The State of the Union

Last night in her rebuttal to the President's State of the Union address, Michele Bachmann spoke about the government telling us what light bulbs to buy. You might have thought, "what a silly thing to say." Well, here is the story. I remember this from last year, and found the news item on the Washington Post web pages. Here is an excerpt from the article. Read it and you decide if Congresswoman Bachmann was being silly. (I have highlighted some passages in bold face.)

Light bulb factory closes; End of era for U.S. means more jobs overseas

Lights out for ordinary bulbs made in the U.S.

By Peter Whoriskey

Wednesday, September 8, 2010; 9:48 PM

WINCHESTER, VA. - The last major U.S. factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs will soon be closing. When it does, the remaining 200 workers at the Winchester, Va., plant, about 70 miles west of Washington, D.C., will lose their jobs, marking a small, sad exit for a product that began with Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s.

…..

What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.

The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences. Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.

…..

"Everybody's jumping on the green bandwagon," said Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But "we've been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE. "

…..

In Obama's vision, the nation's mastery of new technology will create American manufacturing jobs.

"See, when folks lift up the hoods on the cars of the future, I want them to see engines stamped "Made in America," Obama said in an Aug. 16 speech at a Wisconsin plant. "When new batteries to store solar power come off the line, I want to see printed on the side, "Made in America." When new technologies are developed and new industries are formed, I want them made right here in America. That's what we're fighting for."

….

Sales of the CFLs began slowly, but they spiked in 2006 and 2007, when federal and state government efforts promoted their use.

The Energy Department teamed with Disney to develop a public service announcement based on the Disney Pixar film "Ratatouille" to encourage the adoption of technologies such as CFLs. It was shown on CNN, HGTV and the Food Network.

Lawmakers in California and Nevada drafted legislation calling for higher efficiency standards for light bulbs. And in December 2007, Congress passed its new energy standards.

GE balked at the standards at first, knowing that they could impact their U.S. manufacturing. But the company also saw that with restrictions gaining momentum in more states and other countries, some kind of legislation was unavoidable. They decided to support the bill as long as it didn't amount to a ban on traditional incandescents, but instead simply set energy standards.

"We obviously pointed out to legislators that the impact of an outright ban would be an elimination of some manufacturing operations," said Earl Jones, senior counsel in government relations and regulatory compliance at the company. "But it was inevitable that some kind of legislation would be coming to the U.S."

…..

The company developed a plan to see what it would take to retrofit a plant that makes traditional incandescents into one that makes CFLs. Even with a $40 million investment and automation, the disparity in wages and other factors made it uneconomical. The new plant's CFLs would have cost about 50 percent more than those from China, GE officials said.

….

In announcing the plant closure here, GE said in a news release that "a variety of energy regulations," including those in the United States, "will soon make the familiar lighting products produced at the Winchester Plant obsolete."

More about the adjectives

I just heard on tonight's NBC News that the unemployment rate was "lingering" above 9 per cent. Really? I think of "lingering" as something I would do by a cool stream or babbling brook, not to describe the unemployment rate. I think that the most uncolored adjective would be "continuing" above 9 per cent, and of course if a Republican were in the White House it would be "persisting" above 9 per cent.

The adjectives they use tell us so much about speaker or writer's political bent.

More News about our retoric

I was going to write just about the newest edition of "Tom Sawyer" which had removed the "N" word from the writing. But with what has happened in Tucson I also comment on what has happend there, and the news reporting that followed.

First let me say the Saturday shooting was a terrible thing. It truly saddens me. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where such things never happened, but we don't.

In the news since there has been a lot said about conservative comments leading up to and being responsible for this terrible event. There is no proof of that, it is just easy for the liberal press to make such accusations.

There are some things to consider here. This is not the first or only such attack, here or in other countries. Consider in my lifetime, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Sharon Tate, John Lennon, and attempts on Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan to name a few. All these and more were public figures, attacked for various reasons, but primarily because they were public figures. There attackers were primarily individuals with warped and strange ways of thinking. Dare I say, "crazy?"

Attempting to assign blame for any of these is a tall order. Primarily you can only blame the attacker.

Yet very many of the "news" programs are calling for some kind of reaction against the conservative people's right to speak.

These attacks are not new. We have endured them for a very long time. They are known as censorship. Whether it be in the form of being, "politically correct" as in the case of "Tom Sawyer," or "toning down" the political verbiage, it seems to be a popular cause.

I believe it is a dangerous path to pursue. In 1948, George Orwell wrote his classic tale, "1984." It was required reading when I was in English Lit. There is an Appendix to the book. It is titled, "The Principles of Newspeak." Orwell was very insightful, and what he wrote is close to what we now see happening. Orwell predicted that Newspeak would be the language of the land by 2050. Well, we did not see all the terrible consequences in his book by 1984, but perhaps he only had the date wrong. After all, with all the security cameras, cell phone videos, YouTube and FaceBook how far away can it be. You can read the Appendix (the whole book if you like) on line here.

A quote from the appendix will help me make my point for those who do not wish to read the whole thing.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

News Reporting

Perhaps it has always been this way, I don't know, but I do know that you can tell a lot about a news report by the adjectives used in it. For example:

The Republicans are saying we must make DRASTIC spending cuts in Washington.

Why not just spending cuts? The adjective colors the report in a way that leaves the reader thinking perhaps this shouldn't be happening.


I read the other day that a group of news people were wanting to change the phrase "illegal aliens" to "undocumented immigrants." Tell me there is no attempt to sway reader opinion with that change. Well, you can tell me but I don't believe it.

So, I am working on a list of colorful adjectives from news reports. You can help by leaving your comments.

This is my new year's resolution, to share my thoughts with the world. And so I begin with something that bothers me a lot, and that is "news" reports about how poorly we are doing as a country.

At the end of the year we see these assessments of our (United States) progress or position in the world with regard to education. It always amazes me in the logic of some of these commentators reporting such statistics.

My point is that people who should know are always talking or writing about how we are so far behind the rest of the world. They should realize that they are comparing apples to oranges to borrow a phrase. Two items should help make my point. The United States is a major chunk of the North American Continent. You can not compare education here with say, the Netherlands, or any country that could fit in Texas. It just doesn't work that way. Second, we are a country of opportunity which includes education for the masses. Believe it or not, not all countries send all children to school for 12 to 20 years. They are measuring our general population against a select group in other countries.

I have never seen a comparison between our top 1000 brightest students and any other countries top 1000 students. That is just an arbitrary number, so don't get hung up on the 1000. My point is when you hear or read a report base upon statistics consider what those statistics are measuring and how they were gathered.

These same people that cry out about our failing schools are the ones crying out for educational opportunities for all. What if we required admission tests (like the college SATs) for entry to high school? I bet our high school level test scores would zoom right up with the rest of the smaller countries scores.

When you next see or hear one of these laments, ask yourself a few questions.

1. Who made the study?
2. How many people were included in the study from each country?
3. How many children attend schools in these countries?
4. How are students placed in schools in each country?
5. Were the tests consistent in all countries?

Chances are you won't be able to find the answers. Just remember what one of my college professors said, You can prove anything with statistics.