Tag Archives: perfection

Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2021

THE VELOCITY OF CARBON

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Masking won’t help…

In terms of money, economists measure the health or activity of an economy using “velocity” of money in an economy.  There are a thousand measuring tools measuring the same parameter, whether it’s investment dollars generating new production or a change in policy like a tax cut or increase that either releases money to or sucks money from, an economy.  Supply-chain snags can certainly reduce the velocity of money; building road, rail or air infrastructure can speed it up.  If you’re seeking real understanding of this kind of velocity you’ll have to ask someone else: I know only how rapidly $20 bills move out of my pocket these days, converting themselves to a few coins in a blink of an eye.

Let’s talk about the climate… a place where velocity is never discussed as a “good.”  It’s always “bad,” and it’s everybody’s fault, which means “climate change” by today’s – or this morning’s – definition, is going to increase a lot of financial velocities while slowing or stopping others.  These effects will affect everybody and his or her $20’s like we’ve never seen.  In any case, the velocity of “change” in the Earth’s climate seems to always be too fast, potentially the end of humanity, often in a very small numbers of years, and the result of conservative politics.  That is, unless the “conservative” in question is neither European nor English-speaking.  The Earth knows.

Very quickly, climate change discussion centers on carbon: carbon dioxide, carbon-based fuels, “carbon-neutrality” by 2030, 2050 or next week.  Anyway, the other day, at a point when no other useful actions were possible, Prudence led to an interesting question about climate that we’ve never heard asked: “What is the velocity of carbon in the Earth’s climate-economy?”  And this will be followed in most people’s minds with, “What the Hell is wrong with this person?  There’s no such thing as carbon velocity.”  Ahhh, but there is, my friend… there is.

The Earth has about as much carbon on it as it has ever had.  A lot of it is buried deep underground, but a lot more is in the biosphere between, say, 20 feet below ground and, maybe, 200 feet above ground, although with 1,000-foot high rise buildings we’re certainly stretching those limits.  Then, there’s the ocean – definitely part of the biosphere, so… cripes!  We live in a gigantic biosphere!  And, it’s carbon-based, which is to say that molecules with carbon in them are the fundamental building-blocks of life, including seaweed and us.

Now, the CLIMATE we all live in has been “changing” for billions of years, which is a very good thing.  The simplest example of a climate-change “good” is the endings of ice-ages, of which there have been several.  Humans were impacted by only the last couple of them: they’re not very frequent, thank goodness, and the impacts of the last one are still with us, even being enjoyed by us, like the Great Lakes, Cape Cod and so forth.

For the average ersatz vaccine-loving supplicant to climate-change fears, the movement of carbon from safety underground to horrific, polluting, crime above ground is a cumulative, onrushing white-man-caused threat to life.  Why, the USGS (U. S. Geologic Survey) tells us that upwards of 36.5 TRILLION TONS of carbon spewed (probably, “spewed”) into the atmosphere worldwide in 2019!  That is a hu-u-u-u-ge number, but there are lots of huge numbers involved when measuring worldwide things.  A small amount was in the form of methane, other ethanes, ordinary “anes” and the majority of it from CO2 which is a lot heavier than average, breathable air.  Fortunately for all concerned, plants “breathe” CO2 in and oxygen, O2 out.

“Oh, my Gawd!  Everybody stop breathing!”  Also, stop mowing your lawn, heating your homes, cooking, refrigerating, making plastics, driving cars and trucks and, for God’s sake, stop flying back and forth around the world on those terrible jet planes… just stay home.

Quite a bit of CO2 derives from cute little woodland creatures that, since Walt Disney gave them names, we must love and protect, along with every other sort of elk, antelope, bison, bear, reindeer, POLAR bears, for heaven’s sake, whales, dolphins, dogs, cats, protected tigers, elephants and, of course those evil cattle who do little but eat and fart, don’t you know?

Still more comes from rotting vegetation in the normal cycle of plant life and the bacteria and bugs, termites and ants that live off of the trillions of tons of IT.  Government types, those who really like to apply rules for living to most everyone else – rules derived from superior intellects like theirs – hold, without fail, concepts of perfection for humanity and how humanity should live, among which are rules against eating animals that Disney may have named or which provide substantial amounts of nutrition for sub-perfect humans, nutrition those same humans may be “taught” to live better without.

Just the same, carbon in various chemical combinations moves into and out of the atmosphere at rates that could be measured, extrapolated, closely estimated, and measured again for more or less controllable impacts humans might want to have.  Except no one asks the velocity question.  There are no grant millions for calculating how fast carbon churns in what kinds of weather, over what kinds of land or waters. Or, in what levels of the atmosphere.  Grants are plentiful if researchers – or advocates – can add to climate panic; only a level of panic enables political control, after all, which is a large part of making grant monies available: find out something that makes specific political or taxation controls possible.  If you find out something else, give it a good leaving-alone.

No matter how carbon moves around, whether from volcanoes seen and unseen, or burning forests to yield cropland, or propelling planes at 35,000 feet, or burning trash at ground level, moving trucks and things, or, pushing ships with both vital and frivolous container loads, joy-riding passengers or militaries setting off to war, not all climatological consequences are of the same value.  Some are just plain pollution, spreading dirt where we live in ways that we could control if the value were better understood.  Others are “necessary evils,” tolerated, temporarily, for lack of cleaner alternatives.  Over the past 130 years, say, humans have quite consistently moved away from “dirty” ways to improve life and living standards, towards much cleaner ones.  Only a relative handful of people on Earth burn cattle dung to keep warm – too many, and a very controllable problem – but a handful.

Cars and trucks get phenomenally better mileage compared to 40 or 50 years ago, as do even those jet planes at 35,000 feet.  More and more electricity is generated without coal, and “scrubbers” can mitigate particulates and sulphur compounds, which are actually bad to have in the air, along with some CO2, making even coal much cleaner.  New buildings are built to be far more thermally efficient.  New lighting and electronics are far more efficient, too.  Watch for the impact of solid-state batteries in making almost everything electrical more efficient, including cars and trucks.

The point is, CO2 in the air is not, per se, a bad thing, but if you ask the average, fearful, climate-change crybaby what he or she is afraid of and the answer will be that we have to stop spewing CO2 or else the world is going to end… possibly even before illegal aliens and polar bears get the vote!

In a sense, we are constantly reminded that the CO2 from last year, and the year before that, and before that, and ever since the first automobile burned gasoline, is hanging over our heads ready to destroy the PLANET, including my daughter’s recycling science project!  All it will take to tip the balance is for a few more Trump voters to drive through drive-up windows for a cheeseburger and some Freedom Fries, when they could have had a hand-picked kale salad.  The time to act is now, now, now!

But it isn’t, is it?  The CO2 building up in the atmosphere, I mean.  It churns around, dissolving into bodies of water, like oceans, of which there are a lot, and if not dissolved right away, generally CO2 sinks down to near ground level because it’s quite a bit heavier than air.  This, alone, is a good thing, because that’s where most plants that we can eat, grow.  Whoever thought of this system was a very smart Dude.

Mankind, however, is both brilliant and ignorant, wise and foolish, scientific and superstitious, and clean and dirty.  We used to think that God had provided convenient sewers in the form of rivers, but we have become smarter about that foolishness – we could be and will be much smarter about that.  We used to think the atmosphere was a big river to dump effluents into, too, but we’re coming around quickly on that foolishness.  Politically, however, we are being propelled to ever greater foolishness over CO2, not because we can “save the planet” and keep ocean levels and weather right where WE want them by limiting it, but so that we can, politically, control how people live, prodding them ever closer to the perfection models government-types have clung-to since Miss Hannigan’s 4th grade terrarium with the turtle in it.

Just like fraudulent COVID-19 statistics, if the government and compliant media focus on single numbers, a lot of fear can be ginned up, quickly modifying sovereign individuals’ actions, beliefs and willing abandonment of freedoms… like the number of COVID “cases,” as they “spike” from time to time.  Most are simple positive results from testing, and what they have detected are remnants of spike proteins, mostly not actual infections.  If you run enough cycles of PCR tests you can detect a lot of “cases.”  Everyone can be made to change his life through the police-power of the state or municipality because of largely meaningless numbers like these.  Fixating on how much CO2 goes into the atmosphere is much the same.  That we should be happy it’s there, for the most part, is never part of the news.  Do you have any concept of where we’d be without global warming?

Respecting our home planet by not dirtying its air and water is a noble thing to do – not from baseless fears but from purpose.

There are satellites watching the whole earth, now, measuring CO2 for places where it comes from and goes to at different times of year.  These are fine data to have and will, little by little, improve recommendations for spewing less CO2 .  Which we probably should… spew less, that is.  But we never will, or never will fast enough, if we don’t adopt a worldwide perspective on being clean or dirty in how we live, prosper and move ourselves and things about, starting with how cleanly we can generate electricity.  This will have to include nuclear power at its best, for urban areas, and solar collection and energy storage at its best in rural areas.  Cleaning up the planet need not, and should not require forcing people into cities, for example, or forcing ever tighter regulation on freedom (quite the opposite) or directing whole economies from a dictatorial, tight-control top.

It does involve honest education and a recognition that fouling where we live is anathema to both God and to humanity.  Economic mobility is prime in terms of balancing needs and wants and increasing qualities of life.  That comes from freedom.  Any “plan” for defeating – pick any – COVID, inflation, climate change, crime, ignorance, poverty in every other country in the world, that also includes restricting personal freedom or sovereignty, is the absolutely wrong move to accept.  A political party that identifies with restricting freedom and which villainizes those who don’t, does not deserve any American’s vote.

Culture, Education

Little Things Mean a Lot

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When Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York in December of 1994, having been a prosecutor, he instituted a policing philosophy that gave importance to “the little things.”  These were little things like broken windows, littering, vandalism, petty thefts, truancy and the like.  He’d seen the cumulative degradation that took place in neighborhoods’ and even individuals’ characters, when small deviations from decency went un-chastised and uncorrected.  The next offense, public or private, singular or neighborhood, would be just a bit worse, and on and on, until the new normal became neighborhoods where good people put themselves in “jail” for safety, while feral criminals held sway “in the streets.”

Sanctioning and anticipating the little things produced a big reduction in “big” things.  The city became cleaner as well as safer.  “Stop and frisk” appeared to prevent crimes in the highest-crime areas and more people invested in the city… as in living in the city.  Between the mid-nineties and 2006 the population of Manhattan, alone, increased by some 40,000.  People react to high levels of caring in their neighborhood.  It’s a lesson that applies to groups as small as two.

In many smaller cities and towns it’s not uncommon to see signs or bumper-stickers that admonish the reader to “Think globally – Act locally.”  Oddly, these same places are where little acts of uncaring are common, while commensurate acts of “caring” are made public.  Consider this example:  A woman – and often, sadly, it is a woman  – will finish offloading groceries into her car and then carefully leave the carriage in the open parking space next to hers, or propped on the curb of the island in front of her and other’s cars, rather than pushing it 20 or 30 steps to the cart corral provided.  Sometimes they look around to see if anyone is watching, but most often not.

The cart corral became a fixture in store parking lots decades ago when store owners gave up their hopes that customers would return the cart to the store whose owner had provided it for their convenience.  At the same time jobs were created for some fellow to go out into the lot to retrieve the loaned carts that customers were too offended to return.

“Well, hey,” you might be thinking, “people are busy and the carts let us buy more stuff in one trip.  It’s a small cost for the store to pay for the increased business.”  Except it’s not a small cost, and uncaring individuals may impose costs on fellow shoppers quite easily with their failure to return the favor of the loan of that cart, particularly when it rolls into a parked car or is hit accidentally when a harried driver thinks he or she can pull into an open space where the cart was carefully parked out of laziness, earlier.

And, let’s not overlook the cost every shopper pays to have others “pick up” after them.

But let’s compound the costs by recognizing what happens when a woman with children pulls the same stunt.  I know, I know… she can’t leave her children alone or apart from herself for more than 3 seconds.  She puts the kids in their car-seats and buckles them in, offloads her groceries and is suddenly incapable of locking her car and placing the loaned cart in the corral, seconds away and in view of her vehicle and its precious cargo.  So, she, in effect, discards the valuable cart the store owner loaned to her, and blithely teaches tomorrow’s leaders that convenience trumps courtesy – that the implied contract she made with the store when she accepted the convenient use of the cart does not have to be lived-up-to!  She will wonder how, at age 13 or so, those grown-up munchkins think the world revolves for their edification – including their parents.

Small disturbances yield larger and larger ripples of dismay and, one might recognize, degeneracy.  “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”  That quote comes from the 17th century, but refers to Proverbs 13:24, “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.”  Every aware and loving parent grasps the need to make the sanction of bad behavior as close to immediate as possible.  The positive lesson will be learned and remembered.  It is valuable to discomfort yourself a little and return the cart.

There is no sanction as immediate as shame.  Yet, we’ve decided, educationally, to remove shame as a human guidance system, as it may impact a child’s “self esteem,” the strengthening of which has become paramount… to society’s detriment.  The main vector for building self-esteem is to eliminate shame, which means to eliminate rights and wrongs according to absolute social agreements, be they from shared – or similar – religious philosophy or strict legal constructs.  Relative good and bad, determined by temporary, largely uninformed or misinformed feelings – which is to say popular beliefs, often shifting with political demands and broadcast unfairnesses or, perhaps hatreds derived from both, leaves individuals free to feel and act as they think best, based on popular opinions that spread like wildfire, unfiltered.

The result is a sort of sovereignty without responsibility, where laws may be declared “bad” or “wrong” and no longer binding in this or that case.  This form of freedom shrinks, automatically, as rule upon rule upon rule must be imposed to “protect” the new personal rights devised at the speeds of change exemplified by schools of fish or flocks of birds.

Littering is another example.  Each instance is a small thing.  “What will this matter?” the offender thinks, “Look at the trash in the street… mine makes no difference.”  Ah, but it does.  Cigarette butt by gum wrapper by coffee cup, the action of tossing one’s inconvenient trash out of the car window or, simply, on the ground, creates a sort of callous over the fine membrane of community fellowship.  Someone who is practiced at trashing his own town or neighborhood is more likely to disregard the laws and mores of where he or she lives, unless it is convenient to follow them.  Many times such people live in a carefully protected and cared-for home, sometimes fenced and gated, making the point that he or she cares about him- or her-self, but not a whit about others.  Society breaks down when such are the inhabitants.

Sometimes the litterer lives amidst trash, caring not about him- or her-self or about anyone else – including children, in those environments.  Their minds may be just as trashy.  Underlying such surface depravity is a hatred for country, community and self, often projected outward as hatred for others.  Such members literally impose costs on their neighbors, yet it costs nothing to respect oneself, one’s family and children and one’s place of residence.  Discarding one’s trash in a proper receptacle is practically free, as is cleaning up one’s attitude.

Soon, because a messy living condition breeds hopelessness and resentment, there are numbers of weak-minded people who may be led into hate campaigns against their own country or neighbors.  Society’s future and its ability to create happier lives is inversely proportional to the extent of self-inflicted hopelessness.

The two greatest institutions of hopefulness: churches and schools, have been transformed in a generation or two, into irrelevance through socialist philosophizing and, now, virulent atheism.  No longer are religious pillars of right and wrong respected; no longer do government schools reinforce right and wrong – it’s all situational ethics, and we’re paying the price.

Maybe we’re too smart to be bound by religious mumbo jumbo, conscience or shame.  Is it really possible – or likely – that a majority of Americans will pull together to clean up their streets, parks, government and politics, while believing that America deserves to be swept away because it’s not perfect?  And whose perfection would that be?

 

Culture

More than a game

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What can be said that hasn’t been beaten into the ground already, about football? Well, some things can be said about the meaning of it. Your response may be that there must be something more important to expound upon, but there is a point, here, worth making.

Football is a metaphor for America. Not because of the “sport” aspect, but because of its declaration of excellence being rewarded and celebrated, vicarious inclusion of couch potatoes, and attraction of profits – even the creation of millionaires.

“Aww, c’mon,” you say, “it’s just a game.” No, no it isn’t.

Football is a great business, and Americans react well to this because we are, like every other human, innately capitalist. We recognize and appreciate smart business, smart marketing, and that wonderful effect of smart business: secondary benefits to multiple other businesses and tremendous flows of profit dollars into charities.
Even better, football succeeds, itself, because it grandly recognizes and rewards individual excellence and discipline.

No matter how loosey-goosey our morals appear to be, we each value excellence and we honor those among us who strive, daily and hourly toward perfection. We are awed and thrilled by organizations whose profit motivations imbue their individual members toward constant improvement… and success.

“Do Your Job.” Americans respect and reward responsibility. No matter the qualities of leaders – and successful organizations, particularly business organizations are led, obviously, more than simply managed – every individual following a leader is ultimately responsible to that leader, to his associates who depend upon him or her, and to him- or her-self, for the task each has trained and learned to accomplish at the moment of execution. Ya’ gotta’ love it.

There are a handful of truly great and greatly led moments in our history, when large fractions of the nation followed, even sacrificed, for the proper purpose a recognized leader had placed before us. The Revolutionary War – in a sense our first Civil War, as we “seceded” from England – is a perfect example. Clearly Washington was a superb leader who was able, in the face of extraordinary odds and opposition, to maintain the shining goal and keep his under-fed, under-supplied and under-appreciated troops striving toward an “impossible” goal: Independence.

The Americans weren’t fighting for treasure or even for comfort or out of fear, but for a set of ideas and ideals. To maintain leadership for such an effort is rare and justification for our reverence of General Washington.

Lincoln showed similar, not identical traits. But his sense of “mission” was no less complete than Washington’s. And there was a purity of purpose that never faltered and was apparent to enough people in the “Union” to re-elect Honest Abe in the midst of our bloodiest, most-hate-filled war ever.

In a sense, Washington led his troops to become the prow of the ship facing war’s stormy waters; Lincoln was, himself, the prow of that same ship. Both were leaders for the right reasons… and respected. Those being led were able to sacrifice for the purposes each leader embodied. Americans respect and honor that stuff!

Another, more refreshing example was the Apollo Moon-landing mission. Jack Kennedy was a leader. It’s not because of any significant executive experience – far from it. It was because of vision. For those of us born during WW-II, the 1960 election was the first we could vote in. We grew up under Eisenhower, but he didn’t “speak” to us. His presidency marked the end of an era and of his career… he was our parents’ president.

Kennedy represented the vitality of America and the start of new adventures, new ideas… the New Frontier. He was our start, too, and anything was possible. Somehow, in spite of his practical naiveté Kennedy perceived that the competition with the Soviets was a competition between cultures, between beliefs, between dreams, and that American needed a new dream every so often, and that the times and the possibilities were coming together. The U.S./U.S.S.R. conflict was a challenge to the ideas of America, and there simply was no room to come in second.

Kennedy’s May, 1961 Moon-landing proposal to Congress met every aspect of what a leader should include in laying out a mission: it was bold, it was a challenge, it was timed and measurable, and it had a specific goal – a goal that rose and set every day. It was perfect, and what the nation needed at a time when popular, slanted news was extolling the amazing progress the Soviet system had made in everything from rocketry to housing to medicine and to education.

The other element of the Apollo challenge was technological, and a certain boost to our economy… something every President needed. What happened?

Military leaders, scientists, engineers, colleges, think-tanks, machinists and a thousand businesses with their own leaders, adopted the mission and devised a thousand missions of their own. Most of the knowledge needed to pull off the moon landing and a safe return to Earth, was unknown. Many of the skills were floating around among the disparate parts of the nationwide, about-to-be-team, but they’d never been marshaled to a single goal until Kennedy presented a new dream. Still others had to be invented.

Again, what happened? A new unity of purpose. Indeed, there was an irresistible force of purpose that caused levels of sacrifice, stress, service and a striving for perfection rarely experienced by any industrial society… and success. The success was so profound that it swept up the vast majority of Americans into a new belief in what we stood for and could accomplish. It has not been repeated.

But metaphorically, its impact is out-pictured in teams’ quests to reach the Super Bowl. And the fans of those quests, fans of every team, respect the sacrifice and discipline, study, practice, learning and leadership that’s needed to get there. Brady would be nowhere without good leadership at the head of and within the Patriots organization, and within himself in fact.

Americans get that, and respond, even to buying shirts and hats as if to absorb a little of it.

The same qualities exist in the military, although the sacrifices are so compellingly greater. And Americans grasp what it means. We honor and respect the training, discipline, leadership and near-perfection elite teams strive for in every service… and even more, the physical, sometimes mortal sacrifices made in furtherance of the greatest mission on Earth: defending America. We share the pain when we back out of conflict without victory; we try to honor the many victories it has taken to get even to there.

We felt and respected some of the magic under Ronald Reagan, perhaps never recognizing the nature of his and our victory over the Soviet communist system.

But the momentum of dis-education and the constant anti-American pressure that has marked American culture since Nixon was forced out of office, was bearing fruit… and nuts.

From the utter debauchery of the Clintons, through the distorted semi-conservatism of Bush-43, through the Obama dislike of America, of Whites and of Christians, and his greater respect for everything we are not, Americans have yearned to respect again; to respect, perhaps, themselves. We have yearned to respect our institutions, and people, and systems and teachers and churches and everything that has, no matter how hidden or suppressed, the innate sparks of leadership, training, practice and sacrifice, that we know has created greatness in this land and in us.

No ONE can do that, and certainly he or she cannot BE that – not even Donald Trump. But he, at least, knows what IT is and its importance to the ideas of America. Like JFK, he has succeeded because he sensed Americans’ need for a new dream, every now and then.

Now is good. Go Pats!