There is only one way to avoid criticism: Do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.Aristotle

December 2012

  • A Class in Philanthropy

    UCLA finished a first, its first class in philanthropy where several students were charged to give away $100,000. It was an opportunity for them to study the non-profit sector in the Los Angeles area, and decide how to spend this money. They were to make grants for no less than $10,000 and no more than $50,00, all donated by the Texas based Once Upon a Time Foundation which has sponsored similar classes at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas. The goal was to better understand the nature of philanthropy and how it can be relevant in a complex urban environment with varying needs. On the one hand a class in philanthropy seems sad. Contributing should come from the heart and help us help others perhaps supporting causes which are related to our interests. On the other such a class institutionalizes giving, and makes it a thoughtful exercise. It doesn’t interfere with giving from the heart nor with supporting the causes one believes in. Anything that makes us include the needs of others and try to answer them is not only important, it is also necessary, and maybe such a class will become part of standard curriculum in all universities.

  • By Comparison

    UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos is concerned that the humanitarian crisis in Syria will grab the headlines and edge out those places which can compete with it in terms of unmet needs and horrific stories, places like Yemen, the Sahel and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In fact she thinks the human emergencies in those places will dominate the coming year. Women and children are most at risk and in Syria many aid workers have been kicked out. After a visit to Damascus, Amos reported that she is “extremely worried” by the impact of the violence on ordinary Syrians. I am always moved by the inequalities of the world. While we in the West are ushering in the new year with customary panache, many thousands are struggling and suffering in ways that are not possible for most of us to comprehend. People around me talk about holiday and other stresses and enumerate various frustrations. And I wonder if, by comparison, we ought to question the reason for feeling those stresses and frustrations in the first place?

  • Harmful Or Not?

    Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates is thoughtful, knowledgeable, even wise in his assessment and understanding of the issues he had to handle. During an interview with Charlie Rose when asked what he knew of the woman led team that hunted Osama Bin Laden, he replied that he had not known of any woman led team. He was as some may remember one of the few privy to the raid as it was taking place. If one is to believe him, his response does not correspond to the portrayal of the hunt for 9/11’s mastermind in “Zero Dark Thirty”, the movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, where the character of Maya is clearly the team leader. The movie also raises issues in its depiction of the role of information obtained through torture. It implies that torture led to useful information, when several key sources over the last few years have seriously challenged that conclusion. The discrepancies are hardly surprising, despite claims of research—let’s note in all fairness Bigelow’s and Boal’s use of the word research and not truth—the filmmakers’ priority had to have been those of movie making, where the need for emotional impact has been known to trump facts. They were, after all, not filming a dissertation, they were making a movie they hoped would be successful by Hollywood standards. Rightly or not, I assume that unless one is a news junkie, one would more likely accept the film’s version of events as truth. Movies that are documentary-like, that present facts via Hollywood or tilt towards a given perception are far from a new phenomenon. Still whenever they made they come with a question, how harmful are they to the social fabric of the nation?

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