Andrew Golis

From NPR. Very thoughtful, modest and charismatic guy. I know the mainstream media thinks Obama is boring, that he has no future, that he’s dumb and all that, but I don’t care. I’m telling you, this guy is going places!

check this out. A fascinating point about American religion. I don’t know whether it’s valid or simply playing off of common conceptions, but I’m sure curious.

Two things:

First, William Shatner, Ben Folds and Joe Jackson rock my socks. This is a clip of them on Jay Leno. Watch it, it is awesome.

Second, for Napolean Dynamite lovers, a fun little thing.

as discovered by one of my blockmates and wisely considered in a comment in the Crimson yesterday.

An amazingly hilarious staff ed by the NYT yesterday about why John Bolton, President Bush’s nominee for representative to the UN and well-known UN-hater (read here, here, or here). It ends brilliantly:

We certainly look forward to Mr. Bolton’s confirmation hearings, and, after that, his performance at the United Nations, where he will undoubtedly do a fine job continuing the Bush administration’s charm offensive with the rest of the world.

Which leaves us wondering what Mr. Bush’s next nomination will be. Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate a new set of Geneva Conventions? Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission? Kenneth Lay for energy secretary?

Touche NYT. Touche.

Hillary is pushing a bill that would try to combat the effect of sex and violence in the media on children:

She wants President Bush and Congress to direct $90 million over five years to study the impact of electronic media on kids’ “cognitive, social, emotional, physical, and behavioral development.

“We need better, more current research to study the impact of the new interactive, digital and wireless media dominating our kids’ lives,” Clinton said yesterday, after reintroducing the bill that she also backed last year.

As first lady, Clinton pushed for better controls over what children see through the so-called V-chip law, which made it easier for parents to keep inappropriate television shows away from young eyes. During her campaign for Senate in 2000, she supported efforts to limit kids’ exposure to sex and violence.

During a Kaiser Foundation forum, Clinton singled out the popular video game Grand Theft Auto, which allows players to pretend they’re on a crime spree.

“They’re playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them,” Clinton complained.

Over time, she argued, the effects of such media-driven desensitization teaches children “that it’s OK to diss people because they’re women or they’re a different color or they’re from a different place.”

For some reason I have the feeling that this is something that Democrats are supposed to oppose, but I have no idea why. It seems SOOO important that we turn back the tide of our violent, anti-intellectual sexist culture. Can anyone explain to me what the problem with that is?

From DemsTalk (the Harvard College Dems list):

Kerry is a Catholic. Why didn’t he talk about the humanitarian side of his faith? Why haven’t Democrats rallied the religious left? The right does not have a monopoly on religious values. Pope John XXIII once said in his encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963):

But first We must speak of man’s rights. Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services. In consequence, he has the right to be looked after in the event of ill-health; disability stemming from his work; widowhood; old age; enforced unemployment; or whenever through no fault of his own he is deprived of the means of livelihood.

The worker is likewise entitled to a wage that is determined in accordance with the precepts of justice. This needs stressing. The amount a worker receives must be sufficient, in proportion to available funds, to allow him and his family a standard of living consistent with human dignity. It is opportune to point out that the right to own private property entails a social obligation as well.

Finally, man’s personal dignity involves his right to take an active part in public life, and to make his own contribution to the common welfare of his fellow citizens. As Pope Pius XII said, “man as such, far from being an object or, as it were, an inert element in society, is rather its subject, its basis and its purpose; and so must he be esteemed.”

Human society, as We here picture it, demands that men be guided by justice, respect the rights of others and do their duty. It demands, too, that they be animated by such love as will make them feel the needs of others as their own, and induce them to share their goods with others, and to strive in the world to make all men alike heirs to the noblest of intellectual and spiritual values.

Well said and so important.

Boring, old and conservative professor Martin Feldstein is stepping down from teaching Ec 10, the intro to economics class here that is the biggest class at Harvard and taken by almost everyone who concentrates in a social science. Replacing him will be a young, conservative professor (it’s unclear on whether or not he too will be painfully boring) Greg Mankiw, who just finished his tenure as the top economist at the White House (head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors).

I think they should go back to having this class legitimately co-taught, as it was when John Kenneth Galbraith (a liberal former Kennedy advisor and author of the famous book The Affluent Society) taught it with Feldy (and another conservative before that). I understand that explain capitalism in a purely scientific way means being a cold-hearted conservative in some ways, but it doesn’t have to be two former Republican advisors. I also think that the alternate Ec 10 is not a sufficient answer and crams to much info into one semester.

Thoughts?

not to shill for the democratic party or anything (I did work for the party as well as the new chairman, so I guess it’s not really a suprise), but you should all check out and sign the dems petition “Protect Social Security.”

Someone at some point commented on the blog about supporting private accounts. If you’d like to chat about it, comment and we can exchange info, website, thoughts etc.

SAC vice-chair and aspiring SAC Chair (as well as maybe aspiring UC pres/vp candidate) has an important OpEd in today’s Crimson. It’s a bit long and hard to slog through the whole thing, but the gist is really important:

We must recognize this success as the initiation of a more critical conversation between the Undergraduate Council and the University. It is a conversation about the realities of undergraduate life at the College. The establishment of a 24-hour library constitutes an important first step in University Hall’s commitment to recognizing the dramatically skewed and extended schedules of students on campus. And it is a conversation that will continue with all deliberate speed as the UC and the administration work together to gain greater understanding and accommodation of undergraduate lives.

The administration is waking up. As we said during the campaign, they’re realizing that it’s OUR HOME! Fight on oh UCers, fight on.