Debt Intolerance

This paper introduces the concept of "debt intolerance," which manifests itself in the extreme duress many emerging market economies experience at levels of indebtedness that would seem manageable by advanced country standards. The paper argues that "safe" external debt-to-GNP thresholds for debt-intolerant countries depend on the country's default and inflation history and may be as low as 15 percent in some cases. Debt intolerance is linked to the phenomenon of serial default that has plagued many countries over the past two centuries. Understanding and measuring debt intolerance is fundamental to assessing the problems of debt sustainability, debt restructuring, capital market integration, and the scope for international lending to ameliorate crises. The paper makes a first pass at quantifying debt intolerance, including delineating debtors' "clubs" and regions of vulnerability, based on a history of credit events for a large number of countries going back to the 1820s.macroeconomics, Debt Intolerance

Exercise intolerance and fatigue in chronic heart failure: is there a role for group III/IV afferent feedback?

Exercise intolerance and early fatiguability are hallmark symptoms of chronic heart failure. While the malfunction of the heart is certainly the leading cause of chronic heart failure, the patho-physiological mechanisms of exercise intolerance in these patients are more complex, multifactorial and only partially understood. Some evidence points towards a potential role of an exaggerated afferent feedback from group III/IV muscle afferents in the genesis of these symptoms. Overactivity of feedback from these muscle afferents may cause exercise intolerance with a double action: by inducing cardiovascular dysregulation, by reducing motor output and by facilitating the development of central and peripheral fatigue during exercise. Importantly, physical inactivity appears to affect the progression of the syndrome negatively, while physical training can partially counteract this condition. In the present review, the role played by group III/IV afferent feedback in cardiovascular regulation during exercise and exercise-induced muscle fatigue of healthy people and their potential role in inducing exercise intolerance in chronic heart failure patients will be summarised

Political Polarization and Intolerance of Intolerance

Scholarly research linking conservatism to intolerance is widespread (McAdams et al, 2008; Jost et al, 2003): however, relatively little attention is paid to the impact of intolerance on the liberal side. Nevertheless, mounting empirical research and popular journalism suggests that intolerance works both ways, but that liberals are not aware of their own intolerance. Building on survey methodology used by Crawford and Pilanski (2014), the present study uses a scale of ideological consistency, intolerance judgments across a range of issues, and perceived intolerance, to explore both the intolerance levels and perceived intolerance levels of liberals and conservatives, as well as additional variables associated with intolerance. Most notably, the study demonstrates preliminary findings suggesting that even though liberals are objectively no more tolerant than conservatives, they perceive themselves to be so. In an era of intensifying ideological divide and hostility, these findings may be used to inspire further research into an apparent intolerance perception gap among liberals as a contributing factor in political polarization

The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America

Reviews The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, edited by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda

Lactose intolerance: Causes, effects, diagnosis and symptom control

Lactose intolerance is a very common complaint which leads to a number of distressing gut symptoms in those affected. It can be quite easy to control by reducing milk consumption, and possibly by adding lactase to the diet. However, clinicians should be wary of over-diagnosing this condition, particularly in the indigenous white population, and thereby depriving the individual of a useful, cheap and nutritious food. If lactose intolerance is suspected, it should be carefully investigated and diagnosed, prior to the introduction of dietary management. </jats:p

Functional deficits precede structural lesions in mice with high-fat diet-induced diabetic retinopathy

Obesity predisposes to human type 2 diabetes, the most common cause of diabetic retinopathy. To determine if high-fat diet–induced diabetes in mice can model retinal disease, we weaned mice to chow or a high-fat diet and tested the hypothesis that diet-induced metabolic disease promotes retinopathy. Compared with controls, mice fed a diet providing 42% of energy as fat developed obesity-related glucose intolerance by 6 months. There was no evidence of microvascular disease until 12 months, when trypsin digests and dye leakage assays showed high fat–fed mice had greater atrophic capillaries, pericyte ghosts, and permeability than controls. However, electroretinographic dysfunction began at 6 months in high fat–fed mice, manifested by increased latencies and reduced amplitudes of oscillatory potentials compared with controls. These electroretinographic abnormalities were correlated with glucose intolerance. Unexpectedly, retinas from high fat–fed mice manifested striking induction of stress kinase and neural inflammasome activation at 3 months, before the development of systemic glucose intolerance, electroretinographic defects, or microvascular disease. These results suggest that retinal disease in the diabetic milieu may progress through inflammatory and neuroretinal stages long before the development of vascular lesions representing the classic hallmark of diabetic retinopathy, establishing a model for assessing novel interventions to treat eye disease

Intolerance

Non-fiction by Susan Hopkin

Toward an Account of Intolerance: Between Prison Resistance and Engaged Scholarship

The word “intolerance” bears almost exclusively negative connotations. It is treated invariably, almost ideologically as a vice. What would it mean to reconceive of intolerance as a virtue—or, at the very least, a positive affect? In this essay, I analyze two complementary archives of positive intolerance: the records of the Prisons Information Group (the GIP) and the writings of one of its members: Michel Foucault. For the GIP, intolerance—as a militant refusal of intolerable material and political conditions—is essential to the prison activist effort. Relatedly, for Foucault, scholarship—as the creative and/or critical act of naming and changing public awareness of intolerable conditions—can be a mode of political intolerance against an oppressive state. When paired together, these two archives trouble the easy severance of theory and practice, suggesting both that prison resistance efforts involve intellectual assessments of the intolerable and that engaged scholarship often doubles as intolerant activism. Both archives, moreover, agree that such intolerant activism is always rooted in personal investments and local struggles. This analysis allows me to suggest that, if the struggle against forces of marginalization and exploitation mobilizes resistant intolerance as a political and intellectual strategy, then intolerance may very well be commendable. It might, in fact, be virtuous

Football fans in an age of intolerance

This chapter explores the changing nature of policing at football matches, a change that incorporates two different forms of elitism. The shift, it is argued, relates to a move from traditional conservative snobbery about football fans, to a new form of cosmopolitan snobbery. The former, in the 1980s, resulted in the physical caging of fans and led to the deaths at Hillsborough. The latter is arguably more problematic and is preoccupied less with the control of ‘bodies’, than with the regulation of minds (and mouths). Today’s obsession about regulating football fans (and indeed players) stems from an exaggerated concern about the bigoted nature of football supporters – indeed of the white working class, in Britain. The regulation of speech and behaviour at games should be understood as a new form of moralising, a new etiquette and an intolerant form of policing of ‘offensiveness’