For the third year in a row, Dan Mitchell offers his list of things he “Hopes and Fears” from the new year. Topics include Trump, Latin America, and the resolution of Brexit.
We’ll start with things I hope will happen in the coming year.
Ketones are everywhere. And so are associated high fat, low carbohydrate diets, as well as eating patterns that include intermittent fasting – all championed as solutions to obesity, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, etc. While the diets have existed for some time, the addition of intermittent fasting is new, though ubiquitous. So much so that I took notice and considered modifying my eating patterns. Then it hit me ...
Words are funny. Strung together, they can have multiple meanings depending on the perceived context and reader’s viewpoint. I can make a statement with the intent to convey argument A, but the reader interprets my statement as not-A.
An example: Trotsky, in “What Next? Vital Question for the German Proletariat” (published as “How Mussolini Triumphed,” in Fascism: What it is and how to fight it, 1944), disparaged the Italian socialist, Turati, for saying, regarding the political battle with Mussolini’s fascist movement, “One must have manhood to be a coward.”
Work is a determining factor for personal success and social development. Furthermore, there is a socially accepted mantra around work that surrounds it with an aura of mysticism. It is said that hard work is what drives a person, and therefore a whole country. Is this true? This article tries to explain why the idea of hard work as the only determinant for development is incomplete. Work alone does not achieve the economic development desired by all.
Only a few months ago most economic commentators were sanguine about prospects for the US economy. Most of them did not expect an imminent downturn. Now all that has changed with most experts expecting the economy to enter a downward phase of the economic cycle by 2019. According to experts, the key factor behind the emerging downturn is the policies of the US President Trump in particular the imposition of tariffs on imports. Very few analysts however attribute the possible downturn to the decline in the annual growth rate of money supply.
Inadvertently released federal documents reveal that U.S. officials have apparently secured a secret indictment against Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks who released secret information about the internal workings of the U.S. national-security establishment. In any nation whose government is founded on the concept of a national-security state, that is a cardinal sin, one akin to treason and meriting severe punishment.
