In October 1957 the Soviet Union had beaten the United States in the space race by successfully launching the Sputnik 1 satellite into orbit. Now Moscow wanted to demonstrate its cultural superiority. The jury at the inaugural Tchaikovsky Competition was itself a remarkable line-up of Soviet musicians: Dmitri Shostakovich, Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter among them (along with Sir Arthur Bliss from Britain).
The intention had been that a Russian pianist would triumph. However, Cliburn’s performances of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and Rachmaninov’s Third so dazzled the jury that they sought advice from the very top. “Is he the best?” Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, is reported to have asked. “Then give him the prize.”
Picture the scene: Rural Southern man with recent hand fracture, splint in place. He's sitting in our ersatz fast-track area, which consists of small cubicles separated by partial walls and curtains. He needs more pain medicine. His girlfriend loudly complains, He can't even have sex, and I'm tired of doing it on top!
. . .
My friend Frank, emergency department nurse, former clown, former prison nurse, sage of sages, said quite matter of factly, If coyotes were as big as minivans, we wouldn't have problems like that.
Let it sink in for a minute. This is wisdom of the highest order ... Otherwise healthy young men wouldn't sit around acting mortally wounded and praying for disability if coyotes were as big as minivans. They would have to stay alert, keep moving, stay in shape. The implications are staggering.
Not long after Frank shared this with me, I was shopping, and on the sidewalk I saw an enormous woman on a battery-powered scooter. Its little motor was obviously straining under the load. Her ample frame spilled over the sides, a moving, lyrical poem dedicated to fast food and Little Debbie cakes. As she rolled along, looking in windows, smoke trailed from the cigarette burning in her hand. (Or the scooter motor was burning out.) No doubt if I had been seeing her as a patient, she would have complained of arthritis, degenerative disc disease, chronic back pain, emphysema, enlarged heart, fatigue, and peripheral edema. If coyotes were as big as minivans, well, let's just say that odds are the scooter would be empty, and it would be Happy Thanksgiving in the coyote den. Tastes smoky, but the fat marbling is yummy!
2.) Mentally Rehearse
Reston is a strong believer in integrating hours of mental imagery into your training regimen ... “Your mindset to win has to be constantly honed or you’ll lose it. Mental rehearsal is one way to hone it. Imagine yourself confronting and defeating every kind of challenge you can conjure up. Imagine yourself getting shot and how you’ll react. And don’t just imagine the stereotype bad guys. The assailant you have to kill may look a lot like you. They’re not always gangbangers or hardened felons. Anybody at any time may try to hurt you.”
Just be certain, Reston cautions, that in real life you can employ the skills you imagine yourself using to win in your mental scenarios. If candidly you have doubts, then that should identify your training challenge(s), because “in a crisis you won’t surpass your level of preparation.”
Oakland’s crime problems have gotten so bad that some people aren’t even bothering to call the cops anymore; instead, they’re trying to solve and prevent crimes themselves.
. . .
The vigilance has never seemed more necessary than now; 25 homes in [East Oakland’s Arcadia Park neighborhood] have been burglarized over the last two months alone.
. . .
Over the weekend, one home was burglarized twice in a 24 hour period, once while a resident’s nephew was inside.
“He was on with 911 when those men tried to kick into his room. That was very frightening,” said the woman, identified only as Inca.
. . .
“We don’t have a choice. Either die or we hire some security ourselves, because we can’t depend on the police department,” said Tarvins.
America has plenty of enemies but they can probably relax. Who among them could do to the US the amount of damage that it is doing to itself?
Terrorists brought down some buildings in New York and punched a hole in the Pentagon. But it was not a terrorist who brought down the US economy at a staggering cost of more than $US20 trillion ($19.4 trillion) in losses in the value of family homes, shares and retirement funds.
It was, of course, poor US policy and weak governance. In other words, it was self-inflicted, man-made and entirely avoidable. The enemies of the US can only dream of inflicting this much damage on the superpower.
Chinese cyber assailants may have caused damage to the US economy valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, we heard last week. This marks them as serious underachievers compared with the US's legislators, regulators and central bankers.
. . .
Similarly, a terrorist cell or hostile power might conceivably blow up the US Congress or kill a bunch of its political leaders. But who is capable of inflicting an attack so severe that it could force political paralysis and dysfunction on the country so that it cannot make vital decisions? Not just for a day but for years?
To create this much havoc requires the special skills of the US Congress and presidency. This week, for the third time in three years, the US stands on the brink of a fiscal cliff.
. . .
And even if this impasse is resolved, another fiscal crisis looms in March and more will follow every few months about spending cuts, debt ceilings and tax increases.
Vladka [Meed] was born Feigele Peltel on December 29 1921 and was still a teenager when she and her family were frogmarched into the [Warsaw] ghetto. She recalled that despite all the suffering, ghetto life was rich with clandestine cultural activities. “Some just refused to commit suicide, continued to educate their children in secret, celebrated their holidays,” she wrote in On Both Sides of the Wall (1948), one of the first major eyewitness accounts of the destruction of Warsaw’s pre-war Jewish community.
She attended literature classes, remembering “the atmosphere, the elevation, being together with the people and talking about the writer and the character”. It was, she explained, a way to “hold on to culture and history so that the spirit should not be crushed”. The subsequent uprising had only been possible, she felt, because of this “inner preparation to stand up against the enemy”.
She witnessed the deportations that took place between July and September 1942, when between 250,000 and 300,000 ghetto residents were sent to their deaths in Treblinka, including her own mother, 13-year-old brother and married sister. In an almost unbearably moving account she recalled: “Running behind the last van, a lone woman, arms outstretched, screamed: 'My child! Give back my child!’ In reply, a small voice called from the van: 'Mama! Mama!’”
At first no one knew the fate of the deportees: “Nobody imagined any gas chambers. They thought they were going away to work,” she recalled. “When rumours of the truth began to circulate people did not believe them.”
Feigele Peltel survived because, due to a labour shortage in Warsaw, she was allowed to leave the ghetto to work in a tailor’s shop sewing Nazi uniforms. But as news began to arrive of the true fate of the deportees, she joined the Jewish Combat Organisation (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa), and assumed the personality of Vladka, an ethnic Pole, so that she could move freely on the Christian side of the wall. With her light-coloured hair and Aryan features she was able to maintain the pretence for almost three years. As a woman she had a further advantage: men were often exposed as Jews by the fact that they were circumcised.
For the next few months Vladka bought black market weapons and ammunition, paid for with rings, watches and other valuables, which she then smuggled into the ghetto: “I would smuggle dynamite and gasoline for the bombs past the gates. We would wrap it up in greasy paper as if it was meat. Or sometimes we would just bribe a Nazi guard.”
According to the Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, it was Vladka Meed who brought the news that confirmed the worst – that trains filled with Jews were returning empty from Treblinka, that no food was being shipped into the camp and that there was an all-pervasive stench of burning and rotting flesh.
Vladka Meed sometimes managed to smuggle out Jewish children to be placed with sympathetic Christian families, but she claimed that most ethnic Poles were unsympathetic: “Quite a large number of them were openly anti-Semitic and even, in a way, having satisfaction,” she said in 1973.
Vladka observed the uprising from relative safety outside the ghetto and watched the end of one group of captured Jews: “At the ghetto wall stood a bearded, kaftaned Hassid and his small son,” she wrote. “The guards separated the two, but the boy ran back and clung fiercely to the father. A German raised his carbine then, smiling, separated the two once more. Again the child darted back, and the German burst into laughter. Then father embraced his child in sheer despair. Several shots rang out – and the two remained together, even in death.”
The fighting lasted for 28 days during which the bullets and improvised bombs of the Jews were met by the tools of industrial warfare: machine guns, tanks and flame throwers. The rebellion ended in the complete destruction of the ghetto, which Vladka had to watch while pretending to enjoy a fairground ride. “People who participated in the armed resistance knew they were going to die,” she wrote. “What was important to them was they wanted to choose the way they died.”
A MAN lost his temper when he was sacked from his job packing anti-stress balls.
Darren Baldwin turned on the warehouse manager who dismissed him, then clashed with a fellow worker who went to the manager’s aid.
At one stage he pulled out two knives.
Baldwin, 44, of Sidford Court, Blackpool, admitted affray and assault when he appeared before Blackpool magistrates.
We know from a body of scholarship that fiscal belt-tightening in countries with a debt above 80pc to 90pc of GDP is painful and typically self-defeating unless offset by loose money. The evidence is before our eyes in Greece, Portugal, and Spain. Tight money has led to self-feeding downward spirals. If bondyields are higher thannominal GDP growth, the compound effects are deadly.
America may soon get a first taste of this, carrying out the epic fiscal squeeze needed to bring its debt trajectory back under control with less and less Fed help. Gross public debt will hit 107pc of GDP by next year, and higher if the recovery falters as pessimists fear.
With the fiscal and monetary shock absorbers exhausted -- or deemed to be -- the only recourse left is to claw back stimulus from foreigners, and that may be the next chapter of the global crisis as the Long Slump drags on.
Professor Michael Pettis from Beijing University argues in a new book -- "The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perillous Road Ahead" - that the global trauma of the last five years is a trade conflict masquerading as a debt crisis.
There is too much industrial plant in the world, and too little demand to soak up supply, like the 1930s.
. . .
"In a world of deficient demand and excess savings, every country will try to acquire a greater share of global demand by exporting savings," he writes. The "winners" in this will be the deficit states. The "losers" will be the surplus states who cannot retaliate. The lesson of the 1930s is that the creditors are powerless. Prof Pettis argues that China and Germany risk a nasty surprise.
As far as Mr. Connolly is concerned, Europe's heart is still rotting away.
The European political class, he says, believes that the crisis "hit its high point" last summer, "because that was when there was an imminent danger, from their point of view, that their wonderful dream would disappear." But from the perspective "of real live people, and families and firms and economies," he says, the situation "is just getting worse and worse." Last week, the EU reported that the euro-zone economy shrank by 0.9% in the fourth quarter of 2012. For the full year, gross domestic product fell 0.5% in the euro zone.
Two immediate solutions present themselves, Mr. Connolly says, neither appetizing. Either Germany pays "something like 10% of German GDP a year, every year, forever" to the crisis-hit countries to keep them in the euro. Or the economy gets so bad in Greece or Spain or elsewhere that voters finally say, " 'Well, we'll chuck the whole lot of you out.' Now, that's not a very pleasant prospect." He's thinking specifically, in the chuck-'em-out scenario, about the rise of neo-fascists like the Golden Dawn faction in Greece.
. . .
Superficially, there is some basis for the official view that the worst of the crisis is over: Interest-rate spreads, current-account deficits and budget deficits are down. Greece's departure from the single currency no longer seems imminent.
Yet unemployment is close to 27% in Spain and Greece. The euro-zone economy shrank ever-faster throughout 2012. And—most important in Mr. Connolly's view—the economic fundamentals in France are getting worse. This week France announced it would miss its deficit-reduction target for the year because of dimming growth prospects.
It's one thing to bail out Greece or Ireland, Mr. Connolly says, but "if the Germans at some point think, 'We're going to have to bail out France, and on an ongoing, perpetual basis,' will they do it? I don't know. But that's the question that has to be answered."
Since 2007, the amount of new credit generated annually has more than quadrupled to $2.75 trillion in the 12 months through January this year. Last year, roughly half of the new loans came from the "shadow banking system," private lenders and credit suppliers outside formal lending channels. These outfits lend to borrowers—often local governments pushing increasingly low-quality infrastructure projects—who have run into trouble paying their bank loans.
Since 2008, China's total public and private debt has exploded to more than 200% of GDP—an unprecedented level for any developing country. Yet the overwhelming consensus still sees little risk to the financial system or to economic growth in China.
That view ignores the strong evidence of studies launched since 2008 in a belated attempt by the major global financial institutions to understand the origin of financial crises. The key, more than the level of debt, is the rate of increase in debt—particularly private debt. (Private debt in China includes all kinds of quasi-state borrowers, such as local governments and state-owned corporations.)
On the most important measures of this rate, China is now in the flashing-red zone.
This is the first year-over-year contraction since the 2007-2009 Great Recession - and places the reality of the dismal Q4 GDP print in context ... freight expenditures fell in January leading to a 1.6% drop over the last year - compared to a 27.2% rise in January 2011, and 22.2% rise in January 2012.
It is the time of year again, when America’s largest retailers release those critical holiday season figures and disclose their annual sales. A review of these numbers tells us a great deal about how most of the companies will do in the upcoming year. And while successful retailers in 2012 may add stores this year, those that have performed very poorly may have to cut locations during 2013 to improve margins or reverse losses.
For many retailers, the sales situation is so bad that it is not a question of whether they will cut stores, but when and how many.
Though the public hasn't grokked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them. Diesel fuel prices are heading well north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye to the "warehouse on wheels" distribution method. (The truckers, who are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the re-po men come to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.) Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to keep the credit revolving.
Then there is the matter of the American customers themselves. The WalMart shoppers are exactly the demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy. Unlike the Federal Reserve, WalMart shoppers can't print their own money, and they can't bundle their MasterCard and Visa debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick profits. They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience.
The potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this burgeoning dynamic ... K-Mart will close over 200 boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500 stores.
. . .
What we're on the brink of is scale implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy.
"If I see Al Gore, he's gonna get the shovel where the globe don't warm."
Rev. Audette Fulbright had emailed all state legislators, including Republican Rep. Hans Hunt, earlier this month to say she and her husband had just moved to Wyoming and were “seriously reconsidering” their decision amid the proposed expansion of gun laws.
“Ample evidence has shown that schools and guns do not mix, and in particular, guns in the hands of amateurs/non-professionals is extremely dangerous, especially in any highly-charged situation,” Fulbright wrote. “To expose our children to greater risk in their schools by encouraging more guns on campuses is something that we cannot allow.”
Fulbright also said she was concerned about “the profoundly serious dangers of fracking” and said the question of whether to leave was “wrenching to all of us.”
“I know of other new-to-Wyoming families in similar contemplation. Your choices matter. It would be sad to see an exodus of educated, childrearing age adults from Wyoming as a result of poor lawmaking,” she wrote.
Hunt’s response? “By all means, leave.”
“I’ll be blunt,” he wrote back. “If you don’t like the political atmosphere of Wyoming, then by all means, leave. We, who have been here a very long time (I am proudly 4th generation) are quite proud of our independent heritage.”
To preserve, protect and defend the principle of self-reliance and the individual right of self-defense as espoused by Jeff Cooper. The Foundation will provide scholarships for firearms training in the Cooper tradition as well as preserve his writings and his personal collections for posterity.
Bottlenose dolphins call out the specific names of loved ones when they become separated, a study finds.
Other than humans, the dolphins are the only animals known to do this, according to the study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The big difference with bottlenose dolphins is that these communications consist of whistles, not words.
Earlier research found that bottlenose dolphins name themselves, with dolphins having a “signature whistle” that encodes other information. It would be somewhat like a human shouting, “Hey everybody! I’m an adult healthy male named George, and I mean you no harm!”
The new finding is that bottlenose dolphins also say the names of certain other dolphins.
“Animals produced copies when they were separated from a close associate and this supports our belief that dolphins copy another animal’s signature whistle when they want to reunite with that specific individual,” lead author Stephanie King of the University of St. Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit told Discovery News.
. . .
The researchers said dolphins copy the signature whistles of loved ones, such as a mother or close male buddy, when the two are apart. These “names” were never emitted in aggressive or antagonistic situations and were only directed toward loved ones.
The whistle copies also always had a unique variation to them, so the dolphins weren’t merely mimicking each other. The dolphins instead were adding their own “tone of voice” via unique whistling.
While researchers often hesitate to apply the “l word” -- language -- to non-human communications, bottlenose dolphins and possibly other dolphin species clearly have a very complex and sophisticated communication system.
“Interestingly, captive dolphins can learn new signals and refer to objects and it may be that dolphins can use signature whistle copies to label or refer to an individual, which is a skill inherent in human language,” King said.
An afterburner (or a reheat) is an additional component present on some jet engines, mostly military supersonic aircraft. Its purpose is to provide an increase in thrust, usually for supersonic flight, takeoff and for combat situations. Afterburning is achieved by injecting additional fuel into the jet pipe downstream of (i.e. after) the turbine. The advantage of afterburning is significantly increased thrust; the disadvantage is its very high fuel consumption and inefficiency, though this is often regarded as acceptable for the short periods during which it is usually used.
Pilots can activate and deactivate afterburners in-flight and jet engines are referred to as operating wet when afterburning is being used and dry when not. An engine producing maximum thrust wet is at maximum power, while an engine producing maximum thrust dry is at military power.
The most important question for investors concerns how public sector debt levels, which have risen exponentially over the past half-decade, will ultimately be discharged ... there are three options to reducing debt levels. The first is restructuring, also known as default. For obvious reasons this is painful and typically avoided except under the most dire circumstances. Governments can also pursue structural reform, which in today’s case would mean greater austerity. Implementation of this would stand in stark opposition to Keynes’s recommendation that the fiscal and monetary spigots be kept open during hard times. Although tightening is arguably the best long-term path, it appears unlikely that it will be the primary policy of choice in the near future. The third method, toward which I see global central bankers drifting, is to keep interest rates artificially low and permit increasing levels of inflation in the economy.
Pushing down the cost of borrowing and allowing the price level to rise is known as financial repression. The real value of debtors’ obligations is reduced by financially repressive policies. Keynes warned of the dangers of inflation in his early work, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which presciently criticized the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles:
...By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... As inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless.
Keynes reiterated his views in the mid-1940s when he visited the United States and saw programs that were touted as Keynesian although he viewed them as primarily inflationary.
Financial repression is nothing new. Between the 1940s and the early 1980s, the United States reduced its national debt from 140 percent of GDP to just 30 percent while continuing to run sizable deficits. The difference between then and now is the magnitude of the debt mountain on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet that will need to be eroded. A subtle shift has begun in which policymakers are starting to think of inflation as a policy tool rather than the byproduct of their actions. Despite Keynes’ warnings, it appears that higher inflation will continue to be the monetary tool of choice for central bankers tasked with cleaning up sovereign balance sheets.
No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems— of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.
SEALs aren’t supposed to find themselves in trouble that they can’t get out of. That’s why the Navy is seeking to buy 300 new survival kits for the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, sometimes known as Navy SEAL Team 6.
. . .
While Navy folks didn’t rush to answer Battleland’s questions about how much the kits are expected to cost, and if they’ve changed recently, it’s neat to peek inside to see what’s there.
But first of all, the SEALs have been known to wreck things. Like helicopters. So the survival kits – a complete kit includes both hard and soft cases — have to be able to endure SEAL abuse.
The hard case is 4-by-2-by-1.2 inches, weighing six ounces or less, and available in both “Desert Tan” or “OD/Forest Green.”
Beyond those particulars, the hard case shall be:
- Capable of limited cooking without effecting the container finish (i.e. paint bubbling)
- Capable of being used as a limited digging implement without affecting its ability to house contents (simultaneous function of digging and housing not required)
- Shall have a weather resistant gasket able to keep out water during minor water immersion (i.e. river crossings, swimming)
- Shall have a fastening system that is reuseable and secure to prevent accidental openings
- Top surface of kit must have permanently affixed a 2” x 3” piece of loop fastener (i.e. soft side of velcro)
- Ruggedized to take heavy abuse while carried without damage to inner contents
- Case shall securely hold all items below without rattling or other noises
