There are many examples of the failed philosophy of neo (new) conservatism, such as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute , the Project for New American Century, and last but not least, financial ‘innovation’ in the economy. You can argue until you are blue in the face about philosophy and theory, but some evidence is empirical. It just can’t be argued. The outcome, or the results, of particular programs and policies in action speak for themselves, similar to how if you mix water, milk, eggs, and Bisquick just right you get pancakes.
The WPRI was a group that had advocated for school choice vouchers in Milwaukee. After the program was instituted and studied, they issued this report which said, among other things:
“The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find,” George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote in the paper’s first sentence.
On the same topic of vouchers but not from the same report, I spent a day in Jefferson City speaking with a local Republican State Representative at the time named Jim Lembke. It was a very cordial conversation on education policy in the Missouri. However, the conversation ended quite abruptly after I said to him:
My grandfather was a conservative. (I like to call him an Eisenhower conservative.) And as I understand it, in his day, they believed that public tax dollars should not be used for private purposes. In relation to vouchers, what ever happened to that conservative ideal?
Then there is The Project for a New American Century, a conservative think tank formed during the Clinton Administration and whose membership included the likes of Steve Forbes, Bill Kristol, William J. Bennett, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, Richard L. Armitage, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, “Scooter” Libby, Dan Quayle, and more. They penned a letter that said some of the following (keep in mind, this was before 9/11 and a few years before W. was ever elected POTUS):
“That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”
“Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction”
“Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East.”
“a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard…”
“…removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.”
“…If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.
Of course, we know how all of that worked out. $150 a barrel for oil, $10 billion a month in Iraq Afghanistan, oh, and no Weapons of Mass Destruction. Notice how almost all of the people mentioned in the letter to President Clinton seen here ended up in the Bush Administration.
The phrase that freaks me out the most from the Project for a New American Century is an excerpt from the following paper:
Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions.
And last but not least, the financial market. So far, we have talked about two of the items that the conservatives are traditionally given credit for as their strength. Taxes, Defense, and now Finance. It is clear that their strength in these areas is nothing more than a myth, and a very damaging myth at that. Here is the latest from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke:
“One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be,” the Fed chairman said today in a speech at the central bank’s community affairs conference in Washington. “The damage from this turn in the credit cycle — in terms of lost wealth, lost homes, and blemished credit histories — is likely to be long-lasting.”
Question for the fiscally conservative reader…is government waste only government waste when it is money and resources wasted on liberal causes?
Fiscal conservatism and fiscal prudence have come to mean two different things to me. Fiscal conservatism has evolved in to a phrase applied to any kind of spending that does not take place on what a political conservative would consider to be a liberal or progressive cause. (Which is hogwash.) Fiscal prudence, on the other-hand, sufficiently describes transparent and financially sound expenditures, regardless of political ideology.
I think it is necessary to differentiate between the two because of government waste like that which is listed here by New Scientist magazine. Typically, this line-item would fall under ‘defense’ spending, which would usually satisfy a fiscally conservative (but not necessarily a libertarian) expenditure.
As the article states, the military could have asked any astrophysicist if this was possible and probably saved enormous sums of taxpayer money. Instead, we have to chalk this one up to government waste, or fiscal imprudence. (Because I am sure that fiscal conservatives will not want to take any of the credit for it.)
If you think the idea of gravitational waves propelling interplanetary spacecraft sounds like science fiction, you’re in good company - any astrophysicist will rubbish the idea out of hand.
However, that didn’t stop the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from commissioning a report to investigate whether the elusive waves could pose a threat to US security.
The JASON Defense Advisory Group were also asked to judge whether high-frequency gravitational waves could image the centre of the Earth, or be used for telecommunications.
Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time caused by the movement of an extremely large mass, such as a very dense star.
Yet even those from huge stellar events have been too weak to trip the most sensitive detectors. The best evidence is indirect, coming from observations of how superdense, binary neutron stars lose energy.
Bailing out the three auto companies would not be good governance and would prevent, or at the very least, slow the oncoming transportation enlightenment. A bailout would be akin to a massive effort in the 11th century A.D. to bail out the Dark Age. There. I said it. Wow. That feels good.
Some companies, no matter how large they are, deserve to fail, regardless of the consequences.
I have had a bad feeling about the auto bailout since it was proposed, and that feeling has not gone away. However, until today, I just figured that the right choice will be made in Washington. If the bailout attempt fails, which appears to be the case, it will be a good example of the avoidance of “groupthink.” (According to Answers.com, Groupthink is, “The act or practice of reasoning or decision-making by a group, especially when characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of view.”)
Bad companies should fail, regardless of the consequences, especially if they are going to be bailed out at the expense of innovation. I personally know, as most of us do, many people who will lose their jobs and become financially devastated by the auto company failure, but like a recruit at boot camp in the Marines, the auto industry needs to be torn down so it can be built back up in a grander image.
Michael Moore, love him or hate him, documented the failure of GM over 20 years ago when Roger Smith, the CEO of GM at the time, was systematically betraying the American “widget” worker, sending jobs oversees. Instead of investing in the American automobile company and technical innovation, he put GM’s massive resources in to buying large stakes in completely unrelated businesses.
GM and Chrysler are bad companies that deserve to fail. Unfortunately, like the sinking of the Titanic, they are going to bring down a lot of innocent people with them.
But here is the good news. GM and Chrysler’s pending failure, and possibly Ford being not far behind, does not eliminate the demand and the need for new cars. Because we are still a largely free-market based system, other companies will pick up where GM and Chrysler failed.
I believe that while we will take our lumps in the process, this will lead to a sort of automobile/personal vehicle/transportation period of enlightenment. The transportation enlightenment is on the horizon. Many of the workers who will lose jobs will get new ones in the same industry, but in the meantime, perhaps we should take the same $14 Billion that is proposed to bail out the auto companies and use it to provide career training and other support services to those workers to help them get back on their feet.
Instead of bailing out poorly run businesses, we should invest in the ingenuity, grit, and future of the American worker. Our government needs to look at this current financial crises as an opportunity to vaccinate our free market system from the ignorance and greed of the bolo-hatted businessman, and put it back in to the education, workforce, and business systems necessary for economies to thrive in the 21st century.
I wonder what it is that makes people so apathetic to senseless tragedy. This story won’t go away, and for good reason. It reminds me of a time when I was a systems analyst at a local casino in St. Louis, MO. There was a gambler who apparently had a heart attack and died right in front of the soda machine in the food court.
Not only did he die, but there was blood on the ground from him busting his head open. While he was being attended to, other gamblers still wanted their soda, so they would proceed to step over him, even stepping in his blood, to get to the soda fountain. It was a disgusting dispay of human apathy, and one I will never forget.
The video shows a police officer crouching by a 6-foot-5-inch, 270-pound man lying at the entrance of the Long Island Wal-Mart. A paramedic pumps the man’s chest so forcefully his limp legs and feet joggle. Shoppers peer from behind glass doors or stand a few feet away, hands in pockets.
“They need to shock him,” a voice says.
The paramedic stops pumping. The man’s shirt has been pulled to his neck, revealing his belly. A woman in the crowd mutters, “Pregnant.”
Another cracks a joke.
The women laugh.
The trouble at Wal-Mart began well before the sun rose on Nov. 28, the day after Thanksgiving.
Just after 1 a.m., Jennifer Jones, 25, and her niece, Alicia Sgro, 14, joined the 200 or so early shoppers in front of the Valley Stream store, 20 miles east of Manhattan.
Jones wanted the 32-inch plasma flat-screen TV, on sale for $388. Sgro hoped to pick up DVDs, on sale for $2 to $9 each. The couple in front of them wanted the $25 microwave. The guy behind wanted the $5 blender. By the time Nakea Augustine showed up at 3:15 a.m., the line had grown to 1,000 people.
This post is in response to Barbara Walter’s 10 Most fascinating people, who weren’t really all that fascinating. Click here to see Daddy Hogwash’s previous post on the matter. So, with some major input from a fundraising consultant for non-profits and scholar, Tom Diehl, and poet, writer, and archivist, Philip Gounis, here is DaddyHogwash.com’s 10 most fascinating people for 2008.
Our criteria: Someone who either advanced or was recognized for advancing the progress of humanity, and/or our understanding of science, culture, and systems of modern civilization in 2008.
10. Nate Silver - Mr. Silver is the founder and major author of the blog FiveThirtyEight.com with 538 standing for the amount of total electoral votes available to candidates in the Presidential race. Silver, a baseball statistician and performance forecaster by trade, developed what turned out to be a dead-on projection of the outcome of the Presidential race, out-predicting most professional pollsters. Throughout the process, Silver gained fame for his analysis, appearing on various political and news outlets on T.V. and print, and has likely changed the game for political election forecasting for many years to come.
9. Amy Wagers, Phd. - Wagers, at 34 years of age, has accomplished more in the field of stem cell research than most. At the age of 28, she wrote and published a paper disproving some of the recent theories of the pluripotency of adult stem cells. She had this to say in Harvard Science, “The whole idea was that stem cells run around in your blood looking for damage, and then when they find it they just become whatever it is they need to become, magically,” she says. “People still have this idea of stem cells. They’re not magic. But people want them to be,” she adds. Her research on adult muscle tissue stem cells will have long lasting, and exponential effects of the future health of our society.
8. Noam Chomsky - Chomsky was recently dubbed the man who “found the innate humanity in the human brain” by Discover Magazine, and the University of London linguist, Neil Smith, had this to say in the journal Nature, “Noam Chomsky’s position in the history of ideas is comparable to that of Darwin or Descartes…Chomsky has redefined our understanding of ourselves as humans.” Chomsky has a long history of scientific advancement in the area of linguistics and its genetic nature, and as a controversial political writer. Discover went on to say, “…he stands in the tradition of the great Enlightenment thinkers who combined a sweeping intellectual vision with meticulous technical analyses. He revived a rationalist conception of human nature in which the mind is richly endowed with creative powers at a time when behaviorism ruled and “innate” was a dirty word. He showed that languages have an elegant mathematical structure, which set a research agenda for linguistics, psychology, and computer science for decades to come, namely, “What are the computations that allow a language to be learned and used?
7. Raymond Kurzweil - According to Answers.com, Kurzweil is an inventor and futurist. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. In 2009, Kurzweil will be unveiling his movie, The Singularity is Near where he discusses how humans and machines will eventually become single entities, “achieving inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.”
6. Adam Reiss - Reiss, a 2008 MacArthur fellow, was the lead author of a recent paper that discovered that not only is the universe expanding, it is expanding at an accelerating rate, shocking the astronomical research community and reducing the likelihood of the universe as we know it ending in a big crunch. According to cosmologists, the observable mass of the matter in our universe can not account for the universe’s expansion, leading to the theory of a massless gravitational energy called “dark energy.” According to the MacArthur foundation, “Reiss is now actively engaged in designing expiraments and devices to detect and measure dark energy.” Reiss’s fascinating work will continue to have profound effects on how we understand our universe, from beginning to end.
5. Paul Krugman - According to Answers.com, Krugman “is an Americaneconomist, columnist, author and intellectual.[2] He is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, and a columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity”.[3][4] Krugman is well-known in academia for his work in international economics, including trade theory, economic geography, and international finance.” Krugman’s work in these times of economic turmoil will be essential in getting the global economy back on its feet again.
4. John Brockman - According to Answers.com, Brockman is a “literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. He founded the Edge Foundation, an organization aimed to bring together people working at the edge of a broad range of scientific and technical fields.” The basis for the Edge.org project is to ask what would happen if you made an organized effort, “To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, and seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” This project has resulted in several books compiled by Brockman asking some of the pressing questions of our time and seeing what these complex and sophisticated minds have to say about them. Brockman’s accumulation of these minds on pressing questions is what fascinates me about him.
3. William McDonough - McDonough was coined ‘The King of Green Architecture’ by Discover Magazine for his environmentally friendly ‘cradle to cradle’ architectural work. “William McDonough aims to create buildings that produce oxygen, sequester carbon, and produce more power than they use.” McDonough hopes to create a new industrial revolution where the homes and buildings we design are naturally sustainable and make our world a better place, as opposed to destroying our environment. Good luck William McDonough.
2. Barack Obama - Everyone knows Obama’s story by now, but to summarize, what he did was totally change the political landscape of America with an emphasis on empowering ordinary people to make a meaningful difference in their communities. He broke through a barrier that no political analyst would have predicted two years ago. He inspired and challenged African Americans to see themselves in a different light; pushed back against the cynicism that has gripped this nation for 45 years; stimulated young people to take ownership in our political system. The world is anxious for him to take office. His election marks a transformation in American society. Rarely does one individual make such a mark on history. - Tom Diehl
1. Norman Borlaug - The man who has saved a Billion lives and the “father of the green revolution.” How in the world more people do not know the name Norman Borlaug is completely beyond me. Well, I have a guess, he is the epitome of humility and shies away from the television camera. Now at 93 years old, Borlaug received the Congressional Gold Medal in early 2008 for his food research work, which resulted in the feeding, and in some cases, providing self-sufficiency for hundreds of millions of people who would have otherwise starved to death.
Honorable Mention: Arianna Huffington: Huffington is a major force in reinventing and perfecting the way news is reported on the Internet with the huffingtonpost.com. Her solid balance between fresh news, editorial blogging, and news aggregating has led to 9.5 million monthly visitors according to quantcast.com. Huffington has recently moved more in to local news for the Chicago metro area, and looks to expand after securing $25 million in investment capital.
So that is DaddyHogwash’s list of the 10 most fascinating people of 2008. Do you agree? Who would you remove? Who would you add? Who makes up your 10 most fascinating people of 2008?
“At least Bush kept us safe, at least Bush kept us safe, at least Bush kept us safe.” I think if you keep saying it, you might believe it. Has everyone forgotten that when Bush was elected we had two very tall twin towers in New York that no longer exists! What kind of bumbling blow hard could ever say, “At least Bush kept us safe” with a straight face. Especially when you picture him sitting there reading children’s books even while knowing the attacks were happening.
Not only did 9/11 happen under his watch, he completely bumbled the after-strikes. It is widely believed we had Bin Laden at Tora Bora, but the sudden shift in focus back to Iraq, which had nothing to do with September 11, 2001, allowed him to escape, and eventually to regroup along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and everything to do with securing a strategic position in the middle of oil country. Now, Afghanistan and Iraq, both, are infected, bubbling, boiling, blisters on the backside of America.
Here is the question of the day:
Do you think that if broccoli was the number one export of Iraq that we would have over 100,000 American troops there today?
Just picture your average Republican with a long brown haired wig, and a blue and white checkered farm dress, and red, ruby slippers, tapping his heels together and screaming at the top of his lungs….
“At least Bush kept us safe,” “At least Bush kept us safe,” “At least Bush kept us safe!”
Petty Noonan - Back to the Christmas gathering. There was no grousing about John McCain, and considerable grousing about the Bush administration, but it was almost always followed by one sentence, and this is more or less what it was: “But he kept us safe.” In the seven years since 9/11, there were no further attacks on American soil. This is an argument that’s been around for a while but is newly re-emerging as the final argument for Mr. Bush: the one big thing he had to do after 9/11, the single thing he absolutely had to do, was keep it from happening again. And so far he has. It is unknown, and perhaps can’t be known, whether this was fully due to the government’s efforts, or the luck of the draw, or a combination of luck and effort. And it not only can’t be fully known by the public, it can hardly be fully known by the players at all levels of government. They can’t know, for instance, of a potential terrorist cell that didn’t come together because of their efforts.
A clinical psychologist on CNN attributed the Wal-Mart doorbuster killing to a disorder of groups called Groupthink. Groupthink is defined on Answers.com as:
n. The act or practice of reasoning or decision-making by a group, especially when characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of view.
Watch this clip from CNN, think about what happened to that Wal-Mart employee, and then you tell me whether or not attributing this to groupthink is hogwash:
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Bailing out the three auto companies would not be good governance and would prevent, or at the very least, slow the oncoming transportation enlightenment. A bailout would be akin to a massive effort in the 11th century A.D. to bail out the Dark Age. There. I said it. Wow. That feels good.
I wonder what it is that makes people so apathetic to senseless tragedy. This story won’t go away, and for good reason. It reminds me of a time when I was a systems analyst at a local casino in St. Louis, MO. There was a gambler who apparently had a heart attack and died right in front of the soda machine in the food court.
it, you might believe it. Has everyone forgotten that when Bush was elected we had two very tall twin towers in New York that no longer exists! What kind of bumbling blow hard could ever say, “At least Bush kept us safe” with a straight face. Especially when you picture him sitting there reading children’s books even while knowing the attacks were happening.
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