William Greider is interviewed by Columbia Journalism Review on the subject of Social Security.
WG: Opponents of Social Security are deliberately confusing Social Security with Medicare; they are distorting reality. There are simple facts that should be reported: 1) Social Security never contributed a dime to the deficit; 2) Social Security softened the impact of the Reagan deficits by building up a surplus; 3) the federal government borrowed the money and spent it on other things; 4) the federal government has to pay this money back because it really belongs to the working people who paid their FICA deductions every pay day. The elites in both parties know the day is approaching when the federal government has to come up with the trillions it borrowed from the workers. That is the crisis the politicians don’t want to deal with, so they create a phony argument that slyly blames working people for their problem. That’s the propaganda they want the public to believe.
Matthew Battles reviews The Killing of Crazy Horse, by Thomas Powers, in salon.com:
The Sioux Wars of the 1860s and '70s comprised a world with a social structure all its own. Even for the Sioux, the plains were a relatively new domain. They had not made their home there until they embraced the coming of the horse to the Americas in the late 18th century. Like the Comanche in Texas and Mexico, the Sioux would ride the horse to hegemony, creating what the historian Pekka Hamalainen has called an "equestrian empire," co-opting some tribes, like the Cheyenne, while beleaguering others, earning the enmity of the Pawnee to the west and bringing the Mandan -- a peaceable tribe who welcomed Lewis and Clark and who figure heavily in the art of Karl Bodmer -- to the brink of extinction. It was their power, burgeoning and resented by their neighbors, that brought them into conflict with the white pretenders to the plains.
Glenn LaFantasie examines southern arguments for secession in a piece titled "How the south rationalizes secession" at salon.com:
Even a conservative Confederate like Robert E. Lee, however, admitted that "secession is nothing but revolution." Despite this belief, he willingly broke his solemn oath to defend the Constitution, followed Virginia out of the Union, and became the Confederacy’s greatest warrior and its foremost national symbol. When the war was over, he sought a federal pardon. Implicitly he seemed to understand that his actions required absolution. But a war-torn nation was unforgiving. Lee’s rights as a citizen of the United States were not restored to him until 1975. Nevertheless, he was never charged with treason before his death in 1870, although he worried that he would be.
Robert Lane Greene compares the cultures of Apple and Google in a piece from Intelligent Life:
As different as they have become, Google and Apple sprang from the same soil: California’s Silicon Valley. Tales from both companies suggest that many of the engineers and programmers at one could have worked at the other: Apple’s Mac-builders playing Nerf-ball tag in the offices in the early 1980s could have been Google’s founders building server racks from Lego in the late 1990s. The sheer number of companies created and destroyed in the Valley, perhaps the world’s most innovative place, encourages a “don’t tell me it’s never been tried” attitude that has driven both Apple and Google.
Timothy Beal writes about evangelicals for The Chronicle of Higher Education. The article summarizes the literature and makes some original points:
The megachurch service, he argues, cannot be separated from its broadcast. The mass-media production of the megachurch event is not supplemental to the event itself but symbiotic with it. The worship experience resides as much in the editing and production of the show—in the "slow-motion images of a pastor laying hands on the heads of parishioners and zoom-in shots of a parishioner feverishly taking notes during the sermon"—as it does in the service or the evangelist. Indeed, the megachurch event is rendered an "incarnation" of the television show. The event is designed to approximate the show even as the show is designed to create an idealized reproduction of the event—a McLuhanian illustration if there ever was one.
Comments