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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (52417)	3/21/2009 11:17:03 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

This is an excellent and thought provoking article. With Obama as President, I finally see wisdom creeping back into the White House. It is critical for Obama to remain focussed on channeling people's anger to obtain his three goals: economy, health care and education. ========================== The dearth of wisdom OPINION: Phillip Adams \| March 21, 2009 Article from: The Australian My remaining regular reader (bless you Daphne) knows of my attachment to the aphorism "data isn't information, information isn't knowledge and knowledge isn't wisdom". So much so that I wear the words on breast and backsides – not only on my T-shirt but as a bumper sticker on the rear end of the 4WD and as a tattoo on my bum. From time to time I hire a skywriter to trail those 10 words above people clustered for sporting events or state funerals and I try to teach them to parrots and politicians. The former pollies learn faster than the latter. Vouchsafed to me in 1985 by a visiting British scientist, the three "isn'ts" are a useful warning to those with a blind faith in facts (as if they matter) and those who still like to believe that a stern statistic leads to a desirable outcome or policy. Not only does that not necessarily follow but, all too often, the more alarming the data, the less likely the wise response. Exhibit A. The Greenhouse Effect, Global Warming or, to use the Bush Administration's official euphemism, Climate Change – now being replaced in the Obama era by the more urgent-sounding Climate Disruption. The Greenhouse Effect was identified and christened in the 19th century, with the data piling to the polluted skies by the late 1970s. Transformed into information in the early '80s it soon became widely held knowledge by everybody except George W. Bush, Michael Duffy, John Howard, Andrew Bolt and Daphne's husband, Arthur. But wisdom? As thin on the ground as greenhouse emissions are thick in the air. The data informs us that things are even worse than our worst fears, yet the pollies (the ones in suits, not feathers) squawk on. Soon the world becomes a dead parrot sketch. Along with a few dead polar bears and, in due course, lots of dead people. Exhibit B. It's almost 30 years since an ominous cluster of symptoms started appearing in the gay communities of California. I was warning my gay friends about it before it was given a name – which was initially GRID, for "gay-related immune deficiency". Soon the data made it clear that the illness might become a pandemic. Renamed AIDS for "acquired immune deficiency syndrome", growing epidemiological knowledge gave Australia time to implement some wise strategies to keep it under control. Yet despite being forewarned, despite being informed about its modes of transmission, the world let AIDS become a plague that has killed millions. Currently over 30 million are living with HIV, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa. Wisdom? Attempts to control one of the greatest catastrophes in human history aren't being helped by a powerful collaboration between evangelical US Christians and the Vatican, who've opposed the mass distribution of condoms. The three "isn'ts" also applied to the Iraq war, where wisdom was made impossible by doctoring the data. The data was dodgy, the information involved cooking the books and knowledge came a bad fourth to lies, lies and more lies. The same distortions can be seen in those other US fiascos, the wars on drugs and terror, where wisdom was replaced by policies of such epic stupidity that regiments of drug-pushers and terrorists were recruited to guarantee worst-case scenarios. Rereading the findings of the Royal Commission after the '39 bushfires it's clear that wisdom is still in short supply at home, too. There's courage aplenty but even data and information are sadly lacking. So we still build among the gum trees. Take the dug-outs the commission recommended to aid survival: 70 years on, virtually none has been constructed. Nor has there been any contemporary research on their design. Australia has centuries of data on floods and drought – yet we still build on flood plains, and farmers crop with more optimism than wisdom. We have immense amounts of data, information and knowledge on traffic – yet our states, particularly NSW, still blunder on every decision, creating cures that worsen the disease. And public health is as bad as public transport. We need a new word to fit these situations. Wisdumb? Now we've another proof of the sceptical aphorism: capitalism itself. Almost 80 years after the Great Depression the financial world was drowning in data, the executives drowning in personal wealth, their corporations drowning in profits, governments drowning in tax revenues. Despite all the brainpower of a million MBAs and IBMs, a plethora of analysts and pundits and central bankers and legislators and sundry smarty-pants, the planet wobbles on its axis and the entirety of world finance and business is flushed down the toilet. Where was wisdom when we needed it? Wise leadership demands the knowledge that comes from good information and data. But rarely gets it. theaustralian.news.com.au