Category: Uncategorized

The political class isn’t even bothering to pretend anymore:

After a spirited, emotional and at times raucous debate, the New York City Council voted, 29 to 22, on Thursday afternoon to extend term limits, allowing Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to seek re-election next year and undoing the result of two voter referendums that had imposed a limit of two four-year terms.

Even in the EUSSR, they make the people vote until they get it right. In the USA, on the other hand, they simply change the laws at will and run roughshod over the will of the people. And notice how “crisis” is used to justify this legal legerdemain: “Supporters of the bill said the dire economic situation confronting the city — and the possibility of multibillion-dollar budget shortfalls — demanded continuity of leadership.”

A regular who wishes to remain nameless would like to buy a copy of Summa Elvetica for those who would like a copy but feel they cannot afford one for whatever reason. He’s willing to buy 10 of them, so if you’d like to receive a free book, please let me know and email me the address to which you’d like it sent from Amazon. No strings, no nonsense.

We’ll do this as part of the Summa surge, which I’ll announce once the OC tells me when and how we should do it.

UPDATE – We have our ten takers now. I’ll be emailing them tomorrow to let them know.

Courtesy of the OC and his Friday Challenge series:

The First Annual Bane Memorial Halloween StoryFrightening Fiction Contest

That’s right. Bane is gone — for real this time, sadly, but that’s another story — but love him, hate him, or fear him, you must admit, the guy knew how to tell a creepy tale. Ergo, in honor of the passing of our late mutual friend/foe/sparring partner/bête noire, that’s this week’s challenge: write a genuinely scary story.

I shall, of course, be penning a tale in the old Weeper’s honor.

It turns out that the girl who was “attacked” for her McCain bumper sticker made it up. I have to admit, I bought into it until I saw the first picture after I posted yesterday; there’s no way a knife would have left such shallow scratches.

Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter “B” in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

What a bizarre thing to do. Usually women who make these things up are college students or college professors. I’m glad the nation can breathe a big sigh of relief in the certainty that Obama’s supporters won’t be inclined to act up if he should lose next month.

I’ve mostly stayed out of this bear since I knew the up days would be vicious – although I had no idea they’d be 11 percent vicious like earlier this month! But it’s fun to keep your toes in for practice, if nothing else, and those 09 NDX 1200 puts are looking pretty happy right now.

Wall Street headed for another precipitous drop Friday as fears of a punishing global recession stirred panic among investors and sent world financial markets into a tailspin. The Dow Jones industrial average futures fell 550 points, triggering a halt in selling of stock future contracts.

Did you ever stop to wonder why, if it’s supposed to be a free market, they only freeze the markets when they go down? Anyhow, there should be a serious bear rally starting next week, so if you’re still in, next month would probably be the time to get out once there’s a 50 percent retracement of whatever turns out to mark the short-term bottom.

And if you ever wondered why this happened, the explanation is pretty simple: “Nearly a century ago, two audacious mechanisms were put into place to drain wealth and power from the American people and to funnel that wealth and power to an elite. Today’s crisis has arisen because essentially all of our wealth and power has by now been taken from us, and the illusion of normalcy can no longer be maintained.”

In which America is surprised to learn that minorities behave just a little bit differently when they find themselves in charge:

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said. Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard tells Channel 4 Action News that the victim was robbed at knifepoint on Wednesday night outside of a Citizens Bank near Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street just before 9 p.m.

Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim’s car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter “B” into her face, Richard said.

That’s bad news. But the really bad news is that Michelle Obama just hired the guy to lead Obama’s post-election outreach campaign.

Andy McCarthy reminds us that this is the mostest importantest election EVAR… again:

As anyone who follows the Corner and cares about such things knows, I have never been a McCain fan. I worry a great deal about McCain reaching across the aisle for the next four years “to get things done” (which I imagine, to detour for a moment on the judicial-appointees issue Ramesh and Peter debated yesterday, would involve throwing congressional Dems a lot of judicial slots on the lower courts, and — as Ramesh and I have discussed before — I am not as confident as some that McCain’s Supreme Court picks would be very satisfying). I also fret about Republicans in Congress rolling over for McCain when they’d be inclined to fight Obama. For a long time, I struggled with the question whether it would be better — especially on the matter of conservative reform discussed here yesterday — if we just resigned ourselves to rebuilding and becoming a coherent opposition to an Obama administration.

I abandoned that idea because, while I disagree with McCain on many things, I am frightened by Obama. He would try to change the United States in very fundamental ways.

This post is unfortunately yet another in the countless repetitions of “vote the lesser evil because this is the mostest importantest election EVAR”. We see this every four years from Republicans and all it does is to ensure is that both the greater and lesser evils are further to the left four years later. Abandoning reason for emotion – you state outright that you’re “frightened” – is hardly the way to ensure long-term success.

Political pragmatism dug this hole. Abandoning principle one more time won’t help America or the Republican Party get out of it.

McCain will be very bad. Obama will be even worse. No conservative, libertarian, or republican of principle should vote for either man.

Ron Paul explains the obvious to the clueless:

In the midst of highly unpopular bailouts of Wall Street, many justifications have been given about why Washington feels the need to act. Some claim that capitalism and the free market are to blame, but we have not had capitalism. If you compare our financial capital to our aggregate debt, this would be obvious. In the same way, we have not had a truly free market. The monetary manipulations of the Federal Reserve, a complex tax code, the many “oversight” agencies and their mountains of regulations show that we are far removed from a free market economy.

Read. Learn. Think. There is no such thing as “too big to fail”. And the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

This very useful site may help provide a perspective on a concept that for some reason appears to be very difficult for most people to understand: a monetary unit is, on average, a short-lived thing:

The median age for a live currency is 37 years and at least one, the Zimbabwe dollar, is in the throes of hyperinflation. Excluding the early paper currencies of China up until the 15th century and the majority of paper currencies that existed in China until 1935, there are 609 currencies no longer in circulation. Of these, at least 153 were destroyed as a result of hyperinflation caused by over-issuance. The remainder were revalued, destroyed by military occupation/liberation, renamed for political reasons, or were converted to another currency. The median age for these currencies is only seventeen years.

This list, of course, is by no means perfect. For example, the present dollar is by no means identical to the 1792 dollar, which was defined by the Coinage Act of that year and specified a dollar to be 371.25 grains (24.75 grams) of silver. At today’s silver price, that 1792 dollar is worth 8.18 in current dollars.

Regardless, it’s a near-certainty that most of us will live to see the U.S. dollar replaced by another currency. On the other hand, keep in mind that nothing ever goes straight to zero and the dollar may well continue to strengthen against other paper currencies in light of the current deflation.