Losing their soul
November 19, 2005
Here’s a thoughtful article about what is happening with the Republican majority in congress. Although I consider myself a political conservative, I ruefully tend to agree with The Economist view.
Lexington | St Bill of the right | Economist.com
And conservative pundits are people of adamantine principle compared with conservative politicians. Remember those Republican promises back in 1994 to clean up Washington? The Republican majority is now every bit as scandal-plagued and spending-addicted as the old Democratic majority, if not more so. Discretionary spending has grown by 36% in real terms since 2001. The number of pork projects in appropriations bills has grown from 2,100 in 1998 to 12,999 in 2005. Talk about winning the world and losing your soul.
The article is about William Buckley, who was influential in shaping conservative republicanism some 50 years ago. Whatever your political persuasion, you may agree that Buckley was, and still is, a colorful and interesting person. A man who plays the harpsichord can’t be all bad.
I offer the religious viewpoint that we human beings have more devolved than evolved, starting with the Fall. Sociological progressives would have us believe that we homo sapiens are evolving into smarter and more humane beings, but the evidence seems to prove the opposite on both counts. Maybe I am just turning into an old grump.
Dave, warily looking ahead to the bah humbug season.
Global Cooling?
November 18, 2005
It’s not always easy to separate sensible articles on global warming from the myriad of screeds based on pseudo-science and worse, but here’s one that’s worth reading. Blogger Michael Kruse makes a reasonable case that a global warming trend does not in fact exist, based on the data presented. I wish I could cite a similar article making the case for a global warming trend. If you know of one, I would like to read it.
Kruse Kronicle: Social Indicators: Global Warming and Environment
Here are Kruse’s conclusions.
Global warming is not primarily, and probably not significantly, a human influenced phenomenon. It may bring some changes to our lives but radical changes to the world economy to stop the unstoppable will negatively impact the quality of life of millions of people around the world, especially the poor. Air pollution is in decline and quality of life with regard to the environment is stable if not improving in the US.
Finally, let’s step back and take a very broad look at the issue:
This data from the Sargasso Sea studies (the area of the Atlantic between the West Indies and the Azores) shows that we are actually emerging from a mini-ice age. Temperatures were much warmer in the Middle Ages then at present.
The article provides a number of charts that seem to negate the case for global warming. Take a look and see what you think. This and other articles I’ve read seem compelling to me. I am very skeptical about global warming, but who knows?
Dave, finding the thought of global warming enticing this time of year.
Deal averts Internet showdown
November 17, 2005
It looks like the current system for controlling Internet domain names has survived the effort to put it under UN control. This is a Good Thing.
CNN.com - Deal averts Internet showdown - Nov 16, 2005
Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge of the Internet’s addressing system, averting a U.S.-EU showdown at this week’s U.N. technology summit.
So long as ICANN continues to operate independently from the word’s assorted political machines, including ours, the message to the world should be “hands off.”
Dave, who values his domain names.
WSJ.com - Drucker on Everything
November 16, 2005
WSJ.com - Drucker on Everything
For 30 years, the immigrant from Austria graced these pages as a contributor, usually under the heading, “Drucker on Management.” That was a typical piece of modesty, because the more accurate description of his work would have been Drucker on Everything. He was a student of human behavior in all its ways and means, and through his many books and articles he sought to explain how managers could get the most from themselves, their colleagues and their institutions.
I hadn’t thought of Drucker as a philosopher, but that he was.
Dave, trying to find his copy of “The Effective Executive” for a re-read.
Peter Drucker On Leadership
November 16, 2005
Peter Drucker died Friday, November 11, 2005, at age 95. The linked Forbes article was written a year ago.
Peter Drucker On Leadership - Forbes.com
NEW YORK - Peter F. Drucker was born 95 years ago today–can it be possible?–in Vienna. The universally known writer, thinker and lecturer now is nearly deaf and doesn’t get around like he used to. He stopped giving media interviews about a year ago. But in late October, Drucker granted an exception to Forbes.com at the urging of Dr. Rick Warren, the founder and head of the Christian evangelical Saddleback Community Church in Lake Forest, Calif.
Peter F. Drucker at his home in California.The Drucker-Warren relationship may surprise many readers, but it goes back two decades, to when the young minister came to Drucker for advice. Under Drucker’s tutelage, Warren’s own success as a spiritual entrepreneur has been considerable. Saddleback has grown to 15,000 members and has helped start another 60 churches throughout the world. Warren’s 2001 book, The Purpose-Driven Life, is this decade’s best seller with 19.5 million copies sold so far and compiling at the rate of 500,000 per month.
Drucker’s official biography is posted in another article.
During the sixties and seventies I devoured many of Drucker’s books on business management, and his ideas influenced my business career in ways I can only guess at. He obviously had great influence on Rick Warren, which may help explain my ambivalence regarding Warren’s “purpose-driven church.” I am still undecided whether it is a good model for the church or not, but I’ll leave that discussion for another day.
One thing seems certain; Peter Drucker was read and quoted by a wide range of business and institutional leaders, and the impact of his ideas on our culture will remain for a long time. He was a man of the times.
Dave
Peter Drucker, 1909-2005
November 16, 2005
Peter Drucker, 1909-2005
Peter F. Drucker is a writer, teacher, and consultant specializing in strategy and policy for businesses and social sector organizations. He has consulted with many of the world’s largest corporations as well as with nonprofit organizations, small and entrepreneurial companies, and with agencies of the U.S. government. He has also worked with free-world governments such as those of Canada, Japan, and Mexico. He is the author of thirty-one books which have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thirteen books deal with society, economics, and politics; fifteen deal with management. Two of his books are novels, one is autobiographical, and he is a co-author of a book on Japanese painting. He has made four series of educational films based on his management books. He has been an editorial columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review and other periodicals.
Drucker was born in 1909 in Vienna and was educated there and in England. He took his doctorate in public and international law while working as a newspaper reporter in Frankfurt, Germany. He then worked as an economist for an international bank in London. Drucker came to the United States in 1937. He began his teaching career as professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington College; for more than twenty years he was professor of management at the Graduate Business School of New York University. The recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, Peter Drucker has, since 1971, been Clarke Professor of Social Sciences at Claremont Graduate University. Its Graduate Management School was named after him in 1984.
Peter Drucker has been hailed in the United States and abroad as the seminal thinker, writer, and lecturer on the contemporary organization. In 1997, he was featured on the cover of Forbes magazine under the headline, “Still the Youngest Mind,” and BusinessWeek has called him “the most enduring management thinker of our time.”
On June 21 2002, Dr. Peter Drucker, author of The Effective Executive and Management Challenges for the 21st Century, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush.
Mr. Drucker has received honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He is Honorary Chairman of the Leader to Leader Institute. He is married and has four children and six grandchildren.
Pulp friction
November 15, 2005
Online books | Pulp friction | Economist.com
This month, Google announced that it is moving forward with its plans to digitise books from several big libraries, despite two lawsuits filed in October by authors and publishers who claim that the firm’s actions violate their copyrights. (Google says its actions are legal under a “fair use” exception in the law.)
For whatever it’s worth, the “suits” have decided to press the copyright issue. Although critical mass is still in the future, some day many if not most books will be published online. As far as my own inclination is concerned, critical mass has already been reached. I am still buying bound books, but I hope to build an even larger digital library before I check out. Will I need a library in heaven? I suspect not, since heaven is no doubt not limited by space and time. I wonder what will replace my brain, my “thinker?” I wonder… (Now STOP that!)
Few dispute that the services will be a boon for the public and that books will eventually go digital, though the technology for portable display devices is still in its infancy. “As an industry we should embrace the opportunity that that will bring,” says Mr Newton. In time, once robust economic models can be worked out, they will benefit authors and publishers too. In 1987 Stewart Brand, a technology pundit, said, in the very next breath after his oft-quoted aphorism: “Information also wants to be expensive.” But no one seems to remember that bit.
Not surprisingly The Economist can’t quite decide whose side they are on. Mr. Newton has the right of it - an economic model will be worked out that benefits both authors and publishers, but it may take a few false starts to get there. If I were an author, I would be thinking hard about this.
Dave, which he wants no buggy whip business.
The God gene
November 14, 2005
Science and Religion Share Fascination in Things Unseen - New York Times
Scientists know that without experimental vindication their proposals are likely to wither. Moreover, a single definitive “null experiment,” like the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 that dispensed with the long-sought-after ether, could sweep away the whole idea.
Religious belief that the universe is the handiwork of an all-powerful being is not subject to refutation. This sort of reliance on faith may itself have an evolutionary basis. There has been talk of a “god gene”: the idea of an early advantage in the struggle for survival for those endowed with a belief in a hidden patrimony that gives order, purpose and meaning to the universe we experience.
I agree that both science and religion are concerned with things unseen, but the idea of a “god gene” betrays a faith in science that is just as real as the Christian’s faith in a creator God.
Only one of those faiths has been attested continuously and consistently by thinking persons for thousands of years. I rest my case.
Dave, still filling assorted voids in his understanding.
Go to Church or Play a Game?
November 12, 2005
Is achieving happiness the goal of life? A survey concluded that people who go to church are a bit happier than people who don’t go to church. (So… ?)
EconLog, Go to Church or Play a Game?, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty
[The survey] strongly suggests that the psychological benefits people get from religion stem from the social aspect, and not the doctrine. So while people often use findings like this to make a pragmatist’s case for religion, a better interpretation is that people would be happier if they joined a group of some sort with regular meetings. It doesn’t have to be a church; it could just as well be a regular gaming group. Back in high school, I did both, and guess which one gave me more happiness!
If your church is not there to provide the psychological benefit of happiness, why is it there?
Augustine, a wise man from the distant past, once said that you and I were born “with a God shaped void” in our hearts. We were born with a built-in need to know the God who created us, and without dumping the full theological load on you I’ll just assert that your church exists to help fill this void.
This may or may not provide you with psychological benefits, but your church should point you toward the only source of real peace and joy, and that is no little thing. Joy in life is quite different from happiness and much more desirable.
I don’t mean to ride my religious hobby-horse here. I am mainly suggesting that it is a mistake to elevate happiness to the position of the greatest good.
Dave, usually happy anyway.
Moby Dick
November 11, 2005
About 2 or 3 e-books ago, I finished reading Moby Dick on my PalmOne Zire PDA. How I missed this classic by Herman Melville during my school years I don’t know. Well, maybe I do know, because then I was an engineer, not one of those liberal arts airheads.
My, how the years have dealt with me! Now, I’m glad I did miss it. I found Moby
Dick fascinating and edifying, as I’m sure countless others over the years have found it, on several levels. I’ll get back to my Moby Dick ruminations later.
Am I the only one wishing that God would stop the clock for a while to let me catch up with all the good stuff needing to be sampled? How many more “Moby Dicks” are out there waiting for me? But I digress.
So what did I find in this novel? And how do I comment on it without yielding to the temptation to “tell you all about it” and bore you to death in the process?
Hmmm. Well, I guess I can at least identify what I see as the various “levels” of Melville’s narrative, but I will first share a concise summary by one Owen Chace, first mate of the whale ship Essex. He wrote that the story was the
NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN.
So there you have it. Need anything more?
You already know the name of the narrator. “Call me Ishmael,” he says. Using a literary device that would be deadly in the hands of a lesser author, most of the book consists of well-annotated lectures on the history of whaling, the anatomy of a whale, classification of whales, and detailed descriptions of whaling boats and whaling equipment. But yet I found myself an eager pupil under Ishmael, hour after hour. So, one level of the book is the pedagogic.
Another level is the psychological. Ishmael observes some wierd characters, from Queequeg, the pagan cannabalistic harpooner, to Captain Ahab, himself. He makes his character observations in and around copious digressions, all with meanings that will become more or less clear many chapters hence, and there are 135 chapters.
Yet another level is as travelogue. When Ishmael and his bosom friend Queequeg finally leave Nantucket on the Pequod, their leisurely route leads them to adventures over many oceans as they pursue Captain Ahab’s obsession.
Obsession with what, you say? And who or what is Moby Dick? You’ll like me better if I let you find that out for yourself.
Dave, still saying “thar she blows” in his sleep.
