Kids being kids again.......

Actual quote from protesters occupying street of Toronto's stock exchange...

                                                               

“It’s weird protesting on Bay Street. You get there at 9 a.m.  and the rich bankers who you want to hurl insults at and change their world view have been at work for two hours already. And  then when it’s time to go, they’re still there! I guess that’s why they call them the one per cent. I mean, who wants to work those kinds of hours? That’s the power of greed.”            

Institutional Investor magazine

Great to see the powers that be at II bring up the best and brightest in Tyler Durden of Fight Club fame and of course his wonderful web site,  ZeroHedge.com.

Tyler is keeping the cons, the liars, the thieves, the bankers, the vampire squid (aka Goldman Sachs) and just about everybody else on their computers occasionaly checking in with ZH.

You should too.  More than ever.  Keep it up Tyler, there is no equal.

Thanksgiving, 2022

"Winston, come into the dining room, it's time to eat," Julia yelled to her husband.
"In a minute, honey, it's a tie score," he answered.

Actually Winston wasn't very interested in the traditional holiday football game between Detroit and Washington.

Ever since the government passed the Civility in Sports Statute of 2017, outlawing tackle football for its "unseemly violence" and the "bad example it sets for the rest of the world," Winston was far less of a football fan than he used to be.

Two-hand touch wasn't nearly as exciting. Yet it wasn't the game that Winston was uninterested in. It was more the thought of eating another Tofu Turkey. Even though it was the best type of VeggieMeat available after the government revised the American Anti-Obesity Act of 2018, adding fowl to the list of federally-forbidden foods, (which already included potatoes, cranberry sauce, and mincemeat pie), it wasn't anything like real turkey.

And ever since the government officially changed the name of "Thanksgiving Day" to "A National Day of Atonement" in 2020, to officially acknowledge the Pilgrims' historically brutal treatment of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of its luster.

Eating in the dining room was also a bit daunting.

The unearthly gleam of government-mandated fluorescent light bulbs made the Tofu Turkey look even weirder than it actually was, and the room was always cold. Ever since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating all thermostats - which were monitored and controlled by the electric company - be kept at 68 degrees, every room on the north side of the house was barely tolerable throughout the entire winter.

Still, it was good getting together with family. Or at least most of the family.

Winston missed his mother, who passed on in October, when she had used up her legal allotment of life-saving medical treatment.

He had had many heated conversations with the Regional Health Consortium, spawned when the private insurance market finally went bankrupt, and everyone was forced into the government health care program. And though he demanded she be kept on her treatment, it was a futile effort.

"The RHC's resources are limited," explained the government bureaucrat that Winston spoke with on the phone. "Your mother received all the benefits to which she was entitled.---- I'm sorry for your loss."

Ed couldn't make it either. He had forgotten to plug in his electric car last night, the only kind available after the Anti-Fossil Fuel Bill of 2021 outlawed the use of the combustion engines - for everyone but government officials. The fifty mile round trip was about ten miles too far, and Ed didn't want to spend a frosty night on the road somewhere between here and there.

Thankfully, Winston's brother, John, and his wife were flying in. Winston made sure that the dining room chairs had extra cushions for the occasion. No one complained more than John about the pain of sitting down so soon after the government-mandated cavity searches at airports, which severely aggravated his hemorrhoids. Ever since a terrorist successfully smuggled a cavity bomb onto a jetliner, the TSA told Americans the added "inconvenience" was an "absolute necessity" in order to stay "one step ahead of the terrorists".

Winston's own body had grown accustomed to such probing ever since the government expanded their scope to just about anywhere a crowd gathered, via Anti-Profiling Act of 2022. That law made it a crime to single out any group or individual for "unequal scrutiny," even when probable cause was involved. Thus, cavity searches at malls, train stations, bus depots, etc., etc., had become almost routine.

Almost.

The Supreme Court is reviewing the statute, but most Americans expect a Court composed of six progressives and three conservatives to leave the law intact. "A living Constitution is extremely flexible," said the Court's eldest member, Elena Kagan. "Europe has had laws like this one for years.----We should learn from their example," she added.

Winston's thoughts turned to his own children.

He got along fairly well with his 12-year-old daughter, Brittany, mostly because she ignored him. Winston had long ago surrendered to the idea that she could text anyone at any time, even during Atonement Dinner. Their only real confrontation had occurred when he limited her to 50,000 texts a month, explaining that was all he could afford. She whined for a week, but got over it.

His 16-year-old son, Jason, was another matter altogether. Perhaps it was the constant bombarding he got in public school that global warming, the bird flu, terrorism, or any of a number of other calamities were "just around the corner," but Jason had developed a kind of nihilistic attitude that ranged between simmering surliness and outright hostility.

It didn't help that Jason had reported his father to the police for smoking a cigarette in the house, an act made criminal by the Smoking Control Statute of 2018, which outlawed smoking anywhere within 500 feet of another human being. Winston paid the $5,000 fine, which might have been considered excessive before the American dollar became virtually worthless as a result of QE13, the latest round of quantitative easing the federal government initiated stating, once again, it was to "spur economic growth." This time, they promised to push unemployment below its years-long rate of 18%, but Winston was not particularly hopeful.

Yet the family had a lot for which to be thankful, Winston thought, before remembering it was a Day of Atonement. At least, he had his memories.

He felt a twinge of sadness when he realized his children would never know what life was like in the "Good Old Days," long before government promises to make life "fair for everyone" realized their full potential. Winston, like so many of his fellow Americans, never realized how much things could change when they didn't happen all at once, but little by little, so people could get used to them.

He wondered what might have happened if the public had stood up while there was still time, maybe back around 2011, when all the real nonsense began.

"Maybe we wouldn't be where we are today if we'd just said 'enough is enough' when we had the chance," he thought.

Maybe so, Winston. Maybe so.

So true.............

"You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus."

-Mark Twain

Nascar-like politicians pumping sponsorships?

When watching politicians on TV, consistently peddling the agenda of their biggest bidders and never, unfortunately, that of the electorate, one often wonders: why don't these people wear the logos and decals indicating who their sponsor is, and how much money changes hands. After all it works for sports personalities of all shapes and sizes: why should politicians be exempt?   Granted, the quid pro quo is to influence behind the scenes, and as such an overt act of advertising would be largely counterproductive, but campaign financing is without doubt one of the greatest weaknesses of modern society, and among (or at least should be) the main grievance of the Occupy Something crowd. And while a radical proposal like that would certainly never catch on due to concerns of constant exposure of the sell out nature of America's public representatives who really merely represent corporations.

An old Drexel Burnham Lambert alum talking straight

This guy was prescient on Michael Milken taking down Drexel.   Smart guy for sure.

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000053437

Free $$$$ boys and girls, Minnesota loves students!

http://revolutionarypolitics.tv/video/viewVideo.php?video_id=15915

Obama versus Wall Street

Is Rajat Gupta the first shot across the bow?

This should get some fires burning across the nation this winter to keep protesters warm!

Go long fire wood folks.

Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber

You better get your fans an account we can fire some $$$$ into.

A guy like you needs to be amongst those congress-critters up in Corruption, D.C.

Good luck and call it straight.   Have one of your people get ahold of my people.

I want to help and so do some friends. 

You are lucky if you understand this....

We all have a huge responsibility for our own kids because of our fathers.

Got-R-Dun

Just a real Montana freak!!     A trophy antelope for sure.

LOL

You can't fix stupid, but you can numb it with a two by four!

There was no change intended with this activist

From Day 1 this cowboy has been all hat and no cattle.  Just more of the same.

The White House has released its emails surrounding the Solyndra scandal, and they reveal new connections between the Obama administration and Solyndra—adding more questions to the heated political battle over the failed energy company. An Obama administration appointee, Steven Spinner, at the Department of Energy had pressured the White House for the $533 million loan for Solyndra—even as his wife, Allison Spinner, worked as a partner at the law firm that represented the company. The White House's fumbling response to the revelations has marred the image of a team that once promised to bring change to Washington

Steve Jobs

Below I’ve pasted in some key quotes taken from his 2005 Stanford commencement address, and an old 1985 interview with Playboy magazine that the folks at Zero Hedge dug up. Enjoy.


Jobs on -not- following the crowd:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma– which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Jobs on change and politics:

“We’re making the largest investment of capital that humankind has ever made in weapons over the next five years. We have decided, as a society, that that’s where we should put our money, and that raises the deficits and, thus, the cost of our capital.”

“I think it takes a crisis for something to occur in America. And I believe there’s going to be a crisis of significant proportions in the early Nineties as these problems our political leaders should have been addressing boil up to the surface.”

Jobs on charity… and the importance of failure:

“And that’s the problem with most philanthropy– there’s no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. So if you can’t succeed or fail, it’s really hard to get better.”

Jobs on careers:

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. . . As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. . . So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Jobs on making it count:

Most of the time, we’re taking things. Neither you nor I made the clothes we wear; we don’t make the food or grow the foods we eat; we use a language that was developed by other people; we use another society’s mathematics. Very rarely do we get a chance to put something back into that pool. I think we have that opportunity now. And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

Jobs on [the blue screen of] death:

“[D]eath is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

Well done, Mr. Jobs. Be thou at peace.

Jobs on Wiki.........

Jobs was born in San Francisco[1] and was adopted by the Armenian family of Paul and Clara Jobs (née Hagopian)[25] of Mountain View, California.[6] Paul and Clara later adopted a daughter, Patti. Jobs' biological parents – Abdulfattah John Jandali, a Syrian Muslim immigrant to the U.S ,[26][27] who later became a political science professor,[28] and Joanne Schieble (later Simpson), an American graduate student[29] of German ancestry[30] who went on to become a speech language pathologist[31] – eventually married. The marriage produced Jobs' biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson.[32] Jandali claims that he didn't want to put Jobs up for adoption but that Simpson's parents did not approve of her marrying an Arab. Jandali was estranged from Jobs and never contacted him, [33] nor did Steve ever contact his biological father.[34]


Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. He frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California, and was later hired there, working with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[35] Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[36] he continued auditing classes at Reed, while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.[16] Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."[16]


In Autumn 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India.

Jobs then traveled to India to visit the Neem Karoli Baba[37] at his Kainchi Ashram with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.[38][39] During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life".[40] He later said that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.[40]

Jobs returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little interest in or knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. According to Wozniak, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had given them only $700 (instead of the actual $5,000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.[41]

Breakfast in Johns Creek, Georgia, Lorens Cafe!

Let's say you wake up in or around Johns Creek, Georgia and are hungry.  Let's say you need a big plate of breakfast EXACTLY how you want it cooked.  Look no farther than Lorens Cafe on Jones Bridge road.

Bob is the proprietor.  Bob knows food.   Bob's food is fresh, delicious and should be on anyone's lifetime list of TOP FIVE breakfast establishments.   Mine are Harry's in LaJolla,California,   Loren's Cafe in Johns Creek, Georgia,  Melstone Cafe in Melstone, MT,  Westwood Cafe in Spicer, MN and  Pappy's Cafe in Waubun, Minnesota.

Missy will be your waitress and Bob will cook you a phenom breakfast.

Unbeatable in Georgia!

Car need paint? Need some body work?

If you are fixing up a fender bender or in need of a new paint job on your rig look no farther than Tony.

No BS.  No hype.  Tony will just flat out tell you when it will be done and at what price.  

No need to go anywhere else.  He owns the store, his wife works next to him, the family dog will come to sniff you and everybody is friendly.

This is where you find him.

Tony
Maaco
11265 Elkins Road

Roswell, GA 30076

(770) 442-8322

Enjoy the ride...............

Go ahead, click on this link.   It will make your day!

http://www.lshs64.com/enjoytheride.html

Steven Paul Jobs

For every kid who was given up for adoption because he was born out of wedlock, consider Steve Jobs your poster boy.

Genius, passion follower,  Zen Buddhist disciple,  tight-wad, folk-hero, hot-head.

Prayers to your wife, family and the entire Apple family. 

Taylor Swift

She can sing, she can play about any instrument and she can warm up a crowd!

Sheer marketing genius to go along with it!  

Good for her.  Good for her fans.

She rocked Atlanta!

Daddy Sleeps Nekkid!

"Late again!" the third-grade teacher sternly said to little Johnny.

"It ain't my fault this time, Miss Russell. You can blame this 'un on my Daddy. The reason I'm three hours late is my Daddy sleeps naked!"

Now, Miss Russell had taught grammar school for thirty-some-odd years. Despite her mounting fears, she asked little Johnny what he meant by that. Full of grins and mischief, and in the flower of his youth, little Johnny and trouble were old friends, but he always told her the truth.

"You see, Miss Russell, out at the farm we got this here low down fox. The last few nights, he done ate six hens. Last night, when Daddy heard a noise out in the chicken pen, he grabbed his shot gun and said to my Ma, "That fox is back again... I'm a gonna git him!" "Stay back," Daddy whispered to all us kids!

"My Daddy was naked as a jaybird -- no boots, no pants, no shirt! To the hen house he crawled. Then, he stuck that double-barreled 12-gauge shot gun through the window of the coop. As he stared into the darkness, with a fox on his mind, our old hound dog, Rip, had done gone and woke up and comes sneaking up behind Daddy. Then, as we all looked on, plumb helpless, old Rip done went and stuck his cold nose in my Daddy's crack!"

"Miss Russell, we all been cleanin' chickens since three o'clock this mornin!"

Class Warfare, Nevada Style!!

"Senate Democrats will replace tax increases proposed by President Obama to pay for his $445 billion jobs bill with a more politically popular tax increase on millionaires, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said on Wednesday. “When Democrats bring this common-sense jobs legislation to the floor, we’ll ask Americans who make more than a million dollars a year to contribute a little more,” Reid said in a morning floor speech. He said he hopes to set up a vote on the revamped jobs bill "within the next few days."


www.zerohedge.com

Zero Hedge, one of the last remaining bastions of truth, critical thinking, individuality, political independence and free speech left on the planet.

And you think Obama is incompetent?

Ever wonder why the final SEC report on the flash crash doesn't match up to the forensic evidence found by Nanex?


It seems the SEC/CFTC failed to disclose they didn't get around to interviewing the traders that actually executed the algorithm blamed for dumping 75,000 emini contracts on the market "without regard to price or time" until 2 weeks after publishing their final report on the flash crash! Apparently, they were making a lot of things up to fit a foregone conclusion.

According to the media, it was Waddell & Reed who executed those trades right? Well, no. Barclays executed the contracts using their time tested algorithm called Participation. You simply can't crash a market with the Participation algorithm. This is an algorithm that in fact has sophisticated price and time components. This is an algorithm that would only sell at the offer -- and never at the bid. This was discovered and pointed out by Nanex after just one day reviewing the actual 6,438 eMini contract trades (75,000 contracts) which ZeroHedge helped obtain. But the media was happy to hang the guilt on an out of town mid-west Mutual Fund company, and besides all this stuff was getting way too complicated. After all, when it comes to such complexities, it is only economy PhDs who are fit to opine at will.

Only the SEC/CFTC wasn't counting on anyone double checking their work...

So a week after Nanex published their findings on the eMini trades, the CFTC holds their very first interview with Vijay Pant -- the man in charge of executing the infamous W&R trades at Barclays using the Participation algorithm. This was the first time the SEC/CFTC actually interviewed those with intimate knowledge about the algorithm blamed for the flash crash in the SEC/CFTC final report.

How many heads will roll for this faux pas? And if it is only one, it better be that of Madoff "dear friend" Mary Schapiro who may have slipped through the cracks after the biggest ponzi scheme, since the US government, was handed to her on a silver platter.

If it is indeed confirmed that the agency, which is already in hot water for purposefully destroying evidence confirming various hedge funds have participated in insider trading, we are confident that the mere onslaught of class action lawsuits against the SEC, which one can now accuse of out right cover up, by anyone who lost money on May 6, will force not one but countless resignations, as the rats abandon the sinking ship, terrified by the prospect of civil and criminal liability pursuing their very own sad and pathetic bureaucratic careers.

Any class action lawyers feel like they need some work?  

Thank you Meredith Whitney..........

Meredith can not only run marathons on a timely basis she gave clients of Chippewa Partners one of the greatest entry points in the last 30 years to put more assets into municipal bonds.  The service she provided to crater the muni market, in my esteemed opinion, offered astute investors one of the finest inflection points to put more funds to work in municipal bonds.

She trains hard, calls her own shots, works at a firm with her name on the door and calls it the way she sees it.   Thank you Meredith!   You helped grow the fortune of not only Dean  Parisian but many clients who rely on us as fiduciaries to provide unbiased investment management.

Gotta love Hank Jr.

Finally got it right in the correct venue! 

BAC customers.........

I bet the lines are forming at credit unions close to B of A branches.   Maybe a bad bet simply due to the fact the general population doesn't know enough about credit unions.  They for sure don't know the difference between Registered Representatives  (stockbrokers) and investment advisory firms that are true fiduciaries.

It's amazing they have any money at all.

America's Debt

America has now officially closed the books on the 2010-2011 fiscal year. It is only fitting that the last day of the year saw the settlement of all outstanding and recently auctioned off debt. The result: a surge of $95 billion in total government debt overnight, and a fiscal year closing with the absolutely unprecedented $14,790,340,328,557.15 trillion in debt. Net net, in the past fiscal year, the US has issued a total of $1.228 trillion in new debt and has accelerated over time. At a rate of $125 billion per month, total US debt to GDP will pass 100% in just over a month. Incidentally, one may inquire about the benefits of centrally planned fiscal stimulus: the US economy added over 3$ trillion in debt in the past two years and the stock market is almost back to where it was back then. Perhaps it is about time someone demanded that all those lunatics who say that issuing debt for the sake of growth (and pushing the S&P higher of course) be finally locked away in perpetuity.

As true as the law of gravity............

When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they worked for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation!

Tim Armstrong at AOL

Tim,

Your plastic surgeon must have had a twitch when he was working on you.   AOL is not on a comeback path.  Huffington Post is a web site by liberals, for liberals, for the benefit of liberals.   You don't get it.

Your content is atrocious.    Your greed will take your company down within a few years.

 

Aging gracefully..........

"Take your finger and push that hair sticking out of your nose, just poke it back in there."

A beautiful, classic line from my wife on the way to church this morning.