The distance from Bridgeport, Connecticut to Bangkok, Thailand is 8,639 miles. But then, it depends what one means by the word “distance.”As we discovered in the first installment of this GlobalPost Special Report, by some measures there is not much distance at all.

Take the Gini Index, the scale that economists use to measure income equality, with zero equaling perfect equality and 1 representing absolute inequality in which one person owns everything. Thailand, where Bangkok is the bustling capital city of one of Southeast Asia’s fast growing “Tiger economies,” comes in at .536. The Bridgeport area — Fairfield County — is slightly worse at .539. The two places fall very close in their ranking on the Gini Index as highly unequal.

Put more simply, these are cities where you can move, often within minutes, between the wrenching poverty of the dispossessed and the opulence of the super-rich. The physical distance between rich and poor in these places is small. But for the people who live in Bangkok and Bridgeport, traveling from the lower economic rungs to the higher ones is extremely difficult.

That has long been true in the developing world. And in America, which has long lived with the idea of mobility and a belief that all have a shot at the American Dream, it is increasingly difficult, as new economic research reveals.

To explore these issues of global income inequality and its cost, GlobalPost begins today a series of reports by more than 20 reporters, photographers and videographers from every corner of the world. The result of more than six months of reporting and data analysis, the Special Report seeks to match and compare American metropolitan areas with foreign countries that have similar levels of income inequality.

Continue reading this at the Global Post.

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Muslims Enforcing Sharia Law on the streets of London

Happened in White Chapel, London. Mainstream media are silent as usual Spread this video far and wide, First location identified as the Maedah Grill Restaurant,Fieldgate Street in WhiteChapel

Sharia Law: Battlefield London

There’s Islamic leadership tension in Britain – with hardline Muslims trying to enforce Sharia law in London. From abstention to amputation, RT’s Laura Emmett’s been hearing how they want to instill their tough code on the capital.

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The Mysteriously Memorable 20s

Why do we remember more from young adulthood than from any other time of our lives?

Twentysomethings are having a moment. They’re inspiring self-help guides (see Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How To Make the Most of Them Now), hit television shows, Tumblrs-turned-handbooks, and lyrical New Yorker think pieces. What is it about twentysomethings? Robin Henig asked in the New York Times Magazine not too long ago. In part, she was talking about the current crop of young adults. They are dreamy—they have their own fairy tales!—but also deflated and recession-squeezed; peculiarly savvy and adrift, connected and lonely, knowing and naïve. But she was also voicing a perennial obsession. What isit about twentysomethings in general? Why are we so fixated on the no-man’s-land between childhood and stable adulthood?

A little-known but robust line of research shows that there really is something deeply, weirdly meaningful about this period. It plays an outsize role in how we structure our expectations, stories, and memories. The basic finding is this: We remember more events from late adolescence and early adulthood than from any other stage of our lives. This phenomenon is called the reminiscence bump.

Memory researchers have been wrestling with the reminiscence bump since at least the 1980s, when studies began turning up evidence that memory has a peculiar affinity for events that happen during the third decade of life. They still aren’t completely sure what causes us to drench those years with special import, whether it’s the intrinsic qualities of events that happen within that time frame, a consequence of the way our 20-year-old brains encode information, or a recall strategy that arbitrarily favors milestones from our salad days.

Read more at the Slate.

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Apt way to describe our liberal media!

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Reliapundit

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Liberalism versus Blacks

NRO

From minimum-wage laws to gun control, liberal policies hit blacks disproportionately.

By Thomas Sowell

There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?

San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city’s total population has grown.

Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the minimum wage. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum-wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time, but most grow up with only one parent today.

Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities. But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.

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Good Exercise

I came across this exercise suggested for seniors to build muscle strength in the arms and shoulders. It seems so easy, so I thought I’d pass it on. The article suggested doing it three days a week. Begin by standing on a comfortable surface where you have plenty of room on each side.

With a five pound potato sack in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can. Try to reach a full minute, then relax. Each day, you’ll find that you can hold the position for just a bit longer.

After a couple of weeks, move up to a 10 lb. potato sack. Then 50 lb. potato sacks and then eventually try to get to where you can lift a 100 lb. potato sack in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute.

Once you feel confident at that level, put a potato in each of the sacks.

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Biden to NRA: We ‘don’t have the time’ to prosecute people who lie on background checks

During the National Rifle Association’s meeting  with Vice President Joe Biden and the White House gun violence task force, the  vice president said that the administration did not have the time to prosecute  existing gun laws.

Jim Baker, the NRA representative present at the meeting, recalled the  vice president’s words to The Daily Caller: “And to your point, Mr. Baker,  regarding the lack of prosecutions on lying on Form 4473s, we simply don’t  have the time or manpower to prosecute everybody who lies on a form, that checks  a wrong box, that answers a question inaccurately.”

Submitting false information on an ATF Form 4473 — required for the necessary  background check to obtain a firearm — is a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison,  depending on prior convictions and the judge, according to the Bureau of  Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Baker, the NRA’s director of federal affairs, told TheDC that he was given  five minutes to present the NRA’s concerns and the issues they saw as being the  most effective at preventing something like the Newtown, Conn. massacre  from happening again. During those five minutes, he said he brought up the need  to prosecute existing gun laws.

He pointed to the low number of prosecutions for information falsification  and the relatively low felony prosecution rate for gun crimes.

Biden, however, was apparently unmoved by Baker’s ATF Form 4473 concern.

In 2010, prosecutors considered just 22 cases of information falsification,  according to a 2012 report to the Department of Justice by the  Regional Justice Information Service.

Forty additional background check cases ended up before prosecutors for  reasons dealing with unlawful possession. Of the 62 cases that ended up before  prosecutors, just 44 were actually pursued. Over 72,600 applications were denied  on the basis of a background check.

“We think it is problematic when the administration takes lightly the  prosecutions under existing gun laws and yet does not seem to have a problem  promoting a whole host of other gun laws,” Baker told TheDC.

MORE at The Daily Caller

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Only in Texas! Telling you people, nobody messes with Texas!

“You never know who’s sitting in this bank,” said Ed Smith, president of the Chappell Hill Bank. “If you’re coming in to rob it, I think you’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

That’s because the person standing next to you could be packing heat. You see, the Chappell Hill Bank is the first in the nation that actually welcomes legally concealed handguns.

“We’ve been robbed five times,” said Smith, “All of them by Yankees.”

Read it all HERE.

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Bill fails to address key problems, while regulations only a third completed, official says

Securities and Exchange Commissioner Daniel Gallagher blasted the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in a speech to the United States Chamber of Commerce Wednesday afternoon.

“It’s a perfect example of not letting a good crisis go to waste,” Gallagher said. The president signed Dodd-Frank on July 21, 2010. Democrats Sen. Chris Dodd (Conn.) and Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.) have since retired from Congress.

President Barack Obama appointed Gallagher to the SEC in 2011. He assumed office Nov. 7 after the Senate confirmed his appointment.

Gallagher noted Monday, which is Martin Luther King, Jr. day and the president’s inauguration day, is also the two-and-a-half year anniversary of the passage of Dodd-Frank. Gallagher said the bill is yet to be completed despite the length of time since its passage.

“Everybody thinks Dodd-Frank is done, Wall Street’s been reined in, July 2010—it hasn’t happened; we’re a third of the way through” the final regulations, he said.

“The act is a model of the new paradigm of legislation,” he said. “A good concept, in this case regulatory reform, overwhelmed by a grab bag of wish list items.”

Gallagher contrasted what the bill regulates (minerals from the Congo and oil, gas, and mining companies, for example) with what it does not (money market mutual funds, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac).

He said the bill “justifies its mandates as answers but only after asking the wrong questions.”

Gallagher used the Volcker Rule as illustrative of his critiques of the bill, arguing it results in a great increase in regulatory rulemaking as well as misallocation of resources and opportunity costs.

“Like much of the act, the Volcker Rule is a solution in search of a problem,” he said. The Volcker Rule restricts the type of investments in which banks can engage.

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The Bronze Rat….

A Tourist walked into a Chinese curio shop in San Francisco . While looking around at the exotic merchandise, he noticed a very lifelike, life-sized,
bronze statue of a rat. It had no price tag, but was so incredibly striking the tourist decided he must have it. He took it to the old shop owner and asked, “How much for the bronze rat ?”

“No sir,” said the man, “I came back to see if you have a bronze Democrat.

Old joke found HERE.

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