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.

The MSM Is Shocked !

Obama Was Mute on Illinois Corruption - WSJ.com

Wow, corruption in Illinois and Chicago politics. What a surprise!! The MSM did a very thorough investigation on AK politics and even managed to get an investigation going in Sarah Palin was all found to be unfounded the night before the election! Imagine that, they didn't find anything, but it wasn't because they didn't go through Wasilla and Juneau politics with a fine tooth comb looking for ANYTHING! Nice it all worked out the day before the election, I'm sure the media feels HORRIBLE for having raised such a big stink and found NOTHING!

Now we turn to Illinios. Wow, there is corruption in Illinious, who would have thought THAT??!!! Any connections between Blago and BO?? Well, interestingly, the home that BO currently lives in was found by a guy  named Rezko who also came up with some very special finance tricks to allow BO to get into it. Rezko happens to be a convicted felon sitting in jail right now, and his name is all through the Blago charges --- but of course, there is "no connection" between the corruption of IL politics and BO! He simply swam and was successful in that cesspool for 10+ years and didn't even pick up a bad smell! In the MSM / Democrat world, you could go to a restaurant where you pick your fish out of a tank and have no trouble picking yours out of a putrid paste of raw sewage and say "I'll take that one, I don't think he got anything on him!".

Naturally, as per usual, the bleating public sheep are "innocent". They took their information feed from the national media and in the national media Rezko and IL politics in general have been the kind of state secret that the MSM is VERY good at keeping -- now, OTOH, if for example they had actual top secret information that could damage a Republican, but has a good chance of making the whole nation less secure -- say "secret" installations in countries favorable to us for interrogations, THAT would need bold headlines in every paper and on every news show!!

Zero and Oh Look Alike

Investors buy U.S. debt at zero yield - International Herald Tribune

BO doesn't like his middle initial (H for Hussein), and apparently he doesn't like the "B" much either, so he tends to put up the big "O", usually with some rainbows, red-white and blue, or other coloration.

Anybody notice how much 0 and O look alike?

Apparently world investors do and their vote on BO is ZERO!!! As in ZERO % interest on short term T-Bills. The last time we got to that level it had taken FDR a full two terms of screw-up government to get to 38-40 when T-Bills drew NOTHING!!!

In Tuesdays Fed Auction, 4 times as many folks wanted the $30Billion at auction, so the yield fell to zero. This is "government as a mattress". It says that going forward from here the assumption is that EVERYTHING is going to LOSE MONEY, so I may as well bury my money in a coffee can in the back yard--or just have Uncle watch it for me and get NOTHING in return.

If one was inclined to panic, it appears that now would be an excellent time.

..... We interrupt this broadcast to suggest mass panic. Everyone should immediately jump up, run screaming or take another ridiculous action as quickly as possible. Potentially we could try to impeach BO and vote in an even less experienced and unknown empty suit from an even more corrupt state than Illinios ....hmm, on second thought, I'm not sure we could find that, so maybe we really do have the man for the times.

The age of "B Zero"???

Looking At the Change

8 really, really scary predictions - Nouriel Roubini (1) - FORTUNE

Worth reading. In summary, nobody thinks the economy will turn around in '09 and many figure it will be a lot longer than that. Some of them suspect that the stock market is going to drop by another 50% to the neighborhood of $4K before it turns around. Most figure that we will see very significant inflation, if not hyperinflation. Unemployment pushing 10%, 12 million people losing their homes, cheery things like that.

One of the key points made is "confidence has been lost". Really? Who would have thunk it? Back when Slick Willie was wagging his finger at us, the MSM was all over the "confidence thing". Those nasty Republicans were "risking the great economy" by going after poor old Slick, didn't they realize that saying bad things about old Wandering Willie could cause a lost of CONFIDENCE!!!

How awful--of course once Bush got in, there just didn't seem to be much concern about confidence, and while we were at it, why not pile on corporate leadership, banking, wall-street, and globalization!! What we need is CHANGE!!!! ... without any real indications of what that might mean.

Is anybody starting to see the meaning yet, or is it going to take a little more "reality therapy"???

Change In Illinois

Blagojevich free on $4,500 bail after arrest - CNN.com


Who says Democrats are against free markets! Clearly, Blagojevich believed in the power of getting value out of the assets that he had available for sale. One of the reasons that the Republicans were turned out in '06 was "corruption", we know that is a problem that primarily plagues Republicans!!

So I wonder if we had a Republican President-elect and the Governor of the State where he is vacating a Senate seat was arrested for trying to sell that Senate seat on the open market would the MSM be getting into any innuendo about a "sleaze factor"? Howq about trying to find any shoestring connection they might be able to find between the same-party Governor and President Elect? I can't imagine a press that would attempt any "guilt by association" if we had Republicans involved here, can you?

No, I'm sure they wouldn't. Look how strongly they looked into the past of Barry Sottero (currently known as Barack Obama) vs Sarah Palin -- gee, I wonder if Barry was in any beauty contests 20 years ago? That would CERTAINLY be an important issue to be dug out, wouldn't it?

The Dems pulled into Washington control in '06, and the change just keeps on coming. Chris Dodd and Barney Frank doing a bang up job of oversight on sub-prime loans and Freddie and Fannie, Nancy Pelosi being a great little "tuna helper" for Starkist, Charle Rangle misdirecting his rent controlled appartments and grafting hither and yon, and good old Willam Jefferson with his $90K in cold cash in the freezer -- although the voters in LA FINALLY decided to turn him out -- no thanks to the Democrat party for policiing their own membership!

The change is here! I can't see how we are going to wait two more years for even a ray of HOPE!

None of these hardly get any coverage in the MSM though, so for most of the sheep we are still looking at "Bad Bush".

Coleman Wins! ... Again

Power Line - The Recount Is Over

I remain amazed at how little reporting is being done on the MN Senate race. One would think that just because of the "horse race" nature it would be a hot topic, especially locally, but it is as if nobody cares. Yes, of course the GA victory for Chamblis meant that the Dems didn't hit 60, but I think everyone pretty well knows that with Olympia Snow and Susan Collins plus no doubt a few others, the Democrats have their effectively filibuster proof Senate. I'm quite certain they could confirm someone to the left of Karl Marx to any position they desired and the MSM would applaud it.

The "smart money" would assume that Al would have to concede at some point here, but one needs to realize that there isn't a lot of "smart money" in the Democrat world. Hardball partisan politcs is pretty much their order of the day and always has been, so while one might assume there would be "blowback" from overturuning a state election, one might be wrong. The lack of media coverage makes me wonder if they aren't just keeping it low key to help keep Al's options open so if there is a Senate overturn, it "seems like the right thing".

BO's Saintly Speechwriter

Washington Times - BREITBART: I believe Hillary's cardboard cutout

The Saint is the guy doing the groping -- he is a major contributor to the "smoothness of BO".

Hey, these guys are Democrats, so all in good fun! How would one compare this iconic treatment of a current US Senator and incoming SoS by a Presidential speech writer to an alleged mention of a pubic hair on a can of coke and uttering the name of an X-Rated movie 10 years previously? Would there be any sort of a double standard if one tried to deny a black man a Supreme Court seat on the basis of a couple of decade old innocuous comments, yet finds no reason at all to even break this out into the general public as a story?

Naturally, we all know that this is the kind of story that WOULD NOT SELL, so the unbiased press is simply not pushing it because they are only interested in making money and nobody would even look at this!

Now, we all know that if this was a Bush speechwriter it would be treated EXACTLY the same way, right?

Will on Fairness Doctrine

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Fairness Doctrine Fouls Out

Will does a good job of covering the history of the fairness doctrine. A quick review of this sordid chapter in US history and the fact that many Democrats would like to bring it back today gives some instruction on just how hard it is to have freedom of speech!

Because liberals have been even less successful in competing with conservatives on talk radio than Detroit has been in competing with its rivals, liberals are seeking intellectual protectionism in the form of regulations that suppress ideological rivals. If liberals advertise their illiberalism by reimposing the fairness doctrine, the Supreme Court might revisit its 1969 ruling that the fairness doctrine is constitutional. The court probably would dismay reactionary liberals by reversing that decision on the ground that the world has changed vastly, pertinently and for the better.

Until the Reagan administration extinguished it, the doctrine required broadcasters to devote reasonable time to fairly presenting all sides of any controversial issue discussed on the air. The government decided the meaning of the italicized words.

Plutarch and Modern Morality

Parallel Lives by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online

This blog has covered this topic many times, but Hanson does a great job with a few current examples; Fuld/Rubin, Rangle / Stevens, Gonzales/Holder, Dodd/Lott.

The punchline of the comparisons is this:

I could go on and on with these Plutarachean examples of Parallel Lives but you get the picture. Here, the contrast is not the respective virtues of Greece and Rome. Nor is there any regret whatsoever that liberals of good faith thankfully scrutinize the bad judgment and even criminal activity of wayward conservatives. The problem instead is why we continuously consider liberal transgressions as misdemeanors and their conservative counterparts as felonies.

If Plutarch once believed that action, not intention matters (otherwise, as Aristotle noted, we could all be moral in our sleep), we moderns believe the reverse — that proper thinking can often excuse improper acts.

Why so? Perhaps we suspect that a Rubin or Dodd want to do more good things for the poor than do a Fuld or Lott, and so we should interpret their transgressions as atypical lapses rather than characteristic behavior.

I suspect that Anderson is being a bit tounge in cheek here, basically the real answer is that we as a culture have largely stopped thinking with any rigor at all, and the whole idea of "comparative lives" is well beyond our current culture. We as a society have decided it is OK to give a pass to those that we agree with and to treat those that we don't agree with as pariahs no matter what they do.

The left does the most of it for two reasons; first, because they can. They are the dominant culture, so the media will break their way, secondly, anything they have approaching a moral is only relative anyway. Having a consistent outlook would cause way too much soul searching for them, so they simply apply the thought they like when they like it and forgo it the rest of the time.

The Burden of Brilliant Economists

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Markets, Not Economists, Will Help the Economy

George has a good one here, worth the read. I do love the context of BOs claim for "helping to save or create 2.5 million jobs". A classic meaningless statement. Here is some context -- I love the "Before Reagan / After Reagan" part, the change to an economy that averaged a million more jobs a year after Reagan's first term is the kind of results that the MSM isn't that interested in providing for context:

"Since Eisenhower's first term, the economy has created an average of 1.5 million new jobs each year. Since Reagan's first term, the average has been about 2.5 million a year. And Reagan, who inherited an economy as bad if not worse than the current one, saw 6.3 million new jobs created four years after he entered the White House."

What will the benchmark be after BO? How many jobs the economy LOST in a 4 year term? Here is the punchline of the piece--George has a wit that is very urbane and subtle, but it certainly gets the point across.

In his wise book "Capitalism, Democracy & Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery," John Mueller, an Ohio State political scientist, notes that John Maynard Keynes' central theme, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky, was that "the state is wise and the market is stupid." Mueller continues: "Working from that sort of perspective, India's top economists for a generation supported policies of regulation and central control that failed abysmally -- leading one of them to lament recently, 'India's misfortune was to have brilliant economists.'"

Many of them were educated in Britain, by Keynes' followers. In America today, everyone agrees that the president-elect's economic team is composed of brilliant economists.

The End

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Alan Greenspan's book as well. One "little known fact" (at least by me) is that the whole of the world equity (stock) markets are "a pimple on the ass of world finance" in the crude terms of one of the guys in this article.

The cumulative world stock markets are something order $30-$40 TRILLION (they vary--a LOT). The Bond markets are like $50 Trillion (they vary less), and the Derivatives Market is like $500 Trillion !!! or something like 12x the value of the entire world GDP for a year. Derivatives are complicated -- the easiest to understand is the "futures contract" that is commonly used by farmers or people buying their fuel for next winter the summer before, or farmers selling their crops expected in the fall in the spring. The contracts have a couple of functions -- spreading risk and providing a speculative vehicle. The homeowner buying in the summer speculates that the prices are lower in the summer than the winter -- but this year, that is likely wrong by a lot. A fuel contract purchased in the summer is likely very costly compared to the actual price of the fuel if one had waited until the winter to purchase it. BUT, it COULD have been much higher-- so the person buying the contract "hedged" against that risk and speculated that they would actually pay less in the summer than the winter.

Farmers likewise might usually assume that corn prices will be lower in the fall than in the spring, so selling part of their crop in the spring allows them to speculate on that assumption and hedge against the risk that the price will be lower. This year the prices were A LOT higher in the spring than they now are, so a farmer could see 2-3x as much profit off the grain in his field if he had sold it in advance.

I'm not even going to try to go into the long and short sales of stocks, credit default swaps, etc, but suffice it to say that it is all those derivatives build off the home "mortgage backed securities" that blew up when the sub-primes were downgraded. It is those losses that drug down the financial system, and are a major reason that the way forward is quite unclear. Greenspan certainly believes that the world markets need those derivatives, but given the level of leverage that was created, it seems that it may be very hard to unwind all of this to get the system operating again.

Add in all the uncertainties of "change" with the upcoming coronation of BO, and even with the rather staid picks he has made to date, a lot of his economic claims during the campaign would lead one to believe that he may at least desire to do a lot of tinkering with the financial engine, and it is an engine that tends to react badly to uncertainty.

In any case, the article is long but quite worthwhile. This is a nice little anecdote about how far out of hand things got when folks thought that Freddie and Fannie would be bailed out and housing values would always rise:

Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking home­owners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

Suspended Animation

Mark Roth's Proof of Reincarnation - Scientist Bringing Back the Dead - Esquire

Apparently, this guy is in trials with a drug that provides hours of "suspended animation" -- really really good if your heart stops or if you are bleeding out in a battlefield someplace. Get some of this drug that tells your body "stop burning oxygen", and your cells will sit there not burning oxygen for quite a long time with "no ill effects" until they are restarted.

He made the insight that they don't die because they don't have oxygen, they die because they are BURNING oxygen and they don't have any. You stop their operation by telling them "quit burning oxygen".

One of the interesting points of the article -- we still don't scientifically know what "life" is ... we just know what it does.

We don't know what life is, anyway. Not really. We just know what life does--it
burns oxygen. It's a process of combustion. We're all just slow-burning
candles, making our way through our allotment of precious O₂ until it becomes our toxin, until we burn out, until we get old and die. But we live
on 21 percent oxygen, just as we live at 37 degrees. They're related.
Decrease the oxygen to 5 percent, we die. But, look, the concentration
of oxygen in the blood that runs through our capillaries is only 2 or 3
percent. We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the
candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we
don't even have the energy to die?

Third Bush Term?

Op-Ed Columnist - Continuity We Can Believe In - NYTimes.com

BO kept mistaking John McCain for George Bush, could it be that he ought to have looked in the mirror? The finance team is headed Tim Giethner, a Bush appointee to the NY Fed and clearly a major player in the current bailout roulette. Here Brooks talks about the security team, especially the SecDef Gates being a direct cabinet carry over. Who would have thought that the anti-war candidate, opposed to the surge would carry over the SecDef that Bush appointed to preside over the surge?

Had McCain won the election and made these moves, I think we can be certain that the MSM would be screaming "where is the CHANGE!!!" at the top of their lungs. The luxury of being a Democrat is that since it is BO doing it, it is "brilliant".

Secret Senate Seat Grab

TheHill.com - Franken may seek Senate’s help to win race

As the Democrats "get out the vote" for their 60 seat majority, we get a bit of a peek into how they and the MSM operate. Just imagine a reversal of the current situation -- a newly elected Republican President, big Republican majorities in the House and Senate, and a Republican Senate Leader and Republican campaign threatening to throw out the vote of a state in question and have the Republican Senate decide who to seat. Throw in a Republican Sec of State hand-picked to deal with this kind of close race by "Republican organizations" (remember, MN SoS Mark Ritchie was selected by MoveOn and ACORN as part of a move to get "their folks" in positions of power over elections after the 2K FL election)  Think that kind of shenanigan might get just a "little" coverage in the MSM?

MIGHT we hear about "will of the people", "honoring elections", "Diebold", "partisan manipulation of elections", or the importance of "checks and balances in government"???

Nah, that would mean the press is biased, and BO would be quick to assure us that isn't so, so we should all bleat approvingly to what we are now seeing.

Range Toys

There was a gun show early in November and I decided that if I ever wanted to get the little Kel Tec PLR-16 .223 "Assault Pistol", it was very likely now or never. This is what it looks like right out of the box, I've got the picatinny foregrip for it on order and have put the screw-on muzzle brake on the front of the barrel already. In my opinion, those items are critical to the looks of the weapon, and for not burning your fingers while holding on to the front for accuracy, they are needed for function as well. I took it out to the range once and put 50+ rounds through it. Very accurate at 20 yards even in current config with sights that were hard for me to use given my older eyes. (focus on the back sight sort of precludes a lot of focus on the front sight).

I've put a cheap AIM red dot on it already and am waiting for the foregrip on back order -- it seems like everything to do with guns, and especially "assault weapons" is on backorder! My intent is to mount a laser and a light on the front end--mostly because I think it will look cool, but in some theory, one could at least imagine it as a pretty nasty looking home defense weapon.

We also upgraded our Beretta Tomcat .32 to a Glock 26 9mm with VERY happy results. First time in my hand I can shoot better groups with it than I can with my XD and my wife is ecstatic over how well she did with it right away as well. The next gun I get will certainly be a 1911 .45 ACP, but I have to admit that I got a chance to shoot the Glock 30 and 3 different 1911s one day at the range, and my groups with the Glock at 20' were better than any of the 1911s. I guess that means that the 1911 mystique has a hold on me-- the Glock was cheaper than any of them and holds more rounds, but I want the 1911 anyway. So much for my claims to rationality!