"I was told by the founding members of the Women's Studies Department at the State University of New York at Albany that I had been brainwashed by male scientists to believe that hormones even existed, much less had any role in the shaping of our identity and character."--Camille Paglia
The Greeks used to have a word for it. Now it's the Japanese. Kodokushi or “lonely death” refers to the Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time. First noticed in the 1980s, kodokushi has become an increasing problem in Japan, attributed to economic troubles and Japan's increasingly elderly population. It represents upwards of 5% of total deaths – about 30,000 people a year.
In the Middle Ages, the Church viewed translations of the Bible from ancient languages into English, French and other common languages as heresy, and a direct threat to the importance and power of the Church. William Tyndale, whose English translation of the Bible in 1526 was the first to take advantage of the printing press, was tried on a charge of heresy in 1536 and was condemned to be burned to death. Tyndale was a young cleric who had become disillusioned with the pomp and power of the Church; he was ascetic and scholarly by nature, and was instinctively attracted to the purer faith associated with the Lollards and the 'new men.'
The individualism handed down from the Scottish Enlightenment was concerned with finding a social system that "does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they now are, but which makes use of men in all their given variety and complexity, sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes intelligent and more often stupid." This is from Hayek, explaining that individualism is not a reactive greedy isolationism but rather a social theory. Importantly, much of the orderliness of social life is often the result of human action, but not of human design. The distinguishing feature of this brand of individualism is that it takes the self-interest of the individual (which includes caring for one's friends and family) as a psychological fact of human action, not as endorsing the unattractive characteristic of selfishness or greed. For Hayek, the intellectual confusion that leads to the belief that individualism approves and encourages human selfishness (which it does not) is one of the main reasons why so many people dislike it. The next element of his thinking is the limitation of man's knowledge. Hayek elaborates further on what he calls the "pretence of knowledge" in his Nobel Speech.
Who is....Horace Greeley?
The university as we know it today evolved from guilds or unions. Men studying at universities who reached a middling level of competence were know as "bachelors", since, though they had some ability, it was not enough to support a family. A student with considerable experience, he would lecture and otherwise aid apprentice students and serve masters, somewhat in the fashion of teaching assistants in modern research universities. ... A bachelor would then have to pass through two stages on his way to becoming a master.
The Sohn Investment Conference (run by investment guru Ira Sohn) pulls together some of the greatest traders and hedge fund managers in the world every year. “The conference wants a specific recommendation from me. I guess ‘Get out of the stock market’ isn’t clear enough,” said Stanley Druckenmiller from the conference stage in New York. Gold “remains our largest currency allocation.”The billionaire investor expressed skepticism about the current investment environment due to Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy and a slowing Chinese economy.
“The Fed has borrowed from future consumption more than ever before. It is the least data-dependent Fed in history. This is the longest deviation from historical norms in terms of Fed dovishness than I have ever seen in my career,” Druckenmiller said. “This kind of myopia causes reckless behavior.”
He believes U.S. corporations have not used debt in productive investments, but [have] instead relied on financial engineering with over $2 trillion in acquisitions and stock buybacks in the last year.
“The Fed has borrowed from future consumption more than ever before. It is the least data-dependent Fed in history. This is the longest deviation from historical norms in terms of Fed dovishness than I have ever seen in my career,” Druckenmiller said. “This kind of myopia causes reckless behavior.”
He believes U.S. corporations have not used debt in productive investments, but [have] instead relied on financial engineering with over $2 trillion in acquisitions and stock buybacks in the last year.
After the Civil War, Washington was a wreck. With the country growing and expanding, many wanted to move the capital in the direction of the nation's growth, west. St. Louis was a prominent candidate. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune , who advised Civil War veterans to 'go West and grow up with the country,' wanted the capital to do the same, as did the editor of the Chicago Tribune. Reavis even held a 'national' convention in St. Louis to champion his city.
Turkey and Iran are the heirs of the Ottoman and Persian empires. They have a history of expansion and militarism. Iran is Shi'a. Saudi Arabia is Sunni but only a recently minted state and with no military. Iraq is a shell and Syria is tearing itself apart. Israel is armed to the teeth but has no real interest in the breakdowns of the neighboring Arab states other than defensive.
But if Syria and Iraq hollow out a chaotic and powerless center, what will its neighbors, Turkey and Iran, do?
In September 2015, writer and statistician Nate Silver urged people to "calm down" about the possibility of Donald Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination. Two months later, he wrote that the media should "stop freaking out about Donald Trump's polls" and that Trump's odds were "higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent." Six months after that, after Ted Cruz had dropped out of the race but before John Kasich had done so, Silver wrote: "Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination." "Other than being early skeptics of Jeb Bush, we basically got the Republican race wrong," Silver wrote.
Truculent: adj: 1. fierce; cruel; savagely brutal. 2. brutally harsh; vitriolic; scathing: his truculent criticism of her work. 3. aggressively hostile; belligerent. ety: 1540s, from Latin truculentus "fierce, savage," from trux (genitive trucis) "fierce, wild."
Strangely enough, the word truculent in French, same word, is a very positive word applied to people larger than life, with a great ability for words and the language in general. A lot of Shakespeare characters can be seen as truculents in the French sense, a storyteller often is, Gérard Depardieu can be at times and in real life too. It describes someone who takes a lot of space, speaks with wit and laughs aloud, shows a lot of panache and tells impressive stories, some kind of big-hearted lion without the cruelty nor the claws.
[dictionary definitions for the French truculent: colorful, earthy]
[dictionary definitions for the French truculent: colorful, earthy]
The average savings of a 50-year-old is only $42,000. The average net worth of somebody between 55 and 64 is $46,000. A couple at age 65 can expect to pay $218,000 just for medical treatment over the next 20 years. Eighty percent of people between 30 and 54 believe they will not have enough money to retire. One in three people have no money saved for retirement at age 65, and almost 40% are 100% dependent on Social Security.
Those that support what they believe to be isolationism frequently cite Thomas Jefferson’s warning against involvement in entangling alliances. Yet, the American Revolution was won only because the colonies used extensive diplomacy and alliance building. Benjamin Franklin was sent to Paris to recruit the French government to the side of the US. Franklin used the conflict between Britain and France to try to position the US as a French ally. The French, at first, provided some covert supplies to the US during the revolution. France would later make a large-scale commitment to the US because it wanted the British defeated in North America.
Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was quite candid in saying that zero interest rates and quantitative easing were intended to create a “wealth effect.” He wanted asset values to rise so the affluent would spend more, so the economy could boom. He achieved the first of these: asset values rose. But who owns assets?
Ticket splitting is becoming rare in polarized America: In 2012, only 5.7 percent of voters supported a presidential candidate and a congressional candidate of opposite parties. At least half a dozen Republican senators seeking reelection and Senate aspirants can hope to win if the person at the top of the Republican ticket loses their state by, say, only four points, but not if he loses by 10. A Democratic Senate probably would guarantee a Supreme Court with a liberal cast for a generation. Only three Democrats — Andrew Jackson (twice), Franklin Roosevelt (four times) and Lyndon Johnson — have won more than 53 percent. So if Trump gets blown out, what happens to the Rube-publican Party?
Rube-publican strategist Mary Matalin has left the Rube-publican Party.
An observation in an article by David Roberts : Almost irrespective of what you think of Clinton's politics or her policies, she is manifestly more prepared to run the federal government than Donald Trump. The number of people who recognize this elemental fact about the election, however, has probably already reached and passed its peak. It will decline from here on out. The moment of clarity is already ending.....The campaign press requires, for its ongoing health and advertising revenue, a real race. It needs controversies. "Donald Trump is not fit to be president" may be the accurate answer to pretty much every relevant question about the race, but it's not an interesting answer. It's too final, too settled. No one wants to click on it.What's more, the campaign media's self-image is built on not being partisan, which precludes adjudicating political disputes. How does that even work if one side is offering up a flawed centrist and the other is offering up a vulgar xenophobic demagogue? It would be profoundly out of character for reporters to spend the six months between now and the election writing, again and again, that one side's candidate is a liar and a racist and an egomaniac. It would be uncomfortable, personally and professionally." So, according to him, the press will make a race out of an obvious mismatch. Hide the women. Save yourselves.
The earth is getting younger and older with more children and more older people. The problem is that we have not arranged ourselves on the planet in neat, homogeneous groups. In fact, most of the children are going to be in Africa and the arc around the Indian Ocean while most of the retirees will be in the developed world and China. The China demographics are surprising and a result of the "one child policy."
From Crestmont: Short-term interest rates (one year or less) are generally determined by the Federal Reserve; long-term interest rate yields are driven by the inflation rate or inflation expectations. The relationship between interest rates and inflation was not evident before the 1960’s. Current research now suggests implications for the future.
Though there are occasional, very limited periods that break the general rule, according to research from Crestmont's The 6/50 Rule states: “Interest rates will change by at least 50 basis points (0.5%) within the next 6 months.” There’s almost 50 years of history–virtually without exception–in our favor. Chances are that the change will be a good bit more than that.
AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnndddddd......a map of Israel and her neighbors:
Though there are occasional, very limited periods that break the general rule, according to research from Crestmont's The 6/50 Rule states: “Interest rates will change by at least 50 basis points (0.5%) within the next 6 months.” There’s almost 50 years of history–virtually without exception–in our favor. Chances are that the change will be a good bit more than that.
AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnndddddd......a map of Israel and her neighbors:
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