Bowles-Simpson deficit report surprisingly useful
On February 18, President Obama created the “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” a bipartisan 18-member panel of senators, representatives, and other luminaries. Co-chaired by Erksine Bowles (a former Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton) and Alan Simpson (a former Republican senator) the commission was charged with “identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run… including changes to address the growth of entitlement spending.”
WikiLeaks serves the global community by keeping governments in check
Nihilist and criminal labels aside, WikiLeaks has done a lot of good. In 2007, WikiLeaks published the Kroll Report, a secret report detailing extensive government corruption by the richest man in Kenya, Daniel arap Moi. The news came out shortly before the Kenyan national election and received intense airtime on Kenyan TV. According to a Kenyan intelligence report, the leak shifted the vote by 10 percent, changing the result of the election.
Junior varsity terrorism
On October 27th, two packages, each containing a Hewlett-Packard printer with plastic explosive hidden in the toner cartridge, were sent to Chicago, Illinois from FedEx and UPS offices in Sana’a, Yemen. The packages were intended to explode inside planes mid-air over U.S. soil. Instead, authorities were alerted to the bombs (likely by an active double agent within al-Qaeda), and two days later, both bombs were defused.
The nihilism of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange compromises U.S. security
In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Julian Assange, the director of WikiLeaks, was asked if he would ever refrain from releasing information he knew might get someone killed. The question was not just hypothetical: a year and a half earlier, Assange had published a study that detailed technical vulnerabilities in actively employed U.S. Army countermeasures against improvised explosive devices.
Letters to the Editor
Choice is a deeply held value in student life at MIT. I am writing in defense of a choice that is currently lacking on our campus: an adequate dining plan as one of the options in the residential system.
UA Updates and Answers
At the UA Exec Meeting at Next House two Wednesdays ago, the main topic of discussion was dining reform. Several members of Next House elaborated on their concerns, including cost, food options, and living group options in the proposed dining plan. There was also discussion on preserving the culture and people of Next House.
Letters to the Editor
I just want to make it known that I am deeply against the letter to the editor by Richard Kramer ’75 from the November 23 issue of The Tech.
A balanced perspective on dining
As a long time community member I respectfully ask the community to pretty please consider the following with regard to dining plans at MIT:
HDAG plan is the healthier choice
The faculty coaches at MIT strongly support the new dining plan developed by the House Dining Advisory Group (HDAG). This plan addresses a significant area of concern the Department of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation (DAPER) faculty has had for the well being of MIT students.
Ratify START
On April 8, 2010, Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, prompted by the expiry (and coming expiry) of previous nuclear weapons treaties, signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or “New START” for short. If ratified, New START will bind the U.S. and Russia to three important limits on strategic nuclear weapons for a duration of ten years:
Department is wrong to put technology before poetry
The Director of the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Tom Levenson, met with me and wrote a response to my opinion column in The Tech last week, clarifying a few points he feels were errors.
The banana-equivalent dose
Terrorists are stubborn creatures. Even as we leave soft targets across the U.S. unguarded, they continue to target airplanes. It’s an obsession, and appropriately, we’ve dedicated considerable resources to detecting and defeating just these types of attacks.
Of cars and ditches
There’s a story Obama liked to tell on the campaign trail: Republicans drive a car into a ditch, and then hand the keys to Democrats. Democrats work and work to get the car out of the ditch while Republicans sun themselves. Then, once Democrats finally get the car out of the ditch, there’s a tap on their shoulder: it’s the Republicans, and they want the keys back. The car is the economy. Or the nation. And there are Slurpees involved, I think. But the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t give the car keys to Republicans, else they’ll run us all into a ditch.
The value of being seriously funny
Who are those late night orators, keeping real and YouTube crowds from falling asleep? What work do they do and is it worthy of our respect? Should we succumb to the musings and quips of these observational scientists, irrelevant to our culture and irrelevant to our science? Beyond its cackles, laughs, chuckles and giggles, is comedy but an irrelevant escapade into obscurity and inconsequence?
Cash crop
Serious discussions of fiscal reform are usually dominated by the big ticket items: health care spending, Social Security, and taxes. This is sensible — these are the areas responsible for the vast majority of our budget shortfall. But the efficiency losses from these programs are small relative to their size. When we debate them, we are rightfully concerned over the drag they create on our nation’s productivity through disincentives to work. But the broader question, the one that makes reform difficult, is one of wealth redistribution: How much will we borrow from future generations to finance present consumption, and how much will we take from the rich to give to the poor?
UA UPDATES & ANSWERS
The UA President and Vice President met with the DSL and student members of HDAG last Friday. Minutes and slides from the meeting are available at <i>ua.mit.edu</i>.
Moving MIT forward
In September 2011, a new dining plan will be implemented in the residence halls where we are faculty housemasters. This new plan will be one of the most positive developments in the residential system in years. It will elevate the quality of dining significantly by providing nutritious, high quality, affordable meals to our residents. Just as important, the plan will provide a platform for the re-integration of house dining with the educational mission of the Institute.