The "Stretch"

clipped from www.zerohedge.com Below is another way of visualizing the Fed's balance sheet, splitting up assets into securities purchased outright by the Fed, versus liquidity measures: Both have essentially gone flat. What we see is that Bernanke has indeed stopped those programs for all intents and purposes. The net printing shown above has come through a decline in bank Excess Reserves. Whereas before such declines in Excess Reserves were met by Fed sterilization through a shrinkage of the Fed's own balance sheet (for example, see May - July 2009), nothing of the sort has happened this time. That money is just being allowed to enter the system, period. The next logical question is where the bank lending that has replaced the Excess Reserves is heading. Well, we know it is not hitting the consumer debt market My theory is that the money has floated into the Treasury market. Is it that much of a stretch to posit that the Fed reached an agreement with them whereby the banks would take over where the Fed left off?

Slavs

clipped from esr.ibiblio.org >tobacco farmers in the late 1600s decided to set up a race concious society in order to keep black slaves. The actual history is more interesting than this. Early English colonists in the Caribbean and southern U.S. imported slaves in order to preserve a social pattern they valued, one in which a squirearchy controlled a large mass of illiterate laborer/tenants (there’s a good explanation of this in Albion’s Seed). What’s now forgotten is that early on most of the slaves were Irish, or English criminals or political dissenters (and technically they were under 7-year indenture rather than being chattels). Blacks became more valued because they survived the tropical climate and the psychological condition of slavery better than whites and Amerinds did. The “race consciousness” came later This is one of the case studies that falsifies the Marxist idea that ideology is determined by the social means of production.

Subverting The Comparator

clipped from esr.ibiblio.org The use of bloodlines as a means to determine the content of character is a short-cut, it being much easier determine who someone’s parent is than determine how they will behave under pressure or temptation. Racists make similar gratuitous associations for exactly the same reason: they can’t prove or disprove someone’s character traits, so they make an assertion based on an assumption of a causal/property connection whose property (skin color) is easier to determine. The use of programming terminology as a means of describing human behavior is probably fraught with hazards, but can be equally illuminating if done with care. For instance, if these memes are likened to programs running in the wetware of leftist intellectual brains, then how much of their effectiveness within that person is dependent on compromising what passes for the Arithmetic-logic unit? I.e. to be more specific, the comparator unit?

Goals

clipped from esr.ibiblio.org The Goals of Communism 1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war. 2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war. 3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength. 4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war. 5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites. 6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination. 7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N. 8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N. 9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

Pathetic Memebots Redux

clipped from esr.ibiblio.org In this context, Jeff Goldstein has written eloquently about perhaps the most long-term dangerous of these memes — the idea that rights inhere not in sovereign individuals but identity groups, and that every identity group (except the “ruling class”) has the right to suppress criticism of itself through political means up to and including violence. The Soviets didn’t invent it, but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate — and appallingly successful — attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange. he Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.

Nerd Self-Referential COTD Goes To ESR

clipped from esr.ibiblio.org >IOW, we shouldn’t start with definitions or exploring what is considered to be “known,” but instead we should make testable predictions, set out to prove them, and then connect that with definitions, classifications, and “existing knowledge” later? Yup. Well put. >This sounds a great deal like saying “developing a testing strategy and testing tools before you start programming is a simpler way to bootstrap your way to sound code rather than reversing that order as is normally done.” Ha. Yes, the analogy is apt and not misleading. >I did recognize it as Pragmatism, so I get partial credit. Yes. Peirce was like Dijkstra’s famous remark about Algol: a great improvement over most of his successors.

Moderation

clipped from www.qando.net The official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on Tuesday wrote that when Abbas met recently with media figures at the home of the Palestinian ambassador to Jordan, he recounted that during an Arab League Summit in Libya in March he told his fellow leaders that he still preferred war against Israel, but could not do it alone. "We are unable to confront Israel militarily, and this point was discussed at the Arab League Summit," said Abbas. "There I turned to the Arab States and I said: ‘If you want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favor. But the Palestinians will not fight alone because they don’t have the ability to do it.’" Of course they don’t.  So instead they use terror tactics.  And this is from the supposedly “moderate” part of the Palestinian leadership.  No comment, apparently from Hamas. As for the Arab League – 0 for 3.

Now It Can Be Told

clipped from pajamasmedia.com NASA IS running short of plutonium. UPDATE: Reader Troy Hinrichs emails: “Maybe NASA can get some plutonium from Iran when they hit the road on their Mission to Muslims tour.” Heh. Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 2:22 pm

W

clipped from hotair.com The certainty of that financial “hit” on household budgets can’t possibly have anything to do with why Missourians aren’t flocking to spend $250 on tickets to an Obama event. No, nothing that Obama has done has the slightest explanatory power when it comes to why people in Missouri aren’t anxious to buy seats for his appearance at the Carnahan fund-raiser.  The sorry truth must be that the most influential president in history – indeed, the national leader of any kind with history’s most colossally enduring legacy – is still planting political IEDs everywhere Obama goes, with his failed policies and his really, really failed policies and his did-we-mention-the-failed-policies yet, because those were some failed honking policies. And we all know that that president, that towering evil bestriding the narrow presidency of Barack Obama like a 20-story brass bull looming over a horrific scene of human sacrifice, is … George W. Bush.

The Content Of Their Character

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Welcome To The New Racism ... Nazism ... Whatever It Is, O Duce Is For It

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D.E.

clipped from www.moonbattery.com But although voting to turn our country over to the likes of Barack Hussein Obama may be the most contemptible act imaginable, not even Obamania Kool-Aid guzzlers who fully realize just what they have done to the world's Last Best Hope need to spend the rest of their wretched lives skulking around with paper bags on their heads. Andrew Klavan offers hope for sufferers of D.E.:

Ugliness

clipped from www.zerohedge.com As we close on another week replete with ugly economic data and the usual bizarro counterintuitive market, here is a summary of the 50 most underreported facts about the state of the US economy, courtesy of the Coto report. After reading these it almost makes sense that the market has become completely desensitized to the sad reality now pervasive in this country. Readers are encouraged to add their own observations to this list. Surely if the list is doubled, the market will go up to 72,000 instead of just 36,000.   #50) In 2010 the U.S. government is projected to issue almost as much new debt as the rest of the governments of the world combined. #49) It is being projected that the U.S. government will have a budget deficit of approximately 1.6 trillion dollars in 2010. #1) According to the Tax Foundation’s Microsimulation Model, to erase the 2010 U.S. budget deficit, the U.S. Congress would have to multiply each tax rate by 2.4.

RTWT

Not Land It

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Parasite

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Regime Uncertainty Update

clipped from pajamasmedia.com YOU THINK? Lack of jobs increasingly blamed on uncertainty created by Obama’s policies. UPDATE: A reader emails: I am an instructor in a technical school. It puts me in good position to stay close with my industry (auto service). Each year I am on a job hunt for up to fifty students, and you can bet I keep close tabs on what local employers are thinking. The past two years, but this year especially, the single most common thought passed on by employers has been “I’m not sure I want to hire anyone right now, until we know what’s going to happen with taxes and medical coverage”. This is understandable, as these two items make up huge parts of a business’s outgoing spending. Not knowing what they will be nailed with, a LOT of small employers are taking the only safe road. They are putting expansion and hiring plans on hold, till the business environment regains some sanity. I think they may have a long wait, and signs indicate that’s exactly what local employers are expecting.

Some Refreshing Countermoonbattery

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Liberals may dominate the entertainment establishment, but they don't have a total stranglehold on comedy. Here's Brad Stine on the moonbat tactic of controlling us by being offended:

Green Shackles

clipped from www.quadrant.org.au “Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.” Vaclav Klaus Blue Planet in Green Shackles

A Look At O Future

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O Joy!

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No More Thugs In Space

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Hook-handed cleric Abu Hamza last night gloated over the shuttle disaster and rejoiced in the deaths of the seven astronauts. The Muslim fanatic called the Columbia crew "thugs of space" who deserved to die. He denounced the team — made up of Americans, an Israeli and an Indian-born Hindu — as a "trinity of evil" punished by Allah. Not to worry, Allah — the Great Satan won't be launching any more thugs into space with Chairman Zero at the helm. Today NASA took another giant leap for mankind by issuing a new commemorative Muslim box cutter. Via Dark Angel Politics:

Alien Exoneration

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com The “exoneration” by Climategate investigations (like Muir Russell) that never bother to talk to skeptics, create an impossible conundrum of having essentially a trial with judge, jury, reporters, spectators, and defendant, but no plaintiff. The plaintiff is locked outside the courtroom sitting in the hall hollering and hoping the jury hears some of what he has to say. Given this, I thought it valuable to revisit this Cal-Tech lecture on the state of science and consensus by the late Michael Crichton. – Anthony Watts

Pants O Fire

clipped from wizbangblog.com In one of the most embarrassing displays of disingenuity ever perpetrated by an American President, Mr. Obama lauded himself for saving our country from another Great Depression during his now infamous speech in Racine, WI last week. "Now every economist who has looked at it has said that the Recovery Act [stimulus bill] did its job," proclaimed the President. "It put a brake on the collapse of the economy," he continued. "We avoided a Great Depression. We are now growing again." It is plainly evident, however, that all of this is patently untrue. If not for the fact that 974,000 Americans had not dropped out of the workforce the past two months, the unemployment figure would be a staggering 10.1 percent. Actual Unemployment (U6) remains around 18 percent. We are seeing far less job creation than is needed to even keep up with the number of new workers entering the job market.

Mistress Of Disaster

clipped from www.cashill.com The Clintons’ trusted point person, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, would take the investigation away from the professionals in the National Transportation Safety Board and give it to the amateurs of the FBI. There was one reason why. The FBI reported to her. The NTSB did not. This was illegal, of course, but the media had a president to re-elect soon enough, and they were not about to scruple over details. The second part of the strategy was as simple as the first. The FBI would talk only to the New York Times. This essentially made the Times’ Gorelick’s ministry of propaganda. Of the 270 eyewitnesses who told the FBI they saw what looked like a missile strike TWA Flight 800, the New York Times would interview exactly none of them. Fearing perhaps to lose their privileged status and trusting the FBI more than they should have, the Times people followed the FBI lead. The other media, some grudgingly, followed the Times.

Peace Is Coming

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O Perfectly Parted One

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Why Indeed? (Part 94,831)

clipped from pajamasmedia.com GOOD QUESTION: “If, as President Obama and Attorney General Holder claim, there is a federal preemption issue, why hasn’t the administration sued Rhode Island already? After all, Rhode Island is actually enforcing these procedures, while the Arizona law hasn’t even gone into effect yet.” Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 6:33 pm

Joining Islam And America

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More Of It

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The Lame Reject The Sick

clipped from thehill.com The Obama administration has not ruled out turning sick people away from an insurance program created by the new healthcare law to provide coverage for the uninsured. Critics of the $5 billion high-risk pool program insist it will run out of money before Jan. 1, 2014. That’s when the program sunsets and health plans can no longer discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. Administration officials insist they can make changes to the program to ensure it lasts until 2014, and that it may not have to turn away sick people. Officials said the administration could also consider reducing benefits under the program, or redistributing funds between state pools. But they acknowledged turning some people away was also a possibility.

The Manchurian Moonbat

clipped from www.moonbattery.com In case anyone failed to grasp that the long-term objective of ObamaCare is to nationalize the insurance industry: A socialist organization with close ties to Barack Obama has outlined a plan to turn the president's health-care legislation into a government-run system that will ultimately eliminate private insurance companies. Obama's health-care bill "should create millions of new stakeholders in a health-care system governed by democratically established rules rather than by the fiats of private insurers," wrote Frank Llewellyn, national director of Democratic Socialists of America. Writing in the latest issue of the socialist Democratic Left magazine, Llewellyn said "progressives" must use Obama's health-care legislation "to build support for the elimination of private insurers." Lift the rock of Obama's background and prominent members of Llewellyn's Democratic Socialists of America can be found among the repugnant creatures that wiggle and writhe in horror of the light.

Ass In A Hole

clipped from biggovernment.com The administration’s stimulus program has failed. Growth is slow and unemployment remains high. The president, his friends and advisers talk endlessly about the circumstances they inherited as a way of avoiding responsibility for the 18 months for which they are responsible. But they want new stimulus measures—which is convincing evidence that they too recognize that the earlier measures failed. And so the U.S. was odd-man out at the G-20 meeting over the weekend, continuing to call for more government spending in the face of European resistance. The contrast with President Reagan’s antirecession and pro-growth measures in 1981 is striking. Reagan reduced marginal and corporate tax rates and slowed the growth of nondefense spending. Recovery began about a year later. After 18 months, the economy grew more than 9% and it continued to expand above trend rates. clipped from biggovernment.com This more appropriately looks like an ass in a hole. Or would that be a well?

A Fit Resting Place

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The Price

clipped from www.quotedb.com "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." --  Plato

Yes They Have II (Which Doctors?)

clipped from blogs.telegraph.co.uk Economics should never be treated as a science. Its claims are not falsifiable, which is why economists can disagree so violently among themselves: a rarer spectacle in science, where disputes are usually resolved one way or another by hard data. It is a branch of anthropology and psychology, a moral discipline if you like. Anybody who loses sight of this is a public nuisance, starting with Dr Athreya. As for the Fed, I venture to say that a common jury of 12 American men and women placed on the Federal Open Market Committee would have done a better job of setting monetary policy over the last 20 years than Doctors Bernanke and Greenspan. Actually, Greenspan never got a Phd. His honourary doctorate was awarded later for political reasons. (He had been a Nixon speech-writer). But never mind.