Michael B. Duff

The point is this is a regime in transition, a regime in a succession crisis, that is in economic disaster. The people are starving. It needs [outside] aid because we and the South Koreans and the Japanese have correctly cut it off years ago, and this is the way it [North Korea] beckons us into negotiations where, again, it will offer a phony agreement on some kind of halting of perhaps the uranium or plutonium program, and we will once again subsidize them. …

I'm starting to think Blue Staters don't like Thanksgiving very much… The Sam Spratt painting captures the zeitgeist pretty well. There's a sense that Red State America is the place you fly back to for holidays to endure your stupid, racist, theocratic, racist family. Makes me wonder. How did the hippies handle this? Politics has become so PERSONAL now. You can't disagree without being evil. Has it always been this way? To this degree?

If the euro is abandoned, and we go back to the peseta, lira, escudo, dracma, etc, devaluations would follow immediately. And devaluations mean write-offs of loans and investments – of a size that would render the whole European banking system completely insolvent.

This video is so unique and disturbing — such a mix of joy and horror as North Korean blind people are cured by surgery and immediately prostrate themselves before photos of the Dear Leader. Such a fundamental inversion of human dignity, the difference between a customer and a slave.

The real magic of Thanksgiving was…property rights.

So we are now treated to the spectacle of the bonds yields of two already bailed out countries – Greece and Ireland – soaring further, along with the requisite CDS spreads. This is truly phenomenal – evidently the markets are now increasingly questioning whether the euro-zone can be rescued at all. Naturally, Portugal and Spain saw their bond yields and CDS spreads blow out to new crisis wides. 'Interesting times' as the Chinese would say.