That's an urban legend. Here's what really happened:
The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks."
If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with." - WSJ
Bill Gates "built" microshaft. Could he have done it, had no one else built the roads and harbors which allowed for receiving the equipment used to do the programming? Had no one else already built the universities in which advanced programming and theoretic math were taught? Had someone else, not 1st built the computer? (Which also relied upon those roads, harbors, railways, etc etc having already been built.)
THAT, is what the Pres meant with his comment B, and it only requires about 2.3 seconds of cognitive reasoning, to fully grasp.
In general, when someone says something that appears to be controversial, but immediately follows it with "what I mean is," then that clarifying language should be taken into consideration. Anything less is the definition of taking things out of context.
The Obama campaign made fun of the Romney tic of doing just that:
If that was where O left it fine, but what he really implies is that society can claim ownership of what you built with just a tiny modicum of collective involvement. That's where he is clearly going with this line of thinking.
Obama was very clear in his message. Unfortunately there are those who approach others in bad faith, and twist their words to suit their political purposes.
Seriously, DW: There is no convincing Boldwin on this point. He's convinced Obama is a bully who intends to take everything he owns and give it to people who don't deserve it.
Obama speech was pandering to his side of the fence and is no different then Romney's speech where he "wished" he was Mexican.
If anything, I'll give Romney slightly more credit, because there is some truth to it. There are plenty of people who will vote for someone simply because they play for the same "team". It doesn't matter if the person is going to act in their best interest, people assume he will because they have the same skin color or heritage. Look at some of the comments after Obama was elected. I don't think that Obama has done that, but there was a belief that would happen, and not just from white racists.
Obama has a point that no one is able to succeed purely on their own. But, it also degrades the accomplishments of others when you say they had "luck" or couldn't have done it without government support. The people that Sarge mentioned are smart and work hard. There was some degree of luck in their stories, but much more of it is hard work. To even imply that people should sit back and wait for good luck (or the government) to save them is an awful message.
With respect, only those who are looking to be insulted could take a look at what Obama actually said and feel degraded:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
Every successful person stands on the shoulders of those who came before them. This simple truth is an anathema to the Randians who now control the GOP, for whom any mention of societal obligations are to be immediately and completely rejected.
Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.
That sentence right there, is the key to the entire meaning. The interstates, built under Eisenhower for the most part. Where would we be today, without them? The airports, the harbors, the colleges. Isnt it TRULY damn good thing, that those who were tax paying adults 70 years ago, paid those taxes instead of whining about them and laid the foundation for what is modern America. They recognized, that generations before them, made their achievements possible, and they "paid it forward". The current GOP leadership and its adherents, would totally dis the next generation, by shirking their societal obligations today, under the guise that "they did it all, on their own, with no help from anyone, ever".
We have for some time, and continue to, fail to maintain both our infrastructure and our populace.
We invest half of what Europe does in maintaining basic infrastructure. And we invest just a small fraction of what China invests.
We are falling further and further behind in what was once the premier educational system in the world. We not only are failing to adequately fund education, we also have decided it's okay to tier education, so poor kids get the shaft, and don't have the tools needed to succeed.
Don't even get me started on the economic rationing of health care. At least we have taken a stab and improving that.
There are vast investments that must be made at a societal level that we have been skimping on for far to long, and it's starting to bite us in the ass competitively. It's going to snowball unless we start pulling together and working to get our country back on track and providing strong base for our workers to thrive.
We have to wash away the tea party's hateful divisiveness which is eating like acid through the very foundations of our society, and we need to do it now.
We have to wash away the tea party's hateful divisiveness which is eating like acid through the very foundations of our society, and we need to do it now.
very true words, but how do you do such a thing?
these are angry people - angrier than nearly any other person i have seen. They hate openly and show little compassion to those who are not to their liking. the are a small minority, but they are as loud, if not louder, than much of the majority.
so, again, how do you wash the Tea Party back to the fringes and maybe even beyond, to wear it belongs?
We have to come up with an honest, effective response to the seductive and flattering meme that individual effort is more valuable than group effort.
We need to remind our fellow citizens that workers are valuable as well, not just corporate CEOs and investors.
It's tricky because their fairly effective spiel of personal responsibility, is seductive. Everyone likes to see themselves as a winner - if not now someday.
But it the tea party's game, in truth there are very few winners. They don't mention that in their simplistic randian rants.
The GOP, likes to talk about "redistribution", like it is a cancer. What they dont talk about, and perhaps the Dems need to start SCREAMING about, is the "redistribution" which took place from 2001 thru 2008.
re: 20 my problem is that by screaming, we accomplish nothing. we've seen that in a microcosm on these boards - one person starts screaming, a few of us try to scream louder, and everyone else sits out.
again, these boards. there's a noticeable difference in the tone of most people here, since the board was brought back. and we're seeing more posts from people like Bili, SZ, and others, who had largely gone AWOL. they have come back into the fold, i'd like to think, because there is a tiny bit more rational conversation going on lately.
re 19: it makes sense. it's the right idea...but how? how do we accomplish this? yes, Speak Softly and carry a big stick - but how does that work in practice, not in theory. how do we make our voices heard of the rising cacophony of nonsense the Tea Party seduces the ignorant with?
I don't know how, but I think it has to be a simple message that rings true and inspires people to again remember what we can accomplish when we work together as a team. As a nation united, instead of the politics of fracture and hate that the radical right has successfully fomented.
I think the radical right has to be discredited and exposed for what they are. They'll do it to themselves eventually, but our nation may not have that long.
re 21: elaborate? There was a mass exodus of funds from the middle class, to the upper 1%, via in many cases, outright fraud. 401ks declined in value, even as brokers raked in record commissions. Wealth, was HUGELY redistributed, FROM the middle class, TO the upper class.
I would like the moderates (and the left) to make the argument that income inequality stiffles income mobilization (i.e., it gets *much* harder to move up). Our experiment in giving money to the wealthy in the hopes that they would invest in our economy has proven to be largely a failure; instead, the wealthy (not surprisingly) invested the money in the financial services market.
I think the radical right has to be discredited and exposed for what they are. They'll do it to themselves eventually, but our nation may not have that long.
i think that's part of it, for sure. and i think the time frame issue of concern.
the only way i see that happening is if the GOP splinters into the radical right, and then...everyone else.
that splits the vote, and gives a chance for more reasoning and rationale, as we see how the politics of hate divide and destroy a political party, which is a precursor to destroying a country.
I agree that we need to start investing more in our infrastructure.
More investment in our education system, especially to help overcome the social gap that exists is something that we should be working on. We have never had world leading education system.
The current move towards charter schools (by both parties) is scary. No evidence shows that charter schools result in better results than public schools. I think we are going see more and more charter schools as the result in profits for the builders of the charters.
" We have never had world leading education system."
I had thought I recalled reading that the US was the first country to attempt to offer full secondary education to it's entire populous, back in the John Dewey days. Maybe I have that wrong.
I agree with you on charters. If they can pick and choose the students and/or have supplementary outside funding, they sometimes can beat standard public schools, but that's not a fair comparison.
Washington state has voted against allowing Charters 3 times, but they are coming back with another initiative this year, and it's going to be close.
Two weeks into my boy's kindergarten year, and I'm already fed up with central administration. The principal and teachers are almost uniformly awesome however. I which we could figure out a way to clean house in the former without going the charter route.
I've started reading Diane Ravitch's blog and I know she has had several posts that state the US was never the top scoring nation, even going back to the 50s or 60s. While I was searching, I did find the following post, but I missed the following post.
Long island has some great schools that are the heart of their community.
It also has pockets of poverty.
This wise editorial educates the public.
Are American schools the best in the world? The answer is a resounding maybe — which is good news indeed for this back-to-school season.
Beating up on public education is practically our national sport. I often do it myself. But overlooked in the ongoing assault is strong evidence that U.S. schools actually are worldbeaters — except for the problem of poverty. When it comes to reading, in fact, our schools may well be the best in the world. As Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond points out, U.S. 15-year olds in schools with fewer than 10 percent of kids eligible for free or cut-rate lunch “score first in the world in reading, outperforming even the famously excellent Finns.”
This 10 percent threshold is significant because, in high achieving countries such as Finland, few schools have more poor kids than that. In other words, if you look at American schools that compare socioeconomically, we’re doing great. But wait, it gets better. U.S. schools where fewer than 25 percent are impoverished (by the same lunch measure) beat all 34 of the relatively affluent countries studied except South Korea and Finland. U.S. schools where 25 to 50 percent of students were poor still beat most other countries.
These results are from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, a widely followed effort to compare educational outcomes. PISA scores inspire a good deal of hand-wringing in this country — overall, we were 14th in reading — but I suspect we’ve been taking away the wrong message by not adjusting for poverty. That’s odd, because most people know there’s a connection between poor families and poor school performance. The link is reflected in various sources, including the SAT, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the Trends in International Math and Science Study.
So the connection, which exists in most countries, is clear. But somehow the implications haven’t been, and now that school is again upon us, it’s worth thinking this through. If American kids who aren’t poor are doing so well, maybe our problem isn’t bad teachers or inadequate school spending or indifferent parents or screen-besotted children. Maybe the problem is simply poverty — and the shameful fact that we have so much more of it than any comparable country.
How much child poverty are we living with? A study this year by UNICEF found a U.S. child poverty rate of 23.1 percent — way beyond any other economically advanced nation except Romania. In Spain, which is in a depression, the figure was 17.1 percent. In Canada it was 13.3. In Finland, 5.3.
If poverty is the problem, families in middle-class school districts needn’t worry much about their kids’ schools. But they should be worried about the society in which they live, for even if we have hearts of stone, we do not have heads made of the same material. Economic growth — to say nothing of a healthy democracy — depends on an educated citizenry, and we cannot afford to let a large segment of the populace embark on adulthood seriously underschooled.
Some education reformers, such as Diane Ravitch, understand poverty’s effects on our schools. Geoffrey Canada has launched the Harlem Children’s Zone Project to provide poor children with a comprehensive set of programs addressing both poverty and education. It’s an effort well worth watching.
If the problem with education in this country really is poverty, it will not be easy to fix. Yet that is no reason for kidding ourselves about what’s actually wrong.
I've had problems with some of Ravitch's ideas, but I can I agree with most of that.
Parents in poverty are simply not able to focus on their kid's education while working 2 or 3 jobs and trying to keep food on the table. We need to give them more support and more resources. Those communities should be getting the lion's share of the funding and the best teachers. They are getting the opposite due to our localized funding system in much of our country and, I suspect, long-running, covert, institutionalized racism.
How many states still have local funding? I know that Indiana switched recently from local to state funding. That was supposed to help fix the problem, but it doesn't seem to have. What it has done, is make it easier for charters to get funding.
I don't agree with Ravitch's ideas either, but she has a different viewpoint from the media in general.
I think there is plenty of truth to your statement 31, but some communities place a greater emphasis on education then others. That is something that needs to change to really have an impact on graduation rates.
I recall during Desert Shield/Desert Storm while my unit was in Wilmington, NC...there was a school bond issue up for vote. Their recently recruited Superintendent made a commercial, stating that NC ranked 49th out of the 50 states, and that particular county for Wilmington ranked last in NC, for a reason. He said, vote this down and I will resign. They did and he did.
Until education becomes a MAJOR priority, it will continue to serve as a scapegoat.
Washington has state funding, in theory. In practice, they redistribute a few bucks to the struggling rural red counties (who complain bitterly about the pittance they pay at all), and thoroughly underfund everyone.
So, districts like Seattle put up half billion dollar bond measures, rich schools have PTAs raising half million in supplemental education dollars annually to hire more teachers aides, etc...
So the poor districts are still poor, and the good teachers gravitate towards the easy, rich schools.
The dirty secret is funding is approximately equal, both district and state wide, but that doesn't include teacher salaries, which can swing funding for a school by as much as a million bucks higher for those with good, experienced teachers compared to schools with rookies in the ghetto.
Why should we demonize people who deeply believe in something and do whatever they can to promote it? If the Koch brothers spent millions of dollars on politicians who would subsidize their products and outlaw their competitors, that would be wrong. But instead, they advocate for an end to market distortions, government interventions in the private sector, and cronyism in general. They’re not trying to get more of the government pie; they just really believe they have a vision to help America, because they love this country and the values it stands for.
The truth is that everything we have in this country is because of entrepreneurs, large and small. From the corner store up to the most successful business people—whether conservatives like the Koch brothers, liberals like Steve Jobs at Apple, or libertarians like Jeff Bezos of Amazon—the great wealth of this country comes from people helping other people by creating value. Without value, when businesspeople are just in it for themselves and don’t care about value, only about accruing benefits to themselves, everything falls apart—including the business itself! Those who do create value are the reason we have the great society we have. Since their business began, the Koch brothers have been part of the value-creating class, not the crony class of business owners.
My experience with the Koch brothers is in Washington State, where we the courts have ruled we chronically under-fund education, and our in violation of our own constitution, which makes it our paramount duty. We are 46th in the nation in education funding. That's disgraceful for such a wealthy state.
We had an initiative last election which would have raised a billion a year for education by taxing those with greater that 250K in income.
The Kochs spent 8 million killing it, and subjecting our poorer students to an inferior education which doesn't provide the basic tools they need to compete in our society.
The last thing the Kochs are for is a level playing field.
Actually that would be the teachers who don't want to play anywhere near the level of their pupils. Remember when it used to be a noble and underpaid profession?
It still is. New teachers make around 33K in Seattle. And work there ass off for it, if my son's teacher is any indication. I'd love to see you teach 30 kids solo for 7 hours a day.
" Surely such a liberal state can share the education funds they already have, more equitably. But no....spend spend spend some more."
You get what you pay for. Paying your teachers a decent salary in order to attract the best teachers you can and prepare the next generation to compete in the global market place is pretty much the best investment our society can make.
It certainly beats paying your stock broker or Realtor 6 or 7 figures to churn and wank and figure out how to screw you 6 ways sideways.
Right Boldy. You give the ambulance chasing lawyer, who makes his living running around looking for someone to file suit against, a free pass. Arent you the one crying about malpractice all the time, and ambulance chasing lawyers? So why, are you giving this one, a freebie?
So is the present GOP, but you don't see me blaming them for things that aren't their fault. There are plenty of things they are guilty of without me having to make up things whole cloth.
The ability to solve problems depends upon correctly identifying the source of the problem in the first place.
“If foreign lenders and United States citizens stop lending the government money, the debt ceiling doesn’t matter.”
Bongino warned, “We can either impose a real debt ceiling or we’re going to have it imposed rather harshly on us. Let me tell you, that day of reckoning is coming. I think there are very few people out there who are really speaking the truth about the horrendous predicament we’re in.”
He noted that if the U.S. were to cut every dime of discretionary and military spending, it would still run a deficit this year.
Which doesn't stop liberals from proposing new extravagant dream project social spending.
Bongino has a warning for those Americans who argue for so-called “fair taxation” and plan to vote for Obama this November.
“I think what Americans – some who are voting for President Obama – don’t understand is that there’s really no limit to what they perceive as ‘fair taxation,’” he explained. “They’ll never give you a number, because the number to them is ever-increasing. That’s why they won’t put a cap on it, and they’ll never really answer the question.”
If anyone truly questioned Obama about his taxation plans and asked him what percentage each income group should pay in taxes, Bongino said, they would never get a straight answer.
“President Obama will never give you a number because he doesn’t know the number,” he explained. “The number to him is as much as he can get. He views your money as government money on loan. It’s really public funds generated by a public pool of capital.”
He added, “That’s really absurd. It’s nonsense economics. It’s never worked. It’s not what Americans have bled, fought, died for.”
Freedom, Bongino said, is a “painful thing” that requires “tremendous responsibility.”
“You know, people talk about freedom and liberty, and they forget that there are very real responsibilities and requirements for that. Freedom also means freedom to fail if you don’t want to work and you don’t want to produce.”
BTW what do you think happens to a country that simply has to throw up it's hands and tells it's creditors that there is no money and creditors cannot be repaid?
Do you think that the creditor nations look sad and slink away empty handed?