Never say Never

"Crude Oil had a legendary drop during the financial crisis.  After a strong bounce and then consolidation for 4 years it dropped again in late 2014.  Pundits, traders and everyone else was bamboozled.  First there were calls for $20/barrel and then a rise back to $100.  Finally the Famous Dennis Gartman blurb “Crude will never get above $44 per barrel again in my lifetime”.  Pro tip to everyone out there.  The only time to use the word NEVER is when you are telling people to not use the word NEVER." 

~ http://dragonflycap.tumblr.com/post/146748612032/is-crude-oil-spilling-over

Alice in Evolution-Land

QUESTION: Is this conversation from "Alice in Wonderland" or "Alice in Evolution-Land"?
_________________________

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Gandhi - A Surprising 2nd Amendment Supporter

"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest." - Mohandas Gandhi, an Autobiography, page 446.

U.S. Constitution:  AMENDMENT II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

The attack on traditional American values

‎" All we're doing is defending traditional values. All we're doing is defending the institutions and the traditions that have made this country great . . . Oh, so we can't defend all these great traditions, but the left can attack them? The left can attack them and rip them apart and tear them down, and that's good politics? Is that what we're to believe?

We're supposed to sit by while great traditions and institutions like marriage are ripped to shreds. Obama, just as a dictator would, demands that contraception be free and paid for. He can't do that! . . . We conservatives are on defense on these matters. We're not trying to change the world. We're trying to preserve it! . . .

We're not the ones that issued the rule violating the First Amendment. They did! We didn't go to federal court to impose our will and to claim that the will of the people is unconstitutional. They did! We are not the ones doing social experiments with the US military. They are! And yet we're divisive? We're anti-modern? We're unfocused? We're old-fashioned? We're racist, sexist, bigot homophobes? I'm sorry, I am not gutless." ~ Rush Limbaugh

Speaking of which

"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise, in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour? That one hundred and fifty lawyers should do business together, ought not to be expected." ~ Thomas Jefferson

America the exceptional

‎"The idea of American exceptionalism is obnoxious to progressives, who, evidently unaware of the idea's long pedigree (it traces to Alexis de Tocqueville) and the rich scholarship concerning the idea, assume it is a crude strain of patriotism. America, Tocqueville said, is unique because it was born free - free of a feudal past, free from an entrenched aristocracy and established religion.

The American Revolution was a political, not a social, revolution; it was about emancipating individuals for the pursuit of happiness, not about the state allocating wealth and opportunity. Hence our exceptional Constitution, which says not what government must do for Americans but what it cannot do to them.

Americans are exceptionally committed to limited government because they are exceptionally confident of social mobility through personal striving. And they are exceptionally immune to a distinctively modern pessimism: It holds that individuals are powerless to assert their autonomy against society's vast impersonal forces, so people must become wards of government, which supposedly is the locus and engine of society's creativity." ~ George Will

The spirits of fiscal reform and sanity

"A reader of Shakespeare will recall the dialogue between Glendower and Hotspur in Henry IV. Glendower claims, ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’ And Hotspur replies, ‘Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?’

We shall see if the new Congress will prove worthy of the power the American people have ‘loaned’ them, and, together with the president, actually draw the spirits of fiscal reform and sanity from the ‘vasty deep’ to at long last implement meaningful fiscal and regulatory policy that incentivizes private-sector job creation here at home while arresting the hemorrhaging of our Treasury. If they do, then more Americans will find work and be better off, better paid, and freer to make their own decisions about the economy.

If they don’t, then woe to our children, their children, and the American Dream.” ~ Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve branch in Dallas and a voting member of the FOMC committee as of this year