Word: boomingly
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...black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity's central promise - that God will "make a way" for poor people to enjoy the better things in life - had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe "God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house." The results, he says, "were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers...
...Walton suggests that a decade's worth of ever easier credit acted like a drug in Prosperity's bloodstream. "The economic boom '90s and financial overextensions of the new millennium contributed to the success of the Prosperity message," he wrote recently on his personal blog as well as on the website Religion Dispatches. And not positively. "Narratives of how 'God blessed me with my first house despite my credit' were common. Sermons declaring 'It's your season to overflow' supplanted messages of economic sobriety," and "little attention was paid to ... the dangers of using one's home equity...
...peak in the 1980s, the oil pipeline from the North Slope carried 2 million bbl. a day. The flow is now about a third of that, and supplies are projected to dwindle further. Alaska has seen these boom-and-bust cycles before. The "seal mines" of the Pribilof Islands, the salmon canneries, the Klondike gold rush--all these short-lived booms appealed to what New Deal--era Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes once derided as Alaska's "gambling spirit." Palin is now rolling the dice on the national stage with a political persona based in part on her willingness...
That virtue died with the baby boom, but it had been ailing ever since the Depression, argues cultural historian David Tucker in The Decline of THRIFT in America. That crisis, he writes, invited economists to recast THRIFT as "the contemptible vice which threw sand in the gears of our consumer economy." A White House report in 1931 urged parents to let children pick out their own clothes and furniture, thereby creating in the child "a sense of personal as well as family pride in ownership, and eventually teaching him that his personality can be expressed through things." These days...
...Piracy declined in subsequent centuries, thanks to increasingly vigilant militaries and the development of the steam engine. But amid a drop in naval patrols and a boom in international trade following the end of the Cold War, it has flourished anew - particularly in narrow choke points such as Asia's Strait of Malacca and the Gulf of Aden, which links the Red and Arabian seas. Buoyed by fast boats, fearsome weaponry and high-tech communications gear, pirates carried off 263 reported heists in 2007 - 28% of which occurred in the treacherous waters off Nigeria and Somalia, where vast coastlines...