g word adam conover
gwordnotes
Conover has been an outspoken supporter of Nithya Raman, who challenged and beat David Ryu for the Los Angeles City Council. As an activist for Housing First policies, Conover performed stand-up to fundraise for the campaign and canvassed in support of Raman
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119346909/adam-conover-on-the-g-word-and-adam-ruins-everything 39 min audio aug 2022 On the latest episode of Bullseye, Adam talks with us about The G Word, why kids loved Adam Ruins Everything and the journey to find his voice as a comic.
standup debeers diamond atl mag 10 yrs before; annoying & didactic joke fountain
zillions zine consumer reports bd game boy win; NYer chnge world view (about x?); true crime does not crit justice system; [common hate stronger bond than comm love of x? // soc media]; compentency prn ; accuweather pvtize corp from 5th risk; gps 1.4 trill$? corps ggl etc; computer mouse/drone; cargill 1st cam crew in decades; vegan vs dismantle beef sys;
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizzysaxe/2022/05/18/in-the-g-word-adam-conover-explains-what-we-take-for-granted-in-government/?sh=4945a198376f
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizzysaxe/2022/05/18/in-the-g-word-adam-conover-explains-what-we-take-for-granted-in-government
Lizzy SaxeContributor not bad; prioritize food prod (not c word)
I write about the future of food, business, and culture.
10% better AGW not enough
5th risk:
Schedule F appointment - aborted Trump plan for reclassifying civil servants as political appointees
1 "Food"
Adam unpacks the origins of the USDA, the ways in which it keeps food safe, its challenges, and how it's directly responsible for stuffed-crust pizza.
2 "Weather"
How's the weather? The answer could mean life or death. Adam meets with those tasked with predicting the weather and handling its fallout.
3 "Money"
From bank bailouts to stimulus checks: Adam digs into the ways in which the government keeps people in the black - or shortchanges them.
4 "Future"
"Hey, Siri. Who created GPS, drones, Roomba, and you?" "A military defense agency responsible for some amazing - and awful - advancements in tech."
5 "Disease"
Adam examines the U.S. government's helpful and harmful approaches to sickness and finds that incompetence and indifference are all too contagious.
6 "Change"
A disillusioned Adam visits Barack Obama to see if the man who unsuccessfully made "hope and change" a thing can explain how to make an actual impact in government.
Reception
The G Word received positive reviews from critics.[9] Melissa Camacho wrote for Common Sense Media that "There's a lot to be learned here, and it's a lot more entertaining than your average civics class."[10] Nell Minow wrote in RogerEbert.com that "If we don’t believe in government, it dies. We cannot believe in it if we do not understand it, and The G Word's depictions of the best and worst of government are a welcome first step."[11] Libertarian political pundit John Stossel wrote in Reason that he felt the show was "big government propaganda."[12]
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/housing-crisis/
Over the course of Reagan’s years in office, HUD’s budget authority fell by 70 percent. Between 1977 and 2012 the agency lost over half of its funding. As a direct result, only five million families receive federal housing assistance today—a quarter of those eligible for assistance. Unlike food, heating, or medical assistance, federal housing aid is not automatically available to anyone whose income falls below the poverty line. America would still have a housing crisis if Reagan hadn’t been elected in 1980, but it probably wouldn’t have the vicious size of the one we face today.
A 2004 estimate from the National Low Income Housing Coalition shows that if the federal government had continued funding housing assistance at pre-Reagan levels, at least 15 million more people would have enjoyed housing supports. Instead, those millions of Americans—many more, since the study was conducted—are going without housing support in a time of stagnant wages and skyrocketing housing costs. Last December, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that 11 million households are paying more than half their income on rent....
jun 2021
Covid Proved the C.D.C. Is Broken. Can It Be Fixed?
The pandemic revealed the glaring weaknesses of the world’s premier public health agency — and just how much work it would take to reform it.
Covid-19 has shown the glaring weaknesses of the world’s premier public health agency — and just how much work it would take to reform it. By Jeneen Interlandi. Illustrations by Brian Rea
Published June 16, 2021
Updated Oct. 18, 2021
In November, an independent team of academics and public-health experts who called themselves the Covid Rapid Response Working Group gathered on Zoom to puzzle over what had by then become the pandemic’s most vexing challenge: how to make all schools safe for full-time, in-person learning as quickly as possible. Schools had not proved to be a hotbed of coronavirus transmission, but beyond that the research was complicated, and communities were divided about how to balance the risks. Some people wanted a full reopening, immediately, no exceptions. Others were terrified to return at all.
So far, there was no national plan for how to move forward. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was advising everyone to wear masks and remain six feet apart at all times. But that guidance was a significant impediment to any full-bore reopening, because most schools could not maintain that kind of distance and still accommodate all their students and teachers. It also left many questions unanswered: How did masks and distancing and other strategies like opening windows fit together? Which were essential? Could some measures be skipped if others were followed faithfully?
Continue reading the main story
By JENEEN INTERLANDI and BRIAN REA
apr 2020
The U.S. Approach to Public Health: Neglect, Panic, Repeat
Time to give new life to an old idea: A strong public health system is the best guarantor of good health.
By JENEEN INTERLANDI
https://daily.jstor.org/the-origins-of-the-cdc/
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began during World War II to prevent the spread of malaria to troops stationed in the South.
https://daily.jstor.org/what-happened-to-u-s-public-health/aug 2020
What Happened to U.S. Public Health?
After the Civil War, support for public health measures was high. Now, some people blast them as part of the “nanny state.”
City of Chicago Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium poster promoting testing for tuberculosis, 1939
A public health poster from Chicago, 1939 via Wikimedia Commons
By: Livia Gershon August 7, 2020
While other nations have seemingly controlled COVID-19 outbreaks, choices made in the United States are allowing it to keep surging. That’s especially striking because, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, public health efforts in this country were remarkably effective. Public health scholar William W. Darrow argues that this approach was overtaken in the twentieth century by a focus on biomedical research and individual treatment, but a return to a public health framework is crucial to addressing today’s health threats.
Public health became a major concern after the Civil War. New understanding of bacterial disease and sanitation engineering combined with humanitarian principles, producing local efforts to stop the spread of disease. Local governments improved water and sewer systems and built public baths. Housing quality became a central political issue. Infant mortality fell dramatically.
“Conservative private physicians opposed federal programs as examples of ‘creeping socialism.’”
But, starting in the years after World War I, respect for public health gradually shrank. The nation’s focus shifted toward curing disease in individuals rather than preventing it at the population level. The American Medical Association grew in power, encouraging a view of health as a private, individual matter. “Conservative private physicians opposed federal programs as examples of ‘creeping socialism,’” Darrow writes.
Public health programs shifted toward educational campaigns, focused on “individual responsibility” for health. And, in the 1980s, the entire project of public health became associated with “social engineering” and the “nanny state.”
The changed priorities are reflected in the fight against AIDS. While attention to drug development and treatment has greatly reduced HIV infections and AIDS deaths since the 1980s, progress has leveled off. Darrow notes that President Barack Obama’s 2010 plan for addressing the disease focused on testing and access to care, but not on the broader context of racism and economic distress. Today, suffering from AIDS is largely concentrated among Black, Latinx, low-income, and marginalized populations.
To address the continuing problem of HIV, and other continuing health crises, Darrow points to the concept of “social quality,” which emerged in the 1990s. He writes that “social quality theory rests on the premise that people are essentially social beings.” Its goals are to provide all people with basic economic security and social inclusion, as well as a socially cohesive community and the chance to develop their own abilities. This means focusing not just on straightforward models in which disease is stopped through treatment, but on complex social and biological systems.
Democracy Dies in Darkness
POP CULTURE
Why it’s hard to trust an Obama-produced show to critique the government
‘The G Word With Adam Conover’ presents a former president’s optimistic take on the potential of government amid dwindling faith by the populace
Analysis by Sonia Rao
Staff writer
May 19, 2022
Comedian Adam Conover and former president Barack Obama appear in “The G Word With Adam Conover.” (Chuck Kennedy/Netflix)
Comedian Adam Conover’s new Netflix show opens with the assumption that a good chunk of Americans, while opinionated about the federal government, don’t actually know much about how it operates. But he isn’t interested in depicting the “how” of it all, he says. “I want to know if it works, and for whom.”
In six half-hour episodes released Thursday, “The G Word With Adam Conover” examines and critiques how the U.S. government handles certain matters, from food production to weather disasters to military defense weapons. Conover’s approach requires pointing out flaws in the system, which he sometimes does through comedic sketches. The show presents as “Schoolhouse Rock!” with a cause — to advocate for solutions.
Given this agenda, it is notable “The G Word” comes from Higher Ground Productions, a company founded by former president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. Barack Obama makes his presence known, appearing in the first episode and the last, which features a conversation between him and Conover about the feasibility of real change. The Obamas lend “The G Word” a degree of legitimacy in Netflix’s vast sea of offerings, but they might also give viewers pause: Why should we trust a show produced by a former president to offer an objective critique of the government?
In fairness, there are others involved. The show is based on “The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy” by Michael Lewis (“The Big Short,” “Moneyball”), and Conover seems to wield a decent amount of creative control. He doesn’t always let Obama off the hook, particularly when Obama suggests Americans need to be more patient because the government “is a human institution, like every other one, which means there are going to be screw-ups. … For you to change direction on anything means it’s going to take time.”
But, Conover asks, what if a significant number of Americans have been demanding change for a while now? What about matters of criminal justice? What about police violence?
“Of course you’re frustrated by it, and you should be,” Obama replies. “The reason it gets better is because people are impatient. The only thing we can’t do is lapse into cynicism and say, ‘Well, because this hasn’t changed at the pace that it should, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ Because each time we vote and elect people who are more responsive, there’s a window of opportunity for us to make some changes. Typically it’s not going to be 100 percent of what we want, but if we make things 10 percent better—”
“Yeah, but 10 percent for climate change isn’t enough,” Conover says, cutting him off. “When you ran in ’08, you were the change guy. You didn’t run on, ‘Hey if we make things 10 percent better,’ you know?”
When the Obamas launched Higher Ground’s partnership with Netflix, the former president said that they hoped to “promote greater empathy and understanding between peoples, and help them share their stories with the entire world.” The Obamas figure into some projects produced by their company, such as the children’s show “Waffles and Mochi” and the “Our Great National Parks” docuseries, and remain rather hands-off with others, such as the Oscar-winning 2019 documentary “American Factory.”
Similar to “American Factory” — which explores the reopening of a former General Motors factory in Ohio under a Chinese company making automotive glass — “The G Word” advocates for the rights and fair treatment of everyday people. The final episode is titled “Change,” which Obama — in an effort to pacify Conover, a stand-in for frustrated Americans — acknowledges is difficult to accomplish “by design.”
“We don’t want a situation where an all-powerful, all-knowing individual or small set of individuals are able to make decisions for everybody,” he continues. “So we’re going to disperse power, which means things happen slower. Which means that people have to compromise.”
This particular statement might not land well amid widespread distress over the leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the right to abortion established nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade. Politico reported that five justices could overturn the precedent, despite polls that show a majority of Americans support upholding the Roe decision.
But rather than encouraging Conover’s initial skepticism, “The G Word” ends on an affirming note. The government is imperfect because the American people are imperfect, he says, echoing Obama’s comment about the “human institution.” Conover adds that “on its best days, our government is a tool that we can use together to build that better world for ourselves and each other, should we choose to.”
Americans could use an extra dose of hope, but these concluding remarks relay a somewhat disingenuous take on what is required for the government to truly serve its people — perhaps the most obvious indicator of its producers’ bias. A show of this nature would do well to take the microphone away from career politicians and continue to uplift those heard less often. At one point in the final episode, for instance, Conover speaks to a Philadelphia resident who says she aspires to run for office one day.
“This system, what people keep calling a broken system, it’s not a broken system,” she says. “It’s been built to do what it’s been doing all these years, all these decades, [which] is to put our people behind cages. So what we need to do is start breaking the system down and … putting the right people in the right places. People that’s for us. People that’s for the people.”