Does death always win? Or does life always win?
Is the glass half full or half empty?
Leave a CommentDoes death always win? Or does life always win?
Is the glass half full or half empty?
Leave a CommentGoing to try to be more authentic this year. Speak my truth, as they say. How does one speak their truth? Truth changes as people change. I’m not the same person I was five or ten or twenty years ago. As Alan Watts once said: “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
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Different strokes for different folks
Leave a CommentThe Trump administration released a far-reaching plan to force hospitals and insurers to disclose their secret negotiated rates:
“ Employers and patients are often unable to see which hospital systems and doctor’s offices are driving prices upward. Some health-care economists argue that the secrecy is a factor in why the U.S. spends more per resident on health care than any other developed nation.
The administration’s vision is to arm patients with information needed to make health-care decisions much like shopping for other consumer services. Rates potentially could be posted on public websites, where consumers would check the negotiated price of a service before they pick a provider.“
Leave a CommentThe economic expansion has enriched one-percenters to the point they now hold almost as much wealth as middle and upper-middle classes combined. I wonder how this will play out in the coming elections.
Leave a CommentGreta, Greta, Greta.
I admire your passion. You really believe what you say.
However, you have a ways to go in understanding the relationship between humans and nature.
Greta, I remember being your age. I remember thinking that we are destroying “Mother Nature”. As I got older, I realized that I had it backwards.
You see, Greta, nature doesn’t care about humans. Nature never cared. Nature has killed and tries to kill humans in every which way possible: disease, natural disasters, predators, etc.
Humans are the species that tamed nature. We’re taming diseases. Viruses.
Have patience Greta.
Technology will get better. We will become better at reducing emissions. We will cut down on greenhouse gases. Why? Because humans are the only species on planet earth that does NOT take the path of least resistance.
Leave a CommentWhat does the future monetary policy look like? Bloomberg explains:
…In theory, that debt hasn’t been monetized. In reality, most analysts think it has, and the sky hasn’t fallen in.
“The market does not expect the government of Japan to ever be able to repay this debt,’’ Bank of America-Merrill Lynch strategist Athanasios Vamvakidis wrote in a July report. “The BOJ may as well make it explicit.’
“Japan was the first country to cut interest rates to zero, and the first to try quantitative easing. Given its close working relations with the government, the BOJ may provide a blueprint for the latest ideas about central banking too
“Central bank independence increasingly looks like a brief historical episode that peaked around the turn of the century,’’ said Joachim Fels, global economic adviser at Pacific Investment Management Co. “Like it or not, get used to the new normal of dependent central banks.’’…
Leave a CommentGreat article by Ms. Nwaubani in the WSJ about the slave trade and how those whose ancestors sold slaves to Europeans now struggle to come to terms with a painful legacy:
“….Still, my father does not believe that the descendants of those who took part in the slave trade should now pay for those wrongs. As he points out, buying and selling human beings had been part of many African cultures, as a form of serfdom, long before the first white people landed on our shores. And though many families still retain the respect and influence accrued by their slave-trading ancestors, the direct material gains have petered out over time. “If anyone asks me for reparations,” he said sarcastically, “I will tell them to follow me to my backyard so that I can pluck some money from the tree there and give it to them.”
Mr. Chishimba takes a similar view. “Slavery was wrong, but do I carry upon my shoulders the sins of my forefathers so that I should go around saying sorry? I don’t think so,” he said. Mr. Duke doesn’t believe that Africans should play much of a part in the American reparations conversation, because the injustices the descendants of slaves suffer stem primarily from their maltreatment and deprivation in the U.S. “The Africans didn’t see anything wrong with slavery,” he said. “Even if the white man wasn’t there, they would still use these people as their domestics. However, because the white man was now involved and fortunes were being made…that was when the criminality came in.”
Mr. Nwanunobi wishes the matter were as straightforward as paying reparations in cash. He says that he would be willing to hand over all his family’s land and houses to anyone that suffered from his grandfather’s slave trading, whether in Nigeria or the U.S. “I am happy to give anything as long as it would bring an end to this suffering,” he said. “I will do whatever it will take to appease anybody, if only I can identify the particular people we offended.”
As for Mr. Rafiq, he agrees that Africans owe something to the descendants of slaves in America—a forthright acknowledgment of their own complicity in the trans-Atlantic trade. “Educated Africans need to rewrite their history, especially postcolonial history, which was a kind of restorative history that tended to marginalize issues like slavery,” he said. “Part of the compensation is telling the story of our part in what is happening to African-Americans today.”
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50 years ago we put a man on the moon
50 years later we have Snapchat and Instagram models
Leave a CommentNumber of mass shooting victims in the US – circa 120 per year
Number of abortions per year – circa 600,000 per year
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