Surveillance: The government isn’t spying on us; Google is spying on us, and the government is asking Google for certain results.

Mass information gathering by for profit companies and the use of that information is becoming a major issue for societies, groups and individuals who are gradually waking up to the reality that if you type it with a keyboard or upload it and hit the send key you might as well be writing graffiti on government building walls and leaving your name and address in the bottom right hand corner.

What is amazing is how innocent and lulled most of us have been about the use of computers and keyboards.  Especially allowing kids to spend hours unsupervised on the same machines we do our most important communicating with banks, friends, colleagues, you name it.

So here we are having a debate about our relationship with online entities and the use of the data we willingly share and that data they are also able to produce deductively beyond what we are willing to share.

Whether we have anything to hide or not, most of us assume we get to make that choice.

Apparently, our keyboards, desktop computers and online connection are a gateway to big business and big brother which today seem to be becoming one and the same.

“LET’S get the most contentious point out of the way first: Edward Snowden made the right call to make public the extent of the National Security Administration’s surveillance of electronic communications. The American people can now have a debate about whether or not they consent to that level of surveillance in order to prevent terrorist attacks, a debate that we were previously denied by the government’s unwillingness to disclose even the …”

via Surveillance: Should the government know less than Google? | The Economist.

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NSA Snooping Was Only the Beginning. Meet the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar

Conflict and competition can be argued are leading forces in the development of civilizations.  However, when conflict and competition exist within a system that is competing with a plethora of external sources, these internal forces can be destructive because a divided house is more easily destoyed.

America is such a system today.  This is especially true of our divided political system.  From Watergate to various false attempts at “Obamagate” today, America finds itself at an important crossroads.  Eisenhower’s military industrial complex seems to be reaching Orwellian proportions.  It is not just made up of electronic eavesdropping.  It has plenty of mortal and brick and significant parts of it are independent, for profit and privatized.

The abuses of Black Water during the Gulf War are now looking temporary and relatively small compared to the all pervasive and apparently institutionalized programs that listen in on private communication among all Americans in a new America where BIG BROTHER seems to be watching, listening, recording and even sending drones.

“INSIDE FORT MEADE, Maryland, a top-secret city bustles. Tens of thousands of people move through more than 50 buildings—the city has its own post office, fire department, and police force. But as if designed by Kafka, it sits among a forest of trees, surrounded by electrified …”

via NSA Snooping Was Only the Beginning. Meet the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar | Threat Level | Wired.com.

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A Lifeline for No-Longer-Illegal Immigrants – NYTimes.com An interesting comment from this NYT’s comments section …

Contrary to popular belief America was not created by immigration. It was created by conquest and exploration and it was done so on top of many other “native” nations. To this day Americans have not been able to assimilate and fully include those natives into its polity or its economic success. How then can we argue that immigration has been so noble and that immigrants are naturally a part of the American way?The truth lies much closer to Plato’s “necessary untruths.” To romanticize immigration, both in terms of why people leave their native lands and in terms of why they come to America is simply false and misleading. People come to America because they hope for better than they have where they reside as they make the often courageous decision to uproot and venture into the relatively unknown. What never seems to be discussed is how few of us here in America consider leaving this country. In an important way, America was created by people leaving their homeland because they were pushed out by various political and economic factors. That is what we have in common with the new comers. They come here because it is not comfortable where they previously resided. Here then lies the central question that needs to be considered by all of us who want to be fair minded and responsible. What would have become of us and our ancestors if the then native “americans” would have had the wherewithal to keep our ancestors out? Just as many of us want to keep other people out today.

More via A Lifeline for No-Longer-Illegal Immigrants – NYTimes.com.

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Why we can’t win the war on poverty « HealthThinkShop

Not all American’s are created equal but their status under the constitution is.  That is the most important part of the American promise and perhaps of the social contract that makes our democratic polity possible.

What is at stake here is who we are as a nation and how the rest of the world community sees us.  After our heroic role in WWII, we have enjoyed a special place in the new world order that manifested itself as east and west–Russians, their allies, and the rest of us free peoples.  But today the international community and our internal polity have become much more complex.  And we are having a difficult time moving forward.

America’s social, economic and ethnic diversity is becoming an increasing challenge to discussing, understanding and agreeing to a conception of:

what is an American,

what America stands for, and

who is eligible to partake in her bounty.

via ASPE – The Office of The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation: Facts and figures about America’s Poverty Problem – Why we can’t win the war on poverty « HealthThinkShop.

Filed under: Blogosphere, Children and Poverty, Immigration, News, waging war, WeSeeReason, poverty, Welfare Reform

Suburbs and the New Geography of Poverty | Demos

Decades after Michael Harrington’s work on poverty, the issue of what causes poverty and what can be done about it continues to be a controversial and confused one.

The work poverty has come to mean many things to many people and in important ways it has changed for people who do not look nor live like traditionally poor people lived and looked…

“Concentrated poverty has a new address, and this time it’s not in the inner city. For many Americans, moving to a house in the …”via Suburbs and the New Geography of Poverty | Demos.

Filed under: Blogosphere, Children and Poverty, News, propaganda and spin, Public Policy, Unemployment, WeSeeReason, healthcare for the poor; poverty and health needs;Planned Parenthood; Republican budget cuts; Medicaid and reproductive rights; paying for women's reproductive needs; women's health; feminization of p, poverty, poverty programs, the poor, What is poverty?

Healing the Overwhelmed Physician – or Rescuing healthcare practice from the solo provider?

Individualism, the heroic individual, the leader, the father, the head of an organization and Norman Rockwell’s idilic physician all have one thing in common: the increasingly untenable belief that individualist leadership is the optimal form of guidance and decision making to meet our collective or individual needs.

Enter the case of the solo physician trying to navigate the increasingly complex internal and external realms of his/her medical practice.

The variables under consideration regarding an individual’s health status, those variables needed to understand the internal medical practice resources involved in assessing that status, those variables involved in the dynamics of the outside world of lifestyle and behavior causing or maintaining that status, and, perhaps more importantly, the complex healthcare system supporting the physician and the patient’s experience addressing the numerous communicative, behavioral and resource utilization issues involved in addressing that health status are as complex and exhausting as this very sentence.

Such is the healthcare system today.  Hard to argue that we have not made progress from the days of low life expectancy, high child mortality and when, by today’s standards, low level infections caused serious health problems and even death.

The problem today seems much more complex and overwhelming as healthcare knowhow has become an information management problem.  Computers and medical records do not seem to be helping much yet and the individualism involved in our national culture of choice and personal control seems to be militating against group progress.

The NYTs published a worthwhile article to get us thinking on this topic.  The Policy ThinkShop recommends reading it and further discussion–discussion we can continue here at your Public Policy Blog …

“We physicians are susceptible to a kind of medical Stendhal syndrome as we confront the voluminous evidence about the clinical choices we face every day. It would take dozens of hours each week for a conscientious primary care doctor to read everything he or she needed in order to …”

via Healing the Overwhelmed Physician – NYTimes.com.

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How RunKeeper Plans To Make The World a Healthier Place

Do you remember when you got your first calculator and how that made math so different?  Today we have gadgets that connect with smartphones and deliver an incredible experience filled with data, GPS information and social media opportunities–all connected to our heart beat, our movements tracked in real time via GPS and our motivation.

Workouts are transformed by being connected to information about our body that can be shared with friends and family.

Wow!  The following is one such technology …

“RunKeeper dramatically affects the way many people around the world stay healthy, and has plans to do a whole lot more. Available for iOS and Android, the mobile app lets you track your workouts, and then share your fitness achievements everywhere from …”

via How RunKeeper Plans To Make The World a Healthier Place.

Filed under: Blogosphere, Health and Exercise, Health Literacy, Social Media, social media and health, social networking and health, technology and health

The Economist explains: How did the global poverty rate halve in 20 years? | The Economist

As the world’s multiplicity of good and bad personal experiences are seen, quantified and popularized through viral networks and instant messaging, poverty will need to be put into perspective and understood.  Not only what it is but how different it is to many different people in extremely different places.  What ever you think about poverty, understanding the complexities in understanding it and putting it into appropriate perspective is a good place to start… The London Economist is trying to help us with this task…

“POVERTY is easy to spot but hard to define. America sets its poverty line at $11,490 of income per year for a one-person household, or just over $30 a day. Any income below that amount is judged inadequate for the provision of fundamental wants. Other rich countries set their poverty lines in relative terms, so an increase in the incomes of top earners results in more poverty if everything else is held constant. The threshold for dire poverty in developing countries is set much lower, at $1.25 a day of consumption (rather than income). This figure is arrived at by …”

via The Economist explains: How did the global poverty rate halve in 20 years? | The Economist.

Filed under: Blogosphere, Children and Poverty, Culture Think, Feminization of Poverty, diversity and poverty, Global Poverty, poverty

Devoted to Politics, MSNBC Slips on Breaking News

Do you remember Keith Olbermann?  The following article credits him for pioneering the niche MSNBC has carved out for itself in its rise to the top tier in ratings.  

“At MSNBC they view it as rooting against death and destruction: the last thing the channel wants is more months like the last two, filled with terror bombings, tornadoes and ….”

via Devoted to Politics, MSNBC Slips on Breaking News – NYTimes.com.

Filed under: Blogosphere, consumers, Culture Think, Changing Media Paradigm, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, Fox, Fox News, liberal media, ideology and the media

“Killer drones: Out of the shadows” or are they?

Technology is changing war but legal concepts and international law are not as mutable.  As governments and leaders enthusiastically move forward with technological efficacy, the legal morass and moral quandary caused by social, psychological and economic destruction promises to create new problems that may haunt us for generations.  But technology moves fast, corporate America knows how to package and sell it, and the American public is the last to weigh in.  Democracy is increasingly purchased in the ongoing divided American electorate and the internecine warfare election politics now represent.  Like the proverbial Pyrrhic victory, we crush and pick off our enemies as the facts of our deeds slowly leek out and we potentially stand in ubiquitous and unforgiving popular judgement at home and abroad.

We seem to be getting farther and farther away from “though shall not kill” and “violence begets violence”

At last we have a technological equivalent to hackers threatening social and economic information exchange where the government is “anonymous” and civilization itself is the victim.  It is legion, expect it…

“WHEN it comes to lethal drone strikes against foreign targets, America’s government and Congress should be aware that “what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”, says …”

via Killer drones: Out of the shadows | The Economist.

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In America’s cities, demographics must drive policy

The baby boom generation continues to dominate numerically.  Even as they slow down and even retire, their sheer numbers continue to drive American social needs and wants.  As corporations increase their global reach and their local dominance, simple demographic currents may rule the day as millions of boomers smother marketing strategies and trends with a simple “That’s not what I want.”

“As many boomers choose to “age in place,” that is, to retire and continue living in their homes and/or neighborhoods as opposed to in retirement homes, they will demand accessible transportation, services, walkability, and access to health care in their communities. These demands also characterize today’s young, educated, millennial generation.

Will cities and neighborhoods be able to cope with these interrelated demands? There are several key reasons for concern and also several important opportunities.

Areas for concern

• Urban Institute models project that between 2010 and 2030 there will be a 70 percent increase in senior homeowners and a 100 percent increase in senior renters.
• As many seniors choose to “age in place” by staying in their homes and communities, their cities and neighborhoods may not be equipped to provide the transportation, services, and health care they increasingly demand.
• Affordable housing is limited, but retirees on fixed incomes and millennials facing an unprecedented wealth gap will increasingly demand affordable housing in walkable urban areas.

Reasons for optimism according to panelists

• Health care will increasingly comprise the largest share of living expenses for seniors, but in-home care and other in-home services can reduce health care costs, and those cost savings can be reinvested in the services that generate them.
• Social Impact Bonds and other public-private partnerships may be well-placed to make the initial investments in the many services that will be needed, increasing economic efficiency and generating profits.
• Technology will allow many seniors to receive health care monitoring and service delivery in their homes, while millennials will use it to interact with and replace many neighborhood amenities.”

via In America’s cities, demographics must drive policy.

Filed under: News, Civic Engagement, Blogosphere, Demographic Change, WeSeeReason, Children and Poverty, consumers, Culture Think, analytics, Aging, Economic Recovery, Policy Process Politics Values Objectivity of Science Social Science Public Policy, Public Policy, Demographics, American Cities

Income-Based Diversity Lags at Many Public Universities – NYTimes.com

Why do we so vigorously debate affirmative action?   Truth be told, policies purported to address inequality in our society are neither affirmative nor very “active.”

The value of the idea that underrepresented groups within mainstream institutions is a problem greatly relies on who is defining and  how these groups are defined.  The following article in the NYTs raises some interesting issues in this area which show that many in our society are beginning to question how and why we quantify and measure representation within our learning communities.

“Opponents of race-based affirmative action in college admissions urge that colleges use a different tool to encourage diversity: giving a leg up to poor students. But many educators see real limits to how eager colleges are to enroll more poor students, no matter how qualified — and the reason is …”

via Income-Based Diversity Lags at Many Public Universities – NYTimes.com.

Filed under: access to education, Blogosphere, consumers, Culture Think, Demographic Change, Discrimination, Education Policy, Education Reform, ethnicity in politics, ideology, Education policy