“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

That outburst is enshrined in movie history. It’s from the 1976 satire “Network,” which went on to win four Academy Awards.

The now-famous line gave fire to a diatribe by a news anchor named Howard Beale with declining ratings. Played by the great Peter Finch, he urges Americans to yell it out their windows during a dazzling lightning storm.

Beale rants “Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.” Continue Reading »

Andrew Mickey of BreakAway Investor wrote a piece about why Russian President Vladimir Putin is the world’s most dangerous man (you can see it here).

Mickey makes a darn good argument to support Putin’s infamy. He accuses Putin of playing “a deadly game of resource roulette.” That Putin is ready to plunge a “red dagger into America’s financial heart.” And that Putin is “already in the early stages of a strategic strike on the United States economy, the likes of which could cripple our nation for decades.”

I have no argument with Mickey’s take on Putin. But I can’t believe for a moment that Putin is the world’s most dangerous man. Because the most dangerous man in the world is clearly Alan Greenspan. Continue Reading »