So far this year (2019) America has averaged one shooting in which four or more people are killed or injured every single day.
It (the income tax law) was, however, subjected to a succession of rate reductions and amendments, one of them being the elimination, in 1865, of its progressive rates, on the arresting ground that collecting 10 per cent on high incomes and lower rates on lower incomes constituted undue discrimination against wealth.
Very cool: Activists erected a Snowden-Memorial in a park in NYC – police is furious and took it down quickly.
The Economist has a special on helicopter parents. Unbelievable:
“In South Carolina this month Debra Harrell was jailed for letting her nine-year-old daughter play in a park unsupervised. The child, who had a mobile phone and had not been harmed in any way, was briefly taken into custody of the social services.”
How are kids supposed to learn independence?
Lexington: The home-school conundrum | The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600122-meeting-german-christians-who-claimed-asylum-america-home-school-conundrum
This is a really scary report regarding Goldman Sachs’ actions during the financial bust. But the fact that such an inquiry takes place gives us hope. Now, let’s hope that some people will go to jail. A great read!
For Europeans the answer is "solidarity", for Americans it is "monopoly" (from the Economist: Charlemagne – Single Market Bargianing):
"A FEW times a year, Charlemagne has the luck to teach students at a European management school in Paris. It is an enlightening experience (for your columnist, at least). One popular question has been why some European Union policies are so contentious in places like France, notably the commitment to an internal market based on “free and undistorted competitionâ€. After a while, the penny dropped. If you play word association, it turns out that for many in a Parisian classroom, the polar opposite of “competition†is “solidarityâ€: ie, the useful rigour imposed by competition is overshadowed by the pain caused as society divides into winners and losers. For Anglo-Saxon liberals, the instinctive opposite of “competition†is “monopolyâ€: ie, the pain of competition is justified by a quest for fairness, even before getting to arguments about efficiency and companies’ long-term fitness."
A scary blog entry, and important information for anybody who is speaking at US conferences.
Germans don’t like McCain. Still was it really necessary to print this picture (right)? But what is particularly interesting was the subtitle:
In the Rheinische Post the descriptionwas "McCain making faces at Obama" (unfortunately, I found this only in print, not online).
In Hamburger Abendblatt, it was described as "Obama tripping".
In both cases, the picture was the same, it was provided by Reuters.
Canada, Britain and Germany are also high on the list before America.
What I find interesting and worrysome is the fact that these opinion are only to a degree related to George W. Bush. The article states that “the Pew polls provide strong evidence that anti-Americanism is more than a blip associated with Mr Bush or Iraq.” And “more than half [of the people] think of them [Americans] as greedy and violent and, in the Middle East, as immoral.”
I have been living in the USA for ten years now, and sadly, I have to agree with the article. I met many wonderful Americans here, and many have actually quite a harsh opinion about their own country. But the big middleclass certainly things of America as the greatest country in the world, and many sincerely believe that the whole world is knocking on America’s door, trying to get in. Well, not any more.