JoshWilson.org

During the Senate discussions about the impending bailout of the banking system, Ron Paul questioned Bernanke’s authority to create money to purchase bad debt and take a gamble that they can get rid of it later. Bernanke’s response was that the Congress “is given the authority to coin money, and to regulate its value, and they delgated that to us [the Federal Reserve].” (in this video, at the 6:20 mark) Bernanke’s right, but he’s also very, very wrong. Here’s why. Read more»

via Wise Bread

Here’s the gist of it (well, a summary of a summary) - Ron Laszewski has created an economic model based on the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ definition of Peak Debt. When given data from 1925, when peak debt was last reached, Laszewski’s model correctly predicted the crash of 1929 and the subsequence decade long Great Depression. Bad news folks - we hit our peak debt in 2005. It seems to suggest that 2009 will be particularly rough, and the year following even worse.

Here’s my suggestion: don’t take on any more debt, pay off all the debt you can, and figure out how to cut your expenses to the bone. It’ll be much easier if you get to make those decisions under controlled circumstances than have them forced on you later.

Wise Bread is a great source to help get your finances under control.

I may be mentioning this fine woman in the future, but there’s a great interview with Naomi Wolf over at Democracy Now! about her book “The End of America.” In short, in the book she details the ten steps that are common in all downfalls of democracies.

Pay attention.

This is part of a series of extremely simple articles to help you create margins in your life. They are based on Jay Pathak’s sermons on the same topic. The first article is called “Making Room for Life.“

“Why don’t I have enough time?” It’s a question I ask myself on a regular basis. You see, I’m a bachelor. I’ve got no real commitments or responsibilities besides taking care of myself. Pretty easy life, really. But I always feel that I’m stretched and slammed to the max. I’m sure you feel the same way, probably right now. The weird thing is that everybody seems to feel the same way. It doesn’t matter if you’re in high school or college, single or dating, engaged or married, have ten kids or no kids, work at Starbucks or manage an international corporation. But it’s a trick we play on ourselves. You see, we all have the same amount of time in a day. Everybody gets twenty-four hours. Everybody gets seven days in a week. So the real question isn’t “Why don’t I have enough time?”

The question that actually matters is “Where am I spending my time?”

It’s really hard to adjust things until you know that something needs adjustment. If you want to figure out why you don’t have enough time, start tracking it. Everybody gets 168 hours in a week. Most people work forty hours a week, and scientists say that your slowly killing yourself if you get less than seven hours of sleep a night, so we’ll knock out another fifty hours for that. That leaves you with fifty-eight hours. Track it - that’s the first step.

I’ve been struggling for some time trying to decide how best to tackle politics in my writing. So far I’ve been stumped. It seems that the best way to get noticed, or to at least be considered a legitimate source of commentary (if there is such a thing in the blogosphere) is to cover everything under the sun. I’d call this the “Shotgun Approach.” This can be a really good way to do things, so long as you’re interested in buying into the 24/7 news cycle and churning out as many articles as possible. There’s no need to worry about a slow news day because you can always find something to write about even if you have to make it up. Observe Rush Limbaugh. Or CNN. Or Mises.org. Or, well, almost anyone.

Frankly, I find the news cycle sort of boring and unhelpful. I’m sure you do too. You have way too much garbage to sift through as it is. So, I’ll be taking the other extreme - the “Sniper Approach.” I’ve got a sinking suspicion that most of the problems we face are only complex because they’re made that way on purpose. We’re drinking from the firehose because someone pointed it at us. So let’s turn it off. Let’s get to the core of the issues, cut through the veil of confusion, and start talk about things you can actually understand. That’s it.

via Coudal.com.  Article is over at The Guardian.

via AdFreak

Justin Theroux, director of Rain of Madness (the fake documentary about the making of a fake movie of a movie), says they have enough footage to make a real documentary about the making of the fake documentary about the making of the movie about the making of a movie.

What? My head hurts…