JustThinking.us

Why not?

It was the last out.

The kid got the next one too.

Just say, "The game ended here!

The next at bat, didn't happen".

Everyone in the world knows the Ump blew it.

Fix it!

Jim Joyce will thank you.

Hell, the last thing on this earth that guy needs is to have to live the rest of his life having screwed up a PERFECT GAME.

Fix it!

Let it collect the dust of baseball history as a perfect game, rather than have it stand out, for as long as there is baseball, as the game Armando Galarraga got "Joyced".

Then call the replay rule we'll have next year "The Galarraga Rule".

This one has been going around for a while within a number of different presentations.

Having seen it again this PM at Richard Russell's Dow Theory Letter, and lacking the energy to work up any of the other ideas I have percolating, I decided to grab it.

As the great Vince Lombardi almost said,

"Fatigue makes mooches of us all."

Our elected officials are charged with dealing with our national deficit.

Now measured in the TRILLIONS of dollars.

Very few elite mathematicians are able to comprehend the impact of TWELVE ZEROS.

Instead of DOLLARS, let us imagine SECONDS of time:

ONE MILLION -------- 1,000,000 Seconds. ------ 1.65 WEEKS

ONE BILLION -------- 1,000,000,000 Seconds. ------ 31 YEARS, 8 MONTHS, 15 DAYS

ONE TRILLION ------ 1,000,000,000,000 Seconds. ----- 31,710 YEARS !!!

The Hungry Beast strikes again. 

It seems that Doug Casey has been sharing a station on the same wavelength with Nicholas Kristoff, as he writes for Whiskey and Gunpowder in an op-ed titled Charity and the Real Root of Poverty,

And as if that weren't quite enough for one day's work, Mr. Casey continues,

Spending my entire Memorial Day weekend in Toledo, already had me a little crabby.

Then I picked up the Blade, where I stumbled across the following op-ed.

I'm telling you upfront, this one's gonna irritate you in a big way.

You need to read it anyway.

Click anywhere below for the entire piece.

Helping the world's poor means facing uncomfortable truths
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

MONT-BELO, Congo Republic

There's an ugly secret of global poverty, rarely acknowledged by aid groups or United Nations reports.

It's a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating, and ubiquitous.

It's that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes, and prostitutes, their children's prospects would be transformed.

I'll be gone for the weekend and will probably not be posting before Tuesday.

In celebration of the beginning of summer, I posted a very nice Wailers vid.

I also rearranged the categories some.

If you're trapped inside and in the mood for some tunes, all the music is now kept within the "Nothing To Do With Anything" category.

Enjoy.

Have a good weekend.

And remember .....

Johnny Nash had the international hit, but for my money, the great version of the Bob Marley composition Stir It Up was done by The Wailers.

And the best version of The Wailers was this one.

Here's Bob Marley and Peter Tosh on guitars, Bunny Wailer on percussion, Carlton and Aston "Family Man" Barrett on drums and bass respectively.

I'm thinking that's Earl Lindo playing keyboards, but I'm not sure.

From "The Old Grey Whistle Test" in 1973.

Stir It Up. 

As an aside, Aston Barrett is known as family man because ...... 

Fred on Everything is my new favorite site.

I can sit here and read and read and read and read, agree with much of it, and never once have my blood pressure go through the roof.

Most of the time, the more I agree with a guy, the more I just want to go out and throttle some other guy.

Not so much with Fred.

Way, double highly recommended.

Click anywhere an the quote below for the piece from which it was taken.

Now there's some thinkin!

The Wall Street Journal's "Best Of The Web Today" is almost always my first stop of the day.

If I were in public life, I'd employ a fact checker to filter every thought in my head before it fell out of my mouth, purely out of fear from James Taranto et. al.

I believe we now have more than enough evidence with regards to Mr. Frank to place him in our "Pantheon of Liars" and forever refer to him as ... (drum roll please)

"Lying Barney Frank".

"We have, I think, an excessive degree of concern right now about homeownership and its role in the economy.

Obviously, speculation is never a good thing.

But those who argue that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to me to be missing a very important point.

Unlike previous examples we have had, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity--homeownership, homes -- where there is not the degree of leverage that we've seen elsewhere.

This is not the dot-com situation.

We had problems with people having invested in business plans for which there was no reality, people building fiberoptic cable for which there was no need.

Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level, but you're not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble.

And so those of us on our committee in particular will continue to push for homeownership."

Rep. Barney Frank, June 27, 2005

"One of my biggest differences with the Bush administration, and even with the Clinton administration, was that they overdid that.

I have always been critical of this effort to equate a decent home with homeownership.

I think we should have been doing more to provide rental housing.

My efforts have been to try and get affordable rental housing.

I was very much in disagreement with this push into home ownership, and I think the federal government should not be artificially doing that."

Rep. Barney Frank, "Power Lunch," CNBC, May 21, 2010

Who'da thunk it ....

Balls like that on a gay guy.

If you remember .....

In our last two episodes of The Bradley Model we discussed the fact that an outstanding opportunity to test the model's predictive powers was upon us beginning March 1, 2010.

Click the chart below for the amanita.at site.

We also discussed the caveat invariably issued by Bradley believers that the model is better suited for predicting turning points than for determining market direction.

To which I say rude noise (pick your favorite).

I want my models to make me rich by virtue of infallible predictive power.

Maybe I am being unreasonable, but that's what I want.

So, as disclosed earlier, I'm short of the S&P 500 (to quote Dennis Gartman) and pretty damn happy.

Long of Gold, Canadian and U.S. Cash and pretty damn happy about that as well.

Below is the S&P 500 from December 2009 to May 21, 2010.

It doesn't physically line up with the Bradley chart above, the vertical lines fall on March 1, April 1 and May 1 respectively.

So you're gonna have to line it up in your own mind's eye.

And the verdict?

Not horrible.

3/1 turned up, as did app. 4/1.

You can figure out the rest for yourself. 

You can do what you want, but with the possible exception of more Gold, I'm not buying anything much before the middle of August.