Famous Dictums

“Brief Thoughts” is a new category suggested by Noor Salik. In this category the participants can express their thoughts from few lines to a paragraph or send famous dictum, sayings or any other brief material for posting. Some other new categories shall be added soon.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s ( Burma’s Opposition Leader) famous dictum “it is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”

Barry Goldwater,  in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,

 

The New York Times

Mr. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of New York Times, died today. It is fascinating to read the short history of the New York Times, Adolph Ochs and Mr. Sulzberger-former publishers and family owners.

The New York Times (NYT) is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 108 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization.[3][4] Its website is the most popular American newspaper website, receiving more than 30 million unique visitors per month.[5]

The New York Times was founded on September 18, 1851, by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond, who was then a Whig and who would later be the second chairman of the Republican National Committee, and former banker George Jones as the New-York Daily Times. Sold at an original price of one cent per copy, the inaugural edition attempted to address the various speculations on its purpose and positions that preceded its release:[11]

The New York Times was acquired by Adolph Ochs, publisher of the Chattanooga Times, in 1896. The following year, he coined the paper’s slogan, “All The News That’s Fit To Print”;[14] this was a jab at competing papers such as Joseph Pulitzer‘s New York World and William Randolph Hearst‘s New York Journal which were known for lurid yellow journalism. Under his guidance, The New York Times achieved international scope, circulation, and reputation. In 1904, The New York Times received the first on-the-spot wireless transmission from a naval battle, a report of the destruction of the Russian fleet at the Battle of Port Arthur in the Yellow Sea from the press-boat Haimun during the Russo-Japanese war.

Adolph Ochs 

Ochs was born to German-Jewish immigrants, Julius and Bertha Levy Ochs, in CincinnatiOhio. His father had left Bavaria for the United States in 1846.[1] He was a highly educated man and fluent in six languages which he gave instruction in at schools in the South. He sided with the Union during the war. Bertha, who had come to the United States in 1848, a refugee from Rhenish Bavaria and the revolution there, had lived in the South before her 1853 marriage with Julius, and during the war sympathized with the South, though their differing sympathies didn’t separate their household.[2]

After the war, the family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee.[2] In Knoxville, Adolph studied in the public schools and during his spare time delivered newspapers.[1] At 11, he went to work at the Knoxville Chronicle as office boy to William Rule, the editor, who became a mentor.[2] In 1871 he was a grocer’s clerk at Providence, Rhode Island, attending a night school meanwhile. He then returned to Knoxville, where he was a druggist’s apprentice for some time.[3] In 1872, he returned to the Chronicle as a “printer’s devil,” who looked after various details in the composing room of the paper.[2]

His siblings also worked at the newspaper to supplement the income of their father, a lay rabbi for Knoxville’s small Jewish community. The Chronicle was the only Republican, pro-Reconstruction, newspaper in the city, but Ochs counted Father Ryan, the Poet-Priest of the Confederacy, among his customers.[4]

At the age of 19, he borrowed $250 to purchase a controlling interest in The Chattanooga Times, becoming its publisher. The following year he founded a commercial paper called The Tradesman. He was one of the founders of the Southern Associated Press and served as president. In 1896, at the age of 38, he again borrowed money to purchase The New York Times, a money-losing newspaper that had a wide range of competitors in New York City. He formed the New York Times Co., placed the paper on a strong financial foundation, and became the majority stockholder.[1] In 1904, he hired Carr Van Anda as his managing editor. Their focus on objective news reporting, in a time when newspapers were openly and highly partisan, and a well-timed price decrease (from 3¢ per issue to 1¢) led to its rescue from near oblivion. The paper’s readership increased from 9,000 at the time of his purchase to 780,000 by the 1920s.

Ochs died April 8, 1935 during a visit to Chattanooga[8] He is buried at the Temple Israel Cemetery in Hastings-on-HudsonWestchester CountyNew York[9] [10] [2]

His only daughter, Iphigene Bertha Ochs, married Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who became publisher of the Times after Adolph died.(source Wikipedia)

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who guided The New York Times and its parent company through a long, sometimes turbulent period of expansion and change on a scale not seen since the newspaper’s founding in 1851, died early Saturday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 86.

The paper he took over as publisher in 1963 was the paper it had been for decades: respected and influential, often setting the national agenda. But it was also in precarious financial condition and somewhat insular, having been a tightly held family operation since 1896, when it was bought by his grandfather Adolph S. Ochs.

Read full article on Arthur Ochs Sulzberger;

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/nyregion/arthur-o-sulzberger-publisher-who-transformed-times-dies-at-86.html?hp&_r=0

American Foundations and the Politics of Philanthropy

Book review by Houman Barekat 

An interesting worth reading book review on politics and philanthropy. 

In this well-researched study, Inderjeet Parmar, a Professor of Government at Manchester University, examines the rise of the philanthropic foundations as a political force, first within the United States and later, after World War II, as an unofficial wing of the US foreign policy establishment. Though they are dwarfed today by the dizzying wealth of the Gates Foundation, America’s original ‘big three’ foundations – Ford, Carnegie & Rockefeller – played a leading role in building and sustaining US global leadership in the last century.  While their mission statements invariably made reference to achieving economic betterment for the ‘general population’ or ‘the people’, the foundations largely failed in their stated aims of eradicating poverty and improving living standards for the poor, a failure they readily admitted. As the century wore on, their humanitarian goals were gradually marginalized in favor of a utilitarian, technocratic managerialism. National economic development – rather than social ‘uplift’ as such – was their overriding goal; the distinction is subtle but important, illuminating the broader distinction between a ‘nation’ and its ‘people’. This is, therefore, essentially a book about the relationship between state and society, and about how power works within that relationship.

Read full review by clicking on link below:

http://berlinbooks.org/brb/2012/08/american-foundations-and-the-politics-of-philanthropy/

Divine Prportion, Golden Ratio or Phi =1.618

Proportion Control

By STEVEN STROGATZ 
No other number attracts such a fevered following as the golden ratio. Approximately equal to 1.618 and denoted by the Greek letter phi, it’s been canonized as the “Divine Proportion.” Its devotees will tell you it’s ubiquitous in nature, art and architecture. And there are plastic surgeons and financial mavens who will tell you it’s the secret to pretty faces and handsome returns.

Not bad for the second-most famous irrational number. In your face, pi!

It even made a cameo appearance in “The Da Vinci Code.” While trying to decipher the clues left at the murder scene in the Louvre that opens the novel, the hero, Robert Langdon, “felt himself suddenly reeling back to Harvard, standing in front of his ‘Symbolism in Art’ class, writing his favorite number on the chalkboard. 1.618.”

Read More by clicking on Link:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/proportion-control/?src=me&ref=general