First Snow

No rant just now. I drove to Damariscotta and back, and it all looks like a postcard. This is for our more southerly relatives and friends, which would be pretty near all of them.

Proportionality, part deux

Okay, so both my readers are familiar with two recurring pet peeves of mine, which would be proportionality and the global war on terror. I ran across a factoid that makes the two come together in an interesting way. The Bush Administration has come damn near a preemptive war with Iran to prevent them from getting nuclear arms. The morons in charge want us to believe it’s the absolute biggest threat in the world for a Muslim nation to have nukes, and Obama has even nodded to it. (Oh wait. Pakistan has them and they’re an ally. Ignore this, please.) While a nasty concept, there are worse things in the world than Iran with nukes. We faced thousands and thousands of nukes in the USSR for decades, including most of my life, and nothing bad happened. And they were VERY advanced and VERY well tested.

So here’s the factoid that makes the whole matter so ridiculous. The nuke that North Korea set off (and they are WAY ahead of Iran) was estimated at equivalent to 400 tons of TNT. Oooh. Sounds scary. But it turns out that a fully fueled 757 like the ones that hit the WTC each packed the equivalent of 900 tons of TNT. Large commercial aircraft are common as dandelions, and with the airlines in meltdown, they’re downright affordable.

Get my drift? The biggest freaking threat in the world is a loose (likely extremely unsophisticated) nucular (sic) weapon, worth another preemptive war, but anybody and his cousin can buy a used large airliner and fly it wherever they want. When we were in Tucson last year we saw the huge airplane mothball yard, and it goes on forever. Lots of planes out there if anyone needs one.

Once again, the desire to make us blindly fearful, and the lack of seeing things in proportion leads to ridiculous policies.

And another thing. Last week Peggy Noonan wrote an obnoxious column with the basic idea being that, “Say what you want about W, he kept us safe.” And all of the Democrats fear that two words will be added, “unlike Obama.”

These smug assholes love to use the line that since we haven’t been hit again yet, that W deserves credit. I can usually shut this one up by asking if the speaker will take an oath to switch parties in the event of an attack on American soil. No takers yet. And here’s the punch line- if George W. Bush kept us so fucking safe, what’s he got to say to the families of the nearly 3,000 dead in Manhattan, Northern Virginia and Pennsylvania, not to mention over 4,200 dead Americans in Iraq? The attacks on the World Trade Center were on his watch after he ignored Clinton administration warnings. In their arrogance, any concern of the Clinton’s was deemed unimportant. Thanks, assholes.

He kept us safe? More like he tattooed targets on our foreheads.

Next Job

It has been stated that in the nearly 8 years since he left office, Bill Clinton has pulled down $110 million in speaking and consulting fees. This says a lot about how his judgment and policies are viewed, widely and globally.

How many people do you suppose will pay to hear W speak? There were times when I would have paid him to shut up, but I’m not exactly smack in the middle of his demographic. I just can’t imagine having to explain to shareholders why you spent perfectly good money for advice from the worst President in history. Poor sap. Some right wing think tank will probably give him a title, a stipend and a strong warning against opening his mouth in public or leaving the US.

That poor bastard Alberto Gonzalez couldn’t find work in the private sector for almost a year, and it’s a temporary gig.

Gee, maybe they were right about one thing. A free market tells you what people think you’re worth. And these buckos ain’t worth diddly.

Dumb and dumber

Okay, that last post got me thinking about racists and ignorance in general, so I thought I’d check out the mother lode: www.kkk.bz. Holy crap, they’re even dumber than I expected. On the home page, they refer to Omaha, NB, which I’m pretty sure, would be in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Nope, it’s our own Nebraska, NE for short. The banner headline reads, “THE KNIGHTS IS LEADING THE WAY”. Hopefully they is headed for an English lesson.

Here’s another gem, “DO NOT be fooled! The Knights Party is the ONLY legitimate Klan association in the United States. We are not some fringe fly by night group of disgruntled losers who decided to start a "Klan" group.“ That’s pretty funny coming from a fringe group of disgruntled losers.

Honestly, can you think of a group of losers more pathetic and ridiculous than the Klan?

Supremely Ridiculous

So here I am trying to figure out what the hell to write about. The Huffington Post had a link to a David Duke white supremacy site, and it occurred to me that the attendees at white supremacist meeting look to be some of the least supreme people I’ve ever seen. Definitely ignorant, unlikely to be educated, successful only in the sense of not having starved to death yet.

The focus currently of such groups is the problem with the guy about to enter the White House. How many of the posters on stormfront.org do you suppose went to Harvard Law School, or could have gotten in? I’m thinking damn few. Maybe instead of white supremacy they should call it personal insecurity and be done with it.

I’m so sick of these morons that I’m hoping we can just flush all the racists and be done with it. Go public, get bitch slapped, repeat.

Hell, I’m a 13th generation American, mostly English with some Dutch thrown in, and in traveling around the world I sure didn’t find that the white ones were better or smarter than the tan ones, the olive ones, the brown ones, the black ones or anyone else. If I had to admit to any racism it might be that Asians are smarter than the rest of it. But then again, I think it’s for cultural, rather than racial reasons. But honestly, if you look at the racial makeup of the University of California, you gotta think them Asians got something on whitey, but you don’t see them forming “Yellow Power” movements, even though they could probably statistically prove superiority. Sheesh.

Yikes! It's worse than I thought!

Okay, I knew there was going to be a really nasty, long and slow recovery for the financial system, and I’ve been accused of being Chicken Little more than once, but all I can say is Holy Fucking Shit. My bud, Eric Janszen (third smartest man in the world) posted a bit over on iTulip that explains why none of the injecting, pumping and flooding of cash into the financial system can do any good. The piece requires a rudimentary knowledge of economics as well as financial and monetary policy, but the guts of it are as follows.

I made much the same case a few days back but when Eric tells it it’s more compelling and scary. Basically, the major banks shared their risks by buying and selling each other credit default swaps (CDS) so if their bets went bad, somebody would bail them out. An excellent metaphor in a comment on Eric’s post states that it was like a bunch of swimmers tying themselves together far at sea for safety, and then immediately take on more weight than they can handle, thus all sinking together. Basically and collectively they owe more money than there is in the world, something like most of a quadrillion dollars. That’s $1,000,000,000,000,000.00.

Hence the “Holy Fucking Shit” comment above. That’s about $150,000 for every man, woman and child on earth, or about three million dollars for every American. That much money simply does not exist. The American, and therefore global financial system is dead. Kaput. Finished. And no bailout is going to help.

Man! This thing is unwinnable. If you have any dollars at all, and live in a first world country, this stuff is really important to learn and understand.

Figures lie and liars figure

There are any number of pundits out there in Punditistan who remind us why this isn’t the Great Depression 2. There are no bread lines, no hoboes, blah, blah, blah. The thing is, we are so near the beginning of a long, long process. There were no soup kitchens in 1929 and 1930 saw one of the greatest stock market rallies ever.

I read a great bit of wisdom from some old English dude, whose name escapes me, “We leap into debt, and crawl out of it.” I think the whole GDII thing is like that. When your neighbor loses her job, it’s a recession. When you lose yours, it’s a depression.

So anyway, one of the pearls of wisdom being cast before the swine (present company excepted) is that unemployment is “only” six and a half percent. Jeez, when I got out of college it was over ten percent. (Remind me to whine about how much that sucked.) Here’s a little inside baseball. There are many different unemployment numbers. Really.

The “official unemployment rate” is technically known as U3. Over time it has been twisted to make things seem better than they are. It does NOT include discouraged workers, part time employees who want fulltime work and marginally employed workers. These folks are however counted in U6, which is the number they never tell you about. They used to, but not anymore, so any historical reference (“It was much worse back then”) is either misleading or patently false. How’s that for a pisser? They think we’re stupid, and unfortunately, they’re usually right.

Here’s the deal. For October 2008, the “official” U3 unemployment rate was 6.5%, which is high, but not historically. The more accurate, and underreported U6 unemployment rate was 11.8%, and that my friends is a nasty number. No bread lines. Yet. No hoboes. Yet. No food riots. Yet.

Let’s take care of each other, remember the neediest and share what you have with those who need it. It’s a great time to short the market, but a lousy time to short karma.