History Readings

the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history – totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs. The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid.

The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.

the rapid rise of Instagram as a popular source for images of famous people in the wild. This is partly because of the spread of smartphones with more-than-decent cameras, and the ability to publish instantly anywhere, anytime, within seconds and reach millions by posting photos publicly across the network of social media sites.

“The old school way was that you would get an e-mail that said, ‘I was on vacation and saw so-and-so and I’d like to sell it to you,’” she said. “Fans are far less likely to do that now. They’d rather share it themselves first on Twitter and Instagram than sell it immediately. People are dedicated to gaining their own followings and that’s the best way to do that.”

Before, she said, the asking price for photos could stretch into the hundreds of thousands, depending on the rarity of the sighting. But now, because most people see them first on sites like Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, it’s harder to command a hefty price tag. Photos can go for a fraction of their historically high cost

In a new study published today in the journal Science, researchers say they have confirmed that eruptions large enough to bury the U.S. under 300 feet (91 meters) of lava occurred at the same time that vast numbers of plant and animal species disappeared from the fossil record. About 201 million years ago, tectonic forces started ripping the supercontinent known as Pangaea apart, said Terrence Blackburn, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and lead author of the study. The underlying mantle rock melted, generating these large eruptions, he added. The rift, which eventually created the Atlantic Ocean basin, happened between sections of Pangaea that would go on to become North America and Africa. (Read about how Pangaea formed.)

by using a rare mineral called zircon, found in igneous rocks like basalts, the researchers were able to narrow down their margin of error to 20,000 to 30,000 years—pegging the initial eruptions to just before the mass extinction event. “Zircon is a perfect time capsule for dating those rocks,” said Blackburn. When the mineral crystallizes, it incorporates uranium, which decays over a known time with respect to the element lead. By measuring the ratio of uranium to lead in our samples, we can determine the age of those crystals, he explained.

There is evidence that the initial volcanic eruptions doubled the amount of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which led to increased global temperatures and ocean acidification, he noted. This happened quickly, which probably didn’t give organisms at the time much of a chance to adjust to the changes.

To what extent will we really “need” fossil fuel in the years to come? To what extent is it a choice?

Thirteen countries got more than 30 percent of their electricity from renewable energy in 2011, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, and many are aiming still higher.

Could we? Should we?

“He is an advocate of the poor who has consistently opposed the Argentinian government’s ostensible programs for the poor. A social activist who rejects most social reform. A churchman who refused many of the elaborate trappings of his office while promoting the power of the church. A populist who denies almost every request for an interview. A leftist who denounces the state power and cultural changes demanded by the left. A reactionary who despises the accumulation of wealth and the libertarian freedoms praised by the right. No attempt to impose liberal and conservative definitions on him will succeed. Pope Francis simply won’t fit in those categories, mostly because the ancient religious insights of Christianity—taken, as he takes them, in their undiluted form—cannot find an easy place in the modern world,”

even though Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney weren’t culture warriors or evangelical Christians, in the popular imagination their legacy of incompetence has become a reason to reject social conservatism as well.

Just as the post-Vietnam Democrats came to be regarded as incompetent, wimpy and dangerously radical all at once, since 2004 the Bush administration’s blunders — the missing W.M.D., the botched occupation — have been woven into a larger story about Youth and Science and Reason and Diversity triumphing over Old White Male Faith-Based Cluelessness.

Of all the Iraq war’s consequences for our politics, it’s this narrative that may be the war’s most lasting legacy, and the most difficult for conservatives to overcome.

infighting within the government bureaucracy is one of the biggest obstacles to enacting stronger environmental policies. Even as some officials push for tighter restrictions on pollutants, state-owned enterprises — especially China’s oil and power companies — have been putting profits ahead of health in working to outflank new rules, according to government data and interviews with people involved in policy negotiations.

the sulfur levels of diesel in China are at least 23 times that of the United States.

Recorded by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, the image is a heat map of the cosmos as it appeared only 370,000 years after the Big Bang, showing space speckled with faint spots from which galaxies would grow over billions of years.

is in stunning agreement with the general view of the universe that has emerged over the past 20 years, of a cosmos dominated by mysterious dark energy that seems to be pushing space apart and the almost-as-mysterious dark matter that is pulling galaxies together. It also shows a universe that seems to have endured an explosive burp known as inflation, which was the dynamite in the Big Bang.

“The extraordinary quality of Planck’s portrait of the infant universe allows us to peel back its layers to the very foundations, revealing that our blueprint of the cosmos is far from complete.”

“The problem was, what, male blacks,” Inspector McCormack said. “And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this, male blacks 14 to 20, 21.” The conversation was played on the fourth day of a class-action lawsuit covering several million stop-and-frisk encounters in the city, a police tactic that the Bloomberg administration has embraced, citing its effectiveness in driving down gun violence. But the tactic has proved divisive in many parts of the city and has become a major issue in the mayoral race.

Civil rights lawyers have long maintained that the term “right people” is police code for young black and Hispanic men, who make up an overwhelming share of those stopped. But the police, on the other hand, say that they use this phrase to describe habitual lawbreakers, and that by focusing on the “right people,” they are trying to avoid giving tickets to the construction worker drinking a beer on his way home or the couple strolling through a park that is closed for the night.

Since the financial crisis hit in 2008, prominent firms like Merrill, which long catered to individual investors, have lost brokers and customers.

Many investors have turned instead to independent brokerage firms like LPL. Unlike employees of the industry giants, LPL brokers are essentially contractors. They get LPL e-mail addresses and come under LPL compliance but pay for office space and staff.

With overhead costs relatively low, the company can pass a large percentage of commissions and fees — upward of 80 percent — back to its brokers. LPL has said that such a model is also an advantage for investors because the company does not have its own investment products, like the mutual funds created by the big banks, that it wants to push onto its customers.

Len Kendall, co-founder of the new micro-payments platform, reckons the problem isn’t so much that people don’t want to pay for things, but that they forget, it’s too much hassle, and the amounts involved are too big. CentUp, as the name suggests, deals in pennies. To give a few cents to your favorite blogger, all you do is click a little button and send the amount from a pre-charged account.

The contribution in itself isn’t great, but the collective amount could be. "We’re trying to increase the volume of giving by lowering the amount itself,"

There are billions of things being shared every day, and we thought: 'How can we take advantage of this very low investment action, and do something with it to help the world."

North Korea on Thursday threatened to attack American military bases in Japan and on the Pacific island of Guam in retaliation for training missions by American

Now that the U.S. started open nuclear blackmail and threat, the DPRK, too, will move to take corresponding military actions.”

DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,

Kaiser has sophisticated electronic records and computer systems that — after 10 years and $30 billion in technology spending — have led to better-coordinated patient care, another goal of the president. And because the plan is paid a fixed amount for medical care per member, there is a strong financial incentive to keep people healthy and out of the hospital, the same goal of the hundreds of accountable care organizations now being created.

Kaiser has yet to achieve the holy grail of delivering that care at a low enough cost. He says he and other health systems must fundamentally rethink what they do or risk having cost controls imposed on them either by the government or by employers, who are absorbing the bulk of health insurance costs. “We think the future of health care is going to be rationing or re-engineering,”

the way to get costs lower is to move care farther and farther from the hospital setting — and even out of doctors’ offices. Kaiser is experimenting with ways to provide care at home or over the Internet, without the need for a physical office visit at all.

I’m cautiously optimistic that what’s happened over the last handful of election cycles makes that second option, at least to a degree, a real possibility. Not because of some magical Obama effect but because of something much more concrete: demographic trends have hit a tipping point where they appear to be a net loser for the GOP.

Does this mean the GOP is ‘racist’? No. At least not in its entirety. But it benefited mightily from it. What it means is that our politics is significantly framed around the politics of race and, on

t’s been a winning issue for the GOP for the 40 or 50 odd years since white Southerners moved into the Republican party and created a powerful electoral anchor for the party. They raised their sails to the winds of racial animosity and it worked in spades. For decades, you got more white votes pushing this brand of politics than you lost in minority votes. It was a good political bargain

The war that arrived a decade ago is still too painful and too controversial to be taught to schoolchildren

They are desperate and want to see real change, so they’ve stopped looking at the news or remembering past events.”

But the Americans didn’t give us that chance. They did all the things possible to ensure that Iraq is going to be ruined.”