Iran keeps vigorously pursuing uranium enrichment for reactor fuel, or so it says. I’m not one to take at face value the word of a less than credible Iran leadership.
The United States and some of its allies accuse Iran of seeking to build nuclear weapons. Tehran denies the claim and insists it has the right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium and produce reactor fuel.
Whether they intend to use the Uranium for fuel or for weapons is yet to be seen. At this point, all we can really do is monitor and take appropriate action, with international consensus, when the time comes.
But another question comes to my mind completely unrelated to the weapons issue. Is Iran capable of handling the risks and regulation needed for nuclear energy plants? I’m not an expert on the subject and would defer to such, but it seems to me that they may not actually have the scientific or bureaucratic savvy needed to pull this off safely. For the sake of the Iranian people, I hope I am wrong to question.
Britain is considering a ban on “happy hour” discounts at bars and restaurants to curb drinking, a spokesman said Saturday, as health advocates warned that a rise in liver-related deaths among young people may signal a future epidemic.
Health officials will decide on whether to ban the happy hours — designated times for discount drinks — once an independent policy review is published in coming weeks, a health department spokesman said on customary condition of anonymity.
I assume that this will spread to the rest of the EU and then here, just like smoking bans. Of course, some states in the U.S. already ban happy hours, so this may not be much of a change.
A new trend in mental health disorders is where sufferers believe they are part of an elaborate and secretive conspiracy to place them on reality television.
Meanwhile, researchers in London described a “Truman syndrome” patient in the British Journal of Psychiatry in August. The 26-year-old postman “had a sense the world was slightly unreal, as if he was the eponymous hero in the film,” the researchers wrote.
The Oscar-nominated movie stars Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank. He leads a merrily uneventful life until he realizes his friends and family are actors, his seaside town is a TV soundstage and every moment of his life has been broadcast.
His struggle to sort out reality and illusion is heartwarming, but researchers say it’s often horrifying for “Truman syndrome” patients.
A few take pride in their imagined celebrity, but many are deeply upset at what feels like an Orwellian invasion of privacy. The man profiled in the British journal was diagnosed with schizophrenia and is unable to work. One of Gold’s patients planned to commit suicide if he couldn’t leave his supposed reality show.
Mental health disorders are devastating and all too often not regarded with the same weight by the public as other health disorders. And as if they weren’t bad enough already through stigma and symptom, the infusion of reality television as a driving delusion is just remarkably cruel.
Via Yahoo! News, the AP announces ”Stocks jump after government bailout of Citigroup.” The main body of the article says much to this effect.
Wall Street showed clear relief Monday over the government’s plan to bail out Citigroup Inc. — a move it hopes will help quiet some of the uncertainty hounding the financial sector and the overall economy. The major indexes jumped more than 3.5 percent, extending Friday’s big rally.
Doesn’t there seem to be something missing here? In places where trillions of transactions occur in a day, is it good logic to assign the daily trend of these occurances to one factor alone as Tim Paradis, business writer, does here?
I’m not picking on him, there may be a very good reason for making this conclusion, but I don’t see it. Also, he’s not the only one who does it. It seems that business/financial writers as a rule make this sort of leap.
“Barrack Obama is elected, the dow is up.” Okay, maybe, but what about the state of each of the individual commodities that is traded? Or, how is the strength of each company that is bought and sold in the foray of trading?
There’s this other trend of anthropomorphizing the market that I likewise don’t understand.
The market is also a little more optimistic because President-elect Obama is set to introduce his economic team on Monday and has called for another economic stimulus.
The “Market” is optimistic? So, has the “market” been clinically depressed lately or just under the weather? Does this seem silly to anyone else?
Throughout the article, and again, I’m merely using this one to illustrate a commonality that I’ve seen with many a financial new article, there’s a continuance with the primary assertion without any logical stone-stepping or empirical data.
Jim Baird, chief investment strategist with Plante Moran Financial Advisors, said Wall Street is relieved by the government’s decision to help prop up Citigroup but he predicted that the initial enthusiasm could give way to further questions about the effectiveness of the government’s array of efforts to sew up problems in the financial sector.
They do it again. “Wall Street” is relieved. Is this the same as “the Market”? Or are there two independent forces at work?
The only thing I can come up with here is that these “experts” are basing these kinds of statements solely off of their perception of investment confidence. The problem is, their perception of confidence is based on the “uppy” or “downy” -ness of the big indices, and always after the fact. It’s not actually based on anything else. Somebody please enlighten me here.
In Casino Royale, he got his heart shredded. So, blinded by inconsolable rage (as M says), he seeks revenge in completely nihilistic fashion.
Along the way, he realizes first of all that the destruction he leaves behind him is abhorrent, and secondly that part of that destruction is his own self. He only gets a quantum of solace (!) from indulging his rage– it’s just not worth it. So, he decides to wrap himself in another part of his personality (his traditional suave and cynical demeanor) and shut off his emotions entirely except for one: love for Queen and country.
This Bond is a “get it out of the way because we have to” kind of movie, to me. It closes the story arc of the darker, grittier Bond and makes the slick and polished one all the more cool because we understand WHY that is his raison d’etre, and also because when the cruel side flashes to the fore, we can be genuinely afraid of what he might do. That was the significance of placing the iconic walk-turn-shoot shot at the END of the movie instead of the beginning.
I think that makes a lot of sense. Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace are really one long film about how James Bond becomes James Bond. Now, I have to say that while I won’t mind if Daniel Craig takes it back a notch and becomes less brooding, I do hope that they keep the stripped down feel of these two films intact going forward. Please, no villains in volcano lairs or lousy puns when a bad guy is killed.
Citigroup is currently valued at about $20.5 billion. It received $25 billion from the Treasury already, and is now poised to receive another bailout. Here’s how they got to where they are.
There, Citigroup’s chief executive, Charles O. Prince III, learned for the first time that the bank owned about $43 billion in mortgage-related assets. He asked Thomas G. Maheras, who oversaw trading at the bank, whether everything was O.K.
Mr. Maheras told his boss that no big losses were looming, according to people briefed on the meeting who would speak only on the condition that they not be named.
For months, Mr. Maheras’s reassurances to others at Citigroup had quieted internal concerns about the bank’s vulnerabilities. But this time, a risk-management team was dispatched to more rigorously examine Citigroup’s huge mortgage-related holdings. They were too late, however: within several weeks, Citigroup would announce billions of dollars in losses.
Normally, a big bank would never allow the word of just one executive to carry so much weight. Instead, it would have its risk managers aggressively look over any shoulder and guard against trading or lending excesses.
But many Citigroup insiders say the bank’s risk managers never investigated deeply enough. Because of longstanding ties that clouded their judgment, the very people charged with overseeing deal makers eager to increase short-term earnings — and executives’ multimillion-dollar bonuses — failed to rein them in, these insiders say.
Today, Citigroup, once the nation’s largest and mightiest financial institution, has been brought to its knees by more than $65 billion in losses, write-downs for troubled assets and charges to account for future losses. More than half of that amount stems from mortgage-related securities created by Mr. Maheras’s team — the same products Mr. Prince was briefed on during that 2007 meeting.
Explain to me why we’re wasting money on this bank? Citi’s problems aren’t what the bailout was sold to us as–not knowing the value of assets, etc. Citi’s problem is that it was horribly mismanaged. Why shouldn’t we let them go into bankruptcy, exactly? Really I have no idea.
Everybody has this image of “crazy Christians” based on what they hear in the media, but it’s just not true. Most Christians are normal, decent folks. We don’t all blindly follow a bunch of outdated biblical tenets or go all fanatical about every bit of dogma. What I’m trying to say is, don’t let the actions of a vocal few color your perceptions about what the majority of us are like.
Like me. I may be a Christian, but it’s not like I’m one of those wacko “love your neighbor as yourself ” types.
God forbid!
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My faith in the Lord is about the pure, simple values: raising children right, saying grace at the table, strictly forbidding those who are Methodists or Presbyterians from receiving communion because their beliefs are heresies, and curing homosexuals. That’s all. Just the core beliefs. You won’t see me going on some frothy-mouthed tirade about being a comfort to the downtrodden.
Here’s Peter Schiff again, pointing out that things are just going to be worse until we stop building an economy based on consumption and IOUs and start building an economy based on making things for export.
He is making quite a bit of sense here. Also, buy gold.
