A riqueza dos pobres

"Steve Horwitz explains that, contrary to popular belief, the poor are getting richer: http://www.learnliberty.org/content/are-poor-getting-poorer
...
"Are the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer? Prof. Sean Mulholland uses several statistical measures and finds that this common perception may not be accurate. A surface-level examination of statistics may indicate that the poor are getting poorer, but a more thorough study shows that there is more income mobility in the United States than many might think. Prof. Mulholland highlights data showing household income by quintile adjusted for inflation and even uses data that follows specific households over time. For example, if we look at households in the bottom quintile in 1987 and follow those individual households until 1996, about 45 percent of them have moved up to a higher quintile. In the next 10-year period, about 40 percent of households move up. Watch the video to see Prof. Mulholland's findings about income mobility for the top 20 percent of income earners over time and for U.S. households across generations, too."
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A eliminação do cristinanismo continua

Christmas in an Anti-Christian Age

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Recently by Patrick J. Buchanan: Why God Created the GOP

For two millennia, the birth of Christ has been seen as the greatest event in world history. The moment Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem, God became man, and eternal salvation became possible.
This date has been the separation point of mankind's time on earth, with B.C. designating the era before Christ, and A.D., anno domino, in the Year of the Lord, the years after. And how stands Christianity today?
"Christianity is in danger off being wiped out in its biblical heartlands," says the British think tank Civitas.
In Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria, Christians face persecution and pogroms. In Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, conversion is a capital offense. In a century, two-thirds of all the Christians have vanished from the Islamic world.
In China, Christianity is seen as a subversive ideology of the West to undermine the regime.
In Europe, a century ago, British and German soldiers came out of the trenches to meet in no-man's land to sing Christmas carols and exchange gifts. It did not happen in 1915, or ever again.
In the century since, all the Western empires have vanished. All of their armies and navies have melted away. All have lost their Christian faith. All have seen their birthrates plummet. All their nations are aging, shrinking and dying, and all are witnessing invasions from formerly subject peoples and lands.
In America, too, the decline of Christianity proceeds.
While conservatives believe that culture determines politics, liberals understand politics can change culture.
The systematic purging of Christian teachings and symbols from our public schools and public square has produced a growing population – 20 percent of the nation, 30 percent of the young – who answer "none" when asked about their religious beliefs and affiliations. 
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Lei seca?

Jeff Tucker analisa:
"... Murray Rothbard once told me that he thought drunk driving should be legal. I was stunned and shocked that anyone would say such a thing. But over time, I began to see his point. It is not outrageous at all. He was exactly right.
With laws against DUI, what’s being criminalized? Not wreckless driving as such. Not aggression against anyone. What’s being criminalized is the chemical make up of the blood in your body. That itself should be no crime. To make having a certain blood content illegal is essentially totalitarian.
But you say that drinking is associated with bad driving. Well, enforce the laws against reckless driving. Many more people drink and drive than drive recklessly. Some people drive even more safely after a few drinks, correcting for their delayed responses. We do this all the time, e.g. after a workout, when we are sleepy, when we are angry, whatever. Human beings adapt with rationality..."
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O caminho do totalitarismo americano

Passos ao totalitarismo americano
 - The Military Commissions Act
 - The Patriot Acts I and II
 - The John Warner Defense Act
-  The NDAA 
Agora não me diga que não sabia.
Veja Olavo de Carvalho para saber mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjAHwZQlLP0

Metodologia científica

1975: Cientistas alertam sobre a era do gelo

The Cooling World

Newsweek, April 28, 1975

www.denisdutton.com

---

Here is the text of Newsweek’s 1975 story on the trend toward global cooling. It may look foolish today, but in fact world temperatures had been falling since about 1940. It was around 1979 that they reversed direction and resumed the general rise that had begun in the 1880s, bringing us today back to around 1940 levels. A PDF of the original is available here. A fine short history of warming and cooling scares has recently been produced. It is available here.
We invite readers interested in finding out about both sides of the debate over global warming to visit our website: Climate Debate Daily — Denis Dutton

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

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Aquecimento global 1947

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Totalitarismo americano sob o engano de Obama

Olavo de Carvalho fala sobre a grande estrutura totalitária e fascista que está sendo montada nos EUA (e por tabela no resto do mundo).
Olavo explica:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq2J9kUFGxw&feature=player_embedded

Educação universitária não promove mais equilidade social

The Decline of the "Great Equalizer"

Massachusetts, home to America's best schools and best-educated workforce, has seen income inequality soar. Why? The poor are losing an academic arms race with the rich.

By DAVID ROHDE, KRISTINA COOKE AND HIMANSHU OJHA
BOSTON, DECEMBER 19, 2012

"Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men -- the balance wheel of the social machinery."
Horace Mann, pioneering American educator, 1848

"In America, education is still the great equalizer."
Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, 2011

BOSTON - When Puritan settlers established America's first public school here in 1635, they planted the seed of a national ideal: that education should serve as the country's "great equalizer."

Americans came to believe over time that education could ensure that all children of any class had a shot at success. And if any state should be able to make that belief a reality, it was Massachusetts.

The Bay State is home to America's oldest school, Boston Latin, and its oldest college, Harvard. It was the first state to appoint an education secretary, Horace Mann, who penned the "equalizer" motto in 1848. Today, Massachusetts has the country's greatest concentration of elite private colleges, and its students place first in nationwide Department of Education rankings.

Yet over the past 20 years, America's best-educated state also has experienced the country's second-biggest increase in income inequality, according to a Reuters analysis of U.S. Census data. As the gap between rich and poor widens in the world's richest nation, America's best-educated state is among those leading the way.

Desafio intelectual

Nas origens da burrice ocidental

Olavo de CarvalhoJornal do Brasil, 15 de junho de 2006

Um dos paradoxos inaugurais dos tempos modernos está na facilidade sonsa com que a parte pensante da Europa aceitou os dois princípios da mecânica newtoniana -- a eternidade do movimento e a lei de inércia -- sem parar por um instante sequer para notar que eram mutuamente contraditórios...

  O problema com a física de Newton é que, quando um sujeito aceita uma tese autocontraditória como se fosse uma verdade definitiva, a contradição não percebida se refugia no inconsciente e danifica toda a inteligência lógica do infeliz. Newton não espalhou só o ateísmo pela cultura ocidental: espalhou o vírus de uma burrice formidável. Uma parcela da elite intelectual já se curou, mas a percepção da realidade pelas massas (incluindo a massa universitária de micro-intelectuais) continua doente de newtonismo. A quantidade de tolices que isso explica é tão infinita quanto o universo de Newton.

Fonte

Carvalho sobre Obama, o Brasil e a elite mundial

Olavo de Carvalho explica o mundo de hoje (em Português):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjAHwZQlLP0

História escondida - a guerra de Paraguay

Paraguay - The never-ending war
"... The war, known in Paraguay as the “War of ’70” or the “Great War”, was among the worst military defeats ever inflicted on a modern nation state. According to Thomas Whigham of the University of Georgia, as much as 60% of the population and 90% of Paraguayan men died from combat or, more often, from disease and starvation. Other researchers put the figure considerably lower—but still atrociously high. Federico Franco, Mr Lugo’s successor, recently called the war a “holocaust”. Yet it is little known outside the region. Even in Paraguay its moral ambiguities have caused generations of leaders to shroud it in myth...
According to a rough-and-ready post-war census, just 29,000 males over the age of 15 were left in Paraguay. One observer called the survivors “living skeletons…shockingly mutilated with bullet and sabre wounds”...
The war’s worst atrocity occurred in Piribebuy, 80km (50 miles) east of Asunción by road. There Brazilian troops cut the throats of everyone they could find, and locked the doors to a crowded hospital before setting it alight..."
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História escondida americana - Alco envenado pelo própio governo

Alcool envenado pelo governo americano durante a proibição

The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.

By Deborah Blum|

• 121
• 

Detroit police inspecting a clandestine underground brewery during Prohibition.

It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.

Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Advertisement

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history.
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EUA - custos universátrios e renda

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Almanha - doutorado duro

Alptraum Promotion Doktoranden vor der Pleite

Von Johannes Pennekamp

Dumpinglöhne, Selbstausbeutung und sehr viel Arbeit: Zehntausende deutsche Doktoranden leben in prekären Verhältnissen. Statt sich um den notleidenden Forschernachwuchs zu kümmern, setzen die Universitäten auf Prestigeprojekte. Jetzt regt sich Widerstand.
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Reino Unido - advogado sem estudar

An apprenticeship will soon match all a degree has to offer

New routes are rapidly opening into valuable and highly paid professional careers 

By Matthew Hancock

7:12PM GMT 27 Dec 2012

Over the past few years, a small revolution has taken place in the number and quantity of apprenticeships in Britain. This year marks the 650th anniversary of the first recorded apprentices, which were described as an unruly bunch by Chaucer. But until recently, apprenticeships were associated with an old model of heavy manufacturing that was in decline. They were seen simply as a route into a narrow range of jobs.

Yet recently the number of apprenticeships has boomed, with more than a million begun since the election. This is essential in tackling the skills shortage we currently have across a range of sectors, including plumbing and engineering. It will enable more people to progress in work.

Crucially, the quality of apprenticeships has been improving, too. In manufacturing, companies such as Rolls-Royce, Marshalls and BAE provide world-beating training within their apprenticeships.

Now we want to go further, offering apprenticeships instead of university, as a route into the professions including insurance, accounting, and law.
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Estados Unidos - bancarotta por estudar

Parents Snared in $100 Billion College Debt Trap Risk Retirement

By Janet Lorin

Federally backed educational loans to parents, at an estimated $100 billion, make up 10 percent of the $1 trillion in educational loans, according to data analyzed by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of the website FinAid.org. The problem is more acute at some private schools, such as Colgate University, Trinity College and Sarah Lawrence College, which have smaller endowments and can’t offer the same financial aid as Harvard and Princeton universities.

‘Robbing Their Future’

“Parents are facing an economic crisis because they are borrowing too much for college,” said Rick Darvis, executive director of the National Institute of Certified College Planners. “They’re sacrificing their current lifestyle and robbing their future retirement.”
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Korea - não estude, trabalhe!

Skip College Is Top Advice for World-Beating Koreans: Jobs

By Sangwon Yoon

Kim Hye Min boasts a 4.0 grade- point average at one of South Korea’s top colleges, a perfect score in English proficiency and internships at Samsung Card Co. (029780) and AT Kearney Inc. All of her 20 job applications were rejected.
“A degree from a good university used to guarantee a spot at least at a top 10 company, but that was when a college degree actually meant something,” Kim, 25, said on Aug. 28, as she walked to a Chinese lesson she’s taking to boost her chance of joining one of the nation’s most prestigious employers. “I studied hard and did everything right, but there are too many of us who did.”
With almost three out of four high school students going to college in an effort to get a top-paying job in one of the leading industrial groups, known as chaebols, South Korea is being flooded with more college graduates than it needs. Its 30 biggest companies hired 260,000 of them last year, leaving another 60,000 to swell the youth unemployment rate to 6.4 percent in August, more than twice the national average.
The government’s response is a U-turn from decades of increasingly competitive and expensive education that made South Korea No. 1 in the world for academic qualifications. President Lee Myung Bak’s new message to many high-school students is: Skip college and go to work.
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Let it out

Researchers Marcus Mund and Kristin Mitte at the University of Jena in Germany claim that the latest findings may explain why the hotheaded Italians and Spanish live almost two years longer than the cool English who "keep calm and carry on".
They found that exhibiting self-restraint and holding back negative emotions could have serious repercussions for a person's physical and mental well-being.

Read more at http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/13650/20121226/expressing-anger-add-two-years-person-lifespan.htm#yMkhEqBwuvAlouUM.99

O pior político do século XX

Winston Churchill never should have issued a guaranty to Poland in 1939, which led to war when Germany invaded Poland. As esteemed American diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote: “the British guaranty to Poland … was neither necessary nor wise.” The British and French didn’t have the power to save Poland from Germany. Churchill’s foolish guaranty only benefited Stalin, who was happy to see Germany, France, and Britain destroying one another. Stalin had killed millions of his own people in his vast system of prison camps and the engineered famine of 1932-1933 (the Holodomor). Churchill I think should be singled out as the single worst decision-maker of the century. As First Lord of the Admiralty he energetically banged the drums for war as Britain pondered whether to enter World War I. Churchill also deserves a great deal of blame for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer oversaw the catastrophic return of Britain to the gold standard, which helped bring about the Great Depression.
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Brasil - país de lombadas burocráticas

Taxation & Bureaucracy: Whether you are an investor, and especially if you are an entrepreneur, this is no doubt a major downside and one of the more challenging aspects of doing business in Brazil.
The Brazilian tax system is heavy, hugely cumbersome, and at times very unclear, resulting in unknown liabilities.
Labor costs are very high both on hiring and firing, and the legislation is inflexible and hardly supportive of entrepreneurship.
Take for example a recent decision by a major multinational company to block email distribution to its workforce in non-working hours and on vacations, after having lost a an ‘overtime’ labor suit for this reason.
Imagine the potential liabilities, and restrictions to productivity, of such a legal decision(!)
Brazil is laden with these ‘mines’ and unfortunately considerable time has to be spent dealing with bureaucracy rather than building great businesses.
This ends Part I, and to sum-up: Brazil’s potential is massive. At the same time, the current challenges and shortcomings must be embraced and tackled one-by-one, both on the individual level of each start-up, and as a community as a whole.
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O poder de pensamento negativo

The Power of Negative Thinking

Both ancient philosophy and modern psychology suggest that darker thoughts can make us happier

"... both ancient philosophy and contemporary psychology point to an alternative: a counterintuitive approach that might be termed "the negative path to happiness." This approach helps to explain some puzzles, such as the fact that citizens of more economically insecure countries often report greater happiness than citizens of wealthier ones. Or that many successful businesspeople reject the idea of setting firm goals.
One pioneer of the "negative path" was the New York psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who died in 2007. He rediscovered a key insight of the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome: that sometimes the best way to address an uncertain future is to focus not on the best-case scenario but on the worst..."
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Martin Heidegger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvyspxZFSSs

Che Guevara

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUJKNBH0RhI

A voz do povo mesmo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6w4p5Rc3bw

Revoluções científicas

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty

Matthew C. Rees

Fifty years ago, Thomas Kuhn, then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, released a thin volume entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn challenged the traditional view of science as an accumulation of objective facts toward an ever more truthful understanding of nature. Instead, he argued, what scientists discover depends to a large extent on the sorts of questions they ask, which in turn depend in part on scientists’ philosophical commitments. Sometimes, the dominant scientific way of looking at the world becomes obviously riddled with problems; this can provoke radical and irreversible scientific revolutions that Kuhn dubbed “paradigm shifts” — introducing a term that has been much used and abused. Paradigm shifts interrupt the linear progression of knowledge by changing how scientists view the world, the questions they ask of it, and the tools they use to understand it. Since scientists’ worldview after a paradigm shift is so radically different from the one that came before, the two cannot be compared according to a mutual conception of reality. Kuhn concluded that the path of science through these revolutions is not necessarily toward truth but merely away from previous error.
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Join the revolution

Join the Thiel fellowship
http://www.thielfellowship.org/become-a-fellow/

Super poder

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRyN9vHbhZE

Desejos para o ano novo

"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride"
English proverb

Natureza humana, moralidade e violencia

Steven Pinker explica:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFDJJ1KydgE&feature=player_embedded

O Brasil como ele é?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7VYB_Orklg

2012 - Publicações

Publicações 2012 de A. P. MUELLER
 Central Banking - What Is It Good For?Mises Institute Canada
November 12, 2012The Economics of the Fiscal CliffFinancial Sense
November 8, 2012Storm Warnings for your Money WealthFinancial Sense
November 1, 2012Quantitative Easing - Folly or Method?Financial Sense
October 5, 2012Centro de Economia
Aplicada da UFSBoletim de Conjuntura
Outubro
Julho
Abril 

 2012 - O ano em retrospectivaOrdem Livre
12/2012A lenda do multiplicador fiscalOrdem Livre
11/2012O pesadelo da dívida públicaOrdem Livre
11/2012A política monetária americana no caminho para a hiperinflação?10/2012
Por que austríacos lecionam
em universidades
públicas(junto com Fabio
Barbieri e Ubiratan Jorge Iorio)
Instituto Mises Brasil
10/2012
As raízes do estado intervencionista moderno09/2012O capitalismo de estado entra na bancarrota08/2012Does Europe Need a New Marshall Plan?Financial Sense
7/2012O mito do Plano Marshall7/2012O Brasil no voo da galinha6/2012O triunfo do estado-babá5/2012A função do sistema de preços4/2012The Continental Economic Curreny ReviewWorld Economic Outlook
July 2012The Continental Economics Currency ReviewWorld Economic OutlookApril 2012Inflation Targeting Hits the Wall02/20122012 - World Economic OutlookThe Continental Economics
Institute Currency Review
12/2011Políticas de metas de inflação são a causa dos problemas, e não a solução02/2012What's Behind the Euro Crisis and How Will it End?12/2011What's Behind the Currency War? Feb 2011

"The Origin of the Crisis", Back on the Road to Serfdom. The Resurgence of Statism,
ed. by Thomas E. Woods,
ISI, Washington, DC, 2011O que está por trás da guerra cambial?02/2011
O mito do Plano Marshall7/2012O Brasil no voo da galinha6/2012O triunfo do estado-babá5/2012A função do sistema de preços4/2012Capital, dinheiro e crises econômicas3/2012Dinheiro e juros na perspectiva da Escola Austríaca2/2012Crescimento econômico sem milagres
1/2012

O futuro segundo Tyler Cowan

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Cowen is right that technology is a driver of inequality and, as countries become more unequal, there will be more jobs for those who can get the rich to buy stuff. But if the future is about manipulation, I’m not sure this is a good thing. “That’s a value-laden way of putting it”, he says. “Take your own How To Spend It: that’s marketing, is it manipulative? If it tried to manipulate me, it failed.” You’re not susceptible to a $30,000 watch, I say. “This watch cost about $60 and works just fine. Part of the thing about being an infovore is spending your money more effectively.”
I suggest that inefficient consumption is also a case for progressive taxation. Cowen is more sceptical: “To balance our budgets, taxes on the wealthy will go up. It’s a fait accompli. But you also have a lot of the wealthy who give to charity and use the internet to give far more efficiently.” Inequality is not a bad thing per se, he suggests later. “At some point we’ll arrive at a future where a lot of people have stagnant real incomes but they won’t count as poor in the contemporary sense. You will neither be correct to say that they are well-off – but they will have a lot of free stuff, not much money in the bank.”

A revolução sueca

Private healthcare: the lessons from Sweden

The UK centre right has looked on enviously as Sweden has privatised much of its health service in recent years

Despite its reputation as a leftwing utopia, Sweden is now a laboratory for rightwing radicalism. Over the past 15 years a coalition of liberals and conservatives has brought in for-profit free schools in education, has sliced welfare to pay off the deficit and has privatised large parts of the health service.
Their success is envied by the centre right in Britain. Despite predictions of doom, Sweden's economy continues to grow and its pro-business coalition has remained in power since 2006. The last election was the first time since the war that a centre-right government had been re-elected after serving a full term.
As the state has been shrunk, the private sector has moved in. Göran Dahlgren, a former head civil servant at the Swedish department of health and a visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, says that "almost all welfare services are now owned by private equity firms".
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Europa selvagem

The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years...
The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century’s most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation. In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over. Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed. Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved. Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe. Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities. Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.
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Europa comunista

In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Leia mais

2012

2012 – O ano em retrospectiva

Por Antony Mueller·

Quando nos aproximamos o final do ano verificamos que 2012 foi um ano em que muito aconteceu na economia e na política, mas pouco mudou. Houve uma campanha feroz nas eleições presidenciais nos Estados Unidos e depois tudo ficou como antes. China instalou um novo corpo governamental e ainda é difícil identificar a diferença entre a nova administração e a velha. Quase todos os dias ao longo 2012 a crise da dívida europeia apareceu nas noticias, mas hoje, no final do ano, a situação nem é melhor nem pior do que no início do ano. Da mesma forma, a situação da dívida dos Estados Unidos é tão grave como no início de 2012, sem muita melhora da economia ao longo do ano. Todo se posiciona, assim parece, para grandes mudanças em 2013...
Leia mais

Revolução educacional

The audacity of Udacity: Google’s Sebastian Thrun vs. elite university diplomas.

By Zachary Caceres - July 9, 2012

Education start-up Udacity is disrupting higher education in all the right places.
Last year, Stanford professor, Google vice-president, and engineer Sebastian Thrun ran an experiment. He opened one of his classes to the world by putting his lectures and course content online.
160,000 students later, Thrun deemed the experiment a resounding success. He promptly resigned and started Udacity, an independent education company whose stated mission is to “democratize education”.
Sebastian Thrun is the brains behind Google’s self-driving car. He marries his desire to help people with a “disrespect for authority” (which is a nice shorthand for the RSE philosophy).

Sebastian Thrun photo by Forbes.

Other new projects, like Harvard and MIT’s edX have opened Ivy League courses to the world, but Thrun is striking deeper. He’s challenging the foundation of elite education itself: credentialism.
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2012 - O ano em retrospectiva

21/12/2012

2012 – O ano em retrospectiva

Antony Mueller

Quando nos aproximamos o final do ano verificamos que 2012 foi um ano em que muito aconteceu na economia e na política, mas pouco mudou. Houve uma campanha feroz nas eleições presidenciais nos Estados Unidos e depois tudo ficou como …

Leia mais...

"Orderly and humane"

Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized and helped to carry out the forced relocation of German speakers from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable—between 12,000,000 and 14,000,000 civilians, most of them women and children—and the losses horrifying—at least 500,000 people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, while locked in trains en route, or after arriving in Germany exhausted, malnourished, and homeless. This book is the first in any language to tell the full story of this immense man-made catastrophe.
Based mainly on archival records of the countries that carried out the forced migrations and of the international humanitarian organizations that tried but failed to prevent the disastrous results, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War is an authoritative and objective account. It examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the expulsions were conceived, planned, and executed and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The book is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call "ethnic cleansing," and it may also be the most significant untold story of the Second World War.
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História escondida

Orderly and Humane?

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012 by Peter Hitchen posted in History, Socialism, Trade.

Reprinted from Peter Hichen’s Blog at U.K. Mail Online

Some time ago I decided to write a book about the damaging and deluded cult of national victory which has done this country so much damage since 1945. No doubt it will receive the usual mixture of abuse and silence which most of my books receive. But I shall write it anyway, as it seems to me to be a truth urgently in need of being expressed, especially as we shall soon be marking the 70^th anniversary of the end of the supposedly ‘Good’ Second World War. It is now possible to have more-or-less grown-up attitudes towards the First World War, whose last remaining justification – that it was ‘The War to End All Wars’ – crumbled into dust and spiders’ webs in September 1939. But the 1939-45 conflict is still wreathed in delusions, delusions often employed to try to justify modern wars which are alleged to have comparably ‘good’ aims.
The belief in its goodness is in fact ludicrous. Our main ally (rejected at the beginning with lofty scorn, embraced later with desperate, insincere enthusiasm) was one of the most murderous tyrants in human history, whose slave empire we helped him to extend and consolidate, and to whom we afterwards handed thousands of victims, to whom we owed at least a life, though we knew he would murder them.
Our purpose in joining the war was not only not achieved, but the country whose independence we claimed to be ‘saving’ sank under successive waves of horror, cruelty, lawlessness, murder and despotism, to emerge 60 years later and many miles from where it had been when we ‘rescued’ it.

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Geneaologia da teoria econômica

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A ilusão da justiça social

From Firing Line, William F Buckley Jr hosts a discussion on social justice with George Roche III (Hillsdale College) and Noble Laureate economist F. A. Hayek.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnMd40dqBlQ&feature=player_embedded

Ensio por lucro

The Irrational Fear of For-Profit Education

Government is biased against commercial school operators, despite often better results

BY FREDERICK M. HESS

McGraw-Hill recently announced plans to sell its education publishing division to Apollo Global Management for $2.5 billion. The deal is a reminder that K-12 schooling is a $600 billion-a-year business. In 2008, schools and systems spent $22 billion on transportation, $20 billion on food services and even $1 billion on pencils.
These transactions typically elicit only yawns. Yet angry cries of "privatization" greet the relatively modest number of reform-minded, for-profit providers that offer tutoring or charter-school options to kids trapped in lousy schools. Gallup surveys show that more than 75% of Americans are comfortable with for-profit provision of transportation and ...
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O falso deus da modernidade

A LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW ESSAY

WORSHIPPING NATIONS By Richard A. Koenigsberg, Library of Social Science

Gentile, Emilio. Politics as Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 194 pp. $52.50 U.S. (cloth) ISBN 9780691113937.

Emilio Gentile. Politics as Religion(Princeton University Press) EMILIO GENTILE, Professor of Modern History at the University of Rome, an internationally renowned authority on fascism and totalitarianism, argues that politics over the past two centuries has often taken on the features of religion, defining the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life. Secular political entities such as the nation, state, class, and party became the focus of myths, rituals, and commandments and gradually became objects of faith, loyalty, and reverence. Politics as Religion is available through Amazon at discounted rates. Click here for information on how to purchase from Amazon.com Emilio Gentile defines political religion as a “more or less developed system of beliefs, myths, rituals and symbols” that creates an aura of sacredness around an entity belonging to the world and “turns it into a cult or object of worship or devotion.” “Gods” are one class of entities that human beings worship. However, other objects become sacred within societies. One such entity worshipped in the modern world—inspiring a cult of devotion—is the Nation-State. The state may appear as an “enthralling and awe-inspiring power that invokes a feeling of absolute dependency.” MAIS

Insituições

INSTITUTIONS AND CREDIBLE COMMITMENT
by
Douglass C. North
Washington University, St. Louis*
In this essay I intend to assess the road we have
travelled in the ten years since the first conference on
Institutional Economics with the objectives of suggesting
where we should go from here. The suggestions will be
personal reflecting both my special interests as an economic
historian and my undoubtedly subjective perceptions of the
road we have travelled and of an agenda of research.
The title of my essay gives away the key questions that
I believe we must answer. How have economies in the past
developed institutions that have provided the credible
commitment that has enabled more complex contracting to be
realized; and what lessons can we derive from that
experience that will be of value today in the on going
process of building or rebuilding economies?
The issue is straightforward: how to bind the players
to agreements across space and time.
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Picasso

Brasil pensador

No "O Futuro do Pensamento Brasileiro", OdC cita 4 pessoas como sendo os grandes intelectuais do Brasil:
1. Mario Ferreira dos Santos.
2. Otto Maria Carpeaux
3. Miguel Reale
4. Gilberto Freire

Universidade tradicional

Reitor e servidores da UFRJ são denunciados por desvio de R$ 50 milhõesFavoritar

Acusados vão responder pelos crimes de formação de quadrilha, peculato e por dispensa indevida de licitação

17/12/2012 - 18h00 | O Globo

RIO - O reitor da a Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Carlos Antonio Levi da Conceição, o presidente da Fundação Universitária José Bonifácio (FUJB), Raymundo de Oliveira, e mais três pessoas foram denunciados pelo Ministério Público Federal (MPF) pelo desvio de mais de R$ 50 milhões dos cofres públicos. Eles vão responder pelos crimes de formação de quadrilha, peculato e por dispensa indevida de licitação. A denúncia foi encaminhada à 7ª Vara Federal do Rio pelos procuradores Neide Cardoso de Oliveira e Eduardo André Lopes Pinto. Os acusados já haviam sido indiciados por improbidade administrativa, conforme reportagem divulgada pelo Fantástico no dia 18 de novembro.
De acordo com MPF, os recursos desviados são decorrentes de dois convênios, que somavam R$ 9,3 milhões, e de um contrato no valor de R$ 43,5 milhões celebrados entre a UFRJ e o Banco do Brasil, com anuência da FUJB.
Ainda segundo o MPF, tanto os convênios quanto o contrato foram realizados mediante a cobrança de uma indevida taxa de administração, pela Fundação, e sem licitação.
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O novo consumidor

Der Kunde ist ein Kaiser Die neue Macht des Verbrauchers

17.12.2012 · Die Beratungskompetenz beim Einkauf ist in das Internet abgewandert. In der „Hyper-Connected World“ versammeln sich alle Verbraucher zum Kaffeekränzchen - und bekommen neue Macht.

Von Carsten Knop
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A nova universidade

Ex-Stanford-Professor Thrun "Die Uni nutzt Methoden wie vor tausend Jahren"

Getty Images

Er war Professor an der US-Eliteschmiede Stanford - doch Sebastian Thrun, Experte für Künstliche Intelligenz, hat genug vom alten Uni-Geschäft. Im Interview erklärt er, warum er nur noch über eine Web-Plattform lehren will und was Hochschulen mit Ex-Freundinnen gemeinsam haben.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Herr Thrun, Sie haben ihre Professorenstelle in Stanford aufgegeben und möchten nun mit der Online-Universität Udacity die Hochschulbildung verändern. Wie haben Sie das bitteschön Ihren Kollegen erklärt?

Thrun: Viele meiner Kollegen möchten auch online unterrichten, würden dafür aber nicht unbedingt die Uni verlassen. Stanford-Professor zu sein ist eine schöne Sache. Aber es ist wie bei einem Bergsteiger: Das Klettern macht immer mehr Spaß, als auf dem Gipfel zu stehen.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Sie sind gegen eine Ausbildung nur für Eliten, gegen teure Studiengebühren und halten Noten für einen Fehler im Bildungssystem. Warum geht einer wie Sie überhaupt an eine elitäre Uni wie Stanford?
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O novo caminho de publicar

Kindle Direct Publishing Newsletter

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KDP is Available in Brazil, Canada and Japan We are excited to help authors publish their books in their native country and language. KDP authors can reach readers directly on Amazon.com.br, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.co.jp and make their books available in the new Kindle Stores using KDP. Expand your Reach - Make your books available in any of the KDP supported languages and in more than 175 countries worldwide, including all Kindle stores globally. Earn up to 70% Royalties – You’ll be eligible to earn up to 70% royalty for your book sales, in Canada, and only if you enroll your titles in KDP Select for Brazil and Japan. More Flexible Pricing – You can adjust your book’s list price in these new markets. Visit your Bookshelf to review your preferences today. Check out the New KDP sites: kdp.amazon.com.br, kdp.amazon.ca, kdp.amazon.co.jp.