Boy Scouts a Compelling Metaphor

Membership in the Boy Scouts of America peaked in 1973 when the national discourse was near the pinnacle of its progressive introspection, its foundation shaking inquiries, its experimentation with sexuality and the subsequent liberation of gender stereotypes. Then of course, came the backlash with Reagan and the Moral Majority, angry white men desperate to return to the Mad Men days where the coloreds knew their place and the bitch did what she was told. The struggle continues, but the genie is out of the bottle.

Boy Scout membership has plummeted 42% since 1973 and has dropped 16% in the last ten years. Boy Scouts are white. Boy Scouts are homophobic and ban gay membership. Boy Scouts ban atheists and while no religion is officially preferred, keep the Koran at home. Surprise, the organization was ordered to pay $18.5 million in damages to a man who had been abused by a scout leader as a boy. Sometimes what happens in the woods doesn't stay in woods.

The struggle of the Boy Scouts mirrors that of the Catholic Church and the GOP, clinging to obsolete views in a world that has moved beyond them. New realities and new ideas (the earth revolves around the sun, or in today's versions, global warming, evolution, acceptance of diversity including sexual preference, economic interdependence and importance of oversight) have arrived and will stay. It is painful to watch them resist tooth and nail. Indeed, we have whole segments of society that just scream, “NO!”

The insight so needed and so overdue for all of these groups is that one fights ideas with better ideas, and better ideas must be grounded in facts. If you don't like the health care legislation, offer better legislation that passes muster with reality. The same goes for financial reform, immigration reform, and climate change legislation. Solid fact, not fiction, has now cemented that if you have a problem with the gay or those brown people, there's not much cheese down those tunnels in the workplace or the ballot box.

I am not saying conservatism or the GOP are dead or obsolete. There are Republicans who ask intelligent questions in the context of generating real solutions. Consider the Tucson Choices blog.

I am saying that we require solid thinking and reasoning that reflects this century, that takes into account everyone and everything, and not solely the short term gratification of the interest groups representing the ultra rich.

“HELL NO WE CAN'T!!!” won't work for the Boy Scouts, the Catholics, or the Republicans.

Deliberate Deception

(Photo-Charles and Shirley Sherrod with FLAG Executive Director, Susan Stokes.) This story is front page news, so I will be brief regarding what is everywhere. Tea bagger Andrew Breitbart deliberately pieced together an old video of a speech by an employee of a non-profit agency helping distressed farmers in 1986. He posted it at his web site Big Government, suggesting it was current. Fox News then slammed the airwaves, "Obama administration official in the USDA admits racial discrimination, denying assistance to white farmers."

Not wanting to appear sluggish or lacking in chutzpah, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack quickly asked for her resignation.

Shirley Sherrod became a household word yesterday. At first, the NAACP bought the fabrication and denounced her remarks, but naturally it immediately launched an investigation to get the facts.

Fact: she didn't become part of the USDA until 2009.
Fact: the speech message was the exact opposite of what Breitbart manufactured.
Fact: she gave her all for the white farmers and succeeded in saving their farm.
Fact: those farmers came forward immediately, "She saved our farm. She was as nice to us as anyone could have been. Racism? That's ridiculous."

When the NAACP realized it had been completely scammed, it did what big people do. It admitted it had been duped, profusely retracted and apologized, called for the situation to be set right, and posted the FULL video at its website. Tom Vilsack should put her back in her position TODAY or at least initiate an inquiry that will reinstate her if the results vindicate her.

Sherrod got to have that rare experience where the worst day of your life and the best day of your life are the same day. Her entire life just altered.

Breitbart has really stepped in it, because that 43 minute speech is really quite good with some excellent lines, "It's really about those who have and those who don't, whether they are black or white or Hispanic." It is now going to be played and re-played over the next few days, and Shirley Sherrod is now front and center under the big lights as an African American woman doing the right thing who was deliberately slandered by a fat, white, male teabagger slime ball.

Breitbart is the same kook that forwarded the conspiracy that the new Missile Defense Agency logo was blending the Obama logo with Islamic symbols, revealing Obama's actions "fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah."

Problem: The new logo was commissioned and created during the Bush Administration.

Breitbart's site suggested Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is secretly a Muslim, showing images of her wearing a turbin, "Ms. Kagan’s troubling tolerance of Shariah would, of course, have vastly more far-reaching implications should she reach the Supreme Court."

Problem: Kagan is Jewish.

Confronting Stupidity

George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, and Peter Ubel, a professor of business and public policy at Duke, have a short but telling piece in the New York Times about the efforts to implement behavioral economics into public policy to address various issues confronting the country.

Econ 101 notes the free market's fatal flaws in addressing society’s needs, from its lack of ethics (put your kidney up as collateral and we’ll reduce your interest rate), externalities (it’s worth it for Dupont to pollute everyone’s river), and what I consider to be its deepest and most fundamental flaw: the assumption of rational behavior.

This assumption has been amply refuted. People don’t behave rationally and are easily manipulated. They succumb to weakness, desire, and short term gratification at great long term expense. They don’t care how much sodium is in their Whopper and fries, or that enslaved children made their shoes, or that pharmaceutical companies influenced the drug they were prescribed for reasons of profit over medicine. They deny what it does to the planet to fill their gas tank.

Behavioral economics seeks to explain why consumers make irrational decisions, why they eat insane amounts of food, buy gas guzzling behemoths, rack up credit cards on unnecessary purchases, and don’t save for retirement. Behavioral economics is an early step in addressing what humanity has been in denial about throughout its history: stupidity. Yes, we know about it, see it everywhere, but it is not addressed seriously. It is not studied with academic rigor as the force on the planet that it is. It should be.

We understand the limited intellect that tries to understand and fails. Far less do we acknowledge let alone grasp the deliberate preference of ignorance, the refusal to learn, the rejection of both intelligence and education, exemplified by George W. Bush and distilled by "common sense" Sarah Palin. In denial, we find this behavior too horrible to face. We deny it, preferring to think that of course sound and informed minds will prevail, failing to recognize the dangers of allowing an evil and malignant few to exploit this sad aspect of reality.

The likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the Fox News demons have made it easier than ever to see the blatant manipulation and fleecing of the weak minded, serving the political equivalent of fast food: superficially appealing, fostering irresponsibility, and poisonous.

The imbecile always smiles. Tragically, what's hard to accept is that malignant forces have figured out how to manipulate the imbecile and like minded minions in order to get stupid elected. They got stupid into the White House, inflicting eight years of damage that will take decades to repair.

Cloth - The Essence of Fabrication

Star reporter Rob O’Dell has a follow up piece regarding Dr. Heywood Sanders' criticism of the HVS template for greasing the approval of publicly funded construction projects, in this case Tucson’s downtown convention hotel. The HVS report can’t even get basic math straight. For me, this evokes déjà vu all over again, images of obese egos hoisting mountains of nonsense about positioning regional attributes and leveraging community assets. They made a yellow streak. They had a shin dig at the Fox about a blueprint.

I was called into a meeting where highly paid people with serious voices asked me to prepare to train hundreds, perhaps thousands, of technical workers as the TDRI "ramped up" production of products not yet designed. PCC spoke of aggressive recruitment of students to be trained as technicians for "impossible to saturate" positions. Nothing happened, and the Cloth was not so easy to see in the training context. It took awhile for me to get that nothing was ever going to happen.

The current hotel conversation exposes what I have been discussing for years, but not by the numbers or the logic of the arguments per se. What exposes it are the attitudes, in particular the attitude of the Mayor regarding the downtown hotel, the desire to "shorten the presentation," the repulsion towards the facts, the disdain for the reality of the situation. Do you see it?

That’s the Cloth.

The Cloth IS the charade, the circus, the act, the façade where a chosen set of characters gets to wear a tie, draw ludicrous salaries, and pleasure itself. It is TREO’s trip to Austin, Portland, Sweden, Madagascar, Sydney, or their announcement of a local business expansion as if they were involved. It is the ballpark on Kino that will become the spring training center of the southwest. Attend a meeting at the Chamber (seriously, go to one). It is the downtown hotel.

Barring changes, which now might actually happen, here’s how it works. The hotel will be built but changes and mishaps will send the cost to $340M. Sloppy Rio Nuevo accounting will hide this and its continuing losses for awhile. When the $50K/mo taxpayer subsidy is discovered, the suits will present a strategic plan for profitable operations based upon increased revenue projections due to tourism generated by the trolley car. We may not be at 70% occupancy at $165/room, but we will be. In fact, we will be at 90% at $245/room.

Soon.

Something Else 3rd Anniversary

Today marks the third anniversary of the publication of Something Else, the tragic story of a non-profit training institute that made a huge difference for hundreds if not thousands of working Tucsonans before it was gutted and destroyed by TREO.

More accurately, TREO wished to take over the training institute, and the scheme almost worked. They infiltrated the board of directors and slashed the non-profit's funding to inflict severe financial losses. Then their moles cited the bleeding as a reason to replace the existing director with, naturally, one of them.

Well, no. Said existing director learned of the scheme and had said goons ousted from the board. Liar and thief TREO chief Joe Snell, who stole money from the institute ($132,500), from the Microbusiness Advancement Center ($54,000), and from a Goodwill training program for the handicapped ($30,000), didn't get to snarf the "Business Convergence Center" he touted before the council and board of supervisors. Instead he was treated to a new word, "Cloth" and significantly enhanced awareness that he doesn't do a thing for his salary.

The institute imploded in a matter of months. The following year Raytheon built its own training center. Other businesses that used the institute, numbering over 100, now just go without.