I’ve held my peace for as long as I can, but there will be no more silence on this critical issue of the day. Here is the bottom line: you need to learn to make a link or you should fall into the grave early.

The use of lard in cooking is slowly being rehabilitated but the cultural shock of the stuff hasn’t diminished in the slightest.

There I was at the store buying just two products: lard and salt. They sat on the black conveyor belt awaiting checkout at the store. The guy behind me — something like this happens every time I buy lard — asked incredulously: “what are you going to make with that?”

It’s a strange thing that all the leading progressives feel schadenfreude toward all the Starbucks closings around the country.

I mean, this institution samples all the fashionable attitudes in music, aesthetics, and politics, subtly embracing the ethos of the arch-lefty consumer class: happy to promote commercialism provided that the commercialism points to all the right environmental and social-justice causes.

In early 2009 at the AEA meetings, Stanford economist John Taylor, used the term “Mondustrial Policy to criticize the Fed and Treasury response to the financial crisis. Taylor, as quoted in a WSJ bolg post by Jon Hilsenrath (http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/01/05/the-feds-outspoken-critic/, used this “unflattering term” to describe a policy environment that was “not a monetary framework. It is an intervention framework financed by money creation.”

Robert Murphy may think Ben Bernanke is a joke, but Mr. Bernanke’s outfit busted out an almost $82 billion in profits last year. All that paper the Fed sucked up onto its balance sheet during the financial crisis is now throwing off bookoo bucks. Under Bernanke’s guidance central banking is suddenly a growth industry, with Ben’s balance sheet now at $2.43 trillion, up $193 billion from ’09.

Humans are always looking for patterns as a matter of survival, and when the picture isn’t complete our brains fill in the blanks.

Leftist political humorist Calvin Trillin once noted, “sooner or later, every president makes you nostalgic for his predecessor.” Now, halfway through Obama’s term, it looks like the conservative pundits are happy to help this process along as best they can.