Free Republic

The twin crashes in US commercial real estate and the US bond market have collided with $9 trillion uninsured deposits in the American banking system. Such deposits can vanish in an afternoon in the cyber age. The second and third biggest bank failures in US history have followed in quick succession. The US Treasury and Federal Reserve would like us to believe that they are “idiosyncratic”. That is a dangerous evasion. Almost half of America’s 4,800 banks have already burned through their capital buffers and are running on negative equity. They may not have to mark all losses to market...

Jean Duley testified that she was "scared to death" of Bruce Ivins after he left her a string of harassing phone messages, according to an audio recording taken during a July 24 peace order hearing. Duley, 45, told Judge Milnor Roberts that Ivins planned to "go out in a blaze of glory," had bought a bulletproof vest and a gun and planned to kill his co-workers. The audio recording was obtained by The Frederick News-Post on Monday. Duley told the court she got to know Ivins while running group and individual counseling sessions at the Comprehensive Counseling Associates in Frederick...

White Double THIS ILLUSTRIOUS PONTIFF was deservedly placed in the Calendar of the Church side by side with the glorious Bishop of Myra. Nicholas confessed, at Nicæa, the divinity of the Redeemer; Ambrose, in his city of Milan, was the object of the hatred of the Arians, and by his invincible courage, triumphed over the enemies of Christ. Let Ambrose, then, unite his voice, as Doctor of the Church, with that of St. Peter Chrysologus, and preach to the world the glories and the humiliations of the Messias. But as Doctor of the Church, he has a special claim...

Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the nation’s House of Commons Tuesday that he has attended lavish fundraisers for his family’s foundation to “create economic growth for the middle class.” His defense of his participation in fundraisers thrown by the Pierre Trudeau Foundation – which he renounced his official position in upon becoming the leader of the Liberal Party – follows an admission that he allowed attendees to lobby him at these fundraisers, a clear violation of Liberal Party bylaws. The metastasizing cash-for-access scandal follows a calamitous month for Canada’s Liberals in which, partly triggered by Trudeau’s effusive praise...

TO the delight of the White House, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is leaving Washington. Time and again his stories on the Clintons and their abuses of power have been proved correct. He leaves with a warning for Americans. "That's another British invasion we're glad is over," the White House told George magazine. "The guy was nothing but a pain in the ass." [ - SNIP - ] Disappointment was swift, however. I was stunned when the new President - barely installed in the White House - repudiated his campaign promise for a tax cut. It was downhill from there. [ - SNIP...

VIDEO

"I'm In The Market For You" & "Just Like In A Storybook" Ambrose (1930)

Best Advent Hymn! I Wonder If You’ve Ever Heard of It Msgr. Charles Pope • December 17, 2015 • For my money, the best Advent hymn ever is Veni Redemptor Gentium (Come Redeemer of the Nations), written by St. Ambrose in the 4th century. It is known more widely by the title "Come Thou Redeemer of the Earth." Sadly, it is not widely sung in Catholic parishes. Most Catholics I've asked have never even heard of it.One of the beautiful things about the ancient Latin hymns is how richly theological they are. Not content to merely describe an event, they...

Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, was born in the year 340 into the family of the Roman prefect of Gaul (now France). Even in the saint’s childhood there appeared presentiments of his great future. Once, bees covered the face of the sleeping infant. They flew in and out of his mouth, leaving honey on his tongue. Soon they flew away so high that they could no longer be seen. Ambrose’s father said that the child would become something great when he reached manhood. After the death of the father of the family, Ambrose journeyed to Rome, where the future saint...

<p>When the mayor vetoed the building of a sports stadium in a residential neighborhood, SAU sold the property to Assumption High School which was not restricted to the residential zoning regulations.</p> <p>This has been going on for a couple of years now.</p>

Link to Facebook page (with discussion and news): Restless Heart on Facebook.com Filmed in Europe, RESTLESS HEART is the first full-length feature movie on St. Augustine. Born in North Africa, Augustine studied in Carthage, becoming an accomplished but dissolute orator. After converting to Manichaeism, a guilt-free religion, he was called to the imperial court in Milan to serve as an opponent to the Christian Bishop Ambrose. But when the Empress Justina sent imperial guards to clear out a basilica where Augustine's mother, Monica, was worshipping, her constant prayers and the witness of Ambrose won him over to Christianity. Serving in...

...a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful that the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, was, by a unique grace and privilege of Almighty God in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, preserved exempt from all stain of original sin. –Ineffabilis Deus Today's feast day is more than Pope Pius IX's 1854 infallible proclamation, as important as that Dogma was and is. Today's feast day, which issues not only from the Papal Bull Ineffabilis Deus but its echo...

Entitled "Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn’t Happen Here", it is a warfare manual for defeating economic slumps by use of extreme monetary stimulus once interest rates have dropped to zero, and implicitly once governments have spent themselves to near bankruptcy. "snip>" Societe Generale's uber-bear Albert Edwards said the Fed and other central banks will be forced to print more money whatever they now say, given the "stinking fiscal mess" across the developed world. "The response to the coming deflationary maelstrom will be additional money printing that will make the recent QE seem insignificant," he said. Despite the apparent rift with...

You can see why markets and governments both like to blame Lehman Brothers for the "Great Contraction". Such wishful thinking shields investors from the nasty reality that deeper forces are at work: it absolves officialdom from its own destructive role in fixing the price of credit too low for 20 years, luring us into debt. As my colleague Jeremy Warner puts it, Lehman no more caused the economic convulsions of the last year than the assassination caused the First World War. There was the little matter of a rising Germany then, and rising China now. Both scrambled the international system,...

DISTRICT HEIGHTS, Md. - A toddler is in critical condition after being bitten by his family's pit bull Tuesday. Paramedics arrived at a home in the 1900 block of Addison Road South around 9:30 a.m. and found a boy with severe injuries to his face, head and eye, Prince George's County Fire and EMS spokesman Mark Brady says. "As as a result of these injuries, paramedics transported the child to a specialty center in the Baltimore area," Brady says. On the way to the hospital, a man who was accompanying the boy "became confrontational and demanded to be let out"...

Bears beware. The New Deal of 2008 is in the works. The US Treasury is about to shower households with rebate cheques to head off a full-blown slump, and save the Bush presidency. On Friday, Mr Bush convened the so-called Plunge Protection Team for its first known meeting in the Oval Office. The black arts unit - officially the President's Working Group on Financial Markets - was created after the 1987 crash. It appears to have powers to support the markets in a crisis with a host of instruments, mostly by through buying futures contracts on the stock indexes (DOW,...

The foundation marked Gormley’s achievement with a donation of books — seven volumes of the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition — to the Tomlinson Library at Mesa State College. The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark... were edited by Gary Moulton and published by the University of Nebraska Press. They are known among today’s historians as the best and most current version of the duo’s journey through the American West. Mesa State College Library Director Elizabeth Brodak said the fact that the books are forms of primary source material... “Anyone who wishes to get that flavor for...

A Tulsa man will be honored this week for saving another man's life. Back in April, Michael Cook came to the rescue when a pitbull attacked his neighbor. The News On 6’s Chris Wright reports Cook will receive the Citizen Appreciation Award from Tulsa police on Tuesday, an honor his neighbor says he more than deserves. Marvin Battle walks with a cane these days, but says considering what happen to him on April 25th, he can live with the limp. "I can't bend my leg. I have to go through physical therapy,” said Battle. “I've been on a lot of...

There is almost no chance that China will become the world's hegemonic superpower, or that the Chinese yuan will dislodge the US dollar as the key reserve currency in our life-times. It is ageing faster than any nation in history. Indeed, there is a risk that China’s demographic structure will implode long before the great mass of China’s interior ever become rich. This was more or less the conclusion of a closed-door session of Chinese experts at the Davos gathering, regrettably on “Chatham House” rules so none can be named. Those who fret about Chinese chauvinist-militarism certainly have a point....

In the ancient world books were rare. If you had a book, you were probably wealthy. If you got your hands on a book, you had to remember what you read because you might not ever see that particular book again. There would be public readings of books so that more people could hear them. People had to read aloud, actually, to help their memory. The more senses you could involve, the easier it was to remember the material. This holds true today! But, in the ancient world, everyone who read, read aloud. There is a famous moment recounted by...