Booming Brazil and Contrary Catholics

Article on Brazil's booming economy, through some resource price boost but also diversification, internal markets, and anti-poverty programs (microloans and direct payments.)

The payments are part of Bolsa Familia, giving money to the very poor, and money to the poor who vaccinate and education their children. But the Catholic Church allegedly still opposes it. The Catholic Church, through its powerful National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), maintains that "the program vitiates" and leads its beneficiaries to an "accommodation".

Which reminds me:
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist." -Dom Helder Camara, former Archbishop of Olinda and Recife

To be fair, I've so far been unable to find other articles with Church opposition to Bolsa Familia. While searching, I found this, which says the Foreign Minister of France is Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders. I'm trying and failing to imagine something like the US Secretary of State being a head of Human Rights Watch.

Was Iraq Framed by a US lab and ABC?

Remember the anthrax attacks? James links to a news article that a US anthrax researcher has committed suicide, right before he was about to be charged in the attacks. After a wikipedia article, James links to a Salon piece which goes back to the time of the attacks, how the letters in the attacks tried to implicate Muslims, and the false reports of bentonite linking the letters to Iraq, fabricated reports in which ABC played a key roll. Regardless of whether the highly Christian Ivins was personally responsible, the US government is now saying a US government lab was responsible -- so a US lab contributed to the climate of fear post 9/11, and falsely linked it to Islam in general and Iraq in general, thus helping create the attitudes that made invading and destabilizing another country, resulting in tens of thousands of prevantable deaths, seem reasonable.

Me, I'd thought that was obvious it was an inside job, given how the envelopes targetted Democratic politicians and "liberal media" figures, but I hadn't thought about it for a while, nor known of ABC's role.

Welcome to the US! Even our Reichstags are privatized.

In Pursuit of the Longevity Dividend

A call to arms

Leda Cosmides on transhumanism

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2007/1865021.htm

Cosmides, along with her huband John Tooby, is one of the big US researchers in evolutionary psychology. Her take is basically a mix of "to what extent do our devices already makes us 'transhuman'?" and "what are the consequences of meddling with the emotional modules that produce social behavior?"

Do the rich deserve their wealth? -- random walks and economies of scale

A thought experiment:
imagine a bunch of clones, with the same mental talents and skills. They all start with equal amounts of money. For some reason, they all play poker with each other. What happens? Their skills are the same, so their stakes will fluctuate randomly with the luck of the deal. If stakes could range across the integers, each would stay at an average value of what they started with.

But without debt, anyone who gets a bad run and runs out of money is out of the game. And given enough time, someone *will* run out of money. One fewer player, with their money distributed among the others. The process will repeat, and the end point is a single person with all the money. Not because of desert, but because of random walks and the elimination of the zero point.

( Part of why I stopped being libertarian )

Edit: Milton Friedman and Bill Bennett on the wages of luck, the justice of amelioration (education and guaranteed minimum income) and the non-existence of free will.