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.
Obama's 'solution' for what ails us is to utilize two common political treatments for recessions. First, the standard Monetarist 'Easy Money' solution by lowering interest rates. Second, the Keynesian 'Stimulus'. The unfortunate situation we face is really only getting worse because he cannot do the second without the first — there simply isn't enough money interested in supporting more debt. The solution? Print more money, a concept I discussed in an earlier post.
The printing of money allows banks to purchase Treasury Debt, which funds the deficit, which they then sell back to the Fed in order to keep their reserves intact.
Europe has taken a remarkably different approach. The Eurozone wants to emerge from its difficulties in economically healthy fashion, rather than saddled with massive debt. Some European nations have such huge debt that the only sensible track to follow for other Euro nations that are growing modestly is to manage with restraint. They've been backed into a corner, but it's a good corner to be backed into.
Some are not shy about telling Obama why he's wrong.
If Obama was the head of a sports league having economic struggles, BALCO would still be in business. His steroid policy would put individual players at risk in order to keep interest in the league high based on new records. Like Barry Bonds' records, people will soon wonder how things got to this point. Will Congress review Obama's steroid policy and chart a new course?
The Washington Post is usually a little more careful than the New York Times about blatant bias, but its racism hit-job on Governor Perry sinks to a low, at least so far for this election cycle. Perry is supposed to be responsible for the old slur on a rock at a hunting camp rented by his father, which Perry says his father painted over as soon as they rented the camp.
Porky Pig at his worst would call it “wacism.” That’s the words war crossed with racism, as the last refuge of scoundrels out to wage media war to save President Obama’s re-election.
It takes the Texas Tribune to set matters in perspective, doing the job the big city boys wouldn't:
Wallace Jefferson, the first black chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, said the hunting ranch name controversy is "much ado about nothing" and argued the implication that Rick Perry is insensitive to matters of race is flatly wrong…."To imply that the governor condoned either the use of that word or that sentiment, I find false," Jefferson said….
Even some of Perry's fiercest Texas critics say they do not believe he is racist. They point to his record of appointments as evidence: He appointed the state’s first African-American state supreme court justice, Wallace Jefferson, and later made him chief justice. (Jefferson’s great grandfather was a slave, “sold like a horse,” Perry once said with disgust.) Perry’s former general counsel and former chief of staff, Brian Newby, is black; so is Albert Hawkins, the former Health and Human Services commissioner who Perry handpicked to lead the massive agency in 2002.
“He doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” said former Democratic state Rep. Ron Wilson, who is black and served with Perry in his early years in the Legislature. “He didn’t then, and he doesn’t now.”
Added Dallas Democratic Sen. Royce West, who is also black: “I don’t agree with him on policy issues, but you can point to many things he has done that were sensitive to ethnic minorities.”
Those on the Left, as expected, trumpeted the WaPo’s Wacism hit-piece. Those on the Right who went along, to bolster their alternative candidate or out of laziness or to kiss a** in their NYC-DC cocoon, have not only hurt their own credibility but also Republican chances of recovering Washington. Way to go, weasily wascals.
California's elected Insurance commissioner is one of the most anti-insurer in the country. He was part of the Democrat slate chosen by state voters in 2010, from Governor on down, despite the Republican tide elsewhere throughout the country.
His latest, lauding the new law signed by the Governor, making it unlawful for health and disability insurers to be the determiner of whether the claimant on a policy is disabled. Now, according to the Insurance Commissioner's press release: "SB 621 protects consumers of life, health, and disability insurance from 'discretionary clauses' in their insurance policies which give the insurer the sole discretion to decide is a beneficiary has become disabled, even if the consumer has a doctor certify that they are disabled," said Commissioner Jones."
How's doctor certifications worked out in California?
According to the Los Angeles Times, 11% of California drivers used a doctor's note to get a disabled parking tag, so they can park for free in any spot and use those reserved for handicapped drivers. Some truly are handicapped. Most of us have witnessed most parking in those spots getting around fine. According to the deputy chief of investigations of the California DMV, "With the emphasis on fraudulent use ... when we go out, typically on average it's in the area of a 30 to 40 percent violation rate." This is just those using someone else's handicap parking tag. There is no verification of those who obtained a tag with a doctor's note.
Yeah, doctor's notes to obtain health insurance or disability insurance payouts. That's the ticket..........to further destroy insurers and leave us all to government-run, taxpayer-paid coverage.
Several nights ago, I watched Catching Hell on ESPN. I enjoy documentaries and was pleased my wife and boys joined me. My boys have little interest in baseball, and I'm certain my wife got sucked in by the Bill Buckner opening, since she is a longtime Mets fan. Each of them found aspects of the documentary to be interesting and meaningful.
The story centers on Steve Bartman, a young fellow who may have cost the Chicago Cubs a shot at the World Series. It was an unlikely error on his part, one in which fault is questionable. As the documentary points out, many other fans were also reaching for that foul ball. He was unlucky enough to touch it. More importantly, an easy double play ball was booted by the shortstop just a few moments later. Certainly, the lost double play did more to cost the Cubs than a fan preventing a single out.
...we know the brain can “change itself”. You could say that is one of its main jobs in fact – altering itself in response to experience to better adapt to the conditions in which it finds itself. For example, as children learn a language, their auditory system specialises to recognise the typical sounds of that language. Their brains become highly expert at distinguishing those sounds and, in the process, lose the ability to distinguish sounds they hear less often. (This is why many Japanese people cannot distinguish between the sounds of the letters “l” and “r”, for example, and why many Westerners have difficulty hearing the crucial tonal variations in languages like Cantonese). Learning motor skills similarly improves performance and induces structural changes in the relevant brain circuits. In fact, most circuits in the brain develop in an experience-dependent fashion, summed up by two adages: “cells that fire together, wire together” and “use it or lose it”.
Given the clear evidence for brain plasticity, the implication would seem to be that even if our brains come pre-wired with some particular tendencies, that experience, especially early experience, should be able to override them.
I would argue that the effect of experience-dependent development is typically exactly the opposite – that while the right kind of experience can, in principle, act to overcome innate tendencies, in practice, the effect is reversed. The reason is that our innate tendencies shape the experiences we have, leading us to select ones that tend instead to reinforce or even amplify these tendencies. Our environment does not just shape us – we shape it.
Indeed, smart people have been saying for many years that we have the power to shape our world, our realities, and our experience. There is a real reality out there somewhere, presumably, and real truth and Real Truth, but these things are elusive to our limited brains.
In daily life, we don't even consider that we live on a little rapidly-moving and spinning ball of rock in some sort of curved Space-Time in a frightening and awe-inspiring cosmos that few of us can comprehend. It's the stuff of college bull-sessions: Did the world make us, or do we make the world?
It's all good fun, but we do have to run our lives while we're here. Or not.
Our editor mentioned not being able to quite grasp the idea of freshwater stripers. Well, here is one I caught yesterday morning on Lake Murray, 26" - 15 lbs. Caught a total of four over a half hour or so - all in this range - 25 to 26", 15/17 lbs.
I was definitely on the wrong side of the bite, so I switched from bait casting to fly rod. Used a Ugly Stick 7' fast action rod (home build), Galvan T-12 large arbor reel, #12 weight forward sinking line, 5 yards of 48 lb lead core line, 6' 20 lb florocarbon tippet and one of my jig "specials" - 1/2 oz, lead core, foam covered jig head/hook with chartreuse/white bucktail with some transparent yellow colored foil for flash. All topped off with a 6" curly tailed grub.
Now I can here you thinking all the way down here - that's not fly fishing - that's bait casting. No it isn't. Its the same technique used to get the lure down to the fish as you would use on a stream, pond or small lake - it's just heavier with more "umph" if you will. The whole idea is to get the lure to present properly to the fish you're targeting. It works the same if its a nymph, dry fly or foam bass bug.
I jokingly refer to my sons as The Mother’s Curse. Did your mother, exasperated or angry, ever stand over you and say, “You should have children like you. Then you’ll know how I feel.”Surely, my mother is rolling over in her grave laughing at me because they’re like me as I remember my childhood.
They get under my skin when they’re obstinate, selfish, nasty, use bad words, make excuses, talk back. And, I sometimes lose my temper.
Yeah, they are only 11 and 6, I know, and they’ve progressed and are supposed to know and act better and control themselves as they grow older and more experienced.
To become better it is necessary to correct and instruct them, and be willing to make it stick. When they continue to not listen, and even dig in to provoke me, I sometimes blow my stack. And they tremble then and cool it.
But, I wish, and if wishes were fishes we’d never go hungry, they would listen and learn more and I yell at them less (especially when I overreact).
I’ve read many books and tried to follow their guidance. Yet, I still have to yell at them. And, they keep pushing back, one of their more lovable characteristics that they don’t back down or off easily.
Why the remarkable proliferation of law schools? Because schools make a lot of money from them. In my youth, in the 1800s, we learned law from books and apprenticeship. Law school was not a requirement for joining the bar until 1906, which is long after I was admitted to the bar. Why they jumped from 0 years to 3 years of formal education, I do not know.
I happen to believe that legal training is good training for all sorts of things that a person might want to accomplish. However, the legal field is looking a little shaky these days unless you want to chase ambulances and have strange hair like John Edwards. The Obama recession is hurting everybody, dentists and lawyers, plumbers and electricians, doctors and churches, handymen and builders.
I think we're gonna throw a little Oktoberfest party this year.
Cheap and easy: Get a pile of bratwurst, weisswurst, cole slaw, sauerkraut, applesauce, German mustard, German potato salad, and German pretzels at Costco.
Split the wursts and toss them on the charcoal. Boil some of the weisswurst, and grill some of them. Maybe cook up a pile of potato pancakes.
A random selection of German beers - definitely some weissbrau - and maybe some German wine. German chocolate cake too.
After a few brews, get everybody to do the Chicken Dance.
Dan Kahan of Yale Law School discusses Cultural Cognition and the Challenge of Science Communication.
His lecture is basically about confirmation bias, which he discusses in terms of "cultural cognition."
While he acknowledges that at least some of what he terms "cultural" is in fact psychological (eg a person's fearfulness or curiosity about life) rather than groupthink, it is still an interesting approach to opinion formation.
I get the sense that he thinks people should believe what the experts say. I also think he has a slight case of Asperger's, which makes listening to him an interesting experience. As a Maggie's person, my tendency is to be skeptical about what experts say (which places me in his hierarchical, individualistic categories).
Well, I suppose that, to be up to date, I should say "Working with those to whom one is or becomes attracted."
Guys used to have affairs with their secretaries. Today, there are no secretaries, and women are working in every field from the military to police forces to trading floors. When it was a Man's World, there was less temptation.
It is no surprise that people form attractions and attachments with co-workers - after all, most people spend more time with co-workers than with their spouse and family. Some emotional connection is inevitable.
I won't even bother asking whether you have had this happen to you, because it is universal and frequent. (Years ago, a co-worker of mine told me that he only wanted assistants who were ugly or old, so he would not be distracted.)
My question for our readers, if they wish to be open about this topic, is this:
How do you deal with it when you feel turned on by, attracted to, or in love or lust with a co-worker?
Less gullible. Makes sense to me. The people who preach to me about it know nothing. People who have studied the sciences at higher levels know that most scientific knowledge is never settled. Science is about theories, mostly, tested by observation, and eventually replaced by new theories and new information.
Climate science, in my view, is in its infancy, is overfunded compared with more compelling areas, and will ultimately turn out to be largely irrelevant except to those who study it - and to paleontologists.
As regular readers know, we are skeptical but have some hope that some global warming is happening. Gaia would like it. The next ice age would be quite unpleasant.
Only 17% of American physicians are members. I quit them long ago, over their politics. Like so many foundations and non-profits in America, they were hijacked by Lefties years ago.
The antipathy of physicians for the AMA is not just about money, turf, and guild. It goes way beyond that. However, apparently the AMA's strenuous support of Obamacare (seemingly without understanding any of its implications) has been the final straw.
There is a new breed of young physicians, especially women, who don't mind being employees, having bosses, or working as an agent of the government, but most docs over 40 are not interested in that. In general, docs like autonomy, flexibility, self-direction. Also, they hate paperwork and bureaucracy.
With all due respect to the Bible and to Shakespeare, I say that it is obviously acceptable in casual and conversational English, and in poetic English, but not in formal English, and the same goes for run-on sentences.
It is? What kind of "love"? What did Lennon/McCarthy mean, and who made them experts?
Our link yesterday morning from F- Feelings was excellent: Love Slaves. "The bad news is that most love won’t work, and you’ve got to leave it alone when you know it won’t."
If we let emotion control our lives, we are animals. If we let reason control our lives, we are robots.
There are more kinds of love than the Eskimos have (proverbially) kinds of snow. I once tried to make a list, and gave up. People vary enormously in their needs or wants for all of those sorts of need, desire, addiction, and attachment.
The people don't owe Warren and her vast government machine anything. She owes it to them.
For over a century, the public has paid far more into government than it has received back in benefits. That extra money has gone to people like Warren. It has gone into the entire rotten machinery of crony capitalism, welfare state machine politics and massive bureaucracy. So let's be clear about this. We don't owe Warren and her ilk anything. She owes us.
I guess you can store them right next to your secret stash of incandescent bulbs, your stash of salt, your guns, your Bibles, your tobacco, your home-grown medical pot, and your gold coins.
Pastor was preaching today about our congregation being, or becoming, a "deep church" and not a "nice church."
Since our service ran 1 1/2 hours (as it often does), and the second morning service was coming up, I didn't have time to ask him exactly what was meant.
Thank God for these intertunnels. Here's one essay on the topic: Deep Church: A Third Way? If that essay is any indication, I think our church is pretty much there. I don't know about "nice," but we are darn friendly and welcoming. Growing quickly too, for better or worse.
Okay, now you people know, you are well aware one of the reasons you listen is I know liberals. I know them. I know them like every square inch of my glorious naked body. Dealing with liberals is like dealing with a one-armed lunatic.
He wonders who has been producing the money to pay her salary all these years in non-profits, government, and academia. Read the whole thing - with half his brain tied behind his back, just to keep it fair.
There is a parasitic mind-set out there, and lots of people want to get on board. As I like to say, "Ask first what your country can do for you..." No heavy lifting, no accountability. In Warren's world, who does the real work? Slaves?
I have been a de facto slave to government (taxes) and academia (tuitions) most of my adult life. I give more than I can afford to non-profits and my church too, but at least that is voluntary.
Glazer is one of those people whose thinking we have always admired, whether we agreed with his conclusions or not. I say this while quite aware that he is somebody who has never really done anything other than think and study things, and has probably never lifted an engine from a Chevy, built a stone wall, or shot a deer, and really probably knows little about life.
President Obama’s revival of an ambitious social policy agenda makes this a good time to reexamine the work of one of the most brilliant critics of the first wave: Nathan Glazer, now 88, a Harvard sociologist and one of the last of the founding generation of neoconservatives (a term often applied to him, though he has never really embraced it). In his bluntly titled 1988 book, The Limits of Social Policy, Glazer examined two decades’ worth of programs and reached a sobering conclusion: “Against the view that to every problem there is a solution, I came to believe that we can have only partial and less than wholly satisfying answers to the social problems in question. Whereas the prevailing wisdom was that social policies would make steady progress in nibbling away at the agenda of problems set by the forces of industrialization and urbanization, I came to believe that although social policy had ameliorated some of the problems we had inherited, it had also given rise to other problems no less grave in their effect on human happiness.”
What gave that conclusion special power was the intellectual journey that Glazer took to reach it.
It took Glazer a while to realize that liberty and freedom might be a better social policy than anything that the DC and Ivy brainiacs can design "for us." I could have told him that 40 years ago when I first realized that there are sick people in the world who enjoy power and control, and who have the delusion that they deserve those things because they imagine that they are smarter than I am. They are not. I want to be the master of my life.
Wood stove heat, two bedrooms, and lights and a hot shower when they turn the generator on at 5 am. They serve a heck of hearty breakfast - lots of bacon, meat, eggs, pancakes, and home fries - and a tasty, simple supper. They will cook whatever you bring them from the woods. BYOB - and we do. No phone, no cell service.
Our usual hunting cabin at Bosebuck Camps, 13 miles down a rutted dirt logging road with Moosies usually trotting down it, not far from the Quebec border.
Dogs in the lodge, dining room, and on the beds, of course.
The current uproar about the CLASS longterm care portion of ObamaCare is instructive of both how we got into this mess and how difficult it will be to get out of it. For those who watch TVs Falling Skies, where spinal implant harnesses attached to humans by aliens even when removed leave irremovable control over humans, that could also be our fate under ObamaCare. The blogosphere needs to step up its game to avoid or reduce this implantation.
Major blogs are now writing about the meltdown of the ObamaCare CLASS longterm care program, now that some internal memos have been revealed. But, with facts and figures, readily available reporting (including pre-admissions of failure before Congress reported in the New York Times), and my decades experience and certifications in employee benefits, I wrote about the unsustainability of CLASS long before, to be ignored. ( See here, ObamaCare’s CLASS Failure, and here, The Fraud Admitted.) I saw this before regarding my columns over many years on healthcare issues. Why?
Healthcare and insurance are not sexy issues, and require some deeper understanding to speak about intelligently. Most bloggers are involved in quick-takes on the hot issues of the day. Then, the blogosphere is politicized. Unless that issue can be highlighted quickly to undermine the opposition, and doesn’t require much research, it is passed on. This is even so when the issue is reported in the major media. Bloggers also know that very few of their readers are willing to spend much time on the fine details of most issues.
It wasn’t until ObamaCare that most bloggers began to write about healthcare. Suddenly everyone wrote as an instant expert. And, as often as not, superficially or confusing important facts.
Focus was on ObamaCare’s costs, on government controls over individual choices, and on the mandate, all important. However, the details of ObamaCare make readers' eyes gloss over. The Obama administration counted on that to pass the bill and since to keep the details muted. Of course, some specialized blogs went deeper, but are rarely read.
The CLASS portion of ObamaCare was known to be unsustainable from the get-go, which is why the bill itself required it to be examined after passage before implementation. But, the estimated $75-billion revenues from its early years’ was key to falsely claiming that ObamaCare would not increase federal deficits, before CLASS itself went into huge deficits.
There are many more examples I could easily point out. Assuming that after the 2012 elections there’ll be a Republican president and Congress, despite pledges to repeal ObamaCare, we’ll find much of it welded into our spines. The mandate issue is focused upon because it raises libertarian hackles and because it seems the only promising course in the courts. However, even judicially excising mandates may not uproot Obamacare, if found severable despite the ObamaCare bill not including a severability clause. Also, by then, if there is a then at the Supreme Court, many portions of ObamaCare will be so far along, and many aspects of current healthcare so changed, as to be irremovable. Welcome to Falling Skies, the ObamaCare version. Falling Skies next season is next Summer, just in time for the 2012 election season. Will we survive the aliens? Will we survive ObamaCare? Can we reverse the alien harnesses? Will the blogosphere get ahead of instead of behind the ObamaCare issues? Stay tuned.
That building is not a style I'd go out of my way to build or anything, but it's based on one of the coolest things in the history of the US: The Columbian Exposition in Chicago (aka the Chicago World's Fair) on the 400th anniversary of Cristobal Colon showing up. (he was Portuguese, you know; a man holding a knife to my chin told me that and I believed him, con gusto).
Victoria didn't die until 1901, and Britain didn't get the memo until 1940 or so, but the Columbian Exposition was the exact spot on the calendar that the United States became the most important thing in the world. And the pavilions were like a big contest to see who had the biggest architectural stones. All the heavyweights were there. Sullivan (Wright's boss) McKim, Olmstead, every damn person that matters worked there. Walt Disney's father worked there, and that's where Walt got the idea for Disneyland. The world's first ferris wheel! My old, dead neighbor in Mattapoisett, Frank Millet painted murals there. Mark Twain was the best man at his wedding. Pabst Blue Ribbon was introduced there! Tesla! Scott Joplin!
All the swells sent their artsy-fartsy children to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paree, and they studied classical Roman and Greek stuff. The Columbian Exposition was an explosion of American Beaux-Arts/ Neoclassical architecture on the world. The idiot "Elvis's House" two-story columns on the big shack you took a picture of in Newport was born when they put up a replica of Mount Vernon at the exhibition and everyone got the idea from the back portico on George's house. Didn't matter it doesn't have anything much to do with classical Greek and Roman design. There was a lot of pastiche born out of the style.
That's what that house is. Neoclassical. It was really popular right up to the depression, when everyone got gloomy and started building things like Fenway Park.
Here's a pic of Machinery Hall at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The grand buildings were all temporary structures in a temporary Olmsted landscape, and became an inspiration for things like Disneyland:
Mark Safranski is elaborating at his defense issues blog Zenpundit on the problems raised by R2P, Right To Protect, or what I termed “Transnational Elites Uber Alles,” for intervention on humanitarian grounds against those nation’s rulers who our liberal elites dislike.
…it extends the uncontrolled reach of liberal elites within our government to act regardless of our laws or popular will….Transnational self-elected elites making “the world safe for democracy” or for their own supremacy?
Regimes who are not in disfavor with our liberal elites, however oppressive, get off more lightly.
In the first part of a five-part series, R2P is the New COIN, Safranski says:
…like the rise of pop-centric COIN, it will be an electrifying idea that has the potential fire the imagination of foreign policy intellectuals, make careers for its bureaucratic enthusiasts and act as a substitute for the absence of a coherent American grand strategy.
Neither COIN nor R2P are strategies. Unlike COIN, however, which is a set of tactics that may be applicable in some circumstances in pursuit of strategic goals (even if those goals may be arguable), R2P doesn’t have any operational tactics. R2P is more a clarion call to action, including actions that are contrary to US laws or popular will, in pursuit of internationalist goals for global governing as defined by transnational elites.
Further, R2P is cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric that allows liberal elites to preen, displaying their caring feathers, regardless of their ignorance of the military, regardless of the cost-benefit to US national security, and regardless that it isn’t their children being sent into harm’s way.
Lastly, R2P is reactive, not prescriptive of avoiding future threats to US security as a strategy must be. Much the same coterie who want to raise R2P to dominance over US foreign and military policies are largely dismissive of severely hobbling US allies or hollowing our military.
The second part of Safranski’s series is R2P is the New COIN: Slaughter’s Premises, Anne-Marie Slaughter being a prominent intellectual proponent of R2P. Slaughter defines a state as legitimate, effectively governed, only if it provides social goods to its populace, regardless of other sources of cohesion or democratic means of choosing leaders. Illegitimate states are targets for R2P, US core security interests aside.
Safranski writes me that Part 3 will focus on Authority and International Law, R2P resting upon amorphous, internationalist rule proposed to override US laws, Part 4 on Sovereignty, discussing the radicalness of R2P proponents’ program to replace nation states’ independence, and Part 5 on Legitimacy, Networks and Power, discussing the undemocratic, oligarchic views of the R2P proponents.
I suggest you read all five parts if you want to be up on the intellectual fad trotted forward to undermine US sovereignty and core security interests.
A post from our friend Rick, who will be a regular author here at Maggie's once we negotiate the compensation details (he won't take paper money):
"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws" — Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild
Many of us want to get rich. Some of us, anyway. What’s the fastest way to do it? Print your own money.
If it were only that easy. But what if it were? Ignoring counterfeiters, there have been several cases where privately printed money has fueled growth and provided value. Up to a point, that is, because as we all know, if it were that easy, everybody would do it. Yet the government does it because the government wants everyone to be rich, or the government wants to support declining prices, or the government wants to pay back money it borrowed. So the government creates money and backs it up with full faith and confidence and this should be enough for everyone to be rich and happy.
Why hasn't this goal ever been achieved? Let's take a look at one example where this theory was put to work.
In August 1717, somebody had a bright idea. The idea was based on the concept that the New World offered so much resource wealth and opportunity that anyone with a monopoly could sell portions of that untapped wealth to others, reduce his risk, and make himself and investors rich via joint stock ownership. Stock ownership was not a new idea, but this offer carried tremendous upside, particularly because the company offering the stock was owned and backed by a bank, and the company had been granted a government monopoly on all trade in the region.
John Law was the proprietor of the Banque Générale Privée (General Private Bank), which he funded by investing heavily in the debt of the French government. He literally invented paper money because he viewed money only as a medium of exchange, not a store of value or unit of account. It represented a claim on some value already in existence, and therefore could not have an impact on prices or overall valuations. He was brilliant and everyone, including himself, knew it. Law was so smart he was able to win card games by mentally calculating the odds. He also developed economic theories which are still the basis of some modern economic theory. One of his most persistent creations was the establishment of a central bank, which would oversee and manage the issuance of credit and paper money. Based on his theories, paper money had no relationship to the price of goods and services.
Well, I suppose that, to be up to date, I should say "Working with those to whom one is or becomes attracted." 
