On Complicated Remotes

This was one of the remote controls at the vacation house we rented over the weekend in Sutter Creek. I'm convinced you could fly the Space Shuttle with this thing. I think the "Exit" button at the right controls the airlock.

Yellow and Green

I really like the way the lichen-encrusted rock gave these daffodils a contrasting background. It set off the yellows and greens of the plants quite nicely.

Yellow

Wild daffodils in Sutter Creek, CA.

Cheezburger of the Day

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Sutter Creek Sunset

Chaos Glassworks

Beautiful stuff to be found at Chaos Glassworks.

Sutter Creek Rain

Sarah Palin is so Dumb ...

... that she probably thinks there's a difference between collision insurance and liability insurance when it comes to cars.

I don't know if you've seen this, but it's so illustrative of so many points that it's worth recapitulating here. Here's the Obama anecdote from the healthcare summit.

When I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won’t name the name of the insurance company, but there was a company — let’s call it Acme Insurance in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After about six months I got rear-ended and I called up Acme and said, I’d like to see if I can get my car repaired, and they laughed at me over the phone because really this was set up not to actually provide insurance; what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But it really wasn’t serious insurance.

Insurance that meets legal requirements is liability coverage only. Coverage that takes care of your bumper is collision insurance. This is basic knowledge for all of us out here in Hicksville. This was not some slip of the tongue done in the middle of an antagonistic interview, this was a planned anecdote at Obama's healthcare summit. The fact that he used this anecdote proves one or more of the following:

• He has no idea how insurance works.


• His staff has no idea how insurance works.


• The press doesn't care that he doesn't know how insurance works. (Imagine if Sarah Palin had said this.)


• He doesn't think you know how insurance works nor does he think you should have to. Government regulations should make it safe to be a complete idiot.


• He knows how insurance works, but his strategy is to throw so many anecdotes of woe into the debate that it's impossible to react to all of them.

I'm open to your suggestions here.

Sarah Palin. Man, is she stupid or what?

Blue Green Yellow Green

Striations of color.

California Snow

We're up in Lodi this weekend, going wine tasting. Here's a very California photo from our trip up yesterday.

This is Compassion

... to enagage in using individual, anecdotal tales of woe to create massive new entitlements leading to colossal debt and eventually to rioting.

The Obama Administration recently unveiled it's FY 2011 budget. It calls for a deficit of almost $1.6T, the largest budget deficit ever. I don't know what to write about this. It's beyond mind-blowing. It's the result of having the government run by packs of academics and political lifers who have only the most tangential intersection with financial reality.

Germany is to Greece as China is to the US

Dig this.

Germany’s biggest banks are looking at a rescue plan for Greece under which they would buy Greek debt backed by financial guarantees from Berlin, the Financial Times has learnt.

OK, so that sounds like one of our own recent bailouts. The German government will be guaranteeing the Greek debt bought by German banks. Right about now, trusting the Greeks to be able to repay anything seems like a bad idea. So just why are they considering this?

Several such banks, including Hypo Real Estate, Eurohypo and Deutsche Postbank, which hold billions of euros of Greek debt, all said they would not increase their holdings.

The German banks are already up their eyeballs in Greek debt. A Greek default would damage the German financial system. So right now, the German government is trying to figure out how to force Greece to cut spending and raise taxes, not because they care for Greece, but because a Greek default would be very painful for Germany.

That sounds a lot like China and the US. If you read the commentary around the Interweb Tubes, most of it is very sympathetic to the Germans. After all, they're working longer hours and producing things people want to buy while the Greeks are spending money they don't have to get things they haven't earned. It's not a big leap to see that same logic applied to the US.

Just something to think about as you watch all of this play out.

Greece and Califronia

... and the US and Germany and more from Victor Davis Hanson and Mark Steyn.

First, Mark Steyn.

Unfortunately, Germany is no longer an economic powerhouse. As Angela Merkel pointed out a year ago, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. Over 30 percent of German women are childless; among German university graduates, it's over 40 percent. And for the ever-dwindling band of young Germans who make it out of the maternity ward there's precious little reason to stick around. Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that's before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens. Germans, who retire at 67, are now expected to sustain the unsustainable 14 monthly payments per year of Greeks who retire at 58.

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less-profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn't pay. You'll wind up bailing out, anyway. The problem is there are never enough of "the rich" to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they've run out Greeks, so they'll stick it to the Germans...

From VDH:

Here in California we see the symptoms of the same Greek malady as we go from one budget shortfall to the next — dream-like borrowing, raising taxes, and furloughing, in lieu of the tough medicine of cutting government payrolls, changing pension payouts, and freezing the pay of state-workers until their compensation mirror images those in the private sector.

Postmodern Western society will soon witness a real showdown, analogous to the teenager who rebels and either accepts that he is still dependent on his parents and therefore subject to the rules of the house, or runs away and implodes in a sea of drugs and street-life.

In short, how will an entitled society react when the money runs out and it learns that it must change or wither away — and all the whining rhetoric about “social justice” and “a green future” and “spread the wealth” and “redistributive change” won’t bring another barrel of oil or bushel of wheat or Douglas fir 2” x 4”?

Is it progressive to spend ourselves into ruin? Is it compassionate to spend next year's support for the handicapped today?

On the Road Today

... so there won't be much blogging. Of course, if you're on the road, you need road music and that means Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra!

Vote Ackbar!

IMAO points us to this article in the WaPo where the students of Ole Miss are voting on a new mascot to replace their old one, Colonel Rebel. The leader in voting, apparently, is Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars.

Hilarious! Vote Ackbar!

The Ole Miss Rebels need to know when it's a trap. Who better to warn them than Admiral Ackbar?
You can support him at http://www.notatrap.org/. Go Ackbar!

A Run on Greek Banks?

Mish turned us on to this article in the Wall Street Journal that describes how wealthy Greeks are pulling their money out of Greece.

ATHENS--Wealthy Greeks are pulling their money out of local banks and sending it abroad, fearing increased government scrutiny on assets and a run on the banks if Athens is forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund, according to private bankers and other people with knowledge of the situation.

"There is a lot of uncertainty out there," said a senior private banker at a Greek bank. "We've had a number of customers asking to move funds out of Greece, mostly to Cyprus, Luxembourg and Switzerland." ...

"We estimate that €8 billion has moved out of Greece to accounts abroad since December. It's money from bank accounts, stock sales, property sales and other sources," he said, adding that that represented a substantial chunk of the €30 billion under management in Greek's private banks.

Greece and the US are wildly different in size, so I tried a crude comparison to bring these numbers to US sizes by using the two nations' GDP ratio from the World Fact Book. I came up with an equivalent flight from US banks to the tune of roughly $330B. That means Americans would be withdrawing $330B from B of A, Wells Fargo and so forth and sending it off to banks in Japan, France and Germany. The articles claim the Greeks are afraid of a run on their banks. I'd suggest that this is a run on their banks.

Lastly, that article, which I'm afraid is only available to subscribers, goes on to detail how the Greek government is planning on taxing savings by levying a 5% tax on all bank deposits. There's quite a bit more taxing planned, but that's one of the major reasons smart money is leaving the country. By using the Euro, the Greek government has made this even easier as the investors pay no conversion penalty for moving their money. In the old days when they had the drachma, by now the drachma would be practically worthless and the investors would have been killed exchanging them for, say, deutschmarks.

Yesterday, I linked to an article where a Greek union boss said this, "People on the street will send a strong message to the government but mainly to the European Union, the markets and our partners in Europe that people and their needs must be above the demands of markets." That is precisely what Greece has been doing for a long time. The result is a wrecked economy and an unstable banking system. The "people" are now finding out that their needs can't be met by governments waving magic wands.

Nemesis

... is the Greek goddess of retributive justice.

Nemesis directed human affairs in such a way as to maintain equilibrium. Her name means she who distributes or deals out. Happiness and unhappiness were measured out by her, care being taken that happiness was not too frequent or too excessive. If this happened, Nemesis could bring about losses and suffering.

After years of junk science where every odd, warm weather event was attributed to Global Warming, the warmists have indoctrinated us to see statistically anomalous events and indicators of something larger. It suited their purposes at the time and they waxed fat and prosperous doing so.

Whoops.

Snoozing on the Catican Couch

Today's Link of the Day

... comes from Bradley Wright. It will make you feel good about your fellow man.

Lying to Each Other

Remember when everyone was freaking out over the greedy capitalist bankers using weird derivatives and other bizarre investment vehicles to hide the risk levels of the junk they were peddling? Well, dig this.

Concerns that Greece and other struggling European nations may not be able to repay their debts are focusing investor attention on another big worry: Economies across the Continent have used complex financial transactions—sometimes in secret—to hide the true size of their debts and deficits.

Investors long turned a blind eye to European governments' aggressive bookkeeping, aimed at meeting the euro zone's fiscal ceilings. Countries using the euro currency have a rich history of exotic maneuvers aimed at meeting rules requiring members to cap debt levels at 60% of their gross domestic product and their annual budget deficits to no more than 3%. Despite criticism, European leaders deemed many of these moves acceptable as they sought the long-planned currency union.

The suggestion that we'll all be safer if the government watches the books is disintegrating in Greece and across the rest of Europe as well.