For many extreme Muslims, dreams are a serious affair. Osama bin Laden is a dream-believer By Robert Fisk Saturday, 26 January 2008 Source As a little boy, I had a recurring nightmare and it always featured my grandfather's dog. Arthur Rose had a Labrador called Sir Lancelot – Lance for short – and I adored this dog. I think he liked me too, because we raced around Arthur's greaby ProjectC - Project C
"it has often been innovation without substance. And it's achieved nothing. It's been cosmetic." -- Satyajit Das ( Source ) "The UK’s Financial Services Authority warned last week that there was probably more fraud on the way, either because of misdeeds surfacing from more lax times or because individuals were now pressed into wrongdoing by falling markets. Place yoby ProjectC - Project C
By Larry Dignan January 23rd, 2008 Source Virgin Galactic on Wednesday unveiled designs for SpaceShipTwo and the WhiteKnightTwo, two vehicles that are designed to usher in private spaceflight. The technology behind the system will have an open architecture “like Linux,” said officials. In an event at the American Museum at Natural History in New York, Virgin Galactic unveiled the first prby ProjectC - Project C
“…The Russian meltdown has revealed previously ignored flaws in the international banking system. Banks engage in swaps, forward transactions, and derivative trades among each other and with their clients. These transactions do not show up in the balance sheets…” – George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, December 2, 1998 The worst market crisis in 60 yearsby ProjectC - Project C
"My own view of the grave deficiency of the Few Great Men approach has been greatly influenced by the work of two splendid historians of thought. One is my own dissertation mentor Joseph Dorfman, whose unparalleled multi-volume work on the history of American economic thought demonstrated conclusively how important allegedly "lesser" figures are in any movement of ideas. In the firby ProjectC - Project C
(Prof. Alfred Bork falece em 18 de dezembro de 2007) quinta-feira, 10 de janeiro de 2008 Source Alfred Bork, Professor Emeritus of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine, died on December 18, 2007. Alfred’s career with UCI began on October 1, 1968 with joint appointments in ICS and Physics. Passionate about the use of computers in education, Alfred contributed to the early dby ProjectC - Project C
"PAUL VOLCKER: To some extent I think it is. Inflation is related to monetary policy. It's related to the issue of money. The issue of money is a governmental responsibility predominantly, and to use that authority in a way that leads to inflation is a system that fools a lot of people, and to keep fooling them you have to do it more and more; is a moral issue. I put myself in that camby ProjectC - Project C
"Haptonomy is a part of the human sciences. It concerns the very base of human existence from which every being flourishes and develops in order to follow his personal way of life." -- Haptonomy *** "The benefits of haptonomy flow onto to the mother as well. For instance, many women have difficulty in labor due to the fact that the birth canal of the pelvis is simply too nby ProjectC - Project C
"I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed." -- James Giuigan Is Inequality Good for You? Unequal societies will remain unhealthy societies, and also unhappy societies, no matter how wealthy they become' By Michael Prowse December 31, 2007 Source We have grown accby ProjectC - Project C
"Education, too, takes on a new look. It is not enough to learn things; in any case, the busybodies are incapable of organizing real, individual learning. What they can organize is education… with the learning removed or standardized to fit into some new larger national standard. 'Educators' can't be bothered with individual students as they actually are, nor even with local cby ProjectC - Project C
"Dmitry Orlov's publisher sent me the galley proof to get a blurb for the dust-jacket, and I'll furnish one in short order because Reinventing Collapse is an exceptionally clear, authoritative, witty, and original view of our prospects. The thesis is that the United States is headed for troubles as broad and deep as the ones that brought down the Soviet system in Russia, though weby ProjectC - Project C
'...Some analysts have begun to recognize that U.S. asset and debt markets have not faced such precarious dynamics since The Great Depression. Meanwhile, collapsing U.S. and international interest-rates fuel myriad global Bubbles and inflationary pressures. In short, 2007 has been a continuation of the unfolding “worst-case-scenario.”' 2007 Wrap-Up By Doug Noland December 26, 2by ProjectC - Project C
'Today's financial world looks rather more like the era of rootless, trans-oceanic finance that Kreuger entered when he first arrived by ship in New York in 1900, with $100 in his pocket. Once again, credit has ballooned and capital flits around the world faster than any human being can travel; those with the audacity to channel it where it is needed, as Kreuger did, can make unparallelby ProjectC - Project C
"By the end of the 1920s, instalment plans had become the primary way for a middle-class family to attain a piece of the American dream. People who had formerly shied away from acquiring debt now accepted instalment buying as a means to finance modern consumption. This transformation in consumer attitudes resulted from a gradual change in the depiction of instalment buying in advertisements.by ProjectC - Project C
"...If Trichet is clever, he will move the ECB to slower money creation once US and British real estate prices have stabilized. That will allow Eurozone interest rates to rise moderately, while remaining lower than the crisis rates in the Anglosphere. Then he will be able to contrast the problems in the US and Britain with the favorable outlook for Euro zone inflation under his Presidency ofby ProjectC - Project C
"The timeless adage in economics that income is all holds even more true today." -- Henry C K Liu, Part II: Currency Devaluation Depresses Wages Globally, June 13, 2007 Person of the Year: Jean-Claude Trichet FT.com Sun Dec 23, 2007 Source A central banker can never really doze in the sun. But in the usually sleepy month of August, Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Baby ProjectC - Project C
``Soldiers are mistreated in every possible way. That's why it's so difficult for this army to shift into contract service. You have to treat soldiers differently if they are professionals. Many of the officers aren't prepared to do this.'' -- Baev "We walk, and walking has a quality of its own. We're like cops on the beat." -- General David Petraeus (by ProjectC - Project C
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 23/12/2007 Source As central banks continue to splash their cash over the system, so far to little effect, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argues things are rapidly spiralling out of their control Twenty billion dollars here, $20bn there, and a lush half-trillion from the European Central Bank at give-away rates for Christmas. Buckets of liquidity are being splashed oveby ProjectC - Project C
"...Keep in mind that the economy is only now succumbing to recessionary forces, and we’ve yet to experience the failure of a major financial institution in the U.S. There will be many, and it’s worth noting that Rescap’s CDS prices surged again this week. It’s amazing to watch the massive central bank liquidity injections inflate the value of government and quasi-government backed securitieby ProjectC - Project C
By SARA RIMER December 19, 2007 Source CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace. Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusby ProjectC - Project C
"One difference between then and now is that in 1929 a relative small minority of Americans were involved in stock purchases. Today, a relative large number of ordinary citizens own overpriced houses bought using extraordinarily risky loans, and a large number of institutions such as pension funds, banks, hedge funds, and money markets own fraudulent securities based on these house loans, woby ProjectC - Project C
By Andrew Sheen 18 December 2007 Source NETHERLANDS – The ABP pension fund has expressed a desire to enter into a partnership with one or more of Europe’s large pension funds to create a flagship body to pursue environmental, social and governance (ESG) investments. ABP's chief investment officer Roderick Munster announced the initiative at an indexation presentation in Amsterdam yeby ProjectC - Project C
"There has been much scientific debate over climate change — whether global warming is caused by humans or natural phenomena, such as sunspots. The principal debate should be over values: Do we continue to dump waste in uncovered landfills or open-air lagoons, to vent methane gas from coal mining — and consume energy in ways that harm our environment?" Dateline Ukraine: Investing iby ProjectC - Project C
( The Plasma Universe (Here... too.) ) J. *** "The satellites have found evidence of magnetic ropes connecting Earth's upper atmosphere directly to the sun," said David Sibeck of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "We believe that solar wind particles flow in along these ropes, providing energy for geomagnetic storms and auroras." Northernby ProjectC - Project C
"Central banks and regulators bear a serious responsibility for safeguarding the functioning and integrity of financial systems. At the moment they are being exposed like the Wizard of Oz – old desperate men (they are mainly men) behind the curtain running from one lever to another in a desperate attempt to maintain illusions." Regulatory Debauchery By Satyajit Das November 27,by ProjectC - Project C
By Mark Lawin Dec 10, 2007 Source SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has found that our solar system is not round but is "dented" by the local interstellar magnetic field of deep space, space experts said on Monday. The data was gathered by the craft on its 30-year journey into the edge of the solar system when it crossed into a sweeping region called theby ProjectC - Project C
By Jim Kunstler December 03, 2007 Source For those of you concerned about my sense of pride -- yes, I sure got that eggy feeling all over my face last week after calling for a thousand-point Dow plunge, only to watch it put on the greatest two-day melt-up in five years. I suppose I underestimate the desperate moves of desperate people against the backdrop of an economy (and a financeby ProjectC - Project C
By Andy Mukherjee December 3, 2007 Source Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The commodity that poses the biggest threat to long-term prosperity in Asia isn't oil, it's water. It isn't so much the likelihood of Asian cities running out of fresh water that should bother the region's policy makers as the bigger danger of being overwhelmed by waste water. The capability to treat dby ProjectC - Project C
By Nouriel Roubini Dec 03, 2007 Source This author writes a monthly column for "La Repubblica", the leading italian newspaper. The last column was published in Italian today. An english translation of it is provided here below: Events in the last few weeks have clearly shown that the liquidity and credit crunch that started last August in financial markets in the US and Europe nby ProjectC - Project C
naked capitalism Monday, December 3, 2007 Source If you had any doubts that the credit contraction was having real-world consequences (beyond, say, the ease of getting a mortgage in the US), consider this DowJones Newswire story (hat tip Michael Panzner). Banks are not only not willing to lend to each other, but because liquidity is scarce, they are trying to dissuade UK clients from borrowiby ProjectC - Project C