Recommended: Culture Still Matters

Victor David Hanson has another of his insightful commentaries posted, this one called Culture Still Matters. It is indeed culture, not religion nor race nor geographic location, that determines a society's success or failure, prosperity or poverty. And cultural habits are very hard to change. And when they do change they generally take generations to change or evolve. Worth remembering when Washington naively proposes to spend billions of our money to "nation build" in some remote part of the world.

Is the tide turning?

Gov Walker's 53%-46% victory yesterday in the Wisconsin recall election, and the 2-1 ratio by which Californians passed the public pension reforms propositions in San Diago and San Jose suggest that voters are FINALLY getting it, and getting realistic about our state and federal fiscal crises.  That is good news if it continues.

Who is really on trial?

From the daily news about the presidential election, or the Wisconsin recall election, one might think it is right-wing vs left-wing politics that is on trial, or Republican vs Democratic ideologies.  But it isn’t. It is we, the American voters, who are on trial these days.

In the end, it is we, the American voters, who have voted in politicians of both parties who swelled the state and federal deficits, buying our votes and handing out goodies to us funded by our own children’s inheritances.  It is we, the American voters, who have made it political suicide for a politician to propose balanced budgets or sensible fiscal restraint.

In the end, it is we, the American voters, who have allowed, with almost no complaint, a massive reduction of our own civil liberties, so that torture, execution without trial, warrantless searches, tapping of telephones and email, etc, etc are not only legal for the federal government, but now widely practiced.

In the end, it is we, the America voters, who have allowed, with almost no complaint, the growth of unlimited political influence by both corporations and unions, so that we now truly have “the best government money can buy”.

In the end it is we, the American voters, who have allowed successive administrations of both parties to (a) get us into wars without Congressional debate or approval, and (b) to finance those wars with borrowed money, to the serious detriment of our nation’s finances.

If we, the American voters, can’t grow up and behave like responsible adults, and insist that the politicians we elect behave like responsible adults, we deserve the (very, very unpleasant) consequences we will inevitably get, and probably sooner rather than later.

So these next few years will really be a test to see if we, the American voters, have become so addicted to our “entitlements”, so distanced from our ancestor’s values of prudence and thrift and hard work and self-reliance, and so disconnected from reality, that we are unwilling to change our ways even as we head toward national disaster.

Who is really on trial these days is we, the American voters!

Quotation of the week

“Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.”

 

Ayn Rand

Observations about the world

I have spent the past two days attending the CRN Irish Dance World Championships, in Wexford Ireland. It is awesome to see so many brilliant Irish dancers, some as young as 9 or 10, all of whom have pursued their dance with such dedication and focus that they can qualify for the World Championships. I have a granddaughter among them, and she did well.

Two things occurred to me over the long hours of watching the competitions.  The first was a renewed confidence in the younger generation who are inheriting our planet.  At a time when the daily news is filled with stories of disaffected youth rioting in this or that part of the world, it is comforting to see young people who are dedicated enough to put in the proverbial 10,000 hours to become truly excellent at something very demanding and difficult.

The second observation is simply wonder at the human mind and human body.  A dancer is recalling and executing an intricate sequence of hundreds or thousands of individual high speed steps or movements while keeping time to an auditory signal (music beat) while keeping spatial awareness (position on stage and relative to other dancers on the stage) while maintaining balance in a gravity field while shifting body support rapidly from one foot to the other while remembering a myriad of stylistic requirements (point the foot, keep the arms at the side, etc, etc).  And all this coordinated by a relatively small mass of neural tissue in the brain and along the nerve pathways.

We usually take all this for granted, in our daily life, in sports, in dance, in acrobatics, etc.  But if one stops to really think about it, the amount of high-speed processing going on is absolutely astounding.

The world around us is truly wonderful – truly awe-inspiring – if one only stops occasionally to really look at it.

Creationism and democracy

The latest Gallup poll indicates that 46% of Americans, almost half the population, believe in creationism, including that the world was created only some 6000 to 10,000 years ago. I hardly know what to make of this information. It implies that almost half the population either doesn't understand the methods of science, or is entirely unswayed by evidence that contradicts what they want to believe.

It is hard to see how a democracy can function in the modern world with such a population.  But then, our democracy does not seem to be functioning very well these days, and perhaps it is because a successful democracy requires an intellectual and educational level in the voting population that we simply don't have. Certainly successful politicians, who probably do understand their voters pretty well, have learned to simplify even the most complex issues down to simple sound bites, because (I guess) they have found accurate and realistic explanations to be beyond the comprehension of most of their voters.

People are concerned these days that real power in our nation has flowed increasingly to a powerful and wealthy ruling elite. In light of this statistic about creationism it is not clear to me that if power were returned to the general voting public we would get any better governance; indeed we might well get worse government.

It certainly makes me wonder...........

An Easy Guide To Keeping Political News In Perspective

 A friend e-mailed me this wonderful item:


1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country, and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could find the time — and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated .

9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped, minority, feminist, atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. The Key West Citizen is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in.