Sex

"Sex has received little attention in the history of western philosophy, and what it did receive was not good: Plato denigrated it, ... Aristotle barely mentioned it, and Christian philosophers condemned it." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sex-sexuality/ …

"Immanuel Kant (Lectures on Ethics) considered it the only inclination that cannot satisfy the Categorical Imperative, and Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that sexual desire aims to capture the other’s freedom."

1:27 PM - 5 Jul 2018

"Only during contemporary times do philosophers, beginning with Bertrand Russell (1929) and including Sigmund Freud (1905), think of sex as generally good." -- Raja Halwani in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

3 consective tweets by Sean Carroll

Journalism

For most of my Halley's, I've heard the University of Missouri has a good school of journalism. I think I have seen the columns featured in the Steve Canyon comic strip.

My Today's Thoughts blog on 7/22/19 was entitled "Hypothesis" and said in entirety:

'All reasonable people with my background will realize that "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" and recognize that laws against "price gauging" are bad "in the long term"'.

Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on recent events. The word journalism applies to the occupation, as well as citizen journalists using methods of gathering information and using literary techniques. Journalistic media include print, television, radio, Internet, and, in the past, newsreels. Wikipedia

https://www.collegefactual.com/majors/communication-journalism-media/journalism/rankings/top-ranked/


Discover the Best Schools to Study Journalism

There are approximately 13,890 students graduating with a degree in Journalism every year. This helps make it 38th most in-demand from the 384 total college majors we have data on.

Journalism is ranked 87 out of 121 college majors for graduate pay. This means it is around the low end for salary potential, but you can improve your chances of a high-paying career by finding a superior school and pursuing an advanced degree.

Best Journalism Colleges Ranked in Order of Quality

1.  Emerson College is a private college in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1880 by Charles Wesley Emerson as a "school of oratory," the college offers more than three dozen degree and professional training programs specializing in the fields of arts and communication with a foundation in liberal arts studies. Wikipedia

University of Missouri - Columbia is #3.  On Highest Paid Grads list appears at #89.



6. UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

Eager to build your portfolio from your dorm room? At Mizzou, students interested in journalism find plenty of opportunities to get involved with student publications ranging from the on-campus newspaper The Maneater, to The Global Journalist, a print and broadcasting publisher that reports on world issues. You can get on the air with KBIA-FM, the mid-Missouri’s NPR station. Plus, Mizzou’s Walter William Scholars Program offers selected students a renewable scholarship directly from the School of Journalism plus placement in a Freshman Interest Group, a faculty mentor and $1,000 for global programs. William Scholars also get automatic admission to a one-year B.J./M.A. program (assuming they complete the application and maintain a 3.25 journalism GPA) which allows students to complete a graduate degree in one year rather than two. Once junior year comes around, journalism students choose from over 30 different focuses like Data Journalism, Magazine Editing, Multimedia Producing, Sports Journalism and more. And if none of those 30 choices fit your interests, then you can meet with faculty to design a course plan perfect for you under the Individually Designed Interest Area. With professional organizations like the American Society of News Editors and Investigative Reporters and Editors, Mizzou students don’t have to do much investigating to find plenty of great ways to get involved on campus while earning hands-on experience in the journalism field. As a part of the Mizzou Mafia, you’ll soon learn why Mizzou grads love to hire other Mizzou grads.


1.  American University
2.   UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHAPEL HILL
3. STANFORD UNIVERSITY
4. UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
5. ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

https://inside.collegefactual.com/methodologies/rankings-by-major-the-quick-version?_ga=2.65367917.2146021329.1565640639-658916543.1565640638

https://inside.collegefactual.com/methodologies/top-ranked-colleges-by-major-methodology-overview

https://inside.collegefactual.com/methodologies/rankings-by-major-the-quick-version

https://www.collegefactual.com/majors/communication-journalism-media/journalism/rankings/highest-paid-grads/

Mark Levin, in UNFREEDOM OF THE PRESS concludes with:


It is journalism's job to be true to their readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in
a way that will stand up to history's judgment.  To do anything less would be untenable.

The abandonment of objective truth and, worse, the rejection of principles and values of
America's early press and revolutionaries, is not new for the Times. It long predates the
Trump presidency. And it has led the Times and other media outlets into a very bleak and
dark place, destructive of the press as a crucial institution for a free people. If
newsrooms and journalists do not forthwith and with urgency to "fundamentally transform"
their approach to journalism, which, sadly, is highly unlikely, their credibility will
continue to erode and may well reach a point soon where it is irreparably damaged with a
large portion of the citizenry--and rightly so. The media will not only marginalize
themselves, but they will continue to be the greatest threat to freedom of the press
today--not President Trump or his administration, but the current practitioners of used to
be called journalism.

Therefore, I said at the opening, this book is intended to, among other things, "jump-start
a long overdue and hopefully productive dialogue among the American ctizenry on how best to
deal with the complicated and complex issue of the media's collapsing role as a bulwark of
liberty, the civil society, and republicanism."

I think Mark Levin had a different impression of journalism than Mark Twain having read The Comic Mark Twain Reader: The Most Humorous Selections from His Stories, Sketches, Novels, Travel Books and Lectures 
by Mark Twain  (Author), Charles Neider (Editor)
Hardcover – March 1, 1977

Mark Twain died in 1910.  He died before the supposed “objectivity of the press” first surfaced.

Levin's publisher's review states:

It was only at the start of the Progressive Era and the twentieth century that the supposed “objectivity of the press” first surfaced, leaving us where we are today: with a partisan party-press overwhelmingly aligned with a political ideology but hypocritically engaged in a massive untruth as to its real nature.

UNFREEDOM OF THE PRESS

UNFREEDOM OF THE PRESS by Mark R. Levin 2019 Copyright.

p.226 near the middle of the page:

...It is journalism's job to be true to their readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in

a way that will stand up to history's judgment.  To do anything less would be untenable.

The abandonment of objective truth and, worse, the rejection of principles and values of

America's early press and revolutionaries, is not new for the Times. It long predates the

Trump presidency. And it has led the Times and other media outlets into a very bleak and

dark place, destructive of the press as a crucial institution for a free people. If

newsrooms and journalists do not forthwith and with urgency to "fundamentally transform"

their approach to journalism, which, sadly, is highly unlikely, their credibility will

continue to erode and may well reach a point soon where it is irreparably damaged with a

large portion of the citizenry--and rightly so. The media will not only marginalize

themselves, but they will continue to be the greatest threat to freedom of the press

today--not President Trump or his administration, but the current practitioners of used to

be called journalism.

Therefore, I said at the opening, this book is intended to, among other things, "jump-start

a long overdue and hopefully productive dialogue among the American ctizenry on how best to

deal with the complicated andcomplex issue of the media's collapsing role as a bulwark of

liberty, the civil society, and republicanism."

From publisher's review:

Unfreedom of the Press is not just another book about the press. Levin shows how those entrusted with news reporting today are destroying freedom of the press from within: “not government oppression or suppression,” he writes, but self-censorship, group-think, bias by omission, and passing off opinion, propaganda, pseudo-events, and outright lies as news.

With the depth of historical background for which his books are renowned, Levin takes the reader on a journey through the early American patriot press, which proudly promoted the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, followed by the early decades of the Republic during which newspapers around the young country were open and transparent about their fierce allegiance to one political party or the other.

It was only at the start of the Progressive Era and the twentieth century that the supposed “objectivity of the press” first surfaced, leaving us where we are today: with a partisan party-press overwhelmingly aligned with a political ideology but hypocritically engaged in a massive untruth as to its real nature.

From six-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, FOX News star, and radio host Mark R. Levin comes a groundbreaking and enlightening book that shows how the great tradition of the American free press has degenerated into a standardless profession that has squandered the faith and trust of the American public, not through actions of government officials, but through its own abandonment of reportorial integrity and objective journalism.

Statistics

Sir Isaac Newton would not be surprised with Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics.

He would be by either Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac statistics.

Bosons obey Bose-Einstein statistics.  Other particles subject to the Heisenberg exclusion principle obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.

A New Frontier*

It is now possible to take hypotheses about the separate parts of a social system, to combine them in a computer model, and to learn the consequences. The hypotheses may at first be no more correct than the ones we are using in our intuitive thinking. But the process of computer modeling and model testing requires these hypotheses to be stated more explicitly. The model comes out of the hazy realm of the mental model into an unambiguous model or statement to which all have access. Assumptions can then be checked against all available information and can be rapidly improved. The great uncertainty with mental models is the inability to anticipate the consequences of interactions between the parts of a system. This uncertainty is totally eliminated in computer models. Given a stated set of assumptions, the computer traces the resulting consequences without doubt or error. This is a powerful procedure for clarifying issues. It is not easy. Results will not be immediate.

We are on the threshold of a great new era in human pioneering. In the past there have been periods characterized by geographical exploration. Other periods have dealt with the formation of national governments. At other times the focus was on the creation of great literature. Most recently we have been through the pioneering frontier of science and technology. But science and technology are now a routine part of our life. Science is no longer a frontier. The process of scientific discovery is orderly and organized.

I suggest that the next frontier for human endeavor is to pioneer a better understanding of the nature of our social systems. The means are visible. The task will be no easier than the development of science and technology. For the next 30 years we can expect rapid advance in understanding the complex dynamics of our social systems. To do so will require research, the development of teaching methods and materials, and the creation of appropriate educational programs. The research results of today will in one or two decades find their way into the secondary schools just as concepts of basic physics moved from research to general education over the past three decades.

What we do today fundamentally affects our future two or three decades hence. If we follow intuition, the trends of the past will continue into deepening difficulty. If we set up research and educational programs which are now possible but which have not yet been developed, we can expect a far sounder basis for action.

*This was extracted from a paper (Reference item # D-4468) copyrighted in 1971 by Jay W. Forrester. It is based on his testimony for the Subcommittee on Urban Growth of the Committee on Banking and Currency, U.S. House of Representatives, on October 7, 1970.

The Nation's Real Alternatives*

The record to date (almost 50 years ago) implies that our people accept the future growth of United States population as preordained, beyond the purview and influence of legislative control, and as a ground rule which determines the nation's task as finding cities in which the future population can live. But I have been describing the circular processes of our social systems in which there is no unidirectional cause and effect but instead a ring of actions and consequences that close back on themselves. One could say, incompletely, that the population will grow and that cities, space, and food must be provided. But one can likewise say, also incompletely, tha the provision of cities, space, and food will cause the population to grow. Population generates pressure for urban growth, but urban pressures help to limit population.

Population grows until stresses rise far enough, which is to say that the quality of life falls far enough, to stop further increase. Everything we do to reduce those pressures causes the population to rise farther and faster and hastens the day when expediencies will no longer suffice. The United States is in the position of a wild animal running from its pursuers. We still have some space, natural resources, and agricultural land left. We can avoid the question of rising population as long as we can flee into this bountiful reservoir that nature provided. But it is obvious that the reservoirs are limited. The wild animal usually flees until he is cornered, until he has no more space. Then he turns to fight, but he no longer has room to maneuver. He is less able to forestall disaster than if he had fought in the open while there was still room to yield and to dodge. The United States is running away from its long-term threats by trying to relieve social pressures as they arise. But if we persist in treating only the symptoms and not the causes, the result will be to increase the magnitude of the ultimate threat and reduce our capability to respond when we no longer have space to flee.

What does this mean? Instead of automatically accepting the need for new towns and the desirability of locating Industry in rural areas, we should consider confining our cities. If it were possible to prohibit the encroachment by housing and industry onto even a single additional acre of farm and forest, the resulting social pressures would hasten the day when we stabilize population. Some European countries are closer to realizing the necessity of curtailing urban growth than are we. As I understand it, farm land surrounding Copenhagen cannot be used for either residence or industry until the severest of pressures forces the government to rezone small additional parcels. When land is rezoned, the corresponding rise in land price is heavily taxed to remove the incentive for land speculation. The waiting time for an empty apartment in Copenhagen may be years. Such pressures certainly cause the Danes to face the population problem more squarely than do we.

Our greatest challenge now is how to handle the transition from growth into equilibrium. Our society has behind it a thousand years of tradition that has encouraged and rewarded growth. The folklore and the success stories praise growth and expansion. But that is not the path of the future. Many of the present stresses in our society are from the pressures that always accompany the conversion from growth into equilibrium.

In our studies of social systems, we have made a number of investigations of life cycles that start with growth and merge into equilibrium. There are always severe stresses in the transition. Pressures must rise far enough to suppress the forces that produced growth. Not only do we face the pressure that will stop the population growth; we also encounter pressures that will stop the rise of industrialization and standard of living. The social stresses will rise. The economic forces will be ones for which we have no precedent. The psychological forces will be beyond those for which we are prepared. Our studies of urban systems demonstrated how the pressures from shortage of land and rising unemployment accompany the usual transition from urban growth to equilibrium. But the pressures we have seen in our cities are minor compared to those which the nation is approaching. The population pressures and the economic forces in a city that was reaching equilibrium have in the past been able to escape to new land areas.

But that escape is becoming less possible. Until now we have had, in effect, an inexhaustible supply of farm land and food-growing potential. But now we are reaching the critical point where, all at the same time, population is overrunning productive land, agricultural land is almost fully employed for the first time, the rise in population is putting more demand on the food supplies, and urbanization is pushing agriculture out of the fertile areas into the marginal lands. For the first time demand is rising into a condition where supply will begin to fall while need increases. The crossover from plenty to shortage can occur abruptly.

The fiscal and monetary system of the country is a complex social-economic-financial system of the kind we have been discussing. It is clear the country is not agreed on behavior of the interactions between government policy, growth, unemployment, and inflation. An article by a writer for Finance magazine in July, 1970, suggests that the approach I have been discussing be applied in fiscal and monetary policy and their relationships to the economy. I estimate that such a task would be only a few times more difficult than was the investigation of urban growth and stagnation. The need to accomplish it becomes more urgent as the economy begins to move for the first time from a history of growth into the turbulent pressures that will accompany the transition from growth to one of the many possible kinds of equilibrium. We need to choose the kind of equilibrium before we arrive.

In a hierarchy of systems, there is usually a conflict between the goals of a subsystem and the welfare of the broader system. We see this in the urban system. The goal of the city is to expand and to raise its quality of life. But this increases population, industrialization, pollution, and demands on food supply. The broader social system of the country and the world requires that the goals of the urban areas be curtailed and that the pressures of such curtailment become high enough to keep the urban areas and population within the bounds that are satisfactory to the larger system of which the city is a part. If this nation chooses to continue to work for some of the traditional urban goals, and if it succeeds, as it may well do, the result will be to deepen the distress of the country as a whole and eventually to deepen the crisis in the cities themselves. We may be at the point where higher pressures in the present are necessary if insurmountable pressures are to be avoided in the future.

I have tried to give you a glimpse of the nature of multi-loop feedback systems, a class to which our social systems belong. I have attempted to indicate how these systems mislead us because our intuition and judgment have been formed to expect behavior different from that actually possessed by such systems. I believe that we are still pursuing national programs that will be at least as frustrating and futile as many of the past. But there is hope. We can now begin to understand the dynamic behavior of our social systems. Progress will be slow. There are many cross-currents in the social sciences which will cause confusion and delay. The approach that I have been describing is very different from the emphasis on data gathering and statistical analysis that occupies much of the time of social research. But there have been breakthroughs in several areas. If we proceed expeditiously but thoughtfully, there is a basis for optimism.

*This was extracted from a paper (Reference item # D-4468) copyrighted in 1971 by Jay W. Forrester. It is based on his testimony for the Subcommittee on Urban Growth of the Committee on Banking and Currency, U.S. House of Representatives, on October 7, 1970.

Future Policy Issues*

The dynamics of world behavior bear directly on the future of the United States. American urbanization and industrialization are a major part of the world scene. The United States is setting a pattern that other parts of the world are trying to follow. That pattern is not sustainable. Our foreign policy and our overseas commercial activity seem to be running contrary to overwhelming forces that are developing in the world system. The following issues are raised by the preliminary investigations to date. They must, of course, be examined more deeply and confirmed by more thorough research into the assumptions about structure and detail of the world system.

» Industrialization may be a more fundamentally disturbing force in world ecology than is population. In fact, the population explosion is perhaps best viewed as a result of technology and industrialization. I include medicine and public health as a part of industrialization.

» Within the next century, man may be facing choices from a four-pronged dilemma — suppression of modern industrial society by a natural resource shortage, collapse of world population from changes wrought by pollution, population limitation by food shortage, or population control by war, disease, and social stresses caused by physical and psychological crowding.

» We may now be living in a "golden age" where, in spite of the world-wide feeling of malaise, the quality of life is, on the average, higher than ever before in history and higher now than the future offers.

» Efforts for direct population control may be inherently self-defeating. If population control begins to result as hoped in higher per capita food supply and material standard of living, these very improvements can generate forces to trigger a resurgence of population growth.

» The high standard of living of modern industrial societies seems to result from a production of food and material goods that has been able to outrun the rising population. But, as agriculture reaches a space limit, as industrialization reaches a natural-resource limit, and as both reach a pollution limit, population tends to catch up. Population then grows until the "quality of life" falls far enough to generate sufficiently large pressures to stabilize population.

» There may be no realistic hope for the present underdeveloped countries reaching the standard of living demonstrated by the present industrialized nations. The pollution and natural resource load placed on the world environmental system by each person in an advanced country is probably 20 to 50 times greater than the load now generated by a person in an underdeveloped country. With four times as much population in underdeveloped countries as in the present developed countries, their rising to the economic level of the United States could mean an increase of 200 times in the natural resource and pollution load on the world environment. Noting the destruction that has already occurred on land, in the air, and especially in the oceans, no capability appears to exist for handling such a rise in standard of living for the present total population of the world.

» A society with a high level of industrialization may be nonsustainable. It may be self-extinguishing if it exhausts the natural resources on which it depends. Or, if unending substitution for declining natural resources is possible, the international strife over "pollution and environmental rights" may pull the average world-wide standard of living back to the level of a century ago.

» From the long view of a hundred years hence, the present efforts of underdeveloped countries to industrialize along Western patterns may be unwise. They may now be closer to the ultimate equilibrium with the environment than are the industrialized nations. The present underdeveloped countries may be in a better condition for surviving the forthcoming world-wide environmental and economic pressures than are the advanced countries. When one of the several forces materializes that is strong enough to cause a collapse in world population, the advanced countries may suffer far more than their share of the decline.

*This was extracted from a paper (Reference item # D-4468) copyrighted in 1971 by Jay W. Forrester. It is based on his testimony for the Subcommittee on Urban Growth of the Committee on Banking and Currency, U.S. House of Representatives, on October 7, 1970.