Across Western Europe, the “lifestyle superpower,” the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II.
"Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.
The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy."
"Consider: Lighter-skinned Latinos in the United States make $5,000 more on average than darker-skinned Latinos. The education test-score gap between light-skinned and dark-skinned African-Americans is nearly as large as the gap between whites and blacks.
The Harvard neuroscientist Allen Counter has found that in Arizona, California and Texas, hundreds of Mexican-American women have suffered mercury poisoning as a result of the use of skin-whitening creams. In India, where I was born, a best-selling line of women’s cosmetics called Fair and Lovely has recently been supplemented by a product aimed at men called Fair and Handsome.
This isn’t racism, per se: it’s colorism, an unconscious prejudice that isn’t focused on a single group like blacks so much as on blackness itself. Our brains, shaped by culture and history, create intricate caste hierarchies that privilege those who are physically and culturally whiter and punish those who are darker."
'Our ability to take any pleasure, or even interest, in shows like this—in which participants are depicted as energetic but essentially aimless, oblivious of their own deficits, and delusional about their attractiveness and their importance in the world—hinges not on our ability to identify with them but on our ability to distinguish ourselves from them. Unless the show manages to make us feel as though we were anthropologists secretly observing a new tribe through a break in the trees, it hasn’t done its job. MTV has succeeded on that score; it can give itself a pat on the back for enabling viewers to feel superior to at least eight other people.'
"Some experts say the decline in the black population may be overstated because poorer people are typically undercounted by the census, and Harlem has a disproportionate number of poor people. Others warn that proposed development and higher property values may force poor people out and say that when the city was the neighborhood’s leading landlord it should have increased ownership opportunities for Harlem residents .
“Gentrification — the buying up and rehabilitation of land and buildings, whether by families or developers, occupied or abandoned —means a rising rent tide for all, leading inevitably to displacement next door, down the block, or two streets away,” said Neil Smith, director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center."
"Other analysts point to the outflow of some blacks and the influx of others as positive evidence that barriers to integration have fallen in other neighborhoods and that Harlem has become a more attractive place to live.
Check out the NYT article here.
“It’s a mistake to see this only as a story of racial change,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president. “What’s interesting is that many African-Americans are living in Harlem by choice, not necessity.”"
"Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape.Read the NYT article here.
“Now we really have to go undercover,” said Stosh Mugisha, a gay rights activist who said she was pinned down in a guava orchard and raped by a farmhand who wanted to cure her of her attraction to girls. She said that she was impregnated and infected with H.I.V., but that her grandmother’s reaction was simply, “ ‘You are too stubborn.’ ” "
"In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years, according to Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, who conducted the study with a colleague, Cynthia Brandt.Read the NYT article here.
The reasons for the lower rates of civic involvement, Professor McAdam said, include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America’s approach to the issue of educational inequity, among other factors."
"The rules of political speech on the Internet are usually pretty simple. In America, almost anything goes. In places like China, the censors call the shots. But in India -- a boisterous democracy that's riven by religious and ethnic tension -- the game is far trickier, as Google is discovering."
"As Google broadens its reach, it must increasingly tweak the way it operates to suit new cultures. While authoritarian countries pose well-known challenges, Google is learning that even democracies such as India can be fraught with legal and cultural complications. Its experience here could serve as a precedent for other Web companies.
The nation of 1.2 billion is the world's largest democracy and in principle affords free speech to its citizens. But the country has a volatile mix of religious, ethnic and caste politics and a history of mob violence. So, the government has the authority to curtail speech rights in certain cases. India's Constitution encapsulates that gray zone: Free speech is subject to "reasonable restrictions" for such purposes as maintaining "public order, decency or morality."
"It's been less than two days since all of this has happened. We still have a lot to learn about who Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was and what made him into a human bomb. From what I know the story is particularly tragic, because on a continent where most people had so little he seemed to have so much. He made up an elite group of perhaps .1% of the population. Not only did he study abroad he studied to be an engineer. He could have come back to Nigeria and put his skills to use in a wide array of fields: agriculture, health, transportation, telecommunications, he could have created solutions that would help some of the poorest people on earth. Even if he didn't want to do that, with a wealthy family and well connected father, the world was his oyster. Why would he throw all that away to follow this horrific path? When he studied in England, what happened there to infuse this hatred into his heart?
I've spent the last five years of my life dedicated to engineering products that would help the world's poor. I wonder if I had ever had the opportunity to meet Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and talk shop with, discuss the agro-processing devices and small solar lighting systems ... supply chains and accessing rural markets ... that he might have seen that at least this American was not his enemy. Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered at all; how can you reason with what is inherently unreasonable. I suppose that all we can do, all I can do, is not give up."
"With the deal gutted, the heads of state session concluded with a final battle as the Chinese delegate insisted on removing the 1.5C target so beloved of the small island states and low-lying nations who have most to lose from rising seas. President Nasheed of the Maldives, supported by Brown, fought valiantly to save this crucial number. "How can you ask my country to go extinct?" demanded Nasheed. The Chinese delegate feigned great offence – and the number stayed, but surrounded by language which makes it all but meaningless. The deed was done."Read the Guardian article here (Thanks Kelvin!).
"Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away."
"This is a trend that nobody would have guessed. The word "yard" seems fairly uncommon, and indeed it barely breaches a rate of five mentions in every 10,000 status updates. When we compare 2009 to 2008, however, we see a huge increase. Have all the hipsters turned to yard work as the latest fad? Probably not. A more likely explanation is that hipsters' moms and dads are also on Facebook, and these folks have yards that require some tending."
"Tioga designs, finances, installs and maintains solar photovoltaic systems for companies, institutions and municipalities. Its customers pay nothing for the systems. In exchange, Tioga gets to use their property to install solar PV systems and a contract to sell them the electricity produced for a set cost over a long period, typically 15 or 20 years."There are several other players in the solar financing landscape. Similar financing approaches for residental solar systems are being taken by SunRun, SolarCity, SunEdison, and SunPower. All of these companies are taking advantage of a 30% federal investment tax credit on solar installations.
"Tioga doesn’t actually install the cells itself. Rather, it works with small contractors for that purpose. Its expertise is creating pools of cash from banks like Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley that can reap the tax credits and provide Tioga with stable, long-term financing for the projects."
"This labor-saving device — part fortuneteller, part shrink? — has opened a window into our collective soul. With millions of people pouring their hearts into this modern-day confessional, we get a direct, if mysterious, glimpse into the heads of our fellow Web surfers."Here's the NYT article. Here are some of their findings:
"If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy)."
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"The most lethal example, of course, were the two illusions marketed to us on the way to Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and some link to Al Qaeda. That history has since been rewritten by Bush alumni, Democratic politicians who supported the Iraq invasion and some of the news media that purveyed the White House fictions (especially the television press, which rarely owned up to its failure as print journalists have). It was exclusively “bad intelligence,” we’re now told, that pushed us into the fiasco. But contradictions to that “bad intelligence” were in plain sight during the run-up to the war — even sometimes in the press. Yet we wanted to suspend disbelief. Much of the country, regardless of party, didn’t want to question its leaders, no matter how obviously they were hyping any misleading shred of intelligence that could fit their predetermined march to war. It’s the same impulse that kept many from questioning how Mark McGwire’s and Barry Bonds’s outlandishly cartoonish physiques could possibly be steroid-free."
"Google's platform independence isn't meant as altruism—it's good strategy. The company gets the vast bulk of its revenue from advertising. Thus Google has no business reason to care whether I got on the Web using an iPhone, a Droid, a BlackBerry, or a Windows 7 desktop—all it cares about is that I got on the Web at all and that I stay on the Web all day, every day."
