Elink Video ::"It's a good talking point, but it doesn't actually answer the underlying question"


In a discussion of insurance market reforms, President Obama asks Republican Senator John Kyl to move away from talking points and focus on finding common areas of agreement. The President responds to Kyl: “Any time the question is phrased as ‘Does Washington know better?’ I think we’re kind of tipping the scales a little bit there, since we all know that everybody is angry at Washington right now it’s a good talking point, but it doesn’t actually answer the underlying question, which is do we want to make sure that people have a baseline of protection?'”
angol here: I believe that what’s mostly said in Presidential forums can be classified as ”

“It’s a good talking point, but it doesn’t actually answer the underlying question”

rePost :: National Juries :: Overcoming Bias

Read the whole thing by clicking through the overcoming bias blog!!!
Would something like this work for the Philippines? No as long as the Education System is in shambles we cannot do anything as radical as this.

National Juries

The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors. …

The best way to improve modern politics? … The number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district … selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress … there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed … the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.

To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day.  All of these events should be filmed and broadcast, so that everyone could make sure that nothing dodgy was going on.

More here.  This logic is simple and strong enough for most folks to both understand and accept.  Yet most would still prefer our current system – why?
via Overcoming Bias : National Juries.

Musing on Philippine Politics and Healthcare 2010 02 26

People who follow the politics in the USA knows host stupid the people in the system can be.
I’m watching Citizen Tube here http://www.youtube.com/citizentube?feature=ticker on the Healthcare summit. I’m seriously envious of them right now. When we have senators who are hitting each other with personal snide remarks. When most of the questions that are being asked in Presidential forums are not up to snuff, Simply put I have no Idea who has the policy-fu down pat. Who knows basic economics, basic public policy etc. Damn. and you have self styled pundit who really know nothing.

rePost::Grameen Bank – Response to Wall Street Journal article

Excellent read. This was a letter written by Yunus defending his bank on accusations of below board practices. Loved reading this.

A Counter-Culture
Grameen had to create a banking counter-culture of its own. Grameen's central focus is to help poor borrower move out of poverty, not making money. Making profit is always recognised as a necessary condition of success to show that we are covering costs. Volume of profit is not important in Grameen in money-making sense, but important as an indicator of efficiency. We would like to make more profit so that we can reduce interest rate — and pass on the benefits to the borrowers. In Grameen system when a borrower cannot pay back we try to activate our system to help her overcome her problems, rather than go in a punishing mode.
We consider credit as a human right. We built our system on the faith that the poor always pay back. Some times they take longer than the originally scheduled time period, sometimes natural disasters like flood, drought, cyclone, etc and political unrest, rules and procedures of the bank, make it difficult or impossible to pay back; but given the opportunity they pay back. Non-repayment is not a problem created by the borrowers, it is created by factors external to them.
We have always carefully avoided the practices of the conventional banks to make sure we do not fall into the same logical loop which kept the poor out from financial institutions. Grameen had to create new systems to balance financial and human considerations. For example, it presents loan information separately for women and men, lists meticulously every single business of the borrowers in its annual report, and recognizes that a house is not just a house, but a workplace for the poor women, something that is categorised as a 'consumption' loan by the conventional banks is actually a 'production' loan for the poor. Grameen is a system based on human-relationships, not on threats of penalty imposed by legal system or any other agency. Grameen required new style of business, new banking culture of its own.
Sometimes people who are used to conventional banking become suspicious of Grameen because it is different. It is a conflict of two different banking cultures. Just because they do not understand us, they think we are wrong. When they spend some time with us with patience they start enjoying the exciting world of Grameen banking.
via Grameen Bank – Response to Wall Street Journal article.

rePost::How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker

Reading this I was hit by a desire to do something. We are in the midst of what probably is the few times we can do great and original work. It is as if FB and other distractions are the ways we are being controlled to not do useful stuff. sorry for the minor rant.  It’s just that we must able to look at each day in the context of a lifetime and the context of birth to that day is the lifetime.

But it’s been a long time—years now—since he did any serious research. Could he, still? “I’d like to get back to it,” he says. “I’m craving the chance to do some deep thinking, and I haven’t been doing a lot of that. I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. Even Paul Samuelson—the bulk of the stuff you read from him is before he was fifty. There was an intensity of focus that I had when I was twenty-six that I won’t be able to recapture at fifty-six. You develop your habits of mind, and to a point that’s a good thing, because you learn ways to work, but it does mean that you’re less likely to come up with something really innovative. Even if I weren’t doing all this other stuff, I don’t think I’d be producing a lot of breakthrough papers. There’s crude stuff: if I do have some brilliant academic insight, what are they going to do, give me a Nobel Prize? . . . When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.”
For someone else, this loss might be a devastation, but even though for thirty years thinking deeply about economics was all Krugman really cared about, he has let it pass out of his life without regret. “I think he’s happy,” his friend Craig Murphy says. “A much happier person now than when we first met him. He feels like he’s done good things, and they’re greater than what he expected when he was young. If there is sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better, and it would be really nice if we were able to.” ♦
via How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker.

rePost::Life With Food Stamps as Your Only Income : Casaubon's Book

This was a reaction to this article: Alternet, a good piece on what it really means to be one of the six million Americans with no income at all save food stamps:
Hope you can read both the linked sites.

We are teetering on a basic question, I think – what is government for? In the present situation, we don’t have the luxury of doing everything we’d like – of funding every project, of engaging in every kind of research or investing in every area of life that we’d like. We have to make choices. So we come to the question – as more and more citizens are impoverished and desperate, and we invest more and more money in propping up an economy that is still failing, still falling, what should governments do? What choices should we make? Is the mission of our society to preserve an economy at all costs? To preserve an imperialist enterprise? Or to preserve the people?via Life With Food Stamps as Your Only Income : Casaubon’s Book.

rePost::RP, other Asian countries told: Protect seas – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

When you go to beautiful tourist places in the Philippines, beauty of the natural sort, if you keep your ears open you might just hear mutter the words “enjoy this while you can in a few years this would be gone”. I have nothing against people who have have seen decades of change, environmental degradation and similar things. What I rail about is this attitude that we cannot do anything about this. The sense of inevitability we ascribe to losing these natural wonders to the pictures or even the description of people. We cannot accept this, we must not accept this. We as a people have an implicit obligation to the future generations to keep these places intact , beautiful and functioning.

UN REPORT SAYS

RP, other Asian countries told: Protect seas

First Posted 12:03:00 02/22/2010
MANILA, Philippines—East Asia’s economically viable coastal habitats and ecosystems, including those of the Philippines, are under threat from pollution, alien invasive species, and other factors which could impact the region’s poverty levels unless urgent action is taken, the United Nations Environment Program (Unep) said in a new report.
“With nearly three quarters of the region’s population depending directly or indirectly on coastal areas, and with 80 percent of the region’s GDP linked to the coastal natural resources, the time must be right for factoring the marine environment into the center of economic planning,” said Unep executive director Achim Steiner.
The East Asian Seas State of the Marine Environment report said economically important coastal habitats and ecosystems are under pressure as 40 percent of coral reefs and half of all mangroves have already been lost. Coral reefs generate an estimated $112.5 billion and mangroves $5.1 billion annually.
The East Asian Seas—which includes the region between China, the Republic of Korea, and Australia—have some of the world’s highest concentrations of shipping and fishing vessel activity. They account for 50 percent of global fisheries production and 80 percent of global aquaculture production.
via RP, other Asian countries told: Protect seas – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

rrePost:: Invisible platform : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose :: The Long View

If machinery wins National Elections (I’m acutely aware that local elections can be won by a better party machinery) then Pichay should be a senator now. Obviously he isn’t. QED.
Wish people really call BS on these politicians. We would have a shorter news cast.

I have heard it said that Teodoro played a central role in formulating the NPC platform and he himself has been saying things that suggest familiarity with a draft platform. This has been particularly true in recent weeks, coinciding with the period work on a platform has been taking place, as Magno mentioned. The term “subsidiarity” that he mentioned at a recent forum is a vintage Christian Democratic one and is, surely, a hint of what the Lakas-Kampi-CMD platform might put forward. This inability to publish a platform means the ruling coalition believes Prospero Pichay’s statement that their candidate will win because of party machinery and not public sentiment.
via The Long View: Invisible platform : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose.

Better Press Corp Please::Covering Washington like Kabul | FP Passport

This post should be titled better press corp and better electorate please. This is because the two sides are at fault for how lousy the coverage of elections has been. The blame goes to the people who now thinks of politicians as entertainers and vice versa (if I hear another question about Noy and Shalani  I’m going to puke.)
Where are we really. Let’s see.
We have the world’s longest ballot, with electronic elections that is unprecedented. We have 7.1 % unemployment rate. a 19.1% underemployment rate, we have what thousands of OFW in some of the most hostile social environments in the world, we have an education system in rambles, our general populace is scared whenever we see a check point. Our policemen/military can’t seem to understand that belonging to a political/ideological party is not a crime (bearing arms is). We have a few dozen warlords in the poorest provinces whose people are locked in a cycle of poverty , corruption and abuse.
And the question you would like to ask Villar is “Nakaligo ka na ba sa dagat ng basura?”. Fuck, you people have no right to claim being the Fourth Estate or rather it is sad that maybe this is what or how the fourth estate should be if left to the devices of people who do not have any noble belief towards their profession.
In a better world media should be asking Gibo what he has done as Department of Defense? What Gordon did with the ZTE-NBN deal investigation ? Executive success of Noy? and the Peace and Order understanding of Manny Villar?
PS :: Mild Migraines again so grain of salt guys.
PS1: Prior to the C5 road scams my problems with Villar is that our economy may do well with his stewardship but that the Ampatuans and other rumored warlord families would only strengthen their grasp.

Covering Washington like Kabul

Posted By Annie Lowrey

On his New Yorker blog, George Packer takes aim at the “devastatingly unremarkable” bloviation of Beltway journos. He cites Washington Post columnist (and “dean” of the Washington press corps) David Broder’s analysis of a recent Sarah Palin speech as “[showing] off a public figure at the top of her game — a politician who knows who she is and how to sell herself.” He also offers up the New York Times‘ Adam Nagourney’s coverage of a recent Republican leadership conference: “Here in Honolulu, the strains within the party over conservative principles versus political pragmatism played out in a sharp and public way.”
These two characterizations from two top writers for the United States’ two leading papers, Packer argues, are but purple guff — in the words of Michael Kelly, examples of how the “idea of image” is “faith in Washington.” The journalists follow the same, strange, well-worn routine. They take the mundane comings and goings of major political figures, interpret them according to prevailing partisan winds, and write them up in the overheated, undercooked language of a harlequin novel. The result is airy nonsense that fervently insists on its trenchancy.
Packer further demonstrates the absurdity of this journalistic convention by satirically recasting the Palin passage about Afghan President Hamid Karzai: “Speaking at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Karzai showed himself to be at the top of his game. He skillfully co-opted his Pashtun base while making a powerful appeal to the technocrats.”
The point is that Washington coverage of major political figures is not just bizarre stylistically, but dead substantively. To discuss for hundreds of words how Palin is at the top of her game is to spend hundreds of words not discussing her actual relevance to the fractured conservative scene. Foreign correspondence on major political figures needs to be more explanatory than illlustrative — and it would be better if coverage of Washington were more like the clear-eyed, clean-written analysis of Kabul.
via Covering Washington like Kabul | FP Passport.

rePost::Revilla Jr.'s surname is now Bong Revilla – Nation – GMANews.TV – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News

Wow who ever is advising him must be commended this shows an amazing grasps of human psychology and some mental shortcuts people make!!! bravo!!! maybe the best move (in an intellectual sense) for the past 10 years!!!

So that he will be on top of the alphabetical list of senatorial candidates in the ballots, re-electionist Senator Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. decided to change his surname to Bong Revilla.
Revilla’s lawyer, George Erwin Garcia, said the Cavite Regional Trial Court Branch 19 had approved the use of Bong Revilla as a registered family name last October 19, 2009.
“At least yung paggamit niya ng (his use of) Bong Revilla has the imprimatur of the court, it is perfectly legal,” Garcia said, adding that even Revilla’s birth certificate has been corrected.
Revilla’s decision to change his surname prompted a certain Mary Emily Verr Peji to file a disqualification case against him with the Commission on Elections (Comelec) last December.
via Revilla Jr.’s surname is now Bong Revilla – Nation – GMANews.TV – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News.