The executive branch of government can influence fiscal policy—changes in taxation and spending patterns. Administrations have often yielded to the temptation to exercise fiscal policy in a manner designed to pump up the economy just prior to a presidential election and thus garne voter approval for the incumbent party. These pre-election actions and campaign promises often have created some euphoria among voters and investors alike.
On the other hand, post-election periods seem to have suffered from an opposite effect that has resulted in less investor optimism. In The Stock Trader’s Almanac, 2004, Yale Hirsch notes that based on his studies, “Presidential elections every four years have a profound impact on the economy and the stock market. Wars, recessions and bear markets tend to start or occur in the first half of the term and bull markets, in the latter half.”
A potentially lucrative investment strategy would include buying on October 1 of the second year of the presidential election term and selling out on December 31 of year four. This simple strategy would have sidestepped practically all down markets for the last 60 years. For the most part, bear markets have historically occurred during the first or second years of presidential terms.
Markets are also subject to change from time to time because of unforeseen macro events. As a result, some cycles have been shorter and some longer than the norm. Fundamental economic conditions and the role of the Federal Reserve are factors.
Another analysis shows a highly intriguing re-occurrence in the stock market index. During the entire twentieth century, every mid-decade year that ended in a “5” (1905, 1915, 1925, etc.) was profitable! This is not to say that all of these years had uninterrupted ascending trends, but by year’s end there had been impressive gains. Whether that pattern was a fluke or will continue is anyone’s guess.
“Surveillance is ultimately not about safety, Surveillance is about power. Surveillance is about control.”
“Corporations aren’t friends of the people, corporations are friends of money.”
“We need to have space to ourselves, where nobody’s watching, nobody’s recording what we’re doing, nobody’s analyzing, nobody’s selling our experiences.”
When the second amendment was written the flintlock rifle was state of the art weapons technology. It put the individual on equal footing with criminals, foreign armies, the federal government & other threats "foreign & domestic". The second amendment embodies the individual right to self-defense and the means to uphold all other individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution. As technology progresses so do the tools of self-defense. IMO there should be no limits to this right, except in very extreme circumstances (like not being able to yell "fire" in a movie theater relative to freedom of speech). The individual is entitled to any tool that is available to any aggressor.
There will always be crazy people that do crazy things, but it's statistically very rare. What disgusts me is when politicians take tragedy as an opportunity to promote their political agenda. The risk & trend that I see is that those in power want to increase & maintain control. One way that this is done is by reducing the individual's power. What we have been seeing recently is an incremental effort to make the People the servant of government.
Remember, what makes America unique and what makes the constitution so important is that it puts limits on Government in order to keep it under control as the servant of the people.
I hear the flintlock argument all the time. It is usually made by sheep who would happily go to slaughter. Don't buy this bullshit, it is truly dangerous.
From my daughter:
I don't have an argument against the importance of limiting the power of government. I see the importance of this in history - from Hitler to Tiananmen to the US' repeated atrocities abroad to my own inherited anarchist spirit. However, I know that guns do not bring peace, and I am a pacifist. I do not believe that noble men drafted the constitution bearing in mind the potential atrocities that come with mass production, mental illness, radical and shallow ideology, consumer culture, Twitter, Facebook, narco-corridos, drug trade, human-trafficking, grown men with inflated egos, gold chains, tear-drop tattoos, and mass murder in public spaces.
Shortly after Obama’s re-election, the White House was forced to respond to a Texit petition that garnered more than 125,000 votes. The answer was no.
How closely is Daniel Miller tracking the news ahead of the referendum about whether Britain should leave the European Union? “Hourly!” he grins. The Sun’s recent editorial calling for the UK’s departure got him quite excited.
Miller, though, is not from London or Liverpool. He hails from Longview, Texas, and we are talking in a cafe in the bleakly industrial Gulf coast town of Port Arthur, some 5,000 miles from Westminster.
Culturally, too, we are a long way from Europe. Heck, we are even a long way from Dallas. But the referendum matters deeply to Miller and like-minded Texans. As the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, which wants Texas to secede from the United States, he is hoping for a Leave vote that he believes will ripple all the way from Austria to Austin.
“There are a lot of people asking, if Brexit why not Texit?” he says. “I do talk with some folks over there on a pretty regular basis that are involved in Ukip and the Conservative party.”
The night before we met, Miller addressed a local Tea Party group, drawing parallels between Brexit and Texit, which the TNM is pushing as a hashtag. In Miller’s telling, Britain’s relationship with Europe was a marriage of convenience between ill-suited partners that has become stormy and ripe for divorce on grounds of irreconcilable differences, with too much sovereignty ceded to an ineffective central bureaucracy and too much hard-earned money sent elsewhere.
Daniel Miller wants to take off the shackles he says the federal government has placed on Texas. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
“Sound familiar?” he asked the audience. “Nigel Farage, you guys ever heard of him? Look him up on YouTube – trust me, you will enjoy.”
Added to the near-miss of Scottish independence in 2014, a vote for Brexit on 23 June, Miller tells me, “only helps our case because there is a concrete first world example of a modern democracy having a legitimate and public debate where the people of a country, not the political class, get to vote on how they govern themselves and that will resonate not just through Europe but here as well”.
The arguments are fundamentally identical, he insists. “You could take ‘Britain’ out and replace it with ‘Texas’. You could take ‘EU’ out and replace it with ‘US’. You could take ‘Brussels’ out and replace it with ‘Washington DC’. You could give you guys a nice Texas drawl and no one would know any different. So much of it is exactly the same.”
The TNM, based in this humid corner of south-east Texas near the Louisiana border, is the most prominent and best organised of the groups that want the Lone Star state to go it alone, and plausibly asserts that the issue is growing in popularity and gathering more mainstream credibility (or at least, less mainstream ridicule).
Miller, 42, is a polished advocate who grew up in a politically active household and became frustrated by what he sees as the shackles of a federal government that are stopping Texas from reaching its full potential.
Buoyed by the rearguard action at the battle of the Alamo, Texas toiled to free itself from Mexican rule and was an independent nation from 1836 to 1845. But its fiercely solitary spirit did not fade when it became part of the union. Texas Independence Day, 2 March, is still an annual state holiday. In 2003 astate law was passed requiring schoolchildren to pledge allegiance daily to the Texas flag as well as the US flag.
“We come from a heritage of people that carved an empire out of a wilderness. The fact of the matter is that Texas has always been rough. When people first moved to Texas and settled here, you were independent or you died,” Miller says.
In 1997 a member of a separatist group, the Republic of Texas, waskilled in a shootout with police after a standoff in the mountains of west Texas.
The current body calling itself the Republic of Texas believes that Texas never actually ceded its sovereignty to the United States when it joined the union (some prefer the term annexed) in 1845. “The great deception can be undone – stay tuned,” their website states. They run a parallel system of government, with Republic of Texas identity cards and coins.
The TNM, meanwhile, seeks secession through political avenues and calls for the people of Texas to decide via a referendum. Miller claims that the group has 260,000 supporters. It has fans in Russiaamong mischief-makers who would relish the break-up of the United States.
It also has advocates in the Texas Republican party, even though removing one of the biggest and most reliably red states from the US would make it far easier for the Democrats to win presidential elections.
Shortly after Obama’s re-election, the White House was forced to respond to a Texit petition that garnered more than 125,000 votes. The answer was no.
Another petition drive last year to put the matter to a non-binding vote did not gather enough signatures, but secession was debated at the party convention in Dallas last month, a notable moment even though it narrowly failed to make it to a floor vote.
Jeff Sadighi, a TNM backer, wants “Texas solutions” on hot-button issues such as gun rights, marriage equality and, perhaps above all, immigration and border control. “The bottom line is, the federal government due to their legal structures can only offer one size fits all solutions,” the 54-year-old says. “People in Massachusetts aren’t going to approach challenges the same way we are.”
What would the country of Texas be like? “I don’t think we’ll have checkpoints at the border with Louisiana,” Miller deadpans. “Trump may have to move his wall a little further north.”
There are no plans for rival flotillasto clash along the Rio Grande or the bayous of Houston.
But as efforts to lobby Texas lawmakers to put the matter to a vote continue ahead of next year’s legislative session, Miller is eagerly awaiting this month’s verdict in what he sees as a kindred nation.
“At a cultural and spiritual level there are a lot of similarities. A fiercely independent spirit. Keep calm and carry on. The stoicism. There’s a sense that when you’re pushed, you don’t just crumple like yesterday’s newspaper, you stand up for what you believe in,” he says. “We are easygoing, we are friendly, but when our core values and principles are threatened, we don’t take kindly to it.”
Alexander Calder's iconic monumental sculptures have been found to have a unique birthplace in the home town of musician and songwriter Don Henley, Linden, Texas. The long anticipated preservation of this historic landmark is now underway.
Calder's introduction to East Texas came through a lifelong friendship with James Sloan Penny, after the two crossed paths during basic training for the Great War. Penny kept his promise that if they both returned home safely, he would name a daughter for Calder's mother, Nanette.
After receiving a degree in mechanical engineering in the 1920s, Calder worked as a hydraulic engineer. Among his early design commissions during this period was a water storage tower constructed under a Works Progress Administration program facilitated by Linden’s Congressman Wright Patman. This proved to be the first “HORTON TANK” design produced by the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company. Calder personally oversaw the tower's erection.
Today this structure has been recognized as the largest stationary monumental sculpture in Calder's repertoire. If all goes as planned, Linden's water tower will be recognized later this year as a United Nations heritage site.
In addition to Calder's work, a previously unknown sculpture attributed to Donald Judd was identified in Linden earlier this year. This piece is thought to be the genesis of Judd’s goal to bring art, architecture, and nature together in order to form a coherent whole, later embodied at the Chinati foundation in Marfa Texas.
"Underground" Donald Judd 1969 (?)
Linden is also the home of numerous works by renowned Texas muralist Brad Attaway (1955-2016), "The Last Crop" (1939) by Russian muralist Victor Arnautoff, and an outdoor installation attributed to Mark Rothko.
"Grey Blue Red" Marc Rothko (?) 1938
"In the garden" Brad Attaway 2008
"The Last Crop" Victor Arnautoff 1939
Reliable sources indicate that Linden has been short listed to become home to the Guggenheim Foundation's Museum for Music and the Visual Arts, which will be the only facility of its kind in North America. Founded in 1937, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of art, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods.
Preservation of Alexander Calder's masterwork comes none too late. As Henley remarks, time "continues its relentless digestion of our open spaces and eats away at our historic buildings and landmarks. This threat is compounded by the fact that much of our historic built environment has fallen into a severe state of disrepair... After all, our historic landmarks are a part of our environment."
When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.
There's one myth about the US government that needs to die immediately because a lot of people actually believe it: that the United States was founded to be a democracy. You hear politicians and pundits talk about it all the time when they reference, "the strength of our democracy," and "spreading democracy," and all that stirring rhetoric.
The United States was not founded to be a democracy. It's a republic (constitutional republic, to be exact), and yes, there's a gigantic difference. Whereas in a republic there is "rule of law," democracy functions through the "will of the majority."
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself." - John Adams
What's the difference? Majority rule over rule of law. Democracies put the collective willover the rights of the individual. In a democracy, 49% of the people could have any of their rights taken away just because the other 51% vote for it.
Instead, we have a republic. We believe that we have rights because we are individuals, not because we belong to the most popular group. Therefore the individual is protected against the majority.
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests." - Patrick Henry
We elect local representatives that we trust have our best interests at heart and who understand the law, who then go on and elect our Federal representatives. That's why there's an Electoral College: the general population doesn't elect the President. The states do that.
Why? Because according to the Constitution, the Federal Government's only role is governing how the individual states relate to each other and to represent the states in foreign affairs. So you see, the public doesn't actually pick the President because the Federal Government isn't really supposed to have anything to do with our daily lives.
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill
Our Constitution is (supposed to be, when not ignored) the law of the land. According to the 10th Amendment, all powers not delegated directly to the Federal Government in the Constitution are reserved to the individual states and individual people.
That doesn't mean you can't have mandatory health insurance or gay marriage (health insurance and marriage aren't mentioned anywhere in the constitution, FYI), it just means that it's only constitutional when implemented at the state level.
Above: Alternate spelling of "unconstitutional."
The Federal Government wasn't even originally supposed to be able to taxAmericans. The states could, and the Federal Government was supposed to ask for a certain amount of money from each state if it wanted money. Now, we are directly taxed by the Federal Government (and our state governments - yay!).
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people can take away the rights of the other forty-nine." - Thomas Jefferson
Unfortunately, we've ignored our Constitution time and time again and the result is an out of control Federal Government, which is controlled mostly by an out of control executive branch. In the goal of establishing democracy or collective rule, the statists in our country have destroyed the checks and balances in our system meant to protect us from an overbearing government.
Many people agree that the confiscation of private-owned guns would be unpopular with many Americans, and would likely even lead to civil uprising. What many don't know is that the spark that started the American Revolution was the attempted confiscation of civilian-owned firearms and ammunition. There were many, many reasons why the Americans revolted against the British, but none of these grievances resulted in such an immediate, ferocious response by the Americans as the Crown's attempts at gun control.
After the Boston Tea Party, an extremely angry Parliament passed what was called The Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts, intended to punish the city of Boston for the acts of the Tea Partiers and enforced by the British military. The British governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, tried to disperse a town meeting in Salem but the troops he sent were forced to retreat when 3000 armed Americans responded. According to John Andres, Gage's aide, everyone in the area over 16 years of age owned and was experienced with a gun and owned plenty of gunpowder.
Realizing that it would be impossible to enforce the new laws on a well-armed populace with only 2000 troops in Boston. Gage decided to send men to Charlestown to capture the powderhouse - an important building where the members of a community would store their gunpowder to keep the volatile explosive away from their homes. The British seized hundreds of barrels of gunpowder, provoking over 20,000 militiamen from the surrounding areas to start marching toward Boston (but dispersed upon learning that there was no fighting in the city).
Soon after, General Gage began warrantless searches and seizures of firearms and ammunition throughout Boston. The Boston Gazette reported that of all of Gage's policies, "what most irritated the People" was "seizing their Arms and Ammunition." To reduce the supply of guns in America, on October 19, 1774, the British started an arms embargo of America that required British subjects to have a permit to export guns and ammo to America, while simply not issuing any such permits.
In December of 1774, New Hampshire militiamen pre-emptively captured Fort William and Mary, near Portsmouth, and all the arms stores in it, upon learning that the British had sent two warships to do the same.
As a result of the outrage over the arms embargo and other gun control measures, many Americans started to form militiasthat were independent of the British government.
Suddenly, it happened. On April 19, 1775, 700 British Redcoats under Major Pitcairn left the city of Boston with the objective of seizing stores of American weapons at Lexington and Concord. Paul Revere warned the militias of the approaching British troops, and 200 men, aged from 16 to 60, were gathered to meet the British at Lexington. The Americans were quickly beaten, and the British advanced to Concord where the they believed the local Patriots kept most of their arms (including 2 cannons).
But the Americans, knowing that the British were coming to confiscate their weapons, secretly hauled off their arms stores to safety. A group of militia managed to defeat some of the British force at Concord's North Bridge. Disappointed in what they didn't find, the British began to retreat back to Boston, and that's when the massacre really happened.
Hundreds of armed Americans started swarming in from nearby towns to help; they soon doubled the numbers of the British as the Redcoats were peppered with surprisingly accurate rifle and musket fire from opportunist snipers for the entirety of their retreat. The Americans were running out of ammo and powder by the time British reinforcements from Boston came to escort what was left of Major Pitcairn's troops.
That night, American militiamen began the siege of Boston. The War for Independence had started, and it started in response to gun control.
In the military, the term ratfucking (rat in this case is shorthand for ration) is the unofficial slang term used by soldiers in the U.S. Army to mean the targeted pillaging ofMREs (Meals Ready-To-Eat), which the U.S. military calls field stripping. It refers to the process of opening a case of MREs, of which there are twelve in a box, then opening up individual MRE packages, and removing the desired items (generally M&M's and other sweets), and leaving the unenticing remainder. It is a common but generally frowned-upon practice.[7]
