I’m on my way to my parents’ house near Raleigh, NC, and Rachel is driving … and I’ve been doing some work from the passenger seat for the last hour or so. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to really try out the Verizon BroadBand Access wireless internet service for a long period of time … and it’s working really well. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s a little harder to concentrate on the screen on a bumpy section of road, I think I could get a lot of work done this way …
Monthly Archive for December, 2007
And now for something completely different … a break from the serious. The University of Manitoba held a funeral for one of its ancient IBM mainframe computers.
(Thanks to Dr. Biggly for the heads up on the link.)
After persuasively arguing that everybody involved knew exactly what the banks have been doing that has gotten them into this beautiful mess (”The World’s Largest Banks Are Now Trapped“) …
When a criminal conspiracy acts in a criminal fashion, it can be prosecuted. But when a criminal conspiracy has been licensed by the government, and has de facto run the government of every major nation for a century, it will be difficult to get a conviction. None dare call it criminal.
Ouch.
I catch Glenn Beck on the local talk show in town (WGOW 102.3 FM) every now and then when I’m out and about in the evening. I find myself disagreeing with him more often that I agree (probably because foreign policy has been the topic so often recently). Still, the Ron Paul interview on tonight’s show is, I think, the best interview with Dr. Paul I’ve seen yet. He got plenty of time to clearly state his positions, and I think that anybody that watches will, agree or disagree, understand where he stands.
I think one of the best parts of the interview is when Dr. Paul essentially states that there is no divide between personal liberty and economic liberty.
That and “I think the Constitution is very libertarian, so if you’re a Constitutionalist, you’re a Libertarian, which means you want a lot less government. The Constitution was written to restrain the government, not restrain the people.”
CNN has published a relatively good article on Ron Paul. Like him or not, agree with him or disagree, the time that people can pretend that he will have nothing more than a negligible effect on the election is over.
What is the strongest case for gold? That it would end inflation and the business cycle? Those are benefits but not the main one. The gold standard would dramatically restrain the state, which is the essence of freedom. It would force the political class to come to us and ask for tax increases whenever it wanted to expand, and thereupon the population would likely say no. This is the reason politicians hate gold.
– Lew Rockwell in “Easy Money, Easy Lies“
This is exactly the case. Allowing the Federal Fraudulent Reserve to print and coin money at will in order to “jump start” the economy ends up costing the average US citizen money and wealth at the expense of whatever group happens to get the newly printed money first. Think about it this way … in January, the price of gold was roughly $600/ounce. Now it is roughly $800/ounce. The truth of the matter (as a friend of mine who deals rare coins in Wake Forest, NC once explained to me) isn’t that the price of gold has gone up, it’s that the purchasing price of the US dollar has decreased. How many of you have gotten a 33% raise in your salary to compensate for dramatic loss of purchasing power of the dollar? I’d wager not many. So, the Federal Government has taken money from you … in essence, a hidden tax.
As I said to a friend earlier today … it doesn’t take a genius to realize that an economic policy that jump-starts the economy by keeping interest rates artificially low and printing money willy-nilly to try to encourage people to keep spending and borrowing (”business as usual!”) is nothing more than a house of cards built on the beach in the face of an approaching hurricane. There is no way that we collectively can ever pay off the debt load our nation has without a massive increase in dollars and an corresponding drop in their purchasing price.
Take heed, people, because a serious economic collapse is inevitable. The question is whether we as a nation are bright enough to buckle down and take sound money seriously, and mitigate the effects of the crack-up, bad as they will be … or if we’re going to keep our head in the sand and continue encouraging people to borrow money as if nothing was wrong, until enough people get wise to the charade and start bank runs. When the government steps in and allows the banks to refuse to allow people to withdraw their deposits as they first did during the war of 1812 (and they government has show again and again that they’ll do whatever they can to prevent the banks from failing as a result of their reckless business practices), then the real breakdown will have started.
And that, my friends, is why “mountebanks” is an especially apt term for the folks in charge of our economic policy.
Once again, someone puts the pieces together better than I can. This article (”Mr. Speaker, Peace is Always Preferable to War“, by Anthony Gregory) is an excellent compilation of Ron Paul’s warnings concerning our foreign policy, starting during the early years of the Reagan administration.
Thus saith Benjamin Constant:
Every time collective power wishes to meddle with private speculations, it harasses the speculators. Every time governments pretend to do our own business, they do it more incompetently and expensively than we would.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Apparently some crooks learned from Andy Dufresne and hid the holes in the walls they’d made behind posters … “Pinups of bikini-clad women hid jailbreak route, officials say.” Even better, they were smart enough not to escape through the sewer. No word yet on whether they took the warden’s dirty money and fled to Mexico by Greyhound.
You know what they say about kids and electronics … they know more about them and are more comfortable with them than their parents. Well, this morning, my daughter taught me something about my BlackBerry that I hadn’t figured out in the three weeks I’ve had it.
Thing is, she’s 14 months old.
I keep the phone on my nightstand because a) I get alerts from my monitoring services about my servers and such letting me know that they are down or just not working quite right, and b) I use it as my alarm clock in the morning.
Some days Autumn is awake before I am, and Rachel lets her wander around on the floor (and watches her) until I awake. Most days she picks up my phone and plays with it.
I’m going to have to be more careful, because today she managed to unlock the keypad, dial a couple of numbers (none valid, fortunately).
Plus she managed to re-arrange the icons on the BlackBerry. I hadn’t even considered that such a thing was possible. I wasn’t happy with the default arrangement of things, but I had been living with it because I figured that was the way things were. As a result of her meddling with the phone, I figured out that I could change the order, and even create folders to categorize icons. So, I’ve now moved my lesser-used apps and options into folders, and gotten things to the point that I have only 14 icons available at the “main” level, and I’ve got my five most used icons on the “home screen” (or whatever you call it).
Thanks, Autumn!
I suppose in a year or so she’ll be teaching me new things about programming …
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