Sunday, December 15. 2013
The experts predict a market crash.
Also, a recession. I tend to agree, but I don't think we ever really got out of the last recession. The Fed put a band-aid on it to cover up the bleeding and infection.
Remember when liberals, including David Brooks, advocated for a weaker Chief Executive while Bush was in office (and will surely do the same if a conservative wins in 2016)?
He actually said this: "We don’t need bigger government. We need more unified authority."
Maybe you need unified authority, David, but I do not. In fact, I find that to be a profoundly weak and pathetic thought, unsuitable and inappropriate for a hearty American citizen. That's not how Americans roll. We distrust authority, instinctively. It's an American gene, and a healthy one.
The American spirit is that government and politicians are our employees, not our "authorities." We, and God, are our authorities.
Whence this desire to submit to authority? It feels sort of perverted to me. We have no "moral and intellectual superiors." In fact, our "leaders" tend to be our inferiors. Why else would they do those jobs instead of doing something useful and productive?
When I take those online ADD screening tests, I come out as "ADD Likely." I have always been impatient, physically restless, and had trouble concentrating on dense material even though I got a B+ in Physical Chemistry (the best, toughest course I took at U Mass). I don't think I'm on the thin end of the Bell Curve.
This article in the NYT makes no distinction between ADD and ADHD, but it seems to me that there is a big difference: The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder -The Number of Diagnoses Soared Amid a 20-Year Drug Marketing Campaign.
Anyway, all of us at MF have untreated ADD. Are amphetamines performance-enhancers? Of course.
Saturday, December 14. 2013
 Keith Richards describes composing Street Fighting Man
Over 2000 cold and snow records set in the USA this past week
I blame global warming
Women’s rights lobbyist ‘pays nanny $3 a hour’
Senators introduce bill to crack down on 'lavish' portrait expenses
Who do these people think they are? If you think you're so important, take a selfie with your iPhone like the President does.
Steyn:
...how heartening, as one watches the viral video of Obama droning on while a mere foot and a half away Mr. Jantjie rubs his belly and tickles his ear, to think that the White House’s usual money-no-object security operation went to the trouble of flying in Air Force One, plus the “decoy” Air Force One, plus support aircraft, plus the 120-vehicle motorcade or whatever it’s up to by now, plus a bazillion Secret Service agents with reflector shades and telephone wire dangling from their ears, to shepherd POTUS into the secured venue and then stand him onstage next to an $85-a-day violent schizophrenic.
David Brooks Advocates More Executive Branch Power
Good grief. What a putz. A superficial thinker but a fairly glib writer.
Two Americas - being wealthy is now a quasi-disability that can get you off the hook for homicide
Being a spoiled brat is a disability of sorts, curable by a little jail time
Professor 'Totally Destroys' Student In This Email After He Asks For A Grade Bump
Armstrong bribed me with $100K hidden in cake box: cyclist
Cairo Sees First Snowfall In 100 Years
I blame...you know...Bush.
Poll: Californians Gradually Souring on Unions
Free Hunter Yelton - Meet the littlest casualty in the war on men.
Hinderaker: Has our society reached a point where it is too stupid to survive?
Delaware considering a government move "to help" hoarders
Perhaps it's a "crisis". No doubt the hoarders will welcome the government "help"
Ed Schultz Goes Way Off his own Lefty Message
There are two kinds of money: There's Money, and there's My Money
The new holocaust denial
Friday, December 13. 2013
 Even by North Korean standards, this announcement of Jang Song Thaek’s execution is intense
3 Reasons Why Our Teenagers Can’t Find Jobs - And why this is terrible for America.
Big Farms Are About to Get Bigger:
All of us involved in agriculture will soon have to decide whether we want to occupy the nostalgic niche providing artisanal beets and heritage pork to Cowen’s 10 percent, or whether we’ll roll the dice on surviving the transition to a data-driven agriculture. Farming will be more efficient, more environmentally responsible, and easier to regulate and measure. But it won’t be the same.
Why the circular firing squad from conservatives, and why now?
Snark vs. Smarm
Third EPA Official Implicated in $900K Scam
Chris Matthews Panics About 2014: ‘The Tea Party is Still Growing!’
NYT: Obamacare Debacle Could Kill Big Blue:
Cumulatively, recent developments surrounding the rollout of Obamacare strengthen the most damaging conservative portrayals of liberalism and of big government – that on one hand government is too much a part of our lives, too invasive, too big, too scary, too regulatory, too in your face, and on the other hand it is incompetent, bureaucratic and expropriatory.
Green Weenie of the Week: RI Sen. Whitehouse’s Latest Self-Dealing Scam
Unions Paid MSNBC's Schultz $177,000 in 2012, $75,000 in 2013 - MSNBC host often touts "blue collar workers" and unionized "teachers" on his show.
Philanthropy, stock-picking, and Presbyterian frugality:
Bostonians still tell the story of the respectable society matron who was crossing the Common one day and ran into an old college chum she hadn’t seen for years. The matron was dismayed to see that her friend was obviously engaged in the world’s oldest profession. “My dear,” she said, “whatever has happened to you?” “Well,” said her friend, “it was either this or dip into capital.”
... President Obama told Chris Matthews he had discovered “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly.”
"he had discovered..."?
Connecticut's Obamacare Exchange Spends $75K on Murals
Thursday, December 12. 2013
As much as I am agnostic about the value of the Fed, this is interesting: Here's Why People Are So Excited That Stanley Fischer Might Be The Deputy Fed Chief
It sounds to me as if he might be the heavy, and Yellen the figurehead.
 Why the Oxford comma is a good thing
Everyone Is a Criminal: On the Over-policing of America - Try to think of an aspect of everyday life that doesn’t somehow include the police.
Harvard Votes To Banish Bottled Water
Why not ban bottled beer too?
Washington’s Battle of the Skyline - The rent is too high; the buildings are too low.
Feds Spend $224,250 to Change How Kids Order Food
Washington Post Falsely Reports 365,000 'Have Purchased' ObamaCare
Sebelius Calls for Probe of Obamacare Website Launch
WSJ: Warren's Way or No Way - Liberal Democrats try to silence two of our op-ed writers.
How Much Redistribution Is Enough?
The Democrats want little kids to die of cancer
Obamacare, where the liberal dream crashes and burns
Oregon spends $300 million to enroll 44 for Obamacare
From an engineer who knows high tech systems:
Imagine writing a 3,000-page law to totally restructure the national 'utilities' infrastructure. The likelihood of success would be zero; chaos and irreversible damage would surely result.
ObamaCare undertakes to completely and indiscriminately redefine the entire health-care segment of the U.S. economy, including laws and regulations, incentives and market forces, the delivery system, the providers, the insurance model, the customer interface, the billing and financing, and every other aspect of the existing system. This magnitude of change is distinctly irrational.
Wednesday, December 11. 2013
Much ado about nothing, I think. McCain Compares Obama Castro Handshake to Chamberlain And Hitler,
But why the President seems to have this compulsion to bow to foreign low-lifes is beyond me. Americans bow only to God. It's not a masculine impulse.
Why do Americans even care about Cuba (except for the Cuban-American vote in Florida) other than to feel pity for them living under the yoke of their socialist masters in a police state? It's just another tiny, impoverished, God-forsaken Latin American paradise-turned-dump with psycho sadistic billionaire dictators. Population close to that of Haiti, and smaller population than the NYC metro area.
What Cubans need is American tourism and American investment. It's difficult to imagine today, but even Haiti used to be a tourist destination.
 Wall Street Mothers, Stay-Home Fathers
Via Insty, Your Wife Is Not, or Shouldn’t Be, Your Boss
No Child Allowed Ahead
Nation of Islam Leader’s Home In Hyde Park Received $100,000 in Farm Subsidies
Drafting Docs - Look for doctors to be conscripted to treat Medicare and Medicaid patients.
Obamacare will end up forcing doctors to take patients
Quote from Andy McCarthy:
Today’s Democrats, however, are less members of a party than of the movement Left. Their objective, like Obama’s, is fundamental transformation of a society rooted in individual liberty and private property to one modeled on top-down, redistributionist statism. Since statism advances by concentrating governmental power, Democrats — regardless of what governmental branch they happen to inhabit — rally to whatever branch holds the greatest transformative potential. Right now, that is the presidency. Thus, congressional Democrats do not insist that the president must comply with congressional statutes. Laws, after all, must be consistent with the Constitution to be valid, and are thus apt to reflect the very constitutional values the Left is trying to supplant. Democrats want the president to use the enormous raw power vested in his office by Article II to achieve statist transformation. If he does so, they will support him. They’ll get back to obsessing over the “rule of law” if, by some misfortune, the Republicans someday win another presidential election.
Why Is Everybody Sitting on Huge Piles of Cash?
Everybody?
Here's why - Stock market corrected for QE
David Stockman Rages Market "Valuation Has Lost Any Anchor To The Real World"
You won't believe these gummint rules: Newseum Settles with DOJ Over Disability Regulation Violations
How to Keep Workers Unemployed - Another 99 weeks of jobless insurance won't create more jobs.
Greenfield: The Mandela Myth
EPA preparing to unleash a deluge of new regulations - on your own ponds, ditches, and creeks
What's the right amount of redistribution of money? The pivot that isn’t
The New York Times’ ‘homeless’ hooey
Obama Flirts and Clowns at Mandela Memorial Service
Tuesday, December 10. 2013
Kevyn Orr -In Shepherding Detroit Bankruptcy, Lawyer Tackles a Job He Didn’t Ask For
MSNBC’s Alternative Universe - What passes for journalism on the network is downright silly
U.S. exits GM stake,
taxpayers lose about $10 billion
Political polarization: Obama Is Tearing America Apart
Jeff Goldstein unloads on Peggy Noonan
Obamacare, where the liberal dream crashes and burns
The biggest threat to Obamacare is not Republicans. The biggest threat is Murphy’s Law, along with its corollary, the Law of Unintended Consequences. These are the most powerful laws in the world. They are even more powerful than the Affordable Care Act, and they are the nemesis of all master plans. Evidently, the President and his merry band of wonks had never heard of them.
With QE tapering in sight, how high can long-term interest rates go?
Farm negotiators shift on subsidies
CBO:Top 40% Paid 106.2% of Income Taxes; Bottom 40% Paid -9.1%, Got Average of $18,950 in 'Transfers'
China Meets Its Own Worst Enemy: Itself - Excessive nationalism threatens the country's potential.
The religious group known as the Quakers has sacrificed its founding religious principles at the altar of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
Tobin: The Real Benghazi Scandal
Gender wage gap in Obama’s White House: Female staffers earn less than 87 cents on the dollar compared to men
Why "climate change"?
...keen observers have noticed that "climate change" began to replace "global warming" as the preferred term among the enviro-lobby when its predictions of heat-related disasters weren't realized and winter refused to retire.
Maybe another name change is in the works since the data show there hasn't been much change for at least 16 years and that the predicted superstorms haven't materialized.
VDH on presidential lying:
Obama is playing a strange game: The more he speaks untruthfully, the more he resorts to emphatic intensifiers that instead confirm that he is speaking untruthfully. In turn, Obama’s audiences play an even stranger game: The more they hear their president speak, the more they are impressed that he can sound so sincere in being so nonchalantly insincere and mellifluously misleading. When I first heard, “You can keep your doctor and your health plan,” I thought, “That can’t be true; he knows it can’t be true; and the American people must know it can’t be true” — and, then, I shrugged: “But he’s hit upon a winning lie.”
CBO:Top
40% Paid 106.2% of Income Taxes; Bottom 40% Paid -9.1%, Got Average of
$18,950 in 'Transfers' - See more at:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/cbotop-40-paid-1062-income-taxes-bottom-40-paid-91-got-average-18950#sthash.JJPpHvBN.dpuf
Monday, December 9. 2013
An urban liberal visits evil, evil Walmart, and likes it.
I don't think the country (ie the taxpayer) should bail out anything or anybody. Malanga: Bailouts for Cities? Advocates for cash-strapped municipalities want Washington to clean up their mess.
 Image: Coming soon to your doctor's office
Conservationists Outraged After Obama Approves Wind Farm Eagle Slaughter
Coming soon to a doctors office near you: A sign of the times!
- See more at: http://politicsandfinance.blogspot.com/2013/12/coming-soon-to-doctors-office-near-you.html#sthash.NzvTYTKJ.dpuf Read more at http://politicsandfinance.blogspot.com/2013/12/coming-soon-to-doctors-office-near-you.html#vHRlw74FWHtyvzrX.9910-year old Johnny Jones suspended for shooting imaginary arrow
This Week in History: Republican Party Abolishes Slavery
Hooray! More Lousy Jobs Have Been Created
If Pearl Harbor happened now
The Soldiers Who Saved Europe's Art From Hitler
Chris Matthews on his Obama interview: “He came to us. He came amongst us.”
Sheesh. Chris, the guy is our employee.
A Federal Agency That Still Uses Floppy Disks
Why Hillary Will Lose Again
Blumer on Obamacare:
Considering that the people involved are supposedly our best and brightest — as they and their media lapdogs constantly remind us — is it really possible that utter stupidity and incompetence fully explain what has transpired? I think not. Until someone can prove otherwise, the default position has to be that chaos is what they want, and that they will continue to work to deepen it.
Teachers unions face moment of truth
Why Americans aren’t buying into Obama’s economic inequality shtick
Totten: The Once Great City of Havana:
If Cuba had free enterprise, and if Americans could travel there without restrictions, the economy would go supernova.
My Grandpa loved going to Cuba
Gutfeld: The Hate Crime Hoax Business Is Booming
All Aboard! Freight Rail Giant Testing Natural Gas-Powered Locomotives
MSNBC host equates ‘Obamacare’ with N-word
Vladimir Putin has dissolved Russia´s biggest news agency RIA Novosti
Saying Grace goes for $46 million at Sotheby's
Sunday, December 8. 2013
 Mead discusses the new service economy, and well-trained nannies:
...what’s likely to happen in the information age is that services once reserved for a privileged few will increasingly be available for larger numbers of people. There will be more and less expensive personal chefs, for example, but more people than ever will be able to eat high class meals. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing, especially when you consider the appalling dullness and deadening conformity of those industrial jobs and social conditions that people are apparently so nostalgic for.
Steyn discusses income inequality: Inequality far worse than economic:
... the signature achievement of Obama’s “hope and change” combines 1940s British public health theories with 1970s Soviet supermarket delivery systems. But don’t worry: Maybe one day soon, your needle-exchange clinic will be able to deliver by drone. Look out below.
It reminds me of Kudlow discussing moral, spiritual, and cultural inequality.
Income inequality mainly driven by single-adult households: The Income Inequality Problem is Overblown:
Most studies do not take into account changes in the composition of households over the past 25 years. We have more two-earner households at the top, and more one-person households at the bottom.
Mike Rowe (Dirty Jobs) on following your passion:
I’m personally tired of stories about people who follow their dream, ignore the naysayers, struggle mightily, eschew every other viable opportunity, suffer for decades, go into debt, and finally achieve some monumental breakthrough that leads people to marvel at their fortitude and perseverance. Tales of inspiration are important, but do they all have to revolve around the same narrative of never giving up on your “true calling.” I think we need more stories about people who do whatever it takes to thrive, and somehow manage to find happiness and passion in whatever they choose to do. Isn’t that more empowering than identifying one specific “passion,” and making every happiness contingent upon attaining it?
I highly recommend it. Review here.
Saturday, December 7. 2013
Friday, December 6. 2013
Heard the President on the radio this afternoon, and I didn't really listen to what he was talking about but I did notice his speech pattern and intonations. Here's my question: How does a guy raised by late-middle-aged, middle-class white people in Hawaii acquire southern American black speech patterns and intonations?
It has to be an affectation, doesn't it? Just curious, because we all expect phoniness and schtick from politicians.
A reader wonders whether he is doing Richard Pryor.
Thursday, December 5. 2013
Wednesday, December 4. 2013
 Oregon's Legislature is kicking around concepts that would make college free
I want free piano lessons and free painting lessons. Can I get that?
Related: The college-for-all model isn't working - After years of disfavor, vocational
education is being transformed for young people seeking jobs that
require more than high school but less than college.
The Maggie's Farm staff tends to believe in apprenticeships for almost everything that is work-related.
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50 Years After Vaccine Creation, 
Male