A Few Thoughts On The Opening Salvo Of The Debt Limit Debate

President Obama has come out and said he won't negotiate with the crazed fundamentalists who threaten to destroy life as we know it by holding the debt ceiling hostage while they make insane demands to cut government spending down to levels not seen since Ramses II was forcing the Israelites to drag huge blocks of stone around in the desert*. Simply put, his position is that since the spending is already cast in stone, so to speak, raising the debt ceiling so the government can borrow to pay for it is mandatory. One requires the other.

Speaker Boehner or Ramses II, I'm not sure which. I'll have to consult with Mut.

I have a few semi-random thoughts on the whole thing that, as I'm a blogger, I feel you simply must know in order to have a proper understanding of the whole thing. Here they are, in no particular order.

• Since both borrowing and spending are required for the cycle to complete itself, why does one take precedence over the other?
• It's only the House that's fussing over the debt ceiling. They've only got 1/3 responsibility for the spending. They had to compromise on the spending bills. Why doesn't he have to compromise on the debt limit?
• There's no budget even though it's required by law. The only group to have done it's duty and passed a budget are the crazed fundamentalists. Say what you will about their crazy craziness, at least they've done that. Do they get debate points for that?
• The President is required by law to submit a budget to Congress by the first Monday in February, but his people have already said that's not going to happen. I guess some laws are better than others.
• Since it's our debt and not his, is the President really on our side? There's one group of people who are trying to slow down the growth of how much I owe and another side who wants it unlimited. Why am I rooting for the side that wants to stick me with an unlimited bill?

* - I know these aren't his exact words. I'm paraphrasing here. Work with me.

Detroit, Illiteracy And Cultural Rot

First, let's clarify something. That well-publicized 47% adult illiteracy rate for Detroit looks to be bunk. As a more trustworthy figure isn't instantly available, let's just leave it at that. More broadly, Statistic Brain* reports the following table:

U.S. Illiteracy Statistics	Data
Percent of U.S. adults who can’t read	14 %
Number of U.S. adults who can’t read	32 Million
Percent of U.S. adults who read below a 5th grade level	21 %
Percent of prison inmates who can’t read	63 %
Percent of high school graduates who can’t read	19 %

More broadly still, when all the statistics are thrown about and the inevitable demand for more teachers or more schools or more programs, but always more More MORE money is made, the questions I have are these:

• When it's easier than ever to learn how to read, don't these numbers show that a large swath of America doesn't value literacy?
• Since reading is crucial for self-reliance in the 21st Century, doesn't this imply they don't see the need to be self-reliant? What kind of life can you make for yourself if you can't read?
• Why don't these people think they need to be self-reliant?

* - It's on the Internet, so it must be true! (I didn't verify the numbers.)

Sanctuary

We've had some weird moments in the Catican Compound recently. Not bad, just weird. There's a blog post in it somewhere, but not now.

When we went to Mass today, it was like dropping anchor off an island in the Pacific after a bad squall. Seeing the elderly, retired Monsignor greeting us at the door was so welcoming and reassuring and normal. I love that about the Church.

And it's good to see you, too, Father John!

Photo from here.

Tierrasanta Sunset

While out on training maneuvers with the Catican Guards in the local canyons, I found a place near home and easy to reach that offers a panoramic view of San Diego and the Pacific. We've had rain the last few days and that usually leads to perfect skies for sunsets. Yesterday was no exception. I left the photo pretty large, so it may be worth a click. I love the patterns in the low clouds right on the horizon.

Enjoy.

I Know It's Wrong, But

... I can't help thinking of this

every time I hear about Al Gore making about a billion dollars on carbon offset trading or $100M selling his failed television channel to Al Jazeera. The whole thing screams "LOOTING!" at me.

Blue States Are "Makers" And Red States Are "Takers"

There's a Bloomberg article out there today that correlates state fiscal performance with their political leanings. According to the article, in general, blue states are poorly run and have poor credit ratings. The comments dive into the standard talking point arguments, with the progressive side being the following:

One fact worth mentioning here is that, year after year, the deep blue states tend to be the largest net contributors to the federal government, while the deep red states tend to be large net recipients of federal spending. That's right - by and large, the blue states are the "makers," and the red states are the "takers."

Maybe that's true and maybe it's not. The Federal government does so much that lumping all spending into one big pile and accusing a recipient of being a "taker" seems a wild oversimplification. In any case, forget that for a moment and let's just deal with what is.

So the red states are "takers." So what?

Budgets and spending have to deal with what is, not what should be or what would be in a perfectly just and fair world. If your neighbor earns twice what you do, but happens to be a worthless sloth, that doesn't absolve you of managing your finances. It's irrelevant.

If blue states are fiscally irresponsible, it's because blue policies aren't coping with reality. Neighboring states aren't forcing the blue states to spend more than they bring in. That's a choice the blue states make for themselves. If there's a correlation between political leanings and fiscal performance, it's a pretty good indication those policies are inferior.

Just to be clear, not all sloths are worthless.

A Tiny Thought On The Trillion Dollar Coin

TV talking head and Nobel Prize personality Paul Krugman has thrown his weight behind the trillion dollar coin idea. If you haven't heard, the idea is to mint a single coin out of platinum and say it's worth a trillion dollars. The government would then deposit it at the Fed and continue to spend as they wished without concern for the debt ceiling. Debate in Congress from there on out would be meaningless.

Throwing out all the rhetoric, the whole idea is to neutralize political opposition to unlimited government spending. It disenfranchises the half of the population that thinks the government is already too big through the use of a gimmick.

If that's not fascist, nothing is.

Forward!

There Are More Of Us Than You Think

We're out there waiting to be found by each other and connected through social media. Tmotofga, below, could easily be a guest blogger here at the 'Post.

Hmmm. That might be interesting. Any of the SLOBs want to try that? Find someone completely outside of your social circle who looks to have the same values and bring them in as a guest blogger? I'm going to look into that myself.

Connections to new people and groups bring support and strength. That's got to be a good thing.

Update: On Twitter, he's @tmotofga. Worth a follow, for sure.

We Don't Have A Spending Problem

... so saith President Obama, according to an interview with Speaker of the House John Boehner.

What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack Obama was this revelation: "At one point several weeks ago," Mr. Boehner says, "the president said to me, 'We don't have a spending problem.' " ...

The president's insistence that Washington doesn't have a spending problem, Mr. Boehner says, is predicated on the belief that massive federal deficits stem from what Mr. Obama called "a health-care problem." Mr. Boehner says that after he recovered from his astonishment—"They blame all of the fiscal woes on our health-care system".

I find that fascinating. How can that make any sense at all? If the problem is health care, then they must believe one or more of the following things about health care:

1. Private firms are making too much profit,
2. With more preventive care we can save enormously on later treatments and/or
3. Health care allocation is way out of balance.

To think that we can find a trillion dollars a year in government savings with those three things boggles the mind. #1 is not born out by the financial statements of the companies involved, #2 sounds like one of those Lean Six Sigma hallucinations about efficiency and #3 flies in the face of millenia of experience about central planning.

Focusing on the profit idea and looking at Aetna, one of our big health insurance firms and presumably a Vortex of Evil, it's net profit margin is 5.88%. That's not exactly robber baron territory right there. It's total net profit for 2011 was $1.98B. Stomping on one of our largest insurance companies and taking all of its disgusting profits would take care of less than half a day of government borrowing.

This is basic math. Does anyone in the White House understand basic math or have their PowerPoint presentations achieved such a level of sophistication that they no longer resemble anything in the real world?

Or is it that their boss thinks he knows more than everyone else and won't listen to reasonable voices so the math never reaches him or is dismissed out of hand?

“I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Thanks to Gateway Pundit for the image and the quote.

How About A Zombie Retrovirus?

That is, something that turns zombies into zombie zombies - zombies that want to eat other zombies. The end result would be quite interesting. Are the zombie zombies even slower than regular zombies? Can the living tell zombie zombies from zombies? If you shoot a zombie zombie in the head, does it die? (Why would you want to? Zombie zombies would represent the fastest way to finish off the zombie menace!)

Braaaiiinnnnsss!  Zombie braaaiiinnnnssss!

Photo from Soctt Beale of Laughing Squid.

Should Every American Understand Football?

My daughter finds football boring. She also doesn't understand the game, which might be why she finds it boring. The rest of us in the family are football fans to varying degrees and we all understand the game. Whenever we it turn on, she just goes upstairs and hangs out alone.

Today, one of our boys and I are going to watch the Seattle-Washington playoff game and my daughter is going to watch it with us. She'll have us as resources as well as The Complete Idiot's Guide To Football. She may suffer, but as sure as Bart Starr wore shoulder pads, she'll understand the game when it's over. I would argue that every American should.

In her case, imagine her boyfriend takes her to a playoff party at a friend's house. Instead of watching the game with everyone else, she sits there fiddling around on her phone. When asked, she tells everyone she doesn't understand the game. Plenty of people at the party would label her an idiot for not being able to figure out football. It's a social faux pas.

Football's part of our national cultural heritage. Even if you don't watch it, you ought to understand it. Agreed?

Otherwise you won't participate in moments like this.

How Much Do You Know About Michael Tomasky?

I'm in a hurry this morning, but I wanted to toss this one out in partial response to this blog post by WC Varones on the collaboration of the Fourth Estate with Obama's Peronist Administration. I want to posit what I think is the proper response to their propagandizing.

Mr. Tomasky has posted a piece in the Daily Beast describing how President Obama can "win" the upcoming debt ceiling fight. It's filled with sophisticated political strategems and shrewd analyses.

So what?

Unless Mr. Tomasky has inherited a pile of money or he's got a second career outside of journalism, the dude's going to be in a world of hurt in a very short while. Forget the politics, just focus on the money. Michael and the rest of us currently owe this much:

Learn more about us debt.

That's not someone else's debt, that's ours.

What's his plan for paying off his share? If he thinks he can soak the rich, he ought to look at Senator John Kerry's decision to house his luxury yacht away from Massachusetts' enormous taxes. If the True Believers among the idle rich aren't paying Mike's share, what makes him think anyone else will?

What happens in Mike's world as the Fed continues to monetize over a trillion dollars of debt each year?

In short, when will Mike start writing articles with Mike's best interests at heart? Does he want President Obama to "win" the debt ceiling fight?

How I Feel About Hanging Outdoor Christmas Lights

... is a function of the calendar.

She's Watching

There's a small landing at the top of our stairs just right for watching what goes on below.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Idea #1: Crush The Jedi

I thought this was pretty funny.

Stocks, Gold, Dave Ramsey And Inflation

... and real estate. The title was getting too long.

A while back, I linked to a zerohedge post that described the inflationary sweet spot for stocks which turned out to be in the 4% range. That is, as an inflation hedge, your stock returns were best when inflation was between 2 and 6%. I didn't like that analysis as inflation hitting 6% is going to be a way station to much, much bigger problems. Tiny increases in interest rates are going to obliterate the Federal budget through mammoth increases in debt servicing costs.

So stocks are not my favorite investment. How about gold? Well, I understand the arguments made by several of the SLOBs, but I'm not a big fan for anything other than small amounts of it. It's a rock. It just sits there. It's subject to manipulation. It only pays off when you sell it.

Where does that leave us? For me, it's rental property. Middle to low-end housing that you can rent out for a reasonable rate and hopefully keep occupied most of the time. The rent would have to cover at least the mortgage and repairs for starters so it would be cash flow neutral. It has the advantage of being a source of income and in inflationary times, the income would go up while the mortgage would stay the same.

This is where Dave Ramsey comes in. Buy with cash or almost all cash. If you need anything more than a small, fixed-rate mortgage, you are courting disaster. A rental property with an unemployed tenant can turn into a real money sink if you've got a mortgage. Here in California, it takes 6 months to evict someone, so that would be 6 months of mortgage paid with no rent to back it up.

Another issue with California property is Proposition 13. Way back when, the state government was endlessly raising taxes on property. Proposition 13 put an end to that. With the state facing a fiscal crisis and the Democrats having a super majority, there's no telling what will happen. If they can even partially rescind Prop 13, California property values will get whacked.

To me, that seems to suggest buying rental property in another state. Perhaps a retirement house you can rent out in the meantime. Paying cash for it, too. Sound good?

Actually, there are three other things you could invest in as well.

Three Thoughts On The Fiscal Cliff Settlement

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A Newer Commenting Policy

Suffering under a deluge of spam, I had changed my commenting policy to require you to type in those horrid  captcha words. I didn't want to do it, but there seemed to be no alternative. This morning, I went through the spam comments on the site and found a few things.

• Up until the middle of November, Blogger's spam catcher worked well. Why it fell apart then, I'm not sure, but up to that point, it was working fine.
• Spam comments come mostly on old posts.
• Blogger settings allow you to use comment moderation on posts older than a given age.

I've turned the captcha words off again and am using comment moderation on any post older than 7 days. I don't want my email larded up with the stuff, so I won't review comments on those older posts until I get around to looking at them in the Blogger dashboard. I'll try to be better about looking at them in a more timely manner, but I'm not able to make any promises.

Settings -> Comments

If some of your comments got caught in the spam filter, I'm sorry, but I'm just killing everything there. As I understand it, Blogger's spam filter is based on the spam comments you delete, not the ones simply marked spam. I've got more than 47,000 spam comments and there's no way I can go through each of them looking for your work. I'm flushing the whole thing without reading them.

I love comments. I love them more than hits. I want to make it as easy as possible for you to interact here on the 'Post. I'm hoping these new settings will help kill off spam while making the effort to comment as light as possible.

Los Angeles Without Smog

... looks like this.

We visited the Getty Museum last week after rain had washed away the smog. The views were as lovely outside of the museum as they were inside. I left the images fairly large, so they might be worth a click.

The Government Needs Lebensraum

If you saw this in a dystopian alternative history novel, you'd chalk the author up as some kind of survivalist, right-wing crackpot. Instead, it's in the New York Times.

AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

The rest details how the Constitution is restricting the growth and freedom of the government and how, if we only did away with it, fascism paradise could be ours.

A Reichstag fire wouldn't hurt, either.

Commenting Change

Commenters, I apologize for this, but I've had to turn the word verification back on in the comments. Blogger's spam catcher has broken down completely and the blog is now splattered with spam comments.

Sauce For Pandora's Petard Guillotine

How's that for mixing metaphors? There's four of them right there and that's just the title!

1. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
2. Pandora's Box - Once opened, it releases evil upon the world without hope for returning the evil to the box.
3. Hoisted by your own petard means to be ruined by a trap of your own making.
4. The guillotine was originally built to kill enemies of the French Revolution, but it ended up devouring many of the revolutionaries themselves.

Professor Jacobsen over at Legal Insurrection has a good summary of the latest front being opened in American political wars - revealing personal information about one's enemies on the web.

It started with the Lower Hudson Journal News publishing the names and addresses of registered gun owners in their area. Retaliation occurred when Journal News employee information was released on a blog and spread far and wide. Professor Jacobsen is now in possession of personal information of far greater detail about Gannett Newspaper Chairwoman Marjorie Magner. The good professor has declined to publish the information, but it's actually irrelevant whether he does or not. If he doesn't, someone else will.

As far as I can tell, the opening shot in the war, the publication of gun owner names and addresses, was done out of spite and hatred. It's hard to conceive of another motivation despite claims of journalistic interest. It's an act of intimidation and shaming and the reaction isn't going to be uniform across a broad population. While some will take it with varying degrees of grace, there will be others who, incensed, will look for ways to retaliate. The web gives them the ability to respond in kind.

So here we are, with a new set of weapons to use against anyone who disagrees with us. Publishing each others' names, addresses, credit reports, kids' schools, school transcripts, love letters and God knows what else all in the name of political power.

Such are the fruits of an ever-growing government.

The Things We Do For Love

I'm out in the Catican, working on the MGB. Our Maximum Leader has decided to snooze on the sofa out there with me and not on the warm and comfy blanket-covered chair up in the master bedroom. So instead of listening to my Van Halen mix at proper volume while I work, I'm listening to a soft, layered-vocals station I made on Pandora.

Love for a sleeping cat trumps car repair tradition.

A New Year's Wish For The Tea Party

The big PC out in the Catican where my email lives is on the fritz, so I'm doing this from memory. I apologize to Mut if I've got the question a bit muddled.

On with the show.

Mut asked if we had any New Year's wishes or resolutions for the Tea Party. Here's mine.

Realize that everything is interconnected. Social mores, political freedom and fiscal sanity are all part of the same whole. As I (badly?) tried to suggest in a previous post, financial libertarians and social conservatives have common cause. I'd like to suggest that they are inseparable. I'd throw in the fiscal hawks as well. Here's how it works, at least in my mind.

In a democracy, traditional mores* are a bulwark against fascism. When morality breaks down and families atomize, the number of people in poverty with few mechanisms for success grows. Politicians have easy pickings convincing these people that their problems are someone else's fault and they deserve "entitlements" paid for by the "rich". Peronist fascism finds fertile ground with the breakdown of traditional morality.

Dittos for political freedom. As political freedom is lost and more power is granted to the State, those in power find less reason to put up with moral heresies. Don't like funding for abortion? Too bad. They have the money and the power and you'll shut up and do as your told. It may be benevolent and well-intentioned, but the temptation to wield the power to enforce a particular vision of society is always there and eventually, someone will give in to it.

Finally, there is fiscal sanity. The Fed isn't printing $1T+ per year and handing it over to President Obama to spend in support of married, $80K-earning families. Without growing centralized authority and reduced political freedom, there'd be fewer expensive, government solutions proposed and enacted. The fiscal crisis has been fed by the breakdown in traditional morality and the loss of political freedom.

If the Tea Party stands for personal freedom and financial responsibility, I'd suggest that it firmly support all three things - traditional morality, political freedom and fiscal sanity. None of them will succeed on their own.

Bonus wish: That we can bring the social justice crowd along for the ride. Fiscal collapse and family breakdown are not conducive to any definition of social justice. Certainly there's common ground here, no?

* - Just to be sure we have a common frame of reference, when I refer to traditional mores, I'm using Catholic moral teachings as my frame of reference. Your mileage may vary.

It's A Spam-a-Palooza!

Good friend of the Catican, WC Varones, pointed out that the 'Post has been getting whacked with spam comments lately and after doing just a tiny bit of digging we discovered it's a regular spamazoic infestation! While we pull out the stopper and let the spam circle the drain, here's two of my favorites from the latest set:

Here a tip: Don wear a flowy sundress on a windy day, or you be making a fool out of yourself by desperately clutching it to your body so nobody sees the laundry day granny panties lurking underneath

Thanks for the tip, but we hamsters rarely wear flowy sundresses. Here's another spam:

ωii u göг mannen lol=)

Well, ωii u göг mannen to you, too! And I'm sure we'll find that funny as well, just as soon as we figure out what it meant.

And The Vet's Prescription Is ...

I took our Maximum Leader to the vet this morning for her geriatric checkup. Just as she's been trying to tell us, she's lost some weight and needs moar noms. Other than that, she's just fine.

Gushifud is on the way.

Fiscal Libertarians And Social Conservatives Are Perfectly Matched

First, three data points for you.

Data Point 1: The Washington Times has this bit about the ongoing destruction of the traditional family. It's worth reading the whole thing, but this statistic in particular is important.

Married couples with children have an average income of $80,000, compared with $24,000 for single mothers.

Data Point 2: ABC had a 20/20 segment on polyamory wherein they look at it in an open-minded fashion. (H/T: Ann Althouse)

Data Point 3: The conversation on Ann's blog post with comments like this:

Shouting Thomas:

Your support for the gay activist agenda, I've concluded after reading your comments on porn, is that you believe that gay marriage will persuade gay men to engage in the "nice" sex that you endorse.

You're full of (expletive) on that one.

Traditions exist for reasons that are hard to visualize or explain, because they developed over centuries out of day to day human experience.

You've really over-intellectualized yourself into a stupor on the gay marriage stuff.

Here are the orgiasts, declaring that they will play "nice," just as you asked. They've checkmated you.

Shouting Thomas is shouted down in many of the following comments by the same-sex marriage crowd. All of the cliched logical traps are sprung about finely differentiating between gays, straights, people who can have kids, people who can't, statistical differences between married gays and traditional families, etc. It's all so very well-reasoned.

It's also the same nonsense debate we've had for the last 40-50 years.

Connecting the dots

You can't have a smaller government while the underclass grows. Americans won't stand for that. You can't elect flinty-eyed, hard-hearted, totally practical people to major offices. Give it up. If you want a smaller government and lower taxes, you're going to need more people earning $80K and fewer people earning $24K. ABC News is fighting you tooth and nail on that one, even if they're too indoctrinated in progressive, open-minded conventional wisdom to get it.

The 20/20 piece relies entirely on interviewing couples who are two or more standard deviations off the mean for their behavior. It's a conversation held entirely within the white, highly-educated, upper-class, progressive bubble. The entire piece is an act of non-judgmentalist fantasy. Polyamory leads to the total destruction of society through the breakdown of family relationships. There are no two ways about it. Imagine holding those interviews in Compton or East St. Louis or any of the cities on the single parent hit parade where polyamory is the norm.

People aren't rational, they're rationalizing. Sex is fun and everyone wants more fun. Like Shouting Thomas suggested, it's easy to over-intellectualize what's going on here. With libertine "intellectuals" like those on the 20/20 staff leading the way, we give credence to the concept that everyone can do their own thing and there need be no rules, no standards, no expectations. When it's tried outside the Harvard faculty lounge, the results have been disastrous.

Sixteen trillion dollars later, we're all doing our own thing on the edge of a volcano that is about to erupt. More people earning $24K and fewer people earning $80K has been the result and it's a recipe for fiscal disaster.

As you hope and wish and work for a smaller government, rewatch that 20/20 piece and try to work out how you're going to get it with morals like that.

Christmas Sunset

What a beautiful way to end the day celebrating His birth. I left it large, so it's worth a click.

A Very Small Christmas Present For Each Of You

... is this sunset photo I took yesterday while exercising the Catican Guards at the Fiesta Island dog park. I left it particularly large, so it might be worth a click.

I'm with G K Chesterton as far as Christmas goes. There is but one turning point in all of history at that was the birth of Christ - God made flesh walking amongst us, giving himself for our sins. Now that's a Christmas present.

From our Maximum Leader and the entire staff here within the Catican Compound, have a very merry and blessed Christmas. Your visits and comments have been our presents all throughout the year.

Smoked Ribs

Yesterday we made ribs out in our Oklahoma Joe's smoker. We brined them first in sugar and salt water and them applied a homemade rub whose exact ingredients I no longer recall. It was in a jar in our spice cabinet labeled "Dry Rub" so we figured it would work. We used KC Masterpiece for a mopping sauce and, following this recipe for the timing, wrapped them in foil for the last half hour of their 4 1/2 hour smoking time. We used Henry Bain Sauce for dipping at the table, the recipe taken from Terry Thompson's Eating Southern Style. Where KC Masterpiece is a sweet sauce, the Henry Bain mixture is a very vinegar-y one.

The results were full of deliciousness!

Have A Cool Yule!

... and the best way to get it started is with a little Satchmo!

Here in the Catican Compound, we're having a relaxed Christmas. Two of our boys are in college, so instead of everyone giving each other gifts this year, my wife and I just filled stockings for us all. Had we done a gift exchange, the lads would have had to finish finals and then rush out shopping.

There aren't a lot of things any of us want or need and the low stress that comes with no shopping is probably the best gift of all. You can see the payoff in the total family harmony we've had this week.

Just A Quick Thought On QE4

So to revisit something from a while back, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has begun QE4 where he will buy $45B of Federal debt every month until inflation is higher and unemployment is lower.

Isn't he forgetting something?

While his purchases have an indirect effect on unemployment and more direct effect on inflation, they have a direct, dominant effect on government funding.

The Federal government will borrow more than $1T this year, at least half of which will be loaned to them by the Fed through QE4 and other programs. If unemployment were to fall to 6.4% and inflation to rise to, say, 3%, the Fed would be facing a real quandary. The minute they stop buying government debt, the government will have to find a new buyer for $500B of bonds.

Good luck with that.

It's The Game We've All Been Waiting For!

On ESPN 5 right now, it's the Arnold Klingfelter Pest Control Bowl featuring East Neephus State vs. Southwest Wyoming School of Welding. Yay!

Well, it might be something like that. I'll admit, after this many bowl games, I've pretty well lost track of what's going on.

Another Reason I Love English Premier League Soccer

I'm downstairs in the Command Center* of the Catican Compound, wearing my Jonas Gutierrez jersey, drinking coffee from my Newcastle United mug, awaiting the start of what will be one of the most important games of the year for the Magpies. Today, #15 Newcastle plays #19 QPR. Two teams having terrible years are going at it and for me, it's as exciting as a playoff game.

There are 20 teams in the EPL. At the end of the season, the bottom three are "relegated" to the league below and the top 3 teams from that league are "promoted" to the EPL. If the NFL did this, the Cleveland Browns would have been sent to the NCAA a long time ago and Alabama would be playing in the NFL. Relegation makes almost all games interesting. You rarely get teams laying down and playing dead because their seasons don't mean anything. Today's match between Newcastle and QPR has big implications.

Last year was a great one for Newcastle. They finished high enough to qualify for one of the European tournaments and the extra wear of those games combined with a rash of injuries has wrecked what was already a very thin team. This year it's a fight for survival and I'm passionately rooting for players I hoped I'd never see take the field.

Philadelphia Eagles fans should be so lucky.

Update: Newcastle won on a goal by Shola Ameobi in the 81st minute. Hurrah!

Howay the lads!

* - Well, it's the family room, really, but it's where the TV is, so if you look at it the right way it's kind of like those video screen-infested command centers in Hollywood action films.

The Fiscal Cliff - Meh

I'm not sure what just happened. As I understand it, the House Republicans decided not to offer President Obama a bill he had promised to veto which would have done practically nothing to avert our upcoming fiscal catastrophe. Of the major problems facing the nation,

1. Fiscal collapse from massive debts and deficits,
2. Economic sclerosis from metastasizing, omnipresent regulations and
3. Social stratification from the growth of secular, libertine religious values

the fiscal cliff deal would have changed none of them. If it's not tackling any of our top three problems, I don't see why the event is such a big deal.

I guess the issue is that if the political class can't come together on even a modest approach to nibble at problem #1, they're never going to be able to do anything serious about any of them. Having occasionally peeked between the fingers I held up in front of my eyes during the election campaign, I still don't see why this is a surprise or a big deal. The party that won the White House and Senate doesn't even admit that these three things are problems. In fact, they pursuing all three with vigor. How a vote in the House was going to change that, I'm sure I don't know.

Do We Ever Grow Up?

Last night, I stayed up way later than I should have for no reason other than childish petulance, not wanting to go to bed. I was out in the Catican reading comment threads on the Newcastle United Blog. I knew I needed to go to bed to get up for work the next day, but instead, I sat their reading and stamping my little feet in a tantrum, saying, "I won't go to bed! I won't I won't I won't!"

Sigh. I should know better by now.

This Works For So Many Occasions

One of my all-time favorite movie quotes. I use it at home and at work all the time.

Tea Party Racism Is Obvious

Dig who the Tea Party extremists supported to replace Jim DeMint as the senator from South Carolina.

Sickening. Just listen to those "personal resposibility" codewords come pouring out of this guy's mouth. You never stop, do you? You teabagging redneck racists make me ill.

(In all seriousness, can I just say that I'm in love with this guy?)

Pacific Sunset

I shot this one yesterday with my Galaxy S3. Not the optimal camera, just the best*.

* - Your best camera, I've been informed, is the one you have with you.

The President's Speech Last Night

... made me want to go out and buy a gun.

I'm not a particularly strong second amendment supporter and assault rifles or whatever you want to call them make me squeamish. But when President Obama described how teachers hunkered down in their classrooms, completely unarmed, waiting for the cops to show up while a heavily armed lunatic roamed the halls, my first thought was, "Forget waiting for the cops. I want to be able to defend myself."

In the past when I read folks like W C Varones advocate for concealed carry and talk about how armed citizens could stop a shooting like the one in Connecticut, I've always partially scoffed at the idea, picturing the school or mall turning into a shooting gallery where barely-trained goofs with guns tried to out-macho each other, killing as many innocents as they did perpetrators. After last night's speech I wasn't worried about that. Helplessly waiting for the police seems like suicide.

A Suicide Bomber For Moloch

After every mass killing like the one in Connecticut, there's an agitated conversation about guns. Personally, I'm not sure which way I fall because I just can't get over the feeling that to some extent, guns aren't the issue. I would agree that in a military sense, modern weaponry has put the advantage firmly on the side of the killers. Large magazines and easy firing makes higher kill totals possible. Still, that seems to be avoiding the problem.

In Connecticut as in many others, the shooter turned the last bullet on himself. Had we previously banned automatic weapons, he could have gone in with a backpack full of loaded revolvers and shot, say, 12 instead of 20+. He then would have shot himself long before anyone had a chance to react. Tactically, it's like trying to stop the suicide bombers in Iraq. They had various technologies and sometimes killed a lot of people, sometimes just a few, but they were almost impossible to stop because they could strike where we were defenseless and were willing to die in the process. They are the ultimate guided weapon.

Why are they happening at all? It's not something that has happened throughout the country's history. The LA Times has a historical summary with this graphic.

Mass killings over time, 1985 to present.

It's immediately clear that they're far more common now than they were 20-50 years ago. I don't know much about guns, but I can't imagine there was some technological advancement in the last 20 years that led to the huge increase in mass killings.

Moloch was a pagan god in the Old Testament whose worshipers sacrificed children to him. When I hear of these events, I can't help but think that it's a religious statement of some kind, even if it's not explicit. That's probably just my particular hobby horse, no more or less valid than the political ones, but there you have it.

Why the increases in sacrifices to Moloch?

Something happened to American society over the last 50 years, something dark and evil. Whether its huge increases in the prison population, the Holocaust-level killing of the unborn*, the destruction of the traditional family in so much of society or the slaughter of innocents in frenzied bloodbaths like Connecticut, something has clearly happened.

To my mind, these are the fruits of substituting the State for God and delusions about secular rationality for faith and religion, but I could be wrong. In any case, that timeline above needs to be explained in some way.

* - In 2007, there were more than 1.2 million abortions. At that annual rate, a shooting of 20 children represents a little less than 9 minutes worth of abortions. In other words, even during a mass shooting, abortionists kill at a faster rate.

Cheezburger of the Day

Pacific Beach After The Rain

I've always loved this view, particularly when the air is crisp and clear after a rain storm. I left the image large, so it might be worth a click.

Stocks And Inflation

Zedrohedge has a fantastic post today quoting a UBS study discussing whether or not equities (stocks) are a good hedge against inflation. It's particularly timely as the Fed just launched QE4 yesterday, announcing their plan to buy $500B of Treasuries, continuing to monetize the debt. I highly recommend reading the whole thing including the comments. Many of the comments are excellent and I plan to excerpt the ones I liked the best later. In the meantime, here's the payoff chart for me.

The UBS analyst thinks that equities are a good hedge in the 2-6% inflation range, with many conditions. Read the whole post to get the full description.

The problem I have with all of this analysis is that historical data, particularly American data, is no longer particularly relevant. This is not America any more, not in any financial, fiscal or legal sense. This is much closer to Peronist Argentina and it's impossible to predict what will come next out of Washington. I would bet on unpredictable spasms of government intervention rather than on some kind of continuation of American economic models. That makes financial planning and prediction very difficult.

A Trillion Slips Of Paper On The Wall, A Trillion Slips Of Paper ...

... take one down, pass it around, there's still a trillion there.

That's because the Fed will endlessly create monies for everyone! Yay!

WASHINGTON—The Federal Reserve refashioned its bond-buying programs on Wednesday, extending its far-reaching effort to revitalize the jobs market and boost the economic recovery into 2013...

The central bank's policy committee, in its final meeting of the year, said Wednesday it would "initially" begin buying $45 billion of long-term Treasury bonds each month.

$45B of Treasuries plus the $40B of mortgage-backed securities is $85B per month which works out to a little over one trillion dollars a year.

Just because printing wads of money and handing it to the government has never worked anywhere at any time is no reason to think that the Fed is acting in blind panic and the ignorant fascists in the White House are totally clueless.

Nope, it's all good.

The War On Women Continues Apace

There's lots of chatter across the blogosphere these days about marijuana as some states have legalized it. Since smoking weed makes men lazy and stupid, does that make it part of the War on Women™?

He's still available, ladies! And what a catch!

Qui Est John Galt?

Har har har!

Gerard Depardieu has become the latest rich Frenchman to flee his country and the stinging wealth taxes levied by Francois Hollande, the Socialist President of France.

The film star has bought a property in Nechin, a Belgian village near the border with France, which has become a colony for French exiles fleeing President Hollande's tax rate of 75 per cent on all earnings over €1 million.

Speaking on Monday, Pierre Moscovici, the French finance minister said, "It's why we hates them, my precious. Hates the tricksy riches!"*

Elsewhere, the attitude towards successful people was a bit warmer.

At the La Ferme du Chateau restaurant, where Mr Depardieu was sighted, a young female customer told Le Soir that there was "excitement" in the village at the prospect of him moving there.

"We want them to come to us when they feel like it," she said.

In other news, recent experiments by behavioral biologists suggest that living creatures will attempt to flee uncomfortable or painful environments and move towards food and safety. In socialist France, Obama's White House and Jerry Brown's state capitol offices in Sacramento, they are awaiting confirmation of these controversial findings.

* - This is a loose translation. My French isn't very good.

Cheezburger of the Day

California Hits The Skids (Even More)

A bunch of conservative blogs are breathlessly reporting that despite the glorious victories of the people of California over the greedy rich in the last election, the state's tax revenues are down significantly in November. I clicked around the blogosphere and found lots of crowing about the Laffer Curve, but the real data (PDF) from state controller John Chiang told a bit of different story.

Tax revenues are down from projections in the state budget, but in some cases, they are up from last year. To me, the numbers and Mr. Chiang's analysis give mixed support to the anti-tax case*, but what absolutely leaps out at you is the total incompetence of the people who crafted the budget. While taxes may be down a bit, spending is out of control.

A chart of variance from budget. Taxes are a bit lower than expected, but spending is much higher.

Here's what Mr. Chiang has to say about the spending side.

Expenditures are 4.9% above estimates contained in the Budget, with assistance to local governments driving the overage.

My interpretation: Assistance to local governments = lifelines to stave off municipal bankruptcies. That was as predictable as the sun rising this morning. How could you possibly lowball an estimate of that when you've already had 4 major bankruptcies?

Here's another tidbit in John's report. These days, Christmas shopping has little effect on government revenues.

While January sales tax receipts are better than average, the holiday returns are a less impressive specter than Marley’s ghost. Blame it on the state’s reliance on the personal income tax or changes to a service economy, but revenues derived from retail sales in 2012 are not as important as they were in the 1940s. For example:

• The sales tax accounts for about one-fifth of the General Fund. (Contrast this with the situation for Christmases Past: Two generations ago, the sales tax was the dominant revenue source.) So, even if there were a pronounced spike in the sales tax returns in January, its effect is swamped by what is happening with other taxes, especially the personal income tax.

It's still interesting to watch Christmas sales figures, but if you're hoping that smashing Christmas numbers will bail out the state, think again.

Finally, if you dive into the report, one of the things you notice is how revenues are higher this year than last, but they are well short of expectations in the budget. Accusations of Peronist fascism aside, the inability to create a realistic budget is a mark of incompetence. For a state in fiscal crisis, to badly overestimate tax revenues and understate spending, it's absolutely criminal.

And we just voted for lots more of it.

* - Mind you, I think raising taxes will end up disastrously for the state, but it doesn't seem to have really hit home yet. Give it time. It's only a month or so since the voters chose Justicialism and bankruptcy.

Partial Shade

Somebody Needs To Go To Jail Over This

For those of you who don't normally follow English Premier League (EPL) soccer, two teams that regularly fight it out of the championship are Manchester United and Manchester City. Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and Tottenham may be up at the top of the standings depending on the particular year, but ManU and City are the two heavyweights.

EPL teams play each other twice a year. That means there are two times each season when you can catch the ultimate matchup of ManU v. City. This weekend was one of those games.

Foxsoccer.tv doesn't show all EPL games live. Some games, often the big ones, are available on demand the next day. Since I don't live in England, I can watch these games on delay as if they were live, not knowing the outcome. The ManU v. City game was played this morning, but will be available starting at 9PM tonight here in San Diego (midnight Eastern Time).

Topic shift.

I don't know if you've encountered them, but as I surf the web these days, I'm getting more and more ads directed right at me. Clearly, the sites are reading my cookies and browser history and are rotating in ads that match what I look at. I get lots of ads for Adobe Creative Suite and Moss Motors British car parts.

Today, I was clicking around a financial site when one of those little scroll-up boxes slithered into view in the lower right-hand corner of my screen. "Things You Need To Know" was the title. I glanced at it. It had a teeny thumbnail from a soccer game and the caption, "Manchester United stuns rivals Manchester City on last second free kick!"

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? YOU SICKENING, PERVERTED PIECES OF FILTH! YOU RUIN ONE OF THE MARQUEE GAMES OF THE SEASON FOR ME FOR AN AD?

I wish I'd clicked on it so I could remember for all time who did this and add them into my rotation of regular diatribes, the swine.

Unbelievable.

The pigs who did this should be Gulag-bound.

Hmmmm.

Garbage Wars - The Shape Of Things To Come

Greece, according to Standard & Poors, is now in selective default. That is, it's bankrupt. Like any good statist country where the government is responsible for almost everything and politics rules over all, government budget cuts are leading to lots of protests. Citizens are fighting with each other like starving dogs over an ever-shrinking government food dish. Dig this.

The most striking example of this absurdity is the situation at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, where garbage has been piling up all over the campus for the past 10 weeks. Only Aristophanes could have come up with such a great metaphor for Greek exceptionalism. A labor dispute between workers and the company with the contract for cleaning the university resulted in workers taking over the administration building, garbage piling up out of control, volunteers who tried to clean up being attacked by students supporting the strikers (and the dumping on campus of whatever garbage had been collected), the principal first being with the strikers then calling in police, police raiding the university, clearing the administration building, the workers returning and blocking entrance to the building, and so on.

This is what it looks like.

Here in the US, we've got the same cauldron brewing, but ours is larded up with racial poisons not available to the monocultural Greeks. Dig this.

Given the Democrats' and MSM's fixation on race, just what is the garbage strike (or equivalent fight for declining funds) going to look like when it comes here?

"Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president."

To quote one of the sing-song bystanders in that video, "Mmm-hmm!"

Remember, you can't have an us without a them.

Down For The Count?

Fellow SLOB DDE posted recently that the Euro-area was now in a recession. The WSJ is reporting that Germany's central bank is predicting that even mighty Germany will experience a recession next year.

Give their massive debt loads and hopelessly regulated industries, will they come back up without massive upheaval? It's going to be awful hard to stave off default in the big countries with falling tax revenues. If you think about the mechanisms for recovery, there aren't many left open to them. Robert Reich's fascist fantasies aside, there aren't going to be massive stimulus programs from bankrupt governments. The ECB has already cut rates to practically nothing and has been printing money like crazy.

The only thing left is a total rethinking of the business-government relationship and an increase in economic freedom. After watching the Spaniards and Greeks freak out over such things earlier this year, I can't see that happening without plenty of rioting.

Of course, they could do nothing at all and let things continue as is.

Read The Whole Thing

Seriously. Click here and read the whole thing.

It Looks Like Our Investment In The Catican's PopeMobile Wasn't Wasted

... because we can now plan on getting one of the Catican Guards to drive.

These Are Too Pretty To Be Stink Bugs

Click on the image for the whole story.

Cheezburger of the Day

Thanks, Zig

Zig Ziglar died a few days ago. Zig made a big difference in my life, my sales, my goals and my parenting. His books and audio recordings are well worth the time and money.

See you at the top, Zig.

Mexifornia In One Graph

Well, two graphs, but the top one is the one that jumped out at me. The red is the inflow of foreign immigrants, the green is the in- or outflow of Americans.

Source.

In Fascist Societies, Politics Is All That Matters

As the government grows and sucks up more power and money, work outside of the government means less and less. Within the government, political heft is what drives things. Outside of the government, it's performance and production. With the re-election of Barack Obama, it's no surprise to be reading things like these.

Stacy McCain blogs about politics as religion.

Politics is NOT my number one priority in life. For the Left, it seems like it may be. There seem to be Statists who view politics as life itself. A lady in the audience mentioned a rich Obama family (around Richmond, maybe) that put up four Obama operatives for a full year leading up to the election. Think of Democrats as political Jehova’s Witnesses.

An oyster farmer in the San Francisco area is losing his lease on Federal land. Dig the machinations. The wilderness fanatics within the National Parks are shutting down the farm, so the owner is working with elected officials to keep it open. It's all political. The key sentence is highlighted by me.

"This isn't about an oyster company, for us," said Neal Desai, the associate director of the National Parks Conservation Association. "This is about taking care of our national parks for future generations and honoring a decades-old agreement to protect our heritage and create a marine wilderness. Letting the lease expire, removing all the motorboats and removing all the non-native oysters is good for the environment."
Powerful supporters

Lunny's request for an extension had powerful supporters, including Feinstein, Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey and former Peninsula Rep. Pete McCloskey, who put up a major fight to keep the operation going.

In Pennsylvania, low-wage and even mid-wage workers are chumps.

It's all about government management of the population. Working and living outside the government doesn't pay as well as living and working inside of it? That's a feature, not a bug.

As Dean points out, Mussolini is cool again. To quote Il Duce, "Everything within the State, nothing outside the State."

Income Inequality

... can be seen in Pennsylvania's prison population charts.

Since 1980, the prison population has grown by a factor of 5

No matter how many prisons they build, they are always full

Prison populations give you a gross measure of the lowest levels of society. It's not just the number of people in prison, it's what it says about their neighborhoods, their jobs, their families and everything surrounding them.

The prison population has gone up irregardless of economic boom or bust. The cohort at the bottom of the ladder, where failure lives and breathes, has been growing. Implied in that is the group right above the prison populations, the part of society where people make bad decisions and screw up their lives, but don't manage to go to prison, has been growing apace. Something in society over the last 30 years has been breeding bad behavior.

The next time you read some economist droning on about income inequality think about these charts and what they might mean.

Red

Cotoneaster berries. I left the image quite large, so it's worth a click to see it full-sized.