First: I am told I should announce: “Just so you know: there are no 3rd party ads on my site. No guest posts. No one can buy a slot or a referral. I try always to attribute quotations, especially lengthy excerpts. And yes, I write this much. Phew.”
Meanwhile... alas... there is so much that's "political" that mass media doesn't cover well. That's why you come here, right?
== Step back and see the "always wrong" obstructionist pattern ==
In 1987, 197
countries signed the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to stop
releasing chemicals that were eating away at our planet’s
ozone layer. And now, in a rare scientific
triumph, the hole in the ozone layer has just about returned to the size it was
at the time of the protocol’s signing: at its peak size in September, NASA reported that the hole was about 7.6 million square miles wide, the smallest it
has been at peak since 1988.
As I pointed
out, in EARTH (1989), we are capable of seeing problems, appraising them with
intelligence and science, negotiating a mix of priorities, and then solving
them. Contrary to the dogma of gloom spread today by the far-left and the entire-right.
Alas, this
sapience is most often blocked by dogmatists and cheaters. As Jared Diamond
reveals in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a majority of past cultures hewed to rigid
“traditional” hierarchies (most often feudal or theocratic) that made them
brittle, unable to adapt to changing times. The great historian, Arnold
Toynbee, surveyed hundreds of historical cultures and found that those with
resilience were the ones who continued to invest both confidence and resources
in their “creative minorities.”
We have
plenty of examples in both directions. The same portions of society - in some cases
the same people - who tried to block desegregation of the U.S. military, based on
lies, then the ending of Jim Crow, also shouted “Cars don’t cause smog!” then
“Tobacco is good for you!” then "dumping in streams and lakes is harmless!" then "Who needs oil well regulations?" and “the so-called Ozone collapse is a myth and
those wanting to do something about it are commies who aim to destroy market
capitalism!”
Let's zero in on one of those --
== Perfecting the methodology of delay-obstruction and outright murder ==
Let's zero in on one of those --
== Perfecting the methodology of delay-obstruction and outright murder ==
More than half a century ago, American media was saturated with tobacco advertising. Cigarettes were the most advertised product on TV and tobacco companies sponsored hundreds of shows. Decades after they were banned from the airwaves, Big Tobacco companies return to prime-time television this weekend - forced to advertise the deadly, addictive effects of smoking, more than 11 years after a judge ruled that the companies had misled the public about the dangers of cigarettes. See Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes.
This is about more than Tobacco. The villainous shills who fought, obfuscated and delayed regulations to remove lead from gas and paint killed hundreds of thousands and were directly responsible for extending America’s worst era of crime. The very same ad agencies and law firms howled “hoax!” at scientific proof that cars caused smog, or that dumping into waterways caused lethal illness. They got their biggest contracts and refined their methods delaying any action about the tobacco plague.
Sometimes they fail quicker than others. The very same ad agencies and law firms used the same methods to delay action on the Ozone Hole, but this time humanity acted swiftly. Thirty years ago, the world signed that Montreal Protocol. Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) credits that agreement with for preventing an estimated 280 million additional cases of skin cancer, 45 million cataracts, and 1.5 million skin cancer deaths between its signing in 1987 and the year 2050. Without the Montreal Protocol, the planet would have been about 4 degrees warmer by 2050 (resulting in more extreme weather events like droughts, floods and hurricanes).
Sometimes they fail quicker than others. The very same ad agencies and law firms used the same methods to delay action on the Ozone Hole, but this time humanity acted swiftly. Thirty years ago, the world signed that Montreal Protocol. Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) credits that agreement with for preventing an estimated 280 million additional cases of skin cancer, 45 million cataracts, and 1.5 million skin cancer deaths between its signing in 1987 and the year 2050. Without the Montreal Protocol, the planet would have been about 4 degrees warmer by 2050 (resulting in more extreme weather events like droughts, floods and hurricanes).
In all of
those cases, it wasn’t so much “liberalism” that proved right, as that liberals
paid attention to the evidence presented by science, which clearly showed that
something needed to be done. Elsewhere I talk about my own role in one of these
struggles… to get the lead out of gasoline. The delaying tactics that we fought down then caused immense human tragedy, till smart, sapient legislation finally
made the poison go away. It resulted later in a steep plummet in the U.S. rate
of crime. (New York now has its lowest rate since the 1950s.)
Today we have bald eagles again, because we limited DDT, and folks fish along sweet riverbanks in downtown Pittsburgh, and every species of whale still exists… all because we acted on warnings… and no communist hell descended.
Again: no… communist… hell… descended. Innovative enterprise markets boomed, and their only major enemy hasn't been "government regulation"... (though excess regulation can cloy!)... but old foes that our parents in the Greatest Generation knew well. Monopoly, duopoly, oligarchy and cheating.
Again: no… communist… hell… descended. Innovative enterprise markets boomed, and their only major enemy hasn't been "government regulation"... (though excess regulation can cloy!)... but old foes that our parents in the Greatest Generation knew well. Monopoly, duopoly, oligarchy and cheating.
No communist hell descended from any of these reforms... though there was a plague of amnesia, as our rightist neighbors forget they were wrong about every single one of those issues. Every single one.
== A perfected method... and not-quite perfect record being wrong ==
How many times must this happen before we see a relentless pattern? The same morons and cheaters forecast doom to the entire U.S. auto industry, if new efficiency standards were imposed, originally in the 1970s and upgraded in 2011. The actual result? Across the board improvement in our cars, which now have vastly higher quality in every category while actually dropping in adjusted price, compared to other costs of living, while saving consumers tens of billions at the pump.
Of course
I’ve been dancing around the big one. Climate Change. But we've talked about that, plenty. Here, we need to point out that the pattern is the same. The special interests and lobbyists and ad agencies are much the same, as are the messaging and delaying tactics.
After all of these examples, should the conservative position always be discredited?
Nonsense! Criticism makes us better and sometimes a conservative assertion proves correct!
Take the greatest mistake of modern U.S. liberalism, which hurt the movement grievously and helped re-ignite the confederacy across America, an insanity called desegregation by forced school busing. A lefty “innovation” of pyrotechnic stupidity in which it was the “reformers” who stubbornly ignored every bit of evidence that their position was pigheaded and wrong!
Elsewhere I criticize some other liberal policies such as basing legal immigration on family reunions. Sounds nice. In fact it's evil. And don't get me started on liberal/democratic political stupidity! But none of these exceptions fit a relentless pattern.
As you've seen, the relentless return of U.S. conservatism to hatefully anti-science error always turns out to have been bought and paid for by cynical oligarchs. Manipulators who are never brought into account for the countless lives their delaying tactics wrecked.
After all of these examples, should the conservative position always be discredited?
Nonsense! Criticism makes us better and sometimes a conservative assertion proves correct!
Take the greatest mistake of modern U.S. liberalism, which hurt the movement grievously and helped re-ignite the confederacy across America, an insanity called desegregation by forced school busing. A lefty “innovation” of pyrotechnic stupidity in which it was the “reformers” who stubbornly ignored every bit of evidence that their position was pigheaded and wrong!
Elsewhere I criticize some other liberal policies such as basing legal immigration on family reunions. Sounds nice. In fact it's evil. And don't get me started on liberal/democratic political stupidity! But none of these exceptions fit a relentless pattern.
As you've seen, the relentless return of U.S. conservatism to hatefully anti-science error always turns out to have been bought and paid for by cynical oligarchs. Manipulators who are never brought into account for the countless lives their delaying tactics wrecked.
No, it is the process
of denialism itself that merits our contempt and hatred. When conservatives stop this lunatic-dogmatic war on science and every other fact profession, then yes, I am sure they will have something to contribute to the national negotiations toward a better future. I want Goldwater types at the table!
But that will entail jettisoning... well... start with Clear Channel ravers. And Fox.
But that will entail jettisoning... well... start with Clear Channel ravers. And Fox.
== Will the bubbles
pop? ==
“The US stock market as a percentage of GDP is now far
bigger than it was at the housing bubble’s peak, and it’s rapidly approaching
the dot-com bubble peak. That ought to make us a little nervous as we watch the
Dow hit new all-time highs.” Says John Mauldin.
I’m not saying it will pop tomorrow… nor does John. But just look at the
chart. And note it was a month ago. The bubble is bigger now.
== The times demand it ==
Grad Students Would Be Hit By Massive Tax Hike Under House GOP Plan. The war on all fact professions - not just science - is thus made utterly explicit. Use stuff like this. Go after your uncle. Your obstinate friend. Above all, your aunt who doesn't dare speak when "he" is around, but who has a vote. As for student debt, ask if they have any justification for the Republican policy that student debts can never be refinanced?
Grad Students Would Be Hit By Massive Tax Hike Under House GOP Plan. The war on all fact professions - not just science - is thus made utterly explicit. Use stuff like this. Go after your uncle. Your obstinate friend. Above all, your aunt who doesn't dare speak when "he" is around, but who has a vote. As for student debt, ask if they have any justification for the Republican policy that student debts can never be refinanced?
And yet. Can we try to be fair? Mocking Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his wife for posing with the first sheet of dollar bills with his signature on it? Seriously? And what would you do, if you had that honor. but pose with a first sheet, and buy it for the wall? Reflexive lefty twits! Choose… your… battles! There’s plenty to hate about these confederate plantation-lords. Control your rage and aim it at the unbearable real offenses, not harmless and natural stuff. You are supposed to be the sapient ones. All you accomplished, by shrieking at this, is making it harder to attract conservative defectors.
And finally... In a book entitled “America Against America,” based on his travels in the U.S., Wang Huning, a top Chinese communist party ideologist just elevated to the seven-member Standing Committee of the Politburo that rules the Middle Kingdom, “compares American democracy and elections to shareholders in a corporation. In theory, he observes, all shareholders have a say; in reality, minority shareholders control the company.”
Following China’s Confucian tradition, [Wang] also calls for moral education to raise the moral standards of the whole society and especially of officials who he believes must ‘internalize’ ethical behavior.”