He swam the 200 Back which is not his best event, but nonetheless it was great to see him in person.  The race was fantastic as 5 of the top 6 time holders for the event were in the pool at the same time.  Ryan Lochte won the race with Aaron Peirsol coming in second.  Phelps finished 4th.

You can view the introductions here and the race here.

The night got even better when towards the conclusion of the event, the Belle-of-the-Ball encouraged us to hang out by the swimmer’s entrance and sure enough after about an hours wait-I spotted him.

He was very nice and autographed all 3 our my kids’ parkas and thanked us for coming out.  I don’t want to admit that I was starstruck, but it is not everyday that you meet the world’s greatest at anything-but on Saturday that is exactly what happened.

Dr. Taleb is the author of the amazing Black Swan and is highly critical of the federal deficit.

In a recent interview found at moneynews.com, Dr. Taleb compares the federal deficit to a giant Ponzi scheme, and one that is getting away from the politicians.  He goes on, “And what broke con artist (Bernard) Madoff is going to break governments.”

“They need to find new suckers all the time. And unfortunately the world has run out of suckers.”  Nicely stated Dr. Taleb, I couldn’t agree more.

The premise of the book really comes down to a return to the state’s rights that the founding fathers of our nation and Constitution had in mind.  This is explicitly stated in the 10th Amendment of our Bill of Rights:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Dr. Woods has done his homework and provided copious examples from both the past and present on how state’s rights do in fact work to provide a barrier from the overreaching tyranny of the federal government.  From the past we learn of the the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions against the Alien and Sedition Acts signed into law by then President John Adams.  But even present day examples exist, my favorite being California’s stand against the federal government in regards to Medical Marijuana.

My guess is we are about to see the 10th Amendment  again in the near future.  Earlier this week as a matter of fact we read, “a Massachusetts judge struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as solely between a man and woman, on Tenth Amendment grounds.”  This issue will certainly come up again as Obamacare becomes closer and closer to taking effect.

The Daily Caller has a nice write-up today in regards to the 10th Amendment and how it is playing out with various political groups.

Imagine that, God created nature with a way of breaking up oil naturally.

And why should I?

Did the police kill this man?

What about their treatment of this girl?  Her Crime? Cerebral Palsy…

Society is really backwards on it’s understanding of laws, crime, police, and punishment.  There is a claim that we are a Judeo-Christian society, but I just don’t see it playing out.  A war on drugs?  I am not sure that drug use is even a sin…but “Christians” want a war on the stuff?  Really?  Having 3 wives is criminal?  Stupid yes.  But criminal?  Paying a girl for sex is criminal?  Degrading sure.  Criminal…nope.

So what about the punishment of individuals that abuse the power given to them by the very people they assault?  My guess is when Christians should be “dancing upon injustice” they will hide behind Romans 13 and claim that it is a hard job.

Bullcrap!

Juvenal once stated, “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?” or who will watch the watchers?

Written as an allegory about island dwellers that use fish for currency, the book explains how simple economics is and should be and that much of the confusion regarding the subject of economics is placed there intentionally by the elitists that don’t want the masses to get what they are doing.

The book is humorous at points and Schiff does a clever job of altering the names of real players in our nation’s economic history to expose the role that they each played.  Historical figures such as FDR, Alan Greenspan, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all make an appearance on the island.  Peter Schiff writes himself into the story as a guest on Larry Kudlow’s show sounding a clarion call that the no-holds-barred consumption mentality is over.

The book does an excellent job of exposing Keynsianism as a fraud and proving that the Austrian School of Economics is a much better approach to handling both recessions and depressions.  In addition, the book explains what capital is, how trade works and benefits an economy, and how government interference is a plague to any free-market economy.

Coincidence that I wake up to news that the President’s national debt commission is publicly announcing that our nation’s debt (over 14 trillion by next year; or about $47,000 for every RESIDENT) is “like cancer” and will “destroy the country from within.”

But I already knew that, after all, I had just completed Peter Schiff’s new book (Spoiler Alert) and that is exactly how it ends.

On her way to the Supreme Court

It is pretty clear that Sen. Coburn is referring to the Health Care law that passed earlier this year and I have no doubt that the battle over the constitutionality of that law will eventually be decided by the Supreme Court.

It seems rather pathetic to me that she is not able to stand on her principles and announce that she does believe that government has the authority to tell me what I have to purchase and reductio ad absurdum leads right to them telling me what I can and cannot eat.

From the piece we learn, “On Livadia’s main floor, one feels no melancholy, only anger. There, in February, 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt, Britain’s Winston Churchill, and Soviet ruler Josef Stalin met to decide postwar Europe’s future.  In modern history’s greatest betrayal, the Allied war leaders handed half of Europe to Soviet rule, betraying tens of millions of its people to the gulag, dictatorship, and confiscation of all their property.”

I bring this up because it really bothers me how FDR is regularly regarded as a great president.  Yet history seems, day after day, to confirm the exact opposite.  Not only was he not a great president, he may quite frankly have been an evil president.

If it’s not his Keynsian New Deal or tyrannical taxation or the incarceration of 70,000 Japanese then maybe it’s his back room deals with genocidal maniacs…

Margolis goes on, “Yalta was a shameful, one-sided sellout of half the European continent. The left-leaning, likely senile Roosevelt kept hailing Stalin, who had murdered over 20 million people, ‘our Uncle Joe’.”

Great.

It seems to me that FDR’s actions in Yalta lead directly to the ensuing Cold War, yet our current King and so many like him continue to hail FDR as a hero.

At least he did not drop atomic bombs on civilians; his vice-president and successor would do that…

Paul Krugman is right in the fact that “we are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression”.  So I am not concerned with his conclusion as much as I am concerned with his solution.

Government needs to spend more money?

Government needs to get more involved in correcting this mess?

Deflation is of all things the thing to be feared most?

And they gave him a Noble prize for this nonsense.

The fact is there have been other economic depressions in our nations history, other than the 2 that Mr. Krugman brings up.  We actually had a depression in 1920-1921 albeit short-lived.  According to the Austrian School of Economic Thought, the depression was needed for market correction and therefore was a good thing in that it liquidated malinvestments left over from WWI.  What Keynsians like Krugman fail to recognize is that it is government intervention that in fact prolongs the depression i.e. FDR’s New Deal.

If you simply allow the free-market to correct itself as President Harding did in the 1920 depression, then the depression will end quickly and recovery will begin sooner.

I just don’t see Krugman, or Obama for that matter, getting the point and letting the free-market do what it needs to do.

I can assure you that Krugman’s “hair of the dog” spending treatment will only delay what the market needs to do and will in fact make it that much worse when the day of reckoning arrives.

Scary times.

The internet has been a wonderful tool for exposing the evil and malice that so much of our nation’s police force displays day in and day out.

Granny and her grandson are now suing the tyrants that tasered the 86 year-old disable woman.

Pigs.