We finally have our Kennedy Moment in the current political climate. Saturday, January 8th, 2011, is likely to go down as exactly that in the “Where were you when?” canon. On that day, Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, went on a shooting rampage at a supermarket parking lot in Tucson,…
I've previously posted on Philip Zimbardo's excellent discussion regarding the "Secret Powers of Time." He has convinced me that one's perception of time (or even a nation's overall perception of time) affects one's character (or the nation's character) in profound ways. It certainly affects the pace of life. Tonight, I stumbled upon a ten-minute cleverly animated version of Zimbardo's presentation. Citing the work of Robert Levine, Zimbardo indicates that you can identify countries and cities by their pace of life. In those places with the highest pace of life, "men have the most coronary problems." He proposes that the basic purpose of schools is to take present-oriented children (which he defines as our natural state - see 5:30 of the talk) and attempt to turn them into future-oriented children. In American, a child drops out of school every 9 seconds, and it's often a boy and a minority student. Here's the context. By the time a boy is 21 years old, he has spent 10,000 hours playing video games, and many more hours watching shows, including pornography, which they tend to do alone. This means that many hours are not being spent developing social skills. These children thus live in a world they create. Bottom line is that they will never fit into a traditional classroom, which is analogue--it is incredibly boring to them. The commonly-heard cure for our educational ills--that we need more classroom time reading, writing and arithmetic is thus a recipe for disaster for these present-oriented students. Traditional classrooms offer the lack of control and delay of gratification; this is not at all interesting compared to life in front of a video screen. Zimbardo argues that we are "under-estimating the power of technology in re-wiring young people's brains." They get upset even waiting an extra minute or two booting up their computers or downloading files. We bark at our kids to avoid hedonistic addictive activities, but they are already aware of the consequences, but they are not future-oriented kids, so there is no feedback loop to alter their behavior. Bottom line: Many of the disputes we have with other people are due to our differences in the perception of time.
As the new year began, I found myself finishing up the January, 2011 edition of National Geographic. This is not a magazine to be merely scanned. In my experience, National Geographic deserves its own special time. It needs to be read slowly so that its exquisite prose and photography can be deeply appreciated. Every minute invested is paid back tenfold, and National Geographic has been written in this high-quality way for as long as I can remember. So… If you're going to put me on a deserted island and I can only have one magazine subscription, please make it National Geographic. The cover story of the current issue is "Population 7 Billion: How Your World Will Change." In the introduction, the Editor notes that "the issues associated with population growth seem endless: poverty, food and water supply, world health, climate change, before station, fertility rates, and more." Therefore, it would seem that we would insist on discussing the carrying capacity of Earth. We talk about the capacity of motor vehicles and houses and hotel rooms and conference centers, because we can't deny that human animals take up space and use up resources. We can't put 12 people in a boat that is designed to carry four, because it would cause a disaster. Yet many of us simply refuse to consider whether there is such a thing as a carrying capacity of the earth, and we utterly refuse to attempt any sort of quantification of the carrying capacity of the earth. Therefore, as we are approaching 7 billion people on earth, it is preordained by many people that population is simply not a problem, even though societies all over the earth, rich and poor, traditional and modern, are exhausting the resources that are available to them.
The December 27, 2010 issue of The Nation comments on a noteworthy piece of reporting by The Washington Post:
In July the Washington Post published 'Top-Secret America,' a series of articles based on a two-year investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin. The report meticulously documented the growth of a vast secret government in the wake of September 11, encompassing at least 1,271 government organizations, 1,931 private companies and an estimated 854,000 individuals with top-secret security clearance. Secret America, Priest and Arkin wrote, has become 'so large, so unwieldy and so secretive' that it is not only unaccountable, it is practically unknowable--even to the officials charged with administering it. The series elicited much praise from fellow journalists, but from the government there was-- nothing. The Posts report generated not one congressional hearing, subpoena or reform. As far as we know, Secret America continues its work unchecked and unchastised. . . The Post didn't tell secrets so much as outline the contours of the shadow world from which they originate; WikiLeaks rips off the veil. It's the exposure of the secrets that has the world's power elite so rattled.
Here's a link to the Washington Post's articles and introductory video--the secret network of government agencies is so extensive that the authors of Secret American describe it as America's "fourth branch of government, which emerged subsequent to 9/11." Amy Goodman of Democracy Now recently discussed Secret America with Julian Assange. Here's what Assange had to say:Dana Priest’s article on the CIA black sites had all the names of the countries removed from it after a request by the White House to the editors of the Post. Similarly, it is standard Washington Post practice, whenever Dana Priest is to reveal a new story showing significant allegations of abuse, say, by the CIA, to call up the press office the night before to give them the heads-up, as a courtesy move. That doesn’t seem like independent journalism to us. It seems to us that a journalist’s relationship should be with the public, on the one hand, and with their sources, on the other hand, who are providing them with information to give to the public. It seems that the Post is engaging in a sort of an unclear cooperation with the very organizations that it’s meant to be policing. So we’re a little bit hesitant about dealing with them.
But the recent Dana Priest article covering the extensive expanse of money going into the top-secret industry in the United States is encouraging. So perhaps, if that’s a sign of the movement by the Washington Post to a more combative form of journalism, then we would be happy to work with them.
The Lame Duck Congress has ended the year with a Marathon of Epic Legislation. I can't help being impressed. Obama said he wanted Congress to do with Don't Ask Don't Tell, to repeal it legislatively, and not have it end up as a court-mandated order. I can understand this, especially given the rightward shift of the judiciary. But the way in which he went about it seemed doomed and certainly angered a lot of people who thought he was breaking a campaign promise. (The puzzling lunacy of his own justice department challenging a court-led effort must have looked like one more instance of Obama backing off from what he'd said he was going to do.) I am a bit astonished that he got his way. A great deal of the apparent confusion over Obama's actions could stem from his seeming insistence that Congress do the heavy lifting for much of his agenda. And while there's a lot to be said for going this route, what's troubling is his failure to effectively use the bully pulpit in his own causes. And the fact that he has fallen short on much. It would be, perhaps, reassuring to think that his strategy is something well-considered, that things the public knows little about will come to fruition by, say, his second term. (Will he have a second term? Unless Republicans can front someone with more brains and less novelty than a Sarah Palin and more weight than a Mitt Romney, probably. I have seen no one among the GOP ranks who looks even remotely electable. The thing that might snuff Obama's chances would be a challenge from the Democrats themselves, but that would require a show of conviction the party has been unwilling overall to muster.) The Crash of 2008 caused a panic of identity. Unemployment had been creeping upward prior to that due to a number of factors, not least of which is the chronic outsourcing that has become, hand-in-glove, as derided a practice as CEO compensation packages and "golden parachutes," and just as protected in practice by a persistent nostalgia that refuses to consider practical solutions that might result in actual interventions in the way we do business. No one wants the jobs to go overseas but no one wants to impose protectionist policies on companies that outsource. Just as no one likes the fact that top management is absurdly paid for jobs apparently done better 40 years ago by people drawing a tenth the amount, but no one wants to impose corrective policies that might curtail what amounts to corporate pillage. It is the nostalgia for an America everyone believes once existed that functioned by the good will of its custodians and did not require laws to force people to do the morally right thing. After a couple decades of hearing the refrain "You can't legislate morality" it has finally sunk in but for the wrong segment of social practice. [More . . . ]