SerPolUS_IDES

Jud Newborn, a Holocaust scholar who lives in Plainview, was doing research in Munich as a graduate student in the early 1980s when he became intrigued with the story of the White Rose resistance movement. The small, student-based group wrote and printed anonymous anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich and distributed them in that city and beyond before its key members were captured and executed in 1943. Dr. Newborn, who earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago, is the co-author with Annette Dumbach of a book on the White Rose and has developed a multimedia lecture on the subject. In recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Day (April 8 this year), he will present the lecture at two Long Island synagogues. The lecture will be accompanied by nearly 80 historical images, including photographs, posters and newspaper articles, as well as recorded music. Dr. Newborn may also occasionally speak with a mock-German accent when quoting Nazi officials, in the service of his White Rose presentation. (The second half of the program focuses on more contemporary figures who have acted heroically against great odds.)

Until very recently, technology had a clear, if boring, purpose: by taking care of the Little Things, it enabled us, its human masters, to focus on the Big Things. "Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible," proclaimed that noted connoisseur of contemplation Oscar Wilde. Fortunately, he added a charming clarification: "Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends." ...Alas, most designers, following Wilde, think of technologies as nothing more than mechanical slaves that must maximize efficiency. But some are realizing that technologies don't have to be just trivial problem-solvers: they can also be subversive troublemakers, making us question our habits and received ideas. Recently, designers in Germany built devices - "transformational products," they call them - that engage users in "conversations without words." My favorite is a caterpillar-shaped extension cord. If any of the devices plugged into it are left in standby mode, the "caterpillar" starts twisting as if it were in pain. Does it do what normal extension cords do? Yes. But it also awakens users to the fact that the cord is simply the endpoint of a complex socio-technical system with its own politics and ethics. Before, designers have tried to conceal that system. In the future, designers will be obliged to make it visible. While devices-as-problem-solvers seek to avoid friction, devices-as-troublemakers seek to create an "aesthetic of friction" that engages users in new ways. Will such extra seconds of thought - nay, contemplation - slow down civilization? They well might. But who said that stopping to catch a breath on our way to the abyss is not a sensible strategy?

In actual fact, however, in the years before the Civil War, there was no capitalism without slavery. The two were, in many ways, one and the same. At the end of the 18th century, slavery in the United States was a declining institution.... Wage labor was increasingly replacing slave labor in both the urban and the rural areas of the upper South. And then came cotton.... By the end of the 1830s, the Seminole, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw and the Cherokee had all been "removed" to lands west of the Mississippi. Their expropriated land provided the foundation of the leading sector of the global economy in the first half of the 19th century.... Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called "soul drivers." ...It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.

Moral quandaries often pit concerns about principles against concerns about practical consequences. Should we ban assault rifles and large sodas, restricting people's liberties for the sake of physical health and safety? Should we allow drone killings or torture, if violating one person's rights could save a thousand lives? We like to believe that the principled side of the equation is rooted in deep, reasoned conviction. But a growing wealth of research shows that those values often prove to be finicky, inconsistent intuitions, swayed by ethically irrelevant factors. What you say now you might disagree with in five minutes. And such wavering has implications for both public policy and our personal lives. Philosophers and psychologists often distinguish between two ethical frameworks. A utilitarian perspective evaluates an action purely by its consequences. If it does good, it's good. A deontological approach, meanwhile, also takes into account aspects of the action itself, like whether it adheres to certain rules. Do not kill, even if killing does good. No one adheres strictly to either philosophy, and it turns out we can be nudged one way or the other for illogical reasons.... Regardless of whether you endorse following the rules or calculating benefits, knowing that our instincts are so sensitive to outside factors can prevent us from settling on our first response. Objective moral truth doesn't exist, and these studies show that even if it did, our grasp of it would be tenuous. ...But we can encourage consistency in moral reasoning by viewing issues from many angles, discussing them with other people and monitoring our emotions closely. In recognizing our psychological quirks, we just might find answers we can live with.

"Do you have a solve for this problem?" "Let's all focus on the build." "That's the take-away from today's seminar." Or, to quote a song that was recently a No. 1 hit in Britain, "Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?" If you find these sentences annoying, you are not alone. Each contains an example of nominalization.... I don't actually care for "Do you have a solve?" Still, it is simplistic to have a blanket policy of avoiding and condemning nominalizations. Even when critics couch their antipathy in a language of clinical reasonableness, they are expressing an aesthetic judgment. Aesthetics will always play a part in the decisions we make about how to express ourselves - and in our assessment of other people's expression - but sometimes we need to do things that are aesthetically unpleasant in order to achieve other effects, be they polemical or diplomatic.

In addition to pondering the notions of changeability and continuity that watching a stream flow into a river tend to prompt, I was also counting and weighing glass eels, tiny transparent fish only two or three inches long that enter the tributaries of the river each spring. Which is to say, I was practicing something called citizen science, loosely defined as scientific research in which amateurs help experts gather data. Eels are tiny envoys from the realm of the inconceivable. Scientists have never been able to document their mating or birth in the North Atlantic's Sargasso Sea, nor do they know what governs their voyage to the coast's freshwaters.

Easter is the traditional time for Christians to reaffirm their faith. I want to show that we can do this without renouncing reason. ..."Sources of the self" are the sources nurturing the values that define an individual's life. For me, there are two such sources. One is the Enlightenment, where I'm particularly inspired by Voltaire, Hume and the founders of the American republic. The other is the Catholic Church, in which I was baptized..., ...educated for 8 years ... by Ursuline nuns and for 12 more years by Jesuits. For me to deny either of these sources would be to deny something central to my moral being. ...The Catholic philosophical and theological tradition is a fruitful context for pursuing fundamental truth, but only if it is combined with the best available secular thought. ...These three convictions do not include the belief that the specific teachings of the Catholic Church provide the fundamental truths of human life. What I do believe is that these teachings are very helpful for understanding the human condition. Of course, I can already hear the obvious objection: "What you believe isn't Catholicism - it is a diluted concoction that might satisfy ultra-liberal Protestants or Unitarians, but is nothing like the robust tonic of orthodox Catholic doctrine. My answer is that Catholicism too has reconciled itself to the Enlightenment view of religion.

Pro's & con's on assisted suicide, & adequate support for patients & caregivers at end-of-life - initiated by letter by Janice Lynch Schuster, at Ctr for Elder Care & Advanced Illness, Altarum Institute

But the "last chance" for a 4-year-old to quit his screeching, lest he get a timeout? There are usually another seven or eight chances still to go, in a string of flaccid ultimatums: "Now this is your last chance." "This is really your last chance." "I'm giving you just one more chance. I'm not kidding." Of course you are, and your kids know it. They're not idiots. But they're also not adults, so why this whole school of thought that they should be treated as if they are, long before they can perform such basic tasks of civilization as driving, say, or decanting? Why all the choices - "What would you like to wear?"- and all the negotiating and the painstakingly calibrated diplomacy? They're toddlers, not Pakistan. I understand that you want them to adore you. But having them fear you is surely the saner strategy, not just for you and for them but for the rest of us and the future of the republic. Above all I'm confounded by the boundless fretting, as if ushering kids into adulthood were some newfangled sorcery dependent on a slew of child-rearing books and a bevy of child-rearing blogs.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the "bottom" 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans. That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market "recovery," artificially propped up by the Fed's interest-rate repression. The United States is broke - fiscally, morally, intellectually - and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.

Evangelical protest against not dominating the public square

NYT: Long Beach Journal - "They are all variations on a theme of fear and suffering, of water and darkness, and Mary Anne Trasciatti wants to hear every one of them. " 'In the aftermath, we were all walking around like zombies, and the moments when people seemed most connected and able to process what had happened was when we were telling each other about it,' said Dr. Trasciatti, a professor of rhetoric at Hofstra University who has lived in Long Beach since 2000. She has begun to collect oral histories of Hurricane Sandy's impact on Long Beach, a project that may take as long as it will take some people in the barrier island city to rebuild their washed-out homes.

Most people in health care understand and accept the need for clinical hierarchies. The problem is that we aren't usually prepared for them; nor are we given protocols for resolving the inevitable tensions that arise over appropriate care. Doctors and nurses are trained differently, and our sense of priorities can conflict. When that happens, the lack of an established, neutral way of resolving such clashes works to everyone's detriment. This isn't about hurt feelings or bruised egos. Modern health care is complex, highly technical and dangerous, and the lack of flexible, dynamic protocols to facilitate communication along the medical hierarchy can be deadly. Indeed, preventable medical errors kill 100,000 patients a year, or a million people a decade, wrote Rosemary Gordon and Janardan Prasad Singh in their book "Wall of Silence."

"Goal-priming experiments" - of the sort cited by Malcolm Gladwell - "are coming under scrutiny...." 'A team led by the Belgian cognitive scientist Axel Cleeremans and another at the University of California, San Diego, led by Hal Pashler, repeated the [NYU] slow-walker study and found no difference in the rates of walking between goal-primed and unprimed subjects. 'Mr. Pashler's team also tried without success to replicate a dozen other goal-priming experiments, including one showing that exposure to money made subjects more likely to endorse a free market, and another reporting that exposure to a picture of an American flag prompted subjects to express nationalist attitudes. 'To be sure, a failure to replicate is not confined to psychology, as the Stanford biostatistician John P. A. Ioannidis documented in his much-discussed 2005 article "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." The cancer researchers C. Glenn Begley and Lee M. Ellis could replicate the findings of only 6 of 53 seminal publications from reputable oncology labs.'

The Affordable Care Act's updated versions of HMOs are based on flawed assumptions about doctor and patient behavior.

...like SPV: independent living to ALF to SNF care.

Problems with Private Insurance (by financier)

>JimWallis: 'We urgently need a new social covenant between citizens, businesses, and government. Contracts have been broken, but a covenant adds a moral dimension to the solution that is now essential. By definition, this will require the engagement and collaboration of all the "stakeholders" - governments, businesses, civil society groups, people of faith, and especially young people. >Social covenants should all include shared principles and features - a value basis for new agreements, an emphasis on jobs that offer fair rewards for hard work and real contributions to society, security for financial assets and savings, a serious commitment to reduce inequality between the top and the bottom of society, stewardship of the environment, an awareness of future generations' needs, a stable and accountable financial sector, and the strengthening of both opportunity and social mobility. >Such a covenant promotes human flourishing, happiness, and well-being as social goals, and it elevates the movement from a shareholder model to a stakeholder model of corporate governance. Such new social covenants are already being discussed in a variety of settings and countries. The discussion itself will help produce the conversation leading to the results that we need. >A moral conversation about a social covenant could ask what a "moral economy" should look like and for whom it should exist. How can we do things differently, more responsibly, more equitably, and yes, more democratically? >Lack of trust is bad for politics, bad for business, and bad for overall public morale. It undermines people's sense of participation in society as well as their feelings of social responsibility, and makes them feel isolated and alone-more worried about survival than interested in solidarity. Because the "contract" was broken, a sense of "covenant" is now needed, fused with a sense of moral values and commitments. And the process of formulating new social covenants could be an important pa

Sister Rose Pacatte of the Daughters of St. Paul moved through Sundance [as] a veteran film critic. Sister Rose [has] serv[ed] not as a sentry protecting religious belief from cinematic product, but rather as a mediator helping to explain one to the other. As such, she embodies a departure both from the religious temptation to police popular culture, and the effort in fundamentalist circles to create a parallel universe of theologically safe movies, television and music. "To paraphrase a Gospel passage, Christ came into the world to redeem the culture, not to condemn it," Sister Rose, 61, said in an interview here. "It's a negotiation. You don't give everything a free pass. Something has to come out of your convictions and values. But what matters isn't what the movie contains, but what it means."

'Raised in Pennsylvania, I grew up in the black church. My father was a religious leader in the community, and my sister is a pastor. I went to church every Sunday and sang in the choir. But for all that the church gave me - for all that it represented belonging, love and community - it also shut its doors to me as a gay person. That experience left me with the lifelong desire to explore the power of religion to transform lives or destroy them. I became interested in Uganda, an intensely religious country that attracts many American missionaries and much funding from United States faith-based organizations. The American evangelical movement in Africa does valuable work in helping the poor. But as you'll see in this Op-Doc video, some of their efforts and money feed a dangerous ideology that seeks to demonize L.G.B.T. people and intensifies religious rhetoric until it results in violence. It is important for American congregations to hold their churches accountable for what their money does in Africa.' - ROGER ROSS WILLIAMS