GDP Now Forecast For 1Q18 Drops Below 2% -- March 14, 2018

Link here.

Latest forecast: 1.9 percent — March 14, 2018.

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2018 is 1.9 percent on March 14, down from 2.5 percent on March 9.

After yesterday's Consumer Price Index release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and this morning's retail sales report from the U.S. Census Bureau, the nowcast of first-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth fell from 2.2 percent to 1.4 percent.

Easy come, easy go.

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The Literary Page

Updates

March 29, 2018: another source for the Crusades --
Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World, Karen Armstrong, c. 1988, 1991, and 2001 -- with preface written in light of the events on "9-11." 

Original Post

 

The word of the day: Betjemanian, as in, "He also had, from early on, a Betjemanian love of Englishness." -- The New Yorker, March 12, 2018, page 72.  From wiki:

Sir John Betjeman (pronounced, "betch-man'), CBE (28 August 1906 – 19 May 1984) was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack".

He was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1972 until his death. He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.

If I had but one period of my life to re-live and re-live, it would be my years in northern England. I must have walked hundreds of miles in northern Yorkshire over those several years, regardless of the season or the weather.



The books for today:

• The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, edited by Jonathan Riley-Smith, c. 1995
• The Sherlock Holmes Book, a DK book, c. 2015

The crusades:

• 1095 AD
• a church council meeting in Clermont, chairman: Pope Urban II
• called on Frankish knights to vow to march to the East with two mandates:
• free Christians from the yoke of Islamic rule
• liberating the tomb of Christ, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem from Muslim control
• multiple crusades to the East and also to the west, most notably, Spain
• Crusades began in 1107-1108; diverted into a preliminary and disastrous invasion of the Byzantine empire: 1120 - 1125; 1128 - 1129; 1139 - 1140; and 1147 - 1149
• the Second Crusade: 1147 - 1149
• by then, the movement had extended to Spain, the reconquest of which from the Moors had already been equated with the liberation of Jerusalem by Pope Urban II
• the Second Crusade was a fiasco; three further crusades in Spain before 1187, one in northern Europe, and a few expeditions, notably that of 1177, to Palestine, the thirty years that followed were in many ways the lowest point the movement reached before the 15th century
• everything changed, however, with the Muslim victory at Hattin, and the loss of Jerusalem and nearly all of Palestine to Saladin in 1187
• the Third Crusade: 1189 - 1192; the German Crusade (1197 - 1198) recovered most of the coast, King Henry II of England;
• Crusades generated enthusiasm through the 13th century
• Children's Crusade: 1212
• the Crusade of the Shepherds: 1251
• the Fourth Crusade: 1202 - 1204; military forces sailed to the East; diverted to Constantinople, which the crusaders took, together with much of Greece
• the Fifth Crusade: 1217 - 1219; ended with the recovery of Jersualem by treaty 
• the first crusade of King Louis IX of France: 1239 - 1241; 1248 - 1254; inspired by the loss of Jerusalem in 1244
• Louis's second crusade: 1269 - 1272
• crusading armies invaded Egypt: 1218
• Tunisia: 1270
• and, it continues, more crusades to Spain, northern Europe, and north Africa: 1187 - 
• these on-going crusades were fought against political opponents of the papacy in Italy -- endemic between 1255 and 1378

The last great Muslim offensive: the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks in early September, 1683, with the Muslim encampments ringing the city and a spider's web of trenches pressing on the fortifications. The advance of the Ottomans into the heart of Europe precipitated the last great crusade league, which went on to recover large parts of the Balkans for Christendom.

The crusades affected everything -- religious thought, politics, economy, society -- even generating its own literature.

• King Henry II: 1154 - 1189 (planned the Third Crusade but died in 1189 and his son King Richard I, the Lion-Hearted, led the crusade instead)
• King Richard I: 1189 - 1199
• King Richard II: 1377 - 1399
• King Richard III: 1483 - 1485

Crusading is not easy to define: p. 8.

30-second elevator speech:

the "crusades" may have begun with the pope concerned about the Muslims in the Holy Land but over time, the "crusades" turned into a papal fight against all opponents stretching from Spain to Asia and as far north as the Baltic states; from 1095 - 1683; wow, 1100 - 1700

Chapter 5: Songs.

• the great epic traditions of Germany and France: Chanson de Roland; the oldest epic in French; almost certainly dates from about the time of the First Crusade; versions in both French and Occitan, the literary language of southern France
• Roland, a duke of the march of Brittany, 778, perished in what may have been a minor skirmish in the Pyreness; but the minor skirmish, over time, took on tones of an epic: by the 11th century there had been a striking change of scale: the account of events in the Chanson de Roland turns the incident into a major confrontation between Charlemagne's empire and the forces of Islam, culminating in Charlemagne's successful conquest of all of Spain and the enforced conversion of the citizens of Saragossa (it's possible that the skirmish in the Pyrenees, 778, never even involved Muslims)

If I were to come back to this book. I would begin with Chapter 5.

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The Sherlock Holmes Book

A fun, little book whose audience would be 14-year-olds who love Sherlock Holmes. And also the rest of us.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• b. in Edinburgh, Scottish again, May 22, 1859, just before the US Civil War
• strict Jesuit boarding school, Stonyhurst school in Lancashire where he met a fellow student named Moriatry
• questioned his religious believes and by the time he left that Jesuit school was an atheist; turned to spiritualism; left that school in 1875
• a year of school with the Jesuits in Feldkirch in Austria
• returned to Edinburgh University, 1876- 1881: studied medicine
• met two professors who would later serve as models for two more characters:
• Professor Rutherford: Professor George Edward Challenger, the central character in his famous science-fiction novel, The Lost World (1912)
• Dr Joseph Bell: whose method of deducing the history and circumstances of his patients appeared little short of magic; here was the model and inspiration for Sherlock Holmes; his first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories was dedicated "To My Old Teacher Joseph Bell"; Joseph Bell was a father figure for Conan
• gradually built up a medical practice but also began writing fiction
• "I thought I would try my hand at writing a story in which the hero would treat crime as Dr Bell treated disease and where science would take the place of romance." 
• he noted that prior to his method, most detective stories had results which were obtained in nearly every case by chance
• 1887: A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes novel
• 1893: on a trip to Switzerlan with his wife Louise, wrote his final Sherlock Holmes, consigning his hero to the watery depths of the Reichenbach Falls, locked in the arms of the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty
• physically faithful to his first wife, Louise, but never passionately in love with her; more of a friendship
• 1897: falls in love with Jean Leckie, a Scottish woman, 14 years his junior
• 1906: Louise died of tuberculosis
• 1907: Conan married Jean a year later
• 1900: serves in the Second Boer War as a medic

This book would be a great gift for an adolescent "in love" with Sherlock Holmes