Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War - PowerPoint
via nytimes.com
NileshBabu |
Visually delight stuff & some research in between |
Imagine that someone invented a pill even better than the one I take. Let’s call it the Dorian Gray pill, after the Oscar Wilde character. Every day that you take the Dorian Gray, you will not die, get sick, or even age. Absolutely guaranteed. The catch? A year’s supply costs $150,000.
Anyone who is able to afford this new treatment can live forever. Certainly, Bill Gates can afford it. Most likely, thousands of upper-income Americans would gladly shell out $150,000 a year for immortality.
Most Americans, however, would not be so lucky. Because the price of these new pills well exceeds average income, it would be impossible to provide them for everyone, even if all the economy’s resources were devoted to producing Dorian Gray tablets.
So here is the hard question: How should we, as a society, decide who gets the benefits of this medical breakthrough? Are we going to be health care egalitarians and try to prohibit Bill Gates from using his wealth to outlive Joe Sixpack? Or are we going to learn to live (and die) with vast differences in health outcomes? Is there a middle way?
Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.
"This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live." - sadly...
The government is financing 9 out of 10 new mortgages in the United States. If you buy a car from General Motors, you are buying from a company that is 60 percent owned by the government.
If you take out a car loan or run up your credit card, the chances are good that the government is financing both your debt and that of your bank.
And if you buy life insurance from the American International Group, you will be buying from a company that is almost 80 percent federally owned.
... the new chief executive of A.I.G., Robert H. Benmosche, whose roughly $9 million pay package is 22 times greater than Mr. Obama’s, ridiculed officials in Washington ...
... A.I.G. — one of the worst offenders in the risk-taking that sent the nation over the edge last year — would not rush to sell its businesses at fire-sale prices, despite pressure from Fed and Treasury officials, who are desperate to have the insurer repay its $180 billion government bailout.
... according a report issued last week by the independent monitor of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, some of the $20 billion or so funneled to G.M. and Chrysler is probably gone forever.
Nearly three dozen financial institutions have repaid $70 billion in loans to the Treasury, and officials predict that $50 billion more will be repaid over the next 18 months.
... Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which now guarantees about $300 billion worth of bonds issued by banks.
The Treasury took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored finance companies that own or have guaranteed more than $5 trillion in mortgages ...
The Treasury has provided Fannie and Freddie with $95 billion to cover losses tied to soaring default rates and losses in value on their own mortgage portfolios.
The central bank has acquired more than $700 billion in mortgage-backed securities so far, and officials have said they will buy up to $1.25 trillion.
To help Fannie and Freddie raise the money they need to buy mortgages from lenders, the Fed is also buying $200 billion of their bonds.
via nytimes.com
Just look at these sheer staggering numbers... makes me speechless...
Between blogging and microblogging
