Well of COURSE I feel like shooting some wogs. And YES, I think the Marines en route to the Shores of Tripoli should be issued live ammo and given permission slips to defend themselves.

Now, if someone will explain just WHICH Egyptians and Libyans and Yemenis need shooting, we'll be ever so grateful.

Meanwhile, I believe I'd tell President Mursi that because of his failure to operate a civilized government we're planning to reduce our annual $1.3 billion Cairo bribe.

Arab Spring. Vive la revolucion.  I see no way out for us unless we get busy with high-speed rail.

For some reason I'm not too cheerful this morning. Don't know why. The weather is suburb. I have hunted and gathered about all the renewable, sustainable  biomass I'll need for the cold months ahead. A naggy problem with Rusty Red, the  F150 wood hauler has been found and fixed at no cost, right here in the Camp J motor pool.

Maybe it's just a piece of undigested roast beef degrading my emotional innards, part of a rump which, by the way, costs upwards of five bucks a pound in these days of drought, the warp-speed money press, and the ethanol mandate.

Aha. That's it, and if I gotta be a little grumpy I have a right to suck away at your happiness, too.

Bernanke is probably about to screw with our money again, and even some of the world's big bankers are going public with warnings. Printing money willy-nilly is a heck of a lot of fun, they admit,  but it's a little like Wild Turkey. Too much and you find your soiled self collapsed in the weeds, wondering what the Hell happened.

" we think we will get on-going synchronized QE [quantitative easing]. Central banks will have to print more money and this will continue to drive up inflation expectations." 

Yeah, the Fed bosses are meeting this week to decide how much more of your savings account they should steal by tapping the keyboard a few times to create  more magic money. 

They'll tell us Thursday.  All the experts say they will QE3 us. The guru in the above cite says they should do something far more intelligent: nothing. Fat chance.

The Smoky Mountain Railroad

We're in the middle of  the annual Clay County Fair hype. "The World's Largest County Fair"  is interesting enough and I occasionally wander though it. But local radio covers the damn thing with all the scope and intensity usually reserved for something like al Queda landing a regiment or two in Manhattan.

I forgive them for two reasons. First, the summer people are gone and the fair brings a better class of tourists* to the area. True,  they say "shucks" a lot and really seem to like corn dogs. On the other hand they generally don't get drunk and vomit on the sidewalks.

Second, the fair is home to the very large Smoky Mountain Railroad model layout. I know there are a few rail fans in the TMR readership, and you can take a peek at it here.

It's probably interesting even to non-buffs for the craftsmanship and historical content. The thanks are due to a great rarity -- a genuinely nice guy who got wealthy in the radio broadcasting business -- the late Ben Saunders of KICD.

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*Or, as we think of them: "Spending Units"

The Sadness of the Federal Reserve Cartoon

The loophole dealer and I suffered an irreconcilable difference of opinion, so the Victory Model lives elsewhere. I am newly  stuck with a small but still worrisome quantity of the green paper mentioned in the title.

Still, a good little show. The commerce was not frenetic, just active enough to make me look forward to immediately embracing my pillow.