A Slobbering Love Affair: Book Review

I have to admit the title accomplishes its goal: makes a book stand out from its competition, like a brightly designed cereal box on a grocery store shelf. (The full title is A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media".) To be totally honest I did not buy the book, figuring I already knew what it was going to say. A friend loaned me her copy and insisted I read it.

While I was right in that the book just confirmed what I had knew about the media's strong leftist bias I was appalled at how flagrantly and shamelessly the media campaigned for Obama. In many cases there were no attempts to even pretend reporting was unbiased. A former CBS reporter and ten-time Emmy winner, Goldberg shares comments his peers said to him when he pointed out some of their blatant favoritism. At one point one colleague who was guilty of such favoritism says, "It is what it is." (!)

Goldberg also stitches together a nice timeline of the election, showing how the media favored Obama over his Democrat primary rivals such as Hilary Clinton. He also explains how the media at first was friendly to John McCain during the Republican primaries because McCain was the most liberal of the Republican candidates but then turned negative when he became the hurdle for Obama's ascendancy to God-hood, I mean the Presidency.

He doesn't spare the Republicans of blame, pointing out their prolifigate spending during the Bush era (or error as I've seen on bumper stickers). Goldberg also has no kind words for Bush's role in the Republican debacle of the 2008 election.

Goldberg does a nice job detailing their sins but, like other conservative critics of media bias, struggles for an explanation why. They are filled with a mixture of rage and confusion while yearning to return to the good old days where the truth and objectivity meant something. As a result his prescription amounts to a taking a teaspoon of common sense. The problem is that a teaspoon of common sense is no match for the erosion and undermining of objectivity. Such common sense didn’t prevent the current situation.

I believe we're seeing the natural consequence of decades of relativism – the belief that there is no objective truth -- as applied to journalism. Thanks in part to the effects of postmodernism where any attempt to defend objectivity was dismissed by merely representing white European, outdated thinking, collective truth has replaced objective truth. By collective truth I mean if enough people believe something and their motive is to "help people" then no criticism is necessary or allowed. And when challenged one’s rebuttal consists of “It is what it is": a proclamation that there is no debate. It’s deuces wild. You can do, or say, what you want with impunity and without shame, as long as it’s for a “good (i.e., liberal) cause.”

If Republicans and conservatives want to combat the media’s bias they’re going to need to better understand the philosophical issues that underlie this bias. Meanwhile the love affair continues unabated as Obama aggressively expands the role of government into even more sectors of the economy.

The Happiness Trap Review

The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living by Russ Harris is one of the best self-help books I’ve ever read. Yes, that’s a bold claim, especially with how many books of this kind fill the shelves of bookstores. I’ve read a lot of these books over the years. Almost all of them offer variations on one of several themes. Think positively. Repeat affirmations to counter negative thoughts. Bolster your self-esteem. All of them, according to Harris, share the same trap. “To find happiness, we try to avoid or get rid of bad feelings, but the harder we try, the more bad feelings we create.” This trap comes from the shared definition of happiness as feeling good. The Happiness Trap
adheres to a different definition of happiness: living a rich and meaningful life.

Living such a life doesn’t automatically mean we’re feeling good all the time. We will still have negative feelings and challenges to overcome. The goal of The Happiness Trap then is to give us strategies to deal with negative feelings without denying them. Harris offers six core principles.

1. Defusion. Painful or unpleasant thoughts are defused by various techniques such as labeling them. When one notices such a thought instead of suppressing or denying
it we create some distance by saying “I’m having the thought that …” In doing so we put some distance between the thought and us. In other words, we strive for objectivity.
2. Expansion: consists of making room for unpleasant thoughts and feelings.
3. Connection: being fully aware of your here and now.
4. Distinguishing between your thinking self and observing self. The various techniques in The Happiness Trap get us out of our thinking self and into our observing self.
5. Values: what kind of person are you and want to be? What is significant and meaningful to you? What do you stand for?
6. Committed action. All of this business about being objective and mindfulness must be followed by a commitment to action if we truly want to change.

These principles form the core of Action and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hays. While Hays and others have published a number of books on ACT they were written for therapists applying ACT to different conditions. The Happiness Trap
translates ACT’s principles for laymen interested in applying these principles. As Harris points out ACT also stands for something else:

A – Accepting your thoughts and feelings and being present in the moment,

C – Connect with your values, and

T – Take effective action.

The Happiness Trap holds a lot more insights and techniques than I can do
justice to here. Overall I like several aspects of The Happiness Trap and ACT.

1. They don’t try to suppress or ignore emotions. The recommended methods aim at honoring these emotions while trying to get beyond them.
2. They emphasize mindfulness and objectivity.
3. The end goal is to get us to act, not just to idly analyze our feelings.
4. Values play a key role because ultimately this is what motivates us to action: what is important to us.

As I said at the beginning The Happiness Trap has joined the small group of my favorite books. It offers a realistic guide with a number of helpful activates to get us to move beyond self-limiting thoughts and emotions so we can obtain, express and enjoy our values.

Review of The World is Flat 3.0

Do you ever debate buying a book? You know what I mean. Something about the cover or title catches your eye. You pick up the book, skim it a bit then put it back onto the shelf. The next time you go back to the store you go through the routine again. And again. Finally you break down and buy the book. After reading it you wonder why you didn’t buy the book the first time. That’s the story of The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman. I must have picked up the book five times before buying it. I wish I had bought it sooner.

Not that this book is perfect. A 100 or more pages could easily be trimmed with tighter editing and removing repetitive passages and Friedman’s name-dropping stories. But his premise is interesting and particularly applicable to individualists. By “flat” Friedman “means equalizing, because the flattening forces are empowering more and more individuals today to reach farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and that is equalizing power.”

Friedman contends we are in the third version of globalization. In Globalization 1.0 countries were the key agents in the world. Globalization 2.0 shifts from countries to international companies; Globalization 3.0 shifts again with individuals becoming the focal point.

The World is Flat identifies ten flatteners behind this evolution. While I won’t discuss each one they fall into three categories: political, business practices and individual empowerment. The key political flattener was literal: the flattening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 which enhanced the free movement of best practices. Most of the other nine flatteners deal with corporate practices such as work flow software, outsourcing and off shoring which drew formerly isolated countries such as India, China, Mexico and others into the world market. As the corporate practices lowered barriers between countries other developments occurred to enhance the ability of individuals to obtain information and, more important, to express their ideas that normally would have no outlet. Of course, we’re talking about the Internet, search engines and blogging. Traditional media outlets like TV and radio (except call-in talk shows) are just that: outlets in which the participants passively receive media output with limited ability to have their voices heard.

Blogging, personal web pages, etc. allow individuals to express themselves and to form collaborative virtual communities. In addition, as Friedman notes, small and medium size companies hire the most people, not the mega-corporations. Flattening allows these small businesses to compete better with the big boys. All of these developments provide tools to empower individuals like no other time in history.

These developments also could bode well for preventing wars. While some conservative thinkers fear (appropriately) the growth of Islamic terrorism and the rebirth of totalitarianism, Friedman shares something both interesting and hopeful: the Dell theory of conflict prevention. “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain.” In other words, economic interdependence can trump political agendas. One can only hope that this theory is true! Of course there are no guarantees. Political leaders can force their agenda onto an unwilling citizenry. However the ease of being able to do this is getting more difficult as the world flattens.

Returning back to the individual, Friedman offers some advice to succeed. “The most important competition is now with oneself – making sure that you are always striving to get the most out of your imagination and then acting on it.”

Endless Forms Most Beautiful meets The Edge of Evolution

In 1996 Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box was published, setting off a debate that rages even today. Behe, a biochemist, argued for Intelligent Design (ID) based on a concept he introduced: irreducible complexity. Because this is a key cog in Behe’s argument I’ll provide his definition. “By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.)”

To explain this concept he used the simple mousetrap as an example. A typical mousetrap is made of 4 or 5 parts that have to be assembled in a particular arrangement in the proper sequence for it to work. If the pieces aren’t assembled correctly or if a piece is missing the trap doesn’t work.

Behe shows that in the biochemical world there are many examples of irreducibly complex structures and processes. The blood clotting mechanism and vision are examples of irreducibly complex processes which Behe devotes some time to explaining. However, he spends a good portion of the book on the cilium, the whip like tail that bacteria use for propulsion. Behe shows that the cilium is made like a motor complete with gears, bearings, mounts, etc. He claims that chemicals bumping into one another could not assemble this “machine”. It had to be designed, according to Behe.

Darwin’s Black Box created a cottage industry of books for and against intelligent design. Just recently I read one from each side of the debate: Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Behe’s sequel The Edge of Evolution. Carroll’s book relies on recent developments in genetics to explain the diversity of living organisms while Behe extends, expands, defends and refines his earlier work. In The Edge of Evolution Behe revisits the flagellum to report that recent findings reveal even more complexities than were known in 1996. Behe explains the finely tuned, automated repair mechanism that transports materials from the main organism out to the end of the flagellum. Behe also spends a lot of pages discussing how the malaria

Endless Forms provides interesting and enlightening insights from the latest developments and discoveries in genetics. (On a personal note, I happen to play tennis with his brother who first told me about Sean’s work.) While Carroll’s book nicely captures how variations can occur within a species he doesn’t really address how the original forms, such as something “simple” like the cilium, emerged out of its original chemicals. Carroll’s book explains how we can change the color of the paint on a Boeing 777 but doesn’t explain how the plane itself came to be. His book is on a different level than Behe’s, a level that Behe readily admits in Endless Forms where Darwinism can work.

Like other ID critiques that I have read, Carroll’s arguments do not address Behe’s points head on. Towards the end of his book in a few paragraphs Carroll dismisses Behe’s case as “empty” without elaborating. After making this unsupported declaration he moves on to quote various creationists who impugn the motives of Darwinists. Well, as the saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right. In addition, Carroll fails to distinguish that not all advocates of ID are creationists. The reverse might be true: all creationists are advocates of ID but arguing for ID doesn’t automatically make someone a creationist. In my case, I’ve been an atheist for decades. However, I feel the Darwinians have not come up with good counter-arguments. In many cases the Darwinists would rather use ad hominem than objective thinking.

On the other hand I believe ID advocates erroneously jump from pointing out possible evidence of intelligence built into life to the conclusion that there is a God in form of the Christian model. There could be other reasons for the incredibly organized complexity of life, from a principle of non-conscious organization inherent in the universe to a Buddhist-like spirit from which everything emmanates. In either case I believe we should pay attention to the evidence ID proponents offer even if we don’t buy the entire package they’re selling.

Unstoppable Global Warming from the Chilling Stars

In an earlier post I mentioned two books that challenge the popular thesis that carbon dioxide released by our burning of fossil fuels is driving up the world’s temperature. The first book is Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years by S. Fred Singer, distinguished Research Professor at George Mason University and Professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia. Singer does not dispute that there has been some warming in the 20^th century. Instead he challenges the much-publicized theory espoused by Al Gore and his supporters. Singer claims that over the last million years the earth has experienced warm-cold cycles every 1,500 years or so on top of a longer 100,000-year cycle. His conclusion is based on a variety of sources:

• Ice cores from Antarctic’s Vostok Glacier and from Greenland at the opposite end of the earth,
• Sea-bed sediment cores from the North Atlantic and South Atlantic Ocean, the Sargasso Sea and the Arabian Sea,
• Cave stalagmites in Iceland, Germany and New Zealand, and
• Archaeological analysis of human settlements.

Singer also points out that the 1,500-year cycle correlates very closely with a similar length solar cycle (which is the result of the combination of an 87 year and a 210 year cycle).

Of course, this solar cycle does not directly refute the greenhouse theory. Carbon dioxide released by our activities could add to the natural warming cycle. Singer addresses this by showing:

1. Warming occurred during the Roman era and the Middle Ages, well before human burning of fossil fuel would have been a significant factor.
2. Carbon dioxide release doesn’t even explain the most recent temperature changes. The most warming of the 20^th century occurred before 1940 while the most carbon dioxide was generated after 1940.
3. Warming in previous cycles occurs 800 years before carbon dioxide levels increase. In other words, the relationship between warming and carbon dioxide is opposite of what the global warming alarmists claim.

Above I mentioned that Singer reports there is an even longer cycle to the 1,500 cycle. The Chilling Stars: The New Theory of Climate Change by Henrik Svensmark presents a theory he calls cosmoclimatology. Svensmark is a physicist and director of the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. According to Svensmark, “Cosmic rays control the powerful ‘cloud valve’ that regulates the heating of the earth.” As cosmic rays pass through the atmosphere they create ions which become nuclei for cloud condensation. The clouds that form, especially below 10,000 ft, reflect the sun’s energy and thus cool the earth. In the 20^th century the sun’s magnetic field more than doubled in strength and reduced the cosmic rays and, consequently rescued the cloud cover. The reduced cloud cover allowed the earth to warm.

Of course, you could argue that this is just a theory without empirical support. However, Svensmark describes a cloud chamber experiment he designed and ran that demonstrates this mechanism does create nuclei for condensation.

The Chilling Stars ties in nicely with Unstoppable Global Warming on the short warming-cooling cycles but shows there also is evidence of cosmic ray fluctuations on a 145 million year cycle as the sun wanders between the spiral arms of our galaxy.

Bottom line: these books provide a much more plausible explanation of global warming than the Inconvenient Untruth of Al Gore.