With the election of Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil, the fifth largest nation on earth joins the ranks of those who have had women as leaders. It’s not a short list. Nations as diverse as Chile, India, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Germany, and Canada can make this claim as well. Other major nations, like the USofA, seem to be a long way off before they reach this milestone – but you can never tell.
Home » Nooze (Page 130)
Category Archives: Nooze
Journalism and other myths.
Quantitative Easing
The actions of the Federal Reserve have an air of dark wizardry about them – they are mysterious, powerful, and use forces that appear to be a kind of magic. The most powerful incantation is the often-muttered “Quantitative Easing”, a spell that has moved from the dark recesses of economics into the popular press. What it means, in the end, is that the Fed literally conjures money from thin air and gives it to the US government to go out and spur some kind of economic growth. Though this handy li’l charm is now being openly discussed the reasons why it has become so useful have not.
You want to see a magic act? This is one helluva trick. It’s showtime at the Fed.
Those Who Show Up
Polling has a strong allure in an election for many reasons. It appears to make it possible to call the “horse race” before the steeds come through the home stretch. It also has the appearance of objectivity, since it is supposedly based on a dark science that few people know enough to question. Polls are a story that falls into the laps of reporters, allowing them to write a piece on an election without any more work than reading a column of numbers.
Yet polls are nowhere near adequate for describing an election, even without getting into the difficulties of the math. Like so many things in our world today, polling fails because of a flawed assumption at the heart of it long before the technical stuff that jazzes it into what appears to be irrefutable facts. It’s not simply a matter of who is included in the poll, either – it’s the simple fact that democracy belongs to those who show up, not a percentage of a population.
Dia de la Raza and Thanksgiving
To our North, in Canada, today is Thanksgiving. To our South, in Mexico, it is Dia de la Raza. Our brother nations here in North America have found things to celebrate in the early days of Autumn, but here in the USofA we have nothing but the pseudo-holiday Columbus Day – something we’ve tossed over our shoulders and given up on.
This may be a measure of our ability to get anything together.
Managed Depression
Things aren’t going well and many people would rather hide under the covers for a day than go out and confront the realities of the world. That is the image that comes to people’s minds when I insist on using the word “Depression” rather than “Recession” to describe the economic situation we’re in. The picture is one of personal depression, rather than economic or social. As flawed as that image is it can actually work if we think of this as a “Managed Depression”, a big downer we’re trying to get through without a ton of pain. It’s not impossible, we just need a bit of help. Can we look at it that way?
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 