The concept of change has been in high visibility lately.  Obama ran on a campaign promising change, one that resonated quite well with people. 

And it should have.  There are a lot of things in politics that desperately require change.  But the promises and the reality ended up in different directions, as is unfortunately normal in politics.  Maybe I will blog about that sometime.

So that, along with some local and personal events, forced me to once again examine change from many levels.

Now, I am no stranger to change, nor am I narrowmindedly dogmatic about change, one way or another.

Some history:  In the Military change was an interesting phenomena.  On one hand you had what we called “the brown shoes”, the old timers who resisted change, seemingly out of nothing more than habit and comfort.  On the other, you had those who were driving change, the least of which was a change in how the Air Force dealt with and evaluated change.  One of many of the programs that reared up somewhere along the way was one called Total Quality Management, or TQM.  TQM was a  business management strategy aimed at driving awareness of quality and process improvement at all levels, instead of just at the top as was the Military norm, in some ways.

So in the last few weeks, I have given thought to an exchange I have been having with a coworker.

He (we’ll call him ‘Bob’) is a liberal, and an atheist.  He is also what I would affectionately describe as passionate and a bit argumentative.  I mean that too, by the way, as I like Bob a great deal.  Politically we are actually both much closer to the center and too each other than our peers might think.  Where we are close in opinions, we find a great deal of value in our debates.

But, there are a couple of problems in there too, which is where the revelation comes in.

Take the debate that lead me to this blog.  I was making a mention to another coworker about an article I had seen on Drudge, I believe, regarding the Global Climate Change proponents famed Hockey stick chart.  The article was noting that a chief contributer to the chart, Keith Briffa, had never released the raw data his studies were based on.  This was (or should have been) a serious issue in the scientific community, as your science must be demonstrable and verifiable, and the only way to do so is to examine the data.  After 10 years of fruitless and frustrating requests by a statistician named Steve McIntyre, Briffa was finally forced to give it up, and the data was shocking.  It appears that Briffa cherry picked his data to deliberately give the results he wanted, the hockey stick. 

I have been considering this for a few days now and I believe that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama is in a sense more revealing than it is disturbing.

The obvious revelation, that the award has nothing to do with actual *peace* is not what I mean.  That was made long ago when it was awarded to Yassir Arafat and Le Duc Tho, and many others over its history.  So the fact that Obama has not contributed an iota to actual peace is not the point.

It is not that the award is often given for political grandstanding, as the award to the IAEA, the UN Peacpekeepers, the UN itself or even Al Gore and the lying IPCC shows.  Of course it is. o

It was not even that Obama is such a cult of personality figure that eiven his lack of accomplishment is not enough to knock him off that pedestal.nt

The real revelation to me is what this shows about liberalism and one of the several philosophies at its core:  Intentions are more important than actions and should likewise be rewarded more than accomplishments.

Classic….

HT Hot Air.