I had no idea I ♥ the devil. Including Baha’i, little ol’ me fits into six of the categories. Can you beat that? Do you ♥ the devil more?

Boy, that's a lot of hate. About the only thing this person seems to love is Jesus... and' apostrophes'.

Bonus points if you can tell us what P.K. stands for in Jeebus-speak.

Oh and before I forget… McCain ‘08!!

The Iranian economy is primarily based on its fossil fuels. According to the Iranian Central Bank, oil and gas exports accounted for $82 billion in the first quarter of this year. Non energy related exports accounted for only $15.6 billion which comes from mostly pistachios and woven carpets. The energy revenue is about to shrink considerably as oil prices have fallen in international markets from $147 a barrel to $65 a barrel.

A perfect storm is headed towards this teetering economy. Not only will a lower crude oil and natural gas price mean lower revenues for the IRI but a retrenching world economy will mean that Iran’s already thinly stretched trade relationship with the outside world will be strained even more, leaving the economy even more precariously dependent on diminishing petrodollars. As well, the lack of refining capacity means that Iran will have to continue to pay for refined fuel to be imported from Turkey at relatively stable prices. This will further squeeze the economy as their own raw material expenses will be relatively unchanged. Iranians have lived with extremely cheap fuel for their whole lives, paying 3-4 cents a liter. If the government tries to end the subsidies and pass on the real expense of the fuel, there will be an overnight riot engulfing the whole country.
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Here are the 99 most prominent words within Baha’u'llah’s Hidden Words (both Arabic and Persian):

The Hidden Words are the essence of Baha’u'llah’s teachings. The distillation of God’s commandments, eternal. Unchanging.

Lovely words. Wouldn’t mind having that on my wall as a reminder. Hmmm… it seems to be mostly about you (me… you know what I mean!). Not the other guy, or the gal walking down the street.

How does it make you feel?

Since we had discussed this point before in The Challenge of Homosexuality, Dawkins take on things was rather surprising:

Imagine the following newspaper headline: ‘Scientists discover that homosexuality is caused.’ Obviously this is not news at all; it is trivial. Everything is caused. To say that homosexuality is caused by genes is more interesting, and it has the aesthetic merit of discomforting politically-inspired bores, but it doesn’t say more than my trivial headline does about the irrevocability of homosexuality.

You can read the whole essay here (it is only 3 pages).

Every Thursday at dusk, members of one of Iran’s most beleaguered religious minorities gather at Tehran’s railway station. With anxious, teary eyes, they are there to see off relatives and fellow Baha’is who have decided to pull up stakes forever and take the 8 p.m. train to a new life in Turkey and beyond.

Click on any picture to launch gallery view (then click right/left edge for next/previous):

One of the travelers says:

For the next five or six months I kept trying to talk her out of it, but in the end it was I who gave up, because I realized she was right in coming to this decision. But believe me, even now all my heart and soul belongs to Iran.

While I do not mean to diminish the sadness that is understandable for anyone who leaves their homeland, family and friends behind, I find such extreme sentiments a little bit surprising from a fellow Baha’i.

After all, didn’t Baha’u'llah say:

Let not a man glory in this, that he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind.

From the account of Professor Edward G. Browne, of the University of Cambridge.

With thanks to Sen McGlinn for the article.

To celebrate this and to “deliberate on its exigencies” the Universal House of Justice today called for 41 regional conferences to be held around the world. Check the map to see if your city is on the list. Each of the regional conferences will have 2 ITC counsellors as representatives of the UHJ. And Baha’is wonder why there is a revolving door between the two administrative bodies!

To see the document full page click on the top leftmost button (looks like a rectangle within a darker rectangle). You can also find the document here UHJ Calls for Regional Conferences (October 2008) along with all the other neat stuff uploaded there.

Here is a map showing all of them:

Thanks to Jackdaw’s Corner.

In the last 5 years or so property prices particularly in the US started going up; this was stimulated by clever people creating new types of financial institutes that got around government rules about financial institutes needing a certain reserve ratio (amount to be kept in cash). This happened in various countries but more so in the U.S. because there the regulations were less stringent. Since the economy was flourishing, and even though experts in the field could see where this would lead, in such a climate no government would want to insist on tighter regulations – this would be very unpopular.

So we have this bubble of buying and selling – even ordinary people, re-mortgaging their houses for that extra cash to spend on something. It makes sense. You see an opportunity and you take it.

What makes this unstable is when what is borrowed is close to what is the value of a property, because property prices always fluctuate. At some point, sooner or later, experts involved in this buying and selling are going to realise that this bubble will break and so they stop buying and selling. When they do, other experts recognize what is coming and do the same. Now the time for a property to sell takes longer and so there is less cash in movement. It hits institutions (banks / financial institutions) first because they can’t move their money to repay loans.

There was also a stock market bubble, stimulated by interest rates being low. Governments kept interest rates low because this stimulates economic rate. This is a good thing but usually inflation starts to happen (a chain reaction of wages going up, things costing more to buy and so money having less buying power) and this is a warning governments usually see in time and then solve, by raising interest rates. This time inflation was well under control (so interests rates remained low); perhaps the efficiency of new technologies and globalisation (imported cheap products) masked or compensated for the inflation that usually goes with strong growth, but this is a guess.

What is of interest is how governments have responded to this.

The U.S. response was to give credit and to buy mortgages, instead of buying bank shares. Buying mortgages involves more administration and doesn’t punish the shareholders who are mainly to blame for the problem in the financial institutions to start with. Shareholders control how financial institutions work. Where the government buys newly issued bank shares, it means that shareholders lose part of their stake (influence on how the company works and the profits). The U.S. response, -buying mortgages- means that there is no future restriction nor punishment for the irresponsible fat cats (the majority shareholders). They have no interest in being prudent since they didn’t suffer, and are likely to repeat this in the future. Government-owned shares promote more prudent actions, but, yes, in terms of politicking, this is called socialism and that’s most likely the reason that the U.S. didn’t take the approach the U.K. government took. Today on the BBC radio (October 14th) it was announced that the U.S. is considering buying shares in the nine largest banks, whether they need it or not. If this goes through now shareholders of banks who were responsible will be punished along with the irresponsible ones.

A friend posed these questions:

“What would be a “Baha’i” solution to the problem, and here I mean more than the very general ideal of the elimination of the extremes of wealth and poverty and more to the point of how is this ideal to be accomplished?

Is a form of “world socialism” the answer?

Does free market capitalism as we know it have to be fundamentally changed, and if so, will the wealthy of the world ever agree to such?

To my way of thinking the failure of Marxist ideology was more than just the misuse of its ideals by tyrants such as Stalin and Mao. It was also the fact that individuals are more concerned with their own well-being (family and close relatives etc.) than with the well-being of the people they do not know or have contact with. How much are people willing to sacrifice individually for the good of the group, especially when the group is the size of humanity?”

What do you think?