Growing up, raising children, and how I look at the world

I don't have any children of my own, yet.

But, as I mature, and think about raising children and what message about the world best prepare them for life, I do think the simplest message is the best one.

Be good. Be honest. Keep your promises. Be someone of integrity. Do your best. Accept failure and success with class, learn from them, and look forward to new opportunities. When life gets tough, you get tougher. Follow the law. Be good to people around you. Take school, church, family, and life seriously. But not too seriously. Do something you're interested in. Love your spouse and your children and be true to them. Take the Ten Commandments seriously. Live a good life more than a famous or rich or any other kind of life. Be worthy of peoples' trust.

Do what you're supposed to do. Love your friends and family. And have a nice life.

The older I get, the more I realize that the complicated answers to life are generally too complicated. The simple ones are better answers, on the big life questions, I think.

And, after that, there are plenty of very nice lives awaiting you. And you get to choose.

Have at it.

Choice and character

Excepting for a more understanding attitude toward the confusion for young people like Michael Phelps making their way in this strange age, I roughly agree with Michael Continetti's analysis in this article.

The Age of Irresponsibility

"Decades from now, historians are going to fill e-tome after e-tome debating when the crisis in American authority began. A good place to start would be the Clinton era. The president of the United States had a tawdry affair, lied about it, and refused to accept any responsibility for his actions. The Republicans correctly pointed out that the president had acted beneath his office. The problem was that many of them were acting beneath their offices, too. In Washington, where the spirit of public service is supposed to reign, both Democrats and Republicans were using positions of power for private indulgence. Many things sprang from the Clinton impeachment. Confidence in authority was not one of them.

We correct for the mistakes of past presidents. George W. Bush (barely) won the White House in part because he promised to restore integrity to the office. And the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did briefly increase the public's trust in government and its elites. In the tense months following the attacks, the public rallied behind strong leaders like Bush, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Rumsfeld. These men, who had many private failings, nonetheless were seen to be acting in the interests of the nation as a whole. We seemed to be on the verge of a new era of patriotism and civic renewal.

But it was not to be. The lack of accountability among the elites quickly caught back up. There was George Tenet, whose time as CIA director included two massive intelligence failures. Bush gave Tenet the nation's highest civilian honor in return. There was the FBI, which still hasn't definitively figured out who attacked America with anthrax in late 2001. There was Rumsfeld, who committed too few troops to the fight in Iraq and failed to change strategy when it became clear, early on, that America was losing the war. He stayed in his job until 2006. The generals whom Bush and Rumsfeld tasked with running the war? None of them suffered any consequences for his failures. One of the main opponents of the successful surge strategy in Iraq, George Casey, was promoted to Army chief of staff.

Nor was the crisis in authority limited to politics. There were dramatic instances of public corruption such as the Jack Abramoff scandal, but there were also remarkable examples of private corruption such as the Enron and Arthur Andersen accounting scandals. In the months after September 11, business titan after business titan came under indictment: Enron executives, Martha Stewart, Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski--the list goes on. Chief executives were massively compensated even when they drove their companies into a ditch. No surprise when populism started making a comeback. The private sector and the public sector were failing the common man. Neither acted with any sense of propriety.

The same was true of our cultural elites. The celebrity of the age was Paris Hilton, an exemplar of the inequality and promiscuity that characterize the present moment. Hilton was born into extraordinary wealth but did not achieve true fame until 2003, when her homemade porno movie made it to the Internet. Twenty or even fifteen years ago, Paris Hilton's behavior would have been a scandal. Not today. Why? Because the wealthy, famous, and well-connected can do as they please and suffer no consequences--as long as they possess no shame.

There are moments when it seems as though every figure who waltzes across the public stage is a cheat, a fraud, a liar, or a failure. Child abuse scandals have tarnished the image of Catholic bishops and priests. Steroid scandals have racked Major League Baseball, the Tour de France, and the Olympic games. And then there are the celebrities who write books, make music, and perform in film and television. Where to start?

On any given day, any public figure might be arrested, assaulted, admit to infidelity, go bankrupt, or break down emotionally in front of television cameras. Sometimes all of these things happen at once.

The next day the celebrity will be released from incarceration. He will go into a rehabilitation program or 'spend time with the family and emerge, weeks later, with a tell-all book and publicity tour that make him even richer than he was before. The idea of 'rehab' is so ubiquitous that in 2007 it was the title of a hit song. No negative value is attached to poisoning one's body to the point where it requires detoxification. Quite the contrary. 'Rehab' is, in some sense, something to aspire to. To go to rehab implies deep financial resources and a life rich with experience (at least in the areas of alcohol and drug abuse). There are no consequences.

It wasn't until last fall that we saw how widely the rot had spread. Everyone was implicated in the financial meltdown. Everyone who took on a mortgage they couldn't afford, who lent to people who couldn't pay back the loan, who securitized the unpayable debts and resold them in ways even astrophysicists can't understand, and who instituted government policies that spurred a culture of easy money and consumption beyond one's means. All were responsible.

Meanwhile, as the men who brought the financial system to the brink of collapse were cashing in and remodeling their offices, the executives and union officials who bankrupted the American automobile industry were traveling to Washington hat in hand, begging the public sector to give them aid. Bush had no credibility with the American public. Treasury secretary Hank Paulson inspired no one's confidence.

America's political, economic, and cultural elites seem incapable of behaving responsibly and being accountable for their actions. That incapacity is why you wake up in the morning and dread reading the day's headlines. It is why, for years, there seemingly has been nothing but bad news. It is this larger crisis that has driven the public's opinion that the country is headed down the 'wrong track' and fostered the widespread sense that American power has entered a period of decline. This is the age of irresponsibility...

...The failures of the elites aren't related to public expend-iture. They are related to a spiritual torpor afflicting the affluent. In a rich society, as we pursue our individual ends, obligations--both private and public--fall to the wayside. The status game consumes all. Corners are cut. The higher we scale the ladder, the more material possessions become an end in themselves. We chase one pleasure after another. Our mantra is 'eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.' The reigning ethic is every man for himself.

Irving Kristol, in his 1976 essay 'Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism,' anticipated the spirit of our own time:

[H]appiness comes to mean little more than the sovereignty of self-centered hedonism. The emphasis is on the pleasures of consumption rather than on the virtues of work. The ability to defer gratification, which is a prerequisite for a gradual bettering of one's condition, is scorned; "fly now, pay later" becomes, not merely an advertising slogan, but also a popular philosophy of life.

How does more federal money for school construction fix that?

There is no reason Obama can't begin to restore dignity to politics and American life. He just isn't trying very hard. But even if he did try, there is only so much one man can do.

Hence it becomes necessary to identify an alternative vision of society where elites uphold and promote the bourgeois values. Only in this way might we all salve the spiritual crisis behind our age of irresponsibility. Such a task extends far beyond the reach of politics.

Where to begin? Start with some exemplars of decency, professionalism, and ability. US Airways pilot Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger III riveted the nation with his dramatic crash-landing into the Hudson River. -Sullenberger's experience and stoicism meant that not a single life was lost during the dramatic and dangerous touch-down. It is no surprise that he has been lionized in the days since. When everything else seems to be crashing all around us, Sullenberger is a rock of common sense and soft-spoken modesty. Imagine--just imagine--if the men and women who represent us in Congress shared his character?

Then there is General David Petraeus. At the recent Super Bowl, Petraeus received huge applause when he walked on field for the pregame coin toss. The crowd's response was no mystery. They were saluting the man who helped rescue the American war effort in Iraq, the man who did so without mincing words to the American people or their elected representatives. Petraeus has a Ph.D., runs marathons, wins wars, and spends every waking moment trying to become a better soldier and man. It ought to give us hope that our culture--the culture of A-Rod, Madoff, Hilton, and Murtha--is still capable of celebrating someone like Petraeus. Why not boldly and consistently champion the commitment to patriotism and duty expressed in the character of the American soldier--a living refutation to irresponsible living?

The sad fact is that it is difficult to come up with more than a few examples of elite responsibility. Failure breeds apathy. So the age of irresponsibility has spawned a cheap cynicism that says, since everything is broken, why not sit back and laugh at the degradation?

But the cynics are wrong. Things can get a whole lot worse. A failure of accountability not only erodes the foundations of our culture. It also puts our country on unstable fiscal ground. A storm of moral and financial insolvency has been brewing for some time. The populist reaction is only the beginning. We're hearing the thunder. Get ready for the deluge."

The entire article is well worth a read.

As I mature, consider the responsibilities of teaching and parenting and do so coming from a background of social liberalism, my more conservative temper mirrors these concerns. There is work that can and is being done to restore confidence in our public institutions. And it will be choices of character rather than public expenditure that will make the difference.

Progress

For all of our pretensions to dispassionate intellect, when all is said and done, it is all emotion.

Feeling without understanding is humanity at its most destructive.

Feeling with understanding is always what has saved and improved us.

Hearts and minds are forever fallible, complicated things.

But they are all we got.

At least until we have screwed things up, enough, that we turn back to them to find better answers.

In the end, that is what has always moved us forward. It is not power or religion or ideology or any other narrower view of humanity.

It is love and understanding.

Power, religion, ideology, and all the rest can be exercised with love and understanding. Or they can be exercised on behalf of hate, vengeance, greed, envy, wrath, ignorance, and every other ugly impulse that has ever inhabited the human soul. Power, rules, law. None of these have ever been exercised for good or decency or understanding or progress alone. They have always been neutral weapons used for our basest impulses as much as our finest. Law institutionalized slavery, as much as it liberated slaves. Law murdered six million Jews, as much as it convicted their killers. Law crucified great men like Jesus of Nazareth, as much it convicted murderers like Barabus. Law, like money, like intelligence, like morality, like all the rest is and will always be used to advance inhumanity as much as humanity. All of these and every other human creation are subject to our abuse and manipulation as much as to our better angels.

And always will be. Until we commit ourselves, each of us, genuinely, to a better path.

That is why liberal values make for stronger individuals and societies. Because everything else is the illusion that power has made us better than we really are.

Freedom, better than its alternatives, offers us the honest opportunity to be better for real and not as a matter of looking better to others who are not really better either.

And that, and none of the counterfeits, is how we make progress.

Let the learning begin

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

When all is said and done, we just all need to be responsible for our own lives. There is no shortcut around this one.

And there is no magic formula, religion, ideology, or rule that will make that happen. Either we learn or we don't.

And that was all she wrote.

Let the learning begin.

Clever apes

The Economist describes the current financial situation and the subsequent economic consequences quite well.

The spiral of ignorance

"The tide has gone out and, with a very few exceptions, Britain is swimming naked: almost nobody appears to know what he is talking about. The havoc of the financial crisis has stretched and outstripped even most economists. The British political class is befogged. Ordinary people are overwhelmed. And just as the interaction between banking and economic woes is proving poisonous, so the interplay of public and political ignorance is damaging the country’s prospects.

Start with the government, whose ministers are still oscillating between prophesying economic Armageddon and gamely predicting the best of all possible recoveries. Gordon Brown is learned in economic history—indeed, he is at his most animated and endearing when discussing it. But the prime minister’s grip on the history he is living through is less masterful. The government’s implicit strategy is to try something and, when that does not work, try something else: the approach modestly outlined by Barack Obama, but rather less honest.

The Tories are now capitalising on this flakiness; but for much of the past year, they have seemed at least as unconvincing. It was only a few months ago that David Cameron, the Conservative leader, averred that—since the economy was purring so happily—his historic mission was to mend British society. George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, clung for too long to his fair-weather formula about sharing the proceeds of non-existent growth. Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne are vague about the methods they would employ to repair the public finances in office. That sketchiness might be tactical. Or it might be because they do not know.

The truth is that hardly any MPs in any party have more than a rudimentary grasp of the crisis; indeed, their inability to track the City’s baroque excesses helped to foment it. (The intellectual background of MPs, few of whom have much training in economics or commerce, may contribute to this deficiency.) Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats’ treasury spokesman, has the best record in Parliament of predicting and analysing the debacle—and precisely because he is so lucid, he seems increasingly to be regarded as an impartial pundit rather than a politician.

Meanwhile, the bodies and advisers appointed by the politicians to do the understanding for them have been largely discredited. The Bank of England obsessed about monetary policy and neglected financial stability. Sir James Crosby quit as deputy head of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) amid embarrassing questions about risk-taking at the bank he used to run. The involvement of Glen Moreno—chairman of Pearson, which part-owns The Economist—in UK Financial Investments, which manages the government’s new stakes in Britain’s banks, has been undermined by his association with secretive Liechtenstein.

A layman might conclude that there is almost no one in Britain capable of comprehending the financial mess, and at the same time sufficiently uncontaminated by the mistakes and ruses that caused it to be entrusted with the job of fixing it. (Lord Turner, the FSA’s new chairman—who has admitted that financial regulators, among others, missed “an increase in total system risk”—may be a happy exception.) It might help if ministers looked beyond the world of banking, of which they still seem to be in a sort of post-socialist awe, for more of their recruits. The layman, however, may be as much to blame as anyone else.

If financial acumen is limited in the governing classes, it is at least as rare outside them. In surveys, the economy has leapt to the top of voters’ concerns; anxiety is rampant, fed no doubt by the unfortunate trend whereby half the things that “experts” say can never happen come to pass within a fortnight. The public seem to appreciate that the crunch involves both foreign and domestic forces. But to most people the rest is a mystery. Along with the high anxiety, this uncertainty helps to explain the volatile political impact of the downturn: large numbers of people seem to be amenable to whatever explanation seems freshly plausible.

The culprits many have now settled on are the bankers. Some of those—unable to accept the reality of their institutions’ failure—deserve the opprobrium. But the furore over their bonuses has obscured other realities. One is the fact that, now that taxpayers own some of them, they have an interest in the banks being run by clever people; another is the fundamental role banks play in the economy. And because MPs are instinctively populist, as well as bemused themselves, they too have fixated on bonuses.

It is not only banking about which general knowledge seems poor: the same is true of the concept of money. The nasty little secret of the slump is that by overborrowing and making myopic investments, lots of ordinary Britons helped to bring their difficulties on themselves. Low levels of financial literacy (knowing the difference between an ISA and an iPod, and so on) are part of this problem. But so is the cowardly reluctance of politicians to say unpalatable things.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once remarked that he knew of only six people in the world who had followed his daunting book “Principia Mathematica” to the end. There sometimes seem to be almost as few people in Britain who truly understand the credit crunch and its recessionary consequences. The public is scared and uncertain; the politicians are panicky and confused. They are leading each other around and down a worrying spiral of ignorance."

It's more than this, of course. It is the constant talking down of the economy by liberals. The incessant talk of Depression is meant to give justification for intervention measures, whether they are warranted or not (and most of them, I believe, are not). And more generally it is meant to justify for liberals why they are right on every important question that the world has faced since the inception of progressive ideology and why George Bush is responsible for every evil ever since.

We are, perhaps, the dumbest species that has ever called itself intelligent, I think. We are a bunch of clever apes constantly trying to prove to one another just how clever we have always been. Without fail, no less.

This is why I don't trust my fellow apes to fix the messes for everyone else that, often, they have had a hand in creating. We are just not evolved enough to outsmart our own folly when really a little humility and some lessons learned might be in better order.

Might and right

Thank you to every teacher, writer, family member, and friend who has ever taught me the difference between might and right.

Without you, this world would seem like one long, inexplicable and hopeless tragedy.

It is not, because you had the heart and mind to know the difference.

Pity is for Princeton economists

How, exactly, does this guy still pull down a salary? Anywhere?

Back to Reality After 10 Year Illusion of Wealth

You know what Paul Krugman's problem is? He can't make any distinctions.

Whose wealth?

Paul is convinced that it is all his.

And that is the fuckin' problem, Professor Krugman. You got your wealth. It came with that Nobel Prize, you smug fuck. The rest is not your's. Our our's. Or anyone's except for the people who made it.

It is not good for us to think about wealth in the terms people like Paul Krugman suggest. It suggests to us that we are too weak, too dumb, too lazy, too crazy, too disabled, too what-the-fuck-ever excuse that Paul has for why he knows better how to spend peoples' money that everyone else.

Paul is so full of himself and his dubious conceptions of wealth and the economy that it has not even crossed his mind that maybe, just maybe, Americans and most peoples in the liberal democratic world are far more capable than the Paul Krugmans of the world suggest they are and that thinking otherwise is not good for them.

But you know what the beauty of it all is?

You know who they're still going to be reading a hundred years from now?

I'll give you a clue. It isn't Paul Krugman. And Karl Marx and John Keynes will be a faint memory of a bygone era of failed and foolish policy, the goals of which were better facilitated by people like Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton and Mary Wolstonecraft and Annie Sullivan and people who really cared about them rather than pitying them.

Poor people can settle for Paul Krugman's pity. Or they can go get rich. Or they can go find a life they love and tell Paul Krugman where to put his smug, bullshit analyses of nothin'.

Pity is for people you don't really give a shit about. And Princeton economists.

And Paul Krugman can take his pity and shove it up his big, fat arrogant ass.

Because poor people got better things going for them.

Why do liberal cultures always seem to get more liberal?

I think the failure to resolve these questions, and the liberal commitments of the culture, generally, are exactly why we always move in a more liberal direction.

Obama Won't End the Culture Wars

"Because the cultural left and cultural right hold to irreconcilable orthodoxies on these questions, we find scant cultural consensus. That's life in America. Unless we become a homogenous country, we will continue to struggle to live together, staying true to our deepest beliefs while respecting the liberty of others to stay true to their own.

But we do not live in a libertarian Utopia. We can't have it all. If, for example, courts constitutionalized same-sex marriage, as gay activists seek, that would have a ground-shaking effect on religious liberty, public schooling and other aspects of American life. Without question, it would intensify the culture war, as partisans of the left and right fight for what each considers a sacred principle.

What irritates conservatives is the liberals' groundless conceit that they fight from a values-neutral position, while the right seeks to impose its norms on others. Nonsense. Marriage was a settled issue until liberals began using courts to impose their moral vision on (so far) an unwilling majority. Who fired the first shot there?

Culture war is inevitable, because it's in the nature of democratic, pluralistic society. It only ends when one side wins, by force or force of reason. As all drill sergeants know, you prepare your troops to move in for the kill by first dehumanizing the enemy.

If we keep the humanity of our opponents squarely in front of us - as Obama, to his great credit, seems determined to do - we can keep the culture-war casualty count low. That's about the best we can hope for."

Or we could learn to respect peoples' consciences on most matters.

If not, both sides should get used to a culture, especially of young people, who disrespect the law.

And that is why America persistently becomes more genuinely liberal, without any need for utopias.

Getting what we deserve

It's a more important commitment of American life than we have given credit during this period.

The war over Lincoln

"So who can really claim Lincoln’s mantle? In some ways, both sides can. Both parties embrace Lincoln’s vision of America as a model of democratic government to the world, and both want to be more inclusive. The Republicans do appear to understand that they cannot survive as the party of white southern voters. Mr Bush appointed more members of minorities to his administration than any previous president, including two black secretaries of state in a row. Mr Steele’s election is a sign of the party’s continuing commitment to expanding its base.

But, in other ways, both sides have shortchanged one of Lincoln’s most important ideals: that of self-help and upward mobility. Lincoln was not just content to be a personal example of upward mobility—born, in the poet James Russell Lowell’s phrase, "out of the very earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown". He believed that the essence of the promise of American life was “to lift artificial weights from all shoulders" and "afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life."

The truth is that all of the most important debates going on, right now, are about this more fundamental fact of American and liberal democratic life.

Just too many people too proud to admit that maybe all of the "warfare" undermines peoples' opportunities and their confidence in themselves and those opportunities rather than supporting them.

Perhaps we are too stupid and stubborn, all of us, to allow more reasoned discussion and more meritocratic commitments to guide our politics.

Perhaps we are too foolish to reconsider our pride.

If so, we surely deserve the world we get.

Why I hate politics

This is the shit I hate about politics.

NPR Tell Fox News: Please Don't Associate Juan Williams With Us

How is it possible for people to be so self-righteous and have so few unchallengeable ideas?

What a man

I'm working, watching Dave Chappelle, and realizing that, when I'm being real, there is one other music crush I had. And it wasn't all for such noble reasons.



Spinderella wants a man whose always got heavy conversation for the mind. And I loved her and this video because that's the man I wanted to be. But also because I just wanted to more than talk with Spinderella. Or Salt. Or Peppa. Or all of En Vogue, for that matter.

A lover and a fighter. And I would knock another out for any of these girls.

True love

I'm such a fuckin' chick. I actually teared up at the end of this story. I think I'm due for my period.

Love's Labor Rewarded, Nearly Two Decades Later

What a great story for Valentines.

This is the kind of story all of us should have.

And if we don't, this is the kind of story, our own version of true love, that we should figure out how to have.

If you're never experienced true love with your sweetheart, I recommend it. There is nothing finer in this lifetime.

And there never has been and never will be anything truer in this world.

The only thing we have to fear

George Will leads from the center.

Runaway Stimulus

My favorite line:

"The president, convinced that the only thing America has to fear is an insufficiency of fear, has warned that 'disaster' and 'catastrophe' are the certain alternatives to swift passage of the stimulus legislation. One marvels at his certitude more than one envies his custody of this adventure."

Ironic, huh? The party of Franklin Roosevelt can now only speak of how afraid America needs to be.

It's pathetic, is what it is. But it's the bread and butter of people who have run out of better ideas.

Hope and change, indeed.

"The free market is dead"

P.J. O'Rourke has an unusually serious and appropriate column for today's financial crisis.

Adam Smith gets the last laugh

"The free market is dead. It was killed by the Bolshevik Revolution, fascist dirigisme, Keynesianism, the Great Depression, the second world war economic controls, the Labour party victory of 1945, Keynesianism again, the Arab oil embargo, Anthony Giddens’s “third way” and the current financial crisis. The free market has died at least 10 times in the past century. And whenever the market expires people want to know what Adam Smith would say. It is a moment of, 'Hello, God, how’s my atheism going?'...

...The idea that The Wealth of Nations puts forth for creating prosperity is more complex. It involves all the baffling intricacies of human liberty. Smith proposed that everyone be free – free of bondage and of political, economic and regulatory oppression (Smith’s principle of 'self-interest'), free in choice of employment (Smith’s principle of 'division of labour'), and free to own and exchange the products of that labour (Smith’s principle of 'free trade'). 'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence,' Smith told a learned society in Edinburgh (with what degree of sarcasm we can imagine), 'but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.'

How then would Adam Smith fix the present mess? Sorry, but it is fixed already. The answer to a decline in the value of speculative assets is to pay less for them. Job done.

We could pump the banks full of our national treasure. But Smith said: 'To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.' [440]

We could send in the experts to manage our bail-out. But Smith said: 'I have never known much good done by those who affect to trade for the public good.' [456]

And we could nationalise our economies. But Smith said: “The state cannot be very great of which the sovereign has leisure to carry on the trade of a wine merchant or apothecary”. [818] Or chairman of General Motors."

O'Rourke offers some nice perspective that we have seen this all before. For someone going through it the first time, it's a nice reminder that all is well in Bedlam.

Politics and sex

I think politics is like sex.

You can force me to do all kinds of shit.

But you can't make me like it.

And it's got to suck to have everyone bitch all the time, when you do that, about how you don't know what the fuck you're doing.

Human beings, mistakes, and the political class

This just about sums it up.

Random Thoughts by Thomas Sowell (wasn't that a Saturday Night Live skit?)

"Human beings are going to make mistakes, whether in the market or in the government. The difference is that survival in the market requires recognizing mistakes and changing course before you go bankrupt. But survival in politics requires denying mistakes and sticking with the policies you advocated, while blaming others for the bad results."

I think is possible that Democrats believe that they could never really be wrong about anything important.

That is why Lord Acton said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

"Papal infallibility"

That's what prompted Acton's wise observation about people, power, and human nature. The propensity of people to pretend like they never really make mistakes.

And that is why, though the market is and never will be a perfect arbiter of what is valuable or not in the world, that I trust it more than I will ever trust a politician ever.

Because I don't trust politicians any more than I trust myself. And the more I watch them, the less I trust them.

And that will be true no matter how much power they do or do not have.

Self-respect

No offense to Jeffrey Sachs and the important work he has done in international health and economic development, but I just don't trust these assholes, anymore.

5 Points on the Critical State of the Economy

You know why Democrats think this is a time "Unlike Anything We've Seen Since the Great Depression!"?

Because there are Democrats in office and they want to do some spending.

Except there's a 10, going on 11 trillion dollar, deficit for Federal spending, at this point. And that kind of spending beyond our means is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.

Here's the bottom line on this.

Democrats say it is most important to get a little more help to people who are going to be going through this nonsense one more cycle down the road, if they don't change their ways.

People like me say it's more important to keep people focussed on getting their spending under control - and Federal spending, as well - to focus on growing their income, and to avoid this kind of situation for themselves in future cycles.

One group is selling you on the idea that you will need them for the rest of your life because where would you be without them?

I'm saying, "Get focused on what will make your life better and not some snake-oil that Democrats are selling you that they will get you generous social welfare benefits and your life will be on easy street."

It's a bullshit message. Don't believe it. If you are spending too much, stop listening to these assholes who are telling you to spend. Get your spending under control and tell every Democrat or Republican who tells you different to fuck off. Start banking on your future and stop banking on these assholes to save you when they won't.

They want more money to spend. They get that money from you. If you want more money to spend, I suggest you get your spending under control and start working on expanding your supply with savings, investment, work, starting a business, cutting an album, anything that will actually make more money for you and grow the economy for real and not the bullshit way that Democrats are proposing that leaves so many people unemployed in Europe.

Stand up. Be a grown up. Learn to tell the difference between those who are selling that they can take care of you and can't and those who are being honest with you and telling you that you will need to take care of yourself in this world.

There is only one path that offers dignity. And it's not the one that relies on the government.

And I am sick and tired, at this point, of Democrats and socialists selling this bullshit to people.

It's an illusion. It's a lie. Noone is ever going to take care of you. Except for you.

And that is where the only real self-respect comes from.

Teaching (and its limits)

Given where I came from, this was probably as good a path as any, that I was going to find to recognize the opportunities and limits of commitments to help others.

I have still much work I can do to help.

But I think that only experience with these limits, given my upbringing and my thinking previous to teaching, especially in a school like mine, could I have learned those limits as thoroughly as I have.

And for that, I can be grateful to have done this work.

The straight and narrow

Note to journalists:

R&B star's image destroyed?

"There are a half a dozen upcoming teen male pop R&B singers signed to major labels who wish they could achieve his success.

But if the allegations are true that Brown assaulted a woman, his career will be in jeopardy."

This kind of coverage, and the coverage of Michael Phelps' marijuana photo, make it harder to convince kids to take a straight path, not easier.

So be it. But expect plenty of kids to be alienated from a cleaner path, in the meantime.

Congratulations on the fruits of your sanctimony.

Manipulative bullshit

This meaningless and manipulative babbling is exactly why I think so little of Mr. Krugman.

The Destructive Center

Some people are so lost in their bullshit, they only know manipulation. Mr. Krugman is one such person.

The world would be far better off without this bullshit.

The peristence of ideology

Maybe I don't need to write that book. This sums up a lot of my thinking.

The Persistence of Ideology

"Ideological thinking is not confined to the Islamists in our midst. The need for a simplifying lens that can screen out the intractabilities of life, and of our own lives in particular, springs eternal; and with the demise of Marxism in the West, at least in its most economistic form, a variety of substitute ideologies have arisen from which the disgruntled may choose.

Most started life as legitimate complaints, but as political reforms dealt with reasonable demands, the demands transformed themselves into ideologies, thus illustrating a fact of human psychology: rage is not always proportionate to its occasion but can be a powerful reward in itself. Feminists continued to see every human problem as a manifestation of patriarchy, civil rights activists as a manifestation of racism, homosexual-rights activists as a manifestation of homophobia, anti-globalists as a manifestation of globalization, and radical libertarians as a manifestation of state regulation.

How delightful to have a key to all the miseries, both personal and societal, and to know personal happiness through the single-minded pursuit of an end for the whole of humanity! At all costs, one must keep at bay the realization that came early in life to John Stuart Mill, as he described it in his Autobiography. He asked himself:

'Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No!' At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

This is the question that all ideologists fear, and it explains why reform, far from delighting them, only increases their anxiety and rage. It also explains why traditional religious belief is not an ideology in the sense in which I am using the term, for unlike ideology, it explicitly recognizes the limitations of earthly existence, what we can expect of it, and what we can do by our own unaided efforts. Some ideologies have the flavor of religion; but the absolute certainty of, say, the Anabaptists of Münster, or of today’s Islamists, is ultimately irreligious, since they claimed or claim to know in the very last detail what God requires of us."

I would recommend the entire article.

John Stuart Mill represents the kind of liberalism that I take seriously. I have even become persuaded, as of late, as he believed, that though we should be very careful of its, the death penalty may be necessary in some cases where hardened murderers are not likely to change their ways (we may, perhaps, never be careful enough to use this final and irrevocable penalty and thus should lose the power of its use, but I am open to the idea that there are some people who will not ever allow themselves to be redeemed, at least to the prohibition on murder).

This I am sure of. Ideology is often a false lense that artificially creates a sense of certainty in an uncertain world.

And a more understanding liberalism and a more clear and genuinely compassionate conservativism is the kind to which I subscribe. Independent thought and a commitment to moderate impulses that do not try to substitute ideology for uncertainty is the general commitments that animate my life.

What I know is that the persistent manipulation of democracies by ideologues, terrorists, and others of far too certain perspectives must end if we are to have a world that does not rationalize murder for whatever ends and which does not give young people confidence that the world is a generally good and decent place where bad actors must be dealt with but not at the expense of creating space for good actors to come out of many different places we never expected.

And that world would be one of which we could be proud.

Failing our kids

The more time I spend in special education, the more I see just how badly we are failing our kids.

For every leftist romanticizing the wonders of socialism, special education should be an important corrective.

At many levels, special education has become one long excuse for why children and adults have failed. And built into the assumptions of the field is that noone will ever take responsibility for that fact.

Failure is a part of life. What is not a part of life is being protected from our failure. Because being protected from our failure undermines our ability to be honest about failing and correcting the situation to make things better.

It is very sad, to me, that adults - parents, teachers, administrators, etc. - would rather send the clear message to kids that they are incapable of succeeding in school than to face the much clearer and inevitable failures kids will experience in school and the failures of so many adults - especially those in the political world that feed off of this ideological commitment to their weakness and failure rather than to promote self-respect, self-discipline, self-determination and independent learning for all students, and all of the benefits that come from that learning, independent thought, self-respect, self-discipline, and self-determination.

Surely, this is not all we have to offer our kids. Excuses for why they have failed and why we have failed them. Surely there is something better that we have to offer children that, I believe, those same adults do genuinely care about.

There is only one fundamentally sound way out of this mess and to promote greater responsibility and more serious, successful learning on the part of students, parents, teachers, administrators, and everyone who is responsible for schools: giving them the freedom and the choice to identify schools they believe will help them succeed and to choose to do whatever it will take to succeed in those schools.

Everything else is one more excuse for failure.

I am tired of watching kids and adults make excuses for their failure. It does not serve them. It does not serve any of us.

It is time that we expected something better.

Good question

Crush

I've only had five really serious music crushes in my lifetime.

Sinead O'Connor, when I was a teenager. There was something about Sinead's tragic relationship with her own beauty that really touched me. That and she had the rare quality of meaningful lyrics in popular music.



Chrissy Hynde, after I saw this Pretenders video for Brass in Pocket. The innocent seduction and insight into the whys and wheres of it was too much to resist as a young college student.


Pretenders - Brass In Pocket from Roesje on Vimeo.

For a time, Dar Williams, in grad school. But, really, I was so in love, at the time, that noone was going to compete. So it's appropriate that Dar should sing the single most beautiful break-up song I have ever heard in my life.



Annie Lennox, after I heard this beautiful number on the Red, Hot, and Blue album. This song has been on my heart a million times since I last loved.



And, now, Leslie Feist. Secret Heart knocks me out every single time.



The older I get, the less beauty or brains or any of the rest mean much of anything to me.

It's heart that grabs me. Always has.

Now the question is who has a heart that can grab mine?

That's the answer I'm holding out for.

Pity

Rasmussen Reports: Support for Stimulus Package Falls to 37%

And a dash of humility.

Maybe I underestimate the American people.

Promoting liberal values

Rami Khouri is right. As frustrating as it is for liberal democratic peoples of the world to accept, what will eventually create Arab countries and governments more friendly to liberal values is homegrown efforts that promote the benefits of liberal democracy.

Three demons plague the Arab world

"The stark juxtapositions within the Arab world and the wider Middle East-South Asia region were brought home to me one morning this week in Kuwait, where I am participating in a global gathering that seeks to increase the production of indigenous research in the Middle East in order to better influence policy-making. This noble endeavor contrasts sharply with the morning newspaper headlines of suicide bombings in Somalia and Afghanistan, continued military strikes in Israel and Palestine, and the provincial elections in Iraq that happened during a lull between a string of suicide bombings in that country.

Where, in this range of events, is the center of gravity of the Arab world? It is simultaneously in none and all of these developments, for the Arab world is defined both by rampant violence (home-grown and foreign-instigated) and a deep desire to become democratic, productive, and intellectually and culturally vibrant. A key to moving in that direction is understanding the main constraint and the common denominator in all these events. I believe it is the legacy of autocratic, top-heavy, centralized Arab governments that veer into gentle monarchies on the one hand and hard police states on the other.

The modern Arab security state took hold for good in the early 1970s, and has been challenged only in two ways: by foreign armies that overthrew the Iraqi Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, and by slow disintegration or domestic challenge from within, in places like Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Yemen. No Arab country has had the luxury of evolving normally and slowly into a modern, balanced nation-state defining itself and fully controlling its own resources.

The legacy of security-dominated states where power is concentrated in the hands of a family or small group of soldiers has led to two extremes: an almost total lack of indigenous production of cultural capital and intellectual knowledge (with very, very few exceptions, these mostly in Beirut and Cairo), and the widespread use of violence and terror by opposition forces trying to overthrow the incumbents.

The issue being addressed at the gathering of the Global Development Network I am attending in Kuwait clarifies a root problem with sustained Arab autocracy. The production of knowledge and research that can influence policy-making is defined by deep tensions in the region, because autocracy and the production of knowledge are violently contradictory. Those who hold power for decades on end do not have an interest in prompting free intellectual enquiry and free scientific research.

A sign of the problem is that all the institutions of knowledge production - universities, research centers, media - must be approved and licensed by governments. Most Arab governments do not want too many nimble minds openly enquiring into how society operates and power is exercised. This is why most of the best Arab journalists and researchers live abroad.

Where there has been a positive move forward, such as in some Arab satellite channels that openly debate important public issues, the problem remains that providing citizens with more information and a variety of views does not impact on the political process. Better informed citizens do not become more politically empowered citizens.

The lack of real politics is reflected in the absence of peaceful contestation of power and peaceful and regular transitions from one government to the next. When some Arab governments do change, policies do not, because policy is set by a higher authority than official governments. The change of policy that normally accompanies a change of government is on show quite brilliantly these days in the United States, as many men and women move into high government office from positions in universities, think tanks and research centers.

No such thing happens in Arab countries, because independent research institutions and think tanks remain very few in number, and limited in their resources and impact. This situation can only change through homegrown evolution into more democratic, pluralistic governance systems, working with likeminded partners worldwide. Foreign armies cannot do the job for us. Iraq's transformation remains a fascinating ongoing process whose ultimate outcome remains to be seen. It was probably a one-time phenomenon that reflected a unique post-9/11 moment in America that will not be repeated (and should not be).

For now, cross-fertilization between politics and the world of ideas remains weak in the Arab world, which is one reason why our region counts more indigenous terrorists and exiled intellectuals than it does respected resident researchers and public policy analysts. The fact that so many Arabs and their friends abroad insist on reversing this picture is a reason to remain hopeful, and to keep working hard for change, while rejecting the ways of the three demons that continue to plague us: security state autocrats, local terrorists, and foreign armies."

If liberal democracies want insight into how power corrupts free inquiry, the Arab governments that liberal democrats are so rightly wary of provide an opportunity to see our own illiberal practices in a mirror.

Since the beginning of humanity, every group has wanted to challenge the freedom of their competitors. We are no different. We just pretend to be, most days. And it is the pretending that gets us in trouble.

If liberal democrats want more people to take liberal values more seriously around the globe, we need to let those values spread the way that they do best: by the independent consciences of would-be liberal democrats. Governments must be created that promote liberal values. But they must do so by the most liberal means possible, not by the rationalization of illiberalism, either in liberal democracies or in the rest of the world.

Those with power are perpetually invested in the notion that they have, finally, learned how to exercise it wisely. But the only exercise of power that is consistent with a liberal society is one that takes freedom seriously and respects it as much as possible.

We must practice what we preach. And we must allow citizens in illiberal parts of the world to follow their consciences as well.

Everything else is the long repetition of the same tragic mistake of power over and over and over again.

If people want, by their own self-determination, help in establishing liberal democracies, then military force might be useful. And, of course, military force is always necessary in self-defense (thus the complication of the Israeli-Palestinian situation). Most other uses of military force are rationalizations for power and exactly why we have checks and balances to challenge such abuses.

Were liberal peoples to decide that power, and not freedom, were what animated their values, we would be witnessing the slow, tragic death of liberal values, until we choose otherwise, which we will, I am confident.

Because otherwise liberal values become meaningless.

And that is not a fate that those with liberal commitments could ever take lying down.

Sign a deal

I am very skeptical of a military solution in Israel and Palestine, because of so many of the issues Mr. Pearl cites, here, as much as the issues between the combatants.

But Judea Pearl is fundamentally right about this problem of the rationalization of terror in the West.

Judea Pearl: Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil

This nonsense between Israel and Palestine needs to end. Innocent people dying for land, religious holy sites, and historical bitterness and hostilities is beyond absurd. It is time it ended. It will take an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians for it to work. There would never be political support for a post-WWII Japan or Germany scenario (although I would consider these, at this point, if there was political support and Palestinians will not sign a deal).

Here's the bottom line: sign a fuckin' deal. I'm tired of watching people die for this shit.

If you don't, good luck surviving the bloodbath. You're gonna need it.

Adam Smith, or the next best thing

Davos 2009: Beware the Tide of Groupthink

"We understand some of the factors that contributed to the mess we're now in. But I suspect that -- in part to comfort ourselves, as well as to choose villains, and possibly a few heroes -- we are oversimplifying the story line and assuming we know more than we do. There's still much more to be learned, and the exploration of something so complicated requires a good deal of skepticism and humility.

It's true that many business leaders triggered or at least helped facilitate the wild risk-taking that preceded the collapse; many should be faulted for that. And it's true that regulators and regulations failed to protect the public; they should be faulted for that. It doesn't follow that we should entirely disregard the experience, creativity, and even good will within the private sector and replace the professionals' business judgments with those of Congress and government employees. The fact that smart people were wrong doesn't mean there's no value to brainpower and accumulated knowledge, not to mention innovation. Of course smarter, more effective regulation is needed, but we may be fighting the last war -- and reverting to old, unsuccessful models -- if we conclude that because business hasn't behaved wisely, government necessarily will. We need to be as skeptical of one as of the other, and remain open to meaningful, practical solutions from either sector.

The conventional wisdom at Davos in 2007 was that private equity and hedge fund managers were the new power players and therefore knew more than everyone else. The conventional wisdom in 2008 was that sovereign wealth funds were ascendant and would be exerting enormous influence over global businesses. Are this year's collective certainties any more reliable?"

If there is anything that the last 8 years of politics and this financial crash should have taught us, by now, it is this lesson.

Politics is full of people who are too certain of everything. That is the problem. Adam Smith is the best corrective for this tendency in economic matters. In the meantime, a dash of our own humility might be the next best thing.

Valentines and love songs

Because Valentines is coming up and there's not enough of this stuff on the radio.



Never enough love songs. If you got a sweetie, remember that.