What if one day you woke up to find that everything you’d been doing for years was illegal? Sorry, wrong novel. The one we want isn’t Metamorphosis, but Franz Kafka’s other work, The Castle, where the narrator fails to discover to the last what he had to do to receive approval from the Castle’s bureaucrats. The protagonist K, deals with men whose powers are indefinite and who prohibit things for reasons that are never explained. Possibly they don’t know the reasons themselves. The same sort of mystery surrounds the raid of the Gibson guitar factory. The Department of Justice wants to shut them down for a reason. Is it really sane to ask ‘why’?
The ostensible reason given is that Gibson — but not other manufacturers who are — are using wood harvested in environmentally harmful ways from the Third World. Yet with permits from the foreign governments, the US Customs and the Forest Stewardship Council in hand, it is hard to know what more Gibson could have done before making the guitars. Except to stop making guitars. The WSJ provides the bare narrative.
Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson’s chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company’s manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. “The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier,” he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle. …
It isn’t just Gibson that is sweating. Musicians who play vintage guitars and other instruments made of environmentally protected materials are worried the authorities may be coming for them next.
If you are the lucky owner of a 1920s Martin guitar, it may well be made, in part, of Brazilian rosewood. Cross an international border with an instrument made of that now-restricted wood, and you better have correct and complete documentation proving the age of the instrument. Otherwise, you could lose it to a zealous customs agent—not to mention face fines and prosecution.
John Thomas, a law professor at Quinnipiac University and a blues and ragtime guitarist, says “there’s a lot of anxiety, and it’s well justified.” Once upon a time, he would have taken one of his vintage guitars on his travels. Now, “I don’t go out of the country with a wooden guitar.”
Why? Was it because Gibson was not a union shop? Did they offend some powerful interest in the administration? What more could they have done to get proof that their wood was legit? These are all just theories. To get answers to actual questions, Gibson might have to do what K did before the fictitious Castle: wait and wait and wait, and win a case in court only to discover that it changed nothing. The interesting thing is that Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz may understand that he’s never going to get a reply, and unlike K, is unwilling to wait indefinitely simply to get a notice that patience is not allowed. So he’s taking his case to public, because maybe they can figure it out.
Patiently waiting isn’t always the best strategy. In fact, Kafka wrote another story called Before the Law, in which he explained the dangers of patience. The story is a single a paragraph in length and you may read it at the link in five minutes. But here’s the gist of it.
Basically the applicant in the story patiently waits before a gate for permission to enter The Law and is given reason after reason for not being allowed in “just now”. He waits for decades and decades and when he is finally dying of old age he aks the gatekeeper why he was never permitted entry. And he wants to know why no one else was seeking entry at this imposing gate? The answer is unforgettable.
The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things considerably to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know now?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is it that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?”
The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”
“This entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”
How did Washington ever become so Kafkaesque? What process transpired in the historical night to make so many individuals wake up to find themselves transformed into monstrous vermin ruled by officials at golf course? And who can answer this mysterious question? If Juszkiewicz simply waits for an answer to when the DOJ decided it was illegal to manufacture a guitar, it might be like waiting for the last doorway to close, the one made only for him.
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Bravo! you have just described the insanity and the only way to stop the insanity is by destroying the system! starting over. Otherwise it’s the same thing over and over and over again, elected the liars who go and do nothing more then what the previous lairs did…
All bureaucratic life mirrors the works of Kafka. The older and larger it is, the more it does do just that.
It does not matter if the bureaucracy is a creature of the government or a private enterprise. If left to grow old it turns into cancer, eating upon that which it was supposed to serve with an insatiable hunger.
And that is the curse of the idea of central planning. It cannot work without a powerful bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are not just the path the Hell, they are its blueprint.
Yes, Bravo!!! It used to be that quaint customs like “equal justice under law” prevailed and their violation prompted widespread outrage. “And we like sheep…” See Luis Bunuel’s great film, “The Exterminating Angel.”
Well, what do you know. All the rock musicians who slandered President Bush and hyped Obama are now getting their reward. Good. Put ‘em all in jail.
Wretchard,
I know this is off topic but I’m not sure how to contact you otherwise. I thought this link on Filipino as the language of the unlearned
would be personally interesting. http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/lifestyle/08/26/11/admu-students-essay-filipino-language-raises-online-firestorm
Regards, Ken
I see that in November, businesses must by law post all laws and lisences in which they are in compliance. This will include the right of labor to organize.
Surely it is beyong ironic that businesses must publically display their compliance, but government can raid a business without letting the owner know why. We are writing a tragedy, not a science fiction novel.
“Why are they messing with me I never did anything to them? They are messing with you because they can.”
Wild animals are moving into areas inhabited by humans because they have no fear of man. Used too you had to travel some distance or go to protected areas to see large predators. It will take some more killings by the predators before the city folk rediscover the wisdom of terminally discouraging animal predators.
Now we have appointees and bureaucrats who have lost their fear of the populace. Sooner or later they will be re-educated.
tc @ 2: bureaucracies are not just the path the Hell, they are its blueprint
+1
Entropy, I guess, things tend to ratchet down, one can speculate wildly about just why and how this works for social and political systems, but it’s not rare, and only makes the miracle of new life, new creation, positive movements – that much greater.
Translation Guy
It’s been my experience that you never talk about English language usage in the Philippines. The Left see any and all manifestations of English as an affront to themselves even though it is the language in which for the most part they think and privately speak.
The easiest way to avoid getting into political English is to throw a “switch”. If you assume the persona of an Australian, Brit or American no one in the elites will take offense and find themselves responding naturally and unself-consciously. That’s because you’ve taken the political out of it.
But should you ever make the mistake of revealing your understand Tagalog, then don’t speak English unless you are prepared to dumb it down, the knowing both languages well has the effect of pretentiousness. Being “foreign” exempts you from such suspicions, since your are not expected to speak anything but English anyway. Foreigners don’t have airs. They’re just foreigners.
So throw the switch. Either be the gringo man or the pinoy man. But never the pinoy gringo man. That Ateneo student mentioned in the link made the cardinal error of introducing the class dimension into it.
But it’s dated view. In reality the “masses” are learning to speak English by watching DVDs, working overseas and enrolling in Korean-run English schools to make up for what the Left wing educational elite won’t teach them. They’re doing it for the least political of reasons. They need a job. It may be that eventually the people who was the dishes will all speak better English than those who consciously enroll in schools where speaking English is considered shameful for reasons of political correctness. The Leftist educational system the world over is like that. You pay to learn nothing but earn a credential. Then you take the credential and forget the miseducation you received and really learn how the world works.
But this is an elite conceit. Ignore them. The elites play an amusing but by no means central role in Philippine society. Their importance has been greatly exaggerated. In reality the country runs without them, but it won’t run without the remittances overseas workers who can’t function without English.
The process of English language diffusion is unstoppable. English is no longer a “colonial” language. It doesn’t belong to England any more. It belongs to the world. In the long run it won’t matter at all what the top Philippine universities teach or don’t teach since they are irrelevant to the phenomenon at all events.
Institutions have many of the features of livng organisms, but unlike companies or churches, governments are not subject to the discipline of a market which quickly kills off any organism which has acquired any pathological qualities. (Legislatures do, but not the Permanent Government in the bureaucracy) That’s why we need to build in automatic triggers of apoptosis and growth limitations.
Some ideas follow:
All laws expire after 25 years unless extended by majority vote. This includes laws which establish bureaucratic agencies.
All bureaucracies are terminated after 30 years (even the Constitutional ones like the Patent Office) and all of their regulations trashed. If Congress wants to continue the bureaucracy they can do so, but all staff must be replaced (even the janitors – there can be no institutional memory of any kind) and the regulations must be rewritten with only 80% as many words.
No bureaucracy may promulgate more than 200 pages of regulations. The law must be knowable to the average man.
Everyone who wants to be a senior bureaucrat must be able to recite every rule in their organization from memory, and know the page numbers they’re written on.
A third chamber of Congress is established but has no power or responsibility except to repeal old laws and revoke regulatory authority. Voters will elect the men who promise to revoke the most burdensome laws.
Laws which are not enforced for three years expire. A State has no business passing laws it does not have the resources to police.
When a government goes rogue it becomes a tyranny. This is what we have here. A president who makes law, an EPA who makes law that contravenes the scientific fact of the cosmic origins of global warming (hell we are getting out of an ice age). And no agency is worth its salt unless they can persecute the innocent and make a few bones by it.
Meanwhile, the US federal government is illegally running guns to drug cartels and has opened the gate to foreign citizens who don’t bother to wait.
Sorry–my previous comment should have read the path to Hell rather than the path the Hell.
Have mercy for the retarded. But don’t take it too far. Otherwise people like Paul Krugman might be mistaken for sentient beings.
They will have to pry my guitars from my cold, dead fingers. Christ on a cracker!-You’d think we were making these things out of bald eagles and snail darters.
Bad move to piss of vintage guitar owners-those solid body electrics make a great weapon.
Black Panther Case investigation-bad idea
Fast and Furious investigation-bad idea
Terrorist Trials in NY-great idea
Releasing Bush-era interrogation memos and reopening the investigation of CIA
interrogators after they had been cleared-great idea.
Raiding citizens home for wife’s student loan delinquency-better idea
Raiding Gibson Guitar Plant-Top Priority (This will teach this nation of cowards)
We insist on calling our liberal progressive rulers elites, as if they are somehow chosen by God to rule. They have acquired power, yes, but they are not elite in any real sense of the word. They are pissants, and a pissant with power is therefore a puissant pissant.
You make guitars?
The big cigars
Are at all times reliant
Upon the law
Whose very paw
Will press the non-compliant
The rules you see
For such as we
Resemble a great snake dance
While left elites
Suck on the teats
Of other puissant pissants
7. toadold
‘Now we have appointees and bureaucrats who have lost their fear of the populace.’
Absolutely correct and it’s very bad news that this is happening in America. What the heck is American about any of this? I’m sure that the government raiders think of themselves as Americans – but why? They are suffering from a virulent form of some fundamentally un-American neurosis.
This raid might be seen by the bureaucrats as a way to defend themselves against the first lawsuit that Gibson has going. The theory would be something like “find some hanky-panky now and that will poison Gibson’s standing in the lawsuit against the first government raid.” Not logical, nothing to do with the existing lawsuit or how the law works but that’s how the bureaucratic mind works.
Reading “The Castle” scared me because at the time I worked for the government and I could see I was actually inside The Castle. There’s no point in attempting to reason with the raiders. I assume that Gibson has the advantage of not having the federal government as a customer. In the long run, firing legal cannons at the government raiders may turn out to be an expensive way of increasing Gibson’s sales. In any case, it’s do or die for Gibson.
No regulation without representation.
The sad truth is that tyrannies must seek out those who criticize them and to silence them. The late Harry Brown once said; “Every law, no matter how small, will eventually require men with guns to enforce them”. The follow on fact is that they will kill many in consequence.
The king could only hear the chatter of his own court, rumors of dissent was a matter of hearsay but always deadly to those accused of it. It is the modern era with its global communication that gives a new threat to government violence and tyranny, the all seeing big brother and this is exactly what kept Orwell up at night.
Constitutional Amendment:
1) All regulations, existing or future, must be ratified by a two thirds majority of both the House and the Senate.
2) Existing regulations must be ratified within two years of the adoption of this amendment.
3) All regulations must be reviewed, and re-ratified by a two thirds majority of both the House and the Senate, not more than ten years subsequent to the previous review.
4) Each regulation must be expressed in fewer than one thousand words. Existing regulations must be in conformity with this word limit no more than two years subsequent to the adoption of this amendment.
5) After the two year initial ratification period, all contracts which are framed to conform to a non ratified, or non re-ratified, regulation are immediately null and void.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/08/new-scandal-at-doj-as-illegal-guitars-end-up-in-hands-of-mexican-drug-lords.html
…
“I’ve been working the border for over 25 years and have never seen a weapons cachet like this,” said Patrol Supervisor Mike Foreman. “A ’53 Goldtop, a ’59 Black Beauty, Flying V’s, a whole armory of SGs. Enough for an entire guitarmy. It’s a wonder there weren’t any total shreddings.”
Suspicions that the U.S. Department of Justice was involved in the case first arose after agents noticed “Property of the U.S. Department of Justice” embossed on the back of each guitar. A trace of the serial numbers confirmed that they were confiscated only days earlier by DoJ agents from the Gibson Guitar Company in Memphis.
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, Justice Department officials admitted that the guitars were part of a complicated sting program know as “Operation Fast and Fretless,” ostensibly designed to stem traffic of illegal guitars and amplifiers between the U.S. and Mexico. The multi-agency program – involving Justice, ICE, TSA, EPA, IRS, FDA, Fish & Wildlife, USDA, and the Bureau of Whiskey, Groupies & Hotel Rooms – reportedly encourage border area pawn shops to sell the guitars to known drug kingpins.
…
Raiding Gibson might be a guitar bridge too far for the Obama administration. Guitarists are storytellers after all. Gibson is a national icon. This cannot end well for the administration. I’ve got a Gibson cherry red Howard Roberts Fusion with an Ebony neck (Howard always insisted on that)…waiting for the nighttime knock….
Possible someone said it already, but…
They can pry my rosewood fretboards from my cold dead fingers! (They went for rosewood this time)
I’ve got one Gibson SG, one Fender Strat ’62 and one Ibanez GSA, all rosewood fretboards. My acoustics are rosewood too. I’ve been forwading the story links to leftie (not to be confused with leftys) guitarists I know. Hope that some light will enter their dim bulbs.
An example of political correctness and bureaucracy at its typical level of rationality and civility. My residential lot is located on a road that in the 1990’s was designated a “canopy road,” meaning that trees along it may not be cut. The canopy protection zone extends beyond the road right-of-way another 70 feet into my lot. When I moved in, I was aware of the restriction on tree removal, but was unsure whether I could build a fence on my property in the CPZ, so I tried to search county code online, but the links were dead or mislinked. Then I called two different county offices and both told me that I could put up a gate and fence as long as they were not in the right-of-way. I put up the gate and fence.
Two months later I received a registered letter from the county EPA demanding that I submit a “vegetation management plan” that must include a plan to remove the structures. Not a simple, clear letter in plain English demanding removal of the fence, but a demand for a vegetation management plan. After a phone call, I learned that county code did prohibit the fence and I agreed to remove it. But the county still insisted on my submitting a vegetation management plan. Having done published research in plant ecology, I was able to see that the county’s attempt to maintain live oak trees along the road was ill-conceived because the oak seedlings were smothered by grape and bull brier vines as well as by shrubs that could out-compete the young live oaks. To maintain live oaks in perpetuity along the road the county would have to spend large sums of money to clear competing vegetation twice a year at least. So I offered to move the fence, but told the county that vegetation management was something they did not want to get into publicly since they had no management plan themselves. At that point the county cancelled their summons that had required my appearance before the Zoning Enforcement Board.
The piece of crap politicians that created the canopy protection zone were just working to garner votes from ill-informed tree huggers. The politicians and their bureaucrats could not be bothered to actually ask what level of effort it would take to preserve a live oak canopy in perpetuity. Nor did they consider the risk to life and vehicles from falling limbs/trees over the road. I am maintaining a file of news stories nationwide on people killed by trees that suddenly fall (not storm caused). That is more common than one might suppose. When someone is eventually squashed on one of the canopy roads, I will go to their family with my file and urge them to sue the politicians who want to control our lives without thinking anymore deeply about their proposals than that votes can be harvested.
Even bandgeeks must take heed.
“Is that a Selmer EEb contrabass clarinet in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”, said the alluring Customs agent.
“It’s a school horn, so it’s not my property”, I replied.
“Cuff him.”
Rosewood. (spits) It’ll be the death of me.
So alluring to touch, so beautiful to hear, so deadly to your liberty.
Otherwise, you could lose it to a zealous customs agent—not to mention face fines and prosecution.
With the proper papers, the instrument would be ‘arrested,’ then be shot trying to escape, and buried in the collection of a local agent.
If our fascist Government was really intent in stopping this “illegal” activity by Gibson they could have
accomplished it, at the border, by instructing the customs agents to deny importation.
Instead they choose the FBI raid with armed agents. This is a strong message to businesses and individual citizens that they should use extreme caution when dealing with Government officials.
Gibson still has the right to move offshore.
Aix-en-Provence would do.
“How did Washington ever become so Kafkaesque?”
Elections. Decade after decade the American people voted for wise bureaucrats to rule them. And so are they ruled.
This may or not be related. A programer I know works for a small company in the midwest. Two of the companies which this small company have provided services for years [Fortune 500] told the small company that to continue the contract work all programmers on site had to be Indian. So the contract company had to contract with an India company to supply programmers to these two large companies. There was no reason given just that was how all further contracts were going to work. This started in 2009. Could it have anything to do with ‘O’ trip overseas that year?
Crony Socialism. Somebody has an economic reason for having Gibson shut down. They placed enough money into some bureaucrats hands to make that happen. There will never be any evidence because no one will ever look for any. Money always leaves tracks. so if there was a desire to find the crooks, it could be done. Not under current American law, however. Lawfare. Gibson is toast. If this attack doesn’t work, the next one will. The courts are too corrupt to allow any defence….
22. ridgerunner
AFAIK, you cannot sue politicians over the laws they write. There are lawyers that post here, although they seldom admit it. They are Yankee Lawyers so don’t let them see your wallet.
It’s not just bureaucrats who have this sort of idiotic attitude. I once watched a documentary about a PETA rally in London during which the attendees were publicly burning leather jackets. As if leather isn’t a byproduct, and also as if destroying the jacket is going to make any difference to the cow that started off wearing it.
But even stupider than that – someone came along with a leopardskin coat, made in about 1925, and threw that on the fire as well. The point about the creature it came from still applies – but also, making and trading in leopardskin apparel is already illegal, so it wasn’t going to make any difference to the law either! Why didn’t this idiot simply hand the coat to some random homeless person, instead?
Remember the congress before the tea party election of 2010? The Twi lite of the Gads? The Last Daze of the Roamin’ Empower?
They announced that, should time or the whip count be against them, they will simply “deem” passed whatever they deemed passed. “We will just deem it passed” said Speaker of the Horse Pillosi, and deemed passed it was so deemed.
They announced that in order to keep Obama Cares under the trillion public-relations limit, they were going to simply erase the ‘doctor fix’ off the CBO scoring worksheets.
They announced that that this erasure would then be (fraudulently, said the FASB, the Financial Accounting Standards Bored, into the Dead Zone of the MSM) counted as ”savings”, and then later, when the obnoxious trill would again not stay below itself, that they would simply double count that fraudulent ”savings” as savings again.
They announced that the budget, as well as the cobwebby pending budget from the year previous, would be a little late, because they intended to never write it.
All this, and more, they announced.
Federal agent tries to confiscate Keith Richards guitar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv1bM0pp_o4
The head of Gibson contributed to Darryl Issa. That’s it in a nutshell.
Are we all cool with saying Obama is a fascist now?
r/27, remember this is the NYT so you have to read between the lines, but re your story of bundling small companies into the easier-to-control large companies, as well as setting up blame-free minor disasters for the uselessly ill or old, read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/health/policy/20drug.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB
vital cancer and such meds, even ‘by’ J&J, made in China and India, by mystery factories that are ‘having trouble’ with capacity and contamination? What?
#30 Fletcher Christian: What I expected to hear is that the PETA protesters were then arrested for pollution, as the smoke from the fire was protested by an Environmental group claiming both lung damage and global warming from the second hand smoke. LOL
stoicheion @ 29,
Of course. I was expressing myself poorly. It is the county that must be sued, if a court will authorize such an exception to sovereign immunity. Any suit for damages would be for the purpose of inhibiting future elected officials, i.e, to discourage the others. Having attracted a lawsuit is something that a political opponent can use against an incumbent. Absurd it is that we must sue ourselves (our government) to inhibit the statists.
stoi@29 and other southerners:
You know, when I’ve been in the south I’ve gotten my share of grief for being a yankee, but it was always said with a smile. Not one hint of enmity, ever, just good-natured joshing. I was once even asked if I wanted to wear a yankee uniform in a civil war reenactment (you guys are *really* nuts for those, it seems) and “kill” them.
And yet I saw other yankees get treated more circumspectly or even coldly. What’s up with that? Is there some sort of code you guys have for what makes one yankee good and another one bad that I luckily fell on the right side of, or am I just lucky period in the people I’ve met? I know it’s not because of my pretty face or charming personality…
A P @ 37,
One hint of condescension is enough to shut down the heartfelt Southern hospitality, although a polite facade may be maintained to avoid unpleasantness. Apparently you don’t radiate arrogance.
Re Ridgerunner @ 22 & 36 — Mr R. flags an important issue: we don’t just have out-of-control incompetent UN and Federal govts, our State and Local govts are just as contaminated.
L3 has argued strongly on this site for a return to Federalism as a step towards a solution. I would love to see that kind of devolution of power, but then come smack against the kind of local stupidity that Ridgerunner describes. My own County recently passed new land use regulations that (a) encourage so-called “wind farms” (which are usually built on ridges to maximize wind), and (b) mandate preservation of viewscapes (including restrictions on building on ridges). When the incompatiblity was pointed out the Tyrants, they simply shrugged their shoulders and passed their silly regulations anyway.
Frankly, I can’t see an answer to the dysfunctional nature of “democracy” which does not involve a major sifting of the gene pool.
All organizations become corrupt. All bureaucracies become vehicles for increasing the security and authority of their staff at the expense of actual achievement. For example, for many years I have done Red Cross. Over the last few years though my participation has declined as the Chapter became focused on internal turbulence and adherence to increasingly complicated but in appearance sophisticated rituals. Yesterday evening I stopped by the Chapter to see what could be done to help for the impending hurricane. I was warned that once I reported I should expect to stay for 36 hours as the City was shutting down the subways starting at noon. The senior Area Director recognized me and called me a great guy and urged me to come in. So I told him that I would go home and change after buying some food just in case and return around midnight. When I got back there was nobody there who knew anything, they thought the senior officers were in the building when they were not, but in accordance with procedure cots were set up in empty rooms to shelter staff during an extended disaster. I was told to wait in the shelter area until the senior staff returned to begin preparation. So I undressed and lay down. Immediately after I passed out junior staff arrived and threw me out of the building. After trying to build a case to protect themselves, saying untrue things about what I had said or they had said or the Director had said (who they only began to call to cover themselves as I left the building) they adopted a psuedo-legal weasely tone as to my “unauthorized presence” as I put on my shoes. I will not be back.
Buddy @ 31
Have you been reading Finnegans Wake?
The scarcity of Brazilian rosewood is due to the fact that it is not an Amazonian species. It’s native to the “mata Atlantica,” the strip of tropical forest along the east coast of Brasil, and only a minute fraction of that original forest exists after 500 years of human activity. The wood was used as structural members in earlier times and perhaps could be salvaged from old houses like longleaf pine planks are today in the southern USA.
NiceDeb picked up on a comment left at Bill Quick’s place:
“Gibson is the only guitar company targeted by the Obama DOJ under the
Lacey Act.
Tennessee is a right-to-work state.
Fender, Taylor, Rickenbacker, Danelectro, Carvin, MusicMan, and ESP
are in California;
Spector is in New York;
Martin is in Pennsylvania;
Guild, Ovation, and Hamer are in Connecticut;
Alvarez is in Missouri;
B.C. Rich is in Kentucky;
Heritage is in Michigan;
Washburn is in Illinois.
All are forced-union states.
Peavey is another guitar and electronics company, located in the
right-to-work state of Mississippi.
Since 2009, Peavey has been the target of multiple lawsuits filed by
a competitor, MUSIC Group, which alleges that Peavy products fail to
meet federal safety and emissions standards.”
Rules are for one’s enemies. Any vested power carries with it the ability to be corrupted. I’m trading in all my guitars for Gibsons.
I wonder if Henry Juszkiewicz is Jewish. Judging by the President’s disregard for Isreal, could we be entering our own 1938 version of Kristallnacht?
Only this time they won’t come just for the Jews.
Used to, when I heard of some raid, some prosecution out of the blue, with seemingly very little rationale, I used to think, “I wonder what they did?” Today, however, that question is pondered less often. Today, I don’t necessarily think that the ‘target’ did anything wrong.
Today, if I don’t have a shouting fest at the TV upon hearing of some injustice, I come to the realization that I just might be successfully programmed. Just like in society, bit by bit, “we” have taken men out of the cadre of people we revere in society; bit-by-bit, little-by-little.
I read a book back in the early 80′s that I can no longer remember the title. It (a la Red Dawn) describes a Soviet invasion and chronicles the fight of one man who lives (I believe) in the Southwest (New Mexico, Arizona?) and fights against the invading hoards. I remember very little detail about the book except the part at the end where, after the man has died, an old, illiterate man comes upon his diary and begins to shred the diary and burn its pages to keep warm.
I’m starting to feel like that dead guy, right now.
If anyone can relay the title of that book, I would love to know it so I can get my own copy.
#37 Agoraphobic Plumber
I’m a mountain boy, although my family comes from South China [smile]. But in my visits to the South, from what I can see; if you treat people there civilly, you will receive the famed southern hospitality. If you are demanding or arrogant, like many typical Yankees; well “Bless your heart”, you will be treated appropriately.
I remember my first trip to the South in the 1980′s to Biloxi and Pascagoula, Mississippi. Being Chinese, I had certain apprehensions based on the media. I got there, and everyone I met was nice, kind, polite, and helpful. The worst thing that happened was they tried to get me to eat grits for breakfast. If I could have, I would have stayed longer as a tourist once the business trip was over.
I compare that with stays in Columbus, Ohio; where people are just nasty and ill-tempered, or Nebraska where I had to carry a gun for the first time, because I am not Anglo.
In any case, from what I have seen here, I rather believe that you are neither arrogant or demanding; so y’all fit in.
Subotai Bahadur
37. Agoraphobic Plumber
………….
Was your family in the USA during the time of the civil war?
Subotai@45:
I’m sitting here trying to picture a Chinese mountain boy visiting Biloxi on business trying to choke down grits (which I actually rather enjoyed, but I know the feeling, having visited the Cajun back-country in Louisiana where they eat things best left undescribed). Or strapped in Nebraska, staring down the local bullies Clint Eastwood-style, squinting at them with a glint in your eye. Heh. We have a great country where such things can happen.
5. Translation Guy
9. wretchard
…………
I work in the internet marketing business.
Up until about 6-7 years ago Indian writers did a lot of copy in the business. Their writing was very idiomatic. Their phrase forms were Americanized versions of Indian thought processes. They looked funny. Then it was found that Philippine writers used the American language the same way that Americans did. So now they get all the business. There is a lot of business.
Charles@46:
I don’t think most branches of my family got here until the very late 1800s or early 1900s. They all came from Scandanavia, though, and all settled in West Scandanavia, i.e. the upper Midwest, mostly in Minnesota. We don’t carry a lot of the ancient baggage that a lot of older families carry about the civil war, I guess. If y’all wanna visit sometime, I’ll introduce you to lefse and lutefisk.
On second thought, I won’t. That’s not only not neighborly but could also very easily start the next civil war. Well, the lefse’s okay, but I’m pretty sure lutefisk was one of the things Saddam was working on the fear of which partially caused us to invade.
37. Agoraphobic Plumber
I was a “damn Yankee” when I first came to Alabama in 1992 (a Damn Yankee is one who visits and doesn’t have the manners to eventually leave), but I decided I just flat liked the folk down here better than many I met up North (born in Ohio) and many of those I met all throughout my military postings.
The South’s reverence for the military, a strong sense of patriotism, the respect many still show toward their elders, and the fact that the SEC whoops up on the Big Ten at almost every opportunity, made me realize that these were pretty stout folk with which to hang with.
I still meet natives who resent my lack of accent, but the many I’ve come to know and respect also know that my heart rests right next to theirs. I still hear the occasional racist remarks down here, but no less often than I hear them when I visit back home.
Bottom line: There is still a whole lot of good in all parts of this country. As long as the politicians fail to turn us against each other, we will be fine. As long as people realize that our differences are not nearly as important as what we hold sacred: the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution of these United States, we will be fine.
And yet, today, that seems like a big if. There will always be those who ignore the angels of our better nature in order to spawn the demons that will accomplish their selfish, evil ends.
I’m pretty sure lutefisk was one of the things Saddam was working on the fear of which partially caused us to invade.
Lutefisk is best described as the piece of cod that passeth understanding.
This is a fascinating story on many levels.
Although DOJ, as the most visible instrument of federal power, is given credit/blame for the persecution of Gibson, this is entirely under the purview of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Aside from laudable efforts to protect endangered species and habitats, Fish & Wildlife also possesses a robust and muscular law enforcement arm. Among its duties is enforcement of international treaties dealing with wildlife and endangered species.
Apparently, Wednesday’s raid was justified by an Indian law prohibiting the export of unfabricated ebony. The customs statement declared ebony fretboards, but the shipment was small ebony logs. Because the ebony was not cut by Indian workers the shipment was construed as a violation of the Lacey action and Fish & Wildlife sprang into action. (Interestingly, I understand that the Indian government was never consulted and did not request the raid.)
So, Gibson was raided to enforce the laws of a foreign nation.
This is merely the tip of the Kafkaesque iceberg …
With 25 years on active duty in the USAF, including over 4 years in the Pentagon, I could write something of a tome on this subject, including two recent experiences, one in my personal life and the other doing a study for NASA.
But let me add just this: Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.
I have noted on more than one occasion that despite convincing evidence that the Federal Government must downsize, and do so radically, instead I see that in all of its manifestations the government becoming more bureaucratic, more entrenched, more legally hidebound, and more demanding of more restrictive regulations.
When it’s time to deliver the death sentence on Big Government, turn the bureaucrats out into the streets, and padlock empty government offices there will be few indeed who have any regrets.
Sgian #44:
I believe the book of which you speak is from the mid-70′s and is entitled “Vandenberg.” It has nothing to do with the Air Force Base but does describe the aftermath of a Soviet invasion of the USA, one which is mostly unopposed because the American people don’t think it will make a difference to their material possessions and lifestyle.
In its quest for elusive cosmic perfection, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finds itself twisted into exquisite pretzels.
Consider the latest Northern Spotted Owl management plan:
http://www.fws.gov/oregonfwo/Species/Data/NorthernSpottedOwl/Recovery/Library/Documents/2010NSODraftRevisedRecPlan.pdf
After decimating the Pacific Northwest timber industry it is now apparent that the leading threat to Northern Spotted Owl is competition from the common Barred Owl, often referred to as the “Barn Owl.” Not merely competition for prey or nesting sites, but also competition for mating partners because these two subspecies that separated during the most recent North American glaciation readily intermate and produce fertile offspring.
So, the current management plan calls for owl ethnic cleansing – shooting Barred Owls that appear in areas designated as Northern Spotted Owl habitat. Treating a native species as it were a dangerous invasive species.
In effect, the bureaucracy takes its stand and vows that evolution stops here.
k @ 39: Frankly, I can’t see an answer to the dysfunctional nature of “democracy” which does not involve a major sifting of the gene pool.
Harumph. A few thoughts on that. First, neither could Plato, he didn’t much like democracy, and anyway expected all forms of government to alternate in a six-stage cycle. Second, we’re running a republic here not a democracy (tho that’s not a distinction Plato recognized), and that may help, some. Third, a lot of those supposedly high-IQ academic types tend to vote dysfunctionally, so I’m not sure IQ is really the right filter. Fourth, how *have* we been getting by? On luck and pluck. Let’s figure out why things have worked for two-hundred years and make those things better. We’ve had a fair amount of self-selection of voters, so a lot of low-IQ people don’t “bother” to vote. Well and good. Maybe one of the problems today is that these low-IQ ballots are being picked up by ACORN and the like via vote-from-home and the like. Well, Republicans could play that game too, though it might still favor the giveaway left.
But I have a basic faith in the democratic process. The problem is that our politicians need to speak to the electorate and convince them of the merit of their persons and their ideals. Get out there and thump the tub, stand on the soapbox, point with pride and view with alarm, kiss those babies, eat that chicken, believe in the nation and its people, and you will deserve to be elected, and just maybe you will be.
If some of the rhetoric is less than sophisticated for some of the audience, well, that has only been the way of the politician since the most ancient of days. It’s a test of the *polician’s* IQ to see if he can do this.
Effin’ country is eat up with Thugs.
LL3, I found another term; “acela corridor”
It is based on the Amtrak Express rout between Boston and Washington D.C.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express
A large majority of those seeking to change America into a Socialist State live along that corridor. I don’t think it will catch on, since there isn’t much melody there. At least not to my ear. Ad jingles have to please the ear to have power.
Fingerboards are normally shipped and bought as rough cut blanks, about 3/8″ x 2 1/4″ x 20″ It makes no sense to ship logs, as the blanks can be graded and shipped easier. Also the drying degrade is much less as blanks.
Essentially, this Lacey act puts every single furniture maker, cabinet shop, turner, wood collector, musical instrument maker, gun stock carver, etc. under the gun. Try to prove provenance on a piece of ebony purchased in 1984 for door pull or headstock overlay or fore-end cap-to ensure it’s legality today.
This is one of my main problems with a lot of law- the law attempts to make objects illegal, instead of actions.
I’m reading this as I try to figure out what to say to a woman who wrote to me asking if there was anything she could do about her sister’s killer, who isn’t currently being prosecuted for the crime. I occasionally get letters like this.
The killer had been released early from a previous crime, and the feds never got around to uploading his DNA into the federal database. So when he began attacking women, killing at least two, and DNA was drawn from the early scenes, there was no “match.” If the FBI had prioritized real crimes, instead of all the other things they spend time doing, the killer would have been caught before his body count ran quite so high. His capture uncovered systematic negligence. Many thousands of other DNA samples had also been ignored, and other offenders had been enabled to commit more crimes.
Our federal law enforcement agencies don’t just do things they shouldn’t be doing: they do not do what they’re supposed to be doing.
This is what I will tell the surviving sister if the state fails to prosecute: “the killer will not be tried for all his crimes because the state doesn’t like to waste money on trying every crime, even if it is murder. They need that money to pay for a team of attorneys to represent the killer for the next several decades. If your sister’s murder were politically useful to someone — if she had been gay, or an immigrant, and it could be called a hate crime — the state and federal prosecutors would be tripping over each other to try the case. They would try it more than once, so everyone got a turn in front of the cameras. But you may never get a day in court. They will probably try the last case and shelve the others, or bargain with the killer to save even more money.”
I can also say to her: “the feds were busy monitoring guitar-makers, so they didn’t bother to catch your sister’s killer. Consequently, people died, but certain trees in South America are now safe.” Politics is the death of justice.
The Lacey Act was most recently amended as of May 22, 2008, when The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 expanded its protection to a broader range of plants and plant products (Section 8204. Prevention of Illegal Logging Practices).
The Stolen Forests:
On a warm afternoon last May, an environmental activist named Alexander von Bismarck and a man whom I will call Wu De entered Suifenhe by taxi. They had brought with them surveillance equipment; they were working for a nonprofit group called the Environmental Investigation Agency, which tries to uncover how plants, wildlife, and industrial chemicals are smuggled. Von Bismarck is the organization’s executive director, and one of the world’s leading experts on timber smuggling.
[...]
When constructing his aliases, von Bismarck often draws upon his personal history. (He has asked me not to explain which bits, so as not to ruin his cover.) As the great-great-grandnephew of Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, he can trace his genealogy back at least seven hundred years. He is the grandson of Klaus von Bismarck, a German military officer who fought during the Second World War but was a staunch anti-Nazi who later became president of the Goethe-Institut. Sascha’s father, Gottfried, is a business executive and engineer who helped equip West German submarines with sonar. His mother, Kai Maristed, is an American novelist—a daughter of James Abegglen, who served in the Pacific as a marine and later became a specialist on Japanese business culture and a vice-president of the Boston Consulting Group.
[...]
John Lacey was a passionate advocate for forests, but, for reasons that are unclear, the law that bears his name fell short of protecting plants the way it did animals. Von Bismarck told me that in 2005 he began “bouncing from Hill office to Hill office, looking for a champion to move forward an amendment” that would expand the act. A congressional aide told him that he would have to get the support of timber-industry associations, but to do that he had to overcome decades of antagonism. “To say there was animosity is an understatement,” the aide told me. A member of the Hardwood Federation, which is made up mostly of family-owned businesses, said, “The industry is, really, full of very conservative, rural, property-rights-oriented Republicans, who have been deeply suspicious that the environmentalist community’s only interest was to put them out of business.” Illegal logging is not only a foreign phenomenon: in the nineteen-nineties, it was estimated that a hundred million dollars’ worth of trees were stolen from public lands every year. Von Bismarck was asking the timber industry to lobby for tougher regulation of its own business.
As it happened, a number of American companies believed that they were being hurt by illegal wood—“especially coming out of China, the numbers made no sense to us,” said Harry Demorest, who was then a board member of the Hardwood Federation and the C.E.O. of Columbia Forest Products. “We knew what the market price was for logs, and the products were being sold at less than cost.” Another industry group, the American Forest and Paper Association, estimated that the trade in stolen wood was costing the domestic forest-products industry a billion dollars annually. Both groups—along with some large retailers—eventually agreed to support the amendment. (The Bush Administration declined to do so.) It was sponsored in the Senate and in the House by two Democratic legislators from Oregon, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Earl Blumenauer, but much of the bill’s fine-tuning occurred in conferences off the Hill.
A.E. Van Vogt had a solution for all of this in “The Weapons Shops of Isher”.
r @ 59: Fingerboards are normally shipped and bought as rough cut blanks, about 3/8″ x 2 1/4″ x 20″ It makes no sense to ship logs, as the blanks can be graded and shipped easier. Also the drying degrade is much less as blanks.
I didn’t even know India was a source of ebony, but I thought that African ebony “logs” were almost always tiny, few were even 2″ wide or 20″ long in a straight line, much less both at once. Googling … well maybe it’s not quite that bad, but the “log” sizes are still very modest.
http://www.thewoodbox.com/exoticwoods/ebony.htm
So why can’t we find a way to grow Brazilian rosewood and ebony right here in the USofA? Build some big environment enclosures like the bird exhibits at the San Diego zoo, the size of blimp hangers, grow trees, stock with colorful animals, and charge green tourists a fee to walk through.
I have an Indonesian (?) rosewood coffee table that cost nothing even ten years ago, but southeast asian sources of rosewood, however different, are now running out, too. The asian stuff is more like US redwood than any hardwood.
Hey I have a little “message holder” I made in woodshop circa 1965 out of what I believe is African mahogany that you just can’t get anymore, the grain is wonderful (not so much my workmanship). Come and get me coppers.
–
ps: *politicians*
Josh @ 56: “Harumph. … I’m not sure IQ is really the right filter.”
Agree wholeheartedly, Mr. J. That’s why I did not mention IQ as a criterion for sifting the gene pool. The people whom Stalin referred to as “Useful Idiots” were definitely not low IQ; and when Stalin had got what he needed from those people, he had no hesitation about taking their genes out of circulation permanently.
In the nature versus nurture debate, I am mainly on the side of the impact of culture. Look at the disaster of the Brits. The children of the aristocrats who built an Empire On Which The Sun Never Set were able to lose it all and turn their homeland into the Sick Man of Europe within their lifetimes. Now Ivy League grads (with honorable exceptions, Wretchard!) are doing the same thing to the US. But how do we change their culture back to reality?
Another Stalin saying (apparently apocryphal) was “No man, no problem”. I am afraid, in their persistent wilful stupidity, that is the destination the Tyrant Class have chosen for themselves.
The worst thing that can happen to you is for the Federal agency you get crosswise with to decide that its honor and credibility depends on successfully prosecuting you, no matter how absurd the circumstances.
This is true even when its Fed on Fed fire. Here is an example from 20 years ago.
A small company, DSI, was building a couple of satellites for the USAF and USN. The Defense Criminal Investigation Service got a tip from a former employee that “Radio Shack” parts were being used in the satellites. This was not long after CBS 60 Minutes ran a piece on such parts supposedly being used in the Peacekeeper guidance system.
In response, DCIS cowboyed up and raided DSI. The ranking government person present was a USAF Lt. on TDY and they even seized his briefcase and contents, including his airline tickets, leaving him with no way to get home.
DSI directed that both the USAF and the USN satellite be dismantled in order to reveal the Radio Shack parts therein. In the course of this it was pointed out to DCIS (none too gently) that these were experimental low cost satellites and there were no requirements for high reliability or space-qualified parts. If Shack parts were found, BFD.
Finally DCIS let the dismantling of the two spacecraft stop, and let them be reassembled. This cost about another million taxpayer bucks. The Atlas launch schedule was totally screwed up as well and NASA got all hot about the USAF not being able to launch a TIROS bird on time (it wasn’t ready anyway, but that was beside the point). The Air Force sent a letter to DCIS that might as well have begun with “Jane, you ignorant slut…” Personally, I would have seen to it that DCIS found out what a REAL raid was like, as in A-10’s, AC-130’s, and Blackhawks filled with grim men armed with automatic weapons.
Desperate to salvage something of its reputation, DCIS insisted that it be provided with the telemetry data from the satellites, and since they could not tell a stripchart from toilet paper, that the Air Force provide experts to do an independent analysis of the data so they could prove the RS parts were screwing up the spacecraft performance. The Air Force told them what to do with that request.
And the satellites were launched and worked fine.
dq/41, read it? i water ski in it! But do lets hear more from ybr/61 about Demorest, “…a board member of the Hardwood Federation”
64. Kinuachdrach
Your point is correct but that quote I think belongs to Lenin.
I may be wrong: I checked and apparently it can’t be confirmed Lenin said that in his writing; maybe he just spoke it or never actually said it.
It is impossible to run any concern “by the book.” You simply cannot do it. When the inspectors arrive, they will find some citation. No matter how strenuously you strive toward full compliance, you’ll never acheive it. So a lot has depended, does depend, and will always depend on the attitude of those regulators who are brought to bear on you and the orders of those who sent them. If they like you, you’ll get off light. If they don’t, you won’t.
All kinds of mischief, bs, greased palms, skullduggery, and ox-goring gets done in the name of public safety, social justice, or whatever.
You have two ways to protect yourself when the regulatory eye comes fixed on you. One, throw more protection money at K Street. Two, leave the United States.
c/69, a portending, foreshadowing Foreword of the novel.
Possible titles, Atlas HAD to Shrug
…or In Code Blood.
Or a thinner tome Why Your State Guitar is Made of Cardboard & Dental Floss (and costs 5 years’ salary).
There, you have the foreword and some titles, now you can simply whip thru the rest of it.
Gibson is non-union in a right-to-work state and the main guys donated generously to Huckabee in the 2008 election.
You elected a Chicago politician and what did you expect???
We must hang together or surely we will all hang separately–
To my dumb way of thinking there are three types of laws in this country:
• Those laws that violate our constitutional rights
• Those laws that merely infringe upon our constitutional rights
• Those laws that do not affect our constitutional rights.
In the this Gibson Raid, the justification for the raid may be based on foreign law or the Lacey Act or whatever. The Feds should not be enforcing foreign law, period. End of story. At first glance, this raid appeared to have violated Gibson’s rights. The Fifth amendment says: No person….shall be denied of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. Appears to be multiple violations here and I won’t go into the particulars.
But whatever the exact violation of current law that occurred, this raid points out with a harsh clarity that our current system of justice in this country is broken.
If constitutional rights were violated, those agents involved and those supervising them in government should be prosecuted for the violation of those rights and sent to jail. No ifs, ands or buts. And the punishment should be severe. The Constitution is the supreme law of the law, and it should reign supreme. All those agents took an oath to the Constitution and should have followed it. No environmental do gooder law should trump it. Ever. Now we know that will never happen. But it should. Those in our legislative bodies need to pass a civil rights act that finally protects our liberties. There is really no excuse to violate our rights, and it’s high time our elected officials step up to the plate and defend our rights.
Now some will say there were reasonable grounds for the Lacey Act or whatever the justification was for this raid. If this raid was not a violation of Gibson’s rights as some may argue , it at least infringed upon those rights. Again ,there are times when we must accept some infringement of our rights for the public good. However, we are long overdue for an overhaul of how we assess when rights can be infringed upon. We have entered a period where rights are either violated or infringed upon willy nilly by our government without the slightest reasonable justification. We are quickly sliding down the ol’ slippery slope to tyranny.
In a thread a few back, Buddy, YBR and I discussed this very matter. Buddy argued for a series of tests based upon the cost/benefit and risk/reward to society. I think this idea is very good place to start. However, I think that benefit and reward to society for any new regulation that in the slightest infringes upon our liberties, must be found to be overwhelming based upon all rational views of the subject. The onus must be on the government to prove the need for the infringement on our rights, which is not now the case. YBR argued I believe ( to paraphrase) that such a cost/benefit analysis can be highIy subjective and difficult to attain. But I come from the point of view in terms of regulation that less is often more. If there is not a clear benefit to society, we are much better off not regulating. We need to err on the side of not regulating. That should be our bias.
As Brock and others pointed out, we need some process to deal with our present regulation and throw out the dead wood. We need to go back at least 30 years, perhaps 40 years or more, and review every ordinance,law and regulation based upon a cost/benefit- risk/reward approach. If it can’s pass muster, then it should be gone forever. Things like the Endangered Species Act ,which clearly take property without just compensation, should have been obliterated long ago.
As far as agencies and agents of the government enforcing these rogue regulations and laws, as I said above, those agents who violate and infringe upon the legal rights of our citizens should be prosecuted and sent to jail for a long time. That will end very quickly our current “rogue government’ problem. We just have to have the guts to do it.
Looks to me like the Tea Party, far from being the extremists that the left leaning media like to describe them as there in the US and here on our Australian version of National Broadcaster, has arrived just in time to start to deal with the real extremists.
As someone said above, no regulation without representation!
(Aside: the name Tagalog always reminds me of those old computer programming languages like Fortran and Cobol, for some reason. Or perhaps a freight tracking system. Being really tangential, Renmimby is dead-set like the crazy frog ring tone.)
Here’s another example of bureaucracies gone bad.
Part of the reason for the big flooding on the Mississippi this spring was that the Corps of Engineers is not so much interested in flood control anymore. They want to return the Mississippi to its original state and drive out the population up to 10 miles from its banks so the river can go where it wants.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/green_ideology_trumps_flood_control.html
Another great danger is that regulation turns justice on its head. It assumes guilty until proven innocent. In my other life as an urban planner, i see this in “proving” properties are “legal non-conforming”. Planners for a city assume if it does not conform to current regulations, it is the responsibility of the property owner to prove it pre-dates the change. For example; prove a building was built prior to the requirement for building permits. They will do nothing to help you. For many people I was a lifesaver when i knew where to find information that “proved”, it predated requirements. It isn’t always possible to find the needed information. Try finding evidence that a building was built 70 years ago, and it did have a second unit as part of that construction, when it predates the city being incorporated.
It cost property owners much to prove what should have been the requirement of the governmental entity, to prove a use was illegal. Our supposed standard of innocent until proven guilty, is no more. Changing from law to regulation, seems to permit government to ignore the bill of rights.
Perhaps we need a Supreme Court that says that the bill of rights applies to regulations. Just this year in Santa Clara County in California, a man committed suicide when he was forced to leave his home of many years because he was accused of being a “hoarder”, and given one day to clean up. Taking property. Destroying lives of citizens, regulations threaten the very fabric of our civilization.
If you go to the City of Santa Clara in Santa Clara County. Don’t feed the ducks. The city made it illegal. Told it was a useless regulation, one Councilman said. “We have to do something.” This is the problem. It is an attitude that all government has to do is “something”, and that solves the problem. They passed a law, just obey us.
This is at the heart of what our host has posted on. Perhaps we need to make this a second Tea Party thrust. Stop dumb regulation. An example: My cat bit me. I went to the doctor. I told him my cat bit me.
This poem describes what happened. (The beast was my house cat).
Animal control
They came to see the beast.
The one who drew blood.
They came heavy with bureaucracy.
Following orders. Following procedure.
They came for blood money.
Money to pay for their time.
To pay for a paper putting the beast
under house arrest ten days long.
It didn’t matter he was house cat.
It didn’t matter there was no danger.
All that mattered was the money.
Eighty eight dollars for their coffers.
Stiff necked fascist cat police
come for their blood money.
Since the one bit paid for the crime
this only added insult to injury
© Presbypoet, March 8, 2009
We have a very interesting situation brewing here on the east coast with regard to Hurricane Irene. People are freaking out; it is quite a circus. Many mayors and governors have issued evacuation edicts. Now they are pondering travel bans. So some folks might find themselves in a helluva pickle. They have been ordered to leave their homes, and yet denied the right to travel from them.
In the salad days of sweeping bans and compulsory edicts, few wonder where these fiat issuing minds get off. Few wonder why, in the face of a crisis, these edicts are the first recourse. Fear, security, the graveness of the situation, allied with a certain trust in governmental benevolence, all have an emotive tug on the intellect allowing these executives to trounce all.
Nature, economy, military concerns, or even the origin of wood for guitar fingerboards, are all among things that can be parleyed into a Disaster, a Crisis. Never let a crisis go to waste, right?
As the Gibson raid proves, we’re governed by monsters.
I’m having a Gibson, meaning a martini with onions instead of olives. I’m having it shaken not stirred, and bone dry, meaning I’m glancing at the vermouth for its participation, and I’m talking gin of course and not vodka.
Then, I’m picking up my 1975 jet black Les Paul Pro, made of mahogany and ebony I’m telling you. But I can’t prove it. I bought it in a pawn shop 30 years ago in Dallas for $500. I bought it ’cause it look like Jimmy Page’s Les Paul. When they ask me, “Papers, please”, I’m going to have to pull an Indiana Jones on them and hope for the best. It’s the heaviest Les Paul ever known (the thing will cut a notch in your shoulder when you wear even the thickest strap. Seriously, every guitarist who’s played it has marvelled at its incredible weight). It is an axe that will grind you. It might be made of petrified wood, hell, uranium. I don’t know. But it has the most glorious and perfect sustain anybody has ever seen. It’ll ring for days. It has a haunting tone.
It’s got all that marvellous Gibson mystique wrapped up inside it. It is wonderful. You’ve heard it a million times about everything from Ford trucks to toaster ovens, but, simply put, they don’t make them like that anymore.
They can’t. We see why now.
Now they are pondering travel bans.
Mets fans already hatin’ on Bloomie for closing the subways at noon. It didn’t even begin to rain in NYC until about 4:30.
“Is there some sort of code you guys have for what makes one yankee good and another one bad that I luckily fell on the right side of, or am I just lucky period in the people I’ve met? I know it’s not because of my pretty face or charming personality…”
Attitude, I would say. In the South we are taught the being rude isn’t polite. Even If you’re going to kill somebody, there is no point in being rude to them. Manners don’t cost nuttin.
Besides, in the South a yankee is the string used to remove a feminine sanitary device (internal, aka Tampon), Which is why we are smiling when we meet one.
Cowboy, sorry, you are not having a Gibson. Or a Martini. You’re having a glass of cold gin. Which is fine – I like gin too, but to make it a Gibson, you need some vermouth and bitters.
DAve@71: You elected a Chicago politician and what did you expect???
For those who wondered about the timing, from wiki:
The unsustainable exploitation of these tropical hardwoods, particularly rosewood from the SAVA Region, has escalated significantly since the start of the 2009 Malagasy political crisis [in Madagascar]. Thousands of poorly paid Malagasy loggers have flooded into the national parks—especially in the northeast—building roads, setting up logging camps, and cutting down even the most difficult to reach rosewood trees. Illegal activities are openly flaunted, armed militia have descended upon local villages, and a rosewood mafia easily bribe government officials, buying export permits with ease. These illegal operations are funded in part by advance payments for future shipments (financed by Chinese expatriates and Chinese importers) and by loans from large, international banks. Demand is fueled mostly by a growing Chinese middle class and their desire for exotic imperial-style furniture. European and American demand for high-end musical instruments and furniture have also played a role. However, public scrutiny has put significant pressure on shipping companies involved in the trade, and the United States is starting to enforce the Lacey Act by investigating companies with suspected involvement in the illegal trade of Malagasy precious woods.
One more excerpt (from The Stolen Forests link):
In 2003, von Bismarck picked up the trail in Singapore, where he went undercover and met with a trafficker who boasted that profits from black-market ramin [exotic wood, not the noodles] were “better than drug smuggling.”
[...]
…In 1998, the Yangtze River watershed flooded, killing more than three thousand people and causing more than thirty billion dollars in damage. At the time, some Communist Party officials believed that the flood was exacerbated by soil erosion—the result of “over quota” cutting of trees—and the government banned logging throughout much of the country. In order to meet its immense demand for raw materials, China began to buy unprecedented quantities of wood from abroad; it is now the largest importer of logs and also the largest exporter of finished wood products. China began to act the way many developed countries in North America and Europe do: it had destroyed much of its primary forests, gained from doing so, and was now protecting the trees it had left by buying wood indiscriminately, often from “high risk” countries, like Indonesia. The year of the flood, China started importing large volumes of wood from Russia, which has more forest than any country in the world and was in a state of political and economic anarchy. The greatest traffic in illicit wood is now thought to be from Russia to China.
………………………………….
To summarize, Allan Thorton, co-founder of EIA is Canadian, von Bismarck is German, and the Chinese started it, compelled by Russia’s timber.
The obvious solution is to decommission the EPA.
Globalization: Board Certified Insanity.
In the salad days of sweeping bans and compulsory edicts, few wonder where these fiat issuing minds get off.
Chalk me up as one of the few. It amazes me that anyone thinks a freakin’ mayor has the authority to order private citizens out of their homes.
Now, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a Mayor to reccomend people evacuate. I think it’s prefectly reasonable for a Mayor to delcare a, a… seems like a Latin phrase is needed here… to delcare a blackout of emergency services because providing them during the storm would be exceptionally difficult. If Bloomberg said “for the safety of the Police and Firefighters, there will be no emergency responses to Zone A from noon Saturday until 9am Sunday, and anyone remaining in the area will be on their own” I could support it. But ordering people out, nah, that’s overstepping his authority.
One of the lefties’ loudest talking points against the US changing the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq was, that those thugs and terrorists were only slaughtering their own people, counter to UN resolutions, and doing no harm to the domestic United States. That we were, for no good reason, enforcing the laws of other nations for no immediate benefit.
Comes now the Obama government, and shuts down one of our flagship manufacturers of string instruments. One out of many. Under what pretext? That we must enforce the laws of India against Gibson,(that is, counter to our own Constitution), by confiscating its raw materials without due process nor judgement by any court of jurisdiction. Simply on the suspicion that Gibson’s papers are not in order.
This travesty of government must stop, and those responsible must face their own due process in a court of law.
jmh, force majeure the ‘act of God’ clause –
***
ybr, so do you have the list of possible culprits, or was Gibson the only one?
Dunno if the point has been made, but the Gibson raid was done under ‘administrative law’ –the agencies’ own legal system. Back when i was fighting an agency, my Admin Law oppo was a deputy state att’y who officed up the hall from the guys i was fighting, with the admin law judge who would decide my case a little ways down the hall the other way. All shared same coffee room, lunchroom, bathrooms. Also, collected fines go to the dept collecting them, and advancement careerwise is by number of citizen scalps on agent’s belt.
bl@85: so do you have the list of possible culprits, or was Gibson the only one?
The Chinese ([d]emand is fueled mostly by a growing Chinese middle class and their desire for exotic imperial-style furniture), Penneys and WalMart, the latter two of which complied immediately. Let me guess. You skimmed the link.
Looks like Gibson got caught in the globalization meat grinder – or wood chipper.
85. buddy larsen
What you are never told is that Administrative law courts are at best quasi-Constitutional. You can demand a ‘real’ trial with a jury and everything. Lawyers don’t tell you that because real trials take longer and the lawyer makes more money doing a bunch of quickie trials.
Administrative law courts were created to settle arguments between various bureaucracies. Turf wars, if you will. Then somebody let them out of their cage and they are multiplying like roaches. Congress needs to look at them and take away their subpoena powers.
ybr, please take a look at #34 above –the NYT aricle. Like to know what you think. Somehow a new situation has developed re not just rare wood but also plain old patent (and non) meds. The article is light on history, but drops some strange and obscure references to overseas suppliers of some life-supporting drugs that we can’t seem to reliably access anymore.
Yesterday as i was at the grocery store i moseyed over to the pharmacy winder and chatted with the pharmacist a moment about the ‘supply problems’ we’ve been hearing about.
Her almost exact words (short convo, so i recall it well) were that contamination and capacity problems at Chinese and Indian suppliers were the problem. Then i casually wondered aloud, ‘don’t suppose any of that has anything to do with that obamacare business, do you?’ She paused, glanced left and right, leaned in, lowered voice, held my eyes with hers, and said “what do YOU think?”
With that, i let her off the hook. Later, back in me office here, i happen upon –google news or drudge, forget which, that article in the link @ #34.
Imagine my surprise, the nut graf in the article was almost word for word, what the pharmacist had said a few hours earlier. Capacity, contamination, China, India, and strung together in the same way in the same phraseology.
Furthermore, this is probably a stretch, but the photo the NYT uses, is an unsympathetic-looking feller, looks like, well, the a-hole banker who turned down your loan app, who is being ‘brought down to size’ because he can’t get his drugs for his, ewww, rectal cancer.
Several women dying of breast cancer who are in the same pickle re no drugs, they are quoted but not pictured. The a-hole with the a-hole problem is not quoted, but pictured. We are being processed, we are.
bl
The 0bomba misadministration wants to vertically integrate the health dependency engine.
A while back I was reading a book about the political history of Japan an in it the author talked about events that are often named as causes of large changes in a country but often were primarily “trigger” events. The example listed was the arrival of the black ships causing the fall of the Shogunate but the back story was that a lot people both in and out of the government were not happy with the Shogunate. The pressure was already there for change. Often the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand is called a trigger event. I’m wondering if something like the Gibson Guitar raid or the persecution of the Wyoming man who shot a grizzly that was causing problems on his own property will trigger something off. The polling data shows a lot of real resentment by people toward the government. If the bureaucrats and appointees weren’t so ignorant of history they wouldn’t be aggravating individuals and non-Fed governments. All these water drips of agency over reach are going to kill them IMHO, in the coming elections….if they don’t trigger off something even nastier than a landslide vote against them.
Sorry, JMH, but you never consider putting bitters in a gin martini or any of its derivatives, such as a Gibson. Bitters are for whiskey martinis, otherwise known as Manhattans. Dark martinis, meaning whiskey ones, also take a different kind of vermouth. Sweet vermouth + bitters are what’s found in dark martinis. Not classic martinis, or Gibsons.
Cold gin with onions. That’s pretty much a Gibson.
#90 toadold
Here’s another case for your collection: the EPA is proposing to tighten ozone levels again:
“The EPA has proposed to tighten the screws on American businesses and households by reducing acceptable ozone levels. The proposal could render up to 96 percent of U.S. counties noncompliant, and by some estimates would impose economic damages exceeding $1 trillion. There is no compelling health reason to foist such draconian regulatory changes on the fragile U.S. economy. The proposed regulations amount to serious costs with negligible benefits. . . . EPA regulates ground-level ozone levels under the Clean Air Act. The current primary regulatory standard for ozone is 0.075 parts per million (ppm), established in 2008. (Implementation of the 0.075 ppm standard was suspended in 2009 pending further study.) EPA reviews its air quality regulations every five years, so normally EPA would review the ozone standards in 2013. Yet for some reason, the Obama administration has decided that it needs to raise energy and regulatory costs on U.S. businesses right now, two years ahead of schedule.
The official decision has not yet been made, but the EPA’s new ozone regulations will likely fall in the range of 0.060 to 0.070 ppm. That works out to a range of 60-70 parts per billion. To give an idea of just how minuscule these concentrations are, consider that this range is the equivalent of less than one cup of water poured into an Olympic-sized swimming pool. . . . Even the EPA’s own statements on the issue should give Americans pause: It has claimed the new regulations could save up to $100 billion per year on healthcare expenditures by 2020, yet the EPA also acknowledges that the compliance costs to business could be as high as $90 billion by 2020. . . .
It is difficult to have a rational discussion on this issue because proponents of the stricter standard are imagining kids with asthma choking in a smog-filled LA highway. This is very misleading. In reality, the proposed 60 parts per billion standard is so strict, that even areas of Yellowstone National Park may not be in compliance.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/energy-intelligence/2011/08/25/epas-proposed-ozone-regulation-could-cost-1-trillion
Speaking of Yellowstone, it seems to have a problem with bear or human pollution, you decide which: “Yellowstone National Park rangers are investigating whether a man found dead along a trail was killed by a grizzly bear.
The man was found Friday morning by two hikers on the Mary Mountain Trail in the central section of the park. Authorities announced the death Saturday but did not name the man.”
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/27/dead-hiker-found-in-yellowstone/
Well, maybe it was the high ozone levels that did him in.
b/89, that’s what i think too. Form follow function, a crisis is needed to break the old private supply and distribution ‘for profit’ channels. The ‘nonprofit’ structure to emerge is vaguely mentioned in the article, along with ‘the government in the meantime will stockpile and store the base chemicals, for distribution to hospitals in times of shortage, where pharmacists can blend them into injectable doses’.
IOW, the private industry market system which had worked so well for so long, and which like Sallie was deviously incented/maneuvered to start a price-raising run about ten years ago in order to discredit itself into political vulnerability, has now silently without fanfare entered the planned crisis which will retool the new hyper-priced patronage-based political supply and distribution system –of what promises to ape the ‘addiction’ model of the contraband drug system. Only, addiction to staying alive, rather than staying stoned.
By the fruits shall they be known. FDA and USDA, notoriously hyper-rigorous with extenuated testings of new combinations, will just look away and whistle DSixie as it becomes clear that quality control –their raison d’tere –will be shifted from a dozen corporate structures to 25,000 hospital-contracted private pharmacists, to mix ‘branded’ drugs out of 5-gallon buckets of powders worth from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand dollars. Hmm, the janitors will soon own Stavros Niarchos yachts.
Meanwhile, continuing that same new paradigm of the more life-exigent the less oversight needed, Soros and Buffett-heavy Monsanto, whose revolving door execs-cum-pols got the egregiously totalitarian S510 passed, will no longer be bothered by any silly old government oversight of their gene-splicing seed rodeos or biochemical warfare research and ridiculously costly and severly under-produced (1.5 mm smallpox doses? why, that’s only enough for the Acela Corridor!) antidote dosage runs:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=biotech+allowed+to+do+own+testing&form=IE8SRC&src=IE-SearchBox
PS to #93,
Seems anywhere there’s money or power to be had (that ‘nonprofit’ pillmaker will create oodles of political power to be distributed by precinct), the only question is whether or not there is an exploitable black hole in the vicinity to absorb all the questions and blame.
In the financial crisis, the black hole was the complexity of high finance, in the various bills the black holes are the bills themselves –that’s why they are 3000 pages and lack footnotes to the dozen ‘need to look-it-ups’ built into every page.
With the regulations-attack the black holes are the czars –empowered by a president who then sacrifices what he can retrieve in a week, that is his ‘hands-on’ image, in order to give the impression he cannot stop the czars (who are un senate-vetted/voted as cabinet secretaries must be, and who are proof against unwanted congressional hearings) from running wild –long enough to institutionalize as much economic damage as possible.
In Gunwalker Fast & Furious the black hole is ‘national security’ plus everything across the border.
In the BP ‘disaster’ the black hole is the extremely low public understanding of drilling and rig mechanics, the insular industry ‘bunker’ culture, the highly specialized equipment, the nowhere-else-on-earth rig practices, the subsea deep environment, underground geology, pressure control, territorial macro-history, contractor/operator relationships, production parameters, and international area-based competetive rivalries.
And here with the guitar and life-meds crisis, the black hole is, India and China, and the whozzis whatziz foreign sub-contractors with their own national legal arcana.
To bookend pac/92 on the Clean Air Act assassination of the economy, here’s a note to those of you who eat things trucked in from elsewhere. The base best-case estimation of 6% food price inflatiomn is based on production not transport dynamics; this new CAFE will literally gut poor folks in cities jobless and soon to exit the ‘relief’ programs. WTF are they supposed to do? Don’t they gotta EAT?
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/08/12/super-cafe-standards-for-big-rigs/
FWIW Brazilian Rosewood, Indian Rosewood and African Ebony are all species of the same tree genus, Dalbergia. I think that Brazilian Rosewood (Dalbergia nigra) is pretty much limited to Brazil. Indian Rosewood (Dalbergia latifolia) is native to India, Indonesia and can be found as an exotic in Kenya, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. African Ebony (Dalbergia melanoxylon) grows in about 26 sub-saharan countries in Africa.
The timber trade is good at re-branding timber to make it more marketable. For example, years ago in British Columbia Canada, the timber from a conifer species called “hemlock” was very successfully marketed under the name “Alaska Pine”, because at that time, nobody would buy timber called “Hemlock” but everybody liked pine timber. Hemlock timber looks nothing like pine wood but never mind. For the same reason Douglas fir timber was originally marketed as “Oregon Pine”. Today similar things might happen with species whose timber looks like Rosewood, but is not one of the two species listed above.
Mix up a tangled web of possible sources with some possibility of timber re-branding and in spite of certification systems in the exporting country (e.g. India) the U.S. importer, or the government raiders, may never actually know from where a batch of wooden blanks originated. Therefore the government raiders have to use the same rules as people like Gibson. If the rules require some officially sanctioned blessing by the exporting country and the blessing has been given then everyone, including the government raiders, must accept that the timber is indeed blessed. No extra hassles or credential investigations can be justified.
Even if the rule of law has been replaced by the ad hoc judgements of individual bureaucrats, as it has been in super-sized spades, you have to stop somewhere.
RWE@65 — I was at DSI for that raid! I was doing a timing analysis or something. A guy in a DCIS jacket walked into my office. “Are you an engineer?” “Yup.” “So, do you work with, like, parts?” “Yup.” “Gimme all your files.” I got them back about nine months later, after reconstructing all the work that was in them.
The satellites, I believe, were the MACSATs: http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/QuickLooks/macsatQL.html.
Though they were experimental, when Desert Storm happened, they were offered to the Marines to relay aircraft-maintenance traffic between CONUS and Saudi Arabia.
DSI later got bought by CTA Space Systems, which got bought by Orbital Sciences.
Cowboy, I suppose you could count the herbs in the gin against the need for bitters, which anything that wants to call itself a cocktail requires. But a true “Classic” Martini still needs the bitters:
http://www.drinkboy.com/Cocktails/Recipe.aspx?itemid=104
The original Martini used Sweet Vermouth. Sometime after the turn of the last century, Dry Vermouth became more popular, but still, ordering a “Dry Martini” doesn’t mean – contrary to some popular opinion – a Martini without much Vermouth. It means simply a Martini using Dry Vermouth. A “Perfect Martini” uses equal parts Dry and Sweet.
Then again, you’re drinking a glass of cold gin and not a Martini, so it’s a moot point.
We are in perfect agreement on the vodka part though. There is no such thing as a “Vodka Martini.” Substitute vodka for the gin and you have what’s properly called a “Kangaroo.”
Eh, but calling it a Kangaroo would probably make some gubmint dimwit think it was made with illegal imported ingredients.
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/126897/
buncher linx on Guitar gate
Of course, having seized the ebony and since it is an endangered and prohibited product the feds will have to burn it. Makes perfect sense to me.
Just as much sense as when these bans were first introduced. I remember reading reports that since the complex forests were being logged and some particular woods could no longer be exported the harvesters burned them on the spot as now worthless.
Clearly we need more laws and regulations like these.
54. RWE
Thanks! I’m on my way to Amazon.
Whiggish #976:
No kiddin? One of the spacecraft was an STP mission called Stacksat while the other one was some Navy payload that I think went on a Scout. So DSI is now part of OSC? That figures.
A guy I work now with worked at Northrop when the “Radio Shack Parts” business came out. He says they implemented incredible procedures to control the flow of parts.
By the way, DCIS was combined with DIS so the people who do your background checks are now the same ones who pull such idiot tricks.
YBR:
A few years back the Nature Conservancy announced it had discovered a new horror. Recycling and foreign imports meant that US forest products companeis needed to produce much less product. So they needed less forest land and were selling it off. The NC then realized that forest products companies were, after all, pro-forests, and the other private firms who would buy the land probably would not be, wanting to use it for housing developments and (gasp!) golf courses and the like.
Sgian #101:
You might try Half.com if Amazon does not have it. You can almost bet for sure that if it is a used book Half.com will have it.
W: “The protagonist K, deals with men whose powers are indefinite and who prohibit things for reasons that are never explained… The same sort of mystery surrounds the raid of the Gibson guitar factory. The Department of Justice wants to shut them down for a reason. Is it really sane to ask ‘why’?”
“The Party seeks power entirely for it’s own sake. We are not interested in the good of others… We’re different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we’re doing… Power is not a means, it is an end… We are the Priests of Power… The real power; the power we have to fight for night and day is not power over things but over men. How does one man assert his power over another, Winston? By making him suffer…” George Orwell – 1984
Brock 10: “The law must be knowable to the average man.”
“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.” Thomas Jefferson
Annoy Mouse 11: “When a government goes rogue it becomes a tyranny.”
“Only he who has conquered his own people first can conquer a strong enemy… When the people are weak the state is strong; when the state is weak the people are strong. Hence the state that follows a true course strives to weaken the people… If knowledge is encouraged and not nipped in the bud, it will increase, and when it will have increased, it will become impossible to rule the land… If the people are stupid, they can be easily governed.” Shang Yang – Ruler of Shang Province, 4th Century, B.C.
“Tyranny is the exercise of Power beyond Right, which no Body can have a Right to.” John Locke
“Law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” Thomas Jefferson
Kinuachdrach 39: “My own County recently passed new land use regulations that (a) encourage so-called “wind farms” (which are usually built on ridges to maximize wind), and (b) mandate preservation of viewscapes (including restrictions on building on ridges). When the incompatiblity was pointed out the Tyrants, they simply shrugged their shoulders and passed their silly regulations anyway.”
“His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of Doublethink; to know and not to know; to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies; to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… The official ideology abounds with contradictions, even when there is no practical reason for them… Even the names of the four ministries by which we are governed exhibits a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts; the ministry of peace concerns its self with war; the ministry of truth with lies; the ministry of love with torture: and the ministry of plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink; for it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.” George Orwell – 1984
What “Right to Work?”
Another Interview with Gibson CEO
Nov 2009 Homeland Security Swat Team with automatic weapons, confiscated $500,000 worth of wood, made employees go outside, then put some employees in rooms with 4 or 5 armed agents for interrogation.
Gibson was said to have violated Madagascar laws in this case.
Gibson’s day in court was coming up this Monday, this raid was to forestall that.
Government says court case is interfering with their investigation!
Gibson has made 580 new hires in last couple of years, now they are forced to lay off workers, and have lost over a million dollars business because of this in addition to the half-million dollars worth of wood that the Government still holds.
—
Another right to work state…
Issa’s latest on NY Times Error Laden Hit Piece
Darrell Issa keeps pressure on NLRB
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa is keeping up the pressure on the National Labor Relations Board for pursuing legal …In-Depth: Boeing Documents From Labor Board Subpoenaed Bloomberg
Blog: Issa Subpoenas NLRB Documents in Boeing Case Wall Street Journal (blog)
Darrell Issa Subpoenas National Labor Relations Board Documents In …
MSM Never mentions this new Boeing facility was completely solar powered, acres of photovoltaics installed on roof.
Doesn’t fit the narrative, I presume.
Doug, just IMAGINE, if Dems had kept hold of the House in 2010.
Oh, yes, THEY can imagine it –that’s why they want to send the Tea Party to Hell. If they had kept the House, no Issa with subpoena, no Gunwalker whistleblowers would have dared, and Gibson case would very likely have not have proceeded to the scheduled court date in which there will be testimony on discovery. Plus this blog would be in Mississippi in 1935, on the chain gang, breaking rocks alongside George Clooney, John Turturro, and that other feller whatzisname.
Or alongside Cool Hand Luke!
“What we have here is a failure to not communicate”
(ahh, Strother Martin, we loved ye)
***
Look at drudge. Look at the pic of the CIC propped in front of a map at the Nat’l Hurricane Center. He’s still thinking about that last putt, but his handlers have hauled him in to map room and dumped him in front of a camera. Who ARE these handlers –and how DID they get so STOOPID ???
So, what were the mighty winds in NYC today – 30 mph?
Rick Perry farts harder than that.
Saw this and curious as to what others think about it.
http://dianchu.blogspot.com/2011/08/by-econmatters-first-map-is-disturbing.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EconForecastFullFeed+%28Posts+by+EconMatters+Only+%28Full+Content%29%29#ixzz1W9QDAQnA
bl@88: Somehow a new situation has developed re not just rare wood but also plain old patent (and non) meds.
We are being processed, we are.
The whole drug thing is very ominous and I have nothing to add at this point, except to note the impact of GWB’s Medicare Part D Drug Prescription legislation:
The Medicare D price tag continues to escalate because the bill explicitly bars the government from using its market power to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers or establishing a formulary with approved medications.
And unlike the Democratic bills, which won’t add to the deficit, the bill George W. Bush signed was financed entirely through deficit spending. While Grassley and his colleagues accuse Democrats of harming Medicare through cost cuts, it is their bill that has done the most to hasten Medicare’s coming insolvency. Between now and 2083, Medicare D’s unfunded obligations amount to $7.2 trillion according to the trustees. Numbers like these prompted former Comptroller General David M. Walker to call it “… probably the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s.”
The drug companies “own” Washington, regardless of the R/D letters in parens after the honorable name. It was a bad piece of legislation designed to benefit the pharmaceutical industry.
wc@96: you have to stop somewhere.
I posted several lengthy excerpts from The Stolen Forests link to pose the question: how did we get from timber over-harvest … to Keith Richards and Jimmie Page? Enough said. (Since when did all this stuff become retroactive? Reporting liecense?)
RWE@102: housing developments and (gasp!) golf courses and the like.
[smiling] I remain a strong supporter of efforts to keep the land, air, and water resources clean, but I have concerns about the ecosystem sciences, and the intent of too many of the advocates, recalling the early days of F&G in CA where the employees were allowed to actively engage in anti-land development practices. The situation was extreme and out of whack. There’s some critical history (primarily State F&G as well as USFWS) but I can’t locate it right now. It is hard not to notice, however, that the ecosystem regs tend to concentrate in the State F&G and USFWS (ESA is administered jointly by USFWS and NOAA!!, with some NMFS under NOAA), while the Clean Air Act, CERCLA (Superfund) and RCRA (solid and hazardous waste) are administered by the EPA, usually at the state level.
This Gibson Guitar episode – it *looks* like some German activist with red hair (probably part of his “cover”) got someone in Washington to insert a line or two into the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 that activated the Lacey Act (1900!), well outside the normal purview of EPA. The German guy pulled a fast one.
“The process of English language diffusion is unstoppable.”
Exactly. Can’t fly an airplane without it. Next time you are really bored jump on babal fish and have it translate “computer” into as many different languages as you have interest in doing.
On a negative note, the word most likely to be recognised anywhere in the world is “OK”. I consider it more of an infliction then anything else. I was hoping ‘kewl’ would replace ‘ok’ but no such luck.
bl@108: Who ARE these handlers –and how DID they get so STOOPID ???
Obama’s Team Is Blowing It
a further comment, on the southern mannerly tradition that most northerners don’t get; it’s not just a disgust at the lack of manners of someone who’s openly rude, it’s also the lack of intelligence and effort. If an insult is to be delivered, it is worth delivering with a great deal of skill and forethought! People who are rude just spout off whatever thought hits their heads with no forethought at all. That’s easy, and crass, and unworthy of any respect.
Consider this tale of one of my favorite insults, from the American Civil War. Braxton Bragg was at the time commander of the Tennessee-Georgia area, and he was notoriously unpopular with his staff. (His sub-commanders hated him almost more than they hated the Federal forces they were fighting) This hatred progressed until it let to this notable breakfast scene, and one of the best southern insults ever delivered:
(From Master of War, the life of General George H. Thomas, by Benson Bobrick)
“Bragg had planned to attack at dawn. Polk, on the right, was to start it, then the rest of the army to take it up by brigades. As the sun mounted in the sky, Bragg was in the saddle, surrounded by his staff. After listening in vain for the sound of Polk’s guns, he at last dispatched an aide to ascertain the cause of the delay. The officer found Polk seated at a comfortable breakfast, surrounded by his own luxurious staff. When told of Bragg’s peremptory order to attack, Polk replied; “Do tell General Bragg that my heart is overflowing with anxiety for the attack – overflowing with anxiety, Sir!” When Bragg heard this, he swore roundly up and down and ordered his whole line to advance.”
see, If you really want to let someone know how you feel about them, that’s how you do it.
u/110, that is one hell of a map, once one studies the pictographic legend a few seconds. Shows in an instant why so much chinese cash and western hyperbillionaire hedge money is going into NWO brick n mortar in Mongolia and Kazakhstan, and why Glencore the stealth commodity octopus is buying up Kazakh commodities.
***
wws/114, for some other fine insults to Bragg, try Pvt Sam Watkins.
…and heartily concur with AP’s orihginal q and your and other’s anwers. It’s strictly a matter of ‘vibe’ –and i don’t use that word if there’s a more specific. i think the vibe clash has to do with rate of speed of reaction, in a conversational encounter. and this in turn is –as is everything –weather and climate related. Forex, look at how often the word ‘push’ is used, as in ‘pushy’ yankees. That’s literally what a dawdling southerner feels, from a yankee. And the dawdling is simply a race memory of pre-air conditioning. Dasn’t move faist!
On language, I was wondering when no problem replaced you’re welcome? It unnerved me at a time, now there is no getting over it anywhere. The waiter in an upscale restaurant brings you your order, you mutter the obligatory “thank you” and he chirps “no problem!” In days past I would counter argue “Who said there was a problem? Did I say there was a problem? Are you suggesting there was a problem? What problem exactly were you referring to? …no, you said there was no problem….” Now I rather not bother.
Dorothy Parker had a way with insults…
“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
“If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
“That woman speaks 18 languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them.”
…someone said, “There goes So & So. She is her own worst enemy.” Dorothy Parker quipped, “Not while I’m alive.”
You can lead a horticulture, but you cannot make her think.
She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.
Churchill was another.
Buddy,
re: Stoopid Handlers,
At least they didn’t put him in a picture like the one on the Drudge column to the right of the reporter covered with Sea Sludge.
…and how were they to know he would fail so miserably in his attempt to affect a pose of concern and resolve?
Shoulda stayed @ The Vineyard
PS to #115, and the more a yankee radiates ”hurry up”, the more a southerner slows down –but not obviously, not in any way as to give any reason to remark on it without sounding like a jerk. The yankee will ‘sense’ this of course, and feel like the southerner is slyly provoking him. While the southerner feels like he’s just offering a counter example of how to handle the heat and humidity. As well as, of course, how best to provoke. And yes, like the Blues and how to dance outside square dancing, the southern whites learned this exquisite form of insult (and/or insult reaction) from the way southern blacks interact with THEM. If you want to be treated like Simon LeGree, just treat a black guy like Steppin Fetchit.
“This could be worse than a run of bad luck”
he said.
Worth More than a Thousand Words
“This is going to be a tough slog getting through this thing,” Obama said during a video teleconference including senior federal officials and local government agencies in the east coast path of Irene.
“It’s going to be a long 72 hours. Obviously a lot of families are going to be affected … the biggest concern I’m having right now has to do with flooding and power,” Obama said during the videoconference.
“(It) sounds like that’s going to be an enormous strain on a lot of states” that could last days, or even longer in some cases, he said.
Saturday evening Obama convened a conference call with members of his senior emergency response team including Vice President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, among others.
“The President was briefed on the current track of the storm, the weather impacts being felt so far and efforts to pre-position response and recovery assets,” said a statement released by the White House.
“The President asked to be kept apprised of developments throughout the night and said that he wants the group to re-convene tomorrow morning.”
Obama returned home one night early on Friday from his island vacation on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and appeared keen to be visibly in charge as the response to Hurricane Irene unfolds.
“…appeared keen to be visibly in charge as the response to Hurricane Irene unfolds, since he could hardly play golf in it.”
A Dorothy Parkerism for the Moving Finger folder, ‘handwriting on cosmic wall’ file:
(What the Bush presidency foundered on, i.e. the false accusation of disinterest in Katrina, returning as real disinterest in Irene on the part of the successor president:)
Life is a season of unending joy / A medley of extemporanea / Love is a song that can never go wrong / And I am the queen of Romania
.
am @ 116: it may be the “no problem” usage stems from IM and texting. “np” somehow is a better response than “yw”. I picked this up at work and have been following it for about a year now.
it is a bit anomalous for a *waiter* to tell you “no problem”, just as you describe. in the IM environment where you have generally intruded into someone’s (cyber)space, when you close by saying “thx”, their “np” confirms that your intrusion was within protocols, did NOT entail any problems worth mentioning. indeed, was probably highly preferable to your actually appearing in person or trying some of that old voice-only communication people used to do on “telephones”.
if you asked the waiter for something special, like ketchup or a napkin, the point being not the item but that you made a request outside of default behaviors, that might excuse his “np” response.
(just to clarify: where I’ve been working out at “Megabank” IM usage is highly encouraged, project team members are seldom in the same office, state, or time zone, and as a result people will IM you from the next cube, for some kind of weird consistency, I suppose)
A little amateur linguistic anthropology for a Sunday morning …
102. RWE
Sgian #101:
You might try Half.com if Amazon does not have it. You can almost bet for sure that if it is a used book Half.com will have it.
Amazon has it. I like to buy books new, so I ‘ll probably buy the book rather than a paperback. They have both. After that retina tear in April, seeing out of both eyes is enhanced with large print. A paperback would mean only a bookshelf artifact for someone else in the future. Still, some value if inheritors read, rather than burn it. My dates were off – thinkin’ back, a friend lent me his copy when I was on the USS Kitty Hawk, so it must have been between ’78 and ’79 when I read it.
After you got me the name, finding it was quick; the internet is truly a wonderful thing for those who use it with the right motivations.
Thanks, again.
toadold
I really do think that we’ve already passed one significant threshold – I believe a majority of Americans no longer think the government is legitimate. Most still put up with it because there’s no better alternative immediately available, but the second tripwire – people coming to believe there is a better alternative – would “trigger off something even nastier.” There are two ways for a better alternative to gain support. One of course is for some charismatic figure to put together a coalition that seems able to deliver on a promise of better government. This seems like a stretch right now, since the problems are so great and public cynicism is so high. The other way though, is for the current government to get worse and more obnoxious so that existing alternatives – as bad as they may be – become better by default. Another way of saying it, if you hit rock bottom and keep digging, pretty soon rock bottom starts to look really good.
If it does become something nastier than a landslide vote, it’ll be nasty indeed. Different than the last time too. Though the Civil War was a war that pitted ideology, culture and economic interests against one another, the splits were fairly evenly distributed across all strata of society, but there was a very sharp geographical divide. So the Civil War wasn’t really a civil war, or even a rebellion. It was a failed secession attempt by one region of the continent.
It’s not that way this time – the ideological, cultural and economic loyalties are very unevenly distributed socially, but there’s no clear geographic divide. Sure, there’s the notion of the “blue states” and liberal coastal enclaves, but the truth is a half hour drive from most Blue Coastal Cities finds you a Republican congressional district. Well, actually, after a decade of Democratic control of transportation spending that half hour drive might be a bit longer, but you know what I mean.
Speaking of which, I wonder about the timeline of this Northern-Southern cultural animosity. As a Westerner, I can sympathize with both sides. I can see why a Southern Boy might be annoyed with a Noo Yawkers rudeness, and I can understand a Yankee losing patience with an overly-prickly Southern sense of pride. But at what point did those animosities really take hold? Certainly there was always some tension – Washington’s initially rocky relationship with the New England soldiers under his command in the Revolution is well known – but was the animosity always as bad as it was immediately preceding the Civil War?
Amendment to my @111: The Lacey Act is administered through USFWS (which is under the Dept of Interior; still administratively removed from EPA.)
112. stoicheion
“On a negative note, the word most likely to be recognised anywhere in the world is “OK”. I consider it more of an infliction then anything else. I was hoping ‘kewl’ would replace ‘ok’ but no such luck.”
I prefer the phrase A-OK. It provides a good answer to the question “How are you doing?” Much better than the response of “OK” to the command of “Do what you’re told.”
I responded well to orders in the Navy – “Aye, Aye, Sir” was said with commitment, conviction, gusto and understanding. It was offered in support of respected authority. Not so much today. Issues such as Gibson and ‘Fast and Furious’ are eroding that once freely given obedience. Just remember what happened to officers in Vietnam who treated their charges as vassals. Respect is not to be handed out – it is to be “earned,” as John Houseman might aver.
“This is going to be a tough slog getting through this thing,” Obama said.
Meanwhile, Obama’s illegal aiien uncle was arrested last week in Massachusetts for driving under the influence:
“A number of media outlets have already reported that an illegal immigrant from Kenya by the name of Onyango Obama, 67, was arrested last week on Wednesday after he rammed his SUV into a police car in Framingham, Massachusetts.
He was later charged with DUI among other violations. I spoke to Framingham Public Information Officer Lieutenant Delaney who told me that when Onyango Obama was asked at booking if he wanted to make a telephone call to arrange for bail, the Kenyan immigrant replied: ‘I think I will call the White House.’
It should be noted that the Times of London, highlighted an Onyango Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, when the British daily found President Barack Obama’s ‘Aunt Zeituni’ living in Boston illegally. . . . ”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2011/aug/28/picket-obamas-illegal-uncle-arrested-uncle-omar-hi/
As Bryan Preston notes, “That makes two (known) Obama relatives living in the US who are illegal aliens, Uncle Omar (as the alleged drunk driver Onyango Obama is called) and Aunt Zeituni, who lives on welfare furnished by US taxpayers. Obama’s father also nearly faced deportation, when Harvard sought to have him booted (and dubbed him a “slippery character”). Obama Sr. did live in the US for a time as an illegal alien himself — he overstayed after his visa expired. So that’s three (known) Obamas who have lived in the US in violation of US immigration law. Being a scofflaw seem to run in the family. Is it out of bounds to wonder if President Obama enacted his amnesty by fiat in order to keep his welfare queen aunt and drunk driving uncle from having to face deportation? . . . . Bottom line: The Obama family apparently doesn’t respect American rule of law at all. Too bad one of them got elected president.”
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/08/28/obama-arrrested-for-drunk-driving-in-massachusetts-wait-what/
Denigrate if you must, PA…
I look at it as evidence that The Won represents an other Immaculate Conception.
…the menfolk being too inebriated to perform.
Luckily, the weed doesn’t represent such a challenge to the seedstock.
Pull your hair out Dr. Corsi!
Calling James O’Keefe, and his sidekick “Kenya”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2009/09/10/acorn-officials-videotaped-telling-pimp-prostitute-lie-irs#ixzz1WM0nCfoR
#128 Doug
I think you meant another virgin birth. Another immaculate conception would imply that Stanley Ann Dunham was conceived without sin.
Talk about Kafkaesque…
I missed a lot of details back when the ACORN tapes were filmed.
That Fox link has many more than the ones I quote, including Taxpayer Paid for first-time homebuyer seminars, the better to house your illegal operations!
“Exactly,” the ACORN staffer replies. “It’s like they don’t even exist.”
If the girls are under age 16, the ACORN staffer says on the tape, then they are not legally allowed to work in the state, regardless of what they do.
“So it’s like they don’t even exist?” “Kenya” asks.
“Exactly,” the ACORN staffer replies. “It’s like they don’t even exist.”
The staffer goes on to suggest that as many as three of the underage girls can be listed as dependents at the home, but a “flag” will be raised if as many as 13 are listed.
“You are gonna use three of them,” the staffer says. “They are gonna be under 16, so you is eligible to get child tax credit and additional child tax credit.”
The ACORN workers also appear to be promoting the group’s services to the “pimp” and “Kenya.”
A second ACORN employee can be heard on the audiotape suggesting that the couple join the organization for an annual cost of $120 prior to attending one of its first-time homebuyer seminars, which are underwritten with taxpayer funds.
Later, when the “pimp” asks what would happen if the organization is somehow connected to the scheme, the ACORN staffer replies, “First of all, it’s not gonna damage us because we not gonna know. And with your girls, you tell them, ‘Be careful.’ Train them to keep their mouth shut.”
“These girls are like 14, how can we trust them?” the pimp asks.
“Just be very, very careful,” the ACORN staffer says. “Whatever you do, always keep your eyes in the back of your head.”
I’m sure at some age in the O’Keefe application, someone at ACORN would’ve called the police. Wonder what age that would be? I’m betting, 12 okay, 11 not. Though maybe it would’ve been 8 and 7. The left and Feminisim are completely intertwined, so the Cloward-Piven creation ACORN isn’t even ‘left’ –it’s just ‘organized crime’ with a Big Lie shield –like Leninism.
116. Annoy Mouse
On language, I was wondering when no problem replaced you’re welcome? It unnerved me at a time, now there is no getting over it anywhere. The waiter in an upscale restaurant brings you your order, you mutter the obligatory “thank you” and he chirps “no problem!” In days past I would counter argue “Who said there was a problem? Did I say there was a problem? Are you suggesting there was a problem? What problem exactly were you referring to? …no, you said there was no problem….” Now I rather not bother.
I figured that one out – it is a sign of the times. A sign of the herd.
The term is used as a reaction to what has culturally been the norm. Sying “You’re welcome” focuses the respnder on YOU and your convenience. Saying “No Problem” simply lets you know who the waiter thinks is the most important in the exchange. He says “No problem” to let you know that you really didn’t inconvenience him while…he was supposed to be SERVING you.
It says in effect, even in a customer service demanding profession, that he is still the superior one in the relationship. His Mommy and Daddy brought him up that way – HE is the center of his world; you are but on the periphery.
Just as my daughter growing up used to say, “That’s…like…crazy.” And I used to respond attempting to teach her basic communication skills, “Well is it “like crazy” or is it truly crazy?” Deer in the headlights.
I was unsuccessful until she went into business and I’m sure that someone must have finally gotten through. I think that since I was but a parent, I was…”like”…crazy.
118. Doug
Buddy,
Shoulda stayed @ The Vineyard
-
Yeah, it would’ve kept the BS* off of them.
*Big Storm
sd/133, yep, looking at that pic on drudge, it’s easy to see he was thinking,
“…don’t look at the ball … look THROUGH the ball to the cup … and then back to the face of the Putter …then back to the cup … NOT the BALL … dammit …”
***
unsk –re your #114 comment on ”Rap on God”", it closed after you, but i answered you on the ”ancient times” thread @ #64.
***
Back on guitars, there’s a little town in north central-west -ish Texas called San Angelo. If you don’t know where it is, it’s near Brownwood of course. The Garza brothers from there formed a band called ”Los Lonely Boys”. If you want to see what the meaning of guitars is, search ‘em on youtube. Guys and music like theirs does more for the Texican mixed race culture than any army of DC bureaucrats could ever in a thousand years DREAM of doing.
Guitars are dangerous! If you’re a fascist.
Unsk@114 (Rap on God):
Personal Income Tax Rates:
(the information is much clearer at the linked source – and it is important to note the income levels at which the rates (bottom and top) apply.)
President Year Rate (%) Income up to Rate (%) Income over
Kennedy 1960-61 20 4,000 91 400,000 Recession
Kennedy 1961-63 20 4,000 91 400,000
Johnson 1964 16 1,000 77 400,000
Johnson 1965-67 14 1,000 70 200,000
Nixon 1968-69 14 1,000 75 200,000
Nixon 1969-70 14 1,000 75 200,000 Recession
Nixon 1970-74 14 1,000 75 200,000
Ford 1974-76 14 1,000 70 200,000 Recession
Carter 1976-78 14 1,000 70 200,000
Carter 1979-80 14 2,100 10 212,000
Reagan 1980 14 2,100 70 212,000 Recession
Reagan 1981 14 2,100 69 212,000 Recession
Reagan 1982 12 2,100 50 106,000 Recession
Reagan 1983 11 2,100 50 106,000
Reagan 1984 11 2,100 50 159,000
Reagan 1985 11 2,180 50 165,480
Reagan 1986 11 2,270 50 171,580
Reagan 1987 11 3,000 39 90,000
GHWBush 1988 15 29,750 28 29,750
GHWBush 1989 15 30,950 28 30,950
GHWBush 1990 15 32,450 28 32,450 Recession
GHWBush 1991 15 34,000 31 82,150 Recession
Clinton 1992 15 35,800 31 86,500
Clinton 1993 15 36,900 40 250,000
Clinton 1994 15 38,000 40 250,000
Clinton 1995 15 39,000 40 256,500
Clinton 1996 15 40,100 40 263,750
Clinton 1997 15 41,200 40 271,050
Clinton 1998 15 42,350 40 278,450
Clinton 1999 15 43,050 40 283,150
GWBush 2000 15 43,850 40 288,350
GWBush 2001 15 45,200 39 297,350 Recession
GWBush 2002 10 12,000 39 307,050
GWBush 2003 10 14,000 35 311,950
GWBush 2004 10 14,300 35 319,100
GWBush 2005 10 14,600 35 326,450
GWBush 2006 10 15,100 35 336,550
GWBush 2007 10 15,650 35 349,700 Recession
Obama 2008 10 16,050 35 357,700 Recession
Obama 2009 10 16,700 35 372,950 Recession
Obama 2010 10 16,700 35 373,650
Obama 2011 10 17,000 35 379,150
…………………………………………………………………………………….
Take a look at this graph and argue that there isn’t some fiscal ‘component’ to *help* get out of the current bipartisan debt crisis.
Garza bros-Los Lonely Boys miked up at a radio station, without the drum set.
On Town Lake with the night skyline of Austin behind them, in front of a crowd of fans from the barrios as well as the posh suburbs from all over the state, students at UT. Listen to the lyrics on this one, “How Far is Heaven?”
Big timin’ it in Los Angeles, tribute to Richie Valens, “La Bamba” with legendary Carlos Santana guesting his guitar. Listen for “We LOVE You, America!”
So many forces trying to stop people from looking at their endless forms of paperwork applications, and seeing the checkbox labeled ‘race’, and looking up from the paper and hollering out “WTF is THIS doing here?”
And of the free-forces opposing the race checkboxers, music is the BIG one –and the one that gets ‘em young. Guitar music especially.
YBR, Have you ever heard of “Hauser’s Law”. It shows that there is very little, if fact more likely at present rates, an inverse, relationship between total revenue and tax rates. Our Federal Government is addicted to high marginal rates for the well off. As a result, when we enter a period of bad economic times where there is little opportunity for profitable enterprises and poor returns on investments, our total tax revenue tanks. We are in such a period now. We are at a post war low of 14.6% of GDP for total revenue. Raising rates in a depression only discourages investment even more and makes the situation far worse, not better. Raising tax rates now would be pure insanity. It would only kill more jobs and sent investment overseas and into gold and silver.
The track record is clear. Income tax cuts in the 20′s, 60′s and 80′s, as well as capital gains tax cuts in the 90′s and the Prop 13 tax cuts are resulted in far greater revenue, not less. The reverse is also true, here in California, income tax increases have not raised revenue; they have only taken the State down further. In fact, you should study Andrew Mellon’s response to the 1920 depression. He cut taxes and did not bail out businesses despite urgent pleas from the then Sec Treas. Herbert Hoover. Unemployment went from over 20% to 4 % in a little less than two years, and the Roaring Twenties were born. Further Big Gov interventions, tax increases and more propping up of the bankrupt banking and welfare systems will only end in ruin.
There are so many laws and regulations now everyone is in violation of some Federal rule….including the people who wrote the rules. Sooner or later the FBI will attempt to arrest someone one in the Dept. of Education law enforcement team for mopery with an attempt to gawk on a steam boat landing and the Marshall’s service will swoop down on both of them just ahead of a Treasury Dept. task force. Mean While EPA enforcers will be in a fire fight with Fish and Wildlife,
And ATF agents will be caught in a DEA ambush. Obama will issue an order to arrest anyone who is not working for the Federal government and will have no one to do it.
ybr, about a trillion dollars of a quick four trillion spend, simply whooped thru and handed out to supporters, and then y’all pivot and start up “well we have to raise taxes on the ((dirty no good airplane drivin’ las vegas goin’)) rich, becuz it’s the only fiscally responsible thing to do!”
Christ-a-mighty, words fail me.
The fiscal side of the stimulous bill should have been PART of the BILL –otherwise, we are just being crudely played –and it is NOT funny.
***
(well i gotta go cut brush –no rain –trees are dying. i’ll come back and argue with you in about four hours. say something that will change my mind please will you)
Next Storm?
“Mrs Merkel’s aides say she is facing “war on every front”.”
…-
“Financial Crisis
Euro bail-out in doubt as “hysteria” sweeps Germany
German Chancellor Angela Merkel no longer has enough coalition votes in the Bundestag to secure backing for Europe’s revamped rescue machinery, threatening a consitutional crisis in Germany and a fresh eruption of the euro debt saga.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8728628/Euro-bail-out-in-doubt-as-hysteria-sweeps-Germany.html
Unsk & bl:
I’m not going to turn this into a roller ball derby. The numbers show that higher marginal tax rates do not correlate with reduced economic growth, as per this graphic. The airplanes and the publicity noise and the dripping rhetoric don’t have anything to do with it.
Buddy,
While you were reading J.R. Nyquist and worrying about Putin’s Evil Empire and Soros actually being a Russkiy double agent rather than an enemy of Russian AND American sovereignty playing our dumbass spooks like a fiddle in favor of almighty globalism, Senor Equis has been complaining about the keep Foreign Drugs Away (FDA) and the Embargo against Cuba as an act of massive Big Health Care/Pharma cartel competition suppression since 2009.
The situation is especially bad in gastroenterology drugs that have been on the market in Europe since the late 80s ealry 90s which laughably still cannot get approved in the U.S. Forget about the cheap generics from India or even Canada and Mexico for that matter either (Monterrey has plenty of pharma mills that could crank out whatever we needed, long before the Cubans let er’ rip 90 miles from our shores and U.S. Customs starts spending more time keeping their cheap generics out than the Zetas products, since the Zetas perhaps are on the payroll or at least get ATF guns).
It’s no laughing matter if you’re trying to order the pharmaceuticals from Canada with a prescription written in a third country because U.S. gastros don’t know about these drugs or are scared to write something that’s (gasp!) only been approved in nearly all European nations for twenty years. Pray that you do find one if you ever find yourself with a nasty gastric bacteria that proves itself immune to most antibiotics.
And Buddy, since you’ve mentioned before that you have a grandchild who’s married Russian (?), better tell them to stock up next time they fly to Moscow where you can IN A FREE MARKET GET MOST DRUGS THAT DEMAND PRESCRIPTIONS OVER HERE WITHOUT PRESCRIPTION…Go Galt on those bastards and do it in the ‘Evil Empire’ that may be corrupt but doesn’t give a damn what pharmaceuticals you buy.
The only exceptions are the deep tranquilizers, narcotic-related painkillers and anti-depressants. The Russians won’t sell you those without prescription.
These bureaucrats will get you killed, and the only question is whether it’s a bug or a feature.
YBR, Excuse me, the years following major tax cuts were Boom years. Twenties, Sixties, Eighties, and the Late Nineties. The numbers also show that higher marginal rates don’t correlate with higher tax revenue. And you still haven’t responded to my challenge; show us the plan from the so-called “Adults in the Room” that works.
Our crisis is not just about the deficit. It is only part of the problem. If we were to somehow raise taxes or cut spending, or some combination of the two to cut the deficit to under 3%, the economy would crash. That’s more than a 7% slash in the GDP. Ouch. Big Ouch! The economy must grow substantially to soften the blow from the fix Buraq has gotten us into. That is a major problem that did not exist in 2008! It’s all on Buraq, Timmy, the Bernank and the Dems.
Buddy was right @ 139. The Stimulus was just one big payoff to Buraq’s crony bud’s: the big corporate contributors,Soros, the unions, the banks and the guvmint employees. There was nothing in it that would put the economy on a permanent growth path. We are not in a cyclical recession, where a stimulus will get people spending and investing again.
A major structural impediment to recovery is that regulation is way too high, complex and punitive. The cost/benefit and risk/reward ratios are upside down for your typical venture in America these days as a result. Opportunities for healthy profit for both businesses, particularly small businesses, and investors must be restored or this economy will not recover, and will only slide into a scary ruin. That means we must go back to the “whiny,petulant, and spoiled” Tea Party basics: Small, accountable government, a sound currency, sound banking, reasonable and predictable regulation, enforcement of our Constitutional rights and the rule of law. OMG, What radical ideas!
The jig is up for the Socialist and Capitalist Crony sleight of hand con games, pyramid and Ponzi schemes. Too many have seen Bernank, the FED Carnival Barker’s con games once too many times. The markets pissed all over Buraq’s grand bargain with the Rino’s, and the Bernank’s extension of ZIRP into 2013. Gold went through the roof and equities nosedived. There are no more Keynesian bullets available in the barrel. This past week saw B of A nearly do a Lehman on steroids. The Euro is on the precipice. The close calls are coming with greater frequency and greater velocity; that means we are nearing the collapse. We cannot keep kicking the can down the road anymore. The Big Guv tricks that worked in the past have lost their dazzle and now just fizzle. We must get back to basics damn quick or we are doomed.
Unsk: Our Federal Government is addicted to high marginal rates for the well off.
The top bracket personal tax rates have steadily decreased since the end of WWII: from 91% under Kennedy to 50% under Reagan to 39% under Clinton to 35% under GWB and Obama (the so-called Bush tax cuts.) The talk now is going back to the 39% tax rate to help pay the interest, which is now 27% of the total debt incurred by bipartisan spending.
Unsk: It’s all on Buraq, Timmy, the Bernank and the Dems.
Recession Spending:
GWB: $25 B (TARP) + $700 B (Bank Bailout) = $725 B
Obama: $800 B (Stimulus)
I think that’s a wash. And The Greenspan’s contribution is not even factored in.
bl@139: becuz it’s the only fiscally responsible thing to do!
Much like spending $1.2 T on ME adventurism and incurring $7.2 T of unfunded liability from Medicare Part D (not to get into the GWB tax cuts.)
There’s an 18 month lag from tax cut to increased revenue. Thanks for showing the track record.
George Bush adopted several ideas from the Democrats in the hope or even unjustified expectation that he could build trust and cooperation on critical national security issues. Given that for almost a century politicians on both sides of the aisle had chanted, “Politics stops at the water’s edge” he deluded himself with the hope that a handshake with Ted Kennedy meant something.
Medicare Part D is a bad idea. Increased federal funding and regulation of public education is a bad idea. TARP was a bad idea. Protecting the airlines from the legal system in return for federalizing transportation security and hiring 50,000 unskilled federal workers for TSA was a bad idea. Instead Congress should have just declared the attacks an Act of War with damages exempt from civil liability. They were all Democratic Party ideas. The Republicans are only guilty, like the rest of the country, of being repeatedly sucker punched by the Democrats.
This has happened before. Richard Nixon swallowed large chunks of the Democratic Party’s domestic agenda, such as the EPA. Think of all the good that did him or the rest of us.
“And Buddy, since you’ve mentioned before that you have a grandchild who’s married Russian (?), better tell them to stock up next time they fly to Moscow where you can IN A FREE MARKET GET MOST DRUGS THAT DEMAND PRESCRIPTIONS OVER HERE WITHOUT PRESCRIPTION…Go Galt on those bastards and do it in the ‘Evil Empire’ that may be corrupt but doesn’t give a damn what pharmaceuticals you buy.
The only exceptions are the deep tranquilizers, narcotic-related painkillers and anti-depressants. The Russians won’t sell you those without prescription.
”
Sounds like a sure way to quickly breed antibiotic resistant superbugs.
…Doctors and Pharmacists do serve a purpose.
Blast: Thanks for showing the track record.
No problem.
Unsk: And you still haven’t responded to my challenge; show us the plan from the so-called “Adults in the Room” that works.
The long-term plan will include five components: spending cuts, revenue enhancements, economic growth, currency devaluation, and jobs. The two biggest issues are controlling the cost of health care and putting people back to work – putting the demand back into consumption. Political viability is the obstacle, especially as pertains to Big Pharma and Big Insurance. Employment is also on a sliding temporal scale, which means nothing will happen tomorrow, which means we must find a way to pay the bills today – or default on our debt.
The broad outlines are established. The next ten years will require considerably more than stomping heatedly out of the conference room.
Our Secret Leviathan
During the nine years since Sept. 11, the national security state has doubled or tripled in size, with huge annexes in the private sector — and the culture of secrecy has metastasized simultaneously.
Priest and Arkin say that there are as many as 1,271 government entities and 1,931 private companies “working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States,” with an estimated 854,000 people – far more than live in the city of Washington, D.C. — holding top-secret security clearances.”
More than 30 building complexes for top-secret intelligence outfits are either under construction now or have been built since September 2001; altogether, these buildings occupy 17 million square feet of space.
Nobody in the White House, the Congress or any of the intelligence agencies, including the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence, seems to have the capacity to manage the complex tangle of agencies, companies and off-the-books entities that are supposed to protect us from violent extremism.
After reviewing the way that the Defense Department oversees its most sensitive intelligence and operational programs last year, retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines told the Post reporters that he found the morass almost incomprehensible:
“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities. The complexity of this system defies description.”
Calling this thing a “system” is a bit misleading. But does the leviathan offspring of government and corporation make us safer? That, too, is difficult to determine — in fact, it is impossible to determine, as the writers explain, because with “so many employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur.”
We have no way of knowing precisely what the national security complex does with the hundreds of billions of dollars in its shrouded budgets. What we do know is that billions of dollars are wasted through redundancy, corruption and sheer overgrowth. Too many agencies are performing the same tasks, such as shutting down terrorist money transfers and generating too many reports for anyone to read.
Most disturbing is that so many critical functions are outsourced to private corporations, primarily loyal to shareholders and management. The role of these corporations and their lobbyists, who controlled the creation of the Department of Homeland Security during the George W. Bush administration, is a challenge to democracy of unprecedented proportions.
But despite presidential promises of transparency, the Barack Obama administration is fostering more secrecy, not less — which is exactly the wrong way to cope with this problem. Our democracy and our security both depend on bringing this monstrous bureaucracy to heel — and that can only be done in the sunlight.
Blast: This has happened before. Richard Nixon swallowed large chunks of the Democratic Party’s domestic agenda, such as the EPA. Think of all the good that did him or the rest of us.
As I noted above, most of the ecosystem regulations are administered by USDFW (Dept of Interior) and NOAA (Dept of Commerce). The EPA (Cabinet-like office) generally focuses on clean air, land, and water resources (Clean Air Act, CERCLA and RCRA.) The EPA has done a lot of good work.
[GWB] deluded himself with the hope that a handshake with Ted Kennedy meant something.
Blaming the Democrats for Ted Kennedy is no different from blaming the Republicans for GWB. *Both* parties are being recycled.
Dear Blast,
At least 20 years ago there were plenty of articles in the news pointing out that the ease of purchasing antibiotics in Mexico without any prescription was breeding resistant bacteria. The real problem is not that there is no prescription, but that the users of the antibiotics frequently ignored the instructions and STOPPED taking the medicine as soon as the symptoms subsided.
Same thing happens in the USA, WITH PRESCRIPTIONS, when the patients ignore the physician’s instructions. Stupid is stupid, whether the idiot is ignoring written directions or spoken ones from an authority figure.
Blast: TARP was a bad idea.
TARP is the least of our problems:
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The total final cost to taxpayers of the much-maligned $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program will be around $50 billion, the Treasury Department estimated on Tuesday in a “two-year retrospective report,” with costs expected to come from investments in auto companies and a mortgage modification program.
Blast: They [incl Medicare Part D] were all Democratic Party ideas.
Cite? That’s not how some remember it:
Today the Medicare prescription-drug debate is remembered mainly for the political shenanigans Republicans used to get their bill through. Bush officials lied about the numbers and threatened to fire Medicare’s chief actuary if he shared honest cost estimates with Congress. House Republicans cut off C-SPAN and kept the roll call open for three hours—as opposed to the requisite 15 minutes—while cajoling the last few votes they needed for passage. Former Majority Leader Tom DeLay was admonished by the House ethics committee for winning the eleventh-hour support of Nick Smith, a Michigan Republican, by threatening to vaporize Smith’s son in an upcoming election.
Blast: George Bush adopted several ideas from the Democrats in the hope or even unjustified expectation that he could build trust and cooperation on critical national security issues.
Which presupposes GWB’s foreign policy initiatives, with Congress supporting the UN war resolutions, will be recorded by history as successful by some metric(s).
jeez, mr x, what am i, Methuselah? that’s a daughter not a grand daughter –stork dropped me off a decent interval after Red Army sprung dad from Stalag Luft 1. but yes, i agree, we’re about to see a quantum jump in contraband medicinals. FDA is not the emperor with no clothes but the emperor’s clothes with no emperor. And that ‘bug or feature’ remark, i’d've called you krazy not too many moons ago. Re Nyquist, you are mentioning him, so i surmise you are reading him. If he’s full o baloney, you could do a ”Krugman Truth Squad” a la Donald Luskin, and keep old JR honest thataway. Hell, wretchard is so easy on the winding threads you could compress a version and drop it in comments right here, most likely.
ybr, i know you said you did not want to get off into tit-for-tat history, but then you went right off into tit-for-tat history. Let me be too brief here, but Part D would not have been so onerous had we continued owning an economy that despite the dot com bust and the enormous Dem scandals that Bush broke open and 9/11 and two resultant wars, grew at 4-5% with 4-5% unemployment and 2-4% of GDP deficits right up until the end of the eight years, when the collapse that came from Democrats in congress and Democrats on Wall Street combined with a 2006 midterm that Democrats won (due to such as fraudulent scandals a la Plame/Wilsom, Aby Graib, agents provocateur such as Mark Foley shagging male interns, and an MSM high-holy and mendacious jihad, went to Pelosi and Reid, and started the pullback of business that then went into warp speed as soon as it became evident that the GOP rinos didn’t want to fight and that hence the Democrat’s communist wing was going to win the WH too in 2008.
Another point re those high marginal tax rates of bygone years, the federal government in those days had an image of gray haired sobriety and tight-fisted frugality, which meant *everything* as far as attitude toward high marginal brackets.
Of course those who paid the high rates didn’t like the high rates, but there was no queasy, falling off a cliff in the dead of night horror at any fantastical fraud and waste –as there is now.
Small point, but a point –and those stats you quote, about no correlation between GDP and high marginal rates, well, there’s also no correlation vice versa, because there is no control or any semblance of blind test doable in the comparison.
And the phrase ‘high marginal rates’ –are you remembering that there are *people* paying them? The people whose fear and loathing of this admin are already keeping them from the robust can-do risk-taking optimism –which has been the secret of the world’s most dynamic workplace since WW2 and until 2006?
ybr/150, The long-term plan will include five components: spending cuts, revenue enhancements, economic growth, currency devaluation, and jobs
What spending cuts? THAT is the problem with the all-saints-want-’em ”revenue enhancements” (AKA citizen wallet dis-enhancements) –there’s NO deal worth warm spit. Economic growth is part of your plan? Hallelujah, why didn’t I think of that? Jobs is part of your plan? Damn –now THAT’s a PLAN!
The next ten years will require considerably more than stomping heatedly out of the conference room
In response to THAT, here’s what i left (in response to an earlier utteration of it) at ”ancient times” after ”rap on god” closed on an unsk comment i wanted to blabber about:
(open self-quote)
Also, let’s PLEASE not forget that the House, because of the 2010 Tea frosh, DID pass a bill.
So no one can doubt that they were prepared ”to do much more than walk out of the room” –because they already HAD done much more than walk out of the room.
The so-called ‘cut, cap, and balance’ Ryan plan –which every single non-partisan-hack economist LOVED, and which SP stated officially would have prevented the downgrade, and which i know for a fact would’ve boomed the markets, was delivered WEEKS before the ‘final deal’ was hammered out by the Dems and the ‘irresponsible’ Pubs.
It was hand-delivered to Harry Reid, a copy that was the ONLY copy, so Ryan was able to expose later that neither Reid nor the president could’ve possibly read it before Obama promised to veto it if it got thru the senate, and before Reid simply immediately tabled it with prejudice.
IOW, the ‘adult’ Dems BLOCKED the only plan that the financial world and business world and the foreign trading partners world were prepared to respond to with stepped-up business activity –including soon enough, HIRING.
How ANYONE in the light of this can honestly accuse the Tea Party of abdication of responsibility is just totally beyond my comprehension.
PS, and another act of sabotage on the process was Boehner and Obama getting to an agreement, and then obama deciding to kill what he had just negotiated, by adding $500 billion in new taxes onto the people the nation needs to rev up so that they will expand inventories and start hiring the unemployed.
No, the Dems, as they always do, want the issue, not the solution. They want the issue because the freaking press will change the facts until it has a version that demonizes the right in the eyes of the Dem voters. IOW, the debt crisis, like any other crisis, should always be turned into class warfare by any means possible. Solutions? Well, only if the pubbies will
“BE REASONABLE” !
(close self-quote)
bl: ybr, i know you said you did not want to get off into tit-for-tat history, but then you went right off into tit-for-tat history.
No, I don’t and I don’t think I did. All of my more than four posts were in response to “the Dems did it.” My lengthy table was to provide historical trendline/perspective demonstrating declining tax rates over Republican and Democratic administrations. You yourself have objected to my narrative of bipartisan causation. Some move part way in with the crony capitalists vs crony socialists distinction. I see them all as crony criminals. The devil makes them do a lot of things.
I can’t find common ground with any of the remainder of your @156. “Dem scandals that Bush broke open” – GWB had no clue. The “collapse that came from Democrats” might work as a talking point in the upcoming election cycle, but all you have to do is look up the big donors – Wall St “Democrats” have an uncanny ability to pick presidential winners (GWB in 2004, Reagan etc.)
Maybe the partisanship will work with the general public. Maybe not. It doesn’t do anything for me.
It all started with the hysterical screaming about taking the 35% rate back up to 39% (plus or minus), which as the historical trend clearly shows is a few percentage points shy of fiscal Armageddon. Going “absolutist” at this point in time is not wise and yet the heels are being dug in (because fiscal policy doesn’t ‘solve anything’ but yes it does make a statement to the markets which seem locked in a permanent Stella-like swoon of vapors.)
I would prefer to not see that happen. If the Dems are stubborn about spending cuts (those rascally little competitors), then the option exists to cut ten percent across the board, which still won’t get all the way, but it’s a crucial first step that will stabilize the markets with a plan and a purpose and resolute commitment. The US must step up because the EU cannot – too many players, too much debt and too many institutional problems. Their path will be longer.
All of which I have written before, several times, so I believe my positions should be very clear.
What i said was, the guys who built the dark derivatives, the otc, non-cleared, unregistered CDS that suddenly hit daylight and froze the credit markets and set off the bank panic, are all ”progressives”, lifetime ”progressives” –look it up. They were in their minds ‘doing good’ by doing well, very well indeed. Madoff, Cassano, Spitzer, Fuld, Thane, the bear and Merril guys, all of the TBTF CEOs who required the gazzillion dollar bailouts, were Obama Progressives. The legislation that took the CDS ‘dark’ was a clinton, is an Obama as we speak. He is also a Yakuza, but i won’t go there for the moment.
The 35 to 39 you say does not warrant the resistance to it –that is NOT the point –the point is, the Dollar is being BUSTED-OUT by this administration and the capital in the country is frozen and fleeing.
The effect of the 35 to 39 –without concomitant CREDIBLE spending cuts –will be a huge signal that it IS all over for this country’s currency as global reserve, and that another 30s depression must ensue so that from the crisis FDR’s program to put the nation under socialism, and dispose of the Constitution, will have won, and the game will have been over. Doubt that? Watch the stock market.
I suspect you savvy all this, and are just playing dumb with the phlegmatic minimizations of the real issue, so that you can seem ‘reasonable’ while your oppo get frustrated and open themselves to characterization as ‘hysterical’.
Across the board cuts? Yes –tho Gore’s ”rego” tried that and all it did was go LIFO and lose a lot of talent traded for old deadwood.
But that’s moot anyway, as you must know, due to the debt deal and the super committee. It will deadlock, and the DoD will lose its forward weapon systems, and the Dollar will crash because it is being held up by the US military. If we are lucky, the war won’t be violent, and we can hope for jobs on nice Chinese Farms in Nebraska. The Last Best Hope for free humankind will be gone for eternity, and it will be because Democrats wanted it that way.
doug/151, fantastic link. just under a million top-secret security clearances. IOW, our enemies and adversaries are doing their intelligence work on our payroll, over here, where they are safe from security threats.
God help us.
bl: I suspect you savvy all this, and are just playing dumb with the phlegmatic minimizations of the real issue
Actually I thought that was what you (and Unsk) were doing. I don’t recall ever ‘minimizing’ the need for spending cuts or SS reform or tax reform, as I have been accused of doing, which made me think the back and forth was getting suspiciously frothy. And I don’t – support the Gore method of spending cuts, other than as a threat.
As far as the Progressives on Wall St, they supported Bush in 2004, whether you call them progressives or Democrats. And Phil Gramm was not a progressive, nor Tom Bliley, nor Jim Leach. Carter Glass and Henry Steagall were both Democrats.
People are waking up to the idiocy of our ‘dear lard asses’ in power.
You know it’s BAD, REAL bad, I mean, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY effing bad when states mandate that you can’t ‘collect’ rainwater from the effing SKY on your OWN property.
http://www.naturalnews.com/029286_rainwater_collection_water.html
–
On the ‘vermin’ note…
What if [gawd forbid] many rats/rodents become close to ‘extinct’? Will the Leftoid morons decide that we-’teh’-people will just have to put up and shut up to help the ‘population’ of said rats/mice/vermin have a ‘chance’ to ‘thrive’ again?
Oy vey!
Do you have a cite for that ”they supported Bush in 2004? With, the names? And yes, there’s Gramm and those other two. You could also mention Bill Donaldson, Chris Cox, and Alan Greenspan, all of whom registered themselves as GOP, altho they never did a single thing that GOPers ”do”.
And here’s a little buried tidbit –the Bank Holding Company Act was lobbied out of existence by a Goldman Sachs partner named Bob Rubin, who then immediately went to work for Bill Clinton as Treasury Secretary, until Citigroup called him in to Citibank to begin the mergers that created the TBTFs –which sound innocuous, sort of like, silly us, look whut we messed up n’ done –but which in actuality are the vehicles of the death of the free market in this country. As even leftward Elizabeth Warren has maintained often.
Yes I do and I already linked it.
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres04/contrib.php?cid=N00008072
There’s another little tidbit about the S&L scandal (Jim Wright and the Keating Five) resulting in legislation (FIRREA of 1989) that gave F/F “additional responsibility to support low and moderate income mortgages.”
Securitization dates back to about 1970, but it didn’t explode until after Glass-Steagall was repealed in 2000. It worked fine for 30 years under both Democrats and Republicans.
How about a side-by-side?
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contriball.php?cycle=2004
…remembering that GWB was a popular *incumbent* and Kerry was a … Kerry.
Shame on you, ybr, calling this “Wall Street supported Bush in 2004″
***
here’s obama’s revolving door:
http://www.opensecrets.org/obama/rev.php
***
you’re making my case. Jim Wright was the Democratic Speaker of the House, Glass Steagall was boogered (it was not ‘repealed’ –only a –momentous –section was changed) under Clinton.
***
SH*T –it’s almost 3AM –don’t you ever sleep?
This & i’,m gone ta bed –sorry –sandman screaming and stompin his feet, wants to throw his sand and go home and get some sleep
http://www.mrc.org/bmi/articles/2008/Workers_at_Top_Wall_Street_Firms_Give_Millions_More_to_Dems.html
but it’s not these numbers –it’s the little group –Ralph Nadar pegs it around 100 -150 –from all over the globe –that pulled this thing. RTingleader –search [ rbs issues strange warning ] refers to OOB ‘doom’ remarks spring 08 — search [ peter sutherland ] and for gosh sakes look at the CV.
i beat Nadar to THE PUNCH, CALLED IT A ‘dUNBAR nUMBER’ ABOUT oCTOBER 08.
AH HELL I’M IN ALLCAPS —TIME TA GO BEDDIE BYE
last
Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America
Suggestions that the economic downturn can be attributed to individual greed are misplaced. A new report illustrates that an entrenched system of lobbying and 12 deregulatory steps by Washington led directly to a spiralling financial crisis. By Wall Street Watch.
——————————————————————————–
6th March 09 – Robert Weissman and Harvey Rosenfield, Wall Street Watch
Link to Report: Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America
Read the Executive Summary
http://www.stwr.org/global-financial-crisis/sold-out-how-wall-street-and-washington-betrayed-america.html
124. JMH:
Pure ideology causes people to “ramp up” on issues and form their opinions without having one iota of information about the subject other than knowing how the press has portrayed it for them. And since the “press” they have chosen to read today paints (rather accuses) on ideological lines, the truth they depend upon often looks (to me) like propaganda.
I recently read an article about the Second Amendment (or the use of sporting guns) in the New York Times that someone has directed me to. No matter what my assessment was of that article, I could scan the comments section and gain some rather insightful (or should I say inciting) information about how some people “think” who patronize the Times. Comments by the folk who read that paper – no matter where they actually live in the United States, track the deep lefty/Socialism model for which the paper known. Any article involving guns will receive vitriolic responses from about 95% of the readers in the comments section using the words “gun-totin’ idiots,” knuckle dragging Neanderthals, inter-marrying half-breed racists and various other insults. A good third of them refer specifically to their “beloved” cousins in the South and “those peoples’” racist attitudes – notwithstanding that the folk portrayed in the article lived in Connecticut, California, and Illinois. It’s a knee jerk kinda thing. To be honest, I hear the same discussions down here, but most of those occur in playful banter, especially when they learn I’m a Damn Yankee – through-n-through. Our local paper’s readers are certainly much more courteous than what I see in the NYT.
What I have experienced when NYT subscribers opine about an issue such as the right to bear arms, is that most of them comment not on the article in question, but how they FEEL about the topic. In fact, most commenter’s never deal specifically with the facts outlined in the article – even if those “facts” fit their line of rejection. It proves to me, straight up, that those they choose to rail against are not nearly as closed-minded as they who deign to comment in the NYT. Once ramped up, the responses seem to delve naturally into the neuroses of those unknown people they never met. If fact, while the commenter’s discuss the insecurity of those who like to shoot firearms, it is really they who are afraid of their own shadow and seek the protection of “Daddy” government, ignorant of the fact that the police are not responsible for protecting any individual citizen. Legal precedent proves that, even though I believe all cops try to do the best they can.
Some folk who post vitriolic insults on the web are insecure and would be much more polite in person. Others, in reality, are just as mean, tough and nasty that they say they are in print – one never knows. But of the guys I know in the South, many are deadly serious about their freedoms, their right to bear arms, and hunting which in many cases represents deep tradition and values. So I’d advise anyone coming to the North Georgia Mountains to be right respectful-like, because while hiking up yonder you may pass within 10 feet of some hunter…and never see him or her. It wouldn’t be proper to speak ill of their Southern brothers and sisters down here like they might do in New York. You might hurt our feelings.
That said, this seems to me to be the fallacy of an educational system that is churning out an incredible number of folk who have lost an interest in finding the truth as opposed to adapting to some comfortable meme. Of course, that can describe either side in the cultural divide. Reminds me of Reagan’s oft quoted: “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
With respect to a future armed conflict in our near or distant future, i can’t see it. I won’t be alive in 20 years – the last ten years I’ll probably do good to eat out of a straw and in that span, I’m pretty certain someone will find it convenient, sooner rather than later, to “put me out of my misery.” Oh they’ll be “kind” about it – I won’t feel a thing. After all, any culture that can kill over 50 million of its unborn for druthers or convenience, will have absolutely no reticence in terminating the old and infirm who, by their “negative balance sheet value” and not the preciousness of their life, will simply become an “inconvenient truth.” For those who grew up in this culture and embraced the killing of their defenseless fellow citizens – well, they will kill you and me too at the drop of a hat. After all…what’s another 50 million geezers? They will think it an enterprising idea to ensure their social security checks in the future – we pay into it all our lives and after we are taken care of, someone will get to spend the largesse as we politely bow out. It is all very practical when your view of life is strictly utilitarian.
That will be the only fight for independence that this country will embark upon in the near future – there will be no War of Independence II. The distance at which we hold even our neighbors will keep us balkanized into very small groups and thus, muzzled.
There will be no North-South fight because the South is divided basically in half anyway – by ideology. The only hope that I can see is L3s proposals to devolve the power into the states, but that will be vehemently resisted by both parties, the libertarians, and the independents in Washington as well. That and the fact that we don’t have much time. We have lost the sense of “We the People” and the articles I see in the NYT make that point very clear. If we are not successful with L3s approach, in 50 years, there will be no United States of America – at least not one many on this board will recognize. We will have sucked the life blood out of the Republic who, as Ben Franklin intimated of its progeny, by those that “couldn’t keep it.”
If America goes away, we will see something along the lines of the New Dark Ages. President Obama wants to decimate the military, but has planned his own personal army in the Healthcare Bill:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1d6zlyQSPY
If someone can disabuse me of these new demoralizing developments, I would certainly appreciate it and it just might help to cheer me up. America is starting to look to me like pre-war Germany.
We all have a front seat view of how this country will/is being destroyed. Can we save it? We’ll soon see.
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/08/24/obama-administration-pressures-prosecutors-to-drop-criminal-investigations-of-banks-in-mortgage-fraud/
be..csw2cb /whd,,,,iwiu ,zzzzzzzzzzzzz(snort)zzzzzzzzzzz(fart)zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
You could also mention Bill Donaldson, Chris Cox, and Alan Greenspan, all of whom registered themselves as GOP, altho they never did a single thing that GOPers ”do”.
Then we can all agree on “crony criminals.”
…
Shame on you, ybr, calling this “Wall Street supported Bush in 2004″
GWB: $1.6 M ($2 M incl. UBS AG; $2.5 M incl PWHC)
JFK: $0.6 M
…
Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America
Agree with every word of the article, including the following:
The betrayal was bipartisan: about 55 percent of the political donations went to Republicans and 45 percent to Democrats, primarily reflecting the balance of power over the decade. Democrats took just more than half of the financial sector’s 2008 election cycle contributions.
…
Suggestions that the economic downturn can be attributed to individual greed are misplaced.
Not exactly my view, which is better stated as too many of *us*, in particular, the *ruling elite,* care about nothing outside of their personal advancement, not morality, not country, not some spiritual belief – nothing, aside from personal concerns.
…
Workers at Top Wall Street Firms Give Millions More to Dems in 2008.
(Aside from being somewhat in conflict with the Sold Out analysis,) the 2008 election was one of the strongest anti-incumbent elections in our history. That was not a vote *for* progressives. That was a vote against whatever history will choose to call the GWB terms.
…………..
Now see what you’ve done – you (and the Repub’s) got everybody all bunkered up again.
YBR:”The top bracket personal tax rates have steadily decreased since the end of WWII: from 91% under Kennedy to 50% under Reagan to 39% under Clinton to 35% under GWB and Obama (the so-called Bush tax cuts.) The talk now is going back to the 39% tax rate to help pay the interest, which is now 27% of the total debt incurred by bipartisan spending.”
You cannot compare marginal tax rates pre and post the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Tax Deductions were drastically slashed as were tax rates in that act. The top bracket was set at 28%. The Democrats since have raised the max bracket back up to 39%, with help from Bush I without granting back the deductions. That’s nearly a 40% increase, with attendant drops in those paying taxes at the lower end. The current to be max of 39% with the lax of deductions is much more progressive than the 50% max tax bracket code under Reagan. Under current code when the economy is functioning at relative historically averages, the upper 1% pays roughly 40% of the income taxes and roughly the lower half pays nothing.
As far as the Democrats vs the Pubs – who is sleazier game – The Dems have constantly pushed for more government intrusion, higher taxes and more regulation – except for their crony friends. This is the big City Demcrat Machine model. One of the reasons for high, nearly impossible to comply with regulation by the Dems is it creates a huge demand for big payoffs to get Crony Fixes – it’s called the Pay to Play model in Dem Machine Big Cities.
The GOP Establishment, particularly since Bush1 on the other hand, have rarely pushed back against Demcrat Fascist/Socialist tendencies, ( in fact they have joined in the Socialist vote buying fun) and have learned to play the Crony game almost as well. At this point, even though their supposed intentions are different, we have the Dems winning the card on points, but just barely, over the Establishment GOP in the sleazy sellout the country game. It’s all choreographed to be partisan, but in the end, it’s a cronyfest for both. You only have to look at the antics of one Mitch McConnell to see the duplicity of it all. Mitch, when he wants to, can talk the conservative true blue game almost as well as anybody, but get him in that backroom and those supposed principles instantly disappear for some good lobbyist payola.
Unsk, I think you’ve cut to the heart of the matter. The top levels of *BOTH* parties have much more in common with each other than any of them do with the voters; their only real difference is in what kind of talk they think is most effective for the purpose of fleecing the sheep.
THAT’s what the Tea Party movement is all about! It’s a rejection of the top of BOTH parties; it’s a rejection of Washington itself! And you can tell this when you see things such as the Republican establishment’s reaction to Rick Perry being almost as hysterically negative as the Democrats. He’s signaled that he’s not part of their club, and he doesn’t give a damn about keeping their game going. He actually says things like Social Security is a Ponzi scheme! How are they going to keep skimming the money if he messes with the gravy train?
So the “elites” will move heaven and earth to slime Perry as stupid, as a hick, as some kind of fanatical religious cultist, as a racist, as – heh heh, even as someone who’s too “Pro-Muslim!” Saw that this weekend. Hey, these are personality smears, no one said they have to be coherent. But it’s all his enemies (ie, the Washington establishment, BOTH parties) have got.
172. wws, et al—
Remember ol’ George Wallace years ago: “not a dime’s worth of difference”? Whatever else he was, he was right about that and who knows what would’ve happened if he hadn’t been shot?
Republicrats, Democans—all they want to do is stay up there, eat the public’s money, make deals and feel important. Mushroom treatment for the public will suffice and they can go back to picking their noses and clinging to their guns and religion.
But then came the internet . . .
Where Next for Obama?
Magic can turn failure into a resume enhancement.
August 29, 2011 – 12:00 am – by David Solway
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/where-next-for-obama/?singlepage=true
If the timing is right, when the insipid Ban Ki-moon vacates his seat as secretary general of the United Nations, Barack Obama will almost certainly be acclaimed to succeed him.
…………………
this would make sense of the martin luther king memorial as well.
One of the things that has gone wrong is that Congress delegated legislative authority to the regulatory agencies, violating the separation of powers design. The Progressives see this as a feature, for they have ever chafed at the constraints of the Constitution.
And then we have Congressmen who don’t consider oversight to be a Congressional responsibility, unless there is some political advantage to it.
172/wws
I sincerely hope I’m proven wrong, but I believe your assessment of Rick Perry and your hopes for his potential are mistaken and misplaced. Perry will likely turn out to be the ultimate establishment Trojan horse. He talks the talk alright, but his actions on critical national existential issues, e.g. illegal immigration and eminent domain (the Trans-Texas Corridor), to name just two, belie his words and show him to be firmly in the insiders/elites camp. They don’t fear him, they’re just smart enough to know they need to make us think they do.
Perry is good old boy slick, and he has mastered Bill “Bubba” Clinton’s admonition that “sincerity is the key, and once you can fake that you’ve got it made”. The media frenzy surrounding him is just part of the political theater, aka “boob bait for the bubbas” to sell him to the conservative base.
wws @ 172 said:
“So the “elites” will move heaven and earth to slime Perry as stupid, as a hick, as some kind of fanatical religious cultist, as a racist, as – heh heh, even as someone who’s too “Pro-Muslim!” Saw that this weekend. Hey, these are personality smears, no one said they have to be coherent. But it’s all his enemies (ie, the Washington establishment, BOTH parties) have got.”
For Perry, it will boil down to character assassination by the MSM. The MSM went “all in” with Obama. If Perry is elected then the MSM is proven impotent and loses market share.
tharkun @ 176 said:
“… I believe your assessment of Rick Perry and your hopes for his potential are mistaken and misplaced. Perry will likely turn out to be the ultimate establishment Trojan horse.”
Perry did alright as governor of Texas. Truth to tell, we have no real alternative. It is vital that Obama be expelled from office. The next most viable candidate after Perry is Romney. Unfortunately Romney has two albatrosses hanging from his neck, i.e. Massachussets health care and the Mormon thing. Perry lacks this excess baggage so he should be able to easily crush Obama in the general election. The MSM has connected the dots which is why they’ll construct every libel and defamation imaginable to defeat Perry.
I’m trying to understand what’s going on with the stock market. The DJIA has gone up 185 points on no news and no volume. So one answers: It’s just the PPT, move along now, nothing interesting here to see. However gold has dropped significantly today at -43.4/ounce. People say that gold was a bubble. The gold bugs are saying that dark forces deliberately crashed the price of gold through margin increases like they previously crashed silver. I find myself wondering if this is some sly substitute for qualitative easing. Precious metals were pumped into a bubble that is deliberately punctured after the end of QE2. The money fleeing from precious metals has no where to go but the equities markets. Is it possible that the guys in the Fed and behind the PPT are that sophisticated?
egg, i think the small size of the gold market mitigates against that –the amount of dough transacting metals is very small vs the amount transacting stocks. Gold is acting normally i think –obama’s poll numbers are tumbling in the battleground states he needs to win (see instapundit blurb fresh up) –this is causing pause to the Dollar undertakers –which as usual takes an edge off gold.
Re Perry, pls search [ perry tort reform ] and be ready to grin like a wave on a slop bucket –
Yes, a three term governor of a big fast-moving state is gonna have a lengthy pros-and-cons list. Me, i think the ‘pros’ side is way longer. Texas went from the Civil War to the late 1970s or 80s without a single Pubbie winning a statewide office –and that Yellow Dawg Dem establishment has needed some currycomb just to make the place governable.
PS, besides the obama sink, the stock mkt is stabilizing around corp earnings –the earnings Q reports are almost all in now, and showing YoY earnings growth over 12%, a huge chunk over ‘expected’. Net of the financial sector that 12-plus would be a goodeal higher, too. Explanation? People with jobs are working their ass off to keep them.
Perry will wind up supplanting Romney as the generic republican candidate and Palin will wind up supplanting Bachman as the Tea Party candidate. Where it goes after that — I don’t know.
buddy larsen @ 178 said:
“I think the small size of the gold market mitigates against that –the amount of dough transacting metals is very small vs the amount transacting stocks.”
That’s a good counter-argument.
I’ve been reading some speculation that the Fed may have “bought the stock market”, i.e. an unintended consequence of the various PPT activity with freshly printed fiat money has left the Fed as the owner of most of the US stock market. Is this economically possible? How much fiat would the Fed need to print to purchase the entire stock market? One would think if the Fed had injected that much paper money into the economy, we’d already be in a runaway Weimar republic style inflation. Maybe that will be the consequence but there’s a delayed reaction time?
I googled “Perry tort reform”. Lots of information and disinformation on this topic. Somebody thinks it is important enough to bury the topic with lies. Truth to tell, I could not make sense out of it (the disinformation people were successful). It seems intuitive to me that Perry would favor tort reform. It never made sense that tort reform was not the central issue during the Hillarycare and Obamacare debates. It seems if nuisance law suits were removed from the economics of health care then there should be a very significant reduction in costs.
Charles @ 179 said:
“Perry will wind up supplanting Romney as the generic republican candidate and Palin will wind up supplanting Bachman as the Tea Party candidate.”
I wonder who will be Perry’s VP? My guess is that it will be either a female or a black. From the standpoint of political tactics, I’d rather it was a black conservative as VP. That approach would deny Obama the racism card. It would be entertaining if Palin was VP since it would make the moonbat’s heads explode. However that could be expensive entertainment if it mobilized the Left and got Obama reelected.
Sgian Dubh@168:
Whoa. Major dystopian vision you’ve got going on there. My outlook tends to be somewhat brighter…but then it has to be. I’ve got a 3-year-old daughter, and I’m doing everything I can to convince myself that things won’t go so badly for her.
You’re right about one thing, I think…there isn’t likely to be a hot civil or revolutionary war here. The different factions are just too mixed. If you walk down any block in any town or city in America and take a poll, there will be Dems, Repubs and indies on nearly every block. Even in the dark heart of NYC you’ll find lots of closet Rs and out on the back 40 of many ranches in Nebraska you’ll find Ds riding the tractors. And unless someone is publicly politically active, not many know their leanings. In 1860, the masses of like-minded folks were much more clustered together and away from the “enemy”. Today it’s much harder to even separate the two sides out, much less have them start killing each other.
But even if the worst comes to pass in my lifetime and America goes away, that is only what the Constitution foresaw…or at least the Declaration. It offers no prescriptions for what comes after America, but it seems obvious that the ideas of liberty and self-determination and individual rights will last far longer than America. Hopefully the people involved in figuring out what to do after America is done will have the wisdom to incorporate those into the fabric of the new polity.
And life will go on regardless, and people will live and love and laugh and cry. I’m as guilty as anyone of getting bound up in the issues of the day (serious though they may be) and losing sight of the forest for the trees. The very existence of America is important in our current framework of life, yes…but life itself will not end if America does. Who knows, maybe some brilliant democracy geek from Whitefish, MT will find herself sitting in Kansas City (the prospective new capital) drafting a new constitution that turns out to eclipse the wisdom of the old, ushering in an era even better than the one America presided over. Could happen.
176. tharkun
172/wws
“I sincerely hope I’m proven wrong, but I believe your assessment of Rick Perry and your hopes for his potential are mistaken and misplaced. Perry will likely turn out to be the ultimate establishment Trojan horse.”
If you’re right, it means that there aren’t *any* candidates not part of the elite package that can win.
Perhaps we could say the same thing about Sarah Palin.
If what you say is the case, perhaps the election process is already dead.
egg, you are right, i think, as to the manipulative power of the fed re stocks –however, as you know, the p/e ratio is like the floor of a house –it’s very hard to drive it lower than spitting distance of 10. Around 10 the world starts licking its chops and wants a bite. the current bounce is off 11 –and 2Q E reeports are coming up better than expected.
Politics can drive it below the 10 –and crooked politics that cause folks to just quit the mkts surely can take our DJIA to 5K –and would i think but for this small fact –union pension funds are in the market, and even our commie backroomers know that before they can drive the DJIA toi 5k they have to have the revolution ready to hit the streets and burn down the whole structure.
The bugaboo with trading right now is tghe socalled ‘HF’ trading –the ‘high frequency’ black box trading by program (remember the ‘flash crash’? and before that the notorious ‘ten days in September’ 2008) that accounts for too much of the volume. Vulnerability there, the only bar is as i said the PE ratio.
keep in mind, the black boxes need volatility to make money off tiny arbitrage, so the black boxes will try tio induce that volatility. Bank proprietary trading is especially pernicious because it can and does place big bets –why not, it has deposits that do not have to be earned by capital investment as does the widget maker. Dood Frank will take the propritary desks out of the banks –the one good feature.
+++
re perry, read this one –i’ll look for a PDF on the text of the new state law they’re calling ‘loser pays’.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/conserving-freedom/2011/aug/25/rick-perry-revives-hope-tort-reform/
Possible ripostes from ”dumb” Perry: “I may be dumb but . . .
**I know how to pronounce ”corpsman”
**I know better than to conceal my grades
**I can fly a 155,000 lb airplane anywhere in the world, on three engines if necessary, and land it on a dirt strip
**I know they don’t speak ”Austrian” in Austria
**I knew better than to vote ”present” when I was a legislator
And, of course, many more possibilities.
So if this makes you upset then reach out to some of the players and tell them that you are upset.
US Marshall : http://www.usmarshals.gov/district/tn-m/general/marshal.htm
Fish and Wildlife: http://www.fws.gov/offices/directory/OfficeDetail.cfm?OrgCode=99460
US Attorney :http://www.justice.gov/usao/tnm/meetattorney.html
So if you don’t like the Feds messing around let them know. At least remember what they did and if you kind find their names let them live on in infamy:
US Marshall : http://www.usmarshals.gov/district/tn-m/general/marshal.htm
Fish and Willife: http://www.fws.gov/offices/directory/OfficeDetail.cfm?OrgCode=99460
US Attorney: http://www.justice.gov/usao/tnm/meetattorney.html
ggood one, Al –thanks –
***
eggplant, i left a hole in that black box thumbnail –it is not a spiraling into crash –the programmatic volatility consequence gets noted by meatspace players who then adjust for it –and thereby lower it.
The VIX indicator is the record of the phenomenon.
Soros says he invented it and calls it ”reflexivity” –but that’s horse sheist, it’s just ‘trope’.
Unsk: It’s all choreographed to be partisan, but in the end, it’s a cronyfest for both.
Which was my original point: the ‘crony criminalists’ in Washington joined at the hip with Wall St. Where I part company with at least half of this board, if not more, is with “the Dems did it (2008 crash)” theme – and the “no new taxes until h^ll freezes over” theme.
I’ll repeat this Jonah Goldberg link one more time because the King-Makers could do all of us a favor by listening up: Jonah Goldberg on The Perry Problem:
My weariness is hardly a major consideration for anybody, but I think it reflects a larger problem. Conservatism is starting to have an identity-politics problem all its own. I think conservatism needs to spend less time defending candidates for who they are, and more time supporting candidates for what they intend to do.
I’m not convinced Perry is the one to carry the policy water but it’s not up to me.
181. Agoraphobic Plumber
Good Post. Been to Whitefish – stayed overnight enroute to Glacier. Glacier was cold, rainy, dark and dank for a summer day, but majestic and awe inspiring from the main road. We were only there for a half day and I remember not quite knowing how one would “hike” there – without ropes, that is.
Michael Tomlinson wrote a song about Whitefish entitled “Yellow Windows.” You won’t find the town in the lyrics – its in his comments about the song somewhere on the net.
Are you familiar with JWR or BWHM?
Had a dream last night about my long grown children when they were very little. They really do change your perspective for the better.
The USFWS says that Nick Chavez at 505-248-7889 is the official press and media contact.
Salutes to Unsk, Buddy, Eggplant and A.Plumber for the lucid and informative riff on current economics!
I’m operating at more of a spinal reflex level, in which environment one purchases and then HOLDS ON. I would agree that bubbles arise and disappear in the very short term. But peering back down the long corridors of time, you can’t help noticing that the price of gold is trending upward with the inevitability of a glacier sliding down a fjord in the spring.
When I was a kid we visited Knott’s Berry Farm where they had (and still have) a stream where you can pan for gold dust, and take a few teentsy grains home in a glass vial. In the late 1950′s even as a kid I was aware that gold was valued at $35.00 per ounce. I guess it’s one of those factoids that figure in TV melodramas and BatMan comicbook plots.
Didn’t have the faintest idea how much you could buy for $35.00; I got fifty cents “allowance” which stretched to cover some jawbreakers, a toy car, and trip to the matinee with popcorn and ju-ju-bees. My brother and I mowed lawns in the neighborhood all summer, fifty-cents apiece, to buy swim fins and face masks like the ones Lloyd Bridges wore in “Sea Hunt.” That was the extent of our awareness of finance.
That 35.00 per Ounce held for a few decades, IIRC, but by the time Y2K loomed, US currency had been sufficiently debased that Gold was trading for something like $300.00 per ounce. In Silicon Valley, my techie friends all scoffed at the fears of those who knew not computers. They believed that on the stroke of midnight of January 1st, aeroplanes would fall from the sky, food in cans past their sell-buy-dates would suddenly spoil, and all the computer chips in every appliance would either melt down or swap data with every other appliance. Yeah, they scoffed but several of ‘em privately confided that they were buying some gold coins “just in case…”
I never asked those folks what they planned to do with the coins after TEOTWAWKI.
Anyhow, one of the people who’d bought gold coins in ’99 told me that the one-tenth-ounce coins that cost $30.00 apiece in 1999 brought $37.00 apiece when he sold some a few five years later. Doesn’t sound like that much, but it sure beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
This summer just for yucks, while I was on eBay looking for a hand-cranked clothes roller, I looked up those one-tenth-ounce gold coins.
$175.00 to $250 for a tenth-ounce gold coin.
On the other hand, back in 1979 when the Iranians invaded the U.S. embassy, silver jumped from $6/ounce to $42/ounce. I noticed this because I was using a fair amount of film at the time, and the people at the lab that processed my film explained all this to me.
Funny thing: the cost of film stock AND processing more or less doubled when silver (just a single component of all that) jumped by a factor of seven.
That’s understandable.
But after the crisis subsided, and the price of silver returned to about what it had been, the cost of film stock and processing NEVER EVER DROPPED.
What lesson do we learn from this?
Sgian@189: “Are you familiar with JWR or BWHM?”
If you are referencing James Wesley, Rawles, I’m quite familiar with him, read his blog regularly and have read one of his books. A good man. Not sure about BWHM.
I’m not from Whitefish, but I went through there on a vacation as a child. I remember it because we got into the back country and found a REALLY nice little campsite out in the wilderness. It was fantastic. Until about 3 in the morning when a train came within 20 yards of our camper blowing its horn. We had no idea the tracks were there. Makes for a very nice family anecdote, though.
Been to Glacier too, along with Yellowstone and the Tetons. You haven’t backpacked until you’ve done the circuit around the major Teton, overnighting in the saddle between it and the next one. There is a mountain lake up there that I could have sat by for days and just looked at it. I hope to bring my daughter up there someday.
ybr/188, I’m not convinced Perry is the one to carry the policy water but it’s not up to me –LOL –thanks for the perfect reverse-indicator endorsement!
Where I part company with at least half of this board, if not more, is with “the Dems did it (2008 crash)” theme – and the “no new taxes until h^ll freezes over” theme
To the former i re-offer my #s 156 and 157 above, particularly the three hyperlinks imbedded in the three uses of the word ”Democrats” in “…when the collapse that came from Democrats in congress and Democrats on Wall Street combined with a 2006 midterm that Democrats won….”
To the latter i ask why on earth the oppo position of “no spending cuts until the Dollar is no longer the world reserve currency” is not the greater truth than the fabricated ”no new taxes until h^ll freezes over”, which is not even true, as ”hell freezes over” is in truth ”massive waste & fraud overspending to debase currency by dilution” is actually what ”hell freezes over” means.
***
i’m not a pubbie. i’m an idie. i identify with TEA (taxed enough already) and wonder about your fetish for new taxes. As far as who did the dirty deeds, i think it is overwhelmingly obvious why you are so eager to ”be fair” and assign it equally to both parties. It’s because doing so gives your side a freebie of about 40% of the gross 100%.
IOW, when your side is 90% responsible, of *course* you’ll offer to go “50-50″.
bl: To the former i re-offer my #s 156 and 157 above
To which I countered with @158, @161, @170.
The last two paragraphs of your @193 are pure indie-punt camouflage for the microphones and the cameras and the 300 to 500 or so who lurk around for sniffing out issues. I will not go there.
And do nor refer to “my side” until I’ve told you what it is. Prescience is usually all in one’s mind.
Let me offer the huckleberry, then i quit the thread except as reader, as penance for being a bore and a thread-hog.
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/08/24/obama-administration-pressures-prosecutors-to-drop-criminal-investigations-of-banks-in-mortgage-fraud/
steep awhile in the ‘why’ of this.
***
…and clearly Jonas Goldberg favors a different pub candidate –that’s called ‘competition’.
***
…and no, i do not ‘do’ “indie-punt camoflage” –i am not a pub, i’m not a registered pub, an indie, voted for Carter my first vote. I was not posturing, tho it is an easy accusation to make. I was tryinhg to say, i am not defending the indefensible pubs who could have and did not go to ‘the people’ in the midst of the dem oppo to restraining F&F.
One can change attitudes about the history, but one cannot change the history itself.
bl … eggplant…
The Fedsury is engaged in Financial Repression.
It has out gamed the credit markets… driving nominal interest rates to phenomenal lows. In real terms interest rates are very negative.
This is how the capital intensive big business is making its profits. Any normalization of interest rates would crush the S&P 400.
A stable US dollar will crush overseas earnings.
Run-away earnings in the late 20s made many speculators believe that the best was yet to come. Such is the nature of manipulating the control circuits/ publicly released earnings / stock touts — of which see Cramer.
In the 30s gold mining stocks represented 20% of the capitalization of the entire NYSE. Think on that.
Fiat currencies provide despotic financial power: Financial Repression.
This is something the Constitution — in black letter law — prohibited. Congress has pimped out the Constitution — one trick at a time.
The Crime of ’73 was when Congress gave in to the Money Trust ™ and placed our economy on the ( British ) gold standard.
The Gold Standard was and is a 19th Century creation. Until that time all major economies for all time were based upon a Silver Standard. ( Rome, Spain, France, England, America, Austria, China… you name it. )
While gold did trade — a bit — the unit of National Account was always a weight of silver. ( Denarii, Pounds Sterling, US Dollar, Piece of Eight/ Real de a ocho, Thaler/Taler/Talir, … )
The only way that the common man can avoid Financial Repression is by getting out of fiat.
The Trading Metals ( gold, silver, copper ) are well established portable wealth — that carries no counter-party risk.
The gaming of our markets is of such sophistication that you’d best take care with ANY prior trend associations.
There are no government statistics that you can trust. They’ve become entirely politicized.
We’re way beyond Goebbels.
BL: steep awhile in the ‘why’ of this.
I already posted on the mortgage resolution (with links somewhere) and almost put this up last night before deciding enough. One side wants to probe deep, make the banks pay up, and possibly jeopardize title to every property in the country (according to some analysts). The other (Obama/Geithner) side wants a faster resolution that will admittedly lower the banks’ punitive financial liability, but will also put people back in their homes, which will help to reverse the housing decline, and reduce the severity of the slow recovery. IOW, it’s not a slam dunk issue. There are defensible reasons for expediting the process. Disclosure: I haven’t made up my mind on this subject but you can bet your booty it’s a Money Trust issue – butting right up against keeping a bunch of Main Streeters in their homes.
82/Sgian Dubh
If you’re right, it means that there aren’t *any* candidates not part of the elite package that can win. Perhaps we could say the same thing about Sarah Palin. If what you say is the case, perhaps the election process is already dead.
Oh, the election “process” is going strong – just like the Middle-East peace process… /g We’re all going to get a really good show this time.
The real question, however, is whether or not the American people can any longer control and use it to express their will and determine their destinies and that of the country. No, the election process is not dead, but it has been transformed into, as Wretchard described in his opening comments, a Kafkaesque monstrosity which serves different masters than those originally intended.
That said, no matter how dire the outlook, it is our duty to observe, evaluate, make the best judgments we can and then act to try to do what we can with the means and candidates we have to save ourselves. Giving up is not an acceptable option. And even if all our options are of the other side, some of them ARE better than others.
YBR@188: “Where I part company with at least half of this board, if not more, is with “the Dems did it (2008 crash)” theme – and the “no new taxes until h^ll freezes over” theme.”
I’ll agree with you on both those counts, at least to a point. The Dems certainly had a lot of help in setting the conditions for the crash. Those conditions had been in the hopper at least since Clinton’s tenure and probably since Bush 41 or even Reagan. The Repubs certainly were no models of fiscal sanity or self-awareness during their tenure of having full control under Bush 43. It’s refreshing to hear them suddenly gushing about how necessary spending cuts are, but they did have their chance and I don’t trust them further than I can throw a ’65 Buick on that or any other issue. Still, what’s happened since the Dems took over congress is even more appalling, and given the timing and the bald-faced stupidity of the spending the Dems have initiated (it’s like they’re trying to double or triple the stupidity of the Repubs) I am inclined to lay the majority of the fault at their feet.
No new taxes? I’m much more lukewarm about this than most conservatives. I’m open to targeted tax increases…but only after REAL spending cuts (from a flat baseline, not the ever-increasing baseline they all seem to use) are fully committed to. No more mysteriously disappearing cuts after new spending is implemented. I’m open to means-testing SS and raising the retirement age to 75 or 77 or something like that. I’d like to see a rule that all tax legislation is indexed to inflation and all SS ages indexed to the average life expectancy in the US. There are lots of ideas for tax increases (“revenue enhancements” is a cop-out…let’s call them what they are) that make some sense. Not among those is a VAT or several of the other varieties of stupidity that keep getting floated.
The biggest and most effective tax reform I can think of that might actually be doable is to require that every American adult pay some nominal minimum income tax per year. $500? $1000? I don’t know what the actual number should be, but we need to get everybody’s skin in the game to get them to pay attention. Once the number is established we need to index that amount to the total tax level in some way. Tax collection percentage goes up? Then that minimum amount raises by the same percentage. I’m tired of people who pay no tax or negative tax demanding that taxes go up on other people. I’ll accept more tax if I see the necessity and if I know that everybody else is feeling some level of the pain as well.
192. Agoraphobic Plumber
JWR, yes. Why the comma after his middle name? I know, minutia – just curious.
The other is Backwoods Home Magazine – I’m sometimes dyslexic. There are many good articles that I have yet to explore.
Saw the Snake up close and the Tetons from a distance, but never had the time to visit or hike. Only backpacked once for about 6 days around Cherry Lake just NW of Yosemite. All I can do to describe the experience is to borrow British Columbia’s tourism advertisement some years back – Super-Natural! It was the runoff season (May, I think) and the water was 40 degrees and the Trout were voracious. Caught lots of fish.
80. JMH
Cowboy, sorry, you are not having a Gibson. Or a Martini. You’re having a glass of cold gin. Which is fine – I like gin too, but to make it a Gibson, you need some vermouth and bitters.
Yes, no, and maybe.
The original “Gibson” was a martini glass with water and a pearl onion. Gibson was a Mad Man (as in Madison Ave.) in the 50′s who entertained clients at his favorite Mad Ave. bar. Because he spent quite some time there and with multiple clients, he needed to stay sober. The pearl onion distinguished his martini from his clients’ real ones with their olives or lemon peels. Yes, he got in trouble when he was eventually accused, wrongly, of trying to get potential clients drunk.
I don’t know about the bitters, but the original “legit” Gibson had gin, dry vermouth, and the pearl onion. I would not be surprised if bitters became an additional “official” ingredient over time. Consult a Boston Bar Book if you haven’t already
Wow. Over 200 comments.
This post really struck a chord, didn’t it?
Get it? Struck a CHORD?
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Anyhow, we are now a lawless society at our ruling level (it certainly isn’t governance). Everything from not enforcing immigration laws to arbitrary raids guided by political whims to presidents, courts and federal agencies making up their own “laws” willy-nilly — we are lawless.
Sgian@200: “JWR, yes. Why the comma after his middle name? I know, minutia – just curious.”
I read on his site once his explanation for that…it wasn’t very satisfying. He said something like it was a way of showing respect to his family name or something. As a matter of respect for others, I typically spell their name they way they want it spelled and pronounce their name the way they like it prounced. This is the only case where I’ve needed to punctuate it the way they want it punctuated…but no skin off my nose. The man is a beast when it comes to info on anything related in any way to any kind of preparedness and his site has given me many, many tips to aid in my own preps, so if I must punctuate then I will.
Don Rodrigo@202, “Struck a Chord”. I like that.’
An article by Walter Russel Mead, “New Blue Nightmare” about Clarence Thomas’s influence on 2nd and 10th amendment and commerce clause legislation, lends some hope to reining back the overreach of Federal Government, Administrative agencies and so on.
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-blue-nightmare-clarence-thomas-and-the-amendment-of-doom-2011-8
Hey YBR! Obama has finally got a guy with a plan! Yessirreee Bob, a plan!
And guess what it is! You’ll never guess! More Taxes! Hooray!
His new economics guru wants to impose a 5% consumption tax on everyone starting in two years. That way he supposes that people will spend now to avoid the tax! How brilliant! I believe that old nasty coot original Tea Partier Denninger has called past Obama schemes that did similar tricks like with Cash for Clunkers – pulling demand forward. In other words, pulling forward money consumers would have saved for next year and beyond to this year. But what happens next year? Well, that ain’t so good. But we won’t talk about such unpleasantries.
But Anyhoo, we could get a big whoppin’ new tax !
Just think about all the people that will put out of work, and all the people it will bankrupt! Isn’t that great! But ya know, ya got break a few eggs to make an omelette – well maybe several million – but at least we get a consumption tax! I mean, besides National Health Care, that’s like the Holy Grail. We’ll start at 5%, then 10%, then 15% and before you know it we’ll have a Socialist Paradise. Just look at what the VAT did for Europe! Wow! Purdy soon the Greeks will have nothin on us!
http://blogs.reuters.com/james-pethokoukis/2011/08/29/obamas-new-chief-economist-alan-krueger/