If the world were a village of 1000 people:

584 would be Asians

123 would be Africans

95 would be East and West Europeans

84 Latin Americans

55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc.)

52 North Americans

6 Australians and New Zealanders

The people of the village would have considerable difficulty communicating:

165 people would speak Mandarin

86 would speak English

83 Hindi/Urdu

64 Spanish

58 Russian

37 Arabic

That list accounts for the mother-tongues of only half the villagers. The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, and 200 other languages.

In the village there would be:

300 Christians (183 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 33 Orthodox)

175 Moslems

128 Hindus

55 Buddhists

47 Animists

210 all other religons (including atheists)

via State of the Village Report.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates pitched a new form of capitalism on Thursday that would help better serve the neglected poor  in a speech to company bosses assembled in Davos.

He posited that capitalism worked because people were motivated by self-interest to create wealth, but the system did not reflect the other key driver of human behaviour: the desire to help others.

This could be overcome if companies made more philanthropic gestures and gained recognition from the public for doing so. They could also work at stretching their activities to serve neglected and seemingly unattractive markets.

“The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor,” he said, calling for a new form of “creative capitalism.”

via Harness capitalism to help the poor, urges Bill Gates – Yahoo! Canada Finance.

(I must admit to being a bit confused by the timing of this item. It came out in January but it only being reported on now by Yahoo)

I think he makes a point that has been made, from time to time, by others, including Bill Clinton and Jean Cretien.

There is a widening gap between rich and poor, in North America and around the world. Oh, and the middle class is being gutted. Historically, a large gap has led to global unrest, often global violence. World wars, civil wars. This time we’re seeing terrorism on a level that was never seen previously, but it’s still violent unrest.

Mostly the decisions that contribute to this gap, this disparity, are made by nations, but with the increasing power of corporations, especially multi-nationals, there are decisions that can be made by non-elected individuals that might contribute, at least somewhat, to a solution.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite’s day. I thought, “Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.”

But maybe they aren’t. Because unlike in Cronkite’s day, today’s news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That’s why it wasn’t surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter’s time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

via Bill Maher: New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit.

There’s that old TAANSTAFL thing again. Now that news has to make a profit, and you can’t charge for the news itself, you get advertisers to pay for your news. What you get is the news slanted the way the advertisers want it.

Which is fine if it’s also the way you want it. But it seldom seems to be, at least not for me.

So what can we do about it? Byron Alley says that charging a premium for some parts of the news or other services might be a workable option. What do you think?

Given that we all want health and spend trillions to “care” for it, it’s sobering how little thought we give to its true meaning. When I ask, the response I receive is typically “the absence of disease.” Health is much more interesting and consequential than this. To define it in this negative sense is no more accurate than to define wealth as the absence of poverty.

via Dr. Andrew Weil: The Question No One Asks About Healthcare.

It’s easy to look at the soon-to-be-former governor of Alaska as an iconic feminist, a path-breaking working mother, or noble rabble-rousing populist. But when the dust settles, the lesson may be that she was simply a woman who made no sense.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes, the emperor has no clothes. Sometimes, there’s nothing behind the curtain of words.

When I listen to Sarah Palin talk, I’m reminded of that scene from Rush Hour “Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”

I’m pretty sure I speak English. It is, after all, my native language. So I recognize and understand each and every word that comes out of Sarah Palin’s mouth. I just can’t figure out how they go together. Her basketball analogy left me blank (Ok, like Anderson Cooper, I don’t get basketball). She threw the ball to someone else, who will now carry on in her place, so she can leave the court and accomplish more from the sidelines? If she thinks the sidelines are where the action is, why did she run for governor in the first place?

I’ve always been confused by her. What was she doing on the national political stage? What had she to offer, other than youthful looks, to McCain? And, having done such a poor job in that forum, why doesn’t she realize it?

It’s an old truism that we get the government and the politicians that we deserve. Perhaps. But, while that’s clever and descriptive, it’s not very prescriptive.

I think something about our political systems discourages the ordinary person from running, or at least from getting very far in political office. That leaves the field to exceptional people. Sometimes exceptionally good, but often (too often, it seems) exceptional in some not-very-positive ways. What is it about political office that does this?

And how do we change it?

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I’ve decided to quote other author at times when they say things better than I could say them. I’ll do it under the category “Said better than I could have”.