The 14th Amendment

Hands down my favorite amendment to the constitution - I cannot believe it is way down at number 14, it should at least be in the top 10 :-)

Clear as Mud

Quote from Aubrey Bailey:

"ARE you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain.

We support the Iraqi government in the fight against Islamic State. We don't like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like.

We don't like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him.

We don't like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against  our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don't want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.

If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. 

And all of this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren't actually there until we went in to drive them out.

Do you understand now?"

Source: 2014-Year-in-Review-Collum.pdf (page 62)

Madiba

Dignity!

Iraq War

"When the Romans built a bridge, the architect would have to stand under it when the scaffolding was removed. If he did his work badly, the bridge fell down and he was killed.

We'd like to see some feet poking out of the rubble of the Iraq War. Is that too much to ask? Rumsfeld. Bush. Cheney. And all the jackasses in Congress who went along with it. Of course. But how about these war criminals too:

Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, John Bolton, Eliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Michael Ledeen, William Kristol, Frank Gaffney Jr. They said our troops would be "greeted like liberators." They claimed the war would "pay for itself" with Iraqi oil.

And let's not forget Thomas L. Friedman. He said an invasion of Iraq would be one of the great "revolutionizing" events of history... and that American GIs weren't really fighting men, but were "nurturing" a great new democracy.

Surely there is some corner of Hell, dark and hot, reserved for these intellectual miscreants. The sooner they get there the safer we will all be." - Bill Bonner

Uh-oh V

"... Look at the U.S. banking system. Look how much capital is deposited in U.S. banks versus the actual reserves at these banks.

Bank of America, for example, holds $1.1 trillion in deposits. Against that, it holds $457 billion in liquid assets – a $643 billion shortfall. Withdrawal requests are instantaneous… It would take the bank much longer to actually sell those assets in order to meet withdrawals. And should that situation occur, the value of the assets it's liquidating would be impaired.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is the entity responsible for insuring bank deposits. But it doesn't have any money. The whole thing is a mirage… The power of the printing press is the only thing standing behind this insurance."

Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic

"Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company."

Turnaround Artist :-)

Surprise: we are living in the most peaceful times in human history

"The world we live in is, first of all, at peace — profoundly at peace. The richest countries of the world are not in geopolitical competition with one another, fighting wars, proxy wars, or even engaging in arms races or “cold wars.” This is a historical rarity. You would have to go back hundreds of years to find a similar period of great power peace. I know that you watch a bomb going off in Afghanistan or hear of a terror plot in this country and think we live in dangerous times. But here is the data. The number of people who have died as a result of war, civil war, and, yes, terrorism, is down 50 percent this decade from the 1990s. It is down 75 percent from the preceding five decades, the decades of the Cold War, and it is, of course, down 99 percent from the decade before that, which is World War II. Harvard professor Steven Pinker says that we are living in the most peaceful times in human history." Fareed Zakaria