Visual source: Newseum
The New York Times delivers it's own opinion on what the protests of Occupy Wall Street mean, and where they're going.
At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. On one level, the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity.
...
It is not the job of the protesters to draft legislation. That’s the job of the nation’s leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies. Because they have not, the public airing of grievances is a legitimate and important end in itself. It is also the first line of defense against a return to the Wall Street ways that plunged the nation into an economic crisis from which it has yet to emerge.
My only disagreement with the NYT's otherwise fine statement is that it contains the idea that we might
return to the kind of behavior on Wall Street that generated the current crisis. The truth is, that behavior never stopped, and for many of the 1%, it didn't even slow.
Todd Gitlin, a journalism professor at Columbia, sees the Occupy Wall Street movement as a kind of Declaration of Independence for progressives.
The Tea Party, for all its apparent populism, revolves around a vision of power and how to attain it. Tea Partiers tend to be white, male, Republican, graying, married and comfortable; the political system once worked for them, and they think it can be made to do so again. They revile government, but they adore hierarchy and order. Not for them the tents and untucked shirts, the tattoos, piercings and dreadlocks that are eye candy for lazy journalists. (“Am I dressed too nice so the media doesn’t interview me?” read one Occupy Wall Street demonstrator’s sign.)
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And yet it remains true that the core of the movement, the (mostly young and white, skilled but jobless) people who started the “occupation” three weeks ago, consists of what right-wing critics call anarchists. Indeed, some occupiers take the point as a compliment — because that is precisely the quality that sets them apart from the Tea Party. Anarchism has been the reigning spirit of left-wing protest movements for nearly the past half century, as it is in Zuccotti Park.
In an astounding non-coincidence, the difference between the tea party "movement" and the Occupy Wall Street protests is something I'm going to talk about at 9AM ET. So get your non-conforming comments ready. Or don't, you anarchist.
David Leonhardt makes comparisons not between movements, but between economies--in particular, between the Great Depression and the current period. Guess which age comes off on the bad end of this match up?
The most worrisome aspect about our current slump is that it combines obvious short-term problems — from the financial crisis — with less obvious long-term problems. Those long-term problems include a decade-long slowdown in new-business formation, the stagnation of educational gains and the rapid growth of industries with mixed blessings, including finance and health care.
Together, these problems raise the possibility that the United States is not merely suffering through a normal, if severe, downturn. Instead, it may have entered a phase in which high unemployment is the norm.
In the Great Depression, the government worked to undo the results of corporate excess and bad fiscal policy but behind the scenes the economy was strengthening and getting ready to race ahead. This time, the economy is not so much getting ready as holding its breath.
Scott Shane talks about a technology that's ugly to the core: automated weaponry.
What was a science-fiction scenario not much more than a decade ago has become today’s news. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military drones have become a routine part of the arsenal. In Pakistan, according to American officials, strikes from Predators and Reapers operated by the C.I.A. have killed more than 2,000 militants; the number of civilian casualties is hotly debated. In Yemen last month, an American citizen was, for the first time, the intended target of a drone strike, as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda propagandist and plotter, was killed along with a second American, Samir Khan.
It's already more than a little disturbing to be on the
delivery end of these systems. What does it mean when you're fighting a battle in which your side faces no personal danger? As wonderful as it is to go into a fight knowing that all your pilots will come home unharmed (and in fact, may have never left home to start with) that doesn't mean there's no damage. It's a hell of a lot more disturbing to be on the receiving end of a computer-controlled or remotely operated war machine, and that's a position that Americans other than those targeted by America may soon have to face. This technology will continue along the same path as consumer electronics. It'll get cheaper and more ubiquitous, and it will do so quickly.
Ross Douthat says that not all technology is ugly. He pays homage to Steve Jobs not for the technical horsepower crammed into the products introduced under his supervision, but for bridging what had been a rarely crossed chasm between technology and beauty.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, the United States of America conducted a long experiment in ugliness. Our architects grew bored with beauty, our designers tired of elegance, our urban planners decided that function should trump form. We bulldozed row houses and threw up housing projects. We built public buildings out of raw concrete. We wore leisure suits and shoulder pads, buried heart-of-pine floors under shag carpeting, and paneled our automobiles with artificial wood.
This is the world in which Steve Jobs came of age.
And OK, crediting Jobs for the sleekness of the items we carry around routinely may be a bit too much credit, but would you really like to carry the equivalent devices from a world never touched by Job's keen eye for elegant simplicity?
Marc Thessien wins the "Stretch of the Week" award for first attempting to relabel an ordinary technical maneuver in the Senate as the dreaded "nuclear option," and then claiming that this will be "the Democrat's undoing." This stands about as big a chance of being an issue in the next election as John Boehner's choice of socks. On second thought, make it the "Holy Crap, Man, Have You Bothered to Look at the World Lately" award.
Patrick Pexton, Washington Post Ombudsman, is once again fending off complaints from their Perry camp, this time over a WP article on Perry's controversial hunting camp.
The Perry camp put out a carefully worded statement ... stating: “A number of claims made in the story are incorrect, inconsistent, and anonymous.” Anonymous, yes, but incorrect how and inconsistent how?
Since the article ran, no one from the Perry camp has contacted The Post to request a correction or dispute specific points made in the article. Politico also asked the Perry camp to detail its objections to The Post article. Perry officials said no.
That article was completely wrong, but the Perry campaign refuses to say
how it was wrong. Which kind of sounds like the Perry camp was offended. By a few words.
Judith Browne Dianis lists off the myths about voter fraud and finds that we don't need voter IDs to prevent fraud, implementing voter ID is proving expensive for states, and voter ID definitely makes it harder on some groups of voters than others.
In The Washington Post, Kansas Secretary of StateKris Kobach recently defended what he called the “reasonable” new photo ID requirements. “It’s absurd to suggest that anyone is ‘disenfranchised’ by such protective measures,” he wrote in July.
He’s wrong. State photo ID restrictions disproportionately affect African Americans, Latinos, young voters, people over 65 and people with disabilities. Advancement Project studies show that 11 percent of eligible voters, or about 21 million people, don’t have updated, state-issued photo IDs: 25 percent of African Americans, 15 percent of those earning less than $35,000, 18 percent of citizens age 65 or older and 20 percent of voters age 18 to 29.laws to prevent fraud.
The trouble is, Judith Browne Dianis has missed the biggest myth of all--the myth that voter IDs are about voter fraud. Voter ID laws are not being put in place to protect against voter fraud. Republican lawmakers are well aware that there's no threat from that quarter. Voter ID laws are being enacted exactly because they are disproportionate in effect. Cutting down on votes from African Americans, young people, the disabled, and the poor is exactly the desired result.
You say that you'd like to use an (really quite lovely) iPhone, but have trouble seeing that little screen. There's an app for that.
Early next year, a company called Ucansi will launch GlassesOff, an iPhone app that could help older people shed their reading glasses for at least part of the time - and may allow others to carry on reading without optical aids for years longer than would otherwise be possible.
The app helps people compensate for deterioration in their eyes' ability to focus on nearby objects by training the brain to process the resulting blurred images. "We're using the brain as glasses," says Uri Polat of Tel Aviv University in Israel, and co-founder of Ucansi.
How does the placebo effect work? Here's a hint: don't be surprised if your drug-free cure comes with a case of the munchies.
Some of the analgesic (painkilling) effect of placebo treatment is due to endogenous opioids, ones made by the body. Now, evidence has emerged that suggests an additional effect results from the cannabinoid pathway, according to a publication in Nature Medicine.
Cannabinoids are a class of chemicals that are manufactured in the body and associated with reduction of pain and changes to the operation of short term memory. Cannabinoids also come from... exactly where their name implies. What the current study shows is that the placebo effect is not only real, it's very complicated. It can persist even when someone knows they're getting a placebo. Cannabinoids, which are thought to help you forget not just moments of pain but all the tedious day-to-day items that might otherwise get in the way of important points, appear to have a role in the painkilling from placebos.