40 Years Ago, Apollo 8

'God bless all of you . . . on the good Earth' - The Boston Globe

I've mentioned it a few times in this blog, Christmas Eve '68 watching the broadcast from Apollo 8 is one of my most vivid memories from youth. It was very cool to visit the capsule at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago a few years ago, and something like 25 years ago to get to hear Jim Lovell at an inventors breakfast at work.

I would have never believed that our space program would be as pitiful as it is 40 years later. Folks actually believe that competition doesn't matter? There is no doubt that we would have never made it it to the moon without the competition with the USSR!

Non Political View of Financial Meltdown

High and Low Finance - A Year of Financial Contradictions and Chaos - NYTimes.com

Nice concise, well done summary of the meltdown without a bunch of finger pointing. It seems pretty unlikely to me that anybody -- Democrat, Republican, Wall Street tycoons, bankers, businessmen, or anyone at all "wanted it all to melt down". Maybe some really true crazies from the far right or left, just to say "we told you so", but nobody really cares about them. One can always just stare at the craters on the moon, predict that eventually a "big one" will hit the earth with the certainty that EVENTUALLY it will be the right call. So what?

Somehow we now have to restore confidence in the system. Scapegoating won't help unless we can truely net the problems down to some specific actionable set of changes that will help the confidence aspect without destroying the creativity needed in the markets. Not an easy task. We all have to hope that BO and his team are up to it, or as this guy says, next December will be much sadder economically than this one.

The Obama Nation

This book by Jerome Corsi is subtitled "leftist politics and the cult of personality" is a lot more detailed than it needed to be. The key points can be covered here:

• Until some time during his college years, Obama was known as Barry Soetoro -- "Barack" was just funny sounding, so they made it "Barry", and Soetoro was the name of his moms 2nd husband, the one from Indonesia.
  
• Barry was educated as a Muslim -- and a Catholic. He makes some points that he didn't take EITHER religion seriously, but the MSM has made that clear about the Muslim training, not the Christian training.
  
• He did a good deal of drugs and alcohol in HS, his biological Dad pretty much killed himself by repeatedly driving drunk. Both his biological dad and grandfather were pretty much serially irresponsible womanizers. BO has the genetics to fit into the Democrat president lineage just fine.
  
• He was heavily influenced by "black power" and very far left politics. Is that who he really is? Who knows, I'm not convinced that HE could really tell you who he is other than a guy that wants power -- he seems to have been successful with that, now we get to find out what he wants to do with it.
  

I can't really recommend the book. It is way to long for covering information that is largely pretty anti-climactic. A lot of the stuff in this book is just pulled out of BOs two books and linked in context to a little more depth. There is no doubt that "community organizing" is the child of Saul Alinsky, and that BO (and many others of the late 60's/70's in the far left) were very impressed by the subversive nature of Alinsky's book "Rules for Radicals". It is on my Amazon list, I'll get to it eventually.

The bottom line is that the information that we have would indicate that we have a guy headed for the White House that has at least heavily exposed himself to anti-white racism, anti-capitalism and basically "anti the America that we had at least up to sometime in '08".

So what America do we have now? One with a lot less wealthy and a lot less money overall? A nation in some sort of a "transition"? But to what? Socialism? Fascism? Destruction? I'm sure I can't tell.

I'm not at all certain that even BO could answer any of those questions with any sort of implementable policy. He would love a lot of "hope, change, justice, fairness, folks getting a chance, putting America to work, 2.5 million new jobs ... and a hundred other "good slogan things", but other than that rhetoric, I really have no idea what he thinks is a good idea, and I suspect neither does he. I have to admit he is high on the list of the smoothest empty suits that I've ever seen, but I bet Bernie Madoff is pretty good as well. I suspect that comparison may be about as close as one could get to pegging BO.

The Grey Lady Has Cold Feet?

Op-Ed Columnist - Pan Am Dies, America Lives - NYTimes.com

So now that the sheep have fully left the pen, it appears that even the NYT may be having 2nd thoughts about leaving the gate open. That is what I hate most about liberals, the constant willingness to dodge responsibility while complaining of the results of the very thing they push. The NYT is worried about "socialism"? Egads, they ought to stand up and CHEER for it, they have long supported the Chris Dodds, Barney Franks, Charlie Wrangles and Charles Schummers of the world. For God's sake, they employ Paul "comrade" Krugman, do they not know what they have been preaching?

This is a lovely quote ... if it was in National Review:

Americans have always lived at the new frontier, at least in their imaginations. It’s taken the death of the likes of the wonderful Pan Am to keep them contemplating the horizon rather than their navels.
The risk of saving the moribund is the demise of the vital — and the long-term cost of that is incalculable.

But wait, we voted in Democrat majorities in the House and Senate in '06, upped the number massively this year, and have an incoming president whose left leanings are only slightly diminished in power by the fact that he has no previous experience running anything at all. NOW the NYT wants to have 2nd thoughts about making the hard left turn, just because they got a teensy view of the fact that the edge of the road was a steep cliff rather than a comfy snow filled ditch? Pleeease !!!

The whole financial crisis is about the death of responsibility: the buck stopped nowhere. Everyone profited from toxic paper. Bernard Madoff, he of the alleged multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, is only the latest example.

Earth to Planet NYT, where were you when Slick Willie was dissembling on national TV? Talking about "responsibility"? I think not. How about when Chris Dodd and Barney Frank were getting sweetheart loans  and campaign donations from the credit industry they were supposed to be regulating? AWOL as charged. When BO was breaking direct promises to honor existing campaign finance law? "Gone Fishing". What is the use of being a liberal if one has to be "responsible"?

Is just a little peek into the maw of the abyss here making the "paper of record" a bit green about the gills? Oh come on, maybe you just need a nice bailout all of your own and you will get off this pining away for some form of a working economy! We need to actually get into the "BO Change" a bit more before we see what getting rid of those awful markets really does to the nation!

The Limit of BO Adoration?

Obama's inaugural choice sparks outrage - CNN.com

The left used to be outraged over campaign funding. There was too much money in politics, and MUCH more needed to be done about it. Anyone that voted for the "big money folks" was just being cynically manipulated by slick ads and barrage of television time that took them away from the "real issues". Then BO decided that he wasn't going to follow any campaign finance laws at all, started accepting contributions from anywhere with no record keeping, raised and spent more money by 3,4,?? times (nobody really knows), and the left was just fine with it. He is "their guy". They really don't care about campaign finance.

BO ran as an anti-war candidate, solidly against the surge up until the Democratic primaries were over. Now he has kept the Bush Sec Def and the withdrawal timetable is the same as the Bush timetable. Again, the left is silent, they really don't care about war.

BO said that one of the very first things he would do is "repeal the Bush tax give-aways for the rich". Now he is saying that he will likely just let them expire in '10 -- again, the left really doesn't care about even taxing the rich, "whatever".

We may have thought that "it was all about BO", but it turns out that Christ is ALWAYS the real issue. Selecting a guy that has written a book that has sold 20 million copies in the US is enough to get the first negative headline on BO that I've seen in the whole two years he has increasingly sucked the entire available positive news energy out of the MSM.

Warren sent a news letter that had this radical paragraph in it:

"For 5,000 years, every culture and every religion -- not just Christianity -- has defined marriage as a contract between men and women," Warren wrote in a newsletter to his congregation. "There is no reason to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population."

Just 5 thousand years? I'm not an expert on evolution, but I'm thinking that homosexual pairings aren't the most productive relative to offspring, so therefore not exactly what one would call "adaptive" in the evolutionary sense. It would seem that the idea of sexual reproduction in the scientific sense has been around for significantly longer than 5 thousand years.

So does the idea of free speech in America extend far enough that someone can state their opinion on homosexual marriage? From the POV of the left, apparently not.

BO of the Year

Why History Can't Wait - Person of the Year 2008 - TIME

Now here was a big surprise, BO is Time's 2008 "Person of the Year". I was amazed to read that they had discovered that one of the things HE "overcame" was inexperience? When did they learn that? I thought it was just the Governor of Alaska that was "inexperienced", not the 2-years of sitting in the Senate doing nothing, two years of campaigning Jr Senator from Illinois. Who knows what the press might discover once they get all the reporters back from Wasilla and maybe look at Chicago a bit. You never know, maybe the politics there are corrupt? I've heard that since the election, but there are a lot of stories that say that BO managed to be involved for 15 years and apparently was completely uninvolved in much of anything, so therefore never really even knew about any corruption.

Wow, that must take some talent. I wonder how many things he will be able to be unaware of and uninvolved as President? There should be a lot of opportunity to ignore a lot of things in that role!

Madoff -- How Could This Happen?

How Madoff cost my family a job, a 401(k) and a worthy cause - MarketWatch Every time I read about Bernie Madoff and the $50 Billion Ponzi scheme, I'm reminded of Social Security and Medicare and the $50-$100 Trillion dollar US Government Ponzi scheme that we really ought to all understand by now if we believe we are capable of governing ourselves. The reason that most people don't is the same as the reason that Madoff took in so many people--they want to believe!!! The idea that 70%+ of the people can live a better retirement than their lifetime earnings, tax payments, and CERTAINLY their savings would allow is just too enticing to look at the facts. One of the reasons for the 30's depression was that "everyone thought they could get rich" by relatively easy investment means. Up until the last couple years, everyone thought they could "retire rich". Add together the stock market gains to the big Social Security and Medicare payments and we could ALL retire with "well above average assets". Sort of the exact analogue to Lake Wobegon where "all the children are above average". Note that nobody has responsibility to check even the most basic things about their investments, all the "fault" is with the guys that do the Ponzi schemes. Is that true of Social Security and Medicare as well? We will "blame the government" when it doesn't conjure the benefits that are based on assumptions of life expectancy and workforce growth that have been known to be totally wrong for a long time. Sure, guys like Madoff are charlatans, but are they really greater charlatans than Democrats that have been running on "change" since '06 without telling what they are delivering? Losing $50 billion is small potatoes next to the TRILLIONS that are being poured down rat holes right now. Yes, yes, they are Democrats, so they carefully cover their tracks with "Bush" and cover from a few Republicans still in power, but isn't it clear to people yet where the real power is in Washington? CONGRESS!! Who is it that has controlled congress since '06? Didn't they promise "change" in '06? And change we have gotten -- subprime loan expansion and finally explosion, "stimulus packages" that were really naked transfers from higher earners to lower earners. The Democrat promise is to reward failure and tax success, so they are always able to get less success and more failure. The "stimulus" was nothing but a reward to those that make less than a certain amount of money -- you are rewarded for making less, if you make more, you get no reward -- in fact, it is made clear that the intent is to penalize you as soon as politically feasible. So, we have a crash, and when we have a crash, what John Kenneth Galbraith called "the bezzle" comes out. Guys like Madoff (or Enron for that matter) and a whole bunch of others do GREAT as long as everything goes up. If things go down, the loss of the "shady billions" makes the bad situation worse much as it made the good situation SEEM better on the way up. The money Madoff "had" was double counted -- he claimed to have it, and all his investors thought they had it as well. Really, like the value of over inflated homes and stocks, it only existed as long as the confidence was there. That is why they call a lot of swindles "confidence games". Now, the confidence is fast being unwound from the worldwide financial and business systems, and we have an incoming president that is a complete blank slate -- Bzero. Fed funds rate at zero, short term treasuries at zero -- how many zeros are we going to go for here?

Why So Early?

News Analysis - In Blagojevich Case, Is It a Crime, or Just Talk? - NYTimes.com

As the NYT seems to have just figured out, "talking about something" isn't a crime. I wonder if the Federal Prosecutors were aware of that? I'd be pretty certain that they were, so why not just hang back and listen until you get something that can be prosecuted?

I can think of one really good reason right off--maybe it suddenly became REALLY important to "limit the targets"?? While BO and the media are working so hard to distance BO from Blagojevich, I half expect a story to show up that says "BO Unaware that Blagojevich Governor of Illinois". What if the prosecutors had a pretty good idea that say BO's chief of staff Rhambo was due to step into the net? I suspect there are going to be a whole bunch of folks willing to look the other way on just about anything that old BO and company want to do. From the MSM POV, it just wouldn't do to have the "historic new president" go down in flames before ever taking office.

I guess I'd have to agree with them there, I suspect that a State of the Union from Biden would be have to be held in two 4 hour segments, and after it was finally over there would be a lot of issues trying to figure out if he actually said anything.

The Shoe Attack

RealClearPolitics - Articles - The Bush Shoe Attack: A Sign of Hope

NPR really enjoyed the "shoe attack" this AM. With pretty much unveiled malice they thought it "ironic" that Bush was attacked "similarly" at the end of his administration "the same way as the statue of Saddam". It was "symbolic".

As this article points out, attacking the real Saddam with a shoe would have resulted in torture, death, or both -- and maybe for your family as well. So is the fact that an Iraqi feels that they can attack a US President with the President of Iraq standing next to him any sort of progress? So they hate Bush, we know that already. I thought that the left at least CLAIMED that "freedom of speech" was a GOOD thing? Do they hate Bush so much they can't realize how far the situation in Iraq has come that an Iraqi reporter could do this and live on as a whole human being?

I guess not.

Most Corrupt MSM?

North Dakota tops analysis of corruption - USATODAY.com

I don't think we need to think very long to realize that when there is a problem in the Republican ranks, the topic of the day for the MSM is "how deep and wide does the corruption in the REPUBLICAN Party go?". Tom Delay, Mark Foley, Ted Stevens--the message is always clear "Republicans are corrupt, here are some specific examples". Notice any slight difference in how they deal with rampant corruption in the Democrat party?

I'd argue that the REAL message is that POLITICS is a corrupt business, BOTH Democrats and Republicans are often corrupt, but some states and areas are more corrupt than others. In this article USA Today says something really stupid in the headline, but the unintended message is what I just stated, politics are corrupt and these stats prove it. BUT, the idea that North Dakota is even in the same universe of corruption as Chicago and Illinios is so ludicrous that what the USA today claim really shows is just how wildly biased the MSM really is.

First, the "easy one", just reduce the problem to see how accurate the algorithm is. Let's just take "governors per population" ... ND has 1, IL has 1, ND has 600K people, IL has 12 Million, or roughly 18x as many. Therefore, if ND has one corrupt governor any more often than 18 years, that means they are more corrupt than IL. Make sense to you? If it does, you too could be a reporter for the USA today!

Where do you think a black person stands out more? Helsinki, or Kenya? If you guessed Kenya, than you could work for the USA Today. Second test in this vein. If you were forced to be dropped in the "worst neighborhood" in Fargo, Bismark, or Chicago with a funny hat and a big sign that said "will pay for directions", which city would you pick? "Corruption" is something that is VERY relative -- "corrupt" in ND really stands out, in Chicago, what would get you arrested in Bismark could get you awarded "Mr Clean" on the South side of Chi-town.

Why would one pick CONVICTIONs as a test of corruption? Is that the usual USA Today standard? Let's see, Slick Willie had a whole bunch of folks convicted of this and that in his administration, but USA Today didn't have any trouble with him. Bush has had ONE ... poor Scooter, who didn't know what day he was the last to find out the Valerie "I drive into the CIA every day from my home" Plame actually "worked at the CIA". Golly, who would have thunk it!

Isn't the whole deal on "corruption" is that there gets to be a "culture of corruption" and there are a bunch of kingmakers, croneys, corrupt officials, etc and it "keeps going on"? Like say "in Chicago". Doesn't more convictions mean that you are getting rid of more corruption?

How about "level of corruption" as a measure? Let see, IL has had 3 Governors end up eating off tin trays since '70 -- so far, looks like they have another in the running. ND? None ... and of course that is the way it is in most states. USA Today is trying to do nothing put provide misdirection to the sheep in a desperate attempt to direct their attention away from the cesspool from which their beloved BO was spawned.

It is lovely to see some folks ALREADY whining about how "Republicans ought to give BO a chance". Oh yes, you mean like Democrats did with Bush in 2K? How about while we were fighting two wars? Were they big on "giving him a chance" then? Do we live in a country where the President and his party are supposed to be unopposed? Isn't it enough to have the entire MSM braying every day about "historical" and spending all their time trying to defend the emporer on every subject? Must we ALL just bow and scrape to his royal BO about whom there can't even be a joke uttered?

The Republicans I know would VERY MUCH like to see things go better, but the Democrats took over Congress two full years ago, and the "change" is well under way. Worse, the "change" is being sold as "free markets don't work" rather than "if you tell banks to give free loans to people that can't affort them and refuse to regulate THAT, you are creating the seeds of DISASTER". Right now we are so far gone that people aren't even looking at what has already happened and what is in the process of happening as being "wrong direction". The country got so lost on what was good times, bad times, recession, depression, whatever, that I'm convinced that 90%+ of the sheep have no idea what direction they are even going.

Senate Seat on E-Bay

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iowahawk_blog/3097265339/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Swimming In The Cesspool

Obama Worked to Distance Self From Blagojevich Early On - washingtonpost.com

The MSM is working very hard to help BO distance himself from the IL Governor. My analogy is that if you went into one of those restaurants where you get to pick the fish you are going to eat from a tank, and the tank was an open cesspool from which you held your nose and picked a fish saying "gee, I don't think this one got any on him!" you would be as optimistic as it seems that most of the country is about BO and the IL political cesspool.

Let's assume that he DID swim with the turds for 15 years and "didn't get any on him". How then do we account for the fact that he ALSO did absolutely nothing clean up the tank? This guy claims to be a "reformer"? So did he not see corruption in Illinois even though the guy that helped him get his $1.6 million home (Tony Rezko) is now a convicted felon and also part of the Blagojevich investigation? If that is true, he would seem to be naive beyond imagine, but if it ISN'T true, then he knew about it and just "let it go"? But what would that say about this guys character?

"Obama saw this coming, and he was very cautious about not having dealings with the governor for quite some time," said Abner Mikva, a former congressman and appeals court judge who was Obama's political mentor in Chicago. "The governor was perhaps the only American public
officeholder who didn't speak at the convention, and that wasn't by accident. He's politically poisonous. You don't get through Chicago like Barack Obama did unless you know how to avoid people like that."

Gee, he "saw it coming", and the only action he took was to not let the guy speak at the convention? But, then in the NEXT PARAGRAPH we find:

But Obama and Blagojevich shared pieces of the Chicago political network, which is why this has been an uncomfortable week for Obama's presidential transition team. Senior adviser David Axelrod once advised Blagojevich. Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a developer who was convicted in June of fraud and money laundering, raised money for both men. Robert Blackwell Jr., a longtime Obama friend, served on Blagojevich's gubernatorial transition team. Blagojevich appointed one
of Obama's closest confidants, Eric Whitaker, as director of the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Uh, so BO's campain manager and now sr advisor -- the exact equivalent for BO of Karl Rove for Bush, once advised Blagojevich? So that is "avoiding"? I wonder if Rove had advised a governor that was trying to sell a Senate seat if the media would title the article "Bush worked to distance himself..."??

Meanwhile, we see that Rahm Emanuel is suddenly missing from BOs side at a couple press events and was ducking questions on HIS relationship to Blagojevich. Let's see, he was the congressman from the 5th district in IL, is he yet another case of the "unblemished trout in the cesspool tank"? Must be I guess, because we can see from the MSM that the story is NOT about the "connections to crooked Chicago politics", but rather about "how hard he worked to distance himself".

The Age of Turbulence

I enjoyed the walk through the latter 2/3 of the 20th century with a guy that is clearly of genius level and very engaged in the real world. I think this book gives a feel for the global economy in a way that few others can. My major sense (although he never completely directly puts it this way) is that "global free markets and rule of law" are a bit like a giant and powerful genie that is released from the bottle by freedom and the sense that individuals can create value and improve their lives by keeping a significant percentage of that created value to make their own lives, and the lives of their children better (that is a restatement of "rule of law").

The "genie" ONLY produces wealth when it is "uncorked". Attempt to control it via too much in the way of regulation and taxation, and the genie is gone like it never existed. More than anything else, the "genie" arrives ONLY when the vast majority of people see market freedom and rule of law as a reality and believe that they can invest their money, time, energy in "risky" ventures and have a reasonable chance to better their lives. If that "belief and confidence" is removed, you see what has happened in the last quarter of '08 come to pass.

The other sense that I got from the book was that Alan understood that the actions taken after the '87 crash, bailing out Chrysler, bailing out the S&Ls, bailing out the hedge funds, fixing the "Asian Contagion", the Russian meltdown, the crash of 2000, 9-11, Enron, etc were a "danger to the moral hazard", but he didn't want it all to end on "his watch", so he rationalized each risky action. The "moral hazard" is the idea that if folks feel that they are "insured", they will go do stupid things (like sub-prime lending).

My sense is that each action taken to stave off or reduce the impact of the "crisis / recession of the day" during the Greenspan years increased the risk for the future -- and that the future happens to be now. The "moral hazard" was worn down enough, so that coupled with the Democrats taking over in '06 and Bush being left in the weakest state of any US president in memory, the sub-prime crisis collided with what was fanned into a "leadership crisis" and confidence evaporated world wide.

Confidence is WAY harder to create than it is to lose, and somehow I suspect that BO in action is going to be way less impressive than BO giving a speech. Boy, do I hope I'm wrong, because if I'm right, we are likely due for a finger pointing descent into a very long financial abyss.

The book is a very worthy read, I highly recommend it.

Why We Do Recounts

Ann Coulter : Minnesota Ballots: Land of 10,000 Fakes - Townhall.com

Hard to get much information on the MN recount locally. I've heard quite a lot about the horror of the 133 missing votes, and the obvious answer to why they are "missing" being that election workers ran a stack of ballots through twice. Ann raises the obvious question is "Why have recounts if one isn't going to believe the results"? To which of course the answer that a rational and fair minded person would draw is there are two choices:

1). We either decide to abide by the results as of election night
2). We decide to do a recount and abide by those results

Liberals, not being fair minded and rational have option 3:

3). You selectively use the results from either count that best support your candidate

So, in MN, we are going to "leave it up to the canvassing board" of which the chair (Mark Ritchie) is a hand-picked Democrat put in place specifically "remedy" the problem that Florida had a Republican in that post (Katherine Harris) in 2000. Naturally, since Ritchie is a Democrat, the MSM finds him to be completely unbiased and not the subject of any slurs on his impartiality as Harris had to suffer.

So what will they decide? Nobody knows, but I guess one thing that is "nice" is that their decision and the parameters going into it will at least not be done in the midst of a media firestorm. If Franken "wins", even if it is in the Sentate with Harry Reid deciding, it will be "the will of the people". If Coleman wins, it may be 2010 or later before it is reported -- and then it will be a "dissappointment in which folks were disenfranchised again".

BTW, nice AP picture of Al ... sort of portrays him like they usually portray Republicans.

I Love PJ

Print paupers could use bailout | The Australian

PJ O'Rourke for president. I just like his outlook on the world. A sample:

The Government is bailing out Wall Street for being evil and the car companies for being stupid. But print journalism brings you Paul Krugman and Anna Quindlen. Also, in 1898 Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal started the Spanish-American War. All of the Lehman Brothers put together couldn't cause as much evil stupidity as that.