What the GOP Doublespeaks when it Doublespeaks about the Gulf
Filed Under Big Ideas, Conservatives Hate Education, In the News, Politics, Porchy, Rant | Comments Off
A lot has been said in the liberal blogosphere about the sudden GOP and even Tea Bagger turnaround on government intervention, but I think I like Erik Loomis’ sardonic mini-rant on it best.
But the sudden arrival of open-armed acceptance and excitement-soaked pantaloons for Big Government isn’t the only place that GOP hypocrisy reveals itself. How come for all the GOP anti-science folk what used to doubted evolution, the unhealthful qualities of HFCS and salt, the benefits of stem cell research, catastrophic global climate change and the manifest evils of over-fishing suddenly got themselves a new found respect for science? Suddenly what NOOA can predict about hurricanes is valuable and accurate, oceanographers’ reports, geologists, engineers, marine biologists, what they say too; it’s all good and worth listening too now!
Of course, all the prophecies those scientists were pouring out about the potentialities of risky off-shore drilling endeavors in hurricane wracked waters was all just horrible liberal naysaying before. But now that they’re predicting horrible destruction of the precious wild lands that brings in tourists and retains their possible voters, suddenly we should listen to the scientists so they can ask for a bigger bailout?
And I’m not saying this to score cheap political points. I’m saying it to underscore that all the anti-science stuff was only ever just rhetoric politicians could use any ol’ way they damn well pleased. Frankly, I think BP should be paying to clean up the mess they caused. But I also think the BP and the government should have done more to prevent the mess in the first place because of, y’know…science.
Who Watches the Watchmen?
Filed Under Big Ideas, Conservatives Hate Education, Entertainment, In the News, Jeremy, Politics, Uncategorized | 14 Comments
(Okay, this may be old news, but you try blogging with a three year old and new born!)
It was Saturday and I woke up with my three year old to enjoy some Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Handy Manny. While I drank my coffee and my daughter learned about something, I decided to check my Facebook account only be to greeted with an update from a friend (whom I consider somewhat level headed, even if he is a die-hard Republican) which warned all those that read his post NOT to log onto the CARS.gov website because it would give the government complete control of your computer and all of the files on it. My first response was “Hey, I thought Cheney was out of office???” but he could still be hiding in his undisclosed location so I did what any right minded American who thrives for information would do, I Googled this only to find the following link:
I watched the video and thought…”WOW, that is interesting….I have got to try that….” So I did. I went to CARS.gov and was instantly struck by the fact that the color of the webpage I just pulled up was different than the color Mr. Beck had. Had the government realized they had been caught and thus changed the site? Only one way to find out….click everything! (this is the equivalent to “push all the buttons” when faced with any count down to destruction.) Try as I might, I was unable to replicate Mr. Beck’s story UNTIL I clicked the link named DEALERS. Now I had the right color; time to get the message that allows the government to take over my computer!
After clicking wildly again, I came to only one conclusion…the screen I needed to replicate Mr. Beck’s work was ONLY available to me if I was a registered dealer! But wait….that is not what Mr. Beck said. He clearly ranted about how if I, an American consumer, went to this website sponsored by the government, I would have to give them control of my computer in order to partake in this program (never mind that his co-host called it a charitable donation program…apparently she forgot to read the website!) But this was not the case! Clearly Mr. Beck was honestly mistaken in his reporting…right?
Let us revisit the video clip for the warning signs that Mr. Beck IN FACT knew EXACTLY what he was doing.
Sign One: He strongly encouraged Americans NOT to try this at home and then pointed out that he had someone else computer that he “took from their office.” (So theft is okay apparently!) Of course he had someone elses computer because to obtain the screen to which he is referring, the computer MUST be pre-registered with the government as a participating dealer’s computer and is authorized to participate in the cars for clunkers program! Not just any laptop off the street (or from a co-worker’s office) would have done!
Sign Two: Both Mr. Beck and his co-host (or guess) kept pointed out that we should not be doing this along with Mr. Beck. Why did this stick out? I really like to watch Mythbusters on Discovery Channel because, one, they bust myths and try to build lightsabers and, two and more importantly, they generally blow stuff up with very, very large bangs (did you see when they blew up the cement truck full of explosives…..legendary!). In this show, where the hosts are clearly engaging in very dangerous behavior, they remind the audience TWICE (once a the begining of the show and once at the half-way point) not to try this at home. Mr. Beck and his co-host have already warned me not to do what they are doing about five times already….could they be hiding something?
The clip continues on about the government installing Mal-Ware on my computer to access my personal files and how this is just an awful breach of my privacy (however, unwarranted wiretaps are okay). I stopped watching at this point.
HERE IS THE PROBLEM! The news media provides information for the public to consume. Information that not just anyone can get or has to the time to get (every tried to file a Freedom of Information Act?). This information is necessary for a democracy to work because without it how would we know that is going on both in our country or those around us. Now I do not expect that every news agency tells the ‘whole truth’ and I am not naive enough to think that newsrooms do not have agendas; but I do believe that there is a line between “not telling the whole story” and “distorting the story” and that this piece by Mr. Beck clearly crosses that line!
Apparently Mr. Beck also has a radio show (honestly, I had never heard of the man until now) and if he wants to do this on his show…then fine; it is entertainment. The problem I have is that this affront to news reporting is taking place on a NEWS CHANNEL and is disguised as real news! How is this any different than the New York Times running a full page editorial on how Mr. Obama’s health plan will require all seniors to be killed at the age of seventy (apparently there is a provision for seniors to receive counseling in creating living wills) or CNN running with a story of Godzilla invading San Francisco! Or better still; MSNBC spending an entire day providing “hard evidence” that dinosaurs are a scientific joke.
When we allow our news media to become simple propaganda machines, then we are no different than any of the totalitarian states we argue against (Cuba, Iran, etc.). I truly wonder what Mr. Jennings or Mr. Cronkite, not to mention Mr. Washington or Mr. Jefferson, would have to say about Mr. Beck’s “news bulletin.”
-J
Counter Intuitive Arguments in Favor of the Big Bang
Filed Under Big Ideas, Conservatives Hate Education, Politics, Porchy | 3 Comments
If there’s a massive conspiracy to make us all believe the lie of the Big Bang (and consequently a very old Earth) then why are scientists yapping about the Horizon Problem to the uninitiated? [The story talk about 12 more things that don't make sense and it's a great read. h/t Ezra Klein].
The fact that cosmologist openly talk about the Horizon Problem, write papers on it, and teach it to any undergraduate in a public university classroom is telling evidence that the open pursuit of knowledge, not political ideology, is at the root of the scientific endeavor.
Stimulus Stimulus Stimulus
Filed Under Conservatives Hate Education, Domestic Politics, Economy, Politics, Porchy | Comments Off
There’s not a lot of solid empirical evidence to support anything that Congress is doing or anything that they could do. We’ve really only had one depression that is comparable and even that one was pre-Bretton Woods and all the monetary changes it wrought. It seems that the only real lesson we can learn from 1929 is that doing nothing a la President Hoover was a real bad idea. But recently every Republican in Congress is touting their love of Amity Shlaes Depression revisionism. I haven’t read Shlaes’ book, but James K Galbraith did and he has some things to say on it, and he’s a top-tier economist and he says that Shlaes if basically full of it.
Insofar as real world statistics don’t ever get us to causation we don’t have any solid proof that New Deal economic policy worked. What we have instead is the state of affairs when we did nothing (unemployment continued to rise; economy continued to shrink) and we have a solid accounting of the state affairs after New Deal programs were started (economy improved, unemployment dropped). Absent a controlled experiment you don’t really get to tinker with the variables very much and have to make general assumptions about causation. But in this instance, 1933 does get us somewhere in the vicinty. FDR pulled back a lot of his programs in an effort to balance the budget which (seems to have) caused a tiny “recession within a depression). That is, after the New Deal was reined in, the econmy suffered a minor retraction. After the New Deal was started up again, the economy continued to improve until the start of World War II basically ended unemployment and caused massive government spending and essentially put the final nail in the Depression’s coffin.
So it would seem, the New Deal worked! Which, of course, is what you’d always been told, but had to be relearned in light of the Republicans attempting to rewrite history in a way that makes Hoover’s recalcitrance seem heroic and FDR’s progressiveness seem unwarranted and potentially dangerous (thank goodness he was smart enough to go to war against despotism otherwise we would have never gotten out of that silly depression!)
Jim Manzi recreates the misleading chart that Nancy Pelosi has been passing around and he makes a great point. The economic situation has changed dramatically since our last big recession in1981. After a full 12 months of job loss we are just now hitting the unemployment level that the 181 recession started with.
The spending bill that was the declaration of war in December 1939 was not just a powerful stimulus package because of the monstrous spending going to war entailed. It was good economic stimulus because a lot of money was dumped into the telecommunications and autmotive industries. When the war was over America took a firm lead in both of those industries. The automotive industry eventually leveled off, but we are still reaping the rewards of substantial military investment in communications. It was major advances in communications that helped Bill Clinton preside over one of the longest periods of economic expansion since FDR.
With Jim Manzi’s comments in mind, and with the warnings of other economists of both liberal and conservative schools, I think it’s fair to say that the stimulus package really should have happened differently.
We should never have had a “stimulus bill” The idea that government was going to step in and solve the economic crisis is a foolish one and one that speaks directly to traditional conservative fears (Scariest sentence in English: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”) Moreover there is good evidence that the government can’t actually do all that much–what it can do it can’t do very fast–which not only doesn’t help, it could potentially lead to massive inflation.
So along with the debate on what should be in a stimulus bill we got a long debate on whether there is any such thing as stimulus at all, which not only slowed down the process but also gave Republicans some of their best talking points.
Since 800 billion is a large number and most states, groups, industries would only be getting small parts of the money the debate easily took on a pattern similar to what we hear about free trade: diffuse gains, concentrated suffering. So, while your particular piece of the pie was small and good, the rest seemed like too much. Even your industry received 50 million dollars, there was stil $799,950,000,000 going somewhere else that was worthy of fighting against.
Each spending package should have been individually fought for. The recipient parties would have been more vocal in proving their case for their money and wouldn’t have wasted time on unrelated bills. Some of the bills would have passed immediately and so the money could already be in the system working whatever magic it could work.
Finally one would that the money that was being spent would do something for the future like what technological investment did for the 1950-1998 era. You don’t want to just create jobs but you want those jobs to help make new jobs. Education is a good economic investment (it provides training for future employment and it gets people off public welfare and lowers the official count of “the unemployed). Educational infrastructure is a good idea. New schools were going to be built or repaired anyway, so let’s do it now while materials and labor are cheaper. Roads, bridges, rail, dams all always need repair, let’s do it now and we’ll save money in the long run while created jobs. Subsidizing state programs is also good stimulus–state economies don’t have to shrink and states know better how to direct money within their state than the federal government does. One huge bill quickly passed would have been best–but Obama should have known that would never have worked. So what we have now is something decidedly inferior to what we could have had.
This piecemeal method would have had at least one major improvement: it would have been doing something. I know I’ve said before that just going through the motions is not necessarily the best strategy, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have some advantages. It’s important to realize that a lot of this recession/depression stuff really is tied to consumer and lender fears of the future. If people feel they have to save in case of a future job loss, then they’re not buying as much stuff. If banks fear that credit risks are too high due to all the job losses, then they don’t lend. If companies have low expectations of consumer turnout, then they don’t make stuff–and everybody who is saving instead of spending etc is acting perfectly logically but ultimately against their own self- interest. But passing spending bills would have the effect of showing banks, and manufacturers, and consumers that the government is more interested in solving this problem than talking about. So not only would some money be going into the system and saving jobs it would also have been sending the message that help is around the cornder for everybody.
And of course the more focused nature of smaller bills would hopefully help ensure that each project was an actual good one that might have longer lasting implications down the road.
I am aware that part of the size of the stimulus bill was to dump money sort of carelessly, that in recognition of the complexity of the economy a simply targeted bill would open itself to that economic demon “unintended consequences.” A more diversise and indiscriminate bill would put money in lots of places and mute the unintended effects (not get rid of them, mind you, just spread them out so they weren’t quite as harmful). And perhaps we could still have gotten that bill albeit in a different way. Lots of bills going through the Senate would have gotten pork attached to them and now’s a good a time as any not to mind so much. Lots of small town libraries would be built with such process in place, lots of community swimming pools would have been able to extend their hours, lots of botanical gardens would have finally been able to get those new decorative gables they’ve been eyeing. That’s fine. Longer pool hours in Sable Falls isn’t going to save the economy but several thousand dozens of them would have. But first we have to get a bill through Congress.
Conservative Talk Radio
Filed Under Conservatives Hate Education, Entertainment, Politics, Porchy, Rant | 5 Comments
As I was pulling into Tucson last Sunday afternoon the SEEK button on my car radio fount the Truth, an obnoxious conservative talk radio station. I don’t remember the shows I was listening to but I have to tell you, that after less than an hour I was visibly unnerved, depressed, angry, and perhaps paradoxically (although I don’t think so) withdrawn.
Conservative talk radio is just a freaking mess. Even if you are a conservative, the crap that poors out of their mouth just barely makes sense.
Opponent’s arguments are reduced to stereotypes of the left and then the stereotype is trashed rather than the argument. This is basically the setup for all talking points. “Look,” they’ll say, “Look, it’s just this simple. These crybabies on the left are saying…”In less smarmy hands we may call this some sort of reductio argument or setting up strawmen, but labeling these grotesque mockeries of rhetoric would be to grant them something like credibility and I won’t do it.
I point out again the constant use of “look” and “it’s just this simple.” They all act like Big Daddy at Family Meeting time. “Case closed,” “this conversation is over.” I can see on some level why this might be engaging for the audience. Every so often some guy says “look” and your mind says, “OK!” And then he says, “It’s just this simple” and the mind says “I’m navigating a mutli-ton SUV down an interstate, simple is good. Explain it to me like I’m five.” And then some dude explains something very complicated to you the way you might explain evolution to a five-year old. The explanation, such as it is, is full of inconsistencies and blatant errors. It’s a setup for a punchline and the punchline is always, “people who disagree with me are idiot poopyheads.” Audiences eager to not be idiot poopyheads nod their heads at the punchline, anxious already for the next setup.
There was no underlying philosophy guiding the host from one point to the next. These guys aren’t even conservatives by any real measure. They just hate stuff. They may claim to be speaking for real conservatives when they bad mouth Bush. They may pretend to some sort of balance because they talk trash about Obama and Bush. But it just isn’t true and people buy it for some reason. Hey Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore both badmouth Democrats and Republicans, but neither of them pretends that doing so is what makes them balanced.
They jump willy nilly from demanding regulation to demanding no regulation–from claiming that this or that person is of impeccable character and we are treasonous for wanting to question it, to claiming that this other person is unknowable and we are fools for not digging deeper. They lay claim to mortal skepticism and omniscient determinism in equal, unvarying, unrelenting, and deeply infuriating degree.
The takeaway for me was that those hosts and their listeners are lost causes. Their philosophy is insular, armored, and self-perpetuating. Anything said against it is propaganda or naivete. Any comment that asks that they think about their ideas is intellectual trickery, “I know what I know and all your so-called facts can’t tell me otherwise.”
Bill O’Reilly, it turns out, and forgive me if I’m 100% wrong or 100% right but late in the game on this one, might be the least bad of the lot.+ However, he was on NPR this morning, schilling his new memoir and he just helped solidify this idea. Asked why he was inspired to write the book he says, “A lot of people know what I think because I’m a big bloviator; but not a lot of people know why I think the things I do.”++ He then proceeded to say that he, Bill O’Reilly is 100% a by-product of a mid-century New York Catholic school upbringing. The interviewer (forgive me for not remembering who it was or for going to look it up) asks what I think was a great question: She asked, “But I just had a guy on the show last week, a playwright, who went to Catholic Schools in New York at the same time as you and he’s not nearly the self-important, manachean, that you are.”
To which Bill O’Reilly says, “Anybody who went to Catholic School and didn’t come out like me just didn’t get it.’
There it is. Stated calmly, matter-of-factly is the worldview of these guys: They system is all important, what goes in one way must come out another but entirely predictable way, and I can safely ignore any and all anomolies even if I, in fact, am the anomoly. There is no free will, there is no choice, humans are not beautiful snowflakes. It is the simple belief, the unassuming utterance of a true fascist. That is not hyperbole; that is not Jonah Goldbergian rewriting of what the term fascist means, it is a simple statement of fact. These guys believe in control and automation through intimidation and manipulation. This conversation is over. If you were raised in New York and went to Catholic School in in 50s (or so) then you clearly must have a #1 rated screamfest on conservative talk radio where you loudly proclaim who is Good and who is Evil. You must be berating your guests to admit they are wrong or talking over them when they don’t. Guests who agree with you are adorned with praise. You can hear the pleas from the callers who want nothing more than a word of approval from the voice of Daddy.
If you don’t believe, then you just don’t get it.
+ I have to admit I’m always a little less put off by anybody that appears on NPR and doesn’t come off as a complete jackass, and Bill O’Reilly was on NPR this morning schilling his new memoir.
++ All quotes are er…approximate paraphrases.
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