Deadly American generosity

Jon Schwarz commented on Americans praising the generosity of the country for acts that result in the deaths and suffering of many people.

EARLIER THIS WEEK, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar celebrated the Trump administration for its treatment of immigrant children it has separated from their parents. “We have nothing to hide about how we operate these facilities,” said Azar on CNN. “It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids.”

This magnanimous claim raises an obvious question: What are the other great acts of American generosity?

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Support the Pursuance Project Kickstarter project if you can

The Kickstarter project deadline for meeting the goal is just three days away. If you can, please consider donating to it. You can read about the project and donate here.

With the open society under threat, the time has come to fulfill the promise of the Internet by launching an entirely new way for citizens to work together: securely, intuitively, and effectively. The time has come to build Pursuance.

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The growth of nonprofit news media

The traditional news media, faced with filling in every single moment with content that will draw in viewers that can be sold to advertisers, has descended into the pattern that we see, of talking heads who are selected because it is already known what they will say and can be counted on to argue with each other without adding much useful knowledge. In this drive fro phony drama and confrontations, resources for real investigative reporting that requires a lot of digging and analysis, get squeezed out as being too expensive. As Seymour Hersh says in his book Reporter, the worst words a reporter can say are “I think”. But that is the most common phrase in these shows as people speculate about things they don’t know or try to predict the future.
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Bogus civility

It is quite extraordinary how liberals will sign on to the notion of civility, even when that is used as a cover to not take strong public stands. Cartoonists Reuben Bolling and Tom Tomorrow take aim at his kind of advice.

Tom the Dancing Bug 1396 please don’t use the n-word

Afghanistan opium cultivation explodes

I have written before about how getting rid of poppy production has been a major goal of US policymakers in Afghanistan. They have targeted a large number of airstrikes in the province of Helmand, seen as the major source of poppy cultivation. This is due to the belief among US policymakers that the production of heroin is the main source of income for the Taliban and that if farmers could be persuaded to grow other crops, then the Taliban would be weakened and then eliminated. Experts have cast doubts on this theory, arguing that the Taliban is not that dependent on income from the heroin trade and that there are sound economic reasons for Afghan farmers to grow poppies that have little to do with larger political issues.
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Finding a slur for Belgians

Belgium has just lost its semi-final World Cup match against France. The British have a positive genius for coming up with derogatory names for the people of any ethnicity other than white and any nation other than their own. Monty Python noticed that they had not come up with a slur against Belgians and decided to find a good one.

Man and defender of wife’s killer team up against prosecutorial misconduct

Jordan Smith writes about how an unlikely alliance of a man and the lawyer who defended wife’s killer is working to expose prosecutorial misconduct in Orange County, California. Paul Wilson was initially very antagonistic towards the public defender for his dogged defense of Scott Dekraai, the man who murdered his wife Christy in the deadliest mass shooting in the county.
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Who makes up the elite?

I use the word ‘elite’ often to describe people and groups. What I mean by the word is quite straightforward: It means the people at the very top of any given category. So one can have elite musicians, athletes, actors, and so on. In the political context, it means those who are at the top of the socio-economic spectrum. As someone who follows the evolution of words, I have been interested in how the term is now being transformed into a pejorative description of knowledgeable people who have certain progressive political views. So scientists who raise the alarm about the climate are now dismissed as part of the ‘elite’.
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