If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world. -Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)
The G7 currently includes the United States, Canada, Japan, and European Union members France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Russia had been part of the group, redubbed the G8, but it was kicked out in 2014 after the Russian army invaded the Crimea and eastern Ukraine. The current G7 countries have two things in common — large economies, and pluralistic democratic political systems that respect the rights of the individual.
If individual freedom was a quality originally, why would Russia be let in at first at all?
A rebranded “G10” with India, Brazil, and South Korea could include 10 the world’s 11 largest economies representing more than half the world’s GDP. It would also be more globally representative, with a major country from South Asia and from Latin America joining the exclusive group. And all 10 would be represented by democratically elected leaders accountable to their citizens.
Who is...Robert McNamara?
Thigmotropism: n: oriented growth of an organism in response to mechanical contact, as a plant tendril coiling around a string support. A very rare word, restricted to biology, especially botany. All three of the components of the word come from Greek: thígma means “a touch”; trópos and tropḗ are both nouns meaning “a turning, turn”; and -ism comes from the Greek suffixes -ismós, isma, used to form nouns denoting the result of an action. Thigmotropism entered English in the early 20th century. When touch is the stimulus, the response is thigmotropism. Positive thigmotropism occurs when a tendril touches an object and, by growing toward it, wraps around it, so I suppose, it has a political application.
All this worry about government and its success in problem solving reminds of Robert McNamara.
McNamara was in the Kennedy Cabinet. Kennedy called him the smartest man he had ever met. As Sec. of defense he was the architect of much of the wars of the Kennedy and Johnson era. His life in many ways is a tragedy. His obit in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html
 |
www.nytimes.com
Robert S. McNamara, the forceful and cerebral defense secretary who helped lead the nation into the maelstrom of Vietnam and spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war’s moral consequences, died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 93. His wife, Diana, said Mr. McNamara died in his ...
| |
[Robert] McNamara was a man of ferocious will, personal commitment to alleviating poverty and frighteningly little common sense. By instinct, he was a planner and a quantifier. --Michael Wolfe.
From “Can There Be an ‘After Socialism’?” by University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors:
No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in said: “Socialism has a lot of different messages to different people. I think the issue of socialist ideology and what that meant or means is not terribly important.” Perhaps it’s not important to Sanders, but it was to the tens of millions of people who died at the hands of socialists or who currently toil under such regimes in Kim Jong-un’s North Korea and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela.
A 2014 United Nations report on North Korea listed the conditions that ordinary citizens face in North Korea: “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial, and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation”. Two million to three million people are believed to have starved to death in North Korea in the 1990s, including “deliberate starvation” of political prisoners.
Venezuela’s government has practiced socialism since 1998. The result is an annual inflation rate today of 9,000 percent, an economy that shrinks 15 percent annually, empty shelves, crushing poverty, a fleeing population (10 percent of the population has emigrated), 12 percent of children under five suffer from malnutrition and a socialist president who prohibits outside aid, even from the Vatican.
The establishment of absolute monarchies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rise of modern nations imbued with an ardent and youthful spirit of nationalism produced at the same time a control over economic activity and a theoretical justification of that control that is known historically as mercantilism. Its fundamental principles, of which those of the present age, aptly called neomercantilist, remind us, are: the direction of economic life by the public authorities, the consideration of money as true wealth, a concern with a favorable balance of payments with the object of obtaining more money in international exchange, the protection of industry for the purpose of having articles of export in order to bring money into the country, a system of subsidies and privileges for exporters and for industries producing for export or avoiding imports, an increase in the population in order to augment the productive forces of the domestic economy, competition with and isolation of foreigners by means of tariff barriers, and, above all, the belief that the prosperity of one country is possible only at the expense of the others.--Faustino Ballvé
According to Stossel, the Chinese government takes data from online social platforms to assign all people who use them a "social credit score."
In other words, the government monitors your web activity and gives you a grade. Your purchases, social interactions and political activity will determine what privileges you get.
Having a low score — because you smoke, are slow to pay bills or criticize a government official — could get you barred from flying, using certain hotels or sending your kids to better schools.
The record is clear that when America’s total trade is increased, American jobs have also increased, and when our total trade has declined, so have the number of jobs. (See graph)
A strange and sad quote: "It's become safer to demonstrate against Israel than against Abbas or the Palestinian Authority. Israel is at least a country of law and order and they have human rights organizations and a powerful media and judicial system. We can only continue to dream of having something like what the Jews have." — Palestinian activist.
NBA star Stephen Curry has signed a TV, movie, and VR deal with Sony.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention detected more than 220 cases last year of a rare breed of “nightmare bacteria” that are virtually untreatable and capable of spreading genes that make them impervious to most antibiotics, according to a report.
Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American in the 70s that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
In our anthropologic view of the world, God created Nature for us. Now we seek inspiration in our own insignificance.
Edward Lampert is once again carving up Sears in a bid to save his retail empire, offering to purchase the Kenmore brand and other Sears units after the struggling company was unable to find other buyers. (wsj)
3% of American electric power goes to bitcoin mining.
In 1916, on Easter Monday in Dublin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organization of Irish nationalists led by Patrick Pearse, launched the so-called Easter Rebellion, an armed uprising against British rule. Assisted by militant Irish socialists under James Connolly, Pearse and his fellow Republicans rioted and attacked British provincial government headquarters across Dublin and seized the Irish capital’s General Post Office. Following these successes, they proclaimed the independence of Ireland. Later that day, however, British authorities launched a counteroffensive, and by April 29 the uprising had been crushed.
From a scene in "The Death of Stalin":
The people broadcasting a symphony are told that Stalin wants a recording of it. One little problem: they didn't record it. So they persuade some of the audience to stay while they do a do-over. They also have to find a conductor who will conduct the symphony and they need to haul people in off the street to be in the audience. Everyone who is organizing this is scared, quite properly, for his life.
In the three year war over Sarajevo, over 70,0000 civilians were killed--20% of the city's population--by Serbs firing into the city proper.
Between 2007 and 2016, all but three of the 25 highest-tax states lost population. The 5 biggest losers: New York (which lost 1.3 million), California (-928,627), Illinois (-717,445), and New Jersey (-516,326), and Ohio (-346,792).
At the other end of the spectrum, all but five low-tax states gained population. The biggest winners: Texas (1.4 million), Florida (845,239), North Carolina (549,148), South Carolina (361,117), Washington (313,722).
Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.--Plato
There is a new law kicking through congress that will cap retirement plans inheritance at $450,000 unless the excess is invested in insurance. Now, who do you suppose wants to do that? And to whose benefit?
AAAAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnnnndddddd.....a graph:
No comments:
Post a Comment