Category: Uncategorized

Oi. Should I take it as a compliment that some of my posts disappear, even though they have no profanity and stay on topic? I don’t know. Be that as it may, I have learned to always copy my text before hitting post, so that I can do what I am doing right here. If I took the time to write it, it may as well wind up in cyberspace somewhere.

This is my response to this article/hit piece/journalistic low road: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/08/23/rejecting_man-made_global_warming_disqualifies_perry-comments.html

I trust people who know what they know, and know what they don’t know. I don’t trust people like you who don’t know what they don’t know, and infer from that they are really, really smart.

I HAVE studied the data and the arguments used to support the Anthropogenic Global Warming conjecture, and have found it not just wanting, but farcical to any serious mind capable of the most elementary pattern recognition.

Here is a summary I wrote 3 years or so ago: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2008/01/global-warming.html

My case has only strengthened since then. As an example, in this piece I talk about the criticisms of the Mann Hockey Stick hypothesis, noting that serious statisticians found serious flaws in it, and noting that the data appears to have been cherry picked to generate a specific result, one which conflicted with all the analysis that preceded it, and which was Exhibit A for Algore and his Payattentiontome Parade.

Well, we now have email correspondance from the person, Phil Jones, who had responsibility for the primary data set, saying he would destroy the data rather than give it to the people who had been asking for it. The criticism was plainly valid. All serious “researchers” have to remove the Hockey Stick from their arsenal.

I think you are misguided in thinking that the bulk of Americans still buy into this hooey. Educated elitists like you, who think things are true because they happen in classrooms somewhere, are out of touch with the common sense of people who well understand that money corrupts, and that there is a LOT of money in supporting the AGW conjecture.

According to this li

As of 2011, the Chief Justice of the United States receives an annual salary of $223,500, and the Associate Justices receive annual salaries of $213,900.

Think about our current situation. Obamacare is going to cost the American taxpayers trillions of dollars. It is costing us, in all likelihood, hundreds of billions of dollars now. Bureaucracies are being set up, people hired, standards set, regulations written by unelected partisan hacks. Something on the order of the Social Security Administration is being created.

A number of Appellate courts have already found that the insurance mandate is both intrinsic, and unConstitutional. What the fuck are these dumbasses doing? (You will note I don’t swear often, viewing it as superfluous if the verbiage is otherwise accurate; but I have no moral objections to it).

They make the same money that CEO’s of mid-size companies make, and have jobs for life. Why can’t they stop their cribbage game or whatever it is they do all day, and take this up?

I have argued before and will continue to argue that our Constitution became flawed after Marbury v. Madison, an outcome that Jefferson among others anticipated. Specifically, in a system built on checks and balances, there is no remedy to the abuse of the power of the courts.

Abortion, for example, cannot be made illegal anywhere by any legislature, because the Supreme Court determined that hidden somewhere in a secret code only the priests could decipher, the right to abortion was enshrined in a document written in an age when the very concept was not something people mentioned in public.

Patently, they decreased the freedom of Americans to make our own laws. No one can protest. This is the nature of the beast.

Logically, there needs to be a legislative remedy to this situation, and the most sensible one is the ability of Congress to override Supreme Court decisions. The Supreme Court was intended to be the court of last refuge for nationally important cases. It was not intended to create laws that could not be altered by the Will of the People. Such an idea would have been abhorrent to ALL of our Founding Fathers.

As I see it, a two thirds vote in both houses of Congress should be sufficient to strike any specific Supreme Court decision from the record, resetting the case law to its condition prior to that ruling. I am no lawyer, and there may be some smarter way to do this, but something like that is needed.

We also need to create a mechanism by which these retards can be forced to do their jobs over some reasonable time horizon. In issues of profound importance, Congress should be able to order them to hear specific cases, and render decisions within some reasonable amount of time, say 6 months. There is very little which needs to be said that cannot be said in 6 months.

It is said that the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow because they grind exceedingly fine. This may be true, but if the grist is in the other building because the grinder is taking a really long nap, it is not out of order for the more percipient to be angry and wake him the hell up.

I am not particularly grumpy today, but in my more lucid moments I see the extent of the gap between what is possible and what is happening, and it sucks the wind right out of your gut. It makes you dizzy, like standing onthe edge of a very tall cliff.

Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why do we live this way, and not intelligently? Oh, I wish I knew. That is my daily preoccupation.

I sense at times that we exist in boxes within boxes, prisons within prisons. This is the fundamental Hindu intuition, that there are levels of consciousness, which is to say there are also levels of ignorance. To be ignorant is to be confined in your behavior and awareness. This is, functionally, a prison, since the only purpose of a prison is to limit your physical motion.

Some years ago, I read with interest what was effectively a long essay by Doris Lessing, titled “Prisons we choose to live within”, and found it both instructive and entertaining. You may as well.

An old man once sought out a teacher known for his wisdom. He said him: “I am old and will soon die, and I need to ask your forgiveness for a great crime I committed in my youth. I loved a girl, but she did not love me, so in a fit of rage I raped and killed her. No one ever knew who did it but me. Please forgive me.”

The teacher said: “No man can ever redeem any other. I cannot forgive you, because I do not hate you, and my own feelings in any event mean nothing. What you have to do is live with the picture of that crime until you can stand across from that woman in peace. There is no time for that now, in this lifetime. You have sought me out only because you are hoping to continue to avoid paying for that crime. When you die, her image will be all you see. It will torture you. You will not only feel her pain, but the much greater pain of separation from all living souls which is necessary to commit such a crime. You will be covered in the darkness that existed in you when you did this, and you will be alone. The memories of living comforts, and the intuition of God will torture you. These are the true flames of hell, and you will wish that hell consisted in actual flames, as these will burn you from the inside out. Time will cease, and you will be conscious only of pain for a very long time.

Flames die down after a time, however, and when they do, you will be someone else, someone capable of empathy, someone capable of doing good.”

One advantage I can’t remember if I’ve pointed out is that I deal with the Third Rail of American politics, which is to say all those reallocations of capital via the government which people think are due them because they “put in their time”, or because they were born in the wrong place and time, and deserve to catch up, or something like that. Social Security and Medicare are the two most important ones.

They get funded. Money for nothing: it’s the mantra of the age, so why shouldn’t I add my rhyme and rhythym on that theme? You have to riff on the melodies you have.

(editorial note, I’m listening to Arrow, hence the insertion of musical symbolism. The song, appropriately enough, is “Bills”.)

Democrats: you can sell this to your base. Republicans: so can you.

Both of you need to wake the fuck up, though. Get those cobwebs out of your head.

We need to be clear about something: there is no plan being discussed seriously anywhere which anticipates a year or time when our Federal government only spends what it takes in in taxes. As I understand the matter, Paul Ryan’s plan takes 25 years to balance the budget, and it is being vigorously opposed as a big meany-head “grandma can just eat dogfood” GOP monstrosity.

25 years. To only spend what we earn. And it is STILL unacceptable.

Think about that. We are supposedly going to take in $3 trillion in taxes in 2016, and spend $3.5 trillion. Something like that. That is the projection. What if we only take in something like $2 trillion–our historical norm over recent history–and STILL spend $3.5 trillion? Much of the money being spent is more or less on autopilot, unless “tampered” with by Congress. You figure out peoples age and contributions, then checks for Social Security, and reimbursement of Medicare expenses go out automatically. Congress does not budget that money, as I understand it, although they have periodically voted in increases in payments for political purposes, money spent that was not contributed by the people getting it.

This is a train heading towards a bridge that is gone. The direction has been the same since FDR, and Obama is just accelerating.

Do we want to fail as a nation, or not? That is the question. In my view, not even Paul Ryan’s plan is serious. We will have suffered catastrophic financial problems in the next 25 years. Everything he does is based on baseline assumptions that in my view will prove wrong. The task he set himself was creating something that was politically palatable, but as we can plainly see, it isn’t, at least not to this crop of Democrats, who show no signs of disappearing. Hell, Obama still has a 40% approval rating. All the major networks except Fox are covering for him. They could ruin him in a week, but choose not to, for a variety of reasons, that presumably include primarily an inability to foresee the actual consequences of his policies on the poor, the downtrodden and the sick.

I will repeat: my plan, or something like it, is in my view the only viable way to protect this nation, and protect justice and freedom the world over.

When I see someone talking about managed hyperinflation, which self evidently will provoke strong reactions (hell everything that isn’t cookie cutter will piss somebody off, this is a fact of life and of no more concern than the fact that we have to eat to live; it is what it is), then I will know progress is possible.

Who are you?

A word of advice: learn economics top to bottom, to defend this. Particularly study the history of Weimar Germany, what the inflation accomplished, and how it was ended. My proposal goes beyond anything done anywhere, but it is in my view not only workable, but will lead in short order to global peace and prosperity. In any event, this is the zip code we need to be operating in, if we are serious about saving America.

Perhaps seemingly paradoxically, it is much easier to conceal obvious truths among mountains of accurate information than through deception. This is in fact a basic propaganda precept, as I understand the matter.

Since no one person can wade through all that is produced around the world every day–much less over a modern year or decade–you can always assume that what you want is out there somewhere. Quite often, though, it isn’t; or at least it is so obscure that for practical purposes it may as well not exist.

This is why I build my own analyses. I am impatient by nature, and have no desire to spend hours finding inferior versions of what I can create myself.

You can find hundreds of screaming headlines on the internet every day to do with the stock market, but very few people ask what its purpose is, and if it is optimally suited for that purpose.

The purpose of the stock market, in theory, is to capitalize companies. You reach a certain point of growth, and now you can either borrow money, issue bonds (not dealt with here), self capitalize, if you have enough money, or you can offer up ownership shares in the company in the form of stocks.

You find yourself an investment banker, who does all the legal-ey stuff, and poof, you have an Initial Public Offering. My god, that tall, regal looking CEO (or wonky uebernerd who still gets all the girls), and that impressive business plan, and men in fine suits travelling around talking the thing up, and you sell your stock well. You are selling 10,000 shares at an initial price of $15. By the time you have sold 1,000 the initial asking price has risen to $20, then $30. By the time all 10,000 are gone you have reached $50, with an average sale price of $25, netting you some $250,000.

As I understand the matter, this is all you get from this. If, as tended to happen in the dot.com boom, the stock rises to $72,000 a share because it’s rumored you might turn a profit in five years, you still only keep the initial capitalization. Once you launch your baby, it sinks and swims both because of your performance, and–importantly–because of the perception of investors of what the perception of other investors is going to be, which is only partly conditioned by–and sometimes wholly unrelated to–your actual profitability.

Now, your stock price will affect your other borrowing, it will affect the perception of your business, and of course your ego. But fundamentally it does not represent–at least as I understand the matter–an actual asset. You can’t sell it: you already have. Someone else owns it, not you.

What a stock is SUPPOSED to be is an instrument for the receipt of dividends. Have you heard of dividends? Me either. They seem to be hiding somewhere.

Theoretically, though–and this is I think how things more or less actually did operate at some point in our history–all owners in a profitable company get some share of the profit. This is obvious enough in small businesses: they run their year-end, then what is left is distributed among the owners as Christmas money for their families and themselves.

In stocks, you are supposed to get periodic payments, which are supposed to be sharing the wealth. This is what is supposed to motivate stock buying.

In theory, investors who are looking for dividends will invest primarily in profitable, stable companies. Given this, why invest in risky companies? Well, this calculus is wholly different. Venture Capitalists keep a large share of any profit made, so they are more or less betting moderate odds horses to win.

But stock investors, more often than not, will wait years to see a dividend, if ever. If the company goes belly-up, the other creditors will likely eat up whatever insignificant net worth remains.

Their motivation is the belief that other people will want to buy the stock–regardless of its underlying value, and capacity to pay dividends some day–because they can make fat money NOW. Buy at $10, sell at $20 and you doubled your money just like that. If the company goes belly up six months later, you could care less. The only reason you would care is if you still held shares in it.

The net of this logic is that the stock market has lost, if it ever had, any reason to be viewed as a rational judge of inherent value. As many have pointed out, there are many synchronizing signals that investors use, that are utterly divorced from dispassionate financial analysis. If a company lays people off, the stock goes up, since profit is certain in at least the short and medium term, as their costs have dropped. It is also certain that other people will be thinking the same thing, so you try to buy before they do, then sell after they do, making a quick profit. If, after the layoffs, their sales at some point drop as well, then you will have cashed out and moved on by then. You really don’t care if the company is well run or not. To a distressing degree, neither do they in many cases, especially if they think they can cash out their stock options before the shit hits the fan. There are laws and procedures to guard against this, but there are also ways around it.

As things stand, the stock market does not function as a useful integrator of information, as I believe it should. These supposed high speed trading computers are merely a logical extrapolation of the basic dynamic of buying low and selling high without regard to why a price may be low or high.

Now, for some, the impulse for some is to ban things they don’t want. I’m not like that. In my view the carrot is much more attractive than the stick, for all concerned.

Let me therefore propose this: for all stocks you as an individual, bank or investing group hold for one year, you get a 20% reduction in your Capital Gains tax. If you hold it three years, you get another 20%, and if you hold it five years, another 25%.

What we need is more rationality and order, and less chaos oriented around profit-making and taking that adds NOTHING to the economic opportunities and capabilities of Americans.

I had thought maybe we could ban stock selling outright, and insist on bond issues; but that is too draconian, and anti-Liberal. Moreover, if they are going to pay dividends, the stock system is much more flexible than bonds, which demand the same amount no matter how the company is doing. The goal in economic growth is to make it easy to get money to expand.

As things stand, I should note, I think most companies feel little to no need to pay very large dividends, since they know as well as everyone else that the money being made is on exchanging the stocks themselves. This is a feeling that may be wrong, but I suspect I am more right than wrong.

I had also thought that maybe we could enact a law to require all stocks to be sold at the same price, but the problem with that is that one of the reasons the IPO’s sell through is the hope of investors that the stock will rise. Absent that incentive, far less capitalization would take place.

Anyway, these are a few musings of someone watching the ping pong ball on Wall Street, and wondering yet again at how much stupidity there is in all elements of our political, social, and financial institutions. And we do better than most others.

Perhaps I could borrow from Churchill and note that America is the worst of all countries to live in, until you consider the alternatives.

This is where you want to be protesting. Capitalism works fine, if the goal is improving the living conditions of everyone. If you attack “Capitalism”, per se, in its role as an effective system for wealth creation, you create poverty. This should be clear enough.

What you need to be attacking is actual parasitism. Even JP Morgan Chase at least makes loans and capitalizes job-producing business expansions. Only central bankers produce nothing. Their whole mission is to cover up the lies told by bankers to the public. If by some unforeseeable miracle you could bankrupt JP Morgan Chase tomorrow, or Wall Street generally, all you would get is an increase in human misery, one whose epicenter will be among normal, struggling, working class Americans. The rich, being rich, suffer much less in economic downturns. Maybe they can’t afford that new yacht, but they have a whole different set of problems from people who were already struggling to pay their rent.

In fact, on balance, most economic downturns work to consolidate wealth. Formerly viable small business go belly-up, and get absorbed by larger corporations. Firms that have an unlimited expense account at the Fed can outsurvive companies which pay cash money.

If you want to target injustice, target the central bankers.

Again, my rationale is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

Marxian economic analysis was plainly wrong, but his basic idea that some super rich were and are abusing the system was spot-on.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristocracy-got-1-2-trillion-in-fed-s-secret-loans.html

This link is interesting. I have had too much to drink to determine what aim the left-leaning Bloomberg folks are pursuing, but what needs to be pointed out is that all the “loans” in question were of money created for the purpose, in the act of writing the proverbial checks.

The Fed solves, and can only solve, problems created by our fractional reserve system. You can’t get into cashflow problems if you never lend money you don’t have.

Lord, please help me to be the sort of person I will need to have been. Amen.