ING, the Dutch financial giant, announced the departure today of its chief executive and 7,000 job losses as it posted a fourth-quarter deficit of €3.3 billion (£3.1 billion)
It also said that it had reached an agreement with the Dutch Government over €22 billion of state loan guarantees for its troubled mortgage loan portfolio.
Forget the “Dukes of Hazard.” In the eastern German town of Limbach-Oberfrohna on Sunday night, a 23-year-old driver speeding through the town center lost control of his vehicle, launched off an embankment and ended up smashed into the roof of the village church some seven meters (23 feet) up. And far from driving a 1969 Dodge Charger, as Bo and Luke Duke favored, the man was behind the wheel of a modest Skoda Octavia station wagon.
Just how the driver, who was evacuated out of the church attic and taken to the hospital with serious injuries, ended up flying so high remains something of a mystery. Police officer Knut Wagner told reporters merely that “the driver took off due to unexplained circumstances, flew some 30 meters (98 feet) through the air and ended up seven meters up in the church roof.”
Lepanto by G.K.Chesterton is this week’s poem of the week. It is perhaps one of the best poems about a single battle every written. It is certainly better the Charge of the Light Brigade for example.
In part, this is because the poem is about more than just a battle that had happened long in the past. G.K Chesterton wrote the poem during a dark time for Europe and it is his mediation on what had saved Europe in the past and what would be necessary to save it in the future.
Holland’s national suicide note by Ezra Levant is this week’s rant of the week.
If history is ever worth studying, then it is doubly valuable to read the source documents upon which history is based. For when we read other people telling us about history, we are only hearing what other people want us to hear. But when we read the documents that were written by our predecessors, we hear their voice and come to understand their concerns.
To be sure, reading the words of our predecessors has some limitations. Without knowing the context of the times we can sometimes mistake the meaning of what we are reading. Moreover, since we have limited time, it can be hard to know what would be most profitable to read. But even still, it is better to try to hear the words of those now dead than it is to listen to those who try to interpret them for us.
For we are all familiar with the childhood game called telephone. We all know that when a message is passed from one person to another it can become easily garbled. History is no different. The further you are from the source documents, the more garbled the message you are going to receive.
That is why one should take the time read Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address. It was given shortly before he was nominated to be the Republican presidential candidate. He had just lost the previous year’s election contest with Stephen Douglas for a senate seat. His name had been made, but there was no clear sign that he was going anywhere. Yet even though the speech was given in a lull in his frantic personal history, it still gives us one of the best insights we have into his reasoning process.
You can improve your understanding of this speech by brushing up on the Dred Scott decision and the Kansas-Nebraska act.
President Obama is considering another massive injection of cash into America’s stricken banking system, a move that will be deeply unpopular with the public but is being forced upon him by the speed at which the US economy is unravelling.
With the collapse on Saturday of the third US bank this month – the First Centennial Bank of California – Mr Obama is under pressure to spend hundreds of billions more to rescue the financial system. It would come on top of last year’s $700 billion (£515 billion) Wall Street rescue package that was opposed by a most of Americans. They viewed the plan as a bailout of the bankers that they blame for the financial crisis.
Any additional move to ease the crisis afflicting America’s banks will be separate from Mr Obama’s $825 billion economic stimulus package that senior aides spent the weekend trying to sell to a growing number of Republican sceptics and the US public.
Does anyone remember that California needs money soon before it goes under? The problems are happening faster than they can handle them.
Instead they have Gillibrand, who voted against the Wall Street — as in New York — bailout bill. And who introduced a bill to balance the federal budget annually, which suggests she would oppose the $825 billion in deficit spending that President Obama proposes to rescue the country, not least New York.
Actually, this is all meant to be insults and not praise. And sadly, it is not true. I doubt that Gillibrand will have the guts to oppose anything Obama does, regardless of what she has said she believes in the past. Still if this is the best dirt that Maureen Dowd can throw at Gillibrand, it speaks pretty well of her.
The Equuschick herself, a staunch believer in the differences between men and women and their God-given roles in family life, is often both amused and annoyed by the way these roles are defined or sometimes even manipulated by people who claim to be following God-given roles.
Far too often a couple who claims to be following the Scriptural model for gender roles are actually following a cultural tradition without any foundation.
And what fascinates her the most, is that it is just as often women who manipulate the roles to serve their own purposes as it is men.
Would have been rant of the week, but we had too many other good choices. And if we waited another week, we would have forgotten it. But its tone and content reminded us of our very own Troll. She can do the work of two strong men and she only eats as much as your average tabby cat. That is what you call a deal.
Edit: In the interest of being fair and balanced it should be pointed out that she does not make brownies as often as the Bible says a good female should. Indeed, she seems to be shirking that particular duty lately.
Edit Again: Some may doubt that the Bible has anything to say on the subject of brownies. But we are indebted to the early church father Origen for pointing out that the deeper meaning of Proverbs 31:14 -15 is “Woman, make brownies.” If you doubt me, it is clear you know nothing about Origen. Our conclusions follow directly from his methodology.
A recent cold weather snap and low fuel prices might be the reason why some area retailers had to travel to Syracuse for home heating oil recently.
Some began commuting to Syracuse and other locations last week after they were told by regional distributors that more home heating oil would not be available here through the Buckeye Terminal pipeline until Wednesday.
Some consumers who use heating oil to warm their homes might have seen a short-term rise in costs as retailers tried to offset their traveling costs.
The article goes on to explain the errors of forecasting and greed (some people held off buying until it was too late because they thought that prices were going to fall even further) that led to these problems.
But I think they may be missing something. I know of a certain hospital in upstate New York that has what they call interruptable gas supplies. What this means is that they are charged a lower price for their natural gas in exchange for guaranteeing that they have enough oil on hand to switch over to fuel oil at a moments notice.
Well, it just so happen that they had a problem with a pumping station on one of the natural gas pipelines that serves the upstate area in late December. This necessitated shutting down the pipeline for an extended period of time (it just recently got back on line). So this hospital and every one else who had interruptable gas supplies were told they had to switch to fuel oil as fast as they could be required to by contract. And the hospital was told that if it was at all possible for them to switch faster they should pretty please do so. This was done so that the natural gas suppliers could insure that there would be enough gas for those with uninterruptable gas contracts.
What this meant is that the hospital suddenly started burning thousands of gallons of fuel oil a day during the coldest part of the year. Naturally the hospital had enough fuel oil on hand that this was no problem. But they did not want their stock of fuel oil to shrink because nobody knows what is going to happen in the future. Thus, tractor trailer loads of fuel oil were being delivered to this hospital every couple of days.
Multiply this by all the other places that had interruptable gas contracts and you had a huge hit to local oil supplies at the same time a cold snap hit the area.
Tonight there are new claims that Gordon Brown is starting to show signs of panic after the announcement that the UK is officially in recession. The opposition parties appear to have sensed a draining of confidence from the UK Treasury and the Prime Minister after literally billions and billions of pounds appear to have been wasted on a number of rescue packages. The situation with the UK economy has taken a serious downward lurch over the last few days amid signs that the government is running out of ideas.
When I first came across this (via a link on a Belmont Club post) I thought it was overstating its case. I have long thought that the U.K was in big trouble. But I had not seen signs that Gordon Brown was panicking. But then I saw this from the Telegraph….
If you hadn’t seen, Mr Rogers has been urging investors to join in the pound’s slide and “sell any sterling you might have.”
“The City of London is finished,” according to the American now living in Singapore. He believes Britain’s former glories – its North Sea oil supply and the major financial centre in the City of London – have gone to pot and are no longer able to support sterling.
The comments have ruffled a few feathers, including it would seem, the Prime Minister’s. “If you think we are going to build our policy around the comments of a few speculators who want to make money out of Britain then you are very, very wrong indeed,” he told the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning.
Mr. Rogers is only a millionaire. For Gordan Brown to treat his comments seriously is a sign that he is indeed worried. In normal times Rogers would have been laughed off.