E. Alexandria's profileE. Alexandria's spacePhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
E. Alexandria's space |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
December 02 UpdateSo I've been a bit busy. There was an election that we lost. A stock market crash we all saw coming and couldn't stop. A car accident that almost killed one of my classmates. A 60-degree day on December 1st. Everything is falling apart, and all I can think about is my final exams. One of my freinds had a Facebook status of "What is happening in the world?" And I just couldn't help myself from making a snotty remark about worrying about things after the window of opportunity to fix it is closed.
Voting for freebies and handouts is very, very bad because it's unsustainable and expensive and diminishes the value of the individual's responsibility to themselves.
I can't let go of the idea that every decision a person makes matters. A butterfly flaps its wings in Shanghai and India gets a tsunami and all that... Not making a decision is making a decision -- it's a dynamic, constantly moving earth and choosing to stay still changes things just as much as taking action. Your vote or lack thereof matters. Look at Al Franken, suing his campaign into the ground. Yes it was close. But he lost. Those votes mattered.
People voted, allegedly, for "change they can beleive in." I had a joke about change we hope we can beleive in, but it's lost all its humor for me. We voted for this. We voted for bombs in India. We voted for bailouts of private industry. We voted for Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and Joe Biden as our second-in-command.
I'm not saying the other side was "better" -- God knows I had my beefs with McCain and he ran a tragi-comic campaign. I'll be surprised if anyone under 40 votes for a Republican in two years because it was such a joke, such a tease. People want a candidate they can feel good about supporting, someone they don't need to apologize for. But I've got to think that having different essential philosophies on national security and defense, at the very least, would have had a different impact on opinions abroad, maybe saved some lives.
I would never say that it's an American politician's fault that terrorists committed terrorist acts. That doesn't jive with my whole "personal-responsibility" mantra: a person chooses to act or omit all of the things they do every day. If you bomb a building, it's your own d*mn fault, not anyone else's. But creating an environment where our enemies feel encouraged, optimistic, and free to act boldly to do damage is something that can be done at home. We should have crushed them in 2001, now we will have this problem for decades. We are regressing in our own self-defense.
So don't come crying to me when it all goes to hell. You acted. You got your instant gratification, your little pound of the flesh of history, your "victory."
Let's see if anything changes, for the BETTER. Because the "change" I "believe in" right now is something out of Atlas Shrugged, and I don't like it. October 06 Grassroots Equestrian Action!For Immediate Release
Thursday, August 28, 2008
American Horse Council Announces Opportunity for USDF MembersSaddle Up for the Congressional Cavalry Program! October 02 We’re like the blonde who returned the scarf because it was too tight.This is absolutely worth your time to walk through. A must, really. The language is simple, the concepts profound and timely, and it's just required reading for anyone who wants to propose a solution to anything.
September 30 No one expects the Spanish InquisitionOK, so the stock market plunged almost 7% yesterday. My personal investments lost more than 10% on average. Why is investor confidence low?
First, remember that most of the big players on Wall Street are just that: big players! They are not you and me or even our employers' 401(k) managers. Big players use BIG MONEY -- millions and billions of dollars at their discretion, so that if they are in a bad mood, we ALL have a bad day.
Big player "confidence" is low perhaps because they are pouting, perhaps because they are genuinely afraid that the wading pool is drying up. For 15 years, investment has been expanding and people have been making money just by moving money. Billions of dollars move around, giving comissions to the movers without creating anything.
Now, those huge chunks of money have gotten substantially smaller, granting smaller commissions to the movers of the money. They are not protecting investors, they are protecting themselves. Taking a breather, letting the market take a correction is a natural part of the cycle. The worst thing we could do now is freeze the market by fixing prices or costs.
The human reaction to bad news is caution. When the news becomes good again, the market will pick up. The money will come back. A smart investor close to retirement is not saturated in volatile stocks, and therefore should not be hard-hit by this. If they are, the same principle of caveat emptor should apply as much to the small investors as to the big ones.
This industry got out of control due to lack of transparency. The fact that bad mortages (or mortages at all, in some cases) got tied into stock investments came as a surprise to many investors. That's incorrect. People need to know what they are buying so that they estimate how much risk they are assuming. If they are ignorant of the risk, it's morally wrong to hold them liable for their losses -- that's called fraud and it's usually a felony. So who to blame for triggering this? Is it the people selling the badly-packaged bad debts? The investors buying them without insisting on due diligence?
Someone close to the family was involved in this large-scale mingling of debt obligations on behalf of an international banking interest. This person was a safeguard, putting a finger in the dyke of inappropriate trades and poor disclosure of companies bought and sold. This person worked for a bank not yet embroiled in failure, so presumably they are doing their job adequately, but they warned us; more telling, they left the country about a year and a half ago, taking their personal investments with them.
This might change everything, but that might not be bad. People getting something for nothing or, worse, committing fraud and stealing from people not in on the "joke" is not a healthy market, even if it's going up. It's better for everyone in the long run to let those irresponsible settle up thier gambling debts, hit bottom, and never gamble again. September 25 PETA admits it wants to turn humans into livestockhttp://www.wnbc.com/news/17539627/detail.html WOW! They've finally done it!! PETA has solicited that ice cream manufacturer Ben & Jerry's, no right-wing conspiracy member besides, begin purchasing HUMAN BREAST MILK for manufacturing their products. Luckily for western civilization, Ben & Jerry's declined, claiming that it beleived a mother's milk is best reserved for her children. I'm frankly releived that this has finally come out. PETA's relentless attack on human civil rights was cloaked behind their banner of "animal rights" for too long, and it's about time that they tipped their hand. First off, I hardly think that selling breast milk is ultimately much different from selling organs. Objectifying women by literally turning them in to dairy animals is a grotesque thought, and to claim to do it for the sake of "the cows" is beyond the pale. The logical extension is much like the sex-slave trade, where women are used for their bodies and discarded like animals. Humans are not prone to producing large volumes of milk, especially when they nurse their children past the first year. The lack of efficiency alone would be a commercial prohibition to the success of this project. We also have no idea what medical consequences these women would be subjected to, and PETA makes no presumption of caring about that. This is a huge step in boldness to advance PETA's radical agenda of de-evolving human civilization. If we place domestic animals above humans in our list of priorities, we abandon the benefits of civilization: claiming that people are no better than animals opens us up to abandoning law, rights, and any structure established so far. Is this what PETA wants? I beleive it is. I beleive they want to bring our society back to pre-Bronze Age tribalism, forgoing not only meat but modern convinience. I'm broadly opposed on principle to anyone who thinks my rights are worth less than their own (let alone that of animals), but this attack on the actual bodies of human beings is fighting words. PETA will lose support for thier kooky, unsupportable proposition. |
where do I get my ideas?
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
