Consonance and dissonance in political attacks: Why Bain isn’t hurting Romney
January 12, 2012 by Peter · Leave a Comment
There are at least two basic ways a relatively popular political candidate can lose – or be made to lose – substantial support:
- He or she commits a transgression unacceptable to most voters. Crimes, affairs (think Herman Cain), socially unacceptable remarks, etc.
- He or she is subjected to a successful political attack by an opponent.
There are two types of successful political attacks:
- Identifying and publicizing an action or position that is completely at odds with a candidate’s public image – DISSONANCE
- Identifying and publicizing an action or position that is completely synchronized with a (credible) negative frame about a candidate – CONSONANCE
An example of dissonance is Newt Gingrich’s appearance with Nancy Pelosi in a spot about global warming, anathema to conservative climate deniers.
Václav Havel on Kim Jong-il
December 19, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
On a day when two prominent leaders on opposite sides of the moral spectrum pass on, it’s worth reading what one thought of the other:
Fortunately, people who use direct eyewitness testimony in attempts to expose the greatest crimes against humanity can be found in each era and all over the world. Rithy Panh described the terror of the Khmer Rouge, Kanan Makiya detailed the brutal prisons of Saddam Hussein and Harry Wu has tried to show the perversion of the Laogai system of Chinese forced labour camps.
Today, the testimony of thousands of North Korean refugees, who have survived the miserable journey through Communist China to free South Korea, tell of the criminal nature of the North Korean dictatorship. Accounts of repression are supported and verified by modern satellite images, and clearly illustrate that North Korea has a functioning system of concentration camps. The Kwan-li-so, or the political penal-labour colony, holds as many as 200,000 prisoners who are barely surviving day-to-day or are dying in the same conditions as did the millions of prisoners in the Soviet gulag system in the past.
The Northern part of the Korean peninsula is governed by the world’s worst totalitarian dictator, who is responsible for taking millions of human lives. Kim Jong-il inherited the extensive Communist regime following the death of his father Kim Il-sung, and has shamelessly continued to strengthen the cult of personality.
…
Kim Jong-il wants to be respected and feared abroad, and he wants to be recognized as one of the most powerful leaders in today’s world. He is willing to let his own people die of hunger, and uses famine to liquidate any sign of wavering loyalty to his rule.
Through blackmail, Kim Jong-il receives food and oil, which he distributes among those loyal to him (first in line being the army), while the international community has no way to ascertain who is receiving aid inside North Korea.
Innocent North Koreans are dying of hunger or are closed in concentration camps, as Kim Jong-il continues to blackmail the world.
Now is the time for the democratic countries of the world – the European Union, the United States, Japan and, last but not least, South Korea – to unify under a common position. These countries must make it perfectly clear that they will not make concessions to a totalitarian dictator. – Václav Havel
The grim facts about tobacco use
November 11, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
One of the most bizarre political ads of the 2012 cycle was Herman Cain’s spot featuring his chief of staff blowing smoke into the camera. The one good thing about it is that it provoked a conversation about smoking.
Setting aside the oddness of the clip, here’s the awful truth about tobacco use:
Worldwide, approximately 10 million cigarettes are purchased a minute, 15 billion are sold each day, and upwards of 5 trillion are produced and used on an annual basis.
It’s estimated that trillions of filters, filled with toxic chemicals from tobacco smoke, make their way into our environment as discarded waste yearly.
While they may look like white cotton, cigarette filters are made of very thin fibers of a plastic called cellulose acetate. A cigarette filter can take between 18 months and 10 years to decompose.
There is enough nicotine in four or five cigarettes to kill an average adult if ingested whole. Most smokers take in only one or two milligrams of nicotine per cigarette however, with the remainder being burned off.
Ambergris, otherwise known as whale vomit is one of the hundreds of possible additives used in manufactured cigarettes.
Benzene is a known cause of acute myeloid leukemia, and cigarette smoke is a major source of benzene exposure. Among U.S. smokers, 90 percent of benzene exposures come from cigarettes.
Radioactive lead and polonium are both present in low levels in cigarette smoke.
Hydrogen cyanide, one of the toxic byproducts present in cigarette smoke, was used as a genocidal chemical agent during World War II.
Secondhand smoke contains more than 50 cancer-causing chemical compounds, 11 of which are known to be Group 1 carcinogens.
The smoke from a smoldering cigarette often contains higher concentrations of the toxins found in cigarette smoke than exhaled smoke does.
Kids are still picking up smoking at the alarming rate of 3,000 a day in the U.S., and 80,000 to 100,000 a day worldwide.
Approximately one quarter of the youth alive in the Western Pacific Region (East Asia and the Pacific) today will die from tobacco use.
Half of all long-term smokers will die a tobacco-related death.
Every eight seconds, a human life is lost to tobacco use somewhere in the world. That translates to approximately 5 million deaths annually.
Tobacco use is expected to claim one billion lives this century unless serious anti-smoking efforts are made on a global level.
(Full disclosure: I lost my father, a smoker, to cancer, I’m a dedicated anti-smoking advocate, and I’ve done consulting work for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.)
The GOP war on science, courtesy of the Daily Show
October 29, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
A must-see clip via Sheril Kirshenbaum, who writes: “While this segment is done brilliantly, it also accurately reflects the mounting partisan, anti-science, anti-reality stance of certain groups that threaten to send the United States back into the Dark Ages.”
Climate change: our generation’s great failure
October 24, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
Future generations will look back with anger and disbelief at our recklessness. Not only are we turning our planet into a garbage dump, but a good number of people are denying the undeniable effects of our actions: car fumes, bus fumes, truck fumes, airplane fumes, factory fumes, chemical waste, human waste, toxins coursing through our waterways and in our food, forests burned, species going extinct, oceans dying, filth we create in immense quantities turning our atmosphere into a repository of poisonous exhaust.
The following compendium of articles and blog posts summarizes where things stand on climate change, our generation’s great failure…
The rising sea will wash across great swaths of South Florida. Salt water will contaminate the well fields. Roads and farmland and low-lying neighborhoods will be inundated. The soil will no longer absorb the kind of heavy rainfalls that drenched South Florida last weekend. Septic tanks will fail. Drainage canals won’t drain. Sewers will back up. Intense storms will pummel the beachfront. Mighty rainfalls, in between droughts, will bring more floods. The economic losses and the mitigation costs associated with the effects of global warming over the next few decades will be overwhelming. It will cost a medium-sized town like Pompano Beach hundreds of millions just to salvage its water and sewage systems.
A sobering study released by Florida Atlantic University contemplated the effects of global warming in specific terms, particularly for South Florida, considered one of the more vulnerable metropolitan areas in the world, with six million residents clustered by the ocean, living barely above sea level. The study from FAU’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions, adding to an overwhelming scientific consensus about the disastrous effects of global warming, and along with growing hard evidence that temperature changes are already altering the environment, ought to have sent tremors through the halls of government.
Except it didn’t. Perhaps the most peculiar phenomenon associated with global warming has been a burgeoning disdain for climate science even as scientific consensus grows more urgent. … “It is really quite an unbelievable time,” said Harold Wanless, chairman of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami. Wanless, who contributed to the FAU study, described the “dramatically accelerating melt from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.” He said, “We have forced the greenhouse gasses to levels that have not been reached since sea level was about 100 feet higher than present.”
What’s an appropriate punishment for someone who rapes a toddler?
October 9, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
I’d really like to know what justice looks like for the monsters who do this:
In a [Sierra Leone] rape treatment center, I met a 3-year-old patient named Jessica, who was cuddling a teddy bear. Jessica had seemed sick and was losing weight, but she wouldn’t say what was wrong. Her mother took her to a clinic, and a doctor ferreted out the truth. She had been raped and was infected with gonorrhea.
As I stood in the rape center corridor, reeling from the encounter with Jessica, a 4-year-old girl was brought in for treatment. She, too, turned out to have been infected with a sexually transmitted disease in the course of a rape. Also in the center that day were a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old, along with older girls.
Sexual violence is a public health crisis in much of the world, and women and girls ages 15 to 44 are more likely to be maimed or killed by men than by malaria, cancer, war or traffic accidents combined, according to a 2005 study. Such violence remains a significant problem in the United States, but it’s particularly prevalent in countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia or Congo that have endured civil war. The pattern is that after peace arrives, men stop shooting each other but continue to rape women and girls at staggering rates — and often at staggeringly young ages.
The International Rescue Committee, which runs the rape center here in Freetown, the nation’s capital, says that 26 percent of the rape victims it treats are 11 years old or younger. Last month, the center said, a 10-month-old baby was brought in for treatment after a rape.
Rage doesn’t quite describe how I feel about the men who carry out these hideous crimes.
(Also, this reminds me why I continue to send donations to the IRC. Please consider doing so as well.)
Occupy Wall Street versus Tea Party: a video comparison
October 4, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
As OWS defies the skeptics and gains national traction, I figured it would be worth contrasting these interviews, the latter of which were conducted during Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally:
OCCUPY WALL STREET
RESTORE HONOR/TEA PARTY
Fearing death and facing death on September 11, 2001
September 11, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, tributes and remembrances abound, as they should. We learn by remembering. And we honor the fallen.
Every New Yorker has a story to tell about that day. My wife and I had just flown back home on September 10th and had admired the majestic towers on the drive into Manhattan. The thought that those twin icons would vanish 24 hours later was unimaginable.
On that crisp morning, we woke up and began preparing business documents we were delivering to our accountant, whose office was in World Trade Center building 7. We planned to train it down to Chambers from the Upper West Side, stroll down and arrive around 9 am. A couple of minutes before we left, a family member called and told us to turn on the television. We did. Our lives changed forever, as did the lives of everyone around us. [Afterwards, we purposely moved down to lower Manhattan, making Battery Park City our home, surrounded by the spirit(s) of those who gave their lives on that life-changing day. And we still have the package addressed to a building that no longer exists.]
Vindicated by new polls, progressive bloggers and activists will determine President Obama’s political fate
September 6, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
The defining conflict of the Obama presidency is not between the White House and Republicans. It’s not between the White House and the Tea Party. It’s between President Obama and the left, specifically between Obama and progressive opinion-makers and online activists.
It’s no coincidence that the angriest barbs from this White House have been directed at the netroots. And it’s no surprise that the media and political establishment – along with a vitriolic cadre of Obama supporters – are mortified by the principled left, simultaneously dismissing them as bit players and accusing them of being ingrates who are damaging Obama’s reelection prospects (hint: you can’t be both).
I’ve repeated a version of this thesis for years: a handful of influential progressive opinion-makers are canaries in the coal mine, propounding and presaging views and arguments later adopted by rank and file Democrats.
It’s been that way since the dawn of the blogosphere and has only been magnified with Twitter and other online platforms. Just as the netroots laid the groundwork for the eventual downfall of the Bush presidency, the sharp, insistent, principled critiques of President Obama emanating from the left on civil liberties, women’s reproductive rights, gay rights, the environment, secrecy, executive power, the economy, war, among other issues, have had a profoundly outsized effect on perceptions of this president.
Recent polls (including Gallup, which shows a double-digit decline among liberals) indicate significant erosion of support for Obama among groups who propelled him to victory in 2008, reinforcing the idea that reality is catching up with netroots criticism. This crumbling of support is typically attributed by pundits to the poor economy, but the problem is more complicated: it’s the poor economy coupled with the sense (fair or unfair) that Barack Obama has no convictions, no moral center, nothing for which he will take an unwavering stand.
That perception of a lack of convictions can’t be attributed solely to attacks from the right, since they can be discounted as partisan. It’s when the left makes that argument that conventional wisdom congeals.
Reuters- BBC News
- NY Times
- Business News
- Veterans jobs corps: beating swords into plowshares? - Christian Science Monitor
- Greek Leaders Hold Off Talks Until Sunday - Wall Street Journal
- Gazprom says unable to meet greater Europe gas demand-report - Reuters
- Unemployment fell again in January, still over 8 percent - The Colorado Independent
- Dow at Highest Since May 2008 - Wall Street Journal
- Science/Tech News
- Microsoft's Search Head: Google 'Realized We Were Ahead And They Overextended ... - Business Insider
- Look who's listening in to FBI - Sydney Morning Herald
- Microsoft Windows 8 Unification Plan: Grand, But Risky - InformationWeek
- Super Bowl Science Blitz: Watch Out! - Discovery News
- Google Privacy Policy Changes Concern Congress, Europe - eWeek
- Health News
- CDC: HPV vaccination for all, including boys - The State Column
- Komen Foundation bows to social media firestorm, reverses Planned Parenthood ... - San Jose Mercury News
- 9 Super Bowl snacks made healthy - Fox News
- Social media reason behind twitching disorder - Times of India
- Latest illnesses point to raw milk's popularity - USA TODAY
- Earthwire
- Environment
- Health/Poverty
- UN says Somali famine over, but warns action needed to forestall new crisis
- For World Cancer Day, UN stresses early diagnosis to reduce mounting deaths
- UN backs vaccination campaign after yellow fever outbreaks hit Cameroon and Ghana
- Small Indian hill state aims to improve agricultural livelihoods with UN loan
- New UN initiative aims to harness power of social media to fight global hunger
- Human Rights
- Ethiopia's anti-terrorism laws must not be misused to curb rights - UN
- UN official voices concern about possible excessive use of force by Senegalese forces
- El Salvador: UN panel voices concern at arbitrary detention, prison overcrowding
- Somalia: UN envoy deplores murder of radio station director
- Former Haitian leader must face charges for human rights abuses, says UN
- Women/Children
- UN Women to focus on boosting economic empowerment and political roles
- UNICEF appeals for nearly $1.3 billion to assist children in 2012
- Italy must urgently act to end violence against women, UN rights expert says
- Women's education ‘smartest global investment,' Ban tells World Economic Forum
- UN and South-east Asian nations partner to end violence against women and children