Heat up the coffee and stay alert, it's minutes before midnight and the sea is running hard….
August 30, 2013 Leave a Comment
“Research based at Princeton University found that poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life. Experiments showed that the impact of financial concerns on the cognitive function of low-income individuals was similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night’s sleep.”
June 20, 2012 Leave a Comment
Immigration has always been. From Ionian Greeks being pushed out of the mainland and colonizing the western shores of Anatolia about 1,000 BCE to impoverished Africans desperately moving north into Europe today. I don’t know about the tribes who had to accommodate the Greeks but surely in most places and most times the resentment of those who immigrated earlier towards those who arrive later, is a constant. We’ve seen a whole lot of such resentment in the United States, by children of immigrants themselves, towards the most recent “other.”
In fact, I recently “fired” a client where I do computer work, after I could no longer take a senior employee’s rants about the evils of immigrants. And it turns out, all of his “facts” are false. From an article in the NY Times:
… in the regions where immigrants have settled in the past two decades, crime has gone down, cities have grown, poor urban neighborhoods have been rebuilt, and small towns that were once on life support are springing back.
Scholars can’t say for sure that immigration caused these positive developments, but we know enough to debunk the notion that immigrants worsen social ills.
For example, in rural counties that experienced an influx of immigrants in the 1980s and ’90s, crime rates dropped by more than they did in rural counties that did not see high immigrant growth.
Despite what many know, that immigrants are overwhelmingly a benefit to the communities they are part of, deportation has picked up speed under this so-called left-wing president. And with it the human hurt. The NY Times has done a very fine article about the increasing rate of south-bound border crossing, sweeping along with it American kids.
In all, 1.4 million Mexicans — including about 300,000 children born in the United States — moved to Mexico between 2005 and 2010, according to Mexican census figures. That is roughly double the rate of southbound migration from 1995 to 2000, and new government data published this month suggest that the flow is not diminishing. The result is an entire generation of children who blur the line between Mexican and American.
And finally, speaking of immigrants, here is Nate Silver’s intelligent take on whether President Obama’s suspension of deportations for some n0n-citizen aliens will have an effect on the upcoming election.
June 20, 2012 Leave a Comment
From ThinkProgress.org:
“A group of Roman Catholic nuns kicked off a nine-state bus tour across the Midwest this morning in an effort to highlight the cuts to safety net programs contained in the House Republican budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), himself an outspoken Catholic. The bus tour began this morning in Iowa and includes a Tuesday stop in Ryan’s Wisconsin district.
“Along the tour, the nuns will stop at food pantries, shelters, schools, and hospitals to highlight the impact of the cuts. They will also visit the offices of ten Republicans who voted for the budget, including Ryan and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), another outspoken Catholic. The purpose is to draw attention the work the nuns have done on behalf of poor Americans and thedevastating impact the Republican cuts would have on those who rely on safety net programs, Sister Simone Campbell told the New York Times…”
As one of the signs held up in support of the effort said: You Go Girls!
May 18, 2012 Leave a Comment
Nicholas Lemann in April 23, 2012 New Yorker reviews 6 books in an essay called “Evening the Odds: Is There a Politics of Inequality?”
Though he particularly recommends Cost’s book as “the biggest, meatiest available conservative take on American Politics,” and a “full-bore, non-caricature critique of liberalism,” and does a skilful job of distilling the essence of the books, he doesn’t draw any conclusions of his own to answer the question, except to agree that inequality as it now stands is a problem, and “if you believe that government is the best instrument with which to address the problem it’s also a morally urgent one.” I wish he’d been given, or taken, the space necessary to write the kind of long-form essay he is very capable of doing.
To me, personally, the Noah book looks the most interesting. I am some way through “Ill Fares the Land,” and think Judt a thinker and a moral man of the first order. As to a good critique of liberalism, I am all for that, but doubt I will dive into a “big, meaty” book right now. Let me know if you find good notices, or critiques of any of these.
As Lehmann says, we have a “morally urgent” problem on our hands — which may, if not dealt with adequately, ratchet very fast — as Greece is showing us– into a political and even police/military problem.
May 16, 2012 Leave a Comment
Social column in the SF Chron brought the news of Tipping Point to my attention. Have good intentions? Want to make a difference for the poor? Check out Tipping Point.
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