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Bill Gross: “We See Bubbles Everywhere”
The end of this thing is going to be nasty. The bust of the current Fed induced delusion will likely be more impactful for many people alive today than the 2008 Crash or the September 11th 2001 attacks. Bill Gross, probably the biggest bond trader in the world sees storm clouds. Gross says that it may not be as bad as 2008, but I’ll bet that in his heart of heart he thinks things will be worse.
My feeling is consider now a gift. Get your act together as best you can while you can. Maybe the storm never hits, but a wise person would not count on it.
(From Zerohedge.com)
As a gentle reminder, the reason why nobody anywhere trusts this particular bubble – the biggest in history – is not because speculators are not greedy (they are), or because everyone knows the market is always one central planner wrong move away from a collapse which would make the 2009 lows seem like amateur hour (it is), but because, as Seth Klarman explained two weeks ago, it is the Fed itself which by pushing on a string and the economy constantly deteriorating, proves it has no idea how to make things better: “When you tell the populace that we can all enjoy a free lunch of extremely low interest rates, massive Fed purchases of mounting treasury issuance, trillions of dollars of expansion in the Fed’s balance sheet, and huge deficits far into the future, they are highly skeptical not because they know precisely what will happen but because they are sure that no one else–even, or perhaps especially, the policymakers—does either.”
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Bill Maher is put on his heals, defending Obama, war, and destruction.
I absolutely believe that that our methods in the Middle East over the last half century have been colossally wrongheaded. That is kind. In our fear that we would lose access to to oil, the substance our economy runs on, we have done some very un-American things. People are dead who should not be. The world is more chaotic (very arguably) because of our tear assing around in the Old World desert,
There was a time when we let the Brits do warring in the Old World desert. We have no place in the Old World. That is especially true since the natural gas revolution of the past 3 years.
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Political Correctness • Bill Ayers and the Culture of Rape
May 6, 2013
Bill Ayers and the Culture of Rape
By M. Catharine Evans
Bill Ayers told a University of Oregon social justice class in 2012 "our fate hinges on our ability to open our eyes." Well, Bill, rumor has it you are rapist, so let’s open the discussion.
Frontpage Magazine and several other sites published Donna Ron’s account of what happened one Friday night in 1965.
The terms "psychological rape" or "date rape" had not yet been coined but Ms. Ron’s story, the kind the Left are so fond of, suggests Ayers was at most a rapist; at least, a sexual deviant.
So when Ayers talks about women’s rights, or mentions rape as he does in the University of Oregon lecture, he conveniently forgets to mention his own allegedly sordid past with women.
Any woman who has suffered the humiliation of forced sex, whether psychological or physical, never forgets. Donna’s ability to remember graphic details after many years is typical of those who have endured sexual trauma.
The young women introducing Ayers to the University of Oregon class probably had no idea they were standing next to a possible sexual predator. If they dismiss Ayers’ history of violence against innocent police officers and his later refusal to renounce his actions, chances are these same young people that Ayers advises to critically examine the world around them, will not care about one young woman who had the misfortune of meeting up with the terrorist.
But in light of the recent University of Wyoming hoax involving Ayers fan and co-plaintiff in a 2010 lawsuit against UW regarding his speaking engagement at the college, Meg Lankers-Simon and her efforts to draw attention to the "culture of rape," young women at liberal colleges should take a second look at the former Weather Underground terrorist.
Here’s part of Donna Ron’s story (warning: graphic language):
Bill Ayers’ apartment was around the corner and a half a block away from the sorority house. The more time I spent there, the more out of place I felt with my sisters. Sometimes I would stop by just to keep from having to go back to a place I had begun to think of as boring. I guess it was one of those evenings — maybe on the way back from the library, maybe just to get out of the sorority house, I don’t remember exactly. What I do recall is that when I was getting ready to leave Ayers told me I couldn’t go until I slept with his roommate and his brother. At this point Bill and I had slept together just once. I was sexually inexperienced, having had only one serious boyfriend with whom I had recently broken up.
At first I thought Ayers was joking. I got up; and went to the door. He moved quickly to block me at the doorway. He locked the door and put the chain on it. I went to the couch and sat down and told him that I had no intention of having sex with his roommate and his brother or him. He said that I had no choice but to do as he said if I wanted to get out of there. He claimed that I wouldn’t sleep with his married roommate because he was black — that I was a bigot. I had gone to school with black kids and had them as friends all my life. I couldn’t believe he was saying that to me.
I felt trapped. I had to get out of the situation I was in and because he was so effective a guilt-tripper, I also felt I had to prove to him that I wasn’t a bigot. I got up from the couch and walked over to the black roommate’s bed and put myself on it and he —me. I went totally out of my body. I floated beside myself on the outside and above the bed looking at this black stranger— me angrily while I hated myself.
After that I had to go lie down on Bill Ayer’s bed for his brother to — me. Rick Ayers was a decent person, unlike his brother, and couldn’t go through with it He started and stopped and let me go. I also thought I had to let Bill —me but at that point he unbolted the door and I left.
I remember going back to the sorority house and talking to my best girlfriend and telling her what had happened
I was a mess and felt it was my fault for letting it happen. I was ashamed. Back home at the end of the semester, I got my parents to send me to a psychiatrist. What had happened affected my ability to trust in a relationship with a man and I didn’t have a close relationship again for a long time.
Later I read about Ayers and his book Fugitive Days on the Internet. This was just after the terrorist attack on 9/11 and he was entirely unrepentant for having been a terrorist himself. "I would do it again," he told the Times when he was asked about having set a bomb in the Pentagon.
I also discovered that he was a Distinguished Professor of Education at University of Illinois Chicago campus. I think that freaked me out more than anything. That a man so cruel and conscienceless could attain such a position enraged me. I contacted him by email through the University’s website. He wrote back that he didn’t remember me.
Anybody reading this might ask why Ms. Ron bothered to email a man she calls "conscienceless and cruel" more than thirty years after the incident.
Sexual abuse victims are notorious for seeking closure. The need to confront their attackers is at times overwhelming. This part of Ms. Ron’s story rings so true as to make the rest seem very plausible.
As a group counselor for a Women’s Advocacy Program run by the YWCA in the 1990′s, I came into contact with many women exactly like Donna.
In a 9/11 New York Times book review for Fugitive Days Ayers’ own words support Ron’s claims. The "rich kid radical," as he was known, points out in the article that Weather Undergrounders weren’t exactly discriminating when it came to sex.
He also writes about the Weathermen’s sexual experimentation as they tried to ”smash monogamy.” The Weathermen were ”an army of lovers,” he says, and describes having had different sexual partners, including his best male friend.
A month before the New York Times review, which included Ayers’ early fascination with the joy of July 4 "candle bombs" and how he really "trembled mostly for the Big Ones, the loud concussions,” the professor and his Underground terrorist wife wrote an article for Mothering The Natural Family Living Magazine entitled "The Son Also Rises Boys to Men, Outside the Stereotypes."
Oddly enough, the man Ms. Ron accused of date rape in 1965 brings up the topic in the 2001 article. Ayers and Dohrn recounted an "alleged date rape" at their sons’ high school.
The former members of the Weather Underground, who in Ayers’ own words descended into a "whirlpool of violence," and who admitted they practiced ‘anything goes’ sex, offered advice on sexual relationships to other parents of teenagers. After reading about Ayers these past four years it makes sense it takes a sexual predator to know one.
From Mothering:
An alleged date rape after a party at our kids’ high school became a huge focus of fear and anxiety, conversation, accusation, and contention. The adults, typically, knew almost nothing, but the kids were all abuzz. Would the young woman tell her parents? Would she file charges? Would the event and the aftershock become openly acknowledged?
We overheard Zayd, Malik, and Chesa talking about it and, as usual, butted in. When they seemed evasive and somewhat lighthearted about what we took to be a most serious act, we began to question them sharply: "Do you understand what a profound violation, what a disgusting and vile crime is being alleged?" "Don’t you see how badly she was hurt and how unjust and immoral it was?"
…we talked more clearly about guilt and responsibility…The date rape helped us clarify several areas of agreement:
Sex can be enormously pleasurable and powerful when it is mutual, respectful, authentic.
When an older guy and a younger girl have sex, there’s a concern about power and intimidation. (The girl in this instance was a freshman, the guy a senior.)
If the guy uses alcohol and drugs to grease the wheels of cooperation, there’s a real problem. (The guy in this case got her drunk.)
If there is one girl and more than one guy, it’s force, for sure. (The guy arrived at the girl’s house at midnight with his best friend, and the three of them drank heavily until the guy coaxed the girl into a basement bedroom practically within reach of the TV the three had been watching.)
If a girl says "no" at any point, everything stops there.(There was dispute about whether she ever said "no.")
Whether Ayers is making up the date rape scenario at his kids’s school or not, the similarities between the advice he gives to his sons and Donna Ron’s account of what happened in 1965 are startling.
Accounts of Ayers’ early days are as bad as it gets. Just think: a fugitive, a terrorist, a communist with a small ‘c’ and an alleged rapist helped launch a future president’s political career.
Activist young women who are truly interested in the victims of sexual assault should take a hard look at Ms. Ron’s story and run as far away from Bill Ayers and his ilk as they can.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/ … _rape.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon May 06, 2013 9:45 am
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Immigration bill contains 400 waivers, exceptions and exemptions
The issue from our perspective is not immigration per se. Our beef is with the complexity of the bill which comes in at over 800 pages. (In the end it will likely be more.) It is reportedly chock full of goodies and loopholes written by lobbyists with various agendas. I know, who would have thought?
This is how business is done in Washington DC. The bills are so big, so complicated, and written in such legalese that no one really knows what’s in the potential law totally. Senators and representatives know the parts of the bill which are important to their campaign finance sponsors, but that often is about it. The result is a jumble of regs creating lots of work for the legalese translators, the lawyers.
Obamacare is massive and no one knows to this day how it’s really going to affect things. The Dodd-Frank legislation is a travesty. Parts of it are still being written today even though it became law in 2010! CISPA just passed the House even though the public rose up against it last year. And now the immigration bill comes up and according to the Daily Caller it appears custom tailored for every special interest with a dog in the race. Every interest which can afford a lobbyist anyway. Who’s your lobbyist?
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Libertarianism, Bill Maher, and False Dilemmas
During his recent diatribe against libertarians Bill Maher said, “Libertarians also hate Medicare and Social Security and there are problems with those programs but here’s the thing: It beats stepping over lepers and watching human skeletons shit in the river and I also like not seeing those things.”
Libertarians hear this sort of thing a lot. “You don’t think there should be limits on campaign spending? Then you must want corporations to buy elections!” Or, “You’re opposed to public schooling? What, you think all our children should just stay ignorant?”
We call this a false dilemma, a well-known logical fallacy. A person commits it when he limits the available choices in an argument too much. You can pick between A or B, he says, when in fact there’s an option C (and D, E, and F), as well. For Maher, either we keep Medicare and Society Security or we allow horrific poverty.
The false dilemma’s a logical fallacy for good reason and so by itself is never a good argument against, well, anything. But that doesn’t mean we should just ignore it. Instead, once we’ve noticed how many people employ false dilemmas against libertarian proposals, we should take a moment to ask why.
I submit that the false dilemma’s prevalence results in part from the way many libertarians talk about, and argue for, their political views.
If you have no reason to think options exist beyond just A and B, then if you hear someone arguing strongly against A, it’s not stupid to assume he’s either in favor of B or at least prefers B to A. So if you aren’t aware of any ways to prevent destitution besides Social Security, and you hear a libertarian arguing strongly against the morality of Society Security, then it’s rather likely you’ll conclude that he either wants destitution for the poor or at least would rather see the poor destitute than suffer the moral harm of Social Security.
Libertarians bear some of the blame for this. Quite often when choosing our rhetoric, we have a tendency to focus on “not A” instead of saying, “B’s not good either, so let’s instead do C.” For example, folks on the left are less likely to attack us with false dilemmas if we focus not so exclusively on the rights violations inherent in paying for Social Security, but instead point out that Social Security doesn’t work all that well or efficiently if the goal is to prevent destitution, and then offer better alternatives.
This “not A” tendency could result from the simple fact that offering alternatives means having persuasive alternatives in mind. And while they’re myriad, not all of us have the time or inclination to learn them. Call it a kind of rational ignorance in political debate. Far easier to just apply a single principle, a “universal acid” as Daniel Dennett calls it.
But we’re often also motivated by a desire to maintain our principles. Principles are good, of course. That libertarians say we value freedom and mean it is a crucial difference between us and conservatives and progressives. On the other hand, we need to recognize that non-libertarians don’t accept our core principles. If they did, they wouldn’t be non-libertarians. So if our goal is not just to be right, but to be persuasive, then starting with common ground can be rather more effective. Yes, we take a principled stand against the state coercion behind Social Security, but we also don’t want people to suffer from rampant poverty. In fact, much of what’s appealing about libertarianism is that it’s a genuine path to both: we can be free and prosperous. We shouldn’t water down our libertarianism but we should pay attention to when leading with the argument from prosperity—and using it as a way to then persuade on the issue of freedom—can be more effective than making only the argument from freedom.
Bill Maher’s fulmination just shows that the way we express our ideas is often as important for their persuasiveness as the ideas themselves.
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“Nice Charter School Bill You Got There… Shame If Anything Were To Happen To It”
Jason Bedrick
The latest politician to blur the lines between legislating and running a protection racket is Representative Dan Eaton, division chairman of the New Hampshire state legislature’s powerful House Finance committee.
In what Charles Arlinghaus of the New Hampshire Union Leader generously described as “a rare moment of candor”, Rep. Eaton recently stated during a committee hearing that he was going to hold up an entirely uncontroversial bipartisan charter school bill purely for political purposes. As he explained, “I’m looking at this as political. We have a [budget] negotiation [with the state senate] coming up in June and I want to have a trump card or two, and this is … a very healthy trump card.”
Arlinghaus breaks it down:
Consider what he’s saying: He liked the bill and supports the policy, but he believes he can use the bill as part of a hostage negotiation with the Senate. He wants to say to the Senate “I know you want this, but we’ll kill it even though we like it too unless you do something else we want that is completely unrelated.”
Without question, some give and take and normal compromise will be part of a budget process. Everyone expects the House and Senate to pass different budgets and to then negotiate over the details of what gets included. But this bill isn’t part of that process and wouldn’t be part of that negotiation unless Eaton gets to keep it captive in a back room. In effect, he’s looking at charter schools and saying, “I’m sorry you got caught in the crossfire, but I think I can sell you for a good price.”
The bill in question was intended to clear up a misunderstanding about a recent change to the Granite State’s charter school law that the state attorney general’s office understood to mean the opposite of what the legislative authors had intended. The bill, which restored the previous statutory language, had already received a positive recommendation from the NH House Education Committee and passed the full NH House on a voice vote, meaning that the support was so overwhelming that it was unnecessary to count the votes in favor and opposed. What seemed like common sense to most legislators apparently looked like an opportunity for political hostage-taking for Rep. Eaton.
Without the fix, the five new charter schools that are already in the governor’s budget cannot be authorized. Even a delay until the budget negotiations in June will jeopardize the ability of these charter schools to be ready to open in September.
As a former member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, I can attest that the “Live Free or Die” state’s citizen legislature often embodies the highest ideals of self-government. Most of the legislators I encountered in both parties were principled and completely dedicated to making New Hampshire an even better place to live. Unfortunately, these sort of legislative shenanigans leave a stain on the august institution. Let us hope that sunlight proves to be a sufficient disinfectant.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Gold and Silver • Radio interviews GATA Chairman Bill Murphy
GoldSeek Radio interviews GATA Chairman Bill Murphy
Submitted by cpowell on Sat, 2013-03-09 02:41. Section: Daily Dispatches
9:40p ET Friday, March 13, 2013
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
GoldSeek Radio’s Chris Waltzek today interviewed GATA Chairman Bill Murphy about developments in the gold market and particularly attempts by central banks to repatriate their gold from vaulting abroad and suspicion that the metal really isn’t where it is purported to be. The interview is 13 minutes long and can be heard and GoldSeek Radio here:
http://radio.goldseek.com/nuggets/murphy03.07.13.mp3
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Sun Mar 10, 2013 3:38 am
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Bill Maher goes all “Tea Party” and weirds out Howard Dean
The source is completely partisan. I try to avoid using such sources generally, but this video is great. Howard Dean is like, “Dude, where are you going with this? I thought you were our boy.” And Maher is for the most part. But he is given to moments of honesty. This is one of them.
I’m mad it took me a month to find this video.
The post Bill Maher goes all “Tea Party” and weirds out Howard Dean appeared first on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org.
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An Unconstitutional Tax Bill in Virginia?
David Boaz
My long-ago colleague Norman Leahy, once a young research assistant at the Cato Institute, has an op-ed in the Washington Post today. I wonder where he got the idea that an act of the legislature is invalid just because it violates the state constitution.
Those praising the Virginia General Assembly’s transportation compromise may not realize that the bill runs afoul of the plain language in the state’s constitution.
Virginia’s constitution is clear that the General Assembly can impose only uniform taxes across the state for similar activities. But the bill that emerged from the House-Senate conference committee last weekend upsets the historic balance between localities and state government; it contains new provisions about taxation, some of which would effectively set up a two-tier system for residents in certain parts of the state. It’s difficult to see how some of these provisions could survive legal challenge….
As a constitutional matter, these local tax provisions could probably be struck down without affecting the rest of the legislation.
But few should know better than Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) that state legislators don’t have the power to impose a discriminatory local tax. He was the state’s attorney general when his office defended before the state Supreme Court the General Assembly’s previous attempt at a transportation tax package. The court rejected the argument.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Gold and Silver • KING WORLD NEWS INTERVIEW WITH BILL FLECKIENSTEIN
KING WORLD NEWS INTERVIEW WITH BILL FLECKIENSTEIN
http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldn … stein.html
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Thu Feb 21, 2013 12:54 am
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