The former foreign minister of Australia notices that he keeps running into the same people. Alexander Downer, in a March 15 article wrote:
You often hear people saying “it’s a small world”. I was reminded of this last week when reading about Timothy Geithner’s performance as the new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.
In 1998, Geithner was the Under-Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers, who is now President Barack Obama’s head of the National Economic Council, was the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and I, who now work for the UN, Adelaide University and a consultancy firm, was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Australia. That year we all met in Washington.
I was worried. Indonesia’s economy was tanking and the country sought help from the International Monetary Fund. The trouble was, the IMF’s medicine was so drastic I feared it would cause total collapse of Indonesia’s economy and cause political and social chaos on our doorstep.
Downer says the same men are now in Washington. He continues:
Today, Geithner’s the economic boss man in Washington and Summer’s once more calling many of the shots. But this time I’m a spectator. If I wasn’t, I’d fly to Washington again and this time tell them they’re endangering not just Indonesia but the U.S. itself. Why? Because the problem with the U.S. economy is that it’s swamped with debt and their response is compounding the problem on the grand scale. They are adding to America’s already huge debts trillions of dollars of additional debt.
The worry is, where are they going to get the money from? The answer: China. For years the American economy has been built on a foundation of debt. It has run massive budget and balance of payments deficits and household consumption has been funded by debt. Believe me, this money has to come from somewhere and it has come from the reserves and savings of China and the oil revenues of the Middle East. The U.S. has depended on China and the oil-rich kingdoms of the Middle East buying U.S. Treasury bonds.
For those who can’t remember the crisis, Wikipedia notes “the IMF created a series of bailouts (“rescue packages”) for the most affected economies to enable affected nations to avoid default, tying the packages to reforms that were intended to make the restored Asian currency, banking, and financial systems as much like those of the United States and Europe as possible. … The role of the International Monetary Fund was so controversial during the crisis that many locals called the financial crisis the ‘IMF crisis’.” One man who was also active in Asia at the time was George Soros. The Wikipedia article noted the conspiracy theories that were rampant at the time because of the sheer speed with which the crisis developed and the unexpected abruptness with which it came to an end.
There was a general rise in anti-Western sentiment, with George Soros and the IMF in particular singled out as targets of criticisms. Heavy U.S. investment in Thailand ended, replaced by mostly European investment, though Japanese investment was sustained. Islamic and other separatist movements intensified in Southeast Asia as central authorities weakened. … The crisis has been intensively analyzed by economists for its breadth, speed, and dynamism; it affected dozens of countries, had a direct impact on the livelihood of millions, happened within the course of a mere few months, and at each stage of the crisis leading economists, in particular the international institutions, seemed a step behind. Perhaps more interesting to economists was the speed with which it ended, leaving most of the developed economies unharmed. These curiosities have prompted an explosion of literature about financial economics and a litany of explanations why the crisis occurred. A number of critiques have been leveled against the conduct of the IMF in the crisis, including one by former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Soros, who was at the epicenter of the controversy at that time, is still a policy player in current events. In a recent interview by the Australian, it noted that Soros was having “a very good crisis”. In a transcript, Soros explained:
Australian: So do you have a sense that things are coming together for you now?
Soros: It is in a way a culminating point of my life’s work, so to speak.Australian: Everything is coming together.
Soros: Yeah, the American election, the financial crisis, the theory of reflexivity. So it is actually a very stimulating period.Australian: Just as well you didn’t retire ten years ago.
Soros: Right, right.Australian: Will you be having any input with the Obama administration?
Soros: Well, at least I will get a hearing.
Just what some of those changes Soros had in mind were, are summarized in the main Australian article.
He concedes that many of his proposals – such as loosening Washington’s grip on the International Monetary Fund; co-ordinating macroeconomic policies between national governments; and bringing in new international regulatory regimes for banking and markets to oversee some of the wilder financial instruments and derivative products – will be extremely difficult to sell politically. But he claims there is reason for at least some hope because of the growing awareness of the depth of the crisis. …
“I think the Obama administration is moving towards a good bank/bad bank solution, but it is not the right kind of good bank/bad bank solution. What they propose currently is creating this aggregator bank which will take the toxic assets out of the banking system, out of the banks, so it really injects government money into the bad banks, and I am saying that they ought to be injecting money into the good banks. I think it is difficult to generate the political will (for that) … and this is my main worry right now, that they may get it wrong.
“They (are) in a difficult situation because they have two obstacles. One is that the hole has become too big – you need something like a trillion and a half of new money in addition to the (initial) $US700 billion because the hole has grown.”
The second obstacle to be overcome is that the clumsy way in which the Bush Administration handled the Troubled Asset Relief Program has “poisoned the well”, making it more difficult to get future funding packages through Congress. …”
One of the things that Soros understood perhaps better than anyone else was the synergistic role that information played in making markets jump. “His view of the markets was also shaped by the sociological concept of reflexivity, the awareness that the simple act of observing a subject can affect that subject and distort the observations. Soros applied the idea to the markets, rejecting the notion that prices are the efficient outcome of “perfect” knowledge, instead insisting that they are shaped by the biases and ignorance of market players, and that those biases can be self-fulfilling.”
Soros used his faster OODA loop to teach policy makers a lesson by taking them to the cleaners. To some extent, Soros advances himself as Exhibit A of the kind of behavior that markets cannot protect against.
“Soros says his 1992 attack on the British pound, which forced then Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont to accelerate Britain’s withdrawal from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, is an example of his constant search for the opportunities created by imperfect markets overshooting and under-shooting in that way.
“The authorities lagged, you see. There is this reflexive cat-and-mouse game going on between markets and the authorities all the time and I am more aware of it than perhaps most others, therefore I acted more decisively.
Thus, if we don’t “fix” the problems Soros has been warning about, the same catastrophe that befell Asia, and is now upon the West, will happen again and again. That will create a need to re-architecture of the system. Those who are familiar with the hacking game know that two things are often true: that hackers bring the system down, at least partially, to prove their power; but more importantly they hope to bring it down in such a way that when the flaw is fixed, it will make them even more powerful than before. What better way to control the Tipping Point than to get inside the system. Recently, the AP noted that Richard Holbrooke, another man Alexander Downer might have run into, served on the board of AIG. The world gets smaller every day.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Obama administration special envoy Richard Holbooke was on the American International Group Inc. board of directors in early 2008 when the insurance company locked in the bonuses now stoking national outrage. Holbrooke, a veteran diplomat who is now the administration’s point man on Pakistan and Afghanistan, served on the board between 2001 and mid-2008. During that period, AIG undertook the aggressive investment strategies that led to a near-collapse and forced a multibillion-dollar federal bailout.
In a world dominated by information, a meme is sometimes all it takes. Mark Steyn, in a recent article, described just how differently President Obama saw the crisis from other people. To hear the President describe it, it was almost as if the downturn could be switched off at the press of a button. Or perhaps it would really last forever, but in the future it would only seem to be switched off. An exercise in reflexivity. Steyn writes:
The Teleprompter Kid says not to worry: His budget numbers are based on projections that the economy will decline 1.2 percent this year and then grow 4 percent every year thereafter. Do you believe that? In fact, does he believe that? This is the guy who keeps telling us this is the worst economic crisis in 70 years, and it turns out it’s just a 1 percent decline for a couple more months and then party-time resumes? And, come to that, wasn’t there a (notably unprojected) 6.2 percent drop in GDP just in the last quarter of 2008? … I mentioned a few weeks ago the calamitous reality of the U.S. auto industry. General Motors has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to over a million people. They can never sell enough cars to make that math add up. In fact, selling cars doesn’t help, as they lose money on each model. GM is a welfare project masquerading as economic activity. And, after the Obama transformation, America will be, too. The young need to recognize that this is their fight. They need to stop chanting along with the hopeychangey dirges and do something more effective, like form the anti-AARP: the association of Americans who’ll never be able to retire.
Alexander Downer says the spin doctors can’t cure the problem. Maybe that’s where he’s wrong because everybody knows Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania. The last words of the former foreign minister’s article are: “We have every reason to be afraid, very afraid.” Maybe that’s where he’s right.
Tip Jar
Soros is “Goldfinger” personified. I guess that makes Obama “Oddjob”.
The only way out is the President Harding solution:
Don’t change the rules of the economy…
Cut taxes like crazy…
Cut government spending like crazy…
The additional complexities being introduced by H and his demonizing of essential executives is queering the economy.
The market wants simplicity: going back to older norms of finance is what works.
The nostrums flowing from Larry Summers are killing us.
Volker for Treasury Secretary; Larry & Timmy, your days are through.
And BTW we’re going after the bust-out artists and the naked short sellers.
To some extent, Soros advances himself as Exhibit A of the kind of behavior that markets cannot protect against.
Markets protect themselves against this sort of behavior by throwing the practitioner into prison. Of course, that’s a modern invention. In previous centuries, they were just hanged, burned, or beaten to death with sticks. Soros seems intent on undoing a lot of that civilizational progress. He might want to reconsider that.
Australian: So do you have a sense that things are coming together for you now?
Soros: It is in a way a culminating point of my life’s work, so to speak.
That is more than a little frightening.
Cut government spending like crazy, Blert? It’ll be a warm day in Siberia under the present administration and congress. As much as the Obama peaceniks want to zero out the defense budget, it won’t come anywhere close to covering the deficit.
Is the Obama family aware of the coming ‘situation’? Of course. They’re planting a garden in the White House lawn. Will it make any difference? Check back with the White House butler in a few weeks…it’ll be his problem after the camera crews have moved on to the next big event in a few days.
Has Barry ever seen bare earth as an adult?
We are facing possibly 20 million or more unemployed in America if the bottom drops out. It might be a good idea for the nation’s mayors to plan for harnessing armies of the unemployed as laborers on urban farms. I could see large sections of the NYC parks system being put into “Victory Farm” production.
Doug,
He has consumed various agricultural products.
Lifeofthemind,
That’s why legalizing 20 million illiterates is a top priority for BHO.
HR 875 makes any such plot very expensive.
You’d be in violation and subject to $1,000,000 fines per day per plot.
Google it.
I covered Prop 2 and it’s effects here.
The big problem for H is that voting Blacks aren’t all that thrilled with the real prospect of being the second banana minority activist group.
How to reconcile the balance of demographics?
Hispanic Americans out reproduce most other ethnics and are already on record as a functionally expulsive ethnic cleansing faction.
Within not so many years the Congressional Black Caucus is going to become seriously depleted and the leadership of minority shakedowns will flow to a hostile ethnicity.
Of course, the rise of Hispanics ruins the narrative for the ’400 acres and a Cadillac’ reparations settlement.
I’m amazed that the CBC has not focused its energies on making the Black family whole. Why no change in the Aid to Women with Dependent Children stricture against having Father in the house?
In these hard, hard times many a father is going to lose his job and his kids will need welfare. As it stands a tsunami of freshly unemployed fathers are going to have to say good-bye to their kids so that they can be fed.
“Soros says his 1992 attack on the British pound, which forced then Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont to accelerate Britain’s withdrawal from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, is an example of his constant search for the opportunities created by imperfect markets overshooting and under-shooting in that way.
“The authorities lagged, you see. There is this reflexive cat-and-mouse game going on between markets and the authorities all the time and I am more aware of it than perhaps most others, therefore I acted more decisively.
This was not a example of imperfect markets but an example of stupid politics. The Soros type excels in a politicized economy.
What I have forgotten is that liberals don’t have different ideas, or different beliefs, they have an entirely different way of thinking. Fundamental reality is just completely different for them.
“The Matrix” is the best example I can think of for this. In “The Matrix” the reality of those in the matrix is completely imaginary. Those who come to see this are ejected; a truly enlightened one can actually reenter the matrix and take control of it. What the ordinary folk think of as reality is just a complicated illusion.
The Obama crew sincere and strongly adhere to this belief system. They overlap substantially with the Wall Street and academic economics crew, which believes the system can be pumped up back to its previous state and continue along as before. There is a certain amount of friction between thse two groups but it is limited to what to do first.
Unfortunately for them there are whole lot of other people involved. People who no longer trust the system and are adjusting their behavior accordingly.
Never forget that Soros ever makes his currency killings as SHORT SALES ONLY.
Hence the destruction of the US dollar is his bet of a lifetime.
The nations that gave him freedom are expected to impoverish themselves for the sake of his meglo-narcissism.
The entire unregulated hedge fund naked short crowd has to be shut down for national security reasons.
They intend to tank the dollar.
By their actions you’d swear that they were fronts for KGB counter-financial warfare.
They certainly have Soviet Mafia heavies at their beck and call.
#7 LOTM
“a good idea for the nation’s mayors to plan for harnessing armies of the unemployed as laborers on urban farms.”
If the “armies of the unemployed” include those “homeless” guys from SanFranciscwen, I’ve got some concerns about just how they might take to fertilizing the soil, so to speak, if you catch my (or their, in fact) drift
But don’t get me wrong, I think that would have been a great idea after Katrina, to get those folks focused on something else rather than oh, looting, and oscar nominatable performances by their spokesperson’s all over cable tv during what might have been a productive re-building time assisted by all the private companies and churches who provided the bulk of relief supplies to the area there devastated by storm.
But of course, The governor of Louisana wouldn’t get blamed as the enforcer of “forced-labor” by a “slave-driver”; Bush would, and besides, governor Blanco was busy not ordering the National Guard to restore order (per Posse Comitatus) for 5 whole days, per dhimmicrat party instructions so to prevent the executive office from any positive PR for the federal response to the havoc. [It broke the woman, gov. Blanco, and thats why she left office, but hey, she did the yeomans work for the masters in House and Senate: set everthing up for "Iraq surge is a failure" campaign that came next]
so that idea just sat on a shelf collecting dust while carnage and bedlam ensued.
“Markets protect themselves against this sort of behavior by throwing the practitioner into prison. Of course, that’s a modern invention. In previous centuries, they were just hanged, burned, or beaten to death with sticks. Soros seems intent on undoing a lot of that civilizational progress. He might want to reconsider that.”
Sorus has done this at least three times. He is not in prison.
“I’m amazed that the CBC has not focused its energies on making the Black family whole. Why no change in the Aid to Women with Dependent Children stricture against having Father in the house?”
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The one thing the Feds have done that worked in the last 20 years was Welfare Reform.
…naturally the first thing to be dismantled by the Dems.
If the Pubs were smart, they’d give all credit to Clinton when whining about it.
Newt can take it for the team.
Hyperinflation and the crash of the Keynesian model could be in the offing soon if the Chinese drastically draw down.
http://tinyurl.com/da295v
mB
2 years ago there were over 100 big budget films at least partly created in Hollywood.
In 2009, 3, according to Kevin James.
“Maybe that’s where he’s wrong because everybody knows Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania.”
Memo from Big Brother:
There will be a Two Minute Hate at noon. You must attend. Focus on AIG executives.
This has already been noted at the Club: China is shorting the US Dollar.
This is done by gradually buying up the physical world with todays-dollars even on a forward basis.
China has already moved out of long T-Bonds. She is in T-bills and the shorter T-notes. This was easy and painless to do since Ben rigged a floor under their selling pressure.
Never forget that the bulk of US Treasury debt is short term. We live off a credit card: T-bills.
H’s budgets are likely to swamp the bids and crash the budget on the back of runaway T-bill economics.
Anyone can crash a credit card, even the Federal Government.
In Sacramento’s tent city, a torn economic fabric
California unemployment hits 10.5% in February
Countrywide sues AIG unit over its failure to cover loan losses
The legal battle could provide a rare window into the collapse of the financial and real estate markets.
That’s going to be lost by Countrywide.
Her boss is so corrupt that he didn’t mind the store.
Hence Countrywide’s paperwork is a shambles.
So instead of the government bailing AIG she can bail out B of A. How sweet.
From the Soros quote:
“The authorities lagged, you see.”
Is this perhaps why Geithner is dragging his feet on releasing his plan? The Won & Co. know they have to give Father Soros time to act?
Blert @ 15:
“By their actions you’d swear that they were fronts for KGB counter-financial warfare. …”
If you are from the black helicopter crowd then they are from the NWO and ‘The Illunimati’.
Or 4GW practitioners from RoC?
I tend to favor the Occam’s Razor explanation = the simplest one is the correct one => The Won’s minions are either incompetent or stupid at best, malicious at worst.
It’s a fact that China and Russia scheme financial warfare.
Russia figures that it was financial warfare that terminated the Soviet Union. Since we are too close in time for the secrets to get out, who will admit it?
Right now we are in a financial world war IMHO.
The race is to see who can be the last man standing.
We may yet have a world wide currency: the USD !
Our classic financial rivals in banking: Britain and Switzerland have suicided themselves with insane gearing coupled to currency translation risk.
With no commercial law or even an attempt to try; Russia and China are jokes as to issuing international money.
Their main concern at this time is internal: can the governing elite ride the tiger?
I doubt it. I’d expect Putin to suffer kinetic lead poisoning. I’d expect China to fracture and convulse if she can’t maintain headway/ employment growth.
The Anglo-Sphere looks to come out on top all over again.
This final plunge for the Czar will be the end of Central. Muscovy returns.
China goes Christian — the trend is already exponential.
Interesting times, no?
desperate-hospitals-march-2009-update
CHICAGO — More than 190 doctors at the University of Chicago Medical Center signed a letter to trustees protesting plans to reduce the number of beds available to emergency patients as “unnecessarily risky” and a threat to patient safety.
The controversy over the prestigious hospital’s unusual plan is being closely watched by emergency physicians across the U.S. as hospitals wrestle with rising costs and sometimes inadequate reimbursements from federal and state programs. The hospital has done pivotal research, such as the Nobel Prize-winning development of hormone therapy for cancers. Last month, two high-ranking doctors resigned from the university’s medical leadership over the administration’s plan.
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In Huntsville, Alabama
Huntsville Hospital is slashing earned time off for about 4,200 employees to help offset declining revenues from patient care.
Chief Executive Officer David Spillers said the benefit reduction, which will save about $850,000 monthly, is intended to get the nonprofit hospital back on track financially and avoid layoffs.
But a nurse at the hospital, who declined to give her name, said she wonders how administrators can justify spending $65 million on a new hospital in Madison while cutting employee benefits.
“Something’s wrong there,” she said. “We can’t afford to be sick now, we can’t take vacation, but they’re building a new hospital.”
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It’s a Crisis! (care of govt programs)
We have to have ObamaCare Pronto!
80 year old Roy Masters, still doing his program!
“You’re rewarded for failure.
and even bigger rewards for causing others to fail.“
blert said:
“It’s a fact that China and Russia scheme financial warfare.
Russia figures that it was financial warfare that terminated the Soviet Union. Since we are too close in time for the secrets to get out, who will admit it?
Right now we are in a financial world war IMHO.”
I also find myself wondering about this.
Some background: Many years ago I was managing a supercomputing facility at an Australian university. One day I was chatting with some of our Cray computer technicians about which computers were the fastest in Australia. I was told that at the time the fastest machine in Australia was an 8 headed Cray-YMP operated by the Australian Department of Defence in Canberra. The old Cray-YMPs were designed specifically for nuclear weapons and cryptographic work. So naturally, I asked the technician if Australia was running a nuclear weapons program. He replied that the machine was used for economic warfare. He claimed that the Australian Department of Defence ran economic simulation programs for any nation that was seen as a potential adversary. The purpose of these simulations was to locate weak links in a potential adversary’s economy that would enable a single point attack to cause economic collapse. Anyway, this conversation took place almost 15 years ago.
A modern day Beowulf cluster has a compute capability that is 3 to 4 orders of magnitude greater than an old 8 headed Cray-YMP. It is quite conceivable that George Soros could afford a thousand node Beowulf cluster along with a team of Ph.D. level mathematicians that were running economic simulations. I find myself wondering if some sort of “shadow war” could be taking place where different nations or private economic raiders were trying to overthrow the economies of adversary states through pin-point attacks. Again the timing of the collapse of Lehman Brothers that initiated the current economic crisis and also insured Obama’s election was very suspicious.
i think blert is right, up and down the line. i think the treasury’s now-famous staffing problem is mere cover for exactly what robohobo conjectures. SEC is a key place to look –Cox was installed by predeccsor William Donaldson, whose Donaldson, Lufkin, Jeanerette brokerage sold out to thje Swiss bankers also employing Holbrooke, and also financiers for Enron, the microcosm of Soro’s other plays, which was then driven into Sarbanes-Oxley reforms which gave us the instruments and the conditions for the real-estate bust out timed to sweep Dems into DC in unstoppable numbers. Donaldson is one of the appointees to O’s new economic recovery council. that this play was in the works is suggested by the numbers of inner-circle Dems selling out their stocks and real estate holdings in 2006 and 2007 (for example, the Sandlers, ultra-insiders in Soros wing of Dem party, were the original developers of the subprime vehicle, sold their Golden West Financial to Wachovia just before the bust-out began; that aquisition is what killed the venerable old-line eastern seaboard bank), when the off-year election results set the financial attack into motion.
The set-up for that attack is familar to everyone here, it began with Clinton’s CRA initiatives of 1996 and made great progress with the regulatory reforms of 2000 (forced on Clinton by embarrassing outcries against unregistered, anonymous-principaled ‘dark pools’ in our markets, the reforms specifically left the credit default swap unregulated and uncleared and unregistered, making it the perfect rifle shot it indeed became when the attack began in 2007 and the vast CDS obligations began to be revealed), as well as with the consolidation of needed market interfaces 9such as Donaldson, Lufkin, Jeanrette) with the Swiss banks via London-based (out of Sarbox range) hedge funds. Credit Suisse (Holbrooke’s employer) and UBS (whose CEO is like Donaldson also on the Obama privy council, the “president’s economic recovery advisory board, “PERAB”) had in year 2000 set up London-based hedge funds which thanks to Clinton’s deputy sec trasury gary Gensler (who is now O’s head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the world’s international commodity trading regulator) which with SEC covers the whole game. SEC new boss Susan Shapiro was head of FNRA while Madoff and the cast of characters blert refers to and the deepcapture reporters identify and Cramer is now screaming for an investigation of, were doing their work right under FNRA’s nose –FNRA being the industry watchdog created just to watch for that activity, with no other duty BUT to do so. So FNRA’s boss inexplicably (ask Harry markopolis) blew it 100% utterly completely and YET is now the new head of the SEC. Meanwhile the operation at F&F had its own 100 expensive gov’t lawyer oversight board, OFEO, which did diligently produce wan and pusillanimous whitewashes (tho they did complain of latent risk, no one at OFEO did anything to push their reports past Frank and Dodd’s captive committees and into the world outside, where live us sheep in our billions being readied for slaughter).
oddities, Soros uncharacteristically buying huge stakes in LEH right up when its Dick Fuld tactics drove it where it had to go, that is over the cliff with a sudden failure of previously well-oversubscribed rated-security private auctions (where the leverage had reached unheard of Icarus zeniths), and in a thunderclap out of the blue, geithner of the NY Fed hit the press for the first time, rising to argue (clearly falsely) that no one in gov’t nor agency had the authority to call a save in time to stop the bankruptcy, tho both fed & treasury had already qualified certain institution as “too big to fail” and had led the world to believe it WOULD save LEH, as one of only a five market-maker broker/dealer international investment bankers.
The bankruptcy’s resulting panic was based as much on that icy-cold realization that DC was playing a game, picking who would live ot die, as it was on the financial losses –so LEH’s fall could not have been set up better to induce the panic. Fuld, note, exited with a Cheops-like parachute, and will not be among the star-chambered, mark my words.
Holbrooke worked with Soros ito save Kofi Annan from the Oil-for-food scandal, remember –that connection, through Mark Malloch Brown, is all over the web –read up on how these guys do it. Holbrooke, Soros, and Geither are all veteran players in Indonesia and her neighbors, w’s post scratches that surface. makes me wonder where geithner was when Enron was being financed out of UBS and Credit Suisse (Holbrooke later ‘took the 5th’ in conressional hearings on this –but still managed to get a job with O & Clinton –Dems are so forgiving, you see.
Ah jeez, there’s so much more –but i tired o typing.
Well
Easy to carelessly cast aspersions w/o regard for their accuracy, eh, Larsen?
Last night I posted here, on this site, Teleprompter’s testimony that it was his very own father that animated Holbrooke’s statements.
Perhaps you could try learning a little humility and honesty from Teleprompter, even if it involves members of your own family.
The best way to become aware of threats is to ensure the safety of a defector. Whether the subject is a criminal conspiracy or a foreign espionage operation, one of the biggest threats to the internal security of a conspiracy is the snitch, which is why the importance of informers or defectors can hardly be overstated. Most people who betray their fellow conspirators act out of greed, the desire for self-preservation or occasionally, over a disagreement. But one thing all snitches need is a place to go once they’ve spilled the beans. This is the logic behind witness protection programs or relocation arrangements for foreign spies who cross the fence.
So assuming simply as an academic exercise that there are any conspiracies out there, one of the keys to getting someone on the inside to sing is to provide a place for them to go. Back when Marcos fell, many of his key aides defected when they saw the growing strength of the opposition. It wasn’t that they suddenly saw the light. It was that they felt which way the wind was blowing. With that in mind, let’s examine why the weakness of the rudderless Republican party can be particularly dangerous. Without an strong opposition to fly to, very few potential defectors from a hypothetical conspiracy will come forward. They’ll take one look at who they’ll have to rely on for protection and say, ‘no thanks’.
One of the reasons why so many public policy initiatives, even clearly lunatic ones, will continue to go forward is that there is no place for doubters to break ranks for. Right now, it’s BHO’s way or the highway. Nobody wants to be left in the lurch. This means that those who are worried about the current situation, or feel that things are spinning out of control, can do more than just criticize the administration; the one positive thing they can do is get their act together. That will have in inestimable effect of creating a check and a balance. There’s a reason why a strong two party system works to keep things in the center. It understands the politics of defection. Like many things about the principles on which the US political system is founded, there’s a deep analytical reason for the way things are designed. One of the ways for conservatives to restore the system of checks and balances, and to prevent potentially dangerous cabals from emerging, is to get their house in order. The sooner the better.
Glenn Beck is trying to do that while encouraging his audience to join him. He’s got some project going that’s supposed to be ready to present on Sept 12.
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So our “first black President” becomes the first President in my lifetime to stoke a lynch mob mentality amongst the populace with lies and false outrage:
We talked about it, we voted for it, but we didn’t KNOW about it until now, and we’re OUTRAGED!
HotAir: Video: Congress, Geithner Knew About Bonuses on March 3rd – Ed Morrissey
Watch the clip from a March 3rd hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee in which Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY) specifically mentions the upcoming payouts of over $162 million in bonuses to AIG execs, the very same number that inflamed Washington DC this week:
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Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY):
But yesterday, Mr. Secretary, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve announced a new fourth plan to rescue troubled financial services giant AIG. I do agree that AIG’s sustainability is the lynchpin for some of our recovery efforts, and it’s important for the federal government to work to keep it afloat. However, I must demand that AIG increase the accountability and transparency, something that was not done during the previous administration.
For example, just last month, AIG paid 343 employees of AIG FP — their Financial Products division that created the financial hole that AIG is in, and in turn a multibillion-dollar bill for American taxpayers — $56 million in bonuses and are slated to pay an additional $162 million in bonuses to 393 participants in the coming weeks. And there’s more. Further bonus payments totaling approximately 230 million (dollars) are due to 407 participants at AIG’s Financial Products division in March 2010. This makes no sense to my constituency.
In other words, everyone knew about these bonuses. Congress even knew enough about it to question Geithner on it, with remarkable accuracy on the total amount due to be paid out, on March 3rd — nine days before Geithner initially claimed to know about it. (actually, they must have known sometime before this, this is presently the earliest public record)
This whole episode has been a farce perpetrated by Congress and the administration to stoke artificial outrage over contractual compensation obligations.
It’s a freak show put on by Democrats.
They’re giving us populist circuses in order to build a mob mentality — but for what purpose?
Update: The NY Times’ DealBlog has more,
as does the Boss.
—
Who would ever have imagined that an audacious serial tax cheat would LIE?
Meanwhile AIG employees need armed security, and citizen mobs are arranging bus tours of their houses.
Employees are told to ditch any accessories or apparel showing any reference to AIG, and to choose their exits carefully to try to avoid the inflamed mobs.
(will the country still be recognizeable on Sept 12?)
Joe Maysonet, the fitness manager at the Printing House Fitness and Squash Club in Manhattan, said there has been a rush of new attendees at boxing classes. Punching a human-shaped rubber dummy is especially popular.
While fists fly, trainers yell inspiration like, “You’re punching your money back into your pockets!” he said. “You’re punching that portfolio you used to have!”
The dummy, Mr. Maysonet said, will not press charges. “He’s withstood it all,” he said. “Just like our country.”
(now they need a dummy Teleprompter)
“A Treasury spokesman, Isaac Baker, said in a statement on Thursday night, “Although Congressman Crowley raised the issue of the bonuses two weeks ago, Secretary Geithner was not aware of the timing or full extent of the contractual retention payments or the other bonus programs until his staff brought them to his attention on March 10.”
Mr. Baker added that Mr. Geithner “takes full responsibility for not being aware of these programs before last week.”
But Crowley gives the timing and the amounts when he is addressing Timmy!
(also now on YouTube)
W, of course you know that the other side (cabal, whathaveyou = CW) knows that a conservatives having their house in order would be a moderator in the reactor, even to the degree that it could prevent the desired chain reaction. Thus the modus operandi (including spies and defectors) is applied by the CW as well. There are untold billions available (at the current purchasing power) to buy off a lot of folks with not-so-well-defined morals. Every man, woman and child has their price.
The CW has a totalitarian mind set and it is a parasitic creature if we use a biological parallel to describe it.
There is also a group of people (counter cabal, whathaveyou = CCW) that is not as enamored by the prospects of unlimited power. They are aware of the reasons why US was such a strong horse and they would like to keep on that course, with a degree of “corrective influence”. Unfortunately, CCW is rather weak and not well entrenched–due to the fact that they have catching up to do, the group (informal network) formed at the beginning of 90′s, while CW was operating for most of the century already.
The CW has a set of goals that are fairly well defined.
1. Reduction of world population to “sustainable” levels (between 500 million and 2 billion)
2. Re-stratification of society on two-class system
That is it in the nutshell. Of course, it goes without saying that CW sees itself as the ruling class, naturally.
Now, how to achieve these goals?
1. Consolidation of financial resources (IOW, redistribution — not the fake one that is only used to herd the sheep — of financial instruments)
2. Consolidation and monopolization of food production (“Stalin used food as weapon, so can we”)
3. Consolidation and monopolization of manufacturing sector (removal of extraneous industries as defined by the CW)
4. Consolidation of health care (or better put, health distribution system)
There are other consideration that are only tactical, not strategic, the means to achieve the above are numerous and can change based on utilitarian considerations. OWG may be nice idea, but probably hard to manage, so sectioning world in 3-5 blocks may be desired as the acceptable political system. The idea is that by means of morphic resonance, the other 4 blocks would more or less follow the path that has been already charted. And, enemies are necessary as a manipulative factor for channeling potential discontent even in a well oiled society.
If you think that the four points described above are reminding you of horses described in an ancient treatise, you are not that much off the mark.
The CW thinks that they are not evil. You see, it is all for the greater good. Be it the “culling of the herd”, or “sustainability”. The CW ruling class will have a great responsibility, so they must be properly rewarded, naturally. In return, the “sustainer” class would be afforded the basic necessities of life (span of which would be preordained) in a relatively painless and worry-free course.
The projected ratio of Sustainees vs Sustainers is 1 to 20. Figures that are above 1:40 present management problems and are bound to eddies and fluctuations that may be inimical to the system, so the CW experts say.
We are well on the way of CW utopia enfoldment. The chess pieces are in place and first moves of the battle were already deployed.
It will be brutal. I am not saying this to scare anyone. Rather to point out what we are dealing with. The CW thinks that they have the upper hand and everything is well planned. But they have one faulty element in their grand master plan. They don’t consider the law of unintended consequences. They are bound to fail. Or to state it more categorically, they will fail.
It is a little consolation to those that would come out with wretched lives, provided that they would be able to keep them, I know. But the idea that the parasite would not survive may be the glimmer of hope needed when times are … interesting.
#15 Blert, re Soviet Mafia: My brother encountered some of these guys at the recent shindig in Davos. Putin arrived in town, and suddenly all these thug-looking guys appeared, with beautiful blond girls on their arms. Slave girls perhaps? He said it was an eye-opener as far as who the Putin crowd really is.
I just saw (a few days ago) a sign on the back of a car.
“Your Government
Has Just Sold Out
Your Children
To The Chinese”
The occupants of said car looked to be Chinese. (I am from Taiwain. I can tell the difference of Japanese, Korean, Philippines, etc. fairly accurately.)
@ 42. always right
They, the puppeteers, don’t intend to adhere to the bargain and are not worried much about 300 million screaming “chinamen”.
The CBO estimates that President Obama will incur $9.3 trillion dollars in deficits. What rational purpose does the expenditure of these vast sums hope to achieve? Or has the ‘rescue’ process somehow become like an ungoverned engine which is going to thrash itself to death?
What’s really remarkable is that nobody, at least nobody in BHO’s inner circle, seems to think this is a potential problem; and they are busy posting for photo ops in front of vegetable patches on the White House lawn. I used to think the French aristocrats were crazy for playing shepherd in amateur skits or eating cake while things fell apart around them. Maybe its just human nature.
And while Obama was having fun at our, and the Special Olympic’s expense, what was the “vulgar”(Noonan) Sarah Palin doing?
YouTube – Governor Palin’s Address To The 2009 Special Olympics In Boise, Idaho
—
(and, as we might have known, those DVD’s won’t play in Ireland!)
Ok, guys. I’m on “hair of the dog” this morning so I absolutely deny that I wrote what follows.
Anybody remember Armand Hammer? Occidental Petroleum?
”
Edward Jay Epstein published a book critical of Hammer after his death titled Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer. Among his claims:
* James Jesus Angleton, head of counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency, said that the CIA has received evidence from the British secret service that Hammer laundered money for the Soviets.
* Lenin “issued orders to ‘make note of Armand Hammer and in every way help him on my behalf if he applies’.”
* J. Edgar Hoover wrote “a rotten bunch” on the front of FBI file “61-280 — Armand Hammer, Internal Security — Russia.”
”
Soros’ remarkable successes in currency trading could conceivably be explained by insider information, or espionage.
Gotta lay off the gin.
Doug @ 45
The way the Obama campaign obsessed with Sarah Palin, you have to wonder if Barack didn’t have Sarah on his mind when he made those remarks. I’m sure they are tracking her every movent!
Everytime he goes off prompter, there’s a good chance we’ll get a peek at his heart and soul.
…and the coldness and anger of this supposedly super-cool dude.
Rush had some still shots of BHO on Leno.
The contrast with Palin in her own World is eye-opening.
(when the make up teams down here got done with her, I couldn’t keep the Tina Fey Stereotypes out of my mind)
We are watching Dancing with the Stars and they are all on the floor at once. The watching public will slowly reach for the remote as each ox is gored, 401 in ruin – click, layoff – click, inflation – click. The first Kenyon president will soon be in obscurity minding his garden. The revolution will be bottom up as they usually are, the current congress will be dispatched and become the control as instructed by the constitution. Leadership will come from an obscure source not known today, maybe even the “internet”. Wall street will enter a new world of simplicity, buying and selling certificates of ownership. The details have a way of finding a level of comfort. I await the first U.S. purple finger elections.
Contractual obligations? Yes, I hear that and agree.
So; what if AIG had been allowed to go bankrupt as it should, and Uncle Sam had taken it over for a song for just long enough to clean up the mess and re-sell it?
A bankrupt business may indeed have obligations, but they are not enforceable.
In addition, it might have been a rather good idea to start a thorough and extremely unpleasant investigation of the greedy idiots responsible for the mess. An investigation including the freezing of all assets owned by the culprits, until such time as it is possible to determine how many of said assets were obtained by fraud – as, without doubt, at least some of them were.
@ 50. nullification?
That, or something along these lines, is the outcome, no matter what is the pathway and it’s duration. But to get there may be a bit… unsettling and often seem hopeless.
Darn. *its*, not *it’s*.
“But to get there may be a bit… unsettling and often seem hopeless.”
—
Yeah, like The Rapture.
I think we may be in Daniel’s 70th week.
We know what you knew, so just when did you know it?
Despite the lay of the district, so to speak, and the remote prospects for “a real change, there” anytime soon, if you know what I mean: we are poised to deal with better than anybody else in this world.
I love battin the boule right back at them with logic and argument, but when I start gettin nervous, and worryin, and wreeenging my hands, I say we bat that right back as well.
the irony of this all, is that the dhimmis, in their superfatuous quest for ull control, lost control of the one thing they thought irrelevant anymore while they were stuffing to the gills that now warbling teleprompter with doublebubblespeak: the facts
Oh yeah…. the facts, those relevant facts. those pesky…
and I’m begining to see, looking back, that those things have been spiraling (for some time) out of control too.
I’m starting to see things more my way: Like, at any moment, without any advance warning, in a bold counter move, the Administration, either Obama or a spokes person, will anounce the appointment of a special REFRESHMENTS CZAR, and convene a new council to deal with “the thirsty”
And it will get even more lame: a press release will disclose, that President Obama has sprained his
Urkelankle (even though it didn’t even happen), and he’ll be hobblin around, using the crutches as props, to distract and garner sympathy for his waning numbers, while tv runs “news” stories with those medical diagrams showing us just where, and what the ankle looks like, while the administration gives the “go ahead” to quietly dump more and more of his proposals into the garden out back, for the white house staff to bury deep, late at night.And that overconfident advisor who joked, “We don’t kneed no stinking “fact’s” here! Ha! Ha! Ha! will never be seen from again, not for a good long time.
and then, all those documents, things that show like, ooooh medical and birth records pop up, and just what nationality he applied to Harvard to get in with, as a foreign exchange student, (I ain’t sayin where yet) and what aid he recieved, etc, will all start showin up in time for the dems to hopefully get ready for 2010, but by then it will be just a little zu spat.
Because the financial “crisis”, and more importantly the facts only the insiders knew until now, will get its own cable channel, and website, to deal with the auto fill for the many visitors whose portfolio histories, are being compiled into the biggest class action lawsuit in history, (and of course that won’t do any good, but it will give many lowerpaid workers a good laugh) but more importantly it will sure scare the bowlin balls out of those jerks, and in doing so revive their last resort ream scheme to bring back their old “Bowling for Dollars” tv show back to UHF, at least.
I’m not buying into this hype anymore, and they sure ain’t all that. They think this is some kina one way street, (Yeah, Get You Kid!) but the street they been ridin on is the one Senator coldfish gat the ppropriations for, back when he was a lowly, up and coming bagman for the Chicago opertion
Aha! you all thought the Lord Giveth, but its the government that taketh away, but it seems it was the government that was one on the recieving end of marked “downturn” of public and media support.
“The Obamanation of desolation”,
That’s pretty magnificent, Gaffe, if I do say so myself.
Clio@5
That would be the WH Head Gardener. Butlers are prohibited by union rules from touching rakes, shovels, spades, trowels, hoses, sprinklers, edgers, weedwhackers, mowers, or any implement not specifcally designed to be used indoors. And, gardeners in turn may not wear white gloves, hoist a tray, serve canapes or carry a towel.
hear hear, Gaffe!
Roy, go get the gin bottle:
Hammer sponsored Al Gore’s daddy’s political career (Gore’s family farm was once Hammer’s)
Al was the Clinton designee to guide, through the chernomyrdan Commission, the privatization of USSR assets (yes, the international crime syndicate ended up with the good stuff, making Putin Fascism inevitable).
Of all the beneficiaries f Al’s Green Elmer Gantryhood, energy exporters stand out. Intuitively, we know that the crippling of American energy production potential has greatly empowered the Kremlin cadre that has never since the Mongol burned Moscow for the umpteenth time in the 1500s let its eye wander off the ball, the blue ball, the planet earth.
Oil-wise, no need to go into Jimmy “panama canal” Carter and his crucial help getting Chavez in-for-life, but it should be noted that the great antipodal balance to Russian energy is underneath Mecca, and USA, crippled at home by green use of Constitution and the courts which judge it (remember your cloward-piven) has been fighting desperately (and unable to even discuss the matter due to the on-call propaganda of the usual Democrats/academia/media combine) to keep that Kremlin cadre from bagging the Sauds and sewing up the fabric of world history neat & clean, with the thread being the petro pipelines snaking across the topographies.
Here the line of reasoning should tap the Kremlin/Iran/AQ connection, in light of KSA as the target. I won’t go into it here, other than to note the striking effect the 9/11 hijackers being all Saudis would have been thought by Kremlin-type minds to have had.
@ 57. Gaffe Prices
Spirit needs nourishment, for dreams of flying…
But, what can man do about such a reckless hate in the meanwhile?
The 0bots will be swarming soon, demanding your pledge of allegiance to the 0ne TOTUS, accosting you and yours at your door or in the shopping mall.
TOTUS then can claim yet a more solid mandate for hopechange, showing on camera rows and columns filled with binders full of signatures of concerned citizens.
What would Joe Average do? Sign, fearing that non-signing may cause some sort of undefined wrath (knowing not that his name, phone. email would be used as a leverage for taring kulaks big and small and later disposing of them in Brea Pits)?
Or sending them away with a notion he does not believe in religions?
WWJAD?
The thing is, people have enough space to be brave in anonymity, but when the 0Y SA (0bot Youth Signature Acquirers) show up, with a potential to cast an invisible mark on your house, it may be not that easy to say “0bots go away, don’t come back another day”. Politely or not.
You know, while I always thought O was a stooge and a frontman, there was always some little doubt. He must be somewhat in charge of his own destiny, no?
Now I realize the answer is “no.” Look at what he’s been doing lately. Hardly a day goes by that he does not unleash some speech or comment about something, topics in wildly different areas.
Just the past few days.
March 20: O’s “happy birthday” video for Iran (where was Marilyn Monroe?)
March 20: O outlines plans to reduce waste in stimulus spending (ha ha ha)
March 19: O reveals $2.4 Billion grant for electric cars
March 19: O on Leno
March 19: O announces he will sign UN gay rights declaration
March 18-19: O swings through California giving speeches
March 17: O gives speech on health care reform
March 17: meeting with the Irish PM
March 17: O makes first judicial appointments
And on and on it goes. And somewhere in the midst of this, he manages to make his NCAA picks and keep having parties and what not, and going on Leno and playing the hot-shot celebrity.
It isn’t humanly possible that he’s actually addressing all these issues himself, or even thinking about them. Yet the edicts and comments pour forth in a non-stop torrent. Who is actually making all these decisions? Who is pushing forward all these agendas at the same time? Who is putting the words in his mouth and proping him up day after day to be the talking parrot for wave after wave of Leftist remaking of America?
One suggestion to keep 0Y SA at bay:
http://dougpowers.com/2009/03/21/if-somebody-knocks-on-your-door-today/
The lesson of the Trojan Horse is not that the Greek army breached the Trojan Walls, but in how the Trojans had been made overconfidant (the Greek army setting sail & retreating beyond the horizon, much like the Communists and their USSR broke up), so that a great insoluble military standoff reduced to how to insert inside the enemy citadel a highly skilled platoon sized unit which knew how to open the fortress gates.
ACORN Behind ‘Protests’ At AIG Homes
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/acorn-behind-protests-at-aig-ct-homes
The national debt just hit $11 trillion, which reflects only the “on-the-books” amount. The true debt — including Social Security and Medicare — is now $56 trillion. This translates to:
$483,000 per American household
But that is TODAY.
BTW, how does trillion of dollars look like? In $100 bills:
http://msunderestimated.com/2009/03/20/beck-illustrates-one-trillion-dollars-what-we-missed-among-the-aig-circus-video/
to carry it to its usual too-far, the Trojans were an equine society, breeding & trading horses from inland into the coastal hub trading routes. so the Greeks lured ‘em with a horse. how to lure America the world financial center? hmm, ”free credit-money”?
Folks, note, while assessing the progress of the attack now increasingly revealing itself, that we the people have won two significant local counterattacks, (1) the Bush/House of Saud longtime friendship smashingly reversing the oil-price attack the invasion of Georgia was to’ve driven home (re Georgia, look into Soros’ and the Dem permanent foreign-policy warhorses’ pre-war meddling), and (2) the other pincer, the Dollar, surviving so far (that is until perhaps last Thursday’s trillion dollar fiat announcement –which natch, stopped cold a beginning-to-revive-USA two week long stock market rally) via a phenom wherein no matter how great the devaluation, the extent of Dollar penetration has so far devalued the competion too, keeping Dollar the tallest of the shrinking midgets.
Note how upcoming G20 is generating news about a Russian initiative to creat a ‘world currency’ to replace this Dollar which in truth will reliably cause organized-shenanigan trouble whenever in the hands of the truly rapacious-capitalist Democratic party insider cabal.
Buddy, daryonnomu konyu v guby nyesmotri, say Russians. Maybe they did not hear about the Trojan Horse…
Dunno. You can’t give a horse and expect people would react with appreciation when you come tomorrow and say: “Now ponny up!”
They can always say the horse died overnight and show you the marked grave while hiding salami in their pantries. And anyway, was not the horse a free gift? One does not have to be stupid, now, does he?
Say China one day says, “We wanna our money back”.
“Nope”.
“We wanna or else!”
“Else what? Come and take them.”
If you are more polite, you’d say “I need 12 months”. And print the required gazillion to pay off your debt. It would take a big comm ship to deliver that bonanza. But in 12 months, the money may be worth just the paper on which it is printed.
The problem is of course that no one would lend you any money, from that point on in either case.
twoby, the wprld’s so-far purest-of-the-pure believers, Pol Pot, after emptying the capital city Pnom Penh into the agrariary outside, had all the currency his minions could torture into the open, dumped into the streets. Witness reports speak of windrows of paper money piled hither and yon in the empty boulevards.
2×4 Recently in Mall asked to sign some nutty green something by your typical tattoed generation airhead, gladly with a smile, G.T. Hell. She was elated.
Doug (Comment #23):
Thanks for that L.A. Times citation on the tent city near Sacramento.
That was a powerful and moving article.
Jamie Irons
Buddy,
I don’t exclude an occurrence of a madman of Pol Pot caliber, the century is still young, but the players that be are not THAT deranged. They love money, their play thing, for it buys power and also can be made to endow broader outcomes, nudged this or that way.
In fact, it is the people that may one day decide that enuff is enuff, and start issuing local scrips backed by local goods to get a relief from the debased monopoly money.
Wretchard –
The Republican Party fell apart because it too has the same problems that Soros and Obama have: viewing the crisis in terms of the opportunities for the Gentry political class (as Joel Kotkin put it) to control every aspect of political, social, and economic life.
That’s a huge mistake to make, because first to achieve that goal, Soros/Obama have to deliver the economic goods to enough people to pay for suppression of the losers. Goons do not come cheap. Something Saddam knew — most of his expenditures was on goons.
Secondly, the crisis gives rise to other figures as well. You’ve put your finger on the collapse of the Two Party System, with Republicans trapped in “Gentry” mode unable to respond.
What is likely is that a man, likely with a military background, who appeals to the great losers of Soros/Obama: White Middle/Working Class Men, will arise, create a mass-movement explicitly oriented towards: “Who are Our Enemies, Who Are Our Friends?” and proceed to wipe out both Republican Remnants and Democrats alike. And there will be no alternative to the massive losses that Obama wants other than this mass movement, which will be an explicit reaction to punish it’s enemies and reward it’s friends.
America is a big country, there are enough losers under Soros/Obama to fund the initial aspects of this challenge. Which won’t be self-limiting the way Republicans were.
Obama’s coalition is made up of “Gentry” which has a social, cultural, and economic hatred of the non-Gentry (basically Straight White Men), which is powerful economically and culturally but not numerically. The situation is analogous to Europe: there the choice is ethnic/cultural annihilation by unchecked Islamism, or various Rightist parties. That’s not much choice, but people neither Muslim nor rich/connected will chose the latter out of sheer survival.
The Young of course are obsessed with status, having the right/correct opinions, so as to play the endless (twenty year or more) mating and job game. The appeal of an “aristocracy of connections” to government and PC thought and Multiculturalism particularly and especially to young women is of course obvious.
One thing people shy away from is how much support for Obama and hard-leftism in general is gender based. Young men in general preferred riskier systems where they could advance and “get the girl.” Now with full gender voting rights and rough parity in social/economic status, women have tilted the field towards stability and “connections” based systems, which puts most young men (“beta” type ordinary joes) at a huge disadvantage but creates opportunities with low risk for any even moderately pretty young woman with the correct views/fashions.
Obama’s support is dropping among men, married people of both genders, but remains high among single women and VERY high among young single women. The reason for this is raw naked self-interest in social advantage/status and economics.
Soros/Obama’s bet is that the US and the world is like Chicago, and no external threat like say, nukes wiping out NYC and Boston, will provide a strongman with deep populist roots, male-gender appeal, the opportunity to simply roll over the Gentry based system.
It’s a failure of perception, like the famous New Yorker Cartoon. The French Aristocrats and Obama cannot conceived of a rabble led by a Danton or Robspierre, because to their minds all power is focused on the elite. The masses don’t matter. This is a black swan in plain sight that no is willing to admit exists.
@ 74. nullification?
Yea, I was stopped by this statuesque pretty thing with what looked like a polystyrene shark around her hips (it wuz a dolphin), asking for my signature for an enviro-mental cause. The girl was a temptation incarnate, but I gathered my wits and pointed out several pointed examples of enviro-mental lunacies. She attempted a few feeble rebuttals, but then laughed because musa of humor was floating right above my crown and supplied the ammo. About half way home I realized how uncannily pretty she was, but it was too late to turn back. The shark would have to go, though.
But you see, that was a piece of cake. 0Y SA would be a different matter. I would tell’em in no uncertain terms what I think should be their destination, but then, I have been primed in my previous life living under a totalitarian regime, and second, I am not afraid of anything or anyone.
Other people may mistake their stakes and respond with some tint of fear.
Speaking of knock on the door… One day, 2 knock-out model quality Jehowa Witnesesess were pushing the Watchtower. Boy, what a conundrum! It was like vampirettes–their look and smell, everything inviting you in, but I got a hold of myself and declared myself being a satanist.
Back when…
Two handsome lads pitched the Watchtower to me. It was a Saturday, I had time to kill…
Three and half hours later I’d de-programmed both of them!
That this was true was revealed as one came back six weeks later and told the tale: His buddy dropped out of the faith the minute he walked out my door; and that he himself wrestled with his convictions until they were overthrown.
So, take them on retail.
There’s even hope for Ash.
three and a half hours with Ash and I’D end up the Jehovah’s Witness.
@ 79. blert
It was extremely tempting, you see, to get 4 flies in one swoosh (two deprogs, two… other rewards) on that day. But I had other plans that were non-refundable.
Buddy, don’t let ‘em get you, tiger!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKFKGrmsBDk
whiskey (Comment #77),
In my work I see a lot of unhappy, unmarried young women, both with and without children, and I have an opportunity to learn what their lives are all about. There is definitely something in your analysis that resonates.
Jamie Irons
Sorus has done this at least three times. He is not in prison.
Ah, right. But putting Soros in jail is how markets protect themselves against his kind. The fact that they haven’t doesn’t mean they can’t.
Jamie, what would be your best short answer as to what is the matter with them?
Single women support Obama because he is a tall, handsome stud.
@ 87. davidt
Can’t be… Is it? Paradoxically, many of them insinuate all the time that men are only thinking with their dicks.
Single women support Obama because he is a tall, handsome stud.
I’m not a woman, so maybe my opinion doesn’t count, but I think Obama is more like a scrawny, goofy-looking wimp. Big ears, no chest, skinny legs. His wife could probaly snap him in two.
Single women vote for him because he promises them money and security. And he’ll deliver on that promise about as well as he’s delivered on all his other promises. Meaning there will be a lot of broke, vulnerable women out there.
Buddy,
To grossly oversimplify, I think the liberation of women has only very partially been worked through in our time: it takes a very smart, very self-confident, and very loving woman to successfully negotiate the freedoms she has been granted by the struggles of her forebears, and somehow also find happiness in “a marriage of true minds” (if that is the route and the goal she chooses).
Our popular culture, too, obviously lays minefields all over the place. Few navigate that no-man’s-land (pun intended) to find something like happiness on the other side.
Jamie Irons
saying it’s all about sex is really going out on a limb
ok ok, i know i know that was great. Now, back to class:
This Bloomberg report covers much of the report at deepcapture.com and explains the record amounts of money the big investment houses have been pouring into the Democratic party –especially the O campaign, where just the fundraising ‘of record’ was orders of magnitude greater that any previous election.
An average of six billion dollars per day simply conjured into being from nothing –greater by far than the old fabled alchemist’s lead into gold. the reporters at deepcapture have strong evidence the perps are ‘russian mafia’ and the Genoveses. These wise guys are legit brokers and also, that other phone, hedge fund apparatchiks.
What’s striking is, none of the authorities seem to do anything about it –it’s like getting a corrupt police dept to investigate itself, i guess. no antidote but MOWH (man-on-white-horse).
jamie, concur, after three daughters-raising, on the minefields –women have enormous pressures we can only dimly see in outline. just the notion that they must happy the room is harsh duty to my mind. i like not giving a damn, and not being thought nasty of for it. or at least not so’s i notice. you know, “so what did you expect, it’s ME.”
BTW that link @ 91 is a video –give ur eyes a rest & just listen maybe.
Blert how long to deprogram these seeking signed pledges to Obama;?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7A-YwRi7t0&feature=related
“This happened out of haste and anger over AIG”
—
Happened over covering a massive pile of lies by a totally corrupt, Marxist Govt.
“Few navigate that no-man’s-land (pun intended) to find something like happiness on the other side.”
Jamie, if only this lady was the Norm:
YouTube – Governor Palin’s Address To The 2009 Special Olympics In Boise, Idaho
…and Noonan labels her “vulgar”
A Pox upon the Faux Intelligentsia
here’s a comer –despite his curiously 19th century name, looks, and personality. Can’t help but see a Calvin Coolidge like salty reserve and keen mind with sharp ongue ready when needed, but only then, and measured.
Welcome back, McCotter.
Breitbart and Miller have been all over McCotter.
Breitbart visited him when he went to DC, said his office was totally different than Reid’s would be.
…or all the rest of the corruptocrats.
But how do we overcome the ACORN BILLIONS, Buddy?
On the subject of women voting for good men to be president, ya know, good looking guys that your hormones tell you would a be a good mate… Lincoln would not of stood a chance. Poor ol’ guy was kinda homely. Not in this day and age.
If the Bots come to my door I plan to show them my Soviet automatic pistol, complete with the “CCCP” emblem on the grip. “See Comrades? Is no need to be getting my signature on documents.”
If that doesn’t satisfy them then they will get to see the other end of the gun and the general unpleasantness that accompanies that view.
I think it was around 1990, when I still lived in the DC area, when a guy came aroudn trying to get my signature on a petition that would Require the use of recycled materials.
Seems that the materials were being collected as part of various recycling programs but no one could figure out what the hell they were good for. So the answer was to require they be used.
I responded that I started recycling in 1968 and that some of those tin cans still came in handy for mixing paint and draining oil – and that there was no way I would sign that document.
Wretchard #44: We are already seeing the response to the Multi-Trillion Dollar deficts as well as anything else that Goes Wrong: An endless parade of new Federal programs to fix the stuff the other Federal programs broke. The latest is a Small Business aid program that will fix the problems associated the fact that mos people are employed by small businesses, the owners of which are the Evil Rich.
Whiskey, I don’t know man, your convictions are strong, but I look at Obama and I see Robespierre and Lenin, just the cloaked version. The Demo Gentry and Bush Repub Gentry are basically the same people: Ivy Leaguers! The Repub version was never comfortable with Reagan and certainly not with Goldwater. This wing of the Repubs are thoroughly beaten, probably became Demos. I too see where a charismatic leader (Rush?) could lead the now disenfranchised backbone of the USA into political change, but at this point to sound any tocsin of armed resistance merely sounds like a right wing Jane Fonda. We must needs give O time to completely disgrace himself. It will be painful for all of us, but that is the only way for all that political capital to evaporate. OTOH, I don’t blame anyone who stockpiles gold, silver, ammunition, fuel and canned food at a nice remote cabin. . .
Biannual elections give frequent opportunities for political mortification. Just ask the Republicans.
I still wanna know how we beat the Chicago machine backed up by the Multi-Billion Dollar ACORN Brigades.
Once upon a time my dad was having dinner at some Christian friends house when there was a knock on the door. The husband answered and was engaged with a theological argument for some minutes before the wife joined in too. After what seemed like an interminable time the wife came out to see if my dad talk some sense into them. The following conversation ensued:
My dad – ” You’re a Jehovah’s Witness, is that right?”
Jehovah Witness – “Yes, we are.”
My dad – “Do you believe that approximately 144,000 people will be summoned to heaven?”
Jehovah Witness – “Yes, we do.”
My dad – “and you believe these people will be you and fellow Jehovah Witnesses?”
Jehovah Witness – “that is right.”
My dad – “Well, if heaven is full of a bunch of ass-holes like you, I don’t want to go.”
That pretty much ended the debate and they went back to finish their dinner.
@103. Doug:
I still wanna know how we beat the Chicago machine backed up by the Multi-Billion Dollar ACORN Brigades.
That’s a multi-billion dollar question.
1. Scale the operational amount to 35 cents per dollar due to waste associated with a bureaucracy inherent in ACORN type of org. That means we have already reduced the operational capital by 65%.
2. Then the question is how we beat the remaining 35%?
Doug, ok here is a suggestion… why not use the same tactics the opposing side uses?
1. Infiltrate ACORN in substantial numbers
2. Force more waste, cutting the op cap in more than half
I mean, it would be a type of activity that would look entirely natural, no?
I would probably inject some sort of false flag psyops there too. It may not be a measure to increase waste in a short term, but to create an atmosphere of mistrust leading to internal infighting would be an icing on the cake.
2×4…
That’s the style.
False Flag yourself, too.
Also most helpful: spy cams linked to the Web.
Develop enough incrimination such as to sustain a RICO conviction.
ACORN is so corrupt you’d be in a target rich environment.
Thanks, twoby. I think you guys had more backbone than most fatted-up, dumbed-down American Trolls today.
—
For A.I.G. Executives, Tour Bus Is Here
For the handful of executives whose names — and addresses — have slipped out, life is no longer the same: private security guards watch over their homes, reporters seek interviews in the driveways and, on Saturday, a bus and a caravan of press vehicles showed up at their doorsteps.
One organizer called it “Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous” — a bus tour of the Connecticut homes of two executives with the American Insurance Group, otherwise known as A.I.G. It was organized by the Connecticut Working Families Party, a coalition of labor and community groups, and it drew about 40 activists.
—
“It was never the intent to have any sort of mob action,” said Jon Green, the director of the Connecticut Working Families Party. “It’s a tour. It’s a chance to see what these residences are like, and to point out that there’s families who are experiencing this recession in a different way.”
This is Geithner’s (leaked) plan for the banks.
American Thinker
As John Cole put it rather brutally and succinctly:
If this were a medical emergency, it appears it would look something like this:
The Illness – reckless and irresponsible betting led to huge losses
The Diagnosis – Insufficient gambling.
The Cure – a Trillion dollar stack of chips provided by the house.
The Prognosis- We are so screwed.
If these guys are right, this will be the undoing of the Obama administration. Better enjoy this four years, libs.
@ 91. buddy larsen
An eye opener. 6 billion daily, and pretty soon we’re talking real money.
twoby, that’s a point and a half of the total dollar value of the trades –1.5% –the usual ”back vig” –protection insurance premium, set low because zero cost-of-business, being that you’re protecting the mark from your ownself.
doug, re your query, Texas just managed to pass a photo I.D. law –you got to have a pic of yore mug on the card if you want to pull the lever. Other states ought to get busy on that right now, suggest arguing “if it’s good enough for the state providing virtually all the new jobs in the country, it’s good enough for us!”
The other thing we need to do is rant rant rant on the fact that the fix is in in the cities and unless every single rural who can vote, does so, then we’re done for as the greatest radical experiment in liberty since ancient Athens.
and another thing –we anti-reds need to bloc vote, just like the people who gave us Odrama do. This might be ticklish PC-wise, easily thrown into a deliberate category error as anti-red = anti-black, so i suggest we meet it head on and make our ubiquitous bumper sticker and campaign slogan, “We are NOT calling for a race vote!”
as someone said above (the fiendish twoby, probably) cloward-piven works no matter who uses it. let’s take advatage of having all the sparsely populated rural precincts and advertise our intent to cheat like they do. make ‘em spread out, run poll-watchers out into the backcountry, stretch ‘em thin.
tell ‘em we’re gonna match their 110% turnouts.
testing
Mr Larsen, that bloomberg vid gutted my last bit of faith in the market and my 401K…thanks. The suggestion to get inside ACORN is a couple of months behind my own. Sorry dont have the link but it was here when we were discussing the stimulus porkfest…just saying I’m with you…it needs to be done.
Doug @108
An earlier comment linked to an article identifying the Connecticut Working Families Party as a part of ACORN. Surprised?
2×4
1. Infiltrate ACORN in substantial numbers
One question, where do our side find these people from Mom’s basement?
I thought most of us have regular day jobs.
Buzz…sorry man. but remember, most of the industry is still honest most of the time –
“Infiltrate ACORN in substantial numbers”
Don’t see how you do that. To make it anywhere in that organization you got earn your bonafides walking precincts talking socialism I’d ‘spect.
always right,
most of us have regular day jobs
Fewer every day.
AM/119; yep, you might as well get “FBI-NARC” tattoo’d acrost your forehead.
Republican werewolf skulking around the barrios…
Hey brother can you spare a dime?
If you’re really hurtin’ a nickel would be fine…
Chump Hare Rama, ain’t no good to try.
Recession
Depression
Man, I clicked on the “submit” button and it didn’t even give me that “your comment is awaiting moderation” prompt. So here goes again. from the beginning:
Hey @Doug, you were saying back in ’28, about that Chicago Hospital what was “cuttin back on the beds”?
Would that happen to be the same Hospital Shelly-0 sat sat on the board for? The same one that was going to release a statement today saying they “found the cure for rascism” because they got a new macheme what can “delivers 3.5 trillion times the Ke-mo and radiation,” (and some other stuff? (I didn’t read the whole thing))
And BTW, those documents that start “mysteriously start turning up” was to, let’s see here-oh!, was to ‘control the wallfar of discontent surrounding the White House in recent years’, so’s the dems could start “gittin ready for 2010, which also started in earnest back in late 2004″. (Nobody believes it if its from one of our rural papers no more, they say “i gatta see it on the net” to gittum to shuddup
Oh, and that quotation about how “Women think Obama is a ‘tall, hansom stud” or words to that effect, was a missprint or a typo or something, it goes “Women think Obama is tall, hansom, and stupid, just lack they lackum”, I can’t remember the source.
That’s the sub-mitt button gaffe, and don’t you fer-gitt-it.
Hey, what did youknow, and
just when did you forget it?
Yeah gaffe, and why don’t you start forking up some of your whereabouts when all this was going down?
yeah gaffe, and stop pointing the finger at everyone else for a change.
re the meltdown, please to fix nicely in front of mind that several week rally in markets was neatly decapitated by the fiat trillion announcement last turdsday.
(“whew,” thought Little Timmy, “…THAT was CLOSE. Georgie ‘n Barry woulda kicked my *ss SO hard!”)
“An earlier comment linked to an article identifying the Connecticut Working Families Party as a part of ACORN. Surprised?”
Totally!
From this
“It was never the intent to have any sort of mob action,” said Jon Green, the director of the Connecticut Working Families Party.
“It’s a tour.
It’s a chance to see what these residences are like, and to point out that there’s families who are experiencing this recession in a different way.”
I thought it was just some welfare agency Mental Health service.
Now that you brought that to my attention, I’m
experiencing this “Connecticut Working Families Party” in a different way.
(GerryP: 116)
Do not pay attention to posts by “The Mongo Empire” and The Great Mongo Empire: they are fraudulent posts by my wicked, evil imposter twin brothers; I am trying to expand the empire as the great book says to, but I can’t because my scheme-ing brothers have joined forces to embroil me in civil war, just to fuel their mad dreams of bi-partisan control of ull empire.
Now if any of you start with that “go take yout pity-party somewhare’s else”- well, the beheadings will begin immediately, for this grave insult, to the profit(s), may he R.I.P. Or just as soon as I can catch up on some of these cabinet posts, which have been outsourced TO ME, ruler of all Mongo.
Americans must stop Barack Obama and the Pelosicrats from their program of economic suicide.
The alternative is too difficult to contemplate.
Lucky Mongo, who in their right mind wouldn’t want to work for “little timmah” at the treasury department?
World economy kills four-door Lamborghini
Damn, now I can’teven get that Lambo!
…back to the top for a mo, noted today that in the trial of Karadzic comes his swear that Special negotiator Holbrooke had given him war-crimes trail immunity if he would lay down arms. Which he did. Holbrooke has been denying the immunity. But today came out that some of the negotiating committee staff is verifying Karadzic.
This is precisely what Holbrooke did to the East Timorese. According to the east Timorese, Holbrooke made a secret deal with the federal army where he would get credit for the truce if only he would cover for the army finishing the current combat mission. This press blacked-out “clean up’ was especially bloody, thousands more east Timorese christians fell to the muz federals, totals reaching above one hundred thousand killed.
odrama’s new director of national intelligence Dennis C. Blair is said to have been complicit in this off-books secret deal, in his capacity as big chief of regional naval ops at the time.
It’s all in search, take a look.
Now Blair is director of national intelligence and Holbrooke is special envoy to freaking Pakistan and Afghanistan. aS Glenn Reynolds has taken to sighing, “the country is in the best of hands”.
“trail immunity” means a sherpa carries you on cross-country marches.
Mongo, you were a gas in Blazing Saddles. Mongo…santa maria!
always right:
One question, where do our side find these people from Mom’s basement?
I thought most of us have regular day jobs.
programmer kindly suggests:
The same way the Democrats got them. Buy ‘em.
As in the best stuff in NYC is Nuyorican! Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente: everybody Mambo!
I fear if this keeps up, we’ll have Christian pilots in jumbojets targeting the Capital.
Zombie Jamboree! took place in New York cemetaree!
It is indeed a small world.
I followed a link tonight to a report published by the “Center for American Progress” (according to TIME, the most influential organization in Washington at this time) called “New Progressive America”.
There’s not a word about funding on the site but Wiki claims it is being or was funded by, guess who, George Soros and the Sandlers, amongst others, for a grand total of 25 million a year.
Another report on the site has some interesting statistics. It claims that the US is pretty evenly divided now, 48% conservative and 47% progressive (not liberal). They arrived at that conclusion by asking people who identified as moderates and liberals to choose between conservative ideas and progressive ideas.
For conservatives to win again they are going to have to appeal to more moderates. Liberals are probably a lost cause.
Huffington Post, Center for American Progress, MoveOn and probably many other progressive organizations have all been funded by George Soros. And of course, George Soros was funding Barack Obama before he even ran for the Senate.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/03/progressive_america.html
So lemme git this straight. The guy who got appointed as the *new* Secertary of the *newly* created Department of Standards, Practices, and Enforcement (whatever that is) Johnson, is the same guy who was one of them highparrd attorney’s for APORN, before he got bumped over from his previous cabbie appointment working under Holder as Under-secertary of Laws or whatever, and his appointment is being held up because one of his pages, none other than Johnnie Takfri Lynn, was one of the pages got bent over by those tortured folks at gitmo.
And hees lawyers have said in a statement that they won’t suspend the lawsuit that Johnnnie has filed agin the gummit, until its resolved, so hees out in limbo bacause he cain’t get that imunity from prosecution protection that is one of those un-written perks extended to member of the nudge-nudge *wink*wink* Executive/congress miasma
I think i got it
The 90% tax only applies to entities that have received more than 5 Billion from the Feds.
So next door neighbors with the same income, working for different companies, one receiving over 5 billion and the other less, will have RADICALLY different after tax income.
But such is life, in the Post Bill of Attainder Era
When will they come for the Alpacas?
—
Tax Advantages of Alpaca Ownership
Since Section 179 started in 2003 they have extended the expiration several times and made several changes, including raising the limit from $100,000 to $250,000, and increasing the bonus depreciation from 50% to 100%! This means that on top of deducting your entire first alpaca purchase, you can also deduct the entire cost of building your barn and fencing, or setting up your home office with a new computer and furniture, all in the very first year! So, depending on your tax bracket, the government will pay up to 45% of the cost of starting-up your Alpaca Ranch!
Ranch equipment qualifies as well, so you can also deduct the full price of your new truck or tractor!
Gaffe:
Suggestin if been read is sumpn yuz crave n all dat den mebbe lil morry straightfor Englee hep yuz. Ah no style cop but entar posts fillerup on foh dialecky and cutesee typees tee mech work for bizzyb-bizzy fokes tee bee ponderin. Soz ah dunn step reedin cuz tee hard tee fine ware tharun ekkayzhnul nermal werd is. Allin slangertalk, ummmm, ohverlode on noisy-noisy, not nuff signal. Makesens?
As a nation, as a people, we are attempting to close the alpaca gap that has unfortunately opened between USA and Lower Hen Doo Tushistan.
If Congress rams through this ex post facto bill of attainder on taxes I expect that every Director of a financial firm and 50% of other corporate directors will retire on the spot and move to the country. NYC and SF are instantly out of business, the economy contracts by 20% and those mobs you will see of 20 to 40 year old people huddled in the rain fearing the other urban mob that is no longer interested in solidarity will be wondering when their mommies will come to feed them.
LotM, to return to the nightmare world, what if to the new admin your dystopia is a feature, not a bug?
buddy larsen,
what if to the new admin your dystopia is a feature, not a bug?
That could be true. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four Goldstein’s book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism lays out the intent as a matter of policy to have constantly declining living standards. Obama and company may be frozen adolescents who read that when they were 17 and, thought it sounded cool and never grew up.
Another unclosed tag.
I should think that voting for a Bill of Attainder on it’s face is grounds for impeachment.
Anyone doing so is violating their oath of office to uphold the Constitution.
That the press is not baying for blood on this gross Constitutional infraction means that we are far gone.
Booger. I was about to comment on the Iran thread after this one – comments closed. Hate that.
Wonder why comments close. Did someone start posting hate speech?
Your thoughts are hateful.
Don’t ask.
—
– Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ Arrived –
Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ Arrived?
By FRANK RICH
A CHARMING visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”
Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.
Otherwise it never would have used Lawrence Summers, the chief economic adviser, as a messenger just as the A.I.G. rage was reaching a full boil last weekend. Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy.
Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the bailouts began last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?” What followed was a monologue of evasion that, translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it.
“Hate that”
Triton Confirms.
Every time I hear Bill of Attainder I see a Superman-like comic book with this giant 1950s crew-cut American suburbanite standing large in his driveway beaming out at the reader. Why…it’s…BILL, of Attainder, Ohio.
Anyhoo, LotM, re your ‘frozen adolescents’ spec, that’s what i just wrote on the Iran/ Israel thread, that defense minister Ashkenazi may’ve been shunned in DC recently because the new admin’s youngsters have such fond campus fashion memories of those flowing drapery cafe-tablecloth Arafat turbans.
triton, yes, wretchard’s warm professorial tour bus gliding along the information superhighway suddenly jars off on a logging trail whenever those threads slam shut sans word to the wise.
buddy larsen,
Fifty years ago either Mitchner or Uris, I forget which, speculated that the English were more attracted to the romantic Arab sheiks in their flowing robes than the Jewish accountants in their cheap suits and thick glasses.
“triton, yes, wretchard’s warm professorial tour bus gliding along the information superhighway suddenly jars off on a logging trail whenever those threads slam shut sans word to the wise.”
Yeppers, and it’s my head that hit the overhead bin as my hiney left the seat…
lotM, that was around the time all the male leads in Hollywood had to have a big mufti movie or two. Actually that run was long –Rudolf Valentino to Peter O’Toole. O’Toole probably finished off the genre with that little arabesque ballet solo in the desert, looking at himself in the reflection from his daggar. sorta jumped the shark — in the Sahara no less — leaving a vague Ishtar shimmering on the horizon like a movie.
That scene was cut from the original release, buddy.
Whet it was restored it was to the directors cut, and it came back.
Though it looks queer… it mates with a subsequent scene wherein O’Toole gazes at a seriously blooded blade after a binge of Turkish blood.
As for Ishtar, you almost made me ruin a perfectly fine MacBook Pro. I may have to floss my brain to get every scrap of that memory expunged.
yuk yuk –then they called the next giant bomb –Kevin Costner’s “Waterworld” — “Fishtar” –
What’s so unusual about a Sand Shark?
nothing –if you’re in a great idea –thanks –for the third in a troika of excruciatingly bad over-reaches, that is to say, to Ishtar and Waterworld add “Dune” (which featured giant sand worms).
*ding* (light bulb) Soros pipes up:
“I think the Obama administration is moving towards a good bank/bad bank solution, but it is not the right kind of good bank/bad bank solution. What they propose currently is creating this aggregator bank which will take the toxic assets out of the banking system, out of the banks, so it really injects government money into the bad banks, and I am saying that they ought to be injecting money into the good banks. I think it is difficult to generate the political will (for that) … and this is my main worry right now, that they may get it wrong.”
Any method that deals successfully with “toxic assets”, I say, deals successfully with “toxic ass-etts” would be a good thing, no? yes? Because that would free up lending again so the economy could procede apace. And if it restores liquidity to banks and is a credible “solution” then we (all) would (might) support it, no matter who get’s the credit for it.
Soros then goes on to pretend to be innocently querying about the Obama admin…, “[they] propose[al] currently is creating this “aggregator bank” which will take the toxic assets out of the banking system…
and pretends to criticize it, saying it won’t work, and then shuffles good bank/bad bank around again like its three card monty, and then, oh so incidentally drops this hint– “so it really injects government money [after] the bad banks, and I am saying that they ought to be injecting money into the good banks. I think it is difficult to generate the political will (for that) … and this is my main worry right now, that they may get it wrong.”
Political will? Do tell George. They may get it wrong? (Gee, if only they’d have listened to you, for pete’s sake? Right George? (nudge-nudge))
“…May get it wrong”. (?) –Will get it wrong, you mean
So just what is it we’ve been doing so far then, with all our *new* tax revenue not even off the printing presses yet? O Wise Geforge Soros? Sheesh, “As I’ve always said…” Any method that “which will take the toxic assets out of the banking system, out of the banks, [to start re-sowing the seeds for the next harvest, see above] so it really injects government money into the bad banks, [when, according to G.S] they ought to be injecting money into the good banks…” …and so on, back and goodbank/badbank forth…
What are you, the good witch from ‘Wizard of Oz’?
Oh Barbara Streisand!
He then has the temerity to say that (on the record , I might add) that when he “used his faster OODA loop to teach policy makers a lesson by taking them [and the British Pound] to the cleaners.” and that it was “an example of his constant search for the opportunities created by imperfect [?, whoever thought they were "perfect"? anyway?] “imperfect” markets overshooting and under-shooting in that way”.
Or maybe it was, it was… the “Soap Poisoning”?
What, is this based on, the brilliant model of Robert Mugabe’s economic model in Zimbabwe perhaps? (Hmmm, Plot thickens…)
/sarcasm off- So it was he (George Soros) what “cleaned up”, just cause of the “imperfect” response of others due to his plan to take them– [not to mention said policy makers, in particular- (“Soros says his 1992 attack on the British pound, which forced)- then Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont] –to the cleaners.
So, dear Radio Listeners: Soros, in both instances, not only wanted, but planned on British govt. and “Obama” policies to fail, just so’s he could–
["Thus, if we don’t “fix” the problems Soros has been warning about, the same catastrophe that befell Asia, and is now upon the West, will happen again and again. That will] …create a need to re-architecture [of] the system”
To replace that old “aggegator bank” ploy (ruse) with, some *new* “re-architecture”.
Obama uses the the word “FIX” , “this problem” alot, so don’t buy into the ruse that he don’t know about it (or if he didn’t, he was certainly briefed, (or was de-briefed), on it quite a ways back, (on Uncle Georgees wee-knee, I suspect) and hatched back when Obimbi was a mere blip on the political radar)
This sure goes along way to explaining why briefly Rush, and then now AIG employees, were singled out for these ‘punishment as policy’ issued statements by the teleprompter itself, not to mention buddys comment about Dem Party companymen and women cashing out of (or “in” on) of their real estate and stock holdings as far back as 2006-7 in anticipation of the coming planned volley in, as blert described it IHO, economic world warfare, and then launched in real (time) earnest Sept. 18, last year.
sorry for only just now grasping the import of wretchard’s post so late in the tread, but, yuh see, in the confusion and fog of war I pan-ickt and dusted of the ol’ “blithering optimist” Hail Mary Pass strategy lodged into comment #57
Only to get cussed out by some jerk for using the vernacular of my fore-fathers and mothers, (Uncles cousins granfolks too.)
This reminds me of the old posts and discussion, at Belmont clubs past, of weapons systems and strategy and counter moves and bluffs, so scuze us if this don’t ring a little Moriarity and stuff. [*But no! you're wrong: that just what he want's you to believe*, Ahhhhhhhhhh Shuddup!!] So:
Due diligence; thanks #59 Doug, #61 buddy, #63 2buh4, it all may be bluster, cuz alls I know is what my olfactries keep telling me about what’s been breaking my (our) way, for a while now. And it stinks on ice.
Stay tuned, (…for the mysterious Shadow(s) knows…)
“Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Heart of Man?”
de Shadow do!
Great post GP –your cunning linguistics may not suet all, but ass a Yoknapatawpha County homage they air quite innertaining imho –tho it do take a meta-refresh to make the brane read it wright.
re Soros, yep yep yep you’ve certainly glommed the tell of the clever disengenuousness of his press ploys –but the giddy loquaciousness in the FT article alone shows him at playing the megalo who delivers, who now in his sunset delivers his best, his bring-down-the-house (cherabim cavorting as long scaly fingers reach sistinely down toward the limp needy hand of Comrade Adam) third act, his closing of the circle opened with the grand British first, the Asian operatic second, and now finally after a 13 year set-up the grand Trinity-Creating third, the finale, the Finis America.
Who’d a thought Ian Fleming a prophet of a coming (tech-revolution, PoMo ethics, western law, USA arms, enabled) Super Villain ?
Note Russia & China today coordinating calls for a new IMF-based global currency. The Dollar takedown has been GS’s Holy Grail, his Covenant with whatever force it is that wants mankind split unto Eloi & Morloc.
Great post GP
BTW, being “cussed out” was by none other than lurker jurk #145 “Bogie wheel”, (so none of the other good kidders gathered here need take offense)