Definitive, preventative action from responsible parties, should not be postponed because there is not a direct connections proven. Open eyes see the way teens, already behave – necks bent, preoccupied checking their phones, bizarrely concerned with every post on social media, or checking their scores from online gaming.
Most teens today own a smartphone and go online every day, and about a quarter of them use the internet “almost constantly,” according to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center.
Now a study published Tuesday in JAMA suggests that such frequent use of digital media by adolescents might increase their odds of developing symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
“It’s one of the first studies to look at modern digital media and ADHD risk,” says psychologist Adam Leventhal, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California and an author of the study.
When considered with previous research showing that greater social media use is associated with depression in teens, the new study suggests that “excessive digital media use doesn’t seem to be great for [their] mental health,” he adds.
Previous research has shown that watching television or playing video games on a console put teenagers at a slightly higher risk of developing ADHD behaviors. But less is known about the impact of computers, tablets and smartphones.
Because these tools have evolved very rapidly, there’s been little research into the impact of these new technologies on us, says Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician at the University of Michigan, who wrote an editorial about the new study for JAMA.
Each new platform reaches millions of people worldwide in a matter of days or weeks, she says. “Angry Birds reached 50 million users within 35 days. Pokémon Go reached the same number in 19 days.”
Research into their effects hasn’t been able to keep pace with the technological evolution, she adds.
“So it’s nice to finally to have some evidence on longer term impact that [these technologies are] having on children,” says Radesky.”I think it shows that something is going on, that there is an association, even if small, between these type[s] of media use habits throughout the day with emerging inattention, trouble with focusing, resisting distraction, controlling your impulses.”
The study followed 2,587 10th graders in schools in Los Angeles county over two years. The teens showed no symptoms of ADHD at the beginning of the study. By the end, teens with more frequent digital media use were more likely to have symptoms of ADHD.
The researchers assessed the students using a standardized questionnaire for ADHD symptoms, including nine symptoms each for inattention and hyperactivity. Students with six or more symptoms in either category were counted as having symptoms of the disorder, based on criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders.
During the two years of the study, the researchers surveyed the teens every six months and asked them about the frequency of their participation in 14 different kinds of online activities such as texting, sharing on social media and streaming videos or music.
About half of the students said they check social media sites and text many times every day.
“These results show that teens are really attached to their [digital] technologies, throughout the day,” says Radesky, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “It really captured the pervasive design that so many of these mobile technologies have taken on.”
By and large, students who frequently used six or more activities had a higher likelihood of developing ADHD symptoms.
For instance, among the 51 students who frequently did all 14 online activities, 10.5 percent showed ADHD symptoms over the course of the study. And of the 114 teens who frequently did seven digital activities, 9.5 showed symptoms. In contrast, only 4.6 percent of the 495 kids who didn’t do any of the activities frequently had new ADHD symptoms over the two-year period.
In other words, teens who were high frequency users of seven or 14 digital media platforms were more than twice as likely to develop ADHD symptoms than teens who did not use any media platform at a high frequency rate, notes Leventhal.
He and his colleagues statistically controlled for other potential confounding factors like family income level, race/ethnicity and pre-existing mental health conditions.Leventhal is quick to caution that his study does not prove that being plugged into their devices caused ADHD among teens. “We don’t know that,” he says.
Showing ADHD symptoms is not the same as ADHD diagnosis,which is a multi-step process that involves a clinician in addition to the questionnaire. The study did not diagnose any of the kids with ADHD.
The study doesn’t prove causation — it finds an association. Still, because the study involved students who did not show symptoms in the beginning, the results give some cause for concern, Leventhal says. “To have 10-ish percent [of the high frequency media users] have the occurrence of new symptoms is fairly high,” he says.
Starting the study with kids who did not have ADHD at baseline was “a smart choice.” notes Radesky. “It helps reduce the chicken and egg situation.”
One of the strengths of the study is that it included a large number of teens from a diverse backgrounds, because “sociodemographic diversity has been a limitation of prior studies on digital media,” she writes in the JAMA editorial.
While the study doesn’t show that all children are at risk of developing problems with attention and hyperactivity, “there is probably a sub-sample of kids who are more vulnerable,” notes Radesky.
For example, the study found that children with mental health problems were more likely to develop these symptoms.
“That’s important because those are the kids who are doing their emotional expression online,” says Radesky. “They might be getting into more drama online, getting into more cyber bullying. And that can definitely be dysregulating and affect your ability to focus on things.”
However, the study did have some limitations, she notes.
“There are other things changing over time that might explain the results you’re seeing,” she says. “In this case, they did not collect data on teenagers’ sleep. They didn’t have information on what the family dynamics were like at home, you know how involved were the parents? … How much media is being used at home by the parents?”
Previous studies have shown that social media use is associated with disturbed sleep, which could itself affect children’s ability to focus in school and that might manifest in ADHD-like symptoms.
Similarly, “the more parents are on their phone, the more teens are likely to be as well,” adds Radesky.
Radesky, who co-wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics’ media use guidelines, says that she recommends parents and their children pause and reflect on how they use media, so children can understand the benefits and pitfalls of their online habits.
“I’d really like teenagers to develop a sense of tech savviness … so they don’t all feel this pressure to be online constantly in order to feel social relevance or acceptance,” she says.
Twitter says users may see a drop in their followers as it begins removing suspicious accounts it has locked.
This is exactly what Facebook should be doing…constantly. It’s also why I spend so very little time on either of these social media platforms, and in fact, sadly, am very suspicious of all social media now that is based on accruing followers, click-like buttons, anonymous comments etc.
I publish my blog, in my control, respond to known or verified contacts, and generally just hope for the best that readers find my content useful to their lives.
Shannon Van Sant, NPR
Twitter has begun removing millions of locked accounts from users’ lists of followers, in an attempt to crack down further on social media fraud.
The move will eliminate tens of millions of frozen accounts Twitter has deemed suspicious and reduce the total combined follower count on the platform by about 6 percent.
“Most people will see a change of four followers or fewer; others with larger follower counts will experience a more significant drop,” wrote Twitter’s legal, policy and trust and safety lead Vijaya Gadde in a corporate blog post. “We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation.”
In May of this year Twitter announced that it was locking almost 10 million suspicious accounts per week and removing many for anti-spam policies. “Due to technology and process improvements during the past year, we are now removing 214% more accounts for violating our spam policies on a year-on-year basis,” Twitter said in a company blog post.
Twitter has come under criticism for allowing hate speech and has also been used as a tool for Russian influence. NPR’s Tim Mak and Libby Berry reported that Russia’s “information attack against the United States” during the 2016 campaign included Russians posing as American social media users and creating fake Twitter accounts that purported to be local newspapers.
“NPR has reviewed information connected with the investigation and found 48 such accounts. They have names such as @ElPasoTopNews, @MilwaukeeVoice, @CamdenCityNews and @Seattle_Post.
” ‘A not-insignificant amount of those had some sort of variation on what appeared to be a homegrown local news site,’ said Bret Schafer, a social media analyst for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks Russian influence operations and first noticed this trend.
“Another example: The Internet Research Agency created an account that looks like it is the Chicago Daily News. That newspaper shuttered in 1978.”
Mak reports these fake Twitter accounts distributed genuine news, building trust with readers, possibly for “some future, unforeseen effort.”
“Another twist: These accounts apparently never spread misinformation. In fact, they posted real local news, serving as sleeper accounts building trust and readership for some future, unforeseen effort.
” ‘They set them up for a reason. And if at any given moment, they wanted to operationalize this network of what seemed to be local American news handles, they can significantly influence the narrative on a breaking news story,’ Schafer told NPR. ‘But now instead of just showing up online and flooding it with news sites, they have these accounts with two years of credible history.’ “
Mak reports Twitter suspended these fake accounts, which were created in Russia.
Twitter says its continued crackdown on fraudulent accounts will not impact its total number of users. CFO Ned Segal said in a tweet that “most accounts we remove are not included in our reported metrics as they have not been active on the platform for 30 days or more, or we catch them at sign up and they are never counted.”
In a statement, Unilever’s chief marketing officer, Keith Weed, said, “Our digital ecosystem is being polluted by a growing number of fake user accounts, so Twitter’s commitment to cleaning up the digital space should be welcomed wholeheartedly by everyone, from users of the platforms, to creators and advertisers. People having an artificially-inflated follower count made up of bots and redundant accounts is at best deceiving and at worst, fraud. It serves no one and undermines trust in the entire system.”
“Greater transparency leads to greater authenticity, which in turn builds trust,” Weed continued. “This is a big step for the industry and I hope others will follow suit.”
Mumbai’s Juhu beach is strewn with trash at low tide during monsoon season. Floodwaters flush garbage out of the city and into the Arabian Sea. As tides ebb, beaches are blanketed in trash, much of it plastic. (Lauren Frayer/NPR)
From June to September, monsoon rains fall on Mumbai, India’s largest city, delivering relief from stifling heat and vital nourishment to surrounding farmland. But they also bring an unwelcome visitor: Tons of garbage wash up on the city’s shores.
When Mumbai floods, the water flushes waste out of city streets, storm drains and slums and sends it to the Arabian Sea. Then the tides ebb and blanket the beaches in that trash — most of it, plastic.
And now the government is taking action with a ban on plastics.
It’s easy to see the scope of the problem. Joggers, fishermen and families out for a weekend stroll on the waterfront have to clear a path through ankle-deep garbage.
Volunteers and some municipal workers carry buckets of trash to a bulldozer on Mumbai’s Versova Beach. Three years ago, a lawyer who lives near the beach, Afroz Shah, started a cleanup campaign on Facebook and Twitter. (Lauren Frayer/NPR)
Three years ago, a lawyer who lives near Mumbai’s Versova Beach decided he’d had enough.
“The culture of using and throwing away is dangerous. For example, plastic straws. You don’t need plastic straws in your life! They create havoc in a marine environment,” says lawyer Afroz Shah, who launched a cleanup campaign on Facebook and Twitter
I visited Versova Beach last week and saw about 50 volunteers picking up trash – at 7 a.m. on a weekday, in the rain. Among the items raked up and deposited into idling dump trucks: plastic soda bottles, empty chip bags, old sandals, toothpaste tubes, plastic bags — and many, many plastic straws.
A bald eagle flies over its nest in Middle River, Md., in 2009.
Farmers can be painted with a stereotypical salt of the earth wholesome image, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. There’s a dark, selfish, and nasty side to many of them. Here’s one example.
by Vanessa Romo
NPR – June 22, 2018
Robert Edgell has grown accustomed to seeing bald eagles soar over the family farm in Federalsburg, Md., so, when he discovered the carcasses of more than a dozen dead raptors on the property two years ago, he “was dumbfounded,” he told The Washington Post.
“Usually you see one or two soaring over the place, but to see 13 in that area and all deceased. … In all my years, I’d not seen anything like this,” Edgell said.
What could have caused the destruction of so many of the birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, he wondered?
The question was taken up by U.S. Fish and Wildlife authorities, who collected six of the 13 dead eagles. Almost immediately, they suspected poisoning as the cause of death.
They were right.
A 2016 necropsy report only recently obtained by radio station WNAV confirmed all six died after ingesting carbofuran, a pesticide banned by the Environmental Protection Agency beginning in the 1990s.
“Carbofuran was detected in the stomach and/or crop contents of all birds,” the report reads, adding that the pesticide also was found in the partial carcass of a raccoon and fur recovered from the site. Researchers found that five of the six eagles had consumed a recent meal that included raccoon. Other species ingested included marsh rice rat, domestic chicken and deer.
At the time the report was issued, authorities announced they were “intending to close the case in the near future due to a lack of evidence linking anyone to the crime.” No arrests have been made. Killing a bald eagle a felony crime punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
The granular form of carbofuran was banned 1991 partly due the the devastation it wreaked on avian wildlife. Officials estimated it was responsible for killing more than a million birds that mistook the toxic insecticide for grain seeds or consumed small animals that had eaten carbouran pellets. The liquid form was banned by the EPA in 2009.
“Carbofuran is so acutely toxic that animals have succumbed to it with just food in the mouth,” Mourad Gabriel, co-director of the Integral Ecology Research Center, told NPR. “Sometimes we find animals where the food material is undigested — mid-esophagus.”
Gabriel said illegal use of the pesticide by farmers and landowners “creates a vicious cycle of death from even just one poisoning.”
In California, illegal marijuana growers trying to protect their crops from animals are known to set “bait piles” laced with the liquid chemical, Gabriel said. Grey foxes, bears and turkeys there often are the first victims.
“Next come the vultures and other birds who consume the carrion, which later fly away and die some short distance away. Flies then lay eggs in those carcasses, which become poisoned food for other avian birds to feed on.”
John LaCorte, a special agent for the Fish and Wildlife Service told The Washington Post there is an “epidemic on the Eastern Shore” of wildlife-poisoning crimes because people find it “cheaper and easier” than trapping a nuisance animal or predator or building a fence.
La Corte, who spent six months interviewing more than a dozen people in connection to the dead eagles, said the cases are hard to solve because there rarely any witnesses, if any.
“If anyone wants to see things get done about this, they need to be courageous and come forward,” he said.
Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director, on Thursday at the White House. The plan to overhaul the government would make social welfare programs easier to cut.
The related stories to this current article are staggering in their volume and focus.
DeVos, Mulvaney, Pruitt, along with others in the Trump administration, who support them, become as close to defacto evil, as human beings can get, when their judgement suffers from the severe long-term damage of poor upbringing, childhood trauma, and quite probably, mental illness. That’s as polite as I can put it in trying to explain the actions of these people without using the usual epithets.
By Glenn Thrush and Erica L. Green • June 21, 2018
WASHINGTON — President Trump, spurred on by conservatives who want him to slash safety net programs, unveiled on Thursday a plan to overhaul the federal government that could have a profound effect on millions of poor and working-class Americans.
Produced over the last year by Mr. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, it would reshuffle social welfare programs in a way that would make them easier to cut, scale back or restructure, according to several administration officials involved in the planning.
Among the most consequential ideas is a proposal to shift the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a subsistence benefit that provides aid to 42 million poor and working Americans, from the Agriculture Department to a new mega-agency that would have “welfare” in its title — a term Mr. Trump uses as a pejorative catchall for most government benefit programs.
That proposal, which includes an equally ambitious plan to merge the Education and Labor Departments to consolidate work force programs, is not likely to gain the congressional approval needed to make the changes, Mr. Mulvaney’s aides conceded in a phone call with reporters on Thursday.
But the rollout has a bigger long-term purpose, said Margaret Weichert, one of Mr. Mulvaney’s deputies who drafted the proposal. She cast the proposal as a rallying cry for “small government” and said the audacity of the plan proved “why many Americans voted for this president.”
Mr. Trump, for his part, joked on Thursday that the plan was “extraordinarily boring” before TV cameras in the Cabinet Room.
But being boring in an all-too-exciting White House has provided cover for a small army of conservatives and think tank veterans who have been quietly churning out dozens of initiatives like the proposal to reshuffle the cabinet, with the ultimate goal of dismantling the American social welfare system from the inside out.
“Our guys have been in there since the start, grinding it out, and basically no one is noticing it except the smart liberals like Rachel Maddow,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former adviser, who believes the attack on social programs will be one of Mr. Trump’s most enduring policy achievements.
“It is one of the reasons Trump is at like 97 percent with the base. This is what the base wants,” he said. Referring to the right-wing conspiracy theorist who hosts a popular radio show and the progressive consumer activists allied with Ralph Nader, who became a force in Democratic politics in the 1970s, he added: “Trust me, it’s not Alex Jones that’s driving things. It’s these guys — they are our version of ‘Nader’s Raiders.’
Philip G. Alston, a New York University professor and the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, agreed with Mr. Bannon’s assessment. “My sense is they are making very considerable progress, even though no one is paying much attention,” he said.
But Mr. Alston, author of a recent study on endemic poverty in American cities and the rural South, has a different view of what Mr. Trump’s aides are trying to do. “There is a contempt for the poor that seems to permeate the president’s inner circle that seems very worrying,” he said. “It’s done under the banner of providing opportunity and seeking long-term solutions but it all seems designed to increase misery.”
The president himself is deeply uninterested in the details of policy and can identify only a handful of domestic policy aides, including Mr. Mulvaney, by name, according to current and former staff members. His policy operation during the 2016 campaign was skeletal.
Aides would often watch Mr. Trump’s stump speech on TV for cues on what he wanted to do, search Google for policy proposals that seemed to be the closest fit — then draft white papers or debate talking points from the results.
As president, Mr. Trump would become so bored with the details of domestic policy that aides long ago stopped sharing all but the most top-line specifics of their plans — including the reorganization, according to several people who have worked closely with Mr. Trump.
If Mr. Trump is fuzzy on policy, he is acutely attuned to the perils of offending his base, especially older voters.
A few weeks after Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Mulvaney and a handful of other aides, including Reince Priebus, then the chief of staff, approached the president in the Oval Office to suggest a slate of entitlement changes to reduce costs in the Medicare and Social Security programs.
They were a few minutes into their pitch, according to someone familiar with the meeting, when Mr. Trump waved a dismissive hand and shouted, “No way! What else you got?”
Mr. Trump has, however, given wide latitude to conservatives like the education secretary, Betsy DeVos; the housing secretary, Ben Carson; Attorney General Jeff Sessions; the director of the Domestic Policy Council, Andrew Bremberg; and Mr. Mulvaney, who has emerged as the most provocative and hyperactive of the president’s senior policy advisers.
Mrs. Devos has been especially aggressive, pushing to loosen restrictions on for-profit colleges and enforcement of civil rights laws. She is close to Mr. Mulvaney and supported the proposal to merge her department with the Labor Department, calling it a “bold reform” in a statement.
“Artificial barriers between education and work force programs have existed for far too long,” she added.
Democratic critics saw the new proposal as a threat to both departments, but the proposal also divided conservatives.
Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the Republican chairwoman of the House education committee who has aggressively pushed a higher education bill that would achieve the same goals, said it was “a recognition of the clear relationship between education policy at every level and the needs of the growing American work force.”
But it was one of the rare proposals that fell flat with conservative supporters who champion Mr. Trump’s agenda to shrink the government, in part because it did not include an accounting of staff members or funding for the reorganization.
Lindsey Burke, the education policy director at the Heritage Foundation, which has steered a slew of Trump policies, said that the proposal risked increasing the federal government’s role in education and the work force, creating more “bloat, control and federal tentacles in local schools and markets.”
For the most part, however, operatives aligned with Heritage, the Federalist Society and the sprawling Koch brothers network have been on the inside making policy.
Benjamin Hobbs, a former employee of Heritage and the Charles Koch Foundation, who received a top policy job at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was a driving force behind a proposal to raise rents on some of the poorest residents of subsidized housing by as much as 44 percent, according to two administration officials.
In a recent meeting, Mr. Hobbs raised eyebrows by claiming the increases were intended, in part, to persuade unmarried couples to move in with each other to pool rent payments, according to two people in attendance.
Mr. Carson, his boss, broadly supports the idea of reducing dependence, aides said, but was lukewarm on the idea. The backlash to the proposal was so severe that Mr. Carson, speaking this month in Detroit, wavered when asked whether he planned to back legislation needed to achieve the hikes.
Rick Dearborn, another former employee at Heritage, who served as deputy chief of staff for Mr. Trump during his first year in office, steered a total of about 70 Heritage-linked experts into policy roles in the White House and various cabinet departments.
At the same time, Mr. Bannon, who was Mr. Trump’s most influential aide at the dawn of the presidency, enlisted one of Heritage’s founders, Edwin J. Feulner Jr., to help create a list of action items on scaling back social welfare programs days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Heritage had just received a multimillion-dollar commitment from Mr. Bannon’s former benefactor, Rebekah Mercer, according to two people familiar with the gift. Much of the cash was informally earmarked, they said, to help Mr. Trump expand his near nascent policy operation, according to two people familiar with the details of the donation.
By early 2017, Heritage produced a government reorganization plan that served as the initial template for Thursday’s announcement. They also drafted a list of 334 policy recommendations, about half of them aimed at domestic programs for poor people or Obama-era regulations protecting low-income consumers.
“Once the transition started, we seized on the opportunity to help out and define the policy agenda of the next administration,” said Paul Winfree, a social policy expert at Heritage, who once worked for the Domestic Policy Council coordinating administration policy of social welfare programs and entitlements.
“Even when many thought Trump had no chance, Heritage researchers and alumni were working hard over on implementation plans,” said Mr. Winfree. “We went to work while much attention was paid to the palace intrigue or on personalities. Having one big personality isn’t enough to change a government. Having many good people, who know and trust each other, in the right places is the key.”
The core of Mr. Trump’s safety net policy is an expansion of work requirements to foster self-sufficiency among recipients of food assistance, Medicaid and housing subsidies to reduce dependence on the government. “Our goal is to get people on the path to self-sufficiency,” Mr. Bremberg said.
Its real purpose, advocates for poor people claim, is to kick hundreds of thousands of the needy off the federal rolls, to cut taxes for the rich.
That effort dovetailed with a separate but related rollback in the enforcement of fair housing, educational equity, payday lending and civil rights cases pursued aggressively under the Obama administration intended to protect vulnerable populations from discrimination and abusive business practices.
“It’s a war on the poor, pure and simple,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which has challenged several Trump administration policies in federal court.
The pace of administration activity in all of these areas has picked up sharply this year, in part because many of the conservatives inside the administration believe Mr. Trump’s political and legal troubles will limit their window for action after the midterm elections.
Over the last two weeks alone, Mr. Trump’s team unsuccessfully tried to ram through a $15 billion bill clawing back domestic spending, Mr. Mulvaney fired the 25-member advisory board at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he serves as the acting director, and administration lawyers challenged an Obama-era anti-discrimination rule that resulted in greater funding for projects in minority neighborhoods.
What remains unclear is whether the flurry of activity will have a long-term effect on the trajectory of federal spending and the management of safety net programs.
This year, the Heritage Foundation reported that Mr. Trump had checked off 64 percent of their policy checklist. But dozens of those victories were partial or pyrrhic.
Some proposals, including Medicaid waivers that allow states to impose work requirements and the reorientation of enforcement across an array of federal agencies, are moving ahead despite court challenges. But many others, especially those in Mr. Mulvaney’s dead-on-arrival budget proposals, have been blocked by Democrats with the help of Senate Republicans.
As Mr. Mulvaney was pitching his reorganization plan to the cabinet and news media on Thursday, the House was passing a farm bill that included stiffer work requirements for SNAP recipients. Senate Republicans have already vowed to kill that provision.
A handful of Mr. Mulvaney’s recommendations, including changes to federal personnel management and State Department overseas aid programs, can be accomplished through executive action alone.
But many other parts of Mr. Mulvaney’s reorganization plan are likely to face similar resistance as work requirements, including efforts to consolidate fisheries and wildlife programs, aggregate food safety and inspection programs in the Agriculture Department, shift rural housing programs to HUD and move the Army Corps of Engineers to civilian agencies, among others.
“This is an art-of-the-possible exercise,” Ms. Weichert said.
Anthony Bourdain was a refreshing breakaway from the huge crop of foodie chefs that rained down on restaurant and eating culture from the 1990s on. For nearly twenty years after retiring from the grinding restaurant business, he lived his loves of food, travel, writing, and pushing boundaries, as an edgy poet eager to say anything, and everything he felt about the small, and large world around him. Bourdain contributed volumes of eloquence and insight from the many roads of life he traveled. His steady TV presence kept me company over many meals inspired by his passion, as did his cultural narratives that lulled me to sleep dreaming of following his footsteps. I will miss every bit of this… a lot. Maybe what I will miss most is the gift of his desire simply to share it all with us. 😔
A child plays with a mobile phone while riding in a New York subway in December. Two major Apple investors urged the iPhone maker to take action to curb growing smartphone use among children.
Ok…fine, but if parents cave to their kids’ whining, and pouting when it’s time for lockdown, it won’t matter. For many of the kids who are fixated to mobile devices and/or social media, fixing the problem has been undermined by their parents’ addiction, or unwillingness to clamp down. The ship has sailed on helping older teens and young adults already captured take in the world beyond a phone screen. Hopefully, the next generation might regain the ability to straighten their necks, and look up.
Laura Sydell/NPR
June 4, 2018
Apple on Monday announced a new app to allow users to get reports on how much their kids are using particular apps on their iPhones and iPads.
Apple is calling the app Screen Time, and it will let parents set time limits on how long their children can use apps, from Netflix to Snapchat, said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. Screen Time would also allow parents to limit access to some apps and websites. One option is designed to get kids to unplug from their devices at bedtime.
The new feature — announced at the company’s annual conference for developers in San Jose, Calif. — will be part of the next Apple mobile operating system, iOS 12, which is expected out later this year.
Users will now be able to get a few summary of the time they spend on the phone and how long they are on certain apps. Users will also be able to set a time limit for themselves on a particular app.
“We know, this is something that can help families achieve the right balance for them,” Federighi said.
In an interview Monday with NPR, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “We have never been about maximizing the number of times you pick it up, the number of times you use it.
“All of these things are great conveniences of life,” he said. “They change your daily life in a great way. But if you’re being bombarded by notifications all day long, that’s probably a use of the system that might not be so good anymore.”
Apple also launched a “Families” webpage in March, outlining ways in which parents can utilize the company’s pre-existing features.
“We first introduced parental controls for iPhone in 2008, and our team has worked thoughtfully over the years to add features to help parents manage their children’s content,” Federighi said.
Apple’s announcement Monday follows pressure from activist shareholders to take the lead in developing controls to help parents limit iPhone use by teens and children.
In January, Jana Partners and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS, wrote a letter to Apple about growing “societal unease” about overuse of technology and in particular smart phones, which at some point could turn people away from buying Apple products. They called upon Apple to take a stronger role in helping parents control their children’s use of electronic devices.
CalSTRS and Jana, which, combined, owned about $2 billion in Apple stock, say the company could help minimize “unintentional negative consequences” of overusing digital devices and spending too much time on social media.
Charles Penner, a partner with Jana Partners, said the investment firm sees Apple’s latest moves as positive.
“We’re still reviewing it, but Apple appears to have addressed the vast majority of our concerns, and we look forward to seeing their follow-through,” Penner said.
One study by nonprofit group Common Sense Media said that 78 percent of teens check their phones at least hourly and 50 percent report feeling “addicted” to their phones.
Right now, controls give two options — all on or all off. Shareholders want more options for controls that help with screen-time management. They also requested that Apple convene a panel to study the issue.
Monday’s announcement addresses some of the concerns of the shareholders.
Apple’s initiative is the latest push from technology companies under pressure to address smartphone addiction.
“We need to have tools and data to allow us to understand how we consume digital media,” Tony Fadell, a former senior Apple executive, told Bloomberg in May. “We need to get finer-grain language and start to understand that an iPhone is just a refrigerator, it’s not the addiction.”
Google announced similar controls in May for its Android P operating system, which include expanded do-not-disturb controls and ways to track app usage. Google introduced a “wind down” mode that changes the screen’s brightness and color scale later in the evenings. The new software will also allow users to set time limits on apps, similar to what Apple plans to roll out.
“…of the 1,566 institutions studied, 242 reported higher grad rates for their Pell students.”
The focus of this article is about the majority of Pell students having lower grad rates when compared to non Pell students. However, the writer doesn’t even entertain the important question of why 242 schools put out better Pell grad rates than non Pell. Statistically, its a tiny percentage, but its still 242 schools! Its worth looking at, and at least, questioning. >MB
We Now Know A Lot More About Students Who Receive Federal College Grants
by Elissa Nadworny
NPR – June 3, 2018
There’s been a lot of attention lately on low-income students on campus — mostly on how to recruit them and how to make them feel welcome….
Many graduates follow one path, but for Pell grantees, it’s not so simple.
Scott Hutchinson, singer songwriter, founder of the band, Frightened Rabbit, died earlier this month.
I didn’t know him, nor the band’s music well, so I decided to listen some. I came away feeling a familiar sadness, as I often have, after an artistic soul of uncommon depth leaves this earth all too early, from tragic events, and worst of all, from apparent suicide.
The world is dense with throngs of humanity that deliberately choose paths of danger, conflict, warfare, and high risk behavior. Their deaths hurt people left behind, but those outcomes are part of a calculation they made willingly, knowingly playing the odds.
Then, there are people like Scott Hutchinson, and those like him, who have a calling to create music, art, dance, and deeper voices, to share with the rest of us, while they wrestle inside of themselves to find meaning. They die too soon, and too tragically, of struggle they can never quite calculate.
When it comes to corporate theft, betrayal of public trust, nonexistent ethics, immorality, and anything else from the playbook of man’s darkest sides, big pharm companies stand alone in the spotlight of evil, right next door to cold blooded murder.
Understand the new environment we are all in regarding the fight for credible news reporting, and the lack of visible sourcing. Most especially, this is evident in the new distributors of news and information, that live entirely online, and have no legacy of respectable journalistic heritage, nor transparent pedigree of their writers and reporters.
When you realize this, you will come face to face with the reality, that finding credible news and information, is not simply about what you read that’s wrapped in someone’s crafty banner, catchy URL, self-stated mission, masthead, or attention-getting headline. It’s about what, and who, you proactively decide to trust as your source/s of news and information.
The temptation to click, read, share, and disseminate, provocative news we come upon in this new ecosystem is strong. I understand this. It’s so easy to pass along news, shares, online content, to any, and every social media feed we have access to. But, to do so, without qualifying, quantifying, or looking deeper to its origins, it’s sourcing, it’s depth of reporting, or any other checkboxes to gain context, is contributing, even if innocently, to the problem of misinformation and exaggerations that are warping our present day news culture.
There are millions of us who consciously, deliberately, pass on, and share, news and information that we believe in, and feel strongly about in trying to influence others, or to bond with our tribe. This is who we are, and have a right to be.
What I ask, and hope for, from myself, and online posters of all persuasions, on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and everywhere else, is to resist the urge to share any and all, news and info links that don’t show established journalistic roots, or traceable accountability for their content. In choosing what you read, and share, I ask that you make your decision on active, specific criteria in determining accuracy, and motive of the publisher.
This won’t be easy. You’ll need to accept inherent bias along the way. Don’t expect to be free of it, ever. But, if you dedicate to the truth, tarnished as it can be, not just dwelling on compatible positions, you will get through the weeds.
Do this, and it will help you to pick through the informational refuse littering our new, and misleading cyber ecosystem. It will help protect you, and all of us, from a dangerous and destructive atmosphere of continuous mistrust that is already pushing down on our airspace of communication. No matter who seems to be, or feels that they are, on the right side, that atmosphere will eventually suffocate us all.
We can rise above, and push through this muck. It just takes willpower, and work. Same as it ever was.
Listen to each other. Each other. Who woulda thought??!!
Solid advice on how loving partners survive conflict, and grow together.
If you find you can’t do this, nor consider it a priority above all else, or just feel put upon to do it, you really don’t belong in the relationship you’re in.
“Give up what you have to give up today, so tomorrow can be better.”
Understanding Iran and global relations is not a laughing matter, and should never be reduced to a series of smarmy jokes and cheap laughs, but, if your attention span is not geared to digging into the history and politics of this region and U.S. behavior towards it, at least invest twenty minutes in John Oliver’s take.
Still, the best thing on comedy commentary TV. John Oliver stands alone in providing vigorously instructive, educational and funny content on national and world affairs.
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.
When a gunman killed 20 first graders and six adults with an assault rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, it rattled Newtown, Conn., and reverberated across the world. Since then, there have been at least 239 school shootings nationwide. In those episodes, 438 people were shot, 138 of whom were killed.
The data used here is from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that began tracking school shootings in 2014, about a year after Sandy Hook.
Gunshot Victims in School Shootings
The shootings have taken place at sporting events and in parking lots, cafeterias, hallways and classrooms.
A shooting took place Wednesday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., about an hour northwest of Miami. As of Wednesday night, 17 people had been killed and the number of people injured was unknown.
Sixteen of the 239 shootings shown below can be classified as mass shootings, events in which four or more people are shot.
On average, there have been about five school shootings each month, including episodes that were not mass shootings.
Let’s play a game: The next time you’re sitting among a group of friends or out on a date, measure how much time passes before someone grabs their phone to look at it.
How long can you last?
“If that happens, that’s when dinner ends,” said Judith Martin, the Washington Post writer whose Miss Manners column is syndicated to 200 newspapers a week.
“I don’t think anyone would dare do that to me,” she said.
Most of us don’t have the authority that comes with 40 years of being Miss Manners, but no matter who you are it can be near impossible to pry anyone away from their mobile playthings. (Harder still: Are your friends or partner more into their smartphone than they are into you?)
The problem of looking at our devices nonstop is both social and physiological.
The average human head weighs between 10 and 12 pounds, and when we bend our neck to text or check Facebook, the gravitational pull on our head and the stress on our neck increases to as much as 60 pounds of pressure. That common position, pervasive among everyone from paupers to presidents, leads to incremental loss of the curve of the cervical spine. “Text neck” is becoming a medical issue that countless people suffer from, and the way we hang our heads has other health risks, too, according to a report published last year in The Spine Journal.
And the remedy can be ridiculously simple: Just sit up.
Social psychologists like Amy Cuddy claim even standing in a confident posture, with your head up and shoulders back, can heighten testosterone and cortisol flow in the brain, preventing much of the above. So, why aren’t we heeding these signs? It might be simple denial.
Inattentional blindness is a problem
Some 75 percent of Americans believe their smartphone usage doesn’t impact their ability to pay attention in a group setting, according to the Pew Research Center, and about a third of Americans believe that using phones in social settings actually contributes to the conversation.
But does it?
Etiquette experts and social scientists are adamantly united: Nope.
That “always-on” behavior that smartphones contribute to causes us to remove ourselves from our reality, experts said. And aside from the health consequences, if we’re head down, our communication skills and manners are slumped, too. But, ironically, that might not be how most of us see ourselves.
“We think somehow that this antisocial behavior is not going to affect me,” said Niobe Way, professor of applied psychology at New York University.
Ms. Way studies technology’s role in shaping adolescent development. These head-down interactions take us away from the present, no matter what group we’re in, she said. And it’s not just a youth problem. It’s ingrained, learned, copied and repeated, much of it from mimicking adults. When kids see their parents head down, they emulate that action. The result is a loss of nonverbal cues, which can stunt development.
“What’s happening more and more is we’re not talking to our children,” Ms. Way said. “We put them in front of the tech when they’re young, and when we’re older, we’re absorbed in our own tech.”
You’ve seen it: Think of how some parents deal with screaming toddlers. “Here kid, take this iPhone and go to town,” according to Ms. Way — not, “Let’s talk this out, what seems to be the problem, son?’”
She added: “We think, ‘Somehow my kids will know what’s a good and bad interaction, they’ll have empathy.’ But when I go upstairs into my son’s room and seven teens are all looking at their phones, none of them saying a word, there’s all sorts of disengagement happening. It’s not Facebook that’s the problem, it’s how we’re using Facebook.”
All ages are affected
A study in 2010 found that adolescents ages 8 to 18 spent more than 7.5 hours a day consuming media. Since then, our digital addictions have continued to, in some ways, define our lives: In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that 24 percent of teenagers are “almost constantly” online.
“Mobile devices are the mother of inattentional blindness,” said Henry Alford, the author of “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners.” “That’s the state of monomaniacal obliviousness that overcomes you when you’re absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of everything else.”
The social scientist Sherry Turkle analyzed 30 years of family interactions in her book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.” She found that children now compete with their parents’ devices for attention, resulting in a generation afraid of the spontaneity of a phone call or face-to-face interaction. Eye contact now seems to be optional, Dr. Turkle suggests, and sensory overload can often mean our feelings are constantly anesthetized.
Researchers at the University of Michigan claim empathy levels have plummeted while narcissism is skyrocketing, with emotional development, confidence and health all affected when we tuck our chins in and let our heads hang like human ostriches.
Facebook’s former president, Sean Parker, recently said the platform was designed to be addictive and to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible,” which he characterized as boosting our self-esteem, ever-present in the dopamine hit of likes.
“It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” he said. “It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
That said: You’re probably reading this story on a mobile device right now. And that’s O.K.! (As long as you’re not behind the wheel.) We’re not here to tell you to throw away your iPhone and abandon digital media. But like many addictions, admitting a problem is the first step to treatment. And, mercifully, the fix isn’t anti-tech — it’s pro-conversation, according to Dr. Turkle.
Make an effort to interact with people
Digital detoxes have never been so popular, but they’re no cure-all, and realistically, there simply isn’t a black-and-white fix.
The simplest answer for all of us is biblical: Do unto others — and maybe do it without clutching your smartphone. Next time you’re in the checkout lane or stopped at a red light, look around. How many people are really there with you?
“Actual human beings, in the flesh, take precedence,” Ms. Martin chided. “To ignore people you’re with is rude, whether you ignore them for virtual friends or distant friends by snubbing them.”
It sounds so obvious it almost borders on stupid. But like Dr. Turkle’s hope of building dialogue, not denigrating the digerati, it’s an obvious dialogue we’re not having enough of.
Mr. Alford, who used to write a monthly manners column for The New York Times, described the issue as a “monomaniacal obliviousness” of being absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
“To treat the person standing in front of you as secondary to your phone, is usually, as the kids say, a micro-aggression,” he said.
Many Silicon Valley pundits go to war when anyone so much as suggests that tech’s merits aren’t uniformly positive. But in light of the brutal schoolyard that social media has become, that approach now appears moot.
Young or old, we’re all a generation of literal test cases. Etiquette, manners, body language, the way we respond, interact and even look is changing. We’re missing a whole life happening a mere 90 degrees above our smartphones. Start looking up.
“Never be the first person in the group to whip out his phone,” Mr. Alford said. “Don’t be Patient Zero.”
Correction 1/30/2018: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of car accidents attributed to the use of smartphones. About one quarter of car accidents in the United States are caused by texting and talking on the phone while driving, not solely by texting.
Adam Popescu is a writer living in Los Angeles who contributes frequently to the Times. He can be reached on Twitter at @adampopescu
You gotta be crazy, you gotta have a real need
You gotta sleep on your toes, and when you’re on the street
You gotta be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed
And then moving in silently, down wind and out of sight
You gotta strike when the moment is right without thinking
And after a while, you can work on points for style
Like the club tie, and the firm handshake
A certain look in the eye and an easy smile
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you,
You’ll get the chance to put the knife in
You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder
You know it’s going to get harder, and harder, and harder as you get older
And in the end you’ll pack up and fly down south
Hide your head in the sand,
Just another sad old man
All alone and dying of cancer
And when you loose control, you’ll reap the harvest you have sown
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone
And it’s too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around
So have a good drown, as you go down, all alone
Dragged down by the stone (stone, stone, stone, stone, stone)
I gotta admit that I’m a little bit confused
Sometimes it seems to me as if I’m just being used
Gotta stay awake, gotta try and shake off this creeping malaise
If I don’t stand my own ground, how can I find my way out of this maze?
Deaf, dumb, and blind, you just keep on pretending
That everyone’s expendable and no-one has a real friend
And it seems to you the thing to do would be to isolate the winner
And everything’s done under the sun
And you believe at heart, everyone’s a killer
Who was born in a house full of pain
Who was trained not to spit in the fan
Who was told what to do by the man
Who was broken by trained personnel
Who was fitted with collar and chain
Who was given a pat on the back
Who was breaking away from the pack
Who was only a stranger at home
Who was ground down in the end
Who was found dead on the phone
Who was dragged down by the stone
To live honestly, is to spend quiet time with ourselves doing nothing but thinking about life, and what we feel about it. Deeply, honestly,
I don’t mean some few random minutes of thumbnail introspection, whilst in the throes of passion, perhaps during a conflict or interaction about our strongest beliefs, followed by making a grand statement or two, spoken aloud, or to ourselves, as we putter around the house, doing laundry, or feeding house pets. Anybody can do that.
I mean really devoting specifically directed block of time, of thirty or more minutes, in quiet isolation, on a periodic basis, alone with ourselves, free of interruption and distraction, thinking about what we really feel deep inside about who we are, what we want, need, and believe to be most important to help us feel balanced with, and reasonably adjusted to, the complexities, and challenges of life.
It is most important that when spending this time alone to think about who we are, we do so with no pretense, or illusion, on realistic expectations, circumstances beyond our control, or a denial of who we are, innately, instinctively, without apology, guilt, conflict, or hesitancy.
For better or worse, given the benefit or consequences, to face all of this without fear, is the only way to live honestly within oneself. It will help us be who we really are, and it will allow us to live honestly with others.
China’s ban means recycling is piling up at Rogue Waste System in southern Oregon. Employees Scott Fowler, Laura Leebrick and Garry Penning say their only option for now is to send it to a landfill. > Jes Burns/OPB/EarthFix
How ironic, that China, who has been caught red handed tainting everything from pet food to pharmaceuticals, and vitamin and herb supplements, has become oh-so-picky about its recycled imports.
American households, businesses, municipalities do not do a good enough job recycling. Whether its by using outdated inefficient methods for separating, or, by not doing it anywhere near the volume we could be with real dedication. Here in Hamden, there are large communities that do single stream recycling. All kinds of crap thrown in the supposed recycling dumpsters. Really pathetic. Nobody cares. Nobody’s fined. Nobody’s accountable. There’s no excuse for towns to allow single stream recycling anymore. This is a lazy and wasteful cop-out approach to recycling.
Garbage is a daunting issue awaiting us that will eventually cause major global eco stress. Meantime, here’s an impressive video on robotics tackling the sorting challenge…
Recycling Chaos In U.S. As China Bans ‘Foreign Waste’
Like many Portland residents, Satish and Arlene Palshikar are serious recyclers. Their house is coated with recycled bluish-white paint. They recycle their rainwater, compost their food waste and carefully separate the paper and plastic they toss out. But recently, after loading up their Prius and driving to a sorting facility, they got a shock.
I was not of the teen or young adult generation who grew up with the Beatles, but I was solidly attached in adolescence to my evolving musical taste. In the spring of 1963, I officially became a Beatles fan, with the release of the single, I Saw Her Standing There, from the Beatles debut album, Please, Please Me.
I know this will sound nutty, and overstated, but the world changed for me that day. If you were my age, certainly a teenager, or a bit older, and you were a Beatles fan, you will know what I mean. If you were not a Beatles fan, I’m not sure I could actually trust you, but that’s a topic for another day.
In the meantime, from that day on, until the day they stopped recording together in 1970, The Beatles were an emblem of my youth, and a prism through which I viewed much of the world around me. To say that about anything, or anybody, let alone, a musical group, sounds so outlandish. Almost cult-like. But in truth, that’s what they were to millions and millions of fans. Four dudes who riveted most of the planet for the seven or so years after their mother ship arrived.
As the many years have passed, I have forgotten a lot from those days, but every time I spend a few minutes reflecting back, especially on The Beatles, I get a feeling that is too special to even put into words. You really had to be there. You had to live through the phenomenon to have even a clue of what is was, and what it meant.
Ron Howard’s documentary, Eight Days a Week is a must see for any Beatles fan, who wants to feel that time again. There is some excellent rare footage that most people haven’t seen, including live performances that just made me smile the whole way through. If you’re of The Beatles vintage, go and watch this film. Available for rental and purchase on Amazon, Hulu, PBS, and elsewhere. So, so good.
Uber has acknowledged that the personal information of 57 million customers and drivers was hacked last year.
I have never trusted the Uber model because I never liked its CEO and co-founder, Travis Kalanick.
The privacy theft UBER engaged in with its app update earlier this year revealed the first public glance at how he ran this business. I am sure most riders let it slide. They shouldn’t have. Kalanick proceeded to get in deeper trouble stealing software, sexually harassing employees, and supporting a trashy workplace culture.
He was finally pushed out by shareholders, but now this!
It’s time for another company to try and provide a sharing service like this. The concept is promising, but I don’t like UBER executing it. Try LYFT. Or just plan ahead and call a cab.
Convenience should not blind us to risk and exploitation. UBER is not to be trusted.
A malapropism (also called a malaprop or Dogberryism) is the use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, sometimes humorous utterance. An example is the statement by baseball player Yogi Berra, “Texas has a lot of electrical votes”, rather than “electoral votes“.[1] Malapropisms often occur as errors in natural speech and are sometimes the subject of media attention, especially when made by politicians or other prominent individuals. Philosopher Donald Davidson has noted that malapropisms show the complex process through which the brain translates thoughts into language.
Humorous malapropisms are the type that attract the most attention and commentary, but bland malapropisms are common in speech and writing.
Etymology
The word “malapropism” (and its earlier variant “malaprop”) comes from a character named “Mrs. Malaprop” in Richard Brinsley Sheridan‘s 1775 play The Rivals.[2] Mrs. Malaprop frequently misspeaks (to comic effect) by using words which don’t have the meaning that she intends but which sound similar to words that do. Sheridan presumably chose her name in humorous reference to the word malapropos, an adjective or adverb meaning “inappropriate” or “inappropriately”, derived from the French phrase mal à propos (literally “poorly placed”). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of “malapropos” in English is from 1630,[3] and the first person known to have used the word “malaprop” in the sense of “a speech error” is Lord Byron in 1814.[4]
The synonymous term “Dogberryism” comes from the 1598 Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing in which the character Dogberry utters many malapropisms to humorous effect.[5] Though Shakespeare was an earlier writer than Sheridan, “malaprop/malapropism” seems an earlier coinage than “Dogberryism”, which is not attested until 1836.[6]
Distinguishing features
An instance of speech error is called a malapropism when a word is produced which is nonsensical or ludicrous in context, yet similar in sound to what was intended.[7]
Definitions differ somewhat in terms of the cause of the error. Some scholars include only errors that result from a temporary failure to produce the word which the speaker intended.[8] Such errors are sometimes called “Fay-Cutler malapropism”, after David Fay and Anne Cutler, who described the occurrence of such errors in ordinary speech.[7][9] Most definitions, however, include any actual word that is wrongly or accidentally used in place of a similar sounding, correct word. This broader definition is sometimes called “classical malapropism”,[9] or simply “malapropism”.[7]
Malapropisms differ from other kinds of speaking or writing mistakes, such as eggcorns or spoonerisms, and from the accidental or deliberate production of newly made-up words (neologisms).[9]
For example, it is not a malapropism to use obtuse [wide or dull] instead of acute [narrow or sharp]; it is a malapropism to use obtuse [stupid or slow-witted] when one means abstruse [esoteric or difficult to understand].
Malapropisms tend to maintain the part of speech of the originally intended word. According to linguist Jean Aitchison, “The finding that word selection errors preserve their part of speech suggest that the latter is an integral part of the word, and tightly attached to it.”[10] Likewise, substitutions tend to have the same number of syllables and the same metrical structure – the same pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables – as the intended word or phrase. If the stress pattern of the malapropism differs from the intended word, unstressed syllables may be deleted or inserted; stressed syllables and the general rhythmic pattern are maintained.[10]
Examples from fiction
The fictional Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s play The Rivals utters many malapropisms. In Act 3 Scene III, she declares to Captain Absolute, “Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oraculartongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!”[11] This nonsensical utterance might, for example, be corrected to, “If I apprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my vernacular tongue, and a nice arrangement of epithets“,[12] —although these are not the only words that can be substituted to produce an appropriately expressed thought in this context, and commentators have proposed other possible replacements that work just as well.
Other malapropisms spoken by Mrs. Malaprop include “illiterate him quite from your memory” (instead of “obliterate”), and “she’s as headstrong as an allegory” (instead of alligator).[11]
Malapropisms appeared in many works before Sheridan created the character of Mrs. Malaprop. William Shakespeare used them in a number of his plays, almost invariably spoken by comic ill-educated lower class characters. Mistress Quickly, the inn-keeper associate of Falstaff in several Shakespeare plays, is a regular user of malapropisms.[13] In Much Ado About Nothing, Constable Dogberry tells Governor Leonato, “Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons” (i.e., apprehended two suspicious persons) (Act 3, Scene V).[14]
Modern writers make use of malapropisms in novels, cartoons, films, television, and other media.
Malapropism was one of Stan Laurel‘s comic mannerisms. In Sons Of The Desert, for example, he says that Oliver Hardy is suffering a nervous “shakedown” (rather than “breakdown”), and calls the Exalted Ruler of their group the “exhausted ruler”; in The Music Box, he inadvertently asked a policeman, “Don’t you think you’re bounding over your steps?” meaning “stepping over your bounds” – which Hardy corrected, causing the cop to get more angry at him.[15] British comedian Ronnie Barker also made great use of deliberate malapropisms in his comedy, notably in such sketches as his “Appeal on behalf of the Loyal Society for the Relief of Suffers from Pismronunciation”, which mixed malapropisms and garbled words for comic effect – including news of a speech which “gave us a few well-frozen worms (i.e., well-chosen words) in praise of the society.”[16][non-primary source needed]
Archie Bunker, a character in the American TV sitcom All in the Family, is also known for malapropisms. He calls Orthodox Jews “off-the-docks Jews” and refers to “the Women’s Lubrication Movement” (rather than Liberation).[17]
Real-life examples
Malapropisms do not occur only as comedic literary devices. They also occur as a kind of speech error in ordinary speech.[8] Examples are often quoted in the media. Welsh Conservative leader Andrew Davies, encouraged the Conservative party conference to make breakfast (i.e. Brexit) a success. Bertie Ahern, former Taoiseach of Ireland, warned his country against “upsetting the apple tart” (i.e., apple cart) of his country’s economic success.[18][19]
Australian politician Tony Abbott once claimed that no one “is the suppository of all wisdom” (i.e., repository or depository).[21] Similarly, as reported in New Scientist, an office worker had described a colleague as “a vast suppository of information”. The worker then apologised for his “Miss-Marple-ism” (i.e. malapropism).[22]New Scientist noted this as possibly the first time anyone had uttered a malapropism for the word malapropism itself.
Texas governor Rick Perry has been known to commonly utter malapropisms, for example describing states as “lavatories of innovation and democracy” instead of “laboratories”.[23]
During a Senate hearing, Philippine presidential communications assistant secretary Mocha Uson stumbled on the legal phrase “right against self-incrimination” by invoking her “right against self-discrimination” instead.[24]
Philosophical implications
In his essay “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”, philosopher Donald Davidson suggests that malapropisms reveal something about how people process the meanings of words. He argues that language competence must not simply involve learning a set meaning for each word, and then rigidly applying those semantic rules to decode other people’s utterances. Rather, he says, people must also be continually making use of other contextual information to interpret the meaning of utterances, and then modifying their understanding of each word’s meaning based on those interpretations.
We all have strong protective edges. They help us forge on, against friction in life. When challenges arise, or things get difficult, the edges come out of our psychological sheaths, to cut through the resistance. On the other hand, when they become locked behind their bay doors, unable to engage, we struggle with adversity and troubled times.
Conflicted personal, or emotional relationships can weaken our native edge resources and their strength. What was once our innate strength as human beings, to rise above, fight back, and never give up, gets lost and muddled when emotional conflict moves in to the neighborhood. Emotion, is the one area that needs its own health, independent of all others, in order to support all the rest of our survival systems. Gain the edges, and you rise to challenges. Lose the edges, and you lose your power.
A recent speech by George W. Bush made headlines for its pointed criticisms of Donald Trump, but there was something else he said that I found far more compelling. As soon as he finished his thank-yous and his little jokes, Mr. Bush dived immediately into the heart of the crisis confronting Western democracies today:
“The great democracies face new and serious threats, yet seem to be losing confidence in their own calling and competence. Economic, political and national security challenges proliferate, and they are made worse by the tendency to turn inward. The health of the democratic spirit itself is at issue. And the renewal of that spirit is the urgent task at hand.”
I was hardly a fan of how Mr. Bush sought to renew that spirit as president. But I was impressed with these words. They show an understanding of the grave stakes that challenge the United States and other Western democracies.
The problem is not simply one of Mr. Trump’s coarseness and divisiveness and extremism. The problem, from Brexit to Mr. Trump’s election to the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, is how the liberal order responds to a crisis that threatens its erasure in favor of a reactionary, authoritarian alternative.
Those are pretty high stakes. I’m glad Mr. Bush understands them, but given that he’s retired, not much hinges on whether he grasps them.
Much hangs, however, on whether the Democrats understand them. And if they expect to recapture the White House in 2020 and take the lead in restoring and reforming the postwar democratic framework, they — or, at least, one of them — absolutely must.
I haven’t seen much evidence that the party and its crop of potential presidential candidates are up for it. I was disappointed, for example, that after the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., while Democrats duly denounced President Trump’s reaction and the rally’s white supremacism and the right’s defense of Confederate statuary (tough calls!), no one who purports to want to lead the party — and country — out of this darkness stepped forward to offer broader reflections on that grim episode.
Bah! It’s too early for that, some will say. The Democrats are an opposition party right now, and their main job is to oppose. And under the leadership of Senator Charles Schumer and Representative Nancy Pelosi, they’re doing that quite well. But I don’t think Democratic reluctance here is just a matter of timing.
The Democrats are undergoing a historic transformation, from being the party that embraced neoliberalism in the early 1990s to one that is rejecting that centrist posture and moving left. There’s plenty about this to cheer — the neoliberal Democratic Party didn’t do nearly enough to try to arrest growing income inequality, among other shortcomings.
There will be necessary internecine fights, and they boil down to loyalty tests on particular positions demanded by the vanguard. Consider the debate within the party on Senator Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” bill, which most (though not all) 2020 contenders rushed to attach themselves to. To fail to sign on to that legislation is to open oneself to criticism, even abuse, although it’s less a piece of legislation than a goal.
Forget about who’s right and wrong in these debates. Time will sort that out.
My point is that they tend to consume a party experiencing a shift. The Democratic Party, because it is an amalgam of interest groups in a way the Republican Party is not, has always had a tendency to elevate the candidate who can check the most boxes. The current internal dynamics exacerbate that. It’s also worth remembering that no one besides party activists cares.
So when the party’s leaders tussle over this or that policy, they also need to take a step back, to see the direction the country — the West itself — is heading, and take a stand on it. This isn’t just a matter of high-minded idealism; it’s what separates great politicians from merely good ones.
History tells us that the transformative politicians, the ones who can change the country’s direction and will really matter in the history books, are the ones who can do both. I think there have been four of them in the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Why Roosevelt and Reagan should be obvious. I know some would dispute my choice of Mr. Clinton, but he rescued a party that had lost three presidential elections in a row and was being read last rites by some pundits in 1991 (the extent to which he changed the country’s fundamental direction is debatable). Mr. Obama made history and redrew the electoral map. All four were able to speak both to their base and beyond it by identifying the challenge of the moment and persuading majorities that they had some answers.
The future of the Western democratic project is the fundamental issue of our era. It’s under attack from Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon and many people in between (and to the extent that he backs Mr. Bannon’s purge of the Republican Party, from the president himself; think about that).
Democrats can’t duck this question and expect the broader electorate to see them as prepared to lead. To his credit, Mr. Sanders did talk a bit about all this in a foreign-policy speech in late September at the same Missouri college where Winston Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech, noting an “international order” that is “under great strain.”
The Democrats were the party that created this order after World War II. They must now be the party that fixes and saves it.
Michael Tomasky is a columnist for The Daily Beast and editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we’d never die.
—Abraham Maslow
“Where is wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
—T.S Eliot
The mind learns by doing. The heart learns by trying.
—Unknown
Take what you want, said God, and pay for it.
—Spanish Proverb
Sex without love leaves the body cold. Love without sex leaves the soul empty.
—Linda Goodman
Don’t judge a man by what he has. Judge a man by what he gives.
—Unknown
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, otherwise what’s Heaven for?
—Robert Browning
Genius begins great works. Labor alone finishes them.
—Unknown
“What we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact, that when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people who we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. Love contains in it the contradiction; the attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past”
—From the film, Crimes and Misdemeanors
“Perhaps the most one can say is that the normal artist at his easel goes from his normality out to the edges of his personality and approaches madness. Meanwhile, the psychotic artist goes from his craziness out to the edges of his personality and approaches the normal. They come from different directions, but they meet in a no man’s land we call art.”
—Unknown
“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”
—Emerson
“Science is the remedy to feeling at odds with employees over getting more work out of them.”
—Taylor
two shall be born…the whole wide world apart
and speak in different tongues…and have no thought
each, of the other’s being…and no heed
and these same two
o’er unknown seas, to unknown lands, shall cross
escaping wreck, defying death
and all unconsciously
shape each act, and bend each wandering step
to this one end…
that one day, out of darkness
they must meet
and read Life’s meaning in each other’s eyes
and these same two
along some narrow way of Life shall walk
so nearly side by side
that should one turn, ever so little space
to left…or right
their needs must be acknowledged, face to face
and yet…
with wistful eyes, that never meet
and groping hands that never clasp
with lips, calling in vain, to ears that never hear
they seek each other all their weary days
and die unsatisfied
…and this is Fate
—unknown
“Until a person can say deeply and honestly, “I am what am I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” that person cannot say, “I choose otherwise.”
—Stephen R. Covey
“You have to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
—Yogi Berra
“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
—John Ruskin
“Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
—Alexander Smith
“The deepest hunger of the human soul is to be understood. The deepest hunger of the human body is for air. If you can listen to another person, in depth, until they feel understood, it’s the equivalent of giving them air.”
—Stephen R. Covey
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
If you trap the moment before it’s ripe,
The tears of repentance
you’ll certainly wipe;
But if once you let the ripe moment go
You can never wipe off the tears of woe.
—William Blake 1791
“You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.”
—Quentin Crisp
“Next to a circus there ain’t nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.
-Kin Hubbard
If you can find something everyone agrees on, it’s wrong.”
-Mo Udall
An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it.
-Don Marquis
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
-George Bernard Shaw
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.
-George Bernard Shaw
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be,
-Paul Valery
Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.
-Robert Ardrey
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
-Mark Twain
Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing they marry later; for another thing they die earlier
-H.L. Mencken
Lying is a way of taking personal responsibility for reality.
-Garrison Keillor
Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food.
-Alfred Hitchcock
Government is too big and important to be left to the politicians.
-Chester Bowles
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
-H.L. Mencken
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
-Schopenhauer
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
-Lily Tomlin
Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.
-Don Marquis
You can have what you want or what you need, but not both.
-Unknown
The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals. Whether you are dealing with the question of who does what at work, how you communicate with your daughter when you tell her to clean her room. or who feeds the fish and takes out the garbage, you can be certain that unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding, disappointment, and withdrawals of trust.
Communication is primarily a function of trust, not of technique. When the trust is high, communication is easy, it’s effortless. it’s instantaneous, and it’s effective-it works. But when the trust is low and the Emotional Bank Account is overdrawn, communication is exhausting, it’s terribly time-consuming, and it’s like walking around a minefield.
-Steven Covey
“Listening to your heart, finding out who you are, is not
simple. It takes time for the chatter to quiet down. In
the silence of “not doing” we begin to know what we feel.
If we listen and hear what is being offered, then anything
in life can be our guide…Listen.”
-Unknown
“I’m not who I was twenty years ago and I won’t be who I am now in the next twenty years.”
-FM2030 (From Optimism 1)
“Conventional names define a person by his past.”
-FM2030 (From Optimism 1)
“There’s far less mystery to human behavior than there are problems.”
-Anonymous
“House guests are like fish. After two days they start to smell.”
-Unknown
“If you want to sell something to everybody, make sure it has a big bust line.”
-Unknown Advertising Executive
“Life is a game. You’re either playing yours or you’re playing somebody else’s.”
– Michael Bailey
“If you want to know where the country is heading. Look at the Congressman.”
-Michael Bailey
“There’s no such state as formless. Some boundaries are further away, but they are always there.”
-Michael Bailey
“I like lesbians. They’re like really cool men.”
-Michael Bailey
“Problems cannot be solved by the same consciousness that created them”
-Albert Einstein
“Men are made both fools and heroes by women.”
-Michael Bailey
“Money is like sex. You think of nothing else if you don’t have it.”
-James Baldwin
“Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
So many citizens of this great country voted for this Bull-in-a-China-Shop President. The substantial forces of racism and xenophobia, sadly contributed greatly to this train wreck election, but many of the other Trump supporters hold self defeating tendencies by underestimating the complexities of government in a Democracy.
Well, it took almost a year, but we now have the “Trump Doctrine.” It’s very simple. And, as you’d expect, it fits neatly into a tweet. On nearly every major issue, President Trump’s position is: “Obama built it. I broke it. You fix it.”
And that cuts right to the core of what is the most frightening thing about the Trump presidency. It’s not the president’s juvenile tweeting or all the aides who’ve been pushed out of his clown car at high speed or his industrial-strength lying.
It’s Trump’s willingness to unravel so many longstanding policies and institutions at once — from Nafta to Obamacare to the global climate accord to the domestic clean power initiative to the Pacific trade deal to the Iran nuclear deal — without any real preparation either on the day before or for the morning after.
Indeed, Trump has made most of his climate, health, energy and economic decisions without consulting any scientists, without inviting into the White House a broad range of experts, without putting forth his own clear-cut alternatives to the systems he’s unraveling, without having at the ready a team of aides or a political coalition able to implement any alternatives and without a strategic framework that connects all of his dots.
In short, we’re simply supposed to take the president’s word that this or that deal “is the worst deal ever” — backed up by no serious argument or plan about how he will produce a better one.
I’m open to improving any of these accords or institutions. I’m even open to the possibility that by just tipping over all these accords at once, and throwing away his steering wheel, Trump will get people to improve the Iran deal or Obamacare out of sheer panic at the chaos that might ensue if they don’t.
But I am equally open to the possibility that unraveling all of these big systems at once — health, energy, geopolitics — without a clear plan or a capable team will set in motion chain reactions, some of them long term, that Trump has not thought through in the least. Moreover, when you break big systems, which, albeit imperfectly, have stabilized regions, environments or industries for decades, it can be very difficult to restore them.
Question: We’re told by our secretary of state that he’s been engaged in some secret contacts with North Korea, exploring the possibility of a diplomatic solution that might dramatically reduce North Korea’s nuclear arsenal in return for U.S. promises of regime security. If, at the same time, Trump unilaterally pulls out of the deal we’ve already signed with Iran to prevent it from developing nukes — and Trump moves to reimpose sanctions — how does that not send only one message to the North Koreans: No deal with the U.S. is worth the paper it’s written on, so you’d be wise to hold on to all your nukes?
Question: Iran controls tens of thousands of Shiite militiamen in Iraq and Syria who were our tacit allies in defeating ISIS. Tehran also has huge influence over Iraq’s government and over certain regions of Afghanistan as well. Can we stabilize Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan — post-ISIS — and keep our troop presence low and safe, without Iran’s help — and will that help be coming after Trump rips up the nuclear deal? If you think so, please raise your hand.
And since our European allies as well as Russia and China have indicated that they will not follow us in backing out of the Iran deal or reimposing sanctions, Iran would have all the moral high ground and money it needs, and the U.S. would be isolated. Are we going to sanction E.U. banks if they deal with Iran?
Trump came into office vowing to end the trade imbalance with China — a worthy goal. And what was his first move? To tear up the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that would have put the U.S. at the helm of a 12-nation trading bloc built around U.S. interests and values, potentially eliminating some 18,000 tariffs on U.S. goods and controlling 40 percent of global G.D.P. And China was not in the group. That’s called leverage.
Trump just ripped up the TPP to “satisfy the base” and is now left begging China for trade crumbs, with little leverage. And because he needs China’s help in dealing with North Korea, he has even less leverage on trade.
Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord and, at the same time, restricted U.S. government funding for birth control both at home and abroad. Question: What is driving so many immigrants and refugees in Africa, the Middle East and Central America to try to get out of their world of disorder and into America and Europe and the world order?
Answer: It is a cocktail of climate change, environmental degradation, population explosions and misgovernance in these countries. So Trump’s policy is to throw away every tool we have to mitigate climate change and population growth and try to build a wall instead, while also trying to bully Mexico’s unpopular president into trade concessions, which could help elect a radical populist in next year’s Mexican election — a successor who would be anti-American — and destabilize its economy as well.
At a time when China has decided to go full-bore into clean tech and electric cars, at a time when all of the tech giants are building data centers that they want powered by clean energy, at a time when solar and wind power are growing increasingly competitive with fossil fuels (and America still has a technological lead in many of these areas), at a time when climate change may be stimulating bigger hurricanes and forest fires that are costing us hundreds of billions of dollars, Trump’s central energy initiative is to reverse Obama’s and bring back coal-fired power.
None of these dots connect. And we will pay for that. “Whiplash” was a great movie. But it’s a terrible organizing principle for our foreign or domestic policy.
Most of this is obvious by now, but its valuable to recognize ongoingly. Well written summation. Worth reading.
Courtesy NYTimes, OP-Contributor, Peter Sudman
If the modern Republican Party can be said to stand for anything, it is tax relief. Yet as the Republican effort to write and pass tax legislation develops, it looks increasingly possible — and perhaps even likely — that it, like the health care overhaul attempt that preceded it, will end in failure and disappointment.
When the year began, the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, cited health care and taxes as his top legislative priorities, predicting that both would be completed by August. Yet after nine months of party control of Congress and the White House, the Republicans have accomplished essentially nothing. They have become a party without a consensus.
It would be easy to simply blame the president for the party’s disarray. Donald Trump’s aversion to policy detail, his chaotic management style and his combustible personality have all contributed to the party’s failures this year.
Yet it would also be a mistake to pin the party’s problems on Mr. Trump alone. He is not their root cause. Instead, he is an avatar of the party’s pathologies, the culmination of its cynical and shambolic trajectory over the last two decades.
Many of those issues can be traced back to the administration of George W. Bush, which functioned as an enormous political bait and switch. The 43rd president campaigned on humble foreign policy and prudent conservative solutions, but his presidency quickly became oriented almost exclusively around a political defense of the Iraq war.
This meant that domestic policy, and the realm of domestic policy expertise, became an afterthought at best, an opportunity for cynical political maneuvering at worst.
But Mr. Bush’s post-Sept. 11 popularity instilled the administration with an arrogance that extended far beyond the war itself. The president’s inner circle became convinced that the Republican Party was destined for years of unbroken political domination; the ambition-spoiling concerns of the “reality-based community” no longer needed to be taken into account.
National security fear-mongering and culture war controversies, especially over same-sex marriage, were employed to rally the base and ensure its loyalty, even as dissatisfaction with Mr. Bush’s governance continued to grow.
The Bush presidency, then, was both a failure and a fraud. Instead of foreign policy restraint and modest conservative governance, the Bush administration delivered a pair of endless deficit-financed wars, cynical posturing over social issues, soaring federal spending and, eventually, a large-scale emergency intervention in the economy.
Arguably as important as the particular failures themselves, however, was the way the party infrastructure — its leaders and functionaries, its activists and operators — formed a partisan phalanx around the president, playing down his flaws, if not refusing to acknowledge them.
There is always some space between a party’s voters and its leaders, some difference between what the average supporter wants and what the elected representatives are willing to do. But by excusing Mr. Bush’s errors, Republicans radically expanded the trust deficit, creating a yawning gap between the party’s base and its elites, one that has persisted, and grown, in the years since.
In many ways the party’s hangups stem from its unwillingness to fully reckon with the Bush legacy.
Mr. Bush left many voters on the right angry, resentful and suspicious — of war, of policy, of ideology, of the very idea of political solutions and leadership.
The focal point for much of the post-Bush right’s anger and resentment was the Tea Party, a decentralized movement that variously mixed genuine desire for limited government with white resentment and flare-ups of outright paranoia. It attracted hucksters and manipulators, in the media and in the activist sphere, and embraced a cast of unconventional and unqualified candidates.
Republican Party elites were only too happy to exploit this inchoate energy as long as it was useful. This is how John McCain ended up selecting an untested firebrand like Sarah Palin as his presidential running mate and how Mitt Romney campaigned with sideshow characters like Kid Rock and, well, eventually Donald Trump.
The partisan push for the Affordable Care Act under President Barack Obama further amplified these frustrations, which helped Republicans take over the House in 2010.
The defeats of both Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney left the party leaderless, and Mr. Bush’s shredded reputation meant it could not follow the course he had laid out. So the party became defined by what was left: its resentments and suspicions, its antagonisms and obsessions, its anger and its differences. It retreated into tribalism and anti-intellectualism. Eventually, the sideshow became the main event.
Mr. Trump, of course, is the biggest sideshow of them all. He exploited the gap between the base and the elites, embodying the dysfunction and disarray that already existed.
Like all presidents, he serves an organizing function for his party, orienting it around broad goals. But Mr. Trump’s goals have more to do with Twitter feuds and personal aggrandizement than any particular policies. Under Mr. Trump, the party’s chief internal debate is not so much about which governing vision to pursue but whether there should be one at all.
This reality is not lost on all Republicans. Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, one of the party’s most libertarian members, recently said that when he realized that primary voters backed him and his fellow libertarians Rand Paul and Ron Paul, it wasn’t for their ideas. Instead, he said, “they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race — and Donald Trump won best in class.”
Republican voters weren’t voting for any policy outcome. They were voting for chaos. And that, more than anything, is what the party has come to stand for.
A more conventional Republican president might have smoothed over some of these intraparty conflicts, and almost certainly would have managed passing legislation with more skill. But the essential divisions would still have existed.
For years before Mr. Trump was elected, Republicans lacked a consensus plan to replace Obamacare, and their tax reform plans were vague. Republicans blew up the deficit under Mr. Bush before complaining about it under Mr. Obama, and the party has fought bitter internal battles over immigration for decades.
Republican voters, meanwhile, were attracted to shallow political entertainers and obviously unqualified candidates long before Mr. Trump threw his hat in the ring.
Mr. Trump didn’t cause any of this. He just took advantage of it. He is the most successful huckster of the bunch.
While party leaders were quiet under Mr. Bush, some today seem willing to speak out, however haltingly, against Mr. Trump. Republicans would benefit from more of that sort of critical introspection, but it is not enough. Because someday, Mr. Trump will no longer be president. And the Republicans will probably still be the same dysfunctional and disappointing party it is today.
Peter Suderman is the features editor at Reason magazine.
The full concert from Gainesville. One of his best shows. Watch it in HD on a big screen with some good speakers. Available free on YouTube. Worth any Tom Petty fan’s time.
I‘m on board with David Brooks here. Maslow was a great thinker, but the pursuit of self as the highest goal, which has spawned the “me” generation, has always struck me as a cold and removed way of living. Selfish, in more pedantic terms. Especially when juxtaposed within a marriage or close romantic relationship. Life is lonely enough when you really get down to it. Only a deep union with others, the type that is completely unattached to self focused goals, and one we embrace with no weighty fears of failure, can fight off that loneliness.
I’d like to offer you two models of human development.
The first is what you might call The Four Kinds of Happiness. The lowest kind of happiness is material pleasure, having nice food and clothing and a nice house. Then there is achievement, the pleasure we get from earned and recognized success. Third, there is generativity, the pleasure we get from giving back to others. Finally, the highest kind of happiness is moral joy, the glowing satisfaction we get when we have surrendered ourselves to some noble cause or unconditional love.
The second model is Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. In this conception, we start out trying to satisfy our physical needs, like hunger or thirst. Once those are satisfied we move up to safety needs, economic and physical security. Once those are satisfied we can move up to belonging and love. Then when those are satisfied we can move up to self-esteem. And when that is satisfied we can move up to the pinnacle of development, self-actualization, which is experiencing autonomy and living in a way that expresses our authentic self.
The big difference between these two schemes is that The Four Kinds of Happiness moves from the self-transcendence individual to the relational and finally to the transcendent and collective. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, on the other hand, moves from the collective to the relational and, at its peak, to the individual. In one the pinnacle of human existence is in quieting and transcending the self; in the other it is liberating and actualizing the self.
Most religions and moral systems have aimed for self-quieting and self-transcendence, figuring that the great human problem is selfishness. But around the middle of the 20th century, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and others aimed to liberate and enlarge the self. They brought us the self-esteem movement, humanistic psychology, and their thinking is still very influential today.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs moves from the collective to the relational and at its peak, to the individual. Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
For example, on Tuesday one of America’s leading marriage researchers, Eli J. Finkel, publishes an important book called “The All-or-Nothing Marriage.” It’s quite a good book, full of interesting insights on contemporary marriage. But it conceives marriage completely within the Maslow frame.
In this conception, a marriage exists to support the individual self-actualization of each of the partners. In a marriage, the psychologist Otto Rank wrote, “one individual is helping the other to develop and grow, without infringing too much on the other’s personality.” You should choose the spouse who will help you elicit the best version of yourself. Spouses coach each other as each seeks to realize his or her most authentic self.
“Increasingly,” Finkel writes, “Americans view this definition as a crucial component of the marital relationship.”
Now I confess, this strikes me as a cold and detached conception of marriage. If you go into marriage seeking self-actualization, you will always feel frustrated because marriage, and especially parenting, will constantly be dragging you away from the goals of self.
In the Four Happiness frame, by contrast, marriage can be a school in joy. You might go into marriage in a fit of passion, but, if all works out, pretty soon you’re chopping vegetables side by side in the kitchen, chasing a naked toddler as he careens giddily down the hall after bath -time, staying up nights anxiously waiting for your absent teenager, and every once in a while looking out over a picnic table at the whole crew on some summer evening, feeling a wave of gratitude sweep over you, and experiencing a joy that is greater than anything you could feel as a “self.”
And it all happens precisely because the self melded into a single unit called the marriage. Your identity changed. The distinction between giving and receiving, altruism and selfishness faded away because in giving to the unit you are giving to a piece of yourself.
It’s not just in marriage, but in everything, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has always pointed toward a chilly, unsatisfying version of self-fulfillment. Most people experience their deepest sense of meaning not when they have placidly met their other needs, but when they come together in crisis.
Rabbi Wolfe Kelman’s life was fraught with every insecurity when he marched with Dr. King in Selma, but, he reported: “We felt connected, in song, to the transcendental, the ineffable. We felt triumph and celebration. We felt that things change for the good and nothing is congealed forever. That was a warming, transcendental spiritual experience. Meaning and purpose and mission were beyond exact words.”
In one of his many interesting data points, Finkel reports that starting around 1995, both fathers and mothers began spending a lot more time looking after their children. Today, parents spend almost three times more hours in shared parenting than parents in 1975 did. Finkel says this is an extension of the Maslow/Rogers pursuit of self-actualization.
I’d say it’s evidence of a repudiation of it. I’d say many of today’s parents are moving away from the me-generation ethos and toward covenant, fusion and surrendering love.
None of us lives up to our ideals in marriage or anything else. But at least we can aim high. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs too easily devolves into self-absorption. It’s time to put it away.
The Nutty Professor and The Bellboy had me in stitches, and can still do it to me today. I continued to laugh at Jerry through most of the 1960s. In the late 60s and 70s, as he moved away from filmmaking into his iconic role of telethon toastmaster, he became a sober, more serious popular figure that I never quite accepted. But that change was what made him a true individual who followed what he wanted for his life, and for his career. Can’t blame anyone for that. After all, he already perfected his comedian, and that’s worth remembering in itself.
Arturo Toscanini retired from the NBC orchestra before I saw him perform live, but later on in the 1960s, NBC had showed reruns of these famed orchestra performances. I watched them as a young boy, and was riveted by the music, and by Toscanini.
After reading a recent article on him in the New Yorker, I felt a twinge of sadness about the trajectory his career went given his once immense popularity, and the passion he displayed. I remember as a child watching awestruck, and now today, as I watched him again. He was an amazing figure in classical music and in the early days of broadcast television.
The broadcast below is from 1952, when he was 85 years old. Watch it uninterrupted (11:54), and feel the heights this man took his craft. You’ll find more Youtube links to explore, should you be moved to do so. I was.
If you were just half a Grateful Dead fan, you will breeze through all six episodes. Every interview has intelligent and thoughtful accountings of the odyssey of the Grateful Dead. The depth was unexpected. Tons of great unearthed footage and culture as backdrop from a musical era that already sticks to many of us forever.
I wasn’t a Deadhead, by any stretch, but I appreciated the band for what they were trying to do. Mostly it was Jerry Garcia’s guitar, and Robert Hunter’s thinking man’s lyrics that made me a fan. I had their first 8 or 9 albums and then I fell off in ’74. Unlike the true acolyte, I didn’t hang on every note and word, following them from show to show, convinced of a deeper meaning of it all. Still, I had plenty of Dead favorites that I enjoyed just for the music’s sake. I suppose Jerry would be just fine with that.
