The message is clear – grovel and enjoy your genitals being groped or face arrest.
I am rather leery of many of the things on that site but just listen to the embedded video.
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“When it comes to development programs, what we are really talking about is creating an environment within which gifted players have the best opportunity to flourish. When identifying these environments, the evidence consistently points to a committed, passionate coach teaching, guiding and mentoring a gifted player to a successful pro career. How, then, do we best ensure that such relationships are given the best opportunity to thrive in the future? First, it’s imperative to understand that tennis is a highly individualistic sport. Aside from a shared ability to win, the only thing that many of the great champions had in common was that they had virtually nothing in common. Nothing better illustrates this fact than the contrasting styles and personalities of some of the game’s great rivalries, like McEnroe and Borg, Evert and Navratilova, Sampras and Agassi, and Federer and Nadal. Incidentally, it’s a useful exercise to look at who the primary coaching influences were in the development of these players (John McEnroe – Tony Palafox and Harry Hopman, Chris Evert – her father, Martina Navratilova – Billie Jean King and I also understand that Tony Roche had an influence, Pete Sampras – Peter Fischer, Andre Agassi – his father and Nick Bollettieri, Roger Federer – Peter Carter, Rafael Nadal – Toni Nadal). Second, like players, coaches also have their own unique methods and personalities. The best ones are independent thinkers who wouldn’t survive for a second in a regimented environment, where they would be expected to ignore their own knowledge and conform to the dictates of a “one size fits all” approach. Can you imagine Wayne Bryan, Nick Bollettieri and Toni Nadal working within the confines of a stifling bureaucracy? With such a diverse range of players and coaches out there, it’s essential that players and their parents are free to determine for themselves who is the best coach. Any wider program or system must take this into account.” Chris Lewis, who, by the way, is a big Ayn Rand fan. (Thanks to the SOLO Passion website for the pointer to the article).
October 8th, 2013 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Don’t know if this report will get through – the power grid is failing, internet technicians throughout the country are being deported as their work visas expire, and my federal-law-mandated ergonomic keyboard is dissolving even as I type – but I’ll send it anyway, because this news must get out. With the total collapse of the United States of America now entering its seventeenth hour, the situation is grim. Here in Minnesota, with our frigid winter approaching, we are unable to procure supplies of heating oil and natural gas until interstate transport of these commodities resumes. Tanker trucks remain backed up for miles at our southern border awaiting the printing of additional Federal Hazardous Waste Transport Authorization forms. Across the state, worried citizens are being confronted with grocers’ foodstocks which have received no federal inspection stamp. With hungry children waiting anxiously at home, hoping against hope that Today Will Bring Food, bewildered parents are facing for the first time in their generation the choice between saving their childrens’ lives, or obeying federal law. Across the Plains states, children are perishing in droves. All throughout the states, ongoing and viable Alternative Sustainable Energy businesses – businesses that employ tens of people – are closing their doors and turning off their lights, no longer able to sell solar panels and windmills without the federal checks that buttress the consumers’ heavily-subsidized prices. The 12,715-year payback period for solar panels which consumers will now experience in the absence of government purchase-price subsidization has crushed this entire economic sector – the fastest-growing sector of our economy for the last seven years – leaving entire barrooms filled to capacity every evening with old Obama donation bundlers commiserating about the end of the good times and trying to sell each other their $30,000,000 coastal homes. . . . As I type this, the air in our underground shelter is becoming more foul and depleted. Frantic calls to the EPA for advice and support go unanswered – the phones just ring and ring. My wife says, open the damned windows, you big idiot, but I dare not, at least without proper approval. She would seemingly expose our lovely children to hazards unknown, without even bothering to check with The Authorities. Bitch. As you can see, the walls of our suburban basement seem to be closing in on us, making us all edgy and tense and hostile. Our new Hobbesian existence strains the bonds of our shared civility, and I do believe that another day in this hell will find us treating people of differing genders and races in unequal ways, refusing to share our wealth with those among us who are too uneducated to understand that bar-hopping 24/7 will not generate wealth for themselves, and drinking unhomogenized milk. If you read this report – if the internet remains functional for a few more hours – please – Send Warm Clothes. October 2nd, 2013 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
US government begins shutdown after Congress debates end in stalemate
With the watchmen gone from their posts, there can be very little chance that any of our American readers can have survived the plagues, the zombies, the rampaging NRA members and lack of a panda-cam. Theirs has been the fate of Belgium. Mourn. Survive. But can our doom be far behind, now that they have said they will scrap the Human Rights Act? October 1st, 2013 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was reading an article about the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank (boo, hiss) in 1913 and I came across this:
Cue utter confusion. For starters, why would a bank want to issue currency? Surely, a bank has all the money it wishes to lend out in the form of deposits. And what is meant here by currency? notes and coins or money in general?
This is really confusing. I can understand how notes work in a goldsmith system. Briefly, a depositor deposits some gold with the goldsmith and in return receives a receipt for that gold. The receipt, or note, is then capable of being used as money because it is literally “as good as gold”. I can see how government bonds might replace gold but it requires a depositor. And surely, once a depositor has deposited his bond the bank can issue its own receipts/notes rather than having anything to do with the government. Or maybe that’s illegal. Or maybe depositors would prefer to use government notes as they are accepted in more places. “…a normal and elastic currency system”. What do they mean by “elastic”? Do they mean what modern-day Austrian economists mean i.e. inflationary? I doubt it because at the time the UK was on a gold standard which tends to be anti-inflationary [notwithstanding comments I have made about how there was some inflation at the time]. And what’s all this about commercial paper? The modern meaning is short-term business debt. I can kind of see how that would replace government bonds although presumably it would have to be extremely homogenous and what happens when the term is up? And where, if anywhere, is the link with gold which, as I understand it, was one of the main issues in the 1896 presidential election? Whatever the case may be it seems clear that the US monetary system was far from being a free market before the Fed came along. One last thought: there are times when I think the confusion that monetary matters generate is deliberate rather than accidental.  The Times 10 September 1913 page 8 September 19th, 2013 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
It was twelve years ago now, so it is no particular surprise that nobody here, as September 11th 2013 comes to its end, had much to say about September 11th 2001. But Simon Clarke of Libertarian Home does say something of significance about this tumultuous day. In a posting entitled Libertarian Home started 12 years ago today, he says this:
9/11 woke up a lot of people. It got a lot of people thinking. A great many blogs started up soon after that day. It wasn’t merely because, at around that time, they could. In the aftermath of 9/11 people found themselves wanting to say things that the regular media were not saying, and to criticise a lot of the things that the regular media were saying. Simon did not immediately start writing blog postings, but he did start reading blogs, including this one, which is most gratifying to know. September 11th, 2013 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
In short, by 2013 the Republican Establishment had proved itself so alien to the domestic concerns of that majority of Americans who dislike the direction in which the ruling class is pushing it, that the party was becoming irrelevant. Despite the Bush Administration’s disastrous commitment to Nation-Building however, the memory of Ronald Reagan’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s forceful, levelheaded patriotism still lingered about the party. But by urging war on Syria more vehemently than Obama, the Republican Establishment may have finished off the Republican Party, as we know it. Surely it has discredited itself. September 10th, 2013 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
A while back, I did a piece here about US government space policy. I tried to answer the question of why President Obama was doing it so bizarrely well, given that he seemed to be doing lots of other stuff so bizarrely badly. My answer was basically that he is doing everything well, as he understands it. He believes the US government has been chucking its weight around in the world far too much of late, and that this aspect of its activities should be weakened. And he believes that the US government hasn’t chucked its weight around enough, domestically. That aspect of US government policy should be strengthened. All this has been and is being busily accomplished, indeed accomplished with considerable political virtuosity, with Big Government and the political party that favours Big Government working ever more closely in harmony with one another. Norman Podhoretz seems to agree, certainly on the foreign policy bit:
I am seldom convinced by explanations of why the President of the USA has just done something that the explainer considers stupid, when the explanation is that the President of the USA is himself stupid. I didn’t believe this kind of thing when it was said about Reagan or Bush jnr by their political opponents, and I don’t believe it now when it is said about Obama, by his political opponents. Those who argue that this or that bad thing happened because the President is an idiot call this argument things like: “Occam’s Razor”. But I think they confuse brevity and simplicity, and what they want to believe, with truth. If the President is so stupid, how come he’s President? He got that bit right, didn’t he? And President Obama is a member of an even more exclusive club, one that also includes Reagan and Bush jnr. He is a President of the USA who got himself re-elected. The dumber and more disastrous you think his first term policies were, then the smarter you must concede he had to be to win re-election. I think the argument that Obama knows just what he’s doing and is doing just fine, by his reckoning, makes far more sense. September 9th, 2013 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
A generation from now, Americans will be richer, more leisured, healthier and longer-lived than ever. That sentence could have been written at any time since the Mayflower landed (at least of the settlers; it was a different story for the indigenous tribes). It would always have prompted scepticism; and it would always have been true. – Daniel Hannan begins his response to America 3.0, an optimistic book about the historic origins of and future consequences of the exceptionalness of America, by James Bennett and Michael Lotus. Hannan shares their optimism. September 6th, 2013 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
The quick version of something the old plague-carrier said is that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Second time as tragedy and farce would have been more accurate. Top comment: “I did not set a red line, Bush did it and you are a racist” September 4th, 2013 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a Samizdata team joke that the difference between American arrogance and British arrogance is the British think they run the world, whereas the Americans think they are the world. Well just last week I started doing some business with a European bank… a quite mainstream one I might add… and discovered something remarkable. I had to sign a series of statements that I did not do business in the USA, had no assets in the USA and was not a US citizen or resident. Only then would they do business with me. Indeed I had to sign more papers regarding this than any actually pertaining to the business I was doing with them. And this is why…
Surely a significant European bank must do some business in the USA, I asked. Can the world’s largest economy really be so onerous that you truly want nothing whatsoever to do with it? Well he was rather guarded and he knew I was a blogger, which I suspect made him a bit uneasy at the prospect of being quoted, which is why I am naming no names. But to paraphrase the reply I coaxed out of him, it was “yes, the USA is simply not worth the trouble and so rather than complying with their endless diktats and the uncertainties of what are increasingly capricious rules… well… there is a whole great big world out there for us to do business with that does not include the United States.” Yet I suspect the powers-that-be in Washington could not care less and moreover the notion that sophisticated foreign bankers are starting to see American not as the land of opportunity, but as a place to be avoided at all costs, would strike them as preposterous. Indeed had I not had those documents laid in front of me asking me to attest to a complete lack of economic links to the USA or anything associated with the USA that the US state might claim extraterritorial jurisdiction over… well, I would not have believed it myself. Moreover, after our business had been concluded and he relaxed a bit, the banker in question, who I very much doubt is on any Interpol wanted lists (well I certainly hope not given that he now has some of my money) said he would not even visit the USA or transit a flight through it, due to the US authorities propensity to detain foreign bankers and ask them questions if they even suspect any involvement with US nationals, particularly from ‘non-compliant’ banks such as his. Am I the only one who is astonished things have come to this? I am suddenly very glad I do not actually live in Arkham, Massachusetts (not sure which is worse, the IRS or the Deep Ones). August 21st, 2013 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mr Obama laments that the debate over these issues did not follow “an orderly and lawful process”, but the administration often blocked such a course. For nearly five years it appeared comfortable with the secret judicial system that catered to executive demands. It prized the power to spy on Americans, and kept information from Congress. Mr Snowden exposed all of this. His actions may not have been orderly or lawful, but they were crucial to producing the reforms announced by Mr Obama. August 13th, 2013 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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