The Daily Telegraph reports: Under-age girls who become pregnant are most likely to have an abortion if they live in prosperous areas, figures show.
In some of the wealthiest parts of England four out of five under-age pregnancies end in an abortion, but in poorer areas under-age girls are twice as likely to keep their child.
Experts say it is the aspirations of well-off families that lead to a higher abortion rate, as girls opt not to miss out on their education.
Geoffrey Chaucer responds: "Hear, comrades, we're of one mind, as each owns;
Let each of us hold up his hand to other
And each of us become the other's brother,
And we three will go slay this traitor Death;
He shall be slain who's stopped so many a breath." ... "Now, sirs," said he, "if you're so keen, in brief,
To find out Death, turn up this crooked way,
For in that grove I left him, by my faith,
Under a tree, and there he will abide;
Nor for your boasts will he a moment hide.
See you that oak? Right there you shall him find.
God save you, Who redeemed all mankind,
And mend your ways!"- thus said this ancient man. And every one of these three roisterers ran
Till he came to that tree; and there they found,
Of florins of fine gold, new-minted, round,
Well-nigh eight bushels full, or so they thought.
No longer, then, after this Death they sought...
'It would be consoling to believe that the constructive and destructive sides of the megamachine cancelled each other out, and left a place for more central human purposes to develop, based on previous achievement in domestication and humanization.
In some degree this actually happened, since vast tracts of territory in Asia, Europe, and America were only nominally conquered, if at all, and apart from paying taxes and tribute their inhabitants led a largely isolated and enclosed communal life, sometimes overelaborating their own provincialities to the point of self-stultification and ruinous triviality. ... But perhaps the greatest threat to the megamachine came from within: from its rigidity and repression of individual ability, and from a sheer lack of rational purpose.
Apart from the destructive animus of the military machine it had many inherent limitations. The mere increase in actual power had the effect on the ruling classes of releasing the obstreperous fantasies of the unconscious, and giving play to sadistic impulses that had hitherto had no collective outlet.
And at the same time, the machine itself was dependant for operation upon weak, fallible, stupid, or stubborn human members; so that the apparatus was liable under stress to disintegrate. These mechanized human parts themselves could not be permanently held together without being sustained by a profound magico-relgious faith in the system itself, as expressed in the cult of the gods.
The fact is, happily, that human society could not be made to correspond exactly to the theoretic structure that the cult of kingship had erected. Too much of common everyday life escapes effective supervision and control, to say nothing of coercive discipline. … As noted before, the most massive collapse of the megamachine seems to have occurred at the early period when the Pyramid Age, to judge by its mortuary remains, was at its height. Nothing short of a revolutionary uprising can account for the inter-regnum of some two centuries that separates the ‘Old Kingdom’ from the ‘Middle Kingdom.’ ... While the actual incidents that brought on and effected this overthrow of the central government are unrecorded, we have, apart from the eloquent testimony of silence, along with the falling off of construction, a vivid account of changes that could only have followed from a violent revolution, as detailed by an adherent of the old order, Ipu-wer. His lament gives an account of the revolution, seen from the inside, as graphic, if no less fictionalized, as ‘Dr. Zhivago’ does of the Bolshevik revolution.
“Doorkeepers say ’Let us go and plunder.'…A man regards his son as his enemy.…Nobles are in lamentation while poor men have joy.…Dirt is throughout the land....There are really none whose clothes are white in these times....They who built the pyramids are become farmers....The [stored] grain supply of Egypt is now on a come-and-get-it basis.”
At this point, obviously, reality had broken through the imposing theological wall and toppled the social structure. For a time the cosmic myth and the centralized power dissolved, while feudal chiefs, big landowners, regional governors, town and village councils, restored to the service of their lesser local gods, took over the burden of government.
All this could hardly have happened had not the grim impositions of kingship, despite the superb technological achievements of the megamachine, become intolerable.
What was happily proved by this early revolution is something that we perhaps need to be reminded of again today: that neither exact science nor engineering is proof against the irrationality of those that operate the system. Above all, that the strongest and most efficient of megamachines can be overthrown, that human errors are not immortal. The collapse of the Pyramid Age proven that the megamachine exists on a basis of human beliefs, which may crumble, of human decisions, which may prove fallible, and human consent, which, when the magic becomes discredited, may be withheld.
The human parts that composed the megamachine were by nature mechanically imperfect: never wholly reliable.
Until real machines of wood and metal could be manufactured in sufficient quantity to take the place of most of the human components, the megamachine would remain vulnerable.'
FoxNews.com reports: An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a "game".
Ken Wooden, founder of Child Lures Prevention, says the TSA's recommendation that children be told the pat-down is a "game" is potentially putting children in danger.
Telling a child that they are engaging in a game is "one of the most common ways" that sexual predators use to convince children to engage in inappropriate contact, Wooden told Raw Story.
Children "don't have the sophistication" to distinguish between a pat-down carried out by an airport security officer and an assault by a sexual predator, he said.
The fact that the TSA agents tell the children they "pat-down" the exact same thing sexual predators tell the children they assault is certainly quite striking.
A relatively charitable explanation for this is that the TSA agents feel the need to tell the children their groping at the hands of a stranger is a "game" because they couldn't give them an actual reason.
Even a child knows that there haven't been any terrorist attacks against airplanes or airports either carried out by or involving children.
So rather than just admit that they're molesting small children for no reason other than that they were ordered to do so by their governmental overlords, the TSA agents do something which will make the children more vulnerable to pedophiles.
Hugh Hewitt: Well, that’s a fascinating exchange. You also go on to say Putin’s given you lots of reasons to be disappointed in him since.
George W. Bush: Well, he did. And the last anecdote in the book about Putin is at the opening games in China, and Putin is sitting down the aisle from me and Laura, and they had just invaded Georgia. And I had just had a pretty tough conversation with Medvedev, and so Vladimir came down, and you’re trying to have this heated conversation with a smile on your face, because the TV cameras are watching you. And the last thing I said was I’ve been telling you for years that Saakashvili was hot blooded. Vladimir said I am hot blooded. And I said no, Vladimir, you’re cold blooded. And the reason I told him that is because I was convinced at the time that Russia was headed toward Tbilisi. And Georgia was a democratically-elected ally. I mean, they had a democratically-elected leader, and the country was an ally. And I was real concerned that we were watching a re-assertive Russia use force to change the neighborhood.
Hugh Hewitt: So what was that, did he just head fake you then when you first met him in the story of the cross? Or do you think he changed as the weight of the office…
George W. Bush: I think to a certain extent, he changed. You know, in that very same conversation, the first conversation was about Soviet debt saddling the Russian Federation. And one of the later conversations we had was he was asking me how their mortgage-backed securities were doing. So in other words, he’d gone from creditor, I mean, from debtor to creditor.
US Treasuries last week suffered their biggest two-day sell-off since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The borrowing costs of the government of the world’s largest economy have now risen by a quarter over the past four weeks.
Such a sharp rise in US benchmark market interest rates matters a lot – and it matters way beyond America. The US government is now servicing $13.8 trillion (£8.7 trilion) in declared liabilities – making it, by a long way, the world’s largest debtor. Around $414bn of US taxpayers’ money went on sovereign interest payments last year – around 4.5 times the budget of America’s Department of Education.
Debt service costs have reached such astronomical levels even though, over the past year and more, yields have been kept historically and artificially low by “quantitative easing (QE)” – in other words, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s virtual printing press. Now borrowing costs are 28% higher than a month ago, with the 10-year Treasury yield reaching 3.33% last week, an already eye-watering debt service burden can only go up.
Few on this side of the Atlantic should feel smug. The eurozone’s ongoing sovereign debt debacle has pushed up Germany’s borrowing costs by 27% over the last month – to 3.03%. The market has judged that if Europe’s Teutonic powerhouse wants the single currency to survive, it will ultimately need to raise wads of cash to absorb the mess caused by other member states’ fiscal incontinence.
While the UK isn’t ensnared in monetary union, gilt yields have also spiralled 18% since the start of November – to 3.55%. British Government debt is officially £1.05 trillion. We are fast approaching a debt-to-GDP ratio of 100%, compared to 30% just a decade ago. If you add off-balance-sheet liabilities to Government estimates, including the bank bail-outs which disgracefully remain “off the books”, the UK already owes more than an entire year’s national income. In the medium-term, this is surely incompatible with a Triple AAA credit rating.
Even with gilt yields ultra-low, courtesy of British QE, the UK is still spending £42bn a year servicing sovereign debt – up 50% since 2008. The Coalition is talking tough about reining-in the annual budget deficit, but our burgeoning debt stock means interest payments are anyway set to reach £70bn – twice the defence budget – by 2015. And those numbers rest on low gilt-yield assumptions that will be blown out of the water if this recent bond market implosion is the start of a trend.
Some say that growing signs of a US economic recovery are positive for stocks, which means money is being diverted out of Treasuries, so lowering their price, which pushes up yields. That’s wishful thinking. Sovereign borrowing costs have just surged in the US – and therefore elsewhere – because a politically-wounded President Obama caved-in and extended the Bush-era tax cuts, combining them with a $120bn payroll tax holiday.
Lower taxes, and the certainty of lower taxes, may bolster business investment and growth. That’s the logic employed by those painting last week’s global yield spike in a positive light. Government borrowing costs rose in America and elsewhere, they say, as a re-bounding US economy is now drawing investors’ cash away from sovereign bonds and towards more productive uses.
The reality is, though, that the market is increasingly alarmed at the rate of increase of the US government’s already massive liabilities. America’s government debt is set to expand by a jaw-dropping 42% over the next few years, reaching $19.6 trillion by 2015 according to Treasury Department estimates presented (amid very little fanfare) to Congress back in June. Since then, government spending has risen even more. So US debt service costs, like those of many other Western nations, are expanding rapidly in terms of both the volumes of sovereign instruments outstanding, and the yields on each bond.
The new worry in the market is that this latest round of tax cuts could add another $1 trillion to the US deficit, on top of the already horrendous numbers produced in June. With opinion now deeply split about the wisdom of yet another round of QE, bond investors are getting increasingly worried that the Fed will turn off the funny-money and the sugar-rush will fade. Meanwhile, the US has very few plans – and none of them remotely credible – to get to grips with the biggest debt in history.
______________________________________________
"Next year, the first of the 79 million Baby Boomers will hit 65 — retirement age." -USA Today
There's been eleven recessions since World War II in America. The one that started in 2001 was the longest lasting up to that point.
But then the one starting in 2007 came along, and put all the other recessions to shame!
The thing I find remarkable about this is how soon it's happened.
All the Baby Boomers are still of working age (just barely). This is crucial because the Baby Boomers had a much larger percentage of them be of European descent than those generations which came after them, AND because the Baby Boom generation is so much bigger than the generations which came after them.
For this reason when a Baby Boomer reaches retirement age it has a twofold negative effect on the American economy.
One negative effect comes from the fact that European-Americans are more productive workers than most of the non-European descended people who are part of the American workforce.
Thus when a Baby Boomer retires it leads to the average American worker being less productive, which hurts the economy.
The other negative effect comes from the fact that when a Baby Boomer retires, he goes from paying into Social Security to taking out of it.
Since Baby Boomers were so much larger a generation than those that came after, this creates a situation where the retirements of Baby Boomers simply aren't going to be made up for by enough young people entering the workforce.
Given that the old are so into voting, this creates a situation where taxes will likely be raised to avoid cutting Social Security benefits.
This would be murder on the economy.
The fact that we're in the worst recession since World War II right before the asteroid of Baby Boomer retirement hits America is staggering.Read more...
Daniel Gavron writes in Newsweek: Are the Palestinians the last Zionists? It would seem so. The situation of Israel has become surreal. Just as we Israelis are making a stupendous effort to ensure the dissolution of the Jewish state, envisioned by Theodor Herzl in 1896, by hanging onto the occupied territories, the Palestinians, led by President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, are working to ensure the survival of the Zionist enterprise by striving to establish a Palestinian ministate in the West Bank and Gaza.
Let us be very clear on just what is happening here: the Palestinians are doing their best to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza on a mere 22 percent of British Mandate for Palestine, which would afford us Zionist Jews a predominantly Jewish state on the remaining 78 percent. This is surely more than we could ever have envisaged when we set out to create a Jewish state and guarantees the survival of the state of Israel. Against this, we Israelis are fighting to keep the West Bank, which will soon result in an Arab majority and the end of a Jewish majority state.
Moreover, the Palestinians are supported by the Arab and Muslim nations, who are offering, via the Arab initiative, normal relations with the Jewish state. They are even prepared to accept our settlement folly by means of land swaps, which will leave a majority of the Israeli Jews who settled illegally in the West Bank during the past four decades inside the state of Israel.
The Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians are, of course, backed by virtually the entire population of the planet, led by the United States. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is devoting a significant portion of her time to finding a formula for peace, including an agreement with Syria in return for our withdrawal from the Golan Heights. This will result not only in our dreamed-for Jewish state, but also will go a long way toward neutralizing the threats to Israel posed by Iran, Hizbullah, and Hamas.
And how are we Israelis responding? We are mobilizing every possible means of obstruction and delay. We are continuing to build in locations in the West Bank that will preclude the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state and in East Jerusalem, which is scheduled to be the Palestinian capital—as opposed to West Jerusalem, Israel’s capital. ... The Obama administration’s effort to establish a small Palestinian state, accompanied by withdrawal from the Golan Heights and peace with Syria, will finally ensure survival of the state of Israel. Why are we Israeli Jews trying so hard to prevent it?
Here's an interesting article from two weeks ago by CNBC.com senior editor John Carney:
Perhaps the biggest irony in global economics right now is the double-standard applied to economic planning.
When the Federal Reserve in the United States tries to ease our economic slump through quantitative easing, we hear cavils about debasing the money supply and distorting the economy. But when the Chinese government, which has inflated its money supply far faster than the US, endorses price controls on consumer goods to tame inflation it gets praised for its action.
Earlier this week, China's State Council announced that it may impose price caps on "important daily necessities."This is a quite typical reaction of a government that has adopted an inflationary monetary policy but wants to avoid the unavoidable consequence of higher prices.
[Note that it's only that China "may" impose price caps; though the very fact that they're foolhardy enough to consider it is news enough.]
Importantly, it has never, ever worked. What has happened every single time this has been tried is that the government puts the country on a treadmill to economic hell. Inflation leads to higher prices, which leads to price controls. Price controls start at the consumer level but then must be forced ever further backward on the production line. You control the price of food, and soon you have to control the price of fertilizer and fuel used to produce the food.
It doesn't end there. Price controls breed shortages, which leads to government rationing. They also encourage hoarding, which leads to a government crack-down on hoarding.
This is already underway in China. At the same time the State Council indicated it might implement price controls, it announced a new campaign against speculation in vegetables, grain, cooking oil and sugar. Which is to say, it announced that it would begin cracking down on anyone stocking up products in advance of the shortages that will be caused by artificially low prices.
You would think that the long, grim history of price controls would discourage anyone from praising price controls. Instead, China is getting praised for its efforts to "tame inflation."
“This is about the strongest signal the government could give of its determination to slow price rises,” Mark Williams, a London-based economist at Capital Economics Ltd. and a former China adviser for the U.K. Treasury, told Bloomberg. “Whether or not controls end up being widely implemented, the government will hope that the mere fact of the announcement will help to rein in inflation expectations.”
Utter nonsense. Actually, the opposite is likely to happen. Announcing potential price-controls in advance of actually implementing them is probably the worst idea possible. It will encourage hoarding in advance of the controls, which will accelerate rising prices. Because this dynamic is so easy to anticipate, price-controls will actually increase inflation expectations.
In other words, China has adopted a price control policy at war with its monetary policy and that is bound to backfire.
Why aren't we hearing the panic bells go off from our self-styled China experts? All too often, they seem convinced that China is different. The normal laws of economics do not apply, as if the laws of supply and demand get changed when translated into Mandarin. But, as an old Chinese proverb goes, "Crows are black everywhere." And price controls backfire, everywhere and always.
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