Captives of the media?

(Denver Post, Jan. 18) You, a captive of the media? No way. Nobody mediates for you. You think independently. You gather your own information and decide for yourself. Me too. We don’t need no media mediating for us, no sir. Yeah, right. In our dreams, maybe, but not in America today. The world is so interconnected, changes so fast, and presents each person with so many choices, that reliance on others for much of our knowledge is inescapable. But which media can we trust, and how do we keep them at our service – on tap, not on top? Especially if newspapers as we have known them are on the way out, how can we stay reliably informed as free citizens in a free society? That’s the underlying concern as Coloradans wonder about the fate of the Rocky Mountain News, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and maybe even the Denver Post.

I love newspapers. They’ll always be my preferred window on our civic and cultural life. Online and broadcast media rank a distant second. I hope enough American papers manage to reinvent themselves for the digital era so that print journalism can long continue. Since you’re reading this, you probably agree.

Yet trouble and transformation are stalking the media industry regardless. News providers face brutal pressures to adapt. For us as news users, this is a good time to think about the fundamental question we began with: Who mediates for you? Or as the counter-culture used to say, what do you feed your head?

The media seldom challenge us on this. They have a commercial motive not to. Challenging myself, I find I’m often careless as to both the quality and quantity of what gets fed into my head. New technologies and rebranding by the providers are beside the point. The problem is my passivity about the content they deliver.

A medium is a just a conveyor belt. At one end is a loadmaster, the editor. According to what’s on his clipboard, the belt gets loaded with news from reporters, opinions from pundits, and ads from businesses. It’s all conveniently brought to our homes. That convenience can be a trap, however. We may become too accepting.

“Couldn’t drink coffee without the morning paper,” worried someone at our Vanguard discussion club when the industry’s woes were this month’s topic. “We are Colorado,” says a Denver Post promo campaign. Media companies, this paper included, become part of our lives. They’re still only companies, means to an end. The end is knowing what we need to know to live together responsibly and happily.

Running the conveyor costs money. Persuading us to buy things, either subscriptions or advertised goods and services, is life and death to the company. Print is in trouble because more and more people are buying elsewhere. How concerning is that?

After all, as the Post’s Dean Singleton told fellow publishers in a speech last June, “Newspapers are the cornerstone of democracies everywhere…. If we fail, democracy fails.” Thomas Jefferson said two centuries ago that he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than vice versa. So are bankrupt papers a national crisis?

No. Both men’s points go to freedom of the press via whatever medium works best. They aren’t limited to ink on pulp. In America, thanks to the First Amendment, it’s the marketplace and not government that picks media winners and losers. You and I as consumers, voting with dollars, make that sovereign choice.

Again, as I’ve written before, it’s up to us. Insisting on liberty, WE can make our country’s broadcasting and Internet as free as print has always been. Exercising personal responsibility, WE can choose a healthier information diet, more fiber, less junk. Conveyors inevitably come and go, but independent thinking remains.

The church of climatology

One of the things that has always confounded me about many liberals is their arrogance. They are so darn certain they are right that they are unable to entertain any divergent views. Ever try and have a truly rational discussion with a liberal on race? On abortion? How about the war in Iraq? Or Guantanamo Bay? As they say on the Sopranos: Fuggedaboutit.

There are no areas of compromise on what I call the signal issues of the left. And even worse, if you dare to think differently, you are immediately attacked as a racist, a sexist, a fascist or just plain stupid. Using such personal attacks with such highly inflammatory labels has the effect of putting those with opposing views on the defensive, and distracting the discussion from the issue at hand. It is a very common -- and very effective -- way for the left to quell honest debate on many of the most important issues of the day. It's disingenuous. And it works.

Climate change is a perfect example of this. Bill McKibben at the left-leaning Foreign Policy magazine has a fantastically irresponsible piece on global warming where he claims without qualification that global warming is an irrefutable fact and that it might already be too late to save the planet. The science is apparently settled:

Every national academy of science, long lists of Nobel laureates, and in recent years even the science advisors of President George W. Bush have agreed that we are heating the planet. Indeed, there is a more thorough scientific process here than on almost any other issue: Two decades ago, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and charged its scientists with synthesizing the peer-reviewed science and developing broad-based conclusions. The reports have found since 1995 that warming is dangerous and caused by humans. The panel’s most recent report, in November 2007, found it is “very likely” (defined as more than 90 percent certain, or about as certain as science gets) that heat-trapping emissions from human activities have caused “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century.

According to McKibben, the IPCC (a UN sponsored body that is rife with political considerations) has decided that humans are warming the planet -- and so it must be true. He speaks as if the science of geologic activities on the earth -- a planet billions of years old -- is settled fact because a group of scientists have been studying the issue for twenty years or so. That he speaks with such certainty of the science behind temperature change within earth's complex ecosystem is the height of arrogance. How do we know that this isn't normal change in the ebb and flow of the earth's climate process? Doesn't anyone recall that the earth was once covered in ice? And that the onslaught of the ice age happened so quickly that it wiped the dinosaurs from the face of the planet?

McKibben has no such questions, however. His article also includes a strange defense of China as a main culprit of the carbon dioxide that he blames for heating up the earth -- and herein lies a clue as to his political motivations. McKibben argues that while it is true that China has overtaken the U.S. as the main producer of carbon emissions, the only fair way to view the issue is on a per capita basis: because China has four times the population of the U.S., China is not as bad a carbon scofflaw as America is:

And by that standard, each Chinese person now emits just over a quarter of the carbon dioxide that each American does. Not only that, but carbon dioxide lives in the atmosphere for more than a century. China has been at it in a big way less than 20 years, so it will be many, many years before the Chinese are as responsible for global warming as Americans.

Starting to see the picture? China produces more carbon emissions that the U.S., but we are the bigger sinners, since they are new to the game and we've been doing it for years. And, if that isn't bad enough, McKibben actually gives credit to the Chinese political leadership for doing more about global warming than we are:

What’s more, unlike many of their counterparts in the United States, Chinese officials have begun a concerted effort to reduce emissions in the midst of their country’s staggering growth. China now leads the world in the deployment of renewable energy, and there’s barely a car made in the United States that can meet China’s much tougher fuel-economy standards.

Maybe McKibben hasn't been paying attention to the air quality issues athletes faced at the Beijing Olympics, or the tremendous air quality problems throughout China that have created serious health issues. China has one of the worst environmental records in history, and their rapid industrialization has been virtually without restraint.

But none of this matters when you worship at the Church of Climatology, where faith trumps fact every time. It is more important to punish the culture of consumption in the United States and place the blame on Americans who drive SUV's and other cars that the left finds to be a sin against their belief that everyone should ride a bike to work. We are the original sinners, after all; we are the true crucible of industry. It is because of America that the automobile is so ubiquitous in our world.

So according to McKibben we must repent and change our deadly ways. And even then, it may be too late:

The only question now is whether we’re going to hold off catastrophe. It won’t be easy, because the scientific consensus calls for roughly 5 degrees more warming this century unless we do just about everything right. And if our behavior up until now is any indication, we won’t.

And the left always says that conservatives practice scare tactics!

Now, I'm not a scientist and I don't pretend to play on on the Internet. But I've done a little bit of research, and the science of climate change is not settled. Take a quick look at the informative article, for example, at the aptly named JunkScience.com, which takes you through the science of greenhouse gasses and global warming. The most interesting section is the following:

Who says it (the earth) is warming catastrophically?

Humans have only been trying to measure the temperature fairly consistently since about 1880, during which time we think the world may have warmed by about +0.6 °C ± 0.2 °C. As we've already pointed out, the estimate of warming is less than the error margin on our ability to take the Earth's temperature, generally given as 14 °C ± 0.7 °C for the average 1961-1990 while the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) suggest 13.9 °C for their average 1880-2004

We are pretty sure it was cold before the 1880 commencement of record and we would probably not handle the situation too well if such conditions returned but there has been no demonstrable catastrophic warming while people have been trying to measure the planet's temperature.

If we have really been measuring a warming episode as we think we have, then setting new records for "hottest ever in recorded history" should happen just about every year -- although half a degree over a century is hardly something to write home about -- so there's really nothing exciting about scoring the highest number when looking at such a short history.

The JunkScience.com article has lots of interesting graphs -- perhaps the most interesting is the one which shows the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature. For a full resolution image of the graph, click here.  This graph shows a slight uptick in temperature (to the tune of .5 degree centigrade over 120 years), but you see a much larger increase in carbon dioxide over the same period. Doesn't look like a clear causal relationship between the two to me -- and this is the primary foundation for both McKibben's article in Foreign Policy and almost all climate change policy.

The point here is not that the earth isn't warming -- clearly, it is to a small degree. Rather, the issue is how much and why: the left wants us to believe that the science is clear that we are to blame, and that the impact of this change will be catastrophic. These scare tactics are designed to quell open debate about climate change, and to make it impossible to discuss alternative explanations (or solutions) to the problem.

Most religions are organized around fear to a certain degree, and the Church of Climatology is no different. It's a powerful motivator for change. In this case, that change is to remake the world in a more progressive fashion -- wind, solar, electric cars, etc. The only way to get to this in a rapid fashion is to galvanize people through tales of Armageddon. How much are you willing to spend to save the earth from certain destruction? To the green movement's lasting delight the answer is plenty. And with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in charge, you can bet that the money will be flowing for the foreseeable future.

Clueless celebrities vs. leaders & heroes

Americans need to think and talk more about the timeless principles of leadership, principles that also apply equally well to citizenshipand simple person-hood. How desperately those principles are needed everyday, and how sadly lacking.

Too many "leaders" today are merely celebrities, with no notion of integrity and no commitment to God's goodness. Little wonder that people feel cheated and seek ever anew for some "leader" who could restore good government, but instead the media imposes on us yet another clueless, self-serving celebrity. The risk to our republic is immense.

Then, too, because people are taught that those shallow, unprincipled weaklings must be idolized, people have little chance to learn about genuine goodness. In place of valid heroes, representing by their example the principles and godliness we each need to emulate, the media adulate these false "leaders" and people's moral integrity and civic responsibility erode ever further.

This year, on this blog, let's proclaim the true values that we need in our leaders and in ourselves.

If we're all publishers, no one is

(From PoliticsWest.com) Realization: I've been posting less here lately, and more on Facebook and Twitter. The quick shots and impulsive replies encouraged by the format on those social networks, especially the 140-character limit for a tweet, have become a line of least resistance when I want to sound off. In the last few days, versus a single post here at Politics West, I've gabbed dozens of times to my readers (such as they are) on those sites about things like Jason Salzman's assertion that Scripps should keep losing money, Ritter's clueless budget posture, Schwarzenegger's White House fantasy, and -- just this morning -- TABOR hater Rollie Heath and Christmas grinch Susan Greene.

Thus the downward spiral of convenience (plus brevity and vacuity) continues from books to magazines to daily papers to hourly newscasts to 24/7 cable to unmediated blogs to unprocessed tweets. Thoughtful written expression is dying in a race to the bottom, and to my dismay I'm one of the racers. I don't even use a pocket device for the Internet; probably if I did the descent would be even faster, driven by an itchy brain and carpal thumbs.

But, ahem, there's one small problem. Who reads any of this stuff -- my stuff that is; no doubt yours has a large, rapt audience -- who knows or cares or has the time? Well, I'm afraid it's clear who generally has the time: that would be folks who don't otherwise have much of a life. Which tentatively yields Andrews' Theorem:

The attention paid by any given reader to my online musings is inverse to that individual's ability to make any damn difference on the subject I'm writing about.

Oops -- present company excepted once again! This philosophical metacommunication is a minefield of offense-giving and self-contradiction.

I'm hardly the first to say it, but Twitter in particular is forcing upon me the discomfiting truth that if we're all publishers, no one is. Which brings me full circle to a love and regard for the old, slower, fussily-edited, tree-killing modes of writing -- the book, the magazine, the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News (pray God they both survive) -- and even their electronic cousins such as this website. May it too survive the election year that gave it birth.

So thanks for reading this, if you are. Anybody out there? Hello?

Merry Christmas and all the best for 2009 anyway, he said into the cyber-silence.

The multiple gifts of Christmas

This is the season of giving. Nothing except the birth of the Savior (itself a gift) is more distinctive about Christmas than this. Besides fanning out through multiple department stories over many days and hours in search of something wonderful to present family or friends for this unique holiday, we give the gift of ourselves in love and affection. These are truly wonderful things which brighten up the human condition for a few weeks at least each year, but there are still more wonderful gifts for which we do not deserve any credit although we are responsible for their proper use. I mean the gift of life and of all the real potential for good in our lives.

We live in a scientific age in which many of our greatest intellects are convinced that life and everything that is a part of it can be engineered, not to mention ended if a power or authority decides that some persons’ lives are not worth living.

As in ancient times, it is today an act of moral and spiritual boldness to cherish life, the condition for all good things. Whereas the Israelites were surrounded with peoples for whom child sacrifice was a thoroughly established tradition, God’s chosen people (as they understood themselves) regarded human life as a precious gift from God not lightly to be squandered. Indeed, nothing illustrates the value of life more than the grief we feel when our loved ones die.

When sensible people speak of duty and gratitude, two virtues not much in favor these days, they rank life as the greatest of all gifts to uphold and appreciate. That’s why the framers of the U.S. Constitution included among that document’s greatest purposes security of liberty for our posterity, as well as for the living generations.

The patriotic citizen, then, no less than the pious man, understands that life is the most fundamental of all gifts and therefore the cause of our greatest obligations. We must preserve, protect and defend it as much as we do the charter of liberty that aims to secure it.

Human life is not mere biological existence but the whole panoply of human possibilities. We well know that our mind, spirit or body can be devoted to bad and even evil purposes no less than to good ones, so everything depends on knowing what are our fundamental duties and rights. We have duties to ourselves and to others to promote human happiness, including justice. We have rights to remind ourselves that we must restrain the exercise of our powers.

The philosopher Leo Strauss once wrote that "the genius of Shakespeare is not the work of Shakespeare." He meant in no way to denigrate the achievements of that greatest of all English poets (or any other talented human beings) but to point to the fact that their potential for greatness was the necessary condition and that was due to powers beyond themselves.

Our lives are enriched because of these and other divine gifts. Whence comes our capacity for kindness, gentleness, compassion and sympathy which so uniquely marked the life and the eternal legacy of the God made into man whose nativity will be celebrated in churches all over the world this Christmas? Surely it is our choice to practice these virtues but our capacity for doing so is not our doing.

Consider too, the classical virtues of courage, prudence, wisdom and moderation. Marveling at the sacrifices young Americans have made and continue to make in the armed forces in defense of their country, President Reagan once asked, "Where do we get such men?" He was not in doubt as to the answer, this God-fearing man, and he exhibited the respect which the qualities of God’s children deserve.

Common sense has long distinguished between potential and actual achievement. We know that there are people with great gifts who never use them, or not to the degree to which they are capable. For example, the Greek philosopher Aristotle never confused potential intelligence with actual intelligence, reserving the name of this virtue for the actual use of it. The same can be said for all the other virtues.

The many failures of human potential–and worse, think of the Caesars, Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins of the world–give us all the more reason to appreciate the gifts that we receive from our Creator and to develop them to the fullest, for even the greatest gifts can be abused. We show our appreciation for these divine treasures by treating each other with the greatest respect and glorifying the Author of all these things.