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Mr Roh will also visit the Pyeonghwa car factory near Pyongyang, a joint venture with the Unification Church led by Reverend Moon Sun-myung and he will also go to the Kaesong industrial complex, a group of Southern factories on the northern side of the border.

Subvertandprofit.com “operates a black market for votes on social networking sites,” in the words of its 19-year-old founder, who goes by the pseudonym Ragnar Danneskjold. Ragnar told AZ contributor Derek Powazek that while some users of Digg.com “cling to democracy as the final ideal,” others “understand that their community is a wild anarchy...and I believe they like it that way.”

Borax is a naturally occurring mineral, soluble in water. It can deodorize, inhibit the growth of mildew and mold, boost the cleaning power of soap or detergent, remove stains, and be used with attractants, such as sugar, to kill cockroaches.

One of Lal’s most significant contributions to economic science is his recognition of cosmology as a factor endowment. This recognition enriches institutional theory by explicitly introducing religion and superstition into institutional settings and further illuminates the problems of path dependency. There have been great civilizations in the past, but none produced the Promethean growth that came with capitalism. The older agrarian civilizations grew extensively to the limits of their natural resources, but they lacked the innovation and creativity for the kind of intensive growth that capitalism generated. The reason for this lack is not that our ancestors had no instinct for enterprise, but that they were constrained by social norms and communal bonds and, as Lal asserts, by prevailing cosmological beliefs that suppressed individualism.

The second papal revolution occurred when Pope Gregory VII asserted the power of the church over that of the king or the emperor in the eleventh century. Lal argues, following Harold J. Berman (Law and Revolution [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983]), that this revolution set in place all the legal concepts and institutions needed for commerce.

"Jimbo" — was a finance major at Auburn University when the Mises Institute's Mark Thornton suggested he read "The Use of Knowledge in Society," a now-famous essay written by Austro-libertarian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek. The essay argues that prices in the market represent a spontaneous order that results from the interaction of individuals with diverse wants, allowing them to cooperate to achieve complex goals. According to a June 2007 Reason magazine interview, this insight of Hayek's is what led Wales to found Wikipedia. The rather lofty vision that inspired Wales? "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

I like OpenDemocracy. It has some interesting articles, very often on areas about which I know little. But I do have to wonder, sometimes, whether the minds there are quite as open to new ideas as they seem to be:

People who read the newspaper online have a far less favorable opinion of network and local TV news programming than do people who read the print version, and also have a somewhat less favorable view of the daily newspaper they are most familiar with. But consumers of online newspapers feel far more favorably toward large nationally influential newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

And by more than three-to-one (73%-21%), the public feels that news organizations are "often influenced by powerful people and organizations," rather than "pretty independent."

However, even two-thirds of liberal Democrats (67%) say the news media is more motivated by a desire to expand audience than informing the public. People who have attended college are more likely than high school graduates to say that the press mostly seeks to attract the biggest audience. And 85% of those who cite the internet as a main source believe that news organizations are mostly motivated by a desire to expand their audience, rather than to inform the public.

L'alliance des people et des capuches

A. Finkielkraut. - J'ai gardé de très beaux souvenirs de Mai-68 : les rues libérées des voitures, la présence électrisante des femmes dans les manifestations, la décrispation de la sexualité. Mais cette émancipation s'est accompagnée d'une attaque généralisée - dont nous payons encore le prix aujourd'hui - contre la bienséance. Pour preuve cette phrase récente de Daniel Cohn-Bendit : «Ségolène Royal est une soixante-huitarde. Elle dit : «Quand je me fais chier, je m'en vais.»» En ce sens-là, je ne suis plus soixante-huitard. Moi, je ne «me fais jamais chier», je m'ennuie parfois, c'est déjà assez éprouvant. Et quand je m'ennuie, par courtoisie, par égard, j'essaie de prendre mon mal en patience... 68 a voulu supprimer la honte. Eh bien, la honte, c'est la prise de conscience d'autrui. Et son absence, c'est le triomphe de la muflerie.

Michel Foucault l'a très bien dit, à ce moment-là, dans vos colonnes : «Jusqu'à présent on se demandait si la révolution était possible. Aujourd'hui la question, c'est : est-elle désirable ? Et la réponse, c'est non »...

As is often the case, this paradox can be resolved by recognizing that one of the assumptions is wrong. Here, it's the assumption that U.S. society routinely rejects cruelty and degradation. In fact, the United States is a nation that has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation. Think of the way we accept the use of brutal weapons in war that kill civilians, or the way we accept the death penalty, or the way we accept crushing economic inequality. There is no paradox in the steady mainstreaming of an intensely cruel pornography. This is a culture with a well-developed legal regime that generally protects individuals' rights and freedoms, and yet it also is a strikingly cruel culture in the way it accepts brutality and inequality.The pornographers are not a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the mainstream shouldn't be surprising, because they represent mainstream values:

It tries to authorize sharing and reuse — not within a commercial economy, but within a sharing economy. It tries to do so in a way that wouldn't trigger at least most non-copyright rights (though again, most is not all -- a CC BY-NC licensed photograph by a voyeur still violates rights of privacy, for example). And it tries to do so in a way that protects the copyright owner against presumptions about the waiver of his rights suggested by posting a work freely.

Even if times ahead are troubled, the long run is likely to look much more settled. In the short run, a housing slump could well make private investors and central banks outside the U.S. less eager to hold dollars. A survey by the U.S. Treasury Department last year indicates that about third foreign-held U.S. corporate debt consisted by asset-backed securities and about half of that was mortgage-related. Petro-dollars held in the Middle East and Russia are particularly mobile. Once foreign money leaves the U.S., the dollar would fall. In the longer run, U.S. exports would rise, shrinking the huge U.S. trade deficit. Moreover, recession in the U.S. would lead to lower imports, further reducing the trade deficit. At the same time, China may well let the yuan rise against the dollar, leading to a rise in its domestic spending relative to its exports. Once U.S. consumers spend less and Chinese consumers spend more, the large global imbalances, which have cast a shadow on the world economy for the past decade, would begin to disappear.

the raising of the minimum age of marriage, restrictions on polygamy, and the introduction of fair divorce laws.

LOSING OUR DELUSIONS. Not Much Left by Martin Peretz  

It was one of the more fascinating, odd and troubling scientific ventures of the last century. An outline reads like some pulp sci-fi tale: During the 1930s, a hero pilot teams up with a brilliant surgeon in a spooky, black-walled lab to unlock the secret of eternal life to save the West. It sounds a bit nutty, but this isn't fiction.

The thing is that every now and then we do something important. Like really important. We break a story, or house a discussion that changes a mind. I think that we serve an important role on-line. We're a pub where people gather to talk about the days events, and I think this has tremendous value. I think I still am here because there's a community here that I like. And besides, it beats flipping burgers.

Huw explains that broadcast news is about telling stories people want or need to know on radio, TV or a news website.

The answer is not the obvious one: This country has more machinery or tools or natural resources. Instead, according to some remarkable but largely ignored research—by the World Bank, of all places—it is because the average American has access to over $418,000 in intangible wealth, while the stay-at-home Mexican's intangible wealth is just $34,000.

There is no denying this, and Gitlin, to his credit, does not try. Indeed, this self-imposed restriction and its malign consequences are the deep subject of the book. He provides an honest account of the reasons for his generation's disenchantment with patriotism—an account that helps explain why, even now, the term almost never escapes the lips even of mainstream liberal Democrats without being prefaced by the indignant words "impugning" and "my." For Gitlin's generation, the "generation for whom ‘the war' meant Vietnam and perhaps always will," it could be said that the "most powerful public emotion in our lives was rejecting patriotism." Patriotism became viewed as, at best, a pretext, and at worst, an abandonment of thought itself. It became of interest only in so far as it entered into calculations of political advantage. Far from being a sentiment that one might feel with genuine warmth and intelligent affection, it was merely a talisman, which, if used at all, served chiefly to neutralize its usefulness as a weapon in the hands of others, by making it into a strictly personal preference that others were forbidden to question: "my" patriotism.

Fake Steve Here, Fake Steve There

While the Left pursues environmentalism to advance its global agenda, conservation is best entrusted to local stewardship.