“Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people. The general government can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or any despotic or oppressive form so long as there is any virtue in the body of the people.” --George Washington
Harvard Professor John Y. Campbell’s article in the May 2016 issue of the American Economic Review titled “Restoring Rational Choice: The Challenge of Rational Consumer Regulation.” His conclusion? “...household financial mistakes create a new rationale for government intervention in the economy.” So we're dumb and can't have the keys to the car. I wonder when they'll think we're too dumb to vote for the guys that will drive.
Sales of safe deposit boxes in Europe are soaring. And the German insurance company Munich Re is experimenting with the physical storage of banknotes. To start, it will store €10 million in notes.
Richard Fisher was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) from 2005 to 2015. He is wired into the Fed and the state of the economy. He spoke at a conference recently. He is worried about the US government debt, which now totals $19 trillion (up $11 trillion since 2008), because the Fed has fired all its monetary bullets and has no room for further expansion on the balance sheet.
But Fisher’s most telling comment came during the Q&A session when he was asked how his personal portfolio was positioned. Fisher’s response: “In the fetal position.”
Moreover, he also said, “All my very rich friends are holding a lot of cash.”
Harvard Professor John Y. Campbell’s article in the May 2016 issue of the American Economic Review titled “Restoring Rational Choice: The Challenge of Rational Consumer Regulation.” His conclusion? “...household financial mistakes create a new rationale for government intervention in the economy.” So we're dumb and can't have the keys to the car. I wonder when they'll think we're too dumb to vote for the guys that will drive.
Sales of safe deposit boxes in Europe are soaring. And the German insurance company Munich Re is experimenting with the physical storage of banknotes. To start, it will store €10 million in notes.
Richard Fisher was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) from 2005 to 2015. He is wired into the Fed and the state of the economy. He spoke at a conference recently. He is worried about the US government debt, which now totals $19 trillion (up $11 trillion since 2008), because the Fed has fired all its monetary bullets and has no room for further expansion on the balance sheet.
But Fisher’s most telling comment came during the Q&A session when he was asked how his personal portfolio was positioned. Fisher’s response: “In the fetal position.”
Moreover, he also said, “All my very rich friends are holding a lot of cash.”
What is...Aleutian Islands?
[R]eins of power come at a price. Anyone acquiring the reins will be a person to whom such power is worth the price. Moreover, the more power there is to acquire, the more it will be worth, the more people must invest to acquire it, and thus the more that such power gets concentrated in the hands of people intent on using it for all that it is worth. So, the process by which people gain political appointment will systematically tend, and increasingly tend, to select the wrong person for the job.-- Arizona philosopher David Schmidtz
How the country is being managed is always a subjective assessment. The national debt was 8 trillion(!) in 2008. It is now 19 trillion. In Obama's two terms it has leapt 11 trillion dollars. Is that really "managing" the problems?
Legalized marijuana, for medical if not recreational use, is still illegal. The June 6, 2005 Supreme Court ruling in Gonzales v. Raich, upholding a federal ban on medical use regardless of state-passed decriminalization. The Supreme Court case arose from California’s Proposition 215, which in 1996 authorized doctor-prescribed use of cannabis within the state; twenty years on, two dozen other states have followed California’s example, as have many countries worldwide. While federal authorities in the U.S. have mostly turned a blind eye to statewide decriminalization. The economic implications of legal drug commerce, though, is beginning to slide into financial articles.
Edge-On Galaxy NGC 5866
[R]eins of power come at a price. Anyone acquiring the reins will be a person to whom such power is worth the price. Moreover, the more power there is to acquire, the more it will be worth, the more people must invest to acquire it, and thus the more that such power gets concentrated in the hands of people intent on using it for all that it is worth. So, the process by which people gain political appointment will systematically tend, and increasingly tend, to select the wrong person for the job.-- Arizona philosopher David Schmidtz
How the country is being managed is always a subjective assessment. The national debt was 8 trillion(!) in 2008. It is now 19 trillion. In Obama's two terms it has leapt 11 trillion dollars. Is that really "managing" the problems?
Legalized marijuana, for medical if not recreational use, is still illegal. The June 6, 2005 Supreme Court ruling in Gonzales v. Raich, upholding a federal ban on medical use regardless of state-passed decriminalization. The Supreme Court case arose from California’s Proposition 215, which in 1996 authorized doctor-prescribed use of cannabis within the state; twenty years on, two dozen other states have followed California’s example, as have many countries worldwide. While federal authorities in the U.S. have mostly turned a blind eye to statewide decriminalization. The economic implications of legal drug commerce, though, is beginning to slide into financial articles.
Specious: adj: Superficially true, but actually wrong. ety: Originally, the word meant beautiful or pleasing to the sight. Over the centuries the meaning shifted to describe something that is deceptively appealing. The word is from Latin speciosus (fair, beautiful), from specere (to look). Ultimately from the Indo-European root spek- (to observe). usage: “As always, exchange officials will make the final judgment and, we assume, reject specious claims.” Health Care Caricature; The New York Times; Mar 22, 2014.
Bordeaux offering a Bastiat slant on terrorism and protectionism: If we would – as we should – condemn and punish terrorists who create jobs and higher incomes by poisoning municipal water supplies, why do we not do the same to politicians who terrorize us with tariffs and other import restrictions? And why do we not scorn and ridicule – or at least ignore for the ignoramuses the they are – the pundits, preachers, and professors who encourage the economic terrorism that is protectionism?
A nice summary of McCloskey's trilogy by Higgs: Deirdre McCloskey has attracted much attention to her trilogy The Bourgeois Era, in which she advances (again) the notion that the process of modern economic growth—as she calls it, the Great Enrichment—has sprung mainly and fundamentally from a change in reigning ideas, in particular, from cultural changes that began in Holland and Great Britain in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries and accorded for the first time great respect to innovators and capitalists who carried out the technological and economic changes whereby the rate of overall economic productivity growth was raised to a much higher level and average incomes increased eventually by a factor of 30-100. McCloskey, with tremendous erudition, argues against all the previously advanced theories—material capital accumulation, human capital accumulation, slavery, improved institutions (in particular, better-established private property rights), the presence of certain raw materials such as iron or coal, and all the others—and offers instead her own explanation rooted in the cultural and ideological changes that have often been lumped under the rubric of “liberalization” in the old, classical liberal sense of this term.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-church-of-materialism.html
Re: California's drought. Justin Sheffield concluded in a 2012 Nature paper that “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years,” the period that includes half the warming of the last 100 years. Moreover, if global warming were an important cause of drought, the world should have had more droughts. It hasn’t. Was California’s drought part of a long-term decline in precipitation? No. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),“The current drought is not part of a long-term change in California precipitation, which exhibits no appreciable trend since 1895. ” The higher temperatures of the twentieth century, another Nature study explains, did not translate into increased extremes between wet and dry weather. Further, looking back in history, drought was most severe in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Inconveniently, the twelfth century was warm and the fifteenth century was cold..
Bordeaux offering a Bastiat slant on terrorism and protectionism: If we would – as we should – condemn and punish terrorists who create jobs and higher incomes by poisoning municipal water supplies, why do we not do the same to politicians who terrorize us with tariffs and other import restrictions? And why do we not scorn and ridicule – or at least ignore for the ignoramuses the they are – the pundits, preachers, and professors who encourage the economic terrorism that is protectionism?
A nice summary of McCloskey's trilogy by Higgs: Deirdre McCloskey has attracted much attention to her trilogy The Bourgeois Era, in which she advances (again) the notion that the process of modern economic growth—as she calls it, the Great Enrichment—has sprung mainly and fundamentally from a change in reigning ideas, in particular, from cultural changes that began in Holland and Great Britain in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries and accorded for the first time great respect to innovators and capitalists who carried out the technological and economic changes whereby the rate of overall economic productivity growth was raised to a much higher level and average incomes increased eventually by a factor of 30-100. McCloskey, with tremendous erudition, argues against all the previously advanced theories—material capital accumulation, human capital accumulation, slavery, improved institutions (in particular, better-established private property rights), the presence of certain raw materials such as iron or coal, and all the others—and offers instead her own explanation rooted in the cultural and ideological changes that have often been lumped under the rubric of “liberalization” in the old, classical liberal sense of this term.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-church-of-materialism.html
Re: California's drought. Justin Sheffield concluded in a 2012 Nature paper that “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years,” the period that includes half the warming of the last 100 years. Moreover, if global warming were an important cause of drought, the world should have had more droughts. It hasn’t. Was California’s drought part of a long-term decline in precipitation? No. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),“The current drought is not part of a long-term change in California precipitation, which exhibits no appreciable trend since 1895. ” The higher temperatures of the twentieth century, another Nature study explains, did not translate into increased extremes between wet and dry weather. Further, looking back in history, drought was most severe in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Inconveniently, the twelfth century was warm and the fifteenth century was cold..
Philosophy is the study of metaphysics (existence), epistemology (knowledge), ethics (action), politics (force) and esthetics (art and beauty).
A new trove of State Department emails reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor - and high frequency stock trader - was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no experience in the field. The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later.
A new trove of State Department emails reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor - and high frequency stock trader - was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no experience in the field. The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later.
After Byron's death, three of his closest friends (his publisher, John Murray; his fellow celebrity poet, Thomas Moore; and his companion since his Cambridge days, John Cam Hobhouse), together with lawyers representing Byron’s half-sister and his widow, decided that his written memoirs were so scandalous, so unsuitable for public consumption, that it would ruin Byron’s reputation forever. Gathered in Murray’s drawing room in Albemarle Street, they ripped up the pages and tossed them into the fire. The incident is often described as the greatest crime in literary history.
GE is leaving Connecticut for Boston. Hedge funds are moving to Miami. Capital goes to where it is treated best.
The Aleutian Islands are a chain of 14 large volcanic islands and 55 smaller ones extending about 1,200 mi. westward from the Alaska Peninsula toward the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and mark a dividing line between the Bering Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. While nearly all the archipelago is part of Alaska and is usually considered as being in the "Alaskan Bush", at the extreme western end, the small, geologically related Commander Islands belong to Russia.
In the early morning of 6 June 1942, 500 Japanese soldiers landed on Kiska, one of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. They took the only inhabitants of the island, a ten man (and six dog) US Navy Weather Detachment by complete surprise and quickly took control of American soil. This was part of a grand vision of Pacific control that really centered upon Midway. Yamamoto intended to "invade and occupy strategic points in the Western Aleutians" as well as Midway Island on the western tip of the Hawaiian chain. He envisioned these two sites as anchors for a defensive perimeter in the north and central Pacific.
His plan also included the final destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. By using the Aleutians and then Midway as bait, he intended to lure the already weakened American fleet from Pearl Harbor and annihilate it before new construction could replace the losses it had sustained on December 7th. An attack on the Aleutians in early June 1942, Yamamoto believed, would draw the U.S. fleet north to challenge his forces. With the departure of the U.S. warships from Pearl Harbor, he would then move his main fleet to seize Midway. Because of Midway's importance-the island was within bomber range of Pearl Harbor-he concluded that Nimitz would redirect his fleet from the Aleutians to Midway to prevent the loss of the island. Waiting off Midway to intercept that force would be the largest concentration of naval power ever assembled by Japan. After overwhelming the American fleet, Yamamoto would have undisputed control of the central and western Pacific.
But the Americans had the Japanese code and the battle of Midway stopped all that.
AAAAaaaaaaannnnnnndddddddd ...........a picture of a spiral galaxy, edge-on:
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