Stuff below the fold

Naming names: Robert Reich reviews a book.

The real problem, which the authors only hint at, is that Washington and the financial sector have become so tightly intertwined that public accountability has all but vanished. The revolving door described in “Reckless Endangerment” is but one symptom.

Sounds what Sarah Palin wrote last week, except with details.

and then there is the MFGlobal scandal....

Spengler also notes that some Middle East countries are about to go kaput too...to make things worse, Turkey is making noise about intervening in Syria (and Turkey is a NATO member)

----------------------------------

Some buzz on the internet about what is that large structure in the desert of China.

Strategypage says it's a grid to adjust their spy satellite cameras.

----------------------------------
Mary Beard discusses how Rome handled emergencies: Temporary dictators.
and how ambitious men destroyed that idea.

factoid of the day: The source of the name Cincinnati:

One of the most famous of these dictators was Cincinnatus (whose name lies behind the city of Cincinnati). In our terms he was a right wing ideologue, but was a hero of propriety when it came to the dictatorship. Having been consul in the past, he accepted the senate's request that he become dictator while working on his farm ("Cincinnatus called from the plough" as his tag-line went), and as soon as he had secured the victory, he laid the office down.,,returning to the plough.

The last US president who retired to an ordinary life was Harry Truman....the ones that followed him had farms or ranches or multimillion dollar estates for retirement.

After President Truman retired from office in 1952, he was left with an income consisting of basically just a

U.S. Army pension, reported to have been only $13,507.72 a year. Congress, noting that he was paying for his stamps and personally licking them, granted him an "allowance" and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year. When offered corporate positions at large salaries, he declined, stating, "You don't want me. You want the office of the president, and that doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it's not for sale."

---------------------------------
Feeling discouraged about the state of the world?

Read about the Norwich Univ students who volunteered to clean up after the floods in New Hampshire.