The discovery of the Higgs boson would be a gratifying verification of present theory, but it will not point the way to a more comprehensive future theory. We can hope, as was the case with the Bevatron, that the most exciting thing to be discovered at the LHC will be something quite unexpected. Whatever it is, it’s hard to see how it could take us all the way to a final theory, including gravitation. So in the next decade, physicists are probably going to ask their governments for support for whatever new and more powerful accelerator we then think will be needed. That is going to be a very hard sell [...]

One thing that killed the SSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending. There was even nonsense in the press about spending on potted plants for the corridors of the administration building. Projected costs did increase, but the main reason was that, year by year, Congress never supplied sufficient funds to keep to the planned rate of spending. This stretched out the time and hence the cost to complete the project. Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier.

Spending for the SSC had become a target for a new class of congressmen elected in 1992. They were eager to show that they could cut what they saw as Texas pork, and they didn’t feel that much was at stake. The cold war was over, and discoveries at the SSC were not going to produce anything of immediate practical importance. Physicists can point to technological spin-offs from high-energy physics, ranging from synchotron radiation to the World Wide Web. For promoting invention, big science in this sense is the technological equivalent of war, and it doesn’t kill anyone. But spin-offs can’t be promised in advance [...]

the Museum of Hellenistic Alexandria; the House of Wisdom of ninth-century Baghdad; the great observatory in Samarkand built in the 1420s by Ulugh Beg; Uraniborg, Tycho Brahe’s observatory, built on an island given by the king of Denmark for this purpose in 1576; the Greenwich Observatory in England; and later the US Naval Observatory.

In the nineteenth century rich private individuals began to spend generously on astronomy. The third Earl of Rosse used a huge telescope called Leviathan in his home observatory to discover that the nebulae now known as galaxies have spiral arms. In America observatories and telescopes were built carrying the names of donors such as Lick, Yerkes, and Hooker, and more recently Keck, Hobby, and Eberly [...]

The International Space Station was sold in part as a scientific laboratory, but nothing of scientific importance has come from it [...] the Space Station had the great advantage that it cost about ten times more than the SSC, so that NASA could spread contracts for its development over many states. Perhaps if the SSC had cost more, it would not have been canceled.

participant list: http://watsoninstitute.org/euro/?page_id=159

[final segment Q: "Will Europe survive?"]

Kathleen McNamara: "...Yes...but it won't be pretty, and we should not be surprised."

Vivien Ann Schmidt: "...Yes, but not happily...It's conservative politics...We're still without leadership...There's just a bad discourse...This is codependency..."

Wade Jacoby: "...I have the irrepressible impression that we're going to run Goodhart's Law on a massive scale. Every indicator that you can think of to select as a proxy for some kind of good performance, when it becomes public that that's what the commission and the council are counting, will immediately be gamed by a variety of market actors, and those indicators will lose whatever information value they might have once had...Can it all survive the strain? Not in its current form and probably not in the form now envisioned for the future by the council and the commission, and not for lack of trying..."

Jonathan Hopkin of LSE: "...how do we turn voters into constituencies...People go out and vote and they think they're having some impact. Of course they're not, but if they go out and vote they have to think they have some kind of influence."

Peter Hall: "[Yes...there's a resilience in the EU that no one should discount. In minimalist terms, the EU will survive. But can we imagine a feasible path in which the EU is once again prosperous over the next 10-20 years? A weak path, yes. The EU at the moment has no growth strategy. Structural reform is not a growth strategy. Why is the EU clinging to it? Because there is no alternative currently. An alternative will require intense intergovernmental cooperation. Is this politically feasible? What does that mean? Someone else will cover the adjustment costs. We have to look at national electorates. The direction of politicization is toward radicalism. This is very worrisome. What will the EU look like going forward? I think we have to be hopeful, but I think we ought to be very, very worried.]"

Mark Blyth: ends with a 3-minute wrap-up of all the panels, if the Euro can survive all that, it can survive anything, but the EU and the Euro are at odds, fundamentally, and when you destroy trust between people, you destroy everything (implication: requires cultural and social approaches, not just technocratic and political ones; the burden is on people to discard their old ways of looking at themselves)

Political art tends to protest, critique, or revolutionize. Banksy’s graffiti, Orwell’s allegories, and even Uncle Tom’s Cabin intended to motivate political action with clear confrontation. Modern art is often too elite and esoteric for the public.

But Enemy Kitchen is modern political art at its most accessible, open, and delicious.

This is the global information sphere at its best, performing a function journalism lays claim to but rarely if ever fulfills. The obscure message-senders behind a surprisingly popular attempt at political influence and persuasion were researched, poked and pried at by multiple hands, finally revealed to the public in their history, warts and all. Russell and Invisible Children lacked the odor of sanctity and the nuance of scholarship, but nothing was exposed to destroy the credibility of their campaign.

I have watched the video several times. A slick composite of emotion-laden visuals, it links small actions by the viewer to an important intermediate goal (Kony’s arrest), then to cosmic transformation (a political nirvana in which the public, armed with social media, makes known its wishes, if not its commands, to the people in power). Stripped of the hippy-dippy idealism, it’s a fair description of today’s political dynamics.

campaigns use data to expand political participation. Campaigns model the electorate to find their supporters and engage in extensive ground operations and targeted online advertising to fashion them into donors and voters. While this enhanced political participation is normatively desirable on some grounds, it comes with the cost of the erosion of political privacy and democratic debate. Citizens are marketed to and monitored at unprecedented levels, and their personal data are traded on a vast, generally unregulated market. The electorate is carved up on the basis of sophisticated data, meaning many are left out of political communication entirely. Meanwhile, informational asymmetries undermine electoral competition and distort the relationship between candidates and citizens

Presidential Election Ads: Republican Primary

there's a danger to extrapolate conclusions from education experiments - as it was in welfare reform: "Our measurements are imprecise at best and meaningless and misleading at worst. Most educators, advocates, researchers, philanthropists, and policymakers are well aware of the problem of measuring complex outcomes. That awareness disappears when we talk about policy experiments. We act as if testing these programs will lead to some empirical, objective truth about what works best."

Rogers added: "Policy experiments are supposed to tell us empirically how good a program or approach is. They don't do this very well. Randomized experiments are expensive, difficult, and rare. Most policy ‘experiments' aren't really experiments. They are a trial run of a program with data collection. Even then, the data is often collected haphazardly or to highlight program success and minimize failures. Politics and research also operate in different time frames - solid evaluations often take years. In short, well-funded policy evaluations take too long to actually affect policy, and ad hoc evaluations don't produce reliable findings."

In the final analysis, ALEC will take Gates money. It will likely come up with another report touting the success of charter schools and voucher programs, and more reasons to bust teachers unions. It will design sample legislation for its members to introduce in state houses across the country. The privatization of public education will move forward. This is not a project that Bill or Melinda Gates should be proud of.

These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.

If this concept of “political disobedience” is accurate and resonates, then Occupy Wall Street will continue to resist making a handful of policy demands because it would have little effect on the constant regulations that redistribute wealth to the top. The movement will also continue to resist Cold War ideologies from Friedrich Hayek to Maoism — as well as their pale imitations and sequels, from the Chicago School 2.0 to Alain Badiou and Zizek’s attempt to shoehorn all political resistance into a “communist hypothesis.”

On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.

In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.

NoLabels trades on a persistent mythology that "practical solutions" exist somewhere out there, but politicians simply refuse to find or accept them. Not so -- as NoLabels itself proves. If these solutions are so apparent, why doesn't the NoLabels website provide any?

The group proposes to organize members, hold meetings, create chapters and raise money, and it calls on politicians to make "tough choices," but ... to do what? That's not clear. The NoLabels "declaration" asserts, "We may disagree on issues, but we do so with civility and mutual respect." That's dandy, but it's also vapid.

So, let me get this straight. After barely convincing Congress to keep Race to the Top on life support, Duncan is intent on unilaterally pushing his same pet priorities through the back door? He's planning to offer regulatory relief only if states adopt reforms that are utterly absent in the relevant legislation? Facing backlash on the right and left over concerns that the administration coerced states to embrace test-driven teacher evaluation and the Common Core through Race to the Top, Duncan's strategy is to double down?

http://www.frederickhess.org/2011/06/waivers-are-fineback-door-legislating-via-strings

[intense comment section; see Biophiliac]

Tansley attacked. He publicly accused Smuts of what he called "the abuse of vegetational concepts" – which at the time was considered very rude. He said that Smuts had created a mystical philosophy of nature and its self-organisation in order to oppress black people. Or what Tansley maliciously called the "less exalted wholes".

And Tansley wasn't alone. Others, including HG Wells, pointed out that really what Smuts was doing was using a scientific theory about order in nature to justify a particular order in society – in this case the British empire. Because it was clear that the global self-regulating system that Smuts described looked exactly like the empire. And at the same time Smuts made a notorious speech saying that blacks should be segregated from whites in South Africa. The implication was clear: that blacks should stay in their natural "whole" and not disturb the system. It clearly prefigured the arguments for apartheid [...]

And this was the central problem with the concept of the self-regulating system, one that was going to haunt it throughout the 20th century. It can be easily manipulated by those in power to enforce their view of the world, and then be used to justify holding that power stable [...]

What the anti-cuts movement has done without realising is adopt an idea of how to order the world without hierarchies, a machine theory that leads to a static managerialism. It may be very good for organising creative and self-expressive demonstrations, but it will never change the world.

Turner ended with a plea: Mainstream economics needs to embrace the radical notion that people are not rational actors after all. “Good economics leaves us”—policymakers, regulators, and consumers—“with far wider degrees of freedom to make political and social choices than has frequently been asserted,” he told the gathering. “The role of good economics is to inform those choices, not to deny their possibility.” [...]

More than two years after what many authorities called the worst financial crisis in history, neither Obama nor GOP leaders in Congress have embraced a new form of economic reasoning that explains either what has happened or where we are going. The economy is simply too complex, and the global financial system too inter­dependent, to be viewed through the prism of old theories that hold that free markets—or well-timed government spending—can solve almost anything. No one in Washington is challenging those doctrines with any strength [...]

New and emerging models try to explain economies with all their humanity involved. Some incorporate psychology; others, social norms; others still, the power of storytelling to move markets. One branch presumes that markets never have all of the information they need to function properly. Another uses supercomputing to aggregate enough information to begin to predict the sort of catastrophic market failures that other theories dismissed as impossible, that other models call “unpredictable”—the future bubbles that we would neglect until it’s too late, in the same way we neglected the Internet stock bubble in the late ’90s and the housing bubble of the 2000s [...]

Until the financial crisis, says W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at [The Santa Fe Institute], the supercomputing advancements “kind of lay dormant, like an underground river.” Now, academics are slowly starting to rediscover the institute’s work. Policymakers have barely sniffed at it, even though its possibilities are immense. Arthur envisages an open-sourced economic modeling effort to “stress test” major policy proposals—like Obama’s health care law—and run them through simulations to see how the economy might react and what might go wrong.

But in Washington, new thinkers are easily drowned out by the high priests of rational expectations, who have resurfaced, post­crisis, to espouse their doctrine[...]

What both parties are searching for, of course, isn’t necessarily the optimal economic policy or philosophy: They want the policy, consistent with their political-belief system, that plays best with voters. That’s a double challenge for economists to solve. It’s not enough to build a new and better understanding of the economy and its trapdoors. We need a simple narrative to explain it, too. The one that took root under Reagan and Clinton—that deregulating markets and expanding global trade would benefit everyone—worked for 30 years. Now, opinion polls suggest, that narrative doesn’t play. Americans don’t trust the government or the markets [...]

lawmakers might end up making radical changes in how they judge economic progress—perhaps adopting Turner’s suggested shift away from favoring GDP growth toward a more explicit effort to achieve full employment. Those changes, as Turner proposes them, would require lawmakers to invert some of the basic cost-benefit calculations they rely on to guide economic policy. If stability is more important to the U.S. economy than growth, Turner says, then lawmakers should stop worrying about the costs, in lost growth, of stabilizing the global banking system or counteracting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Banks should hold whatever level of capital is necessary to forestall runs on the system and a potential repeat financial crisis—even if that means slowing down lending and curbing the economic activity that grows from it. Countries should pay whatever it takes to dramatically improve energy efficiency and transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon ones, even if the increased price of energy stunts growth by far more than the 1 percent of global GDP that a British blue-ribbon panel estimates is the price of climate stability.

...people demonstrate an amazingly resilient capacity to relabel their existing practices with whatever ideas are currently in vogue [...]

Resilient, powerful new beliefs—the kinds of beliefs that transform the way we think about how children are treated in schools, for example—are shaped by people engaging in behaviors or practices that are deeply unfamiliar to them and that test the outer limits of their knowledge, their confidence in themselves as practitioners, and their competencies [...]

...I have tried to convince my students that the first step in acting consistently with what they believe to be “the public interest” is to disabuse themselves of the view that they, and the institutions they inhabit, somehow automatically represent interests broader than their own. In short, you have to know your own interests before you can pretend to represent someone else’s interests, and then you have to respect the fact that their interests are not yours. To say that the adults in public institutions “represent” the interests of their clients—children and families—is self-deceptive and irresponsible. To say that you are aware of your own interests, and that you are respectful enough of the divergent interests of your clients to listen to them and respond to them as actual people, rather than as constructs of your own view of what’s good for them, is to deal honestly and responsibly with your own role.

Almost any policy, it seems, no matter how harmful, can be rationalized in the name of “competitiveness” by politicians and corporate executives, or by journalists whose imaginations are flatter than the world about which they write. But educators ought to aim higher. Our loyalty, after all, is not to corporations but to children. Our chief concern – our “bottom line,” if you must -- is not victory for some but learning for all.

Whatever they may say about giving poor students a leg up, their real priority is nothing short of the total dismantling of our public educational institutions, and they've admitted as much. Cato Institute founder Ed Crane and other conservative think tank leaders have signed the Public Proclamation to Separate School and State, which reads in part that signing on, "Announces to the world your commitment to end involvement by local, state, and federal government from education."

But Americans don't want their schools dismantled. So privatization advocates have recognized that it's not politically viable to openly push for full privatization and have resigned themselves to incrementally dismantling public school systems. The think tanks’ weapon of choice is school vouchers.

so people gravitate toward information that confirms what they believe, and they select sources that deliver it. Same as it ever was, right? Maybe, but the problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or context, or "narrowcast" and often highly ideological media that have relatively small, like-minded audiences. Those basic human survival skills of ours, says Michigan's Arthur Lupia, are "not well-adapted to our information age." [...]

You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

This is not, however, what this issue of The American Interest means by plutocracy. We mean not just rule by the rich, but rule by and for the rich. We mean, in other words, a state of affairs in which the rich influence government in such a way as to protect and expand their own wealth and influence, often at the expense of others. As the introductory essay to this issue shows, this influence may be exercised in four basic ways: lobbying to shift regulatory costs and other burdens away from corporations and onto the public at large; lobbying to affect the tax code so that the wealthy pay less; lobbying to allow the fullest possible use of corporate money in political campaigns; and, above all, lobbying to enable lobbying to go on with the fewest restrictions. Of these, the second has perhaps the deepest historical legacy.

Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics, one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites. The most dysfunctional societies in the developing world are those whose elites succeed either in legally exempting themselves from taxation, or in taking advantage of lax enforcement to evade them, thereby shifting the burden of public expenditure onto the rest of society [...]

Why has a significant increase in income inequality in recent decades failed to generate political pressure from the left for redistributional redress, as similar trends did in earlier times? Instead, insofar as there is any populism bubbling from below in America today it comes from the Right, and its target is not just the “undeserving rich”—Wall Street “flip-it” shysters and their ilk—but, even more so, government policies intended to protect Americans from their predations. How do we explain this? [...]

But as it turned out, Obama was not riding a tide of left-wing populism. While the Democratic majorities in Congress succeeded in moving this ambitious legislative agenda forward, the results fell far short of expectations. The stimulus package did not produce stunning economic successes. The healthcare bill did not include a public option, and failed to address the real sources of cost inflation. Above all, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform bill did not change the perverse incentives that led to the crisis in the first place. Indeed, while Wall Street brought considerable opprobrium on itself, it was arguably the sector of the U.S. economy that suffered the least in the long run. Bank earnings were restored after a couple of quarters. And though the banks now face tougher regulation, Congress failed to do anything about the fact that investment banks are still too large and too interconnected to fail, and will surely be bailed out again when they get in trouble. Indeed, the U.S. financial sector is now concentrated in fewer hands than it was before the crisis [...]

here is the evidence for an American plutocracy of a narrow and discrete but hardly harmless sort. Wall Street seduced the economics profession not through overt corruption, but by aligning the incentives of economists with its own. It was very easy for academic economists to move from universities to central banks to hedge funds—a tightly knit world in which everyone shared the same views about the self-regulating and beneficial effects of open capital markets. The alliance was enormously profitable for everyone: The academics got big consulting fees, and Wall Street got legitimacy. And it has kept the system going despite the enormous policy failures it has generated, not to exclude the recent crisis.

Another set of ideas was of even more direct help to the wealthy: Reaganomics. Supply-side economics provided a principled justification for the rich paying lower taxes on the grounds that entrepreneurial incentives unleashed by lower marginal tax rates would not merely trickle but pour down both via public finance and through the creation of employment. This argument was likely true at the near 90 percent marginal rates that prevailed after World War II, but those rates were reduced in several waves beginning in the 1960s. Clinton’s tax increases of the early 1990s brought rates up only slightly, and didn’t have the growth-killing effects widely predicted by Republicans—just the opposite, they preceded one of the great economic expansions of recent memory. The benefits of the Bush-era cuts flowed overwhelmingly to the wealthy, and yet were promoted on the grounds that lower rates would redound to everyone’s benefit. This is still a gospel that many people continue to believe, including, oddly enough, all too many of those left behind.

It’s the Republican Party’s deliberate disinformation strategy, more than any properties inherent in so-called information technologies, that has created these two parallel Americas. In one of them, weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, climate change is a patent hoax, and the Laffer curve is the most basic truth of economics. As for the inhabitants of the other universe — “the reality-based community” of old-fashioned skeptics and empiricists, frequenters of public and university libraries, readers of the New York Times and of Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, avid perusers of Harper’s Index and WikiLeaks — we possess ever vaster quantities of mostly accurate facts, and not much sense of what to do with them. Data data everywhere, and not a thought to think! Outside of a hedge fund or the CIA, there aren’t too many places where knowledge is power. Much of the time, intellectually and politically, knowledge is powerlessness [...]

Apart from glimmerings in early forebears — Flaubert in Bouvard and Pécuchet, Dickens himself in Bleak House, a few chapters of Moby-Dick, and most famously Zola — the informationization of literature became most clearly visible in what we’ve called “the research novel” of the 1980s and ’90s: the fact-flaunting of writers as diverse as Sebald, Tom Wolfe, and Don DeLillo, whose brilliant but failed Cosmopolis gave us Eric Packer, a portrait of the artist as a hedge-fund tycoon and obsessive gatherer of facts. As James Wood observed in 2001, ‘knowing about things’ has become one of the qualifications of the contemporary novelist...What we begin to glimpse in recent years, especially in “literary nonfiction,” is something different: the evolution of a style that resembles “information for information’s sake,” in something like the art for art’s sake of 19th-century French decadence. What can this new literature of information be saying? The nature of facts is supposed to be that they speak for themselves. The nature of literature of course is the opposite — that it always means more than it says. Maybe the new literature of information can tell us something about our relationship to facts that the facts alone refuse to disclose?

[...]

The absence in these texts of anything resembling argumentation is itself a tacit kind of advocacy. The assemblage of information (Wikipedia and WikiLeaks being collective examples of the form, and Jonathan Lethem’s famous essay-of-quotations being an individual one) promotes the cause of Roland Barthes’s open form, where meaning-making is fundamentally a readerly rather than writerly activity. It also brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s over-cited proclamation that montage is “useless for the purposes of fascism” — because it doesn’t predigest reality, in the manner of propaganda.

However, I am firmly of the opinion that the massive censorship of reality and images of this reality by mainstream news organizations from their inception has been incredibly damaging. It has severed this link of common humanity between people “audiences” in one part of the world and victims in another. This censorship has effectively relegated the status of other humans to that of livestock, whose deaths we also do not encounter except in an unrecognizable format in the supermarket. While I cannot discuss the reasons behind this censorship in one blog post, suffice it to say it ranges from political control to keeping audiences receptive to advertisements.

Children with access to arts programs are better students, higher achievers than those who do not have the benefit of arts education. At risk youth who are able to participate in arts programs are more likely to stay in school and continue into higher education than those deprived of that education. Why would any politician want to eliminate funding for a government program that leads to more competitive students and lower drop out rates?

While some of the movement's self-described liberals undoubtedly have good intentions, the strategy is effectively the same as any conservative effort to hobble the public sector: defund government so that it is less effective and then use that ineffectiveness to argue for further privatisation.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/11

the seeming inevitability of Orszag-like migrations points to a potentially fatal tension within the progressive strand of liberal thought. Progressives laudably seek to oppose injustice by deploying government power as a countervailing force against the imagined opressive and exploitative tendencies of market institutions. Yet it seems that time and again market institutions find ways to use the government's regulatory and insurer-of-last-resort functions as countervailing forces against their competitors and, in the end, against the very public these functions were meant to protect.

We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation. For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism. So it's no surprise that progressives would rather worry over trivialities such as campaign finance reform than dwell on the paradoxes of political power.

In education, as in so many other aspects of society, money is being used to squeeze out democracy.

Waiting for Superman and its surrounding campaign reflect an influential trend that has proven adept at dominating education policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations. This bipartisan alliance unites 20th Century conservatives closely aligned with the Republican Party who made the bulk of their money before the dawn of the digital era, and 21st Century billionaires more loosely aligned with the Democratic Party who generally made their fortunes through digitally based technology. (These two groups can loosely be described as analog conservatives and digital billionaires.)

Despite their differences, both groups embrace market-based reforms, entrepreneurial initiatives, deregulation and data-driven/test-based accountability as the pillars of educational change. Under the banner of challenging bureaucracy and promoting innovation, both groups chafe at public oversight and collective bargaining agreements. Above all, both rely on money to get their way.

Here's what would be new: questioning all the stuff that Papert's early 20th-century visitors would immediately recognize: a regimen of memorizing facts and practicing skills that features lectures, worksheets, quizzes, report cards and homework. But the Gates-Bush-Obama version of "school reform" not only fails to call those things into question; it actually intensifies them, particularly in urban schools. The message, as educator Harvey Daniels observed, consists of saying in effect that "what we're doing [in the classroom] is OK, we just need to do it harder, longer, stronger, louder, meaner..."

Real education reform would require us to consider the elimination of many features that we've come to associate with school, so perhaps the reluctance to take such suggestions seriously is just a specific instance of the "whatever is, is right" bias that psychologists keep documenting. At the same time, traditionalists -- educational or otherwise -- know that it's politically advantageous to position themselves as being outside the establishment. Our challenge is to peer through the fog of rhetoric, to realize that what's being billed as reform should seem distinctly familiar -- and not particularly welcome.

how different income groups do under Republican and Democratic presidents

http://www.slate.com/id/2266025/pagenum/all/

Bloggers carry so much influence that many senators have a young press aide dedicated to the care and feeding of online media. News about, by, and for a tiny kingdom of political obsessives dominates the attention of senators and staff, while stories that might affect their constituents go unreported because their home-state papers can no longer afford to have bureaus in Washington. Dodd, who came to the Senate in 1981 and will leave next January, told me, “I used to have eleven Connecticut newspaper reporters who covered me on a daily basis. I don’t have one today, and haven’t had one in a number of years. Instead, D.C. publications only see me through the prism of conflict.” Lamar Alexander described the effect as “this instant radicalizing of positions to the left and the right.” [...]

On July 21st, President Obama signed the completed bill. The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.

[ see also: Todd Purdum's "Washington, We Have a Problem"
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/09/broken-washington-201009?printable=true&currentPage=all ]

A government’s capacity and willingness to service its debt depend on an almost infinite number of present and future contingencies. They depend not just on its tax and spending plans but also on the state of the economy, the external conjuncture, and the political context. All of these are highly uncertain, and require many assumptions [...]

This opens up some room for governments to maneuver. It permits self-confident political leaders to take charge of their own future. It allows them to shape the narrative that underpins market confidence, rather than play catch-up.

But to make good use of this maneuvering room, policymakers need to articulate a coherent, consistent, and credible account of what they are doing, based on both good economics and good politics. They have to say: “we are doing this not because the markets demand it, but because it is good for us and here is why.”

Their storyline needs to convince their electorates as well as the markets. If they succeed, they can pursue their own priorities and maintain market confidence at the same time.

[The Nixon Administration's] cheap food policy worked almost too well: crop prices fell, forcing farmers to produce still more simply to break even. This led to a deep depression in the farm belt in the 1980s followed by a brutal wave of consolidation. Most importantly, the price of food came down, or at least the price of the kinds of foods that could be made from corn and soy: processed foods and sweetened beverages and feedlot meat. (Prices for fresh produce have increased since the 1980s.) Washington had succeeded in eliminating food as a political issue—an objective dear to most governments at least since the time of the French Revolution [...]

Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids [...]

What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. As the Diggers used to say during their San Francisco be-ins during the 1960s, food can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself.

liberalism is more than a temperament; it is also a political tradition with substantive commitments—a body of ideas—and it has, as well, a dedication to fair procedures, impartially administered, legitimated by the consent of the people. Temperament, substance, procedure can all be liberal, and understanding liberalism requires a grasp of all three and of the connections among them. Wolfe's distinctive claim, however, is that the key to liberalism is a set of dispositions, or habits of mind—seven of them: "a sympathy for equality," "an inclination to deliberate," "a commitment to tolerance," "an appreciation of openness," "[faith that we can remake ourselves]," "a preference for realism," and "a taste for governance." [...]

Liberalism, like a large rambunctious family, is characterized more by its long-running arguments than by its shared beliefs. It is not so much a creed as a list of things worth fighting about. And as time goes on and history teaches us fresh lessons, new options arise and old ones are discarded [...]

Liberalism, he argues, "may not have created modernity, but liberalism is the answer for which modernity is the question."

That Europe’s problem economies — Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal — are all in the south is no accident. Mediterranean societies, despite their innovations in politics (Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic) were, in the words of the 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel, defined by “traditionalism and rigidity.”

The relatively poor quality of Mediterranean soils favored large holdings that were, perforce, under the control of the wealthy. This contributed to an inflexible social order, in which middle classes developed much later than in northern Europe, and which led to economic and political pathologies like statism and autocracy. It’s no surprise that for the last half-century Greek politics have been dominated by two families

[must read Rushkoff's and Lanier's responses in Reality Club responses:

Rushkoff:

It's not that the Net doesn't allow for the creation of the required charismatic leader. It's such a leader is no longer necessary. The ground rules have changed with the landscape.

Lanier:

It seems apparent, alas, that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have not improved American democracy, and yet we expect these tools to promote democracy elsewhere.]

The questions being asked in this conversation are for the most part coming from thinkers who are not situated in traditional academic disciplines and whose authority is not derived from institutional affiliations. This is a crowd of maverick intellectuals. In addition to Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky, participants in the ongoing Edge discussion include David Gelernter, George Dyson, Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Yochai Benkler, Douglas Rushkoff, and Charles Leadbeater. Only Gelernter (Yale), Benkler (Harvard), Shirky (NYU), hold academic positions.

Perhaps one reason there are so few thinkers from the psychology, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy departments of our major universities contributing to this conversation is that communications theory has long been deemed to be a low-prestige discipline among academics. The best people are likely to be found outside academia.

Morozov: huge intellectual void with the regards to the Internet's impact on global politics

[...]

Yes, it was a very vibrant, online campaign, but I didn't see it extending into real world coordination all that much.

says Michael Petrilli: The news that 15 states plus the District of Columbia qualified as finalists in the first round of the “Race to the Top” is sure to anger many reformers, and for good reason.

[w/ links = full discussion]

There are several dubious aspects of the majority's opinion (principally its decision to invalidate the entire campaign finance scheme rather than exercising "judicial restraint" through a narrower holding). Beyond that, I believe that corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture. But there are also very real First Amendment interests implicated by laws which bar entities from spending money to express political viewpoints [...] while this decision will make things marginally worse, I can't imagine how it could worsen fundamentally. All of the hand-wringing sounds to me like someone expressing serious worry that a new law in North Korea will make the country more tyrannical. There's not much room for our corporatist political system to get more corporatist. Does anyone believe that the ability of corporations to influence our political process was meaningfully limited before yesterday's issuance of this ruling? [...] It's the smaller non-profit advocacy groups whose political speech tends to be most burdened by these laws. Campaign finance laws are a bit like gun control statutes: actual criminals continue to possess large stockpiles of weapons, but law-abiding citizens are disarmed [...] Meaningful public financing of campaigns would far more effectively achieve the ostensible objectives of campaign finance restrictions without any of the dangers or constitutional infirmities.

For the first time in memory, the suburbs are under a conscious and sustained attack from Washington. Little that the adminstration has pushed—from the Wall Street bailouts to the proposed “cap and trade” policies—offers much to predominately middle-income-oriented suburbanites and instead appears to have worked to alienate them.

And then there are the policies that seem targeted against suburbs. In everything from land use and transportation to “green” energy policy, the Obama administration has been pushing an agenda that seeks to move Americans out of their preferred suburban locales and into the dense, transit-dependent locales they have eschewed for generations.

Edwards had denied each detail of his affair with Rielle Hunter as it came out in the press, starting with the National Enquirer's first scoop in October 2007. Edwards dismissed the story as "tabloid trash," and would not admit to lying about it until nearly a year later. When he finally made his confession in August 2008, it was only partial: he still denied offering Hunter hush money, and even more strenuously denied paternity of her child. He also insisted that his transgression did not occur while his wife, Elizabeth, was being treated for breast cancer. Recently, he was rumored to be facing a paternity suit, and a federal investigation is examining the possible use of campaign funds to keep Hunter quiet about the affair.

The question of who was Quinn's father played a strange role in the episode. Not only did Edwards fail to admit the truth, but one of his aides, Andrew Young, initially claimed paternity of the child to cover for Edwards when he was running for president. Young's book detailing the scandal, "The Politician," is due out in a few weeks.

The ad was a surprise to some, since John McCain opposed gay marriage during his 2008 presidential run, and his wife rarely speaks out on particular issues. McCain's office issued a statement saying that the senator respects differences of opinion between his family members, but still "believes the sanctity of marriage is only defined as between one man and one woman."

To politicians, corporate CEOs, or companies that produce standardized tests, this prescription may seem to make sense. (Notice that this is exactly the cast of characters leading the initiative for national standards.) But if you spend your days with real kids in real classrooms, you’re more likely to find yourself wondering how much longer those kids -- and the institution of public education -- can survive this accountability fad [...] Are all kids entitled to a great education? Of course. But that doesn’t mean all kids should get the same education. High standards don’t require common standards. Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence – or equity. (In fact, one-size-fits-all demands may offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the cause of genuine equity.) To acknowledge these simple truths is to watch the rationale for national standards – or uniform state standards -- collapse into a heap of intellectual rubble.

To be sure, excellence and uniformity might turn out to be empirically correlated even if they’re theoretically distinct. But I know of no evidence that students in countries as diverse as ours with national standards or curricula engage in unusually deep thinking or are particularly excited about learning. Even standardized test results, such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), provide no support for the nationalizers. On eighth-grade math and science tests, eight of the 10 top-scoring countries had centralized education systems, but so did nine of the 10 lowest-scoring countries in math and eight of the 10 lowest-scoring countries in science.

Dr. Robert Lustig UCSF series; by the end of the story, I hope I will have debunked the last 30 years of nutrition information in America [...] part III: fructose/sucrose=poison [...] part IV: desired high HDL:trigylcerides, carbs raise LDL [...] part V: the biochem [...] part VI: alcohol/fructose [...] part VII: sugar sports drinks-> ^uric acid, ie: gout, high BP ... a high sugar diet IS a high fat diet ... HUGE increases in triglycerides, lipogenesis, free fatty acids, insulin resistance (then leptin doesn't work...nucleus accumbens, reward circuit) after 6 days of fructose diet...different curves for Caucasians and African Americans ie: Metabolic Syndrome - @9:20 list of symptoms associated w/ chronic alcohol exposure compared to fructose (8/12) --- fructose and alcohol are metabolized the same way, do the same thing, come from the same place [...] part VIII: lifestyle intervention @2:10 why is exercise important @3:30 why fiber is important @6:00 paleolithic diet, ie: if you ate everything as it came out of the ground, you'd cure type II diabetes...takes about a week...[children's diets] [...] part IX: the earlier you expose kids to sweets the more they'll crave it later; the more sugar a pregnant woman eats, the more it affects development [...] @3:15 what can we do about it and a comparison of FDA's regulation of tobacco; FDA doesn't regulate chronic toxins, only acute ones [...] what can we sell overseas: weapons, entertainment, food @6:50 a calorie is NOT a calorie, dietitians are wrong ie: eat less, exercise more does NOT work...FDA can't and won't regulate fructose: it's up to us.

Desperation measures like big water projects and aggressive production of biofuels and coal-to-liquids will probably move forward, even if they’re ultimately doomed ideas. Self-interest and political popularity will continue to trump science, and blow up more than a few investment bubbles.
Self-reliance will continue to enjoy a surge in popularity, at least among the 10% or so of the population who are inclined to it. I expect millions of backyard gardens to bloom in the next decade, along with an explosion in residential and small commercial solar thermal and PV. Survival gear and guns should also enjoy continued growth.
I maintain my view that carbon capture and sequestration will be a boondoggle (although it may enjoy a period of investment froth), and the entire focus on carbon emissions will be ineffectual, because it is a backwards approach to the problem. One cannot effectively deal with the problem of climate without first understanding energy. I predicted that Copenhagen would be a failure, and I remain convinced that whatever progress we do make in reducing carbon emissions will only come from deploying efficiency and renewable energy.

when you get Arnold Schwarzenegger in a room with the leadership of the Senate and Assembly, Schwarzenegger has the most budget and legislative experience in the room. A guy who was starring in Terminator films as recently as 2003 is now the most seasoned elected official during one of the worst crises California has ever had. Term limits are one of those ideas that sound good in theory but are madness in practice. You wouldn't want to go to a hospital filled with medical residents or stock a sports team with an ever-changing cast of rookies. Legislating is hard. We need to give people time to learn how to do it.

Lieberman has tossed the process into chaos. But the short-term satisfactions won't overwhelm the long-term judgments. Lieberman is "point person" because he has appointed himself the 60th senator. Every other member of the Democratic caucus could have done the same, but most all have judged the underlying bill more important than their disagreements with it. Lieberman did the opposite, and there's little evidence that he actually had disagreements with the bill so much as dislike for some of its supporters.

Part (though not all) of what annoyed me was their affected, almost mannered style, and there’s a kind of literary-political righty that enjoys being perversely old-fashioned. This often shades over into a urge to distress if not shock people—a desire no less potent than in those radical “artists” who work in bodily fluids or set up exhibits featuring themselves masturbating to sounds of crying children [...] What better way to hold onto your prose, to make sure that no one ever strikes a letter, than to make it so exasperatingly exact that in some sense it can’t be edited? Hyper-correctness became a style, a strategy, because perhaps that’s all that was left to them.

If higher education is to play a key role in capacity building for graduates’ professional workforce futures, then a pedagogy of induction into disciplinary knowledge needs radical reworking into a pedagogy in which teachers and students work as co-creators and co-assemblers (and dissemblers) of trans-disciplinary knowledge applications for digital work futures [...] Western governments worldwide have also, as part of their retreat from the direct funding of public education, increasingly tied university funding to ‘outcomes’ measured against pre-determined government ‘standards’. These standards are generally linked to predictable government approved national priorities such as better employability skills, and improvements in literacy, numeracy and citizenship. And inevitably these ‘skills’ are framed with both eyes squarely on short-term political agendas [...] The capacity to learn and reproduce appropriate social behaviours, he argues, is no longer the key to success. Instead of opening up possibilities, such learning may actually be unhelpful because it assumes a fixed or predictable social world.

[Like the university system is going to be around 40 years from now.] “I suppose you can say that the universities are all looking toward intangible goals in terms of student education,” said Shirley Strum Kenny, who helped bring Division I sports to Stony Brook as its president from 1994 until her retirement this year. “There’s very little way to measure it, unless you’re going to wait 40 years.” [...] Two of the universities have benefited from connections to powerful state senators. In 2002, Stony Brook completed construction on a football stadium that is named for State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, the former chairman of the chamber’s higher education committee, who helped procure the $22 million in state money used to build it. The Binghamton University Events Center, an all-purpose arena where the Bearcats play basketball, opened in 2004 and cost the state $33 million. The financing was secured with the help of a local senator, Thomas W. Libous. [...] Jonathan Orszag [did I go to PEA with him? Peter's bro?] an economist who has evaluated for the N.C.A.A. the financial impact of moving to Division I, said that if the intangible benefits were significant enough, “you should expect some of that to be reflected in the financial data.” An increase in school spirit or heightened visibility should translate to higher application rates, for example. “And during the period that we’re studying, we didn’t observe it,” he said.

What made BarCamp so interesting, and quickly turned it into a worldwide underground phenomenon, was the way it incorporated open-source and related principles. While the term means many things to many people, to Messina open source is “both an attitude and a methodology. It’s a practice for how you work. You build an idea by being transparent and by offering up the blueprints, by allowing other people to modify that work so they can spawn their own individual project.”

For the first BarCamp, Messina and his buddies devised a simple system that let attendees, rather than organizers, create the day’s agenda on the spot. Anyone could claim a room and lead a talk. The result was a user-generated “unconference” where collaboration and serendipity ruled.

Immigrants played a major role in the growth of the New York labor movement in the early 20th century and, more recently, in the revival of unionism in other cities, like Los Angeles. It is hard to imagine a robust future for New York labor without significant immigrant involvement.

There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has--in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption. Projects such as the one that the health care bill would launch--building a massive database of doctors who got money from private interests; or projects such as the ones (these are the really sexy innovations for the movement) to make it trivially easy to track every possible source of influence on a member of Congress, mapped against every single vote that the member has made. These projects assume that they are seeking an obvious good. No doubt they will have a profound effect. But will the effect of these projects--at least on their own, unqualified or unrestrained by other considerations--really be for the good? Do we really want the world that they righteously envisage?[...]not all data satisfies the simple requirement that they be information that consumers can use, presented in a way they can use it. "More information," as Fung and his colleagues put it, "does not always produce markets that are more efficient." Instead, "responses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response."[...]The public is too smart to waste its time focusing on matters that are not important for it to understand. The ignorance here is rational, not pathological. It is what we would hope everyone would do, if everyone were rational about how best to deploy their time. Yet even if rational, this ignorance produces predictable and huge misunderstandings. A mature response to these inevitable misunderstandings are policies that strive not to exacerbate them.

[follow link to Brendan Nyhan's] These numbers also suggest a pretty significant secular trend toward everybody hating Congress all of the time. Minority parties can make politics a pretty miserable sphere. Nothing gets done. Media coverage is thick with outrage and scandal and trivialities. Voters begin to loathe the system, and that hurts whoever is in power at the moment.

From a political science perspective, 1994 was the culmination of the long decline of Democratic dominance among whites in the South -- many incumbents were vulnerable on issues like guns, gays in the military, etc. because their districts had changed. There's no comparable regional partisan shift working against the Democrats right now. Clinton's second point can be similarly reinterpreted -- the damage done to Republican brand under President Bush may restrict Republican gains in this election relative to 1994.

With the US Senate bogged down in the fight over reforming health care, American leaders have said that the senators might not move on climate legislation until 2010, well after the global climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. That drew a sharp response from John Bruton, head of the European Union delegation: "The United States is just one of the 190 countries coming to this conference," Bruton said, "but the United States emits 25% of all the greenhouse gases that the conference is trying to reduce. I submit that asking an international conference to sit around looking out the window for months, while one chamber of the legislature of one country deals with its other business, is simply not a realistic political position"...Europe has proposed far-reaching reforms designed to impose new rules on executive pay and bonuses, requiring that banks link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance...

The Working Families Party was started in 1998 by a group of labor and community activists who wanted to reinvigorate the fight for economic and social justice in New York. The Nation played a small but significant role in the party's birth, running an editorial calling on our New York readers, who then numbered over 20,000 (we've grown!) to vote for the WFP candidate on the party's ballot line.

What's really happening with these protests is that the genuine rage and not unreasonable economic insecurity of these citizens is being stoked, exploited, distorted and manipulated by movement leaders for entirely different ends. The people who are leading them -- Rush Limbaugh, the Murdoch-owned Fox News, Glenn Beck, business-dominated organizations of the type led by Dick Armey -- are cultural warriors above everything else. They're all in a far different socioeconomic position than the "middle-income Americans" whose anger they're ostensibly representing. Their principal preoccupation is their cultural contempt for various groups (illegal immigrants, the "undeserving" poor, liberals) and their desire to preserve the status quo whereby the prime beneficiaries of government policies remain themselves: the super rich and the interests that control Washington. [read excerpt from Matt Taibbi]

In these disparate comments we can see the outlines of a coherent view of society. It expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms--that taking from the rich harms the economy--but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways.

There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand...Rand’s Russian youth imprinted upon her a belief in the polemical influence of fiction. She once wrote to a friend that "it’s time we realize--as the Reds do--that spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause."...There seems to be something almost inherent in the right-wing psychology that drives its rich adherents to dismiss the role of luck--all the circumstances that must break right for even the most inspired entrepreneur--in their own success. They would rather be vain than grateful. So seductive do they find this mythology that they omit major episodes of their own life, or furnish themselves with preposterous explanations (such as the supposed handicap of making it in American television with a British accent--are there any Brits in this country who have not been invited to appear on television?) to tailor reality to fit the requirements of the fantasy.

By early 2010, according to the forecast, Iran will be at the brink of developing one, but then it will stop and go no further. If this computer model is right, all the dire portents we’ve seen in recent months — the brutal crackdown on protesters, the dubious confessions, Khamenei’s accusations of American subterfuge — are masking a tectonic shift. The moderates are winning, even if we cannot see that yet.

the reason why quality of scale has eluded us is that we have all of these obstacles in the way of people being able to unleash their creative potential. ... We've been so prescriptive at every level ... from the federal government to the state government to the school district level ... about what we should and shouldn't do that we've basically disempowered people closest to our kids...To me the burden of proof is not on the people who want to change the system, the burden of proof is on people who want to keep it the same. The objective is to give kids a real chance here. And that is what everybody wants. We have a system that in a lot of ways owes its essential design to colonial America and to a labor market that discriminated against women, and in the 21st century that simply won't do.

Honduras Iraq Iran Afghanistan Bangladesh China Thailand Serena

The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.

The result was a tax system that is both inequitable and unstable. It’s inequitable because older homeowners often pay far less property tax than their younger neighbors. It’s unstable because limits on property taxation have forced California to rely more heavily than other states on income taxes, which fall steeply during recessions.

Even more important, however, Proposition 13 made it extremely hard to raise taxes, even in emergencies: no state tax rate may be increased without a two-thirds majority in both houses of the State Legislature. And this provision has interacted disastrously with state political trends.

anyone who can communicate these ideas this clearly really needs to take a seat before the Senate's Committee on Agriculture

Definitely I wouldn't call these my "good old days".

If science really and truly discredited liberalism, then the only honest response would be: so much the worse for liberalism. But, of course, it does not. The distinction between nature and culture that Wolfe brandishes so menacingly is far more subtle and tenuous than he recognizes. His version, like the obsolete distinction between body and soul, implies that we cannot be both purely physical and meaningfully moral. And yet we are. Whatever "free will" means, it does not mean that choices are uncaused. Someday our descendants will emerge from the metaphysical mists, shaking their heads and wondering what all that philosophical fuss was about. Meanwhile, as Wolfe acknowledges, a majority of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists are liberals who believe that "it is wrong...to confuse a scientific theory such as evolutionary psychology with a moral and political agenda." Wolfe thinks he knows better. I cannot understand why.

the boards voted to close one of the local schools. In both cases, one reason given is declining enrollments because so many local families now send their children to yeshivas. In both cases, the decision was made by boards dominated by Orthodox Jews who are running the public schools but don’t send their own children to them.

the matrix, superman, harry potter, the lion the witch and the wardrobe, the lord of the rings, star wars, star trek, the terminator

Our survey results show that Americans are solidly center-left in their ideas about role of government, the economy, and domestic politics and somewhat less so on cultural and social issues.

http://change-congress.org/ al gore @ 37:00 - "democracy crisis" Q&A 42:00

Pushed by scientists everywhere, the NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge. Proprietary publishers, however, didn't like it. And so rather than competing in the traditional way, they've adopted the increasingly Washington way of competition -- they've gone to Congress to get a law to ban the business model they don't like. If H.R. 801 is passed, the government can't even experiment with supporting publishing models that assure that the people who have paid for the research can actually access it. Instead, if Conyers has his way, we'll pay for the research twice.