Sunday, January 25, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
You're Not So Special
Wow! At last someone is bringing out some great, balanced parenting advice! The folks over at JuiceBoxJungle are producing some common sense ideas and videos on balanced parenting. I've long been against the commonly held notion that you have to praise and reward every little thing a kid does just to make them feel good for a moment while not doling out appropriate punishment when they've done something bad. Or rewarding real accomplishments. All you have to do these days is look around at some of the younger generation around us to see the Unintended Consequences.
Clueless ditzes cutting everyone off on the road without a hint of remorse or even any appreciation of what it is they've done - all while driving down the road putting on makeup and texting while they're driving. Idiots arguing with you over trivial points of view that would even make sense to a 6-year old. And my most common retort has always been, "Just because your Mommy told you how smart you were doesn't mean it's true!" (And my all-time favorite: "Just because your Daddy called you Son doesn't mean you're bright!")
Unfortunately, it's not a joke. (One of my favorite comedies of recent times is Idiocracy. My girlfriend hates it but I love the prophetic message.)
A lot of parents today seem to have been brought up praised to death and enabled to believe they can do anything they want. Anything. All without any thought of how it might affect anyone else or even what the consequences might be. And now these people have children. OMFG! Heaven help us!
We've watered our society down to new lows after decades of praising slow kids at the expense of smart kids and now we're seeing the results of those actions. In some ways, the old Soviet Socialist way of testing kids early in school to determine their place in life made some sense. "Young Comrade - your tests tell us you're best suited to be a garbage collector. So that's how we're going to educate you." Let's face it - not every kid can grow up to be a rocket scientist. While we sure don't want to lose that one little Einstein coming up through the system, imagine a kid with an average IQ constantly being groomed as the smartest kid in the world. And of course, his teachers in the school system won't tell him either because they don't want to look bad. But then the kid grows up with low self-esteem and goes postal one day and no one knows why... So we've built a system with little praise for real smarts and advancement while dumbing it all down for the lowest common denominator just to make sure little Johnny never feels stupid. Small wonder a lot of our kids can't read or spell or even make change at McDonalds!
That said, in many ways, some things haven't changed much over the years. It wasn't cool to be smart when I went to school either. You couldn't be too smart or you couldn't hang out with the cool kids. It was a whole, new world when the tech revolution finally happened in the 80's!
Anyway, you get my point. With that, here's an aptly titled 4-minute video from the good folks at JuiceBoxJungle:
Clueless ditzes cutting everyone off on the road without a hint of remorse or even any appreciation of what it is they've done - all while driving down the road putting on makeup and texting while they're driving. Idiots arguing with you over trivial points of view that would even make sense to a 6-year old. And my most common retort has always been, "Just because your Mommy told you how smart you were doesn't mean it's true!" (And my all-time favorite: "Just because your Daddy called you Son doesn't mean you're bright!")
Unfortunately, it's not a joke. (One of my favorite comedies of recent times is Idiocracy. My girlfriend hates it but I love the prophetic message.)
A lot of parents today seem to have been brought up praised to death and enabled to believe they can do anything they want. Anything. All without any thought of how it might affect anyone else or even what the consequences might be. And now these people have children. OMFG! Heaven help us!
We've watered our society down to new lows after decades of praising slow kids at the expense of smart kids and now we're seeing the results of those actions. In some ways, the old Soviet Socialist way of testing kids early in school to determine their place in life made some sense. "Young Comrade - your tests tell us you're best suited to be a garbage collector. So that's how we're going to educate you." Let's face it - not every kid can grow up to be a rocket scientist. While we sure don't want to lose that one little Einstein coming up through the system, imagine a kid with an average IQ constantly being groomed as the smartest kid in the world. And of course, his teachers in the school system won't tell him either because they don't want to look bad. But then the kid grows up with low self-esteem and goes postal one day and no one knows why... So we've built a system with little praise for real smarts and advancement while dumbing it all down for the lowest common denominator just to make sure little Johnny never feels stupid. Small wonder a lot of our kids can't read or spell or even make change at McDonalds!
That said, in many ways, some things haven't changed much over the years. It wasn't cool to be smart when I went to school either. You couldn't be too smart or you couldn't hang out with the cool kids. It was a whole, new world when the tech revolution finally happened in the 80's!
Anyway, you get my point. With that, here's an aptly titled 4-minute video from the good folks at JuiceBoxJungle:
Friday, January 9, 2009
Global Warming Officially Re-named Global Climate Change
All I actually started out to do this afternoon was to post a 3-minute video someone posted on YouTube of the flooding yesterday in Chehalis WA on my general blog HERE. Almost looks like Katrina (except everyone will start recovering this weekend).
Then I found another YouTube clip of 100 years of climate headlines and I'm still dizzy from the seesawing back-and-forth from one year to the next. So then I decided to extend it into a little rant on climate change.
In a classic textbook maneuver right out of Marketing 101, an inconvenient truth of the Al Gore movement has been the quiet re-branding of Global Warming to Global Climate Change. As we head into another year of record cold winters (Germany apparently recorded 32 degrees below zero today!), the idea of global warming seemed a little hard to grasp for the minions. So over this past year, we've seen the term global climate change being used interchangeably for global warming. Nice trick. (On a side note, last year I started lobbying a lot of the media to start using the term Homicide Bomber instead of Suicide Bomber as a more accurate description for homicidal fanatics - to date, only Fox Networks has been doing that).
I don't know about you but I personally think the reason Al Gore turned Barack Obama down for a position in his administration is because he's found something better. Much, MUCH better! Imagine having a gig even better than President of the United States. No one can take pot shots at you, no one can even argue with you or call you out on your positions. What a cool position to be in! Hey - the polar ice caps are melting. Global warming! Oh my God - lots of hurricanes in Florida this year. Global warming! But then things started to go the other way. So: Wow - it's freezing and flooding in Washington state! Global climate change! You get the drift. No matter what you say, you're now wrong and Al Gore's always right. What a great gig - who would want any other job? And it snagged him the Nobel prize. So why bother stooging for Obama when you can play God?
Well, why is this up on my Law of Unintended Consequences blog? Because I think there will be unintended consequences for the deceptive promotion that's being sold to everyone. I'm not saying that humans don't contribute to what goes on in our environment and our climate. But I also believe that there are a lot of things that we don't know or perhaps haven't even factored in yet. There's no doubt we know a lot more today than we knew just 20 years ago. A lot has happened over that time. But I still remember that as recently as 5 years ago, there was still a lot of talk about global cooling and how our children and their children would be facing a total global ice age in the next century if we didn't correct our awful ways. So now the tide literally turns the other way overnight and became ...global warming. And now it's global climate change.
I'm old enough to still remember littering. In the 50's and 60's, people didn't hesitate to toss their litter out the car window as they drove down the freeway. There was litter flying around everywhere. So then we started a campaign of road signs, laws and education in order to educate the masses, particularly kids. And as kids gradually came around and carried the message to their kids (and their parents), our roads got cleaner and the general mindset shifted to one of no littering. Most of our cities and towns and our roads are now very clean in the States and Canada. And most of Europe is also incredibly clean. But if you go to third world countries where such concepts aren't an accepted priority yet, they'll look at you as if you had two heads for taking the extra effort to avoid littering. The point I'm making is that these things take time to become part of our social fabric. And it's often at least two to three generations.
Scare tactics tend to have an adverse effect on adoption. If you overexaggerate the consequences and people discover it, then you'll also run the risk of losing a lot of credibility. If we're to teach our next generations about environmental responsibility so they can bring change effectively, a more honest approach might prove to be much more effective. The risk we run by taking the panic approach might well be the deciding factor in success or failure.
Then I found another YouTube clip of 100 years of climate headlines and I'm still dizzy from the seesawing back-and-forth from one year to the next. So then I decided to extend it into a little rant on climate change.
In a classic textbook maneuver right out of Marketing 101, an inconvenient truth of the Al Gore movement has been the quiet re-branding of Global Warming to Global Climate Change. As we head into another year of record cold winters (Germany apparently recorded 32 degrees below zero today!), the idea of global warming seemed a little hard to grasp for the minions. So over this past year, we've seen the term global climate change being used interchangeably for global warming. Nice trick. (On a side note, last year I started lobbying a lot of the media to start using the term Homicide Bomber instead of Suicide Bomber as a more accurate description for homicidal fanatics - to date, only Fox Networks has been doing that).
I don't know about you but I personally think the reason Al Gore turned Barack Obama down for a position in his administration is because he's found something better. Much, MUCH better! Imagine having a gig even better than President of the United States. No one can take pot shots at you, no one can even argue with you or call you out on your positions. What a cool position to be in! Hey - the polar ice caps are melting. Global warming! Oh my God - lots of hurricanes in Florida this year. Global warming! But then things started to go the other way. So: Wow - it's freezing and flooding in Washington state! Global climate change! You get the drift. No matter what you say, you're now wrong and Al Gore's always right. What a great gig - who would want any other job? And it snagged him the Nobel prize. So why bother stooging for Obama when you can play God?
Well, why is this up on my Law of Unintended Consequences blog? Because I think there will be unintended consequences for the deceptive promotion that's being sold to everyone. I'm not saying that humans don't contribute to what goes on in our environment and our climate. But I also believe that there are a lot of things that we don't know or perhaps haven't even factored in yet. There's no doubt we know a lot more today than we knew just 20 years ago. A lot has happened over that time. But I still remember that as recently as 5 years ago, there was still a lot of talk about global cooling and how our children and their children would be facing a total global ice age in the next century if we didn't correct our awful ways. So now the tide literally turns the other way overnight and became ...global warming. And now it's global climate change.
I'm old enough to still remember littering. In the 50's and 60's, people didn't hesitate to toss their litter out the car window as they drove down the freeway. There was litter flying around everywhere. So then we started a campaign of road signs, laws and education in order to educate the masses, particularly kids. And as kids gradually came around and carried the message to their kids (and their parents), our roads got cleaner and the general mindset shifted to one of no littering. Most of our cities and towns and our roads are now very clean in the States and Canada. And most of Europe is also incredibly clean. But if you go to third world countries where such concepts aren't an accepted priority yet, they'll look at you as if you had two heads for taking the extra effort to avoid littering. The point I'm making is that these things take time to become part of our social fabric. And it's often at least two to three generations.
Scare tactics tend to have an adverse effect on adoption. If you overexaggerate the consequences and people discover it, then you'll also run the risk of losing a lot of credibility. If we're to teach our next generations about environmental responsibility so they can bring change effectively, a more honest approach might prove to be much more effective. The risk we run by taking the panic approach might well be the deciding factor in success or failure.
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