Sunday, June 26, 2011
Cyberwars and Internet viruses
Evgeny Kaspersky: "... this war can't be won; it only has perpetrators and victims."
How to invest nowadays? "Think like a criminal"
Investment under Bernankenstein:
Think like a criminal. Look, it’s a matter of knowing what the Fed’s next move is going to be, and knowing the investment implications. You have to stay with the trend until the Fed sends signals that it is going to reverse. We’re at that inflection point. The issue is how much front running will there be? You definitely have to be out of your longs by now. When support fails after having succeeded, succeeded, succeeded, and every other previous retracement has held, then suddenly one doesn’t, it’s a huge signal.
Monarchist news
The Mad Monarchist has a nice roundup of news, including the trial balloons being floated against primogeniture in London.
Gay marriage will be mandatory
The right to gay marriage may become compulsion for gays to marry:
If the rollout of marriage equality in other states, like Massachusetts, is any guide, lesbian and gay people who have obtained health and other benefits for their domestic partners will be required by both public and private employers to marry their partners in order to keep those rights.I would look for the next push to be for "partner" benefits outside of gay marriage.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
"Government is institutionally blind to individual philanthropy"
Maybe. I would put it another way: government is efficient in developing new constituencies of need.
Tax all the young cripples
Private Eye: HM Revenue & Customs ... Having let Vodafone and Goldman Sachs off millions in tax ... it’s been commendably ruthless with a small charity for disabled children. [...] Now the charity has been whacked with a £16,000 tax bill, dating from an accounting error made in the early 1990s when the centre was run by completely different people. The charity has been given a year to find the cash, which will eat up the proceeds of dozens of the raffles, sponsored walks and coffee mornings that usually keep the service afloat.
Recycling dollars for gold
FOFOA notes that dollar holders who get tired of buying US treasuries can buy gold instead.
I have my own theory that the actual physical flow of gold into China corresponds to money that Ben Bernanke must now print that was previously being funded by the PBOC.Fascinating.
[...]
Buy gold (instead of Treasuries) with your excess dollars received from selling to products or oil to the US. As long as you buy on the open market (as opposed to dark pools as the Saudis used to do or from mines inside your own country) this drives up the price of gold and causes a physical inflow into your country. You no longer have to print equal amounts of your own currency so you have stopped your internal monetary inflation and, instead, channeled it into the price of gold (inflation only against gold, not life’s necessities). The Fed, in turn, is forced into “QE” which is essentially printing those dollars you would have given to Treasury since Congress can’t cut the budget. Also, those dollars you used to buy gold in London or Zurich will eventually find their way back into the US through private channels and add inflation on top of the printing the Fed is doing.
What would Eric Voegelin say?
Gnostic politics is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare.
Politicians and their reading habits
Occasionally, during the last presidency, we were treated to lists of what nonfiction titles Bush and Cheney were reading. It was appalling, but nothing you wouldn't find at the bedside of a newspaper-reading, NPR-listening, highly credentialed suburban striver.
Very impressive to find a book reviewer who understands these fatal cultural deficits:
Very impressive to find a book reviewer who understands these fatal cultural deficits:
DAVID BROOKS is not the first contributor to the airport book stand to whom our leaders have turned for enlightenment and instruction. In the search for insight on the issues of the day, the politicians who are meant to be guiding us toward a better world have nudged, blinked, pirouetted on tipping points and anxiously pondered the wisdom of crowds. Yet none of these brightly packaged manuals has proved to have the practical usefulness that was promised. But not to worry, those who govern us are invincible positive thinkers who will never give up the hope of finding someone who will tell them how to conjure away all our problems.As a general rule, you want to watch out for people who express themselves in one and two syllable words. That's a way of saying, stay off the op-ed pages and stay away from political stumps.
[...]
ONE MIGHT be tempted to say that the political success of Brooks’s book is testimony to the callowness of our leaders, who have lost touch with the intellectual traditions that shaped Western cultures.
Beer archaeology - a social science we can support
On the one hand, polka teaches us "In heaven there is no beer," and "Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think." On the other hand:
Alcohol may be at the heart of human life, but the bulk of McGovern’s most significant samples come from tombs. Many bygone cultures seem to have viewed death as a last call of sorts, and mourners provisioned the dead with beverages and receptacles—agate drinking horns, straws of lapis lazuli and, in the case of a Celtic woman buried in Burgundy around the sixth century B.C., a 1,200-liter caldron—so they could continue to drink their fill in eternity.
And now a message from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
"When it does blow up it will be too late." - James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
You don't need to tell us
New cars with new features suffer more reliability problems than previous models with the old features. Yes? And?
Americans are suckers for aspirational technology. The not-quite-ready breakthrough. The consumer-as-beta-tester stuff. At the same time they are insane about reliability, the most repair and maintenance averse consumers in the world. Or so it seems.
Who on earth buys or drives these new cars anyway?
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