Rise If You Must

Apr 24

“Suppose you grow up poor in Alabama. You decide to move to New York to make a better life for yourself. But when you get to the state line, you’re stopped by armed men who won’t let you in. New York already has enough people, they say, and it doesn’t need you. And since you weren’t born there, you have no right to go there. You would — quite reasonably — find this ridiculous. So why is it any less ridiculous to tell a Guatemalan or a Bangladeshi that he cannot move to the U.S.?” —

Self-refuting nonsense from Reason Magazine.

Immigration Reform Falls Short - Reason.com

Apr 18

sarahspy:

Through April, I’m offering 15% OFF any of my handmade glass pendant necklaces (or new bumble bee lino print cards), such as the one pictured above, which features a REAL four-leaf clover, found and pressed by me!

To receive the 15% off discount, visit my Etsy shop and enter “SPRING” in the promo code field when ordering :)

I want a pocket watch like this.

Did Cocaine Cause the Financial Crisis? -

There is a lot of cocaine use in finance. A head of one of Wall Street’s top firms used to keep an antacid bottle full of the stuff in his desk drawer. A top trader from Bear Stearns once showed me a cocaine dispenser he had built from a retractable ballpoint pen that had his firm’s logo on it. At the TGIF’s near Wall Street you could silently pick up cocaine just by leaving a very large tip for the bartender; he’d then slide a napkin covering a baggie of coke across to you. Talk about an over-the-counter trade.

Apr 14

[video]

Mar 27

“Berezovsky claimed to have been the mastermind behind picking a man with no public face, a former K.G.B. agent, to succeed Yeltsin as the president of Russia. He also said it was his idea to manufacture an entire nonideological pseudo-political pseudo-movement to serve as the new president’s base of support. Berezovsky also had another brilliant idea, which to his regret Putin did not grasp: creating a fake two-party system, with Putin at the head of a socialist-democrat sort of party and Berezovsky leading a neoconservative one, or the other way around.” —

Till Death, Berezovsky Defends Backing Putin - NYTimes.com

Something to remember when watching American politics.