Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. - A.J. Liebling
{ Daily Archives }
A new study warns of stagnation in arab societies
“The whole Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth the number that Greece translates,” the report said. In the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, it concludes, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.
The Economist summarizes the problem as a lack of freedom, knowledge, and women’s rights.
The Economist describes how both parties (but especially the Democrats) remain hopeless on the voucher issue:
It is only a small exaggeration to describe the Democratic Party as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers’ unions. Throw a brick into any large gathering of Democrats and you are sure to hit a teacher or two. It is impossible to win a nomination for national office without pledging allegiance to the unions on vouchers.
This means that the job of championing vouchers falls by default to the Republicans. But Republicans are hardly the ideal champions for a measure that primarily benefits poor blacks in the inner cities — not least because their own base, the middle-class suburbs, are perfectly happy with their local schools (which are often the reason why they live where they do). Very few think “their” schools really need a large influx of poor black children using vouchers to flee from inner-city schools.
Besides, few if any Republicans are serious enough about vouchers
to increase them as Milton Friedman suggests:
Raise the voucher amount to $7,000 — the sum that Ohio state and local governments now spend per child in government schools — and make it available to all students, not simply to students from low-income families, and most private schools accepting vouchers would no longer be religious. A host of new nonprofit and for-profit schools would emerge. Voucher-bearing students would then be less dependent on low-tuition parochial schools.
So, I remain an independent.
As a serious magazine, the Economist appreciates a sense of humor more than most. (A few years ago, a survey on the downturn in the petroleum industry showed an oil rig drilling with the caption “unwell”. And writing on artificial intelligence:
There is no practical reason to create machine intelligences indistinguishable from human ones. People are in plentiful supply. Should a shortage arise, there are proven and popular methods for making more.
This article on an American-demanded exemption from the International Criminal Court shows an American soldier with a machine gun playing basketball with a Bosnian youth. The caption: “Just don’t foul anybody deliberately”.
Historian David McCollough has an NYT Op-Ed on the (dead white) men who authored the Declaration of Independence 226 years ago today.
The miracle was that imperfect mortals could so rise to the occasion, that such noble ideals and brilliant political leadership came to the fore as they did, that so few could, in the end, accomplish so much for all humankind….
We think we live in a dangerous, uncertain time, and we do. But theirs was worse, and they had no sure way of knowing how things would turn out, any more than we do. Their courage and determination, their commitment to what they called the Cause of America, were almost beyond our imagining. To sign your name to the Declaration of Independence was to declare yourself a traitor to the British Crown. If caught by enemy forces, you would almost certainly be hanged.
And consider that in that same first week of July 1776, the British fleet appeared in New York Harbor and began landing on Staten Island the largest force ever sent to crush a rebellion, fully 32,000 troops by the time they were all ashore. This was more than the entire population of Philadelphia, the largest city in America. When the signers of the Declaration pledged “our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor,” that was no mere rhetorical flourish.
It is impossible to express the gratitude we owe to those few brave men.