Saturday, September 7, 2013

THIS, IS HYSTERICAL:  There are some seriously funny pictures here.

HE WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN:  "Washington is engaged in a massive "campaign" to make Americans believe the economy is in recovery.  But in reality the United States is at the brink of a devastating economic crash that will cause catastrophic market losses and impoverish millions.

That's according to Peter Schiff, the best-selling author and CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, who delivered his frightening warning to investors in a recent interview on CCTV.

"The problem with politicians is they don't want to level with the voters and tell them how bad the economy really is and what the cure for the disease is," Schiff said.

The "disease" Schiff refers to is a toxic combination of our massive $16.4 trillion debt and the Fed's continued devaluing of the dollar through its controversial 7-year long "easing" program.

The Fed is currently purchasing $85 billion a month in Treasury and mortgage bonds, a form of stimulus.

President Obama and like-minded politicians claim this stimulus has pushed the economy forward, boosting GDP and keeping inflation low.

But Schiff says "it's another lie." 

In fact, according to Schiff, the government has done nothing more than create a "phony" economy that is "completely dependent on the ability to borrow more money that we can't pay back."

"The Fed knows that the U.S. economy is not recovering," Schiff said. "It simply is being kept from collapse by artificially low interest rates and quantitative easing. As that support goes, the economy will implode."

"The crisis is imminent," Schiff said. "I don't think Obama is going to finish his second term without the bottom dropping out. And stock market investors are oblivious to the problems."

IT'S ALL CAUGHT UP WITH HIM: Hard for anyone to argue with Hanson's conclusions here

TRUTH TO POWER: Conrad Black tells it like it is from a Canadian perspective

THE MUSLIM RELIGION NEEDS A SERIOUS OVERHAUL: Mark Steyn is on an almost one man crusade against PC.

In 2010, the bestselling atheist Richard Dawkins, in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post, called the pope “a leering old villain in a frock” perfectly suited to “the evil corrupt organization” and “child-raping institution” that is the Catholic Church. Nobody seemed to mind very much.

Three years later, in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” This time round, the old provocateur managed to get a rise out of folks. Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the “controversy.” The Independent‘s Owen Jones fumed, “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.” The best-selling author Caitlin Moran sneered, “It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again. Something’s gone weird.” The Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers beseeched him, “Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.”

It’s factually unarguable: Trinity College graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10.

None of the above is Muslim. Indeed, they are, to one degree or another, members of the same secular liberal media elite as Professor Dawkins. Yet all felt that, unlike Dawkins’s routine jeers at Christians, his Tweet had gone too far. It’s factually unarguable: Trinity graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10. If you remove Yasser Arafat, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Islam can claim just four laureates against Trinity’s 31 (the college’s only peace-prize recipient was Austen Chamberlain, brother of Neville). Yet simply to make the observation was enough to have the Guardian compare him to the loonier imams and conclude that “we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.” . . .

Even a decade ago, it would have been left to the usual fire-breathing imams to denounce remarks like Dawkins’s. In those days, Islam was still, like Christianity, insultable. Fleet Street cartoonists offered variations on the ladies’ changing-room line “Does my bum look big in this?” One burqa-clad woman to another: “Does my bomb look big in this?” Not anymore. “There are no jokes in Islam,” pronounced the Ayatollah Khomeini, and so, in a bawdy Hogarthian society endlessly hooting at everyone from the Queen down, Islam uniquely is no laughing matter. Ten years back, even the United Nations Human Development Program was happy to sound off like an incendiary Dawkins Tweet: Its famous 2002 report blandly noted that more books are translated by Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years.

What Dawkins is getting at is more fundamental than bombs or burqas. Whatever its virtues, Islam is not a culture of inquiry, of innovation. You can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a pre-Muslim past — as, indeed, much of the Dar al-Islam did in those Middle Ages Dawkins so admires — but it’s not unreasonable to posit that the more Muslim a society becomes the smaller a role Nobel prizes and translated books will play in its future.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

RONALD COASE DIED AT 102:  An economist for practical thinkers. How Ronald Coase left politically correct UVA.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2013

THIS IS FOREIGN POLICY?: Best to know who your friends are and be nice to them.

Obama's inept foreign policy: Column

The president's Syria coalition (France) is dwarfed by the international coalition involved in the Iraq War.

One of the things we were promised back in the 2008 election campaign was that under a Democratic administration America would be better liked and more influential in the world. Forget those dumb cowboys in the Bush/Cheney administration whose brash style grated on foreign sensibilities: Smooth, Europhile Democrats would win over the world, ushering in an era of peace and good feeling.

So, as Sarah Palin might say, how's that hopey-changey stuff workin' out for ya?

Not so great, as it turns out. Things got off on the wrong foot right away with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's botched "reset" with Russia -- even the "reset button" was improperly labeled, owing to a translation error that substituted the Russian word for "overcharge." The whole reset attempt was, at any rate, the product of wishful thinking. And it soon became clear to most observers that Russia under Vladimir Putin viewed itself as a rival, not an ally, of the United States. Russia even announced its withdrawal from a major arms-control agreement. In fact, although Mitt Romney was mocked for calling Russia our greatest "geopolitical foe" last year, that's looking pretty spot-on today as Putin lines up behind Syrian President Bashar Assad and frustrates the United States in numerous settings across the globe. Not much of a reset here.

KOHUT: Obama shines on world stage

Then there's our relationship with the British. Under previous administrations going back to World War II it was a "special relationship." Now it's ... not so special. Even back in 2009, Obama treated the British rudely, leading one British pundit to ask: "Does Obama have it in for Britain?" More recently -- even as British troops were dying alongside Americans in Afghanistan -- Obama snubbed the British by remaining neutral on the Falkland Islands. Well, not quite neutral: In another bout of "smart diplomacy," Obama tried to call the Falklands by their Argentine name -- Las Malvinas -- but blew it, calling them instead the Maldives, an entirely different set of islands located half a world away. Can someone buy this guy a globe?

Now Obama wants to do something about Syria, and -- while the Russians do their best to interfere -- the British have decided that they're not going along this time, thank you. It's the first time a British prime minister has lost a war votesince 1782. Now Obama -- having boxed himself in with his off-the-cuff "red line"remarks from last year -- has changed tack and decided that he, too, will consult Congress after all.

Perhaps he's hoping to lose that vote, as well, so that at least he can blame Congress for whatever happens next. But the real question is how we got in this situation to begin with. And the answer is, through a series of unfortunate decisions ranging from Obama's 2009 Cairo speech, which ignited the Arab Spring uprisings, through the mishandling of Libya and Benghazi, to his unscripted, and unthought-out, "red line" remarks.

Say what you will about George W. Bush's diplomacy, but he nurtured relationships with our most important allies -- like Britain -- and managed to put together a huge multinational coalition for his own foray against an Arab dictator suspected of having chemical weapons. Obama's diplomatic efforts -- championed by Hillary Clinton and, now, John Kerry -- are looking more and more inept by comparison: So far, our only ally in the proposed Syria venture is France, maybe.

But that's what happens when your diplomacy is a failure. Our friends are avoiding us, our foes aren't afraid of us, and it's looking more and more like nobody in charge knows what they're doing. It's enough to make you look back fondly on the smooth, capable diplomacy of the Jimmy Carter era. Alas, we have over three years of this left. One can only hope that we, and the world, will not pay too high a price for the ineptitude at the top.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

PASSING OF A REAL ECONOMIST:  Professor Coase lived to be 102.

ANOTHER SCANDAL:  IRS winks and nods at fraudulent use of SSNs  You can make a case that the corruption in this agency is beyond repair.

FIN DE SIECLE STUFF: Kinda gloomy but thought provoking material.

Monday, September 2, 2013

ARE THERE ANY HONEST DEMOCRATS ANYWHERE?  Impossible to have an honest debate with Krugman & Co.

THIS IS FINANCIAL REFORM? Thank you Dick Durbin

MORE FINANCIAL REFORM Gratis guess who?

Sunday, September 1, 2013

GET READY FOR FASCISM: What it looks like when the bureaucrats control everything.  At some point Big Brother will tell us what we can and cannot buy based on what's good for us.  We've made great strides in that direction since Obama arrived on the scene.  Cleaning out these Augean stables is not going to be easy or fun.

FAIRLY TYPICAL LIBERAL CONFUSION: Touching on some issues but not really understanding cause and effect.  What we see here is the inability of liberals to come to grips with reality.  The example of Asians who came to America with no resources and opportunities in their country of origin, seizing the opportunity presented them to acquire education and take advantage of a free enterprise economy, is where the focus should be.  Instead, liberals are always looking for government programs to solve any minorities's problems with success.  There are successful examples of blacks making it in America and in every case it has little to do with government handouts and hand ups as much as family values and personal responsibility.  Little economic progress in the black community side the Civil Rights Movement?  Blame LBJ and the War on Poverty.  Government dependency and personal responsibility are simply incompatible values.