I'll push back on this a bit. I suspect that even though one might create multiple links to digital notes in all directions like this, it really doesn't happen happen at scale like this in practice.

I'd be willing to guess that very few people in the digital space are linking their ideas to more than two or three others. In fact, I suspect that if you looked at many digital ZKs you'd find a lot of orphaned notes floating around.

Separately, even in the analog space, the two links (down or forward) isn't always correct either. I cross link all over the place. The one constant benefit of the analog is that you're generally required to create at least one link because you have to place the card somewhere, and this isn't the case in most digital contexts/tools.

I'd posit that it's a lot of work to link a new idea into your system once much less in multiple places. Generally the more ideas you can link/cross-link it to, the more likely you'll run across it in the future and have potential to reuse it. I'd also suggest that the more links it's got, the better you'll "own" it. These addition links will also allow you to better compare/contrast various ideas by juxtaposing them in the future.

Theorem: more (good/great) links = more complexity which yields more "life", serendipity, and surprise to be found in your slip box for future use.

Main idea

Writing and refining one's note about an idea can be key to helping one's basic understanding of that idea, but this understanding is dramatically increased by linking it into the rest of one's framework of understanding of that idea. A useful side benefit of creating this basic understanding and extending it is that one can also reuse one's (better understood) ideas to create new papers for expanding other's reading and subsequent understanding.

Yes!! Thank you!!

typo: cloud work -> could work

Spending just a few minutes writing about an idea in one's flash card review can be a useful way to better integrate that idea into one's field of thought. Bringing it out and expressing it more fully, linking it to other thoughts, and shifting the modality from reading into writing can be powerful methods for ensconcing it into one's memory as well as mentally owning it and even potentially extending it.

Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind lays out an idea he call's "Symphonic Thinking" which is a practice of finding connections between unrelated ideas. He suggests that this practice is an important key to the future of work.

Link this to other incarnations of this pattern in history: - Raymond Llull - Llullan combinatorial arts - Niklas Luhmann - linked zettelkasten - Marshall Kirkpatrick - triangle thinking - Dan Pink - symphonic thinking - etc...

Dan Pink A Whole New Mind #books/wanttoread

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/spring-83/

I've been thinking about this sort of thing off and on myself.

I too almost immediately thought of Fraidyc.at and its nudge at shifting the importance of content based on time and recency. I'd love to have a social reader with additional affordances for both this time shifting and Ton's idea of reading based on social distance.

I'm struck by the seemingly related idea of @peterhagen's LindyLearn platform and annotations: https://annotations.lindylearn.io/new/ which focuses on taking some of the longer term interesting ideas as the basis for browsing and chewing on. Though even here, one needs some of the odd, the cutting edge, and the avant garde in their balanced internet diet. Would Spring '83 provide some of this?

I'm also struck by some similarities this has with the idea of Derek Siver's /now page movement. I see some updating regularly while others have let it slip by the wayside. Still the "board" of users exists, though one must click through a sea of mostly smiling and welcoming faces to get to it the individual pieces of content. (The smiling faces are more inviting and personal than the cacophony of yelling and chaos I see in models for Spring '83.) This reminds me of Stanley Meyers' frequent assertion that he attempted to design a certain "sense of quiet" into the early television show Dragnet to balance the seeming loudness of the everyday as well as the noise of other contemporaneous television programming.

The form reminds me a bit of the signature pages of one's high school year book. But here, instead of the goal being timeless scribbles, one has the opportunity to change the message over time. Does the potential commercialization of the form (you know it will happen in a VC world crazed with surveillance capitalism) follow the same trajectory of the old college paper facebook? Next up, Yearbook.com!

Beyond the thing as a standard, I wondered what the actual form of Spring '83 adds to a broader conversation? What does it add to the diversity of voices that we don't already see in other spaces. How might it be abused? Would people come back to it regularly? What might be its emergent properties?

It definitely seems quirky and fun in and old school web sort of way, but it also stresses me out looking at the zany busyness of some of the examples of magazine stands. The general form reminds me of the bargain bins at book stores which have the promise of finding valuable hidden gems and at an excellent price, but often the ideas and quality of what I find usually isn't worth the discounted price and the return on investment is rarely worth the effort. How might this get beyond these forms?

It also brings up the idea of what other online forms we may have had with this same sort of raw experimentation? How might the internet have looked if there had been a bigger rise of the wiki before that of the blog? What would the world be like if Webmention had existed before social media rose to prominence? Did we somehow miss some interesting digital animals because the web rose so quickly to prominence without more early experimentation before its "Cambrian explosion"?

I've been thinking about distilled note taking forms recently and what a network of atomic ideas on index cards look like and what emerges from them. What if the standard were digital index cards that linked and cross linked to each other, particularly in a world without adherence to time based orders and streams? What does a new story look like if I can pull out a card either at random or based on a single topic and only see it or perhaps some short linked chain of ideas (mine or others) which come along with it? Does the choice of a random "Markov monkey" change my thinking or perspective? What comes out of this jar of Pandora? Is it just a new form of cadavre exquis?

This standard has been out for a bit and presumably folks are experimenting with it. What do the early results look like? How are they using it? Do they like it? Does it need more scale? What do small changes make to the overall form?

For more on these related ideas, see: https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%22spring+%2783%22

The trending topics on Twitter can be used as a form of juxtaposition of random ideas which could be brought together to make new and interesting things.

Here's but one example of someone practicing just this:

Y’all, imagine Spielberg’s Sailor Moon pic.twitter.com/xZ1DEsbLTy

— Matty Illustration (@MN_illustration) June 30, 2022

cc: https://twitter.com/marshallk

One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"

aside on serendipity

As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

A major benefit of working in public is that it invites immediate feedback (hopefully positive, constructive criticism) from anyone who might be reading it including pre-built audiences, whether this is through social media or in a classroom setting utilizing discussion or social annotation methods.

This feedback along the way may help to further find flaws in arguments, additional examples of patterns, or links to ideas one may not have considered by themselves.

Sadly, depending on your reader's context and understanding of your work, there are the attendant dangers of context collapse which may provide or elicit the wrong sorts of feedback, not to mention general abuse.

This idea doesn't appear in Steven Johnson's book itself, but only in this quirky little BoingBoing piece, so I'll give Forte credit for using his reading and notes from this piece to create a larger thesis here.

I'm not really a fan of this broader archipelago of ideas as it puts the work much later in the process. For those not doing it upfront by linking ideas as they go, it's the only reasonable strategy left for leveraging one's notes.

To test one's own understanding of a topic one has read about and studied, it can be useful to discuss it or describe one's understanding to friends or colleagues in conversations. This will help you discover where the holes are based on the person's understanding and comprehension of what you've said. Can you fill in all the holes where they have questions? Are their questions your new questions which have exposed holes that need to be filled in your understanding or in the space itself.

I do this regularly in conversations with people. It makes the topics of conversation more varied and interesting and helps out your thinking at the same time. In particular I've been doing this method in Dan Allosso's book club. It's almost like trying on a new idea the way one might try on a piece of clothing to see how it fits or how one likes it for potential purchase. If an idea "fits" then continue refining it and add it to your knowledge base. These conversations also help to better link ideas in my thought space to those of what we're reading. (I wonder if others are doing these same patterns, Dan seems to, but I don't have as good a grasp on this with other participants).

Link to :<br /> - Ahren's idea of writing to expose understanding<br /> - Feynman technique<br /> - Socratic method (this is sort of side or tangential method to this) <- define this better/refine

The area of serendipity becomes much more powerful when one has ideas both directly interlinked, ideas categorized with subject headings or tags, or when one can have affordances like auto-complete.

The method Forte suggests and outlines allows for some serendipity, but not as much as other methods with additional refinements. Serendipity in Forte's method isn't as strong as in others.

In this section he's talking about some of the true "magic of note taking" which is discussed by Luhmann and others.

link to:<br /> Luhmann's writings on serendipity and surprise when using his zettelkasten (Communication with the Slipbox...)<br /> Ahrens mentions of this effect

Many people take notes, they just don't know where they're taking them to. It's having a concrete use for them after you've written them down that makes all the difference. At this point, most would say that they do read back over them, but this generally creates a false sense of learning through familiarity. Better would be turning them into spaced repetition flashcards, or linking them to ideas and thoughts already in our field of knowledge to see if and where they fit into our worldview.

link to - research on false feeling of knowledge by re-reading notes in Ahrens

Within the P.A.R.A. framework it's helpful if you know what your note capture is meant for, but it's wholly against a lot of note taking for things which may simply spark joy. This may be helpful for the work-a-day productivity person, but is painfully out of sync with keeping notes as a means of generating new ideas. Many of these sorts of notes will be hidden away in an archive and thus broadly unusable in the long run.

Sorting ideas into folders is still an older classical way of thinking instead of linking an idea to related things that make it imminently more usable. Cross linked ideas seem wholly more interesting, vibrant and more useable to me.

I'm not sure I agree here as one can take other annotations from various texts throughout a course and link them together to create new ideas and knowledge within the margins themselves. Of course, at some point the ideas need to escape the margins to potentially take shape with a class wiki, new essays, papers, journal articles or longer pieces.

Use of social annotation across several years of a program this way may help to super-charge students' experiences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxfTVdohSwA

Christine Moskell talks about a professor's final exam design prompting students to go back to annotations and add new commentary (or links to other related knowledge) that they've gained during the length of a course.

Link to:

This is very similar to the sort of sensemaking and interlinking of information that Sönke Ahrens outlines in his book How to Take Smart Notes though his broader note taking thesis goes a few additional steps for more broadly synthesizing ideas into longer papers, articles, theses, and books.

Dr. Moskell also outlined a similar tactic at the [[Hypothesis Social Learning Summit - Spotlight on Social Reading & Social Annotation]] earlier today, though that video may not be accessible for a bit.

Cross reference: https://web.hypothes.is/event/social-learning-summit-spotlight-on-social-reading-social-annotation/

How can we better center and model these educational practices in our pedagogies?

—Marshall Kirkpatrick

Mixup Method of Synthetic Idea Generation: Write out 3 sentences from past notes. Write a new sentence made of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd part of each respective sentence. Repeat total of 3 times. Now look at the 3 synthesized lines & ask if wrong or right and why. Clarifies a lot.

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) June 14, 2022

Interlinking your ideas can help to create a harmony within your collection. There are no loose ends or lost ideas. There is a place for everything and everything is in its proper place, ready to be used and reused.

Beethoven kept a variation of a waste book in that he kept a pocket notebook for quick capture of ideas. Later, instead of copying them over into a permanent place, he'd translate and amplify on the idea in a second notebook. Later on, he might pick up the idea again in a third notebook with further improvements.

By doing this me might also use the initial ideas as building blocks for more than one individual piece. This is very clever, particularly in musical development where various snippets of music might be morphed into various different forms in ways that written ideas generally can't be so used.

This literally allowed him to re-use his "notes" at two different levels (the written ones as well as the musical ones.)

Beethoven apparently kept organized notebooks for his work. His system was arranged based on the level of finished work, so he had spaces for rough ideas, improved ideas and others for finished ideas.

Source for this?

Marshall Kirkpatrick describes a method of taking three ostensibly random ideas and attempting to view each from the others' perspectives as a way to create new ideas by linking them together.

This method is quite similar to that of Raymond Llull as described in Frances Yate's The Art of Memory (UChicago Press, 1966), though there Llull was memorizing and combinatorially permuting 20 or more ideas at a time. It's also quite similar to the sort of meditative practice found in the lectio divina, though there ideas are generally limited to religious ones for contemplation.

https://content.blubrry.com/thrivingonoverload/THRIVING_013_Marshall_Kirkpatrick.mp3#t=1559,1745

Other examples: - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=%22combinatorial+creativity%22 - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=%22Llullan%20combinatorial%20arts%22

It would seem that Barzun didn't create links between particular ideas as he made them given the fact that his outlines are abstract and his connections felt "weak and artificial".

Main Idea by the author.

In an interview about how she wrote the smash hit “Blank Space,”3 Swift says, “I’ll be going about my daily life and I’ll think, ‘Wow, so we only have two real options in relationships—it’s going to be forever or it’s going to go down in flames,’ so I’ll jot that down in my notes . . . I’ll come up with a line that I think is clever like ‘Darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream’ and I just pick them and

NME, “Taylor Swift—How I Wrote My Massive Hit ‘Blank Space,’ ”NME.com, October 9, 2015, YouTube video, 3:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bYUDY4lmls

link to Eminem and "stacking ammo"

Does the system really do each of these? Writing things down for our future selves is the thing that makes ideas concrete, not the system itself. Most notebooks don't reveal new associations, we actively have to do that ourselves via memory or through active search and linking within the system itself. The system may help, but it doesn't automatically create associations nor reveal them. By keeping our ideas in one place they do incubate to some extent, but isn't the real incubation taking place in a diffuse way in our minds to come out later?

Most people born since the advent of the filing cabinet and the computer have spent a lifetime using a hierarchical folder-based mental model for their knowledge. For greater value and efficiency one needs to get away from this model and move toward linking individual ideas together in ways that they can more easily be re-used.

To accomplish this many people use an index-based method that uses topical or subject headings which can be useful. However after even a few years of utilizing a generic tag (science for example) it may become overwhelmed and generally useless in a broad search. Even switching to narrower sub-headings (physics, biology, chemistry) may show the same effect. As a result one will increasingly need to spend time and effort to maintain and work at this sort of taxonomical system.

The better option is to directly link related ideas to each other. Each atomic idea will have a much more limited set of links to other ideas which will create a much more valuable set of interlinks for later use. Limiting your links at this level will be incredibly more useful over time.

One of the biggest benefits of the physical system used by Niklas Luhmann was that each card was required to be placed next to at least one card in a branching tree of knowledge (or a whole new branch had to be created.) Though he often noted links to other atomic ideas there was at least a minimum link of one on every idea in the system.

For those who have difficulty deciding where to place a new idea within their system, it can certainly be helpful to add a few broad keywords of the type one might put into an index. This may help you in linking your individual ideas as you can do a search of one or more of your keywords to narrow down the existing ones within your collection. This may help you link your new idea to one or more of those already in your system. This method may be even more useful and helpful for those who are starting out and have fewer than 500-1000 notes in their system and have even less to link their new atomic ideas to.

For those who have graphical systems, it may be helpful to look for one or two individual "tags" in a graph structure to visually see the number of first degree notes that link to them as a means of creating links between atomic ideas.

To have a better idea of a hierarchy of value within these ideas, it may help to have some names and delineate this hierarchy of potential links. Perhaps we might borrow some well ideas from library and information science to guide us? There's a system in library science that uses a hierarchical set up using the phrases: "broader terms", "narrower terms", "related terms", and "used for" (think alias or also known as) for cataloging books and related materials.

We might try using tags or index-like links in each of these levels to become more specific, but let's append "connected atomic ideas" to the bottom of the list.

Here's an example:

• broader terms (BT): [[physics]]
• narrower terms (NT): [[mechanics]], [[dynamics]]
• related terms (RT): [[acceleration]], [[velocity]]
• used for (UF) or aliases:
• connected atomic ideas: [[force = mass * acceleration]], [[$$v^2=v_0^2​+2aΔx$$]]

Chances are that within a particular text, one's notes may connect and interrelate to each other quite easily, but it's important to also link those ideas to other ideas that are already in your pre-existing body of knowledge.

See also: Thesaurus for Graphic Materials I: Subject Terms (TGM I) https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm1/ic.html

This makes me wonder if it would be a useful product to have a highly linked note collection to sell to others in a modern context? It could be done entirely in text files for compatibility with Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, et al. Ideally it would be done in a more commonplace way with quotes and interlinked and could be expanded upon by the purchaser.

I will look this hashtag up later, it might helped with my research for "Invisible Illness".

tangential definition of a genex

Meet atleast any one Core objectives for each student

... If I was asked in a teaching staff meeting, about my role as a teacher in a semester, I will say, fulfilling atleast any one core objective in the subject curriculum to each and every student is my highest priority *if this has been the priority for every teacher and the pressurising management during covid online classes, the [[covid batch wisdom catastrophe]] would not be this much impact - I can certainly write an feature article on this covid batch catastrophe topic - especially who passed 10th as covid batch, during start of the covid now directly face 12th public face-off with [[post-covid zero knowledge calibre]]. And then going to join college without learning subject fundamentals [[Devastating post-covid college education for freshers]]

https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/big-upgrade-portraits-name-clicking-new-filters-mobile-version-and-more/

=$ Post-COVID indian adolescent transformation after modi govt prescient move on cryptocurrency

Lit/Quote prescient move amounts to effectively being a de facto affirmation of the role that cryptocurrency and related technologies could play in India’s financial-cum-economic system.

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/11/inspiring-or-distracting/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Matthias Melcher

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Matthias Melcher </span> in Matthias Melcher on Twitter: "@ChrisAldrich I agree. The simple zettelkasten is a TOOL for thought, but many people want a prosthesis for thought. See https://t.co/N9lDSM7guD" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>02/05/2022 15:27:06</time>)</cite></small>

The important part of permanent notes are generating your own ideas and connecting (linking them densely) into your note system. The linking part is important and can be the part that most using digital systems forget to do. In paper zettelkasten, one was forced to create the first link by placing the note into the system for the first time. This can specifically be seen in Niklas Luhmann's example where a note became a new area of its own or, far more likely, it was linked to prior ideas.

By linking the idea to others within the system, it becomes more likely that the idea can have additional multiple contexts where it might be used and improve the fact that context shifts will prove more insight in the future.

Additional links to subject headings, tags, categories, or other forms of taxonomy will also help to make sure the note isn't lost completely into the system. Links to the bibliographical references within the system are helpful as well, especially for later citation. Keep in mind that these categories and reference links aren't nearly as valuable as the other primary idea links.

One can surely collect ideas and facts into their system, but these aren't as important or as interesting as one's own ideas and the things that are sparked and generated by them.

Asking questions in permanent notes can be valuable as they can become the context for new research, projects, and writing. Open questions can be incredibly valuable for one's thinking and explorations.

Do we need to develop out concersational style email reviews?

Would be really interesting to see which chat platforms. Eg. Slack VS Teams. Could build out a review bot, similar to email in.

ReconfigBehSci. (2021, October 20). RT @ProfJohnDrury: Sustaining mutual aid and community support groups: Covid-19 and beyond Free online event, 12.30pm November 3rd [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1453284900711370756

• [[Venmurasu MOC]]
• I can build fictional india map for venmurasu using cartography3d software and [[🔌 obsidian leaflet plugin]] obsidian://show-plugin?id=obsidian-leaflet-plugin

=! biologist hate to shed tears to avoid thirst

- தண்ணீர் வேட்கைக்கான துயரை கண்ணீர் விட்டு ஆற்றியபடி மனிதர்கள் பயணிக்கும் பாலை வெளி போலும் ஓர் வாழ்வு.

Chu, J. S. G., & Evans, J. A. (2021). Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(41). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2021636118

The main idea taking about the text what say .

In this section make sure to include a summary of what you'll be writing about. an introduction to the paper. restate your main idea in your conclusion as well.

focuses on developing college-level literacy skills. More simply, this course will prepare you for the reading, writing, and critical thinking required of you as a university student.

Por otro lado el periodismo es una labor de suma importancia en la sociedad, los periodistas no son simples mensajeros. Se tiene la capacidad de procesar lo que vemos siendo testigos activos. Saber preguntar y a quienes preguntar. En una sociedad en la que la informacion signfica tener poder. El propósito principal del periodismo es proporcionar a los ciudadanos la información que necesitan para ser libres y capaces de gobernarse a sí mismos. Los medios informativos nos ayudan a definir la comunidad y a elaborar un lenguaje y un conocimiento compartidos basados en la realidad. El periodismo también contribuye a identificar los objetivos de una comunidad, y reconocer a sus héroes y villanos.

Heesen, R., & Bright, L. K. (2020). Is Peer Review a Good Idea? The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 000–000. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axz029

Not usually one for this type of visual web, but I love this one for how it can be used, in addition to simply being interesting to see. Could be a great way to discover confirmation bias at play, if for instance people with opposing views are never referenced together. It could also simply serve as a way to find "other authors you might like," who write on similar topics to those you already have a founded interest in.

Are vaccine passports a good idea? (2021, March 13). The Economist. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/03/13/are-vaccine-passports-a-good-idea

In regular Ruby, `` executes in a shell, but obviously there is no shell of that sort in JS, so it makes sense that they could (and should) repurpose that syntax for something that makes sense in context of JS -- like running native JavaScript -- prefect!

The author first develops his claim by exclaiming how president Harrison advocated for African American rights and their justice. The author states that the republicans want Harrison to promote this bill mainly for the support they are receiving from African Americans. However, this decision by Harrison was a big influence on the Lodge Bill. Also, this develops debate of african american rights which is still discussed today.

This is a shift in the article as the author was talking about how the bill was still up to debate and the support was split up evenly, but after this, everything went down for Lodge's bill and the democrat senators eventually succeeded. This shift signifies the author's main idea that a small minority has the ability to dictate the entire government using harmful methods such as filibustering.

The similarities Pete points out between a wildlife ecosystem and a New York restaurant ecosystem serve to emphasize his point of how one major effect, COVID, can shut down multiple facets of the ecosystem. He does so by focusing on one word, megafauna, as he described the previous state of New York restaurants as having "charismatic megafauna".

First time I've seen someone create a validator by simply matching against URI::MailTo::EMAIL_REGEXP from std lib. More often you see people copying and pasting some really long regex that they don't understand and is probably not loose enough. It's much better, though, to simply reuse a standard one from a library — by reference, rather than copying and pasting!!

Imagining the Next Decade of Behavioral Science. (2020, January 20). Behavioral Scientist. https://behavioralscientist.org/imagining-the-next-decade-future-of-behavioral-science/

Hanea, A., Wilkinson, D. P., McBride, M., Lyon, A., Ravenzwaaij, D. van, Thorn, F. S., Gray, C. T., Mandel, D. R., Willcox, A., Gould, E., Smith, E., Mody, F., Bush, M., Fidler, F., Fraser, H., & Wintle, B. (2021). Mathematically aggregating experts’ predictions of possible futures. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/rxmh7

The author finally jumps to the overall purpose, goal, or claim of the essay: to criticize the government officials(specifically Republicans) for their inability to fix their problems and create distracting disputes instead.