The front page of today’s Times, in one of a series of fine analytical reports that have cropped up in the wake of Occupy Wall Street (but, to be fair, might well have been in the works anyway), points directly to the dishonesty of the You’re-On-Your-Own, Social Darwinist orthodoxy that wholly owns the Republican Party and buffaloes non-Republicans too.  The headline:  ”Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It.”

This piece is full of illuminations.  A few are here:

[T]he poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.

So …

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The NYT’s Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, remains clueless about the political reality of our time.  (But I must immediately step up to confess factual error, committed in the interest of pith, for his office is in fact a few blocks from Times Square.)  Earlier this month, he asked aloud “whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”  Said gaffe was worsened by the unwittingly hilarious headline slapped on it (“Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?”)  The letters that poured in were almost uniformly scathing, making it plain that Times readers had far outdistanced their anointed ombudsman in their understanding that if journalists do not correct the false claims they report, they are not journalists at all, but rather stenographers—or worse, to quote the late, great Jack Newfield on the ideal Washington …

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By the time I got there around 4:45 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 17, Foley Square, the site of courthouses in lower Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge, was so clogged—not even counting the riot police—it took me 10 minutes to make my way through the crowd from the southern end to Worth Street on the northern end.  There were obviously more people in the square than during the Oct. 5 march, when 10,000 to 15,000 was the going estimate—which then seemed about right to me.  On Thursday, I was in the square till 6, when I walked down to Zuccotti Park.

In Foley Square, Moveon Civic Action and a number of unions, notably the SEIU, were conspicuous by their presence.  I didn’t see any dreadlocks or nose rings—not that there’s anything wrong with them. I can’t swear there were no drum circles but I didn’t hear any.  There was, however, a chorus of “Singing Grannies and their…

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This NYT report on “a torrent of deals” for the purchase of local TV stations by larger companies may not seem as though it deserves urgent attention from supporters of the Occupy movement, but please keep reading.

Who “owns” local TV stations? According to the Times piece, for example, in September, “the Sinclair Broadcast Group bought seven local stations from the Four Points Media Group for $200-million.” So it would seem that something called the Four Points Media Group owned those seven stations. And so, in some legal sense that is above my pay-grade to parse, they no doubt did.

But here’s the interesting wrinkle: Aside from whatever resale or scrap value their physical possessions might command, the stations would be useless were they not licensed to broadcast at particular frequencies. The licenses are issued by the owner of the airwaves, namely, the people of the United States …

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On a silent, whitening day in the country, reading David Barash’s fine rumination on consciousness and its irreducibility (to physical facts) encourages me to jump into the stew of the consciousness question with less fear of embarrassment than I’d ordinarily feel. Although (or because?) I have no professional credential for such speculations, I brood about such matters a lot. It seems to me unfortunate, and culturally diminishing, that the discussion moves so quickly from consciousness—this phenomenon, this whatever—to mind, cognition, and reason, as if the ability to play Jeopardy were an adequate marker of our existential situation, as if what gets called “mind” exhausts the fullness of consciousness. The cognitivist bias of the scientific age, in its reduced version of Enlightenment, disposes us to conflate consciousness with certain of its possibilities, and (as Antonio Damasio …

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Not much.  The reach of established media is far less extensive than decades ago.

That said (I): My favorite sign on the Oct. 5 march (which unfortunately I can’t upload because the WordPress system seems to think it poses a security risk):  ”Am I dressed too nice so the media doesn’t interview me?” And this carried by an attractive young woman, yet.

That said (II): If OWS gets aggressive rather than remaining playful, don’t expect media to smile upon the movement. A lot of difficulties remain as the movement searches for its sequels. I’m inclined to agree with Michael Scherer of Time that Washington is paying attention, and that this is a very good thing. A complex movement with multiple roots (I’ll have a piece up in the NYT Sunday Review section tomorrow) is not going to march in lockstep, and what some elements do will alienate other elements. That’s how these things go. The …

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The Ground Zero ceremony yesterday was, the NYT informs us, “an occasion deemed too solemn for speeches.”

This judgment, shared by the organizers of the memorial, was less about solemnity than about speeches. Yes, the occasion was solemn. Almost three thousand human beings (the numbers vary) were massacred 10 years ago (and, largely unmentioned, many others have perished since from aftereffects). The sinister violence of the deaths, their astounding suddenness and gruesomeness and simultaneity, stamped them as horrific. The absences of all those individuals is more raw than if they had each died separately, and their relative youth no doubt makes every single death harder for survivors to assimilate.

It’s not hard in the slightest to understand, then, why the survivors would want to recite the names of the lost, to touch the official engravings and make rubbings. What needs to be…

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I’m just catching up on the dead-tree Chronicle, so just came upon this front-page piece by Jeffrey R. Young from the Aug. 12 issue. It seems that grade inflation, and the misguided demand to make education prove its value by numbers, has led some universities to cut out their brains to spite their faces. Or, to put it more neutrally, they’re not only hiring low-cost contract labor to grade papers, they’re also using computers to grade answers to essay questions. “Robot grading is the hottest trend in testing circles,” says the editor of the journal Educational Measurement:  Issues and Practice.

The two universities mentioned by name as robograders are the University of Central Florida and the University of Missouri, Columbia. But this trend can’t even be laid at the door exclusively of the American mania for numerical measurement, since the editor of said journal is Canadian.

I…

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