Christoph Rehage's hairy video

Christoph Rehage's hairy video an internet hit
Adventurer Christoph Rehage filmed the growth of his beard and hair during a year-long trek / Christoph Rehage (www.thelongestway.com) This guy is awesome!

Snaptu: Why are black people turning to Islam? | Richard Reddie

Some are following their heroes, others looking for meaning in their lives. One thing's for sure – the numbers are growing

Black conversion or...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/05/black-muslims-islam

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Burgers and private equity

For two days running, the NYT has given us epic explanations of how the sausage of modern American capitalism is made. First, on Sunday, came Michael Moss's harrowing tale of where the burger that paralyzed Stephanie Smith came from:The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled "American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties." Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.Then, in today's paper, there's Julie Creswell's harrowing tale of how a succession of private equity firms paralyzed Simmons Bedding Company:Every step along the way, the buyers put Simmons deeper into debt. The financiers borrowed more and more money to pay ever higher prices for the company, enabling each previous owner to cash out profitably.But the load weighed down an otherwise healthy company. Today, Simmons owes $1.3 billion, compared with just $164 million in 1991, when it began to become a Wall Street version of "Flip This House.
At this point it seems worth pointing out that sausage-making is usually kind of unpleasant (it isn't always; I went to a sausage-making party at a friend's house in Brooklyn a couple years ago and that was pretty great), and that—considering how many hamburgers are consumed in the U.S. and how many private-equity takeovers there have been—the fact that sometimes things haven't worked out so great isn't proof that either the burger business or private equity is irredeemably nasty.But in each article, something stood out that struck as especially unpleasant and unwise. In the burger epic, it was that some big meat suppliers have a habit of cutting off customers who demand to test their product for E. coli before accepting it. In the private equity tale, it was the sense that the whole Simmons saga had in the end been about nothing more than sucking wealth out of an organization and concentrating it in fewer and fewer hands. Neither of those seem like sustainable practices.
http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2009/10/05/burgers-and-private-equity/
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Is Manufacturing Overcapacity a Threat to the Global Recovery?

The half-decade before the financial crisis was a go-go time for the global economy. Consumption reached unprecedented heights; so did oil prices and shipping rates. And that frantic buying and selling was a boon for manufacturing. As U.S. consumers flexed their credit cards on flat-panel TVs and video games, factories sprouted around the world to make all the stuff crammed into their SUVs. But amid the recession, spending has shrunk dramatically, as debt-laden U.S. consumers are learning to save -- and those factories have a lot less to do. During the downturn, the rates at which industrial capacity was being utilized in the U.S. and Japan, the world's two largest economies, plummeted to the lowest levels on record. In China, the world's workshop, tens of thousands of factories making mostly low-end merchandise have shut down.A slowdown on the world's assembly lines is a normal part of any recession. As demand shrinks, so must production. But now that the recession is easing, there is considerable debate among economists about whether manufacturers will be re-hiring workers and restarting assembly lines any time soon. Despite aggressive downsizing by industries such as auto manufacturing over the last 18 months, there are fears that the world remains stuck with so much excess production capacity that any recovery will be anemic, plagued by deflationary pressures, high unemployment and ailing bank loan portfolios. "Unless we deal with the excess capacity situation, we will have a protracted crisis that will continue to wreak havoc on all countries," warned World Bank chief economist Justin Lin in a July speech.

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http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1928261,00.html
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More Republicans for Obamacare

Okay, maybe it's not enough to call a groundswell. But after former Majority Leader Bill Frist told me last Friday that he would end up voting for the bill were he still in Congress (with some caveats about the shortcomings of the legislative language as it now stands), we've heard from some other GOP voices in support of the basic contours of Barack Obama's health care reform effort: Bush Administration HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who ran as a Republican, but who is now an independent)* and Mark McClellan, who ran both the Food and Drug Administration and the Medicare and Medicaid programs under George W. Bush.But what was more striking, in its own way, was this op-ed yesterday by Louisana Governor Bobby Jindal, making what the headline described as a "conservative case" for health reform. Why? Because much of what Jindal calls for is in the legislation, as Washington and Lee University Law Professor Timothy Stoltzfus Jost notes here.

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http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/10/06/more-republicans-for-obamacare/
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