THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

I had a good chuckle reading the articles on "Heaven is for Real." In case you missed it, this is a movie about a young boy who says he came back from the dead, after going up to heaven and meeting Jesus. Here's an article from The Mirror (UK): And he told his parents how – while the surgeons were fighting to save him – he visited heaven, sat on Jesus’s lap, patted his rainbow-striped horse and was serenaded by winged angels. The reactions from Christians doubting his story because it goes against the Christian ideas of the afterlife, and the atheists calling it a pre-schooler's fantasy, are predictable. Interestingly, scientists have long looked at these stories of people who have had "near death" experiences, in which they experienced something pretty close to what young Colton experienced in his hospital bed. They floated up. They could see their relatives crying. They went off into different transcendental states (depending upon which...

It’s like one of those Hollywood movie scenes. The protagonist and antagonist, locked in death, falling off a highrise. Neither one will let go, and neither one is going to survive the crash. I’m talking of the USA and Russia. They both appear to be in free fall, economically. Each time an American publication reports gleefully that Russia’s foreign investors have fled, another sober news item comes out saying that Standard and Poor’s, Dow Jones and Nasdaq are not doing so well either. Tech stocks have crashed. Amazon is down. Visa and Mastercard have lost out once the Russians started to use other methods to transfer money. And so on. In an interlinked world, a conflict hurts all parties involves. We saw that in the Nepal civil conflict—everybody was hurt, especially economically. Nobody wins a war in these days, they just “manage” the conflict and get out of it with great bruises that they try to nurse over the next few decades. As for the Ukraine, it should read u...

April 26, 2014 The Results are in! And the demographic majority has won! The Indians and the Chinese top the list. The Pope  is a lone white male survivor of popularity in the tyranny of demographic majority! Sigh. This is even worse than white male domination. This is "We win cause we have a lot of Twitter followers" mode of judging great thinkers. Life in the time of social media. To see the list, click below: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/world-thinkers-2014-the-results 

It seems Barclays, one of London’s pre-eminent banks, is winding down its commodities market branch. They say it’s not profitable enough. And what is the commodities market? (I’m asking because like most people on the planet, I actually don’t know.) It appears to be a stock exchange where people are betting on wheat and gold and oil, and commodities of this nature. So basically (for people like you and me who have no clue how these things operate), it appears there are some rich people with money, betting that the wheat harvest this year will be better than last year’s, and putting money down in a virtual casino where they win if the wheat does well. Or perhaps they win if there’s a drought and there’s less wheat than predicted, in which case the prices go up and they win. The rest of the world loses, but never mind that. Or perhaps the referent, wheat, doesn’t even have to do well or do badly—at this point, the virtual simulcrum of wheat separates from its referent an...

In case you missed this Reuter's article: France’s lower house of Parliament banned GM corn in a sweeping fashion,  Reuters  reported. Now, no variety of GM corn can be cultivated because of its toxic threats to the soil, insects and human health. The senate has to approve the ban. If it rejects it, the   National Assembly still makes the final decision. Europe is going to be the test case in GM seed planting.    It occurred to me all this talk about how GM is urgently needed to solve world hunger is hogwash. First of all, nobody has actually done a study to find out how much of GM food is dumped each day by people because its inedible. GM may be selling like crazy--to unsuspecting Third World customers who spend their hard earned money buying these grains and vegetables that are not edible, and end up in the compost pile. I will post a photograph of a uncookable corn that I bought at the market—the corn was so tough it couldn’t b...

I thought I’d try  my hand at writing a Malcolm Gladwell column. Just because he’s getting a lot of shit from people. And I rather liked his “Outliers” book. Here we go: Apple did some great design work, but there’s one thing that really bugs me about my Mac. Mainly, the USB slot that goes into the left, instead of the right, of the computer. Now I am right-handed, so I use the mouse from the right. At first, there’s no need for the mouse because there’s a trackpad and a mouse built into the center of the MacBook Pro. But unfortunately these things have a way of breaking down, after which you need to attach an external mouse. Which, of course, goes to the right side. But there is no USB port on the right side. Which means you have this long snaking cord attached to a clunky USB port, going from the left to the right.  Just a minor detail, you may say. But these things matter. Panasonic lost me after it sold me a camera with 20 cords and a DVD burner that neede...

Seems like almost every country in the world is now selling its debt (or is it buying debt? What's the "euro-debt markets", anyways?.) Apparently Turkey just raised 1 billion this way. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/15/idUSL6N0N61S220140415 Why can’t countries in Africa, which supply all the metal that make up today’s Apple computers, or places like Nepal, which supplies the world with semi-precious jewels and pashmina scarves, do the same, and print a few billion dollars a year for free?   According to this article, there’s someone out there saying: you guys can issue debt and we’ll buy it. You guys can’t. According to the same article quoted above: The euro debt market is so far open only to investment grade-rated, frequent issuers, says SocGen's Cherpion. Lowly rated or debut issuers, from Africa for instance, are unlikely to find takers. Seems like these higher authorities, arrayed like a pantheon of Roman gods, doling out the ca...