I thought about titling this post The Essential Sopranos but that would not really capture the show. So, for your enjoyment here is the NWS shorter Sopranos:
the sopranos, uncensored. from victor solomon on Vimeo.
I suspect the shorter running Deadwood would top this in length.
Via Daring Fireball.
Paul Krugman quotes a clearly correct statement from Keynes:
“The resources of nature and men’s devices,” Keynes wrote, “are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life. … But today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”
It is still …a delicate machine, the workings of which we do not understand and the obama administration is no more clueful than the previous occupants.
Local and world economies would work much better, perhaps as well as ant colonies, if giants did not continually step in them. Alas, governments have been stepping on the operation of economies for 100s of years and we still have not learned the lesson that we must keep them out; restrain them to their possibly appropriate role of fighting fraud and the use of force.
All the bail out and stimulus schemes already hatched and yet to be born are no better than throwing mud on the wall to see what sticks.
It will be painful to disengage the government gangs but, really, if you want any chance at all of these cycles not continually repeating on ever larger scales we must do so.
When I’m out in the car on a Saturday afternoon I usually check into the discussion on Ring of Fire for a while. Kennedy and Papantonio often have interesting interviews although Papantonio reminds me of a lefty Hannity.
I tuned in this afternoon and landed in the midst of the two hosts touting the supremacy of the European economic models over the failed soviet model and, I paraphrase closely, the just collapsed/failed American laissez-faire capitalism model.
Kennedy repeats the mantra, failed laissez-faire captalism many times, apparently wanting his listenners to pick this up as a phrase to be repeated.
Unfortunately, the laissez-faire thing did not collapse, did not fail; has not existed in years, if ever. The thing that has recently failed, that is causing so much havoc around the world, is yet another iteration of state capitalism.
I do not believe Kennedy is so ignorant as to not know the differences. Therefore I can only conclude that he is simply lying.
Otherwise, he would be reporting that both the republicans and the democrats do little other than continue to support variations on the plans and programs that brought us both the first great depression, the current mess and most, if not all, the failures that so-called progressives love to rant about.
An honest speaker would tell us that there may be some programs, some stimulus, some spending, that might reduce some of the symptoms for a while but that until the entire system is unraveled and rebuilt we will not cure the disease.
Until that happens we will continue to get change that is more of the same.