The Election

Regardless of one's opinion about the election, one very good thing will come out of it: All the poseurs will now be uncloaked.  The House Republicans and Democrats could vote any way on anything because the Senate refused to vote on any of the bills they passed. That also protected the Senate Republicans and Democrats and shielded Obama from decision-making. Votes were of symbolic import only. Now everyone's vote will be important and revealing. As it should be. More, there will by necessity a direction that will emerge, what people really want, what they can achieve and what they are willing to bargain.

Inefficiency in government is not necessarily bad; sometimes it protects us working folks from organized idiocy. But the current debate--a real shift in the underlying structure of the country--should not occur through inertia. This election should be clarifying. The country needs clarification.

Cab Thoughts 11/6/14

I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property.--deTocqueville


The underground economy in the U.S. is estimated at $450 billion. The question is, of course, how would they know?

A Galton-like idea from Sowell: Even if an intellectual knows more than anybody else, that is not the same as saying that he knows more than everybody else put together — which is what would be needed to justify substituting his judgment for that expressed by millions of others through the market or through the ballot box.

 

Who is....Christina Kelly?

 

Home ownership is at a 19 year low, apartment living at a 17 year high. Balloon mortgages are coming due so foreclosures are up as well. 40% of millennials say they want to own a home. 97% of late teens do.

 

The White House had their own photos for the Nurse Pham Obama visit, replacing independent photojournalism with visual press releases. This provided an opportunity for some pent-up resentment to emerge. Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson said, “It is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering”; New York Times reporter James Risen said, “I think Obama hates the press”; and CBS News’s Bob Schieffer said, “This administration exercises more control than George W. Bush’s did, and his before that.” USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page called the current White House not only “more restrictive” but also “more dangerous” to the press than any other in history. This is the press that loves Obama so, presumably, his opponents can be forgiven their excesses.


AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd has been charged with trying to arrange a murder, BBC reports.

 

According to new statistics released by the Association of American Publishers, the first seven months of 2014 showed marked growth in e-book revenue — largely thanks to young adult and children's literature.

 

The WSJ has a short weekly article called "The Experts" where opinions and advice from business experts is offered. This is from a recent article by Tom Davenport a Distinguished Professor at Babson College, a research fellow at the Center for Digital Business, director of research at the International Institute for Analytics, and a senior adviser to Deloitte Analytics: "Understanding how to design, write and maintain a computer program is important even if you never plan to write one in business. If you don’t know anything about coding, you won’t be able to function effectively in the world today."

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/03/confirmational-creativity.html

 

There is 24 trillion dollars in retirement plans. An additional 3 trillion dollars are unfunded, 1% in private plans, the rest in state and federal plans. 41% of 55-59 year old workers do not contribute to 401-K plans.

 

McDonalds has just announced that the minimum wage changes will make them replace some workers with automation. Lowe's will do the same.

 

The  $300,000 NIH's study  of the response of mothers to pictures of babies compared to their response to pictures of puppies was inconclusive. Fortunately they have another proposal, this for $400,000, to include men in the study. Fairness.

 

Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo module blew up Tuesday night just moments after lifting off from NASA's launch complex at Wallops Island, Virginia. The accident could draw scrutiny to the space agency's growing reliance on private U.S. companies in the post-shuttle era. NASA is paying billions of dollars to Virginia-based Orbital Sciences and the California-based SpaceX company to make station deliveries, and it's counting on SpaceX and Boeing to start flying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting lab as early as 2017. It was the fourth Cygnus bound for the orbiting lab; the first flew just over a year ago. SpaceX is scheduled to launch another Dragon supply ship from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in December.

Until Tuesday, all of the supply missions by Orbital Sciences and SpaceX had been near-flawless.

 

700,000 Social Security homes have student loans outstanding.

 

At least 20 emails  between AG Eric Holder and his spouse, Sharon Malone, a medical doctor in Washington, D.C., and between Holder and his late mother are being withheld from a Freedom of Information suit over the "Fast and Furious" scandal under a claim of "executive privilege." Quite something. And no one laughed.

 

According to the GAO, paying an additional 1% a year in 401-K expenses can reduce your nest egg by 17% after two decades. The expense ratio for any mutual fund — whether in your 401(k) or elsewhere — doesn’t capture all the costs you’re paying. The biggest missing expense is commissions the fund pays to buy and sell investments, which are disclosed in the “statement of additional information.” 

 

Quiddity \KWID-ih-tee\, n.: The essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity of a thing. A hairsplitting distinction; a trifling point; a quibble. An eccentricity; an odd feature. From the scholastic Medieval Latin term quidditas, "essence," from quid, "what."

 

A recent Chapman University survey showed that more Americans believe in the lost civilization of Atlantis and that "UFOs are probably spaceships" than evolution and that as many people believed in Bigfoot as the Big Bang.

 

The investigator who led Homeland Security's internal review of how the 2012 Secret Service prostitution scandal was handled has himself resigned after he was reportedly spotted with a hooker. Probably research.

 

As of Oct. 25, the World Health Organization reports that 450 health care workers have contracted Ebola this year and 244 have died. One in seven people infected with Ebola doesn't have a fever before diagnosis. Data on over 4,000 Ebola cases — the most complete analysis ever — published Oct. 16 in the New England Journal of Medicine show that 13% of patients don't develop fever early on. Relying on returning doctors and nurses to monitor themselves assumes they will catch any sign of illness quickly and avoid spreading it. But the New England Journal of Medicine research found doctors and nurses with Ebola don't get to the hospital sooner. The administration has taken the position that temperature monitoring is adequate yet there is actually strong evidence that is not true. But there clearly is more going on here than science and epidemiology. Thomas Frieden, the head of the CDC, said, in response to the move by several governors to create quarantine programs for doctors and nurses returning from West Africa, that isolation would be a "stigma" and make them "pariahs." Stigma? Pariahs? These people are willing to sacrifice a lot for some principle that is hard to define. Remember when AIDS was supposed to be a heterosexual disease?

 

Ice cores in Greenland contain traces of lead dust from 2,000 years ago, carried on the wind from giant Roman smelters. One of the largest, located in Spain, was operated by tens of thousands of slaves.

Christina Kelly, 39, is filing for divorce in Manhattan from her husband, a big deal Wall Street guy. There has not been much attention paid to this suit in the U.S. but the Brits have been running it. The allegations are startling. Drugs--lots of them--and wild and weird sex accusations fill the complaint. It gives you a very unsettling feeling to think people with a lot of financial sway in the culture do stuff like this.
 If corporations and businesses do not create jobs, as Obama and Hillary say, why is outsourcing bad?

 

There is fear in Europe of deflation. What happens? Prices fall. Incomes fall and offset any advantage of lower prices. People put off purchases with hopes that falling prices will give them a cheaper product later. Debts are harder to pay and are defaulted on; that compromises the banks.
 

$4 billion will be spent on this year's election, an off year.

 

The U.N. is making a bid to control the Internet and make it a utility. 17% of the phone bill is tax. How the American citizen is supposed to vote for a tax that supports its enemies is, as yet, unexplained. What is also unexplained is why we would accept the idea of an international censor--taxation being the inherent ability to control. The U.S. is in favor, in favor, of this U.N. control. One can only wonder how Saudi Arabia, Chad and other lovers of freedom will take their new responsibility.

 

AAAAAaaaaannnnnndddddd.....a graph on what and when earnings start to out-gain contributions to savings:

The Vulnerability of Those With Something to Lose

A young college student was beaten in front of my house in broad daylight recently by a local man and badly hurt. The circumstance are simple: The boy objected to an  unprovoked insult as he passed by. The attacker has a criminal history and is living in the neighborhood--a nice city community--apparently through the largess of his mother-in-law. His wife is the only witness and presumably nothing will result from this attack.
There are few cultures, other than some religious shards, that encourage gratuitous attacks and damage outside of warfare. Indeed the limiting of such behavior is the basis of most social law. But this threatening element is always lurking in every culture.
The disparities--or inequities, if you prefer--are glaring here. First there is some expectation that the law-abiding community has for justice. There will be none. There is some expectation the law-abiding have for simple safety. There is none. The courts clearly give us decisions, not justice; the police are usually little more than armed secretaries who rarely intervene. But the most important inequity is the disparity of futures. Here is a confrontation between a student with hopes and aspirations and a man with none. The young man has a future, the criminal has none. As a result the confrontation has no implications for the criminal and broad implications to the student. There is no way the student can win this. Even if he wins the fight he will be caught up in the legal whirlpool with its notoriously random results so a successful defense might ruin his life. 
This is a difficult realization for the young. The productive member of society cannot win in this situation and the predator knows it. Meeting the predator on his terms is an unqualified disaster. The only option is flight and isolation. The society has no interest in the old virtues and anyone who abides by them is an anachronistic idealist who needs good insurance if he loses and good legal help if he wins.
In a culture that mouths its hatred of inequities, here is a place it could start.

Taming Sharyl Attkisson

Sharyl Attkisson is an ex-CBS reporter who believes her stories were deep sixed for political and business reasons. She has since quit her job and is writing about her experiences. She hired a computer expert to analyze her computer for spyware and he found  the computer was hacked into by “a sophisticated entity that used commercial, non-attributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.” The spyware included programs that Attkisson says monitored her every keystroke and gave the snoops access to all her e-mails and the passwords to her financial accounts.

He also discovered three classified documents that he said were “buried deep in your operating system. In a place that, unless you’re a some kind of computer whiz specialist, you wouldn’t even know exists.” He added, “They probably planted them to be able to accuse you of having classified documents if they ever needed to do that at some point.” Read that again.
The Feds planted phony evidence to threaten or undermine a reporter? In the United States? Now I understand that this woman is selling a book but these are serious charges about our own government.

Does Power Corrupt?

The sleazy Pennsylvania Governor campaign is drawing to a close. It is awash in lies, misrepresentations and innuendo and it will be a blessing when it expires. One of the most outrageous hints has been the Corbett-Sandusky connection.
Every talk show has callers suggesting Corbett's connection to a pedophile when he was Attorney General and now as Governor. It was part of Kathleen Kane's Attorney General's campaign and it continued on when she was elected. She initiated a 16 month investigation under special investigator H. Geoffrey Moulton. The governor challenger, Wolf, picked up the tattered banner with the implication that political donations came from Sandusky through his charity, First Mile. This is very reminiscent of the attacks on Romney, vague but ugly with some sticking quality.
But the donations have come from people who were associated with First Mile; they may have been associated with the Anglican Church or the Philadelphia Phillies, too, Moreover, special investigator Mr. Moulton, Jr. released his report  this summer which concluded there is "no direct evidence that electoral politics influenced any important decision made in the Sandusky investigation," and that "Attorney General Corbett never made any substantive decisions related to the conduct of the investigation."
No matter. Keep those calls and letters comin'. The political process has no shame. Maybe power doesn't corrupt, maybe it just attracts the corruptible. The only thing worse than elections would be not being allowed to have them.

Sunday Sermon 11/2/14

This gospel is filled with problems as Christ presents a confusing picture of Himself and His relationship with the Father:   
"I came down from heaven not to do my own will
but the will of the one who sent me."
This is the kind of thing that drove the Arians, the Gnostics and Mohammad mad. 
Then He promises all His followers eternal life:
"For this is the will of my Father,
that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him
may have eternal life,
and I shall raise him on the last day.”
And so Christ turns an ending into a doorway.


THEY are chanting now the service of All the Dead
And the village folk outside in the burying ground
Listen--except those who strive with their dead,
Reaching out in anguish, yet unable quite to touch them:
Those villagers isolated at the grave
Where the candles burn in the daylight, and the painted wreaths
Are propped on end, there, where the mystery starts. (D. H. Lawrence)

Cab Thoughts 11/1/14

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."- George Orwell, 1984


Former US Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke gave his first speech in Japan, to a group of more than 100 institutional investors, covering his thoughts on deflation, global monetary policy, and job creation. Bernanke told attendees that he believed central banks around the world had the power to fight our current No. 1 economic fear —  deflation. According to a source who was at the speech, Bernanke sounded positive about global prospects in a general sense. The former Fed Chair doesn't believe in secular stagnation, holding that industries like biotech, tech, and energy are poised to create more jobs to the global economy than we expect. (From Business Insider)

What is the difference between "fiscal" and "monetary?"

Serendipity: n. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident. Coined  by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann dated 28 January 1754. He took it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of." An often overlooked element in the word is the 'sagacity" component.

Who is .....Catherine Evelyn Smith?

“I have left no immortal work behind me, but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had the time I would have made myself remember’d.” This heartbreaking line is from a letter written by the remarkable poet John Keats in Rome, 1820, the year before he died of tuberculosis at 25.

British writer John Lanchester wrote “Capital,” a novel about contemporary London. His research taught him that most people do not understand the workings of the economy, an entity that has a huge influence on their everyday lives. So he continued his research and wrote a new book,  “How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say — And What It Really Means. According to him, an example of the problem is the public ignorance of what the words "fiscal" and "monetary"--two commonly used words--mean. ” ‘Fiscal’ means to do with tax and spending, and it is controlled by the government; ‘monetary’ means to do with interest rates, and it is controlled by the central bank,” he says.

Several conservative outside groups that propped up tea party candidates and gave the GOP establishment fits during the primaries have yet to air a single TV ad during the homestretch of the election in key states, according to a review of campaign finance records and media tracking sources.

Hillary Clinton said the following in Boston recently: “Don’t let anybody tell you it’s corporations and businesses create jobs." This is presumably from the "You didn't build that" school of economics and it must be the coming rage. But what does it mean? What are the next several sentences that explain where jobs do come from? This is not a simple question and anyone with the answer has made a very significant breakthrough and must be made to share the information.

A drop of water doubling in size every minute starting at noon will fill the Fenway Park at 12:49 but at 12:44 it will be only 7% filled. So it is with compounding debt: It will grow on the exponential curve. Creating more debt makes it worse. Only decreasing debt and increasing surplus will help.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/03/confirmational-creativity.html

Yoenis Cespedes was acquired by the Red Sox prior to the trade deadline for Jon Lester and Jonny Gomes. Despite his strong traditional numbers — he had 20 home runs and 100 RBIs — his low walk totals and career .316 on-base percentage is undesirable for many sabermetric-inclined clubs. More, the Red Sox management dislikes him and that has got around. So it might drive his value down a bit when his contract is up after 2015--but probably not. No one liked Barry Bonds.

From the Cotton Mather Gazette: Supporters of Breast Cancer Action are protesting the decision of fellow breast cancer awareness group, Susan G. Komen, to accept a $100,000 donation from Baker Hughes, the Houston-based supplier of equipment for the oil and gas drilling industry.
You see, some money is impure.

It might be worthwhile to open a special section in the news like the comics and cooking and sports sections devoted to wacko Islamic acts. That way the reasonable people of the world would not have to consider every one of these events any more than the average person is confronted with hockey scores or cake recipes on the front page or lead news. 

"We have to use this opportunity," Younesi, formerly Iran's minister of intelligence, said of Democrats holding power in the White House and the Senate, "because if this opportunity is lost, in (the) future we may not have such an opportunity again."
(From a translated  copy of a Farsi language interview with Iran's Fars News Agency, reported in the
 Washington Free Beacon, apparently in the context of Iran's nuclear ambitions and the world's sanctions.)

Sharyl Attkisson was a long-time CBS investigative reporter who was awarded five Emmys in her career. She recently has come in to increasing conflict with her bosses, resigned and, of course, has written a book on her experiences called "Stonewalled." She has a history of a pretty even hand; it was she who exposed the program called Wide Receiver, a program under the Bush administration quite similar to Fast and Furious and she calls herself a "political agnostic." But she has had significant problems reporting on current politics. She writes, “Many in the media are wrestling with their own souls: They know that ObamaCare is in serious trouble, but they’re conflicted about reporting that. Some worry that the news coverage will hurt a cause that they personally believe in. They’re all too eager to dismiss damaging documentary evidence while embracing, sometimes unquestioningly, the Obama administration’s ever-evolving and unproven explanations.”

The U.S. has surpassed Saudi Arabia as the No. 1 oil producer and Russia as the No. 1 natural gas producer. The U.S. has increased oil production by an enormous 65% over the past five years. Saudi Arabia's income is 90% dependent on oil. And ISIS makes 5 million dollars a day on stolen oil. An increase in U.S. production would defund these guys. And the decline in oil and gas prices at the pump is like a $75 billion tax cut per year for U.S. households.

Carole Hinders has run a small restaurant in N.M. for forty years. Recently the IRS confiscated over 30 thousand dollars from her checking account. No crime was stated or implied. The money was seized solely because she had deposited less than $10,000 at a time, which they viewed as an attempt to avoid triggering a required government report. Using a law designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking their cash, the government has gone after run-of-the-mill business owners and wage earners without so much as an allegation that they have committed serious crimes. The government can take the money without ever filing a criminal complaint, and the owners are left to prove they are innocent. Many give up. Some (tax exempt) group called the Institute for Justice, a Washington-based public interest law firm that is seeking to reform civil forfeiture practices, analyzed structuring data from the I.R.S., which made 639 seizures in 2012, up from 114 in 2005. Only one in five was prosecuted as a criminal structuring case.

AAAaaaaaannnnndddddd.......a chart: