Author: Administrator
MEANWHILE….IN MIAMI
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Guest Post by Jeff Thomas
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Alice in Wonderland
We live in an age when the level of deceit and propaganda is at an all-time high. Josef Goebbels, Vladimir Lenin and others did their best to force-feed propaganda to the masses, but they were rank amateurs compared to the spin doctors employed by the political leaders of today. They’re masters at convincing people of impossible things.
Whenever I listen to Americans discuss their country, I find people that are eager for more news and information, yet most, without even knowing it, accept much of the dogma they’ve been fed on a daily basis by their government and the media, even if, to outsiders, the assumptions are preposterous. Only those who make a concerted, ongoing effort to see through the smokescreen seem to keep clear.
Here are six impossible things that many seem to have little trouble accepting as reality.
Part-Time Jobs Soar By 430,000 As Multiple Jobholders Surge To August 2008 Levels
by Tyler Durden
While today’s headline jobs print was somewhat disappointing, with the Establishment Survey missing the expected print of 175K, and growing by 156K, it was offset by a far higher 354K jump in the household survey which offset last month’s weakness. But while the quantitative headline aspect is open to interpretation, the qualitative component of the September jobs print was clear beyond a doubt: it was ugly.
First, looking at the reported composition of jobs, while full-time jobs actually declined by 5,000 to 142,296K part-time jobs soared by 430,000…
Continue reading “Part-Time Jobs Soar By 430,000 As Multiple Jobholders Surge To August 2008 Levels”
How To Solve The Migrant Crisis (In 2 ‘Easy’ Steps)
Submitted by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,
Nick Giambruno: The migrant crisis is tearing Europe apart. What’s your take Doug?
Doug Casey: I’m all for immigration and completely open borders to enable opportunity seekers from anyplace to move anyplace else.
With two big, critically important, caveats:
1) there can be no welfare or free government services, so everyone has to pay his own way, and no freeloaders are attracted; and
2) all property is privately owned, to minimize the possibility of squatter camps full of beggars.
In the absence of welfare benefits, immigrants are usually the best of people because you get mobile, aggressive, and opportunity-seeking people that want to leave a dead old culture for a vibrant new one. The millions of immigrants who came to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had zero in the way of state support.
Continue reading “How To Solve The Migrant Crisis (In 2 ‘Easy’ Steps)”
CAPTION CONTEST
More Illegal Immigrant Voters Discovered In Philly – “Just The Tip Of The Iceberg”
by Tyler Durden
Over the past few weeks, we’ve written frequently about allegations of voter fraud from around the country. The key swing state of Virginia, in particular, seems to be a hotbed of potential corruption as evidenced by the actions of 19 year old “Young Virginia Democrat”, Andrew Spieles, who allegedly acted alone to re-register a bunch of dead voters in his home state (see our post here). Then there were the efforts of Virginia’s governor, and long-time Clinton confidant, Terry McAuliffe to register 200,000 felons to vote.
But Virginia, isn’t the only state with questionable voter registration practices. Fraudulent voter registrations have been uncovered in Colorado, where dead people were found to be voting multiple years after their death, and in Washington where the Turkish-born, non-citizen who killed five people at the Cascade Mall massacre has apparently been voting for years.
Now, the latest voter registration fraud comes from the “City of Brotherly Love” where, according to LifeZette, an investigation by Joseph Vanderhulst, an attorney with the Public Interest Legal Foundation, revealed that 86 “non-citizens” have been registered to vote in Phildelphia for years with half of them casting ballots in at least 1 election. What’s worse, the only reason Philadelphia election officials were even able to identify the “non-citizen” voters was because they had self-reported that they were erroneously registered to vote after a trip to the DMV to get a drivers license. According to Vanderhulst’s investigation, the DMV “errs on the side of registering voters” if there are any discrepancies on their forms.
ISIS, Not Russia, Is the Enemy in Syria
Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan
Denouncing Russian air strikes on Aleppo as “barbaric,” Mike Pence declared in Tuesday’s debate:
“The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength. … The United States of America should be prepared to use military force, to strike military targets of Bashar Assad regime.”
John McCain went further:
“The U.S. … must issue an ultimatum to Mr. Assad — stop flying or lose your aircraft … If Russia continues its indiscriminate bombing, we should make clear that we will take steps to hold its aircraft at greater risk.”
Yet one gets the impression this is bluster and bluff.
Pence has walked his warnings back. And there are few echoes of McCain’s hawkishness. Even Hillary Clinton’s call for a “no-fly zone” has been muted.
The American people have no stomach for a new war in Syria.
DEMOCRAT LOCKDOWN
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The Democratic Party has turned its back on working people and now pursues policies that actually increase inequality.
The first piece of evidence is what’s happened since the financial crisis. This is the great story of our time. Inequality has actually gotten worse since then, which is a remarkable thing. This is under a Democratic president who we were assured (or warned) was the most liberal or radical president we would ever see. Yet inequality has gotten worse, and the gains since the financial crisis, since the recovery began, have gone entirely to the top 10 percent of the income distribution.
This is not only because of those ‘evil Republicans,’ but because Obama played it the way he wanted to. Even when he had a majority in both houses of Congress and could choose whoever he wanted to be in his administration, he consistently made policies that favored the top 10 percent over everybody else. He helped out Wall Street in an enormous way when they were entirely at his mercy.
He could have done anything he wanted with them, in the way that Franklin Roosevelt did in the ’30s. But he chose not to.
Why is that?”
Thomas Frank
17 INCHES
Hat tip card802
In Nashville, Tennessee, during the first week of January, 1996, more than 4,000 baseball coaches descended upon the Opryland Hotel for the 52nd annual ABCA convention.
In 1996, Coach Scolinos was 78 years old and five years retired from a college coaching career that began in 1948. He shuffled to the stage to an impressive standing ovation, wearing dark polyester pants, a light blue shirt, and a string around his neck from which home plate hung – a full-sized, stark-white home plate.
After speaking for twenty five minutes, not once mentioning the prop hanging around his neck, Coach Scolinos appeared to notice the snickering among some of the coaches. Even those who knew Coach Scolinos had to wonder exactly where he was going with this, or if he had simply forgotten about home plate since he’d gotten on stage.
Then, finally…
“You’re probably all wondering why I’m wearing home plate around my neck. Or maybe you think I escaped from Camarillo State Hospital,” he said, his voice growing irascible. I laughed along with the others, acknowledging the possibility. “No,” he continued, “I may be old, but I’m not crazy. The reason I stand before you today is to share with you baseball people what I’ve learned in my life, what I’ve learned about home plate in my 78 years.”
Even Bigger Conflicts, Of Rational Self-Interest
Guest Post by Duane Norman
Clinton: well, because Hillary is a candidate, I would be happy to offer an opinion if she weren’t a candidate. But I think it would be wrong to do so because she is. However, I will say this. Janet Yellen, Lael Brainard, whom I know, several others—these are really smart people and they’ll do what they think is right. And i think the political emphasis is overrated because I think whatever happens is if that they think is right economically will be manageable economically at this point. But it’s been a perplexing time. There was a very long tail on this financial crash that explains most of the road rage in the American electorate and much around the world. And so, we just finally had one good year-on-year report on rising per capita income. 5.2 percent. And family incomes. About 2.5, I think. So what they’ll do is they’ll look at that in the long-term numbers, and they’ll see whether they could actually if they’ve got longer term growth, would it actually help to tick up interest just a tad, or should they leave it where it is because in spite of the growth figure, the jobs figures are not still robustly growing so much. They got more data than i do. I trust them to make the decision.
Source: Read Bill Clinton’s full interview about the Fed, his foundation and US jobs | CNBC
Credit goes to the readers – you guys are a really astute bunch. After my recent article detailing Janet Yellen’s response to a query on Lael Brainard’s conflicts of interest at the Fed was picked up by ZeroHedge, someone questioned why I had not included Bill’s commentary on Brainard and Yellen in the above interview with CNBC. I hadn’t even seen the interview in the first place. And, after looking closely at Bill’s interview… I’m kicking myself for not seeing it and including anything on his commentary. The conflicts of interest at the Fed clearly go beyond prior employment and campaign contributions.
Continue reading “Even Bigger Conflicts, Of Rational Self-Interest”
The Last Cards
Guest Post by The Zman
In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched Operation Michael, a well designed offensive against the Allies, specifically designed to knockout the British Expeditionary Force in France. It was assumed, correctly, that the British were exhausted from the previous year’s battles. The Germans had close to a million fresh troops from the Eastern Front to throw at the British. The plan was to punch a hole in the lines and then surround the BEF in Flanders.
After the war, historians would call the German offensive the “final card” in the story of the Great War. The Germans had run out of options for winning the war. This was their last card they could play in order to go to the peace table as an equal. This spring offensive was going to be the great last gamble to force the Allies to the peace table and get a good deal from the process. If it failed, then all would be lost as the German people, as well as the German army, were close to collapse.
The funny thing about this phase of the war is that in retrospect, there was no way this could work as the Germans imagined. They had developed new tactics for punching through the lines and avoiding the meat grinder offensives of the past, but they lacked the mobility to exploit it. The role of cavalry had yet to be replaced by tanks and and armored personnel carriers. A retreating Allied army would have to be chased on foot and the German Army was starving.
IT’S NOT RAINING
Dear Senator McCain, You & Hillary Are The Problem
Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,
Senator John McCain is the biggest warmonger on the planet, next to Hillary Clinton of course.
Ironically, McCain has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today that proclaims Stop Assad Now—Or Expect Years of War.
Like Hillary who wants a no-fly zone over Syria, McCain says “Ground the regime’s air force, create safe zones for Syrian civilians, and arm the opposition.”
McCain: America’s intrepid secretary of state has now taken the meaningless step of suspending talks with Russia over Syria. Meanwhile, Mr. Assad and Mr. Putin are creating military facts on the ground in Syria that will enable them to dictate the terms of a peace secured by carnage. They have decimated coalition-backed Syrian groups, slaughtered countless civilians, consolidated the Syrian regime’s hold on power, and even struck a United Nations humanitarian-aid convoy. And they have done all of this with no consequences. Thus the war grinds on.
- Mish: Dear Senator, how many innocent civilians were slaughtered in Iraq in a needless war you sponsored? How many in Afghanistan? How many innocent victims has US drone policy killed? And for that matter, how many innocent people have died in Syria because the US backed Al Qaeda terrorists? Can we please have an accounting?
Continue reading “Dear Senator McCain, You & Hillary Are The Problem”
Compaction, Pack Instinct, and Territoriality: Some Aspects of Irrationality
We’re all crazy. This explains everything. I will elaborate in hopes of joining Plato, Burke, and Hunter Thompson as a lighthouses of the intellects
The human mind cannot think of more than a very few things at once. We cannot for example think of a billion citizens of China as individuals, so we say “China,“ or “the Chinese” did something or other when most of them hadn’t heard of it, didn’t want to do it, or wanted to do something else. The billion become one sentient being, a sort of sprawling person.
Thus, for example, people speak of Cuba as “Castro,” or say that “Cuba” must be punished for doing something that Washington doesn’t like, and thus the embargo on trade. In fact, there are 11,000,000 million Cubans, of whom only one is Castro. Most Cubans do not like Castro, as evidenced by their attempts to paddle ninety miles to Miami on inner tubes. The embargo doesn’t punish “Cuba.” It makes life miserable for 11,000,000-1 people almost none of whom have any influence on Cuba’s policies. The embargo certainly doesn’t discomfit Castro, who can have all the prime rib and good bourbon he wants, embargo or no embargo.
Continue reading “Compaction, Pack Instinct, and Territoriality: Some Aspects of Irrationality”