We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Why Lefties hold bureaucrats, technocrats, and dictators in such high esteem remains a mystery to me. I think it might be a substitute for faith in God - and in onseself.
More people shop at Macy's in NYC every day than are involved in OWS, but those normal Macy's shoppers don't get on the news. Silent majority, I guess, getting on with life without any hystrionic public bitching.
Windmills are a joke. Solar is mostly a joke unless you live in some place like Nevada. For fuel and power, we love nuclear, coal, oil, and gas. And wood!
The planners like their project and speak well of it; that is enough to get a lengthy, heavy breathing puff job (hardened newspaper people would use a phrase in place of that one that is unsuitable in a family friendly blog like Via Meadia) in the New York Times. Only an idiot or a propagandist would write such a piece; it is hard to see how any editor would put it in print.
I'd like to thank my teens for pointing out to me that pizza has been declared a vegetable by Congress.
Years ago, the Reagan administration received abuse for suggesting ketchup was a vegetable. Now we have Congress actually voting on this stuff?
At a point in time where the government could be shut down almost weekly, is nearly bankrupt and the Super Committee can't help forge agreement, we can agree that pizza is a vegetable.
Tomatoes, of course, are a fruit. So pizza should be a fruit, not a vegetable. Since they can't even get that right, it's probably no surprise Congress can't come to a reasonable agreement on the budget.
I'm not inclined to believe conspiracy theories, and the thought that Jon Corzine would comply with something along these lines seems absurd. But Jon is very well connected and does have an interest in maintaining the strong link between the government and Wall Street. That link, however, is starting to show signs of wear. Between Tea Partiers and OWS complaining about crony capitalism, and the fact that market rigging only lasts so long before it collapses on itself, we may well be seeing the end stages of the game being played out.
From that standpoint, a 'hit' on MF Global would make perfect sense. It's true that even in the best economic conditions, speculators are viewed as evil. The balance they bring to prices and markets, as well as the liquidity they provide, are overlooked because they operate in a realm many people simply don't understand. As a result, there is a belief that somehow speculators 'control' market outcomes. Nothing is further from the truth, but it is a widely held concept.
Did the Fed want to see some pressure taken off upward price movements? Yes. Will this help? Yes. Does this undermine markets further? Yes. Does this increase the uncertainty which is keeping our economy from moving forward? Yes.
We can ask many other questions, but none will answer whether or not this was a hatchet job. My guess? It wasn't, it was just mismanagement. But there is an awful stench coming from this whole affair.
Palin: How Congress Occupied Wall Street - Politicians who arrive in Washington as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires. Why?
And this: Damn It Feels Good to be a Banker. I'd rather be a kick-ass banker than a Consultant - or an OWS lowlife, but really do not wish to be any of those things:
As states send more and more mediocre students to college, students learn less and less. “Our colleges and universities are full to the brim with students who do not really belong there, who are unprepared for college and uninterested in breaking a mental sweat.” “Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority,” according to a widely-publicized January report from experts like New York University Professor Richard Arum.
While Italy is bickering over just how inhumane it is to raise the retirement age by 2 years in a 15 year span (which works out to a whopping 48 days per year) and will likely lead to mass riots and bloodshed in Rome before the idea is ultimately scrapped, things in America's own back yard, the country that now that the EFSF is finished will have no choice but to come to Europe's rescue via the IMF, are looking horrendous to quite horrendous. In fact when it comes to retirement, 80 is, we are sad to say, the new 65, at least according to Wells Fargo. And with average life expectancy in the US peaking at 78.1, it means that the typical American will have to work for an additional 2 years after death to pay for not only not having any retirement savings (thank you Bernanke ZIRP and VIX>30 stock market), but to make sure Europeans have theirs. You think we jest? Nope.
Read the whole thing. Years of cheap money, the housing bubble, and other bubbles resulted in a 20-year party built on credit and spending. (Of course, governments did the same thing.) Although most people continue to work after retirement, it is more pleasant when it is semi-optional.
On the other hand, if you spend most of your life drearily putting money into savings instead of living, you will get sick before you ever have a life with some fun and adventure in it. Sailing in the Med, fly fishing in Patagonia, hunting Ptarmigan in Alaska, cruising around the world, riding horses in Montana, golfing in Scotland - none of these things are (yes, "none" takes a plural verb) much fun to do when deaf, half blind, and with a colostomy bag, two bad knees, and a touch of dementia.
Honestly, I'd rather be working with the latter and have some of my fun in advance. Buy now, pay later. Health, like youth, is wasted on the young, and idleness wasted on the old. During my two years of zombie working, I'd like to be a WalMart greeter, just adding some good cheer to the world for a humble wage.
We have been warned that the world is in for a long period of deleveraging from debt-driven economies. This via Zero Hedge:
This is not a bump in the road; it is the exhaustion of the entire model of growth that we have depended on for the past 30 years. Once the debt saturation point has been reached, adding more debt subtracts from the economy rather than adds to it. This is reflected in the decline of employment by every metric: total number of jobs, civilian participation, payrolls per capita, and employment as a percentage of the total population.
We are past the point of debt saturation, and so we need a new model of employment, and indeed of “growth” itself. Sadly, as discussed in a recent report, the Status Quo financial witch-doctors have only prescribed more debt and more unproductive friction.
Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness. … The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition
The rising cost of medical care comes from advanced, expensive technology (almost all created in the US), advanced expensive pharmacology, costs of malpractice insurance and absurdly excess expenditures to avoid lawsuits, and medical insurance and government insurance-subsidies for all medical care. Given all of the above things not changing anytime soon, the only way to control costs is bureaucratic rationing - which will entail the politicizing of any medical care which is covered by insurance. And that is a very bad idea, too. I see a future for medical care outside the entire insurance nexus.
Had I been a young, junior kid on the staff, I'm sure I would have done what McQueary did. Chain of authority. Had I been in Paterno's shoes, probably what he did: chain of authority. Arguably ethically wrong, but natural. (Update: I may not be well-informed about what was witnessed.)
Many attorneys and many law profs generally assume that the Commerce Clause is dead and, indeed, was laid to rest many years ago. Whenever I bring up my sentimental and quaint views of the Constitutional limits on federal power, colleagues often see me as a naive artifact from a former age. Which, perhaps, I am.
Lawyers rarely deal with Constitutional issues, just with ordinary civil and criminal laws and rules and regulations (of which there exist more than anyone could possibly know or even be dimly aware of, thus providing people like me with tidy incomes).
Fact is, the late, lamented death of the original meaning of the commerce clause (designed mainly, as I understand it, to eliminate then-existing obstacles to inter-state commerce) opened the door to the Feds regulating and controlling everything and anything they want to. One might wish that the FFs might have been a little more explicit in their definitions and intentions, but they could not have anticipated every single language loophole the feds might have decided to exploit in their reaches for more and more power, control, and money - even though that was their greatest fear and the reason they bothered to write the thing in the first place. King George lll would envy the power of our current federal government. Loopholes are always for the Common Good, naturally. Antique that I am, for me freedom is the ultimate Common Good. To me, the meaning of "Freedom" is freedom from the power of the state far more than it is freedom from external threats to security, or German threats to Europe, or Islamist insanity.
I predict that much or all of ObamaCare is upheld by the Supremes, in deference to Congress. I deeply hope that I am wrong because the feds have shown little ability to run much of anything effectively or flexibly except the armed forces, much less 17% of the American economy. We'll all end up with USPS medical care, and it will be frozen in law so it can no longer adapt or innovate, or even try to help me and you outside of government guidelines.
The idea first conceived back in the 1920s by two senior officials of the League of Nations – Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter, a British civil servant – was a United States of Europe, ruled by a government of unelected technocrats like themselves. Two things were anathema to them: nation states with the power of veto (which they had seen destroy the League of Nations) and any need to consult the wishes of the people in elections.
Even as the Eurozone cracks, however, such leaders as Germany’s Angela Merkel are calling for greater political integration.
“It is time for a breakthrough to a new Europe,” she said. “That will mean more Europe, not less Europe.”
She’s dead wrong, and the failure of the euro proves it. What Europe needs is less faux unity and more honest division — free nation-states united by a common Western culture, not a centrally planned, bureaucrat-run pipe dream.
Good for Cameron. He can see that Germany (and maybe France) want to use the crisis to consolidate and build power, a la Rahm Emanuel. Given the track record, one wonders why anyone would want to go along with that plan. I always thought the Common Market seemed reasonable, but it was just a first step towards some crazy utopian vision created by people with little experience in the real world but who think they know what's best for everybody else.
By the way, what's the difference between a technocracy and a dictatorship?
When I was able to get on a military transport home to the East Coast from the West just before going on to Vietnam, it was all officers on board except me (then a Lance Corporal). Regardless of rank, I was fully treated as an equal. When we arrived at New Jersey's Maguire AFB, anti-Vietnam protesters surrounded the gates, blocking buses in to NYC. Several high-ranking officers invited me to share their cab, at no cost (knowing I cleared about $100 a month).
When I returned from Vietnam and was mustered out, all my college friends -- most opposed to the US in Vietnam -- threw me a welcome home party. It was totally sincere and non-political. Many told me I had experienced something they couldn't imagine and wouldn't risk, and wondered what that would add to my life or diminish in theirs. -- However, my first date after that was with a girl who asked if I'd killed any babies in Vietnam. I didn't date for many months after.
My point is that almost any who have an inkling, a modicum of sense, have respect for our service. As decades have gone by, most Americans have realized that respect is due.
All this is by way of introducing you to read all of Justin Timberlake's awakening to respect. Then, for rueful chuckles at a complete fool in a dangerous position of academic authority, I invite you to read this post, and wonder "why can't this jerk be more like Justin Timberlake?"
Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, up 40% in the last three years, according to Evergreen Education Group, a consulting firm that works with online schools. More than two million pupils take at least one class online, according to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a trade group.
Transnationals are not so much anti-democratic as post-democratic. They believe that in the 21st century, democracy should be updated to include the enforcement of "universal principles of human rights" that they, of course, will enumerate and define. They talk not of surrendering sovereignty but of "sharing" it "collectively." The result, they assert, will be a new age of "global authority" that will produce "global justice" under a "global rule of law."
Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, transnational progressives have been establishing international laws — really supranational laws — that no voters can repeal or even amend. One way this is accomplished is to draft a treaty and apply international pressure to get the U.S. president's signature and the U.S. Senate's ratification. Judges — often from undemocratic countries — in transnational courts then interpret the treaty to mean whatever they want it to mean. There are no courts of appeal.
And if the U.S. rejects the treaty or agrees to only parts of it by issuing "reservations," the transnationals declare that the U.S. is bound nonetheless — under what they call "customary international law" to which, they further insist, even the U.S. Constitution is "subordinate."
I saw hundreds of people who want change, for the common good. I saw people who deserve a bunch more respect than any yahoo, always an employed person who doesn't have to sweat being unemployed, or their health insurance getting cut off, who barks, "Just get a job!" at them. I saw folks who were peaceful, and who appeared to me to be more grounded in reality than the Wall St barons who don't understand why anyone would find it repellent that CEOs make 343 times as much as the average worker. At Zuccotti Park, Day 54, I saw a brighter future for the nation.
Where poor students soar - What works at a school dealing with poverty and a lack of English fluency? Tough love, hard work and a laser focus on achievement.
The Five Most Infantile Beliefs on Display at the ‘Occupy’ Tantrums - Most of the lot are, we can be pretty certain, pure hope-dopers from the Obama Youth brigade – the in-your-face and up-yours gang – now come to flaunt their disillusionment with their adolescent president.
Just like Jefferson County, Alabama, you cannot borrow forever, and when you begin borrowing (as we have begun to in the US) to make your interest payments, it's a bad sign, not sustainable unless God intervenes.
In my view, all Euroland can do now is to pray that somebody strikes oil in Provence or Tuscany - and I don't mean olive oil. Problem is, they don't pray over there anymore. I think they are screwed, and it will affect all of us. A slo-mo death spiral.
The Euroland project is in hospice care, it seems to me, on oxygen and IV morphine. There is not enough money available in the world to cover their crappy debt from their crappy, lazy, hyper-regulated welfare states, and they will never be able to pay it back. Never. Furthermore, as my Wall St. friend tells me, defaults will trigger more CDSs than anybody in the world can cover. It's a shit show, as they say.
I would advise getting popcorn to watch the earthquake unfold, but it can hit us in the US with a financial tsunami here, across the pond.
Maggie: "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money." She never mentioned that you can run out of credit, too.
There will be others. Blue municipalities, tethered to their unions, are the grasshoppers. They will borrow to get re-elected until the money runs out, and leave the mess to others.
Before a federal tax on Christmas trees, why not a special tax on Thanksgiving turkeys first, then we can get to taxing the trees. By the way, CO2 makes Christmas trees grow faster and thicker, so how about a subsidy for CO2 production? Just a thought for the highly-educated geniuses in Washington.
Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms
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I know they want to tax the air,