It’s Not Too Late for the Media to Fix Its Election Coverage | New Republic

It’s Not Too Late for the Media to Fix Its Election Coverage | New Republic: "That development is the product of many collective choices and thousands of individual ones. It is an institutional failure, and as such, a major and abrupt course correction seems highly unlikely. But that doesn’t absolve reporters, editors, producers or anyone else who is part of the system. There’s still time to alter our focus, however incrementally, so that it better captures what’s new and alarming, and all journalists have some degree of power to nudge it in that direction. The goal is not to swing an election, or call Trump mean names, or render partisan judgment about whether electing him would be a world-historical mistake. It’s simply so that after this is all over, however it shakes out, we can say we bore witness faithfully.

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Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun - The New York Times

Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun - The New York Times: "In many of the worst-hit cities, mayors of both parties are sounding an alarm.

“I’m a Republican, but I also realize, by any objective analysis, the sea level is rising,” said Jason Buelterman, the mayor of tiny Tybee Island, one of the first Georgia communities to adopt a detailed climate plan."



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When a Crackpot Runs for President - The New York Times

When a Crackpot Runs for President - The New York Times: "I’m not sure that journalism bears responsibility, but this does raise the thorny issue of false equivalence, which has been hotly debated among journalists this campaign. Here’s the question: Is it journalistic malpractice to quote each side and leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions, even if one side seems to fabricate facts or make ludicrous comments?



 President Obama weighed in this week, saying that “we can’t afford to act as if there’s some equivalence here.”"



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LaTuFu comments on What's the most common mistake people make when choosing their spouse?

LaTuFu comments on What's the most common mistake people make when choosing their spouse?: "Date to establish trust. Time is actually your friend, not your enemy. Do not ignore ANY red flag you see in a relationship. Examine it for what it is, then determine if it is something you can work through with the other person, or is it something they refuse to acknowledge or deal with? If you're dating someone who is selfish and they refuse to see it, they will not magically become unselfish because you were kind enough to marry them. Red Flags ignored in dating will become the rocks upon which your marriage boat smashes in the coming storms. If there are multiple red flags and they won't talk to you about any of them, walk away. It doesn't matter if you've already moved in, share the bank account, the dog, and a car. Get out now. If they're not willing to work on things that impact the security of a relationship today, you can count on them not working on them after you get married.
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Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet - Lawfare

Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet - Lawfare: "Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses.

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(643/103) NewsBlur

(643/103) NewsBlur: "On the morning of September 11th, 2001, having decided to stop en route in order to vote, Hilary North was late for work. Had she turned up on time, it’s almost certain that she would have perished along with 176 of her co-workers, for her office was situated on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower, approximately 20 floors above the entry point of the hijacked jet airliner. Hilary wrote this list shortly after the tragedy; a recording of it being read aloud was featured in the Sonic Memorial Project, an audio archive of reactions to the event from all over the world.
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Why the Media Didn't Bother to Verify if Hillary Clinton's Remark About Half of Donald Trump's Supporters Being 'Deplorable' Was True - The Atlantic

Why the Media Didn't Bother to Verify if Hillary Clinton's Remark About Half of Donald Trump's Supporters Being 'Deplorable' Was True - The Atlantic: "This is what Andrew Breitbart, and his progeny, ultimately understood. What Shirley Sherrod did or did not do really didn’t matter. White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers. It is very difficult to imagine, for instance, a 9/11 truther, who happened to be black, becoming even a governor. And yet we live in an era in which the country’s leading birther might well be president. This fact certainly horrifies some of the same journalists who attacked Clinton this weekend. But what they have yet to come to grips with is that Donald Trump is a democratic phenomenon, and that there are actual people—not trolls under a bridge—whom he, and his prejudices against Latinos, Muslims, and blacks, represent.

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A Very Long Conversation With Univision’s Isaac Lee About Deleting Posts

A Very Long Conversation With Univision’s Isaac Lee About Deleting Posts: "Following the outcry, Isaac Lee, Univision’s chief news officer, invited Gizmodo to interview him at Univision’s Miami headquarters about the decision to remove the aforementioned posts. We presented the Gawker Media staff’s intense skepticism about Univision’s commitment to defending the work of its journalists, and Lee pledged that as long as the newly acquired sites practice “fearless but also rigorous journalism that meets the standard that we have to meet, we will never delete those posts.”

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The George W. Bush White House ‘Lost’ 22 Million Emails

The George W. Bush White House ‘Lost’ 22 Million Emails: "Meanwhile, the episode has been nearly forgotten by almost everyone but the litigants. A source involved with the stymied congressional investigation recalled the period as “an intense time,” but the Obama administration didn’t encourage any follow-up, devoting its political capital to dealing with the crashing economy rather than investigating the murky doings that took place under his predecessor. Since then, no major media outlet has devoted significant—or, really, any—resources to obtaining the emails, or to finding out what was in them, or what, exactly, the Bush administration was hiding (or losing).
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An Anniversary of Shame - POLITICO Magazine

An Anniversary of Shame - POLITICO Magazine: "Obama has in fact stretched the laws of war—never that clear to begin with—past their intended breaking point in the effort to continue his secret global war without new authorization. There may be no better example than the concept of “elongated imminence”—a new, quasi-Orwellian term for a tactic the Obama administration is using to justify more strikes under Article II of the Constitution, under which the president has the power to respond on his own to “imminent” threats. Under this new interpretation, according to an account in Daniel Klaidman’s 2012 book, Kill Or Capture, terrorists no longer have to be on the verge of pulling the trigger or boarding a plane, or an attack about to happen. They just have to be at the first stages of planning it for the president to order them killed. “It would be enough if they were designing the suicide vests,” Klaidman wrote.

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Real-Time Election Day Projections May Upend News Tradition - The New York Times

Real-Time Election Day Projections May Upend News Tradition - The New York Times: "Providing real-time updates will be a drastic departure from standard election reporting that television networks, national newspapers and The Associated Press have rigidly adhered to for decades. Many news organizations refrain from publishing exit poll data about the likely winners in a state until a majority of polls there have closed. (Exit polls are based on surveys of voters as they leave polling stations, and they are considered a polling gold standard because only people who voted are questioned.)

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Being white, and a minority, in Georgia - The Boston Globe

Being white, and a minority, in Georgia - The Boston Globe:

He listed big changes that he’s noticed: More renters in the neighborhood who seem to him to care little about the upkeep of their property, single-family houses that he says are filled with multiple families, garbage bins overflowing and litter in the streets.

There are also the subtler things that get under his skin.

“You can see them at the Kroger customer service center desk,” he said, saying that many of his neighbors line up there to send money home to Mexico. It’s a flow of cash leaving this little community, not building it.

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An Anniversary of Shame - POLITICO Magazine

An Anniversary of Shame - POLITICO Magazine: "We went into Iraq to rid a dictator of WMD he didn’t have, and to impose democracy on a country that plainly wasn’t ready for it. Instead, American troops spent more than a decade in Iraq —at the cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives and limbs -- as a recruiting tool. The societal sickness we created in Iraq—whereby nearly a generation of angry young Arab Islamists have grown up in seething resentment of the American military in their backyards—has fed upon itself since that time. The Bush administration inadvertantly promoted this when it turned the Iraqi insurgency into a terrorist threat like al Qaeda (rather than seeing it for what it was, a backlash against the U.S. occupation), and alienated much of the Iraqi population with often-brutal tactics.

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CONNECTIONS - Attacks on U.S. Challenge the Perspectives of Postmodern True Believers - NYTimes.com

CONNECTIONS - Attacks on U.S. Challenge the Perspectives of Postmodern True Believers - NYTimes.com: "For now though these considerations are subsumed by poco ideology, spiced by pomo sentiments. While condemning the recent attacks, they establish near symmetries between the outrage of both sides, and they eliminate perspectives that might reveal fundamental cultural differences (like those affirmed, unambiguously, by the attackers). The great ironic twist is that the values latent in pomo and poco -- an insistence that differing perspectives be accounted for and that the other be comprehended -- are consequences of the very ideas of the Western Enlightenment -- reason and universality -- that they work to undo.

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In Defense Of A Boring, Comfortable Life

In Defense Of A Boring, Comfortable Life:

The truth is, it’s totally cool to go to bed at 10pm. Or read books on the weekend. Or live your life close to home.

Because nobody should be in the business of telling you all the things you should be doing to be happy. You have to decide and figure that out for yourself. And then make a concentrated effort to regularly do those things. If you find that reading books on the weekend is that thing? That’s awesome. And if you can find someone who has that very same interest? Hey, that’s even better. That’s a partner you want to spend the rest of your life with.

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Police Pledge "Fresh Look" At Rape Cases After BuzzFeed News Investigation - BuzzFeed News

Police Pledge "Fresh Look" At Rape Cases After BuzzFeed News Investigation - BuzzFeed News: "One day after a BuzzFeed News investigation exposed how the Baltimore County Police Department declares many rape reports “unfounded” after only minimal investigation, the department has promised to “re-examine” three years’ worth of such reports.
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Remembering a Hero, 15 Years After 9/11 - WSJ

Remembering a Hero, 15 Years After 9/11 - WSJ: "As Welles went down the stairwell he saw what happened on the 78th floor sky lobby. People trying to escape had been waiting for elevators when the plane hit. It was carnage—fire, smoke, bodies everywhere. A woman named Ling Young, a worker for the state tax department, sat on the floor, badly burned and in shock.



From out of the murk she heard a man’s voice: “I found the stairs. Follow me.”

“There was something she heard in the voice, an authority, compelling her to follow,” Mr. Rinaldi writes. Ms. Young stood, and followed. She saw that the man was carrying a woman. Eighteen floors down the air began to clear. He gently placed the woman down and told them both to continue walking down. Then he turned and went back upstairs to help others."



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passionformywork comments on Pokemon Go

passionformywork comments on Pokemon Go: "My passion is the memorials. These memorials are the last remaining visual tributes to their family and where they rest. So when I hear about a Pokemon Go players saying that Montlawn needs to "lighten up", "let people play", and "call the cops, then", I think about those families that are affected because of the players that enter our park. I cannot "lighten up" and let people play. If you come into this park and ask for Passionformywork, you will see that I'm not just a stuffed shirt, telling kids to get off my lawn. I am a person of passion for the work I do and people I serve with my job. I have no feud with people who come to walk our memorial park on their lunch for exercise or with people who walk the park to play while maintaining distance away from funeral services, being courteous. The people who come and disturb these grounds and cause damages, my fight is with you. Knowing how cowardly it is to cause damages and try to run away, I have a feeling that you won't show your face by visiting me here. We were instructed by the police to put up No Trespassing signs - this gives us the right call the local law enforcement and have citations issued. We will be doing this. People come out here to play for an hour or two and think nothing of it. I work here 40 hours a week. So if you think you are doing no harm just by driving and playing and feel that we need to "lighten up", sit here in the office for just one day and you will feel and see the pain these families are feeling."



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How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children : Nature News & Comment

How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children : Nature News & Comment: "Some insights have come from German studies9, 10, 11 that have a methodology similar to SMPY's. The Munich Longitudinal Study of Giftedness, which started tracking 26,000 gifted students in the mid-1980s, found that cognitive factors were the most predictive, but that some personal traits — such as motivation, curiosity and ability to cope with stress — had a limited influence on performance. Environmental factors, such as family, school and peers, also had an impact."



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How getting cancer just might have been the best thing that ever happened to me. : religion

How getting cancer just might have been the best thing that ever happened to me. : religion:

God says that if you do too much for people, they become dependent on you, but if you do too little, they lose hope. That, you have to use a light touch. And that when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.

To me, this is how God interacts with us. Subtly, and quietly. There aren’t any unbelievable miracles. He’s the guy in the background occasionally making sure that one cell does not turn into cancer, or allowing people to be healed through the actions of their doctors. Basically, he’s making sure the coin flops the right way or the dice roll like they should.

And he give us but one real commandment: love each other. Everything else is a house of cards constructed, by humans, on that bedrock principle. The window dressing is unimportant. The message is everything.

And that is the God in whom I now believe.

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