Watching the Olympics: Pt 2, The Official 2012 Logo

I am going into this without any background information.  I don’t even want to know who designed the official 2012 Olympic logo.  The designer might be my über hero, Paul Krugman, for all I know.  Or another man who can do no wrong, the fictional Siegfried Farnon.  It doesn’t matter.  Regardless of who designed this, it is a mistake.

We all know the excellent Olympic rings.  Simple, elegant, and relevant.  They symbolize unity across the continents, each equal and identical other than color.  But the colors are careful to be irrelevant to favoring any nation or region while being vibrant an identifiable as part of a whole.  The rings endure as the most recognizable symbol of the Olympics — for which many symbols exist — because of its appropriate elegance.

Now look at the official logo…

As in love, I know what is right and what is wrong; I trust my heart.  But this logo looks the way it makes my heart feel.  Crushed, shattered, and a weak shade of pink.  There is no love here.

I had seen other logos related to the 2012 Olympic games, but discovered the official logo only yesterday when prepping my previous post.  I mentioned this yesterday while at the neighborhood bar being a hamster (cf., my excellent and particularly moving Watching the Olympics:  Pt 1) when someone said the current logo looks like a swastika.  I’m sure they’re not the only person to mention this, because it is absolutely true.

But then if you look at it again, if you unscramble the blocks, it looks like “Zion” to me.  Who knows?

The entire concept is wrong.  Instead of interlinking rings standing for unity, you have garish, violently jagged blocks jostling against each other.  The design is confrontational, with each piece pushing to fit within the roughly square area of the design.  The elegance is gone, the simple unity missing.  It is unbalanced.  In short, the design utterly misses the mark.  A pink blemish on the world of art and design, if you ask me.

I will go now and see if Paul Krugman or Siegfried Farnon designed this logo.  I doubt it.  One is an economist and the other doesn’t really exist, but either could have done a much better job than what we have here.  I will choose one of the many other tasteful, more appropriate Summer Olympic logos in use out there as my official logo.  Don’t expect to see the pink monstrosity here again.

Related articles

• Design: Who Made the Olympic Rings? (nytimes.com)
• The naughty 2012 Olympics logo (kottke.org)
• How the Olympics got their rings (thesportsbank.net)

Minnesota Marriage Amendment and Advice

This protester was on his own and letting Minnesota state Senators know his position on gay marriage. This is freedom of speech in action. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I believe a key reason why “mainstream” conservatives — a disappearing breed, indeed — support crazy proposals like a so-called Marriage Protection Amendment is to rally conservatives to the voting booth.

I have a hard time believing that more informed and socially sophisticated conservative leaders really sees something like gay marriage as a threat to our country.  Gay marriage, a threat to America?  Really?  What about jobs, the environment, education?  Or gay marriage as a threat to the sanctity of marriage?  How about divorce?  That seems like it is doing more damage to the virtues of marriage than people choosing openly and freely to join together.  (Perhaps John Edwards or Newt Gingrich have some pointers I am missing.)

These hot button social issues simply play a key role in keeping otherwise aloof voters active.  So I have always thought, don’t freak out.  Most of America is relatively sane and sanity will prevail.

But then I read Baird Helgesen’s assessment of how the vote in Minnesota might hinge on a general rural versus urban divide among voters in last Sunday’s Star Tribune.  That got me thinking more about this.  First of all, social issues increasingly straddle political lines and there really is no objective identity with an issue one way or the other anyway.

Which political party, for example, really has the corner on “family values.”  I would argue, however, that one party has done a much better job co-opting the language of social issues and the discourse of topics like family values.  That is the Republican Party.

This is an important consideration if your goal is defeating something like an anti-gay marriage amendment.   Strategically, defining your “base” is difficult and depending on that base to vote consistently with your ideology might add another layer of uncertainty.  In the anti-marriage amendment example, the state might run blue, but how deep is that shade of blue?

Baird brought up a good example.  In Minnesota the Iron Range tends to be socially conservative.  And if politically active voters on the Iron Range turn out whether you bait the ballot with a social issue or not you still put a social conservative in the polling booth.  They might vote pro-labor and anti-marriage, for example.  These socially conservative democrats mark a troubling tipping point in politics when progressives stay home, making once progressive states like Minnesota more a robin’s egg blue than deep navy.

So, since legislators are increasingly eager to let the public legislate by putting issues up majority vote — which flies in the face of what the Bill of Rights is intended to protect, i.e., the rights of the minority against the wishes of the majority — why not put progressive hot issues on the ballot?  We could have a Clean Air Amendment, a Right to Education Amendment, and a Chicken in Every Pot Amendment!  Who doesn’t like chicken?

Ok, I am joking…kind of.  What progressives need and don’t seem to have is the ability to stir up its aloof base.  The left doesn’t seem to have a solid and consistent policy discourse.  The left doesn’t have simple ideas people can grasp.  ”Change We Can Believe In” is much more abstract than the simple — and simple-minded — “one man, one woman,” for example.  In short, progressives need a better message, need more guts.

Today when you listen to the debate about our economic malaise, for example, you hear Democrats speaking the so-called moderate language of compromise and pragmatism.  Democrats are in a double-lose situation.  The right has hijacked the discourse of freedom while the left struggles to co-opt the language of failed conservative policy.  The result is a somewhat poorly defined Democratic Party and disengaged political support.

To quote my man Paul Krugman, “Compromise, if you must, on the policy — but never on the truth.”

So two-fold advice.  First, progressives cannot take it for granted that the wacky minority will be defeated by a more sophisticated and calm majority.  You have to rally to vote.  Every election is important, whether local or national.

Second, while I believe progressives need to put teeth into their political messages, I also think they simply need more fight.  Find stronger policy positions and promote them consistently and aggressively.  Engage and re-engage the voter.  Most Americans are not going to sift through the marginalia of political discourse anyway.  Right now I don’t see a lot from the left-of-center that seems all that definitive.  Instead I see too much compromising on the truth.

And if that is going on, then these divisive social issues do indeed matter, and could present potentially regressive results.  It is bad enough that we live in a society suffering from failed conservative fiscal and economic policy.  It isn’t going to get any better if we start making laws that strip citizens of their basic rights.

A lot divides this country politically.  It is hard to see how divisive issues set up as fodder for political discourse and as tests for political identity are going to reunite the country.  These are distractions that have to be dealt with, but the bigger issue is the bigger message.  In politics it is all about “What have you done for me lately?”  In that regard I believe the left needs a better PR wing.

Related articles

• General Mills Officially Against Minnesota’s Gay Marriage Ban (queerty.com)
• PPP Poll: Minnesota Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment in Serious Trouble After Major Shift in Attitudes (towleroad.com)

Being a Good Conservative and Understanding Oil

I Like Elephants.

Good conservatives — primarily American Republicans, of course — understand all the important issues best.  Economics, the environment, politics, human rights, education, family values and morality…They say so all the time.  So I thought, heck, why not give it a try?  Why not undergo a conservative conversion?  I want to be the best, too.

I presume there is plenty of conservative superiority to go around.  They spend millions and millions to get people to sign on, after all.  If there were a limited supply of superiority, you would think wise conservatives would be asking Americans to spend millions and millions to join them, right?

(Ok, so liberals do it, too.  My Conservative Conversion isn’t complete.  I can still have some fun.)

I was listening to NPR — something I will need to forgo as a conservative, alas — when a story about the looming Obama-Romney presidential election focused on the politics of oil.  That gave me the idea to start my Conservative Conversion with oil, a topic conservatives know best.

The solution to our energy problem is simple.  We only need to drill for more oil in this country.

The conservative premise looks something like this:  If we produce more oil, oil prices will come down, our economy will recover, and we’ll all be back at the drive-in diner in the 1950s again.

The 1950s drive-in seems like a stretch, but it is quaint and I like it so I decided to roll with it.  The rest of the premise is more difficult to swallow, unless, of course, you graced with a conservative’s greatest self-serving asset:  Ignorance.

As my post started to fill with links to charts, studies, and smart people, I began to feel uneasy.  None of it was squaring with the “Drill, Baby, Drill” policy promoted as gospel by conservatives.  Newt Gingrich says we can have $2.50 gasoline.  Michele Bachmann, however, is a better choice.  She has us at $2.00 a gallon.  So what where did I stray on my early course toward conservatism.

I started to think about this in a common sense sort of way, and unfortunately I could not get get any of the facts to square with the conservative premise.  Not being a fully fledged conservative, facts and common sense mattered.  So imagine my frustration — and my disappointment — as I struggled to join the conservative bandwagon.

Fortunately, I was just being silly.  The first thing a good conservative must do is distance himself from facts, reason, and common sense.  And, by golly…I wasn’t doing that.  Jeepers, it is a lot harder being superior than I thought!

The facts fouling the conservative solution came from smart people doing research and sharing ideas and we know where those people come from.  Academe.  Or Hollywood.  They are the liberal elite and we must at all cost avoid the elite.  Better to look into the glassy stare of Sarah Palin or even Mitt Romney than rely on some unshaven leftist intellectual for your facts.  (Sorry, Paul Krugman.)

That simple mistake was screwing me up.

And when I figured that I didn’t need facts, my post became shorter and less troublesome.  Blog posts are supposed to be short and simple anyway, a  a bit of advice for which I never took much respect.

But even today, as a conservative wannabe, I don’t understand this.  The United States consumes almost 20 million barrels of oil a day and produces less than half of that.  But even if we were able to produce more than our demand, there isn’t any guarantee that our costs would go down.

There is a little problem in the conservative dream of controlling our country’s energy costs.  That problem isn’t Barak Obama.  It isn’t really a factor of domestic production and consumption.  The obstacle to controlling our energy costs is the global market for oil.

Nuisances like cartels and emerging markets will always wreak havoc on the idea of energy independence for as long as we choose to rely on a resource like oil for a major share of our energy resources.  Factors of production matter.  It costs about 1/10 as much to “lift” a barrel of oil in regions like the Middle East and the former Soviet republics than it does in the North Sea and North America.

If oil were to fall below $90 a barrel again, for example, it is hard to see how oil exploration would continue in the United States.  Oil wells would like go quiet here.  We would import “cheaper” oil and delay further our independence from oil and the global oil market.

But that’s neither here nor there…the United States doesn’t have the oil to cover its needs, neither in the short term nor in the long term.  A policy of drilling for more oil seems economically unsound.

“Drill, Baby, Drill” has terrible environmental impacts, too, as our remaining oil becomes more difficult to reach and as refining and burning lower grade oil products elevates pollutants and greenhouse gasses.

Don’t worry, conservatives, I haven’t given up.  I want to be right!  And, man, do I look not-so-great in red.  But superiority and bliss is my goal.  Perhaps I’ll have better luck joining you on important policy issues like marriage and keeping the children of illegal immigrants out of our declining schools.  Of course there’s the fight to defend America’s disaster…it’s decaying health care system.

On at least one issue, intelligence, compassion, and common sense won’t matter.  Correct?  Please advise.

Related articles

• Paul Krugman: Natural Born Drillers (economistsview.typepad.com)
• Why Are Conservatives Anti-Science? (robertlindsay.wordpress.com)
• Some Interesting Oil Industry Statistics (gravmag.com)

Is it Taxes or Demand?

Paul Krugman and his peers must be frustrated.  Even the most simple and straightforward solutions to our economic mess are beyond the reasoning abilities of most Americans, including those we deem to be among our brightest and most talented.  If there was ever an era that begged for the rule of philosopher kings over the rule of the people, this has to be it.

Today’s lead story in the New York Times reports on employer reaction to President Barak Obama’s jobs plan.  Business owners explain that Obama’s proposal  is welcomed but will not change any minds soon.

Why?  Because what the business really needs is an increase in demand.  This of course is where Krugman et al chokes on their morning coffee.  Even simple people like me have been trying to explain this simple fact.

You can give business owners all the tax breaks they ask for, but they have no reason to invest in workers if they have no demand for what the workers do.   But we have been hearing nothing but the tired call to cut taxes on the “job creators.”

So, of course, Obama includes some tax cuts in his plan to placate that crowd.  And what do we find out?  Most employers would use that credit to support hires they were planning to do anyway.  In essence, therefore, the tax cut contributes to the bottom line of the “job creator” and does not stimulate growth.

For the mathematically challenged out there, that’s what has been going on in recent decades.  Tax cuts giving the wealthiest earners among us a bigger break haven’t “trickled down” as planned, but have kept a concentration of wealth at the top.  Trillions of dollars in tax cuts and trillions of dollars in unbalanced wealth in the United States; subtract from one (middle class) and add to another (upper, upper class) and you see how these numbers roll up (literally).

Even for the small business owner, a tax cut means nothing for hiring decisions if there is no reason to hire another worker.  In fact this logic is especially true for a small business.  If I mow lawns for a living and I get a tax cut on any new hire, why would I hire someone who I might need to pay $20,000 in order to get a $4000 credit if I am not going to have the work to generate revenues to cover the hire?  I won’t.

This is such basic stuff that a person has to question the sincerity or the intelligence – or maybe both – of the conservative class today.  What it looks like to many of us is conservatives leveraging economic hardship for political gain.  In other words, bad times are good for conservative politics – they scare and mislead the public – and change social and economic policy in the process.

But let’s get back to this demand argument and President Obama’s plan.

Again critics are showing a short-sighted understanding of the plans benefits.  A large part of Obama’s plan is putting construction workers on infrastructure projects.  One way or another, if they United States expects to remain an economic leader, we need to upgrade our 1960s era infrastructure.  The construction industry and all that supports it – suppliers, designers, engineers, financers – need work.  Put a solution to that need.  That’s what Obama’s plan supports.

Of course if you sell refrigerators this stimulus plan is not going directly to you.  You won’t be getting a contract that will enable you to hire new workers.  But your customers – your market base – will be getting jobs…and money.

Construction workers are more likely to spend their new or increased income (unlike the rich) and there is a ripple effect here, called a multiplier.  Dollars given to people who
will spend increases the value of those dollars.  (This holds true for tax breaks, too.  It would be better for the economy to tax the working class at a lower rate than the fortunate class.)

Ultimately everyone is better off.  The business owners now complaining about the state of the economy and arguing that they cannot hire will have legitimate economic reasons to hire.  It will be in their best interest – i.e., growth and profits – to add to their workforce.

Workers will be better off because they will have living wages again.  They can make investments and purchases consistent with what had become a traditional middle class
lifestyle.  (Unless, of course, Republicans get away with gutting education, social security, and healthcare programs, which they are eagerly trying to do now.)

President Obama’s Jobs Plan is a necessary investment and provides what the private sector cannot provide now:  Job opportunity.  In time the jobs created by our government investment will translate into demand and growth in the private sector.  It is the sort of spark we need to reunite our overall economic engine.

I am going to write more about this later, but it simply defies logic and reason to side with the complainers on the right.  NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WORKS FOR
THEM!  And unfortunately for us, too many Americans are not bold enough or smart enough to push them aside.  You want America to work again?  Stop voting for Republicans.

 

Sophistication and Politics (Draft)

Eagle? Penguin? Ostrich?

George Lakoff has written about the connection between morality and politics and there certainly seems to be something to his Strict Father versus Nurturing Parent models of morality and how those correlate to conservative versus liberal political views. 

But I think it is increasingly difficult to ignore the intellectual divide in politics today.  In an argument, calling the other side stupid is name calling; “serious” critics and politicians avoid this offence at all cost.  However, if it is the case that you have a bird that looks like a duck and sounds like a duck it just might be a duck.  When it comes to intelligence and politics, I think we can identify a few ducks.

Perhaps what I am really after is sophistication in politics and political positions.  It might not be fair to say that politicians mindlessly repeating ideological dogma regardless of the facts are stupid — although it is hard to look into Michele Bachmann’s glassy stare and not wonder how things could be otherwise — when maybe some politicians just don’t have the right information. 

Duck.

But there’s the rub.  How far apart is a lack of facts from a lack of intellectual inquisitiveness?   Wouldn’t you hope that someone standing up for a cause and ideals would have facts to support his or her claims?  Not in the Republican Party.  In fact, the less you know, the better.  And, I’m sorry, it is hard to respect the political right, both its leaders and the following horde, as sophisticated thinkers because of it.

Clearly we are not as smart as we should be as a nation.  Too many of us don’t have facts, we don’t understand our nation’s social and economic history, for example, and yet we expect intelligent political decsions from American voters.  We laugh at bits like Jay Leno’s “Jay Walking” in which he asks average Americans simple questions about history and current events and gets blank stares instead of easy answers.  That might be funny, but it points to a bigger problem here:  People don’t care.

Paul Krugman once again offers a smart essay today about America’s short-term thinking.  Mr. Krugman annoys the right — and sometimes the left — because he makes sense; he makes intelligent arguments based in facts.  You don’t hear that from the right.  (Glenn Beck?  CPAC?  Your local GOP representative?)

What you hear are inane folksy pleas for simple-minded solutions that exist completely out of any meaningful context with the facts. 

How often have you heard the tired complaint that government must learn to “live within its means”?  Great.  Who would disagree with that?  However conservatives have used a policy of planned underfunding to cut government to a point where there is no meaningful application of this argument today without turning us into a third-world oligarchy.  You can’t say to someone, for example, go fill my car’s gas tank and give them $20 and expect to get it done.  If they ask for the needed $50, they are not living frivolously, they are asking for what is needed to get the job accomplished.

For decades the right has demonized government, made it the scapegoat of all problems, big and small.  In the process the right supported irresponsible underfunding and debt-building policies that have left budgets from the federal level on down through local levels strapped with burdens that will be impossible to correct without funding changes.  Yet the solution to these problems is to cut more and more.  Even as we see our wealth and social progress collapse all around us, the right presses on.  Can this be a sign of intelligent behavior?

And don’t even get started on the racist, jingoistic fear and paranoia from the right.  Ignorance breeds fear and violence.  The cry babies on the right have all sorts of villains to blame for our economic and social decline.  The self-righteousness of it can be frightening and has already caused us much loss in war.

I think a lot about fear and ignorance in our country, and the reactionary bitterness it breeds, while I am reading The Coming of the Third Reich (2004) by Richard J. Evans.  I think we can do much better, but heed the warning of George Santayana:  Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.