My daughter and I have a local writer friend who teaches at the elementary school level a local quasi-magnet type school which advertises itself as offering a challenging college prep curriculum, and she is discouraged beyond words over how difficult it is to interest the pupils, especially the boys in her class in reading. Of course, given the run of books generated of late by mainstream establishment publishing, aimed at the YA and young readers and then approved by schoolteachers and librarians … most of them seem to be a grim wallow in social or familial dysfunction, misery, gloom, and despair … plus of late, lashings of sexual confusion as well of the latter, it seems the more explicit, the better.
A Talking Dinosaur, for Adults
…not just any adults, but national leaders. The Global Climate Conference was visited by Frankie the Talking Dinosaur, who warned the attendees (and viewers around the world) about the danger of extinction.
Reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s interesting little book, In the Beginning was the Command Line, in particular, a passage in which he describes something he saw at Disney Worlda hypothetical stone-by-stone reconstruction of a ruin in the jungles of India. It is supposed to have been built by a local rajah in the sixteenth century, but since fallen into disrepair.
The place looks more like what I have just described than any actual building you might find in India. All the stones in the broken walls are weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling down them for centuries, the paint on the gorgeous murals is flaked and faded just so, and Bengal tigers loll among stumps of broken columns. Where modern repairs have been made to the ancient structure, they’ve been done, not as Disney’s engineers would do them, but as thrifty Indian janitors wouldwith hunks of bamboo and rust-spotted hunks of rebar.
In one place, you walk along a stone wall and view some panels of art that tell a story.
…a broad jagged crack runs across a panel or two, but the story is still readable: first, primordial chaos leads to a flourishing of many animal species. Next, we see the Tree of Life surrounded by diverse animals…an obvious allusion (or, in showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic Tree of Life that dominates the center of Disney’s Animal Kingdom…But it’s rendered in historically correct style and could probably fool anyone who didn’t have a PhD in Indian art history.
The next panel shows a mustachioed H. sapiens chopping down the Tree of Life with a scimitar, and the animals fleeing every which way. The one after that shows the misguided human getting walloped by a tidal wave, part of a latter-day Deluge presumably brought on by his stupidity.
The final panel, then, portrays the Sapling of Life beginning to grow back, but now man has ditched the edged weapon and joined the other animals in standing around to adore and praise it.
Clearly, this exhibit communicates a specific worldview, and it strongly implies that this worldview is consistent with traditional Indian religion and culture. Most viewers will assume the connection without doing further research as to its correctness or lack thereof.
Stephenson argues that the sensorial, image-based type of communication…of which this exhibit provides one example…has very different characteristics from explicit, text-based communication. For one thing, the sensorial interface is less open to challenge than the textual interface. It doesn’t arguedoesn’t present you with a chain of facts and logic that let you sit back and say, “Hey, wait a minuteI’m not so sure about that.” It just sucks you into its own point of view.
Tunnels of Oppression, which became popular on university campuses some years ago and are apparently now very popular, represent additional examples of persuasion via sensorial communication. So did the Obama administration’s propaganda video game featuring space aliens, global warming, and gender issues. And so does this dinosaur video.
I’ll grant that the dinosaur is very smart marketing; someone might well hire the person or group who did it to put together a good marketing campaign for a product or service. But it’s not science and not serious policy thinking, and no responsible person would put together a presentation of this kind for a board of directors considering a major corporate decision point. Or a country, or a world.
I reviewed Stephenson’s book here.
Book Bleg – German Occupation of France
I am taking some (well deserved) time off around the Holidays, and would like to read up on the German occupation of France during WW2. I know it is a big subject but just let ‘er rip. Thanks in advance.
Unpacking the Port Part Two
Ginny provided an excellent link to a discussion about the port mess on the West Coast. I read the entire (long) thing and the comments and had a few things to add here.
I doubt that some guy (although he is a logistics company CEO) could rent a boat, put out a few tweets and change a municipal rule. It isn’t like the guy has millions upon millions of followers. I suppose it could have happened but sounds doubtful (8 hours is what it took). And while it is great that they can stack containers higher, that isn’t going to solve the overall problem.
As many others (including me) have pointed out the problem didn’t happen overnight and won’t be fixed overnight. The problem needs a team of people to come up with a game plan that is realistic, and a bunch of rules will need to be changed if the issue is going to be fixed. Mayor Pete is clearly underqualified and probably doesn’t care, as evidenced by his extended time off to play mom. While taking time off to take care of a child in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, taking off so long is, of course, ridiculous and a bad look. Full disclosure – when my wife bore my two children I think I took off one or two days for each.
I have said before that there needs to be a Port Team, or something on the federal level and they need to get with the state and local governments as well as the unions and fix the archaic rules that everyone is playing under, and come up with some out of the box solutions. I figure this would take the team around a month to come up with, and I would involve everyone, including the army logistics people, or anyone else I could think of to help.
This will not happen.
So, back to reality. In the world of industrial distribution, things are somewhat like they have been for the past year and a half. Anything imported is completely crazy and unpredictable as to when it will arrive. Everyone is more accepting of substitutes, as sometimes there is no choice – and many times the substitutes are much more expensive. But if the choice is “heat” or “no heat”, it makes things easier. Winter will have no mercy on facilities or homes that don’t have parts or units that work to keep them thawed. I get very little time off, but I have no choice right now as we need stuff and I have to do whatever it takes to get it.
There are some holes in the inventory but nothing too tragic, with the notable exception of imported finished goods such as ductless mini split systems, all of which are made “over there”. That industry is pretty much tanked. Domestically made products are doing much better, although the continuing labor shortages and problems with getting certain raw materials such as plastics and foam (we really didn’t need that Texas freeze on top of all of this) hurt lead times.
It is still pretty wild with some things, but overall, it isn’t the end of the world unless you are relying on imported stuff. LTL continues to be a major issue and I expect problems with food chain eventually. We need autonomous trucks and fast.
A Note on Votes
Parents want to take responsibility, perhaps, but they have (I certainly often did) shirked their responsibility to keep track of the teachers and their good and bad teaching; this new movement is surely restorative, good, appropriate. Our public schools have been examples of the tragedy of the commons – who really was taking care of the children, nurturing their minds? Who respected the students/children enough, the discipline they taught enough, not to give gruel and expect equally watered down responses? For many school boards this Tuesday will be a reckoning – we’ll see how much parents cared, how much others cared.