This page is a work in progress…

News

In addition to the websites that I regularly link to in the ‘Top News Stories’ column, I also enjoy reading a small collection of independent news aggregators. Here are some of those sites, in no particular order (some links are now dead, unfortunately…):

• Maggie’s Farm
• Rice Farmer
• Energy Matters
• 321 Gold
• 321 Energy
• The Automatic Earth
• Implode-Explode
• Dollar Collapse
• Archaeologica
• It’s Different This Time
• Gus Van Horn
• Econ Circus
• Investing in Chinese Stocks

Live Charts

The employed-to-population ratio:

All the various official inflation measures:

M1, M2. and MZM money supply growth. The Fed no longer tracks M3.

Other Stuff

Here is a disorganized assortment of things that you may find interesting, or not…

George Orwell – You and the Atomic Bomb

Orwell wrote the essay ‘You and the Atomic Bomb’ in 1945 within two months of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Russia didn’t have the bomb yet. Mao hadn’t seized China yet.

The Doomsday Gap:

If you’ve ever wondered about the logic behind doomsday weapons like Russia’s cobalt-60 nuclear tsunami torpedoes and nuclear powered nuclear missiles, Peter Sellers summed it up perfectly back in 1964:

Worried about the future?

Listen to a few hours of C-SPAN from 35 years ago and perhaps you’ll see how ‘timeless’ most of our political disputes actually are.

One difference is that at least a few serious people debated important things face to face on TV back then.

Below is nine hours of Christopher Hitchens on C-SPAN from the 1980s (absolutely not an endorsement). There is even a brief bit in there about mail-in ballots flipping an election in Florida and Russians mediating conflict a between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Free Speech:

Rowan Atkinson explains what free speech is and what it isn’t:

The freedom to say that which a given society deems non-controversial has been enjoyed by every society in history. Free speech only has meaning when it applies to speech that society finds controversial, rude, wrong, and/or offensive.

Thomas Sowell on Wealth, Poverty, and Politics:

An aside, Dr. Sowell is 85 in the this interview. 

Milton Friedman: Free to Choose – 1979

I would have loved to know Milton Friedman’s take on the last decade.

Calvin Coolidge on taxes and government spending in 1924:

Calvin Coolidge was the last president to write his own speeches.

E.M. Foster – The Machine Stops (PDF)

E.M. Foster wrote the short story ‘The Machine Stops’ in 1909, amazingly capturing the phycological landscape of our modern tech dystopia decades before the earliest computer had been invented, let alone video chatting on tablets.   

To be continued…