November 20, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
Cable news yesterday and today’s newspapers are full of references to the embarrassment Detroit’s “big three” automakers’ chief executives occasioned by flying to DC in 3 separate private jets to ask for a $25 billion “bailout” bridge loan. Pleading poverty while showing off the extravagance of one’s expenditures is poor form, no matter what the season, but it clearly displays a lack of awareness of how much the economic culture of the nation has changed.
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November 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Poetry is the frontier where language in use comes in contact with future meaning, and in the process, when best executed, brings a wealth of transcendent truths into the present. Poetry is relevant to all uses of language, though there may be trends that suggest popular culture is looking to new forms of poetic activity to replace specific old models: many musical artists now play the role of mythic historian or wandering troubadour, but poetry is not confined to these purposes.
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November 16, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.
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November 13, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Complexity is not an outlandish tendency of troubled souls and pretentious intellects; it is the basic state of nature as we know it. The more we discover, the more certain we can be of this: even elemental particles are less solid than they seem, behaving like tightly bound arrangements of spherical bodies —irreducible monads—, they apparently achieve this physics by behaving like something they are not (now widely accepted in particle physics, “string theory” proposes that elemental particles are actually 2-dimensional vibrating “strings” whose vibration causes them to interact as if they were not strings at all).
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November 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The “conservative movement” in America is struggling to understand its most important setback in a generation, in part because its worldview takes for granted that what has happened simply cannot be real. In today’s New York Times, David Brooks writes about the growing rift between the conservative “Traditionalists” and the “Reformers”. He suggests the traditionalists, who say their losses come from not clinging firmly enough to the tax-cutting, slash government, immigration-crackdown agenda, will prevail in coming years, due to institutional entrenchment.
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November 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The Republican party has seen virtually every one of its over-arching policy assumptions discredited or rejected, in the 2006 and 2008 elections. It now faces an historic challenge, to reinvent itself in a climate where the other party dominates both houses of Congress and has elected a popular new president by a wide margin. The campaign of Sen. John McCain struggled to overcome the Obama message, in part because it was relying on the assumption that specific Republican party platform planks were the political ideas most en vogue with the electorate, when they were in fact at odds with current economic and political reality.
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November 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
John McCain used to be a “maverick”, an independent thinker, a rebel against his party’s leadership, and that entailed adopting, promoting and furiously defending ideas that diverged from his party’s stated agenda and its leaders’ most prized political philosophies. He shed the trappings of the true moderate or independent in an apparent effort to win favor among his party’s decision-makers and financial backers, which dampened his appeal as an independent thinker. And most importantly, he seemed blind to the real spirit of the times, which rejected the politics of fear and called for an activist approach to crisis.
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November 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
I have long felt, as so many Americans do, a profound emotional attachment to the ideals we always speak of when we talk about our founding revolution, our enlightened democracy, our progress toward a freer and more just world. And I have always aspired to see those ideals put on display, not just by an historic moment, but by the collective awareness of millions of impassioned American citizens. This moment in history is a sea change in our collective mindset, and a victory for all Americans.
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November 3, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
We have seen the old punchcard ballots ridiculed for their potential flaws in 2000, in Florida. We have seen the dangers of touchscreen voting machines almost everywhere they have been used, at one point or another. Indeed, the state of New Jersey is using them even after having commissioned a study that demonstrated comprehensively they could be easily manipulated to swing an election. And none of the solutions we’ve heard seem able to guarantee an errorless or tamper-free count.
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November 2, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The confluence of viciously hard economic times and an election that has stoked tensions over social and political conservative values and their place in our future course, pushing ideology to the side —even as vastly divergent approaches to multiple crises play out in the national political discourse—, has illuminated a dark corner of institutional conservatism: the empathy deficit. The struggle of conservative ideologues and politicos to be relevant in the present economic unraveling is tied to a rhetorical habit of demonizing the Other, i.e. the underprivileged, the alien, the non-institutional, the marginalized.
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November 2, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Any individual, be they low-level election officials, state governors, or non-state actors, who participates in an effort to deprive legitimately registered or entitled-to-be-registered voters of their vote, should be prosecuted. The denial of Constitutional rights is not just a civil liberties issue, not simply a matter of accidental incompetence, and when it involves the actual election process, it is an assault on the government of the United States, which is ultimately supposed to be led by the will of the voter.
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October 21, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois, is the candidate that is best positioned to offer the solutions our nation requires, in these troubled and challenging times. His positive vision of a dynamic American society, capable of innovating to combat a global energy crisis, principled in defending Constitutional law and human rights, combines the open and dynamic nature of American democratic culture with an energetic commitment to tackling new challenges, motivating a resurgence of the kind of major projects that will help rebuild and spur our economy.
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October 20, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
It has for some time been a hallmark of American politics that conservative ideologues speak of “liberals” with disdain and condescension, and liberals view “right-wing” politics as nasty and unsavory. But the recent eruption of anger, vitriol and even violent hatred, from some individuals attending McCain-Palin rallies brings up the question of whether conservatives have blinded themselves to political reality, to the meaning of democracy, to the virtues of balance, by entertaining an irrational hatred of liberals.
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October 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Sen. John McCain brought back to life the question of whether or not the “No Child Left Behind” law was a good or a bad idea. He claims it was a good start, but foolishly glossed over the fact that the bill’s punitive “accountability” measures target the poor directly. Schools that most need funding are deprived of it, by the No Child Left Behind law, guaranteeing failure in schools that would otherwise be forced to struggle continually with scarce funding.
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October 16, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Barack Obama appears to have kept his cool, delivered his message and kept his focus firmly on issues and the work of governing. John McCain fired a number of gimic-enabled shots at Obama, but failed to deliver a coherent message, other than his allegation that Obama wants to raise taxes and he would cut them for everyone, a factually untrue claim about his tax proposal.
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October 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Sen. John McCain may be scrambling to save his political life. Of course, until the American people vote, it remains true he might win and become the next president of the United States. But the Branchflower report has just found his vice-presidential candidate guilty of abusing her office as Alaska governor, and he has just had to scold his own supporters for espousing racist and paranoid views which his campaign had at least implicitly sought to smear Obama with. His standing in the polls has fallen dramatically —as of today, RCP’s daily tracking poll average projects 313 Electoral College votes going to Obama, 158 to McCain, with 67 “toss up”—, and conservative luminaries are weighing in on his weakness as a candidate.
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October 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA/Dow) today had its single biggest day of gains in history, climbing 936 points. It could be a good sign, that on Friday the market “established a bottom”, but it’s important to remember: the nature of volatility is not that it is ripe for gain or ripe for loss, but that it is volatility, and one’s will and judgment are not always as relevant as one would like.
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October 12, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
American schools have been many things over the centuries: the world’s first true universal public education system, a decentralized municipal forum for sincere ambition and hopeful good efforts, indoctrination channels, oases of political correctness, the envy of the world in science and math, edge-leaders in social progress, the root-structure of the most vibrant university culture in the world, and now, largely insufficient, as competing with the world’s best.
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October 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Arizona Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign has become mired in a controversy over its aggressive personal attacks on Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, which has put the Republican candidate in a supremely awkward position. During a week in which rallies held for his candidacy have featured allegations that Sen. Obama is somehow linked to domestic terrorists or has suspicious overseas supporters, more than once audience members have shouted out threats to Sen. Obama’s life.
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October 9, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Since Sunday, when the McCain-Palin campaign consciously opted to “go negative”, attacking Obama as having “poor judgment” and “palling around with terrorists”, rallies for Sen. McCain’s candidacy have been marred by what appear to be increasingly hot racial tensions. A spokesman for the campaign has told Café Sentido they “do not play the race card”, but observers have questioned whether there is a conscious effort being made to spark racial or ethnic biases and instill fear in the electorate about Sen. Obama’s background or personal associations.
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September 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
I want to write about hope, about the nature of optimism and how closely linked the quality of imagination is to our ability to conceive of, work for and see through meaningful improvements to the human condition. I want to write about it because it is such a vital commodity in our times, such a spiritual enigma and a challenge to our political systems, but then one glaring fact becomes clear that seems to limit what can be said about hope: that vital spiritual resource does not stand alone, but is linked in every case to human specifics, inseparable from what we seek to apply to it, and so hope is different to all people, even in its most essential manifestations.
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September 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Una ola de misticismo financiero entró en los mercados financieros hace unas décadas, y poco a poco ha ido provocando crisis y revueltos, pero sólo después de haberse contagiado a los políticos de Washington, Londres y Pekín, ha llegado a ser una catástrofe económico in potentia. Matemáticamente, hay que negociar con lo que hay, con recursos finitos, y planificar sistemas de contabilidad que tomen en cuenta que riesgo no es dinero ganado, sino dinero por ganar si todo sale bien. Parece una lógica más que evidente, pero para los místicos de la contabilidad no-finita, se ha convertido en moda anticuada y normativa molesta.
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September 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
El Onze de Setembre, en Catalunya, es un día de luto nacional, cuando se recuerda que en esta fecha en el año 1714, Catalunya perdió sus leyes y su autonomía ancestral, sus usatges, un sistema legal que databa del medioevo tardío. Y en celebrar el día, se celebran valores básicos y la posibilidad de comunidad, de una identidad cultural-política y una soberanía sobre el destino compartido. El once de septiembre, 1973, fue el día trágico en que la nación chilena se vio sumergida de repente en una dictadura militar que usaría el terror, la tortura y el asesinato extra-oficial para “desaparecer” a los disidentes y romper la democracia. Es un día contencioso, porque los golpistas tienen sus seguidores todavía, porque sigue existiendo el mito de una “dictadura suave”.
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September 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Sen. John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was meant to be his answer to the stadium-sized explosion of his rival’s historic address, his moment to demonstrate his own version of leadership. It is now being mocked by political commentators as a ham-fisted attempt at catching the wave. McCain performed rhetorical acrobatics to try to both be like Obama and be like Bush, while supposedly offering something of his own entirely distinct brand of politics. Botched stage-craft was an added drag on the speech’s resonance.
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September 4, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska accepted the Republican party’s nomination for vice president in at their convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. She said she was looking forward to the “challenge of a tough fight against competent opponents”, but wasted no time getting to the red meat. She said she was joining a ticket that would “serve and defend America”, and that John McCain put the “security of the country that he loves” ahead of his own political fate, reminding the audience that McCain said he “would rather lose an election than lose a war”.
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September 2, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and Howard Dean’s predecessor as chairman of the DNC, has said 2008 will be “the most vicious campaign we have ever faced”. Already shadowy “527 groups” and PACs are running ads and sponsoring the publication of books full of disproven rumor and innuendo, with the openly stated aim of “defeating Barack Obama”. Author Jerome Corsi, who has written a best-selling anti-Obama tome, openly admitted, against the wishes of his publisher, that his book is not intended to be factual, but rather to further the anti-Obama agenda, with the aim of influencing the outcome of the November election.
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August 29, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Over the 4 days of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, media analysts have repeatedly asked where the real ‘red meat’ was? Who would throw the red meat to the delegates hungry for an affirmation of the party’s cause and will to fight? Who will blitz John McCain with attacks and insults. There was, apparently, a resistance to believing that Barack Obama’s message might be real, that he could defend his ideas and take the fight to his opponent without demeaning or smearing him. The speech Obama delivered last night demonstrated with astonishing clarity that the red meat he’s throwing to his audience is not insults or attacks, but a vision of possibility and a call to action in common values.
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August 28, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
As is usually the case in a presidential election year, we are hearing non-stop talk about cutting taxes. The Republican candidate, as usual, relentlessly accuses his Democratic opponent of conspiring to “raise taxes” and “punish” American businesses for success. And as usual, we are being deprived of an opportunity to really examine the facts of the matter. The truth is, both Obama and McCain are proposing their own tax-cut plans, but we might be better served by thinking about tax-credits, and what they should be aimed at achieving.
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August 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
As the US economy goes through one major shock after another —in jobs, stocks, housing, banking, general inflation, food prices and energy—, with economists saying this is the worst economic trauma since the Great Depression and the “dustbowl” of the 1930s, we are still hearing debate about whether we are in recession and whether or not consumer confidence is dropping off for material or psychological reasons. It just might be that the perspective of the average consumer is determined by actual spending ability.
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August 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The World Bank estimates that 750,000 people are killed each year by China’s impenetrable pollution problem; and 400 million people are expected to migrate to China’s already super-saturated metropoli by the year 2025. China is now burning one-third of the world’s coal for electric-power generation, and has opted to move its national transport infrastructure toward the automobile, a potentially catastrophic choice that could have a decidedly negative impact on health and economic wellbeing across the world.
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July 30, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
With gasoline prices at record highs, and the strain on a weak American economy already at an extreme, Pres. Bush is pushing Congress to hold an “up-or-down vote” on renewed exploration of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) before its August recess. Opponents protest that none of any oil found there would be available for production for 10 to 15 years, and the OCS plan is an attempt to deliver oil firms an otherwise unjustifiable gift, taking advantage of the pressurized situation of exorbitant prices.
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July 27, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
There are few things more damaging to the right of witnesses and bystanders to contribute to the resolution of a given problem than harboring the assumption that no one involved has anything to contribute. For western and Asian lookers on, viewing the problems of the African continent as outsiders, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by surrendering to the ugly bias of the belief that Africans cannot contribute to the change and development they both need and deserve.
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July 23, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Sen. Barack Obama is traveling to vital foreign-policy hotspots as part of a Congressional delegation, including Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), but there is no missing the relevance of his tour of Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel, among other places, to his preparation on foreign policy matters and his labors as a presidential candidate. The media are covering it as if it were both a spectacular and ongoing campaign event and a foreshadowing of what Pres. Obama might look like when meeting with foreign leaders.
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July 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The New Yorker magazine has chosen for its cover cartoon for the 21 July 2008 edition a caricature showing Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) dressed in traditional Muslim garb, his wife with a large afro and an AK-47, bumping fists, with an American flag burning in the fireplace and a portrait of Osama Bin Laden on the wall. The cartoon has caused widespread offense, and both candidates’ campaigns have said the cartoon is tasteless and offensive. Subscribers have reportedly begun canceling their subscriptions.
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July 4, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The Fourth of July is an American standard. It is a day of celebrations, of national fanfare, national idiosyncrasy, encounters with the outdoors, and the landscape and the feel of people coming together, a celebration of common experience, and of difference. It is so intimate a part of the national fabric that this particular holiday actually helps illuminate what sense of connectivity there is across the cultural spectrum that comprises American society.
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June 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Corn-ethanol, long a fascination for US politicians and for the farm lobby that courts their support for ethanol subsidies, may play some role in remediating the economic fallout of soaring gasoline prices, though it seems unlikely, for a number of reasons. First and foremost is the fact that the numbers work against us: in order to produce more corn-ethanol, we must divert cropland destined for food production to fuel production, and that has a severely negative impact on the availability and affordability of corn for human consumption.
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June 2, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a force to be reckoned with, a political entity with a nationwide support network that outstrips nearly all rivals and most past icons, with the added weight of her husband’s legacy and immense popularity among key constituencies. But, she has made her case for the presidency at a time when another Democrat has achieved even greater success and has rallied hundreds of thousands of new voters, and at present, she is, in fact, in second place, with one day to go.
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March 22, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Sen. Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech continues to bring new faith to his message of hope and unity. The message has been called “historic” and “presidential”, lauded even by conservative pundits as the most important address of the ‘08 campaign. Observers have speculated widely that his “A More Perfect Union” speech was a tipping point that […]
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March 19, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
‘WE THE PEOPLE, IN ORDER TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION’ SPEECH TACKLES RACIAL DIVIDE IN U.S., DISTANCES CANDIDATE FROM PASTOR’S REMARKS
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, by the slimmest of margins the frontrunner for the Democratic party’s nomination for president, yesterday delivered a major policy speech on race and tolerance in America. Major mainstream media […]
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November 5, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
El modernismo, gran época de la innovación y del diseño, adornos lujosos y caprichosos, entretejidos con estructuras completamente nuevas e insólitas, avances en la ingeniería y poesía infundiendo la mezcla de una vida especial que no tenía par en la época. O, ¿puede que sea una tradición ya pasada de moda que hay que superar para tener una “identidad propia”?
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October 7, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Flag on the lapel… the quality of debate in American political punditry has reached the near absurd, when months before any primary vote, nationally syndicated columnists and commentators on one of the most serious shows in political analysis attempt to assess whether or not a candidate is ‘ready’ based on the unserious question about wearing […]
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July 4, 2007 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
s el 4 de julio y en mi país, todo el mundo está de fiesta. Hay personas que no pueden dejar de trabajar, enfermeras, policías, pero la celebración inunda el paisaje social. Se celebra: la independencia colonial, la teoría de la democracia, en momentos sinceros también la realidad de la democracia, lo que se quiere vivir, la familia y los seres queridos, el lujo del combustible cada vez menos asequible, el hecho de que hoy, no trabajan ni los bancos ni los políticos.
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September 18, 2006 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
POLICIES THAT CIRCUMVENT OUR CONSTITUTION CONVEY A FUNDAMENTAL LACK OF FAITH IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
Until 12 days ago, the Bush administration maintained that there were no secret CIA-run “black-sites”, extralegal prison camps where accused terror suspects were held incommunicado and beyond any judicial process. On 6 September, Pres. Bush admitted to constructing and managing the […]
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May 25, 2006 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Is the United States an “English-speaking nation”, or a place where all cultures are welcome to converge, mix and evolve? To answer this question, we must consider that there is a natural human tendency to fear what is perceived as the definite and invasive “other”, that which is different and which we feel can be categorized in a way that fits our worries.
The push to establish a single national language can only be sustained on the basis of a number of false premises. We will explore seven such lies and misperceptions here, all of a particular sort, having to do with a way of rationalizing one’s aversion to difference or to change. And, in each case, it is fairly easy to illustrate how the lie works against the interests of both a democratic society and American tradition itself.
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January 2, 2006 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
A contract is legally binding only when: all signatories freely and voluntarily agree to its provisions; all provisions are themselves legal; none of the provisions is inherently unreasonable or deceptively worded. Neither contracts nor “terms and conditions” including indemnities disclaimers, can be classified as legislation. They do not make or construct legal limits by themselves.
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December 20, 2004 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
A great and resonant thinker dies, and a great and resonant newspaper publishes an obituary dismissing his work as destructive and “abstruse”. It is an unjustifiable communicative travesty. When Jacques Derrida passed away, in October of this year, the New York Times wrote that his work was an attempt to undermine Western culture.
The obituary was full of factual errors and infected with a hard-line bias against complex and rigorous thought… the facile and mistaken point of view that to distinguish between meaning and truth is to call for nihilist or morally bankrupt agendas in thought and politics… it failed to look at the work itself or the man himself and instead paraphrased poorly wrought critiques and conceptual gossip to try to discredit a monumental life of study in Western philosophy.
That complex and rigorous thought, involved in much of postmodern theory, which characterized Derrida’s research and theory, has proven vital to extending human understanding in disciplines as diverse as science, literature and policy. The Times obituary railed against this level of self-conscious complexity, accusing Derrida of questioning the very right of W
