By selecting the criteria, Investopedia influences retirees to conclude that the south and the suburbs are best.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

A great example of fixing the game before the game starts can be seen in “5 Things to Consider When Choosing Where to Retire,” which Investopedia distributed to Yahoo! Finance and other portals aggregating articles on personal finance over the past week.

In the article, writer Stephanie Christensen, gives us the five following factors that we should consider when considering where to live in retirement:

  • Taxes
  • Climate
  • Work opportunities and recreation
  • Cost of living
  • Housing market

Note that Ms. Christensen never mentions the following factors to consider when planning a retirement location:

  • Cultural activities
  • Mass transit
  • Access to tertiary medical facilities (regional hospitals)
  • Services for seniors

Christensen has consciously decided to list the criteria for which the south and suburban areas have advantages, while ignoring those criteria for which cities, and in particular older northern cities like Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, are noted.  The most obvious example is to mention recreation like “national parks, historical sites, military parks, campgrounds, and state parks,” while completely ignoring cultural activities like symphonies, concerts, theatre, museums, major universities, historic buildings and libraries.

More subtle, though, is the mention of taxes as a consideration:  It is true that taxes can potentially be devastating for senior citizens since they are typically on fixed incomes, but only potentially so.  Keep in mind that only seniors who are wealthy will end up paying significant taxes and that many municipalities and states protect retirees from increases in property taxes.

The writer never poses the question, what do you get for your taxes.  For example, the residents of New York City and Boston get far more for their taxes in the way of mass transit, senior programs and public spaces than do people in virtually any city in the south and all suburban sprawl-opolises.

The selection of criteria is completely ideological, whether on a conscious or an unconscious level.  Warm weather leads you south; recreation leads you either south or to smaller, exurban areas. Taxes lead you away from the blue-state north and west coast to the red-state south.  Cost-of-living as an absolute (without considering services) leads you south and away from cities. 

Thus, without saying that life is better in the automobile-dependent suburbs (and south) of shopping malls, chain restaurants and sparse public space and services, Christensen drives us to considering these places first when thinking about retirement.

A writer sincerely interested in giving useful advice to those considering a change of address in retirement would have listed all the criteria and then discussed how some of the criteria can act against others—better mass transit may mean more taxes, but it may be worth it to many seniors.  To others, golfing and hiking may be of less interest than checking out the exhibit of Yuan dynasty masterpieces at the Met or attending that cheap Thursday rehearsal of the Pittsburgh Symphony. 

Christensen could have closed such an article by saying that the first thing to do is to decide which criteria are most important.  That would have helped people organize their minds to consider where they really want to spend their golden years.   Instead, she prefers to force-feed us a car-dependent lifestyle in which the options are driving to a nearby national park for a hike or shopping for more stuff at the mall.

My final point is that when reading any how-to or advice column in the mass media—newspapers, magazines, websites—the first thing you have to ask yourself is, what is the writer selling?

Cuts to needed programs in budget compromise avoidable by letting temporary tax cuts for the wealthy expire.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Everyone in Washington looks as happy as cherrystone clams at high tide this morning after the budget compromise that prevented a shutdown of the federal government.

“Today Americans of different beliefs came together again,” said President Barack Obama.

“We made history instead of repeating it,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner.

Republican Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, he who wants to eviscerate Medicare/Medicaid, called the budget plan “good news.”

All this patriotic and chest-swelling bipartisan pride is about what may be the biggest heist in history.  In this unarmed robbery, the rich stole from everyone else, and in particular the poor.

Obama’s delight in compromise ignored the sad fact that the $38.5 billion in cuts serving as centerpiece of the compromise will mean decreases in spending in the following crucial areas:

  • Head Start, which prepares poor and disadvantaged children for school.
  • WIC, which gives federal grants to states for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income mothers, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk.
  • Infrastructure projects and programs to improve roads, bridges and mass transit
  • A program that provides international aid that directly and literally saves lives from pandemic diseases
  • Proven work and income supports that lift families out of poverty
  • Support for education, especially in low-income communities

It doesn’t take an Aristotle to see that these cuts will hurt people already suffering and postpone repairs and improvements to the infrastructure that could boost our economy.

And none of it would have been necessary if the Democrats and Obama had not compromised with Republicans last December to extend temporary tax cuts for the wealthy  and instead allowed them to expire.  Remember that at the time, they controlled both houses of Congress.  If the Dems had forced the issue during the campaign season, they might have had an issue that appealed to voters and done better in last November’s election.

Put the two compromises together and you have a net transfer of wealth of $38.5 billion and counting, all of it going up the economic ladder from the middle class and poor to the wealthy, who already were doing well, having improved their share of all of America’s wealth by 70% and their share of total income by about 66% over the past 30 years.

Most of the media coverage of the compromise this morning reported on the drama of negotiation and the exuberance of avoiding a shutdown.  Very few reporters bothered to list the cuts.  Nothing devious there—it’s just the standard media preference for focusing on personalities and the drama of struggle over considering the details of issues.

 

But I did find it interesting that in all the “sound and fury” and “cries and whispers” reported in the media leading up to and immediately following the budget compromise, there has been virtually no mention of the fact that the Pentagon’s budget is being increased by $10 billion.   That means that instead of dedicating $10 billion to helping people in need, we are going to buy more guns, bullets and planes and shoot up Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and wherever else we are making a muck of things.

New Republican majorities try to curtail a woman’s right to an abortion in many states.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

While the war on public unions is getting most of the ink, new Republican majorities in state legislatures are quietly also moving to curtail the rights of women to have abortions in a large number of states.

Arizona just became the first state to outlaw abortions for reasons of race or sex, which, as many have observed, is an invasion of privacy.  Kansas Republicans want to license abortion clinics in that state, while Florida, Iowa and Ohio legislatures are all considering bills that would place more restrictions on women seeking abortions, make them jump through more hoops and make it harder to pay for abortions.

Indiana may take the cake for nutty legislative proposals:  One proposed new Indiana law bans taxpayer-paid abortions in cases of incest or rape.  Another requires physicians to tell women seeking abortions that having an abortion has been linked to a higher prevalence of breast cancer, a scurrilous lie parading as theory but disproved by scientific research long ago.  

Coming to a position on abortion is not easy, unlike the other key issues on the right-wing social agenda.  Unlike abortion, we can easily disprove every other right-wing stand on the major social and political issues of the day:

  • Scientists have proved that man-induced rapid global warming is occurring and beginning to leave negative marks on nature and mankind.
  • The overwhelming preponderance of evidence supports the theory of evolution.
  • Research has demonstrated time and again that capital punishment is not a deterrent to crime and that torture does not yield additional information from suspects.
  • Research also shows that when more people own guns, more people are killed and injured by guns, both legal and illegal ones.
  • Spending more does improve the performance of children in the classroom and on standardized tests, but only if the money is spent on smaller classes with more qualified teachers.
  • The claims that gay marriage harms “responsible procreation” and endangers other marriages and families have been disproved.
  • The United States has a substandard and expensive medical system when compared to other Western nations, all of which have nationalized systems.

Facts will disprove all the right-wing nonsense, except when it comes to abortion (and the related issue of stem cell research).

In truth, defining when life begins really is a matter of belief, since no one can really say.  Does life begins at inception, viability or someplace else?  And what does viability really mean, since a new-born thrown into the woods or even put in the street can not survive on its own, and so is not really all that viable.

So what’s the answer? Everyone’s stand on abortion is a matter of belief, no matter how reasoned the arguments made or the graphic photographs flashed.

So whereas we can demonstrate beyond the doubt of any truly rational and open-minded person that appropriate public policy and legislative change should favor gun control, greater emissions controls and more educational aid targeted on the classroom, it is impossible to make such a confident assertion regarding abortion.

But there must be public policy.  There must be laws.

What to do?

The way into the dilemma—belief—is also the way out.  From atheist to Hassid, belief is always a matter of faith, which of course belongs to the universe of religion.  And religion has no place in our political system and should have no power to influence our laws.  Our Deist forefathers wrote religious freedom—freedom of belief—into the Constitution.  They believed that something that is a matter of faith is rightfully a personal concern of our private lives.  And today I think most right-wingers, centrists and left-wingers agree that the government for the most part should stay out of our private lives.   Of course, they make define that term differently, to be sure.

As a matter of public policy, then, we should and must allow women the right to an abortion.  To do anything else would represent a tearing of the thick steel wall that is supposed to separate the state from any and all religions or religious belief in the United States.

We certainly have the right to set sensible medical ground rules, such as limiting late-term, and influencing people not to use abortion as a means of birth control by promoting other methods such as condoms and the morning after pill.  But we should in no way slow down the process, once the woman makes the decision to investigate the abortion option.  And we should recognize that any rule we lay down regarding late term abortions must have room for medical exceptions. 

Finally, we should not have legislation that promulgates the idea that abortions are inherently wrong or immoral.  Those are religious judgments, and government is not supposed to make those, except when it involves saving human lives. 

And that starts us full circle, as it begs the question, when does life begin? But again it’s a circle of belief.   And in our culture, government butts out of those discussions.

An “It can’t happen here” approach to nuclear-generated electricity will ensure that it does.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

As we all know by now, the Fukushima plant’s inability to withstand natural forces has resulted in the poisoning of water and land in the surrounding area and the emission of radiation into the atmosphere that is now detected in parts of the United States.  And the reactors are still not under control, the potential damage to humans and other living things still not contained. 

While everyone around the world is asking, “Could it happen here?,”  our governments (outside of Germany) and the nuclear industry minimize the risks and boast about new technologies.

I’ve only read opponents of nuclear-generated electricity use the expression “It can’t happen here,” always to describe the attitude of proponents.  I know of no proponent of nuclear who has used this exact idiomatic expression, at least not since a massive Japanese earthquake began a chain of events that caused an as-yet uncontrollable meltdown of nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant. 

I thought I would share some of the facts I have culled from my reading about the Fukushima incident, the reactions of both opponents and proponents of nuclear-generated electricity, and the comparisons between Fukushima and U.S. nuclear plants presented by both sides:

  • Of the 104 nuclear-powered electrical generating plants in the United States, 53 (more than half) have the same basic reactor design as the Fukushima reactors.
  • One of the biggest problems at Fukushima is that the fuel rods are not covered by enough water.  The uncovered rods spew radioactivity into the environment. And it turns out that on average, the rods are piled twice as high in U.S. nuclear plants than at Fukushima. As anyone with common sense will realize, the higher you pile the rods, the more water you will need to cover them, the more likely there will be insufficient water (all other things being equal)  and the greater the potential problem if the rods are uncovered.   
  • After power failed in the plant, which meant, among other things, that there was no way to pump water to the spent nuclear rods, Fukushima ran out of battery power in about eight hours.  Virtually all U.S. nuclear-generated electrical power plants—93 in all—have batteries that last a mere four hours.

These three facts are enough to convince me that the overall the safety and the standards of safe operation at U.S. nuclear-generated power plants are about what they are in Japan.   That conclusion in turn begs a few important questions:  Could a U.S. plant be hit with a natural disaster like the one that hit Japan—a major earthquake followed by a tsunami?  Would it take less than an earthquake-tsunami to do the damage? What other weaknesses in design or operations are there that we won’t know about until something bad happens

My current reading, Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter, makes me raise another very frightening question.  The massive amount of evidence that Dikötter presents builds a solid case for the idea that during the Chinese so-called “Great Leap Forward” in 1958-1960, the mores and practices supporting the social and economic system seemed to crumble away in a matter of months because of the crazy policies of the communist party.  Standards of safety and maintenance were loosened to the degree that equipment and factories quickly became inoperable and some unreal number of manufactured and finished goods—maybe a third—were so shoddy that they were unusable.  New dams and irrigation projects failed everywhere because of shoddy construction.  Corruption and falsification of reports was endemic.

What if such a total breakdown occurred in a country that generates electricity using nuclear power?  The thought of what could happen is almost too horrific to conjure.

Front page Times article on Wal-Mart exemplifies major propaganda technique: selection of facts to distort reality

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The front page of Saturday’s New York Times displayed an egregious example of perhaps the most utilized propaganda technique other than the big lie: selection of details, facts or experts to distort reality.  It works best, as in the Times article, when the writer does not state the point of distortion, but lets the facts or experts selected do the talking.

Here, then, are the first three paragraphs of the Times story in question (or should I say, propaganda document), which reports Wal-Mart’s latest efforts to open a store in New York City 

“It persuaded the makers of All laundry detergent to shrink their bottles by more than half to generate less waste. It got thousands of farmers to stop using pesticides. And it encouraged millions of consumers to dump incandescent light bulbs in favor of energy-sipping compact fluorescents.  

But for all of its arm-twisting powers of persuasion, Wal-Mart has been unable to achieve the simplest of ambitions: to set up shop in New York City, America’s biggest urban retail market.

It is a galling failure for a company that transcended its humble rural roots to become a global behemoth.”

When you get done with the first paragraph, don’t you just love this environmentally friendly company that persuades others to help clean up the environment?

If you love this Wal-Mart, you might admire the following historical figure: “He turned around his country’s lagging economy in less than five years.  He created an organization that helps young people learn about the joys of outdoor activities and the importance of high ethical standards.  In negotiations with the leaders of other countries, he obtained everything that his country needed while giving away few concessions.” 

Don’t you just love this guy?  Don’t you wish he was our leader?  Or did you guess that I’m describing Adolph Hitler? 

I think most readers understand that I’m not comparing Wal-Mart to Hitler.  What I’m doing is using the same distorting propaganda technique of fact selection to make Hitler look more admirable that the Times writer Elizabeth A. Harris uses to describe Wal-Mart.

In distorting reality by selection of facts, the subtext of Harris’ message is that Wal-Mart takes its corporate responsibilities seriously.  Besides suggesting explicitly that Wal-Mart is a jolly green giant, the use of specific words—“persuaded,” “encouraged”—undercuts the common image of Wal-Mart as a big bully.

Here is another way that Harris might have begun her story, using the same rhetorical device of listing facts to create a contrast between what the powerful company has been able to accomplish elsewhere and its long-term inability to take a bite out of the Big Apple: “It used its purchasing power to hardball entertainment companies to sanitize the lyrics of best-selling music CDs.  It has successfully kept unions out of its workforce with a combination of questionable activities and massive spending.  It has driven thousands of mom-and-pop stores and small chains out of business while destroying the downtowns of smaller cities all over the country.”

My paragraph is a more relevant picture of what Wal-Mart has wrought, focused on big-picture actions as opposed to some tactical decisions Wal-Mart made to save money that happened to also help clean the environment.  My version also suggests why the contrast to the New York situation is so poignant: because Wal-Mart is used to throwing its weight around and getting its way, and that has never happened in New York.   

The reporter is attempting to elicit admiration for Wal-Mart and sympathy for its plight in the Big Apple.  But to do so, she has to ignore both Wal-Mart’s long and negative past as an employer and a competitor. 

The article goes on to describe Wal-Mart’s NYC efforts, puts the new NYC campaign in the context of the company trying to sell “liberal America,” and quotes numerous experts. 

What the article doesn’t do is explain why New Yorkers and the existing New York political and governmental infrastructure are so hostile to Wal-Mart.  Let’s start with the low salaries and Ebenezer Scrooge-like benefits the company pays most of its employees.  And then there’s the fact that in Manhattan, and to a lesser degree in the other boroughs, you can see a lot of small and regional stores selling all kinds of interesting and different things in the streets along side the national chains with the standardized offerings.  These stores give dozens, if not hundreds of New York neighborhoods an individual character that is lacking in so many American residential areas nowadays.  Or maybe it’s that New Yorkers are less willing than other Americans to put up with censorship or to suffer companies accused of discrimination against any group, as Wal-Mart has been so accused numerous times.

Whatever it is, Wal-Mart and New York City are completely mismatched.  As a once-and-always New Yorker, I hope that Wal-Mart loses its latest battle to enter the city, and worry that it appears that this time out the Arkansas monster has The New York Times on its side.   

Over time, derogatory labels such as nerd and queer warp, transform and become terms of pride.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Ian Simpson gave a very reasoned response to my recent blog entry about anti-intellectualism in mass culture.  His comment regarded the word, “nerd”: “The term ‘nerd’ is often worn as a badge of honor these days by a substantial subset (myself, included). In the digital age, being a nerd is actually kind of cool. The tech-savvy hacker is this year’s model, and the jocks and buttoned-down frat rats get their comeuppance in the end (at least in the movies)…all the same, being a nerd isn’t quite as bad as it used to be.”

Everything Ian says is absolutely true and on point.

Ian’s response reminded me of two other words that once were considered to be completely derogatory, queer and the “n” word.

A long time ago, “queer” meant someone who was odd or strange, but sometime during the 20th century the meaning devolved to “someone strange sexually,” that is to say, GLBT.  When I was reaching manhood in the late 60’s and early 70’s, queer was a very derogatory term, one that I was afraid to use around any one who was homosexual, or around anyone for that matter, for risk that someone would think I was anti-gay.  I still hate using or hearing the word.  It grates on my ears, like long nails on a chalkboard.

But in fact, queer is no longer a derogatory term among GLBT and enlightened heterosexuals and asexuals.  “Queer as folk”, “queer studies” and “queer theology” all attest to the change in use of the term.  For many GLBT, queer is now a label of honor.

Those benighted non-souls who still hold deep-seated prejudices against GLBT individuals, however, still use queer as a poisonous curse word.

The “n” word has seen a slightly different evolution.  To my recollection, in the 60’s and 70’s, it was never very cool to say the “n” word, although I heard it lot from other whites.  I remember that by 1972, it was better not to use the word, “Negro,” which gave way first to “Black,” and then to “African-American.” 

And yet African-Americans now will use the “n” word with and to other African-Americans, especially in typical male bonding environments, such as sports fields, locker rooms, taverns, dens and back yards.  But it is still an anathema for a non-African American to say, “n—.” It’s about the only word that I am too embarrassed to write out in an essay, although I would write it out if I had a character say it in a work of fiction.  I think my squeamish attitude reflects the attitude of Americans not of sub-Saharan African origin, except for that sizable group of unrepentant virulent racists.

On the surface, it looks as if “nerd” shares the same fate as “queer”: a derogatory term is now worn as a badge of pride by the people it describes, while remaining an insult to those with prejudices and resentments against the group.

But note this important difference in the original meanings of “queer” and “nerd”: In the case of “queer,” its meaning was accurate—someone who is not a heterosexual.  Now a lot of false and malicious baggage that was attached to GLBT people decades ago, and still today unfortunately, also attached to the term “queer.”  But “queer” always means and still means someone who is GLBT.

But the original definition of “nerd” was, and is, false!  “An unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person; especially: one slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits.” 

There are plenty of very handsome men and beautiful women who are intellectuals and get good grades.  Many intellectuals and academics are also great athletes.  

The mass media wants us to believe that those who are very smart or academic are not attractive to the opposite sex.  The term “nerd” hasn’t escaped that image.  Just think of phenomena such as nerd love jokes and nerd quotes.  So even when the nerd gets the girl (or guy), the nerd love experience imagined in the mass media is an awkward one.

Of course, as Ian and most avid book-readers already know, that image is ridiculously untrue.

For the third time in a decade, American can think of nothing better to do than start a war.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I’m not going to mince words: It was a grave mistake for our country to lead a military action against the forces of Libya’s ruler since 1969, Muammar Gaddafi.  And after the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was also a sign of collective lunacy among our policy makers and politicians.

Here’s what’s wrong with the move, which of this writing consists of massive bombing with the promise of ground forces in which the American role is still undefined:

There is no goal. What does this French-British-American-led war hope to accomplish?  Free elections? Less repression and a more open economic system? Overthrow?  What’s the plan when Gaddafi falls? Who replaces him? Remember the thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars lost because we didn’t have a plan in Iraq.  Remember, too, the utter destruction of Iraq and the death of 151,000 Iraqis. (by the count of the Iraqi Family Health survey; other estimates, by the way, range as high as 600,000!) 

Why Libya and not other dictators? As we Jews would say at the Passover Seder, ma nish tanah?, which roughly translates into “Why is this any different?” Why haven’t we invaded North Korea or Iraq for mistreating their people?  Why haven’t we invaded Saudi Arabia for keeping its people in totalitarian darkness?  Why didn’t we invade Guatemala and Nicaragua in the 60s and 70s, and in fact lent support to the regimes that were suppressing the people?  What about our good old buddy and financier China?  To those who say their difference is the degree to which Gaddafi is hurting, even torturing, innocent people in his crackdown on protest, my response is: Before we get into another dirty and potentially endless war, perhaps we should first prosecute those in our own country who approved of and created our reprehensible torture gulag.

I think what’s happened is that the U.S. (Hillary?) made a deal with Europe, who really needs Libyan oil much more than we do, and China to be the world’s policeperson, in return for unnamed economic concessions.  But that surmise merely locates the source of the lunacy.  It doesn’t tell us what the leaders of the so-called free world were thinking when they decided to plunge headlong once again into the internal battles of sovereign nations on other continents.

There is a lot we could and should be doing to help the Libyan rebels short of invasion. But it seems as if our government prefers to shoot first and ask questions later.  

Nuclear power advocates make illogical comparison to hydroelectric and coal plant accidents

Posted on by Marc Jampole

When a Guy Chapman responded to my blog entry on ending nuclear-generated electricity by citing a 1975 Chinese Dam accident in which 26,000 died and another 140,000 may have starved to death later, I thought I would ignore it. 

But yesterday in many newspapers across the globe, Gwynne Dyer, a legitimate international journalist, repeated the ridiculous argument central to Chapman’s response, that nuclear is unfairly treated and held to a higher standard than we hold other ways of generating electricity. 

Now I have to analyze what looks like one of the major rhetorical strategies that the nuclear industry and its supporters will employ to explain away the growing disaster at Fukushima.

The way this argument goes, hundreds of miners die every year and only 5,000 died at Chernobyl, which of course ignores the thousands of malformed children born or those who developed thyroid and other cancers afterwards and the hundreds of thousands of early deaths that have occurred and we know will occur over the coming decades.

There are five problems with the argument that other electrical-generating industries kill more people and get a free pass:

  1. It’s not true that the other industries get a free pass:  After the 1975 Chinese hydroelectric disaster, the heads of those in charge rolled and the dam was entirely rebuilt.  We see what’s happening to Massey and its CEO in the wake of the West Virginia coal accident: investigations and indictments.
  2. You are comparing apples to oranges:  In both the hydroelectric and the coal comparison, the authors compare the total fatalities of many accidents or of the very worst imaginable accident to the immediate fatalities of what may or may not have been a severe nuclear plant accident. 
  3. The failures leading to most of the coal and hydroelectric accidents resulted either from human error, poor maintenance or bad technology, all of which can be corrected with existing technologies and higher inspection standards, which virtually all nations are now dedicated to achieving.  But while human error and inferior design have led to most nuclear accidents, too, the unavoidable safety hazards of nuclear are inherent in that it produces harmful radiation, which is impossible to store safely and lingers for tens of thousands of years.
  4. A hydroelectric or coal accident affects only the immediate surroundings, whereas the nuclear accident can infect water and food hundreds and even thousands of miles away.
  5. It is possible to implement all the steps to ameliorate hydroelectric or coal damage to the natural and human environments within the course of a few decades at the most.  Ameliorating not only the damage from a nuclear accident, but the waste nuclear produces takes far longer than the recorded history of mankind to this date.   

One thing that all these technologies have in common is the need for governmental support to produces inexpensive electricity.  If governments made coal-powered generating plants use equipment that is now available to “scrub” most of the noxious wastes from burning coal to generate electricity, the price of electricity would rise significantly.  Virtually all hydroelectric projects have government support.  In the case of nuclear-generated electricity, the industry would not even exist without the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the financial liability of companies that generate electricity through nuclear fission to the equivalent of the cost of a fender-bender. If we were to repeal the Price-Anderson Act, I’m betting virtually every nuclear power plant in the United States would shut down in 10 years.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t provide support to electricity-producing industries.  What I am saying is that we should immediately end all governmental support of nuclear-generated electricity and invest that money into cleaning up and making safer existing technologies and commercializing solar, wind and other renewable alternatives. 

Mass media barrages young people with messages that even if school is good, learning is not.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I like to collect examples of the ideological subtext hidden in mass media documents such as TV shows, advertisements, movies, cartoons and news stories.  Today I would like to share some recent examples of one ideological message embedded in the mass media for decades: anti-intellectualism and anti-learning.

The mythology of anti-intellectualism has been alive since at least the end of World War II.  In this mythology, only the socially maladroit and sexually unattractive do well in school or engage in intellectual pursuits.  The brand name for these socially inadequate creatures that end up alone with their books is the nerd.  Here is how Merriam-Webster’s defines nerd:  an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person; especially: one slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits. 

It’s easy to spot anti-intellectualism in films such as “Grease,” the “Revenge of the Nerds” series and even “The Social Network,” or in any number of television shows.  I want to give a few examples of more subtle digs at those who like to do well in school or pursue intellectual activities:

  • The latest New Yorker has an article by D.T. Max about chess phenom Magnus Carlsen that sets Magnus up as the anti-chess nerd.  Max tries to convince us the Magnus, who played thousands of games of chess over the Internet a year, is not a studious chess professional compared to unnamed others.  All the details about Carlsen are meant to oppose him to some imaginary chess archetype who is less normal and nerdier.  This imaginary archetype exists only in myth.  Most of the children and young adults whom I met when my son was a nationally ranked youth chess player were well-rounded, athletic kids with a lot of social poise and grace for their age, including the current American phenom Hikaru Nakamura.
  • A Match.com article circulating the Internet this week claims to tell us the “Top 10 cities to date a nerd.”  It’s a list of the 10 cities with the highest educated Match.com members in technical or educational occupations.  I can see the value of the article, because if I wanted to find a spouse, I would certainly be interested in going where there are a lot of highly educated people.  But note that the label doesn’t glamorize highly educated people, the articles uses the derogatory “nerd.”
  • A Garfield the Cat cartoon of March 3 finds Garfield and his owner, Jon, perusing the owner’s yearbook. Remember that years ago the strip’s creator Jim Davis established Jon as a socially inept doofus.  Here’s what Jon says as they flip the pages:  “There’s me in the chess club….There’s me in the Latin club…There’s me in the science club…There’s me in the calculus club.” Finally, in the last panel the punch line comes, “There’s me stag at the Junior prom,” to which Garfield think-says with a sarcastic smirk etched across his face, “Go figure!”  The inference and the essence of the joke, is that it’s a no-brainer that Jon went stag to the prom since no one with those intellectual activities could ever attract a date.

Now for two examples of one of the most popular sub-themes of the anti-intellectual ideology, the myth that math is impossibly hard.

  • In October of last year, Mackenzie Carpenter wrote a very good story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the fact that all over the county, more and more freshmen kids are freaking out when they get to colleges.  Unfortunately, she marred the story with her anti-math opening: “It’s late October. Have you gotten The Call or The Text yet from your college freshman?  As in: I hate it here. No one will sit with me in the dining hall. I’m going to flunk algebra because the teacher has a foreign accent and I can’t understand her.” 

In analyzing this hypothetical case history that Carpenter presents, let’s place the mildly racist comment to one side and look at what Carpenter imagined was the tough class the hypothetical freshman was failing: algebra.    The fact of the matter is that most kids bound for college have already taken algebra, many as early as the 6th grade.  On the college level, algebra is considered a remedial class. To propose algebra then as the “hard subject” in the hypothetical case history actually demeans the intellectual content that should be the central experience of college.  By selecting algebra instead of calculus or freshman English is inherently anti-intellectual, while also supporting the false view that math is extremely hard.

  • “The Motley Fool” column of financial advice and news also took a gratuitous swipe at math by assuming that his target market assumes math is hard in an article from last October: “The bad news: Studying companies well involves a little math. The good news: It’s not that hard.” There are so many other ways that the Fool (or should I write fool?) could have approached the story, which is about calculating growth rates, none of which would have proposed that math is hard.  It’s not that the Fool/fool has an agenda to help enslave people intellectually by convincing them they are not smart enough to master the intricacies of “10 = X + 3, what is X?”  It’s that “math is hard” and “intellectuals are socially maladroit” are part of the underlying ideological messages that permeate all our lives, including the Fool/fool’s. 

Some of you are going to remind me that I often write about another social trend: the mad push by helicopter parents to get their children into the very best colleges possible.  This mad dash can include a lot of actions that would appear on the surface to support and cherish learning, such as taking enrichment classes during the summer and getting private tutors.  But judging from the stories in the mass media and the vast anecdotal evidence I have collected from my own experience and those of many other parents, the quest of the helicopter parent, or maybe I should say the Tiger Mom, has nothing to do with learning or education.  It has to do with upgrading to a brand of education that the parents believe will represent a more powerful certification of their children’s status and therefore lead to a higher social position and a job that pays more money.  The helicopter parent has commoditized education, that is, turned it into a commodity that they believe they can buy to enhance their children’s lives (and their own).

Far from being a paradox, the coexistence of these two trends—anti-intellectualism and the helicopter parent—makes all the sense in the world.  What debases intellectual activity more than reducing its value to a certification that money and not intellectual achievement can buy? 

Mother Nature reminds us to stop messing around with nuclear generation of electricity.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

At the time of this writing, we have just learned that the heroic efforts of Japanese nuclear-generated electrical power workers have failed and the last remaining workers have evacuated the Fukushima nuclear power plant.  It seems all but certain that some amount of poisonous radiation will escape the containment and carry into the atmosphere to silently harm millions of people. 

The nuclear electrical generation industries in Western Europe, China and the United States have responded admirably by inspecting and closing plants on a temporary basis.  But that doesn’t change the fact that they have a flawed and pernicious technology that represents a dead end in the development of alternative energy.  

It took a forceful act of Mother Nature to demonstrate the inherent dangers of depending on nuclear energy to generate electricity. 

I can understand why many of those cognizant of the danger of continued global warming should have recently warmed up to nuclear-generated electricity, which does not empty carbon into the environment and by that measure has a “clean bill of health.”

But consider these facts about nuclear-generated electricity, facts that have not changed in the 60 years that power plants have been generating energy while accumulating harmfully radioactive nuclear wastes:

  • The half-life of some radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants is 25,000 years.  That means that in 25,000 years half the radioactivity will dissipate, and then in another 25,000 years another half of it will dissipate.  The challenge then is to build waste disposal facilities that will last through more than 25,000 years of natural disasters, evolving languages, government changes, lunatic leaders and the downfall of civilizations.   If the waste facilities are built to withstand all but a massive natural disaster that happens only every 100 years (the Katrina event or an earthquake), it must weather 250 such events, just to get through one half life cycle.
  • There are two theories regarding the dangers of radiation: the threshold theory, which avers that radiation never is harmful until exposure is above a certain level.  The alternate view is called the cumulative theory, which states that the effects of radiation accumulate so that every X-ray you take adds to the possibility of future side effects.  No one knows for sure, but the nuclear-generated electrical power industry works under assumption that the threshold theory is right.  But it seems to me that until we know for sure, the cumulative theory—the one used by medical professionals—is the safer one for the public.
  • Most people know about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now the Japanese reactors, but in total there have been more than 15 serious accidents, meltdowns and partial meltdowns since the dawn of the nuclear power generation age in the early 50’s.  That’s an average of one every four years.  The source I’m using cites no major accident in 11 years before the recent earthquake and tsunami leveled parts of Japan, but that is not enough time to say the technology has gotten safer, especially in light of these recent events. 

Did you know that if a Japanese style reactor disaster were to occur in the United States, the nuclear industry’s liability is likely inadequate to clean up a major mess, thanks to the Price-Anderson Act, passed in 1957 and extended several times?  By limiting the liability of the nuclear industry,  the federal government has transferred the true cost of delivering nuclear-generated electricity from the companies that generate the electricity to society in general. 

And did you know that in the early 50’s, experts presented white papers outlining how to commercialize nuclear and solar power to President Truman (our worst president and one of the most evil men in recorded history for ordering the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki)?  Truman rejected the solar option and poured billions into subsidizing nuclear-based businesses.   

And did you know that in the 1970’s, some 40 years ago, Barry Commoner proved that if the U.S. army insisted that all their field batteries were photovoltaic (which means the energy is generated by solar power), then cost of manufacturing would come down to the point of making photovoltaic cells a competitive source of energy?

The relentless pursuit of the nuclear option pretty much ended in the United States after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but a few years back, as soon as we realized that the twin challenges of energy dependency and global warming were entwined, politicians, think tanks and the news media began generating  support for nuclear-generated electricity again.   

With such a bad record of safety and no real way to store dangerous wastes, why is there still such a fascination with nuclear power? Why waste more money on this inherently dangerous technology instead of working on more energy-efficient technologies and the development of solar, wind, hydraulic (water) and biomass energy?

The answer, I believe, lies in the difference between the language typically used to describe the subject of the blog entry—nuclear power—and the more accurate phraseology I have employed—nuclear-generated electricity.

All nuclear power can do is make electricity and send that electricity to a centralized grid that delivers it to industrial, commercial and residential users.     

Government leaders everywhere tend to like generating electricity centrally, instead of providing the energy at the source of use (which by definition wastes less energy), as you could with rooftop solar panels or solar-generated electricity stations in neighborhoods, and as you do with natural gas powered vehicles.

But why do many leaders in virtually all governments love nuclear power?  My speculations:

  • Industries with few participants are easier to deal with and easier to integrate into industrial policy decisions.
  • It takes big organizations to operate and finance electrical generation and our leaders hobnob all the time with the leaders of big organizations, in their spare time and during campaigning.  If you don’t believe me, check the social schedule of all our presidents and ex-presidents since Richard M. Nixon.  What that means is that our leaders are always hearing the views of big organizations and tend to think in terms of “big” when they want to get something accomplished.
  • It’s the big companies and their owners and large shareholders (and in particular of nuked-out utility companies and the financial institutions backing them) lining the pockets and campaigns of our elected officials.
  • Especially at the dawn of the nuclear age, governments have liked the fact that nuclear generation of electrical energy is a peaceful use that in part justifies their horrifying and macabre weapons research and manufacture.  

Yes, our governments love nuclear-generated electricity because they love electricity, they love big projects, they love central control, easy access to major economic players, and an easy source of campaign funds and future endowed university chairs.  They love it because they love their nuclear weapons.

Other energy sources can deliver some of these benefits to short-sighted or corrupt government leaders, but none can deliver all of them in one pretty little glowing package.