Is this your first visit to Syria, the passport-control man asks me. No, I tell him, I came here once before over a decade ago. He stamps my passport. I had been very lucky to get a Syrian visa this time. The travel advice was not to visit. The Syrian regime is very wary of foreigners, fearing that journalists and spies are inflaming the situation further. I collect my bag and walk through customs, passing a poster, of modest size, of President Bashar al-Assad with the words in Arabic proclaiming: “Leader of the youth, hope of the youth.”
I jump in a taxi. I ask the driver how are things in Syria. Things are fine, he assures me. There has been some trouble around the country, but things are OK in Damascus. As we drive, we chat. He points out the area where Druze live. With his hand, he waves in another direction to where Palestinian refugees live, and then again to where Iraqi refugees live. Alawites are over there and in villages. Christians this way and in villages. Sunnis are around 65 percent of the population. Kurds live in the north. Many different peoples live in Syria. I ask him how he knows who someone is or whether they are Sunni or Shiite. He tells me that he does not know and it does not interest him to know: There is no sectarianism here in Syria. We pass Damascus University. Outside there are lots of flags and pictures of Assad and his deceased father. Across the city, the Syrian flag is flying strong and photos of the president are omnipresent. As I ride through al-Umawiyeen Square, I see lots of young men and women gathering, holding Syrian flags. It is not a demonstration, a Syrian tells me; it is a celebration — a celebration of the regime. Later, I watch the event on television. It has made the international news. Tens of thousands of Syrians have come out to al-Umawiyeen Square to show their support for President Bashar al-Assad in a lively celebration that includes pop singers and fireworks.
Fiscal Indulgences
MICHAEL MUNGER, a professor of political science at Duke University, insightfully compares “tax expenditures” to the Catholic church’s practice of selling indulgences, which fomented the Reformation by sending Martin Luther into fit of righteous pique. Mr Munger reminds us that
Indulgences were “get out of purgatory free!” cards. Of course, it was the church that had created the idea of purgatory in the first place. Then the church granted itself the power to release souls from purgatory (for a significant fee, of course).As Luther put it, in his Thesis No. 27, “as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out.”
If high tax rates are a sort of purgatory (and who doubts it?), then tax credits are indeed akin to indulgences. Mr Munger writes:
We let people out of tax purgatory if they own large houses, if they receive expensive health insurance from their employer, if they produce sugar or ethanol, or any of thousands of special categories. These categories have nothing to do with need (is there a national defense justification for a protected sugar industry?), but instead depend on how much these sinners are willing to pay to members of Congress.
“As the campaign contributions jingle into the campaign funds, the tax revenues fly out”, he adds. As a result, “we have categories within categories within subgroups, all at different prices, deductions or exemptions that release some elites from the published tax rates.
Six-hundred billion of the $1.24 trillion held by U.S. businesses is in overseas
American City Business Journals:
Six-hundred billion of the $1.24 trillion held by U.S. businesses is in overseas accounts, a matter of debate in Washington over offering tax breaks to encourage repatriation of the money.
Moody’s said the cash stash grew even though the amount spent on capital improvements, mergers and acquisitions and dividends increased.
Moody’s also said that the U.S. corporate debt-to-cash ratio was the lowest in the last five years at 3.06.
Want to Start Your Own Business? Better Try France
Since Tocqueville, foreign observers have often helped the United States to see itself in a new light, and the British thinktank ResPublica seems to be continuing in that tradition as it prepares to set up an American branch. During a recent visit to FrumForum, ResPublica founder Phillip Blond shared a presentation which included a startling fact: despite American politicians’ pro-small business rhetoric, the U.S. lags far behind most other developed countries in the share of citizens employed by small businesses.
NSA Lawyer Questioned Over Cellphone Location Tracking of Americans
Is the government using cellular data to track Americans as they move around the U.S.?
According to the general counsel of the National Security Agency, it may have that authority. Matthew Olsen, who is currently at the NSA and has been nominated to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, discussed the possibility at a confirmation hearing Tuesday morning in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
“There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist,” he said. His comments came after Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) asked him several times whether the government has the authority to “use cell site data to track the location of Americans inside the country.”
Although Olsen acknowledged the possibility, he also said “it is a very complicated question” and that the intelligence community is working on a memo that will provide a better answer for the committee.
The Scourge of the Faith-Based Paper Dollar: Jim Grant foresees a new American gold standard despite Wall Street’s stake in monetary chaos
Jim Grant’s father pursued a varied career, including studying the timpani. He even played for a while with the Pittsburgh Symphony. But the day came when he rethought his career choice. “For the Flying Dutchman overture,” says his son, “they had him cranking a wind machine.”
The younger Mr. Grant, who can be sardonic about his own chosen profession, might say he’s spent the past 28 years cranking a wind machine, though it would be a grossly unjust characterization. Mr. Grant is founder and writer of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, perhaps the most iconic of the Wall Street newsletters. He is also one of Wall Street’s strongest advocates of the gold standard, knowing full well it would take away much of Wall Street’s fun.
You might say that, as a journalist and historian of finance, he has been in training his whole life for times like ours—in which the monetary disorders he has so astutely chronicled are reaching a crescendo. The abiding interest of Grant’s, both man and newsletter, has been the question of value, and how to know it. “Kids today talk about beer goggles—an especially sympathetic state of perception with regard to a member of the opposite sex,” he says of our current market environment. “We collectively wear interest-rate goggles because we see market values through the prism of zero-percent funding costs. Everything is distorted.”
General Mills hits out at ethanol subsidies
General Mills hit out at ethanol subsidies as a driver of rising food prices in the US, arguing that they needlessly fuel inflation.
“We’re driving up food prices unnecessarily,” Ken Powell, chief executive of General Mills, said in an interview with the Financial Times. “If corn prices go up, wheat goes up. It’s all linked.”
General Mills, which makes Cheerios cereal, Progresso soup and Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, is the world’s sixth-largest food company by revenues. It said last month that it expects its input costs to increase up to 11 per cent next year as it lowered its earnings forecast on inflation fears.
How the civic groups that once defined America are thriving abroad, and what it means for us.
One sweltering day last spring, out of curiosity and a long-standing interest in the old-fashioned American institutions of civic engagement, I stepped out of my apartment building in the nation’s capital and walked over to attend a nearby conference of the Toastmasters. Founded in a Southern California YMCA basement for the betterment of tongue-tied young men, the Toastmasters have been offering “practice and training in the art of public speaking” along with “sociability and good fellowship” since the mid-1920s. In my mind, the group harked back to a half-imagined America of bowling leagues, church barbecues, and Rotary signs on the edge of town. What was funny was that my apartment resided in a sandy, congested neighborhood of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Under the Arabian midday glare, I scurried across one of the city’s sprawling six-lane boulevards—past a billboard that months earlier had advertised the local Krispy Kreme’s “Ramadan Dozen” special—to reach the campus of a local women’s college that was hosting the event. When I arrived at the main auditorium, I found it humming with a 300-horsepower murmur. The place was packed with men and women in off-the-rack power suits, plus a few starched white robes and black abayas. The room was decked end-to-end with gold silk banners, each, to my amazement, representing a different local chapter of the Toastmasters. By itself, Abu Dhabi—a young boomtown of global migrants roughly the size of Milwaukee—harbors seventeen active chapters of the group, I learned. The UAE as a whole, with a population of about eight million people, has seventy-one chapters.
Tension on Government Subsidized Electronic Medical Records; Comments from Verona’s Epic Systems
The administration’s initiative takes on particular significance because this year is when the government begins spending billions of dollars to accelerate the adoption of computerized patient records.
The incentive payments, typically as much as $44,000 a physician, begin this year. But those payments require doctors to make “meaningful use” of “certified” electronic health records. The payments are staggered over five years, and to get the money physicians must use the technology for increasingly extensive record-keeping and reporting. The administration has not said whether a usability standard will be in the next stage of requirements, due by early next year.The government says it is committed to working with technology companies, medical professionals and academics, to adopt the best approach. Yet common ground has been elusive so far.
At a meeting last month at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., Janet Campbell, a software developer at Epic Systems, a supplier of electronic health records, expressed the industry’s concerns. Doctors are discriminating consumers, she said, and companies like hers work on improving their products in the marketplace every day.
the Government should NOT be using our tax dollars to subsidize health care automation. This approach never works.
Panorama: Penn Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
Click or tap to view this handheld panoramic scene from the Penn Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology. Apologies for a few scene errors.