The rich tend to get richer not just
because of higher returns to capital, as the French economist Thomas
Piketty has argued, but because they have superior access to the
political system and can use their connections to promote their
interests.--Francis Fukuyama
The Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany--one of the country's finest special collections--suffered a terrible fire in 2004. Fifty thousand books were lost to the flames, a full 25 percent of which were considered by the library to be irreplaceable. One of the lost titles was Copernicus's 1543 treatise, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Libri VI, an essential work in the history of science. Last month, ten years after the fire, the book was found among a group of damaged books awaiting restoration.
Eugenics: Greek eu, meaning "good/well", and -genēs, meaning "born") is the belief and practice of improving the genetic quality of a species. Also the study of human improvement by genetic means.
The
word was coined by the polymath Francis Galton. Interestingly it was
Galton who also, later in his life, showed "the wisdom of crowds" where
large groups gave widely spread answers to questions but, collectively,
the group generally was accurate, a philosophy that opposed the value of
selection and narrowing the gene pool.The first thorough exposition of eugenics was made by Galton in Hereditary Genius (1869)
where he proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction
and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race. The
American Eugenics Society, founded in 1926, supported Galton's theories.
U.S. eugenicists also supported restriction on immigration from nations
with "inferior" stock, such as Italy, Greece, and countries of eastern
Europe, and argued for the sterilization of insane, retarded, and
epileptic citizens. Sterilization laws were passed in more than half the
states, and isolated instances of involuntary sterilization continued
into the 1970s.
Golden oldie:
In various countries around the world, having to pay an official to access the public health system, police services or education can be a daily occurrence. More than one in four of the 114,000 people surveyed in the 2013 Global Corruption Barometer reported having to pay a bribe to access the most basic services.
In 1916, after reports of shark attacks off the coast of New Jersey--attacks that, incidentally, stimulated the writing of Jaws by Peter Benchley--, Dr. Frederic Lucas, the renowned and highly esteemed director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, calmly reassured the country that sharks were harmless. As far as Dr. Lucas's thirty years of personal scientific investigations could determine, an animal capable of amputating a human limb or killing a man simply did not exist. Science.
Islamist militias in Libya took control of nearly a dozen commercial jetliners last month, and western intelligence agencies recently issued a warning that the jets could be used in terrorist attacks across North Africa.
What was...the Gleiwitz radio station episode?
Aside from James Madison, no American President can match the range of James Buchanan's public service and experience. The Pennsylvanian had served in his state legislature in his twenties, had gone on to the U.S. House and Senate in his middle years, and had interrupted his legislative career to serve in James Polk's cabinet as secretary of state from 1845 to 1849. Earlier Andrew Jackson had appointed him minister to Russia; Franklin Pierce had sent him to the Court of St. James in London as the American minister in the 1850s, and both Polk and his predecessor, John Tyler, had offered Buchanan a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet at the end of his presidency he had divided his party, thereby ensuring the election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And that election led to the secession of South Carolina, followed by six other states in the lower South. A month before Buchanan left office, these seven southern states formed a separate nation, proclaiming themselves the Confederate States of America. Despite his history, accomplishments and efforts, Buchanan left office with the U.S. on the edge of destruction.
As angry as Islam is at Jews and Christians, they are still "people of the book." Their polytheism is at least debatable. But that can not be said of Hinduism. Hinduism is proudly and emphatically polytheistic. One would think Islam far more interested in India, where previous wrongs to be righted in the land of polytheism already exist.
The U.S. Dow was 11,722 in 2000 and was 12,418 in 2012. That's 5.6 % increased over 12 years. That's an annualized return of 0.47%. Every single investor who held long term investments for retirement was terribly damaged by that period.
In moving away from areas of high taxation to areas less taxed, companies are following logical, time-honored behavior. This is similar to withdrawing one's hand from heat or shielding one's eyes from the sun. It is a basic action-reaction phenomenon. While economic laws are written with less a firm hand, is the insistence that companies ignore this law any more reasonable than the belief in a 5000 year old earth?
In a study of the impact of corruption, corruption is consistently correlated with lower growth rates and income per person, and less economic equality. Corruption also deters investment and puts off businesses: more than 35 per cent of companies surveyed in 2006 said they had opted out of an attractive investment due to corruption in the host country. Rather than helping grease the wheels, bribery undermines businesses' productivity more than bureaucracy.
They seemed surprised to find corruption exacerbates the gap between the rich and poor. It creates a political and social system that favors the wealthy and well-connected which, in turn, perpetuates inequality.
The first 10 pages of an unpublished and untitled Tennessee Williams play about D. H. Lawrence; his wife, Frieda; Katherine Mansfield (spelled Katharine in the draft); and her husband, John Middleton Murr, were found in an archive by scholar Gerri Kimber.
At Watt's Up With That?, Ed Hoskins spotlights the intractable problem with solar and wind power: much of the time, the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. This means that in practice, solar and wind facilities can produce only a small fraction of their nominal capacities.
AAAaaaaaannnnndddd .....a graph from Hoskins on the disparity of vision vs. achievement:
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