Friday 29th of November 2024
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a Cпутник-1 moment...

sputnik moment

President Barack Obama didn't say much about foreign or military policy in Tuesday night's State of the Union address. To the extent he did talk about it, he spent more time on economic agreements with India, South Korea, and China than on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—and, given the state of the economy and the nature of the political battles ahead, the balance was probably right.

But he did evoke a huge defense issue from a half-century ago—the signal wake-up security call that marked the years of transition from Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy, the single word that has symbolized ever since the fear of slipping behind in a dangerous world: Sputnik.

"This is our generation's Sputnik moment," Obama said. As a result, we need to fund "a level of research and development we haven't seen since the height of the space race," with particularly strong investments in biomedicine, information technology, and clean-energy technology. In the same section of the speech, he likened this funding effort to "the Apollo Project," which later put a man on the moon.

Yet later on in the speech, Obama proposed, starting this year, to "freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years," a step that, he boasted, would "bring discretionary spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president."

It's hard to see how he or the Congress can resolve this contradiction—Kennedy-esque vigor and investment on the one hand, Ike-like torpor and penny-pinching on the other. He said much of this extra money could be freed up by eliminating subsidies for the oil companies. First, good luck on that. And second, that alone won't free up enough.

The history of Sputnik, and the revival of the American economy that it spurred, is instructive.

Sputnik was the 184-pound satellite that the Soviet Union launched into outer space on Oct. 4, 1957. It was a first (the United States had tried once before, with the Explorer, but failed), and it shocked the world. Everyone had assumed the Soviets were technologically primitive; now it looked like they were ahead.

The achievement wasn't merely symbolic; it also meant that, if the Soviets could build a rocket to boost a satellite into orbit, they might also build a rocket to boost an intercontinental missile that carries a hydrogen bomb and comes back down on the other side of the Earth, blowing an American city to smithereens.

http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2281847

on the importance of governments' investment

Barack Obama was born about four years after the USSR feat of launching the first satellite.

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Toward the end of his speech, President Obama mentioned several entrepreneurs who in recent months have revamped their businesses to solve new crises and meet new demands. They're inspiring case studies. But if the U.S. economy is going to do big things—and Obama said, twice, near the end of his speech, "We do big things"—they often don't get there without a spurt of government funding.

http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2281847

Same with the NBN in Aussieland...

an R-rated stammer in the works...

Hollywood is considering censoring The King's Speech, the British film nominated for 12 Oscars, to remove coarse language for US audiences.

It is part of a plan to broaden the appeal of the movie in America where it has been given a Restricted rating, which means anyone under 17 wanting to see it has to be accompanied by an adult.

The R rating was made because George VI, played by Colin Firth, is shown swearing as he tries to overcome his stammer.

The film was given a lesser 12 rating in Britain where it has grossed about 19 million pounds ($30 million) in fewer than three weeks.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/cut-language-in-the-kings-speech-too-strong-for-us-audiences-20110130-1a9es.html

Gus: actually the "king" is encouraged by his Aussie speech therapist (with no qualification whatsoever mind-you) to say fuckfuckfuck and shitshitshit a few times to liberate himself from repressed anger... It works to a point...

Meanwhile Michael Palin's dad inspired him to a stammer reduction advocacy, though he played a stutterer in "A Fish Called Wanda" himself......

I may have mentioned this already on this site, but I have observed that learning to live with a different language for a few years has freed a few people from stammer. Going back to their original language and they do not stammer anymore... Cunning...

the adjustment bureau...

Damon, 40, star of the Bourne spy trilogy and two new films, The Adjustment Bureau and True Grit, is scrupulously polite and mild-mannered when we meet in a Manhattan hotel. But laying bare his disenchantment with the Obama administration, he doesn't hide how let down he feels. President Obama's record on the economy particularly rankles. "I think he's rolled over to Wall Street completely. The economy has huge problems. We still have all these banks that are too big to fail. They're bigger and making more money than ever. Unemployment at 10 per cent? It's terrible."

What has proved to be a challenging time in office for President Obama culminated in significant Democratic reversals to the Republicans at last November's mid-term elections. Many of his star backers have either kept quiet about politics or, as in the case of George Clooney, Damon's close friend and co-star in the Ocean's trilogy, remained steadfastly loyal. Not Damon. He is upset that Mr Obama, who promised to "spread the wealth around", has extended the Bush tax cuts and that the inequality gap has widened.

"They had a chance that they don't have any more to stand up for things," he says. "They've probably squandered that at this point. They'll probably just make whatever deals they can to try to get elected again."

Damon appears so disillusioned that, playing devil's advocate, I ask whether he is considering voting Republican. "Good God, no! I just got a 3 per cent tax cut. Do you think I'm going to start a small business with that money? You're out of your mind if you think so. I'm going to put it in the bank. So is every other guy that makes the kind of money I make. I don't think that's what's best for the country. I think a stronger middle class makes for a stronger country."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/from-no-1-fan-to-criticinchief-damon-takes-aim-at-obama-2233622.html

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The Wealth Explosion
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, Deirdre N. McCloskey, University of Chicago, 571 pages

By Brian C. Anderson

For most of history, existence was a grind, at least for the vast majority—though a short grind, for dying young was the norm. Food was scarce and rudimentary, work was drudgery, and the elements were a daily threat. Little changed: you could expect to do the same kinds of things that your great-grandparents did and subsist on a miserable $3 a day. Then, around 200 years ago, beginning in the Netherlands and in Britain with the Industrial Revolution but swiftly spreading to other countries, and then to the four corners of the globe, life began to get better in breathtaking ways. Today, the average American consumes roughly $127 every day in nourishment, housing, energy, and countless amenities unimaginable in 1800. He typically lives until he’s 80, not 40. His horizons are considerably more expansive than those of his ancestors.

What caused this historical mutation? In Bourgeois Dignity, the second of six planned volumes on the genesis and development of the modern capitalist world, Deirdre McCloskey, an economist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argues that most traditional economic models—from expanding trade to capital accumulation—fail or provide at best a partial account of what happened. Much of Bourgeois Dignity is about debunking these theories.

Pace Max Weber, for instance, thrift doesn’t cut it. As McCloskey points out, human societies from “the Garden of Eden” on have been thrifty because survival required it. Pre-industrial Europe needed to be particularly frugal because of persistently lousy yields of wheat, barley, and oats. Further, as measured by savings rates, British thrift during the Industrial Revolution was actually a bit lower than the European average.

Foreign trade wasn’t the engine of the West’s spectacular growth, either. Trade may help economies expand, but it doesn’t get you anywhere close to the 1,600 percent growth in need of explanation. Moreover, trade, like thrift, was nothing new. “Exports grew, sometimes explosively, in many other times and places—the Silk Road, for example, when political unity was established in central Asia,” McCloskey observes. “Why not trade-powered industrialization, from Sumer on?”

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/the-wealth-explosion/

Gus would say, as an aside here, that the creation of our carbon-based industry aligned with the privatisation of inventions in the 19th century helped greatly in "wealthing" the Western World... Both walked hand in hand on a carpet already laid down by the "enlightenment" of the 18th century, where the "abstain from things material" of religious overtone got defeated. (Material sin had been exempted for kings and popes obviously, but the plebs had to toil...)

Religion still participate in this contradiction, but it had to adapt it's message and is all muddled up.

Science demolish religious fanciful interpretation of the world, daily...

Another factor in the development of wealth was the tolerance by kings and popes — who had lost some of their moneys through wars and stuff — of people who LENT MONEY at interest and the development of better taxation and record of financial transactions that were not the privilege of the "wealthy".... In the end it started the "democratisation of wealth" but we have a long way to go to be fair.

The rich have rediscovered (or reinvented) kings' privileges... It ain't good.