LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Equal People Are Not Free
“Equal people are not free, the second half of my first principle, really gets down to brass tacks. Show me a people anywhere on the planet who are indeed equal economically, and I’ll show you a very unfree people. Why?
The only way in which you could have even the remotest chance of equalizing income and wealth across society is to put a gun to everyone’s head. You would literally have to employ force to make people equal. You would have to give orders, backed up by the guillotine, the hangman’s noose, the bullet or the electric chair. Orders that would go like this: Don’t excel. Don’t work harder or smarter than the next guy. Don’t save more wisely than anyone else. Don’t be there first with a new product. Don’t provide a good or service that people might want more than anything your competitor is offering.
Believe me, you wouldn’t want a society where these were the orders. Cambodia under the communist Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s came close to it, and the result was that upwards of 2 million out of 8 million people died in less than four years. Except for the elite at the top who wielded power, the people of that sad land who survived that period lived at something not much above the Stone Age.”
Harry Markopolos On The SEC
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Harry Markopolos Daily Show
Full EpisodesPolitical Humor Health Care Reform Subsidising The Baboons Through Bonds
From Sauvik Chakraverti’s Antidote:
“Mint has a little piece that says one-third of all government expenditure is financed by borrowing, and one-fifth of all expenditure goes towards paying interest. They add that out of every 100 rupees spent, 14 rupees goes towards creating assets, while the rest goes towards salaries – that is, towards consumption. Note that “welfare” and poor relief also have nothing to do with production; they are all matters relating to consumption. Also note that, in India, most of the “consumption” is done by the personnel of The State itself – the politicians and the baboons.
Now, capital consumption is the highway to de-civilization. Progress and civilization has always meant increased saving and investment – that is, the accumulation of capital. This capital, when invested in production, raises the wages of labour and results in an abundance of goods and services for all. This is how, throughout history, civilizations have arisen.
What about those who “invest” in government bonds? Their savings do not go into capital creation or production. They merely finance the consumption activities of The State and they are rewarded with interest that comes from us taxpayers. How can this be called “investment”? It is not. It therefore becomes clear that all government borrowing is nothing but capital consumption – the highway to de-civilization.
I am therefore of the opinion that widespread awareness must be created about the pernicious consequences of putting private savings into government bonds. Investors should be made aware of the fact that they are destroying precious capital in a capital-poor country, and that they would be doing their bit for the nation if they made genuine investments either in the stock market, with the banking system or elsewhere within The Market. Further, public opinion must demand that all these perpetual irredeemable loans be repudiated at once. Those who will lose money have only themselves to blame, for they “invested” their money in an insolvent institution. They did not invest in The Market. So theirs were not “capitalist investments” at all. Throughout history, many foolish people (including the Medicis) have lost fortunes by lending to monarchs. Let this important lesson be learnt once again.”
Feds Uses Bribery, Class-Warfare To Catch Tax Cheats
From CNN, via Lew Rockwell, the latest Federal incentives for snitching and snooping on your fellow citizen:
“In 2006, the IRS really started cracking down on big time cheaters and introduced a new whistle-blower program, in which informants are paid a minimum of 15% and a maximum of 30% of the amount owed.
But there’s a catch: In order to collect a reward, the taxes, penalties and interest in dispute must add up to at least $2 million. And if the suspected tax evader is an individual, his or her annual gross income must exceed $200,000.
So far, the new incentives have been effective. The IRS has received tips from about 476 informants identifying 1,246 taxpayers in fiscal year 2008, the first full year the program was implemented………
Who snitches?: In this program, the most common informants tend to be dissatisfied middle-ranking employees in big companies, said Tim Gagnon, an academic specialist of accounting at Northeastern University……..
Stephen Whitlock, director of the IRS Whistleblower Office, said that informants have had some connection to the taxpayer but they are not always close acquaintances. They have typically been employees, investors or business associates.
He also said many claims are for substantially more than the $2 million threshold and involve businesses or very wealthy individuals.”
My Comment:
In other words, what you have is the IRS incentivizing class-warfare. By dangling a chunk of cash in front of their noses, the government encourages employees to act against their own economic interest on the basis of a non-existent public good.
Non-existent?
Well, yes. Since the government is using its tax revenues mostly to pay off its own friends, to fatten the banks and financiers, loot the tax-payer, murder foreign nationals, and generally mismanage the country, the public interest (in so far as we can ascertain one) may well be better served by not paying taxes.
Tax cheats, while clearly not heroes from a moral standpoint, are also not the villains they’re often made out to be.
The villains are those who constantly demand higher and higher taxes and destroy the productive capacity of this country in pursuit of hubristic and vain schemes that have done nothing but turned a nation built on free enterprise into one enslaved by political patronage…
Tax snitches, as I said, don’t even serve their own economic self-interest. Sure, they get their one-off reward for snitching. But they’ve effectively ended any chance of their being hired by anyone…unless they manage to evade detection.
Any taxes an employer pays to the government must inevitably be passed on to employees and customers. That’s as ineluctable an economic law as any.
Ergo, pay taxes and the Feds get the money….don’t pay and the economy, the customer, or employees eventually get it.
An employee who plumps for snitching is obviously not only treacherous and disloyal as a human being, he’s also an economic fat-head.
Mexican President Nominated For Citi Director
Robert Wenzel at Economic Policy Journal:
“Citi’s Board of Directors has nominated Ernesto Zedillo as a new non-management director candidate to stand for election at Citi’s annual shareholder meeting on April 20, 2010. He was the President of Mexico from 1994 to 2000 and is now Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and Professor in the Field of International Economics and Politics at Yale University.
Zedillo (58) worked at Mexico’s Central Bank (Banco de Mexico), serving in various positions, including those of deputy Head of Economic Research and deputy Director. Zedillo is on the boards of Alcoa Inc. and Procter & Gamble Company.
Obviously, despite the fact that it almost blew itself up because of schemes far from traditional banking, Citi continues to take the New World Order approach to banking.
There is nothing wrong with Citi attempting to penetrate into Latin America for business but, putting a former Mexican president on the board smacks of penetration via back door crony government deals versus attempting to serve the serve the consumer in the Latin American countries.
Sure, you have to deal with the crooked governments in these countries, but that’s what you have connected law firms for. They get things done in a very low key efficient manner. Putting Zedillo on the board sends a different signal, that Citi will not only deal with Latino politicians, but that it is part of the crooked club.”
Mark Twain: the War Prayer
Mark Twain’s satirical “War Prayer”:
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
Manmohan Singh Needs to Emphasize Discipline, Not Blame Democracy
C. Gopinath, writing in The Hindu, blows away the notion that democracy can be blamed for slow decision-making and bureaucratic delays in India:
“It is easier for Dr Manmohan Singh’s to admit that we have bottlenecks in areas of roads, power and ports. Everybody knows that. It is also easy to blame democracy, for that is something we are not going to give up. The unintended message, unfortunately, is that we have to put up with these inefficiencies.
Other observers have chimed in, talking about a democracy tax or a discount due to democracy. The real problem is that we lack the work ethic that should drive us to excellence. Instead, the dominant ethic seems to be that the individual should do whatever it takes to get ahead, and forget about the rest of society. Look at the way we treat garbage (keep the house clean and dump the trash outside), drive on the road violating rules just so we are ahead, and so on.
Statesmen should not be finding excuses for lapses but challenging the people to new heights. The former President, Mr Abdul Kalam, continues to do a great job inspiring people with his vision for a prosperous future.
If Dr Manmohan Singh is looking for a theme on which to build his legacy, he should pick discipline. Nobody seems to be paying attention to it.”
Tom Woods On Pro-War “Progressives”
The always thoughtful Tom Woods unmasks so-called “progressives”:
“Just weeks ago, Think Progress, after a one-sentence summary of my career that (as usual) left out the past 16 years, actually quoted Max Boot against me, as if Boot’s opposition to my work was sufficient to bury me forever. So instead of an antiwar libertarian, these progressives prefer neocon Max Boot, who according to Juan Cole “never saw a war he didn’t love, never saw a conquest he didn’t find exhilarating, never saw an occupied land he didn’t think could be handled.” They approvingly quoted Boot’s dumb-guy propaganda line that “Woods’ sympathy extends not only to slave-owning rebels but also to German militarists” (because, like 99 percent of people who have studied the matter, I think Woodrow Wilson’s conduct during the early years of World War I was based on a double standard between Britain and Germany). This is the same sense in which Ron Paul “sympathizes” with al-Qaeda because he doesn’t buy U.S. war propaganda. (I did reply to Boot, by the way.)
And these are the progressives”
More at Lew Rockwell...
Business Managers Need To Change Their Framework
The Economic Times notes the poverty of management frameworks rooted in the demands of mass manufacture (Fordism and Taylorism):
“Ramnath Narayanswamy, professor of economics and social science at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore, who teaches a course on spirituality at the workplace, explains: “Management as a discipline quite literally originated in North America against the historical backdrop of Fordism and Taylorism. While its reach is indeed universal, its origins are very North American and in some respects, the discipline is still a prisoner of its historical orientation.
The excessive emphasis on analytical intelligence as opposed to emotional and spiritual intelligence is a case in point. The overwhelming predominance of “reason” and “science” when in fact it’s our daily experience that all life is based on faith and sacrifice, is another. Or the importance accorded to tools and techniques in MBA education at the expense of neglecting character, values and attitude might be yet another.”
There is a realisation that management theory has to be home grown and not just transplanted from the West. Satish Pradhan, executive VP-group HR, Tata Sons, says, “Western thinking has been dedicated to frameworks and metaphors, and the poverty of these frameworks is revealing itself — it’s not intellectually robust.”
In contrast, says Pradhan, thinking in this part of the world isn’t linear, so one cannot simply take ideas and replicate them. By the same token, this makes it difficult for Eastern concepts to be understood or grasped fully by Westerners. “It’s much like how the Americans wondered, ‘The Japanese are hiding something’ when they visited factory shopfloors of Japanese companies to learn the secrets of their success in managing costs and quality in the early ‘80s.”
Ramzy Baroud On the Media Protection of Israel
“As someone who has been grilled and challenged in the media for making such outrageous statements as “Israel must learn to respect international human rights,” I cannot take seriously the media’s claims to “objectivity”. If this were the norm, no Israeli hasbara campaign would have even dented public perceptions of the criminal war. No unfeeling Israeli Army spokesperson could possibly explain the logic of the wanton destruction of Gaza, as hungry civilians were chased in an open-air prison with nowhere to escape and no one to come to their rescue.
Israeli officials continue to congratulate themselves on a job well done, and must be preparing yet another marvelous hasbara campaign to justify the killings that are yet to follow. However, there are some things that are becoming increasingly obvious, at least to the rest of us. First, the secret of Israeli “success”, if any, was not its own doing, but rather stemmed from the media’s decision, made years ago, to protect Israel’s image. Second, despite the fanfare and self-congratulating commentary, Israel has now largely lost the media war, and the tide since the Gaza war has been turning, thanks to the underfunded, but solid and increasingly determined efforts of independent media groups, intellectuals, citizen journalists, civil society activists, artists, poets, bloggers, ordinary people and those in the media who possess the courage to challenge Israeli hasbara and its devotees.”
Ramzy Baroud in Counterpunch
Lost In the Andes..
Well, no. I’m not really lost. But I’m in the Andes alright. And my computer cable is lost, although lost isn’t the right word. Swiped is. As in, swiped by some blighter who grabbed it out from me while I was, of all things, trying to check my stuff into the left luggage. May it blow up his laptop and may his descendants be Internet addicts who run up his DSL bill and send him to the poor house…
So that is why I’ve been remiss in my blogging. And will continue to be a while, until this is all sorted out.
Which may not be for a bit, because right now the main puzzle I am trying to work out is how to bus it from the Andes into Colombia in the safest and cheapest way possible. I want to avoid visas, but it seems I cannot. Apparently, from Salta, which is where I am now, you have to take a bus that either gets you to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, or across the Bolivian border. One route I am looking at is Salta to Arica and from Arica to Lima.
Does this work out fiendishly cheaper than a bargain flight from Buenos Aires? Probably not. But then the Argentines have gone and introduced a visa charge of some kind, effective from January. Something like a hundred dollars or so. It’s a reciprocity fee (that means it’s tit for our government’s tat - and who can blame them) but it means I’m trying to avoid airports, which is where they levy such things.
So far the past several days, it’s been buses and terminals…33 hours of them, and day long layovers. And on top of that I’ve been a little ill…and developed some kind of rash or allergy that makes my scalp crawl literally. I’ll never use the phrase casually again. And no, it was not cooties or dandruff, it was my new Argentine shampoo that did it…I have a sensitive skin and new anything on it is always a bit of a risk.
Which is all much more than you should know.
But on the up side the scenery here is spectacular.
I fed the ducks on the pond on San Martin Avenue right outside the bus terminal, had myself three empanadas with goat cheese - which felt like manna from heaven after two and half days without food..
The hills are verdant and rise high. And in the summers, the temperatures reach up to 50 degrees celsius, I’m told.
Which is what the temperatures are in my home town in India. There the hills are much lower and have been denuded over centuries. And of course, the town is overpopulated, noisy and polluted. But in a strange way, in its bare bones, it has some similarities…
The food in India is, of course, way, way better.
After 7 months of the rather stodgy South American diet, I am positively ravenous for rasam, curry, pappadams, pilafs…
I shouldn’t have started…..
Former Spy Bosses, Goldman Exec Behind Full-Body Scanner
I blogged earlier about the full-body scanner.
It turns out that one of the scanner’s strongest advocate, Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security Czar, stands to gain by the sale of the scanner, via his security consulting outfit, Chertoff Group.
Its 8 members include 3 former senior executives from Homeland Security, 2 from the CIA, 3 from the NSA, 1 from FEMA, and 1 from Goldman Sachs. (more…)
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Chair Berates Lloyd Blankfein
“It sounds like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy” on the driver,”
– Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Chairman Phil Angelides (D) to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Well, well, well,
Doesn’t sound too different from what we said in September 2008, does it? (more…)
Gerald Celente Predicts Wars and Rumors of Wars in 2010
Gerald Celente of Trends Research Institute is out with his 2010 predictions. And most of them are not for the faint of heart:
- The Crash of 2010, as the effects of the stimulus wear off
- Another 9-11, as more blow back for US foreign policy hits the homeland
- Israel attacks Iran, perhaps sparking WW III
- Crackdown on illegal immigrants
- Bigger is no longer better - a new move to elegance and quality
- Thin America, as people eat less and become fitter
America. the constitutional republic, as we noted at the time, came to its official end on September 2008.
More at Lew Rockwell.
Too Big To Fail And Too Big-Headed To Admit Failing
In the Times of India, Abheek Barman reviews Andrew Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail,” a blow-by-blow account of the bail-out and makes a couple of insightful observations:
“It’s a tribute to his writing that despite his ball-by-ball narrative Sorkin manages to hold your attention for nearly 550 pages. His character sketches are lean and unjudgemental. Yet, though he doesn’t pass judgement, by the end most of the characters - with the possible exception of Buffet and some of the regulators - come across as distinctly unsavoury.”
Establishment Media Hops On Survivalist Bandwagon
Newsweek, getting on the survivalist bandwagon…months late…(see my piece “Getting Off the Grid“).
You read it first here or on some other libertarian site…then it percolates upward to the “elites,” carefully sanitized of its origins. An anthropology of the taboos and totems of the journalistic tribe is in order..
“In the end, what it all boils down to, at least for the preppers, is self-reliance—a concept as old as the human race itself. As survival blogger Joe Solomon pointed out in a recent column, during the Victory Gardens of WWII, Americans managed to grow 40 percent of all the vegetables they needed to survive. “My mother’s parents had a 10-acre garden, and my grandfather worked at the dairy farm next door,” says Hill, the former jet mechanic. “They worked by raising their own food, they had their own chickens, they canned vegetables, and my grandfather fed a family of 12 like that.” But in the modern world, he says, many of those skills are easily forgotten. Today, our food comes from dozens of different sources. Most of us aren’t quite sure how electricity gets from the wires to our stoves. We use debit cards to buy a can of tuna and we wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to filter contaminated water. We are residents of the new millennium; we simply haven’t needed to prepare.
So for the moment, people like Bedford are reteaching themselves lost skills—and in some cases, learning new ones. Bedford has read up on harvesting an urban garden, and is learning to use a solar oven to bake bread. She is ready with a pointed shot in the event she ever needs to hunt for her own food. And until then, she’s got 61 cans of chili, 20 cans of Spam, 24 jars of peanut butter, and much more stocked in her pantry; she estimates she’s spent about $4,000 on food supplies, an amount that should keep her family going for at least three months. Now, even if something simple goes wrong, like a paycheck doesn’t go through, “we don’t need to worry,” she says.”
Gold Bears On The Prowl
Former Chairman of President Reagan´s Economic Council:, Martin Feldstein via 321gold.
“In short, there are better ways than gold to hedge inflation risk and exchange-rate risk. TIPS, or their equivalent from other governments, provide safe inflation hedges, and explicit currency futures can offset exchange-rate risks.
Nevertheless, although gold is not an appropriate hedge against inflation risk or exchange-rate risk, it may be a very good investment. After all, the dollar value of gold has nearly tripled since 2005. And gold is a liquid asset that provides diversification in a portfolio of stocks, bonds and real estate.
But gold is also a high-risk and highly volatile investment. Unlike common stock, bonds, and real estate, the value of gold does not reflect underlying earnings. Gold is a purely speculative investment. Over the next few years, it may fall to $500 an ounce or rise to $2,000 an ounce. There is no way to know which it will be. Caveat emptor. “
My Comment:
My interpretation of that is that there´s going to be a concerted effort to push the gold prices lower, which coincides with a technical need to correct…
A Real Investigative Journalist: Gary Webb
This is a what a really great reporter looks like - Gary Webb, author of “Dark Alliance,” the book that blew open the CIA-crack cocaine connection. (Webb eventually committed “suicide” after the media trashed his career, although he had once been the recipient of a Pulitzer).
Here is Webb explaining media inertia and resentment in a 1997 interview:
“Webb: It’s been incredible, and it’s been amazing, and it’s been disgusting at times.
You’re referring to the media?
Well, first of all, I think the public’s response was fairly amazing, just the public outcry. I mean, it’s not like something you write about and [expect] people start marching in the street. That was a fairly amazing reaction. And I think some of the media follow-up’s been fairly disgusting.
Why do you think the media reacted the way they did?
Well, I think there’s a couple of reasons. One is that the big papers in this country have sort of an institutional history of sitting on this story. You go back and you look at what was written back in the ’80s by the three big papers in this country about this Contra-cocaine topic, and most of it was just a pack of lies. And they have continued that sort of “There’s nothing here” attitude up until now. So I think that one of the reasons is that they had an institutional history of covering this story up, and this [series] sort of exposed that for what it was. I think the other part of the problem is that you have most of the people that wrote these stories for most of the papers are establishment organs, they are mouthpieces a lot of the time for the government. And I think that’s what they’re being used for in this case, is the government’s side of the story.”
Rogue American Agent Key Suspect In Mumbai Bombing
We always suspected that there was something odd about the Mumbai bombings. Something “stagey.” And we have been biting our tongue wondering when some bright-eyed reporter was going to turn over a few stones:
“A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe.
David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitring targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.
He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.
Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr Headley, suspect that he remained on the payroll of the US security services — possibly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — but switched his allegiance to LeT.“
My Comment
Rogue he might be, but it´s odd that, once again, when you dig deep enough….you find a CIA link.
How big is that outfit anyway?
At least, the FBI is on the case.
Second Journalistic Dude Who Can Read Correctly
I got my Christmas present early this year, from Graham Rankin, who is now enshrined in my writerly heart:
“For the role of a modern-day Luther and his 95 Theses, we could suggest to the historians Matt Taibbi and his article on Wall Street bankers Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone magazine, ‘Inside The Great American Bubble Machine,’ which caused such a huge fuss in July, as long as we remember a lot of similar points had already been made in 2006 by Lila Rajiva in a piece that should have won an award for prescience, and hopefully one day still might. No doubt the historians will debate that role for some time to come.”
Thanks Graham, and if you´ll check on my blog for my articles and books, you will find the rest of Taibbi´s thesis there too. Plus some of my language and one-liners, I do believe. You get dinner on me some day, buddy.
The other dude who can both read and tell the truth is Robert Wenzel, who´s also cited me on that.
There is hope.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays…
I am off for Christmas…which I hope to spend on the delta of the Parana…an especially pretty spot this time of year..
Best wishes to all.
Tepper’s 7 Billion Gain: Luck Or Goldman?
The Wall Street Journalreports:
“Mr. Tepper’s hedge-fund firm has racked up about $7 billion of profit so far this year—with Mr. Tepper on track to earn more than $2.5 billion for himself, according to people familiar with the matter. That is among the largest one-year takes in recent years.
Behind the wins: a bet worth billions of dollars that America would avoid a repeat of the Great Depression.
Through February and March, Mr. Tepper scooped up beaten-down bank shares as many investors were running for the exits. Day after day, Mr. Tepper bought Bank of America Corp. shares, then trading below $3, and Citigroup Inc. preferred shares, when that stock was under $1. One of his investors insisted more carnage loomed. Friends who shared his bullish beliefs were wary of aping his moves amid speculation that the government was about to nationalize the big banks.
“I felt like I was alone,” Mr. Tepper recalls. On some days, he says, “no one was even bidding.”
The bets paid off. A resurgent market has helped Mr. Tepper’s firm, Appaloosa Management, gain about 120% after the firm’s fees, through early December. Thanks to those gains, Mr. Tepper, who specializes in the stocks and bonds of troubled companies, manages about $12 billion, a sum that makes Appaloosa one of the largest hedge funds in the world.”
My Comment:
I’m all for going against the grain and making out like a bandit. But then you look closer, and it turns out that Tepper once worked at …surprise..Goldman’s junk bond trading department in the 1980s…
turns out that all he did was be on the right side of figuring out whether the government would back the banks whose stocks he’d bought at the bottom in February and March..which they did.Viva casino capitalism. Especially, when you’ve worked at the casino..
Krugman Watch: Some Effigies Are More Equal Than Other Effigies
Matt Welch at Reason:
“Last week, you’ll recall, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman began his column by saying: “A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy,” which was in seeming contradiction to his alarmed observation four months prior that “congressmen hanged in effigy” by Tea Partiers represented “something new and ugly” in American politics. Well, yesterday, the Krugger issued one of the better non-apology apologies you’ll read this week:
(Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.)”
Military Detention Ruling Legalizes Torture And Non-Person Status
From Chris Floyd
“While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.
It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.
Here’s how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.”
Honest Environmentalist Contradicts Climatistas
“There is a lot of evidence that the activity often called science, and the scientists who practice this activity (as opposed to those few who have a monk-like dedication to the scientific method), are not trustworthy. Peer review is a bankrupt process, for example. It is lousy at detecting fraud but very good at suppressing innovative thought. Financial conflicts of interest are frequent and rarely disclosed. Scientists often fall into the trap of focusing on their next grant rather than what important questions need to be asked (including questioning their own assumptions and biases). The prejudices of the system are amplified in this way. Those who conform are rewarded with grants which inform the granters that this is a subject of great interest.
“The proof of this is that there have been many scientific errors that have survived for decades – Piltdown Man, Radical Mastectomy, (opposition to) continental drift, irradiation of the thymus, the germ theories of scurvy, pellagra and SMON. We, like all generations before us, falsely believe that all false beliefs lie in the past.
“The ClimateGate scandal illustrated this problem well. Without access to data scientists cannot fully evaluate the work of others. Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, at the center of this scandal, said, Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” That is exactly why the data should be released. If it can pass scrutiny from a skeptical, critical, cynical scientist then our confidence in the data and interpretations drawn from it will be much higher. It is a waste of time to give data to a scientist whose intention is to prove that previous interpretations are correct.”
Social Media Machinations Of the Financial Press
A piece of Orwellian obfuscation by one Tom Sykes at Daily Kos *(see note at the bottom of this post) goes into the file, rip-roaring propaganda:
“I want to be clear on something up front. I think hedge-funds are a menace and should be outlawed. I think Goldman Sachs is a criminal conspiracy and its whole leadership should be indicted.
There are plenty of commentators, like Paul Krugman in the New York Times today and Matt Taibbi in his article in Rolling Stone, that have done great reporting on Goldman and on hedge funds.
But what we’re seeing is how a really odious character named Patrick Byrne is trying to hijack this issue…”
My Comment:
Byrne hijacked Taibbi? The liberals busted Goldman Sachs and naked short-selling and the hedge funds?
Aren’t Goldman Sachs and the hedge-funds the money men who funded the whole left-establishment..and wasn’t it people on the right libertarian side who busted them, and in fact called the whole financial crisis?
The libs were on the case only in 2008 when everyone was on the case and you’d have to have been blind not to notice.
This kind of revisionism makes me question the impetus behind the Rip Van Winkle awakening of the MSM on the financial crisis.
Either it shows that the MSM can’t see what’s going on in front of its collective nose, which argues that its working hypotheses are wrong (the kinder interpretation), or it shows rank dishonesty (the truer interpretation, likely).
I’d go with the first interpretation, only the hatchet job the press keeps doing on anyone from the other side of the political spectrum suggests that the second interpretation is the right one.
As I’ve repeated ad nauseum, Taibbi seems to have lifted my Goldman Sachs piece of 2006 (Money Week) as well as a bunch of other articles written in 2007-2008 (see ABOUT) . You can read it on the net and then go back and see what Taibbi wrote, only about three years after I did. (He probably pinched stuff from at least one other person as well). You will also see that I wrote more than half-a-dozen articles on Goldman after that in 2006 and 2007 (check this site). In 2008, everyone began writing about Goldman. I figure someone at Rolling Stone got worried that the population was beginning to wake up to which side really had the goods, and decided to co-opt the issue before their intellectual ineptness was too evident.
Otherwise, I’m hard pressed to explain why they don’t think they need to source and attribute correctly. They can’t all be such intellectual charlatans? Right?
As for naked short selling, Byrne has been waging that campaign since 2005.…and some others on the right, even before him. Even people who don’t think there’s an NSS hedge-fund-media conspiracy involved have long ago conceded that NSS is a problem (see this Motley Fool piece from 2005), and that it’s difficult to figure out what’s really going on, because the DTC/SEC, for example, won’t/can’t release the figures needed to assess the situation.
(Now, why would anyone think conspiracy when there’s stone-walling going on…)
Matt Taibbi basically borrowed Byrne’s argument. And having taken the argument, the establishment is now trying to discredit the person who made it first (see Ritholtz here and here, even before the Facebook brouhaha).
It’s not irrelevant that in coming to his conclusions, Ritholtz cites only the very same journalists whose credibility is shot by the evidence of their collusion with hedge-funds. That is certainly a bizarre way to report on a topic.
Mind you, this should not be taken to be an endorsement on my part of Byrne’s business practices or accounting, about which I know only what I have read. And that of course has mostly been written by his critics and critics of the NSS thesis, like Dow Jones reporter, Carol Remond.
But Remond, despite her reputation as a respected reporter on penny-stock scams, is seriously compromised in her reporting on this issue because of alleged collusion with hedge funds.
I say alleged, to be on the safe side, but to my eyes the evidence is convincing.
On the other hand, Overstock has repeated accounting problems that its foes argue are the real reason for its NSS campaign.
How serious these problems are is hard to say.
Of the two accountants who routinely denounce Byrne’s business practices in multiple postings that take up a remarkably (and suggestively) disproportionate space on their blogs, one, Sam Antar, has been convicted of one of the most extensive cases of embezzlement in recent history. Antar also claims the mantle of reformed felon without any evidence that restitution of the embezzled funds took place. He escaped prosecution only by turning in his own family. This is not a confidence-builder. Actually, there’s some evidence of further wrong-doing involving one Barry Minkow that’s also posted on the Deep Capture blog. Antar and Mankiw are practicing greenmail, according to this piece.
(Its author uses the term loosely. Greenmail, in recent US financial history, is what Michael Milken is infamous for - a type of corporate raid. And Milken is one of the central villains in the Deep Capture story of the corruption of Wall Street. Since I researched this period for a book I was planning to write on Goldman Sachs, I’m conversant enough with the subject to say with some confidence that Byrne is on the right track on this).
The other accountant who criticizes Byrne, Tracy Coenan, seems to be another ally of Antar and equally over- concerned with the accounting problems of Overstock, to the neglect of other companies.
Yet these are the only two accounting experts I see cited by Weiss.
Could there be other things wrong with Overstock?
Perhaps.
I have no way of knowing. But what I do know doesn’t so far make me think the problems are related in any way to the thesis of Deep Capture. The accounting errors don’t seem especially egregious, compared to the rest of what is going on in the market that the reform movement that Byrne spearheads is trying to tackle.
So is Deep Capture’s work discredited because of Byrne’s alleged and real problems?
No.
Overstock could very well be mismanaged and Byrne could be guilty of accounting shenanigans. That has nothing whatsoever to do with the extensive, indeed, mind-boggling, ties between supposedly neutral financial reporters and the hedge-funds that Deep Capture report on. The evidence the site has collected is shocking and undercuts any defense of the neutrality of the reporters in question (Bethany McLean, Remond, Weiss, Herb Greenberg, Roddy Boyd, etc).
To return to the media manipulation story.
After Taibbi put the two stories on Rolling Stone, Goldman and Penson came out and shot them down.
Taibbi, strangely, for a supposed target of Goldman and for all his righteous indignation over NSS, vanishes on the latter subject (NSS) and retracts parts of the former.
So what happens?
The entire Goldman argument gets reduced to “Goldman corrupted the regulators,” which works very well if you want more government and more regulators (and we are not fundamentalists on either subject). The good part of that from the point of view of the MSM is that that lets them displace the outrage on one or two figures (Rubin, for example), while using GS as a whipping-boy to funnel off popular rage from any effective overhaul/criminal prosecution, as well as to deflect it from the evidence of conspiratorial criminal activity.
(Yes, there are conspiracies, Virginia, and often the ones protesting loudly that they don’t exist are part of them…unwittingly or not).
Take this piece at Business Insider by Ritholtz, which sets up the boundaries of establishment discourse, with Taibbi and Gasparino at either end. What it does is to come down roughly “midway” between the two in a way that conveniently does nothing to change the centrist liberal establishment discourse.
(At least, that’s my take).
Now, Taibbi comes from a well-established media background, with a father who was an NBC TV man.
It’s hard to believe he doesn’t know the ethics and etiquette of sourcing. In fact, it’s downright impossible.
We’d have to conclude that
1. He was tasked with co-opting the stories for political or national security reasons.
2. Or lacks journalistic integrity, a deficiency fairly rampant these days….
3. Or wants to protect the left-liberal establishment on the issue….
4. Or some combination of the above.
Note:
*Tom Sykes is apparently a sock-puppet created by Gary Weiss, the former Forbes and Business Week reporter, at least, according to the considerable evidence amassed at Deep Capture.
Note: I have sent several mob/corruption-related articles to the Deep Capture team and consider myself a supporter of their research, which I’ve tried to link and forward to others, as well as to more generally publicize. I don’t think that prevents me from assessing the merits of their claims objectively. I don’t, for example, condone any social engineering attacks on social media sites like facebook, no matter what the legal status of such attacks is. Frankly, the work Deep Capture is doing on market/media corruption is too important for its members to get into such unworthy activities. Nor do I think bringing in personalities, family members, or even private networks of journalists is particularly important or even necessary. The point is not whether a journalist talks to or is friendly with another journalist….or even hedge-fund. The point is whether their work is significantly biased by the friendship and whether they disclose the friendship and attempt to correct for it. I appreciate a number of left and liberal writers, even when I disagree with them, because I find them intellectually honest and reasonably objective (complete objectivity being impossible as well as unnecessary). That’s not a very high standard to demand now, is it?
A Million Hits On Gaza
From Ramzy Baroud:
Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press; Palgrave Mcmillan, 2010). The book is available at Pluto Press (UK) and Amazon
A Promotional Film about Gaza Launches New Book’s Worldwide Awareness Campaign
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY
SEATTLE/TORONTO/LONDON - A promotional short film for a new book on Gaza is being released worldwide today, days before the official book launch in the U.K., to commemorate the first anniversary of the Gaza massacre - Israel’s so-called Operation Cast Lead, which killed and wounded thousands in Gaza a year ago.
Told from the perspectives of the refugees, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story is heralded as an incomparable chronicle of the history of the Gaza Strip, and has been endorsed by leading intellectuals and academics.
The book’s author, Ramzy Baroud, was born and raised in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He was witness to much of Gaza’s tumultuous history. “Gaza’s story is the most fascinating story there is, yet somehow it’s reduced to a few simple, redundant, and misleading clichés that barely grab attention anymore,” Baroud said. “I am determined to challenge and change that. Thanks to courageous publishers like Pluto Press, and the dedicated efforts of many talented individuals out there, we shall together change the ways the Gaza story is told.”
The short film, carrying the name of the book, is being released on YouTube, in both English and Arabic versions. The film will also be broadcast on a number of TV stations around the world. The filmmakers and book author are calling on readers and activists around the world to ensure the widest possible dissemination of Gaza’s untold story, by reading and helping to promote the book, and by encouraging others to watch the film at YouTube, through sharing the film with friends, family, and colleagues – with an aim to reach a million views at YouTube.
The “A Million Hits on Gaza” film-sharing movement at YouTube is just the beginning of a worldwide campaign to raise awareness of the book, and of Gaza’s untold stories and history, a campaign that will also include readings, book tours, the screen adaptation of the book into a feature film, and various educational, grassroots, community, and international film festival screenings of the completed feature film.
The promotional short film was created in a matter of days, with zero budget, by a team of artists in Canada and the U.K. that included filmmakers Paul Lee and Cathy Gulkin, editor and screenwriter George Kaltsounakis, composer and jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, and with the collaboration of writer and journalist Hani Yared (who helped with the translation and the preparation of the Arabic version of the film).
The book is now available through the Pluto Press website (www.plutobooks.com), and also through Amazon.com. Beginning March 2010, the book will be distributed in the United States by Palgrave Macmillan, which is promoting the book as a ‘trade title.”
To view the film in English, click here:
To view the film in Arabic, click here:
To purchase the book from Pluto Press, visit: www.plutobooks.com
Or click here:
http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745328812&
To purchase the book at Amazon, visit: www.amazon.com
Or click here:
http://www.amazon.com/My-Father-Was-Freedom-Fighter/dp/0745328814/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260802483&sr=8-1
For more information, reviews, book tours, visit www.ramzybaroud.net, or e-mail: info@ramzybaroud.net
Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press; Palgrave Mcmillan, 2010). The book is available at Pluto Press (UK) and Amazon.It Never Ends
This page shows up with an old error reinstated.
http://www.investmentu.com/IUEL/2007/20070827.html
“As Bill writes, “Thus does the neocortex sputter in fits and starts from dubious assumptions to preposterous conclusions with nary a whisper of doubt in between.”
Trust me, if I could write that well, I would.”
Of course, it wasn’t Bill who wrote those lines…. And in 2007-08, twice, this “error” (the article also drops my name entirely off the book) was corrected..only to reappear, conveniently, despite, having a signed agreement beyond the contract. (Of course, I have no idea, really, who’s responsible for these “mistakes”…the difficulty with large companies).
(No Subject)?From: Sent: Wed 1/16/08 5:22 PM To: Lila Rajiva (E-mail) (lrajiva@hotmail.com) —–Original Message—–
From: DELETED
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2008 10:12 AM
To: DELETED
Subject: RE: LILAThe Mobs, Messiahs and Markets review has been updated on the site. Should be good to go…
Have a great day,(I deleted the names and anything but the relevant portion of the mail, to be safe)…
Wow.
That difficult to get things straight?
Especially when the original piece is on the web, Satan and Sex Manias, published under my own name (a fortunate precaution).
This has been the case not just with these lines but with dozens of passages and research. I ask for a change. It’s made. Two weeks later it’s undone. I write again. I’m met with - Oh it was changed. When I look, something else has been tweaked.A year later it goes back to what it was. Then copyright material is used elsewhere. Who knows. In two years time, the entire book may have someone else’s name on it, for all I know.
Of course, I have the screen shots and the emails….
And of course, it sometimes leads to hilarious results: http://www.businessinsider.com/doomsayers-2010-2009-12
Weisenthal’s list of leading doomsdayers has my coauthor on it, but with only one book to his credit…
(at least, the last I looked…possibly, as soon as I write this, it will be air-brushed another way)
Manipulating records and manipulating the markets..they go hand in hand.. as part of the entitlement mentality of the financial industry….and its media shills.
Harvard Paper Suggests SEC Favors Big Firms
Now I’m waiting for the Harvard Law paper that says that if you jump off a cliff, you tend to fall downward not up…
August 11, 2009
Harvard Law and Economics Discussion Paper No. 27
Abstract:
Recent financial collapses have focused policymakers’ attention on the financial industry. To date, empirical studies have concentrated on corporate issuer activity, such as securities offerings and class actions. This paper makes a first step in studying SEC enforcement against investment banks and brokerage houses. This study suggests that the SEC favors defendants associated with big firms compared to defendants associated with smaller firms in three ways. First, SEC actions against big firms are more likely to involve exclusively corporate liability, with no individuals subject to any regulatory action. Second, the SEC is more likely to choose administrative rather than court proceedings for big-firm defendants, controlling for types of violation and levels of harm to investors. Third, within administrative proceedings, big-firm employees are likely to receive lower sanctions, notably temporary or permanent bars from the industry. To explain this gap, the paper first investigates whether big-firm violations are qualitatively different from small firms’ violations, but finds no support for this. This paper next explores two hypotheses that could explain a systematic bias in enforcement patterns: that constraints in bureaucratic resources weaken the SEC’s negotiating position towards big firms, and that SEC officials favor prospective employers.”Peterson Gives Away A Billion
Having cast aspersions on Pete Peterson’s Blackstone Group in the pages of this blog, I am obliged to point out this article on his charitable giving. It implies that most of the money earned from Blackstone will be given to the Peterson Foundation, which I’ve blogged about before.
“Ultimately, I decided to commit $1 billion to the Peter G. Peterson foundation—the vast majority of my net proceeds from Blackstone. Why so much? Kurt Vonnegut once told a story about seeing Joseph Heller at a wealthy hedge-fund manager’s party at a beach house in the Hamptons. Casting his eye around the luxurious setting, Vonnegut said, “Joe, doesn’t it bother you that this guy makes more in a day than you ever made from Catch-22?” “No, not really,” Heller said. “I have something that he doesn’t have: I know the meaning of enough.” I have far more than enough.”
Read more at “Why I’m Giving Away More than One Billion Dollars,” Pete Peterson, Newsweek, May 30, 2009
When Did Roubini Call The Collapse
I saw this on Business Insider:
“Nouriel was predicting collapse from as early as 2002, if not before, and his focus was on the current account and the dollar more than the banks. I first raised the spectre of a massive liquidity crisis for highly leveraged U.S. financial institutions in 2006, so I think my timing and focus were a little better. But I was wrong in one respect: I thought a geopolitical event would be the trigger for a massive repricing of risk. Wrong. It happened all by itself, caused by endogenous forces within the financial system.”
So now Roubini is supposed to have called the collapse in 2002?
Maybe. But when I looked through his archives I could only find speeches to that effect in the summer of 2006. That’s all I’ve heard Roubini claim too.
But now here is Niall Ferguson (above) claiming Roubini called it in 2002.
Time for some more research…
We want to give the man his due. Just because he seems to be draped on the arms of beautiful women at parties nearly everywhere we see his mug, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t right on…er…top..of things..
Update: Megan McArdle says Roubini got the magnitude of the crisis right but not the causes.
(Lila: But he got that right only well into 2007, which I don’t consider prediction so much as description, at that point).McArdle points out, however, that Roubini was mostly focusing on the current account deficit and the dollar in 2004…neither of which was central to the crisis.
But then she herself goes onto suggest that it was the mispricing of risk through incorrect statistical modeling, as described by Mandelbrot and Taleb (of Black Swan fame)k, that underlay the crisis. But this too is incorrect. Indeed Taleb himself has denied it and said he was misquoted.
Frankly, even though I say it myself, Mobs beats them all in prescience and apt timing in describing why the system toppled over.
In a word - it got hollowed out. I think that was a theme already described in Empire of Debt (Bonner & Wiggin) in 2005 and Financial Reckoning Day (Wiggin & Bonner) in 2002.
All three were read widely by a large swath of the business community and press and plagiarized.
Speculation Tax and In-House Informants In The Works
“We can also be a bit clever about cracking down on evaders. Suppose that we gave a reward of 10 percent of the tax collected to workers who turn in their bosses. There are few Wall Street billionaires that physically do the trading themselves. They have assistants for this task. And many of these assistants would be happy to make themselves rich by turning in their bosses.
In reality, the idea that a tax on speculation is unenforceable is laughable on its face. Compare the difficulties of enforcing a speculation tax with enforcing copyrights. In the case of a speculation tax, the issue is a relatively small number of very large transactions. No one cares if trades involving a few thousand dollars go untaxed. The real issue is a relatively small number of trades involving millions, or even billions, of dollars.
By contrast, copyright enforcement is all about billions of small transactions involving movies with a copyright-protected price of $15 or $20 or songs with a copyright-protected price of less than a dollar. The problem of enforcing copyrights is several orders of magnitudes greater than the problem of enforcing a financial transaction tax. Yet, none of those insisting on the impossibility of enforcing financial transactions taxes have said that copyrights are unenforceable. The issue is clearly what they want to enforce, not a question of what is enforceable.
The country does need to let itself be ripped off by the Wall Street crew indefinitely. We can make them pay a price for the damage they have caused. We just have to stop listening to the Wall Street apologists and get serious.”
My Comment
Two questions and a wince:
Question: Are we to assume from this that after the taxes you already pay on capital gains from trading, you are going to be further taxed, because, thanks to inventors and businessmen, costs in trading have come down?
Question: And are we to believe that this will affect only million dollar trades, but not the few thousands that many more investors are concerned with?
Wince: Did I hear that people are going to be given incentives to report their bosses?
Whoa!
We already have the SEC and FBI bribing people to inform on other people. Personally, I think an informant who receives money for his information should be disregarded.
What happened to doing your civic duty as a virtue?
Do citizens have to be bribed to perform duties (assuming you think, which I don´t, that turning in tax evaders is part of your moral duty)?
(Of course, we already bribe them to fight, bribe them to make babies, bribe them to vote, bribe them to run businesses…socialism being the society built on bribery rather than on demand).
And that´s only one part of the problem with this….
Why Am I Not Surprised?
(Sept 26, 2009)
(strong critic of the Fed, on speaking to Congress about reform and about oversight by Congress of the Fed)
“I was invited to testify this week to the House Financial Services Committee about reform and regulation.
I politely demurred.
Quite bluntly, I didn’t see how speaking to Congress would matter one tiny bit. Its not like they seem to be paying much attention to witnesses, or have very much interest in figuring out what was the cause of the crisis. Besides, they seem to be beholden to those whose interests are to not fix the problems at hand.
While I have been critical of the Federal Reserve (especially the Greenspan years), my beef with them has been their judgment and decision-making process. Congress, on the other hand, is a whole different matter. Its not their judgment, but rather, the fact they are owned not by the American people, but by lobbyists, and corporate interests. They have become structurally deformed.
(Lila: So who owns the bankers and the Fed? The American people?)
How weird is it for me, who spent so many pages blaming the Fed for much of the recent crisis, to find myself in a position of defending them from outside political pressure?”
My Comment
Oh, not weird at all. Perfectly transparent.
Here´s why.
It´s OK for establishment critics to criticize Obama. It´s OK to criticize Congress, and the Regulatory Agencies. And to call them all bought and paid for by corporate interests. It´s OK to criticize the oil industry, and the defense industry, and fundamentalist Christians, Bush, Cheney, Phil Gramm, and abstractions like “the power structure”. It´s OK to criticize speculators (in the abstract) and the Fed (in theory). It´s OK to lecture African leaders. Or the Indian caste system. Or socialism or capitalism..or greed…or the Catholic church.
But it´s never OK to actually do anything that really limits the power of the bankers and financiers at the heart of the problem.
No audit of the fed.
No investigation of the actual, provable corruption of the financial media, the academic peer review process, prize committees, etc. etc.
No lawsuits against bankers, without retaliation from the SEC.
The Creation Of Professional Consensus
An article that illustrates how professional consensus is created in the sciences today:
“To experts such as McIntyre and Pielke, perhaps the most baffling thing has been the near-unanimity over global warming in the world’s mainstream media - a unanimity much greater than that found among scientists.
“For example, last year the BBC environment reporter Roger Harrabin made substantial changes to an article on the corporation website that asked why global warming seemed to have stalled since 1998 - caving in to direct pressure from a climate change activist, Jo Abbess.
“‘Personally, I think it is highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics who continually promote the idea that “global warming finished in 1998” when that is so patently not true,’ she told him in an email.
“After a brief exchange, he complied and sent a final note: ‘Have a look in ten minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.’
“Afterwards, Abbess boasted on her website: ‘Climate Changers, Remember to challenge any piece of media that seems like it’s been subject to spin or scepticism. Here’s my go for today. The BBC actually changed an article I requested a correction for.’
“Last week, Michael Schlesinger, Professor of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Illinois, sent a still cruder threat to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, accusing him of ‘gutter reportage’, and warning: ‘The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists … I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’
“But in the wake of Warmergate, such threats - and the readiness to bow to them - may become rarer.
“A year ago, if a reporter called me, all I got was questions about why I’m trying to deny climate change and am threatening the future of the planet,’ said Professor Ross McKitrick of Guelph University near Toronto, a long-time collaborator with McIntyre.
“‘Now, I’m getting questions about how they did the hockey stick and the problems with the data.
‘Maybe the emails have started to open people’s eyes.’
Read more here at the Daily Mail.Efficient Market Theory Is Bogus
I have noticed that everyone who has ever tried to tell me that markets are efficient is poor.
– Larry Hite
From Anti-War to Anti-Warm
An insightful blog post by Richard Cummings on Lew Rockwell, on where the antiwar movement went:
“Your piece on global warming and the left is spot on. As they used to say in the Soviet Union (if you will forgive my invocation of them), it is “no accident” that Gore has diverted the left from its anti-war position. This has been the tactic of Establishment liberalism for ages. Earth Day itself was an attempt to divert the anti-war movement away from the Vietnam War. As a person, Gore is dishonest. I know this from personal experience.
Naive liberals have never understood the insidious nature of the liberal Establishment, which shares none of their goals. It is totally cynical. The inner circle is hugely rich and lives incredibly well. They buy stocks in defense companies and look down on blacks. They fear the downtrodden will rise up and take away their wealth and privilege, so they toss them crumbs from the state to keep them docile and pretend to identify with them. The epicenter of these phonies is Goldman Sachs, a parasitic firm that got bailed out by the government. It plays both major parties for its own ends.”
The Post-Theft Society
Having stolen the family heirlooms, robbed the vault, emptied the bank accounts, and stripped the house, the thieves have declared a post-theft society….
How can there be thieves, if theft no longer exists?
Having played race against race, religion against religion, group against group, the victors have declared a post-racial society.
How can there be racists, if race no longer exists?
Climate-Gate Is The Work Of A Whistle-blower
Excellent demonstration by Lance Levson, a system and networks administrator with fifteen years experience, that the climate-gate data could not have been the work of a random hacker but was most likely that of a whistle-blower publishing documents previously collected pursuant to a freedom of information act (foia) request- After a lengthy technical analysis of the sources of the email and data, he concludes:
“I suggest that the contents of
./documentsdidn’t originate from a single monolithic share, but from a compendium of various sources.For the hacker to have collected all of this information s/he would have required extraordinary capabilities. The hacker would have to crack an Administrative file server to get to the emails and crack numerous workstations, desktops, and servers to get the documents. The hacker would have to map the complete UEA network to find out who was at what station and what services that station offered. S/he would have had to develop or implement exploits for each machine and operating system without knowing beforehand whether there was anything good on the machine worth collecting.
The only reasonable explanation for the archive being in this state is that the FOI Officer at the University was practising due diligence. The UEA was collecting data that couldn’t be sheltered and they created FOIA2009.zip.
It is most likely that the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it.
If as some say, this was a targeted crack, then the cracker would have had to have back-doors and access to every machine at UEA and not just the CRU. It simply isn’t reasonable for the FOI Officer to have kept the collection on a CRU system where CRU people had access, but rather used a UEA system.
Occam’s razor concludes that “the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one”. The simplest explanation in this case is that someone at UEA found it and released it to the wild and the release of FOIA2009.zip wasn’t because of some hacker, but because of a leak from UEA by a person with scruples.”
Climategate: Wiki Distortion and Censorship?
Check the wiki entry for climategate.
Notice that editing is now blocked until the end middle of the month, which means for the whole period in which Copenhagen convenes, this entry will be the popular take on Climategate and will set the parameters of what can be debated and how:
Type in “climate gate and wiki” into google and you get an entry titled
“Climatic Research Unit email hacking incident”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident
Then check the revision history
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident&action=history
(Update, Dec 9, 11.20 PM) I notice that this has become considerably longer than when I saw it this morning December 9. A number of the revisions appear to have taken place since I posted, and hopefully address the issues I commented on here).
***************************************************
Editing of this article by new or unregistered users is currently disabled until December 23, 2009.
See the protection policy and protection log for more details. If you cannot edit this article and you wish to make a change, you can request an edit, discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or create an account.*********************************************************
Update: December 9, 11: 23
Notice the change in the notice on top of the page.
It now has the following added:
This article may be inaccurate in or unbalanced towards certain viewpoints. Please improve the article by adding information on neglected viewpoints, or discuss the issue on the talk page. (December 2009) 
This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page. ****************************************************
Here is the link to the log of the change in protection level on this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=protect&page=Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident
*******************************************
Now look at the article itself:
Note the distortions:
1. The title focuses on the email “hacking” and calls it an “incident.” — trivializing the affair and placing a misleading emphasis on the outing rather than on the scientific crimes revealed.
2. The article doesn´t mention that there is good evidence to show that the emails were outed because of stonewalling of a freedom of information act (foia) request (correction: foia requests) that no personal messages were taken, and that the emails and data were originally sent to media outlets like the BBC, which refused to publish them.
In other words, this was clearly a responsible attempt at whistle-blowing not a malicious hack.
3. The scientists who committed the wrong-doing are quoted extensively, while scores of independent scientists who have criticized the research manipulation are not quoted.
4. The wrong-doers and the comments from media sources and experts who support climate change are given far more prominence than the actual substance of wrong-doing.
5. The main critics quoted are people whom the culpable scientists had previously tried to trash. This makes it look as if the only people objecting to the cooking of data are people who were in personal conflict with the data-cookers anyway. It becomes a question of “he said, she said.”
6. Lengthy exculpatory statements by the guilty scientists are prominent. Testimony of scores of disinterested scientists and journalists who have reacted negatively to the revelations have been ignored.
Chesterton On The Innocence Of Tyrants
“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.” — G. K. Chesterton.
Goldman Bankers Talk To God But Keep Powder Dry
Ah, the masters of the universe….always so quick to protect their own hides…
This, from Bloomberg (Dec. 4):
“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.
I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.”
Meanwhile, CEO Lloyd Blankfein´s on talking terms with God, and assures us he´s only going about his father´s business….
No profiles in courage here.
Just to bring in a little perspective: These are multimillionaires, who work and live in the best part of town, who have immense political clout, who are probably tall males, if the profile typical of a high-flying Wall Streeter is anything to go by.
I used to teach at a school in the inner city for a few years, trudging home sometimes well past ten at night, often with music equipment in hand. I started carrying mace only at the end. I never had my wallet picked or a purse snatched. Once, a couple of panhandlers acted aggressively toward me. I returned the favor and they backed off. Another time, at 2 AM, near a bus-station, a teen girl “broke bad” with a razor blade. Two young men came over and warned me to get away so I wouldn´t be hurt. Twice, walking through a ghetto, I´ve had young teenagers carry my bags and give me directions, without my asking.
The only time I was robbed was in an affluent neighborhood, where someone picked my pocket. Later there were the brokers, the lawyers, and the rest to add to my bitter experience and teach me the semi-criminal nature of the upper echelons of our society. This upper level is not “smart,” as Bethany McLean seems to suggest in her strange piece on Goldman Sachs in Vanity Fair . Call it by its proper name. It is corrupt. Deeply so.
And its corruption is commonplace.
The monstrous size of the crimes committed reflects not the size of the men who commited them but the monstrosity of the ideology of which they are, in some sense, the greatest victims….
V Tech: Administrators Took Care of Themselves Well Before Students
More evidence that the V Tech shooting involved a lot of negligence on the part of school officials:
“Some Virginia Tech officials warned their own families and the president’s office was locked down well before a campus-wide alert was issued in the 2007 slayings of 32 people, according to a revised state report that details new fumbles in the response to the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
One student survived several hours after being shot without anyone notifying her family until she had died, said the updated report, released Friday.
At least two officials with a crisis response team called their family members after the first shootings at a dorm and about 90 minutes before the all-campus alert was issued at 9:26 a.m.. The president’s office was locked down at 8:52 a.m. and two academic buildings were also shut down before the general alert.”
Jobs Report Signals Possible Rise in Interest Rates
Wow. That was quick. Thwack. Gold got its sunny little head lopped off (for now)…just after it had peeped over $1225 ..and this morning fell to the sub $1180´s level (>$50 decline), apparently on the jobs report, which shows jobs decreased by 11, 000 in November, considerably less than the 30,000 predicted in the most optimistic forecast. That signals a quicker end to the recession and the likelihood that Bernanke will raise interest rates, which in turn is dollar positive.
The dollar index is over 75 now and looking good.
“The data point to a transition in the economy from a deep recession to a modest recovery,” said William Sullivan, chief economist, JVB Financial Group in Florida.
“This will encourage the Fed to be more vocal about an exit strategy from their highly accommodative posture.”
A look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Report for November 2009 (non-farm payrolls) shows that most of the jobs were added in temporary employment and in health care - which is very inflected by government spending and programs.
That means in the rest of the economy, the real economy, the situation isn´t better at all.
And when you go through the rest of the numbers, that´s the case. Indeed, some numbers are significantly worse.
"The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) rose by 293,000 to 5.9 million. The percentage of unemployed persons jobless for 27 weeks or more increased by 2.7 percentage points to 38.3 percent.
Over at GFT Forex, Kathy Lien also expresses some suspicion about the numbers, implying that they might be due for a revision in the future and contrasting them with the Consumer Confidence numbers and the employment part of the ISM reports.
But traders, probably looking for a reason to sell gold at such overbought prices, took the improvement in temp employment as a sign of better things to come, translated that into a possible interest rate hike, and jumped out of stocks and gold.
Which suggests that the move up in gold was not so much a result of perception of it as a safe-haven as perception of it as a currency and a vehicle of speculation.
And the moral of this story is a lot of what´s going on is not the market. It´s not supply and demand. It´s more like smoke and mirrors..
Japan Selling US Treasury? Endgame Begins for Empire
From Business Insider:
“This morning, this message popped up on Bloomberg:
“MARKET NEWS SAYS ‘RUMORS’ ARE JAPAN MAY TELL OF PLANNED SALE”
Said sale in question is rumored to be a U.S. Treasury sell off by the Japanese government.
Adding fuel to the fire is the U.S. and the Federal Reserve. Today, the Fed conducted a reverse repo (repurchase) test that could help with the Japanese UST sale.
On the other hand, this wouldn’t seem to jibe with reports that the country’s main concern is the rising yen. If anything, you’d think they’d be snapping up more treasuries. So something is amiss.
The Houston Chronicle reports Japan could be selling off as much as $100 billion worth of treasuries.”
My Comment:
Well, nothing does jive these days. And the reason nothing does is because half of what´s done in public is done for motives and with a trajectory invisible to the public eye.
And yet the press reports these events without any context or history as perfectly transparent events….
I´ll be back with whatever I can dig up. I don´t understand reverse repos…
More Fall Out From Dubai On Indian Market
“Segments of the economy such as consumer durable and core industrial growth that are driving the current recovery in the Indian economy are purely a function of domestic stimulus initiatives and remain to that extent relatively insulated,” HDFC Bank said in a report today.
However, areas such as exports, remittance, banking and construction as well as real estate are likely to see further damage, the report added.
Exports are going to be the most affected by Dubai woes, as the UAE region is now India’s largest export destination toppling the United States.
Besides, bullion trading in Dubai is likely to be impacted, which may have ripple effect for India as around $29 billion of gold from the country is being traded in Dubai.”
Marginal Redefinitions…
Tyler Cowen seems to be getting a tad confused in his moral reasoning, as he tries to shove the poop back up the fear-mongerers who fatally compromised science, genuine environmentalism, and genuine conservation:
“Good vs. evil thinking causes us to lower our value of a person’s opinion, or dismiss it altogether, if we find out that person has behaved badly. We no longer wish to affiliate with those people and furthermore we feel epistemically justified in dismissing them.
Sometimes this tendency will lead us to intellectual mistakes.
Take Climategate. One response is: 1. “These people behaved dishonorably. I will lower my trust in their opinions.”
Another response, not entirely out of the ballpark, is: 2. “These people behaved dishonorably. They must have thought this issue was really important, worth risking their scientific reputations for. I will revise upward my estimate of the seriousness of the problem.”
I am not saying that #2 is correct, I am only saying that #2 deserves more than p = 0. Yet I have not seen anyone raise the possibility of #2. It very much goes against the grain of good vs. evil thinking: Who thinks in terms of: “They are evil, therefore they are more likely to be right.”My Comment
This is so idiotic confused
(in the spirit of Humble Libertarian´s post, I want to start ratcheting down any stridency on my own part, before expecting others to)
I can´t believe I´m reading it.
I don´t believe the very intelligent Professor Cowen wrote it.
Let´s see. Point by point.
1. Hitler did several rather evil things…would Cowen be happy if we tried to take another look at Hitler, because, gee, we´re all counterintuitive an’ all..
Of course, see what happens when anyone dares to make the morally far saner argument that although Hitler did many evil things, he might have been right about some other things…say, like vegetarianism. The howls of neo-Nazism would drive him from respectable (and unrespectable) society forever.
But it´s quite OK for a liberal to argue from the morally insane position that because Hitler did many evil things, he was therefore right.
I can only imagine what would have happened if someone from the south had ever said that….or someone from the third world….or any other benighted place where our superiors haven´t already planted the flag of moral imperialism (I coined that one just now)….
It never occurs to the supercilious center-liberals (I´m not sure the positions taken by Cowen or Powell are really libertarian) that their lectures admonitions are best directed at themselves.
2. Cowen calls Austrian theory a religion, when it´s not even a theory. It´s a set of principles that can be applied quite broadly to arrive at very different conclusions, even conclusions diametrically opposed to many positions that Austrians actually hold.
3. He uses the phrase ¨good versus evil thinking” — which seems to be a reference to Glenn Greenwald´s book on Bush and how good versus evil thinking got his administration into trouble. As a matter of fact, I made that analysis of Bush´s reasoning in my first book (”The Language of Empire”) as well as in an article, “The Pharisee´s Fire Sermon” (Dissident Voice), …and I can assure you that “good versus evil” thinking permeates every aspect of American thought…from Christian fundamentalism to liberalism universalism. Lew Rockwell has the least of it.
And one of the underlying reasons for why this kind of polarised thinking is pervasive is a very simple one.
Citizens in an imperial state can get away with it.
In no other corner of the world is there a state with so much space in its back yard, so many armaments to back up its lightest word and so much clout to twist every arm that can be twisted to get reality to bend to its own solipsistic vision of how things should be.
Mr. Cowen has mistaken an imperial problem pervasive in the US for a local ideological problem.
Only one of a number of errrors.Here´s more of Cowen´s cogitations via EconomicPolicyJournal.com:
“Cowen began his comments, and almost immediately differentiated between what he called “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarianism” and “realistic” libertarianism. He said that like Palmer, he fell into the “realistic” camp.
During the Q&A, I asked Cowen to amplify on the differences between what he deemed “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarianism” and “realistic” libertarianism. He pointed to a view on immigration and “too much” conspiracy theory that he claimed the “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarians” held. He said they were moving toward the extreme right wing Republican camp. He contrasted this with what he called realistic-secular libertarianism. He said he expected that a full split between the two camps will occur.”
Outside the right-wing Islamophobe militarati, the place where you´ll see the most “good-versus-evil” thinking is not Lew Rockwell (where you can find even liberal-left thinkers like Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Wolf). It´s the liberal-left center.
And that split that´s coming up between LRC and secular libertarianism?
Baloney.
Lew Rockwell has plenty of atheist and secular libertarians. I happen to be a secularist and a Christian agnostic. Both the Christianity and the agnoticism are important to me. Equally. If Cowen can´t get his head around a position like that and lumps it in together with some loony farfetched idea he has about “Austrian religion” that really is his problem, not LRC´s.
Actually, the only split that´s coming up is the split of libertarian progressives and sensible environmentalists…from the left…and into the Ron Paul camp..which is also, much more prosaically, the just-the-facts, ma´am camp.
Cowen:
He then told me I could google, Austrian theory and financial crisis, and half the results would be “religious Austrians.”
Nice try at scare-mongering.
This is simply scare-mongering.
The real ayatollahs of thought are Olympian liberal-leftists who believe that anyone who argues against any of their most precious sacred cows — subsidized illegal immigration, thought police, the immaculate purity of the government on 9-11, the imminent end of planet earth on account of Republicans, and a host of other dim-bulb positions — must automatically be a wicked, greedy racist.
Economist, audit thine own intellectual books before trashing anyone else´s.
And for more juicy tomatoes flung at the good professor by fellow libs, read this .
Monbiot Suggests Jones ¨Guilty As Charged,” Should Go
Monbiot in the Guardian::
“When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.
I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get……….
Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific……
When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU’s opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped “no comment” and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean “guilty as charged”.
My Comment
George Monbiot seems to be the only global warming advocate with the integrity to state the obvious. What the emails reveal is reprehensible in the extreme, given the position of the scientists involved. They have to go, no matter where you stand on the issue.
And by the way, I´m no hard-core skeptic about climate change or human influence on the environment at all. I think the “preventive principle”
(correction: I mean precautionary principle)
is a pretty good rule to go by when considering economic and other options, am a strong advocate of organic and sustainable farming, and think that many forms of development do indeed create havoc with the environment - destroying shorelines and exacerbating natural disasters, if not actually provoking them.
However, hijacking the entire world into an international regime in which scam artists like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, allied hedge funds, speculators, and governments play roulette with “carbon credits” has nothing to do with being a steward of the environment.
Want to help the planet?
Plant a garden. Plant trees. Use meat as a condiment not as a staple. Walk or ride a bike as often as you can.
Don´t think of yourself solely as a consumer but also as a citizen.
And fight the militarized state.
The single biggest problem (I mean man-made problem) for the climate is war. Nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, fighter jets, weapons testing, bunker-busters - this is where the damage is done, most of all in misdirecting energy and resources into destruction, when they could as easily be directed toward productive uses.
Death Knell of the Carbon Credit Scam
Dr. Tim Ball, from Canada Free Press (via Lew Rockwell):
“Professor Wegman showed how this “community of scientists” published together and peer reviewed each other’s work. I was always suspicious about why peer review was such a big deal. Now all my suspicions are confirmed. The emails reveal how they controlled the process, including manipulating some of the major journals like Science and Nature. We know the editor of the Journal of Climate, Andrew Weaver, was one of the “community”. They organized lists of reviewers when required making sure they gave the editor only favorable names. They threatened to isolate and marginalize one editor who they believed was recalcitrant.
These people controlled the global weather
data used by the IPCC through the joint Hadley and CRU and produced the HadCRUT data. They controlled the IPCC, especially crucial chapters and especially preparation of the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM). Stephen Schneider was a prime mover there from the earliest reports to the most influential in 2001. They also had a left wing conduit to the New York Times. The emails between Andy Revkin and the community are very revealing and must place his journalistic integrity in serious jeopardy. Of course the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion. Surely this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the Carbon Credits shell game.CO2 never was a problem and all the machinations and deceptions exposed by these files prove that it was the greatest deception in history, but nobody is laughing. It is a very sad day for science and especially my chosen area of climate science. As I expected now it is all exposed I find there is no pleasure in “I told you so.”
You can download the climate change fraud documents from the link below:
http://www.filedropper.com/foi2009 or http://www.megaupload.com/?d=003LKN94
(Lila: I am linking the hacked emails after all, because no private emails (correction: I meant ´personal´) are included and because I´m convinced the material was gathered for an FOIA request that was being obstructed).
Dubai Debt Taken Out in Islamic Bonds
“To complicate matters further, the debts were taken out as Islamic bonds, known as sukuks, and the rules about what happens if the borrower fails to pay them back are hazy.”
My Comment
Add to this the earlier announcement that Abu Dhabi would treat the debts selectively, and you begin to wonder. If the selectivity is based on the degree of interconnection with the government, that would be one thing. But if the selectivity is based on discriminating between domestic and foreign creditors, Islamic and non Islamic, I suspect this would cause problems.
Now a bit of information on the sukuk.
Islamic banking has five pillars, as noted in this Times piece :
1. a ban on interest
2. a ban on speculation
3. a ban on haram (forbidden) investments, such as pork or gambling
4. the requirement of partnership or sharing of profit and loss
5. the requirement of asset backing.
What´s interesting is that while several Islamic funds have defaulted, the sukuk itself has never been tested in court, giving rise to uncertainty about how creditors would be treated in an insolvency….how they would be ranked in preference…and whether they would be competing against each other rather than for the underlying assets…..
Henry Hazlitt On Keynesian Economics
“The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.
The distinction may seem obvious. The precaution of looking for all the consequences of a given policy to everyone may seem elementary. Doesn’t everybody know, in his personal life, that there are all sorts of indulgences delightful at the moment but disastrous in the end? Doesn’t every little boy know that if he eats enough candy he will get sick? Doesn’t the fellow who gets drunk know that he will wake up next morning with a ghastly stomach and a horrible head? Doesn’t the dipsomaniac know that he is ruining his liver and shortening his life? Doesn’t the Don Juan know that he is letting himself in for every sort of risk, from blackmail to disease? Finally, to bring it to the economic though still personal realm, do not the idler and the spendthrift know, even in the midst of their glorious fling, that they are heading for a future of debt and poverty?
Yet when we enter the field of public economics, these elementary truths are ignored. There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.” And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.”
– Henry Hazlitt. Economic In One Lesson
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