Am I the only one flummoxed by his pressing concern that there are many places to hide dead bodies? I mean, shouldn’t you first worry about the murder itself?
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Detroit’s ‘shocking’ 47 percent illiteracy rate
Holy Crap!
More than 200,000 Detroit residents — 47 percent of Motor City adults — are “functionally illiterate,” according to a new report released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund. That means they can’t fill out basic forms, read a prescription, or handle other tasks most Americans take for granted, according to the fund’s director, Karen Tyler-Ruiz, as quoted by CBS Detroit. Her organization’s study also found that the education and training aimed at overcoming these problems “is inadequate at best,” says Jackie Headapohl at Michigan Live. So what’s to blame?
(Read more)
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Also, Horrific 10 Percent Literacy Rate Prompts ACLU to Sue Michigan Schools
Platinum Coin Idiocy
Characteristically, Nobel Laureate Krugman takes the idiotic “Platinum coin option” proposition seriously and uses it to bash the Republicans mere compliance (as opposed to enthusiasm) for spending the economy into oblivion.
The left treats Republicans as Bolsheviks treated Mensheviks. The Republicans are (for now) the radical saboteurs solely responsible for the failure of the otherwise glorious plans of our commissars.
Socialism requires endless enemies on which to blame the failures of central planning. Think of Orwell’s image of the future: a jackboot stomping on a face, forever.
The platinum coin discussion has moved with startling speed, from an idea nobody took seriously (and which, as I’ve mentioned, senior officials were unaware of just last month), to assertions that it’s ridiculous and illegal, to grudging acknowledgment that it’s almost surely legal coupled with strained attempts to dismiss it as an option nonetheless.
Ezra Klein has now opened up a new front, which I would consider a sort of progressive version of the shock doctrine: we shouldn’t invoke the coin option, he says, precisely because it would work too well, and therefore let us sidestep the real issues. . . .
This isn’t a stupid argument. We really do need to come to grips with Republican extremism. The question is whether refusing to use this escape hatch is the place and time to do that.
My own view is that I was willing to go over the brink on the fiscal cliff, but not here, for three reasons. (Read more)
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Here’s Robert Murphy’s take:
Jack Balkin — a professor of constitutional law at Yale — outlined strategies that the White House could use to evade the pesky borrowing ceiling imposed by a fickle Congress:
Are there other ways for the president to raise money besides borrowing?
Sovereign governments such as the United States can print new money. However, there’s a statutory limit to the amount of paper currency that can be in circulation at any one time.
Ironically, there’s no similar limit on the amount of coinage. A little-known statute gives the secretary of the Treasury the authority to issue platinum coins in any denomination. So some commentators have suggested that the Treasury create two $1 trillion coins, deposit them in its account in the Federal Reserve and write checks on the proceeds.
The government can also raise money through sales: For example, it could sell the Federal Reserve an option to purchase government property for $2 trillion. The Fed would then credit the proceeds to the government’s checking account. Once Congress lifts the debt ceiling, the president could buy back the option for a dollar, or the option could simply expire in 90 days. And there are probably other ways that the Fed could achieve a similar result, by analogy to its actions during the 2008 financial crisis, when it made huge loans and purchases to bail out the financial sector.
The “jumbo coin” and “exploding option” strategies work because modern central banks don’t have to print bills or float debt to create new money; they just add money to their customers’ checking accounts.
These suggestions should horrify anyone who understands the importance of sound money. Not only are the proposals themselves preposterous, but the mere fact that they are being discussed is a symptom of the cultural decadence wrought by the government and the Fed’s responses to the 2008 financial crisis.
Money for Nothing
When critics of the Fed assert that Bernanke creates money “out of thin air,” they mean the following: The Federal Reserve has the power to buy whatever assets it wants at whatever price it wants. In principle, Treasury Secretary Geithner could sell a paperclip to the Fed for $2 trillion. The Fed would simply write a check made out to the Treasury, drawn on the Fed itself.
When the Treasury deposited this check with its own bank — which just so happens to be the Fed — then its own “checking account” balance would go up by $2 trillion. This money wouldn’t come from anywhere in the sense that some other account would need to be debited $2 trillion. On the contrary, the system’s total reserves (and what is called the “monetary base”) would have swelled by $2 trillion. The Treasury would be free to start paying bills by writing checks on the $2 trillion in its account.
The only kink in the plan would be the state of the Fed’s balance sheet. Initially it could value the paperclip at $2 trillion — what the Fed paid for it — and list the paperclip among its other assets such as Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities.
“These suggestions should horrify anyone who understands the importance of sound money.”
Of course, people in the financial markets would cry foul. They would know that if the Fed’s books were “marked to market,” the paperclip would be worthless and the Fed would suddenly be insolvent according to regular accounting rules. (Its liabilities, in part consisting of bank reserves — which are dollar-denominated claims on the Fed — would have risen by $2 trillion, while its assets didn’t budge.) But this would merely be an embarrassment rather than a legal obstacle because the Fed has put into place Orwellian rule changes that allow it to shield its shareholder equity from capital losses.
The difference between my absurd paperclip scheme and the two proposals discussed by Balkin is one of degree and not of kind. As of this writing, platinum is trading for a little less than $1,800 per ounce. Thus, $2 trillion in platinum would weigh about 35,000 tons (Read more)
Schiff: Government/Media Inflation Propaganda
J.R.R. Tolkien on Politics
“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.”
He sounds like a Hoppeian.
Another quote:
“… the most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men; not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”
Palestinian Authority officially changes name to ‘State of Palestine’
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed a presidential decree on Friday officially changing the name of the Palestinian Authority to the “State of Palestine.” All Palestinian stamps, signs and official letterhead will henceforth be changed to bear the new name, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
The move marked the first concrete, albeit symbolic, step the Palestinians have taken following the November decision by the United Nations to upgrade their status to a non-member observer state. Abbas, who has enjoyed a boost in his status since the successful bid at the United Nations, has hesitated to take more dramatic steps, like filing war crimes indictments against Israel at the International Criminal Court, a tactic that only a recognized state can carry out.
Also on Friday, tens of thousands of Fatah supporters rallied in the Hamas stronghold of Gaza for the first time since they were routed from power there by the Islamist militants in 2007.
The rally, approved by Gaza’s Hamas rulers, marks a renewed attempt by the rival Palestinian factions to show unity following a fierce Hamas battle with Israel in November and Fatah’s recognition bid at the United Nations. (Read more)
How the Fed will be FORCED to peg the dollar to gold (?)
From Dan Amoss of the Daily Reckoning, originally published in September 2012:
“For years, I’ve expected that at the end of all this central bank printing, we’ll see the end — not a reversal — of quantitative easing programs and a re-pegging of the US dollar to gold at much higher gold prices. A new gold standard would allow the Fed and other central banks to save face after the following sequence of events:
1. Central banks inflate their balance sheets and buy up many of the bonds governments issue to fund soaring budget deficits
2. Once the largest suppliers of scarce products realize they’re exchanging products for infinitely diluted paper money, they start demanding more and more money in exchange for sending their scarce products to the marketplace
3. Consumer prices start rising
4. Calls for monetary tightening (reduction of central bank balance sheets and interest rate hikes) grow louder
5. These central banks won’t be able to slash money supplies without crashing government bond markets and stock markets. They talk about tightening, but don’t tighten
6. As central banks lose credibility, gold launches on a final, near-vertical stage of its bull market
7. In response to inflation expectations running wild, governments and central banks draw up plans to re-peg currencies to gold in order to avoid having to drain trillions worth of cash from the banking system.”
In the face of imminent hyperinflation, Dan Amoss postulates that the Fed will back the dollar with gold at some significantly higher price in order to avoid a complete collapse of the dollar. It is reassuring that the Fed can do this, but will it? Another scenario is that some large and important country, such as Germany or China, will back its currency with gold and cause demand for the dollar as the preferred means of international settlement to fall. This will cause prices to rise in the US as overseas dollars start to flow back into the only economy where they must be accepted for all debts public and private. (Read more)
The wit & wisdom of HL Mencken
Mencken meme posters:
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Other Mencken qutoes:
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Liberals have many tails and chase them all.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law…that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
Judge: A law student who marks his own papers.
Misogynist – A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule–and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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What School Teaches Children Pic
NYC anti-terror patrol
New York City is a great place to be from.
Two Charts About Guns to demonstrate data bias
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CNN’s ridiculous anti-gun bias
Don’t watch the MSM to learn the truth. Tune in from time to time to see what the lies are.
We don’t need AR 15s to hunt, but the police need this to direct traffic
