2021 In Memoriam | LV Discourse - WDIY

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John Pearce presents 2021 In Memoriam with co-host Francisco. They review the past year with tributes to notable Lehigh Valley residents; athletes; politicians; stars of stage, TV, and screen; musicians; authors; and more.

Tune in to Lehigh Valley Discourse Thursdays from 6:00 to 7:00 PM following All Things Considered.

(Original air-date: 12/30/21)

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Dialog Journalism® Inventor Nielsen Posts Embodied Internet-Compatible Global Discourse Plan - PRNewswire

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CHICAGO, Dec. 31, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Geodialog Media LLC CEO Christine Marie Nielsen today posted a blueprint for global discourse compatible with an embodied Internet environment. The release precedes the publishing of a book from Geodialog Publishing Open Plan: Bringing Everyone to the Table for Equitable Information Delivery.

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The information provided in the blueprint is contained in a public domain patent submitted by Nielsen to the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2012. Already cited by two entities working to improve online communication, the invention "System and Method for an Improved Communication and Interactive News Forum," is available here in USPTO records and on the Geodialog Media website under "Discourse Resources."

"I wanted to raise the profile of the patent to give others a chance to access and improve upon it," says Nielsen. "Organizations around the world are emphasizing shared dialogue among a variety of stakeholders and this plan connects users on a digital platform to create an environment of fair information distribution and global arbitration."

About Christine Marie Nielsen

Nielsen launched Geodialog Media LLC in 2012 after creating Dialog Journalism® (2011) to form a solution-focused dissemination of news that integrates international editorial content and an online social media forum. She first invited the public to a "global citizenship ecosystem" with a campaign launched in 2014.

Born in Milwaukee - polarized in terms of socioeconomic circumstances and race - Nielsen has written about how intergenerational poverty has impacted her family. She's worked as a staff reporter for Dow Jones & Company Inc. and Knight Ridder Inc. She's also worked as an intercultural editor for the Christian Science Monitor and Living Earth Television. She has an MA from Northwestern University in Creative Writing and a BA from Marquette University in Journalism, minor in English.

Nielsen has been a proponent for fostering minority and women-owned entities in an information industry threatened by a concentration of power.

Geodialog Media LLC

Geodialog Media LLC is the original dialogic-based journalism organization.

Our Earth Issues (OEI) at https://ourearthissues.com, one of Geodialog Media's flagship products, attempts to show reported perspective from each region, incorporating articles and other types of media from that region and local audiences during Geodialog® global town halls.

Geodialog Publishing publishes works that underpin online conversations.

Contact:
Christine Marie Nielsen
Geodialog Media LLC
(877) 871-6224
[email protected]
geodialogmedia.com  

SOURCE Geodialog Media LLC

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Opinion: Focused on the positive blessings going into Year 3 of COVID - AL.com

This an opinion column

Two years ago, I happily celebrated New Year’s Eve with my three sons as they ignited fireworks in an alleyway much to the intense indignation of our stuffy neighbors.

Yes, they called the police. The officer kindly asked us to stop firing off bottle rockets and smoke bombs because it was technically a violation of a city ordinance.

Fair enough.

Maybe we all would have celebrated the end of “normal” had we not all been so oblivious to the stealthy virus spreading around the world.

Midnight soon struck and the globe celebrated, spinning helplessly into the year 2020.

Do you remember where you were that night, two years ago? Who you kissed to welcome in the New Year? Were you sipping champagne? Maybe you were sleeping?

Some of you probably took stock of your accomplishments in 2019, charting your plans for improvement in 2020. Maybe you’d finally put that gym membership to use since it’s been sitting on autopay all these months?

What was your New Year’s resolution in 2019?

Two years have come and gone, seemingly slipping away in a blink like the legendary night in the movie The Hangover. Yet, short of having our minds erased by some foreign substance I can stop and remember days during the pandemic being quarantined at home watching and reading how world leaders attempted to navigate this incredibly challenging pandemic.

My prediction for 2022 is that we are closer to the end of this thing than we are to the beginning, and we should start planning crazy celebrations worthy of what you might have read about upon the end of World War II.

Yes, COVID numbers are up dramatically in recent days – record numbers here in Alabama. That’s not to be ignored or taken lightly. But as past COVID waves have come and gone, this too shall pass.

One of my colleagues has been the Nostradamus of forecasting what might happen throughout the pandemic. He poignantly predicted in February 2020 we would vacate the office for “weeks” once the COVID-19 virus spread to the United States.

I thought he was crazy.

Of course he grossly underestimated the timeline of a return to the office, but he was correct about initially stocking up on toilet paper.

Our office vacated March 13, 2020. Our staff has not returned to the building since that day, only a handful of us stopping in here-and-there briefly to see many of the relics of that day still in place, reminiscent of Pompeii though far less dramatic.

My colleague and I often talk about what’s to come instead of reflecting on what has happened. We’re still trying to navigate our team the best we can. I cannot tell you how proud I am of everyone in our company. They have continuously served the public interest throughout while many managed difficult personal circumstances.

Throughout the pandemic, my colleague has pointed to 2023 as the time the world will have one of those big parties. Many big parties worldwide, he predicts, because generally pandemics have a two-to-three year span where they strangle the world before mercifully loosening their grip.

You can Google the science better than I can try to explain it in this space.

As we helplessly spin into the year 2022, my eyes are wide open. I’m prepared for the worst and I hope for the best.

A lot has changed as we inch toward Year 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m focused on the positive blessings in my life, including our decision to move a year ago about a mile away from our old neighborhood.

Of course, the plan tonight is to light off fireworks and see how the neighbors react.

My prediction: we’ll all celebrate a few hours of feeling normal again – socially distanced, of course.

Izzy Gould is Senior Director of Content at AL.com - igould@advancelocal.com

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Dialog Journalism® Inventor Nielsen Posts Embodied Internet-Compatible Global Discourse Plan - Longview News-Journal

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Dialog Journalism® Inventor Nielsen Posts Embodied Internet-Compatible Global Discourse Plan  Longview News-Journal

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Opinion | Do We Have the Supreme Court We Deserve? - The New York Times

When I left the daily Supreme Court beat back in 2008, the Week in Review, as The Times’s Sunday Review section was then called, invited me to offer some reflections on nearly 30 years of writing about the court, its cases and its members. The long essay ran under the headline “2,691 Decisions,” a number based on an editor’s calculation of how many decisions the court had issued during my time on the beat. I ended it with an observation about the “vital dialogue” between the court and the country. This was my conclusion:

“The court is in Americans’ collective hands. We shape it; it reflects us. At any given time, we may not have the Supreme Court we want. We may not have the court we need. But we have, most likely, the Supreme Court we deserve.”

A friend who recently came upon that article challenged me. “Do you still think we have the Supreme Court we deserve?” she asked.

Actually, sadly, my answer now is no.

It’s not that I think the country simply deserves a Supreme Court that happens to agree with me; I was finding plenty to disagree with back in 2008. Justice Samuel Alito had taken Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s place in early 2006, wrenching the closely divided court to the right. In June 2007, Justice Stephen Breyer, during an impassioned oral dissent in a highly charged case on what measures public school systems can take to maintain racial diversity, lamented that “it is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.”

Nonetheless, Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter were still on the bench in 2008, proving every day that to be a Republican-nominated Supreme Court justice was not necessarily to be a handpicked conservative spear-carrier in the country’s culture wars. (The three were chosen by Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush respectively.) It had not occurred to anyone then that a hostile Senate in 2016 might keep a president’s Supreme Court nomination bottled up for 11 months without even a hearing, nor that a supine Senate would do a subsequent president’s bidding four years later and bludgeon a nomination through to confirmation while millions of Americans were already casting early ballots for president.

In short, we are in a different place now than we were in 2008, and the current term finds the court in a danger zone as a willing — and willful — participant in a war for the soul of the country. Last term’s cavalier treatment, in a case from Arizona, of what remains of the Voting Rights Act sent a frightening signal about whether the court can be counted on to protect democracy from the Republican-led assault now taking place before our eyes. We now have justices apparently untroubled by process and precedent, let alone appearances: Let’s not forget that two of Donald Trump’s three appointments arrived under debatable circumstances, with Justice Neil Gorsuch taking a seat in 2017 that was Barack Obama’s to fill and Justice Amy Coney Barrett being jammed through to confirmation late in 2020.

One might suppose that the supercharged conservative majority might proceed with some caution, if not humility, before projecting its agenda on a wary country that never signed up for it. After all, of the six Republican-appointed justices, only three were named by a president who won a majority of the popular vote — Justice Clarence Thomas by George H.W. Bush, and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Alito by George W. Bush in his second term. And given the small-state, red-state tilt of the Senate, it’s not surprising that the senators whose votes provided the narrow margins for confirming the three Trump-chosen justices represent less than half the country’s population.

Yet what we see from the court is not humility but, to put it politely, a lack of situational awareness. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, something the court has given every indication that it will do within the next six months. Three-quarters of respondents in one recent poll said the abortion decision should be left to women and their doctors. (That was also the view of a majority of the public in a Gallup poll released in the summer of 1972, shortly before the court issued its decision in Roe.)

Hundreds of pages of briefing in the Mississippi abortion case that was argued this month failed to unearth a single reason other than “because we want to and because we can” for overturning a 49-year-old precedent that the court reaffirmed in crucial respects two decades later in the carefully considered compromise that was the Casey decision. (All five members of the Casey majority were appointed by Republican presidents, just as are all those who stand on the verge of repudiating that same precedent today.)

It is now four months and counting since the court permitted the obviously unconstitutional Texas vigilante law, known as Senate Bill 8, to all but shut down abortion in the state, a situation the 5-to-4 majority has refused to rectify. Instead, the court made a show of expediting the S.B. 8 argument in early November and then issued a Potemkin village-like opinion that resulted only in pushing a resolution further into an unknown future.

The justices’ responses to arguments this month suggested that a majority will soon force Maine, against the will of its legislature, to subsidize tuition for parents living in school districts without high schools who send their children to parochial schools. Roughly half the state’s school districts are too small to sustain a high school. To satisfy the state Constitution’s guarantee of free K-12 education, the state pays the tuition at private schools but excludes those offering an explicitly sectarian education. Where a federal appeals court, in upholding the exclusion, saw a principled distinction, the conservative justices saw only anti-religious discrimination.

As the court proceeds down its current path, will there be a reckoning of some sort? I’m not smart enough to know the answer, but a prescient essay that Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution published in 2019 suggests that political scientists’ long-held view of the role of the Supreme Court in American politics will be profoundly upended. Mr. Wheeler, Brookings’s longtime specialist on the federal courts, recalled a famous 1957 article in which the Yale political scientist Robert Dahl observed that because of regular presidential appointments, “policy views dominant in the court are never for long out of line with the policy views dominant among the lawmaking majorities of the United States.”

It was a comforting observation that anchored the court’s legitimacy in democratic theory. Mr. Dahl, who died in 2014 at 98, perhaps chose not to envision a president with the muscle, the will and the opportunity to place young partisans on the court — in other words, aided by the Constitution’s gift of life tenure, to capture the court for the next generation and freeze in place a legacy the American people never chose.

Is this the Supreme Court we deserve? It is not.

***

In late 2009, David Shipley, the editor of what was then called the Op-Ed page, invited me to write an opinion column every two weeks centered on the Supreme Court. He left The Times for Bloomberg News the following year, and we never actually met, but I remain in his debt. Writing roughly 26 columns a year for the past 12 years has given me not only a platform but a discipline, a privileged and rare second act in journalism. I have felt a deep connection not only to my subject but also to my readers and, of course, to the newspaper where I began, fresh out of college, as an intern for the storied political columnist James Reston.

This is the last of my regular columns, but not the last time my voice will appear here. I will venture an opinion from time to time. How could I not?

In 1998, I was fortunate to win a Pulitzer Prize. I was the publisher’s dinner partner at the celebratory dinner he threw for that year’s Times winners. Midway through the meal, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. asked me what my long-term goal was at the paper, where I had been working by then for 30 years.

“I would like to write a column,” I replied.

The publisher looked at me with a surprised expression. “A column!” he exclaimed. “What would you write about?”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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Opinion: COVID’s long haul - CT Post

COVID still has us locked in its steely grip. We have been wrestling with it for over 20 months in multiple waves. In March 2020, we watched its sweep across the globe as an unchecked outbreak, forcing society to shut down to protect ourselves as the numbers of sick, hospitalized and dead mounted. We became mini-epidemiologists and tracked the alpha, delta and now omicron variants. In these pages I reflected on each deadly milestone, pausing to mourn the mounting loss. As of this writing, COVID has killed more than 817,000 in the U.S. and we have expectations that many more will die.

While to many it might seem like we are on a relentless gerbil wheel, we must recognize we are not back in March 2020. We now have vaccines that have proven very effective at protecting against death and serious illness, and treatments, such as monoclonal antibodies and the two newly approved antiviral pills. Our medical professionals have learned a great deal about the disease and how to treat it. We have accurate tests (currently in short supply) and a better understanding of the importance of mitigation strategies.

Twenty months is a long time without an end in sight. So, the fatigue and resistance around vaccines and masks is understandable. It seems we locked into the COVID waltz, three steps forward and one back … a rhythm we have gotten used to as we have come to the realization that COVID isn’t going away. The best we can hope for is that it quickly becomes endemic and moves to the background.

In previous columns I talked about how we needed to mourn for the dead and missing. But mourning is difficult when the losses continue. It happens when the destruction is over. It is a way to deal with the loss and move on. We need to learn how to live with it. We fell into tribal responses to our current conditions. We live in bitter political times where the line between politics and culture has completely vanished. So it should not surprise anyone that COVID became completely politicized.

Seeing this as tied only to our current politician dysfunction seems too simple. Step back and we can see that public health has always been a challenge of the U.S. In a society where we privilege the individual over the collective, public health, which asks us to see collectively, is at a disadvantage. It requires that we do something to ourselves in order to protect others. The success of public health ultimately involves cultural change, and cultural change is slow and tedious work.

Our COVID tribal clustering falls around our sense of community responsibility. Those who see the world only through the lens of individual risk are less inclined to support any mandates. On the other side, there are those who demand mandates to protect the community. These two wings might be small, but they are loud in the media. The vast majority of us fall in between. We take personal responsibility seriously, hence the high level of vaccination in our region and the general following of mask mandates. We are generally respectful of the official recommendations of experts.

It is this middle that is most important for how we come out of COVID. They are fatigued and confused about what they should do and when. These are the people we see partially wearing masks. They aren’t mocking mandates. They are signaling their understanding of the risks and dangers, but they are exhausted. They are not the folks we see in stores or indoors who never wear masks.

What is forgotten in this activity is the responsibility we have to the larger society. Masking, mitigation and vaccinations are tiring, but they protect the community. There are those among us who can not protect themselves. Millions are need our help to protect them, such as the immunocompromised, those with underlying conditions, those under 5, and those who are in families that are resistant to mitigation. And, let’s not forget those who are not yet fully vaccinated or boosted. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves is the job of all Americans. But, we need not rely on laws, mandates, executive orders or government regulations to solve this democratic dilemma. We need to see this as an individual civil responsibility that we owe to each other. We need to be agents of change agents in the culture.

This means we need to have our institutions, civic and business, step up because they are positioned in our world to make a strong case for this sort of responsibility. Institutions need to explain what we owe to each other. They need to personalize the message to their communities.

What we have learned in this pandemic is that we live in a deeply fractured communication ecosystem. We know that communication has power and words can move people. Yet we do not have a civic discourse. We need a clear and coherent message that ties each of us to our beloved community. Instead we have muddied messaging that is so inconsistent and uninspiring that it is easily ignored. Nowhere is this more true than with our civic institutions, who used to own this space. They have retreated and we need them to step up and forcefully remind us of our civic responsibility as fundamental to a democratic society.

These institutions (including religious organizations, universities, civic groups and even the news media) have to depoliticize the message, decoupling it from the current party politics and return it to our civic roots. Friction and factions are part of American politics. There have been deep rifts in our past. But what seems to hold us together is our sense of connection to the larger democratic movement. If we lose that, we lose the republic.

Richard A. Greenwald is a professor at Fairfield University.

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Opinion: ‘Old’ year’s resolutions can help too - Atlanta Journal Constitution

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OPINION: Why we should work together with nondemocratic countries - Kyodo News Plus

While democracy has been shaken in advanced countries, it is receding in developing countries. In such times, it is becoming difficult to speak about advantages of democracy.

According to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the number of countries experiencing "democratic backsliding" doubled in the last decade.

Ken Endo. (Kyodo)

The United States was among them, but it is understandable if one recalls events like the attack on the U.S. Capitol following the 2020 presidential election.

In 2020, the number of countries moving in an authoritarian direction outnumbered those going in a democratic direction. Looking at countries like Thailand and Myanmar, this democratic backsliding is clear.

Amid such times, the "Summit for Democracy" was held on Dec. 9-10 led by the United States, attended online by government authorities and social leaders from more than 100 countries and regions, including Japan.

Also among them was Taiwan, while China and Russia were excluded.

At the summit, U.S. President Joe Biden, the host of the event, warned that the trends of declining democratic values are being "exacerbated" and vowed to provide financial support to assist democratization.

This attempt drew outcry from various directions. China, which was pushed aside by the United States, was undoubtedly critical and hosted its own international democracy forum, claiming that it was a "democracy that works."

Apart from ostensible support, a Japanese government official has confessed that it was worrisome to alienate countries like Vietnam as nondemocratic nations when their cooperation is needed to cope with China.

Many democratic activists appeared to have also shown a critical stance, with some questioning whether the United States is qualified to criticize China, or saying that the United States should rather reflect on itself, or that it is a double standard to invite nations such as India whose democratic practice is in question.

However, democracy can wither if it is not spoken out for constantly and not put into practice along with familiar issues. As former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, "We must work for it (democracy) together, again and again, every day."

At the same time, democracy has an ability to rectify itself in a way that cannot be done by dictatorship or tyranny. People are neither angels nor demons so sometimes they make mistakes, but they also have resilience. That value should not be underestimated.

This conference was a "summit for democracy," not a "summit of democracies." This was certainly a U.S.-centered attempt to rebuild its domestic polity damaged by former President Donald Trump and re-establish itself as the global leader in trying to get ahead of rivals such as China and Russia, under the idea of democracy.

---

Related coverage:

OPINION: COVID-19 and new "broken dialogue" with Japan

OPINION: Japan's destiny as A-bomb victim was reconciliation with U.S.

OPINION: Bomb-grade uranium for Australian submarines?

---

However, instead of excluding others as a gathering limited to democratic countries, the summit at least sought to collaborate to pursue its ideology.

If that was the case, then nondemocratic countries like Vietnam can be included, as democracy can be used as a logic to keep a powerful neighbor's exercises in unilateral behaviors in check when it incorporates the vector of equality.

What is most important is to use its ability to promote democratic values outside to touch up its own yard that has grown wild. Those two things do not contradict and are capable of coexisting.

As is well-known, democracy in developed countries has been deteriorated in recent years. The election of President Trump and the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union are typical examples, and in many other democracies, xenophobic sentiments heightened and far-right forces have emerged.

Although its mechanism has not been completely grasped, it can be said that it involves an economic factor of the shrinking middle class and a socio-cultural factor attached to concerns and anxiety that one's country will be destroyed by globalization and integration.

It will not be easy to reverse this situation, but we will face an unstable path if we do not tackle it. From a taxation system that expands the middle class to measures against hate speech, we have to reform democracy.

If we bring down the flag of reform, we are playing into the hands of authoritarian regimes, as democracy has already been ridiculed as a dysfunctional system in the face of populism and the coronavirus pandemic.

On the contrary, if we raise the flag, we can be made aware of issues to be addressed both internally and externally, and that will build up democracy exposed to the challenges of authoritarianism.

Japan also has a special role to play. It embodies the possibility of recovery as an old parliamentary democracy that once fell into militarism.

It also has good relations with countries excluded from the summit, like Vietnam, and is placed in an ideal position to act as a bridge between such nations and include them.

Whether or not the summit can become the starting point for not giving up raising the flag and aiming for the revival of democracy, it depends on future developments.

(Ken Endo is a professor at Hokkaido University's Graduate School of Public Policy.)

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