“The Goode Family” is not funny

June 1st, 2009

The Goode family are too nice and sincere to laugh at. Where is the liberal fascism and liberal totalitarianism? Observe that the kid gets away with defining his ethnicity as “African American” (he is white from South Africa) while in real life the kid from South Africa who pulled that stunt got expelled from college.

The only funny character is the dog, because he is rebelling against the family veganism by devouring every neighborhood pet smaller than himself.

The show fails because it is too soft on liberalism.  To get a laugh, have to stick the knife in and twist it a bit.  This show is too much like “Father knows best”

The only part of the first episode where they really stick the knife in, and follow it up with a few boots to the head, is, of course, where they stick the knife into fundamentalist Christians.

The Goode Family are genuinely and sincerely trying to do good.   That is not funny.  They should be genuinely and sincerely deluded that they are doing good.  That would be funny.

Blog empty due to crash and move to new host.

May 10th, 2009

My previous host (Servers and Domains) crashed on me, and despite considerable passage of time, are still down.

As a result many articles are missing

I hope to recover nearly all of them in the next couple of days.  Recovering comments will take a little longer.

I apologize for the inconvenience – and for my failure to keep adequate backups.

obamanomics

May 7th, 2009

Megan nails it:

the government is using its intervention in the banking system to pressure banks to give special deals to the government’s special friends.

Securitization

May 6th, 2009

From the point of view of oligarchs and crony capitalists, the crisis is not that a lot loans were made to no hablo English wetbacks. The crisis is that people are rejecting securitization of debt.

The Obama regime’s capitalism smashing measures are intended not to destroy capitalism, nor to install socialism, but to restore securitization of debt. This is socialism for the financiers, not for the proles:  Crony socialism, crony capitalism, a fascist economic order.

Regular old fashioned loans are going through just fine. There is no credit crisis, the financial system is not freezing up. Securitization is freezing up, and it @#$% well should freeze up.

When debts are securitized, many different debts of many different borrowers are piled together into a great big pool of debt, and then shares in the pool are sold to lots of creditors – which means that there is no one person responsible for verifying that any one particular loan is sound, that the assets securing the loan are worth what they are supposed to be worth, that the person responsible for making payments on the loan can read and write, that he speaks the language that the papers that he signed were written in, that he was sufficiently sober when he signed them to remember signing them, or even that the paperwork exists and is in good order.

For securitization to work, the particular organization that arranged the loan, and the particular people in the particular organization, would have to remain responsible for that loan.  The debtor would have to be making payments through the people that arranged the loan for the life of the loan.

Securitization leads carelessness with large sums of other people’s money. Such carelessness leads to crime. Crime destroys the trust that is necessary for the economic system to work. Securitization must stop. If securitization continues, capitalism will end. By and large, those who favor continued securitization are wealthy criminals, who personally benefited from stolen money, as over the years carelessness slowly became indistinguishable from deliberate fraud.   The problem before Obama was not lack of regulation, but that the foxes were regulating the chickens, and now under Obama the foxes are still regulating the chickens.  Each Obama intervention has the effect of keeping the criminals in power over other people’s money, resisting the natural propensity of capitalism to purify itself through creative destruction.

Securitization was born in fraud:  The original motivation for securitization was the 1995 Community Reinvestment Act. If the government is pressuring you to make loans on the basis of race, rather than willingness and ability to pay one’s just debts, you want to get rid of the politically correct mortgages to some other sucker as fast as possible.

Securitization of debt is only legitimate when the people that arranged the loan remain linked to the loan.  Otherwise, securitization is a scam, as the origins of mortgage securitization demonstrate.

Courage

May 2nd, 2009

A kid carrying a gun, and wearing an explosive vest, attempted to enter a mosque. It seems that though the congregation were Muslim, they were the wrong kind of Muslim.
Courage
A guard tackled him. That is courage.

Galt strike or inadequate aggregate demand?

May 1st, 2009

The Randian concept of a Galt Strike is that if the elite slack off, the masses will be impoverished – that countries are rich or poor according to whether the elite is productive, while the masses and resources do not matter much, except in extreme cases such as oil rich sheikdoms.

There has been a large fall in GDP over the past six months:

The Keynesian explanation of this fall is inadequate aggregate demand – the economy could easily produce more, but no one is spending due to depression of animal spirits, in which case a big spending government will make everything rosy.

The Austrian and Chicago explanation is complicated, and perhaps confused.

The Randian explanation is that it is a Galt Strike – the elite are slacking off, and focusing on hiding their wealth and economic activities from the government, rather than creating value, in which case big government spending will merely result in inflation or massive borrowing from abroad.

Core CPI will in time tell us which account is correct. We will know by about November 2010.

  • If  late in 2010 core CPI is substantially higher, nominal GDP substantially higher, but real GDP still woeful, then Randians will have been proven correct.
  • If  late in 2010 core CPI is lower or unchanged, then both sides can argue they were right, and the Austrians will probably have some explanation that I will be disinclined to follow.
  • If  late in 2010 core CPI only rises moderately, but real GDP rises substantially, then Keynesians will have been proven correct.

I am betting on disturbing levels of core inflation with a distinctly unimpressive recovery in real GDP.

Trillion missing, top accountant dead

April 23rd, 2009

David Kellerman, the acting Chief Financial Officer and Senior VP at
Freddie Mac, was found dead early this morning from at his home in Virginia. It is described as an apparent suicide.

The press is rightly comparing this with the very similar “suicide” of Enron’s top accountant.

When large sums of money disappear, the person who knows most about where the money went often, by an interesting coincidence, winds up with his mouth permanently closed.

Freddy Mac and Fannie May have had accounting scandals before, but during the housing boom, all their sins were forgiven, and the offending executives retired with golden parachutes. This time around, the public is in a less forgiving mood.

There is an effort to link this murder with Obama, which is unreasonable because he has nothing he needs to cover up yet, not being in charge when the money vanished. On the other hand, his treasury department is full of friends of Obama who do have something to cover up.

Iran tells it like it is:

April 19th, 2009

In his April 15, 2009 speech, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told America:

We say to you that you yourselves know that you are today in a position of weakness. Your hands are empty, and you can no longer promote your affairs from a position of strength.

… with the grace of God, and thanks to Iran’s national unity, the recommendations of Supreme Leader, and the following of his [path], nearly 7,000 centrifuges are spinning today

We are all terrorists now

April 15th, 2009

The liberty papers found an interesting Obama document.  It seems that it is not those poor misunderstood adherents of the Religion of Peace that are a problem.  It is any American who disagrees with the Obama agenda.  Michael Malkin confirms the document is real, not a parody.

Veterans are also terrorists, no doubt it comes of persecuting those poor adherents of the Religion of Peace.

Dr Lindzen on “corrected” data

April 13th, 2009

Dr. Richard Lindzen on “corrected” climate data.

it has become standard in climate science that data in contradiction to alarmism is inevitably ‘corrected’ to bring it closer to alarming models. None of us would argue that this data is perfect, and the corrections are often plausible. What is implausible is that the ‘corrections’ should always bring the data closer to models.