"Someone like you"

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This woman has incredible pipes. Here's Adele at the 2011 Brit awards...

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On the failure of "the invisible hand" to influence our financial sector

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In Alan Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence , one of the issues he explores is the failure of economic populism in Latin America. Here are his thoughts: " The dictionary defines 'populism' as a political philosophy that supports the rights and power of the people, usually in opposition to a privileged elite. I see economic populism as a response by an impoverished populace to a failing society, one characterized by an economic elite who are perceived as oppressors. Under economic populism, the government accedes to the demands of the people, with little regard for either individual rights or the economic realities of how the wealth of a nation is increased or even sustained." So in Greenspan's view as a self-described Libertarian Republican, economic populism comes to life in "failing societies" that have significant income inequality and are dominated by an economic elite. And in Greenspan's mind, it is not the government that can make t...
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Niall Ferguson: the Ann Coulter of Harvard

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Niall Ferguson has a post in the Daily Beast in which he lambasts the Occupy Wall Streeters for blaming "big business" for our ills, rather than the real culprits, which (in his mind) are the Baby Boomers. For Ferguson, a Harvard professor, it's easier to point a finger at a generation, rather than at the highly compensated Ivy League grads on Wall Street, whose fiscally unsound business practices dragged our economy into a sewer. Here's Ferguson, on the protestors: "Yet if I were a young American today, occupying Wall St. would not be my objective. Just reflect for a minute on the unbridled economic mayhem that would ensue if the protesters actually succeeded. The headline “Goldman Sachs Under Control of Hip Teenage Revolutionaries” would be the last straw for an already fragile economic recovery." Ferguson feels the protesters need to shift attention away from Wall Street and focus on Boomers - the source of our ills today is the Boomers' pr...
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"Good-bye to all that..."

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Harry Patch died last week in England. It was the expected outcome for a man of 111. But it is a notable death because with Harry Patch goes the last living memory of trench warfare experienced nearly a century ago during The Great War - known now as World War 1. This story on CNN.com is a wonderful summary of Patch's life. He was a plumber before and after his stint in the trenches. He saw some of the worst warfare man has ever experienced: "He fought and was seriously wounded in Ypres, Belgium, in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, in which 70,000 of his fellow soldiers died -- including three of his close friends." That's a placid little sentence to describe the slaughter of 70,000 men. A horror Patch refused to talk about until he turned 100 years old. Here's a YouTube video that shows some photos and film footage from the Battle of Passchendaele: You can hear the survivor's voice in this video shot at Passchendaele about two years ag...
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