Say wha?!

The Mighty Fang looks pissed. I musta forgot ta feed the fat furry bastard again...

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Paranoid grass

The Avett Brothers, "Paranoia In B Flat Major". Some paranoid bluegrass?

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Some Thursday garden porn

Mandy is doing a lot better than the scraggly half-dead thing I photographed two months ago since she started getting regular doses of water and some fertilizer. This is of course a Mandevilla Red Riding Hood, semi-reclining though some tendrils are heading up the lattice... oh yeah, I put some drip irrigation down as you can see, it should be hidden in the mulch whenever I decide what kind of mulch I want (sigh!)....

-- Badtux the Garden Penguin

Would Glibertarians lie for their agenda?

Why... YES! Forbes columnist Lenore Skenazy's nose grew another six inches longer on this one, when she blames the Consumer Product Safety Commission for canceling a sale of rocks to a school district.

So, did the CPSC have anything to do with canceling the sale of rocks? Let's go back a few weeks before Ms. Glibertard's hyperventilating screed about the evils of government, and look at the source of her information: an article in USA Today about the law that requires products sold for use by young children to be lead-free. In that article, we find out that the school district asked if the rocks had been tested for lead as required by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, a law passed in the aftermath of an outbreak of lead-contaminated Chinese toys hitting the U.S. market. American Educational Products replied that no, the rocks, intended for grade school science classes where they would be handled by young children, had not been tested for lead. The school district asked if they would be tested for lead, and AEP said "Nope." The school district then cancelled the purchase.

In short, the school district wanted unleaded rocks, and AEP refused to sell them unleaded rocks. The CPSC had nothing to do with this, it was all about AEP not wishing to sell the school district the product (unleaded rocks) that the school district wanted to buy. It was, indeed, the kind of market transaction that glibertarians should be pointing to with glee as they gloat "see? The CPSC isn't necessary, buyers and sellers will self-regulate because sellers who don't meet buyers' safety criteria will not make sales!" Instead, the glibertards appear to be using what is essentially a glibertarian transaction in the marketplace to prove that a government body that wasn't even involved in the transaction is evil and should be eliminated. But hey, nobody ever accused glibertarians of making sense... these are the same people who claim that government isn't needed in order to have good highways, for example, despite the fact that no civilization anywhere on the face of the planet has ever had good highways without government being involved big-time. Reality ain't exactly their thing, heh.

-- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

Snark of the day

Dealing with the Austerian "economist" bozos is like dealing with the deranged offspring of Bozo the Clown and Ann Coulter: Not only are they stupid, but they have the same level of mendacity as Richard Nixon.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Burning throat

Caitlin Rose, "Shanghai Cigarettes". Just some Austin singer-songwriter stuff, y'all.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Shorter Krugman

We Are So Fucked.

-- Badtux the sore-rear'ed Penguin

Gold is a scam

A graphic depiction of Glenn Beck's Goldline scam.

Note that Talking Points Memo is careful to not call it a scam. They are, after all, reputable journalists (snicker!) who can't use such "charged words" for fear of damaging their "credibility". But when you are being tricked into buying overpriced gold by a two-bit huckster, I don't know what term other than "scam" applies ("overcharging" is rather an understatement by comparison).

Only good thing about Glenn Beck's scam is that you do actually get the gold, even if it's at horrifically rip-off prices. Other scammers don't even do that much.

-- Badtux the Investment Penguin

When will it make sense?

Yet another mostly-unknown band. This is Stripmall Architecture (2/3rds of the band formerly called Halou) with their song, "It'll All Make Sense in the Morning" from the Halou album Halou, which was their last album before they abandoned the dream pop genre and Halou name and the third member of the band and decided to rock out a bit more as Stripmall Architecture. They're from up the road in San Francisco, so maybe I'll go see'em at the DNA Lounge sometime...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The Wikileaks document dump

I suppose I need to comment on this, since everybody else has.

1. The comparison to "The Pentagon Papers" is apt. This is a detailed historical document dump of the progress of the war, from near the start to about 8 months ago.
2. Note the "eight months ago" part. There's nothing in these documents that puts our troops at risk. If our troops are still in the same positions that they were in eight months ago, we're fucked anyhow.

So what is the bottom line that these documents tell us? Well, nothing that we don't already know -- that we are no closer to conquering Afghanistan today than we were eight years ago. The only way to "win" in Afghanistan is the Tamerlane way -- extermination of entire populations, i.e., genocide. Tamerlane was the last person to successfully conquer Afghanistan back in 1370 or so, and his descendants the Moghuls then swarmed down from Afghanistan in the early 1500s and conquered all of Pakistan and Northern India. But Tamerlane had some advantages we don't have. Tamerlane had no logistics tail -- none. He fed his armies by seizing the food, weapons, and supplies of the peoples he conquered, who no longer needed it because they were, err, dead. Tamerlane was not put off by squeamish notions of killing women and children. If a province defied Tamerlane, he simply turned it into an unpeopled wasteland without bothering to try to kill only combatants. He was by all accounts possessed of an amount of viciousness that make even the Taliban look like Boy Scouts, an amount of viciousness that no army of a would-be democracy could ever contenance because it would repulse too many taxpayers.

In short: Unless we turn the U.S. into an empire led by a vicious warlord like Tamerlane, there's no point being in Afghanistan. The place can't be conquered short of doing it the Tamerlane way. Temporarily occupied, yes. Conquered, no.

'Nuff said on that, we already knew all the above, just felt like ranting...

- Badtux the History Penguin

Siberia

I didn't even know BP had operations in Siberia. Apparently Tony Hayward, soon to be former CEO of BP, is now going to get his life back. I wonder if one of the former gulags has now been chosen as BP's new corporate HQ in Russia?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Some more clover

This one by the youngsters Buffalo Clover gives me a bit of Tom Waits combined with Dresden Dolls vibe. The song is "Ashes and Sand", which isn't on any released album -- yet. Keep checking iTunes.

BTW, I first came across these youngsters via their song Luck, which was about having anything but. It's available on iTunes now via their album Pick Your Poison. I don't know if I'd call this a "must-buy" -- it's not something like, say, Serj Tankian's Elect the Dead or Drive By Trucker's Decoration Day which are brilliant and important and if you don't own the album, you should immediately start pounding yourself over the head with a hammer in dismay -- but thus far what I've sampled has been interesting and somewhat unique. And really, if you don't have any must-buys in your queue, interesting and unique is certainly worth dropping a few coins for, especially since these youngsters aren't exactly drowning in coin...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Corruption in the federal bureaucracy

One of the things that has become clear recently, whether we're talking about regulation of Wall Street, regulation of deep sea oil drilling, regulation of coal mining, or whatever, is that federal regulators are now working for the companies they're regulating, not for We The People.

So why is that? Well, you can blame this on ole' Saint Ronnie Ray-gun again. In 1983, Reagan eliminated the Federal Retirement System for all new federal employees. New employees would pay into Social Security like everybody else, and then pay into a 401(k)-like plan, with the Federal Government providing some matching money.

There were two things that occurred because of this. The first is that the Federal Government had to start paying people more in order to come to work for the government. Much more. Federal employees today are paid salaries typical of private enterprise, whereas before Reagan did this, federal employees accepted less money up front in order to get more money on the back end when they retired with a federal pension.

The second thing is that the new system encourages corruption. Back in the days when you put in your 30 years and then retired with a federal pension for life, there was no percentage for corruption. If you accepted prostitutes and bribes from one of the companies you regulated, you would at the very least be fired, and then you'd be forfeiting your 30 year retirement benefits. But now if you're fired, you still have your Social Security benefits paid in, and you still have your 401(k) contents, and you can go to work for the company that gave you the bribe because you still know other people within the federal bureaucracy who might be bribable.

In short, eliminating the FRS a) made federal employees more expensive, and b) increased the incentive to accept bribes from the industries you regulate, or accept job offers from them in exchange for giving them what they want regulation-wise. Federal employees no longer have a reason to stay with the Federal government for the next 30 years, since there is no longer a pension waiting for them at the end of the line, so if someone offers a Federal employee a cushy job for the next few years if the Federal employee rules in favor of the company... well, there's no monetary reason to *not* do it. You're not giving up your federal pension, after all, because there *isn't* a federal pension...

So anyhow, that is why as the people covered under FRS have retired, and new employees have come in, that corruption in federal regulatory bodies has become rampant. Let that be a lesson to state and local governments planning on slashing their public employees retirement plans: That way leads to runaway corruption and higher personnel expenses overall. 'Nuff said.

-- Badtux the Pensionless Penguin

In the grass

Phosphorescent, "Full Grown Man", from his 2005 album Aw Come Aw Wry. Phosphorescent is the nom-de-band of one Matt Houck, who writes sort of psychedelic folk rock from what I can tell...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Some weed

Cross Canadian Ragweed (which despite the name is out of Oklahoma). Have no idea how to describe their music, which seems to remind me of a number of folks who aren't at all like them, but this is pretty damn good Southern country rock, whatever the hell it is.

"Dead Man", off their 9th album Mission California (hmm, hear a little Eagles in there?). Hold it, their ninth album? Why hasn't anybody ever heard of these dudes?!

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Keynesian monetarists?!

Someone made the observation that the previous post about Austrian stupidity makes me sound like a monetarist. Yes, in general, yes, New Keynesians are mostly Friedman-style monetarists... until you hit the zero bounds / liquidity trap. At the zero bounds, any money that is simply issued -- or dropped out of helicopters -- basically disappears under mattresses. That's because there's no incentive to actually lend it since you cannot get any interest income from it, and everybody is expecting their money to be more valuable to them in the future so they are saving it rather than spending it. (Note that "saving" money in a bank at the zero bounds -- i.e., lending it to the bank -- is essentially the same as putting it under a mattress, since the bank, for the same reason, will not lend it out but will instead shove it under the Fed's virtual mattresses as reserves). Note that money under mattresses has essentially disappeared as money. It is no longer pegs out there in "the economy" to use to fill holes. Rather, it's lumpy mattress stuffing, having zero (0) effect upon economic activity happening in the economy.

The fundamental difference between Keynesian economics and monetarism thus occurs at the zero bounds. Until then both tend to have the same goal of printing enough money to match the amount of goods and services in the economy, and a little bit of extra (roughly 2% to 4%) to encourage people to move money out from under mattresses and into the economy (since inflation -- a decrease in the value of money under mattresses -- discourages people from shoving money under mattresses, duh). But hit the zero bounds, and the Keynesian observation about lumpy mattress stuffing holds -- there is simply no reason to move the money out from under your mattress at that point. The Keynesian then says, "well, given that having all these empty holes err unemployed people around is not good for social stability or the health or welfare of the people, which after all is what an economy is for, we can print the money err make this peg but *directly* put it into the hole via government purchasing decisions rather than just throwing it out of helicopter windows!" That is, are there slack resources in the economy? Is there insufficient money to put those resources to use? Well, print the money and have *government* put those resources to use!

But note that this is only an issue once you hit the zero bounds and have actual slack resources in the economy (as measurable by unemployment statistics). Which is why the stagflation of the 1970's is *not* an example of Keynesianism being "discredited", because that was straight monetarism -- we were nowhere near the zero bounds, and there were no slack resources in the economy, which was at 5% unemployment at the time. All that happens if you print more money (pegs) than you have goods (holes) is that you have leftover pegs... which then find holes to go into (i.e., prices rise).

Note that I mention slack resources, and specifically, unemployment. Which is another Austrian fail. While their holy Saint Mises admitted that the unemployed didn't want to be unemployed, most Austrians appear to agree more with their holy Saint Hayek, who claims that the unemployed aren't *really* slack resources (which don't exist in their religious philosophy) but, rather, are taking a long vacation voluntarily. Because, y'see, if they'd only drop their wage demands then they'd get jobs! That despite the fact that the latest statistics show five unemployed people for every one job opening in the U.S. economy... but oh wait, I forgot, there I go with those funny "number" thingies again, and math is hard. Alrighty, then!

- Badtux the Snarky Economics Penguin

Lonely nights

Neko Case "I Wish I Was The Moon" , off her album Blacklisted. The gal has some pipes on her...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Outrage!

I have been recently made aware of the fact that a major criminal religious organization is locating close to the World Trade Center towers! This criminal organization is well known for the criminal acts of its clergy and membership, including major acts of terrorism against U.S. allies, abusive behavior towards women and children, and a general medieval mindset that views women as property and demands absolute obedience. This religion has a history of forced conversions at gunpoint and of murdering Jews.

Given all these facts about this criminal religious organization... how in the world can we contenance Saint Peter's Roman Catholic Church being located within the perimeter of the World Trade Center security area?!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Note: St. Peter's is located approximately the same distance from the WTC site as the proposed mosque that has the tighty whitey righties' panties in such a dither.

Hangin'

Mencken and The Mighty Fang just hangin' out in the heat last week... TMF has arrived at a, well, unique way of dumping heat into the atmosphere. And he's not big-boned, he's just fat :).

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Why unemployment is up, part 23453

To put it bluntly: The investor class -- the class of people who invest most of their income since it is excess to consumption necessary for their lifestyle -- has profited over the past 30 years. The consumer class -- the class that consumes most of their income because their income has minimal excess over that necessary to maintain their lifestyle -- has seen stagnant incomes over the past 30 years. The end result is that increases in consumption cannot be sustained by the incomes of the bottom 80% of the population, the consumer class, and consumption invariably drops back down to baseline after short bursts fueled by cheap borrowing.

Which probably is a good thing, because if everybody consumed as much as they'd consume if they had a million dollars like the top 1%, we'd strip this world bare of resources. The problem is that the level of consumption sustainable by the incomes of the bottom 80% is insufficient to employ everybody who wants a job and is willing to work, thanks to massive improvements in productivity over the past 30 years. This causes extreme hardship and misery and, eventually, social disorder. One possible solution is simply to introduce inefficiency into the economy so that more people are employed than the level of consumption at current productivity levels would support being employed. Hmm, what entity do we know that is famous in right-wing circles for introducing inefficiency?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

H/T

The pigeonhole principle

Shorter Prof. Anderson: "Math is hard."

I am amused by the resistance of Austrian "economists" to the use of modern statistical tools, which they sneeringly refer to as "aggregates". Mathematics is a fundamental tool of science, and by rejecting modern mathematics they thereby prove that they are not members of a branch of science but, rather, members of a religion, complete with a holy canon of Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard each of whose words must be accepted as holy doctrine and never criticized regardless of how little data there is supporting those beliefs.

The fundamental mathematical principle that applies at the zero bounds is the PIGEONHOLE PRINCIPLE. That is, if there are fewer dollars in the economy than are necessary to pay all the employees and buy all the goods, then clearly some of the employees will go unpaid and some of the goods will go unsold. This has nothing to do with mythical appeals to holy canon of Saint Rothbard, but, rather, a fundamental mathematical quality of the universe. If you have five holes and four pegs, it simply is impossible to put pegs in all the holes.

To counter this, Holy Saint Mises and His followers then came up with the theory of "price elasticity". That is, okay, so we have four pegs and five holes, we'll just chop a little piece off of each peg and glue them together to make a fifth peg and fill all the holes that way! The problem is that in a *real* economy, as vs. the fictional economy in the Holy One's scriptures, it took a whole peg's worth of money to create the goods and services available for sale, and no business is going to sell goods for less than it cost to create them. In other words, price elasticity is a crock of BS. When you hit the zero bounds and go into deflation, what happens is that one of those holes is going to go unfilled -- i.e., somebody's going to lose his job, and some goods are going to go unsold.

What Keynesian economics says is that when you hit the zero bounds -- where we are right now -- the solution is simple: Make another peg from scratch to fill that fifth hole. Given that our particular pegs happen to be made of zeros and ones in the mainframe computers of banks, clearly we aren't going to run out of zeros and ones anytime soon. And this is the situation that Keynes was pondering, and which describes the "zero bounds" issue that Krugman was talking about.

Now, neither Keynes nor Krugman proposed making more pegs when there was already sufficient pegs to fill all the holes. When the economy is at full employment then clearly printing more money simply causes inflation (more pegs getting jammed into the holes) rather than an increase in sales and employment (a peg now available for a previously unfilled hole). But given real unemployment in the US is close to 20% if you count the people who've been "disappeared" from the statistics as "not in workforce", can anybody say that this is the situation? Clearly we have holes (goods available for sale) that lack pegs (money available in the economy that can be used to purchase them), otherwise those people (who, remember, are a commodity available on the open market like any other commodity) would be employed!

Note that I talk pegs and holes because if I started talking mathematical induction and proofs then Austrians would start shouting "Heresy! Aggregates!" because, well, math is hard. Needless to say, all this *can* be expressed mathematically in terms that comport with the physical laws of this universe, as vs. of some fictional universe that exists only in the fertile mind of the authors of the holy scriptures of Austrian "economics"...

- Badtux the Snarky Economics Penguin

What a way to die...

And he was only 13 years old... I *knew* those clowns were evil!

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

H/T

The cost

Yes, I've done this one before. It still brings tears to my eyes even today. Jason Isbell wrote this while he was with the Drive-By Truckers, but wasn't allowed to release it on an album until he went solo in 2007. "Dress Blues", off the album Sirens of the Ditch.

Some of the 60's types complain, "there aren't any good protest songs today!" But they're wrong. Today's protest songs aren't pyrotechnic. They aren't full of slogans. They just count the costs, and say, without saying, "is this really what we want to be doing? Is the cost worth it?"

- Badtux the Music Penguin

Bernanke can't find the keys to his helicopter

So now we have Bernanke's testimony before Congress that, despite last month's disastrous economic news, the Federal Reserve has no plans to do anything to help the economy. In 2002, Bernanke claimed that it was impossible for the money supply to go into free fall as long as the central bank was willing to print as much money as needed and push it into the economy, even if it required dropping money from helicopters. Today, the money supply appears to be in free fall thanks to so much money disappearing into the Federal Reserve as reserves (at which point it disappears from the economy), but Bernanke appears to have lost the keys to his helicopter, and Congress -- by not passing any successor to the now-dwindling stimulus bill -- appears to have shot holes in the helicopter's fuel tanks anyhow.

We are in monetary deflation right now according to every measure that counts, to the point that even some right-wingers are starting to panic. What is confusing most people is that prices are not going down. But price deflation (and wage deflation is a subset of price deflation) is just one possible side-effect of monetary deflation, and, as we discovered during the Great Depression and as I've mentioned here before, price deflation is a *lagging* indicator of monetary deflation. The reason being that companies will *not* voluntarily sell goods at less than what it costed to manufacture them. Period. If there is not enough money circulating in the economy to buy all of the goods and services companies offer for sale, they will not lower prices beyond what it cost to make them (which would be losses, which would look bad and drive down their stock prices) — instead, they’ll voluntarily choose to instead accept fewer sales, and lay off the people not needed at the lower volume. In other words, the first symptom of monetary deflation is *GDP* deflation (of which employment deflation is a subset), not price deflation — and we’re seeing that in spades.

Given that we *know* GDP deflation is the first major symptom of monetary deflation (and note that “mattress money” — money on file at the Fed as reserves — basically does not exist as far as the economy is concerned, since it’s not being used for fostering commerce in the economy), and given that we *know* that price and wage deflation is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator, of monetary deflation, any sensible central banker would be revving the helicopters big-time right now given last month’s disastrous economic news. But what we have now not a sensible central banker but, rather, a “reasonable” central banker, one who is in thrall to the “reasonable people” who rule Washington, who make decisions not based upon facts and analysis, but upon “truthiness” — i.e, emotional reactions from the gut based on seemingly plausible but long-disproved superstitious beliefs like “no pain no gain”.

In other words, we are so f*cked….

-- Badtux the Sore-cloaca'ed Penguin

Showing the flag

John Prine, "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore", off of his first album John Prine. As I mentioned before, the sad thing about current history is that you can take the protest songs from 40 years ago, change a few geographic locations and a few politicians' names, and they're still as valid today as they were then... sigh!

- Badtux the Music Penguin

A book review

This book has an incredible amount of sex and violence, including incest, entire cities being destroyed, plagues of frogs and locusts, and even the death of 99.9% of the world's population in a giant flood. Irwin Allen would have had a field day making a television movie of this book, there's just so much entertainment here, much better than Twilight. But the downside is the incredibly one-dimensional characters (with the exception of that "Jesus" dude, who is this really groovy stoner hippy type who, like, preaches peace and giving up material possessions in pursuit of the spiritual and stuff like that when he's not, like, toking out big time, but also has downer times when he wonders why he bothers), and an utterly disjointed plot where characters pop up, do a few things, then disappear for the rest of the book. Dude. This book really needed an editor, not only for the major, major plotholes (*TWO* different stories about how the Earth was created? Dude!) but for the atrocious spelling, grammar, and rampant run-on sentences. For example, at the beginning of the Book of Matthew there's this one sentence that literally runs on for multiple pages of "begat" after "begat" after "begat"! Which is okay if your name is James Joyce, but this "God" guy who wrote this book isn't anywhere near the talent that James Joyce was. Dude. Get a real copy editor for your next book, 'kay?!

-- From a review on The King James Bible.

A less competent Timmy McVeigh

So now we have tighty righty white-winger Byron Williams, who headed off to attack the ACLU and Tides Foundation in San Francisco in order to "start a revolution". Shades of Timmy McVeigh! Luckily he was so irate that he couldn't drive straight, and got pulled over by the CHP, at which point he engaged in a shootout with the CHP rather than making it to his designated targets.

Mr. Williams shows signs of typical derangement amongst white-wingers. He was "upset because he had not been able to find a job and because of the poor economy", which of course the ACLU and Tides Foundation have *so* much to do with in deranged right-winger minds, *not* the corporate oligarchs who have looted our economy so that 75% of America is owned by the top 1%. And he was upset about "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items." Because, y'know, legislators elected by the majority of voters in their districts who are passing laws (like the unemployment extension that Mr. Williams would have been eligible for if he hadn't been, well, off his fucking rocker) with a 60% majority of votes is "railroading".

And, alas, Mr. Williams also is just another data point in another observation: Every terrorist attack against Americans by Americans over the past twenty years has been by right-wingers, *not* by "lefties". Blow up the Oklahoma City federal building? Check. Kill doctor as he shakes his pastor's hand at his church? Check. Attempt to blow up the Atlanta Olympics? Check. Being a member of the far right in America seems to be part and parcel of being a domestic terrorist in America. Not that our MSM will ever call Byron Williams a domestic terrorist... even though that is, err, what he is. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Terrorist-observin' Penguin

Back to the future

The sad thing about recent history is that you can take the protest songs from 40 years ago, dust them off, and they're still as valid today.

Eric Burdon and the Animals sing Sky Pilot. Of course, today the pilot is often some geek in Phoenix flying a drone with a joystick from a cubicle...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin