Tuesday Tune-up

Red Molly, "Sing To Me"

Quote for the Week, December 28, 2014-January 3, 2015

I come to the conclusion that the first class men of America are in the counting houses and the less brilliant ones in the government.
--Winston Churchill, age 20, upon his first visit to the U.S.

Tuesday Tune-up

Lily & Madeleine, "I've Got Freedom"

Quote for the Week, December 21-27, 2014

There's really no point to voting.  If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
--H.L. Mencken

Tuesday Tune-up

Boy & Bear, "Arrow Flight"

Quote for the Week, December 14-20, 2014

Democracy fails because it does what voters want.
--Bryan Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter

Tuesday Tune-up

Haim, "Strong Enough"

Quote for the Week, December 7-13, 2014

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
--Frederick Douglass

Tuesday Tune-up

Lisa Nemzo, "The Last Straw"

Quote for the Week, November 30-Decxember 6, 2014

The Japanese ability (and willingness) to take pain for the greater good is beyond the comprehension of most market watchers.
--Grant Williams

Tuesday Tune-up

Glen Hansard & Lisa Hannigan, "Falling Slowly"

Quote for the Week, November 23-29, 2014

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
--Douglas Adams

Tuesday Tune-up

Shovels & Rope, "The Devil Is All Around"

Quote for the Week, November 16-22, 2014

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower

Tuesday Tune-up

England Dan & John Ford Coley, "I'd Really Love To See you Tonight"

Quote for the Week, November 9-15, 2014

Concert For Valor?  That sounds like something the North Korean government would organize.
--Rory Fanning

Tuesday Tune-up

Sera, "Wandering Stranger"

Quote for the Week, November 2-8, 2014

No history is a matter of record; it is a matter of faith.
--James Branch Cabell

Tuesday Tune-up

Herb Alpert, Tijuana Brass Medley

Quote for the Week, October 26-November 1, 2014

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt.  He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
--Albert Einstein

Tuesday Tune-up

Dires Straits, "Sultans of Swing"

Quote for the Week, October 19-25, 2014

All -ism's end up in schisms.
--Huston Smith

Tuesday Tune-up

Everly Brothers, "Why Worry"
w/ Mark Knopfler & Chet Atkins

Quote for the Week, October 12-18, 2014

There is no Plan B because we have no Planet B.
--UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, on the need to address climate change

Tuesday Tune-up

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, "Learning to Fly"

Quote for the Week, October 5-11, 2014

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
--François de la Rochefoucald

Tuesday Tune-up

Agnes Obel, "Dorian"

Quote for the Week, September 28-October 4, 2014

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.
--Douglas MacArthur

Tuesday Tune-up

The New Victorians, "Somebody To Love"

Quote for the Week, September 21-27, 2014

When you're under pressure, the distinction between "volatility" and "loss" can seem only semantic.
--Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital

Tuesday Tune-up

Chrissie Hynde, "Back on the Chain Gang"

Quote for the Week, September 14-20, 2014

You may think that Scotland can become another Canada, but it's all too likely that it would end up becoming Spain without the sunshine.
--Paul Krugman to Scots hankering for independence

Tuesday Tune-up

The Alan Parsons Project, "Eye in the Sky"

Quote for the Week, September 7-13, 2014

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
--Bertrand Russell

Tuesday Tune-up

Al Stewart, "Year of the Cat"

Quote for the Week, August 31-September 6, 2014

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
--H.L. Mencken

Tuesday Tune-up

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, "Please Read the Letter"

Quote for the Week, August 24-30, 2014

Even the smallest amount of central planning, where it disturbs private, individual planning to the slightest effect, reduces the sum of human happiness.
--Bill Bonner

Tuesday Tune-up

Shovels & Rope, "Lay Low"

Quote for the Week, August 17-23, 2014

Sadly, our modern internet-connected brain tricks us every day into thinking that it is more rewarding and a better use of our time to simply not think but instead absorb and dump.
--Anthony Richardson

Tuesday Tune-up

Jason Mraz, "3 Things"

Quote for the Week, August 10-16, 2014

Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist.
--Alan Bloom

Tuesday Tune-up

Sugar and the Hi-Lows, "I've Got You Covered"

Quote for the Week, August 3-9, 2014

It's like me adopting an African child, then claiming myself as his dependent.
--Stephen Colbert on tax inversions engineered by U.S. corporations

Tuesday Tune-up

Luray, "The Wilder"

Quote for the Week, July 27-August 2, 2014

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"
--Eleanor Roosevelt

Tuesday Tune-up

Kris Angelis & Zane Carney, "Nothing You Can Say"

Quote for the Week, July 20-26, 2014

Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.
--Denis Diderot

Tuesday Tune-up

Clare Bowen & Lucy Schwartz, "Black Roses"

Quote for the Week, July 13-19, 2014

Those who thought the war would not last long underestimated the hierarchical state's ability to sustain industrialized slaughter.
--Niall Ferguson on the outbreak of WW1 a hundred years ago

Tuesday Tune-up

Chris & Gileah, "Love On This Island"

Quote for the Week, July 6-12, 2014

Gronk's become one of Boston's greatest ambassadors and tourist attractions, our goofy human Faneuil Hall or something.

--Chad Finn, Globe columnist

Tuesday Tune-up

Blue Oyster Cult, "Don't Fear the Reaper"

Quote for the Week, June 29-July 5, 2014

It's pretty much 90 minutes of turnovers.
--Dan Shaugnessy, Globe columnist, on the world's greatest sport

Tuesday Tune-up

Toto, "Rosanna"

Quote for the Week, June 22-28- 2014

The people's military belongs to the people, and cannot oppose the people.  Even less can it kill the people.
--petition of senior commanders within the Chinese military prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre

Tuesday Tune-up

Roger Hodgson (Supertramp), "Dreamer"

Quote for the Week, June 15-21, 2014

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
--Maya Angelou

The Dutch Annihilate the Defending Champs

Van Persie's goal vs. Spain earlier today
Netherlands 5, Spain 1

A Terminal Case of World Cup Fever

Miracle on turf?

Tuesday Tune-up

Sarah Blacker, "Shiver"

Rafa Encore Une Fois

Rafael Nadal,

French Open men's champion for the 9th time

Quote for the Week, June 8-14, 2014

I have been advocating "congressmammal" for some time.  It avoids the problems of gender injustice and should mollify the ultra-progressive professors who are talking out against species normativity with increasing passion.
--John Frary

Tuesday Tune-up

Sera, "Lifeboat"

Quote for the Week, June 1-7, 2014

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety), by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
--H.L. Mencken

Tuesday Tune-up

Lily & Madeleine, "Devil We Know"

Quote for the Week, May 25-31, 2014

There really is [in the U.S....a] kind of permanent government that doesn't get affected by election choices and that isn't in any way accountable to any sort of democratic transparency and just creates its own world off on its own.
--Glenn Greenwald

Tuesday Tune-up

Santana, "Soul Sacrifice"

Quote for the Week, May 18-24, 2014

I get the top bunk at Gitmo.
--Edward Snowden to Glenn Greenwald, at the Hong Kong handoff

Tuesday Tune-up

Over the Rhine, "Meet Me at the Edge of the World"

Quote for the Week, May 11-17, 2014

There can be nothing more silly...than a man popping his head "over the top," with gin-manufactured courage, in order to meet a lead bullet and die for a newspaper-manufactured "cause."
--Lin Yutang, My Country and My People

Tuesday Tune-up

Gerry Rafferty, "Night Owl"

Quote for the Week, May 4-10, 2014

The whole country has gotten a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome from the newest popular sport of Extreme Finger Wagging.
--Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Tuesday Tune-up

Fleetwood Mac: "Go Your Own Way"

Quote for the Week, April 27-May 3, 2014

Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
--Henrik Tikkanen

Tuesday Tune-up

Steppenwolf, "Magic Carpet Ride"

Quote for the Week, April 20-26, 2014

There is always something left to love.
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

1927-2014

Tuesday Tune-up

Billy Joel, "Just the Way You Are"

Quote for the Week, April 13-19, 2014

Over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance.
--Hyman Minsky

Tuesday Tune-up

The Corrs, "Goodbye"

Quote for the Week, April 6-12, 2014

He was between, somehow, and it was a lonely place--between, as he was, this foreign house and the house of earth.  He had no real home, and his was a very lonely heart which could not be wholly here nor there.
--Pearl S. Buck, A House Divided

Tuesday Tune-up

Richard & Mimi Farina, "Pack Up Your Sorrows"

Quote for the Week, March 30-April 5, 2014

The belief that wealth subsists not in ideas, attitudes, moral codes, and mental disciplines but in identifiable and static things that can be seized and redistributed is the materialist superstition.
--George Gilder

Ken Lewis Finally Gets His, Sort Of

One of SIGTARP's first cases: Bank of America, ex-CEO Lewis settle NY lawsuit over Merrill http://t.co/zjjSwzwNQx
— Neil Barofsky (@neilbarofsky) March 27, 2014

It only took five years to settle this case, which stems from Bank of America's takeover of Merrill Lynch (refresher here).  Notice that Lewis pays zilch (keeping all $135 million of his deferred compensation) as shareholders pick up the legal tab.  Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil explains here why Lewis wins--and why Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke might have been the real culprits.

Oh.  Then there is this, on the very same day:

$BAC Bank of America settles with Fannie and Freddie for $9.5 billion: Bank of America settles with Fannie an... http://t.co/rPD11w1oyD
— FinancePress (@thefinancepress) March 27, 2014

Tuesday Tune-up

Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart & Sting, "All For Love"

Quote for the Week, March 23-29, 2014

At the end of the day, fiscal discipline is the fundamental predicate of a free society.
--Jerry Brown, Governor of California

Tuesday Tune-up

The Cardigans, "Live and Learn"

Quote for the Week, March 16-22, 2014

You should never be proud of doing what's right.  You should just do what's right.
--Dean Smith, former UNC men's basketball coach

Tuesday Tune-up

The Sea The Sea, "Love We Are We Love"

Changing of the Guard in Ukraine

Interviewing protesters in Independence Square

Quote for the Week, March 9-15, 2014

And to him war was a thing like earth and sky and water and why it was no one knew but only that it was.
--Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

Tuesday Tune-up

The Band Perry, "Don't Let Me Be Lonely"

Quote for the Week, March 2-8, 2014

Sometime, in dark quiet moments alone, a Bond King may realize he was just lucky to coincide a career with a secular disinflation.
--Kevin Ferry

Tuesday Tune-up

The Honey Trees, "Moon River"

Quote for the Week, February 23-March 1, 2014

A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.
--Albert Einstein

Bullets Flying in Kiev

Were the sniper targets armed?

Tuesday Tune-up

Alison Krauss & Robert Plant, "Killing the Blues"

Quote for the Week, February 16-22, 2014

Political labeling nowadays has become virtually a form of abuse, driving one to try to make a political philosophy out of the defense of simple human decency.
--Harold Isaacs, writing in 1951

Tuesday Tune-up

The Cars, "Just What I Needed"

Quote for the Week, February 9-15, 2014

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
--Marcus Aurelius

Here Comes the Sun (Or Not)

Say No to hibernation:  "North of the Sun"

Tuesday Tune-up

Otis Redding, "I've Been Loving You Too Long"

Quote for the Week, February 2-8, 2014

Bitcoin is freedom. It's very American.
--Tyler Winklevoss

Bitcoin Believers

Click here for a 2-minute primer
on the new digital currency.
[from the N.Y. Times]

Tuesday Tune-up

Green Day, "Stay the Night"

Quote for the Week, January 26-February 1, 2014

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation.  The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
--Will Rogers

Tuesday Tune-up

Lindsey Stirling, "Zelda Violin Duet"

Quote for the Week, January 19-25, 2014

Markets will be permanently efficient when investors are permanently objective and unemotional.  In other words, never.
--Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital

Maps That Morph

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
(or, for that matter, the jet she's flying on)

Tuesday Tune-up

Linda Ronstadt, "Down So Low"

Quote for the Week, January 12-18, 2014

The war between the centrifuge of knowledge and the centripetal pull of power remains the prime conflict in all economies.
--George Gilder

Tuesday Tune-up

Everly Brothers, "Let It Be Me"

Quote for the Week, January 5-11, 2014

Bipartisan means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.
--George Carlin