COTD: More Printing

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com A lot of treasuries are now held by US households both directly and indirectly. With a savings rate around 4% the cash is going somewhere. And it winds up in treasuries. Look at the article in this mornings WSJ noting that the 500 largest non financial companies hold more cash than they have in 40 years -nearly a trillion $'s. And it isn't going anywhere but into treasuries either directly or cash in banks which in turn are buying treasuries. This mountain of cash is creating a treasury bubble which is helping hold down interest rates at the moment. The conundrum is that the goal is to get these companies reinvesting the cash to create jobs. But they won't while they are uncertain of the future. But when they eventually do, they will be selling those treasuries or, if they are short term, will be cashing them in and where will the funds come to replace that? More printing? More taxes? Interest rates will have to rise to compensate.

Censor Fail

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com Top Iranian student Mahmoud Vahidnia confronted Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei at a public meeting with students. The Supreme Leader was so distraught by the confrontation that he skipped prayers and left the meeting early. The event was being broadcast by Iranian state-run TV. That made the authorities stop airing the programme. Rooz Online reported: Mahmoud Vahidnia, a distinguished mathematics whiz from the Sharif Technical University, frankly criticized the supreme leader during his meeting with students, as state-run media outlets were unable to censor the remarks. This international mathematics Olympiad winner blasted Khamenei in person in an unexpected move, focusing on “supreme leader’s performance” and the “lack of criticism against supreme leader.”

Go green!

Percentages

clipped from taxprof.typepad.com The Tax Foundation computes the income tax rates necessary to close the deficit:

Sound Familiar?

clipped from www.americanthinker.com In truth, even if the griot had known a Kunta Kinte, there was no way Haley could have written anything approaching a "history" about the first seventeen years of his life. The notion that an oral historian could recall the life of an ordinary young boy two hundred years prior surpasses the preposterous. "There was no Kunta Kinte," says Nobile bluntly. Nobile and an African-American coauthor put a book proposal together on the subject, but as Nobile ruefully admits, "Nobody wanted to touch it." A Lexis search shows shockingly little follow-up by the media, major or minor. Not surprisingly, the Pulitzer people did not ask for their award back, and the book and video have remained a staple in history classes across America. Nobile blames Roots's seeming immunity on his progressive colleagues. "They were all too scared, or dishonest," he writes, "to admit to the public that the most famous black writer had lied about his ancestry." Sound familiar?

Du'O jOnes

clipped from www.colorofchange.org A new left-wing organization created specifically to attack Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Brown has ties to ex-Obama green jobs czar Van Jones. As NewsBusters reported Thursday, StopTheWitchHunt.org was formed to "call out" what it considers "mischaracterizations and hate speech" by the aforementioned quintet. With the assistance of tipster Bret A. Gehring, NewsBusters has discovered an organizational link to Jones. But this gets better, for CMJ's Facebook post sent readers to its "Actions" page. There, readers can find a September 11 headline, "Tell Fox News to Stop the Witch Hunts!" The embedded link sent readers to -- wait for it!!! -- Color of Change's Beck petition. This was posted at CMJ's website just five days after Jones was forced to resign as Obama's green jobs czar. Now, roughly seven weeks later, a new coalition has been created using the same phrase "Stop the Witch Hunt" for its name

COTD #N: But Not India Or China

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com In words quoted on the cover of my new book, Prof Lindzen wrote: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly exaggerated computer predictions combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.” Such is the truly extraordinary position in which we find ourselves. Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written. How long will it be before sanity and sound science break in on what begins to look like one of the most bizarre collective delusions ever to grip the human race?

COTD #N: 1922 All Over Again

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com 1922 US Weather Bureau report “The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot,” according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from US Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. “Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.”

QOTD: Trouble

clipped from www.brainyquote.com The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Bertrand Russell

The Verdict Is In

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Texas, increasingly, is the economic and intellectual leader of the U.S. During the last 18 months before the current recession took hold, while the country as a whole was still creating jobs, more than half of those jobs were created in a single state: Texas. Texas has usurped the leadership position that, decades ago, belonged to California. Today California is in decline, likely irreversibly so. William Voegeli draws the sad but instructive comparison in the Los Angeles Times: In America's federal system, some states, such as California, offer residents a "package deal" that bundles numerous and ambitious public benefits with the high taxes needed to pay for them. Other states, such as Texas, offer packages combining modest benefits and low taxes. These alternatives, of course, define the basic argument between liberals and conservatives over what it means to get the size and scope of government right. ...

Tip Top Tyrant

clipped from pajamasmedia.com LINE OF THE WEEK, in response to the White House’s criticism of Edmunds.com on Cash For Clunkers: “If Obama’s skin was any thinner, he’d have a reservoir tip on the top of his head.” Or, a bit less pithily, here: “Yeah, it’s one thing for the administration to take office with very little administrative experience. It’s something else that the administration apparently hasn’t aquired any yet, one year later, and are still throwing prissy little snits over events and reporting that are about five levels below anything the administration should be concerning itself with right now.”

The Full Monckton

clipped from www.youtube.com

WTWT.

Miscalibration

clipped from neoneocon.com The Dunning–Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than relatively more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

COTD #N: Arendt On The Origins Of Totalitarianism

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Lately I’ve been re-reading Hannah Ahrendt, and she made the same point just after WWII in the introduction to “Origins of Totalitarianism” ~ “The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility – based on the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men – is in danger whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.” ~

COTD: Night Of The Living Constitution

clipped from pajamasmedia.com “The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they may please (The “Living” Constitution).” Thomas Jefferson “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution (into a “Living” Constitution).” Abraham Lincoln The “Living” Constitution is a dead Constitution; it plays into the hands of our Marxists who must have an arbitrary law (of a minority) to usher in their self-serving schemes of class struggle (social engineering projects of economic equalization through un-Declarational property confiscation and un-Constitutional property redistribution.) The only living Constitution is the one our Founders actually wrote – the one which draws its breath of life from the amendment process.

Tweeners

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com Thank your lucky stars to be alive on Earth at this time. Our planet is usually in a deep freeze. The last million years have cycled through Ice Ages that last about 100,000 years each, with warmer slivers of about 10,000 years in between. We are in-betweeners, and just barely — we live in (gasp!) year 10,000 or so after the end of the last ice age. But for our good fortune, we might have been born in the next Ice Age. Our luck is even better than that. Those 10,000-year warm spells aren’t all cosy-warm. They include brutal Little Ice Ages such as the 500-year-long Little Ice Age that started about 600 years ago. Fortunately, we weren’t around during its fiercest periods when Finland lost one-third of its population, Iceland half, and most of Canada became uninhabitable — even the Inuit fled. We should enjoy the warmth while we can, and hope that it persists so that the world our children and grandchildren inherit will be no less warm and welcoming.

Our World

clipped from pajamasmedia.com This is our world.  Iranian soldiers  cross the Iraqi border and snatch three American tourists.  Meanwhile, important Iranians find a way to escape the regime’s clutches, and join the West.  The Iranians propose a swap that amounts to this:  citizens of a free country can only regain their freedom if former citizens of an evil tyranny are sent back to the tyrannical country to face a terrible fate. That’s the sort of deal you get from the Islamic Republic.  If you don’t like it, convince the feckless leaders of the West to join with the Iranian people and bring it down.  The next potential watershed is next Wednesday, November 4th, the anniversary of the assault on the American Embassy in Tehran and the seizure of American hostages. It’s the perfect date for the fall of the regime, don’t you think?

cOllapse

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough over Iran’s nuclear programme were dwindling tonight after Tehran demanded changes to a uranium exchange deal that European diplomats described as “unacceptable”. If the deal collapses, as seemed likely, the apparent progress made over Tehran’s nuclear programme in recent weeks would evaporate, the diplomats said. It would deliver another critical blow to the Obama administration’s policy of engagement, and put international sanctions and Israeli military action back on the table. … “They want to keep all the gains, and give nothing away themselves,” another diplomat said. Gee, you would have thought they would have guessed. Meanwhile, in other news, Daniel Ortega is re-establishing himself as the dictator of Nicaragua.  The wolves are howling everywhere, even in the backyard.  Investors.com reports: Daniel Ortega muscled Nicaragua’s courts to permit his permanent re-election, effectively making him dictator.

A Real Hockey Stick

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com Fannie Mae reported today that the rate of serious delinquencies – at least 90 days behind – for conventional loans in its single-family guarantee business increased to 4.45% in August, up from 4.17% in July – and up from 1.57% in August 2008. “Includes seriously delinquent conventional single-family loans as a percent of the total number of conventional single-family loans. These rates are based on conventional single-family mortgage loans and exclude reverse mortgages and non-Fannie Mae mortgage securities held in our portfolio.” Just more evidence of the growing delinquency problem, although these stats do include Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) loans in trial modifications. Now that’s a hockey stick to be worried about. It hardly is a surprise then that when we see that sort of graph of actual data in the American economy, we start to see graphs like this one depicting confidence in climate change as an important issue:

The Fool

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com The extreme delay in getting decisions out of Washington that were urgent many months ago, on how to proceed in Afghanistan, was made sickly comic on Monday when President Barack Obama told a military audience that he would not "rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way." The Bush administration was, for all its misjudgments in other areas, good at making clear, clean, practical decisions with troops in harm's way. Bush himself commanded overwhelming support in the military vote for his re-election in 2004. John McCain, who could also be taken as having some idea about military issues, largely kept that vote. If Obama thinks he can now win the trust of soldiers, by blathering to them about the solemnity of his own august personal angst, he is as much of a fool as he looks to them already. It is surely evident by now, this is a president who cannot make decisions. It grieves me that the soldiers must pay for that.

hOpeless sh*t

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Exactly. And the reason things are so hopeless is that a 20% or more or of the electorate, maybe 60 million people, must of them putatively educated, are almost blindly convinced in this nonsense. And the only way they’re going to learn different is when they run their faces headlong into a granite wall. I knew a guy once, and I think I told the story before, who told me about his cellmate in Marcos-era political prison. His cellmate started laughing manically one night in the small hours of the morning. When he settled down, he asked him what was so funny. “Mao … Mao Tse Tung” “What about him?” “When we were taken on a tour of China (in 1969), they brought us to his boyhood home.” “And?” “And I rushed straight for the pond where Mao had bathed as a boy and plunged my face into the scummy water, to the amazement of all our Chinese escorts because I said, hey, this is where He bathed. This is where He dipped His feet.” “Why were you laughing?” “How could I have believed that shit?”

hallOween

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

Excuse Me While I Hurl

clipped from www.dailymail.co.uk A British nuclear expert who fell from the 17th floor of a United Nations building did not commit suicide and may have been hurled to his death, says a doctor who carried out a second post-mortem examination. Timothy Hampton, 47, a scientist involved in monitoring nuclear activity, was found dead last week at the bottom of a stairwell in Vienna. But she said one possible theory was that Mr Hampton was carried to the 17th floor from his workplace on the sixth floor and thrown to his death. Professor Yen used new forensic techniques to detect internal bruising caused by strangulation which would not be visible to the eye. She said: ‘In my opinion, it does not look like suicide. My example is that somebody took him up to the top floor and took him down. Under a year ago, an American died at the IAEA in strikingly similar circumstances, his body being found at the bottom of a stairwell.

Smart Power!

clipped from www.popsci.com Clean tech has seen a boost as the U.S. pours government funding into renewable energy, and China looks set to reap much of the benefits. Latest example: a Chinese wind-turbine company has just become the exclusive supplier for one of the largest wind-farm developments in the U.S. The Shenyang Power Group has signed on to supply 240 of its massive 2.5-megawatt wind turbines to a 36,000-acre development in West Texas. The Wall Street Journal reports that the wind farm is also slated to receive $1.5 billion in financing from the Export-Import Bank of China. This comes as the U.S. has increasingly out-sourced much of its wind turbine development. Less than a quarter of wind turbine components installed in the U.S. came from domestic production, and Europe currently holds the lion's share of turbine manufacturing. A Norwegian firm launched the world's first full-scale floating wind turbine this September.

We Tax Everything That Moves And Doesn't Move

clipped from www.dailytimes.com.pk LAHORE: The leadership of Al Qaeda is in Pakistan, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday. “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” she added. “Maybe that’s the case; maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know... As far as we know, they are in Pakistan,” Clinton told senior Pakistani newspaper editors in Lahore, AFP reported. “The percentage of taxes on GDP (in Pakistan) is among the lowest in the world... We (the United States) tax everything that moves and doesn’t move, and that’s not what we see in Pakistan,” she said.

Among "friends" the truth comes out.

Believers

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com Many years ago, at a certain academic institution, there was an experimental program that the faculty had to vote on as to whether or not it should be made permanent. I rose at the faculty meeting to say that I knew practically nothing about whether the program was good or bad, and that the information that had been supplied to us was too vague for us to have any basis for voting, one way or the other. The director of that program rose immediately and responded indignantly and sarcastically to what I had just said-- and the faculty gave him a standing ovation. After the faculty meeting was over, I told a colleague that I was stunned and baffled by the faculty's fierce response to my simply saying that we needed more information before voting. "Tom, you don't understand," he said. "Those people need to believe in that man. They have invested so much hope and trust in him that they cannot let you stir up any doubts."

Saved

clipped from www.americanthinker.com He descended from the railcar and ordered that the track behind the train be pulled up and laid in front of the train. He pounded his shoe on Lenin’s platform for emphasis. Later the train began to roll again. This time it went further than before. But then it stopped again. Brezhnev said he’s fix things. He scrambled down the ladder, gathered the new foremen around him, and said, “Comrades, divide your workers into two groups. Line one half along one side of the train, and the other along the opposite. Rock the train from side-to-side so that it feels like we’re moving.” And they did. Inside the railcar Lenin, Stalin and Kruschev marveled at how Brezhnev had been able to get so much track laid in so little time, and at all the distance they were moving across the wilderness. Outside, Joe Bidenchev, a new foreman, encouraged the workers saying, “Look, Comrades, at how many foremens’ jobs we’ve saved.” Okay, the last part wasn’t part of the original telling.

RTWT.

Reminds me of the general summarization joke of life in the USSR: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

We are barreling down the track to re-enact it here unfortunately.

The lOner?

clipped from www.foxnews.com Frustrated by Iran's continued defiance of demands to come clean on its nuclear program, the Obama administration is leaning toward imposing new sanctions, even if it must act alone. Administration officials acknowledged growing concern that there may not be international consensus to expand the existing U.N. sanctions, despite Tehran's apparent rejection of a confidence-building measure proposed by the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog in hopes of making progress on the nuclear issue. To that end, the administration is quietly supporting legislation in Congress that would give President Barack Obama a broad new array of authority to target Iran's energy sector by penalizing foreign firms that sell and ship refined petroleum products to Iran. The regime is heavily dependent on gasoline, kerosene and propane imports.

If he actually does this -- and in an effective manner rather than finding a way to blame Bush for any aspect he messes up -- then he'll get full credit from me and even a bump or two.

RTWT. There's even talk of trying to stop the Mullahs from acquiring spy technology they are using against the Green movement.

I think hell will freeze over before this happens but I'm trying to keep an open mind...

Not Detroit

clipped from ace.mu.nu

On Why Gandhi Masks Are Appropriate For Halloween

clipped from www.zimbio.com In his 1949 “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell, regarding the late war, wrote that “one question every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: ‘What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?’” Orwell recorded Gandhi’s answer, which was: German Jews should commit collective suicide.

The Tinfoil Curtains Opocalypse

clipped from www.qando.net There were so many ways to get this right, and one clear to way to completely blow it. The Obama administration chose to blow it, and to blow it big, by embracing an imbalanced dictator-wannabe whose efforts are supported by the worst offenders of representative democracy and individual freedom in the region: The interim leader of Honduras says he is ready to sign a pact to end its crisis which could include the return of ousted President Manuel Zelaya. Roberto Micheletti said the agreement would create a power-sharing government and require both sides to recognise the result of November’s presidential poll. Mr Zelaya said the deal, which requires the approval of the Supreme Court and Congress, would be signed on Friday. … The opponents had earlier been told by US Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon that they had to reach an accord in order to ensure international support for the election on 29 November.

O, What A System!

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com "It would not only give patients enforceable health care entitlements but it would also prevent managers and clinicians from controlling waiting times as a way of limiting demand and saving money," she said. "In the past requirements to make financial savings often resulted in hospitals stopping routine surgery for a couple of months before the end of the financial year." What a system! It beggars belief that Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress want to reproduce the fiasco of socialized medicine here in the U.S.

How Low Can The Blue Line Below Go?

clipped from www.businessinsider.com If anyone mentions the just-released 3.5% U.S. third quarter GDP growth, just throw this chart in their face. Cash for Clunkers clearly distorted the U.S. economic figures in an unsustainable fashion. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), motor vehicle output spiked a seasonally-adjusted 157.6% quarter on quarter. This is completely unprecedented. Vehicle output is clearly going off a cliff next quarter. The question will be how low can the blue line below go. Now imagine if next quarter the blue line below goes down into negative territory as it did just two quarters ago. Next quarter, not only are we unlikely to get Q3's boost, but motor vehicle output data could subtract from GDP as well. So watch out for the cliff...

hOpenchange (Part 83,903)

clipped from pajamasmedia.com CHANGE: Top Obama fundraisers get posts. “More than 40% of President Obama’s top-level fundraisers have secured posts in his administration, from key executive branch jobs to diplomatic postings in countries such as France, Spain and the Bahamas, a USA TODAY analysis finds.”

sOrOs

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

Their Lips Are Moving

clipped from fortcollinsteaparty.com

Kudos to Ray for finding this one.

I Don't Care. Honest.

clipped from www.youtube.com

Clunked @ $24K

clipped from features.csmonitor.com American taxpayers paid a lot of cash for those clunkers: $24,000 for each new car sold, according to a study released Wednesday. That’s a lot of money, especially when the so-called “cash for clunker” stimulus program offered only a maximum $4,500 in cash for each person who traded in an old gas-guzzler and bought a new car. The government could have done almost as well by just giving away cars for free, instead of creating an elaborate incentive program, according to an analysis by the automotive information firm Edmunds.com in Santa Monica, Calif.

Bye Bye Bill Nye

clipped from fortcollinsteaparty.com Here you can watch Richard Lindzen make mince meat of Dr. Bill Nye the science guy:

My friend Ray found this one. I'm sure Larry will be slapped down well and good by his masters for allowing this on the air.

Droid

clipped from www.qando.net A company named Boston Dynamics has developed a robot that mimics the way a human being walks – well, at least the way a slightly tipsy human being walks: