I never played lacrosse but I love watching the game. Except I think I need to get an extra large bottle of Tums before the game from now on. Seems like every game I catch has a heart attack finish. Saturday Cornell beats Loyola in triple OT. Last night Army upsets Syracuse in double OT. Phew.
This is Hallgrímskirkja, a church in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland. It is built to resemble an ancient area of the countryside, near a waterfall, where stones in these shapes were found as part of a natural geological formation.
Restricted, regulated and monopolized markets are especially handicapping to people who are seen as less preferred, latecomers and people with little political clout. For example, owning and operating a taxi is one way out of poverty. It takes little skills and capital. But in most cities, one has to purchase a license costing tens of thousands of dollars. New York City’s taxicab licensing law is particularly egregious, requiring a person, as of May 2007, to pay $600,000 for a license to own and operate one taxicab. Business licensing laws are not racially discriminatory as such, but they have a racially discriminatory effect.
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
Brilliant presentation. Learn about the Federal Reserve. Sounds boring, but it matters. Why is the dollar in your pocket worth 1/20th of what it was worth 100 years ago? The Fed.
Once again the vast majority fails to see a crisis in the making, even as it stares at them from close range. Just as market observers in 2007 told us that the credit crisis would be confined to the subprime mortgage market, current analysts tell us that sovereign debt problems are confined to Greece, Spain, Portugal, and perhaps Italy. They were wrong then, and I believe that they’re wrong now…
Just because we can inflate does not mean we can escape the consequences of our actions. One way or another the piper must be paid. Either benefits will be cut or the real value of those benefits will be reduced. In fact, it is precisely because we can inflate our problems away that they now loom so large. With no one forcing us to make the hard choices, we constantly take the easy way out.
When creditors ultimately decide to curtail loans to America, U.S. interest rates will finally spike, and we will be confronted with even more difficult choices than those now facing Greece. Given the short maturity of our national debt, a jump in short-term rates would either result in default or massive austerity. If we choose neither, and opt to print money instead, the runaway inflation that will ensue will produce an even greater austerity than the one our leaders lacked the courage to impose. Those who believe rates will never rise as long as the Fed remains accommodative, or that inflation will not flare up as long as unemployment remains high, are just as foolish as those who assured us that the mortgage market was sound because national real estate prices could never fall.
When the subprime mess hit the prevailing wisdom was that “no one saw coming.” Did no one really see it coming? I asked myself, and then went on a search to test this statement. It turns out there were some people who saw it coming. Peter Schiff was one of those people. I have been following his writing since. And he makes some dire predictions for the US’s future if we fail to clean up our debt.
2 points:
The quality of knowledge should be judged based on its ability to predict accurately. Knowledge is useless if it does not help you modify future behavior in order to better your plot in life.
People like Schiff who make accurate, albeit dire, predictions often go ignored, not because of the accuracy of the prediction but because they are viewed to be “un American” or too “gloom and doom.” People tend to react by saying things like, “we’re better than that. We can overcome anything.” Essentially blinding themselves to the POSSIBILITY of large catastrophic events so much that proper, preventative action is never taken.
America, we had a pretty bad flood happen here in Nashville. We noticed that you didn’t notice. That’s OK, there was a bomb that didn’t explode in Times Square and and oil spill in the Gulf. It took up all the news space. Seriously, it’s OK.
Here’s the deal with our town. We have one particular industry here, the music industry, which isn’t really that big in the grand scheme of things, that has made a lot of money putting out an image that we’re a bunch of inbred hillbilly yokels who sing about sexy tractors and watermelon crawls. We know that’s what you think, and that’s OK. Meanwhile we are walking around in our regular clothes, not in cowboy hats and boots, going to our jobs in healthcare and publishing and tourism and tech, just living our lives in peace.
Now, it’s true that we aren’t entirely like some of you. We hold the door open for old ladies and say thank you to the cashier and get called “hon” by the waitress at the Waffle House. We say “y’all” and “all y’all” and we eat grits and biscuits. And here’s another thing, we’re quick to help people, but we’re also quick to mind our own business. There are a lot of famous people in this town. We leave them alone. I saw Jack White at my favorite watering hole recently. Everybody left him alone. I saw Michael McDonald at an Indian buffet recently. There were 100 people in that restaurant, everyone left him alone. We all know where Nicole Kidman buys her groceries and where Vince Gill eats breakfast on the weekends, yet you never see paparazzi hanging out in those places. This isn’t New York and it isn’t L.A. That’s how we like it.
So, now that something happens that deserves national attention, you’re leaving us alone. We’re OK with that. Because we’re helping ourselves. That’s how we roll here. The volunteer effort here has been amazing. There aren’t people clamoring for a government bail out. Nobody is bitching at FEMA. Nobody is looting. Nobody is getting raped at a shelter. We’re helping each other. We’re cleaning up and we will move on.
This is a big deal, America. I know several people who have lost everything. I’m helping clean up, and offering clothes and a place to stay. There are thousands of similar stories like that in Nashville. We help each other out. We do what we can.
So y’all go on about what you’re doing and we’ll go on about what we are doing. But I just want to let you know, right now this is the strongest city in America. Right now this is the proudest city in America. So, after we clean up, come see us sometime. Y’all are always welcome.
I tried to edit but this post demands full reblog - let’s all go down to Nashville soon.
This is basic for properly understanding economists. If you do not understand this, you will not understand why economists, who should see the devastating cumulative effects of government debt, invariably say that things are not beyond the point of no return. For an economist, now is not the day of salvation. That day is always in the future. For an economist, there is always enough time for getting government debt under control. For an economist, there is no day of national judgment, no day of national reckoning. A business can go bankrupt. An individual can go bankrupt. But a government need not go bankrupt if it has a cooperative central bank or foreign central banks to buy its debt. Such is the teaching of economists, except for Austrian School economists, who know a government drunk when they see one…
What is my solution to the Federal Reserve System? It is Andrew Jackson’s solution: Revoke its federal charter by revoking the Federal Reserve Act. Then demand the return of every ounce of gold at $42.22 (the official price), which will then be minted into tenth-ounce gold coins and sold to reduce the Federal deficit
