Author: Brian

Known as enteromancy, these fellows of Ethiopia’s Dorze Tribe are reading the condition of things by analyzing the guts of a lamb. The array of blood vessels, globs of navigated fat, translucent linings and, well, the overall gusto in the guts tell many things….

Be curious before you scoff. Because it is not the intestines they are studying. It is their own thoughts and impressions that they see. The designs in the oddly fluid time-frozen intestines are a “cognitive tool“.

We have many tools to help us see the condition of things in our modern world. Stock market charts for example. But are we having better luck than tribesmen divining the guts of our future?

OK. Some believe we are a nutty nation:

If America is to adopt socialism, why not have socialism for the poor, rather than for the rich? Why should American households that earn $50,000 a year subsidize Goldman Sachs partners who earn $5 million a year?

Believe it or not, there is a rational explanation, and quite in keeping with America’s national motto, E pluribus hokum.

Thinking back and exploring further:

…the ill-fated markets for structured credit and mortgages of the past 10 years had the undivided attention of some of the world’s best applied mathematicians.

Never before were risks so parsed, measured, cut, dried and marketed to different investor groups with different risk preferences. Professional gamblers, or “hedge funds”, were enlisted to manage the riskiest part of the capital structure, while legions of mathematicians arranged other securities to be as safe as possible – for example, AAA-rated securities backed by subprime mortgages that are now trading at 50 cents on the dollar.

E pluribus hokum.

Americans who saved money during the 1990s put a great deal of it into the stock market and were bitterly disappointed. An American saver who invested in 1996, just as the boom was getting underway, would have given up all his gains by October 2002, at the stock market’s following the technology stock collapse. If the same investor held on to a broad market portfolio all the way to the present, he would only break even after inflation.

American asset markets did not offer returns high enough for the baby boomers to earn enough to retire.

Alaska Daily News endorses Barack Obama,

The election, after all is said and done, is not about Sarah Palin, and our sober view is that her running mate, Sen. John McCain, is the wrong choice for president at this critical time for our nation. Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, brings far more promise to the office. In a time of grave economic crisis, he displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand.

Charles Smith at OfTwoMinds is predicting a furious up-tick in the stock market next week.

Won’t that be handy for McCain?

There is $6 trillion sitting on the sidelines in the U.S. alone, and trillions more in non-U.S. accounts ready to jump in once a “bottom” has been “officially” recognized. Not everyone has been wiped out in the past 6-week decline.

It’s like he says. Nothing moves in a straight line.

Chorus:
Oh oh I never knew, I never knew
You could lie to the bottom of your grave, oh woe…
Repeat:
Oh oh I never knew I never knew
You could lie to the bottom of your grave, oh woe…
Verse:

And go on home:
Oh oh I never knew, I never knew
You could lie to the bottom of your grave.

Early Friday Morning Update by Nouriel Roubini:

“Yesterday Thursday I gave a speech in London arguing that markets were in sheer panic and becoming literally dysfunctional and unhinged.

“I also made the point that policy makers may soon be forced to close financial markets as the panic selling accelerates.”

About hard times,
she’s been under arrest 13 years,
democratically the leader,
shriveled in a corner,
tucked to a blanket,
shuffling a dim room of rice and relief,
noble yearning,
hope bloating,
scars breathing,
pain and horror and damn resignation,
the weak strength of humanity when we accept torment…
a starvation of our victory.

Justice Is Before Democracy

I tried to purchase Burma once.
Well, a few swashbucklers too.
…ports and airports, huge hotels and smooth highways, lights and power lines, water and solids treatment, export agriculture and tech packaging, all that over-prime stuff we’ve forgotten. Folks visited and dined and toured but D.C. said an embargo is better…. Sub-prime can do that.

Years ago I taught local leaders that it’s untrue we live in a chain of command; that locality is our essential prosperity and not once have any laws or rules taken that from us. Today our future is again nearby: Vigor to assure sustenance and a growing justice is our tomorrow – the same frontier that built us.

[NYTimes] Who was the highest paid individual in McCain’s campaign down the homestretch?

Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist – $22,000 for two weeks.

Who’s next up?

Palin’s hair stylist – $10,000 in two weeks for “Communications Consulting”.

Charles Hugh Smith offers a horrifying jolt:

I actually lived in one of the last plantation “company towns” in Hawaii, and though Dole Pineapple didn’t operate a “company store” in 1969, earlier plantations (and coal mining towns, etc.) did–and the set-up was sweet indeed.

Much like a serf renting/sharecropping land owned by a manor-house or nobility, the plantation worker needed to borrow money to buy food and other necessities at the company store, which just happened to operate as a monopoly and just happened to charge sky high prices. (The serf needed to borrow seed for the next planting, and money to buy food for the family in between harvests.) The rate of interest paid by the serf/worker was always much higher than market rates–another monopoly capital (and highly profitable) feature of the set-up.

The system’s most pernicious feature: the worker/serf never escaped debt. Indeed, the system was constructed to increase the debt to the point it could never be paid off, insuring a lifetime of profitable servitude to the nobility/corporation.

Now the Powers That Be, as embodied in this Republican Administration and its lackeys/minions in both parties, have perfected an entire economy based on this “Company Store”

…
And if against all safeguards and probability this succeeds in gaining power, and burning the Constitution to preserve our freedom becomes a popular slogan, and a slyly articulate but otherwise inexperienced, almost mediocre, leader arises, and the corporate powers support this person in order to achieve their ends, then it will be time to leave, without looking back, before the storm breaks, and madness is unleashed, and a darkness falls over the land.

I would add only this: the middle class is an illusion, a false construct created by the Ministry of Propaganda to provide self-delusional cover for the serfs whose pride might be pricked by a realistic self-assessment of their true servitude.

The only people who can claim to be middle class are those few with virtually no debt and an income independent of the corporations who view employees as expenses to be slashed and burned as needed and the soon-to-be-bankrupt welfare state. I would estimate that by this more realistic and rigorous definition, no more than 4% of the nation’s households are truly middle class: independent professionals, small landlords, small business owners with no debt and agile, recession-resistant enterprises, etc.

Eric Roston at WorldChanging writes a short rhythm, a rant, a message.

Americans’ requirement for health care, education, labor, and pensions is thought of, at least by inference, as a hand-out, something the state shrugs its shoulders and begrudgingly offers to balance the scales. They are anything but.

These policy areas make up the four corners of human capital investment.

health care
education
labor
pensions

In the 21st century, democracies that understand this and invest in their populations will thrive. Other nations will atrophy.

This observation applies most vividly in education. Every nation that can afford it (or that funds it) builds schools so that the youngest generation can acquire the knowledge and skills that allow civilization to perpetuate itself. I think this is incontrovertibly true; what’s sad is that the state of our schools is such that the previous sentence is a howling absurdity.

Everybody will know soon that the New York Times has endorsed Barack Obama.

“This country needs sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership and strong leadership. Barack Obama has shown that he has all of those qualities.”

And slammed McCain-Palin.

“As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.

“Mr. Obama has met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change. He has shown a cool head and sound judgment. We believe he has the will and the ability to forge the broad political consensus that is essential to finding solutions to this nation’s problems.

“In the same time, Senator John McCain of Arizona has retreated farther and farther to the fringe of American politics, running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism. His policies and worldview are mired in the past. His choice of a running mate so evidently unfit for the office was a final act of opportunism and bad judgment that eclipsed the accomplishments of 26 years in Congress.

“Given the particularly ugly nature of Mr. McCain’s campaign, the urge to choose on the basis of raw emotion is strong. But there is a greater value in looking closely at the facts of life in America today and at the prescriptions the candidates offer. The differences are profound.”

Ideoblog is valiantly hoping headlines are not where we learn.

What Greenspan actually said was

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.

Greenspan was wrong in thinking banks wouldn’t take the risks they did.

So perhaps, this whole incentive thing that is at the root of capitalism, the profit and loss system that incentivizes firms is overrated.

Well, Greenspan’s not the first one to say that. Here’s what another free market guy, Adam Smith, had to say:

The directors of . . . companies … being the managers rather of other people’s money rather than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which [they would] watch over their own. . . .Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

Wrap up.
“The idea that incentives can get out of whack was not exactly invented by Alan Greenspan or Henry Waxman in Congress today. The question has always been whether the market or government is better able to figure out incentives.”

“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.” – Mark Twain

In a nutshell, we pay for services, not for results; and bad results actually increase the profits of providers, because they generate more services. – Cervantes, Health Sociologist

The art Hummer by Matthew Harrison truly shows the conflict in the USA economy today, ey wot?

Harrod’s is selling this Teddy Bear sofa. At first I was delighted and then I realized I would feel cruel sitting on these sweet bears.

Knock it off. It’s not right. The American people are not running against each other for office… [Danny Sullivan, search techno leader]

Todd and Sarah are unabashedly asking “for God’s intervention” on election day.

About God on election day, Sarah says “God will do the right thing on election day.”

“It is that intercession that is so needed. And so greatly appreciated.

“And I can feel it too…

“I can feel the power of prayer, and that strength that is provided through our prayer warriors across this nation.

“And I so appreciate it.”

define:unabashed

Stupid stupid wingers, so inflamed to merely win, fail to see simple principles in the slogans cemented to their thoughts.

The grandfather of market theory Adam Smith said,

“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. . . . The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. . . .

It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

The ultra-rich bajillionaire Warren Buffett “blasts the system” that lets him pay less tax than his secretary.

Class is open in Europe, Canada and Mexico, but hidden in the USA. We know nothing about the rich.

This election seems like parents arguing if spanking is a good thing. Our nation is better than that.

John Ralston Saul

“I’ve talked to several Supreme Court justices, several times in several countries and I say, look, in your rulings, can you differentiate easily in cases between the social contract and the commercial contract, and to which the answer is, we can no longer differentiate. And that lies at the heart of the problem.

“You don’t have the concept of the other, and of obligation of the individual leading to individualism.

‘You can’t have that if the whole legal system has slipped over the last, really, 50 years, increasingly, to a confusion between the social contract and the commercial contract. Because they are two completely different things.

“The social contract is about the public good, responsible individualism, imagining the other. The commercial contract is a commercial contract. They’re not supposed to be confused. They don’t actually fit together.

“The commercial contract only works properly when the social contract also works in a democracy.”

We must be strong at home to be strong abroad – that is the lesson of our history. – Barack Obama

Mark Morford:

I’m told it is sometimes helpful to project outside yourself, to mess with your own ideological boundaries, to attempt, however exasperatingly and however much it makes you want to hose yourself down with the cool fire of intellectual clarity afterwards, to enter the minds of your enemies, or those with whom you merely disagree, or — perhaps most challenging of all — with those whose mental gyrations you simply cannot fathom in the slightest.

Strong and optimistic? Yes. Only with vision and decision.

I laughed when I believed future history will call us Limbos in the same way history called them Luddite.

Hate Radio is as real and will be forever noticed.

To make easy victory the angry fool yells ‘Kill Him’ near our Secret Service, while our wealth is slipping away and while the world scorns us not for our dead but its dead.

We compete in falsity to only win pride. Does fear do this? No. Only lies make fools. Is superstition against reason? No. Our thinking is losing to simple dominance.

What horrid shame is poor freedom?
Reporters Without Borders, burdened with a checkered pedigree, tells us that our nation ranks only 46 of 169 for a free press. See Reporters sans frontières – Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index.

In good Virginia, are they waking?
The Newport News Daily Press headline says, October 21, 2008, “Government Lies Are The New Normal”.

Fear, which had cut through us like a hot poker, became instead a low- grade fever, ambient noise, wallpaper, something you feel without feeling, hear without hearing, see without seeing.

Then you look up one day and realize how profoundly that fear has changed your world.

Is losing normal?
A good American replies,

“I would rather be killed by a terrorist than oppressed by my own government.”

Other good American friends also say:

1. I only fear that we will wait too long and sacrifice too much of our freedom and self respect as a people before standing up to the deceit, tyranny, and oppression that is becoming so commonplace.
2. I don’t know what people are talking about. The war on terror has not affected me one iota. However, it sure has made life miserable for terrorists! Which is great! I don’t care if the ragheads have to suffer. They started it and by God, we’ll finish it.
3. For all the reasons we initially broke away from England can now be leveled our own “elected” Government. The Red and the Blue have been screwing you, and its been going on for 50 years. Think about it, All of the major issues that face this country back then are the same things the politcians run on today. Nothing has really changed except that now more wealth is concentrated to 1% of the Population.

“So what is a Limbo”, a future student asks?

A good person trapped in anger, failed by style, poor often, saying nothing.

Pardon me for asking, but if they’re too big to fail, they’re too big, period. – Robert Reich