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I’m not normally one to write a blog post about a dead celebrity, but then I suppose there is no such thing. There are only living celebrities, not dead ones. In death, wealth and prestige decay and we are brought into a new reality, the only reality there is or ever was — one which, for much better or much worse, doesn’t care at all about our popularity or our money. The death of Robin Williams is significant not because he was famous, but because he was human, and not just because he left this world, but particularly because he...

As he stepped out on stage last year to hawk his big TV comeback in front of advertisers, comedy great Robin Williams joked it was 'nice to have a job where the checks will clear.' After making his name as the eccentric and beloved alien on 1970s TV hit Mork and Mindy, Robin transferred his attentions to Hollywood with a stream of box office hits. But after acclaim and an Oscar, the movie career started to dry up and the actor signed up for CBS show The Crazy Ones, a small-screen comedy about a 'renowned and slightly unhinged' advertising genius/madman....

LOS ANGELES – They earn their living by making the masses laugh, but experts say comedians are all too often masking intense sadness behind those smiles.

"Depression is one of the most tragically misunderstood words in the English language," writes Stephen Ilardi, an associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Kansas, in a blog post on the Psychology Today website. "When people refer to depression in everyday conversation, they usually have something far less serious in mind," than what the disorder actually entails. "In fact, the term typically serves as a synonym for mere sadness." Here are some facts about depression: •Although major depression can strike people of any age, the median age at onset is 32.5, according to Washington University School of Medicine...

Oscar-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams has died at age 63, according to police in Marin County, Calif. The full statement is below. On August 11, 2014, at approximately 11:55 a.m, Marin County Communications received a 9-1-1 telephone call reporting a male adult had been located unconscious and not breathing inside his residence in unincorporated Tiburon, CA. The Sheriff’s Office, as well as the Tiburon Fire Department and Southern Marin Fire Protection District were dispatched to the incident with emergency personnel arriving on scene at 12:00 pm. The male subject, pronounced deceased at 12:02 pm has been identified as Robin...

Back in 2013, Williams predicted that it would be “game over” in 2014. What are the statistics showing him now? Williams says, “They are showing the economy continues to weaken, and it never recovered. A second quarter contraction here would most assuredly be recognized as a new recession, and I contend we never got out of the old recession. We had plunge, stagnation and, now, we are turning down anew.”

Amity Shlaes does not believe in playing it safe. In 2007 she issued the original edition of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, which dared to badly dent the established shibboleths regarding America’s Great Depression and how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal did—or did not—dealt with it. In 2013, she departed the beaten path still more provocatively, resuscitating the reputation of the much-maligned Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge defied all odds and joined The Forgotten Man in achieving best-seller status. Having placed such high-stakes bets and won, she doubled back—and doubled-down—to collaborate on a “graphic” version of The...

The first quarter contraction, especially our corrected number, implies a second quarter negative real GDP. In other words, the years of Quantitative Easing (money printing) by the Federal Reserve has not resulted in economic recovery from the 2008 downturn and has not prevented further contraction.

Hi all, I never, NEVER, thought I'd post this here. But at this point, I have no one to turn to. I'm a 51 year-old housewife/reporter and photographer who tries to make money doing proofreading, editing, writing,taking pictures, and oh, yes, selling ads for a phone book belonging to a dear friend of mine who was on Gatineau's city council (that's how I met him; we broke a lot of stories here). I need to make a profile on FR; it would save a lot of time. :) Long story short. I grew up in Des Plaines, IL, met my...

There have been many truly awful presidents elected in the United States, but if I had to pick my least favorite, I might choose Herbert Hoover. I obviously have disdain for Hoover’s big-government policies, but I also am extremely irritated that – as Jonah Goldberg explained – he allowed the left to create an utterly bogus narrative that the Great Depression was caused by capitalism and free markets. Indeed, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity produced a video demonstrating that the statist policies of both Hoover and Roosevelt helped trigger, deepen, and lengthen the economic slump. Building on that theme,...

I warned about this in part two of my 2.5 hour Economics Video Presentation back in November of ARSH 2012, and, sure enough, it has now happened. Because, as I have been saying all along, for anyone who knows ANYTHING about ANYTHING having to do with economics, finance and/or banking, and who does not have their brain bucket completely and firmly inserted up their rectal vault, it is obvious what is happening and how the chain of events will unfold. If a mouthy broad with a mere bachelor’s degree in animal husbandry from a land-grant university can see this stuff...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When the government updates its estimate Wednesday of how the U.S. economy fared last quarter, the number is pretty sure to be ugly. Horrible even. The economy likely shrank at an annual rate of nearly 2 percent in the January-March quarter, economists estimate. That would be its bleakest performance since early 2009 in the depths of the Great Recession. So why aren't economists, businesses or investors likely to panic? Because most agree that the economy last quarter was depressed by temporary factors - particularly the blast of Arctic chill and snow that shuttered factories, disrupted shipping and...

The essential economic problem we confront today is that our dominant Keynesian intellectuals have abandoned reality. They do not grasp what they have wrought with the mountainous loads of debt and malinvestment that are overwhelming us. Much of this burden must be liquidated before genuine demand and growth can be restored, which will require radical reform if we are to evoke a genuine cure. To try and solve today’s debt created crisis with more debt (as the Keynesians are presently doing) can only bring on a bigger bust the next time around, which will require still larger “debt injections” to...

Levels of a small molecule found in humans and other primates are lower in the brains of depressed individuals, according to researchers at McGill University. In a study published in the journal Nature Medicine, Dr. Gustavo Turecki, a professor at Montreal's McGill University, and his team discovered that the levels of a tiny molecule may provide a marker for depression and help detect individuals who are likely to respond to antidepressant treatment. "Using samples from the Douglas Bell-Canada Brain Bank, we examined brain tissues from individuals who were depressed and compared them with brain tissues from psychiatrically healthy individuals,"says Turecki,...

"One of the most appalling things about NRA was the sudden multiplication of new rules with which businesses must comply, rules not resting on settled law but on arbitrary decisions of administrative bodies, subject to change almost without notice.The business community was suddenly called upon to rush to Washington to participate in the making of codes, codes which represented bargains among different elements of the industries, bargains with labor, and bargains with an extraordinarily incapable set of Government officials and employees, many of whom were extremely radical, and few of whom knew anything about business"

At West Point last week [1], President Barack Obama went to a variant of an economic theme he’ll probably reprise until the day he leaves the Oval Office once and for all (we hope) 31-plus months from now.Obama told the assembled graduating Army cadets and their families: When I first spoke at West Point in (December) 2009 … our nation was just beginning a long climb out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. What if I told you that nearly five years into the nation’s “long climb” out of the recession, the relative size of the...

Paul Bedard June 3, 2014 Influential financial publisher and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes is out with a new warning that the U.S. faces an economic catastrophe due to the Federal Reserve's loose dollar policy, and returning to a strict “gold standard” is the only way to avoid disaster. In Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy -- and What We Can Do About It, Forbes blames President Obama's money team for the stagnant economy, high prices, declining mobility and big government. "[The Fed's] vastly misguided monetary policies are now setting the stage for a new...

When Maryland governor Martin O’Malley signed a minimum wage of $10.10 an hour into law this week, U.S. labor secretary Tom Perez argued that a higher wage would help growth in Maryland, saying “it’s good for the economy.” The governor’s press release supplied the context: Maryland needs help so badly because the state has “faced the worst national recession since the Great Depression.” Nor are Maryland politicians alone in working the Great Depression angle. Vice President Joe Biden likes to hold up for ridicule current critics of the minimum wage by pointing to the foolish negative reaction to the formal...

It is now five years since the crash of 2008. Today's media and much of our academic crowd, of course, believe that the crisis has been handled, and that we can settle back to "business as usual." But such pundits are viewing only the trees, not the forest. They see correct Federal Reserve policy and legitimate fiscal policy on the part of the Federal Government. But this view comes from a false concept of economics and from a major failing of humans – their use of "euphemism" to flee from reality. For example, almost all of today's scholars and pundits...

What doesn't kill us only makes us stronger, right? Well, not when it comes to bullying. Some may still consider bullying a harmless part of growing up, but mounting evidence suggests that the adverse effects of being bullied aren't something kids can just shake off. The psychological and physical tolls, like anxiety and depression, can follow a person into early adulthood. In fact, the damage doesn't stop there, a British study published this week in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests. It actually lasts well into the adults' 40s and 50s. "Midlife ... is an important stage in life because...