Bring Back The Dodo Birds

clipped from mises.org It is the unusual that grabs the attention, and the ideas and beliefs of the majority of our ancestors on how best to clean up the mess of 1819 are vastly different from almost everything I see and hear today. From CNBC's cute little money honeys to newspaper op-eds to my coworkers on the trade desk, all cry that the government must do something. Many of the elite from 1819 believed the exact opposite — that government must do nothing. The newspaper editors of 1819 in particular led the fight against continued government intervention in the market and, most surprising to a denizen of 2009 America, many politicians at both the state and federal level joined them. Dodo birds of a political kind once roamed our nation's capitals. In 1819 America, nobody blamed the effects for the Panic of 1819, they rightly blamed the cause; they blamed (in Caroline Baum's words) the "friendly central bank." As Professor John Dobson points out, "the [central] bank's policies fueled inflation

Postmodern Discourse

clipped from drsanity.blogspot.com BTW, Here is how Stephen Hicks in Explaining Postmodernism put forth the concept of using contradictory discourses as a political strategy: In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consisteny can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims: - On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is. - On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad. - Values are subjective--but sexism and racism are really evil - Technology is bad and destructive--and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others. - Tolerance is good and dominance is bad--but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows. There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next.

Ogabe Takes Back The Internet For Algore

clipped from www.sundriesshack.com Private or not, Federal or not, according to Section 18, if the President says something is critical, he can shut it down. Furthermore, Section 18 (6) gives him the power to “order the disconnection” of any designated network “in the interest of national security”. Oh, and you computer geeks will love reading Section 6, which compels the government to develop a standard security software configuration for all critical sites plus “a standard testing and accreditation protocol” for all software running on those systems that have any security component at all. Additionally, if you’re in the cybersecurity business, you’ll have to be certified under a new government program and, if you aren’t, you won’t be able to do business within three years of the bill becoming law. Because we all know just how great the government is at computer security and writing good software, right?

Elections have consequences.

Stuck With The Bill

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com

Oxymoron Update, Armageddon Edition

clipped from hotair.com Manhattan’s District Attorney plans to unveil an indictment of a Chinese national on 118 counts relating to the transfer of technology and material for nuclear weapons to Iran.  Several New York City banks unwittingly took part in the vast laundering ring, which allowed Iran to acquire critical material for its nuclear-weapons program.  This comes just on the heels of Barack Obama’s pledge to “engage” with Iran and rid the world of nukes: The Manhattan district attorney’s office has smashed a sinister plot to smuggle nuclear weapons materials to Iran through unwitting New York banks, the Daily News has learned. Officials plan to unseal a 118-count indictment Tuesday accusing a Chinese national of setting up a handful of fake companies to hide that he was selling millions of dollars in potential nuclear materials to Tehran. What?  Why, the American intelligence community declared that any such talk of Iran continuing its pursuit of nuclear weapons to be mistaken.

The Enron Deja-Vu "Mistake"

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com I'm not qualified to judge this assessment by a Bay-area based "quant," but if he's right, the Geithner plan is more or less a reprise of Enron. You really have to read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts: A friend of mine, who used to be on an energy trading desk back in the early 2000s, was listening to me talk about the government plan. He couldn't believe what I was telling him about letting the banks that are selling auctions also bid on them. In the middle of my explanation, he had his own wave of nostalgia: "Man does that bring back memories...." So why did my energy trading friend get all nostalgic? "Because what you are telling me brings back some great memories from what Enron was up to back in the day. All of us energy traders back then watched with our jaws on the floor. 2000 was a hell of a year." Or maybe it's not a mistake; maybe this is his way of paying back all those contributions he got from Wall Street.

Don't forget that Enron was pushing the global warming scam. Somehow the press kept forgetting to mention that. I wonder why?

And A Deafening Cricket Comment: On Idiotic Power Consolidation

clipped from www.stoptheaclu.com Here’s where it should start to sink in that I’m not a “lefty”… I’ll stand by everything I’ve said on this subject. Obama can go !@#$ himself just as hard as I advised Bush to. There are precious few humans capable of resisting great power. That’s why it’s idiotic to consolidate so much power into a single office.

Deafening Crickets

clipped from www.stoptheaclu.com I can’t wait to hear how, after all the whining about how evil Bush was invading our privacy, the left will defend Obama on this. The ACLU will be absolutely unable to. They’ll stab a democrat in the back every time if it even appears they might care about national security. Fun stuff! The Obama administration is again invoking government secrecy in defending the Bush administration’s wiretapping program, this time against a lawsuit by AT&T customers who claim federal agents illegally intercepted their phone calls and gained access to their records. Will the ACLU suddenly become silent on this issue while trumpeting the issue of Gitmo, or will they call Obama out as a fascist that hates civil liberties? Change, baby, change! Hear the deafening silence from the civil liberty loving left? No, thats crickets.

The Collosal Screwup

clipped from pajamasmedia.com OOPS: “The government’s official view that toxic assets are incorrectly priced due to illiquidity ‘fire sales’ is wrong, a new study by Harvard and Princeton finance professors suggests. . . . The striking conclusion is that the low prices of toxic assets actually reflect the fundamentals, rather than being driven by an illiquidity discount.” If they’re right, the whole enterprise is a colossal screwup. Are they? Beats me.

Hard To Argue With That

clipped from gatewaypundit.blogspot.com It didn't take 100 days for us to see that Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan. This week Obama promised to weaken our national defense, bashed America while in Europe, told the world we were torturers, and handed over our rights at the G20. If anything, Barack Obama proved himself to be just the opposite of Ronald Reagan. Bob McCarty adds: Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama share several things in common: Both were lawyers; both served in the Illinois legislature; and both were elected president of the United States. When it comes to the issue of slavery, however, the men share nothing in common. While President Lincoln worked hard to earn a place in modern history books as the man most responsible for ending slavery in the United States, President Obama seems focused upon returning today’s Americans — as well as generations of future Americans — into a different kind of slavery known as financial bondage. It's hard to argue with that.

20 Fools

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com The first foolish idea is that, given the black holes opened by the financial crisis, we should throw money into them. This is called, I believe, "the new Keynesianism." To be fair to the late Lord Keynes, who made at least one successful prediction ("in the long run we are all dead"), every Keynesianism has been a new Keynesianism, including the first. This is because politicians have invariably selected the easy part of his common-sensory proposals ("the government should spend when the economy falters"), while ignoring the hard part ("the government should save at all other times"). The second foolish idea is that, given the abject failure of national regulation to prevent financial institutions from giving bad loans, and leveraging themselves to perdition, we need vastly increased, international regulation. Where once the purpose of regulation was to assure the public that banks were solvent, it is now to assure the authorities that banks are doing good deeds.

The Disintegration

clipped from pajamasmedia.com The Charles Murray of the Bell Curve fame argues in an WSJ article called “The Europe Syndrome” that the real effect of increasing dependence on the state is that communities, families — and individuals — begin to atrophy like disused muscles. “Europeanization” isn’t a cosmetic change, but a fundamental one. The effect is that we eventually expect things to be “guaranteed” to us by others and stop learning how to do it ourselves. But, from a systems point of view, this is sleight of hand. We are the “others” we’ve been waiting for to save us, and we are also the atrophied. The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality–it drains some of the life from them … it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.

Hopelessly Corrupt

clipped from pajamasmedia.com CHRIS DODD UPDATE: By almost every measure, Washington is hopelessly corrupt. And we are at once victims and accomplices. Career politicians are spending the country to near-bankruptcy as they feather their own nests, tighten their leash on our necks and pat us on the head. They take our money, bend it to their will, then return small portions of it at their discretion to make us feel it has all been worth it. Washington is to the taxpayer as the drug cartels are to the addict. . . . Meanwhile, with the power to give out our money as they wish, congressmen take campaign money from lobbyists and industries they regulate. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., is only the latest poster boy for that, but boy is he a good one. There may be no one who better represents all that is wrong with Washington. The powerful Senate Banking Committee chairman got a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide; he has received $280,000 in campaign contributions from troubled insurer AIG

Surprise!

clipped from pajamasmedia.com LOOK WHO ELSE IS PROFITING FROM TARP FUNDS: Warren Buffett promoted the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), and lambasted the greed on Wall Street, yet he is one of the main benefactors of the TARP largesse according to a Sacramento Bee story. Buffett endorsed Barack Obama for President last year, and Obama tapped Buffett to be a member of the candidate’s economic team. Obama requently referred to Buffett’s endorsement during the campaign as proof that he had the capability to deal with the troubled US economy. Maybe he’s trying out for the role of Orren Boyle.

Cold War II Goes Viral

clipped from www.forbes.com Last weekend, a report by researchers at the Munk Center of the University of Toronto revealed "GhostNet," a computer espionage virus that had infected around 1,300 computers worldwide--including many "high value" targets where diplomatic and national security information was stored. The attack focused on computers in Southern Asia and offices belonging to the Dalai Lama, exiled leader of China-occupied Tibet. GhostNet-infected machines were controlled by computers located in the People's Republic. Experts disagree on whether the evidence proves China's guilt or merely suggests it overwhelmingly. Either way, the most important message goes far beyond computer espionage. The attack had real-world implications, although what's emerged so far is apt to be a small fraction of the actual damage. After the Dalai Lama's office sent an e-mail invitation to a foreign diplomat, Beijing diplomats happened to phone the same diplomat and discourage the visit.

Problem? What Problem?

clipped from www.suitablyflip.com What the Goracle Giveth the Messiah May Taketh Away It's worth noting that this kind of "safeguard" is exactly how Skynet got its foot in the door. When Mother Jones and Jules Crittenden agree, isn’t that a sign of the apocalypse?  Both take a hard look at the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, S.773 sponsored by Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and Olympia Snowe (R-ME).  The bill addresses the need to protect vital networks from cyber attack, but it gives a lot of power to the executive branch — perhaps too much power.  Mother Jones reports: The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security.” The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president.

Go Away Obama

clipped from pajamasmedia.com HEY, I THOUGHT EVERYBODY WAS GOING TO LOVE US ONCE OBAMA WAS PRESIDENT: “Demonstrators shout slogans against U.S. President Barack Obama during a protest in Istanbul April 5, 2009. The placards read ‘Go away Obama’.”

The Left Fork

clipped from online.wsj.com I must be naive. I really thought the administration would welcome the return of bank bailout money. Some $340 million in TARP cash flowed back this week from four small banks in Louisiana, New York, Indiana and California. This isn't much when we routinely talk in trillions, but clearly that money has not been wasted or otherwise sunk down Wall Street's black hole. So why no cheering as the cash comes back? My answer: The government wants to control the banks, just as it now controls GM and Chrysler, and will surely control the health industry in the not-too-distant future. Keeping them TARP-stuffed is the key to control. And for this intensely political president, mere influence is not enough. The White House wants to tell 'em what to do. Control. Direct. Command. It is not for nothing that rage has been turned on those wicked financiers. By managing the money, government can steer the whole economy even more firmly down the left fork in the road.

COTD: Burning

clipped from hotair.com Obama burns down your house and reminds you that Bush once lit a match. Jim Treacher on April 5, 2009 at 3:26 PM

Building OReligion

clipped from jimtreacher.com Michael Hussey created this video and uploaded it to Youtube last year. For some reason, they put an age restriction on it, so you have to sign into your Youtube account and verify your age before you can watch it. This video doesn't have any profanity or naked people or violence, so presumably it's the sociopolitical content they find offensive. I just uploaded it again under my account, so you might still be able to watch this embed by the time I post this.

$2 Trillion? How Quaint

clipped from hotair.com

They attacked Reagan with this. Down the memory hole it goes...

Declaration Repealed

clipped from gatewaypundit.blogspot.com

No Du'oh

clipped from www.rasmussenreports.com Fifty-seven percent (57%) of U.S. voters nationwide favor a military response to eliminate North Korea’s missile launching capability. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 15% of voters oppose a military response while 28% are not sure. Support for a military response comes from 66% of Republicans, 52% of Democrats and 54% of those not affiliated with either major political party. There is no gender gap on the issue as a military response is favored by 57% of men and 57% of women. Seventy-three percent (73%) are at least somewhat concerned that North Korea will use nuclear weapons against the United States. That’s up just a few points from 69% who held that view in October 2006. Prior to that survey, North Korea had successfully conducted an underground nuclear test.

Making Waves

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com Diurnal solar insolation and temperature variation, daily and monthly lunar tide cycles, seasonal variation of solar insolation by hemisphere, seasonal variation of temperatures by hemisphere, seasonal biomass variations, seasonal sea ice variations, seasonal albedo variations, 11 and 22 year solar cycles, Earth’s length of day variations, El Nino Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and at very long periods, Milankovitch cycles. There are many many cycles on earth that are known, some yet to be discovered. Almost all of them have a root cause in periodic circular motions such as planetary rotation and orbital motion in our solar system and the variances of orbital eccentricity, obliquity, and precession. For example, the graph below shows how these different waves eventually synchronize to cause cycles of ice ages on earth.

Up To Israel Now

clipped from fairuse.100webcustomers.com US officials are considering whether to accept Iran’s pursuit of uranium enrichment, which has been outlawed by the United Nations and remains at the heart of fears that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons capability. As part of a policy review commissioned by President Barack Obama, diplomats are discussing whether the US will eventually have to accept Iran’s insistence on carrying out the process, which can produce both nuclear fuel and weapons- grade material.

Love And Hate

clipped from pajamasmedia.com As he points out in a wonderfully compact paragraph, the greatest novels about modern tyranny “all powerfully depict totalitarian society’s assault on…personal love.”  But as Huxley, Orwell and Zamyatin all remind us, total tyranny is impossible; subversion invariably sets in.  Erotic passion overcomes both the seduction of tyranny and the tyrant’s threat to annihilate all those who fight him.  “And that is why love presents such a threat to the totalitarian order: it dares to serve itself.” The compulsion to extinguish spontaneous love, as Jamie tells us, is the point of intersection between the ideologies of the Left and the jihadis. for example the details of the will of the leading 9/11 terrorist, Mohammed Atta.  No women were to be present at his funeral, and were to be banned from ever visiting his grave.  Moreover, his shame about his own body was spelled out: “He who washes my body around my genitals should wear gloves so that I am not touched there.”

Not Serious

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com But if "young" Mr Riemenschneider chooses to miss the point, so be it. Richard Fernandez gets it: The Financial Times explains in numbers what Mark Steyn has asserted in words.  We don’t have enough people to pay our bills. The advanced economies are piling up generational debt so fast they need to make children pronto so they can saddle them with unpaid obligations. Forget having kids because they’re wonderful; you need them to pay off the stimulus. The FT says the ageing bill will be a tsunami that will dwarf the current economic meltdown. And just to clarify: for Japan, Russia and Europe, we're no longer talking about demographic-economic catastrophe just beyond the horizon - say, mid-century - but within ten years. If you're not talking about this, you're not serious. Which is why the O-man and the G-20 aren't serious.

Tinfoil Apocalypse Update: Globalized Psychoses

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com The danger we face is not a Chinese superpower or an Islamist superpower: if it’s a new boss, you learn the new rules and adjust as best you can. But the greater likelihood is of a world with no superpower at all in which unipolar geopolitics gives way to non-polar geopolitics, a world without order in which pipsqueak thug states who can’t feed their own people globalize their psychoses. The North Korean test, about which our new president has issued the feeblest of rote protests, is the flip side of the post below. The western world has no will. So we approach a state in which the planet's wealthiest jurisdictions, from Norway to New Zealand, lack any capacity to defend their borders, and the planet's basket-cases, from North Korea to Sudan, will be nuclear powers. We'll see how that arrangement works out.

The Endless Fleecing

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com The Financial Times reports some of the major American banks seem set to use some of the bailout money they have received and the leverage made possible by the Geithner plan to buy large amounts of toxic assets from one another—a clever manipulation of the proposed “public private investment partnership” that essentially amounts to using taxpayer resources and assurances to inflate the banks’ books by raising the prices of the assets through implicit swapping arrangements. Francis Cianfrocca at Contentions suggests this might have been one of the scenarios Geithner’s team actually envisioned in proposing the plan. Whether it was or not, it certainly sheds a different kind of light on the risks and costs to the taxpayer the plan will involve.

A--clown Media Update: Shhh! Don't Tell Anyone!

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com Well, all hope is not lost yet. Remember that shooting spree at a North Carolina nursing home a week ago that left eight people dead? Here's how that ended: The shooting spree was ended by 25-year-old Officer Justin Garner, who entered the nursing home alone as he responded to a 911 call. McKenzie said Garner, a training officer with more than four years on the Carthage force and a past winner of the department's officer of the year award, knew he was headed into a perilous situation, but didn't wait for back-up or a SWAT team to arrive. "If that's not heroism, I don't know what is," [Carthage, N.C. Police Chief] McKenzie said I do wonder if part of the problem here is that we no longer celebrate and make an example of such heroic acts. So here's to Officer Garner.

The Deeply Guarded Secret

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com President Obama's obsequisous bow to the King of Saudi Arabia during his current European trip is a deeply guarded secret of the mainstream media, the New York Times and Washington Post foremost among them. Even FOX News has kept the lid on the story. Via The Anchoress, Ed Morrissey discovers that the New York Times took note of Bill Clinton's inclination of his shoulders towards Japanese Emperor Akihito in 1994. Indeed, Ed notes that "NYT scolded Clinton for almost bowing to royalty." I guess the Times they are a changin'.

Time For Atlas?

clipped from www.qando.net Talk of putting Ayn Rand’s classic, Atlas Shrugged, on the silver screen has made its way back into the news: After decades in development hell, Ayn Rand’s capitalism-minded “Atlas Shrugged” is taking new steps toward the big screen In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Rand called business, “America’s persecuted minority.” Though, as Rand once pointed out, businessmen are often enemies of capitalism because they seek government favor, much like companies seeking bailouts today. With the rise of the group mentality and class warfare, the producers in our world today are castigated and blamed for the current economic downfall. Rand once said, “One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.” That is exactly what we are seeing in today societal and political rhetoric

NYeT: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

clipped from www.qando.net The New York Times engaged in union busting: The New York Times Company has threatened to close The Boston Globe unless labor unions agree to concessions like pay cuts and the cessation of pension contributions, according to a person briefed on the talks. What a strange and different world we find ourselves in today. Of course I guess that’s really no different than Rosie O’Donnell railing against guns while her armed body guards stood next to her.

The Deaf Oracle

clipped from mises.org a viewer asked Buffett if he believed what his father Congressman Howard Buffett believed, which was this: "So far as I can discover, paper money systems [like John Law's] have always wound up with collapse and economic chaos." "Sounds like my dad, yeah," Buffett replied, "I heard that every night at the dinner table for a long time." The Oracle admits that the printing of paper money is inflationary, but being a consistent proponent of expanding government, he constantly dismisses gold and proposals to return America to a gold standard. His father Howard understood the evils of unchecked government money printing. "The paper money disease has been a pleasant habit thus far and will not be dropped voluntarily any more than a dope user will without a struggle give up narcotics," Congressman Buffett wrote. "But in each case the end of the road is not a desirable prospect." The Congressman's son may have heard his father at the dinner table, but he wasn't listening.

Friday Night AIG ORemix

clipped from hotair.com The Obama administration has mastered the art of the Friday Night Disclosure.  They tried to avoid media scrutiny over the revelation that National Economic Council chair Lawrence Summers made millions from the same people demonized by Barack Obama and the Democrats for the economic collapse: Lawrence Summers, director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, earned millions working at a hedge fund and speaking to banks such as Citigroup Inc. that later received taxpayer bailout money. Obama’s “choice going forward is to choose unknowns of modest means who may be less controversial in terms of their connections,” Schmidt said. “Except those people would be far less knowledgeable and thus less of an asset to fix these very same urgent problems.” You know, the same argument could be made with, oh, AIG and the people they need to retain to fix their problems.

Messy Questions And The Robots Of War

clipped from kennethandersonlawofwar.blogspot.com Large-scale military operations are less useful directly against transnational terrorists, however, who are few in number, dispersed across populations and often borders, disinclined to fight direct battles, and more efficiently targeted through narrower means. Law enforcement utilized outside the United States, on the other hand, has also discovered its outer limits. Moreover, the political costs for any U.S. administration taking and holding detainees are now enormous. Politically, the most powerful institutional incentive today is to kill rather than capture them. The intelligence losses of killing rather than capturing in order to interrogate them are great. But since the U.S. political and legal situation has made interrogation a questionable activity anyway, there is little reason to seek to capture rather than kill. And if one intends to kill, the incentive is to do so from a standoff position, because it removes messy questions of surrender.

The World's Greatest Orator?

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk "A question for you both, if I may. The prime minister has repeatedly blamed the United States of America for causing this crisis. France and Germany both blame Britain and America for causing this crisis. Who is right? And isn't the debate about that at the heart of the debate about what to do now?" Brown immediately swivels to leave Obama in pole position. There is a four-second delay before Obama starts speaking [THANKS FOR NOTHING, GORDY BABY. REMIND ME TO HANG YOU OUT TO DRY ONE DAY.] Barack Obama: "I, I, would say that, er ... pause [I HAVEN'T A CLUE] ... if you look at ... pause [WHO IS THIS NICK ROBINSON JERK?] ... the, the sources of this crisis ... pause [JUST KEEP GOING, BUDDY] ... the United States certainly has some accounting to do with respect to . . . pause [I'M IN WAY TOO DEEP HERE] ...

My answer -- in Ogabe's voice -- if I could make him say anything I wanted for parody's sake:

"The unaccountable private banking cartel called the Federal Reserve by creating a huge inflationary bubble together with their bought and paid for, boot-licking toady politicians like me pandering for votes by giving away free houses did it. So France and Germany would be right except we're not sure whether they're part owners in the Federal Reserve and also responsible themselves. Since as I pointed out the Fed is completely unaccountable.

And of course none of that nearly $200 billion poured into AIG went to European banks -- especially French and German ones -- well other than a huge portion of it I'm guessing.

Oh, and I'm going to give the Federal Reserve more power to regulate so this doesn't happen again. That will teach those nasty bankers a thing or two. And no, Fed created inflation doesn't fund political agendas and it isn't a tax on the stupid. That would be you.

I know the Fed should be abolished in any sane world but us sneeringly manipulative liberals are great at hypnotizing you to blame everything on the "free market". Even when we're about an infinity away from having a free market.

Oh, and Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with this problem. And they weren't backed by the taxpayer's wallets at all ... until they were."