The Bubble Inevitability

The ‘folly’ of the U.S. housing bubble - The Washington Post

Good little article. Now that all the scapegoats have been herded up and duly flogged -- if not prosecuted, let's realize that we have met the enemy, and as the inimitable Pogo pointed out long ago, "he is us".

Foote, Gerardi and Willen admit that economists are no closer to explaining the U.S. house mania than they are to understanding the tulip mania in Holland almost four centuries ago. They think the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy or Fannie Mae’s interventions might have helped start the madness but can’t account for its timing or momentum. 

We can clean up the housing mess and learn from it. But even the most enlightened policy can’t guarantee it will never happen again. Folly is human nature, and you can’t regulate human nature.

As much as "progressives" believe you can regulate, educate, tax, fine, etc it away, the enemy is STILL us! ... worse, the "progressives" are at least as bad, and likely worse, since they STILL don't understand that "bubbles", "irrational exuberance", "x is ONLY going to go up in value", etc are endemic to the human creature.

Government spending / debt is just one more bubble -- the fine people of Europe decided to thumb their nose and say that "what has gone up is going to keep going up FOREVER" -- but it still won't. Reality bites -- and it cares not for the opinion of even the "wisest" man on the matter.

It Isn't the Cliff, We Gotta Hit Bottom

RealClearPolitics - Austerity as a Bridge to Nowhere

"Austerity" is here re-defined to mean "living within your means". I guess "normal living" must be defined to be continually running massive deficits and ignoring anyone who says it is "unsustainable".  ... oh, and while not covered in this particular column, it also tends to involve cutting energy production, massive taxes on the productive, huge government regulation, and bully pulpit abuse of anyone making a profit.

"Unsustainable" is used to point to anyone that thinks drilling, mining, making things at a profit, etc are good ideas. THOSE are "unsustainable" ... where massive government financial incontinence is not only "sustainable", it is good policy!!

The solution proffered? "growth". Since the election of a Socialist was cheered, I can only guess what "growth" means to this columnist.

I especially love this one:

In Britain, the economy was growing when Prime Minister David Cameron took office two years ago. Adhering to the platform of his Conservative Party, Cameron took the austerity route with a host of gloom-and-doom budget cuts. Now unemployment is rising and the economy appears to be slipping back into recession. Nice job, Tories.

I suppose 115K jobs and 2.2% positive in the US is "growth"? Oh, wait ... I'm sure any problem we have is due to the sad fact that Republicans have "held the lid" on spending to ONLY the tune of $1.5 T budget deficits -- as Krugman says, they ought to be MUCH higher! Oh, and anyone that still has a job or is making a profit ought to be taxed until after they learn to shut up after screaming loudly in pain. 


The elections in Europe show that just going over the cliff is not enough -- people need to hit the bottom with lots of blood and explosions before they wake up.

Death of a Salesman’s Dreams - NYTimes.com

Death of a Salesman’s Dreams - NYTimes.com

I don't have a lot of time to go dig into this, but this somewhat artsy column reduces "the purported death of the middle class" to basically this paragraph:

Then again, in 1949, the top marginal tax rate was 82 percent. The drop in that rate to 28 percent by 1988 helped create a stratum of people who could afford to pay high prices for everything from inflated theater tickets to health care and college tuition.

The assumptions in such a view are vast -- a few must be "income re-distribution is a PRIMARY function of Government, AND it works!".  Also,  "tax rates have little or no effect on people's motivation to make money". I especially like the last -- I'd be MUCH more inclined to look for a job to supplement my pension if it wasn't for the fact that 40-50% of money I made would go to taxes (fed, state, local, FICA, etc). Why oh why would one go to work for half of what you earn if you are already reasonably comfortable?

How about if you only got 18 cents on the dollar (the proud 82% tax rate)? Very short answer, they wouldn't. Very few people that have achieved reasonable food, shelter, clothing and very basic recreation are going to work for even 50 cents on the dollar, virtually none are going to work for 18 cents on the dollar.

In support of my way of thought, I found the following -- in a paper dedicated to pointing out the EVILS of "income inequality". Note that since 1922 the top 1% has bounced primarily between 30-40% of national wealth. The "best" for re-distribution was the wonderful '70's ... a period of economic disaster that we do seem rather intent on returning to.

Otherwise, it is what you expect -- the wealthy own the stocks, bonds and property where the rest of us work. When the economy is good, the value of American Industry (the stock market) goes up, so their percentage goes up. When the economy sucks, their valuation drops. When you wound the goose that lays the golden eggs, you get less eggs ... news at 11!

Our "elite" generally has such a lack of understanding of economics that they believe the "messages" they get from a Broadway play -- one could only hope they would direct us via Horoscopes, it would be a distinct improvement!

Table 3: Share of wealth held by the Bottom 99% and Top 1% in theUnited States, 1922-2007.

	Bottom 99 percent	Top 1 percent
1922	63.3%	36.7%
1929	55.8%	44.2%
1933	66.7%	33.3%
1939	63.6%	36.4%
1945	70.2%	29.8%
1949	72.9%	27.1%
1953	68.8%	31.2%
1962	68.2%	31.8%
1965	65.6%	34.4%
1969	68.9%	31.1%
1972	70.9%	29.1%
1976	80.1%	19.9%
1979	79.5%	20.5%
1981	75.2%	24.8%
1983	69.1%	30.9%
1986	68.1%	31.9%
1989	64.3%	35.7%
1992	62.8%	37.2%
1995	61.5%	38.5%
1998	61.9%	38.1%
2001	66.6%	33.4%
2004	65.7%	34.3%
2007	65.4%	34.6%

Sources: 1922-1989 data from Wolff (1996). 1992-2007 data from Wolff (2010).

Note, by this chart, at least this measure of the dreaded "inequality" was WORSE during the reign of the glorious Slickster, he whom walked the halls of power with his pants around his ankles! Naturally, the media was MUCH less concerned about it in those days!

Pocahontas Warren

White and wrong: On the reservation with Elizabeth Warren - BostonHerald.com

This is just way to funny ... and sad. Just read it.

I especially loved "the race card, Obama never leaves home without it!"

If I Wanted America To Fail

RealClearMarkets - If I Wanted America to Fail: Free Market Agitprop With a Lesson:

The little video embedded below is worth the 5 min if you have not seen it. Note, it DOESN'T say that Progressives want America to fail -- just that many of their policies might be causing that result. "Surgery" is only surgery if it works a reasonable percentage of the time -- otherwise it is just mutilation or murder.

My view of the core problem of many liberal policies is that the ends are not only assumed to justify the means, once the means are in progress, the questioning of the means is taken as absolute disagreement on the ends. We are all in favor of clean water, but I'd hope that we all agree that extermination of mankind to achieve it would be a very bad "means".

I find the following paragraph to be right on. It seems clear, but the problem is that many liberals are purists while many conservatives are pragmatists. Liberals want "clean water" -- to the highest purity possible, and tend to not care about the cost. Conservatives are willing to make cost / benefit trade-offs, and even worse, both sides have the problem of ALWAYS using less than perfect policies -- so some of them fail. When failure happens, our very adversarial current political situation causes both sides to attempt to use the failure to snuff out the other for good.

"The questions are: Should government policies be judged by their intentions or their results? Should political leaders be judged by what they say they want to accomplish or by what actually happens after they gain the reins of power?"

'via Blog this'

BO Ain't No SEAL

pObama encounters blowback from the SEALS | Power Line

Admittedly, he has to say SOMETHING on the stump, but come on. Mittens is exactly right on this one, .CARTER would have have given a green light to killing Osama!

Jimmuh WAS willing to defend himself against PAWs after all ...

TP, Modern Medieval Penance

Works and Days » It Was the Power, Stupid!

Victor Davis Hanson tends to think way too much like me -- having way too good a memory and loving irony just a bit too much. But this one was good enough that I could not resist.

I especially loved this paragraph -- the similarity of the MSM and the left to medieval catholicism is amazing. When I refer to "progressives" as "regressives", this is partially what I mean. The fetish to chant certain phrases "global warming", "fairness", "the 1%", "corporate greed",  "the reactionary Robert's court", etc ... but then the penance provided to go and be secure in your "sins" of being worth 100's of millions or billions of dollars, multiple houses, private jets, etc.

Two, the Left has always operated on the theory of medieval penance. We surely must assume that Warren Buffett has never had problems with the ethics of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. or had a company he controls sued by the IRS for back taxes. Why? Because he has confessed his sins, and accepted the faith and paid his tithe to the Church. Ditto a Bill Gates or a rich celebrity like Sean Penn or Oprah. In the relativism of the left, if the one-percenters will simply confess that their class is greedy and needs to pay their fair share—even if they are entirely cynical in the manner of GE’s Jeffrey Immelt and penance is written off as the cost of doing business—then they become exempt from the wages of them/us warfare and the “you want to kill the children” rhetoric.

He maybe ties together just a few too many things ... but I do so like how he things.

One Month, The End Of IBM

It has been one glorious month since my mandatory "retirement" from IBM ... it seems like a few days though. Revelations on my future?? Not so much, other than just to live a lot more free than the existence that being an IBM employee had become. While you are there, it is impossible to calculate how much of your mental space and life force is locked in servitude.

I've mostly kept up with Cringely for a long time -- He is the guy behind http://www.pbs.org/nerds/
he has a lot of connections and is usually a reasoned and worthy read. Is he right this time? Unfortunately it certainly seems so.

I really don't think there is anything in here of any real news for those of us currently or recently at IBM. Can the company keep paying some of our retirement after 2015? Bob isn't super clear on that ... Oracle is after all profitable -- but it is not a pretty outlook for IBM as a place to work.

Prelude

Part 1: A Terminal Diagnosis of IBM

Part 2: IBM As Off Shoring Middleware

Part 3: Silver Bullets of the Day at IBM

Part 4: Showing the emperor's nakedness

Part 5: Bob interacts with the IBM of Mythology in his youth

Conclusion: 2015 IBM As Oracle

Miami-Dade '06 New Car Fleet

Miami-Dade New Car Fleet Parked Since ’06 in Garage - ABC News

"Government Efficiency"

Crucify Them

EPA official blasted over 'crucify' oil and gas comments - CNN.com:

Apologize for the use of the word "crucify" and you STILL have an EPA trying to pick out oil and gas companies to "make and example of". We need energy MUCH more than we need the EPA!!

We have another case here of of the would be American Caesar in action. Remember the faux Roman/Grecian pillars at the Democrat convention in '08?? 

Weep for America

Churchill on the Buffett Rule | Power Line:

Read it to the end and weep for America.

A Lack of Will

While Syria Burns - Charles Krauthammer - National Review Online

A very well reasoned and cogent column by Charles, worth the read.

Were a Republican in the WH, there is no doubt that Syria would be a crisis of the first order. Take your pick of the story lines -- lack of leadership, inability to work with allies, rhetoric vs action, etc.

The point is that reality doesn't change any with the party in the WH, only how reality is reported to the American people. Charles correctly points out that making the case that Syria is NOT in our interest to defend would be reasonable as well.

What Obama does is say the lofty words but accomplish nothing. His approach is the same as his approach on  the economy, energy and the deficit.

Guns, The East of the Hudson View

Trayvon Martin and America’s Gun Laws : The New Yorker

The article is long, but this quote really tells you all you need to know -- there is nothing in the article that really relates to this quote ... for example "civilian life" is never defined.

When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

In this article, a world is presented in which nobody in the US believed in anyone's right to use a gun in self defense until the NRA created the idea out of thin air in the '70s. The 2nd amendment is purely about a militia, and any other thought is "a fraud" created by lawyers paid for by the NRA. Must be the only case in history where lawyers working for money create documents in support of some view -- clearly a sinister concept. The alternative being? Well, he doesn't say ... something other than an adversarial legal system where all points are entitled to paid legal representation. 


I'm certain there is not a single anti-gun, environmental or labor organization that has EVER paid a single lawyer to write documents advocating their positions! How can the NRA think they can get away with such a thing??

The author does a "good" ... or "sinister" job depending on your views of the 2nd Amendment and gun ownership, job of weaving a story that includes his personal trip to a gun shop, a lot of selected snippets of history supporting the "right of the militia to have guns" view of the 2nd Amendment, school shootings, Trayvon Martin and smearing the NRA. He shows his colors just a bit in this quote ... 

The walls are painted police blue up to the wainscoting, and then white to the ceiling, which is painted black. It feels like a clubhouse, except, if you’ve never been to a gun shop before, that part feels not quite licit, like a porn shop.

Having grown up in rural WI prior to "the gun wars" the "like a porn shop" is mind blowing -- although likely indicative of the Red - Blue State gap. In my youth, it was not uncommon at all for kids to take guns in to school shop class to work on, nor to have them in the car at HS age to go hunting in the afternoon. Nobody in the US had ever heard of a school shooting -- and it CERTAINLY wasn't due to a shortage of guns. I bought my first gun at a hardware store. All manner of stores loaded with guns were common -- if I had known what a "porn shop" was in those days, the idea that it would in any way be related to anything about guns in any sense would have been bark at the moon crazy. In fact, it still is -- and shows why the "Red/Blue" divide is so stark -- we live in the same country in different mental model universes. 

I would have thought that school shootings were a phenomenon of the late '90s ... Paducah, Jonesboro, Littleton, but Wikipedia at least manages to make it seem like "they have always been happening" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting/ a quick glance through their history shows a lot of the targets as being teachers or administrators -- targeted due to some sort of romantic issues by mostly adults, and occasionally by students. In general, prior to the late '90s it isn't just "go in and kill students indiscriminately" ... although I'm not going to claim that the quick scan was definitive  research. 

It would appear though that "school shootings" have very little to do with the prevalence of guns -- bolstered by the incidence in places like Finland, France, and Norway of similar phenomenon. All those lack an NRA and a "Right to Bear Arms", but folks bent on violence still get guns ... or bombs, etc and kill others. The problem is as old as Cain and Able. If one wanted to tie the "post late '90s" to something, violent video games, Quentin Tarantino, internet isolation, family breakup, massive prescriptions of anti-ADD, anti-depressants, etc to youth ... etc etc might all be more likely causes due to the historical timeline than devices that have been around for over 200 years.  

What does the author hope to achieve with this article? More liberal outrage against the NRA? Against the SCOTUS? Is it just "phooey on the other side" for the loyal liberal readers of the New Yorker?  Probably the old "dominant view" in action -- when you write for a conservative rag, you MUST address "the other side" -- because all of your readers live their lives steeped in the MSM dominant left culture. When you write for the New Yorker, it is safe to assume that the vast majority of your readers share your world view -- isn't it the ONLY reasonable view?

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics

The latest from Jonathan Haidt, and it is a great one. Extreme recommendation.

For people with a conservative bent, a lot of this book will be "didn't everyone know this already"? But for folks of the liberal bent -- like Haidt, although his research for this book migrated him to what he sees as "moderate", it will be something of a struggle.

Sadly, I'm sure that Haidt is due to discover that his observations about human nature may be hyper proven as the liberal establishment punishes him for his heresy of using actual science to point out some fairly obvious things about human nature that would seem to indicate that conservatives are not exclusively just "stupid and evil".

First, we are not rational beings, we are RATIONALIZING beings. The book carries on  the excellent rider/elephant analogy from "The Happiness Hypothesis" and builds off it. The Rider is best seen as the Press Secretary for the elephant -- the elephant does something or "leans" in some direction and the rider dutifully develops a case for the elephant. Humans developed into "hive creatures" (like bees) that could specialize labor and cooperate without all having to be related. Morality is the "wetware" that we use to create and enforce the rules to do that -- our "rider" (consciousness) was created so that our "elephants" (subconscious) could operate this way.

The Six Moral Senses:

1. Care/Harm
2. Liberty/Oppression
3. Fairness/Cheating
4. Loyalty/Betrayal
5. Authority/Subversion
6. Sanctity/Degradation

Liberals tend to be very heavily focused on #1 ... although interestingly, conservatives seem to "care" almost as much, they just don't "care" to the exclusion of all other moral senses. On #2, liberals and libertarians are somewhat close -- although liberals see corporate power as much worse and "oppressive" than government power, which they have a hard time even equating with oppression.

On #3, liberals think of "equality" and completely forget about proportionality -- or Karma. One of the huge problems in cooperation is the "free rider problem". Haidt covers this and why it is impossible to have cooperation without "punishment" (sanctions) against free riders.

Liberals are nearly blind (or claim to be) on 4,5 and 6. It turns out that when tested, the "moral modules" for even Sanctity are there and working in the liberal brain just fine -- they just don't want to admit it because in their view it seems "less enlightened" to admit that degrading things are degrading.

I believe that this book is an EXCELLENT base to at least attempt to open some lines of communication between liberals and conservatives, but I suspect that Haidt is in for a shock -- maybe somewhat equivalent to the shock that Edward O Wilson wrote "Sociobiology" back in the '70s.

The "divine faith" of liberals is that there is no God and man is an infinitely malleable blank slate. While proving that there is no god (or that there is) is not going to happen, it is scientifically known that man is NOT a blank slate, and at least in the "next few millennia" not likely to be improved upon much. Wilson was trashed for stating the basic outline of what a "human nature" was likely to be, now here comes Haidt with some fairly solid research showing what it actually is.

As Wilson outlined in "Consilience", the more science moves forward, the more we begin to see the fact of an intricate and complex human that is no less difficult to mold to our desires than ecologists are realizing the ecology of the planet is. We are each little ecosystems honed by selection (or created by God) to interact within the the planetary and social constructs that we are born with and into.

Reality has never been very much of interest to the Progressive Project -- now about 100 years in, with all of the progressive nations facing economic demise, even the social sciences start to point out that reality is not in line with the progressive vision. My guess is that the response is not likely to be very reasoned, but rather very emotional.

Property Taxes Drop in WI

Review & Outlook: A Wisconsin Vindication - WSJ.com:

Seems like a great idea to recall a Governor that enabled property taxes to go down and the WI economy to improve in order to replace him with? A union marionette I guess.