Have You Visited WannaSmile Lately?

You should.

Link of the Day

... comes from the Secular Apostate. That's some pretty high production values there.

There Isn't Enough Competetion in Health Care Insurance

... and that's why it costs so much! Yep, that's the ticket! It's the greedy insurance companies who hold a monopoly on health care and are gouging the public like crazy!

Dig this (partial) list of insurance companies in the US. If only there was some competition to encourage price cutting and improved service!

More Ackbar

At work, Admiral Ackbar's famous line, "It's a trap!" has become one of our regular sayings. Last night, while showing an Ackbar video to my kids, I stumbled across this one. Enjoy!

The Ultimate Argument Against Big Government

... comes from Democratic Congressman Eric Massa when he describes how Rahm Emanuel threatened him.

"I'm sitting there showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me because I wasn't gonna vote for the president's budget," Massa said. "Do you know how awkward it is to have a political argument with a naked man?"

No, Eric, we don't know how awkward it is. If we hadn't given you and your pinheaded, egomaniac friends too much power long ago, we still wouldn't. And thanks for the mental image of two naked, pampered, overfed, middle-aged dorks arguing about how to throw a trillion and a half more dollars on our collective credit cards so they could slop the troughs of groups of lazy parasites.

This, dear readers, is what happens when you let the government make too many decisions for you and spend too much of the money you earned. You get front-page stories about the lives of dreary, little trolls who would otherwise be selling insurance from a phone bank in a cubicle in Albany or (in Rahm's case) be in and out of jail on mundane and unimaginative extortion and racketeering charges. Instead, these pipsqueak windbags without the intelligence or gumption it takes to run a taco shop are given all kinds of press and we're expected to hang on their every anecdote.

If that doesn't turn you into a Milton Friedman small government fanatic then you need serious help.

"¿Dónde está Barack? La basura está llena de nuevo!"
H/T: Ann Althouse and the Puppy Blender.

How Much Exercise Does Bodie the Wonder Dog Require Every Day?

More.

Thin Ice

This is the second or third time I've seen the carry trade discussed lately and it's easily the most accessible version. I thought I'd share the link and an excerpt here. The tagline for the article is "When interest rates rise, don't be surprised how low markets can go."

Government can only issue debt so long as there are willing buyers at reasonable interest rates. This is so far being achieved by the Fed by keeping short-term rates artificially low so that banks and hedge funds can borrow at 25 basis points and use this money to buy treasuries yielding 3.5% to 4%. This is called the carry trade, and it is going on today on a massive scale.

The systemic danger of this carry trade activity is that it is done by institutions that leverage themselves by 10 to 30 times. This means they absolutely cannot afford to have long-term interest rates (which the Fed doesn't control) go up. A rise in rates means the value of their holdings will quickly drop much more than all the interest they have earned on those holdings.

In short, at the first sign interest rates may rise, the carry-trade bubble will burst and everyone will rush to sell.

The article is predicting inflation, not necessarily a massive market collapse, although I've seen that predicted as well. As an aside, one of my ex-favorite bloggers, Mish Shedlock, has been blogging nothing but econodoom for the last year and a half and his followers have missed the entire 2009-10 bull market. What this has taught me is that fundamentals may drive the market in the long run, they don't drive the market in the short to medium run.

Food for thought.

Getting Rid of my Tvilum-Scanbirk

I've got a Tvilum-Scanbirk I bought at Ikea several years ago. I'm thinking of getting rid of it and replacing it with a Lardnorb or a Slathfest. What do you think I should do?

Sun Cat

It's cold and rainy today, so I thought I'd post an old photo from the Maximum Leader's archives. Enjoy!

Would You Trust a Financial Advisor

... who recommended massive borrowing?

WASHINGTON – A new congressional report released Friday says the United States' long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama's grim budget submission last month.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama's budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That's $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.

Other arguments aside, no matter what the guy said, wouldn't his credibility be destroyed such recommendations? Wouldn't you naturally avoid all other suggestions the fellow made?

The Shape of Things to Come

A friend at work, knowing I'm a debt geek, asked me what was up with the Greeks these days. I told him about their austerity measures and that it looked like the Germans were finally going to be sufficiently satisfied to bail them out. In the process of discussing it, it dawned on me that the austerity measures did not change the course of Greek society, they just applied the brakes. A little bit. There was no move towards a market economy or deregulation in a country where starting even the tiniest of businesses requires approval from 11 different government entities.

The slothful, trundling hulk of Greek society shuffles on, just more slowly.

Reading this piece by Mark Steyn today, a particular paragraph caught my eye.

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.

Mark has long been arguing that passing ObamaCare will forever change the nation. No matter what happens after that, we'll never be able to undo it and we'll be just another limpid Eurostate. The Greeks are proving him right. In the face of economic catastrophe, brought on by disconnecting earning from having and ignoring what things cost in favor of what they simply want to have, the Greeks are not moving to dismantle any part of their bloated, parasitic govenment.

Argentina proves Mark right as well. Peronism, the blueprint for the Obama Administration, was economic fascism that drove Argentina into default, currency devaluations and chaos. It's also still the way to get elected in Argentina.

I used to think that Mark Steyn was a pessimist. The Greeks are proving him right.

America or Greece? Both.

Bed Jumpers

... a Flickr group. Dig their slide show:

Selfishness at the Top

Backing off from the health care debate and just looking at the mechanisms at play, I can't help but marvel at the utter selfishness of President Obama. His party is cruising for mammoth losses in the next election, but all he's concerned with is his health care ambitions. Real, concrete signs are out there in the form of Scott Brown and others that his policies are going to lead his compatriots to defeat, but he doesn't care. It's all about him.

Can you imagine the conversations going on in the halls of Congress within the ranks of the Democrats right now? Do you think that many of them see him as an ally or a friend? Don't look at this as a political event, but a human and personal one. Your boss is knowingly choosing actions that will most likely cost you your job and he's asking you to support them.

Is it any wonder that some of them are bailing out right now, probably to line up jobs as lobbyists? Congresscritters have families to support, too. Once the election is over and you've gotten crushed, the paychecks will stop and you, the nondescript, pipsqueak congressman from the fifth district in Arkansas will have to find another job.

And every day, the dude at the top shows that he doesn't care about that at all.

Not Blackened, but Browned Catfish

... or maybe yellowed.

I tried to make blackened catfish on the grill a few nights ago, but I was too miserly with my coals. I figured since all I needed to do was heat a single cast iron skillet, I could get away with fewer than usual coals and just pile them up in a cone under the pan.

Bzzzt. Wrong answer.

When Paul Prudhomme says get the pan hot, he means hot. In his cookbook, he tells you the pan cannot be too hot and you want to see white ash forming at the bottom of the pan from the oils used to season the skillet between uses. I didn't even get close.

The end result were catfish fillets boiled in butter. My wife loved them, but I was disappointed with the results. Cooking blackened anything is a dramatic affair with lots of smoke and usually a butter fire erupting in the pan as you pour more over the food. This was a bland event with the butter burbling away at the bottom and the fish lounging about in the lake of butter.

Meh.

Peter Tork Playing Louis Jordan

... does it get any better than this?

Railway to Nowhere

Quotes to Ponder

... perhaps with the help of very strong psychotropic drugs.

Here are a few tidbits from Greek labor leaders protesting budget cuts that will prevent a total economic collapse.

“The measures are grossly unfair,” Dimitris Bratis, the president of the Greek teaching federation, which will strike for 24 hours tomorrow, told NET TV today. “We’re being asked to pay for the crisis. Greek taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill again.”

Err, of course they are. That's where the borrowed money has been going, you know. That was good, but here's the grand national champion quote so far from the crisis.

“The attempt to fix the fiscal crisis underlines clearly the government’s attempt to move the cost of this attempt to the real economy,” Nikos Skorinis, the secretary of GSEVEE said in an e-mailed statement.

Wow. The underlying mental construct that leads one to make that statement without their head exploding must envision the government as something like this.

Update: Upon reflection, this quote may not be as paralyzingly stupid as I had originally thought. By "real economy" he may be differentiating between the legitimate portion of the Greek economy and the black market where no taxes are paid. The estimates I've seen suggest that as much as 30% of the economy is hidden and therefore contributes nothing to the support of the government.

You faithless Money Fairy! Come back here and give us more monies!

Milton Friedman and Greece

Over at the WSJ is an excellent, 10-minute video on what happened in Greece. I don't believe that it's subscriber only, so you can pop over and watch it if you'd like. What you see, unspoken in the video, is a society of people who have detached earning from having.

In all of the interviews, the people speak of the government as if it were some kind of mystical being that provides goods and services conjured out of thin air. They complain about price or availability or wages, but nowhere do they discuss the cost of producing the things they want and who will pay that cost. Reality requires the equations to be balanced, cost equals price paid, but that equation has been locked away in a closet somewhere and ignored. It's like watching people jump off of a chair and then after they land, complain to each other that they fell instead of floated in mid-air. Equations as immutable as those of physics are dismissed as irrelevant or rather, are ignored completely.

That air of unreality is echoed in this little clip of Milton Friedman being interviewed by wannabe Greek*, Phil Donahue.

Phil, like the Euros and the American Left, believes in the moral and productive superiority of the government and was not moved by the abject failure of his philosophy all around him. Socialism failed in 1979 the same as it is failing now in Greece.

* - Well, Greek or European or American progressive or tax-cut fanatic American conservative. Phil wants things, but denies that someone has to make them and that someone has to be paid what that thing is worth.

Very Unhappy with the iPod Touch

Our trip up to Sutter Creek featured two 9-hour car rides as we travelled to and from San Diego. We had my wife's iPod Touch in our car and a special connector to hook it to our stereo system. The stereo, original to the car, did not feature an audio jack, so I could not connect my Droid to it. We were short of time (of course!) leaving San Diego, so I only put a few things of my own on the iPod, but I figured that once we arrived in Sutter Creek, we could download the rest as the house we rented had WiFi.

Bzzzt. Wrong answer.

It turns out that the iPod Touch cannot download from sites like drop.io, at least not and save the file to memory. It can stream from there, but it can't store it. My laptop and Droid were loaded with good things, but we couldn't transfer them via the Interweb Tubes and we didn't have the connector cable for the iPod. Since the iPod doesn't use a standard USB cable, we were out of luck.

On the morning we left, I tried audible.com, figuring I could get an audiobook for the road. I signed up for the service and then using Safari on the iPod Touch, bought one of Rita Mae Brown's Mrs. Murphy mystery books.

Bzzzt. Wrong answer.

Audible doesn't work with the iPod Touch. I bought the book and then it just sat there on the server. All downloads have to come through iTunes (which I hate on my machines anyway). My Droid would have had no problem with this.

That does it for me. Apple's insistence on locking everything down really ticked me off. I want an Internet appliance of my own, not their Internet appliance that I just happen to be borrowing. No more Apple products in my house. Yes, the user interface and is very swoopy and cool and all, but the product isn't very usable. It's poor performance is masked by a lot of slick flashiness.

Blech.

The Best Goals Book Out There

... is Goals! How to Get Everything You Want--Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible,by Brian Tracy. At least this is the best of the ones I've read, and I've spent quite a bit of time going through them. I took this with me on our weekend jaunt to Sutter Creek and went through it. It's a very comprehensive book taking you from determining your goals from first principles all the way to establishing a plan of action and following through on it. I'm going to be recommending it at work for my team.

There aren't any surprises in this book if you've read much on the subject, but Tracy does the best job I've yet seen of writing up the strategies and concepts in an easily-read way. As I go through it myself, I'm going to blog part of the process here.