Dear Mr President

Dear Mister President:

Thank you for helping my neighbors with their mortgage payments.You know the one's down the street who in the good times refinanced their house several times and bought SUV's, ATV's, RV's, a pool, a big screen, two Wave Runners and a Harley.

But I was wondering, since I am now expected to pay my mortgage and theirs, too, could you arrange for me to borrow their Harley now and then?

They also need help with their credit cards, when will you expect me to start making those payments for them too? I operate with a balanced budget, something neither you nor they seem to understand, but it requires planning and matching income to outflow.

P.S. I almost forgot - they told me they didn't file their income tax return this year. Should I go ahead and file for them or will you be appointing them to cabinet posts?

"Agressive" Interrogation Works?

Bush-era interrogation may have worked, Obama official says - CNN.com

Tell me it isn't so. I thought everyone knew that:

1. The Bush Administration used TORTURE
   
2. It was COMPLETELY INEFFECTIVE!! (and they knew it)
   

Now the media generally didn't go all the way to telling you WHY they would continue doing this, but the answers seemed obvious to me:

1. They were stupid
2. They were evil
   
3. Most likely both.
   

But wait, now we find out that "torture" was "something that didn't leave a mark". Putting a fuzzy caterpillar on your terrorist that was afraid of bugs, THAT was acceptable! (but not if it was a stinging caterpillar). In the Clinton administration we pretty much established that it wasn't sex unless pregnancy and multiple births ensued. Now in the BO administration we have discovered that little kids at picnics are regularly torturing their friends if they put a fuzzy caterpillar on them? What's more, the evil lawyers that tried to claim that such was NOT torture ought to be PROSECUTED for their opinion.

I stand corrected, I guess under THIS definition of "torture", it IS really rampant in America -- at summer camp, in the back yard, EVERYWHERE. I've heard that some of the kids (no doubt destined to become evil Republicans) will even make the claim that the caterpillar bites/stings to try to terrorize their victims more! The SADISTS!!

But wait! "aggressive interrogation" works! Wow, what a concept. It is like when the teacher comes into the classroom, sees an insult written on the board and asks "who did it"? According to what the BO administration has now figured out after careful study, if the teacher was to say "nobody leaves this room until I find out", that MIGHT have a better chance of working.

I hope we do a government study on that. Maybe they should try to figure out if people respond to incentives / disincentives in general? Finding out that they did would obviously be a huge piece of new information to the BO administration.

Memo's To Be Proud Of

The Case for the ‘Torture Memos’ by Rich Lowry on National Review Online

I've read a few of the dueling "torture books" -- on the left, the "horror" of any sort of treatment short of a comfy chair, nice bed and three squares a day is of course barbaric. The very idea that any sort of "coercion" at all would be used is simply unconscionable. If that is your standard and you want to accept the consequences of it, then so be it. I really hope they see the treatment of "right wing extremists" as being worthy of such high standards. They seem to be already calling for highly paid Wall Street types that they deem to be responsible for the financial meltdown to be "taken out and shot", "horse whipped", "hung", or some other not very nice sentiment. I'm certain those desires are meant to be figurative, but it is odd how much gusto they seem to be able to gather against those nasty Wall Street types. I wonder if it would help if they realized those folks are 90%+ Democrats and gave tons of money to both BO and the Democrat party to help get control of Washington?

Of course, the stogy issue from the right is to make "torture" almost boring -- we put our special forces guys through waterboarding to help them get familiar with the approach in case it is used on them. Most of them have likely had a couple "boo boos" already in their careers -- fractures, contusions, lacerations, hypothermia, deydration, sleep deprivation, etc, etc, so they have seen some of that more painful side of life. It seems that pain is pretty unavoidable for those that get away from the keyboard / tv / high horse from time to time, so the issue sort of becomes "how much pain" pretty quickly.

Thus, the memos -- "where is the line"? As Lowry points out, in all of human history, and even most all of the countries in the world today, any such thought process isn't even an issue. If one decides that they have a responsibility to their fellow citizens to protect them from folks intent on killing then by any means possible, then what one is interested in is methods that work within some boundary that makes sense. Perfection isn't even a consideration.

I'm reminded of surgeons -- no question, even today with anesthetic, they inflict some severe pain -- in civil war times, the pain often had to be beyond unbearable. They don't WANT to inflict pain any more than a US interrogator, but they know that to not to the surgery is going to be worse than doing it. So too an interrogator, they only want the information, the pain is just a side effect. One would think that your average liberal utilitarian "what provides the most good for the greatest number", and "man is the measure of all things" would not be so bothered. I'm not sure there is any pain that could be inflicted on a baby in a partial birth abortion that would even give them any pause at all, and that has no prospect of saving any lives, only of taking one.

So the memos drag on about using a caterpillar (did these folks ever go camping?), how far you can push the waterboarding, and using using special "walls" to make a loud noise so the person thinks they are hurt worse then they are. Now that BO has spoiled all the surprise, getting captured by the US must be at worst as scary as a fun house where you can sit and watch everyone come out the other side. Now our enemies know that US policy never did allow any "lasting injury", and the new policy appartently doesn't allow any detainees to feel more stressed than your average Carribean cruise.

I'm wondering if we are going to maintain this attitude when we lose a city, a stadium, or a few million people to germ or poison attack? One would have thought that 9-11 would be enough for a little "learning experience", but apparently not. Lessons are so quickly forgotten by some parts of our population. I can kind of understand forgetting 32-53 and 65-83, but 2001 is < 8 years ago. One would think we would have more national memory than that. "The short and the dead" I guess.

Those Nasty Christians

State retracts militia report | News-Leader.com | Springfield News-Leader

Gotta love this.

Missouri Highway Patrol Superintendent James F. Keathley ordered the Missouri Information Analysis Center to "permanently cease distribution" of the Feb. 20 report, which labels fundamentalist Christians, members of third-party political movements, strict followers of the U.S. Constitution and people who oppose taxes, abortion and illegal immigration as possible members of militias.

Gee, I wonder if a state had profiled say "Muslims, Hispanics, and Blacks" as potential "terrorists, illegal aliens, and drug users" there would have been any outcry from Federal anti-discrimination and "hate speech" types? Suppose that would have lasted 2 months????

Oh wait -- Christians, Ron Paul followers, folks that believe the Constitution means something, think they are better judges of what to do with their money than the government DO sound like REALLY radical types!!!

Uh, wonder where the ACLU is on the profiling thing in this case???

Facts and Reason on Carbon

Bound to Burn by Peter W. Huber, City Journal Spring 2009

This article is long and slightly technical, but it probably does about as good a job of summarizing a fairly complex issue as can reasonably be done.

First of all, what we already HAVE been doing since roughly the Carter era is making decisions that hurt our economy and while they MAY help OUR emissions, end up hurting world net emissions (stopping nuclear, developing less coal, failing to do oil shale):

Cut to the chase. We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.

So, most of our energy saving efforts shoot both ourselves and the world emissions in the foot. But, as the liberals often say, "you have to do SOMETHING" -- they nearly always prefer counterproductive action to a relatively benign status quo. It is just the way they are wired.

The oil-coal economics come down to this. Per unit of energy delivered, coal costs about one-fifth as much as oil—but contains one-third more carbon. High carbon taxes (or tradable permits, or any other economic equivalent) sharply narrow the price gap between oil and the one fuel that can displace it worldwide, here and now. The oil nasties will celebrate the green war on carbon as enthusiastically as the coal industry celebrated the green war on uranium 30 years ago.

Thirty years ago, the case against nuclear power was framed as the “Zero-Infinity Dilemma.” The risks of a meltdown might be vanishingly small, but if it happened, the costs would be infinitely large, so we should forget about uranium. Computer models demonstrated that meltdowns were highly unlikely and that the costs of a meltdown, should one occur, would be manageable—but greens scoffed: huge computer models couldn’t be trusted. So we ended up burning much more coal. The software shoe is on the other foot now; the machines that said nukes wouldn’t melt now say that the ice caps will. Warming skeptics scoff in turn, and can quite plausibly argue that a planet is harder to model than a nuclear reactor. But that’s a detail. From a rhetorical perspective, any claim that the infinite, the apocalypse, or the Almighty supports your side of the argument shuts down all further discussion.

So BO has promised to do carbon taxes and "invest" 100's of Billions in wind and solar. The 3rd world is doing coal for 3 cents a Kwh. Wind is 15 cents, Solar is 30 (when the wind blows and the sun shines) -- so even though we have no path at all to getting to the capacity that we require, we would be paying 5 and 10x as much for energy as the folks we are competing with IF we could get it that way (which we can't). Want to make a bet what is going to continue to happen to our jobs? We are going to pay other Americans inflated government salaries to hamstring us with a sunk-cost in ultra expensive energy for decades to come. Our major ongoing cost of production, communication and even entertainment is going to be 5-10x that of our competitors. I wonder who wins at that game??

Shoveling wind and sun is much, much harder. Windmills are now 50-story skyscrapers. Yet one windmill generates a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground; Google is building 100-megawatt server farms. Meeting New York City’s total energy demand would require 13,000 of those skyscrapers spinning at top speed, which would require scattering about 50,000 of them across the state, to make sure that you always hit enough windy spots. To answer the howls of green protest that inevitably greet realistic engineering estimates like these, note that real-world systems must be able to meet peak, not average, demand; that reserve margins are essential; and that converting electric power into liquid or gaseous fuels to power the existing transportation and heating systems would entail substantial losses. What was Mayor Bloomberg thinking when he suggested that he might just tuck windmills into Manhattan? Such thoughts betray a deep ignorance about how difficult it is to get a lot of energy out of sources as thin and dilute as wind and sun.

It’s often suggested that technology improvements and mass production will sharply lower the cost of wind and solar. But engineers have pursued these technologies for decades, and while costs of some components have fallen, there is no serious prospect of costs plummeting and performance soaring as they have in our laptops and cell phones. When you replace conventional with renewable energy, everything gets bigger, not smaller—and bigger costs more, not less. Even if solar cells themselves were free, solar power would remain very expensive because of the huge structures and support systems required to extract large amounts of electricity from a source so weak that it takes hours to deliver a tan.

There is some complexity here, but the bottom line, as in most things where the BO position is followed is "we're screwed".

BO Attacks On Pirates

The BO administration is claiming that there was an unfortunate misunderstanding relative to his orders on the Somali Pirates.

Apparently he thought he was authorizing "a TAX on Pirates" and it was fatally misconstrued as the authorization of "attacks".

BO will be traveling to Somalia to bow deeply to as many leaders as possible, apologize profusely and seek agreement on more taxes for high income Pirates.

Safety With BO

"On a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009."

One thing that Democrats excel at even beyond the "political normal" for any politician is inconsistency. We have heard 100's or even thousands of times how "Bush made us less safe" -- and of course, one of the ways that he did that was through "torture". Bush and Cheney were and are evil men that made the world hate us, and one of the reasons that the world hates us is "torture".

What was more interesting was the accompanying statement by the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, trying to justify Obama's decision--or at least put it "into perspective." The perspective, the context, is that in the months after 9/11, "we did not have a clear understanding of the enemy we were dealing with, and our every effort was focused on preventing further attacks that would kill more Americans. It was during these months that the CIA was struggling to obtain critical information from captured al Qaida leaders, and requested permission to use harsher interrogation methods. The OLC memos make clear that senior legal officials judged the harsher methods to be legal."

Blair continues: "Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing. As the President has made clear, and as both CIA Director Panetta and I have stated, we will not use those techniques in the future. But we will absolutely defend those who relied on these memos and those guidelines."

So: We were once in danger. Now we live in "a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009." Now, in April 2009, Obama's Director of National Intelligence seems to be saying, we're safe.

So either those horrible methods actually worked to put those dark days behind us, or all that was required was the sweetness and light of the divine presence of BO to make us safe.

We have now decided to tell every terrorist in the world "what we won't do"; for what? For the "benefit" of being able to re-state that BO finds Bush and Cheney to be evil? They won the election, they have said it over and over, when will they believe that they have made that point enough so that those that find their positions to be convincing are convinced, and those of us who are much less enamored with the divine power of BO are not likely to be convinced by further blandishments.

What the evil Bush and Cheney did "made us less safe" according to BO. On that, we are clear. It was evil and it didn't work, that is their position. Now, somehow, we are "more safe". How are we "more safe" than no terrorist attacks on the US since 9-11?? Are we now somehow metaphysically secure to not even have a cause for any concern due to the holy power of BO? I don't know, they don't say -- it seems odd that pirates took a US ship for the first time in 200 years, we are sending more troops to Afghanistan, and we have to shoot at folks from Predators in Pakistan. Is their a flaw in his most holy BO protective essence?

What will convince me of the correctness of the "BO Doctrine" of apology and blaming the past" will be RESULTS. Statements from al Quaeda to the majesty of BO and their desire to serve him humbly, or simply silence and a world wide reduction of violence in addition to no attacks against the US. As a citizen of the US, I find a "blame America" strategy to to be costly in that while there are no limits on how high we might have risen, there will eventually be some doormat level that we can't manage to sink below. When we are apologizing for existing and drawing breath, the next step could be painful.

We have fallen a good long way since "the change" started in '06, but seeing the acceleration since January, I'm afraid there is a lot of falling left to do.

The stench of BO's America -- a nation sorry for it's very existance.

Kooks, Demagogues, and Right Wingers On Tax Day

A Short Citizen's Guide to Kooks, Demagogues, and Right-Wingers On Tax Day | Robert Reich's Blog

The nice thing about the left is that they are always so caring and respectful--they believe whole heartedly in diversity, and as the intellectual cream of the crop, they know that diversity of thought is the only kind that really counts. That is why they are so open minded.

A buddy of mine asked me which of the key messages of the tea parties will resonate with the general public? That they are deranged, or that they are dangerous? I responded that with something like 80% of the public, even though it looks like millions turned out in protest, what will resonate is "Tea Party"? Who did that, and did anyone show up? I looked out on CNN today a couple times, not a word about the tax protests.

Mr Reich, and a few of the more radical of the lefties are of course up in arms about anyone showing up from the right to protest for any reason. What right do those people have to a different opionion? Well, to listen to Bob or most lefties, none at all. Our founding fathers created a nation dedicated to total thought agreement and maximum enjoyment of the payment of taxes. The essense of "American" is to transfer as much of your income as possible to the government to redistribute to any bank, deadbeat mortgate holder, defunct brokerage house, failing unionized car manufacturer, or just someone that has less money than you for whatever reason. The reasons we are all Americans is that we believe in the government taking as much of our money as they want, and anyone that questions that is simply "not patriotic".

I was unable to attend the local tea party as I had a business engagement that evening, but I did get to drive by. Looked like in excess of 1K people peacefully and quite quietly gathered with signs that were generally pretty tame -- "Trillions in Debt: CHAINS we can believe in" was pretty good I thought. What a far cry from Code Pink throwing buckets of blood on people or all manner of "Bush is a Terrorist", etc anti-war signs. Cindy Sheehan in a ditch outside the Bush ranch in the summer of '05 was a national story for weeks. One woman and some occasional hangers on saying "get out of Iraq" was worth hours of coverage, millions of people questioning the spending of many trillions of dollars is worth virtually none. Our press has no biases.

I shudder to think what would have happened if the Bush administration had come out with a Homeland Security finding on "Left Wing Anti-War Protesters" the week of some sort of planned anti-war demonstration. The press would have been apocolyptic for weeks -- and I'm not sure that if such a thing had happened, I might somewhat agree with them. Surprise, the BO administration comes out with a finding on "Right Wing Extremeism" on Monday of this week. Not a single MSM invocation of "chilling", even when the report goes so far as to indicate that "returning servicemen are a special threat". Oh, really? I thought the "demean the soldiers" went out with Vietnam -- apparently not.

A lot of the lefties seem to think that if you didn't protest a $400 Billion deficit, you can't protest $2 Trillion deficit. Huh? If I don't get mad over someone driving 40MPH, I'm not allowed to say anything about someone driving 200MPH? If I don't bitch about someone having 4 beers, I'm some sort of a hypocrite if I say that 20 is too many? There seems to have been a sudden development of some sort of logic that would receive rather shrill laughter were the shoe on the other foot. I believe that it is supposed to be the claim of the left that the right has all these "hard line views" and doesn't understand "gray". Most Republicans I know are "unhappy" with any deficits at all, were VERY pleased when the combination of the Repubilcan congress and Bill Clinton gave us a surplus, and VERY dissappointed when the combination for Bush and a Republican congress gave us deficits.

BO is exceeding the entrie Bush 8 year deficit spending in 4 months, and will exceed the entire deficit spending of all US presidents prior to him in 8 years by his own rosy estimates. The protests are not primarily about CURRENT taxation, they are about the DIRECTION that our country has turned. Some of us believe that we have turned in a direction that calls into question the very meaning of "America" in ways that may not be possible to ever recover. Are we right? Only the future will tell, but at one time we were a country where "diversity of thought" was considered a very good and prudent thing. We believed in not only an economic market, but even more importantly in a market of "idea competion" where concerned citizens were willing to stand up and take a postiion, even if (and sometimes especially) if it was contrary to the views of the masses.

Has that day passed? Maybe, but I'm proud to cast my lot with the "Kooks, Demagogues and Right Wingers".

Core Liberal Argument

Excellent coverage of the most effective liberal argument. 

SHUT UP!

BO Really Is Historic!

Hostage captain recaptured by pirates after dramatic escape attempt - Times Online

Hey, BO makes history! First US ship that pirates have taken in 200 years!!

More details have emerged about Wednesday’s dramatic seizure — and release — of the 509ft Maersk Alabama, which became the first US merchant vessel to be taken by pirates since the North African Barbary Wars two centuries ago.

The MSM doesn't seem to be making as much of a deal out of the historic nature of this one would expect! I got to read quite a bit about the Barbary Pirates in  "Six Frigates".

BO's Country?

RealClearPolitics - Articles - It's Your Country Too, Mr. President

Charles has another great column, but I disagree with his premise about the US being BO's country. BO seems to be more proud of being Luo (his tribe). He is very proud of his Kenyan heritage, but he seems quite ambivalent about white folks.

The MSM seems be in continuous worship mode and somehow seems to think that the BO trip to Europe was a "success" -- in what way? He got no stimulus money from those goverments, no help in Afghanistan, no help on Iran, and even less than no help on N Korea after saying:

"Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response."

So what was the "strong international response"? Nothing!!! The security council couldn't even agree that Korea had done anything wrong. BO was snubbed 100%!!! Totally ineffectual with the UN, the body that he declared would be so important to his foreign policy. How does the MSM treat that abject failure? They don't -- "hail BO the magnificent".

And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One! (Sadly, he'll have to leave his swim buddy behind.) The Austrians said they would take none. As Interior Minister Maria Fekter explained with impeccable Germanic logic, if they're not dangerous, why not just keep them in America?

When Austria is mocking you, you're having a bad week. Yet who can blame Frau Fekter, considering the disdain Obama showed his own country while on foreign soil, acting the philosopher-king who hovers above the fray mediating between his renegade homeland and an otherwise warm and welcoming world?

It is pretty clear what BO meant by being "a citizen of the world" during the campaign -- he seeks to apologize for the country that he was elected to lead. It is hard to imagine a sadder commentary on where we have fallen.

The Culture of Debt

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Reversing America's Culture of Debt

Good article -- I'd argue that the core evil that caused a lot of this problem is the creation of FICA. The idea that "everyone deserves a decent retirement", independent of how much they saved over the course of their life pretty much instigates the idea that "I might as well enjoy myself now" -- because tomorrow, I'm taken care of.

Recently, America has been moving from a culture of ownership to a culture of debt. People went from wanting to own their home and car and have enough for retirement to making monthly payments on everything they consume while relying on someone else (the government) to pay all the bills when they get older.

We have also been moving to a culture of "economic relativism". Democrats for years kept piling on long term entitlements -- FICA, Medicare, Welfare, Foodstamps, etc, etc that were effectively "debt". The promises were made to their voting blocks, and the checks would have to be cashed by subsequent administrations and generations. Yes, Bush piled on the same stupidity with the prescription drug benefit, but it was something that very few Republicans supported. The saddest part about it -- and his daddy's tax increase, was that it muddied the waters. With the dominant culture being Democrat, it is very important for Republicans to stand very firm -- when they don't, as in the case of Bush Jr and Sr, but even in the case of Reagan with the big FICA increase and large deficits, it all adds to the "both parties do it, so we might as well have the Democrats, cuz they give us more".

The other nasty part of the relativsm is that the sheep get confused about the numbers. When Republicans are in power, the size of deficits are a never ending source of sensational articles in the MSM of how HORRIBLE the numbers are. Of course, when the Republicans are in power, we tend to have a growing GDP, which means that the deficits as a % of GDP are low. If I tell you "I spent $1,000", the only way that is really meaningful is if I tell you what I make -- $10K a grand spent is huge, $100K it is significant but only 1%, $1,000K, and it is "lunch money". So the Bush deficits of $400+ Billion were chided as "records" but only in raw numbers. As a % of $10T+ growing economy, they were not records.

Suddenly, deficit numbers in the $2 or even $3 Trillion area on a GDP that is shrinking are now of very little MSM concern. Other than the issue of "Are they big enough??".

These policies are a Trojan horse creating not only a mentality of government reliance, but also a mindset where a lifestyle of permanent debt is acceptable. Not long ago, someone paying massive interest to finance things they couldn't afford was looked upon as irresponsible, and their behavior shameful.

Now, instead of debt being an unfortunate necessity for massive purchases like a house, everything is being financed by interest-bearing debt. If you can't afford something, don't save up until you have the money, just put it on a credit card and pay 12% or 20% interest for years. This interest can double the sticker price, cutting in half people's purchasing power and plunging them ever-deeper into debt.

I'd argue that we got here long ago -- we just keep going deeper, and the BO policies have put us in hyperdrive going straight down.

The Lack of Knowledge Depression

Our Epistemological Depression — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

I'm starting to love that word even more. Epistemology, the study of knowledge and of the limits on man's ability to know.

In many cases, even more importantly, our willingness to jump to anything that SEEMS like knowledge because it "sounds good enough". We don't really like to think about complex things much, even less if the answers turned out are grey to maybe negative, vs nice quick judgments that seem to show our enemies to be wrong, evil and deserving of punishment while showing those that we like, and above all, ourselves to be brilliant and morally above reproach!!

So with our current financial situation, the congress, the president and the MSM grind away about "greed, rich folks and the failures of Wall Street" -- and how in hind sight, it is all so "obvious".

These factors have received a good deal of attention. But they are not the whole story, and certainly not the most original part of the predicament. What seems most novel is the role of opacity and pseudo-objectivity. This may be our first epistemologically-driven depression. (Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and limits of knowledge, with how we know what we think we know.) 

That is, a large role was played by the failure of the private and corporate actors to understand what they were doing. Most heads of ailing or deceased financial institutions did not comprehend the degree of risk and exposure entailed by the dealings of their underlings—and many investors, including municipalities and pension funds, bought financial instruments without understanding the risks involved. 

We should keep this in mind when we chastise government agencies such as the SEC for failing to monitor what was going on. If the leading executives of financial firms failed to understand what was taking place, how could we expect government regulators to do so? The financial system created a fog so thick that even its captains could not navigate it.

The article goes into a quite a bit of detail about how the financial firms were thinking and operating and that when it all went down, all the "features" that were supposedly there to "keep them safe" -- diversification, hedging, fancy mathematical models and "insurance" all turned against them and aided in the fall.

Confidence cannot just be conjured out of air. Nor can it be created with injections of capital or fiscal stimulus. It will be rebuilt to the extent that financial institutions take actions that lead us to believe that they know what they are doing. And they are more likely to know what they are doing if they are smaller, less diversified, and less engaged with financial instruments that are too clever by half. 

Some recent policies seem likely to exacerbate the problems I’ve outlined. Take the Treasury’s encouragement of institutional consolidation through amalgamation. Bank of America was encouraged to take over Merrill Lynch; and JPMorgan Chase took over Bear Stearns, and then bought the assets of Washington Mutual. Whatever the purported advantages of these takeovers, the creation of ever larger and more diversified companies makes it more likely that these firms will be plagued by the epistemological problems noted above. The Treasury has created more firms that can’t really be understood (or whose riskiness can’t be assessed)—not by their managers, not by government regulators, and not by investors. 

To speak of a crisis of financial epistemology may sound abstract, but it has had very concrete and disastrous consequences. Understanding this underrated aspect of our current crisis is a prerequisite for getting us out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into.

I think that McCain was more right than we know when he discussed the "recession" in early '08 as being more mental than anything. In the late '90s, the MSM was VERY worried that impeaching Slick Willie would "hurt the economy". Somehow, when it came to casting the Bush administration as completely corrupt, incompetent and to talk about the economy as "depressed", before anything severe had even happened, there was suddenly no "confidence issue".

As in a lot of things, confidence is a lot easier to destroy than it is to build -- like economies, countries, investment accounts, relationships, careers -- and so much more. It can take decades for the things to be built (or longer), but usually, it is possible to destroy much if not all of what was built in a very short period of time. Look at how successful the Democrats have been! They only took over congress in '06, and the WH and filibuster proof congress in '09, and already we have the worst economic numbers in at least 25 years and the largest deficits by all measures in the history of the world!

BO Likes Secret Wiretaps Now

Government opts for secrecy in wiretap suit

There would be some elements of a hopeful sign here if BO is ONLY going to follow the same very limited actions taken by the Bush administration to thwart terrorism. The REAL problem with the Bush did is and always was "precedent", which was made much more horrible by the media "outrage" over the "destruction of constitutional rights". Naturally, considering how buried this obvious move by BO to keep the same programs legal is, we can see that the REAL MSM focus was on "destruction of the Bush administration" -- which I must admit that they succeeded at very well.

The Justice Department said Friday that government agents monitored only communications in which "a participant was reasonably believed to be associated with al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization." But proving that the surveillance program did not sweep in ordinary phone customers would require "disclosure of highly classified NSA intelligence sources and methods," the department said.

Uh, Duh!!! Suppose that legally proving how you knew that some of these phone numbers were attached to al Qaeda would compromise getting that info in the future??? Who would have thunk it!!! Naturally, no such Bush defense would get even momentary consideration by the MSM as having any merit, but hey -- this is BO, we can trust him!!!

Unfortunately, I suspect that we can "trust him" to wiretap political adversaries, create a bunch of false indictments and do IRS audits against "enemies" like the Clinton administration liked to do. Of course, nothing to be worried about there, all those evil people would be on the RIGHT, and the MSM knows that they whatever THEY get, they deserve!!

Fluent Austrian?

Uh, gee BO, I think you will find that "Austrian" is not a language. He isn't sounding so good again -- maybe they don't have a teleprompter there?