Clarification:
It turns out that
Article 2, Section 2, Clause 2 says that the president shall nominate
justices to the Supreme Court unless
the president is a Democrat in the fourth year of his elected term.
It is too bad that Justice Scalia's actuarial event did not occur at
a time more convenient to the Republicans – it is awkward for
them to try to prevent the
clear wording of the constitution from being followed in
replacing a firm proponent of “original intent”.
Lessons
Learned: Eight
years into the Great Dismal Swamp a few things have become clear, the
most important being that the world's central banks – specifically
the Fed – have failed to drag us out of the doldrums. After
bailing out the big banks with trillions, wasting a few hundred
million on a puny pretense at putting people back to work, flinging
money at the problem with QE I, II, and III, (globally this comes to
$12.3 trillion) and then pretending things were turning up well
enough to engineer an ill-timed interest rate hike... all this and
now we're being prepped for negative
interest rates, which are really, really uncharted territory.
No
one really knows what is going on. “No one knows what the Fed
is really trying to accomplish, or what it can accomplish, or how to
go about accomplishing it.”
The
Skinny:
Oprah
bought a big chunk of Weight Watchers not because it works, but
because it doesn't.
But she knows from long personal experience that permanent lifelong
weigh loss is simply not achievable, but the desire to do so is
everlasting – as
are the profits to be made from the needy.
Feedom
Of Choice: The
British government has decreed that deciding who you want to buy
things from is not a basic right, especially if you boycott arms
makers, fossil fuels, tobacco producers or illegal Israeli
settlements.
Ultimate
RICO:
US families whose relatives have been killed by Mexican drug cartels
have brought suit against HSBC on the basis that it knowingly
participated in and profited from the criminal activities of the
cartels – and use as evidence the bank's admission that it
laundered over $800 million for the cartels, an act for which
it paid nearly $2 billion in penalties.
It's
Different This Time. Really:
Those who make their living stealing your living claim that the
economy is not entering a recession, this
is not 2008, and –
for the first time ever – the market is wrong.
Better
Never Than Late:
Is there really long suppressed
evidence that Sirhan Sirhan could not have and did not shoot Bobby
Kennedy?
The
Parting Shot:
7 comments:
re Scalia. Indeed, good point. You gotta hand it to the wingnuts: it's a curious way to honor the supposed legacy of Scalia.
Of course, not even Scalia stood for what he claimed to stand for. He stood for the same thing the GOP stands for, enhancing the power of the right, and to hell with the rationales du jour.
re: perverse incentives for diet product. Indeed. So, lucky for us this phenomena does not carry over to the drug companies. If the collective net effect of their products was to actually increase demand for their products, surely they'd stop doing it.
We've been trained/conditioned to think in terms of 'us/them, Dem/Rep because you are being forced to buy-in. The Us/Them divide has always been 'have/have-not' and depending on how you were raised, usually determining which side you favored. {it's not unusual/surprising to find people who haven't a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of counting themselves as among the 'haves' (mostly because they believe if the have enough faith, they too will eventually 'have'.)
Self-deceit even trumps self-interest but stupid is as stupid does. Let us not forget, while ignorance can be fixed, stupid is permanent.
Politics has 'evolved' since the founding of this nation and it evolved along the line it has throughout history. The masses are 'too ignorant' to rule. [Mind you, this does nothing to 'qualify' the 'owner class' as rulers, but if they were 'smart enough' to swindle you out of your choice then you shouldn't complain about not being given a choice...]
Oh, and don't confuse the usurpers 'genius' in buying your government out from under you with intelligence. It is just one more aspect of money being funny, and people being gullible beyond belief...which is to point out that they gyp'd you using 'funny money', which isn't so much 'smart' as it is clever. {for those of you who foolishly equate 'rich' with 'smart'.)
And I apologize for anyone that is offended by my belaboring the obvious, the truth hurts and it's a set of circumstances you were born into...which is to point out things have NEVER been 'right'.
But I digress once again.
There are NO Democrats just as there are no Republicans...there are only 'haves' and 'have-nots'. You can't fight the problem if you can't keep the opponent in your sights.
There isn't a nickle's worht of difference between (today's) version of democrats and republicans, neither represents the will of the people and it is not either unkind or untruthful to say that they are all 'opportunists', out to do the most good for themselves.
[Bernie is the only one 'on record' as running to make this a better world for us all, which is all any of us can hope for! With age comes wisdom.
Some people remain children all thier lives...yeah, I'm looking at the 'haves' clown car.
Remember, can't fix the problem if you can't identify it. It's how they keep us at each other's throats when we should be slipping a noose around theirs.
RE "Lessons Learned": I'm inclined to think that the sociopaths running central banks and their fellow travelers know precisely what they're doing - extracting as many resources as possible for their clients for as long as possible. It's probably true that they don't know where their policies will take us but I don't think they care because they're confident the world's police and military will be there for them should the worst happen. And there's power and resources to be grabbed amid chaos.
RE "Porn O'Graph": Oh please, let's not confuse the issue with facts about healthcare value for the patient's money. Healthcare in the US is about value to corporate management and the shareholder first . . . actual patient healthcare is far down the line.
re kwark. Indeed, I tend to give the elite the benefit of the doubt. They know exactly what they are doing. It's just not necessarily what they SAY they are doing. And certainly not why.
Now, as far as consequences and collateral damage, they care too little to be clueless.
LESSONS? It has always seemed questionable, at best, that lowered interest rates spurred recovery. If anything, the last 20 or so years in Japan, the clone of western economy, shows that it does not help at all. Interest is supposed to be the market way to price risk, so lowering rates would seem to turn off the primary market function. And negative rates, well that is just formalized deflation. Nothing in the known world lives by contracting, so there seems to be a major shift afoot in the affairs of man.
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