Imagine a gene for every crime!

Amazing justice: "Gary L. Sharpe of Federal District Court in Albany, was quoted as saying, 'It is a gene you were born with. And it’s not a gene you can get rid of,' before he sentenced the defendant [for posessing child pornography]."

Russian monarchists continue pushing their cause

Nice roundup of Russian legitimism. The Russian monarchists even have their own media guy, Anton Liubich. H/T Russian Monarchist's Blog.

Whatever happened to Clinton bashing?

If you are nostalgic for some good-old-fashioned Clinton bashing, Stella Paul can help. The notes on Abedin and Panetta are worth the trip.

"Putin, Corruption" seized

Police have cracked down on dissidents in St. Petersburg and reportedly seized 5,000 copies of their publication "Putin, Corruption." The tract was "co-written by opposition politicians and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov."

But what is it with tracts? There must be a Russian Wikileaks out there somewhere...

Meanwhile, lest provincialism lead you to tut-tutting those Russians, consider this.

Low regards to all

Policy decisions obviously have econonomic effects. Edwin Leap notes that high gas prices represent a low regard for rural culture.

Personally, I think we're dealing with an imperial middle class that cannot transcend its own narrow concerns and interests. Its provincialism is documented in every new edition of the New York Times and Washington Post, every new episonde of "Morning Edition" and every evening newscast across the nation.

To flip from rural to urban: consider the poor families in tiny apartments who have to allocate 25 square feet or more to various kinds of recycling containers as they satisfy a purely middle-class recycling fantasy?

"Low regard" and "no regard" emanate from champions of "diversity" and "multiculturalism".

IP-based narcissism: look more to boomers

Ron Liddle singles out the boomers as more addicted to Facebook and Twitter than other demographics. He particularly objects to Stephen Fry.

Fry seems to me morphing into one of his own characters while shedding the reticence. He made his gay "coming out" a national media event and has not let up since.

Mistah Speakah! How many moah...

As yet another Massachussetts speaker of the house heads off to prison, Howie Carr tallies them up.

Know the Bay State, know epic corruption.

The race for octopus expertise

German scientists, presumably marine biologists, are looking for an octopus that can predict soccer match winners. Their previous octopus with this specialty expired.

One shudders to think what might happen should the Taliban or Qaddafi discover such a marine creature first.

"The Myth of Precision-Guided Coercion"

Good to see Franklin Spinney is still active and in good form:

What passes for a war strategy in Libya is now a comic opera starring NATO as an understrength, self-referencing techno bully, who acts as if he is now so fearsome that he does not even need a carrot to go with his stick.
[...]
In fact, the US version of technological supremacy eliminates the need for cleverness in a military strategist. The mental labors of a Sun Tzu, Napoleon, Grant, or a Manstein are no longer needed, because they can be displaced by silver bullets spit out by machines. All that is needed in a 'strategist' is the ability to construct coarse threats, even when, as in the case of Libya, the bullies making those threats are manifestly out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas.

Dog bites man

Oh, look, another deeply corrupt environmentalist! (Are we allowed to say that?) Working for that paragon of ethical agencies, NASA!

Car of the day

Rita Hayworth's 1953 Cadillac Ghia

Euro: safer than the dollar?

The dollar holds more risk than the euro, says this European portfolio manager. Surprise: your money market fund is holding European bank commercial paper, including banks heavily exposed to Greek debt. Prediction: The Fed will spend resources to prop up foreign banks to keep your money markets solvent.

H/t to Rocky Vega.

Update: ZH and Jim Grant have much more to say on this.

Grant: "The Fed has embarked on something new: to enforce the symptoms of prosperity [stock and bond market health] rather than prosperity." "Either it owns the stock market or the stock market owns the Fed." "We have exchanged the gold standard for the PhD standard, a very bad trade."

Safe to say that the member (owner) banks of the Fed have considerable stock and bond market exposure which the Fed's practices are designed to aid.

Is liberty (or Libertarianism) a "scam"?

Stephen Metcalf says yes. Julian Sanchez says no.

Hat tip to A&LD.

The conservative objection to Libertariansim, in a nutshell, is L's indifference to the pernicious social effects of certain types of voluntary contracts. This puts it in the difficult position of sitting in the same camp as liberalism and drawing lines of distinctions regarding which effects are worth regulating some liberty for.

A meditation on wealth

Stories of the rich are a staple of the corporate media. Here's one we can look at together.

One of the oddities of American thought is the general confusion about wealth and what it is.

Wealth is property; it is value stored in precious metals, land, resources; it is rentier (not labor) income; it is “money at rest”; and it can be “savings” that are noncontingent.

Wealth is not and can never be wages earned by an employee through labor. Wealth is not money in a checking account. Wages might become wealth after they stop being wages, but this is a very problematic transition, more on which in a moment.

In the US I am always surprised to find high income earners called “wealthy” and their income called “wealth.”

The publicly-owned company’s CEO, an at-will employee, sits atop the wage-slave pyramid, no matter how big the paycheck. He (she) is not an owner and the earned income stream realized by this person is negotiated in the labor market where time and expertise is bought and sold.

Think about public company CEOs you may know (who were not company founders). I have never known one or heard of one who started a company (other than a consulting firm) after losing the CEO position. These people are helots with no ownership in them. They do not even have it within themselves to invest their own wages that they may have saved, relying on the Madoffs of the world.

They are superbly credentialed strivers overcoming modest family backgrounds who rather resemble lottery winners except that they go broke at a slower rate.

Would we call a lottery winner “wealthy,” BTW? And yet for the year or two that he can hold on to it, the lottery winner’s money “rests” while the CEO’s money is constantly working, or leveraged, or gone away due to high living.

Do you think owners, and in particular the real wealthy, even break bread with this high income crowd? Why would they? What have they to learn from on-the-make hirelings? The master does not socialize with his factors. It’s the difference between Beverly Hills and Beverly Farms.

The ongoing confusion about wealth in this country is very helpful to the bona fide rich. Their status and possessions are never threatened. No one even conceives of wealth in non-income terms. If you are accumulating wealth, be encouraged.

“Tax the rich” means “tax income” not “tax property.”

“Spread the wealth” means “redistribute income,” not wealth.

“Income equality” is a battle cry that leaves the wealthy on the sidelines.

When you look at the orientation of the class warfare Left, they are focused on earners. This is a sad little dogfight among lowly wage slaves (and tax consumers) observed from afar by the wealthy.

One of the amusing things Grub Street likes to do is tally numbers of rich. Since newspapers can only parrot academic “expertise,” they fall into the polemic trap of repeating tiny totals for the “wealthy” because academics minimize these figures to serve a rhetorical purpose: to emphasize inequality through magnitude of comparison.

First, let me say, the rich are all around you. You can take that tenth of a percent or whatever number the professors are peddling (through their wretched ink-stained friends) and send it back whence it came. It may be that a tenth of a percent is earning a million a year but that has nothing to do with the percentage of the population that is wealthy.

Look around your street, your town, your office. Someone has to own all that.

Thirty years ago I was an infantry officer living the in the sad-sack town of Phenix City. I went to the landlord’s office to pick up my security deposit. One of his clerks looked up the street address of my apartment in his properties register, a tome six inches thick with one property per line, a dozen or two dozen lines per page. There may have been some leverage there, but there was an awful lot of property too. The man dressed like a used car salesman and spoke with an impenetrable Alabama brogue. You would brush past him on the street. Perhaps today, he has a Harvard PhD pressing his slacks.

Nowadays, if I just count the number of polo players in my county, factor in the cost of owning and maintaining at least four ponies per player, plus the cost of stable, groomsman, etc., the newspaperman’s miserable fractions crumble fast. If I add in the local fox hunters and their enormous horse and hound costs, the newspaper numbers become more ludicrous still.

Of course, all these horse and dog owners live outside of the wage economy, so they are invisible to professor and pundit alike. Being invisible, they can’t possible exist. Rather like Iraqi WMDs!

Ownership does not show up on W2s. Gold or jewelry in a safe deposit box is invisible to would be counters. Overseas realty is something you’ll never see. The wealthy hide their wealth; they dissimulate in public; they may drive dirty pickups, they may live poorly, they may travel constantly, they are a moving target far beyond the capability of today’s press-release-dependent reporters. They would be poor soon enough if they called attention to themselves.

Active business owners, meanwhile, are phantoms surrounded by entities in other people’s names. Tax avoidance has created elaborate fictions in the form of trusts, and shell companies, holding companies, and 501(c)3s.

You cannot count the rich. If you counted them, they’re not rich.

And why exactly would they want to talk to you anyway?

(Note: The dotcom CEOs are exceptional in that they include owner-founders who continue forming and joining companies. They transcend wage slavery when great blocks of stock are extracted from public markets. They tend to be nouveau riche employers of helot-class CEOs.)

Poland celebrates Reagan

Poland is celebrating Reagan's centennial. "Ronald Reagan is a Polish hero!" Look and learn, mediacrats.

Poor Lebanon

Hezbollah took over the whole shootin' match and nobody even noticed.

Value traps

Book value can be a death trap. Ask Mish.

Electric cars are losers

Aside from being chock full of toxic chemicals, having traveled the world during piecemeal manufacture, and being dependent on rising electricity prices, there are other reasons for loathing the electric car:

An electric car owner would have to drive at least 129,000km before producing a net saving in CO2.
[...]
Many electric cars are expected to need a replacement battery after a few years. Once the emissions from producing the second battery are added in, the total CO2 from producing an electric car rises to 12.6 tonnes, compared with 5.6 tonnes for a petrol car.
[...]
...drivers wanting to minimise emissions could be better off buying a small, efficient petrol or diesel car...

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.