Articles and Essays on Legitmacy

In today’s society that hungers for instant information, more and more people are questioning the media’s role and their legitimacy in authentic news reporting.

The press seems capable of taking any situation, blowing out of all proportion, predict the outcome, anticipate what people will say before they say it, and put words in the mouths of people without any justification. The gutter press of today appears only to want to report on the negative aspects of any situation. The question that begs to be asked is: do the public only want to hear bad news?

Is this form of media reporting detrimental to the national moral? Are we entitled to ask the media to adopt a more balanced view point, and to keep things in proportion?

When challenged media institutions can become very defensive. When, on the rare occasion, that a member of the public, who is under scrutiny by the media, launches a counter attack, the media immediately adopts a semi-self righteous pose. They are inclined to operate in the grey area between supposition and truth and are masters of providing information that can be readily misconstrued .When accused of telling outright lies or at least cynically manipulating the facts to lend a little edge to the story, the counterattack by implying that their’s is the role of protecting this democracy and all it stands for, especially free speech. Even it is damaging or offensive.

Their point in arguing the legitimacy of media within a democratic system is that the very people who were the architects of constitution set one of the principal foundations to be the right to the freedom of speech. And it is true to an extent.
The media rightfully enjoys very high levels of protection for the reason that as flawed as members of the press can be in pursuit of today’s scoop, democracy would not function as it was intended to do.

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With the coming of the internet, came the boom in online gaming. A boom which has imploded on itself recently, with increase US government legislation to effectively ban gaming online, by starving the fuel on which it feeds. The flow of money.

There are many that would argue that wagering on line is a compulsive and dangerous pass time, and may even have a point. While online casinos will argue that the odds are 96% in favor of the player, statistics will show that the massive profits that these online casinos were earning prove otherwise. Where in a live casino, there is a theoretical possibility that he odds can work in favor of the player, in an online casino, the games are programmed as such that if a player continues to wager eventually the odds will wear them down.

However the facts are that certain games, classed as games of skill and where the players play against each other and not the house, should be treated in a different category, and the legitimacy of playing backgammon online as a game of skill should not be hampered.

Backgammon has reached tremendous heights of success due to its ready adaptation to the online media. Players all over the World play and enjoy this game. The same skills and strategies that made it the longest lasting and most popular board game have been captured by the software programmers.

Once again players can only lose a fixed amount. They can enter online backgammon tournaments where the prize money is calculated against the number of entrants. The backgammon games room only takes a percentage of the entry fee to cover expenses, and make a profit.

Backgammon players have to be aware of all the strategies and percentages to proceed in these tournaments and even win one.

If they don’t then the entrance fee that they will have lost will surely have provided them with some fine entertainment as well as some international camaraderie. Take into account the fact that finals of online tournaments are decided over 21games. Luck will play a part over two or three games but a successful backgammon strategy will be required to win a long series of games.
The first and most important thing that the backgammon novice has to understand that luck plays a pretty small factor in the game. In order to win consistently at backgammon, strategy and experience plays a much larger part.

These are facts that those who question the legitimacy of playing backgammon online should be aware of.

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The causes and consequences of the global debt crisis is one which should be a source of worry for most people. However most of us are either oblivious or unaware of it, although it has now reached massive proportions.

Debts to Third World Countries grew dramatically during the seventies. At that time it was felt that these countries were about to go through a period of rapid growth, and banks were very interested in getting in on the ground floor and lend money to these developing countries. A prominent banker of the era proudly pronounced that lending to governments is safe banking because sovereign nations do not default on their debts. He was later proved to be seriously wrong on his estimation

Twenty years later the world’s poor and developing countries owed more than $1.3 trillion to industrialized countries. By 1997 it had grown to $2.3 trillion, and estimates are that by end of 3007, it will have reached $3.3 trillion.

Of the total developing-country debt, roughly half is owed to private creditors, mainly commercial banks.

The rest consists of obligations to international lending organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and to governments and government agencies—export-import banks, for example. Of the private bank debt, the bulk has been incurred by middle-income countries, especially in Latin America. The world’s poorest countries, mostly in Africa and South Asia, were never able to borrow substantial sums from the private sector and most of their debts are to the IMF, World Bank, and other governments.

The debate that has been raging since it became obvious that most of these countries, and especially the poorer ones are experiencing major difficulties balancing their budgets, is on the legitimacy of writing of the debts of Third Word countries, and what would be the implications for the future.

World bankers have now reached the conclusions that the economic debts of the developing world cannot ever be made good. Situations in African and far eastern countries will continue to deteriorate, global warming is taking its toll. Scientists estimate that natural disasters such as the tsunami of late 2004 will occur on a semi-regular basis and the people’s plight will only gradually worsen.

These nations should be looked upon by the global financial community as being need of charity, instead of loans, Any debts that they have outstanding should be written off, and they should instead regular financial assistance in the form of grants to help them survive the difficult times ahead.

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