This is the opening paragraph in my Analysis paper that was just turned in.
Tell me what you think
The Commodores were an American funk and soul band during the 1970’s and 1980’s. They had a falling out when the lead singer, Lionel Richie, left the group to pursue a solo career in 1982, and for a few years after that, they could not make a hit song to save their lives until two sudden events happened in 1984. On January 21 and April 1, 1984, two great soul legends died. Their names were Jackie Wilson and Marvin Gaye. Both singers were loved by all, including The Commodores. The Commodores wanted to pay a tribute to Jackie Wilson and Marvin Gaye by using allusions to their own songs and telling of how the two great artists would bring their own style of singing into it: The Commodores song was called, “Night Shift.”
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Back To Rome
October 20, 2009
Peter J. Boyer: Back to Rome- The New Yorker
A few years ago, when an Episcopal priest told me that many of his fellow churchmen planned to “retire and go to Rome,” I rather stupidly imagined a sunny scene of pensioner clerics sipping espressos on the Via Veneto. I soon learned that by “going to Rome,” disillusioned Anglicans meant reversing the course set by Henry VIII and reconciling with the Roman Catholic Church.
There may soon be quite a few Anglicans “crossing the Tiber” (to employ another term describing Catholic conversion), after the Vatican’s announcement that Pope Benedict XVI has created a special means allowing Anglicans to convert to the Roman Catholic Church while maintaining much of their own worship tradition. The Pope’s creation of a new structure within the Church to accommodate disaffected Anglicans apparently surprised Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury (and the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion), who, the Daily Telegraph reports, was only fully briefed on the move yesterday.
The Pope’s action was not a complete surprise, though, to those who have followed the long, slow fracturing of the Anglican Communion over such matters as the ordination of women and, more recently, of gays in some Anglican churches.
Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, where authority resides in the Pope, the nearly eighty million Anglicans in the worldwide Communion acknowledge no official “head” of the church. Indeed, there really is no single, authoritative Church at all, but, rather, an association of churches—such as the Episcopal Church in the United States—of which the Archbishop of Canterbury is the symbolic leader. This loose structure reflects the congenital Anglican impulse, dating back to Elizabeth I, to find a middle way between Roman Catholicism and reform Protestantism. Sometimes, it presents a management problem, as when the Episcopal Church confirmed the 2003 election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, as a bishop. (I wrote about the election of Robinson and the rift it caused in the April 17, 2006, issue of the magazine.) Robinson’s election excited revolt among traditionalists in the Western churches, and fierce opposition from Anglican leaders in Africa, where the church is rapidly growing.
Some American parishes left the Episcopal Church and aligned with the Africans, but, after years of conferences and committee studies, there is nothing approaching resolution to the central issues dividing the Communion. That is partly why many traditionalist Anglicans found themselves longing for the authority, and relative clarity, of Rome. “I’m very sympathetic to people who say, ‘Golly, I’d rather have a Benedict XVI,” one Episcopal priest told me.
Peter J. Boyer: Back to Rome- The New Yorker
A few years ago, when an Episcopal priest told me that many of his fellow churchmen planned to “retire and go to Rome,” I rather stupidly imagined a sunny scene of pensioner clerics sipping espressos on the Via Veneto. I soon learned that by “going to Rome,” disillusioned Anglicans meant reversing the course set by Henry VIII and reconciling with the Roman Catholic Church.
There may soon be quite a few Anglicans “crossing the Tiber” (to employ another term describing Catholic conversion), after the Vatican’s announcement that Pope Benedict XVI has created a special means allowing Anglicans to convert to the Roman Catholic Church while maintaining much of their own worship tradition. The Pope’s creation of a new structure within the Church to accommodate disaffected Anglicans apparently surprised Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury (and the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion), who, the Daily Telegraph reports, was only fully briefed on the move yesterday.
The Pope’s action was not a complete surprise, though, to those who have followed the long, slow fracturing of the Anglican Communion over such matters as the ordination of women and, more recently, of gays in some Anglican churches.
Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, where authority resides in the Pope, the nearly eighty million Anglicans in the worldwide Communion acknowledge no official “head” of the church. Indeed, there really is no single, authoritative Church at all, but, rather, an association of churches—such as the Episcopal Church in the United States—of which the Archbishop of Canterbury is the symbolic leader. This loose structure reflects the congenital Anglican impulse, dating back to Elizabeth I, to find a middle way between Roman Catholicism and reform Protestantism. Sometimes, it presents a management problem, as when the Episcopal Church confirmed the 2003 election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, as a bishop. (I wrote about the election of Robinson and the rift it caused in the April 17, 2006, issue of the magazine.) Robinson’s election excited revolt among traditionalists in the Western churches, and fierce opposition from Anglican leaders in Africa, where the church is rapidly growing.
Some American parishes left the Episcopal Church and aligned with the Africans, but, after years of conferences and committee studies, there is nothing approaching resolution to the central issues dividing the Communion. That is partly why many traditionalist Anglicans found themselves longing for the authority, and relative clarity, of Rome. “I’m very sympathetic to people who say, ‘Golly, I’d rather have a Benedict XVI,” one Episcopal priest told me.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Nobel Peace Prize
Nobel Surprise
by Hendrik Hertzberg
October 19, 2009 The New Yorker
If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal. They don’t force it on you while you’re still waiting for the bus to take you to the stadium. They don’t give it to you in anticipation of possible future feats of glory, like a signing bonus or an athletic scholarship. They don’t award it as a form of gentle encouragement, like a parent calling “Good job!” to a toddler who’s made it to the top rung of the monkey bars. It’s not a plastic, made-in-China “participation” trophy handed out to everyone in the class as part of a program to boost self-esteem. It’s not a door prize or a goody bag or a bowl of V.I.P. fruit courtesy of the hotel management. It’s not a gold star. It’s a gold medal.
We can take it as a sign of what a lucky fellow our President is that winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been widely counted a bad break for him. Barack Obama has come very far very fast. Five years ago, not long after finishing a distant second for a Chicago congressional nomination, he was still one of the hundred and seventy-seven members of the Illinois state legislature. Four years ago, he took his seat in the United States Senate, ushered there not only by his own undoubted talents but also by the serial self-destruction of his opponents. One year ago, he won the Presidency with a margin of victory—nine and a half million votes—that was the largest since 1984; absent the tailwind provided by his predecessor’s abysmal record, however, that margin would have been far smaller, possibly even nonexistent. He is certainly one of fortune’s favorites. He came into office on a tide of euphoria. Lately, though, his supporters have been experiencing a vague sense of disappointment. He may have saved the world from a second Great Depression and all that, but the jobless rate keeps on climbing, the planet keeps on heating up, Guantánamo keeps on not getting closed, and roadside bombs keep on exploding. He’s had eight whole months, and he still hasn’t signed a comprehensive health-care bill. Given that his perceived political problem is exaggerated expectations, does he really need a Nobel Peace Prize before he has actually made any peace?
The award to Obama illustrates, among other things, the difference between the “hard” and the “soft” Nobels. The prizes for physics, chemistry, and medicine are never given for trying, only for succeeding. Also, there is no apparent attempt to achieve regional, national, or ethnic balance. The same cannot be said of the literature prize, which frequently goes to authors who write in languages that few if any of the judges—eighteen grandees of the Swedish Academy—can read. Anyhow, literature is a matter of taste, which is why, among American writers, Pearl S. Buck was deemed worthy of the honor while Henry James was not. (The roster of literary losers, A to Z, also includes Auden, Borges, Conrad, Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov, Proust, Tolstoy, Twain, and Zola.) As for the relatively new economics prize (full name: the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), it is neither hard nor soft, just kind of mushy—a Golden Globe, not an Oscar.
The peace prize, first given in 1901, has always been the trickiest of the lot. For the first fifty years or so the judges, a five-member committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament, almost always honored a person or an organization devoted to working, in the words of Alfred Nobel’s will, “for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”—a formula that excluded, for example, Mohandas Gandhi. After the Second World War, the judges’ definition of peace grew more capacious, producing laureates like Martin Luther King, Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Dalai Lama. But the choice has always been, as a former chairman of the judging committee wrote in 2001, “to put it bluntly, a political act.”
The chairman of the Republican National Committee would agree. He quickly fired off a fund-raising e-mail headed “Nobel Peace Prize for Awesomeness,” calling the choice proof that “the Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control.” A trifle overwrought? Perhaps. Still, to be fair to the chairman, there’s little doubt that for eight years the most prominent figure hovering over the Nobel committee’s deliberations was not any of the nominees under consideration; it was George W. Bush. Jimmy Carter richly deserved his belated prize—he is as responsible as were Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin for the thirty years’ peace between Israel and Egypt—and Al Gore, who sounded the tocsin on climate change, deserved his. But in neither case did the judges try very hard to hide their satisfaction in delivering a rebuke to Bush. This time their message was one of relief—and of hope and confidence, not just in Obama himself but in a United States that has reëmbraced, as the prize announcement put it, “that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman.”
A few hours after the news from Oslo, Obama, looking a little abashed, even a little uncomfortable, stepped up to a portable podium in the Rose Garden and spoke of the honor that had come to him so soon—too soon, even many of his admirers admit—and so unexpectedly. “Let me be clear,” he said, and went on, first acknowledging the obvious:
"To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize—men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace. But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women and all Americans want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the twenty-first century."
After a few more sombre words, he turned and walked back into the West Wing, there to attend another in a series of meetings on the strategy that he soon must set for the war in Afghanistan. The prize is won, but the peace, as always, is elusive.
by Hendrik Hertzberg
October 19, 2009 The New Yorker
If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal. They don’t force it on you while you’re still waiting for the bus to take you to the stadium. They don’t give it to you in anticipation of possible future feats of glory, like a signing bonus or an athletic scholarship. They don’t award it as a form of gentle encouragement, like a parent calling “Good job!” to a toddler who’s made it to the top rung of the monkey bars. It’s not a plastic, made-in-China “participation” trophy handed out to everyone in the class as part of a program to boost self-esteem. It’s not a door prize or a goody bag or a bowl of V.I.P. fruit courtesy of the hotel management. It’s not a gold star. It’s a gold medal.
We can take it as a sign of what a lucky fellow our President is that winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been widely counted a bad break for him. Barack Obama has come very far very fast. Five years ago, not long after finishing a distant second for a Chicago congressional nomination, he was still one of the hundred and seventy-seven members of the Illinois state legislature. Four years ago, he took his seat in the United States Senate, ushered there not only by his own undoubted talents but also by the serial self-destruction of his opponents. One year ago, he won the Presidency with a margin of victory—nine and a half million votes—that was the largest since 1984; absent the tailwind provided by his predecessor’s abysmal record, however, that margin would have been far smaller, possibly even nonexistent. He is certainly one of fortune’s favorites. He came into office on a tide of euphoria. Lately, though, his supporters have been experiencing a vague sense of disappointment. He may have saved the world from a second Great Depression and all that, but the jobless rate keeps on climbing, the planet keeps on heating up, Guantánamo keeps on not getting closed, and roadside bombs keep on exploding. He’s had eight whole months, and he still hasn’t signed a comprehensive health-care bill. Given that his perceived political problem is exaggerated expectations, does he really need a Nobel Peace Prize before he has actually made any peace?
The award to Obama illustrates, among other things, the difference between the “hard” and the “soft” Nobels. The prizes for physics, chemistry, and medicine are never given for trying, only for succeeding. Also, there is no apparent attempt to achieve regional, national, or ethnic balance. The same cannot be said of the literature prize, which frequently goes to authors who write in languages that few if any of the judges—eighteen grandees of the Swedish Academy—can read. Anyhow, literature is a matter of taste, which is why, among American writers, Pearl S. Buck was deemed worthy of the honor while Henry James was not. (The roster of literary losers, A to Z, also includes Auden, Borges, Conrad, Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov, Proust, Tolstoy, Twain, and Zola.) As for the relatively new economics prize (full name: the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), it is neither hard nor soft, just kind of mushy—a Golden Globe, not an Oscar.
The peace prize, first given in 1901, has always been the trickiest of the lot. For the first fifty years or so the judges, a five-member committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament, almost always honored a person or an organization devoted to working, in the words of Alfred Nobel’s will, “for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”—a formula that excluded, for example, Mohandas Gandhi. After the Second World War, the judges’ definition of peace grew more capacious, producing laureates like Martin Luther King, Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Dalai Lama. But the choice has always been, as a former chairman of the judging committee wrote in 2001, “to put it bluntly, a political act.”
The chairman of the Republican National Committee would agree. He quickly fired off a fund-raising e-mail headed “Nobel Peace Prize for Awesomeness,” calling the choice proof that “the Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control.” A trifle overwrought? Perhaps. Still, to be fair to the chairman, there’s little doubt that for eight years the most prominent figure hovering over the Nobel committee’s deliberations was not any of the nominees under consideration; it was George W. Bush. Jimmy Carter richly deserved his belated prize—he is as responsible as were Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin for the thirty years’ peace between Israel and Egypt—and Al Gore, who sounded the tocsin on climate change, deserved his. But in neither case did the judges try very hard to hide their satisfaction in delivering a rebuke to Bush. This time their message was one of relief—and of hope and confidence, not just in Obama himself but in a United States that has reëmbraced, as the prize announcement put it, “that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman.”
A few hours after the news from Oslo, Obama, looking a little abashed, even a little uncomfortable, stepped up to a portable podium in the Rose Garden and spoke of the honor that had come to him so soon—too soon, even many of his admirers admit—and so unexpectedly. “Let me be clear,” he said, and went on, first acknowledging the obvious:
"To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize—men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace. But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women and all Americans want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the twenty-first century."
After a few more sombre words, he turned and walked back into the West Wing, there to attend another in a series of meetings on the strategy that he soon must set for the war in Afghanistan. The prize is won, but the peace, as always, is elusive.
Children and Exorcisms
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, exorcisms are running rampant. Whenever a child is accused of witchcraft, he or she is immediately either thrown out of the house or taken to a pastor. If the child is taken to a pastor, he will perform an exorcism. These exorcisms are not cheap. This is seen more in poverty-stricken parts, which is all over Congo, where the average person makes one hundred dollars a year in Congo. These exorcisms cost fifty dollars, half a yearly salary. It's a very lucrative business for the pastor. There was one incident in which the pastor held down a little girl's arms and legs, poured hot candle wax on her, and then bit her stomach hard and pulled up just stretching her skin and acting as if he was pulling demonic flesh out of her. Then he said she was cured.
Harris is a reporter and anchor for ABC News. His report on children accused of witchcraft in Africa will air tonight on Nightline on ABC at 11:35 ET.
(c) USA TODAY, 2009
(Dan, Harris "Children forced into exorcisms." USA Today n.d.: Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 13 Oct. 2009.)
Harris is a reporter and anchor for ABC News. His report on children accused of witchcraft in Africa will air tonight on Nightline on ABC at 11:35 ET.
(c) USA TODAY, 2009
(Dan, Harris "Children forced into exorcisms." USA Today n.d.: Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 13 Oct. 2009.)
Thursday, October 8, 2009
The Loss Of All Innocence
A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah
This is what I think the saddest part of the book is....
"...I heard Josiah scream. He cried for his mother in the most painfully piercing voice that I had ever heard. It vibrated inside my head to the point that I felt my brain had shaken loose from its anchor….I searched for Josiah. An RPG had tossed his tiny body off the ground and he had landed on a tree stump. He wiggled his legs as his cry gradually came to an end. There was blood everywhere. It seemed as if bullets were falling into the forest from all angles. I crawled to Josiah and looked into his eyes. There were tears in them and his lips were shaking, but he could not speak. As I watched him, the water in his eyes was replaced with blood that quickly turned his brown eyes into red. He reached for my shoulder as if he wanted to hold it and pull himself up. But midway, he stopped moving. The gunshots faded in my head, and it was as if my heart had stopped and the whole world had come to a standstill. I covered his eyes with my fingers and pulled him from the tree stump. His backbone had been shattered. I placed him flat on the ground and picked up my gun. I did not realize that I had stood up to take Josiah off the tree stump…..my deafness disappeared….I turned towards the swamp, where there were gunmen running, trying to cross over. My face, my hands, my shirt and gun were covered with blood. I raised my gun and pulled the trigger, and I killed a man…..I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved, until we were ordered to retreat because we needed strategy (ALWG 118-119)."
This is what I think the saddest part of the book is....
"...I heard Josiah scream. He cried for his mother in the most painfully piercing voice that I had ever heard. It vibrated inside my head to the point that I felt my brain had shaken loose from its anchor….I searched for Josiah. An RPG had tossed his tiny body off the ground and he had landed on a tree stump. He wiggled his legs as his cry gradually came to an end. There was blood everywhere. It seemed as if bullets were falling into the forest from all angles. I crawled to Josiah and looked into his eyes. There were tears in them and his lips were shaking, but he could not speak. As I watched him, the water in his eyes was replaced with blood that quickly turned his brown eyes into red. He reached for my shoulder as if he wanted to hold it and pull himself up. But midway, he stopped moving. The gunshots faded in my head, and it was as if my heart had stopped and the whole world had come to a standstill. I covered his eyes with my fingers and pulled him from the tree stump. His backbone had been shattered. I placed him flat on the ground and picked up my gun. I did not realize that I had stood up to take Josiah off the tree stump…..my deafness disappeared….I turned towards the swamp, where there were gunmen running, trying to cross over. My face, my hands, my shirt and gun were covered with blood. I raised my gun and pulled the trigger, and I killed a man…..I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved, until we were ordered to retreat because we needed strategy (ALWG 118-119)."
Financial Planning
Inconspicuous Consumption
by James Surowiecki
October 12, 2009 The New Yorker
For all the uncertainty about the current state of the economy, everyone is sure of one thing: this recession has permanently remade American consumers, turning them from spendthrifts into tightwads. From cover stories on “The New Frugality” to stories about cheapness as a new status symbol and pundits’ repeated analogies to the lessons inculcated by the Great Depression, the message is the same: there has been a fundamental change in American consumer behavior, one that will endure after the recession ends, returning us, as one economist put it, to “the days of ‘Leave It to Beaver.
The assumption that consumers have fundamentally changed is understandable. Personal spending is down sharply from 2007, while the national savings rate, which dipped below zero a few years ago, went above six per cent earlier this year. But although analysts point to the numbers as proof of a new mind-set, you don’t need psychology to explain what’s happened: simply put, Americans have been spending less because they have less money to spend. After all, in the past two years, nearly seven million jobs have been lost and wage growth for people who have kept their jobs has been anemic. At the same time, the housing crash and the stock-market meltdown erased, conservatively speaking, about thirteen trillion dollars in household wealth. Given the well-known wealth effect—people’s tendency to spend more when they get richer, and vice versa—that alone would translate into an expected drop in personal spending of between five hundred and seven hundred billion dollars.
In fact, you could argue that consumption has actually fallen less than might have been expected. Spending did drop off the proverbial cliff in the fall of 2008, in the direst phase of the financial crisis, but it stabilized at the beginning of this year, and has now risen for four months in a row. And much of the decrease in consumption since early 2008 can be traced to a drop in spending in just two categories: gasoline (thanks to lower prices) and cars. The decline in new-car purchases has been so steep that the average life of a car on the road today is at a historic high. This is just one example of how better product quality makes it possible for consumers to cut back without experiencing much decline in their standard of living. We can delay buying a new car because the one we have can be driven hundreds of thousands of miles without problems—making the auto industry a victim of its own success. Nonetheless, the response to the Cash for Clunkers program indicates a certain amount of pent-up demand out there.
Of course, none of this precludes the possibility that our frugal ways will endure even after the economy starts to recover. But there are reasons to be skeptical. Recessions regularly give rise to assertions that consumers will begin spending more responsibly. Toward the end of the 1990-91 recession, for instance, Fortune reported forecasts of the “death of conspicuous consumption.” Time ran a cover story on the return to the simple life, arguing that “after a 10-year bender of gaudy dreams and godless consumerism, Americans are starting to trade down.” Consumer-behavior experts predicted that people would be more frugal in the nineties, and consumers themselves said they planned to cut back on spending. It didn’t happen. A decade later, the bursting of the Internet bubble and the impact of 9/11 led many to predict that Americans would consume less—and we all know how that panned out.
This is a far more severe and traumatic recession—the worst downturn since the Great Depression. So, just as the Depression, as the Times put it, “imbued American life with an enduring spirit of thrift,” won’t this recession make Americans thrifty again? Maybe. But the current downturn, bad as it has been, is nothing like the Depression, which lasted a decade and saw unemployment hit twenty-five per cent. What’s more, the notion that the Depression turned Americans into tightwads is largely a myth. In fact, it was after the Second World War that America really came into its own as a consumer society. In the five years after the war ended, purchases of household furnishings and appliances climbed two hundred and forty per cent, while between 1940 and 1960 the rate of homeownership rose by almost fifty per cent. If the Depression didn’t make Americans wary of the pleasures of consumption, it’s unlikely that this downturn will.
This doesn’t mean that we’re going back to the days when the average American saved not a penny of his paycheck. As people try to rebuild their nest eggs, the savings rate is bound to remain higher than it was a few years ago. And what we spend our money on will change, too; housing costs, which were the central cause of the rise in Americans’ indebtedness in recent years, should eat up less of our budgets in the future. But the evidence for a radical shift in the way we consume seems more like the product of wishful thinking (there’s a palpable longing among pundits for Americans to become more frugal) than anything else. In many categories, spending has dropped only slightly, if at all. And, while these are very tough times for retailers who believed that spending could only go up, retail sales rose briskly in August. Before we go proclaiming this the age of the American tightwad, a little perspective is in order. Even after the worst recession of the past seventy years, retail sales this year will be about where they were in 2005. Does anyone really think that four years ago Americans were misers?
by James Surowiecki
October 12, 2009 The New Yorker
For all the uncertainty about the current state of the economy, everyone is sure of one thing: this recession has permanently remade American consumers, turning them from spendthrifts into tightwads. From cover stories on “The New Frugality” to stories about cheapness as a new status symbol and pundits’ repeated analogies to the lessons inculcated by the Great Depression, the message is the same: there has been a fundamental change in American consumer behavior, one that will endure after the recession ends, returning us, as one economist put it, to “the days of ‘Leave It to Beaver.
The assumption that consumers have fundamentally changed is understandable. Personal spending is down sharply from 2007, while the national savings rate, which dipped below zero a few years ago, went above six per cent earlier this year. But although analysts point to the numbers as proof of a new mind-set, you don’t need psychology to explain what’s happened: simply put, Americans have been spending less because they have less money to spend. After all, in the past two years, nearly seven million jobs have been lost and wage growth for people who have kept their jobs has been anemic. At the same time, the housing crash and the stock-market meltdown erased, conservatively speaking, about thirteen trillion dollars in household wealth. Given the well-known wealth effect—people’s tendency to spend more when they get richer, and vice versa—that alone would translate into an expected drop in personal spending of between five hundred and seven hundred billion dollars.
In fact, you could argue that consumption has actually fallen less than might have been expected. Spending did drop off the proverbial cliff in the fall of 2008, in the direst phase of the financial crisis, but it stabilized at the beginning of this year, and has now risen for four months in a row. And much of the decrease in consumption since early 2008 can be traced to a drop in spending in just two categories: gasoline (thanks to lower prices) and cars. The decline in new-car purchases has been so steep that the average life of a car on the road today is at a historic high. This is just one example of how better product quality makes it possible for consumers to cut back without experiencing much decline in their standard of living. We can delay buying a new car because the one we have can be driven hundreds of thousands of miles without problems—making the auto industry a victim of its own success. Nonetheless, the response to the Cash for Clunkers program indicates a certain amount of pent-up demand out there.
Of course, none of this precludes the possibility that our frugal ways will endure even after the economy starts to recover. But there are reasons to be skeptical. Recessions regularly give rise to assertions that consumers will begin spending more responsibly. Toward the end of the 1990-91 recession, for instance, Fortune reported forecasts of the “death of conspicuous consumption.” Time ran a cover story on the return to the simple life, arguing that “after a 10-year bender of gaudy dreams and godless consumerism, Americans are starting to trade down.” Consumer-behavior experts predicted that people would be more frugal in the nineties, and consumers themselves said they planned to cut back on spending. It didn’t happen. A decade later, the bursting of the Internet bubble and the impact of 9/11 led many to predict that Americans would consume less—and we all know how that panned out.
This is a far more severe and traumatic recession—the worst downturn since the Great Depression. So, just as the Depression, as the Times put it, “imbued American life with an enduring spirit of thrift,” won’t this recession make Americans thrifty again? Maybe. But the current downturn, bad as it has been, is nothing like the Depression, which lasted a decade and saw unemployment hit twenty-five per cent. What’s more, the notion that the Depression turned Americans into tightwads is largely a myth. In fact, it was after the Second World War that America really came into its own as a consumer society. In the five years after the war ended, purchases of household furnishings and appliances climbed two hundred and forty per cent, while between 1940 and 1960 the rate of homeownership rose by almost fifty per cent. If the Depression didn’t make Americans wary of the pleasures of consumption, it’s unlikely that this downturn will.
This doesn’t mean that we’re going back to the days when the average American saved not a penny of his paycheck. As people try to rebuild their nest eggs, the savings rate is bound to remain higher than it was a few years ago. And what we spend our money on will change, too; housing costs, which were the central cause of the rise in Americans’ indebtedness in recent years, should eat up less of our budgets in the future. But the evidence for a radical shift in the way we consume seems more like the product of wishful thinking (there’s a palpable longing among pundits for Americans to become more frugal) than anything else. In many categories, spending has dropped only slightly, if at all. And, while these are very tough times for retailers who believed that spending could only go up, retail sales rose briskly in August. Before we go proclaiming this the age of the American tightwad, a little perspective is in order. Even after the worst recession of the past seventy years, retail sales this year will be about where they were in 2005. Does anyone really think that four years ago Americans were misers?
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Wanna Play A Game?
Rate these movies in order of highest to lowest in terms of most money in the Box Office:
1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
4. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)
5. Titanic (1997)
6. The Dark Knight (2008)
7. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
9. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
10. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
CAN YOU FIGURE IT OUT????
DON'T CHEAT!!!!!
TRY AGAIN!!!!
OK, SO YOU THINK YOU GOT IT RIGHT HUH?
WELL HERE, CHECK YOUR ANSWER!
5-8-10-6-1-4-7-2-9-3
1. Titanic (1997) $1,835,300,000
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) $1,129,219,252
3. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) $1,060,332,628
4. The Dark Knight (2008) $1,001,921,825
5. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) $968,657,891
6. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) $958,404,152
7. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) $937,000,866
8. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) $923,967,829
9. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) $922,379,000
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) $921,600,000
1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
4. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)
5. Titanic (1997)
6. The Dark Knight (2008)
7. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
9. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
10. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
CAN YOU FIGURE IT OUT????
DON'T CHEAT!!!!!
TRY AGAIN!!!!
OK, SO YOU THINK YOU GOT IT RIGHT HUH?
WELL HERE, CHECK YOUR ANSWER!
5-8-10-6-1-4-7-2-9-3
1. Titanic (1997) $1,835,300,000
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) $1,129,219,252
3. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) $1,060,332,628
4. The Dark Knight (2008) $1,001,921,825
5. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) $968,657,891
6. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) $958,404,152
7. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) $937,000,866
8. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) $923,967,829
9. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) $922,379,000
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) $921,600,000
Obama's Meeting With The General
From McChrystal’s Mouth to Obama’s Ear
By PETER BAKER
Published: September 29, 2009- The New York Times
WASHINGTON — When President Obama looks at the screen in the Situation Room on Wednesday, he will find a face he has not seen lately except in newspapers. There, via secure video from Kabul, will be Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, his commander in Afghanistan, explaining directly to the president for the first time why more troops are needed.
Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, made a point of speaking with his Iraq commander roughly once a week at the height of the war there, a habit that forged a close working relationship between them even if it effectively bypassed the normal chain of command. Mr. Obama’s aides said he relied on General McChrystal’s advice but did not feel the need to duplicate Mr. Bush’s personal engagement with battlefield generals.
Instead, they said, he receives weekly memos from General McChrystal and meets weekly with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Aides said the president had thoroughly studied the general’s report, and they noted that it was Mr. Obama who approved firing the last commander and replacing him with General McChrystal.
“The president signed off on putting General McChrystal where he is,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday.
Does he regret it?
I would say that the president values, General McChrystal's opinion enough to no go and visit him every week and make the general feel uncomfortable because his boss is coming to see him. Everyone knows that when the boss comes to visit, all must be on their best behavior. The general sends the president updates on what is happening in Afghanistan each week and the president meets with his advisors to decide what to do. President Obama has a lot of trust for the general to leave him with so much power, which president Bush might not have. President Bush did visit his Afghan-general each week, maybe to build a closer relationship or maybe to check-up on him because Bush didn't trust the general. I do not know for sure, but that could be a good reason why Obama doesn't want to do that with the McChrystal because he does not want McChrystal to feel unworthy of being the commander of the army over seas.
By PETER BAKER
Published: September 29, 2009- The New York Times
WASHINGTON — When President Obama looks at the screen in the Situation Room on Wednesday, he will find a face he has not seen lately except in newspapers. There, via secure video from Kabul, will be Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, his commander in Afghanistan, explaining directly to the president for the first time why more troops are needed.
Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, made a point of speaking with his Iraq commander roughly once a week at the height of the war there, a habit that forged a close working relationship between them even if it effectively bypassed the normal chain of command. Mr. Obama’s aides said he relied on General McChrystal’s advice but did not feel the need to duplicate Mr. Bush’s personal engagement with battlefield generals.
Instead, they said, he receives weekly memos from General McChrystal and meets weekly with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Aides said the president had thoroughly studied the general’s report, and they noted that it was Mr. Obama who approved firing the last commander and replacing him with General McChrystal.
“The president signed off on putting General McChrystal where he is,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday.
Does he regret it?
I would say that the president values, General McChrystal's opinion enough to no go and visit him every week and make the general feel uncomfortable because his boss is coming to see him. Everyone knows that when the boss comes to visit, all must be on their best behavior. The general sends the president updates on what is happening in Afghanistan each week and the president meets with his advisors to decide what to do. President Obama has a lot of trust for the general to leave him with so much power, which president Bush might not have. President Bush did visit his Afghan-general each week, maybe to build a closer relationship or maybe to check-up on him because Bush didn't trust the general. I do not know for sure, but that could be a good reason why Obama doesn't want to do that with the McChrystal because he does not want McChrystal to feel unworthy of being the commander of the army over seas.
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