Bad News All The Time: The Media Needs to Move Beyond Negativity for the Sake of Negativity8/17/2015 Picking up a newspaper or turning on the evening news more often than not reveals some tragic and disparaging headline followed by a long list of negative events that happened over the course of a day. For more than year and a half, the world news has largely focused on the numerous calamities of the Middle East and the potential for a third World War over the Ukraine Crisis or the South China Sea Conflict. This, of course, has left many important stories around the globe unheard.
In turn, the national new sources like to highlight murders, riots, and political gossip while local news sources continue to focus less and less on constructive community news. Mass media is a wonderful tool, but its users want exciting, eventful details. Consequently, every media source from the local newspaper to the worldwide web tends to feature violence, tragedy, suspense, and the follies of stupid people.
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Perpetrators of rape and other sexual assaults are motivated to commit their abusive crimes for a variety of reasons. Just as the Islamic State beheaded Journalist James Foley and many others to send a message to the world, the abuse of Kayla Mueller as a sex slave to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was intended to demonstrate the supremacy of the ISIL leader over Western powers. In the case of Kayla and an unknown number of victims in the hands of sexual predators, the act the modern world calls rape is also intended to psychologically transform a person into an object.
A husband can rape his wife, or vice versa, if the spouse is forced to engage in a sexual against her, or his, will. Although this notion has gained traction in the West, the idea that a married woman has a choice when it comes to sex is not universally accepted. For traditionalists who believe a married woman should feel obliged to satisfy her husband’s sexual whims, marriage is a means of legitimizing the mistreatment of a woman as a living object. For the Islamic State, both marriage and slavery are simply an attempt to legitimize the rape of women and girls while denying the reality that these self-proclaimed religious men are sinning against women. “Too big to fail” was a phrase coined in the midst of the Subprime Meltdown as the world slid into the Great Recession. At the time, it referred to banking conglomerates that were so fundamental to the financial services sector that their collapse could have meant the end of the modern global economy. Unfortunately, the size of these financial institutions also meant they had to be rescued by the US government in order to protect the broader economy, even though their size had shielded them for years from the consequences of irresponsible, shortsighted policies their managers had pursued at the expense of average Americans.
Wealth has always been a form of power and that power has only grown with the rise of the globalized economy, but the modern age is also the information age. In many respects, those who control the flow of information are now the most powerful in our world. In this modern age, the tech savvy hold the greatest power. No entity, of course, has had greater success in monetizing and influencing the flow of information than Google. Like powerful governments and the wealthy, which can be more powerful than governments, powerful companies like Google must be scrutinized, especially since the formation of Google parent company Alphabet. Ferguson History Repeated Around the World: the Lesson for National Security Civil Servants8/11/2015 "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana
Michael Brown’s death last year at the hands of Police Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri became a focal point for both community outrage and a renewed civil liberties movement across the Country. Unfortunately, the anniversary was marked by the same violence that plagued the town for months following the tragedy. Where protestors demonstrated to remind the world that little has changed for blacks and other minorities in communities like Ferguson, violent interlopers used the event to justify vandalism and attacks on police. Clearly, the lessons of Ferguson need reviewed while the lessons can be applied throughout the world. Looking at the violent relationship between Ukraine and Russia, as well as the contentious relationship of Russia with the West, the unhealthy dynamics surrounding the Ferguson shooting are shared by many conflicts that persist and periodically escalate into violent outbursts. The violent relationship of the Palestinians with the Israelis, as well the uneasy relationship of Israel with the Muslim world, serves as another example. Considering crises like the South Sea Chinese conflict, Arab Spring Revolutions, the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, and so many more, there is no shortage of parallels to social conflicts like those in Ferguson and those seen elsewhere in the world. Inside Washington D.C., Jewish advocacy groups like Aipac are spending tens of millions of dollars in an attempt to derail Congressional approval of the Iranian Nuclear Deal. The war between the Obama Administration and Aipac is nothing more than a battle for a sinking ship. Because the effectiveness of economic sanctions in a globalized world depends on the cooperation of highly influential economies, the reality that European nations are preparing to lift sanctions against Iran means the Iranian Nuclear Deal is more or less a certainty.
Unless Iran commits a major infraction that resonates throughout the International Community, the world will move forward with or without the approval of the US Congress. Clearly, the US Congress has a right and duty to review any treaty the Executive Branch wishes to sign. America as a whole is responsible for upholding its agreements with foreign governments. If the American People and their political representatives find a particular agreement unacceptable, the US Congress has an obligation to reject that agreement. After all, foreign powers should not enjoy greater influence over US public policy than the American People. |
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