Amid Near-Meltdown in Monday Stock Markets, Advisers Urge Investors to Stay the Course … As investors hammered stock markets Monday in the first day of trading since Standard & Poor’s downgraded the nation’s coveted AAA credit rating, veteran financial advisers urged clients not to panic and to stay the course. Why? Because this is not a repeat of 2008.
Cheating Report Confirms Teacher’s Suspicions … Last month, 178 teachers and principals at 44 Atlanta public schools were found to be responsible for, or directly involved in, cheating on the state’s standardized test … Eighty-two educators acknowledged involvement. … and six principals declined to answer investigators’ questions.
NASA Awards for Bright Ideas … NASA is awarding $100,000 one-year grants to 30 teams for out-of-this-world ideas ranging from new kinds of spacesuits to quantum communication and space solar power. … “These innovative concepts have the potential to mature into the transformative capabilities NASA needs to improve our current space mission operations, seeding the technology breakthroughs needed for the challenging space missions in NASA’s future,” NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun said in today’s announcement.
Danger in the Lunch Bag … The sack lunches of most preschoolers reach potentially unsafe temperatures by the time kids eat them — even if an ice-pack was included, a new study suggests. … The results simply show that how parents pack their kids’ lunches could inadvertently lead to foodborne illness, Fawaz Almansour and his colleagues concluded.
Amid Near-Meltdown in Monday Stock Markets, Advisers Urge Investors to Stay the Course
As investors hammered stock markets Monday in the first day of trading since Standard & Poor’s downgraded the nation’s coveted AAA credit rating, veteran financial advisers urged clients not to panic and to stay the course. Why? Because this is not a repeat of 2008. The economy is no longer saddled with a huge housing bubble. Giant companies are not hovering near bankruptcy. And banks are not nearly as overleveraged. All that makes the economy less risky. … At ProVise [a Florida-based investment firm], 40-year veteran Ferrara rattles off a series of positive economic signs, from strong corporate earnings and still low mortgage rates to falling commodity prices. If that’s not enough, if a new recession arrives, maybe there’s another solution, he says. “In 15 months, we get to elect new people in Washington.” – St. Petersburg Times
Dominant Social Theme: The US is in strong financial health, people need to stay focused on the fundamentals.
Free-Market Analysis: The article is correct about one thing … this is not 2008 all over again. It is setting up to be worse, much worse. We have said all along in these humble pages that the real problem is the unrestrained and continuously inflated currency unit itself and the central banking system that manages it — all working together under the auspices of the Bank for International Settlements. The system allows Western politicians to make unrealistic promises to a mass of non-thinking “takers” who’ve been educated into believing they have a “right” to a free ride through life. It feeds Money Power’s hunger for global government and enables its use of NATO and the US military-industrial complex to mold foreign countries into manageable pieces that can eventually be amalgamated. The Internet Reformation, not unlike the Gutenberg Press-inspired Protestant Reformation a few centuries before, threatens to reshape the world as we know it by exposing the power elite’s machinations for all to see. Mainstream media is under attack. Establishment politicians stumble through one embarrassing press conference to the next attempting to maintain the illusion that they are really working for the people. Simply stated, frontline actors – Bernanke, Obama, et al. – have no magic band-aids that can be slapped on this US dollar debt-dam and no ability to prevent its eventual breakdown. And even if they did, Money Power wouldn’t permit them to do it. Instead, they are willing soldiers intent on increasing the debt-pressure and ignoring the rising barometer of understanding. We feel sorry for people like Ferrara and even sorrier for those who heed his advice. 2008 was only a precursor of what is coming, in our opinion.
Cheating Report Confirms Teacher’s Suspicions
Last month, 178 teachers and principals at 44 Atlanta public schools were found to be responsible for, or directly involved in, cheating on the state’s standardized test … Eighty-two educators acknowledged involvement. … and six principals declined to answer investigators’ questions. … The weight put on tests for assessing not only students but teachers, administrators, schools and even whole states is what led to cheating in Atlanta on such a huge scale, Rogers-Martin says … “There’s a whole range of thought processes: making inferences, generating hypotheses, and generalizing and synthesizing and valuing … that every human being engages in every day, and nobody knows how to test them (with standardized tests).” – CNN
Dominant Social Theme: Government-run schools are so wonderful that the wonderfulness can’t – and shouldn’t – be measured.
Free-Market Analysis: Government routinely asks the public to accept logic that people wouldn’t accept from any other source. Would you believe a car manufacturer’s claim of mileage so good that it can’t be measured? Or its warning that attempting to measure the mileage would degrade it? Not a story you’d buy. The last thing the government and those who are fed by it want to let happen is measurement. The teachers’ unions are the lynchpin of the Big Government project in the U.S. Their money and members are the single largest source of go-power for every effort to expand the state. Measuring teacher performance would, far too often, demonstrate that there isn’t any. Ergo, measuring teacher performance is strictly out of the question.
NASA Awards for Bright Ideas
NASA is awarding $100,000 one-year grants to 30 teams for out-of-this-world ideas ranging from new kinds of spacesuits to quantum communication and space solar power. … “These innovative concepts have the potential to mature into the transformative capabilities NASA needs to improve our current space mission operations, seeding the technology breakthroughs needed for the challenging space missions in NASA’s future,” NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun said in today’s announcement. … The most promising concepts will be chosen for two-year Phase 2 grants amounting to $500,000 each. – MSNBC/Alan Boyle
Dominant Social Theme: If you want to see progress in science and technology, cheer for more government funding.
Free-Market Analysis: Government has become so involved in science and technology that its involvement is taken for granted as the only source of progress. In fact, there is another source – the profit motive. From the steam engine to the transistor, the money for development and the decision to risk the money came from profit-seeking businesses. And the truly great leaps of pure science, such as the law of universal gravitation and the theory of relativity, came from minds in love with knowledge, not from winners in the competition for government grants. There is no limit to the scientific and technological projects that might be undertaken. But they all cost money, if only to pay for sandwiches for a deep thinker. Who is better suited to choose among them, your Congressman or investors with a serious stake in making the right decision?
Danger in the Lunch Bag
The sack lunches of most preschoolers reach potentially unsafe temperatures by the time kids eat them — even if an ice-pack was included, a new study suggests. … The results simply show that how parents pack their kids’ lunches could inadvertently lead to foodborne illness, Fawaz Almansour and his colleagues concluded. … Less than 2 percent of the perishable items tested were in the “safe” range, Almansour and his colleagues reported. … Moms interviewed by msnbc.com took the new findings with a grain of salt. – MSNBC
Dominant Social Theme: Government needs to step in, because parents don’t know what they are doing.
Free-Market Analysis: Perfect is the state’s best friend. Nothing is every perfect, so there’s always a need for government to do something. Short of running Junior’s lunch through a neutron furnace before you send him off to school each day, the lunch is going to contain some level of bacteria. Unless you’ve been exceptionally careless, the bacteria won’t hurt him – but they will show up in a laboratory test. And the thought of them works nicely to prime the public for (1) food handling rules that every family will be compelled to follow, (2) lunch programs for public schools or (3) a troop of government-paid lunch safety experts to visit schools and instruct parents on lunch matters – you’ll be sitting down with them right after that parent-teacher conference.
