Flyknit

...tried to get these this past weekend...style I desired was out of stock.  These were just recently introduced, probably to coincide with the Olympics.   I stumbled across this early this year.  I thought I put the video up on RP-BP, but, I can't find it...here we go again...then....

Bradley Wiggins Best Interview Ever

Dallas Fed Prez

Truth

EINSTEIN: Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?

TAGORE: Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the Truth of the Universe is human Truth.

I have taken a scientific fact to explain this — Matter is composed of protons and electrons, with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to man’s world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner, it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.

EINSTEIN: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) The world as a unity dependent on humanity. (2) The world as a reality independent of the human factor.

TAGORE: When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as Truth, we feel it as beauty.

EINSTEIN: This is the purely human conception of the universe.

TAGORE: There can be no other conception. This world is a human world — the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it Truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose experiences are through our experiences.

EINSTEIN: This is a realization of the human entity.

TAGORE: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realized the Supreme Man who has no individual limitations through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth, and we know this Truth as good through our own harmony with it.

EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.

TAGORE: Why not? Truth is realized through man.

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.

TAGORE: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man, there is also a Truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence of the latter.

TAGORE: Truth, which is one with the Universal Being, must essentially be human, otherwise whatever we individuals realize as true can never be called truth – at least the Truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human. According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute Truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a Truth cannot belong to Science. The nature of Truth which we are discussing is an appearance – that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore is human, and may be called mayaor illusion.

EINSTEIN: So according to your conception, which may be the Indian conception, it is not the illusion of the individual, but of humanity as a whole.

TAGORE: The species also belongs to a unity, to humanity. Therefore the entire human mind realizes Truth; the Indian or the European mind meet in a common realization.

EINSTEIN: The word species is used in German for all human beings, as a matter of fact, even the apes and the frogs would belong to it.

TAGORE: In science we go through the discipline of eliminating the personal limitations of our individual minds and thus reach that comprehension of Truth which is in the mind of the Universal Man.

EINSTEIN: The problem begins whether Truth is independent of our consciousness.

TAGORE: What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.

EINSTEIN: Even in our everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experiences of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.

TAGORE: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.

EINSTEIN: If nobody would be in the house the table would exist all the same — but this is already illegitimate from your point of view — because we cannot explain what it means that the table is there, independently of us.

Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack — no primitive beings even. We attribute to Truth a super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.

TAGORE: Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate physical reality is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric force, also belongs to the human mind.

In the apprehension of Truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The perpetual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science, philosophy, in our ethics. In any case, if there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing.

It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.

EINSTEIN: Then I am more religious than you are!

TAGORE: My religion is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the universal human spirit, in my own individual being.

Wait

Rob Arnott Interview

Why Big Banks Are Above the Law

By JAMES RICKARDS

July 30, 2012
Two developments in the banking industry with roots in the 1980s have now converged to give immunity to bankers for their criminal acts including mortgage fraud, accounting fraud, and LIBOR rate-rigging.

The first has to do with the consequences of a financial institution being charged with a crime. In the 1980s, Drexel Burnham was one of the largest and most powerful banks on Wall Street and the home of junk bond king Michael Milken and his hostile takeover empire. Drexel worked side-by-side with corporate raiders, hedge fund managers, and bond buyers to shake established company managers to the core and show that no one was safe from a debt-financed takeover backed by Milken. Behind this machine was a web of securities fraud and insider trading that was under investigation by the U.S. government. Beginning in 1986, Drexel suffered a series of individual and firm indictments and civil enforcement actions including some aimed at Milken himself. In December 1988, Drexel pleaded no contest to six felony charges and paid one of the largest fines in corporate history.

Then a curious thing happened. Over the course of a single day in February 1990, Drexel's short-term secured financing in the repo market evaporated. Drexel collapsed suddenly not because of a government indictment, but due to a run on the bank. The criminal cases against Drexel and Milken had caused a loss of confidence by the rest of Wall Street. Drexel was unable to leave its past behind and the firm succumbed to a criminal legacy.

The following year the king of Treasury securities dealers, Salomon Brothers, found itself involved in a criminal plot to rig the Treasury note market. Again, a run on the bank commenced and Salomon's balance sheet collapsed by two thirds in a matter of weeks. This time the outcome was different. The Treasury and Federal Reserve decided that two major bankruptcies in two years might be more than the system could bear. Warren Buffett was recruited as a white knight to refinance Salomon and a new management team including a former Treasury general counsel was brought in to put a clean face on the company. Salomon was spared. The lesson of Drexel and Salomon was that when banks face criminal prosecution, they also risk collapse.

The second development was the rise of the "too big to fail" doctrine. Many observers believe too big to fail is a product of the 2008 panic and TARP bailout, but the policy is much older. In 1984, Continental Illinois, the seventh largest bank in the United States, suffered a run on the bank. Contrary to established regulatory practice of bank closure or purchase by another bank, the regulators provided open bank assistance. In defending this action, the comptroller of the Currency explicitly stated that it was the policy of the United States not to let any of the 11 largest banks in the country fail. By 2011, that list had expanded to 29 firms including Citibank, J.P. Morgan, and Bank of America.

Now consider how these two developments work when applied together. The government knows that banks that are prosecuted may fail. They also know that some banks are too big to fail. It follows that some banks are too big to prosecute. They are above the law. Too big to fail means too big to jail.

Consider further that bankers know this. They know they are above the law and act accordingly. Normally, the prospect of being rousted out of bed at 5:00 a.m. and led away in handcuffs by FBI special agents in the full glare of television news lights is enough of a deterrent to keep even the greediest bankers in bounds. Yet, knowing they are immune from prosecution increases the temptation to engage in various kinds of fraud. When this green light for fraud is combined with heads-I-win, tails-you-lose gambling financed by federal deposit insurance, it's no wonder banks are engaged in institutionalized serial criminality not seen since the heyday of the Mafia in the 1950s.

Government has tried to finesse this dilemma using deferred prosecution agreements. These are basically deals where the government announces criminal charges but agrees not to go forward with the prosecution provided the bank pays fines, changes management, and keeps its nose clean for a year or more. If new crimes are committed in that time period, the deferred criminal charges spring back to life. It's a way to highlight alleged crimes without actually causing a run on the bank.

Expect to see such deferred prosecution agreements in the LIBOR scam cases. Also expect some individual arrests, perhaps soon, but only when the public has been carefully prepared and it has been made clear that these are "rouge" individuals and not the bank itself being charged with a crime.

At least that's some accountability. Yet, the larger problem remains. Unless banks are allowed to fail, whether it be for mismanagement or crimes, the feeling of being above the law will remain. The government reinforces that arrogance by its failure to prosecute. In the end, those who don't enforce the law are just as much to blame for bank crimes as the pinstriped perpetrators.


http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/07/30/why-big-banks-are-above-the-law