I had always viewed it as a silly song that is simply fun to listen to. I never tried to make any sense of it. This article looks a little closer into what the song might be about.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
I had always viewed it as a silly song that is simply fun to listen to. I never tried to make any sense of it. This article looks a little closer into what the song might be about.
Michael Lewis appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show recently to discuss the financial crisis. I realize that this is a comedy show and that the humor is provided by Colbert using his guests as foils, but on occasion Colbert gets carried away and talks far too much. This was one of those episodes where he kept on interrupting Lewis and became really annoying. Lewis as a guest was interesting and amusing in his own right and Colbert was a nuisance and a distraction.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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Those following business news will have read that many European countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy) are facing financial crises and are looking for help from external sources. The causes of their predicament are drearily familiar: a banking sector that lent money recklessly on the basis of endless growth in real estate prices and now that that market collapsed, the big banks are demanding that governments must bail them out or that the entire financial system will collapse. It is exactly the kind of extortion that happens in the US. This is why the terms ‘banksters’, which was coined as an amalgam of bankers and gangsters during the time of the Great Depression, is so apropos in describing them.
Currently all eyes are on Greece but in an article for Vanity Fair titled When Irish Eyes Are Crying, Michael Lewis describes the spectacular rise, and even more spectacular fall, of the Irish economy. “What has occurred in Ireland since then is without precedent in economic history. By the start of the new millennium, the Irish poverty rate was under 6 percent and by 2006 Ireland was one of the richest countries in the world.” And yet, within a few years, it had completely tanked.
An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10 trillion.) At the rate money currently flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years.
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In late 2006, the unemployment rate stood at a bit more than 4 percent; now it’s 14 percent and climbing toward rates not experienced since the mid-1980s. Just a few years ago, Ireland was able to borrow money more cheaply than Germany; now, if it can borrow at all, it will be charged interest rates nearly 6 percent higher than Germany, another echo of a distant past. The Irish budget deficit—which three years ago was a surplus—is now 32 percent of its G.D.P., the highest by far in the history of the Eurozone. One credit-analysis firm has judged Ireland the third-most-likely country to default. Not quite as risky for the global investor as Venezuela, but riskier than Iraq. Distinctly Third World, in any case.
Ireland managed to collapse its banking sector without all the new fangled gimmickry of Wall Street with its derivatives and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs). They lost money the old-fashioned way, with a classic bubble where they kept buying and selling each other real estate at escalating prices using easily available mortgages on the assumption that prices would continue to rise.
But unlike in the US where a homeowner is only liable for the value of the mortgage and thus can walk away from their home if its market value drops below the mortgage amount (a state known as being ‘underwater’ or ‘upside down’), leaving the bank to get what it can from the foreclosed property, in Ireland you are forced to pay back to the bank what you owe. This means that the average person faces unavoidable large and inescapable debts.
Ireland’s 87 percent rate of home-ownership is among the highest in the world. There’s no such thing as a non-recourse home mortgage in Ireland. The guy who pays too much for his house is not allowed to simply hand the keys to the bank and walk away. He’s on the hook, personally, for whatever he borrowed. Across Ireland, people are unable to extract themselves from their houses or their bank loans. Irish people will tell you that, because of their sad history of dispossession, owning a home is not just a way to avoid paying rent but a mark of freedom. In their rush to freedom, the Irish built their own prisons. And their leaders helped them to do it.
There is one major difference in what happened in Ireland and in the US. As Lewis says, “In America the banks went down, but the big shots in them still got rich; in Ireland the big shots went down with the banks.”
But despite that one slightly positive aspect, the Irish banks are still draining the economy. In March, the Irish government said that they need another 24 billion euros to ‘save’ the banks, whose ratings have been reduced to junk status and the total cost of the bailouts keeps continually rising.
Currently Greece is in the headlines because of fears that it will default on its debts. I do not think this will happen because the banksters will demand that money be loaned to the Greek government so that it can then give it to the banks. Since these banks have global reach, they can exert pressure on the French and German governments to lend the Greek government the money. Of course, those governments will tell their people that this ‘aid’ is in order to save the European Union when it is really driven by the banksters’ extortion.
Veteran political observer Sam Smith tries to provides some guidance as we enter the fairy tale period known as the presidential election season where desperate people pin their hopes on some leader to take us out of the mess we are in, not realizing that the game is rigged and that wars, assaults on civil liberties, and giveaways to the rich will continue whoever wins.
There has been over the past few decades a steady deterioration of the political difference between national Democratic and Republican politics, most notably with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Today it is hard to define that difference given the strong bipartisan support for several illegal wars, the unconstitutional Patriot Act, and a bottomless desire to bail out Wall Street, and a stunning indifference to the financial problems of everyone else.
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It’s more sensible to regard the two major parties as Mafia mobs fighting for control of a region known as the United States.This isn’t to say that there isn’t a difference between them. But it’s about survival, however, not politics. The Demos tend to do less damage to our lives than the Repubs. Both mobs may beat the shit out your father, but the Demos are less likely to harm your children or your grandmother.
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If America is to be saved, it will because of movements outside the mainstream political game. It’s always been like that and will continue to be so.So enjoy the fairy tale that is bubbling up around us. Vote for the bastards who will be do us the least harm. But if you want to be part of the story – and you are whether you desire it or not – then that only thing that will really matter is what you do outside the voting booth.
There are so many people running for the Republican nomination that it is hard to keep track of them all, so I decided to make it easier by classifying them according to what I thought their intentions are. The asterisk is for those who are being coy and have not yet declared that they intend to run.
Some people may belong in more than one category. Palin, for example, could easily be put in 1, 2 and 5 as well but I limited myself to just one. Feel free to argue with my sorting. I may have also overlooked someone, the field is so crowded.
But where is my favorite candidate Alan Keyes? No major election is complete without the man who set the standard for the crazification factor. Run, Alan, run! God is calling you to save the nation!
Blog reader FuDaYi sent me this news item about a Jewish rabbinical court that sentenced to death by stoning a dog that wandered into premises because they thought it was the reincarnation of a secular lawyer who had antagonized the court 20 years earlier and had been cursed by the judges to have his spirit passed to a dog when he died, which happened a few years ago. Fortunately the dog escaped.
What is it about religion that destroys people’s minds?
I came across a film called The Ledge that supposedly has an explicit atheist as a main character. The film’s website has this press release:
The Ledge is the first film in Hollywood history that puts an atheist into the hero role in a production that features A-list stars. It is written and directed by Matthew Chapman, the great-great-grandson of Charles Dawin, the scientist who discovered evolution, the biggest challenge to religion since Gallileo. The film was nominated for Best US Drama at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and stars Charlie Hunnam, Sons of Anarchy, Liv Tyler, Lord of the Rings, Tony, Emmy, and Golden Globe nominee, Patrick Wilson, Watchmen, and Oscar nominee Terrence Howard, Crash, Iron Man.
On the rooftop of a city skyscraper, Detective Hollis (Terrence Howard) pleads with Gavin (Charlie Hunnam) not to jump. What he does not know is that Gavin, an atheist, is involved in a deadly feud with Joe (Patrick Wilson), a Christian extremist. Joe’s wife, Shana, (Liv Tyler) is caught in the middle as Joe seeks to test Gavin’s faith or lack of it. Cutting between the present and the past, tension escalates as verbal shots give way to deadly threats in a race against time that neither God nor the police can stop. Along the way, the film provocatively explores the intellectual and emotional conflicts between religion and atheism.
Here’s the trailer.
This famous cartoon from 1993 in the early days of the internet has gained new relevance with the recent revelation that a supposedly lesbian blogger in Syria who had reportedly been kidnapped was actually an American man living in Scotland. What is more, the supposedly lesbian co-owner of the website on which this fake Syrian lesbian posted has also been revealed to be a (different) American man, a US military veteran no less. They say that they were doing this to raise the awareness of gay and lesbian issues and of the troubled situation in Syria.
What is the matter with these people? Don’t they realize that by creating these fake identities, they actually diminish the causes they supposedly support, not to mention the credibility of real people who might be in danger and needing help?
The Daily Show comments on this weird story.
This interactive map shows surprisingly large variations across the US. The darker the region, the higher the life expectancy. The article states that the US is 37th amongst all countries in overall life expectancy at birth in 2007 (although the CIA Factbook estimates it at 50th for 2011) and is now stagnant or even declining, hardly something to be proud of for the world’s largest economy.
The range within the US is huge, varying from highs of 86 years for women in some counties in Florida to a low of 65.9 years for men in Holmes county in Mississippi.
Although I do not consider myself a libertarian, I do agree with some libertarian principles, especially the ones that says that adults have the right to privacy and be able to engage in solitary or consensual practices that do not harm others free from interference from the state and society. But Michael J. Sandel in his book Justice: What’s the right thing to do? (p. 74) provides a story that sorely tests my allegiance to those principles
In 2001, a strange encounter took place in the German village of Rotenburg. Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, a forty-three-year-old software engineer, responded to an Internet ad seeking someone “willing to be killed and eaten.” The ad had been posted by Armin Meiwes, forty-two, a computer technician. Meiwes was offering no monetary compensation, only the experience itself. Some two hundred people replied to the ad. Four traveled to Meiwes’s farmhouse for an interview, but decided they were not interested. But when Brandes met with Meiwes and considered his proposal over coffee, he gave his consent. Meiwes proceeded to kill his guest, carve up the corpse, and store it in plastic bags in his freezer. By the time he was arrested, the “Cannibal of Rotenburg” had consumed over forty pounds of his willing victim, cooking some of him in olive oil and garlic.
I had not heard of this shocking story before, even though it occurred quite recently. That two hundred people responded to the ad at all, even assuming that most of them thought it was a joke of some kind, was weird.
Is the negative reaction that most people will feel towards this story a result of revulsion towards cannibalism? And is that feeling rational? After all, once a person is dead, no further harm can be done to that person. When someone dies, we are allowed to use the body for research or to bury it or burn it. In the Zoroastrian religion the custom is to leave dead bodies out in the open to be eaten by vultures, so we could take the extreme position and say it is acceptable for it to be eaten by humans too.
Or is our feeling of revulsion due to the idea that a young and seemingly healthy person in a state of sound mind should voluntarily choose to have himself killed and eaten at the request of a stranger? The whole episode was videotaped (which is why we know that this bizarre transaction was consensual) but the tape also indicates that the dead person had some truly weird ideas of his own and was not of sound mind as we would understand the term, except in the narrow sense that he knew what he was doing.
As you can imagine, the case posed extraordinary problems for the justice system and made me glad that I was not the judge assigned to oversee it.
When Meiwes was brought to trial, the lurid case fascinated the public and confounded the court. Germany has no law against cannibalism. The perpetrator could not be convicted of murder, the defense maintained, because the victim was a willing participant in his own death. Meiwes’s lawyer argued that his client could be guilty only of “killing on request,” a form of assisted suicide that carries a maximum five-year sentence. The court attempted to resolve the conundrum by convicting Meiwes of manslaughter and sentencing him to eight and a half years in prison. But two years later, an appeals court overturned the conviction as too lenient, and sentenced Meiwes to life in prison.
Sandel reflects on what this might tell us about the limits of libertarianism as a philosophy.
Cannibalism between consenting adults poses the ultimate test for the libertarian principle of self-ownership and the idea of justice that follows from it. It is an extreme form of assisted suicide. Since it has nothing to do with relieving the pain of a terminally ill patient, it can be justified only on the grounds that we own our bodies and lives, and may do with them what we please. If the libertarian claim is right, banning consensual cannibalism is unjust, a violation of the right to liberty.
The weirdness of the story does not end there. Sandel says that, “In a bizarre denouement to the sordid tale, the cannibal killer has reportedly become a vegetarian in prison, on the grounds that factory farming is inhumane.”
There are some truly strange people in the world.