Saturday, February 28. 2009
 What I am reading: A few of Michael Novak's books
Mike Pence at CPAC: Video. This guy is good.
Romney is looking better too.
How did the Left come into power? Hawkins
Thought crime at Central Conn
Cruel and funny, but apt
John Silber on university Presidency coups (with references to the Larry Summers debacle)
The Dyl sends in this piece on slums via a fascinating site, Emergent Urbanism. I blame Jacob Riis for our misunderstanding of "slums." Also via that site, half of Americans want to move. That is sad.
Flocks of birds from Richard Barnes. h/t David Thompson's Friday Ephemera.
 Question re Cap & Trade: why would corporations mind paying a carbon surcharge? They will simply pass it on to consumers as a price increase and have a net cost of zero.
Answer: Passing the cost to consumers, which they must do, will make domestic American products more expensive in comparison to imports and will result in reduced sales.
Unintended consequences: 1. To the extent that production can be shifted to foreign companies or foreign plants of US companies, jobs will move overseas. 2. With respect to domestic production, the result will be wildly inflationary. 3. Because cap & trade fees allow pollution to continue, the environment will not benefit (but it is becoming clear that global warming climate change is not human-caused in any case so the only effect will be that production will shift to China and the world will see a net increase on pollution). 4. Cap & Trade is designed to motivate companies to spend money to reduce their pollution, but that will further increase their costs and further reduce their competitiveness – a lose-lose situation.
Photo: That's our Kondratiev
That's a King Protea sitting in a water pitcher. Odd, gigantic flowers. You can read about Protea here.
Sipp says that my very old kitchen table is Chestnut, and emailed me this unstained Chestnut sample to prove it. It's the same grain:
Ultra ETFs are double leveraged. Bullish? Ultra Long ETFs. Bearish? Ultra Short ETFs. They are trading tools: volatile and fun to play with.
Short-term winning strategy? Short the Dow before every Obama or admin. speech.
Friday, February 27. 2009
 How soon before China owns the USA? Mortgaging America. Geopolitically smart of China, because they already have us over a barrel.
Time to loosen up on Havana? I think so. Our approach to Cuba is a Cold War relic. The world is full of terrible governments.
Class warfare returns to Washington. Politico. Related: What's wrong with income inequality anyway?
The era of big government arrives. USA Today
Lib David Broder is worried about Obama
Old Europe finally getting involved in Iraq. For the oil!
Obama's war against coal
Phony Indian tribe's casino plan nixed by Supremes
Why does Obama keep arguing against straw men? Answer: Folks believe him. (H/T, NEONEO)
Krauthammer begins:
Not a great speech, but extremely consequential. If Barack Obama succeeds, his joint address to Congress will be seen as historic -- indeed as the foundational document of Obamaism. As it stands, it constitutes the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.
Read the whole thing.
Conservative strategies: Who needs Joe the Plumber? A quote:
Conservatives should not need Joe the Plumber to prove their middle class bona fides. We are naturally the party of the middle, and we don't need gimmicks to prove it. Demographically, Democrats rely on being the party of the upper sixth and the lower third, while Republicans tend to do better with everyone in between. When we start losing the middle class and the suburbs, we lose big like we did in 2008.
What Conservatives need are compelling candidates who can communicate.
 David Leonhardt explains in the NYT how Obama's budget sweeps away Reagan.
How nice. Back to the 1970s, or the 1930s. Reagan wanted everybody to get wealthy. The old way is to reduce prosperity. It's very easy to do: just take their money away from them, take the gummint cut, and hand it to somebody else.
The history of the United States economy over the last 70 years can be roughly divided into two periods: the decades immediately after World War II, when inequality plummeted, and the past three decades, when global economic forces and government policies caused it to soar. Mr. Obama is setting out to begin a third period that looks more like the first than the second.
That agenda starts with taxes. Over the last three decades, the pretax incomes of the wealthiest households have risen far more than they have for other households, while the tax rates for top earners have fallen more than they have for others, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
She Who Must Be Obeyed has already warned me: If this goes through, I am working 4 days a week, not five. She would prefer my company to my working at 50 cents on the dollar (with CT income tax) for the government - and she mostly handles the financial affairs. Fortunately for me, I enjoy her company too. I can easily help to reduce income inequality by being less productive. I love to work, but I love to have fun too. And there is nothing I wish to buy...besides vacations and trips.
Chris thought you might get a kick out of this Madoff Map. Just move the cursor over the spots and get the names. I recognize some of those names, including some big-time divorce lawyers. I cannot account for those accounting firms on there. Sheesh.
Kandinsky has always been one of my favorite Expressionists. This is Kirche in Murnau (1909):
This is going around. There will be lots of honking:
 "I dress for church." Englishman. So do I, most of the time.
Don't these bozos realize that trees are grown on tree farms?
The opening chord of "Hard Day's Night." It's sort of a "clang," isn't it?
Dems seek to kill DC school choice
The genetics of male superiority in chess and science.
A closer look at the Bombay slums. They are neighborhoods, really. As I recall, "urban renewal" didn't work too well in the US.
How the socialized medicine scheme will work. I don't think folks will go for it.
Welcome to anarchy. Hitchen's Battle of Beirut
OK, some links re the proposed Obama socialist, eat-the-rich budget:
I actually agree about eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. There is nothing fair or rational about it, and all it does is to drive up the price of housing. However, their just mentioning this will add to the slump in home prices. They will just tighten the deduction phase-out at the high end.
I do not particularly like the idea of eliminating charitable deductions, despite the arguments for it.
Marginal Rev had this:
Today President Obama proposed about $634 billion in new spending and taxes. But since we here at MR cover only the quantitatively significant policy initiatives, I have nothing to say about it.
Q&O:
The era of big deficit financed government isn’t just back, it’s back on steroids sitting in a rocket sled pointed at economic hell.
Insty:
BOB KRUMM: “Barack Obama’s plans to hyper-inflate the government bubble while he taxes the rich at confiscatory levels, is so certain to collapse the economy that I can only conclude that he is a brilliant Rovian plant whose purpose is to finally drive a stake into the heart of the era of big government.”
Henninger: This is a radical budget:
Barack Obama is proposing that the U.S. alter the relationship between the national government and private sector that was put in place by Ronald Reagan and largely continued by the presidencies of Bill Clinton and the Bushes. Then, the private sector led the economy. Now Washington will chart its course.
A Vermont Lib goes through the lies in Obama's speech. h/t, SDA
Cap and trade is a tax on everybody. Volokh:
The most dangerous proposal in the new budget is the institution of a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Indeed, the single largest source of new tax revenue in the budget going forward are these payments to be made by businesses for the right to emit excess carbon.
The goal is an 83% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 compared to 2005 levels.
That would bring US per capita emissions of CO2 down to a level below what we had in the 1700s.
The Audacity of Trope at Villainous. She quotes the NYT:
“To the extent that Mr. Obama has talked about raising taxes, he has focused on households that make at least $250,000 a year. . .But the problem can’t be solved just by taxing the rich. That top 1 percent pays only about one-quarter of federal taxes. Once the recession ends, taxes on the not-so-rich will need to rise, too.”
From a piece on the budget at Politico:
For those who might feel assured that this sneaky tax increase – pretending for deductibility purposes that your tax rate is lower than it actually is -- is only hitting the multi-millionaires of Obama’s derision, think again: the vast majority of the resulting new tax revenue will be paid by the entrepreneurs, professionals and successful small businesses (the ones with actual employees) whose paychecks are only a tiny fraction of those dastardly bankers and CEOs. For a Subchapter S small business, where personal income tax rates apply, it takes only a handful of employees to generate the $150,000 or so in taxable income (for a single owner or a married owner filing separately) to get hit with this tax increase. Moreover, this is not simply money that would otherwise be pocketed by the owner; these retained earnings are usually the only source of equity capital for sustaining their payroll and growing their businesses. And with banks so reluctant to lend, this is the worst possible time to reduce their working capital.
And to sum it all up, Dick Morris:
Why does Obama preach gloom and doom? Because he is so anxious to cram through every last spending bill, tax increase on the so-called rich, new government regulation, and expansion of healthcare entitlement that he must preserve the atmosphere of crisis as a political necessity. Only by keeping us in a state of panic can he induce us to vote for trillion-dollar deficits and spending packages that send our national debt soaring.
And then there is the matter of blame. The deeper the mess goes — and the further down his rhetoric drives it — the more imperative it becomes to lay off the blame on Bush. He must perpetually “discover” — to his shock — how deep the crisis that he inherited runs, stoking global fears in the process.
So, having inherited a recession, his words are creating a depression. He entered office amid a disaster and he is transforming it into a catastrophe, all to pass every last bit of government spending and move us a bit further to the left before his political capital dwindles.
But the jig will be up soon. The crash of the stock market in the days since he took power (indeed, from the moment he won the election) can increasingly be attributed to his own failure to lead us in the right direction, his failed policies in addressing the recession and his own spreading of panic and fear. The market collapse makes it evident that it is Obama who is the problem, where he should, instead, be the solution.
Thursday, February 26. 2009
A repost from 2007:
 Today during lunch I read the piece by Tyler at Tangled Web about Dawkins, who is hopeful that a "final scientific enlightenment" will destroy religion on earth. Dawkins thinks it might require that elusive "theory of everything" to do the job.
Tyler correctly notes that the "theory of everything" will never address mankind's eternal questions.
Then I followed a link in one of his commenters to an essay by physicist Stanley Jaki, who makes the case that the "Theory of Everything" must be subject to Godel's Theorem. Very interesting essay, but I cannot cut and paste from it. Read it. He discusses Stephen Hawkings' epiphany, after many years of championing the quest, that a "theory of everything" is impossible.
Then I went over to Wikipedia to refresh my vague recollections of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which has nothing in common with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. That Wikipedia entry was good, but there was some rough sledding in it.
And that led me to the entry on The Liar Paradox.
The Liar Paradox is the old "Nothing I say to you is true," and the many variations thereof.
Is the Liar Paradox a true paradox, or an artifact of symbolization? I think the latter, but that reveals my bias of expecting consistency from reality. If you're curious about the approaches to the puzzle, the Wikipedia entry seems to do a good job with it.
Thus passed a very enjoyable Tuesday lunch break for this dilettante. (The Escher image is perfect, Bird Dog - thanks.)
Update: Here's a piece that takes you deeper into the Liar Paradox. Thanks, BL
Big surprise. Pajamas. I do not think this is what America signed up for.
Obama's proposed cap and trade will cost business billions, for no purpose whatsoever. I think this is psychotic - unless the goal is to destroy American business. But then who will pay the taxes? (Meanwhile, scientist forces Al Gore to back down.)
I doubt that even Congress is this crazy.
Related: Obama proposes one trillion in new taxes. That's for "the rich," of course. Around here, that's a teacher married to a cop, or the guy who owns the dry-cleaner.
 When people move into the White House, they get a dog. Sometimes a cat too. Some of them actually had dogs before the White House, which is a different matter. It's about Pet Politics. (As you may recall, the Clinton's Lab was promptly run over by a car after leaving the WH, and Hillary dumped her famous cat on the secretary. I suspect the Bush's still have their dogs.)
The breed the Obamas decided to exploit is the Portuguese Water Dog. It's probably a breed ancestor of the Poodle. They need more daily exercise than any White House pet is likely to get.
I don't know how anybody can live without dogs around the place.
For those who have faith in the power of civil discourse to expose and isolate radical nonsense, there was a small victory this week at San Diego’s prestigious University of California campus.
The faculty and grad students of its Ethnic Studies Department issued a Statement one-sidedly accusing Israel as racist for its actions in Gaza, the Statement failing to consider Gazans’ fault or, indeed, that Israel itself is a multi-racial society where Sephardic (mostly Middle Eastern) Jews as well as Arabs have more rights and economic opportunities than in any Islamic country. The Ethnic Studies Department scheduled a forum on campus for Wednesday, Feb. 25, to further their charge.
From on and off campus, there was vigorous written refutation of the charge, and criticism of the Ethnic Studies Department’s lack of academic standards. The refutations were informed and civil. I wrote a column in the San Diego Jewish World on the matter (including a link to the Statement and comment thread on it), pointing out that the Islamist and pro-Palestinian groups alliance with far leftists on campuses has graduated anti-Semitism from singling out individual Jews to eradicating the Jewish state.
The UCSD Ethnic Studies Department cancelled yesterday's forum, claiming that the “character” of counter-writings is threatening. This is another of such groups’ canards and excuses, actually further revealing their fear and inability to stand up to determined factual and sane rebuttal.
Each campus is different but, regardless of outcome, this incident demonstrates the power of civil discourse. If not exercised by those who believe in it, the field is surrendered to those who don’t.
The fallacy of positive rights
Not satire: Dartmouth's Climate Justice Research Project. I demand a colder climate.
Thoreau: Anti-government free-marketer
When children roar. Thompson
Via Insty:
ERIC HOLDER: Gitmo is a “well-run, professional facility” that will be hard to close. Now they tell us.
Stocks are good buys now.
Steyn is back with Macleans, and urging folks to have kids
Packed with info and analysis: Rich States, Poor States - ALEC-Laffer State Competitiveness Index. h/t, Cafe Hayek
Are violent video games adequately preparing our kids for the future? Let's hope so.
Obama's balancing act: Scare them enough, but not too much. Related: Are we seeing a generational shift towards big, parental government?
Mr. Free Market has Slumdog fatigue:
If I want to watch a feel good film about India, I will watch North West Frontier again & fantasize about the redoubtable Captain Scott, played with perfect aplomb by Kenneth More, ordering his Havildar to turn a Maxim gun on the entire audience at the Academy Awards. Now that would be worth watching. The nobilty of the slums my a*se
Bobby Jindal does better without a teleprompter
Government and medical care in the US, via a piece at Willisms:
Wednesday, February 25. 2009
- From Vanderleun: Let my cry come unto Thee: An Ash Wednesday Confession
- Via The Anchoress in her Ash Wednesday post:
Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan, newly-named, Archbishop of New York City ...:
“Maybe the greatest threat to the church is not heresy, not dissent, not secularism, not even moral relativism, but this sanitized, feel-good, boutique, therapeutic spirituality that makes no demands, calls for no sacrifice, asks for no conversion, entails no battle against sin, but only soothes and affirms.” -
Came in today's email. Dont know who to give credit to. Whoever you are, you're a magnificent bastard.
(Update: Needs a soundtrack:)
 The pretty, well-endowed girl in the photo led to Obama's Presidency.
Pols now want to ban primates as house pets. Aren't children primate house pets?
Why your kids are less well-educated than Belgian kids
Cause of cancer finally found. It's the Jews.
Trying to keep Obama honest: His lies about regulations. His lies about medical bankruptcies. I know lying is their job, but I don't have to like it.
Quote at Patterico:
We hold this policy to be unfair and unjust as it rewards those who do not pay their mortgages, and punishes those who work each month to pay theirs.
How rich bastards like me rip off the taxpayers
Am Thinker: I will defend to the death their right to silence you
15 Dos and Don'ts of The New Progressive order
Is the excellent Bobby Jindal too dorky for prime time? Obama can make anybody seem dorky by comparison.
A new approach to the global warming scare: Maybe even a teensy change will be catstrophic. They are getting desperate to salvage this thing.
Beijing's Olympic center. Empty and abandoned.
Kill "mark to market." I agree. Investment is future-oriented, not present-oriented.
Greenies beginning to come around to nuclear
Memo to Eric Holder from Am Thinker:
...one of America's greatest and most precious dialogues between black and white took place in a sound studio in New York City back in 1959. That was when the immortal jazz great Miles Davis defied some serious criticism coming from the black community and chose the white Bill Evans to accompany the famed group on piano. Why, the black community wondered, when there were so many great black jazz pianists, did Davis pick Evans? The answer is quite simple: Bill Evans was the best (sorry Art Tatum fans). The result? The best selling and most beautiful jazz album of all time: Kind of Blue.
Funny how little we hear about Iraq these days. Quoted at Lib Leanings:
'Jon Stewart, late in the Daily Show last night to Newsweek pundit Fareed Zakaria: "I’ve watched this thing unfold from the start and here’s the great fear that I have: What if Bush, the president, ours, has been right about this all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may, and again I don’t know if I can physically do this, implode.'
Politics in the guise of science. Tierney in the NYT
Jihadist recruitment tactics are changing. The UK seems to be their fertile soil now.
Bipartisanship debunked. We are in a phase of polarized parties.
The ten things you need to know about the Employee Free Choice Act
Don't you want to help this foreclosure "victim"? And these "victims"? Annie Liebovitz is a victim too! Housing prices in 2009. Supply and Demand Related: History of home values:
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