It's The Central Bankers' World, We Just Live In It

A 1-year chart of the Nikkei (Japan) and the DAX (Germany).

It would be hard to find two first-world countries going in such different directions as Germany and Japan. Germany has relatively low debt and decent prospects. Japan is a currency crisis waiting to happen and a demographic basket case. Thanks to crazed money printing at their central banks, their stock markets are marching ever upwards, almost in lockstep.

Over at the perpetually gloomy Zerohedge, there's this post with this tidbit.

"This is not investing," exclaims Ed Yardeni in this brief clip, "it is all about central bankers... these markets are all rigged." That is not a criticism he notes, "I just say that factually... I love these central bankers, they've been very good to the stock market."

I don't think I'd use the term "rigged" as I see this as more of an unintended consequence of progressive social spending. With debts as high as we've got - Japan (gross debt is 238% of GDP), US (107%), Germany (82%), central banks have no choice but to keep interest rates low by printing money. If interest rates were at historic norms, our governments would go bankrupt trying to make the payments on our loans.

All that money has to go somewhere and since there's no point in building factories or even digging oil wells these days, it goes into the stock markets. Investors get richer, but jobs aren't created. The fabled 1% make out like bandits and the 99% go wanting, except for what happens to their 401(k) plans.

Oh well. At least we all get that temporary glow from feeling compassionate as we vote for more and more government handouts funded by borrowed money. In the meantime, stock markets around the world all rise together.

Some Francesca Battistelli For A Friday

I found her on my Newsboys Pandora station and I really like her music. The videos are cute, too.

Enjoy.

Just Because Something Can Be Done, It Doesn't Mean It Should Be Done

Horrible. Simply horrible.

Link of the Day

If we divide the foodie base by the difference between the locavore vegans and the gender transitionals, and then add in the Greens, and raise the whole thing to the power of the anahata chakra, we get a positive Vibe Count!

My Favorite Knife Sharpener

Has to be this one:


I love to cook and I've got a bunch of knife sharpeners, but nothing compares to this one. 5 quick strokes on each side and my chef's knife slices through everything like a hot knife through butter. Definitely my favorite.

On Re-Wiring An MGB Cockpit

My project car, the old Time Eater, a 1973 MGB, still sits in my garage with the wiring incomplete. When I pulled the thing out of storage, I found that the old wiring harness had rotted away and needed to be completely replaced. Instead of buying a wiring harness, I decided to rewire the car from scratch myself so I could make some improvements to the system.

It turned out that getting the Chronovore back on the road wasn't as nearly as important to me as I had thought and weeks turned into months which turned into years. Confronted daily with the little guy in the garage, I tweeted this.

Goals without deadlines are just mild suggestions you make to yourself.
— K T Cat (@ktcat) February 13, 2015

This weekend, I rewrote my goals (I try to do this every 6 months, but it's really more of an annual thing) and I put dates to the stages of my MGB restoration. For example, I'd like to have the cockpit done by this Sunday.

The issue here is that the wiring in the cockpit is complicated, the most complicated part of the car. Actually, now that I write this, it's only complicated where it comes out of the ignition, wiper and blinker switches on the steering wheel column. The rest is relatively straightforward. For example, coming off the ignition is the auxiliary power feed that goes to the wiper motor, the fan blower switch, the windshield washer pump and so on. Each individual light or instrument is fairly simple.

The problem comes in wrapping the wires. I've got most of the wiring in, running behind the dash and into the engine compartment where needed, but when I'm done, I'll need to pull it all out and wrap it with electrical tape. Further, feeding the lines behind the dash is quite a chore, something you can't do when the instruments are in the dash.

The magical piece here is sequencing the installation. What goes in first and what goes in next and so on? As I hinted above, I've not been very serious about this project, but now, since I've put a deadline on this, things just got real as the kids say.

I'm going to take a spiral notebook and make a single page for each switch and instrument. I'll draw out the lines for that device. Once that's finished, I'll have a complete list of the wires that go from the cockpit into the engine compartment. I'll run and wrap those, leaving plenty of slack for the instruments and switches with the wires dangling out of the dash where the devices go. I'll then attach the wires in the steering column since those can't be moved. Finally, I'll attach the instruments and switches, one at a time, from left to right in the cockpit because the exit into the engine compartment is on the right hand side.

That ought to do it. Making a single page for each circuit will also allow me to double-check my current loads. I've been using 18ga wire in most places, but I'm a little concerned about that. Every time I check amperage ratings, it looks good, but it just feels like I should be using larger wire.

There. A plan and a deadline. And now, on to victory!

How Much Water Is One Inch Of Rain?

It's a real broiler out here in San Diego today. Dry as a bone, with temperatures in the 90s where I live. Our potted plants on the patio are going to take a real beating. As I watered them this morning in preparation for the day's desiccation, I wondered how much I should be giving them. What if I was trying to simulate an inch of rain?

Well, the calculation is actually pretty simple. The volume of a 1" cylinder is Pi times the pot diamter squared, divided by 4. (Remember Pi R Squared is the area of a circle and the diameter is twice the radius, R.) This equation gives the result in cubic inches and each gallon is 231 of them. Here's a table of the results.

Pot Diameter in Inches	Volume in Cubic Inches	Quarts, Rounded to 1/2
6	28.27	0.5
9	63.62	1.0
12	113.10	2.0
15	176.71	3.0

The surprising thing to me is that other than our really big pots, most would do just fine with a half gallon of water.

A Fantastic Bathroom Scale

A bohemian at heart, I typically wear aloha shirts to work. I had an occasion recently where I had to wear a sport coat. I've got a lovely one, but this time when I donned it, I discovered the buttons had moved. They no longer reached their button holes!

"Hmm. It looks," I thought to myself, "like it's time for a diet."

I've never dieted in my life. Being a goals freak, I decided to create a spreadsheet and measure progress daily. I figured I could increase activity and reduce intake to the tune of 500 calories a day, giving me a one pound per week weight loss glide path to success. I pulled out our trusty bathroom scale to get a starting point.

I couldn't read the thing. With my glasses or without them, I couldn't read the dial. I went to Target and picked out a digital scale with big numbers, brought it home and stood on it. I got a number. I stood on it again. I got a different number. And again. The scale readout was good to 0.2 pounds, but the sensor looked to be accurate to plus or minus 3 pounds. That was totally unsatisfactory for my daily data collection. I'd have no idea at all if I was heading in the right direction for weeks.

Googling the issue, I came across the scale below. It's totally awesome. It gives you the same result every time. It may not be perfectly accurate, but it's perfectly consistent, which is the most important feature of all. It's the delta that matters, not the actual values. So long as I see I'm on my glide path, or close enough to it, I'm good.

If you need a reliable scale, you could do a lot worse than this one.

Beating Father Junipero Serra With His Own Stick

A while back, I snarked about a PBS hatchet job on Father Junipero Serra which found him guilty of all manner of crimes against the Indians. The central theme of the criticism is that he forced Spanish Catholicism on the Indians. Their culture was swept away and their lives were dictated by the Spanish. Why is this "bad"? Consider:

• The Romans would have killed many Indians, enslaved more and kidnapped others as hostages and then forced the remainder to pay taxes to the Empire.
• The Nazis and Soviets would have shot many and shipped the rest to forced labor camps.
• The Apache and Sioux would have shoved them off their land, whereupon the survivors might well have died in the desert to the east.
• The Aztecs would have captured them and slain them in a religious ritual.
• African tribes of the time would have enslaved them and sold them to Arabs.

How is it, then, that Father Serra is fair game for criticism? It seems to me that the critics are picking up Christian morality like it was a club and beating Father Serra with it. Why not apply Soviet morality instead? In that case, Father Serra would be criticized for allowing any of them to live and for allowing any of them to retain any of the fruits of their labors.

Applying Khmer Rouge morality, Father Serra is weak and a tool of the capitalists for not killing them all. To the Aztecs, he's a fool for letting them keep their internal organs internal. The Africans would have been amazed at all the profit he left on the table by not selling them to other tribes.

The criticism is based on the very culture that Father Serra sought to give to the Indians.

Here, Father Serra is ordering the Indians out of their homes and force-marching them into the wilderness where they will be shot.

Libertarians Support Sagging

It's late and I haven't blogged today for a variety of good and bad reasons. Still, there's something to be said as there is every day, whether I've got time to type or not.

Driving past my daughter's school before the first bell, I saw students walking in. Many were sagging or exhibiting other forms of dress less-than-suitable for success.

So what? Why shouldn't they?

What if the majority of the country decided that our fascination with material success was misplaced or undesirable and what mattered most in life was smoking weed and satisfying our basic, organic needs? Who should object?

Curmudgeons like me, that's who. But not for the reasons you might expect.

As the national debt clock says, we all owe about $60,000 in government debt. It's worse than that as the elderly, infirm, incompetent and addicted will never pay. Let's round it up to $120,000 and leave it at that.

With a debt burden like that, we don't have the freedom to dress like idiots. Each one of us has to be deliberately industrious, striving to earn as much money as possible so we can pay our share of the debt. The alternative is an Argentina-style currency crisis, as Japan will experience any day now.

In retrospect, the title of this blog pot is backwards. Saggers should be libertarian. Anyone who wants to dress and behave in a counter-culture, express-yourself, conventions-be-darned* fashion ought to be fanatical libertarians, doing everything they can to shrink the government and pay off the debt.

Once we do that, we can all smoke weed and wear our pants around our thighs. Victory!

Err, victory of some kind. Not mine, mind you, but at least we'd be free again. Debt makes you a slave.

* - I'm such a prude, I won't even swear here.

55,000 Pages

... must have taken forever to print.

Hillary says she handed over all relevant emails to Congress. By printing them out. All 55,000 pages of them.

wuzhhhuurrrrr ... wuzhhhuurrrrr ... wuzhhhuurrrrr ... wuzhhhuurrrrr ... 

No staffer can search those with a ctrl-f without scanning them in. All of them.

wuzhhhuurrrrr ... wuzhhhuurrrrr ... wuzhhhuurrrrr ... wuzhhhuurrrrr ... 

As someone (probably lots of someones) on the Internet said, "The Clinton circus is back in town!"

Ready For Hillary!

Look, we all know where this is going to end, right?

Cultural Erasure

... is a term used in this PBS hit piece on Father Junipero Serra. After a long list of crimes that are heinous today, but were pretty common for the 1700s, there's this histrionic paragraph.

Serra's mission project resulted in more than individual suffering; it also effected a kind of cultural erasure. The missions upended Tongva social organization and discarded traditional Tongva religion and lifestyle. "The Spanish mission was insensitive and antagonistic to the cultural traditions of the California Indians," writes William McCawley in "The First Angelinos." "Although some priests may have cared deeply about the welfare of the Indians, cultural conflict was implicit in the goals of missionization...acculturation was seen as flowing in one direction only, that is, from the missionaries to the Indians."

Let's see if we can rewrite this, substituting the secular progressives of the sexual freedom movement for Junipero Serra and the Spaniards and American blacks for the Tongva.

The progressives' counter-culture project resulted in more than individual suffering; it also effected a kind of cultural erasure. The pressure to accept all family structures as equal upended blacks' social organization and discarded traditional black religion and lifestyle, particularly with respect to the traditional, nuclear family. "The progressives' mission was insensitive and antagonistic to the cultural traditions of the blacks," writes KT Cat on "The Scratching Post." "Although some progressives may have cared deeply about the welfare of the blacks, cultural conflict was implicit in the goals of counter-culture movement...acculturation was seen as flowing in one direction only, that is, from the progressives to the blacks."

Works for me.

Plum Flowers

For the first time since we got it, we pruned and fertilized our plum tree this year. For the first time since we got it, it's giving us a ton of flowers. I wonder, is there a correlation between the two events?

I left the images below quite large, so I think they're worth a click. Enjoy!

You Know You'e In Trouble When

... the people defending you in public during a scandal look like they're out of their minds.

David Brock, imitating a troll doll while defending Hillary Clinton.

About That "Reset" Button

Remember this lovely image?

The label on the button, in Russian, was supposed to say, "Reset," but instead it said, "Overcharged." I'm not sure that was a mistake so much as a double entendre. Hillary as Secretary of State ran an email server inside of her house and did all of her business from there where no one could monitor what she was doing. While Secretary of State, foreign governments poured millions of dollars into the Clinton Foundation. After she left office, she's pulled in 6-figure payouts for canned speeches all across the country while her inexperienced and semi-skilled daughter was similarly paid by a major news organization.

That button was a symbolic start to her career.

Her career as a Russian-style mafia queen.

High government officials and well-connected, cooperative industrialists becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice is the end state of fascist countries that don't go in for world domination.

Leadership Secrets Of The SEALs

... may not apply to everyone.

I heard a talk today given by a SEAL team commander on leadership. It didn't resonate with me at all and I tried to put my finger on just why that was. I wondered if it was my normal contrariness until I finally hit upon it.

SEALs are effectively professional athletes. Their ability to carry out their missions are closely tied to their physical prowess. After a while, age takes it's toll and they can no longer do the job.

Contrast that with a professional - engineer, scientist, accountant, what have you. You can continue to develop within your profession until your mental faculties give out which is a substantially longer time frame. In fact, most of the superstar engineers and scientists I know are 40 years old at least. You need to fail in lots of different ways to gain wisdom as a professional. When SEALs fail, they can die or be severely injured.

Leadership in the professional world has a lot to do with recognizing and grooming talented youngsters and helping them manage their careers over a decade or more. I'm not sure what the lifespan of a SEAL is, but it's got to be pretty short in comparison. It was great to hear the chap's perspective on leadership and listen to his sea stories, but it wasn't my world at all.

About That Private Email Address For Hillary

So it turns out that under Hillary Clinton, the IT department was a server in someone's garage. No? Well, it might as well have been. She never used a government email address. The Secretary of State used her own, private email address for everything.

Lots of people have focused on the transparency issue - how can anyone ever get copies of her emails for audit and investigation purposes. That's not a big deal to me. At least not nearly as big as the threat of espionage, blackmail and massive breaches of security.

What do you think happened the first time someone in the Kremlin got an email from her home address? My bet is that an 8-figure bribe was prepared and various owners of Hillary's email chain approached. China, Iran and plenty of others had reasons to get in on the act.

Network security and network management is not there to hinder a Secretary of State. It's there to protect them.

Why was it that Hillary valued that protection less than the ability to keep all of her own records?

Why Net Neutrality?

It could be to increase political donations. Our good buddy DDE suggested it in a comment on this post.

Lets not forget that more and more people are watching Netflix and popcornTime...cancelling their cable television service...

That is a lot of lost political contributions from companies under FCC control.

Great point. An unregulated industry has no need for political contributions. For companies in a regulated one, political contributions are a necessity.

Question, Answered

From Twitter, a statement.

The benefits of marrying in your mid-to-late 20s http://t.co/KVzyPYDHsr
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 28, 2015

From Twitter, an objection.

This article reeks of an implicit, outdated, sexist values framework regarding what makes a worthwhile life. @washingtonpost @WilcoxNMP
— Samten Chuwo (@samtenchuwo) February 28, 2015

From a UK newspaper, a response from a lady involved in the online dating scene.

It’s been a week of gloomy thoughts about what one applicant called “the packaging”. In fact, he wasn’t an applicant. He wrote specifically to tell me he wasn’t. “It’s a shame I don’t fancy you,” he said, “because otherwise you tick all the boxes.” Another said I sounded nice, but added: “Though unfortunately I have stringent physical criteria.”

There seems to be a gender imbalance, vis-a-vis the packaging thing. All the women I know are tolerant of middle age showing itself in a chap. We quite like a late flowering, in fact: the silvering, the smile lines, the coming of bodily sturdiness. We read these as signs that life has been lived and enjoyed. We read them as indicators of substance, of being substantial. In general, men don’t seem to grant us the same courtesy, at least not the men I meet online. They are highly focused on the packaging. It’s disheartening.

Biology is sexist and favors marriage in your 20s.