FCC disappointment on broadband

Tim Karr of Free Press reports that the FCC's newly released broadband plan is severely lacking on some of the most pressing issues:

Judging from the back-slapping and high fives over at the FCC, you’d think that America’s Internet was sailing smoothly into the future. Think again.

With much fanfare on Tuesday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski delivered the National Broadband Plan to Congress, saying it will help make Internet access faster and cheaper for everyone in the United States. Getting more people connected to high-speed Internet -- from the 65 percent currently online up to 90 percent of households by the year 2020 -- is Job One, according to Genachowski.

There are a lot of good things in the plan’s 376 pages, including pledges to reform the Universal Service Fund and to re-allocate spectrum for broadband. But the plan glosses over some of thorniest problems plaguing U.S. Internet users: high prices, slow speeds and a lack of choices among providers.

Internet access in America is held captive by powerful phone and cable interests. And regardless of what the laissez-faire editors at the Wall Street Journal think, doing nothing to protect people from getting ripped off is not an option.

I haven't yet reviewed the FCC plan, but this report concerns me--Free Press is a highly trusted source regarding media reform. Once again, it appears that the needs of individual citizens are about to take the back seat to corporate interests.

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Amy Goodman talks health care and wars with Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich

Amy Goodman dedicated an entire hour to discuss health care and the ongoing U.S. wars with Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich (video below). It was an intense and insightful discussion--truly worth watching. As you might imagine, much of the discussion focused on Kucinich's willingness to vote for Obama's version of health care. As Kucinich made clear, however, the fact that he is voting for this bill does not mean he supports it. The bill essentially disgusts him, but he believe that voting no would be even worse. Amy Goodman injects the topic that Kucinich is facing massive pressure by his own party to get in line. As I mentioned at the top, the discussion is intense. At about 45 minute mark, the topic turned to foreign policy. Ralph Nader asks how we can possibly "get the American people angry" regarding the war and corruption in Afghanistan. At the 50-minute mark, Dennis Kucinich discusses the actual costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He warns that war has become ordinary and acceptable to Americans, despite the homicidal actions of private contractors, despite the unimaginable costs and despite the lack of any meaningful objectives. Mr. Nader argued (at minute 54) that President Obama has stifled dissent at his White House, just like President George W. Bush.

President Obama is like President Bush in this regard: he doesn’t receive dissenting groups in the White House. He froze out the single-payer advocates, including his longtime friend, Dr. Quentin Young, in Chicago, Illinois. And he’s freezing out dissenters, dissenting groups from meeting with him in the White House. They can’t get a meeting with him. He’s surrounded by warmongers. He’s surrounded by the military-industrial complex. But he won’t meet, for example, Veterans for Peace. He won’t meet Iraq Veterans Against the War. He won’t meet the student groups and the religious groups and the business groups and others who opposed the Iraq war back in 2003. What is he afraid of here?

You know, we’re supposed to have a new wave with the Obama administration. Instead, we have the same old—the same old same old. And I think the whole idea—just let me make this—the whole idea that Obama is for things, but they’re not practical—he’s for single payer, he really doesn’t like war, but, but, but. But he goes along, and he goes along. We have to have the American people give the White House a measure of political courage here, because it’s not going to come from inside the White House.

Juan Gonzales asked Ralph Nader why we aren't seeing more demonstrations against these wasteful wars by the American people:

[During] the 2004 election with Kerry and Bush, the antiwar movement, most of the groups, gave Kerry a pass and broke off their mass demonstrations. It broke the momentum. Momentum is very important in mass demonstrations. Second, there are fewer people in Congress that these—the antiwar people can cling to. That’s a demoralization effect on people. And third, it costs a lot of money to put these demonstrations on, and there aren’t many super-rich antiwar Americans, like George Soros and others, who are putting some money to get the buses and get the demonstrations all over the country. And finally, the Washington Post, New York Times, they do not give adequate coverage to antiwar demonstrations, compared to the coverage they’ve been giving to the tea parties. Just check the column inches in the Washington Post covering the tea parties, compared to blocking out pro-Gaza, pro-Palestinian demonstrations, for example, when the Israelis invaded Gaza, or the upcoming demonstrations against the war. All of this demoralizes people. And they say, “What are we doing this for?” So, unfortunately, the political leaders are not leading, and the President is not leading.

Continue ReadingAmy Goodman talks health care and wars with Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich

On voluntourism

For those who want to spend their vacation volunteering their time in some far-off exotic place, Slate's Sandy Stonesifer offers this thought:

There is no question that unless you have very specific skills to offer, an organization could do more good with the amount of money you will spend on travel, accommodations, and tourism than you could do during your weeklong visit.

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Milgram redux

There's a new French documentary based upon a faked French television show ("The Game of Death"). The "show" was based on the experiments Stanley Milgram conducted at Yale in the 1960's.

On the TV show, the game consisted of one participant asking questions to another player locked inside a booth with an electrode hooked up to his or her wrist. Any wrong answer meant the first player had to push a lever that subjected the victim in the booth to electrical charges up to 460 volts as punishment. The audience applauded and chanted "Punishment! Punishment! Punishment!" when the contestant inside the booth answered wrong.
The results were startling, just as they were in Milgram's study: 80% of the contestants administered what they believed to be lethal electric shocks. BTW, it's not clear whether the audience consisted entirely of stooges--I assume that all audience members were stooges and that they had been instructed to encourage the reckless behavior of the contestants (if not, the consistently terrible audience reaction was phenomenally more interesting to me than the behavior of the contestants). The CNN reporter reporting on this French "show" was perplexed by the behavior of the contestants on this "show." She was flummoxed by the contestant's willingness to administer (what they believed to be) painful and apparently deadly shocks to innocent people. She quoted the show's French producer: "People were willing to act against their own morals, their own principles when they were ordered to do something extreme by a source they they trust is legitimate." According to the CNN reporter, the lesson is that "even the most well-adjusted person can be swayed to act in horrendous ways if the situation leads them to it--that anyone is vulnerable to this." The host of the CNN news show, Campbell Brown added, "I hope that's not the case." But the evidence is ubiquitous that people will happily allow entire communities of other people to needlessly suffer and die. We tolerate mass death of millions of innocent people, including children, through starvation and malaria right here on planet Earth, even though we could substantially alleviate those disasters if we only acted. We tolerate and even cheer on wars that have no purpose relating to "freedom," even though we know that using our terrifying weapons often takes the lives of numerous innocent human beings. We fail to guarantee a minimum safety net of health care for those who can't afford it, resulting in more deaths. We tolerate thousands of institutions that are "schools" only in name rather than insisting on paying a bit more for first rate teachers--we know that these sad public "schools" are ruining lives, but most of us couldn't care less (if we cared, would we be doing something about the situation? Consider too, these eight other ways to kill 3,000 people. How is it that we tolerate any of this? But we do tolerate needless suffering every day, most of it through our inaction. "The Game of Death" demonstrates (just as Milgram had earlier demonstrated) that people are also willing to hurt and kill through their one actions, not merely inactions. For the most part, however, I find this action/inaction distinction to be legalistic and distracting. Highly moral people don't make this distinction when lives are on the line. How can people on the "show" be so cruel? In my opinion, the Milgram study is a finding that relates to limited human attentional capacity. Our limited and rickety working memory can easily be filled with things (such as audience encouragement and the "authority figure" of a show host) which leaves little room for moral processing. Simply fill up our heads with TV, "the threat of terrorism," or whatever, and we are willing to not attend to everything else. We are incredibly fallible beings. I would also suggest that Hannah Arendt's concept of banality of evil illustrates this human vulnerability to attentional distraction. I explain my reasoning regarding human attention capacity in the context of Arendt's work here. Back to the "Game of Death". . . Some of the contestants purportedly explained that the power of television made them do those horrendous things, but this claim confuses me. I suspect that the live audience served as a proxy for that "television audience" (there actually wasn't any such audience, at least until the documentary came out). But assume that the live audience boo'd and hissed when shocks were administered, thereby working at cross-purposes with the show host. In such as case, I would assume that far fewer "lethal" shocks would have been administered. My belief, then, is that the fact that there was a television audience (even an imagined one) didn't cause the contestants to act in any particular way. Rather, the effect of that audience depends on how that audience reacts. No research needs to be cited for the fact that we are social animals and that we feel immense pressure to do the things that are approved by others around us (though I will cite this famous study by Solomon Asch). Some might find this sort of "show" bizarre, but I find it valuable, and I hope that the documentary reaches a wide audience. Humans cognition is a complex and conflicting bag of tricks, many of which work counter to others. That is one reason I have repeatedly stressed at this site that we should first and foremost think of humans as human animals, not the demigods . We desperately need the humility and the skepticism that usually comes with the acknowledgment that we are frail and fallible. Consider that when when humans are thinking least clearly, we are nonetheless capable of feeling certain that we are correct. We are a lot less competent than we'd like to believe. The French "show" is dramatic evidence that merely presenting an audience and an "authority figure" can severely inflict moral blindness. These two things blinded the contestants to the most basic rule morality: don't needlessly hurt and kill others. The more likely that human animals become consciously aware of their gaping cognitive and moral vulnerabilities (I consider these part and parcel), they are less likely to do great damage to other humans. Perhaps this show will remind us that we regularly need to exercise social skepticism and put on the moral brakes, even when those around us seem certain.

Continue ReadingMilgram redux

The so-called interview

I'm having a difficult time believing that FOX calls this an interview. The elephant in the room is that FOX and much of its audience want to believe that everything would be OK without any sort of health care reform. That assumption seemed to be driving the questioning. In the past few months, though, I've been meeting more and more people who are going without health insurance, which can lead to tragic foreclosures and bankruptcies. This situation is not tenable. With regard to this frustrating interview, I do find some fault with President Barack Obama too. He's claims both that we know what's in the bill and that we'll someday see what's in the bill. And he speaks as though there is going to be a meaningful comment period. I'll be watching to see how many hours tick by after passage of this bill, before the bill is rammed home at the White House. We'll see how much input the citizens will have. And from what we suspect, the Obama bill will apparently be a huge gift to corporations that are gaming the health care system. But you wouldn't know any of this based on the questions by this hack interviewer. We desperately need to reform the health care system, though I think that most of that work, and much of the sacrifices will need to be incurred by individual Americans. The national debate thus frustrates me because it is, I think, fundamentally dishonest. We, the People need to take far better care of their bodies and quit expecting our (incredibly talented) health care professionals to bail us out of problems we create with our terrible eating habits and sedentary lifestyles. And we might need to better understand that more high-tech medicine does not necessarily lead to better for real-life health and mortality rates. Americans are dreaming to think that they can pay less and get the same or more of the same type of healthcare that they are currently consuming. Something's gotta give. Maybe a lot of things gotta give. Mostly, we need meaningful exchanges of information in order to improve health care delivery. We need civilized debate and straight talk. This "interview" was pathetic--I do put most of the blame on the shallow-minded sputtering "interviewer," who came equipped mostly with barking points, rather than any interest in developing useful ideas. This session should be shown in journalism schools a an example of how not to conduct an interview. I'd never seen Bret Baier until this interview. I'd bet that he never again gets a chance to conduct any high profile interview. I really have to wonder about his objective going in, other than a dozen barking points.

Continue ReadingThe so-called interview