Posted by Richard on January 28, 2012
Home before midnight, safe and sound. And surprisingly sober. But it was fun, except for one thing. If you live in the Denver metro area, I have some advice for you: don’t go to Merle’s on a Saturday night around 6:30 or 7. Unless you enjoy standing around for an hour waiting for your table.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: blogger bash, colorado, denver, rocky mountain blogger bash | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on January 28, 2012
San Francisco’s new sheriff, Ross Mirkarimi, helped found the Green Party of California, worked for Ralph Nader in 2000, and was a strident advocate of gun control. Even MSNBC described him as “fiercely liberal –even in the context of progressive San Francisco.” Before being elected sheriff, he served for seven years on the Board of Supervisors, where he worked hard to strengthen San Francisco’s already-stringent gun control laws.
Recently, Mirkarimi was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence battery, child endangerment, and “dissuading a witness” (Is that like intimidating a witness, but more polite? Or just more politically connected?) for an incident involving his wife. Since the initial charges, two former girlfriends have come forward alleging that he abused them, too. And it’s been reported that Mirkarimi has a bad temper and tyrannizes his staff.
As a result of the arrest, and to the surprise of many, he was forced to surrender three handguns that he owns. According to CBS San Francisco, “Mirkarimi would not comment about any aspect of his gun ownership, where he kept the weapons or in what manner the firearms were stored.” That’s interesting because one of the gun control laws he helped strengthen last year mandates that all guns be securely locked up (and unavailable for self-defense).
David Cordrea, while not exactly sympathetic to Mirkarimi’s plight, pointed out the injustice of the laws Mirkarimi and his ilk have long supported, and which are now applied to him:
“If Mirkarimi were convicted on the domestic violence charge, he would not be able to carry a gun as sheriff,” reporter Joshua Sabatini claims.
True, but it would entail more than that. If convicted, “thanks” to the infamous Lautenberg Amendment, he would be a prohibited person under federal law, forbidden not only to carry a gun, but to own or even touch one—forever.
And a protective order is enough to disenfranchise him from his fundamental right to keep and bear arms prior to being convicted of anything.
…
But even if convicted, a prohibition of a fundamental natural right over a misdemeanor is overkill. …
CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb was less measured:
“Mirkarimi’s case presents a massive irony,” Gottlieb observed. “Here’s a man who has supported restrictive gun control measures while on the Board of Supervisors, and yet he had three handguns. He just was elected sheriff, and now he’s accused of a crime that, if he is convicted, could cost him his gun rights for the rest of his life under federal law.
“Perhaps Mirkarimi’s biggest problem is that he is now exposed as a double-standard elitist,” he continued. “News reports about this case over the past few days suggest that he may also have an anger-management problem.”
…“Someone who has been legally disarmed over a criminal charge,” he concluded, “should not be permitted to serve as a chief law enforcement officer. Someone like Mirkarimi, who has done whatever he could to discourage others from owning firearms, should admit his world-class hypocrisy and walk away from the public arena.”
Admit his hypocrisy? I’m not holding my breath. But I look forward to hearing him argue that he can continue to fulfill the duties of sheriff without so much as touching a gun.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: california, firearms, gun control, hypocrisy, leftists | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on January 28, 2012
If you’re not concerned about inflation, a set of graphs at The Big Picture may change your mind. They show the balance sheets of the world’s eight largest central banks: the European Central Bank (ECB), the Federal Reserve (Fed), the Bank of Japan (BoJ), the Bank of England (BoE), the Bundesbank (Germany), the Banque de France, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB). They were posted by James Bianco of Bianco Research, who summed up the information succinctly in the first sentence of his post:
The degree to which central banks around the world are printing money is unprecedented.
…
The combined size of these eight central banks’ balance sheets has almost tripled in the last six years from $5.42 trillion to more than $15 trillion and is still on the rise!
…
Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the eight central bank balance sheets were less than 15% the size of world stock markets and falling. In the immediate aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ failure, these eight central bank balance sheets swelled to 37% the capitalization of the world stock market. But keep in mind that the late 2008/early 2009 peak was due to collapsing stock market values combined with balance sheet expansion via “lender of last resort” loans.
Recently, the eight central bank balance sheets have spiked back to 33% of world stock market capitalization. This has come about not by lender of last resort loans, but rather by QE expansion (buying bonds with “printed money“) even faster than world stock markets are rising.
So how long can these eight helicopters keep dropping trillions of dollars in newly printed money all over the world before we need a wheelbarrow-full to buy a few days’ groceries? No one knows. But if ever there was an argument for fleeing to hard assets (gold, silver, platinum, …), these charts are it. Sometime down the road, gold at $1700 per ounce is going to look like a bargain.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: economy, gold, inflation | Leave a Comment »
