We have been avoiding posting Solzhenisyn’s Harvard Address because everyone has read it. Or at least, anyone who is likely to find it interesting has read it.
But by the same token, we knew that we would have to post it sooner or later. How can you not make one of the most famous essays of the last hundred years an essay of the week?
I came across some really cool videos on Parkour and Freerunning. Parkour is basically the skill or sport of clearing objects and moving quickly when chasing or running away. Parkour is basically about various vaulting techniques, landing safetly from very high drops, and landing precisely on very small surfaces. Freerunning is Parkour, except instead of trying to use the most energy efficient techniques, they try to make it look cooler by adding spins and flips, etc.
This is a good video to give you a taste:
And this is a good video to give you an idea of how they practice:
It reminds me a lot of the jumping games we used to play as kids, but taken to extremes.
Security camera footage.
The ECB’s offer to lend to all takers who could post collateral for two weeks at 4.21% or higher led to an unprecedented $500 billion worth of advances.
For perhaps as many as 27 million American adults, keeping warm this winter will mean borrowing money and 20 million will use credit cards to be able to afford their heating bills, according to a CreditCards.com poll.
From the Wall Street Journal….
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, once a fiscal hawk among Clinton Democrats, said the government should consider a $50 billion to $75 billion tax-cut and spending package to stave off a deep recession.
Click on this link for your fire safety lesson of the day.
Although food inflation has been hard to miss (just go to a grocery store), it’s getting worse. Inflation in cereals, which drives the costs of other foodstuffs, is accelerating. Bloomberg reports that wheat has just risen to over $10 a bushel as corn and soybean prices are spiking; the Financial Times has a series of articles today on food price inflation.
Notice how the index for shelter is rising even though home prices are falling nationally. This tells me the .3% rise for shelter simply is not happening. This component was seriously understated for many years but is now overstated for the last two years. What is rising however, is the cost of “driving” a home so to speak. Energy (heating and utilities) are soaring but with $400,000 homes (2005 prices) now going for $250,000 in many places, the overall cost of housing for a new buyer has plunged. Unfortunately the debt hasn’t, and that debt is an enormous drag on bank and consumer balance sheets alike.
And Stuart Staniford has bunch of graphs relating to food inflation. He ends his piece by saying…
And there lie the key issues for wealthy citizens of developed nations I think.
In the last year, there have been food riots, protests, or stampedes in Mauritania, China, Senegal, India, Pakistan, Morocco, Mexico, Yemen, Indonesia, and Burkina Faso.
If food prices continue to go up, the world’s middle classes will still be able to afford ample food. But it’s hard to see how, in the long term, we will be insulated from the social and ecological collapses that might get triggered in poor countries.
You’ll remember that Defense Tech and Military.com were on top of the story of worries over the M4’s reliability in the dusty conditions found in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn insisted the Army conduct side-by-side testing between the M4, SCAR, 416 and XM8 in an “extreme” dust environment.
Well, the tests are complete and it seems the M4 came in dead last against its competitors. And, guess what…the Army’s not budging. The M4 is still the best.
For those who do not keep up on military lingo, M4 is just an shorter version of the M16
Growing up, I always thought that all rock and roll bands were stupid. The few times I heard some of the songs only served to confirm my bias. But as I worked in the trades I was kinda forced to listen to a lot of good old rock and roll. In the process I discovered that some of the classical rock bands actually had a talent that I could respect. There were a number of songs that I actually looked forward to coming on to the radio.
One such song is “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. You can read the lyrics here, but I think that it is better to just listen to the song through the clip below.
It is frustrating to work for supervisors who are not as smart/knowledgeable as you are. Especially if they will not listen to you. This rant from Ambulance Driver is something I think we can all relate to.
One of the things that lead to the down fall of the Roman Empire was the fact that rich Romans no longer wanted to fight their own wars. The Abbasid’s lost power because they came to rely on their Mamluk armies to do their fighting for them. And so it goes throughout history. The separation of a nation’s elites and those who do the nations fighting invariable spells disaster for the elites.
In “On Forgetting the Obvious” Robert D. Kaplan highlights the growing divided between America’s military and the educated elite that rules the country.