@dystopianfuturetoday: here are some of the mechanisms that DOJ can use to force BP to pay for oil spill, even if it's not due to negligence http://www.mainjustice.com/2010/06/09/perrelli-doj-will-pursue-bp-for-wide-range-of-damages/

If we revoke BP's corporate charter, who's going to pay for the clean-up? The 75 million cap does not apply if oil spill is due to negligence, so we need BP to continue being profitable so it can pay for the clean-up (which could be as high as 100 billion)

None of the www.videosift.com links load for me, while videosift.com links load fine. Quick fix is to remove "www." from the location and reload page. Strangely enough "ping xyz" on MacOS gives same IP address for www.videosift.com as videosift.com

Translation:

And then I sung this song in many countries. And usually coming to a country like Germany I would say that I would sing it in German. First couplet was lalala, second couplet was lalalala, and when third came along, audience would start laughing. When I came to Netherlands I said I would sing it in Dutch. In fact this record that ended up on the Internet is either German or Swiss, because the suit I'm wearing there, I bought in Switzerland. In fact, this could be German TV, around 70s

Privacy is such a 20th century notion. Once people born in privacy-less 21st grow up, we'll stop talking about it

jwray -- it's an issue of freedom of speech at universities rather than First Amendment which has to do with government restrictions on speech. If a university group prevents you from giving a speech by storming the stage and being noisy to the extent of making your words impossible to make out, they are essentially imposing a form of censorship

blankfist -- "give me your tired..." was written before welfare. Nowdays, US is attracting a lot of freeloaders. I have some experience with large communities of religious Ukranians/Russians that came here using lax religious freedom laws. Many of them don't speak English, don't work and have lots of children which qualifies them to extra bonuses in welfare. Did carvers of the statue really wants *those* tired masses?

Funny, she says "we didn't try to ban them from speaking" (so it's not freedom of speech issue), as if preventing him from speaking by storming the stage is somehow better.

This reminds me of university student mobs described on Pinker's "Blank Slate." One biology researcher (Herrnstein) was misquoted in pro-racist literature and then found that he could no longer speak about his research specialty, learning in pigeons, because wherever he went the lecture halls were filled with chanting mobs.

Even Ahmadinejad was able to give his speech uninterrupted at Columbia university, is this guy so much worse?

"At the cost of weakening their own currency"

... which is exactly what China wants to do. China *wants* to keep yuan weak and dollar strong to keep it's forces competitive. In fact that's one of the points of conflict between US and China right now -- US wants China to release yuan and let exchange rates be set by the market, while China wants to artificially keep it weak in order to keep Chinese goods cheap abroad

I wouldn't lend money as a restaraunt owner, which shows how different the decision-making process is made at the country level. On a country level it actually makes sense for China to keep buying US bonds despite the trade deficit because it drives up employment inside the country.

If there's some kind of collapse due to Fed lowering interest rates, I'll conclude that such aggressive lowering was not a good idea. However, there's no risk of "foreign nations" stopping lending to us because they are too dependent on our spending. If China stops lending money to US, US stops buying Chinese goods, and Chinese economy crashes. So they are forced to keep lending money indefinitely

Maybe "monetary" inflation was the "true" definition of inflation back when people thought that prices rose mainly due to government printing money, but it's no longer such because we now know that many other factors can raise prices. There's cost-driven inflation, demand-driven inflation, etc. For instance "stagflation" of the 70s is now commonly blamed on oil crisis and crop failures, which led to higher prices across the board.

Ron Paul's notions of money are positively quaint. They hark back to the times when money was in form of gold coins produced by government. Nowdays, most money is virtual, and created by private institutions, not the government. Imagine a new bank extending the loan to you. They simply create some virtual bits crediting your account, and since most people never convert their loans to actual cash, they are free to create a lot of those virtual dollars. The Fed makes restrictions of how much extra money they can create that way. If we got rid of the Fed, the banks could essentially "print" unlimited money, and then go under when someone tries to cash it, something that happened around the era of Wildcat Banking in the USA (instead of bits, they issued bank paper, which people used as money).

"Trusting in academia to determine intellectual clout is unwise. Moreover, academia is chop full of people interested in validating Macro economics, it keeps the research grant money coming."

That's like accusing "academia" of reinforcing anti-Creationism theories because it keeps the grant money coming. Partially true (you'd have a hard time funding Creationist research, or anti-modern-economics research), but besides the point. Macroeconomics is a science, and we can either choose to listen to scientists regarding macroeconomics issues, or to politicians/clergy etc.

Interesting that all the references from the "Monetary Inflation" page are from Ron Paul and Von Mises institute, whereas the wikipedia "Inflation" page references are Macroeconomics textbooks.

Ron Paul may be sincere, but he is a physician with no formal economics training, and his macro-economic proposals (for instance, that we should encourage deflation), would go against advice of any established macro-economist.

"When goods are more highly demanded then prices go up, this is not inflation,"

Yes it is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

Increases in prices cause increases in incomes and vica versa. Hence there's no direct relation between inflation and buying power.