Today's NYT op-ed by one of the world's most distinguished economists covers our economic dilemma from the perspective of Japan's parallel example starting in 1989. It's a worthwhile distillation of how policy choices affect a bust economy, lessons worth learning. It's also a stark warning that our votes this November will set direction for the near term, and that direction could be very much downward.
In which the unnamed Courier editor tries to play the tough-love mentor to teens about drugs. Have you ever read anything so fatuous?
Every reputable statistical and field study proves the headline's premise completely false. Punishment does not work. That's counterintuitive for most people, though, so we persist in treating drug abuse as a criminal problem.
I have a clue for you, editor: the cause of the recent "alarming number of juvenile drug arrests on Prescott Unified School District campuses" is not more kids doing drugs, it's more narcs in the schools. The results will be far more damage to the lives of the kids being arrested than they'd have experienced if we'd left them alone, and most of the the kids who haven't been caught will just get smarter about avoiding arrest, more loyal to the freak group and more alienated from community values and institutions.
Talking to kids like you're their dad is guaranteed only to make you look foolish, editor. One approach can help, and that's to speak clear, consistent truth about drugs. That starts with understanding the truth yourself. You don't.
Kids hear so many lies about drugs through their lives that the smart ones are naturally cynical about what adults have to say about them. Our crazy drug laws effectively prevent responsible adults from teaching kids how to handle and safely use illegal substances, so they generally learn from other kids who don't know. The results are predictable, with kids creating and maintaining myths of their own and learning everything the hardest way.
As long as ignorant, reactionary mythology about mind-altering substances drives otherwise sensible people into frenzies over drug use, many more kids will get involved with drugs than otherwise, with a broad range of motivations. The editor's pious admonishments based on that mythology just aggravate teenagers and reduce the paper's credibility further.
Now I'm completely convinced that JJ is a personal favorite of someone powerful at the Courier. The suddenly regular frequency of his columns, their general lack of content, the weird, scattershot writing and apparent absence of editors indicate a protected writer who's getting a paycheck as an indulgence. I'm afraid he's offering less value to readers than the wacky rants of Cal Thomas, and for me that's saying something. Waste of space, and an insult to the op-ed page.
The unnamed Courier editor seems more than a little distracted in today's editorial. We have the headline confusion, of course, but more telling is that the editor seems to have forgotten to write up the point s/he intended to make.
The piece starts out with the Board of Supes taking "no action" on a couple of infrastructure plans, and ends with an accusation that " the board members cannot seem to get beyond their turf wars and work together." In between the editor provides no justification for saying this. Very sloppy, and I'm sure it makes no friends among the Supes, who no doubt are being justifiably careful about capital plans right now.
On top of that, we get this little gem on the Sheriff's request for improvements at the jail: "The sally port, another name for a prisoner holding area, could hold as many as 80 prisoners awaiting their court hearings or trials." Clearly the editor misunderstood what the Sheriff was talking about and didn't bother to check the technicals.
"Sally port" is a very specific term referring to a passage through a fortification for troops to venture outward, and it's been adapted in the prison context to describe double-door passages for prisoner control. It's a door, not a room or enclosure or area. I imagine the Sheriff presented a plan for improvements to the prisoner holding area that include a double-door security passage, and I see with a quick Google search that at least one maker of security doors is using this fanciful term to describe its products.
The editor, as a communications professional, should have checked understanding of the term and then translated it into understandable parlance (e.g. "security passage") rather than apply a mystifying term like a kid showing off a shiny new toy.
In today's editorial, the unnamed Courier editor calls for the right ideas, but in doing so contributes to the problem and ducks responsibility.
Yes, absolutely, we need representatives in government who will bury their egos and work together for the greater good. But the editor does us all a disservice by pretending to stand on the lofty mountaintop, saying both sides are equally at fault. It only takes one obstructionist to halt a negotiation, one criminal to steal your purse.
The primary constitutional responsibility of the press is to inform the voters so that we may make better decisions about what we want government to do and who we want to represent us in doing it. So when one party is trying to get something important done and the other is telling lies and obstructing that work only to gather more power, it's the editor's responsibility to tell us that.
Instead it's become the fashion for the commercial press to pump up the conflict and cast the contenders as equal in everything, like sports coverage. With no sustained interest in the integrity of the process, the ideas put forward or the real consequences of previous decisions, the only value left is who is winning the fight today. That's pro wrestling, not political analysis.
Here's the truth right now: the Republican minority in Congress is preventing the healing of our economy, the creation of vitally needed jobs and a sensible solution to our health-care disaster because they calculate that voters will blame the Democrats and vote for Republicans instead. Neither side can claim perfect integrity, but the Rs are playing a dirty game. At the state level, the Republican majority, which could easily be focusing on the state's economy and jobs for Arizonans, are instead cementing their hold on power by whipping up fear of Mexicans, without reference to truth or reality. All this is being covertly manipulated by very rich men for their own gain at the expense of the vast majority of us. None of this is conspiracy theory. All these statements have been extensively and carefully documented, and that reporting is easy to find. But the commercial press in the main will not tell you about it. It doesn't fit the narrative.
One factor in this is that people seem to prefer to hear sports coverage over boring old facts and careful analysis. I think that's chicken and egg -- they watch it because that's pretty much all there is to watch, and it molds expectations. The other, far more important factor is that the commercial press is owned lock, stock and smoking barrel by those large corporations whose political interests run counter to ours. The descent of news to where it's indistinguishable from entertainment is no accident.
The editor is one of the few people in our community who has the power to buck this trend and do some real good. He could bury his ego and his political agenda, and be the fair umpire dedicated to a clean game rather than the sports promoter trying to sell more tickets. But that requires watching the players closely and being unafraid to call the fouls. To do that fairly, he can't bet on the game. Passing over fouls by one team indicates the fix is in.
You're reading this blog, so you know all this and I'm preaching to the choir. But every day you talk to people who don't get this, and, lacking a trustworthy fourth estate, the respected word of one person to another is the only avenue left for communicating these things. Please, speak up.
You need to know about this:
Republican Runs Street People on Green Ticket
Update, Wednesday: Green Party files suit to stop them. (sub required)
Every Arizonan should see this performance. Repeatedly.
Update, 4pm: Take 2
And for those of you who are doing your homework, here's the full debate, sans snark.
Today's column by JJ reads like a pile of random notes from incomplete research for a story on local police work. It's a real test for the reader to figure out what points he intends to make. Perhaps he got off an a rant and sidetracked himself. In any case it's rambling and incoherent. The editors should not have let it go out like this.
I don't always look at the midweek outside columns (not on dcourier, sorry), as they're generally so predictable. This one fooled me.
Purcell goes on and on about his dumbass performance in selling a car. But rather than admonishment to readers to have more sense than a fence post in dealing with strangers, he winds up with a completely gratuitous and unsupported swipe at the President.
It just astounds me that any literate person, leave alone the editor of a newspaper, would lend any credence to this sort of thing. I don't care what political point of view it espouses, it informs no one and only aggravates public hostility. Bad choice, editors. Worse than Mike Reagan.
(Here's the column as carried in the Ironton Tribune.)
The unnamed Courier editor loves these paeans to wars past. And why not? They're so easy to write and so unlikely to draw criticism. What's next, a tribute to the heroes of the Spanish-American War? Give Jerry this stuff, it's a bit mouldy for the editorial page. For this, the first Barcalounger of the post-Hansen era. Waste of space.
Today's editorial cartoon twits the City staff for cutting off recycling service for the whole area. We've been talking about that here, too. Why is it that Flag and even Cottonwood can make it happen, but we can't? It's hard to believe there's anything at work here other than a lack of imagination and an excess zeal about making City services "profitable." Mr Norwood.
Perhaps the Courier would consider an investigation of this issue, including cash-flow numbers and exploration of options for the ground glass.
Here's the money quote from the report: "It will not be possible to accommodate growth and avoid traffic congestion by improving roadways alone, . . .." Not possible. That's a pretty strong statement from a bureaucratic report, and I'm sure the planners would have qualified it if they could.
So all the commenters heaping scorn on the idea of a state rail corridor either don't understand the words in front of them or are happy to accept limits on growth and permanent traffic congestion.
Smart people have known this was coming for decades given AZ's growth-powered economy, of course. It's a big project that just gets bigger the longer we delay starting it. I'm glad the planners are thinking big, because it's the only way to create a system that will really work. No doubt the final report will recommend a phase-in starting with the corridor from Tucson to Sky Harbor and there'll be plenty of foot-dragging when the debate comes to starting the second phase. But for a dozen reasons this needs to be done, and I have little doubt that, barring a new Dark Ages, it will be done eventually.
What I don't get is why the report so far leaves out Williams. Failing to connect with Amtrak and Grand Canyon Railway at Williams (via Drake and Ash Fork) would be dead stupid, despite the expense.
PS: Thanks to whomever eventually corrected the headline fail in the original online version. Too bad about the print version, but at least the editors have discovered enough care about the product to correct where easy.
Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor,” Taliban operative Zabihullah tells NEWSWEEK. (Like many Afghans, he uses a single name.) “It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” [...]
Taliban officials say they’re looking forward to a new wave of terrorist trainees from the West like this year’s Times Square car bomber. “I expect we will soon be receiving more American Muslims like Faisal Shahzad who are looking for help in how to express their rage,” says a Taliban official who was a senior minister when the group ruled Afghanistan and who remains active in the insurgency. As an indication of the anger that is growing among some Muslims in the West, this official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, mentions the arrest of three Canadian Muslims in Ontario last week on charges of plotting to build and detonate improvised explosive devices. (A fourth individual was arrested in Ottawa last Friday in connection with the case.) The Ground Zero furor will likely add to that anger. “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get,” Zabihullah predicts.
New entries in two of the Courier's woefullly neglected "blog" sections offer signs of life.
The third entry in the "Eco-Logic" pseudoblog section brings us a new writer, Deb Weissmann, and some practical, readable advice on how to set up home landscaping for better use of water. Good work.
Steve Stockmar has posted a column in "The Inbox" that at last gets around to looking critically at some Courier content (every editor's primary job) rather than making pointless fun of online commenters. This is a good direction, Steve.
Yesterday the unnamed Courier editor showed up with a reaction to the five-year anniversary of Katrina. Like most in the media, s/he reinforces the clearly wrong idea that it was a natural disaster.
It would have greatly reinforced the editor's point about rebuilding trust in government to properly characterize the disaster as a predictable and predicted result of decades of shoddy engineering and negligence by the Army Corps of Engineers and state and federal regulators. So why sidle around that opportunity? Could it be related to the Courier's penchant for deifying the military and demonizing regulation?
I first heard about the Arcosanti project back in the mid-'70s while still in Michigan, and if we'd been able to scrape up a few bucks in those days of inflation and unemployment, my best friend and I would have been there helping build. Many years and happenstance eventually brought me to Prescott, and one of my first local trips was to visit Paolo Soleri's urban experimental laboratory.
The feature on Arcosanti casts the project as incomplete, "utopian," and cultlike, none of which is fair. The writer ignores or doesn't understand its context and important influence in the development of modern architecture and urban design, preferring to reinforce the derisive narrative that has helped keep the project small and grossly underfunded for decades.
While it necessarily has an overall design, Arcosanti is a laboratory and prototype, not a town, and its success cannot be measured in terms of "completing" the evolving design. Because of its rural location, high ideals, radical vision and participation by young people, the media have regularly painted it as some sort of hippie cult in the desert, which is where the "utopian" idea comes from. Soleri's vision is central to the experiment and he exerts firm control over its expression, and that has drawn both fair and unfair criticism, but he's an internationally respected, award-winning artist and educator, not a cult leader. The unnamed writer mentions his "workshops," but not his faculty position at ASU. Why is it "near Mayer" in the headline rather than "at Cordes Junction" or "on I-17"? All this would seem calculated to minimize if I weren't so familiar with the Courier's general disinterest in research.
Arcosanti is not about the buildings or its population, it's about the ideas. Much like Prescott College, it is underappreciated by most Prescott residents as a value feature, educational resource and attraction for our area. As Soleri nears the end of his life, major change is certainly coming for the project. The value we place on it as a community will have an effect on what it becomes going forward. This would be a worthy subject for newspaper coverage, also ignored here. Even the many arts events that Arcosanti hosts are left out.
The big question for me is why this story now? What's the news value here? And why didn't the Courier add local knowledge to this wire piece?
Update, Tuesday: Today's editorial offers a defense of the project (which only needs defending because the editors failed to deal with the bogosity of the AP story), touching on several of my points. Oddly, the editor still insists (twice!) that it's "a stone's throw from Mayer." (My maps put them about nine miles apart. Perhaps the editor is better at throwing stones than I'd imagined.) How about "on the edge of the Aqua Fria National Monument" instead?
Learning language is often like a huge game of telephone. We hear someone else put something in a certain way, and we say it that way too, passing on the usage to others and reinforcing it. When it works right this process teaches us about usage and builds living language. But sometimes it goes off the rails. We don't generally stop and check an authoritative source to see whether the usage is correct. In print, that's what editors are for.
A misusage becoming increasingly common in street speech and creeping into print is the substitution of "reticent" for "reluctant," seen in the Courier here and here in the last week.
"Reticent" means "inclined to silence" or "uncommunicative in speech." Try plugging that meaning into this phrase: "Solop is reticent to narrow the potential field of winners." This construction is common, but it's nonsense. (Red flag: "Reticent to" is always wrong.)
Watch out for situations where two words sound similar and have related meanings. In this case "reticent" can be taken to mean "reluctant to speak," and away you go.
On deep analysis, Tim reveals that McCain says whatever he thinks will win a vote. I'm sure you're stunned by this revelation. What's really amazing is why Republican voters continue to let him get away with it.
I have to take issue with the headline, though. McCain says he'll give you whatever you want, and then forgets to deliver anything but what will advance himself politically. The only thing we can count on about McCain is that he will say yes to any Sunday talk-show invitation.
And the idea that McCain is a pragmatic middle-of-the-roader at heart is a canard left over from his media honeymoon in the '90s, after the part about the corruption investigations. Tim's library could stand some updating, I gather. A good start would be McCain's Senate voting record.
