Informant38

crazy, man!

Indoctrination is supposed to be a predicate for action commensurate with professions of seriousness.
[...]
Opinions differ as to whether acid rain from the Canadian mining and smelting operation is killing vegetation that once absorbed carbon dioxide. But a report from CNW Marketing Research ("Dust to Dust: The Energy Cost of New Vehicles from Concept to Disposal") concludes that in "dollars per lifetime mile," a Prius (expected life: 109,000 miles) costs $3.25, compared to $1.95 for a Hummer H3 (expected life: 207,000 miles).
[...]
The question is:

Suppose the costs over a decade of trying to achieve a local goal are insignificant. And suppose the positive impact on the globe's temperature are insignificant -- and much less than, say, the negative impact of one year's increase in the number of vehicles in one country (e.g., India). If so, are people who recommend such things thinking globally but not clearly?

George Will/WaPo/MiamiHerald 12.04.07
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and, another one!

Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture.
[...]
Mr Blair said he had been moved to make his controversial remarks after speaking to a black pastor of a London church at a Downing Street knife crime summit, who said: "When are we going to start saying this is a problem amongst a section of the black community and not, for reasons of political correctness, pretend that this is nothing to do with it?" Mr Blair said there needed to be an "intense police focus" on the minority of young black Britons behind the gun and knife attacks. The laws on knife and gun gangs needed to be toughened and the ringleaders "taken out of circulation".
[...]
Mr Blair is known to believe the tendency for many black boys to be raised in families without a father leads to a lack of appropriate role models.

He said: "We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong - it has not - but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold."

Wintour-Dodd/GuardianUk12.04.07
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...you're at the grocery store and somebody behind you in line starts talking and you realize after a little bit that they're not only not talking to someone else on a cel phone, they're not talking to anyone visible in particular and they're not making any coherent sense, either. But they're relatively normally dressed and they don't stink, and they have packages of food they seem to intend to buy, which is normal activity for the context.
But the things they're saying, while constructed grammatically and having essentially appropriate tonalities, don't add up to a logical and pertinent delivery of conversational info.
Kind of like that. Will makes beaucoup umpteen dollars-a-word and has a national audience for whatever he says whenever he says it, and Blair is second only to GWBush on the world stage, or was until a few months ago
Two men with the ready ear of millions, and both of them either Satanically possessed or pretty much barking mad.
"My dog failed his second driver's test."
Nothing overt in the sentence is wrong, the sentence itself is correct grammatically, both dogs and driving licenses are common elements of the contemporary landscape.
It's the linking of the one with the other, with the unstated, unspoken and therefore invisible corollary that having your dog get a driver's license would imply getting your dog behind the wheel at some point, an idea that without a great deal of background reinforcement most people would find absurd to the point of incoherence.
Will's version of this:

Opinions differ about the point I don't like, and here's a study that says something I do like.

Those aren't equal bits of information and they don't belong in the same sentence as parts of a logically coherent argument.
The study I'm presenting may well be differed-with equally or even more strenuously than the opinions I'm discounting, but we aren't going to talk about that because we're not being logical, we're being absurd. And getting away with it.
Blair's version:

Things are a certain way now, and certain things now are not to my liking, therefore I want to change them, by disrupting things as they are and forcing others to behave in ways I find more acceptable.

The irrefutable statistical evidence that young black men are far and away more responsible for incidents of violent crime, in England as well as the US, when taken all by itself provides all the confirmation needed for social controls on young black males, to either be "taken out of circulation", or "brought back into the fold" depending on which paragraph of Mr. Blair's speech you happen to be reading.
But as soon as you widen the boundaries of the problem, to include, let's suggest, more of the real world and its real history, including the exploitation of the resources young black males represent, or represented, say what young black males - the cultural if not genetic ancestors of these contemporary young black males - represented in the 19th century, so that what you have there is really more like a strip-mined mountain in some ways than a living landscape with its ecological components intact and in balance, and that imbalance, that incompleteness, that damaged place is directly and without any fuzzy cheap talk your fault, and came about as a direct result of the same events and practices that built the very fortunes and properties and other economic benefits you now try so frantically to protect from them, those young black males - the people you fucked over to get it.
But as long as you pretend that never happened what you're saying makes perfect sense.
As long as you pretend everyone was born pretty much when the television began to take up its residence in the home, and to take over the historical function of grandparents, to teach the youngest members of the family who they are in a wider, more rooted sense, and where they come from past the obvious beginnings in their parents' adult lives. As long as you pretend the past is over and done with and all we have is this long extending now that stretches from just about right here to whenever up ahead or forever. As long as you pretend that slavery stopped being a problem in any way as soon as it became functionally illegal, and that racism, while irritating, like smoking in public, is essentially a lifestyle choice of ignorant and unpleasant people, and not systemic and institutionalized, still, yet. And as long as you can keep the public debate from the topic, chilling as it may be, of Darwinian evolution working on us as a species, and as races, and even as classes of people in economic segregation.
And of course the same pattern's there in the non-existent, still at this late hour, media public debate over climate change and its causes and consequences.
Black male rage as internalized global warming.
Same cause, and there's the same mealy-mouthed horseshit that's all we're given, coming from the same heirs to the same benefits of that same cause, trying to rectify and justify what they can't possibly justify, because there isn't any way to do it.
Greed wrecked the lives of these "young black Britons" through wrecking the lives of their ancestors, and that damage has never been addressed for what it really was and it's never been healed; and greed has wrecked the world's climate, and that's become too obvious to ignore now, and the people that did it are in both cases the same people generally and in particular, and they're still riding the power and privilege that come from it, and Will and Blair both work for them, as servants, and that's why they say these things that make no sense at all, but seem to.