Economy
Related: About this forumWeekend Economists Making Choices October 24-26, 2014
How the Pill Overcame Impossible Odds And Found a Place in Millions of Women's Purses By Ann Friedman BOOK REVIEW
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119569/birth-pill-jonathan-eig-reviewed-ann-friedman
Margaret Sanger promised it would be “a miracle tablet.” Hugh Hefner hailed it as “a powerful weapon.” A 30-year-old woman with six children called it “my ray of hope.” The pill is now so common—four out of five sexually active women have used it—that it’s easy to forget that oral contraception was once the stuff of fantasy.
In The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution, Jonathan Eig chronicles the decades-long effort to make that fantasy a reality. In his telling, this transformation is thanks to a unique alliance between feminists and scientists: the spotlight-seeking activist Margaret Sanger, the rebel researcher Goody Pincus, the single-minded heiress Katherine McCormick, and the photogenic family doctor John Rock. These four people provide a formula for what it takes to create scientific breakthroughs that are ahead of their time politically: an incredible amount of drive and little concern for traditional values, a willingness to flout powerful institutions and their rewards, a tremendous amount of money, and, eventually, a way to appeal to the mainstream. It’s no wonder that, despite lots of modern talk about disruption and innovation, truly world-changing breakthroughs are so rare.
America before the pill sounds like something out of Margaret Atwood. Contraception was illegal in most states from 1873 until after World War I, and not even recognized by the American Medical Association until 1937. Single women in 26 states were denied contraception until well into the 1960s. While some women were lucky enough to live in a state with more liberal birth-control laws or near a clinic that was willing to circumvent them, many were out of luck. Women used douches as a dangerous and ineffective morning-after contraceptive. Some tried the rhythm method, but even doctors’ knowledge of the reproductive system was still spotty, so that technique wasn’t very effective. Condoms were available, but married couples were reluctant to use them. Some clinics offered diaphragms, which were often poorly fitted and difficult to obtain. And these methods were only available to women with male partners who were interested in preventing pregnancy. Many men were not.
As early as 1914, Margaret Sanger, then a women’s health activist in New York, had a crazy idea: reliable birth control—ideally in pill form so women’s partners wouldn’t even have to know they were taking it. It wouldn’t just ensure that “woman” was not synonymous with “mother,” it would be the dawn of a new era of women’s pleasure and self-realization: sex without fear of pregnancy. Sanger knew that as long as men had the final say in when and how women became mothers, they would have the final say about all aspects of women’s lives.
This was a long-term goal, though. In the meantime, Sanger founded the Birth Control Federation, later called Planned Parenthood, to distribute condoms and diaphragms and lobby for the liberalization of contraception laws. She became a figurehead. She fretted that talking about “family planning” instead of “birth control” would dilute her movement, yet seemed to have few qualms about cozying up to racist, eugenicist “population control” advocates in the hopes of spreading the birth control message wider and farther. But in the post-war era, as contraception became more accepted but still remained politically taboo, Sanger grew sick of the incremental approach. She did not want to focus on improving the diaphragm. She did not want to distribute more condoms. She wanted a pill.
This was a tall order. The midcentury medical establishment was still figuring out how hormones worked—an oral contraceptive was a pipe dream. And Sanger couldn’t exactly roll up to a respected research institution and ask their most forward-thinking scientists to create one. Anti-contraception laws were still on the books in most states, and even though enforcement was lax, venerated institutions weren’t eager to push the bounds of legality. Sanger herself was a nationally known firebrand—not the type of person that tenured Ivy League medical researchers would have lunch with. Instead she sought out Pincus, “a scientist with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation” who had been fired from Harvard and recently established his own private research institution in Worcester, Massachusetts. Pincus was “interested in science and action, not long-term budgets or endowments,” Eig writes. He loved a challenge. And so when Sanger came to him in 1950 with her crazy idea for a pregnancy-preventing pill and asked if it was possible, he said he was willing to try.
Pincus’s research was enabled by the largess of Katherine McCormick, who had earned a biology degree at MIT and later inherited a fortune when her schizophrenic husband died not long into their marriage. She, like Sanger, saw controlling fertility as essential to women’s self-determination. In 1923, when contraception was still very much illegal in the United States, she smuggled diaphragms from Europe by buying them in bulk and having them sewn inside newly purchased clothing. When the paltry research budget Sanger was able to wrangle from Planned Parenthood proved insufficient, McCormick stepped in, funneling millions of dollars (in today’s money) toward Pincus’s research...
BUT IT WASN'T ALL RAINBOWS AND UNICORNS, NOR SMOOTH SAILING. IT WAS A HARROWING ADVENTURE! READ MORE OR LISTEN TO THE PODCAST BELOW:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/07/354103536/the-great-bluff-that-lead-to-a-magical-pill-and-a-sexual-revolution
Margaret Sanger
Katharine McCormick, biologist & millionaire philanthropist; FOR A SHORT BIO:
http://www.amazingwomeninhistory.com/katharine-mccormick-birth-control-history/
AUTHOR JONATHAN EIG
http://www.trbimg.com/img-543fdc4b/turbine/ctfl-jonathan-eig-web-jpg-20141016/900/900x506
MANY OF MY GREAT AUNTS TOOK TO THE CHURCH, TO AVOID BEARING 17 CHILDREN, AS THEIR MOTHER DID....WE AREN'T THAT FAR FROM THAT TIME...ONLY 3 GENERATIONS OR SO!
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Demeter
(85,373 posts)The two branches of The National Republic Bank of Chicago will reopen as branches of State Bank of Texas during their normal business hours...As of June 30, 2014, The National Republic Bank of Chicago had approximately $954.4 million in total assets and $915.3 million in total deposits. In addition to assuming all of the deposits of The National Republic Bank of Chicago, State Bank of Texas agreed to purchase approximately $626.1 million of the failed bank's assets. The FDIC will retain the remaining assets for later disposition...
The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $111.6 million. Compared to other alternatives, State Bank of Texas' acquisition was the least costly resolution for the FDIC's DIF. The National Republic Bank of Chicago is the 16th FDIC-insured institution to fail in the nation this year, and the fifth in Illinois. The last FDIC-insured institution closed in the state was GreenChoice Bank, fsb, Chicago, on July 25, 2014.
HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)According to latest information, the US tax authorities have declared in a secret workshop of representatives of the EU, how to close a bank overnight, if it is broke. Before the announcement of the ECB stress tests, nervousness increases in the EU and the Member States: Apparently, several banks from the ECB's perspective will not be able to survive. If they can not be transferred quickly to a competitor, there will be threatening bank runs.
Between representatives of the EU and the United States Deposit Insurance Fund, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) are practiced secret bank closures overnight. The United States had handled more than 500 banks during the financial crisis. Close to an ailing bank is almost a 'cloak and dagger operation', because this must be done within a very short time.
From November, the ECB will take over the banking supervision. For this purpose, a unified processing mechanism is established, which includes a process for closure of banks in the euro zone.
In the stress test of the ECB, allegedly 25 banks have not been able to meet the capital requirements of the ECB. That's amazing: Because the stress test has been applied rather harmless and certain risks were not considered...
THERE ARE STILL TOO MANY BANKSTERS IN THE WORLD...HOW CAN THE FDIC SHUT THEM DOWN?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)A year and a half AGO I wrote an essay on how the US chooses to view Russia, titled The Image of the Enemy. I was living in Russia at the time, and, after observing the American anti-Russian rhetoric and the Russian reaction to it, I made some observations that seemed important at the time. It turns out that I managed to spot an important trend, but given the quick pace of developments since then, these observations are now woefully out of date, and so here is an update...At that time the stakes weren't very high yet. There was much noise around a fellow named Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer-crook who got caught and died in pretrial custody. He had been holding items for some bigger Western crooks, who were, of course, never apprehended. The Americans chose to treat this as a human rights violation and responded with the so-called “Magnitsky Act” which sanctioned certain Russian individuals who were labeled as human rights violators. Russian legislators responded with the “Dima Yakovlev Bill,” named after a Russian orphan adopted by Americans who killed him by leaving him in a locked car for nine hours. This bill banned American orphan-killing fiends from adopting any more Russian orphans. It all amounted to a silly bit of melodrama.
But what a difference a year and a half has made! Ukraine, which was at that time collapsing at about the same steady pace as it had been ever since its independence two decades ago, is now truly a defunct state, with its economy in free-fall, one region gone and two more in open rebellion, much of the country terrorized by oligarch-funded death squads, and some American-anointed puppets nominally in charge but quaking in their boots about what's coming next. Syria and Iraq, which were then at a low simmer, have since erupted into full-blown war, with large parts of both now under the control of the Islamic Caliphate, which was formed with help from the US, was armed with US-made weapons via the Iraqis. Post-Qaddafi Libya seems to be working on establishing an Islamic Caliphate of its own. Against this backdrop of profound foreign US foreign policy failure, the US recently saw it fit to accuse Russia of having troops “on NATO's doorstep,” as if this had nothing to do with the fact that NATO has expanded east, all the way to Russia's borders. Unsurprisingly, US–Russia relations have now reached a point where the Russians saw it fit to issue a stern warning: further Western attempts at blackmailing them may result in a nuclear confrontation. The American behavior throughout this succession of defeats has been remarkably consistent, with the constant element being their flat refusal to deal with reality in any way, shape or form. Just as before, in Syria the Americans are ever looking for moderate, pro-Western Islamists, who want to do what the Americans want (topple the government of Bashar al Assad) but will stop short of going on to destroy all the infidel invaders they can get their hands on. The fact that such moderate, pro-Western Islamists do not seem to exist does not affect American strategy in the region in any way.
Similarly, in Ukraine, the fact that the heavy American investment in “freedom and democracy,” or “open society,” or what have you, has produced a government dominated by fascists and a civil war is, according to the Americans, just some Russian propaganda. Parading under the banner of Hitler's Ukrainian SS division and anointing Nazi collaborators as national heroes is just not convincing enough for them. What do these Nazis have to do to prove that they are Nazis, build some ovens and roast some Jews? Just massacring people by setting fire to a building, as they did in Odessa, or shooting unarmed civilians in the back and tossing them into mass graves, as they did in Donetsk, doesn't seem to work. The fact that many people have refused to be ruled by Nazi thugs and have successfully resisted them has caused the Americans to label them as “pro-Russian separatists.” This, in turn, was used to blame the troubles in Ukraine on Russia, and to impose sanctions on Russia. The sanctions would be reviewed if Russia were to withdraw its troops from Ukraine. Trouble is, there are no Russian troops in Ukraine....In other ways, the sanctions are actually being helpful. The import ban on foodstuffs from EU is a positive boon to domestic agriculture while driving home a politically important point: don't take food from the hands of those who bite you. Russia is already one of the world's largest grain exporters, and there is no reason why it can't become entirely self-sufficient in food. The impetus to rearm in the face of NATO encroachment on Russian borders (there are now US troops stationed in Estonia, just a short drive from Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg) is providing some needed stimulus for industrial redevelopment. This round of military spending is being planned a bit more intelligently than in the Soviet days, with eventual civilian conversion being part of the plan from the very outset. Thus, along with the world's best jet fighters, Russia is likely to start building civilian aircraft for export and competing with Airbus and Boeing. But this is only the beginning. The Russians seem to have finally realized to what extent the playing field has been slanted against them. They have been forced to play by Washington's rules in two key ways: by bending to Washington's will in order to keep their credit ratings high with the three key Western credit rating agencies, in order to secure access to Western credit; and by playing by the Western rule-book when issuing credit of their own, thus keeping domestic interest rates artificially high. The result was that US companies were able to finance their operations more cheaply, artificially making them more competitive. But now, as Russia works quickly to get out from under the US dollar, shifting trade to bilateral currency arrangements (backed by some amount of gold should trade imbalances develop) it is also looking for ways to turn the printing press to its advantage. To date, the dictat handed down from Washington has been: “We can print money all we like, but you can't, or we will destroy you.” But this threat is ringing increasingly hollow, and Russia will no longer be using its dollar revenues to buy up US debt. One proposal currently on the table is to make it impossible to pay for Russian oil exports with anything other than rubles, by establishing two oil brokerages, one in St. Petersburg, the other, seven time zones away, in Vladivostok. Foreign oil buyers would then have to earn their petro-rubles the honest way—through bilateral trade—or, if they can't make enough stuff that the Russians want to import, they could pay for oil with gold (while supplies last). Or the Russians could simply print rubles, and, to make sure such printing does not cause domestic inflation, they could export some inflation by playing with the oil spigot and the oil export tariffs. And if the likes of George Soros decides to attack the ruble in an effort to devalue it, Russia could defend its currency simply by printing fewer rubles for a while—no need to stockpile dollar reserves.
So far, this all seems like typical economic warfare: the Americans want to get everything they want by printing money while bombing into submission or sanctioning anyone who disobeys them, while the rest of the world attempts to resist them. But early in 2014 the situation changed. There was a US-instigated coup in Kiev, and instead of rolling over and playing dead like they were supposed to, the Russians mounted a fast and brilliantly successful campaign to regain Crimea, then successfully checkmated the junta in Kiev, preventing it from consolidating control over the remaining former Ukrainian territory by letting volunteers, weapons, equipment and humanitarian aid enter—and hundreds of thousands of refugees exit—through the strictly notional Russian-Ukrainian border, all the while avoiding direct military confrontation with NATO. Seeing all of this happening on the nightly news has awakened the Russian population from its political slumber, making it sit up and pay attention, and sending Putin's approval rating through the roof. The “optics” of all this, as they like to say at the White House, are rather ominous. We are coming up on the 70th anniversary of victory in World War II—a momentous occasion for Russians, who pride themselves on defeating Hitler almost single-handedly. At the same time, the US (Russia's self-appointed arch-enemy) has taken this opportunity to reawaken and feed the monster of Nazism right on Russia's border (inside Russia's borders, some Russians/Ukrainians would say). This, in turn, makes the Russians remember Russia's unique historical mission is among the nations of the world: it is to thwart all other nations' attempts at world domination, be it Napoleonic France or Hitleresque Germany or Obamaniac America. Every century or so some nation forgets its history lessons and attacks Russia. The result is always the same: lots of corpse-studded snowdrifts, and then Russian cavalry galloping into Paris, or Russian tanks rolling into Berlin. Who knows how it will end this time around? Perhaps it will involve polite, well-armed men in green uniforms without insignia patrolling the streets of Brussels and Washington, DC. Only time will tell.
You'd think that Obama has already overplayed his hand, and should behave accordingly. His popularity at home is roughly the inverse of Putin's, which is to say, Obama is still more popular than Ebola, but not by much. He can't get anything at all done, no matter how pointless or futile, and his efforts to date, at home and abroad, have been pretty much a disaster. So what does this social worker turned national mascot decide to do? Well, the way the Russians see it, he has decided to declare war on Russia! In case you missed it, look up his speech before the UN General Assembly. It's up on the White House web site. He placed Russia directly between Ebola and ISIS among the three topmost threats facing the world. Through Russian eyes his speech reads as a declaration of war.
MUCH MORE GOSSIP, RUMOR, INNUENDO AND FACT AT LINK
Dmitry Orlov is currently working on a new book that will be out later this year. Orlov says, “The new book is about communities and what makes them resistant to adverse events such as financial collapse.” Orlov adds, “The U.S., as a whole, is not resistant to shocks, but some parts of America are.” You can find Dmitry Orlov at ClubOrlov.com.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts).... I particularly like
And this
I remember reading about the people burned alive - by "our side" - where, I don't know because I can't remember anything being made of it in mainstream news? (Of which, to be fair, I hear very little other than on NPR)? However, it did not fit the narrative of "our side" being brave freedom fighters, so .... of course, when some crazed religious nut does same in Africa, it will appear on "Yahoo" for shock value - that's OK because s/he (usually he of course) is not "our side" and anyway, you know, crazy black savages .... anyway, sorry to meander it is all so awful - I waited for some outrage, but I can't recall any from US?
The Guardian wrote one of those careful sentences in which something occurs without any human agent. In this case
"was set alight" such innocuous wording for BURNING PEOPLE ALIVE
MattSh
(3,714 posts)Orlov has been on my reading list for a while, though the reading list is just too big these days to hit them all...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)http://blog.sfgate.com/fiore/2014/10/23/ebola-buddy/
Voter Fraud Vigilantes
http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/voter_fraud_vigilantes_20141016
The Beheading Coalition
http://blog.sfgate.com/fiore/2014/09/17/the-beheading-coalition/
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Ever since Marty McFly took to the air in the 1989 classic "Back to the Future II," humanity has been eagerly awaiting the arrival of a real, fully-functional hoverboard. Since then, tinkerers and scientists the world over have launched countless attempts at building such a device, and now, after more than 25 years of trying, technology has finally caught up with our far-fetched dreams. Thanks to a startup by the name of Hendo Hover, the hoverboard is finally a real thing that exists in the world that you and I inhabit.
How is such a thing possible? Well, according to the company's Kickstater page, the magic behind the Hendo Hoverboard lies in its four disc-shaped hover engines. These are essentially giant downward-facing electromagnets that work together to create a powerful magnetic field which literally pushes against itself, thereby generating the lift which levitates the board above the ground.
The only catch is that, unlike Marty McFly's board, Hendo's levitation trick only works when the board is sitting atop a non-ferromagnetic conductor — in other words, a solid sheet of metal that doesn't contain iron or steel. For this reason, you unfortunately won't be able to ride it around town. Practically, a board like this would be about as useful as a pair of ice skates as a means of transportation, but in a special metal-floored rink (like the one Hendo shows in the video), this thing could definitely be a good bit of fun.
Because it doesn't make any contact with the ground and uses electromagnetic fields to levitate, the board is completely frictionless. Therefore, a rider could glide across the rink without slowing down after a single push. Better yet, Hendo has also figured out a way to modulate the strength of the hover engines to create directional thrust, so with a more development, you could drive the board around without touching the ground at all.
Right now the hoverboard is just a prototype, but despite some rough edges, it's a solid proof-of-concept. Hoverboards are definitely possible, and with some additional funding from the crowdfunding community on Kickstarter, Hendo hopes to bring them to the masses within the next year. The company is currently just a few thousand dollars shy of its $250K funding goal, and still has two months left in its campaign. If all goes well, Hendo hopes to ship the boards to backers as early as October 2015, which, oddly enough, is the date that Marty McFly traveled to in the second installment of the trilogy.
IT'S FOX NEWS...YOUR RESULTS MAY VARY
Demeter
(85,373 posts)be back later! Carry on, as usual (as if I could stop you!)
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)I listened a few weeks ago, very enlightening.
antigop
(12,778 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)"The Pill" is a 1975 country music song recorded by Loretta Lynn. It is one of her best known songs as well as the most controversial record of her career.
Despite having the same name and similar themes, it is not related to "The Pill," written by Scottish folk musician Matt McGinn and performed in the United States by Pete Seeger.
About the song
"The Pill", written by Lorene Allen, Don McHan, and T. D. Bayless, is a comic-tinged song about birth control. The song tells a story of a wife who is upset about her husband getting her pregnant year after year, but is now happy because she can control her own reproductive choices because she has "the Pill" (which had been introduced in 1960). The song, like many of Lynn's other hits, suggested her personal life (she'd had six children, two of whom them before she was 19).
The song's frank discussion of birth control, something that was considered risqué subject matter at the time (especially in country music), led to a number of country radio stations refusing to play it. The song received much publicity and airplay on the stations that would air it, but its ban from a number of radio stations caused the record to stall at number five on the charts at a time when a Loretta Lynn record was almost guaranteed to be a top three hit, often a number one record. Nevertheless it earned her more press and attention outside the country market than anything she had ever recorded before and ultimately became her highest-charting pop single, peaking at #70 on the Hot 100.
Recorded in 1972 and held back by her label, the song was finally released in 1975, Lynn's first single that year. The single was released on her 1975 album, Back to Country and was the only single released from the album.
Influence of song
In an interview for Playgirl Magazine, Lynn recounted how she had been congratulated after the song's success by a number of rural physicians, telling her how "The Pill" had done more to highlight the availability of birth control in isolated, rural areas, than all the literature they'd released.
Matt McGinn (17 January 1928 – 5 January 1977) was a Scottish folk singer-songwriter, actor, Author and Poet. Born in Glasgow in the late 1920s. McGinn was a prolific songwriter and is recognised as an influential figure in the British folk music revival of the late fifties-early sixties.
MattSh
(3,714 posts)
Crewleader
(17,005 posts)
Boomer witches
MattSh
(3,714 posts)Saudi Arabia has unleashed an economic war against selected oil producers. The strategy masks the House of Saud’s real agenda. But will it work?
Rosneft Vice President Mikhail Leontyev; “Prices can be manipulative…Saudi Arabia has begun making big discounts on oil. This is political manipulation, and Saudi Arabia is being manipulated, which could end badly.”
A correction is in order; the Saudis are not being manipulated. What the House of Saud is launching is “Tomahawks of spin,” insisting they’re OK with oil at $90 a barrel; also at $80 for the next two years; and even at $50 to $60 for Asian and North American clients.
The fact is Brent crude had already fallen to below $90 a barrel because China – and Asia as a whole – was already slowing down economically, although to a lesser degree compared to the West. Production, though, remained high – especially by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - even with very little Libyan and Syrian oil on the market and with Iran forced to cut exports by a million barrels a day because of the US economic war, a.k.a. sanctions.
The House of Saud is applying a highly predatory pricing strategy, which boils down to reducing market share of its competitors, in the middle- to long-term. At least in theory, this could make life miserable for a lot of players – from the US (energy development, fracking and deepwater drilling become unprofitable) to producers of heavy, sour crude such as Iran and Venezuela. Yet the key target, make no mistake, is Russia.
A strategy that simultaneously hurts Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Ecuador and Russia cannot escape the temptation of being regarded as an “Empire of Chaos” power play, as in Washington cutting a deal with Riyadh. A deal would imply bombing ISIS/ISIL/Daesh leader Caliph Ibrahim is just a prelude to bombing Bashar al-Assad’s forces; in exchange, the Saudis squeeze oil prices to hurt the enemies of the “Empire of Chaos.”
Yet it’s way more complicated than that.
Complete story at - http://rt.com/op-edge/196148-saudiarabia-oil-russia-economic-confrontation/
xchrom
(108,903 posts)In a telling quote, influential International Olympic Committee member Gian-Franco Kasper told CNN that the 2014 Sochi Olympics was too expensive.
"Russia did what [Switzerland] did in our ski resorts in 150 years in five years, that of course costs money," he said. "And then they did it in the Russian way, as big and as beautiful as possible. But more than $50 billion was just too much, there's no question."
At a cost of $51 billion, the Sochi games were widely criticized for being wasteful and corrupt. A single 31-mile train and highway project cost $8.7 billion — more than the entire Vancouver Olympics.
But in light of the disastrous bidding process of the 2022 Olympics, it's clear that the games didn't just cost the Russian people, it cost the IOC as well. Every potential host city for the 2022 games with a democratically elected government eventually pulled its bid proposal. Stockholm and Oslo both cited the exorbitant cost as the reason. Almaty, Kazakhstan and Beijing are the only two cities still bidding.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/sochi-olympics-cost-reform-2014-10#ixzz3H9cHo7Ec
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Build one facility, and reuse it every year.
Sheesh! Do I have to do all the thinking around here?
MattSh
(3,714 posts)Western leaning governments, up to their yingyang in debt. Because of this indebtedness, it's impossible to see much beyond the end of your nose. Russia had a vision, and like many visions, it required infrastructure. Remember infrastructure? Most Americans don't, until something falls and hits them on the head.
In contrast, the small city of Sochi lacked prerequisite engineering sophistication, project management talent and labor required to address the challenge of an Olympic transformation. Hence, the investment program kicked off with port facilities required simply to receive construction materials and equipment, as well as construction of housing facilities for imported project management and labor.
Both rising economic powers eager for global recognition, is it any wonder that Russia's investment in Sochi is the same order of magnitude as China's investment in Beijing?
and...
Located on the Black Sea coast in one of Russia's few subtropical climate zones, the Soviet Central Planners designated Sochi as the premier vacation resort for the Soviet Union. However, like all Communist System consumer undertakings, it was typified by constrained capacity with access doled out each year to a privileged few.
As Russia's largest resort city today, Sochi's available capacity falls far short of the vacation demand of Russia's 143 million citizens, resulting in high occupancy rates and even higher prices. The upshot is an annual exodus of holiday seekers to venues in Europe and Asia, despite language and cultural barriers. Indeed, direct beneficiaries of Russia's domestic "supply deficit" are the well-supplied markets around the world, particularly sun-and-sea locations, including France's Côte d'Azur and Spain's Costa Brava.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101385144#.
Of course, not all visions pay off.
Looks like Russia wasn't the only one with a vision. Kazakhstan has a vision too, it seems. Images at the link.
http://goo.gl/3kGy4Z
And if you think that's impressive, just look at their brand new capital city...
http://goo.gl/3wxTMh
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Most business schools are tallying up the final career stats for the Class of 2014 and won't release their pay and placement data for another month or so. But this week, two highly ranked schools — one private and one public — published their stats, and they are among the best-ever endorsements for the value of the MBA degree.
At Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business and the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business starting salaries were up, along with job offers and acceptances this year at levels not seen since before the Great Recession. The reports are a likely harbinger of good news to come from the nation's top business schools.
Tuck reported that 91% of the class that graduated on June 8 had offers — exactly the same as last year — but that number zoomed to 98% three months later, up by three percentage points from the 95% rate in 2013.
"That is as high as I have seen it," said Jonathan Masland, director of Tuck's counseling and recruiting in career development. "But the economy is continuing to recover, the students worked hard and the recruiters and alumni really wanted our students. It was a very strong year."
Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141024074228-17970806-great-news-on-the-mba-job-front#ixzz3H9cpmApb
Demeter
(85,373 posts)That's the $185,000 question.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Thought I'd answer my own question....
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Opium poppy cultivation sprawled to more than a half-million acres in Afghanistan last year, a record according to a report by the Inspector General responsible for overseeing Afghanistan's reconstruction.
Two charts in the report convey the sheer depth of the US's failure to end a globally illegal industry that directly funds the Taliban.
One of the report's charts used UN data to show how market forces appear to hold sway over the country's opium production levels.
That market paid amazingly little heed to over a decade of external efforts to crush it.
This map shows that the increase was a national phenomenon. It's not as if a couple of regions enjoyed a bumper crop. Opium is a growth industry everywhere:
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-uss-failure-to-end-afghanistans-opium-trade-2014-10#ixzz3H9e0yqfJ
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The release of new Social Security Administration wage data gives us a chance to update our analysis of wage trends for the top 1.0% of wage earners and wage groups in the bottom 99.0%. There’s some surprising news this year, as top 1.0% wages fell, while the remainder of the workforce saw real wage improvements. In the analysis below we review these recent trends, as well as trends during the Great Recession and over the longer-term.
Wage growth from 2012 to 2013
New data for 2013 (Table 1) provide some surprising news: real average annual wages nudged down slightly, falling 0.2% since 2012, because wages of the top 1.0% of wage earners declined, although those of the bottom 99.0% grew. The biggest wage decline was among the top 0.1% of earners, whose wages fell 9.0%, while the next 0.9% saw their wages fall just 1.4%. In contrast, the wages of the bottom 90% (averaging $32,333 in 2013) rose a modest 0.4% (real hourly wages did grow modestly in 2013). Higher wage workers, those earning between the 90th and 99th%iles of wages (averaging $136,820 in 2013) fared the best, with real wages rising by 2.5%. Thus, wage inequality between high and middle/low wage workers grew even though those at the very top—the 1%ers—actually lost ground. David Cay Johnston wrote on this yesterday. Our analysis goes beyond his reporting by placing earners in%ile wage groups (bottom 90%, top 1%, etc.) and providing analyses of changes over the Great Recession’s downturn and recovery and the longer-term changes back to 1979.
What explains the dip in top 1% wages? Without access to the underlying data, this is a difficult task, but here are some thoughts. This stratum of wages is heavily influenced by executive pay trends and, therefore, by the ups and downs of the stock market, which executive pay has closely tracked for the last twenty years. Stock values, judged by the Dow Jones index and the S&P 500, grew strongly (roughly 15%) in 2013, but CEO compensation for the largest firms grew a modest 2.8%. That does not explain a fall in wages though. The fall may be due to some income shifting, as tax rates did rise in 2013 (a new, higher top bracket at 39.6%, and an additional 0.9% Medicare tax on high earners). Those able to probably shifted compensation they would have received in 2013 into 2012 (when top one% wages grew 6.1%). The Wall Street Journal did report that there were “more bonuses paid by firms in December to avoid higher federal tax rates.” If so, then we can expect the 2013 dip in wages to be temporary, and for the wages of the top 1.0% to recover strongly in 2014.
Read more: http://www.epi.org/blog/top-1-percent-wage-earners-falters-2013/#ixzz3H9hLMkN1
Read more: http://www.epi.org/blog/top-1-percent-wage-earners-falters-2013/#ixzz3H9h7N4bu
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(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Margaret Higgins Sanger (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) was an American birth control activist, sex educator, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term birth control, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Sanger's efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States. Sanger is a frequent target of criticism by opponents of birth control and has also been criticized for supporting eugenics, but remains an iconic figure in the American reproductive rights movement.
In 1916, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, which led to her arrest for distributing information on contraception. Her subsequent trial and appeal generated enormous support for her cause. Sanger felt that in order for women to have a more equal footing in society and to lead healthier lives, they needed to be able to determine when to bear children. She also wanted to prevent unsafe abortions, so-called back-alley abortions, which were common at the time because abortions were usually illegal.
In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In New York City, she organized the first birth control clinic staffed by all-female doctors, as well as a clinic in Harlem with an entirely African-American staff. In 1929, she formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, which served as the focal point of her lobbying efforts to legalize contraception in the United States. From 1952 to 1959, Sanger served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She died in 1966, and is widely regarded as a founder of the modern birth control movement.
Early life
Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins in 1879 in Corning, New York, to Michael Hennessey Higgins, an Irish-born stonemason and free-thinker, and Anne Purcell Higgins, a hard-working, Roman Catholic Irish-American. Both Anne and her parents immigrated to Canada when she was a child, due to the Potato Famine. At 14 Michael Hennessey Higgins immigrated to the USA and when Michael turned 15 he served in the U.S. Army during the Civil War, where he was a drummer. After leaving the army he studied medicine and phrenology, but ultimately chose to become a stonecutter, making stone angels, saints, and tombstones. Michael H. Higgins was a Catholic who became an atheist and an activist for women's suffrage and free public education. Anne Higgins went through 18 pregnancies (with 11 live births) in 22 years before dying at the age of 49. Sanger was the sixth of eleven children, and spent much of her youth assisting with household chores and caring for her younger siblings. Supported by her two older sisters, Margaret Higgins attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, and then in 1900 enrolled in White Plains Hospital as a nurse probationer. Her 1902 marriage to dashing architect William Sanger ended her formal training.Though Margaret Sanger was plagued by a recurring active tubercular condition, she bore three children and the couple settled down to a quiet life in Westchester, New York.
In 1911, after a fire destroyed their home in Hastings-on-Hudson, the Sangers abandoned the suburbs for a new life in New York City. Margaret Sanger worked as a visiting nurse in the slums of the East Side, while her husband worked as an architect and a painter. Already imbued with William Sanger's leftist politics, Margaret Sanger also threw herself into the radical politics and modernist values of pre-World War I Greenwich Village bohemia, where she joined the Women's Committee of the New York Socialist party. She took part in the labor actions of the Industrial Workers of the World, including the notable 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike and the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike and she became involved with local intellectuals, artists, socialists, and social activists including John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, and Emma Goldman.
Her political interests, emerging feminism and nursing experience led to her 1912 column on sexual education entitled "What Every Mother Should Know" and "What Every Girl Should Know" for the socialist magazine the New York Call.
During Margaret Sanger's work among the working class of immigrant women she was exposed to graphic examples of women forced into frequent childbirth, miscarriage, and self-induced abortion for lack of information on how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Access to contraceptive information was prohibited on grounds of obscenity by the 1873 federal Comstock law and a host of state laws. Searching for something that would help these women, Sanger visited public libraries, but was unable to find information on contraception. These problems were epitomized in a story that Sanger would later recount in her speeches: while Sanger was working as a nurse, she was called to Sadie Sachs' apartment after Sachs had become extremely ill due to a self-induced abortion. Afterward, Sadie begged the attending doctor to tell her how she could prevent this from happening again, to which the doctor simply gave the advice to remain abstinent. A few months later, Sanger was called back to the Sachs' apartment—only this time, Sadie died shortly after Sanger arrived because of another self-induced abortion. Sanger would sometimes end the story by saying, "I threw my nursing bag in the corner and announced ... that I would never take another case until I had made it possible for working women in America to have the knowledge to control birth." Although Sadie Sachs was possibly a fictional composite of several women Sanger had known, this story marks the time when Sanger began to devote her life to help desperate women before they were driven to pursue dangerous and illegal abortions.
Awakened to the connection between contraception and working-class empowerment by radicals like Emma Goldman, Sanger came to believe that only by liberating women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would the fundamental social change take place, she then proceeded to launch a campaign to challenge governmental censorship of contraceptive information. She would set up a series confrontational actions designed to challenge the law and force birth control to become a topic of public debate. Sanger's trip to France in 1913 exposed her to what Goldman had been saying. Sanger's experience during her trip to France directly influence The Women Rebel newsletter. The trip to France was also the beginning of the end of her marriage with William Sanger.
In 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, an eight-page monthly newsletter which promoted contraception using the slogan "No Gods, No Masters". Sanger, collaborating with anarchist friends, popularized the term "birth control" as a more candid alternative to euphemisms such as "family limitation and proclaimed that each woman should be "the absolute mistress of her own body." In these early years of Sanger's activism, she viewed birth control as a free-speech issue, and when she started publishing The Woman Rebel, one of her goals was to provoke a legal challenge to the federal anti-obscenity laws which banned dissemination of information about contraception. Though postal authorities suppressed five of its seven issues, Sanger continuing publication, all the while preparing Family Limitation, an even more blatant challenge to anti-birth control laws. This 16-page pamphlet contained detailed and precise information and graphic descriptions of various contraceptive methods. In August 1914 Margaret Sanger was indicted for violating postal obscenity laws by sending the The Woman Rebel through the postal system. Instead of standing trial, she jumped bail and fled to Canada. Then, under the alias "Bertha Watson", sailed for England. En route she ordered her labor associates to release copies of the Family Limitation.
Margaret Sanger spent much of her 1914 exile in England, where contact with British neo-Malthusianists helped refine her socioeconomic justifications for birth control. She was also profoundly influenced by the liberation theories of British sexual theorist Havelock Ellis. Under his tutelage she formulated a new rationale that would liberate women not just by making sexual intercourse safe, but also pleasurable. It would, in effect, free women from the inequality of sexual experience. Early in 1915, Margaret Sanger's estranged husband, William Sanger, was entrapped into giving a copy of Family Limitation to a representative of anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock. William Sanger was tried and convicted, he spent thirty days in jail, while also escalating interest in birth control as a civil liberties issue.
Some countries in northwestern Europe had more liberal policies towards contraception than the United States at the time, and when Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915, she learned about diaphragms and became convinced that they were a more effective means of contraception than the suppositories and douches that she had been distributing back in the United States. Diaphragms were generally unavailable in the United States, so Sanger and others began importing them from Europe, in defiance of United States law.
In 1917, she started publishing the monthly periodical Birth Control Review.
On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy St. in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States. Nine days after the clinic opened, Sanger was arrested. Sanger's bail was set at $500 and she went back home. Sanger continued seeing some women in the clinic until the police came a second time. This time Sanger and her sister, Ethyl, were arrested for breaking a New York state law that prohibited distribution of contraceptives, Sanger was also charged with running a public nuisance. Sanger and Ethyl went to trial in January 1917. Sanger was convicted; the trial judge held that women did not have "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception." Sanger was offered a more lenient sentence if she promised to not break the law again, but she replied: "I cannot respect the law as it exists today." For this, she was sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse. An initial appeal was rejected, but in a subsequent court proceeding in 1918, the birth control movement won a victory when Judge Frederick E. Crane of the New York Court of Appeals issued a ruling which allowed doctors to prescribe contraception. The publicity surrounding Sanger's arrest, trial, and appeal sparked birth control activism across the United States, and earned the support of numerous donors, who would provide her with funding and support for future endeavors.
Sanger became estranged from her husband in 1913, and the couple's divorce was finalized in 1921. Sanger's second husband was Noah Slee. He followed Sanger around the world and provided much of Sanger's financial assistance. The couple got married in September 1922, but the public did not know about it until February 1924. They supported each other with their pre-commitments.
After World War I, Sanger shifted away from radical politics, and she founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 to enlarge her base of supporters to include the middle class. The founding principles of the ABCL were as follows:
Sanger's appeal of her conviction for the Brownsville clinic secured a 1918 court ruling that exempted physicians from the law that prohibited the distribution of contraceptive information to women—provided it was prescribed for medical reasons—she established the Clinical Research Bureau (CRB) in 1923 to exploit this loophole. The CRB was the first legal birth control clinic in the United States, and it was staffed entirely by female doctors and social workers. The clinic received a large amount of funding from John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family, which continued to make donations to Sanger's causes in future decades, but generally made them anonymously to avoid public exposure of the family name, and to protect family member Nelson Rockefeller's political career since openly advocating birth control could have led to the Catholic Church opposing him politically. John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated five thousand dollars to her American Birth Control League in 1924 and a second time in 1925. In 1922, she traveled to China, Korea, and Japan. In China she observed that the primary method of family planning was female infanticide, and she later worked with Pearl Buck to establish a family planning clinic in Shanghai. Sanger visited Japan six times, working with Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue to promote birth control. This was ironic since ten years earlier Sanger had accused Katō of murder and praised an attempt to kill her.
In 1926, Sanger gave a lecture on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. She described it as "one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing," and added that she had to use only "the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand." Sanger's talk was well received by the group, and as a result, "a dozen invitations to similar groups were proffered."
In 1928, conflict within the birth control movement leadership led Sanger to resign as the president of the ABCL and take full control of the CRB, renaming it the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB), marking the beginning of a schism in the movement that would last until 1938.
Sanger invested a great deal of effort communicating with the general public. From 1916 onward, she frequently lectured—in churches, women's clubs, homes, and theaters—to workers, churchmen, liberals, socialists, scientists, and upper-class women. She wrote several books in the 1920s which had a nationwide impact in promoting the cause of birth control. Between 1920 and 1926, 567,000 copies of Woman and the New Race and The Pivot of Civilization were sold. She also wrote two autobiographies designed to promote the cause. The first, My Fight for Birth Control, was published in 1931 and the second, more promotional version, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, was published in 1938.
During the 1920s, Sanger received hundreds of thousands of letters, many of them written in desperation by women begging for information on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Five hundred of these letters were compiled into the 1928 book, Motherhood in Bondage.
Planned Parenthood era
In 1929, Sanger formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control in order to lobby for legislation to overturn restrictions on contraception. That effort failed to achieve success, so Sanger ordered a diaphragm from Japan in 1932, in order to provoke a decisive battle in the courts. The diaphragm was confiscated by the United States government, and Sanger's subsequent legal challenge led to a 1936 court decision which overturned an important provision of the Comstock laws which prohibited physicians from obtaining contraceptives. This court victory motivated the American Medical Association in 1937 to adopt contraception as a normal medical service and a key component of medical school curriculums.
This 1936 contraception court victory was the culmination of Sanger's birth control efforts, and she took the opportunity, now in her late 50s, to move to Tucson, Arizona, intending to play a less critical role in the birth control movement. In spite of her original intentions, she remained active in the movement through the 1950s.
In 1937, Sanger became chairman of the newly formed Birth Control Council of America, and attempted to resolve the schism between the ABCL and the BCCRB. Her efforts were successful, and the two organizations merged in 1939 as the Birth Control Federation of America. Although Sanger continued in the role of president, she no longer wielded the same power as she had in the early years of the movement, and in 1942, more conservative forces within the organization changed the name to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a name Sanger objected to because she considered it too euphemistic.
In 1946, Sanger helped found the International Committee on Planned Parenthood, which evolved into the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952, and soon became the world's largest non-governmental international family planning organization. Sanger was the organization's first president and served in that role until she was 80 years old.
In the early 1950s, Sanger encouraged philanthropist Katharine McCormick to provide funding for biologist Gregory Pincus to develop the birth control pill which was eventually sold under the name Enovid....
Death
Sanger died of congestive heart failure in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona, aged 86, about a year after the event that marked the climax of her 50-year career: the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized birth control in the United States. Sanger is buried in Fishkill, New York, next to her sister, Nan Higgins, and her second husband, Noah Slee. One of her surviving brothers was College Football Hall of Fame player and coach Bob Higgins.
MORE NUANCE AT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger
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(85,373 posts)Katharine Dexter McCormick (August 27, 1875 – December 28, 1967) was a U.S. biologist, suffragist, philanthropist and, after her husband's death, heir to a substantial part of the McCormick family fortune. She is remembered for funding most of the research necessary to develop the first birth control pill.
Early life and education
Katharine Dexter was born August 27, 1875 in Dexter, Michigan, in her grandparents' mansion, Gordon Hall, and grew up in Chicago where her father, Wirt Dexter, was a prominent lawyer. Following the early death of her father of a heart attack at age 57 when she was 14 years old, she and her mother Josephine moved to Boston in 1890. Four years later, her brother Samuel died of meningitis at age 25. Katharine graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1904, earning a BSc in biology.
Marriage to Stanley McCormick
She planned to attend medical school, but chose to marry Stanley Robert McCormick, youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, an heir to the International Harvester fortune. They married on September 15, 1904. In September 1905, they moved into a home in Brookline, Massachusetts. The couple did not have any children.
For over a decade, since graduating cum laude from Princeton University in 1895 where he had also been a gifted athlete on the varsity tennis team, Stanley had been showing signs of progressively worsening mental illness. In September 1906, he was hospitalized for over a year at McLean Hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia.
In June 1908, Stanley was moved to the McCormick's Riven Rock estate in Montecito, California where Stanley's schizophrenic older sister, Mary Virginia, had lived from 1898–1904 before being placed in a Huntsville, Alabama sanitarium. While there, he was examined by the prominent German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin and diagnosed with the catatonic form of dementia praecox. In 1909, Stanley was declared legally incompetent and his guardianship split between Katharine and the McCormick family.
Women's rights activist
In 1909 McCormick spoke at the first outdoor rally for woman suffrage in Massachusetts. She became vice president and treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and funded the association's publication the Woman's Journal. McCormick organized much of Carrie Chapman Catt's efforts to gain ratification for the Nineteenth Amendment. While working with Catt, she met other social activists, including Mary Dennett and Margaret Sanger. In 1920 McCormick became the vice president of the League of Women Voters.
Throughout the 1920s McCormick worked with Sanger on birth control issues, McCormick smuggled diaphragms from Europe to New York City for Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau, and in 1927 she hosted a reception of delegates attending the 1927 World Population Conference at her home in Geneva. In that year McCormick also turned to the science of endocrinology to aid her husband, believing that a defective adrenal gland caused his schizophrenia.
Philanthropist
She established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School, and subsidized the publication of the journal Endocrinology. Katharine's mother Josephine died on November 16, 1937 at age 91 leaving Katharine an estate of more than 10 million dollars. Stanley died on January 19, 1947 at age 72 leaving an estate of over 35 million dollars to Katharine. She spent five years settling his estate, most of which went to pay inheritance taxes.
In 1953 McCormick met with Gregory Goodwin Pincus. Pincus had been working on developing a hormonal birth control method since 1951. McCormick agreed to fund Pincus research into oral contraception and she and Pincus persuaded Dr. John Rock to conduct human trials. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale of the Pill in 1957 for menstrual disorders and added contraception to its indications in 1960. McCormick had provided almost the entire $2 million it took to develop and test the oral contraceptive pill. She continued to fund birth control research through the 1960s.
While MIT was always coeducational it could provide housing to only some fifty female students. Therefore, many of the women who attended MIT had to be local residents. However, the place of women at the Institute was far from secure as Katharine Dexter told Dorothy Weeks (a physicist and mathematician who earned her master's and doctorate from MIT) that she had lived "in a cold fear that suddenly—unexpectedly—Tech might exclude women...".
In order to provide female students a permanent place at MIT, she would donate the money to found Stanley McCormick Hall, an all female dormitory that would allow MIT to house 200 female students. The ramifications of the hall are best stated by William Hecht '61, executive vice president of the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT when he said, "the visible presence of women at MIT helped open up the science and engineering professions to a large part of the population that before had been excluded. It demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that at MIT men and women are equal."
Following her death in 1967, aged 92, her will provided $5 million to Stanford University School of Medicine to support female doctors. $5 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which funded the Katharine Dexter McCormick Library in New York City, and $1 million to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology.
Katharine McCormick is a character in T.C. Boyle's novel Riven Rock (1998), which is mainly about her husband Stanley's mental illness.
She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2000.
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(85,373 posts)Dr. Gregory Goodwin Pincus (April 9, 1903 – August 22, 1967) was an American biologist and researcher who co-invented the combined oral contraceptive pill.
Birth and education
Gregory Goodwin Pincus was born in Woodbine, New Jersey, into a Jewish family, the son of Polish-born immigrants Elizabeth (née Lipman) and Joseph Pincus, an agriculture teacher. He credited two uncles, both agricultural scientists, for his interest in research. He went to Cornell University and received a bachelor's degree in agriculture in 1924. He attended Harvard University where he was an instructor in zoology while also working toward his master's and doctorate degrees. From 1927 to 1930 he moved from Harvard to Cambridge University in England to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology with Richard Goldschmidt in Berlin where he performed research. He became an instructor in general physiology at Harvard University in 1930 and was promoted in 1931 to an assistant professor.
Research
Dr. Pincus began studying hormonal biology and steroidal hormones early in his career. He was interested in the way that hormones effected mammals' reproductive systems. His first breakthrough came early, when he was able to produce in vitro fertilization in rabbits in 1934. In 1936, he published his discoveries after his experiments. His experiments involving parthenogenesis produced a rabbit that appeared on the cover of Look magazine in 1937, which may have been a reason for Harvard's having denied Pincus tenure. To create the in vitro rabbit baby, Pincus removed the ovum from the mother rabbit and placed it in a solution mixture of saline and estrone. Afterwards, he placed the "fertilized" ovum back into the rabbit. Pincus' experiment became known as "Pincogenesis" because other scientists were unable to attain the same results when conducting the experiment. After his experiment, Pincus began to be acknowledged, but for the wrong reasons. After he was misquoted in an interview, it was believed that his experiment was the beginning of the use of in vitro for humans.
In 1944, Dr. Pincus co-founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. He wanted to continue his research of the relationship between hormones and diseases such as, but not limited to, cancer, heart disease, and schizophrenia. By the end of the 1960s, more than 300 international researchers came to participate in the Worcester Foundation of Experimental Biology.
Pincus never lost interest in mammals' reproduction systems. He began to research infertility. In 1951, Margaret Sanger met Pincus at a dinner hosted by Abraham Stone, director of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau and medical director and vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), and procured a small grant from PPFA for Pincus to begin hormonal contraceptive research. Pincus, along with Min Chueh Chang, confirmed earlier research that progesterone would act as an inhibitor to ovulation.
In 1952, Sanger told her friend Katharine McCormick about Pincus and Chang's research. Frustrated by PPFA's meager interest and support, McCormick and Sanger met with Pincus in 1953 to dramatically expand the scope of the research with 50-fold increase in funding from McCormick. Pincus was fascinated by Sanger because she revealed what life was like for poor women who had to endure many pregnancies. She indirectly influenced him to create a successful contraceptive to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
In order to prove the safety of "the pill," human trials had to be conducted. These were initiated on infertility patients of Dr. John Rock in Brookline, Massachusetts using progesterone in 1953 and then three different progestins in 1954. Puerto Rico was selected as a trial site in 1955, in part because there was an existing network of 67 birth control clinics servicing low-income women on the island. Trials began there in 1956 and were supervised by Dr. Edris Rice-Wray.
Some of the women experienced side effects from "the pill" (Enovid) and Rice-Wray wrote Pincus and reported that Enovid "gives one hundred percent protection against pregnancy but causes too many side reactions to be acceptable". Pincus and Rock disagreed based on their experience with patients in Massachusetts and conducted research showing that placebos caused similar side effects. The trials went on and were expanded to Haiti, Mexico and Los Angeles despite high attrition rates, due to the large number of women eager to try this form of contraception.
In May 1960, the FDA extended Enovid's approved indications to include contraception.
Personal life
Pincus married Elizabeth Notkin (1900-1988) in 1924 and they had three children together.
Awards
He received a number of awards. Some of these awards include the Oliver Bird Prize in 1957, the Julius A. Koch Award in 1962, and the American Medical Association's Scientific Achievement Award in 1967. Pincus was acknowledged for his creation of the Laurentian Hormone Conference, which was a conference of endocrinologists. He was the chairman of the conference. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the hormones of the endocrine system. The conference was attended by endocrinologists from all over.
Death
He died in 1967 of myeloid metaplasia, a rare blood disease, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was 64 years old and lived in Northborough, Massachusetts. Dr. Pincus's funeral was held Friday August 25, 1967 at Temple Emanuel in Worcester, Massachusetts.
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(85,373 posts)John Rock (March 24, 1890 – December 4, 1984) was an American obstetrician and gynecologist. He is best known for the major role he played in the development of the first birth control pill, colloquially called "the pill".
Early life and career
Rock was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University medical school in 1918 and founded his own medical practice a few years later. Rock and his wife raised five children.
Rock was a pioneer in in vitro fertilization and sperm freezing. He helped many of his patients achieve pregnancy and became known as a "ground-breaking infertility specialist."
As his career progressed, Rock also became known for his acceptance of birth control. (Birth control was illegal in Massachusetts until the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut.) In the 1930s, he founded a clinic to teach the rhythm method, the only birth control accepted by the Catholic Church. In 1931, Rock was the only Catholic physician to sign a petition to legalize birth control. In the 1940s, he taught at Harvard Medical School—and included birth control methods in his curriculum. Rock also coauthored a birth control guide for the general reader, titled Voluntary Parenthood and published in 1949.
Pill development and promotion
In 1951 and 1952, Margaret Sanger arranged for funding for Gregory Pincus's research of hormonal contraception. In 1952, John Rock was recruited to investigate clinical use of progesterone to prevent ovulation. In 1955, the team announced successful clinical use of progestins to prevent ovulation. Enovid, the brand name of the first pill, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and put on the market in 1957 as a menstrual regulator. In 1960, Enovid gained approval from the FDA for contraceptive use.
Rock was 70 years old when Enovid was approved for contraceptive use. But over the next eight years, Rock campaigned vigorously for Roman Catholic approval of the pill. He published a book (The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor's Proposals to End the Battle over Birth Control), was featured in Time Magazine and in Newsweek, and gave a one-hour interview to NBC. In 1958, Pope Pius XII had approved use of the pill to treat menstrual disorders. Rock believed it was only a matter of time before the Catholic Church approved its use as a contraceptive.
In 1968 the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae entrenched Catholic opposition to hormonal contraception. Rock was profoundly disappointed. For the first time in his life, he stopped attending Mass.
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(85,373 posts)G.D. Searle & Company or just Searle was a company focusing on life sciences, specifically pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and animal health. It is now part of Pfizer.
History
Searle was founded in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1888. The founder was Gideon Daniel Searle. In 1908, the company was incorporated in Chicago. In 1941, the company established headquarters in Skokie, Illinois. It was acquired by the Monsanto Company in 1985. Pharmacia Corporation was created in April 2000 through the merger of Pharmacia & Upjohn (itself the result of the merger of Pharmacia and Upjohn) with the Monsanto Company and its G.D. Searle unit. The merged company was based in Peapack, New Jersey. Pfizer acquired Pharmacia in 2003 and retired the Searle name.
Robert B. Shapiro acted as general counsel for the firm from 1979 onwards, where he went on develop Searle's aspartame product under the brand name NutraSweet. He became CEO of its NutraSweet subsidiary in 1982.
G.D. Searle & Company's chairman was William L. Searle until 1985. He was a University of Michigan graduate and Naval reservist, and was an officer in the Army Corps in the early 1950s. Directors of G.D. Searle included Andre M. de Staercke, Reuben Richards, and Arthur Wood.
Donald Rumsfeld served as CEO, and then as President, of Searle between 1977 and 1985. During his tenure at Searle, Rumsfeld downsized the number of employees in the company by 60%. The resulting spike in the company's bottom-line financials earned him awards as the Outstanding Chief Executive Officer in the Pharmaceutical Industry from the Wall Street Transcript (1980) and Financial World (1981). In 1985, he played an instrumental role in the acquisition of G.D. Searle & Company by Monsanto.
In 1993 a team of researchers at Searle Research and Development filed a patent application for celecoxib, which Searle developed and which became the first selective COX-2 inhibitor to be approved by the FDA on Dec 31, 1998. Control of this blockbuster drug was often mentioned as a key reason for Pfizer's acquisition of Pharmacia.
Notable products
The company manufactured prescription drugs and nuclear medicine imaging equipment. Searle is known for its release of Enovid, the first commercial oral contraceptive, in 1960. It is also known for its release of the first bulk laxative, Metamucil, in 1934; Dramamine, for motion sickness; the COX-2 inhibitor Bextra; Ambien for insomnia; and NutraSweet (also known as Aspartame), an artificial sweetener, in 1965. It was released in 1981 by FDA.
In 1996, the FDA removed all restrictions on the use of aspartame, which enabled its use in heated and baked goods. G.D. Searle's patent on aspartame was extended in 1981 and ultimately expired in December 1992.
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(85,373 posts)IT'S A RIPOFF OF AMERICAN PIE! OY VEH!
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(85,373 posts)The World Is Pervated With
Ironie, Hunger And Corruption
The Eastern World And The Africans Too
Are Going To Repeat The History Of Our Wars
And Our Industry Supplies Them With Arms
Everybody Knows, But Apparently
Nobody Can Do Anything Against It
For Our Society Is On The Make
Well, Sometimes, Sometimes,
I Tried To Draw Up A List
I Tried To Find Out What Death Had Done
I Thought Of Honourable Murderers You Know
Like Jobbers And Mad Rabble-Rousers
At Anytime, Everywhere In The Whole World
If I Were A Gamma Ray, A Gamma Gamma
Gamma Ray Made Of Pure Existence
If I Were A Gamma Ray, A Gamma Gamma
Gamma Ray Mighty And Unfailing
I'd Radiate Love, To Fight Misery
Without A Body I Could Fly Round
The World Destroying Arms, Destroying Rockets
Mix-Up Complexions Of The Whole Human Race
We All Would Turn Into Chocolate People
Everybody, Everywhere In The Whole World
If I Were A Gamma Ray, A Gamma Gamma
Gamma Ray Made Of Pure Existence
If I Were A Gamma Ray, A Gamma Gamma
Gamma Ray Mighty And Unfailing
I'd Radiate Love, To Fight Misery
Wikipedia says........
Birth Control is a German rock band known for their progressive hard rock sound and provocative album covers.
Birth Control formed in the middle of 1968 in Berlin from two other bands, the Earls and the Gents. The initial members were: Bernd Koschmidder (bass), Reinhold Sobotta (organ), Rolf Gurra (saxophone and vocals), Fritz Groeger (vocals), Klaus Orso (guitar), Reiner Borchert (guitar), and Hugo Egon Balder (percussion).
After a series of disappointing albums in the early 1980s, the group disbanded, but reunited in 1993 with only drummer/lead vocalist/band leader Bernd 'Nossi' Noske remaining along with new members. The band continues to tour in Germany and release new albums periodically. As of recently, former members Peter Föller (bass, vocals) and Zeus B. Held (keyboards, reeds) from the band's classic period have been making special guest appearances at gigs. Sadly, original guitarist/songwriter Bruno Frenzel died on September 21, 1983 from a long illness.
http://www.birth-control.de/
Demeter
(85,373 posts)This is a book about JPMorgan Chase. It is, therefore, a book about greed, corruption, arrogance and power. And it is also a book about Bernie Madoff. Few people realize the link between America’s biggest bank and America’s biggest crook. Our government, which knows about it and should be the most outraged, doesn’t care. Although it announced criminal charges against the bank for two felony violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, it simultaneously entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the bank, suspending an indictment for two years provided that the bank complies with the law in the future.1 As if JPMorgan Chase, with its armies of high-priced lawyers, didn’t know how to comply with the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act in 44 years. It needs another two years to figure out how to comply with the law!
Our government did not require that a single JPMorgan Chase employee face criminal charges . . . or even lose his job. In deferring the indictment against the bank, the United States government may have feared that JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail. But surely JPMorgan Chase, with 240,000 employees, can survive without the handful of officers who sheltered Madoff from the law for 20 years and, as the bank has acknowledged, violated the law. Are these officers too rich to jail? How did we become a country where powerful employers can purchase immunity from criminal prosecution for their employees?
Since the government won’t protect you, the purpose of this book is to give you the information you need to protect yourselves: when bankers act like gangsters, you should treat them like gangsters, even if the government won’t. And the last thing you should do is trust them with your money.
Madoff could not have stolen $64.8 billion of other people’s money without the complicity of a major financial institution. Madoff was able to get by with a three-person accounting firm working out of a store front in a shopping center in Rockland County, New York. But make no mistake about it. Madoff needed the imprimatur and facilities of a major bank. And JPMorgan Chase stepped up to the plate. Why would the bank do this? Shall we follow the money? Do you have any idea how much money JPMorgan Chase was able to make off the Madoff account? Did you know that Madoff maintained huge balances in his JPMorgan Chase account, reaching $4 billion or more from 2006 on. And do you think the folks at JPMorgan Chase know how to make money off other people’s money? You bet they do.
MORE AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)JPMorgan, UBS and Credit Suisse were fined a total of 94 million euros ($120 million) by the European Commission for taking part in cartels in the financial sector.
The Commission handed JPMorgan a 61.7-million-euro fine for rigging the Swiss franc Libor benchmark interest rate between March 2008 and July 2009. It was also fined 10.5 million euros for participating in a cartel on Swiss franc interest rate derivatives.
UBS' penalty in the derivatives cartel came to 12.7 million euros and that of Credit Suisse was 9.2 million euros. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L) alerted the Commission about both cartels and escaped total fines of 115 million euros.
The penalties are the latest by the European Commission, which along with authorities around the world, has handed down billions of euros in fines against top banks for rate-rigging, breaking trade sanctions and other misbehavior.
"Acting against financial cartels is one of our top priorities, given the importance of a healthy, transparent, well-functioning financial sector for the entire economy," European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said.
The EU competition watchdog said the banks in the interest rate derivatives cartel agreed to collectively fix a pricing element which should have been determined by the market, between May and September 2007 with the aim of preventing rivals from competing on the same terms.
All the banks admitted wrongdoing in return for a 10 percent reduction in their fines.
The Commission slapped a record 1.7-billion-euro fine on six financial institutions last December for rigging two financial benchmarks.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The Federal Reserve's New York branch knew about risks JPMorgan Chase & Co was taking with its massive "London Whale" derivatives bets four years before they imploded, but it failed to act properly to head them off, the U.S. central bank's inspector general said. The Fed's Office of Inspector General said on Tuesday one of the key flaws it uncovered in its probe of the 2008 transaction at the Wall Street bank was the New York Fed's over-reliance on certain personnel who left the supervisory team in 2011. That created a "significant loss of institutional knowledge" within the team assigned to inspect JPMorgan, the report said. In what amounts to another recent black eye for the New York Fed's bank supervision unit, the report also noted that competing supervisory priorities and limited resources contributed to a failure to conduct key follow-up examinations.
The London Whale case emerged from JPMorgan's (JPM.N) credit derivative trading losses in Europe in 2012, which were connected to its chief investment office (CIO) and ballooned to $6.2 billion by the end of that year. The bank was fined more than $1 billion by U.S. and British regulators for the loss, which sparked concerns in the U.S. Congress over lax Fed oversight in the throes of the financial crisis. The inspector general's findings could stoke long-simmering concerns among Americans that federal regulators, the Fed in particular, are too deferential to Wall Street to head off another crisis and recession.
"It's a failure to coordinate, and it's frustrating," said Cornelius Hurley, a former assistant general counsel at the Fed's Board of Governors.
"It's nice to think that with the new set of players (since 2008) in Treasury and the New York Fed that we would get a re-examination of bank supervision, but I really don't see that happening without another financial crisis."
Perhaps the most damaging finding on Tuesday was evidence that the New York Fed became aware of risks in J.P. Morgan's CIO four years before the scandal broke. According to the report, the New York Fed identified the risks and planned two examinations of the bank's CIO office. A team from the Washington-based Federal Reserve system also planned an examination in 2009, but the probes were not discussed with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, another U.S. agency responsible for bank supervision.
"As a result, there was a missed opportunity for the consolidated supervisor and the primary supervisor to discuss risks related to the CIO and to consider how to deploy the agencies' collective resources most effectively," the report said.
.......................................................
On Monday, William Dudley, a former Goldman Sachs partner who is now president of the New York Fed, delivered a tough speech aimed at the continued bad behavior exemplified by bankers, calling for an overhaul of compensation and for the firms to shrink if they cannot be managed effectively.
The inspector general's unabridged report is not publicly available. To read the summary report, click on: 1.usa.gov/1uzrxo5
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Fannie Mae has reached a $170 million settlement of a lawsuit accusing it of misleading shareholders about its finances, risk management and mortgage exposure before it was seized by the U.S. government during the 2008 financial crisis. The settlement, which requires court approval, was disclosed in a Friday filing with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. It resolves shareholder allegations that Fannie Mae defrauded shareholders and inflated its stock by issuing false and misleading statements about its internal controls, capitalization, accounting, and exposure to subprime and low-documentation "Alt-A" mortgages.
The settlement allocates $123.8 million to common stockholders and $46.2 million to preferred stockholders between Nov. 8, 2006 and Sept. 5, 2008.
Fannie Mae's market value peaked during that period at more than $60 billion. It is now $2.71 billion...The government seized Fannie Mae and the smaller Freddie Mac on Sept. 7, 2008, and put them into a conservatorship under the Federal Housing Finance Agency, where they remain. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together drew about $187.5 billion of bailout funds, but have returned roughly $218.7 billion to taxpayers in the form of dividends.
The lead plaintiffs suing Fannie Mae are the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board, the State-Boston Retirement Board and the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System, and are seeking class-action status. They said the settlement averts potential "numerous and substantial risks" of continuing the lawsuit after similar litigation against Freddie Mac was dismissed last year...
MORE DETAIL AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I have shed several "jobs" that grew increasingly onerous and frankly boring, frustrating and exhausting, this week and this very day!
I am taking a leap of faith that the new, very low stress gig I picked up will keep body and soul together economically, while the resulting freedom of time and energy and commuting keeps the mind and spirit from dying. And then, there's the time to catch up on deferred maintenance
...and if the new gig does not meet the expenses, I believe there will be other opportunities in the Michigan labor market, which has cracked open just a bit for the first time in 14 years.
Here's to luck!
antigop
(12,778 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Something had to give, and I'm glad it was possible without losing mind, health or committing a murder.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)IT'S AUTUMN, AND STRESS-TEST TIME, AND THE BANKSTERS ARE FALLING LIKE LEAVES
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/25/us-deutsche-bank-suicide-idUSKCN0IE08U20141025?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews
Calogero Gambino, a senior Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) regulatory lawyer, has been found dead in New York in what appears to have been a suicide, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing New York City officials and other sources.
The 41-year-old man was found early on Oct. 20 hanging by the neck from a stairway banister, the newspaper said.
Gambino, an associate general counsel and a managing director who worked for the German bank for 11 years, was found by his wife and pronounced dead by medical practitioners at the scene, according to the paper. He had been closely involved in negotiating legal issues for Deutsche Bank such as a probe by regulators of banks over allegations they manipulated the Libor benchmark interest rate as well as currency markets, the newspaper said. He was also an associate at a private law firm and a regulatory enforcement lawyer between 1997 and 1999, the Wall Street Journal said, citing Gambino's LinkedIn profile and conference biographies.
Germany's biggest lender, which has already paid 6.1 billion euros in fines and settlements in the past two and a half years, expects to post litigation costs of 894 million euros alone for the third quarter of 2014.
Earlier this year, former Deutsche Bank manager William Broeksmit, who had close ties to co-chief executive Anshu Jain, had been found dead at his London home in what also appeared to have been a suicide.
LAWYERS COMMITTING SUICIDE LOOK ESPECIALLY BAD FOR THE BUSINESS...
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)10/25/14
Back on January 26, a 58-year-old former senior executive at German investment bank behemoth Deutsche Bank, William Broeksmit, was found dead after hanging himself at his London home, and with that, set off an unprecedented series of banker suicides throughout the year which included former Fed officials and numerous JPMorgan traders.
Following a brief late summer spell in which there was little if any news of bankers taking their lives, as reported previously, the banker suicides returned with a bang when none other than the hedge fund partner of infamous former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Khan, Thierry Leyne, a French-Israeli entrepreneur, was found dead after jumping off the 23rd floor of one of the Yoo towers, a prestigious residential complex in Tel Aviv.
Just a few brief hours later the WSJ reported that yet another Deutsche Bank veteran has committed suicide, and not just anyone but the bank's associate general counsel, 41 year old Calogero "Charlie" Gambino, who was found on the morning of Oct. 20, having also hung himself by the neck from a stairway banister, which according to the New York Police Department was the cause of death. We assume that any relationship to the famous Italian family carrying that last name is purely accidental.
As a reminder, the other Deutsche Bank-er who was found dead earlier in the year, William Broeksmit, was involved in the bank's risk function and advised the firm's senior leadership; he was "anxious about various authorities investigating areas of the bank where he worked," according to written evidence from his psychologist, given Tuesday at an inquest at London's Royal Courts of Justice. And now that an almost identical suicide by hanging has taken place at Europe's most systemically important bank, and by a person who worked in a nearly identical function - to shield the bank from regulators and prosecutors and cover up its allegedly illegal activities with settlements and fines - is surely bound to raise many questions.
The WSJ reports that Mr. Gambino had been "closely involved in negotiating legal issues for Deutsche Bank, including the prolonged probe into manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and ongoing investigations into manipulation of currencies markets, according to people familiar with his role at the bank."
He previously was an associate at a private law firm and a regulatory enforcement lawyer from 1997 to 1999, according to his online LinkedIn profile and biographies for conferences where he spoke. But most notably, as his LinkedIn profile below shows, like many other Wall Street revolving door regulators, he started his career at the SEC itself where he worked from 1997 to 1999.
much more...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-25/deutsche-bank-lawyer-and-former-sec-enforcement-attorney-found-dead-apparent-suicide
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The similar MO, the Gambino name, and so on...
It remains to be seen if Calogero's death was also related to precious metals rigging although it certainly would not be surprising. What is surprising, is that slowly things are starting to fall apart at the one bank which as we won't tire of highlighting, has a bigger pyramid of notional derivatives on its balance sheet than even JPMorgan, amounting to 20 times more than the GDP of Germany itself, and where if any internal investigation ever goes to the very top, then Europe itself, and thus the world, would be in jeopardy."
Hotler
(11,415 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)REALITY WILL MAKE A REALIST OF HIM YET
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amazons-monopsony-is-not-ok.html?_r=1
Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America...O.K., I know that was kind of abrupt. But I wanted to get the central point out there right away, because discussions of Amazon tend, all too often, to get lost in side issues. For example, critics of the company sometimes portray it as a monster about to take over the whole economy. Such claims are over the top — Amazon doesn’t dominate overall online sales, let alone retailing as a whole, and probably never will. But so what? Amazon is still playing a troubling role...Meanwhile, Amazon’s defenders often digress into paeans to online bookselling, which has indeed been a good thing for many Americans, or testimonials to Amazon customer service — and in case you’re wondering, yes, I have Amazon Prime and use it a lot. But again, so what? The desirability of new technology, or even Amazon’s effective use of that technology, is not the issue. After all, John D. Rockefeller and his associates were pretty good at the oil business, too — but Standard Oil nonetheless had too much power, and public action to curb that power was essential. And the same is true of Amazon today.
If you haven’t been following the recent Amazon news: Back in May a dispute between Amazon and Hachette, a major publishing house, broke out into open commercial warfare. Amazon had been demanding a larger cut of the price of Hachette books it sells; when Hachette balked, Amazon began disrupting the publisher’s sales. Hachette books weren’t banned outright from Amazon’s site, but Amazon began delaying their delivery, raising their prices, and/or steering customers to other publishers. You might be tempted to say that this is just business — no different from Standard Oil, back in the days before it was broken up, refusing to ship oil via railroads that refused to grant it special discounts. But that is, of course, the point: The robber baron era ended when we as a nation decided that some business tactics were out of line. And the question is whether we want to go back on that decision. Does Amazon really have robber-baron-type market power? When it comes to books, definitely. Amazon overwhelmingly dominates online book sales, with a market share comparable to Standard Oil’s share of the refined oil market when it was broken up in 1911. Even if you look at total book sales, Amazon is by far the largest player.
So far Amazon has not tried to exploit consumers. In fact, it has systematically kept prices low, to reinforce its dominance. What it has done, instead, is use its market power to put a squeeze on publishers, in effect driving down the prices it pays for books — hence the fight with Hachette. In economics jargon, Amazon is not, at least so far, acting like a monopolist, a dominant seller with the power to raise prices. Instead, it is acting as a monopsonist, a dominant buyer with the power to push prices down. And on that front its power is really immense — in fact, even greater than the market share numbers indicate. Book sales depend crucially on buzz and word of mouth (which is why authors are often sent on grueling book tours); you buy a book because you’ve heard about it, because other people are reading it, because it’s a topic of conversation, because it’s made the best-seller list. And what Amazon possesses is the power to kill the buzz. It’s definitely possible, with some extra effort, to buy a book you’ve heard about even if Amazon doesn’t carry it — but if Amazon doesn’t carry that book, you’re much less likely to hear about it in the first place. So can we trust Amazon not to abuse that power? The Hachette dispute has settled that question: no, we can’t.
It’s not just about the money, although that’s important: By putting the squeeze on publishers, Amazon is ultimately hurting authors and readers. But there’s also the question of undue influence. Specifically, the penalty Amazon is imposing on Hachette books is bad in itself, but there’s also a curious selectivity in the way that penalty has been applied. Last month the Times’s Bits blog documented the case of two Hachette books receiving very different treatment. One is Daniel Schulman’s “Sons of Wichita,” a profile of the Koch brothers; the other is “The Way Forward,” by Paul Ryan, who was Mitt Romney’s running mate and is chairman of the House Budget Committee. Both are listed as eligible for Amazon Prime, and for Mr. Ryan’s book Amazon offers the usual free two-day delivery. What about “Sons of Wichita”? As of Sunday, it “usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks.” Uh-huh. Which brings us back to the key question. Don’t tell me that Amazon is giving consumers what they want, or that it has earned its position. What matters is whether it has too much power, and is abusing that power. Well, it does, and it is.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)U.S. investigators, automakers and a parts supply company are trying to figure out why some automobile air bags inflate with too much force, blowing apart metal canisters and sending shards flying at drivers and passengers.
So far, more than 12 million vehicles worldwide with air bags made by Japanese parts supplier Takata Corp. have been recalled for the problem. But safety advocates says as many as 25 million vehicles may be equipped with the faulty air bags in the U.S. alone. There have been recalls in Japan, Europe, China and other areas.
Many of the U.S. recalls have been limited to high-humidity areas in the South, but the boundaries of recall zones vary by manufacturer. All of this has confused car owners and even government safety regulators who published incorrect and incomplete lists of recalled models.
Here are some questions and answers about the recalls:
Q: What is the problem here?
A: Chemicals that quickly inflate air bags during a crash are exploding with too much force in Takata air bags made from 2001 to 2011. This blows apart metal canisters around the air bags and sends fragments into passenger compartments.
Q: Has anyone been injured or killed?
Safety advocates say there have been four deaths and multiple injuries. The government has reports of three injuries and is investigating.
Q: How can I find out if my car is included?
A: Dozens of models made by BMW, Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Mazda, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru and Toyota dating to the 2001 model year are covered. You should have received a recall notice from your automaker. Also, you can go to http://www.safercar.gov and key in your vehicle identification number, which normally is printed on your registration and stamped on the dashboard. That will tell you if your car is being recalled. You can also call your dealer. Honda is a big Takata customer, and has recalled over 5 million vehicles in the U.S. alone.
Q: Why are so many cars involved?
A: Takata makes 22 percent of the world’s air bags, according to Valient Automotive Market Research.
MORE
MattSh
(3,714 posts)Most people that discuss the "economic collapse" focus on what is coming in the future. And without a doubt, we are on the verge of some incredibly hard times. But what often gets neglected is the immense permanent damage that has been done to the U.S. economy by the long-term economic collapse that we are already experiencing. In this article I am going to share with you 12 economic charts that show that we are in much, much worse shape than we were five or ten years ago. The long-term problems that are eating away at the foundations of our economy like cancer have not been fixed. In fact, many of them continue to get even worse year after year. But because unprecedented levels of government debt and reckless money printing by the Federal Reserve have bought us a very short window of relative stability, most Americans don't seem too concerned about our long-term problems. They seem to have faith that our "leaders" will be able to find a way to muddle through whatever challenges are ahead. Hopefully this article will be a wake up call. The last major wave of the economic collapse did a colossal amount of damage to our economic foundations, and now the next major wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching.
#1 Employment
The mainstream media is constantly telling us about the "employment recovery" that is happening in the United States, but the truth is that it is just an illusion. As the chart below demonstrates, just prior to the last recession about 63 percent of all working age Americans had a job. During the last wave of the economic collapse, that number dropped to below 59 percent and stayed there for a very long time. In the past few months we have finally seen the employment-population ratio tick back up to 59 percent, but we are still far, far below where we used to be. To call the tiny little bump at the end of this chart a "recovery" is really an insult to our intelligence...
#2 The Labor Force Participation Rate
The percentage of Americans that are either employed or currently looking for a job started to fall during the last recession and it has not stopped falling since then. The labor force participation rate has now fallen to a 36 year low, and this is a sign of a very, very sick economy...
Complete story at - http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/12-charts-that-show-the-permanent-damage-that-has-been-done-to-the-u-s-economy
MattSh
(3,714 posts)From the comments:
Before reading the other comments, there are obviously a whole bunch of key dates coming up in the next 3 weeks.
Ukraine Elections (October 26) - this weekend. More Crazy Nazis elected to power? Probably.
Brazilian Presidential Election (October 26) - this weekend. How will a vital Putin ally go? Will Rousseff survive?
Ending of Federal Reserve Quantitative Easing Program (POMO) - October 27-28 (Tuesday - Wednesday)
Federal Reserve Meeting - first meeting since POMO QE3 ended October 28-29 (Tuesday-Wednesday)
Further talks between Russia-Ukraine-EU regarding Russian sale of gas to Ukraine - October 29 (Next Wednesday) **See note below**
Report due to the European Commission on how much gas each European Union has to survive the coming Winter (October 31, Next Friday)
Manuel Barroso steps down to be replaced by Jean-Claude Juncker . Is Junkcer more of a Eurasianist or Atlanticist? The opposition to Juncker from the likes of the UK/ David Cameron gives hope Juncker might actually be someone Russia can work with, someone who's not attached, for instance, to the Kiev Regime. (November 1, Next Saturday)
French Mistral ships delivery to Russia? (November 1, Next Saturday) - not sure if this is still happening, but at the time the delivery was postponed it was postponed until the first of November - anyone know what's happening here?
Local Elections in Donetsk & Luhansk (November 2, Next Sunday) - In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the new offensive happens after the Ukie elections and is designed to disrupt and destroy any local elections planned in Donestk & Luhansk next week.
US Mid-Terms (November 4) - Tuesday Week. Obama likely to get hammered? Can Obama grow a spine after the Mid-Terms and sack the likes of Nuland, Kerry, Brennan & Pyatt for a start? The two weeks after the Mid-Terms are Obama's last chance to assert himself in the eyes of the world. In the eyes of Russia.
The bonds owed by Naftogaz (which weren't paid on September 30) and were transferred to the Ukrainian State to be paid to the value of $1.67 Billion are due to be paid today or else Ukraine is officially in default. Anyone know if these bonds have been paid???? (November 4, Tuesday week)
UK by-election in the seat of Rochester with a defecting Tory MP joining UKIP. UKIP should win this election and it will be a further signal that England votes are sick of their craven policies of the likes of David Cameron, Ed Miliband & Nick Clegg. LibLabCon as they say. A win for UKIP here is a good sign for Russia (November 6, A fortnight away)
APEC Leaders Meeting - Beijing, China. Bringing together the Leaders of China, Russia & USA. (November 11-12, 2014)
G20 Leaders Meeting - Brisbane, Australia. Bringing together all the major world Leaders. (November 14-16, 2014)
NOTE: On a somewhat positive note, we do have heat now in Kiev. Who knows about other parts of the city. A couple of weeks ago, they extended the fall school break from one week to two, meaning the schools would reopen Nov 10. Meaning it would likely be around that time that the heat would get turned on. But two days ago, we got our first sub 20F temperature, so El Presidente announced everybody should see heat by Friday afternoon. And two days before the election! So now our radiators are warm enough to melt an ice cube, as long as the room temperature itself remains above freezing. But apparently the gas agreement is still up in the air.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)After he hugged the woman with ebola? You want further proof?
No, he's not going to grow a spine. Obama doesn't much care what happens to his fellow Democrats or the US population as a whole. If he did, we'd have seen some evidence of it by now.
Would he flip off the public, like Bill Clinton did in his last hours...pardoning war criminals and crooks? Why should that change? It's not like he will suddenly prosecute banksters, now, is it? Or war criminals.
Obama will coast. He makes W look like an activist. He's just praying that ebola is going away (without actually doing anything to make it so).
I have no hope, I see no future....
We ought to commission a song and get it up on youtube!
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)I heard on radio about some guy who somehow takes videos of different people singing the same song - in their garage or yard or wherever - and somehow melds them .... it was interesting and I meant to note the website or FB "community" or whatever it was and forgot all about it till now. But it sounds like fun. Of course, our lyrics, not so much fun ..... oh well, never mind as Emily used to say
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)We've repeatedly warned that this strain of Ebola might be spread by aerosols. But there is a fascinating and terrifying wrinkle to this ... You might assume that hot, steamy places would be more likely to spread deadly germs than developed countries. But the opposite might be true. In 1995, scientists from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) reported in the International Journal of Experimental Pathology:
Peter Jahrling was one of the authors of the report. Jahrling was discoverer of the Reston strain of Ebola, and is now chief scientist at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In 2012, scientists from USAMRIID published a report in the journal Viruses finding:
Given that this is the first time that Ebola has spread out of West Africa to cooler, dryer nations, we may soon find out whether or not high temperature and humidity really do suppress the spread of Ebola by aerosols.
antigop
(12,778 posts)Yves here. The irony is delicious. Chief bank apologist Andrew Ross Sorkin accidentally elicited a damning admission from JP Morgan chieftan Jamie Dimon. But that also reveals Dimon’s confidence that he is a member of a protected class, which sadly happens to be true.
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives
I want to give a hat tip to a recent Wall Street Journal article that brought to my attention two damning admissions by JPMorgan’s (JPM) CEO and Chairman of the Board, Jamie Dimon. The irony is that Dimon was lulled into making these admissions because he was basking in the perfect calm created by the confluence of Sorkin’s and CNBC’s storied sycophancy at the one place on earth where elite bankers feel most loved, honored, and protected – the annual meeting of the ultra-wealthy in Davos, Switzerland. Sorkin was the only interviewer, so Dimon faced no risk of tough questions. It may well have been this perfect setting that caused Dimon to let slip the mask and reveal two illustrative sins of elite bankers reported in the WSJ article.
‘But we got to figure out exactly how to create a safe harbor for that so you don’t…end up getting punished,’ he told the interviewer, according to a CNBC transcript.”
Yes, you read that correctly. It has been a “norm of business for years” for multinational corporations to hire the “sons and daughters of companies’ [controlling officials]” and to hire “ex government officials” in order to secure the favor of those powerful officials for the banks. Dimon’s concern is that it is essential that firms should be able to continue to purchase this influence with other elites in this manner with no threat of ever “getting punished” for buying influence with such powerful foreign officials.” JPM’s priority is “to figure out exactly how to create a safe haven for that.” The elite firms’ “norm of business for years” is not an admission from Dimon’s perspective, but rather a claim of right. Anything that elite firms have done successfully for years to purchase influence with other elites (including hiring “ex government officials”) is obviously something that they have a right to continue to do – with total impunity from “getting punished.” It’s not bribery, it’s buying influence with powerful officials who run firms and government agencies and ministries.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)
Preface: If you are an atheist (or adherent of another faith) and believe that the Catholic faith is crazy, you are obviously entitled to your belief. But please remember that very few Americans are atheists … and the majority don’t trust atheists. More importantly, it's wise to work with allies on core issues, such as fighting corruption ... even if you would normally disagree with them. In this case, the Pope just may speak for a lot of allies. After all, there are more than a billion Catholics worldwide. Some 85% of the American population identifies itself as Christian, and 78 million Americans have been baptized into the Catholic Church. The U.S. has the world's fourth largest Catholic population.
Legal authorities have done nothing to crack down on Wall Street corruption. The U.S. government admits that it refuses to prosecute fraud … pretty much as an official policy. Sure, a few "small fish" are indicted ... but the big boys go free. Indeed, there are two systems of justice in America … one for the Wall Street fatcats, and one for everyone else.
In reality, the government helped cover up the crimes of the big banks, used claims of national security to keep everything in the dark, and changed basic rules and definitions to allow the game to continue. See CORROBORATIVE LINKS AT OP Because fraudsters weren’t prosecuted and the banks weren’t broken up, the fraudsters are now committing bigger and bigger crimes, and banks are now bigger than ever … leaving the economy open to an even bigger crash than occurred in 2008...Even the President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank has repeatedly said that bankers have to improve their ethics ... but to no avail.
Why isn't the government cracking down on corruption and fraud? Because most government workers are themselves corrupt. As is the government procurement process.
Yesterday, Pope Francis gave a powerful speech, directly addressing these problems (Google translate):
The corrupt through life with shortcuts opportunism, with the air of one who says, "It was not me", coming to internalize his mask as an honest man. It's a process of internalization. The corrupt can not accept criticism, dismisses anyone who provides criticizes, tries to belittle any moral authority to question him, does not value the other and insults anyone who thinks differently. If the balance of power permits, he prosecutes anyone who contradicts him.
Corruption is expressed in an atmosphere of triumphalism because the corrupt fancies himself a winner. In that he struts to belittle others. The corrupt knows no fraternity or friendship, but complicity and enmity.
The corrupt does not perceive his corruption. It's a little like what happens with bad breath ... it's hard for those who have it to know, unless someone else tells them.
For this reason, the corrupt can hardly get out of their internal state by way of remorse of conscience. Corruption is a greater evil than sin. More than forgiven, this evil must be cured.
Corruption has become "natural" to the point of getting to statehood linked to personal and social custom, a common practice in commercial and financial transactions, in public procurement, in any negotiation involving State agents. It is the victory of appearances over reality ...
***
There are now many international conventions and treaties on the matter ... not so much geared to protect the citizens, who ultimately are the latest victims - particularly the most vulnerable - but how to protect the interests of operators of economic markets and financial companies.
The penalty is selective. It is like a net that captures only the small fish, while leaving the big [fish] free in the sea.
What Does it Mean to Do God's Work?
The head of Goldman Sachs said he’s doing “God’s work” with his banking activities.
The head of Barclays also told his congregation that banking as practiced by his company was not antithetical to Christian principles.
Are they right? Is big banking as practiced by the giant banks in harmony with Christian principles?
MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It was a mini-riot during the Kiddie time, but they all had fun (except the lonely pre-teen). Most of the kids were Asians without a clue about the season, but we tried to introduce some understanding of the basics....
And then dinner was VERY successful, and the best part of all?
I don't have to get up at 3 AM!
I think I'm gonna like this life a lot. I'm going to bed, and sleeping in!
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)First, Canada has spent the last 13 years proclaiming itself a nation at war. It actively participated in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and was an enthusiastic partner in some of the most extremist War on Terror abuses perpetrated by the U.S. Earlier this month, the Prime Minister revealed, with the support of a large majority of Canadians, that “Canada is poised to go to war in Iraq, as [he] announced plans in Parliament [] to send CF-18 fighter jets for up to six months to battle Islamic extremists.” ...
It is always stunning when a country that has brought violence and military force to numerous countries acts shocked and bewildered when someone brings a tiny fraction of that violence back to that country....
That’s the nature of war. A country doesn’t get to run around for years wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others, without the risk of having violence brought back to it.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)what bores! Nobody but them counts as people...more like furniture at a garage sale.
"...It is always stunning when a country that has brought violence and military force to numerous countries acts shocked and bewildered when someone brings a tiny fraction of that violence back to that country. Regardless of one’s views on the justifiability of Canada’s lengthy military actions, it’s not the slightest bit surprising or difficult to understand why people who identify with those on the other end of Canadian bombs and bullets would decide to attack the military responsible for that violence..."
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Here's the breakdown from the ECB:
Capital shortfall of €25 billion detected at 25 participant banks
Banks' asset values need to be adjusted by €48 billion, €37 billion of which did not generate capital shortfall
Shortfall of €25 billion and asset value adjustment of €37 billion implies overall impact of €62 billion on banks
Additional €136 billion found in non-performing exposures
Adverse stress scenario would deplete banks' capital by €263 billion, reducing median CET1 (common equity tier 1, a common definition of a bank's core financial strength) ratio by 4 percentage points from 12.4% to 8.3%
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/25-banks-just-failed-europes-biggest-ever-health-tests-2014-10#ixzz3HFaDS8xT
Demeter
(85,373 posts)xchrom
(108,903 posts)SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — One of the largest gold nuggets in modern times pulled from Northern California's historic Gold Country has sold to a secret buyer.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday (http://bit.ly/1snahAB ) that even the sales price of the so-called Butte Nugget will remain a mystery at the buyer's request.
But Don Kagin, the San Francisco-area coin dealer who brokered the deal, said that the sale price for the nugget weighing slightly more than 6 pounds wasn't far off from the asking price of about $400,000.
A gold hunter in July found the nugget in the mountains of Butte County; it went up for sale Thursday with the deal finalized on Friday.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/gold-nugget-sale-2014-10#ixzz3HFfg79eD
Demeter
(85,373 posts)That's $4000/ounce. Quite a premium for being unprocessed....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...When I mention that I expect the decline and fall of industrial civilization to take centuries, accordingly, people take this to mean that I expect a smooth, untroubled descent. When I mention that I expect crisis before this decade is finished, in turn, people take this to mean that I expect industrial civilization to crash into ruin in the next few years. Some people, for that matter, slam back and forth from one of these presuppositions to another, as though they can’t fit the concepts of prolonged decline and imminent crisis into their heads at the same moment...The overfamiliar cry of “but it’s different this time!” is popular, it’s comforting, but it’s also irrelevant. Of course it’s different this time; it was different every other time, too. Neolithic civilizations limited to one river valley and continental empires with complex technologies have all declined and fallen in much the same way and for much the same reasons. It may appeal to our sense of entitlement to see ourselves as destiny’s darlings, to insist that the Progress Fairy has promised us a glorious future out there among the stars, or even to claim that it’s humanity’s mission to populate the galaxy, but these are another set of faith-based claims; it’s a little startling, in fact, to watch so many people who claim to have outgrown theology clinging to such overtly religious concepts as humanity’s mission and destiny.
In the real world, when civilizations exhaust their resource bases and wreck the ecological cycles that support them, they fall. It takes between one and three centuries on average for the fall to happen—and no, big complex civilizations don’t fall noticeably faster or slower than smaller and simpler ones. Nor is it a linear decline—the end of a civilization is a fractal process composed of crises on many different scales of space and time, with equally uneven consequences. An effective response can win a breathing space; in the wake of a less effective one, part of what used to be normal goes away for good. Sooner or later, one crisis too many overwhelms the last defenses, and the civilization falls, leaving scattered remnants of itself that struggle and gleam for a while until the long night closes in...
........................
One wrinkle many people miss is that we’re not waiting for the first of the three and a half rounds of crisis and recovery to hit; we’re waiting for the second. The first began in 1914 and ended around 1954, driven by the downfall of the British Empire and the collapse of European domination of the globe. During the forty years between Sarajevo and Dien Bien Phu, the industrial world was hammered by the First World War, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, millions of political murders by the Nazi and Soviet governments, the Second World War, and the overthrow of European colonial empires around the planet.
That was the first era of crisis in the decline and fall of industrial civilization. The period from 1945 to the present was the first interval of stability and recovery, made more prosperous and expansive than most examples of the species by the breakneck exploitation of petroleum and other fossil fuels, and a corresponding boom in technology. At this point, as fossil fuel reserves deplete, the planet’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide and other pollutants runs up against hard limits, and a galaxy of other measures of impending crisis move toward the red line, it’s likely that the next round of crisis is not far off. What will actually trigger that next round, though, is anyone’s guess...here’s a narrative sketch of the kind of future that waits for us:
SEE LINK (I'M SUCH A TEASE)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The second wave of crisis began with the Ebola pandemic, which emerged in West Africa early in 2014. Efforts to control the outbreak in its early phases were ineffective and hopelessly underfunded. By the early months of 2015, the first cases appeared in India, Egypt, and the Caribbean, and from there the pandemic spread to much of the world. In August 2015 a vaccine passed its clinical trials, but scaling up production and distribution of the vaccine to get in front of a fast-spreading pandemic took time, and it was early 2018 before the pandemic was finally under control everywhere in the world. By then 1.6 billion people had died of the disease, and another 210 million had died as a result of the collapse of food distribution and health care across large areas of the Third World.
The struggle against Ebola was complicated by the global economic depression that got under way in 2015 as the “fracking” boom imploded and travel and tourist industries collapsed in the face of the pandemic. Financial markets were stabilized by vast infusions of government debt, as they had been in the wake of the 2008 crash, but the real economy of goods and services was not so easily manipulated; joblessness soared, tax revenues plunged, and a dozen nations defaulted on their debts. Politicians insisted, as they had done for the past decade, that giving more handouts to the rich would restore prosperity; their failure to take any constructive action set the stage for the next act in the tragedy.
The first neofascist parties were founded in Europe before the end of the pandemic, and grew rapidly in the depression years. In 2020 and 2021, neofascists took power in three European nations on anti-immigration, anti-EU and anti-banking industry platforms; their success emboldened similar efforts elsewhere. Even so, the emergence of the neofascist American Peoples Party as a major force in the 2024 US elections stunned most observers. Four years later the APP swept the elections, and forced through laws that turned Congress into an advisory body and enabled rule by presidential decree. Meanwhile, as more European nations embraced neofascism, Europe split into hostile blocs, leading to the dissolution of the European Union in 2032 and the European War of 2035-2041.
By the time war broke out in Europe, the popularity of the APP had fallen drastically due to ongoing economic troubles, and insurgencies against the new regime had emerged in the South and mountain West. Counterinsurgency efforts proved no more effective than they had in Iraq or Afghanistan, and over the next decade much of the US sank into failed-state conditions. In 2046, after the regime used tactical nuclear weapons on three rebel-held cities, a dissident faction of the US military launched a nuclear strike on Washington DC, terminating the APP regime. Attempts to establish a new federal government failed over the next two years, and the former United States broke into seven nations....
AND IT JUST GETS BETTER....HIS ANALYSIS EXPLAINS A LOT OF THE PAST THAT TROUBLED ME, MUST READ AND REMEMBER!
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)although he has taken the time to lay out a illustrative scenario, and I haven't, it is in line with my own thoughts.
I read the Druid right after reading an article on Alternet that left me shaking my head in despair at the inadequacy with which "we" (the so-called "progressive" community) are proposing to try to avert or ameliorate the horrors we are likely to face.
http://www.alternet.org/activism/apocalypse-now-seriously-it-time-major-rethink-about-liberal-and-progressive-politics
Apocalypse Now: Seriously, It Is Time for a Major Rethink About Liberal and Progressive Politics
We are losing badly to the corporate state. Here's what we need to do.
by Don Hazen (executive editor of AlterNet)
Don Hazen spends seven pages on just how awful things are right now - how puny and paltry and insignificant in any but the most local and personal sense even our few victories are.
And what does he say we need to do?
Let 's do more political action with friends and colleagues. Let's agree a higher level of popular political education and self-reflection is necessary.
Huh? We are talking about apocalypse and we are going to confront it with "political education and self-reflection?" This reminds me of the posters around here, who exhort us to build up the Dem Party by taking over our local school boards and sheriffs offices .... I always want to say to them, "look, friends .... I'm sure the Dems pay people six figures to devise strategy, and you don't think that if they really wanted to do this they would not have started it, oh, maybe around 1980? They didn't care then, and it's too late now. We don't have the time for that anymore, even if the Ds were not as sold out and corrupt as the Rs and it was worth doing.
Now, I'm sure Don Hazen is a good and very smart man. I think Alternet is a good site, despite occasional fringiness, and overall very useful. And to be fair, he does go on to say:
Yes, that's a good idea. We'd better be thinking about local food and power systems too.
But ... facing apocalypse .... where is the call for - oh, say, national strikes? Where is the call for everyone to stop paying their medical bills to a corrupt vampire rentier "insurance" profiteers? Where is the call to stop paying our utility bills and demand nationalization of energy production? Where is the call for labor and faith communities and everyone else to join with the poor of Detroit and SHUT THE CITY DOWN until water is restored?
Look, I know we don't have the people or organization to do this effectively now ... but we never will until we call for it, and until some of us begin to do it. Occupy showed us that "if you build it they will come" - not enough of them yet, I know - but we have to start calling for it and doing it nonetheless, or it will never happen.
Sure as hell the Ds are not going to save us, nor is "self-reflection" for goddess sake.
(One interesting thing he noted - he references an article he wrote some months ago:
and goes on to relate that many responses to the article included
That longing for balance, to believe that where evil triumphs, there must be good in equivalency .... so manifestly not true.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)"Appropriate Technology" was the geeky side of the Green Movement: meaning, use the lowest quality materials and power possible for the job. Don't split the atoms to boil water to turn a turbine....go to hydro, wind, tides, solar. Don't chop down redwoods to make toothpicks, and more notions of that nature.
But if the premise that the End of WWII didn't solve a thing (which the Cold War, Vietnam, Reagan's little escapades, W's big ones, and Obama's foot-dragging have shown), then it's not a question of appropriate, any more. The question has dropped back several centuries to "SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY", in other words, everything that people knew before the Industrial Revolution, plus whatever we can keep alive from technological advances since then.
IF we are clever, and put an absolute ban on warfare of any kind, including economic (which refers to both the USA, China, AND the Pope and Fundies of all stripes that strive to prevent family planning), we might be able to sustain our technology for the foreseeable future.
Since that's not likely to happen, we need to take inventory.
WHICH technologies are sustainable at the 17th century level of civilization?
WHICH technologies might we convert to 17th century sustainability?
HOW do we keep the information gained in the past 250 years from being forgotten, misunderstood, or misapplied (again)?
Think of the areas of expertise we have to consider:
AGRICULTURE: good agricultural practices ended with the Industrial Revolution in large part, as farms turned into factories and eating local became a sign of backwardness. There's a lot of this that has to be re-applied, restored, renovated.
TRANSPORTATION: without transportation, the world shrinks to a day's travel on foot.
Modes of travel:
Foot & Swimming
Wheeled carts/ chariots / carriages / Draft animals
Sailboats / Wind-driven prairie wagons
Bicycles and other human-enhancing mechanics / Rowboats, paddle wheels
and already we are reaching into manufacturing technologies that aren't sustainable:
Flywheel-driven or enhanced / solar powered / steam driven mass transit / bio-diesel
Forget air travel, space travel, anything "wasteful". Manufacturing will have to scale down to the area in which it can be utilized. No sending coals to Newcastle, nor cheddar to Vermont. Making sensible choices will put most of our Useless Eaters/Obscenely Wealthy out of power, if there are any not hanging from lampposts.
MEDICINE: Just as the technology and the basic research is starting to catch up with the complexity of the human animal, we are in danger of reverting to cowpox inoculations. This just makes me mad. So little of the past 100 years of medical development will be sustainable through a hard collapse.
CLOTHING, SHELTER: Some rudimentary knowledge persists, and some skilled practitioners of ancient crafts. Insulation and passive solar design are the things we most need to keep current. Fashion will yield to practicality and warmth.
POWER: If the effort starts now, we might be able to keep solar, wind and water at modern levels of efficiency, which would make it possible to sustain our technology level. If not, say goodbye to:
COMMUNICATION: Quills and rust-based ink, anyone? Maybe the hand-operated printing press can be revived. Goodbye, Internet! It was nice knowing you.
MATERIALS SCIENCE: The biggest strides in technology have their roots in innovations in materials science: turning raw, unprocessed materials into something more useful: integrated circuits, super-conducting metals, plastics, graphene, buckyballs. Even anodizing requires power. Without the refined materials, technology isn't possible, no matter what Gilligan's Island portrayed.
THE GEEKS ARE GOING TO NEED HELP. NOBODY EVER WANTS TO HELP THEM, EITHER.
Geeks only get rewards when they invent cheaper ways to kill more people, thereby boosting profits for the profiteers. Geeks need peace, communications, refined materials, education and power.
Otherwise, as Spock said, it's back to the stone knives and bearskins. Except there won't be many bears.
Oh, wait, my sister's got a bear in her bird feeder, in a Mass. suburb...maybe the wildlife will come back in force!
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)although not in as detailed a manner as you. I think about what is essential - and what makes life meaningful for most people?
It seems to me that for most people, what makes life meaningful is
sufficient food, shelter & health
a connection to others & to nature
work that contributes to one's own and one's community's well-being
outlet for self-expression (art & craft, music, scientific inquiry, games & sport ...)
access to knowledge and communication
The work must not be mind or body-numbing with the exception of true necessity, such as getting in the harvest - work that would not be done alone.
ALL of those needs could be met locally in a "right-size" community, except health, scientific inquiry, and access to knowledge and communication.
So it seems to me we need to try to save medicine/science and communications. Everything extraneous can go - in fact, must go. But your post makes clear just how unlikely that possibility is.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)But his posts are so long and wordy, quite interesting. I have run out of time to keep up.
hamerfan
(1,404 posts)Choices by George Jones:
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Thanks for finding music--this was a very hard topic to set to song!