big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
A Black Church?
Sharing her pulpit with a witch-hunter, does Sarah realize that Pentecostalism is a flow of African Christianity to Europe and North America?
Have Pentecostalism, Will Travel,
How Sarah Palin’s religion continues to evolve around the world, by David Martin, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
Pentecostalism becomes what local people make of it, whether bureaucrats or charisma, goods or spirit, and is shaped in any way the local authorities want.
Nov 23rd 1929 – The Economist
The slump on the New York Stock Exchange, which has resulted in this great change in the monetary outlook, is one of the spectacular episodes of financial history. A prolonged upward movement, the extent of which is illustrated by some graphs which we print in a later column, has been built up over a series of years on the amazing and unexampled prosperity of America. But some two years ago the speculative movement seemed to lose all touch with reality; and in spite of occasionally vigorous but more often half-hearted, measures by the banking authorities of the United States, speculative fever spread throughout the nation and carried prices, mainly with the aid of borrowed money, to fantastic heights.
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
The fall of Bank rate on Thursday by another half per cent is an outward and visible sign that the dramatic and precipitous slump of the last three weeks in Wall Street has definitely relieved the pressure on the world’s money markets which the New York situation has been exerting so continuously for the last two years.
Very few could have dared to hope…
The human cost…’My grandfather jumped off a roof in the 1929 crash’
“If J. P. Morgan wanted a boat made out of papier-mâché, they would have made him a boat out of papier-mâché.”
Newsweek:
To date, experts have amassed enough evidence to demonstrate that the ship broke into three pieces, not two—before sinking, not after—and she went down faster and at a much lower angle than James Cameron would have ever guessed—all thanks to skimpy rivets and a flimsy hull.
… the problem was not just one of incompetence and poor construction.
…U.S. and British governments were throwing money at an industry that was virtually unregulated.
…the ship’s builders suspected that the ship’s hull was too flimsy, but overrode engineer.
Making the hull plating a quarter of an inch thinner and the rivets an eighth of an inch thinner than the original designs called for would reduce the ship’s weight by 2,500 tons, enabling her to cross the English Channel faster than the competition.
An investigation held after the ship sank was not made public; the heads of Harland and Wolff allowed two formal government inquiries to lay blame for the wreck on the shoulders of the ship’s captain. The lawsuits of so many victims would have bankrupted the Titanic’s owners—J. P. Morgan among them.
How Wall Street went from helping people trade stocks into a bunch of cowboy hedge fund traders who didn’t even realize what they were trading, but knew they were making tons of money — so they kept borrowing to do more of it.
The AP’s Washington bureau scorned McCain as being un-American by inserting racism into this election. Mainstream media is seldom so straightforward even if this editorial is politely obscure.
Although well-known for being polite, Ann Lander’s daughter Margo Howard, who has written advice columns for years, is more direct. She says Sarah Palin is a ‘loud mouth’.
I really thought I was done talking about Sarah Palin, but life is what happens when you’re making other plans. I wish there were a word that was a cross between “appalled” and “nauseated,” because that’s what the lady’s latest outburst has me feeling. Saturday evening Drudge picked up a Breitbart story where the headline was: “Palin says Obama ‘palling around’ with terrorists.” As if this weren’t bad enough, she went on to tell whatever group she was addressing: “This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America.” Well, I’ll tell you what I see: a loud-mouth, loose-lipped nobody who is drunk on media attention and a quart low in the judgment department. I think both she and her aged “maverick” buddy owe Mr. Obama an apology for this one.
To live on the same street and to have served on a board with Billy Ayers, part of the Weather Underground when Obama was in grade school and now a professor, is not my idea of “palling around with.” I think this hockey mom/moose skinner fits perfectly into the class war she is helping perpetuate, even though she has none.
It would have far more factual validity for Obama, or a surrogate, to publicize the fact that Track, the kid who joined the Army, did so because a judge told him it was that or jail due to his dealing drugs. I have a strong hunch, however, the Obama people would never get into that. Up until now the lady has annoyed me because of her ignorance and arrogance, but now I am furious, especially when her headline-making remark from yesterday was that Obama was not “fit” to be commander-in chief. I think the McCain people better lock the lady up again and tell her to zip it, because she is not fit to even ad-lib.
Sarah Palin’s son?? “…to publicize the fact that Track, the kid who joined the Army, did so because a judge told him it was that or jail due to his dealing drugs.” Dealing??
“I support my son’s independence, and I am proud of his decision because he made it for the right reasons — to serve his country,” Palin said in the Anchorage Daily.
The Rolling Stone says in Mad Dog Palin, the scariest thing about John McCain’s running mate isn’t how unqualified she is – it’s what her candidacy says about America. 
“Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.
And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin’ Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.
Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States.”
In early 1980, John McCain was a man in transition — and in a hurry.
Nine months earlier, at a cocktail reception in Hawaii, he met a glamorous young heiress named Cindy Lou Hensley and, by all accounts, fell instantly in love. McCain spent months flying from Washington to Arizona pursuing this new relationship. Soon, the 43-year-old naval attache and his 25-year-old sweetheart were engaged.
There was only one complication: McCain was still married.
World stock markets have plunged after government bank bail-outs in the US and Europe failed to stem fears of slower global economic growth.
London’s key UK share index lost 7.85% – its biggest percentage fall since 1987.
Paris Cac-40 suffered its largest fall on record.
The Dow Jones fell below 10,000 points for the first time since 2004.
The BBC Business Editor says it’s the “the messy response of the authorities that’s to blame.”
Founder of Quadrangle investment firm, Steven Rattner points to the NYT series The Reckoning as “amongst the best stuff I’ve read on the meltdown situation. They shed important light on how we got into this mess without a lot of the hyperbole, hyperventilating and simply wrong headed notions that have diminished much of the coverage of this.
The Money Meltdown is a comprehensive site with ‘everything you need to know about the global money crisis‘ – simple articles as well as extensive analysis of previous banking crises.
International Monetary Fund economists give a dry but surprisingly readable comparison of the current banking crisis to 42 previous crises, including an overview of past government interventions and their effects.
Pope Benedict XVI says. “The global financial crisis is proof that the pursuit of money and success is pointless.”
Perhaps the frivolous pursuit of wealth – ‘they bought things they didn’t need with money they didn’t have to impress people they didn’t like’ – but our prosperity is important, our path to a peaceful world, a sustained earth.
One day we’ll grab our government and our enterprise until it behaves.
John McCain’s campaign has been tapped to transfer its political technology to cattle ranchers.
Dean Anderson, an animal science researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is working on a system that will allow remote control of herds by singing commands and whispering – singing jingles, sharp commands, or mimicking bees or snakes – via radio and satellite tracking and computer data analysis.
Anderson and others involved in researching the concept of “virtual fencing” say it is getting close.
You are bought!
To cater to voters, “Republican presidents have been remarkably successful in timing income growth…”
Unequal Democracy debunks many myths about politics in contemporary America, using the widening gap between the rich and the poor to shed disturbing light on the workings of American democracy.
Larry Bartels – director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University – shows that increasing inequality is not simply the result of economic forces, but the product of broad-reaching policy choices in a political system dominated by partisan ideologies and the interests of the wealthy.
…elected officials respond to the views of affluent constituents but ignore the views of poor people.
…Republican presidents in particular have consistently produced much less income growth for middle-class and working-poor families than for affluent families, greatly increasing inequality.
He provides revealing case studies of key policy shifts contributing to inequality, including the massive Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the erosion of the minimum wage.
He challenges conventional explanations for why many voters seem to vote against their own economic interests, contending that working-class voters have not been lured into the Republican camp by “values issues” like abortion and gay marriage, as commonly believed, but that Republican presidents have been remarkably successful in timing income growth.
Unequal Democracy is social science at its very best. It provides a deep and searching analysis of the political causes and consequences of America’s growing income gap, and a sobering assessment of the capacity of the American political system to live up to its democratic ideals.
Bill Clinton says read these three bailout-related books:
Michael Heller’s Gridlock Economy (about hoarding resources), David M. Smick’s The World Is Curved (why things could get much worse), and Larry M. Bartel’s Unequal Democracy (on how partisanship has hurt the poor). Especially at this time every thoughtful American needs to learn as much as possible about the relationship of politics to economics.
A President watching out for us!
Dear Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson,
We cannot sit on the sidelines while increasing numbers of American families face the risk of losing their homes.And while neither the government nor the private sector acting alone is capable of quickly balancing the important interests in widespread access to credit and responsible lending, both must act and act quickly…
[A] consortium of industry-related service providers and public interest advocates may be able to bring quick and efficient relief to millions of at-risk homeowners and neighborhoods, even before Congress has had an opportunity to act. There is an opportunity here to bring different interests together in the best interests of American homeowners and the American economy.
Please don’t let this opportunity pass us by.
March 2007.
Andrew Sullivan asks, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a president who actually anticipated problems rather than grappled with them after the fact?” More here… including the full letter to the Treasury Department.
We must all be bananas!
Observer, Monday morning in London:
Sources indicated banks might choose not to participate in the bail-out as there is a growing view on Wall Street that the market may be bottoming out.
Breast cancer vaccine ‘within reach’
New study confirms disease is associated with childbirth.
Professor Valerie Beral of Oxford University, who leads the Million Women’s Study into the causes of the disease, told the Guardian the study had put beyond doubt what had long been guessed – that many breast cancers are caused by the absence of hormonal changes connected with childbirth.
Beral challenged the scientific community to turn its efforts to preventing breast cancer. While money and effort is poured into better drug treatments, hardly anyone is working on prevention.
Speaking to the Guardian, she said that while death rates have been slashed by new drugs and earlier diagnosis, the number of women getting breast cancer and having to go through traumatic surgery and chemotherapy was rising.
Genes played a part in only a very small number of cancers. The processes of giving birth and breastfeeding protected a woman from breast cancer more than anything else.
The more children a woman had and the longer she breastfed, the lower her risk was of later contracting breast cancer. Women in developed countries where small families are the norm have six times the breast cancer risk of those in rural parts of Asia with large families.
This is a story from the Norwegian newspaper VG.
This is the link to the translation of this story.
ÅSGÅRDSTRAND (VG): Mary was a newlywed and ready to move to Norway, but was stopped at the airport because she didn’t have enough money for the trip. Then a stranger turned up and paid for her.
I started to cry, tears were pouring down my face and I had no idea what to do. Then I heard a gentle and friendly voice behind me saying, That’s OK, I’ll pay for her.
Mary turned around to see a tall man whom she had never seen before.
He had a gentle and kind voice that was still firm and decisive. The first thing I thought was, Who is this man?
Although this happened 20 years ago, Mary still remembers the authority that radiated from the man.
He was nicely dressed, fashionably dressed with brown leather shoes, a cotton shirt open at the throat and khaki pants, says Mary.
She was thrilled to be able to bring both her suitcases to Norway and assured the stranger that he would get his money back. The man wrote his name and address on a piece of paper that he gave to Mary. She thanked him repeatedly. When she finally walked off towards the security checkpoint, he waved goodbye to her.
The piece of paper said ‘Barack Obama’
This person Sarah Palin has no restraint of honor and our press is failing to put a liar down.
She said in the TV debate’ “When I and others in the legislature found out that we had some millions of dollars in Sudan, we called for divestment through legislation of those dollars.”
She did not. In fact she opposed leaving Sudan. Her office sent this statement to quash the vote in Alaska, “The legislation is well-intended, and the desire to make a difference is noble, but mixing moral and political agendas at the expense of our citizens’ financial security is not a good combination.” [Daily Dish]
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling:
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man –
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began –
That the Dog return to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of … terror and slaughter return!
Roger Cohen is looking at the terrible requirement to be serious, asking us why we tolerate tiny politics in a continuing danger.
The United States is often an unwelcoming place these days. But as Bill Clinton said last week, the country is more inspiring with the “power of our example” than with “the example of our power.”
Roger Cohen explores another important question too: How home became homeland.
The 20th Century was not easy.
It was a century of war.
We triumph from it.
We carry its trauma too.
I’m asking, “What would we be after a century of peace?”
Is this the first mainstream media piece to stop carrying water for McCain?
Douglass K. Daniel is an editor at the Washington bureau of The Associated Press.
John McCain occasionally looks back on decisions with regret. He has apologized for opposing a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. He has apologized for refusing to call for the removal of a Confederate flag from South Carolina’s Capitol.
Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as “not like us” is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.
Most troubling, however, is how allowing racism to creep into the discussion serves McCain’s purpose so well.
As the fallout from Wright’s sermons showed earlier this year, forcing Obama to abandon issues to talk about race leads to unresolved arguments about America’s promise to treat all people equally.
When the 2008 campaign is over McCain might regret Sarah Palin.
She is only on the ticket as a result of the scheming ideas of rich old white men, being no more worthy to them than the cocktail waitress who just brought over the latest round of drinks. She’s a political pet to men and nature, unconsciously spitting out her lines about being a proud American and how evil her opponent is because that’s what she’s to do. When you see her speak you realize she could do no other.
The author studies George W. Bush. His thesis as a PhD student at the University of Canberra was “based around attempting to understand how he envisaged the idea of freedom a word you find in just about every speech he’s given as president since 9/11”.
He continues:
Bush always represented to me a uniquely American Story. A puzzle to try and figure out. A tragic tale unfolding before our eyes. Palin’s story is simple farce. Hers is not an American Story. America’s real story is one of self-creation. Of making and remaking onself, that is why the opportunity, freedom, and independence matter. Because they allow for people to make and remake something of themselves in spite the circumstances. Bush did, Palin never has and probably never will. Hers is not an American story.
MI5 intelligence service to monitor the chat, e-mail, browsing and telephone of every person in Britain. Three billion e-mails every day!
every call
every text
every email
Sunday Times:
Britain’s most senior military commander in Afghanistan has warned that the war against the Taliban cannot be won.
“We want to change the nature of the debate from one where disputes are settled through the barrel of the gun to one where it is done through negotiations.”
“If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that’s precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this. That shouldn’t make people uncomfortable.”
Republicans bear the brunt of the blame for a damaged economy. In the most recent Washington Post-ABC News national poll, more than half of all voters said they were ‘very concerned’ that the failure of the first bailout vote would cause a ‘severe economic decline.’ By a ratio of 2 to 1, they blamed the defeat on Republicans.
…
Obama is not left. Utopian, cornucopian Republican free-marketers hate economics and replace it with magical thinking. The whole government dominated by these Utopians. It’s quite understandable that economists would migrate to Obama. Obama’s economic and tax plans would be better for the economy than McCain’s.
…
Economists to have a healthy respect for empirical evidence. The Republican Party’s economic and fiscal policy over the last couple decades has seriously diverged from actual “free market” principles. Republican economic dogma is based on 50 year-old models (at best) that don’t reflect current thinking.
…
It’s time for our proudly free-market American pundits to realize they were never the smartest guys in the room. They just caught a case of hubris and crashed our economy.
…
The major difference between the hard sciences and economics is the large degree of complexity and uncertainty in the latter. The greater the uncertainty, the easier it is for the frauds, charlatans and self-serving fundamentalists to exploit.
A survey of the National Bureau of Economic Research, America’s premier association of applied academic economists, published at The Economist.
The detailed responses are bad news for Mr McCain. Eighty per cent of respondents and no fewer than 71% of those say Mr Obama has a better grasp of economics. Even among Republicans Mr Obama has the edge: 46% versus 23% say Mr Obama has the better grasp of the subject.
Make-Believe Maverick
“A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.”
In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.
In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.
How long does America expect the far-right wing of the GOP and religious fundamentalists to keep things afloat? We’re starting to see blowback from all these failed policies and instead of questioning the policies we are supposed to question the players and the system.
The problem is the GOP is too far to the right.
I’m not buying the problem lies with “both parties.” The problem lies with one party.
Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill by Jonathan Raban
Poujadism flourished most vigorously in the last years of the French Fourth Republic and articulated the economic interests and grievances of shop keepers and other proprietor-managers of small businesses facing economic and social change. The movement’s main revendication was of lower taxes; ideologically, the movement was corporatist, denouncing of the political, journalistic establishment; later, the movement grew increasingly nationalist and xenophobic and critical of parliamentary institutions.
The word poujadisme now has in France the general meaning of some political ideology that articulates the fears of some part of the population facing social or economic change, and that blame the problems on the “establishment” and the political system.
Everyone should learn this as quickly as possible! It’s been said, “This election is going to hinge on Ohio hockey moms who read the London Review of Books.”
Moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t ask her whether she believes that human beings and dinosaurs inhabited this planet simultaneously only 6,000 years ago.
Chris Matthews compared Sarah Palin to a spelling bee contestant. I agree, with one addition: Instead of spelling the word she was given, she spelled any word she felt like spelling.