Aspect Ratios

The electronic screen is showing a movie from France. Subtitles in white flicker vanishing in the white of black and white. Old men are plotting while a young girl weighs her options. Everyone smokes cigarettes because smoking is normal. Everyone thinks about money.

The Obama Slaughter Care Gambit

http://zenpundit.com/?p=3355

The Anglo-American tradition of “rule of law” is distinct from that of continental Europe or Confucianist traditions in Asia, both of which are primarily concerned in different ways with the health of the state. Anglo-American “rule of law” has been an evolutionary - and sometimes revolutionary - march to constrain the exercise of arbitrary power and, eventually, assure an egalitarian access to justice.

Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, a great man to whom much is owed, but who today is largely forgotten, was the great theorist and defender of judicial independence and common law from the whims of a sovereign. Without judicial independence, the rule of law is hardly possible because it is ultimately inseparable from the executive power; Coke was instrumental in moving elite Englishmen’s minds from accepting “Rex lex” (”The King is Law”) to demanding “Lex rex” (”The Law is king”).

The matter was not formally settled with the English Civil War, which came not long after Coke’s death, or even the Glorious Revolution of 1688; nor the American Revolution of 1776 or even at Appomattox Courthouse. “The rule of law” is an ongoing struggle that must be constantly renewed by an active and vigilant citizenry if it is to be sustained.

Wbboei on David Axelrod

I wonder who owns David Axelrod. How is it that he gets out ahead of his supposed boss and says they will ram health care reform down our throats regardless of how we feel about it, and then a day later his boss comes out and contradicts him completely by saying do not ram it through, pick the best parts. Who owns Axelrod?

There are a number of machines in the Democratic Party. The three most powerful are the Clinton Machine, the Chicago Machine and the Kennedy Machine. Ostensibly, the Clintons are out of politics so their machine is like an army at winter garrison, The Chicago Machine aka the Daley Machine/Illinois Combine is active at this point. It owns the west wing of the White House. They are vile people of the lowest order. The Kennedy Machine is without a leader. Ted died and he tried to make Obama his political heir but that dream ended with the election of Scott Brown. The film critic Roger Ebert, a lifelong democrat, has a posting on his site yesterday saying the Brown victory is a fuck you Teddy, from the voters of Massachusetts.

David Axelrod is a soldier in the Chicago Machine. He was sent to Massachusetts to manage the campaign of Littel Deval and test market the Chicago machine candidate Obama for the job of president. The alliance between those machines dates back to the time of the 1960 election when Daley Sr. threw the state for Kennedy. But that does not mean they are his only boss. He also reports to George Soros, and his group of global money men.

Many assume that Axelrod runs Obama, since most people realize that Obama is a puppet. In this case, however, the puppet contradicts the puppet master. This suggests that other interests are in play.

One of them is the inevitable decline of the leaderless Kennedy Machine. This machine is old and rickety. It aims to control all activity within its geographic area, much like a union or mafia family does. When the machine can no longer control the market it declines. Thus when the surface transportation market was deregulated in 1980, the Teamsters lost their ability to control that market and non union competition drove many of their companies under. Similarly, when Irish gangs in Chicago and Brooklyn encountered a huge influx of Italians between 1890 and 1920, they lost control of the street and the rackets. When 51% of the electorate in Massachusetts becomes Independent, as it has, then the Kennedy Machine can no longer control the politics. The fear factor is gone. The Brown victory drove that point home rather convincingly.

Obama knows his policies are unpopular. He knows his own popularity is declining as well. Now he has figured out that this “anger” among voters is like a river that runs wide and deep. In sum he can get drowned.

Until now his moves have been dictated by the Chicago crew. How do we know that? All we have to do is look at who his closest advisors are and we know this is true. What we do not know is exactly who is pulling their strings. Certainly Soros and his conies are the financial arm and Zbig is involved too. But the fact he stepped up and repudiated Axelrod means that someone else is whispering in his ear now. Most likely it is Bill Clinton. Obama at this point is lost. He does not know what to do. He is in trouble. And so is the country.

I can’t see the future, but …

Knock, knock. Is it time for a joke? OK.

Ole goes out one day to use the outhouse, and he finds Sven there. Sven has his wallet out, and he's throwing money down into the hole of the outhouse. Ole asks, "Uff da! Sven, watcha doin' there, fella? You're throwing the five dollar bill and the ten dollar bill down into the hole of the outhouse! Whatcha doin' that for?" Sven answers, "Well, when I pulled up my trousers I dropped a nickel down there—and I'm not going down into that mess for just a nickel!"

Problems in Understanding the Validity of Reality

Learning from Science: 75% anomalous results represents a huge information stream in information-theoretic terms. But it’s mostly noise. So scientists have filters in their minds to deal with it — as do we all (read the rest of the article for a little neuroscience about that). The filters explain why “normal science” can proceed so long in the face of anomalies before a Kuhnian paradigm shift occurs. It’s a perfectly reasonable bias to assume that your existing theory, that has worked in the past, is right and the contradictory evidence is noise. It usually is.

But if the bias of your filters somehow gets set by something else — a political belief, for example — the fact that the filters control so much of what you see can steer you wrong a lot faster than you think.

2010 Food Crisis for Dummies

2010 Food Crisis for Dummies: The world is blissful unaware that the greatest economic/financial/political crisis ever seen is a few months away. While it is understandable that general public has no knowledge of what is headed their way, that same ignorance on the part of professional analysts, economists, and other highly paid financial "experts” is mind boggling, as it takes only the tiniest bit of research to realize something is going critically wrong in agricultural market.

Wisconsin Farm Bureau: It is so unusual for corn harvest to stretch into December that USDA had no year ago or five-year average harvest progress comparisons. Wet weather has plagued harvest in parts of the Midwest and Great Plains. North Dakota corn harvest stood at just 60 percent, while South Dakota stood at 82 percent and Wisconsin at 85 percent.

Computer Modeling - FAIL

Another example of trying to define computer modeling as science with disastrous results.

http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=2299

No economist influenced the economics profession in the second half of the twentieth century as much as Paul Samuelson, who died Sunday at the age of 94. As the New York Times noted, “Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.”

Unfortunately, Samuelson’s influence was not as positive as the Times would have it. Samuelson turned economics from a social science that tried to figure out how the world worked into an pseudo-science that tried to turn the world into a mathematical model — a model that failed to account for the realities of individual human desires, incentives, and diversity. As a result, by 1960, economists, politicians, and would-be central planners were misled into viewing the economy as a machine that could be controlled by pulling levers, i.e, passing laws, issuing regulations, and setting tax and discount rates.

The economy is not a machine.

Computing is an epic technological advancement. Too many people, however, believe programming always generates correct answers. Reference: http://xkcd.com/676/

Beautiful Central Command China

http://www.chinahush.com/2009/10/21/amazing-pictures-pollution-in-china/

Will Waxman-Markey fix this?

Calculating Risk Chat

Dryfly: (in reply to Whiskey asking: For whom is this inflationary?)

Doesn't effing matter - inflation is a monetary event NOT a price event. Prices are just symptoms of TWO independent factors: [1] money supply & velocity and [2] actual supply/demand of the good.

Sheesh - you'd think people here would eventually get the memo.

Yagij: Calm down.

Remember that the under 35 crowd have never lived through a time of slow velocity of money supply. Credit boom is all they know, and all they know is a (relatively) stable currency that is the world's reserve paper of choice. They got the memo on supply/demand because they have seen it their entire lives (cool shoes, clothes, toys, BFs/GFs). They have never seen "Deflation" in most of their lives, and if they did, it wasn't the "Candy now costs 5 cents and I don't even have that to spend" kind of deflation. Yes or No?

Dryfly: Yes... plus they've never seen the back side of an innovation wave... we were on the up swing from mid-80s on [IT-telecomm-internet] and we are now well into the 'commoditization & consolidation' down side. Couple that with credit collapse and it is like nothing most of us have ever seen before [not this severe anyway - not since the 30s]. Will probably be 15-20 years before the cycle changes again. That's the typical cycle 40 years or so.

Yagij: Woo! Now if I can get you to talk to the 45-55 yo crowd who talk about how bad the 70s were and how it isn't as bad this time and we may start making progress in the "relearning" of America!

Dryfly: The 70s & 80s were worse - LOCALLY - in rust belt. Wasn't too bad in the SE US or West Coast. In that respect today is much harder than the 70s & 80s... its national if not international.

Comrade Kristina: I hear people in their 40's and 50's talking about deflation like it is a good thing. All they know is inflation is bad so the opposite must be good. I try to explain the opposite is much, much worse but they don't seem to get it. They will though, they will.

Dryfly: I see the exact opposite - young people saying deflation is good because they hope to buy houses cheap. They don't realize in a true deflation most people’s wages drop even faster making the cheap house 'expensive'. Few benefit from either deflation or inflation once all factors are evenly weighed. Even fewer realize this.

Hoover's ooover - Timer

Pursing the Eloi Languor

J. Storrs Hall says: It is the absolute genius of the post-industrial age that we have created a society in which a growing majority of people are doing useless, and in many cases counter-productive work (plus producing luxuries and entertainment), but where we all feel like we’re doing something necessary and important, and that we’re making a difference in the world.

Unlike a century ago, today for everyone who is working on technological progress, there is someone else who thinks that they are saving the planet by stopping them. Has the pace of technological change slowed? It certainly has for technologies that have to run the gauntlet all the way into consumers’ hands and make an obvious difference, because those are the easiest kinds to attack. It has also slowed in areas where scare stories are easy to generate, like nuclear power. In a world of delusional, self-important Eloi, it is much more advantageous to be a screaming coward than to be brave and productive.

There Is Always Soma, Delicious Soma

NeoNeocon says: As a young teenager of about twelve or thirteen, I read the novels Brave New World and 1984. I was absolutely terrified to the point of nightmares by the latter, but the former seemed more odd than frightening.

Yes, I could see that the society described in Brave New World was a dystopia. But compared to the far more horrific world Orwell’s imagination had created, Huxley’s vision seemed relatively pleasant, with the feelies and the soma and the sex. It was much lighter, and contained a certain amount of humor, an element notably absent from the exceedingly dark 1984

As I grew older, I came to understand that the two books described twin tyrannies, the yin and yang of dystopias (”Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice”). There was Huxley’s clamp of a science-controlled society on the human spirit, and then there was Orwell’s’ brutal stamp of the boot on the human face forever.

Freedom is what’s missing from either vision. Yes, if I was forced to choose, I’d choose Huxley’s world over Orwell’s. But both societies are nightmares. Obamaworld is not like that of 1984 (except for his habit of Orwellian Newspeak); it’s a kinder, gentler universe more like that of Brave New World, where people are ministered to for their own good, soft music plays in the background, and we’ve got sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Meanwhile, liberty is just as dead in that world as in the other.

Sheeple With Doubts

Gracias xkcd

Leading Indicator Action

Zero Hedge says: California lost more than Michael Jackson on Thursday. They also lost their credit rating as Fitch dropped them to A-minus and even that rating was immediately placed on negative credit watch. California faces a $24 billion-plus budget deficit for the fiscal year that begins Wednesday, rapidly declining sales tax revenues and an impotent legislature that can’t agree on solutions. Faced with the prospect of running out of cash, State Controller John Chiang said Wednesday the state will begin to issue IOUs for all general fund payments other than those categories protected by the state constitution, federal law and court decisions.

Waxman-Markey Government Control Act of 2009

Mama says: I don't think the average person realizes that much of our current power plant dates from decades ago, that nuclear plants are going to going off line in about a decade due to age, and that we are apparently signing on to something that will raise the basic cost of living in a very substantial way, without actually having any alternatives.

Okay, so in pursuit of a goal that's nonsensical, for a problem that is international and that will not be addressed internationally (India and China, for example, are refusing to starve their people to death), we adopt legislation that either sets up an iron wall of tariffs or drives half the nation into poverty in about 15 years. This is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen in my lifetime. Let's hope it can be stopped in the Senate.

Intrigue Ending

Joe Posnanski says: I can tell you that whenever I went to the swimming pool in the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, “Human Nature” was playing on the radio. The opening guitar strains on “Beat It” — Eddie Van Halen, of course — still evoke a trip to the lake I took with high school friends. The sounds of “Off The Wall” can be so powerful, I can almost smell a sunny afternoon in 1981, just as my family had moved, just as I was about to enter high school, when I was afraid of just about everything.

The $134.5 Billion Mystery Chap 2

Karl Denninger says: This is stuff out of a Tom Clancy novel, and the longer it goes on and the more twisted the "explanations", the less sense it makes. I find it incomprehensible that the Italian government released these two if they were actually caught in a massive counterfeiting operation with $134 billion in fake US Securities.

I find it equally incomprehensible that there was not an immediate indictment out of a US Prosecutor coming from such an event and a demand for extradition back to the United States. And further, I find it equally incomprehensible that if the securities are in fact real, and Treasury is lying, that Italy would not impose the fine.

Only the latter scenario, however, covers what apparently has happened - the two "couriers", whoever they are, have been released and, according to some accounts, they took the allegedly "fake" instruments with them, and there has been no US indictment issued for counterfeiting the instruments. Uh, can we have some truth here folks, because none of what is being reported adds up and my BS detector is ringing off the hook.

Who Switched the Playbooks?

Managing the Dragon says: When I was starting up in China, many experts cautioned me on what I would encounter. “It’s not a free market and there’s no rule of law, they told me. “The government controls the courts, the companies and the banks. Central planners in Beijing, not the marketplace, decide what goods to produce and which companies should produce them.”

“Decisions are made for political, not economic reasons,” they went on to explain. “The heads of China’s state-owned enterprises serve at the pleasure of the Party, the banks are told what loans to make, and making a profit is secondary to ensuring employment. That’s the reason why China’s banks are a mess and full of non-performing loans.”

The $134.5 Billion Mystery

Contrarian Profits says: For those of you who don’t know, a report surfaced on Monday, June 8, on an obscure Vatican-sponsored news website, AsiaNews.it, that Italy’s financial police (Guardia Italiana di Finanza) had “seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland.”

The story has received a lot of coverage in Europe and Asia. But US media outlets have ignored it, despite the fact that it concerns either the biggest ever counterfeiting or the biggest ever smuggling of US bonds. (A third possibility is that the story itself is a fake. Even so, this would merit serious attention as it implies that someone or some state or state agency is interested in destabilizing the value of US debt at a time when it’s most sensitive to destabilization, i.e., when America is issuing most of it.)

Crisis Problems Demand Harsh Remedies

EarthTimes says: Any person caught using plastic bags in Uganda from early 2010 will be jailed for three years or be fined an equivalent of 1,500 dollars, press reports said Saturday, quoting government environment lawyers. Madison City Council take note.