Over the years, Tracy Kidder has written a number of best-selling nonfiction stories. This is his latest and the first one I have read. It's quite a story.
The story is about a man named Deo from the small African country of Burundi, one of the poorest countries in the world, racked by civil war and genocide. He escapes the country, comes to New York with two hundred dollars to his name, not knowing English. Luckly he eventually meets who help him get into Columbia University where he eventually becomes a medical doctor.
Along the way we readers learn about Africa with its ethnic conflicts and colonial history. That continent has always been a mystery to me, still is, but now I know a little more than I did.
This is a stirring story of survival (Deo was homeless, sleeping in Central Park), perservance, and ultimate triumph---a great story for our time.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Bankrolling the Right
Op-Ed Columnist
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 28, 2010
ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.
The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.
This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).
Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.
Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.
The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.
No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.
When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”
And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 28, 2010
ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.
The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.
This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).
Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.
Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.
The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.
No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.
When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”
And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Read Moby Dick Again?
Having read "Moby Dick" once in the summer of 1974, I have often wondered: should I read it again?
Don’t Write Off Moby Dick by David Frum
August 28th, 2010 at 10:12 am David Frum | 4 Comments |Share
During the worst of my bout with Lyme disease this summer, Herman Melville was my constant companion. He entertained me on the walks that were the only exercise I could tolerate, kept me company through the insomniac hours of the night.
I’d read Moby Dick in college of course, then listened to it read aloud eight or nine summers ago, back when audiobooks still arrived on cassette tape. This third encounter was the most intimate yet, because I was spending so much time alone.
I won’t weary readers with a long essay of my thoughts on America’s most famous novel. What new is there to say about a book that has preoccupied the country’s greatest critics? But I will say this: it baffles and vexes me that so many people dismiss Moby Dick as dull. “Too much fish,” complains one normally astute and sensitive friend. If you are one of those, here’s my plea: If you won’t read the book, try someday to listen to it. You’ll discover that it’s not only profound and beautiful, but also … funny! I mean, laugh out loud funny. You’ll realize that many of the scenes that are most notoriously condemned as “fishy” are actually elaborate jokes and satires.
The book is long, true. But think of how much time you spend in the car. Talk radio hosts are always urging us to rediscover the founding principles of the nation. Why not shut them off – and liberate the time to rediscover your nation’s literature?
Don’t Write Off Moby Dick by David Frum
August 28th, 2010 at 10:12 am David Frum | 4 Comments |Share
During the worst of my bout with Lyme disease this summer, Herman Melville was my constant companion. He entertained me on the walks that were the only exercise I could tolerate, kept me company through the insomniac hours of the night.
I’d read Moby Dick in college of course, then listened to it read aloud eight or nine summers ago, back when audiobooks still arrived on cassette tape. This third encounter was the most intimate yet, because I was spending so much time alone.
I won’t weary readers with a long essay of my thoughts on America’s most famous novel. What new is there to say about a book that has preoccupied the country’s greatest critics? But I will say this: it baffles and vexes me that so many people dismiss Moby Dick as dull. “Too much fish,” complains one normally astute and sensitive friend. If you are one of those, here’s my plea: If you won’t read the book, try someday to listen to it. You’ll discover that it’s not only profound and beautiful, but also … funny! I mean, laugh out loud funny. You’ll realize that many of the scenes that are most notoriously condemned as “fishy” are actually elaborate jokes and satires.
The book is long, true. But think of how much time you spend in the car. Talk radio hosts are always urging us to rediscover the founding principles of the nation. Why not shut them off – and liberate the time to rediscover your nation’s literature?
Friday, August 27, 2010
A Nation of Know-Nothings
Here is a brilliant summary of the willful ignorance of Republicans. It is truly stunning and depressing.
Friday, August 27, 2010
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
August 25, 2010, 8:30 pm
Building a Nation of Know-Nothings
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Tags:
Fox News, lies, president obama, Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh
Having shed much of his dignity, core convictions and reputation for straight talk, Senator John McCain won his primary on Tuesday against the flat-earth wing of his party. Now McCain can go search for his lost character, which was last on display late in his 2008 campaign for president.
Remember the moment: a woman with matted hair and a shaky voice rose to express her doubts about Barack Obama. “I have read about him,” she said, “and he’s not — he’s an Arab.”
McCain was quick to knock down the lie. “No, ma’am,” he said, “he’s a decent family man, a citizen.”
That ill-informed woman — her head stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler — now makes up a representative third or more of the Republican party. It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.
Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.
Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
The Democrats may deserve to lose in November. They have been terrible at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their governance. But if they lose, it should be because their policies are unpopular or ill-conceived — not because millions of people believe a lie.
In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.
Rush LimbaughSo where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:
“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”
Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate.
On the Muslim deception, Limbaugh has sprinkled lie dust all over the place. “Obama says he’s a Christian, but where’s the evidence?” he said on Aug. 19. He has repeatedly called the president “imam Obama,” and said, “I’m just throwing things out there, folks, because people are questioning his Christianity.”
You see how he works. He drops in suggestions, hints, notes that “people are questioning” things. The design is to make Obama un-American. Then he says it’s a tweak, a provocation. He says this as a preemptive way to keep the press from calling him out. And it works; long profiles of Limbaugh have largely gone easy on him.
Once Limbaugh has planted a lie, a prominent politician can pick it up, with little nuance. So, over the weekend, Kim Lehman, one of Iowa’s two Republican National Committee members, went public with doubts on Obama’s Christianity. Of course, she was not condemned by party leaders.
It’s curious, also, that any felon, drug addict, or recovering hedonist can loudly proclaim a sudden embrace of Jesus and be welcomed without doubt by leaders of the religious right. But a thoughtful Christian like Obama is still distrusted.
“I am a devout Christian,” Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That’s not enough, apparently, for Rev. Franklin Graham, the partisan son of the great evangelical leader, who said last week that Obama was “born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed on from his father.”
Actually, he was born from two non-practicing parents, and his Kenyan father was absent for all of his upbringing. Obama came to his Christianity like millions of people, through searching and questioning.
Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.
Beck tosses off enough half-truths in a month to keep Politifact working overtime. Of late, he has gone after Michelle Obama, whose vacation in Spain was “just for her and approximately 40 of her friends.” Limbaugh had a similar line, saying the First Lady “is taking 40 of her best friends and leasing 60 rooms at a five-star hotel — paid for by you.”
The White House said Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha were accompanied by just a few friends — and they paid their own costs. But, wink, wink, the damage is done. He’s Muslim and foreign. She’s living the luxe life on your dime. They don’t even have to mention race. The code words do it for them.
Climate-change denial is a special category all its own. Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and Fox.
It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?
But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.
It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?
Friday, August 27, 2010
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
August 25, 2010, 8:30 pm
Building a Nation of Know-Nothings
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Tags:
Fox News, lies, president obama, Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh
Having shed much of his dignity, core convictions and reputation for straight talk, Senator John McCain won his primary on Tuesday against the flat-earth wing of his party. Now McCain can go search for his lost character, which was last on display late in his 2008 campaign for president.
Remember the moment: a woman with matted hair and a shaky voice rose to express her doubts about Barack Obama. “I have read about him,” she said, “and he’s not — he’s an Arab.”
McCain was quick to knock down the lie. “No, ma’am,” he said, “he’s a decent family man, a citizen.”
That ill-informed woman — her head stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler — now makes up a representative third or more of the Republican party. It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.
Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.
Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
The Democrats may deserve to lose in November. They have been terrible at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their governance. But if they lose, it should be because their policies are unpopular or ill-conceived — not because millions of people believe a lie.
In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.
Rush LimbaughSo where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:
“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”
Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate.
On the Muslim deception, Limbaugh has sprinkled lie dust all over the place. “Obama says he’s a Christian, but where’s the evidence?” he said on Aug. 19. He has repeatedly called the president “imam Obama,” and said, “I’m just throwing things out there, folks, because people are questioning his Christianity.”
You see how he works. He drops in suggestions, hints, notes that “people are questioning” things. The design is to make Obama un-American. Then he says it’s a tweak, a provocation. He says this as a preemptive way to keep the press from calling him out. And it works; long profiles of Limbaugh have largely gone easy on him.
Once Limbaugh has planted a lie, a prominent politician can pick it up, with little nuance. So, over the weekend, Kim Lehman, one of Iowa’s two Republican National Committee members, went public with doubts on Obama’s Christianity. Of course, she was not condemned by party leaders.
It’s curious, also, that any felon, drug addict, or recovering hedonist can loudly proclaim a sudden embrace of Jesus and be welcomed without doubt by leaders of the religious right. But a thoughtful Christian like Obama is still distrusted.
“I am a devout Christian,” Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That’s not enough, apparently, for Rev. Franklin Graham, the partisan son of the great evangelical leader, who said last week that Obama was “born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed on from his father.”
Actually, he was born from two non-practicing parents, and his Kenyan father was absent for all of his upbringing. Obama came to his Christianity like millions of people, through searching and questioning.
Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.
Beck tosses off enough half-truths in a month to keep Politifact working overtime. Of late, he has gone after Michelle Obama, whose vacation in Spain was “just for her and approximately 40 of her friends.” Limbaugh had a similar line, saying the First Lady “is taking 40 of her best friends and leasing 60 rooms at a five-star hotel — paid for by you.”
The White House said Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha were accompanied by just a few friends — and they paid their own costs. But, wink, wink, the damage is done. He’s Muslim and foreign. She’s living the luxe life on your dime. They don’t even have to mention race. The code words do it for them.
Climate-change denial is a special category all its own. Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and Fox.
It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?
But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.
It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Willie Mays (5)
I finish this splendid biography of Willie Mays. This book has certainly opened my eyes to the accomplishments and greatness of this baseball player.
Many baseball people say that Willie is the greatest baseball player of all time. I used to scoff at such talk. Now I understand. Look at it this way.
There are 5 major skill sets in baseball: hitting, hitting with power, throwing, fielding, and baserunning. The case for Willie is simply that he did these 5 skills in combination better than anybody else.
He hit 660 homeruns---4th currently on the all-time list. He finished with a .302 lifetime batting average. He had a rifle for an arm---made throws that were considered superhuman--- and still ranks first in outfield putouts and assists. He stole bases better than any other power hitter in history. The other thing is that he played the game with such enthusiasm and style. People would truly come to the game just to see him play.
I have trouble comparing athletes from different eras. I have no trouble saying that Mays was the best baseball player in his era---the 50's and 60's.
Many baseball people say that Willie is the greatest baseball player of all time. I used to scoff at such talk. Now I understand. Look at it this way.
There are 5 major skill sets in baseball: hitting, hitting with power, throwing, fielding, and baserunning. The case for Willie is simply that he did these 5 skills in combination better than anybody else.
He hit 660 homeruns---4th currently on the all-time list. He finished with a .302 lifetime batting average. He had a rifle for an arm---made throws that were considered superhuman--- and still ranks first in outfield putouts and assists. He stole bases better than any other power hitter in history. The other thing is that he played the game with such enthusiasm and style. People would truly come to the game just to see him play.
I have trouble comparing athletes from different eras. I have no trouble saying that Mays was the best baseball player in his era---the 50's and 60's.
Digital Overload
From NPR
Marian McPartland's
Digital Overload: Your Brain On Gadgets
August 24, 2010
A New York Times/CBS News poll found that 30 percent of people under 45 said the use of devices like smart phones and personal computers has made it harder to concentrate.
"It's an onslaught of information coming in today," says New York Times technology journalist Matt Richtel. "At one time a screen meant maybe something in your living room. But now it's something in your pocket so it goes everywhere — it can be behind the wheel, it can be at the dinner table, it can be in the bathroom. We see it everywhere today."
Richtel has spent the past several months researching the toll technology and "information juggling" is taking on our lives — and our brains. His series "Your Brain On Computers" describes how multitasking on computers and digital gadgets affects the way people process information — and how quickly they can then become distracted.
The Brain In The Wild
Recently Richtel accompanied several scientists, all of whom are studying the brain, on a week-long retreat to a remote corner of Utah. The rules of the vacation? No cell phones, no Internet access and no technological distractions.
"Partly they wanted to go on vacation and see it through a neurologic lens," he says. "They wanted to take a look at what was happening to their brain and their perspectives — and by extension, ours — as they got off the grid."
The scientists were divided in half about how they felt about information overload. Two of the five — whom Richtel termed "the believers" — thought that the constant stream of data coming into their lives was making it increasingly difficult to focus and concentrate — and that heading back into nature could help them recharge. The other three neuroscientists — "the skeptics" — thought that the benefits of having constant access to information far outweighed any consequences.
While out in the wild, the scientists — including the "skeptics" — noticed something significant happening on the third day they couldn't use their handheld devices, computers and mobile phones.
"You start to feel more relaxed. Maybe you sleep a little better. Maybe you don't reach for your phone pinging in your pocket," Richtel says. "Maybe you wait a little longer before answering a question. Maybe you don't feel in a rush to do anything — your sense of urgency fades." Richtel terms it the "three-day effect."
Though the "three-day effect" didn't surprise the neuroscientists on the trip, they realized it presented a new research problem.
"They said 'Let us see if there's anything in this three-day effect that might be the basis for future study that might help us understand when we're overwhelmed with data and what happens to us when we get away from it?'" explains Richtel, who accompanied the scientists on the trip. "To some extent, the skeptics did see a bit of a change in their perspective. They did say [things like] 'I am not as engaged in my world when I'm constantly using devices as I am when I am away from them.' They also said that revelation will inform [their] research going forward and may help us reach broader conclusions. But they didn't say 'I understand now what is happening to the brain.' They simply said 'There is something that merits real study here.'"
Streaming Information And The Brain
Richtel says another question scientists are asking is how much is too much, when it comes to processing technology.
Just as food nourishes us and we need it for life, so too -- in the 21st century and the modern age -- we need technology. You cannot survive without the communication tools; the productivity tools are essential.
- Matt Richtel
"What is the line right now when we go from a kind of technology nourishment to a kind of stepping backwards, to a kind of distraction — where instead of informing us, [technology] distracts us and impedes our productivity?" he asks. "There's growing evidence that that line is closer than we've imagined or acknowledged."
He points to one study conducted at Stanford University, which showed that heavy multimedia users have trouble filtering out irrelevant information — and trouble focusing on tasks. Other research, he says, says that heavy video game playing may release dopamine — which is thought to be involved with addictive behaviors.
"When you check your information, when you get a buzz in your pocket, when you get a ring — you get what they call a dopamine squirt. You get a little rush of adrenaline." he says. "Well, guess what happens in its absence? You feel bored. You're conditioned by a neurological response: 'Check me check me check me check me.'"
Richtel says that research is ongoing, particularly into how heavy technology may fundamentally alter the frontal lobe during childhood, how addictive behavior can lead to poor decision-making and how the brain is rewired when it is constantly inundated with new information.
But it's not all doom and gloom, he says. There are enormous benefits associated with technology, too. Research from the University of Rochester indicates that certain video gamers have more visual acuity than those who don't game. And there's value in offloading thinking onto a computer, he says — by, for example, using Google Maps instead of calling for directions or organizing information in Excel instead of keeping track of it in your head.
New York Times
Matt Richtel covers technology and telecommunications for The New York Times.
"There's some stuff being done at UCSF where scientists are trying to figure out if they can train older drivers to pick up more information in their surroundings that would let them react more quickly," he says. "Could they effectively develop games that would have transferability outside the game environment into the real world environment? A key word in this discussion is transfer. How do tasks we perform on the Internet transfer to real life? That stuff is still very much in its embryonic stages."
One way of looking at all of this research, he says, is to think of technology the way we think about food.
"Just as food nourishes us and we need it for life, so too — in the 21st century and the modern age — we need technology. You cannot survive without the communication tools; the productivity tools are essential," he says. "And yet, food has pros and cons to it. We know that some food is Twinkies and some food is Brussels sprouts. And we know that if we overeat, it causes problems. Similarly, after 20 years of glorifying technology as if all computers were good and all use of it was good, science is beginning to embrace the idea that some technology is Twinkies and some technology is Brussels sprouts."
Matt Richtel covers technology and telecommunications for The New York Times. He also writes a syndicated comic strip called "Rudy Park" and is the author of Hooked, a thriller set in Silicon Valley. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for a series in The New York Times on driving while multitasking.
Marian McPartland's
Digital Overload: Your Brain On Gadgets
August 24, 2010
A New York Times/CBS News poll found that 30 percent of people under 45 said the use of devices like smart phones and personal computers has made it harder to concentrate.
"It's an onslaught of information coming in today," says New York Times technology journalist Matt Richtel. "At one time a screen meant maybe something in your living room. But now it's something in your pocket so it goes everywhere — it can be behind the wheel, it can be at the dinner table, it can be in the bathroom. We see it everywhere today."
Richtel has spent the past several months researching the toll technology and "information juggling" is taking on our lives — and our brains. His series "Your Brain On Computers" describes how multitasking on computers and digital gadgets affects the way people process information — and how quickly they can then become distracted.
The Brain In The Wild
Recently Richtel accompanied several scientists, all of whom are studying the brain, on a week-long retreat to a remote corner of Utah. The rules of the vacation? No cell phones, no Internet access and no technological distractions.
"Partly they wanted to go on vacation and see it through a neurologic lens," he says. "They wanted to take a look at what was happening to their brain and their perspectives — and by extension, ours — as they got off the grid."
The scientists were divided in half about how they felt about information overload. Two of the five — whom Richtel termed "the believers" — thought that the constant stream of data coming into their lives was making it increasingly difficult to focus and concentrate — and that heading back into nature could help them recharge. The other three neuroscientists — "the skeptics" — thought that the benefits of having constant access to information far outweighed any consequences.
While out in the wild, the scientists — including the "skeptics" — noticed something significant happening on the third day they couldn't use their handheld devices, computers and mobile phones.
"You start to feel more relaxed. Maybe you sleep a little better. Maybe you don't reach for your phone pinging in your pocket," Richtel says. "Maybe you wait a little longer before answering a question. Maybe you don't feel in a rush to do anything — your sense of urgency fades." Richtel terms it the "three-day effect."
Though the "three-day effect" didn't surprise the neuroscientists on the trip, they realized it presented a new research problem.
"They said 'Let us see if there's anything in this three-day effect that might be the basis for future study that might help us understand when we're overwhelmed with data and what happens to us when we get away from it?'" explains Richtel, who accompanied the scientists on the trip. "To some extent, the skeptics did see a bit of a change in their perspective. They did say [things like] 'I am not as engaged in my world when I'm constantly using devices as I am when I am away from them.' They also said that revelation will inform [their] research going forward and may help us reach broader conclusions. But they didn't say 'I understand now what is happening to the brain.' They simply said 'There is something that merits real study here.'"
Streaming Information And The Brain
Richtel says another question scientists are asking is how much is too much, when it comes to processing technology.
Just as food nourishes us and we need it for life, so too -- in the 21st century and the modern age -- we need technology. You cannot survive without the communication tools; the productivity tools are essential.
- Matt Richtel
"What is the line right now when we go from a kind of technology nourishment to a kind of stepping backwards, to a kind of distraction — where instead of informing us, [technology] distracts us and impedes our productivity?" he asks. "There's growing evidence that that line is closer than we've imagined or acknowledged."
He points to one study conducted at Stanford University, which showed that heavy multimedia users have trouble filtering out irrelevant information — and trouble focusing on tasks. Other research, he says, says that heavy video game playing may release dopamine — which is thought to be involved with addictive behaviors.
"When you check your information, when you get a buzz in your pocket, when you get a ring — you get what they call a dopamine squirt. You get a little rush of adrenaline." he says. "Well, guess what happens in its absence? You feel bored. You're conditioned by a neurological response: 'Check me check me check me check me.'"
Richtel says that research is ongoing, particularly into how heavy technology may fundamentally alter the frontal lobe during childhood, how addictive behavior can lead to poor decision-making and how the brain is rewired when it is constantly inundated with new information.
But it's not all doom and gloom, he says. There are enormous benefits associated with technology, too. Research from the University of Rochester indicates that certain video gamers have more visual acuity than those who don't game. And there's value in offloading thinking onto a computer, he says — by, for example, using Google Maps instead of calling for directions or organizing information in Excel instead of keeping track of it in your head.
New York Times
Matt Richtel covers technology and telecommunications for The New York Times.
"There's some stuff being done at UCSF where scientists are trying to figure out if they can train older drivers to pick up more information in their surroundings that would let them react more quickly," he says. "Could they effectively develop games that would have transferability outside the game environment into the real world environment? A key word in this discussion is transfer. How do tasks we perform on the Internet transfer to real life? That stuff is still very much in its embryonic stages."
One way of looking at all of this research, he says, is to think of technology the way we think about food.
"Just as food nourishes us and we need it for life, so too — in the 21st century and the modern age — we need technology. You cannot survive without the communication tools; the productivity tools are essential," he says. "And yet, food has pros and cons to it. We know that some food is Twinkies and some food is Brussels sprouts. And we know that if we overeat, it causes problems. Similarly, after 20 years of glorifying technology as if all computers were good and all use of it was good, science is beginning to embrace the idea that some technology is Twinkies and some technology is Brussels sprouts."
Matt Richtel covers technology and telecommunications for The New York Times. He also writes a syndicated comic strip called "Rudy Park" and is the author of Hooked, a thriller set in Silicon Valley. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for a series in The New York Times on driving while multitasking.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Another Way to Look at Democrats vs. Republicans
The Democrats' Branding Problem
Jonathan Chait
One of the old but vital aphorisms of American politics is that Americans are ideological conservatives but operational liberals. They oppose government in the abstract, but favor it in most of the particulars. (The primary exceptions being programs seen as benefitting only the poor, only the rich, or only foreigners.)
A corrollary of that premise is that Republicans have an easier time expressing their views as an abstract ideology. They're against big government. That's a popular sentiment, unless you try to translate it into a governing program. But Democrats can't say they're for big government, both because they don't favor big government per se the way Republicans oppose it, and because expressing a generalized pro-government philosophy in the abstract is not a vote-winner. Republicans want to conduct the debate in abstract terms (big government versus small), while Democrats want to conduct it on specific questions (tax cuts for the rich versus Medicare).
John Harris and James Homann have a big piece today about Democrats who are upset that President Obama has failed to create a big ideological brand for his policies:
In interviews, a variety of political activists, operatives and commentators from across the party's ideological spectrum presented similar descriptions of Obama’s predicament: By declining to speak clearly and often about his larger philosophy — and insisting that his actions are guided not by ideology but a results-oriented “pragmatism” — he has bred confusion and disappointment among his allies, and left his agenda and motives vulnerable to distortion by his enemies.
They cite two opposing strands of criticism. The critics on the left want Obama to make a straightforward defense of government. The critics on the right want him to create a Clintonian, Third Way rubric.
The flaw with the pro-government rubric is clear enough. The Clintonian, Third Way, steer-not-row rubric is that it was always vague and failed to provide any real substantive guidelines for what constituted an appropriate government intervention and what didn't. Lord knows the New Democrats devoted enormous effort to fleshing out their philosophy, but none of its lasted, because ultimately the only convincing answer is that Democrats are in favor of government when there's convincing evidence of market failure. It just doesn't work as a bumper sticker solution. Ultimately, I think "we're for what works" is probably as good an answer as you can find, not that it makes for such a satisfying or effective answer.
Jonathan Chait
One of the old but vital aphorisms of American politics is that Americans are ideological conservatives but operational liberals. They oppose government in the abstract, but favor it in most of the particulars. (The primary exceptions being programs seen as benefitting only the poor, only the rich, or only foreigners.)
A corrollary of that premise is that Republicans have an easier time expressing their views as an abstract ideology. They're against big government. That's a popular sentiment, unless you try to translate it into a governing program. But Democrats can't say they're for big government, both because they don't favor big government per se the way Republicans oppose it, and because expressing a generalized pro-government philosophy in the abstract is not a vote-winner. Republicans want to conduct the debate in abstract terms (big government versus small), while Democrats want to conduct it on specific questions (tax cuts for the rich versus Medicare).
John Harris and James Homann have a big piece today about Democrats who are upset that President Obama has failed to create a big ideological brand for his policies:
In interviews, a variety of political activists, operatives and commentators from across the party's ideological spectrum presented similar descriptions of Obama’s predicament: By declining to speak clearly and often about his larger philosophy — and insisting that his actions are guided not by ideology but a results-oriented “pragmatism” — he has bred confusion and disappointment among his allies, and left his agenda and motives vulnerable to distortion by his enemies.
They cite two opposing strands of criticism. The critics on the left want Obama to make a straightforward defense of government. The critics on the right want him to create a Clintonian, Third Way rubric.
The flaw with the pro-government rubric is clear enough. The Clintonian, Third Way, steer-not-row rubric is that it was always vague and failed to provide any real substantive guidelines for what constituted an appropriate government intervention and what didn't. Lord knows the New Democrats devoted enormous effort to fleshing out their philosophy, but none of its lasted, because ultimately the only convincing answer is that Democrats are in favor of government when there's convincing evidence of market failure. It just doesn't work as a bumper sticker solution. Ultimately, I think "we're for what works" is probably as good an answer as you can find, not that it makes for such a satisfying or effective answer.
With Republicans It's all About the Richest
We need to pinch pennies these days. Don’t you know we have a budget deficit? For months that has been the word from Republicans and conservative Democrats, who have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy.
Paul Krugman NY Times 8/22/10
But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.
What — you haven’t heard about this proposal? Actually, you have: I’m talking about demands that we make all of the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the middle class, permanent.
Some background: Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision — namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.
Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation — yes, the same procedure that Republicans denounced when it was used to enact health reform — while sidestepping rules designed to prevent the use of that procedure to increase long-run budget deficits.
Obviously, the idea was to go back at a later date and make those tax cuts permanent. But things didn’t go according to plan. And now the witching hour is upon us.
So what’s the choice now? The Obama administration wants to preserve those parts of the original tax cuts that mainly benefit the middle class — which is an expensive proposition in its own right — but to let those provisions benefiting only people with very high incomes expire on schedule. Republicans, with support from some conservative Democrats, want to keep the whole thing.
And there’s a real chance that Republicans will get what they want. That’s a demonstration, if anyone needed one, that our political culture has become not just dysfunctional but deeply corrupt.
What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.
And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.
How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? Well, history is repeating itself. The original campaign for the Bush tax cuts relied on deception and dishonesty. In fact, my first suspicions that we were being misled into invading Iraq were based on the resemblance between the campaign for war and the campaign for tax cuts the previous year. And sure enough, that same trademark deception and dishonesty is being deployed on behalf of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
So, for example, we’re told that it’s all about helping small business; but only a tiny fraction of small-business owners would receive any tax break at all. And how many small-business owners do you know making several million a year?
Or we’re told that it’s about helping the economy recover. But it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.
No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.
So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.
Paul Krugman NY Times 8/22/10
But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.
What — you haven’t heard about this proposal? Actually, you have: I’m talking about demands that we make all of the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the middle class, permanent.
Some background: Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision — namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.
Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation — yes, the same procedure that Republicans denounced when it was used to enact health reform — while sidestepping rules designed to prevent the use of that procedure to increase long-run budget deficits.
Obviously, the idea was to go back at a later date and make those tax cuts permanent. But things didn’t go according to plan. And now the witching hour is upon us.
So what’s the choice now? The Obama administration wants to preserve those parts of the original tax cuts that mainly benefit the middle class — which is an expensive proposition in its own right — but to let those provisions benefiting only people with very high incomes expire on schedule. Republicans, with support from some conservative Democrats, want to keep the whole thing.
And there’s a real chance that Republicans will get what they want. That’s a demonstration, if anyone needed one, that our political culture has become not just dysfunctional but deeply corrupt.
What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.
And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.
How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? Well, history is repeating itself. The original campaign for the Bush tax cuts relied on deception and dishonesty. In fact, my first suspicions that we were being misled into invading Iraq were based on the resemblance between the campaign for war and the campaign for tax cuts the previous year. And sure enough, that same trademark deception and dishonesty is being deployed on behalf of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
So, for example, we’re told that it’s all about helping small business; but only a tiny fraction of small-business owners would receive any tax break at all. And how many small-business owners do you know making several million a year?
Or we’re told that it’s about helping the economy recover. But it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.
No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.
So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
That 20%
We read that 20% of Americans believe that President Obama is a Muslim. My guess is that same 20% worship Sarah Palin and that same 20% would believe ANYTHING no matter how outlandish about Obama. In other words, 20% of Americans are just plain stupid.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Willie Mays (4)
I'm reading about 1958 when the Giants moved to San Franciso. I can relate to the places mentioned in the book. The city had a parade for the team down Montgomery Street. The Seals stadium where the team played its first year was in the Mission District. SF was rich in baseball history before the coming of the Giants because the San Francisco Seals were a mainstay in the old Pacific Coast League for many decades.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The Hype About Ebook Readers
I have yet to give in to the hype about ebook readers; specifically, the assertion that because of Kindles, Nooks, and iPads, that people are reading more than ever. I just do not believe it.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
James S. Hirsch - Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend (3)
Each year I try to read at least one baseball book. So far this is it for 2010 although I reserve the right to read the new biography of Henry Aaron also.
More than any other sport, baseball is a game of statistics. Most of us know that Babe Ruth once hit 60 home runs in a season, that Roger Maris hit 61, and that Barry Bonds hit 73. I could go on and on quoting baseball statistics.
No numbers stand out for Willie Mays. He hit 660 lifetime homers but that number is superseded by three others now. What I have learned reading this book is that Willie Mays had talents that don't necessarily relate to statistics.
I learn that he had an incredible arm. That he had amazing fielding prowess. That he was an electrifying player to watch. Yes, he was something of a hot dog in the field. Maybe that rubbed some people the wrong way. Yet many loved him.
More later.
More than any other sport, baseball is a game of statistics. Most of us know that Babe Ruth once hit 60 home runs in a season, that Roger Maris hit 61, and that Barry Bonds hit 73. I could go on and on quoting baseball statistics.
No numbers stand out for Willie Mays. He hit 660 lifetime homers but that number is superseded by three others now. What I have learned reading this book is that Willie Mays had talents that don't necessarily relate to statistics.
I learn that he had an incredible arm. That he had amazing fielding prowess. That he was an electrifying player to watch. Yes, he was something of a hot dog in the field. Maybe that rubbed some people the wrong way. Yet many loved him.
More later.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
James S. Hirsch - Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend (2)
I continue to enjoy this illuminating life of Willie Mays, a baseball player that many people say was the greatest all-around baseball player of all times. I don't know about that, but I am learning many interesting things about this man who grew up in Fairfield, a suburb of Birmingham.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
James S. Hirsch - Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend
I am enjoying this definitive biography of baseball great Willie Mays.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
From Publishers Weekly
The exhilarating conclusion to bestseller Larsson's Millennium trilogy (after The Girl Who Played with Fire) finds Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant computer hacker who was shot in the head in the final pages of Fire, alive, though still the prime suspect in three murders in Stockholm. While she convalesces under armed guard, journalist Mikael Blomkvist works to unravel the decades-old coverup surrounding the man who shot Salander: her father, Alexander Zalachenko, a Soviet intelligence defector and longtime secret asset to Säpo, Sweden's security police. Estranged throughout Fire, Blomkvist and Salander communicate primarily online, but their lack of physical interaction in no way diminishes the intensity of their unconventional relationship. Though Larsson (1954–2004) tends toward narrative excess, his was an undeniably powerful voice in crime fiction that will be sorely missed. 500,000 first printing. (May)
I'M GLAD I READ THIS TRILOGY. AT LEAST I'LL BE ABLE TO TALK ABOUT THIS POPULAR CRIME FICTION BONANZA. THIS LAST VOLUME IN THE SERIES IS #1 ON THE CURRENT NY TIMES BESTSELLER LIST. THE STORY IS GOOD, BUT THE THING IS THE WONDER WOMAN LISBETH SALANDER, COMPUTER HACKER AND SURVIVOR EXTRADIONARE. SHE WILL BE TALKED ABOUT FOR YEARS TO COME.
The exhilarating conclusion to bestseller Larsson's Millennium trilogy (after The Girl Who Played with Fire) finds Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant computer hacker who was shot in the head in the final pages of Fire, alive, though still the prime suspect in three murders in Stockholm. While she convalesces under armed guard, journalist Mikael Blomkvist works to unravel the decades-old coverup surrounding the man who shot Salander: her father, Alexander Zalachenko, a Soviet intelligence defector and longtime secret asset to Säpo, Sweden's security police. Estranged throughout Fire, Blomkvist and Salander communicate primarily online, but their lack of physical interaction in no way diminishes the intensity of their unconventional relationship. Though Larsson (1954–2004) tends toward narrative excess, his was an undeniably powerful voice in crime fiction that will be sorely missed. 500,000 first printing. (May)
I'M GLAD I READ THIS TRILOGY. AT LEAST I'LL BE ABLE TO TALK ABOUT THIS POPULAR CRIME FICTION BONANZA. THIS LAST VOLUME IN THE SERIES IS #1 ON THE CURRENT NY TIMES BESTSELLER LIST. THE STORY IS GOOD, BUT THE THING IS THE WONDER WOMAN LISBETH SALANDER, COMPUTER HACKER AND SURVIVOR EXTRADIONARE. SHE WILL BE TALKED ABOUT FOR YEARS TO COME.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
About Republicans
Like Harry Truman, I do not understand how anyone can be a Republican. I really and truly can't.
I despise the Republican Party. I detest all professional Republican politicians. I really do.
Everyday people who call themselves Republicans are deluded. They really are.
I despise the Republican Party. I detest all professional Republican politicians. I really do.
Everyday people who call themselves Republicans are deluded. They really are.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Senate Unable To Get Enough Republican Votes To Honor 'To Kill A Mockingbird'
the ONION
4 August 2010
WASHINGTON — Unable to find a single Republican senator willing to break ranks and support the measure, Senate Democrats failed Thursday to stop the filibuster of S. 6253, a one-page resolution recognizing the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. "We almost had Scott Brown (R-MA) on board, but he balked when members of his party insisted the book only be commended if its court-room scenes were shortened a bit and the setting changed to Nebraska," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), explaining the procedural difficulties in passing legislation to honor the classic tale of a small-town lawyer's tireless efforts to defend an innocent man. "If we'd agreed to all their compromises, we'd have wound up with a watered-down version of the novel containing only seven of its original 31 chapters." At press time, Republicans said they would be willing to resume negotiations if the beloved work of American literature is revised so that Tom Robinson is a small-businessman wrongly accused of failing to provide employees with health benefits and Scout is a boy.
4 August 2010
WASHINGTON — Unable to find a single Republican senator willing to break ranks and support the measure, Senate Democrats failed Thursday to stop the filibuster of S. 6253, a one-page resolution recognizing the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. "We almost had Scott Brown (R-MA) on board, but he balked when members of his party insisted the book only be commended if its court-room scenes were shortened a bit and the setting changed to Nebraska," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), explaining the procedural difficulties in passing legislation to honor the classic tale of a small-town lawyer's tireless efforts to defend an innocent man. "If we'd agreed to all their compromises, we'd have wound up with a watered-down version of the novel containing only seven of its original 31 chapters." At press time, Republicans said they would be willing to resume negotiations if the beloved work of American literature is revised so that Tom Robinson is a small-businessman wrongly accused of failing to provide employees with health benefits and Scout is a boy.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Islamic Center Near Ground Zero
Is building an Islamic community center two blocks from the former site of the twin towers insensitive? I don't know.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Restore the Bush Tax Cuts
Robert ReichFormer Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley
Posted: August 2, 2010 04:11 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
Why We Really Shouldn't Keep the Bush Tax Cut for the Wealthy
The economy is slouching backward because consumers can't and won't spend enough to revive it. Congress is about to recess for the summer without doing anything to fill the gap. And it looks like the only issue it will be debating when it returns is who, if anyone, should pay more taxes next year -- just the very rich, everyone, or no one? The cuts enacted by George W. Bush will expire in January, and with midterm election pending in November we're about to be treated to months of tax demagoguery.
Here's a guide to the perplexed.
From a strictly economic standpoint -- as if economics had anything to do with this -- it makes sense to preserve the Bush tax cuts at least through 2011 for the middle class. There's no way consumers -- who comprise 70 percent of the economy -- will start buying again if their federal income taxes rise while they're still struggling to repay their debts, they can't borrow more, can no longer use their homes as ATMs, and they're worried about keeping their jobs.
But the same logic doesn't apply to people at the top, earning over $250K, who represent roughly 2 percent of tax filers. Restoring their marginal tax rates to what they were during the Clinton administration (36 and 39 percent) won't inhibit their spending. That's because they already save a large portion of what they earn, and already spend what they want to spend. (During the Clinton years the economy created 22 million net new jobs and unemployment dropped to 4 percent.)
But restoring those top marginal tax rates will help bring down the long-term debt, pulling in almost a trillion dollars of revenues over next ten years. That's not nearly enough to make a major dent in the nation's projected deficits, but it's not chicken feed either. It would at least signal to financial markets we're serious about cutting that long-term deficit -- and the rest of us will chip in when the economy strengthens.
So-called supply-side economists don't like raising taxes on anyone, of course, and argue that raising them on the well-off will slow economic growth. They say people at the top will have less incentive to work hard, invest, and invent.
Unfortunately for supply-siders, history has proven them wrong again and again. During almost three decades spanning 1951 to 1980, when America's top marginal tax rate was between 70 and 92 percent, the nation's average annual growth was 3.7 percent. But between 1983 and start of the Great Recession, when the top rate was far lower -- ranging between 35 and 39 percent -- the economy grew an average of just 3 percent per year. Supply-siders are fond of claiming that Ronald Reagan's 1981 cuts caused the 1980s economic boom. In fact, that boom followed Reagan's 1982 tax increase. The 1990s boom likewise was not the result of a tax cut; it came in the wake of Bill Clinton's 1993 tax increase.
A final reason for allowing the Bush tax cut to expire for people at the top is the most basic of all. Although Wall Street's excesses were the proximate cause of the Great Recession, its fundamental cause lay in the nation's widening inequality. For many years, most of the gains of economic growth in America have been going to the top -- leaving the nation's vast middle class with a shrinking portion of total income. (In the 1970s, the top 1 percent received 8 to 9 percent of total income, but thereafter income concentrated so rapidly that by 2007 the top received 23.5 percent of the total.) The only way most Americans could continue to buy most of what they produced was by borrowing. But now that the debt bubble has burst -- as it inevitably would -- the underlying problem has reemerged.
Why make it worse? George W. Bush's 2001 tax cut was a huge windfall for the wealthy. About 40 percent of its benefits went to the tiny sliver of Americans earning over $500,000. So rather than debate whether to end the Bush tax cuts for the top and restore the top marginal tax rates to where they were under Bill Clinton, we should be debating whether to raise the highest marginal tax rate higher than it was under Bill Clinton and use the proceeds to give the middle class a permanent tax cut.
I'm not suggesting this, mind you, but just to get the debate started: How about restoring the top rate to where it was under John F. Kennedy (76 percent), or under Dwight Eisenhower (91 percent)?
Posted: August 2, 2010 04:11 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
Why We Really Shouldn't Keep the Bush Tax Cut for the Wealthy
The economy is slouching backward because consumers can't and won't spend enough to revive it. Congress is about to recess for the summer without doing anything to fill the gap. And it looks like the only issue it will be debating when it returns is who, if anyone, should pay more taxes next year -- just the very rich, everyone, or no one? The cuts enacted by George W. Bush will expire in January, and with midterm election pending in November we're about to be treated to months of tax demagoguery.
Here's a guide to the perplexed.
From a strictly economic standpoint -- as if economics had anything to do with this -- it makes sense to preserve the Bush tax cuts at least through 2011 for the middle class. There's no way consumers -- who comprise 70 percent of the economy -- will start buying again if their federal income taxes rise while they're still struggling to repay their debts, they can't borrow more, can no longer use their homes as ATMs, and they're worried about keeping their jobs.
But the same logic doesn't apply to people at the top, earning over $250K, who represent roughly 2 percent of tax filers. Restoring their marginal tax rates to what they were during the Clinton administration (36 and 39 percent) won't inhibit their spending. That's because they already save a large portion of what they earn, and already spend what they want to spend. (During the Clinton years the economy created 22 million net new jobs and unemployment dropped to 4 percent.)
But restoring those top marginal tax rates will help bring down the long-term debt, pulling in almost a trillion dollars of revenues over next ten years. That's not nearly enough to make a major dent in the nation's projected deficits, but it's not chicken feed either. It would at least signal to financial markets we're serious about cutting that long-term deficit -- and the rest of us will chip in when the economy strengthens.
So-called supply-side economists don't like raising taxes on anyone, of course, and argue that raising them on the well-off will slow economic growth. They say people at the top will have less incentive to work hard, invest, and invent.
Unfortunately for supply-siders, history has proven them wrong again and again. During almost three decades spanning 1951 to 1980, when America's top marginal tax rate was between 70 and 92 percent, the nation's average annual growth was 3.7 percent. But between 1983 and start of the Great Recession, when the top rate was far lower -- ranging between 35 and 39 percent -- the economy grew an average of just 3 percent per year. Supply-siders are fond of claiming that Ronald Reagan's 1981 cuts caused the 1980s economic boom. In fact, that boom followed Reagan's 1982 tax increase. The 1990s boom likewise was not the result of a tax cut; it came in the wake of Bill Clinton's 1993 tax increase.
A final reason for allowing the Bush tax cut to expire for people at the top is the most basic of all. Although Wall Street's excesses were the proximate cause of the Great Recession, its fundamental cause lay in the nation's widening inequality. For many years, most of the gains of economic growth in America have been going to the top -- leaving the nation's vast middle class with a shrinking portion of total income. (In the 1970s, the top 1 percent received 8 to 9 percent of total income, but thereafter income concentrated so rapidly that by 2007 the top received 23.5 percent of the total.) The only way most Americans could continue to buy most of what they produced was by borrowing. But now that the debt bubble has burst -- as it inevitably would -- the underlying problem has reemerged.
Why make it worse? George W. Bush's 2001 tax cut was a huge windfall for the wealthy. About 40 percent of its benefits went to the tiny sliver of Americans earning over $500,000. So rather than debate whether to end the Bush tax cuts for the top and restore the top marginal tax rates to where they were under Bill Clinton, we should be debating whether to raise the highest marginal tax rate higher than it was under Bill Clinton and use the proceeds to give the middle class a permanent tax cut.
I'm not suggesting this, mind you, but just to get the debate started: How about restoring the top rate to where it was under John F. Kennedy (76 percent), or under Dwight Eisenhower (91 percent)?
Slow Reading
The art of slow readingHas endlessly skimming short texts on the internet made us stupider? An increasing number of experts think so - and say it's time to slow down.
Patrick Kingsley The Guardian, Thursday 15 July 2010 Article history
Is it time to slow our reading down?
If you're reading this article in print, chances are you'll only get through half of what I've written. And if you're reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute's Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.
The problem doesn't just stop there: academics report that we are becoming less attentive book-readers, too. Bath Spa University lecturer Greg Garrard recently revealed that he has had to shorten his students' reading list, while Keith Thomas, an Oxford historian, has written that he is bemused by junior colleagues who analyse sources with a search engine, instead of reading them in their entirety.
So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of. According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.
Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, "we're losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we're in perpetual locomotion".
Still reading? You're probably in a dwindling minority. But no matter: a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.
"If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author's ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly," says Ottawa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading (2009).
But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term "slow reading", disagrees. He argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader's creativity, as uncovering the author's. "My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content," the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. "I told my students to believe that the text was written by God – if you can't understand something written in the text, it's your fault, not the author's."
And while Fletcher used the term initially as an academic tool, slow reading has since become a more wide-ranging concept. Miedema writes on his website that slow reading, like slow food, is now, at root, a localist idea which can help connect a reader to his neighbourhood. "Slow reading," writes Miedema, "is a community event restoring connections between ideas and people. The continuity of relationships through reading is experienced when we borrow books from friends; when we read long stories to our kids until they fall asleep." Meanwhile, though the movement began in academia, Tracy Seeley, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, and the author of a blog about slow reading, feels strongly that slow reading shouldn't "just be the province of the intellectuals. Careful and slow reading, and deep attention, is a challenge for all of us."
So the movement's not a particularly cohesive one – as Malcolm Jones wrote in a recent Newsweek article, "there's no letterhead, no board of directors, and, horrors, no central website" – and nor is it a new idea: as early as 1623, the first edition of Shakespeare's folio encouraged us to read the playwright "again and again"; in 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche described himself as a "teacher of slow reading"; and, back in the 20s and 30s, dons such as IA Richards popularised close textual analysis within academic circles.
But what's clear is that our era's technological diarrhoea is bringing more and more slow readers to the fore. Keith Thomas, the Oxford history professor, is one such reader. He doesn't see himself as part of a wider slow community, but has nevertheless recently written – in the London Review of Books – about his bewilderment at the hasty reading techniques in contemporary academia. "I don't think using a search engine to find certain key words in a text is a substitute for reading it properly," he says. "You don't get a proper sense of the work, or understand its context. And there's no serendipity – half the things I've found in my research have come when I've luckily stumbled across something I wasn't expecting."
Some academics vehemently disagree, however. One literature professor, Pierre Bayard, notoriously wrote a book about how readers can form valid opinions about texts they have only skimmed – or even not read at all. "It's possible to have a passionate conversation about a book that one has not read, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who has not read it," he says in How to Talk About Books that You Haven't Read (2007), before suggesting that such bluffing is even "at the heart of a creative process".
Slow readers, obviously, are at loggerheads with Bayard. Seeley says that you might be able to engage "in a basic conversation if you have only read a book's summary, but for the kinds of reading I want my students to do, the words matter. The physical shape of sentences matter."
Nicholas Carr's book elaborates further. "The words of the writer," suggests Carr, "act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies." And, perhaps even more significantly, it is only through slow reading that great literature can be cultivated in the future. As Carr writes, "the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer's work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory."
What's more, Seeley argues, Bayard's literary bluffing merely obscures a bigger problem: the erosion of our powers of concentration, as highlighted by Carr's book. Seeley notes that after a conversation with some of her students, she discovered that "most can't concentrate on reading a text for more than 30 seconds or a minute at a time. We're being trained away from slow reading by new technology." But unlike Bath Spa's Greg Garrard, she does not want to cut down on the amount of reading she sets her classes. "It's my responsibility to challenge my students," says Seeley. "I don't just want to throw in the towel."
Seeley finds an unlikely ally in Henry Hitchings, who – as the author of the rather confusingly named How to Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read (2008) – could initially be mistaken as a follower of Bayard. "My book on the subject notwithstanding," says Hitchings, "I'm no fan of bluffing and blagging. My book was really a covert statement to the effect that reading matters. It's supposed to encourage would-be bluffers to go beyond mere bluffing, though it does this under the cover of arming them for literary combat."
But Hitchings also feels that clear-cut distinctions between slow and fast reading are slightly idealistic. "In short, the fast-slow polarity – or antithesis, if you prefer – strikes me as false. We all have several guises as readers. If I am reading – to pick an obvious example – James Joyce, slow reading feels appropriate. If I'm reading the instruction manual for a new washing machine, it doesn't."
Hitchings does agree that the internet is part of the problem. "It accustoms us to new ways of reading and looking and consuming," Hitchings says, "and it fragments our attention span in a way that's not ideal if you want to read, for instance, Clarissa." He also argues that "the real issue with the internet may be that it erodes, slowly, one's sense of self, one's capacity for the kind of pleasure in isolation that reading has, since printed books became common, been standard".
What's to be done, then? All the slow readers I spoke to realise that total rejection of the web is extremely unrealistic, but many felt that temporary isolation from technology was the answer. Tracy Seeley's students, for example, have advocated turning their computer off for one day a week. But, given the pace at which most of us live, do we even have time? Garrard seems to think so: "I'm no luddite – I'm on my iPhone right now, having just checked my email – but I regularly carve out reading holidays in the middle of my week: four or five hours with the internet disconnected."
Meanwhile, Jakob Nielsen – the internet guru behind some of the statistics at the beginning of this article – thinks the iPad might just be the answer: "It's pleasant and fun, and doesn't remind people of work." But though John Miedema thinks iPads and Kindles are "a good halfway house, particularly if you're on the road", the author reveals that, for the true slow reader, there's simply no substitute for particular aspects of the paper book: "The binding of a book captures an experience or idea at a particular space and time." And even the act of storing a book is a pleasure for Miedema. "When the reading is complete, you place it with satisfaction on your bookshelf," he says.
Personally, I'm not sure I could ever go offline for long. Even while writing this article I was flicking constantly between sites, skimming too often, absorbing too little; internet reading has become too ingrained in my daily life for me to change. I read essays and articles not in hard copy but as PDFs, and I'm more comfortable churning through lots of news features from several outlets than just a few from a single print source. I suspect that many readers are in a similar position.
But if, like me, you just occasionally want to read more slowly, help is at hand. You can download a computer application called Freedom, which allows you to read in peace by cutting off your internet connection. Or if you want to remove adverts and other distractions from your screen, you could always download offline reader Instapaper for your iPhone. If you're still reading, that is.
Patrick Kingsley The Guardian, Thursday 15 July 2010 Article history
Is it time to slow our reading down?
If you're reading this article in print, chances are you'll only get through half of what I've written. And if you're reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute's Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.
The problem doesn't just stop there: academics report that we are becoming less attentive book-readers, too. Bath Spa University lecturer Greg Garrard recently revealed that he has had to shorten his students' reading list, while Keith Thomas, an Oxford historian, has written that he is bemused by junior colleagues who analyse sources with a search engine, instead of reading them in their entirety.
So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of. According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.
Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, "we're losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we're in perpetual locomotion".
Still reading? You're probably in a dwindling minority. But no matter: a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.
"If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author's ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly," says Ottawa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading (2009).
But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term "slow reading", disagrees. He argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader's creativity, as uncovering the author's. "My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content," the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. "I told my students to believe that the text was written by God – if you can't understand something written in the text, it's your fault, not the author's."
And while Fletcher used the term initially as an academic tool, slow reading has since become a more wide-ranging concept. Miedema writes on his website that slow reading, like slow food, is now, at root, a localist idea which can help connect a reader to his neighbourhood. "Slow reading," writes Miedema, "is a community event restoring connections between ideas and people. The continuity of relationships through reading is experienced when we borrow books from friends; when we read long stories to our kids until they fall asleep." Meanwhile, though the movement began in academia, Tracy Seeley, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, and the author of a blog about slow reading, feels strongly that slow reading shouldn't "just be the province of the intellectuals. Careful and slow reading, and deep attention, is a challenge for all of us."
So the movement's not a particularly cohesive one – as Malcolm Jones wrote in a recent Newsweek article, "there's no letterhead, no board of directors, and, horrors, no central website" – and nor is it a new idea: as early as 1623, the first edition of Shakespeare's folio encouraged us to read the playwright "again and again"; in 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche described himself as a "teacher of slow reading"; and, back in the 20s and 30s, dons such as IA Richards popularised close textual analysis within academic circles.
But what's clear is that our era's technological diarrhoea is bringing more and more slow readers to the fore. Keith Thomas, the Oxford history professor, is one such reader. He doesn't see himself as part of a wider slow community, but has nevertheless recently written – in the London Review of Books – about his bewilderment at the hasty reading techniques in contemporary academia. "I don't think using a search engine to find certain key words in a text is a substitute for reading it properly," he says. "You don't get a proper sense of the work, or understand its context. And there's no serendipity – half the things I've found in my research have come when I've luckily stumbled across something I wasn't expecting."
Some academics vehemently disagree, however. One literature professor, Pierre Bayard, notoriously wrote a book about how readers can form valid opinions about texts they have only skimmed – or even not read at all. "It's possible to have a passionate conversation about a book that one has not read, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who has not read it," he says in How to Talk About Books that You Haven't Read (2007), before suggesting that such bluffing is even "at the heart of a creative process".
Slow readers, obviously, are at loggerheads with Bayard. Seeley says that you might be able to engage "in a basic conversation if you have only read a book's summary, but for the kinds of reading I want my students to do, the words matter. The physical shape of sentences matter."
Nicholas Carr's book elaborates further. "The words of the writer," suggests Carr, "act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies." And, perhaps even more significantly, it is only through slow reading that great literature can be cultivated in the future. As Carr writes, "the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer's work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory."
What's more, Seeley argues, Bayard's literary bluffing merely obscures a bigger problem: the erosion of our powers of concentration, as highlighted by Carr's book. Seeley notes that after a conversation with some of her students, she discovered that "most can't concentrate on reading a text for more than 30 seconds or a minute at a time. We're being trained away from slow reading by new technology." But unlike Bath Spa's Greg Garrard, she does not want to cut down on the amount of reading she sets her classes. "It's my responsibility to challenge my students," says Seeley. "I don't just want to throw in the towel."
Seeley finds an unlikely ally in Henry Hitchings, who – as the author of the rather confusingly named How to Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read (2008) – could initially be mistaken as a follower of Bayard. "My book on the subject notwithstanding," says Hitchings, "I'm no fan of bluffing and blagging. My book was really a covert statement to the effect that reading matters. It's supposed to encourage would-be bluffers to go beyond mere bluffing, though it does this under the cover of arming them for literary combat."
But Hitchings also feels that clear-cut distinctions between slow and fast reading are slightly idealistic. "In short, the fast-slow polarity – or antithesis, if you prefer – strikes me as false. We all have several guises as readers. If I am reading – to pick an obvious example – James Joyce, slow reading feels appropriate. If I'm reading the instruction manual for a new washing machine, it doesn't."
Hitchings does agree that the internet is part of the problem. "It accustoms us to new ways of reading and looking and consuming," Hitchings says, "and it fragments our attention span in a way that's not ideal if you want to read, for instance, Clarissa." He also argues that "the real issue with the internet may be that it erodes, slowly, one's sense of self, one's capacity for the kind of pleasure in isolation that reading has, since printed books became common, been standard".
What's to be done, then? All the slow readers I spoke to realise that total rejection of the web is extremely unrealistic, but many felt that temporary isolation from technology was the answer. Tracy Seeley's students, for example, have advocated turning their computer off for one day a week. But, given the pace at which most of us live, do we even have time? Garrard seems to think so: "I'm no luddite – I'm on my iPhone right now, having just checked my email – but I regularly carve out reading holidays in the middle of my week: four or five hours with the internet disconnected."
Meanwhile, Jakob Nielsen – the internet guru behind some of the statistics at the beginning of this article – thinks the iPad might just be the answer: "It's pleasant and fun, and doesn't remind people of work." But though John Miedema thinks iPads and Kindles are "a good halfway house, particularly if you're on the road", the author reveals that, for the true slow reader, there's simply no substitute for particular aspects of the paper book: "The binding of a book captures an experience or idea at a particular space and time." And even the act of storing a book is a pleasure for Miedema. "When the reading is complete, you place it with satisfaction on your bookshelf," he says.
Personally, I'm not sure I could ever go offline for long. Even while writing this article I was flicking constantly between sites, skimming too often, absorbing too little; internet reading has become too ingrained in my daily life for me to change. I read essays and articles not in hard copy but as PDFs, and I'm more comfortable churning through lots of news features from several outlets than just a few from a single print source. I suspect that many readers are in a similar position.
But if, like me, you just occasionally want to read more slowly, help is at hand. You can download a computer application called Freedom, which allows you to read in peace by cutting off your internet connection. Or if you want to remove adverts and other distractions from your screen, you could always download offline reader Instapaper for your iPhone. If you're still reading, that is.
Ayn Rand & the Republican Party
Ayn Rand And Conservatism
Jonathan Chait
Noah Kristula-Green has a piece about the growing influence of Rand on the right:
[P]rominent national conservatives have overcome their repugnance for Rand’s militant atheism to endorse her vision – and her politics.
The Wall Street Journal declared in an Op-Ed by Stephen Moore—its senior economics writer—in January 2009 that Rand’s work had moved “From Fiction to Fact.” Rush Limbaugh gave monologues that quoted Rand and called her “Brilliant.” Among politicians, Ron Paul has described Atlas Shrugged as “telling the truth.” Amity Shlaes tried to map the characters of Atlas Shrugged onto the real world in a piece for Bloomberg. ...
The recently opened Ayn Rand Center in Washington DC now trains Objectivists to appear in the media. The Center’s President, Yaron Brook, has become a common guest on Glenn Beck’s program. The Center has also worked with the FreedomWorks and the Competitive Enterprise Institute on Tea Party themed panels and seminars.
When I wrote a review essay last year about Ayn Rand and her influence upon contemporary conservatism, I probably understated the extent of her intellectual influence. Few people share her bizarre and multitudinous intellectual obsessions in the realm of art, sex, philosophy and the like, and fewer style approve of her bizarre personal behavior. But the basic inverted Marxism at the heart of her ideology has become the central focus of both modern conservative thought and Republican policy-making. (That ideology holds that the world is fundamentally divided between virtuous creators of wealth and lazy parasites, the identity of whom is the reverse of what Marx believed.)
When the essay came out, I was expecting the right-wing attack on my essay to argue that it's unfair to the GOP to associate it with Rand. Instead, critics argued that it's unfair to Rand to associate her with the GOP. As Kristula-Green observes, the conservative movement is associating itself with, and taking philosophical cues from, a deeply sick individual.
Jonathan Chait
Noah Kristula-Green has a piece about the growing influence of Rand on the right:
[P]rominent national conservatives have overcome their repugnance for Rand’s militant atheism to endorse her vision – and her politics.
The Wall Street Journal declared in an Op-Ed by Stephen Moore—its senior economics writer—in January 2009 that Rand’s work had moved “From Fiction to Fact.” Rush Limbaugh gave monologues that quoted Rand and called her “Brilliant.” Among politicians, Ron Paul has described Atlas Shrugged as “telling the truth.” Amity Shlaes tried to map the characters of Atlas Shrugged onto the real world in a piece for Bloomberg. ...
The recently opened Ayn Rand Center in Washington DC now trains Objectivists to appear in the media. The Center’s President, Yaron Brook, has become a common guest on Glenn Beck’s program. The Center has also worked with the FreedomWorks and the Competitive Enterprise Institute on Tea Party themed panels and seminars.
When I wrote a review essay last year about Ayn Rand and her influence upon contemporary conservatism, I probably understated the extent of her intellectual influence. Few people share her bizarre and multitudinous intellectual obsessions in the realm of art, sex, philosophy and the like, and fewer style approve of her bizarre personal behavior. But the basic inverted Marxism at the heart of her ideology has become the central focus of both modern conservative thought and Republican policy-making. (That ideology holds that the world is fundamentally divided between virtuous creators of wealth and lazy parasites, the identity of whom is the reverse of what Marx believed.)
When the essay came out, I was expecting the right-wing attack on my essay to argue that it's unfair to the GOP to associate it with Rand. Instead, critics argued that it's unfair to Rand to associate her with the GOP. As Kristula-Green observes, the conservative movement is associating itself with, and taking philosophical cues from, a deeply sick individual.
The Moral Bankruptcy of the Republican Party
by Andrew Sullivan
Stockman's Diagnosis: Still True
02 Aug 2010 10:47 am
It's the kind of op-ed that has one sitting up straight with the sting of fresh memory. Back in the 1980s, I was a Thatcherite. I believed in low taxes but I also believed in - you know - balanced budgets as a core principle of, you remember, conservatism. It was odd coming to America to be told that here, for the first time in human history, you could cut taxes and raise revenue at the same time! It was triply odd, coming from green eye-shade Thatcher-land, to hear that "deficits don't matter." In his first term, of course, even Reagan felt it necessary to adjust from this madness - a madness that, far from "starving the beast", simply made Americans believe that the beast never needed full funding. The first Bush, to his enormous credit, did the responsible thing - but was destroyed by his party for violating the no new taxes pledge. From that moment on, it became not policy but doctrine for the GOP. And the results of further tax cuts and further spending increases, mitigated by divided government in the 1990s, but unleashed in full force under Bush-Cheney, is what we face today:
By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s. Then, after rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures, George W. Bush surrendered on domestic spending cuts, too — signing into law $420 billion in non-defense appropriations, a 65 percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier.
No intellectually honest person can hold Barack Obama responsible for this long term sabotage of America's fiscal health. The spending he has authorized has to be seen in the context of the massive financial crisis that nearly caused the second Great Depression and may well still cause a lost generation of output and jobs and productive lives.
But the central point Stockman makes is that all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated, we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.
Stockman's Diagnosis: Still True
02 Aug 2010 10:47 am
It's the kind of op-ed that has one sitting up straight with the sting of fresh memory. Back in the 1980s, I was a Thatcherite. I believed in low taxes but I also believed in - you know - balanced budgets as a core principle of, you remember, conservatism. It was odd coming to America to be told that here, for the first time in human history, you could cut taxes and raise revenue at the same time! It was triply odd, coming from green eye-shade Thatcher-land, to hear that "deficits don't matter." In his first term, of course, even Reagan felt it necessary to adjust from this madness - a madness that, far from "starving the beast", simply made Americans believe that the beast never needed full funding. The first Bush, to his enormous credit, did the responsible thing - but was destroyed by his party for violating the no new taxes pledge. From that moment on, it became not policy but doctrine for the GOP. And the results of further tax cuts and further spending increases, mitigated by divided government in the 1990s, but unleashed in full force under Bush-Cheney, is what we face today:
By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s. Then, after rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures, George W. Bush surrendered on domestic spending cuts, too — signing into law $420 billion in non-defense appropriations, a 65 percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier.
No intellectually honest person can hold Barack Obama responsible for this long term sabotage of America's fiscal health. The spending he has authorized has to be seen in the context of the massive financial crisis that nearly caused the second Great Depression and may well still cause a lost generation of output and jobs and productive lives.
But the central point Stockman makes is that all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated, we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Nicholas Carr - The Shallows (2)
Carr's central point is that the internet is chipping away at our brains, making it harder to concentrate and contemplate as we click from one link to another. The linear mind, developed by print, gives way to the scattered mind, unable to focus on strictly linear print as well as it used to.
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