Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in 1661. Now it’s come farther than most on the path toward getting rid of them.
“I can’t see why we should be printing bank notes at all anymore,” says Bjoern Ulvaeus, former member of 1970’s pop group ABBA, and a vocal proponent for a world without cash.
The contours of such a society are starting to take shape in this high-tech nation, frustrating those who prefer coins and bills over digital money.
Conventional wisdom has advanced competing theories: Wall Street types took too many risks, encouraged by lax government regulation; or pro-homeownership policies eroded mortgage-lending standards and created the housing bubble.
Actually, both theories are correct ”” and neither is….
[The real foundation was laid with Paul Volcker’s]… decisive defeat of double-digit inflation in the early 1980s.
All the good news (low inflation, high employment, rising stock and real estate prices) drove economic growth. Between 1982 and 2007, there were only two mild recessions. When prosperity was jeopardized ”” by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the tech crash in 2000, the 9/11 attacks ”” the Federal Reserve seemed to defuse the threats. The economy seemed less risky. Economists announced the Great Moderation of business cycles.
Booms become busts because justifiable confidence becomes foolish optimism. So it was. Believing the world less risky, people took more risks. Investment banks and households increased their debt. Lending standards eroded, because borrowers’ repayment prospects were thought to have improved. Regulators relaxed oversight, because markets seemed more stable and self-correcting. On the fringes, ethical standards frayed; criminality increased. The rest, as they say, is history.
Major steps toward the dis-establishment of Norway’s state church, the (Lutheran) Church of Norway, were passed by the government on March 16 in its weekly session with King Harald V.
Expected to be adopted by the Parliament (Storting) in May or June this year, the proposals will make changes in the country’s constitution as well as in other church legislation, the Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs announced.
“I hope we have now prepared a good basis for the Church of Norway to be an open and inclusive national church, also in a multicultural and multi-religious setting,” Minister Rigmor Aasrud (Labour Party), said in a news release.
Show an empty tournament bracket to a random sample of Americans and they’re likely to make the same instant association: NCAA basketball.
This simple design, which is used whenever a competition needs to winnow a large group of contestants to a single winner, has become a much-admired cultural meme. If there were a hall of fame for sports graphics, the bracket would be the first inductee.
But as ubiquitous as brackets have become, they’re also the center of a surprising mystery: Nobody knows for sure where the idea came from.
America’s self-understanding as a shining “city on a hill” helps explain both our westward expansion and our paternalistic foreign policy. From Cuba and Central America to the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq, Americans have been willing to impose their will on others. Some will argue it was because we wanted their land or oil. Perhaps. But it was also because we thought we knew what was best.
But probe the biblical metaphor that forms the foundation of the American psyche and you find that exceptionalism is always for service ”” never for favor. The prophets of Israel emphasized this point. Even the ancient book of Genesis establishes this baseline principle when God speaks to the patriarch Abraham: “By your descendants all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”
That’s a whole different way of thinking about the world and our place in it. If there is such a thing as American exceptionalism, it is for service, not domination.
At some point, the spectacle America is now calling a presidential campaign will turn away from comedy and start focusing on things that really matter””such as the “fiscal cliff” our federal government is rapidly approaching.
The what? A cliff is something from which you don’t want to fall. But as I’ll explain shortly, a number of decisions to kick the budgetary can down the road have conspired to place a remarkably large fiscal contraction on the calendar for January 2013””unless Congress takes action to avoid it.
Well, that gives Congress plenty of time, right? Yes. But if you’re like me, the phrase “unless Congress takes action” sends a chill down your spine””especially since the cliff came about because of Congress’s past inability to agree.
President Obama’s 2013 budget would add $3.5 trillion to annual deficits through 2022, according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
It also would raise the deficit next year by $365 billion, according to the nonpartisan office.
The CBO estimate is in sharp contrast to White House claims last month that the Obama budget would reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion over the next decade.Ӭ
‘That was the most bitter and painful experience of my life,” observes Tom McMillen. “What happened in Munich was the most controversial and tragic sports competition in modern times.”
Mr. McMillen is a former college and NBA basketball star, Rhodes scholar, three-term Democratic member of Congress, and now successful businessman. We’re in his Northern Virginia office reminiscing about the continuing impact of the 1972 Olympic Games, held 40 years ago this summer. Overshadowing it all is the tragedy of what TV announcer Jim McKay called “the worst day in the history of sports.”
That was the hostage crisis in the Olympic Village, which culminated in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian terrorists (linked to the Fatah group that we now know enjoyed Soviet funding and training for many years). Four days later was the disputed basketball game between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in which Mr. McMillen played a pivotal role.
From a purely legal point of view, thus, the process is clear: it is up to the two chambers of parliament to jointly decide on the composition of the Constituent Assembly. Politically, however, there is strong resistance by secular parties to allow the parliament to exercise the power given to it by the constitutional declaration. Secular parties and independents did poorly in the elections, collectively receiving less than 25 percent of the seats. Thus they are demanding that the Constituent Assembly be composed primarily of representatives of organizations outside the parliament””such as religious institutions, universities, and professional syndicates””which in their view represent the Egyptian people better than the elected parliament. Allowing the parliament to elect the Constituent Assembly as it sees fit, many argue, would allow Islamists to dominate the writing of the constitution.
The debate is remarkable for two reasons. First, it shows that Egypt has made no progress on the issue of how and by whom the constitution will be written. The current debates are a reiteration of earlier discussions that place, without coming to a conclusion, since the overthrow of Mubarak. Such debates hampered agreement on a clear transition process early on.
Second, the debates do not touch on the content of the constitution even at this late date….
What has taken the place of religious commitment is the “economy” in the form of an ever greater consumption of the goods that science in the service of technology and industry delivers. Combined with an ever more malleable and mercurial “self” defined in terms of the fulfillment of material desires, the urge for infinite acquisition has become the default religion even of believers. This “religion” prevails even though in acting it out Christians violate their own religion’s claims that self-love and covetousness are close to the essence of sin. The religion is that of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,” or, more recently, “Whatever.”
Yet this state of affairs cannot last because neither science nor philosophy can prove the existence of individual rights, the maintenance of which is the liberal state’s only reason for existence. The ecological limits of indefinite production and consumption moreover threaten to topple the very foundations upon which this default religion rests.
This scenario in a few words characterizes the symptoms of liberal Western “civilization” and its discontents as sketched by Brad Gregory in The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Or rather liberal Western civilization and its “contentments.”
….the story of religion in America over the last two generations is a story, not of outright secularization, but of institutional decline. Contemporary Americans are as religiously-minded as ever, but the rise of church-switching and do-it-yourself faith and the steady weakening of the traditional churches and communions has left the country without religious institutions capable of playing the kind of social role that [Yuval] Levin describes…This organizational decline has been most pronounced within what’s often described as liberal Christianity ”” in the churches of the Protestant Mainline, and in the “Spirit of Vatican II” wing of the Catholic Church. But among more self-consciously conservative believers, too, constant church-shopping is commonplace (just ask Marco Rubio), national political causes often excite more interest than local social engagement, and the glue of confessional and denominational traditions is much weaker than in generations past. The vitality of American Christianity today is too often a vitality of individuals rather than institutions, or else of institutions that depend too heavily on a single personality for their strength and survival. We have plenty of celebrity pastors and authors and bloggers and television hosts, but the more corporate and communal forms of faith are growing weaker every day.
I have much more to say about this in the book, but so far as Murray’s argument is concerned, I think that religious institutions are both one of the areas of American life hit hardest by elite self-segregation (you can’t pastor a church in suburban Buffalo from a corner office in Washington D.C.) and one of the few areas where it’s plausible to imagine his call for elites to leave their cocoons and live among the people actually being answered. Institutions are only as strong as their personnel, and the major religious bodies in the United States have struggled mightily since the 1960s to attract large numbers of the best and brightest (and, indeed, large numbers period) to the ministry.
The German Church’s accommodation of the Nazi regime reveals an appalling failure of basic Christian preaching and teaching. In [Edmund] Schlink’s understanding the failure of the churches was not so much caused by the persecution as revealed by it. “The forces outside the church showed up what was real in the life of these churches, and what was only an empty shell” (p. 100).
By God’s grace an astonishing renewal of the Church occurred as well. “The renewal began when the Church recognized the enemy’s attack as the hand of God ”¦ and when resistance to injustice became at the same time an act of repentance and of submission to the mighty hand of God” (p. 100). As the contrast with anti-Christian propaganda became more intense “the Church’s ears were re-opened to the Word of God. ”¦ But at the same time God’s Word challenged us, questioned the reality of our own religion, and forced us to recognize God simply and solely in His Word….”
[CHRIS] ARNOLD: In other words, without the rest of the economy doing better, will the recovery in the jobs market stall out?
Lawrence Katz says that idea is troubling, because even the job growth that we’re seeing right now isn’t great and we need it to get much stronger.
[LAWRENCE] KATZ: Even if we had a very rapid recovery, we have a huge distance to go still. We are still 10 million jobs behind. So it would take basically four years of strong job growth to get back to a normally functioning labor market.
ARNOLD: So slower job growth would mean an even longer period of high unemployment and economic hardship for millions of Americans.
The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s, according to calculations based on Census Bureau data. The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit. Even bicycle sales are lower now than they were in 2000. Today’s generation is literally going nowhere. This is the Occupy movement we should really be worried about….
In the most startling behavioral change among young people since James Dean and Marlon Brando started mumbling, an increasing number of teenagers are not even bothering to get their driver’s licenses. Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 ”” even before the Great Recession ”” that number had dropped to 65 percent….
America is back. You can tell because Americans are maxing out their credit cards again.
Household debt grew at an annualized rate of 0.25% in the last quarter of 2011, according to the Federal Reserve’s flow-of-funds report released last week. That’s not a big jump, but until now there hadn’t been any uptick at all in household debt since the 2008 crash.
“Consumers have been more willing to use credit cards for shopping, signaling renewed confidence in their financial and job prospects,” explained Paul Edelstein, director of financial economics at IHS Global Insight, in a recentAssociated Press report.
Alain de Botton, the British pop philosopher whose new book Religion for Atheists has made him the friendly face of modern godlessness….said if you walked into a modern university and asked to study the humanities in order to find meaning in life, “the people in charge would immediately dial the number of the insane asylum, and you would be taken away.”
He said the message of the secular world is that life is simple, and the only people who need help are stupid people who read self-help books.
He set his own views against the “virulent strain” of atheism that sees religion as “not just false but wrong, ridiculous, malign and corrupt,” epitomized by Christopher Hitchens’ claim that “religion poisons everything.”
The Book of Common Prayer, 1551
This object is doubly resonant. It is the first book printed in Ireland and, as such, marks the island’s rather belated acquisition of one of the defining features of modernity. The revolutionary process of printing on a press with moveable type was pioneered by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany almost exactly a century earlier. The delay in catching up with this new technology says much about Ireland’s absence from the mainstream of the Renaissance.
But if the advent of the first printed book brings a key aspect of modernity to Ireland, that modernity arrives in a form that is unwelcome to a substantial majority of the population….
Every so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?”
I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.
Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of ”” it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction ”” yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence ”” men and women. I always tell my friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas ”” and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?”
Ever since their mad dash out of Egypt bound for the Promised Land, Jews have been on the move ”” and they continue to be, far more than any other religious group, according to a new study.
One in four of the world’s Jews has migrated from one country to another, compared to 5% of Christians and 4% of Muslims who have left their native lands.
Given that the Government’s plans to legalise gay marriage have been strongly and very publicly opposed by leading members of the Church of England ”“ including a former Archbishop of Canterbury and the current Archbishop of York ”“ it would have been unrealistic to expect anything like a welcome from the generally more conservative hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Even so, the ferocity of the language used in a newspaper article…[last weekend] by Cardinal Keith O’Brien, leader of the church in Scotland and the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in Britain, almost takes the breath away.
Ray Ozzie, the man who succeeded Bill Gates as Microsoft’s tech visionary, believes the world has moved past the personal computer, potentially leaving behind the world’s largest software company.
The PC, which was Microsoft’s foundation and still determines the company’s financial performance, has been nudged aside by powerful phones and tablets running Apple and Google software, the former Microsoft executive said.
“People argue about ‘are we in a post-PC world?’. Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world,” Ozzie said at a technology conference run by tech blog GeekWire in Seattle on Wednesday.
Poverty has not been front and center in American political debate since the passage of the welfare reform act in 1996.
But a new book may have started to change that.
Conservative scholar Charles Murray, who created intense partisan conflict with “The Bell Curve,” his 1994 book on inheritance and intelligence, has now touched a nerve with “Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010.”
In it, he argues that there is a growing gap between highly educated, married, hardworking, affluent Americans and unmarried, less educated, chronically unemployed poorer Americans.
With one run of the printing presses, he has reignited the culture wars.
The agency’s 2011 long-term budget outlook showed that federal debt would begin to hurt the economy once it reaches about 77% of GDP. CBO’s January budget and economic outlook estimated that it will hit that level in 2013 under its high-debt scenario that is based largely on current policy.
“CBO expects that the large government deficits during the recession and afterward will raise the cost of capital in the future . . . constraining investment,” the nonpartisan scorekeeper wrote in its January budget and economic outlook.
Initially, the impact would be minimal, but it would grow over time as debt levels increase.
The recent theft of a 12th century Irish saint’s heart from a Dublin church has left local Christians stunned and devastated.
“All I would ask is that whoever took it would return it with no questions asked. It’s valueless to anyone but the Cathedral here and our community and the community of Dublin”¦we’re grieving over it, really,” church dean Rev. Dermot Dunne told CNA on March 5.
The heart of St. Laurence O’Toole was stolen from Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin sometime between 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on March 3 and has yet to be recovered.
Lord Howe Island Stick Insect hatching from Zoos Victoria on Vimeo.
Wowowow. Totally Cool! Watch it all.
Now, go and read the whole stunning story.
It is an example of how hard it can be to keep your sources of information straight, even when you’ve only got two newspapers to mix up. Our own editorial board meetings are often punctuated with statements on the order of, “Gee. I know I saw that somewhere. Where did I read that? Or was it on NPR?”
Not only do we read a lot of newspapers, magazines and books, as editorial writers always have, now we’ve got websites and Twitter feeds to follow, and to keep straight.
And it is our job to follow this stuff. It’s going to be increasingly hard for people who just try to be good consumers of news and information to keep all these sources straight.
Yes, the band 30 years ago was U2, and its mysterious second album was called “October.” Both were surrounded by clouds of rumors, which I explored in a News-Gazette column on Feb. 19, 1982. What I needed to do was meet the band before its Feb. 23 concert in Champaign-Urbana.
Luckily, the 20-year-old Bono was willing to discuss “Gloria” and “October.” Describing that interview, the reference book “U2: A Diary” notes: “Although the band have gone out of their way to avoid talking about their faith up to this point, they speak candidly now.”
That column ran on March 5 and it apparently was the first mainstream news piece in which Bono and company discussed their faith.
For the new generation of empty-nesters, divorce is increasingly common. Among people ages 50 and older, the divorce rate has doubled over the past two decades, according to new research by sociologists Susan Brown and I-Fen Lin of Bowling Green State University, whose paper, “The Gray Divorce Revolution,” Prof. Brown will present at Ohio State University this April. The paper draws on data from the 1990 U.S. Vital Statistics Report and the 2009 American Community Survey, administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, which asked all respondents if they’d divorced in the past 12 months.
Though overall national divorce rates have declined since spiking in the 1980s, “gray divorce” has risen to its highest level on record, according to Prof. Brown. In 1990, only one in 10 people who got divorced was 50 or older; by 2009, the number was roughly one in four. More than 600,000 people ages 50 and older got divorced in 2009.
Fear and a lack of choice may carry the election for Mr Putin, but they cannot disguise the growing discontent across different classes, ages and regions. For those who have done less well than Ms Guseva over the past 12 years but still remember Soviet times, the 1990s are becoming less relevant. Polls show that the fastest decline in Mr Putin’s support is among poorer people over 55 years of age; they feel Mr Putin has not honoured his promises, and are tired of waiting. The conspicuous display of riches by corrupt bureaucrats heightens their sense of injustice. The number of people who no longer trust Mr Putin has risen to 40%, and people tell pollsters that the country is stagnating. “The regime is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the population,” says Lev Gudkov of the Levada Centre, a social-research outfit. Mr Putin’s victory will only make things worse.
The ground assault by Syrian forces in central city of Homs has evoked memories of a massacre 30 years ago in nearby Hama.
At least 10,000 people were killed in February 1982 during the three-week pounding of the city by government artillery and tanks that was ordered by Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current president.