Life never knows the return of spring. --John Gay in Beggar's Opera
A lot of talk around about everyone writing in friends and family members for the election.
Dating sites: Older men are more popular with women than younger men. In the online dating space older men inspire trust, stability and maturity. Men from 20 to 30 years are rarely sought as a potential partner for long-lasting relationship followed by future marriage. The tendency with the women’s age is quite opposite. Not knowing this, men lower their real age on sites.
German regulators estimate that insurers will begin to fail after 2018 due to the impossibility of operating in a negative interest environment with over 80 percent of said insurers’ investments in fixed income. Read that again.
In his autobiography Twain says that his career as a river-boat pilot began in the mid-1850s: "I made up my mind that I would go to the head-waters of the Amazon and collect coca and trade in it and make a fortune.... When I got to New Orleans I inquired about ships leaving for Para and discovered that there weren't any and learned that there probably wouldn't be any during that century." He signed on as an apprentice with Horace Bixby, the pilot who had brought him to New Orleans; on the nostalgia and research trip of 1882, Twain arranged to travel upriver with Bixby. The riverbank was so different that when given a chance to pilot his old route Twain couldn't find any of his remembered landmarks. As a boy he would see a dozen steamboats an hour; now there were maybe a half-dozen a day -- one day he saw only one, though it was called "The Mark Twain." The end of his trip was a three-day stay in hometown Hannibal, Missouri; here he reports bursting into tears because of the changes, because of the familiar look and smell of the mud, because he was no longer Sam Clemens but Mark Twain, the famous author who now traveled with a secretary hired to take down notes so that no profitable impression might be lost. (King)
"What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias." --Judge Learned Hand
An analysis of Europe I stumbled across: Nonperforming loans make up almost 20% of Italian banking system assets. As you go from north to south in Italy, the percentage of bad loans increases. Some southern banks hold nearly 40% nonperforming loans. By contrast, nonperforming loans of US banks are down to a somewhat manageable 1%. During the worst of our banking crisis, US nonperforming loans never rose above 3½%. Italy’s level is almost six times greater, and there is not an economic crisis yet. A collapse of the Italian banking system is a systemic risk for all of Europe. Compared to Italy, Greece will seem quite manageable.
Who is...Ben Rhodes?
Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul in 1981. Agca claimed that he had planned to go to England to kill the king but couldn’t because it turned out there was only a queen and “Turks don’t shoot women.” He also claimed to have Palestinian connections. Most people believe this story is all disinformation and that Agca was a contract killer for the Russians through Bulgaria’s KGB-connected intelligence agency. The motive behind an alleged Soviet-inspired assassination must be viewed in the context of the Cold War in 1981. Pope John Paul II was Polish-born and openly supportive of the democratic movement in that country. His visit to Poland in 1979 worried the Kremlin, which saw its hold on Eastern Europe in danger. Documents from the ex-East German secret police, the Stasi, appear to pin the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II on the KGB.
Although the exact extent of the conspiracy remains unknown today, Agca reportedly met with Bulgarian spies Sergei Antonov, Zhelio Vassilev, Todor Aivazov, and Bekir Celenk in Rome about assassinating Lech Walesa, the Polish labor union leader. However, this plan was abandoned when Agca was offered $1.25 million to kill the pope.
Although the exact extent of the conspiracy remains unknown today, Agca reportedly met with Bulgarian spies Sergei Antonov, Zhelio Vassilev, Todor Aivazov, and Bekir Celenk in Rome about assassinating Lech Walesa, the Polish labor union leader. However, this plan was abandoned when Agca was offered $1.25 million to kill the pope.
I wonder, who was the Russian KGB man in East Germany at the time?
Global debt increased by $57 trillion in the seven years ending 2014. The leaders among creditors were the sovereigns: at 9.3-percent growth, government debt swelled to $58 trillion from a starting point of $33 trillion. Corporations came in second place with their debt levels rising by 5.9 percent to $56 trillion from $38 trillion. The onus was clearly on these two competitors to offset the relatively weaker growth of financial and household debt which was no doubt dragged down by the collapse in U.S. mortgage availability and the recapitalization of (some) lenders.
In Paris in the early 1800s there were two hospitals devoted entirely to the treatment of syphilis. Afflicted women were sent to the Hôpital Lourcine, a hospital filled with the most frightful instances of venereal ravages. The men were sent to the Hôpital du Midi, which required that all patients be publicly whipped as punishment for contracting the disease, both before and after treatment. There were hospitals everywhere, hospitals for lunatic women and for idiot men, hospitals for the incurable, for the blind, for the deaf and dumb, and even for ailing elderly married couples who wished to die together.
Golden oldie:
There has been some talk about a BTT, a "Business Transfer Tax." It is sort of a VAT, like the tax-hungry Europeans. Basically, with a BTT, a company pays tax on the revenue it receives net of what it pays for the services and products it is selling. For example, Netflix would pay on the revenue it receives after deducting the money it sends to television and movie producers for the rights to show their products.
Texas achieved independence from Mexico in 1836. In 1844, President John Tyler restarted negotiations with the Republic of Texas, culminating with a Treaty of Annexation. But the slave thing never stopped. The treaty was defeated by a wide margin in the Senate because it would upset the slave state/free state balance between North and South (and because risked war with Mexico, which had broken off relations with the United States.) But shortly before leaving office and with the support of President-elect Polk, Tyler managed to get the joint resolution passed on March 1, 1845. Texas was admitted to the union on December 29. While Mexico didn’t follow through with its threat to declare war, relations between the two nations remained tense over border disputes, and in July 1845, President Polk ordered troops into disputed lands that lay between the Neuces and Rio Grande rivers.
This bull market is more than seven years old, and only one rally in history has lasted longer—from December 1987 to March 2000. After that, we had a two-and-a-half-year bear market that chopped the stock market in half.
Ben Rhodes, the White House information guy, was profiled in NYT Magazine. It is not pretty. Rhodes declared, “We created an echo chamber.” Rhodes exploited the fact that when newspapers close foreign bureaus to economize on staff, the gray beards disappear. Now, “They call us (at the White House) to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo,” Rhodes proclaimed. “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Exhibit A of the “master shaper” Rhodes bending the press to Obama’s will was the Iran arms deal. The Times explained that Obama’s team exploited the press by pretending the 2013 election of President Hassan Rouhani and a “moderate” faction of the Iranian regime presented a brand-new opportunity to strike an Iran deal. But in reality, the Obama negotiators began talking to Iran in July of 2012, almost a year before the election. This false narrative entered the echo chamber. Polls showed that the American public didn’t like the Iran deal, but the media just shouted over them with recycled Obama lingo about the “historic” and “landmark” agreement.
Another example that wasn’t mentioned by the Times is the death of four Americans at Benghazi. In 2012, Rhodes easily ventriloquized the media with the bizarre spin that the U.S. Consulate wasn’t subjected to a terrorist attack, but that it suffered from a spontaneous protest over an internet video mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Even after Team Obama was forced to relent on this blatantly false talking point, the ventriloquist dummies wouldn’t focus on how they had been used.
Just last week, Fox News’ chief Washington, D.C., correspondent James Rosen told host Bill O’Reilly that the State Department blatantly lied to him when he asked about the Iran deal negotiations timeline.
These economist are disturbing to read when their guard is down. Greenspan, after the financial crisis, and the criticism he received for contributing to the housing bubble at the core of it, went back and studied herd behavior, with some surprising results. “I was actually flabbergasted,” he admitted. “It upended my view of how the world works.”
Exhibit A of the “master shaper” Rhodes bending the press to Obama’s will was the Iran arms deal. The Times explained that Obama’s team exploited the press by pretending the 2013 election of President Hassan Rouhani and a “moderate” faction of the Iranian regime presented a brand-new opportunity to strike an Iran deal. But in reality, the Obama negotiators began talking to Iran in July of 2012, almost a year before the election. This false narrative entered the echo chamber. Polls showed that the American public didn’t like the Iran deal, but the media just shouted over them with recycled Obama lingo about the “historic” and “landmark” agreement.
Another example that wasn’t mentioned by the Times is the death of four Americans at Benghazi. In 2012, Rhodes easily ventriloquized the media with the bizarre spin that the U.S. Consulate wasn’t subjected to a terrorist attack, but that it suffered from a spontaneous protest over an internet video mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Even after Team Obama was forced to relent on this blatantly false talking point, the ventriloquist dummies wouldn’t focus on how they had been used.
Just last week, Fox News’ chief Washington, D.C., correspondent James Rosen told host Bill O’Reilly that the State Department blatantly lied to him when he asked about the Iran deal negotiations timeline.
These economist are disturbing to read when their guard is down. Greenspan, after the financial crisis, and the criticism he received for contributing to the housing bubble at the core of it, went back and studied herd behavior, with some surprising results. “I was actually flabbergasted,” he admitted. “It upended my view of how the world works.”
Jon Stewart showed up and gave an interview about the nomination of Trump and argued that the failure of Liberals to manage big government successfully had a lot to do with the voter disillusionment. Somehow this was seen as wise. Then he said something actually telling. Commenting on Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again," he said, "When was America ever great?" This is an essential--maybe the essential--difference between the Right and the Left in the U.S.. The Right see America as a revolutionary change in the history of the relationship between men and their governance, the Left sees it at a flawed, bigoted effort at maintaining a flawed, bigoted status quo.
There are two sides of many word bases. Scrutable, licit, peccable, clement, effable are a few of the "positives." Some "negatives:" Incredible, infinite, irresistible, unafraid, and unambiguous.
A piece by Jack Winter in The New Yorker of July 25, 1994, “How I Met My Wife” which used “positives” opens: “It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consulate.”
Burgess said A Clockwork Orange was his least favorite book. Critics did not like it either: "Anthony Burgess is a literary smart aleck whose novel, A Clockwork Orange last year achieved a success d'estime with critics like William Burroughs, who mistook his muddle of sadism, teddyboyism, jive talk and Berlitz Russian for social philosophy." (I tend to like anything with a crack at Burroughs.) He said he had to write the book "in a state of near drunkenness in order to deal with material that upset me very much."
A piece by Jack Winter in The New Yorker of July 25, 1994, “How I Met My Wife” which used “positives” opens: “It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consulate.”
Burgess said A Clockwork Orange was his least favorite book. Critics did not like it either: "Anthony Burgess is a literary smart aleck whose novel, A Clockwork Orange last year achieved a success d'estime with critics like William Burroughs, who mistook his muddle of sadism, teddyboyism, jive talk and Berlitz Russian for social philosophy." (I tend to like anything with a crack at Burroughs.) He said he had to write the book "in a state of near drunkenness in order to deal with material that upset me very much."
But Burgess did not think that he was in a muddle over meaning: the muddle was due to the film being based on the American edition of the book, which omitted his last chapter. In his introduction to the 1986, restored, American edition, he says that he gave in to his American editors because he needed their money, but they turned his novel into a fable, something merely sensational and not "a fair picture of human life." He explains that in his last chapter -- symbolically, Chapter 21 -- "my young thuggish protagonist grows up" because he recognizes "that human energy is better expended on creation than destruction."
AAAaaaannnnnddddd.........a picture of a pet:
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