Visual source: Newseum
Nicholas Confessore shows that even in charity, the rich are different. You may contribute to a cause, but a billionaire can rewrite one.
In keeping with the anti-government spirit of the times, the new philanthropists — some with roots in the loosely libertarian milieu of Silicon Valley or Wall Street — share a disdain for established politics and an impatience with the slow churn of old-fashioned policy making. ...
But the very loftiness of such ambitions raises a significant question: Can even the very wealthiest philanthropists finance public services on the scale necessary to achieve social change — that is, on the scale of government itself?
Even putting aside what it would mean to live in a nation beholden to the largess of the 1%, the wealthy have discovered that they really can't do it as well as government. So they've taken next step: telling government how to do it.
After early experiments with directly financing new experimental schools around the country, for example, some of the biggest advocates for charter schools, including the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation of Eli and Edythe Broad, shifted gears several years ago and began pouring billions of dollars into advocacy at the federal, state and local levels. One result: The Obama administration’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” grant program, whose rules prohibited states from limiting the number of charter schools.
There are several things wrong with this idea—a few billion, in fact—but the biggest might be that government is allowing people to set direction who have the most to gain if government policy fails. Step 1: compete with government. Step 2: fail. Step 3: get government to stop competing. Step 4: profit!
The New York Times warns that while protecting intellectual property is a worthwhile goal, the acts now being rushed through congress are the wrong approach.
Under the bill, copyright owners could direct payment providers like Visa and advertising networks like Google’s to cut off business to a Web site simply by filing notice that the site — or "a portion" of it —“engages in, enables or facilitates” intellectual property infringement or is being willfully blind to it.
Accused Web sites would have only five days to assert their innocence. And the payment providers and ad networks could not be sued by sites that were wrongly cut off, so their easiest course of action might be to just comply with copyright owners’ requests. If copyright owners could starve a Web site of money simply by telling a payment processor that the site was infringing on intellectual property, the bill could stymie legitimate speech.
Creating a system that allows you to lob unlimited baseless accusations at the competition? I can't imagine what could go wrong with that.
Nicholas Kristof says that President Obama has done a better job than either side will credit.
President Obama came into office with expectations that Superman couldn’t have met. Many on the left believed what the right feared: that Obama was an old-fashioned liberal. But the president’s cautious centrism soured the left without reassuring the right.
Like many, I have disappointments with Obama. He badly underestimated the length of this economic crisis, and for a man with a spectacular gift at public speaking, he has been surprisingly inept at communicating.
But as we approach an election year, it is important to acknowledge the larger context: Obama has done better than many critics on the left or the right give him credit for.
I don't begrudge the president one bit of credit. I just don't believe that unthinking support has any more value than unthinking opposition.
Frank Bruni says that it's going to be a nasty campaign season (and in other news, water wet, night dark), but warns that the cost of this is that no matter who is elected, trust in government is harmed. I don't know how to break it to Frank, but eroding trust in government is what the GOP calls winning, no matter who actually lands in office.
Ross Douthat takes offense at a Stephen King novel because King implies that John Kennedy could have gone on to be a good president. Next week maybe we can get a review of another fictional book with some alternate history elements. Like the one that O'Reilly just stamped his name on.
Stacey Patton says that black Americans don't feel connected to the Occupy movement.
African Americans share white Americans’ anger about corporate greed and corruption, and blacks have a rich history of protesting injustice in United States. So why aren’t they Occupying?
“Occupy Wall Street was started by whites and is about their concern with their plight,” Nathalie Thandiwe, a radio host and producer for WBAI in New York, said in an interview. “Now that capitalism isn’t working for ‘everybody,’ some are protesting.”
Leonard Pitts is thankful for camera phones.
A menacing crowd of protesters had encircled police and they had no choice but to defend themselves with pepper spray. Or at least, that is the story campus cops at UC Davis initially told.
Video of the Nov. 18 incident tells a different story. It shows a group of Occupy Davis student protesters sitting peacefully with arms interlocked while a police officer walks back and forth, dousing them at close range with liberal amounts of pepper spray. There is an awful contemptuousness in his bearing. He could be spraying weeds in his garden or roaches in his kitchen.
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As we grapple with this vandalism of the First Amendment, we should ask ourselves this: what if there had been no cameras on hand? What if we had only the word of the protesters and their sympathizers that this happened versus the word of authority figures that it did not? Is it so hard to imagine the students’ claims being dismissed, the media attention being a fraction of what it is, the public’s outrage falling along predictable ideological lines and these cops getting a walk?
There have been all too many instances of abuse of power caught on video in the last few years. The saddest thing is that there are some who think the solution is to turn off the cameras.
You've heard of Mother Earth, but what it if was literally true?
Once upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.
This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.
Would knowing that we were all children of a singular, world-spanning being make people treat the planet with more respect? Hard to tell. However, I choose to take this as an excuse to promote the 1961 novel
Solaris by Polish Science Fiction author Stanislaw Lem which featured just this type of being.