Tag: Policy

Arthur Brisbane and selective stenography

This isn’t merely the practice of journalists; rather, as Rosen points out, it’s virtually their religion. They simply do not believe that reporting facts is what they should be doing. Recall David Gregory’s impassioned defense of the media’s behavior in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when he rejected complaints that journalists failed to document falsehoods from Bush officials because “it’s not our role“ and then sneered that only an ideologue would want them to do so (shortly thereafter, NBC named Gregory the new host of Meet the Press).

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Source : Salon

Berlin off the road for the BMW-Guggenheim-Lab “Urban Impressions

Come talk about individual and collective comfort in an urban laboratory funded by multinationals when their quality of life is found jeopardized by an aggressive capitalism appears to be fairly … inappropiate.

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Source : http://impressionsurbaines.wordpress.com/

The end of online privacy?

But the damage has been done. “Between the Path debacle and Google’s Safari cookies, [Silicon] Valley’s moral bankruptcy on privacy was made obvious,” commented James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School, on Twitter.

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Source : Guardian

Honeybee problem nearing a ‘critical point’

Unfortunately, it was the EPA itself that green-lit clothianidin and other neonics for commercial use, despite its own scientists’ clear warnings about the chemicals’ effects on bees and other pollinators. That doesn’t bode well for the chances of getting neonics off the market now, even in light of the Purdue study’s findings.

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Source: The Guardian

ULI – Demographic Changes Mean Dramatic Shifts In Demand for California Housing: ULI Report Finds Imbalance Between Consumer Preferences and Existing Stock

A recent poll of Southern California voters conducted by FM3, a public opinion research firm, confirmed the trend: nearly two thirds of respondents (64 percent) would prefer to live in communities that are pedestrian friendly, rather than in conventional residential communities that require driving to stores and other businesses. Sixty-five percent indicated they would rather live in communities with smaller lots and shorter commute times than in communities with larger houses and longer commutes.

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Source : ULI

Studies Show Growing Education Gap Between Rich And Poor

[Stanford Professor Sean Reardon] is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.

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Source : Think Progress.org

International suffering – Thinking allowed

Also on the programme, the suffering of strangers: What is it that makes us care for people we have never met and have very different lives from our own? A sense of justice or an impulse for charity? Laurie talks to Kate Nash

Listen from about 20 mins 15 secs into the podcast..

Listen

Source : BBC

Giles Fraser: ‘Economic justice is the number one moral issue in the Bible’

He characterises it as “frustratingly democratic” because when he has said to protesters “take me to your leader”, there has turned out to be no leader. And yet, as he remarks, the advantage of this is obvious: “You have to engage with the issues.”

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Source : The guardian

Could the desert sun power the world?

“The human race must finally utilise direct sun power or revert to barbarism,” wrote Shuman in a letter to Scientific American magazine the following year. But the outbreak of the first world war just a few months later abruptly ended his dream and his solar troughs were soon broken up for scrap, with the metal being used for the war effort. Barbarism, it seemed, had prevailed.

“In 1986, in direct response to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, he scribbled down some figures and arrived at the following remarkable conclusion: in just six hours, the world’s deserts receive more energy from the sun than humans consume in a year.”

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Source : The guardian

Payroll Tax Cut Raises Worries about Social Security’s Future Funding

The payroll tax cut changes that. Instead being a protected program with its own stream of funding, Social Security, by taking money from general revenue, becomes more akin to other government initiatives such as Pentagon spending or clean-air regulation — programs that rely on income taxes and political jockeying for support.

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Source : Common dreams