You know how America’s cuisine comes from just about everywhere, and then they Americanize it? 

Chicago is famous for a few things, but particularly meat. I think the meat packing industry was big there? Anyway, deep dish pizza is a Chicago thing, and “Vienna hot dogs” are another Chicago thing. 

So some fun facts. A lot of the stereotypical American foods are actually often German. 

Hot dogs are also called wieners, which makes a lot of children giggle. But “Wien” is the German name for Vienna, and all over the German speaking world there are sausages named after cities or regions where they’re specialized. 

Therefore a “Wiener” is a sausage in the Vienna style, or more specifically it’d be called a Wienerwurst. 

Since Wurst is the word for sausage, that’s why “Wiener Schnitzel” doesn’t actually involve sausages at all. It’s a schnitzel in the Vienna style. 

Americanization takes the emphasis in a weird way. Bratwurst is a white sausage that’s made for frying, or “braten” which is the verb for frying. But in America, the colloquial name is “Brat.” So Americans will ask if you want a Brat, not a Wurst, which makes sense in America but sounds very weird if you know German. 

The more you know. 

From a Facebook friend. 

Now we know what America needs to save itself from economic depression. Rabbits. 

Source? 

I really wish Americans would stop referring to freedom whenever talking about their soldiers. 

Soldiers in any official army are public servants for national defense, which does include defense of national interests in whatever way the government sees fit. That’s pretty much it, and the rest depends on the priorities of the government in each particular country. 

Sometimes American national interests include restricting other people’s freedoms. And in case of domestic emergency, it’s also necessary to restrict the freedoms of Americans. That’s all normal stuff to be expected of any national military. 

So I don’t really see why Americans need to hero worship their soldiers all the time. They’re just soldiers. They do need government support and pensions and all of that, but there’s no need to glorify them at the same time. 

American Exceptionalism

So my Comparative Welfare States class is naturally somewhat Europe focused. This is to be expected because, frankly, Europe has both the widest variety of, and also the most comprehensive welfare states. 

Of course, a somewhat different way of looking at things is that the US, for example, which has a fairly minimal welfare state, just has a different philosophy: that a flexible labour market acts as its own source of welfare: easy employment is the security net for those who falter. 

Anyway, in Europe the vast majority of comprehensive social reform came around the 1960s, pushed along by the various Social Democratic parties. And this is more or less the case from Sweden to France to the UK and to Italy. 

Social Democrat parties are traditionally moderate-left leaning, their original constituencies and strong supporters being industrial working men, who were breadwinners for families which relied on them. And the system was more or less built to support them. 

Today though, it’s a complicated world. The family structure has changed, with more women going to work, and the jobs market has changed too. In Europe and the US fewer and fewer jobs are industrial, more and more are service oriented. 

So the traditional structure of setting up a social support system for an industrial worker who might expect to work in the same company for his entire working life… has changed. For one, service jobs are harder to regulate, since a lot of them are either very education requiring, like waiters. People like waiters also don’t work regular hours, and many won’t have a full time contract, and instead will be part time, or on-call. 

And in most of Europe, just like in the US, part time work doesn’t really grant you any benefits. People like this, who are inconsistently employed, are called the Working Poor. 

This is part of why a lot of the older former industrial workers have shifted their support towards more conservative parties. Although they traditionally supported Social Democrats, who pushed to create their welfare system, the changing nature of these countries’ economies has made them much more conservative. 

After all, that’s what conservative means. They want to preserve the old system. Though that’s not entirely true: they want the world to go back to how it was in the 1960s, when they had it made. And this is part of why they’re also typically against immigration, because all change is threatening to their part of the social order. 

In a way, you could correlate this kind of thing to America. It’s typically pointed out that there are a lot of poor white people who nevertheless vote against their economic interests by voting Republican, since Democrats are usually seen as supporting poor people and Republicans are typically seen as supporting rich people and their businesses. 

In Europe, it’s a resistance against change, against the growing insecurities of the changing world. In America, is it the same?

This is, to me, a non-rhetorical question. I see a lot of people like to answer that it’s a problem of lack of education and easy brainwashing or that “Republicans are just dumb”, but Europeans aren’t too badly educated and many of them still support conservative parties which aren’t necessarily working in their economic interest but are perceived to be. 

‎”The Center for Responsive Politics says that in total, the 2012 election will cost upwards of $6 billion – on advertisements, organizing, and canvassing,” says Ravi Agrawal on GPS. “A large chunk of that amount has been spent on attack ads, with both campaigns engaging in a seemingly never-ending cycle of chest-thumping to prove who is more pro-American.” 

“But what does that do to the people? In an insightful piece in The New York Times, Scott Shane points out that perhaps more than anywhere else in the world “Americans demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.” (Try telling Americans that on child poverty, they rank 34th of 35 economically advanced countries, Shane notes. Or that the very cornerstone of the American Dream – social mobility – is greater in Europe, Australia, and Canada, he adds).”

by Denis G. Campbell and
Charley James

Why is Mitt Romney so confident?

In states where the winner will be decided by less than 10%, of the vote he already knows he will win. This is no tinfoil hat conspiracy. It’s a maths problem. And mathematics showed changes in actual raw voting data that had no statistical correlation other than programmable computer fraud. This computer fraud resulted in votes being flipped from Democrat to Republican in every federal, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial election since 2008 (thus far) and in the 2012 primary contests from other Republicans to Mitt Romney.

Can someone verify this? 

diadoumenos:

Why Are Elections on Tuesdays?

[W]ith the advent of the railroad and telegraph, Congress decided it was time to standardize a date. Monday was out, because it would require people to travel to the polls by buggy on the Sunday Sabbath. Wednesday was also not an option, because it was market day, and farmers wouldn’t be able to make it to the polls. So it was decided that Tuesday would be the day that Americans would vote in elections, and in 1845, Congress passed a law that presidential elections would be held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November

Non-Americans might probably wonder as well why American holidays also aren’t held consistently on dates, but instead on days. 

Thanksgiving, for example, is the third Thursday of November. 

Sometimes it’s hard to conceive of the older United States before the Civil War, which was much less federal than it is now. Each state had its own different rules and laws, and in this case they didn’t always agree upon the same calendar. So to find days which worked for everyone for federal occasions, this system was born. 

Something has puzzled me in the realm of American politics every time a politician talks about job creation. Because America is currently allergic to the idea of government specific jobs, politicians like to talk about what initiatives they have supported that create private industry jobs. 

Obama in particular has highlighted his support for the development of clean energy, and creating jobs in that sector. 

Now, as a sort-of-non-American, I thought “That’s great for engineers who are out of work, but what about people like me?” I mean, I did some Physics in IB, but for all intents and purposes I’m a soft knowledge person. My existing degree is geared towards the service industry, and my future intended degree leans towards education or something similar. So what good does it do if a politician says “Well, there’s a job in building solar panels for you” if I’m out of work? 

Well, that comes right back down to the way America works, and thank you to my Comparative Welfare States class for covering this. 

There’s a theory written by a few people in a book called “Varieties of Capitalism.” They discuss how it is that companies sometimes offer their own social protection to their workers without any government incentive to do so. This is basically to encourage employee loyalty: the company offers you a pension plan dependent on how many years you work for it, and so it’s in your economic interest to stay for as long as you can. 

Taking it further, you can oversimplify and divide different systems in terms of how strong their employment and unemployment benefits are. Employment benefits vary the extent a country values industries which promote industry and company specific skills, and unemployment benefits make it easier or harder to fire people. 

The USA provides low unemployment benefits, and low employment benefits. The idea in the US is to only provide the bare minimum of welfare so as to provide a pressing incentive to return to work. It makes it easy to fire people but also easy to hire people. This means that people in general are encouraged to not specify their skills. 

Switzerland has an interesting education system. When kids are 16, they have two basic choices: either continue their education and attend formal university, or enter vocational school, which sets them up for a trade skill they can use for the rest of their lives. Higher education creates politicians, lawyers, teachers, and that sort of thing. Vocational schools create cooks, chefs, carpenters, plumbers, and that sort of thing. 

Basically, Swiss people are encouraged at the ripe young age of 16 to train a job skill to set them up for life. The idea then is that you have a specific skill you can rely upon. You can change companies, but your job will stay more or less the same. This is good for Switzerland, which has highly specialized industries in watchmaking and high precision machinery. 

In America there are very few vocational schools, and they’re not taken terribly seriously. Instead the normal thing to do is for most people to go to university, and most of them will probably get somewhat general degrees. Many of them will not necessarily work in the area that they previously studied in, but their general education will make it easy for them to take a variety of jobs, and not specialize. 

Basically, the system operates in America that it’s not technically impossible for me, as a service industry worker, to take a job in the energy sector. So when they talk about creating jobs, they really hope that you, with your fast food work experience, might be able to get work as an environmental engineer or something. I’m oversimplifying for comedy. 

But of course, in practice that’s difficult. There aren’t a whole lot of retraining facilities in the US. If I were trying to go from hotel management to engineering, well, it wouldn’t be easy. Not least because I might be required to have a degree in engineering, which we all know is really expensive because university is expensive. 

Community colleges exist to provide some level of job retraining. I took a Spanish course in one in Texas and my classmates were mostly working people who were required to attain a certain level of Spanish for whatever job they were getting or aspiring towards. Community colleges offer all kinds of courses, but I think it would still be difficult to go from a service industry background, which is most of the American economy now, to an engineering background. It will still be difficult to get that kind of job. 

Anyway, that’s what I picked up, and my further extrapolations. I am happy to hear contributions, feedback, or even corrections.