Kind of. The article, Neural evidence for inequality-averse social preferences, doesn’t mention the C word, but it does claim to have found evidence that people’s brains display more egalitarianism than people themselves admit to. [...]

When people received money for themselves, activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the ventral striatum correlated with the size of their gain.

However, when presented with a payment to the other person, these areas seemed to be rather egalitarian. Activity rose in rich people when their poor colleagues got money. In fact, it was greater in that case than when they got money themselves, which means the “rich” people’s neural activity was more egalitarian than their subjective ratings were. Whereas in “poor” people, the vmPFC and the ventral striatum only responded to getting money, not to seeing the rich getting even richer.

The authors of the study concluded that this is evidence of a neurobiological preference against inequality.

NeuroSkeptic: Is Your Brain A Communist?

Korea?! Are you scoffing? Readers, when you spied my headline did you think, “Mr. Hyena’s insane! Korea’s not a superpower; it’s a dwarf peninsula shuddering in China and Japan’s shadow! Korea’s a bisected baby-tiger south / starving-hermit north mess! Korea? Superpower?! Absurd!” Hear me out, netizens. I’ve categorized abundant facts explaining why a unified Korea (or even a solitary south) will emerge as world leader. It’s already preeminent in crucial categories. South Korea is not the destitute orphan pickled vegetable of the 1960’s or the laughable Hyundai of the mid-1980’s. SK is wired, willing, savvy, sexy and it works harder than any other hominid nation. Reunited with its surly sibling, it’ll be the Seoul center of the planet.

The reasons (explained in detail at the link):

Direct E-Democracy

Hardworking Economy

Robot Future

Military Might

Massive Mineral Wealth

Education & IQ Edge

Green Goals

Cyber Warriors

Seductive K-Culture

Read More – h+: The Next Global Superpower is… Korea?

(Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hero8989/3952513186/ / CC)

(via Wade)

Emphasis mine:

About 20 percent of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems, according to consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research. It expects that number to grow to nearly 30 percent in just three years.

But perhaps nobody is as ambitious as PayPal. In November, it further opened up its code, giving anyone with rudimentary programming skills access to the kind of technology and payment-industry experience that Ivey used to build Twitpay. The move could unleash a wave of innovation unlike any we’ve seen since self-publishing came to the Web. Two months after PayPal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services, sending $15 million through the company’s pipes. Software developer Big in Japan, whose ShopSavvy program lets people find an item’s cheapest price by scanning its barcode, used PayPal to add a “quick pay” button to its app. LiveOps, a call-center outsourcing firm, built a tool that streamlined payments to its operators, turning what had been a nightmare of invoicing and time-tracking into an automated process. Previously, anybody who wanted to create a service like this would have had to navigate a morass of state and federal regulations and licensing bodies. But now engineers can focus on building applications, while leaving the regulatory and risk-management issues to PayPal. “I can focus on the social side of the business and not on touching money,” as Ivey puts it.

Wired: The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free

See also:

The New Currency War

And Technoccult posts tagged altcurrency.

Scores of employees gathered to help Bob Moore celebrate his 81st birthday this week at the company that bears his name, Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods.

Moore, whose mutual love of healthful eating and old-world technologies spawned an internationally distributed line of products, responded with a gift of his own — the whole company. The Employee Stock Ownership Plan that Moore unveiled means that his 209 employees now own the place and its 400 offerings of stone-ground flours, cereals and bread mixes.

Read More – Seattle Times: On 81st birthday, Oregon man gives company to employees

(via Cryptogon)

From now until the first of March, OurGoods, an online barter network, is running a pop-up storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan called Trade School, where entry into classes is based not on money or talent, but on meeting the needs of a particular teacher. And while some classes like grant writing and butter making have already filled up, there’s still plenty of room to learn more about irrational decision-making and chair-bound pilates, not to mention composting and improvisation.

Read More – Good.is: Trade School: Will Barter for Skills

(via Kristin Wolff)

Good, long article in the Santa Fe Reporter on economist Samuel Bowles’s 42 years of research on economic inequality.

Again with the numbers:
30

32

The first number is the likelihood, expressed as a percentage, that a child born to parents whose incomes fall within the top 10 percent of Americans will grow up to be at least as wealthy.

The second is the percentage likelihood that a person born into the bottom 10 percent of society will stay at the bottom.

Just to drive the point home, here’s a third number: 1.3

That’s the percentage likelihood that a bottom 10 percenter will ever make it to the top 10 percent. For 99 out of 100 people, rags never lead to riches.

These estimates come from research by one of Bowles’ former students, American University economist Tom Hertz, published in Unequal Chances, a 2004 book co-edited by Bowles. To arrive at these figures, Hertz mined the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a survey of 4,800 American families that’s been updated each year since it began in 1968, the year Martin Luther King inspired Bowles to study inequality.

It may not come as a shock that rich kids who grow up learning to sail eventually buy yachts, while the offspring of burger-flippers might hope to rise to be the night managers for whole crews of burger-flippers. What’s troubling about this research is that poverty tends to persist through generations, no matter how individuals try to improve their circumstances.

So, much of what Americans tell their children is wrong. It doesn’t really matter how long you go to school or even necessarily how hard you work. The single most important factor to success in America is “one’s choice of parents,” as a contributor to Unequal Chances wryly put it.

Bowles’s solution: give every person in America $250,000 when they turn 18.

Santa Fe Reporter: Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

Interesting stuff. Even pro-welfare state pundits are sometime swayed by the myth of American upward mobility. Take this pro-Netherlands article from the New York Times:

Another corollary of collectivist thinking is a cultural tendency not to stand out or excel. “Just be normal” is a national saying, and in an earlier era children were taught, in effect, that “if you were born a dime, you’ll never be a quarter” — the very antithesis of the American ideal of upward mobility. There seem to be fewer risk-takers here. Those who do go out on a limb or otherwise follow their own internal music — the architect Rem Koolhaas, say, or Vincent Van Gogh — tend to leave.

But is this accurate? As stated above, most Americans are never able to actually pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And according to this study the Netherlands actually lead in economic mobility amongst several developed nations, at least as of 1999:

The lack of outliers who become hugely successful has obscured the greater truth: the Dutch are far more successful than Americans.

Despite Fears of a Post-9/11 Drop, Most Science, Engineering Post-Grads Have Stayed

Most foreigners who came to the U.S. to earn doctorate degrees in science and engineering stayed on after graduation—at least until the recession began—refuting predictions that post-9/11 restrictions on immigrants or expanding opportunities in China and India would send more of them home.

Newly released data revealed that 62% of foreigners holding temporary visas who earned Ph.D.s in science and engineering at U.S. universities in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007, the latest year for which figures are available. Of those who graduated in 1997, 60% were still in the U.S. in 2007, according to the data compiled by the U.S. Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education for the National Science Foundation.

Foreigners account for about 40% of all science and engineering Ph.D. holders working in the U.S., and a larger fraction in engineering, math and computer fields. “Our ability to continue to attract and keep foreign scientists and engineers is critical to…increase investment in science and technology,” Oak Ridge analyst Michael Finn said.

Wall Street Journal: U.S. Keeps Foreign Ph.D.s

(via Beerken’s Blog)

Above: One of DARPA’s many useful inventions.

This is from a year ago, but I don’t remember it:

Newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama has been urged by a top US spysat chief to revitalise America’s economy through the use of DARPA*, the legendary Pentagon barmy-boffinry bureau which has given the world the internet and the stealth bomber. More recently the agency has also sponsored initiatives such as mindreading peril-sensitive brainhat binoculars and brainchipped cyborg zombie insecto-bugs.

The recommendations come from Pedro L Rustan, a senior figure in the US National Reconnaissance Office, the secretive agency which handles American spy satellites. Rustan delivered his exhortations to Mr Obama in the form of an open letter to the aerospace mag Aviation Week, titled Refocus DARPA Beyond Defense.

Spy chief to Obama: Let DARPA fix economy

The open letter

The Supreme Court acquitted two defendants in a case related to the legality of using cash to buy and sell cyber money for online games.

The court conditioned its ruling on the fact that the cyber money was earned through skill, not luck.

Supreme Court Justice Min Il-young ruled in favor of the suspects surnamed Kim and Lee.

The two allegedly purchased “Aden,” cyber money in an online multiplayer role-playing game “Lineage,” worth 234 million won ($207,558), which was lower than market price, through game item-trading Web sites.

JoongAng Daily: Supreme Court acquits two in cyber money game case

(via Theoretick)

The Atlantic is running a story provocatively titled “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” Well, no, clearly it did not. The crash was caused by the casino-schemes orchestrated by Wall Street and their accomplices in Washington (See here and here for starters). But could Christianity, or more specifically a form of Christianity called “prosperity gospel” have contributed? Hanna Rosin makes a good case for it.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.” [...]

From 2001 to 2007, while he was building his church, Garay was also a loan officer at two different mortgage companies. He was hired explicitly to reach out to the city’s growing Latino community, and Latinos, as it happened, were disproportionately likely to take out the sort of risky loans that later led to so many foreclosures. To many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well. [...]

Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.

The Atlantic: Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

See also: The cult of positive thinking

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime’s influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

Guardian: Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor

(via Global Guerrillas and Cryptogon)

Does unemployment drive insurgency? That’s a big question that hasn’t been studied much. Despite the lack of data, unfounded assumptions abound. These assumptions are the basis of grand strategic theories to multi-billion $$ counter-insurgency programs (such is the intellectual poverty of US military thinking). One interesting statistical study, Do Working Men Rebel by Eli Berman, Joseph Felter, and Jacob Shapiro (NBER), attempts to answer this question (November 2009).

They conclude that unemployment is actually negatively correlated to insurgency. They posit that the most likely explanation for this is that the government’s counter-insurgency efforts are cheaper/easier to accomplish, since they can buy intel on insurgent locations more easily. The other (less likely) potential conclusion is that high unemployment is an artifact of successful counter-insurgency efforts that restrict movement and increase isolation. In either case, the idea that opportunity costs etc. (the standard theories regarding unemployment and insurgency) drives insurgency doesn’t appear to be valid. Another ancillary conclusion of the paper is that high unemployment typically forces a shift in tactics towards stealth area of effect attacks (IEDs, and other methods that connote relative weakness rather than strength) that produce high levels of collateral damage.

Global Guerillas: Unemployment and Insurgency

In many ways this story is far field from our contemporary debates about network management, file sharing, and the perils of protocol discrimination. But the main questions seem to remain the same—to what degree will we let Western Union then and ISPs now pick winners and losers on our communications backbone? And when do government regulations grow so onerous that they discourage network investment and innovation?

These are tough questions, but the horrific problems of the “Victorian Internet” suggest that government overreach isn’t the only thing to fear. In 1876, laissez-faire “freedom for all” meant (in practice) the freedom for Henry Nash Smith to read your telegrams if he didn’t like who you supported for President. It meant freedom for Associated Press to block criticism of Western Union, and even to put potential critics and competitors out of business. And it meant freedom for a scoundrel to hijack the system at his leisure.

Sure enough, the technologies and debates are different. Still, one wonders what Charles A. Sumner would say today if told that net neutrality is a “solution to a problem that hasn’t happened yet.”

Ars Technica: How Robber Barons hijacked the “Victorian Internet”

(via /Social Physicist)

The main point, he says, is that too often people’s emotions get in the way of clear financial thinking about mortgages, turning them into what he calls “woodheads” — “individuals who choose not to act in their own self-interest.” Most owners are too worried about feelings of shame and embarrassment following a foreclosure, and ignore the powerful financial reasons for going through with it, he said.

Buttressing these emotions is a system that White labels “the social control of the housing crisis” — pressures and messages continually sent to consumers by the “social control agents,” namely banks, government and the media. The mantra these agents — all the way up to President Obama — pound into owners’ heads, White says, is that “voluntarily defaulting on a mortgage is immoral.”

Yet there is an inherent imbalance in the borrower-lender relationship that makes this morality message unfair to consumers: Banks set the rules during the housing boom, handing out home loans with no down payments, no income checks and inflated appraisals. Now that property values have dropped 20 to 50 percent in many areas, banks have been slow to modify troubled mortgages and reluctant to reduce principal debts.

Only when homeowners cut through the emotional fog and default strategically in large numbers, White argues, will this inequitable situation be seriously addressed.

Washington Post: The moral dimensions of ditching a mortgage

(Thanks Trevor)

Michael Hudson wrote back in February:

The officials drawn from Wall Street who now control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve repeat the right-wing Big Lie: Poor “subprime families” have brought the system down, exploiting the rich by trying to ape their betters and live beyond their means. Taking out subprime loans and not revealing their actual ability to pay, the NINJA poor (no income, no job, no audit) signed up to obtain “liars’ loans” as no-documentation Alt-A loans are called in the financial junk-paper trade.

I learned the reality a few years ago in London, talking to a commercial banker. “We’ve had an intellectual breakthrough,” he said. “It’s changed our credit philosophy.”

“What is it?” I asked, imagining that he was about to come out with yet a new magical mathematics formula?

“The poor are honest,” he said, accompanying his words with his jaw dropping open as if to say, “Who would have guessed?”

The meaning was clear enough. The poor pay their debts as a matter of honor, even at great personal sacrifice and what today’s neoliberal Chicago School language would call uneconomic behavior. Unlike Donald Trump, they are less likely to walk away from their homes when market prices sink below the mortgage level. This sociological gullibility does not make economic sense, but reflects a group morality that has made them rich pickings for predatory lenders such as Countrywide, Wachovia and Citibank. So it’s not the “lying poor.” It’s the banksters’ fault after all!

Asked to name the single biggest benefit of America’s invasion, many Iraqis fail to mention freedom or democracy but instead praise the advent of mobile phones, which were banned under Saddam Hussein. Many Iraqis seem to feel more liberated by them than by the prospect of elected resident government.

In the five years since the first network started up, the number of subscribers has soared to 20m (in a population of around 27m), while the electricity supply is hardly better than in Mr Hussein’s day. That is double the rate for Lebanon, where a civil war ended two decades ago and income per head is four times higher. [...]

They also became a tool of commerce. Reluctant to risk their lives by visiting a bank, many subscribers transferred money to each other by passing on the serial numbers of scratch cards charged with credit, like gift vouchers. Recipients simply add the credit to their account or sell it on to shops that sell the numbers at a slight discount from the original. This impromptu market has turned mobile-phone credit into a quasi-currency, undermining the traditional informal hawala banking system.

Economist: Better than freedom?

(via Chris Arkenberg)

Pinning down the informal economy is as tough as catching a fake Louis Vuitton vendor running from the police. But it’s huge in the United States – larger than the official output of all but the upper crust of nations across the globe. And, due to the recent recession, it’s growing.

Whether that’s good or not depends entirely on one’s point of view. The rise of the informal economy is either the flourishing of entrepreneurship among America’s poorest or a drag on legitimate businesses that play by the rules. Here, on Harlem’s Malcolm X Boulevard, you can find both.

Perhaps the biggest surprise about America’s shadow economy is its size. Long associated with colorful street hawkers in the developing world, the shadow economy makes up a larger portion of the economies of countries like Greece (25 percent) or Mozambique (more than 40 percent) than it does in the US. But because America’s economy is so much bigger, its shadow economy amounts to nearly 8 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) – in the ballpark of $1 trillion, estimates Friedrich Schneider, an economics professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. That’s bigger than the GDP of Turkey or Australia.

There’s nothing particularly ominous about the shadow economy – at least, not the one Professor Schneider measures. He doesn’t include illegal activities like drug trafficking or counterfeiting. The transactions he looks at involve the legal production of goods and services that are not taxed and may violate labor laws.

The article concludes:

Off-the-books work “is probably neutral to good,” says Alfonso Morales, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He argues that formal and informal economies are linked and cannot be neatly separated.

“People who make their money in unregulated businesses probably spend it in regulated ones,” he says.

Christian Science Monitor: America’s ’shadow economy’ is bigger than you think – and growing

(via John Robb)

There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, possibly even millions of jobs, if some variation of the current proposals being debated by Congress get passed into law. [...]

However, the oil industry’s scare stories about job loss never put it in any context. In these models, any government measure that interferes with market outcomes almost by definition reduces efficiency, leading to less economic growth and fewer jobs. Efforts to slow global warming fall in this category, but so does almost everything else, and many items in the everything else category have a much larger impact.

For example, defense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs.

Truthout: Massive Defense Spending Leads to Job Loss

I didn’t believe this story was true at first — thought it had to be a spoof. But it turns out to be true. The great banks of the world have gone on a p.r. counteroffensive in Europe, and are sending spokescrooks in shiny suits into churches to persuade the masses that Christ would have approved of the latest round of obscene bonuses.

Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself. This seemingly baffling outburst by a Goldman executive in what appears to have been a prepared speech — someone actually wrote this, and thought about it, before saying it out loud — gets even weirder when one tries to figure out what could possibly have motivated this person, and by extension his employer Goldman Sachs, to make such statements in such a place as St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Matt Taibbi: Goldman One-Ups Gordon Gekko, Says Jesus Embraced Greed

Update: Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while will be familiar with The Family. Reader Joe points out in the comments:

This shouldn’t be surprising for anyone who has read Jeff Sharlet’s book _The Family_. This rhetoric is straight out of their play book. This guy is likely a member (he *spoke at* the funeral of Wallace Haines, The Family’s ‘man in Europe’, in 2007). http://www.wallacehaines.com/inmemoryof.htm

The plot sickens.

Those who like banks that are too big to fail will love the latest financial reform proposals circulating in the US Congress. The bill put forward by Barney Frank, the chairman of the House finance committee, does little to change the current structure of the financial system.

The “too-big-to-fail” banks will be left in place, even bigger and less accountable than before. There will be nothing done to separate commercial and investment banking, so giants like Goldman Sachs will be free to speculate with money guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The main difference is that the Federal Reserve Board will be granted even more power than it has now. And, we will tell the Fed to be smarter in the future, so that it doesn’t make the same stupid mistakes that gave us the current crisis. [...]

The bottom line is that this bill is almost certain to leave the taxpayers holding the bag for future bailouts. Even worse, it does nothing about the moral hazard created by having institutions that are too big to fail. There is nothing in the bill to lead creditors to believe that the government will not make good on their loans to Goldman, JP Morgan and the other banking behemoths.

Guardian: Breaking up the banks is hard to do

Until the day he was outed, the most influential commentator on South Korea’s economy lived the life of a nobody. Park Dae-Sung owned a small apartment in a middle-class neighborhood of Seoul and freelanced part-time at a telecom company. Thirty years old, he still hoped to earn a four-year degree in economics. In the mornings, he would bicycle to the public library to study for the university entrance exam. His standard uniform was slacks, loafers, and wrinkle-free button-down shirts, as though he were going to work in an office. But with his slightly chubby moon face, glasses, and neatly parted hair, he easily blended in among the rows of students. While they worked through school assignments, he immersed himself in the text of his chosen profession.

In the evenings, Park would go online, frittering away the hours like millions of other geeks. He often played the simulation game Capitalism II, where he’d assume the role of a blue-chip investor, closing million-dollar deals and speculating on skyscrapers. Nothing that he did earned him any attention.

Then, in March 2008, Park opened an account on South Korea’s popular Daum Agora forum. Here, he decided, he would call himself Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom, and write exclusively on economics, drawing on both public reports and his years in the stacks poring over Adam Smith and Joseph Stiglitz. Affecting the effortless command of a seasoned investor, he strove to project the authority that had eluded him in real life. The world economy is in the midst of collapse, he warned, so pay your debts and stock up on noodles and drinkable water. He made pronouncements on when to buy or sell a home, exchange Korean won for dollars, and pull out of the financial markets altogether.

Wired: The Troubles of Korea’s Influential Economic Pundit

See also:

Christian Science Monitor: Financial blogger’s arrest tests Korea’s progress on human rights

Korea Times: Foreigners Puzzled Over Minerva’s Arrest

Also of interest:

New York Magazine’s article on Zero Hedge and Matt Taibbi’s response.

From: Financial Services Technology: Federal deficit: who owns what?

(Via Contexts via Brainsturbator)

Here’s how naked short-selling works: Imagine you travel to a small foreign island on vacation. Instead of going to an exchange office in your hotel to turn your dollars into Island Rubles, the country instead gives you a small printing press and makes you a deal: Print as many Island Rubles as you like, then on the way out of the country you can settle your account. So you take your printing press, print out gigantic quantities of Rubles and start buying goods and services. Before long, the cash you’ve churned out floods the market, and the currency’s value plummets. Do this long enough and you’ll crack the currency entirely; the loaf of bread that cost the equivalent of one American dollar the day you arrived now costs less than a cent.

With prices completely depressed, you keep printing money and buy everything of value — homes, cars, priceless works of art. You then load it all into a cargo ship and head home. On the way out of the country, you have to settle your account with the currency office. But the Island Rubles you printed are now worthless, so it takes just a handful of U.S. dollars to settle your debt. Arriving home with your cargo ship, you sell all the island riches you bought at a discount and make a fortune.

This is the basic outline for how to seize the assets of a publicly traded company using counterfeit stock. What naked short-sellers do is sell large quantities of stock they don’t actually have, flooding the market with “phantom” shares that, just like those Island Rubles, depress a company’s share price by making the shares less scarce and therefore less valuable.

Rolling Stone: Wall Street’s Naked Swindle

I haven’t listened to this yet, but it sounds interesting:

Tom Rees has conducted research into religion and personal insecurity in 50 countries. Using figures on how much people pray and how unequal income is in each of them, he claims to have found evidence to show that the most religious societies are the most unequal, and concludes the inequality leads to religion. Is it fear and hardship that makes people of one country more religious than another, or is there a mysterious third factor that can explain why some nations pray so much more than others? Laurie Taylor talks to Tom Rees about his findings, and to sociologist of religion David Voas.

BBC: Thinking Allowed

(via Disinfo)

You know what’s just too damn liberal? The Bible! But don’t worry, those crusaders for truth at Conservapedia are working on a new translation of the Bible that is meant to fulfill the following requirements:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity

3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.

5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”; using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census

6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.

7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels

10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

I’m sure The Family will love number 7. The timing of this is meaningful, as Michael Moore’s new film uses Christianity as a wedge against capitalism.

Conservapedia: Conservative Bible Project

(via Theoretick)

Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed.

New York Times: U.S. Job Seekers Exceed Openings by Record Ratio

The number of young Americans without a job has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. — meaning millions of Americans are staring at the likelihood that their lifetime earning potential will be diminished and, combined with the predicted slow economic recovery, their transition into productive members of society could be put on hold for an extended period of time.

New York Post: The dead end kids

(both via Cryptogon)