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Reading on a Saturday Morning

Even more reading on a Sunday morning

Submitted by Roanman on Mon, 10/11/2010 - 09:40

 

 

From yesterday's Quarter Horse News

 

Trainer Mugged Outside Hotel During The Congress 

 

Dallas Schmidt, a reining and working cowhorse trainer from Cooperstown, North Dakota, was mugged outside of his room at the Baymont Hotel located at the Dublin/Granville Road exit in Columbus, Ohio on Thursday evening. Schmidt was in Columbus attending the Congress.  Schmidt, his wife DaLayne, and their young daughter Bailey had just returned to their room, and Dallas went back to his truck to get a baby bottle.

According to accounts by wife DaLayne, Dallas had parked by some trees and while he was standing on the running boards looking for the bottle, two men came out of the trees and approached him. They told him they wanted his money. Dallas had just emptied his pockets in the room and had nothing for them.

Armed with nothing more than his spurs, Schmidt started kicking his attackers and was able to scare them off. Police later found one of the alleged attackers who was severely injured and is now in intensive care. The spur went under his chin, through his tongue and in to his palate. Because the spur was dirty, he is now fighting an infection.

 

If you would accept a little advice from your Uncle Roany.

Horse trainers work 10 to 12 hours a day wrestling with heavy and/or strong stuff: bales of hay, young horses, sometimes cattle, occasionally buffalo.

Do not mess with these people, they are hard and stronger than hell.

And for God's sake never antagonize a bull rider, even horse trainers are scared of bull riders.

 

Reading on a Sunday Morning

Submitted by Roanman on Mon, 10/11/2010 - 08:52

 

James Taranto on Roger Scruton on Oikophobia.

 

From British philosopher Roger Scruton  Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' " 

The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN, though without troubling to consider Terence's question, and defining his political vision in terms of universal values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community.

The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. For we are seeing a massive expansion of the legislative burden on the people of Europe, and a relentless assault on the only loyalties that would enable them voluntarily to bear it. The explosive effect of this has already been felt in Holland and France. It will be felt soon everywhere, and the result may not be what the oiks expect.

There is one important difference between the American oik and his European counterpart. American patriotism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism but an allegiance to a country based in an idea of enlightened universalism. Thus our oiks masquerade as--and may even believe themselves to be--superpatriots, more loyal to American principles than the vast majority of Americans, whom they denounce as "un-American" for feeling an attachment to their actual country as opposed to a collection of abstractions.

Yet the oiks' vision of themselves as an intellectual aristocracy violates the first American principle ever articulated: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . ."

This cannot be reconciled with the elitist notion that most men are economically insecure bitter clinging intolerant bigots who need to be governed by an educated elite. Marxism Lite is not only false; it is, according to the American creed, self-evidently false. That is why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting.

 

Reading on a Sunday morning, as usual

Submitted by Roanman on Sun, 10/10/2010 - 10:42

 

Jesse's Cafe Americain is of of my very favorite sites.

To begin with, his biases align perfectly with my own, which of course causes me to think he's really, really smart.

I also thoroughly enjoy the poster art with which he decorates this fine site.

Obviously ..... recommended.

Anyway, the chart below links to a pretty simple discussion titled "Triffin's Dilema Reserve Currencies and Gold" by Walker Todd which begins as follows:

 

Nearly 50 years ago, Yale University economist Robert Triffin identified the inevitable future deterioration of the dollar in his book, Gold and the Dollar Crisis: The Future of Convertibility (1960). Essentially, Triffin argued, under the Bretton Woods system in which the U.S. dollar was the world’s principal reserve currency (instead of gold, for example), the United States had to incur large trade deficits in order to provide the rest of the world with the liquidity required for functioning of the global trading system. 

Unfortunately, Triffin wrote, U.S. trade deficits eventually would undermine the foreign exchange value of the dollar because foreign accounts would hold an increasing quantity of dollars. Restating Triffin's argument in contemporary terms, as the proportion of dollar claims held abroad versus U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) increases, the foreign exchange value of the dollar must decline if dollar interest rates do not increase at about the same rate as the foreign dollar claims.

 

  

The article was originally posted at the American Institute for Economic Research.

Jesse's provided a link at the top of his post to the entire Walker Todd piece.

Got all that?

Jesse has most of it with a cool chart.

AIG has all of it without the chart.

It's all good and not too tough to get your mind around.

Next.


Reading on a Sunday morning continues, as usual.

Submitted by Roanman on Sun, 10/10/2010 - 09:46

 

Here are two clear, simple and depressing charts from Calculated Risk.

I'm starting to really like this site, having been turned on to it by Clusterstock Chart of the Day.

It's a little random which we really like around here, with concise, easy to understand posts.

Recommended.

Click either chart for the entire post.

 





 

Reading in the Middle of the Night Continues

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 07:38

Reading in the Middle of the Night

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 05:56

 

Fred Reed at Fred On Everything is back with an essay on Mexico and drugs.

Way double highly recommended.

 

If Mexico were not next to the world’s most ravening drug market, it would be a corrupt, but functioning and reasonably successful upper Third-World country.

If this were not so, Mexico would not have the huge number of American who have come here to retire.

But the country cannot withstand a drug business that, by a common figure, brings the traffickers forty billion dollars a year.

The money means that the cartels can buy heavier armament than can the government, as well as buy heavier officials on either side of the border.

(It is an American conceit that corruption exists only in other countries.)

 

Reading at 4 in the morning

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 09/28/2010 - 13:19

 

Thanks to Libby N. for the following.

I don't subscribe to Scientific American.

As most of you know, my reading time is mostly taken up with Gold mongering, Bilderburg expose' types, and other uplifting topics.

Libby sent this through with a comment suggesting that the tone of this article puts it right up my alley.

Sarcasm is an unattractive quality in a woman Libby.

Click anywhere below to link to the balance of the free part of the story.

I'm encouraging all of you to sign up for the digital Scientific American in the hope someone will forward future articles sans the snippy commentary.

 

Death and Chocolate: Disease Threatens to Devastate Global Cocoa Supply

A blight is threatening the world's cocoa supply. Will genetic intervention save our desserts?

   September 24, 2010

In a rare tale of technology, bio terrorism and chocolate, scientists are racing to sequence the cacao tree genome. They fear that without the genome in hand they will be unable to stop the spread of two virulent pathogens that threaten to devastate the world’s cocoa crop.

Cacao trees were first domesticated more then 1,500 years ago by Mayans living in what is now Central America, but fungal diseases such as witch’s broom and frosty pod have largely chased the bean out of its native habitat. The great worry is that one of these diseases will cross the Atlantic Ocean to West Africa, where 70 percent of the crop is now produced. Cacao trees in West Africa have no resistance to the pathogens, which form spores and spread via the wind, careless farmers and, in at least one case, bioterrorists. Scientists say that just a few infected pods would lead to the loss of one third of total global production.

 Nnnnooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!

 

To quote Gutle Schnaper

Submitted by Roanman on Sun, 09/26/2010 - 15:26


 

Gutie Schapner, Mayer Amschel Rothschild's wife and mother of the Rothschild dynasty's second generation: 

Amschel Mayer von Rothschild, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild. Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Carl Mayer von Rothschild and James Mayer de Rothschild, offered the following revelation from her deathbed.

 

 

 

 

 

Links to Rothschild/Illuminati conspiracy theories abound.

One of the better ones (minimal vitriolic noise, easiest to follow) is here.

It's gonna take you more than a minute to read it.

We recommend you take the time.

It's illuminating.

Get it? ..... Illuminating?.

Anyway ..... bare in mind, as always.

 

 

 

Bacha Posh?

Submitted by Roanman on Sun, 09/26/2010 - 09:31

 

 

I don't even know what to think about this one.

This six page article takes some time to read but could hardly be more ........... something.

From The New York Times.

Click the photo for the entire piece.

 

Afghan Boys Are Prized, So Girls Live the Part

 By JENNY NORDBERG September 20, 2010

 Mehran Rafaat, 6, left, and her twin sisters, Benafsha, center and Beheshta, near their home in Badghis Province, Afghanistan

 KABUL, Afghanistan — Six-year-old Mehran Rafaat is like many girls her age. She likes to be the center of attention. She is often frustrated when things do not go her way. Like her three older sisters, she is eager to discover the world outside the family’s apartment in their middle-class neighborhood of Kabul.

But when their mother, Azita Rafaat, a member of Parliament, dresses the children for school in the morning, there is one important difference. Mehran’s sisters put on black dresses and head scarves, tied tightly over their ponytails. For Mehran, it’s green pants, a white shirt and a necktie, then a pat from her mother over her spiky, short black hair. After that, her daughter is out the door — as an Afghan boy.

There are no statistics about how many Afghan girls masquerade as boys. But when asked, Afghans of several generations can often tell a story of a female relative, friend, neighbor or co-worker who grew up disguised as a boy. To those who know, these children are often referred to as neither “daughter” nor “son” in conversation, but as “bacha posh,” which literally means “dressed up as a boy” in Dari.

 

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