Worth Noting Pages 76-80

WORTH NOTING PAGE 76

·         On the honesty of emotion -- quote from movie, Almost Famous

The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.

·         Unlazy days of summer by Timothy Peltason:  One Week p. 7; USN&WR, July 14 1997

The long, languid summers of my childhood in central Illinois in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s really were longer and more languid than any I’ve known since.  School was out for 12 weeks then rather than the miserly 10 doled out to public-schooled children of New England where I live now.  The New England summer has been squeezed to pay for snow days and for an extra week off in February when two-career families like mine – professor husband, psychologist wife, and two heavily scheduled children – can fit in a trip to the ski slopes or Disney World. 

Fine trips they are, but they feel like projects, and so do these compressed summers, with their cobbled-together day-care arrangements, effortfully coordinated camp and work schedules, summer reading lists and over-organized athletics.  And shoe-horned in there, starting this week for many Americans, comes the determined hustle of a big vacation.  Wonderful times all, but no time off.

My childhood summers truly were vacations, with all the vacancy, the spaciousness of time that the word promises.  Some kids went away to camp, but not many, not me.  When I left the house in the morning, I could count on finding a pick-up baseball game, or girls to flirt with awkwardly, or a friend headed off to go swimming, all within an easy bike ride and an unhurried day that stretched until late summer darkness.  I must have been bored sometimes.  I know that I pestered my mother to take me here and there, to the movies or a different swimming pool on the other side of town.  But each long day held pleasures and surprises, and it was boredom and unhurriedness that made them possible.  When it was time to travel, my family went most often to see more family and find the same easy summer happening someplace else.

A free space.  The emptiness of my childhood summers was protected by special circumstances.  Those summers were possible only at a particular American place and time, in a safe, small city and at a moment for the country’s economy when many middle-class women could afford to stay at home – and few were welcomed into the white-collar world.

Older teachers at my elementary school, especially the ones from small farming towns, told stories about another kind of summer, split between late spring and early fall, when children were needed to help with the planting or the harvest.  What was vacation for those turn-of-the century farm children, or their parents?  What was it for an earlier generation still, when childhood was the brief time before real work could begin?

Summer was a time for labor for those rural generations, a reality of nature with far greater significance for them than for us.  But summer vacation is a relatively recent construct, an invention of privilege, like the weekend, which came into being only a century ago, when Saturday workers and Sabbath observances yielded to a new hunger and a new space for leisure.  Summer is the school year’s end and in our child-oriented society, that makes it the end of the working year and the beginning of a free space we’ve carved out until Labor Day.

Americans abhor a vacuum, however, and we seem to be filling that free space fuller every year, working so hard at summer that it has lost some of the restorative power it had a generation back.  Maybe our children experience it differently.  Maybe summer camp is as good a place as the neighborhood to feel the day stretching out.  But maybe it’s time for real time off, just in case those parental anxieties are infectious – which camp to choose, which places to visit, how to cram it all in.

WORTH NOTING PAGE 77

·         On Excess from Stephen Tyler of Aerosmith, 25 Years of Rock ‘n Roll

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

·         On Free Will

If one has morals, they can’t be taken away by me or anybody else.

                                          -- burlesque queen Lili St. Cyr

·         An Amazing Conclusion as printed in Street News July ‘03

The sport of choice for the urban poor is BASKETBALL

The sport of choice for maintenance level employees is BOWLING

The sport of choice for front-line workers is FOOTBALL

The sport of choice for supervisors is BASEBALL

The sport of choice for middle management is TENNIS

The sport of choice for corporate officers is GOLF

AMAZING CONCLUSION:  The higher you are in the corporate structure, the smaller your balls become.

·         From Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Matters of great importance should be treated lightly.  Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

·         From State of Fear by Michael Crichton

Every scientist has some idea of how his experiment is going to turn out.  Otherwise he wouldn’t do the experiment in the first place.  He has an expectation.  But expectation works in mysterious ways – and totally unconsciously.  Do you know any of the studies of scientific bias?  All that matters is that hundreds of studies prove again and again that expectations determine outcome.  People find what they think they’ll find.

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence?  We call it prejudice

Do you know how many species there are on the planet?  “No.”  Neither does anybody else.  Estimates range from three million to one hundred million.  Quite a range, wouldn’t you say?   Nobody really has any idea.  “Your point being?”  It’s hard to know how many species are becoming extinct if you don’t know how many there are in the first place.  How could you tell if you were robbed if you didn’t know how much money you had in your wallet to begin with?”

Computer models can’t prove anything, Ted.  A prediction can’t be proof – it hasn’t happened yet.

WORTH NOTING PAGE 78

From State of Fear cont’d

In the old days … the citizens of the West believed their nation-states were dominated by something called the military-industrial complex.  Eisenhower warned Americans against it in the 1960’s, and after two world wars Europeans knew very well what it meant in their own countries.  But the military-industrial complex is no longer the primary driver of society.  In reality, for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive.  I call it the politico-legal-media complex.  The PLM.  And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population – under the guise of promoting safety.  “Safety is important.”  Please.  Western nations are fabulously safe.  Yet people do not feel they are, because of the PLM.  And the PLM is powerful and stable, precisely because it unites so many institutions of society.  Politicians need fears to control the population.  Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money.  The media need scare stories to capture an audience.  Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless. For instance, consider silicon breast implants.  You will recall that breast implants were claimed to cause cancer and autoimmune diseases.  Despite statistical evidence that this was not true, we saw high-profile news stories, high-profile lawsuits, high-profile political hearings.  The manufacturer, Dow-Corning was hounded out of business after paying $3.2 billion, and juries awarded huge cash payments to plaintiffs and their lawyers.  Four years later, definitive epidemiological studies showed beyond a doubt that breast implants did not cause disease.  But by then the crisis had already served its purpose, and the PLM had moved on, a ravenous machine seeking new fears, new terrors.  I’m telling you, this is the way modern society works – by the constant creation of fear of fear.  And there is no countervailing force.  There is no system of checks and balance, no restraint on the perpetual promotion of fear after fear after fear.  “Because we have freedom of speech, freedom of the press.”  That is the classic PLM answer.  That’s how they stay in business … but think.  If it is not all right to falsely shout ‘Fire!” in a crowded theater, why is it all right to shout “Cancer!” in the pages of the New Yorker?  When that statement is not true?  We’ve spent more than twenty-five billion dollars to clear up the phony power-line cancer claim.  “So what you:? … we’re rich, we can afford it.  But the fact is that twenty-five billion dollars is more than the total GDP of the poorest fifty nations of the world combined.  Half the world’s population lives on two dollars a day.  So that twenty-five billion would be enough to support thirty-four million people for a year.  Or we could have helped all the people dying of AIDS in Africa.  Instead, we piss it away on a fantasy published by a magazine whose readers take it very seriously.  Trust it.  It is a stupendous waste of money.  In another world, it would be a criminal waste.

Similarly, in environmental thought, it was widely accepted in 1960 that there is something called ‘the balance of nature.’  If you just left nature alone it would come into a self-maintaining state of balance.  Lovely idea with a long pedigree.  The Greeks believed it three thousand years ago, on the basis of nothing.  Just seemed nice.  However, by 1990, no scientist believes in the balance of nature anymore.  The ecologists have all given it up as simply wrong.  Untrue.  A fantasy.  They speak now of dynamic equilibrium, of multiple equilibrium states.  But they now understand that nature is never in balance.  Never has been, never will be.  On the contrary, nature is always out of balance …

WORTH NOTING PAGE 79

From State of Fear cont’d

I should have known.  Everybody is a lawyer these days.  Extrapolating the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants.  They will be born lawyers. What do you suppose it will be like to live in such a society?”

Alston Chase: When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.

Author’s Message … I have had an opportunity to look at a lot of data, and to consider many points of view.  I conclude:

·         We know astonishing little about every aspect of the environment, from its past history, to its present state, to how to conserve and protect it.  In every debate, all sides overstate the extent of existing knowledge and its degree of certainty.

·         Before making expensive policy decisions on the basis of climate models, I think it reasonable to require those models to predict future temperatures accurately for a period of ten years.  Twenty would be better.

·         I believe for anyone to believe in impending resource scarcity, after two hundred years of such false alarms, is kind of weird.  I don’t know whether such a belief today is best ascribed to ignorance of history, sclerotic dogmatism, unhealthy love of Malthus, or simple pigheadedness, but it is evidently a hardy perennial in human calculation.

·         There are many reasons to shift away from fossil fuels, and we will do so in the next century without legislation, financial incentives, carbon-conservation programs, or interminable yammering of fear mongers.  So far as I know, nobody had to ban horse transport in the early twentieth century.

·         I suspect the people in 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more enery, have smaller global population, and enjoy more wilderness than we have today.  I don’t think we have to worry about them.

·         The current near-hysterical preoccupation with safety is at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism.  Public education is desperately needed.

·         I believe people are well intentioned.  But I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.

·         I have more respect for people who change their views after acquiring new information than for those who cling to views they held thirty years ago.  The world changes.  Ideologues and zealots don’t.

WORTH NOTING PAGE 80

From State of Fear cont’d

·         We need a new environmental movement, with new goals and new organizations.  We need more people working in the field, in the actual environment, and fewer people behind computer screens.  We need more scientists and many fewer lawyers.

·         We cannot hope to manage a complex system such as the environment through litigation.  We can only change its state temporarily – usually by preventing something – with eventual results that we cannot predict and ultimately cannot control.

·         I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

·         I personally experience a profound pleasure being in nature.  My happiest days each year are those I spend in the wilderness.  I wish natural environments to be preserved for future generations.  I am not satisfied they will be preserved in sufficient quantities, or with sufficient skill.  I conclude that the “exploiters of the environment” include environmental organizations, government organizations, and big business.  All have equally dismal track records.

·         Everybody has an agenda.  Except me.

·         On solitude from William H. Macy movie

I like people.  I like them best when they’re not around.

·         On Life from Laurie Anderson

Life itself is just bad art.

·         On newspapers, George Bernard Shaw once wrote that the problem with newspapers is that they often seem “unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.”

·         On Press Freedoms by Collin Levey in NY Post 2/17/05 [related to “outing” of CIA agent Valerie Plame involving reporters from NY Times and Time]

Lets all just take a deep breath.  The press doesn’t have a “right” to know anything it wants, or have access to whomever it wants.  The power and freedom of the press is that it has the right to publish whatever it wants. 

·         Training Motto – Danielle Carruthers, Hurdler

The body remembers effort.