Loads of lumber

We had excellent exchanges here over the weekend, and I am left with the realization that the best writers use the fewest words. But I’ve always known that. Blogging is easy. Mark Twain, I think, apologized for writing someone a long letter, but said he did not have the time to write a short one.

I wanted to address the idea of stupidity in a few words, and realized that others had done it already. Keep in mind that stupidity has in it, by definition, the lack of awareness of one’s own stupidity, so that even as I arrogantly recite the lines below, I could be up to my eyebrows in it too. But who would ever convince me of that?

  • Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped. (Elbert Hubbard)
  • Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. (Euripides)
  • To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. (Gustave Flaubert)
  • There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity. (Goethe)
  • Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. (Martin Luther King)
  • Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it. (Stephen Vizinczey)
  • The bookful blockhead ignorantly read
    With loads of lumber in his head.     (Alexander Pope)

Now, I’m going to put down my own pithy thoughts on this subject …

Bush III

imageThe US ran war games on the Korean Peninsula during the entire month of March, and they were not defensive, but rather a practice of “pre-emptive” war. Part of the drill included flying stealth B52’s from Missouri to Korea. Those aircraft are capable of nuclear delivery.

The entire operation is a massive provocation, and North Korea, which has no way of knowing the intent of US war planners, did what any rational actor would do – it responded in kind. They ramped up rhetoric, went into high defense posture, and explained what they were capable of doing at this point – dropping a bomb on Tokyo.

In the US state-controlled media, this is “provocation” by those crazy nuts in the DPRK. We’re rational, they’re not. I’ve looked through the first three pages of Bing search results on the B52 incident, and found that it was reported by two American sources – US News, and Yahoo. In each it was described as a warning in the wake of North Korea’s provocations.
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Newspapers versus blogs*

Horse_Pasture,_Welland_-_geograph.org.uk_-_427120A word again about blogging – it’s nature and importance.

Blogs are forums for expressions of feelings, attitudes, and sometimes ideas. They are a personal outlet. They are criticized for not being fact-checked or accurate. They are criticized for excess emotionalism and dis-inhibition. Most of what goes on in blogs disappears the next day as bloggers and commenters move on to the next topic, unaffected by the last.

It’s pointless, so why do it? (It’s fun.)

Blogs are looked down upon by newspaper employees, journalists and editors. The closest comparison to blogging in their sphere is the editorial page. Consider the following:
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PTSD

Manning: Caught in the act of catching them in the act
Manning: Caught in the act of catching them in the act
The film “Collateral Murder” (at end of this post) put Wikileaks on the map and Bradley Manning behind bars. He had, after all, committed the supreme crime againt a national security state: exposing the crimes of the national security state.

Ethan McCord was patrolling the streets of Baghdad as the events depicted in the film transpired. He was interviewed at RT (yes, we must go to Russian media to learn of American news). He was five blocks away that day, July 12, 2007.

“One guy’s head was off, the top of his head was completely off and his brains were on the ground and the smell, the smell still haunts me every day. …

A four-year old girl had been struck by bullets and had a wound to the stomach. He remembers her “looking at me and the blood around her eyes made her eyes so ghostly. He grabbed the girl and ran her into a nearby building. There he picked the glass out of her eyes so she could blink and handed her off to a medic. Then he discovered another child. Looking at the film clip he says

“That’s me right there. That is a little boy that I originally thought was dead. I couldn’t stop myself from crying.”

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Pondering life’s complexities (2)

I saw Lincoln on Sunday night, and with muddled head wrote about it Monday morning. I committed the cardinal sin of op-edding, failure to stay on message. I do that a lot, but with that movie, I want to give it a second shot.

lincoln-1067508-squareWe finally saw the movie Lincoln last night. I feared that the man would receive a royal Spielberging, or be drowned in excess sentimentality. There is some of that at the beginning and scattered about, but it’s an excellent film. Spielberg has embraced complexity – the use of evil means to achieve good ends. Sometimes that works.

It is difficult to get anything done in politics without duplicity. That’s why lying is a tool of the trade, and not an ignoble one. According to the movie, Lincoln did the right thing for the right reasons and by the wrong means. We can debate that sort of thing afterward, but Lincoln did not have the luxury of a Department of Philosophy and Ethics. He had to get things done amidst swells of turmoil, suffering and feverish emotions, and maintain a steady hand.
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Pondering life’s complexities

lincoln-1067508-squareWe finally saw the movie Lincoln last night. I feared that the man would receive a royal Spielberging (Lincoln turns as they watch the play and says “Molly, have I led a good life? Am I a good man?”*). There’s some of that right at the beginning and scattered about, but it’s an excellent film. Spielberg has embraced complexity – evil means to achieve good ends. Sometimes that works.

Politics, with all of its duplicity, can be a noble profession when used towards noble ends. It is difficult to get anything done, good or bad, without duplicity. According to the movie, Lincoln did the right thing for the right reasons and by the wrong means. Good for him.
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Professional victims

6a00d8341c1aee53ef00e54f82cc248834-800wiDuring the last baseball game we attended in Arizona, at Chase Field, the stadium announcer asked all people who had served in the military to stand so that we could applaud and honor them. Though I sympathize with their plight I don’t “honor” these people. But there is no way of expressing sympathy without joining the general applause for nonexistent accomplishments fighting manufactured enemies as unwitting agents of Wall Street (or the military-industrial complex, if that makes more sense.)

All of these people had to go through basic training. It’s a terrible experience that none should endure. My brother, a gentle man who had no business carrying a gun, was force-marched, made to stand guard in the rain until exhausted, sleep deprived and hypothermic. He was drilled to exhaustion, kicked in the stomach by a drill instructor, called every imaginable demeaning name. This, we are told, made him a man. But he was already well on his way to manhood before this interruption. The experience merely separated him from humanity, which is necessary to create killing machines.
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The testing regime

satMy son, who is in the teaching profession, has reminded me that most teachers care about kids, know how to teach, and don’t need advice from outsiders like me. I agree. This is not about them. It is about public policy, or more specifically, the testing regime.

I never took the SAT, though it probably existed. Instead, I took the “ACT” (I think). These were general tests given perhaps yearly. I don’t recall being grilled on anything more than basic abilities in math, science, reasoning and language. I received the results in a percentile form, and have never been told what my “IQ” is. Such testing was important to identify strong students as part of the culling process, as these would be our future technicians, scientists, and blah blah blahs. It was a system that relied on testing, but not a testing regime. I have struggled with the idea, as do teachers including Polish Wolf, who wrote this piece about a testing scandal in Atlanta. NCLB had created perverse incentives, people have responded accordingly, and now we must punish them.
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Another dung beetle on the feedlot of power

“The greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.” (John F. Kennedy)

Washington Post editor Jackson Diehl
Washington Post editor Jackson Diehl
Driving home yesterday we listened for a while to NPR, not expecting much and not disappointed. During the Vietnam war protesters had managed to use various local radio outlets to spread their message, and the result was widespread dissemination of information that the government did not want. NPR, which went on the air in 1971, is not without an accomplishment here and there, such as exposing Archer Daniels Midlands corruption in the mid-1990’s. (ADM promptly began funding NPR, so that never happened again.) But the effective result of NPR and its 900 stations is to suck up bandwidth. Those pirate community stations are almost all gone now, blanded out of existence. NPR has replaced them with news indistinguishable from any other major outlet, and cultural programming. I listen to some of it, but have long given up on NPR as a meaningful alternative to government-managed news as presented to us by the other major outlets.

We listened to Talk of the Nation Yesterday as the host interviewed Washington Post editor Jackson Diehl. (Transcript here.) He appears to have all of the credentials of an ‘Op”, or government intelligence employee placed at a critical junction as a news filter in the private news media*. He’s a Yalie, and pro-military aggression and war all the way, including an advocate of the attack and invasion of Iraq in 2003. News, after all, is too important to be left in independent hands. If Diehl is not an op, he’s very dumb.
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