Remind Me Again...

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com LONDON -- President Barack Obama suggested that Iran may have some right to nuclear energy _ provided it proves by the end of the year that its aspirations are peaceful. In a BBC interview broadcast Tuesday, he also restated plans to pursue direct diplomacy with Tehran to encourage it set aside any ambitions for nuclear weapons it might harbor. Iran has insisted its nuclear program is aimed at generating electricity. But the U.S. and other Western governments accuse Tehran of seeking atomic weapons. "What I do believe is that Iran has legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations," Obama said, adding that the international community also "has a very real interest" in preventing a nuclear arms race.

...why nuclear power is legitimate for Iran (and France although we need to keep that top secret) but not for the U.S.?

Du'O

clipped from www.politico.com The impressive fundraising Obama demonstrated in 2007 was largely a result of the usual high-dollar contributors – not the small-dollar donors the campaign liked to hold up to the press. “It wasn’t the Internet,” admitted Penny Pritzker, Obama’s national finance chair.

Gramsci -- A Periodic Reminder

clipped from www.jacksonville.com Gramsci thought that Western traditions and values were simply too strongly engrained in the Italian people, and the people of other Western nations, to be overcome by armed revolution. Gramsci advocated a long-term approach instead. He thought the only way to conquer the West was to destroy the West's political and religious values through moral subversion and reinterpret Western history in such a way that makes it look evil and corrupt. Gramsci knew this was a long term goal, since those people of his own generation were exposed to Western values and would be unwilling to give them up. Gramsci knew though that future generations could be influenced IF there was a way of exposing them to the proper propaganda. Gramsci, in a shrewd mix of Machiavelli, Marx and Proverbs 22:6, advocated attacking the children through the schools in order to - Pied Piper-like - lead them into communism.

Feeling Better

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com The cat-and-mouse game does not end there. As detentions at Bagram and traditional renditions have come under increasing legal and political scrutiny, the Bush and Obama administrations have relied more on other tactics. They have secured foreign intelligence services to do all the work -- capture, incarceration and interrogation -- for all but the highest-level detainees. And they have increasingly employed targeted killings, a tactic that eliminates the need to interrogate or incarcerate terrorists but at the cost of killing or maiming suspected terrorists and innocent civilians alike without notice or due process. The government, however, sees the terrorist threat every day When one of its approaches to terrorist incapacitation becomes too costly legally or politically, it shifts to others that raise fewer legal and political problems. This doesn't increase our safety or help the terrorists. But it does make us feel better about ourselves.

You Know Things Are Bad When...

clipped from www.breitbart.com The proximate cause of the bankruptcy was supposed to be the inability of GM and the government's auto task force to reach an accommodation with GM's bondholders. But late last week, the bondholder problem was moving toward rapid resolution, and was clearly resolvable. Why then are GM and its multibillion government financier proceeding with bankruptcy? The bankruptcy and the GM restructuring plan are the product of a secretive, unaccountable, Wall Street-minded government task force that assumed power because of a Congressional abdication of historic magnitude. By all rights, the restructuring plan should have been submitted to Congress for deliberative review and decision.

... not only do I find myself in agreement with the Russians and Chinese criticizing O Duce's lunatic plunge into Marxism, but I can find more than one paragraph in anything Ralph Nader says that I'm even within a parsec of agreeing with. Good Lord.

Insanity On Stilts

clipped from gatewaypundit.blogspot.com The New York Times made this stunning admission today: It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism. But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry. Nor, for that matter, had he given much thought to what ailed an industry that had been in decline ever since he was born. A bit laconic and looking every bit the just-out-of-graduate-school student adjusting to life in the West Wing — “he’s got this beard that appears and disappears,” says Steven Rattner, one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force — Mr. Deese was thrown into the auto industry’s maelstrom as soon the election-night parties ended.

Into History

clipped from online.wsj.com The Trabant originally derived from a well regarded West German car (the DKW) made by Audi, which today produces some of the most prestigious cars in the world. In the hands of the East German government, the unfortunate DKW became a farce of a car. The bureaucrats and the union that ran the Trabant factory made the car smaller and boxier, to give it a more proletarian look. Automobile manufacturing and government do not mix in capitalist countries either. In 1945, the British voters, tired of four years of war, kicked out Winston Churchill and elected a leftist parliament led by Labour's Clement Attlee. Attlee nationalized the automobile, trucking and coal industries, as well as communication facilities, civil aviation, electricity and steel. Britain was already saddled by crushing war debts. Now it was sapped of economic vigor. The old empire quickly passed into history. It would take decades until Margaret Thatcher's privatization reforms restored Britain's place

RTWT.

If It's Not An Aluminum Can, Skip It

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Collectivism As A Cargo Cult

clipped from en.wikipedia.org A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced, non-native cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors. Members, leaders, and prophets of cargo cults maintain that the manufactured goods ("cargo") of the non-native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities and ancestors, and are intended for the local indigenous people, but that, unfairly, the foreigners have gained control of these objects through attraction of these material goods to themselves by malice or mistake[citation needed]. Thus, a characteristic feature of cargo cults is the belief that spiritual agents will, at some future time, give much valuable cargo and desirable manufactured products to the cult members

Ya Think?

clipped from www.reuters.com An obvious culprit for the move in bond yields is the country's record fiscal deficit, which will generate a massive amount of new government issuance.

Brutal ... But He Looks Nice So It's OK

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com One of the most striking features of the young Obama administration is that whatever personal popularity the President enjoys has not carried over to his policies. Obama is currently enjoying a bounce due to greater approval by Hispanics--the result of the Sotomayor nomination--but once again, that bounce fails to be reflected in the realm of policy. Rasmussen finds today that by a 67 percent to 21 percent margin, voters "oppose a plan for the federal government to give General Motors an additional $50 billion to buy 70% of the company." Only 18 percent say the government will do a good job of running GM. (It would be interesting to know how many of those 18 percent are union members.) These are absolutely brutal numbers.

Bi-Party Sin

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And they both just love the Federal Reserve. Can you say "Sugar Daddy"?

The Worse It All Becomes

clipped from articles.moneycentral.msn.com This week I'd like to update readers on the funding crisis. That's the third in the three-baseball-game analogy that I dreamed up last fall (read "Economy sinks as we save bankers") as a way to think through the enormous problems we faced. The first and second games (crises) -- the credit meltdown and the economic downturn -- have been pretty easy for folks to understand, as they were front and center in the news. Essentially, the financial crisis now lies behind us But therein lay the seeds for the funding crisis -- which, as I noted in my daily column at FleckensteinCapital.com on May 21, appears to have started. Because if the dollar is called into question (as now appears to have begun) and if the Federal Reserve's monetization cannot lower interest rates (and in fact causes them to rise, due to the consequences of printing so much money), then the Fed is trapped. The more it tries to solve the problem by printing more money, the worse it all becomes.

Bright Beacons

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com Despite the car manufacturers' critical state, the United Auto Workers are resisting concrete steps to help the industry that has provided their livelihood for 70 years. Instead, they look to the government for subsidies Shades of the U.S. maritime industry, which began its death spiral in the 1970s, a time when it was massively subsidized by the federal government and when laws guaranteed that U.S.-flag vessels would carry all government-related cargo. Yet even with these subsidies and guarantees, the dozen or more U.S. companies -- including such once well-known names as American Export Lines, Grace Lines and Pacific Far East Lines -- failed, one after another, in the face of competition from more efficient carriers as more and more countries entered the international shipping market. the most efficient providers of goods or services that are similar in price or quality will succeed The parallels between the auto industry and our departed maritime industry are bright beacons.

Taxing The Stupid

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com The figure of $1.4 million, for the amount of the taxpayers' money that will be spent on saving each job at General Motors and Chrysler, has now appeared in the media. I have no idea whether it is accurate; more fundamentally, no idea how anyone could arrive at a plausible final reckoning, at the bottom of a sheet of wildly expensive variables. What began as a $4-billion bailout, and was defended at that level by a prime minister who wrote and reasoned so eloquently against corporate bailouts when he was running the National Citizens Coalition, has blossomed within weeks into a $13.5-billion bailout. One of the proofs that Canadians are indeed rather stupid, is that we will stand for this sort of thing: that people who themselves face penury in old age, will agree to have their pockets picked to cover $70-an-hour auto-workers. And then actually vote at the next election for the politicians who robbed them. (For not all Canadians are basically conservative.)

Changing America

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com For Obama as candidate, as for Obama as president, one of the most important political tasks has been neutralizing that Catholic constituency. The selection of Joe Biden as running mate was an astute manoeuvre to this end. But the speech at Notre Dame was a master-stroke. But I watched the speech itself -- given the kind of live mass coverage that commencement speeches seldom receive -- with a kind of admiring horror. In a few short minutes of sophistical artistry, Obama had changed the issue from whether we should allow the killing of babies, to whether we should tolerate the sort of people who are against such things. And then, by declaring that we should, indeed, tolerate such people, he harvested the general applause. Here is a man who will in fact change America. I flinch at what it will become.

Amusing Ourselves To Death: More On Pedagogy

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com Let me say I thoroughly enjoyed, sensually, reading the papers in print-form again, including those in languages I less than half understand. And let me now add my key point. I had suspected before that people do not retain what they read on computer screens as well as what they read in print. After my five-week experiment, I am quite sure of this. Partly for the wealth of physical associations in print reading, and partly from other causes, our memories favour the tangible. We confirm this point instinctively, every time we print out a long article. This is a serious matter, for as any competent pedagogue could assure us, what is not retained was never adequately processed in the first place. So while the Internet provides a festival of information, it also subverts the comprehension of all things humane.

Joiners

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Stuff The Italians Used To Do

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com Historically, we don't own car companies -- or banks or insurance firms. But we do now. Tick them off on your fingers: GM, Citi, AIG. Oh, and let's not forget Fannie and Freddie, those big, quasi-government, taxpayer-owned housing agencies. California is broke and likely headed to bankruptcy. Will we the taxpayers own that, too? Altogether, we're talking about hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that will never be repaid. This is the stuff the Italians used to do, and the Brits before Margaret Thatcher, and the Soviets a long time ago. But it's something very new and very different for America. Is this onslaught of government ownership an attack on free-market capitalism? Yes, it is. Call it Bailout Nation or Ownership Nation, it's an unprecedented degree of government command, control and planning, all in the name of a tough economic downturn.

And did I mention that Fiat gets a piece of Chrysler now?

P.J.: The Retreat

clipped from pajamasmedia.com P.J. O’ROURKE: “The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of economics. It’s a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies.” Plus this: “We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. . . . And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.”

The Dead Children Can't Speak

clipped from www.foxnews.com Still, anti-DDT activism led to hearings before an EPA administrative law judge during 1971-72. After seven months and 9,000 pages of testimony, the judge concluded "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man... The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife." Despite the exculpatory ruling, then-EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus banned DDT anyway. Ruckelshaus never attended the hearings, didn�t read the transcript and refused to release the materials used to make his decision. This wasn�t surprising given Ruckleshaus� bias. Ruckleshaus belonged to the Environmental Defense Fund, an activist group formed by the National Audubon Society to lobby for its agenda without endangering the Society�s tax-exempt status. They built their "success" on junk science and the bodies of third world children.

No Nukes For Japan?

clipped from www.qando.net While at a conference in Singapore with Asian defense leaders, Sec. Gates did a little podium thumping about North Korea’s recent nuclear test: “We will not stand idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in Asia — or on us,” Mr. Gates told a major defense conference here that has been dominated by North Korea’s test this week of a nuclear device and the firing of at least six short-range missiles, all in defiance of international sanctions. It took a foreign journalist to point out to Sec. Gates that while the US may not recognize North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, it was, in fact, already a “defacto nuclear weapons state.” “We are resolutely opposed to nuclear proliferation,” General Ma said, adding that “we hope that all parties concerned will remain cool-headed and take measured measures to address the problem.” China is resolutely opposed to nuclear proliferation only after NoKo. That means it wants no nukes in Japan.

Good luck with that. And frankly, the whole concept is silly. Japan is technically capable of doing pretty much anything it wants -- in days not weeks -- almost regardless of the technology involved.

And given that estimates are that they have enough nuclear material for, oh, 4000 or so nukes stored up from operating their nuclear reactors, well it's all, shall we dare say, a "kabuki dance".

And did I forget to mention that the NorKorComs are nuttier than cuckoo-clocks?

In Thrall

clipped from www.ft.com Of course, Mr Krugman knew what I meant. "The only thing that might drive up interest rates," he acknowledged during our debate, "is that people may grow dubious about the financial solvency of governments." Might? May? The fact is that people - not least the Chinese government - are already distinctly dubious. They understand that US fiscal policy implies big purchases of government bonds by the Fed this year, since neither foreign nor private domestic purchases will suffice to fund the deficit. This policy is known as printing money and it is what many governments tried in the 1970s, with inflationary consequences you do not need to be a historian to recall. It was Keynes who noted that "even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist". Today the long-dead economist is Keynes, and it is professors of economics, not practical men, who are in thrall to his ideas.

Redux: Peter Schiff On Russia Today

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WTWT.

I'd Call It Hypocrisy But That's Somehow Not Sufficient

clipped from pajamasmedia.com ABC NEWS: First President in US History to Have Voted to Filibuster a Supreme Court Nominee Now Hopes for Clean Process. Heh. That’s their headline, not mine.

Exactly As Intended

clipped from pajamasmedia.com As we know, most of the stimulus spending does not take place until next year and beyond, so the short-run gains are puny. On the other hand, the big increase in the projected deficit creates the expectation of higher interest rates, which raises interest rates now. These higher interest rates serve to weaken the economy. According to this standard analysis, the stimulus is going to hurt GDP now, when we could use the most help. Much of the spending will kick in a year or more from now, with multiplier effects following afterward, when the economy will need little, if any, stimulus. This is the flaw with using spending rather than tax cuts as a stimulus. The lags are longer when you use spending. Of course, if the real goal is to promote government at the expense of civil society and to create a one-party state in which business success is based on political favoritism, then the stimulus is working exactly as intended. Indeed.

Losing Un-America

clipped from pajamasmedia.com TED RALL thinks Obama should resign. “We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.” I think this is just something Axelrod set up to make Obama look more centrist . . . . UPDATE: Rand Simberg emails that Rall is probably bitter and clinging to his lack of religion because he got laid off. And the “stimulus” doesn’t look likely to save him. MORE: “If Obama’s lost Ted Rall, he’s lost un-America.” Heh. Now that’s funny. Plus, a stroll down memory lane.

Ovaluation

clipped from pajamasmedia.com STIMULUS! Crude Oil Caps Biggest Monthly Gain Since 1999 on Dollar Drop. Money quote: “The devaluation of the dollar is leading to the revaluation of energy and commodities in general.” Nothing says “economic recovery” like “expensive oil!”

The Spending This Time

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No Decoupling? Really?

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Man O Straw

clipped from www.commentarymagazine.com Ross almost sounds like he’s debunking a strawman when he says believers in the theory of ‘linkage’ think “all other Middle East conflicts would melt away” if only the Palestinians had a state. I don’t know if President Barack Obama would go that far, but former President Jimmy Carter nearly does. “Even among the populations of our former close friends in the region,” Carter said, “Egypt and Jordan, less than 5 percent look favorably on the United States today. That’s not because we invaded Iraq; they hated Saddam. It is because we don’t do anything about the Palestinian plight. Without doubt, the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem. The populations of Egypt, Jordan, and other Arabic countries have a nearly inexhaustible list of grievances against the United States. Many are based on phantasmagoric and state-manufactured conspiracy theories that have nothing to do with the West Bank, Gaza, or anything else in the real world.

COTD: Today's FDR=O Duce Nugget

clipped from lucianne.com Both of my late parents switched to Republican when FDR ran for his fourth term. He was obviously dying and they thought his running again was a fraud. (As it turned out Harry Truman had the guts to drop the bomb, so their concern was misplaced.) If they were alive today they'd be well into their 100s - and there is no way they would ever have voted for Obama.

Cycles Illustrated

clipped from www.dagnyd.net The Dow (DJIA) to Gold (Au) ratio: You can think of the ratio as the balance between enthusiasm and fear. When we are enthusiastic for our financial prospects, the Dow is higher. When we have financial fear of losing our assets, we value gold more. While gold is not a productive asset, it is a relatively safe one. In contrast, investing in business and the Dow is a productive asset, but a relatively unsafe one. You can also consider the ratio to be the changes in the Dow corrected for inflation by basing it on gold or Dow per unit of gold. The Great Depression, the Carter Stagflation, and the Bush-Obama Downturn all follow a pattern that is striking: The economic peaks are separated by almost exactly 35 years. There are also suggestive patterns in politics, military affairs, and technology, all of which are tied into the repeating pattern. Perhaps we can use this to see where we are and where we will go financially, politically, and technologically.

Incompatible

clipped from fortcollinsteaparty.com And please don’t be taken in by the predominant liberal view that the best economy is a “mixed economy,” or a “blended” one. In actuality, there is no such a thing. That is also collectivism. Private ownership of the means of production (market economy or capitalism) and public ownership of the means of production (socialism or communism or “planning”) can be neatly distinguished. Each of these two systems of society’s economic organization is open to a precise and unambiguous description and definition. They can never be confounded with one another; they cannot be mixed or combined; no gradual transition leads from one of them to the other; they are mutually incompatible. With regard to the same factors of production there can only exist private control or public control (Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, Chapter 27). In short, any kind of blended system — or “hampered economy” — effectively means rule by lobbyists.

Big Stones

clipped from bighollywood.breitbart.com I decided to stick to direct quotes from the President within the last 18 months. Some I have commented on, the others, as they say at Harvard Law, res ipsa loquitur.     1)  ”…not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t — not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited — I am.”   Speech to Congress, February 24, 2009 2) “And that is why I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and will seek swift and certain justice for captured terrorists…” Speech to Congress, February 24, 2009 3) “My administration has also begun to go line by line through the federal budget in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs.” I wonder if the President knows he doesn’t have a line item veto.   4)  “My immediate task is making sure that the second half of that money, $350 billion, is spent properly. That’s my first job.”  Press conference February 9, 2009, talking about TARP money. 9) “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

The Normal One

clipped from esr.ibiblio.org Mancur Olson, in his book The Logic Of Collective Action, highlighted the central problem of politics in a democracy. The benefits of political market-rigging can be concentrated to benefit particular special interest groups, while the costs (in higher taxes, slower economic growth, and many other second-order effects) are diffused through the entire population. This general model has consequences. Here are some of them: There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it. Political demand for income transfers, entitlements and subsidies always rises faster than the economy can generate increased wealth to supply them from. Although some taxes genuinely begin by being levied for the benefit of the taxed, all taxes end up being levied for the benefit of the political class. Corruption is not the exceptional condition of politics, it is the normal one.

Any more questions?

COTD: The Creature

clipped from www.lucianne.com WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing that the Federal Reserve serve as an all-seeing regulator to detect activities that could pose risks to the entire financial system. I am reading "The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve" by G. Edward Griffin. If accurate, it describes the concept of the "Fed" as a banking cartel set up by wealthy bankers and politicians in 1910. The cartel was designed to suppress competition from the new crop of banks sprouting up away from the old New York hub. The "bosses" wanted a secure hold on power, and the ability to inflate the money supply to enrich themselves and enable "The Government" to fund its favorite schemes invisibly. All this is a lengthy intro to this idea of "The Fed" as "risk regulator" as: "the foxes guarding the chicken coop". The Fed should not be the regulator, rather it should be regulated out of existence, thus stopping the monetary inflation that is destroying the dollar.

The Prohibition This Time

clipped from www.qando.net A government-sponsored study into greenhouse gases found that producing 2.2lb of lamb released the equivalent of 37lb of carbon dioxide. The problem is because sheep burp so much methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Cows are only slightly better behaved. The production of 2.2lb of beef releases methane equivalent to 35lb of CO2 Tomatoes, most of which are grown in heated glasshouses, are the most “carbon-intensive” vegetable, each 2.2lb generating more than 20lb of CO2. Potatoes, in contrast, release only about 1lb of CO2 for each 2.2lb of food. The figures are similar for most other native fruit and vegetables. Funny how that works in a carbon based eco system, wouldn’t you say? Oh, and barley and hops? FAIL! Alcoholic drinks are another significant contributory factor, with the growing and processing of crops such as hops and malt into beer and whisky helping to generate 1.5% of the nation’s greenhouse gases. My goodness, just look at what is happening to us.

Baaaack

clipped from online.wsj.com They're back. We refer to the global investors once known as the bond vigilantes, who demanded higher Treasury bond yields from the late 1970s through the 1990s whenever inflation fears popped up, and as a result disciplined U.S. policy makers. The vigilantes vanished earlier this decade amid the credit mania, but they appear to be returning with a vengeance now that Congress and the Federal Reserve have flooded the world with dollars to beat the recession. Treasury yields leapt again yesterday at the long end, with the 10-year note climbing above 3.7%, its highest close since November. Treasury yields had stayed low, and the dollar had remained strong, as long as investors were looking for the safest financial port amid the post-September panic. But as risk aversion subsides, and investors return to corporate bonds and other assets, investors are now calculating the risks of renewed dollar inflation.

Behind The Confidence Game

clipped from www.marketwatch.com Of course, the stock market's reaction would certainly appear to be quite rational. Won't more confident consumers spend more money, thereby jumpstarting the economy -- and, in turn, propelling the stock market ever higher? Intuitively appealing as this argument appears, however, it receives little support from the historical data. To find out what the historical record can teach us, I analyzed the Conference Board's consumer confidence index back to 1977, which is when this research firm started updating this index on a monthly basis. I then compared each of the index's monthly readings over this three-decade period with how the stock market performed over the subsequent month, quarter, year, and two-year period. The biggest monthly jumps in the consumer confidence index were, on average, followed by sub-par returns. Conversely, big drops in the index were typically followed by above-average returns. They found that consumer confidence is more of a lagging indicator than a leading one.