Who Says Shakespeare's Dead?

I'd place this one above Troilus and Cressida, but below Julius Caesar.

Meerkat Yoga

... at least I think that's what this little fellow (or is it a lady as skyehaven suggests below?) is doing.


Any other guesses?

Fred Astaire Was Born Just A Few Years Too Early

Fred Astaire
You know, if he'd been born in our time, there's no doubt he would have been involved in something like this.

I'm so glad I live in an enlightened and charming era. I'd hate to think I would have been born in a time when dignity was treasured.

H/T: Our Monks of Miscellaneous Musings.

Orange

Momma Daisy's at it again. You can't stop her, you can only hope to slow her down!

Lion Silhouette

My parents took my daughter to the San Diego Wild Animal Park yesterday. Amidst an avalanche of photos from her camera was this gem.

Does Omniscience Negate Free Will?

So I was driving around the other day when this conundrum came to me. If God is omniscient, is the future foretold? Doesn't omniscience negate free will? It seems to me that any determinism outside of molecules obeying the laws of chemistry and particles obeying the laws of physics eliminates the essence of free will. I've always objected internally to statements such as, "God knew what you were going to do before you did it" or things of that nature.

I suppose you can reconcile such statements with free will by suggesting that an omniscient God could map out all possible permutations of decision and thus He knows not only what you did before you did it, but all the other choices you didn't end up making as well.

For me, free will trumps omniscience. That is, I believe in a God that created the world and then let it go, save for occasional interventions. While He knows all that is and was, what is to come is as much a mystery to Him as it is to us.

Thinking out loud (or rather, in prose), if you decide that God lives outside of time, then you could reconcile free will and omniscience. That is, it's possible for you to know the temperature in Wichita and San Diego simultaneously because we humans can communicate across distances. If you could travel with similar ease across time, you would indeed know last night that I was going to give our Maximum Leader gushifud this morning. I would retain free will, but your ability to traverse time the way we traverse distance would give you omniscience about my decisions.

Hmm. That seems like a more reasonable answer to me.

Why the Republican Party is Irrelevant

... because they want to be DemocratLite. That they are irrelevant is illustrated in this post by our Monestary of Miscellaneous Musings.

And more evidence how this (the Tea Parties) isn't a G.O.P. thing:

Something hugely significant just happened here at the Sacramento Tea Party. Organizer Mark Meckler singled out GOP opportunists who wouldn’t give him the time of day weeks ago — and then wanted to hitch their wagons to the Tea Party bandwagon at the last minute.

Meckler said he heard that California GOP chair Ron Nehring was in the audience. Meckler invited him to say hi to the crowd — and then ripped him for waffling on the massive tax hike ballot measures (particularly Prop1A - $16 billion tax hikes).

Massive boos from the crowd of thousands here against the Calif. GOP establishment.

My best example is the health care reform craze that's sweeping the nation. Every time you hear some Republican talking head discuss it, they always say something like, "Yes, we need it, but we don't want it in the form Obama is suggesting ..."

The reason the Republicans are irrelevant is that this is total nonsense from beginning to end. All of the health care reform efforts on the table vow to give things to people who haven't earned them. It doesn't matter how nice this would be or how much those people need health insurance, they can't have it. We're out of money. There is no money to pay for this, not in taxes, not in borrowing, not even in printing.

Health care for all will never, ever happen. Oh sure, we might manage to pass legislation and we might allocate funds in the budget, but those funds don't exist. It's simply a fantasy to talk about health insurance for all.

The time is coming when we will not be able to print money to cover our deficits because the Dollar will have been replaced as the global reserve currency. The time is already here when there's no one available to lend us the money we want to spend. Very, very soon, everyone in the US will only be able to consume what we as a nation produce, less the interest payments on our gargantuan debt. We will have less than we have right now and right now we don't have universal health coverage.

The Republican Party is irrelevant because it's the me-too party of a doomed governing philosophy.

Cheezburger of the Day

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A Cautionary Tale

The only reason we might have been surprised at this


is because we never learned things like this.

A close examination of their finances shows that the Obamas were living off lines of credit along with other income for several years until 2005, when Obama's book royalties came through and Michelle received her 260% pay raise at the University of Chicago ...

In April 1999, they purchased a Chicago condo and obtained a mortgage for $159,250. In May 1999, they took out a line of credit for $20,750. Then, in 2002, they refinanced the condo with a $210,000 mortgage, which means they took out about $50,000 in equity. Finally, in 2004, they took out another line of credit for $100,000 on top of the mortgage.

Tax returns for 2004 reveal $14,395 in mortgage deductions. If we assume an effective interest rate of 6%, then they owed about $240,000 on a home they purchased for about $159,250.

This means they spent perhaps $80,000 beyond their income from 1999 to 2004 ...

The Obama family apparently had little or no savings during this period since there was virtually no taxable interest shown on their tax returns.

Of course, there was always the data point from Obama's stint running the Annenberg Foundation Challenge where he and William Ayers blew something like $150M on useless education projects in Chicago.

If only we'd known. Maybe next time it would be helpful to have a free press, one that actually tries to examine both candidates. Otherwise, we could end up right back here.

The Comment of the Week

... comes from Brad Setser's blog. He's been posting about How China has been moving out of Agency bonds into short-term Treasuries because Agencies are not backed up by the US Government, but Treasuries are. They're getting out of all unsecured US Government debt. Brad argues that this is not necessarily an indication that they're planning to move away from the US Dollar like they've been threatening, but commenter WStroupe disagrees.

I would suppose that, being patient and deliberate, China’s CB managers would like to come near to finishing their conversion out of Agencies before they take on any other potential conversion, say from longer-dated Treasuries to short-dated ones ...

You task China’s leaders to put their money where their mouth has been recently - you just might get what you asked for when their conversion from Agencies gets sufficiently far along. Once they get into the short-dated Treasuries, it’s much easier to sprint from there to somewhere else that’s more desirable from a safety and/or return perspective. While short-dated Treasuries are certainly the safest and most liquid financial assets around, there might turn out to be other assets (not necessarily financial assets) that are even more desirable, going forward. Conversion from short-dated Treasuries into such other assets could be the planned 3rd leg of a 3-leg strategy. 1. Get out of Agencies and into short-dated Treasuries. 2. Get out of a significant measure of long-dated Treasuries and into short-dated ones. 3. Expend a large measure of short-dated Treasuries for other non-dollar assets.

All over time - not too suddenly. China’s leaders probably know they have a couple of years or so to get this all done to a sufficient degree so as to measurably decrease China’s exposure to the dollar.

That's a brilliant comment. I'd never looked at it that way. If he's right and the Chinese are slowly unwinding themselves from the Dollar, we're going to be in real trouble as Obama burns through mountains and mountains of money.

Rescuing a Gazelle

... may be easier than you think.

Should I Pick Some Up For You?

... after all, they're quite delicious!

Err, at least I think they are. I've never tried them myself, you see.

Spreading the Addiction

The Obama Adminstration and the Democrats in Congress have been spending money by the truckload, money that didn't exist up until a few weeks ago. They're not getting it from taxes, they're getting it from the Fed, who is simply conjuring it up out of thin air. It's like crack cocaine for these people. It's completely addictive because it allows them to throw money all over the place and not have to propose tax hikes.

Now California, long the perfect laboratory for progressive policies, wants in on the act.

California Treasurer Bill Lockyer asked U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Wednesday to authorize assistance for his state from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program, warning that depressed tax revenues may cut into basic services and halt the building of infrastructure.

In a letter, Lockyer asked Geithner for TARP assistance for California and "other financially strapped states and local governments which face a severe cash flow crunch."

"If we cannot obtain our usual short-term cash-flow borrowings, there could be devastating impacts on the ability of the State or other governments to provide essential services to their citizens," Lockyer wrote.

Rather than confront their problems, the California Legislature is turning to the Federal government to hand them crack cocaine money out of thin air.

The Solution, Of Course, Is To Have The Government Sieze Moody's

... and then they could never, ever discuss nonsense like this again!

Long before the current financial crisis, nearly two years ago, a little-noticed cloud darkened the horizon for the US government. It was ignored. But now that shadow, in the form of a warning from a top credit rating agency that the nation risked losing its triple A rating if it did not start putting its finances in order, is coming back to haunt us.

That warning from Moody’s focused on the exploding healthcare and Social Security costs that threaten to engulf the federal government in debt over coming decades. The facts show we’re in even worse shape now, and there are signs that confidence in America’s ability to control its finances is eroding.

We need a Congressional committee to start looking into Moody's. They can't be allowed to stop our march to a glorious new future based on Hope and Change!

Coporate Web 2.0 at its Best!

Where I work we have an Integrated Product Team working on how we can use Web 2.0 tools to improve recruiting at colleges. I am not on it, nor are any of our Web 2.0 users. In fact, as far as we can tell, no one in the group even has a Facebook account. Twitter? Nope! Blogging? Never!

And so this band of experts is crafting our Web 2.0 Strategery.

Oh that's gonna work out well.

Next up for the team: manned, interplanetary spaceflight!

The Coast Guard Gets It

Dig this from the Coast Guard Commandant's blog, where he just celebrated his 200th post.

We are going to try tweeting on the FY-2010 budget hearing with the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation. The hearing starts at 2 p.m. You can follow user iCommandantUSCG.

Now that's the way for a modern executive to communicate to his workforce.

Do You Think She Knows?

Here's a Blackberry photo of our Maximum Leader doing what she loves to do - snoozing on the couch next to me. Do you think she knows that we found a way to keep her?


I've been taking photos with my Blackberry when something like this arises and I don't have time to go get a better camera. For distance shots it is serviceable, but it seems to have a minimum distance for clear pictures.

Populism Looking Backwards

Like the generals of World War I who took four years to realize the machine gun had changed warfare, President Obama and the rest of the populists in both parties are fighting the last war, unaware that the world has changed.

I've been doing more reading about Juan Peron and Peronism. Peronism is a fascist government system that was created to break the power of the oligarchs of Argentina who dominated the working poor. It looks very similar to Obama's policies. Companies were siezed, unions were aided, government spending on the general public was increased and regulations over all manner of activities were strengthened. Despite initial successes, within ten years of its inception, the Argentine government had overspent, was unable to raise more money and ended up with runaway inflation.

While Peronism may or may not have worked for Argentina - it was a pretty mixed bag in the long run - it sought to solve problems that don't exist here. Peronism doesn't just fight the last war for us, it fights a war that never existed in the first place. The US has never had the conditions of illiteracy and tremendous poverty that Argentina suffered from. There is no landed gentry dominating a working class of peasants here and there never has been. Instead, we're on the far side of the societal development curve where our problems come from too much wealth and the expectation of rewards without effort.

Fighting the last war has never worked. I can't imagine that fighting someone else's last war is going to work, either.

Cheezburger of the Day

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The Future of GM