Meet some Obama low information voters who appeared on a Jimmy Kimmel segment. This is what we are up against.
The black chick at 2:40 who said “Sequester what? I don’t know, I just voted for him because he’s black, I don’t know nothing about some sequester” is the most openly honest person amongst them.
Surfing is nothing but controlled falling in moving water, but this is a jaw dropper. Garrett McNamara is a professional big wave surfer who travels a world wide circuit, and on this particular outing off the shores of Portugal, he caught a rogue wave, estimated to be 90 feet tall at the crest. Here’s another take:
Garrett McNamara caught a monstrous wave Tuesday off Nazaré in Portugal, but did the wave face measure anywhere close to 90 feet, as a witness in the surfer’s group implied and as news reports suggested? Is it the largest wave ever ridden, as stated in the headline of a news release issued after the epic tow-surfing session?
Both points are debatable based on footage provided by McNamara to GrindTv.com, for its Tuesday afternoon post on the surfer’s incredible ride.
It was, without doubt, an amazing performance by the big-wave surfing icon from Hawaii. The wave face, however, does not appear to measure 90 feet. It’s worth noting, though, that footage captured from up high or far away, as was mostly the case here (there is some helmet-cam footage), can be misleading.
According to the folks who were there:
McNamara, a big-wave surfing icon from Hawaii, was riding large waves with Andrew Cotton and Al Mennie when three gigantic waves appeared on the outside. Cotton used a personal watercraft to tow McNamara onto the massive shoulder of one of those rogue waves. Mennie was siting in the channel on another vessel, acting as lifeguard, and described the event: “Everything seemed to be perfect, the weather, the waves. Both Cotty and I rode two big ones in the 60-foot-plus range and then when Garrett got on the rope a wave, maybe 30 feet bigger, came out of the canyon.
A fifteen-foot tall wall of water intimidates many surfers, but the guys who get the most credit are those running the towing operation on huge offshore breaks. They time the swells, estimate the breaks, and after dropping their cargo of brass balls off of a multi-story tower of water, manage to escape with their lives.
Fortunately, most of us don’t deal with that kind of awe-inspiring death-defying thrill-seeking bravado because we can be internet dare-devils instead, on
The Overnight Open Thread.
(h/t: yenta-fada)
Business Dictionary offers a long-winded, technical definition of sovereign debt. In a nutshell, sovereign debt is debt that a government owes. If a debtor government cannot repay its debt, its creditors (bondholders) do not have the power to force it into bankruptcy and divide up its remaining assets. So if the debt goes bad, both the debtor government and its creditors are in a predicament.
Government debt. Under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, the repayment of sovereign debt cannot be forced by the creditors and it is thus subject to compulsory rescheduling, interest rate reduction, or even repudiation. The only protection available to the creditors is threat of the loss of credibility and lowering of the international standing (the sovereign debt rating) of the country which may make it much more difficult to borrow in the future.
Note: The above video makes some valid points about the financial house of cards that various governments are busily trying to prop up. That said, I place no faith in the ability of the IMF or any other international financial organization to do anything other than worsen the crash by attempting to delay the inevitable.
I also must point out that there is a tremendous difference between a private enterprise with a good credit rating borrowing at a low interest rate to invest in future productivity, and a government borrowing money for supposedly the same reason. Experience has proven governments to be incapable of investing borrowed money in anything that will result in economic expansion.
The real outcome of such wasteful spending will be more like this chilling ad by Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW):
Originally published on 1389 Blog.
The Diary of Daedalus
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