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Monk's News Reel
Nov. 13th, 2011 07:59 amPhung yearns to attend university and become an accountant. It’s an almost impossible dream for a village girl, but across East Asia the poor often compensate for lack of money with a dazzling work ethic and gritty faith that education can change destinies. The obsession with schooling is a legacy of Confucianism — a 2,500-year-old tradition of respect for teachers, scholarship and meritocratic exams. That’s one reason Confucian countries like China, South Korea and Vietnam are among the world’s star performers in the war on poverty.
-- Nicholas D. Kristof at NYT
Thousands of enraged Penn State students tore through the streets of State College, Pa., overnight to protest the firing of Joe Paterno after the longtime head football coach was removed from his position effective immediately.
Amid chants of "We want JoePa," "One more game" and "F*** the media!," rioting students flipped over a television van, knocked a lamppost onto a car, threw toilet tissue and rocks at police and set off fireworks.
-- LJ/News on the child sex abuse scandal at Penn State
The sad irony here is that the euro is, in reality, essentially an Italian creation. If you were part of the dialogue in the late 80s and early 90s, it became clear that the euro was best understood as a plot by Italian technocrats to get themselves German central bankers.
This was not, it turns out, a good idea.
-- Paul Krugman on Italian phase of Eurocrisis
As anti-capitalism protests spread around the world, a growing group of almost 1,200 authors including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Neil Gaiman has publicly announced its support for the Occupy movement.
-- ONTD/Guardian
At this moment, a whole lot of people, most of them 15 to 20 years younger than me, are protesting in every major city. What are they angry about? A lot of things, some of which are partially my fault.
See, I'm a part of Generation X, the post-Baby Boom era kids who grew up on a mental diet of Beavis and Butthead and Alice in Chains. We wrote poems about how angry we were at our fathers, wore goatees like weapons and made panties burst into flames by playing Pearl Jam's Black on our acoustic guitars. We were a bridge from the Baby Boomers to all you guys who are in high school and college now. And I'm pretty sure we fucked up that handoff pretty badly.
-- John Cheese at Cracked.com
Conservatives have been complaining about the supposed inefficiency of large welfare states for a very long time. But in the last few years, respected economists like Jeff Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz have been pointing out that the data suggests otherwise. The countries with the most generous welfare states in Europe are the Scandinavian ones, where the overall tax burden exceeds 50 percent – in other words, more than half of all income goes back to the government. Yet these have thrived economically.
This isn’t coincidental, the economists argue. On the contrary, the generous welfare states that these taxes support guarantee economic security and the provision of essential services – not just health care but also quality day care – that make people less anxious about economic volatility. That, in turn, allows the government to pursue free trade and other policies that allow for a more fluid economy.
-- Jonathan Cohn
In the 1970s—and still today, though to a lesser extent—two beliefs held sway in the social sciences. First, that people are generally rational and have sound judgment. Second, that when they depart from rationality, it's a temporary aberration, resulting from emotions like fear, hatred, and love. Kahneman and Tversky's research suggested an entirely different view: that it is the very way we think—our use of what they called heuristics, or mental shortcuts—that leads us astray.
-- Evan R. Goldstein at The Chronicle Review
The best piece about Darío Castrillón Hoyos was written by the Catholic essayist John Zmirak, and his words apply to Joe Paterno as well. Sins committed in the name of a higher good, Zmirak wrote, can “smell and look like lilies. But they flank a coffin. Lying dead and stiff inside that box is natural Justice ... what each of us owes the other in an unconditional debt.”
No higher cause can trump that obligation — not a church, and certainly not a football program. And not even a lifetime of heroism can make up for leaving a single child alone, abandoned to evil, weeping in the dark.
-- Ross Douthat at NYT
-- Nicholas D. Kristof at NYT
Thousands of enraged Penn State students tore through the streets of State College, Pa., overnight to protest the firing of Joe Paterno after the longtime head football coach was removed from his position effective immediately.
Amid chants of "We want JoePa," "One more game" and "F*** the media!," rioting students flipped over a television van, knocked a lamppost onto a car, threw toilet tissue and rocks at police and set off fireworks.
-- LJ/News on the child sex abuse scandal at Penn State
The sad irony here is that the euro is, in reality, essentially an Italian creation. If you were part of the dialogue in the late 80s and early 90s, it became clear that the euro was best understood as a plot by Italian technocrats to get themselves German central bankers.
This was not, it turns out, a good idea.
-- Paul Krugman on Italian phase of Eurocrisis
As anti-capitalism protests spread around the world, a growing group of almost 1,200 authors including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Neil Gaiman has publicly announced its support for the Occupy movement.
-- ONTD/Guardian
At this moment, a whole lot of people, most of them 15 to 20 years younger than me, are protesting in every major city. What are they angry about? A lot of things, some of which are partially my fault.
See, I'm a part of Generation X, the post-Baby Boom era kids who grew up on a mental diet of Beavis and Butthead and Alice in Chains. We wrote poems about how angry we were at our fathers, wore goatees like weapons and made panties burst into flames by playing Pearl Jam's Black on our acoustic guitars. We were a bridge from the Baby Boomers to all you guys who are in high school and college now. And I'm pretty sure we fucked up that handoff pretty badly.
-- John Cheese at Cracked.com
Conservatives have been complaining about the supposed inefficiency of large welfare states for a very long time. But in the last few years, respected economists like Jeff Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz have been pointing out that the data suggests otherwise. The countries with the most generous welfare states in Europe are the Scandinavian ones, where the overall tax burden exceeds 50 percent – in other words, more than half of all income goes back to the government. Yet these have thrived economically.
This isn’t coincidental, the economists argue. On the contrary, the generous welfare states that these taxes support guarantee economic security and the provision of essential services – not just health care but also quality day care – that make people less anxious about economic volatility. That, in turn, allows the government to pursue free trade and other policies that allow for a more fluid economy.
-- Jonathan Cohn
In the 1970s—and still today, though to a lesser extent—two beliefs held sway in the social sciences. First, that people are generally rational and have sound judgment. Second, that when they depart from rationality, it's a temporary aberration, resulting from emotions like fear, hatred, and love. Kahneman and Tversky's research suggested an entirely different view: that it is the very way we think—our use of what they called heuristics, or mental shortcuts—that leads us astray.
-- Evan R. Goldstein at The Chronicle Review
The best piece about Darío Castrillón Hoyos was written by the Catholic essayist John Zmirak, and his words apply to Joe Paterno as well. Sins committed in the name of a higher good, Zmirak wrote, can “smell and look like lilies. But they flank a coffin. Lying dead and stiff inside that box is natural Justice ... what each of us owes the other in an unconditional debt.”
No higher cause can trump that obligation — not a church, and certainly not a football program. And not even a lifetime of heroism can make up for leaving a single child alone, abandoned to evil, weeping in the dark.
-- Ross Douthat at NYT
