Spengler from the Asia Times thinks there’s a rough road ahead. While there have been tough times before, he argues the coming days will be different. “President Barack Obama may be remembered for permanent depression, the way that Leon Trotsky’s name is linked with permanent revolution. Fiscal stimulus combined with near-zero interest rates have proven to be a toxic cocktail for the United States, the macroeconomic equivalent of barbiturates and alcohol. … Obama inherited a crisis, to be sure, but he has made it much worse.” How? In part by taking the worst mistakes of the past and doubling down on them. One example, according to Forbes, involves the housing market.
As we try to shake off the financial crisis, here’s a bright idea. Take a law that has led to the writing of an enormous amount of bad mortgages and expand it. Then take enforcement away from bank examiners and give it to housing activists. Sound like a poisonous cocktail? Well, it is what the Obama administration and Democrats are currently stirring up on Capitol Hill.
The White House and Congress want to expand a 30-year-old law–the Community Reinvestment Act–that helped to fuel the mortgage meltdown. What the CRA does, in effect, is compel banks to seek the permission of community activists to get regulatory approval for bank expansions and mergers. Often this means striking a deal with activist groups such as ACORN or unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and agreeing to allocate credit to poor and minority areas that are underserved.
What, yet another catastrophe? It’s no longer news. It’s like so many other stories people are already numbed to it. The public wants to feel something other than outrage. Several strategies are always opened to the doomed, to those already under a sentence of death. One is to try and escape. Those who can are looking out for themselves. The Independent is reporting the end of the dollar as the world currency.
In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.
Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.
Well, maybe not yet, but at this rate it’s only a matter of time. The important point is not to talk about problems openly, because it’s a bummer. General McChrystal has been told to shut up over Afghanistan. And in an action as symbolic of the White House as anything else, white coats were handed out to doctors who were photographed with the President as evidence of their support for his health care reform. Those who can’t escape the new dawn can join in the fun of destruction. Don’t worry: the Wall Street Journal says it OK to break things. It’s government policy to destroy perfectly good things. The paper describes the cash-for-clunkers debacle.
Remember “cash for clunkers,” the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, “This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program.”
If that’s true, heaven help the other programs. Last week U.S. automakers reported that new car sales for September, the first month since the clunker program expired, sank by 25% from a year earlier. Sales at GM and Chrysler fell by 45% and 42%, respectively. Ford was down about 5%. Some 700,000 cars were sold in the summer under the program as buyers received up to $4,500 to buy a new car they would probably have purchased anyway, so all the program seems to have done is steal those sales from the future. Exactly as critics predicted. …
The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them. In the category of all-time dumb ideas, cash for clunkers rivals the New Deal brainstorm to slaughter pigs to raise pork prices. The people who really belong in the junk yard are the wizards in Washington who peddled this economic malarkey.
Or you can engage in that old perrenial: wondering how things turned out this way. Marc Ambinder in the Atlantic starts the first of a three part series. He writes: “Exclusive: How Democrats Won The Data War In 2008 … Tomorrow: Inside the Service Employees International Union’s sophisticated targeting.”
Get-out-the-vote operations mounted by the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party and progressive organizations mobilized more than one million dedicated volunteers on Election Day. But it was buttressed by a year-long, psychographic voter targeting and contact operation, the likes of which Democrats had never before participated in. In 2008, the principal repository of Democratic data was Catalist, a for-profit company that acted as the conductor for a data-driven symphony of more than 90 liberal groups, like the Service Employees Union — and the DNC — and the Obama campaign.
Finally, people can position themselves for the time when things touch bottom. Spengler says that despite the white coat photo-ops and outward confidence, there’s a sense of foreboding in the councils of power. “Panic is starting to take hold at the Obama White House over the relentless deterioration of the job market. US jobs in September declined by about 263,000 jobs, worse than the 175,000 drop expected by Wall Street economists. To the 15.1 million on the official unemployment count, add 9.2 million “involuntary part-time workers” and 2.2 million who were dropped from the tally because they had not sought work in the past month, and the unemployment rate would rise to 17.1 million.”
For all of its uncertainties, today is an exciting time to live. Certainly a time of upheaval is the moment to make one’s mark. The first chapter of Charles Dicken’s famous novel A Tale of Two Cities is ironically entitled “Recalled to Life”. The next years will be anything but boring. We can tell our grandchildren about it, if we ever make it that far.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
What more can you ask for but to live out these days? And hey, here’s Ronald Coleman saying the words.
Locally before cash for clunkers new auto sales were running 5,000 to 5,500 a month. The clunker of a law kicked in and sales spiked at around 15,000. And now they are running 2,500 a month. It is not very efficient – manufacturing wise – to ramp up production way beyond demand and then have sales crash until the forward sales have been replaced by regular demand.
And don’t even get me started in on destroying cars the poor could use.
And did I mention that Government Motors and Crisis Motors were hurt the most by this debacle?
We are in the very best of hands.
And so it begins. When one trillion-dollar attack doesn’t force the crisis, what do you do? You set about hammering on the economic levers over which you have some control until the giant wobbles – and Then you hit him with a 5 trillion dollar attack. After that, who will stop the tanks rolling through Asia? I think I may start stocking up on canned goods and get a Smith & Wesson manufacturing franchise going (if there’s any left).
There’s line in “Gone with the Wind” where Rhett Butler is explaining to Scarlett how he got so rich. He tells here that one can build wealth while building a nation like Scarlett’s father did in building Tara, the family plantation.
But one can get richer, quicker, while a nation is collapsing, as was the Confederacy during the Civil War.
so who’s getting rich right now?
My wife and I are visiting Houston from our home in Jalisco, Mexico. We are overwhelmed by the price of everything and the difficulty in avoiding “spending” $200 plus per day without much to show for it. The wealth here is remarkable…the Mercedes, Lexus and Cadillac’s, the high end stores and restaurants…what recession? Yet there are the beggars at each on-ramp to the freeways and the scores of Mexican men hanging out, waiting for a contractor to pick them up for day labor. This doesn’t look like the great depression, but we sense an uneasiness that’s hard to describe…its almost has if people here are going through the motions that “we are living the good life”, but looking over their shoulder as they sense the shadow of foreboding that is being cast by the daily onslaught of fear and loathing but the MSM. Maybe this is what it was like in 1939 during the period called the “phony war”…a calm before the storm? Something eerie about it.
Just got a little note from our County assessment office indicating that as far as they are concerned our place is worth $40,000 less than it was last year. I guess it could be worse, they could have assessed it in 人民币.
It seems that popularist socialization of American politics and economy came about 10 years too early.
I would imagine that 10 years from now, at the outer edge 15 years, energy resource problem will be solved just as food resource problem is mostly solved now.
At that point in time, there would have been more than enough resources to provide for any social programs that could be imagined.
It’s just too bad that at the very cusp of energy and genetic revolution, we have to endure this setback.
Don’t worry too much. Move to Calif and enjoy the sun until near-free energy lifts us all in 10 years time.
In answer to #3 Whitehall’s question “so who’s getting rich right now?”
Answer: Obama’s strongest supporter, the man who arguably pulled the most strings to get him elected: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25211027-5018057,00.html
FHA is doing the Fannie/Freddie two step; millions are getting mortgages at
3 1/2% down. All you need is a 500 FICO score. And for good measure, ask to put the closing costs into the asking price,btw. I know a loan broker who just went to work for Wells Fargo, who says Wells has a internal memo that almost all mortgages will be FHA next year. Hey, that’s great!
But on the flip side, you want a conventional loan and your self employed? Get outta here, ya bum! Oh and Karl at Market Ticker says the Fed is buying more in mortgage backed securities right now than the Banks are loaning in mortgages.
No loans for small business and the self employed equals a declining employment base, nor matter how the state run media spins it. Despite the guvmint telling us only 263,000 people lost their jobs last month, total employment fell a staggering 995,000! And a million and a half stopped looking for work. Isn’t this recovery thing great!
Oh and one last thing: Putin, China, Iran, France and the Arabs are conspiring to avoid selling oil in dollars. Another great “victory” for Buraq. Hang on to your hat boys and girls. http://www.redstate.com/dan_perrin/2009/10/05/the-world-moves-against-the-dollar/
joe buzz; was that the Chinese lettering for yuan?
Actually, the Arab decision to use other currencies than the dollar to denominate oil sales in doesn’t bother or surprise me at all. Gasoline will probably end up cheaper in Europe – which for this purpose includes the UK.
Yet another rotten fruit of the greed and irresponsibility of American bankers – which allowed a lending-driven property price bubble, the ongoing proceeds of which were used by the borrowers to buy Chinese toys and Arab oil to run their ridiculously oversized and inefficient vehicles on.
When are those responsible going to be hanged as the traitors they are?
If America falls – well, you did it to yourselves.
The “recession” hasn’t hit Texas nearly as bad as say California but it is slowly slicing the GDP of the state down.
The “house hold survey” shows that unemployment is at 17 percent. Just got through reading that a lot of people are retiring and drawing their Social Security early just to get some money flowing in. This of course puts more demand on Social Security.
When you look at the multitude of financial disasters and pending fails, it makes me think that unless the Democrats do a 180 degree turn RIGHT NOW. They’ll be toast before the mid-terms.
For once, I agree 90% or more with the iconoclastic Spengler. But remember, Obama has no economic policy of his own, it’s entirely delegated to the mediocrity and tax cheat Geithner and the earnest but massively uncreative Bernanke.
Where are the academic economists? Are they all raving Marxists now with an admixture of a few libertarian crackpots?
You know what I’d like is an accounting, of just where did those trillions of dollars in losses, go? Some of it is lost “goodwill”, but a lot of it is in the pockets of those lucky few (million) who sold houses at the top – and of course in the pockets of the investment bankers who sold bad CDOs and took their tiny percents – that add up to many billions. Now, those who sold at the top, for the most part bought new at the top, and then lost as the market fell … which to me, comes out as a net break-even.
If that’s true, there’s no huge failure at the consumer level. The loss of good will means consumers are scared. And the real damage remains only to the capital structure of the major banks, who TOTALLY screwed up the mathematics of the derivatives market and thus screwed their stockholders, employees, customers, and their government backers. For that matter, the entire banking system was effectively disintermediated and nationalized in 1978, and we’re only just now noticing. Hey Spengler, look into that, would you?
I’m just noodling this out, stream of consciousness, but that would mean Obama is not really doing or making anything, just the man in the can when the bubble bursts, to mix some metaphors. If he is in total denial that the bubble *has* burst, why not, we all have been for thirty years, and Goldman and company are still on the same old road, too.
It really sucks, don’t it? I wonder if this will clear anytime in the next fifty years, and what those fifty years will be like. Obama is like the perfect icon for this feckless, disintegrative incompetence, even if he didn’t invent it. He didn’t invent anything, that’s the real issue – there is nothing new under the sun, and there’s no such thing as an original sin.
Nervous in the White House over jobs? Could be when even Herbert Of The Times is criticizing Hussein on that topic. Buyers’ remorse?
don’t get too negative on the economy, at least for the next year or so. ECRI (http://www.businesscycle.com/)is a respected independent group with a decent record of forecasting economic cycles. They are currently predicting a fairly strong recovery in the U.S. This, however, says nothing of the long term implications of the dollar losing reserve status and the combined effects of the move toward socialism and raising taxes on the U.S. economy. Oh, and jobs are a trailing indicator, they won’t pick up for a while.
Mr. Unsk #9,
I’m actively trying to buy a modest family home in Silicon Valley using an FHA loan at 3.5% down. Don’t know about the FICA score requirement but apparently even I meet it. So far I’ve put in 14 bids and lost 10 of them with 4 still active. These have not been low ball bids either. One was for $75k over the asking price! So, yes, I’m looking for my slice of the government cheese.
For short sales and foreclosures (80% of the listings) the banks won’t even consider a FHA loan purchaser. Most of the houses are going for all cash.
So what’s happening? Foreign money is flooding in, both to get out of the dollar and into a hard asset before inflation hits and to exploit the weak dollar and pick up assets on the cheap while the dollar is so low. I can’t tell which is the dominate factor.
Every open house I go to is crowded with Asians.
Kind of makes you wonder which part of “God damn America” so many people missed.
Remember Baraq proclaiming himself a citizen of the world and giving the finger to Hillary and then McCain? That was meant for all of us.
Beck has some great clips lately of BHO’s Marxist buddies revealing the “stealthy” redistribution that’s already been accomplished and discussing how multiple crises will be required to destroy the old world order so it can be replaced.
And Fletcher, get back to us when you’ve managed to get out of the noose that the multicultural nut jobs on that side of the pond have fashioned for you.
And the irony is the BHO could turn it all around in a heartbeat if he would take rhe time to stop for a moment and contemplate where he is versus where we wanted to be, and then set a corrected course.
But he won’t. Not because he isn’t smart enough to realize things a very badly awry, but because as a Narcissist he is incapable of making sensible mid-course corrections. So his same poisonous inner circle will continue to call the shots, dumping the country further down the rathole, and someone, somewhere will miscalculate badly and go a step beyond the pale.
Many deaths and WWIII later BHO will claim a hollow victory of sorts even though with statesmanship and leadership it would have been preventable.
49er. I really think the evidence is mounting that he/they are doing this on purpose. Not that you’re wrong about the narcissism.
The left is essentially perverted, meaning that these people take sadistic pleasure in destruction. The narcissism removes them from conscious awareness that what they’re doing is evil as well as from understanding the ultimately self-destructive nature of the course that they have charted.
Hair of the dog. http://wp.me/iCpQ
Narcissism trumps empathy to those who are suffering from the revolution. What could be more important than the revolution that the narcissist is bringing about? It is for their own good, after all.
As to the Soros interview linked by Mr. Talnik #8, that was in March of this year, it seems like more a puff piece with few hard questions. I’d like to see an update with some real probing. He doesn’t claim here to be setting up a crisis from which to profit although there is evidence of that strategy in the interview.
I wonder, did the White House hand out white coats to doctors, or to SEIU rent-a-mobsters? The Baucus bill now looks like it’s going to spend something like $15-20k per year for every person it adds to the insurance rolls, but only by cutting payments 40+%. Talk about your New Math, the crooks in DC are making 2+2 = negative infinity.
Fletcher Christian,
I will dance on your grave, you congenital self pitying loser. PJ O’Rourke, who I quoted on the last thread @ #175, was right. America will get it’s game back and remember both our friends and the ankle biters. This problem is not an indictment of capitalism or the American system. It is merely the result of a networked vote fraud and linked financial abuse by a powerful conspiracy and amoral speculators.
The Independent article on the demise of the dollar is written by …. Robert Fisk.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it is not accurate, but it sure casts doubt on it.
I was talking to the financial advisor at the credit union last week. He says the main effect of the Cash for Clunkers program was to cause new car prices to increase by 28%.
This makes perfect sense. If you go to buy a new car do you flash a big roll of bills and brag how much you won at poker last night? Do you proudly tell the salesman how much you just received from the Powerball lottery? So you tearfully say you are buying the car in memory of your dear Aunt Cora, who left you $100K in you will? No, but that is what Uncle Sam did for you.
By one estimate, the removal of the old gas guzzlers from the road will reduce gasoline consumption by the equivalent of one day of use. I think that is grossly overstated. When you get a new car, especially one that uses less gas, you drive it more.
Some even talk of a recovery in the housing industry. But the reality is there are SEVEN MILLION new foreclosures about to hit the market.
A “Permanent Depression” is just what I have been worrying about.
The USA can survive the failure of the Obama Administration. But we cannot survive it’s false success.
What choice does a president have? To let the free market (and I mean truly free, where the market sets interest rates) set the direction for the future? That future is a road of much suffering – physical, mental and emotional. Particularly for the poor and unprepared. And that road is also the road to recovery, where the seeds to economic strength are sowed. Creative destruction.
The road Obama has chosen is to double down, hoping that stimulus will bring our debt ridden national life back again.
I, for one, would opt for the painful, perhaps extremely painful, route to true recovery. But I ain’t holding my breath that we’ll see it.
An exciting time to live? Hahahaha This recalls the ancient curse: may you live in interesting times.
However Moore’s Law still operates. new science is discovered daily, new inexpensive nuclear plants can be mass produced. In all ways technology is advancing & thus the capacity for wealth creation is growing fast. In much of the world eg China & India government parastism is delining or at worst unchanging & growth is fast. The recession is entirely because of governmentspending something close to 50% of the economy & regulating something like 50% of it out of existence. Fortuntely goverenment regulates government so that those 2 50%s intersect leaving 1/4 of what we could have as a productive economy).
I am in Detroit for a few days and this place feels scary. I was in a laundromat yesterday and in a half hour and saw the nastiest foul smelling crazy homeless person I ever saw and talked to a lady who rented a house in Detroit from a scammer who took her money and then sent his son to shoot her when she moved in. I think Gerald Celente’s prophecy of societal collapse may be coming in parts of USA.
Agree with LOFTM, Screw you Fletch, Good luck when the Muslims slit your throat,fool.
The economic crisis is all, more or less, planned. The Anointed One is just cutting Amerika down to size. We must always remember who O is and to do that we need to study the world from which O inhabited most of his life. O is a hard leftist, some of his influential friends are Bill “kill your parents” Ayers, Bernadette “and they stuck a fork in the pig” Dorn, and Rev. Wright to name a few. Why on earth would a hard leftist do ANYTHING that would strengthen America? The number one requirement for entry into Leftism is that “I pledge to do my utmost, to leave no stone unturned, no path unexplored, in my quest to harm the United States of America”. When we accept that we have a POTUS who deep in his heart believes that America is fundamentally a deeply flawed and destructive nation, then all of O’s policies begin to make sense whether its on the economy, his “transformation” rhetoric, relations with allies, his endless apologies, or his “indecisiveness” on Afghanistan.
Fletcher: the last time America really lost it’s goodwill and humor cities were ash. Please keep poking the bear, I for one appreciate your continued efforts.
Neil Craig Mid east oil knows U.S. has reserves to be totally self-sufficient but not the will. The Eagle Ford shale has been reassessed to produce 4 trillion cubic ft. of recoverable resources, a drop in the bucket of the 475 tcf nationally. This is in the south Texas basin that has been drilled forever. Cut EPA, OCHA and the other meddling bureaucrats along with a sane tax policy and were off and running.
Making my way through Amity Schlaes’ “The Forgotten Man”, I am stupefied at the degree to which the Obama administration is imitating FDR, right down to the use of the arts to promote the agenda. There is an interesting turn, however. FDR was obsessed with expanding power to the Southeast… Obama seems obsessed with limiting our use of energy altogether. The bad news is that there will be no world war to bail him out… I hope.
However, he is more like Nero than FDR, I think, if the legend is to be believed. What shall Obama recite if not “The Fall of Troy”? It won’t be Kanye… at least we know that.
From WSJ comments on C4C:
“” * Stephen R. Pohlit wrote:
The key point is that this program destroyed productive assets and increased debt.
“”
I cannot think of a better precis.
tom
To sigintel, who is surprised at the prosperity in Houston – you should know that you are in the heart of the last fully functioning job creating unashamedly capitalist bastion left in the entire nation – you are in Texas.
You are seeing what this entire country could be with even the least bit of competent management.
Amazing, all this economic activity, and we don’t even have income taxes. (besides the federal burden, of course.) You’d think there’d be some kind of lesson there.
and the uneasiness is the knowledge that the damn yankees are going to do everything they can to drag us down into their hellhole with them. Again.
that and Tony Romo’s passing.
to Trangbang68, who wrote: “I am in Detroit for a few days and this place feels scary. I was in a laundromat yesterday and in a half hour and saw the nastiest foul smelling crazy homeless person I ever saw and talked to.”
FYI, That was a City Councilman.
Seems to me that these “steps” were taken knowing they wouldn’t help, but with the assumption that the economy would rebound on it’s own (as it typically does) and then these “steps” and the Obama admin would get the credit for it. And that would be beneficial in the attempt to increase government control. Unfortunately, the “steps” made the situation worse, and now they don’t know what to do. Can’t blame the “steps”, because that would require denouncing your ultimate goals for the nation. What to do, what to do!!
I have been concerned that the sheer size of the debt will preclude any choices by the Govt in reaction to any unforeseen circumstance. Interest rates are now nominal to negative. The interest being paid now is around $400B. If interest went to say 5% it will become $2T. Just for debt service. So far without getting to the other 85% of the Stimulus. More that anybody can extract from the $13-14T US economy. What happens to SS, Medicare, Defense and the rest of it?
I havent read Celente but have heard of his predictions. As this think goes along, they dont seem outrageous.
Have we been eaten by a Black Swan?
exhelodrvr@36:
“Seems to me that these “steps” were taken knowing they wouldn’t help, but with the assumption that the economy would rebound on it’s own (as it typically does) and then these “steps” and the Obama admin would get the credit for it.”
That’s precisely what they were doing. Hey, it worked fantastically for Clinton, right?
Fletcher@10
Have no fear, America won’t fall before Europe does. If we simply can’t afford it, then we’ll just have to pull our military from client states like the EU and make them defend themselves for a change.
Food for thought: some of the missiles that Iran has been testing can reach parts of the EU. They can’t reach us yet. Maybe you guys should be taking the lead on that one.
WWS Did you mention we have medical tort limitation, i thought you did.
I think I could fill up about 200 pages on the things that Obama and his gerbils have done over the last 9 months to trash this country. At first I thought they were just blinded by ideology. Then I thought it was inexperience and a lack of intelligence combined with a failed ideology. Now I’m convinced that ideology or intelligence has little to do with it. They are just miserable, evil, bastards. Their ideology is just icing on a turd.
Their manners and the way the treat who they perceive as their “lessors” tell me more about them than their public words.
“Those who love everybody in theory, love no one in particular.”
On the U.S as world currency. There is something people miss. The Yuan is not convertible. Other currencies have a long way to go before they are competitive, even the Euro. A suitcase of dollars is still welcome anywhere. Even if oil is paid for by a “basket” of varied currencies, the more currencies in the basket, the more trouble for members of the gang. Who decides who gets to print money? China’s numbers are highly suspect. Europe is in just as much debt as we are. They don’t have a central bank. Imagine if we needed agreement from all 59 states to conduct monetary policy.
When China tries to get out of T bills, they will discover many con men waiting to help them, (Soros). They are building all this capacity. Who will they sell to? The mixture of command economy, crony capitalism, corruption makes any of our problems in either of those areas look minor. Russia is dependent on oil. That price bubble will pop, when the world economy tanks.
Jackals, baboons and a stray coyote circle a wounded lion. They better make sure it is mortally wounded. They will pay a high price when they find it isn’t dead yet.
Like chemo to get rid of cancer, we may need to go through some pain to get rid of socialism and treason. It is important to remember when the people rise up, the question is: Who will the army support. Will they shoot their own people? In China they did. In Russia they didn’t. They say it can’t happen here. Will it? We are still free. Will we be in 20 years?
Government endeavors are always debacles, and the idiots who schemed them become further convinced that the only way to correct the accumulating tragedies they’ve generated is, of course, more government.
I might have some therapy for the publics out rage though, a side from howling at your representatives who can’t be bothered to listen more than half the time, there’s a game that doubles as a political satire where you can bring each traitorous element of the federal government to justice (http://www.usofearth.com/2011-obamas-coup-fails.php). I think it’s a good laugh and momentary escape for any conservative currently mired in the reality of the consequences of our governments actions.
Good information.
Good comments.
A lot of this economics stuff has a pace and timing to it that has been totally missed.
Enough time has gone by since the crash, that we can expect a recovery. They are apparently seeing the recovery in Asia and Europe already.
Question is how much damage has been done with Obama’s socialist flailing around.
That is still an open question.
Has the underlying weakness and corruption in our financial structure been fixed?
Today’s Belmont Club Forecast: Cloudy, with a chance of apocalypse.
“Has the underlying weakness and corruption in our financial structure been fixed?”
Oh it’s fixed all right.
They are doing the same thing that got us into the mess but tripling down on it. Or worse. To make it worse.
As Rush said today, they are “evil”.
It’s time to get completely out of the stock market, 401Ks, IRAs, and any other investments the government can arbitrarily increase taxes on or downright seize, pay off all debt possible, and get ready for a rocky ride.
Mr. Fernandez, you wrote under the title “The Moment” on Oct. 3: “So when an African-American President gets up on a stage in Copenhagen and dons sack-cloth and ashes; apologizes for his culture and all the rest, he is really telling two stories. To the domestic audience it is the familiar tale of guilt and redemption. But to the international audience it is in some ways a totally different narrative. It says, “we are only the man behind the curtain. The Mighty Oz is nothing but the flacks I have around me.”
Can you back this up with a direct quotation and a link — Obama apologizing for the US is some manner — or did you concoct this out of your own demented fantasies?
More bad news.
From Twitter:
PoliticalMath
Pray for General David Petraeus, receiving treatment for prostate cancer http://bit.ly/HpYJe
about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck
Between the seeting hatred of certain islamocracies and the cold calculation of foreign and domestic leaders who plot American discomfiture and even defeat, we are in a pickle. Reminds me of a poem, by Robert Frost, 1928:
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
General Petraeus can survive, Mitterrand did 15 years. We can hope that there will be new treatments soon, that could cure him
Fletcher Christian
In l969 I was in a graduate seminar in City Planning taught by Alex Garvin (you can look him up.) For several weeks the class focused on the questions of access to financing for residents of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. We did role-playing, with different students researching the positions of bankers, city officials, community activists, and regular citizens, renters and homeowners, with kids in school and jobs and businesses. (It would be funny except we took ourselves so damn seriously…)
What strikes me as most significant in our reactions 40 years ago is the near unanimity of the students on hearing of the banks’ practice of “red-lining” neighborhoods. That’s the practice literally of drawing a red line around a neighborhood on a map, to indicate graphically for the bank staff that its residents do not meet criteria for most loans. We were all deeply shocked! Shocked! “Racists!” “Bigots!” “Scoundrels!”
Bad, Bad, Bad Bankers! They must be REQUIRED, even FORCED to give money to those unfortunate people! There CAN’T be any valid reason for withholding loans to entire communities that way!
Keep in mind that not a single one of us had even so much as BEGUN paying back our student loans. The oldest students were maybe 22 to 24 years old, in a master’s degree program after having been in school continuously since childhood. We all were dependents of our parents or the university. For many of us, even our part-time were mostly arranged and managed by the university, excepting summer jobs, when we lived with our parents.
But we KNEW everything we needed to know to make that judgment on the evil bankers.
I had never even heard the phrase “bank examiner.”
Pure emotion without any rational grasp of the underlying truth that Banks are by law required to exercise caution with their depositors’ money by following long-established objective guidelines derived from centuries of experience in evaluating then reviewing the performance of hundreds of thousands of transactions.
Yeah, I know about the cheating and embezzling and greed … Those were the reasons there were specific rules imposed on banks for lending!
The Community Reinvestment Act was imposed on the country in utter, contemptuous defiance of the historical responsibility that has been expected of the finance industry. It was never a plan; it was a spasm.
The people YOU’re calling traitors, Fletcher, are the self-righteous bastards who are sure they know f**k-all about everything, without bothering to actually study or take time to learn anything. Oh, yeah. AND the leftist lying bastards that are perfectly aware that relaxing the rules for lending would lead to disaster on a vast scale.
mad: It wasn’t so much that the standards were lowered, the CRA required them to lower the standards and to follow the lowered standards. Loaning money to people who couldnt pay it back was a requirement of the Federal Government.
#48 LOTM, the article states General Petraeus had treatment from February for two months. I saw Gen. Petraeus when he visited Seattle July 8 and gave an update on Iraq & Afghanistan (a public lecture forum). He looked in excellent health and came across vibrantly. He got a standing ovation from a Seattle audience, which in itself is an amazing victory. I think he would be an excellent candidate for presidency, if he were so inclined.
Marie Claude,
That was well said.
If Spengler and other purveyors of economic and international gloom and doom are correct, and I see no reason to believe they are not, then we are in for a difficult time in the next ten years. But we’ll come out of it, we always do, and it may be the silver lining to all this will be Polywell fusion to solve both the energy and the Arab problem, and the economic turmoil that turns the political landscape of the United States away from the liberal progressive Robin Hood mindset that holds that robbing Peter, you and me, to pay Paul, favored constituencies, will be at an end. The Great Depression brought in the New Deal, so perhaps this economic crisis will bring back the Old Deal of a country run on conservative and constitutional principles.
O Gloom, O Doom
What do they have in common
They both have lots of Os, when one’s too much
And O, we know
Means economic bombin’
For our Big O is hitless in the clutch
The fan, the man
The excrement together
All form a nasty stew of bleakest broth
As now, we bow
Our heads into the weather
And hope the storm blows out in gentle froth
The buck, with luck
Will hold itself upright till
A new administration takes the wheel
And sets, and gets
It’s sights upon that high hill
That signifies the end of the New Deal
Bad times, tough climbs
Ahead are what we’re in for
The only thing about it that is good
Is that, now flat
The Dems and all they’ve been for
Are dead and gone and so is Robin Hood
“Loaning money to people who couldnt pay it back was a requirement of the Federal Government.”
Yep, it worked so well the last time that they’re doing it again! And on a much bigger scale!
What must be remembered is that the author of the Independent article, Robert Fisk, is known for “inaccuracy” in writing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisking
That said, it is remarkable how many people (myself included) were ready to believe and act on his story.
http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html
I don’t think ANYONE in Washington, other than maybe a few mid-level technical financial types, has given any thought to the consequences of teh dollar no longer being accepted internationally–=unless it really is their plan to shut this economy down and they don’t care about being voted out of office if not impeached.
Whether or not Fisk is right, and whatever schadenfreude he feels, I’ve been prdicting this to friends for months and I’m hardly alone in seeing it as a possibility. If not now, next month or next year, but continuing the current policies will eventually bring the world to the point where no one will want any more dollars. As Herb Stein said, if something can’t continue forever, it won’t– and $1.5+T federal deficits (and growing) and $600B trade imbalances and a shrinking tax base cannot continue forever.
U.S. runs a HUGE international deficit and can only do so because the rest of the world accepts the dollars we print. If that stops, we have to bring imports in line with exports and given our dependence on foreign energy that is inconceivable without knocking about another $trillion or more off annual GDP.
If the plan is to cripple the US and throw the world security situation into chaos, O and his crew are doing a great job in only 8 months. If that’s NOT the plan, they better wake up and look around.
Government by community organizer, the thing that gets me is how so many people act surprised.
Langley, Fisk’s journalistic skills are so laughable that his name has become a verb. But still, even the stopped clock… and all that.
The reason it’s believable is that China and Russia have been talking about this for months, the Arab oil states have been talking about this for years. We kept the Arabs supporting this setup because they have always been under our military umbrella (Kuwait, etc) Now that they see the umbrella slipping away, there’s no reason to stick with us and every reason to start playing to their new best customers, the Chinese.
In fact, whether or not this particular set of meetings happened, it’s inconceivable to think that these discussions haven’t been going on in financial centers around the world.
http://tinyurl.com/ye6xo4v
Also, Herman Szig thinks that Obama has never apologized for the US. What, has he been in a coma the last year? Or a cave in the woods? I’m sure someone will find the appropriate quotes for him, but geez louise, at some point people gotta be willing to do just a little bit of homework. How about checking the text of the speech to the UN for starters.
“America has acted unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others.”
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/23/obama-un-speech-text_n_296017.html
Herman, you’re kidding, right?
Herman (47) asked “Can you back this up with a direct quotation and a link — Obama apologizing for the US is some manner — or did you concoct this out of your own demented fantasies?”
Try googling obama + “apology tour” or simply obama + apologizes. You’ll find not shortage of articles providing several specific examples. Here are ten.
1) The President’s Apology Tour – WSJ.com
2009 Obama Apology Tour-Mexico | novatownhall blog
2) Obama Blames America – WSJ.com
3) American Power: Barack Obama’s European Apology Tour
4) The Obama Apology Tour Does Turkey — Politics Daily
5) Romney Slams Obama’s ‘Apology Tour’ – FOXNews.com
6) On World Stage, Obama Uses Podium to Express Regret
7) Obama Continues Apology Tour
9) Obama Apology Tour: Part Deux! – Mixx
10) Hillary carries on with Obama apology tour: Apologizies in India …
Obama has a policy. It is destroy America as a Power and a free nation! He does not even care if he get re-elected. He is out to do as much damage as he can. It seems like most of the Democrat party are in cahoots with him. It looks like they will succeed.
People need to stop musing how “they do not understand his policies”, or how “wrong-headed” they are. If you were out to destroy the nation, these are just the policies that you would pursue. He knows exactly what he is doing. He is out to ruin us. He knows exactly what he is doing.
Just who are their paymasters? It cannot just be Soros, though I am sure that he is short the dollar and long on the Euro, but he just does not have this much power. Powers in Russian, China, the ME and the EU have got to be in on it. They have Obama and the Dems, and for all I know, lots of RINO’s too, in their pockets. It is getting clearer and clearer everyday. I do not know what the confusion is a about. Again, he is out to take us out as a superpower and a force for good in the world.
It looks like he will succeed. It is hard for me to understand how we reverse it after 3+ more years of this no matter what happens in 2010 or 2012. Look at the damage he has done in less than a year! He has done more harm too American interests than any other man in our history, counting even Jefferson Davis. We have been laid low without even a fight. It will get much, much worse. It is not about reversing his laws or policies: The damage will be done. We will be deeply in debt, we will no longer have the military might we had and will not be able to get it back. We will no longer be a reserve currency, oil will not be priced in dollars. We will have an eroded industrial and technology base, and nation that were way behind us even five years ago will be advancing over us, and not necessarily on their own merits either. This is almost a complete certainty. It is not paranoia, it is not doom-saying. It is what is going to happen. And it is what the Democrats want.
The Democrats hate this nation, and Obama hates it to its very core with the most bitter of emotions. We are in extremely deep trouble–as real as it gets–and trouble that politics alone cannot fix. The problems are most likely permanent. Traitors rule us, and rule us for the benefit of foreign and hostile powers. We have been sold down the river. It is as though we are have slost a war and are now occupied by a foreign power.
What more evidence to we need about the Democrats when we hear that not only is the mess of CRA, Fannie and Freddie still not reformed, but they are going to increase the problem (and remember this time around it will not be financed through the back door with MBS’s and CDR’s, it will be taken directly out of the taxpayers wallet via taxation, inflation and the ruination of the dollar).
We have lost our position without a defeat in battle but by the betrayal of the left and the Democrat Party. It just amazes me. How history will condemn us for our callowness, frivolity and irresponsibility. We have destroyed ourselves at the highest level of wealth, success and power, and for what? And by whom? These centuries of struggle and over coming and then to be undone by people like Obama, Pelosi, Hillary and Chuckie Schumer?
I tell you even if we were to get back both houses next year, the damage will be done.
It is beyond belief!
“relaxing the rules for lending would lead to disaster on a vast scale” Mad Fiddler@51.
It probably shows just how fuzzy my thinking has been over the years, but I think I have finally managed to really begin to understand the immorality of slack money, and how it is the root of so much evil.
It’s all-pervasive nature is hard to grasp, and it’s borders hard to discern. It’s corruption has spread almost everywhere, and it has facilitated huge amounts of bad, immoral and downright stupid government, sloshing over into the funding of bad, immoral and downright stupid social engineering, science, art, and so much else.
Having been brought up by parents who could remember the 1930s, I had watched all this without much understanding but with a strong feeling that it was riding for a fall. Now, being of a “bah, humbug” character I feel more in my element. A rough road ahead ? “Luxury!”
1. Obama gave away the internet, serving up ICANN on a platter to The World.
2. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking at regulating bloggers.
3. US administration joins Egypt in a UN-proposal “deploring attacks on religions”, while continuing to call its own critics (one and all) “racist”.
It strongly appears that the next gift from Obama to America will be to restrict our right to free speech, on the internet, in real life, and any where else that a Big Brother can eavesdrop.
This is *not* socialism taking from the rich and giving to the poor, nor is it Marxism as I understand it. It is Manchurian Candidate tearing down America, plain and simple.
Normally if Robert Fisk says something, I assume the opposite is true. Fisk is a notorious imbecile and personifies the MSM. However I think the American economy is in serious trouble. I closely follow http://www.zerohedge.com and market-ticker.denninger.net . In my very humble opinion, I believe the stock market has been on a sucker’s rally since March. This sucker’s rally has been funded mainly by the Federal Reserve using freshly printed TARP money through intermediates like Goldman Sacks. Again, I think we’re doing a repeat of what the American economy did between 1929 and 1930, i.e. an initial sharp down turn followed by a strong rally driven by stock manipulation that then collapsed into a decade long depression. If anything, America’s fundamentals are much worse than they were in 1930. I’m currently short against the SPX and anticipate a major correction before the end of this month. However since the market appears to be under near total control by the federal government (it’s no longer driven by efficient market forces and standard technical analysis is no longer valid), it’s quite possible that the market will not collapse and bears like myself will have their pants pulled down (most of the bears have already been driven from the market). Probably the wisest course is to be out of the market altogether (be neither short or long) until after the government stops manipulating it. Also, I think gold is a lousy investment (the gold price is even more manipulated than the stock market). I’ve sold all my investment gold.
To Mongoose and others,
Those of you asserting that Obama has a plan or a mission to destroy American power, please make your predictions of what are his likely moves over the next year or two.
Any theory lives or dies based on its ability to make predictions that come true.
The problem with the lower dollar is evil argument is that– because oil is priced in dollars– a lower dollar is very stimulative to strong currency economies–because it lowers the cost of their energy bills–and therefor increases their productivity.
This means that not only are the US goods more competitive but strong currency countries can afford to take in US imports–ie whatever exports strong currency countries lose to the US– they make up for in cheaper energy supplies.
Meanwhile the US balance of payments shrinks. US dollars sloshing around the world are repatriated.
Notice that oil prices have stayed steady in the face of a falling dollar. You would think that oil prices would rise above their current levels.
They’re not.
Why not?
US consumption of oil is still flat to down.
I fail to see hope oil priced in Euros is going to help the UK much, unless of course you finally betray yourselves and your forebears and dump the Pound for the Euro.
Seriously Fletcher, you often come here and spit out the most ill-informed opinions about the USA–you have a very real tendency to not understand the USA whatsoever–and mouth these bizarre, rather left of center pronouncements. We saw this in your ill-informed comments about the American medical system. Strictly MSM inculcated left agitprop is what we heard from you. The UK media is actually worse than the American Media, and that is a rather low standard to fall beneath. You do yourself no service by paying much attention to them.
The Bankers? A failure of Capitalism? This is like saying that rape is a failure of virginity. I do not think you understand what the problems last year in financial markets were at all.
And I must say for a citizen of nation who is in the process of willfully giving over its national sovereignty to the powers of the European continent, a right nasty capitulation after all of the centuries of stout and honorable independence and defiance, you really are hardly in a position of chastise anyone. Commiserate with us might you perhaps, but hardly use the sort of language you use here today..
The EUocrats, the Enarchs, all think that they are on a rode to glory by attempting to crowd America out and foist a feral Europe on the peoples of Europe, but they are actually on the raod to misery, ruin and perdition.
It is not as tough Europe as not been through this before, and we know ow it ends. Not with a whimper, I can tell you that. they will drag the UK into tose flames as well. This time the USA may not be around to pull you out. Mediate on that one.
Eggplant – I agree with you almost completely about the long term economic outlook, but Spengler in the article referenced by wretchard makes a very good argument for why stock prices could stay up – in terms of other currencies, they are already trading at discounted rates.
I agree with you about gold the metal, but I think the gold miners are potentially very profitable, especially those with low finding costs.
I have come to think that the downturn in prices we are all anticipating (“correction” what a ridiculously political word) may not begin in earnest until the Fed starts raising interest rates again, and that’s a political decsion. Of course, at some point they will be forced to raise rates by events – otherwise, why wouldn’t we just keep rates at zero all the time? To me, the question is just how long they can put this move off.
For Whitehall – here is *my* prediction of what he will do, based on my own analysis of his character in previous situations. In a way it’s better than the plan to destroy America that some have envisioned; but it may also be worse.
I strongly suspect that Obama has led a life in which he has *always* been able to find the easy way out, and up till now this has always worked for him.
Look at his biography – sure, his mother’s troubles are well documented, but at an early age he went to live with his wealthy hawaiian grandparents, one of whom was a bank vice president. Come on – even as a kid, he lived the dream that the rest of us could only fantasize about. He went to one of the best prep schools in the state. Then he partied his way through his undergrad degree at Occiental – notice how the records have never been released? (well, there’s that possible Indonesian Exchange Student thing) But he presented well, and he got someone big to clear his way to Harvard (he didn’t do it on his own, no way)
Now I want to make a point about his Harvard career that I haven’t seen made before, because I think it is a very close parrallel to what is happening with Obama’s Presidency:
At Harvard, he became editor of the Law Review through a *combination* of grades and a popularity contest – but although you know he didn’t produce any articles, most don’t quite realize the significance of this. The *reason* that Editor of the Law Review at any law school is so prestigious is that it gives *that* person the right to pick and author the most prestigious and significant research that may be open at the time. This in turn is used as a hiring marker for the various judicial clerkships and big Wall Street firms – the successful author of a lead article will literally have his choice of positions.
It is *Unheard* of for someone to rise to this position and then to just kick back and do nothing at all but coast through a years worth of meetings with his feet on the table – but that is exactly what Obama did. He *never* wrote anything, and although I haven’t verified this, I suspect he is the *only* Harvard Law Review editor who has *never* written any actual research. It was an astounding failure, but not just a failure – it was a total lack of effort.
*This* is why he never went on to any senior judicial clerkship, which he should have done, and why he never went to any big law firm but instead ended up with some community activist group in Chicago. Potential employers looked at his record and saw a very glib and well spoken screw-off. Well, guys like that are a dime a dozen in this world. That’s why his legal career failed.
He still had his gift of gab and good looks, which is always useful in machine politics. Since then, he’s had a helping hand pushing him from one legislative office to another – he’s never actually had to do any work. He didn’t have to raise the money, other people did that, he didn’t come up with the strategy, Axelrod did that, he didn’t have to build the organization, other people did that for him. He has *never* had to do anything in his life besides show up and take the easy way out. Somehow he managed to ride this incredible run of good luck all the way up to the Presidency, and he has never in his life had to do anything but show up, smile, and say some vaguely reassuring words to his fans.
And now, for the very first time in his life, he has to face the reality that there is no easy way out. He has literally never been truly responsible for *anything* in his life up to this point – Heck of a time to think about growing up!!! I suspect he’s going to do the same thing as he did at the Harvard law Review – now that something is being required of him, I think he’s going to put his feet up on the desk and just pretend that everything is going to work out. And when it doesn’t he’ll search for someone to blame rather than fixing anything, which is always the other easy way out. And when that doesn’t work, he’ll find a way to quit, if not literally, then at least in real terms. Just as he did at Harvard.
That’s my prediction. What is Obama going to do when things get really bad? He’s going to make Herbert Hoover look like an activist, that’s what he’s going to do. Because he doesn’t have it in him to do anything else, and he never did. Oh, he’ll have plenty of underlings that will try stuff – Emmanual and Pelosi and Reid, oh my. But they’ll all be at cross purposes and all be at each others throats while Obama is smiling and waving and pretending that Prosperity is Just Around the Corner. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if, by 2011, he doesn’t start finding ways to spend most of his time outside of the country.
Now how we deals with his own supporters once this administration collapses into incoherent incompetence is going to be the most interesting game to watch. They’re already starting to figure out that things aren’t going well – when they finally realize they’ve been snookered by a false messiah things could get very ugly indeed.
Whitehall – I look for a sideways attack on our military capabilities. As I had hypothesized once before, Obama can totally defang us just by giving over control of our military to the UN. Or NATO. Or Europe.
He also has to go after Americans owning guns. DC / Chicago / Detroit keep passing laws that disarm the people living there and the Supreme Court keeps overturning those laws, so then they pass laws outlawing bullets, etc. ad nauseum. Now that Obama has a wise Latina on the Supreme Court, maybe he can get the Supremes to agree that the rest of us need to be disarmed, and that silly amendment really meant to say there was NO right to a well-armed militia.
I’m not sure what he’ll want to do about separation of church and state. He’ll probably leave the religious alone as long as they promise not to meddle in Progressive politics, since more and more Americans are leaving their churches any way, and said churches can be used as a taxable source of income. Except for the Muslims, of course. They will be increasingly elevated and protected from any and all criticism.
We’ll also see the concept of being an American citizen more and more degraded, since we’re moving towards including anyone who can parachute, swim or crawl into the country automatically being able to vote, receive free education and receive free health care once they are here, without ever being arrested for any of their crimes on the grounds that doing so would be racist.
I do think ACORN will be resurrected under a new name, since the democratic voting system that America is founded on depends upon an organized group to recruit enough fake voters to throw elections predictably. The neo-ACORN will also function as a job-provider for legions of Obama supporters who are unemployable otherwise; they will be recruited as brown shirts to rat out their neighbors, to intimidate at polling places so that only approved Obama voters are allowed to vote, and to beat up on Obama critics and Tea Party protestors.
///
P.S. Wretchard has a new picture. Very elder statesman, much less pirate. Bummer.
30, 31, 51, 68, et al.:
Y’all might want to chip in and buy FC a one-way ticket to Pitcairn Island. According to Caroline Alexander’s 2003 book about the Bounty, “[Christian] was variously said to have died [in 1793] of natural causes, committed suicide, gone insane and been murdered”– within four years of their arrival on the island, the Bounty mutineers had pretty well killed off one another.
Whitehall: I am making an observation, not a posing a “theory”. In any event, “prediction” is only profoundly viable as a logical proof in epistemologies which mainly rely of empirical methods. My statement is deductive, and given the preponderant evidence of his actions, attitudes and statements in the current historical, economic and political context, is both necessary and sufficient in and of itself. It require no “prediction” to Be valid. It also happens to be true.
However, implicitly, there is in my observation the firm notion that his actions will do harm of some sort if he can. It logically follows, but it is hardly a prediction, no more than saying that if you poke out your eyes you will be blind is a prediction. It is a commonsensical deduction.
Moreover, to say there is “a snake in the room” is valid if there is no reason to believe that it is anything other than a snake, even though one might not be able to divine when it might get around to biting anyone.
So in this case it is hardly a matter of “Any theory lives or dies based on its ability to make predictions that come true”.
#68 Mongoose
Agreed about the fate of Europe, and of Britain. There is a sort of willful denial of reality going in over there. The EU Treaty was passed by Ireland. Other than some technical delays inherent in the ratification processes in Poland and the Czech Republic [two countries who, incidentally, now have no reason to love us]it is a done deal.
Barring an uprising in Britain [NOT gonna happen, they are forelock tugging serfs at heart now]; Britain will cease being a separate nation as soon as the final ratification takes place. It will have, by the EU Treaty; yielded over total control of its military policy, its foreign policy, and its economic policy to Brussels. Since Brussels already makes most Brit law, there will be nothing left. A country that cannot defend itself, cannot speak for itself in the councils of the world, and whose pursestrings are held somewhere else is literally not a sovereign nation.
The “special relationship”, even if we rid ourselves of our own regime, is over because Britain and England will no longer exist.
For that matter, neither will France, technically. However; France, Germany, and Belgium are the real rulers of the EU, and the rest of the continent are subject states. So guess where Britain will be ruled from. One does wonder what justification that they will have for retaining separate UK seats in the UN General Assembly and Security Council. Probably the same as the Ukraine and Beyelo-Russia during the reign of the Soviet Union. And they will have as much independence as the two Soviet subject states.
The EU is no longer anything that we can recognize as the source of our culture and history. It, and its subject states, are just another hostile power bloc that the United States will have to deal with, akin to OPEC or the Warsaw Pact. I do rather believe, though, that the time we will have to deal with them will be limited. For within a decade or so, Europe will either be absorbed into the coming Caliphate, or will break into internal warfare of a visciousness not seen since the Thirty Years War. European cities may well envy Magdeburg.
Some here have encountered my other writings. One of the things that proves that I am not a nice person was distributed a couple of years ago under the title Catapultae Secundus. The time is ten times overpast for a Catapultae Tertius.
We will stand alone, with Britain and Europe ranged against us alongside our enemies; at least till their own flickering light dims.
“Blow, wind! Come, Wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back!”
Subotai Bahadur
The EUocrats, the Enarchs, all think that they are on a rode to glory by attempting to crowd America out and foist a feral Europe on the peoples of Europe, but they are actually on the raod to misery, ruin and perdition.
It is not as tough Europe as not been through this before, and we know ow it ends. Not with a whimper, I can tell you that. they will drag
the problem is that, that the countries that are in the biggest troubles, are precisely those that followed your economical model, ie UK, Ireland, Spain ….
if you want them, have t’em, but you’ll have to bail t’em out too, from your own taxes, good for us !
For that matter, neither will France, technically. However; France, Germany, and Belgium are the real rulers of the EU, and the rest of the continent are subject states. So guess where Britain will be ruled from.
oh dear ! ask their populations first, not your blind poodles, Spain, Ireland, Poland, Czechs… they all had a groth rate that you could dream of being of the 30 glorious years after WW2. To whom do you think they owed that ?, not to sanctus spiritus or to UK !
Why do you think that UK’s businesses headquaters are moving around Brussels ?
Whitehall,
i really like wws’s analysis; it rings true. There may not be an overarching plan. Buraq ‘s moves are just following academic left’s orthrodoxy that Buraq and almost all his close friends believe. The left believes it’s own fantasies. Their world is a world without consequences. Hard work, cause and effect, rule of law, economics and liberty are foreign concepts to them. Seems like Buraq is just winging it, living the good life as POTUS, partying with the black celebs, playing golf, soaking up as many adoration and benefits as he can. In the end, I don’t think he gives a crap how many million lives he ruins. He’s a callous bastard.
As far as your house hunting goes, the exact same thing is happening in Southern California in the lower end of the market. Multiple offers on any decent house; most over asking price. Tough to make the sale if you can’t afford to go higher in your offer. Get yourself a really good agent. One approach is to look for the sleeper short sale. The short sale process is long and arduous for the owner. Often times, the short sale properties just sit, because the lender hasn’t approved a sales price. ( It seems the lender often can’t bring themselves to the point of admitting they made a mistake enough to take the loss). But if you follow them, and ask where they are in the process, you may find one that the lender has approved and the market hasn’t picked up on yet.
The EU is no longer anything that we can recognize as the source of our culture and history.
d’ya know why ? I tell ya, cuz you’re too self absorbed that you couldn’t perceive that the whole world evolve, while you’re mourning on the good ol days of America
I’ll add, that you’re still not awake, “plus dure sera la chute” !
WWS, I want to
move to Texas. Any nursing gigs over ur way??
Dear Sub,
Perhaps you could put up a Tiny You-Are-Ell link to your magnificent octopus “Catapultae Secundus.”
The only appropriate Latin quote I can dredge up is “Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.”
I believe it translates roughly:
“I have a catapult. Give me all your money, or I will fling an enormous rock at your head.”
You probably have something more serious in mind…
Can anyone explain how properly to use TinyURL?
Does anyone know a way for folks to connect besides publishing their contact information in one of these postie things.
Herman Szig:Can you back this up with a direct quotation and a link — Obama apologizing for the US is some manner — or did you concoct this out of your own demented fantasies?
Thank you sir, for proving my point. What we have is a problem of evidence and although some commenters have provided links to meet your requirements, in reality there is probably nothing I can say which can convince you. We are at the point where events will do the talking: manifested by state the dollar, the economy, international relations, civil liberties and social consensus.
Shortly before the elections one of my best friends said he was going to vote for Obama, and another commenter said he would do the same. I emailed them privately and said: “here’s my fearless forecast, Obama’s going to be the worst President in history”. So my answer to you is: please continue to believe I’m crazy and believe all’s well. But here’s my fearless forecast: you’ll be sorry.
My cunning take on all this:
Obama is not the future. He’s the last gasp of the New Deal. Come 2012, after four years of Obamanism, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone–even in Berkeley, Austin, Chapel Hill, or Ann Arbor–who will admit they voted for The One. After all, ’tis better to remain silent and think yourself a fool, than to open your pie-hole and remove all doubt.
Barnabus #14
Agree about separating the impact of the economic cycle vs the long term effects of higher taxes and more socialism. The election of the 1974 Watergate Congress did not prevent a strong economic recovery and stock market rally. Many on this blog are way too negative about the economy and the market.
If the Spenglers are wrong, and the economy continues to recover, Obama is going to be Warren Harding, not Herbert Hoover.
BTW, I feel a lot better about my $ US investments now that I know that Robert (impregnable Baghdad) Fisk was the sole author of that “Demise of the Dollar” article.
Marie,I hope you join the resistance, otherwise your valiant countymen will shave your head after we’ve saved you from the “youths”
Doom and gloom, not going to happen. Even this glitch, this interloper who got lucky can’t deconstruct this country. The USSR was a mess and had no chance of recovery yet even today with a corrupt leadership they seem to be staggering along. Why, natural resources and enough scientific knowhow to get it done. We have tremendous resources and the added advantage of the greatest workforce at anytime in world history. The tipping point has come and gone now only awaiting the last straw, O will not complete his term and will be unceremoniously relieved of command by a mandate of opinion. The world might like us to take a good shot but no knockout, we will survive and the comeback will be awesome. The precedent is set, thanks Dick Nixon, say goodbye O have a nice retirement in Kenya
Marie, How you liking that brand spanking new McDo’s at that fancy picture hanging pyramid palace? Now you got some culture to go with your silly crayon pictures…
And as usual comrade Szig is a day late and a few rubles short of a weeks pay.
Mad Fiddler, Start a blog and put the URL in the proper comment box and it will provide a linkable name like mine. If you click on my name it takes you to my blog and you can leave me a message there or shoot me an email. Or you can go twitter and post that so those that wish can follow you.
Just a slight side note.
I am beginning to think that four years is too long for a term of office. Now that the world is moving at the speed of the internet. I think we should start looking at continuous election cycles for the office of President and reduce the number of years for Senators to 3 and put the Congress critters on instant recall. What do you guys think?
Oh Mark, if only!
Of course Obama will be defended. He may turn out to be a terrible President, but he will still poll 35-40% (minimum) of the vote come 2012, even if things are as bad as many seem to think they might get.
There are people who would DIE before they would EVER vote other than Democrat. I know people just like that, and so does everyone else.
What is scary to many is that political consensus is dissolving on practically everything. In short, everything political will be up for grabs. This is what is the result of the political entropy that whirls about the Obama Administration.
I just read a comment on a lefty blog regarding one “conservative” comment that Obama was indecisive about Afghanistan (the argument was regarding the newest trope that McChystal had spoken out of turn in London last week, which he didn’t if you actually read his words, but no matter), and somebody on the lefty blog insisted that wemust RESPECT Obama because he was the C in C.
Gee, where was all that respect the last few years? Oh yeah, it was that virulent religious fever regarding “Bush Lied!” which trumps all that normal political consensus thing. Disorder trumps reason. Chaos to follow. Film at eleven.
I don’t think that Obama is callous. But he is incredibly careless. As was stated above, he and his administration simply believe in every liberal-left trope from every generation that has been uttered in the 20th Century. They believe without much thought or actual introspection as to the possible consequences of their actions.
That’s why it is political entropy. Every action creates more disorder than before. There is no positive organizing thought or intelligence oriented toward lawful order or reason. There is the appearance of reason, but that is the facade of the Obama’s personality and alleged intellect. It is afterall, illusory.
You can see that it is political entropy as normal politicians in other nations will begin to distance themselves from Obama. How’s that rebuilding of alliances working out?
They do not wish to be sucked into the maelstrom that will surely follow the increasing disorder of the Lightworker and his mythical band of policy Jedi. Even in failure, millions will still defend him, and chant for Hope and Change. They might as well chant for Chaos and Disorder, Wrack and Ruin, Fear and Terror, Ren and Stimpy.
Whether Obama truly heralds a brighter future (?) or is the last gasp of a century of failed ideas (!), he truly is spinning us all to the cusp of great change, for good or ill. We are all certainly living in interesting times.
Lucky us.
Eggplant # 65 – I share most of your concerns and opinions, which means I’m at least as lost as you on what will happen next. Nobody knows. As Gandalf says at some point, “Or being wise, why would they expect to know, until the time has come?”
It’s not the President’s fault. The memo on his earlier trip to Europe said that it was going to be the “Apogee Tour”, but the speechwriters thought that was a typo. And the teleprompter had been up too late the night before with the DVD player, and didn’t catch it, either.
Whether Obama truly heralds a brighter future (?) or is the last gasp of a century of failed ideas (!), he truly is spinning us all to the cusp of great change, for good or ill. We are all certainly living in interesting times.
Exactly. There are two things to remember. One, the wheel is in spin. Two, place your bets, remembering that not to bet is also to bet. But it’s better to lay your wager with open eyes and to simply let someone nudge your chips onto some random number. The other day someone asked me about Pascal’s famous wager, and I remarked that it came to this: that it is better to play to win, given that you find yourself in the middle of a game. Life is exciting in that way really, once you realize that you have no choice but to make a choice.
Off the economic thread but consistent with how disconnected our President has become from the unwashed masses, and these data points provide encouragement to me that Hopey Change seems to be fading:
Majority in U.S. Would Back Attack to Prevent Iran Nuclear Bomb
By Janine Zacharia
Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) — A majority of Americans are skeptical that diplomacy with Iran will succeed and say the U.S. should use military action if necessary to prevent the Iranian government from developing a nuclear weapon.
A Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey released today found 61 percent of Americans would support a military strike. Twenty-four percent said it is more important to avoid conflict even if that means Iran will end up building nuclear arms.
The survey by the Washington-based group found 63 percent support direct U.S. negotiations with Iran to push the country to abandon its nuclear program. Still, 64 percent said such efforts won’t succeed. The poll was conducted last week, when Iran held talks with the U.S. and other United Nations powers and agreed to widen discussions on the nuclear dispute.
I think that we have to look at another poll that is taken daily; how the US Treasury market trades. With 30 year yields below 4%, the market is discounting a complete anihilation of the dollar. But it is also saying the economic recovery is nowhere in sight.
#84 LFMayor
It is questionable whether there would be any interest here in making the effort of “saving” anyone from their “youths”, or either in this particular case or a more generalized view by those over there whether they would have any interest in being saved. It may happen as a byproduct of the larger war, but not as a primary war aim. Let Darwin sort them out.
#80 Mad Fiddler
To use tiny url, go to http://tinyurl.com/ and enter the url you want to shorten in the box, hit the button, and it gives you a coded short url to paste and use. I admit that when I get on a roll writing a comment, I usually am too lazy to interrupt my easily broken train of thought to go chasing to another site, and so I honor it more in the breach than the observance.
As far as Catapultae Secundus, it was kind of an inside comment for some BC-ers. NOTE: this is not link whoring, because it is an email thing and not a site-based blog. No commercial involvement as nobody makes anything off of it, except perhaps my ISP. I am not looking for more readers by the mention.
Since 9/11 I have put out, via a growing email tree, a newsletter on political and military affairs to certain people who are interested in such matters. I found that the tree kept growing, and it includes a fair number of serving personnel both here and deployed. I occasionally create what I call Special Projects, on one controversial topic. They run about 50 pages. My approach to national security is distinctly un-PC and if necessary quite bloody-minded. Think Gordian Knot. Thus my references to not being a “nice person”. Some readers at BC are also on my newsletter tree, and it was an inside reference to a Special Project that involves certain future problems in Europe. For the record, the newsletter is on hiatus, and has been for several months due to family medical problems that I hope to see resolved by year’s end; or at least before we lose health care in this country.
The hiatus is why I have frequented here and a couple of other blogs in the last months; as a way to deal with my “writing jones”. I probably should not have mixed my two writing worlds. Sorry.
Subotai Bahadur
LF Mayor, d’ya know, we live in 2009, and your still watching old movies, I tell ya, C’est FINI, watch at your right, watch at your left, d’ya see the wehrmacht irgend wo ? you should focus on Hong kong movies today, cuz they know how to make movies for you, and my little finger told me that you’re not world champion in their art
Obama is too relaxed, given the current circumstances, to just be a f**-off. He’s either an idealogue who is hoping against hope that things will turn around or, as others have suggested, is just fine with Cloward-Pivan. The latter suggests that we should expect a foreign policy crisis in an effort to really bring the house down and pave the way for “the revolution” that all of these post-60s morons have been hungering for for the past 40 years.
On the other hand, I’m with those who think the U.S. has much more stamina than anyone thinks, although I don’t think the era of the circling sharks will be that comfortable, not by a long shot.
I just got back from CA. Not that I visited every nook and cranny, but for a place on the verge of being our first “failed state” it looks great. My point being that we are so complex, so strong, and so deep that there is unlikely to be any house-of-cards effect, not in the time that these clowns will have allotted to them.
I will be so bold as to predict that, in a few years, we will see that we are presently undergoing one of our periodic great awakenings. Frankly, I think that is essential to our long term survival — as a species, in fact.
Mongoose, I can go to that dark place with you, but I think there are other things at work here than what’s perceptible on the surface. Much more, in fact, than the aforementioned clowns can control or manage effectively.
Whoever they are, I think they are just about now beginning to figure out that they have a tiger by the tail. This ain’t no USSR. There will be blood in the water, but I think we’re still the Yankees and there are no Red Sox out there laying in wait, no matter what Marie and Fletcher might wish.
wws said:
“Spengler in the article referenced by wretchard makes a very good argument for why stock prices could stay up – in terms of other currencies, they are already trading at discounted rates.”
In my opinion, Spengler is up there with Wretchard as among the brightest people on the Internet. However I think Spengler is mistaken about US stock prices. No doubt foreign purchase is a factor but I believe that direct manipulation by the US government is the main driver. I should emphasize that I’m merely a clueless engineer and don’t do finance for a living.
wws also said:
“I agree with you about gold the metal, but I think the gold miners are potentially very profitable, especially those with low finding costs.”
Gold mining is profitable only because people are prepared to spend lots of money on gold. Gold is certainly a pretty metal (I enjoy owning gold coins) and it’s useful for electronic circuit boards but beyond that it’s almost useless. We’re prepared to spend lots of money on gold because we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s valuable. We believe gold to be valuable because that’s something our ancestors believed since the dawn of civilization. However there is really no practical reason why gold should command such a high price.
JFSanders031 asked:
“I think we should start looking at continuous election cycles for the office of President and reduce the number of years for Senators to 3 and put the Congress critters on instant recall. What do you guys think?”
You’re essentially proposing that we adopt a Westminster parliamentary system where there can be a vote of no confidence. If anything, there’s too much direct democracy in this country (remember the MSM can convince the sheeple of almost any lie through simple repetition). California is in the toilet mainly due to its voter initiative system. What I’d like to see is a system that excludes silver tongued demagogues like Obama and favors somebody like Harry S. Truman.
Jimmy,
How you liking that brand spanking new McDo’s at that fancy picture hanging pyramid palace? Now you got some culture to go with your silly crayon pictures…
And as usual comrade Szig is a day late and a few rubles short of a weeks pay.
Sorry I’m not a custommer, but your fellahs are when they cross the pond
but if it was an enigma, give me the code, uh, I can’t transmit your message otherwise
I think we’re still the Yankees and there are no Red Sox out there lying in wait
Ah, but there’s still the National League (sorry, couldn’t resist).
The pure anti-theist, who is sure this world,( currently going to hell in a handbasket), is all, is much more subject to being discouraged. That is why they are such easy prey for flim flam artists promising a bright future for marxism or environmentalism .
A Christian, who knows God is real, knows the True Hope. I think of myself as a special forces guy dropped into enemy territory. There was a plan, which as far as I know, did not survive contact with the enemy. But, I am not alone. Life is seeking those who will join me to fight against evil.
Remember He doesn’t promise easy. Read Elijah’s story when the brook of Kerith dries up in 1st Kings. Look where God sends him. Look who God sends him to. We are called to live that story in our troubled times. If you think things are bad, ask yourself if you would trade with either Elijah or the widow. I find this story helps me keep perspective, when things seem to go wrong. One advantage I have is
“Be not afraid, for I am with you.”
Eggplant #95:
Early in the year I asked my financial advisor about buying gold, He ruefully said that he wished that he knew a good way to buy it; many people had asked him about that. But he had concluded that the sales charges, shipping costs, and other fees were too high to make it a good investment.
He did say that if you wanted to get into gold the best way he could see was to buy the stock of the largest mining and processing company. I added that company’s symbol to the list of ones I monitor on a daily basis – and promptly forgot about it.
When he suggested I might buy some of the stock it was at around $20 a share. He pointed out the current stock price to me a couple of days ago.
It is now $69.71 a share. I feel like an idiot.
N/85; you could be right but we will have to make it so. As is, & re the ‘prediction’ theme, i’d refer to the fiscal deficit projections going forward –they are based on 3% money. Fisk has a rotten rep but the world is (self-protectively you must admit) for a fact moving out of the USDollar at deliberate orderly speed. What O & the Dems are doing is setting us up to where the slightest nudge from foreign debt holders will easily double that 3% and *pfft* before we know it double the cost of new financing.
Foreign interests can’t help but react to USA capacity utilization powering down to two/thirds and falling, employment falling twice as fast as the official unemployment number is growing, fiscal considerations sunk in ideology, monetary policy (ahem, “quantitative easing”) painfully obviously aiming to pay back cheap without even the usual reach-around of higher rates because we are holding them down the same way Sheriff Cleavon Little held back the crowd in Blazing Saddles –”Stop or I’ll shoot myself”. The dollar and dollarized chits are a matter of faith and that faith is under brutal attack, real as well as psychological. that’s what furriners such as MC, bless her hard little Cassandra heart, are trying to tell us.
That faith is weird stuff –it’s at once the foundation and of all there is, and a butterfly fart on the far side of the world –who was that in the 60s –Donovan? –singing “First there is a mountain, then there is no moontain at all” –of course he also sang mellow yellow and made me try to light a banana but thats another story
#81 Wretchard – “here’s my fearless forecast, Obama’s going to be the worst President in history”
I absolutely agree, and that is saying a lot since we have that idiot Jimmy Carter in competition with Obama as the worst. I think if we get through these horrible 4 years, and I think we will, it will be seen as the low point in American history.
98 presbypoet
I would add Romans 8:31-39: a good meat-and-potatoes message for troubled times.
96. Marie:
Wow! It really does sound better when a French woman says your name. Sorry, back to the comment. I was speaking of the Louvre allowing a McDo to be built inside their museum! Evidently it was causing a minor riot in the clubs of Paris. As for the enigma that was caused by a forgotten separator between the comment for you and the comment for the idiot comrade Szig. My apologies.
Eggplant: I was really going for the sarcasm, sorry for the off speed pitch. I do think Fletcher got it tho…
Peak Gasoline Is Here
By Toby Shute
October 6, 2009
The jury’s still out on peak oil, but the concept of peak gasoline has some very credible proponents.
Last Thursday, ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) CEO Rex Tillerson argued that U.S. gasoline consumption peaked in 2007. In his words, “motor vehicle gasoline demand is down, is headed down, and is going to continue to head down.”
This isn’t a new position for the prominent oil patch poobah. Back in April, The Wall Street Journal cited Exxon’s belief that U.S. light duty gasoline demand will drop by 22% by 2030.
Tillerson isn’t alone in the peak-gasoline camp, either. The government’s own estimates indicate that gasoline consumption peaked in 2007, at 371.2 million gallons per day. Cambridge Energy Research Associates has concluded that 2007 was probably the peak, barring a collapse in the oil price.
#92 – Subotai Bahadur,
Darn! I would like to get on the mailing list; I googled “Catapultae Secundus” and got to samzidata comment board, but no “special project” paper to pull. I always scan for your comments (and others!)
A commenter fisks a bit of perspective onto one of the UK’s recent doomed dollar articles:
“Now America is the world’s greatest debtor”
No, she’s not. Many nations are in far greater debt relative to their economy, including most developed nations.
“she can no longer sustain her role as protector of the world’s only reserve currency in the long term.”
Yes, she can. She’s been doing it on a mere 3-5% of GDP for quite some time.
“The brutal truth is that for most of the next decade China’s economy will grow by more than 10 per cent a year”
Only under the most optimistic of projections.
“America’s by less than 2 per cent.”
Only under the most pessimistic of projections. See a theme running here?
“China will soon be the world’s largest economy”
Not for several decades, if at all.
(So that’s it –not doomed quite yet, but trend lines all save one running in the wrong direction. The one that isn’t? You can see it right here on this thread –millions of us are not gonna turn loose of this rag ’til we get it completely chewed to pieces, dead, buried, and gone. but not forgotten. anyhoo, the front line is everywhere two people are talking.)
Luddy’s link from earlier thread:
Far Leftist Robert Scheer commenting @ “The Nation”
Obama’s Toxic Advisers
So “they”–Summers, Gensler, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and their ueber mentor, Rubin–were as wrong as anyone could be. Perhaps such error is human, but aren’t there folks out there with a better prospect of getting it right that Obama can rely on?
A great deal is at stake, and we are being asked to support the president’s plans as a matter of trust in a hopeful new leader. But the latest administration plan, announced by Geithner on Monday, seems to be more of the same.
We taxpayers are being asked to buy back from the banks the very toxic assets that the members of Obama’s economic team once celebrated as an unmitigated blessing. Only this time, instead of trusting the banks, we will turn over control, but little risk, to hedge funds that are totally unregulated. Here we go again.
Subotai, I second Knight1′s ‘Darn!’. Any way to get there from here?
I think if we get through these horrible 4 years, and I think we will, it will be seen as the low point in American history.
To steal Churchill’s phrase, I’m not sure whether the next four years will mark the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning. Obama is a symptom of a much bigger underlying problem, one that has been festering for forty years. A very large number of people are absolutely committed to what he stands for and I think he stands for them. It’s a deep, deep problem which will take perhaps a hundred years to resolve fully, like most things that are widely held.
I don’t think that even catastrophic wars can completely cleanse us of bad memes. Sixty years after “never again” we’re headed right back to where we started. The world will always have its Obamas because it can never get rid of people whose attitudes give rise to them. Like the poor, those types of people will always be with us. All one can do when living through history, I think, is to try and survive and gain a relative ascendancy over insanity. But as literature points out, survival always exacts a price. The old ways pass; beautiful legacies, vistas, ways of life end forever. Gone with the Wind. History is full of shimmering ante-bellum universes, now only memories. Someone wrote that there were exiles from Russia who lived out their lives abroad hoping to return one day. Well they had to wait for 1989 and even then what they returned to was something vastly different.
Perhaps humanity emulates, in its own way the manner of ordinary individuals, who enter into this world with nothing and leave it in the same condition. We build only to depart, but the difference is that our lives don’t depend on the things we leave behind. We can take a little with us going forward, but not much more than ourselves.
Over 110 years ago Gustave Le Bon wrote The Psychology of Socialism. According to Le Bon, the fundamental problem of socialism is found in the dangerous misfits who support the socialist cause. Le Bon warned against a host of degenerates and failures who “are made at great expense by our colleges and universities.” Le Bon explained that these superfluous “graduates, licensees, instructors and professors … will one day, perhaps, constitute one of the most serious dangers against which society will have to defend itself.” As he further explained, “Notwithstanding their diversity of origin, they are united by one common sentiment – hatred of the civilization in which they can find no place.”
What Le Bon could not have foreseen, however, was something that Ludwig von Mises recognized decades later: “The subversive activities of these professional plotters are dangerous precisely on account of the naivety of those who are merely flirting with the revolutionary idea.
http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2009/1002.html
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.e272eaa74dccc30f21c6ff7638b0f37b.461&show_article=1
(isn’t just the Fisk article)
***
In what place soever ye enter into an house, there abide till ye depart from that place. –i wish i could interpret such a line. Does it mean, “accept fatalism” ? because, that’s a tautology. so there must be more.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way.
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
-
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
– Orwell
Paralysis in the Debt Markets Is Deepening the Credit Drought
Many investors have lost trust in securitization after losing huge sums on packages of subprime mortgages that had high default rates. The government has since spent more than $1 trillion trying to restore the markets, with mixed success.
Until more of the securitization market revives, or some new form of financing takes its place, a wide range of loans needed to secure a lasting economic recovery will remain elusive, experts said.
“Given the imperative for securitization markets to fuel bank lending, we won’t have meaningful economic growth until securitization markets are re-established,” said Joseph R. Mason, a professor of banking at Louisiana State University. Mr. Sachs agrees:
“It’s very important these markets come back to get credit to businesses and families who need it, and also as a sign of confidence.”
Enormous swaths of this so-called shadow banking system remain paralyzed. Depending on the type of loan, certain securitization markets have fallen 40 to 100 percent.
A once-thriving private market in securities backed by home mortgages has collapsed, from $744 billion in 2005, at the peak of the housing boom, to $8 billion during the first half of this year.
The market for securities backed by commercial real estate loans is in worse shape. No new securities of this type have been issued in two years.
111 luddy barsen
Think of “house” as a single household and “that place” as referring to the entire village, settlement, or town. The Markan verse is usually interpreted as Jesus’ telling the Twelve not to think of their own comfort first by moving from a poorer household that has first offered them hospitality into a wealthier house in the same town. As one commentator put it, the apostles “are not to change quarters for the sake of greater comfort. They have not gone out to make a pleasure tour, but to preach, and so are to stay where they are welcomed, and to make the best of it.”
Hope that helps.
The first of the quoted lines is really from Matthew and the rest from Mark, but they express a single thought which was the subject of a lecture by my long-dead teacher of the “Newtest” — the other subject code was “Oldtest” and you can guess what that meant. The verses, as I remember the way he put it, raised the question “where is your true home”? For the man who intended to live by the words of Matthew was on his way there. Now where was that?
And my departed teacher challenged each of us to try it literally. Some did, actually leaving their homes and setting out on an actual physical journey like a monk or holy man of old. And after a time some began to think they understood what the verses meant; that their true homes weren’t at the addresses they left; they carried it with them. So the lines “and there abide till ye go thence” meant in a rough way that where ever you hung your hat was home. It didn’t matter because your real home was up ahead; and while you were on the Road you, for as long as you were getting closer, each stage was a truer home than the last. But it wasn’t so much a solitary journey as much as a procession: “and as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Come along everybody, can’t you see?
Only one popular work of fiction that I know of has this explicit theme: Kipling’s Kim as reflected in the search for the River of the Arrow. The Lama tells Kim in the last lines of his great discovery, of finding the place he had been seeking from the beginning of the novel:
And for those who like to think in secular terms and see themselves in the great river of history, the lesson is approximately the same. We are the river of history. Our civilizations and our paid up mortages aren’t really the real places that we live. And in times of a crisis, when we see ourselves on the verge of losing everything, it’s important to know that we carry our homes with us, if we come into self-possession, the only property that means anything. And we will be at home until the end. God bless my dear departed teacher. He knew. He knew.
I paid my way to the September 9/11 Rally in DC bringing my youngest grand son with me as part of his continuing education.
I have had to counter about half of the social education he and my three other grand kids get from their high schools. High schools that teach from textbooks that are not only incomplete, biased but in some cases just outright wrong.
For almost fifty years the liberals, progressives if you will and the closet Commies and Marxists have been infiltrating and perverting the American Educational System and in turn, churning out new young progressives that influence and pervert their kids and send them to the same institutions of “higher learning”. Even worse is that this progressive decay has cheeped down into our primary and secondary educational systems, giving them a head start on the brainwashing of our children.
You think the divide in America is growing? Well so do I and millions of other Americans in flyover country do too.
This time it really is not just about politics.
SOME of us realize that it is about taking control of the United States of America and turning it into a Socialist/Marxist cesspool just like the other failed states in this world. Which of course will cause our Military to shrink and it’s ability to defend to diminish. The economy/energy/education will be in the hands of the state, which is the fastest way to the destruction of America and her beliefs.
We conservatives and others haven’t liked the choices our representatives have been making for about the last fifty years. But being the silent ones we just kept working and hoping that our government would somehow see the light and the errors in their ways. And being gullible we kept voting for those that lied and said they were for conservative ways and measures and a smaller government.
While of course the progressives kept eating out bigger and bigger pieces of the federal and state governments.
So there you have it…Our continuing bad judgment and mistakes. We have to bear much if not all of the blame. Especially for electing Obama.
Also remember this, Obama and his backers understand the stealthy incremental nature of legislation, and he also has been taught the Chicago way of doing business in politics, and he has backers and handlers that understand it even more.
The dirty tricks department not only extends to false registrations and vote fraud, but to Chicago dirty tricks in the Senate and the House, and in the back rooms of Lobbyists, Progressive Support Groups such as ACORN and of course-Unions.
When enough Americans finally understand what our Founders feared would happen-has indeed happened slowly and steadily over the last fifty or so years, Obama, Reid, Pelosi and RINOS like them will never be reelected. Or you would think so, wouldn’t you? But if we go by our past record, it appears that Americans can’t see past the lies told by those running for office.
Maybe that will change, I certainly pray it does.
In the LAST ten or so years, it has taken an out of control federal government spending our money and lots of it to FINALLY get our attention. while it should have happened over these last fifty or so years, it just didn’t because it was a slow and steady drain of our liberty and stealthy building of government theft and accumulation of powers.
Even now today, there are still millions of Americans that don’t know or care a twit about politics but just vote the party line or even worse…don’t vote at all. The democrats almost have a lock on minority and black voters and will close that lock with legislation in the next few month.
This time in our history, this enemy within, are almost succeeding. The only thing in their way is you and the rest of loyal Americans, of all parties and affiliations, because it appears our representatives and even our President will not uphold their oaths.
Power indeed does corrupt, but it takes a certain deviant breed of people that want to change America into something that our Founders never wanted, fought against and warned us about. They are our enemies within.
Our Founder’s not only warned us against all this, but wrote rules in our Bill of Rights (and it’s Preamble), our Constitution. And inscribed in other important papers that were meant to warn, prepare and enable us to protect the Republic for which they stood, died for and wanted for all of their future generations of Americans.
It has only been in the last few months or so, that American’s attention has not only been raised, but also their long held anger has been allowed to vent itself against our so called “representatives”, the ones that are supposed to be working for us, but seem to just be working for themselves and others.
I pray in the next few years or so there will be many more millions of Americans that will voice their opinion loud and clear and vote accordingly. If they don’t or are stopped by voter fraud and other Chicago tricks and tactics, then the only alternative is not to be spoken of until it will be almost too late.
Papa Ray
West (now Central) Texas
__________________
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
2009 Judge Alex Kozinski
#103 – JFSanders031 said:
With sarcasm on the Internet (at least for nincompoops like myself), one should identify it with a smiley
–or– [sarcasm] I’m too stoopid to understand sarcasm even when it’s staring me in the face. [/sarcasm]. 
@79 Ashen – re nurses in Texas
The Texas Medical Center (a few miles from downtown Houston) is huge – about 75k jobs, including over 10K RNs. There are also a number of of new and/or expanding hospitals in the suburbs – look at Sugar Land, Katy, Woodlands.
I have heard lately that the demand for nurses is reduced somewhat, however, at least as measured by the availability of part-time fill-in work.
BC cohorts are welcome in Texas and will find kindred spirits. Ya’ll come.
it is better to play to win, given that you find yourself in the middle of a game. Life is exciting in that way really, once you realize that you have no choice but to make a choice.
Thank you, Wretchard, that was a very welcome thing to read. It’s been a day for Black Dogs here at the JMH Compound, and a little reminder that all our anchor cables have been cut so we better keep some steerage way on the ol’ ship is well received.
Oh, and re: here’s my fearless forecast, Obama’s going to be the worst President in history
Well, no wonder Jimmeh Carter likes him then. Must be nice for the peanut farmer to finally get off the bottom rung. Your forcast is, BTW, unfortunatley quite right. Comes the moment, comes the muddler, I guess
We are the river of history. Our civilizations and our paid up mortgages aren’t really the real places that we live. And in times of a crisis, when we see ourselves on the verge of losing everything, it’s important to know that we carry our homes with us, if we come into self-possession, the only property that means anything. And we will be at home until the end.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
– T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
Good show papa ray –the boy has a ‘legend’ trip now that will throw off sparks even unto HIS grandsons.
Thanks, PACat –i did not have that distinction among places.
wretchard, “…on the verge of losing everything, it’s important to know that we carry our homes with us, if we come into self-possession, the only property that means anything. And we will be at home until the end.” –there it is again, that mystery being, who dat? –that possesses us unless ‘we come into self-possession’. Don Juan Matus who taught the paleolithic spirit world to Carlos Castaneda said he knew who it ws, he could see him when he prepared correctly –it is your own personal Death, just behind your left shoulder, watching you, his other half. Matus never explained those things, but clearly having that thing behind you in your mind is a constant reminder that you are in fact alive, and that you are in the midst of an incredible adventure. A light show between two eternities.
“The world’s not my home. I’m just a stranger here”. Great song. Listen on Youtube, if you know how to get there.
Yet there is a prime paradox here. God has created an amazing universe. I think you must be as familiar with quantum mechanics as theology. Each points to God. The universe is designed for life, free will, and beauty.
God has created a beautiful place. When we see pictures taken by Hubble, and the other space telescopes of things never seen by man, they show us beauty.
This is where the danger of too great a focus on the world’s not my home lies. We would join gnostics who imagine only spirit good, and matter evil. We miss the chance to live eternal life starting now. Remember Jesus first miracle changed water to wine. Not just a little, but hundreds of gallons. Not just ordinary wine, but the best wine the taster ever tasted.
In the midst of all the awful things happening, be drunk on Hope. Not the Oboma hope that is a lie, but real Hope, that promises only chance of success, real Hope, “the thing with feathers”.
Our journey, along His Way, takes us into the valley of the shadow. As we enter the darkness, where second civil war seems certain, where atomic doom for one or more American cities seems certain, where third conjecture seems certain. Rejoice. Not at the horrors we face, but that in the midst of the worst the world can throw at us, we are not alone. We walk together.
I thank you Wretchard for this place of truth. A place we can hear others who see what we see, and struggle with what we each are called to do as individuals, and as a body of those who would strive to hold back the darkness.
“To dream the impossible dream”. That other great song.
dan @ 2:
Better than S&W, try this!
AK-47 Building Projects
Or:
How to build an AK type rifle
Marie claude @ anywhere/anytime:
Good Lord, woman (I assume). You come here and sling your poo about how broken we are here in the US but let someone point out your own shortcomings and you come out swinging. You also write in a fairly schizophrenic tone. If you are on top and slinging poo freely you sound very, very Fwench. BUT, should the going get tough your English improves markedly as do your arguments. Are you really two? Poor Marie, baiting the US conservatives when it is easy and either Daddy or Msr. coming to help you with the tough parts, when you hit tough slogging. Why the dichotomy? Please tell me if I misread but you do have two ‘voices’ as it were.
Eighty years more or less, Wretchard. Oh, 1913, yes, and 1861. But in 1933, the barbarians were inside the gates, the citizens outside. Now we don’t even know what it all means. That was the plan.
P/122; but real Hope, that promises only chance of success, real Hope, “the thing with feathers”.
Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
(by Wallace Stevens, from Reading PA, the mid-20th century, & Harvard)
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry–It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
Marie Claude,
I enjoy your opposing comments, although sometimes don’t understand them all.
You obviously have great disdain for the US, as many of us here have for Europe. But you seem to be very optimistic about the future of Europe, and I’d like to know what you see that provides this optimism.
Could you explain, or send links to English language articles that you generally agree with? It would be appreciated.
D/113; re your link -it;s really sort of a ghastly joke that NYTimes has bumped into the truth that its own 2005-2008 propagation of junk-think did so much to make too big to fail. ‘No more private securitization market?” it laments –well for starters, the credit system still has not written down to actual value them euphemistically called toxic assets (frauded appraisal valuations and defaulted loans) and taken the hit on capital that has to happen before new C&I business can come off the freed-up underlying and marked-to-market collateral pledges.
Assets still “extending and pretending” their busted financing of course can’t be pledged anew on real business nor in many cases even rolled over as far underwater as they are. They’re waiting for “employment to come back” which it would if the gov’t was using even a scrap of supply-side –AKA ‘real’ –stimulation.
Those bad C&I 5 years loans that started in 2005 are whoops due next year, and we’re still in fiscal cloud cuckoo commie land without even a hint of the payroll and corporate tax holiday that would get some job growth for the shopping season that makes or breaks small biz for the year –and it’s already October.
And on the mortgage side not only are jobs being sacrified wholesale to commie ideology, but the Krupps oops i mean banks (such as the Soros-reconstituted Indybank) with the ”loss-share” programs built into the new owners’ already hugely discounted purchase price (marked to market when THAT hurts the country, marked to book when THAT hurts the country), are indemnified –losses from foreclosure are the gov’t's –which of course makes instant cash flow to the forecloser –and thus a far better deal for the ‘loss-share’ lenders than the workout program that is supposed to be ‘keeping folks in their homes.
Huge systems everywhere, reoriented not just wrong but 180 degrees wrong on the incentives which drive free markets. Everywhere ya look. Stuck like a million yellow post-its all over a matterhorn-sized Turd Mountain of moral hazard.
121. luddy barsen:
wretchard, “…on the verge of losing everything, it’s important to know that we carry our homes with us, if we come into self-possession, the only property that means anything. And we will be at home until the end.” –there it is again, that mystery being, who dat? –that possesses us unless ‘we come into self-possession’. Don Juan Matus who taught the paleolithic spirit world to Carlos Castaneda said he knew who it ws, he could see him when he prepared correctly –it is your own personal Death, just behind your left shoulder, watching you, his other half.
……
read this twice. first time gnostic outside looking in — so my left side was from the pov of someone just in front of me–ie his view of my left side ie his left side.
then I wondered. whose pov (“point of view”)are we talking about? so I had to re read the thread. this time when I came to the lines above–I read them as over my left shoulder from my pov.
who is that being in front. Its best to call him Jesus and recall that he is fully Man as well as Fully God. Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus
bluddy, I read your inquiry about the line,
In what place soever ye enter into an house, there abide till ye depart from that place.
and the following explanations by PA and Wretchard, but allow me to offer two thoughts which are competing within my skull.
First I thought it was a complex variation of Ashes to Ashes or as you mentioned fatalism, and depending on the translation the arguement could be made that is so, but the verbage in your quote is too fine for that to be likely.
Second, “In whatever place you enter an house”, if you enter a house lowly or exalted, don’t expect different treatment and don’t act differently no matter how your work progresses. Closer to you never get a second chance to make a first impression but with a nod to the hosts circumstance.
Important stuff for missionaries.
103 Jimmy,
I know about this project, thing is that Louvres is an historic protected site, depending on “Monuments historiques” department, that lovers of old stones are cautious to survey.
Problem is that this administration is usually touchy when a particular, or an enterprise wants to built an inhabitation or a store in the nearby of such monuments, and often refuses autorisations, or authorises them with draconian requests.
This is why it’s ironical, dunno the deepness of the problem, it seems that Sarkozy’s governation, or Paris Mayor’s, is less respectful of the rules. Also, if Macdo wanted to settle in the aera, it’s surely because tourists are very numerous, it’s not really Parisians that urged for such sort of food
Ragnad D
WTF, you’re the persons that advocate freedom of speech, seems that your people largely use it to critisize and or to deamonise us ; so if you’re respectful of the rules, then suffer that, we, being incorrectly attacked, also can benefit of the right of response.
I saw that Mongoose and Subotai projectected, probably purposely, their bitterness upon us, that’s all !
dtmack,
“You obviously have great disdain for the US”
it’s not a few responses to bitter comments that represents my real sentiments. If I really disdained your country, I wouldn’t even bother to reply to “virtual dusts”. If persons hold a rational discourse, then I am on the same waves, but if some others express their emotional “hate” for us, then I am using my sword. Not always with good manners, but I learnt to use my punch with your people, so, in a way, thanks. Besides, I’m from Mars, so I enjoy crossing swords.
Now, I am optimist by nature, and so far EU has been benefitful to the new countries that accessed to its membership. But some still have difficulties to understand the rules, they are still living in their historical space.
I have no particular infos sites, just that I surf on different papers, or blogs, in english, german and french.
And given the actual “recession”, being united is still the best way to resist. Also we are living in times of great moves, dunno where we will be in 10 years, so, if you display negative feelings, sure you’re not constructing an armour for confidence. That’s where your enemis can manipulate you so that you slide lower.
“What the CRA does, in effect, is compel banks to seek the permission of community activists to get regulatory approval for bank expansions and mergers”
All decisions are political, and must be made with the proper “consultation.” Under the Obama regime, everyone needs a political (NKVD) advisor. It’s that simple.
Nahncee #71
“P.S. Wretchard has a new picture. Very elder statesman, much less pirate. Bummer.”
Whiskey’s premises on women proven beyond doubt by his biggest critic.
Criticize him again, and proven hypocrite you’ll be.
Some time back, if anybody asked which country they would be most optimistic about, the US often ranked high, if not the highest. That’s not true anymore, and Obama and gang are doing everything they can to make things worse.
This is the worst thing that could happen, for a country could never recover if there is no faith left in it. The crazies have to be dealt with, but I don’t think you can ever convince the irrational 35-40% of Americans that they were wrong, and if they stick around, their ideas will just get promulgated by Gramsci stealth again. Besides, a great deal of the human race will always remain stupid.
So what does that leave us? Ideo-cide? Idiot-cide? Forgive me if I seem to be supporting the idea that people should die for supporting irrational ideas which have proven time and time NOT to work. Because their failed ideas have consequences just as deadly as a bullet.
As for the fact that China is now pressing for a new currency… I’ve long looked on China as a big parasite sucking on the US, trying to grow big enough for the day it can stand on its own. Does their support for a new currency regime indicate that they’re indeed ready for this next step?
In any case, my bet is still on China to make it. The Chinese autocrats are probably torn between laughing at Obama and agonizing over how the impending collapse of the US will severely damage their own export-oriented economy.
W
And for those who like to think in secular terms and see themselves in the great river of history, the lesson is approximately the same. We are the river of history. Our civilizations and our paid up mortages aren’t really the real places that we live. And in times of a crisis, when we see ourselves on the verge of losing everything, it’s important to know that we carry our homes with us, if we come into self-possession, the only property that means anything. And we will be at home until the end. God bless my dear departed teacher. He knew. He knew.
One of your all time great writings. You have a tremendous talent.
Even as a committed secularist, atheist even, I believe the same thing as you have written.
Part of my home that I carry with me now is the Belmont Club and its multidimensional commenters.
God bless,
ADE
Like the new photo, W.
O come one, no more uro, no more b.s., everybody likes pirates. Doesn’t mean you’re going to vote for one, much less marry one. And if she’d said, I like the elder statesman look, you’d accuse her of wanting to marry a Prince.
Cap’n Harry Morgan was a Princely pirate. At one time he commanded a fleet of 37 ships and 2000 men and attacked communities on the Spanish Main.
There’s a guy any girl should go for.
bob/138; that was in between Dragnet and M*A*S*H wasn’t it? Ah, Dragnet. That opening four words of Jack Webb’s voice over was sheer hard genius.
“This is the city.”
and then Detective Cap’n Harry Morgan sailing down Sunset Blvd under the Jolly Roger. wow –those were the daze –
God has created an amazing universe. I think you must be as familiar with quantum mechanics as theology. Each points to God. The universe is designed for life, free will, and beauty.
Consider the sea. How wonderful and fearful it is. An unending eat and be eaten. The forms wonderfully and strangely created, for offense and defense. Centuries of it, eat and be eaten, endless, life feeding on life, sickening, millions of years of it, billions, chomp, chomp, here on our little watery world, not to mention out in the vasty spacial deeps. If you can figure out the wonderful meaning of all this, give it a try. Since we’re not fish, we ought to try to swim to shore fast as we can. That’s the dignity of being human, some try to swim away from the chomp chomp. Most of the universe wasn’t designed for free will and beauty. Most of the universe seems to be designed as a horror factory, a pulsating urge of the aggressive biological cell.
Keep things in perspective. Most of the animals live in a hell, and to some, we’re the devils.
The Harry Morgan I like wasn’t nobody’s second banana. Not the real Harry.
Ernie Hemroid had a Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not. This Harry only had one arm, making it hard to work a machine gun.
While he wasn’t the best provider in the world, he was a good lover. His wife loved him too, and he was monogamous, and thought first of the wife and the kids.
obama has no interest in keeping any vestige of a free market Adam Smith based economy where the regnant precept is:
“Every individual…generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”
The Wealth of Nations, Book IV Chapter II
This is the invisible hand that would have allowed the markets to self correct, with peril for many, but you can’t save all the stupid people in the world. Community organizers, like communist street thugs are interested in taking from the well to do and saving the stupid at the expense of the better off comrade. Hence we get the Marxian precept:
“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Karl Marx
This nation adopted this plank of the Communist Manifesto. http://tinyurl.com/dr5cq
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Americans know this as misapplication of the 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, 1913, The Social Security Act of 1936.; Joint House Resolution 192 of 1933; and various State “income” taxes. We call it “paying your fair share”.
Obama is a dedicated, committed, lying, cheating communist worthy of any spot in FDR’s Cabinet.
The average U.S. citizen is still sitting on the sofa eating cheetos and watching football.
You deserve what you get. We have earned a revolution.
C/128; –beautiful triste melancholia on the violin –thanks –i do try but am seriously unworthy –i’d make Doubting Thomas look like George Patton –so i skulk around the outside –within earshot i hope.
W/129; think i get it –if a missionary were to move on to richer quarters it would have hurt the feelings of the humble folk who had welcomed him in –and thus to drain the missionary’s whole message. So a practical instruction to missionaries –indeed a worthy if oblique take –
“First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.”
One can’t step on one’s own message and then expect anyone to take it seriously.
Unsk #9 – “Putin, China, Iran, France and the Arabs are conspiring to avoid selling oil in dollars.”
Why the word “conspiring”? Anyone would think that America has the God-given right to pay for its imports in its own currency – never mind how much that currency is devalued by the actions of a small number of hideously greedy and dishonest Americans. Oh, wait – apparently you do think that.
Wrong. The oil belongs to those whose country it’s in, and it is entirely up to them how it’s paid for. Unless, of course, the USA wants to enforce its whims by other means (a la Clausewitz). Which, again, apparently it does – as long as it doesn’t hurt the business interests of the current President’s family and friends too much.
The USA had (and still has to some extent) its own oil reserves. It isn’t everybody else’s fault that you don’t seem to know how not to waste them.
If the USA had not helped the cause of Arab nationalism and jihad in order to walk all over the UK and France, fifty years ago, and if after that the USA had not been utterly incompetent in its policy in the Middle East, and if after THAT the right target had been attacked in response to 9/11 – then there wouldn’t be a problem, would there? You’d already own the Arab oil. Or the Europeans would. People who want to kill us would not.
“Spoiled brat with a gun” covers it.
Bob@140 says:
Most of the universe wasn’t designed for free will and beauty. Most of the universe seems to be designed as a horror factory, a pulsating urge of the aggressive biological cell.
What most don’t realize is that our planet is NOT a paradise. It is a very hostile environment. God, as Artist and Engineer, has provided us with a wide range of tools and gifts with which to survive and grow in this deadly place. However, if we fail to use Faith, intelligence and reason, along with the other gifts we have, to cope with our challenges we will surely die as individuals and if we are really stupid, perhaps as a species. In fact, the smart money is on the fact that each of us is going to die no matter what we do. So, with all the wonderful things that ARE available to enjoy and savor as a result of hard work, education, and our individual gifts, savor the beauty in the dance of life and death. Plant a tree, make a friend, fall in love, raise children, build a house, create, grow, bring order out of chaos, catch a fish…
So,…bob, do you want to live forever?
“sickening”
why “sickening” to see new life come from old life, especially when nothing on this world is permanent? That’s more a display of squeamisness than any serious moral analysis. Sure, the natural world has a lot of sharp edges. Learn to accept that and you’ll understand much about this world.
“Most of the universe seems to be designed as a horror factory, a pulsating urge of the aggressive biological cell.”
Again, you’re imposing your human values on things without realizing it. “Horror” only comes into play if you fail to accept death as a natural and ordinary part of life, and one which almost always leads to new life of some sort.
Everything dies, including us. Only our childishness makes us regard this as something “bad”. For non-sentient beings, the utility of their lives lies in what new life they will leave behind them, either by procreation or predation. As sentient beings, we have infinitely more potential, but still the same limited time to realize that potential. It’s an intersting system. Now, it would be false to claim that this means there is no good and evil; but human ideas of good and evil exist *inside* of this system, not external to it.
To Fletcher C. – as an American, I agree with you completely that it is ridiculous to call these meetings “conspiring”. They are normal activities that any countries would take when faced with the ridiculous financial mismanagement that we are unleashing on the world.
Furthermore, I think that a de-linking to dollars and a consequent inflationary run-up in oil prices would have terrible short term consequences but vastly more positive long term conseqences. What do I think these will be? Not the green fantasies that are already failing; no, out of necessity and under the threat of economic collapse, America will finally be forced to abandon much of our current restrictions and will develop the vast oil reserves that exist off Florida, off California, and off Alaska, not to mention the reserves of coal and natural gas which could power everything we require for the rest of the century.
We need a crisis bad enough to scare us into dumping almost all of our current environmental restrictions on development. De-linking oil and the dollar looks likely to do exactly that.
And that’s going to be the road to true economic recovery.
So,…bob, do you want to live forever?
Depends on the circumstances.
> So,…bob, do you want to live forever?
> Depends on the circumstances.
No one wants to live to be 100 except the man who’s 99.
@ 100, you been old a helluva long time
I think if we get through these horrible 4 years, and I think we will, it will be seen as the low point in American history.
How we get through them is the issue, traditional Finance (Black market?) and alternate funding sources are soon to fill in where government and “legal financing” will not. It will come down to a battle over resources with big G having the advantage initially, but not long. The issues are much greater than that Stamp Act, or Whiskey rebellion or any right to suspend commerce or bonds of kinship. My children are worth more than the leftist pursuit of a fancy.
The move away from US currency is a smart move for everyone but the US. What will be interesting in the years ahead, is whether or not the US can remain one nation as the stress today is great and the anger palpable. If Washington answers with more of the same we are done as a nation. The Liberals with laissez-faire foreign policy and in your face domestic agenda’s will have won. The US will no longer be responsible, nor expected to act accordingly.
Who or what will help us then.
My father was born in 1916. When he was born, he was expected to live to about 1966. Male life expectancy in 1910 was 46.3, in 1920 was 53.6, (1975 World Almanac).Today at 93, he he is closing in on double the anticipated amount.
A man born in 1940 was expected to have 60.8 years. That same man in 2009, now closing in on 50 years, can expect 30 more years. As we learn more about what makes us age, we will be “younger”, with vigor for more decades. Dementia was seen as the inevitable fate of the aged. While we have a long way to go, for those under 50, the fear of losing your mind may only be a historic memory.
Quality of life is important, yet the true question is not how long did you live but how did you live? Did you embrace life, never fearing to fail? Join the adventure? Live a life of joy?
While I know where I go when I die, living life’s adventure is so much joy. I keep wondering what is around the corner. Stay out of nursing homes. They kill you.
Chomp Chomp?
A fish has gotta eat.
—
Jack and Harry’s lecture to BHO could just as well be directed toward “Bob.”
PS, Bob likes to impale flies on a hook so fish can “chomp chomp” on these innocent aviators.
—
Jack and Johnny Carson
If one subscribes to the idea of the fall of man, surely it’s easy to ascribe a fall to nature, and the animal world, as well.
Things don’t all come up roses out there.
Just yesterday I watched my little cat, growling over some hapless bird he’d got ahold of, tormenting it, pawing it around.
The images of a restored nature in the book, pine trees clapping their hands, sheep dancing on the hills, etc., are images of what the world should like if it were ever to recover from such an imagined fall. Humans however seem to have some ability to nudge this recovery about, in our own realm, at least, but seem to continually make a mush of it.
There are no shadows in heaven, and no sea there, so I have read.
Out this way we have taken pity on the poor elk, who have been really slaughtered by the reintroduced wolves, collapsing the herds, by having a hunting season on the wolves.
The one thing the Obama ad. has done right, taken the wolves off the endangered species list.
The animal rights folk have been against this move, however, inexplicably.
The elk, however, have been supportive.
I don’t use real flies, Doug, just fakaroos.
Think of all the little fish saved for every big one taken!
I call it fishing for a restored paradise.
Donofrio At Work
It’s possible something may actually come of this.
NRO’s Jay Norligner goes to the financial con-fab in Davos Switzerland every year and blogs about it in parts. I wasn’t aware of this get together of the Rulers of the World and find his reporting scary and prescient. I think our fate was decided there between the Clinton’s and who knows –China.
@134 no mo uro writes
Nahncee #71
“P.S. Wretchard has a new picture. Very elder statesman, much less pirate. Bummer.”
Whiskey’s premises on women proven beyond doubt by his biggest critic.
Criticize him again, and proven hypocrite you’ll be.
To which @138 bob responds
O come one, no more uro, no more b.s., everybody likes pirates. Doesn’t mean you’re going to vote for one, much less marry one. And if she’d said, I like the elder statesman look, you’d accuse her of wanting to marry a Prince.
Thanks Bob – not to mention it’s kinda hypocritical for any man to fault women for commenting on physical appearances. And it hardly proves whiskey’s point that we’re all politically immature and totally to blame for everything that’s wrong with the state of the Union.
Just for the record, I like the new picture. And my dream man is a pirate prince. Decades of disappointment have yet to tarnish my hopes
123: Ragnar
Prices on evil black rifles of all makes/models and calibers have come down in recent weeks, AMD-65′s are on special now at Centerfire Systems for 399.00. The kits you speak of are nice and entirely doable, I built an AMD when the kits could be had for 80.00. Used the pre-bent channel and tapped the trunnions for screws. not pretty, but entirely functional and not a problem in almost 4 years. I wish I had bought a truck load of them
Rounds and components both remain high… not much let up in prices so far (and I doubt there will be).
One interesting part of this is the blithe assumption various gulf countries will create a common currency. Does Kuwait really want the big bully Saudis to control their currency? Can they trust them?
The article seems to assume to propose is to do. Sounds like the way democrats do things. Just pass legislation and think you’ve solved a problem.
Does Japan even want to think of putting their faith in China? Why would anyone trust Putin? Maybe Obamo. So the more you look at this the less it makes sense.
Presbypoet,
Could a market determined specie be explored? Perhaps something based on a multiple number of items, and not pegged to any one thing. Would that allow for easy manipulation or dissuade it?
Has George Soros created and now inflated s “dollar bubble” just to deflate the US Economy?
K.I.S.S.
Ask yourselves a simple question. If you were the government of Japan, or Ireland, or Poland, or India or Kuwait or …., and you saw what the government of the United States has done over the last 9 months, what would you do? This has nothing to do with whether you had previously been a friend of the U.S. or not. If your responsibility is for the future of your nation and you see the hegemon that had kept the system going for over sixty years imploding you would have to react.
The only choices available for smaller forces facing a new power distribution system with China rising and Russia rampant are confrontation or accommodation. To confront could be achieved in theory by forming new alliances to contain the rising powers. That may happen over time but for now without the promise of Uncle Sam to support them by acting as an offshore balancer to continental powers, a role that would have given space for smaller powers to play off the larger ones like France and India did during the Cold War, they are choosing to accommodate.
In Asia perhaps a coalition of nations like Japan, Australia and India will form over time. Perhaps the Japanese will be Finlandized. In Europe the triple pressures of Russian energy blackmail, Islamic subversion and Brussels authoritarianism stripping away the sinews of sovereignty make the future look even bleaker.
Wretchard. Thank you for the article and comments.
#165 – LOTM – I think you’ve got it.
Re Wretchard’s new photo – much sexier than the previous.
130. Marie:
Au contraire, ma cherie. The reality is that McDo is France’s fastest growing eatery per the same article that assaulted my cultural sensibilities with the announcement of the debasement du Louvres. It would seem that Gaulic appetite is moving toward a gastronomic catastrophe of epic proportion. Evidently prompt and courteous service is valued by your average Jacques to the detriment of the corner cafe’.
But enough from me. I like France and the French people. Not so much the Parisians but the country folks are top notch in my book. Aquitaine is a picture painted on my mind. It always brings back memories, very good ones. Passez une bonne soiree ma cherie.
bob/159; Nordlinger is right to be fearful. These people are in the White House now in the persons of many of the ‘czars’ –Holdren, esp –that notoriously get no vetting –unless the press jumps on ‘em, in which case they get the swift boot quickly –weirdly quickly –and that’s that, we are to assume.
( be sure and scroll down about 60% to the Wizard of Baca Grande )
re Davos:
“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of state and corporate power”
- Benito Mussolini
marymcl #160:
And my dream man is a pirate prince.
Thus bearing out Whiskey’s theories.
Whiskey has a theory about pirate princes? Are they Somali’s?
Wretchard writes with the plumb line of the eternal optimist.
The foreward progress of history is a given constant. We argue about the details.
“God is in the details” so I heard. Yet that is an individual pursuit.
Yesterday I showed someone a tool shed I had built over the summer. It was one of those projects. I had a week off I didnt need. It took from June to August to complete and good enough for now. Winter is coming.
This is clearly not my field.
I kept pointing out to him how I had to even up sides with scrap pieces and brace it up, here or there, with metal angles. A pro could have done it better, cheaper, and faster. Yet I needed to do something with that time and my yard tools are in decent lodgings tonight.
Leaves will fall and spring will come.
Shalom,
Spindok
Sam (7) must be smoking some of that ‘medical marijuana’ you see advertised in all the counterculture magazines here in California. What free energy? Maybe he’s tongue in cheek. Hard to tell. All I know is that California is on the cusp of a complete and total collapse. The governator hasn’t got a clue and the dems in charge of everything have no intention of fixing the broken economy. They raised the sales tax AND the income tax in the middle of the worst downturn in 70 years and they’re planning on more ‘revenue enhancements”. Even after the collapse, and there will be one, I can’t see the crazies in the big population centers of LA and the Bay Area wising up and saying, “Gee, maybe the democrats don’t know what they’re doing.”
Battle of Wanat – Inside the Ambush –
luddy barsen,
Illuninati conspiracy promoters? What next, Lyndon Larouche? You are joking aren’t you?
We lament the absorption of Ireland, England, and all the other once independent nations into the smugly gitness of the EU.
I wonder if those intellectual twits know the American dismissive “Eew.”
On a time, families who were born and raised up in Virginia considered themselves Virginians first. The chartered and self-governing colonies created feelings of loyalty and solidarity that have persevered to the present day. You can see this preserved in the stubbornly separate state governments, legal codes, university systems, national guard units, state police, etc.
On a time, Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx, Staten Island were all independent municipalities. Their citizens even now pridefully proclaim themselves by borough, even when traveling in the hinterlands.
Maybe Europe will awaken and cast off the stifling statism of its government.
It is to be hoped this will happen before the Islamic Jihad subjugates Dar al Harb all as it has been trying to do for 14 centuries.
The New Caliphate is coming for You.
Or just as likely, the inheritors of the Cossacks or the Huns or the Mongols Or the Moghuls will flow over the Caucasus and establish a new outpost among the barbarians.
The unthinkable is not just approaching, it is HERE NOW, in manifold manifestations.
We have seen innumerable demonstrations that there really are people who treasure Honor and Duty enough to sacrifice themselves for their fellows. We have seen like demonstrations that there are evil humans. A surprising number of those are central to the incumbent government and their supporters.
Perverts, Thieves, Cheats, Frauds, have been exposed. Some have been dismissed, but far more continue comfortably in their inexplicable posts, consolidating their power, and spreading their vicious lies. I wouldn’t trust these degenerates to clean up after my dog. I sure don’t want them making decisions for the country. Seeing the backs of them trudging away after a good caning… can’t come too soon.
That reminds me…
Whatever happened to the moving vans full of White House furniture, silver, china, lace, and paintings the Clintons took after Bill pardoned all those late-term contributors?
LotM/177; i wish. I dunno from lyndon larouch –but a passel of these ‘New Age’ people are inside the White House. You do note the extreme oddity of the energy field arond that UN IPCC Report, i’m sure. That was a straw in the wind –there’s some sort of coordination going on worldwide, in the field of junk science, and it’s aimed at something. Search John Holdren –just start there. Obama’s science advisor has a record –writings & associations and so forth. take a look esp at his work on ‘excess human population’.
Scythianneedle is right –by the time we notice what’s onstage, there’s already been a whole lot of commotion offstage.
@172 ntk
Yeah, whatever. Actually whiskey’s social determinist theorizing is a mirror image of the thing he’s always ax-grinding about. Just like his uber-feminist counterparts, he conflates the personal with the political and just like them, he has no sense of humor.
Is it any wonder we like pirates and princes better?
How about Parrothead Pirates?
how about a Parrot Ox? it can talk and pull a plow too, paradoxically.
These are serious: They’re from 2007 –see if they still make sense –
http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2007/1012.html
http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2007/0831.html
I confess, I am a member of the Illuminati.
It doesn’t pay nearly as well as you think.
Illuminati conspiracy advocates are Dim Bulbs.
There is a problem when dealing with unstable people prone to fantasies and conspiracy theories, and make no doubt about it hard Leftists are (remember Lenin did pull off a genuine tin hat style conspiracy to overthrow the largest contiguous nation on earth.) The problem is in studying the dysfunctional while remaining objective. Cops face a similar problem. They have to deal with and associate with criminals, the manipulative and the disturbed, without losing their own attachment to reality. Another problem is the need to retain credibility before the public. We have to tease out the real threats from the dysfunctional fantasists on the Left. The latter provide noise in the system that the real threats can use for cover. Among those we hope are on our side we have to consider nuggets of useful information that can be offered by another set of dysfunctional, indeed mirror image, conspiracy theorists. While their motivations may be wrong their results may be important.
Isaac Newton was by some standards a lunatic obsessed with peculiar religious theories and Alchemy. Is it possible that the Illuminati conspiracy theorist can be correct about there being a threat from Maurice Strong and the anti-capitalist connections of Green politics influencing current American policy? Of course they can be right and the information they provide should be tested and applied if found useful, just as Newton’s work is accepted despite his other peculiarities. That does not mean that we need to tolerate theories linking vast networks into conspiracies involving Satanists and the CIA. It is also important that if we refer to any such sources we do so in a very careful way that makes clear that we are considering a specific item from a suspect source. To do otherwise will be to expose ourselves to ridicule.
Is it possible that someone linked to Lyndon Larouche or Ron Paul’s fringe supporters could be right about some threat? Sure it is but I would not trust them unless the information they offered had been very very very carefully inspected.
Lotm/184; that’s about the way i see it too –the URL i posted above is one i just found in a search, and saw as readable and full of five w’s (who what when where why) facts about the history and reach of of the radical green new-age movement. One can read the material without going Gemstone File (the notorious source of CIA as a drug operation, dunno about satanism, only skimmed the first of it to see its nature).
Point is, some of these big time Earth Day UN transnationalist folks are officials in the new administration. Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren especially has a record of seeing people as problems, as liabilities, as mistakes –see his work with Paul Ehrlich and their ideas about secret population control –and tell me the word ‘epidemic’ doesn’t flash across your mind –as what a select group of mad scientists could engineer if they (LOL!) got ahold of the White House or sumthin.
For contrast regard Ronald Reagan’s message –that a person is an asset, a resource, a producer and consumer who creates virtuous circles of activity that raise the living standards of all –that it takes people to create markets for progress and innovation in handling natural resources. Of course History bears him out –as do the metrics of human welfare –and not to mention that only a richer country will concern itself with environmentalism.
But the one-worlders, new agers, Gaea acolytes, etcetera, they are no laughing matter –we should not let fear of being seen as Lyndon Larouch berserkers keep us from looking at wazzup wit dese birds. If they could put something in the water to sterilize you without you knowing it, they would. –and then you’d be like Group Captain Mandrake, who thought his CO was wrong about the water!
Anyhoo, read the link –it won’t contaminate yo mind, i promise. and info dissemination is vital. for example, a handful of zealots running tests on 12 trees in Siberia + a directed meme drift thru UN science panels + Al Gore = cap and trade = enslavement of the last great hope of mankind, the USA middle class. And yet a few million people reading <a href="http://windfarms.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/al-groe-and-maurice-strong-con-artists-extordinaire/">“>stuff like this would’ve kept Gore from ever elevating himself to sainthood credibility in the first place!
http://windfarms.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/al-groe-and-maurice-strong-con-artists-extordinaire/
luddy barsen,
Agreed and thank you. I’m counting on you Buddy. If you went off the deep end we would be in trouble.