Beyond the Banking Crisis: A Strategy Crisis

whats-new-5.jpgIs what’s shaking the economic landscape just a simple banking crisis? Or is there – as so many feel, and as the tremors indicate – something more hidden just beneath the surface?

Let’s begin with a quick explanation from the ever-incisive Tyler Cowen. He notes:

“What is distinctive today is the drying up of market liquidity — the inability to buy and sell financial assets — caused by a lack of good information about asset values…Market prices have been drained of their informational value.”

Bolding’s mine - that’s an excellent beginning.

But Tyler doesn’t talk about root causes: why have prices been drained of meaning, especially to an extent never seen before?

Read More

This Revolution Will Not Be Televised

vandalism.gifBy Ian Jobling
On the night of April 12, vandals tagged three homes, a mailbox, a dumpster, and 15 vehicles in a Denver suburb with the words ‘BROWN PRIDE,’ a Hispanic racialist slogan. Slapstick Politics, a Denver blog, notes that the Denver Post, which printed the photograph to the right, merely stated that the neighborhood had been tagged with graffiti, without mentioning what the graffiti said or speculating about its meaning or source. Even more egregiously, a local TV news report photographed the graffiti in such a way that you couldn’t read it. (The news video is here on the right hand side of the page.) The report speculates that the vandalism may have been gang-related, but does not mention that it was certainly Hispanic-related.

The blogger, El Presidente, asks, ‘If White Pride or anti-Semitic symbols had been spraypainted over quite a large swath of property (remember, just one word at a university has the moonbats up in a rage), would the local MSM have conveniently ignored this fact?’

You have follow that train of thought a bit further if you really want to understand what’s going on here and to appreciate the full measure of the media’s perfidy. If someone had tagged a neighborhood with ‘White Pride,’ the story would not only have been put on the front page of Denver newspapers and been picked up by the national media, but the vandalism would have been interpreted it as the expression of a desire for racial domination and ethnic cleansing, a terrifying prospect. In short, the media did their best to sweep a threat of ethnic cleansing under the rug. We only know it happened because a story on vandalism has to be accompanied by a photograph.

Read More

The (in)equality of Gay Marriages and Gay Adoptions

raising_gay_flag.jpgI know this is a sensitive subject but one I feel I need to express an opinion about.  We recently visited our friends in CA - a female couple that adopted a little boy who is now nearly 3.  It struck me as I sat there watching this bright little boy interact with his loving parents how absurd our society has become in its judgments.  Those that know me know that I’m not bound by religious constraints in how I decide to live my life and how I view others.  I don’t want to make this about religion but typically those that have the strongest stance against homosexuality are religious and base it on the religious views they have.  I am of course not saying that all religious people have this view or judge people in this way - quite the opposite in a lot of cases, but religion is used as an excuse to condemn at times.  People quote the Bible when it is convenient for their cause but ignore the Bible when it is not convenient for them.

I am not here to debate whether homosexuality is right or wrong (although Adolf Hitler thought homosexuality was wrong as well - any belief system that you have that has something in common with Hitler, I would suggest examining).  I’m here to proclaim that we need to leave it alone.  We need to stop jumping up and down and judging others from our own insecurities.  The debate over gay marriage and gay adoption is ridiculous. 

Read More

Shhhh! DON’T Say it Out Loud …

lifecoach.gifShhhh! DON’T Say it Out Loud …

Posted by NanceGreggs in General Discussion: Primaries
Sat Apr 12th 2008, 10:00 PM

How many times have we all said, especially over the last seven-plus years: “If you’re not pissed-off, you’re not paying attention.”

So one can only wonder at the Clinton camp’s response when Barack Obama spoke to the fact that those who have been paying attention are pissed-off – and rightfully so.

Senator Clinton’s immediate reaction was not only to feign outrage that Obama had actually acknowledged the presence of the elephant in the room, but to go the further step of pretending that the elephant doesn’t even exist.

“That hasn’t been my experience,” she said of her travels through Pennsylvania. Hillary only sees happy, optimistic people who are willing to roll-up-their-sleeves – as though they have been lazily lounging in front of the afternoon soaps while their jobs disappeared – the inference being that people whose lives have been decimated by outsourcing, unfair trade deals, and government policies that leave working-class citizens in the dust while catering to the already-wealthy and the bottom-lines of corporations are too stupid to do anything but smile mindlessly in the midst of their plight.

Read More

Anger, Bitterness and Small-Town America

weaponsofmassdistraction-x.gifAnger, Bitterness and Small-Town America

Posted by Renaissance Man in General Discussion: Primaries
Fri Apr 11th 2008, 11:14 PM

So, today I decide to log on to DU because I wanted to catch up on the latest manufactured outrage, and behold, there’s something new. The only problem is that the “new” isn’t really new, and it should be common knowledge for anyone who halfway pays attention to economic patterns and trends and what has happened over the course of the last 25 years.

I was raised in small-town America in the South in a community with a tax-base primarily supported by people working in marine and fisheries, oil refineries, textiles. You name it, the blue collar worker was there to work the job. Small businesses (the local pharmacy, convenience store, a few small banks and small mom-and-pop clothing retailers were there) and you felt some sense of security and you held a belief that the American Dream was possible, even in what is often a small part of America often forgotten. You know small town America — little league baseball games, Friday night football games, cotton candy and the county fairs, etc. Everything America was intended to be in a little encapsulated space.

Read More

If Dr King was still around…

1801.jpgIf Dr. King were still around, we might have come to the point we’re at today a bit sooner. With his calls for equality, and his ability to reach out and touch everyone, we’d possibly have gotten rid of white male stereotypes for President years earlier.

We’d certainly see less distrust in younger people, bred from assassinations and divisive politics in the U.S.

Outside the U.S., MLK is held in great esteem. Perhaps he’d have been able to help the U.S. image, which has been considerably tarnished lately.

Carole
www.Americans-Away-From-Home.com

[Slashdot] [Digg] [Reddit] [del.icio.us] [Facebook] [Technorati] [Google] [StumbleUpon]

Remember: They are all Liars…

bush_liars_actually1.jpgRemember: They Are Liars
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Tuesday 08 April 2008

No one is such a liar as the indignant man.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, along with a slew of administration underlings and a revolving-door cavalcade of brass hats from the Pentagon, have been making claims regarding Iraq for many years now.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, “enough to kill several million people,” according to a page on the White House web site titled Disarm Saddam Hussein.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 500 tons, which equals 1,000,000 pounds, of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.

Read More