A crowd in central Damascus waves flags and portraits in support of President Bashar Assad on Monday, two days after the U.S., Britain and France carried out airstrikes. The photo was released by the official Syrian news agency SANA.-AP
Dear Greg Myre of NPR:
Your article has a good headline, but you write almost nothing that actually answers the question you posed. It’s very difficult to do, but you could’ve tried. You did not, and that’s the problem with current mainstream journalism. It does not provide depth of analysis to complicated world problems. Even respectable outlets like NPR, apparently, are not raising the bar on their writers to go deeper.
Good news sources exist that do provide viable explanations and historical perspective of the Middle East quagmires, and other intractable conflicts around the globe, as well as, complicated national issues, but too many people never read those sources, because they are not deeply interested enough. So, it’s left to mainstream disseminators to inform most of the public what’s going on around them. Unfortunately, they don’t do a good enough job, and that is yet another topic that needs deeper discussion.
President Trump called Syrian leader Bashar Assad a “monster” on Friday night as he announced airstrikes to punish Assad for an apparent chemical weapons attack against Syrian civilians.
On Saturday morning, a tweet by the Syrian Presidency account showed a video of Assad walking into the presidential palace in Damascus wearing a dark suit and tie, briefcase in hand — business as usual.
By Sunday night, the White House issued a statement stressing that the U.S. would not be drawn into the wider war.
“The U.S. mission has not changed — the president has been clear that he wants U.S. forces to come home as quickly as possible,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said.
This past weekend was emblematic of the way the U.S. and much of the world have dealt with Assad since Syria’s devastating civil war erupted in 2011: harsh criticism and occasional action, but no sustained effort that’s come close to ousting him.
“Given that the Western strikes in Syria were about chemical weapons and nothing more, it is no surprise that Syria’s President Assad was reported to be in a good mood,” Middle East analyst Robert Danin wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations. “Assad now has further reason to feel confident that the United States will not work to topple his regime.”
I have lots of company joining me, exhausted with the ongoing news cycles for the last year and a half. It’s not subsiding any time soon. I’m thinking years. Given the American culture, and habits of, news reporting, its consumption, buying it, selling it, sponsoring it, and distributing it, I see an almost constant peaking of news events on any, and every, level and scale, offered up almost daily, with no breather.
The comic parodies mocking the overwrought “Breaking News” interruption on cable news have long lost their humor yield. In real life, it’s exhausting, and almost surreal. There literally has not been a break from “breaking news.”
Maybe I’m just feeling vulnerable, but it feels like events are getting really serious now. There’s a convergence of multiple news happenings, any one of which alone, has global implications, coming up in days, or weeks, maybe a month, that’s going to put a collective hurt on the people, the governments, and the infrastructure in this country. It feels party-less, like, what could be about to happen, is about to mutate into a life of its own, with tentacles, and reach beyond where any forces fighting it, on either side of the oceans, can ever extend. A soulless enemy of cancerous mistrust that we made together as humanity into an incurable disease.
The U.S. power grid has been targeted before by hackers. Assessing the risk is years old, but now they’re officially in, and we’re sitting ducks. It is already known, that the level of consequence to the U.S. today, right now, would be colossal. Based on that fact alone, we are in big, big trouble. Grand-spectacle-wise, we lose any war before it even starts. Period. Done. Well-Done.
Three articles below. All chilling. Make special note of the Vocative article, from April 2017.
Royal Australian Navy Lt. Elizabeth Livingstone and Singapore Army Maj. Paul Zhao perform cataract surgery aboard the hospital ship USNS Mercy during a visit to Quy Nhon, Vietnam in 2010.
There is no way I would allow ANY doctor to administer anesthesia on me instead of anesthesiologist. This is awful and should not be tolerated.States and medical associations should organize and fight back on this, in Washington, if necessary.
Michelle Andrews, NPR
If you need cataract surgery, your eye surgeon may have to do double duty as your anesthetist under a new policy by health insurer Anthem. In a clinical guideline released this month, the company says it’s not medically necessary to have an anesthesiologist or nurse anesthetist on hand to administer and monitor sedation in most cases.
Some ophthalmologists and anesthesiologists say the policy jeopardizes patient safety, and they are calling on Anthem to rescind it.
“The presence of anesthesia personnel is one of the key ingredients in the patient safety and effectiveness of cataract surgery today,” says Dr. David Glasser, an ophthalmologist in Columbia, Md., who is secretary for federal affairs at the American Academy of Ophthalmology, a professional group for eye physicians and surgeons. “An ophthalmologist cannot administer conscious sedation and monitor the patient and do cataract surgery at the same time.”
Following the horrific school shootings in this country, numerous articles have been written connecting mass shootings to fatherless boys and broken homes. Most of them are associated with Conservative media and their journalists. After reading the older article from Peter Hasson at the Federalist, I had enough with this garbage.
My thoughts follow…
It has long been widely accepted, that a broken home “can” (not “does”) increase the risk of troubled children, and later, as they grow older. This is not a groundbreaking observation.
The problem with author Peter Hasson’s article is that he is taking a small view of isolated cases and drawing over-arching conclusions about broken homes. Hasson writes as if the connection of fatherless boys demands attention regarding gun violence. He does so by grossly simplifying and extrapolating inconclusive data. That’s not just bad journalism. It’s irresponsible.
Further, he invests much of the journalistic privilege in his space, writing the same oppositionist dreck attacking or distorting other voices dissimilar to his. This does readers a disservice, and does nothing to address the real-life multi-faceted problem of school gun violence in America. It only perpetuates the political quagmire this country is stuck in.
Nobody with a straight face can possibly believe that fixing broken homes is the main focus to the horrific shootings. Likewise, no one can honestly state that gun control alone without improved mental health, community family resources, and law enforcement is going to fix things.
The particular brand of gun violence going on at schools is a problem of multiple factors. It can’t be approached with any one size fits all solution, or a single focus. It deserves honest discussion about factual causes, not theories, and clearly connected causative factors. It also deserves all voices to be heard, without name calling or marginalizing any of them.
Hassan could’ve penned an intelligent and realistic essay, had he recognized the true complexity of this crisis, rather than fixate, rather bizarrely, on the importance of a good marriage.
Related links:
Click below to read two articles which are thought-out, researched, and properly reasoned.
