Poland-embracing Europe but not the Euro!

By Michael Birnbaum, Washington Post, March 19, 2012

WARSAW—Here in Poland, where dreary communist-style apartment blocks still dominate the landscape, the euro was once hailed as a fast-track ticket to the economic big league.
Now, after years of problems in the euro zone, Poles have realized that the big league ticket was in their pockets all along. Their own currency, the zloty, has buffered Poland from the turbulence surrounding it, and few here are in any rush to adopt the euro, even though Poland agreed to do so when it joined the European Union in 2004.
The euro, currently shared by 17 of the 27 E.U. countries, used to be a status symbol of economic success, endowing those who gave up their pesetas and lire with cheap borrowing and quick growth. Today it’s a burden, and Europe’s debt crisis has turned upside down old assumptions about the benefits of wider integration.
In Greece, whose weakness is at the heart of Europe’s troubles, policymakers privately say they never should have adopted the euro but are now trapped, with the economic consequences of leaving the currency more perilous than the pain of staying on. Other euro members rue having to contribute to the bailouts that are propping up Portugal and Ireland as well as Greece, and resent that giant Germany is calling many of the shots.
Newer E.U. members that have not yet adopted the euro, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, are no longer lining up to do so. In 2008, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk trumpeted that his country would join the euro zone in 2011; now the diminishing enthusiasm for the idea makes the prospect so remote that few policymakers will hazard a guess about when it might happen.
“It’s not a simple decision, and for the time being in Poland, it’s not under discussion,” said Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, the prime minister’s top economic adviser. “We Poles are now maybe a little more pragmatic than before. We were historically very romantic.”
With 38 million people, Poland is the largest E.U. country besides Britain not to use the euro. Boosted by the strength of the zloty, its economy is the fastest-growing among the E.U.’s 27 countries, with robust exports and a burgeoning consumer sector. It is on track to continue on that path, with growth forecast at 2.5 percent this year, even as its peers on the euro sink into yet another recession.
Poles who are wary about joining the euro see lessons in others’ misfortune. They say that Greece’s economic struggles are compounded by being locked into the euro zone, because it can’t devalue its currency in a way that would draw investors and tourists. They look especially cautiously at Slovakia and Estonia, two other former communist countries that did adopt the euro—and now have to chip in for the bailouts of richer countries.
And some Poles say they just prefer their pastel-hued zloty bank notes, which are reminiscent of Poland’s finely engraved Easter eggs, to the bland, generic feel of euros, whose designers slapped fictional bridges and buildings on them to avoid favoring any one country.
In Warsaw’s hardscrabble Praga neighborhood, Artur and Elzbieta Zawadzki have run a clothing store and gallery for 33 years. From their stoop they watched Poland’s debt crisis in 1981, the hyperinflation that came with the market economy at the end of communism and the gyrations of the zloty since. They prefer what they have now to what the euro might bring.
“The euro would make prices go up,” said Artur Zawadzki, 58. “And it would hurt little firms” such as his, he said, where three small storefronts are packed full of ceramics, quirky sculptures and clothing, all made in Poland. Staying on the zloty keeps the products cheap for tourists and brings in money for the artisans who make them. If Poland went on the euro and prices rose, business wouldn’t be as good, Zawadzki said.
“The Czech Republic doesn’t have the euro, but Slovakia does,” he said. “And it has problems. It’s a poor country. Poland will wait and watch.”

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The Death of Cash--Sweden Leads the Way!

By Malin Rising, Associated Press, Mar 17, 2012

Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in 1661. Now it’s come farther than most on the path toward getting rid of them.
“I can’t see why we should be printing bank notes at all anymore,” says Bjoern Ulvaeus, former member of 1970’s pop group ABBA, and a vocal proponent for a world without cash.
The contours of such a society are starting to take shape in this high-tech nation, frustrating those who prefer coins and bills over digital money.
In most Swedish cities, public buses don’t accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices—which make money on electronic transactions—have stopped handling cash altogether.
“There are towns where it isn’t at all possible anymore to enter a bank and use cash,” complains Curt Persson, chairman of Sweden’s National Pensioners’ Organization.
He says that’s a problem for elderly people in rural areas who don’t have credit cards or don’t know how to use them to withdraw cash.
The decline of cash is noticeable even in houses of worship, like the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, where Vicar Johan Tyrberg recently installed a card reader to make it easier for worshippers to make offerings.
“People came up to me several times and said they didn’t have cash but would still like to donate money,” Tyrberg says.
Bills and coins represent only 3 percent of Sweden’s economy, compared to an average of 9 percent in the eurozone and 7 percent in the U.S., according to the Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella organization for the world’s central banks.
Three percent is still too much if you ask Ulvaeus. A cashless society may seem like an odd cause for someone who made a fortune on “Money, Money, Money” and other ABBA hits, but for Ulvaeus it’s a matter of security.
After his son was robbed for the third time he started advocating a faster transition to a fully digital economy, if only to make life harder for thieves.
“If there were no cash, what would they do?” says Ulvaeus, 66.
The Swedish Bankers’ Association says the shrinkage of the cash economy is already making an impact in crime statistics.
The number of bank robberies in Sweden plunged from 110 in 2008 to 16 in 2011—the lowest level since it started keeping records 30 years ago. It says robberies of security transports are also down.
“Less cash in circulation makes things safer, both for the staff that handle cash, but also of course for the public,” says Par Karlsson, a security expert at the organization.
The prevalence of electronic transactions—and the digital trail they generate—also helps explain why Sweden has less of a problem with graft than countries with a stronger cash culture, such as Italy or Greece, says economics professor Friedrich Schneider of the Johannes Kepler University in Austria.
“If people use more cards, they are less involved in shadow economy activities,” says Schneider, an expert on underground economies.
In Italy—where cash has been a common means of avoiding value-added tax and hiding profits from the taxman—Prime Minister Mario Monti in December put forward measures to limit cash transactions to payments under €1,000 ($1,300), down from €2,500 before.
The flip side is the risk of cybercrimes. According to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention the number of computerized fraud cases, including skimming, surged to nearly 20,000 in 2011 from 3,304 in 2000.
Oscar Swartz, the founder of Sweden’s first Internet provider, Banhof, says a digital economy also raises privacy issues because of the electronic trail of transactions. He supports the idea of phasing out cash, but says other anonymous payment methods need to be introduced instead.
“One should be able to send money and donate money to different organizations without being traced every time,” he says.
Most experts don’t expect cash to disappear anytime soon, but that its proportion of the economy will continue to decline as such payment options become available. Before retiring as deputy governor of Sweden’s central bank, Lars Nyberg said last year that cash will survive “like the crocodile, even though it may be forced to see its habitat gradually cut back.”
Andrea Wramfelt, whose bowling alley in the southern city of Landskrona stopped accepting cash in 2010, makes a bolder prediction: She believes coins and notes will cease to exist in Sweden within 20 years.
“Personally I think this is what people should expect in the future,” she says.
But there are pockets of resistance. Hanna Celik, whose family owns a newspaper kiosk in a Stockholm shopping mall, says the digital economy is all about banks seeking bigger earnings.
Celik says he gets charged about 5 Swedish kronor ($0.80) for every credit card transaction, and a law passed by the Swedish Parliament prevents him from passing on that charge to consumers.
“That stinks,” he says. “For them (the banks), this is a very good way to earn a lot of money, that’s what it’s all about. They make huge profits.”

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Youth Turned Off by Religion and Politics!

Napp Nazworth, Christian Post, Mar. 19, 2012

Young people are turning away from churches because they associate Christianity with Republican politics, a study reveals.
Political science Professors David Campbell (University of Notre Dame) and Robert Putnam (Harvard University) published their findings, “God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Religion and Politics Is Bad for Both,” in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs. Campbell and Putnam also wrote American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010), which was recently released in paperback.
One of the most surprising findings from the data they collected, Campbell said in a March 13 interview with The Christian Post, was that people are driven away or toward religious involvement because of their political leanings. In particular, those who are politically conservative, or Republican, are more likely to become churchgoers and those that are politically liberal, or Democratic, are more likely to turn away from religion.
This is the opposite of previous understandings of the interaction of religion and politics. Social scientists believed that people first got involved in a particular religion, which then influenced their politics in some way. Increasingly, more studies like Campbell and Putnam’s are finding, though, that politics is more likely to determine religion than religion determine politics.
Campbell likes to use the image of a “brand” from marketing. The Republican brand has been increasingly associated with religion and social conservatism due to the influence of the Christian Right, a social movement which has been a part of the Republican coalition since the 1980s. Moderates and Democrats are uncomfortable with that brand and seek to not be identified with it.
“A lot of what goes on in politics is not so much people thinking through political positions but it’s sort of a visceral reaction you have to a brand, whether it be Republicans or Democrats,” Campbell said.
Political conservatives and Republicans, who identify positively with the brand, have been more likely to attend church regularly. Campbell suspects that is due to conservatives being more likely to associate with other churchgoers in their social networks.
“You’re a conservative, you’re around people who are churchgoing, so you begin to adopt the idea that, well, this is what it means to be someone who is conservative, I ought to attend church regularly, I also think of myself as religious,” Campbell explained.
While these trends were found in the general population, Campbell and Putnam found them to be much stronger among young adults, those under 30, and especially those under 25.
“Anything you might say about the general population, double it or square it when you talk about the young,” Campbell said.
Since young voters are more likely to be politically liberal, especially on the issue of gay rights, they have been driven away from the church by the perception of a close association between religion and Republican politics.
To young adults, Campbell and Putnam write, “‘religion’ means ‘Republican,’ ‘intolerant,’ and ‘homophobic.’ Since those traits do not represent their views, they do not see themselves—or wish to be seen by their peers—as religious.”
Campbell and Putnam report that between 2006 and 2011, the proportion of the population that reported having no religion rose modestly, from 17 percent to 19 percent, but among young Americans rose five times as much.
While it has been true that young people of previous generations have been less interested in religion, then become more religious as they become older, today’s generation of young adults are more likely than previous generations of young adults to be without a religious affiliation. About one-third of 20-somethings were without religion in 2011 compared to about one-fourth of 20-somethings in 2006.
Campbell noted that the trends he and Putnam identified are mostly among those who can be described as “nominally” religious. Those who are the least committed to a church or denomination are the ones who are most likely to drop out. When they do drop out, they are not likely to become atheists. Formerly churchgoing young adults remain comfortable with a belief in God but uncomfortable with organized religion.
“The reason this is important for clergy is these are not people who are lost completely to religion. It’s almost like they’re an untapped constituency, or untapped market, that could be brought back to a different kind of religion, or a religion that they thought was stripped of politics,” Campbell argued.

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How to find photos you can use legally!- Flickr

By Dave Johnson, CBS MoneyWatch, March 19, 2012

No matter what you publish—a blog, updates to the company website, project reports, or even the venerable tri-fold—you no doubt need artwork to complement it. Most people run to the Internet in search of photos and clip art, since those images are free and easily accessed. But a lot of those resources are copyrighted. That’s easy to avoid, though, if you know how and where to look for the right kind of images.
In a nutshell, you should look for photos and other images which have a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is the name of a non-profit organization that has developed a number of licenses, all available for free, to help artists share their work.
Here’s the most important take-away: In general, a Creative Commons license allows you to re-use the image in your own work.
There are actually a handful of conditions that can be attached to a Creative Commons license. The artist can choose to allow or prohibit commercial use of their work, allow it to be modified, and they might impose a “share alike” condition. Essentially, that means that anyone who re-modifies the image must also publish that new work under the same Creative Common license.
So, how do you find these photos that have Creative Commons licenses?
Well, thankfully, the Internet is awash in photos with Creative Commons licenses, but the single best place to look is the photo-sharing site Flickr, which makes it easy for people to license their photos as Creative Commons. For example, when I need to finds a photo online for this blog, I always head directly to Flickr’s search page and select both “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” and “Find content to use commercially.”
Another powerful alternative is the excellent CCFinder. This free program is a Creative Commons-licensed photo search engine that you can use to find any sort of photo by keyword, and then visit the web page it lives on or download the image directly.

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He Touched Me!

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Hide Thou Me- testimony of Calvin Newton

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Testimony of Jessie Dixon!

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Because He Lives!

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I Can`t Even Walk!

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Streams that Never Run Dry!

By Virginia Brandt Berg

How sweet the memory as a child, when disappointments came
My mother’s faith and courage sweet, that put my own to shame.
For in the time of trouble deep, my faith would weaken sore,
While hers just seemed to thrive on trials and only grow the more.
And then it was I’d hear her say as my doubts took to wings,
“Why, God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.”

But, after years, I wandered from the shrine at mother’s knee:
For seeming wise and learned men had clearly shown to me
That such a simple, childlike faith was now quite obsolete,
Belonging just to ages past; today, for fools ’twas meet.
“All this,” they said, “is only myth, and from gross ignorance springs,
That God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.”

Their way seemed well in weather fair, but Oh! when troubles came
It didn’t meet the need at all; ’twas such a futile game.
“Now just hold on,” the scoffer said. “There’s nothing else to do.”
But that was just the trouble when there was naught to hold on to.
For I had lost the simple faith that such assurance brings,
That God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.

So I turned back with eager heart to the old-fashioned way;
And now I know that God is real, no matter what they say.
For better proof could not be had than truly answered prayer,
And answered too in such a way as to know God is there.
And where is greater happiness than the peace that this truth brings
That God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.

I can never forget the day when it dawned upon my consciousness as a reality, a fact, that the promises of the Bible were practical and could actually be applied to my everyday needs. It was a revelation to me. I had been taught the Bible since earliest childhood, but never had I realized that God meant exactly what He said in the numerous promises given in His Word, and that He would fulfill them to the very letter if faith would reach out and claim them in a definite manner.

God’s Word says, “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.”1

So it is a very serious matter to either overlook or look lightly at the promises of God, because by these we become “partakers of the divine nature.” I would never have dared to take a promise and step out on it, expecting God to really meet me, for to my limited faith they were only beautiful scripture language, never meant to be taken seriously or for practical application. I fear I was like the woman who was asked, “Well, why do you think God put all these promises in His Word? What are they for?”

“Why, just to fill up space,” I suppose.

I believe, however, if I had thought about it at all, I was more like the very ignorant Scottish woman who had lived most of her life way back in the hill country of Scotland, who was so poor she was unable to pay her rent and so had to depend upon her church to take care of it for her.

One day when her pastor, a very kind-hearted man, brought the rent to her, he said, “Mrs. McKintrick, you will pardon me if I speak very plainly to you about something, and I am sure you will understand. Your friends who are helping you with the rent cannot understand why it is that your boy does not support you. I understand he has a very good position in Australia, and that he is a good boy and loves you dearly. Is this not the case?”

“Oh yes,” said the mother, “and he never forgets me, for every week he writes me the most loving letter. I would like for you to see one of his letters.” Curious to know more of such a son, who could so love a mother and yet leave her without support, the pastor instantly signified that he would be glad to hear some of the letters. Soon the woman returned with two packages, one of which she put in the pastor’s hands and said, “These are his letters.” The pastor was untying the faded string about them when she said, “With every letter he always sends me a pretty picture. They aren’t very big, and just fit nicely in the letter, but it shows he thinks about me.”

The pastor lifted his head, interested at once. “A picture in every letter.” He was more curious than ever. “May I see them also?”

“Oh, surely,” she answered, “some are of a man’s head, some of a man sitting on a horse, and a number of them have the king’s picture on them. See, this one here has the King of England; long live the king!”

“Long live your son,” said the astonished pastor. “My dear friend, do you know that you are a rich woman? These are banknotes. This is money. Why, you have wealth here; and to think of how you have suffered and done without, when right here in the house all the time you had riches and thought they were just pretty pictures.”

This was surely my trouble when it came to the promises in God’s Word. I thought they were just pretty pictures, just beautiful language. For instance, Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters.” To me this was just beautiful poetry, a picture story. I never dreamed for a moment that it had a literal application—that Jesus would be to us just such a shepherd and fulfill every verse of that Psalm, if we really trusted Him.

What a pity that so many today look upon the hundreds of promises in God’s Word in the same manner. How few there are who are like the other dear saint of God in whose home the minister was taking tea. While she was in the kitchen, he picked up her much-worn Bible and rather absently began to turn the leaves, when he noticed here and there along the margin these two letters: T.P. When she came back with the tea he said, “Auntie, I was enjoying looking at your Bible, but what do these letters mean that you have written here in so many places? T.P., and here it is again, T.P.”

“Oh, brother,” she said, her face lighting with joy. “That means tried and proven. In the time of some great need I have taken those promises and claimed them as my very own. They are the ones that I have tried and proven true.”

How precious, indeed, and that’s exactly the way the Lord intends us to use them. He wants us to prove His Word, to use it in our time of need. “Prove Me now herewith, saith the Lord,”2 until with strength, faith, and sweet confidence we can write on the margin beside many a verse, “tried and proven.”

God’s Word says, “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises,” and there are hundreds of them. Abundant supply! Limitless resources! “Streams that never run dry.” “Let us go in and possess the land,” or we will be like the thick-headed Israelites for whom God had made such large provision, and yet they never inherited the promise because of their unbelief.

“This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.”

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