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"Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves." –- Norm Franz My Stuff Safe in the Fire Swamp Amazon Profile Old Silver Articles Blogger Profile Blogs of Friends and Heroes 3 O'Clock AM A Tenor's Tale Code Monkey Ramblings Elusive Wapiti Giraffe in a Compact Car Hart's Heart Jayhawkers and Red Legs JD's Evolution Jedi for God Jim Sinclair John of Argghhh! Kawaika Magic Negro Watch Metal Dad Mish Roland Drake Rollin' Like Sisyphus Something Feral Vox Popoli Vikings Blog ...will not be televised Required Reading 7 Lesson Schoolteacher Aliens Cause Global Warming Fire and Ice Is the USA Bankrupt? Neutral Power FTW On the Reading of Old Books The Subprime Primer The Toledoth of Genesis Archives November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2009
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The Finger of God Thus saith the former head of the DNC: "The hurricane’s going to hit New Orleans about the time they start. The timing is -- at least it appears now that it’ll be there Monday. That just demonstrates that God’s on our side. [Laughter] Everything’s cool."I, too, have noticed that God is prone to show his love of Democrats by destroying entire cities of them. Labels: democrats  Whether you can them or freeze them, 15# of green beans is a lot of beans.So the first day of class, my Spanish professor drops a, "You love me, right, Bill?" in front of the class, apparently because he was going to ask me a particularly tough question* and didn't want me to hit him or something. What I tried to respond was, "Por supuesto. Y me encanta los besos que me das." What I said was, "Ummm..." I think it embarassed both of us. It's funny how the leftern side of the Blogosphere is uniformly critical of McCain for choosing a woman qua woman, arguing, as Joel Mathis** does, that it's "more than a little cynical" given the GOP's opposition to affirmative action. But I think such a complaint misses a critical distinction: while Palin was chosen because she's a woman, it's not because McCain thought that men have had the job long enough and therefore it was time for a woman to have the job, but because a certain portion of the electorate will vote for her simply because she's a woman. It's no different than choosing a veep from California in the hope that such a choice would attract enough Californians to carry the state. It's not affirmative action, it's counting on voters to base their decisions primarily on appearances. On second thought, I suppose that could be considered cynicism. But it's more likely realism. It is one of the ironies of state-funded universities that while we pride ourselves on keeping tuition low for instate students, we covet*** out-of-state students because they pay more tuition. * It turned out to require conjugating and spelling the verb "hacer" in ustedes/preterit form. ** Who is an all-around fine fellow, despite being a member of the press. *** and actively recruit  UPDATE: Terrymum gives me the what for: Ah come on Bill - your choice is clear now! Hot smart pro-life pro-gun chick and old dude who is a waffler and a weenie, versus two wafflers and weenies who are in George Soro’s pocket!!? Yea, McCain is still a real sad specimin. But with Sarah at his side (bed-side if we are lucky) it could turn into an interesting next 4-8 years!! And THEN we will get to see Sarah and Bobby Jindall run together; what a dream ticket!Let me say that this "hot smart pro-life pro-gun chick" is the only one of the four I would vote for for ANYTHING. Any Democrat who wants to bag on her for 'inexperience' while supporting Obama is simply being dishonest, and I'm very much enjoying the conniptions being thrown on the left side of the blogosphere. Politically, I think it will turn out to be a very good pick, and I may actually watch a Vice Presidential debate or two*, just to see if she eats Jumping Joe's lunch as bad as I think she will. That said, I would still only vote for McCain/Palin if I knew McCain was going to die in December. There are a few reasons for that:
America's main problem is not that we have the wrong kind of government, it is that we have too much of it. Our problem is that every area of life has been politicized, we issue so many laws, administrative rules and judicial findings of such breadth that there seems no part of life that the government recognizes as outside its authority and responsibility. Politics is today what religion was in the 14th century: ubiquitous, bureaucratic, oppressive, expensive, and senile - we have come to the point where the government is literally creating money from nothing and giving it to people to spend. It's insane, and it will end badly. The government is currently beyond the control of anyone, even the president, the congress, and the courts, and it is on course to destroy the very civil society it was created to protect. No matter who wins we're not going to get less government, which is why it still doesn't matter if McCain or Obama get elected. It's going to be a very interesting 4-8 years either way. * I would still rather be waterboarded than watch a Presidential one, however. ** Which is not NAFTA or WTO, it is removal of all barriers to import and export by Americans in America. *** Why do we get to complain about what the Russians do in Cuba yet we do what we want in Poland? Labels: demotivators, Palindrones  So anyway, I went to a management "team building" retreat this week, and one of the exercises was a Subarctic survival scenario* in which your plane crashes about 30 nautical miles** from your destination, the pilot is killed, and the plane sinks into the water. You have to choose 15 items you'll need for your survival, in order of importance, then you get together with your team and decide again, then you compare both your individual scores and your team scores with what the "experts" say, and usually your team scores will be better than individual scores and the average of individual scores.But sometimes the experts are full of crap. One of the items was a deflated inner tube, which I thought would be helpful because if you needed to make a lot of black smoke for a signal, or if you broke a latch on your snowshoe, an inner tube is a pretty cool thing to have. The experts asserted the the inner tube would be valuable for making a slingshot. When they said that, I laughed out loud, I just couldn't help it. Not only does an inner tube lack the elasticity to throw a rock under normal conditions, when you're in 10-40 degree weather it has none at all. That was one point at which I realized that the experts are not necessarily any such thing. Given that we were not expected back for two weeks and all we had was a gallon of maple syrup and a bottle of Bacardi between 6 of us, every group decided to walk out, a decision which the experts declared would mean that we all died: the experts said, "if you're lost you stay put," and that if we tried to move, every time we crossed a creek we would have to get wet, then we would have to build a fire and dry out or we would die of hypothermia. The only problem is, we weren't lost. We had a map, a compass***, a million long, skinny lakes that all ran the same direction (NW to SE). But while it might have turned out to be impossible to walk over the lakes to the town, it was not nearly impossible to follow them southeast to the rail line that ran to town. Yes, you had to walk twice as far, but what else are you going to do? I would agree with the experts that if we did not know where we were, we should stay put - if you don't know where you're going, you don't leave. But we had everything we needed to make the trek, and on top of that, survival is 90% mental, so giving everyone a goal they can see and reasonable tasks (packing up the camp, moving it, cutting some long poles for a lean-to, etc.) to work towards that goal is going to be a lot more mentally healthy than sitting in a camp and drinking maple syrup, i.e. fighting one another during every waking hour while we starve to death a few short miles from civilization. We may only move 10 miles a day or less, but we are going to have something to do and a goal to reach. But what about the roadblocks? How do you cross the innumerable creeks and streams that connect all these lakes? It's not as hard as the experts made it out, because they said that at night it gets down to zero and during the day maybe up to 40. That means the lakes and probably the streams are frozen, especially in the morning. So you break camp early, walk along the ice on the edge of the straight, flat, long, frozen lakes for two or three hours - no up and down forested hills, that's crazy - then you set up your camp again and take the rest of the day off. When you reach the tracks, you can walk to town, probably in 3 more days or catch the first train. In all likelihood you'll be back before your plane is declared missing. I said all that to say this: it was actually a pretty cool exercise, and I learned a lot, and I re-learned a few things I should have remembered but did not. I learned that experts sometimes don't know what they are talking about. I learned that when no one knows anything about something, it is useless to appeal to them when you think their experts have it wrong. I learned that no matter how expert I think I am, there are very important things that I forget, too. I learned that teamwork is good - in all but two cases, team scores were better than individual scores - and I learned that sometimes it's good to ignore what the experts say you can't do and just come up with a plan to do what the team thinks needs to be done. * It was kind of funny because the leader of the retreat said that she chose that specific survival scenario because she has never met anyone who has any real experience with winter survival - a good choice, because the purpose was to work on decision-making, not expertise. But she did ask if anyone did have any Subarctic survival experience, and like an idiot, I raised my hand. ** but like 100 ground miles. Just looking at the map was enough to burn "You can't get there from here" into your irises. *** Which is one place I did make a serious mistake in prioritization. Not realizing the amount of iron in the soil and how close were were to magnetic north, I carried what would have turned out to be a pretty worthless item. Labels: management Labels: Obamarama  Magruder axes:One other thought. David Plouffe says that it will be a close election.I really have no idea whether it'll be a close election, because Obama has turned out to be a weaker candidate than I expected and McCain has moments exactly the same way. So it's like the two worst teams in the NFL facing off. That's not just a cheap shot*, but if you think about what happens when they play, it's often not a close game. Both teams stink up the field, but the team that manages to put ANYTHING together - usually after a blunder by the other team so epic that even they are awed - can usually run away with it. That's what I think can happen here, but I don't know who will commit the blunder, or when. Biden will certainly try, but the electorate has thus far refused to even notice that he exists. If the polls have ANY value right now, it's only a surprise factor - things should not be this close this early and the Democrat usually has to work hard to blow his early lead. Obama won't have to worry about blowing that, anyway. But I do think it's like the Reagan/Carter race in this respect: you have a "new" black guy like you had a "new" conservative - it's not that the electorate was anti-conservative any more than it's racist, it's just that "new" takes time to come to terms with. Everyone was afraid of Reagan the warmonger, Reagan the actor, Reagan the old man, Reagan gonna cut all my programs to the bone**, and the race was close. In that last week people looked at Reagan and decided that a conservative wasn't so weird and scary after all, and he ran away with it. It wasn't Iran or inflation or swimming rabbits that made Carter lose, it was that people looked at Reagan and decided he would make a fine replacement. Why vote for McCain? That's a very hard question to answer without reference to another candidate, because he inspires nothing and never will, much like Carter. The middle electorate had plenty of reasons to vote against Carter. When they looked for reasons to vote against Reagan, they came up short. If folks in the last 2 weeks decide that Obama's ok, I think he'll run away with it. Remember, the presidential race is NOT about issues: people use issues to justify voting against the candidate they don't like. If the muddled middle decides they can live with Obama, Obama it is. * Not JUST a cheap shot. ** If only he would have. Labels: politics   One relic simply won't go quietly into that good night:A LEADING expert on the shroud of Turin has won the support of an Oxford University laboratory for new carbon dating tests on the venerated but controversial relic, which was dismissed two decades ago as a fake.While no expert on the shroud, I have read a couple of books on it*, and I can't help but note the similarities between it and the Kensington Runetone, which I have mentioned a couple times before and recently took a pilgrimage with PiffordT to view again. Not that a stone with runic writing purportedly left in Minnesota by vikings and a piece of cloth that allegedly shows the crucified body of Jesus have much in common on the surface**, but what does impress me is the generational swing of scientific consensus between acceptance and rejection. The runestone has always found adherents among the people with whom it rests - not surprising considering the Swedes in Minnesota have a lot of bragging rights to gain - but while it was immediately rejected by experts, the next generation went so far as to place it briefly in the Smithsonian. It was thereafter banished to Alexandria, Minnesota, under a cloud of scholarly ridicule, which recently has begun to disperse as newer scientific methods are applied to it. It remains to be seen how far this pendulum swings***. A similar thing seems to be happening with the shroud: the shroud was originally rejected by the Church and its veneration banned. It became more widely accepted - though never declared genuine - after advances in photography revealed qualities that were believed to be beyond the means of a medieval forger. Further science then undercut that, though without providing a satisfactory explanation for the image itself. There are plenty of reasons to believe that it was not created in 14th Century Europe. The weave is 1st Century Syrian, not medieval. It is infested with plant pollens native to the Middle East but not found in Europe. There is quite possibly a document trail that leads us to a date earlier than the accepted date and a plausible reason to explain its appearance in Europe when it did - the family that owned it was closely related to one of the leaders of the Knights Templars, a medieval order of knights originally charged with managing Christian territories in the Holy Land. On the flip side we have the fact that the document trail is not without holes one could drive a medieval army through and Europe at the time was crawling with fake relics, separating the gullible from their money from Italy to England. Shrouding itself was not a particularly popular method of dressing a 1st Century Jewish body and seems to fly in the face of John 19:40, though Luke 24:12 could be interpreted the other way. And we have the carbon date, which is one piece of evidence that is usually deemed to trump any others, at least among those who demand pat, scientific answers. One thing that does bug me, though. The reason for the re-dating is that the cloth samples tested allegedly came from a patch that may have been added when the shroud was damaged in a medieval fire, and it's an argument that was brought up at the time. So didn't the testers know that when they tested it? If the shortcomings of the test are so obvious that they were known in 1988 even as the 14th Century date was being trumpeted in press articles around the world, why weren't they obvious enough to keep the bad samples from being taken in the first place? I guess we'll have to wait for today's science to tell us why (or if) yesterday's science got it so wrong. * both pro-and anti-. I don't personally have an opinion on its genuineness - there are good arguments either way - though I think it would be pretty cool if it turned out to be the real deal. ** It is one of those weird coincidences of history, however, that the inscribed date on the Runestone, 1362, falls within the "accepted' radiometric dates for the shroud. *** The one thing I do note is that the swings are less based on evidence, I think, than death - the generation that holds an opinion tends to take it to the grave, leaving room for new experts while illustrating that old saying about ideas and spouses. Labels: science   Rob in a Rush says, not much:While Christian Evangelicals will insist the Bible is factual — cover to cover — and that it should be taken literally, do not be deceived. The Bible is full of myth! How do we know this? Because countless stories found in the Bible are also found in other Mediterranean mythologies...Long-time readers will know that I don't have much truck with creationalists. I give them a fair shake - I think: I review their stuff, and then when it turns out weak fall back on my long-held position that I personally do not know how much of Genesis is to be taken literally. Some of it only makes sense when taken literally, not only that, but it fits into what we know archaeologically about the Ancient Near East. Some of it, I'll admit, is difficult to swallow*. However, I tend to follow the "What would we expect?" school of history** at times, and flood narratives actually tend to fit that pretty well. If there were a huge flood that knocked out all of mankind but a few people, what would we expect? We should certainly expect that "the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians all believed in the myth of the great deluge thousands of years before the Hebrews were even recognized as a people" - in fact, I've even used the Babylonian version here before. Since every people would by necessity be descended from the survivors, then we ought to expect that nearly every nation would have some manner of remembrance of it, however mangled. Which, coincidentally, is what we find. That the Sumerians had it "first" is simply a function of chronology - we have stuff that they wrote that is older than the Hebrews because the Hebrews came out of Sumeria after it was written. In short, if the Hebrews' version*** is true, then the evidence we find from the Sumerians is precisely what we ought to expect to find. Rather than evidence against the Hebrew story, its existence is evidence for it. Does the fact that it passes the "What should we expect?" test mean it's true history? Of course not - it could still be myth - but it does mean that it's not "indisputable" that the Hebrews stole a story that existed only because those who came before them had a penchant for gripping fiction. The "stolen myth" motif does not explain how the Mi'qmak (feather) Indians taught that the flood was caused by the tears of the sun/god over the fact that the first family created started killing one one another off, with only 2 righteous people being saved from the ensuing flood, and who then repopulated the whole earth - a much closer parallel to the Hebrew than the neighboring Akkadian version, in which the flood was caused by gods concerned with overpopulation. Though I suppose that one could always propose that the Hebrews stole the story from a wandering tribe of Canadian Indians. * that being said, God is God, if and he wants to put a talking snake in a garden a la Gen 3, I'm certainly not going to say he can't do so, nor will I be surprised if he tells me that he did when I stand before him in a few short years. It just seems representative of a religious truth, not unlike Pandora's wonderful jar in Greek mythology. ** I frankly find it more useful than the "x peoples crossed the x mountains in x bc" school, as in the book on the early Greeks that I'm currently reading. Where did they come from? Well they just showed up and started tagging the walls of Crete City in Linear B. We don't know where most people came from, nor when they showed up where they did. They cannot tell us and left no evidence for us to find. That's where our own myths about the Bering Strait land bridge come in so handy. *** I won't say "Moses' version" as I don't think he wrote it. Labels: bible  Labels: demotivators  When a couple weeks ago I wondered publicly which presidential candidate would be the first to sign on to using taxpayer dollars to bail out Detroit automakers, Elusive Wapiti didn't hesitate:I say McCain...he has to shore up his white vote to have a prayer against Obama. What better way to do this than to purchase some blue-collar votes in a critical swing state?Turns out that's exactly who bit first: Presidential candidate and presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain today gave his support to the proposal...I'm not surprised that McCain supports fascist policies regarding heavy industry*. In fact, from the time I heard this proposal I had no doubt he would sign on and little doubt he would do so before Obama. But what I remain surprised about, and what I may never stop being amazed at, is the Republicans' reputation as believers in the free market, in dog-eat-dog capitalism, in devil-take-the-hindmost and Horatio Alger. There is absolutely nothing free-market about John McCain and very little in the party he leads, and it is as predictable as it is tragic that - should he become president** - his coming fascist***/socialist/militarist/inflationist policy failures will all be blamed on free markets and laissez-faire. * Nor am I surprised that EW figured it out. He's a clever chap, that one. ** which is still possible, despite his best efforts. *** which, before it became simply another bad word, referred to an economy in which the means of production were privately held but whose output was organized, directed, and supported by national government. Democrats call Republicans "fascists" by which they mean "bad guys," which makes them half right without endangering their near total ignorance. That's quite a feat. Labels: McCain  Labels: guns  Today's fun fact: a Google search of Biden + gaffe returns more than 100,000 results.But it will be interesting to see how long until the GOP uncovers the old Dem primary footage* showing Biden and British Labor erstwhile leader Neil Kinnock delivering the same speech. * If I remember correctly, it was Gore's campaign that created it, the same campaign that was responsible for Willy Horton, before GHW Bush got the blame for that. That Gore was pretty clever. What ever happened to him? Labels: democrats  No one does it better than CNBC:A record number of U.S. homeowners thought their homes depreciated in value in August, according to a Reuters/University of Michigan survey published on Friday.How much is your house worth? I am married to a recovering real estate agent, and yet we probably could not tell you within $20,000 or so what ours would bring in a final sale. The fact that so many homes remain on the market for so long is further evidence that while people may think they know what their home's value is, they simply do not know, either*. That being the case, people cannot possibly have 'reported declines in their home's value,' all they reported was their opinion of a perceived change in a number they did not know and continue not to know. Since the people CNBC is asking have no way of knowing the answer, how can their collective response be meaningful at all? Perhaps it has some value for measuring attitudes about trends and fears, and so some clever marketing firm can make a commercial for Obama or McCain that will promise soothing targeted at this particular wound of our troubled collective psyche. But as an actual gauge of prices - and as actual news - it is wholly without value. So pretty much par for the course. * Everyone is wholly ignorant of the prices of illiquid assets, not just homeowners. Brokerages don't know what their crap bonds are worth, S&Ls don't know what a repossessed strip mall will bring, private investment pools have no clue what they will receive when they finally dump that half-built condo in Vegas. There is a number on the books because there must be, but that no more represents reality than Obama's family war stories.  This one's not mine, but it's just so fitting I had to run with it.  Ain't it pretty? Thanks, ebay!I mentioned a few months ago that while I hadn't bought any gold for a while, if the price dropped 20% from any point I would be buying gold like Mitt Romney buying votes*. Apparently, I'm not the only one with that idea: Gold-market bulls couldn't buy publicity much better than this: The U.S. Mint says it has run out of 1-ounce American Eagle gold coins because of rocketing demand...I hate to be down on gold-market bulls, but 60,000 1-oz coins is a pittance. That's about $50m for the month at current prices, this in a nation that needs to borrow literally 1000x that amount every month from foreigners just to fund our trade deficit. So when we talk about "unprecedented" demand and "rocketing" demand, we are not talking about big demand. It may look huge compared to historical American demand, but that's only because Americans don't believe in gold. FDR fixed** us good on that score. Which is what makes it so funny to read articles screaming that gold (or especially silver) has run out or is in some huge shortage because of this "huge" new demand. It's not. The fact is that US eagle mintages are tiny, and any significant change in demand is going to cause market disruptions because we are talking about new coins that are minted to order. That the mint is sold out of gold coins simply means they cannot produce them as fast as orders are coming in, no more. It does NOT mean that gold is in short supply***. With the price dropping as quickly as it has, dealers are not willing to hold a lot of inventory which they might have to sell at a loss. They are sold out because they would rather run short than hold depreciating inventory. It does not mean there's a shortage of silver****. There's plenty at AJPM, though the high spreads do reflect market volatility. Could there become one? Absolutely, in fact I think there will become one at some point. That point will be, MUST be, when a lot more than $50m wants to get into gold. * which comparison made sense at the time; now it might be interpreted as something that is both expensive and ultimately worthless. Let us hope that does not turn out to be the case. ** As in, "my dog is going in to get fixed." *** I bought that coin above, last night, for less than its melt price, even with shipping thrown in. If gold was scarce, that would simply not happen. **** On the old blog I once wrote concerning the creation of the Silver ETF, a fund that buys and stores physical silver, that if they bought as much as they said they were planning to, it would either blow up the market or I would change my opinion, which at that time was that there was a physical silver shortage. I have changed that opinion, and I'm glad for it. I don't know where all the world's silver is, but I am certain that for now, there is no imminent danger of running out. Labels: Pretty soon you're talking real money   Farmer's Almanac says break out the bikinis. Not:It's the middle of August, and it's been cold enough here in SEK that I'm going to be pulling up my tomatoes on Sunday and rebuilding their raised bed*, one of 4 or 5 that I'll be doing this fall. I ended up with a couple cases of salsa, but both the tomatoes and the jalepenos appear to be done for the year. They are convinced the summer is over. In fact, we seem to have misplaced about 6 weeks of the hot, sticky, miserable summer we usually have, and were forced to settle with 2. Not that I'm complaining. But my son and I noticed yesterday that we actually have a few trees starting to turn orange. I don't know if it's going to be a cold winter, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be an early one. * replacing the wood with those gray landscaping bricks and making them about a foot taller.  Sometimes it's not rife enough.  I got an email containing some pictures of a gorgeous, life-sized stations of the cross from Groom, Texas. Someone must've spent a lifetime making that statuary. But the end of the email had this note attached:If you believe in God and in JesusI didn't realize Jesus would throw me into hell for not forwarding email. McCain has opened a lead of about 5 points over Obama, which is absolutely amazing to me, as I don't know a single person who is planning to vote for him*. Maybe the only way he can salvage defeat this fall is to get Gore's old running mate on his ticket. Experience like that is invaluable. Some folks in James Dobson's orbit are praying for it to rain on Obama's big speech. And Keith Olberman seems to be afraid it just might work. Perhaps it would do more damage to Obama's election hopes if he prayed that people would actually watch the speech. It turns out Bigfoot was a fake after all. Who could have known? * I know, I sound like one of these college professors who could not believe Mondale lost because everyone they know voted for him. It worries me, too.  Labels: money  NBC had such high hopes when they presented football in the dark to save the planet:In the end, preparing to kickoff the Green is Universal initiative on Football Night led to some small but tangible results. A number of staffers took mass transit to work instead of driving, hopping on a subway or taking Metro North from the suburbs. At least one started studying his electric bills going back several months looking for trends and ways to save. And even though we'll go back to business as usual next week, with the lights on during our football studio shows, we will be turning the lights off in between shows, something we didn't think do in the past until, during our preparation for tonight's show, we determined that doing so will have a positive impact.But when it comes to Olympics, it's all for naught: Journalism students line the fence, hoping to be noticed. The set is outside, but air conditioning vents make the weather bearable.That's right, the network that promised they would have a positive impact by turning the lights off between shows has now taken to running the air conditioners outdoors. On the other hand, maybe NBC has accidentally discovered the solution to global warming. Labels: Global Climate Progress, press  Labels: demotivators, McCain  That's what I thought:CORRECTION: An article on Wednesday about a Government Accountability Office study reporting on the percentage of corporations that paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005 gave an incorrect figure for the estimated tax liability of the 1.3 million companies covered by the study. It is not $875 billion. The correct amount cannot be calculated because it would be based on the companies’ paying the standard rate of 35 percent on their net income, a figure that is not available. (The incorrect figure of $875 billion was based on the companies’ paying the standard rate on their $2.5 trillion in gross sales.)Translation: we don't know what the real number is and we didn't know upon what it would be based, but we now know that the numbers we did include were irrelevant. We hope you will believe it was a simple mistake rather than liberal-tilting dishonesty as alleged by El Borak. Here's a hint: the correct amount, rather than $875 billion, is zero. And we know it is zero because if it were not zero, the IRS, which takes an interest in things like the amount of taxes corporations owe, would be trying to collect it from them. They did not pay any taxes because under the law they had no tax liability*. Companies don't loot the public treasury by breaking the law, there's too much risk in that. They loot the public treasury by working *with* the government, either by selling goods and services to it, by getting favorable tax treatment written into the law, or by getting grants, tax credits, or subsidized loans - money taken from taxpayers - for doing what the government asks. And befriending the right (or left) politicians is invaluable in being asked. UPDATE: TJ asks: What is this "liberal-tilting dishonesty"? Why would the Times purposely make such a stupid mistake when someone was bound to catch it and rub it in...It's actually quite a simple concept. Mistakes are made all the time and slanted numbers are fed to reporters all the time by politicians. The "liberal tilt" comes not because a reporter necessarily says, "I'm a liberal, so I'll slant it this way," but because a reporter is more likely to cross-check numbers that don't "feel" right. That's why liberal mistakes take on such a predictable pattern. If some conservative senators released a GAO report that showed corporations all paid tons of taxes, you could bet that the NYT would not make a mistake that made them look like they paid even more; those numbers would be checked carefully**. Good liberals "know" that corporations are cheaters, so numbers that show they are cheaters must be true, not unlike how creationalists are liable to run with questionable data that fits their preconceived ideas without checking it too hard. It's not a liberal thing, it's a human thing, but it turns up as liberal slant here because it deals with a liberal bugaboo. I say it's dishonesty because the Democrat senators who fed reporters the original data know full well that corporate taxes are based on profits, not sales, and profit data was not provided. Sales data, known to be an irrelevant number, was provided instead, included solely for the political purpose of whipping up anti-corporate sentiment by making the corporations look like cheaters in the eyes of people who don't know better. Like NYT reporters and editors. * Or they paid it in some other way, like under an individual form for a Subchapter S corporation. ** Assuming they paid it any mind at all. Such news might not be fit to print. Labels: press  Quick, everyone act surprised: The U.S. Treasury is growing increasingly likely to recapitalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the months ahead on the taxpayer's dime, Barron's reported in its Aug. 18 edition.  I'm going to look like a fool for rushing in to take on Mish and Gary North simultaneously:(North Quoted by Mish) "[Bernanke] warned about rising oil prices as part of the "inflation front." This, of course, is economic nonsense. Rising oil prices do not cause price inflation. If oil prices rise, then consumers must cut back elsewhere in their budgets. Cost-plus inflation is a fallacious idea based on ancient fallacies that should have died off after the rise of modern economic theory in the 1870's. But it is still popular, even at Princeton University, I guess.Mish wrote this piece a few months ago, and I'll admit, it has been bugging me since the first time I read it. He is absolutely correct that true inflation is a function of money supply*, and correct that money supply is currently DEflating because of all the writeoffs and losses that started when the subprime fuse reached the debt powder keg. That said, Bernanke is talking about "rising prices" as is North ("price inflation"), and regardless of what Mish and North both say about it, rising oil prices, like the prices of any other input, must eventually cause the general price level to rise**. The reasons are simple:
First we must recognize that pricing power is a two-edged sword; it is the ability to raise prices OR to lower them. But why would anyone want to lower prices? There was a funny commercial on SNL a few years back about some bank that just made change. You bring in a dollar and they give you four quarters or ten dimes, whatever you want. When asked how they could stay in business with such a plan, the spokesman replied that they make it up on volume. Funny, yes. Fallacious, absolutely, but only because multiplying by zero gets you nowhere. But let's say I'm a bookstore owner***. I can choose to offer my books at anywhere along a sliding price scale - I can choose to sell 100 books that cost me .50 for $1 each, netting $50, or I can choose to sell 50 for $1.50 each, netting $50, and so on, knowing that the more I offer them for, the fewer I will sell. But because I have the whole range of prices available to me, if market conditions are tough - or if customers' budgets are tight - I can work the lower end and "make it up on volume." But I cannot lower prices below what the books cost me; that's a quick trip to the bankruptcy court. So what has this to do with inflation? If one is measuring "inflation" as "rising prices" it has a great deal to do with it. Let's say the cost of a book, to me the retailer, rises to a dollar. That means I have lost (downward) pricing power. I cannot now offer books for .51 and hope to make it up on volume. I cannot even sell them for a dollar and do that. I *must* raise my prices to the point where I will make a profit****. The "lower end" is now $1 to $1.50 rather than .50 to $1. But the laws of economics are still in effect and the supply/demand curve hasn't changed: fewer books will be sold by me and by everyone else at the newer, higher prices because higher prices reduce demand, just as demand for gas is falling today. Some bookstores will go out of business, reducing overall supply to meet the new, lower demand. And therein lies the first part of the answer to our conundrum: in the supply-demand curve, price affects supply and demand just as they affect price. If a lack of (downward) pricing power results in marginal suppliers going out of business, it all still balances: there are fewer books in the economy and less demand for them, yet they cost more on average. The cause and effect are screwed up perhaps*****, but at the end of the day, the graph works and average prices have risen. But how can this be when Mish uses GM's lack of pricing power to "prove" that cost-push inflation is a fallacy? The rest of the conundrum is solved thusly: Rule #1 can be gotten around in the short term. GM stays in business today by consuming past profits and borrowing money rather than by producing cars. As he elsewhere notes, that is nearing an end. When Rule #1 catches up with GM, whoever is left making cars must still charge enough to make a profit over the long term, just like the bookstore or gas station. Rising input costs *must* result in rising prices because the loss of downward pricing power necessitates the loss of low-end supply and of suppliers that cannot survive in the new, lower-demand environment. In short, rising input costs mean there will be less of everything available and it will cost more on average. Which is fine, for as North notes, consumers "must cut back elsewhere in their budgets" anyway. But it makes Mr. Bernanke's numbers look bad in the meantime. He's still looking in the wrong place for the ultimate cause. A mirror might be a good place to start. * in fact, the "inflation" itself is economic shorthand for "inflation of the money supply." It can cause rising prices, but it is not itself rising prices. ** This is what Bernanke (wrongly) calls inflation. He calls this inflation because he is the head of the organization responsible for causing real inflation. *** Because I am. **** or at least I must stop selling items that bring less than $1. In that case, a fancy new tabletop book with pictures of birds may cost the same, but cheap paperbacks will be unavailable. Prices have not gone up as much as the lower range along the sliding scale has been cut off. Specific prices may be the same; average prices will rise. ***** Any externally set price, like a price control, can do this. And I know Mr. North knows this; he wrote a very good book called "Price Controls" in which he explained it very well. Labels: economics   CNN makes an easy mistake:(CNN) -- A policeman and a former corrections officer say that on Friday, they will unveil evidence of what they claim is their biggest capture ever: the body of Bigfoot.Everyone seems to have a theory* about the frozen piece of meat that will be unveiled at a press conference tomorrow, but I think that the photo evidence that I amassed during minutes of painstaking research via Google images tells the true story. If you remember at the end of Trading Places, when Randolf Duke has his heart attack, he yells out, "Where the hell is Beeks?" Billy Ray turns to Winthorpe and ponders aloud, "Yeah, I wonder what happened to that guy?" Valentine knew exactly what happened to that guy, Clarence Beeks, head of Lyndhurst Security. They had taped him into a gorilla suit and put him into the cage with a male gorilla (see unretouched photographic evidence above). Then he was sent to Africa to have invasive scientific experiments performed on him, like Russell Casse in Independence Day, only worse because the process was started by the gorilla** on the trip. After his heroic escape***, he swam back to the US using for navigation the trail of sharks that still ply the old slave trade routes, finally landing on the coast of Georgia, where, unfortunately, he was killed by stray artillery when the Russians invaded. His body was found by rednecks who stuffed it in a freezer and will try to pass it off as Bigfoot. First Brett Farve, now this. I picked a hell of a week to quit sniffing glue. * even though only scientists are normally permitted to have them. The rest of us have to endure a background check and a waiting period. ** who has no scientific credentials that I'm aware of. He was even rumored to be a creationalist. *** this is the theory part. Labels: science  A traveling story from westernksgirl:speaking of music .. so as you know, the family took a trip, that required us to fly. And, we had layovers in an attempt to save money (actually, we just reallocated those *saved* funds to a car rental once we got to the east coast .. ). Anyhow, the boy child, aged 11, is really into music. Is taking electric guitar lessons and listening to 80's music and doing guitar hero .. which, is fine by me, most of the time. We are waiting in MN for our plane, and I spy (with my little eye), Steven Tyler from Aerosmith. Boy Child, who is on crutches, is hobbling over to get his picture and his autograph. Me, being the mama bear that I am, follow behind and hold his camera. Steven Tyler sees Jud, grabs him, and poses for me to take a picture! When Jud asks for his autograph, Steven notices Jud's crutches and his bent leg and states: "man, if you had a cast, I'd autograph it, 'walk this way'"*." Boy child was on cloud nine. One way back to our seat, he starts to sing: "Step inside, *walk this way*, you and me babe, hey, hey". I froze! I said, boy child, that's the wrong group! You're singing Def Leppard, not Aerosmith. Needless to say, when we got home, I downloaded the correct 'Walk this Way' on his iPod. Thank goodness we were out of hearing range of Steven Tyler.** * no foolies. ** who is really old, and really, really skinny.  Spain's B-Ball team is just begging for an email from HR.  So anyway, I mentioned before how I have to use Shoutcast or AOL Radio via Winamp to drown out the coma-inducing hymns that our secretary plays on her PC. Over the past month I had been listening to a station that played nothing but Latin* Rock. Well, as happens with depressing frequency, that station disappeared a few days ago, so I replaced it with a hair-metal station that was practically perfect in every way**. Now it, too, is gone. Back to square one we go.So I'm meandering through the list of potential replacements when I hear this vaguely familiar instrumental on a station called Radio Rivendell. It's a very upbeat classical with drums about as big as trampolines, and I like it, but I can't place it. After about 20 seconds I'm sure I've heard this song a thousand times, and it's really starting to drive me nuts not being able to figure out where I know it from. Was it in a movie? Maybe LOTR? I don't think so. I know it's not Conan. Being the clever type, I realized that if I mouse over the icon in the system tray, it'll show the song name. So I do. Turns out the song is the main theme from the video game Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal. This is the coolest station ever***. * Mexican (Pxndx, Don Tetto, et al) mostly, but with a little Shakira thrown in for spice. ** by which I mean the music was great, but it had only one commercial, an excruciatingly annoying one from Esurance, which it played on every break, and sometimes several times in a row... so I was forced by the pain of my teeth grinding together to turn it off temporarily whenever I heard Erin's loathsome voice. Then I cut down a tree just to spite them. *** Perhaps this post should be titled, "Hi, my name is El Borak, and I'm a geek."  Labels: Obamarama  Senator(s) Obvious are outraged:The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes* for at least one year between 1998 and 2005...Dorgan and Levin are Democrat senators who between them have more than 4 decades in the Senate**, so it might be tempting to conclude that they really are slower than the speed of stupid to be complaining about the "current tax system," a system that they ought to know quite well, having been involved in the creation of it. But one would be incorrect in doing so - the senators, like this reporter, are simply blatantly dishonest and use a combination of irrelevant facts and outright lies to mislead the readers for political gain. The irrelevancies are easy to discover: four times in eight paragraphs the reporter notes the gross receipts or sales of the companies, not bothering to mention that income taxes are not based on receipts at all, they are based on profits - a company can have a quadrillion dollars in sales, but it will still have no income if it has no profit on those sales. She allows the Senators to (mis)use that big, irrelevant number to create the impression that these rich - and they must be rich with all those sales - companies are evading Their Fair Share™ of taxes, and she is either too ignorant to correct the record or is willing to let them get away with it because she agrees with the tactic, or at least the result. The blatant dishonesty comes in both the headline and the first paragraph, which passes off the Democrats' talking point as if it were a fact supported by the numbers. Note first the first line above (which is actually the second paragraph of the article), that 57 percent of US companies paid no federal income taxes "at least one year" between 1998 and 2005. So 57% of companies did not have a tax liability at least one year in eight, and as the article later notes, 42% did not have liability for two years in eight. That means that most (58%) of US companies paid income taxes at least six years of the last eight. That's what the article's own numbers say in the details. What does the headline say? Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxesAnd the first paragraph is even worse, as it combines both the lie and the irrelevancy: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Most U.S. and foreign corporations doing business in the United States avoid paying any federal income taxes, despite trillions of dollars worth of sales, a government study released on Tuesday said.Neither of those statements - especially as written in the present tense - is even remotely true. You simply cannot honestly conclude that companies that pay income taxes in six of the last eight years "avoid paying any federal income taxes." It is of course in the Democrats' interest to lie with statistics and irrelevancies: these are the raw materials used to manufacture the kind of outrage that puts more tax money in the government's coffers***, and they are the 'facts' that will pass into the public consciousness and bounce endlessly around the simpleton echo chamber that is the left side of the blogosphere. But the mainstream press that lets them get away with it, even amplifying the politicians' outright and obvious lies with a few of their own? They sure make it hard to accept at face value their protestations that they don't protect Democrats. * Corporations do not pay taxes anyway, they simply collect them. Since corporations get all of their money from individuals, the money they "pay" in income taxes, like the money they pay in payroll taxes, excise taxes, property taxes, unemployment taxes, and all others, is simply an add-on cost that whoever buys their products or services pays. They then pass that money on to the government. ** Levin has been a senator since the Carter Administration, and I might note that the tax laws have been changed a few times since then. *** And creates more poor people to spend it on.  Labels: demotivators, McCain  From Something Awful, meet the megababies:Favre and Bill, ubiquitous and increasingly despised, seem unable to shrink from the spotlight. They're self-destructing relics fighting off the crooks of the stage poles tugging at their necks. They both have mortal enemies in Chicago.Frankly, I have a hard time deciding who I like to see suffer more, these two or the long-time friends they publicly alienate and humiliate through their selfishness. But I have no doubt that Clinton is the more accomplished whiner of the two, not just because he can successfully* whine on behalf of others, but because he's training an entire army of crybabies to carry on his legacy when he's gone. Favre, on the other hand, just wants to be on TV. * Not successfully in the sense that the person will get the thing whined for, but successfully in the sense that the person vicariously whined for is herself branded as a whiner.  I'm not sure if that's the newest Olympic sport or the oldest.  So anyway, there's no use in posting the story, because now it's everywhere, but I did see* a rather funny thing on Leno talking about the sordid affair a day or so before it was breathlessly announced to the surprise of people who have not been in a grocery store checkout line for the last 6 months. Apparently the Enquirer alleged that the woman was receiving $15k a month in "hush money" so Edwards could promote his plan for providing concubines for the other America. "I wonder how much," he wondered much, "the mainstream press is getting."It's a good question, and I'm amazed that they did not demand that Edwards provide video proof that the affair had occurred before they decided to run with the story**. I guess they learned something from their own front-page treatment of the similar rumors concerning John McCain. Or Maybe John Edwards is a Democrat and so rumors about him aren't newsworthy. It's hard to tell which. Anyway, the vacation was great, other than the fact that I destroyed Pifford T's computer during a brief stopover at his house. At least now he won't read me making fun of the fact that the quarterback he has hated most for the past decade and a half will be starting for his favorite team. If Chad Pennington becomes a Viking, that will be a little consolation, I suppose. * Actually I didn't see it at all, but heard it. The judges agreed that my streak of not watching Leno remains intact at 1126 episodes. ** Maybe they were just speechless at being scooped by the National Enquirer.  Well, so long as they promise they don't need it:While Ford, GM, and Chrysler insist they have enough liquidity to stave off bankruptcy, the three domestic automakers are currently lobbying the U.S. Congress for up to $40 billion in funding.Sure, why not? After all, banks, brokerages, and now mortgage lenders are lining up for their government loans, so why not automakers? Why not restaurants and casinos to boot? The reason they have to ask Congress is because no one in their right mind would lend these three companies any more money, not when the credit markets are already pricing in a 95% chance of default over the next 5 years. Care to take any bets on which presidential candidate will propose such a prudent investment of taxpayers' dollars on his next campaign stop to Michigan? The sad thing is that it could conceivably be either one. Labels: McCain  Lee1941 has beenthinking about translations:When reading July 30, 2008 Daily Bread Devotional, The Message Bible translation was quoted. I don’t think you’re aware that The Message does NOT use the phrase “Lord Jesus”, it has been replaced with “Master Jesus” a New Age phrase. The Message is a dangerous, mis-leading translation. I remember reading, some 20 years ago, a book about the New Age Movement called "The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow," by Constance Cumbey. It was a Christian-perspective take on Marylin Furguson's "The Aquarian Conspiracy*," which explained from a New Age perspective how that movement, a confluence of messianic Leftism and nuevo-Hinduism, was molding itself into an open conspiracy that would force an evolutionary change in Mankind, making us all happy in the realization that we were God. The NAM even had a prophet, ironically named "Lord Maitreya," whom well-placed, full-page newspaper ads declared would be soon revealed to lead the world**. And in my studies of the movement, which covered a few years, I learned a little bit about conspiracy, and of both those that promote them and those who decry them, settling into comfortable agreement with Machiavelli on the subject: "[T]he difficulties that conspirators have to face are infinite, and we know from experience that while there have been many conspiracies, few of them have succeeded." I suspect that that will remain the case throughout human history. That said, I did learn that a very particular use of language plays a key role in conspiracy. Conspiracies have code words, words that mean one thing to the initiated and something completely different to those on the outside. I also came to understand that Christianity acts a lot like Conspiracy in this regard. We have a lot of words that mean one thing to us and something else (or nothing at all) to those who do not share our particular obsession, words designed to keep others safely outside the boundaries of our conversation. In worrying about the New Agers' use of code words, Lee1941 betrays our own such usage. What, for instance, is a "lord"? Well, its origin is middle English and late medieval, and the word literally means "loaf keeper." It evolved from there into the head of a manor or a medieval fiefdom, the upper crust of English society which is today still represented in the House of Lords. Historically speaking, it is certain that Jesus' disciples did not call him "Lord" - the word is wholly English and is, or was, a fitting translation of a couple Greek words, despotes and kurios. Jesus' disciples, speaking mostly Aramaic, probably used some variation of rhabbi or as we would say today, rabbi. Wow, how Jewish***. To non-Christians, when lord is used at all, it carries British, not biblical, connotations: Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Lord Curzon was Governor-General of India, and the like. But to most English-speaking Christians****,"Lord" is a religious word with (only) religious connotations, those which we, by our own experiences, have imparted to it. It has become a code word, a plumb line by which we measure the "straightness" of others' theology. Others are simply not of our own conspiracy - they are both "dangerous" and "mis-leading" - if they don't call Jesus their loaf-keeper. So if one were to translate the word "lord" today, for the 21st Century reader who does not impart to the word a lifetime of KJV memorization and pulpit-pounding sermons, how would we do it? We could probably do no better than the dictionary's first definition: a person who has authority, control, or power over others; a master, chief, or ruler. It might sound a little too familiar to call Jesus "Chief." I suggest "master" is a perfectly acceptable modern translation, whatever the New Age Movement has to say about him. * you know, as in "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius" and all that. Frisbee full of buds sold separately. ** If that happened, I missed it. *** Spanish-speakers say "el Señor Jesús," in the same way they would talk about "el Señor Ortiz, the grocer." It's a simple title of respect. **** And especially American ones, which is either very odd or completely understandable, depending how you look at it, as we have never had a true manor system here and so lord is a word without experiencial referent. Labels: bible  Labels: demotivators  Obama thinks I need more money:Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Friday announced an “Emergency Economic Plan” that would give families a stimulus check of $1,000 each, funded in part by what his presidential campaign calls “windfall profits from Big Oil.”While details can be found in a six-page policy paper here, they hardly matter. What matters is that if this not-a-recession can hang on for a few more years, politicians will have given me so many refunds and rebates and stimuluses* I'll be able to retire to somewhere exotic. Like Zimbabwe. But what Obama ought to do is set one up one iteration of this vote-buying scheme as generic reparations. For blacks it would pay for slavery, for Mexicans and Indians, their lands the white man stole. For feministas it could reparate whatever it is that upper-middle-class white college students have to be so angry about. In fact, given enough thought, pretty much anyone can come up with a grievance that can be assuaged by cold hard cash**. Since we're giving away money anyway, you know. * stimuli? ** Or money fraudulently borrowed from our grandchildren, whatever. Labels: Obamarama  |
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When you need a picture of 'the one that got away,' try Lyin' Your Bass Off. |
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