The accepted view is that the Gypsies left areas in northwest India about 1,000 years ago and headed westwards, passing though Persia and Armenia and arriving in the Balkans in the 14th century. From there many continued farther west. There are account books from Holyrood House in 1529 that mention payments to Gypsies dancing for King James V of Scotland.
Thin and seductive, that's what men find attractive in women. But the ladies are less in agreement over what makes for a hot guy, new research finds.
I can’t think of anyone less qualified than Sharpton to be a Jackson family representative. Maybe bin Laden?
But really, what bothers me more than anything else is the way modern philosophy, especially Locke, is discussed. One might be left with the impression that social planners have used the Second Treatise as a handbook in their ceaseless campaign to undermine traditional marriage, among other ills. Political theorists often complain about the habit of philosophers to quickly go from a text to a "position:" i.e. the move from "Locke" to a "Lockean" conception, which, though they vary only by two letters, are tremendously different things. They complain because it's poor intellectual history to assume that anyone who takes up a thinker has understood the nuances of their thought (or, goodness, read the text); almost everyone in the debate assumes Locke is Nozick's Locke, or one very similar; this is not unlike assuming that Plato is Popper's Plato--an interesting contribution in its own right, but a bad reading of the underlying text.
So this is a plea I launch into the blogosphere, certain to be ignored, but nevertheless requesting two things: when debating about the thought of some important, canonical political theorist, it would be immensely helpful to see the text--or at least have it cited--which is the source of the commentary being given. Second, someone has to be willing to play contrarian pretty consistently--just to keep things honest.
A woman pleaded no contest last week to prostitution charges, accused of agreeing to be paid for services with a box of chips by a man who said he was a Frito-Lay employee.
Marshall also produced a nice formula for risk (R) where R=L2+C3. The "L"s in the formula stand for leverage and liquidity and the "C"s for concentration, correlation and complexity. So a portfolio with illiquid assets, high leverage, concentrated, correlated and complex portfolios will be very risky. That may not sound like rocket science but the formula escaped those who took leveraged positions in morgtage-backed securities in 2006.
The King of Pop and one of Charlie's Angels have died, but what people really want to know - according to Google search statistics - is who Mark Sanford, the governor of Califorina, was visiting in Argentina.
Unlike private companies the government has the power to subsidize its health care public option plan. Put simply: It takes tax dollars and plows them into the plan. A private company can't compete with that. In fact, a lot of government inefficiency could be covered up with some creative government accounting.
If the public plan is never subsidized, then I don't see anything wrong with it. It's just a publicly offered plan, and it probably won't be terribly competitive. But it won't stay unsubsidized. Funds are fungible and it will get subsidized either directly or indirectly. I really fear that this is a backdoor way of getting everybody on a public plan.
An important question about any public provider of health insurance is whether it would have access to taxpayer funds. If not, the public plan would have to stand on its own financially, as private plans do, covering all expenses with premiums from those who signed up for it.
But if such a plan were desirable and feasible, nothing would stop someone from setting it up right now. In essence, a public plan without taxpayer support would be yet another nonprofit company offering health insurance. The fundamental viability of the enterprise does not depend on whether the employees are called “nonprofit administrators” or “civil servants.”
In practice, however, if a public option is available, it will probably enjoy taxpayer subsidies. Indeed, even if the initial legislation rejected them, such subsidies would be hard to avoid in the long run.
But perhaps the biggest mistake of the Clinton years regarding Wall Street and the one that rings loudest today was the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which effectively had split investment banking and brokerages from commercial banks.
In the years leading up to the repeal, Wall Street had been grumbling that the law had become an anachronism. Financial technology was sophisticated. We were so much smarter than they were back in 1929 that there was no way a financial-services conglomerate could pose a threat to the system, Wall Street experts said. Besides, they argued, it was a good idea for banks to handle customers' investments and savings as a hedge in the bad times.
The Clinton administration effectively had its hand forced by the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group in 1998. The creation of Citigroup (C, news, msgs) required a lot of chutzpah by its CEO, Sandy Weill, because it was effectively prohibited under Glass-Steagall.
Enter the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which not only allowed Citigroup to exist but also eliminated key barriers between bankers, who were supposed to limit risks, and investment bankers, who were supposed to take them.
The biggest argument critics have against bringing back Glass-Steagall is that it would be too chaotic. Whole companies would have to be cleaved. Relationships would have to be unwound.
Well, back in 1933, the law effectively split J.P. Morgan, the bank, from what would become Morgan Stanley, the brokerage. Both seem to have come through the disruption fairly well.
Colombia has outlawed the construction, and use, of the semi-submersible boats used to smuggle much of the cocaine coming into North America. For those caught building these boats, it's twelve years in prison. For those caught using these boats, it's fourteen years. The U.S. estimates that Colombian cocaine smugglers have developed semi-submersible boats that are so successful at evading detection, that they are carrying most of the cocaine being moved north. Several years of effort by the U.S. Navy to improve detection methods, have not had much success.
Do we make the U.S. a better nation to do business in by lowering corporate taxes as some suggest? Can lower taxes make us more competitive, or do low labor costs trump even that?
Does the government play some role in developing new technologies that we can build here and export, thus providing new jobs or is this too much interference?
And isn’t this a case for high investment in education and in broadening education to include public trade school options for high school students? In other words, as we move toward free trade and thus inevitably let some major industries die off, do we play any sort of role in providing for those displaced by this transition?
And in the mean time, do we strengthen our own hand by implementing some form of protection – as many of our neighbors overseas and south of the border are almost guaranteed to do?
And finally, what about the trade deficit? It keeps growing and there is no end in sight….
Since the end of the Cold war, globalization seemed to impose on everybody the idea that there was only one way to follow, that there was one possible model, that there was only one logic. The crisis demonstrated this was a dead end, and we are now forced to find replacements. I said it, a few days ago, at the conference of the International Labor Organization: Finally, there are two types of globalization. One that privileges external growth, each seeking by all the means to take jobs and other markets. Or one that privileges internal growth, i.e. a development model in which everybody produces more and consumes more and contributes to the development of all. The first globalization pushes the extreme logic of competitiveness at all costs while resorting to dumping, with aggressive marketing policies, the crushing of the purchasing power and the standard of living. The second is based on the increase of productivity, the rise in the standard of living, improvement of the well-being. First is conflict. Second is co-operative. The first opposes economic progress and the social progress. The second on the contrary binds one to the other.
Stacy McCain and Conor Friedersdorf need to set up a reading circle with a heavy diet of Adam Smith and other members of the British Enlightenment, so that they can recollect the juncture points of the free market and the virtuous society.
Nasa's Cassini spacecraft has obtained strong evidence that Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus retains liquid water.
Scientists envisage misty caverns just below the tiger stripes where some of the water vaporises free of sodium and some of it becomes frozen into the small grains detected by Cassini.
In this understanding, grand strategy is not so much a grand plan but a shared understanding and overall guiding concept that is transmitted laterally to elites and then down the ranks. SE argues that “[s]ince the breakup of the Soviet Union, American grand strategy has defied meme. Various concepts–globalization, black swans, Y2K, [counterinsurgency], etc., have managed to spread among elites, but there has been very little coherence among these concepts.” SE is right, but it’s also important to point out that since the end of the Cold War, we have seen hundreds of eminent foreign policy theorists and military officers offer their own overarching grand strategic concepts. Many of them have written breezy, irreverent pop-academic tomes that seem almost tailor-made for memetic production. So why hasn’t a memetic competitor to Containment arrived?
FLG,
You wrote:Even more oddly, Al-Qaeda is a thoroughly modern response in its incarnation.
I don't think you mean that they use computer, email, and the Internet to communicate because of your skepticism of the impact of Twitter in Iran.
Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.
Sharia is not in and of itself a concern. Many of its tenets are perfectly reasonable. Granted there are some parts that are a bit concerning, but so are there parts of Christianity that are concerning.
My concerns, such as they are, arise largely from the feeling of inferiority in the Arab world, due in no small part to post-colonial political and economic systems, combined with the complete unwillingness of the leaders in that region to shift from autocracy.
Oddly, the issues we have with Islamic Terrorists are in very important aspects a bastardization of Islam endued with the idea, which arises from Western Modernity's whole-hearted embrace of the Scientific Revolution, that the material world is more important than the hereafter because it's all we can see, touch, and measure. And in this light the economic and political humiliation of Muslim countries demonstrates God's displeasure with the umma. Even more oddly, Al-Qaeda is a thoroughly modern response in its incarnation.
Anyway, I think I'm off topic, but my point here is that sharia per se is not the problem but some specific problematic interpretations of it. Therefore, if the charities involved are linked with terrorism, then we need to deal with it. However, all believers should be extremely careful of pushing church and state issues through the courts, even if this religion in question is Islam, because precedents set toward separating Islam and the US Government can just as easily apply to Christianity or Judaism and the US Government.
I agree that it might be challenging to view how the past sixty years might have turned out without the United Nations, but we can speculate, certainly. For example, the whole of the Korean peninsula likely would be living under Kim Jong Il's rule today. The U.N. is not without successes.
Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb and France's Jean Chauvel introduced a joint Anglo-French resolution that welcomed "the prompt and vigorous support" which the world had given U.N.'s earlier Korea actions; they urged "a unified command under the United States," and asked the U.S. "to designate the commander of such forces."
Sticking with the Darfur issue, Bush labelled the events there "genocide." Andrew Natsios addresses the issue in today's Washington Post ("Obama, Adrift on Sudan"). Natsios, who quit working on Sudan issues as he was making the only real progress toward peace in the history of the conflict, shows "genocide" was not and is not the right term to address the violence in Sudan, including Darfur.
At AU in the fall of 2006, I asked professors and students (in vain) to tell me what the rebels in Darfur wanted. They attacked government outposts in early 2003, starting a conflict because they thought they were not receiving enough attention from the central government. They received lots of attention after that. Peace negotiations brought together various rebel groups, but never all, and revealed that they had no agreed objectives. How then, would the central government satisfy them?
All that said, while Bush insisted that genocide was occurring, he never intervened. Indeed, it is impossible to claim he did more than the U.N. So, while the U.N. is a favored punching bag, especially when it does not do what we want, we have to take our own inaction into account as well. Right now, Natsios makes clear no action is urgently needed.
And one aside: Besides the U.S., the ICRC and the U.N. are the only entities doing anything to support displaced populations in western Pakistan while the government there attacks Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds in South Waziristan. This is the closest we have come to capturing or killing bin Laden since we lost him at Tora Bora. The effort can only continue if the Pakistani people continue to support their government. The U.N. is helping preserve that support. Who benefits more from this than we? More on this in two essays at myspace.com/occdis.
The Purposes of the United Nations are:
1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
The United Nations Human Rights Council voted Thursday to continue its close scrutiny of the situation in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan against the wishes of the African country and its allies on the 47-member body. The decision effectively continues the post of the United Nations special rapporteur on Sudan that was created in 1993.
Substantively, the public’s concerns [about budget deficits] don’t really make sense, as deficit-reduction amidst a severe recession will only make the recession more severe.
For women in today’s civil wars, often the war is not over when it is over. Sexual violence has become a method of fighting in modern war, with devastating impact on women and their communities. Failure to address sexual violence in the peace processes, to treat it as a war crime and prosecute it means that it spills over into peace time, with countries like Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo currently seeing an epidemic of rape. Addressing sexual violence in peace processes is a way of signaling that sexual violence is unacceptable in the post-conflict era. Yet it has been absent from peace accords for a number of reasons, not least because so few women participate in peace talks. In 2008, the UN Security Council acknowledged the use of sexual violence in conflict as a deliberate tactic of war. The challenges of addressing this issue in peace processes will be discussed at the Colloquium of high-level mediators, experts, and peace activists. The meeting is timed to contribute to discussions on the upcoming Secretary-General’s Report on the implementation of Security Council resolution 1820.
In ceasefires, sexual violence has not in the past been monitored effectively or treated as an act that would breach the ceasefire.
I believe there is a reason that Islamic terrorists are predominately engineers. It is because engineers view the world through a specific lens that view everything as a problem to be solved along some strict guidelines or formula. I don't want our country filled with engineers. Don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with engineering per se. I was an engineering student myself. I would prefer more liberal arts students, not engineers.
Liberal arts helps to prepare a citizen and person. Engineering prepares a problem solving machine. Problems need to be solved, no doubt. But sometimes people should ask two questions: 1) Should the problem be solved? 2) Is the most efficient way of solving the problem the best for society in the long-term?
A typical engineer will answer Yes to both before the questions are asked. I don't like that
We found that engineers are three to four times as likely as other graduates to be present among the members of violent Islamic groups in the Muslim world since the 1970s.
A lot of piecemeal evidence suggests that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers.
As a historical culture, a civilization, the West is to be distinguished not only from the East but also from "pre-Western" cultures to which it "returned" in various periods of "renaissance." Such returns and revivals are characteristics of the West. They are not to be confused with the models on which they drew for inspiration. "Israel," "Greece," and "Rome" became spiritual ancestors of the West not primarily by process of survival or succession but primarily by a process of adoption: the West adopted them as ancestors. Moreover, it adopted them selectively -- different parts at different times. Cotton Mather was no Hebrew. Erasmus was no Greek. The Roman lawyers of the University of Bologna were no Romans.
The family-resemblance argument is difficult to sustain if only because of the very different shape European intellectual life had between, oh, 400 and 1300. There is almost no Aristotle until the end of that period (the bishop of Paris did ban the teaching of Aristotle twice); only one Platonic dialogue in wide circulation; no Greek drama to speak of (Petrarch, if I remember, assembles the dialogues we have today); no work with Biblical texts in the original; and law itself tends to be commentaries on commentaries (or glosses) of Roman law rather than the law itself.
In the murky world of computer espionage, the United States faces hard choices on how to retaliate when government or privately owned networks come under cyber attack, senior military and intelligence officials said Tuesday.
Young readers now see the protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” as a whining preppy, not as a virtuous outcast.
Some critics say that if Holden is less popular these days, the fault lies with our own impatience with the idea of a lifelong quest for identity and meaning that Holden represents.
This is classic lefty/Brown thinking: compassionate towards groups; moral in an abstract, aggregate sense; but insensitive or oblivious when it comes to actual flesh-and-blood individuals.
People on the right, of course, sometimes suffer from the opposite complaint: good manners towards individuals, but indifference towards aggregate outcomes.
But no. God doesn't have to intervene all the time; he has set the world in motion at the beginning of time, omniscient and omnipotent, and foreseen and fore-ordained everything that will happen in time, including his own miraculous interventions. (Which are, however, largely unnecessary since his his providence can bring about all events as he wills without the need of intervention; he intervenes directly to make himself manifest, not as necessary to bring about any event. The question, then, is why God fore-ordains from the beginning of time that bad things happen to good people. (Assuming we can at all reliably call them good.) Most to the point, why does he fore-ordain their damnation when they have done good works all their life? For which answer, read John Calvin, Beza, and other Calvinist divines.
It is easy to assume that the argument for index funds depends on markets being efficient; it doesn't. The case for index funds simply depends on a truism; that the performance of the average investor must be based on the performance of the market before costs. Some managers will beat the market, but can we identify them in advance? If we cannot, then we are likely to pay 1-2% a year in expenses for nothing.
There’s a massive, U.S. Navy-led exercise taking place on the Baltic, this week, involving 11 European nations plus the U.S. — but, notably, not Russia. Despite participating in previous incarnations of the annual BALTOPS war game, Moscow is sitting out, this year. And depending on who you ask, Russia is even the target of the 12-day training event, which is hosted by Sweden and includes Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania. “Another provocation against Russia,” one Russian tabloid calls BALTOPS 2009.
There was every reason to believe I was heading for trouble, that I'd pushed my luck a bit far. I'd abused every rule Vegas lived by—burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help. The only hope now, I felt, was the possibility that we'd gone to such excess, with our gig, that nobody in a position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it . . . When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don't waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies. The mentality of Las Vegas is so grossly atavistic that a really massive crime often slips by unrecognized.
"Eleven million votes difference? Sometimes there's a margin of 100,000, 200,000, or 1 million maximum. Then one can doubt maybe there has been some rigging or manipulation or irregularities," Khamenei said.
"But there's a difference of 11 million votes. How can vote rigging happen?" he asked.
After $196 billion, no proof U.N. programs help
Some programs may actually hurt health care by disrupting local services
Why is it that none of these "dissident" conservatives can be bothered to read Hayek or Mises? Why do they never seem to take any interest in the basic questions of political economy and limited government? Why must they seek out this conservatism that, they assert, transcends mere politics -- a conservatism of "temperament," as Conor calls it?
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Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War
The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World
