Passing Comments

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig gave a talk last week at the Yahoo! campus (“Innovation Corruption” May 20, 2010). He spoke about how corruption in government and business are blocking innovation in the U.S.

In case you think this has always been the case and isn’t getting much worse, Lessig explains how this isn’t so. The details he provides are more than a little disheartening to hear. But…

His plea to the audience was to not be passive – that the public is very much a part of the problem when clearly there are patterns but no one does anything about it. As a major player in the Internet world, he’d like to see Yahoo! pushing for competition in the IP world. As far as the government is concerned, Lessig would like to see a return to citizen-funded elections – a concept born during Teddy Roosevelt’s term in office. Such a system would eliminate money from the economy of influence – the underlying cause of corruption and ultimate roadblock to innovation.

If you really want to understand precisely how the system goes so incredibly awry, you will learn here.

And if you agree with Lessig, you can go to his website, ChangeCongress.org, and sign up to participate in helping him bring our political leaders back to serving the common good. Lessig’s organization is non-partisan — its sole bias is for the good of “we the people.”  I think Lessig has a great idea here.

Fans of Juliette Binoche — I’m one! — will enjoy this interview with the French actress in today’s Guardian (“Juliette Binoche: the queen of Cannes” by Xan Brooks).

Excerpt:

Binoche is in Cannes to discuss her role in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (Copie Conforme) – a performance that will later win her the award for best actress. She stars as a gallery owner who hooks up with a British art historian (played by William Shimell, an opera singer). Together, these two lost souls drive off through the hills of Tuscany, where they first accept and then furnish the misconception that they are actually a couple, married for 15 years and toiling to keep their relationship afloat. En route, She and He talk about artistic forgeries, and ponder the meaning of originality. What Kiarostami is saying here, I think, is that we are all copycats who play-act our lives, and that doesn’t make us any less real…

And if you haven’t seen the movies of Abbas Kiarostami, you’re missing a great director. Earlier post here.

Must read investigative journalist Matt Taibbi provides an unvarnished play-by-play of what (and how) the U.S.Congress is and  is not doing to reform the country’s financial practices (“Wall Street’s War” Rolling Stone, May 26, 2010).

Congress looked serious about finance reform – until America’s biggest banks unleashed an army of 2,000 paid lobbyists.

I really like the article yesterday –”The left is trying to take back centre ground in Europe” — in the Netherlands newspaper nrchandelsblad International.  Reporter Marc Leijendekker nails down some of the meatier issues at the center of the accelerating conversation about social democracy versus free market capitalism.

To begin with he addresses the paradox of a voting public in Western democracies that often enough has drifted to the right in recent elections even after the worldwide financial crisis

…laid bare the faults in an economic model in which free market thinking takes centre stage and the state plays a supporting role.

Leijendekker explores some of the reasons for voters’ choices, a well-known and most unpleasant one being that in many cases it was the political leaders of the left who pushed the hardest for freer markets (See Tony Blair’s Third way and Bill Clinton’s Triangulation).

Division of wealth is a focus of the second half of the article, plus a glance at the upcoming June parliamentary elections in the Netherlands where “opinion polls show things are going well for social democracy…”

On an impulse today, I decided to try out Animoto, using some photos I took last spring of a blooming yellow rose on the balcony. It was fun.

Some answers to how new media differs from old media are offered in a report published yesterday by Pew Research Center (“How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from Traditional Press” May 23, 2010). The question was the focus of a 2009, year-long study by Pew.

First answer — the differences between the new and the old are substantial, Pew reports.

Excerpt:

Most broadly, the stories and issues that gain traction in social media differ substantially from those that lead in the mainstream press. But they also differ greatly from each other. Of the 29 weeks that we tracked on all three social platforms, blogs, Twitter and YouTube shared the same top story just once…

Each social media platform also seems to have its own personality and function. In the year studied, bloggers gravitated toward stories that elicited emotion, concerned individual or group rights or triggered ideological passion. Often these were stories that people could personalize and then share in the social forum — at times in highly partisan language. And unlike in some other types of media, the partisanship here does not lean strongly to one side or the other. Even on stories like the Tea Party protests, Sarah Palin and public support for Obama both conservative and liberal voices come through strongly…

So much for critics who claim that bloggers and other social media sites are only re-cycled imitations of traditional media. And the finding that new media content isn’t homogeneous indicates that it’s less susceptible to the pack journalism syndrome. That’s good news.

Another finding from the Pew study may point to why traditional media is struggling to gain the eye and ear of new generations of  audience. Referring to content of new media sites, Pew reports:

…top weekly stories differ dramatically from what is receiving attention in the traditional press. Blogs overlap more than Twitter, but even there only about a quarter of the top stories in any given week were the same as in the “MSM.”

Instead, social media tend to home in on stories that get much less attention in the mainstream press. And there is little evidence, at least at this point, of the traditional press then picking up on those stories in response.

That last sentence packs a wallop.

Although I can only lay claim to the merest smidgen of knowledge about the European Union, I have become unmistakably aware since I moved here that many Europeans are as ideologically passionate about a united Europe as many Americans are about a United States. This is especially noticeable with Europe’s younger generations.

But to find any awareness of this in the major USA news and opinion media takes a long hunt. During the eurozone crisis, the headlines in much of the USA (and also UK) English language press I was reading online were dominated by financial and market perspectives. From outside Europe, in particular, the focus seemed to be exclusively on the financial scenario.

The implication was that a monetary union is the only important aspect of the European Union that anyone — European political leaders and citizenry — cares about. And if this monetary union falters or fails, these pundits and experts seem to imply, “Well, there goes the European Union itself and, by the way, the European Dream is dead.”

Yesterday, I was happy to see a passionate rebuttal of this strange, uninformed nihilism offered by Julien Frisch, a political scientist from Germany, on his “Watching Europe” blog (“The European Dream is not dead” May 18, 2010)

I am excerpting three paragraphs, the final one being Frisch’s summing up (I hope he won’t mind):

“The European Dream has been to create unity in diversity, it has been to prevent wars happening between European countries, it has been to allow freedom of movement, to create a common market, a common social model or even to create a common demos etc…”

“For me, the political fight we are seeing is the proof of a common Europe, not an indicator of its bad state. And even if this was a fight of nations, it is still a political fight and the European Union’s system is advanced enough for that this will remain just a political fight – quite an unlikely scenario 60 years ago!…”

“The European Dream is not dead, it is there, and many of us are living this dream – very well aware of the luck that we had having grown up in a European Union, one in which we look at each other as different but equal, and one in which we don’t mind having a good political fight with friends and partners today and a glass of wine tomorrow to talk about our common plans.”

UPDATE:

(Tuesday, 29 June 2010)
Dear readers,…
… this is the last real post of this blog, and the day after tomorrow at midnight, quite exactly two years after he came into existence, the blogger “Julien Frisch” will cease to exist… (read more here).

Nowadays very few of our friends and neighbors here smoke. Still ever once in a while, someone visiting us from the U.S., will notice a smoker and then, as if by rote, comment that “all Italians smoke.”

I’ve learned to murmur, “No, not really,” and leave it to time and the obvious for them eventually to realize that most of the Italians they are encountering are, in fact, not smoking.

Now if I want to do more than murmur, I can cite the new survey results on smoking that came out this week from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), an agency of the Italian National Health Service. According to an ANSA.it article today about the ISS report, the percentage of the Italian population (est. 60 million) that smokes is now down to only 21.7 percent.

Of the 11.1 million Italians who still smoke, down from over 13 million a year ago, 5.9 million are men and 5.2 million women.

The new survey finding of 21 percent places Italy on a par with the USA where the percentage of smokers is more or less the same.

Europe’s reputation was damaged at the beginning of the recent eurozone crisis, but now everyone is backing the euro, former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said in an interview today with Bloomberg Television.

He added that it would have been better if the European Union had not taken so long to make its decision, but now the clear decision is that there is no alternative.

The delay has had very, very high costs, you know, but to build Europe, you need time, as you know, Prodi said.

To see the full interview (7:33), click on thumbnail above.