Up Is Down

clipped from prudentbear.com Our Ministry of Sound Money had a goal of controlling prices. One dollar in 1950 is now worth 12 cents.   Our Ministry of Sound Government had a goal to reward citizens for voting appropriately. For the past 15 years our politicians have used ultra-long-term debt to purchase votes in the next election. Mathematically it has become impossible to pay back this liability with future income, so by definition it is a Ponzi scheme. Our Ministry of Sound Accounting has created bookkeeping techniques to hide the Ministry of Sound Government's Ponzi scheme. Presently our Ministry of Truth is saying we need to borrow large amounts of money from hostile foreign nations to increase our children's standard of living and keep them safe in the future. Debt and consumption are good. Saving is very, very bad. Our government and our financial sector are good. The corporate sector is evil. Up is down. And left is right.

Rumors

clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk Tommaso Dorigo, a physicist at the University of Padua, has said in his blog that there has been talk coming out of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, that the Higgs has been discovered. The Tevatron, the huge particle accelerator at Fermi - the most powerful in the world after the LHC - is expected to be retired when the CERN accelerator becomes fully operational, but may have struck a final blow before it becomes obsolete. If one form of the rumour is to be believed - and Prof Dorigo is extremely circumspect about it - then it is a "three-sigma" signature, meaning that there is a statistical likelihood of 99.7 per cent that it is correct. But, of course, that is only if the rumour is to be believed. In the post, titled "Rumors about a light Higgs", Prof Dorigo said: "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal.

Transparent O(K)

clipped from ace.mu.nu I thought we were supposed to take the European feelings seriously? Or was that before they became ummm...inconveniently inconvenient. ...And there is considerable disdain for the rhetoric of President Obama and his advisers regarding Germany's export-orientated economic progress. Particular derision is reserved for the rhetoric of Nobel prize-winner Paul Krugman, who with his recent diatribes against an allegedly inflationary bias in German policies is widely regarded in Berlin as somewhat imbalanced. "Obama is becoming increasingly transparent1," says one satisfied German official. "With his arguments that we should become a bit less reliant on exports and allow the others to catch up, he's just trying to weaken us. Well, we're not going to take his advice." ... 1 "Transparent" == "buffoonish and clown like"

No One Knows

clipped from hotair.com A Wednesday report from the National Taxpayer Advocate (NTA), an independent watchdog within the IRS, backed those claims, finding that the agency currently lacks the resources to take on the new duties. … “Before ObamaCare passed, [Minority Leader John Boehner] and others warned that it would require an army of new IRS agents,” Boehner (R-Ohio) spokesman Michael Steel said in an email. “Democrats denied it. Now we know the truth.” So how much will the IRS need?  No one knows — and that’s the point that Republicans have been making all along.  The NTA can’t figure it out, the IRS can’t estimate it, and the Democrats never seriously attempted to determine it at all.  Like many other provisions of ObamaCare, they simply made up cost numbers in order to argue that the bill would be deficit neutral.

Du'O (Part 86,936)

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans -- the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries," Simpson said. "We can't grow our way out of this," Bowles said. "We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can't tax our way out. . . . The reality is we've got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We've got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that."

The Senor

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Beyond Parasites

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Was there a direct connection between springing a terrorist and BP getting an extremely cozy oil drilling deal in Libya? Bret Stephens of the WSJ has a jaw-dropping report that suggests the oil giant profited immensely from the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber. Yesterday, the chairman of Libya's National Oil Co. told Zawya Dow Jones that he would urge Libya's sovereign wealth fund to buy a strategic stake in the troubled oil giant. That follows news that Libya will allow BP to begin deepwater drilling next month off Libya's coast as part of a $900 million exploration deal initially agreed upon in 2007.

Ask What You Can Do...

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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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