From Alfred Hitchcock to Johann Sebastian Bach

The day Teller gave me the secret to my career in magic

By Brian Allen Brushwood

Lately a lot of young magicians have been asking me for advice, which has caused me to remember one of the most valuable correspondences of my life:  one of the most mind-blowing letters I ever received, chock-full of insights that to this very day guide my career and philosophy in both creating and performing magic.

This is a pretty long post, but with Teller's permission, I'd like to share with you the secrets he gave me 14 years ago to starting a successful career in magic.

The pains of growing up

The eternal search for freedom from responsibility

Blame football fans not the police for the deaths of seventy people after a football match in Egypt 

by Theodore Dalrymple

The deaths of at least seventy people at a football match in Egypt has confirmed my reasoned prejudice against this sport, whose psychological, cultural and economic effects is so disastrous. Of course, there is nothing in the game itself, apart from its inevitable propensity to injure the players, that is intrinsically deleterious; but all that surrounds it, at least in its modern professional form, is harmful and horrible.

USA on automatic pilot

Athens on the Potomac

Yet another invitation for the conflagration in Greece to leap the Atlantic

By the Chicago Tribune editors

President Barack Obama's budget proposal Monday all but seals the deal: Together, Washington Democrats and Republicans have stopped governing. Both parties now are on automatic pilot. They'll do as little as possible to solve this nation's debt crisis before Nov. 6. Instead they'll wait to see whether American voters firmly choose a direction for the United States and its destructive indebtedness.

How destructive? Conveniently, one of this nation's plausible futures plays out vividly on a TV screen near you: Fire-heaving mobs enraged by the harsh consequences of rampant public borrowing have torched one of Europe's grossly indebted capitals, Athens. Fretful officials in other capitals — Rome, Lisbon, Madrid and more — must wonder whether the flames will rage in their countries next.

A blessing in disguise ?

California’s Demographic Revolution

If the upward mobility of the impending Hispanic majority doesn’t improve, the state’s economic future is in peril.

By Heather Mac Donald

California is in the middle of a far-reaching demographic shift: Hispanics, who already constitute a majority of the state’s schoolchildren, will be a majority of its workforce and of its population in a few decades. This is an even more momentous development than it seems. Unless Hispanics’ upward mobility improves, the state risks becoming more polarized economically and more reliant on a large government safety net. And as California goes, so goes the nation, whose own Hispanic population shift is just a generation or two behind.

The scale and speed of the Golden State’s ethnic transformation are unprecedented. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the most Anglo-Saxon of the nation’s ten largest cities; today, Latinos make up nearly half of the county’s residents and one-third of its voting-age population. A full 55 percent of Los Angeles County’s child population has immigrant parents. California’s schools have the nation’s largest concentration of “English learners,” students from homes where a language other than English is regularly spoken. From 2000 to 2010, the state’s Hispanic population grew 28 percent, to reach 37.6 percent of all residents, almost equal to the shrinking white population’s 40 percent. Nearly half of all California births today are Hispanic. The signs of the change are everywhere—from the commercial strips throughout the state catering to Spanish-speaking customers, to the flea markets and illegal vendors in such areas as MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, to the growing reach of the Spanish-language media.

The War on Progress, Freedom, and Human Civilization

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

by Gennady Stolyarov II,  Tuesday, August 03, 2010

A clandestine international treaty is currently being negotiated among parties including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the European Union, Japan, Singapore, and Morocco. It can justly be called the greatest threat of our time to the advancement of human civilization. Considering the magnitude of the other abuses of power pervading the world today, this might seem an exaggeration, but the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) contravenes every principle of civilized society, both in its content and in the nature of the proceedings leading to its creation.

It threatens to undo the accomplishments of the great Internet revolution and to thrust humankind back to a time when individuals had no public voice and no countervailing power against politically privileged mercantilist institutions. ACTA tramples on essential rights that have achieved even mainstream recognition: innocence until one is proven guilty, due process, personal privacy, and fair use of published content. Moreover, because of its designation as a trade agreement, ACTA could be imposed on the people of the United States by the president, without even a vote of Congress.

Is there a small light at the end of the tunnel ?

Is Austerity Bad?

While is was reported that the Greek economy once again contracted by a 'bigger than expected' 6.8% in 2011,  these reports are merely highlighting events of the past. They are a slice of economic history.

“Greece’s economy, reeling from austerity measures demanded by creditors in exchange for rescue funds, contracted almost a percentage point more last year than the government forecast, according to Bloomberg calculations.

Gross domestic product dropped 7 percent from a year earlier in the fourth quarter after contracting a revised 5 percent on an annual basis in the third quarter; the Athens- based Hellenic Statistical Authority said in an e-mailed statement today. GDP declined 6.8 percent for the full year, according to Bloomberg calculations, compared with a 6 percent contraction projected in the government’s 2012 budget.

Greece is now in what is forecast to be a fifth year of a recession compounded by spending cuts and tax increases as the country seeks to trim its budget deficit and debt burden. Prime Minister Lucas Papademos’s government on Feb. 13 passed through Parliament a new package of austerity measures demanded by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in exchange for a 130 billion-euro ($172 billion) second rescue plan.The fourth-quarter preliminary figure is based on available non-seasonally adjusted data, the statistics authority said. GDP declined a revised 8 percent in the three months through March and 7.3 percent in the second quarter, the agency said. It didn’t provide seasonally adjusted figures.”

(emphasis added)

An Endless Greek Tragedy?

Perhaps Not

A Few Quotes From Actual Greek Tragedies:

"Drive the corruption from the land" Creon (Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)

"Chance rules our lives" Jocasta (Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)

“How terrible to see the truth” – Teireisias (Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)

 "So much for prophecy" Jocasta (Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)

"Half my life is wasted away in hopeless waiting" Electra (Electra, Sophocles)

"My policy is to bow before the storm" Crysothemis (Electra, Sophocles)

"I smell the open grave" Cassandra (Agamemnon, Aeschylus)

"What a brilliant day it is for vengeance" Clytemnestra (Agamemnon, Aeschylus)

"Words, endless words I've said to serve the moment." Clytaemnestra (Agamemnon, Aeschylus)

"Mother, have mercy" Pentheus (The Bacchae, Euripides)

"O misery!" Electra (Electra, Sophocles)

"If you will not cease your wailing you are to be sent to some place where you'll never see the light" Chrysothemis (Electra, Sophocles)

"I'll let loose, I have such fury in me“ Oedipus (Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)

It almost sounds as if the famous Greek dramatists of the 5th century B.C. have had a glimpse of the future.

Something Happened

Black Community Responsible For Its Young People

By WALTER E. WILLIAMS
 The Philadelphia Inquirer's big story Feb. 4 was about how a budget crunch at the Philadelphia School District had caused the district to lay off 91 school police officers. Over the years, there's been no discussion of what has happened to our youth that makes a school police force necessary in the first place.

The Inquirer's series, "Assault on Learning" (March 2011) reported that in the 2010 school year, "690 teachers were assaulted; in the last five years, 4,000 were."

The newspaper reported that in Philadelphia's 268 schools, "on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes. That doesn't even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year."

I graduated from Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954. Franklin's students were from the poorest North Philadelphia neighborhoods — such as the Richard Allen housing project, where I lived — but there were no policemen patrolling the hallways. There were occasional after-school fights — rumbles, we called them — but within the school, there was order. Students didn't use foul language to teachers, much less assault them.

The Noble Savage

Getting back to the stone age

by David Deming

The late Joseph Campbell maintained that civilizations are not based on science, but on myth. "Aspiration," Campbell explained, "is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization." Our technological society has been built on Francis Bacon's myth of the New Atlantis. Bacon was the first person to unambiguously and explicitly advocate the practical application of scientific knowledge to human needs. "The true and lawful goal of the sciences," he explained, "is that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers." Writing in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon predicted lasers, genetic engineering, airplanes, and submarines.

Freedom Watch Finest Hour

What Happened to America

It' Over.

'Greece Cannot Be Ruled Against the Will of its People'

By Charles Hawley, Spiegel Online

Greece may now have passed the austerity measures demanded from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, but the country's political system is showing signs of stress. Additional pressure from Europe isn't helping. German commentators warn that political radicalization cannot be ruled out.

One can perhaps understand the European Union's lack of trust when it comes to pledges emanating from Greece. Despite multiple promises of political reform and fiscal austerity, progress has been slow in some areas (privatization of government held assets, for example) and virtually non-existent in others (such as the collection of billions in back taxes).

Comments in parliament on Monday night by conservative New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras are unlikely to foster any trust in Brussels. "I am calling on you to vote for the new loan agreement because I want to avoid falling into the abyss, to restore stability, so that we can have the possibility tomorrow to negotiate and change the policy that is being imposed upon us today," he said.

On to Tehran–or Is It Damascus?

If Assad falls, who rises?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Our War Party has been temporarily diverted from its clamor for war on Iran by the insurrection against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Estimates of the dead since the Syrian uprising began a year ago approach 6,000. And responsibility for the carnage is being laid at the feet of the president who succeeded his dictator-father Hafez al-Assad, who ruled from 1971 until his death in 2000.

On the Dangers of Central Banking

The Other Bagehot

by George Selgin 

Free bankers like to claim Walter Bagehot, the British essayist and former (and most famous) editor-in-chief of The Economist, as one of their own. And they well ought to, for there can be no disputing the fact that Lombard Street, Bagehot's celebrated "description of the [London] money market," treats the concentration of cash reserves in the Bank of England as the Achilles heel of the British financial system, while in turn regarding that concentration as the unintended and "unnatural" consequence of the Old Lady's accumulation of monopoly privileges:

I shall have failed in my purpose if I have not proved that the system of entrusting all our reserves to a single board, like that of the Bank directors, is very anomolous; that it is very dangerous; that its bad consequences though much felt, have not been fully seen; that they have been obscured by traditional arguments and hidden in the dust of ancient controversies.

The times they are a changin

A reprieve, nothing more

by The Economist

CITI economists Willem Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari write:

First, we raise our estimate of the likelihood of Greek exit from the eurozone (or ‘Grexit’) to 50% over the next 18 months from earlier estimates of ours which put it at 25-30%. Second, we argue that the implications of Grexit for the rest of the EA and the world would be negative, but moderate, as exit fear contagion would likely be contained by policy action, notably from the ECB.

Not "Grout"? Exposure to Greece among European financial institutions was always relatively small given the relatively small size of the country. Banks have been working furiously to reduce even that, and with the European Central Bank now directing a flood of money toward euro-area banks it looks, to these fellows at least, as if the economic and financial risks of a Greek departure are mostly contained. As this paper acknowledged recently, the cost of a Greek exit to the broader euro zone is falling:

In Memorial of a human loving human

Julian Simon

By David R. Henderson

On February 8, just four days before what would have been his 66th birthday, the economist Julian Simon died. He was one of a kind. He believed that having more people on earth was good. People--their skills, spirits, and hopes--are the ultimate resource, Simon claimed. He came to these beliefs after years of research, and his writings are filled with the evidence that convinced him.

How could population growth not reduce resources? It is true that in the short run, population increases drive up demand for natural resources and thus their prices. But then the high prices prompt entrepreneurs and innovators to find new resources, or new ways of getting existing resources more cheaply. The net result: resources are more plentiful and cheaper than they were before the population grew. In The Population Bomb, Mr. Ehrlich generalized from animal behavior--he had studied butterflies--to human behavior. But Simon saw humans as fundamentally different from animals. He liked to quote the 19th-century American economist Henry George: "Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens."

What Price for Socialism?

Billionaire Peter Thiel Is Worried About America's Future

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has made a fortune as an investor. Why is he so worried about the future?

by Niall Ferguson  

Damn. Peter Thiel is smarter than I am.

It’s not just that, as the founder of PayPal, president of the hedge fund Clarium Capital, managing partner of the venture-capital firm Founders Fund, and one of the early angel investors in Facebook, he’s vastly and maddeningly wealthier than I am. I have met some people even richer than Thiel who turned out to be intellectually vacuous.

It’s the fact that Thiel is also one of the most interesting and original thinkers in America today—something you’ll already know if you’ve read the darkly powerful article he published in National Review last year titled “The End of the Future.”

Thiel is not the only dotcom billionaire to have views on history and politics. Google’s Eric Schmidt is writing what promises to be a fascinating book on the impact of the Internet on democracy. Also impressive is Yuri Milner’s vision of the whole of humanity connected to form a single megabrain. But most Silicon Valley sages tend to be incorrigible optimists. And the fact that technology has made them so rich as individuals makes you wonder—just a little—when they proclaim that technology will save us all. They would say that, wouldn’t they?

Interest Rates and Real Goods

Cyclical Changes in Business Conditions

An artificially stimulated boom must inevitably lead to crisis and depression.

by Ludwig von Mises

The Role of Interest Rates
In our economic system, times of good business commonly alternate more or less regularly with times of bad business. Decline follows economic upswing, upswing follows decline, and so on. The attention of economic theory has quite understandably been greatly stimulated by this problem of cyclical changes in business conditions. In the beginning, several hypotheses were set forth, which could not stand up under critical examination. However, a theory of cyclical fluctuations was finally developed which fulfilled the demands legitimately expected from a scientific solution to the problem. This is the circulation-credit theory, usually called the monetary theory of the trade cycle. This theory is generally recognized by science. All cyclical policy measures, which are taken seriously, proceed from the reasoning which lies at the root of this theory.

Germany Speaks

Not So Fast On The Greek "Deal"

by Tyler Durden

Europe's now painfully transparent policy of demanding that Greece decide to default on its own is becoming so glaringly obvious, we truly fear for the intellectual capacity of everyone who ramps the EURUSD on any incremental "europe is saved" rumor. As a reminder, yesterday we said, in parallel with the Greek irrelevant MoU vote: 

We are running behind schedule

Friedrich Hayek on the sanctity of the Rule of Law

by SIMON BLACK 

One of the greatest thinkers of all time was Austrian economic Friedrich Hayek, and his work The Road to Serfdom is an absolute must-read.

Hayek’s writings are incredibly powerful in these times. In light of the countless recent examples of governments changing the rules whenever/wherever it suits them (from the Troika nonsense in Europe to the Fraudclosure settlement in the US), I’d like to share a few key passages with you today.

The Dream and the Nightmare

Europe in the Rearview Mirror

By Victor Davis Hanson 

The European Union was always a paradox. Its existence was predicated entirely on the notion of German guilt, translating into massive cash transfers east and south. Just as Versailles was supposed to have restrained Germany, then a divided, postwar Germany, then NATO integration and the common Soviet enemy, and then the EU — and now what next?

There was quite a EU veneer placed over the politically incorrect “German Problem.” Most of us listened in disbelief as we were lectured that veritable disarmament, subsidized windmills, reach outs to a Syria or Libya, easy anti-Americanism, and sermons about cradle-to-grave socialism were the way of the new Europe. And always came the grating condescension, that a self-appointed bureaucratic class in Brussels might lecture Neanderthals what was good for them, without worry over democratic checks and balances.