Street Sex Workers in Bangladesh are Very Mobile

-Mohammad Khairul Alam-
-Executive Director-
-Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foundation-
-24/3 M. C. Roy Lane-
-Dhaka-1211, Bangladesh-
rainbowngo@gmail.com
www.newsletter.com.bd
Tell: 880-2-8628908
Mobile: 01722344997

Asia has one of the fastest rates of spread of HIV/AIDS infection in the world. At present, HIV/AIDS infection is still virtually nonexistent amongst most of these populations in Bangladesh. But it is extremely likely that once it is initiated, it will spread rapidly through these extended networks of risk. Prostitutes exist at significant levels in Bangladesh, India and Philippines, and condom use is minimal in these areas. In Bangladesh, sex workers in brothels as well as on the streets report rather high client turnover, by Asian standards. Sex workers contact around 19 clients per week on average and the ratio for the street workers is reported to be between 12 and 16 in different cities. Consistent use of condom is one of the lowest in the South Asia region.

The social exclusion of sex workers exacerbates the situation of the more vulnerable groups among them, such as minors, drug users, ethnic minorities or migrants, and finally the people who are under the total control of pimps and/or traffickers. All these groups face the pressure of repressive legislation, which often excludes them from the legal, social and health care facilities available to the general population. A prerequisite for the social inclusion of sex workers, including the above-mentioned groups, is the recognition and protection of their human and civil rights, irrespective of issues if they are migrant, local, drug-using or homosexual people.

Many women and girls from rural areas in developing countries feel it is their duty to migrate to urban areas to lessen the impoverished condition of their family. Some of them leave their familiar environment and live in the cities without much support. Theses women and girls who migrate are highly vulnerable to sexual exploitation, abuse or violence. This is where they are often exposed to high-risk situations for which they are not prepared to save themselves. These circumstances of instability and vulnerability often leave these female migrants easy prey to sexual exploitation and also very much vulnerable to HIV as a result.

Street sex workers in Bangladesh are very mobile. They typically work in one place for around a year before moving on to another location. In a survey conducted in Dhaka city by Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foundation (2007), Floating/street sex workers interviewed were predominantly adolescent, illiterate, poor who come from rural areas. Street sex workers are at a heightened risk for acquiring HIV due to the fact that they go through multiple sexual contacts per night and rarely care about consistent use of condoms. Street sex workers, especially those new to the sex worker chain, are also very much vulnerable to HIV infection during their first six months of sex work, when they have minimal bargaining authority.

Due to the nature of their business – often as street gangs, overlooked by pimps – they are also a difficult group to educate and to be reached. Some NGOs, like the Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foundation, have initiated livelihood training, through which they hope to provide these street girls with an alternative to prostitution. Consisting of education and awareness building programs in schools at the target areas, reaching out to students aged 15 and above, these programs are designed to give an overview of Reproductive Health, safe sexuality, STDs and HIV/AIDS awareness. But many of the street girls who end up on the training center at a very early age – 12 to14 years, would probably not benefit from the training program because there is a good chance that they might dropout from such program due to their frequent ratio of migration.

Behavioral change of men is essential to prevent unprotected sex as well as protecting commercial sex workers from physical violence. Because of their multiple sex partners and potential for HIV transmission through unprotected sex, sex workers are considered one of the highest risk groups for HIV. The Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foundation found that floating sex workers with an average one year’s experience attend five clients per week. They work in diverse locations at night, most commonly in gardens, parks and terminal place, and also in the streets and markets. Many sex workers are faced with more immediate problems such as instability, loss of family environment, forced sex, violence, and social exclusion. Judging by all these aspects, this group does not emerge on a high position in our list of priorities to work with, because they are less likely to be found as a group.

Source: Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foundation, UNAIDS, CARE, UNICEF

by Iqbal Tareen

So called “Free media” in Pakistan is still in its infancy. Members and owners of the Pakistani media carry huge burden of predisposed opinions and ideas about various political issues and political parties. High percentage of owners and journalists alike seem to muscle their power to pursue personal, political and business objectives.

To some extent it is true about the developed nations including USA. The difference is the highest degree of people’s access to information through alternative media and through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). Other than Presidential elections, the politics in USA is more local and so is local media, which constitutes the core of communications.

Other than war, economy, and immigration no issue takes a central stage in American politics. Foreign policy issues become hyperactive only when Western countries are engaged in war or active conflict with other nation/s. Other than major political decisions, politics in developing countries does not drive day to day life of their citizens.

In contrast, in Pakistan along with many developing countries in Asia, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South America there is very little that politics does not drive. Some states would like to determine how their citizens behave in the privacy of their bedrooms. Due to un-quenching thirst of power, rulers in developing countries hate decentralization because they prefer to rule from the top.

Media Moguls also become power maniacs. They blackmail, fabricate stories, feed to the public frenzy instead of providing both sides of story.

It is this upside down system that makes government a big daddy and first and the last resort of providing relief to the people in developing countries. With unlimited state power and huge gap between the power of bullet and power of ballot people in developing countries will continue living under the darkest clouds of corruption and power abuse.

All above creates a live Molotov cocktail when mixing of religion and state provides a needed ignition.

I have a bad news my friends. No one but yourself is responsible for your demise. Take control of your destiny and refuse to take it from spin doctors and Hippocrates anymore. Cut through the chase to bring their game to an end. Don’t let them govern you in the name of Pakistan or in the name of Islam. Focus on your rights to pursue better life for yourself and your children. Yesterday’ s philosophies and religions are today’s common sense.

Take everything with grain of salt when it comes from the media, mullah, or a politician. Trust your instincts.

Right now all rightists organizations including fascist organization like MQM and Military picked media hounds are staging a parliamentary coup against a representative government. Is PPP regime corrupt, the answer may be yes, But you are not choosing between angels and an evil. You are being forced chose between a government manufactured in GHQ and the one sent by the masses.

I have never been a member of PPP nor do I have any connection with its ruling leadership. I knew Mohtarma Benazir Bhtto and I have been supporting democracy and peoples rule in Pakistan since 1968. A few people I know in PPP are not on a favorite list of Mr. Zardari. But let us look at the big picture and not gripe about a few strokes of a brush.

The main difference between PPP and other political parties is simple. PPP’s program focuses on taking care of ordinary people whereas other will tell you to “go take care of yourself”

Your foes know how to pick the side.

Do you?

By: Satya Sivaraman

Courtesy: Himal Southasian, August 2009

The rampant, often-frivolous use of antibiotics over the past half-century has made us dramatically more vulnerable today. A looming catastrophe … one our planet faces due to long-term human intervention in the natural world … the impacts of which are already being felt … though the real damage lies ahead, the issue could be ameliorated through urgent action to bring about policy and behavioural changes. Surely we are talking about global warming, the hot issue on everyone’s minds these days? No, in fact we are referring to an equally significant though vastly under-discussed threat confronting the world today: antibiotic resistance, the phenomenon of bacteria becoming immune to antibiotic medication.

While global warming is all about the damage wrought to macro-ecosystems by human excess, antibiotic resistance is the story of what we have done over the decades to the world’s micro-ecosystems. It is about the ways in which our entire planet seems to be developing resistance to the presence and activities of the human beings living on it, in the ways in which the largely invisible world of bacteria and viruses have become resistant to our attempts to control them. In other words, while global warming threatens to bring the skies down upon our heads, antibiotic resistance, silent and faceless, is crumbling the ground beneath our feet.

In fact, the problem of antibiotic resistance has been around since the historic discovery of penicillin – the so-called miracle drug – by Alexander Fleming in 1928. Penicillin came into mass production in 1943, and since then numerous classes of increasingly powerful antibiotics have been developed. Prior to Fleming’s discovery, people commonly died of a variety of bacterial infections; by conquering these, antibiotics were quickly established as the cornerstone of modern medicine. Today, from heart surgeries to organ transplants, no major surgical procedure is possible without the use of antibiotics to keep infections under control.

Yet within years of the introduction of penicillin, medical practitioners had already begun to notice that whatever bacterium the drug was supposed to eliminate was beginning to develop resistance. Over time, these bacteria increasingly refused to surrender and die off so easily. While this resistance was initially overcome by the discovery of new and more-powerful antibiotics, today we are faced with a situation in which almost all antibiotics in use have been matched by resistant bacteria. “The growing phenomenon of bacterial resistance is now threatening to take us back to a pre-antibiotic era,” says Otto Cars, an infectious-diseases specialist at Uppsala University, in Sweden. Without effective treatment and the prevention of bacterial infections, Cars warns, we risk rolling back some of the most important achievements of modern medicine.

Irrational, unmonitored

Resistance is a natural biological outcome of antibiotic use. The more we use these drugs, the more we increase the speed of emergence and selection of resistant bacteria, which in turn require newer and more-powerful drugs to control them. Meanwhile, the almost overwhelming complexity of factors influencing antibiotic consumption includes cultural conceptions, patient demands, diagnostic uncertainty, economic incentives, the level of training among health staff and pharmacists, as well as advertising to prescribers, consumers and providers from the pharmaceutical industry.

Studies from some developing countries show that several antibiotics tend to be prescribed at each consultation. The use of broad-spectrum antibiotic agents, as a substitute for precise diagnostics or to enhance the likelihood of therapeutic success, increases the chances of resistant bacteria emerging. In addition, counterfeit and substandard drugs contribute to sub-optimal concentrations of antibiotics, failing to control bacterial populations that are considered a risk factor for developing resistance. Today, it is estimated that over half of all antibiotics worldwide are purchased privately without prescriptions, from pharmacies and even street vendors. “While antibiotics have saved lives when rationally used, they have also resulted in serious adverse affects like producing resistant strains of bacteria, which have unfortunately remained unmonitored,” says Dr Mira Shiva, a veteran public-health activist based in New Delhi. She says the adverse affect of the irrational use of antibiotics has not only created problems for individual patients, but also for the community in general.

Following their success in human beings, antibiotics have also increasingly been used to treat and prevent diseases in animals, fish and plants. Perhaps more importantly, small, sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics have also been shown to have growth-enhancing effects, and thus for decades have been intensively used in animal-rearing practices. In Europe till a few years ago and North America even today, antibiotic use in the livestock sector constitutes half of total consumption. In addition, according to a study conducted in 1987, more than 90 percent of the drugs used on animals in the US were being administered without veterinary consultation. And whether the patient is animal or human, the effects of such indiscriminate and unmonitored use is very similar. Emerging multi-resistant bacteria from farm animals or antibiotic pollution are then transmitted to humans mainly through the food chain or by direct contact.

Indeed, much antibiotic resistance has come about due to inadvertent ingestion. A potent example comes from earlier this year, when a group of Swedish researchers published findings of their 2006-2007 study of treated wastewater outside Patancheru, an industrial estate in the Indian city of Hyderabad. The water, flowing from the over 90 generic drug factories operating in the estate, contained some of the highest concentrations of antibiotics and other medicines ever found – anywhere in the world. The concentration of pharmaceuticals found in wastewater downstream from the Indian plants, for example, was 150 times the highest levels detected in the US. The Swedish team found 100 pounds of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin alone running down the Iskavagu stream every day. This was a potentially serious situation, given that the villagers use the water for agriculture, and livestock drink from the stream. The surrounding communities could easily become an intense laboratory for the growth and spread of resistant bacteria.

There is inadequate data on antibiotic resistance in Southasia today. However, it is estimated that a large proportion of the over one million young children and infants who currently die of respiratory diseases every year might have been affected by resistant strains of bacteria. Diarrhoea is another major killer in South Asia; in the 1980s, over a thousand deaths took place in West Bengal due to the emergence of resistance to common antibiotics against the diarrhoea-causing bacteria Shigella. Likewise, a few years back stool samples from nearly 8200 individuals in four slums of Karachi, collected as part of a surveillance study, also showed the presence of highly resistant strains of Shigella in almost 400 patients. Up to 89 percent of these were found to be resistant to commonly used antibiotics such as cotrimoxazole and ampicillin. This is no small point: Shigella is now recognised as a major public-health problem in developing countries, with the majority of cases and deaths occurring among children less than five years of age.

The burden of antibiotic resistance is also becoming significant in high-income countries such as England and Wales. Here, researchers have found that the ten times increase in deaths between 1993 and 2005 associated with infections with the common bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, which can lead to blood poisoning and prevent the healing of wounds, was almost completely caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). A recent survey in the US likewise found that, every year, 126,000 patients are hospitalised with MRSA infections, of whom about 5000 eventually die from the bacterium. Treatment and care for these patients is thought to cost more than USD 4 billion every year.

Potent commons

For many years, society’s medical needs for antibacterial drugs were met by the pharmaceutical industry, and the apparent symbiosis between the interests of the community and those of the industry prevailed. Today, we see a completely different scenario. While existing antibiotics are losing their effect at an alarming pace, the development of new antibiotics is declining. Resistance to antibiotics frequently leads to resistance to the whole class of drugs; thus new classes of drugs are required to treat resistant bacteria, not just new drugs in existing classes.

More than a dozen new classes of antibiotics were developed during the 1930s through the 1960s. Since then, however, there have only been two new classes developed. In the four years between 1983 and 1987, drug companies created 16 new antibiotics; but from 1998 until 2002, only seven new ones were created. Currently, antibacterial drugs constitute only 1.6 percent of all the drugs being developed. This contrasts to 5.4 percent of the pipeline that is dedicated to antiviral drugs.

According to a fact sheet produced by group Action on Antibiotic Resistance, pharmaceutical companies are not researching and producing new classes of antibiotics for several reasons. Among these: drug discovery for chronic diseases is more favourable because long-term treatment generates more revenue than the short-term treatment of antibiotics; and a large number of old antibiotics already exist, resulting in a high level of therapeutic competition for newly developed drugs. Research-and-development programmes focus on broad-spectrum antibiotics, which may be counter to public-health efforts to encourage ‘narrow spectrum’ use of such drugs.

Apart from new drugs, there is also a sore lack of efficient and affordable diagnostics, particularly in the developing world, as again, this is an area pharmaceutical companies do not find very profitable. With high-enough sensitivity and specificity to distinguish bacterial from viral diseases, and to identify resistance patterns in bacteria, such diagnostics would significantly help to reduce inappropriate antibiotic use and minimise delay to effective therapy, thereby saving lives.

Meanwhile, even as the knowledge of antibiotic resistance is continually increasing, the gap between what is known and what is done widens. “Although the essential components of control of antibiotic resistance have been well known for long, there has only been limited success in changing policies and efficiently responding to the problem,” researchers wrote recently in the British Medical Journal. In 1998, the World Health Assembly adopted a resolution urging the member states to take action on the problem of antimicrobial resistance. Two years later, the World Health Organisation (WHO) urged a massive effort to prevent the “health care catastrophe of tomorrow”, and shortly thereafter presented a global strategy for the containment of antimicrobial resistance, calling for a multidisciplinary and coordinated approach to the problem. However, sufficient financial and human resources were never provided. In 2005, member states initiated a new resolution to strengthen the WHO’s leadership role in containing antimicrobial resistance, but again very little has taken place since then to implement the resolution.

Part of the problem is the fact that although international collective action and coordination is essential, responsibility for health remains predominantly national. In many settings, major roadblocks for evaluating and implementing interventions are linked to both the poverty of patients and weak public-health systems. Also, few proven mechanisms exist for resistance control, and almost none have been developed for implementation in low-income countries. Measures that are routinely recommended to contain antibiotic resistance include regulation of over-the-counter sales of antibiotics, more cautious prescribing by clinicians, better compliance with treatment guidelines by patients, avoiding antibiotic pollution in the environment, improved hospital hygiene, prevention of infectious diseases and overall strengthening of public-health systems.

A key part of solving the problem of antibiotic resistance will be to find ways in which both to curb the needless use of antibiotics and to regulate their sales. In this situation, both patients and doctors are at fault: patients often demand antibiotics even when do not really need them, and doctors often hand them out without giving much thought to the long-term consequences. “Patients need information and knowledge to reduce expectations of antibiotics for minor infections, and physicians need better diagnostic tools to help improve their treatment decisions,” says Dr Sujit Chandy, of the Department of Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacology at Christian Medical College, Vellore.

Particularly in the Southasian context, there is also a need to target the thousands of unregulated, informal pharmacies that constitute the source of antibiotics for a large section of the population. Until the infrastructure to efficiently abolish unsanctioned drug distribution becomes available, informal distributors need to be engaged in some way to curb sales of antibiotics and their excessive use. In addition, far more emphasis is required on the prevention of infectious diseases. Investments in solving basic problems – lack of safe drinking water, poor nutrition and dysfunctional sanitation – would go a long way towards curbing the needless use of antibiotics as quick-fix solutions to avoidable diseases (see box, “Bacteria control, Kerala-style”).

Within the medical world and particularly in the field of microbiology, there is today consensus building that we need a fundamentally changed view of the use of antibiotics. At one level, antibiotics constitute a powerful tool that must be looked upon as a common good, wherein the individual’s choice to use an antibiotic will affect the possibility of effectively treating bacterial infections for others. Antibiotic effectiveness can be thought of as a natural resource, like fisheries or forests, in that it is accessible to anyone who can purchase it. Yet all antibiotic use, appropriate or not, ‘uses up’ some of the effectiveness of that antibiotic, thus specifically diminishing our ability to use it in the future.

At the same time, many veteran microbiologists are now arguing that bacteria can no longer be looked upon as ‘enemies’ to be ‘vanquished’ with antibiotics. Apart from being impossible to achieve – as evidenced also from the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance – this warlike approach is also counterproductive. New understandings that are emerging of the microbial world are today giving startling insights into the sheer scale and importance of microbes to human evolution and survival as a species (see box, “Micro-organisms are the good guys”). The future may indeed lie in finding a way for human beings to discern better ways to navigate their way through the ocean of microbes in which we live – and, ultimately, to strike a critical balance between their own protection and bacterial resistance.

Satya Sivaraman is a writer, journalist and filmmaker based in New Delhi.

Source – http://www.himalmag.com/Resisting-resistance_nw3214.html

Here’s the link I so eagerly prOmised yesterday.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/p236cb

Hopefully you like it (no one is reading leon. This is sent to pretty much just you!!)

It’ll only take 5mins to download and is free of course. Enjoy.

A CONTROVERSIAL energy drink called ‘Cocaine’ and billed overseas as being more than three times stronger than Red Bull has gone on sale in Australia.

While the drink does not contain any actual cocaine, the US and UK versions have 280mg of caffeine for every 250ml can – a concentration that is illegal in Australia and New Zealand.

Local distributors say Cocaine Energy Drink is being targeted at young people in a marketing ploy that has been roundly condemned overseas.

“Cocaine is synonymous with energy,” John Mancini from Wize Distributors told news.com.au.

“People over 30 or 40 have got a different view (of the word), but to anyone between 16 and 30, they go ‘I’ll try that’.”

But Paul Dillon from Drug and Alcohol Research and Training Australia said it was abhorrent that people were trading on such a controversial name.

“I find it despicable that people are importing these sorts of products,” Mr Dillon said

“Something like this that is out there attracting attention is going to be more appealing for a certain group.”

Over the past fortnight, several shipments of the drink – originally advertised as a legal alternative to drug of the same name – have arrived from New Zealand and cans are being sold across Sydney’s western suburbs.

The Australian version of the drink contains just 80mg of caffeine per can to comply with regulations.

A spokeswoman for Food Standards Australia said that as long as the amount of caffeine in Cocaine adhered to regulations and the cans contained correct labelling, the product was legal.

The spokeswoman for Food Standards Australia said that as long as the amount of caffeine in Cocaine adhered to regulations and the cans contained correct labelling, the product was legal..

At the time New York, a city councillor called for a boycott of the drink.

“There are only two reasons that you would seek to use this infamous and insidious name to market your so-called energy drink,” councillor James Sanders said. “Either you are woefully ignorant of the horrors of cocaine addiction, or your god is the dollar bill.”

David Raynes from the UK National Drug Prevention Alliance also criticised the manufacturer soon after the launch.

“It is people exploiting drugs,” Mr Raynes said. “It is a pretty cynical tactic exploiting illegal drugs for their own benefit.

“The fact is that subliminally, it is making the image of drug use cool and that’s what kids what to be, cool.”

The drink was temporarily pulled from shelves in the US after complaints, but has since returned to sale.

www.news.com.au

My Comment :

What ever next !

I would like to see the government take it off the market.

The Distributors  are saying   ” Don’t do the drug – Do the drink “

I say Don’t do either

What a bloody ridiculous name for a drink.

In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb heavily references the narrative fallacy which represents the human tendency to construct stories around facts, regardless of how the story changes the interpretation of the facts, and regardless of whether the final story is true.  In some cases the story actually distorts the facts.  For more information, I strongly suggest reading the book, its worth it.

I suppose I can thank (or curse) Nassim for explaining the narrative fallacy to me because now it appears in my everyday life.  I don’t generally look for it, but my awareness of it makes it stand out like porn: you know it when you see it.

Now I don’t claim to be perfect when it comes to my economic and financial blogging, and I am sure I have made mistakes.  I am also sure that I have misinterpreted facts, and maybe even misquoted them on occasion.  But after all, I’m one guy with a day job, no editor and a wife who’d prefer I spend less time doing this anyway.   And I don’t get paid to do this, ergo read what I write with a grain of salt.  However, when I read stories from paid writers on mainstream financial news services I expect a basic level of understanding economics and finance and at least a strong editing process.  Lord knows I could use a good editor!

In any event all this brings me to an excerpt from a Bloomberg article I just read, an article written by Eric Martin, poor Eric.  The problems I have with the article are in the passages below.  For the record while I am only pasting a section, I am not contextualizing this just to pick on Eric, I don’t know him at all, and nothing prior to this passage or after this passage serves to correct these errors or narrative fallacies.

The S&P 500 slipped 2.3 percent to 825.88 to complete a fourth straight weekly drop, its longest losing streak since July. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 148.15 points, or 1.8 percent, to 8,000.86. The Russell 2000 Index of small U.S. companies declined 2.1 percent.

Benchmark indexes opened higher after the Commerce Department said gross domestic product contracted at a 3.8 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter, less than the 5.5 percent estimated by economists in a survey. Still, the report showed that a buildup of unsold goods helped pare the decrease in gross domestic product.

‘Poor Report’

“It was still a pretty poor report,” said Jeffrey Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial in Boston, which oversees $233 billion. “If prices hadn’t been falling so dramatically, we would have seen an even worse number.”

Yeah, and if you had proofread your own comments I wouldn’t be blogging about it.  So sure, yes, here Eric is quoting a narrative fallacy from Jeffrey Kleintop, so this empty statement is not his own.  Regardless, reading that passage invoked the old expression: “if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle”.  The facts are that 1. prices fell and that 2. the economy slowed less than expected. Right?  Those are the facts, nothing more, nothing less.  Reorder them if you like, make sentences out of them if need be, but please avoid linking them, and definitely avoid adding an arbitrary narrative or causation.

The narrative fallacy here is simply filler for a guy who really has nothing to say, or maybe two guys who have nothing to say.  I’m sorry, I don’t know Jeffrey at all either, which probably makes me the ignorant one here since his current employer, LPL Financial, describes him as “‘Wall Street’s Best and Brightest’ and his market commentary is regularly sought out by national print media and business television and radio.” However I just can’t believe that this was a quote worth passing along. And if that gem was not enough to set me off, it was back to back with this piece of pure frontier gibberish.

Unadjusted for inflation, GDP shrank at a 4.1 percent pace, the most since the first three months of 1958. The drop in so- called nominal growth explains why corporate profits slumped as the year ended.

Please, please, just take a moment before I highlight this one.  Read it again, and if that don’t work, read it another time.  Have you spotted what’s wrong with this one?  Ok there are two, but one is silly.

The real problem I have with this statement is the implication that the “drop in so-called nominal growth” is cited as causation for why corporate earnings (profits) slumped. !@#$^&*!!!

Dude, I am pretty sure that this is Econ 101.  The fall in GDP did not cause profits to slump.  Slumping profits were ultimately a component of the final GDP calculation.  Apparently Eric now thinks GDP is a leading indicator of economic activity.  Man, if this is the trash that gets you to become an acclaimed financial author then please sign me up.  Really, if we have to sift through shit like this to get the news then we are all going to die young.

Ok, and I promised a small bone to pick too.  Why the use of “so-called”?  It makes it sound like we should doubt the use of the word nominal. It’s kind of like a so-called friend who wrecks your car but never offers to pay for the damage.  To be fair to young Eric (I have no idea how old he is, but if he is asking us to question the use of the word nominal next to GDP, then I am just going to assume he is still in his 20’s) “so-called” does have two distinct definitions:

The first definition supports his use since nominal GDP is a popular term, however I think most people would agree that the colloquial use is the latter, creating an element of doubt or distrust. I don’t know, maybe I’m old fashioned, OK I am old fashioned, but it doesn’t seem prudent for a financial reporter to refer to nominal growth in a manner that will generally construe that we are now questioning the basic diction of economics.

Sure we can question the mortgage market, the investment banks, the regulators, the Bush administration, greedy homebuyers, hedge funds, Bernie Madoff and even economists, but should we really question that pesky term “nominal GDP”?

But I digress.

Sources:
So-called
Merriam Webster, Accessed January 30, 2009
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so-called

LPL Financial Services Appoints Jeffrey Kleintop, CFA, Senior Vice President, Chief Market…
Business Wire, March 27 2007, Accessed January 30, 2009
http://www.allbusiness.com/services/business-services/4310209-1.html

U.S. Stocks Drop, Capping Market’s Worst January, on Economy
Eric Martin, Bloomberg, January 30, 2009
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a4DYRS8nD4gM&refer=home

My name is John or you can call me Karl or John or karl or some of my friend call me jok or whatever you want..you can even call me hawnny if u want <3. I was born at the age of 12…. I grew up in my so-called hometown til im old enough…I went to school,studied hard and sucked so hard….,yes I learned it in the hard way . I’m a pretty laid back individual, kind of like happy  go lucky person, who dont give a damn thing about pretty much everything,(in short SLOB) I work in a fast pace environment I like working with other fellaz, im honest and trustworthy guy…….and before I transform this into a resume… I like playing mmo games.. esp. rpg and fps.. they give me a hell outta fun. But yeah I’m a quitter.. I cant play a game more than a month I get bored and tired easily unless the game is really good. and thats the kind of personality that i want to get rid off..yeh it affects my “RL” too if  I have one. Uhm I like music I pretty much listen to any kind of music as long as it sounds pathetic,weak,emotional,crybaby,faggotface, who cry in the corner begging for another cheddar cheese on his bread music…..and im kidding. I like rock,acoustic,mellow,ballad,a lil bit of rap… and etc.
I used to be a sporty type of guy back in the old days O.O. I like competing using my tremendous physical amount of strength…the only problem is I dont have it. I got hooked in baseball.. I joined taekwondo club and yeh I failed. Then I shift my interest to some geeky stuffs…and I kinda living with it till now. I took ACT(whatever that means)in lyceum subic bay back in 2004??not sure. but didnt enjoy it. math killed the living crap out of me and some other issues…(you know college) then I’m currently taking webdesign in moraine valley college and as usual im loosing my interest. I’m thinking of computer tech or game dev in the future.. but i dont know..i hope it’ll work out. Right now I’m looking for a job..yes a job. I need a freaking job a job..not the job you thinking.. A REAL job. where i can earn money not pleasure >.<.

A date? you want to date me? no sorry i refuse.. you cant date an eight yr old kid…i was born at the age of 12 remember?…so sorry..anyway.. that’s all.. Ima add more info about me in the future..astalavistabeybe

Un vieux copain qu on ne voit pas souvent…

Il fait un show ce soir au Festival de Jazz et Egypto se joignera à lui pour 2-3 verses.

MINUIT @ CLUB SODA!!!

 
Le très talentueux So Called nous offre une visite plutôt intimiste de son jardin secret.

J’adore.

So Called – You Are Never Alone

psst, pour la version mp3, c’est ici.

re-psst, tel un patron cherchant les secrets bien enfouis de ces chers employés, j’ai googlé le nom de Benjamin Steiger Levine (réalisateur du clip) et j’ai trouver un autre clip qu’il a réalisé ici.

So Called Myspace
Buy GhettoBlaster