Skip to main content

Home/ Long Game/ Group items tagged america

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
anonymous

Why comedian Louis C.K.'s appearance and race talk matters - 0 views

theloop21.com/...why-louis-ck-matters

media racism

shared by anonymous on 14 Jul 10 - Cached
  • My friend Lilah has been encouraging me to listen to Louis C.K.'s stand up for months.
 "He talks about race all the time!"
 I could not, as when urged to do something someone says I will really like, I refuse to move (I pull on the leash like Lilah's dog does suddenly and for no apparent reason).
  • When a white man does something that black people have been doing for ages, he gets a lot of praise and overshadows the others. This is not news. Black comedians have been talking about race frankly and honestly for years. The attention Louis C.K. gets may anger some. He's doing the same thing we've been doing forever, he's just white. But his whiteness is exactly what's important. He is white. Blindingly white. Red headed and baldingly white. Everyday American white. One million of McCain/Palin supporters can even relate to. If this man, this man, talks about race and sexuality in a passionate, and unembarrassed way while maintaining his masculinity and humor all without a hint of self righteousness, maybe others will follow his lead. Maybe.
  • anonymous on 14 Jul 10
     
    "He makes race more easily palatable to white America." An interesting argument by Kartina Richardson at TheLoop21 on July 14, 2010.
anonymous

What America Has Lost - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/...overreacted-to-9-11.print.html

news media terrorism

shared by anonymous on 11 Sep 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Sep 10
     
    "Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden's terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda's best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives." By Fareed Zakaria at Newsweek on September 4, 2010.
anonymous

Ten things I know about the mosque - 0 views

blogs.suntimes.com/...hings_i_know_about_the_mo.html

media politics

shared by anonymous on 28 Aug 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 28 Aug 10
     
    "#1. America missed a golden opportunity to showcase its Constitutional freedoms. The instinctive response of Americans should have been the same as President Obama's: Muslims have every right to build there. Where one religion can build a church, so can all religions." At Roger Ebert's Journal on August 19, 2010.
anonymous

Is 'Waiting For Superman' An Inspiring Call To Arms -- Or A Convenient Cover For Privat... - 0 views

crooksandliars.com/...-superman-inspiring-call-arms-

superman education

shared by anonymous on 28 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 28 Sep 10
     
    "The problems in our class system are systemic, going far beyond access to the "right" schools. You can't rationally hold teachers "accountable" for whether they have more students without heat or food than the teacher in the next classroom. You can't lay off experienced inner-city teachers and replace them with shiny Ivy League "Teach for America" recruits who are only passing through, gathering a hip credential on their way to a better job. While this film may excite liberals whose kids will never see the inside of an inner-city public school (unless Mommy or Daddy brings them along while they're filming documentaries like this), the parents whose kids are in those schools are rightfully wary of Great White Saviors -- as well they should be." By Susie Madrak at Crooks & Liars on September 20, 2010.
anonymous

Why Americans Hate the Media - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...5060

media politics america

shared by anonymous on 14 Oct 10 - Cached
  • But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by U.S. and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners. What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to "Roll tape!" as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire? Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds. "Well, I guess I wouldn't," he finally said. "I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans." Even if it meant losing the story? Ogletree asked. Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life, Jennings replied. "But I do not think that I could bring myself to participate in that act. That's purely personal, and other reporters might have a different reaction."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Oct 10
       
      This was a powerful moment that I *still* remember to this day.
  • Jennings was made to feel embarrassed about his natural, decent human impulse. Wallace seemed unembarrassed about feeling no connection to the soldiers in his country's army or considering their deaths before his eyes "simply a story."
  • Meet the Press, moderated by Tim Russert, is probably the meatiest of these programs. High-powered guests discuss serious topics with Russert, who worked for years in politics, and with veteran reporters. Yet the pressure to keep things lively means that squabbling replaces dialogue.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • In the 1992 presidential campaign candidates spent more time answering questions from "ordinary people"—citizens in town-hall forums, callers on radio and TV talk shows—than they had in previous years. The citizens asked overwhelmingly about the what of politics: What are you going to do about the health-care system? What can you do to reduce the cost of welfare? The reporters asked almost exclusively about the how: How are you going to try to take away Perot's constituency? How do you answer charges that you have flip-flopped?
  • Earlier in the month the President's performance had been assessed by the three network-news anchors: Peter Jennings, of ABC; Dan Rather, of CBS; and Tom Brokaw, of NBC. There was no overlap whatsoever between the questions the students asked and those raised by the anchors. None of the questions from these news professionals concerned the impact of legislation or politics on people's lives. Nearly all concerned the struggle for individual advancement among candidates.
  • The CBS Evening News profile of Clinton, which was narrated by Rather and was presented as part of the series Eye on America, contained no mention of Clinton's economic policy, his tax or budget plans, his failed attempt to pass a health-care proposal, his successful attempt to ratify NAFTA, his efforts to "reinvent government," or any substantive aspect of his proposals or plans in office. Its subject was exclusively Clinton's handling of his office—his "difficulty making decisions," his "waffling" at crucial moments. If Rather or his colleagues had any interest in the content of Clinton's speech as opposed to its political effect, neither the questions they asked nor the reports they aired revealed such a concern.
  • When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them—through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public's representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so—as at the typical White House news conference—with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public's views much less than they reflect the modern journalist's belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.
  • The subtle but sure result is a stream of daily messages that the real meaning of public life is the struggle of Bob Dole against Newt Gingrich against Bill Clinton, rather than our collective efforts to solve collective problems.
  • The natural instinct of newspapers and TV is to present every public issue as if its "real" meaning were political in the meanest and narrowest sense of that term—the attempt by parties and candidates to gain an advantage over their rivals.
  • when there is a chance to use these issues as props or raw material for a story about political tactics, most reporters leap at it. It is more fun—and easier—to write about Bill Clinton's "positioning" on the Vietnam issue, or how Newt Gingrich is "handling" the need to cut Medicare, than it is to look into the issues themselves.
  • Whether or not that was Clinton's real motive, nothing in the broadcast gave the slightest hint of where the extra policemen would go, how much they might cost, whether there was reason to think they'd do any good. Everything in the story suggested that the crime bill mattered only as a chapter in the real saga, which was the struggle between Bill and Newt.
  • "In some ways it's not even the point," she replied. What mattered was that Clinton "looked good" taking the tough side of the issue. No one expects Cokie Roberts or other political correspondents to be experts on controlling terrorism, negotiating with the Syrians, or the other specific measures on which Presidents make stands. But all issues are shoehorned into the area of expertise the most-prominent correspondents do have:the struggle for one-upmanship among a handful of political leaders.
  • When the Clinton Administration declared defeat in 1994 and there were no more battles to be fought, health-care news coverage virtually stopped too—even though the medical system still represented one seventh of the economy, even though HMOs and corporations and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies were rapidly changing policies in the face of ever-rising costs.
  • Health care was no longer political news, and therefore it was no longer interesting news.
  • In interviews and at the news conferences he conducted afterward Bradley did his best to talk about the deep problems of public life and economic adjustment that had left him frustrated with the political process. Each of the parties had locked itself into rigid positions that kept it from dealing with the realistic concerns of ordinary people, he said.
  • What turned up in the press was almost exclusively speculation about what the move meant for this year's presidential race and the party lineup on Capitol Hill. Might Bradley challenge Bill Clinton in the Democratic primaries? If not, was he preparing for an independent run? Could the Democrats come up with any other candidate capable of holding on to Bradley's seat? Wasn't this a slap in the face for Bill Clinton and the party he purported to lead? In the aftermath of Bradley's announcement prominent TV and newspaper reporters competed to come up with the shrewdest analysis of the political impact of the move. None of the country's major papers or networks used Bradley's announcement as a news peg for an analysis of the real issues he had raised.
  • Every one of Woodruff's responses or questions was about short-term political tactics. Woodruff asked about the political implications of his move for Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Bradley replied that it was more important to concentrate on the difficulties both parties had in dealing with real national problems.
  • As soon as he finished, Woodruff asked her next question: "Do you want to be President?" It was as if she had not heard a word he had been saying—or couldn't hear it, because the media's language of political analysis is utterly separate from the terms in which people describe real problems in their lives.
  • Regardless of the tone of coverage, medical research will go on. But a relentless emphasis on the cynical game of politics threatens public life itself, by implying day after day that the political sphere is nothing more than an arena in which ambitious politicians struggle for dominance, rather than a structure in which citizens can deal with worrisome collective problems.
  • Fourteen prominent journalists, pollsters, and all-around analysts made their predictions
  • One week later many of these same experts would be saying on their talk shows that the Republican landslide was "inevitable" and "a long time coming" and "a sign of deep discontent in the heartland."
  • But before the returns were in, how many of the fourteen experts predicted that the Republicans would win both houses of Congress and that Newt Gingrich would be speaker? Exactly three.
  • As with medieval doctors who applied leeches and trepanned skulls, the practitioners cannot be blamed for the limits of their profession. But we can ask why reporters spend so much time directing our attention toward what is not much more than guesswork on their part.
  • useless distractions have become a specialty of the political press. They are easy to produce, they allow reporters to act as if they possessed special inside knowledge, and there are no consequences for being wrong.
  • The deadpan restraint with which Kurtz told this story is admirable. But the question many readers would want to scream at the idle correspondents is Why don't you go out and do some work?
  • Why not imagine, just for a moment, that your journalistic duty might involve something more varied and constructive than doing standups from the White House lawn and sounding skeptical about whatever announcement the President's spokesman put out that day?
  • The list could go on for pages. With a few minutes' effort—about as long as it takes to do a crossword puzzle—the correspondents could have drawn up lists of other subjects they had never before "had time" to investigate. They had the time now. What they lacked was a sense that their responsibility involved something more than standing up to rehash the day's announcements when there was room for them on the news.
  • How different the "Better safe than sorry" calculation seems when journalists are involved! Reporters and pundits hold no elected office, but they are obviously public figures. The most prominent TV-talk-show personalities are better known than all but a handful of congressmen.
  • If an interest group had the choice of buying the favor of one prominent media figure or of two junior congressmen, it wouldn't even have to think about the decision. The pundit is obviously more valuable.
  • Had Donaldson as a journalist been pursuing a politician or even a corporate executive, he would have felt justified in using the most aggressive reportorial techniques. When these techniques were turned on him, he complained that the reporters were going too far.
  • Few of his readers would leap to the conclusion that Will was serving as a mouthpiece for his wife's employers. But surely most would have preferred to learn that information from Will himself.
  • ABC News found that eight out of 10 approved of the president's speech. CBS News said that 74 percent of those surveyed said they had a "clear idea" of what Clinton stands for, compared with just 41 percent before the speech. A Gallup Poll for USA Today and Cable News Network found that eight in 10 said Clinton is leading the country in the right direction. Nielsen ratings reported in the same day's paper showed that the longer the speech went on, the larger the number of people who tuned in to watch.
  • The point is not that the pundits are necessarily wrong and the public necessarily right. The point is the gulf between the two groups' reactions. The very aspects of the speech that had seemed so ridiculous to the professional commentators—its detail, its inclusiveness, the hyperearnestness of Clinton's conclusion about the "common good"—seemed attractive and worthwhile to most viewers.
  • The difference between the "welcoming committee" and the congressional committees headed by fallen Democratic titans like Tom Foley and Jack Brooks was that the congressmen can be booted out.
  • Movies do not necessarily capture reality, but they suggest a public mood—in this case, a contrast between the apparent self-satisfaction of the media celebrities and the contempt in which they are held by the public.
  • the fact that no one takes the shows seriously is precisely what's wrong with them, because they jeopardize the credibility of everything that journalists do.
  • when all the participants then dash off for the next plane, caring about none of it except the money—when these things happen, they send a message. The message is: We don't respect what we're doing. Why should anyone else?
  • anonymous on 14 Oct 10
     
    "Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media's self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country's real problems" By James Fallows at The Atlantic on February, 1996
anonymous

The perils of false equivalencies and self-proclaimed centrism - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

media politics

shared by anonymous on 28 Sep 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 28 Sep 10
     
    "I think Jon Stewart is one of the most incisive and effective commentators in the country, and he reaches an audience that would otherwise be politically disengaged. I don't have any objection if he really wants to hold a rally in favor of rhetorical moderation, and it's also fine if, as seems to be the case, he's eager to target rhetorical excesses on both the left and right in order to demonstrate his non-ideological centrism. But the example he chose to prove that the left is guilty, too -- the proposition that Bush is a "war criminal" -- is an extremely poor one given that the General in charge of formally investigating detainee abuse (not exactly someone with a history of Leftist advocacy) has declared this to be the case, and core Nuremberg principles compel the same conclusion. Leave aside the fact that, as Steve Benen correctly notes, Stewart's examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn't born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP, while his examples of left-wing excesses (Code Pink and 9/11 Truthers) have no currency (for better or worse) in the Democratic Party. The claim that Bush is "a war criminal" has ample basis, and it's deeply irresponsible to try to declare this discussion off-limits, or lump it in with a whole slew of baseless right-wing accusatory rhetoric, in order to establish one's centrist bona fides." By Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com on September 19, 2010.
anonymous

What will future generations condemn us for? - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010092404113_pf.html

morality history longnow

shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - Cached
  • First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.
  • a look at the past suggests three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation.
  • Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.
  • four contenders
  • Our prison system
  • Industrial meat production
  • The institutionalized and isolated elderly
  • The environment
  • Roughly 1 percent of adults in this country are incarcerated. We have 4 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. No other nation has as large a proportion of its population in prison; even China's rate is less than half of ours.
  • People who eat factory-farmed bacon or chicken rarely offer a moral justification for what they're doing. Instead, they try not to think about it too much, shying away from stomach-turning stories about what goes on in our industrial abattoirs.
  • Other elderly Americans may live independently, but often they are isolated and cut off from their families. (The United States is not alone among advanced democracies in this. Consider the heat wave that hit France in 2003: While many families were enjoying their summer vacations, some 14,000 elderly parents and grandparents were left to perish in the stifling temperatures.)
  • Look at a satellite picture of Russia, and you'll see a vast expanse of parched wasteland where decades earlier was a lush and verdant landscape. That's the Republic of Kalmykia, home to what was recognized in the 1990s as Europe's first man-made desert.
  • Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, is the author of "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen."
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    "Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today." By Kwame Anthony Appiah at The Washington Post on September 26, 2010.
anonymous

The big letdown - 0 views

www.boston.com/...the_big_letdown

politics

shared by anonymous on 12 Oct 10 - Cached
  • In short, alleviating disappointment means understanding what someone actually means when they say they’re disappointed. And for a politician, it means realizing that a certain amount of disillusionment is built into the system--the natural human optimism that allows people, election after election, to believe campaign promises also consigns them to repeated bouts of disappointment. Even if a voter manages to keep his expectations low in the fever of a campaign, research suggests that his conception of the counterfactual--what might have been if different decisions had been made, different policies pursued, or different politicians elected--grows increasingly positive in his memory, setting him up for disappointment.
  • Of the two sister emotions, regret is by far the more studied. Regret--or, more accurately, our desire to avoid future regret--is a major factor in how we decide what to do, what to say, and what to buy. A man might go on an adventurous vacation because he doesn’t want to regret missing the opportunity, or he might forgo ordering a fifth and then a sixth cocktail because he regretted it the last time he did it. Disappointment, on the other hand, usually drives us to do not much at all, making it a less fruitful emotion for marketers and professional motivators. Negative emotions like anger or fear give people energy and incentive to act; disappointment does the opposite. That difference is reflected in polling right now that shows a yawning enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats, with the former angry, motivated, and eager to vote, and the latter listless and expected to stay home in the upcoming mid-term elections.
  • Gilovich sees several reasons for this, but one of them is that over time we steadily minimize the barriers to action that shape our decisions. Our instinct is to come to believe that the thing we didn’t do would have been less difficult than we found it at the time. ”We think it’s easy in retrospect to have learned a foreign language. Sure, we think, we could have found a half an hour a day to listen to tapes. But half an hour a day in actual life is hard to find,” says Gilovich.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Taken together, this body of research underlines just how inevitable some degree of disappointment is, in electoral politics as in our personal lives. There’s ample research in the psychology literature that shows just how incorrigibly optimistic and trusting human beings can be, and how vulnerable, as a result, they are to campaign rhetoric like Obama’s in 2008. ”Don’t compare me to the Almighty,” Vice President Joe Biden likes to say, quoting Boston’s former mayor Kevin White, ”compare me to the alternative.” Even when they think they’re doing just that, though, people tend to romanticize the road not taken.
  • anonymous on 12 Oct 10
     
    "America is disappointed. The economic recovery, such as it is, has produced few jobs and little growth, the war in Afghanistan is going poorly, and Washington's political culture, which President Obama took office promising to reform, is as vitriolic and paralyzed as ever. As a supporter put it to Obama at a Sept. 20 town hall meeting, "I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I'm one of those people. And I'm waiting, sir. I'm waiting."" By Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe on October 10, 2010.
anonymous

Despite highest health spending, Americans' life expectancy falls behind other countries' - 0 views

www.labspaces.net/..._falls_behind_other_countries_

layscience nutrition

shared by anonymous on 07 Oct 10 - Cached
  • While the U.S. has achieved gains in 15-year survival rates decade by decade between 1975 and 2005, the researchers discovered that other countries have experienced even greater gains, leading the U.S. to slip in country ranking, even as per capita health care spending in the U.S. increased at more than twice the rate of the comparison countries.
  • When the researchers compared risk factors among the 13 countries, they found very little difference in smoking habits between the U.S. and the comparison countries—in fact, the U.S. had faster declines in smoking between 1975 and 2005 than almost all of the other countries.
  • In terms of obesity, researchers found that, while people in the U.S. are more likely to be obese, this was also the case in 1975, when the U.S. was not so far behind in life expectancy.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "But what really surprised us was that all of the usual suspects—smoking, obesity, traffic accidents, homicides, and racial and ethnic diversity are not the culprits. The U.S. doesn't stand out as doing any worse in these areas than any of the other countries we studied, leading us to believe that failings in the U.S. health care system, such as costly specialized and fragmented care, are likely playing a large role in this relatively poor performance on improvements in life expectancy."
  • anonymous on 07 Oct 10
     
    "America continues to lag behind other nations when it comes to gains in life expectancy, and commonly cited causes for our poor performance-obesity, smoking, traffic fatalities and homicide-are not to blame, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. " At Lab Spaces on October 7, 2010.
anonymous

Stephanie Coontz on "Mad Men" - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...stephanie-coontz-on-mad-men

generations

shared by anonymous on 11 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Let me bring this discussion back around to generations, turnings, and cyclical versus linear time.  One thing  Bill and I discovered many years ago, even before  The Fourth Turning appeared, was that most people who really do not like our perspective on history have fairly strong ideological motivations.  These tend to be people whose ideology colors their perspective on history, who see history moving from absolute error toward absolute rectitude, and who (therefore) are really bothered by a view of history that is not linear.  In this view, the idea that there might be something archetypal in a bygone generation or era of history seems bizarre, even perverse.  There can be no archetype for social dysfunction and blatant injustice.  It’s like a disease.  When it’s over, you hope and expect it never returns.
  • anonymous on 11 Oct 10
     
    "I have argued before that " Mad Men" is a fundamentally unhistorical rendition of how most Americans felt and behaved in late First Turning (the High) America. To summarize, my point was basically that most of the roles are played by Generation X (born 1961-1981) who meticulously "look" like circa-1960 business-world people-but who fail to reflect the authentic mood of the era as it was lived and experienced. Instead, the actors come across as Gen-Xers dressed in 1960 clothing and trapped in 1960 social mannerisms. Let me put aside all instance in "Mad Men" where the script is simply impossible-like characters telling each other to "get in touch with their feelings." Even aside from such obvious anachronisms, most scenes (to my eye and ear) are suffused with a sense of oppressive tension and cynicism." By Neil Howe at Lifecourse Blog on October 11, 2010.
anonymous

The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother - 0 views

www.thestar.com/...on-high-security-little-bother

security

shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away. Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.
  • That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.
  • In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies. "There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "We have a saying in Hebrew that it's much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it's dark over there. That's exactly how (North American airport security officials) act," Sela said. "You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification. That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience. "It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He's worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world." By Cathal Kelly at thestar.com on December 30, 2009.
anonymous

The Love of One's Own and the Importance of Place - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...one_s_own_and_importance_place

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 10 Dec 10 - Cached
  • The study of geopolitics tries to identify those things that are eternal, those things that are of long duration and those things that are transitory. It does this through the prism of geography and power.
  • there is a huge gulf between the uncertainty of a prediction and the impossibility of a prediction.
  • There is no action taken that is not done with the expectation, reasonable or not, erroneous or not, of some predictable consequence.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Nature is the most predictable thing of all, since it lacks will and cannot make choices. Scientists who like to talk about the “hard sciences” actually have it easy.
  • First, human beings have choices as individuals. Second, and this is the most important thing, we are ourselves human. Our own wishes and prejudices inevitably color our view of how things will evolve.
  • Successful forecasting should begin by being stupid.
  • By being stupid we mean that rather than leaping toward highly sophisticated concepts and principles, we should begin by noting the obvious.
  • we should begin by noticing the obvious about human beings.
  • they are born and then they die
  • Human beings are born incapable of caring for themselves
  • Humans protect themselves and care for their young by forming families
  • Who should you ally with and where would you find them?
  • Why should you trust a relative more than a stranger?
  • The idea that romantic love should pre-empt the love of one’s own introduces a radical new dynamic to history, in which the individual and choice supersede community and obligation.
  • Which love is prior? Is it the love to which you are born — your family, your religion, your tradition — the love of one’s own? Or is it the acquired love, the one you have chosen because it pleases you as an individual?
  • one married out of love for one’s parents, and out of the sense of duty that grew out of that love.
  • Romantic love is acquired love.
  • This notion is embedded in the American Declaration of Independence, which elevates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over obligation.
  • Ideology is an acquired value. No child can be a Jeffersonian or a Stalinist. That can only be chosen after the age of reason, along with romantically acquired spouses.
  • Tradition is superseded by reason and the old regime superseded by artificially constructed regimes forged in revolution.
  • As a citizen, you have a relationship to an artificial construct, the constitution, to which you swear your loyalty. It is a rational relationship and, ultimately, an elective relationship. Try as one might, one can never stop being an American. One can, as a matter of choice, stop being a citizen of the United States. Similarly, one can elect to become a citizen of the United States. That does not, in the fullest sense of the word, make you an American. Citizenship and alienage are built into the system.
  • Loving America is simple and natural. Loving the United States is complex and artificial.
  • For modern regimes, birth is an accident that gives no one authority.
  • In post-revolutionary society, you may know who you were but that in no way determined who you would become.
  • Traditional society was infinitely more constrained but infinitely more natural.
  • This leads us to nationalism — or, more broadly, love and obligation to the community to which you were born, be it a small band of nomads or a vast nation-state.
  • Modern liberalism and socialism do not know what to do with nationalism.
  • For economists, self-interest is a natural impulse. But if it is a natural impulse, it is an odd one, for one can see widespread examples of human beings who do not practice it. Consider the tension between the idea that the United States was created for the purpose of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and the decision of a soldier to go to war and even willingly give his life.
  • Dying for a regime dedicated to the pursuit of happiness makes no sense. Dying for the love of one’s own makes a great deal of sense. But the modern understanding of man has difficulty dealing with this idea.
  • There is an important paradox in all this. Modern liberal regimes celebrate the doctrine of national self-determination, the right of a “people” to choose its own path. Leaving apart the amazing confusion as to what to do with a nation that chooses an illiberal course, you have the puzzlement of precisely what a nation is and why it has the right to determine anything.
  • Europe had been ruled by dynasties that governed nations by right of birth. Breaking those regimes was the goal of Europe’s revolutionaries.
  • In the case of the American founders, having acted on behalf of national self-determination, they created a Bill of Rights and hoped that history would sort through the contradiction between the nation, the state and the individual.
  • Why should we love those things that we are born to simply because we are born to them? Why should Americans love America, Iranians love Iran and Chinese love China? Why, in spite of all options and the fact that there are surely many who make their lives by loving acquired things, does love of one’s own continue to drive men?
  • Wherever one chooses to go, whatever identity one chooses to claim, in the end, you cannot escape from who you are.
  • anonymous on 10 Dec 10
     
    The study of geopolitics tries to identify those things that are eternal, those things that are of long duration and those things that are transitory. It does this through the prism of geography and power. What it finds frequently runs counter to common sense. More precisely, geopolitical inquiry seeks not only to describe but to predict what will happen. Those predictions frequently - indeed, usually - fly in the face of common sense. Geopolitics is the next generation's common sense. William Shakespeare, born in 1564 - the century in which the European conquest of the world took place -- had Macbeth say that history is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. If Macbeth is right, then history is merely sound and fury, devoid of meaning, devoid of order. Any attempt at forecasting the future must begin by challenging Macbeth, since if history is random it is, by definition, unpredictable. By George Friedman at StratFor on May 26, 2008.
anonymous

Clinton on the Falklands - 0 views

fpwatch.blogspot.com/...clinton-on-falklands.html

longgame foreignpolicy

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 10 - Cached
  • That might seem like boilerplate language and nothing to get exorcised about, but as Massie notes, the British position on the Falklands is that there's really nothing to discuss. Britain wants and has the islands. The people who are living on the islands have no desire to be under Argentine rule. End of discussion. By encouraging the two countries to "sit down," Clinton was arguably legitimating the Argentine claim.
  • Hello Matt,Unfortunately, the United States has to take a position on this issue, and for two reasons, the latter being more important than the former:(1) American policy has always been to edge European influence out of the Americas, a la the Monroe Doctrine.(2) Many South American countries associate the United States with the United Kingdom; partly because of this and partly because they have their own grievances with Washington, they have started moves to form a new regional grouping which excludes America. This is not good for the United States.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 10
     
    Matt Eckel looks at Hillary Clinton's recent statement about the most recent Falkland Islands statements.
anonymous

Greater India Before the Himalayas; Dinosaur Eating Snakes - 0 views

www.3quarksdaily.com/...the-dinosaur-eating-snake.html

earth science

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.
  • Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.
  • Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.
  • Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.
  • Dinosaurs are one of the best groups for studying the potential effects of paleogeographic changes on evolution because dinosaurs were large animals that were capable of traversing continent scale-distances. For example, early in the Mesozoic Era, when the Earth's continental landmasses were connected, dinosaur faunas worldwide are generally similar. Carnivorous dinosaurs from North America, for example, bear striking resemblance to those from southern Africa, and herbivorous dinosaurs from China resemble those from South America. Later in the Mesozoic Era, however, this is not the case. Dinosaur faunas worldwide became more distinctive from one another due to evolutionary changes and extinction associated with increased isolation.
  • Snakes first appear in the fossil record 100 million years ago, but most Mesozoic snake fossils consist of isolated vertebrae—complete skeletons are extraordinarily rare and limited to a handful of specimens collected from Patagonia, the Levant, and southern Europe.
anonymous

The Real New Deal - 0 views

www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm

money

shared by anonymous on 11 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Money, an item not necessarily intrinsically desirable or usable but serving as a stand-in for the complex wants and valuations of untold individuals, is an unnatural idea that required centuries to take hold.
  • Endism, especially when attached to the sort of nouns we were once prone to capitalize, can become a bad habit when used as anything more than a literary device to call attention to events worthy of it. The Great Depression was certainly worthy of its capital letters; even if nothing exactly ended, plenty changed. But what? And with what, if any relevance for present circumstances?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Mar 10
       
      Hat Tip to Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias for pointing me toward this article. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/great-depression.html
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      And this 'endism' is quite present in the current anger over health-care reform. It's not merely a loss, it is elevated to historical travesty.
  • Whether we realize it or not, we are still reacting to those portrayals more than we are to the actions themselves. What really changed was the way the world’s elite thought of themselves and their institutions.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      This falls under the category of "lies we tell ourselves." Of course, less cynically, we can call it the standard act of national mythmaking. It's akin to the fact that humans remember what they *need* to remember, not what was.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • In crude political form, this Whiggish inclination toward progress was encapsulated in the functionalist view retailed by Norman Angell around the turn of the last century, which held that countries that traded with each other would develop economic self-interests too intertwined to justify war.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Mar 10
       
      This strikes me as something generally true, but not necessarily a truism. Libertarians will often postulate the "trade kills war" argument, without appreciating that it's not an iron-clad law or even - necessarily - the most likely outcome. It strikes me as more a naive, though admirable, conceit of what they *wish* as opposed to what IS.
  • If markets had come to play a more prominent part in the industrial West, it was not because markets had just been invented. It was because social and political systems had evolved in which powerful elites were willing to tolerate institutions that diffused economic power and weakened the state at the expense of private enterprise. This was the core meaning of liberalism in its original formulation.
  • The Crash of 1929, the subsequent economic slump and, particularly, the duration of the Depression took most contemporaries completely by surprise. Indeed, the uniquely severe catastrophe of the 1930s is so unusual that modern analysts should be cautious in drawing lessons from it.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      One way in which we fundamentally misunderstand a time period is in projecting our current political definitions on a period in gross violation of the political norms of the time.
  • Conventional wisdom tends to treat President Hoover as a clueless advocate of laissez faire who refused to stimulate the economy in the dramatic downturn. Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, was the heroic leader who both saved the day and transformed the American economy through his promotion of the New Deal. Conventional wisdom is still very much with us.
  • Hoover did not advocate “do-nothing” policies.
  • Roosevelt’s interventions were neither as thorough nor as systematically revolutionary as they have often been portrayed.
  • Above all, FDR’s worst policies were animated by a desire to repress business, by distrust of competition and a general disdain for the market. Those were, of course, precisely the qualities that made his policies extremely popular. FDR’s economic policies scored mixed successes at best, but his political strategy succeeded by any measure long before U.S. entry into World War II, and subsequent generations have not ceased to conflate the former with the latter.
  • So thoroughly has the West taken for granted the triumph of the more abstract liberal nation-state that its denizens must remind themselves how fragile its origins were and how little emotional loyalty it has commanded.
  • Even in America, where visceral support for individualism and self-reliance remains strong, this has always been so. In good times, economic systems are supported by inertia and utilitarian compromise that appeal to the broad center. In hard times abstract convictions tend to melt away. The American preference for the free market is neither as common nor as “American” as many suppose.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      But our identities are inventions and are mostly divorced from a close reading of history. As America nears a genuine crisis point, the current phenomenon of the "Tea Party" is going to be less relevant. It will eventually become "quaint" and irrelevant. At least, that is my hope (and current Generational prediction).
  • Seen as a reversion to older habits, the odd mix of regulation, make-work, intervention, protectionism, nationalism and (as in Germany and elsewhere) anti-Semitism that characterized the Western policy response to the Depression suddenly seems less like an incoherent flaying in all directions and more like elements of a uniform retrenchment in social relations.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      Which is why the narratives don't stick on a closer read.
  • It seems odd that humans in their day-to-day interactions think of buying or selling as the most natural of activities, recreating markets unprompted in the most dismal of circumstances. Yet there is something about the ideology of a market system, or of any generally decentralized order, that seems inconceivable to most people.
  • Economists have a hard time dealing with nationalism.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      Again: Nationalism - in its current form - is a modern social invention.
  • A severe economic crisis implicates the entire system of political economy, regardless of how narrow the source of that crisis may be. Thus those with long-simmering fears and resentments—as well as those with more venal or ideological motives—see crisis as an opportunity to strike out at the system.
  • Anti-market movements, whether pushed by Populists or Progressives in the United States or the various forms of socialism in Europe, took for granted that vigorous political action was the only way to impose order and bring social harmony to an unfettered market economy. But the specific remedies and the zeal with which reformers sought to repudiate the past belie ideological origins more than technocratic ones.
  • He had mastered the politics of trust.
  • Roosevelt deserves credit for largely resisting these ideological enthusiasms. On balance, he dealt with the crisis pragmatically and forthrightly.
  • If FDR had left out the high-flying rhetoric and only pursued an attenuated New Deal—namely the financial policies that economists now agree truly helped us out of the Depression—would he be as celebrated a figure as he is today? Not likely.
  • The end of World War II furnishes still more evidence that political images leave a wider trace in historical memory than actual policies.
  • Thanks to Truman we were once again moving in the direction of a competitive, open-access market economy. Had there been a lingering recession and a continuation of older, harmful regulations into the 1946–48 period, Truman, not his predecessor, would have been blamed. Yet Truman’s stellar reputation today owes nothing to his economic achievements, which most of those who today praise his foreign policy acumen know nothing about.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      I'll raise my hand on this one. Even with my better-than-nothing knowledge of US history, I knew nothing about this.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      They weren't in the stories I learned about.
  • In any event, we would do well to bear in mind how important, yet also how unnatural, the modern system of impersonal finance and trade really is. If we would preserve that system as a basis for our prosperity, we must recognize that many of the regulatory solutions we apply to our current crisis may themselves induce responses that can generate new crises. History suggests, too, that fears of the market and the political pressures it generates will wax and wane as crises deepen or ease. Patience and prudence are, therefore, the best watchwords for government amid the many trials and errors we will surely endure in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.
  • Indeed, many of his interventions—for example, his attempts to balance the budget by raising taxes in 1932, and strengthening support for the gold standard—worsened the economy for reasons orthodox theory would have predicted. On the other hand, Hoover initiated the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to support failed banks, to fund public works, subsidize state relief and otherwise engage in policies that presaged the widely praised interventions of the Roosevelt era.
  • Economic historians stress that it was in the realm of monetary and not fiscal policy that FDR had the most success.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      I can't even tell you the difference between those two things. I would venture to guess that a *lot* of people with strong convictions about government intrusion can't either.
  • What is one to make of the widespread popularity of protectionism and high tariffs throughout the Western world? Nationalist policies of every stripe, whether in the form of cartelization of industry in the United States or of more widespread regulation and control in Europe, especially in Germany, were not natural accompaniments to any neutral, technocratic view of recovery.
  • large-scale systems based on anonymous exchange were a recent phenomenon.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      We have a stubborn inability to understand that businesses are technologies like anything else we create. A chief conceit of neocons is the idea that our current economic system is somehow closer to a blank slate than those with more government power. Since it is our corporate system that is the "newish" thing, it puts supporters on the right in the uncomfortable position of being Progressives of at least one stripe.
  • The current Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer, wrote in her widely cited article, “What Ended the Great Depression?” (1992), that “unusual fiscal policy contributed almost nothing to the recovery from the Great Depression.” The consensus view is that FDR’s policy success was the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933.
  • Harry Truman left office in 1953 a very unpopular man. Almost no one at the time gave him credit for overseeing a period of rapid recovery that was much broader and more impressive than anything that happened under Roosevelt’s tenure—and this at a time when most economists predicted a deep postwar recession.
anonymous

Empire and Social Spending - 0 views

fpwatch.blogspot.com/...mpire-and-social-spending.html

geopolitics military foreignpolicy

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 10 - Cached
  • France, which spends more of its GDP on health care than any other European country, also spends a higher percentage than the rest of Europe on its military.
  • Britain's financial straits following the Second World War coincided with an expansion of the British welfare state that made imperial expenditures hard to maintain (though the British Empire was in its death throes in any case).
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      Another important difference is the rather unique situation of having your nation-proper repeatedly bombed whilst your ally (America) is working to secure the transfer of all Britain's Ports via the Lend-Lease agreement.
  • If a government is going to tax people heavily, those people had best feel as though they're getting something out of the bargain.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      A really big hole in this neocon logic is this: the example of Roosevelt during the Great Depression. WW2 gave us a showcase to build industrial momentum (free of direct threat, no less) after our muddled responses to the depression failed. Whether or not you view the creation of a truly heroic number of federal bodies as a good or bad thing, it would be foolish to argue that America has become *less* powerful since that time.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the idea that in order to have an empire (or be a "superpower" or an "indispensable nation" or whatever other euphemism you feel like using), a country must necessarily have a weak social safety net is worth exploring.
  • If people like Max Boot want the United States to remain a militarily-dominant superpower, it strikes me that they ought to counsel the development of a social contract that will encourage people to accept the concomitant financial sacrifices over the long term.
anonymous

The End of Bretton Woods? - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...the-end-of-bretton-woods

generations

shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 10 - Cached
  • But there’s something bigger here: The disintegration of the  Bretton Woods consensus, built by the  G.I. (born 1901-1924), that formed the basis for global trade and power for 66 years, 1945 to 2011–that is, for three turnings.
  • a seismic shift in the geopolitical firmament.
  • To many Xers, the idea that America is “above all that” is a joke. Every since they were kids in the OPEC-stagflation ‘70s, they’ve been hearing that America is in crisis, has reached its last days, and is sliding into no-growth irrelevance and decadence (of which their generation btw is a prime example). For Xers, the hubris and complacency of the G.I. worldview has been replaced by survivalism and revanchism.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The G.I.s believed in Bretton Woods because it was *their* system. They built it and trusted it. For decades thereafter, younger generations deferred to their institutional confidence. I think that may now be coming to an end.
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 10
     
    By Neil Howe at Lifecourse Blog on April 14, 2010.
anonymous

Death of the American Century | Lifecourse Blog - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...death-of-the-american-century

generations silent genx

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
  • This view that Allen describes, of America as history’s existential good guy, is very linked to the psyche of his  Silent (born 1925-1942).
  • In any event,  Generation X (born 1961-1981) seems entirely unmoved by the emotional tensions and turmoil that Allen describes.
  • It’s fascinating, in retrospect, that the Silent interpreted the warmth with which a war-devastated world regarded Goliath America just after WWII as genuine affection, as opposed to transient gratitude triggered by necessity. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Back in the 1990s, Allen interviewed me at length about a feature story he was doing (it was later published in the WP) on how people of different ages react to that old Warner Brothers cartoon about Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote.  In a talk he was giving at a local college, he discovered by accident that all of the (Xer) students sympathized with the coyote, not the roadrunner.  He was flabbergasted, because for as long as he could remember, he and his peers had always rooted for the roadrunner.
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 10
     
    By Neil Howe at Lifecourse on April 30, 2010. A generational look at the changing assumptions of America's ascendancy.
anonymous

Death of the American Century - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...death-of-the-american-century

generations

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
  • It’s fascinating, in retrospect, that the Silent interpreted the warmth with which a war-devastated world regarded Goliath America just after WWII as genuine affection, as opposed to transient gratitude triggered by necessity.
  • This view that Allen describes, of America as history’s existential good guy, is very linked to the psyche of his  Silent (born 1925-1942).
  • In any event,  Generation X (born 1961-1981) seems entirely unmoved by the emotional tensions and turmoil that Allen describes. 
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 10
     
    By Neil Howe at Lifecourse on April 30, 2010. A generational look at the changing assumptions of America's ascendancy.
anonymous

Who free-rides on American military power? - 0 views

www.economist.com/...defence_spending

geopolitics military

shared by anonymous on 19 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Mr Salam notes that Mr Auslin also "raises an important question, namely whether the fact that much of metropolitan Europe and East Asia 'free-rides' on American military power creates benefits that outweigh the costs."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Apr 10
       
      This is about American control of the international trade system. If there are any "free rides", it's only because the trade-system has been explicitly engineered in that fashion.
  • China is heavily dependent on its export trade to sustain economic growth at home. It has no incentive to disrupt or “stress” trade flows or to embark on policies abroad that would lead to this.
  • seems to me to be a non-fact
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 1. The major European powers spend a healthy 2%-plus of GDP on defence
  • 2. No major European country faces any serious military threat.
  • otherwise "foreign governments will expand their regulatory and confiscatory powers against their domestic economies in order to fund their own military expansions."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Apr 10
       
      Again, the fear here is that America will lose its leverage in blue-water operations. I think that the bulk of these arguments are sort of beside the point. This is about *control* and America, having been thrust into the world of empire (trade-based though it is), feels the need to maintain that control. Crying about how other nations will act 'badly' is a cute cover.
  • anonymous on 19 Apr 10
     
    By M.S. at The Economist on April 19, 2010.
« First ‹ Previous 61 - 80 of 170 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page