The Elites have failed

I know, it is something I have been harping on for some time. But I believe it is true and important to recognize. It could be the start of an epic civilizational change a la Toynbee, or the alarm bell that sparks some genuine reform. Or both? I'm not sure, but it should be an interesting time.

Every now and then I see something Steve Pearlstein has written that I like, partly because he hits the Democrats as hard as the Republicans in a logical honest way that pulls me back towards a more centered universe. I have a positively Hellenic passion for the Golden Mean.

Today's column by Pearlstein is a case in point. Just the title deserves a place on Sententiae. "The Epic Global Leadership Fail." Love it. The content is even more pointed:

The global financial system teeters on the edge of collapse because European politicians refused to tell citizens of their crumbling economies that they could no longer guarantee them “la dolce vita” - the sweet life - they had come to expect.

Top executives at Olympus, one of Japan’s leading companies, resign in shame after acknowledging that for nearly 20 years they used a complex accounting scheme to hide billions of dollars in speculative trading losses.

A revered coach and a respected president at Penn State are fired because they were more concerned about protecting their own reputations, and that of their school, than protecting young boys from an alleged sexual predator.

And a former governor, senator and head of Goldman Sachs resigns as chief executive of MF Global after bankrupting the broker-dealer with overleveraged bets on European sovereign bonds.

Welcome to this week’s exciting episode of “Failures in Leadership.”

Read the whole thing. Unlike most of the stipendiary punditocracy he offers some solutions. Let's hope he is as realistic as I think.

me, as an historian: I'd just as soon miss a civilizational change.

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Light at the end of our tunnel?

"Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow."
Steve Jobs upon dying.

Without comment

Tea Party

White, over 60, mostly southern and mostly Protestant. Put that way, I am one of them.

History Lessons

I thought about entitling this "When we die, this is who will replace us."

This is from a friend's facebook page talking about just one day, and one question of one day, in his history class:

Most disturbing question of the day: While discussing ancient migrations from Siberia to Alaska, a student in my U.S. History class asked if this means we now think that the Puritans were NOT the first people to settle in America.

Yes. We now think that.

One of the comments was from another teacher: "I have you ALL beat. A student of mine asked me if I had served in WW2, and she was serious."

Years ago another friend of mine had students in her North Carlina history class who didn't know which came first, World War I or World War II. Another one thought the Civil War (ours, presumably) came after World War I.

ed. majors, learning to mold the minds of our future.
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The Storm in New York

The storm formerly known as Irene hits New York. Our ace reporter on the scene reports that the city needs an emergency airlift of turkey baby food (preferably Gerbers).

[picture from today's New York Times]

Without comment

Why income disparity might matter (to you and me)

Tom Friedman seems to be the foreign affairs columnist that everyone likes to take pot shots at. Easy target I suppose. But today he has an interesting column on why there are so many angry demonstrations and political movements in the world, from the Tea Party, to Egypt, to Israel to the burning streets of London. Here is his conclusion and any comments would be appreciated. It might turn out to be something I will ask my students to read next week. Here's his conclusion:

So let’s review: We are increasingly taking easy credit, routine work and government jobs and entitlements away from the middle class — at a time when it takes more skill to get and hold a decent job, at a time when citizens have more access to media to organize, protest and challenge authority and at a time when this same merger of globalization and I.T. is creating huge wages for people with global skills (or for those who learn to game the system and get access to money, monopolies or government contracts by being close to those in power) — thus widening income gaps and fueling resentments even more.

Pay attention to that widening income gap. The one many American politicians, mostly corrupt millionaires, tells us is not important.

Apres moi...

It's not about race

Glenn Beck, late of TV fame, is upset by the fact that Marvel comics has killed off Peter Parker and replaced him with a new Spider-Man: Miles Morales, a half black half Hispanic teenager. Apparently Beck feels that whatever made America great is being trashed. He blames all this on the obvious culprit:

On his radio show today, after repeatedly telling listeners that “I don’t care” about the new Spider-Man and that it is just a “stupid comic book”, Beck got his real opinion out. He explained why the new bi-racial Spider-Man can be attributed to Michelle Obama.

“I think a lot of this stuff is being done intentionally. What was it that Mrs. Obama said before the campaign? Because its strange how so much of this seems to all be happening,” he said. Beck then played an audio file of Michelle Obama saying that “we’re gonna have to change our traditions.”

Makes you want to go out and "take back America" doesn't it?
From the Frum Forum, btw.

I mean, messing with Spider-Man!?

The Rapture: So far so good

Is everyone still out there?

I am here, in the house. No sign of The Rapture, yet. But then I can't see anyone from where I am. I last saw Carmen with a pot of picadillo leaving for ...

... her church. .... and now she's nowhere to be seen.

you don't suppose ...

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News of the weird

That would be the state somewhere to our south, dangling down obscenely from the underbelly of Georgia, the great state of ...

.. the truly weird. And this is not just my opinion. It's on AOL! Just check it out.

"It doesn't seem like anybody is really from Florida -- it just seems like a transient state where all the miscreants wind up," Greenlee said.

Which is what Budweiser the lawyer told me over thirty years ago.

The rewards of performance

Remember the folks who brought you the BP oil platform explosion and the oil leak into the Gulf? What did they suffer from such lax, and expensive, incompetency?

Bonuses all around.

From CNN:

Declaring 2010 "the best year in safety performance in our company's history," Transocean Ltd., owner of the Gulf of Mexico oil rig that exploded, killing 11 workers, has awarded its top executives hefty bonuses and raises, according to a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Meanwhile I win a big teaching award and an effective pay cut along with it.

makes you wonder what they were doing in all those other years.

American exceptionalism

One of the biggest jokes on the planet. Whatever the truth once was, how can you read stories like this and not feel the fetid breath of history (as in "He's history!" blowing down the nape of your neck.

Last month, the results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests were announced. It was the first time that Chinese students had participated, and children from Shanghai ranked first in every single area. Students from the United States, meanwhile, came in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and an especially demoralizing thirty-first in math. This last ranking put American kids not just behind the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Singaporeans but also after the French, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Estonians, and the Poles.

I'm sure we're ahead of somebody.

aren't we?

there is, of course, a slight trick to these results. Reassured?

Check out North Carolina

Country to Emulate!

East Germany.

They know how to close their border. Here is Tea Party candidate Joe Miller on how to solve our immigration problem, based on his military time on the German border:

During that time, he said, "East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow" from one side of the border to the other. "Now, obviously, other things there were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, obviously to secure our border. If East Germany could, we could."

And, indeed, we could. If we want to be like East Germany.

the picture is an example of how the East Germans closed the border with the Berlin Wall (and shooting anyone who got near it).

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News Flash!! Florida edition!!

The absolute nadir of Central Florida, the ever swampy Alachua Co., is the home of at least one media hungry charlatan preacher!

There.

While the entire media world goes gaga over this startling revelation, I will point out that Alachua Co. is also the home of the U of F as well as several of the nation's most notorious speed traps.

Please discuss the significance of this juxtaposition quietly among yourselves while I leave the room. Which do you think is most worthy of 24-7 news coverage?

Carmen and I pass through the place 6 or more times a year. Lovely place. Though we never, ever, stop there.

Without Comment

[from Yahoo's new Upshot site]

BP and the big mess

Frank Rich in the NYT takes Obama to task for trusting "experts" - i.e. missing the point of the Double Aughts: all elites and institutions failed. Here is his rundown of the record of British Petroleum:

This is baffling, and then some, given BP’s atrocious record prior to this catastrophe. In the last three years, according to the Center for Public Integrity, BP accounted for “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” — including 760 citations for “egregious, willful” violations (compared with only eight at the two oil companies that tied for second place). Hayward’s predecessor at BP, ousted in a sex-and-blackmail scandal in 2007, had placed cost-cutting (and ever more obscene profits) over safety, culminating in the BP Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 and injured 170 in 2005. Last October The Times uncovered documents revealing that BP had still failed to address hundreds of safety hazards at that refinery in the four years after the explosion, prompting the largest fine in the history of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (The fine, $87 million, was no doubt regarded as petty cash by a company whose profit reached nearly $17 billion last year.)

I'd tell you what I think about BP but then I would be unAmerican, at least according to one well known Republican.

who the hell names their child after Ayn Rand?

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The value of an education

This just in from the Washington Monthly.

* Oh my: "A report by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities indicates that the U.S. is one of only two nations on Earth in which people aged 25 to 34 have lower educational attainment than their parents."

Meanwhile, just about every state is raising tuition much faster than the rate of inflation.

although that doesn't explain the size of my last pay raise.

Sane conservatives!

They're out there. They really are out there, somewhere. And they seem to be regaining their voice. Here's one, Rod Dreher (thanks to Sullivan):

Watching the school-speech insanity blow up on the right, a friend who has been deeply involved for decades at the top of Republican politics, e-mailed to say that she was done. The conservative movement is hurtling off a cliff – and she was bailing out.

And concludes:

Where can those who wish to think and debate clearly about a serious politics of the right go? The degenerate form of populism now dominant on the right loves to praise "freedom" – but it has no use for freedom of thought, or thinking much at all. In turn, increasing numbers of thoughtful conservatives have no use for it.

Though what their options are right now seems a bit dim to me. The Republican Party? The Democrats? Non-involvement or a third party?

I think they are stuck with the Repubs, which means a long tough slog to regain the levers of power.

oh, well.

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