORNADOES EVERY YEAR in the United States. Once, over a two day span (April 3-4, 1974), there were 147 separate tornadoes in 13 states! (see the Online Tornado FAQ hosted by NOAA). Per the same source, the month of May, 2003, saw 543 tornadoes in the United States!
Let's face it, Bill, there are ALWAYS severe weather events (hurricanes, tsunamis, blizzards) trundling one after the other across North America and the world. You can group them any way you wish in order to suggest a pattern (or lack of one, for that matter).
I'm not saying that there could never be a link between global temperature change and severe weather. It makes perfect sense that there could be such a link. I for one, haven't seen the straw people that McKibben hypothesizes (the myopic d-e-n-i-e-r-s) who adamantly assert that there can't be a link. But I can well imagine the intelligent and thoughtful (not necessarily readers of WaPo) who admit the possibility but intuitively understand the risks of jumping to broad conclusions based on clusters of more or less random events.
It is silliness to suggest that a cool spring debunks theories of global warming. It is just as silly to assert that a couple of severe weather events in a 3 or 4 week period supports those same theories.
While there "could be" a link between 2011 tornadoes and global warming, I suppose that there could also be a link beween the death of my mail carrier and that of Aunt Agnes about 6 weeks ago.
If it is wrong to be skeptical about the conclusions of fanatics and true believers, then I don't want to be right.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
One America
As I look out over I-57 tonight, I think that the differences between us are not so great, that we are but one America. One country. Allied and aligned. And what we all want is universal: a good life for ourselves, our children, and our fellowman. And how to get there: hard work (who among us wants to reward the slothful?), hope, and an omnipresent eye on the prize relative prosperitry, a tomorrow brighter than tonight).
I cringe at those among us who want the working and giving amng us to give even more to those who think that they haven't been given enough. I cringe at the sight of those who beg at the steps of the county courthouse: Give me some more! (For you seek but a gift, exactly like those at the food line at the homeless shelter).
This man's America is a land where we all work hard, and we all do well. Not well enough to fly in jet airplanes to tropical beaches to frolic in the saline tides, but well enough to dine on eggs and sourdough biscuits and bacon. To live well, in the humblest sense of the word.
This man's America is a land where we stop crying, and stop begging. Where we get off our chairs and stoops and take what is ours, what is our birthright: wealtth, prosperity, happiness.
What do we need from Uncle Sam, from Government?
Nothing, except open roads and freedom from interference.
Freedom made this land great. Freedom from oppresssion. Freedom from contol. Freedom from those who would make their pet issue ours. Freedom from those who demand 'rights,' when the only authentic right is that to be left alone to pursue our destiny.
I cringe at those among us who want the working and giving amng us to give even more to those who think that they haven't been given enough. I cringe at the sight of those who beg at the steps of the county courthouse: Give me some more! (For you seek but a gift, exactly like those at the food line at the homeless shelter).
This man's America is a land where we all work hard, and we all do well. Not well enough to fly in jet airplanes to tropical beaches to frolic in the saline tides, but well enough to dine on eggs and sourdough biscuits and bacon. To live well, in the humblest sense of the word.
This man's America is a land where we stop crying, and stop begging. Where we get off our chairs and stoops and take what is ours, what is our birthright: wealtth, prosperity, happiness.
What do we need from Uncle Sam, from Government?
Nothing, except open roads and freedom from interference.
Freedom made this land great. Freedom from oppresssion. Freedom from contol. Freedom from those who would make their pet issue ours. Freedom from those who demand 'rights,' when the only authentic right is that to be left alone to pursue our destiny.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
From Diversity to Sustainability: How Campus Ideology is Born
October 12, 2010 By Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars.
(Originally published by The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Recently I came across a photograph of students at an event gathered around a cake that bore the iced command, "Celebrate Sustainability!" Clearly the candle had been passed. For more than a generation, cakes at campus events have tutored students to "Celebrate Diversity!" Something has changed—besides the frosting.
The pursuit of diversity on campuses remains a highly visible priority, but it is being subtly demoted by enthusiasm for sustainability. As an ideology, diversity is running out of steam, while sustainability is on fire. This month hundreds of colleges will mark the eighth annual Campus Sustainability Day, with activities to include a Webcast offering "social-change strategies and tools" to help campuses lower carbon emissions.
How did this happen? Partly it is the Macy's-window effect: Ideologies have to be replaced from time to time to attract attention. But sustainability is gaining ground also because it offers college students a stronger sense of personal significance than diversity does.
Diversity and sustainability are the two most characteristic ideas of the modern academy. Diversity asks us to focus on group identity and personal affiliation, and it puts race at the center of the discussion. Sustainability asks us to focus on humanity's use of natural resources, and it puts climate at the center of discussion. Outwardly, diversity and sustainability belong to separate narratives. They deal with different topics and might, in principle, have no more friction between them than typically exists between English departments and physics labs. Or between polar bears and tropical fish. But in fact, diversity and sustainability have a complicated, decades-old rivalry.
They vie, in effect, for the same conceptual space and the same passions. Both are about repairing the world; both invite exuberant commitment; both are moralistic; and most of all, both are encompassing ideas that crowd out other encompassing ideas. They also compete for the same financial resources.
Diversity and sustainability are also both second-wave movements. Diversity is second-wave affirmative action; sustainability is second-wave environmentalism. Like all second-wave movements, each embodies a complicated awareness of its predecessor, by turns appropriating and repudiating the earlier movement. Diversity set aside the ideal of racial integration as a moral imperative for equity in favor of a convoluted claim that racial preferences should rest on pedagogical advantages. Few proponents of racial preferences actually believe this, and the old moral imperative lurks in the background. But the pedagogical rationale became enshrined in law in Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger.
Likewise, sustainability set aside the driving idea of the original environmental movement, that we help ourselves when we clean up the environment. Sustainability shifts the focus to both the imagined future and the supposed needs of the earth itself. Sustainability decenters environmentalism from the health and enjoyment of living people to the world beyond and replaces a focus on the dangers of pollution with the idea that Western society itself is profoundly at odds with the earth.
Diversity and sustainability are not simply repackaging of old ideas. Both are distinct ideas in their own right, and both aspire to be cultural concepts that impose a general order, not only on the university but also on society at large. Both express vigorous dissatisfaction with the social order, but beyond that, they convey ideals that are probably irreconcilable. Diversity calls for a fractionated America but leaves intact a vision of personal success and amenity. Sustainability is, not far beneath the surface, a doctrine of privation, offering only the psychological comforts of asceticism.
One index of the rise of sustainability at the expense of diversity is the size of the institutional memberships of their professional groups. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education now lists as members 800 colleges and universities in the United States. The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, by contrast, has about 150 member institutions.
Diversity is a story of a once-fresh ideology that swept through higher education in a spirit of triumph but that quickly seems to be losing its status as the sexiest ideology on campus. Diversiphiles would like to keep the adrenaline flowing, but it is hard. Freshmen now arrive on campus already having sucked on multicultural milkshakes from kindergarten to senior prom. Diversity for them is just the same ol' same ol'.
That doesn't stop the diversicrat establishment from trying to pump new excitement into the project. California State University at Chico, for example, recently circulated a new "action plan" titled "To Form a More Inclusive Learning Community," in which the university president sets his sights on placing "diversity at the core of our mission, vision, and priorities." The practical goal is to get ChicoState listed as an official "Hispanic-Serving Institution" by 2015, which requires substantially increasing Hispanic enrollment past the university's current 13.5 percent. (ChicoState serves mostly a local population in a part of the state with relatively few Hispanics. Hispanics are already "overrepresented" at Chico from a purely demographic standpoint.) The federal designation "Hispanic-Serving Institution" would bring access to additional federal support. But the diversity game is never about just numbers and dollars. It is also about ideology and intimidation, and Chico State is actively pursuing those, too. As part of the new campaign, it invited the "Diversity Guru" Lee Mun Wah to provide workshops including "Unlearning Racism in the Classroom." Faculty members get the message: Openly expressed doubts about the diversity program will be treated as racist conduct.
Sustainability hasn't yet achieved this level of intimidation, but not for want of trying. AASHE keeps a directory of "peer-to-peer sustainability outreach programs," or "eco-reps." These are the busybodies who do things like go through students' trash to make sure that everyone is diligently recycling, and who hector everyone to squeeze into a tighter carbon footprint. The Green Gator at Allegheny College is promoting dorm-based compost bins and planning to map energy usage. It urges lights out in the bathrooms and laundry. BardCollege students, meanwhile, are working on "the psychology of fostering sustainable behavior" and are promoting "Recyclemania." If it sounds like the "psychology" of sustainability is akin to OCD, maybe that isn't far off. At the University of California at San Diego, the enforcers posted a shocking discovery complete with photos: "Sadly today we found a bunch of recyclables in the GARBAGE!" A happy ending, though: "We rescued all the recycling ... and got them in the recycling bin."
The power to enforce something, of course, always finds takers, no matter how petty the rules. Sustainability, however, seems especially suited to the rise of student enforcers. They might best be described as sustainabullies. Why does this have the power to light up the imaginations of so many students? How did it become the distinctive banner of this generation?
I view this changing of the ideological guard with wariness. Diversity was pretty bad; sustainability may be even worse. Both movements subtract from the better purposes of higher education. Diversity authorizes double standards in admissions and hiring, breeds a campus culture of hypocrisy, mismatches students to educational opportunities, fosters ethnic resentments, elevates group identity over individual achievement, and trivializes the curriculum. Of course, those punishments were something that had to be accepted in the spirit of atoning for the original sin of racism.
But for its part, sustainability has the logic of a stampede. We all must run in the same direction for fear of some rumored and largely invisible threat. The real threat is the stampede itself. Sustainability numbers among its advocates some scrupulous scientists and quite a few sober facilities managers who simply want to trim utility bills. But in the main, sustainability is the triumph of hypothesis over evidence. Its scientific grounding is mostly a matter of models and extrapolations and appeals to authority. Evoking imminent and planet-destroying catastrophe, sustainatopians call for radical changes in economic arrangements and social patterns. Higher education is summoned to set aside whatever it is doing to help make this revolution in production, distribution, and consumption a reality.
Sustainability combines some astonishingly radical ideas with mere wackiness. Many sustainability advocates want to replace free markets (a source, as they see it, of unsustainable growth and exploitation) with some kind of pan-national rule with little scope for private property rights. On the other hand, sustainatopians also busy themselves with eliminating trays from cafeterias and attacking the threat of plastic soda straws. Sustainability thus unites vaunting political ambition and comic burlesque.
Both are at odds with patient and open-minded intellectual inquiry.
The diversity movement has always been rife with contradictions. Seeking to promote racial equality, it evolved into a system that perpetuates inequalities. But whatever else it is, the diversity movement thirsts to be part of mainstream America. Its ultimate goal is to make diversity a principle of the same standing as freedom and equality in our national life. The sustainability movement, by contrast, has no such affection for the larger culture or loyalty to the American experiment. It dismisses the comforts of American life, including our political freedom, as unworthy extravagance. Sustainability summons us to a supposedly higher good. Personal security, national prosperity, and individual freedom may just have to go as we press on to our low-impact, carbon-free new order. In this sense, it goes beyond promising to redeem us from social iniquity to redeeming us from human nature itself.
Many campus adherents to sustainability may eventually tire of its puritanical preachiness and its unfulfilled prophecies, but for the moment, sustainability has cachet. Diversity, meanwhile, has aged into a static bureaucracy, and diversicrats increasingly spend their energy polishing the spoons. The current displacement of diversity by sustainability can be traced back to two developments. In June 1992, Sen. John Kerry and Teresa Heinz attended the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development—the Rio Summit. On their return to the United States, they founded an advocacy group called Second Nature, specifically dedicated to bringing the sustainability movement to the American college campus. Second Nature is explicitly radical. It calls for making "sustainable living the foundation of all learning and practice in higher education." Second Nature chose as its primary tactic the winning over of college and university presidents, and it has so far succeeded in getting 674 to sign its "American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment."
The other development that seems to have pushed sustainability forward as a campus movement was the rise of social activism in residence-life offices. Responding to a call from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for colleges to do more to promote "community" on campus, residence-life staff stepped up in 1994 with new "co-curricular" programs heavily freighted with leftist ideas about social transformation. Sustainability soon became part of that package. In 2005, nine higher-education associations teamed up to create the Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium. They aimed, like Second Nature, to make "education for sustainable development" the priority for American higher education. The HEASC announcement was timed for a "United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development," from 2005 to 2014.
Sustainability thus did not grow up organically on campus. While there were faculty members who pursued research on climate change and a few, such as the Oberlin professor David Orr, who gained recognition as uncompromising proponents of radical environmentalism, there was no mass movement behind them, nor did such a movement well up from students. It arrived, Cortés-style, as a well-financed and shrewdly organized expedition bent on conquest. And its immediate target was academic administrations.
One wouldn't think on that basis that sustainability would have had much of a chance in displacing diversity as the dominant campus ideology. Yet here we are, eating our sustainability cake without a tray and sipping our bug juice without a plastic straw. In the end, I suspect that a quarter-century or so of hugging identity politics close and trying to feel perpetual shame about the nation's racial past just proved too dreary. Sustainability may be based on a grimmer view of life in general, but it offers relief from that ever-expanding story of group oppression that had eventually become all that diversity had to offer. In an odd way, sustainability is liberating.
(Originally published by The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Recently I came across a photograph of students at an event gathered around a cake that bore the iced command, "Celebrate Sustainability!" Clearly the candle had been passed. For more than a generation, cakes at campus events have tutored students to "Celebrate Diversity!" Something has changed—besides the frosting.
The pursuit of diversity on campuses remains a highly visible priority, but it is being subtly demoted by enthusiasm for sustainability. As an ideology, diversity is running out of steam, while sustainability is on fire. This month hundreds of colleges will mark the eighth annual Campus Sustainability Day, with activities to include a Webcast offering "social-change strategies and tools" to help campuses lower carbon emissions.
How did this happen? Partly it is the Macy's-window effect: Ideologies have to be replaced from time to time to attract attention. But sustainability is gaining ground also because it offers college students a stronger sense of personal significance than diversity does.
Diversity and sustainability are the two most characteristic ideas of the modern academy. Diversity asks us to focus on group identity and personal affiliation, and it puts race at the center of the discussion. Sustainability asks us to focus on humanity's use of natural resources, and it puts climate at the center of discussion. Outwardly, diversity and sustainability belong to separate narratives. They deal with different topics and might, in principle, have no more friction between them than typically exists between English departments and physics labs. Or between polar bears and tropical fish. But in fact, diversity and sustainability have a complicated, decades-old rivalry.
They vie, in effect, for the same conceptual space and the same passions. Both are about repairing the world; both invite exuberant commitment; both are moralistic; and most of all, both are encompassing ideas that crowd out other encompassing ideas. They also compete for the same financial resources.
Diversity and sustainability are also both second-wave movements. Diversity is second-wave affirmative action; sustainability is second-wave environmentalism. Like all second-wave movements, each embodies a complicated awareness of its predecessor, by turns appropriating and repudiating the earlier movement. Diversity set aside the ideal of racial integration as a moral imperative for equity in favor of a convoluted claim that racial preferences should rest on pedagogical advantages. Few proponents of racial preferences actually believe this, and the old moral imperative lurks in the background. But the pedagogical rationale became enshrined in law in Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger.
Likewise, sustainability set aside the driving idea of the original environmental movement, that we help ourselves when we clean up the environment. Sustainability shifts the focus to both the imagined future and the supposed needs of the earth itself. Sustainability decenters environmentalism from the health and enjoyment of living people to the world beyond and replaces a focus on the dangers of pollution with the idea that Western society itself is profoundly at odds with the earth.
Diversity and sustainability are not simply repackaging of old ideas. Both are distinct ideas in their own right, and both aspire to be cultural concepts that impose a general order, not only on the university but also on society at large. Both express vigorous dissatisfaction with the social order, but beyond that, they convey ideals that are probably irreconcilable. Diversity calls for a fractionated America but leaves intact a vision of personal success and amenity. Sustainability is, not far beneath the surface, a doctrine of privation, offering only the psychological comforts of asceticism.
One index of the rise of sustainability at the expense of diversity is the size of the institutional memberships of their professional groups. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education now lists as members 800 colleges and universities in the United States. The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, by contrast, has about 150 member institutions.
Diversity is a story of a once-fresh ideology that swept through higher education in a spirit of triumph but that quickly seems to be losing its status as the sexiest ideology on campus. Diversiphiles would like to keep the adrenaline flowing, but it is hard. Freshmen now arrive on campus already having sucked on multicultural milkshakes from kindergarten to senior prom. Diversity for them is just the same ol' same ol'.
That doesn't stop the diversicrat establishment from trying to pump new excitement into the project. California State University at Chico, for example, recently circulated a new "action plan" titled "To Form a More Inclusive Learning Community," in which the university president sets his sights on placing "diversity at the core of our mission, vision, and priorities." The practical goal is to get ChicoState listed as an official "Hispanic-Serving Institution" by 2015, which requires substantially increasing Hispanic enrollment past the university's current 13.5 percent. (ChicoState serves mostly a local population in a part of the state with relatively few Hispanics. Hispanics are already "overrepresented" at Chico from a purely demographic standpoint.) The federal designation "Hispanic-Serving Institution" would bring access to additional federal support. But the diversity game is never about just numbers and dollars. It is also about ideology and intimidation, and Chico State is actively pursuing those, too. As part of the new campaign, it invited the "Diversity Guru" Lee Mun Wah to provide workshops including "Unlearning Racism in the Classroom." Faculty members get the message: Openly expressed doubts about the diversity program will be treated as racist conduct.
Sustainability hasn't yet achieved this level of intimidation, but not for want of trying. AASHE keeps a directory of "peer-to-peer sustainability outreach programs," or "eco-reps." These are the busybodies who do things like go through students' trash to make sure that everyone is diligently recycling, and who hector everyone to squeeze into a tighter carbon footprint. The Green Gator at Allegheny College is promoting dorm-based compost bins and planning to map energy usage. It urges lights out in the bathrooms and laundry. BardCollege students, meanwhile, are working on "the psychology of fostering sustainable behavior" and are promoting "Recyclemania." If it sounds like the "psychology" of sustainability is akin to OCD, maybe that isn't far off. At the University of California at San Diego, the enforcers posted a shocking discovery complete with photos: "Sadly today we found a bunch of recyclables in the GARBAGE!" A happy ending, though: "We rescued all the recycling ... and got them in the recycling bin."
The power to enforce something, of course, always finds takers, no matter how petty the rules. Sustainability, however, seems especially suited to the rise of student enforcers. They might best be described as sustainabullies. Why does this have the power to light up the imaginations of so many students? How did it become the distinctive banner of this generation?
I view this changing of the ideological guard with wariness. Diversity was pretty bad; sustainability may be even worse. Both movements subtract from the better purposes of higher education. Diversity authorizes double standards in admissions and hiring, breeds a campus culture of hypocrisy, mismatches students to educational opportunities, fosters ethnic resentments, elevates group identity over individual achievement, and trivializes the curriculum. Of course, those punishments were something that had to be accepted in the spirit of atoning for the original sin of racism.
But for its part, sustainability has the logic of a stampede. We all must run in the same direction for fear of some rumored and largely invisible threat. The real threat is the stampede itself. Sustainability numbers among its advocates some scrupulous scientists and quite a few sober facilities managers who simply want to trim utility bills. But in the main, sustainability is the triumph of hypothesis over evidence. Its scientific grounding is mostly a matter of models and extrapolations and appeals to authority. Evoking imminent and planet-destroying catastrophe, sustainatopians call for radical changes in economic arrangements and social patterns. Higher education is summoned to set aside whatever it is doing to help make this revolution in production, distribution, and consumption a reality.
Sustainability combines some astonishingly radical ideas with mere wackiness. Many sustainability advocates want to replace free markets (a source, as they see it, of unsustainable growth and exploitation) with some kind of pan-national rule with little scope for private property rights. On the other hand, sustainatopians also busy themselves with eliminating trays from cafeterias and attacking the threat of plastic soda straws. Sustainability thus unites vaunting political ambition and comic burlesque.
Both are at odds with patient and open-minded intellectual inquiry.
The diversity movement has always been rife with contradictions. Seeking to promote racial equality, it evolved into a system that perpetuates inequalities. But whatever else it is, the diversity movement thirsts to be part of mainstream America. Its ultimate goal is to make diversity a principle of the same standing as freedom and equality in our national life. The sustainability movement, by contrast, has no such affection for the larger culture or loyalty to the American experiment. It dismisses the comforts of American life, including our political freedom, as unworthy extravagance. Sustainability summons us to a supposedly higher good. Personal security, national prosperity, and individual freedom may just have to go as we press on to our low-impact, carbon-free new order. In this sense, it goes beyond promising to redeem us from social iniquity to redeeming us from human nature itself.
Many campus adherents to sustainability may eventually tire of its puritanical preachiness and its unfulfilled prophecies, but for the moment, sustainability has cachet. Diversity, meanwhile, has aged into a static bureaucracy, and diversicrats increasingly spend their energy polishing the spoons. The current displacement of diversity by sustainability can be traced back to two developments. In June 1992, Sen. John Kerry and Teresa Heinz attended the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development—the Rio Summit. On their return to the United States, they founded an advocacy group called Second Nature, specifically dedicated to bringing the sustainability movement to the American college campus. Second Nature is explicitly radical. It calls for making "sustainable living the foundation of all learning and practice in higher education." Second Nature chose as its primary tactic the winning over of college and university presidents, and it has so far succeeded in getting 674 to sign its "American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment."
The other development that seems to have pushed sustainability forward as a campus movement was the rise of social activism in residence-life offices. Responding to a call from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for colleges to do more to promote "community" on campus, residence-life staff stepped up in 1994 with new "co-curricular" programs heavily freighted with leftist ideas about social transformation. Sustainability soon became part of that package. In 2005, nine higher-education associations teamed up to create the Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium. They aimed, like Second Nature, to make "education for sustainable development" the priority for American higher education. The HEASC announcement was timed for a "United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development," from 2005 to 2014.
Sustainability thus did not grow up organically on campus. While there were faculty members who pursued research on climate change and a few, such as the Oberlin professor David Orr, who gained recognition as uncompromising proponents of radical environmentalism, there was no mass movement behind them, nor did such a movement well up from students. It arrived, Cortés-style, as a well-financed and shrewdly organized expedition bent on conquest. And its immediate target was academic administrations.
One wouldn't think on that basis that sustainability would have had much of a chance in displacing diversity as the dominant campus ideology. Yet here we are, eating our sustainability cake without a tray and sipping our bug juice without a plastic straw. In the end, I suspect that a quarter-century or so of hugging identity politics close and trying to feel perpetual shame about the nation's racial past just proved too dreary. Sustainability may be based on a grimmer view of life in general, but it offers relief from that ever-expanding story of group oppression that had eventually become all that diversity had to offer. In an odd way, sustainability is liberating.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Earth from 3 Billion Miles Away
 |
| Photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 |
CARL SAGAN: "From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
-Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Cheering Immaturity
This article by Thomas Sowell touches upon one my all time pet peeves: the expectation of liberals that the world should operate on a quota system, when the reality is that outcommes depend on inputs.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Please No Romney, No Palin
Mitt: Don't run in 2012. You are nothing but a carpet-bagging, slightly more conservative version of Bill Clinton. Like Bill, you have proven that you will do anything, say anything to get elected. You are a carpetbagger and an unprincipled opportunist. Not only will I not vote for you, I will oppose you.
Sarah: Don't run in 2012. You are a lightweight; you lack what the pundits called "gravitas" in 2000. Turned out that W had a hell of a lot more gravitas than the Associated Press gave him credit for when 9/11 struck. You have none. You lack a conversational understanding of most of the issues which you would confront as the leader of the free world. Love the glasses, but I can't support you.
People I can support:
Bobby Jindahl
Paul Ryan
Mitch Daniels
Sarah: Don't run in 2012. You are a lightweight; you lack what the pundits called "gravitas" in 2000. Turned out that W had a hell of a lot more gravitas than the Associated Press gave him credit for when 9/11 struck. You have none. You lack a conversational understanding of most of the issues which you would confront as the leader of the free world. Love the glasses, but I can't support you.
People I can support:
Bobby Jindahl
Paul Ryan
Mitch Daniels
Saturday, March 27, 2010
ObamaCare Redux
I highly recommend an excellent overview/summary of the shortcomings of ObamaCare at the Weekly Standard ("REPEAL - How and Why Obamacare Must Be Undone"). In it, Yuval Levin eloquently makes the case for repeal of this monstrosity, both as to the whys and the practical possibilities.
The Wall Street Journal Opinion blog also has a great article discussing immediate real world impacts of ObamaCare on the financial statements of some major American companies such as AT&T, Deere & Co., Caterpillar and others.
Thanks again to Barry, Nancy, Harry and the other fools who made all of this possible.
The Wall Street Journal Opinion blog also has a great article discussing immediate real world impacts of ObamaCare on the financial statements of some major American companies such as AT&T, Deere & Co., Caterpillar and others.
Thanks again to Barry, Nancy, Harry and the other fools who made all of this possible.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Toyota's Redemption
I have been following the "runaway Toyota" stories with great skepticism for a while. They are reminiscent of the Audi 5000 stories that circulated in the mid-1980s.
In today's news, the NHTSA looked at the "black box" of a Toyota Prius which allegedly suffered from the sudden acceleration problem. Turns out that the black box (which records various metrics of vehicle operation) showed no braking and wide open acceleration in a New York case. In the case of the Audi 5000, the car was ultimately exonerated.
Now that the fools that are operating these killer Toyotas know that there IS a black box, and now that doubt has been cast on the driving abilities of the people who have experienced problems with their Toyota, my modest prediction is that this story is going to wind down in the media, and that reports of these incidents will stop.
Of course, if you are dumb enough to throw rubber, winter floor mats on top of the carpeted ones (which are actuallyfastened to the floor), you deserve what you get.
In today's news, the NHTSA looked at the "black box" of a Toyota Prius which allegedly suffered from the sudden acceleration problem. Turns out that the black box (which records various metrics of vehicle operation) showed no braking and wide open acceleration in a New York case. In the case of the Audi 5000, the car was ultimately exonerated.
Now that the fools that are operating these killer Toyotas know that there IS a black box, and now that doubt has been cast on the driving abilities of the people who have experienced problems with their Toyota, my modest prediction is that this story is going to wind down in the media, and that reports of these incidents will stop.
Of course, if you are dumb enough to throw rubber, winter floor mats on top of the carpeted ones (which are actuallyfastened to the floor), you deserve what you get.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Anyone Can Do Anything (Article by B.B. Robinson, Ph.d)
Black History Month is an ideal time to measure progress. This year is especially appropriate as we embark on a new decade.
Some indicators of progress are how blacks are catching up with their white counterparts with regard to income, education and political participation. In the latter two categories, reports say blacks made marginal progress. But we have not yet really progressed on equalizing incomes.
Some might argue this income disparity is of overwhelming importance and must be rectified immediately. They may contend it directly affects education and other opportunities.
Our nation's unfortunate history of discrimination has residual effects that remain today. There are also post-civil rights era problems related to entitlements that breed a reliance on government. We can acknowledge these problems, but we must not dwell on them.
To keep from spending the next 90 years debating reasons for this income disparity, let's focus on what can be done to increase black earnings. Solutions include encouraging more blacks to train in the financial, mathematical and scientific fields. Entrepreneurship is also ideal - starting one's own business to actually become the employer.
Classroom education alone is not sufficient to boost income levels. There are too many blacks with doctoral degrees who lack jobs or have jobs that earn less than one might expect. Put simply, their degrees are not in growing or lucrative fields.
Rather than focusing on great black scholars or heroes this Black History Month, why not focus more on black Americans who achieved financial success and how they did it? Think about BET founder Robert Johnson or the late venture capitalist Reginald Lewis.
Americans earning the most money do not necessarily have a multitude of advanced diplomas adorning their walls. Instead, they are thinkers who bring about new wealth-generating ideas. They are go-getters with the drive and ambition who are willing to take the risks to get ahead.
This is not to say the most successful people aren't educated. They can have such degrees, but their smarts aren't always obtained in school.
Think about how many university professors are very wealthy. Not many. What professors can do successfully is impart wisdom upon others. They can school someone about becoming a doctor or a lawyer or to understand the world of business. But what then?
It all comes down to how someone applies his talents. Anyone can do virtually anything when given the proper training.
Oprah Winfrey, for example, was a television reporter who used her ambition and talents to become a media mogul. She did not enter her profession with a Harvard MBA.
Black Americans must understand that anyone can do almost anything - from plumbing to nuclear physics. There's little holding most Americans back if they are given the proper training and have the ambition to succeed.
Again, it's not always education as much as it is training. Put a young mind that is willing to learn in the proper position, and that young mind will master the job. We can't be fooled that one must first obtain a advanced degree to be a success.
Those who know will tell you that, the first day on the job, even the newly-minted Ph.D. may be told by an experienced supervisor to "forget everything that you learned at the university."
Black History Month should help to identify wealthy and successful black Americans. People should learn how they became wealthy and commit themselves to replicating that model.
If we use self-study, mentoring and commit ourselves by supporting each other (especially black businesses), then we can certainly produce considerably more wealthy black Americans. In turn, those wealthy blacks can help other blacks become wealthy because "anyone can do anything."
B.B. Robinson, Ph.D. is a member of the national advisory council of the black leadership network Project 21. You can visit his website at www.blackeconomics.org. Comments may be sent to Project21@nationalcenter.org.
SOURCE: The National Center for Public Policy Research.
Some indicators of progress are how blacks are catching up with their white counterparts with regard to income, education and political participation. In the latter two categories, reports say blacks made marginal progress. But we have not yet really progressed on equalizing incomes.
Some might argue this income disparity is of overwhelming importance and must be rectified immediately. They may contend it directly affects education and other opportunities.
Our nation's unfortunate history of discrimination has residual effects that remain today. There are also post-civil rights era problems related to entitlements that breed a reliance on government. We can acknowledge these problems, but we must not dwell on them.
To keep from spending the next 90 years debating reasons for this income disparity, let's focus on what can be done to increase black earnings. Solutions include encouraging more blacks to train in the financial, mathematical and scientific fields. Entrepreneurship is also ideal - starting one's own business to actually become the employer.
Classroom education alone is not sufficient to boost income levels. There are too many blacks with doctoral degrees who lack jobs or have jobs that earn less than one might expect. Put simply, their degrees are not in growing or lucrative fields.
Rather than focusing on great black scholars or heroes this Black History Month, why not focus more on black Americans who achieved financial success and how they did it? Think about BET founder Robert Johnson or the late venture capitalist Reginald Lewis.
Americans earning the most money do not necessarily have a multitude of advanced diplomas adorning their walls. Instead, they are thinkers who bring about new wealth-generating ideas. They are go-getters with the drive and ambition who are willing to take the risks to get ahead.
This is not to say the most successful people aren't educated. They can have such degrees, but their smarts aren't always obtained in school.
Think about how many university professors are very wealthy. Not many. What professors can do successfully is impart wisdom upon others. They can school someone about becoming a doctor or a lawyer or to understand the world of business. But what then?
It all comes down to how someone applies his talents. Anyone can do virtually anything when given the proper training.
Oprah Winfrey, for example, was a television reporter who used her ambition and talents to become a media mogul. She did not enter her profession with a Harvard MBA.
Black Americans must understand that anyone can do almost anything - from plumbing to nuclear physics. There's little holding most Americans back if they are given the proper training and have the ambition to succeed.
Again, it's not always education as much as it is training. Put a young mind that is willing to learn in the proper position, and that young mind will master the job. We can't be fooled that one must first obtain a advanced degree to be a success.
Those who know will tell you that, the first day on the job, even the newly-minted Ph.D. may be told by an experienced supervisor to "forget everything that you learned at the university."
Black History Month should help to identify wealthy and successful black Americans. People should learn how they became wealthy and commit themselves to replicating that model.
If we use self-study, mentoring and commit ourselves by supporting each other (especially black businesses), then we can certainly produce considerably more wealthy black Americans. In turn, those wealthy blacks can help other blacks become wealthy because "anyone can do anything."
*****
B.B. Robinson, Ph.D. is a member of the national advisory council of the black leadership network Project 21. You can visit his website at www.blackeconomics.org. Comments may be sent to Project21@nationalcenter.org.
SOURCE: The National Center for Public Policy Research.
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Obama Watch - Nov. 8 2008
Memories are faulty. Big E is going to try to keep track of Barry Obama's
3. Income Tax Cut for 95% of America. Never mind that about 40% of Americans don't currently PAY income tax; BO promised during the campaign that he would give a tax break to the 95% of Americans making less than $250,000 per year.
4. Fiscal Stimulus Package. From BO's press conference 11-7-08:
While I have little doubt that Barry, Harry and Nancy will try to dust off the ineffective gimmick of sending out $500 checks; I doubt that it will get done before March and I guarantee you that it won't be effective.
3. Income Tax Cut for 95% of America. Never mind that about 40% of Americans don't currently PAY income tax; BO promised during the campaign that he would give a tax break to the 95% of Americans making less than $250,000 per year.
- From the Obama Campaign Website (http://www.barackobama.com/taxes/11-8-08)
-No family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase.
- Typical middle class family will receive well over $1,000 in tax relief
- Families making more than $250,000 will pay either the same or lower tax rates than they paid in the 1990s .
- Cut taxes overall, reducing revenues to below the levels that prevailed under Ronald Reagan (less than 18.2 percent of GDP). "The Obama tax plan is a net tax cut – his tax relief for middle class families is larger than the revenue raised by his tax changes for families over $250,000. Coupled with his commitment to cut unnecessary spending, Obama will pay for this tax relief while bringing down the budget deficit."
If Barry does all this, I will vote for the fool in 2012.
4. Fiscal Stimulus Package. From BO's press conference 11-7-08:
"If it [stimulus package] does not get done in the lame-duck session, it will be the first thing I get done as president of the United States . . . A fiscal stimulus plan that will jump-start economic growth is long overdue. I've talked about it throughout this - the last few months of the campaign . . . we should get it done.""
While I have little doubt that Barry, Harry and Nancy will try to dust off the ineffective gimmick of sending out $500 checks; I doubt that it will get done before March and I guarantee you that it won't be effective.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Obama Watch - Nov. 7 2008
Big E will be memorializing the gaffes, mis-steps, scandals, contradictions and campaign reneges of the ill-fated Obama Administration.
Let's see: today is Friday November 7. The election is 3 days old.
Item 1: Obama's New Politics. This is going to be a "post-partisan" administration pursuing new politics, one that rises above entrenched partisan rifts to unite a divided country. Remember "Change We Can Believe In"? So who is Barry's first appointment? Rahm Immanuel, a retro play (was senior advisor to Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1998), one of the most partisan choices available. Yah, "New Politics." Right.
Item 2: Cut and Run in 16 Months. We heard often during the 21 month Obama campaign about how opposed he was to the Iraq war, and his plan to get the troops out in 16 months, despite the fact that major combat operations had already been over for years, the efficacy of the 2007 troop surge had exceeded expectations, and the U.S. role had already been reduced to peace-keeping and transitioning the job of keeping the peace to the Iraqi military.
"Barack Obama will work with our military commanders to begin the phased withdrawal of our troops out of Iraq in the first 16 months," Sen. Jack Reed told delegates at the Democratic National Convention in August. This strategy is still being touted on Barry's transition website today. http://change.gov/agenda/iraq/
That would mean troops out May20, 2010. Won't happen. And Big E will be there to document that failure.
Let's see: today is Friday November 7. The election is 3 days old.
Item 1: Obama's New Politics. This is going to be a "post-partisan" administration pursuing new politics, one that rises above entrenched partisan rifts to unite a divided country. Remember "Change We Can Believe In"? So who is Barry's first appointment? Rahm Immanuel, a retro play (was senior advisor to Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1998), one of the most partisan choices available. Yah, "New Politics." Right.
Item 2: Cut and Run in 16 Months. We heard often during the 21 month Obama campaign about how opposed he was to the Iraq war, and his plan to get the troops out in 16 months, despite the fact that major combat operations had already been over for years, the efficacy of the 2007 troop surge had exceeded expectations, and the U.S. role had already been reduced to peace-keeping and transitioning the job of keeping the peace to the Iraqi military.
"Barack Obama will work with our military commanders to begin the phased withdrawal of our troops out of Iraq in the first 16 months," Sen. Jack Reed told delegates at the Democratic National Convention in August. This strategy is still being touted on Barry's transition website today. http://change.gov/agenda/iraq/
That would mean troops out May20, 2010. Won't happen. And Big E will be there to document that failure.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Hillary's Comeuppance
This excellent article by the Associated Press is an excellent summary of how Hillary got to be where she is today.
Her biggest problem is that she is not likable; that's not a fault, it's a fact. But surrounded by yes-men and sycophants, she never heard that. It's like the worst of the worst on American Idol: all of their lives they have been singing in the church choir, and they are shocked when they learn that the larger world is a much harsher judge.
Bolstered by her own hubris, she always believed that this was her turn, and still can't seem to grasp that she'll have to wait for another day to get her ride on the carousel.
Her biggest problem is that she is not likable; that's not a fault, it's a fact. But surrounded by yes-men and sycophants, she never heard that. It's like the worst of the worst on American Idol: all of their lives they have been singing in the church choir, and they are shocked when they learn that the larger world is a much harsher judge.
Bolstered by her own hubris, she always believed that this was her turn, and still can't seem to grasp that she'll have to wait for another day to get her ride on the carousel.
Muddled Vision for Champaign County Nursing Home
Today's News-Gazette article about the Champaign County Nursing Home really gets to the crux of the problem behind this debacle of local government. I confess I haven't been paying attention, but it appears that the place we find ourselves in today is the result of a lack of clear goals for this facility.
County homes have historically been a place where folks without means (either because of age, infirmity or mental illness) were allowed to live. They were clearly charitable institutions, funded largely by taxpayer subsidy. There was no discussion about breaking even, or making a profit; the budget discussion was about how to pay the bills.
Here in Champaign County (home of the dysfunctional 27-member County Board), there appear to be competing visions regarding the County's $27 million investment. [Not surprising, given that the biggest dream that some of the members have is to get elected to the worst-in-the-nation Illinois General Assembly, or worse, to be mayor of Urbana. ]
Some apparently expect the home to run on at least a break-even basis. But if that is the case, why is government involved at all? Is there a lack of private nursing home companies out there? Not likely. Why in the world would an impotent county government imagine that it is in a better position than a professional private company to run this operation? If the goal is to minimize expense to taxpayers, sell the damn thing to a professional operator and cut your losses.
It is not a little ironic that the idea of booting impoverished Medicaid recipients is being floated. If the goal of the facility is to provide refuge to those who would otherwise be out in the cold, this step would be absolutely contraindicated.
So what's it going to be, you dummies? A decision to provide heavily-subsidized care, or to make the facility a self-sufficient enterprise? The choices could not be more stark, but resolution will require courage and clear-thinking. I, for one, am not holding my breath.
County homes have historically been a place where folks without means (either because of age, infirmity or mental illness) were allowed to live. They were clearly charitable institutions, funded largely by taxpayer subsidy. There was no discussion about breaking even, or making a profit; the budget discussion was about how to pay the bills.
Here in Champaign County (home of the dysfunctional 27-member County Board), there appear to be competing visions regarding the County's $27 million investment. [Not surprising, given that the biggest dream that some of the members have is to get elected to the worst-in-the-nation Illinois General Assembly, or worse, to be mayor of Urbana. ]
Some apparently expect the home to run on at least a break-even basis. But if that is the case, why is government involved at all? Is there a lack of private nursing home companies out there? Not likely. Why in the world would an impotent county government imagine that it is in a better position than a professional private company to run this operation? If the goal is to minimize expense to taxpayers, sell the damn thing to a professional operator and cut your losses.
It is not a little ironic that the idea of booting impoverished Medicaid recipients is being floated. If the goal of the facility is to provide refuge to those who would otherwise be out in the cold, this step would be absolutely contraindicated.
So what's it going to be, you dummies? A decision to provide heavily-subsidized care, or to make the facility a self-sufficient enterprise? The choices could not be more stark, but resolution will require courage and clear-thinking. I, for one, am not holding my breath.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Its NOT the Economy, Stupid
The economy showed "remarkable signs of resilience Friday as job losses slowed, the dollar gained a bit of muscle for a change and there were even indications that food prices may be easing." The unemployment rate actually decreased by 1/10th of 1%, although the actual number of jobs decreased.
While the economy is obviously taking a rest, those who traffic in gloom and doom will have to temper the hand-wringing a bit.
That's bad news for the Hill and Barack crowd, who are heavily engaged in the rhetoric that we are all going to hell in a handbasket, NOW.
We heard the same tripe in 1992, when, despite evidence that the economy had started to rebound in late summer, the disaster drum continued to be beaten, all to the benefit of a certain New Democrat from Arkansas.
This year, let's all keep in mind that (a) the economy has ups and downs, (b) we are probably in a down, (c) in life, it's almost never as great or terrible as we think, and (d) the news media is slow to pick up on change, as the inertia pushes last month's story about 6 months past its prime.
My question: is is REALLY that bad?
The phony-baloney 'subprime mortgage mess' is a total red herring; 99% of Americans are indifferent.
Gas prices? Yes, they've gone up, along with the price of eggs, groceries and everything else that is transported by truck. Call me insensitive and elitist, but I'm hard-pressed to believe that an additional $20 a week for gas is going to ruin anyone's life.
The stock market? Sure, your 401(k) has taken a beating. But, unless you are retiring tomorrow, it's just numbers on a piece of paper.
The truth? Things are about like they've been for a long time. To hell with any politician who tells you any different.
While the economy is obviously taking a rest, those who traffic in gloom and doom will have to temper the hand-wringing a bit.
That's bad news for the Hill and Barack crowd, who are heavily engaged in the rhetoric that we are all going to hell in a handbasket, NOW.
We heard the same tripe in 1992, when, despite evidence that the economy had started to rebound in late summer, the disaster drum continued to be beaten, all to the benefit of a certain New Democrat from Arkansas.
This year, let's all keep in mind that (a) the economy has ups and downs, (b) we are probably in a down, (c) in life, it's almost never as great or terrible as we think, and (d) the news media is slow to pick up on change, as the inertia pushes last month's story about 6 months past its prime.
My question: is is REALLY that bad?
The phony-baloney 'subprime mortgage mess' is a total red herring; 99% of Americans are indifferent.
Gas prices? Yes, they've gone up, along with the price of eggs, groceries and everything else that is transported by truck. Call me insensitive and elitist, but I'm hard-pressed to believe that an additional $20 a week for gas is going to ruin anyone's life.
The stock market? Sure, your 401(k) has taken a beating. But, unless you are retiring tomorrow, it's just numbers on a piece of paper.
The truth? Things are about like they've been for a long time. To hell with any politician who tells you any different.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Al Gore = Henny Penny
According to Wikipedia, global warming is the observed increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near surface air and oceans in recent decades and its projected continuation. Former Vice President has appointed himself the world's gadfly on the issue, and has won accolades from the save-the-whale set for his efforts. (The cynical view is that he is using the issue as a medium for shedding his "Wooden Al" persona in an effort to garner support for an '08 run for prez).
Let's big picture this thing.
First, who with a functioning brain would expect the earth NOT to be warming? Think about it - the sheer number of warm human bodies has multiplied hundreds of times in the last millenium. Even the most primitive cultures start fires, and the most developed among us heat our dwellings and drive vehicles powered by combustion engines. In other words, Al, damn straight human activity is warming the earth! And since there are more of us every day, expect that trend to continue.
Second, no one really knows just how quickly the earth is heating up, and no one knows what the effects are going to be, either short or long run. The earth is too big and long term weather patterns too complex to understand with much certainty. Anyone who claims too strongly to the contrary is reading tea leaves. Myopia sets in when such calculations are made. For example, while arctic glaciers might melt (massive flooding!), have the geniuses making such calculations factored in the additional moisture that the warmer atmosphere will hold?
Third, any effects will come about gradually. The sky is not going to just cave in one day, Al.
Fourth, in the big picture, who cares if the world does warm up? Will it be such a tragedy if we lose some coastline in Florida? If you can grow produce in Illinois? If there is an uptick in severe storms?
Finally, given the vast and diverse number of persons and activities on this earth, it is highly unlikely that trivial and silly efforts by developed countries to 'reduce greenhouse gases' will have any meaningful effect. In other words, by far the greatest contributors to global warming are non-discretionary: we need to generate heat to warm our homes, manufacture goods, and transport people and things around the world. Even if everyone on the earth started using solar power tomorrow, think about the aggregate amount of heat from sunlight that we would be trapping and absorbing!
Global warming is inevitable. Enjoy it and think about moving to Minnesota.
Let's big picture this thing.
First, who with a functioning brain would expect the earth NOT to be warming? Think about it - the sheer number of warm human bodies has multiplied hundreds of times in the last millenium. Even the most primitive cultures start fires, and the most developed among us heat our dwellings and drive vehicles powered by combustion engines. In other words, Al, damn straight human activity is warming the earth! And since there are more of us every day, expect that trend to continue.
Second, no one really knows just how quickly the earth is heating up, and no one knows what the effects are going to be, either short or long run. The earth is too big and long term weather patterns too complex to understand with much certainty. Anyone who claims too strongly to the contrary is reading tea leaves. Myopia sets in when such calculations are made. For example, while arctic glaciers might melt (massive flooding!), have the geniuses making such calculations factored in the additional moisture that the warmer atmosphere will hold?
Third, any effects will come about gradually. The sky is not going to just cave in one day, Al.
Fourth, in the big picture, who cares if the world does warm up? Will it be such a tragedy if we lose some coastline in Florida? If you can grow produce in Illinois? If there is an uptick in severe storms?
Finally, given the vast and diverse number of persons and activities on this earth, it is highly unlikely that trivial and silly efforts by developed countries to 'reduce greenhouse gases' will have any meaningful effect. In other words, by far the greatest contributors to global warming are non-discretionary: we need to generate heat to warm our homes, manufacture goods, and transport people and things around the world. Even if everyone on the earth started using solar power tomorrow, think about the aggregate amount of heat from sunlight that we would be trapping and absorbing!
Global warming is inevitable. Enjoy it and think about moving to Minnesota.
Monday, December 04, 2006
School Desegregation / Integration
Today, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases (Meredith v. Jefferson County Public Schools (Louisville, KY) and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District (Seattle, WA)) challenging the ability of public schools to use race as a factor when assigning students to schools.
My question: why does anyone think, in 2006, that it is appropriate to use race as the basis of eligibility for ANYTHING?
While desegregation might have been a necessary tool to jerk America out of the Jim Crow south in the 1950s and 1960s, those days are long since past. At some point, we need to stop using race as a factor, even in supposedly benign ways and with the stated goal of remediating past discrimination.
Is it fair and just to bus kids (regardless of race) across town just so their neighborhood school can be "racially balanced"? No.
Is it fair and just to deny black parents the right to send their kids to a neighborhood school, if that is what they want to do? No.
Is it fair to give one kid the last spot in an elite school, at the expense of some other kid, who goes to a lessser school? No.
None of these things was fair, just or right when it was being done to black kids, and it's not fair, just or right now for anyone else.
Let's take race off the school application, the job application, and the scholarship application. Race should be as irrelevant as the color of one's eyebrows or one's height. THAT is the colorblind ideal of the civil rights movement, not blind adherence to a quota or preference system that is badly outdated.
My question: why does anyone think, in 2006, that it is appropriate to use race as the basis of eligibility for ANYTHING?
While desegregation might have been a necessary tool to jerk America out of the Jim Crow south in the 1950s and 1960s, those days are long since past. At some point, we need to stop using race as a factor, even in supposedly benign ways and with the stated goal of remediating past discrimination.
Is it fair and just to bus kids (regardless of race) across town just so their neighborhood school can be "racially balanced"? No.
Is it fair and just to deny black parents the right to send their kids to a neighborhood school, if that is what they want to do? No.
Is it fair to give one kid the last spot in an elite school, at the expense of some other kid, who goes to a lessser school? No.
None of these things was fair, just or right when it was being done to black kids, and it's not fair, just or right now for anyone else.
Let's take race off the school application, the job application, and the scholarship application. Race should be as irrelevant as the color of one's eyebrows or one's height. THAT is the colorblind ideal of the civil rights movement, not blind adherence to a quota or preference system that is badly outdated.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
The Real Reason for Declining Enrollment in Champaign Schools
Jim Dey had another informative piece in Saturday's News-Gazette regarding declining enrollment in Unit 4 schools, and the corresponding increases in enrollment at private schools and schools in satellite communities such as Mahomet and St. Joe.
Of course, most of the dialogue involving our schools concerns issues of race and the continuing consent decree that mandates federal district court involvement in monitoring efforts to improve educational opportunities for racial minorities.
While I would readily concede that racism is alive and well in Champaign-Urbana (and everywhere else on this planet), I think there has been too much focus on racsim as the source of Unit 4's troubles.
The unfortunate part of the consent decree mess is that the focus has shifted from the old utilitarian "greatest good for the greatest number" to an incredible over-emphasis on student skin color and a need for administrators to weigh each decision, first and foremost, on disparate impact considerations.
In my view, the biggest part of the exodus from Unit 4 schools involves issues of class, rather than race. For the same reason that wealthy families in New England send little Muffy and Charles off to rich-kid prep schools, middle class Champaign county families send their kids to relatively expensive private schools locally: they want their kids to intereact with kids of similar socio-economic means.
While there are a handful of idealists who believe that there is educational value in having their (privileged) kids hang out with kids who live in trailer parks, there are far more who go to great lengths to avoid those kinds of interactions.
Elitist snobbery? Sure. Racism? Not so much. It's easy to confuse race and class, because a disproportionate number of blacks fall on the lower end of the economic spectrum.
My kids go to private school, not because I hate black people or poor people. They go to private school because they can get a great education and make friends with kids who come from achievement-oriented families who make education and personal success a priority. They go because order and discipline is a constant requirement, can be meted out swiftly and uniformly, and can include expulsion, where the situation demands it.
Can you attend public schools and get a great education? Sure.
Are there families of modest means (including single-parent families) who are achievement-oriented and upwardly mobile? Certainly.
Are there kids at private school (including weathly and "upper class" kids) who are a horrible influence on the kids around them, and who come from wholly-dysfunctional families? Without a doubt.
Are there kids in public schools who are brilliant and headed for a lifetime of success? Yes.
Am I somehow sheltering my kids from the 'real world'? Probably.
But what I am really doing is sending our kids to schools that, on balance, give them the best educational environment.
Of course, most of the dialogue involving our schools concerns issues of race and the continuing consent decree that mandates federal district court involvement in monitoring efforts to improve educational opportunities for racial minorities.
While I would readily concede that racism is alive and well in Champaign-Urbana (and everywhere else on this planet), I think there has been too much focus on racsim as the source of Unit 4's troubles.
The unfortunate part of the consent decree mess is that the focus has shifted from the old utilitarian "greatest good for the greatest number" to an incredible over-emphasis on student skin color and a need for administrators to weigh each decision, first and foremost, on disparate impact considerations.
In my view, the biggest part of the exodus from Unit 4 schools involves issues of class, rather than race. For the same reason that wealthy families in New England send little Muffy and Charles off to rich-kid prep schools, middle class Champaign county families send their kids to relatively expensive private schools locally: they want their kids to intereact with kids of similar socio-economic means.
While there are a handful of idealists who believe that there is educational value in having their (privileged) kids hang out with kids who live in trailer parks, there are far more who go to great lengths to avoid those kinds of interactions.
Elitist snobbery? Sure. Racism? Not so much. It's easy to confuse race and class, because a disproportionate number of blacks fall on the lower end of the economic spectrum.
My kids go to private school, not because I hate black people or poor people. They go to private school because they can get a great education and make friends with kids who come from achievement-oriented families who make education and personal success a priority. They go because order and discipline is a constant requirement, can be meted out swiftly and uniformly, and can include expulsion, where the situation demands it.
Can you attend public schools and get a great education? Sure.
Are there families of modest means (including single-parent families) who are achievement-oriented and upwardly mobile? Certainly.
Are there kids at private school (including weathly and "upper class" kids) who are a horrible influence on the kids around them, and who come from wholly-dysfunctional families? Without a doubt.
Are there kids in public schools who are brilliant and headed for a lifetime of success? Yes.
Am I somehow sheltering my kids from the 'real world'? Probably.
But what I am really doing is sending our kids to schools that, on balance, give them the best educational environment.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Unit 4 Consent Decree - October 19, 2006 Order
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
CENTRAL DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
SA'DA JOHNSON, ET AL.,
Plaintiffs,
v.
BOARD OF EDUCATION CHAMPAIGN
COMMUNITY UNIT SCHOOL
DISTRICT #4,
Defendant.
BOARD OF EDUCATION CHAMPAIGN
COMMUNITY UNIT SCHOOL
DISTRICT #4,
Defendant.
Case No. 00-1349
Having found Defendant’s brief to be largely unresponsive to the Court’s July 31, 2006 Order in that it did not, in collaboration with Plaintiff’s, adequately address specific targets, steps, and responsibility for accelerating the progress of African American students as agreed under the Second Revised Consent Decree, the Court hereby orders Defendant to work collaboratively with Plaintiffs to produce a plan that is responsive to the Court’s Order, and which addresses all areas of the Consent Decree including all objectives and goals as stated in the Education Equity Implementation Plan.
The proposed plan must be reviewed and approved by the Monitoring Team. Any disputes that arise during the negotiation of this plan should be submitted for mediation. The plan should include a mutually agreed upon process for fulfilling the District’s good faith commitment for the provision of student seats in North Champaign. The plan must be submitted to the Court no later than January 15, 2007.
ENTERED this 19th day of October, 2006.
s/Joe B. McDade
JOE BILLY McDADE
United States District Judge
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