Contentment, Paths, Slay Them With Satire!

Talk about contentment. They don't even know about my memos!

 Dagny Frances:

 

 Estelle Victoria (Stella):

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Different paths leading to same conclusion!

Not what my generation hoped for future generations.  We did not act responsibly and now they will pay for our sins, commissions and omissions.  Sad legacy for the 'Greatest Generation.' (See 1 below.)
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Yes a  bit strong but satire is a powerful weapon! (See 2 below.)
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Greenspan helped cause some of  the problems we now face with his easy interest policy  but he is correct in highlighting the main problem that prevents us making progress - fear induced by uncertainty.  Why the uncertainty?  Stupid  policies emanating from an incompetent president who is way in  over his head.  (See 3 below.)

From time to time I post either comments or videos of Peter Schiff.

Peter is an investment person who ran for Senator from Rhode Island. He was defeated by a Democrat who had been the State's Attorney General and who lied about his military record. Rhode Island, being the Liberal mafia-union controlled State that it is, elected their Attorney General and Peter went back to telling it like he saw it and lamentably has come to be.  (See 3 a below.)
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The long knives of the New York Times are out and drawing blood from one of their own.  Not surprised.

The liberal media and press dolts are hard pressed but they will defend Obama as previously suggested , ie. because he is learning!

Obama is so ideologically hidebound, so defensive, so narcissistic and surrounded by those even more extreme it is highly unlikely he/they are incapable of learning. DUH! To learn you must first understand you made a mistake! (See 4 below.)
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Sen. Rubio was interviewed by Paul Gigot this afternoon on two matters: what to do about  youth here illegally and Syria.

In both instances Rubio was rational, careful not to speak out of turn regarding his position on the Intelligence committee. Listening to him was like a breath of fresh air.  He will go very far and one day certainly appears to be destined for the presidency.

With respect to his proposed program for amnesty for children his is a sensible attempt to allow children, who were brought here, to have an opportunity to make a contribution to our nation.  His proposed plan, if they measure up, allows them to  achieve a work status (green card) and apply for citizenship, should they wish.

It is also designed to undercut claims by Democrats that Republican solutions  are extreme and mean spirited as AG Holder has been doing as he travels around the country claiming Republicans, are engaged in  bigotry because they want, as I do, to make sure people who vote are in fact doing so legally, by having an I.D..

With respect to Syria, Rubio suggested we need to be sure we understand, as best we can,  where the sympathies lie among the opposition and then we should provide them whatever help we can. He did not, unlike McCain, advocate military action at this point.

 My friend, Bret Stephens, followed and was asked by Gigot what he thought about our helping the  Syrian opposition.  Bret, like myself, believes we generally know where the  sympathies of various opposition groups lie, that Syria has been our enemy for over 40 years, has assisted Iran in helping kill Americans and that we would be doing the ourselves and the  world a favor, while at the same time taking out Iran's surrogate, if we rid Syria of Assad.

I recently posted Kissinger's rejection of military intervention in Syria.  Granted the risks of getting rid of another nation's leadership has moral, as well as military and post event, implications.  Lawyers and diplomats can,and generally do, present every caution why you should not take action. If they ran everything, as tragically they often do, little would happen or when it finally did it would be too late, cost more and thus,  be even more destructive.

I believe we have every right to pick and choose who we actively oppose and the basis should be whether it is first in our national interest to do so and second the world's.  In the case of Syria, getting rid of Assad is in our national interest because it would allow us to have say over the control of  their WMD to assure they do not fall into terrorist hands and  might eliminate the threat of war in the Middle East specifically against Israel (though I believe that is a long shot)  and, most importantly, would eliminate  a significant proxy ally out from Iran's umbrella. This would also send a signal to Iraq, Turkey, the Egyptian Brotherhood, Hezballah  and both other terrorist leaners and wavering so-called allies to consider mending  their own ways.

It would also call Russia's bluff and should be seen favorably  even by the Saudis. Finally, it could lay a marker down that dictators who  allow the slaughter of innocents is something we will not tolerate if it is deemed in our national interest. No, we cannot be the  world policeman and no we cannot engage every two bit dictator no matter how moral it would be to do so.  We have every right to pick and choose who our enemies are based on our history and experience with them and it is past time we began standing up like a great power we once were - Kissinger notwithstanding.
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Obama seems to have a lock on ooops!  (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)Mark Steyn:  U.S. ,  Europe  on different paths to same place  

By MARK STEYN  

The Eurovision Song Contest doesn't get a lot of attention in the  United States , but on the Continent it's long been seen as the perfect Euro-metaphor. Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype pan-European institution and predicated on the same assumptions. Eurovision took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi and Debussy, and in return gave us "Boom-Bang-A-Bang" (winner, 1969), "Ding-Ding-A-Dong" (winner, 1975) and "Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley" (winner, 1984). The euro took the mark, the lira and the franc, and merged them to create the "Boom-Bang-A-Bang" of currencies.

How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in  Zagreb : " Yugoslavia  is very much like an orchestra," cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahović. "The string section and the wood section all sit together." Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV's head of "war information" programming.

Fortunately, no one remembers  Yugoslavia . So today  Europe  itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week's Eurovision finale in  Azerbaijan , The Daily Mail in  London  reported that the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the competition "because the cash-strapped country can't afford to host the lavish event next year," as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and two-thirds of the country's airports are under threat of closure and whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a poignant symbol of how total is Spain's implosion. Ask not for whom "Ding-Ding-A-Dong" dings, it dings for thee.

One of the bizarre aspects of media coverage since 2008 is the complacent assumption that what's happening is "cyclical" – a downturn that will eventually correct itself – rather than profoundly structural. Francine Lagarde, head of the IMF, found herself skewered like souvlaki on a  Thessaloniki  grill for suggesting the other day that the Greeks are a race of tax evaders. She's right. Compared to Germans, your average Athenian has a noticeable aversion to declaring income. But that's easy for her to say: Mme Lagarde's half-million-dollar remuneration from the IMF is tax-free, just a routine perk of the new transnational governing class. And, in the end, whether your broke European state has reasonably efficient tax collectors, like the French, or incompetent ones, like the Greeks, is relatively peripheral.

Likewise, on this side of the Atlantic:  Quebec  university students, who pay the lowest tuition rates in  North America , are currently striking over a proposed increase of $1,625. Spread out over seven years. Or about 232 bucks per annum. Or about the cost of one fair-trade macchiato a week. Which has, since the strike, been reduced further, to a couple of sips: If you're wondering how guys who don't do any work can withdraw their labor, well, "strike" is a euphemism for riot. The other week, Vanessa L'Écuyer, a sexology student at the Université du Québec à Montréal, was among those arrested for smoke-bombing the subway system and bringing the city's morning commute to a halt. But, as in  Europe , in the end, whether you fund your half-decade bachelor's in sexology through a six-figure personal debt or whether you do it through the largesse of the state is relatively peripheral.

In the twilight of the West,  America  and  Europe  are still different but only to this extent: They've wound up taking separate paths to the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars' worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.

That's to say, the unsustainable "bubble" is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called "adolescence" that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half-decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you're 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents' health insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called "retirement" that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.

The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your working life, and it's been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate, as it has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. Staying ever longer in "school" (I use the term loosely) leads to ever later workplace entry, and ever later (if at all) family formation. Which means that our generation is running up debt that will have to be repaid by our shrunken progeny. One hundred Greek grandparents have 42 Greek grandchildren. Is it likely that 42 Greeks can repay the debts run up by 100 Greeks? No wonder they'd rather stick it to the Germans. But the thriftier Germans have the same deathbed demographics. If 100 Germans resent having to pick up the check for an entire continent, is it likely 42 Germans will be able to do it?

Look around you. The late 20th century Western lifestyle isn't going to be around much longer. In a few years' time, our children will look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.

I was sad to learn that Helga Vlahović died a few weeks ago, but her central metaphor all those years ago wasn't wrong. Any functioning society is like an orchestra. When the parts don't fit together, it's always the other fellow who's out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the Germans, and vice-versa. But the developed world is all playing the same recessional. In the world after Western prosperity, we will work till we're older, and we will start younger – and we will despise those who thought they could defy not just the rules of economic gravity but the basic human life cycle.

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2)2012 DNC NATIONAL CONVENTION SCHEDULE 

4:00 PM   Opening Flag Burning Ceremony
4:05 PM   Singing of "God Damn America" led by Rev. Jeremiah Wright
4:10 PM   Pledge of Allegiance to Obama

4:15 PM   Ceremonial 'I Hate America' led by Michelle Obama
4:30 PM   Tips on Dodging Sniper Fire , Hillary Clinton

5:00 PM   UFO Abduction Survival , Joe Biden
5:30 PM   Eliot Spitzer Speaks on "Family Values" via Satellite
5:45 PM   Tribute to All 57 States

6:00 PM   Joe Biden Delivers 100,000-Word Speech Featuring 23-Minute
                Question and 2-Hour Answer
8:30 PM   Airing of Grievances by the Clintons
9:00 PM   Bill Clinton Delivers Rousing Endorsement of Obama Girl

9:15 PM    Tribute Film to Freedom Fighters at Gitmo , Michael Moore
9:45 PM    Personal Finance Seminar - Charlie Rangel
10:00 PM  Denunciation of Bitter Gun Owners, Rosie O'Donnell

10:30 PM  Ceremonial Waving of White Flag for Iraq & Afghanistan
11:00 PM  Obama Energy Plan Symposium/Tire Gauge Demonstration
11:15 PM  Free Gov. Blagojevich rally

11:30 PM  Obama Accepts Tony and Latin Grammy  awards
11:45 PM   Feeding of the Delegates with 5 Loaves and 2 Fish , Obama Presiding
12:00 AM   Official Nomination of Obama by Bill Maher

12:01 AM   Obama Accepts Nomination as Lord and Savior
12:05 AM   Celestial Choirs Sing
3:00 AM    Biden Delivers Acceptance Speech


Note: There is one omission in the list above: Memorial recognition of Obama's surrogate son, Trayvon, will be in conjunction with the 12:05 AM event.

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3)Greenspan: ‘Fear of the Future’ Hinders Investing, Economic Growth

By Forrest Jones

Fear and uncertainty are preventing companies from making long-term investments in America, says former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Meanwhile, investors could turn on the country on a moment's notice thanks to political unwillingness to tackle deficits, which would send markets tanking and interest rates soaring, Greenspan adds.

Short-term investments in goods and services like software are doing well, but long-term assets like "structures and buildings" reflect concern over the fate of the economy.

"If you want to learn what the degree of uncertainty is — and the level I've been using for quite a long period of time is to watch what corporate executives do, what proportion of their cash flow they choose to invest in long-term assets. That number in the early part of 2010 was at the lowest ratio since 1935," Greenspan tells CNBC. 

"There were equivalent things in the noncorporate area, there's a significant type of contraction, very much for the same reasons in residential buildings. In short, there is a fear of the future." 

Massive debts continue to stoke fears, and corporate executives know that markets can punish countries facing fiscal imbalances.

Unfortunately for the U.S., policymakers aren't facing long-term deficits with enough urgency.

"Almost every economist says we'll deal with the longer-term problem later, let's get to work now on short-term stimulus. That presupposes something they do not know, namely will the markets tolerate that? I know of no way you can make that judgment," Greenspan says. 

"But to say implicitly that it's a 100 percent probability, that is wrong, and we don't have a Plan B."

Today, the yield on the 10-year Treasury is dropping to record lows as investors punish European assets out of fear and rush to the safety of U.S. government debt.

In Europe, yields in Spanish and Italian bond markets are soaring on fears the periphery eurozone countries are so indebted that financing them is becoming increasingly risky.

Central Bankers across the Atlantic are echoing Greenspan, calling for more urgency dealing with structural flaws plaguing the European economy.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has urged European leaders to fix the economy now, as the current setup is "unsustainable."

"The next step ... is basically for our leaders to clarify what is the vision for a certain number of years from now. How is the euro going to look ... in a certain number of years from now," Draghi told European Parliament, according to the AFP newswire.

"I think the sooner this is specified, the better it is."

3a)Peter Schiff: ‘We’re Already Bankrupt’

By  Peter Schiff

U.S. financial affairs have fallen into extreme disrepair, says Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital. 

"We're already bankrupt,” he tells Yahoo. “It’s better to acknowledge that than to pretend we're not." 

The fact that our country is “so broke” has led the Federal Reserve to push interest rates to record lows, Schiff says. The 10-year Treasury yield hit a new trough of 1.61 percent Wednesday.

“If interest rates were allowed to rise, the federal government would have no choice but to restructure debt,” he says.

“A lot of our banks would fail. We’d have a bigger drop in our real estate mark. We’d be right back in recession.”

But the Fed’s insistence on keeping interest rates near zero is “creating even bigger problems,” Schiff says. Monetary policy is making us save too little, invest too little, produce too little, borrow too much, and spend too much. 

"We can't have real economic growth until interest rates go up," he says. 

"If we admit we're bankrupt and at least restructure, we can start repairing the damage and preparing the economy for real growth."

Schiff will undoubtedly be pleased to learn that New York Fed President William Dudley and Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher recommended against further easing Wednesday.

"My argument has been that we have done enough, in fact, we've done too much," Fisher told reporters, according to Reuters. “I don't see what we would accomplish with further accommodation."
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4)A liberal former New York Times editor turns on his media colleagues . . . and writes a devastating biography of Barack Obama.

Then the New York Times tries to destroy the author and the book, calling it an "invective-laden" anti-Obama book, and tells its readers to ignore the book since it offers no real sources.

But then the book hits the #1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list its first week of publication . . .

And, as it turns out, the book, by journalist Edward Klein, is based on 200 interviews of people who personally knew Barack Obama, including the first major interview with Jeremiah Wright and even Obama's personal physician — with some shocking revelations!

This sensational best-seller — Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House —

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5) OBAMA AT MASTER LOCK  CO.

When Obama stopped in at Master Lock in  Milwaukee  Wisconsin a few 

weeks ago, he was walking the plant and stopped to talk with a plant  
employee.* *He looked up at the banner hanging on the wall and  said 
to the workers and people around him, "It is great to be in a  union 
shop, especially one as old as this union is " - - -- pointing  to the 
banner. He then said, "A union shop since 1848" - - - and then  he 
went on to talk about what that Banner stood for and how important  it 
was to display it and show your union support.*

The  worker then said to Obama that it was the flag of the State  of
Wisconsin - -  which was founded in 1848.  DUH!  This was only reported
by a local Radio station in  Milwaukee (1130AM)  and not by the major 
news networks - - - they didn't want to  embarrass this "got no freaking'
clue" President!.

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