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anonymous

Dating the Fourth Turning - 12 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...dating-the-fourth-turning

generations

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Pending stunning new developments, I believe the catalyst occurred in 2008. 
  • First, the economy.  Yes, the U.S. recession technically started in December of 2007, but neither the public nor the market felt it until the spring and summer of the following year.  In fact, if I had to give the catalyst a month, I would say September of 2008
  • Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson later recounted (in On the Brink) that in the last two weeks of September, 2008, they were only “days away” from “economic collapse, another Great Depression, and 25 percent unemployment.” 
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • And, to add even greater edge to this catalyst, we were at that time just six weeks away from the election of Barack Obama, who brought a new party to power and was America’s first African-American President.  Would he have won without the meltdown?  Who knows.  It would have been a much closer election. 
  • As a rule, a new turning starts a few years (typically 2 to 6) after each living generation (especially the new youth generation) enters a new phase of life.  2008 was 4 to 6 years after the oldest Millennials reached age 21 and graduated from college—and 3 years after the oldest Boomers (born in 1943) started to receive their first Social Security retirement checks.  In terms of phase of life, this is right on.
  • 9/11 will go down as one of the more famous crisis precursors in American history.  A crisis precursor is an event that foreshadows a crisis without being an integral part of it.  Other such precursors in American history include the Stamp Act Rebellion (1765), or Bleeding Kansas (1856), or perhaps the Red Scare (1919). 
  • Now let’s move on to the next question: Where is the regeneracy?
  • I think it’s pretty obvious that the regeneracy has not yet started.
  • We may like to imagine that there is a definable day and hour when America, faced by growing danger and adversity, explicitly decides to patch over its differences, band together, and build something new.  But maybe what really happens is that everyone feels so numb that they let somebody in charge just go ahead and do whatever he’s got to do.
  • The regeneracy cannot always be identified with a single news event.  But it does have to mark the beginning of a growth in centralized authority and decisive leadership at a time of great peril and urgency.  Typically, the catalyst itself doesn’t lead directly to a regeneracy.  There has to be a second or third blow, something that seems a lot more perilous than just the election of third-party candidate (Civil War catalyst) or a very bad month in the stock market (Great Power catalyst).
  • When it happens, I strongly suspect it will be in response to an adverse financial event.  It may also happen in response to a geopolitical event.  It may well happen over the next year or two.  Given the pattern of historical 4Ts, it is very likely happen before the end of the next presidential term (2016). 
  • Which means we already know who will be President at that time: Either Obama or Romney.  (Or at least this is high probability: According to Intrade, it is now over a 96 percent bet, so if you disagree you can make 25-to-1 by betting against global future traders.)  It’s interesting that both men are temperamentally similar—cool, detatched, capable of gravitas–and that one could imagine either playing a Gray Champion role if history required it.
  • When will the 4T climax take place?  To be honest, I have no idea.  On timing, let me toss out my guess based on the typical pattern of historical 4Ts: The climax may arrive around 2022-2025.
  • The point here being that 4Ts are pretty chaotic.  During 4Ts, the future seems much less certain than in retrospect.  They are mostly defined not so much by how much institutions provide order, but by how much people want order.  Here’s where the Millennials will play a key role.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 12
     
    Readers of The Fourth Turning already know that 4Ts in history are dated and internally subdivided into stages by four critical events.  The first event, the catalyst, triggers or starts the 4T.  It is "a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood." The second, the regeneracy, marks the beginning of "a new counter-entropy that reunifies and re-energizes civic life." The third, the climax, is "a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and triumph of the new."  The fourth is the resolution, "a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates winners from losers, resolves the big public questions, and establishes the new order."
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

Ted Koppel, Bad Reporter - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all

shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • In both the Post and Times pieces, he accuses the cable networks of giving audiences what they want instead of what they need to know because it's the best way to secure advertising profits.
  • The assertion that TV network news lost money everywhere until Don Hewitt birthed 60 Minutes is frequently repeated. But it's wrong—dead wrong—as a paper in the December issue of Journalism by Michael J. Socolow of the University of Maine shows.
  • The idea of the philanthropic news division continues to be propagated because network journalists—and their employers—derive benefits from its public dissemination. It allows journalists to indulge in jeremiads about the decline of journalistic standards and the intensity of contemporary corporate pressure.
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  • NBC News' nightly news program, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, brought in an estimated $27 million a year in network advertising revenues, making it NBC's highest-grossing show.
  • Weaver wrote that a show would get billed $60 whenever the NBC staff repaired a broken ladder that originally cost just $4.
  • More accounting tricks: After NBC stated that it spent $800,000 on the coverage of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, hospitalization, and funeral, it admitted to reporter Edward Jay Epstein that at least $500,000 of that included salaries of existing news crews and technicians and "general overhead" that had to be paid regardless.
  • Socolow amply documents that making money from news was already a tradition at CBS and NBC in the radio era, writing that "by 1944 news programming provided the majority of NBC's revenues."
  • If Koppel is so keen on criticizing the sensationalizers and popularizers of TV news who are bent on turning profits, won't he please look in the mirror?
  • There's a lot wrong with broadcast and cable news, but hustling for profits isn't their main fault and never has been.
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "ABC News veteran Ted Koppel ladles out self-serving news nostalgia in the Washington Post." By Jack Shafer at Slate on November 15, 2010.
anonymous

Pew Study: Americans Abandoning News Outlets, Citing Lower Quality - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...s-outlets-citing-lower-quality

shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Nearly a third of those surveyed, or 31%, said they had ceased relying on a particular news outlet because it no longer provided them with the sort of news they were used to getting.
  • To learn exactly what respondents meant by that, Pew asked whether the issue was quantity — ie. fewer stories — or quality. Overwhelmingly, they chose the latter, with 60.7% citing “less complete” coverage as the reason for turning away, versus 23.5% who chose “fewer stories.”
  • Yet as sensitive as they are to the declining quality of news, Americans aren’t particularly perceptive about the financial pressures underlying the trend. A full 60% said they knew nothing whatsoever (36%) or very little (24%) about the economic forces disrupting the news business, although awareness was somewhat higher among the affluent and educated.
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  • Curiously, even among those who claimed to know at least a little about the situation, a majority of 57% didn’t believe news outlets’ economic woes limited their ability to produce quality coverage.
  • With newspaper newsrooms employing 28% fewer journalists than they did in 2001 (fewer than 40,000 nationally), that’s a bizarre finding. How could anyone, you might wonder, not see the link between a dramatic reduction in the number of people producing the news and the thoroughness of that product?
  • Consumers are sending a message: They want the same quality of news they’ve always known, not excuses, and they’ll punish news outlets that fail to meet that standard by taking their business elsewhere.
  • anonymous on 18 Mar 13
     
    "Like all vicious cycles, the relationship between the declining fortunes of news outlets and the shrinking of their audiences is a difficult one to untangle, a chicken-and-egg problem. Newspaper circulations have been sliding for decades, starting well before digital media started siphoning off ad dollars and forcing widespread newsroom cutbacks that, inevitably, resulted in a poorer editorial product."
anonymous

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science - 0 views

motherjones.com/106166

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 20 Apr 11 - Cached
  • In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [3]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [4] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
  • The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience [5] (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia [6] of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
  • a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum.
  • In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing.
  • That's not to suggest that we aren't also motivated to perceive the world accurately—we are. Or that we never change our minds—we do. It's just that we have other important goals besides accuracy—including identity affirmation and protecting one's sense of self—and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.
  • Ironically, in part because researchers employ so much nuance and strive to disclose all remaining sources of uncertainty, scientific evidence is highly susceptible to selective reading and misinterpretation.
  • people's deep-seated views about morality, and about the way society should be ordered, strongly predict whom they consider to be a legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and thus where they consider "scientific consensus" to lie on contested issues.
  • In Kahan's research [13] (PDF), individuals are classified, based on their cultural values, as either "individualists" or "communitarians," and as either "hierarchical" or "egalitarian" in outlook.
  • The results were stark: When the scientist's position stated that global warming is real and human-caused, for instance, only 23 percent of hierarchical individualists agreed the person was a "trustworthy and knowledgeable expert." Yet 88 percent of egalitarian communitarians accepted the same scientist's expertise.
  • people rejected the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views—and thus the relative risks inherent in each scenario.
  • head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.
  • A key question—and one that's difficult to answer—is how "irrational" all this is. On the one hand, it doesn't make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information. "It is quite possible to say, 'I reached this pro-capital-punishment decision based on real information that I arrived at over my life,'" explains Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick [21]. Indeed, there's a sense in which science denial could be considered keenly "rational." In certain conservative communities, explains Yale's Kahan, "People who say, 'I think there's something to climate change,' that's going to mark them out as a certain kind of person, and their life is going to go less well."
  • people gravitate toward information that confirms what they believe, and they select sources that deliver it. Same as it ever was, right? Maybe, but the problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information
  • a higher education correlated with an increased likelihood of denying the science on the issue.
  • one insidious aspect of motivated reasoning is that political sophisticates are prone to be more biased than those who know less about the issues.
  • It all raises the question: Do left and right differ in any meaningful way when it comes to biases in processing information, or are we all equally susceptible?
  • Some researchers have suggested that there are psychological differences between the left and the right that might impact responses to new information—that conservatives are more rigid and authoritarian, and liberals more tolerant of ambiguity. Psychologist John Jost of New York University has further argued that conservatives are "system justifiers": They engage in motivated reasoning to defend the status quo.
  • What can be done to counteract human nature itself?
  • Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.
  • Kahan infers that the effect occurred because the science had been written into an alternative narrative that appealed to their pro-industry worldview.
  • You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.
  • anonymous on 20 Apr 11
     
    In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [3]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [4] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
anonymous

The Fox News-iest Segment in Fox News History - 0 views

nymag.com/...gment-in-fox-news-history.html

shared by anonymous on 07 Mar 13 - Cached
  • If you have never seen Fox News before, here is a four-minute clip that captures the essence of the network so perfectly that you need never watch anything on it again. It’s all here. At the center, you have an old conservative white guy who is enraged about a fact that exists only in his addled brain. At his side, there’s a blonde sidekick who nods along with him but doesn't get in the way. And ready to absorb his anger is the network’s Emmanuel Goldstein figure, feebly attempting a rebuttal that quickly devolves into a sniveling plea for civility:
  • The subject of the debate is Bill O’Reilly’s belief, widely shared within the conservative bubble, that President Obama has offered no concessions on long-term spending cuts.
  • This is factually untrue — Obama has offered a plan including more than a trillion dollars in reduced spending to a variety of programs, including Medicare and Social Security, as well as the reduced spending on interest payments.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But the lack of Obama spending cuts is a Fox News Fact, and as such, O’Reilly believes in it with unswerving devotion.
  • When Alan Colmes manages to interject that Obama has offered a proposal that has more spending cuts than tax increases, O’Reilly insists Obama’s offer is vague and begins insisting Obama has not mentioned any specific programs he wants to cut.
  • O’Reilly: “Give me one program he said he’s cut!”Colmes: “He would cut Medicare and Medicaid … ”O’Reilly: “That’s not a specific program!”
  • At this point, O’Reilly pivots from denouncing Obama for failing to name any specific cuts to denouncing Colmes as a liar and claiming that Colmes has failed to name any specific programs that Obama would cut.
  • This is where the segment truly achieves its Fox News transcendence.
  • After all, the viewing audience surely believes O’Reilly that Obama has not named any programs that he would cut. But they just watched Colmes name two programs that he thinks, however falsely, Obama would cut. Yet O’Reilly screams that he hasn’t. It becomes a new Fox News Fact
  • Everyone here is playing their appointed role. Colmes is pleading with O’Reilly to stop yelling at him and whimpering things like “we’ll just have to disagree.” Crowley is affirming O’Reilly’s correctness and cheerfully allowing him to interrupt after a couple of seconds of talking so as not to yammer on in a way that annoys him.
  • And O’Reilly himself, after finally calming down, reaffirms his own white-is-black claim with such conviction that viewers have probably already forgotten that he is feverishly denying something that they witnessed with their own eyes.
  • The segment has achieved such Fox News perfection that it can never be reached again. Roger Ailes should simply loop it endlessly for the rest of time.
  • anonymous on 07 Mar 13
     
    Politics is hard. Divining FOX News' purpose is not.
anonymous

New Nickelodeon Research Study Finds Generation Gap Closing, Reflecting Changing Attitu... - 0 views

www.redorbit.com/...index.html

generations

shared by anonymous on 20 Dec 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 20 Dec 10
     
    "NEW YORK, Nov. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- A new Nickelodeon research study, titled "The Family GPS," reports that the generation gap is a thing of the past as today's increasingly multi-generational American families are united by an expanding set of values and converging tastes. Released today, the Nickelodeon study finds that new cultural attitudes, technology and the current economic climate are drawing today's American families closer together and changing how parents raise, and regard, their children compared to how their parents raised them. Nickelodeon's "The Family GPS" study was conducted as part of an ongoing partnership with Harris Interactive in which the companies will study the changing face and role of the family in the U.S. "As Millennials become parents and Baby Boomers become grandparents, today's families are different from what we've seen and come to expect from previous generations, in that staying together and playing together are the top priorities among everyone in the household," said Ron Geraci, Senior Vice President, Nickelodeon Research. "Instead of being divided by tastes and clashing over values and things like music and entertainment choices, today's parents, kids and grandparents are being drawn closer together by them, as well as embracing new value systems of tolerance and acceptance.""
anonymous

The force that is Jon Stewart: Daily Show's ratings now higher than most of FOX News - 1 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...s-ratings-higher-FOX-News.html

satire dailyshow

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 06 Jun 11
     
    Jon Stewart is leaping ahead of one of his most popular targets: Fox News. The comic's TV program, The Daily Show, beat most of the entire Fox News network in terms of total viewers, according to the May Nielson ratings. Mr Stewart's show averaged 2.3million viewers, while most of the Fox News prime time and day time line up averaged only 1.85million viewers. Total viewership slid 10 per cent at Fox News, which lost viewers in the valuable 25-54 demographic in every prime time show. Bill O'Reilly's show was down 9 per cent, Sean Hannity was down 6 per cent, and Greta Van Susteren dropped 12 per cent. Glenn Beck's Fox show was  cancelled entirely last April, largely due to sliding numbers. Only one of Fox's shows, The O'Reilly Factor, managed to hold off Jon Stewart's surge in the numbers.
anonymous

Arsenic in Rice: of Baby and Bath Water - 0 views

health.usnews.com/...in-rice-of-baby-and-bath-water

health arsenic

shared by anonymous on 01 Oct 12 - Cached
  • Arsenic is an element present in the earth's crust. There would likely be some of it in ground water even without the human activities that traumatize that crust in a variety of ways, but not enough to threaten health. Our various activities that have moved both rocks and water, from mining to drilling wells into aquifers, have resulted in significant mobilization of arsenic from rock into ground water.
  • Arsenic comes in two forms, organic and inorganic.
  • Organic arsenic, which is present in foods in very small amounts, is probably non-toxic, and may even be an essential trace element.
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  • Inorganic arsenic is certainly a toxin, as was made famous in the movie, Arsenic and Old Lace. It is the primary variety released from rocks into water, and the main concern for human health.
  • Attention to arsenic in the environment by the Environmental Protection Agency, and in our food by the FDA, can only be a good thing, advancing food safety. Eating a variety of whole grains, for those without reasons to avoid them such as gluten sensitivity, is good for health in general—and may also reduce arsenic intake.
  • But inevitably, when a peril in our food or medicine cabinet or environment is pointed out to us, it invites the hyperbole of concentrated media attention, an inclination to invoke conspiracy theories, and at least some temptation to panic. When we do give in to panic, we tend to jettison the baby along with the bath water, resulting in net harm.
  • 1. Don't make perfect the enemy of good.
  • since we can't have perfectly pure food, the operative question in the real world is: Which of the available choices are best for health?
  • The presence of a contaminant in food does not reliably indicate that eating the food is harmful.
  • Similarly, there is more arsenic in brown rice than white, but the health benefits of eating a whole grain may outweigh that.
  • 2. Don't exaggerate a risk just because you don't control it.
  • We have known for decades that the four leading causes of chronic disease and premature death in industrialized countries are smoking, poor dietary pattern, lack of physical activity, and obesity. Yet these four are routinely ignored or neglected by people who get very worked up over the latest chemical threat in our food or environment.
  • We should not ignore big risks just because they are under our control, nor exaggerate much smaller ones simply because they are not.
  • 3. New in the news is not new in the world.
  • The tendency when a chemical threat is highlighted in the news is to think the threat itself is new, and the consequences are unknown, and in the future. But if arsenic in rice or other foods does actually contribute to cancer risk, it has been doing so for years.
  • the notion that there is a spike in cancer or other disease rates looming around the next bend is misguided; we are already around that bend, and any harms of arsenic are already part of the epidemiologic landscape we know.
  • Perfectly pure food is, alas, not available on this planet. So those of us living here should focus on net health effects rather than the media hype du jour, and do the best we can with the food supply we've got.
  • anonymous on 01 Oct 12
     
    "Predictably, there was widespread media attention to a recent release by Consumer Reports highlighting contamination of rice by arsenic. In customary "consumer watchdog" fashion, Consumer Reports presented a long list of popular consumer products, from cooking rice, to rice cakes, to breakfast cereal, and most worrisome, baby food, with arsenic levels in each. The story was covered extensively by the major network news programs."
anonymous

The World in 2036: New era, new god, says Paul Saffo - 2 views

www.economist.com/...17509358

shared by anonymous on 11 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Our current religious order formed in what Karl Jaspers termed the “axial age”—that extraordinary period between 800BC and 200BC that witnessed monotheism's move into the mainstream with Zoroastrianism, the appearance of Buddhism, the establishment of Confucianism and the efflorescence of Greek humanistic philosophy.
  • Jaspers's axial age shares close parallels with today. It was a time shaped by innovations in government, transport and communications.
  • Three technologies have brought us to the edge of another axial shift today.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Air travel has given entire populations unprecedented mobility.
  • The intermodal container has delivered a cornucopia of products to every corner of the globe.
  • And cyberspace has become a promiscuous, meme-spreading hotbed of ideas.
  • anonymous on 11 Sep 12
     
    A short, interesting (and...god, *short*) bit of wordmaking: "Over a century ago, Nietzsche observed, "Almost 2,000 years and no new God!" Indeed, though hundreds of new religions appear and disappear every year, it has been centuries since a truly new great religion has appeared on this planet. We are overdue for a new god."
anonymous

Making Holes in Our Heart - 1 views

www.kk.org/...making_holes_in.php

technology

shared by anonymous on 24 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 24 Jan 12
     
    "If we are honest, we must admit that one aspect of the technium is to make holes in our heart. One day recently we decided that we cannot live another day unless we have a smart phone, when a dozen years earlier this need would have dumbfounded us. Now we get angry if the network is slow, but before, when we were innocent, we had no thoughts of the network at all. Now we crave the instant connection of friends, whereas before we were content with weekly, or daily, connections. But we keep inventing new things that make new desires, new longings, new wants, new holes that must be filled."
anonymous

Dispatch: Mississippi River Flooding and New Orleans - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...river-flooding-and-new-orleans

shared by anonymous on 13 May 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 13 May 11
     
    "Throughout America's history, New Orleans has really been the axis through the heartland - the core, if you will - of the United States of America. The colonization of the Midwest is really what allowed America to become a great agricultural power and also eventually an industrial power. This is why the battle for New Orleans in January of 1815 was actually one of the most key moments of American history. To this day, New Orleans remains a critical piece of infrastructure in the United States. The Port of South Louisiana is the largest port in the U.S. by tonnage, and New Orleans retains its role in transportation of not just energy, but also petrochemicals, fertilizers and agricultural products."
anonymous

Beyond the Post-Cold War World - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...beyond-post-cold-war-world

shared by anonymous on 07 Apr 13 - Cached
  • An era ended when the Soviet Union collapsed on Dec. 31, 1991. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union defined the Cold War period. The collapse of Europe framed that confrontation.
  • Three things defined the post-Cold War world.
  • The first was U.S. power. The second was the rise of China as the center of global industrial growth based on low wages. The third was the re-emergence of Europe as a massive, integrated economic power.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • Meanwhile, Russia, the main remnant of the Soviet Union, reeled while Japan shifted to a dramatically different economic mode.
  • The post-Cold War world had two phases. The first lasted from Dec. 31, 1991, until Sept. 11, 2001. The second lasted from 9/11 until now.
  • The initial phase of the post-Cold War world was built on two assumptions.
  • The first assumption was that the United States was the dominant political and military power but that such power was less significant than before, since economics was the new focus. The second phase still revolved around the three Great Powers -- the United States, China and Europe -- but involved a major shift in the worldview of the United States, which then assumed that pre-eminence included the power to reshape the Islamic world through military action while China and Europe single-mindedly focused on economic matters. 
  • In this new era, Europe is reeling economically and is divided politically.
  • Nothing is as it was in 1991.
  • Europe primarily defined itself as an economic power, with sovereignty largely retained by its members but shaped by the rule of the European Union. Europe tried to have it all: economic integration and individual states. But now this untenable idea has reached its end and Europe is fragmenting.
  • Germany wants to retain the European Union to protect German trade interests and because Berlin properly fears the political consequences of a fragmented Europe.
  • But as the creditor of last resort, Germany also wants to control the economic behavior of the EU nation-states.
  • In the indebted peripheral region, Cyprus has been treated with particular economic savagery as part of the bailout process. Certainly, the Cypriots acted irresponsibly. But that label applies to all of the EU members, including Germany, who created an economic plant so vast that it could not begin to consume what it produces -- making the country utterly dependent on the willingness of others to buy German goods.
  • There are thus many kinds of irresponsibility.
  • Europe can no longer afford pride, and it is every nation for itself. Cyprus set the precedent that the weak will be crushed. It serves as a lesson to other weakening nations, a lesson that over time will transform the European idea of integration and sovereignty.
  • In such an environment, sovereignty becomes sanctuary.
  • Authoritarian nationalism is an old European cure-all, one that is re-emerging, since no one wants to be the next Cyprus.
  • Leaving aside all the specific arguments, extraordinarily rapid growth in an export-oriented economy requires economic health among its customers.
  • It is nice to imagine expanded domestic demand, but in a country as impoverished as China, increasing demand requires revolutionizing life in the interior. China has tried this many times. It has never worked, and in any case China certainly couldn't make it work in the time needed.
  • Instead, Beijing is maintaining growth by slashing profit margins on exports.
  • It is interesting to recall the extravagant claims about the future of Japan in the 1980s. Awestruck by growth rates, Westerners did not see the hollowing out of the financial system as growth rates were sustained by cutting prices and profits. Japan's miracle seemed to be eternal. It wasn't, and neither is China's. And China has a problem that Japan didn't: a billion impoverished people. Japan exists, but behaves differently than it did before; the same is happening to China.
  • Both Europe and China thought about the world in the post-Cold War period similarly. Each believed that geopolitical questions and even questions of domestic politics could be suppressed and sometimes even ignored.
  • They believed this because they both thought they had entered a period of permanent prosperity.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      See also: All those 1990's op-eds about "the end of history" which now seem so completely ludicrious that it's hard for me to believe that so many Americans and Europeans ever bought it.
  • Periods of prosperity, of course, always alternate with periods of austerity, and now history has caught up with Europe and China.
  • And the United States has emerged from the post-Cold War period with one towering lesson: However attractive military intervention is, it always looks easier at the beginning than at the end.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      You think?
  • The greatest military power in the world has the ability to defeat armies. But it is far more difficult to reshape societies in America's image.
  • A Great Power manages the routine matters of the world not through military intervention, but through manipulating the balance of power.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      This is where I start to sound like a broken record: American civic perception is wildly at odds with MANY of the realities of international relations.
  • The United States has emerged into the new period with what is still the largest economy in the world with the fewest economic problems of the three pillars of the post-Cold War world. It has also emerged with the greatest military power.
  • But it has emerged far more mature and cautious than it entered the period. There are new phases in history, but not new world orders.
  • Eras unfold in strange ways until you suddenly realize they are over.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      This is so curt and quotable and (I think) so true. Like John Green says, one non-revolution leads to another until... well, you realize you HAD a revolution. :)
  • Now, we are at a point where the post-Cold War model no longer explains the behavior of the world. We are thus entering a new era. I don't have a good buzzword for the phase we're entering, since most periods are given a label in hindsight.
  • But already there are several defining characteristics to this era we can identify.
  • First, the United States remains the world's dominant power in all dimensions. It will act with caution, however, recognizing the crucial difference between pre-eminence and omnipotence.
  • Second, Europe is returning to its normal condition of multiple competing nation-states. While Germany will dream of a Europe in which it can write the budgets of lesser states, the EU nation-states will look at Cyprus and choose default before losing sovereignty.
  • Third, Russia is re-emerging. As the European Peninsula fragments, the Russians will do what they always do: fish in muddy waters.
  • The deals they are making, of which this is a small sample, are not in their economic interests, but they increase Moscow's political influence substantially. 
  • Fourth, China is becoming self-absorbed in trying to manage its new economic realities.
  • And fifth, a host of new countries will emerge to supplement China as the world's low-wage, high-growth epicenter. Latin America, Africa and less-developed parts of Southeast Asia are all emerging as contenders
  • There is a paradox in all of this. While the United States has committed many errors, the fragmentation of Europe and the weakening of China mean the United States emerges more powerful, since power is relative.
  • It was said that the post-Cold War world was America's time of dominance. I would argue that it was the preface of U.S. dominance.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      This is a hard sell to many Americans (and others) that don't have the benefit of hindsight to guide their judgements. Of course, I'm a bit of StratFor buff and so trust George & company on this, but there are plenty of aspects to explore and debate. I hope to do both with my readers in the coming years.
  • Its two great counterbalances are losing their ability to counter U.S. power because they mistakenly believed that real power was economic power. The United States had combined power -- economic, political and military -- and that allowed it to maintain its overall power when economic power faltered. 
  • A fragmented Europe has no chance at balancing the United States.
  • And while China is reaching for military power, it will take many years to produce the kind of power that is global, and it can do so only if its economy allows it to. The United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War because of its balanced power. Europe and China defeated themselves because they placed all their chips on economics. And now we enter the new era.
  • anonymous on 07 Apr 13
     
    "Many shifts in the international system accompanied the end of the Cold War. In fact, 1991 was an extraordinary and defining year. The Japanese economic miracle ended. China after Tiananmen Square inherited Japan's place as a rapidly growing, export-based economy, one defined by the continued pre-eminence of the Chinese Communist Party. The Maastricht Treaty was formulated, creating the structure of the subsequent European Union. A vast coalition dominated by the United States reversed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait."
anonymous

Nate Silver's genius isn't math. It's journalism. - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...enius-isnt-math-its-journalism

shared by anonymous on 24 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The typical answer to this is, well, “the election.” But getting the election right was no great feat.
  • The betting markets got the election right. The pollsters got the election right. The polling aggregators, like Real Clear Politics, got the election right. The modelers — which included Silver, but also included Sam Wang and Drew Linzer, among others — got the election right. Wonkblog’s election model called the election right — and it did it in June.
  • The truth is that 2012 just wasn’t a very hard election to call. The polling data all pointed in the same direction
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  • Silver had two other innovations, both of which are, I think, more important in explaining the appeal — and potential scalability — of his work.
  • The first is that his model begins many, many months before the election, and long before the polls become particularly predictive or frequent. 
  • I think of that model as a journalistic innovation more than a statistical one.
  • But if that early model didn’t work to predict the election, it served Silver’s other, and most important, journalistic strength: narrativizing the data.
  • The way a lot of horserace coverage deals with this problem is by blowing up unimportant news — gaffes and ads and the like — into stories that makes the readers feel like they’re learning urgent new facts about the campaign even as nothing changed that day and whatever gaffe or ad or speech got made stands almost no chance of influencing the campaign.
  • There’ve been election models before Silver’s. But their proprietors proudly stood in opposition to this trend. They pointed to their models and said, “See? Most of this stuff doesn’t matter, and there’s no reason to be covering it.” Analytically, they might well have been right about that. But people still wanted to read about the election.
  • Silver’s reputation as a math wizard often obscures his innovations as a journalist. But it’s the latter that makes him such a valuable hire for ESPN and ABC News.
  • anonymous on 24 Jul 13
     
    "The news that Nate Silver is leaving the New York Times for a role at ESPN and ABC News (corporate synergies! They're a thing!) has occasioned some interesting posts on what he got right during the election."
anonymous

Geopolitical Intelligence, Political Journalism and 'Wants' vs. 'Needs' - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...-journalism-and-wants-vs-needs

shared by anonymous on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • At Stratfor, the case is frequently the opposite: Our readers typically are expert in the topics we study and write about, and our task is to provide the already well-informed with further insights. But the question is larger than that.
  • We co-exist in this ecosystem, but geopolitical intelligence is scarcely part of the journalistic flora and fauna. Our uniqueness creates unique challenges
  • Instead, let's go to the core dynamic of the media in our age and work back outward through the various layers to what we do in the same virtual space, namely, intelligence.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • You could get the same information with a week's sorting of SEC filings. But instead, you have just circumvented that laborious process by going straight to just one of the "meta-narratives" that form the superstructure of journalism.
  • Meta-Narratives at Journalism's Core Welcome to the news media's inner core.
  • For the fundamental truth of news reporting is that it is constructed atop pre-existing narratives comprising a subject the reader already knows or expects, a description using familiar symbolism often of a moral nature, and a narrative that builds through implicit metaphor from the stories already embedded in our culture and collective consciousness.
  • The currency of language really is the collection of what might be called the "meta-stories."
  • There's nothing wrong with this. For the art of storytelling -- journalism, that is -- is essentially unchanged from the tale-telling of Neolithic shamans millennia ago up through and including today's New York Times. Cultural anthropologists will explain that our brains are wired for this. So be it.
  • We at Stratfor may not "sync up." Journalists certainly do.
  • Meta-Narratives Meet Meta-Data There is nothing new in this; it is a process almost as old as the printing press itself. But where it gets particularly new and interesting is with my penultimate layer of difference, the place where meta-narratives meet meta-data.
  • "Meta-data," as the technologists call it, is more simply understood as "data about data."
  • Where the online battle for eyeballs becomes truly epic, however, (Google "the definition of epic" for yet another storyteller's meta-story) is when these series of tags are organized into a form of meta-data called a "taxonomy."
  • And thus we arrive at the outermost layer of the media's skin in our emerging and interconnected age. This invisible skin over it all comes in the form of a new term of art, "search engine optimization," or in the trade just "SEO."
  • With journalists already predisposed by centuries of convention to converge on stories knitted from a common canon, the marriage of meta-narrative and meta-data simply accelerates to the speed of light the calibration of topic and theme.
  • If a bit simplified, these layers add up to become the connective tissue in a media-centric and media-driven age. Which leads me back to the original question of why Stratfor so often "fails to sync up with the media."
  • For by the doctrines of the Internet's new commercial religion, a move disrupting the click stream was -- and is -- pure heresy. But our readers still need to know about Colombia, just as they need our unique perspectives on Syria.
  • Every forecast and article we do is essentially a lab experiment, in which we put the claims of politicians, the reports on unemployment statistics, the significance of a raid or a bombing to the test of geopolitics.
  • We spend much more time studying the constraints on political actors -- what they simply cannot do economically, militarily or geographically -- than we do examining what they claim they will do.
  • The key characteristic to ponder here is that such methodology -- intelligence, in this case -- seeks to enable the acquisition of knowledge by allowing reality to speak for itself. Journalism, however, creates a reality atop many random assumptions through the means described. It is not a plot, a liberal conspiracy or a secret conservative agenda at work, as so many media critics will charge. It is simply the way the media ecosystem functions. 
  • Journalism, in our age more than ever before, tells you what you want to know. Stratfor tells you what you need to know. 
  • anonymous on 29 Oct 13
     
    "Just last week, the question came again. It is a common one, sometimes from a former colleague in newspaperdom, sometimes from a current colleague here at Stratfor and often from a reader. It is always to the effect of, "Why is Stratfor so often out of sync with the news media?" All of us at Stratfor encounter questions regarding the difference between geopolitical intelligence and political journalism. One useful reply to ponder is that in conventional journalism, the person providing information is presumed to know more about the subject matter than the reader. At Stratfor, the case is frequently the opposite: Our readers typically are expert in the topics we study and write about, and our task is to provide the already well-informed with further insights. But the question is larger than that."
  • Erik Hanson on 05 Nov 13
     
    Excuse me while I guffaw. Stratfor is not the first to claim that they're the only ones not swayed by financial factors. Stratfor has its own metanarratives (especially geographic determinism) as much as anyone else does.
anonymous

The Roadmap to a High-Speed Recovery - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...-reset-recovery-economy-future

politics economics

shared by anonymous on 12 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Let me say first that the bailouts and stimulus programs of the last two years were not a complete mistake. Economic policymakers don’t have the luxury of hindsight in the heat of a crisis; there is tremendous pressure on them to do something. It would have been suicidal not to give the banks the capital infusions they needed when the whole financial system was on the brink of meltdown or to refuse to help states avoid laying off thousands of teachers and police and other workers.
  • this is no bump in the business cycle that we are going through; it is an epochal event, comparable in magnitude and scope to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even more so, as historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has observed, to the decades-long crisis that began in 1873. Back then our economy was undergoing a fundamental shift from agriculture to industry. We are in the midst of an equally tectonic transition today, as our industrial economy gives way to a post-industrial knowledge economy—but by focusing all our attention of whether we need a bigger stimulus or a smaller deficit, we’re flying blind.
  • More R&D labs opened in the first four years of the Great Depression than in the entire preceding decade, 73 compared to 66. By 1940, the number of people employed in R&D had quadrupled, increasing from fewer than 7,000 in 1929 to nearly 28,000 by 1940
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  • Between 1980 and 2006, the U.S. economy added some 20 million new jobs in its creative, professional, and knowledge sectors. Even today, unemployment in this sector of the economy has remained relatively low, and according to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, is likely to add another seven million jobs in the next decade. By contrast, the manufacturing sector added only one million jobs from 1980 to 2006, and, according to the BLS, will lose 1.2 million by 2020.
  • Our whole education system needs a drastic overhaul to make its teaching styles less rote and more dynamic, to encourage more hands-on, interactive creativity.
  • Home ownership provided a powerful form of geographic Keynsianism. But that system has reached the end of its useful life. It has led to overinvestment in housing, autos, and energy and contributed to the crises we are trying so hard to extricate ourselves from today. It’s also no longer an engine of economic growth. With the rise of a globalized economy, many if not most of the products that filled those suburban homes are made abroad. Home ownership worked well for a nation whose workers had secure, long-term jobs. But now it impedes the flexibility of a labor market that requires people to move around.
  • Federal policy needs to encourage less home ownership and a greater density of development
  • Concentration and clustering are the underlying motor forces of real economic development. As Jane Jacobs identified and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas later formalized, clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates the diversity required for new ideas to fertilize and turn into new innovations and new industries.
  • the key to understanding America’s historic ability to respond to great economic crises lies in what economic geographers call the “spatial fix”—the creation of new development patterns, new ways of living and working, and new economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it.
  • That means high-speed rail, which is the only infrastructure fix that promises to speed the velocity of moving people, goods, and ideas while also expanding and intensifying our development patterns. If the government is truly looking for a shovel-ready infrastructure project to invest in that will create short-term jobs across the country while laying a foundation for lasting prosperity, high-speed rail works perfectly. It is central to the redevelopment of cities and the growth of mega-regions and will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars. High-speed rail may be our best hope for revitalizing the once-great industrial cities of the Great Lakes. By connecting declining places to thriving ones—Milwaukee and Detroit to Chicago, Buffalo to Toronto—it will greatly expand the economic options and opportunities available to their residents. And by providing the connective fibers within and between America’s emerging mega-regions, it will allow them to function as truly integrated economic units.
anonymous

Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010111202857_pf.html

media partisan politics

shared by anonymous on 12 Nov 10 - Cached
  • We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts - along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor. To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the "public interest, convenience and necessity," as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses.
  • On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable.
  • It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn't know that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple yet.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Broadcast news has been outflanked and will soon be overtaken by scores of other media options. The need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been. But we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.
  • anonymous on 12 Nov 10
     
    "And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone." By Ted Koppel at The Washington Post on November 14, 2010.
anonymous

Social Is Not A Destination - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...social-is-not-a-destination

shared by anonymous on 02 Jun 13 - Cached
  • For Facebook, your social network sits on the Facebook site and most of the experience is consumed through the Facebook application; for Google+, social is about a type of glue that ties its services together across search, maps, photos, and more.
  • Google+ is now behind your email (it’s in Gmail), your chats (it powers Google hangouts), your calendar (in Google Calendar), your documents (it’s in Google Drive), your pictures (stealing a big functional element of Facebook by offering it in an integrated fashion with Android devices) and your videos (youTube channels are now managed via Google+); It’s there when you comment on a blogspot site or review a business or restaurant on Zagat and Google map.
  • Google+ serves as glue instead of destination, which means that any comparison between Google+ and Facebook is similar to comparing people who love New York with the Empire Empire State Building: One is a group of people, who can do different things based on some invisible association (love of New York) while the other is a destination where those people or other people can gather for a brief period of time before they move on to some other place.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Google+’s approach is much more boring but also much more resistant to long-term changes because it focuses on links between people instead of being a destination.
  • links are also more resilient than destinations: once a series of links has been established, it is harder to undo than trying to switch from one destination to another.
  • While companies like Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo (through its more recent acquisitions, including Tumblr) have been busy building destination sites on which they can display advertising, Google has been using destinations as a driver for what advertising to display next.
  • This kind of inference based on previous patterns sits at the core of what Google+ is about and, interestingly, a Google alumni has founded a company that would fit nicely in that vision: Foursquare, with its recent switch to search seems to be the perfect database of location signals for Google to pick up.
  • anonymous on 02 Jun 13
     
    "Google+ serves as glue instead of destination, which means that any comparison between Google+ and Facebook is similar to comparing people who love New York with the Empire State Building: One is a group of people, who can do different things based on some invisible association (love of New York) while the other is a destination where those people or other people can gather for a brief period of time before they move on to some other place."
anonymous

New Dimensions of U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Russia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s-foreign-policy-toward-russia

shared by anonymous on 11 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • This is a new twist not because it makes clear that the United States is not the only country intercepting phone calls, but because it puts U.S. policy in Ukraine in a new light and forces us to reconsider U.S. strategy toward Russia and Germany.
  • Nuland's cell phone conversation is hardly definitive, but it is an additional indicator of American strategic thinking.
  • Previously, the United States was focused heavily on the Islamic world and, more important, tended to regard the use of force as an early option in the execution of U.S. policy rather than as a last resort.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • The strategy was successful when its goal was to destroy an enemy military force. It proved far more difficult to use in occupying countries and shaping their internal and foreign policies. Military force has intrinsic limits.
  • The alternative has been a shift to a balance-of-power strategy in which the United States relies on the natural schisms that exist in every region to block the emergence of regional hegemons and contain unrest and groups that could threaten U.S. interests.
  • The new strategy can be seen in Syria, where rather than directly intervening the United States has stood back and allowed the warring factions to expend their energy on each other, preventing either side from diverting resources to activities that might challenge U.S. interests.
  • Behind this is a schism in U.S. foreign policy that has more to do with motivation than actual action.
  • On one side, there are those who consciously support the Syria model for the United States as not necessarily the best moral option but the only practical option there is.
  • On the other, there are those who argue on behalf of moral interventions, as we saw in Libya, and removing tyrants as an end in itself.
  • Given the outcome in Libya, this faction is on the defensive, as it must explain how an intervention will actually improve the moral situation.
  • for all the rhetoric, the United States is by default falling into a balance-of-power model.
  • Russia emerged as a problem for the United States after the Orange Revolution in 2004, when the United States, supporting anti-Russian factions in Ukraine, succeeded in crafting a relatively pro-Western, anti-Russian government.
  • The Russians read this as U.S. intelligence operations designed to create an anti-Russian Ukraine that, as we have written, would directly challenge Russian strategic and economic interests.
  • The Russian response was to use its own covert capabilities, in conjunction with economic pressure from natural gas cutoffs, to undermine Ukraine's government and to use its war with Georgia as a striking reminder of the resurrection of Russian military capabilities.
  • Washington had two options. One was to allow the balance of power to assert itself, in this case relying on the Europeans to contain the Russians. The other was to continue to follow the balance of power model but at a notch higher than pure passivity.
  • As Nuland's call shows, U.S. confidence in Europe's will for and interest in blocking the Russians was low; hence a purely passive model would not work.
  • The next step was the lowest possible level of involvement to contain the Russians and counter their moves in the Middle East.
  • The United States is not prepared to intervene in the former Soviet Union.
  • Russia is not a global power, and its military has many weaknesses, but it is by far the strongest in the region and is able to project power in the former Soviet periphery
  • At the moment, the U.S. military also has many weaknesses.
  •  A direct intervention, even were it contemplated (which it is not), is not an option.
  • The only correlation of forces that matters is what exists at a given point in time in a given place. In that sense, the closer U.S. forces get to the Russian homeland, the greater the advantage the Russians have.
  • Instead, the United States did the same thing that it did prior to the Orange Revolution: back the type of intervention that both the human rights advocates and the balance-of-power advocates could support.
  • it appeared that it was the Germans who were particularly pressing the issue, and that they were the ones virtually controlling one of the leaders of the protests, Vitali Klitschko.
  • Berlin's statements indicating that it is prepared to take a more assertive role in the world appeared to be a historic shift in German foreign policy.
  • Although Germany's move should not be dismissed, its meaning was not as clear as it seemed. In her cell phone call, Nuland is clearly dismissing the Germans, Klitschko and all their efforts in Ukraine.
  • This could mean that the strategy was too feeble for American tastes (Berlin cannot, after all, risk too big a confrontation with Moscow). Or it could mean that when the Germans said they were planning to be more assertive, their new boldness was meant to head off U.S. efforts. Looking at this week's events, it is not clear what the Germans meant.
  • What is clear is that the United States was not satisfied with Germany and the European Union.
  • This is a touchy issue for human rights advocates, or should be. Yanukovich is the elected president of Ukraine, winner of an election that is generally agreed to have been honest (even though his constitutional amendments and subsequent parliamentary elections may not have been). He was acting within his authority in rejecting the deal with the European Union. If demonstrators can unseat an elected president because they disagree with his actions, they have set a precedent that undermines constitutionalism. Even if he was rough in suppressing the demonstrators, it does not nullify his election.
  • From a balance of power strategy, however, it makes great sense.
  • A pro-Western, even ambiguous, Ukraine poses a profound strategic problem for Russia.
  • Using the demonstrations to create a massive problem for Russia does two things.
  • It creates a real strategic challenge for the Russians and forces them on the defensive. Second, it reminds Russia that Washington has capabilities and options that make challenging the United States difficult.
  • And it can be framed in a way that human rights advocates will applaud in spite of the constitutional issues, enemies of the Iranian talks will appreciate and Central Europeans from Poland to Romania will see as a sign of U.S. commitment to the region.
  • The United States will re-emerge as an alternative to Germany and Russia. It is a brilliant stroke.
  • Its one weakness, if we can call it that, is that it is hard to see how it can work.
  • Russia has significant economic leverage in Ukraine, it is not clear that pro-Western demonstrators are in the majority, and Russian covert capabilities in Ukraine outstrip American capabilities. The Federal Security Service and Foreign Intelligence Service have been collecting files on Ukrainians for a long time. We would expect that after the Olympics in Sochi, the Russians could play their trump cards.
  • even if the play fails, the United States will have demonstrated that it is back in the game
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Feb 14
       
      Whoopie.
  • The mere willingness of the United States to engage will change the expectations of Central Europe, cause tensions between the Central Europeans and the Germans and create an opening for the United States.
  • Of course, the question is whether and where the Russians will answer the Americans, or even if they will consider the U.S. actions significant at all.
  • if the United States ups the ante in Central Europe, Russian inroads there will dissolve.
  • If the Russians are now an American problem, which they are, and if the United States is not going to revert to a direct intervention mode, which it cannot, then this strategy makes sense.
  • The public interception of Nuland's phone call was not all that embarrassing. It showed the world that the United States, not Germany, is leading the way in Ukraine. And it showed the Russians that the Americans care so little, they will express it on an open cell phone line. Nuland's obscene dismissal of the European Union and treatment of Russia as a problem to deal with confirms a U.S. policy: The United States is not going to war, but passivity is over.
  • anonymous on 11 Feb 14
     
    "The struggle for some of the most strategic territory in the world took an interesting twist this week. Last week we discussed what appeared to be a significant shift in German national strategy in which Berlin seemed to declare a new doctrine of increased assertiveness in the world -- a shift that followed intense German interest in Ukraine. This week, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, in a now-famous cell phone conversation, declared her strong contempt for the European Union and its weakness and counseled the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine to proceed quickly and without the Europeans to piece together a specific opposition coalition before the Russians saw what was happening and took action."
anonymous

After Breitbart and Shirley Sherrod, We Need a Slow-News Movement - 0 views

www.politicsdaily.com/...od-we-need-a-slow-news-movemen

media news criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 28 Jul 10 - Cached
  • What brings this journalistic parable to mind is the arrogantly unapologetic way that Andrew Breitbart has reacted to the furor over the ripped-out-of-context Shirley Sherrod speech excerpt that he posted on his website. Choosing bluster over blushing, Breitbart told Matt Lewis in a Politics Daily interview: "I couldn't wait to get this story. I knew from past experience that I had a news cycle to get this out." Later in the interview, Breitbart underscored his cavalier publish-or-perish approach to fact-checking: "It had to be done at the exact moment in time that the press would notice it." A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism details how the Sherrod charade migrated from conservative blogs taking their cues from Breitbart to Fox News and then to CNN.
  • Breitbart is just a symbol of a larger problem that transcends the poison-pen politics of ideological warriors (of both the right and left) and the slippery ethics of the blogosphere.
  • anonymous on 28 Jul 10
     
    A good case for why we need to kill the modern news-cycle. By Walter Shapiro at Politics Daily on July 28, 2010. Thanks to Dylan555 for the hat-tip (http://twitter.com/dylan555/status/19764594739).
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