Daniel Lubetzky

Convicted Of Charisma
By Michael Kinsley
Washington Post, 8/23/2008
Kinsley explains the Republican strategy for presidential elections. He says they don’t waste much time and energy probing the Democratic opponent’s weaknesses. Instead, they go after his biggest strength. So, in 2004 they attacked Kerry’s war service and in 1988 went after Dukakis’ populist appeal. Now the Republicans are attacking Obama’s charisma, as if popularity itself were a disqualifying factor. It comes close to being an attack on democracy itself.
Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time magazine.
Link to full text in primary source.

72 hours that will change the world
By Nahid Hatr
Al Arab Al Yom (Jordan), 8/18/2008
Hatr comments on Raghida Durgham, a well-known writer for Al-Hayat, who expressed anxiety because of the "American retreat and confusion facing the Russian bullying in the Caucasian region." "What is important here is that Durgham is close to the pivots of the Arab-American alliance. Thus, her attitude shows that the circles of this pivot are extremely worried that Washington might be too weak to confront Moscow’s return to the international playground as a major player," he writes. "Washington’s allies must be feeling extremely edgy at the escalating international developments, which are leading to the emergence of a new multi-polar world order." How will the Americans respond? Will they accept the new balance of power and the new world order based on many players? "Or will the Americans follow Durgham’s advice and use their forces in Iraq in a new aggression on Iran as part of an effort, which we believe is doomed to fail, to regain global hegemony?"
Link to full text in primary source.

For those denying that America is being enveloped by an obesity epidemic whose repercussions we cannot begin to fathom, as if data about how 1 in 3 children born this year will be diabetic and 32% of children are overweight, new data shows that adult obesity rates increased in 37 US States across the US over the past year.  "The rate of adult obesity now exceeds 25% in 28 states" compared to a national average of 15% back in 1980.  1980 is when obesity started growing at such steep pace, and it is no coincidence that 1980 is also the year when high fructose corn syrup was introduced.

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A few weeks back I attended a play hosted by Stanford Law School, a one-man-show by Lawrence Fishburne about Thurgood Marshall.  At the end, retiring Justice Marshall quotes a poem from his classmate Langston Hughes:

Oh, let America be America again

The land that never has been yet —

And yet must be — the land where

every man is free.

The land that’s mine

— the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME —

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Oh yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me.

And yet, I swear this oath —

America will be!

The full poem is here.

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A recent study with pregnant female rats indicated that the pups of those rats who were offered junk food ended up opting for junk food at far higher rates than the pups of moms that were under a regular chow regime. 

…pups whose mothers ate junk food while pregnant and lactating had a greater taste for food high in fat and sugar than those whose mothers did not. The junk-food pups ate more calories and were more prone to gaining weight.

And:

For most of our evolutionary past, the problem has been avoiding starvation. An environment awash with sugars and fats is, therefore, an evolutionary novelty: in hundreds of millions of years of evolution, this is the first time such foods have been abundant. Giant quantities of fats and sugars have not, historically, been available to a developing fetus, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they do have a harmful impact.

If this is right, it raises the alarming possibility that the obesity epidemic has a built-in snowball effect. If children born to obese mothers are, owing to the environment in the womb, predisposed to obesity, they may find staying thin especially hard. Reversing the epidemic may thus rest on helping women to lose weight before they conceive and helping them to eat a balanced, non-junk-food diet while they are pregnant. The well-being of the next generation may depend on it.

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From the ever-incisive and amusing Michael Kinsley, trying to decode the Democratic Party’s "platform":

Translating the document is no simple task. First, an alarmist note. Democrats favor “tough, practical and humane immigration reform.” And, “We will provide immediate relief to working people who have lost their jobs, families who have lost their homes and people who have lost their way.” It’s not clear what that third item refers to. Tax credits for G.P.S. devices? Presumably, “people who have lost their way” doesn’t mean illegal immigrants trying to find the border.

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Underscoring the depth of the challenge to freedom as we know it, no less than NYT Editor Bill Keller led the Week In Review with an analysis of China and Russia’s rise:

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

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"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

- Alan Kay

Mike Edwards questions whether the trendy concept of philantrocapitalism exemplified by Bill Gates is as effective as the uncritical buzz it is generating.  And he raises questions worthy of consideration, including this one in his q&a:

…what are the actual effects of business involvement in activities that are intended to promote social change? Where is business involvement useful, where might it be damaging, and do we have the evidence to separate one from the other? Here’s a list of things that business could usefully do:

• pay your taxes
• don’t produce goods that harm people
• pay decent wages and benefits
• stop subverting politics
• obey regulations in the public interest

The problem is, philanthrocapitalism does none of these things.

Well, business actually has a pivotal role to play beyond the basic code of decency Mike Edwards lists above.  As the primary force in the 21st century, the private sector can make enormous positive contributions into our lives. 

I am a strong advocate of engineering market forces to achieve positive change, marrying the business model to the social mission, as we’ve endeavored to do for the last fifteen years at PeaceWorks. 

And I am similarly an advocate of using entrepreneurial and creative practices commonly found in the private sector to maximize impact in civil society, as we try to do at OneVoice.

But beyond critical appraisal of "philantrocapitalism’s" effectiveness advocated in Mike’s article, what most resonates and troubles me about the unexamined noise with this and the broader concept of "corporate social responsibility" is that often it is used to mask dishonest or noxious behavior from corporations, to create bland appearances about business contributions to society while hiding under the carpet abhorrent behaviors that may be the primary driver of a business. 

Certainly, a company cannot justify or sugarcoat ruthless practices, or an underlying business model that harms people just by affixing the "csr" motto to its ads.  Unlike when people purchased indulgences from the medieval Church to swiftly absolve them for abominable sins, you cannot (or should not be able to) donate your way into brand heaven in the 21st century.

In sharp contrast to Mike’s provocative article, take a look at this piece in TIME Magazine where Bill Gates discovers the field of social entrepreneurship for humanity, dubbing it "creative capitalism."  Gates first announced this discovery in Davos back in January, where he was given 45 minutes to share how he conceived a utilitarian servile version of social responsibility.  It struck me he had just discovered and repackaged a field long in existence, just as he appropriated the netscape browser and apple’s operating system.

Social contributions should have a soul, a sentiment, and a sincerity of purpose.  Corporations are driven by human beings, so hopefully they will be driven to make our world better because this too is their world.  I have yet to meet a business person (or a human being) that does not care about the world.  But the trouble is that sometimes some corporate business models or junctures present people with concentrated profit-maximizing opportunities that cause harm to society overall.  And no amount of "CSR" should exculpate taking the wrong path – whether by lobbying the government to help a specific industry at the expense of the community or the environment, or by undermining competition, or any of the items in Mike’s list.

In the end, consumers will see through corporate efforts to manipulate causes just to make them look hip and responsible.  Alas, along with the unscrupulous corporation so too will fall the credibility of this important space – the sincere intersection between doing well and doing good.

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Aluf Benn provided an insightful report on what Olmert "offered’ Abbas as a way to at least insert a proposal that may give him a legacy.

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Interesting:

A new study from the RAND Corporation examined how 648 terror groups around the world ended between 1968 and 2006. It found that by far the most common way for them to disappear was to be absorbed by the political process. The second most common way was to be defeated by police work. In contrast, in only 7 percent of cases did military force destroy the terrorist group.

“There is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” the report declares. “Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended.”

From Nicholas Kristof’s NY Times column, Make Diplomacy, Not War.

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