The renationalization of European politics is a product, first and foremost, of generational change. For Europeans who came of age during World War II or the Cold War, the E.U. is an escape route from a bloody past. Not so for younger Europeans: A recent poll revealed that French citizens over 55 are almost twice as likely to see the E.U. as a guarantee of peace as those under 36.The article itself doesn't mention how Europe is no longer Christian, but this little tidbit shows one way that matters. Without a common faith, historical events aren't enough to bind people together. In time, the generation that was affected by, say, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 dies off and the following ones are no longer driven by its memory.
One of the effects of Chile’s hyperinflation was the collapse in asset prices.Definitely read the whole thing.
This would seem counterintuitive. After all, if the prices of consumer goods and basic staples are rising in a hyperinflationary environment, then asset prices should rise as well—right? Equities should rise in price—since more money is chasing after the same number of stock. Real estate prices should rise also—and for the same reason. Right?
Actually, wrong—and for a simple reason: Once basic necessities are unmet, and remain unmet for a sustained period of time, any asset will be willingly and instantly sacrificed, in order to meet that basic need.
To put it in simple terms: If you were dying of thirst in the middle of the desert, would you give up your family heirloom diamonds, in exchange for a gallon of water? The answer is obvious—yes. You would sacrifice anything and everyting—instantly—in order to meet your basic needs, or those of your family.
Here's Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's labor secretary, explaining "The Anatomy of Intolerance" to readers of TalkingPointsMemo.com:Darwinism (and scientific atheism in general) tries to explain the world as a series of logical consequences of previous actions. There is no deeper meaning to anything, everything you see is the product of evolution and scientifically explainable actions. That mental model for explaining the unknown is the same that's being applied here.Many Americans (and politicians who [sic] the polls) don't want a mosque at Manhattan's Ground Zero. . . .So if some Americans are afraid of people "who have what seem to be strange religions," it must be a totally irrational reaction to "economic insecurity." It couldn't possibly have anything to do with an act of mass murder committed in the name of the religion in question.
Where is all this coming from?
It's called fear. When people are deeply anxious about holding on to their homes, their jobs, and their savings, they look for someone to blame. And all too often they find it in "the other"--in people who look or act differently, who come from foreign lands, who have what seem to be strange religions, who cross our borders illegally...
And Reich doesn't just fail to see the obvious. He dehumanizes his fellow Americans by treating their values, feelings and opinions as no more than reflexive reactions to material conditions.
For a week all you heard from cable anchors was "PEOPLE think OBAMA is a MUSLIM. It's in the POLLS. How do you EXPLAIN it?" Every time I heard it, I'd think: Maybe it's because you keep screaming it.Why in the world was this question even asked in a poll? What was the purpose? Given that some of us think the moon landings were faked or the government was behind 9/11, there was never any doubt that this question would get a healthy batch of positive answers.
Unfunded public pension liabilities, which a Pew Center on the States report calculates is now as high as $1 trillion nationwide, threaten to bankrupt states that fail to address this ticking fiscal time bomb. But in California, which has an unimaginable $500 billion public pension problem and became the object of national ridicule for outrageous pension abuses in Bell, state lawmakers still couldn’t bring themselves to pass legislation preventing highly paid government employees from using unused vacation and sick days accumulated during their last year on the job to pad their life-long pensions.The use of leave days is pretty mild stuff compared to the monstrous unfunded liability that's out there, but they can't yet manage to remove even that. They've not yet woken up to the fact that their temporary fantasy world of rights, benefits and entitlements is coming to an end. Their fictional world lasted only as long as the borrowing continued and now that it's winding down, they will have to change the way they see reality. That's going to be a very slow and painful process for many of them (and us).
Stocks dropped for fifth day and U.S. index futures declined amid concern Europe’s debt burden is worsening while the American recovery falters. The yen weakened after Japan said it will curb appreciation, and Treasuries rose...The decline in U.S. futures indicated the S&P 500 will extend yesterday’s 1.5 percent tumble to a seven-week low. Orders for U.S. durable goods increased less than forecast in July, a sign that one of the few remaining bright spots in the economy is cooling.The stimuli are all wearing off and they have accomplished nothing. All they did was devour future demand. The cash-for-clunkers did not generate any new demand for cars at all, it simply caused people who were going to buy cars anyway to buy them earlier. A brief bump in sales was followed by a slowdown. Dittos for the temporary tax credit to buy new homes.
The sun had already gone down, and we were running through the suburbs of Hamburg. For the first time, I beheld what I was soon to see every day: the ruins of Germany. Black against the pale green and golden sky -- the afterglow of the late summer sunset -- saw no end of shattered walls; of heaps of wreckage; of blocks of iron and stone out of the midst of which emerged, now and then, the skeleton of what had once been a boiler, or a wagon, or an oil tank; no end of long dark streets in which no life was left. The whole place looked like an immense excavation field.
Tears came to my eyes, not because these were the ruins of a once prosperous town, the lamentable remnants of happy homes and useful human industries, but because they were the ruins of our New Order; all that was materially left of that supercivilization-in-the-making which I so admired. Far in the distance, I noticed the steeple of a church standing, untouched, above the general desolation -- like a symbol of the victory of the Cross over the Swastika. And I hated the sight of it.
When I asked members of The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council...to name the most influential business book they had read, many cited Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma." That book documents how market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in industry after industry—computers (mainframes to PCs), telephony (landline to mobile), photography (film to digital), stock markets (floor to online)—not because of "bad" management, but because they followed the dictates of "good" management. They listened closely to their customers. They carefully studied market trends...And in the process, they missed disruptive innovations that opened up new customers and markets for lower-margin, blockbuster products.I deal with this problem all the time at work. We've embraced business process management and lean six sigma and just about every other structured management fad out there. We're organized like a straight jacket. Part of our corporate culture is "listening to the customer."
This dire prognosis comes even despite Athens' massive efforts to sort out the country's finances. The government's draconian austerity measures have managed to reduce the country's budget deficit by an almost unbelievable 39.7 percent, after previous governments had squandered tax money and falsified statistics for years. The measures have reduced government spending by a total of 10 percent, 4.5 percent more than the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had required.Emphasis mine. The problems are not coming despite the austerity program, but because of it. The time frame on that is quite myopic as well. The contraction is the consequence of living beyond their means, not austerity. Blaming austerity is like blaming your hangover on the fact that you stopped drinking. This isn't a bug, it's a primary feature of debt-addicted entities whether it is a person, a family, a company, a state or a nation.
The problem is that the austerity measures have in the meantime affected every aspect of the country's economy. Purchasing power is dropping, consumption is taking a nosedive and the number of bankruptcies and unemployed are on the rise. The country's gross domestic product shrank by 1.5 percent in the second quarter of this year. Tax revenue, desperately needed in order to consolidate the national finances, has dropped off. A mixture of fear, hopelessness and anger is brewing in Greek society.
Nikos Meletis is neatly dressed, and his mid-range car is clean and tidy. Meletis used to earn a good living at a shipbuilding company in Perama, a port opposite the island of Salamis. "At the moment, I'm living off my savings," the 54-year-old welder says, standing in front of a silent harbor full of moored ships.I'll bet they now wish the government had acted with compassion instead of vanity all those years. The compassionate thing to have done was to spend only what they brought in. It was pure vanity to swagger about, handing out wads of borrowed money.
Meletis is a day laborer who used to work up to 300 days a year; this year he has only managed to scrape together 25 days' work so far. That gives him 25 health insurance stamps, when he needs 100 in order to insure himself and his family -- including his wife, who has cancer. "How am I supposed to pay for the hospital?"
New Zealand’s sheep farmers are flocking to a government carbon trading program that pays more to plant trees than sell wool and mutton.We're building a world on empty sanctimony.
The system, begun in 2008 and the only one of its kind outside Europe, awards farmers credits that are sold to offset greenhouse gas emissions. The project may earn them about NZ$600 a hectare ($172 per acre) a year on land unprofitable for grazing animals, said David Evison, a senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury’s New Zealand School of Forestry.
I do believe you may be on to something here! As long as the daisy is well watered and the chamber is not too humid, she can cool herself off for a while by evaporative transpiration (call it plant sweat, if you like), but I don't think the scale are so lucky (they are built to conserve moisture, not evaporate it).Indeed they can't, Tim. In fact, with very rare exceptions, only warm-blooded creatures can sweat.
And a big advantage of heating over suffocating, is that reasonably accurate thermometers are *way* cheaper than oxygen sensors.
"Boredom is your mind telling you to GET BUSY and find something interesting to do."I love it.
SPIEGEL: But doesn't the money that is donated serve the common good?Err, that would be the legitimacy we found laying around about 234 years ago.
Krämer: It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it's not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That's a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?
The bill by Assemblyman Joel Anderson, R-La Mesa, languished for a while but is building steam as the budget season drags on and IOUs loom. Medical providers, businesses and individuals could use the state IOUs as payment for everything from taxes to vehicle registration to fishing licenses.Essentially, this creates a new currency, one only valid within the government. The money is trapped entirely within the State economy since you can't use it to buy things from private parties. The idea of being able to use the IOUs within the State seems like a good idea until you pair it with our growing Justicialism. Consider this.
One of the most sobering observations made by Wax comes in the form of a disarmingly simple calculus presented first by Isabel Sawhill and Christopher Jencks. If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view. In 2004, the poverty rate among blacks who followed that formula was less than 6 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percent*. Even after hearing the earnest musings about employers who are less interested in people with names like Tomika, no one can gainsay the simple truth of that advice. Crucially, neither bigotry nor even structural racism can explain why an individual does not live up to it.I've lived both sides of the kids and marriage question. The mechanics of failure are simple, powerful and inescapable when you're unmarried with kids. If you care about the poor and you care about children, you've got to be a prude.
Whatever is going on in the world of finance, it isn’t capitalism or a free market. Paul Brodsky and Lee Quaintance of QB Asset Management in New York reckon markets are now at the whim of “the vagaries of the subjective central bank decision- making apparatus as a capricious pursuit posing as systematic.”I point to this, not because it's wildly different from previous posts nor because it's particularly well-written and exciting. I point to it because it's Bloomberg. When one of the nation's top two financial news outlets allows veiled accusations of fascism to be published, you know there are big things afoot. It's one thing to have the right wing nuts over at Free Republic scream about Obama being a Kenyan and it's another to have the left wing nuts in the media and the entertainment industry foam at the mouth over Sarah Palin. It's another thing entirely when Bloomberg publishes pieces that say this:
The defining feature of tyranny, they argued in a research report this week that channeled the author Christopher Hitchens, is the unpredictability of its rules -- a valid description of the current market environment.
“The path of global markets will be determined by policy makers and politicians, not by natural economic incentives or even by policy makers resetting our ‘animal spirits,’” they wrote.
When politicians steal from their constituents, your market compass is useless at guiding investment decisions.I've spent some time on this blog playing around with atheism vs. science lately. In the past, I fiddled around with how the bond markets worked. I'm thinking of moving on to examining who flourished during the financial collapse of Justicilaism in Argentina and why.
The results showed that the time required to kill 100% of the insects varied among species and even among the developmental stages of a given species. For most insects tested, exposures of less than 72 hours were required to insure complete kill. Certain stages, such as eggs of cigarette beetles, may require up to 8-day exposures to insure complete kill. Preliminary tests indicated that the addition of CO2 to the nitrogen slightly decreased the exposure time required to kill the insects. However, if increased temperatures or decreased relative humidities could be tolerated by the objects, they would probably have a much greater effect than using CO2 and N2 mixtures in reducing exposure times.That leads us to ask, "At what O2 level will a candle go out?" Here, we found some information from a spelunking site.
When caving in the Arbuckle Mountains, the BIC (lighter) was the air quality instrument of choice though at the time, no one knew how reliable or accurate it was at the time.It sounds to me like the candle will not consume sufficient oxygen to kill the bugs. Still, I think it's worth an experiment since the idea is so easy and inexpensive.
During the course of the state park project, we became curious at what oxygen levels the lighter would start reacting. Using the instruments we set up a number of controlled experiments and verified them with a number of repetitions over several years with different brands.
The lighter will start reacting at 19.5% oxygen. The flame changes color and a small gap will begin to be noticeable between the flame and the jet. At 18% oxygen, the flame will burn about 1 inch above the jet. At 17% oxygen, the lighter goes out and can not be relit. As mentioned earlier, these measurements were very repeatable and could be verified by anyone with the instruments to do so.
Your perfect Word of God explicitly supports slavery, subjugation of women, genocide, stoning of homosexuals, stoning of adulterers, and a whole laundry list of Bronze Age barbarisms. There is no proper context for such things. They were wrong back then, and they're wrong now.This was typical of the kinds of arguments that came from the atheists. It's a deliberate misreading of Christianity. A quick counterexample illustrates this. If you knew nothing else about Christianity, what would you conclude from examining someone we consider to be a wonderful example of living our faith?
I've had my fill of you guys. You clearly have no problem supporting blood-soaked myths on the basis of zero evidence, and apparently endorse eternal punishment for incorrect thoughts. It's obvious that no amount of rational discussion is going to change that.
I cannot despair though, because if there is one thing that history has proven, it's that disgusting, backwards ideologies such as yours are destined to be cast down and forgotten as sure as the night follows the day.
Peace out. It's been thoroughly depressing.
