Lincoln

Man In Critical Condition After Hearing Slightly Differing Viewpoint--Babylon Bee

Well, the Pens just got beat. And I do not see what they can do. Trotz is impressive.
Tiger Woods winning the Masters is unbelievable.
I watched GoT all weekend. Even Mom watched the start last night.
Chris gets fixed tomorrow.

Trump has become a metaphor for our politicians and our system. This is what Gillibrand, a woman who thinks herself a presidential candidate, said in an interview: "When you say you want to develop low-yield nuclear weapons that are tactile, what you’re saying is you want to use them." Tactile nuclear weapons? Touchie feelie? These people want to lead us?

So Trump's crazy Trade War may have slowed down the world economy so much the Fed may not have to raise rates? May not be able to? So he's taken over the economy from the Fed? Is this genius or are we watching random behavior?

European banks are trading at 5 -6 PE ratio.

Domestic update:  Overdosing on drugs has now become the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, 40 percent of all births in the U.S. now happen outside of marriage. But if you go back to 1970, that figure was  just 10 percent. At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father.

Don sent an article that is shocking. We suffer in this country when a church is vandalized but in 2018 in France there were 1063 attacks on Christian churches or symbols, over two church attacks a day. Unlike anti-Antisemitism, which seems to be a persistent and unaided European phenomenon, this anti-Christian behavior seems to be "migrant," i.e. Islam. This behavior growing in Germany as well. One or two is a lunatic; two a day is an atmosphere.

A gay guy I have some regard for had this quote he got off an article somewhere (but did not credit): "An estimated 14,700 troops identify as transgender." Now, national stats are that 1 out of 30,000 adult male and 1 out of 100,000 females seek sex change surgery. So....

Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.”--Jill Abramson, former NYT editor, in her “Merchants of Truth.” Abramson described a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. There is the belief that the paper actually became an anti-trump brand that drove readership. The NYT saw digital subscriptions during Trump's first six months in office jump by 600,000, to more than 2 million.

The National Taxpayer Advocate estimated that American taxpayers and businesses spend 6.1 billion hours every year complying with the income tax code, based on IRS estimates of how much time taxpayers (both individual and businesses) spend collecting data for, and filling out their tax forms. In addition, Americans will spend an estimated $10 billion for the services of tax preparation firms and $2 billion on tax-preparation software programs like TurboTax that still require many hours of time. The amount of time spent for income tax compliance – 6.1 billion hours – would be the equivalent of more than 3 million Americans working full-time, year-round (or 2% of total US payrolls of 150 million). By way of comparison, the federal government currently employs 2.8 million full-time workers, and Wal-Mart, the world’s largest private employer, currently employs 2.2 million workers worldwide and 1.3 million workers in the US (both full-time and part-time). At the current average hourly wage of $27.70 an hour, the dollar value of the opportunity cost associated with tax filing would be $169 billion, which exceeds the GDP of 19 US states.

"Instead of seeing trade as a cooperative process of mutual benefit, politicians and businessmen came to regard it as a struggle with winners and losers. Germany’s leaders, instead of seeing Russia’s rapid growth after 1890 as an opportunity and blessing, agonized over it as a terrible threat. Their response was the idea of “MittelEuropa,” a customs union including Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Balkans, which would supply Germany with raw materials while providing a captive market. The leaders also advocated colonies outside Europe and a “blue water” navy. This provoked a similar and hostile response from other powers, especially from Russia. The result was a clash of imperialisms in the Balkans, and in July 1914 the German elite took the (insanely foolish) decision to fight a war with Russia and France. Had they seen the world differently this would not have happened." This is from an assessment of the causes of World War I, an interesting misunderstanding of trade which is based in agreement, not competition. So "trade war" is an oxymoron.

Today Lincoln died. And Titanic sank.

                                           Lincoln 

We Americans stupidly recognize this day as the day taxes are due. So we emphasize money and materialism over greatness of mind and soul, greatness that was both a product of and an influence upon the nation. Taxes are trivial compared to what happened on this day in 1865. President Lincoln was shot by Booth on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 and died the next morning. Secretary of State Seward was brutally assaulted as was his son. There is good evidence that General Grant was stalked to his train the same night by the conspirators. This occurred 5 days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox and doomed the South to a reconciliation with the North shepherded by the usual political wolves. More importantly it deprived the nation and politics of the high standard of mind and spirit Lincoln embodied.

Tolstoy on Lincoln:
“.... how largely the name of Lincoln is worshiped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.

“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country — bigger than all the Presidents together.

“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do.

“His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”