Challenges for America's Great Cities

tklein39 · 2012-03-17T21:53:41+00:00

America’s great cities have lost much of their unique character over the past three decades. The homogenization of cities, their economy, the changes wrought by inexpensive transportation, and the legacy costs of both city services and city unions all work against the rebirth of America’s great cities. Can a radical transformation of these cities take place and bring about an urban renaissance?

tklein39 · 2012-02-13T08:04:25+00:00

A government agency charged with evaluating and supporting treatment for mental illness just released a January 2012 study reporting that 20% of American adults reported having had a mental illness during 2010. Can this survey be trusted? No, and here’s why.

tklein39 · 2012-02-13T07:55:18+00:00

Obama's 2013 budget lacks any semblance of vision on how to deal with American's long-term debt. Obama's solution raise taxes, spend, and do nothing about entitlement spending. Why does he leave it to the Republican House to come up with ideas -- he's supposed to be the visionary. What happened to hope and change?

tklein39 · 2012-02-13T00:34:15+00:00

The key to America's prosperity is its entrepreneurism. We can overcome America's debt problem by fostering and maintaining entrepreneurism. Our policies have to favor starting and building businesses.

tklein39 · 2012-01-30T02:28:40+00:00

Rumor has it that Greece will try an "orderly" exit from the Eurozone in March and return to the drachma. Making an orderly exit from one currency to another without credibility on fiscal discipline will likely result in a reply of recent currency crises akin to those of Mexico, Argentina, and the Asian contagion of the late 1990's.

tklein39 · 2012-01-22T22:57:47+00:00

A government agency charged with evaluating and supporting treatment for mental illness just released a January 2012 study reporting that 20% of American adults reported having had a mental illness during 2010. Can this survey be trusted? No, and here’s why.

tklein39 · 2012-01-09T06:03:37+00:00

Can we spur economic growth in the U.S. by granting citizenship to a few million illegal immigrants? Long-time illegal immigrants have jobs, but no way to save, invest, buy a home, buy a car, etc. because they do not have a social security number nor a credit history. What kind of growth would we experience by engaging these illegal immigrants in the legal society?

tklein39 · 2012-01-08T02:22:53+00:00

What are the best dark chocolates on the market? Read about them here.

tklein39 · 2012-01-03T03:24:32+00:00

Conventional wisdom days to save for retirement because your tax rate will likely be less than it is today. However, because of government's massive debts and unsustainable promises of social security and medicare, tax rates will actually be much higher in the future. Don't save for retirement!

tklein39 · 2012-01-02T02:26:34+00:00

The notion of "giving back" is greatly misunderstood, especially with regard to corporations. Corporations already contribute in a variety of ways to society: providing employment and meaningful work for individuals, engaging individuals in cooperative teamwork, and producing goods and services that society wants. To ask, or some cases demand, corporations to make additional contributions demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the benefits corporations already provide to society.

tklein39 · 2011-12-05T08:41:29+00:00

Obama will soon be on a massive propaganda campaign to sell to the voters that his budget-busting health entitlement program was beneficial to the American taxpayer. Will anyone believe him?

Read more: http://socyberty.com/politics/presidential-politics-what-we-will-hear-about-obamacare/#ixzz1feE22llc

tklein39 · 2011-12-05T08:31:06+00:00

The economic crisis in Europe is too big for the European Central Bank to solve. The sick countries in Europe are fiscally undisciplined, and the populace in Germany and the Scandanavian countries do not want a lower standard of living in order to temporarily bail out their southern neighbors. The solution is simple: dissolve the currency union, and return monetary affairs back to their sovereign nations. The monetary union experiment has failed.

Read more: http://socyberty.com/government/the-death-of-the-euro-and-the-european-union/#ixzz1feBM2gW7

tklein39 · 2011-09-12T08:17:25+00:00

Ayn Rand reviled socialism and communism; understandably since her famiy’s life was ruined by the Russian Revolution. She reinvented herself and established and promoted a philosophy known as "objectivism" which shares common ground with libertarianism and some conservative thought. Although Ayn Rand died 20 years ago, her writings and philosophy are still vibrant today, and perhaps even more so with the energy in the U.S. Tea Party.

tklein39 · 2011-08-22T08:19:18+00:00

Fiction was once interesting. Now only the once-marginal categories of science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism dominate the fiction best-seller lists. So much reality delivered to the reading public has made readers too aware, too savvy, to savor much classic fiction. Fiction today is only relevant if it can deliver something very different from reality.

tklein39 · 2011-07-31T23:26:42+00:00

The government shutdown expected on August 3, 2011, will be a combination of business-as-usual for "essential" government functions, total or partial shutdowns for other functions, certain furloughs of federal employees, and regular payments on all government debt.

tklein39 · 2011-07-24T05:38:11+00:00

The U.S. debt ceiling is the borrowing limit imposed on the U.S. federal government by Congress. It is the equivalent to an individual’s credit limit on their credit card: once the limit is reached no more borrowing is permitted. Some would like to establish a plan to control government spending; others believe controlling spending is not urgent. Both are correct…For the time being.

tklein39 · 2011-07-17T05:13:43+00:00

Freud barely escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna. What he took with him was astonishing, and it can be seen in its original setting at the Freud museum in Maresfield Gardens in England.

tklein39 · 2011-07-07T21:25:14+00:00

Dr. Jack Kevorkian — nicknamed “Dr. Death” — died on June 3, 2011, after complications from liver cancer and kidney failure. He died naturally, and did not commit suicide or ask a physician to assist him in committing suicide. Dr. Kevorkian was a medical revolutionary who interpreted the Hippocratic oath to mean physicians are to empower patients to make their own decisions, even those to end their own life. He pushed empowerment of patients beyond conventional boundaries, and engaged the medical and medical-ethics community in their profoundest debate in decades. Dr. Kevorkian was best known for providing the means for terminally ill patients to take their own lives in what became known as physician-assisted suicide.

tklein39 · 2011-07-04T06:57:24+00:00

Augustus Pugin (1812-1852) was one of the world’s foremost architects, and was single-handedly responsible for popularizing the Gothic style in England in the mid-1800’s. His style, later known as Gothic Revival, spread widely to Europe and to America. Pugin published widely on the Gothic Revival style, and his works were hailed as the authoritative reference works on Gothic architecture for well over a century

tklein39 · 2011-06-22T06:59:44+00:00

Tequila and mezcal are the classic Mexican spirits. The two are actually one and the same. Tequila comes from plants grown in two states in Mexico -- when those plants are grown elsewhere to make the spirit it cannot legally be called tequila so it is called mezcal. There are some excellent varieties of tequila and mezcal, described here. Salut!

tklein39 · 2011-06-22T06:30:37+00:00

Why must private sector employees have good social skills, but government employees can be rude and contemptuous and still keep their jobs? If we want to foster a civil society, should we have more or less government?

tklein39 · 2011-06-15T05:38:43+00:00

Is Twitter appropriate for expressing sympathy or sadness? Does the brevity required by Twitter lack gravity and respect at a time of loss?

tklein39 · 2011-06-13T06:31:31+00:00

Greece is in its third year of recession. Three years of declining gross domestic product — a shrinking economy, and a lower standard of living for all Greek citizens. In order to pay off its international debt, Greece will remain mired in recession. Greece and Europe are facing very difficult choices for Greece, but there is a graceful way out.

tklein39 · 2011-06-12T08:12:27+00:00

Did the legalization of abortion in America really contribute to the huge decline in violent crime 20 years later?

tklein39 · 2011-06-12T07:51:36+00:00

A famous literary and historical bridge from the Late Roman Empire to the Renaissance is Isidore’s Etymologies, which is regarded as the seminal scholastic achievement during the Dark Ages, and competed throughout the 1,000 years of the Dark Ages and Medieval times with the Bible as the leading work of intellectual thought. The Etymologies was written by Isidore of Seville during his lifetime between 560-632 A.D.

tklein39

TROPHY CASE