Myth Of The 28% Foreign Aid Budget By Ezra Klein November 7, 2013 For years, the example budget wonks turn to when they want to underscore the public's ignorance about the budget is the baffling, but persistent, belief that foreign aid is bankrupting the country. "Foreign aid is the only program that [people] consistently favor cutting," said Bruce Bartlett with a sigh, "perhaps because of grossly overestimating its share of the budget." He went on to list poll after poll showing the public's wildly incorrect opinions about how much the United States spends helping other countries. And yet the perception persists. Of course, foreign aid isn't that pricey. But as of yet, budget wonks haven't had a shadow of success at convincing the country that foreign aid is a tiny sliver of federal spending.
Benefits of using a wiki - CustomWare Book - Wiki While You Work When I ask people what they like about using wikis, I typically get subjective responses such as 'I just love it', 'it makes documentation easier', 'I don't know how I could live with out it'. One nice quote is as follows: When the team had doubts on decisions and changes that have been made in past activities we always use the wiki to remind us of the decision or changes that were made. (The wiki is like the 5th member in the group.) Wikis have many benefits, some are are difficult to precisely define. Tangible Benefits The use of wikis in projects has been shown to reduce project delivery time . Intangible Benefits Wikis are social software in that they help connect people across an organisation.
Confessions of a Public Defender I am a public defender in a large southern metropolitan area. Fewer than ten percent of the people in the area I serve are black but over 90 per cent of my clients are black. The remaining ten percent are mainly Hispanics but there are a few whites. I have no explanation for why this is, but crime has racial patterns. Hispanics usually commit two kinds of crime: sexual assault on children and driving under the influence. Blacks commit many violent crimes but very few sex crimes. As a young lawyer, I believed the official story that blacks are law abiding, intelligent, family-oriented people, but are so poor they must turn to crime to survive. The media invariably sugarcoat black behavior. Although blacks are only a small percentage of our community, the courthouse is filled with them: the halls and gallery benches are overflowing with black defendants, families, and crime victims. When I am appointed to represent a client I introduce myself and explain that I am his lawyer. No fathers
List of wikis This page contains a list of notable websites that use a wiki model. These websites will sometimes use different software in order to provide the best content management system for their users' needs, but they all share the same basic editing and viewing website model. §Table[edit] §See also[edit] §References[edit] §External links[edit] 31 states have heightened religious freedom protections The recent flurry of state bills giving religious exemptions from certain laws -- including the Arizona law that Gov. Jan Brewer (R) just vetoed -- raises a question: How many states already provide heightened protection for the exercise of religion? The answer? Thirty-one, 18 of which passed state laws based on the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. "These state RFRAs were enacted in response to Supreme Court decisions that had nothing to do with gay rights or same-sex marriage," explained University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock in an e-mail. A new political fight has emerged in part because some of these more recent proposals are shifting the definition of when citizens can opt out on religious grounds. Kansas, for example, already has the Kansas Preservation of Religious Freedom Act. This week the Kansas state Senate declined to take up the House bill. Indiana Gov. Continue reading 10 minutes left
Introduction to Problem Solving .:VirtualSalt Robert Harris Version Date: July 2, 1998 Regardless of what they do for a living or where they live, most people spend most of their waking hours, at work or at home, solving problems. What is a Problem? One of the creative thinker's fundamental insights is that most questions have more than one right answer and most problems have more than one solution. 1. Developing a positive attitude toward problems can transform you into a happier, saner, more confident person who feels (and is) much more in control of life. 2. 3. The Importance of Goals in Problem Solving As you read these definitions, I hope you noticed that they all include the ideas of goals and ideal states. Another way of thinking about this would be to say that the goal or ideal state defines how much of a problem exists or even whether or not there is a problem. For example, let's say you have just brought a pizza home from the pizza parlor and it is beginning to cool. What is a Solution? Stop It Prevent It. Mop It
Barry Goldwater Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Barry Morris Goldwater (January 1 1909 – May 29 1998) was an American politician. §Quotes[edit] I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! My faith in the future rests squarely on the belief that man, if he doesn't first destroy himself, will find new answers in the universe, new technologies, new disciplines, which will contribute to a vastly different and better world in the twenty-first century. … To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom. §Washington Post interview (1994)[edit] §Misattributed[edit]
The War on the Private Mind In Indiana, in Arkansas, and in the boardroom There are two easy ways to get a Republican to roll over and put his paws up in the air: The first is to write him a check, which is the political version of scratching his belly, and the second is to call him a bigot. In both cases, it helps if you have a great deal of money behind you. Tim Cook, who in his role as chief executive of the world’s most valuable company personifies precisely the sort of oppression to which gay people in America are subjected, led the hunting party when Indiana’s governor Mike Pence signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, while Walmart, a company that cannot present its hindquarters enthusiastically enough to the progressives who hate it and everything for which it stands, dispatched its CEO, C. Douglas McMillon, to head off a similar effort in Arkansas, where Governor Asa Hutchison rolled over immediately. RELATED: Religious Liberty and the Left’s End Game RELATED: RFRA: Now More Than Ever
Social Justice Bullies: The Authoritarianism of Millennial Social Justice Social justice, as a concept, has existed for millennia — at least as long as society has had inequity and inequality and there were individuals enlightened enough to question this. When we study history, we see, as the American Transcendentalist Theodore Parker famously wrote, “the arc [of the moral universe]…bends towards justice.” And this seems relatively evident when one looks at history as a single plot line. Things improve. And, if history is read as a book, the supporters of social justice are typically deemed the heroes, the opponents of it the villains. And perhaps it’s my liberal heart speaking, the fact that I grew up in a liberal town, learned US history from a capital-S Socialist, and/or went to one of the most liberal universities in the country, but I view this is a good thing. But millennials are grown up now — and they’re angry. Many will understand this term I used — millennial social justice advocates — as a synonym to the pejorative “social justice warriors.”
KOHLBERG'S STAGES OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT Lawrence Kohlberg was a moral philosopher and student of child development. He was director of Harvard's Center for Moral Education. His special area of interest is the moral development of children - how they develop a sense of right, wrong, and justice. Kohlberg observed that growing children advance through definite stages of moral development in a manner similar to their progression through Piaget's well-known stages of cognitive development. These conclusions have been verified in cross-cultural studies done in , , , , , , , , and . An outline of these developmental stages follows: FOCUS: Self AGES: Up to 10-13 years of age, most prisoners Behavior motivated by anticipation of pleasure or pain. STAGE 1: PUNISHMENT AND OBEDIENCE: Might Makes Right Avoidance of physical punishment and deference to power. response of physical retaliation. determine its goodness or badness. holocaust who were simply "carrying out orders" under threat of punishment, illustrate that others? peers. "nice." here.
Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party | The Weekly Sift Tea Partiers say you don’t understand them because you don’t understand American history. That’s probably true, but not in the way they want you to think. Late in 2012, I came out of the Lincoln movie with two historical mysteries to solve: How did the two parties switch places regarding the South, white supremacy, and civil rights? The first question took some work, but yielded readily to patient googling. Who really won the Civil War? That sounded crazy until I read about Reconstruction. And oh, those blacks Lincoln emancipated? Here’s what my teachers’ should have told me: “Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It wasn’t just that Confederates wanted to continue the war. The Lost Cause. But eventually the good men of the South could take it no longer, so they formed the Ku Klux Klan to protect themselves and their communities. A still from The Birth of a Nation That telling of history is now named for its primary proponent, William Dunning. The first modern war.