Monday Open Thread
Welcome to your Monday open thread. I had quite a busy weekend and now I’m exhausted. At least I have a short work week, then a four day weekend! Hooray for Thanksgiving!
The internet is rotting your brain:
Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.
Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”
It seems like there’s always something that is hurting each generation. For the Baby Boomers, it was Elvis’s hips and rock & roll. My generation was going to ruined by 2 Live Crew and naughty rappers. I guess worrying about how the newest thing is ruining our children is an American tradition.
Someone has been feeding Joke Line (Joe Klein) wheaties for breakfast. He actually talks about the hypocrisy of the establishment with their deficit hysteria.
So you’ll excuse me if I muffle my deficit-reduction cheerleading this time. There is much of value in the co-chairs’ proposal. I like the fact that Social Security solvency is mostly achieved by increasing taxes on the wealthy and that there are additional benefits for the working poor. I don’t like the fact that the chairs would limit the earned-income tax credit, which benefits those same working poor. We could go through the proposal line by line — but why waste the lines? There is a larger problem: Why are we spending so much time and effort bloviating about long-term deficits and so little trying to untangle the immediate economic mess that we’re in?
Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that so many of the people whinnying the loudest are prominent members of the financial community, the sector that has had the most to do with hollowing out our manufacturing base and creating the Ponzi scheme in housing that caused the 2008 bust. After all that uncreative destruction, they need to polish their high-minded credentials. (See how some Americans are facing the prospect of long-term unemployment.).
There is, for example, Glenn Hubbard, who was featured on the New York Times op-ed page recently in defense of the deficit commission, describing the problem this way: “We have designed entitlements for a welfare state we cannot afford.” This is the same Glenn Hubbard who served as George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser when Dick Cheney was saying that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” One imagines that if Hubbard was so concerned about deficits, he might have resigned in protest from an Administration dedicated to creating them. But, no, he’s here to speak truth to the powerless — to the middle-class folks whose major asset, their home, was trashed by financial speculators, thereby wrecking their retirement plans and creating the consumer implosion we’re now suffering. Hubbard is telling them they now have to take yet another hit, on their old-age pensions and health insurance, for the greater good.
Yes, the thieves can’t wait to get their hands on that pot of money in the Social Security trust fund. But somehow the very serious people listen to the thieves – because money talks (and SCOTUS says money = speech).
Tags: Open Thread
Over the weekend, the blogger known as “Republican David” wrote some of the ugliest comments that I can recall ever reading on this blog. In these comments, he spoke approvingly of the bloody dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile in which thousands of people were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered for their political beliefs.
I really find it difficult to distinguish his commentaries that glorify Pinochet and his murderers much different from commentaries that would glorify Hitler and his murderers.
It is quite clear that David believes that killing fathers, mothers, and children for their political beliefs, as was done under Pinochet, is a legitimate use of government power to maintain a rightist dictatorship against what he calls “commie libs.”
It is not surprising that he supported a republican congressional candidate who referred to liberal Americans as “Nazis.”
In the future, if David works for any Republican political campaigns, I think the question would be legitimate as to why a candidate would have somebody with such ugly opinions on their campaign staff.
Furthermore, I would hope that the Delaware Liberal team would consider if the opinions of someone who condones governments killing people for their political beliefs is any less than offensive than any other “vile bigoted statements.”
He does, after all, have his own blog to spew his vile, authoritarian, American-Taliban view of the world.
The internet is rotting your brain
I have found that I don’t need to know anything anymore, because I have the google. When I find myself looking up the same information twice, I know there is some kind of problem.
A Guatemalan immigrant was convicted today in the murder of Chandra Levy.
For those that remember, Chandra Levy was an intern that was romantically-linked to married Congressman Gary Condit. Condit eventually resigned but didn’t have anything to do with Levy’ disappearance and murder.
Dayuuummm, Motor Trend lets loose on Rush Limbaugh (and George Will).
The whole thing is good but the last paragraph is killer.
Is Obomba Purposely Sabotaging The U.S.?
“I can’t wait for the blood bath in April,” said [Obomba appointee] Alan Simpson at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast round table with reporters this morning. “It won’t matter whether two of us have signed this or 14 or 18. When debt limit time comes, they’re going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We’ve got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give ’em a piece of meat, real meat, off of this package.’ And boy the bloodbath will be extraordinary.”
This is an appointee of Obomba; this person who “can’t wait for a bloodbath” in America. And yet there are still people who think that Obomba is on the side of liberals and shouldn’t be primaried by a real progressive.
Melanie disappoints:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/melanie-sloan/
More sheer incompetence from Obomba’s Wonderful Afghanistan War: “Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor”
“But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.
“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
Freaking brilliant.
“Mr. Mansour” 2010 = Curveball 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/world/asia/23kabul.htm
Right, but you would have cried “POLICE STATE” if they tried to identify him on anything other than his word.
Ben, I am pleased to hear that you’re happy with the intelligence that the U.S. spends $80 billion per year on. Now, please go stand in line at the airport so they can squeeze your balls.
I knew this war would make a great movie. I didn’t realize it would be a comedy.
A1: It might not be fair to hold Obama responsible for what Simpson said — but then again, he hasn’t repudiated it, has he?
anonone, i never said i was happy. I just think it is hilarious how you have the fox news double standard. Every thing that goes wrong is actualy a plan by obama designed to kill the country, and if something goes the way you demand, it is just a failed obama policy that was meant to be evil.
and the TSA should feel honored they get to check me for lumps. I encourage everyone to let out a little pleasure moan/sigh.
Obomba could have fired Simpson in August when he wrote that “We’ve reached a point now where [Social Security] is like a milk cow with 310 million tits!” Since that wasn’t enough to get him fired, I think it is fair to hold Obomba responsible for anything Simpson says subsequently.
you’re right. Just like we should hold Obama responsible for everything Joe Biden says, and everything Rev Wright said.
While were at it… he IS the president. Glenn Beck is on Obama as well. REVOLUTION!
“It seems like there’s always something that is hurting each generation. For the Baby Boomers, it was Elvis’s hips and rock & roll. My generation was going to ruined by 2 Live Crew and naughty rappers. I guess worrying about how the newest thing is ruining our children is an American tradition”
Im much more worried about the effect the trolls from Jersey Shore have. The most damaging thing being done today is teaching kids that behaving that way is not only acceptabel, but fame-worthy.
Obomba cannot fire the Vice President or Rev. Wright. Obomba can and should fire Simpson.