LyrArc Article Gist
Social media is doing irreparable damage to health. Julie Jargon in WSJ says self-harm, sad posting, disordered eating videos abound on TikTok. It's worse because it is doing the most damage to young people. When only 20% of 8th graders can get a passing grade in civics and history, most can't read proficiently, what does social media like Facebook as shown in a WSJ investigation, and TikTok as shown here do but damage health, damage global literacy levels, hurt democratic forms of government that require civic education, limit exercize and outdoor living, and the ability to think or concentrate essential to lead a healthy productive life? 

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The failure of the SEC under Gary Gensler to protect ordinary Americans who are mistakenly trusting their savings to cryptocurrency firms is seen as a major flaw in his running of the agency by former SEC officials and other SEC experts. The gaps in SEC enforcement and this weakness is the subject of this report in the WSJ. The cryptocurrency firms are not registered with the SEC and do not follow SEC rules hurting ordinary Americans putting money there. Mr. Gensler was made head of the SEC in 2021, and the SEC has been looking at crypto firms since 2017 but failed to come up with a regulatory model in 5 years.

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There can be some comfort with the loss of the usual social contact during the period of lockdown and working from home. There are is the opportunity to slow down, pause and reflect in prayer or meditation. There is also time to spend in gardens or parks, a patio or balcony to be outside. As Adrian Higgins of the Washington Post- who has two books on gardening and covered it since the 1980's- points out here we are not apart from nature or above it, we are nature, and plants and birds outside are fellow beings of a sort. Most of us live in tight urban environments and this is a great opportunity to break away from all the noise and bustle and experience some time with nature and with ourselves. A time for renewal and listening to our inner voices, as the gods may be reminding us about living a better and slower life. Higgins reminds us that sometimes it is an experience that is alive in memory as there is a word for it in Japanese and in German, and in other languages. In Japan shinrin-yoku is about forest bathing, by finding a woodland or park and experiencing the stillness. Germans call it a forest walk or waldspaziergang. Plant gardens or parks will do, even landscaped areas in urban settings. The shades in a garden with sunlight falling in different ways on leaves and plants. We develop a capacity to notice things we stopped noticing as we grew up. Just walk or sit quietly and look. Plants and trees also take away some of the isolation and loneliness as they are fellow travelers of a sort. As anyone who has planted will know we can look forward to the new flowering, and the growth into next year, and the next. We have got too intertwined with the short term and the immediate fulfillment, and this draws us out of this in ways that enrich and nourish our lives.     ...

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Sixty four years ago president Kennedy accepted the nomination of his party with these words in Los Angeles on July 15, 1960- "But I think the American people expect more from us than cries of indignation and attack. The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high--to permit the customary passions of political debate. We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future. As Winston Churchill said on taking office some twenty years ago: if we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future.  Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.  Abroad, the balance of power is shifting. There are new and more terrible weapons--new and uncertain nations--new pressures of population and deprivation. One-third of the world, it has been said, may be free- -but one-third is the victim of cruel repression--and the other one- third is rocked by the pangs of poverty, hunger and envy. More energy is released by the awakening of these new nations than by the fission of the atom itself."       ...

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Joe Biden says in the Wash. Post Jan 6, that what happened on this day Jan 6 2021- that "we cannot allow the truth to be lost."

"Four years later, leaving office, I am determined to do everything I can to respect the peaceful transfer of power and restore the traditions we have long respected in America. The election will be certified peacefully. I have invited the incoming president to the White House on the morning of Jan. 20, and I will be present for his inauguration that afternoon.But on this day, we cannot forget. This is what we owe those who founded this nation, those who have fought for it and died for it.And we should commit to remembering Jan. 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as a day when our democracy was put to the test and prevailed. To remember that democracy — even in America — is never guaranteed."

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Mental health is no longer an issue during the pandemic and its aftermath just for a few. It has assumed a mainstream character. Here in this NYT report one finds the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, describe his problems with mental health. To create an awareness among the public that it is important to pay attention to what may be lost in a overly large focus on work or business, ignoring the social signals whose importance may not be realized till much later. As Surgeon General he says he simply focused on work and did not pay attention to the simple social interactions that help one relate to other people, and knowing about other people's lives that add a new dimension to living.  In Lyrarc during the pandemic we described the German mental health practice of Feierabend of consciously breaking away from work- especially remote work that lacks preset boundaries- so that by 5 or 6 pm one just calls it a day. At that point going out for a bike ride or walk or some activity in the outdoors that helps revive mind and spirit in ways that keep good health. It also prepares one for the next day's activity, to be able to approach it feeling refreshed and invigorated. ...

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Emily Baumgaertner of NYT does a wonderful report on how RFK Jr. is right on the dot when it comes to obesity and health, chemicals in food supply and health, affordability of medicine and Pharma. There are so many points most Americans can agree on if only they listened carefully and looked for ways to tackle serious problems such as health and obesity, by avoiding getting tangled up in propaganda lines or controversial headlines. As this report shows Senator Booker and other Democratic senators, share a common concern with RFK Jr., the rest of the American people and most Republicans in Congress about the fight to get Americans good health practices- removing chemicals from the food supply, putting healthy foods in school lunches and creating a culture of eating healthy foods, and fighting bad practices. Do this without getting tangled up in controversies about vaccines or spreading misinformation or exaggerating vaccine positions of political opponents. ...

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Rina Bliss, a professor of sociology at Rutgers, says while AI can bring information to kids it cannot make them think. To truly learn children will have to do it themselves and in interaction with teachers, parents and other children. She took the approach of a scientist and let her two children try out AI tools and software and came to this conclusion. One reason she says is that AI is based on computational intelligence and the human mind and brain are not quantifiable. The brain is flowing like a river and always learning from its environments.  There is a social environmental piece says Marin, there is interaction, there is a drive to know and connect, curiosity and passion that are part of learning.  Basically AI is developed through taking vast amounts of information collecting it and ordering it in a certain way. How each originator of the AI orders it affects how it will work. And what is in the basket of information collected will affect how it will work. There is no thinking brain outside of the human originator who put a particular version together. Like every piece of software there are implicit or explicit instructions on how to use the basket of information collected that is put in by an originator who developed the AI software. For these reasons it will only do basic tasks and is not intended for complex tasks that involve thinking processes and social-emotional aspects of human behaviour. The risks of using it begin to grow as soon as it is used for tasks it was never intended to perform such as replacing the human thinking  processes and the socio-emotional aspects of these processes.  If it is used to do things it was never intended for, the larger the activities it performs, the larger the mistakes and risks it it is liable to make or create. If it is assigned the task of transportation for a country, it will at some point be asked to think and at that point it will fail to make the right decisions, making the risks grow exponentially, very, very fast, leading to disaster. ...

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Action United Airlines is taking after the episode of bumping passengers on a flight to Louisville caused public protest in media with live pictures, include offering more financial incentives to passengers to vacate seats on overbooked flights, and setting up new rules for handling such situations. Upto $10,000 will be offered to passengers in travel vouchers. Only safety and security would be considerations once passengers are already on the plane. Other airlines are also taking these steps- Delta has set $9950 as the amount maximum to be offered to passengers as vouchers. Other steps United is taking are special call center for overbooking, and reducing number of overbooked flights, offering $1500 no questions asked for lost baggage. United's Board has also acted by not promoting Mr Munoz, the CEO to chairman, and by making it essential that executives show meaningful improvements in customer experience to get incentive compensation. These steps are a result of the report that looked into the failure at United in bumping passengers who were already seated made by the airline. ...

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Tracy Dolgin, CEO of the YES cable sports network takes a novel approach to managing by reversing the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle pointed out that people start by being good at doing what they do, every time they get promoted they manage more and do less, to the point that they are not hands on anymore and are into meetings, shuffling paper, sending too many memos, often into political interdepartmental rivalry, making them worse at their job in terms of productive effort. Dolgin's says she created a flat organization and hired people who were good at doing and with functional expertise who loved to be hands on.

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Dan Osborn is a union leader who led the strike at Kellogg Omaha plant in 2021. He is running for the US Senate seat in Nebraska which is conservative and Republican. He is shown here campaigning with Shawn Fain of the UAW autoworkers union at his side.

Osborn says he does not see Republican or Democrat or any color just a fair fight for fair wages for workers.

Osborn says-

“I didn’t see men or women or black or white or Republican or Democrat on the picket line. I just saw people that wanted to go to work for a fair wage and some good benefits.”  

This is what 2024 is also turning into in the US a fight for wages and for managing the cost of living in ways that bring a better life for workers and their families after years of neglect.

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Everybody ought to be spending some time standing and walking even with the laptop in hand, as its the worst thing to do to sit with the laptop for long periods of time. That constitutes sedentary activity which doesn't do much for healthy living. WSJ has turned this into a comic strip.

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What a generation of war can do to a country with a third of the people having disabilities is shown in DW.com.

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DJT on Canada "lives because of the US," and Carney's referencing the relationship and saying "Canada does not live because of the US." Rupture in relations started earlier but was mended. This time Carney takes the first step after visiting Beijing to clearly distance Canada from the US in speeches at Davos, by being openly critical of US policies. This does not bode well for negotiations onthe USMCA agreement that is being rewritten. Disputes with Mexico continues over US preference to strike on land against drug cartels in Mexico that are trafficking drugs to the US with loss of hundreds of thousands of lives more than the Korean and Vietnam wars, and World War 1 combined over the last decade. The USMCA involves negotiations with Mexico and Canada. The Border has been secured but like Eisenhower in 1954 DJT faces the problem of how to send back the surge in migrants that entered the border illegally through Mexico with the Mexican government not intervening and the Biden/Harris/Mayorkas government failing to secure it -asking for legislation as late as 2024 when most of the illegal entry had already happened. In 1954 Eisenhower organized Operation Wetback to do this, which is now underway in the US in a different way by DJT in 2026 with the clear focus on getting criminal activity out. ...

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When you compare the US to the European Union or India one can see how America is failing its people in offering basic public services that other countries do routinely. Jennifer Pahlka is the author of- Recoding America: How America is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. Pahlka points out the problem in the US where private companies obstruct the delivery of basic services that the government can provide, just for their own profit. They throw in a carrot so that there is an excuse for not doing anything about this. For example tax preparation companies tell the IRS not to develop a simple tool available to all taxpayers to file their own taxes easily which is already filled with basic details. The carrot so that no one complains is that they will offer free tax preparation services to low income people. In the EU and many other countries tax preparation is done using tools offered by the tax agencies for easy preparation. In India it was possible to make it through the pandemic for large parts of a population of 1.4 billion because checks could be deposited directly into people's bank accounts. Digitization is used in India to make certain there is delivery of public services directly to each person. ...

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Eugene Daniels Politico interview with Brian Fallon of the Harris campaign. The focus of the Harris campaign is to get the electorate to know more about her and her plans for the economy, across all parts rural and urban of the most contested states. To get across to voters how her plan for the economy stands in contrast to the former president in the belief that once people get to know her economic plan they will support her for a better future for America.  There is also the realization that this campaign is compressed into three months August-September-October. The change from Biden to Harris integrating the campaigns had to seamless, and this has been seamless, an essential prerequisite. Another is that it had to be nonstop in every corner of the nation indifferent to rural and urban, red or blue. Nothing matters more than talking to all parts of the nation, to young and old, Republican and Democrat, urban and rural, men and women, to fight for every single vote, and this is happening in this campaign. The essential prerequisite to do this was to do it as the underdog which is how the Harris campaign is being carried out in these last weeks and days. ...

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Scott Shane and Jo Becker provide this exceptional account of the events that led to the unraveling of Libya. Saying they were not going to do another Iraq, senior policymakers and president Obama failed to realize the importance of basic steps that needed to be taken to secure the large arms arsenal of the Gaddafi regime, providing the assistance and support for transition to peacetime of the many militias in the country, and arrangements with Arab allies of the U.S. such as Qatar and UAE and other Arab neighbors allied with the U.S. to secure the arms arsenal and secure borders. It was clear from the beginning that Gaddafi had discouraged the development of institutions that would hold the country together- handholding was essential for the Libyan project to succeed. Instead as Shane and Becker document here Libya received neglect with strong conditions set for U.S. assistance such that neglect was assured. It is not clear from this report that Secretary Clinton supported the policy because this is what she would have done, or because of a sense of being a team player in the Obama administration, though it leans on the latter. Observing her role in supporting a Libya free of the dictatorship supports the idea that Hillary Clinton would have seen the need to help build institutions where none existed, and the basic step of transition of militias to peacetime. The weakness of the Libyan government is cited here, which only reinforce the need for the U.S. to be involved in a transition to peacetime Libya, after enabling the Libyan people to remove the Gaddafi regime. The militias allied with Qatar and UAE on opposing sides helped worsen the situation, with the U.S. having sufficient influence with western allied governments to ensure a unified internationally supported policy for transition with basic security....

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The Obama administration announced a policy of increasing the number of refugees accepted in fiscal 2017 to 110,000. This will be an increase from 85,000 in 2016, and 70,000 in the prior 3 years. Secretary of State Kerry says the target is consistent  with the idea that all countries need to do more, and if we could do more we would. After 3 years of cautious policy president Obama now follows Chancellor Merkel's lead.

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Efforts to build air defense systems for Guam, American base 1300 miles east of the Philippines. China has stockpiled missiles that could reach Guam, says this report in the WSJ. There are 150,000 American civilians in Guam, which is an island the size of Chicago. As Guam is entirely American the US can operate from Guam in a manner that it cannot do from Okinawa or other bases in the Pacific, or in South Korea. About 50,000 Americans are based at Okinawa, Japan. US has 22,000 military personnel on Guam island. Guam played a critical role in the early days of the Pacific War with Japan and after it was retaken from the Japanese.

This is becoming important as the US faces the prospect of being able to help protect Taiwan's independence, and protect free navigation on seas in the Indo-Pacific region that extends from Africa to India and Australia and to western US.

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More flexible attitudes about how lives can be lived and independent attitudes are leading to more people in Japan doing things alone on their own. For people to travel, go to concerts or events alone, and take part in other activities alone, is becoming more acceptable in Japan, a country where doing things together was once the only way. About 50% of people in Japan now do things independently, as society changes and demographics adds another factor of single people in retirement. The term used for this is ohitorisama in Japan. There is even karaoke for one person on his own, and eating by oneself at a restaurant or at work is now ok, quite acceptable.

 

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A view of rural life in China during the period of Japanese occupation and the Mao years in Mo Yan's short stories and novels. "Red Sorghum" (1993) is one of his well known novels turned into a movie, a popular short story is "Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh" (2001)

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Rather than getting bogged down with perfectionist instincts, it helps to take a shot at difficult work and then fine tune with corrective steps once the results are seen. In this way shortcomings can be fixed in a progressive step path as opposed to trying to do it all at once which can be too much to do in one step.