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Good news, lads! Good news! Seen in the checkout mag rack at Ralphs, across from OneWest, Satan’s Favorite Bank in Pasadena, today.
Better watch the Colbert video or you won’t know whether to shit or go blind. But the greatest dubious achievement is this: The modern day Marie Antoinettes who fabricated the Newsweek cover story never get even a faint taste of what everyone else suffers.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Dow Hits 11,000 | ||||
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One of the phenoms of modern journalism is that of the non-scientist reporter who gets to explain stuff about science the rest of us are deemed just too dim to fathom.
They’re ‘explainers’ and it’s not surprising to see how clownish they are at real explaining, although the grand places which employ them pretend not to notice.
Today’s case study is someone named Michael Specter.
This is how CNN describes him:
Michael Specter is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens our Lives.” TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading,” hosts talks on many subjects and makes them available through its Web site …
Wow! The New Yorker! Effin-ay! Specter talks on many subjects and makes them available through his website! That certainly is something not too many people can do!
This is how Specter kicks off his bit at CNN:
American denialism threatens many areas of scientific progress, including the widespread fear of vaccines and the useless trust placed in the vast majority of dietary supplements quickly come to mind.
That’s his lede. Really.
Yes, growing American denialism is a threat. And what does our swell from the New Yorker want to talk about?
The stubborn denial of evolution? The GOP disbelief in global warming, a rejection of fact so profound and rabid it threatens to overturn any rational progress toward mitigating the problem for future generations.
No. Too obvious and dull. Let’s do dietary supplements!
“Nowhere has the screaming been louder, however, than in the fight over how we grow our food,” Specter continues. “If you are brave enough to set a Google Alert for the phrases ‘genetically modified food’ and ‘organic food,’ you will quickly see what I mean.”
DD knows much about denialism. There’s the creationist biochemistry prof from his school, Michael Behe, someone who has so contributed to screwing up national debate on the subject that university’s biology department has to have a disclaimer on its website about him.
There are the Bruce Ivins deniers. Despite the hard work of scientists in the service of the FBI, they still believe the anthrax was made elsewhere than at Fort Detrick. And that it was weaponized.
No amount of exposition, no reading of facts, dissuades them.
And just last week, although it wasn’t science, DD dealt with a Lehigh Valley rock band named Poker Face, one with a website that exists merely to rant about “Jew-suits”, “Zionazis” and how Hitler’s WWII concentration camps weren’t extermination camps, but work camps. They were really big supporters of Republican Ron Paul.
Of course, the most damaging denials are over climate and evolution. And these denialists are the exclusive property of the GOP.
“Denialists replace the open-minded skepticism of science with the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment,” writes Specter.
“It isn’t hard to find evidence: the ruinous attempts to wish away the human impact on climate change, for example. The signature denialists of our time, of course, are those who refuse to acknowledge the indisputable facts of evolution.”
Well, there you go. Specter has mentioned it! Remarkable! But there’s something big missing. Can you spot it?
Yes, I know you can. Nowhere does Specter mention that it’s the Republican Party which is the formost hater of science in the United States!
And there is no mention of the development of the strongly held belief within the GOP that ‘science’ is a political instrument or ideology of the opposition, one to be vigorously defended against wherever it is seen. It is the party of anti-enlightenment, the party of those who have contempt for science because science is a characteristic of the hated ‘elites.’
The GOP is the big tent for heevahavas and it couldn’t be plainer than the nose on your face. And you can’t have a responsibly run country, one that meets its commitments to the world, one that stands for something, when such people control national policy.
In fairness to Specter, perhaps he has written about this in his book and I have just not seen it.
Still — scan that column. After skipping all the real obvious stuff about American denialism on this high-rent real estate, look at what our swell has to say: The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is supporting scientists who are “engineering vitamins and micronutrients into cassava.”
“Who could be opposed to that?” he asks.
Good job. Atta boy!
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American extremism is impossible to satirize. It’s a reality cartoon from which there is no escape. And one standard example is rocker Ted Nugent.
The zinc-plated proof of it is that he was too-too-too-much for even his conservative hometown newspaper, the Waco Tribune, which 86’d him as a columnist last year.
“No more namecalling,” said the newspaper.
Asking Ted Nugent to not namecall is like telling Fido that from now on he will have to defecate in the toilet like the rest of the family.
Anyhoo, for yesterday, colleague Chuck was commissioned to do a short piece for the Rhapsody on-line music site. It was an April Fool’s announcement that Nugent had just announced a run for the presidency:
Angry times call for angry measures, so rock ‘n’ roll’s Angriest Old White Man of all — Ted Nugent — is the first candidate to officially declare presidential ambitions for 2012. “The Nuge,” as his bow-hunting buddies call him, will run on a hybrid True Republican/Tea Party/Michigan Militia ticket, he announced Thursday morning at O-Dark-Thirty while clad in full camouflage gear and straddling a great white buffalo on his homestead not far from the ATF-seized former Branch Dividian compound in Waco, Tex . . . With the Atrocious Theodocious at the helm, the G.O.P. arsenal can now train its full stormtroopin’ firepower on Obamacare Maoists, animal-rights numbnuts, states’ rights deniers, illegal invaders, global-warming charlatans, paycheck-blowtorching Fedzillas, bailout-happy congressional cockroaches overloading America’s credit cards like drunken sailors in a Planet of the Apes whorehouse, sperm-whale-shaped children fed on junk food, smokers who expect the healthy to fix their self-poisoned lungs, human leeches claiming poverty [etc] …
He even got the foaming, shouted into a tape recorder run-on style of Nugent’s columns at Human Events pretty close.
Of course, if you watch Glenn Beck for even fifteen minutes you know everyday is an April Fool. You can’t make up more ridiculous stuff and pass it than he does on a daily basis. And since his large audience believes every word, one sees the problem. There’s no longer any real distinction between telling them a story on April Fool’s day as opposed to any other day of the year.
All these people can’t be nuts. But there is something else that has taken root in them over the last decade of polarization and however one tries to describe it — it points only to an increasingly bleak future. (See Digby today.)
So DD thought it unsurprising when the majority of Rhapsody readers who chose to comment did not actually get the Ted Nugent thing was part of the April Fool’s party. Even when other commenters tried to tell them so. They believed it because they wanted to, it seemed entirely consistent with news they get from their regular sources.
Be sure to read the entire thing here. I’ve posted only two of its ‘better,’ or more discouraging — if you will, bits:
You go for it Ted, We as True-Blooded Americans need someone like you as a FrontMan to start kicking some A– so we and the younger generations to come can enjoy a lifestyle as the Constitution was written. I have no doubt the end is near if we don’t remove these “Fedzillas”. I will support you 100% in any way I can.
I’m 100% disabled, but I make my own way; I don’t give em nuthin and I don’t want nuthin! I’m with ya all the way “Lock n Load”
Woodman
I had planned on voting for Palin, but If Ted runs, he’s got my vote! I’ve never been a big fan of his music, but I agree with his line of thinking!
I’ve got a strange hunch that Obama will not complete his 4 years in office as president.
From the end of 2008 here:
I used to catch my dad reading trash like Mandingo and “Masters of Falconhurst” in the early Seventies, books he’d hide away in a closet whenever the neighbors were about to come by. Although something like [Nugent’s political manifesto] “Ted, White and Blue” is non-fiction, it’s a book of quality in the same way that Fifties-made fiction for white men about sex between plantation owners and slaves, fisticuffs and torture made for books of quality.
Approximating $25/hardback, Regnery … made about $600,000 gross on “Ted, White & Blue.”
Sales of 24,000 would have merited Nugent being summarily dropped by a major label in the Seventies.
Another publication for right-wing nutjobs feigning sanity, the City Journal, featured an article by a conservative book reviewer who admitted to some heartburn over the success of “Ted, White and Blue.”
“William Regnery once told his publisher son, ‘If you ever begin to make any money in that business you are going into, you can be pretty sure that you are publishing the wrong kind of books,” writes the reviewer.
“Regnery is now highly profitable, and the elder Regnery’s words loom over such titles as Chuck Norris’s Black Belt Patriotism and Ted Nugent’s Ted, White, and Blue.”
Ted Nugent — from the archives.
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People wonder if the US has lost its mojo.
Well, yes. Yes it has.
There is daily proof, often from the grassroots. Here is some, beyond satire — school science projects in Delaware.
“I surveyed like 50 people and asked them if they had ever been discriminated at an amusement park because they were too short or overweight, and there actually are a lot of people who are too overweight for rides,” she said. “There were like 30 of them who were too big for at least one ride.”
Some people have to stand in line in the sun for a couple of hours before they find out they are too big to fit. Having adjustable belts could rectify that, [someone named] Meekins said.
“I don’t understand why every theme park can’t do that,” [the person named Meekins] said.
Or, there’s this:
Schoolmate Ben Ross also chose a summertime subject for his senior project: “Shark Repellent Technology.”
“I found out what sharks are allergic to is magnets. Not necessarily allergic to, but most sensitive to,” he said. “Sharks have what’s called electric sense in the tip of their nose. That’s what helps them attack prey. I figured I could make buoys that could line the shore. Then I could place an electromagnetic pulse generator on each buoy to keep sharks away during the summer.
“I figured I could turn it off from dusk to dawn, because that’s when sharks normally feed,” he added.
Well, other than they don’t really work there’s the thing that lotsa people often swim in the ocean at night.
Anti-shark electromagnetic pulse rays. This is what it’s come to?
Here.
What’s the matter with a chemical volcano , trial and error composition of gunpowder, or learning what a guinea and feather tube illustrates?
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There are fewer more poisonous articles than those which lash nabbed terrorists together in search of a trend or a growing problem.
“Recent cases show challengeds of US terrorists,” reads the latest, from Associated Press.
Reporters Eileen Sullivan and Devlin Barrett lash together a collection of designated bad people in the news and consults a variety of experts to read the future. The future, in these stories, being always rotten and getting worse. No context in terms of what problems the US faces by comparison, or the amount of miscellaneous mayhem that goes down every month on US streets, is furnished.
It reads:
One was a drywall contractor and father, another a petite woman who cared for the elderly, another a U.S. military officer. The most alarming thing about a string of recently arrested terror suspects is that they are all Americans.
And there’s the crazy guy who shot and wounded guards to the entrance of the Pentagon and the man who wandered around as a construction worker nobody at nuclear plants in the US and then went off to crawl the dunes of Yemen for years. The crazy kid is left out because he was not a Muslim. Same for the poor man’s Ted Kaczinski who flew his airplane into an IRS building. And the deadliest bioterrorist in history, against which individuals like Jihad Jane seem silly — Bruce Ivins — is also not here.
Just not the right religion.
And of the terrorists selected for this story, only the US Army-minted Nidal Hasan proved truly capable — killing thirteen.
One might venture to say the number still seems quite small in a country as diverse and vast as the US, particularly when considering the poor state of mind imposed on nearly everyone by current economic conditions.
” ‘These cases, [one counterterrorism expert] said, ‘underscore the constantly evolving nature of the threat we face,'” reads the AP piece.
Another way to look at it, logically, is to see that it’s a rather bad argument for endless war and increasingly oppressive snooping, vigilance and intolerance. And that next to everyday problems like rising unemployment, broken government, and the failure of the United States to effectively educate and lead as befits a country of its history and size, these are only small annoyances which — by their exaggeration — point to a self-imposed increasingly bleak future.
A drift into terrorism is “a combination of psychology, sociology and people who, just for cultural reasons, gravitate” [to Islamic extremism] … We can’t assume we’ve got months and years,” Michael Chertoff opines.
Chertoff can always be counted on to reliably deliver the noxious disguised as wisdom. Just last month he was part of a program which CNN ran repeatedly over the course of one weekend, a feature presentation selling the idea that cyberattacks will deliver the new WMDs.
Chertoff’s observation on US terrorists implies one ought to take up the very bad idea that we need to quickly develop the right amount of observation and surveillance, marked up against a scientifically approved list of social character markers, so that these troublesome people can be ferreted out sooner — before too many of them show up and the streets run red with blood.
I know there are more of them out there,” says someone named Jack Tomarchio, another former Dept. of Homeland Security employee.
In these stories the most toxic quote always seems to be delivered by the ubiquitous Bruce Hoffman, a “terrorism expert at Georgetown University.”
“The spate of cases over the past two years shows the conventional wisdom about who is a terrorist is dangerously outdated,” the AP says Hoffman informs.
“There really is no profile of a terror suspect; the profile is broken … It’s women as well as men, it’s lifelong Muslims as well as converts, it’s college students as well as jailbirds.”
These words work to create the impression that terrorism is sort of like a hard to diagnose disease or a trace poisonous gas, floating through the air, capable of infecting or tainting anyone at anytime depending on a panoply of inner weaknesses. And that the only way to stop it is to go to the source and deliver a regular prescription of root terrorism-killing antibiotic or antidote — the burning and stamping out of Muslims who look at the US with anger from other countries.
It is the most meretricious thing, a prescription for endless war, more threats to blow out of proportion next to more urgent problems diminishing the quality of life and blighting futures nationwide. Except for those in the business of explaining and countering terrorism.
Today, this in from Yahoo News on absurd potential changes in public school history textbooks for Texas. The reason being, as goes Texas, so everyone else must suffer equally.
A greater emphasis on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.??? This means not only increased favorable mentions of Schlafly, the founder of the antifeminist Eagle Forum, but also more discussion of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association and Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America.
One would be hard-pressed to name one substantial thing the Heritage Foundation has contributed to the US.
Paul Revere’s? Uh-uh. Great inventors? No. Scientists? No. Great advancers and defenders of civil rights and the rule of law? No. Healers and philanthropists? No. Eradicators of smallpox? No. Discoverers of electricity? No. Great astronauts of our time or first makers of the electric guitar? No and no. Arms controllers and peace workers? No. House of Nobel laureates? No. Invented the Internet? Sadly, no. Heroes of bloody Tarawa or the Meuse-Argonne? No.
Haters of homosexuals. Yes. EMP Crazies? Yes. Despisers of Democrats? Yes. Upholders of old-right-wing-white-guys political club? Yes. Dumping ground and sounding board for out-of-power GOP pols? Yes. Bomb Iran lobby central. Check. Advocates of using lasers to battle pirates? Yes!
A reduced scope for Latino history and culture. A proposal to expand such material in recognition of Texas’ rapidly growing Hispanic population was defeated in last week’s meetings—provoking one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out in protest. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” she said of her conservative colleagues on the board. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
It’s a damn shame when the last and only way to learn about the intertwine of American and Mexican culture — like if you don’t live in California or Arizona — is through the record catalog of ZZ Top. I heard it, I heard it, I heard it on the X!
A more positive portrayal of Cold War anticommunism. Disgraced anticommunist crusader Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator censured by the Senate for his aggressive targeting of individual citizens and their civil liberties on the basis of their purported ties to the Communist Party, comes in for partial rehabilitation. The board recommends that textbooks refer to documents published since McCarthy’s death and the fall of the Soviet bloc that appear to show expansive Soviet designs to undermine the U.S. government.
Can we have a shout out for Roy Cohn, too, while you’re at it?
Language that qualifies the legacy of 1960s liberalism. Great Society programs such as Title IX—which provides for equal gender access to educational resources—and affirmative action, intended to remedy historic workplace discrimination against African-Americans, are said to have created adverse “unintended consequences??? in the curriculum’s preferred language.
Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin …
How Calvinist. Stoning should have never fallen out of favor.
[The] recommendations include an entry listing Confederate General Stonewall Jackson as a role model for effective leadership, and a statement from Confederate President Jefferson Davis accompanying a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
A recommendation to include country and western music among the nation’s important cultural movements. The popular black genre of hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.
To DD this is more richly amusing than dismaying.
In education, we could get exactly what we’ve been working to deserve. If one believes in a God, he apparently has a very finely developed dry sense of humor.
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Good news, lads! Good news! Between Wall Street and the way things are done here, the US is getting set to march proudly into the future. Home-schooling for everyone! Fire more of those slackers with three months off in the summertime.
“The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment,” Brooks said to applause from the standing-room-only crowd.
“And now the public education system is aiding and abetting in the economic demise of our school district,” she said. “It is shameful and sinful.”
Under the approved plan, teachers at six other low-performing schools will be required to reapply for their jobs, and the district will try to sell its downtown central office. It also is expected to cut about 700 of the district’s 3,000 jobs, including about 285 teachers.
“The Kansas City school board voted … to close” fifty percent of its schools to avert bankruptcy it sez.
More than a year ago I coined a phrase that seems to have made its way into the econolexicon; writing about how cutbacks at the state and local level would tend to undermine fiscal stimulus at the federal level, I said that we had fifty Herbert Hoovers.
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In today’s New York Times Sunday magazine, from an article on what makes good teachers, a remarkable technique is cited:
In Cold Call, No. 22, stolen from Harvard Business School, which Lemov attended, the students don’t raise their hands — the teacher picks the one who will answer the question. Lemov’s favorite variety has the teacher ask the question first, and then say the student’s name, forcing every single student to do the work of figuring out an answer.
All the techniques are meant to be adaptable by anyone. To illustrate cold-calling in Boston, he showed clips of four very different teachers: Mr. Rector, whose seventh graders stand up next to their chairs as he paces among them, lobbing increasingly difficult geometry problems; Ms. Lofthus, who leans back in a chair, supercasual, and smiles warmly when she surprises one second grader by calling on him twice in a row …
Taken from the Harvard Business School, huh?
DD can’t recall being in public school in Pine Grove, PA, in the Sixties and Seventies where teachers didn’t randomly call on kids.
The New York Times Magazine is for upper middle class snobs.
From my perspective it publishes a certain flavor of pap.
And one can always count on a reinvention of the obvious.
For example, I grew up surrounded by teachers, like many Americans. My mother was a teacher at Pine Grove Area Middle School. It was the only job she ever held.
She was a reading instructor. And she hated reading.
I never saw her read a book in her free time at home, ever. She never read for pleasure. Not once — in my memory.
If you read this blog for even 20 seconds, you know DD is a reader.
When I went off to grad school in the late Seventies, my mother took books I’d accumulated over the years but could not take with me, purloining them for her class at Pine Grove Area High School.
Not liking reading, she had no books of her own. To make herself look real, she had to take my clothes.
Was my mother a reading teacher? I have no idea. I had her as my fifth grade teacher for almost a full year in Pine Grove Elementary. It’s a given that a kid ought not to have one of his parents as teacher considering the temptation to always embarrass the child as some manner of good, bad or indifferent example. I can’t recall a single uplifting thing about the experience. However, it was only fifth grade and I knew how to read.
My mom is used here, not only out of spite, but as fairly average proof of the obvious — that teaching schools often turn out those who may not be the best or who frequently don’t even particularly care about the subject they’ve chosen to be certified in. And I am certain a good portion of people my age could still point out public school teachers –ticket-punchers — who mystified because of the obvious dislike or disinterest which they held for the subjects they were earning their money on.
My mother was certified to teach reading by Millersville State Teachers College.
MSTC was a school that required liberal arts and ed students to take three units of music composition.
You’ll recall DD is a rocker and a guitar player, forced to hear his mom’s feeble efforts at composing some fragment of a tune for the course, after being told numerous times that playing the electric guitar or Iggy & the Stooges’ Raw Power too loud was Satan’s work. The class’s instructor issued a pitch pipe to every student.
If you need a pitch pipe, you’re beyond help, tone deaf.
Learning this rubbish had nothing to do with being a teacher. It was just someone’s idea on how education majors needed to be made to jump through various hoops to get their licenses validated.
When I eventually came back from Lehigh University with a Ph.D. in chemistry and before going off to do postdoctoral work at the PSU School of Medicine, I subbed at Pine Grove Area to earn money. This was a mistake.
I started as a chemistry instructor in the high school from which I graduated. This worked under the assumption, now shown to be stupid by US life, that people trained to be expert in something for over half a decade are actually well-trained experts:
I was the most highly qualified instructor Pine Grove ever had. I was quickly pulled off this, the rationale being that I was likely to destroy the reputation and credibility of the high school chem teacher who I was standing in for in front of his students.
The man had been one of Pine Grove Area’s shop teachers.
That made sense.
Don’t overexpose the kids to the Ph.D. in chemistry because it would make the shop teacher’s work harder. Y’know, just in case the young people might harbor an interest in science or something.
So I was then set to teaching algebra at the middle school.
Pine Grove’s schools did have many good teachers. Many of those I could mention are now dead. They ran the gamut from those who had tyrannical discipline — good “classroom management skills” — to those who had no discipline at all.
There was not a common set of features as to what determined a ‘good teacher’ among them. It was governed by circumstance and serendipity, plus a pool that generally was of much higher quality, in terms of raw education, than what is ‘average’ in the country now. Odds were good then that you’d get regularly better than an average cut of person.
And, of course, every classroom wasn’t a pail full of fail, needing daily heroic interventions to be rescued, coming in.
I give “Doug Lemov” — the person who’s techniques and methods are featured in the New York Times magazine — five years or less before he’s thrown to the devil and the merciless statistics of the FUBAR American system.
DD was directed into science by Pine Grove Area High School teachers from wide curricula. This must still happen but one only sees it as a sort of man-bites-dog story in today’s news. It is a great disservice to a US system of education less and less can remember.
Between then and now the country changed radically for the worse.
Among the many unintended consequences: The destruction of public schooling, to be replaced by a never-ending string of ‘problem-solvers’ haplessly trying to regain what never needed losing.
God bless my old teachers at PGAHS. I was rather lucky, it seems. Spanning hard science to athletics to high math, they were teachers I didn’t always like but who I always believed in, people who inspired the young through collegial wisdom and basic human decency.
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If someone had asked me in 1985, the year I earned my Ph.D. in chemistry, if I thought the US would be a profoundly more backward country in 2010 I’d have likely thought they were nuts.
Today, in a front page story at the New York Times, on the unending labors of heartland US religious freaks and zealots to throw down accepted science:
The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.
A better editor or journalist might have written the second sentence this way:
By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution absurdly argue they are championing academic freedom in general.
Another way to put it is that they are ‘bundling their flat-earther disbeliefs.’ And as usual, it’s solely the property of the current Republican party and Evangelical Christian religion, the American Taliban.
The Discovery Institute makes an appearance in the Times story, a fringe agency that has continuously fought to have creationism taught in biology class. Quite naturally, it has also latched onto global warming denial as a convenience.
It again reminds me of Lehigh University’s predicament: Professor Michael Behe, advertised as a senior fellow at Discovery.
Behe arrived at Lehigh through vetting by its Department of Chemistry as I was leaving. The search committee, of which my advisor was a member, thought he was grand.
At the time, Behe was either keeping his opinions about evolution to himself or perhaps no one was really paying attention.
In the mide-Nineties, DD even recalls a hastily put together alumni letter issued by the same department lauding Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, for landing on bestseller lists. This only demonstrated that someone rather benighted in the place had not actually read it.
By the time Lehigh — a school that prided itself on its science and engineering curricula — got its act together with regards to Behe, he’d done all the damage he could.
Writing editorial features for the New York Times and other places on intelligent design — evolution deniers code for creationism — he had generally contributed to the casting of the impression in the lay public that there was significant scientific doubt about evolution.
Behe also had tenure at Lehigh.
And the only thing the school’s biology department could do was post a really late-to-the-party disclaimer on him.
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Little Tommy Friedman discovers — probably for the hundred or more time — LAX is a rotten place to be.
I was traveling via Los Angeles International Airport — LAX — last week. Walking through its faded, cramped domestic terminal, I got the feeling of a place that once thought of itself as modern but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. In some ways, LAX is us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification. They save, invest and build. We spend, borrow and patch.
Whenever looking up at the intellectual giants in the sky I never have to strain to see little Tommy jetting about the country (or world) to interview some really big corporate swell. Some person whose boots are always to be licked, be they a wizard sipping strawberry lemonade with Friedman on a patio at Caltech or a king of the corporate world, for it is these people who are packed with wisdoms the rest of us shits cannot fathom or appreciate.
I had a chance last week to listen to Paul Otellini, the chief executive of Intel, the microchip maker and one of America’s crown jewel companies. Otellini was in Washington to talk about competitiveness at Brookings and the Aspen Institute. At a time when so much of our public policy discussion is dominated by health care and bailouts, my public service for the week is to share Mr. Otellini’s views on start-ups.
Yes, I think we can all agree, Intel is quite the start-up. And who better to hear such a man leader than more wonderful and smart people at Brookings or the Aspen Institute, places where the rest of us are properly forbidden to go.
You can guess what comes next.
The same old story: America costs too much compared to China, a real laugher if you’ve been reading any stories about the many medium-sized towns in America emptying out and collapsing as a result of our current national sickness.
What Americans aren’t is too expensive. It’s just damn inconvenient to use them after their wages have been compressed for two decades, because the Chinese are still cheaper and one doesn’t have to worry about pollution, really squandering energy, the occasional pesky union, or dumping hydrofluoric acid into the back lot in plain sight until the silica in the earth catches on fire.
Give us more R&D tax credit, from one of the most successful companies in the world, says the guy who runs it.
Would someone tamp a cigarette out in his eye?
If the government just boosted the research and development tax credit by 5 percent and lowered corporate taxes, argued Otellini, and we “started one or two more projects in companies around the country that made them more productive and more competitive, the government’s tax revenues are going to grow.??? With the generous research and development tax credits and lower corporate taxes they receive, Intel’s chief competitors in South Korea basically have “zero cost of money,??? said Otellini. Intel can compete against that with superior technology, but many other U.S. firms can’t.
We must eat our moldy peas “because smart, skilled labor is everywhere now. Intel can thrive today — not just survive, but thrive — and never hire another American.”
To change this, of course, wealthy corporations must receive more tax credits, government incentives and rewards. So while you are eating your crappy-tasting peas this year and the next, implies little Tommy, you must hope our government smartens up enough to realize it must give much more to those who have everything before it trickles down to those of us grubbing around in the dirt.
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