LIFE photo archive hosted by Google
Click on the link above to search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
Month: November 2008
Born to Be Bad?
The study found that children who were slightly impulsive and had mild behavioral problems in pre-school often faced harsh disciplinary action from parents and teachers. Instead of having the desired effect, these actions further alienated the children, often making the child more aggressive and preventing him or her from learning important social and cognitive skills.
As a result, these young children were unprepared for school and often developed social problems; punishments like being sent to the principal’s office meant losing more class time and falling further behind.
By the time the children were in their teens, their parents spent less and less time with them, possibly in order to avoid conflict. With the parents providing less supervision, the children gravitated to similarly estranged peers, Dr. Dodge said.
via A Cascade of Influences Shaping Violent Teens – NYTimes.com
Stand By Me – International Version
Thanks to the ability to overlay multi-track recordings from preformers all over the world to the same track of the classic opo tun”Stand By Me”, Bill Moyers Journal presents…
thanks to Randy Marks.
Is Muhammad A Title?
A German attempt at improving faith relations backfired, with their Muslim scholar ‘s research. He had no doubts at first, but slowly they emerged. He was struck, he says, by the fact that the first coins bearing Muhammad’s name did not appear until the late 7th century — six decades after the religion did. The earliest biography, of which no copies survive, dated from roughly a century after the generally accepted year of his death, 632, and is known only by references to it in much later texts.
He traded ideas with some scholars in Saarbrücken who in recent years have been pushing the idea of Muhammad’s nonexistence. They claim that “Muhammad” wasn’t the name of a person but a title, and that Islam began as a Christian heresy.
Prof. Kalisch didn’t buy all of this. Contributing last year to a book on Islam, he weighed the odds and called Muhammad’s existence “more probable than not.” By early this year, though, his thinking had shifted. “The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable,” he says.
He has doubts, too, about the Quran. “God doesn’t write books,” Prof. Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert at 15 and Germany’s first professor of Islamic theology says. T
via Islamic Theologian Says Prophet Muhammad Likely Never Existed – WSJ.com
Scholarly Paper roughly translated by Google into German
London 2001 London 2001
What’s Behind the $700bin?
If US nominal GDP is about $14tn and the central government share of GDP is 20%, the roughly $700bn stock of banknotes represents just a single quarter’s tax receipts.
US has ~12x the amount of gold that China has, and more than any other country. The US’s gold reserves amount to something like 2/3 of its total reserves, and China’s are around 1%..
China & US – Two two-trillionaires
China hold 2 trillion of our debt according to this analysis ( simply SAFE is the Bank of China and the RMB is their currency).
Because a lot of the vulnerabilities that built up in the US economy between 2003 and 2007 can be linked – in part – to large purchases of dollars by SAFE during that period. Holding the RMB down discouraged investment in tradables, and encouraged investment in non-tradeables (think homes). And the rise in China’s surplus even as the oil exporters surplus was growing implied large offsetting deficits in the US and Europe – deficits that were found in the US household sector. Brad Setser: Follow the Money » Blog Archive » Two two-trillionaires
20 Unhealthiest Drinks in America
The most bloating beverages in gas stations, bars, smoothie counters, and coffee shops across America.
A study from the University of North Carolina found that we consume 450 calories a day from beverages, nearly twice as many as 30 years ago! This increase amounts to an extra 23 pounds a year that we’re forced to work off—or carry around with us.
via The 20 Unhealthiest Drinks in America – Page 1 – MSN Health & Fitness – Nutrition
Obama & Race
Obama had done it one last time. Having cast himself in Selma twenty months ago as one who stood on the “shoulders of giants,” as the leader of the Joshua generation, he hardly had to mention race. It was the thing always present, the thing so rarely named. He had simultaneously celebrated identity and pushed it into the background. “Change has come to America,” Obama declared, and everyone in a park remembered until now as the place where, forty summers ago, police did outrageous battle with antiwar protesters knew what change had come, and that—how long? too long—it was about damned time
via A Reporter at Large: The Joshua Generation: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
The Rich Elected Obama
Top Clinton advisor Mark J. Penn points out that…the exit poll demographics show that the fastest growing group of voters in America has been those making over $100,000 a year in income. In 1996, only 9 percent of the electorate said their family income was that high. Last week it had grown to 26 percent — more than one in four voters. And those making over $75,000 are up to 15 percent from 9 percent. Put another way, more than 40 percent of those voting earned over $75,000, making this the highest-income electorate in history.
The poorest segment of the electorate, those making under $15,000, has shrunk from 11 percent to 6 percent over the past dozen years. And those making $15,000 to $30,000 annually — the working poor — also shrunk from 23 percent to 12 percent of the electorate.
President Clinton got 38 percent of the vote among those making over $100,000. This year Obama earned 49 percent of that vote. He also got 52 percent of a new polling category — those making over $200,000 a year who were no longer among the top 1 percent of earners, as they had been in past elections, but were now the top 6 per cent. Continue reading “The Rich Elected Obama”
How Merrill Lynch Failed
For years, the product that Ms. Masters and her colleagues invented remained just a mechanism for offloading risk in high-grade corporate lending. But as often occurs with Wall Street alchemy, a good idea started to be misused — and a product initially devised to insulate against risk soon morphed into a device that actually concentrated dangers.
This shift began in 2002, when low interest rates pushed investors to seek higher returns.
via The Reckoning – How Merrill Lynch Faltered and Fell – Series – NYTimes.com