The Holy Spirit Behind The Main Altar At St. Peter's

Click. It's worth it.

Sublime.

I Think The Builders Would Have Been Happy

... to see how people were thoroughly enjoying their work hundreds of years later.


People standing, gaping and photographing. This scene can be observed in almost any of the great churches in Rome.

The Trevi Fountain

Worth a click.

Italian Patriotism

Includes large, beautiful posters of pregnant women wearing the flag.


The Italian flag is everywhere as are caps emblazoned Italia and all manner of other patriotic emblems. It's natural and accepted and wonderful.

So Old, So Young

At the Coliseum in Rome, looking up. Click on the first image to see where the little plant in the second one is.

In Italy

... and my Droid 2's GPS system is totally lost. It has absolutely no idea where it is at all. It can't even find one satellite, much less the three it needs for a fix, even with the whole sky visible. Yowza. I wonder if it's because it needs to be on the network. It's a Verizon Droid, so it has no connectivity here unless it's on WiFi.

Update: From the Droid Forums:

The GPS unfortunately requires a network connection to get it's initial fix, for whatever reason. Therefore, you'll be out of luck in England with the Droid.

I wonder if I can get a fix with the thing on the WiFi. The only problem is that my hotel is in an urban canyon and we can't see the sky. Maybe from an upper floor ...

Update 2 - Fixed it! The WiFi was one issue - it needed connectivity to the network to get started. The other was that you can't run GPS in airplane mode because the GPS receiver draws power from the CDMA chip. So saith one of the Droid forums and their suggestion worked. We now have location to go with our very nice offline maps. Yay!

Photos and other odds and ends tomorrow.

St. Peter's Basillica In The Trees

Breakfast Today

... included salmon paté squeezed from a tube, much like you'd squeeze toothpaste. Are the Italians awesome or what?

The Catican Visits The Vatican!

Today, the Catican management team and the editorial staff from the 'Post have been granted* a private tour of the Vatican and will take in the sights and sounds and spiritual joy of the Papal State. Hurrah!

We'll be sure to mention our Maximum Leader and the Feline Theocracy to our hosts. I'm certain they'll make a special effort once they know that her servants are involved.

Our Maximum Leader in full Theocratic regalia.
* - Well, maybe not granted. Purchased might be a better word for it.

Off To Rome!

Well, the Catican management team and the crack editorial staff of The Scratching Post are off for a two-week, long-belated honeymoon in sunny Italy! We're hoping to post regular updates from there as our hotels have promised us access to the Interweb Tubes. If we can't manage to communicate with the outside world, we'll bring back photos and stories and share them when we return.

As for today, given the flights and the time change, we're hoping for a lot of this:

Time for a nap? Why, yes! Yes it is!

Can You Help Someone Who Doesn't Want To Help Themselves?

More Greece Debt geekery here.

So the ECB and the EU (read: Germany) are wondering how to stave off a Greek default. They're debating a new aid package for the Greeks who, for years, have borrowed and spent and partied. The Greek government is trying to pitch in and has plans to cut civil service payrolls and pay as well as sell off parts of their bloated government*.

The Greeks themselves are going bonkers in the streets.

The Greeks are demanding an indefinite continuation of childhood with the ECB and the Germans as Mommy and Daddy, paying the bills.
The German government is having an increasingly difficult time selling these bailouts to the German public. Now put yourself in the position of a German citizen and consider that video. What do you feel about the Greeks?

How long before you want to cut them loose and use the bailout money to save the German banks who made the bad loans, assuming you want to do anything at all?

It doesn't seem like the Greeks have any concept whatsoever about the source of wealth**. Right now, their future hinges on the rest of Europe sucking it up in a big way and sending them tens of billions of Euros so they don't end up bankrupt and growing vegetables on their apartment patios to survive.

Seen from a distant view, their behavior seems crazy. It's like they never learned anything practical about economics in their schools.

* - In a completely unrelated development, the US under Bush and Obama has gone in the opposite direction, taking over the mortgage, car and health care industries to one extent or another. There is nothing the US can learn from Greece. Nothing. It's a totally different situation, so don't draw any conclusions at all here. Really.

** - Hmmm. No idea about where wealth comes from. Who does that remind you of?

Change In Greece

... can come from the editorial pages. Dig this.

The political system post-1974 was all about granting all sorts of favors to political cronies, ultimately at the expense of healthy entrepreneurship and private initiative. Now the system is bankrupt and it can no longer offer protection to its acolytes.

Young people can chose between two paths: one is the path of violence, of denial and nihilism. The other path is to turn indignation into a movement whose objective is to get rid of the inept politicians and the hypocritical academics who purport to be fighting for the well-being of public institutions.

Such a movement of indignation would aspire to transcend blanket negativity and violence. But such a movement requires a certain element of risk and positive action, not just loud protest.

If we want jobs for our young people, if we want to keep the brightest and most talented of them in the country, then we ought to encourage them to express those characteristics that have made Greeks distinguish themselves in the past: the ability to sniff out an opportunity, extroversion, business acumen, the ability to think outside the box -- all those traits, in other words, that have enabled Greeks to excel away from home, in environments that are free from graft, corruption and the false protection of a bankrupt state and political system.

Wow. That's some pretty potent stuff. Read the whole thing.

Selling Is A Transference Of Feeling

... or so says Zig Ziglar in his Secrets of Closing the Sale.

My daughter wants to play soccer in high school. If you don't play club soccer outside of school, you're chances of making the high school team are remote. For a variety of self-inflicted reasons, she did not make any of the local teams, but looks to be catching on with a team a good half an hour away.

I'm willing to make the long drive, provided she commits to working hard at the game. I like the sport and it's been a great teaching tool to help her connect work with success with happiness. Soccer has been the best teacher of that connection.

So how do you get her to fully buy in? That's where Zig comes in. Zig's book is full of pearls of wisdom. I'm on my fourth time through it right now and each time I've had a different sales problem and each time it's come through in a different way. In this case, I pictured her future if she followed a plan of Deliberate Practice and worked out 30-60 minutes a day, focusing on the area that has cost her spots on the other teams, ball control. I'm convinced that if she does this, she's guaranteed success. I've seen it work with her before and I know that the skills she needs to master aren't that far out of reach. In my heart of hearts, I know she can do it if she follows the plan. Selling, then, is getting her to know, in her heart of hearts, that success is hers if she follows the plan.

That's been the focus of our conversations lately. We worked out yesterday and focused on a single type of turn and did it over and over and over again. She improved markedly. We also worked on shooting and she took 30 shots into a baseball backstop, making sure her form was as good as it could be. (YouTube abounds with soccer videos showing you just how to do the basics.) She drilled shot after shot. Afterwards, it was clear I had sold her on Deliberate Practice. She knew she was getting better and could see the results. I still hadn't sold her on doing it on her own.

My daughter has a very kind heart. She would never deliberately hurt anyone. She doesn't have a very good sense of the sacrifices others make for her so she can succeed, however. I explained how one of her brothers had agreed to take time off of work to drive her to those distant practices on the days when I couldn't do it. I asked her to think about how her other brothers worked out with her and encouraged her. We talked about what it looked like to her teammates when her ball-handling skills were poor, how she was wordlessly telling her teammates to win the game for her. I think she got it. The next few weeks will tell.

I think I made the sale. If I did, it was because I took a step back and asked myself if I really believed my plan would make a difference. In all honesty, I just can't see how it can fail. My sales effort was an expression of that feeling to my daughter. I'm optimistic that it worked.

This post was really just an excuse for me to put up this video of Cheik Tiote's amazing goal against Arsenal.

A Mother Teresa Quote

... one that was used by the salutatorian at my daughter's 8th grade graduation. I liked it a lot. Enjoy!

Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.
Life is a beauty, admire it.
Life is a dream, realize it.
Life is a challenge, meet it.
Life is a duty, complete it.
Life is a game, play it.
Life is a promise, fulfill it.
Life is sorrow, overcome it.
Life is a song, sing it.
Life is a struggle, accept it.
Life is a tragedy, confront it.
Life is an adventure, dare it.
Life is luck, make it.
Life is life, fight for it!

Where Does Change Come From?

I've started reading the Athens News and ekathimerini in the morning in addition to Der Spiegel. I want to see what the EU debt crisis looks like from inside the vortex. If a society was going to change because it's habits had been self-destructive, where would you expect to see it first? The arts? The editorial pages? Fringe bloggers?

Arab Spring? Not So Much

Der Spiegel has a story about women in Egypt being forced to undergo virginity tests.

Yuck.

The Real Solution Is To Phase Out Electricity

Germany is phasing out their nuclear reactors because they're afraid of 9.0 earthquakes and repeated, 25' tidal waves hitting them. Unfortunately, it's going to whack their carbon emissions and electricity generation just a tad.

Stephan Kohler, head of the German Energy Agency, told SPIEGEL that one significant side-effect of the phase out could be that the country will fail to reach its emission reduction goals. "Large energy companies are now turning more to cheap lignite (brown coal) to replace atomic energy and less to natural gas, which is more efficient but also more expensive," Kohler said ...

In addition, the removal of atomic energy from Germany's power mix and the resulting need to invest billions in the development of alternative energies and a new power grid could result in higher energy bills. "The phase out of nuclear energy is not going to be free," Rainer Brüderle, Merkel's economics minister until recently, told SPIEGEL. Brüderle, who is now floor leader for the Free Democrats, Merkel's junior coalition partner, added that "we have to be honest with the people. We will all have to pay, the power customers, the taxpayers."

The environmentalists are overlooking the most obvious solution.


Or are they?

Fried Chicken and Mixed Greens, Please

Organic sprouts killed 29.

Health authorities in Germany have finally been able to show that the pathogens which caused the deadly EHEC outbreak came from sprouts at an organic farm in the Uelzen district.

Secular Apostate has the lowdown on how it happened.

A Little Bit About The Sarah Palin Emails

First off, our Monks of Miscellaneous Musing have a great post on the topic.

Second, the whole thing is sick and insane. What's wrong with these people? They are positively out of their minds with hate for Sarah Palin.

Lastly, where are the Rev. Wright emails? She's a private citizen, he's a private citizen. She's a public speaker, he's a public speaker. She's been involved, indirectly, with the presidency, he's been involved, indirectly, with the presidency. Yes, I know, these emails are from her time as a public servant, but so what? Why was Barack Obama's crazed, racist mentor not subjected to this kind of scrutiny?

It's enough to make me support Sarah Palin for president, just out of spite.

Just A Quick Note On Greece

So the European Central Bank (ECB) owns about $60B in Greek government bonds. I could be off on that number, but the point is that they own a lot of it. Something like 1/3 of all Greek bonds not held within Greece are owned by the ECB.

Just like the Fed, the ECB can print money.

The ECB is refusing to renew their Greek bonds when they mature. They're going to dump the things onto the open market instead of hold them and roll them over.

If a huge organization like the ECB, which can print money is getting out of the market for Greek debt, what idiot would hold on to them?

Talk about a catalyst for a run on the stuff! If that's not it, nothing is. I think all the desperately hopeful folks are waiting for the rest of the EU to use their taxpayers to make good on the Greek bonds in an effort to stave off default.

Crazy days are ahead for the EU.

How I Feel Today

Yesterday was my daughter's 8th grade graduation. Today, I'm totally beat.

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Link Of The Day

Babylonsista about what makes a marriage work. Great stuff.

Rescuing Governments Is All Very Well And Good

... but in doing so, the geese that lay the golden eggs are getting hurt.

Dig this.

June 10 (Bloomberg) -- Political wrangling over the future of Greece is infecting Europe’s corporate bond market, pushing relative yields to a 2 1/2-month high and forcing borrowers to pull deals.

The extra yield investors demand to hold non-financial company debt instead of government securities rose 3 basis points this month to 118, the highest since March 24, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data. Denmark’s Nykredit Bank A/S and Finnish lender Pohjola Bank Plc postponed bond sales yesterday citing market conditions.

Euro-region governments are pitched against the European Central Bank in a dispute over what a potential restructuring of Greece’s sovereign debt would look like. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is calling for private creditors to take more pain while ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet warns such a course may spread contagion. A plan needs to be in place by June 24 to prevent the International Monetary Fund from withholding the next instalment of the nation’s bailout.

It's very nice to go worrying about whether or not a government can keep doling out benefits, but it's still the middle man. What's really happening is that people and corporations that create value are handing some of their profits out as government benefits. The governments don't create anything they just take from one person and give to another.

Wealth creators are suffering collateral damage from government overspending.

Cheezburger of the Day

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Children Of The Russian Rich

Der Spiegel has a photo essay showing the tykes of the Russian oligarchs. If you click through it, I'd be interested in hearing your take on it. If we get a comment or three, I'll venture my thoughts, but I wanted to leave it just as a link without commentary so you can form your own opinions free from influence.

Something You Might Not Have Known

... or you might have, in which case you can roll your eyes, sigh and click away.

As corn prices rise, pork prices temporarily fall. That's because pigs are fed with corn and rising feed prices make it more expensive to maintain larger herds. Pig farmers kill off some of their pigs so they can pay their feed bills. The result is a temporary glut of pork on the market until the herds have been reduced to a size the farmers can afford.

Bloomberg's got an article on this phenomena today.

U.S. hog producers may start to cull herds as the faltering economic recovery curbs pork demand and tightening corn inventories boost livestock-feed prices, curbing animal supplies and increasing costs for meatpackers.

Since May 16, wholesale pork has dropped 9.6 percent from the highest since at least October 1997, while corn, the main ingredient in animal feed, gained 9.5 percent. Hog producers are facing record production costs, based on current futures prices, Steve Meyer, the president of Paragon Economics, said yesterday at the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa.

Just thought I'd share.

Because It's My Blog And I Like This Song

Take five, Jack, and enjoy some Nat K C.

Facing Down Revolutionaries

... may mean acceding to their demands.

Here at home, I cook about half our meals. Maybe a shade more than that as my wife spends a few nights a week taking care of others at Hospice or our church. It's my job to feed the troops and I'm facing a palace revolution.

My preferred cuisine is Southern and my preferred method is experimental. Last night, I made blackened catfish (good!), cornbread (good!) and mixed greens with tasso (bad!). This was not just an isolated foray into culinary territory unfamiliar to the youthful savages in our house, it was one of a steady stream of them. One of our sons has taken to asking who is cooking that night before deciding whether to come home for dinner.

It looks as if the Arab Spring has come to San Diego. Our own Street Arabs are gathering in the market square, waving their arms and chanting for regime change. As the local dictator, I'm being forced to acquiesce to their demands. It's going to be harder than it looks.

A scene from our dining room.
We have four children. Here are their gustatory limitations.

1. Child A - no onions or mushrooms.


2. Child B - all food must be the sort one can find at a county fair - spaghetti, quesadillas, hot dogs or sausages, hamburgers.


3. Child C - no shrimp or shellfish.


4. Child D - no peppers, green or otherwise.

Each of them, taken individually, cuts out a substantial number of recipes. Taken en toto, even assuming you find some substitute meal for Child B, eliminates about 80% of all recipes. (No onions? Impossible!)

Add to that the fact that some of my favorite recipes that fit all of these restrictions, Cuban Pecadillo, Chicken Country Captain and Moroccan Chicken with Olives have been banned for various reasons, I'm left with ... grilling sausages every night? Simply dreadful for the experimental cook. I had considered forays into Greek and Indian cuisine, but the rioters outside the kitchen would surely burn the place down and lynch the kitchen staff in short order should I do that.

Heaven help me, but I may be forced to open the Betty Crocker cookbook and work my way through it's bland and boring recipes, one at a time. Sigh. It's like Van Gogh having to give up the canvas and paint bathrooms instead.

Suggestions are welcome.

To A Central Banker, Everything Looks Like An Interest Rate

The Fed is befuddled by the lack of economic growth. After all, they've done what they were supposed to do, they kept interest rates low and poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the Federal Government so they could spend, spend, spend. Now that it's been a clear failure, they're scratching their heads and concluding that they have to simply keep at it for the foreseeable future.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the “frustratingly slow” U.S. recovery warrants sustained monetary stimulus while predicting that growth will gain speed in the second half of the year.

“The economy is still producing at levels well below its potential; consequently, accommodative monetary policies are still needed,” Bernanke said yesterday in a speech in Atlanta. At the same time, the Fed “will take whatever actions are necessary to keep inflation well controlled,” he said.

They have the tiniest glimmer of thought that there might be something more than just interest rates at work here.

The chairman also said the Fed needs to do “more thinking” about how new rules requiring banks to hold more liquidity will affect the broader financial system, and that the central bank wants to create new regulations that won’t “unnecessarily constrict credit.”

But in the end, they all want to fall back on what they know - printing money and setting interest rates.

Policy makers have few options left to respond to accumulating signs of a slowdown after their second round of asset purchases sparked the harshest political backlash against the central bank in three decades.

“We’ve gotten inconsistency, hesitancy and unevenness” in U.S. economic growth, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said yesterday in a speech in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I’m troubled by what you might describe as a lack of conviction in this economy.”

Meanwhile, in states like California, the regulatory jihad continues unchecked.

Farming has long been a field dominated by California, yet environmentalist pressures for cutbacks in agricultural water supplies have turned a quarter million acres of prime Central Valley farmland fallow, creating mass unemployment in many communities.

“California cannot have it both ways, a desire for economic growth yet still overregulating in the areas of labor, water, environment,” notes Dennis Donahue, a Democrat and mayor of Salinas, a large agricultural community south of San Jose. Himself a grower, Donahue sees agricultural in California being undermined by ever-tightening regulations, which have led some to expand their operations to other sections of the country, Mexico and even further afield.

It's not just California, either, and it cuts across political lines.

Number of pages in the Federal Register, a crude measure of the growing regulatory burden on the country. Image taken from The Percolator, the free-market environmentalism blog.
Every time I hear Ben Bernanke or even an outside economist like Nouriel Roubini speak about interest rates and quantitative easing, it's like they live in some distant, academic world. You can have all the money you want available to you, but if the rules for using it are hopelessly complicated or punitive, who's going to do anything but sit on their hands?

Cheezburger of the Day

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Tradition Protects The Younger Generation From Themselves

This is a partial explanation of my affection for G K Chesterton's quote on tradition.

Last week, I stopped by an art supply store to get a gift certificate for my father. The young man behind my counter, who looked to be in his early 20s, had tattoos from his upper arms all the way down to the first knuckles of his fingers. His ears had been pierced with those disks that create large holes in your ear lobes, but the right one had gone horribly wrong and while the left ear lobe was a large, hollow loop, the right one had broken and two strands of flesh dangled down where his earlobe used to be.

In an frenzy of unrestrained self-expression, he had permanently mutilated himself.

I tried to keep up some normal banter with him while he filled out the gift certificate, but about halfway through I faltered and just couldn't continue. The sight of this boy, young enough to be my son, his body polluted and torn, took all my strength from me. I wanted to cry.

This boy had been allowed to make whatever decision he wanted about his body. Society no longer held to traditions of appearance or propriety and did not enforce self-restraint through opprobrium and censure. Instead, each tattoo and each piercing was celebrated as an act of artistic freedom. The end result was a hideous mess. No one had protected him from himself.

The young man recognized the look on my face. As he was finishing the transaction, he saw my eyes go to his mangled ear. He stopped speaking as well and his body slumped a bit. It had all happened before, many times.

Toddlers have one way of hurting themselves and young adults have another. While we make sure little kids wear helmets, live in houses with baby gates and outlet covers, we not only allow, but applaud our young adults when they permanently coat their bodies in childish art and puncture their flesh with various pieces of fishing tackle. I don't think we realized that when we did away with traditional norms of behavior, we were taking down the barriers to self-destruction that kept our younger generation free to make choices later in life.

Chesterton On Tradition

I've been reading (well, listening to) some G K Chesterton books recently. This quote, from Orthodoxy, resonated with me.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Why it has such an impact on me in later posts.

My Reply To Matthew Hess

Matthew Hess is a cartoonist who is part of a movement in San Francisco to ban circumcision. He has created some thoroughly anti-Semitic cartoons that you can see here. Rather than write a standard Scratching Post polemic where I call Mr. Hess names and sneer at him, I found the video below.

As a Catholic, it bothers me that so many non-Catholics see us portrayed as being all about gays, abortion or priest scandals. We're not. I just got back from a profoundly Catholic retreat, Cursillo, and it was all about living a more Christ-centered life. Looking at Mr. Hess' cartoons, it's obvious he has no idea what it means to be Jewish. I'm sure he's not alone.

Enjoy.

Update: I know this doesn't really explain what it means to be Jewish, but I think that after watching it, it would be pretty difficult to work up the hatred to draw pictures of crazed, knife-wielding rabbis with fangs.

Grasshopper Headshot

I found this character clinging to our screen door the other day and he was nice enough to sit still while I photographed him. I didn't do a very good job of it, even this section of him isn't completely in focus. In spite of that, I think it's worth a click. Looking at the larger image, you can see his kinship with crabs and lobsters, particularly in the joints where his legs meet his body.

Enjoy.

Aphids Are Actually Good For Your Plants

... according to President Obama.

I continue to be mesmerized by this video, posted by our Monks of Miscellaneous Musings.

The thing is completely mind-blowing to me. Despite a total breakdown in job creation, the guy just can't stop with the social justice rhetoric. It's like he's living in a different world.

Pretend you're a business owner watching this. Large business, small business, whatever. Demand for your products is down. Costs of raw materials are up. When the president says, "every citizen deserves a basic measure of security," you know exactly where that measure of security is going to come from. You! The guy is planning to load you up with yet more commitments, this time in the form of supporting everyone out there and making sure they get what they need. You're a plant with aphids and the dude is importing more.

When you watch the head of the Administration say stuff like this, you'd be crazy to expand, hire or do anything other than look for other places to go. He shows no comprehension whatsoever of what it takes to generate wealth. All he knows how to do is spend yours. Follow this up with a speech on the environment and the consequent financial attacks by the EPA on your business, and it's no wonder no one is hiring.

Obama: Aphids are good for your plants. We need to do more to support the aphids.

The Greatest Photoshop Of All Time

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Video Of The Day

... is Andrew Klavan with a typically awesome effort.

Can We Please Stop Behaving Like Swine Now?

Re: the recent Twitter controversy over Democrat representative Weiner texting horrid photos of his private parts photos to some chick.

Cindy Meston directs the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a past president of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health. If there is something you want to know about what turns women on, she is the person you call.

“We spent six years of research on why women have sex,” Meston says. They compiled 237 reasons. Duty sex. Revenge sex. Pity sex. Bored sex, engaged in because women simply had nothing better to do. “Of the 237 reasons why women have sex,” Meston says, “not one was looking at a man’s genitals.”

Sadly, the reason that Weiner and Brett Favre and others send these images is that women expect nothing better.

See also: men, lack of marriageable

Addendum: Whatever we do, let's not go back to the bad old days when behavior was judged according to fixed standards. The Victorians had it all wrong. All wrong. I mean, they did, didn't they?

Link of the Day

Felix Salmon has an outstanding piece on how the national Central Banks in Europe are lending between each other. To be brief, the Germans are financing everyone else and money is being printed in vast quantities to do so. Here's an excerpt.

Since then, the Bundesbank has essentially been singlehandedly financing the PIGS central banks: it’s now owed a whopping €325 billion, and rising. (That’s about $470 billion, at today’s exchange rate; we’ll surely hit the half-trillion-dollar level soon.)

What’s being done with all this money? “Let us call a spade a spade,” says Wolf: “This is central bank finance of the state.”

Read the whole thing.

Cream Of Tiger Soup

I may have posted this before, but at work I'm on a Tiger Team, trying to salvage something out of a complete catastrophe. While on a conference call, I found this. Enjoy!

LOLCats

Bee In Flight

I think the photos are worth a click. Or two. Enjoy!

Crazy Tornado Footage

Dig this. Wild.

Cheezburger of the Day

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MTV Meets Michelangelo

... and is told to go away.

FLORENCE, Italy—The cast of "Jersey Shore" relocated to this Tuscan citadel expecting to bask in their Italian heritage and soak up the country's legendary hospitality.

What they're getting is a very cold shoulder...

One of the town's chic eateries has posted a "No Grazie, Jersey Shore" sign outside its door, instructing cast members to stay away. The cultural superintendent has barred the entire cast from being filmed in the city's hallowed museums...

The clash of cultures is rooted in opposing views of what it means to be "Italian." Florence—the land of Michelangelo, Dante and Gucci—has always regarded itself as an emblem of Italian elegance and courtly etiquette...

The Jersey Shore brand of being Italian involves more braggadocio. Revealing clothing, occasional impromptu urination, public displays of drunkenness and casual romance are the hallmarks of the "Guido" and "Guidette,"

Allow me to recommend a sign to post all across Florence.

Cheezburger of the Day

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Imagine What It Looks Like From Inside The Building

Say you're some Greek government budgetary functionary and at your desk. Outside there are mobs protesting. Right in front of you are the fiscal facts - hopeless, every one of them. The feeling of desperation inside those buildings must be palpable.

The Crux Of The Matter

Robert Samuelson has a typically excellent piece on the European debt crisis. In it is this nugget that you find over and over again in such pieces.

Europe is playing for time. It's struggling to delay any Greek default long enough for other vulnerable countries to demonstrate they can handle their debts.

Here's where it seems relatively simple to me, but isn't addressed in 99.99% of the pieces I read on the topic. There are two questions to ask, ones that are independent of scale. That is, they can be asked of your 10-year-old daughter, a corporate CEO or the head of a country.

1. What are you going to do that people will be willing to pay for?


2. How will you service your debts?

If you can't answer them satisfactorily, you're hosed and playing for time isn't going to do anything but prolong things. Neither Greece or the EU or Barack Obama can answer either of these. Our Monastery of Miscellaneous Musings has a great snippet illustrating just this point. Dean uses it to make a different one, but the content of the speech leaves you no doubt that not only does President Obama not have an answer to these questions, he doesn't even know they should be asked. The failure to address these crucial, foundational questions blows my mind.

The more I read both theology and economics, the more I become convinced that we're living at the end of an age of denial.

Lazy

Economists Should Read More Lewis

C. S. Lewis, that is. Gretchen Morgensen, writing in the NYT, has an interesting column today about America's debt chickens coming home to roost. She quotes a scholarly article with this observation embedded:

An intriguing aspect of their analysis is how it views the rising tide of debt around the world from a historical perspective. For so many countries to be groaning under so much debt at the same time is unusual, the authors say. More typical are the somewhat contained debt crises, like in Latin America in the 1980s or in Russia in 1998. While both of those episodes reverberated beyond the countries from which they sprang, today’s debt problems are far more widespread. And, as a result, more worrisome.

The simultaneous buildup of very large public deficits and debt positions in virtually all of the advanced high-income countries “is a new element at work in the global economy,” the report says.

Historical, yes, surprising, no. Globally, the Western world has become more and more secular, seeking salvation by proxy. Instead of you doing works of charity with your own life and money, you are forced to give money to the government who will do them for you. The end result is what we see today, massive debts created by separating giving from receiving.

To the donors, the recipients are invisible, so politicians seeking to buy votes can convince them that the poor are deserving, no matter what destructive behaviors have become commonplace. To the recipients, the donors are invisible, so those same politicians can convince them that the donors aren't yet paying their fair share, no matter how much is being paid. There was no reason for the average person to want to slow the growth of these secular charities. To do so would be an act of greed or selfishness.


While we are observing the failure of an economic model, we're also observing the failure of the societal model that drove it. Salvation, both economic and spiritual, is personal, not collective.

Praying To The Government

There's a bigger point here, but I just wanted to share a link, an excerpt and a video with you and suggest that the Greeks have passed back into the world of mythology, only this time the gods they worship are politicians.

Indignant Protests

The mass rallies by the “Indignant” that were held on Wednesday and Thursday night in almost every major Greek city represent a new parameter in political developments. This is a new phenomenon, which in form mimics the initiative by Spain’s youth, but in essence is stoked by the impending local economic crash. The movement is spontaneous, ideologically multicolored and politically astray. Its demographics and the symbols used to represent it represent a great departure from the usual stuff seen in protests. Here we don’t see a configuration of many small, tight-knit groups -- or blocs -- and the “professional” protesters of the left; you see people who are novices at protests. Instead of banners and red flags, you see Greek flags and hear the national anthem. Moreover, there is no fire missing from the chanted slogans, which sweep aside political correctness in favor of a morally accusatory tone.

Protest Video

General Odds and Ends

Here, I'm using Chesterton's definition of mythology - mysticism without philosophy or logic. That is, the crowd can't tell you how anything is supposed to happen, only that they want something to occur. In essence, they're praying to Zeus and Hermes. There's no end point here, no evidence that their gods have any power at all. They are simply crying out for mercy.

Borrowing Dollars And Returning Paper

I just read Ellen Brown's column, Japan shows how to defuse debt time-bomb. If the title wasn't enough to blow your mind, dig the the closer:

We have been frightened into believing that government debt is a bad thing...

The public debt is the people's money, and today the people are coming up short. Shrinking the public debt means shrinking more than just the services the government is expected to provide. It means shrinking the money supply itself, along with the ability to provide the jobs, wages and purchasing power necessary for a thriving economy.

The public debt is the people's money? Huh? Does that make your credit card debt your kids' money? It's like she has lost all contact with reality here. She thinks we should borrow money and pay back our creditors with paper which is worth less than what we borrowed. I wonder if that works in her life.

When you deposit money in the bank, they, in turn, lend it to someone. That's how they make money. In essence, you're lending money to the bank. Well, by her logic, isn't that then the bankers' money? Why do they need to pay that back? Why should there be any results from that loan at all? When Ellen wants to make a withdrawal, the bank should just shrug and say, "It's the people's money, now, Ellen!" Maybe they could give her twenty cents on the dollar. I wonder if she'd like that.

Borrowing money is predicated on your ability to pay it back. Otherwise it's just stealing.

John Dillinger, banker.

I Just Installed IE 9

... and immediately moved to Firefox as my browser. I have no idea what IE 9 does for me. All I know is that I wanted to surf the web and I had to fight with the stupid thing just to get started. It wanted to show me all of it's new features and then gave me a wave of warnings about content on my own blog.

I'm done. Microsoft just lost another customer.

The Nightly Spot Of 'Nip

Our catnip plant has gotten huge, affording us the opportunity to crush up some fresh 'nip for our Maximum Leader right around drinkie-poo time.

Ahhhhhh. That's good 'nip.

Daughter Goes Traditional

Yes, Daughter Daisy sometimes puts on the red dress and hits the town, but there are also those time when she's Momma's little girl and shows off her traditional side.


I left this photo fairly large because I liked the textures and geometry of the flower. It's like a burst of soft orange. It might be worth a click to see that larger version. Enjoy!

We Don't Need A Border Fence

We need a force field and robotic guards with laser guns. Dig this.

MORELIA, Mexico—Fierce fighting among apparent rival drug gangs in western Mexico left 28 dead, while in a nearby state more than 700 people huddled in shelters after fleeing villages that had become battlegrounds.

The violence, which appeared to be unrelated, escalated Wednesday in the western states of Nayarit and Michoacan, where drug cartels have been warring for territory ...

Police found 28 men lying dead and four others wounded on the road littered with bullet casings from high-powered weapons and 10 abandoned vehicles.

All I'm asking is give heavily armed robots a chance.

Soccer While Wearing Binoculars

Hilarious!

Cheezburger of the Day

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A Big, Hairy, Green Spider

... or maybe a Watermelon Spider* since the abdomen looks like a watermelon. Either way, he was pretty cool. We found him meditating in the Catican. I left the photo fairly big and he's worth a click to see him in full detail. The eye structure in particular was fascinating for me.


* - In reality, it was a Green Lynx Spider, Peucetia viridians. Identification thanks to the Spider Identification Guide. You can read lots more about him here.

Cheezburger of the Day

What Hope Looks Like In Greece

After muddling around with the latest news from Greece on Bloomberg and the WSJ, I Googled greek newspaper english language and came across ekathimerini.com and the Athens News. Bloomberg and the WSJ had hinted at Greek "asset sales", but it was unclear just what that meant. Were they selling gold bars or state-run corporations? The answer is much deeper than asset sales. They're moving away from the Paul Krugman, progressive economic model that has clearly failed and towards a more Milton Friedman-esque one.

First up, they're ditching lots of regulations.

The Finance Ministry has made public a list of 136 professions that will be liberalized from July 2 as part of the economic reforms Greece has been encouraged to make by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

The reform means that those seeking to enter these professions can do so freely, without restrictions on the number of people in the sector or limits on where they can set up their businesses.

The professions in the list published on Monday range from taxi drivers to beauticians but do not include some of the key so-called closed professions.

Notaries, lawyers and civil engineers will see their professions liberalized at a later date, yet to be set by the ministry.

Second, while dangerous to draw conclusions from a single paper's editorials, here's ekathimerini.com discussing the crisis.

The rapid deterioration in economic conditions has made it clear that changing Greece’s economic model will be more painful than previously thought.

The delays in overhauling and downsizing the public sector, which is key to changing the Greek economic model, will entail even greater economic and social costs than envisaged even six months ago if the government does not convince party loyalists in state-controlled corporations to accept privatizations and vested interests everywhere else to accept competition.

Corroborating this point of view is the Athens News' reporting from the inner sanctums of the EU.

The head of the Eurogroup urged Greece to set up an independent privatisation body overseen by the European Union to bring down its ballooning debt level.

Jean-Claude Juncker told German news weekly Der Spiegel's edition to be published Monday that the EU in future will monitor Greece's privatisation programme "as if we were conducting it ourselves."

People adapt. It may take them a generation or two to see how screwed up they were, but in the end, we all learn from mistakes and figure out what worked and what didn't. Unquestionably, the Greeks have made a mess of their economy, but it looks like the light is dawning on them. And lest we be too harsh on them, or on the Greek-like progressives in our own country, they smashed the place in an effort to be kind to the "less fortunate." They were trying to give security to all, not realizing that salvation, both spiritual and economic, is a personal thing. Now that collectivism has failed yet again, it looks like they're figuring it out.

Awww

Click here.

The Proper Response To Draw Mohammed Day

... from none other than our very own Precentor of Measurements. Classy, Foxie. Very, very classy.

Authors In Out Midst

Frequent commenter Jeff Burton is also an author of young adult fiction. Awesomeness squared! Here's his latest book. I just bought my copy to read myself, being a fan of such things.

Spanish Gen-Y Protest, Demand More Leprechauns

... or whatever the Spanish equivalent of a leprechaun is. Dig this.

Unemployment is at 45% for these guys. They're demanding more jobs and more government spending. Umm, massive government spending is what they had been doing and it resulted in high unemployment like it always does. Logically, doing more of what you've been doing to get into the mess would seem to be a bad idea.

It's a sad sight to see. They're good people. They want to work. They want to be productive. Unfortunately, they've been brought up completely ignorant of where money comes from. Someone has done these folks a very great disservice.

It's A Lazin' On The Couch Kind Of Day

Red-Headed Daughter

Momma's little girl is a readhead. Sometimes. I can't quite make out why it happens from time to time. Usually, Daughter Daisy produces orange blooms just like Mom. Once in a great while, Mom will come out with a reddish bloom, but nothing as committed as this.

Oven Fried Chicken

This is a great recipe for it, particularly when you substitute Gullah Fried Chicken Seasoning* for half the paprika. Having said that, the flour mixture is too large by a factor of two for 8 thighs. If you use the recipe, you can safely cut the flour mixture in half. Also, I use lard instead of margarine. It works.

* - The restaurant's website is down. I wonder if they're still in business. Lovely owner, nice place to eat. I bought her seasoning and use it on fried chicken.

Yikes

Portugal, Ireland and Greece are all sad stories, but, because of its size, the real atomic bomb in Europe is Spain. This is bad news indeed for the Continent.

MADRID—Weekend elections that threaten to drive Spain's ruling Socialist party from power in several regions and cities also promise a potentially nasty surprise: the revelation of piles of undisclosed debt in local governments that could undercut the country's drive to avoid an international bailout.

Five months ago, a government change in Spain's Catalonia region revealed a budget deficit more than twice as big as previously reported. Now, a growing chorus of economists, local politicians and business leaders say that new governments are likely to discover, as Catalonia did, piles of "hidden debt" owed to health clinics and other suppliers.

Elsewhere, it was reported that Spanish bond yields have jumped. Having a lot of debt makes you fragile. Increases in the interest rate you pay on your debt have larger and larger effects as your debt level grows.

Bad medicine, this.

On Regulations

Here's a video from the 70s which is way out of date in terms of the size of the Federal Register, but is right on the money in terms of the growth of regulations. I apologize in advance for the shouting at the beginning. It seems to be the trademark of the fellow who posted the video.

Where I work, our regulations, processes, forms and restrictions have grown substantially over the last 5 years. The result is not, as the regulators might expect, control actually being ceded to the higher authorities who impose these regulations. Instead, there's a widespread cheating on our rules and regulations and general, unspoken lying about what's going on.

Increased regulation requires an increase in regulators to manage them. A regulation is only as good as its enforcement. If you don't increase the regulators, then all that happens is people lie and fudge and wink at the forms and processes and try to do what they were going to do anyway. Greece has discovered this as their black market economy has bloomed in concert with their preposterous regulatory regime.

I would argue that the more regulations you have, the less any one particular regulation is followed. It seems to be true where I work, but I wonder if it's really true across the world. If true, this would asymptotically approach anarchy as more regulations would lessen the power of all other regulations to the point where no one followed any rule at all.

Video of the Day

Hilarious!

Cheezburger of the Day

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Gorging Yourself Into A Vet Trip

So I got back from my retreat weekend and our Maximum Leader and I resumed our normal relationship. She demanded food and I gave it to her in measured amounts, portions that she usually inhales. Only this time, she didn't finish what little I gave her. This is a bad sign in cats. I took her to the vet yesterday to make sure everything was OK. It was.


My wife had decided to free feed her over the weekend and it seemed to work out well for everyone involved with one slight twist. Apparently, our Maximum Leader gorged herself to the point where the trigger for demanding more food was there, but she wasn't actually hungry. The spirit was willing, as it were, but the body was weak.

:-)

Greece Going Over The Falls

Bloomberg says the Euros are talking about allowing Greece to extend the maturity dates of their loans. That is, Greece will pay you back, but more slowly than they promised.

May 17 (Bloomberg) -- European finance ministers for the first time floated the idea of talks with bondholders over extending Greece’s debt-repayment schedule, saying that last year’s 110 billion-euro ($156 billion) rescue has failed to restore the country to financial health.

Der Spiegel points out how they're doing everything they can to avoid facing the facts.

More than a year ago, they created a €110 billion ($157 billion) bailout fund for Greece. Since then, however, the likelihood of a government bankruptcy has only increased. The country's mountain of debts is growing, the economy is at risk of collapsing and the promised austerity programs are not progressing as planned ...

"A restructuring of Greek debts is absolutely out of the question," says French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, while Schäuble notes: "A debt restructuring is not under consideration and is completely speculative."

Instead, the European Commission intends to fight the crisis with new debts, even though government officials in European capitals are still denying this, as usual. There is talk of a €60-billion loan package, additional austerity programs and even tougher austerity.

Greece couldn't pay back its loans before the added loans from their "bailout" and they can't pay them back afterwards, either. Extending the life of the loans doesn't make it better, it just delays the inevitable. The Greeks are insolvent and that's a fact. If the EU wants to avoid a default, they're going to have to do what the Fed has done which is print money and hand it out at 0% interest. The other alternative is to blow up the EU entirely through a Greek restructuring.

As I understand it, these bailouts require unanimous consent by all EU members and the Finns, for one, won't stomach another. I can't see how a Greek default results in anything other than a break in the EU and that's why they're frantic to prevent it. They're like kayakers in rapids. They'll be able to control their path to some extent, but the end result is going to be going over the falls no mater what they do.

Catch

I just started using Catch to share notes, links and images across all of my devices and I love it. It's like a personal version of Twitter. In the past, when I took the dogs to the dog park, I'd sit and surf the web on my Droid 2 while they played. When I found something I wanted to blog or share with others, I'd email it to one of my accounts. Catch allows me to post it to my Catch account where I can pick it up anywhere. I can do the same for photos. Awesomeness!

Link of the Day

Click on the image.

Cheezburger of the Day

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Back From Retreat

... wouldn't that mean advancing?

I just spent three and a half days on my first Cursillo weekend and I'm not entirely sure what to say about it. A quick summary was that I shared a weekend with about 30 other Catholic men who were joining a movement to live a Christ-centered life, but that summary doesn't do it justice. In fact, until I've had a chance to write my way through what happened, I don't think I'll fully understand it. Even in that, I'm sure it will end up like a C. S. Lewis theology text and will require several runs through to even get to the 75% mark.

What I do know for certain is that it's a major inflection point in my life.

See You On Monday!

Heading off for a weekend religious retreat.  I'm looking forward to all of it save for the part where I can't have a laptop or my beloved Droid 2.

Three whole days without the Interweb Tubes. Pray for me.

Update: this should have been posted Thursday night, but the Blogger system was down.

The Frog As It Boils

I wandered over to the progressive blog Firedog Lake, searched on Greece and came up with this. The author's flippancy about the US position is interesting.

(T)he US is in a superior position for a separate reason. We own the printing presses for the currency in which our debt is denominated. Furthermore, that debt just so happens to be the reserve currency of the world.

I've seen this on blogs and in pundit pieces from both left and right and it reminds me of the story of the frog being slowly boiled. Up until the point where it expires, the frog feels things are just fine.

We're now at the point where people blandly talk about printing money to solve our debt problems as if that's no big deal at all.

Amazing.

For Tim

If you've never visited Tim's Backyard Arthropod Project, you're missing a real treat. Tim is a throwback to the days of the gentleman scientist. For me, his site is Why The Internet Was Invented.

In any case, here's a bug I found in my house the other night. I took about 12 shots of the stupid thing and this was the best of the lot. Between the drastic contrast, the wretched ambient lighting and the focal length of my shots, I managed to get the bug, but not fully in focus. It gave me an even greater appreciation for Tim "Karl Theodor Ernst von Siebold" Eisele.

Click on the photo for greater detail. Despite my bungling, I think it's worth the effort.

Sad

More protests in Greece:

Here is what they are protesting.

Jungle Cat

While taking shots for a photo essay on the prodigious reproductive capabilities of my Mexican Feather Grass I caught a few of our Maximum Leader walking near a thicket* of the stuff. I cropped the photo to remove the sidewalk and it ended up looking like her head was photoshoppped onto a picture of the grass.


* - Mexican Feather Grass is small, so it's really not a thicket. Maybe it's a thicketette.

Pun-ishment

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Timo Soini Is Not Crazy

In fact, he's quite sane.

Instability

There are two very nice debt porn posts out in the blogosphere today. Stephen Meister argues that since much of our $14T debt is held by Social Security, we essentially owe that money to ourselves so it kind of doesn't count. Things aren't as bad as they seem. Yet.

The Calafia Beach Pundit thinks that the end of QEII is a good thing for free market reasons.

In short, instead of worrying about the end of monetary "stimulus" and fiscal "stimulus," we should be cheering. Misguided stimulus is bad; ending it is therefore good. The economy is struggling under the weight of too much "stimulus," and it needs a break.

In response to them, I offer this chart from yesterday:

This is what it looks like when people decide you aren't going to pay them back. Source.
Greece and Ireland and Portugal obeyed the standard economic models until a few months ago. Now they're simply deadbeats on the run from their creditors.

As a private citizen, you can borrow money on your home, your credit card, your paycheck and who knows what else. Up until the first debt collector calls you, there are all kinds of models and spreadsheets and budget programs that can convince you things are going to be OK. After that first call and your first series of late payments, those models and charts and equations don't mean anything. In the case of a government, once bondholders decide they aren't going to get their money back, they flee.

See chart above.

Economic models are great when things are relatively stable, but gargantuan debts relative to your income make things highly unstable. In the Calafia Beach Pundit's post above, I left this in the comments.

My problem with the end of QEII is not interest rates but volume. Just who is going to buy $100B of Treasuries every single month? Every month is going to be a rollercoaster with ups and downs driven by random world events. The volume of the debt will make the system unstable and investors panicky.

I don't think QEII was actually instituted to keep interest rates low, I think it was instituted because the Treasury got cold sweats wondering who was going to buy endless cataracts of debt and with good reason. Keynesian economics is stable until it's not and compassionate nations all around the world are finding this out.

Dropwords

Here in the Catican, we've all become addicted to a game on our Droid 2 called Dropwords. It's a Scrabble-y game where you find words in a table of random letters. It's loads of fun. While the dictionary of possible words is huge, it's missing some key ones.

Like these two: rewoo and rezap.

Rewoo: "Say, Mark, after your rowdy and rude behavior at the party last night, Maria is really mad at you. Looks like you're going to have to rewoo, old buddy."

Rezap: "Good Lord! The Marlokian ambassador is getting back up! You'd better rezap him before he has a chance to activate the Thrombolian Device!"

A Good Time To Buy Treasuries

When is it a good idea to buy short-term Treasuries paying 0.25%? When everything else is uncertain, that's when.

Greece is doomed to default, err, restructure. They are now paying credit card interest rates on their ever-increasing debt.

This is what it looks like when people decide you aren't going to pay them back. Source.
When that happens, banks all over Europe are going to suffer major losses to the tune of tens of billions. Some might even fall. Who has exposure to that? Who has exposure to the exposure?

Hypothetical scenario with company names and amounts pulled out of the air: Say you manage a big mutual fund and you invest in Caterpillar. They've got their pensions invested in Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo has huge loans to Deutschebank. Deutschebank has $8B in loans to Greece. Greece decides to blow off it's creditors, err, restructure it's loans and Deutschebank takes a mortal blow. Wells Fargo's loans are now worthless. Caterpillar's pensions take a huge hit because Wells Fargo's stock tanks. Your investment in Caterpillar is now deeply underwater because they were caught up in the chain reaction of Greece's collapse.

Is that scenario real? Who knows? How many linkages do you have to trace to figure out whether or not you're exposed to the Eurosocialist implosion? Instead of sitting out there waiting to get killed, it would be a better thing to park your $$ somewhere safe and sit it out. It won't take long for the whole thing to blow over, probably 6 months or so. One place you can be reasonably assured of holding on to most of your value is buying short-term Treasuries. Since you're not going to be in them that long, their appalling rate of return isn't a big deal. There's no worry about price, either, since there's a never-ending supply of the things.

Best to park your cash for a little while and once the dust clears you can sell them (or not roll them over) and get back into the market.

There. That was just a little thinking out loud as I wandered through my normal morning reading. I'm not doing this with my money nor do some of the giants like PIMCO seem to be doing it. It's only a little thought exercise to try to understand how things work. Or not. :-)

Overthinking Things

So the Euros are now thinking about asking Greece for collateral for their next loan.

May 8 (Bloomberg) -- European Union officials may require Greece to provide collateral for aid as policy makers struggle to prevent the euro area’s first sovereign debt restructuring, said a person with direct knowledge of the situation.

Expanding the 110 billion-euro ($158 billion) lifeline Greece received last year may mean that assets or revenue from asset sales are used to secure extra funds, the person said. Demanding collateral, an idea floated last year by Finland, may help avoid a political backlash against bailouts.

All of this is a huge example of overthinking the problem. Greece borrowed too much money, more than they could pay back. They didn't borrow it so that they could turn a profit with it by building more industry, or if they did it was an abysmal failure and something which should have been recognized right away. Instead, they borrowed it to pay their people more than they were worth.

In essence, Greece was your shiftless brother-in-law and you loaned him money so he could take vacations. The Euro solution has been to successively loan him still more money with the conclusion of each loan being renewed surprise that he can't pay you back. That would have been a stupid idea for you to do and was an equally stupid one for the European banks, investors and ECB.

All the Keynesian explanations in the world, all of the graphs and charts and equations in all the textbooks serve only to temporarily obscure the fact that loaning money to people who can't show a profit in short order is a stupid thing to do. It's that simple.

"They Don’t Want To Play By The Rules"

... does this work for physicists? Chemists?

How far would you get in life if you had to rediscover everything for yourself? Wouldn't that be a complete waste of time?

This is a tiny follow-up to my previous post.