February 2012
3 posts
4 tags
The Faux Agendas of Conservatives and Liberals
My problem with American political conservatism (just so as not to be confused with other usages of the term ‘conservative’) is that it purports to be in favor of “getting government out of people’s lives” and uses the language of freedom, but is not actually in favor if liberty at all. Rather, conservatives want to restrict human action to a few avenues of free...
Stop Saying Privacy is Dead
Seth Godin says today that privacy is dead. A friend of mine posted this article to facebook and declared himself in agreement with Godin’s arguments. Here is my response:
The “privacy is dead” argument is not only poorly framed, but dangerously so. Privacy/No Privacy is a false dichotomy. The only person with 100% privacy (in any era, not just our own) is the hermit who lives...
The Best Use of 4 Years?
There is an interesting controversy today in the UK surrounding a public school mathematics (my compromise with the Brits, since I refuse to use the term ‘maths’) teacher who told one of his brightest students to ‘slow down’ and enjoy being 17 rather than push so hard to get into University at Oxbridge.
Recounting a conversation with one pupil fitting that description, he...
January 2012
12 posts
Primary Elections - Survivor Style?
Spending a significant time outside of the US gives one an interesting perspective on US news and politics. Watching clips and seeing pictures from the Republican Primary debates from afar has been fascinating, as I am not engaged in any day to day conversation about the elections in the way I have been in every election in the past. This morning, when I saw the picture of the four remaining...
Chile Doesn't Make Top 5 in Latin America on...
Rather interesting infographic from Gist showing the entrepreneurial countries/hubs in the world. Europe and Latin America lag the pack, while the US/Canada and Asia lead. The absence of Chile from Latin America’s leaders is sadly not surprising. In spite of its consistent leadership in “Best Places to Do Business” rankings, it is not a good place to try to get into business....
Maybe We Shouldn't Eliminate Depression
The Wall Street Journal reports that physical stimulation of the brain, in addition to having cured tremors in Parkinson’s patients, is now being utilized to cure depression and other forms of ‘mental disorders.’
I wonder if this is an actually positive development. Depression is an important part of the human experience—it drives us to make corrections to our lives, to...
Small Countries and Economic Potential
In his blog today, British MP Douglas Carswell makes the following point concerning the prospects of a Scottish referendum on independence:
During the coming referendum campaign, I hope that no one in Scotland will be put off by the idea that Scotland is somehow “too small” to prosper as a self-governing nation. Norway, Switzerland and Singapore are each of a comparable size, and seem to be...
20-Year Peso Bonds in Chile
I may have found reason to doubt my bearish position on the Chilean real estate market. Business Week is reporting that Chile is set to debut 20-Year peso bonds. This is a significant development for the country, since most debts are denominated in UF (unidad fomento), which is an inflation-linked currency unit. This means that long-term fixed rate mortgages do not exist.
20-year peso bonds would...
Silicon Valley's Alternate Reality
Business Week reports on Silicon Valley’s alternate reality:
In Silicon Valley, all the Sturm und Drang of 2011 seemed as relevant as the Cricket World Cup. High Unemployment? Crippling debt? Not in Silicon Valley, where the fog burns off by noon and it’s an article of faith that talented, hard-working techies can change the world and reap unimaginable wealth in the process....
Eurozone Growth Slows
From Business Week:
The inflation rate in the 17-nation euro area fell to 2.8 percent from 3 percent in November, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said in an initial estimate today. Euro-area services and manufacturing output contracted less than initially estimated last month and French consumer spending unexpectedly declined in November from October, separate reports...
Rise in Chilean Peso Due to Local Buying
Sebastian Boyd, writing in Business Week, explains the strengthening of the peso in the last 48 hours:
Chile’s pension funds had $133 billion of assets under management at the end of November, the equivalent of 65% of the country’s gross domestic product. The funds must take long peso positions to offset their foreign currency exposure when they buy assets abroad.
Despite...
Chile's Real Estate Bubble
“Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.”
-Otto von Bismarck
Chile’s Central Bank has issued a report on the status of the real estate sector here. From Chile’s newspaper, El Mercurio:
A study of the Central Bank concluded that the Chilean real estate sector does not indicate any risks of being in a bubble. The study said that the price...
Evans-Pritchard's 2012 Apocalypse
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writes in The Daily Telegraph
There will be no Chinese credit explosion this time, no real help from post-bubble India or over-stretched Brazil. It will be a global downturn on all fronts, aborting what remains of recovering even before industrial output in the OECD bloc has regained its pre-Lehman peak.
The second wave will hit with youth unemployment already at 45% in...
Is QE losing its effectiveness?
Chris Kacher and Gil Morales write today in MarketWatch that
Right now the action in gold is telling us that all might not be right in “QE-land” as we move into the New Year. If gold presages another down leg in stocks, we would tend to look at this as a necessary “clearing of the decks” in the stock market given that we are now in the third year of a bull rally that...
G7 and BRIC must finance $7.6 Trillion in 2012
From Bloomberg today we see that the world’s largest economies have a pretty hefty refinancing ahead of them.
The amount needing to be refinanced rises to more than $8 trillion when interest payments are included. Coming after a year in which Standard & Poor’s cut the U.S.’s rating to AA+ from AAA and put 15 European nations on notice for possible downgrades, the...
December 2011
5 posts
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
Divine Love is not a Meritocracy
“Deep down in my soul Thou hast planted the happy assurance that Thou art love. Thou hast treated me paternally like a child; teaching me the same thing a second time, Thou hast shown me that Thou art love. Then thou hast kept Thy silence for a moment; Thou hast wished to try me on my own without proof to see if I would come to the same conclusion all alone. Then have I seen everything...
The Closed Hand of God
“Father in Heaven! It is from Thy hand that we receive all. Thou stretchest forth Thy powerful hand and it seizes the wise in their foolishness; Thou stretchest forth Thy powerful hand and worlds pass away. Thou openest Thy compassionate hand and it fills with abundant blessing all that live, and if at times Thou seemest to take Thy hand from us, we know that Thou dost only close it in order...
2 tags
“Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few.”
– G.K. Chesterton
4 tags
Living in Superabundance
“Lord our God! Every creature turns its eyes to Thee and awaits its nourishment and its subsistence from Thee. Thou openest Thy compassionate hand and Thou dost fill abundantly with blessing all who live. Thou hearest the cry of the beast; Thou listenest to the complaint of man. And those to whom Thou hast given much raise their thoughts to Thee, for they know that all cometh from Thee and...
April 2011
4 posts
The Hope of Easter and the Transformation of the...
Mighty victim from on high,hell’s fierce powers beneath thee lie;thou hast conquered in the fightthou hast brought us life and lightnow no more can death appallnow no more the grave entrall thou hast opened paradiseand in thee thy saints shall rise.-17th Century Hymn, Author Unknown When St Paul writes that God found us dead in trespasses and sin, we must imagine ourselves in the most horrid...
A Life of Service, A Life of Sacrifice
On the night in which our Lord was betrayed, he humbled himself before his disciples, washing their feet, exemplifying the lives of service we ourselves ought to live. Serving others necessarily require a level of humility that does not come naturally to us as humans. But even more anathema to our biological being is what Christ showed us we are to do on Good Friday, which is to take our life of...
A Maundy Thursday Prayer
Merciful and Gracious God, I pray on this Maundy Thursday, as we remember Our Lord’s tripartite institution, of the Body & Blood, the New Commandment, and the Example of Service, that we may be moved to follow in his holy footsteps all that we undertake. Our world is broken, and we have lost our way. Your holy Church is being liquidated and dismembered as we are carried off by the...
Iceland: A Profile in Courage
We must all stand up and applaud tiny little Iceland (population: 320,000) for standing up to the neighborhood bullies, The Netherlands (population: 16.6 million) and the United Kingdom (population: 62 million), who are demanding that Icelandic taxpayers pay for the bailouts provided to savers in the two European countries who lost money when IceSave collapsed in the financial crisis in 2008. 60%...
March 2011
8 posts
Facebook: Pseudo-Community Made Easy
Richard Beck, in his Experimental Theology Blog, wrote an article earlier in the month entitled How Facebook Killed the Church. It is well worth the read, as it quite accurately describes a relatively simple reality: 2 generations of young people have viewed the church as hypocritical, mean-spirited, and judgmental, but it served a social function for which there was no alternative, until cell...
Forgiveness from a Tortured God
The miracle of the Incarnation—God becoming flesh and dwelling among us—gives us uncountable insights into the character and motivations of God. As we are made in his image, we must recognize the vast similarities between ourselves and our creator in order to better understand our small part in this mortal life. What God does in and through Jesus Christ in the Incarnation is to pull...
Several Unfiltered Lenten Reflections
Working out our own faith through fear and trembling we often encounter lengthy periods of spiritual drought, where we are not seeking and/or we are not being shown. Sometimes these droughts are punctuated by floods of insight, which tend only to reveal to us the vastness of the body of knowledge that is inaccessible to us. It so happens that one such flood befell me this morning, and as I...
The Annual Pilgrimmage of Discipline
“The Almighty and merciful Lord grant us absolution and remission of all our sins, true repentance, amendment of life, and the grace and consolation of his Holy Spirit. Amen.” The Lenten season is one part of our annual pilgrimage commemorating the life, ministry, sacrificial death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord and the sending of the Holy Spirit to be our aid and...
Christ to Comfort and Restore Me
I bind unto myself today the power of God to hold and lead,his eye to watch, his might to stay,his ear to hearken, to my need;the wisdom of my God to teach,his hand to guide, his shield to wardthe word of God to give me speech,his heavenly host to be my guard.—St Patrick’s Breastplate The austerity of Lent should not be a burden for us, but rather a gift. We should find ourselves...
Lenten Trials
Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith. -1 Peter 5:8-9Should we venture into the world, forsaking monastic piety and escapism, and should we determine to engage the people we meet, we inevitably face all manner of temptations, but perhaps none more than temptations to pride and to malice. Of all...
Our Intemperate Love
Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work, we confess to you, Lord.(The Order for Ash Wednesday, the Book of Common Prayer)Decadence surrounds us—it has become the defining element of Western culture, and the central component of Western culture that is now being copied by those gaining new affluence in the East. Though many are claiming...
In Preparation for an Holy Lent
O, my black soul, now thou art summoned By sickness, Death’s herald and champion;Thou’rt like a pilgrim, which abroad hath doneTreason, and durst not turn to whence he’s fled;Or like a thief, which till death’s doom be read,Wisheth himself deliver’d from prison,But damn’d and haled to execution,Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned.Yet grace, if thou...
January 2011
1 post
Aspirational Parenting
In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Yale professor Amy Chua wrote about the virtues of “Chinese parenting,” though she also calls it “immigrant parenting.” You can read her article here and her responses to reader comments here. While much of her initial article might seem overly harsh to the contemporary soft American who lives in constant fear of offending...
December 2010
4 posts
A Holy Time of Rest and Quietude in Christmastide
No love that in a family dwells,No carolling in frosty air,Nor all the steeple-shaking bellsCan with this single Truth compare—That God was Man in PalestineAnd lives to-day in bread and wine. -John Betjeman, “Christmas” A sincere thanks to dear friend Fr Larry Smith for both the subject line and quote. For most people, the Christmas season is full of noise—the noise of...
Business Organizations Old and New
I will write more on these diagrams in the coming days, but I wanted to go ahead and put them out for feedback/comment.
Life's Anesthesia
Our lives are the product of the way we interact with the people surrounding us. All too often, those interactions are not conducive to a fulfilling and experiential life. While family and history are valuable, it can frequently hinder innovation. Our constant need for acceptance, which is borne out of our interactions with people we call “friends” can often stand in the way of us...
The Tiny Liberty Bill
Were I advising House Speaker John Boehner or the thousands of TEA Party organizers who want to continue their momentum for the next two years, I would tell them to Keep It Simple. The public has a short attention span, and so every agenda item in the political sphere must be high impact or it will get lost in the hundreds of thousands of WikiLeaks documents that will no doubt continue to occupy...
November 2010
6 posts
Fiscal v. Monetary Policy
Bryan Caplan at EconLog writes:Austrians and hard-core libertarians usually jointly dismiss monetary and fiscal policy. But among more moderate economists, there’s a long-standing tendency for pro-market views to correlate with a preference for monetary over fiscal policy. Friedman and Samuelson are the classic examples: Friedman combined highly pro-market views with a strong belief in the...
Jesus in the Business Deal, Part II
“Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live...
Jesus and the Business Deal
You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for an eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. -Matthew 5:38-40When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal....
Welcome to Latin America
There have been a number of interesting articles that have popped up in my RSS feed recently about the Latin population in the United States, including one that observes the overall better health and life expectancy of Latins, and one reporting the fact that Latino children now comprise more than 50% of California’s public school student population. These articles no doubt send chills up...
The Genesis of Income Inequality According to St...
“In the beginning, when our planet was but a primordial sludge and humanity was a twinkle in Marx’s eye, most of the earth was a light and airy green, foreshadowing the grass and trees of a pristine natural, perfect idyll that would emerge and sustain itself from Gaia’s breast. But in one dark corner, there was a black swamp that formed out of what we know today to be crude oil....
TEA Party: There Will Be No Mulligans
Last night’s results may mark the one of the most interesting developments in American political history. On the one hand, there was a clear and broad national rejection of the last two years, the Obama administration, and especially the Nancy Pelosi-run House of Representatives. The voters wanted to send Washington a message, and they did. Yet simultaneously, they returned the Democrats to...
October 2010
2 posts
The American Supernova
A revolution can be neither made nor stopped. The only thing that can be done is for one of its several children to give it a direction by dint of victories. -Napoleon Bonaparte The United States has fallen victim of late to an interesting trend that is lost on the politics-of-the-moment attitude in the media coverage of the 2010 election, and by the rhetoric of the politicians of both parties,...
Systemic vs. Arbitrary Injustice
Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article in the New Yorker is well worth a thorough read. In general, his critique of the claims of social media evangelists ring pretty true to me. Having spent quite a bit of time in that universe (and now having stepped back from it), I can attest to the “social media as a panacea” attitude that tends to characterize many who work in that space every...
September 2010
2 posts
Sam Adams or Robespierre?
The TEA Party, by implication of its name, makes itself out to be the modern equivalent of the Boston Tea Party, but by all historical accounts, the Boston Tea Party and the revolutionary sentiment in late 18th Century America was founded on a principled intellectualism, rooted in the extensive study and philosophy of the enlightenment. It enlisted the masses reluctantly, and the masses...
A Prayer for Perspective
as recorded in my journal today:Almighty Father, giver and sustainer of life,I pray thee grant unto me a vigilant and sober eye, a discerning and deliberate mind, and a patient and enduring heart. Grant in times of abundance that I may be frugal in the use of my resources, austere in satisfying my own needs, generous in giving to others, full of all humility in the recognition that thou art the...
August 2010
3 posts
Equities are the only assets of choice?
Just when I thought the market cheerleaders rah-rah couldn’t get any more ridiculous, I happened upon this little gem on CNBC. I am not the kind of person who often literally laughs out-loud at something I am reading, but I did at this one. Quoting Phil Orlando, the chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors, “Investors are focusing on the fact that stocks are very...
America: Where Votes Don't Matter?
Read this article from St Louis Today about Missouri’s overwhelming passage of “Proposition C,” which was designed by TEA Party activists to opt Missouri out of ObamaCare. Of course I am thousands of miles away from Missouri, and everyday it seems I get a few miles further away in terms of my emotional connection to the future of the US, but I am both happy and troubled by this...
Community in our Everyday Lives
Of all human sentiments, I find nostalgia to be the most peculiar. At best, nostalgia is selective forgetfulness. At worst it is militant ignorance of the past. People are nostalgic for all kinds of things, places, people, and ways of life. I am light-heartedly nostalgic for 19th Century England and joke that I was born in the wrong country in the wrong century. But 19th Century England was...