One stoic's look at living in the Upper Midwest, mostly about time spent outdoors, dogs, and food.
HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. -- A clerk at a business in Western North Carolina punched a would-be robber and knocked him out cold just minutes after the man barged in with a gun and demanded money.
...Mothershead said the man came behind the counter with a bag.
“I got the money and he had the bag out and instead of putting it in the bag I stuck it out and said, 'Just take it.' So, when he reached out, I took a step in, I cocked back and preloaded and I hit him hard,” Mothershead told News 4's Mike McCormick.
It is well worth following the link to watch the video. More than just knocking the guy out, he knocked him out with a left....While they waited for police and paramedics, Mothershead gave the man a roll of power towels, sprayed the floor with cleaner and told him to clean up his own blood.
The members of the Obama administration have many fine talents, but making adept historical analogies may not be among them.Everything else is building up for the Iowa caucuses in a week and the news is slow in anticipation.
When the administration came to office in the depths of the financial crisis, many of its leading figures concluded that the moment was analogous to the Great Depression. They read books about the New Deal and sought to learn from F.D.R.
But, in the 1930s, people genuinely looked to government to ease their fears and restore their confidence. Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.
According to a Gallup survey, 64 percent of Americans polled said they believed that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 26 percent believed that big business is the biggest threat. As a result, the public has reacted to Obama’s activism with fear and anxiety. The Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 elections.
The Great Society is the lineal descendant and the intensification of those other pretentiously named policies of 20th-century America: the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Era, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the New Frontier. All of these assorted Deals constituted a basic and fundamental shift in American life — a shift from a relatively laissez-faire economy and minimal state to a society in which the state is unquestionably king.[1]
In the previous century, the government could safely have been ignored by almost everyone; now we have become a country in which the government is the great and unending source of power and privilege. Once a country in which each man could by and large make the decisions for his own life, we have become a land where the state holds and exercises life-and-death power over every person, group, and institution. The great Moloch government, once confined and cabined, has burst its feeble bonds to dominate us all.I think I'll break the monotony with some creative destruction to fix a closet and the floors in one of the bedrooms: pictures to follow.
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| Don't worry. We'll build it again. |
WASHINGTON -- There are moments when our political system, whose essential job is to mediate conflicts in broadly acceptable and desirable ways, is simply not up to the task. It fails. This may be one of those moments. What we learned in 2011 is that the frustrating and confusing budget debate may never reach a workable conclusion. It may continue indefinitely until it's abruptly ended by a severe economic or financial crisis that wrenches control from elected leaders.Authors Neil Howe and William Strauss in their book The Fourth Turning (published 1997) have laid out a perspective on this unwinding of a settled political order that they term "unraveling" which occurs every 70 to 90 years. The last time one order unraveled and another was built was through the Great Depression ending in the current "give away politics." The previous unraveling/building was the Civil War and Reconstruction period. Four score and seven years before that was the order resulting from the American revolution and Constitutional Congress.
We are shifting from "give away politics" to "take away politics." Since World War II, presidents and Congresses have been in the enviable position of distributing more benefits to more people without requiring ever-steeper taxes. Now, this governing formula no longer works, and politicians face the opposite: taking away -- reducing benefits or raising taxes significantly -- to prevent government deficits from destabilizing the economy. It is not clear that either Democrats or Republicans can navigate the change.
The Republican field is crowded and fluid right now, but it won’t be for long. By January 11th, there will be at most three remaining contenders, and we’ll have a much clearer understanding of how the race will develop.
There are seven candidates with a pulse, and only six of them—divided into two groups of three—are competing in Iowa. For two of the three denizens of the lower tier—Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum—failing to finish among the top three on January 3rd would spell the effective end of their candidacies. The third—Rick Perry—would probably have enough money left to stagger on to New Hampshire, but with the prospect of eventual success even further reduced from its current low level.A Democrat, optimistically, foresees a repeat of Bush v. Gore:
The 2012 presidential race will be decided in a dozen swing states, and President Obama faces a hard road to victory in many of them.
“It appears this election will be much more like Bush-Gore” in 2000, said Democratic strategist Steve McMahon, co-founder of Alexandria-based Purple Strategies. “The president ain’t gonna win by 95 electoral votes.”
WASHINGTON -- At a moment when the nation wonders whether politicians can agree on anything, here is something that unites the Republican presidential candidates -- and all of them with President Obama: Everyone agrees that the 2012 election will be a turning point involving one of the most momentous choices in American history.
True, candidates (and columnists) regularly cast the impending election as the most important ever. Campaigning last week in Pella, Iowa, Republican Rick Santorum acknowledged as much. But he insisted that this time, the choice really was that fundamental. "The debate," he said, "is about who we are."
New political orders can, I suppose, look a lot like those of the past. Whatever else we might think of Ron Paul, he is the one Republican candidate which seems to garner support from both extremes of the current divide. What remains is a catalyst to make him palatable to the vast middle. Personally, I like his views. I'm still, however, trying to overcome my fear of change before I could embrace a newly isolationist America.Speaking not far away in Mount Pleasant, Newt Gingrich went even further, and was more specific. "This is the most important election since 1860," he said, "because there's such a dramatic difference between the best food-stamp president in history and the best paycheck candidate." Thus did Gingrich combine historic sweep with a cheap and inaccurate attack. Nonetheless, it says a great deal that Gingrich chose to reach all the way back to the election that helped spark the Civil War.
In this year's GOP presidential track meet it seems that everyone gets a turn in front -- and this week Ron Paul is the lucky candidate. While still trailing in the national race numbers, recent poll results from Iowa suggest that, two weeks until caucus day, Paul has jumped into the lead there ahead of the water-treading Mitt Romney and the sinking Newt Gingrich.
Paul brings a unusual set of views to the Republican presidential sweepstakes -- on almost every core national security and foreign-policy issue he holds a position that is in fierce opposition to the views of mainstream Republicans.
Indeed, his entire philosophy is largely a renunciation of much of what Republicans believe about America's role in the world. He questions the popular notion of American exceptionalism and has argued in his recently published book, Liberty Defended, that the "United States is an empire by any definition, and quite possibly the most aggressive, extended, and expansionist in the history of the world." This is the kind of language that might cause Ronald Reagan to roll over in his grave.Jon Huntsman is frequently observed as getting every issue right but can not seem to get his moment in the media spotlight. I guess this just goes to show that life never deviates too far from Jr. High. The bad boys get the girls and the class clowns get the attention. The rich kids get encouraged to advanced placement and the quiet "good" kids gets to sit in the back, reading an encyclopedia for fun. Whoops, am I projecting again?
Three years after the near implosion of the economy, the nation’s largest banks continue to exist as financial skyscrapers on the landscape, their collapse threatening to rain destruction on all the lesser players. The memory of that frightening September, when then-President George W. Bush was told by advisers that immediate government intervention was necessary, may be fading already. Yet the threat of the bankruptcy or near-bankruptcy of a handful of banks and insurance companies continues as the nation’s economy slowly recovers.Among the abiding disagreements in my marriage is the role of the full moon in the number and severity of hospital admissions. If your year did not involve enough math or you want another demonstration of a yes/no questions answered with a statistical "it depends," perhaps this series of blog posts from the Guardian is for you.
I was a particularly cowardly child. I'm not such a brave adult either, but the subjects of my cowardice have changed somewhat. As an adult I'm more scared of losing my job in a recession or having my identity stolen on the internet. As a child, I was terrified of werewolves. Every full moon I would worry about being on the wrong end of gnashing, razor-sharp teeth.
Of course I shouldn't have been any more worried when there was a full moon than on any other night. Or should I? A classic article in the British Medical Journal sought to answer a similar question: are crime rates higher when there's a full moon?
Science is all about formulating and testing hypotheses. In this case the hypothesis would be: "Crime rates are higher when there's a full moon." Often, scientists set out to test the "null hypothesis": the default statement that, if true, would indicate that their experiment had not detected any real effect. In the case in question, the null hypothesis could be expressed as: "There is no difference in crime rates when there is a full moon compared with other nights."
The problem with data like crime rates is that it contains random noise – patterns can appear and disappear by chance alone. So we first need to ask ourselves how sure we want to be that there is a real difference between crime rates on a full moon and those on any other night. Quite sure? Fairly sure? Almost certain?
The death of Christopher Hitchens deprives us of a writer of verve and charm, a controversialist, and an intellectual. He was a journalist, above all – he filed many dispatches from war zones – and the long essay was the form in which he was most comfortable. His skill in this neglected discipline places him in the English tradition of men of letters.Mr Hitchens did not produce many full‑length books, but he did turn out scores of graceful and erudite essays. This work will be seen as his distinctive contribution to the literature of our time; the belligerent, proselytising atheism that made him a celebrity is a distraction.As a polemicist, he certainly could be intemperate. Often, he was rude to the point of absurdity, referring to Diana, Princess of Wales, after her death, as a “simpering Bambi narcissist”. But he spoke his mind, and in a world of anodyne public figures this was refreshing. Nor was all his work vituperative: he wrote with sensitivity about favourite writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and P G Wodehouse.
Kim Jong-un has apparently begun to put his own people in place, but it’s hard to imagine that such a process is complete or irreversible. There are many fissures within North Korean society, and relatively few individuals who can bridge those gaps to project power across the system. This works in the favor of the Kim family, which remains at the center of power.What we don't know is whether there might be cleavages within the family or other disconnects between the family and the bureaucracy that might emerge as points of conflict as the process unfolds.
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| Image from Salon.com |
And anecdotal evidence suggests that while China’s government may not be constrained by rule of law, it is constrained by pervasive corruption, which means that what actually happens at the local level may bear little resemblance to what is ordered in Beijing.I hope that I’m being needlessly alarmist here. But it’s impossible not to be worried: China’s story just sounds too much like the crack-ups we’ve already seen elsewhere. And a world economy already suffering from the mess in Europe really, really doesn’t need a new epicenter of crisis.
Speaking of the 1930's and 40's Bloomberg publishes an opinion piece outlining how World War II did not end the Depression just by adding demand to the economy but by transforming the economy and adding entire an entire sector (aerospace) to the nation. Of course it didn't hurt that once the war was over those our factories were the last left untouched for the rebuilding of Europe and parts of Asia."Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."
-- John Maynard Keynes, 1936WASHINGTON -- The eclipse of Keynesian economics proceeds. When Keynes wrote "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" in the mid-1930s, governments in most wealthy nations were relatively small and their debts modest. Deficit spending and pump priming were plausible responses to economic slumps. Now, huge governments are often saddled with massive debts. Standard Keynesian remedies for downturns -- spend more and tax less -- presume the willingness of bond markets to finance the resulting deficits at reasonable interest rates. If markets refuse, Keynesian policies won't work.
Most national candidates, and too many political commentators, miss the mini-primaries that lead up to the real events. In coalition parties, which theDemocrats have been since F.D.R. and the Republicans have been since Nixon, campaigns are formed by creating personal coalitions around the various candidates. And for grassroots campaigns, of the sort I constructed for myself in 1983-84, it is even more basic than that. It is about finding key people in key primary states who combine a high reputation, organizational skill and a network of political contacts to form a campaign nucleus around which the rest of the state can be organized. I was once asked how many people I needed to win New Hampshire and I said, “Six.”
'Why would anyone want to live in Illinois?" So muses Curt Wooters, who works for the state and helps his dad run the family's sporting-goods store in Findlay, 200 miles south of Chicago. Imagine California without the sunshine, New York without the cultural elan, New Jersey without Chris Christie. That's Illinois.
A newfound comet defied long odds today (Dec. 15), surviving a suicidal dive through the sun's hellishly hot atmosphere, according to NASA scientists.The should compare the grades of students who write when their drunk.
Writer, philosopher, gadfly, and Slate contributor Chrisopher Hitchens died on Thursday of complications from esophageal cancer. While drinking and smoking may have contributed to his untimely passing, Hitchens didn’t regret either habit: “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that—or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation—is worth it to me.” After Steve Jobs died, we explained how LSD may enhance creativity among innately creative people. Does alcohol improve your writing?
Almost half, 49 percent, told the polling organization that the United States should "mind its own business" internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own, the Pew Research
Last week, America's currency fell to a 15-month low against the euro, cutting through $1.5050. Against a trade-weighted currency basket, the dollar was also at its weakest since July 2008. The greenback plunged to parity with the rock-solid Swiss franc, then hit a 14-year low against the yen.
The dollar's weakness is based on fundamentals – not least America's jaw-dropping debt. It's a long-term trend. From the start of 2002 until the middle of last year, the dollar lost 30pc on a trade-weighted basis.
Richard Ravitch said New York and other states had historically relied on temporary measures to balance budgets in downturns as a bridge to recovery, a strategy that was unsustainable.
FT: Fears grow about overheated US debt marketThe techniques fell into disrepute during the financial crisis because they were based to varying degrees on the same rosy expectations that encouraged companies and consumers to assume what proved to be crippling levels of debt.
Furious investors warn troubled Dubai it will 'never raise a penny again'
Furious bondholders have arranged emergency talks with Dubai officials this week in an effort to get some clarity on the financial health of the state-owned company Dubai World, which caused widespread panic on world markets last week when it asked creditors for a six-month standstill on debt repayments.
A conference call has been organised by the New York-based hedge fund QVT Financial, after an attempt last week was abandoned when the telephone system collapsed under the weight of calls.
Investors are angry that the announcement was made at the start of the Islamic Eid and US Thanksgiving holidays, leaving them in the dark for days. "They won't be able to raise a penny again from the international investment community," one hedge fund manager said.
What Recovery? U.S. Consumers Getting "Dramatically Worse," Howard Davidowitz Says "The consumer is in worse shape since I was here last" in August, Davidowitz says, citing the following:
Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.
I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.
UK Telegraph: Angela Merkel alarmed by worsening credit crisis"We are in a very critical situation," said Chancellor Angela Merkel in her weekly radio address. "We are going to discuss with leaders of the financial institutions what can be done to head off a credit crunch."
The move comes days after the Bundesbank revealed that German banks face a further €90bn (£82bn) of likely write-downs over the next year.
Gary Hart: Followers and LeadersIt is very difficult, if not impossible, for a politician to be both leader and follower. Let’s consider three examples: climate; defense; and health care. Suppose a member of Congress is absolutely convinced we are near a tipping point where further increases in carbon emissions could have disastrous consequences for generations to come. She is also convinced that the most effective way to avoid this catastrophe is a carbon tax or even, for that matter, a system of caps and trades. The people of her State or district resist any change that would affect the status quo. She follows the popular will, votes against dramatic change, and is reelected.
