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May 26, 2014 - 06:47 AMBy: James Quinn The definition of death rattle is a sound often produced by someone who is near death when fluids such as saliva and bronchial secretions accumulate in the throat and upper chest. The person can’t swallow and emits a deepening wheezing sound as they gasp for breath. This can go on for two or three days before death relieves them of their misery. The American retail industry is emitting an unmistakable wheezing sound as a long slow painful death approaches. Death rattle It was exactly four months ago when I wrote THE RETAIL...

Last week a World Bank report that compares something called purchasing power parity claimed that, based on the purchasing power statistics, the Chinese economy has reached a point of rough equality with the United States, or, could actually have moved slightly ahead of the USA, based on the incomplete figures of economic growth over the last three years. This announcement, which confirms the fact of China’s explosive economic development, and the anemic American recovery after the Great Recession of 2008-2010, has caused quite a stir in a number of quarters. The Chinese, usually quick to tout great achievements, have been...

Four years ago it was 61 percent. I had a theory to explain the most recent drop when I started reading the poll, but now that I’ve looked at the trends over time, it just doesn’t hold up. I thought this new low was a reaction to the shutdown last fall; the first big dip in tea-party popularity came after the first debt-ceiling standoff in 2011, after all, so it would stand to reason that a new economic disruption would drive the numbers down further. Ted Cruz was on camera throughout the process promoting “defund” so tea partiers are bearing...

Parents have more options as overeducated young people turn to baby-sitting. Ashley Newhall of Philadelphia has a law degree and a master's in agricultural law, and she passed the bar in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. These days, she's working with some extremely demanding and exacting clients. Most of them are less than 3 years old. Newhall's primary income source for the past few years has been baby-sitting. Parents, said Newhall, are "blown away. They're like, 'Oh my gosh! You're the most overeducated nanny I've ever had.' " But jobs are scarce, and all that education came with six-figure debt for...

(CNSNews.com) - The number of women 16 and older not in the labor force climbed to a record high of 55,116,000 in April, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This means that there were 55,116,000 women 16 and older who were in the civilian nonsinstitutional population who not only did not have a job, they did not actively seek one in the last four weeks. That is up 428,000 from the 54,688,000 women who were not in the labor force in March. In April, according to BLS, the labor force participation rate for women was 56.9...

The real median income of American men who work full-time, year-round peaked forty years ago in 1973, according to data published by the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1973, median earnings for men who worked full-time, year-round were $51,670 in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars. The median earnings of men who work full-time year-round have never been that high again. […] By comparison, the real median earnings of American women who work full-time year-round peaked in 2007, when women who worked full-time earned $38,872 in constant 2012 dollars. …

China will be the "world's most Christian nation" in 15 years, according to a report from the London Sunday Telegraph. "It is going to be less than a generation. Not many people are prepared for this dramatic change," Fenggang Yang, a leading expert on religion in China, told the newspaper. There are about 1.3 billion people living in the country, and in 2010, 58 million of them were Protestant Christians. Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University and author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule, estimated that by 2025, the number of Christians will have...

In the summer of 1992, I took my first real job, working as a graphic designer for the venerable Meier & Frank department store chain in downtown Portland, Oregon. Those three years proved to be quite educational for a fairly naïve young man fresh out of Bible college and figuring out the ways of the world in the very beautiful, exceedingly secular Northwest. Within just a few days, I found myself having long conversations—arguments, actually—about Proposition 9, a measure sponsored by the Oregon Citizen's Alliance (OCA) which sought to add the following to the state constitution: All governments in Oregon...

March 28 (UPI) -- Young U.S. voters have become more likely to identify with the Democratic Party since 2006, a Gallup Poll said Friday. Gallup said the movement is fueled partly by increasing racial and ethnic diversity. But the poll found whites between the ages of 18 and 29 have also shifted to the Democrats in recent years.

More people are moving out of New Jersey than are moving in. The same is true for Illinois and New York. Those three states top the "outbound" list compiled by United Van Lines, the big St. Louis-based moving company that has put together an annual survey of where Americans are moving for the last 37 years. The company analyzed a total of 125,000 moves across the 48 continental states and the District of Columbia in 2013 and came up with a picture of migration patterns across the U.S. According to Professor Michael Stoll, chair of the Department of Public Policy...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)FRAMINGHAM, Mass. (AP) — Staples will close up to 225 stores in North America by the end of next year as it seeks to trim about $500 million in costs annually by 2015. The nation’s largest office-supply retailer said Thursday that nearly half of its sales are now generated online, so it will aggressively cut costs to become more efficient....

Plenty of excuses out there for this evening's collosal miss in Chinese exports (-18.1% YoY vs an expectation of a 7.5% rise) mainly based on timing issues over the Lunar New Year (but didn't the 45 economists who forecast this data know the dates before they forecast?) This is a 6-sigma miss and plunges China's trade balance to its biggest miss on record and 2nd largest deficit on record. Combining Jan and Feb data (i.e. smoothing over the holiday), exports are still down 1.6% YoY - not good for the much-heralded global recovery. Exports to the rest of the BRICs...

In 2013, we had Leonardo DiCaprio snorting cocaine off — well, if you saw “The Wolf of Wall Street” (a totally missable movie, regardless of what the vaunted Academy says), you know where. Cate Blanchett chomped Xanax like they were Tic Tacs, Matthew McConaughey did his yeoman’s share of coke, and “American Hustle” taught us all that drugged-out crime really does pay.But 2014 looks different. A lot different. Perhaps it’s five years of President Obama. The economy is worse, not better. All those 20-somethings whom millions of Americans have been putting through college the past half-decade are moving back home....

Last week, Peter Wehner wrote a piece in Commentary magazine laying out a collection of data regarding recent elections and demographic trends.  He was mostly content to let the data speak for themselves, save for a codicil to the piece arguing that something had to change: “Republican problems are not superficial, transient, or cyclical. The trends speak for themselves. The GOP therefore needs to articulate a governing vision and develop a governing agenda that can reach groups that have not traditionally been supportive of it.” His ultimate takeaway is that the GOP needs to substantially revise its platform, and make...

Fifty-five percent of Americans reported in a new Gallup poll that they are dissatisfied overall with American gun laws and policies, an increase from 51 percent in 2013 and just 42 percent in 2012. But the most dramatic rise in dissatisfaction comes from the contingency of Americans who feel gun laws are too strict, rather than from those who think they aren't strict enough. This percentage jumped to 16 percent this year, a rate that more than triples the 5 percent recorded by Gallup last year. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans favoring stricter gun laws fell seven points in 2014,...

For the firearms industry, women are the next big opportunity. They are a desirable demographic and the number of female gun owners is growing, CNN Money reported. Sometimes the appeal may include a fashion statement. Glock offers both sub-compact and slim line handguns for women. Smith & Wesson offers a model called the “Lady Smith.” Mossberg markets shotguns and rifles with a pink camouflage pattern, and one shooting range in Las Vegas offers pink AK-47s with the bachelorette parties that it caters to. "When you are aiming at your target and you're executing a safe shot, you're not thinking about...

According to recent polls, some 81 percent of adult Americans believe in heaven, and fully 80 percent expect to go there when they die. By comparison, about 61 percent believe in hell, but less than 1 percent think it’s likely they will go there. In other words, a slight majority of Americans still believe hell exists, but genuine fear of hell is almost nonexistent. Even the most conservative evangelicals don’t seem to take hell very seriously anymore. For decades, many evangelicals have downplayed inconvenient biblical truths, neglecting any theme that seems to require somber reflection. Doctrines such as human depravity,...

If I asked you to describe the state of Christianity in Europe, you'd probably answer "not good." And there'd be ample reason to do so. Most of us are familiar with the depressing statistics regarding church attendance in Western Europe and Scandinavia. But there is more to Europe than Britain, France, and Sweden. And in Central and Eastern Europe, a different story is being written. This story was the subject of a recent First Things article by Filip Mazurczak. In it, Mazurczak reveals to readers what is going on in former communist societies such as Hungary and Croatia. For instance,...

Divorce rate is higher among religiously conservative Protestants, and even among those living around them, finds a new study that examined all counties in the United States where divorces occurred and looked at what the characteristics of those counties were. Demographers Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas and Philip Levchak at the University of Iowa looked at the entire map of the United States, and found that a key factor predicting divorce rates is the concentration of conservative Protestants in a county. To be published in the American Journal of Sociology next month, the study notes that religiously conservative...

In spite of their advances in education and the workforce anxiety disorders are replacing happiness for American women. Sexual liberation was supposed to bring equality for females that expected fulfillment with the freedom to pursue lust without expecting committed relationships.