Saturday, February 01, 2014

Losing the Propaganda War - NYTimes.com

Israel losing the Propaganda War - NYTimes.com

"The
“apartheid wall,” “apartheid roads,” colonization, administrative
arrests, travel restrictions, land confiscations and house demolitions
are the clay apartheid comparisons are made of, and cannot be hidden or
denied, for as long as Israel continues with the status quo.
Military
occupation comes with checkpoints, antiterrorist barriers, military
courts, armed soldiers and tanks. That’s the reality, no matter what
your politics, and just the ammunition the Palestinians and their
supporters need in their new war."
"..
Israel is doing almost everything it can to help its opponents achieve
their goal. Instead of focusing on peace talks, Israel continuously
signals its intention to build more settlement housing, most recently on
Jan. 10, when plans for 1,400 new homes in East Jerusalem and the West
Bank were announced. Instead of welcoming Eritrean and Sudanese refugees
seeking asylum — the way that a former Likud Party prime minister,
Menachem Begin, did in 1977 with the Vietnamese boat people, saying they
reminded him of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust — Israel is
confining today’s asylum-seekers to a camp in the desert, providing
reams of footage to those who want to prove Israel is a racist society.
And
it didn’t help when, on Dec. 15, a ministerial committee approved a
bill that would impose heavy, punitive taxes on groups like B’Tselem,
which tracks alleged human rights violations in the occupied
territories, and Adalah, the legal center for minority rights in Israel."

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

The American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - William Deresiewicz

The American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - William Deresiewicz:



Came across this blog - some of it resonates so well -



"Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.
If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?
Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling."
"The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them."
"When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.
Indeed, that seems to be exactly what those schools want. There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way."
"The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have."



Monday, January 27, 2014

Why Do Some Americans Speak So Confidently When They Have No Clue What They're Talking About? | Alternet

Why Do Some Americans Speak So Confidently When They Have No Clue What They're Talking About? | Alternet:

"The Harvard Business School information session on how to be a good class participant instructs, “Speak with conviction. Even if you believe something only 55 percent, say it as if you believe it 100 percent,” Susan Cain reported in her bestselling book Quiet. At HBS, Cain noticed, “If a student talks often and forcefully, then he’s a player; if he doesn’t, he’s on the margins.”

Cain observed that the men at HBS “look like people who expect to be in charge.... I have the feeling that if you asked one of them for driving directions, he’d greet you with a can-do smile and throw himself into the task of helping you to your destination — whether or not he knew the way.”
HBS alumni include George W. Bush, class of 1975, as well as:
  • Jamie Dimon, 1982, CEO and chairman of JP Morgan Chase
  • Grover Norquist, 1981, president of Americans for Tax Reform
  • Henry Paulson, 1970, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, former CEO of Goldman Sachs
  • Mitt Romney, 1975, former governor of Massachusetts, co-founder of Bain Capital
  • Jeffrey Skilling, 1979, former CEO of Enron, convicted of securities fraud and insider trading
People with great power over our lives, in government, business, medicine, and elsewhere, who don’t know what they are talking about are scary. Even more scary are people in authority who don’t know what they’re talking about but who have spent a lifetime perfecting how to appear like they do. Complete conviction and total certainty are sources of great power, especially over vulnerable and uncertain people. And so the pretense of conviction and certainty can be quite damaging.
Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” and former hedge-fund manager, received his BA from Harvard and his JD from Harvard Law School. In 2007, Market Watch quoted Cramer: “What's important when you are in that hedge-fund mode is to not do anything remotely truthful because the truth is so against your view, that it’s important to create a new truth, to develop a fiction.”
Some Harvard graduates have famously rebelled against bullshit training, as Harvard alumni also include Henry David Thoreau and David Halberstam. Halberstam’s 1972 book The Best and the Brightest, with its ironic and mocking title, takes down pseudo-certain Harvard (and other Ivy League-educated) presidential advisers who convinced American leaders and the American public that the Vietnam War was a great idea. To be fair to Harvard alumni, some of America’s most famous pseudo-certain government officials did not attend Harvard, including Donald Rumsfeld (Princeton) and Alan Greenspan (New York University)."

Sunday, January 26, 2014

The new face of food stamps: working-age Americans

The new face of food stamps: working-age Americans

"In a first, working-age people now make up
the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps - a switch from
a few years ago, when children and the elderly were the main
recipients."


"Economists say having a job may no longer be enough for self-sufficiency in today's economy.

"A
low-wage job supplemented with food stamps is becoming more common for
the working poor," said Timothy Smeeding, an economics professor at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in income inequality.
"Many of the U.S. jobs now being created are low- or minimum-wage -
part-time or in areas such as retail or fast food - which means food
stamp use will stay high for some time, even after unemployment
improves.""


 

Bayer Pharmaceutical CEO: Cancer drug only ‘for western patients who can afford it’ | The Raw Story

Bayer Pharmaceutical CEO: Cancer drug only ‘for western patients who can afford it’ | The Raw Story

"In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Bayer CEO Marijn Dekkers said that his company’s new cancer drug, Nexavar, isn’t “for Indians,” but “for western patients who can afford it.”


The drug, which is particularly effective on late-stage kidney and liver cancer, costs approximately $69,000
per year in India, so in March 2012 an Indian court granted a license
to an Indian company to produce to the drug at a 97 percent discount.


Bayer sued Natco Pharma Ltd., but in March of last year, the High
Court in Mumbai denied its appeal. Bayer CEO called the compulsory
license issued by the Indian court “essentially theft,” then said “[w]e did not develop this medicine for Indians…[w]e developed it for western patients who can afford it.”


Nexavar costs approximately $96,000 per year in the United States, but Bayer assures “western patients” that they can have access to the drug for a $100 copay."