Inflation, Interest, British Isles Prices

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis: Ben Bernanke, Confused as Ever, Starts His Own Blog to Prove It:

If you follow the link, Ben  Bernanke started a blog and one of his first posts was "Why are interest rates so low?" Mike "Mish" Shedlock is an investment guy that was relatively on top of the housing bubble and made money off it -- Bernanke isn't all that clear in his column, Mish disagrees with most of what he has to say, but isn't super clear either. My view is that when you are talking a $17T US economy, heavily intertwined with a $73T world economy, there is plenty of room for everyone, expert or not, to be confused, wrong, etc -- Mooses most of all!

The "simple Moose baseline" is that money is a "good" ... mostly like any other good; grain, oil, beer, ZZ Top tickets, etc. It happens to be the good that we all exchange, invest, etc to live, and it has a few "brands" -- dollars, euros and pounds were the brands that I spent some time with the past couple weeks. Interest is what we pay for money on the market -- and right now, we are paying historically low rates. (and of course also receiving historically low rates if we have some money to lend)

I found the key statement in the Bernanke post to be:

Except in the short run, real interest rates are determined by a wide range of economic factors, including prospects for economic growth—not by the Fed.

I think he is maybe being a little overly honest there -- global economic conditions and government polices have interacted to do a couple of things -- first, to make investment, savings, work and general productivity less likely to net good returns. We are in the age of consumption, not production, with vast amounts of that consumption being done by governments or people receiving payments in one form or another from governments (FICA, medicare, earned income credits, welfare, subsidies, grants, etc, etc). Second, the costs and risks of investment, savings, work and productivity are at very high levels -- taxes of all sorts, regulation, mandates like BOcare, PLUS the trend is clearly toward ever greater and ever more unpredictable risk on all those fronts -- more taxes, more regulation, unpredictably and capriciously applied often with no more than an executive decree.

Government has also been lowering the value of the money commodity by printing more of it here and in Europe, while at the same time raising both the costs and risks of production -- so the demand for money is LOW -- or in common terms, interest rates are low.

Business always deals with unpredictability. Government likes to lie to everyone that it deals in security and "certainty" (whatever that is), but it is in fact the biggest bubble of all -- it claims to be "too big to fail". In my personal dictionary, under "too big too fail", it says "see Brontosaurus"!

But what of inflation? We are told that it is also very low, yet anyone going out to eat, buying food, looking at what it costs to just live in your home, or doing much of anything KNOWS that they are being lied to -- that is unless you are being subsidized by the government, which slightly over 50% of the population now are.

The government keeps the inflation books, and like all their books, they cook them -- the fact of interest being low is part of the "low inflation" calculation (the "market basket" assumes you are a borrower) ... the fact that housing prices are still well below their bubble high also artificially depresses the inflation number -- homes are "down" relative to the bubble numbers. It is my understanding that the cost of taxes doesn't get factored in at least directly -- I'm not an expert, something I need to look into more.

My personal observation from the trip is that inflation in many areas is relatively INSANE, especially when one considers that we were getting a BETTER dollar - pound and dollar - euro exchange rate than what has been had in a good long while.

A 30 min train ride each way from Gatwick to London was $50! The one day tube pass was $25! Most all the "attractions" -- Stonehenge, Chartwell, Churchill's WWII bunker, were $30 per person. What's more, items that were formerly not charged for -- like Winchester Cathedral,  not charged for in '89 when I was last in London (yes, I know, a LONG time ago!) are now also $30+.

The other factor that I noted was that I get a lot more tired traipsing around the "square mile" now than I did nearly 30 years ago! Age seems to take a bit of a penalty on physical assets!

My suspicion on public transportation is that it is yet another form of socialist transfer payment -- while we just went out to the rail site and looked for fares, I bet if you live in the UK you can plug in your income, buy a long term pass and pay a much reduced rate. The concept is an old one -- tax the productive at high rates to build the system, and then "tax" the productive again with high fares if they want to use the system -- the socialist ideal of no good (productive) deed going unpunished!

While I had a lot of fun on the trip, it is VERY good to be home where the 4-lanes don't have curbs right at the edge of the lane and the rest of the roads have SOME form of buffer better than often having a rock wall 6" from the edge of the narrow lane. Not to mention hotel rooms the size of modern ladies closets in the US, and everything just packed in like sardines. Europe is a great place to visit, but it is EASY to see why so many people left!











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Coke, Bud, Jack, KFC

Some observations from Ireland and England -- may be applicable to the continent as well, dunno. It is just an observation ... nothing meaningful.

Coke is everywhere, Pepsi is pretty much MIA.

Every Pub has Bud ON TAP! **AND** people sit in Irish Pubs with Guinness, Murphy's, Beamish, etc and drink BUD! They also have Heineken in every Pub we saw ... so two taps pretty much down with beer that I don't want to drink when I'm across the pond. Fortunately, many places have a good number of taps, and the Guinness there is heavenly -- positively creamy, and the US Tenders really need to learn to put a shamrock in the foam!

Oh, I do drink Bud in IA when the choices are Bud Lite,  Coors Lite, Bush Lite, Miller Lite and Nite  Lite  ... or Bud!

And JACK! Every pub had Jack Daniels -- and sometimes Makers Mark and usually Canadian Club -- which was enough for me to look up the list -- Jack, Johnnie Walker, Jameson, Canadian Club (that explains it!) ... interestingly, Ballantines, Japanese brands I'd never heard of, plus Jim Beam (expected it to be higher on list) as well as Crown and Black Velvet appear in top 10.

McDonalds is there of course -- isn't it everywhere? But I was shocked by the prevalence of KFC -- both in Ireland and England. Apparently the folks on the isles find it finger lickin good!

Oh, and at the Jamison distillery, Marla, who just isn't into even triple distilled ultra smooth whiskey neat, went for the Jamison, Ginger Ale and a lime twist ... Now THAT could get a person into trouble! Smooth Jamison with it's little appleish-citrus tang accentuated by the lime, plus the Ginger Ale light ginger sweetness ... very nice! But possibly a little TOO subtle!

Germanwings 9525, Technology, Incrementalism, Trust

Germanwings 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust - The New Yorker:

This article jumps a bridge too far relative to safeguards on aircraft. The plane doesn't need to COMPLETELY fly itself, it just needs to add more "self preservation" ... which the fly by wire craft like the Airbus already have -- as do most cars now. Rev limiters, lock-outs to prevent shifts to reverse,  not starting in gear, etc. My Gold Wing won't stay running in gear with the kickstand down, thus preventing driving off and being up-ended by turning with it down.

Current planes limit the ability to pull up too fast on takeoff, fly over-speed, damage the engines, etc  -- all these elements have good and bad points. A fairly recent slide off a runway was caused when a plane had not settled enough on the gear to allow the thrust reversers to be used. There was a way to override that, but they could not find that switch fast enough.

There are ZERO systems that are "foolproof", "suicide proof" or will not have unintended side-effects as the hardened cockpit door added as a result of 9-11 did in this case. The systems analysts game is a game of odds -- prevent the big failure, weed out anything "common". First do no harm.

Current nav information DEFINITELY allows the planes systems to know where it is relative to ground and where airports are at. There is really not much of an excuse for an autopilot to accept a command to fly the plane into terrain. Such a command ought to require two pilots to type in an override code at a minimum if it is even allowed -- I fail to see a scenario where flying a jet into terrain is "the best alternative available".  It damned well better be in a landing configuration --  below 150mph, flaps deployed, etc, etc before the automation lets it get to say "1000 AGL" (Above Ground Level)

Our technology is not ready to allow commercial planes to go fly routes on their own, but it is clearly at the level where a plane ought not to allow a pilot to destroy it without putting up a very good  battle!  Certainly there need to be overrides and ways to "shut off most of the automation" -- because ALL systems can fail, but those overrides can be 2 man decision points.

Some of the more thoughtful may be saying, "Yes but, what if the other pilot is incapacitated" ... etc, etc. Again, this is about ODDS -- what are the ODDS that you not only need to disable all the automation, but ALSO the other pilot is incapacitated? Even that is possible to get around -- perhaps a flight attendant has a third code to cover that eventuality. I'm not doing a full design here -- it just ought not be as easy as it apparently was to allow one pilot to instruct a $70M plane to fly into terrain with a load of passengers.

The choice is NOT "remove the pilots" or just go on with the same risks. There are LOTS of incremental steps that can, and I'd argue ought to have been taken already given EXISTING navigational and programmed automation capabilities to make flying a modern aircraft into off-airport terrain an act that is nigh on impossible to execute.

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"Gone With the Wind", Indiana, History

Indiana Takes On America: Discrimination Against Gays, Religious Freedom And Rewriting The Constitution | Richard Brodsky:

It isn't the least bit "conservative". It is a radical, un-American, reactionary re-writing of our basic freedoms. We had struck a constitutional balance between private religious observance and public commercial activity. Real conservatives would be looking for a way to reasonably accommodate both interests.

Islam and "liberalism" share the concept that "wins" are not reversible. Any territory EVER under Islamic rule is ALWAYS considered under Islamic rule and Jihad against "occupiers" is forever the official Islamic position. If you want to understand the Islamic position on Israel, just study that aspect of Islam for about 10 min and you will understand it.

So too, "liberalism" or "progressivism" -- once the state has expanded its powers to coerce behavior by force, those liberties may NEVER be regained (without armed conflict).

From a "progressive" view, "gay marriage" was now ALWAYS a "basic right" and nobody can EVER decide that it is against their religious position to take part in such a ceremony. You may think that the concept of a "gay marriage" was so foreign to the writers of our Constitution that they would never have believed such a thing a remote potential -- but if you think that, you are not a "progressive" as defined by this article -- you are a "reactionary" and "un-American" to boot.

TWENTY states have versions of such laws as Indiana -- designed to allow Christian (or Islamic for that matter) photographers, caterers, bakeries, etc the freedom to decline to participate in a gay union ceremony, but Indiana is "too far north", "too populus", or something -- the line must be drawn there.

We know that the cornerstone of the US government is dead  -- LIMITED government is no more. The government can and does tell you what you may and may not do in every way. You could certainly refuse to do something for the NRA, the Koch brothers, Amish people in your community, your local gun club, a church -- nearly anyone except the gay or the black.

America was founded on the idea that YOU the individual had LIBERTY. "Justice" was something that the GOVERNMENT abided by -- it meant things like "equal protection", but that is long gone, invalidated by the "progressive" income tax and many other things since. Justice meant that the laws applied to all, but more important, LIMITED Government meant that law was a hammer to be little used. At our founding, it was coercion of the individual at the point of a gun that was "un-American".

The country that the column writer talks about is not America in any definition that would be recognized for the first 100+ years of our history, and little recognized for the first 200. There is no longer an "America" because there is no effective Constitution -- laws, government and court actions now violate the Constitution constantly, even in the tattered sense that it still held some sway up to 1950 or so. We were a nation of laws not of men -- or of territory. America was embodied in the now dead Constitution.

To the column writer, there are no powers "reserved to the States and the People" -- the Federal government is the sovereign, and "whatever some voting block big enough can get" is the law of the land. Mob rule, what the Constitutional Republic was founded to prevent.

All gone now -- the vast majority of the people no longer understand either of the twin perils of Leviathan -- unlimited government, nor the tyranny of mob rule. We now live under an unlimited mob tyranny. Liberty is dead. "Gone With the Wind" -- as the old South, now America.

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Ireland and England, Sunday Jet Lag Edition

I slept in until 10am, Ireland time mostly -- woke up at 2AM local time but got back to sleep until 5Am local. We left the hotel at 4am Dublin time yesterday, Saturday the 28th and landed in Minneapolis at 2pm CDT. Kept going until 8 Rochester time, or 1am Dublin time, which is what the biological and real "hours awake clock" was running on -- 17 hours up with a little nap on the plane.

I'll post the trip up in snippets and blurbs -- little recovery time, ZZ Top concert in La Crosse Tuesday, Holy Week. One thing about coming home after travelling than was different than the IBM career -- no massive set of email to go through with a bunch of new problems and the same ones that were there before to deal with. No post vacation letdown! Which is a really nice thing.

We were blessed with exceedingly trouble free travel. The trip over to Paris 3/18 on  Delta flt 171 using an Airbus 330 was way better than standard Moose over the pond travel -- the seats, spacing and positioning of the headrests give the impression of more space than the 767 we flew back on, plus with a prompt takeoff and nice tailwind it was short of 8 hours to Paris and over 9 back. The City Jet high wing Avro RJ to and from Dublin was a really nasty small fit seating -- although with some decent headroom for a small jet. Made for LONG two hour flights.

The highlights of the trip -- Cliffs of Moher. MUCH thanks to niece Jonna for introducing us to this wonder of Irish beauty. Had never heard of them ... could walk around and just sit at a few spots for days and ponder the heights, the sound of the waves far below, the views of the vast Atlantic with the Aran islands in the foreground. Simply stunning.

The Dingle peninsula -- who knew Ireland had mountains! It would be another good place to spend a number of days or even a week just soaking up the scenery and the local pubs.

Chartwell! My Churchill worship continues -- the man had REALLY great ponds and water features! I've been to a number of "estate / residences", but this was really a very LIVEABLE place as well as suitable for entertaining the greats of the world. No pictures allowed inside -- the dining room, where Churchill held court would have been STUNNING to dine in with three sides of windows looking out on the the incredible grounds. Standing in the study where he wrote and rehearsed many of his most memorable speeches and did all his writing was a wonderful connection to history.

NYTs, Green Bay Paper for the Clintons

To Avert Repeat of 2008, Clinton Team Hopes to Keep Bill at His Best - NYTimes.com:



Listening to NPR or reading the NY Times on political issues is reminiscent of reading the Green Bay Gazette or the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel without the honesty. The Gazette and the Journal Sentinel know and freely admit that they are 100% total Packer partisans!



NPR and the NYTs will make no such admissions, so their "reporting" -- better called "cheer leading" or "home team kibitzing" sometimes seems surrealistic to someone that has a tiny bit of objectivity left in the brain. The Packer papers are even well aware that although the Pack is their team and they LOVE them, the Pack will not win every game, and in fact a competitive NFL is actually really important for the game of football.



For NPR and the NYTs, there is no such understanding. They no longer believe that the competitive give and take of a competitive market of ideas is actually critical to the future of liberty and success in our nation. They want single party 100% Democrat rule with other views and parties being banished to the ash heap of history. In their minds, it is not possible that ANY "reasonably intelligent decent people" could possibly hold any views that diverge from those of THE PARTY (Democrat).



I don't really recommend the linked article unless you are into "inside baseball" (politics) ... it is SO reminiscent of Packer artcles at this time of the year as to who the Pack should draft, weak spots, player development, if the "Pistol" offence ought to be used more, etc, etc ... all of which I find interesting.



The coronation of Hillary and how to best deploy Slick Willie is clearly of A LOT of interest to the NYTs ... I guess I'm weird. If it was not so sad, it would be really funny to contrast the treatment of the left media of Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, etc with this kind of fawning adulation and hopeful strategizing that the Hilly-Beast gets!



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Winchester, Guinness, Jamison

This is mostly a marker post -- I intend to put some pictures in and edit it after I return.

The general thought though -- the "nugget".

We did Jameson Whiskey in Cork, Guinness Storehouse in Dublin and this evening walked through Winchester Cathedral.

When I was over here in '89 -- first time across the pond, major business trip, excitement, anxiety, jet lag and a lot of other things. I woke up early and went over to the cathedral at like 6:30 AM and was completely awed by the size and the scope in time. Winchester was finished in 1093 and contains bones brought over from the old abbey -- built around 600. It puts me in my place -- tiny, a speck in space and time next to the majesty of God.

While I very much enjoyed our tours of Jameson and Guinness, it is hard to go through them and not say; REALLY??? You have GOT to be KIDDING!!!

The canonization of John Jameson and Arthur Guinness is along the lines of "forget Plato, Greece, Rome, Christ, Da Vinci, Newton ... or whatever name one wants to insert, it is the IRISH on which the "spirit" of Western Civilization rests in the form of Guinness and Jameson and the heroics of their founders!

I'm afraid that when one stands in Winchester Cathedral the soul feels just a wee bit more than even walking through the hall with 1000 private oak casks of Jameson, or standing in the largest Guinness pint in the world! There are actual foundations of Western Civilization, and then there are products -- certainly well crafted products with great traditions that can bring a lot of pleasure to millions, but still products. Consumables.

The pillars are BIG!

One other little point to ponder -- The Rock of Cashel is great to visit, but it is a RUIN -- it dates from just a little LATER than Winchester, yet all the old stuff is purely a ruin.

The simple, no doubt flawed, but still worthy of some thought point is "winning is better than losing". Were the Brits "bad" -- certainly they were at least sometimes, but building a giant empire was also not "easy", took some motivation and gained long lasting rewards for the nation.

Fail to "win" and priceless things like Winchester Cathedral fall in and are piles of rubble with maybe a few walls still standing rather than what you see if you go to the link, or better yet come here. There **IS** a difference!

BO Mandatory Voting

Obama calls for mandatory voting in U.S. - Washington Times:

Here we see a solid piece of left leaning thought. First, if an idea is viewed as "good" from the left it MUST be MANDATORY at least eventually!

Second, consistency is not an issue. To the "small minded", mandatory voting would mean that there would have to be a voters list and names would be checked off. Such a thing would seem to come dangerously close to voter ID, but we know that Dems HATE ID and regularly call it "voter suppression".

“It would be transformative if everybody voted,” Mr. Obama said during a town-hall event in Cleveland. “That would counteract [campaign] money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country.”

We know what BO hates about the political map -- other than major urban areas, it is almost entirely red. BO also makes a not so subtle point in that utterance -- the government isn't a "special interest" in his mind. This is one of the major subterfuges of the left. The government always growing, always spending on groups in efforts to gain their votes and working hand in glove with AFSCME, the largest union is NOT a "special interest". As the government flirts with being 40% of the economy and is already the largest employer, the left wants you to see this behemoth as having "no interests". 

One of the problems with many conservatives is a lack of imagination at least about the political machinations of the left. I'm quite certain that Dems and BO would be quite happy to come up with a system where their voters were herded to the polls, allowed online voting, or maybe "straight party automatic voting" where you indicated your party and your vote automatically counted for that party until you changed it -- like "auto pay" for voting or other "innovation". 

No doubt, random people showing up at the polls, or "over votes" where over 100% of the voters vote (a condition that happens in a few heavily D areas every presidential election now) would be fine -- how could such a thing be "biased", right?

When Democrats have "a good idea", it must be mandatory, subsidized, etc -- if there is something they don't like it must be illegal, fined, taxed, etc. They believe in CONTROL! 

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BO Mandatory Voting

Obama calls for mandatory voting in U.S. - Washington Times:



Here we see a solid piece of left leaning thought. First, if an idea is viewed as "good" from the left it MUST be MANDATORY at least eventually!



Second, consistency is not an issue. To the "small minded", mandatory voting would mean that there would have to be a voters list and names would be checked off. Such a thing would seem to come dangerously close to voter ID, but we know that Dems HATE ID and regularly call it "voter suppression".

“It would be transformative if everybody voted,” Mr. Obama said during a town-hall event in Cleveland. “That would counteract [campaign] money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country.”

We know what BO hates about the political map -- other than major urban areas, it is almost entirely red. BO also makes a not so subtle point in that utterance -- the government isn't a "special interest" in his mind. This is one of the major subterfuges of the left. The government always growing, always spending on groups in efforts to gain their votes and working hand in glove with AFSCME, the largest union is NOT a "special interest". As the government flirts with being 40% of the economy and is already the largest employer, the left wants you to see this behemoth as having "no interests". 



One of the problems with many conservatives is a lack of imagination at least about the political machinations of the left. I'm quite certain that Dems and BO would be quite happy to come up with a system where their voters were herded to the polls, allowed online voting, or maybe "straight party automatic voting" where you indicated your party and your vote automatically counted for that party until you changed it -- like "auto pay" for voting or other "innovation". 



No doubt, random people showing up at the polls, or "over votes" where over 100% of the voters vote (a condition that happens in a few heavily D areas every presidential election now) would be fine -- how could such a thing be "biased", right?


When Democrats have "a good idea", it must be mandatory, subsidized, etc -- if there is something they don't like it must be illegal, fined, taxed, etc. They believe in CONTROL! 



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Bibi Beats BO!

Israeli Bonds Rise With Stocks as Netanyahu Wins Election - Bloomberg Business:



BO isn't a big fan of Israel -- he has made it pretty clear who "his people" are and aren't, and Jews don't make the cut. It would be impossible to sit in Rev Wright's church for 20 years if they were.



The Democrats had some of their big guns over there trying to beat Bibi -- oh, you heard they said that they "didn't want to influence the election in Israel"?  What part of don't believe anything they say have you missed? What they MEANT was they didn't want to influence the election in Bibi's favor!



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A Courageous Liberal Closes the Books on Ferguson

‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ was built on a lie - The Washington Post:

This is rare and it needs to be applauded -- certainly the author, Jonathan Capehart, a BLACK reporter for the WaPo, but also the Post itself. Saying nothing would be easier and would better serve the liberal and minority narrative. If this kind of reporting could become standard, the TRUTH would be well served, and in my view, that would serve us all!

 MOST of the left will allow the bottom line of the Ferguson case to remain murky at best, and to lend support to the idea that Brown was "murdered", saying things like "the report shows endemic racism in the Ferguson force" ... and letting people believe that therefore the lack of prosecution of Officer Wilson was likely racially motivated as well.

I'm willing to accept the indictment of the Ferguson local government and police force as this column also points to as valid -- it doesn't take a lot to convince me of government malfeasance, local, state or national. I'd like to think that the report would give liberals a little pause as to their near religious faith in government. We shall see.

What this column does though is do a VERY detailed coverage of the report on the actual shooting -- the one that the MSM is generally not covering at all that shows clearly that the whole idea of "Hands up, don't shoot" was a complete and total lie. If you need to be convinced, there is a lot of good discussion of the impact of actual forensic evidence and what looks to be excellent work done by the DoJ under Eric Holder -- again, to be applauded. Holder is FAR from a personal favorite of mine, but it appears that in this case, even no doubt under some pressure to come up with SOMETHING to support the "shot in the back, hands up" narrative, he was at least willing to let his organization base the outcome on the facts.

The DOJ report notes on page 44 that Johnson “made multiple statements to the media immediately following the incident that spawned the popular narrative that Wilson shot Brown execution-style as he held up his hands in surrender.” In one of those interviews, Johnson told MSNBC that Brown was shot in the back by Wilson. It was then that Johnson said Brown stopped, turned around with his hands up and said, “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!” And, like that, “hands up, don’t shoot” became the mantra of a movement. But it was wrong, built on a lie.

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Baseball Vs Beanbag

The Party of the Furrowed Brow | The Weekly Standard:

An excellent column, well worth the read. The overarching message is that conservatives tend to play very very nice -- they know the rules and like them, they assume they will always be in the minority, they have lots of other things they would rather do than play political games.

If brow-furrowing were thinking, the Republican establishment would be geniuses. If hand-wringing were prudence, GOP politicians would be exemplars of Aristotelian virtue. If tongue-clucking were eloquence, conservative elites would be orators for the ages. 

But of course Trey Gowdy, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tom Cotton have done more for conservative principles and Republican prospects in the last few weeks than the brow-furrowers, hand-wringers, and tongue-cluckers have done in years.

Conservatives DON'T always lose -- Burke beat back the sentiments of the French Revolution that threatened to catch fire in England. The US Revolution was essentially a conservative revolution. The Victorian Era in England was a return to conservative values. Reagan won, the USSR fell -- conservatives can and do win, though usually quite nicely and by the rules.

The left on the other hand has a long history of "off with their heads" in the French Revolution, lots of blood as the Bolsheviks and Maoists rose to power, buildings blowing up burning as riots consumed the streets here in the late '60s here. The left doesn't much like rules and they are not concerned about "breaking a few eggs" (or skulls) to achieve what they see as their morally superior vision.

As a great American writer put it, “Politics ain’t bean-bag.” Republicans and conservatives spend an awful lot of time playing endless variations and ingenious permutations of bean-bag. But it’s baseball, not bean-bag, that is the American game. It should of course be played cleanly and forthrightly, and according to the rules. But baseball is hardball. So is politics. Maybe it’s time to stop fussing and fretting long enough to learn how to play it.

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A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell

Link to book on Amazon.

This is at least my second reading of this favorite book, my first review is covered here.

My first review is pretty good I think, so just go read it if you are a conservative, if not, read this first.

The first reviews biggest failing is that I TOTALLY fail to accomplish in the review what Sowell does so very well in the book -- my bias for the constrained vision is obvious. Sowell is not only BRILLIANT (and happens to be black), but how well he is able to avoid showing his (also constrained) bias is a thing of beauty.

The "Visions" are quite simple once one starts looking at them, but remarkably powerful in how they affect how the world is viewed. They are pretty much the same as "worldview", the largely pre-conscious lens through which we see the world.

For those of you that are more video than reading oriented, here is Sowell himself discussing the work. In my view, Dr Sowell is the greatest living mind on understanding and explaining Political and Economic issues.

***Note: While the video is interesting and covers some things from the book, you should NOT get the idea that Sowell in the book is like Sowell on the video relative to which Vision is his !!! In some ways, reading the book after watching the video might give one greater hope in potential ability to rise above our biases that is likely unwarranted in people less brilliant than Sowell ... about 99.9999 % of us!

The Clinton Mob Reunion Movie!

Its Hillary All the Way Down:

The only reason I post this is because Jonah had EXACTLY the same thought as I did when the Hillary scandal management vermin started wriggling out of the slime and ooze. Lanny Davis, Carville, David Brock ... I swear I heard something from Paul Begala as well, though I hear he is off in Israel trying to defeat Netanyahu -- we know how much the Democrats and media are aghast at any potential meddling in foreign elections!

I like what Jonah has done with the concept -- "the reunion movie", "getting the old gang back together again" -- It shows up often in film. Space Cowboys, even "The Unforgiven" -- what were the old Clinton cronies, henchmen and fixers doing when the call came that their services were required once more, and do they still have "the right (in this case, wrong, or at least nasty) stuff?".

I'm pretty certain the Clinton gang is more like "The Godfather" or "The Sopranos" -- in order to play, they have to have a 100% dead to rights major league Felony on you, so they KNOW that you are "their kind of people" and they can "trust" you in the only sense that counts for such an organization.

There used to be a bunch of lists of all the people that had died "unexpectedly" around the Clintons over the years -- Vince Foster and Ron Brown were just the famous ones. I'm certain the vast bulk of those were "just accidents", but there were plenty of opportunities for soulless henchmen like "Commander Cue Ball" Carvelle" to solve a nasty problem and prove that he has what it takes to  be inside the Clinton cesspool.

The Goldberg piece is pretty entertaining for the most part. I've been sick of the Clinton Mob for 20 years at least -- the fact that there are ANY people that would be willing to even CONSIDER an evil hag like Hilly for any role where we have to see her shows that taste is one of the things that quickly departs in a nation in decline!

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Working Hard Doesn't Work

Middle-Class Betrayal? Why Working Hard Is No Longer Enough in America - NBC News.com:

Anyone that grew up on a small dairy farm knew LONG ago that working VERY hard has NEVER been a guarantee of any sort of life -- even being able to keep the farm, as many small dairies went bust and have been superseded by multi-thousand cow mega automated farms.

Choosing to be a librarian as this young woman did was also never the road to riches, and with the advent of computers and the internet, it has the kind of flavor of becoming a blacksmith as the auto catches on. People have always needed to pay attention to what was happening around them as they selected a career at which to work.

All that aside, the tone and many of the facts of the article are true for our time -- MUCH as many articles were in the late '70s and early '80s, the last time we were in a long term "malaise".

At some point, we will have to compete again in the world. People will stop saying things like "Well, you can't compete with Chinese slave labor wages making a $1 a day" (or some other suitably small number). No, we ARE competing -- with China, India, Brazil, etc, etc -- we are just competing badly, which is known as LOSING.

Back in the '30s we made a determination -- as Europe did as well, that it was possible for a nation to provide a "safety net" of increasing capability that was available to ALL, independent of their earnings. Today, our labor participation is the lowest in non-depression history, our Federal debt is over $18T and rising, and that "safety net" for the elderly at least is an unfunded liability (meaning a promise to pay with no cash or assets to back it up) of $60T or so as of 2030.

Those of us lucky enough to have worked hard in a reasonably lucrative career and even saved money find themselves between a risk rock and a tax hard place. Pull a little too much money out of our accounts full of stocks and other financial instruments, supposedly safer, but still paper, and we get a big AMT tax surprise. ... That particular problem is a little too personal ;-(

Economic collapse is natures way of settling the books when poor assumptions are made about the way things work. As the Bible says in Thessalonians: 'For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order: if anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat, either."

There is nothing any more profound in that statement in the long run than "What goes up must come down". Create a system in which people believe that work is optional, and to some degree even worse, lose the drive to invent, create and risk in search of new sorts of  riches and lifestyles beyond the imagination of most, and the end is certain. We will come down. 

There is no certain positive outcome from innovation, risk and hard work, BUT, there is a certain outcome from playing it safe, sloth, and looting those that continue to work hard. 

I believe all of us understand this in our souls -- Gordon Gekko was wrong in the movie" Wall Street" when he said that "Greed is good". It isn't, it is a deadly sin, but it is better than Envy -- also a deadly sin. Greed is an active sin, it can provide drive. Lust is often bad -- but again, it is active, it is better than apathy which drives nothing at all. 

To be human is to be imperfect. Inequality of outcome is imperfect -- but so definitely is human administered EQUALITY of outcome, because it has MANY costs, not the least of which is taking resources by force from those who earned them and passing them to others that did not. In doing so, all are corrupted -- those that take, those that receive, and those from whom their earnings are taken. 

Working hard was never a guarantee, but as we have increasingly focused a lot of our "working hard" on the corruption of our system, it increasingly fails. We all fail. 

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