I was happy to see Slumdog Millionaire win at the Oscars.

Besides just being an original and wonderful film, it showed that creativity is not restrained by the lack of big names and big budgets.

Ideas and talent can still prevail over wealth and power.

Luck doesn’t hurt either.

from New York Times

December 21, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Bleeding Heart Tightwads
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Excerpts

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

Something similar is true internationally. European countries seem to show more compassion than America in providing safety nets for the poor, and they give far more humanitarian foreign aid per capita than the United States does. But as individuals, Europeans are far less charitable than Americans.

Americans give sums to charity equivalent to 1.67 percent of G.N.P., according to a terrific new book, “Philanthrocapitalism,” by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green. The British are second, with 0.73 percent, while the stingiest people on the list are the French, at 0.14 percent.

It’s true that religion is the essential reason conservatives give more, and religious liberals are as generous as religious conservatives. Among the stingiest of the stingy are secular conservatives.
According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do. But Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes.

In any case, if conservative donations often end up building extravagant churches, liberal donations frequently sustain art museums, symphonies, schools and universities that cater to the well-off. (It’s great to support the arts and education, but they’re not the same as charity for the needy. And some research suggests that donations to education actually increase inequality because they go mostly to elite institutions attended by the wealthy.)

Conservatives also appear to be more generous than liberals in nonfinancial ways. People in red states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent.

Yet the financial ability to contribute to charity, and the willingness to do so, are strikingly unrelated. Amazingly, the working poor, who have the least resources, somehow manage to be more generous as a percentage of income than the middle class.

read the entire article here

Mary Grabar writes in Pajamas Media about the place for foreign languages in the United States. There is a difference in being required to learn a foreign language and the choice to learn a language to expand your learning experience and depth.

Obama’s Language Mandate: Why It Feels Like Hungarian to Me

August 3, 2008 – by Mary Grabar

excerpts

“Obama’s call to teach children Spanish, therefore, reveals not an enlightened appreciation of another culture, but a quotidian concern with basic communication, furthermore communication with immigrants who today are most often illiterate or semiliterate. Obama is not imploring us to learn Spanish in order to read and discuss the works of Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Cervantes, but to be able to fill out welfare forms, give orders to construction workers, and to unionize chicken pluckers.”

“Obama, the Harvard-educated lawyer, betrays his own leftist objectives and profound lack of intellectualism. Like his radical friend, education professor and leader of the former Weathermen Bill Ayers, he does not value learning for its own sake, but sees it as a political tool, another way to use education to advance social goals. Obama’s view of foreign language acquisition is the opposite of the one of conservative parents and professors who have advocated foreign language study for the benefit of the student’s intellectual advancement. Obama, the dour schoolmaster, tells us we “must” learn the language of the border-hoppers who have invaded our country. I think I know what it felt like when my aunt was forced to learn Hungarian.”

Random ideas to decrease life’s annoyances.

1. At the doctor- do not make me fill out the same data I filled out the last time I was there. Print a copy of my file and ask me to correct it. There are computers out there that can do this. or give me the option of completing this information on line.

2. Vending machines that sell movie tickets are a good idea, but have enough of them and make sure they work. Even better let me buy them on line at home and print them for admittance.

3. If your customer service line says that “my call is important” be sure a real human being is saying it and not a computer recording. Otherwise you are a ****ing liar.

4. If you pay so crappy that you can not hire a real human being then at least give me the option of leaving a message instead of making me wait on a phone for 12 minutes. Always give me the option of getting a real human being if the auto attendant gets confusing.

5. Kill the cell phone signals at the movies.

6. If you are a waitress do not make me wait for the bill. Why is it that the same waitress that refills my drink after every sip is no where to be found when I need to leave and I am ready to pay?

7. Make seats available on the plane based on the height and weight of the passenger. Have special seats for anyone over 250 lbs or over 6′4″ tall. Do not charge extra. For the price of a ticket a comfortable seat is not too much to ask.

8. Stop inserting ads at the bottom over the TV show I am watching. You get to run your freaking ads every ten minutes; do you have to wreck my viewing experience by overlaying them on the main show as well?

Do you have any other suggestions?

Like ‘The Truth About Chuck Norris’, ‘Stuff White People Like’ started out as a whimsical to nonsensical collection that became so popular on line that publishers sought to bring the content to the printed page and pursued the creators to bring out a book.

A sample entry:

Comparing People to Hitler
By: Isaac “Absent” Amirian

Being a truly advanced white person means being able to speak with authority about pretty much any field of conversation- especially politics. In order for white people to streamline the process of knowing everything, all human beings can be neatly filed into one of two categories: People I Agree With, and People Who are Just Like Adolf Hitler.

Comparing people to Hitler is an easy way for white people to get a strong point across to the less enlightened, or the insufficiently white. Everyone knows who Adolf Hitler was. And everyone knows that Hitler was very, very bad. Therefore, if a white person really, REALLY, doesn’t like something or someone, he or she may angrily say something to the effect of, “This is exactly the same kind of thing that Hitler used to do!” accompanied by varying levels of profanity based on blood-alcohol content. No matter what your gut reaction may be at that point, do not disagree with that white person. Otherwise, well, you love Hitler.