Sunday, February 5. 2012
"We are living through a period of rapid global poverty reduction. According to recent estimates, high, sustained growth across most of the developing world has helped nearly half a billion people escape $1.25-a-day poverty between 2005 and 2010. Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period.
"Over the past decade, the number of countries classified as low-income has fallen by two fifths, from 66 to 40, while the number of middle-income countries has ballooned to over 100. This means 26 poor countries have grown sufficiently rich to surpass the middle-income threshold.
"Since 2005, nearly all of the 20 countries have seen significant increases in per capita income, reflecting the strong overall economic performance of the developing world. Additionally those that enjoy the highest gains see the most rapid decrease in poverty, affirming the central role of economic growth in poverty reduction."
The above paragraphs are excerpts are from a fascinating paper about the progress that has been made against severe Poverty in the world, especially in China and India- primarily the result of Government-led economic policy and development. The article also documents ironies and contradictions about this progress.
Sunday, February 5. 2012
According to Mark Mills, a physicist and founder of the Digital Power Group who writes for the Forbes Intelligence column, and Julio Ottino, dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Northwestern University, we sit “on the cusp of three grand technological transformations.” And what are those three?
Big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution. Here’s a quick summary of their significance:
1. Big Data. Processing power and data storage are not only virtually free, but becoming virtually unlimited. The iPhone alone has computing power that puts the 1970s-era IBM mainframe to shame. “The internet is evolving into the “cloud” – a network of thousands of data centers any one of which makes a 1990 supercomputer look antediluvian.
2. Smart Manufacturing. In what is called the “first structural shift” since Henry Ford launched mass production, engineers will soon “design and build from the molecular level…even creating new materials.” This era of “new materials” will explode when combined with 3-D printing (also known as direct-digital manufacturing). Imagine “literally ‘printing’ parts and devices using computational power, lasers and basic powdered metals and plastics.” Then one day, the Holy Grail: “’desktop’ printing of entire final products from wheels to even washing machines.”
3. Wireless Revolution. Soon, most humans on the planet will be connected wirelessly. “Never before have a billion people – soon billions more – been able to communicate, socialize and trade in real time.” As the authors of the article note, this introduces both rapid change (e.g., the Arab Spring), as well as great opportunity.
That was written by James White. Read the article he references here- http://online.wsj.com/article
Sunday, February 5. 2012
Obama administration, in creating specific rules to implement Obamacare, will require all employers (with a very narrow exemption discussed below) to offer their employees health insurance that provides FDA-approved contraception, female sterilization, and other “reproductive” services free of charge — even if the employer is a religious organization and doing so violates its doctrine. I also recalled the times that President Obama and other members of his administration have supported “freedom of worship.” However, as in Pliny’s time, “freedom of worship” is not the same thing as “freedom of religion.” The former means that one may believe whatever one wants and worship privately without interference, whereas the latter allows one freedom to live in the world at large consistent with one’s faith tenets, even if they are not endorsed by the state.Because the administration is knowingly forcing (primarily Catholic) religious organizations to pay for medical services to which they are theologically opposed, the new rules represent a frontal assault on freedom of religion...Read the rest of the article http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/289536/
Sunday, February 5. 2012
Modern “liberalism” is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of “tolerance” are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to “celebrate diversity” coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration’s insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients.
The average salary of the top eight executives [of Planned Parenthood]:is $270,000, which makes them officially part of what the Obama administration calls “the 1 percent.” In America today, few activities are as profitable as a “non-profit.” Planned Parenthood receives almost half a billion dollars — or about 50 percent of its revenues — in taxpayer funding. A billion dollars seems a lot, even for 322,000 abortions a year. But it enables Planned Parenthood to function as a political heavyweight. Ms. Richards’s business is an upscale progressives’ ideological protection racket,
Read the entire article by a rightly outraged Mark Steyn -http://www.nationalreview.com/articles
Friday, February 3. 2012
"Today the Susan Komen Foundation for the Cure announced that it was caving to pressure from the Planned Parenthood Federation, reversing its decision not to fund Planned Parenthood in the screening of women for breast cancer. This is an important victory for Planned Parenthood and the abortion rights lobby. First of all, the association with Komen is a key piece in Planned Parenthood's effort to present itself as a "women's health provider" rather than simply as an abortion provider. Beyond that, the surrender of the nation's leading breast cancer awareness group to this kind of political pressure proves the clout of Planned Parenthood and their allies.
"In all of this, though, we can gain an opportunity to see what the abortion culture is all about: cash. Planned Parenthood and their allies use the thoroughly American language of freedom of choice and women's empowerment, but what's at stake, as seen here, are billions of dollars. That's why, despite their talk about adoption as a "choice," Planned Parenthood and others hardly ever lead women through an adoption process relative to how often they promise them the "fix" of a "terminated pregnancy." There's a profit motive involved in every abortion.
"The answer for those of us who cherish the lives of women and their children, regardless of stage of development, isn't to long to compete with Planned Parenthood in the influence that comes with massive amounts of wealth. It's instead to see, first of all, how our own captivity to Mammon devolves us in the same way."
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/februaryweb-only/bad-komen-lessons.html
ALSO -
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/february/planned-parenthood.html
Wednesday, January 25. 2012
"Dwight Eisenhower was one of the outstanding leaders of the Western world. He also spent more consecutive time at the center of national and international affairs than any other American of his time: longer than either of the Roosevelts, longer than Henry Stimson, longer than anyone. For 18 years - from the moment in November 1942 when he took command of the Allied Expeditionary Force whose invasion of North Africa began the defeat of Hitler's Third Reich, until Jan. 20, 1961, when he handed the burden of the presidency to John F. Kennedy ...
He was supreme commander of the greatest political-military coalition in history, holding it together despite great centrifugal forces (both political and personal) until that coalition won what Eisenhower memorably called its "crusade in Europe" and the "Thousand-Year Reich" was no more. He led an Ivy League university; he helped forge NATO into one of the instruments that prevented another totalitarian power from dominating Europe; he helped keep the Republican party from drifting into the irrelevance of isolationism. Despite the criticisms of the nation's high-cultural and journalistic tastemakers, he was a successful (and crafty) president, one of the few two-term chief executives who left the Oval Office a highly popular man. Americans, now and in the future, ought to know that this country can produce men of such accomplishment.
No one will learn any of this, however, from the Eisenhower Memorial that will soon be built in the heart of monumental Washington: unless, that is, Congress moves quickly to force a reconsideration of a historical and aesthetic travesty.
The present Eisenhower Memorial design, by postmodernist Frank Gehry, has virtually nothing to do with the Dwight David Eisenhower of history. Plans call for Ike to be memorialized in sculpture as a barefoot farmboy on the Great Plains: not the great wartime leader; not the soldier-diplomat; not the chief executive of the United States who presided over eight years of peace and prosperity. The Gehry conceit seems both obvious and entirely in tune with the postmodern deconstruction of history: There are no great men; there are no great virtues; there is no great striving; nor is there great accomplishment or great service to others." Read the entire Article-
http://eppc.org/publications/pubID.4636/pub_detail.asp
Wednesday, January 25. 2012
In his SOTU Speech, Mr Obama said, “I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.”“[Barack Obama] didn’t get it right,” says Harry V. Jaffa, professor emeritus of Claremont McKenna College, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and author of two influential books on Lincoln. Professor Jaffa noted that this quotation leaves out a great deal. Jaffa recited the full statement from Lincoln’s speech, “The Nature and Objects of Government, with Special Reference to Slavery” (July 1, 1854):Mr Lincoln actually said, “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”"Notice the difference? The emphasis is on the need to have done, not on government doing the action. 'That distinction was missing from his quotation' Jaffa explains.Thomas L. Krannawiter, another Lincoln scholar and professor at Hillsdale College, explains, "Of course, when Lincoln, ... supported what Henry Clay termed the “American System” of internal improvements and protective tariffs, he understood that all economics is political economics, that economics always serves political ends. … Lincoln’s political economics was a means toward limited government, the end of which was the protection of individual natural rights and political liberty, the principles upon which America was founded."Krannawitter continued, "In the Progressive view, the ends of government cannot be limited to protecting natural rights, because nature supplies no rights, and positive rights created by government change over time. Thus limited government is replaced with government of unlimited power and scope, what some political scientists call the administrative state. Rejecting natural justice, the liberal mind concerns itself with “social justice,” which at a minimum requires vast redistributions of wealth from the few to the many. As the administrative state itself is the arbiter of what “social justice” on any day might entail, there can be no restraints on its power; the bigger government becomes, the more “rights” will be bestowed on the people."Read entire article http://biggovernment.com/cjohnson/2012/01/25/exclusive-noted-lincoln-scholar-
Wednesday, January 25. 2012
Which Presidents were more wealthy than Romney would be? Washington, Jefferson, Kennedy (if ...)
Which Party Nominees were more wealthy than Romney is? Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, John Kerry
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/would-mitt-romney-be-the-richest-president-ever/2012
By the way, here in the Massachusett's Senatorial race, running for the "People's Seat", Brown and Warren are close to spending 70 million combined!
Wednesday, January 25. 2012
I do not care if Mr Romney is very wealthy. To me, Mr Obama and Mr Gingrich are wealthy also. I do not care if Mr Romney is a Mormon. I care about what their views are about Government and the role it will have in our lives. I care about what kind of President and Leader of our Nation that they would be, if elected.
All this talk about what is "fair" is meaningless because no one has, or can, define the word. We would do far better if we discussed what is constitutional and legal, as well as what is moral and ethical. I can think of dozens (hundreds) of things in life that are not fair to my mind, but others could disagree for lack of a mutually agreed upon definition of the word. At any rate, it is not the Government's purpose to "make life fair" for everyone.
Income inequality is not our most crucial problem as a Nation. If the Government had the will and power to triple everyone's income, would that make the Middle Class happy? Of course it would. But since that would mean the wealthy would also be better off and many in the Lower and Middle Classes would cry foul and think this would not be fair. That would prove that a major problem in our Society, beyond greed and the corruption that comes with it, is envy. I believe envy as well as greed are hurting us as a People far more than income inequality. The Government can not fix the dark side of human nature, but Politicians should not cater to it and exploit it for political purposes. And certainly, Government should not make any Policy based on it.
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