Tonight, Bill Moyers is redoing the journal on the press’ role in the lead-up to the invasion. Ink quantity, pressure, passivity, information suppression. It’s very frustrating to hear the excuses. The doubters were placed on the back page. Those who had all he opportunity could have made the calls.
I feel now as I did then: it should have been easy to say no.
Spazeboy comments on a proposal by Rep Tim O’Brien that would hope to keep graduates in the state by offering them “savings” incentive:
While I think this plan will do a lot to keep young college graduates in the state, I also think it will make it easier for more adults to go back to college. Surely they are planning to stay in the state, but may not be able to afford college along with all the other expenses of running a household–especially earning wages at a job that doesn’t require a degree. It sounds to me like O’Brien’s proposal would allow for CT residents to go to college and get better jobs, regardless whether the fickle youngsters decide to stay in the state.
There are a few problems I have with this. The first goes to the reason why graduates leave the state in the first place: it’s not because of the costs of an education, but because staying hurts more than leaving. How will the incentive address the question of in-state innovation at the environmental, cultural, social, and economic level? People would stay in CT if they had the opportunity, wouldn’t they, or if “place” convinced them to: re the cool factor?
Secondly, the incentive is weak in that it removes choice and “punishes” people for what may be a necessity. What if the field calls me to Arizona? If I leave the state, I’m pretty much in the same boat as now, having to pay my college costs, but if I stay, I may or may not be able to work at a particular level of income and impact. India may call anyway.
Thanks, Beau, for the heads up.
One headline in the paper this morning read:
Pentagon: Spy Satellite Hit
Defense Officials Say Missile Fired From Navy Ship Probably Destroyed Toxic Fuel Tank
This is an Onion headline, right?
Congratulations go to Susan Gibb who’s been promoted to Director of the writing arts at the Fine Arts Connection of Thomaston, Connecticut. In this position she’ll be able to promote her interests in traditional and digital arts from the ground up, where, I believe, swells need to occur and are most valuable.
The technical nature of the digital arts isn’t really the problem or the solution. It’s the promotion of fine work of whatever form and of whatever flavor and by whomever wishes to engage them. In hypertext, for example, we shouldn’t bother so much with the tech but, rather, with simple questions: should storytelling, which serves the needs of the community, take priority over snappy graphics, which can either get in the way or weigh too much in the favor of candy over substance? We always should argue for a balance: excellent telling, excellent art, excellent whatever.
Susan is the perfect pick: her energy, knowledge, and persistence can enflame.
Good luck and congrats.
Just for kicks, I added a hypertext fiction group to Facebook. Carolyn had asked what my feelings were about Facebook and, since I have no real feelings about it, I decided to add the group to promote some measure of subjectivity.
Maybe you remember Beverly Cleary books from the ’60s. I don’t. I read comics, Hardy Boys, and other things I can’t remember in the early ’70s. My son has gone positively ape over Ralph S. Mouse and Henry and Ribsy, partially due to the quality of the storytelling and to the way Cleary writes for performance reading. She has an amazing ear for the oral quality of storytelling. Cleary refines the art of closing at energetic plot points that makes for the wonderful explosion of screams for more and “What’s going to happen to Ralph?”
Even better is the agreement she makes with the reader, young and old: mice are cute, but good storytelling demands edge. In Ralph’s world, the tension is palpable, the danger and dramatic challenges aggressive and unexpected.
Wonderful stuff and refreshing in a time of cute and bland fluff that generally treats children as brainless and provides them no basis for evaluating excellence from mediocrity.
TV’s metaphors are interesting and scary.
The Visa commercial is the image of America (brain) on Debt (drugs) (and human as conformer).
Desperate Housewives has nothing to do with housewives but has a lot to say about suburban blight.
We’re back on Babylon 5 again. Years 2 and 3 are now more relevant than ever. Yikes.
Chris Jordan has some amazing visualizations of amounts here.
The details matter.
Since we’re on the subject of reality, here’s a way of putting it together. From Juan Cole:
I personally find the controversy about Iraq in Washington to be bizarre. Are they really arguing about whether the situation is improving? I mean, you have the Night of the Living Dead over there. People lack potable water, cholera has broken out even in the good areas, a third of people are hungry, a doubling of the internally displaced to at least 1.1 million, and a million pilgrims dispersed just this week by militia infighting in a supposedly safe all-Shiite area. The government has all but collapsed, with even the formerly cooperative sections of the Sunni Arab political class withdrawing in a snit (much less more Sunni Arabs being brought in from the cold). The parliament hasn’t actually passed any legislation to speak of and often cannot get a quorum. Corruption is endemic. The weapons we give the Iraqi army are often sold off to the insurgency. Some of our development aid goes to them, too.
The average number of Iraqis killed in 2007 per day exceeds those killed in 2006. Independent counts by news organizations do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths over-all. Nation-wide attacks in June reached a daily all-time high of 177.5. True, violence in Baghdad has been wrestled back down to the levels of summer, 2006 (hint: it wasn’t paradise), but violence levels are up in the rest of the country. If you compare each month in 2006 with each month in 2007 with regard to US military deaths, the 2007 picture is dreadful.
There are numerous important links at the source. He has an important factual repeat:
Repeat: US troop deaths in Iraq have not fallen and that is not a reason to support the troop escalation. And, violence in Iraq has not fallen because of the surge. Violence is way up this year.
My thoughts on borders come from my experience growing up in the US/Mexico region. The facts are that neither Ciudad Juarez nor El Paso could flourish without each other; they’re linked territory where the idea of “country” and “state” has always been blurred. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t aware of difference, boundary, and color. On the border, color and difference can be striking. When push comes to shove, however, most people realize that tensions are real but that symbiosis is also a reality.
The nearest city to El Paso is Juarez, Mexico and most people that I know in El Paso have a pretty wide territory that circles into New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Chihuahua, Mexico, a very different regional sense than in New England. This spatial sense makes immigration policy difficult normalize. We shouldn’t come at international relations from a “policy” perspective. We should, indeed, avoid policy altogether.