I'll Thank Them....

The six hundred pound gorilla of the world's problems -the one that seems to be consensually suppressed in the world's press- is population. It is the real core of "green," the sine qua non: with population control, the other problems can all be ameliorated; without it, they just get worse & worse. Resource depletion, energy, food supply, endangered species, pollution....even theories with untenable conclusions like global warming.
Population theorists like Paul Ehrlich have long passed from favor, yet they haven't been disproven. In the long haul, they maintain the carrying capacity of the Earth is probably no more than the current population of the United States.....and perhaps less.

Well, the Chinese have brought it up, and good for them.

As an aside, the Euros -among others- are becoming more deeply mired in highly questionable programs like establishing carbon markets for "cap & trade." As with all sweeping government economic manipulation it sounds good on paper......and it might just send the world economy down the same path that destroyed the economy of the Soviet Union, and was on the way to doing the same for China until they wised up.

Damn You, Apologize!

Whatever channel I was watching this morning (Fox, I think, but, heck, it doesn't matter, could be any of them....) was featuring serial apologies.

"You apologize for calling Jessica Simpson fat!"

"Now that there's been a general apology, where's the specific apology?"

"We're drawing lots to determine whether Al Sharpton or Barbara Boxer will be first in line to decry the collective apologies and declare the transgression 'unforgivable'."

"Next: Apologies for calling Hillary Clinton a Secretary of State."

"Our chief investigative reporter will apologize soon for not having found a reason to have Don Imus fired again."

"At eleven, a list of suspects for immediate proscription who are rumored to have called Michelle Obama 'unfashionable'."

"Tomorrow at 5. You are on The Weather Channel, apologizing for the California mudslides with Al Roker."

That is all.

Remember Journalism?

A soldier dies in Afghanistan. As someone remarked, "There are two rules in war, 1, that young men die, and, 2, you can't change Rule #1." Presumably, any adult understands that war, and its attendant casualties, cannot be prevented so long as the human race does business in any of its known avatars.

The role of journalism should be to report, basically, and do it clearly, unflinchingly, and with the bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs. So- what happend to journalism? In today's example, a U.S. soldier, Joshua Bernard, is fatally wounded in Afghanistan, serving his nation gallantly and in the best traditions of the United States Marine Corps.

The Daily Mail online reported, and I can only wish they were not typical of today's news reporting. Unfortunately, this kind of reportage can be seen on a daily basis, without even searching. The first sentence of the article:

"It is a deeply disturbing image which depicts the grim reality of war - a fatally wounded U.S. soldier lies slumped in the mud as fellow marines desperately try to save him as his young life ebbs away."

This, of course, is all too typical of much reportage, not only that coming out of Albion, but all too many -perhaps even a majority of news outlets. It's bad reporting, pure and simple.....and those "Limeys" didn't bother to capitalize "Marines."

The sentence, as it should have been written: "It is an image which depicts the reality of war- a wounded soldier lies in the mud as fellow Marines try to save him." All else is hype, gloss, dross, unwarranted hyperbole.

It is as if The Mail were attempting to construct an inflammatory and divisive article, instead of reporting on an event; to attempt to construct division through verbiage instead of providing evidence of such division.

Oh, America is divided, all right, but not about Marines lying in the mud. They're mainly divided over why the government can't afford all the things they want, why the recession won't go away.

It seems fitting to let the last word here go to some U.S. Marine graffiti in Iraq: "America is not at war. The Marines are at war. America is at the mall."

We're all about Teachable Moments

Bob Schieffer came across pretty well on the news the other day when he said that Mr. Obama was the one who clearly needed a "teachable moment," in this case when to button his lip. The written version of Schieffer's comments was in a curiously different vein- at least it's curious if you don't understand how things are classified in current media blame-jargon.
After reading this little piece, I am supposed to conclude:

1. Crowley, Gates, & Obama were all at fault (in that order?).

2. None of the players could really help themselves, only being human*.

3. When Schieffer writes "-my guess if they had said that is none of this would have even made the local news"** we're supposed to conclude that he either works for the media in another universe, or doesn't understand how the media manufactures news in ours.

*Note1: Since the principles of "everybody's a victim" must be applied, but isn't directly applicable in this case, this is implied as a close cousin.

**Note2: This quote applies only to Crowley and Gates, therefore additionally implying that if they had been more thoughtful and apologetic, they would have also spared their President the necessity of popping off and inserting both feet into his mouth.

Age of Adjective

It seems impossible in the first decade of the 21st Century -and in any arena of public utterance- to avoid the use of the most extreme adjectives in either writing or rhetoric. All phenomena are "terrifying, devastating, phenomenal, etc....just fill in any extreme adjective you know. As a result, the language becomes debauched....or perhaps I should just resort to the tamer "corrupted." What recourse have we to our word-hoard when we have spent all our bolts? Will we need to abandon English, that most flexible means of expression, simply because our enormous vocabulary has been rendered unidimensional by our own misuse?

I hereby hope these musings are merely rhetorical......

.....before breakfast.

While we are told by the media that the First Lady is busy "enchanting Europe," her husband is engaged in "town meetings," throwing out the same sort of content-free howlers that seem to be more and more common in this administration.

"....a world free of nuclear weapons."

"....The U.S. is changing, but Europe must change too."

"....reaching out to all Muslims who seek peace."

This of course is on what CBS calls his "world tour," which consists of the U.K., France, and Turkey. I've been to more European countries on what I call a "trip."

My best response to this was written by Lewis Carroll:

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

- the Queen, Alice in Wonderland.

Quote While You Can....

The front & center column in our local "commentary" section featured this piece by John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute. It begins with this quote by Ray Bradbury:

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."

Now that's worth reading.......and maybe on a daily basis. Even though all this may be far too late. My fears began with the publication of Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint some years ago.

Now, whether it's clowns to the right of me or the jokers to the left, it's all about......control.

Should Have Seen This Coming

We already have a Foaming Free Speech brouhaha in MS, brought about by administrators deciding all discussion of the president-elect should be banned from the classrom or the halls.

I don't claim for a moment that the administrative ban on discussing this person (or any person) isn't stupid and abysmally ill-advised. All it's likely to do is have exactly opposite the desired effect, while whipping up emotion on every side. From three decades of experience, best that it be left up to the individual classroom teacher to control. The method? Let the kids talk it out. Given the attention spans and stamina for any topic of high schoolers.....about 20 minutes. But, after all, we are talking about school administrators, so this whole tempest in a teapot may (literally) become a federal case.

Thanks for the Satire

The New Yorker magazine is renowned for its satirical covers. You can buy volumes archiving the covers going back to 1925. Now, it appears, it's time for another giant Obamaflap, this time over this particular effort.

There may have been controversy in the past over how successful a particular New Yorker cover has been, but never a chorus of voices saying it shouldn't have been published, that somehow this particular subject matter transcends the First Amendment. As we have subscribed to The New Yorker for decades, I don't regard this cover as particularly extraordinary as one of their political efforts.....it's perhaps somewhat broadly drawn for my tastes.

The more interesting question here stems from a comment I heard on a cable channel concerning the ability of the average person to draw the satirical inference from the cover, having viewed it "-on a newsstand." The conclusion was that it would take "-great mental effort" for the average person to think his or her way through to the lampooning the magazine intended. I wonder how many people would view this cover in passing and, their brains melting down from attempting analysis of the subject matter, have gone on to raise a controversy on this level. As I know The New Yorker and its probable readership pretty well, my conclusion: damn few.

The controversy stemmed from a rather blatant objection from the Obama campaign directly to the media. The second step, of course, was for the media to create a controversy where none might have ever come about. I can only infer that the Obama campaign wanted the controversy, their motives in doing this I can hardly imagine. Perhaps public attention to the candidate is flagging. The media, of course, and for the nth time, have proven the perfect no-cost tool in inflating a passing incident to a mouth-foaming issue, this time over the putative martyrdom of Barack & Michelle by The New Yorker.

Whatever anyone thinks, its publication is clearly Freedom of the Press (and I'm not defending The New Yorker....), all the rest being opinions & taste. Nothing here goes beyond New York Times v. Sullivan, which means it is in violation of no civil or criminal law. End of story.

None Dare Call It....

I have now read several rather long articles about the crisis at Los Angeles' Martin Luther King Jr. - Harbor Hospital, and, to quote that famous philosopher Mr. Lewis Black, "I am confeeewzed."
We are regaled with the apparent ineptitude and even outright malpractice of the hospital staff, but no media report I have read even hints at a cause- not one. And yet the articles state that the hospital primarily serves the minority areas of Watts & Willowbrook, and we're supposed to just draw the implied conclusion, the one the media doesn't dare discuss, that this hospital is almost certainly so chaotic, such a snakepit that attracting good staff must be a near impossibility.
And since the causes can't be mentioned, it becomes impossible to discuss solutions, so all we read is that the L.A. County Board of Supervisors is considering closing the hospital. And this will help.....what?
At least if the reasons for this meltdown in health care delivery were discussed frankly, it might be possible to do something about it. In the long run, I don't know what the answer is, but in the short run, I suspect that if hefty premiums were paid to get better people working there (as long as such competence could be assessed ) and those who couldn't demonstrate competence had their pay cut until they could meet standards, with the clear understanding that they were on probation, and would soon be on the street if they didn't shape up.
It's not a cure, but it's a start, and when people are dying on the ER floor, a start is clearly what's needed.