Chasjo Mitch's Profile

The answer is simple: with no Lehman and no Bear to curb its tentacular dominance of all aspects of the Fixed Income market, Goldman can now rely almost exclusively on its monopolist agency position vis-a-vis mutual, pension, and hedge funds who are desperate to maintain a good relationship and an open dialog with the firm which rewards its best clients with market moving information ahead of all others peasants.

They’ve come from two basic sources: one, government subsidy, and two, depleted competition, which allows the bank to charge outrageous rates to clients for services they used to have to price against competition from Lehman and Bear.

Goldman makes all its money gouging its clients, who either don’t know any better or are reluctant to get on the wrong side of the bank, for obvious reasons.

not only Goldman but all the banks have made mountains of money this year by borrowing cheap from the government and lending dear to the rest of the world is also manifestly obvious

The more I think about it, though, the more I think that this must be some sort of clever p.r. strategy. I’m actually almost desperate to believe that this is a conscious strategy on Goldman’s part because if this really is what it looks like — if these people really are that blind and stupid — then that makes their exalted, entrenched position as mega-oligarchs endlessly lording over us truly horrifying, in a the-universe-is-random, black-comedy sort of way.

"There is a hunger on the part of Americans to know what happened," said
Angelides. "There is a hunger to hold people accountable. There is a
hunger to ensure that the people who acted irresponsibly, take
responsibility."

But perhaps the most important contribution the FCIC can make is helping
citizens figure out where we go from here--what kind of an economy do we
want to construct? How do we prevent a recurrence of this kind of
meltdown?

"We haven't gotten to the heart of what we want our financial system to
be," said Angelides. "Do we want it to be a system that is in and of
itself mainly about making money? Or do we want it to be a capital
system that in the end is the driving force that helps create jobs and
broadly shared prosperity?"

The focus is not on the public confusion and ignorance about the Middle East, but on where the fault lies. The researchers believe the media, and primarily television news, are at fault.

They point to the way Israeli and Palestinian combatants are labelled in television reports. Palestinians are "activists," "militants," "extremists," "assailants," "gunmen," "bombers," "terrorists," "killers," "assassins," "fundamentalist groups," "attackers," "self-styled Palestinian martyrs" and "fanatics."

Israelis are "soldiers" or "troops," and even when an Israeli group tried to bomb a Palestinian school, they were not "terrorists" but "vigilantes."

The report also found that there is significantly more coverage of Israelis casualties than Palestinian, even though Palestinians consistently have two or three times as many casualties.

Also, in the spiral of Palestinian-Israeli violence, Palestinians are frequently described as "starting" the trouble, while the Israelis "retaliate."

"It is clear," they say, "that the fact of military occupation and its consequences are crucial to an understanding of the rationale of Palestinian action." Many in the audience sample did not understand that there is a military occupation and that it is widely seen as illegal.

The authors conclude that the lack of understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict leads to a lack of interest. One British viewer complained, "Every time it comes on, it never actually explains it so I don’t see the point in watching it. I just turn it off and go and make a cup of tea or something."

Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.

What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned.

It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.

Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest

Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal.

The idea that natural selection can favor groups, instead of acting directly on individuals, is highly controversial.

One is the highly egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies, which makes everyone behave alike and gives individual altruists a better chance of passing on their genes.

The other is intense warfare between groups, which enhances group-level selection in favor of community-benefiting behaviors such as altruism and religion.

In the larger, hierarchical societies made possible by settled living, rulers co-opted religion as their source of authority.

. “Drat, I think I’m becoming a god!” Vespasian joked on his deathbed.

Biologists and many atheists have a lot of respect for evolution and its workings, and if they regarded religious behavior as an evolved instinct they might see religion more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles.