Misellany
Very nice trip to Ann Arbor on Saturday. I got to spend the day with Alex and Abbie, plus my three youngest sons and a niece. The weather was perfect. We got to see a lot of campus and experience the game-day excitement that is U of M's central campus (something I hadn't seen in over 20 years, since I don't attend games often, and when I do attend, I park with the adults on the south side of the stadium and have very little interaction with the actual campus). The university bus system was inadequate, but other than that, it was a great day.
2013
When I first started reading the doom-and-gloomers in late 2008 and 2009, they seemed fairly united on one point: the wheels would completely fall of the economy in 2012 and 2013. Well, 2012 is almost over, and the wheels haven't come off. Things aren't good, and it looks like they're going to get worse (which makes the gloomers more prescient than the MSM financial writers), but for the most part, life has pretty much continued as I've known it for the past 45 years.
But might 2013 bring the anticipated catastrophe? Jim Rogers thinks it will. I wish I could remember whether Rogers thought the economic world would fail by 2012, but I can't. Regardless, he's a highly successful fellow with a solid economic worldview (though my man Nassim Taleb thinks he's an idiot), so when he speaks I listen.
Your Daily Outrage
Counseled to Abort in a Catholic Hospital. Link. Excerpt: “Well,” chuckled the mental health therapist sitting under a Catholic roof, “Catholics don't really believe that today, that's an old idea. Women are not expected to tear up their bodies giving birth to baby after baby, and besides, most Catholics have small families. If that's what Catholics really believed there'd be many, many more large Catholic families, wouldn't there?
