Greg A. Brown

Charles Taylor ordered his soldiers to eat the enemy as to cause fear amongst the population. Whoa.

This is the big debate in education philanthropy right now.
There are two camps: the “fix the system” people and the “replace
the system” people. There are philanthropists who only want to help the
system get better, and they only invest through public-school districts. And
then there is a group of philanthropists who don’t believe the system
can be fixed or should be fixed, and they only invest in alternatives to the
system, like voucher programs or charter schools. There are a few, like the
Gates Foundation, that attempt to be a bridge. When I was at Gates, our belief
was that if your long-term goal is to provide quality schools for all kids,
then you have to do both. One of our main educational initiatives was to start
new small high schools. It was mostly an outsider approach, and it was pretty
successful. Of the 1,200 new schools, 80 percent of them are going to be good
to very good. That’s a high rate of success. But we only reached, with
those schools, 3 percent or 4 percent of American high-school students. You
look at that and you say: “O.K., that was a good investment. It’s
going to stick; it has lots of sustainability — but it won’t grow
to scale fast enough.” If you want to make a real impact, you have to
work inside the system, too.

Vander Ark lays this out in a group interview on how to make the biggest difference in education philanthropy, but that basic dictum applies in all sorts of other fields too. If you want to instigate political change within the United State, you’re far better served by pushing for it within one of the two major parties than to start or support a third-party that’ll likely never win any significant elections. Institutions often survive out of their skill at self-preservation, not necessarily their skill at intended tasks. And the ones that have been around for long enough are very good at it. Within the myriad, intertwining narratives of The Wire is a constant insistence that this is the way institutions perpetuate themselves, and that any institution will eventually turn against those whom it serves. Any reform has to be predicated upon accepting that fact, and Mr. Ark does just that.

The New Republic has a great article up on Obama’s economic and foreign advisors, and how they like to come up with policy. Particularly interesting was his tendency to pull economic advisors from the academic sphere, particularly the right-leaning University of Chicago.

“Representative Tom Tancredo, another long-shot GOP candidate, tells me that after a debate in New Hampshire, one of his staffers walked up to a guy in a shark costume and asked him if he was a Ron Paul supporter. ‘No. They’re all nuts,’ replied the shark. ‘I’m just a guy in a shark suit.’”
Time Magazine

China Mieville, a sci-fi/fantasy/hard-to-classify author and part-time writer on international law, wrote a scathing indictment of libertarian philosophy that also laments how they stole the original coolness of floating city-states, giant ships that only function under their own laws. It’s a great, great read.

The New York Times Magazine this Sunday featured an excellent article on the clash in southeastern US between diminishing water supplies and ever-growing cities. A teaser:

A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

Lawrence Lessig fought the radical extension of copyright for 10 years, and now he’s turning his attention to the deeper problem of corruption in democratic institutions, with this presentation an early attempt to begin grappling with the issue. Over an hour long, it’s pretty much quality all the way through.

Maplight.org is a really interesting (and useful!) venture that allows anyone to easily view the relationships between money received by congresspersons and the votes they place on bills. For great examples, check out the intro video they offer.

The best investigative reporting (and documentaries) being produced today started a new season yesterday when Frontline aired “Cheney’s Law,” covering Dick Cheney’s continuing campaign to use the office of the Vice President to radically expand the conception of executive authority (see the extensive Washington Post series on the same subject). Along with the new season is a new website, and they stream their videos using flash (like YouTube) now, instead of the old system of Windows Media Player and Real Player.

Late last night, the New York Times published an article on how Al-Qaeda sympathizers use the internet to spread propaganda supporting their ideological causes. I was able to track the site down shortly after the article was published, but it was quickly forced offline (maybe by the traffic of bloggers independently finding the site and pointing to it?) with only Google’s cache remaining. But luckily for our little academic investigation here, the author of that site previously maintained a mirror on Wordpress.com that allows you to look through the archives for interest’s sake.