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Syria Breaks?

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Should the US take military action against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria?  It’s become the one important question in the US since President Obama announced that the dictatorship had indeed used chemical weapons against its own people.  After a year of ducking the question, a brutal attack on August 21 with multiple rockets full of nerve agents into the suburbs of Damascus has made the situation intolerable.

It’s best to never react to the news as it is coming in because everything is fluid. We last wrote about Syria 18 months ago and it was not clear that the horror has lessened.  But today it seems as though there has been a breakthrough and the threat of US force, wielded without flinching, works well in the hands of an administration that would rather not have to do it at all.

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Containerized Cargo

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Stop for a moment and look around you.  In front of your nose might be the aroma of coffee from Sumatra steaming inside a mug made in China.  The table  you are sitting at may be from South America or Canada.  Your clothes could be made of Egyptian cotton.  What do all of these things have in common, other than your life?  Nearly all of them spent some time in a metal box, 20 feet by 8 feet by 9 and a half feet tall – a Twenty foot Equivalent Unit (TEU).

Containerized cargo has changed the world more than any other technology over the last 30 years, maybe or maybe not excluding the internet.  Yet few people stop to consider this phenom and what it means

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ADP Employment Report

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The stock market has been up so far in September, a somewhat unusual event for the weakest month in stocks.  The optimism is propelled largely by decent news on jobs, with weekly initial unemployment claims dropping to their lowest level since 2008 at 323k.  But the big news was the ADP Employment Report, which came in at 176k jobs gained in August.  Investors are still watching for the official Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report on Friday – but they don’t need to.

What is this ADP Employment Report, and what does it mean?  It’s actually the best barometer of where we are, if not the official one, and it comes with a lot of useful information that can’t be found anywhere else.  Since we’ve dissected the official BLS report it’s time to take a good look at the ADP numbers – and why they are in many ways much more interesting.

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Realistic Generation

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This piece has been updated from when it first ran 2 years ago.

The bundles of anxiety that used to be our kids bubbled through the high school parking lot towards parents long used to waiting.  A normal day would never end with something as uncool as a ride from Dad – that’s what Metro Transit buses are for.  But this day they were coming back from a camping trip and had bundles of stuff under tired arms.  The milling crowd was my chance to meet some of my daughter’s friends.

The joys of high school – so much to worry about, so few cares in the world.

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Sovereignty

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The year was 1648.  After 30 years of Lutherans slaughtering Catholics and Catholics slaughtering Lutherans, Europe had become tired of war. The heart of western Germany, the Palatine, was utterly destroyed.  A treaty was concluded at Westphalia, near the heart of the conflict, which crafted peace through a new concept – sovereignty.  The warring monarchs agreed that each side had territorial integrity and that neither would interfere in the internal affairs of the others.

The entire world was eventually divided up into “sovereign nations” based on this principle.

The year was 2011.  Protesters igniting the “Arab Spring” in Syria were slaughtered by their sovereign national army, and eventually formed something like an armed rebellion in what is now known as a civil war.  The world watched in horror as at least 100,000 people were killed, about half civilians, for more than two years.  Sovereignty means that no one is supposed to intervene, at least not directly.  That has held until repeated attacks by chemical weapons occurred, crossing an apparent “red line” that denotes the limits of sovereignty.  The world wants to act to stop it.

Why this line?  Why now?  What is the real limit of “sovereignty” and what does it mean to be a nation-state today?

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