Why a Democrat?

They don't have answers. Good try here, but that's not going to change anything.

I spoke to a deeply committed Democrat of many decades recently and she had no earthly idea that corporations donated to Democrats and would not believe that Obama had received any money at all from banks. She had never heard of Corzine, Blankfein, Paulson, Rubin, Dimond, Immelt, et al.

For most Democrats, it will always remain 1967.

The rats and their cocaine pellets

Charles Hugh Smith, on a roll:

If the nation had to pay a historically average rate of interest on its debts, the economy would quickly implode like a supernova star.
[...]
The "borrow more, we need more demand!" thumpings of "liberal" economists like Krugman and Reich are completely blind to the fact that the borrowing they demand is precisely what has sold the nation down the river and handed control to the banks and Wall Street.
[...]
Hey, what's a trillion dollars at zero interest? You and I could make the interest-only payments each month, because they're zero.
[...]
This is the basis of the current stock, bond and commodities booms in the global economy: push trillions of dollars in "free money" to financial players, and guess what, that hot money flows out seeking a fat return.
[...]
The Keynesians and other economists have no ideas for confronting the reality of a post-consumerist debt economy and society. Like frenzied rats in a cage, they only have one lever to push to release the cocaine-laced pellets, and so they've been pushing it for 40 years.

If bankers are the main employers of economists, economists will likely not renounce a thoroughly financialized economy.

California = Greece

Bill Bonner in good form:

Consumers are correcting 60 years of credit expansion. In many ways, this is a worse problem than Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. In Europe, the problem could be solved by letting a few banks and speculators go broke. It would teach the rest of them a lesson. Most likely, Europe could get back to work soon after. But America’s consumer debt problem will take many years to solve. Household debt is down to 115% of disposable income

Poem of the day

Seamus Heaney is marvelous. A new translation from from Aeneid VI - The Sibyl:

‘O you who survived,
In the end, the sea’s dangers (though worse still await
On the land), you and your Trojans will come
Into the realm of Lavinium: have no fear of that.
But the day is one you will rue. I see wars,
Atrocious wars, and the Tiber surging with blood.
A second Simois river, a second Xanthus,
A second enemy camp lie ahead. And already
In Latium a second Achilles comes forth, he too
The son of a goddess. Nor will Trojans ever be free
Of Juno’s harrassments, while you, without allies,
Dependent, will go through Italia petitioning
Cities and peoples. And again the cause of such pain
And disaster for Trojans will be as before: a bride
Culled in a host country, an outlander groom.
But whatever disasters befall, do not flinch.
Go all the bolder to face them, follow your fate
To the limit. A road will open to safety
From the last place you would expect: a city of Greeks.’

If we're going to import foreign nuke waste

.. why not crank up a few reactors of our own? We can put them in Tennessee.

Kaliningrad's Prussian past

The Orthodox Church is taking custody of Lutheran and Catholic ruins and historical structures in the Russian part of East Prussia (Kaliningrad); some people don't like it (see here and here).

Personally, it seems to me that the historical character of these sites can still be preserved and the Orthodox hierarchy can be appealed to if a wrong turn is taken. This is not like the secretive Turkish leveling of Armenian sites...

Breaking down the misery index

Addison Wiggin has your cheat sheet on the misery index.

Canadian activists

... are more professional.

Saving the tigers - who pays, who benefits?

There was an episode of a sketch comedy show, Big Train, I think, where people had set up tables and were collecting signatures for tiger extinction. The hapless signers were finding out that the signature was on a petition to kill more tigers - these animals are very dangerous.

It was an amusing way to state a serious point:

There is a mismatch between who pays the costs and who gets to benefit from tiger conservation.

Games central bankers play

That Belgium would lease out its gold supply for a miserable Euro or two is not surprising, given central bankers' value system. What would be interesting to see how much more leverage has been extracted from the same loaned gold by its borrower.

The fractional reserve habit is hard to kick.

Marshall McLuhan, Catholic thinker

Jonathan Miller (he of Beyond the Fringe) read McLuhan and was appalled by the Catholicism informing the text:

McLuhan found it necessary to elaborate a psychological theory which owes considerably more to the unacknowledged authority of St. Thomas Aquinas than it does to any of the scientific sources he openly refers to.

That was 40 years ago and the rest of us now need to catch up.

Car of the day

A 1957 Bentley Continental S1. Body by Mulliner. The straight six might even give something close to economical mileage, should you be on a pension or under some sort of income restriction. (Frank Dale & Stepsons)

What would Douglas MacArthur say?

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

Well, that didn't take long

Shortest war on record.

A headline to love

"The IPCC: Greenpeace's glove puppet" and "Governments pay hippies to lobby them."

These headlines appear on The Register's splash page today, though not over the story concerned.

That sweet song that CEOs love to sing

The CEOs of America know very few songs but those they know they sing often and with gusto.

Here's one of my all time favorites: the "Labor Shortage Blues." Remember that one? Bill Gates used to sing that as a medley with "Gimme Some H1B Lovin', Uncle Sam." The business press just loved those tunes.

Well, with U6 at 20%, audiences just don't clap as hard for the "Labor Shortage Blues," so some new songwriter has come up with the "The Labor Market Mismatch Boogie." You can still sing that in medley with "Gimme Some H1B Lovin', Uncle Sam." Labor market mismatch, oh labor market mismatch, good rhythm, good chorus.

Here's another new song you'll be hearing a lot of: "You Got the Wrong Training Baby and You're Education Ain't No Good." Oh yeah. See how that one also goes great with "Gimme Some H1B Lovin', Uncle Sam."

You'll find these great tunes and others in the new Siemens American Labor Songbook. Everybody, join in!

p.s. All fooling aside, why not just pay the damn wages the market requires? "Siemens had been forced to use more than 30 recruiters and hire staff from other companies to find the workers it needed ..." - yes, at the price it wants to pay! You've got some HR pay scale determined by "surveys" and you'll go any lengths to preserve that absurd scale. Hint: if you have to have 30 recruiters and then special training for the marginal employees and the rejects that you hire, your pay scale stinks and your business model is wrong. Likewise, if you're bringing in workers from overseas, you don't have a business model, you have an arbitrage model.

MSNBC - what you think it is

MSNBC finally, publicly embraces its political identity.

This should clear the way for some GE stockholder activism.

If Perry enters the race...

There will be two Texan candidates for presdient. One will present the respectable face of Republicanism, the other certain extreme tendencies. That's how the cards will be played, don't you think?

Incentives for genocide

If Sudan is slated to divide into North and South and the North wants to maximize its territory, it has an incentive to ethnically "cleanse" mixed border areas.

This is an old story, usually accompanied by violent population exchanges. Worth noting, in any case.

Nobody loves Goldman

Coca-Cola, et al, are now piling on Goldman. But here's a question: If Goldman owns the store of metals in question, why speak of manipulation? Is it manipulation beause they don't sell into demand?

Why isn't Coca-Cola an owner of metals? Why doesn't it hedge metal prices in its treasury department?

Barnett: Don't fear US cyberpolicy

Barnett has an interesting take on the new cyberstrategy:

So there's no reason to fear America's decision to fold the cyber realm into this overall deterrence posture, just as there is no reason to fear the continuing unwillingness of authoritarian regimes to submit to our desired rule-sets on this subject. Time remains on America's side in all these structural evolutions, and globalization remains our winning hand.

Hackers declared war today

In case you missed it: "I wonder if this may very well be the beginning of our May 1968."

Anarchists who issue press releases? Not as menacing as the other kind.

What would Mae West say?

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before

Strauss and Schmitt - symbiosis?

Michael Presley remembers Heinrich Meier's study, which

demonstrates how Carl Schmitt, due to his own exigencies, was unable to exoterically collaborate with Leo Strauss, but at the same time used Strauss' criticisms to modify and refine his own thinking.

This puts a very interesting light on Schmitt - but it requires you to be up-to-date in your Schmitt reading.

Buchanan: Romney as Taft

Is this an analogy too far?

While front-runner Mitt Romney said he would listen to the generals about when it is safe to get out of Afghanistan, he spoke out against any more wars to win independence for nations not vital to the United States. This is straight out of the Robert Taft tradition that America does not fight other countries’ wars or pay other countries’ bills.

But "not vital" is an escape clause, isn't it?

Credit crisis a boon to European centralization

Boris Johnson has a point rarely made:

Indeed, there is a sense in which the slow-motion disaster of the PIGS - Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain - has been terrific for the federalist cause. Bit by bit we seem to be creating a fiscal as well as a monetary union, in which huge sums - including about £20 billion of UK bail-out cash - are being transferred from the richer to the poorer parts of the EU. [...] These profligate and improvident countries would be obliged, in return, to submit to a kind of economic supervision that is now proposed for Greece. Taxes, spending, benefits - all the panoply of economic independence - would then be subject to agreement with Berlin and Brussels. I sometimes think Kohl, Mitterrand, Delors and co instinctively knew that this would happen.

RIP, Yelena Bonner

Yelena Bonner has died, another link to the lost world of anticommunism. Bonner was seen by Reds as a kind of Yoko Ono figure, misleading Andrei Sakharov.

Photo of the day

Courtesy zenpundit.

Rule by technocracy

In our authority-loving, authority-driven culture, the highly credentialled groupthinkers have great sway, no matter who wins an election: The junta of experts tells us:

‘Vote how you like, but policies cannot change'

... a junta has installed itself nonetheless, a junta of ‘experts', technocrats, those educated in the knowledge of What Needs To Be Done.

These are the experts who, in the words in May of the president of the Eurogroup of states and Luxembourgish Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, believe that fiscal policy (that is to say almost all government endeavours involved in spending money that touch most citizens apart from home affairs and foreign policy) is "too important" for voters to have a say over, that would be better be agreed, again, in his words, in "dark, secret debates."

...

But wherever these masters of the European universe happen to be hovering at any one moment, the refrain in effect is the same: ‘Of course, there is no question that you are still allowed to vote however you like. Nevertheless, the policies absolutely cannot change even if the government does.'

The boom business in mental illness

Amazing: Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created. Nice roundup of skeptical books.

Assisted suicide

Darymple and Hitchens are against it.

June is Sacred Heart month

Take a Sacred Heart break.

Obama rejects draft missile deal with Russia

This is very interesting. It looks like the president quashed a sellout engineered by Hillary.

Sorry to get all newsy on you.

Bilderberg - a media non-event

Taki's editors notice the sound of silence around Bilderberg, this year and every year.

And only a lunatic would suggest that bringing together avowed globalists such as David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger alongside such globalist and quasi-globalist organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations, the European Commission, the European Council, the Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, and the United Nations World Food Programme would have anything to do with attempts to shape a global agenda.

What would Karl Kraus say?

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

Have you considered a crisis vacation this year?

That's the spirit!

Greece is in trouble, Fellow Reckoner…which means it’s almost time for the crisis vacationer to book a few weeks lounging on her splendid islands.

And the Arab Spring has brought about art collecting opportunities as well.

Vote for the imbecile

Looking at the Republican field, Alexander Cockburn remembers an Auberon Waugh quote that encapsulates the upcoming 2012 election:

Years ago I remember Auberon Waugh electioneering in Fulham in a challenge to the Labour and Conservative candidates. Waugh was outraged by the betrayal of Biafra, a chunk of Nigeria that had dared to secede in the late 1960s. Catholics, from the Pope to Waugh backed Biafra. Not the Labour Government, whose foreign secretary Michael Stewart, MP for Fulham, stuck firmly to stentorian support for oil-producing Nigeria. About a million people died. "People of Fulham," I remember Auberon bellowing to a modest throng, "An awful choice confronts you, the choice between a mass murderer and an imbecile."

Should be an easy choice, whatever imbecile wins these primaries.

Bitcoins - deep thoughts from FOFOA

The quality of analysis normally given to Gold is being applied to the Bitcoin situation by FOFOA ("Friend of a Friend of Another"). After a coupe of open forums, FOFO dives in on Open Forum 3 and concludes:

One of the reasons gold is money is that, of all the physical elements that meet other monetary requirements, gold is the one that comes closest to achieving the perfection of this monetary property that Bitcoin achieves, being completely worthless aside from its monetary uses. Bitcoin is truly an artificial, purely symbolic currency, which makes it, you guessed it, just like all the fiat currencies in the world today. Except there is one big difference: Bitcoin has a limited supply!

What this means in practical terms is that Bitcoin is a hard currency. And remember, hard means difficult and inelastic. Today Bitcoin is trading as an asset backed only by the speculation that eventually it will be sufficiently accepted and adopted as a medium of exchange. Let's be clear about this. Today Bitcoin is not widely (or sufficiently) accepted and adopted as a medium of exchange. Today it is a speculative asset backed by nothing more than being a neat idea mixed with a little misguided hope and speculation. As strictly a medium of exchange, today, Bitcoin is redundant and superfluous.

FOFOA is wrong about silver, he may be wrong about Bitcoin. Worth reading as always.

See Open Forum 1, Open Forum 2, and Open Forum 3.

The new economic model in a nutshell

This has more the taste of truth than of mere analysis:

Government deficit spending, financed with paper money creation, has replaced debt-funded private consumption as the principal source of global growth.

Housing woes

Everytime I think I'm ready to move out of the paleolithic age, an irresistibly attractive cave goes on sale.

McLuhan's 100th

There will be 15 conferences on McLuhan in Europe this year commemorating 100 years since his birth. Very little seems to be happening in the USA, however. Will have to post a few things. Here's a mini-eulogy.

Sunday joke

A shipwrecked man is washed ashore where he meets a castaway. After an excited exchange, the shipwrecked survivor points to a shape in the distance and says, "What's that?" The castaway says "I built it myself. That's my church." The shipwreck survivor points at another shape nearby and says, "What's that then?" The castaway answers "I built that too. That's the church I used to belong to."

Guadalajara - decency preserved

From the Guadalajara Reporter last week:

Protestors taking part in the World Naked Bike Ride on Saturday, June 11 have agreed to wear swimsuits and underwear after Guadalajara city hall officials slammed the gesture as an offense against public decency.

Good.

The White House has a revolving door

The twin memes of radicalism and incompetence continue to dog this administration. Its CIO unveils a 25-point technology plan and then departs.

What would H.L. Mencken say?

"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."

Convergence

Alan Keyes used to say that the problem in this country is not economic, it's moral.

The two converge when you consider "the US Government is now paying over 1/3rd of US incomes… and it’s financing this by having the Fed buy new debt from the Treasury."

This is much more than a dollar and cents transaction and its moral meaning must be clear to the actors involved.

A solution to the Greek crisis

This sounds radical:

1) Kick them out of EMU and send them back to their miserable drachma, which would, of course, suffer an immediate devaluation of 50% or more...

2) Allow European banks to continue to accrue interest on Greek government debt... the European Central Bank will issue scrip to the banks in the sum of unpaid coupon payments ... “I bought your paper from the guys you owe, and now you owe me..."

3) ...seize Greek assets everywhere in Europe, starting with foreign-currency bank accounts, Greek ships in international ports, and so forth...

4) Demand that the Greek government seize the property of Greek citizens who have not paid taxes and auction it to foreigners. That would bring in plenty of foreign exchange. Sell the Parthenon, too. Sell it all.

This sounds like a bankster's fondest dream. Outrageous? Compare it to the Icelandic option of default and I think this elaborate scenario has more chance of being realized.

The difference between Iceland and Greece is that the French and German governments hold so much Greek debt.

Weekend reading: Spinney's death spiral

Blogging will be light over the weekend. Those of you who have not yet encountered the famous Pentagon procurement spiral of death are urged to make time for this essential reading.

Spinney's study is a classic and is referred to constantly. Gates, on his way towards the exit has quoted the underlying idea more than once last week.

The real Wall Street dress code

You should dress according to your career path. Droll. And here's a special tip for the ladies, from a "man of a certain age" - cover up.

Cyber-bullying - arrests have begun

"They were just degrading everybody on there, it was ridiculous." Actually, a youth was mocking his classmates.

I had better tone it down, myself, then.

Driving safety mythology

John Adams is in fine form bursting these bubbles.

The finger-pointing has begun

"The Afghan war is lost. So now who'll take the blame?" - Guardian

Keep four more fingers free for Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Kosovo.

The decline and fall of "Gun and Garden"

What has happened to "Gun and Garden?" WHERE ARE THE GUNS? It's become a roaming garden variety city magazine.

Defending the dollar?

Extraordinary coincidences:

(1) Quebec raids Kitco; Kitco badly wounded

(2) Bitcoin struck by malware

(3) The World Gold Council (of all organizations) comes up with a clever new plan for keeping much Gold off the market

What will they think of next?

What would Nicolás Gómez Dávila say?

"Nobody in politics can foresee the consequences either of what he destroys, or of what he constructs."

"Nine tons of historical excrement"

No, not the Congressional Record: "waste that has been found in the sewer system of the town of Herculaneum, which was buried by an eruption from nearby Mt Vesuvius near Naples in AD79."

You send your daughter to Penn and she aces archeology, lands a gig in Italy, and gets to sift through this.

Girls, please get the grapes off the table.

Content analysis: "they feasted on sea urchins and dormice as well as fish, figs, olives and eggs." Insufficiently interesting, except for the dormice. Find a new project.

To capture "movement" votes

... the GOP must divorce free market support from big business support. Amen? A short piece from the Manhattan Institute points this out but the argument needs to be developed across the right.

The public-private museum partnership

An interesting tour d'horizon from the Art Newspaper: "As prices rise and museum budgets shrink, collectors are playing an ever bigger role in public institutions."

One collector says museums need to stop competing for pieces with private collectors and start applying slim budgets to marketing shows and driving traffic.

Trend noted: big collectors opening their own museums. Does that mean we can be done with tax-supported art museums?

Edwards' "two Americas"

As he was developing his "two Americas" meme, John Edwards' principal donor was a Mellon.

The man's mind was/is very compartmentalized.

Dodd-Frank?

They'll get to it when they get to it. "...they are running drastically behind schedule in writing their new rules." Poor things.

"The best cure for student radicalism is a normal working life"

Amusing but not original:

Becoming “radicalized”—whether your bearded prophet happens to be Marx or Muhammad—is essentially code for having too much time on your hands and a sense of smug entitlement. This is the essence of university life. With three years of sleeping late, anything seems possible.

"Tragic role" for labor unions in 2012

Telegraph: "Big labour is a paper pussycat, eight lives down."

Here, children....

When the teachers wanted a break, they would put on a movie for us. Something about Switzerland or science. Music videos seem to be the contemporary pedagogical dodge.

Operation "Empire State Rebellion"

Objective: Bernanke's resignation. It fizzled yesterday. (Scroll down.)

Geert Wilders in Tennessee

He was stateside last month and said:

My dear American friends, you cannot imagine how we envy your First Amendment. The day when America follows the example of Europe and Canada and introduces so-called “hate speech crimes” which is only used to punish people who are critical of Islam, that day America will have lost its freedom.

Much more here.

Cosmocracy!

Avoid it like the plague.

Gold standard Republicans

Bachmann, Pawlenty, Gingrich: they've joined a gold standard bus tour. Easy to unite on the what, harder on the how.

Lunch with the CIA (chew slowly)

The mad hedge fund trader had lunch with Leon Panetta and shares the results.

Interesting:

The long term outlook for supplies of food, natural resources, and energy is becoming so severe that the CIA is now viewing it as a national security threat. Some one third of emerging market urban populations are poor, or about 1.5 billion souls, and when they get hungry, angry, and politically or religiously inspired, Americans have to worry.

This sounds like a recipe for endless nationbuilding.

Any farm labor shortage

... can be filled by using criminal labor.

[GA Gov.] Deal suggested that people who are on criminal probation could fill the job openings: “There are 100,000 probationers statewide, 8,000 of which are in the Southwest region of the state and 25 percent of which are unemployed."

This Georgian idea dovetails in an odd way with events in Maryland, where the Democrat legislature tried to pass a law prohibiting employers from doing criminal background checks.

Of course, if you ran a farm in Georgia, you'd eventually have to do a background check to ensure you were hiring criminals.

Perhaps, eventually, non-criminals would sue. Unemployed college graduates; illegal aliens; teenagers tired of wilding; consider their needs before passing a criminal opportunities act.

Flannery O'Connor has a repository

Not underground, here, on the Web.

Summer is for shorter hair

Williambanzai7 is something of a financial stylist.

Al-Zawahiri's connetions

Muckety has one of its interesting little network charts drawn up for Ayman al-Zawahiri today. (Note - the expand function produces various effects from box to box)

What would Malcom Muggeridge say?

"Surely the glory of journalism is its transience."

USG puts out call for starship designers

USG has (borrowed) money for all kinds of projects.

From one darned jihad to the next

As much as chimps may prefer Glocks or H&Ks, I'm really struck by the resurgence in Model 1911 Brownings.

"M1911 comeback" gives 147,000 hits on Google. This is an old article but still interesting; the new article is in gun stores with every arms make putting out multiple variations on this venerable theme.

As a mere child I was taught the design was to stop the Moros of Mindano - Islamists peeved with Teddy Roosevelt and infused with lots of get-up-and-go. Well here we are 100 years later and...

(IBM just turned 100 as well.)

Job creation

... White House style.

Bitcoin fraud

... has begun. The claimant is a fraud or he was defrauded.

Renewable energy

Less so than you think.

Army revises its sumptuary laws (again)

The old Class A (greens) have been abolished in favor of dress blues. Wherever the A was worn, blues will now be worn.

The first time my father saw me in greens he said "You look like a Bulgarian railway conductor." The first time in blues, "Now you look respectable."

This would be an upgrade if Army folk didn't wear their battle fatigues absolutely everywhere at all times (even to Congressional hearings).

The debate continues!

Pipe or Cigar? Corporates or munis? Bourbon or Scotch? One hull or two? Cross-country or downhill? Sabre or épée? Mink or fox? Marienbad or Corfu? English or western? Oil or acrylic? Greek or Latin? Boarding or day? Gold or silver? Homburg or bowler?

Share the road

On a busy highway today I saw no fewer than two dead foxes. Share the road. We need foxes for hunting.

I still believe in John Edwards

"I still believe in John Edwards" gets you six hits on Google. That's quite a metric.

Top Gear demographics: your handy guide

No one wants a demographic mismatch in their television viewing; that would be socially and personally inappropriate. To save you, our worldwide readership, time that might be lost in inappropriate entertainment selection, we offer this brief socio-economic analysis of Top Gear.

English Top Gear (l-r): art school graduate (celebrity); public school boy (dilettante); public school boy (engineer)
Typical stunt: Have foxhunters and hounds try to catch an SUV cross-country
Audience appearance: well groomed, orderly middle class.
Program pace and tone: slow to moderate, needlessly competitive, slow repartee

Russian Top Gear (l-r): science institute graduate (analytical); macho proletarian (aggressive); clerk (docile)
Typical stunt: drive a car filled with explosives through a rocket barrage
Audience appearance: salt of the earth
Program pace and tone: fast, contrived, rapid repartee

Chinese Top Gear (l-r): hipster slacker (opinionated), white collar wage slave (intense); undergraduate student (verbose)
Typical stunt: See which powers a grain mill better, donkey or Cadillac
Audience appearance: random, young
Program pace and tone: slow; gaps in repartee

Australian original Top Gear (l-r): art school graduate (opinionated); formula car racer (relaxed); rally racer (chirpy)
Typical stunt: race to haul more gold ore in competing pickups
Audience appearance: farmers
Program pace and tone: slow to moderate, gregarious, little repartee

Australian new Top Gear (l-r): rally racer (chirpy), prole (droll), prole (dull)
Typical stunt: test drive a downmarket Ford
Audience appearance: farmers
Program pace and tone: slow to moderate, contrived, less repartee

American Top Gear (l-r): rally racer (self-conscious), prole journalist (cheerful), NYC comedian (out of his element)
Typical stunt: whatever BBC Top Gear did last season
Audience appearance: younger blue collar men
Program pace and tone: slow, sparse repartee

McLuhan comments on Republican debate

Not really, but his comments apply to all debates since 1976.

Notice his rough handling of the hapless middlebrows.

Label the picture

I choose Clients in search of a patron.
(Part of our hard-hitting, wall-to-wall Election 2012 coverage.)

Brass to reclaim programs

Senior generals are looking to restore military programs that Gates cut. This is like a bad conspiracy movie filmed by a left wing director.

We are China

Charles Hugh Smith:

Despite their many differences, the economies of China and the U.S. share a number of key traits: both are corrupt, rigged, crony-capitalist, rely on phony statistics and propaganda and operate with two sets of rules, one for the elites, and another for the masses.

I don't think anyone under 30 realizes how far we have come in the falsification of data, in the open courting and rewarding of cash patrons, and in the application of informality to government decisionmaking, waivers being a brilliant example of the collapse of law in the US.

This seems like a good place to plug Shadowstats, if you havent't visited that site yet.

For a vigorous, healthy democracy

... you need a monarchy. Awesome data from 2010.

Unacceptable!

Before PC foisted "unacceptable" on the world, we would say "stupid," "inhumane," "evil," "wrong," "bad," "cruel," "thoughtless," "illegal," "immoral," "fattening," and occasionally, "NFG."

The Republicans, swimming in the water pop culture provides, deem "Obama’s ‘New Normal’ Is Unacceptable."

I could focus on the substance of their post but "unacceptable" stops me cold every time.

Chasing yield

Let's see, an 17.25% payout annually, that's pretty good. Until you consider the yield to maturity!

The end of the Arab nationalist

Buried in these hollow musings about overseas social engineering (did you think that our government would limit this to the USA?) there lies a point that needs broader development: the Arab revolutions have thus far collapsed Arab Nationalist governments. The monarchies have survived but the secular dictatorships have fallen, with Ba'athist Syria and nationalist Yemen on the brink.

That Arab nationalist governments are being destroyed and their ideology is on death's door is an historic point something like the end of communism.

Dodd-Frank doomed

Any reasonable adult knew that Dodd-Frank was going to help political friends, hurt political enemies, and that any bark or bite would be removed in the application of the law. This story can be filed with all that shock-unexpected-surprise economic reporting.

Walter Benjamin = kitsch

An admirer of Benjamin notes that he has been rendered into kitsch by the cultural machine and that his fans are his worst enemies.

I would say that he has been made accessible to that vast middlebrow audience that over here torments us with the idiot reductionism of PBS, NPR, NYT, WaPo, etc.

Pallets of cash

You wondered what pallets of cash look like. Now you know. (Next year, this may buy a gallon of milk.)

"Going to Law School Was The Stupidest Thing I Have Ever Done!"

Okay, then!

We need this

We need a "Cannon Superstore." Imagine the possibilities.

Theodore Darymple

The writer we know by the pen name Theodore Darymple has a fan blog (with audio and video clips, for those so inclined).

What would Auberon Waugh say?

“Anyone wishing to communicate with Americans should do so by e-mail, which has been specially invented for the purpose, involving neither physical proximity nor speech.”

Humanity's right to cheap soda

... apparently extends to welfare recipients.

Corruption noticed

The Politico has done quite a spread on the scope of Obama's deep, personal corruption. Knowing their readers as well as they do, however, they had to take the sting out of the story by subordinating it to a big headline and investigation that proves talk show hosts sell advertising.