Alabama Power’s Miller Steam Plant on the Locust Fork River emits more mercury into the air than any other power plant in the country.

Under the Microscope
by Cliff Griggs

Back in 1971, the environmental movement was just a dream in the minds of people who wanted the governments and the corporations of the world to respect the planet that we all live on.

In other words, quit setting off nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, and quit spewing toxic chemicals into our air, our water sources and on our land. Back then we still had lead in our gasoline, with Los Angeles and other big cities covered with air so toxic it was literally killing people.

Our national forests were being treated as a piggy bank for the large lumber firms who clear-cut the forests and turned them into agricultural plantations, row after row of straight lines that wiped out most of the forest eco-systems. Our rivers were used as dumping grounds for chemical manufacturers, fouling our drinking water and poisoning any living thing that lived on or near it. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio actually caught fire.

An awareness of those problems led to the first Earth Day, and to passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, as well a host of other environmental regulations that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Over the years, numerous environmental groups sprang up to tackle serious issues until today they are recognizable names like the Sierra Club, The World Wildlife Federation and literally thousands of others. Many were single issue groups that fell apart, and others managed to hold on to their membership and take on other issues.

But today, it seems, the environment has taken the last seat on the bus, as the nation focuses on job creation, deficit reduction — and hate filled politics.

Even with the specter of global climate change, with larger, more violent storms, and Texas and much of the South and Mid-West in deepest drought, nobody is sounding the alarm to concentrate attention.

At least Greenpeace is still there. More on that in a moment.

What has happened to the environmental movement?

Most of the groups have sold out, in my opinion. It has been a long, slow process, but most of these groups are useless.

Part of the problem for most was in the formation of what is known as 501-c-3 groups. The 501 is a designation of tax status from the IRS. The c-3 part of that means they are tax exempt, but it also means they cannot get political. They can’t make campaign contributions, they can’t advocate for political candidates and therefore they get shuffled aside when it comes down to a fight.

In addition, most groups are formed to fight a particular battle; to stop the degradation of a river, or clear-cutting of a national forest. After they win or lose their fight, mostly losing, they may still try to keep their group alive. With their leftover funds they hire professional staff, and then seek grants from the government, large foundations and sometimes major corporations.

Like a pet, you could say they are neutered. Suddenly, they are reduced to the level of bake sales and getting everyone to buy a T-shirt.

Basically, there is little fight left in them. They don’t want to piss anyone off, because then the country club donors won’t give anymore. Neutered!

Now back to Greenpeace. This group is still going strong. They were formed back in 1971 by a group out of Vancouver, British Columbia, to try and stop nuclear weapons testing by the U.S. in Amchitka, Alaska. They were originally a committee named Don’t Make a Wave, and they named their first ship Greenpeace. Later they took that name for their group.

The Greenpeace movement spread around the world and became famous for taking direct actions, getting in the face of governments, whalers and corporations. They are most responsible for bringing environmental issues into public parlance, and now lobby governments, conduct scientific research and still get things done.

By the way, they don’t take grant money from big corporations and governments and they don’t do bake sales. They are not 501-c-3, and the money you contribute to Greenpeace is not tax deductible.

Most smaller 501-c-3 groups, and I’ve helped in the formation of a lot of them, think they can depend on corporate media for their publicity. But as I quickly found out that is a dream. Corporate media is a hoax.

How do you compete with TVA, the Southern Company (parent of Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi Power) when they spend literally millions of dollars a year with these same corporate media? You are going to be portrayed as a bunch of tree huggers.

The people who have gotten the attention have been members of Greenpeace, and the former Earth First!, who were labeled environmental terrorists.

You want to know who the terrorists are, look to Dow, Monsanto, TVA and Southern Company and the politicians who take their money and go along with the policies they demand.

These corporations have dumped millions of pounds of chemicals into our air, water and soil, causing millions of cases of cancer to those around them. Many of those chemicals are still hanging around and will cause cancers for thousands of years. If they get caught, by EPA or the state agency equivalent, like the Alabama Department of Management in this state, they may get hand-slapped with small fines. It’s just a part of doing business, and the major media sources just interview the company PR spokesmen who tell us…”There is no danger to the public.”

Hey, some of these small environmental groups, when working on their initial issues, do good work, but after that initial spurt, they turn into social clubs where the officers sit around arguing about how to support their worse than useless staff members. But you can get some nice T-shirts, tote bags or colorful calendars, and feel like you are doing something useful for the environment.

But don’t fool yourself. Corporations and quasi-government corporations like TVA don’t give a damn about The Friends of the Tennessee River, Inc.. They simply outspend and outlast them.

Direct action, getting in their face with demonstrations, whether through your own chapter of Earth First!, or by your annual donations to Greenpeace, are the only true way of changing behaviors.

Forget about corporate media sources or your state congressional delegations. These congressmen need more than $2 million to mount an election campaign every two years. That means they have to raise $3,000 a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for two years. Senators have to raise even more to meet their $6 million threshold. Unless you are a major campaign contributor, you aren’t even going to get to see a member of congress unless you go to a town hall meeting — and those get more infrequent as we go along.

I sometimes think that we have waited too long to change our ways and now we are going to pay for environmental degradation. But it is not too late to take action on a lot of issues.

Yet we are going to need people who are not afraid to tell the truth, and to get in there and take direct action to call attention to what is being done to us. Forget about starting a 501-c-3. Organize people who are directly affected and learn from what Earth First! and Greenpeace have done. Look it up on the Internet and learn the methods that work.

Perhaps most importantly, support alternative Web media, as they are the only ones that support your views and see the world as you do — and they are willing to step into the breach with you when bad stuff happens.

Cookies are good to eat, but bake sales have never stopped a war — or prevented a dam on a river.

Cliff Griggs is a writer, photographer and activist living in Arab, Alabama.

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Only in America, a country founded on the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” is there a statistical measure of “well-being” where highly paid social scientists spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out just how happy we are as a people.

Unfortunately, we don’t have data from July 4, 1776 to gauge how we compare with our ancestors on that score. There were no pollsters in those days, and only a few newspapers and a primitive voting system to gauge public opinion.

There are some important lessons to be drawn from such measures of public opinion, however, if you look deeper than the basic numbers.

It should come as no real shock that the happiest people in the happiest state in the country live in Hawaii, a dreamy set of tropical islands where the climate is wonderful all year around, the unemployment rate is only 6.3 percent (compared to 8.9 percent nationally) and only 8 percent of the population is uninsured (compared to 17 percent nationally).

According to the latest Gallup well being scores, the people of Hawaii expressed the highest wellbeing among states with a score of 71 out of 100.

It is sort of sad, when you think about it, that even in the happiest state of them all, the score is only a C on any standard academic report card. The country as a whole only averages a D score of 66 percent on Gallup’s well-being index.

Was there ever a time when the country was closer to being 100 percent happy? Maybe in the 1960s or the 1990s, times when the economy was booming and the future looked bright? Unfortunately, Gallup was not conducting these polls then, so we will never know.

As I sit here sipping my coffee and pouring over the data this Sunday morning, I’m wondering what it would take to improve these scores? There are some clues in the numbers. More on that in the end.

What we know now is that people seem happiest in Hawaii, Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, Colorado, Minnesota, South Dakota, Utah, Connecticut, Nebraska and Massachusetts, the top 10 states, while the saddest people live mostly in the South, in West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Louisiana, along with the states that round out the bottom 10 states, Ohio, Delaware, Nevada and Michigan.

“Ten Southern states have a Well-Being Index score that puts them in the lower range wellbeing group. There are also more states in the South with wellbeing scores in the lower range than there are throughout the rest of the country,” Gallup concludes. “Nevada, which is influenced by the poor wellbeing in Las Vegas, is the only Western state with a lower range wellbeing score.”

Hawaii placed first in wellbeing in part because people scored it high in the categories of “life evaluation, emotional health and physical health,” according to Gallup. “West Virginia took last place in wellbeing because of the opposite: The state was the worst performing on the same three sub-indexes. Delaware residents continue to report the worst work environments in the country, while those living in South Dakota are the most positive about their work situations.”

Vermont still boasts the best overall health habits in America, and Kentucky continues to have the worst, according to Gallup. While Massachusetts residents have the best access to necessities crucial to high wellbeing, “Mississippi residents again have the worst,” according to Gallup, “with a score on this index even lower than it was in 2009.”

Gallup’s Bottom Line

“Improving wellbeing scores will be a challenge for leaders as many states have been facing and continue to encounter significant fiscal problems, including having to close public schools, lay off or cut salaries of public workers, and cut back on public services — all of which have the potential to affect different aspects of wellbeing,” Gallup concludes. “Although money is tight, finding ways to increase residents’ access to good jobs and to basic necessities — including medical care in particular — and decrease costly, chronic conditions such as obesity and diabetes will be the most likely means to improve wellbeing.”

At a time when state and local governments are challenged with being able to provide basic services, Gallup strangely suggests that “business leaders may be able to step in and play an important role in increasing wellbeing in their communities, which is good for business,” since the polling outfit concludes that “higher wellbeing means lower healthcare costs and greater economic growth.”

Further Analysis

While Gallup’s analysis reveals a tinge of anti-government bias, not unlike the population it measures, realists understand that the government has an important role to play both in investing to improve the economy and in taking up the slack in health care where private, for-profit corporations seem more intent on maximizing profits and CEO pay than helping the country and its people to be healthier and happier.

Gallup’s State of the States series reveals state-by-state differences on political and economic trends that effect wellbeing, and at a glance, it becomes clear that some of the more conservative or “red” states in the country are also some of the most unhappy.

So, what can be done to make the country a happier place? Two things seem obvious. Provide people with health care and improve the economy.

Remember, President Barack Obama is from Hawaii (not Kenya, as Southern Baptist preacher and presidential wannabe Mike Huckabee said on talk radio this week). So maybe the implementation of “Obamacare” would be a good thing for the nation’s happiness, not a bad thing, as all those conservative Republicans in the U.S. House and governor’s offices in some parts of the country would have you believe.

Then, as any respectable economist knows, the government is the lender and spender of last resort. So if government spending were focused in the right kinds of activities, like say the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Peace Corps, we might could get that measure of happiness moving up again.

The only reason we are even discussing the deficit now is because of the tea party movement, which is intent on destroying American happiness to discredit a Democratic president and get more conservative, Christian and/or corporate Republicans elected.

Let me suggest one other measure that would help improve our nation’s happiness. Rather than attacking workers unions in this country, as Republican governor’s are doing now in a number of states, perhaps unions should begin trying to increase their role in American life.

Union members tend to have higher wages and better health care coverage than non-union workers, so would it not behoove us to strengthen unions rather than working to gut them?

While we don’t have enough public opinion data to accurately measure this, it is not hard to imagine that the country was happier overall in the 1950s, when union membership reached its peak in this country.

There is a lot of nostalgia still for the 1950s, when America was strong in the wake of the Allied victory in World War II when we even went through a massive Baby Boom. Do you think when more people are having sex and conceiving children that might be a good indicator of the health and happiness of a country?

Think about it.

About the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index

These state-level data are based on daily surveys conducted from January through December 2010. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is calculated on a scale of 0 to 100, where a score of 100 represents ideal wellbeing. Well-Being Index scores among states vary by a narrow range of 9.3 points. The Well-Being Index score for the nation was 66.8 in 2010.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index tracks U.S. wellbeing and provides best-in-class solutions for a healthier world. To learn more, please visit well-beingindex.com.

To view and export trend data and for more information on each of the six Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index sub-indexes, please see the following charts: Well-Being Index, Life Evaluation Index, Emotional Health Index, Physical Health Index, Healthy Behavior Index, Work Environment Index, and Basic Access Index.

The Work Environment Index, one of six sub-components of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, includes four items: job satisfaction, ability to use one’s strengths at work, supervisor’s treatment (more like a boss or a partner), and is it an open and trusting work environment.

Survey Methods

Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey Jan. 1-Dec. 31, 2010, with a random sample of 352,840 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using random-digit-dial sampling. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1 percentage point.

“Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”
– William Faulkner, from Light in August (1932)

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

It seems almost inevitable that about this time every year, while joining the rest of the press in searching the world over for a good man or woman to highlight as the person of the year, I sort of feel like Diogenes the Cynic, who you may recall from the story, supposedly walked around naked and homeless in ancient Athens, Greece — holding up a lantern looking for an honest man.

While none of Diogenes’ writings actually survive from his time of about 400 years before Jesus trod the earth, the tale has been passed down through history in many forms over the generations. The story of Diogenes is remembered as a lesson in ethics. He mocked the idea of finding true human virtue and even the idea that we could ever really know the truth about human nature.

The most famous such search in the modern media, of course, is Time magazine’s cover story on the person of the year. For 2010, the magazine named Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives.”

As a recent convert to Facebook myself, I can see why the editors made that choice, although it clearly remains to be seen whether Zuckerberg’s creation will ultimately be used for good or evil. It allows for some amazing connections to be made and helps citizens bypass traditional barriers to knowledge, but it also has a couple of serious down sides. The loss of individual privacy for one.

Then, it is another tool that continues to allow the hyper concentration of wealth into the hands of too few people, a problem that will plague this country until enough people face the facts and fight to turn the tide. Perhaps we can use Facebook to do just that — unless they screw it up and corporatize it, which seems to be the direction the Internet is going like every technology that came before.

There was a time when newspapers were used for good, followed by radio and then television. Now it is hard to find a newspaper, radio station or television station that is not corrupted by capitalist greed.

When I put up my first Website 15 years ago, there was much talk about the “democratizing power” of the Web.

I still believe in the possibility of that power. But just like newspapers, the positive examples of actual results are hard to quantify. The WikiLeaks story should at least get a mention in any story of the top media stories for 2010, although it is too early to know where to put it on the list. There will be plenty of time for that over the next few months.

In looking back on the Top Stories and People of 2009, I believe our choices were good ones, naming Mark Ingram and Nick Saban, Barack Obama and John Wathen.

For their excellence, class and humility in the face of success, Saban and Ingram deserved the honor. Is Auburn’s Cam Newton equal to the same honor because of his individual achievement of winning the Heisman Trophy this year? I’m not so sure.

While President Barack Obama remains the Most Admired Man of 2010 according to the Gallup Poll, does he truly deserve the honor again this year? Or does his lackadaisical response to the BP oil disaster and his compromise with the Republicans on tax cuts for the rich constitute enough of a chink in his armor to knock him off the list — and even threaten his reelection chances? I think so.

Moving on down the list, there is no doubt in my mind that the top national, regional and local story of the year was the worst environmental disaster in our history, what has come to be called the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, even though it was not a spill at all. More like a disaster or a catastrophe, the explosion and sinking of one of the deepest offshore oil rigs ever drilled was followed by a gusher of more than 4.9 million barrels of oil, or 205.8 million gallons, into the Gulf.

Riki Ott

John Wathen and Tom Hutchings

There is also no doubt in my mind that the most censored story of the year was The Untold Story of Human Health Effects From BP’s Oil Disaster, and that many people along the coast deserve credit for their citizen activism, including Hurricane Creekeeper John Wathen and South Wings pilot Tom Hutchings of EcoSolutions. For braving the oil and chemical polluted air out to 50 miles in the Gulf in a single engine airplane on a number occasions to provide an independent documentation of what was actually happening, as opposed to the industry and government white wash, these two deserve a special mention — so we have an interview and video in the works to publish in the next few days.

It is also our view that Dr. Riki Ott deserves a special mention — for coming down from Alaska to help the folks on the Gulf Coast as an expert from the Exxon Valdez days on Prince William Sound.

Just for the record, we should also acknowledge here the 11 men who lost their lives on that oil rig: Jason C. Anderson, 35, of Midfield, Texas; Aaron Dale Burkeen, 37, of Philadelphia, Miss.; Donald Clark, 49, of Newellton, La.; Stephen Ray Curtis, 39, of Georgetown, La.; Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, of Jonesville, La.; Karl D. Kleppinger Jr., 38, of Natchez, Miss.; Gordon L. Jones, 28, of Baton Rouge; Keith Blair Manuel, 56, of Gonzales, La.; Dewey A. Revette, 48, of State Line, Miss.; Shane M. Roshto, 22, of Liberty, Miss,; and Adam Weise, 24, of Yorktown, Texas.

But as my thinking has evolved on this subject over the past few days, I believe 2010 was such a bad year all around that perhaps we should highlight some of the most evil people in the country and on the planet instead of those striving for good.

In that vein, we should not allow this opportunity to slip by without mentioning BP CEO Tony “I just want my life back” Hayward, who Democrat Henry Waxman admonished to his face for his “astonishing complacency” about safety warnings over the company’s drilling platform, which exploded on April 20.

But there is another story that may end up having an even more profound impact to the detriment of American life, and for that we must acknowledge a few other evil people.

Perhaps the most important quotes that explain how profoundly wrong the Supreme Court was this year, when it upheld the novel legal theory that corporations are “persons” and ruled in Citizens United vs. FCC that corporations may contribute unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns, came from retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens on Sixty Minutes.

The ruling majority on the Supreme Court was led by Chief Justice John Roberts, who some readers will recall was the lawyer who presided over the cover up of the Iran-Contra Scandal during the Reagan years. Roberts has to be on any list of the worst people of 2010, along with the guy who appointed him, former President George W. Bush.

Glynn Wilson

But perhaps even more importantly, the power broker who is now in charge of carrying out the continued destruction of the American Dream, the Middle Class and the rights of workers in the U.S. is the very same political animal who was known as “Bush’s brain” and “the architect” of Bush’s election victories for governor of Texas and president of the United Sates. That’s right, the very same political guru who helped orchestrate the Republican takeover of U.S. House of Representative last year and the Alabama Supreme Court in the 1990s.

We know him around here as Karl ‘Turd Blossom’ Rove, who just happened to be in Birmingham signing books the week the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.

In hindsight, perhaps I should have done more than take Rove’s picture and get in his face that day, because he is the evil doer to watch for 2011 and 2012 as well. He is sitting on a secret cache of corporate campaign cash of at least a billion dollars, sources say, and he is carrying out the decision that threatens democracy.

For the evil that Rove has orchestrated on this country already in his political career, and for the evil he has the potential to wreak in the years ahead, The Locust Fork News-Journal names Karl Rove as the Person of the Year for 2010.

Glynn Wilson

We will have much more to say about this MoFo in the months ahead…

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
- Paul Newman as Luke, in Cool Hand Luke

“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
- John Muir

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

LITTLE RIVER CANYON – Sitting as quietly and patently as could be expected on such a quick, short trip to the mountain waterfalls around Mentone, Alabama over the weekend, I gazed until I knew the sun would soon disappear from view behind the treetops at one of the Littler River Falls overlooks.

In this preserved idyllic setting, I thought about my Cherokee ancestors who lived here for hundreds of years before the United States of America was a gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye. I thought of the men who killed the Cherokee too, and connected the dots in my mind to understand the modern descendants of those killers.

Is it possible that a grudge could linger from a human gene, and not just pass down from one generation to another through the culture?

I thought about the social and political problems in the world today, chiefly focusing on this country — and my native state.

There in that muted fall beauty, as muddled as the world has become today, my thoughts also turned to the Scotsman John Muir, an early American botanist, one of the first American naturalists and nature writers to roam from the hills of Scotland to New England, through Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately California by way of South America.

Glynn Wilson

Click on the image for a larger view…

Muir never saw this exact spot, and for that he missed one. But he passed through these mountains on the Georgia side as surely as DeSoto. (See map below).

Now I’m no botanist. My learned science is of the social science variety, in communications, political science, public opinion and environmental sociology. Our interests are in the same arena, the world of nature, but our tools and perspectives are quite different. Nevertheless, since part of me is descended from his nature writing, along with others like Henry David Thoreau, I hope to one day trace some of Muir’s footsteps in California.

Today, however, like a composer combining musical forms to create a new music, or an abstract painter looking at a room full of blank canvases, I hold several discrete thoughts in my head simultaneously.

Looking at how the water falls, I try to merge my individual thoughts into a larger whole like drops of water form larger streams, lakes and eventually oceans.

For the water it comes naturally. When ice and snow melts or rain falls, it flows downhill — following the laws of gravity.

The gravity that holds together human thought, however, tends to be drummed up propaganda by those with tons of capital, then transmitted to the people (at least the one’s who pay attention) through the sometimes muddled messages of the mass media, which is bound by more than a century of flawed dogma about how objective knowledge should work. All this moves public opinion like moving fault-lines build mountains, if sometimes the terrain is suspect. Change is slow but sure.

Sometimes a bad idea, a meme or a thought virus, gets so embedded in human culture that trying to imagine the force large enough to erode it seems daunting. Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. used the non-violent protest. Woodward and Bernstein used the newspaper. Muir used magazines and books.

I suspect to get us out of this thought hole we are in today will require the destruction of a few large dams, just to let the mighty rivers of information flow like a tidal wave over humanity.

Truth Will Set You Free

It is said that truth will set us free. The problem is, whose truth?

The alleged fundamental truth of Jesus from 1500 years before the invention of modern science?

The truth of a political hack like Karl Rove?

How about media personalities such as Glenn Beck? Sean Hannity? Rush Limbaugh? Is that really who people are going to choose to believe in the end?

Muir, like a modern day Jesus, had his run ins with the money men trying to take over the temples of nature.

“These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar,” Muir said in his day.

His words spawned a movement that still flows like a river, but one that seems to be drying up.

Millions of people know about him, but just as he lost the battle for Hetch Hetchy Valley to the dam built by San Francisco in 1913, Muir’s legacy is also at risk by men who want to build a dam of bad thought so high it threatens the central question to our very being. This is not just about our way of life. What is at stake is the very survival of our species and the planet that spawned us. I am not making this up and this is no sensational exaggeration.

Muir said there is “no synonym for God … so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening — still all is Beauty!”

This Beauty IS God, in other words, and that beauty is obscured today by a people so distorted by their evolution and socialization into a corrupt, capitalist and yes organized religious culture that they do not have the eyes to see or the ears to hear the warning signs and calls.

There are millions searching for it on the Internets, however, so that is where hope lies.

The hard part is to figure out how to mesh all these thoughts into one abstract yet coherent narrative to somehow communicate with as diverse an audience as possible what the problem is — and what to do about it.

In my own search for the right river of thought to pass down my ideas on the subject, this morning I ran across some thoughts on our predicament from a man the people of my state seem to at least half-way listen to, retired Auburn University professor Wayne Flynt, who says enacting change here “will involve helping ourselves.”

I found Dr. Flynt’s ideas interesting, if limited in scope, but I called him on the phone to line up an interview (which I will conduct in the next few days on video).

What has he learned after speaking to groups across Alabama for years about what is needed for this place to “realize its potential?”

“I have become convinced of three things,” he said. “Alabamians don’t much like change; our historic statewide leadership patterns are badly flawed; and we need new forms of local leadership. Waiting for the old top-down political leadership to solve our problems is futile. If that were going to happen, it would have occurred long ago. Solutions to the big problems — tax, education and constitutional reform — will probably be solved the way they usually are in Alabama, through intervention by federal courts.”

When talking to Dr. Flynt it didn’t take long to figure out he’s not much up on the Internets. I suspect his knowledge of the state of the courts in Alabama is also a tad behind the times, along with his knowledge of the media today. But those are questions best saved for the followup piece.

For today I want to lay down some of the essential building block questions and an answer or two. That involves quoting a few other pretty smart folks.

Change and Character

One of the problems we have is our resistance to change, and our misunderstanding of what it takes to build character — or even whether that is a worthy goal for which civilized society should even strive anymore. Our schools and our newspapers seemed to abandon that mission in my lifetime, in part because of the economic and political takeover of television.

“Change is the only constant,” Heraclitus of Ephesus once wrote. He was a stoic Greek philosopher known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, and for establishing the term Logos in Western philosophy as meaning both the source and fundamental order of the Cosmos.

His stoic ideas often involve avoiding indulgence in sensory affections, a skill which, he says, will free a man from the pains and pleasures of the material world. Rationality and clear-mindedness allow one to live in harmony with the logos. This allows one to rise above faulty perceptions of “good” and “bad.” (Try going without TV for awhile. You might learn something).

“Good character is not formed in a week or a month,” he said. “It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.”

IQ and Intelligence

One of our problems is that the masses of people do not have the Intelligence Quotient to think abstractly enough about problems to connect the dots, and the mass media reflecting that for money’s sake have neglected to connect the dots for people. Forget politicians of the left or right. Their job is to boil the world down into little black and white dots to get votes so they can get their share of the pie.

Intelligence, at least according to Dr. C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, is measured by a person’s capacity to acquire knowledge (to learn and understand), to apply knowledge (solve problems), and to engage in abstract reasoning.

Psychologists have attempted to measure it for well over a century. While IQ tests may ultimately fail to act as an accurate measure of “intelligence” in its broadest sense, failing to account for emotional intelligence and such, it is safe to say those with an average IQ of 100 or less are never going to learn the lessons and make the right decisions without leadership from those who do have the ability to think abstractly. This has always been true for human survival back to the days when our species traveled as hunting and gathering bands across the African savannah.

Abstract Thinking

Abstract thinking lies in contrast to “concrete thinking,” in which thinking is limited to what’s in front of the face, the “here and now,” like what is said about most subjects on TV (except for the better documentaries and movies you may find there).

In writing, as in painting or any other art, there is a difference between an abstract piece of work and a concrete or “explicit” one.

Newspapers are full of explicit public relations information, and so are many blogs. But rarely do they connect the dots in an abstract way, except every now and then in a Sunday feature or on the editorial page of the paper — or on a Web site like this one.

According to one conception, readily at hand, “The abstract thinker can conceptualize or generalize, understanding that each concept can have multiple meanings. Such thinkers might see patterns beyond the obvious and be able to use patterns or a variety of concrete ideas or clues to solve larger problems.”

Abstract thinking is not only of benefit to people. It literally is essential for survival. From the invention of the wheel to the solar panel, without it homo sapiens would have already perished from this earth like Neanderthal Man. Perhaps his brain was too small for abstract thinking, and that’s why he went extinct?

Sometimes thinking abstractly is referred to as “thinking outside the box.” It allows for richer conceptual understanding.

People exhibit a range of abstract thinking ability, according to the research. Younger children can’t think in abstract terms. It takes time, nurturing, the right food and education to develop a concept of time and the ability to think into the future, as in planning ahead (something that often seems to elude society at large, and certainly the business class that now rule our lives in countless ways. Remember, there was no plan for a massive oil rig blowout in the Gulf. Is it possible that structured, corporate culture prohibits some abstract thinking?).

Not all people develop abstract thinking strengths. Some people lose the ability, like those with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. People with certain learning disabilities have great difficulty conceptualizing beyond a certain point, or have trouble with words that represent ideas rather than things. Injuries to the frontal lobe of the brain have been shown to affects a person’s ability to think abstractly.

The inability to think abstractly causes difficulties when people go to make conceptual decisions, moral judgments or try solving complex problems.

Where We Are

That’s where we are today. We are in a world in the full throws of going through fastest and most dramatic changes in human history, and a large part of the population does not possess the ability to think through the problem abstractly. That’s perhaps why the black and white world painted by former president George W. Bush was popular for a time, and why the tea party movement picked up some steam in the last election cycle.

People are mad as hell, and they have good reason to be. But there is no trusted leader who can show them the correct path. They don’t trust the media either, also for good reason. And that’s too bad, because there was a time in our history when we had a chance to do it better.

Shaping Public Opinion

One of the original muckraking journalists who went through an academic period and ended up being the mainstream media’s biggest mouthpiece with the largest audience ever, Walter Lippmann, wrote an enlightening and critical assessment of functional democratic government in 1922 in book called Public Opinion.

He wrote about the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior, which prevent optimal societal cohesion. He described the cognitive limitations people face in comprehending their socio-political and cultural environments, and proposed that people inevitably apply an evolving catalogue of general stereotypes to simplify a complex reality. In other words, we all live to some extent by the “pictures in our heads.”

Changing that picture is difficult, although propagandists have learned to do it by repeating the same slogan over and over again. Like George Orwell’s slogans in the book 1984, “War is peace; Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strength,” Republican spinmeisters started a few of their own back in the 1980s that haunt us still. “Tax and spend Democrats,” for example, or “activist (liberal) judges.”

While Lippmann expressed some hope that newspapers could cover science and help educate the people to be good citizens and live together under a democratic republic form of government, he said the function of news is to signal an event, and that signaling, eventually, is a consequence of editorial selection and judgement. That’s how newspaper news, magazines and books in the early 20th century sowed the seeds that established public opinion, he thought. (Don’t forget this was well before widespread use of radio for news, or even the invention of television. The picture is way more complicated now).

In 1925, Lippmann completed a sort of an evolution in his thinking on the subject in another book, The Phantom Public. In it he expresses his lack of faith in the democratic system, arguing that the public exists merely as an illusion, and that the for-profit media could never live up to the task of filling all the gaps in the public’s knowledge.

Picking up on his term “manufacturing consent,” Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky later used the term to criticize the Western Press.

They first started talking about the problems of “corporate-owned mass media” — print, radio and television. They are first businesses subject to commercial competition for advertising revenue and profit, and their distortion (editorial bias) of news reportage — i.e. what types of news, which items, and how they are reported — is a consequence of the profit motive that requires establishing a stable, profitable business, not necessarily an informed electorate.

What did they recommend?

“Access should include ownership, not merely an occasional program or appearance. We have to start from the bottom. Grassroots organizations have to become more media-oriented and more concerned to reach out to similar groups and beyond. We can’t neglect progressive media either.”

Sitting here watching the water fall over the timeless rocks, I’m wondering if people around here will ever figure out in my lifetime what The Locust Fork News-Journal was created to do. It’s not your average conservative “family” newspaper, to be sure. I like to think we are faster and smarter in our approach. Like those who can hear and see, a few people will get it. Most won’t, unfortunately. But all we really have to do is reach those who matter, the opinion leaders, who can tell everybody else that there is a new journalism around, again.

That and maybe eliminate some of the worst evil doers on the planet, like the one’s who came up with the term “evil doer” in American politics. If you’ve read this far, you probably know who I mean. By “eliminate” I mean with market forces, lawsuits, or war by other means, politics. If that doesn’t work, and if this war on the earth continues, then it might come to mean something else.

In the interest of avenging my ancestors, I’m sitting here wondering: Where is Hawkeye, or Le Longue Carabine, when we need him?

Tear down some social dams people, and let the river of information flow. When a drop becomes an ocean, you will know we have won.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
A very smart drinker…

If you like to drink and party and think you are smarter than the average American or Brit, it turns out you may be right.

According to a national child development study in the United Kingdom and a national longitudinal study of adolescent health in the United States, more intelligent people consume alcoholic beverages more frequently and in greater quantities than less intelligent people.

In the case of the British, “very bright” children grew up to consume a fair amount more alcohol than their “very dull” cohorts.

Even controlling for demographic variables such as marital status, parents’ education, income and childhood social class, the findings were the same: Smarter kids grow up to drink more than dumb kids.

Oddly, according to Psychology Today, the hypothesis behind the study is based on evolution and the results disprove social, cultural factors.

“It means that it is not because more intelligent people occupy higher-paying, more important jobs that require them to socialize and drink with their business associates that they drink more alcohol,” the social scientists conclude. “It appears to be their intelligence itself, rather than correlates of intelligence, that inclines them to drink more.”

In other words, it is nature, not nurture, in this case.

Drinkable alcohol is a relatively “novel” invention going back to only 10,000 years ago. Prior to that, human ancestors found they could get a buzz by eating fermented, rotten fruit.

The results of this study do not “predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to engage in healthy and beneficial behavior,” since the fact that over drinking “may be detrimental to health and has few, if any, positive consequences.”

That is simply irrelevant for the hypothesis.

Rather, the results predict that “more intelligent individuals are more likely to engage in evolutionarily novel behavior.”

“Since the consumption of modern alcoholic beverages — including binge drinking and getting drunk — is evolutionarily novel, the hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to engage in it, and the empirical data from the UK and the US confirm it.”

Here’s to that. Cheers, y’all!