Money and How it Got That Way

I urge all interested in the history of money, debt, and nonsense of economics as a scientific discipline to read this, this, and this. While we're at it, I strongly urge reading this ignorant and hostile response and the comments in which hostility and ignorance vie against and lose to reason and evidence.

Kids Today

Reasons to think that the future may not be a bleak as it may seem:



and



or



gotta love the Dutch

Beer Summit

There are, of course, all manner of reasons, actions, and facts to find Obama less than perfect. On the other hand, there is this:

The man is comfortable in his skin and, given it's color and America's problems with that color, he is kind of amazing.

Nostalgia

In the comments, John  Rove, friend of the blog, makes the point that mediocrity and success go hand in hand. This seems to be true politically, given the rarity of Lincolns and the swarms of George Bushes, who can disagree.  I was reminded that Bryan MaGee made the same point in his memoir. For a variety of reasons, I read this several times. In it he mentions, more than once, his various BBC series in which he discussed philosophy with philosophers on the BBC for all, as it were, to see. Guess what? You can watch some of them.

I may be wrong, as I often am, but it strikes me as unlikely that any Western tv station is going allow some old Marxist egghead like Marcuse burble on in this day and age.

Round One:

With Friends Like This

According to the NRO, former Sen. Malcolm Wallop and friend of liberty is dead.  According to the webpage of the "think tank" he founded and chaired, his love of liberty led him to

[r]ather than simply promising to retaliate if we were attacked with nuclear missiles, Malcolm Wallop argued we should defend ourselves and render missiles powerless to threaten future generations. Malcolm Wallop is the father of missile defense and was the first elected official to propose a space based missile defense system, a program that later became part of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. There are people all across the globe that are safer and freer because of Malcolm Wallop. Malcolm Wallop changed the world for the better.

 According to this, Bush alone spent 10 billion a year on a failed attempts to build missile defense; this suggests that by 2013 over 100 billion in total expenditures for a failed system.

Waste, fraud and abuse, thunder the Conservatives; Government can't do anything right, they insist. And yet a paranoid maniac sets the state on a course to waste billions and billions on a fraud dies a friend of liberty.

God bless America indeed.

Oh For Dumb

A couple of days ago, Matthew Yglesias lamented the winner take all refusal to compromise politics of the contemporary Republican party. He also insisted that

[t]his is the fundamental reality of American politics today, but far too few people put it at the center of their accounts of what’s happening.

Some time ago he praised Mitch McConnell as being "very good at his job" precisely because of his obstructionism and etc.

It's almost like he types the first thing that  comes into his head without thinking.

9/11

Where I was and what I remember are of less importance than zero. Ditto everyone else memorializing the day. On the other hand, what Vonnegut had to say way back in the day, seems relevant.