What happens when the executive branch is allowed to operate in secrecy and without constraint? This was answered in 1976, by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church: The natural tendency of Government is toward abuse of…
With the high price of gasoline, more people are now riding trains then ever before. I hadn't before seen any fuel efficiency numbers for Amtrack, but here are some from the NYT: Oil costs hurt Amtrak, too. Fuel is projected to reach 11 percent of Amtrak’s budget this year, up…
Hardly a day goes by when you don't hear yet another Republican claiming that the "surge" is working in Iraq. And see here and here. If the surge is really working, let's see daily videotape showing Western reporters strolling freely through Baghdad's neighborhoods, outside of the Green Zone, chatting with…
In 1964, Rudolph Dreikurs wrote a child psychology book that is still considered a classic by child psychologist: Children: the Challenge. Dreikurs argued that using punishments to change behavior is inefficient.
No amount of punishment will bring about lasting submission. Confused and bewildered parents mistakenly hope that punishment will eventually bring results, without realizing that they are actually getting nowhere with their methods or, at best, they gain only temporary results from punishment. When the same punishment has to be repeated again and again, it should be obvious that it does not work. The use of punishment only helps the child to develop greater power of resistance in defiance.
Dreikurs argued that the authoritative idea of using punishment needs to be replaced with a sense of mutual respect and cooperation. Children need real leadership. “A good leader inspires and stimulates his followers into action that suits the situation.” It is important to arrange the learning situation such that a child learns “without a show of power, for power insights rebellion and defeats the purpose of child-raising.”
Dreikurs also cautions parents about using rewards:
The system of rewarding children for good behavior is as detrimental to their outlook as a system of punishment. The same lack of respect is shown. We “reward” our inferiors for favors or for good deeds. In a system of mutual respect among equals, a job is done because it needs doing, and the satisfaction, for the harmony of two people doing a job together…. satisfaction comes …
The list has grown too long to ignore. We are a country that exercises almost no foresight. We wait for disasters to occur and only then (if then) does it occur to us to do something about the problem.
Here’s an especially heinous example: our government hires numerous financial experts, of course. Alan Greenspan was one of them. Why couldn’t any of them see the subprime disaster long before it occurred? Instead, our government’s experts allowed unscrupulous mortgage companies to lend out far too much money to homeowners in the form of “exploding ARMs” such that it was entirely predictable that the borrowers would fall behind on their payments after only a few years, and that many would lose their homes through foreclosure. Our government stood by while these loans were hyper-securitized to the point where the unscrupulous mortgage companies would go belly up, tranch-laden real estate trusts (who ultimately purchased the loans) would throw their hands and claim that they were innocent and Wall Street would laugh all the way to the bank. That is, until Wall Street failed and successfully begged the federal government to bail out Bear Stearns. All of this was entirely foreseeable. The real disaster is that we failed to use our brains.
For another example, think of the Minnesota Bridge collapse. Let’s see… what might happen if you don’t allocate proper federal funding to fund sufficient bridge inspections? Of course, it’s only after a huge bridge collapses or a major levee breaks that we …