A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong. -Lewis H. Lapham, editor and writer (b. 8 Jan 1935)
Herman Woulk wrote Marjorie Morningstar, The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. When Isaiah Berlin suggested Woulk write his memoir, his wife—“Betty Sarah Wouk, the beautiful love of my life”—discouraged him with the words, “Dear, you’re not that interesting a person.”
Obama has created some new gun laws. This phenomenon is worth a lot of thoughtful attention but likely will get only the attention part. This follows the San Bernardino atrocity where a number of innocent county workers were murdered while having a Christmas party. Obama wants to legislate against guns. Trump wants to legislate against Muslims. Some probably would ban Christmas or parties or both. But there are two significant problems here. The first is that there is no clear understanding of the factors involved in these types of episodes; banning guns or Muslims, or parties are more than just a placebo, they are easy. They are substitutes for the real hard questions and complex answers that are at work here. The desire to do something--anything--is very human and very wrong. The second problem is that the U.S. is meticulously divided up in governmental responsibility.
There is a legislative branch, an executive branch and a judicial branch. The legislature writes the laws. Obama is in the executive branch and can only enforce the laws the legislature has written. He can not write laws, however caring or brilliant.
When Ghana became independent in 1957 it had a G.N.P. equal to that of South Korea. Now South Korea -- less richly endowed in natural resources than Ghana -- is exporting cars and television sets to Africa.
Storms on Saturn can last for months or even years. A long-lived 2004 storm on Saturn, named the “Dragon Storm,” created mega-lightning 1,000 times more powerful than lightning on Earth.
Who is....Bismarck?
When Iran learned that Saudi Arabia had beheaded a prominent Shiite cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, on Saturday, "the Shiite theocracy in Iran took it as a deliberate provocation by its regional rival and, true to form, Iranian protesters torched the Saudi embassy in Tehran and another Saudi diplomatic outpost in Iran. Iran is having second thoughts. The Saudis "knew we couldn't look the other way,” Fazel Meybodi, a cleric from the Iranian holy city of Qum, told The New York Times. “Saudi Arabia killed Mr. al-Nimr at this sensitive juncture in time to widen the gap between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.... Unfortunately they had predicted our overreaction, and now they are using it against us to try to isolate Iran once again."
One factor in the decline of liberal arts in college must be how depressing it all is.
Democracy and equal rights are not the norm in the world. The revolution that created the American Republic was just that, a revolution. And unique. It was so because the tendencies of us, as beings, are contrary to democracy and equal rights. We have, as a species, had a lot of opportunities to create cultures from the ground up; it took a long time to create the U.S.. The reasons for that delay and uniqueness should always be on our minds as the nation mulls reversion to the norm.
At least 3,600,000 black slaves were brought to Brazil alive [4.86 million according to Eltis and Richardson], while thousands more perished aboard the ships traveling from Africa to Brazil. Between 1800 and 1852, during the period when some European nations began to turn against the institution of slavery and pressure slave traders to cease, more than 1,600,000 slaves arrived in Brazil. In Africa, slaves were captured, branded, placed in heavy iron manacles, and transported on voyages that sometimes took as long as eight months to reach their final destination. The international trade was outlawed in 1830, but slave ships continued to journey to Brazil. By the 1840s, the British were seizing ships carrying slaves and freeing their captives, although when slavers saw hostile naval vessels approaching, they often threw their human cargo into the sea to avoid fines and the confiscation of their ships.
Golden oldie:
The reviews of "The Big Short" continue. Here's another: The question that neither The Big Short nor Margin Call address is the one everyone should be asking: how did so many smart people get it so wrong for so long? Of course, market traders can be wrong. But why was most everyone wrong? Why were their errors centered on housing and not some other sector? And why were they wrong on housing in this period and not previously? Any explanation that does not deal with these questions directly is not really getting to the core of the problem that needs to be explained. Here is where we must deal with the delicate signaling system of interest rates and the way they came to be so distorted through 1) Fed policy, 2) subsidized lending, and 3) the recklessness of traders in the face of too-big-to-fail policies.
Obsequy: plural: Obsequies: n: A funeral rite or ceremony. ety: 1350-1400; Middle English obseque < Middle French < Late Latin obsequiae, alteration (by confusion with exsequiae funeral rites) of obsequia, plural of Latin obsequium. Interestingly, "obsequious" has the same root: Excessively eager to please or to obey all instructions; fawning, subservient.
The minimum wage debate will go on forever. But some people have used it to great effect. During South Africa’s apartheid era, the secretary of its avowedly racist Building Workers’ Union, Gert Beetge, said, “There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances, I support the rate for the job (minimum wage) as the second-best way of protecting our white artisans.” The South African Economic and Wage Commission of 1925 reported that “while definite exclusion of the Natives from the more remunerative fields of employment by law has not been urged upon us, the same result would follow a certain use of the powers of the Wage Board under the Wage Act of 1925, or of other wage-fixing legislation. The method would be to fix a minimum rate for an occupation or craft so high that no Native would be likely to be employed.”
The paragraph that gave the book by Alan Paton its title: "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veldt with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much. "
The Enlightenment is a period in European history, around the 17th century, when science and reason came to triumph over faith and tradition. There were two central ideals in the Enlightenment: the perfectibility of human nature and the belief in human progress through the development of human knowledge, especially the sciences. While quantum physics in the early 20th century had seriously questioned the possibility of a deterministic world, the power of reason was still affirmed and so was the belief in human progress. Modernism still allowed for faith in human improvement and endeavors but began to make such more personal and less generalized. The great wars destroyed what remained. Postmodernism has no faith in anything. Post-modernism can be thought of as modernism taken to its logical conclusion, from an Old Master's "this is what there is to see" to Picasso's modernist "this is the way I see it" to Jackson Pollock's postmodern "here's a blotch, see whatever you want to see."
Is one of the appeals of Islam its simple, redefined order and meaning that the Enlightenment inadvertently subverted?
A new paper on income inequality is out by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, coming as an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Reynolds writes, "the Zucman-Saez data are so misleading as to be worthless. They attempt to estimate top U.S. wealth shares on the basis of that portion of capital income reported on individual income tax returns--interest, dividends, rent and capital gains.
A significant factor influencing the 20th Century was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Prussia had defeated Austria in the Seven Week War of 1866 and Bismarck wanted to confirm Prussia's dominance among the German states and unify them. France's motives under Napoleon III were less clear but they felt confident with their new military structure, their new breechloaders and their machine guns. They got overwhelmed, Napoleon was removed, Germany unified, Alsace and Lorraine lost to the Germans in the treaty and pride and resentment simmered until the Great War's mind altering bloodbath.
The square-root of 2 cannot be written as the ratio of two integers. That statement is provable, and the proof is very simple. Yet this is a statement that could never have been discovered experimentally. The ancient Pythagoreans considered it to be a different kind of knowledge, essentially a knowledge of the spiritual world.
AAAAAaaaaaannnnnndddddd....a picture of the Earth setting from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:
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