Challenges that confront and confound efforts to bring about institutional change
June 7, 2009
by Robert A. Letcher, PhD
“Is there anything in all of that to suggest a way forward?” We! contributor Jerry Lobdill posed this question to me in his comment #20 of 25 pursuant to the conversation following my “infrastructure” essay. I had just mentioned Mancur Olson’s “logic of collective action”. This essay responds to Jerry’s questions by interpreting two anecdotes through Olson’s logic: both anecdotes involve short-sightedness, and in very different ways the US Postal Service. One anecdote involves my own personal short-sightedness, dating back to the mid-1980s when I applied “technology assessment” consulting job with the then US Post Office,. The other dates back to early February 2009 and involves the Postmaster General’s proposed remedy $3-4 billion operating loss incurred this year for the now US Postal Service’s.
Back in the mid-1980s, I applied for a job that would have involved me in helping the US Post Office prepare itself for the digital age. Importantly, although I didn’t realize it at the time, “prepare” was to be understood in a very broad sense. As I thought of myself as being a broad thinker, I thought I was a shoe-in for the job—but I was wrong! I let my own preferences constrain my imagination. For example, I loved to handwrite letters with my fountain pen. My aesthetics blocked my view of the future of e-mail, and that limited my preparation for the interview – and I didn’t get the job. As I’ve since allowed myself to learn, “digital” has expanded far beyond e-mail in its implications for me and for the Postal Service. Read more
General Dave’s Map Shows Human Terrain Really Continues East into Afghanistan and Pakistan!
May 16, 2009
by George Thomas
Bi-products of unwise foreign policy have afflicted us before, and they will probably afflict us again. Such is the stability of cultural values and, generally speaking, today’s Neoconservatives have never accepted that fact. So many believe we can construct Disneyland in far-off lands for our entertainment.
Sometimes we make blanket condemnation of everyone involved, one way or other, in the Iraq-Afghanistan-BushWar mess. This is not particularly helpful. It’s even wrong, so wrong. Take for example the normal-guy and gal ignoramuses caught up and eventually charged in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. They reaped the most damaging negative sanctions, even though they held relatively little responsibility. Policy makers, as we speak, remain on the lam so far.
I can’t say enough about the callow, naive folks in charge of much leadership and responsibility within many military organizations. Sometimes training and education include the mistakes made early in a career. But when these mistakes become really, really public and visible, and become the main point of contention in international brouhaha, it can scar a young, naive – let’s face it, stupid, callow mind well into adulthood, regardless of whether that mind ran like a well-oiled engine of genius proportions. Read more
Words Are Important
February 17, 2009
by Jerry Lobdill
Words are important. That was never more apparent than in the 2004 Democratic primary race for the presidential nomination. George Lakoff tutored us all in this concept in his writings about framing. But we didn’t learn our lesson very well, it seems. We are now being bombarded with frames that bid for our belief like, perhaps, never before, and we seem to just let them stand.
A frame is a clever use of subliminally lurking concepts that have somehow been vetted erroneously by our conscious thought and which no longer possess nuances that we recognize as needing to be considered each time we hear the words of the frame. For example, take the word, “freedom”. I could write an entire essay on what a fine word this is for those who need to frame an odious proposal in such a way that we will buy it. But the point is that words like this stimulate warm positive feelings in us that lull us into accepting whatever else is said. Read more
A Way to End Partisan Gridlock in Washington
February 7, 2009
by Robert A. Letcher, PhD
With every passing second, I find myself growing increasingly upset over gridlock in Washington. I’m tired of Nero McConnell fiddling the same song while so many jobs burn as Nero W fiddled while he was starting the fire. And I am seriously bummed that most of the current Nero’s helpers are members of what more and more people have begun to refer to as a “rump regional” party. I mean, it’s bad enough to get your—ummm—rump burned, but it’s even worse to have it done by a rump full of Neroes, especially when that big, fat, cigar smoking, oxycontin popping, Rush of a Nero is playing first fiddle.
I have an idea about what to, but I’ll have to write it indirectly, as I am afraid of violating the Sedition Act if I were to write it explicitly. Fortunately, I have three personal stories to help describe what I have in mind. Read more
Something for Flat-Earth Religionists to Ponder
February 7, 2009
by Robert A. Letcher, PhD
[Author’s note: Reading George Thomas’ recent essay on two topics that the recently departed President left me thinking of as having nothing substantive to do with each other: evolution and Texas reminded me of an essay I wrote four years ago. My essay responded to a national effort led by—if I recall correctly—a person whose last name was Horowitz. In Ohio, Horowitz’s flat-earth program was being pushed through the Legislature by State Senator Mumper. The following is a verbatim transcription of a letter I wrote to the Editor of The Columbus Dispatch.]
To the Editor:
Subject: “BILL COULD LIMIT OPEN DEBATE AT COLLEGES: Lawmaker says profs are pushing agendas” (published: January 27, 2005)
History provides another “other side” to the debate over Senate Bill 24, the misleadingly titled “academic bill of rights for higher education”. Consider…
There was a time when most people thought Earth was flat… Until the 1500s, most people believed that Earth was the center of the universe, and Copernicus was excommunicated for arguing that Earth revolved around the Sun… Read more
A Weak Debate over “Weaknesses” in Science
January 26, 2009
by George Thomas
Newspapers all over carried a story on January 22, about the Texas Board of Education debate over one line in the official science curriculum. One side insists that Texas add verbiage about “weaknesses” in scientific theory — and of course this political issue involves evolution. The other side argues for keeping the verbiage about testing hypotheses and theories on the basis of empirical evidence.
The board, padded with Republican governor Rick Perry’s appointees, continues with fruitless squabbling over semantics. What’s conspicuously absent from this debate, as covered in the New York Times (”In Texas, a Line in the Curriculum Revives Evolution Debate”, Jan. 22), is the nature of science education itself. If well-taught, science education stresses skepticism, critical thinking, and the search for measurable evidence to support or refute hypotheses, modify and strengthen theory, and thereby advance scientific knowledge. Then, if another set of researchers can take the same question and apply similar measurable data to it, and come up with the same thing, the theory is strengthened. Read more
When Greed Triumphs and Individualism Runs Amok
January 16, 2009
by LINDA HUNT BECKMAN
I grew up as a proud New Yorker. It was in the Bronx, but in those days we regarded ourselves as New Yorkers in every sense, even though we had to take the D train to Manhattan. Once “downtown,” we enjoyed the museums, ice-skating in Central Park, theater (not prohibitively expensive then), the automat, and just sharing the exhilarating streets of the city with our fellow New Yorkers.
As working class kids, we went to public school, which seemed up to the task, and after high school to one of the branches of what later became the City University. At colleges like Hunter, tuition was free (though there was a fee of $24 a semester). My dad worked for the United Parcel Service, was a fierce union supporter (a Teamster); my mom a housewife who had joined the workforce at 15. We never felt poor, even though we lived in a one-bedroom apartment and, indeed we were not, as my father’s wages rose steadily as a result of the prosperity of the times and of belonging to an effective if not always squeaky-clean union. Read more
Childhood
January 1, 2009
by Sam Friedman
When I was
ten and reading Tolstoy,
and Dostoevsky,
and Gamow’s books for the populace
on number
theory and the birth of stars,
I worried
about Russia
and visualized
the future days
when the
Bomb would fall—
and it bred
in me a love for life Read more
Valkyrie Reviews Panned
December 27, 2008
by George Thomas
I don’t get it. Reviewers in both the New York Times and the Austin American Statesman panned Valkyrie. I don’t know what movie Chris Garcia screened for his review (Statesman, Dec. 25, D-8), based on actual events of 1944. Col. Claus von Stauffenberg led the last of several attempts on Adolph Hitler’s life, failing six months before the Reich’s defeat and Hitler’s suicide.
To read the review, one might suspect that Garcia palled around quite a lot with early skeptics in Germany who feared the film would not live up to an adequate portrayal of the German Resistance. “Cruise…plays a tin soldier with an unfashionable eye patch…. Shellacked in martial decorum, the actor is ready for duty, sir, all range and individuality squeezed out of him. If only he could loosen that high choking collar. But then his halo might slide off.” Read more
Food for Fought - How to win the battle against overpopulation
December 25, 2008
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
Back about 35 years ago, a science fiction writer named Philip José Farmer wrote a novella called “Seventy Years of Decpop.” The premise was that a mad-scientist sort released an aerosol that blanketed the entire earth and rendered 99.999% of humanity sterile. The story covered, in jumps, the seventy years following this action, at the end of which humanity’s population was reduced to some 200 million (from nearly five billion at the beginning), and was looking forward to a bright new future on a clean earth with lots of resources and incredible high tech. Read more
-
Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm
-
How Do You Like Deregulation Now? graphic politics by Dicky Neely
