Link

I stumbled on this 2 minute snippet of an interview with Richard Feynman. Perhaps Al Gore should look at it the next time he writes (or tells someone else to write) his next op-ed.

I’ve read Paul Ryan’s Roadmap 2.0 and it is one statist POS. All he’s trying to do is save big government by freezing it in place. As though Big Government is OK, it just needs to find that sweet spot where it can stay big and not go bankrupt. To me, this is precisely why the word “conservative” is as vomit-inducing as “liberal”.

I can’t help but think this plan is the anti-Laffer curve.

How could have foreseen this: Ford, private company, is starting to outsell GM, Government Motors:

Go Capitalism!

You’re just disturbing the leftist illiterati, claymore. They think all rights are gifts from the government, to be taken away if we displease them.

The Constitution only enumerated an existing right to keep and bear arms.

The Supremes ruled correctly in Heller that reasonable restrictions are not prohibited, because nowhere does the second amendment say “shall not be infringed”…oh…wait…what?

I get various US Government bond market color each day from a variety of sources and I’ve been seeing this idea bubbling up there now as well as some blogs and other sources:

We have been writing substantially on this issue - we have dubbed the GSEs as Son of Q-E (ie post Fed Q-E) and believe that there is a move on to eventually merge the two GSEs with the Fed/Treasury behind the curtain pulling the strings (convenient that China won’t be able to see their maneuvers and complain about money printing as in the ballooning in the Fed’s balance sheet).

Stealth Q-E. In other words “money printing” by the Fed that is not transparent to anyone, like the Chinese but also like US citizens. All in the hopes that we can print money and also run massive budget deficits without spooking the US Government and GSE bond markets into sending rates higher.

If a corporation was selling large amounts of bonds in public offerings but at the same time was expanding it’s liabilities (those Federal Reserve Notes are technically Fed liabilities, a claim on the Fed’s assets, which used to be backed with gold but are now backed with, voila, dodgy mortgage loans and US Treasury securities) through hidden maneuverings that didn’t allow investors in the bonds to see those expanding liabilities (ie potential future losses by FNMA and FHLMC that the US Government now de facto guarantees) would that company run afoul of the law?

Think about what our government is trying to do here.

Jack, they’ll probably comment on their own, but every time folks think the markets should be plummeting, and they aren’t, rumors of the plunger protection team surface. Note that the linked article dates from 2008. I remember hearing the same rumor back in the dot.com bust.

Also, the usual rumors are about buying futures or options, not stocks themselves.

Where’s the UN when you need ‘em.

In bed with children.

Bill

That link appears to be broken. Can you check that.

Jack

Let me relate how one market was influenced greatly by the government. During the 1970’s the major Money Center banks lent a lot of money to Sovereign nations in Latin America and even in Eastern Europe (Poland especially) on the premise that sovereign nations taxing authority meant they could not default and anyway with oil revenues running so high for countries such as Mexico and Venezuela, this was “money good” lending. Walter Wriston of Citibank was a leading proponent of this idea. He was wrong. Very wrong. As the price of oil and other commodities fell during the high interest rate environment of 1979 - 1982, all of these governments found they had overborrowed and could not pay the money back. Meanwhile, the Money Center banks had been syndicating a lot of these loans to regional banks, but still keeping a large exposure for themselves. The US banking system, had the banks had to adequately reserve for those loans, would have been bankrupt.

The regulators allowed several things to happen. One, they allowed the banks to “restructure” the debt and lend more money to make payments on them. Rinse, repeat and kick the problem down the road. Very liberal regulatory treatment indeed. The banks then took much of their profits from 1982 - 1989 and reserved against these loans. Then the Bush admin engineered the “Brady Plan” using the IMF (whose major funding came from the US) to lend to these countries in order for them to buy long dated US Treasury zero coupon bonds to defease the principal on new Brady Bonds which carried lengthened maturities and/or reduced interest rates. Granted, they did ask these countries to make pretty stringent budgetary and other fiscal reforms in order to qualify for the Brady Plan. Without that, the Plan would not have worked.

As government solutions to problems go, the Brady Plan and Brady Bonds as they were known, was one of the better idea because it did team government and market forces with real reform in the debtor nations. But it was an instance where the US government intervened albeit behind the scenes (with regulatory leniency and political pressure on the debtors) and through a third party which essentially was controlled by them (the IMF).

The Fed and US government have many tools at their disposal to affect markets without directly intervening. I think the FNMA/FHMLC maneuvers are just such an instance and I would think the Plunge Protection Teams are too direct for them. I can’t rule it out though and there may be points in which they do this for very short periods under extreme market duress (hence the “plunge” moniker implying they prop up a plunge so that sellers can get out in an orderly fashion).

Kennycan, your remark about manipulating the fixed income markets reminded me of the recent plunge in the 10-year treasury yield, from around 3.8% to 1.5% for a time. It then bounced back to its former level. The graph is stunning.

Now the 30-year is following suit, dropping just as suddenly from 4.6% to 1.5%. Is that the result of manipulation, or a perfect storm of circumstance at the offerings, or is it better explained by chaos theory? What the fed/treasury is going on?

NY Gov Race. Scozzafava II: The Dickering

Sorry for NYT link.

I predict it will pass.

Link

Now this is bi-partisanship that I can believe in.

If you are ever looking to find an example of one of the mechanisms by which our constitutional rights get kicked in the teeth, take a looks here

Here is a self reportedly libertarian law prof detailing every tree and quibbling about if it is oak or ash, while completely ignoring the forest he’s in.

To the common man, it’s simple as shit: Does government interception of a communication without a warrant or consent of either party violate 4th (check yes or no).

10 million illegals naturalized 1993-1996. More in the next 4 years. ACORN implicated in vote fraud. You can claim they were elected all you want. I remain unconvinced… not that it matters at this point.

And remember the wall we are building is to keep people OUT, the wall Reagan asked to be torn down was to keep people in. Huge difference that is lost on the dumbocrats.

I’m sure the fruits and vegetables you’ll buy at the movie theater will be delicious and fresh. I just threw up in my mouth a little bit thinking what the grapes in that fruit salad would look like.

Sony = Rootkit. Never forgive, never forget.

“NY Strip” - grrr, those thievin’ NY bastages!

(just continuing my ongoing campaign to preserve the honor of the Kansas City Strip)

I dunno, Bill. I can’t say I know any climatologists, but the Physicists (including myself), Chemists, Engineers, and other scientists I know cast a really skeptical eye on the global warming scam, although to varying degrees. The climatologists seem to be immunized against even the most preposterous assertions. Take for example the claim that global warming will cause parts of the earth to cool down. This is generally greeted with hoots of derision from the other (non-climatologist) scientists I know, because none of us has ever, even once, encountered a physical system which cools down in places when you apply heat. A physicist or chemist, when faced with a notion like that, will appeal to simple thermodynamics instead of a complex computer model which is allowed to run wild and violate whatever simple physical laws it feels like violating. I guess my point is, I think there’s some merit in viewing things from “the outside” especially when you’ve been trained to think like a scientist. At least then you’re not susceptible to groupthink.

Well YKH, I stand properly chastened by your reminder that it is possible to create a heat pump by adding energy to a system. Whether that level of engineering exists in nature is doubtful, at least to me. And if it does, and I’m wrong, I would want an explanation as to why I’m wrong and you don’t seem to get much of that from the climatologists. All you get is some hand-waving argument. As far as thunderheads go, you do add energy to the system, and hail does form, but the entire column, all the way into the stratosphere heats up even though it’s still cold enough at the elevated altitudes to freeze the water, so I don’t think that’s a particularly good example. Oh, and mea culpa on the capitalization. Sorry. It wasn’t my ego talking, just an error.

Charles, a thunderhead that drops ice onto the ground is a heat pump. Consider the particular piece of ground just before sunrise. It’s maximally cool from radiating heat into the black, 4 degree K sky all night, its temperature maybe 40 degrees F. During the day, the sun heats this ground and eventually, above, a thunderhead forms and dumps ice onto the ground, cooling the surface to maybe 35 degrees. The ground is now cooler than it was in the morning before energy was added to the system. It is colder as a direct consequence of the thunderstorm, and the thunderstorm is a direct consequence of the solar heating. The heat has been transported into the upper atmosphere. Had the sun not set up the circulation, the ground would not be cooled to 35 degrees.

You spoke of “a physical system which cools down in places when you apply heat”. This satisfies that criterion. The thunderstorm is, in this case, a true heat pump in which applied energy causes part of the system to cool. All heat pumps move heat to a location where the heat is removed by a cooler surrounding environment and return a coolant to the location being cooled - in this case the coolant is water, which undergoes a phase change from vapor to ice when its heat is removed before returning to Earth to the location being cooled.

Is this not the very definition of a heat pump? I think it is a very good example.

I agree completely with you about climatologists.

The problem, I think, is not that they think that climate systems are more complicated than they really are so that they can claim they mimic complex engineering systems where simple, first order analysis should be used. It is the other way around. Climate systems are far more complex than the most complex engineered systems, so much more so that they are chaotic and are unpredictable.

I would like to impeach him just so he and the other Democrat whores in the media can squeal about the Republican partisanship so rabid that they’ll impeach a seditious bastard er uh, a Democrat who overthrows the Constitu– no, that’s too accurate as well — so rabid that they’ll impeach a president out of sheer partisanship.

Then we can taunt them with 1861. Come get some, bitches. While Democrats are Western history’s most successful murderers, their victims are all unarmed.

To be blunt about it, I am sick and tired of being worried about what the Evil Party will do next. It’s time to stop living under their threat. The gutless writer Jefferson even knew about that.

The dirty little secret of the media in 2006 was that most of the stuff the people were angry about was done by their party, the Democrats, with a couple of dozen Republicans joining in to make a majority in the House, and even fewer in the Senate.

One big difference between the parties is that the Dems have their most radical leftists in control, utterly, and they get their way except rarely when something or someone intervenes. Republicans, on the other hand, have compromising wimps in power most of the time, and they often compromise themselves out of power. Furthermore, it’s unlikely to be otherwise for the foreseeable future since too few voters are well informed enough or principled enough to choose properly in primaries, and then there’s the problem of candidate recruitment. If the U.S. operated according to the Constitution, it would likely be easier to find people who could abide with heading to Washington for a month or 2 each year and then going back to live their normal lives at home. But with the gargantuan state along with fiat money to make it grow on the sly, fewer decent people want to be associated with it.

I’m talking about people like former Speaker Hastert. He was a wimp. Compare to any Democrat Speaker, especially the communist Pelosi, who got the vote of every Democrat in the House. Her staffers are writing all of the major legislation being passed the last 3+ years, which is inappropriate, to say the least. The cloests thing to a man of the right Republicans had in the Speaker’s chair was Newt “This week I’m an environmentalist, next week I’ll be something else” Gingrich.

As far as social issues, I generally find people who write things of the tenor of:

Maybe the SoCon true believers think their congressmen are compromising wimps. The Greenie and other lefty true believers think the same about their partisans. From where I sit, both sides are just as fanatically determined to use the all-encompassing power of the state to achieve their goals

are social leftists, to use similar language. Of course there are likely some number who want the federal government to nationalize law about all sorts of things, but they make up a small minority of the right from what I’ve seen. Leftist-invented boogeymen are rarely as portrayed.

One rarely hear of people on the right looking to enact federal laws on most social matters unless they’re to correct politicized courts or to restore the system to the way it was before earlier congressional or executive interventions. Having said that, there are laws that should be repealed but have little chance of being for various reasons, such as federal drug laws. That will take a long time to get to, and we’ve got bigger fish to fry, first. It would certainly be nice if we weren’t helping destroy Mexico with our drug war. We could defund FARC and other leftist scum in South America while we’re at it. But first, how about we end slavery in the U.S., and then worry about getting rid of the other foolishness?

Two wheels good

Indeed.

Wish I had one.

Advertisers have used this sort of psychological manipulation for years. I remember the Radio Shack catalogs, with the constant “Good — Better — Best” gear. The “Best” gear wasn’t there to sell; it was there to get people to move up to “Better”.

In politics, the media tries hard to paint morally equivalent extremists on both sides as flanking the moderate, pragmatic middle ground, which they just happen to completely believe in. It doesn’t matter to them whether one or the other of the extremist positions might actually have evidence on its side, or whether the position they like is actually supported by evidence. It’s just a psychological ploy.

You see it all the time when media hacks are challenged about bias. “Well, I get negative letters from both sides.” (Implied: “So I’m fair and correct.”) A hack from the Nashville Tennessean once tried to feed me that line personally, and I think she was surprised when I came back with a complete explanation of why that was BS.

By the time it is evident this is a disaster and people get presented the bill to pay for it the damage will already have been done.

We’ve got to get people to understand now what they are doing so that come Nov 10 we get a Congress that can stop this before implementation.

I am concerned that if the bill can’t be stopped and is signed into law, the Dems could lose this upcoming election, sure, but if it’s not entirely repealed by the “is hereby repealed” language of an actual repeal, they’ll be back and they’ll be a permanent majority. Some will be like the people who spent the 1950’s through the early 1990’s buying the media/crat BS fear about Republicans taking away their Medicare/Social Security if they let them into power. The rest, a growing proportion of the electorate, won’t be able to conceive of “the right to medical care” not existing, and as with all things under collectivist tyranny, won’t be able to conceive of how much better everything is living in liberty. In other words, the entire electorate becomes a feminized and stupid bitch.

Which is why it has to be stopped before it’s passed, and everyone involved in its promotion and support has to be destroyed… politically, for now.

The wheels may be falling off - and soon, but what you get when the new cart is assembled may not be a wagon of freedom. Indeed, I would suggest that it is highly unlikely. The current state is the result of 220+ years of representative democracy. Its failure would suggest that representative democracy is flawed. Why would the winners in the struggle to define the new cart recreate the constitutional system that led to failure? Why would they trust “the people”, who had proved the truth of Franklin’s dictum, “when the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
If the wheels fall off the cart, the new cart is highly likely to be some form of intolerant dictatorship worse than what we now have.

Better to stop the legislation and preserve the creaky cart. Remember, George III was indeed a tyrant. This time, the tyrant is the people. It is the war of ideas which must be won, not the struggle to clean up the mess after the idea, which is the republic, has failed

wtfo: On first starting to read your response it seemed you were disagreeing with me, but you seem to have ended up even more troubled than I. I think things could end up as bad as you worry, but it’s fairly possible they won’t. The problem is that non-slavers don’t like to keep involved in politics. They have their lives to live, as opposed to eating someone else’s lunch and acting as though they owe it to them.

But, what could happen to stop the November elections? I know that if there was an official attempt to stop them, well, that attempt, and all adherents thereto, would in a remarkably rapid manner no longer be any trouble. Lots of people are in a position to set things right. Lots of people.

Yep. They work fine. You have to be pretty nimble and willing to take the heartbreak of perhaps putting a scratch or two on the iPod, but at that point, who cares?

iPad, on the other hand, is one of those unibody bastards, so I’m not sure how that works out.

This is one of those things that bruises the Apple for me. The refurb scam is pretty stupid. If the battery can be replaced, then just replace the damn thing. The price doesn’t bother me much; look at the cost of replacement computer and cell batteries. It’s the whole waiting in line for a refurb. WTF, Apple?

yes, it worked as advertised, ifixit.com

Fun Fact: Many refurbs have lower failure rates than stock products. Usually because they are more fully tested once fixed.

Fun Fact: Most repair/refurb schemes are just a logistical tricks to decrease turn around time. Broken units are put in a fix pile, and instead of waiting for your particular unit to get fixed, you get the next fixed unit. Assuming it’s fully tested and gets a new exterior, it’s a good system.

I’m not an apple fanboy, but just wanted to put that out there. I also don’t buy battery-permanent products if I can avoid it. I purchased 1 iPod in the past, and that was when no other manufacturer was putting anything of similar quality out.

uhh, it’s like Obama’s credit card donation system - you can tell it you’re Minnie Mouse living at DisneyWorld and it will work just fine.

That is definitely all debt, not just public debt.

And how that is discoverable in litigation has been widely discussed in the legal press for several years.

ny discussion of these devices constitution selff-incrimination?

No self-incrimination issue. I’m not sure what the full capabilities of these devices are, but, to the extent they would be useful in litigation, it would really be only civil litigation where there is no right against self-incrimination. If you don’t like an IRS audit, or if you’re generally worried about government surveillance, you better pray you don’t ever get caught up in civil litigation.

Isn’t this Donk dork up for re-election defeat real soon?

Election 2010: Nevada Senate - Rasmussen Reports™

Two of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Republican challengers have again crossed the 50% threshold and now hold double-digit leads in Nevada’s U.S. Senate race. One big hurdle for the incumbent is that most Nevada voters are strongly opposed to the health care legislation championed by Reid and President Barack Obama.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters in the state finds Sue Lowden, ex-chairman of the Nevada Republican Party, with a 51% to 38% lead on Reid. Seven percent (7%) prefer some other candidate, but just three percent (3%) are undecided.

Businessman Danny Tarkanian posts a similar 50% to 37% lead over the embattled Democratic leader. Nine percent (9%) opt for another candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided.

Reid is toast. And there is a marginally credible candiadate runnning against Pelosi in San Francisco. His name is John Dennis.

Would you be interested in hearing my opinion about anonymous bullshit from folks named Mr. Advisor?

This should be fun…

(To watch, that is…)

Okay.

You cannot begin to imagine how little my interest is in anything you might find of interest.

What a boring troll; hardly worth the name — a tino.

Some people seriously need to get a life.

I disagree only in the matter of degree, PG. Some of those people need to be pushed back HARD. I’m not ready to recommend the rope+lamppost solution (yet), but people need to organize some pushback.

If people had pelted Bloomberg with sticks of rancid margarine when he banned transfats, maybe Cali legislators would have thought twice about banning transfats statewide.

New Yorkers have a duty to us all to write letters of protest to their legislators - and shake some salt into the envelope. If nothing else results, at least legislators would be distracted from writing this crap while hazmat teams are scrubbing their offices.

If Tea Partiers truly believe in smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation and individual freedom, they should be the catalyst for opposition.

Some people seriously need to get a life.

I’m thinking the opposite for these guys.:)

Ride Fast:

…they are now banning stuff you have to have some of to live.

Ride, this is just a trial balloon for the real thing — banning O2 since it just gets converted to that eeeevil CO2. Perhaps just a tax on O2 will do.

This is fucking insane. Shit like this makes my eyes bleed. Someone needs to take a fucking clue hammer to this moron Bloomberg.

Simply put, I want to put this stupid bastard in a cage and force feed him everything I can think of that could be possibly bad for him.

Starting with bacon. Lots of it. Foie gras. Every goddamn bottle of corn syrup soda I can get my hands on. He’ll need to burp to make room for what’s coming…

I truly despise Bloomberg. He is the epitome of a health Nazi. He is a threat to individual liberty to the highest degree.

But mostly, he’s fucking with my livelihood. In times of economic uncertainty, never, ever fuck with another man’s livelihood.

…banning O2 since it just gets converted to that eeeevil CO2. Perhaps just a tax on O2 will do.

For now, I’ll settle for a ban on The O - although taxing him out of existence would work about as well…

I think salt is compulsary for any food.Without salt any food is tastless.But on the other hand it is not good for health.We should use little amount of salt in our food as i do.

I think salt is compulsary for any food

Especially for peaches and cream, and don’t forget to shake some onto your chocolate cake.

Without salt any food is tastless

That’s why I always salt my oranges.

But on the other hand it is not good for health.

I thought “too much” should go in there somewhere. I thought no salt (of any form) was a killer, but apparently not.

We should use little amount of salt in our food as i do.

Don’t you mean we should use none, since you advised us that salt is bad for our health? Are you actually advising us to do something bad for our health?

WE GOT A COMMIE HERE!

Good God, can anything top this as evidence of the nanny staters we have become?

four basic food groups are salt, sugar, preservatives and alchohol.

Heh, as I sat in Korea tonight with my Korean partner and two muslims and two hindu’s, all of us drinking, I mentioned to my friends an Iraqi reaction after the fall of Saddam - freedom, whiskey, sexy. Much laughter and a toast to the USA.

The case was actually tried in Santa Ana. Although Orange County demographics have changed over the past couple of decades, juries here still tend to be pretty conservative and it’s not really a surprise that the jurors rejected this scum bag’s pleas for mercy.

Three trials for the same crime??? When does triple jeopardy become quadra-jeopardy?

Yeah, Alcala is a scumbag that probably deserves multiple deaths, but we good Americans aren’t suppose to try people indefinably. That, after all, was an English trick we banned constitutionally.

Double, tripe or quadra jeopardy doesn’t have anything to do with it. Although I’m not familiar with the case, it looks like the murder convictions or sentences were overturned on what some might characterize as technical grounds. It’s not the same as a verdict of not guilty, which is where x-jeopardy kicks in.

Mmmmm…I heart the .45 version when it comes out, rws.

I like the .40 a little better for it’s longer range ballistics, but I can see the .45 version being a very nice unit to have around the house, for “vermin” control. Especially since that big, slow .45 bullet just cries out for a suppressor to avoid annoying the neighbors.

Quick range report: I can hit the range gong, about a foot square, at 200 yards 3 out of 5 times using a red dot sight. Of course that’s about a 40″ holdover, and instead of the “bong” you normally get with a rifle you only get a “tink” from the weenie 9mm, but at least the rifle is accurate enough for friendly socializing. And all the folk that have tried it out have had a big grin on their faces and vow to “get them one”.

Guess I’ll have to buy the other variations as they become available.