Tom Faranda's Folly

Very good; WSJ look at the election of Pope Francis

The Journal is publishing an ebook this coming week which looks very interesting (I pre-ordered it as soon as I watched the video below). They published an excerpt this weekend.

You can read it here - Fifteen Days in Rome: How the Pope Was Picked

According to the excerpt and the video, a simple four minute speech at one of the pre-conclave meetings was what elevated him as a candidate. Here's an excerpt from the excerpt ...

The notes on Cardinal Bergoglio's sheet were written in his native Spanish. And he could easily have delivered the remarks in Spanish—19 of the cardinals voting in the conclave came from Spanish-speaking countries and a team of Vatican translators was on hand to provide simultaneous translations in at least four other languages.

But he spoke in Italian, the language cardinals most commonly use inside Vatican City and the native tongue of Italy's 28 voting-age cardinals, the most of any single nation. He wanted to be understood, loud and clear. The leaders of the Catholic Church, our very selves, Cardinal Bergoglio warned, had become too focused on its inner life. The church was navel-gazing. The church was too self-referential.

"When the church is self-referential," he said, "inadvertently, she believes she has her own light; she ceases to be the mysterium lunae and gives way to that very serious evil, spiritual worldliness."

Roman Catholicism, he said, needed to shift its focus outward, to the world beyond Vatican City walls, to the outside. The new pope "must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the church to go out to the existential peripheries, that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing."

The word he used, periferia in Italian, literally translates into "the periphery" or "the edge." But to Italian ears, periferia is also a term loaded with heavy socioeconomic connotations. It is on the periphery of Italian cities, and most European ones, that the working-class poor live, many of them immigrants. The core mission of the church wasn't self-examination, the cardinal said. It was getting in touch with the everyday problems of a global flock, most of whom were battling poverty and the indignities of socioeconomic injustice.

German Cardinals Reinhard Marx of Munich and Walter Kasper, an old Vatican hand, perked up. So did Cardinals Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne of Lima and Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino of Havana, who promptly asked the pope for the notes of his address. For days they had heard speeches about "new evangelization," a term from past popes that many cardinals used to honor their memory while disagreeing over what it meant. Suddenly, they were hearing someone speak about justice, human dignity. And it was simple, clear, refreshing.

"He speaks in a very straightforward way," said Cardinal George. "And so perhaps—more than the content—it was simply a reminder that here is someone who has authenticity in such a way that he's a wonderful witness to the discipleship."

Here's the video -

 

Yanks pull off amazing triple play on way to a win

Must see!! And the first 4-6-5-6-5-3-4 triple play in history!

Hit the link -

"Can they get three?!... It's a triple play!!"

 UPDATE: It's being posted all over youtube. Here's the Orioles TV coverage -

 

NYT columnist Nick Kristof talks about his visits to N. Korea

While I certainly don't agree with many of Kristof's views, he is a NYT columnist I have some time for. I do think he's sincere and lacks the arrogance of many of the other Times columnists.

Here he offers two minutes on N. Korea.

 

The Atlantic: "Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell's (murder) Trial Should be a Front Page Story"

Charged with murdering seven newborns and one mother. But it's not news, because Gosnell ran an abortion mill in Philadelphia. Which means cover up.

Glad The Atlantic ran this.

"The dead babies. The exploited women. The racism. The numerous governmental failures. It is thoroughly newsworthy."

The grand jury report in the case of Kermit Gosnell, 72, is among the most horrifying I've read. "This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy - and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors," it states. "The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels - and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths."

******

Until Thursday, I wasn't aware of this story. It has generated sparse coverage in the national media, and while it's been mentioned in RSS feeds to which I subscribe, I skip past most news items. I still consume a tremendous amount of journalism. Yet had I been asked at a trivia night about the identity of Kermit Gosnell, I would've been stumped and helplessly guessed a green Muppet. Then I saw Kirsten Power's USA Today column. She makes a powerful, persuasive case that the Gosnell trial ought to be getting a lot more attention in the national press than it is getting.

The media criticism angle interests me. But I agree that the story has been undercovered, and I happen to be a working journalist, so I'll begin by telling the rest of the story for its own sake. Only then will I explain why I think it deserves more coverage than it has gotten, although it ought to be self-evident by the time I'm done distilling the grand jury's allegations. Grand juries aren't infallible. This version of events hasn't been proven in a court of law. But journalists routinely treat accounts given by police, prosecutors and grand juries as at least plausible if not proven. Try to decide, as you hear the state's side of the case, whether you think it is credible, and if so, whether the possibility that some or all this happened demands massive journalistic scrutiny.

* * *

On February 18, 2010, the FBI raided the "Women's Medical Society," entering its offices about 8:30 p.m. Agents expected to find evidence that it was illegally selling prescription drugs. On entering, they quickly realized something else was amiss. In the grand jury report's telling, "There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets. All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff." Authorities had also learned about the patient that died at the facility several months prior.

Public health officials inspected the surgery rooms. "Instruments were not sterile," the grand jury states. "Equipment was rusty and outdated. Oxygen equipment was covered with dust, and had not been inspected. The same corroded suction tubing used for abortions was the only tubing available for oral airways if assistance for breathing was needed. There was no functioning resuscitation or even monitoring equipment, except for a single blood pressure cuff." Upon further inspection, "the search team discovered fetal remains haphazardly stored throughout the clinic - in bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers."

There's lots more, if you hit the link. A massive cover-up.

Nice story: Korean vet meets the woman he saved 60 years ago

On CNN.

 

Very predictably, assisted suicide/euthansia being proclaimed as the next "right"

Cnn just did a special on a military veteran who wants to end his own life, the NY Times had an extesive article on the rising cost of paying for aged people with dementia, suicide and euthanasia are continuing to gain respectability as a "choice".

This from Bloomberg -

Boomers Push Doctor-Assisted Dying in End-of-Life Revolt

Bills under consideration in northeastern states as well as in Kansas are modeled after laws in Washington and Oregon, the only two states that currently permit doctors to prescribe life- ending drugs. One of those, in New Jersey, is sponsored by Burzichelli’s brother-in-law, state assemblyman John Burzichelli. Often referred to as physician-assisted suicide or doctor-aided dying, the movement has come a long way from the 1990s when Jack Kevorkian, a Michigan pathologist, was in the spotlight for hooking patients up to a homemade device that helped them administer lethal drugs.

******

While Caplan (note from Faranda - he used to write an ethics column for the NY Times; now pro-euthanasia) has changed his views, opposition from doctors, religious organizations, anti-abortion groups and disability advocates hasn’t been swayed. They are waging their own campaigns at the state level against legalizing any form of aided dying.

The Washington, D.C.-based anti-abortion advocacy group National Right to Life takes the position that all life has value and the priority should also be trying to improve the quality of life for patients with terminal illness, said Jennifer Popik, legislative counsel for the organization. The group helps its state affiliates lobby against the measures.

“You don’t fix the problem by killing the patients,” Popik said. “We want the focus to be on saving as many lives as possible and having people’s quality of life be as high as it can be.”

In election, Reagan vs. Obama, who wins?

Reagan gets 58% in this poll. Must be true, it's on the HuffingtonPost.

The finding is consistent with a broader theme of the survey's results. Approximately three in four respondents agreed that the government functioned better in the 1980s than it does today. They also said the nation as a whole was better off and safer while Reagan was in the White House.

Catholic Korean War Chaplain to receive Medal of Honor

Fr. Emil Kapoun. Died in Korean prison camp in 1951. He is also a candidate for sainthood - you can find out a bit more here.

 

Goldman Sachs says short gold

In other words they think the price is going down.

Turn in gold prices accelerating; closing our long gold position Given gold’s recent lackluster price action and our economists’ expectation that the acceleration in US growth later this year to above-trend pace will support US real rates, we are lowering our USD-denominated gold price forecast once again. Our new forecast is further below the forward curve with year-end targets of $1,450/toz in 2013 and $1,270/toz in 2014.

 

Washington Post on Margaret Thatcher: "In every sense a leader"

The post editorialized late on Monday -

“UNLESS WE change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mists of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.” Margaret Thatcher, never given to understatement, presented that grim vision for Britain in 1979, the year she became prime minister.

Then, for the next 11½ years — almost as long as three U.S. presidential terms — she worked with fierce determination and unrelenting stubbornness to dispel it. By the time she left office, reluctantly, in 1990, there was not much talk anymore of Britain’s inexorable decline. Ms. Thatcher, who died Monday at age 87, had changed not only her country’s direction but also its standing in the world. She continued to be passionately detested by some and admired and respected by others long after she left office, and her record will be debated for decades — or centuries. What is hardly debatable is the proposition that she was, in every sense of the word, a leader.

Margaret Thatcher was a new kind of Conservative in British politics, a true-believing, Friedrich von Hayek-quoting enemy of what she saw as the excesses of the welfare state, of the unions that seemed to run it and of the mass of socialist encrustations that had formed on the Labor Party’s left wing after World War II. She thought statism was crushing the nation’s economy, destroying the morale of its people and rapidly diminishing its standing in the world. Apparently a good many Britons agreed with her, though not necessarily with her fervent embrace of the total conservative ideology. The country was ready for a break with the postwar past, and Ms. Thatcher’s party had the good sense to see in her the forcefulness, conviction and eloquence that could bring it off.

Margaret Thatcher on collectivism/socialism

The exchanges took place during Margaret Thatcher's last speech in the House of Commons on 22 November 1990.

Read the complete transcript for this speech here:
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speec...

 

Letterman: "Top Ten Little-Known Facts About Hell"

#4 is a hot one.

 

NY Times on Thatcher: "transformed Britain more thoroughly than any other prime minister of the past half-century"

A leader who transformed Britain by pushing the nation in new directions.

Margaret Thatcher, who died of a stroke on Monday at age 87, transformed Britain more thoroughly than any other prime minister of the past half-century. She was a pathbreaker from the moment she took office in 1979 as Britain’s first, and so far only, female prime minister. And she was the rare conservative leader to come not from the upper echelons of Britain’s class-obsessed society, but from a modest apartment above her father’s grocery.

But much more than that distinguished the 11 years of Mrs. Thatcher’s government, which followed years of tepid leadership, economic stagnation and high inflation. She tamed the power of Britain’s once powerful labor movement by shutting down inefficient coal mines and privatizing state-owned industries. She encouraged an entrepreneurial culture that had grown timid and somnolent. With her powerful, plain-spoken approach to issues large (like Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait) and relatively small (the brief war over the Falkland Islands), she reawakened Britain’s taste for military engagement.

In the process, she revived policy debates among political parties that had grown too comfortable with safe consensus mumbling. As she pushed the conservatives to the right, she pushed the Labour Party to the center. Without Mrs. Thatcher, there probably would have been no Tony Blair.

Five more paragraphs - hit the link.

WSJ op ed: "The World-Changing Margaret Thatcher - Not since Catherine the Great has there been a woman of such consequence."

Paul Johnson the British historian -

Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around—decisively—the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries. "Thatcherism" was the most popular and successful way of running a country in the last quarter of the 20th century and into the 21st.

Thatcher's long ministry of nearly a dozen years is often mistakenly described as ideological in tone. In fact Thatcherism was (and is) essentially pragmatic and empirical. She tackled the unions not by producing, like Heath, a single comprehensive statute but by a series of measures, each dealing with a particular abuse, such as aggressive picketing. At the same time she, and the police, prepared for trouble by a number of ingenious administrative changes allowing the country's different police forces to concentrate large and mobile columns wherever needed. Then she calmly waited, relying on the stupidity of the union leaders to fall into the trap, which they duly did.

She fought and won two pitched battles with the two strongest unions, the miners and the printers. In both cases, victory came at the cost of weeks of fighting and some loss of life. After the hard men had been vanquished, the other unions surrendered, and the new legislation was meekly accepted, no attempt being made to repeal or change it when Labour eventually returned to power. Britain was transformed from the most strike-ridden country in Europe to a place where industrial action is a rarity. The effect on the freedom of managers to run their businesses and introduce innovations was almost miraculous and has continued.

Thatcher reinforced this essential improvement by a revolutionary simplification of the tax system, reducing a score or more "bands" to two and lowering the top rates from 83% (earned income) and 98% (unearned) to the single band of 40%.

She also reduced Britain's huge and loss-making state-owned industries, nearly a third of the economy, to less than one-tenth, by her new policy of privatization—inviting the public to buy from the state industries, such as coal, steel, utilities and transport by bargain share offers. Hence loss-makers, funded from taxes, became themselves profit-making and so massive tax contributors.

There's more - hit the link.

Margaret Thatcher broke the class ceiling, not just the glass ceiling

This column, by a former vice-presidential candidate; also an outsider. It's a good short essay.

The Grocer’s Daughter

Many will focus on the fact that Margaret Thatcher’s career was a collection of “firsts” for women — she was the first and youngest female Conservative-party member to stand for election, the first woman to hold the title Leader of the Opposition, and the first woman prime minister of the United Kingdom.

But Thatcher not only broke a glass ceiling; she broke a class ceiling. She was a grocer’s daughter from the back of beyond who advanced to the height of power in a class-conscious society. Like her friend Ronald Reagan, she was an underestimated underdog and political outsider. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Evening Standard, once said, “There was no Thatcher group within the Tory Party. . . . She was utterly and completely on her own. She simply was an outsider in every way.”

 

Political leftists in the UK show their class; celebrating the death of Thatcher

Predictable. Brainless dolts. From the Daily Mail (UK).

Champagne was flowing tonight as the Left took to the streets to celebrate the death of former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

 

MSNBC commentator on children and the "collective notion".

This is actually an MSNBC commercial -

 

Annette Funicello

The mouseketeer and no doubt my first crush as a seven year old. Annette suffered from MS for years.

Here is her website.

Margaret Thatcher

UPDATE: Brigid is watching the BBC coverage.

A popular figure in Farandaville. I was living in Jamaica when she was first elected Prime Minister. I remember the consternation of my dedicated communist socialist Labor Party member friend Mick whose flat was next to mine.

Prime Minister David Cameron led tributes saying: "Today is a truly sad day for our country. We've lost a great prime minister, a great leader, a great Briton. As our first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher succeeded against all the odds, and the real thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she didn't just lead our country, she saved our country, and I believe she'll go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister."

 

Police changing their thinking on civilian response to terror/mass attacks

An interesting article in yesterday's NY Times. Unfortunately, I suppose it's worth reading by anyone. There are no safe places anymore.

Anyway, at least some police departments are saying no longer wait for help (or if you are law enforcement, don't wait for back up, but go right into action!) but either flee, hide, or attack the assailants (as last resort).

Here's the NYT feature, and below it i've embedded the Houston PD video that the article links to. I actually found the video to be a bit scary (it's had over 2 million hits on youtube). It was funded by a grant from Homeland Security.

In Shift, Police Advise Taking an Active Role to Counter Mass Attacks

The speed and deadliness of recent high-profile shootings have prompted police departments to recommend fleeing, hiding or fighting in the event of a mass attack, instead of remaining passive and waiting for help.

The shift represents a “sea change,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which recently held a meeting in Washington to discuss shootings like those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo.

The traditional advice to the public has been “don’t get involved, call 911,” Mr. Wexler said, adding, “There’s a recognition in these ‘active shooter’ situations that there may be a need for citizens to act in a way that perhaps they haven’t been trained for or equipped to deal with.”

 

Yeah - "Seriously Strong", the cheese commercial

My friend Joe sent me this - it might be a tribute to Tim's bench press?

Anyway, amusing!

 

Leadership: A look at the the Louisville basketball team captain

A nice, not very long, article about Luke Hancock. If you saaw the video of Kevin Ware's broken leg, you'd have to notice that Hancock was immediately beside him, whil most everyone else was cringing. 

Louisville goes for the college basketball national championship Monday night.

For Louisville, a Leader Steps Forward

Except Luke Hancock. While everyone else was looking away or turning away, Hancock was going in the other direction. Hancock was the only player who immediately ran toward Ware after he crumpled, and he knelt beside his teammate and began praying with him, patting Ware’s chest over and over. He knew Ware was scared, he would say later, and he did not want his teammate to be alone.

This display of humanity is emblematic of a larger point about Louisville’s team. Hancock, a junior, transferred from George Mason in 2011 and was named a team captain before he ever played a game for Louisville — a development that speaks both to Hancock’s character and, perhaps even more, to that of his teammates, who saw his motivation and accepted him as a leader despite barely knowing him.

 Why? Now, a season of games later, they say they could simply see what everyone else saw when Ware was writhing on the court and Hancock ignored the screams and gasps and groans to kneel beside him. It is why the Louisville players mobbed him in celebration after Hancock scored 20 points during the Cardinals’ Final Four victory over Wichita State here Saturday.

Hancock is not the Cardinals’ most talented player (that is guard Russ Smith). And he is not their best-known player (that is surely Ware, who spent the last week doing a variety of interviews, including one on David Letterman’s talk show where he read the Top 10 list). But despite having played just one season for the Cardinals, Hancock is a significant piece of Louisville’s soul.

 “He showed his leadership out there tonight,” guard Peyton Siva said after Saturday’s victory. “He showed his leadership when Kevin got injured. He’s an all-around great player and person. Tonight, he showed the world what he’s capable of doing.”

******

Leadership in sports often comes with murky motivations, but Hancock’s drive — it is the only way he knows how to act, he has said — is genuine. Yes, he arrived at Louisville with a track record, having famously hit the game-winning 3-pointer for George Mason in a 2011 N.C.A.A. tournament victory over Villanova, but his worth has always been about more than that.

 It is also his presence, his teammates say. His willingness to push and prod and demand. His calm during a time of crisis, as when he dropped next to Ware — a player he used to compete with for playing time — and tried to convince his teammate that everything would be O.K.

John Sterling's new home run calls for new Yankees

"It's a Nuke from Yuke"

YIKES!

Washington Post - NRA current efforts vs. gun contral

The NRA adapts the same tactics (of course) of othe lobbying groups (like Planned Parenthood and their ilk): never compromise, attack anyone who isn't completely in the tank with you, no easonability. ...

NRA tactics erode post-Newtown support for gun-control measures

New tax idea - go after the retirment accounts of wealthy people

Wealthy as defined by ... the government. And "reasonable levels of retirment savings" also defined by the feds.

Obama Budget to take Aim at Wealthy IRA's

The senior administration official said that wealthy taxpayers can currently “accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”

 

Kevin Ware (broken leg) on Letterman - very funny!

Yeah the guy with the terrible leg injury in the basketball game.

If he can't play ball again, he has a future as a comedic straight man.

 

On a Midnight Run looking south on Park Ave., from St. Bart's

Last night, Joe and I out on a Midnight Run (dropping off supplies tot he homeless), with about seven other people from Croton in three vans. St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church  at 51st and Park is currently a big stop for Midnight Runs, with lots of street people hanging out there. 

I've been meaning for awhile on Midnight Runs to get this night view from in front of St. Bart's looking south down Park St.. Of course no pictures of Midnight Run recipients.

Taken with my android phone (can't remember the model) - OK shots, nothing brilliant.

And a little zoom -

Vatican communication problem ...

Pointed out to me by my friend Joe

Democrats and same sex marriage

I guess they all "evolved". Hillary is exceptionally eloquent.

Rugby: Tokyo 7's - big upset in USA vs. Fiji

Last weekend, last play of the game!

 

Because of sequester, cancer clinics not treating some medicare patients

UPDATE: Rush limbaugh talking about this - "Republicans causing cancer patients to die ... as media line"

From the Washington Post this morning. 

Cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Blame the sequester.

Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially.

Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.

“If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. “The drugs we’re going to lose money on we’re not going to administer right now.”

After an emergency meeting Tuesday, Vacirca’s clinics decided that they would no longer see one-third of their 16,000 Medicare patients.

******

Non-profit hospitals will likely have an easier time bearing the brunt of the sequester cuts. A federal program known as 340B requires pharmaceutical companies to give double-digit discounts to hospitals that treat low-income and uninsured patients.

Eastern Connecticut Health Network began preparing for additional volume after a local oncology practice sent out notice that it would stop seeing certain cancer patients.

“What we’re trying to do in the hospital is prepare for this,” ECHN spokesman Eric Berthel said. “We’re making sure we have access to the pharmaceutical companies and that we have appropriate staff on hand. We’re hoping the oncology practice will be successful in renegotiating this. It’s so fresh, so we’re pretty unsure.”

Some cancer clinics are counting on the federal government to provide relief, and continuing to see patients they expect to lose money on.

“We’re hoping that something will change, as legislators see the impact of this,” Ralph Boccia, director of the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders in Bethesda, Md., said. “I don’t think we could keep going, without a change, for more than a couple of months.”

An analysis prepared by his clinic estimates that, if the full 2 percent cut takes effect, between 50 and 70 percent of the drugs it administers would become money losers.

Hit the link  - a very revealing article about the real world of medical economics.

Johnny Carson as a politician -- taking a polygraph test

Sent to me by my brother Jim - funny!

 

Democrat syncophant Joe Klein suddenly discovers Obamacare is a mess

The Time Magazine political correspondent and a man who couldn't be more in the tank for the Democrat Party (Wrong - Chris Matthews is just as much in the tank).

From the Time magazine website.

Obamacare Incompetence

Let me try to understand this: The key incentive for small businesses to support Obamacare was that they would be able to shop for the best deals in health care super-stores—called exchanges. The Administration has had 3 years to set up these exchanges. It has failed to do so.

This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it’s not the Administration’s fault. It’s the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning? There certainly are models, after all—the federal government’s own health benefits plan (FEHBP) operates markets that exist in all 50 states. So does Medicare Advantage. But now, the Obama Administration has announced that it won’t have the exchanges ready in time, that small businesses will be offered one choice for the time being—for a year, at least. No doubt, small business owners will be skeptical of the Obama Administration’s belief in the efficacy of the market system to produce lower prices through competition. That was supposed to be the point of this plan.

There's more if you hit the link. Klein is not stupid, but he was blinded by his insane party loyalty.

Tim - a new PR in the shot put

At Iona meet; 39'2" on April 1st. His previous best during the indoor season was 38'3.25", so a big increase - almost 11 inches. I wasn't at the meet; Brigid did the video.

 

NY Post columnist on the Cuomo abortion expansion Bill

Actually it's not his specific Bill, he is just giving it his Blessing.

A large segment of the public may support broadly Roe and a woman’s right to choose — but these changes are another matter. A recent Chiaroscuro Foundation poll found that women and independent voters rejected these types of proposals by very wide margins.

For example, 82 percent of New Yorkers, including 79 percent of
pro-choice New Yorkers, oppose changing the law to prevent prosecution
for the homicide of an almost-born baby. And 79 percent of women oppose
changing the law so that someone other than a doctor can perform
surgical abortions.

Can you live on 2.8%?

The new normal? I don't know.

The idea being that you can only draw down 2.8% of your money in retirement, if you want it to last.

Any more than that and you risk running down your principal.

Anyway, below is a quasi-academic column from a website named seeking alpha (alpha in investment management parlance refers to value-added from advisors, over and above what you should be earning based on modern portfolio theory (MPT) and the "efficient frontier".

"The 4% Rule is Dead ..."

 

Kevin Ware out of hospital and back to Louisville already

Ware, the basketball player with the grim broken leg injury in the game on Sunday. Surgery and then out of the hospital in less than 48 hours.

 

Rugby: Tokyo 7's, Day two and finals

Amazing New York political shenanigans; bunch of arrests

Bizarro World.

An effort to rig the NY City Mayor's race

“Today’s charges demonstrate, once again, that a show-me-the-money culture seems to pervade every level of New York government. The complaint describes an unappetizing smorgasbord of graft and greed involving six officials who together built a corridor of corruption stretching from Queens and the Bronx to Rockland County and all the way up to Albany itself, " US Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

"As alleged, Senator Malcolm Smith tried to bribe his way to a shot at Gracie Mansion – Smith drew up the game plan and Councilman Halloran essentially quarterbacked that drive by finding party chairmen who were wide open to receiving bribes. After the string of public corruption scandals that we have brought to light, many may rightly resign themselves to the sad truth that perhaps the most powerful special interest in politics is self-interest.

People believing in Jesus' Resurrection shows large drop

64% believe Jesus rose from the dead, down ffom 77% in one year! An amazing drop for one year.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 64% of American Adults believe Jesus rose from the dead, while 19% reject the central Christian tenet of the Resurrection. Seventeen percent (17%) are not sure.

The large drop is pointed out here -

Percent of Americans Believing in the Resurrection Drops To 64% From 77% Last Easter

So one in eight Americans went from believing to not believing - if you believe the polling.

 

NY Times mischaracterizes Easter as "his Resurrection into Heaven"

The Newspaper of record.

But they did correct it.

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.

Rugby: Tokyo 7's, Day one opening matches

David Stockman NY Times op ed

Remember Stockman? He was a whiz kid of the Reagan era - his budget director from '81 to '85.

The op ed/essay is very pessimistic, and probably at least partially right. I bolded a paragraph which i think we'll certainly see in the next two - three years.  Meanwhile NYT columnist Krugman dismissess it all by saying Stockman is a cranky old man.

State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

******

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

******

Less than 5 percent of the $800 billion Obama stimulus went to the truly needy for food stamps, earned-income tax credits and other forms of poverty relief. The preponderant share ended up in money dumps to state and local governments, pork-barrel infrastructure projects, business tax loopholes and indiscriminate middle-class tax cuts. The Democratic Keynesians, as intellectually bankrupt as their Republican counterparts (though less hypocritical), had no solution beyond handing out borrowed money to consumers, hoping they would buy a lawn mower, a flat-screen TV or, at least, dinner at Red Lobster.

But even Mr. Obama’s hopelessly glib policies could not match the audacity of the Fed, which dropped interest rates to zero and then digitally printed new money at the astounding rate of $600 million per hour. Fast-money speculators have been “purchasing” giant piles of Treasury debt and mortgage-backed securities, almost entirely by using short-term overnight money borrowed at essentially zero cost, thanks to the Fed. Uncle Ben has lined their pockets.

If and when the Fed — which now promises to get unemployment below 6.5 percent as long as inflation doesn’t exceed 2.5 percent — even hints at shrinking its balance sheet, it will elicit a tidal wave of sell orders, because even a modest drop in bond prices would destroy the arbitrageurs’ profits. Notwithstanding Mr. Bernanke’s assurances about eventually, gradually making a smooth exit, the Fed is domiciled in a monetary prison of its own making.

******

These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.

And there's more at the end - as he outlines in the last four paragraphs what he thinks needs doing. The last line of his essay is:

If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.

 

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