Check this out. I guarantee that this is the heaviest article you (will) have read in 2008.
RELATED: Muslims leaving Islam in droves. Interesting article, but the numbers and rapid impact seem a bit fantastic to me.
I changed the book cover only - the innards are the same. You can do this sort of thing when you use Lulu and don’t lock yourself in with an ISBN number.
PROTEST & INVEST
and other insights into urban and multiethnic ministry
It’s chaordic - over at the Emergent Village web site there’s a post naming a variety of Emergent subgroups that have, uh, emerged. They’ve got Luthermergents, Methomergents, Presbymergents, Reformergents, Submergents (Anabaptists), Anglimergents,Convergents (Quakers), AGmergents (Assemblies of God), and they are asking if there are more subgroups out there. Though the name doesn’t carry a “mergent” at the end of it, I think they should list La Red del Camino, a Latin America-wide network of Emergents.
The past 10 days will be remembered as the time the U.S. government discarded a half-century of rules to save American financial capitalism from collapse.On the Richter scale of government activism, the government’s recent actions don’t (yet) register at FDR levels. They are shrouded in technicalities and buried in a pile of new acronyms.
But something big just happened. It happened without an explicit vote by Congress. And, though the Treasury hasn’t cut any checks for housing or Wall Street rescues, billions of dollars of taxpayer money were put at risk. A Republican administration, not eager to be viewed as the second coming of the Hoover administration, showed it no longer believes the market can sort out the mess.
“The Government of Last Resort is working with the Lender of Last Resort to shore up the housing and credit markets to avoid Great Depression II,” economist Ed Yardeni wrote to clients.
Pasadena Star News on tomorrow’s walk:
For the past year, groups like El Centro de Accion Social, the Pasadena NAACP, the California Coaches Coalition, Amer-I-Can, the Neighborhood Outreach Workers and the Western Justice Center, among many others, have quietly chipped away at the problem, according to area activists.“We need to concentrate on our similarities, not our differences,” said Israel Esteban, executive director of the upcoming Pasadena Marathon and an activist who has worked on building bonds between the city’s blacks and Latinos. “We have more in common than we have different.”
To highlight the commonalities and continue the dialogue, El Centro de Accion Social and Pasadena NAACP have organized a “Peace and Unity Walk,” beginning at 1 p.m. Saturday at the Villa Parke Community Center. From there, blacks, Latinos and anyone else who wishes to join will walk to the Jackie Robinson Community Center, about a mile away on Fair Oaks.
“It’s important to do this and develop trust between Latinos and African Americans, and I think it sends a strong message to our young people,” said Randy Jurado Ertll, El Centro’s executive director, who will walk at the head of the march next to local NAACP branch President Joe Brown.
While a lot has been accomplished in terms of increasing understanding between the two communities, the activists said Wednesday, much more still needs to be done.
“I feel we need to keep talking,” said Tarik Ross, a city commissioner who represents Northwest Pasadena and a program director for the nonprofit community group Amer-I-Can. “Young African Americans and Latinos need to start communicating.”
The orange-flavored, sugar-free lollipop they devised is infused with a natural ingredient found in licorice that kills the primary bacterium causing tooth decay, Streptococcus mutans….…(there are more innovations) in the works to target bacteria wreaking havoc in the nose, ear and gut, to name just a few.
I’m only linking to this because that’s an interesting phrase. I’m not sure what it’s about, nor why I’m on the mailing list. But these appear to be some Christian brothers and sisters. Here’s the link to their page explaining everything: www.wrf.ca/urban
Why then are so many business leaders ambiguous about markets?Apart from resenting market disciplines, many businessmen have not proved immune to the neo-Keynesianism still dominating much economic policy throughout the world. An example is some private bankers’ refusal in the present credit-crunch to contemplate letting any significant financial institution fail – no matter how insolvent it may be. Hence, they agitate to have governments and central banks provide special-financing for ailing institutions, thereby, in classic Keynesian fashion, putting off the ultimate reckoning instead of actually addressing the problem by letting bankrupt financial houses go, well, bankrupt.
Another source of business market-ambivalence is, surprisingly enough, many business schools. We often assume business schools produce hard-charging, wealth-creating capitalists. Undoubtedly some do. But close inspection of many business schools’ curricula reveals their primary focus is on management – accounting, financial, personnel, and process management – rather than free competition and entrepreneurship. While an important aspect of business, management per se is not about risk-taking. Management is mostly about planning and control. It often struggles with, and is sometimes wary of, economic creativity.
Clearly it’s not enough for business to be “pro-business.” Business leaders need to be pro-free enterprise, pro-free competition, and pro-free trade. Otherwise they risk simply becoming lobbyists, helping to create a world in which political influence counts for more than entrepreneurial ability, consumers pay more for lower-quality/higher-cost goods, and the poor in developing nations are locked out of the global markets that give them more hope of a better life than any amount of foreign aid.
To paraphrase St. Luke’s Gospel: “Businessman, heal thyself!”
I love the way this article begins, with this Adam Smith quote: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
via Newsbusters:
NB: All right, I’ve got just one more quick question for you. Last time I saw you, you’d just gotten an iPhone. How’s that working out for you?ROVE: I love it. My life has changed. I have a shred of coolness. I’ve got my 3,500 people in my addressbook on the phone, I can sync my calendar. I keep track of my modest little stock investments. I can check the weather of my house in Washington, my house in Florida, my boy at school, my hunt-lease in south Texas. I can surf the web, I’m just–I get part of my email there.
I mean it is just shocking how much better, how much more productive I am. I no longer carry around a giant address book, if I don’t have my calendar close at hand, I can quickly check it out of my– I don’t have to carry, I used to carry several notecards, now it’s just as easy to scribble on my little notepad, I can take photographs and forward them on immediately, it’s just remarkable.
NB: All right. Well it sounds like Steve Jobs should call you up as a spokesman.
ROVE: There we go, there we go. And not only that, I also have the Mac Book Air which is really cool. Even my wife is jealous of my MacBook Air.
NB: Ahh, well it sounds like you’ll have to get her one then.
ROVE: No I don’t, no I don’t. I’m the only cool one in the family with a MacBook Air.
I think, when I get out of my present cell contract, I might just grab one of these iphone doohickeys.
Whenever Ronald Reagan would mention his suspicion that Mikhail Gorbachev was a secret believer, everyone on the White House staff would scoff, thinking the president naive. When I had the opportunity to speak to Gorbachev a couple of years ago, however, I found myself concluding that Reagan had been onto something after all. Why, I asked, had Gorbachev refrained from putting down the revolution of 1989, just as Khrushchev had put down the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Brezhnev had put down the Prague Spring of 1968? “Because of something I shared with Ronald Reagan,” Gorbachev replied. “Christian morality.”Now the last leader of the Soviet Union has spent half an hour on his knees at the tomb of St. Francis.
Today we are saving a teenager’s ear. A ENT doctor told him that he would lose the hearing in one ear if he did not have surgery by summer. A bevy of circumstances almost caused him to miss his scheduled surgery today. But he made it. As I write they are prepping him for surgery. I talked to him on the phone a few minutes ago. I told him I’ve been scared for weeks that he would lose an ear; I can’t imagine that. He said he had been scared, too, but “thank God” that he was about to get surgery. Harambee did a bunch of stuff behind the scenes to help make his surgery possible. This young man has had long-standing ear trouble, going back to when he was a child. However, we just learned that when he got jumped into a gang, he was beaten badly and he wonders if the beating has contributed to his ear problems. He’s trying to stay away from the gang life, and we are thinking about him for years to come, not just in his present circumstances. We can see him when he’s 30, as the man God created him to be. We just hope he can learn to see himself that way and then live that vision out.
This post - How would free individuals handle climate change? - over at Samizdata.net has produced an interesting and helpful comment thread. It’s a bunch of libertarians discussing what a properly libertarian approach to Global Warming would look like. A few people mention the standard “encourage poor Bangladeshis to get rich and solve their own GW-related problems, i.e., sea rise.” But there’s more than just that view, including a few efforts to actually answer the question posed by the poster. Note: I sympathize with a lot of the libertarian perspective, except I also like paved roads, police, street lights, etc., that are best provided by government. I’m also not convinced that Jesus is a libertarian.
In other news, UCLA and Stanford are playing for the Pac-10 Tourney championship.
Ok, you got me: I’m at the emergency room with Sam. He swallowed a dime. The x-rays show the dime is in his stomach, which means he’ll be just fine. We are just waiting to see the doctor to get the official OK.
See the image below. The white dot to the left of the spinal column is the dime in Sam’s stomach.
This morning I hired a guy in Argentina to do graphic design work (a very quick project) for the Harambee. He got paid up front, digital payment. I sent him the assignment via email. He just got back to me with the draft, which I will check out when I’m done with this post. Dig it.
We raised over $36,000 at our annual Harambee Benefit that took place this past Saturday night. 200 images from the event are here (Thank you, photographer Michael Fernandez).
I’m getting this book:
I’ve heard about this book for a while. It was written anonymously by an MD who works at a university health center. Warren Throckmorton interviewed this doc back in late 2006:
A superb storyteller, she describes patients who do all the right things: They eat well, exercise, and structure their lives around getting a good education. What they don’t do well is manage healthy intimate lives. One young woman, Heather, told Dr. Grossman that she was depressed but never considered that her depression might relate to a loveless “friends with benefits” relationship with a young man. Dr. Grossman quotes the girl saying, “I’m confused, because it seems like I don’t get the ‘friend’ part, but he still gets the ‘benefits.’” Apparently no mental health or health professional ever told Heather that, for women, an increased risk for depression is associated with casual sex.
Unprotected. I think about the concept of protection a lot, because I have small children. I think about my seven-year-old constantly. He has already survived a bout with cancer at this tender young age. But my neighborhood is full of hazards (one dwelling away from me, a car rolled up on two teen girls, pointed a gun, and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber - two weeks ago). Even more, I think about bullies or twisted-minded minors who might pressure him. They idea of leaving him to fend for himself is crazy. Yet that’s what happens all over our society. It happens in the hood, yes. But this book argues that we have left the hearts and minds of young adults - regardless of their level of affluence - unprotected, and they are suffering because of it. I’ll let you know if I think the book lives up to its hype.
