Here's a beautiful little commercial for Krytik, an Italian clothing brand for kids. Filmed in St Tropez, at the same Place des Lices where Karl Lagerfeld was entertaining his fashion friends last summer. Great colors, crystal clear - especially in HD -, and cute music.
Only one little (round) thing is missing :)
Maybe the guys & gals from Conestoga HS chould go over there and give them some tips!
Monday, January 31, 2011
Bambini in St Tropez
Here's a beautiful little commercial for Krytik, an Italian clothing brand for kids. Filmed in St Tropez, at the same Place des Lices where Karl Lagerfeld was entertaining his fashion friends last summer. Great colors, crystal clear - especially in HD -, and cute music.
Only one little (round) thing is missing :)
Maybe the guys & gals from Conestoga HS chould go over there and give them some tips!
Only one little (round) thing is missing :)
Maybe the guys & gals from Conestoga HS chould go over there and give them some tips!
Can we have our money back, please....
The German banks want their money back. At least, they want to get it out of other EU countries. Since the crisis began, German banks have reduced their claims i.e. loans to other Europeans by 385 billion euros.Don't worry, the money seems to be returning very rapidly to Germany.
Germany - the beast is back
What is going on in Germany?
In the third quarter of last year, the German economy expanded 0.7 percent, and clocked up an annual growth rate of almost 4 percent. By recent historical standards, this was an impressive growth rate. In the previous 20 or so years, average quarterly growth was just 0.3 percent. So while the British economy shrinks, Germany is back on the steroids.
It does help to have a strong, competitive and innovative export sector. Sadly, the UK gave this away in the early 1980s, when Thatcher needlessly wrecked our manufacturing sector.
However, the surge in German growth raises a tricky question for the ECB. The eurozone economy has bifurcated. The centre seems to be hightailing it out of the recession. The periphery remains encased in a debilitating financial crisis. Moreover, eurozone inflation is picking up quickly.
Time for a rate hike? Recently printed German numbers say yes. Numbers coming out of the periphery say no.
Just what we need right now; an oil price bubble
The crisis in Egypt is doing wonders for the price of oil. As demonstrators filled the streets of Cairo, the price of Brent crude hit $100 a barrel, its highest level for two years.However, it would be misleading to think that the political crises in North Africa is the main driver behind the recent spike in oil prices. The crisis has helped over the last month or so, but the market has been trending upwards since the summer.
Cheap money, lots of speculation and a growing expectations of inflation - these are the factors driving the price of oil higher.
ESTHER CEPEDA: Adding to the pack: Scouts aid assimilation
Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are a good way for kids to get together and become assimilated, but not many immigrants join, maybe they should. - - Donna Poisl
by ESTHER CEPEDA, The Bakersfield Californian
The Flintstones introduced me to the world of Scouting. I vividly recall the episode where Fred and Barney took their families camping in Shangri-La-De-Da Valley and found themselves in the middle of the biggest international Boy Scout jamboree of all time.
That episode taught me about camping trips, good deeds and being prepared. Later, I learned that the Boy Scouts were an integral part of American culture.
But to a child of recent immigrants, the thought that either of my male cousins or I would ever have anything to do with Scouting was as foreign to me as the Irish soda bread I first tasted during my third-grade classroom's "cultural celebration."
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
by ESTHER CEPEDA, The Bakersfield Californian
The Flintstones introduced me to the world of Scouting. I vividly recall the episode where Fred and Barney took their families camping in Shangri-La-De-Da Valley and found themselves in the middle of the biggest international Boy Scout jamboree of all time.
That episode taught me about camping trips, good deeds and being prepared. Later, I learned that the Boy Scouts were an integral part of American culture.
But to a child of recent immigrants, the thought that either of my male cousins or I would ever have anything to do with Scouting was as foreign to me as the Irish soda bread I first tasted during my third-grade classroom's "cultural celebration."
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Cleveland: Immigrant family's American dream could yield new development
This immigrant family bought a large building and is heading a new development which will house a Town Center. This will have a supermarket, restaurants and other stores and employ many people. They are living the American Dream! - - Donna Poisl
by Paul Thomas
CLEVELAND -- As traditional lion dancers weaved through the crowd to the beat of a drummer, the Duong family watched the Chinese Lunar New Celebration, along with hundreds of customers.
The Duong family is the modern adaptation of immigrants building their American dream. They are the driving force behind a new Asian Town Center on East 38th Street and Superior Avenue in Cleveland.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
by Paul Thomas
CLEVELAND -- As traditional lion dancers weaved through the crowd to the beat of a drummer, the Duong family watched the Chinese Lunar New Celebration, along with hundreds of customers.
The Duong family is the modern adaptation of immigrants building their American dream. They are the driving force behind a new Asian Town Center on East 38th Street and Superior Avenue in Cleveland.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
An immigration reform window opens
This op-ed in the LA Times tells reasons why this is a GOOD time to be working on immigration reform. I hope it is correct. - - Donna Poisl
By Peter H. Schuck
Reports of the death of immigration reform in the 112th Congress may be exaggerated. True, immigration politics are divisive and sometimes toxic, and Republicans don't want to enable President Obama to claim another legislative victory as he gears up for the 2012 election. Even so, the strands of effective reform are there, waiting to be knitted together into a grand bargain by political entrepreneurs.
Almost everyone accepts that our current approach to immigration needs fixing. And they also recognize that the problem is likely to get worse. Paradoxically, given our current economic troubles, now is the best time to tackle the problems, for several reasons.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
By Peter H. Schuck
Reports of the death of immigration reform in the 112th Congress may be exaggerated. True, immigration politics are divisive and sometimes toxic, and Republicans don't want to enable President Obama to claim another legislative victory as he gears up for the 2012 election. Even so, the strands of effective reform are there, waiting to be knitted together into a grand bargain by political entrepreneurs.
Almost everyone accepts that our current approach to immigration needs fixing. And they also recognize that the problem is likely to get worse. Paradoxically, given our current economic troubles, now is the best time to tackle the problems, for several reasons.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Keeping ties to homeland
Immigrant parents want their children to keep in touch with their culture while becoming Americans. It is hard to keep the kids interested in the old stories. They should learn this as kids though, because they will probably regret it as adults if they don't do it. - - Donna Poisl
Many families face cultural quandaries about assimilation
By Kim Lamb Gregory
Twelve children dressed as signs of the Chinese zodiac stood in a classroom at the Ventura County Chinese Language School in Camarillo recently and rehearsed the song that means “happy New Year and congratulations.”
They were rehearsing for a play to present to their parents in celebration of the Chinese or Lunar New Year, which begins Thursday.
“I’m the jade emperor!” said Alden Huang, 10, of Camarillo, as he swept around the room in a red cape.
Although most of their kids were born in the U.S., their parents don’t want them to forget the Chinese part of their Chinese-American heritage. It’s a sentiment shared by many parents who were not born in this country, but want their children to know about their roots.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Many families face cultural quandaries about assimilation
By Kim Lamb Gregory
Twelve children dressed as signs of the Chinese zodiac stood in a classroom at the Ventura County Chinese Language School in Camarillo recently and rehearsed the song that means “happy New Year and congratulations.”
They were rehearsing for a play to present to their parents in celebration of the Chinese or Lunar New Year, which begins Thursday.
“I’m the jade emperor!” said Alden Huang, 10, of Camarillo, as he swept around the room in a red cape.
Although most of their kids were born in the U.S., their parents don’t want them to forget the Chinese part of their Chinese-American heritage. It’s a sentiment shared by many parents who were not born in this country, but want their children to know about their roots.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
For ethnic Karen immigrants, life in KC is a dream after a nightmare
These immigrants are having a hard time learning to live in this country but compared to the life they came from, they are happy. - - Donna Poisl
By DONALD BRADLEY, The Kansas City Star
Paw Wah Tamla bounces between getting her people to remember and forget.
Her people are the Karen who fled oppression to come here from a land they still call Burma.
As a community leader, she wants them to remember their proud history and customs. For several weeks, she’s helped plan today’s celebration of the Karen New Year, a pageant complete with traditional costumes, food and dance.
But as a parent liaison for the North Kansas City School District, she works to get them to forget the crude ways of the refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border where they all lived before coming to Kansas City.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
By DONALD BRADLEY, The Kansas City Star
Paw Wah Tamla bounces between getting her people to remember and forget.
Her people are the Karen who fled oppression to come here from a land they still call Burma.
As a community leader, she wants them to remember their proud history and customs. For several weeks, she’s helped plan today’s celebration of the Karen New Year, a pageant complete with traditional costumes, food and dance.
But as a parent liaison for the North Kansas City School District, she works to get them to forget the crude ways of the refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border where they all lived before coming to Kansas City.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Arizona-inspired immigration bills lose momentum in other states
This law may fail in other states for reasons other than humanitarian or moral ones. - - Donna Poisl
By Lois Romano, Washington Post Staff Writer
As state legislatures convene this month, lawmakers across the country who had vowed to copy Arizona's strict measure cracking down on illegal immigrants are facing a new reality.
State budget deficits, coupled with the political backlash triggered by Arizona's law and potentially expensive legal challenges from the federal government, have made passage of such statutes uncertain.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
By Lois Romano, Washington Post Staff Writer
As state legislatures convene this month, lawmakers across the country who had vowed to copy Arizona's strict measure cracking down on illegal immigrants are facing a new reality.
State budget deficits, coupled with the political backlash triggered by Arizona's law and potentially expensive legal challenges from the federal government, have made passage of such statutes uncertain.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Families That Learn Together
Boston University has a program to teach English and other skills to immigrants and refugees, teaching all members of the family. - - Donna Poisl
by Kimberly Cornuelle
Griselda Madronero has just finished work—boxing food on the late night shift at a bread factory in Chelsea. It’s 7 a.m. and by 8:30, she’s sitting in a classroom at Chelsea’s John Silber Early Learning Center, sounding out words in English. “Enemy,” she says, “friends,” and a new one today: “pose.” The class is one of several in the Intergenerational Literacy Program, an enduring component of a two-decade collaboration between the Chelsea Public Schools and Boston University.
Founded by Jeanne Paratore, a School of Education associate professor, as part of the Boston University/Chelsea Partnership—where BU educators helped rebuild the Chelsea public education curricula and managed the school system—the program is designed to teach English language literacy skills to entire families, children and parents. It usually serves between 75 and 90 families at any one time, and over the years has helped equip more than 2,400 families with the reading skills needed for life in a new country.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
by Kimberly Cornuelle
Griselda Madronero has just finished work—boxing food on the late night shift at a bread factory in Chelsea. It’s 7 a.m. and by 8:30, she’s sitting in a classroom at Chelsea’s John Silber Early Learning Center, sounding out words in English. “Enemy,” she says, “friends,” and a new one today: “pose.” The class is one of several in the Intergenerational Literacy Program, an enduring component of a two-decade collaboration between the Chelsea Public Schools and Boston University.
Founded by Jeanne Paratore, a School of Education associate professor, as part of the Boston University/Chelsea Partnership—where BU educators helped rebuild the Chelsea public education curricula and managed the school system—the program is designed to teach English language literacy skills to entire families, children and parents. It usually serves between 75 and 90 families at any one time, and over the years has helped equip more than 2,400 families with the reading skills needed for life in a new country.
Click on the headline above to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Adventure Travel Company Accused Of Killing Over 100 Sled Dogs
An adventure travel company has come under scrutiny in British Columbia, Canada after a former worker filed a compensation claim for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The employee says that the condition came about because he was ordered to shoot more than 100 sled dogs over a two day period last year.
According to this story from CTV News, Outdoor Adventure Whistler conducted a "horrific" culling of their sled dogs last April, killing more than 100 of the them and throwing them in a mass grave. The culling took place April 21-23 and in the original claim, the worker says that he helped kill 70 dogs. The article says that the company later corrected that number to 100.
The tales that the person filing the claim has to tell are certainly not easy ones to read, and dog lovers will especially want to take caution when reading the story. A follow-up article, found here, says that Royal Canadian Mounted Police have now joined the investigation into what actually happened, and they will now dig up the mass grave to further investigate the allegations.
The story says that Outdoor Adventure Whistler did not respond to inquiries about the incident, but indications are that with the economy still sluggish and the travel industry still recovering, the dogs were killed off following a particularly slow winter season last year. One Vancouver group has already called for a complete ban of dog sled tours following this report.
Reading this story earlier was a extremely tough for me. As an animal lover, I wouldn't want to see any creature treated this way. This is a glimpse of a darker side to adventure travel, and while I believe that this is probably an isolated incident, it doesn't make it any easier to read about. If the allegations prove to be true, I hope action is taken very swiftly against the people involved.
Thanks to Eric Chan for sharing this sad story.
BREAKING: Federal Judge Rules Obama’s Health Care Act Is Unconstitutional- Says Whole Act Must Be Declared Void
[Update] From U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson's ruling, the exact wording is that the whole act must be declared void..
78 page ruling can be found here. (Quotes above are on page 76.)
Original post below-
"Congress exceeded it’s authority by requiring Americans buy health insurance."
News just in that U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson has ruled the individual mandate portion of Obamacare where citizens are required to purchase health insurance or face penalties is unconstitutional and Congress exceeded it's authority.
This is the biggest court victory to date for opponents of the law's requirement that all Americans buy health insurance which is a key aspect of the Obamacare law on the whole.
Florida Judge Venison is the second judge to rule against the individual mandate and Florida is one of the 26 states that has brought suit against the administration over the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
More on the original rulings and suits here.
Part #2- Obamacare Is Dead, Now It Just Has To Be Buried
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"I must reluctantly conclude that Congress exceeded the bounds of its authority in passing the act with the individual mandate. That is not to say, of course, that Congress is without power to address the problems and inequities in our health care system. The health care market is more than one-sixth of the national economy, and without doubt Congress has the power to reform and regulate this market. That has not been disputed in this case. The principal dispute has been about how Congress chose to exercise that power here," Vinson wrote.
"While the individual mandate was clearly 'necessary and essential' to the act as drafted, it is not 'necessary and essential' to health care reform in general," he continued. "Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void."
78 page ruling can be found here. (Quotes above are on page 76.)
Original post below-
"Congress exceeded it’s authority by requiring Americans buy health insurance."
News just in that U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson has ruled the individual mandate portion of Obamacare where citizens are required to purchase health insurance or face penalties is unconstitutional and Congress exceeded it's authority.
President Barack Obama’s health care reform legislation, assailed as an abuse of federal power in a 26-state lawsuit, was ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. judge.
U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson in Pensacola, Florida, declared the law unconstitutional in a ruling today. Then- Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum filed suit on behalf of 13 states on March 23, the same day Obama signed into law the legislation intended to provide the U.S. with almost universal health-care coverage. Seven states joined the litigation last year, and six signed on this year. Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli sued separately on March 23 and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt filed his own suit on Jan. 21.
This is the biggest court victory to date for opponents of the law's requirement that all Americans buy health insurance which is a key aspect of the Obamacare law on the whole.
Florida Judge Venison is the second judge to rule against the individual mandate and Florida is one of the 26 states that has brought suit against the administration over the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
More on the original rulings and suits here.
Part #2- Obamacare Is Dead, Now It Just Has To Be Buried
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Atacama Extreme: Blisters Bring The Suffering
We're now a week into the Atacama Extreme, which is an expedition that has been undertaken by explorer Ray Zahab who is attempting to run the length of Chile's Atacama Desert, the driest place on the planet. So far, the pace has been exactly what he expected, as he has covered roughly 70km (43 miles) per day, but that hasn't come without a price. Ray has been suffering with a massive blister, which has rubbed his foot raw, and as a result, yesterday he was forced to take some time off to let it heal. This is, as you can imagine, a bit of a frustration for the man who has run across the Sahara, gone to the South Pole on foot, and traversed the length of Lake Baikal in the dead of winter.
The video below gives you an idea of what exactly Ray has been dealing with while he has run the past few days. Clearly the desert has taken its toll on his feet. Since our last update on the run, Ray has moved through a region that was full of deep gorges and has found his way out onto the salt flats that the Atacama is so well known for. He has also found a set of abandoned railroad tracks that have helped lead the way through some of the more remote areas, but despite that, the desert still presents a considerable challenge, although the expedition remains on track to finish up later this week.
Day 7 Atacama Extreme from GOi2P on Vimeo.
The video below gives you an idea of what exactly Ray has been dealing with while he has run the past few days. Clearly the desert has taken its toll on his feet. Since our last update on the run, Ray has moved through a region that was full of deep gorges and has found his way out onto the salt flats that the Atacama is so well known for. He has also found a set of abandoned railroad tracks that have helped lead the way through some of the more remote areas, but despite that, the desert still presents a considerable challenge, although the expedition remains on track to finish up later this week.
A Google Docs documents list refresh
Files stored 100% on the web can be accessed from any computer or device and shared with co-workers with ease. Over the past year, many of you have been taking advantage of the ability to upload any file to Google Docs. With more files and a variety of file types in one place, organizing and quickly being able to find what you need becomes even more important. As a result, we’re happy to announce that, over the next couple of days, we’ll be rolling out a refresh to the documents list, aimed to make it easier to find, explore and share all your files. We’re also rolling out big improvements to our back-end systems to make your experience in the documents list faster and smoother.
Google Apps for Business customers who have the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the control panel, and customers of all other editions will start seeing the new interface within a few days. Google Apps for Business customers without the “pre-release features” option selected won’t see this improvement for a few more weeks. More details can be found on the Google Docs blog.
Google Apps for Business customers who have the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the control panel, and customers of all other editions will start seeing the new interface within a few days. Google Apps for Business customers without the “pre-release features” option selected won’t see this improvement for a few more weeks. More details can be found on the Google Docs blog.
This, Right Here, Is What Is Wrong With Progressive Liberals
In 2007, the yearly Kos Convention, now named Netroots Nation, hosted Democratic presidential contenders, Democratic politicians and liberals from across the country and they hold this convention every year.Do Conservatives protest this convention, do hundreds flock outside holding signs and declaring that liberals do not have the right to meet and discuss their agenda?
Not that I have seen, please feel free to provide evidence to the contrary if you have photos of any massive protest against this or any other liberal meeting.
In the meantime, the news is full today screaming headlines "Hundreds march outside Koch brothers' retreat."
Koch Industries is the nations second-largest privately held company. They fund efforts to push for limited-government, libertarian agenda as well as help organize Tea Party groups.. among other things.
Charles and David Koch held their eighth retreat for prominent conservative elected officials, major political donors and strategists, and according to Koch spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer, the meeting "brings together some of America's greatest philanthropists and job creators … who share a common belief that the current level of government spending in our nation is simply unsustainable."
The meeting is focusing on ways to reduce the rising federal deficit, she said, as well as "strategies to promote policies that will help grow our economy, foster free enterprise and create American jobs."
Liberals have MoveOn.org and many attend the annual Net Nations conventions which has work groups set up to discuss the progressive agenda and how to further it, just to name two such events and organizations, which bring Democratic politicians, strategists, presidential contenders together to discuss many of the same issues. Groups that donate heavily to the progressive agenda, but in the eyes of a liberal, to their thinking, they have the right to bring together like minded individuals, corporations and such but Conservatives do not.
About Koch Industries:
Koch Industries was co-founded by Fred C. Koch in 1940 when they developed an innovative crude oil refining process. Now Koch Industries is a conglomerate based in Wichita, Kansas, with subsidiaries involved in manufacturing, trading and investments. Koch is involved in manufacturing, refining and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizers, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, ranching, finance, commodities trading, as well as other ventures and investments.
To liberals the Kochs represent "corporate greed" as the protest signs signal.
Last I heard, starting a business, building it up and creating a profit by offering services for money, is the basis behind capitalism. Handing that business down to your children to have them expand and grow it, is a legacy.
It also creates jobs for thousands if not millions over time.
In the twisted minds of liberals, Koch's main offense is that they are conservative/libertarian in political nature and they are prepared to put their money where their mouth is.
How dare them support the Tea Party!! How wrong of them to have a political affiliation as well as having money. How "insidious" for them to use their money to help achieve their goals and what they believe to be right for the country and themselves.
I mean come on, liberal protests are never funded and organized by groups, unions or organizations, right? Protesters are never bussed in by liberals to liberal rallies or such, right?
If Conservatives held massive protests against Liberal conferences and meetings where Liberals got together to discuss what their ideas and politics, they would accuse, hell they would scream bloody murder, about how Conservatives were trying to stifle their free speech, their right to a political belief.
Yet that is exactly what liberal protesters did at the Koch retreat. All because these folks are rich and influential. Isn't that prejudicial? Isn't that discrimination?
Oh no, sorry, in the eyes of the progressive liberals you cannot be discriminatory and prejudicial against the rich, they aren't people, they are rich.
The fact that they cannot even see their own hypocrisy and double standards, right there, is what is wrong with the far left liberals of today.
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Democracy rises for Arabs, retreats for Israelis?
Naomi Chazan, the former Meretz Knesset member who now serves as the New Israel Fund's president, is in New York this week for an NIF board meeting. So I saw her twice this past weekend at shuls that I occasionally attend on Manhattan's Upper West Side. First, she was the guest speaker in front of a standing-room only crowd at a Seudah Shlishit (the ceremonial third meal that traditionally concludes Shabbat with study).
An impassioned speaker, she surely left a striking impression for the moderately liberal Conservative-affiliated synagogue, Ansche Chesed. The audience was unfailingly polite and mostly receptive to her message, which contrasted the massive upheavals for democracy and human rights going on in Tunisia and Egypt right now (including spillovers in at least a couple of other Arab countries) with a contraction of democracy and civil rights threatening to take hold in Israel. Dr. Chazan spoke powerfully of a crescendo of legislation up for imminent approval by the Knesset which, for example, seeks to criminalize the act of mentioning the "Nakba" (the Arab term for the catastrophic events that occurred in their community during Israel's war for independence), to investigate the funding sources of human rights NGO's, to outlaw any kind of boycott, and to facilitate discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel in housing.
Still, the first questioner during the Q & A strongly dissented. He expressed alarm at the chorus of strident anti-Israel voices erupting at our university campuses, as well as other places. (He mentioned the late Tony Judt in this connection, overstating Judt's ill-considered characterization of Israel as "an anachronism," as actually advocating its destruction.) Dr. Chazan responded on the need to distinguish between reasonable criticisms of Israeli government policies and moves that seek to delegitimize Israel's existence.
I see a need to build a bridge between these two views, with the recognition that there is an understandable emotional aspect to this discussion. The questioner is rightly worried by Israel's widespread demonization, but he is off the mark in blurring the line between dissent and delegitimization.
The next day, I chatted with Ms. Chazan at another Upper West Side liberal congregation, B'nai Jeshurun, following a panel discussion; the Forward's J.J. Goldberg served ably as moderator for this program entitled, "Loving Israel, Debating Israel: Between Debate, Democracy and Delegitimization." The panel consisted of spokespeople for the very left-wing Jewish Voice for Peace, the somewhat conservative David Project, and the left-liberal New Israel Fund.
While neither the more left nor more conservative speakers were rabid, the default position for Rebecca Vilkomerson, the national director of JVP, was to mostly find fault with Israel; Matthew Ackerman, Middle East analyst for the David Project, mostly defended the status quo. Vilkomerson indicated more of a personal connection to Israel than I would have guessed, but the JVP's position regarding BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is flawed: while only explicitly endorsing the boycott of settlements and companies that "profit from the occupation," it does not condemn BDS campaigns which are more broadly aimed at Israel proper. Ackerman acknowledges that Israel is imperfect, but he has his head in the sand in refusing to see the ways in which democratic values are eroding. Only Daniel Sokach, the CEO of the NIF spoke from a well-informed reform-minded perspective.
Both Sokach and Chazan (the night before) highlighted the crisis for democracy threatening Israel by mentioning that even traditional Likud leaders--such as Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor and [cabinet] Minister Benny Begin--have voiced alarm at the situation. Both Sokach and Chazan articulate a vision of Israel that is consonant with the high ideals expressed in its declaration of independence: i.e., ".... THE STATE OF ISRAEL ... will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace as invisaged by the prophets of Israel; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture...."
An impassioned speaker, she surely left a striking impression for the moderately liberal Conservative-affiliated synagogue, Ansche Chesed. The audience was unfailingly polite and mostly receptive to her message, which contrasted the massive upheavals for democracy and human rights going on in Tunisia and Egypt right now (including spillovers in at least a couple of other Arab countries) with a contraction of democracy and civil rights threatening to take hold in Israel. Dr. Chazan spoke powerfully of a crescendo of legislation up for imminent approval by the Knesset which, for example, seeks to criminalize the act of mentioning the "Nakba" (the Arab term for the catastrophic events that occurred in their community during Israel's war for independence), to investigate the funding sources of human rights NGO's, to outlaw any kind of boycott, and to facilitate discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel in housing.
Still, the first questioner during the Q & A strongly dissented. He expressed alarm at the chorus of strident anti-Israel voices erupting at our university campuses, as well as other places. (He mentioned the late Tony Judt in this connection, overstating Judt's ill-considered characterization of Israel as "an anachronism," as actually advocating its destruction.) Dr. Chazan responded on the need to distinguish between reasonable criticisms of Israeli government policies and moves that seek to delegitimize Israel's existence.
I see a need to build a bridge between these two views, with the recognition that there is an understandable emotional aspect to this discussion. The questioner is rightly worried by Israel's widespread demonization, but he is off the mark in blurring the line between dissent and delegitimization.
The next day, I chatted with Ms. Chazan at another Upper West Side liberal congregation, B'nai Jeshurun, following a panel discussion; the Forward's J.J. Goldberg served ably as moderator for this program entitled, "Loving Israel, Debating Israel: Between Debate, Democracy and Delegitimization." The panel consisted of spokespeople for the very left-wing Jewish Voice for Peace, the somewhat conservative David Project, and the left-liberal New Israel Fund.
While neither the more left nor more conservative speakers were rabid, the default position for Rebecca Vilkomerson, the national director of JVP, was to mostly find fault with Israel; Matthew Ackerman, Middle East analyst for the David Project, mostly defended the status quo. Vilkomerson indicated more of a personal connection to Israel than I would have guessed, but the JVP's position regarding BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is flawed: while only explicitly endorsing the boycott of settlements and companies that "profit from the occupation," it does not condemn BDS campaigns which are more broadly aimed at Israel proper. Ackerman acknowledges that Israel is imperfect, but he has his head in the sand in refusing to see the ways in which democratic values are eroding. Only Daniel Sokach, the CEO of the NIF spoke from a well-informed reform-minded perspective.
Both Sokach and Chazan (the night before) highlighted the crisis for democracy threatening Israel by mentioning that even traditional Likud leaders--such as Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor and [cabinet] Minister Benny Begin--have voiced alarm at the situation. Both Sokach and Chazan articulate a vision of Israel that is consonant with the high ideals expressed in its declaration of independence: i.e., ".... THE STATE OF ISRAEL ... will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace as invisaged by the prophets of Israel; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture...."
Egypt, George W. Bush, and the fight for freedom
Eastern Europeans love Ronald Reagan. Egyptians will soon love George W. Bush. Taking down Saddam was a domino in the spread of freedom and liberty.
http://www.tygrrrrexpress.com/2011/01/egypt-george-w-bush-and-the-fight-for-freedom/
Speaking at 5pm today to Liberty on the Rocks in Denver, Colorado.
eric aka the Tygrrrr Express
http://www.tygrrrrexpress.com/2011/01/egypt-george-w-bush-and-the-fight-for-freedom/
Speaking at 5pm today to Liberty on the Rocks in Denver, Colorado.
eric aka the Tygrrrr Express
Ireland Gets A New Adventure Film Festival
The Explore Foundation, which is a new non-profit organization founded by Tim Lavery and Ripley Davenport, has announced a new adventure film festival for Ireland. The Killarney Adventure Film Festival, or KAFF, is scheduled to take place April 7-10, 2011 and will feature plenty of great adventure films from amateurs and professionals alike.
The organizers of the event are now looking for submissions and on the official KAFF website they have this to say about what they are looking for:
"It’s open to everyone that does weird, wacky, death-defying acts of adventure so here’s your chance to get excited and have a crack of getting your adventure film into the Hall of Fame and onto the big screen. By all accounts, who knows where this may lead to next?"No matter what your outdoor adventure passion, you'll find a spot at KAFF. Entries can be short videos or feature length films, and can fall into a variety of categories including: Polar Adventures, Climbing Adventures, Desert Adventures, and a whole lot more. For a complete list of the categories click here and to register to submit a film, click here.
While still in the early planning stages, it seems that there are plenty of great things on tap for the first ever KAFF. The early info hints at surprise guests, screenings of some big films, and great prizes for the winners. The official website offers more info on Killarney as well, including where to stay while attending the event.
The Explore Foundation was founded in December of 2010 and has the ambitious goal of inspiring young people to see the world through a different perspective. The non-profit hopes to educate and inspire them through exploration and adventure. It seems there are some big things in the works for the organization, and we'll all just have to wait to see what is ahead. For now though, the focus is on KAFF and building a great adventure film community around that festival. Sounds like a blast!
NeighborWorks Network Organizations Offer Free Tax Prep Services
As W-2 and other income forms make their way to taxpayers’ mailboxes, signaling the start of the 2010 tax season, NeighborWorks America reminds consumers to be aware of the real cost of quick refund services offered in the market today and to seek advice from nonprofit organizations that provide free tax preparation services.
Several NeighborWorks network organizations offer free tax preparation services to new and existing low- and moderate-income clients. Depending on the complexity of the return, using a free service can save each taxpayer hundreds of dollars.
The economy continues to be the big story and many NeighborWorks organizations are here to help low- and moderate-income families prepare or to find help to prepare their returns professionally, quickly and comprehensively,” said Chris Krehmeyer, president and CEO of Beyond Housing, a NeighborWorks network member based in St. Louis. “The foreclosure situation around the country means that for many there’s new paperwork and having someone experience helping out could be a big relief.”
Most NeighborWorks organizations that offer free tax preparation help are staffed with volunteer tax professionals who believe in helping their community.
NeighborWorks America also wants consumers to be financially savvy in their short-term finance decisions, particularly those that relate to tax-refund anticipation loans. Refund anticipation loans are costly and often unnecessary because taxpayers who file their returns electronically often can expect to have their tax refund within about 10 days if they choose the direct deposit option.
And despite the weaker than normal housing market in 2010, many low- and moderate-income people became first-time homeowners this year, said Roy Nash, executive director of NeighborWorks® Waco. Many of them may have never filed an itemized return and may now benefit from the longer form.
"Our volunteer tax preparers have had great training,” said Roy Nash, executive director of NeighborWorks Waco. “We think that the tax preparation service is an added value to the people of our community and is in keeping with our mission of service and economic empowerment.”
It’s best to call ahead to your local NeighborWorks organization to determine if they offer tax services or have a referral network of free, trained professionals ready to help. Contact information for local NeighborWorks network organizations can be found at http://www.nw.org/network/nwdata/NeighborWorksOrganizations.asp.
Egypt Updates: Linkfest
A week of protests across Egypt with Egyptian demonstrators demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak and his 30 year rule, the Egypt government shutting down their Internet and cutting their people off from the rest of the world and the protests becoming larger and larger each day for the last six days and heading into the seventh, with Tuesday expected to be the largest yet.
Recent news coming out from Al Jazeera, one of the few places news is still coming out directly, shows a country uprising against it's government.
To some this seems to be coming from left field as they proclaim surprise at the demonstrations and the possibility that the people of Egypt may topple the Mubarak regime, but others clearly saw it coming and warned the U.S. and others of the instability, as reported by The Politico.
Everyone seems to be weighing in on the subject with their opinion of what should and what should not happen and the ramifications across the world if Mubarak is toppled, but those in Egypt, the people, are the ones that will be forced to deal with the immediate consequences of any outcome.
This is about Egypt first and foremost, Egypt's allies across the globe are secondary. The instability of the Middle East just got worse no matter how it is cut and no matter the outcome.
LINKFEST:
Some links to places updating as the days of protests continue.
WSJ: Opposition Unites in Egypt
ABC News: ‘This Week’ Transcript: Crisis in Egypt
BBC: Egypt protests enter seventh day
Al Jazeera: Al Jazeera camera equipment seized
NYT: Protests Persist in Egypt as New Cabinet Is Seated
Other Links
LA Times: White House quietly prepares for a post-Mubarak era in Egypt
New York Times: Clinton Urges Egyptian Dialogue
CBS News: Clinton: In Egypt, "Words Alone" Are Not Enough
Quote of the Day I chose as I see headlines with Obama, Clinton, just about everybody issuing "suggestions" and I sit here and think, this is about Egypt folks, not us, not those that will be affected the most harshly afterward, but right now, right this second, this is between Egypt's people and their government.
Ross Douthat, NYT column, titled "The Devil We Know."
Read the whole thing, it is worth the few minutes it takes.
.
Recent news coming out from Al Jazeera, one of the few places news is still coming out directly, shows a country uprising against it's government.
To some this seems to be coming from left field as they proclaim surprise at the demonstrations and the possibility that the people of Egypt may topple the Mubarak regime, but others clearly saw it coming and warned the U.S. and others of the instability, as reported by The Politico.
Everyone seems to be weighing in on the subject with their opinion of what should and what should not happen and the ramifications across the world if Mubarak is toppled, but those in Egypt, the people, are the ones that will be forced to deal with the immediate consequences of any outcome.
This is about Egypt first and foremost, Egypt's allies across the globe are secondary. The instability of the Middle East just got worse no matter how it is cut and no matter the outcome.
LINKFEST:
Some links to places updating as the days of protests continue.
WSJ: Opposition Unites in Egypt
ABC News: ‘This Week’ Transcript: Crisis in Egypt
BBC: Egypt protests enter seventh day
Al Jazeera: Al Jazeera camera equipment seized
NYT: Protests Persist in Egypt as New Cabinet Is Seated
Other Links
LA Times: White House quietly prepares for a post-Mubarak era in Egypt
New York Times: Clinton Urges Egyptian Dialogue
CBS News: Clinton: In Egypt, "Words Alone" Are Not Enough
Quote of the Day I chose as I see headlines with Obama, Clinton, just about everybody issuing "suggestions" and I sit here and think, this is about Egypt folks, not us, not those that will be affected the most harshly afterward, but right now, right this second, this is between Egypt's people and their government.
Ross Douthat, NYT column, titled "The Devil We Know."
The only comfort, as we watch Egyptians struggle for their country’s future, is that some choices aren’t America’s to make.
Read the whole thing, it is worth the few minutes it takes.
.
Gear Box: Polarmax Base Layers
There is an old adage amongst outdoor enthusiasts that says "there is no bad weather, just bad gear." We all love to play outside no matter what time of the year it is, but if you don't have the right clothing, it can make for a very long day. This is especially true during the winter, when cold weather can keep you shut inside for weeks on end. Thankfully, modern outdoor apparel is fantastic, allowing us to enjoy our favorite winter sports in even the worst conditions.
For me, a good layering system always starts with the base layers, and we're fortunate enough to have a lot of options in this area. But I recently had the chance to put the entire line of Polarmax base layers to the test when I went to Montana and Yellowstone in early January, and over the course of several days, I had the full gamut of weather to try them out in.
Polarmax base layers come in three varieties: warm, warmer, and warmest. The "warm" category is actually a lightweight travel silk that can be quite versatile in a number of environments, even when it isn't necessarily all that cold. The "warmer" option offers comfort and performance in a great package, and it even looks and feel like cotton, although it performs like the technical gear you would expect. This option is great for true winter conditions, keeping you warm in just about all temperatures. Finally, the "warmest" option is exactly that – warm! I wore the tops as a stand alone option until temperatures fell below zero, at which time I paired it with a shell jacket and stayed perfectly warm all day long.
Each of the various options come in both tops and bottoms, and all of them are extremely comfortable to wear. I rarely need to wear the technical tights, but on extremely cold days they are nice to have on your legs. The Polarmax pants not restrictive to movement at all, and they kept me warm while breathing, which meant that while I was snowshoeing in sub-zero weather, I remained comfortably warm without getting too hot.
When we're headed out for a day in the snow, that is exactly what we want, great technical clothing that keep us comfortable no matter what we're doing. Polarmax delivers that and then some with their entire line of gear and with all the options they have available, they have the right piece for where ever you're headed or what ever you're doing.
On my Montana trip, I wore the "warm" layers while kicking around Big Sky Resort, snowboarding and zip lining. On those days, temps were roughly 25º-30ºF and when used with a shell, it was comfortable all day long. A few days later, while in the very heart of Yellowstone, temperatures dropped to single digits, with some scary wind chill factors. It was then that I jumped up to the "warmest" option, donning both technical tops and tights. They served their purpose quite well while standing out in the cold watching wildlife and geothermal activity. They were also versatile enough to transition to more active pursuits while cross country skiing and snowshoeing as well.
My favorite piece that I tested was the Quatro Fleece Men's Zip that falls into the "warmest" category. It works so well in so many ways that it quickly earned a place of honor in my gear closet. It can be a base layer on it's own, or you can put a technical top under it for added warmth, and on the very cold days, you can pull a shell over top for a complete layering system. I love a piece of gear that can be this versatile, which comes in handy when you're trying to pack light for winter travel. I've used the Men's Zip alone on cold weather runs and as part of a full layering system on sub-zero days.
With a well designed, good looking line-up of base layers available, Polarmax has us well covered for all of our cold weather needs. If you're planning some winter adventures in the near future, you'll find everything you need in the Polarmax line no matter where you're headed. I give them a big thumbs up for comfort and performance and I think you'll love the layers too.
(MSRP: Varies depending on pieces.)
Please take it Easy on Michael Yon
On January 24th (at 9.47am) Michael Yon told his 'fans' on FaceBook page that he is a "war correspondent." Within the same long thread on FB that Yon identifies himself as that, he also plays psychologist, and sets himself up as someone far more knowledgeable than the current military who interact on a daily basis with a specific US Iraqi veteran.
The above quotes (and the title of this column) were all proclamations that Yon made about a soldier he has never met. Insert the soldier's name, and you have Yon's opinions about a soldier who is serving America honorably; a soldier Yon is proudly, and loudly, determined to destroy. This despite the fact that this soldier's chain of command are very well aware of all that the soldier has faced - and dealt with. But shhhhh! Don't tell 'expert' Michael Yon that.
A few of Mr Yon's readers recently mistakenly thought Yon was discussing PTSD out of concern for those dealing with this pernicious byproduct of deploying in a war zone. Yon clarifies:
Many of Mr Yon's readers were appalled. One of those is the editor at the site War on Terror News:
Those words were written by Yon, in the same thread, about the US soldier. Go now, HERE and read the rest of WOTN's column about Yon the bully, and then decide, for yourself, to whom the words in that last quote REALLY apply.
No, my academic background is not in psychology, although within my area of expertise, I did crack a few psych textbooks. This gives me as much right as Michael Yon to conclude: HE should be evaluated before he is allowed anywhere near any of our troops. Michael Yon has - again - exposed himself and "he needs help." (again a Yon quote.)
[...] wrote with a poison pen,...and should be evaluated. It would be irresponsible to deploy him -- especially if he is in a position to make life/death decisions. Clearly he should not have a weapon....[...] has no business deploying or holding a weapon. I forwarded this article to a very high level. His chances of being deployed now are extremely remote.... I don't argue with insanity, but certainly will expose it if it threatens the mission or other soldiers. To cover up insanity that threatens the missions or others is a moral crime.
The above quotes (and the title of this column) were all proclamations that Yon made about a soldier he has never met. Insert the soldier's name, and you have Yon's opinions about a soldier who is serving America honorably; a soldier Yon is proudly, and loudly, determined to destroy. This despite the fact that this soldier's chain of command are very well aware of all that the soldier has faced - and dealt with. But shhhhh! Don't tell 'expert' Michael Yon that.
A few of Mr Yon's readers recently mistakenly thought Yon was discussing PTSD out of concern for those dealing with this pernicious byproduct of deploying in a war zone. Yon clarifies:
There is some misunderstanding about my intentions behind the post. Some people say I was trying to highly [sic] PTSD and then used that against a bad Soldier.. I was not highlighting PTSD. In fact, I was attempting to point out the obvious: [...] appears to be insane.
Many of Mr Yon's readers were appalled. One of those is the editor at the site War on Terror News:
War on Terror has much more, and it IS a damning indictment of Yon, using Yon's own words, as he attempts to smear - destroy - a true American hero. It IS a must read, as WOTN clearly and concisely shows Yon for what he really is:01/26/2011
YonWatch: Just a Bully
At Blackfive, Yon learned a new word that described his actions: "deflection." His attacks and allegations (formed in the journalistic style of "questions") were repetitious and avoided any question that was legitimate and asked of him. Yon has now taken up way too much of my time and attention, but I will offer up his use of the 1st Amendment to allow him to expose himself for what he is. I don't repeat his repetitious threats, attacks, or demands. To see that, see the source links. Later, on Facebook, he uses his new word to deflect any questions about him.There's a fine line between the necessity to expose a malcontent and it being better to ignore him. I want to ignore Yon. I have for years and hence I did not know many of the negative actions he had taken. Yon does not want to be ignored and he will commit to all sorts of negative behavior to get attention. He may or may not have already forgotten his call to find me, but his new focus is on CJ Grisham. The behavior demonstrated here is unacceptable.
When Yon had proven his intent in the Blackfive thread
I told him this:"Yon, I've oft stated the 1st Amendment protects the right of idiots to prove how stupid they are. I see you are using it to the fullest extent of your capacity."
This would almost sound like Yon was suddenly understanding of CJ, in a patronizing manner. To understand the background on this, one needs to understand that CJ Grisham has been open about having PTSD and how he is struggling to overcome the negative effects. But Yon would later clarify that his intention was not at all to ask readers to honor the trials that come with combat, but to attack Grisham and end his career.
What is clear in this thread by Yon attacking a Warrior with PTSD, is that Yon does not understand what PTSD is, nor how it is dealt with. But in the storyline, several readers step forward with messages of support for CJ's battle to overcome the effects, and at least one other steps up to say that not only does he have PTSD, but is also currently deployed and fully functioning....
[...]he is morally bankrupt and manipulative, and that doesn't come from PTSD."
This guy [...] is unintelligent, manipulative, hateful and spiteful. To not see that is to be handicapped.
Those words were written by Yon, in the same thread, about the US soldier. Go now, HERE and read the rest of WOTN's column about Yon the bully, and then decide, for yourself, to whom the words in that last quote REALLY apply.
No, my academic background is not in psychology, although within my area of expertise, I did crack a few psych textbooks. This gives me as much right as Michael Yon to conclude: HE should be evaluated before he is allowed anywhere near any of our troops. Michael Yon has - again - exposed himself and "he needs help." (again a Yon quote.)
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Stability As Code For Keeping Dictators In Power
Note: This was originally posted at The Third Way: Finding Balance in Mideast Analysis
Israel has apparently begun working to press Europe and the United States to try to save the embattled regime of Hosni Mubarak. Ha’aretz reports that Netanyahu asked other countries to tone down criticism of Mubarak. However, while the headline says this came from Netanyahu, the article only mentions the foreign ministry, and, as we have seen many times, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman writes his own foreign policy and sometimes acts without necessarily coordinating with the Prime Minister’s office.
In either case, Israel is once again showing itself to be horribly out of touch with the realities of the world they live in. There is only one, very slim, possibility for Mubarak’s survival and that is massive violence. This would probably fail as well, and if it succeeded, it probably would not succeed for long. And in the aftermath, Israel, the US and Europe would be facing a much angrier country that would be far less concerned about maintaining good relations outside the Arab world.
In any case, it doesn’t seem that anyone in Europe, nor the Obama administration, is interested in interfering with Egypt directly, though one suspects they’d all prefer to see Mubarak remain long enough to pass the mantle off to someone who would maintain Egypt’s current stances in foreign policy. The fact that they all were happy to work with Mubarak for thirty years despite his awful human rights record and refusal to democratize the country indicates that these are not the concerns of the foreigners.
Israel’s urging for other countries to prioritize Egyptian “stability” is simply code for maintaining the status quo, at least as far as Egypt’s real positions and actions in regard to the Palestinians, to Israel, to Iran and the Middle East in general. They seem to have completely missed the fact that the status quo has already crumbled in Egypt. Things are changing, and Israel’s desperation for holding the status quo is not only foolhardy, it reflects an inability to deal with changes that are already happening (increasing public pressure in Turkey, Europe, the US and elsewhere to free the Palestinians from occupation) and an even greater inability to deal with even more changes that are coming.
Israel simply can’t afford to be this ignorant. If it does not move immediately to change the status quo itself and start finding a way to seriously move toward a Palestinian state that is viable and includes Jerusalem and some accommodation of the refugee issue, history is going to overtake the country. And everyone interested in peace and in Israel’s future should be pounding away at this message.
Instead, we have Malcolm Hoenlein articulating not only the fact that the organization he heads, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (COPJ) works against Israel’s interests as well as those of the Palestinians and the USA, but also illustrates just why so many of us call the coalition of his group, AIPAC, ADL, AJC and other groups the “status quo lobby.” In one of the most absurd remarks even Hoenlein has ever made, he called Mohammed ElBaradei, the man who appears to be the favorite to take over for Mubarak, a “stooge for Iran.” Which mnade me laugh when I thought of all the people who had called ElBaradei a stooge for the US and Israel because he publicly chastised Iran for not granting his International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) full access for their inspections.
Israel is staring at a very dangerous future. The current government is steering it toward disaster, and the supporters of that government in Washington and Europe are literally killing Israel. If the occupation doesn’t end, Israel will find that it will have to face Arab anger over the issue of Palestine without dictators like Mubarak to keep the locals in line. And at that point, this ugly and unnecessary conflict will get a lot uglier.
UK property market; less than two percent of post codes report a price increase
More evidence of a weakening UK property market; in January less than two percent of postcodes saw an increase in home prices.
(Data is from the Hometrack January 2011 report)
LULAC to Honor Legislative Champions
PRESS RELEASE
Senator Richard Lugar, Congressman Pedro Pierluisi, Texas Representative Trey Martinez Fischer and Daniel Hernandez Jr. will be recognized at LULAC National Legislative Awards Gala on February 10th
WASHINGTON, Jan. 28, 2011 /PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE/ -- The League of United Latin American Citizens will honor Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, Congressman Pedro Pierluisi of Puerto Rico, and Texas State Representative Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio at its 14th Annual National Legislative Awards Gala on February 10th at the JW Marriott in Washington, D.C. In addition, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Charlie Gonzalez will speak at the event.
"LULAC is proud to honor these outstanding legislators who have championed key issues important to Latinos," said LULAC National President Margaret Moran. "We look forward to thanking them for their efforts to pass the DREAM Act, increase access to health care, expand educational opportunities and defend our civil rights."
Daniel Hernandez, Jr., the intern whose quick actions helped save Congresswoman Gabriella Gifford's life, will receive a special recognition during the Gala. Satcha Pretto, the host of Univision Network's weekend newsmagazine "Primer Impacto Extra," will be the Mistress of Ceremonies.
The gala begins with a reception at 6 p.m. followed by the awards program at 7 p.m. and dinner at 8 p.m. For tickets or table sponsorships, call Silvia Perez at (202) 833-6130 ext. 17 or SPerez@LULAC.org. Tickets can also be obtained on our web site at www.LULAC.org/gala.
The awards gala caps off LULAC's two-day legislative conference which provides Latino leaders from across the country the chance to strategize on legislative priorities for the Latino community and visit with their elected members of Congress and senior administration officials. On February 9th, the conference begins at 9:30 a.m. with a series of workshops including: What's in Store for Hispanic Students, New Opportunities for Addressing Poor Health Outcomes in Latino Children, and Effective Latino Advocacy Strategies.
A luncheon at 12:00 p.m. that day will address Improving Latino Broadband Access and feature Anna M. Gomez, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and Deputy Administrator for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn. On Thursday, attendees will meet with their elected representatives and visit federal agencies during the LULAC Advocacy Day. Free registration is available at www.LULAC.org/gala.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest and oldest Hispanic membership organization in the country, advances the economic condition, educational attainment, political influence, housing, health and civil rights of Hispanic Americans through community-based programs operating through 880 LULAC councils nationwide.
CONTACT: Amanda Keammerer, +1-202-833-6130 ext. 17
SOURCE League of United Latin American Citizens
Senator Richard Lugar, Congressman Pedro Pierluisi, Texas Representative Trey Martinez Fischer and Daniel Hernandez Jr. will be recognized at LULAC National Legislative Awards Gala on February 10th
WASHINGTON, Jan. 28, 2011 /PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE/ -- The League of United Latin American Citizens will honor Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, Congressman Pedro Pierluisi of Puerto Rico, and Texas State Representative Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio at its 14th Annual National Legislative Awards Gala on February 10th at the JW Marriott in Washington, D.C. In addition, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Charlie Gonzalez will speak at the event.
"LULAC is proud to honor these outstanding legislators who have championed key issues important to Latinos," said LULAC National President Margaret Moran. "We look forward to thanking them for their efforts to pass the DREAM Act, increase access to health care, expand educational opportunities and defend our civil rights."
Daniel Hernandez, Jr., the intern whose quick actions helped save Congresswoman Gabriella Gifford's life, will receive a special recognition during the Gala. Satcha Pretto, the host of Univision Network's weekend newsmagazine "Primer Impacto Extra," will be the Mistress of Ceremonies.
The gala begins with a reception at 6 p.m. followed by the awards program at 7 p.m. and dinner at 8 p.m. For tickets or table sponsorships, call Silvia Perez at (202) 833-6130 ext. 17 or SPerez@LULAC.org. Tickets can also be obtained on our web site at www.LULAC.org/gala.
The awards gala caps off LULAC's two-day legislative conference which provides Latino leaders from across the country the chance to strategize on legislative priorities for the Latino community and visit with their elected members of Congress and senior administration officials. On February 9th, the conference begins at 9:30 a.m. with a series of workshops including: What's in Store for Hispanic Students, New Opportunities for Addressing Poor Health Outcomes in Latino Children, and Effective Latino Advocacy Strategies.
A luncheon at 12:00 p.m. that day will address Improving Latino Broadband Access and feature Anna M. Gomez, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and Deputy Administrator for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn. On Thursday, attendees will meet with their elected representatives and visit federal agencies during the LULAC Advocacy Day. Free registration is available at www.LULAC.org/gala.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest and oldest Hispanic membership organization in the country, advances the economic condition, educational attainment, political influence, housing, health and civil rights of Hispanic Americans through community-based programs operating through 880 LULAC councils nationwide.
CONTACT: Amanda Keammerer, +1-202-833-6130 ext. 17
SOURCE League of United Latin American Citizens
It is a cold breezy day in New York....
Here is a future scenario where the dollar collapses. The timeline suggested in this video seems too tight.
It reminds me of that quote from Mark Faber:
I am 100% sure that the U.S. will go into hyperinflation. Not tomorrow, but the problem with the government debt growing so much is that when the time will come and the Fed should increase interest rates, they’ll be very reluctant to do so and so inflation will start to accelerate.
-Marc Faber, Bloomberg, May 2009
The interest rate hike is on its way
A rate hike is looking more likely. Here is Martin Weale, the newest member of the Monetary Policy Committee, writing in the Guardian.
As we cast our votes at the January meeting of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee – ahead of last week's GDP figures – I saw a compelling case for an increase in the bank rate.
My concern is that, if businesses and pay-bargainers come to regard an inflation rate of 3%-4% as normal, it will become more costly for the MPC to keep inflation close to the government's 2% target.
The longer inflation stays above the target and the further it rises, the greater the risk that inflationary expectations will become built in.
A rate hike at the next MPC meeting looks very likely.
As we cast our votes at the January meeting of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee – ahead of last week's GDP figures – I saw a compelling case for an increase in the bank rate.
My concern is that, if businesses and pay-bargainers come to regard an inflation rate of 3%-4% as normal, it will become more costly for the MPC to keep inflation close to the government's 2% target.
The longer inflation stays above the target and the further it rises, the greater the risk that inflationary expectations will become built in.
A rate hike at the next MPC meeting looks very likely.
NFL 2010-2011 Pro Bowl Recap
The world is still burning, and I will deal with it tomorrow. Today is the NFL Pro Bowl from Honolulu Hawaii. The game will be recapped later today.
http://www.tygrrrrexpress.com/2011/01/nfl-2010-2011-pro-bowl-recap/
eric aka the Tygrrrr Express
http://www.tygrrrrexpress.com/2011/01/nfl-2010-2011-pro-bowl-recap/
eric aka the Tygrrrr Express
Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Structuralists
[Once again, let me apologize to those of you who bought a copy of A Question of Values. The following essay is included in that collection, but is posted here online for the first time.]
Limbo is our Way of Life.
–William Appleman Williams
The word "structuralism" is commonly associated with a group of French intellectuals who were prominent in the sixties and seventies, and whose work, which was based on linguistics, came to dominate the human sciences for a good many years. Indeed, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Louis Althusser constituted a veritable galaxy of talent. Although one can find numerous academic texts explaining what structuralism is, the philosophy (or mode of analysis) can be summarized as follows:
1. Every system, whether it be a novel or a civilization, has a structure, i.e. is characterized by deep underlying patterns.
2. That structure is more significant than the individual elements of the system, and in fact determines the position or role of the elements in the system.
3. In any system, continuity is much more common than change, and that continuity follows the "map" provided by the deep underlying patterns.
4. Structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface phenomena, or appearances (cf. the distinction between light and shadows in Plato's Parable of the Cave).
Understood in this way, it seems fair to assert that structuralism is not the exclusive property of the French. For example, although structural analysis is not typical of U.S. intellectual circles, a few American scholars have nevertheless used it in their research to great effect. I am thinking of four writers in particular, whose work, when integrated into a comprehensive whole, provides a radically different picture of the United States than the one commonly held: the land of freedom and opportunity. It is not likely that many Americans would be able to tolerate this alternative structuralist view of American history, although they needn't worry, inasmuch as anything even mildly resembling it remains very far removed from public discussion. Thus for most Americans, Vietnam was an unfortunate "mistake"; Iraq is part of the effort to "spread democracy" (but now in the process of being reclassified as a mistake); September 11th was the result of enemies who are "evil" or "insane"; and the economic crash of October 2008 was the product of individual greed, the work of a few (perhaps even quite a few) "bad apples". None of these sorts of events (which could, in fact, be multiplied indefinitely) are seen as being endemic to the system, to the American Way of Life; as following inevitably from its underlying structure. That would, needless to say, be a wake-up call of the first magnitude.
The four scholars I have in mind probably never met, and for the most part (not entirely) were ignorant of each others' work. These are the historians William Appleman Williams (d. 1990) and Joyce Appleby (Professor Emerita, UCLA); the philosopher Albert Borgmann (U of Montana); and the Chilean-born writer and journalist Ariel Dorfman (who has lived and worked in the United States for several decades now). Ostensibly, they don't have all that much in common, having directed their attention to very diverse topics. But as indicated above, when you put them together you get a picture of the United States that forms a coherent whole, one that most Americans would find very disturbing to contemplate. As the saying goes, they don't teach this sort of thing in school.
To begin with Williams, then: 2009 marked the fiftieth anniversary of his most famous work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. In this book, Williams argues that the expansionist or imperial tendencies of the United States were present from its earliest days. American political leaders, he writes, believed that the doors to economic expansion had to be open in order to secure U.S. democratic institutions. They couldn't imagine the American people living within the limits of their own resources. And the American people, he goes on to say, were thoroughly on board with this program. Whether we are talking about farmers or workers or the middle class, they all shared an ideology of informal imperialism. Empire, in a word, was seen as essential to the good life. In particular, the Founding Fathers regarded territorial expansion as key to keeping American society from congealing into a European class system. But there was a price to be paid for all of this, and it was not a small one. For what the frontier did, according to Williams, was take us away from what was essential–a fair and just society, organized along the lines of democratic socialism. Instead, there was a collective (if unconscious, I would add) decision to run away from this, and thus to run away from (real) life. In The Contours of American History (1961), Williams puts it this way:
Americans...have the chance to create the first truly
democratic socialism in the world. That opportunity
is the only real frontier available to Americans in the
second half of the twentieth century. If they...acted
upon the...intelligence and morality and courage
that it would take to explore and develop that frontier,
then they would finally have broken the chains of their
own past. Otherwise, they would ultimately fall victims
to a nostalgia for their childhood.
I shall return to this theme of childhood in a moment. For now, let us be clear about the conundrum that Williams identified: the choice between individual capital accumulation, or obsession with private property, and a more equitable capital distribution, or concern for the collective well-being of the nation. Williams traced this fundamental conflict back to England's Glorious Revolution (1688), by which time it was clearly understood that expansion was the only way to reconcile these opposing ways of life. In the American context, it took the form of an addiction to the frontier as utopia. As a result, there really was no positive vision of commonwealth. In the nineteenth century, says Williams, the focus was on expansion, pure and simple, at the cost of social and personal values. To put it bluntly, Americans have always relied on expansion to escape from domestic problems, and resorted to violence and aggression when this failed. Williams was fond of quoting James Madison on the subject: "Extend the sphere and you have made it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens."
According to Williams, then, the United States was caught in a kind of balancing act, in which outward movement–territorial conquest, market expansion, or war–became the default solution to all of its domestic ills. Empire would reconcile avarice and morality. You defuse demands for a redistribution of wealth by opening up "surplus social space." "We have been playing hide-and-seek for two centuries," he wrote in 1976; "limbo is our Way of Life."
Still, it is not clear what Americans are running from; it is probably deeper than democratic socialism, and at one point Williams argues that we are afraid of our own violence. Whatever this dark presence is, it has to run very deep, because as Williams shows, anything that stood in the way of expansion--Native Americans, the Confederacy, the Soviet Union, and finally the Third World--was regarded as "evil," unnatural, beyond redemption. Looking inward, looking at ourselves, was never a serious option, and examining the structures that underlay its behavior was never America's forte.
Before we can ascertain what Americans are running from, however, it will be necessary to get some idea of how they wound up in a state of internal conflict and competition in the first place. On the surface, it seems almost as though aggression, narcissism, and imperialism are literally woven into the country's DNA; as though, in the United States, life and greed are synonymous. The shift from a European-based sense of commonwealth to a me-first free-for-all dates primarily from the 1790s.* Until that time, according to Joyce Appleby, the idea of a greater good and a system of reciprocal obligations still carried some weight, and the word "virtue" was defined as a commitment to those things. Under the impact of the ideas of Adam Smith and the Scottish enlightenment, however, this began to change. The new Newtonian-based philosophy held that societies were collections of individuals ("atoms"), and that the pursuit of profit on the part of each of these entities combined–i.e. the collective result of individual self-interest–would be the prosperity of the whole. "Virtue," in other words, had by 1800 come to mean personal success in an opportunistic environment; looking out for Number One.
The result was that the glue that had held colonial life together began to disintegrate, for individual greed is basically an antiglue. Historically speaking, according to Gordon Wood, this constituted a complete transformation in human social relations, amounting to a very new type of society. One might even call it an antisociety. Contemplating these developments in the early years of the Republic, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush was forced to conclude that the nation "would eventually fall apart in an orgy of selfishness." The reality of contemporary America would undoubtedly shock Dr. Rush, were he to return from the grave, but it probably would not surprise him.
(As an aside I offer the following anecdote: a friend of mine who happens to be the dean of a major medical school in the United States read Appleby's work some time ago and was very impressed with it. But he discovered that whenever he tried to discuss her thesis with members of the faculty, their eyes would glaze over within thirty seconds and they would change the subject. I believe this attests to the massive brainwashing prevalent in the United States, such that even the nation's most intelligent citizens literally cannot tolerate even a casual examination of the country's structural premises.)
In any case, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890; there was no more unclaimed land to be had. Having stolen half of Mexico in 1848, the United States really couldn't now lay claim to the rest of that country, so it began looking farther afield for new conquests. Thus, the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the formulation of the Open Door Policy in 1899, which asserted the importance of overseas economic expansion. Yet the real frontier of the so-called Progressive Era was internal, which is to say, technological--a conception that has lasted down to the present day. For this development we need to move on to the third figure on our list, Albert Borgmann, whose Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) takes the work of William Appleman Williams to the next level.
In some ways, Borgmann was anticipated by the historian David Potter, who recognized (in People of Plenty, 1954) that Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis," while correct, didn't have to be conceived of in strictly geographical terms. The psychic frontier in the United States, he said, is based on the interaction between technology and the environment, and hence the promised expansion is without limit. This had actually been made explicit by the first presidential scientific adviser, Vannevar Bush, in his definitive essay of 1945: Science the Endless Frontier. But the basic structural mechanism–expansion as a way of mitigating domestic conflict–was in place long before Potter or Bush arrived on the scene. "Commodity expansion," to coin a phrase, was merely the old structure of Manifest Destiny mapped onto a different field; and as Borgmann demonstrates, it "works" even better. For there isn't, and there will not be, an end to the gizmos and gadgets the consumer society can crank out. Where there are now ten varieties of razor blades, there will be twenty tomorrow, and fifty a year from now--all "new and improved," with advertising serving to convince us that all of this junk is essential to our lives. From Milton Friedman to Condoleezza Rice, drowning in crap is regarded as "freedom," with virtually no dissent on the subject from the American people.
Here is a definition of democracy provided by a former American ambassador to Brazil (1961-62), Lincoln Gordon, in his book A New Deal for Latin America:
True democracy...is the regime of continuous social
revolution. I use the word revolution to mean a
process of structural change in society—an alteration
in the pattern of social class, in the social mobility
of individuals and their children, in the educational
structure, in methods of production, standards of living,
and the distribution of income, and in attitudes toward
relationships among individuals, business and other
private organizations, and the State.
Sounds pretty good, right? A far cry from the stagnant, class-based society of medieval Europe, to be sure. But what it amounts to in practice–if we leave aside the reference to distribution of income, which strikes an odd note here–is the society Joyce Appleby described and Benjamin Rush decried: an endless jockeying for position and power. And what fuels this social mobility, as Borgmann recognized, is constant invention and innovation, so that the lower class believes it can acquire the goods and lifestyle of the middle class, and the middle class believes it can acquire the same of the upper class. In Dark Ages America I wrote:
The privileges of the ruling class are exercised in
consonance with popular goals. Rich and poor both
want the same things, and in this way commodities
...are the stabilizing factors of technological societies.
Social inequality favors the advancement of the reign
of technology, in other words, because it presents a
ladder of what can be attained through technology.
This results in an equilibrium that can be maintained
only by the production of more and more commodities.
The less affluent must be able, at least in theory, to
catch up with the more affluent. Hence politics remains
without substance, a realm from which the crucial
dimensions of life, the core values, are excluded.
In reality, this "escalator" of social mobility is an illusion. Very little wealth "trickles down," and the statistics are quite clear on this point: the vast majority of the population never escape from the class into which they were born. But the combination of techno-economic expansion, and stories of the "self-made man," are sufficient to keep the lid on the conflict and hostility that are generated by endless competition. Meanwhile, our lives are filled with toys as substitutes for friendship, community, craftsmanship, quality, an equitable distribution of wealth, and an enlightened citizenry as opposed to a large collection of child-consumers who have literally no idea as to what genuine political debate is about. "Growth" is all...but to what end? This is the question that almost never gets asked.
The matter of children and their toys brings us to the fourth author, Ariel Dorfman, who formulated the concept of "soft power" long before Joseph Nye of Harvard University coined the phrase. What Dorfman asked was this: What makes American culture so popular, worldwide? Why is everyone attracted to its omnipresent symbols--Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, blue jeans, American sitcoms, and the like? What a paradox, that so many nations despise the United States while the citizens of those nations are literally addicted to American television programs. What, in short, is America's secret?
Dorfman is a Marxist, yet he surprised himself when he realized the decidedly non-Marxist answer to this question: "The way in which American mass culture reaches out to people may touch upon mechanisms embedded in our innermost being." In a word, the appeal is archetypal, transhistorical, and transcultural. For human beings are biologically programmed to respond to anything tinged with childhood. We seek to protect our young; we have tender feelings toward them. Mickey Mouse effectively joins power and infantilization, as does virtually all of American culture. That culture broadcasts a message of rejuvenation, a fountain of eternal youth, and (says Dorfman) "the possibility of conserving some form of innocence as one grows up." Whereas previously the U.S. Army was the means of exerting influence, the mass media now becomes a "peaceful" way of extending the American frontier. In fact, it is far superior to "hard power," because it enables Americans to retain an image of themselves as innocent, and to not have to recognize that this is just another version of imperial expansion. "America was able to project a universal category–childhood–onto alien cultures that were subjected politically and economically, and to seek in them infantile echoes, the yearning for redemption, innocence, and eternal life that, to one degree or another, are part of the constitution of all human beings." But when the American is shorn of adult faculties, adds Dorfman, and "handed solutions that suckle and comfort him...what is left is a babe, a dwindled, decreased human being."
The recent remarks of third-party candidate Ralph Nader, who could never manage to garner more than a tiny fraction of the vote, are quite relevant in this regard: the new generation of Americans, he said, “have little toys and gizmos that they hold in their hands. They have no idea of any public protest or activity. It is a tapestry of passivity." But the problem goes way beyond toys as a political substitute. It is all part of remaining a child, and of renewing or "reinventing" oneself through the latest electronic gadget or new consumer product that rolls off the assembly line. (One could include New Age gurus and philosophies in this list as well.) And even beyond this, the notion is that all of the world can be renewed by turning it into one huge market place, or toy store. What else, after all, is life about–for a child?
This, then, is the heart of "soft power," that empire and childhood are linked by an endless succession of new toys; a world in which every day is Christmas, and in which the neurosis of the United States becomes the power of the United States, as every last human being on the planet is sucked into this vortex. The American empire, in reality, is an Empire of Children.
We are now, I believe, in a position to answer the question of what all of this frenetic activity is designed to hide; what Americans are running away from. Toward the end of his life Williams wrote: "America is the kind of culture that wakes you in the night, the kind of nightmare that may [yet] possibly lead us closer to the truth." This is a haunting, if enigmatic, sentence. What truth, after all? Possibly, an example of what not to do. For the truth here is an emptiness at the center, to which is added a desire to never grow up. It should be obvious by now that the American definition of "progress" is little more than a joke, and that running away from the responsibilities of adulthood–including the construction of a society not based on endless consumption, competition, and expansion–could be the single greatest thread in American history. That there is a possible alternative history, and a very different type of progress, characterized (for example) by marginal figures such as Lewis Mumford or the late Jane Jacobs, is something Americans don't wish to contemplate, for alternatives to the life of running faster to get nowhere scare them. No, the expansion game, and the life of limbo, as Williams puts it, will continue until we hit a wall, and the game cannot be played any longer (although I suspect we shall be able to limp along with "crisis management" for two or three more decades). This game, of self-destruction and the destruction of others, will continue until there is no place for America to go except to the graveyard of failed empires. And as Williams suggested, violence is very likely part of the equation.
In the meantime, much of the world, ironically enough, will go on taking the United States as a model for development, ignoring the bankruptcy of this way of life. The sadness of it all was captured by Richard Easterlin in his incisive study, Growth Triumphant: "In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity." Once expansion fails, however, the jig will be up. Whether Americans will finally address the thing they've been hiding from all these years is another question altogether.
The widespread emulation of this model is thus a peculiarly depressing aspect of the whole drama. I wrote this article in Mexico City, and being late for a meeting with a friend, shut my notebook and grabbed a taxi to get to my rendezvous on time. The driver, a young man of about twenty-five years of age, stared into the screen of his cell phone or blackberry while weaving through traffic. As I glanced over his shoulder, I saw that he was looking at cartoons, of the kind I watched on television when I was seven years old. Finally, nervous that he was going to plow into the truck in front of us, I asked him whether watching a screen while driving wasn't just a little bit dangerous. "Oh no," he told me, never taking his eyes off the screen; "not a problem." Meanwhile, he overshot my destination, had to consult the map I had with me, and wound up charging me twice as much as the ride would normally cost. I wasn’t in the mood to get into a long argument with him in Spanish about it, so I paid the fare and wished him buen dÃa. But I couldn't help thinking what a jackass this kid was, and, at the same time, that what was in his head regarding the components of a meaningful life was probably not very different from what was in the head of the president of any Mexican or American or (for that matter) Indian university or corporation. Clearly, the psychology of expand-and-hide spreads like cancer: "growth" über Alles.
We see, then, the picture of the United States that emerges when we look at it structurally. Put Williams, Appleby, Borgmann, and Dorfman together, and it is as though you are looking at America with X-ray eyes. "Freedom" and "Opportunity" are not what stand out, on this view. Rather, the X-ray vision reveals something much closer to disease, what has been called an "ideological pathology." Living in limbo, as Williams told us over and over again, cannot be prolonged indefinitely. Yet the real tragedy, in my view, is not one of American diplomacy but of willful ignorance. Is it likely, when the system finally unravels and the empire is a feeble shadow of its former self, that we (or the hegemon that replaces us) will have learned anything at all?
*This is not quite true. Walter McDougall, in Freedom Just Around the Corner (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), says we were a nation of hustlers (his word) from the get-go; and Richard Bushman documents this for eighteenth-century Connecticut in From Puritan to Yankee (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970).
References
Keith Berwick, review of Williams, The Contours of American History, in The William and Mary Quarterly, January 1963, pp. 144-46.
Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin, "War Without End," The Village Voice, 5 November 1991, p. 75.
Ariel Dorfman, The Empire's Old Clothes, trans. Clark Hansen (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
Greg Grandin, "Off Dead Center," The Nation, 1 July 2009.
Chris Hedges, "Nader Was Right," posted on http://www.truthdig.com/, 10 August 2009.
William Fletcher Thompson, Jr., review of Williams, The Contours of American History, in The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Winter 1962-63, pp. 139-40.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” lecture to the American Historical Association, Chicago, 1893; reprinted in numerous anthologies and available at http://www.historians.org/pubs/archives/Turnerthesis.htm
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993).
Limbo is our Way of Life.
–William Appleman Williams
The word "structuralism" is commonly associated with a group of French intellectuals who were prominent in the sixties and seventies, and whose work, which was based on linguistics, came to dominate the human sciences for a good many years. Indeed, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Louis Althusser constituted a veritable galaxy of talent. Although one can find numerous academic texts explaining what structuralism is, the philosophy (or mode of analysis) can be summarized as follows:
1. Every system, whether it be a novel or a civilization, has a structure, i.e. is characterized by deep underlying patterns.
2. That structure is more significant than the individual elements of the system, and in fact determines the position or role of the elements in the system.
3. In any system, continuity is much more common than change, and that continuity follows the "map" provided by the deep underlying patterns.
4. Structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface phenomena, or appearances (cf. the distinction between light and shadows in Plato's Parable of the Cave).
Understood in this way, it seems fair to assert that structuralism is not the exclusive property of the French. For example, although structural analysis is not typical of U.S. intellectual circles, a few American scholars have nevertheless used it in their research to great effect. I am thinking of four writers in particular, whose work, when integrated into a comprehensive whole, provides a radically different picture of the United States than the one commonly held: the land of freedom and opportunity. It is not likely that many Americans would be able to tolerate this alternative structuralist view of American history, although they needn't worry, inasmuch as anything even mildly resembling it remains very far removed from public discussion. Thus for most Americans, Vietnam was an unfortunate "mistake"; Iraq is part of the effort to "spread democracy" (but now in the process of being reclassified as a mistake); September 11th was the result of enemies who are "evil" or "insane"; and the economic crash of October 2008 was the product of individual greed, the work of a few (perhaps even quite a few) "bad apples". None of these sorts of events (which could, in fact, be multiplied indefinitely) are seen as being endemic to the system, to the American Way of Life; as following inevitably from its underlying structure. That would, needless to say, be a wake-up call of the first magnitude.
The four scholars I have in mind probably never met, and for the most part (not entirely) were ignorant of each others' work. These are the historians William Appleman Williams (d. 1990) and Joyce Appleby (Professor Emerita, UCLA); the philosopher Albert Borgmann (U of Montana); and the Chilean-born writer and journalist Ariel Dorfman (who has lived and worked in the United States for several decades now). Ostensibly, they don't have all that much in common, having directed their attention to very diverse topics. But as indicated above, when you put them together you get a picture of the United States that forms a coherent whole, one that most Americans would find very disturbing to contemplate. As the saying goes, they don't teach this sort of thing in school.
To begin with Williams, then: 2009 marked the fiftieth anniversary of his most famous work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. In this book, Williams argues that the expansionist or imperial tendencies of the United States were present from its earliest days. American political leaders, he writes, believed that the doors to economic expansion had to be open in order to secure U.S. democratic institutions. They couldn't imagine the American people living within the limits of their own resources. And the American people, he goes on to say, were thoroughly on board with this program. Whether we are talking about farmers or workers or the middle class, they all shared an ideology of informal imperialism. Empire, in a word, was seen as essential to the good life. In particular, the Founding Fathers regarded territorial expansion as key to keeping American society from congealing into a European class system. But there was a price to be paid for all of this, and it was not a small one. For what the frontier did, according to Williams, was take us away from what was essential–a fair and just society, organized along the lines of democratic socialism. Instead, there was a collective (if unconscious, I would add) decision to run away from this, and thus to run away from (real) life. In The Contours of American History (1961), Williams puts it this way:
Americans...have the chance to create the first truly
democratic socialism in the world. That opportunity
is the only real frontier available to Americans in the
second half of the twentieth century. If they...acted
upon the...intelligence and morality and courage
that it would take to explore and develop that frontier,
then they would finally have broken the chains of their
own past. Otherwise, they would ultimately fall victims
to a nostalgia for their childhood.
I shall return to this theme of childhood in a moment. For now, let us be clear about the conundrum that Williams identified: the choice between individual capital accumulation, or obsession with private property, and a more equitable capital distribution, or concern for the collective well-being of the nation. Williams traced this fundamental conflict back to England's Glorious Revolution (1688), by which time it was clearly understood that expansion was the only way to reconcile these opposing ways of life. In the American context, it took the form of an addiction to the frontier as utopia. As a result, there really was no positive vision of commonwealth. In the nineteenth century, says Williams, the focus was on expansion, pure and simple, at the cost of social and personal values. To put it bluntly, Americans have always relied on expansion to escape from domestic problems, and resorted to violence and aggression when this failed. Williams was fond of quoting James Madison on the subject: "Extend the sphere and you have made it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens."
According to Williams, then, the United States was caught in a kind of balancing act, in which outward movement–territorial conquest, market expansion, or war–became the default solution to all of its domestic ills. Empire would reconcile avarice and morality. You defuse demands for a redistribution of wealth by opening up "surplus social space." "We have been playing hide-and-seek for two centuries," he wrote in 1976; "limbo is our Way of Life."
Still, it is not clear what Americans are running from; it is probably deeper than democratic socialism, and at one point Williams argues that we are afraid of our own violence. Whatever this dark presence is, it has to run very deep, because as Williams shows, anything that stood in the way of expansion--Native Americans, the Confederacy, the Soviet Union, and finally the Third World--was regarded as "evil," unnatural, beyond redemption. Looking inward, looking at ourselves, was never a serious option, and examining the structures that underlay its behavior was never America's forte.
Before we can ascertain what Americans are running from, however, it will be necessary to get some idea of how they wound up in a state of internal conflict and competition in the first place. On the surface, it seems almost as though aggression, narcissism, and imperialism are literally woven into the country's DNA; as though, in the United States, life and greed are synonymous. The shift from a European-based sense of commonwealth to a me-first free-for-all dates primarily from the 1790s.* Until that time, according to Joyce Appleby, the idea of a greater good and a system of reciprocal obligations still carried some weight, and the word "virtue" was defined as a commitment to those things. Under the impact of the ideas of Adam Smith and the Scottish enlightenment, however, this began to change. The new Newtonian-based philosophy held that societies were collections of individuals ("atoms"), and that the pursuit of profit on the part of each of these entities combined–i.e. the collective result of individual self-interest–would be the prosperity of the whole. "Virtue," in other words, had by 1800 come to mean personal success in an opportunistic environment; looking out for Number One.
The result was that the glue that had held colonial life together began to disintegrate, for individual greed is basically an antiglue. Historically speaking, according to Gordon Wood, this constituted a complete transformation in human social relations, amounting to a very new type of society. One might even call it an antisociety. Contemplating these developments in the early years of the Republic, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush was forced to conclude that the nation "would eventually fall apart in an orgy of selfishness." The reality of contemporary America would undoubtedly shock Dr. Rush, were he to return from the grave, but it probably would not surprise him.
(As an aside I offer the following anecdote: a friend of mine who happens to be the dean of a major medical school in the United States read Appleby's work some time ago and was very impressed with it. But he discovered that whenever he tried to discuss her thesis with members of the faculty, their eyes would glaze over within thirty seconds and they would change the subject. I believe this attests to the massive brainwashing prevalent in the United States, such that even the nation's most intelligent citizens literally cannot tolerate even a casual examination of the country's structural premises.)
In any case, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890; there was no more unclaimed land to be had. Having stolen half of Mexico in 1848, the United States really couldn't now lay claim to the rest of that country, so it began looking farther afield for new conquests. Thus, the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the formulation of the Open Door Policy in 1899, which asserted the importance of overseas economic expansion. Yet the real frontier of the so-called Progressive Era was internal, which is to say, technological--a conception that has lasted down to the present day. For this development we need to move on to the third figure on our list, Albert Borgmann, whose Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) takes the work of William Appleman Williams to the next level.
In some ways, Borgmann was anticipated by the historian David Potter, who recognized (in People of Plenty, 1954) that Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis," while correct, didn't have to be conceived of in strictly geographical terms. The psychic frontier in the United States, he said, is based on the interaction between technology and the environment, and hence the promised expansion is without limit. This had actually been made explicit by the first presidential scientific adviser, Vannevar Bush, in his definitive essay of 1945: Science the Endless Frontier. But the basic structural mechanism–expansion as a way of mitigating domestic conflict–was in place long before Potter or Bush arrived on the scene. "Commodity expansion," to coin a phrase, was merely the old structure of Manifest Destiny mapped onto a different field; and as Borgmann demonstrates, it "works" even better. For there isn't, and there will not be, an end to the gizmos and gadgets the consumer society can crank out. Where there are now ten varieties of razor blades, there will be twenty tomorrow, and fifty a year from now--all "new and improved," with advertising serving to convince us that all of this junk is essential to our lives. From Milton Friedman to Condoleezza Rice, drowning in crap is regarded as "freedom," with virtually no dissent on the subject from the American people.
Here is a definition of democracy provided by a former American ambassador to Brazil (1961-62), Lincoln Gordon, in his book A New Deal for Latin America:
True democracy...is the regime of continuous social
revolution. I use the word revolution to mean a
process of structural change in society—an alteration
in the pattern of social class, in the social mobility
of individuals and their children, in the educational
structure, in methods of production, standards of living,
and the distribution of income, and in attitudes toward
relationships among individuals, business and other
private organizations, and the State.
Sounds pretty good, right? A far cry from the stagnant, class-based society of medieval Europe, to be sure. But what it amounts to in practice–if we leave aside the reference to distribution of income, which strikes an odd note here–is the society Joyce Appleby described and Benjamin Rush decried: an endless jockeying for position and power. And what fuels this social mobility, as Borgmann recognized, is constant invention and innovation, so that the lower class believes it can acquire the goods and lifestyle of the middle class, and the middle class believes it can acquire the same of the upper class. In Dark Ages America I wrote:
The privileges of the ruling class are exercised in
consonance with popular goals. Rich and poor both
want the same things, and in this way commodities
...are the stabilizing factors of technological societies.
Social inequality favors the advancement of the reign
of technology, in other words, because it presents a
ladder of what can be attained through technology.
This results in an equilibrium that can be maintained
only by the production of more and more commodities.
The less affluent must be able, at least in theory, to
catch up with the more affluent. Hence politics remains
without substance, a realm from which the crucial
dimensions of life, the core values, are excluded.
In reality, this "escalator" of social mobility is an illusion. Very little wealth "trickles down," and the statistics are quite clear on this point: the vast majority of the population never escape from the class into which they were born. But the combination of techno-economic expansion, and stories of the "self-made man," are sufficient to keep the lid on the conflict and hostility that are generated by endless competition. Meanwhile, our lives are filled with toys as substitutes for friendship, community, craftsmanship, quality, an equitable distribution of wealth, and an enlightened citizenry as opposed to a large collection of child-consumers who have literally no idea as to what genuine political debate is about. "Growth" is all...but to what end? This is the question that almost never gets asked.
The matter of children and their toys brings us to the fourth author, Ariel Dorfman, who formulated the concept of "soft power" long before Joseph Nye of Harvard University coined the phrase. What Dorfman asked was this: What makes American culture so popular, worldwide? Why is everyone attracted to its omnipresent symbols--Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, blue jeans, American sitcoms, and the like? What a paradox, that so many nations despise the United States while the citizens of those nations are literally addicted to American television programs. What, in short, is America's secret?
Dorfman is a Marxist, yet he surprised himself when he realized the decidedly non-Marxist answer to this question: "The way in which American mass culture reaches out to people may touch upon mechanisms embedded in our innermost being." In a word, the appeal is archetypal, transhistorical, and transcultural. For human beings are biologically programmed to respond to anything tinged with childhood. We seek to protect our young; we have tender feelings toward them. Mickey Mouse effectively joins power and infantilization, as does virtually all of American culture. That culture broadcasts a message of rejuvenation, a fountain of eternal youth, and (says Dorfman) "the possibility of conserving some form of innocence as one grows up." Whereas previously the U.S. Army was the means of exerting influence, the mass media now becomes a "peaceful" way of extending the American frontier. In fact, it is far superior to "hard power," because it enables Americans to retain an image of themselves as innocent, and to not have to recognize that this is just another version of imperial expansion. "America was able to project a universal category–childhood–onto alien cultures that were subjected politically and economically, and to seek in them infantile echoes, the yearning for redemption, innocence, and eternal life that, to one degree or another, are part of the constitution of all human beings." But when the American is shorn of adult faculties, adds Dorfman, and "handed solutions that suckle and comfort him...what is left is a babe, a dwindled, decreased human being."
The recent remarks of third-party candidate Ralph Nader, who could never manage to garner more than a tiny fraction of the vote, are quite relevant in this regard: the new generation of Americans, he said, “have little toys and gizmos that they hold in their hands. They have no idea of any public protest or activity. It is a tapestry of passivity." But the problem goes way beyond toys as a political substitute. It is all part of remaining a child, and of renewing or "reinventing" oneself through the latest electronic gadget or new consumer product that rolls off the assembly line. (One could include New Age gurus and philosophies in this list as well.) And even beyond this, the notion is that all of the world can be renewed by turning it into one huge market place, or toy store. What else, after all, is life about–for a child?
This, then, is the heart of "soft power," that empire and childhood are linked by an endless succession of new toys; a world in which every day is Christmas, and in which the neurosis of the United States becomes the power of the United States, as every last human being on the planet is sucked into this vortex. The American empire, in reality, is an Empire of Children.
We are now, I believe, in a position to answer the question of what all of this frenetic activity is designed to hide; what Americans are running away from. Toward the end of his life Williams wrote: "America is the kind of culture that wakes you in the night, the kind of nightmare that may [yet] possibly lead us closer to the truth." This is a haunting, if enigmatic, sentence. What truth, after all? Possibly, an example of what not to do. For the truth here is an emptiness at the center, to which is added a desire to never grow up. It should be obvious by now that the American definition of "progress" is little more than a joke, and that running away from the responsibilities of adulthood–including the construction of a society not based on endless consumption, competition, and expansion–could be the single greatest thread in American history. That there is a possible alternative history, and a very different type of progress, characterized (for example) by marginal figures such as Lewis Mumford or the late Jane Jacobs, is something Americans don't wish to contemplate, for alternatives to the life of running faster to get nowhere scare them. No, the expansion game, and the life of limbo, as Williams puts it, will continue until we hit a wall, and the game cannot be played any longer (although I suspect we shall be able to limp along with "crisis management" for two or three more decades). This game, of self-destruction and the destruction of others, will continue until there is no place for America to go except to the graveyard of failed empires. And as Williams suggested, violence is very likely part of the equation.
In the meantime, much of the world, ironically enough, will go on taking the United States as a model for development, ignoring the bankruptcy of this way of life. The sadness of it all was captured by Richard Easterlin in his incisive study, Growth Triumphant: "In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity." Once expansion fails, however, the jig will be up. Whether Americans will finally address the thing they've been hiding from all these years is another question altogether.
The widespread emulation of this model is thus a peculiarly depressing aspect of the whole drama. I wrote this article in Mexico City, and being late for a meeting with a friend, shut my notebook and grabbed a taxi to get to my rendezvous on time. The driver, a young man of about twenty-five years of age, stared into the screen of his cell phone or blackberry while weaving through traffic. As I glanced over his shoulder, I saw that he was looking at cartoons, of the kind I watched on television when I was seven years old. Finally, nervous that he was going to plow into the truck in front of us, I asked him whether watching a screen while driving wasn't just a little bit dangerous. "Oh no," he told me, never taking his eyes off the screen; "not a problem." Meanwhile, he overshot my destination, had to consult the map I had with me, and wound up charging me twice as much as the ride would normally cost. I wasn’t in the mood to get into a long argument with him in Spanish about it, so I paid the fare and wished him buen dÃa. But I couldn't help thinking what a jackass this kid was, and, at the same time, that what was in his head regarding the components of a meaningful life was probably not very different from what was in the head of the president of any Mexican or American or (for that matter) Indian university or corporation. Clearly, the psychology of expand-and-hide spreads like cancer: "growth" über Alles.
We see, then, the picture of the United States that emerges when we look at it structurally. Put Williams, Appleby, Borgmann, and Dorfman together, and it is as though you are looking at America with X-ray eyes. "Freedom" and "Opportunity" are not what stand out, on this view. Rather, the X-ray vision reveals something much closer to disease, what has been called an "ideological pathology." Living in limbo, as Williams told us over and over again, cannot be prolonged indefinitely. Yet the real tragedy, in my view, is not one of American diplomacy but of willful ignorance. Is it likely, when the system finally unravels and the empire is a feeble shadow of its former self, that we (or the hegemon that replaces us) will have learned anything at all?
*This is not quite true. Walter McDougall, in Freedom Just Around the Corner (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), says we were a nation of hustlers (his word) from the get-go; and Richard Bushman documents this for eighteenth-century Connecticut in From Puritan to Yankee (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970).
References
Keith Berwick, review of Williams, The Contours of American History, in The William and Mary Quarterly, January 1963, pp. 144-46.
Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin, "War Without End," The Village Voice, 5 November 1991, p. 75.
Ariel Dorfman, The Empire's Old Clothes, trans. Clark Hansen (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
Greg Grandin, "Off Dead Center," The Nation, 1 July 2009.
Chris Hedges, "Nader Was Right," posted on http://www.truthdig.com/, 10 August 2009.
William Fletcher Thompson, Jr., review of Williams, The Contours of American History, in The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Winter 1962-63, pp. 139-40.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” lecture to the American Historical Association, Chicago, 1893; reprinted in numerous anthologies and available at http://www.historians.org/pubs/archives/Turnerthesis.htm
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993).
Somebody stop me
I have got to stop clicking on the links on the World Economic Forum's website. Everywhere I look, I find idiocy.
The latest discovery was the Financial Development Index, which is found in their Financial sector Report. Guess who is top. Yes, it is the UK. We are number one. The US is number three, while Ireland and Spain are 15th and 16th respectively.
This index must be reliable. It has numbers, so it must be scientific.
It sounds significant but what does it mean?
Here are some selected quotes from this year's World Economic Forum. The language is convoluted, tortured and vague. To ease your pain, I have attempted to translate these sentences into understandable English.
In the search for solutions, leaders must navigate a complex network of systems interlinkages, difficult trade-offs and powerful feedback loops within the political, business and natural environments.
Translation: Leaders should watch out for loops because the world is complicated.
Sustaining and extending this prosperity, however, depends on decoupling global consumption from both its use of natural resources and its broader environmental impacts.
Translation: How can we stop poor people from consuming stuff.
New models for global governance and cooperation are needed that are commensurate with the realities of increasing financial integration and economic interdependence.
Translation: Forget about regulating the banks. Things stay as they are, pal.
To support innovation leading to better quality and low-cost healthcare, social entrepreneurs need to communicate more effectively to investors.
Translation: I am not sure who are the social entrepreneurs in the health sector. But whoever they are, they should talk to investors.
There are three types of motivational systems in the human brain: incentive-focus wanting, which includes drive, excitement and impatience; non-wanting affiliation, which is about love and safety; and threat-focused, which covers anxiety, anger and disgust, and is linked to stress. Oxytocin, a hormone in the brain, inhibits the threat-focused system. Mental training can regulate one’s stress level and increase compassion, which leads to an increase in well-being and cooperation.
Translation: Try thinking before you do anything. Then you won't get stressed out.
The theme this year is Shared Norms for the New Reality, reflecting the fact that we live in a world that is becoming increasingly complex and interconnected but also experiencing an erosion of common values and principles.
Translation: The masses are finding it hard to buy into the idea that income inequality is a good thing.
Social innovation focuses on finding efficient and sustainable solutions that create value for society in general, rather than individuals and private companies.
Translation: Countries should cut back on public sector employment.
In contrast to the “population bomb” of the last century, the world now faces “population cluster bombs” – accelerated growth in some of the world’s most fragile countries while others experience population decline.
Translation; European economies will age, decline and eventually fade away. It is an outcome that should be exported Africa and India.
In the search for solutions, leaders must navigate a complex network of systems interlinkages, difficult trade-offs and powerful feedback loops within the political, business and natural environments.
Translation: Leaders should watch out for loops because the world is complicated.
Sustaining and extending this prosperity, however, depends on decoupling global consumption from both its use of natural resources and its broader environmental impacts.
Translation: How can we stop poor people from consuming stuff.
New models for global governance and cooperation are needed that are commensurate with the realities of increasing financial integration and economic interdependence.
Translation: Forget about regulating the banks. Things stay as they are, pal.
To support innovation leading to better quality and low-cost healthcare, social entrepreneurs need to communicate more effectively to investors.
Translation: I am not sure who are the social entrepreneurs in the health sector. But whoever they are, they should talk to investors.
There are three types of motivational systems in the human brain: incentive-focus wanting, which includes drive, excitement and impatience; non-wanting affiliation, which is about love and safety; and threat-focused, which covers anxiety, anger and disgust, and is linked to stress. Oxytocin, a hormone in the brain, inhibits the threat-focused system. Mental training can regulate one’s stress level and increase compassion, which leads to an increase in well-being and cooperation.
Translation: Try thinking before you do anything. Then you won't get stressed out.
The theme this year is Shared Norms for the New Reality, reflecting the fact that we live in a world that is becoming increasingly complex and interconnected but also experiencing an erosion of common values and principles.
Translation: The masses are finding it hard to buy into the idea that income inequality is a good thing.
Social innovation focuses on finding efficient and sustainable solutions that create value for society in general, rather than individuals and private companies.
Translation: Countries should cut back on public sector employment.
In contrast to the “population bomb” of the last century, the world now faces “population cluster bombs” – accelerated growth in some of the world’s most fragile countries while others experience population decline.
Translation; European economies will age, decline and eventually fade away. It is an outcome that should be exported Africa and India.
Happy Planet index: US ranks equal with Africa and lower than Mexico and India
(click for larger image)
The Davos World Economic Forum is drawing to a close. We will have to wait another year before the titans on olympus will again allow us to hear their globally significant thoughts.
Nevertheless, this year's events left us with some humourous moments. The CEO of JP Morgan - James Dimon - gave us a wonderfully self-pitying plea for the rest of us to leave the bankers alone. For me, it was the high point of this year's forum. I laughed; I cried, and I loved every moment. I hope he comes back next year. The tissues are ready, James.
Davos also left us with a few cracking pdf downloads. My favourite was The Consumption Dilemma: Leverage Points for Accelerating Sustainable Growth.
I pulled the map above from that document. It tracks the World Economic Forum's Happy Planet Index. "Above a certain level, quantitative increases in GDP no longer signify greater human prosperity. The returns of GDP growth – and its associated resource use – to well-being may fall, or even become negative."
In order to address this deficiency, the Happy Planet Index is calculated on the basis of three components of the Index (life expectancy, life satisfaction and ecological footprint).
The authors of the report claim that "countries in the developed world are often worse at delivering long, happy lives in terms of the planetary inputs that they use than some developing countries."
The conclusions from the report and the map attached abov are shocking. In terms of the Happy Planet Index, the US is at the same level as virtually all of Africa. The US also ranks lower than India and Poland. Judging by the colour coding, the happiest countries seem to be Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela.
The UK is also in pretty bad shape, although happier than the US. We are above Africa, but on the same sorry level and Russia. We rank lower than India and Saudi Arabia.
This, of course, explains the huge population migrations from the desperate wastelands of North America towards the serene and contented lands south of the Rio Grande. Who wouldn't trade a life in New York for one in Mexico city.
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