RealCurrents

I’ve been intending to write something here about the upcoming presidential election. I can’t help but notice how many folks over 35 are really frustrated with their choices this time. The United States is desperately in need of strong, conservative leadership, yet the Republican Party seems about as bankrupt of ideas as the mortgage lenders are of money.

It’s pointless to try to record all my thoughts here, it would go far too long. Let me just state the obvious, the Republican Party has gone terribly astray, to the point that it’s hardly recognizable as a party for true conservatives, and nowhere is this most apparent than in the recent campaign strategy of the McCain-Palin camp. True leadership brings creativity to bear on difficult problems, getting people to work together in innovative ways to solve them. I’ve written a little about the need for such creativity in the pro-life movement, for example.

Sadly, the Republican Party, at least at the national level, instead keeps retreating to worn-out slogans that stifle real discussion of the serious problems we face. This isn’t any news to liberal Democrats or even independents. Rather, the point I’m trying to make is that it’s not working with Republican voters either, yet the Republican leadership remains so frustratingly out of touch, unable to grasp that THEY are going to have to hold themselves to a higher standard, or else the Party itself is in danger of collapsing. Let me just repeat the comment I left earlier today on Carmen Van Kerckhove’s blog Racialicious, in response to “An Open Letter to White Voters“:

Hi Carmen, perhaps you will find my perspective interesting. Whites are such a huge voting block that it’s difficult to generalize, but I will say that as far as Republican demographics go, I should be right in the middle of their voter bloc. I’m a WASP from Texas who has voted a straight Republican ticket several times, & a Christian conservative.

Nevertheless, I’m very unhappy with the Republican congress, in particular, and was never very enthusiastic about voting for McCain, either. The Palin choice is kind of a wash, in my view, she has a lot of qualities I admire, but at the same time doesn’t seem ready to fill McCain’s shoes if something happened to him.

I had just about convinced myself to go ahead and vote for McCain-Palin before they started what’s been about a month of the most bone-headed campaigning I can remember. First they kept Palin off-limits from interviews for the most part (hardly a vote of confidence), then they started the ridiculous attacks on Obama that just seem to keep getting worse.

It’s disturbing to think that Palin may end up destroying her reputation and a promising political future. McCain should have never hired the campaign “experts” that have ruined a campaign that was really starting to connect with voters. We’ve all seen the worst of Republican rhetoric over and over in recent years, and I’m as tired of it as anyone. BTW, it really turns me off when they say “Barack *Hussein* Obama”, as if that’s supposed to imply something. THAT seems pretty racist to me, anyway.

Yes, it’s an insult to all voters to think this sort of campaigning will sway opinion. Barack Obama’s voting record is far too liberal for me to support him, but now I’m really having second thoughts about voting for McCain as well.

It’s sad to see the Republican Party basically falling apart from a lack of leadership. A true leader would never allow that kind of stuff to happen. The only slight hope Republicans have in capturing the White House is if Palin finally says enough, gives the McCain folks an earful, and strikes out on a different course. America is starving for leadership. Can’t any of these “experts” see it obviously isn’t working?!!

As long as the Republican Party sends folks to Washington who then start acting more or less like everyone else in D.C. politics-as-usual, Republicans will continue to fail at being a conservative influence. We need a Republican Party - or some replacement for it - that has an activist bent throughout the ranks and understands it’s fighting a battle and that sacrifices must be made. This is what all true leaders embody, and this is the only solution to America’s many problems: true leadership.

I was reading Jessica Mah’s post on how a lot of her high-school and college-age friends are really scared about global warming. Here in the U.S., it’s often reported that folks in other countries are more concerned than the average American, but little attention has been given to how the issue is impacting younger Americans.

It occurred to me that they need a little perspective on this. I grew up in the 1970s, and for those of us Americans who went through this period when the U.S. was in a severe technophobic angst, and there were constant pronouncements about all the terrible things that were going to happen, I suppose we’re just not so quick to be convinced the world is coming to an end every time scientists start preaching doom and gloom.

This was a very long list of crises that 1960s-70s experts insisted were soon to befall us, most of which I’ve probably (thankfully) forgotten, but which included such calamities as pollution, endangered species, population, overcrowded skies, the San Andreas and yes, even a looming ice age. I guess being terrified of nuclear armageddon just wasn’t enough anymore. The funny thing was, very few of these scientists were talking about an energy crisis.

Of course, even the “energy crisis” didn’t last long, once investors started pouring hundreds of billions into oil, which was $35 when I got out of high school but less than $10 when I got out of college. Jessica titled her post “Scared of Global Warming? Bring in the entrepreneurs!” and so yes, I think she’s right that entrepreneurs and the free market are a lot of the answer to global warming.

In general, though, I think we ought to stop and notice something. It sure seems to me that scientists can get into a negative funk about stuff, and end up focussing too much on the problems rather than the solutions. In fact, I can’t help wondering if it’s sort of the same dynamic as with investment newsletters - negativity and fear apparently sell a lot more newsletters, and a crisis may, sadly, be the only thing that will finally garner a research project any funding.

Now, this is certainly not all the scientists’ fault, nor is the business world off the hook. Just look at the American car industry, one of the most pitiful examples of research budgeting in modern history. Perhaps GM, Ford and Chrysler may be excused for being caught unprepared on fuel economy in the early 70s, since they were already struggling with new emissions restrictions. On the other hand, here we are again thirty years later and, sadly, it seems that only the recent combination of high oil prices, a dropping dollar, and concerns over carbon emissions was finally enough to get them serious again about improving fuel economy.

Amidst all the prognostications, it’s still not clear how global warming is going to play out. Besides the many questions of specific effects in specific places, there’s at least three basic questions involved. First is the question of how fast temperatures will go up. Second, how much will they rise long-term (or is it a runaway increase with no end in sight)? Third, if temperatures can be stabilized, will (can?) they then head back down?

We hear virtually nothing of potentially beneficial effects, but clearly there’s going to be some winners among the many losers from effects of global warming. Interestingly, so far the Russians seem to be the only ones thinking ahead about any positive outcomes from it. As Jessica suggests, entrepreneurs ought to be also. Again, though, we must keep a proper perspective - a long-term perspective.

While there’s a lot we don’t know, we can say that at least for practical purposes, whatever we can do will take place over decades. Realistically, it’s far too late to do anything about changes that may take place within the next decade or so. In other words, whatever research and changes - technological or political - that are to be made must be done consistently over a decades-long time frame.

This is, for example, why I strongly disagree with the basic Kyoto (Treaty) framework. Already China is producing as much carbon emissions as the U.S., and will likely continue to increase. Kyoto might be effective in reducing the emissions of Western industrialized nations, but given these reductions and the continued growth of China, India and other large industrializing countries, within a few years this extremely costly plan will prove ineffective in reducing the bulk of emissions.

We’ve heard from the scientists on global warming, but have yet to hear from the engineers, who are going to be the folks who have to make reductions in carbon emissions actually happen. We need to think about cost/benefit ratios. We also need to think about sustaining research investments over decades, which as the history of NASA indicates, is awfully difficult to do when you start out with crash-program type overbudgeting.

I think it’s a good bet that a lot of these new technologies are going to come from both big American businesses (such as Boeing with its new 787) and American entrepreneurs. This realization may not play well overseas, but any approach such as Kyoto that hobbles the American economy is going to be counterproductive.

Like it or not, the U.S. is still a (if not the) major innovation engine in the world. Companies in Silicon Valley (1, 2, 3) and elsewhere in the U.S. are working on hundreds of different technologies, everything from emission controls to cheap solar to electric cars to wind power and so on. Here in Texas, it’s become common to see the giant parts of wind turbines rolling down the highway on their way west, where hundreds are being put up.

We must remember that innovation, not political decrees, is the only way to solve the problems from global warming, and while we’re at it, let’s not forget to also think about taking advantage of the benefits.

With all the criticism of George W. Bush and Republicans in general, I think we need to sort out a few basic aspects of our current mess so we can then, hopefully, make intelligent changes.

In my view, Republicans (in which I include myself, since I generally vote that way) have two basic problems:

1. Bush’s administration has been hijacked by war-hawk NeoCons, the first evidence of which appeared to be his picking Dick Cheney (seemingly out of nowhere, considering Wyoming isn’t a big state) to be his running mate.

As a result, early philosophical drivers of Bush policy, such as Marvin Olasky’s notion of “compassionate conservatism“, a foreign policy that refrained from “nation building”, and in general a more limited federal government, gradually gave in to the NeoCon urge to use power whenever possible, wherever possible.

Of course, the dam broke after 9/11, an event which may well have been given too much import in re-shaping U.S. foreign and domestic policy. In any case, the war-hawk NeoCons were firmly behind the wheel after that, and within a year were openly maneuvering to invade Iraq.

2. The near-complete failure of the rest of Republicans to make a serious effort to reclaim their party from the war-hawk NeoCons.

As I wrote before, despite Bush’s obvious failings, I put more blame on the Congress, for largely abdicating its responsibilities: “the Republican Congress … has failed to fulfill two of its primary duties: providing a check on the Executive Branch and controlling spending.”

So, two basic problems: the NeoCon takeover of the Bush administration, and the failure of the rest of us Republicans to counter it. With these in mind, it’s time for someone to finally state what’s plainly obvious, at least to any non-NeoCon in the Republican camp:

War-hawk NeoConservatives do NOT represent the views of all or anywhere near a majority of Republicans, nor are they legitimate heirs of Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

Through most of my teen years, I would hear Ronald Reagan in the morning, giving his radio address outlining his views, and no one’s going to convince me that his vision of personal responsibility and freedom, with limited government, has anything in common with the imperialist, police-state policies promoted by the war-hawk NeoCons.

The Republicans lost control of Congress for the simple reason that they failed to do their job. They completely failed to control spending, they failed to rein in government, and one by one those opposed to the invasion of Iraq knuckled under, I guess swayed by the argument, “We’re in a ‘war on terror‘, you just have to trust us.” Well, it’s amazing that the Bush administration still seems to be trying to use that argument. It shows how out of touch they really are.

As far as Bush’s failings go, I think Lee Iacocca hits the nail on the head in his new book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?. Iacocca gives 9 “C’s” of leadership, and notes that Bush dismally fails on the very first one: Curiosity.

George W. Bush has a lot of good, even great, qualities, and I’m sure most Republicans, including myself, want to continue supporting him, but he has GOT to develop both a much greater interest in what is going on, and multiple alternative channels of information. As someone once said, a leader must use the chain of command to issue orders, but can NEVER depend on the chain of command for information.

As for other Republican politicians and candidates, I hope they will not abandon Bush, but will finally begin to demand accountability (and fiscal responsibility) from his administration.

Obviously, the folks Republicans DO need to be abandoning, and driving from the party, are the war-hawk NeoCons, who haven’t got a clue what terms like “limited government”, “Constitution”, “separation of powers”, and “conservative” really mean.

Sadly, if this mess continues much longer, us conservatives will have to come up with a new name for ourselves, lest people think we’re in favor of torture, abolishing the Geneva Convention, pre-emptive war, and all the other nonsense (evil) that’s been foisted upon us by these “Neo-Conservatives”, who seem to think the solution to every problem is the exercise of more government power.

Raymond’s lament about how CNN has degenerated into the “Celebrity News Network” got me thinking about media and journalism again. I realize how important the media folks are, how much they influence the conversation, and I know it’s essential to keep pushing for improvements in that industry. I, for one, am certainly a fairly dissatisfied customer.

Raymond’s complaint brought up at least two things that particularly annoy me about the media:

1. Journalists seem to be really BAD at ever covering stuff that would actually be useful to know about. We hear about disasters all over the world and, of course, whatever mess (or island resort) Paris Hilton may be in at the moment. Nevertheless, there’s all kinds of practical stuff that we hardly ever hear about. I wrote about one such example, changes in credit card minimum payment rules, back in 2005.

I encountered another example this afternoon, when I was picking up one of my kids from work, and the subject of the minimum wage hike came up. He was wondering when the first increase would go into effect and how much it would be (i.e. whether he’d get a raise). I really don’t know. I think it’s sometime next winter, but I guess information like that is just too practical for the media to bother with.

There’s a lot of examples like that, of missed opportunities to be helpful, across most all the media, and I’ll try to point out more in the future (see the Journalism category).

2. It used to be there were 3 TV networks, only AM radio, etc., but now that we’ve got a zillion channels, they STILL can’t seem to focus on a specific topic. In other words, an awful lot of media channels are all chasing the entire market, rather than specializing.

CNN isn’t the only channel that’s lost its focus, but what’s more frustrating is that with so many more channels available (and so many owned by major media players), they still won’t specialize.

Radio provides perhaps the best test case, at least here in the Houston area, where we still don’t seem to have a dedicated news station, even though ClearChannel has bought several of the top AM stations. In fact, it’s gotten worse, as long-dominant KTRH 740AM lost a lot of its news coverage (and apparently its staff) after the 2004 election, and is just a shell of its former self.

Why can’t a huge media company like ClearChannel have at least one 24 hour news station in a big market like Houston? The obvious answer is they think they can make more money by changing formats all day long, from morning news to Rush Limbaugh to local talk to sports to UFOs, etc. That may work for them, but the longer this goes on, the more I just lose interest.

I wrote recently on All Things about how most of society STILL isn’t taking information overload seriously, and the major media are prime culprits. It’s not just broadcast media, either. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, how many ads I get for print magazines. Don’t they realize I’ve already got a pile of magazines I can never find time to read?

For years Americans have seemed to be relentless consumers of more and more media output, whether TV shows or sporting events or newspapers, books, etc., but I can’t help but think we’re nearing a limit, and that the winners in the media are going to be the ones who help us to find the right information, and package it for us in easy-to-swallow bites.

Google is perhaps the best example of this currently, of a business that helps us to overcome information overload, to cut a swath through the jungle to just what we’re looking for. In other words, Google is actually helpful, and they’ve been richly rewarded for it.

What I’d like to see are broadcast channels that are actually oriented toward my needs, to where my needs are placed first, and advertising comes second. This will seem ridiculous to traditional media types, but in my view, there’s an incredible amount of media out there, and I’ll just go somewhere else. Who knows, maybe I’ll get my weather updates from Twitter before long. After all, I can’t hardly find them on KTRH anymore.

Here’s some html I’m supposed to post in order to get my Technorati account to include RealCurrents:

Technorati Profile

I’m rather conservative in my political views. At least that’s how I see myself. But I’m frustrated using that term because it seems to me that so many groups have pre-empted it that it means little in practice. Everyone from the Libertarians to the Neo-Cons is using the term conservative, so there are few principles that it embodies anymore.

On the other hand, it wasn’t much more than a century ago, I guess, that the term liberal meant something quite different as well. I’m not really sure exactly what it stood for, in this country or in England, but I find it interesting that the term “liberal arts”, so derided by later technocrats, meant the fields of history, communication (language, literature, composition, rhetoric, etc.), political theory, law and the like that were considered necessary grounding for life in a free society. Of course, these are the very disciplines that are much neglected today, a dangerous situation.

My point here is that it’s common for conservatives in the U.S. to take a rather arrogant, holier-than-thou outlook, while not even bothering to define what the “conservative” position stands for. For that reason, I want to set out some basic characteristics for how a true conservative thinks about things and so approaches the formulation of policy. In my view, a conservative is by nature:

Gradualist Perhaps most importantly, a conservative strongly prefers gradual change. Now most folks see this meaning that conservatives oppose change, but this is an unrealistic position. We must recognize that change is often inevitable, but that it is best for the effects of change to be gradual enough so that it can be managed. When change is gradual, a great deal of its negative effects can be mitigated, if there is sufficient leadership to do so.

When we try to deny that change is coming, it’s like building a dam that will eventually burst, with catastrophic results. It’s better to let the water out bit by bit, which means we establish a pace of change that can be sustained, rather than try to avoid it.

Of course, the most obvious place where gradualism applies today is in our policy toward China. China is changing with breathtaking speed, even by Western standards. Nevertheless, there still seems to be a lot of folks who are strangely dissatisfied. Of course, I’m aware that there are many problems remaining, but when you consider the church growth in China, the economic liberalization, and many other rapid changes, what’s happening there is certain to be one of the great historic events of our time.

Conservatives are by nature prudent, understanding that sudden change is usually dangerous. As a concrete example, many folks have been pressuring China to revalue its currency by at least 15%. It probably should be adjusted that much or more, eventually. Recently, though, they finally made a smaller revaluation, about 2%. It needs to do more, but if China had moved by the entire 15% all at once, it might destroy the thriving dollar store business in the U.S. (not to mention the 100¥ stores in Japan). This wouldn’t help either them or us.

Thrifty The very term conservative implies thrift, i.e. that valuable resources need to be conserved. The practical abandonment of this outlook is perhaps the biggest failure of the “conservative” movement in the U.S. today. The U.S. has always been a wasteful country, in many ways, but in the last 25 years things have really gotten out of hand.

Thrift implies many things, including a desire to moderate taxes and regulations, whenever possible, and eliminate obsolete or redundant programs and bureaucracy. Thrift is likewise characterized by a future-orientation, a willingness to make short-term sacrifices in order to secure a better future. I will have more to write on the subject of thrift (and its decline in American culture) later.

Reverent Washington, D.C., from what I can tell, has developed something of an irreverent culture, and this is causing some real problems nowadays. I don’t mean by this that people there are any worse than the rest of us Americans, but it’s dangerous when we start equating a desire to be/do good and right with simplistic naivete.

Reverence implies a respect for all parties. The U.S. is still the biggest power in the world, both economically (for at least a little while longer) and militarily, and it’s important, for ours and the rest of the world’s sake, that we be a good and righteous people. Of course, it’s difficult to agree on anything since we’ve lost a common value system, but we must make the effort to think through things in these terms, and avoid neglecting legitimate interests of other parties, such as the recent National Security Strategy seems to do.

Distrusting A conservative knows that power is potentially corrupting, and that it is essential that a balance of powers be maintained. I do think this is why Bush won re-election, because a lot of folks think the judicial branch of the federal government really is out of control. I suspect the recent Kelo v. New London ruling has opened the eyes of a lot more moderates as well.

Conservatives are distrustful of grandiose plans and of the consolidation of power. The U.S. has a long history, back to Washington’s presidency, of granting extra powers to the federal government during a crisis, but then revoking these later, which is why a sunset provision should be part of any broad grant of powers such as the Patriot Act.

Conservatives instinctively prefer a local or private solution where it makes sense. Nevertheless, a practical balance must be struck, and much of the history of U.S. domestic policy has revolved around this concern.

Humble Finally, a true conservative is humble. Conservatives realize that real life is complex, and that idealism generally must yield to practical compromises in order to get anything done. Humility implies that no one has all the answers and so listening is a key part of reaching a solution to any problem.

Humility also dictates a recognition that we need one another, and likewise we need, both individually and as a society, the blessings of God. A true conservative is actively involved in making the world a better place and is under authority themselves. A guy out in a shack in the wilderness with his own little paramilitary outfit may be an anarchist, but he’s not a conservative.

While conservatives generally do want the civil government to leave them alone, they carry a sense of duty that keeps them active and involved in a purpose larger than themselves. True conservatives are pro-active in building something for the future that will make the world a better place.

Welcome to RealCurrents. I’m going to focus this blog pretty much on current events and commentary. Of course you’ll find commentary on my other blogs as well, but this one will be more about the news, politics, and various issues. You’ll find my discussion of many different topics and interests of mine, mostly technical, at my blog All Things. I’ve also got a personal blog, Light Side.

This blog is mostly short-term in orientation and diagnostic in nature, analyzing current events. While bad news seems to make up the bulk of what is reported in the media, I’m hoping this blog won’t get too negative. I do hope to start another blog before too long that will take a long term, prescriptive view offering suggestions for how to actually makes things better.