#unsordid

[cunnycreamer]

They don’t tell you this in literature class but Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams is 10x more fun if you stop trying to psychoanalyse Sylvia Plath and start reading her as an avatar of The Eye

[whisperthatruns]

Dream by dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a dream stopper, a dream explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves alone.

Sylvia Plath, from "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" (1958), Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (Harper & Row, 1979)

[infamousbrad]

"A stopped clock is right twice a day."

Once in a rare while, even George Will is right. (Non-paywall link.)

... In March 1941, Congress approved Lend-Lease aid to Britain and others (235 Democrats and 24 Republicans yea, 25 Democrats and 135 Republicans nay). This “most unsordid act in the history of nations” (Winston Churchill) ended the facade of U.S. neutrality. By approving aid for Greece and Turkey in May 1947, Congress affirmed (161 Democrats and 126 Republicans yea, 13 Democrats and 93 Republicans nay) the Truman Doctrine: The United States would assist democratic nations threatened by authoritarians. World War II’s end would not revive isolationism. In today’s Republican Party, dominated by someone who repudiates the internationalism to which Eisenhower committed the party seven decades ago, the cabal of grotesques might yet predominate. It includes Missouri’s Sen. Josh Hawley, who thinks we have given “blank checks” to Ukraine (actually, 5 percent of defense spending, and less than half the monetary value of European support). Yet Hawley says we cannot defend both Ukraine and Taiwan, so this would be an excellent time to reduce the U.S. forces in Europe that are deterring Russia from aggressions against NATO allies. Another grotesque, Ohio’s Sen. J.D. Vance, an itinerant Neville Chamberlain visiting green rooms, would welcome Ukraine’s death on the installment plan (see Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939). Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (she who wonders whether Jewish space lasers cause forest fires) expresses her loathing of Ukraine with lunatic accusations that confirm the judgment of Texas’s Rep. Michael McCaul (Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee) that Russian propaganda has “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” ... Today’s Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis is, as the 1930s Axis was, watching. Johns Hopkins foreign policy analyst Hal Brands, writing for Bloomberg, reminds us: “Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 encouraged Hitler to send his military back into the Rhineland in 1936, just as Germany’s blitzkrieg through Western Europe in 1940 emboldened Japan to press into Southeast Asia.” We can now see that the great unraveling that was World War II perhaps began with Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Without the benefit of retrospection, we cannot be certain that World War III has not begun.

[khalilhumam]

The broadband industry steps up to connect students when the FCC will not

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/the-broadband-industry-steps-up-to-connect-students-when-the-fcc-will-not/

The broadband industry steps up to connect students when the FCC will not

By Tom Wheeler Hooray for the broadband industry! It is time for some good news! America’s broadband providers have stepped up with the ‘K-12 Bridge to Broadband” to help meet the needs of millions of low-income American students who are unable to get on the internet so they can go to class from home. The national non-profit EducationSuperHighway estimates that 9.7 million students—half of which are students of color—do not have the home internet necessary for the COVID era’s online educational needs. Together, EducationSuperHighway and NCTA-the Internet & Television Association created the new program, subsequently to be joined by NTCA—The Rural Broadband Association and USTelecom. America’s cable broadband providers are stepping up to a national emergency. To apply Winston Churchill’s description of the Lend-Lease program, what the industry has done is “the most unsordid act.” The new program will do two things the Trump Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has failed to do. First, it will identify households with students that have broadband passing their door but have chosen not to subscribe. Having identified those households, the companies then offer school districts and other local entities special rates to provide discounted broadband service for the identified homes. Numerous studies have shown the principal reason low-income Americans do not subscribe to broadband is price. With a median monthly price around $60, internet access falls below food, shelter, heat, and light in household spending priorities. For years, broadband companies have responsibly offered special packages for low-income Americans, such as Comcast’s $9.95 per month “Internet Essentials”. When COVID hit, the companies increased the speed and throughput of such services to meet household demands. The problem is that even at $9.95 per month, many households cannot afford broadband. It is a problem we have seen before. During the Reagan administration the FCC solved the problem for telephone service by creating the Lifeline program, a $9.25 per month subsidized telephone connection for low-income Americans. The Trump FCC has turned a blind eye to broadening the Reagan idea to the digital era. Such negligence should not come as a surprise. When the Obama FCC proposed a national eligibility program that would have eased the ability of cable companies to participate in Lifeline for services like Internet Essentials, Ajit Pai opposed the idea as an FCC Commissioner. The Trump FCC subsequently scrapped the initiative after he became Chairman. The broadband companies have agreed to a cut in revenue from homes with low-income students. But, even at a reduced rate, they still need to be paid—precisely at a time when school districts are experiencing decreased revenue and increased expenses. So where is the FCC and its self-proclaimed “number one priority” to close the digital divide? The response of the Chairman of the FCC to the K-12 Bridge to Broadband was a somewhat defensive statement that schools and local governments should use the money in the COVID legislation (CARES Act) to pay for connecting students. It is a statement that conveniently ignores that the $14 billion for education in the CARES Act was for all COVID-related expenses. As the Detroit Free Press observed of the funds that would go to Michigan schools, “no district expects that money to cover all the costs associated with coronavirus response.” Just a few days before the K-12 Bridge to Broadband announcement, I wrote about the Trump FCC’s failure to use existing programs to assist low-income students  getting online during the COVID crisis using existing programs. A national emergency such as coronavirus should have stimulated the FCC to get creative with its low-income Lifeline and education-supporting E-Rate funding programs. The broadband industry’s responsible K-12 Bridge to Broadband should have been another stimulus. The FCC should be a part of the solution but has chosen not to be. Ninety-five percent of American voters say that “broadband access for students is a problem.” Stop to let that sink in a minute. On what other issue does 95 percent of America agree? It is time for the Trump FCC to get behind those 95 percent and use the programs they currently administer to close the education digital divide.

Comcast and NCTA—The Internet & Television Association are general, unrestricted donors to the Brookings Institution. The findings, interpretations and conclusions in this piece are solely those of the author and not influenced by any donation.

[publicsituation]

RT @KFJ_FP: 70 yrs since the Marshall Plan,the 'most unsordid act in history.' And now its legacy being deliberately cast aside. https://t.co/O755Id0FHG

[jcdevinejr]

Another President, Another Time

A pre-election (May 2016) piece about presidential leadership - pertinent today, of course - touching back to Harry S Truman 70 years ago. jcd

On long road trips, my wife Peggy and I enjoy listening to books on CD. A few weeks ago, it was “Truman”, the biography of our 33rd president, written and narrated by David McCullough.

It was a purely chance selection. McCullough is a terrific historian and author, and ‘Truman’ had been on my must-read list for years. I ran across the audio version at the library and I grabbed it for our trip.

I’d not intended to listen to that book as a counterpoint to the insanity of this election year, but it proved to be just that. It’s popped into in my mind with every new episode of the Trump and Hillary circus.

A lot has been written about Harry S Truman, not all of it as complimentary as in McCullough’s excellent book.  But the consensus is that Truman was a remarkable man at a remarkable time. Franklin D. Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945, leaving his obscure and untested vice president to confront WWII still raging in the Pacific and a bleak worldwide post-war horizon, with 60 million dead, farms and food supplies decimated, and certain economic chaos.

Truman was a Missouri farmer who understood real work and self reliance; he was plain spoken, self confident and decisive; he was a man of modest means, living on his government salary and rejecting every opportunity to leverage his position to achieve personal wealth. He was famously accountable for his decisive actions. “The Buck Stops Here” was his mantra, captured on the plaque on his desk.

Do you know anyone like that in the 2016 presidential sweepstakes? I don’t.

He was a Democrat through and through, but that was before the labels ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ were permanently attached. By today’s standard, Truman would be a pragmatic political centrist.

But far more important is his profound influence. In retrospect, Truman’s decisions and actions shaped the world for decades to come. That’s not because he wanted to shape the world or to build a legacy - it was because the job demanded it.

That is the very nature of presidential leadership, then and now. Every decision, every policy, every public statement, every action or inaction, has consequences. It can’t be avoided. That’s why we must select leaders with capability, integrity and principles.

As a rookie president Truman was faced with the momentous decision of whether or not to deploy the new, unimaginatively destructive atomic bomb against Japan. With his decision to do so, one sure to be second-guessed for generations, he accepted its huge consequences as a price for stopping the carnage in its tracks. It was the right call, preempting the planned invasion of Japan and by all estimates saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of US troops and an even greater number of Japanese military and civilian casualties.

With Europe on the brink of calamity, Truman embraced General George Marshall’s plan to rescue Europe from economic chaos and mass starvation. Churchill called it “the most unsordid act in history’. At enormous cost and at a time of serious US economic uncertainty he pushed it through Congress. That led to the Berlin Airlift, and later to US support of Japan’s reconstruction, both helping our defeated enemies to rejoin civilization and stabilizing a shattered world.

And there was the Korean War. Everyone hated it. There were no good answers, but Truman honored our commitments to our allies, stayed the course, demonstrated to the world (China and Russia surely watching every step) that US means business. He walked the tightrope in not provoking WWIII, and he fired public hero General Douglas MacArthur for stepping too far in that direction. There was fierce public dissent – but in retrospect, our Korean ‘police action’ set the stage for a cold war instead of a hot one, a cold war that we eventually won, largely without bloodshed.

Let’s imagine our current and prospective future leaders in Truman’s position. Would they have the foresight and the political courage to make comparable decisions?  We’ve seen what happened when President Obama abandoned the field in Iraq and when he proclaimed (and subsequently ignored) red lines in Syria. We’ve heard Trump’s endless bombast about securing ‘great deals’, about demanding payment from our allies for protection, and setting isolationist trade policies. Secretary Clinton pushed destabilization of Libya and then talked away the Benghazi debacle.  Just where does the buck stop these days?

A recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed article pointed out that just prior to the1952 Republican convention, facing perilous times with weak presidential candidates on both sides, the GOP drafted Dwight Eisenhower - apolitical, a proven leader, a patriot – to lead the ticket. The rest is history.

Isn’t if obvious that we’re in exactly that situation today?

Jack DeVine

May 2016