Moonlapse

Note how they give you unbiased coverage by including a contrary opinion.

Indeed! The tshirt page has our spreadshirt.com page embedded in it, which you can find here: http://unrv.spreadshirt.com/us/US/Shop/ The checkout uses a secured http connection and all the transactions go through spreadshirt.com.

I don't really have a comment on either candidate or the outcome of the election. I'd just like to interject that I'm horribly disgusted by most of the voters. It's nice to read informed opinions here on the forum, but in real life I haven't found a single person who has a flippin' clue. It seems that I'm surrounded by people who only understand and parrot political generalities and have no clear understanding of their chosen candidate's ideology or stance on even popular issues. When I've queried them on their support for certain policies, I'm met by irritation or vague 'but *insert generality here* is good/ungood' type answers. Something is wrong, it really shouldn't be this way.

This should make you feel better http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF41Ia4j3yE

No worries, I'm the master of late delivery.

Hahaha! Do a search for Austrian Death Machine - Get To The Choppa

Thanks

My wife's grandma is Italian, her parents were immigrants. She has the simplest yet savoriest spaghetti sauce I've ever had. Now that I've had it, most other sauces taste too sweet and overly seasoned. I don't know the exact quantities but it goes something like this: Mix up a small can of tomato paste, fresh garlic, and olive oil in your pan and get an oily wad of paste going. Cook this on low heat for a while, moving it constantly, until it darkens a bit like its been browned. This part can take a little while and if you over do it, it will ruin the taste. This will mellow out the flavor of the paste and get some good tomato garlic flavor into the oil. Slowly add a large can of plain tomato sauce and some chicken broth and make sure you mix up that wad of paste. Make it a little runny and just let it reduce for a bit. Towards the end, add a little bit of fresh basil, parsley, onion, and perhaps salt. A little goes a long way. Its not extravagant, but I think the flavor is perfect.

Shit yes. There's a pseudo-fast food restaurant chain in the area called Noodles & Co. and they used to have a dish called Mediterranean mixed grill. It was a plate with a little pasta, some fresh spinach, balsamic grilled meat (beef or chicken or both), cucumbers, red onions, kalamatas, feta, and some tzatziki to dress it with. They've since changed it to mostly shitty lettuce and pasta, but that original dish was one of my absolute favorite meals of all time. I would eat that every day if I could. I would also eat crab and lobster every day if possible.And German food. And fuckin ripe avacados with salt and pepper. And good beer. Ahhh jesus.

Sim salabim!

Kalamata olives, oh god I'm drooling.

McCain seemed to be controlling the debate offensively, forcing Obama to defend himself most of the time. I think they both are skilled as politicians, but I guess that's just my euphemism for being able to make bullshit sound noble and patriotic and nationalistic and what-have-you. They talk about all the issues as if the office of President has the same influence over them as a dictator. The truth is, they both scare the shit out of me in their own ways, but if you'd ask me who is less evil, I'd say Obama. Even though I don't trust anything he says, he at least pays lip service to an anti-war ideal. McCain seems to want nothing more than to do whatever it takes to kick the shit out of anyone who gives the U.S. a sideways glance, in order to ensure our globally dominant position. For that, I think he's a total fucking idiot. It also my personal opinion that both of them know just enough about economics to be extremely dangerous in the same way that a 3 year old has enough knowledge to insert a hairpin into a wall socket. In fact, pretty much every politician falls under that category.

Actually it would have stopped the Fed from pumping credit into these GSE institutions which the government itself had urged to expand sub-prime lending. It would have effectively put the brakes on the housing bubble in 2003 and caused a long overdue corrective recession (provided that the Fed didn't find a way to blow up another bubble). The tax exemption concerns this clause of the Federal National Mortgage Association Charter Act: It's intended to eliminate an additional corporate subsidy in the guise of an exemption of all forms of local taxation. The exemption also helped insulate the corporation from anything but Federal influence. The act was basically design to strip all government largesse and special privileges from these pseudo-government institutions because they were being used as tools to channel the credit expansion into the housing market. The government now directly controls these institutions. There will be no choice but to rethink our lifestyles because our standards of living are going to take a few steps back, until we learn to get it right. With these bailouts and the sequence of events that they will unwind, the value of your money is going slip away like sand.

I think they should all wear circus clown suits as an official uniform. Just imagine Paulson saying those things with poofy orange hair, a little top hat,a big red nose, and painted tears leaking from his eyes. Bush's speech was a real crack-up, too. Poor lending standards are merely a proximate factor in our current predicament, not the ultimate. I'll attempt to give an incomplete and very abbreviated sequence of events which led to this point and maybe show why creating and enforcing mortgage lending regulations are like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound in your chest. And if you didn't have the bullet wound, you wouldn't need the band-aid. In 1995, the US bailed out the Mexican economy and Mexican bond holders. The Mexican crisis followed the massive credit expansion in the country from 1988-1994. The Reverse Plaza Accord of 1995 reversed the Plaza Accord of 1985. The Plaza Accord was an agreement by the G-5 to subsidize US exporters by artificially lowering the exchange rate of the dollar against the Yen and the Mark and thereby improving the profitability of US manufacturing. However, by 1995, Japanese manufacturing firms were faltering and many Japanese banks were facing insolvency. Instead of obviously bailing out another country in crisis, the Reverse Plaza Accord basically reversed the previous agreement and in effect subsidized American consumers' purchases of Japanese and German manufactured goods. This was accomplished by lowering Japanese interest rates and by huge purchases of instruments such as Treasury bonds by Japan, Germany, and the US in order to increase the exchange rate of the dollar against the Yen and the Mark. This,in effect, allowed the US to pursue inflationary monetary policies (credit expansion) during the late nineties without a rise in CPI figures, due to the suppression of prices levels by the artificially low prices of imports. The Bank of Japan cut its discount rate to 0.5% which created guaranteed profits by borrowing Yen at the low rates, then bringing the money to the US market to reinvest at a higher yeild. Also, other Asian governments were now purchasing much larger quantities of US government securities. At the same time, tech IPOs starting with Netscape were popping up and literally making people extremely rich overnight. It was not uncommon for these offerings to double on their first day of trading. It was this historical contingency that drew so much of the credit expansion into the dot-com boom. The Fed started cutting interest rates in July and kept them relatively low throughout the late Nineties despite the fact that the Fed had met its goal of 'full employment' (5-6% unemployment). One of the justifications for doing so was that the computer revolution had made labor so much more productive and therefore increased labor demand to point that it dropped the full employment rate much lower. It had supposely also ushered in some kind of new economic evolution which made old economic principles obsolete and allowed for the simultaneous achievement of low interest rates, low inflation, low unemployment, and sustainable economic growth without any busts. Greenspan even came up with some simplistic function that was supposed to empirically prove and mathematically necessitate the point. Many East Asian companies who has pegged their currencies to the dollar were now being affected by the Reverse Plaza Accord by making it increasing difficult to compete with the Japanese competitors being subsidized by the agreement. By pegging their currencies, they were actually helping to pay their competitor's subsidies. However, unpegging the currencies would cause these currencies to drop against the dollar and thereby magnify the cost of their debt to the US and negatively affect credit. The end result when they eventually unpegged was a reversal from $93 billion of capital flowing in to the region to $12 billion of capital flowing out of the region during the course of 1997. In 1998, Russia defaulted on its debt, much of it held by US investment banks. Brazil had its own financial crisis and the Y2K scare really started rolling. When the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund in the US started to fail, the Fed reacted with three consecutive rate cuts, one of which was announced between Fed meetings at a finacially strategic point in time in regards to stock options, which I won't discuss. The Fed also prompted GSEs like Fannie and Freddie to drastically start stepping up their borrowing and lending activities. The rate of increase of MZM (a measure of money supply) was 15% in 1998 compared to about 2.5% just a few years earlier. It hit over 20% in 2001. In 1999 alone, the NASDAQ Composite (the primary stock exchange for tech firms) rose more than 80%. By 2000, the personal savings rate was negative... something unprecedented in the previous half century. This meant that regular consumers were spending more than they earned by relying on credit. The essence of this is that people were consuming future wealth; foregoing future consumption for immediate consumption. Debt as a proportion of personal disposable income was 97%. In the absence of savings, all credit must be produced by the creation of new quantities of fiat money or fiduciary media. In less than six month during late 1999 and early 2000, the NASDAQ rose 83%. During this time, the pinnacle of Y2K, the Fed engaged in money pumping sufficient enough to deviate the Federal Funds Rate from its target of 5.5% to below 4%. More than 50% of new mortgages had less than a 10% down payment and mortgage refinancing into lower interest rates became almost rampant. After Y2K turned out to be a non-event, the Fed started to increase its rates to try to bring the credit frenzied market under control. However, with negative savings and a market with its foundation in a long streak of constantly accelerating credit expansion, this was obviously the needle in a very large balloon. Many tech companies riding this wave were completely invalid and had no real way of generating a real profit, except when credit was pouring in; something supposedly assured by the "New Economy" - the 90's version of the New Plateau of Prosperity of the 20's. In 2001, facing yet another crisis brought on by the Dot-Com bust along with the September 11th attacks, the Fed started dropping the Federal Funds Rate back down from 6% to 1.75% over the course of that year. The Fed kept it under 2% until December 2004. Consumer spending was supported by massive mortgage refinancing, home equity lines of credit, and zero interest auto loans. Take a look at these articles from 1999 and 2001: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...75AC0A96F958260 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...752C1A9679C8B63 If you want to see the source of our current crisis, look no further. I can boil this all down into something very simple: Intervention -> Boom -> Unintended Consequences -> Crisis -> Intervention -> Boom -> Unintended Consequences -> Crisis -> Intervention -> Boom -> Unintended Consequences -> Crisis -> and on and on until everything is eventually nationalized. The housing boom was the means of recovery from the Dot-Com boom. If you want to take the time to study this, you can go all the way back to the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913. There is no fix other than letting the system fail now and suffering the harsh consequences, or continuing the same cycle of postponement and ultimately suffering much harsher consequences. In an election year, the former is never an option. A good metaphor would be a heroin junkie. He can quit now and go through a very hard time as he withdraws and rebuilds his life, or he can keep going for that next fix and eventually put himself in the grave and affect the lives of everyone around him. We 'need to' pass this bailout plan just like a junkie 'needs to' get more smack. We know its not good, but we can't keep going on the same way without it. I believe a system with a commodity currency like gold AND a 100% reserve requirement on demand deposits (something that has always been absent from our economy, but was an established legal principle in Rome) would spell the end of this crap. No artificial credit expansion through fiat currency printing and risky fractional-reserve banking, no massive-scale malinvestment, and no need for deposit insurance. If you want to read something interesting take a look at Ron Paul's address to the House Financial Services Committee on September 10, 2003. Here is the proposed act, which died immediately. Think about what you were doing in 2003... at least one person had the foresight and principles to try to prevent this.

Free at last

When there are no lenders, the central bank and treasury can simply hyperinflate the currency.

Nice! Cello Sonata - Part 1 Cello Sonata - Part 2

YouTube is awesome. I can't imagine easily finding these videos without it.

Beware and Warning! This book is different from other books. You and YOU ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story.

Protectionism and controlled market paired with small government??? How does that work?

I won't even try to comment on my specific results, the terms used mean different things to different people. I don't think any test will ever be accurate to the way people perceive their own political affiliation. Results are obviously meant to be shown to other people, but each person will interpret each others results the way they wish to.

Briefly, the existence or not of Global Warming or any public health problem is of no consequence to you as long as nobody bothers you and everything is allowed to you. Have you seriously misunderstood all that I have said and are you really suggesting that I'm some kind of apathetic asshole? In this entire discussion my primary focus has been on what would prevent the most unnecessary human suffering and death. In my opinion, policies like drug prohibition cause unnecessary human suffering and loss of life in the same ways that alcohol prohibition did in the 20's. Do you refuse to acknowledge that alcohol prohibition created more problems than it solved? If you acknowledge it, do you refuse to acknowledge that drug prohibition is remarkably similar? What I'm saying is that the course of action that we should try to take on ANY problem is the one that has the most beneficial side-effects and the least unintended consequences. Based on what I know of history and economics, I am absolutely positive that government policies intended to cap fossil fuel use will do very little to curb total CO2 output, will make certain people very rich, will slowly impoverish just about everyone who doesn't have special connections, and will cause certain death to those in the world who are currently just managing to survive. As it is, we are at the beginning of what will be a very turbulent and painful time in U.S. history (perhaps the world), completely discounting CO2 restriction.

I fail to see how requiring the use of safety equipment on publicly owned roads might equate to the prohibition or partial prohibition of the private use of goods or services that are permanently in high demand, don't violate anyone's rights, but are considered to have a generally negative effect on society. Prohibition has never and will never eliminate any of these goods/services nor the negative effects they help create. In fact, the only things it ever has done and will ever do is drive the activity outside the realm of proper law enforcement, create ever increasing law enforcement expenditures, establish and entrench organized crime, provide funding for political corruption and wars, put an overwhelming population of people who have not violated anyone's rights into prisons, and create a violent and lawless system that takes many people's lives. I can't disagree more. The best fight is the one you fight yourself, not the the fight where you blindly trust a parasitic institution that serves someone else's best interests to do it for you. The latter breeds indifference and squanders efforts and resources. The issue is not whether to do something about the problems we face, its whether you are willing to face them yourself and whether the governments use of force is effective without creating more problems than before. I still have no idea what this has to do with nihilism, which I disagree with BTW. Don't you think that these things would be far easier to deal with if they went on within the scope of legal commerce, instead of in a violent and lawless black market? Are the problems associated with prostitution worse in Nevada or in New York City? Many of these problems are exacerbated by our current situation and are a dilemma because of it. Bringing the problem into the legal scope will reduce problems and even allow it to be taxed if need be in order to help deal with whatever damages it causes. Remember, these problems will never go away, they can only be dealt with. If there's no explicit contradiction between both statements, you would be basically respecting how incautious such people may be. Yes, I'm respecting their right to hold an opinion and voluntarily make changes in their life according to what they believe instead of waiting for others to change things for them. I don't however respect anyone who holds a certain opinion, but instead of using their own efforts to set an example and make a difference through reason and persuasion, try to get the government to coercively force the changes on everyone.

As far as the concept of global warming goes, I'm sort of agnostic. I think we are far from having a complete understanding of this planet's climate. CO2 induced warming is perfectly logical to me, but even that is limited by physics. I've seen so much misinformation and contradiction on both sides of the fence, and its obviously become a political tool, so I'm extremely cautious. As far as authority goes, the most atrocious crimes against humanity have originated with authoritarianism in its various forms. If your rights are properly protected what more is required for public safety? I don't accept the notion that its government's job to protect us from making bad decisions or from the consequences of bad decisions. People become smart and gain common sense by making bad decisions and facing the full consequences. That's how most people gain a realistic understanding of drugs and sex. Im sure everyone is glad that they were not always busted for the various victimless crimes that everyone has no doubt committed at some time or another. Sure a few people get trapped in it, but nothing will ever prevent that, and nothing ever has. I consider it my unalienable right to make mistakes and to face the full consequences. If the mistake has violated someone else's rights, then punishment has become part of the consequences. I'd rather allow people to potentially hurt themselves, but punish them for hurting others. If you try to prevent people from hurting themselves, but the result is that they still find ways to hurt themselves in addition to creating an extremely harmful underground system, isn't it better to just let them hurt themselves without the additional and unnecessary death and pain? Can you explain to me how this is nihilistic? As far as these public health risks go, give me an example of how someone who does not participate in the activities is affected by them and I'll try to give you a better answer.