HuffPost's Problem With the iPad: Aggregator Beware!
I love-love-love the Huffington Post. It has become my second favorite source of online news (behind one of the best-kept secrets in America, The Week). When they upgraded their iPad app recently, I downloaded it to give it a try. Earlier versions of the app had been...sort of ok but not exciting.
The new version is much better. I like it a lot. But it continues to suffer from one problem HuffPost can't help because by its very nature as a content aggregator, it is stuck with stupid decisions made by its sources. This means that very often a video re-published by HuffPost ends up a blank spot on my iPad. A quick random sample this morning suggests that less than 20% of the videos they share are usable on iOS. Which makes me wonder about whether their sources are ignoring HTML5 or using some proprietary player-required format in a misguided effort to protect their IP.
Whichever it is, the whole thing makes HuffPost much less enjoyable on the iPad. Which in turn dramatically limits the number of hours I spend on the site each week.
Maybe Stock Market Isn't the Right Gauge?
Let me see if I get this.
The country is driven to the very brink of defaulting on its national debt because the government is unable to act on legislation that was purposely overly complicated by both sides.
We're told that if that logjam isn't dealt with on time, our bond rating could be affected and the stock market could tumble.
A "compromise" is reached. (Don't get me started.) The crisis is averted, at least in the main.
The next day, our bond rating is unchanged but the forecast for the bond rating is downgraded severely. Given that bonds are always trading on the future, this seems at least similar to a downgrade in the bond rating itself, just not of the same immediate effect.
And, oh, yeah. The stock market plummets anyway. This time, the excuse given for the drop is investor concern about the slowness of the recovery. A slowness that has just been greatly exacerbated by the passage of a "compromise" debt ceiling bill that both parties are guilty of mangling worse than anyone could have imagined a year ago.
So Wall Street drops if we don't raise the debt ceiling. It encourages the irrational and almost unprecedented tying-together of the debt ceiling (which deals with debt already incurred) and upcoming budgets (which do not deal with debt already incurred, duh). Then when it gets what it wants, it plummets out of concern for the consequences of its actions.
Maybe we need to find a better barometer of our nation's economic state than the Stock Market, which has actually long ago stopped being a valid indicator of economic movement because of the day trading and automatic triggering brought to bear in the past 15-20 years.
Yet More Agreement: The Drug War is an Abysmal Failure. Let's End It Now
In an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times, former President and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Jimmy Carter reaffirmed his strong opposition to America continuing its present failed War on Drugs, a war that began 40 years ago yesterday.
Building his argument around a report issued by the Global Commission on Drug Policy earlier this month, Carter provides persuasive data to demonstrate the futility and counter-productivity of the War on Drugs. None of his statistics is particularly new or startling. But I did find this comparison interesting. In the generation following Carter leaving office in 1980, U.S. prison population ballooned from 500,000 to 2.3 million. As prisons eat up more and more of state budgets, other, more socially productive and, if you will, "profitable" undertakings such as education (particularly higher ed) take the brunt of the cutbacks needed to sustain the unsustainable.
To borrow a campaign slogan used by Barry Goldwater when he ran for President, "In your heart, you know he's right." It seems so much easier and more effective in the short term to lock up people who have done no real harm to anyone else, whose punishment is far worse for them than the results of continuing to use drugs might well have been. At least it puts them somewhere you and I don't have to look at them. But it is bad policy. Economically, socially, legally, and morally bad policy.
And there's no real justification for maintaining it. You can bet your bottom dollar that if any of these drugs that are perceived as causing such problems as to be allowed to disrupt totally our social contract were patented by one of the Big Pharma companies, the laws would favor their sale, and they'd probably get a handful of government subsidies in the bargain.
The Drug War: Let's call the whole thing off, eh?
Vietnam Reconciliation Gets Around to Agent Orange's 3 Million Victims
The United States and Vietnam have announced the beginning of a plan to deal with one of the Vietnam War's deadliest after-effects: the defoliant Agent Orange. Vietnamese officials estimate three million people suffer from the consequences of our misguided use of the poison and more than 400,000 have died as a result. The $323 million US-funded project is aimed at removing the poison dioxin from the region around the Da Nang airbase where we stored Agent Orange prior to its use on jungle cover the Viet Cong were using to hide their movements from our aircraft.
Our government dragged its feet for more than 35 years after the end of hostilities in Vietnam, continuingly insisting that more research was needed to conclude that Agent Orange had the claimed health impacts. It was fairly recently that the Veterans Administration finally acknowledged -- after years of stalling, denial and subterfuge -- that Agent Orange was in face a major health hazard to those of us who served in Nam. Obviously, the government couldn't very well agree with all the studies proving the effects of the chemical on the Vietnames population while at the same time denying our vets coverage.
Just yesterday I read a piece on MSNBC.com by Retired Colonel Jack Jacobs making a return voyage to the country where he was wounded and where he lost a large number of soldiers in an ambush. He met with the Vietnamese general who masterminded the ambush. His story was frank and candid and although it is clear that some reconciliation took place, it's also clear that much of what happened in that awful war can never be reconciled.
Still, the efforts are worthwhile. If two nations who were once as bitter enemies as we and the Hanoi-based North Vietnamese were for more than 15 years, can reach a state of engagement where such mutual cooperation is possible, then the hope for world peace can continue to draw strength from that experience.
What Constitutes "Closure" and Is It Useful?
One of the strangest ideas I've encountered in my many years on this planet is that of "closure." We hear and read about it all the time, usually in connection with a crime and with the apprehension, trial and punishment of the crime's perpetrator. Families are often characterized as wanting or needing closure before they can move on with their lives after the loss of a loved one.
Information about the "need for closure" that I've been able to glean from online sources indicates that the concept is pretty fuzzy psychologically even though there is an instrument called a Need for Closure Survey (NFCS) psychologists can use to characterize those who feel a strong need for closure and other aspects of their beliefs. (It turns out, e.g., that there is a fairly strong correlation between NFCS scores and political beliefs with conservatism and the need for closure aligning nicely.) But everyone agrees that, "[t]he need for closure varies across individuals, situations, and cultures." Which is another way of saying, it's not very meaningful or scientific or particularly measurable, actually.
But my concern is that the idea of closure is often used as a pretext for overzealous prosecution and for punishing beyond what would seem to "fit the crime" (another weird phrase for me to encounter).
In a story today, the police in Santa Barbara, CA, are using closure as a reason (excuse?) to dig up an old highway construction site where a seven-year-old girl's body may be buried. I can see the need for that kind of police work, but in this case the crime was committed more than 50 years ago, the most likely suspect and the girl's parents are all dead, and her sister, now 62, has left the area. But a police spokesman insisted that pursuing this possible lead is important because ""We would like to have some closure and know what happened." Note that in that sentence, the "We" is the police, i.e., the government, i.e., allegedly, the citizens. Really? Is this worth spending time and money on? Particularly when governments are being hit with major cutbacks? What new crimes will go undetected or be allowed to be committed while law enforcement people and money are being spent trying to find a 50-year-old skeleton?
Information about the "need for closure" that I've been able to glean from online sources indicates that the concept is pretty fuzzy psychologically even though there is an instrument called a Need for Closure Survey (NFCS) psychologists can use to characterize those who feel a strong need for closure and other aspects of their beliefs. (It turns out, e.g., that there is a fairly strong correlation between NFCS scores and political beliefs with conservatism and the need for closure aligning nicely.) But everyone agrees that, "[t]he need for closure varies across individuals, situations, and cultures." Which is another way of saying, it's not very meaningful or scientific or particularly measurable, actually.
But my concern is that the idea of closure is often used as a pretext for overzealous prosecution and for punishing beyond what would seem to "fit the crime" (another weird phrase for me to encounter).
In a story today, the police in Santa Barbara, CA, are using closure as a reason (excuse?) to dig up an old highway construction site where a seven-year-old girl's body may be buried. I can see the need for that kind of police work, but in this case the crime was committed more than 50 years ago, the most likely suspect and the girl's parents are all dead, and her sister, now 62, has left the area. But a police spokesman insisted that pursuing this possible lead is important because ""We would like to have some closure and know what happened." Note that in that sentence, the "We" is the police, i.e., the government, i.e., allegedly, the citizens. Really? Is this worth spending time and money on? Particularly when governments are being hit with major cutbacks? What new crimes will go undetected or be allowed to be committed while law enforcement people and money are being spent trying to find a 50-year-old skeleton?
I don't get it. But I'm certainly not saying that fact should be substituted for the judgment of experts when it comes to the "need for closure" in any given situation or family. I am, however, suggesting that closure is not a good reason by itself to conduct cold case investigations of this nature.
I've Added News Coverage to my Blog World
I've just added a new blog to my Posterous arsenal, which now boasts nine of my own blogs and one blog I share with my business partner. The new blog (linked on the left as with all the others) will give me a place to comment on current events and news items I run across.
I will, however, astutely continue to avoid U.S. politics. One of my favorite topics in the news is how the news folks do news, so expect the occasional outburst on that raw topic!
You can subscribe just to the News blog or you can sub to the main blog and get all my posts on all topics. Either way, I appreciate your followership!
