Paul M. Jones

Just go look at them. They're not afraid of handling weapons; why are you? Girls of the Israeli Defense Forces (37 Photos).

Recently, my parents found an old dog that had been abandoned.  He stunk.  We needed to bathe him, and he wasn't keen on the idea.  It might seem mean to hold him down and spray him with a hose and soap with all his whining and complaining and whelping.  It would seem to the dog like he was being abused, and would sound like he was being abused.  But if we don't clean the dog, no one is going to take him in.  It is a loving action to wash the dog.  Whereas if we let him go on stinking, it will be much happier, and will surely die of starvation in a matter of weeks.  That isn't loving.

This is also a concept largely missing in modern morality.  Evil can wear kindness, and good can wear cruelty -- God was once praised as "terrifying".  Don't be fooled by appearances, but intention.  Love looks to better the other, while true hatred looks to please the other so as to use them for one's own wishes.

Go read the review to see why I picked that particular excerpt. Via the Wood between Worlds: Let Me In: the anti-Twilight.

To build a financial system meant building institutions (foremost, the Bank), and that in turn meant constitutional construction. Everyone on all sides eagerly mobilized the “original public meaning” of the Constitution, only to discover that it would carry only so far. Those arguments, moreover, were part of a vituperative, sharply polarized and, over long stretches, closely divided debate. (McCraw records the often razor-thin margins on votes on the Bank, the debt, and internal improvements.) The stuff that we now take for granted and cite, reverently and/or precedentially, as constitutional wisdom easily could have come out the other way. In our current confused debate, it’s good to hold on to all of that at the same time: the Constitution as a lode star; the limits of mere interpretation and the impossibility of a Constitution beyond all politics; and the recognition that the Constitution can survive and, in a real sense, rests on political strife.

via The Founders’ Finance, and Ours | Online Library of Law and Liberty.

Ask Not What's Possible: the question is not what you can do, the question is how much the client is willing to pay for it and how long they will wait.

Time Substitutes for Money on a Logarithmic Scale: e.g cutting the time by 20% will require doubling the budget. Cutting the budget by 30% will quadruple the amount of time.

All Estimates are Optimistic: new application development will take three times as long as you expect, and cost twice as much. Or vice-versa.

(Emphasis in original.) Via Database Soup: 20 Rules of Software Consulting.

Germany, the ECB and rest of the EuroThieves did something innovative.

They simply ignored Parliament and came up with a scheme that didn't require a vote.

We'll see how this works out for them.

This, incidentally, is exactly what happened here with GM.  It was blatantly unlawful to protect the UAW's pension fund, which had no senior standing while trashing senior bondholders.  The government did not care and did it anyway -- and the courts permitted it.

This has been the repeated means by which you are stolen from.  When you enter into an investment, whether you make a deposit in a bank or buy a bond or something else, you are buying into a capital structure in a given place with a given and declared level of both risk and potential reward.  You price that risk and your willingness to enter into the transaction with the full understanding of where you are in that capital structure.

When that is unilaterally changed retroactively you are being stolen from.  

via Quick Update On Cyprus in [Market-Ticker].

the most important lesson of economics is that no one has ever washed a rental car.  An excellent point, but the problem is worse than that: Without an incentive to preserve, many of us will gleefully destroy.  

via On Human Evil: Concrete Down the Drain Edition, Garett Jones | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

the EU has reached a deal to bail out Cyprus, but unlike the prior proposal, there will be no tax levied on anyone.

Insured deposits under 100,000 Euros will be safe and transferred to a new “good” bank, but the losses will be concentrated on the larger depositors who will be stuck at the “bad” bank.  And in a move eerily reminiscent of the maneuvering to get Obamacare passed, the deal is structured to avoid calling it a tax (which would require parliamentary approval).

via » EU and Cyprus agree to take big depositors’ money without calling it a “tax” - Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

The hallmark of the inferior being is not hypocrisy, or the mere appearance of hypocrisy.  Everyone with ideals fails to live up to them at some point or another.  One's failure to live up to a standard is not at all the same thing as denying the standard applies to oneself.  The hallmark of the inferior, the sure sign of the self-admitted inferior, is the individual who demands others live up to standards that he refuses to accept for himself.

If you do not hold yourself accountable to the same standards you apply to others, you are not only an anti-equalitarian, you are a self-declared and admitted inferior to those to whom you hold to those higher standards.

via Alpha Game: The hallmark of the inferior.

Late last night, after markets closed for the weekend, following an extended discussion the European finance ministers announced their "bailout" solution for Russian oligarch depositor-haven Cyprus: a €13 billion bailout (Europe's fifth) with a huge twist: the implementation of what has been the biggest taboo in European bailouts to date - the impairment of depositors, and a fresh, full blown escalation in the status quo's war against savers everywhere.

Specifically, Cyprus will impose a levy of 6.75% on deposits of less than €100,000 - the ceiling for European Union account insurance, which is now effectively gone following this case study - and 9.9% above that.

...

Congratulations Cyprus savers - you were just betrayed by both your politicians, and by Europe - sorry, but you are the "creeping impairments" in the game known as European bankruptcy. And so is anywhere between 6.75% and 9.9% of your money, which you were foolish enough to keep with your banks (where at least you were compensated with a savings yield of... 0%).

More importantly, as of this morning Europe has finally grasped that there is a 6.75% to 9.9% premium to holding physical cash in your mattress rather than having it stored with your local friendly insolvent bank.

Luckily Cyrpus is so "small" what just happened there will never happen anywhere else: after all in Europe nobody has ever heard of "setting an example". Or so the thinking among Europe's unthinking political elite goes.

And congratulations Europe: just when people almost believed you things are "fixed" you go ahead and prove to the world that you are as disunified (because size doesn't matter in a true union), as confused, as stupid and as broke as ever. 

Don't worry, it can't happen in the US. (/me rolls eyes) Via Europe Does It Again: Cyprus Depositor Haircut "Bailout" Turns Into Saver "Panic", Frozen Assets, Bank Runs, Broken ATMs | Zero Hedge.

The beautiful wife of a millionaire Long Island real-estate mogul got a judge to rip up her prenup -- a rare, precedent-setting decision that could influence countless marriages to wealthy people.

Elizabeth Petrakis, 39 -- sometimes acting as her own lawyer -- got a an appellate panel last month to toss the agreement she signed with Peter Petrakis, 41, four days before their lavish 1998 wedding.

The prenup stipulated that Peter, who parlayed a string of smoke shops into a $20 million commercial real-estate empire, would keep everything in his name if they split up.

But Elizabeth argued for seven years that Peter coerced her signature, threatening to call off the wedding even though her father had already paid $40,000 for the reception.

I find this horrifying. If she didn't want to get married under a prenup, she should not have signed it. It's not coercion to present someone with a contract (although I will allow that waiting until a few days before the wedding was a high-pressure tactic). Via Mangan's: Prenups no longer valid?.