Belmont Club

February 11th, 2009 7:42 am

Opening the package

Howard Kurtz writes in the Washington Post that “I’m not an economist, but when Tim Geithner unveils his long-awaited bailout plan and the Dow plunges nearly 400 points, that’s probably not a good sign.” Kurtz has a roundup of quotes from different sources suggesting a certain skepticism about its possible effect.

“Investors had been expecting the Obama administration to unveil a shock-and-awe solution Tuesday for the nation’s hobbled banking system,” the NYT reports. “But the main reaction was disappointment as the new plan raised more questions than it answered, sending stock markets — and the shares of banks assumed to be holding swaths of toxic assets — sharply lower.” …

This Huffington Post report doesn’t inspire confidence: “Administration officials were greeted with sarcasm and laughter Monday night when they briefed lawmakers and congressional staff on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s new financial-sector bailout project, according to people who were in the room.

“The laughter was at its height when Obama officials explained that the White House planned to guarantee a wide swath of toxic assets — which they referred to as ‘legacy assets’ — but wouldn’t be asking Congress for money.

The right is really rebelling against the stimulus. Rich Lowry calls it “socialism” … An analysis by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation shows that the House version has $264 billion in new means-tested welfare spending that, (safely) assuming it’s never rolled back, will add $787 billion in welfare costs over ten years

Why, if Kurtz’s roundup is to be believed, neither the markets, nor Left nor Right like it. Then why is it passing? Is it because the economic doctors know something the public doesn’t and therefore we should all pipe down and drink our medicine? Maybe. But it’s hard to believe that when even the oracles aren’t sure what they are saying or aren’t saying it. For example, Geithner is alluding to further unspecified steps down the track.

Brian Williams told Geithner in a CNBC interview that taxpayers would like to know whether he’s going to need more money from us. Geithner sidestepped the question, saying it would be cheaper over the long run to be “more forceful up front,” but didn’t explain what that meant.

This stimulus package has acquired an aura of inevitability based on the fact that it’s inevitable. Just what exactly is fated to happen nobody can quite say, only that it will. However, we are reliably informed that we are all going to find out in due time. “Obama bluntly told a Florida town hall yesterday that if his plan doesn’t work, ‘then you’ll have a new president.’” And that’s fair enough because the something as complex as the economy cannot be very accurately modeled. But the stimulus bill compounds the problem not only because many of its effects will be spread over time and will interact with other measures, such as monetary policy or decisions by other central banks, but most of all because it commits to certain acts which may not be appropriate when the time comes. Imagine programming a car to turn left, right or downshift at a point two hours from now without quite knowing where the car will be or how fast it is traveling when those instructions kick in. The feedback loop is too lagged to be of much use. Maybe it would be better if government quit trying to manage the future under situations of such great uncertainty. Instead, it could try and concentrate on discovering the real value of “toxic assets” and engage in a moderate, but immediate stimulus instead of a jobs program dressed up as economic pump priming.

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308 Comments

1. wildernesscalling:

“O” and crew ain’t got a clue of how to fix it, Deceit has become so common place thru out the government and buisness culture that NO ONE in the driver’s seat knows the truth, they don’t even know if their own navigators know the correct way out.

Feb 11, 2009 - 7:56 am 2. dan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMu1mFao3w

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:03 am 3. Alexis:

I doubt that this “stimulus package” was ever about the economy to begin with. Instead, it is about giving a strong signal to audiences domestic and foreign that the Obama administration is a force to be reckoned with. The Obama administration is attempting to show that it has a working majority in Congress, so it is treating the “stimulus package” as if it were a “make or break” moment for Obama. It seems as though Obama is betting his political house on breaking the back of conservative opposition.

The problem, of course, is that if the “stimulus package” actually passes, he may have consolidated his control over political patronage but but he has also taken responsibility for the economy. If anything goes wrong with the economy after this gargantuan bill, Obama’s responsible.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:10 am 4. Derek:

They will stop distributing cash when they run out.

The only question is when that will happen.

Derek

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:15 am 5. slade:

What I consider a trend-changing development to watch – if reporting is accurate – is the rise of what seems to be a generational divide with some substance beyond hairdos and hemlines. Reporting from Israel covering the election focused on young people who were unhappy because they wanted an “Obama” candidate and neither Livni nor Netanyahu qualified. Maybe a fluff piece but raises again the point of voting age. More assuredly the generational divide between those who fear the various expressions of totalitarian government and those who scoff with derision is a well defined dichotomy.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:19 am 6. Mark:

Laughter now, tears later?

It’s remarkable that the analysis provided by the CBO does not get more traction. If the intermediate range result of the spending bill is less economic recovery, how can any reasonable person support the bill?

Maybe we are witnessing a national acceptance of the ‘Pottery Barn’mantra: ‘If you break it, you own it.’ In effect, “We elected Obama; let’s give him an opportunity to try his thing.”

But the Democrats don’t seem to care, given their pronouncements, if they break the economy, as long as they remain in power. This holding on to power, and the income and privilege it provides, is the lesson of Mancur Olson’s analysis of command economics, “Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships.”

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:27 am 7. dla:

I prefer to believe that this administration is really trying to give the economy a boost, and not just trying to pad the Democrat party for the next generation. And I certainly did not vote for Obama.

There’s the Keynesian theory that $1 of Government spending will cascade down to more than $1 of economic activity. I’ve only seen that happen a couple time (1) The 1930’s Hydro-Electric dams and (2) the 1960s Interstate Highway system.

But converter boxes, NEA, Amtrak, nutrition programs, etc. are not likely to generate the returns that electric power and a highway system did.

At some point I think that Obama believes a version of the Keynesian theory where any Government dollar spent will magically result in more than $1 dollar of economic activity.

Spend money to make money is true sometimes. And sometimes it leads to Chapter 11. If Obama bet wrong, we’ll be like Japan in the 90’s. If he’s right, we’ll bounce back and grow enough to make the 7% of the GDP he played with insignificant.

Or it could be that our economy is big enough and fundamentally sound enough that we’ll bounce back as soon as we are done being afraid.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:28 am 8. dan:

Does anyone know of or have you heard of massive purchases of gold occurring in the world lately? I have heard a rumor. I’m curious to see if you wise people have heard anything similar.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:29 am 9. Brock:

Because Nancy’s too dumb and Obama’s too arrogant to realize how wrong they are?

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:30 am 10. Oh, bother:

I thought of it as the Democrat Toady Relief Act of 2009, until readers found socialized medicine, which is rationed medicine. “Health care is 17% of the national economy. We have to cut that!” I wonder what else besides rationed medicine is in it?

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:53 am 11. Peter Boston:

Q. When was the last time bank stocks went down so much? When was the last time the balance sheet of any central bank exploded like the Fed has? When was the last time interest rates went to zero, essentially, making monetary policy as we know it ineffective? When was the last time we had deflation?

A. Great Depression in the ’30s, Latin America in the ’80s, Japan in the ’90s

Minds greater than my own explain the problem simply. The universal People purchased overpriced assets on easy credit with the irrational expectation of perpetual growth. The first bump in the road that reduced cash flows made debt service on the assets unsustainable and defaults inevitable.

The only historical solution is to deflate the value of the assets and restructure the debt. No amount of government spending will create economic growth.

Obama may or may not believe that spending will help the economy but the purely political aspects of the Spending Bill leave no doubt that Obama believes that greater government intrusion into American life is a desirable outcome.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:57 am 12. SShiell:

I can’t but help believe that the Obama Administration believes this whole recession is “much ado about nothing”. They must believe what the CBO is saying, that the recession will be over by the latter half of 09 – following the old rule fo thumb that a recession will last only about 18 months. If that be true, then this is merely a grandstand play that will end with Obama symbolically riding in to save the day with his “Stimulus” Plan. Then the entire US, if not the world, will be forever greatful for being saved by the Democrats, led by Obama. The US, now being forever reminded of this action by “waving the bloody shirt” (Remember the post Civil War era?) of the economic miracle, will bow to the will of the Democrats/Obamacrats for the next 50 years or so.

The reality is that this is not some simple stimulus plan but a more comprehensive plan for perpetual Democratic rule.

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:14 am 13. steveaz:

There are two plans in the works that this “stimulus” bill is designed to assist.

1. get “the system” to buy the homes that the CRA “gave” to sub-prime borrowers. The gambit that Clinton, Franks and Raines initiated always had as its end-game the “bail-out” of urban indigent borrowers. This bill assures, stealthily, that this final end is achieved.

2. cement Democrat Party majorities by rewarding and enlarging the indigent, urban classes. By increasing both the size of the unionized civil-service sector (including its dependents) and the benefits awarded to it, the Dem’s hope to guarantee their party’s continued majority-appeal – even if the tactic relies on farming and milking indigents for votes, like so many dairy cows.

Period.

Echoing SShiell, that’s why the bill has been so hastily constructed and why it’s been ushered under our noses with such secrecy. If the media were to inform diligent mortgage payers in Phoenix, San Diego and El Paso that, with this bill they’re saddled with paying other peoples’ mortgages as well as their own, the revolt among the responsible classes would be unanimous and resounding.

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:30 am 14. joe buzz:

“if his plan doesn’t work, ‘then you’ll have a new president.’”
So dude put his fate in the hands of Pelosi and Reid or Timmy G.? There are so many plans on and under the table now I dont know which one he is referring to.
How about the new cover of Newsweek? Palin calls Obama a socialist and its considered racist. Newsweek does the same and its considered “European”.

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:37 am 15. newtland:

SSDD – same spending, different Democrat.

So what’s New Zealand’s immigration policy?

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:57 am 16. Peter Boston:

Republicans have caught the Democrats in a midnight “stimulus” power play that seeks to cut Republican conferees out of the House-Senate negotiations to resolve a final version of the Obama “stimulus” package. Human Events

The Athenians appointed citizens “out of the phone book” to the most responsible offices in the polity. At the end of the term the assembly conducted an audit of the citizen’s performance. If he screwed up in any way that cost the polity money or prestige they took it out the regulator’s personal property.

We get Jamie Gorelick screwing up monumentally two times and walking away unscathed with tens of millions of public money in her pocket. Good gig if you can get it.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:06 am 17. Mongoose:

Joe Buzz, I think he means another democrat president.

Or he may have an altogether different meaning for the phrase “If his plan does not work”.
As far as cementing Democrat control, I say that the odds are good that he can put it out in at least the short and mid terms.

We may not at all get a “V” shaped recovery, however, and the economic opportunities for Americans could be substantially reduced for a generations, perhaps even longer depending how rooted the new political and bureaucratic structures become. The damage to liberty, freedom and property rights likely permanent. Look to the UK, the EU and Latin America for what is to come. We may not have anything approaching an honest election again in our lifetimes. And here on this thread we have not even gotten around to the destruction of the dollar, which will surely follow all of this.

Just how is al of this avoided?

They are quite aware of all of this. We must disabuse ourselves of the notion that in a year or a year and a half things will somehow “get back to normal”. For Obama to talk about this plan “working” in this sense is as absurd and shameful as the acquiescence to the Stimulus plan by congress and the large portions of the public.

Our only hope is that a substantial portion of the nation wakes up very soon.

Frankly I have never seen anything like this. I, for one, remain unconvinced that this “crisis” was not manufactured in whole or in part.

I am beginning to think it will take and act of God to turn this around.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:07 am 18. Charles:

imho this total gargantuan boondoggle will work if the admin gets the energy part right.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:11 am 19. steveaz:

@5, Slade
This divide was engineered into being by the same political class we have just elected to DC. Using the Vietnam war draft to lower the minimum voting age was tactical genius. It ensured that those least able to discern global and national political trends and most willing to whine about being drafted to serve the republic’s aims, were granted a new, loud voice in the republic’s policies.

Then, being suggestible and gullible, this aggrieved demographic became easy fodder for the media’s various social-acculturation programs (ie. MTV, and urbanized “pop” culture), as well as the Democrat’s appeals to youths’ bruised adolescent passions, “me-first-ism” and ignorance.

It is unpopular today to call for taking the vote away from 18-year olds. Even conservatives are quick to defend a fighting marine’s right to vote in late adolescence, due to her service to country and all that. But that argument is a wet-hen. Only a minority of 18-year old voters ever volunteer to serve in our military, leaving the great majority of this ungrounded demographic busy to chase adolescent whims and hormone-fueled fantasies at the ballot-box: a tailor-made constituency for sugar-daddy government that is too easily led for the Left to pass up.

Now America must deal with our childrens’ sweet-tooth influencing public policy, when before we’d just tell them “no dessert until you’ve eaten your peas” and be done with it.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:12 am 20. Eggplant:

Peter Boston said:

“Minds greater than my own explain the problem simply. The universal People purchased overpriced assets on easy credit with the irrational expectation of perpetual growth. The first bump in the road that reduced cash flows made debt service on the assets unsustainable and defaults inevitable.”

I’ll begin by mentioning that I’m clueless about economics and finance. That may not be much of a limitation given that economics appears to be useless black magic and finance mostly gobblygook intended to confuse the suckers/investors.

I think the basic American economic model of the late-1950s to early-1970s would have been sustainable if the United States had infinite natural resources and a static population. We had neither and the system began to break down in the mid-1970s. I believe the “hidden hand” of Adam Smith was working in the background. Somewhere in the process it was realized that manufacturing was not sustainable because it required cheap natural resources and slave labor (Chinese factory workers). A consequence of the hidden hand was the development of globalization and the American service economy. We “globalized” our manufacturing economy by shifting it off shore while converting our work force over to a busy-work service economy. We paid for this “globalized service economy” by spending down our parents and grand-parents equity (we began eating our seed corn). It’s a credit to our parents and grand-parents that we were able to “party-on” for 30 years (essentially my entire generation). I suspect the unspoken assumption was that we’d all die from old age before the money ran out. Unfortunately in August 2008, the money did run out but we were still alive and kicking. So now what do we do?

I suspect that almost all of our economic assumptions based upon the last 30 years will go in the trashcan, e.g. green economics, socialism, globalism, service economy, etc. After this depression fully sets in, there will emerge a cynical pragmatism, e.g. Tell me what something is really worth, not what you fantasize it’s worth based upon some baloney utopian theory. Obama’s election was based upon platitudes, skin color and empty slogans. He maybe the last American politician (in the near future) who could get elected based upon that formula. The next American leader might not even be elected (he’ll appear on a white horse leading an army).

We live in “interesting times”.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:20 am 21. twobyfour:

@ 19. steveaz
See, the problem is not the voting age. In late 1700’s, a 15 years old was considered an adult. And they usually were. They were mature.
Now we have adolescents that are even 35 years old.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:21 am 22. PA Cat:

21 2 x 4

Not to mention the 47-year-old adolescent in the White House.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:25 am 23. Mongoose:

Charles: That is like saying “It would be a nice day if it was not raining.”

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:25 am 24. twobyfour:

@ 22. PA Cat

He’s not an adolescent. He’s a pure, unadulterated screwup.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:31 am 25. PA Cat:

24 2 x 4

I was thinking along the lines of juvenile delinquent (Biden being the senile delinquent). But yes, screwup is a better word (“pure” seems a bit oxymoronic in the context).

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:38 am 26. twobyfour:

@ 20 Eggplant
We live in “interesting times”

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:38 am 27. Mongoose:

Eggplant: Well your notion model of the 50’s thorough the 70’s is not quite right–that “50’s model” did not survive the 1960’s. The rupture point is LBJ, and the great society. That model of the ’50s we replaced by the late 60’s, and that model was replaced in the 80’s with the globalist model. We just had the fortuitous accident of the high tech revolution coming in during that period, and that obscured the structural changes. (BTW, This high tech economic spike may have just been an accident of history–we have no reason to think that we will get a similar thing thie time around. Sure will not be “green tech”, I can tell you that._

So growing socialism, growing government, educational collapse and a hollowing out of almost all aspects of American society from globalism are the key points.

This is the point: The stimulus plan, or at least it public face, assumes that there is someting to “go back to” so that we will have a normal “recovery”. This is not the case.

Eggplant, I have less faith than you that the polical system will be free enough for the country to discard the things that you mention, though it sure would be wonderful if this did occur.

The structural political barriers would be hard to change. Rarely do countries discard socialist tyranny on their own, at least by means of a political process. We need to face that we are in the middle of Communist Coup, and not just a momentary “swing” between on the political spectrum. The Democrats are playing for keeps, which is a what the GOP should have been doing under Bush. We can exect the country to be unionized and large segments of new Democrat voters create through changes to immigration laws. The muddle” that bought the snale oil this time around could well have served their purpose by 2012, and maybe even 2010.

There would have to be a radical realignment in 2010 to stop this, if it could be stopped at all; radical enough that congress had veto proof majorities and the will to use them.

That seesm a bit to much to hope for to me.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:46 am 28. Eggplant:

Continuing my earlier thread: I think there are too many people on this planet. I also think that trying to maintain an economy by burning fossils is insane. Over civilization will not recover until the world’s population has been knocked down to a sustainable amount (less than two billion) and our energy supply is based upon renewable or semi-infinite sources, e.g. thorium breeder reactors, nuclear fusion (if it’s possible) or efficient solar energy (if it’s possible). I believe a thousand years from now after multiple world wars and a holocaust of massive depopulation, people will look back at the 20th century as a paradise inhabited by utopian lotus eaters who were too stupid and childish to realize that they were living the good life.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:49 am 29. PA Cat:

ShrinkWrapped says that the following quip was sent to him by a Wall Street executive. SW’s take is that it “expresses sentiments that are apparently quite old and growing”:

Geithner’s Plan Template found…
In the beginning was ‘the plan’.
And then came the assumptions.
And the assumptions were without form and the plan was without substance
And darkness was upon the face of the company and they spoke among themselves saying, “The plan is a crock of s**t and it stinketh.”

And the company went to their supervisors and sayeth, “It is a pail of dung and none can abide the odor.”

And the supervisors went unto their department heads and sayeth unto them, “It is a container of excrement with an odor that few can tolerate.”

And the department heads went unto the vice presidents and sayeth, “it is a vessel of fertilizer and its strength offends many.”

And the vice-presidents spoke among themselves saying, “It contains that which aids plant growth and it is indeed strong.”

And the vice-presidents went unto the president and sayeth unto him, “It is a powerful promoter of growth.”

And the president went unto the chairpersons of the board and sayeth, “This plan will greatly stimulate the growth and efficiency of this company.”

And the chairpersons looked upon the plan saying, “This is a good plan.”

And the plan became policy. And this is how s**t happens.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:00 am 30. blert:

It is very worthwhile to take a peek at what happens when the aggregate debt carriage turns into a pumpkin:

http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2009/01/31/therovingcavaliersofcredit/

The only way to pull a spinning aircraft out of a fatal dive is to relax and steady the controls. Whipping the joystick around is fatal. You can never get inside the OODA loop of unstable flight.

If you want to check out someone who’s ahead of the curve:

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

Mish is a great place to start.

Today’s unlimited global financial cold war will produce serious casualties:

Pakistan
Indonesia
Venezuela
Iran
Turkey
Syria

It will be quite astonishing if any of these countries can stay afloat during the Greatest Depression.

Sarbanes-Oxley has killed the IPO market and exported our capitalization advantage. Thanks, guys. The compound effect of this overkill is hard to overstate.

Massive Dollarization will spread into ever more economies. As it stands even now both China and Russia are massively dollarized.

Dollarization is best defined as nominating all substantial contracts in the International Money: USD. Trades may be settled in the local fiat currency, but at a rate that reflects the spot currency cross versus the USD.

It’s this pervasive Dollarization within the Russian, Chinese, et. al. economies that makes exchange rates so ‘sticky’ and revaluations so traumatic.

It stands to reason that the hefty swings in the Ruble are bankrupting some major players.

You should expect Russia to go insolvent within 18 months, at the outside. Putin will continue to blow his money stash on the Ruble. If he doesn’t he’ll come down with kinetic lead poisoning at the hands of his own crew.

With clueless BHO at the helm the theme song must be Paint It Black:

I see a red sum and I want it painted black

No losses anymore I want them in the black…

Its not easy facin’ up when your whole world is broke…

No more will my greenbacks return a deeper blue

I could not foresee this thing happening so soon

If I take cash enough into the settin sun

My crew will laugh with me before the mournin’ comes…

Maybe then I’ll fade away and not have to face the facts.

Yeah!

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:01 am 31. Walt:

The stimulus bill will soon be passed
Obama’s lashed us to the mast
The ship of state is headed for the rocks
He’s piling up this massive debt
So that his lib’ral friends can get
Their hands into the henhouse like the fox
Where do you think this money goes
To help the poor, to succor those
Who need a helping hand, or to the banks
And other friends Obama may
Reward in the Chicago way
While we who disagree are heartless cranks
So now it’s done, this massive mess
All thanks to voters’ passiveness
All thanks as well to Specter, Collins, Snowe
I guess I’ll always wonder why
It’s always ours and not their guy
Who turns against his friends and joins the foe
Now where we go I hope it takes
A path where someone has the brakes
To curb the Dhimmicrats’ big spending ways
Let’s not forget who has to dig
In pockets deep to feed this pig
It’s always us the little guy who pays
Of course the past eight years or so
Has seen the Federales grow
The GOP is just as bad a crew
So just right now I think we need
A party that won’t make us bleed
To death while DC tightens down the screw
So maybe it is now the time
To cast aside the prose and rhyme
And yell that we won’t take it anymore
Let’s throw the bastards all in jail
And let them scream for bloody bail
We’ll laugh until we even up the score
So let’s elect some honest men
And just clean out that devil’s den
Let’s take our country back, we have the cure
For all the ills besetting her
Let’s get the guys who’re getting her
Away from her ideals so clean and pure
I’m not so sure the guy in charge
Is working for the land at large
Or for his friends who want to tear us down
Yes Soros and that lefty crowd
Will find us firm and yet unbowed
We’ll stand up tall and fight for freedom’s crown
We need a man to lead us all
We need a man to give the call
We need a man to help us make the stand
Now I know just the man to shake
The heavens and the man to make
Us wretchard’s wretches ‘to a mighty band

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:09 am 32. Eggplant:

Mongoose said:

“your notion model of the 50’s thorough the 70’s is not quite right–that “50’s model” did not survive the 1960’s. The rupture point is LBJ, and the great society. That model of the ’50s we replaced by the late 60’s, and that model was replaced in the 80’s with the globalist model. We just had the fortuitous accident of the high tech revolution coming in during that period, and that obscured the structural changes.”

This is a sterile line-of-inquiry since the 1950-1970s were obviously not stable and socialism was still a work in progress (socialism also assumed infinite natural resources and a static population). In his critique of that era, Mongoose neglected to mention the Cold War and having the hydrogen bomb hanging over our heads.

— It was a miracle that we survived the Cold War! —

However the 1950-1970s was an era of extreme prosperity. My family lived quite comfortably (in California) on the single salary of my father who was a grocery store manager. That is not possible today on that sort of income (both parents must work and support a hefty mortgage).

This whole line of inquiry brings to mind whether or not any society or economic system is stable on a world of finite resources. There is also the issue of having a technology advancing much more rapidly than political and economic advancement. Julius Caesar was a bright guy and after a few months of training, could probably function in the US Senate. However modern technology to Julius Caesar would seem like magic. I think he would be very intimidated by airplanes, automobiles and laptop computers. Technological versus political/economic advancement is almost as lethal a contradiction as population growth versus resource depletion.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:15 am 33. steveaz:

Bravo, Walt! Compile ‘em and get a publisher, dude.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:18 am 34. Mongoose:

It is more likely that we will colonize the solar system before we get to the point that you are talking about.

The petroleum economy will be replaced by a better one in 20 or 30 years. that age of sail was only 150 years ago, you know. Hard to predict this out 100 years, let alone 1000. Besides, these will have a way of balancing themselves out. You sort of sound like a star trek episode here. We rather have more pressing problems closer to home.

I do not think resource issues that might lead us to another dark age, it will be collectivist political tyranny that does us in. It is more likely that they look back at us as a time of imaginable freedom and creativity and wonder why we just threw it all away. It has been this freedom and crative spirit that gave us this world, not the resources. Were there is a will there is a way, as far as technology goes. Freedom, on the other hand, is a much more delicate treasure. The world has never seen the sort of wide spread prosperity and freedom that it has seen in the last 200 years. There is no reason to take this condition as a new constant in history.

There are not to many people, there are just too many people that allow themselves to be manipulated by tyrants. It is a harsh thing to say that we must do away with billions of people, though I imagine that the hard left and the Davos crowd might agree with you. More people also mean more talent.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:25 am 35. justgd:

I have said many times before and i will say it again and that is this Stimulus Package is just another way to give more money to the Mismanaged banks and so the big CEO’s can get their big paychecks. This Stimulus Plan to work has to do the following in the following order: 1. – JOBS, 2. – Housing and 3. – Affordable Healthcare for the working class people.
What good does it do to give the banks the money to be able to loan money. I want you to go to one of these bailed out banks and fill out your loan application and when it comes to job: enter UNEMPLOYED and see how fast you get escorted out of the bank because they won’t give you a loan because you have no way to pay the loan back if you don’t have any income except unemployment and that is a big joke. Get back to Helping the People get their lives back and let the banks get their money like everyone else does and that is let them work for it. This whole Stimulus Package is the biggest Joke i have seen in mnay years. Plain and simple: No Jobs, No Homes and No Affordable Healthcare and you have the biggest robbery in the world without using a gun.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:28 am 36. Roderick Reilly:

“”"”"”18. Charles:

imho this total gargantuan boondoggle will work if the admin gets the energy part right.”"”"”"”

If you mean “energy independence” and an “end to the use of oil,” then you are deluded. If not that, what does constitute “getting the energy part right?”

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:36 am 37. Roderick Reilly:

“”"”"”"I want you to go to one of these bailed out banks and fill out your loan application and when it comes to job: enter UNEMPLOYED and see how fast you get escorted out of the bank because they won’t give you a loan because you have no way to pay the loan back if you don’t have any income except unemployment and that is a big joke.”"”"”"”

I see your point, except for one thing: have you ever heard of “Ninja” loans (No Job, No Income)? Such loans were made in large numbers, and were part of the reason for the financial meltdown. They represented the most egregious example of the bad mortgages debacle, and were a direct result of agitation and litigation on behalf of “the little people.”

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:39 am 38. RWE:

One of the big yuks the other day was when Obama went to Elkhart, Indiana to promote the stimulus package.

He went there because that city has a 15% unemployment rate. And that is because their major industry is building recreational vehicles.

Now how is the package going to help them? One lady even asked how long it would take to get the money to Elkhart. Obama responded that they were going to build a new overpass downtown that would help people get to the stores there.

Yes, that oughta do it. People who are unemployed will find it so much easier to get to down town that they will go spend money there that they don’t have.

No one asked Obama, “Aren’t you one of the people who refused to allow offshore drilling and drilling in ANWR and so drove up the price of gasoline to the point that no one would buy a big gas hog of an RV?”

Then he went to Ft Myers, Florida, one of the towns that is suffering from a high unemployment rate because the CRA led to such loose lending practices that people overbuilt and overbought homes ad condos. So all those people who flocked there to build and sell and furnish those places now have no work to do. The crazy real estate market that built that level of false prosperity is gone and likely will never be again. So who is going to buy all those places? The people working on the overpass in Elkhart?

The fraud perpetrated by the Dot Com scammers and the CRA-enabled real estate flippers has created a false sense of what is “normal” and what people are “entitled” to.

Incredible!

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:41 am 39. Eggplant:

Roderick Reilly asked:

“… what does constitute “getting the energy part right?””

If you’ll pardon me sticking my nose in…

Getting the energy part “right” is a massive program of building nuclear reactors based upon modern safe designs and developing synthetic petroleum production from coal through the Fischer-Tropsch process (Sasol fuel). Synthetic petroleum would act only as a stop-gap until we could convert our economy away hydrocarbon based internal combustion engines. I should emphasize that so called “green energy schemes” are mostly a distraction and a waste of money. However research and development should continue on solar and wind energy schemes until it has been proven that they are not economical.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:48 am 40. Mongoose:

Eggplant there is nothing sterile about it at all, I am saying that there is not one but three pariods there. In any event, the Cold war did not end until the 1990’s, so it hardly solely characteristic the 50’s thorough the 70’s alone, and canot by iteslf account for any change. The Bomb (hydrogen or otherwise) was hanging over our heads in 1990 too. This is specious.

The issue is how to characterize the change from where we were in the immediate post war period to were we are now. It is not a question of stability, no decade was “stable”. It is a question of key characteristics and trends.

My point is that the nation post was history–economically, politically and socially–is separated by the latter half of the decade of the 1960’s. THis is the crucial juncture. The 1970’s is a different world altogether than the 1970’s. The major change was not from the end of the 1970’s on ward. it looks more like 1950 through 1964 (or 65); 1965 though 1985; 1985 to now (one could consider a fourth period that dbreaks this last “era” into two periods.)

The big break is in the 1960’s not the end of the 1970’s. As I said, this is obscured abut by the 1980’s tech economy taking off.

Examples abound about this divide. Civil Rights, the Great Society, the consolidation fo regional industries into national ones during the conglomeration craze of the late 1960s. Veit Nam. The ME Generation, incredible inflation, faith in national insitutions, etc. Popular music even changes radically.

It is not a case that there was this epoch of the 1950’s through the 1970’s that was destroyed by “resource issues”, or population issues from the beginning of the 1980’s onward.

It is the case that there was a major sea change in our economic, social and political life dating from the 1960’s.

1969 looked much more different from 1959 than 1979 looked form 1969.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:50 am 41. Whitehall:

Inflation? Who cares? It’s good for the US government and the bill vastly increases the power of the people voting for it and signing it.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:51 am 42. joe buzz:

Buddy must be burning up the nets researching the mid Sept. bank run. Either that or he is taking a mental health break….either way I wish him luck.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:51 am 43. Charles:

In a normal world the person who got to the heart of who was behind the 550 billion dollar electronic bank run back on Sept 18th–would be up for a Pulitzer.

alas the commies own the pulitzer.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:56 am 44. Roderick Reilly:

Eggplant:

Thanks for the comments. I do have a comment in turn: I don’t think we should ever completely “waen” ourselves off of hydrocarbons. Not ever. It would be a big mistake. A varied energy source civilization is what we need. Also, there can — and will be — many uses for hydrocarbons for generations to come.

Feb 11, 2009 - 12:06 pm 45. Charles:

what does constitute “getting the energy part right?

mostly that just means enhancing the processes already in place or at least continuing to enable the processes already in place.

The Pentagon has already signed some major contracts here. Biomas production plants are springing up on military bases all over the country. Quoting from this article

J.C. Bell, agricultural researcher and CEO of Bell Bio-Energy, Inc., predicts that within the next three to five years the company will be producing around five million barrels of hydrocarbon fuel a day using its biomass to hydrocarbon process. Using this fuel will require no modification to automobiles, oil pipelines or refineries as they exist today and could forever end the United States’ dependence on foreign oil, Bell said.

I blog about this in more detail here:

Feb 11, 2009 - 12:12 pm 46. always right:

This stimulus package has acquired an aura of inevitability based on the fact that it’s inevitable.

Inevitable does not mean infallable. Quite the opposite, this ‘gift package’ has every ingredient that leads to an opposite effect to ’stimulate’ the economy.

Remember when Bush and McCain said the fundamentals of American economics are strong? They were laughed off the stage, ridiculed as ‘out of touch’ with the harsh truth of struggling American working families.

Now we have the new POTUS fearmongering catastrophes if his bill not passed right away. And he is hailed as wise, decisive, and prudent. The Monday presser on the domestic front of Obama’s message seems to be “I AM the government, and I am here to save you all.”

Question: With doomsday coming, why would any business and/or investor want to put money back in the system? What is the realistic expectation on the returns?

So 6 months from now, the economy (probably rippled across the globe) REALLY tanked and American families are at the even dire situation,

What then? What other rabbit can they pull out from their magic hat?

Feb 11, 2009 - 12:13 pm 47. Clioman:

A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking some real money. What happens when this spending effort (#3, IIRC) fails? What happens when the Feds try to issue bonds for stimulus #4, or #5 and NOBODY WILL BUY THEM?

Feb 11, 2009 - 12:26 pm 48. Charles:

More on Sept 18 550 billion bank run

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:16 pm 58. trangbang68:

I got drunk for the first time when I was about 15 and later mixed in a heady mix of drugs. 15 years later I got straight from almost a 15 year buzz minus a few days in jail, 8 weeks of basic training, 8 months in the rice paddies, a few months in rehab. My motto in those days of stupidity was; “oh oh, my mind is coming out of the fog, better medicate. ” When I got straight through the good graces of God, it was time to begin building a sensible, responsible life.
Our political class is a jackels’ chorus of venal, lying weasels. They are tying their arms off and shooting up a billion dollar a day habit of stealing other people’s money and squandering it on stupidity and corruption. The nation is suffering from co-dependency in the jargon of psycho-babble. We sit on our hands while these wretched a-holes drive our country over a cliff. If we would wake up one morning with an epiphany we would hang them all on the gallows they’ve built, bulldoze DC and start over. One can only dream

Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An’ I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An’ stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

I’d smoked my brain the night before,
On cigarettes and songs I’d been pickin’.
But I lit my first and watched a small kid,
Cussin’ at a can that he was kicking.
Then I crossed the empty street,
‘n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken.
And it took me back to somethin’,
That I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
‘Cos there’s something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’,
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin’ city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.

In the park I saw a daddy,
With a laughin’ little girl who he was swingin’.
And I stopped beside a Sunday school,
And listened to the song they were singin’.
Then I headed back for home,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin’.
And it echoed through the canyons,
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.

-Kris Kristofferson

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:19 pm 59. steveaz:

@45, Clioman,
I’m not the first to say it, but, if the goal was getting America to default on its foreign debt, then the forced bankruptcy of our entire banking system could be the way to do it.

I guess, to the Progressives, if a single sub-prime borrower gotsta default, well, then the whole country gotsta too.

Familiar? The Prog’s always work to drag everything down to the lowest common denominator: they call it “egalitarianism” and it’s supposed to be a good thing!

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:22 pm 60. dan:

So the Post article characterizes the $500+ billion electronic bank run as a response to sudden credit freeze. All in one hour? Well, maybe that’s how the system has been tuned. Fine. It would be nice to have more background on exactly something like that would happen.

Another observation: the Post article claims the Fed’s $105 billion infusion satisfied crucial institutional lenders and forestalled a complete meltdown/run. The good Congressman from the CSPAN clip seems to think that the $105 billion didn’t actually work and they shut down the system. I wonder who is correct.

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:28 pm 61. Eggplant:

Roderick Reilly said:

“I don’t think we should ever completely “waen” ourselves off of hydrocarbons. Not ever. It would be a big mistake. A varied energy source civilization is what we need. Also, there can — and will be — many uses for hydrocarbons for generations to come.”

I’m an aerospace engineer and a fantasy concept that I like to play around with is Mars colonization. I should mention that when I got into aerospace, I thought Mars colonization was actually going happen but now I’ll be pleasantly surprised if we even have a Space Program 10 years from now.

Anyway, a big problem with a Mars colony is hydrocarbons. Mars has plenty of carbon in its atmosphere, e.g. carbon dioxide. Mars also has plenty of hydrogen in its regolith in the form of ice. However Mars probably never had life on it so there would only be trace quantities of hydrocarbons in the Martian regolith. That means a Mars colony would have to produce hydrocarbons if it wanted to have plastics and lubricants (both essential for a modern technology). Producing hydrocarbons from scratch is not easy. On Mars, one would have to first grow plants in a green house warmed and serviced by a nuclear reactor and then harvest the plants for methane production. The methane would then have to be polymerized into more complex hydrocarbons for conversion into lubricants and plastics. This is all energy intensive and requires a significant industrial infrastructure.

It’s interesting to speculate what would be more precious to a Martian colonist, a pound of gold or a pound of polyethylene. It’s obvious that the polyethylene would be much more precious (they’d keep in bank vaults). It’s ironic that because petroleum is so common on Earth that we burn it as fuel. A thousand years from now, our descendants will look back at this and be amazed.

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:34 pm 62. NahnCee:

Whiskey – I’ll ask again: what do you propose to DO about the problem of women?

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:34 pm 63. Captain Ramen:

I don’t know why the idiots in Congress believe that these emergency measures are supposed to magically fix everything. We have two options in this financial crisis: recession or depression. Not ‘I want the go go 90s back yesterday.’

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:36 pm 64. Eggplant:

NahnCee,

I don’t know about Whiskey but my strategy has been to agree with them and do what ever they say to do. I enjoy a tranquil family life.

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:37 pm 65. Herb:

What scares me are the long term economic effects of the injection of the equivalent of a year’s GDP in fiat money on top of the stimulative effect of the drop in oil and other commodity prices over the past six months. I dont think the term inflation is strong enough.

If you buy a bond from the USGovt. for $1000 and it pays the current fed interest rate of ~1or 2%, What happens to the value of that bond when, in response to inflation, the market interest rate goes to say, 15 or 20%?

Say you name is Chi and you live in Peking and you have US bonds with a face value of $100,000. What happens to the dollar?

We may have to learn how to can.

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:39 pm 66. Herb:

Nahncee, NahnCee, Ive been thinking
What a great world it would be
If the Girls were all transported
Far beyond the northern Sea

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:43 pm 67. RWE:

Eggplant:

I agree with the nuclear power and coal conversion approach. The maddening thing about wind energy and solar power is that there is no damn reason to use them except where it is useful. Nuclear and coal can handle it all and a be a hell of a lot more reliable, too. A friend of mine has a cabin in the mountains of Vermont powered entirely by solar cells, but he has a propane generator backup and does not try to live there at all in the winter, either – he would die if he tried.

There is no possible way that we could ever run out of hydrocrabons, unless we were incredibly stupid – which admittedly seems more likely every day.

Ever hear of a planet called Jupiter? Jupiter is MADE out of the stuff. We could have nuclear powered ramscoops diving in and out of the upper atmosphere there for a hundred thousand years and not make a dent in it.

Same is true of Saturn, and there are moons out there with atmospheres of Methane, too.

I think the problem with Mars is water. We should divert some small slushball comets there (some of the 100 ton variety that hit Earth all day long) and let things develop. Throw in some gentically engineered alge and let it go to town.

Then it’s on to Venus, which gets the same treatment. Of course, it’s got a lot of hydrocarbons, too.

Feb 11, 2009 - 2:31 pm 68. RWE:

“Whiskey – I’ll ask again: what do you propose to DO about the problem of women?”

Here is my 2 cents worth – take all the Stimulus money and have the Playboy company run reeducation camps for them.

Feb 11, 2009 - 2:34 pm 69. Herb:

RWE

How do you suppose all those hydrocarbons got up there? Arent all hydrocarbons fossil fuels and therefore finite? Could it be that they self generate in the planets?

Feb 11, 2009 - 2:38 pm 70. Charles:

64. Herb:

That’s a possibility. But my wag is that its as likely that a pretty massive shift led by the USA towards alternative energy occurs in the next five years. The shift will be led by biofuels. The result will be the price of oil will remain low, the US current account deficit will not include oil–and therefor fall sharply. The low US current account deficit will be offset by the huge numbers of dollars rolling around the world. I don’t know how long it will take for the banking system to right itself. but currently the process of moving from 30-1 to 12-1 loans to assets is deflationary.

as for solar wind power stuff, the collapse of the economy has dried up investment capital. As the NY Times says we’re entering the dark days of green energy Therefor public capital will do at least replace private capital. But it probably won’t do as good a job.

Feb 11, 2009 - 2:39 pm 71. Lifeofthemind:

Personally I am willing to do my share to make women happier. Please form a line.

Feb 11, 2009 - 2:46 pm 72. Lifeofthemind:

Yesterday I went to a debate on the Green Subsidies sponsored by the Smith Family Foundation http://www.thesmithfamilyfoundation.org. These are always the best policy debates available. A nice enough fellow arguing for “green investments” on behalf of the National Resources Defense Council pointed out that he had spent years working for Nomura so he knew that mindless stimulus spending wouldn’t work and the problem was that the lack of liquidity brought about by the housing manipulations prevented the presumably worthy projects he was advocating from getting market financing. When I pointed out that no one could seriously trust these projects to the same corrupt people who created the financial meltdown to begin with he could only spread his hands and smile.

Feb 11, 2009 - 2:57 pm 73. buddy larsen:

herb, nothing that you’d notice unless you trade the bond (bond trading is about 7 times larger a mkt than stocks), or do a truthful balance sheet. then you see that your bond is worth less than par, by a factor of the mkt’s inflation discount. Sometimes WAY less –like under Carter. works the other way, too, a big coupon in a rate-falling trend sells for *over* par.

Buzz, you got it –mental health break. Just in time, too! (*whew*)

Feb 11, 2009 - 3:11 pm 74. blert:

Recent advances in Lithium-ion battery technology is the real deal: the next wave in energy utilization.

Most of the popular green initiatives are as fruitless as the coal liquifaction dreams of Jimmy C.

We must transition over to dual fuel vehicles: methane plus gasoline; methane plus diesel…

These schemes are already economically viable and offer a way forward for trucking and RV’s…

Feb 11, 2009 - 3:17 pm 75. buddy larsen:

speaking of the planets, they’ve finally changed that embarrassing Uranus. It’s now Urectum.

Feb 11, 2009 - 3:17 pm 76. blert:

As for PV…

Residential PV conversion is a loser…

The arrays need maintenance. Joe Homeowner is not going to be able to do it right, and contracting out is ruinous.

PV arrays need to be in optimal settings and professionally maintained, just like conventional power plants.

You should look at the numbers for

nanosolar.com

They have demonstrated that they can PRINT PV arrays.

When coupled to Sodium-Sulfur batteries…
Or Lithium-ion batteries…

You’ve got a practical solution to energy storage writ large.

I like Sodium-Sulfur because these elements are dirt cheap. Hence, constructing massive arrays is possible.

Feb 11, 2009 - 3:24 pm 77. Lifeofthemind:

When asked which was more environmentally destructive a regulated socialized society or a freer less regulated one the representative of Green for All claimed not to know. The representative of the American Enterprise Institute happily took that ball and ran with it. I was reminded of:

Vaclav Havel’s New years Speech

At the end a nice campus radical, I do not know if he was a Sparticist or a Revolutionary Maoist or a member of some other alphabet party, tried to have some fun with me after assuming that I was a representative of Wealth and Power. Since I was alas painfully aware that he had no judgement in these matters I was not threatened and enjoyed the encounter. Shows you that the left are more slavishly dependent on appearances and good clothes than the right is. His problem was that he wanted people to want “better things” cleaner air or dignity for old auto workers, choices that meant altering their preferences. When I pointed out that the preferences were a priori to the economic analysis he wanted to make people change their desires, what I called their Utilities. Given the extensive track record on the results of having sincere people use government power to change the General Will to a more moral position I felt safe in urging him to, in Vaclav Havel’s words, “Look out the window.”

Feb 11, 2009 - 3:28 pm 78. Aether:

60. NahnCee:

“Whiskey – I’ll ask again: what do you propose to DO about the problem of women?”

Arranged Marriages would do the trick

Feb 11, 2009 - 3:32 pm 79. Lifeofthemind:

@Aether,
Absolutely, Why go through life miserable and hating your own foolishness when instead you can go through life blaming your parents? Seems much healthier.

Feb 11, 2009 - 3:39 pm 80. whiskey:

I don’t propose to do anything since it’s up to women to force social change if they want to. Or probably more accurately, women will change or not depending on a confluence of economic, social, and security factors that can be increased or decreased in outcomes based on female leadership and initiative.

It goes to risk tolerance. What is the perceived risk of doing something to address systemic risk to the current system. Currently the global position of women everywhere there is economic growth and progress is that it is best to avoid all risk anywhere in terms of military action and law enforcement and any “male” type of activity. That social pressure alone and “soft” power are dominant. Because war, or defense spending, or law enforcement, are too “risky.”

Particularly given what Kay Hymnowitz of City Journal calls “the New Girl Order” of fashionable bodies, shoes, hair, and lifestyles.

If however that New Girl Order is seen as already at huge risk, toleration of course-corrections like military spending or direct action against Iran by Israel increases quite a bit.

Feb 11, 2009 - 3:52 pm 81. geoffgo:

Charlie @ 68

That’s the problem we have now. If the private investors aren’t putting their capital into it, it’s because it’s not viable without subsidy. Coal, oil and gas require no gov’t subsidy, and we have endless supplies right here inside our borders.

Fewer than 15 people go to ANWR annually, and only becuase they’re gov’t teat-suckers. Who are we saving it for? It is in the Artic; ie, never going to be a visitor draw. Pristine my a**.

Coal is the most “shovel ready” asset in North America. Nuff for 1,000 years.

Feb 11, 2009 - 4:06 pm 82. RWE:

Herb:

I am one of those of the opinion that the hydrocarbons on Earth as well as those Out There come from the process of formation of the planets rather than Fred Flintstone’s septic tank and the town of Bedrock’s yard rakings. It’s hard to explain the biggest planet in the solar system being made out of compacted smog, otherwise.

Relative to solar and wind, I recall an interesting statistic. The largest cause of injury is falls. And all that stuff involves climbing atop something to install it and keep it working. Solar and wind energy are going to be way more dangerous that oil refineries and nuclear power plants.

Buddy:

I heard that Uranus was being renamed Urpenis. What is your information source? Mine is unimpeachable, namely that company that will be running the reeducation camps.

Feb 11, 2009 - 4:10 pm 83. programmer:

Totally off track, perhaps…perhaps not. How about a peek at the future?

There is about a 30 second ad clip before the real video starts. Be patient. I was most impressed by the bit near the end when he dials a virtual phone (about 2:30 or so into the clip)

Link to video clip

Now for a cup of tea.

Feb 11, 2009 - 4:11 pm 84. whiskey:

The biggest issue with male/female political divides goes to risk tolerance and perception.

Men prefer more risk, women less. You can see that in Israel, and in Obama’s political agenda.

Livni represents the less risk-taking course. It’s more of the same, the same type of action that minimizes snubs at Davos, or condemnation at the UN, and so on. Seeking a “path to peace.” Wanting social approval of the world at large.

If however it becomes so obvious that this course of action is a total failure and only major departures from that policy avert disaster, then yes female support for Livni evaporates.

You can see that in analysis of election returns. The “New Girl Order” segments in Tel Aviv voted for Livni. Those rocketed voted for Lieberman. The rest, fearing rocketing more than social disapproval, voted for Netanyahu.

I see a similar breakdown in the way Americans will react to Obama’s plan. More men than women are losing their jobs. Men are more concentrated in Engineering and Manufacturing positions, while women are more concentrated in Advertising/Marketing, Legal, Medical, etc professions which will be the last hit. Layoffs hit male-oriented positions first, because it’s more PC to fire men (a measure of women’s social/consumer/political power), and because these jobs are more variable in the first place.

If Israel is seeing a raw, gender based struggle on the need to survive versus the need to be politically correct (social approval/status), America is at least as likely to see that struggle replicated on an economic level. And for men it’s likely to be much worse. They are likely to suffer more economically, sooner, and have catastrophic loss of attraction to the opposite sex based on loss of money/power. Women of course are either attractive or not, status matters relatively little.

Obama has to deliver, soon, for men or he loses them. Decisively. And forever. Obama can play to a female audience longer, as they will face less economic pressure and face less costs sooner. Women have more demographic and social power than men, are valued by consumer products companies more, and have a consistent preference for the status-quo.

Eventually, however, real costs and more particularly the costs of doing the conventional wisdom become blazingly obvious. If Iran gets nukes, with a test, then even the status-obsessed PC women of Tel Aviv can figure out they will be politically correct and high status, but dead in an Iranian attack. Even Obama’s mostly female supporters can see they will be poor when the money runs out, there is no more welfare spending, and printing money gets Venezuelan hyperinflation.

Arranged marriages? Please the idea is revolting and an abolition of everything the West stands for. Basically, the West is seeing the problem of too much wealth, power, for too long, and the weakness (too much excessive avoidance of risk by women) that wealth brings.

Women will change, probably quite a bit, in attitudes, as their attitudes towards risk inherent in the “New Girl Order” of Hymnowitz in City Journal changes.

As we can see with both Israeli election results and Obama’s spendulus, sometimes the biggest risk is more of the conventional wisdom. We are probably also seeing the limits of the ability of the conventional wisdom leaders to play to the female desire for risk-avoidance. If every course is seen as risky, the prudent management of risk, the “prudently bold” leader rejecting conventional wisdom but with a plan that might work, is seen by women as well as men as the better choice.

An example would be Golda Meir. Who approved the Six Day War as the most prudently bold choice in a sea of bad choices.

Feb 11, 2009 - 4:14 pm 85. Jay:

I am getting more and more impressed with “whiskey” ideas. How else can one explain the vote for the bird lady Lipsi in the Israeli election yesterday. She is a nothing that Erik Sharon dragged into his bizarre coalition Kadima which means “forward”. Sharon is a brain dead and the bird lady is not so far but she walks and talk nonsense.
Tel Avis metro voted for her over Likud. They did not get any missiles. Now the distance from Gaza is a days walk.
If the Israeli voters are so out of touch with reality what can we expect of our brain dead academics and stoonz.

Feb 11, 2009 - 4:20 pm 86. wireline:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

Feb 11, 2009 - 4:31 pm 87. Peter Boston:

In recent history, we have seen those who were reluctant to stand up to the Japanese, the Germans, the Russian Soviet empire, the North Vietnamese/Chinese – and now the Moslem assault, in its various forms, on the West.

Is it a psychological issue (eg masochism, which implies a sexual excitement in being dominated – or an enacted suicidal impulse), is it plain cowardice, is it a kind of hatred for one’s own culture or nation? Or is it really just a unicorn and rainbow dreaminess about life (which I tend to view as a psychological defense based in denial of the hard and often cruel reality that people pursue their interests)? I have seem much of the latter, especially in women and in young men who haven’t really worked yet.

From Dr. Joy Bliss at Maggies Farm

What I get out of that is that adolescents (including Dear Leader) are steering the ship of state.

Feb 11, 2009 - 4:52 pm 88. orlandoslug:

Wretchard, you’re onto something – that is, in your comment that the whole thing cannot currently be accurately modelled; therein lies the problem…

what with globalization and all the many leveraged instruments eminating from so many places, it’s nigh onto impossible to get an accurate picture of what’s lurking out there…that’s why a whole new technology needs to be implemented, not only to help keep the financial system on an even keel in the future; but also, so that we can assess the magnitude of the current problem…
I’ve been sitting back wondering why they didn’t just back all the dodgy mortgages – at least they’d have a house as collateral, admittedly at a lesser value; but, at least all the mortgages (with tangible asset)along with the any asset (for instance mortgage backed securities) which were based upon them would be sound. No problem – Fannie & Fred problem taken care of…

…until you start searching for the sheer magnitude of the problem – I believe Karl Rove said that the order of magnitude of the dodgey mortgages was on the order of $1 trillion dollars; I’ve also heard that a typical leverage ratio of 1:30 bantered about. I may be off, but if that’s correct that creates about $30 trillion of shakey assets, just based on the mortgages…
…then you start hearing about all kinds of other leveraged instruments and start thinking about that derivatives trader in Singapore about 4 years back and it makes one wonder about just how leveraged our economy really is?
…and that leads to the problem coming out of the mouths of the politicians; if we have a problem, and you’re potentially putting us on the hook for said problem (low balling how much we may be guaranteeing), what is the size of the problem?
then you have to ask yourself in this day and age of globalization, if you let the idiots that allowed the leverization to take place in the first place to bite the dust, just who will you be screwing?

it’s as if everyone hopes that if we can just keep the music playing that eventually everything will work itself out…
…I keep thinking about riding bumper cars at the fair, with the gas pedal as the currency pump – we’re betting the farm that we can stay on the accellerator until the last moment and then hit the brake and avoid hitting hyper-inflation and cataclysmic currency devaluations – all because we don’t have a grip on exactly what’s going on, and having too few tools in our shed to deal with a complex problem that is viewed from the perspective of an over-simplified model…

…so we come full circle to what Wretchard has said: just how to model such a complex system

…I believe that it will take not only a program on the order of what is currently used to predict weather (which has become increasingly accurate over the years); but may also require a central registry, if none currently exists, so that a system of registering the many varied transactions and leveraged assets can be tracked

Feb 11, 2009 - 4:59 pm 89. Bob Murphy:

62. Eggplant:
Humouring them is called appeasement, Eggplant.

I told my last live in galfriend, on her way out after she had descended into a perfect storm of drug, tobacco and alcohol dependency and menopause, “Next time I want something to pat I’ll get a dawg”.

The dawg is 5 years old.

It all gets easier as I get older and reason and awareness become more important.

Feb 11, 2009 - 5:09 pm 90. twobyfour:

@ 28. Eggplant:

“I think there are too many people on this planet. I also think that trying to maintain an economy by burning fossils is insane. Over civilization will not recover until the world’s population has been knocked down to a sustainable amount (less than two billion)…

Hogwash. The overpopulation part, that is. As for burning carbon fuels, agreed (not all carbon fuels are fossil, I’d argue, shale oil would be in that category). The nuclear energy is severely under-utilized. In France, it comprises about 75% of energy generation. At least in that regard, Frogs are quite progressive. With modular pellet based nuclear plants available, there should not be any energy crisis for a foreseeable future.

Feb 11, 2009 - 5:09 pm 91. Bob Murphy:

The big question to me is whether it is possible for anxiety and reason to coexist in the same mind, and possibly when as in under what conditions (presuming the first is possible).

Feb 11, 2009 - 5:12 pm 92. blert:

Nanosolar is on track to make solar electricity:
# cost-efficient for ubiquitous deployment
# mass-produced on a global scale
# available in many versatile forms.

Nanosolar has developed proprietary process technology that makes it possible to produce 100x thinner solar cells 100x faster.

Watch videos by CNN, KQED, CNBC, PBS NOVA to see how we can simply roll-print thin-film solar cells.

Our first product, the Nanosolar Utility Panel™, is the industry’s first panel specifically designed for optimal utility-scale systems economics.

The above from their website…

They expect to hit $ 990 per kWatt of capacity. That’s well underneath the installed cost of a coal plant at a mine mouth. Of course, you wouldn’t need the coal, but you would need some energy storage mechanism.

Feb 11, 2009 - 5:13 pm 93. Eggplant:

RWE said:

“I am one of those of the opinion that the hydrocarbons on Earth as well as those Out There come from the process of formation of the planets rather than Fred Flintstone’s septic tank and the town of Bedrock’s yard rakings. It’s hard to explain the biggest planet in the solar system being made out of compacted smog, otherwise.”

We are fairly certain that Saturn’s moon Titan never had life on it (way too cold). The composition of Titan’s atmosphere is a function of altitude. The Wikipedia formula reported for Titan’s atmospheric chemical composition [mole fraction] is:

N2 98.4%
CH4 1.6%

The Wikipedia acticle on Titan is fascinating and worth a read. There is evidence from the Cassini Spacecraft that Titan has lakes of liquid ethane.

RWE was mistaken about Jupiter’s atmospheric composition. The main components of Jupiter’s atmosphere are hydrogen and helium in roughly the same quantities as the Sun’s composition:

H2 86.41%
He 13.59%

The Wikipedia values for Jupiter are incorrect. The 13.59% mole concentration for helium was measured in-situ by the Galileo Probe through two different instruments and is a bullet proof result. There are trace quantities of hydrocarbons in Jupiter’s atmosphere (less than a percent). Those trace quantities are what gives Jupiter its colorful band structure and makes the Great Red Spot red. An interesting aspect about Jupiter’s atmosphere is the planet has huge convection cells where material is transported from near the atmosphere’s top where we can see it to deep within the atmosphere where the temperatures are thousands of degrees Kelvin. The atmospheric gases are broken down into monatomic gas while deep within the atmosphere and then recombine into more complex molecules as the material convects to the higher altitudes and allowed to cool.

Feb 11, 2009 - 5:22 pm 94. Eggplant:

twobyfour said:

“Hogwash. The overpopulation part, that is”

We’re killing the Earth’s oceans through fairly innocuous forms of pollution (fertilizer runoff) and over-fishing because they’re are too many of us. Moonbats like to hyper-ventilate about global warming but the damage that we are doing to the ocean is real.

Feb 11, 2009 - 5:31 pm 95. Tony:

It had to happen, sooner or later. Beyond Man’s Odds, the Impossible happens in the Real World.

Two Satellites Collide –

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/11/AR2009021103387.html

Two communications satellites collided yesterday 491 miles above Siberia, exploding in two clouds of debris … According to NASA, one was an an Iridium satellite launched in 1997; the other was a Russian Cosmos satellite launched in 1993 and presumed to be non-operational. … Said Humphries: “It gets down to probabilities. Space being very big, these pieces of debris being very small, the odds are very high that they’re not going to collide.”

Feb 11, 2009 - 5:35 pm 96. Eggplant:

Tony:

It’s happened before. The Mir space station got whacked multiple times and was pretty beat up before it reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. The Challenger Space Shuttle got a star in its windshield when a tiny fleck of paint hit it at 7.8 km/sec. I’d be scared stupid as a space walking astronaut worrying about whether I would get hit by a fleck of paint and my pressure suit punctured.

The astronauts are very brave men and women. An interesting bit of trivia: Some of the astronauts who died on the Space Shuttle Columbia didn’t have their helmets on during reentry. They were so devil-may-care that they figured (correctly) that the pressure suits wouldn’t save them so why bother.

Feb 11, 2009 - 5:54 pm 97. Tony:

Thanks Eggie,

The coolest thing about pilots is that they know exactly where the edge is, where the aircraft stalls and gravity takes over … the cool thing is that they still keep nudging the stick and dancing on the rudders until they actually….

That’s how they roll.

In this case, maybe that old Sov satellite still had a little thruster juice, this was an unprecedented mass on mass collision, two intact satellites intersecting in the dark vasty.

Feb 11, 2009 - 6:01 pm 98. Ed Driscoll » Quote Of The Day:

[...] Kurtz, as spotted by Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club Filed under: Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, Muggeridge’s Law, Oh, That Liberal [...]

Feb 11, 2009 - 6:01 pm 99. PA Cat:

The MSM whitewash machine is back on spin cycle: AP reporting “Stocks End Higher on Agreement on Stimulus Bill”:

“News late in the session that key lawmakers agreed on a $790 billion economic stimulus plan sent stocks moderately higher in a partial rebound from a plunge Tuesday that took the Dow Jones industrials down 382 points. Stocks meandered for much of Wednesday’s trading as investors struggled for a second day over what to make of developments in Washington.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090211/ap_on_bi_st_ma_re/wall_street

The “partial rebound”? 50 points.

Feb 11, 2009 - 6:26 pm 100. marymcl:

whiskey@78 ~ “I don’t propose to do anything since it’s up to women to force social change if they want to. Or probably more accurately, women will change or not depending on a confluence of economic, social, and security factors that can be increased or decreased in outcomes based on female leadership and initiative.”

So this is what it all boils down to, huh? You don’t have to be responsible for anything? Honestly, your posts are like one of those Irish serpents that ties itself into seventy-five knots and eats its own tail.

And you don’t get to wander off with Golda Meir on your arm. I don’t believe she acted as she did because of any convoluted mental gymnastics compelled by the irresistable social forces of the past fifty years or whatever it is you’re running with here. This is what she said in the 1972 interview with Oriana Fallaci (from Interview with History, p.119)

“…But I think that women, more than men, possess a capacity that helps in doing this job. It’s that of going right to the essence of things, of taking the bull by the horns. Women are more practical, more realistic. They don’t dissipate themselves in mystifications like men, who always beat around the bush trying to get to the heart of the matter.”

Feb 11, 2009 - 6:32 pm 101. outa my league:

Whiskey,

If our best hope in this country is a Military Coup, then it had best happen in a hurry, before the females take over the Military.

Feb 11, 2009 - 6:45 pm 102. geoffgo:

blert @ 90

I am not opposed to solar. Use it for your house. It does not scale to the task, and may never. I simply ask that it be correctly defined…it’s only sporatically renewable energy, doesn’t serve the nightitme, or cloudy days. It only works optimally in a small portion of the country. And the storage technology isn’t up to the task. The meantime-to-failure is about 2 years for the batteries. They are very expensive and maintenance intense. And they’re very dirty.

To power Manhatten, you’d need several million acres of arrays. Whose backyard will they cover? How many batteries in one place for 5GW at midnight?

There more area where solar won’t work, than will. It’s only additive to the grid, and has to be subsidized. And, it’s not PORTABLE. It can solve only a tiny fraction of the energy problem.

Feb 11, 2009 - 6:47 pm 103. Mongoose:

Well here is something interesting…

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D969LTSO0&show_article=1

Look for Obama to go after Republicans like no administration ever before.

Serious, I feel like I am living in Brazil or Russia.

It is like we have changed into a different coun try in 3 weeks.

Can it go on like this?

Feb 11, 2009 - 6:49 pm 104. JFSanders:

The supposed problem with women is a nonstarter. They will unbreed themselves out of the population. Or there will be “bad luck” and they will see the error of their ways.

The planet is a closed system. Except for cosmic energy input. What is here for the most part was here at the beginning. We are not killing the oceans or anything else. Yes we cause localized mutation in ecological cycles. These are only temporary. See the reforestation of the Amazon jungle and the regreening of Detroit. Humans think too highly of themselves. We have not evolved into planet destroyers of star trek fame. Nor are we likely to.

We should be looking for a free market solution. The most prudent one would be to insist that our elected officials do nothing to support bad decisions by greedy people. Secondly, It should be a capital crime to betray the public trust. There will be no healing until the public begins to trust in the system and its admins.

Charlie should be laughing. He just got a free pass and kept his position on the ways and means committee. Now if he had a pack a day habit like O does. That would be sweet…

Jim

Feb 11, 2009 - 7:06 pm 105. Ben Franklin:

I don’t see how the republic survives this presidency. Obama has insured that we will be insolvent for the next two generations at a minimum and he is only a few weeks into his administration.

What does it matter whether he gets his domestic army and all the rest after this? We have long since passed the point of no return and people are simply giving up and dropping out of the economy because they want no part of it. Why would anyone invest in a business or stock in the US when it can be ruined at the whim of the US government?

I would suggest that we come up with some sort of secret sign we can make to each other like the ancient Christians were purported to do. Perhaps one person making an “S” on the ground and the other drawing a line through it? I also suggest that everyone read as much as possible about how people survived behind the Iron Curtain without drawing the notice of the secret police. It’s coming. All of it is coming, from energy rationing, to restraints of speech,to civilian armies, to nationalization of any industry that does not follow orders. They are not even bothering to hide it anymore.

There is no counterbalancing force anywhere on the planet pushing in the direction of liberty. We shall all walk into the fire arm in arm this time.

Other than that everything is just peachy!

Feb 11, 2009 - 7:19 pm 106. NahnCee:

RWE said “Here is my 2 cents worth – take all the Stimulus money and have the Playboy company run reeducation camps for them.”

And my immediate reaction on behalf of ladies all over the world, “Cool! Manolo Blahniks for everyone!” An utmost priority would be to re-educate the Birkenstock wearers of the world. (Can we also re-educate men and take away their Nikes in favor of something Italian?)

As to women taking over the military, are we agreed that women are allowed to be stupid sometimes too? Just as stupid as men, I mean. General Janet, for example, was in charge at Abu Ghraib.

If there *is* a problem with women it’s being born and raised with a Madison Avenue body image of Barbie to aspire towards. As long as we have a thriving plastic surgery industry there will be a problem with both men and women striving to perfect their physical appearance because we’re told that so much depends upon the first impression. If we want to be successful.

That again comes from having enough money to have breast implants, tummy tucks and collegen lip injections. They’re supposed to make you happy and successful, but I wonder how much of the same sources fund these surgeries as have been funding housing for poor credit risks.

If and when the Apocalypse comes, women will suddenly discover that their breast implants don’t do a lot of good towards their survival unless they want to become a prostitute. But then men will discover at the very same time that the skills involved in being an investment banker don’t actually put food on the table either.

So again, I just can’t see where the feminization of reality television is more to blame for the decline of American society than dishonest DC politicians and rude Wall Street Masters of the Universe and bullying environmental professors.

Feb 11, 2009 - 7:29 pm 107. Mongoose:

Ben, I am with you. and not one shot fired? how is this possible?

The speed of it. Obama ony got 52% and he “ran as a centrist”, or at least that is what the “muddle” thought. He was not elected to stage a Communist Coup.
What is America really thinking out there? Am I totally wrong in my sense of the country? Does not something have to give?

And Ben, this is just the beginning. They will be back for more.

Oh, and here is some wonderful news for the EU

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/4593539/European-banks-toxic-debts-risk-overwhelming-EU-governments.html

Makes one almost believe in the Illuminati. It is as though the Socialists are willfully trying to crash the system.

Feb 11, 2009 - 7:33 pm 108. Leo Linbeck III:

I believe the most logical explanation for a $550 billion money market withdrawal is a classic “run on the bank,” with a modern twist. Here’s how it might have happened:

Large corporations have two big levers they use for managing cash: commercial paper and sweep accounts. Here’s a very simple, brief primer on these cash management tools:

Commercial Paper

Commercial paper is unsecured, very-short-term debt issued by corporations. It is used primarily to manage working capital, that money used to run the financial parts of a business. Here’s the way CP works:

A corporate executive (usually the Treasurer or the Chief Financial Officer) looks at the cash needs of the organization for some short time period, say the next 2-4 weeks. Let’s sat the company has $50M of payables to vendors that are due in the next 30 days. It also has $75M of receivables from customers that will be paid in the next 30-60 days. For simplicity, let’s say that today the company has no cash in the bank.

The company would then sell $50M of CP with a term of, say, 60 days. (CP terms range from 1 to 270 days max.) The buyers are typically other companies that have a temporary cash surplus – an example would be a company that has cash of $100M that it will need in, say, 90 days. It could buy CP to earn interest on the cash until it needs it, and the interest rate would be higher than a bank would pay. (You can think of CP as a way to directly connect, at very low cost, lenders and borrowers – this is the role that banks play, but they have a higher cost structure.)

So, after selling $50M of CP, our company pays its vendors with the cash over the next 30 days. Once again, it has no cash. But then its customers begin making payments, and at the end of 60 days it has $75M of cash. The company then uses this cash to pay back the $50M of CP that it sold (plus interest), and everything is hunky dory. But what if customers paid more slowly, and at the end of 60 days the company has only collected $30M of cash? The way the CP market works is that the company would then “roll” its CP, paying back $30M and selling another $20M of new CP, perhaps with a 15 day term. The rest of the cash comes in, and the final CP traunche is retired.

Anyway, the point is that large corporations were huge issuers and buyers of CP. It was the cash lifeblood of large corporations. It was also very efficient, since you could effectively manage more business activity with less overall cash. It was as if large corporations pooled their working capital, which made everyone more efficient, much in the way people pool their risk when buying insurance.

In addition to other corporations, money market funds were huge buyers of commercial paper (more on them below).

The CP market is typically divided into financial (banks, both commercial [Fed-regulated] and investment [non-Fed-regulated]) and non-financial firms. Traditionally, financial firms were the largest users of CP. In the past 10 years, with the tremendous growth of the financial sector, financial firms have been much larger issuers, essentially using CP as a way to borrow short-term.

Finally, to give you a sense of scale, the amount of CP outstanding at financial firms in mid-2008 was about $800 billion

Sweep Accounts

Sweep accounts are a very common way for companies to manage cash. The basic principle is best demonstrated with a simple example of two accounts: think of one as your checking account and one as your savings account. The two accounts are linked electronically in a way that when you write a check from the checking account, if there is not enough money to cover the check, the bank automatically transfers enough cash from the savings account to clear the check. This makes sense to do because savings accounts earn more money than checking accounts – there is a prohibition on paying interest on business checking accounts, so you want to keep as much in savings as you can.

These are widely used with the “checking” account being a domestic bank account and the “savings” account being a money-market fund. The accounts are generally not automatically linked; rather, the Treasurer figures out how much money they’ll need that day, and if they don’t have enough cash they place an order with the bank to transfer funds from the money market account. Generally, this determination is made the evening before, or early morning, before the markets open.

The money market funds used in sweep accounts were huge buyers of commercial paper. So the MM and CP markets were closely linked.

Finally, to give you a sense of scale, the amount of money market funds in mid-2008 was about $4 trillion.

So, with this as background, here’s what I think happened.

On 14 September 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Lehman was a huge player in the CP market, both as an agent (through its Lehman Commercial Paper, Inc. subsidiary) and as a borrower. Large amounts of Lehman CP was held by money market funds.

The Lehman bankruptcy put the fear of God into the CP market. Basically, the market for commercial paper failed – new issuances stopped, companies couldn’t roll over their paper, and the amount of CP outstanding fell by about $300 billion. Note that this didn’t happen instantly, because longer-dated paper took a while to expire, and when it couldn’t be rolled it was paid off. But make no mistake about it: once Lehman failed, the trading stopped.

So, the morning of 15 September, financial firms all around the world had to face the brutal facts: there would be no more CP. This represented a double-whammy:

1. You couldn’t raise any more cash with CP. The market was gone.
2. Your money market funds – which were your backup source of liquidity – were at risk because you knew they held lots of CP, and you couldn’t be sure they would get repaid, and if they didn’t get repaid, neither would you.

The result is that a huge chunk of Wall Street – damn near everyone – put in redemption orders for money market funds. They wanted cash, they wanted it now, and only cash would do. Once they got the cash, they turned around and bought US Treasuries, driving down the yield (yield on T-BIlls that day fell from 1.34% to 0.243% – a staggering decline). The funds were unprepared for this fast a run, and didn’t have the cash. This meant that the financial industry was in danger of a liquidity-driven meltdown.

The Fed responded by opening their window to money market funds. The funds, then, could take their assets, including outstanding CP, to the Fed and borrow cash to handle their redemptions.

This kept the market from imploding, but it completely unnerved everyone involved. CP markets remained closed, money market funds continued to get hit with redemptions, took their cash and invested in Treasuries. Basically, everyone lost confidence in CP and money market funds, and parked their cash in Treasuries.

Since then, things have stabilized; the Fed’s intervention in the CP market as a buyer-of-last-resort has resuscitated its activity, and money markets have regained their footing. The Fed did an excellent job of stabilizing a very unstable situation. But it was a scary run on the bank, at a scale unseen in the past.

Sooooo, that’s my read of what happened. No nefarious Soros plot. No coordinated Sino-Russian conspiracy. Just an old-fashioned panic.

Feb 11, 2009 - 7:55 pm 109. Mongoose:

thanks, L3. You are invaluable.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:03 pm 110. twobyfour:

@ 92 Eggplant

Fertilizer runoff:
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15630360

So, that seems not to be that much of a problem. More fytoplankton = more food for them fishies.

Overfishing:
Response – fish nurseries, ponds
The Czechs figgered that out in 13th century when they created a lots of artificial ponds for carp production, being a landlocked country. These ponds produce carp and catfish still to this day. It is also way cheaper than fishing in the open ocean.

Yes, resources are finite, if you let them!

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:15 pm 111. twobyfour:

L3, yea, that is more than very likely. I initially introduced that topic on another thread not as a guaranteed sorosian/illuminati conspiracy, but a pattern that may be repeated in a deliberate fashion for a specific purpose (to bring US economy crashing down) if someone(s) can pull it off.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:28 pm 112. twobyfour:

@ 105 Mongoose

It is as though the Socialists are willfully trying to crash the system.

Nope, it’s their nature. Mental aberration => Garbage premises => Logical fallacies => wrecking by default.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:33 pm 113. Al Reasin:

As I commented at Q&O: I fear stagflation or worse hyperinflation. I don’t see how we can get enough people/companies/countries to buy our bonds to cover $1.5 trillion in spending (plus interest) and the regular budget deficit. To do so the interest rate return will have to be increased which will cause problems in our economy. Already interest rates reportedly have risen 0.94% because of the prospect of a February sale of bonds.
¼br /> I have yet to hear anyone discuss the impact of inflation/rising interest rates on ARM’s. We had few of those in our worse modern recession in 1981-82 with its very high inflation peaking at 14.76 in 1980 and unemployment peaking in 1982 at 10.8%. The worse misery index, inflation plus unemployment, was 21.98% in June 1980.

Today so many 2nd mortgages are ARM’s and as are a high percentage of 1st mortgages. Some ARM’s now have a 2.48% interest rate and people supposedly can’t make the mortgage payments. What will it be like when they rise to 10% or more. My fixed mortgage in 1975 was 9.5% with inflation over 9% and in 1974 inflation was over 11%. So if we think we have mortgage defaults now, wait until interest rates skyrocket.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:38 pm 114. Mongoose:

2×4: I am withholding judgement

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:38 pm 115. Leo Linbeck III:

2×4,

Point taken.

My only problem with the single actor hypothesis is simply scale. $500B is an enormous amount of liquid assets. I don’t think there is any individual player – not even the Saudis – who keep around that kind of liquidity.

It is certainly possible to spark a panic with much less money – sort of a butterfly effect – especially if you had a reputation; so a Soros hypothesis is not nuts, just seems really unlikely to me.

But you certainly shouldn’t take my hypothesis as any more than an educated guess; I don’t work on Wall Street, and don’t have any special or inside information. All of the data I cite is either from the WSJ Markets Data site or the Federal Reserve or some other public source via Google. It would take someone working inside the Fed or one of the big banks to verify what really happened.

Cheers.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:58 pm 116. Lone Summit:

Whiskey
Sorry to dissappoint you but the Golda Meir example actually disproves you.She was PM during the Yom Kippur War.Military Intelligence hadbeen hammering her for at least 3 months about the UAR intentions to invade Israel.She had a”willing suspension of disbelief”with the results of a surprise invasion when the whole IDF had furloughs.Seems to me the “NGO” risk inherent attitude is
that its easier to wear a burqa tan to have ameaningful and productive life.

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:59 pm 117. pendejo grande:

I remember reading Anne Applebaum’s book, “Gulag”, several years back. And one of the points made was that one of the ways in which prisoners managed to survive was by pretending to work while actually resting and conserving their energy. They got away with it because the guards were only pretending to watch them and therefore had to fudge the production records in order that no one would come looking over their shoulders to find out why production was nil. The commandants forwarded the fudged production records on up the line without reviewing them because they didn’t want to get out of the office to go see if the guards really were watching the prisoners who really were working. And on and on. The whole of Soviet society functioned basically the same way.

How in the hell is what’s going on with our banking and financial systems any different. No one knows what’s really going on and no one wants to pull back the curtain and find out.

And very few ever bothered to escape from the gulag simply because you would only be escaping from one prison into another. Is this our future?

Feb 11, 2009 - 8:59 pm 118. twobyfour:

L3,

Of course not by a single actor. It would require many nodes and good psyops to start the cascade.

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:11 pm 119. Eggplant:

Mongoose@ 105:

The Telegraph article that you linked was scary. Looks like the Europeans are even more screwed up than the Americans (didn’t think that was possible). It occurred to me that even if we pulled ourselves out of toilet, we could get sucked back in again following the wake of the Europeans. I was reading somewhere that the situation in Japan is terrifying. Supposably their industrial output is collapsing at an amazing rate. The world’s economy maybe on the verge of thermal run away.

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:16 pm 120. twobyfour:

@ 115. pendejo grande:

People were not escaping gulags because of exchanging a prison for another one. It would be like exchanging the high security hellhole for a prison with a weekend leave.

People were not leaving because of the isolation and almost guaranteed death sentence, by either hunger when getting lost, by animal predation, or when caught by guards.

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:18 pm 121. whiskey:

Mary — oddly enough, women don’t like being told what to do. Anything men tell them they generally ignore. Women generally don’t care about what Men in general think, however female social networks are intensely oriented towards consensus and female opinion makers. In any event, women will like men act in their own best interest. So far, that has been Obama and Livni.

Meir’s generation of women was far different than that of todays. First off, they had direct experience (or that of their parents) of genocide, something most Israeli women don’t feel a credible threat unless rockets land among their kids. For example, to pull a name out of a hat, a woman like Bar Rafeali, Israeli supermodel, stated she felt no attachment emotional or intellectual to Israel. Such a public profession of “citizen of the world” would have been unthinkable a mere twenty years from the Holocaust. It is today quite common among the glamorous sophisticated of Tel Aviv.

Women are indeed far different, in that they are single most of their lives, increasingly single mothers, and marriage if it happens at all, occurs far later in life. In the 1960’s most women in the developed world got married in their twenties. They now get married in their mid to late thirties. That’s a profound shift because what has happened is both simple and devastating.

Women now spend most of their time on their social networks, positioning, fashionable opinions (Obama being the biggest and latest fad) and so on. If your primary social orientation is toward a female social network, then voting Livni or being in favor of Obama’s fashionable economic “spendulus” makes perfect sense.

Trying to change women while this is happening is like Canute at the sea. You can give your commands, they will be futile.

If you have a husband, and children, you have far different concerns, your old female friends fall away, the center of your life is your own family. Not concerns that you will be thought uncool because you voted the “incorrect” way or have the wrong shoes.

Meir was quite correct about women being more practical, but this only occurs when they are married and have children, and removed from the Yuppie status wars. Taking direct care of a vomiting three year old tends to bring things to the point. Playing in the Yuppie status wars tends to turn people into shallow Yuppie status snobs with fights over PC orthodoxy worse than any male priesthood. This has an effect on men too, but it’s most strong in women.

Outa my league — Women don’t like the military. They tend to avoid it, in the main. It’s a volunteer military. Women don’t really comprise much of it. There’s probably more Code Pink members than say, female pilots in the military (including transport, helicopter, etc.).

Nahncee — Women’s power is both commercial and social as well as political. Ford in China is targeting … young women, not young men, for the Fiesta. It’s a sign of where the money is. Which tends to follow or correlate with power. Even in China, of all places.

What’s wrong with women is simple: they are single consumerist yuppie status warring folks for far too long, creating in their wake either a few dominant player types and eternal man-boys. That breeds PC. Barbie btw does not make women get breast implants … it’s older women still in the mating game wanting an advantage over younger, prettier rivals for the few dominant, desirable men. Indeed the beauty industry, which is three times larger globally than the global arms industry, is evidence of women seeking technological help to be prettier longer in competition for a few men.

The cause of extended singlehood is of course blindingly obvious: the pill, condom, anonymous urban living, and rising female incomes. Changing ingrained female-male behaviors will only happen when living becomes less anonymous, and incomes decline. I doubt contraception can or should be banned or made more expensive. I think it unwise to proscribe “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche.” I don’t think most women pursuing an endless consumerism driving PC and a deep desire for status quo risk avoidance is wise either. YMMV.

Obama’s play is clearly to keep his female followers happy, and he does not see IMHO a great danger. Not of Republicans suddenly sweeping to power but a guy less stable than Perot, angrier, and more charismatic sweeping to power through men cut out of the money train. Which in any event will go to only a few, not a major patronage network. When Robert Reich talks about keeping White Men from getting any employment or money from the spendulus, and Nancy Pelosi and Rangel nod along, that’s an extended form of political seppuku. It might play to the largely anti-White Man sentiment of the Democratic coalition, women, gays, non-Whites, and so on. But it’s dumb economics and worse politics.

Because people with no stake in the system tend to roll the dice for anything.

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:19 pm 122. buddy larsen:

but L3, it’s what killed LEH that is so far out –the auction-rate securities, the accellerating feed ever-more-bogus investment-grade from F&F into burgeoning supplies of 40:1 tranches pushed until they blew. after which, bank panics and stock price turmoil wouldrun on automatic.

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:45 pm 123. bob:

It’s a big task, but I’m bound to do it, though it’s going to take me a few days.

I’ve been re-reading my Joseph Campbell, and came across a part about ‘The Supernormal Image’ in his book about our Primitive Philosophy.

It kind of hit me tonight as to what a deep idea that is.

He makes mention of a species of butterfly that mates with the darkest of its kind, and always goes for the very darkest.

From this, he makes an argument, since there doesn’t seem to be any real survival benefit in this behavior, to the idea that there is such a drive ‘in the nature of things’–a pull from the ‘front’ or a ‘push from hehind’–whatever you might call it–the idea being there is always something ‘more’.

Always something more built into the nature of things.

If there is anyone that knows more about this than I do, I’d be delighted to hear from you.

It seems to me that it may be an idea that puts economics and state relationships in their proper perspective.

And put Whiskey at the back of the class.

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:53 pm 124. bob:

I call this “thought”.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:01 pm 125. Walt:

Whiskey thinks the world would be
A better place without ‘em
I can’t believe that he can’t see
The beauty that’s about ‘em
I know they can infuriate
Not doing what they oughter
But I can very definitely state
He’s not talking ’bout my daughter

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:05 pm 126. JFSanders:

Buddy and LEOIII, When LEH went to the bench they had approx. 20billion in assets over their debts. What caused them to leave the field? The FRE and FME default ratio? And that they were the largest mortgage bank with exposure to that toxic ocean? That it was growing faster by the week? Seems to me that Fuld was in possession of an ego large enough to think he could save it before ground contact. But the .gov boys didn’t throw a life line??? But extended one to Merrill Lynch? Am I the only one who thinks we would be better off doing nothing and letting the asswhipping commence on all those involved. You know once burned twice shy and all that.

Jim

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:09 pm 127. Triton'sPolarTiger:

It’s amazing how this site has stayed so incredibly informative for so long – thanks all for providing me with such a fabulous bit of continuing education. Oh, and tuition is waaaay low compared to the value of the information gleaned. Thanks Wretch

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:47 pm 128. Lifeofthemind:

Lehman was a Jewish firm, Merrill Lynch was not. The lords of the Democratic Party let LEH go to the wall.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:47 pm 129. buddy larsen:

triton, what’s the smallest a nuclear power plant can efficiently be? In terms of households it can spark up? just a guess, don’t haul out your slide rule and geiger counter.

LotM, in the case of the unified field theory, that would qualify as “what we are supposed to think”.

instead, observe this:

Weird article, he wrote a couple weeks ago in FT.

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:15 pm 130. buddy larsen:

http://americaswatchtower.com/2008/10/15/are-george-soros-and-the-democrats-manipulating-the-economy-for-political-gain-2/

Feb 11, 2009 - 11:57 pm 131. J Charles:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/hyperion-uranium-hydride-nuclear.html

Coming to your neighborhood soon?

Feb 12, 2009 - 12:02 am 132. Charles:

35. Roderick Reilly:

The Pentagon has already signed some major contracts here. Biomas production plants are springing up on military bases all over the country. Quoting from this article

According to Time Magazine.

India has set aside 100 million acres for jatropha and expects the oil to account for 20% of its diesal consumption by 2011.

The point here is that its possible that biofuels can make up oil supply shorfalls in 3-5 years and keep oil prices low. In the US “five million barrels of hydrocarbon fuel a day using biomass” would be a very good start toward pushing the US toward energy independence.

Of course, the pentagon already had this program in motion before obama was elected.

Feb 12, 2009 - 12:43 am 133. Fletcher Christian:

#100 geoffgo -

“To power Manhatten, you’d need several million acres of arrays. Whose backyard will they cover? How many batteries in one place for 5GW at midnight?”

Nobody’s, and none. There is a place where you can put millions of acres of solar arrays and get in nobody’s way, and where night never comes. It’s also a place where you can get the stuff to make those arrays, as well as astronomical (literally) amounts of everything else you care to name.

Where is that? Not very far away. In fact, about 120 miles away. The problem (a soluble one) is that those 120 miles are straight up.

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:20 am 134. Molon Labe:

OT: What are the chances of this being an accident?

I think Obama just got tested again.

Satellites Destroyed in Orbital Collision

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123438921888374497.html

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:20 am 135. Doug:

“We’re leaving Gitmo:
We’ll get back to you when we figure out how.

Were going to fix the Economy:
We’ll show you the plan in 2 weeks.”

Reminds me of less than stellar college students wrt upcoming finals.
NOT adults aware of the magnitude and importance of the responsibilities that come with the office they have so casually assumed.

Had GWB entered office equally unprepared, one cannot imagine the level of outrage and scorn.

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:25 am 136. dephine:

After reading the NYT regarding women’s sex dreams about Obama….women should not be allowed to vote. I haven’t read anything as stupid in all my life. Really, there’s no way Obama could have been elected without these women. Think about it. It’s really disgusting. I don’t have a problem with the sex part. I have a problem with women who are so stupid that they are actually having these kind of, “someday my prince will come” dreams. They are waiting for either their Prince or Daddy or whoever, I don’t know. Only women could be this stupid. Hey, I’m a woman, but the truth hurts. FOR THE MOST PART, having women in politics has been a total disaster. (Thank you, Nancy.) Think before you speak.

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:54 am 137. bob:

The women can only come so many times.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:08 am 138. Walt:

Dephine @133

Whiskey poses us a daunting thesis
An argument with which I must agree
When Mommy State implodes who gets the pieces
Is something I at present cannot see
In eighteen one a Brit named Alex Tytler
Proclaimed democracies not long to run
I hope his name rhymes not at all with Hitler
In any case he said that number one
Democracies last only ‘til the voters
Find out their votes breed governmental doles
He didn’t know that once invented motors
That women could be driven to the polls
They voted in the guys who’d give them power
They’re voting for them to this very day
They disengaged the cradle from the bower
And now we find we’ll soon have hell to pay
The Mommy State has fastened on our culture
But surely it has finally run its course
That shadow overhead is from a vulture
Just waiting for some unforgiving force
To put a noisy end to all this posing
To see such nonsense put at last to bed
I see this lefty chapter quickly closing
If lucky we shall not have many dead
The Mommy State will last until some tragic
Event now clearly seen as tipping point
Will clean the slate again as if by magic
And once again the men will run the joint

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:10 am 139. bob:

Then the morning after sets in, and the clean-up begins.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:14 am 140. bob:

Walt, you’re faster on the handle than I am.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:16 am 141. Mongoose:

This may be why they are “waiting” on announcing what the tarp 2 is really about

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/

look at some of the comment

So behind close doors they decide what banks they take over?

It is a coup. It is the destruction of everyone oin the establsihment that is not with them. Just beyond belief.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:22 am 142. bob:

I don’t have a problem with the sex part.

Of course not!

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:28 am 143. bob:

women should not be allowed to vote

A thought that has occured to bob, Whiskey, and many another or us.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:32 am 144. bob:

of us, I got too excited there.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:34 am 145. bob:

O, I could tell a tale of how the men took over from the women, from Joseph Campbell, back in the day, but I leave it for another day.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:39 am 146. PA Cat:

133 dephine

I doubt it’s women who keep returning such paragons of political virtue as Frank, Dodd, Murtha, Reid, Byrd, and Kennedy to Congress. In my experience, Folly is an equal opportunity employer.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:49 am 147. Doug:

83. Jay,
In the Israeli system, the conservatives outpolled Lipsi with two parties which will now form a coalition.
Other news of interest:

Holocaust survivors’ party teams up with pro-marijuana offshoot.

The Green Leaf Graduates, which split from the political party Aleh Yarok, best known for its advocacy of the legalization of cannabis, is making waves with its most recent announcement: a plan to incorporate the Holocaust Survivors Party.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:57 am 148. bob:

I don’t think Dephine is really a lady, I think she is really a man just making some stuff up.

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:05 am 149. Doug:

Perhaps she’s a TransCelestial.
—
Litter in orbit has increased in recent years, in part because of the deliberate breakups of old satellites. It’s gotten so bad that orbital debris is now the biggest threat to a space shuttle in flight, surpassing the dangers of liftoff and return to Earth. NASA is in regular touch with the Space Surveillance Network, to keep the space station a safe distance from any encroaching objects, and shuttles, too, when they’re flying.

“The collisions are going to be becoming more and more important in the coming decades,” Matney said.

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:37 am 150. Mongoose:

Bob: I would not be using Campbell as a historical reference, if I were you.

His books are mostly poems masked as “scholarly” works.

We was Bill Moyers “spritual” guru; that ought to tell you something.

He was an arch-liberal, and the sort things he puts out are rife with projection of the usual nonsense, albeit with more imagination and intelligence. It reads well, but it hardly can be held as a basis for understanding the world as it is or how it got to be there. It is a sort of “interpretive, modern paganism.” Lit Crit applied to the cultural and archeological residue of man’s assent.

Sort of an anti-ambrose.

His notion about a uniferm prehistoric matriarchy somehow overcome by men is hardly borne out by facts.

In any event, if wiskey is right, the women domnated society will quickly collapse, it will just be replaced b a more masculine and dynamic competitor.

The whole notion of a global civilization is one thing that will be destroyed by this comming depression. Even the national state may tear at the seam.

If it is severe enough, the social “advances” of the last 80 years could well be wiped out.

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:07 am 151. Mongoose:

uniform^

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:08 am 152. PA Cat:

I don’t think Dephine is really a lady, I think she is really a man just making some stuff up.

David Axelrod resurfacing?

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:10 am 153. Mongoose:

We waa^He was (need some coffee)

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:20 am 154. RattlerGator:

143. PA Cat

So true, so true.

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:28 am 155. bob:

The last thing Joe Campbell would want to be used by, if he was used by anything, would be a ‘historical reference’.

I don’t think you get it.

His books are mostly poems masked as “scholarly” works.

And what ’scholarly works’ do you want to be masked as poems?

I agree there is much poetry in Joe Campbell.

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:52 am 156. Unsk:

L3 seems to think the commercial paper market failed on 9-18 because of the Lehman failure as I understand it.

Buddy @ 128 hints at the working of a dark pool hedge fund, if I get it right.

Both have points. I think it’s possible that both could be partially right? Isn’t it possible once some of the dark pool hedge funds on 9-15 or is it 9-18? saw major weakness in the commercial paper markets so they decided to call some major hedge fund bets that such a thing might occur and purposely made matters infinitely worse.

Seems to me L3 is saying the play is just too big. I can see that. But I also can see by the L3 scenario that for all banks to react all in the same way in a one to two hour window some period of time later after Lehman goes down doesn’t quite make sense either. While the big banks did control a sizeable chunk of the money market securities market for their own purposes, I would guess the vast majority of the market for money market securities was in millions of smaller accounts which wouldn’t react that quickly. We are still not hearing the whole story here and may never will.

It does seem kind of funny that so many prominent political Dems would be working for Hedge funds where they seemingly have little expertise and while at the same time those same Democrats say that the hedge funds/Capitalists are the enemy of the people. It also seems that the Soros, Putin, Evil Democrat crowd was pressuring the financial system at multiple stress points over a fairly long period of time, hoping that at some point, one point would rupture and cause a crisis.

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:56 am 157. bob:

Joe told us all one thing we all know, but don’t know, and that is, we don’t know.

Neither did Jesus know, but rather lived out the meaning of his society, in his time and place.

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:56 am 158. bob:

So are you, Mongoose, going out on the ice, to tell me, bob. what the meaning of life is, and make it stick?

I doubt it.

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:02 am 159. bob:

I want to hear what the meaaning of life is, as explained by Mongoose.

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:06 am 160. bob:

But I have one idea, that may or may not be be true, and that is, there is a pull from the front.

Mongoose may accept it, or reject, as he will.

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:12 am 161. bob:

Bob: I would not be using Campbell as a historical reference, if I were you.

Thankfully, you’re not me.

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:19 am 162. I'm Just Plain Dumb:

All of this is going to end in war.

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:57 am 163. Fletcher Christian:

#140 bob – Most men shouldn’t be allowed to vote, either.

This will never fly – but a return to a voting age of 21 (at least) for most of the population would go a long way to undo some of the damage. The exceptions to this rule being anyone who puts himself or herself in harm’s way for others; obviously including military, but also police, firefighters and other emergency personnel.

I would also be inclined to say that anyone who depends on the government (local or national) for his livelihood should also have no vote – including welfare recipients but also civil service chair-warmers. The exception to this being the people mentioned above.

It will never happen, of course, barring a revolution in Heinlein style.

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:12 am 164. peterike:

@whiskey: Obama’s play is clearly to keep his female followers happy, and he does not see IMHO a great danger. Not of Republicans suddenly sweeping to power but a guy less stable than Perot, angrier, and more charismatic sweeping to power through men cut out of the money train.

The problem with this idea is that such a man would be blacked out by the media. Impossible for him to get any traction. And if he did the attack machine would kick into high gear. It’s like when Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary (was that 1980?). Before that he was treated as a joke. After that, it was full-bore attack mode labeling Buchanan a dangerous crank at best, a Nazi at worst. His candidacy was rapidly crushed. And that was before we had 24×7 news coverage.

Any truly republican (small R) person who made a splash on the scene would be marginalized in a heartbeat. For someone to have a chance they would have to be fabulously wealthy, rich enough to buy airtime to compensate for the attack dogs (assuming the nets would sell him the airtime). And as we’ve learned, the rich by and large do not have the slightest interest in keeping the republic.

Feb 12, 2009 - 7:07 am 165. dan:

Unsk describes my difficulty accepting the normal financial account of the bank run. L3 as always makes great points, but – although I hate to use the phrase – it’s “the timing.” $550 is certainly a colossal sum; it wasn’t one or three actors suddenly withdrawing $550 billion of their own cash. We’re taking about two hours here. It may be that ordinary mechanisms coalesced in a perfectly coordinated flurry of lever-pulling – I understand how closely these things are governed. Yet for some reason this isn’t enough to dispell the vague dread inspired by such (Keynesian) phrases as “Lenin said the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency…not one man in a million can diagnose it.” It may be that the tenor of the times inspire an untrustworthy paranoia, but something seems awfully odd about the whole house of cards, particularly if this run catalyzed the crisis in its present dimensions.

Speaking of that, I’m sure it’s been provided before, but could someone link us to a reasonable explanation of the supposed underlying exposure of mortgage misvaluation which – and it sounds reasonable – first caused it to dawn on the relevant imaginations that all these assets’ values and their associated risks were essentially unknown? We’d be much obliged. This financial stuff sucks, though, doesn’t it? I can’t wait to get back to missiles and the hordes of Asia.

Feb 12, 2009 - 7:29 am 166. marymcl:

whiskey – you start out making sense and then it devolves into a tug-of-war between condescension and envy.

Admittedly I’m a simple-minded person (not to mention a woman) but I don’t see much difference between an oligarchy of the non-rich and a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Seriously, taking away the vote from anyone who doesn’t meet a particulat set of prejudices is supposed to fix all our problems? I think we’re all going a little nuts here.

And whatever truth there is in whiskey’s basic premise (and I don’t deny it) and despite it’s obvious emotional appeal to other men, it only goes so far. As I’ve said before, it sheds a certain light on things but that’s it.If all the women in America dropped dead tomorrow the same problems would still be here and I daresay there’d be a few unexpected ones cropping up as well.

Feb 12, 2009 - 7:35 am 167. Charles:

if I understand whisky rightly, all he’s doing is trying to explain why it is that single (american) women tend to vote democratic and married (american) women tend to vote republican.
I’m not sure that this assertian is substantially different from the one that goes like this:
If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart.
If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.
– Winston Churchill
here are 20 more versions of the same thing from the 20th century

Feb 12, 2009 - 7:42 am 168. fred:

I can see only these solutions in our future: a change in government either (much preferably)by the ballot box or by revolution/civil war. And then the new government repudiates and repeals most of the socialism mandated by this current government. Repudiation by either the Congress or by Presidential decrees. Take your pick.

The alternate to this is national suicide and accelerated civilizational suicide.

Obama and the Leftist and transnational elites are going to keep on truckin’ with the agenda they have in mind, and there is no stopping them. We are only at the beginning. It’s going to get much worse.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:13 am 169. dan:

Alternative explanation to the $550 billion electronic run: it never happened.

Found on Powerline a few minutes ago:

http://patdollard.com/2009/02/papers-kanjorski-is-lying-to-cover-his-own-ass/

I hate this financial crap I’m going back to my tales of the real Byzantium.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:17 am 170. slade:

Always something more built into the nature of things.

David Bohm presented a physicist’s model of thought that was never popular within mainstream science for reasons that are obvious from the description. Bohm and Karl Pribram also developed a holonomic model of the brain that posits brain function as a hologram. I am unclear how their work connects with Hawking et al which treats information as a form of entropy suggesting the world is a giant hologram (ref programmer’s link awhile back), but I am sure there is more than meets the eye.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:23 am 171. slade:

I recommend The Looking Glass Universe by David Briggs and John Peat. Short and fascinating.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:27 am 172. slade:

I hate this financial crap I’m going back to my tales of the real Byzantium. – dan

LOL. Derivative is econ-speak for hollowgram.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:32 am 173. kevIN:

As of late I’ve started doing some reading on the Spanish Civil War – it is one possible future road map among many. How much longer can the conservative side of America be bullied? What will be the result of this deepening cultural clash? As noted by others, the very language and ‘cohesion’ between the different political sides of America has become too disparate. We can no longer agree on common principles.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:38 am 174. geoffgo:

Dick Morris on Foxnews said last week that “if the Dems get just 3 yes votes for the porkulus bill from ostensible Republicans, then that would effectively signal the end of the Republican Party,” because hundreds of billions in the bill were slated for that exact purpose. And, here we are.

I believe Morris’ prediction. Since Republicans are now destined for ineffectuality (tokenism), then those who still believe in a democratic republic need to energize the taxpayers in a dramatic fashion. Right now!

The RNC and the remaining believers in Congress should adopt the “Save Our Republic” mantra, and incite “all taxpayers to withhold their tax payments until we can get a few things ironed out.”

Ten million holdouts will send a big enough counter-signal.

My Top 10 list of demands:

1st demand – Rangel, Dodd, Frank, Pelosi and Reid must be stripped of their Congressional status and be sent home in disgrace with no pensions (add your list of favorites)

2nd demand – the stimulus bill will be entirely retracted within 10 days

3rd demand – the FBI and the IRS will be directed to immediately deploy the resources necessary to audit the financials of every member of Congress for every year they’ve been in office, and report within 90 days of their findings on all sources of outside income, with any such income compared to earmarks and publicized – no fewer than 5,000 agents will be assigned to this task, with 10% of any illicit funds discovered then paid as bonuses to the investigators

4th demand – the military budget will be increased with half of the stimulus funds that were allocated elswhere over the next 4 years

5th demand – Energy independence will be instantiated for the US – public discussion and participation will be encouraged and facilitated and those proven to be lying will be barred from participating int he public debate for 10 years – begin drilling everywhere there’s oil – clear the way for massive and immediate use of all indiginous energy supplies, to include nuclear and coal, etc.

6th demand – all discressionary spending will cease – no Congressperson can cast a vote on any bill they cannot be shown to have read, with penalty being immediate dismissal from all duties (should cut down on the number of bills proposed and their length and complexity, and improve readability) – all negotiations will be televised and open to the public input (if nothing else, it’ll slow down the lawmaking machine and the need for the compliance monitoring rackets)

7th demand – close the borders to illegal immigration starting now, begin deporting all illegals, stop HI-X visas until our unemployment falls below 4%

8th demand – make all lawsuits “loser pays” – make frivolous lawsuits an automatic 90-day jail sentence for all losing parties -(plaintiff and attorny)

9th demand – Continue the military tribunals with sentencing for the remaining slimeballs due in 180 days max, and execution sentences carried out within 24 hours

10th demand – announce every day for one year by all available means that the people of the US are really, really tired of dealing with jihad, and any further attacks on our interests will result in instant and severe retaliatory measures against the sponsors and the families of those responsible. Anyone found to be funding jihad can expect to be assinated, whenever and wherever they can be located and immense collateral damage is unfortunately anticipated.

Feel free to add you own favorites.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:43 am 175. buddy larsen:

that’s the first thing –a manifesto, to sort who’s in and who’s not –

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:50 am 176. geoffgo:

Thanks Buddy, that’s the only program available barring bloodshed, no?

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:56 am 177. buddy larsen:

The gang is running us backwards, back thru every progress, to the Bolshevik Revolution. They’re going to replicate the conditions, and then do it again, and try to get it right this time, no co-option by fascist military command.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:57 am 178. buddy larsen:

just look –the NY Fed was supervising the banking that blew the system. Now the head of the NY Fed that let it happe, is the new Treasury Sec. He was SO vital to the gang, to have as Treas Sec, that even his IRS scofflawing did not bar him from becoming head of the IRS. So, the moral hazard has been offered up on a platter, Geoffgo. one might say by the hand of Fate.

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:03 am 179. Mongoose:

KevIN. The left has as corrupted language itself that we cannot even comprehend each other. We are almost speaking different languages than each other.

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:17 am 180. buddy larsen:

language the tissue of the culture, vital yet fragile, the carnivore kills by tearing into it.

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:25 am 181. geoffgo:

I never drink hard liquor. It might make me shoot at tax collectors, and miss.
W.C. Fields

The basic premise of voluntary tax-withholding is to energize and aggregate enough taxpayers so as to make it obvious that this won’t be solved by monitoring compliance, or with the collection processes at hand.

Sure, the risk is that they’ll come after you and you’ll be fined, eventually. (Amnesty is intrinsic to our demands) But, aren’t they using your money to construct the means to come after you whenever they get around to it, anyway? No guns – no speech – no vote – no rights…no matter how unalienable you thought they were.

The DC-T Party It’s our Republic, but only if we can keep it. We cannot continue to voluntarily contribute funds that will so obviously be spent on our own destruction. If I understand it, that’s another form of jizzah, no?

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:29 am 182. shropshirelad:

To amplify a bit on the shadows forseen by Walt, @135…

Catharsis

Still mired in their muddy teens
With half a dozen magazines
They constantly must pass around
(And megatons of meat to pound)
Hearts and minds of one accord
Declare, “We are becoming bored.”
They say, “I have a fantasy:
Love isn’t what it used to be.”
Explaining, “I detest the way
You look so naked in that negligee.
I can believe you’re even human
Without identification.”

One might think that were in trouble:
The present speculative bubble
Will burst upon us, like a cloud
Of anthrax, plague, or something loud
Enough to rattle the bones of the dead,
And toss the living out of bed
In Bliss into the arms of Hate,
Crying, “Katie, bar the door! O, Kate—”
O, let us slip downstairs together,
Prepare ourselves for evil weather:
And, in the cellar, with the rats,
The broken glass, the baseball bats,
Pray granny’s throbbing corns are wrong.
The storm will pass, or not last long.

Pray, Gravity suspends its rules,
Pray, Politicians are the fools
That we selected them to be
To put a stop to History.
Pray Clio, Lady of the Whips
Will wait forever, hands on hips,
For the arrival of her date—
A day too terrible to contemplate.

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:42 am 183. Doug:

Bling the tissue of Pop Culture, DOA yet Fragile, Letterman kills by tearing into it.

—
Well Worth Watching:

Letterman, as he customarily does with guests on his show, asked Phoenix to help set up the clip he was about to show. Phoenix had no idea and took exception to Paul Shaffer’s laughing. “Are you —— kidding? Are you serious with that maniacal laughter? I don’t know what the clip is.”

Letterman explained it was a clip with Paltrow, to which Phoenix said, “You’re doing fine.” Letterman fired back, “That’s high praise, coming from you.”

That response clearly irked Phoenix, who tried to get an explanation from Letterman for his sarcasm. The host said, “Relax. We’re having fun.”

“I’ll come to your house and chew gum,” Letterman added.

Phoenix took the gum out of his mouth and put it under Letterman’s desk.

Letterman closed the interview by saying, “Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight.”

Phoenix smiled a bit, looked down and said, “He’s funny. He’s a funny dude.”

Watch Joaquin Phoenix’s ‘Late Show’ Interview Here

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:57 am 184. buddy larsen:

well, the Movement found it’s poet before it found it found a name! That’s a good omen!

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:58 am 185. Doug:

The audience snickered and Phoenix looked generally surprised and said,
“What is that, a joke?”
He then looked at Letterman and said,
“What do you have them on? What do you gas them up with?”

Feb 12, 2009 - 10:00 am 186. tharkun:

re: 140. bob: …women should not be allowed to vote… A thought that has occurred to bob, Whiskey, and many another of us.

Ann Coulter has discussed this problem, of women voting, by their nature, for those who promise security without cost, pain or the necessity to sometimes fight for it. She is on record that, for the good of the country, she’d be willing, as a woman, to give up her right to vote in order to begin the necessary cultural correction of this suicidal process.

Feb 12, 2009 - 10:02 am 187. buddy larsen:

john Rutledge to co-host next hour of Fox Business news –he’s savage on the Royalists who are sharpening their knives as we watch, tied down to our gurney. tune in if can –

Feb 12, 2009 - 10:02 am 188. buddy larsen:

who will get 30 or 300 million to “protect the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse”? The Luigi Pelosi Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse Protection Specialist Company, Inc. ?

Feb 12, 2009 - 10:12 am 189. Peter Boston:

Aristotle didn’t think that women should have any position of power or authority within his ideal polity. Aristotle had a taxonomy for everything including the ability to reason. Woman’s ability to reason, he said, was too influenced by emotion and passion to make good decisions for the state.

Feb 12, 2009 - 10:16 am 190. Walt:

I dunno, to quote a quote
We’re getting far afield
From claiming women should not vote
To questioning bond yield
It seems to some the country is
Just headed for a fall
While others say it’s only biz
It’s just a put and call
Some say that our new Treasury Sec
Is just a puppet for
A gang that wants around our neck
Depression or a war
For me I don’t know what to think
At least most of the time
Our problems seem to have no link
To reason or to rhyme

Feb 12, 2009 - 10:48 am 191. dan:

FWIW:

Cramer says only markets up this year are China, Russia, Brazil.

http://www.thestreet.com/video/10463664/cramer-obamas-stimulus-plan-is-a-joke.html?puc=_breitbart&cm_ven=BREITBART&cm_cat=Free&cm_pla=Feed&cm_ite=Feed&puc=breitbart&&s=1

Feb 12, 2009 - 10:49 am 192. buddy larsen:

Dan, that’s BRIC, the last few year’s best investment theme –but without India, which has an “Enron” in play disturbing the mkts. Note all four countries have no green movement, and are thus able to rationally operate the energy component of production.

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:06 am 193. blert:

Thanks Dan for the contrary indicator.

Cramer is the anti-Wretchard…

All talk with limited insight.

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:11 am 194. Mongoose:

Dan: I would have been nice to know how he reaches that conclusion about Russia, Chia and Brazil. I can buy it with Brazil, but not much of an increase.

Russia? based on what? It is a one commodity economy. Oli would have to get back up a lot. Outside investment? do not see that. reconquest of E. Europe? maybe. Some sort of development deal in the CIS. Well, good luck with that. Might as wellburn the money.

China? their major markets are the USA and the EU. I do not believe the government figures coming out of China. Maybe some sort of porpped up deal with Russia (CIS again). They will have some real problems. Their stimulus is another one of these infrastructure packages;they will try to simmer down laid of industrial workers and the rural masses with it. It is hard to see how this creates internal markets for the Chinese based manufacturers. It is a drop in the bucket, in any event. They are in for some domestic problems. Some sort of Brazil/Russia/China tripartite arrangement with Brazil pulling the consumer demand, and Russia giving the oil? Tin foil time here.

If Cramer is right, it is interesting that the one’s that benifit are all have either socialist or authoritarian regimes.

Curious that he left out India too.

Maybe he will fill us in later. Interesting to see a dem like him rain on the stimulus, though. He is right, of course.

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:14 am 195. buddy larsen:

he means, for the calendar year –they’re up from december 08 –

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:16 am 196. Portia:

I too would be willing to give up my vote. Any woman worth her salt controls her man’s vote, anyway. The others don’t DESERVE a vote.

What I think has happened is that the politics of so called “feminism” have driven a rift between men and women, making women believe every injustice of nature was not only the fault of men but a conspiracy by men — as though men in the collective (or women in the collective, either) could conspire their way out of a wet paper bag, much less for six thousand years. I don’t blame men for not wanting to deal with the spoiled darlings that feminism has created — who are at once insistent on grrrl power and screaming for the authorities to protect them from evil males. I’ve heard that a man talking a woman into sex is rape, for ex — which presumes men have special, evil, mind rays and women are fainting Victorian roses.

I’ve seen this in the schools, too, with my kids, where no girl can be wrong and no boy can apologize enough. To expect these… female creatures to grow into functional women, much less adults capable of a rational vote is to expect pigs to fly.

If an alien race wanted humans to stop reproducing a better system than “feminism” could not have been invented.

We will either fix this — take our girls out of daycare, stop them watching stupid Saturday morning cartoons where every girl is brilliant, beautiful and brave and every boy a cowering moron, explain to our boys the responsibilities to protect & provide that civilization imposes upon the male — or we will be gobbled up by islam.

It will offer our newly-barbarized boys a way out of the wilderness and into city gates. And our spoiled, pampered, curiously unsatisfied girls will slouch into the veil with a sigh of relief that they no longer have to hold up to contradictory ideals.

I don’t want this. Perhaps the current liberals do, who knows? Islam is after all “a minority culture.” But I will fight to the end of my ability and my life to prevent this from happening. And the first step is admitting that most of the great sisterhood are cackling hens, with no more brain, bent on screaming their victimhood and getting goodies from daddy/government.

PS – However, fairness I must point out to 186 without malice that it didn’t go so well for Athens.

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:26 am 197. buddy larsen:

portia, that could happen, via initiative & referendum. Women would have to provide the initiative, tho. If all the men, and half the women, supported, the 19th Amendment could be revoked –and USA saved from the communist movement. Really, it WAS women who put Clinton the anti-christ into office –even tho he had a knwn record of abusing women -i think because he had great teeth and hair and promised =excitement. pretty thin stuff –but it’s just nature’s design –women as protectors species through willing to martyr for the young, and the cave too when necessary –meaning, long/short, women are designed by nature to work from emotion. thus a predatory attitude toward females can easily parlay to an election victory, ceteris parabus. the other candidate, not a threat so not a presence in the limbic brain, the id, is ipso facto ‘duller’ than the bad boy.

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:45 am 198. Triton'sPolarTiger:

@ 127 buddy larsen:

Remember – nuke by education… which has gotten pretty rusty…

That said, Charles’s link has some interesting info on pocket reactors. Given the regulatory climate in the US, it’s hard to see how one of these small uranium hydride hottubs gets installed anywhere near the average smallish (20,000 pop) town, what with all the NIMBYs lurking everywhere. Can’t you just hear the protests? “What about a meltdown? The thing’s already BURIED IN THE GROUND, fer crissakes! One goofup and it starts out closer to the water table than TMI did! Help, help, the sky is falling!” (Sorry – drive-by lampooning there – couldn’t resist)

No surprise that Eastern Europe looks promising… the things will probably be in service in SE Asia before we ever see one.

The smallest commercial power reactor in the US is the Fort Calhoun facility in Nebraska:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/reactors/fort_calhoun.html

The link indicates it’s rated at 476 MW(e), or about 17 times the generating capacity of the pocket reactor in Charles’s link. That’s more like 350,000 average sized homes… much less in terms of AlGore Homes.

As for the smallest a reactor could efficiently be… nuclear battery designs can be quite small… are you thinking in terms of a pwr or bwr power plant, a Gen III or Gen IV facility, or a small “heater” that could power a few homes in the American Outback?

Triton

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:48 am 199. Peter Boston:

Portia

I’m only reporting what Aristotle said to demonstrate that the role of women in politics has been a focal point of discussion for a very, very long time.

My personal opinion is that one would have to be quite dumb to intentionally exclude 50% of brain power from the political process. My wife of many years says it 60%.

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:52 am 200. blert:

Doug 181…

That JP bit is a gag.

He’s aping Borat.

He’s shooting a mockumentory.

The final seconds of glasses-off hand pumping and the smirks after DL’s jokes indicate just how contrived the gag is.

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:54 am 201. buddy larsen:

PS, the effect is to minimize the republic as an abstraction, and maximize a facsimile of it as a tribe. however more intense a sensory experience the tribe may be, the republic actually IS an abstraction, a construct charged with raising the future young, and best operated by those not charged with raising the current young (and caring for the old, which again needs emotion first).

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:55 am 202. Triton'sPolarTiger:

“in terms of a pwr or bwr power plant”

should have read “in terms of a currently operating pwr or bwr power plant”

(posting from work while looking over my shoulder…)

Triton

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:57 am 203. Charles:

cramer gives good insight into connected democratic opinion.
if you follow the link at 190. dan:
you’ll see that Cramer is totally bearish on the Obama plan. He’s more bearish than this board in fact.

His interview makes for interesting listening.

To help understand Cramer- check out Bill Goss over at Pimco.

Goss is the bond guy. I think his shop manages something like half a trillion in bonds.

Feb 12, 2009 - 12:12 pm 204. buddy larsen:

you pegged it, the ”outback” model –just wondering how little ”grid” needed for how small can it be? there’s some people here from the Hale-Bopp comet who wanted me to ask, as their earth lingo is pretty weak.

Feb 12, 2009 - 12:13 pm 205. Eggplant:

Peter Boston said:

“Aristotle didn’t think that women should have any position of power or authority within his ideal polity. Aristotle had a taxonomy for everything including the ability to reason. Woman’s ability to reason, he said, was too influenced by emotion and passion to make good decisions for the state.”

It’s a series of short rational steps that transforms a moral human into someone wearing an SS uniform and pushing innocent people in gas chambers. I put Nazis, Communists (Bolsheviks not moonbats) and Islamic fascists all in the same bucket. They all process information in essentialy the same way, i.e. their ideology justifies obvious immorality like mass murder. The only real difference between these different ideologies is the flavor of the Koolaid that they drink.

Given that Nazis, Communists and Islamic fascists are rational and believe that they are “right”, how does a moral human being know that he/she is right? What keeps a moral person from drifting into becoming a Communist or an Islamic fascist?

I believe a moral person has some basic (rigid) ethical concepts that trumps all ideology, e.g. I will not murder, I will not steal my neighbor’s property, I will try to serve the best interests of my family and community, etc.

However, here is the contradiction: Where do these ethical concepts come from?

A Christian will say the “teachings of Christ”. A Jew will say the “Torah”. A Moslem will say the “Quran”. The problem here is these religions are different and their holy books are open to broad interpretation. For example, an Islamic fascist would be quite insistent that his actions are all sanctioned by the Quran.

One of the reasons why I despise moonbats is they have no basic ethics. Being a nihilist is what defines a moonbat. A typical moonbat claim is that all morality comes from the culture or the community and that different cultures are intitled to radically different morality, e.g. it’s okay for Aztecs to rip out the living hearts of 10,000 captives because their religion sanctions it. Moonbats because of their implicit ethical stupidity are the enemies of moral rational people. Consequently. moonbats have been the useful idiots in the service of Communists and Islamic fascists.

Aristotle was obviously mistaken when he said that women are too influenced by emotion and passion to make good decisions for the state. However Aristotle would have been correct if he had said that about moonbats.

I have a basic set of ethical beliefs and am confident that these beliefs will shield me from becoming either a moonbat or a Nazi. However I can not rationally justify those ehtical beliefs. They were imprinted upon me by my parents while I was a child. This is where I’m left flapping around like a fish out of water. How does one define an ethical system that will enable society to survive without recourse to some arbitrary set of religious beliefs?

Feb 12, 2009 - 12:18 pm 206. buddy larsen:

(*whew*) they just left –don’t worry about it triton –i’ll search Popular Mechanics –how’s life over your way? fine, i hope –guess you must have some kindergardeners by now eh?

Feb 12, 2009 - 12:19 pm 207. Lifeofthemind:

@geoffgo,
You “demand?” Where do you think you are, at Kos? Even if your desires are worthy that is no way to make an argument. Now if you really want to be useful rather than yelling that you do not like the results of the election, neither do I, and implying that you refuse to accept it, which is to be harsh infantile, find something constructive to do. Work with us on how to communicate to the electorate more effectively, combat vote fraud more effectively, and elect honest and competent people on the local level more effectively. Have you considered running in a community school board or district party committee election? Do you even vote in those elections? Until you can answer “Yes” to those questions you are wasting our time with your demands.

Feb 12, 2009 - 12:21 pm 208. joe buzz:

Wow, this complex thread has caused some interesting folks to come on out of the ethervoid and post. Poets notwithstanding.
Thanks again for the forum Wretch!
Joey

Feb 12, 2009 - 12:34 pm 209. Lifeofthemind:

@Eggplant,
This is similar to the problem I faced when talking to the campus radical in my post #75. He was emotionally ready I think to emulate other great revolutionary intellectuals such as Pol Pot and sacrifice the selfish inhabitants of the present for a more moral future.. Regrettably I do not see that the external code is sufficient protection against following that path. Humans are to smart, to adaptable and flexible for that. The most subtle and competent among us are the most likely to succumb to the temptations of solipsism. Any decently trained scholar can twist a moral text to justify purging a guilty land in blood.

What is needed is an internal brake and not one that is sophisticated but rather one that is more durable for being modest. Whiskey is right is pointing out that the responsibilities of domestic life make women, and I would think men, more practical and focused. This reduces the risk of their engaging in selfish and romantic explorations that could endanger society at large. One reason that I believe in 6 months of universal military training after the 17th birthday is that, at a minimal cost to society since little other productive activity would be forgone, people would get sufficient training in practical problem solving to reduce the probability of their falling prey to irrational exuberance in the future. People need to be taught, in Vaclav Havel’s phrase, to “look out the window.”

Of course we will always need some risk takers, visionaries and rule breakers. A general encouragement of individual restraint and modesty in the culture, in far more than the sexual sense, will allow for personal liberty and creativity while stopping conditions in which the “Sex and the City” Left both milks the productive cow dry and ties down the risk taking sheep dogs, while falling prey to Millenarian moral extremists.

Feb 12, 2009 - 12:44 pm 210. joe buzz:

Lifeof, you forgot to suggest worming into ACORN and changing it from within. Crack that nut!
looks like they are into blocking foreclosure auctions now:
http://www.acorn.org/

Feb 12, 2009 - 12:46 pm 211. Eggplant:

Lifeofthemind said:

“What is needed is an internal brake and not one that is sophisticated but rather one that is more durable for being modest.”

My son just had his Scoutmaster’s review for the Tenderfoot rank. In preparing my son for the Scoutmaster’s review, I coached him with memorizing the Scout Motto, Slogan, Oath and Law. I required my son to be able to quote the Scout Law from memory both forwards and backwards. As luck would have it, the Scoutmaster spent almost no time reviewing the Scout Law and focused instead on practical things like First Aid and knot tying (my son passed anyway despite having an idiot for a father). Anyway, Baden Powell was a pretty smart guy. He was able to incapsulate a basic survival oriented ethical system that was so simple that a 12 year old could easily understand it.

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:05 pm 212. Peter Boston:

Republicans lawmakers not allowed to see bill before vote.

The now “agreed-to” conference report has DOUBLED to a whopping 1434 pages. With an additional 700 pages in the bill, it is no wonder that Members would like to review the single largest spending bill in this nation’s history before casting a vote.

But, in possibly the most bizarre parliamentarian argument ever made, according to National Journal’s Congress Daily; “Democratic lawmakers fired back that Republicans didn’t need to see the bill anyway, since none of them voted for the stimulus when it moved through the House the first time and would probably stand in opposition.”

Heritage Foundation

VDH has a post at NRO today in which he says that the ancient republics fell apart and went to their ends because of the loss of trust between the political classes. VDH used the act of paying taxes for his illustration.

I’m not a VDH class historian but I’ve done quite a bit of reading on the Roman Republic lately. The Roman political system was complex but it worked because the consuls, the tribunes, the patricians and the plebes stayed within boundaries that respected a veto from one of the other classes.

Dear Leader and the Democrats have tossed all our Republic’s boundaries out the window and seek only to destroy their political opponents within and without government. All that talk about bipartisanship is a smoke screen to hide the daggers. If Obama gets to pack SCOTUS with ideologues then the game is up and we look back to the day the Republic as we knew it ended.

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:23 pm 213. geoffgo:

Lifeofthemind,

Sorry meant it to read “we” demand. All your suggestions for proactivity might have merit, had we the time. I’ve been doing all those things you advise for over 50 years. Hasn’t helped, enough.

I’m not yelling yet, thank you. (no caps in my posts) Also, I’m not speaking solely to the results of the latest elections, but to the hole we find ourselves getting buried ever-deeper in, and attempting to suggest a resolution absent a bloody revolt.

None of your proactive callouts will help to “unwind” this dilema in time. We need an immediate movement comprised of volunteers, not a “universal” draft to be controlled by our masters. ACORN is but the first version of your universal service.

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:23 pm 214. Lifeofthemind:

@joe buzz,
Any job will be a good job soon. Acorn will be stuffed with opportunists, we can then expect purges, and rectification campaigns, with show trials. If you go in there just remember to wash your hands frequently.

@Eggplant,
Baden-Powell was weird but he got Scouting right. Junior Achievement is another good outfit that produces excellent tools for economic education. The tools for teaching citizenship exist, what is needed is the hard work. Glad to hear you are doing it.

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:24 pm 215. Lifeofthemind:

@geoffgo,
OK, accept the smackdown for literary merit. The argument to go on a tax strike is not only hard to defend without laying out a much more detailed explanation but does have the demerit of possibly attracting unwanted attention to this corner of the blogosphere where I enjoy being a guest. We have had a couple of drive by posters who seemed to call for decorating lamp-posts with politicians. I get excited by what seems to be Unclubable incitement. Things are bad and we need to work on how to make them better.

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:32 pm 216. Mongoose:

Eggplant:

I believe a moral person has some basic (rigid) ethical concepts that trumps all ideology, e.g. I will not murder, I will not steal my neighbor’s property, I will try to serve the best interests of my family and community, etc.

This is sort of what moral philosophers and theologians call “The Natural Law”. It is central to both judism and Christianity, but it shows up in Western Classical civilizations as well (it is also implicit in Confucianism).

The Judeo-Christian heritage asserts that it is a fundamental aspect or faculty of man, and a separate faculty from the intellect. Moveoverm this facutly is a divine gift, it is a reflection of God (i.e., “man is made in the image of God”). The Faiths are built (in part, of course) on this aspect, they do not create it, they develop it (through prayer, grace, practice and doctrine, etc.)

If one accepts this, then the questio becomes “how is this faculty perverted?”
(Remember, all mankind is born with it).

other than that I think that you are quite right about it all.

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:43 pm 217. Triton'sPolarTiger:

@ 202 buddy larsen:

Let me get back to you on the personal stuff (it seems that email addy of yours shuttled me to your junk pile as I never got a response eons ago) – anyway, I keep hearin ’bout dis ekonomik kerfuffle, but I hasn’t reached my little backwater… I’m up to my pits in work. Let me clear the decks and I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version…

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:45 pm 218. Mongoose:

LOTM: I personally think that that”brake” is the sanctity of life. Whit this ends tend to not justify means. Take Palin’s child–it has every right to life.

Part of this is humility. We do not know the full meanings of things. Our lives in the world are larger than our abstractions and emotions, as is the world itself.

Purely deterministic and positivist systems lead away form these insights, most particularly materialistic systems. Of course tis is not alwats the case. The nazis had their own brand of mysticism.

Family life tends to lean in the opposite direction.

That is why, come the revolution (and before too) we must focus on that a a key political unit.

Feb 12, 2009 - 1:58 pm 219. Eggplant:

Mongoose said:

“This is sort of what moral philosophers and theologians call “The Natural Law”…. The Judeo-Christian heritage asserts that it is a fundamental aspect or faculty of man, and a separate faculty from the intellect…. If one accepts this, then the questio becomes “how is this faculty perverted?” (Remember, all mankind is born with it).”

The implication here is this “Natural Law” comes from some sort of genetic memory (assuming that it’s origins are not supernatural). I’m skeptical that we have this sort of genetic memory and reject supernatural explanations. However the existence of “Natural Law” as a genetic memory is a testable hypothesis. Again, my own suspicion is this basic ethic was imprinted upon us while we were children by our parents who in turn had the same ethic imprinted upon them by their own parents.

Lifeofthemind said:

“Baden-Powell was weird but he got Scouting right.”

I keep hearing people say that Baden-Powell was weird. I’ve read some short biographies about him but could detect no real weirdness (maybe I’m weird?). He seemed like your run-of-the-mill 19th century British officier who took an interest in educating children. There have been some accusations of homosexuality made against Baden-Powell. However my impression has been that these accusations were merely slander made by moonbats trying to pull down a respected authority figure (happens way too often).

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:22 pm 220. geoffgo:

Sen. Judd (R-NH) withdraws from Sec. Commerce appointment.

Apparantly for 2 reasons:

1) dissatifaction with the porkulus
2) because of the White usurpation of control of the Census

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:24 pm 221. Doug:

Boston’s #208 can’t be true, because less than a year ago, the Messiah promised everthing would be online for 72 hours for the public to peruse before taking action.

Madam Pelosi is also commited to Full Transparency.
Dingy Harry, not so much.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:29 pm 222. Doug:

“2) because of the White usurpation of control of the Census”

Back in the Old Days, someone would have taken that to court.
Back when we had 3 Branches of Government.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:31 pm 223. Doug:

“House”

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:32 pm 224. LFMayor:

211 LOTM:
I’m puzzled by your statement. Last time I checked we still had the 1st to protect what we said, if you really think it’s that bad already then you should probably stop worrying anyway. You’ve been logged already. If the nemisis is strong enough to come for the “inciters” do you really think they’ll give a passing care that you were merely an innocent bystander?

It’s also my conviction that a lot of talk and no action are why this mess is so great right now. All the phone calls and emails to congressmen in the past couple weeks didn’t prevent the stimulus, why would they begin to listen now?

A semi organized civil disobedience of a greater magnitude just might jolt them now, but even that won’t fix the problem.

Wretchard wrote a few weeks ago about “doing something”, perhaps I’m too materialistic but I plan on using my $13 boon from the Annoited One to purchase things that might not be available soon. Or some non-hybrid seeds, still fancying getting some of those to salt away.

Best of luck to you, and us all.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:45 pm 225. Peter Boston:

How many 7.62 rounds can you buy with the $13 tax cut?

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:46 pm 226. Doug:

The next two years should include much discussion of how to counter the newly energized ACORN.
The Messiah could dominate the waves with less than a Billion, ACORN now will have 4 Billion and counting.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:48 pm 227. LFMayor:

ROFL. Not many now pete, “consumables” are out the roof price wise. Still, when you only have 5 left, it’s that much better than 4.
The money will stretch a bit further if you spend it on components, though, if you roll your own.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:49 pm 228. Doug:

7.62’s are a worthy suggestion for ACORN, Boston!

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:49 pm 229. geoffgo:

Pretty easy to see how Pelosi and Reid persuaded, coerced, bought the two turncoat votes of the female Senate RINOs from Maine.

“Listen here girls, Maine has a very small population, so you get only a couple of Reps in the House. Now if you should choose to join your brethren across the aisle and vote against our stimilus, which BTW is a lock no matter your votes, then you can expect none of those funds to flow to Maine.”

“We’ll make certain that Bath Ironworks gets no new shipbuilding contracts from the military, and we might put lobsters under study as an endangered species. Furthermore ladies, we’ll make sure no gov’t money finds its way into Maine’s coffers for the next 8 years, and perhaps not until you are voted out of office.”

Spector is harder to understand.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:54 pm 230. Mongoose:

Eggplant, no that is not the assumption in the judeo-christian tradition. It is an aspect of the soul. It is not a physical thing at all. Not genetic memory.
but one could, I suppose make a physicalist argument for it, and say it is part of the structure of what ever constitutes mind. In tht sense it would be “genetic” but not a memory, rather a capacity.

For you point of view, let me ask, then how did it arise in the first place if morality in not a native and organic aspect of mankind?

I would also have to ask, if there is not natural law (as a innate moral faculty), then how do we derive natural as enumerated in our founding documents?

I argue that is a uniform and universal human condition, and at some bases levels the moralities and mores seem to be universal among all communities of humans.

This is how we come by the name.

It arises out of the human as a faculty, just as, on a lesser level, language is a natural aspect of man. It is a part of his nature.

Another problem with you notion is that it tends towards moral relativism and/and or utilitarianism. There are no moral absolutes at all. Why would not nazis be a common place?

Rejecting natural law, and therefore natural rights, is just how one gets totatlitarian imorality such as LOTM describes, IMO.

Feb 12, 2009 - 2:55 pm 231. Eggplant:

Peter Boston asked:

“How many 7.62 rounds can you buy with the $13 tax cut?”

If you had to chose a weapon in preparation for total social breakdown and were assuming that spare parts and ammo would be difficult to acquire, what would be the best weapon? It’s not obvious to me. Here’s a short list:

1) stainless steel pump action shotgun
2) M1 Garand rifle
3) AR-15
4) a pump action stainless steel pellet rifle
5) a compound bow

I could cookup arguments for any of those weapons but remain unconvinced. I’m slightly inclined towards the shotgun. My father and grandfather would instantly go for the M1.

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:01 pm 232. steveaz:

I’m late to the energy debate here: I rely on solar energy to power my home, and in the SW’s mountains you can count on sunshine 350+ days of the year – even in Winter.

Agree with the other posters: Solar only makes sense if you can move it, or move to it. It’s the second option, moving to a sunnier clime, that I think we’ll see as the costs of PV materials drop.

Which may not be a bad thing. This works against Obama’s urbanization efforts, because it incentivizes migration away from the frozen Northern cities. Imagine the choice: you can stay in Minneapolis, shiver all winter, and talk, talk, talk about being “Green,” or you can pack up, buy land in Kingman, AZ and really live it.

One of my theories is, most of the people pitching sustainable living are debutants: they would not be able to hack the energy conservation and the occasional, selective appliance use that is required during cloudy spells, and they’re really just pining to be part of a government-sponsored crusade that jibes with a ‘feeling’ they have.

RE Whiskey’s thesis: Used to be women derived their power from rearing multiple successful children. The mother of a large Italian family with 12 kids was a hegemon to be reckoned with – especially once her children grew up enough to rally to her side outside the home. This hearth-power used to be the font of womens’ rule in the house, against the husband, and out about the town.

But now, it may be that today’s trend towards childlessness has eliminated females’ traditional process for attaining “power,” and they’re stuck trying to recover it poetically in other, non-familial bodies.

I’m with Mongoose – let’s get back to family. It’s the marrow of the Republic.

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:03 pm 233. Mongoose:

geoffgo: who knows, at this point they may have threaten their families.

At any rate, these two would be Dems anyway if the Hard left had not forced anyone out of the party that was not a true believer.

I really think that they really do not understand what the Democrats are up too.

It may be that some other members of the GOP caucus are noly now understanding what is really afoot. The GOP people tend to think of the Dems as misguided rather than evil. The stupid party indeed. Let us hope that the GOP can live to fight another day.

To me this package is their death warrant as a party. The only thing that trillion will go toward is 2010 and 2012. It will be impossible to fight if there s not a major and radical disillusionment with the dems.

And I bet they renege on any promises they made, or if not they will make sure that they get the credit in Maine anyway. They will go after those seats.

The Main gals have really hurt the nation. I do not even think that they know what they are doing.

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:04 pm 234. Mongoose:

then how do we derive natural rights as enumerated in our founding documents?^^

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:08 pm 235. LFMayor:

good call Egg!

For the sake of price and shovel-esque reliability, I’d go for the M-44 Mosin-Nagant. Fodder is still affordable and will take out anything that runs in this hemisphere, including engine blocks.
any .223
any .308
Any 12 gauge
Any 9mm, .40, or .45
a Ruger 10/22
a recurve of 40lbs or greater (easier to re-string)

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:09 pm 236. Eggplant:

Mongoose asked:

“For you point of view, let me ask, then how did it arise in the first place if morality in not a native and organic aspect of mankind?”

I would argue that it came through social Darwinism. Certain moral formulas enabled families to survive long enough to imprint their moral values upon their children. What we call “morality” are actually codes for survival as social animals. I reject supernatural explanations and only accept explanations that are susceptible to empirical verification. IMHO, saying “god told me so” is another way of saying “I don’t have a clue”.

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:16 pm 237. Unsk:

LF Mayor- This stimulus package is no longer about stimulus- it’s about losing our rights to the marxists. We don’t even know what’s in the latest round of “improvements”.

The Health Care provisions should scare the holy crap out of any sane person, particularly Seniors. Those provisions are easily understandable, and should be easy to sell as a disaster and a ruin to our country and our future. On that one issue alone, this stimulus package should fail.

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:20 pm 238. geoffgo:

Mongoose,

The extant GOPers have it too cushy, not yet parnoid, not realizing that the DNC will target and pick them off one at a time, through slander, trumped up scandel and Soros’ money for vote buying.

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:37 pm 239. geoffgo:

Parnoid = paranoid – yuk, no spell check

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:39 pm 240. Peter Boston:

Interestingly FDR used Maine as a testing ground to see how oodles of Federal money would change voting patterns. He targeted those counties that were 60%+ Republican. Two years of Federal money spread around the country in visible make work projects changed the voting to 60%+ Democrat. It has not changed much since then.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita wrote a book about about how politicians, in every kind of system. got elected (or selected) and stayed incumbent by analyzing the segments of the population that were necessary to achieve those objectives.

In every case the size of population necessary to stay in power was much less than the size needed to be selected in the first place. So long as this key constituency had its needs met the leader could be assured of reelection or reselection.

The spending bill is geared to satisfy the constituency that will keep the Democrats in power. FDR’s successful experiment spreading Federal largess in Maine suggests it will work again.

Feb 12, 2009 - 3:49 pm 241. Doug:

If the right wing Blogosphere never learns to swarm effectively (again, like Blathergate) Maineline Amerika is inevitable.

Why does right wing talk radio continue to swarm so effectively while the Blogos are AWOL?

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:21 pm 242. Doug:

(and Huffpo, Slate, and Kos kick our Butts)

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:23 pm 243. Mongoose:

Egplant:

Social Darwinism? Are we sure that there even is such a thing as Social Darwinism? This is an odd notion. One can except actual Darwinism, it does not require something as delicate as an actual thought or memory to be passed around through generations, but Social Darwinism?
Even if it is so, does not might then make right? I thought we had rejected the rights of kings, and embraced natural rights? why are there such uniformity in moral codes? Is this not moral relitivsim? How can men then chose to die for what is right?

Social animals? Animals have no moral faculty. They are morally innocent. They cannot sin or know of it. Animals are not called upon to make moral choices. Ants do not know right from wrong, and they are not afflicted with suffering when they encounter injustice. This notion of man as a “social animal” is unfortunate construct because it obscures the true nature of the human. Man is unique in his moral challenge and capacity. He is much more than an animal.

Moral formula? I am not sure what that is. Mores? A moral code? these are just embodiments of some higher capacity, not a thing in and of itself. It is like saying that that you can have a understanding of mathematical formula without having a innate capacity for mathematics, without know how to count. No matter what the code is, how can you feel it is “wrong”? Having your hand slapped? That is reactive training not morality. Good and evil is sensed innately in humans. They suffer from the very sight of wrong. It is not learned.

This is all behaviorism, not morality.

The whole concept of natural law is founded on the notion that there is aome fundamental basic commonality in the mores and moral codes at some fundamental level. These change little over time, and more tend to be refined that mutated.
How could that be if it were merely “animals reacting” to an “environment”?
Why would it be so uniform? So universal?

(you know they have found natural law in cases where there was little or no adult supervision–feral children, etc.)

I ask again, if it is all happenstance, then how can we speak of the natural, inalienable rights of mankind?

How does a child know its has been wronged? Why would we suffer physically from in justice? We have very refined moral “sense”, and they develop quite early. Morality is purely learned? In that small amount of time? What “learns it”? Seems like an innate capability, and aspect, that is enhanced.

If there are no absolutes how do we not degenerate into relativism and utilitarianism? And if there are no absolutes then aren’t the Nazis just a valid, if their “social codes” lead to their survival? If there are no absolutes does not the end justify the means?

And if there are absolutes, does that not point to God.

Can you really reject God, what you call the “supernatural”, out of hand?

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:29 pm 244. Doug:

I don’t even reject SuperDave.
…but then again, I’m a cheap laugh.

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:44 pm 245. Mongoose:

PB, how right you are.

however

The only difference is that we are in a much different position now. The times are much different.

There is not the old wasp hierarchy to loot. There is most just fiat dollars based on our ability to work and create (and print money). He just cannot get enough dollars to spend. They have to loot Rich democrats now. They are the ones with the big bucks.

Different set of expectations, we cannot take a 10 year depression now. We expect a better life. He will have to destroy a lot of expectations.

There is global competition now.

Being a Republican is a much different thing that it was before 1930. It is not the same party at all.

He will try to do it though. That is what they are trying to do, set back the clock to the New Deal. It is at the very least neurotic, if you as me.

I think it is lunacy, they will never do it. it is a collective psychotic break thinking that they can just wipe out 60 years and start over.

They will have to get extremely oppressive and intrusive to keep power. Way beyond what FDR did. They seem to actually have a need to do it. The republic will break one way or the other. They are too ambitious and too loony.

I am not saying that FDR was an angel, but this crop is way beyond FDR. They are true Stalinists. They make FDR look like Ike.

If the Ameican people are so stupid to go along with this, they deserve it.

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:44 pm 246. geoffgo:

There are no absolutes? Except that one?

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:50 pm 247. Mongoose:

geoffgo @242: there is one in every crowd…

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:52 pm 248. Eggplant:

Mongoose,

You brought up a bunch of interesting points. I’ll just touch upon a few.

Mongoose said:

“If there are no absolutes how do we not degenerate into relativism and utilitarianism?”

The statement “There are no absolute truths” is self negating and therefore the opposite must be true. I would argue that empirical knowledge of the natural world constitutes absolute truth.

Mongoose also said:

“And if there are no absolutes then aren’t the Nazis just a valid, if their “social codes” lead to their survival?”

That is the first step towards putting on an SS uniform and taking the trip to Auschwitz. The logical sequence that follows transforms a moral person into a monster.

Mongoose also said:

Can you really reject God, what you call the “supernatural”, out of hand?”

I’m an agnostic not an atheist. My attitude towards the issue of whether or not the universe is an artifact is one of inquiring skepticism. I’m quite happy to accept any conclusion provided the empirical evidence can be produced. And yes, the existence of a universal creator could be proven through scientific inquiry. For example, the creator could leave his designer’s initials and control marks in a dimensionless number (the ratio of the proton mass to electron mass) cast in a hexidecimal base (the preferred number base for Pi). The usual assertion that god is only accessible through faith is itself a leap of faith and probably incorrect.

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:53 pm 249. Mongoose:

Unsk. it would fail if people knew what it was about. So what happens when they do.

FDR did not move this fast and this hard. It is a real coup.

unprecedented. Guess we just have to wait and see what happens (ohm and fight for it too, I do not mean to imply passivity is called for).

The GOP has to make clear how easy it is for them to steal an elections.

Thet should compare this to corrupt countries out there.

Feb 12, 2009 - 4:56 pm 250. blert:

This legislation must surely corrupt medicine….

We are 65% of the way towards national health care now.

And the MSM thinks they are reporting from the Good Ship Lollypop.

Yuck…

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:04 pm 251. Subotai Bahadur:

#227 Eggplant & #231 LFMayor

Much depends on what kind of emergency you anticipate as the most likely in a breakdown. If you are anticipating it just getting hungry out, the pellet gun and the bow will come in handy, with the other calibers for larger game. For close in to medium range defense against goblins, the 12 gauge is your friend. For activities involving more firepower intensive applications; I would go with the standard NATO calibers. The Moisin is a wonderful piece, but keeping it fed over the objections of the government may be a problem. I would go with LFMayor with two exceptions. I would add the pellet gun to the arsenal, just because rabbits and squirrels are edible and that is a cheap, quiet way to get them if you can stalk close enough. And personally, I would not go for the .40 caliber, because of ammo availability.

.223 Remington [5.56 mm NATO] and .308 Winchester [7.62 mm NATO] will always be available, because those are the standard military calibers used in this country. As much as I distrust the stopping power of the jacketed 9mm, it is also a standard caliber, which is why I would tolerate it. But there is a whole bunch of .45 caliber which may be available, so I would make a semi-exception for it. Basic rule of combat, if possible do not go into a gunfight with a pistol whose caliber begins with a number less than “4″.

In an other than conventional warfare scenario, it is always good to use you opponent as your logistics system if it can be done.

The Garand [30.06] is also a good weapon. My dad walked across Europe to Austria carrying one. But 30.06 is not a standard military caliber here any more.

Not that people have been thinking about such things, or anything.

Subotai Bahadur

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:05 pm 252. slade:

Mongoose – I want to say Wittgenstein but I don’t know why.

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:13 pm 253. Doug:

…probly to make me feel bad about my liberal arts “education.”

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:21 pm 254. Eggplant:

slade,

It was Wittgenstein who soured me against philosophers. They’re just a bunch of very clever cats chasing their own tails. Lots of questions but no usable answers…

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:21 pm 255. slade:

Quantum mechanics is dead in water right now because the theory can’t be proven by empirical observation/experimentation. Some quibble, but the point is – the effort requires extreme physical constraints that must be artifically created. The large hadron collider was a beginning but the melted magnets have to be repaired.

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:25 pm 256. slade:

Chomsky postulated an innate “universal grammar.”

Language, mathematics, ethics seem to have common analytical ancestry.

Where do numbers come from?

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:35 pm 257. Eggplant:

slade:

“Quantum mechanics is dead in water right now because the theory can’t be proven by empirical observation/experimentation.”

Quantum mechanics is currently dead in the water because it can’t be unified with gravity. However quantum theory is remarkably verifiable through experimentation. Derive the wave function for atomic hydrogen and then work out the emission spectra. You can match that to an amazing number of digits against empirical observation (just look at a hydrogen discharge tube with a good spectrometer). The empirical basis behind quantum theory is bullet-proof. Some have argued that the irrefutal experimental basis for quantum theory was what turned Einstein into an atheist (an emotional reaction IHMO).

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:40 pm 258. Eggplant:

slade said:

“Chomsky postulated an innate “universal grammar.””

Chomsky is full of sour owl excrement. Despite that, he might be right about a universal grammar.

“Where do numbers come from?”

Numbers come from counting. Here’s a brain teaser. Which is more fundamental? Physics or Mathematics.

I would argue that physics is more fundamental and that mathematics arises from physics. I would also argue that all of physics could be modeled by a good mathematical theory. Chicken and egg…

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:47 pm 259. Doug:

“Numbers come from counting. Here’s a brain teaser. Which is more fundamental? Physics or Mathematics.

I would argue that physics is more fundamental and that mathematics arises from physics.”
—
Agree

“ I would also argue that all of physics could be modeled by a good mathematical theory.”
—
Prove it!

Feb 12, 2009 - 5:55 pm 260. Eggplant:

Doug joked:

“ I would also argue that all of physics could be modeled by a good mathematical theory.”
—
Prove it!

Obviously I can’t prove it. However along that line, go to the Wikipedia article on “Conway’s Game of Life”. My gut tells me that the proof starts there but requires someone a whole lot smarter than me to figure it out.

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:06 pm 261. Peter Boston:

“I would argue that physics is more fundamental and that mathematics arises from physics.”

Pythagoras says you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:09 pm 262. Doug:

We Lost Count and didn’t make it to Geometry.

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:13 pm 263. Doug:

(but we were counting long before we got lost)

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:16 pm 264. Karen:

Rejecting the supernatural always leaves one floundering about. Always has. Many want the issue to be throw-away-religion but it’s an issue of which religion is chosen, and which is chosen should not be impugned by naming bad representatives of it. I’m with Mongoose, natural law is not genetic memory – that materialistic explanation is like a question that leads to another question that leads to a dead end. (But rejecting the supernatural is the primary thing so the questions continue.)

Even a child, who is too young to talk or walk, knows that if he is punished for nothing, an injustice has occurred. This isn’t “genetic memory.”

Cicero’ famous statement about natural law:

True law is Reason, right and natural, commanding people to fulfill their obligations and prohibiting and deterring them from doing wrong. Its validity is universal; it is immutable and eternal. Its commands and prohibitions apply effectively to good men, and those uninfluenced by them are bad. Any attempt to supercede this law, to repeal any part of it, is sinful; to cancel it entirely is impossible. Neither the Senate nor the Assembly can exempt us from its demands; we need no interpreter or expounder of it but ourselves. There will not be one law at Rome, one at Athens, or one now and one later, but all nations will be subject all the time to this one changeless and everlasting law.

Our consciences are subject to a standard they know they did not create. Materialistic attempts to get around this truth always leads to the totalitarian.

Wish I wasn’t so rushed for time… can’t do this justice and no time either for the women-voting topic, boo-hoo.

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:25 pm 265. Mongoose:

Chomsky is just screwing off

that is know as the “homunculus fallacy”. It works like this.

there is a man, how does he have language? well, there is a “little man” inside him that has language. Chomsky calls them “mental organs” but it is the same fallacy. So how does the little man know language? Oh, let’s talk about that later.
The concept does not explain the phenomena, it just dodges understanding it. It is an attempt to avoid metaphysics. but it does not work.

This happens all the time in artificial intelligence, Computational linguistics and cognitive science “research” and it totally bogus. Chomsky’s linguistics work is just as bogus as his political crap if you as me, at least from a computational,scientific POV. There is nothing to implement, mostly because of this fallacy and ones like it.

Wittgenstein is about issues about language and formalisms, not moral truth. it is not about metaphysics much. He seems not very interested in this.

I am coming more from the judeo-christian heritage, by way of Plato and Plotonious.

Really eggplant, it is a longer discussion about morality than I can have right now because I have to go.

But Empiricism is a method, not truth in and of itself. Mathematical truth, for example, lies outside of its scope. I would argue so does morality. Empiricism works best in science because it has no ontology, no theory of meaning, it is only descriptive and predictive. Using it for aquiring moreal truth borders on Scientism. I wanted to get at it less from philosophical stance than more a philosophically backed theological stance.

but I want to get back to you about it because i actually thing it is important.

I think that is it crucial to be clear about these things for positivism leads to the errors of “scientific socialism”.

I think ultimately we have to talk about morality in the metaphysical sense (in the sense of epistemology, ontology, etc., not in some “New Age” sense). It come down to notions about the true nature of mankind, of Good, Truth and Beauty, and that to me is a discussion about absolutes, and thus God.

Marxisms is an outrage because it defines man in terms of materialistic determinism. But he is much much more than that. This is what we mean by placing Liberty above security. This is precisely the problem we have with the Marxists, and what must be defeated. But I will get back to you later about it.

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:28 pm 266. Mongoose:

Karen: I am wit you on that. Wish I could stay and chat.

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:31 pm 267. Doug:

Two of my favorite courses in College were an introductory upper division experimental Psych course, and an introductory lower division Organic Chem course.

Both because they taught the usefulness of models of reality while stressing the importance of remembering that they were models, not reality.

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:43 pm 268. Unsk:

Apparently Kennedy is heading back to Florida. The Patriots only need one of the traitor trio Spector, Collins or Snowe to vote no and the Stimulus Package goes down to defeat tomorrow.

Flood their Emails tonight!

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:50 pm 269. Doug:

Spector was not even aware of the Stealth Hillarycare provisions.
…got caugh out on Hannity, I think.

Feb 12, 2009 - 6:57 pm 270. Doug:

UNBELIEVABLE — Democratic Leadership Requires Stimulus Job Access for Illegal Aliens — Secret Negotiations

IT’S FINAL — Stimulus Jobs Have to be Shared with Illegal Aliens — Banks Can Replace U.S. Workers UNBELIEVABLE!

Thanks for all your hard work to create a different outcome, but I regretfully have to inform you that:

All protections for U.S. workers were stripped from the Stimulus Bill tonight. Illegal aliens can be hired at the same rate as usual.

House Speaker Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Reid and the Obama White House were absolutely certain about one thing for the House/Senate negotiating committee on the Stimulus Bill:

There was to be no special restriction to keep illegal aliens from getting new jobs created by the bill at a cost of $250,000 to $500,000 each.
The Democratic leadership of our federal government made it clear that there has been no change from eight years of a Republican White House that let the Chamber of Commerce call the shots on immigration.

Pelosi, Reid and Obama gave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce exactly what it wanted — freedom for unscruplous businesses to continue to hire illegal aliens at the same rate as in the past, and to use the hundreds of billions of Stimulus dollars to do it.

Pelosi, Reid and Obama also made sure that banks can continue to discriminate against Americans in favor of cheaper more compliant foreign workers.

The pro-illegal-alien Stimulus Bill will now go back to the Senate and House where it is expected to pass.

The only way this type of anti-American-worker, closed-door autocracy is going to be stopped is if all of you reading this do everything possible to spread this story so that all Americans know what happened. If you don’t spread it, they won’t know because the mainstream media thus far have blacked out the news.

Go to the NumbersUSA home page to read my full blog and our news stories about this incredible betrayal of the American worker.

Feb 12, 2009 - 7:18 pm 271. blert:

The mathematics of everything:

http://www.aimath.org/E8/

This is the route to super symmetry at every level.

It’s worth a look….

Mathematicians have mapped the inner workings of one of the most complicated structures ever studied: the object known as the exceptional Lie group E8. This achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge and because of the many connections between E8 and other areas, including string theory and geometry. The magnitude of the calculation is staggering: the answer, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. Mathematicians are known for their solitary work style, but the assault on E8 is part of a large project bringing together 18 mathematicians from the U.S. and Europe for an intensive four-year collaboration.

You may have to be a Fields Medalist to wrestle with it, though.

Feb 12, 2009 - 7:19 pm 272. JFSanders:

Physics came first. Just watch a baby in the crib. He doesn’t learn numbers until much later.

I don’t care if that JP interview was a setup. It had me laughing so hard my kid came in to see about me.

Agnosticism/Atheism are sucker bets. If you are evil and act upon it then it is to your advantage to be one. If you have a sense of right and wrong and self determination in good working order. Then it is to your advantage to have a belief in the supernatural(GOD). I personally tend to believe that most people who claim Agnosticism/Atheism are just averse to organized religion and not the supernatural.

I would like to know how a person who is a wage earner and receives a paycheck can opt to withhold their withholding? A tax revolt would most likely pluck the tripwire and send the bouncing bettys up into the air. John Gault anyone?

Weapons are secondary only to air in your survival plan. But for those who would like to explore the real world of survival after SHTF. Read this guys account of his dance with Katrina.
SHTF

Jim

Feb 12, 2009 - 7:41 pm 273. joe buzz:

Doug,
Doug,
the Dems are trying to strip and kill provisions for the system run by DHS called E-Verify:
http://www.uscis.gov/e-verify

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/08/keep-e-verify-system/

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/House-Senate-Split-on-EVerify-for-Stimulus-Package/

Feb 12, 2009 - 7:51 pm 274. Doug:

Nice that you get more real news from e-Week than from many in the MSM.
Would be nice to do w/o the POTUS and the Senate for four years.

—
Our Pretend President:

Obama’s Outrageous Oversight

White House Counsel Greg Craig, often seen whispering in the president’s ear during question periods, admitted later to Ms. Burlingame that the chief executive was getting the facts of the law wrong during the discussion with the families.
Craig asked her if CIPA covers a case in which terrorists defend themselves, noting that “this is something we hadn’t contemplated.”

If nothing else, this admission of ignorance is more evidence that the decision to rush ahead with closing Guantanamo and shutting down the military tribunals was ill-conceived, poorly planned, and may ultimately be injurious to our national security. The president may talk a good game about “swift, certain justice,” but it is becoming clear that justice will not be swift, is highly uncertain, and in the end may not even be just.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:25 pm 275. Doug:

From Joe’s eWeek:

“The Chamber of Commerce’s lawsuit challenges the government’s use of a presidential executive order coupled with a federal procurement law to make E-Verify mandatory for federal contractors with projects exceeding $100,000 and for subcontractors with projects exceeding $3,000. The Chamber of Commerce also challenged the expansion of E-Verify to require the reauthorization of existing workers.

Also joining in the lawsuit are the Associated Builders and Contractors, the Society for Human Resource Management, the American Council on International Personnel and the HR Policy Association.”

Nice to have multiple organizations dedicated to decimating US Citizen’s Livelihoods.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:34 pm 276. sigintel:

“Do a good turn daily”…sink the US and world financial system by withdrawing $550 billion in one hour, elect a US President who has no executive or middle manager experience( a Tenderfoot), kill(via an intense media attack, appealing to women’s fears)any anti-socialist talking points or positions( ie;free speech), Republican congressmen and senators that survive are painted as non-partisan (any arguments against “We Won”-Obama and San FranNan are “un patrioti), nominate to the presidential cabinet posts ex-Clintonista’s and un-vetted “super liberals” that can not pass scrutiny on such basics as tax payment to the IRS….hello Scout Master…. “On my honor I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my Country and to obey the scout laws…………………..

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:50 pm 277. Doug:

sigintel,
Are there enclaves in Mexico relatively untouched by the Drug Wars, or are you just well-defended and well-armed?

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:57 pm 278. Doug:

Label “super liberals” centrists,
and declare all is well.

Feb 12, 2009 - 8:59 pm 279. sigintel:

Doug…way down here in Tequila land we are pretty much untouched by the drug wars on the border. In fact life is very peaceful here and the 6 to 8 thousand ex-pats hanging out around Lake Chapal are pretty glad they are not as we say “NOB”…north of the border!

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:13 pm 280. Doug:

Even ex-pat Wahines, huh!

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:15 pm 281. sigintel:

Me gusta ex-pat wahines !! …gotta say that the view from SOB (south of the border) is that the “Great White Father”, NOB has lost his mind and that Mejico and the rest of the world is gonna hurt bad because gringo bankers and gringa congressmen colluded to create economic Armageddon.

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:21 pm 282. Doug:

If someone had told me the Activist Jerks in college would one day run Washington, I could have predicted it.
But who woulda thot.
They haven’t changed a bit.
Wish we could say the same about the country.

Feb 12, 2009 - 9:35 pm 283. buddy larsen:

search [ everify ] It’s the Bush program, eVerify, with which an employer can with a click verify the prospective hiree –said to be 95% accurate, a good database, lots of work to build it. it shuts dowm March 6 without a re-funding. the stim bill left it out, left it to die on march 6th.

TRY to save it! Write, call, complain –

CNBC is re running House of Cards in a minute. Watch if you can. i did, and it inspired this letter from me to fox (i’ll write CNBC too):

Hi Fox,

Just now watching David Asman and Nightly Scoreboard discuss the financial crisis.

Just before, watched the CNBC two-hour special on same, and wanted to mention that in the entire show (a good, high production value show with loads of location shots and interviews) the critical third leg of the stool, Congress, was never once mentioned.

Bush was featured several times, saying things that now look haplessly optimistic. But no Congress anywhere to be seen or inferred.

Nope, in this show, there’s no Community Reinvestment Act, no ACORN pressuring the banks to make liar loans, no pressure on Fannie & Freddie from Rep Barney Frank and Sen Chris Dodd, none of their years of stopping all efforts to regulate Fan & Fred, nothing about the feedback loop of political protection traded for campaign donations and political support.

Nope, two hours long, and Congress and the mandated bad lending practices it forced on private banking did not make it into the show, though it is rather a spectacular part of the story, as is the Obama connection with ACORN and ACORN’s part in the crisis.

But for the GE-owned CNBC network, it was more important to deceive the audience. A big, expensive special on the disaster, and CNBC went for spin –even tho the show was otherwise great.

Great, but doesn’t leaving out large, fundamental facts amount to propaganda and false history?

Thanks for listening!

Feb 12, 2009 - 10:02 pm 284. bob:

hehehe

Harry Reid has come through for his sponsors.

Train from LA to Vegas, funded by you and me.

Just what we need to get the country ‘back on track’.

Feb 12, 2009 - 10:06 pm 285. sigintel:

Buddy…bias is what the media is all about these days!

Feb 12, 2009 - 10:33 pm 286. buddy larsen:

but sig, leaving the political/legal/DC angle out of the story makes it into another “Wall Street swindles da suckahs” story. That’s not bias, that’s transmogrification. The spitted heads on pikes along the walls moan for the Fanny of Franks to be mounted alongside.

Feb 12, 2009 - 11:33 pm 287. bob:

If the casinos, and, say, the states of Califonia and Nevada want to make a compact to build a rail service to transport gamblers and suck their wallets dry, that’s one thing. I don’t want to pay my share,

What a fraud.

We need a medical school in Idaho. That’s where some money ought to be spent.

What are they going to call this train? “The Desert……” you fill in the blanks.

Feb 13, 2009 - 12:02 am 288. Karen:

The appealing allure, to some, of repealing the 19th amendment I’m afraid is all glitter and no gold. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks to me like, if only men had voted in the Nov. election, Obama still would have won. By a narrower margin, but he still would have won.

I’ve been wanting to address this idea put forward by Whiskey that single women/single moms are singularly to blame for all our woes. His position is that these status-oriented single women/moms are motivated by power. The current status-quo affords them this power and only an Armageddon-type catastrophe can induce them to relinquish it.

Plenty of women might well enjoy having power but I don’t believe that’s what drives their lifestyle choice. It’s a self-worth issue, not a power issue. For them, being dependent on a man = loss of self-respect. This has been a steady drumbeat for 40 years. If you’re not a rich celebrity, you might have to endure a temporary period of dependency while your children are very young but, once they reach school age, you’d better rejoin the workforce if you want to be able to face yourself in the mirror. I suspect, at bottom, these women have come to believe they don’t have a right to ask a man to care for them and their children.

I agree with Whiskey about all the resultant social devastation but he never mentions the benefits of the current state of affairs to men. They are let off the hook to an astounding degree, compared to the past. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good men out there, lots of devoted dads, lots of loving husbands; but there are also a lot of men who are happy with the way things are. Else what is the perennial popularity of pornography, prostitution, having mistresses, etc. all about? It’s about escape from the demands of reality. The lifestyle of today’s young single urban women lets men have a lite version of this escapism legitimately. And not a few men are fine with that.

Feb 13, 2009 - 1:13 am 289. bob:

I think it’s all way overanalyized. I think a majority of the people fell for a tale of the myth of the birth of the hero, which we all like, and, also, a desire to have someone else pay the bills.

Feb 13, 2009 - 4:30 am 290. slade:

The subject is self-determination, as I understood the movement before the caricature of bra-burning began, and still is – for both sides of the gender divide. In my view men and women don’t belong on the same planet but for thousands of years survival required the sacrifice of tolerating each other. Biology is destiny and all that. In the modern world we’re just more civilized and/or clever at rationalizing and validating the tension.

The social instability released by the deterioration of the family as the dominant social unit could have been balanced by accelerated maturation of the emotional and psychological “phenotypes” if I can express it that way – along the lines of “OK so your social unit isn’t perfect – deal with it.” That obviously didn’t happen and may never happen. Self-determination was intended to act as a social degree of freedom, loosening up the interstitial space of the male-female relationship to allow entry of mutual respect as a means of enhancing the quality of the relationship thereby making life more meaningful. That did happen to a larger degree than has been popularly acknowledged.

NahnCee is so much better at this than I am but let me just suggest that the some of the Birkenstocks are strapped a little tight on this subject.

Mongoose – I raised the subject of Wittgenstein because of his association with Bertrand Russell and the general failure of Russell’s mathematical formulism – it never logically “closed” which I correlated with your argument than humanity cannot be logically closed by material formulism, as the AI people well know.

{Deep breath} On to CNBC.

Feb 13, 2009 - 4:38 am 291. Charles:

23. Mongoose:
Charles: That is like saying “It would be a nice day if it was not raining.”

true if you conflate 2112 with 2009. But presidents typically time their policies to flower in the year of their re elections. So they’re looking for a nice day in 2112 while slogging through the rain of 2009.

Feb 13, 2009 - 8:58 am 292. Eggplant:

Blert,

I took a look at your link about the exceptional Lie group E8. I went through the linked article and could see that it was very complicated but no where could I see what it was good for. Does it actually have an application?

On the subject of group theory: As a hobby project, I wrote a program that could analytically find the root of any first through fourth order polynomial. For practical problems, this is normally done with a Newton-Raphson numerical method but I thought it would be fun to write a program around the classical methods of del Ferro and Cardano. It struck me as really odd that analytic solutions existed for 1st-4th order solutions but were impossible for a 5th order polynomial. As you probably know, group theory was originally developed to address the problem of solving polynomials. Through group theory, the Abel–Ruffini theorem showed that there is no general solution in radicals to polynomial equations of degree five or higher. Now I have a confession to make: I went through the Abel–Ruffini theorem but couldn’t make any sense out of it (it was totally beyond me). The Wikipedia article on the Abel–Ruffini theorem almost immediately became incomprehensible due to the jargon used. The Wolfram MathWorld article provided these weird diagrams that were also incomprehensible. The Abel–Ruffini theorem seems to be something that mathematicians are comfortable with but is too hard for a garden variety engineer. Could you dumb down a description of the Abel–Ruffini theorem to my level and explain it to me?

Feb 13, 2009 - 11:00 am 293. blert:

Eggplant…

E8 math is already considered the way forward to unify the fundamental forces of nature.

Super-symmetry is one of the routes to model quantum physics and perhaps model the first picoseconds of the universe.

New models are already being crafted based on E8 math…

They are still in peer review… as far as I know.

Anyhow, just intuitively, it seems only natural that math can completely explain the universe; but that we can’t understand the math….

What to make of an expression that would take up the footprint of Manhattan Island if you used common sized type!

Feb 13, 2009 - 1:03 pm 294. Eggplant:

blert said:

“Anyhow, just intuitively, it seems only natural that math can completely explain the universe; but that we can’t understand the math….”

Again, I’m a garden variety engineer and very ignorant. However I’m skeptical about string theory and super symmetry explanations for the fundamental physical laws. My observation has been that as we bored down in our understanding of the atomic structure, the essential mathematics became more simple. Then we got down to the sub-quark level and there was this explosion of complexity.

Looks like Ptolemaic epicycles to me.

Again, I think the real solution comes from something like Conway’s Game of Life. At the most primitive level, the mathematics should be only discrete points, and Boolean logic with random chaos driving the process.

Feb 13, 2009 - 1:52 pm 295. Charles:

288. bob:

I think it’s all way overanalyized. I think a majority of the people fell for a tale of the myth of the birth of the hero, which we all like, and, also, a desire to have someone else pay the bills.

I think these are two sides of the same coin for women–similarly love(faith and hope) on the one hand — and courage on the other

Feb 13, 2009 - 10:39 pm 296. marymcl:

Happy St.Valentine’s Day all

http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/mythopoeia.html

Feb 14, 2009 - 10:12 am 297. marymcl:

Karen @284 – All good points. I’m frankly surprised more men haven’t noticed how whiskey’s theorizing reflects on them as a group.

Ditto for those women offering to give up their right to vote, not to mention mine too, for the good of the country. That’s nothing but evidence for those who think we’re too silly to deserve it in the first place. And if a woman’s vote is dangerous, what does that say about her opinions or the expression thereof? Any woman who really believes this stuff is free to stay home on election day. I’ll keep my two cents, thank you, and spend it as I see fit.

How Ann Coulter figures the loss of her vote and that of other conservative women will help the conservative cause in the voting booth is a mystery to me. Granted, it’s her job to toss these rhetorical firecrackers around, but we are not the Borg.

Feb 14, 2009 - 11:15 am 298. Karen Yvonne:

marymcl: thank you for that. I’m with you there. I think Whiskey’s posts often contain some really good insights but he gets stuck on the woman thing – it’d be great if only it weren’t for women, that kind of thinking. Ha, if ONLY that were true… that’s where Ann Coulter is coming from imo. And I must admit, while her method of delivery wouldn’t be my way, I really like that girl. Also got to recognize the male replies to Whiskey that took exception to his view, which tempered my initial exasperation of: leave it to a man to think everything’s about power. I doubt Whiskey will ever change his mind but that’s okay. Cutting women off from the public square (which Whiskey himself isn’t advocating, though possibly implying that’s the logical solution) will never happen anyway – unless Sharia law gets us all.

Incidentally, this poster was formerly just “Karen” but I noticed another Karen on another PJM blog so modified the name to be less generic. Not that anyone would notice enough to wonder if it was the same person but nevertheless got to insist on individuality.

Feb 14, 2009 - 3:15 pm 299. OldNeocon:

Buddy @127
How about a nuclear plant the size of a dumpster that will power about 40,000 homes at an initial cost of about $25 million? See at http://www.gerrycharlottephelps.com/2008/11/mini-nuclear-plants-to-power-40000-homes.html.

Feb 14, 2009 - 4:36 pm 300. marymcl:

Karen @294 – “…my initial exasperation of: leave it to a man to think everything’s about power.”

I hear you loud and clear on that one! In the “Crock of Gold”, James Stephens wrote

“Power is man’s secret, Sex is woman’s secret, and Man is God’s secret”

Feminists got that formula all mixed up, wouldn’t you say? Likewise whiskey may have a knack for interpreting social data but what he doesn’t know about women is a lot. What irks me about these posts is the ax-grinding to no purpose. All it does it rankle and divide to no useful end that I can see. And as you pointed out, where are the men in all this? If I understand him correctly they’ve all been sitting around helplessly like horny baboons for the past thirty years getting nowhere fast and increasingly humorless. And the best answer he has for NahnCee is Nothing? Speaking as a mother and a nurse, I know a tantrum when I see one.

I agree with Eggplant’s assessment that self-reliance is a driving concern. Child-support horror stories aside, this has not been a particularly easy road for women. One thing I’ve observed in young working mothers, the married ones no less than the single, is a simple lack of faith in the idea that men can be trusted to take care of them. They don’t seem happy about it, just resigned.

(Off track somewhat but have you ever read “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles? It’s about a wealthy American couple, sexually and emotionally estranged, who try to save their marriage by slumming around post-WWII North Africa – frankly the characters aren’t very likable but the author had a remarkable insight into the darker impulses at war within the female mind)

Feb 15, 2009 - 10:15 am 301. marymcl:

oops, eggplant – didn’t mean to put words in your mouth, that should read “slade’s assessment” – my apologies to all concerned

Feb 15, 2009 - 10:55 am 302. Karen Yvonne:

marymcl: What irks me about these posts is the ax-grinding to no purpose.

Couldn’t agree more. Virtually all of us here are on the same side in the culture wars; let’s keep it that way.

I generally don’t read novels but if you say “The Sheltering Sky” is worth it, I’ll check it out as a reliable recommendation.

Feb 15, 2009 - 1:57 pm 303. Eggplant:

marymcl:

No problem. Right now, I’m up to my eyeballs with child caring issues. Two weeks ago, my wife went to visit her elderly mother (lives in South Africa) and I’ve been left to manage the home and children. It’s definitely a two person job. A week ago my daughter came down with a snotting/coughing disease (now recovering) and everything is slowly going to hell. My wife will be back in a week (can’t wait for her to return).

Feb 15, 2009 - 3:27 pm 304. marymcl:

Karen – Well, if you don’t go for novels generally I wouldn’t recommend depressing yourself with this one! You might never pick up another – it’s what the critics call a “disturbing” tale. It’s the sort of book that leaves you thinking – What was that?!? But as I said I was impressed with the author’s insight into some of the demons that haunt the female mind. And Bowles was a fine stylist as well.

Hang in there Eggplant – rest and fluids

Feb 16, 2009 - 11:09 am 305. buddy larsen:

OldNeocon/299 –thanks! I bleev that’s the one –

Feb 17, 2009 - 3:26 am 306. buddy larsen:

don’t forget to tell her what you just told us, eggplant (advice from old divorced fool)

Feb 17, 2009 - 6:44 am 307. marymcl:

It doesn’t look good -

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/bulletin/bulletin_090217.htm

Obama Promoting Agenda In Key Battleground States

Media reports are casting President Obama’s trip to Denver (where he’ll sign the stimulus bill this morning) and Phoenix as an attempt to boost popular support for his economic agenda. Moreover, says the Los Angeles Times, the tour “reflects a decision by the president to escape the Beltway and touch base with the rest of the country at least once a week” and a recognition “that congressional Republicans were gaining traction in the debate.” The Politico says that “in turning their fire on the capital’s process-and-power-obsessed political class,” Obama’s aides are “actually indulging in a time-honored Beltway tradition.” Both Arizona and Colorado “are…key to Obama’s reelection strategy,” notes The Hill

Feb 17, 2009 - 8:01 am 308. marymcl:

uh-oh wrong thread……

Feb 17, 2009 - 8:06 am

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