a baseball break

  I really never talk about baseball anymore. I still love it, but between work and trying to change people's minds about morality (trying to convince about the non-aggression principle), who has the time?

  But the Mets have been playing well. Other than their recent series against the Yankees, in which they lost the season subway-series - five games to one - Santana and Dickey have been throwing great - Santana tossed the Mets FIRST EVER NO HITTER and Dickey threw two complete game one hitters consecutively. So there's that.

  There's also two minor stories of politics and baseball in the news. Barack Obama thought he was getting booed when he had brought up Kevin Youkilis. President Obama had a scripted line by some idiot bureaucrat who didn't think of all of the unintended consequences; he was trying to play cute with the innocent American people who just want to be left alone and to watch their baseball and football. It's really funny that some of the media also thought that Obama was booed. It was Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, who informed the people about a "Youk" chant could sound like booing. So Carney, who works for the president, saved the president from the media thinking he was booed because of bringing up a sore subject, then made the president look like he doesn't know what he's talking about. Brilliant!

  The other new story is that presidential candidate Congressman Ron Paul is going to be inducted into the Congressional Baseball Hall of Fame. His play during his first stint in Congress in the 70s and 80s culminated with what is believed to be the first of only two out of the park home runs.

FOMC policy announcement tomorrow (I bet on a surprise)

The Federal Reserve's monetary policy making committee will be releasing information from their every-six-week policy meeting tomorrow (you can see their Press Release by clicking on the "Statement" link for June meeting tomorrow after 12:30. Despite the disappointed expectations from Bernanke's testimony at his address to the Joint Economic Committee (see the entire hearing), I have a feeling that the Fed is going to announce a formal easing program tomorrow. Certainly the Fed has not at all taken a QE3 (in reality a QE5 or QE6) off the table, but I don't think markets have signaled recently that they expect a new purchase program from the Fed. I could be off base, but I have a feeling that the Fed thinks a surprise announcement toward more money printing might jump start the economy. Of course, all it will do is jump start financial markets holding dollar denominated assets.     Update: If Bernanke does announce a new round or easing or if he drops a strong hint that they might do it soon, we will see markets rally. Gold and silver could hit new records in the next few months. We will see.

Hope for America

  I have said before that I still have hope for America for one reason - generally speaking, almost all Americans are pro-right-to-bear-arms - that is that all law abiding citizens should be allowed to own firearms. I had plenty of formal and informal debates in college, and we debated a host of issues. But the least controversial discussions I had with my very good Democrat friends were about guns and gun ownership. I saw pictures of them at one of their houses with an M1 Garand, some sort of large revolver, and a couple of other guns. They might believe in some sort of system like in New Jersey where you must have a Firearms Identification Card to own and purchase firearms, where I don't believe in that, but I doubt they support gun registration or microstamping. And they thought it was a good idea that good Americans have guns. Also, they definitely enjoyed shooting.

  In addition to only .1% of Americans subscribing to the Brady campaign and most Americans liking that Americans have firearms, guns are all over popular culture - and in non-negative ways, in ways that will project the opposite of gun owners than a rapper will do when rapping about putting a cap into someone's ass. American Guns and Sons of Guns are two television shows which are just about building and customizing guns. Then there's Top Shot which is a shooting competition show. In other shows, like Storage Wars, Auction Hunters, Pawn Stars, Hardcore Pawn, and even Antiques Roadshow, firearms will commonly be an item about which we will learn history and get an appraisal.

  I really don't see interest in guns decreasing or support of gun control increasing in America, which gives me great hope that Americans are not in a totally helpless mindset. If registration, banning, and confiscation like in Cananda Great Britain occur here, though, there will be no hope left.
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  Update: I just posted this blog entry to my Facebook, and apparently as I was writing the above, Art of Manliness (a great website I highly recommend visiting and reading a few articles) posted an article A Primer on the Shotgun.

  Update #2, 6/7/2012: This came from Lew Rockwell's blog today.