jbd.mee.nu

November 28, 2008

SOBERING STATISTICS FOR US SO CAL HOMEOWNERS

Here's a great site on housing and home finance that I found through a link at NRO to this post which led to this post, all about the truly depressing projections for So Cal home values. They chronicle some of the stupefyingly huge pricing jumps caused by the Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac "Every man a homeowner" madness.

And read this, too.

Oy gevalt.

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LINKS FOR YOUR EDIFICATION

1. This author has a "Only Obama Can" type article about the auto industry. His take is that only Obama could abolish CAFE standards (corporate average fuel economy) and by doing so free the auto companies to ... well, somehow make money again. I've read the article 3 times and I still don't follow how the author concludes that dumping CAFE and raising & spending tax money will somehow magically fix the union problem. Yeah, I see how it made things worse, but CAFE didn't stop Toyota, Honda, VW, etc. from making money and hosing unions. This is too little, too late. Chapter 11 is the only permanent solution.

2. Nonsense on stilts. Here's a big dose of "Why didn't you stop me from [enter here stupid activity that was entirely your fault]?!?" This surprises me, coming from the WSJ. Really, Tom? Mr. Chicago Machine Politician Obama is going to clean up the "mess" made by federal contractors? Beltway bandits and 10-percenters have been DC fixtures since at least the late 50's, when Ike warned of the problems of a military-industrial complex. This author laughably tries to blame the excellent recommendations of Reagan's Grace Commission as the main causes of the (mostly imagined but some real) eeevil and wasteful spending by companies like Blackwater, Halliburton, and all those other "contractors" and their "lobbyists".

Hey, dude, read the last line of the Wikipedia entry I link to above:

"The Congress did not act on the (Commission's) recommendations."

So how can he blame the commission if Congress didn't implement any of its recommendations? Just you never mind, Mr. Literal Interpretation of Words. OK, fine, I get it; this is just more of the usual liberal historical revisionism. So what's this guy's solution? More government employees, which will increase accountability. No, stop laughing now, he really means it.

3. Gag me with a twisty bulb. The minute you start reading this journalistic onanism you just know what the outcome is going to be. Way to go, self -made Disney hero! "Green" schmucks like these are going to look back 10 years from now and cringe at these articles in the same way I do when I see the style of clothes I was wearing in the mid-70's. In short, what in God's name was I thinking?

4. One key concept missing from this otherwise sappy paean to America - private property rights. All the wonderful things she describes that were done by Edison, Ford, and the fictional George Bailey, were done because they wanted to be rich. What sets traditional America above most every other country is that individual Americans get to keep (most) of what they earn To the extent that we continue to erode that concept through taxes, regulation, bigger government and stupid policies, we will gradually strangle or chase off all the current and future Fords, Edisons and Baileys to countries where they can still find those opportunities. Problem is, there are damn few countries left. So let's fix this one, OK?

5. Here's one that's thinky and a little churchy but dead-on. In short, stop being spoiled brats. Don't look to government to solve your problems. Government will only make your problems permanent.

6. From the same website: this guy takes a long time and a lot of words to restate Prof. Sowell's simple maxim:

All government power comes down to two questions -

Who decides? and
At what cost?

Also, the usual liberal response to "the government produces nothing" line is "Everything you have was delivered over government roads, and electricity is over a government grid, protected by government laws and enforced by government police. You'd have nothing without the government. So There!"

Sowell's Maxim answers that completely. This guy's "list" leaves him wide open for contradiction. Smarten up, chump.

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ONLY OBAMA CAN END FARM SUBSIDIES

Since the Depression, our federal government has taken a portion our tax dollars and redistributed them to farmers. The reasons are basic and easy to understand:

We need farmers or we don't eat
Farming is risky, and subject to acts of God unlike practically any other endeavor
Farmers are businesses, so they will raise crops based on profits, meaning we have to bribe them not to raise more of what we don't need, and cover their losses for raising crops that we want but don't want to pay more for at the checkout stand (i.e. keeping the price of bread, milk, beef, etc cheap)

The industrial revolution started the trend of farmers moving to the cities for a better life based on proven wages rather than iffy crop margins. As a consequence, cities became ever more dependent on fewer and fewer farmers to feed the growing non-farm population, and crop failures had an increasing impact on city and state politics.

To soften that impact, city dwellers started subsidizing farming through water projects, electrification, railroads, highways, etc. This was more logical 75 to 150 years ago when farming methods were still fairly primitive, and the combination of drought, soil erosion and a bad economy could force farmers to abandon their farms and look for better land, sending food shortages rippling through the country.

By the 1960s, farming was primarily a capital-driven business, and rapidly disappearing as a subsistence-level family occupation. The holy "family farmer" was mostly a myth by the 80s. The advent of modern industrialized farming and globalized food sourcing meant historically low food prices and abundant fresh fruits and vegetables of all kinds without regard to season or local crop successes. The era of price-driven (as opposed to scarcity-driven) food markets was here to stay, and the definition of malnutrition went from hunger to obesity in a generation.

For the past 25 years or so, subsidies have been nothing more than bribes handed to farm state politicians by non-farm state politicians to get them to vote for things the non-farm state politicians want. The most recent 5-year plan (I love the Soviet cachet of that term) was pure pork, and Obama had a chance to join with President Bush to reduce or eliminate many subsidies. Obama talked like he was going to oppose subsidies, then missed the actual votes, so he had no record of either supporting or opposing. Then he went on the campaign trail to selectively bash whichever side was most advantageous to him at the time.

Now that he's looking for cash anyplace he can find it, watch for him to reverse his rhetoric and cut off all the subsidies to anybody who doesn't actually live on the land they farm, and to set a very low income cap, and to tie all subsidies to green initiatives or volunteerism. This is a fairly accurate description of a Soviet-era collective farm.

Possibility of this actually happening: 95%. This one should be a no brainer. And about time, too. As I review in this post, there is no reason to think that agricultural commodities will suffer from a low Dow or fewer Chevys. We should have ended subsidies in the 80s, but with all the Farm Aid whiney-butts, it was just too hot a political topic, and the log-rolling effect of Wall Street to Main Street to dirt road farm subsidies are too tempting for Congress to pass up.

Obama doesn't need farm votes or agribusiness campaign contributions to get re-elected. On the contrary, the farm state politicians will have to drink ethanol, plant wind farms, and plow solar panels to get any dough out of Obama. Will BHO actually end farm subsidies, or simply transfer them to his socialist agenda? Depends on how bad the economy gets, and how good a job the Republicans and the press do in exposing the soon-to-be-rampant corruption of the Obama administration.

Barring some natural disaster like mad cow, hoof & mouth, or wheat blight, once we get rid of farm subsidies, like welfare, they will be nearly impossible to reinstate, I'd settle for that for now, and work at picking off the other mini-soviets as they fail.

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November 26, 2008

ONLY OBAMA CAN...

Expanding on this post and the Weekly Standard article it links to, here's a new list for your enjoyment, based on the famous phrase "Only Nixon could go to China". This refers to Tricky Dick's 1972 Presidential visit to Red China, a country which had heretofore been seen by Nixon's conservative supporters as the home of a mysterious faceless barbarian hoard and treacherous enemy.

The ChiComs fought us in Korea in the Fifties, and in Vietnam in the Sixties, and were seen as both rivals to and allies of the Commies in the USSR, depending on varying interests and appetites of their mad rulers. Of course, like the USSR, liberals loved the ChiComs, remaining willfully blind to the atrocities of Communism as practiced by Mao, Stalin and their successors.

Nixon, always the ballsy strategic macher, sent Kissinger to China to help open up normalized relations, primarily as a poke in the eye to Brezhnev, but also to help heal from the Viet Nam war. Because Dick was a well-known anti-commie, he could make this happen without being accused of being soft on communism, which would certainly have been the charge had either Hubert Humphrey or George McGovern won the White House and started talking with China.

So I will use the phrase "Only Obama Can..." to identify uniquely conservative issues or ideals that only Obama, as both a true-blue liberal and an African-American, could make happen.

The first one is easy:

Only Obama Can End Affirmative Action.

He's African-American. He's President, elected with a clear majority of all ethnicities and cohorts. Game Over. Affirmative action and all its forms and features - set-asides, quotas, targets, diversity, and so on - has done what its proponents said it was there to do - level the playing field for minorities, and compensate for historical discrimination.

There is now no area of interest, no part of government, no level of business or fame, that does not now have full free market, achievement-based representation of African Americans. Time for them to grow up, throw down the crutch of victimization, spit out the teat of Mother Government, and join the rest of America as unhyphenates.

On January 20, 2009, Obama will take the podium as President, and as part of his Inaugural Address, he should pledge to institute color-blind policies throughout his administration, and to work with Congress to abolish all other forms of ethnic segregation in all laws and regulations.

Odds of this actually happening: 50%

I think the odds are actually pretty good, depending on how greedy the race-baiters get. With Obama at the top, they will think it's open season for racial goodie-grabbing, featherbedding, and favoritism. Think Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans come to Washington, DC.

The more they threaten Obama's administration with scandal and mayhem (example A - the Community Reinvestment Act) the more he will want to keep them from building rival feifdoms and showing up on TV being frog-marched into the courthouse for tax fraud and embezzlement committed under Obama's banner. It was OK while Bush was in charge - it made him look bad no matter who it was that was being sleazy, and co-ethnics saw these shenanigans as simply gettin' their fair share back from The Man. Yes We Can!

Rahm Emmanuel will try to keep everybody in line, but he'll fail. Obama will have to get all Angry Father on everybody's ass "If you can't share, then nobody gets anything!"

Here's another easy one:

Only Obama Can Privatize Social Security and Health Care

Federal, state and union pensions and benefits are the elephant in the room of this financial crisis, as I have stated previously. These pensions and benefits packages amount to trillions in promises made by lawmakers and public administrators on behalf of the taxpayers to current and former employees. They are all based on the Wimpy philosphy - pay them something in the future for work performed today.

Actually, it is additional pay, on top of what these employees took home at the time they performed the work. The putative reasoning is to entice good workers to stay with the organization by promising that their future pay and benefits will increase, meaning that they will have more money after they retire.

This includes:

regular payments equal to a high fraction of their ending salaries for the rest of their lives (annuities),
medical insurance,
life insurance, and
other perqs, like purchasing clubs, employee discounts, travel and leisure discounts, etc.

All this was supposedly funded by deposits made on behalf of the employees. But legislators looking for dollars found it easy in boom times to reduce the number of dollars actually set aside, expecting that high returns from the stock market would make up the difference over time. This is the actuarial crap game played by all government budgeteers.

Well, all these bets have come up snake eyes. Between underfunding the pensions and over promising on benefits, government organizations of all sizes are finding they have laid out more markers than they can cover, and their current and projected bankrolls are no longer big enough to keep them in the game. For some, their entire current budgets are no longer enough to cover the deposits required to fund the promises they made. This means bankruptcy.

This same problem has crippled the Social Security system. Originally set up to cover a few thousand poor little old ladies and orphans, SS blossomed into a gargantuan Ponzi scheme, where politicians could promise the heavy-voting oldsters all kinds of future benefits without actually having to pay for them.

This worked for a long time because the demographics of the country made it easy to hide the true costs. Just a few dollars per paycheck from the tens of millions of baby boomers provided all kinds of cash for the few million qualifying greybeards. So much so that the politicians started using SS taxes for other spending. And when that wasn't enough, they started writing IOUs instead of depositing the money needed to cover future obligations.

All this was sold to the Boomers as a retirement savings and safety net program, providing them a guaranteed income once they retired, or if they became too disabled to work. So now that the Boomers are starting to cash in, and the demographics have turned around, there is not enough money to cover the IOUs.

Also, the financial meltdown has stripped off any camouflage left in the budget process, so there is no longer any way to further put off the day of reckoning. SS was known as the original third rail of politics, because to even talk about touching it was supposedly fatal. Now that the whole train has derailed, those worries are over.

Obama can fix all of this at one time. My plan is outlined in this post. In short, we cash out pro rata to their contributions everybody not already receiving benefits, closing all public pension systems and social security. You can take your proceeds as an annuity, or as tax deductions (up to a certain maximum per year) or as long maturity T-Bills or savings bonds. From that point forward, everyone is responsible for their own retirement savings.

Those currently receiving benefits will have them means-tested - i.e. wealthy (high net worth) people get less than poor people - and then benefits will be reduced to a level that can be covered by current SS taxes. As current beneficiaries die off, the SS taxes on everybody else will be reduced until the system closes out 30-40 years from now.

I would include in this process Medicare/Medicaid, and all government-funded health care.

Odds of this actually happening: 70%

Fantasy, you say? I don't think so. The only way to continue funding all this at anywhere near current levels would be to do what other socialist countries have done - let unemployment rise to 20% or higher, and take over key cash-producing commodity industries - petrochemicals, crops, mining, etc. Americans won't go for this.

I believe Obama will be blindsided and cornered by this crisis before his second term, forcing him to make choices based on reality. Like Bill Clinton with welfare, he'll have to sign on to conservative ideas and fix the problem if he hopes to be re-elected.

In the same way that the financial meltdown is (re) educating all Americans about the laws of finance and markets, the pension & health care funding meltdown will force everyone to face the music and fix the problem.

I believe this is a good thing. The sooner the better.

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DO THESE COSTS REALLY COMPARE?

I've run into these bail out cost comparisons in two places now - here and here. It looks like the source of the numbers is the same for both.

This schitck falls into the "Empire State Building - Statue of Liberty - Football Field - "We Can Put A Man On The Moon..."" category of soft-news analogies, as in "The amount of cloth required to cover Al Gore's embonpoint is equal to 3-and-a-half football fields."

So I have a question: How do these numbers compare as a % of (inflation- adjusted) GNPs? I'm going to go see if I can figure this out, but I bet some economy wonk will beat me to it.

In the mean time, go here, and enter 1900 as the initial year and 2007 as the end year. The result is a comparison of various flavors of GDP numbers. The 2007 per capita number is over 7 times that of 1900, but the 2007 raw GDP is over 650 times bigger.

So, are these big bailout numbers relatively bigger because they are really bigger (making them scary big), or because the scale of today's economy is bigger (making them annoying big)?

My point is that it took complete mobilization, war bonds, wholesale conversion of industries, and so on, to fund & run WWII, but all this bailout stuff seems to be confined to the virtual world of government finance. It seems to me that the Brobdingnagian dollar-cost size of these bailouts is not really causing that much hardship in the everyday lives of ordinary people.

I guess I should add "yet" to that last line.

Still, so far we seem to be coping by forgoing the luxuries - the Thanksgiving trip to Maui and the every-other-year SUV upgrade - rather than suffering like they did in the Thirties. I'm talking Wall Mart instead of Nordstroms, that kind of "sacrifice."

Also, are we simply correcting paper values falsely inflated over the last decade, i.e. putting the economy on a diet, or are we lopping off gangrenous limbs to save the body?

Of course, even these minor "sacrifices" will certainly affect wide swathes of the economy. Fewer trips to Maui mean cutbacks at the airlines, airports, car rental places, hotels, lei makers, poi grinders, and pineapple loppers. What we don't know is if this slowdown is enough to drive these people into poverty, or is it just a reduction in previous annual growth, which they can handle through similar proportional cutbacks of their own.

But my question stands - historically, are we on a diet, or are we amputating, as these comparisons suggest?

The answer seems to be - wait and see.

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A SAINT GETS A TASTE OF PURGATORY

My Sainted Mother has had to deal with some unpleasant roommates and various other challenges during her first two weeks in rehab. Fortunately, the staff and management at the Alamitos Belmont rehab hospital have responded rapidly and professionally to correct all problems, and Mom is now progressing very well indeed.

Physical therapy is going particularly well, especially compared to the less-than-satisfactory experience she had last time. This facility has excellent equipment and a permanent resident staff, so therapy is consistent and additive. And they took the time to review Mom's program with her so that she could fully participate.

I helpfully suggested playing the theme music from "Rocky" during her sessions, like our high school coaches did for us in the football weight room, but Mom has learned to ignore this kind of "help" from me.

Her surgeon is very pleased with her progress, and barring any unforeseen complications, she'll be home just before Christmas.

Like I said before - jigs & reels.

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FIELD RESEARCH REVEALS 3=2

About a month ago, I asked for your help finding our why there are three grades of gasoline. Now, thanks to the crack JBD investigative team, I can reveal that there are actually only TWO grades of gas produced by refiners.

Thanks to a wayward driver, one of the pumps at my local Mobil station (the one where White Lightning used to melt wrenches with car batteries to amuse local hoodlums) was damaged to the point where they couldn't get the cover panels back on. So they just wrapped it in clear plastic, awaiting repair.

Today I go to fill up (at $1.99 per gallon, fer chrissakes!) and being the Nosy Nate I am, I took the opportunity to check out the guts of the pump.

The pump has three grades available - 87, 89, 91. There is only one pump nozzle, and you press a button to select your grade. Lo and behold, my inspection of the pump guts reveals that there are only two input pipes coming up from the underground tanks, both feeding into individual filtered pumping meters, one marked LOW OCTANE, the other HIGH OCTANE. Their outputs then feed into a manifold (a mixing chamber), with a single pipe feeding from the manifold up to the nozzle.

So my guess is that if you select 87 or 91, the appropriate pump works at full speed to feed the nozzle. If you select 89, both pumps run at half speed, mixing the fuel in the manifold, delivering a mix that averages 89 octane.

This means that if you follow a driver who bought 91, and you pick 87, you get a little higher octane until the hose and manifold are flushed out. The same goes for buying 91, following someone who bought 87, but you get a small amount of low octane first.

I wonder if this system works the same for pumps that have individual nozzles for each grade. My guess is that most stations have moved to the one nozzle system, saving money by eliminating two nozzles. I'll have to start noticing this as I drive around. Inquiring minds want to know!

This makes a lot more sense to me. There are really just two grades available to serve both the low end and high end of the market. And for just a little more hardware cost up front, the oil companies earn an extra 10 cents a gallon from people who think slightly higher octane gives them value. My idea of injecting octane boost on the fly would be just as expensive as the current two-tank system.

While this also kills my idea of simply converting one nozzle to a flex-fuel ethanol/methanol feed, they could still easily convert one feed to pure ethanol/methanol, leaving the other at high octane gas. Ideally, this would be even better than just one or the other. You could then dial in the mix you wanted based on your vehicle, the comparative costs of the fuels, the kind of driving you're doing (local stop-go or long distance), vehicle load, etc.

A simple calculator (which many cars already have) would allow you to feed in these factors and give you the best mix to use for lowest cost per mile (MP$ vs. MPG). The pump system would then adjust the two pump speeds to feed the right ratio into the manifold, delivering to your tank the custom blend you want.

There! With the stroke of a key I've reduced our energy crisis by one-third. So now I can move on to perfecting the flyin' car.

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GOOD THING WE ELECTED A REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR

A British financial analyst rates California a higher bankruptcy risk than Slovakia.

Nice work, Arnie. Back to the movies for you.

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November 25, 2008

THE PROFESSOR HAS THE FLOOR

Thomas Sowell, always a must-read.

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MAKING IT UP AS THEY GO ALONG, PART #1,258

It's "science" stories like this that make it easy for me to group theoretical physicists with nutballs like fundamentalist hyper-religionists and the UFO Scientologists.

Their discovery? Hey, dudes, it's just some big sucking sound holding the universe together:

For now, DÃ¼rr's calculation shows that QCD describes quark-based particles accurately, and tells us that most of our mass comes from virtual quarks and gluons fizzing away in the quantum vacuum.

Got that? Most mass comes from non-existant subatomic particles. It says so, right here in our huge, complicated, theoretical computer program that is so impossibly big there is no way to actualy calculate any provable values, plain as the nose on your face. So give me more money to keep studying it and issuing bafflegab as science. These guys make Al Gore and his laughable "climate models" look like amateurs.

They end up this little exercise in science fiction with this howler, tossed out off-handedly as if to say "So long, and thanks for all the fish:"

So if the LHC confirms that the Higgs exists, it will mean all reality is virtual.

"... all reality is virtual." Period, full stop. That's why we spent all that money on that stupid Large Hadron Collider? To prove that nothing is real? Can I have the money instead?

We need to use some of those superstrings they're always going on about to tie these morons to a tree, in hopes that they will experience a little Newtonian bop on the head and bring them to their senses. Then once they learn to use Occam's razor, they can cut themselves free.

Hopefully, our oncoming Great Depression v2.0 will put loonies like this out of business, and force them to earn a living doing something valuable.

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LET THE TERRORISTS KILL THE PIRATES

There they were, the world-famous Somali pirates, wheezing on Johnny Depp's gig, earning props for their mad hijacking skillz, bagging millions in ransoms from various shipping concerns, and basking in the glow of celebrity.

Then they had to get cocky, and piss off the Saudis by hijacking an oil tanker. Bad move, you bucktoothed morons. The Saudis don't play nice, like all the Western types you've been shaking down. They drop dimes. Enjoy your head while you still have it, Mustafa.

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THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN, BUT APPARENTLY HOMOSEXUALITY CAN MAKE YOU DEAF

Are you all enjoying the endless tantrums by radical gay advocates over the passage of proposition 8? The threats and protests outside Mormon churches? The mau-mauing of Prop 8 contributors? The violations of civil rights in the name of special privileges?

What did you expect? Radicals are self-defined by their naughty public actions. They must act up and act out, smothering their insecurities in rage against their imaginary oppressors. They are not happy with their lives, and the only thing that makes them happy is expressing their misery as street theater.

Relax, gay people. Time is on your side. 4 or 8 years from now, the overwhelmingly pro-gay cohort of young voters will grow in size & influence, and the unprecedented high turnout for Obama by anti-gay blacks will not recur. The relentless bastardization of our language and culture will continue, and you will finally enjoy the legal designation of being "married" to your Other. So get started now on figuring out whatever else it is that is victimizing you so that you will have something new to protest against in the future.

In the mean time, watch in horror as a minuscule vocal sub-minority of your tiny nebulous self-declared minority will cement in the minds of everyone the stereotype of the insecure and mincing fop homosexual, screaming in frustration at his shih tzu and weeping uncontrollably when his favorite model loses on Project Runway.

Good marketing, guys. I recommend that you stick to interior design.

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STUFF THE MATTRESSES UNTIL MARCH

Following up on comments I made in previous posts, this article makes a good case for staying on the sidelines until the end of the first quarter next year.

If the current and future Fed continue to hand taxpayer money to losers, investors need to withhold their cash until the trend is reversed. If investments flow only to companies getting government bailouts, then profitability, open markets and free competition are corrupted. At some point in the future, the market will expose this corruption, and the pain will be twice what it would be if investors simply stay out of the market until the true survivors are known.

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WE COME TO BURY THE DETROIT 3, NOT RAISE THEM

Go read this, and then you'll know for sure why the Rigged Three need to go through Chapter 11.

As the Chief is fond of saying "Ford is getting higher quality ratings than Toyota and Honda." The post I link explains why spot excellence is not a justification for funding the overarching failed financial model.

There is no reason why Ford trucks, Jeeps, and other popular and efficient Chrysler and Chevy lines should not survive bankruptcy and emerge as profitable companies. It is fiction that bankruptcy will shutter all plants and cripple North American manufacturing. Those who are saying so are carrying the water of the UAW. I'm looking at YOU, Nancy Pelosi!.

For this rebirth to happen, however, the automakers need to shed the pension, wage and work rule burdens of their current UAW contracts, and to re-create themselves to be as lean at the management and sales levels as they are at the manufacturing levels. They have existing working models to copy - Toyota, Nissan, Honda, VW.

Because of the glut of cars in North America, all carmakers, along with their dealers and associated businesses, will go through hard times in the next 3-4 years.

If we let the market dictate the winners and losers, the winners will come out the other side lean, mean carmaking machines.

If we let the government pick winners, we'll only delay and worsen the pain. Lance the boil now, and let the healing begin.

Hat tip to Jeff Eckles for the economy.com link.

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HOW OBAMA CAN CREATE CONSERVATIVE GOODWILL

This is a nice short list of executive actions Obama could do to demonstrate that he believes his "working together " campaign rhetoric.

I'll check back in a couple of months to see how he's doing on this list.

So far, his supporters are not helpful.

And this guy thinks it will be Obama the Wolf in moderate sheepskin. Obama may try this, but there are too many Democrat grabbers out there for him to control. Also, our enemies have a funny way of upsetting moderate agendas. Just ask GWB.

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CUE THE JOADS? NOT HARDLY.

This post at Instapundit brings up the possibility of famine caused by our current financial straits. Putting aside the goofy "manna from Heaven" angle, why should any kind of financial meltdown cause famine?

Let's run down the main causes of famine, and see which of these will come about because Citigroup defaults or GM goes bankrupt:

War - This is an African specialty. Populations living on subsistence farming are driven from their homes by advancing hostilities, and become refugees in an area with no arable land, ready water, seed, fertilizer, etc. If things get really bad here in America, the worst we'll see in the way of militant action will be a union tantrum here and there, or a hippie-filled street protest, but nothing close to war, civil or otherwise, is possible. Especially with Their Man in the White House, the liberals and radicals will forebear. Everybody else will just work harder and share what they have, like Americans always do in the face of adversity.

Weather - Pace Al Gore, unless we get dramatic changes in climate starting right now, crop yields due to freezes, frost, heat waves, etc. in the next 5 years should be no different than the previous. And even if Gore is somehow correct (and he is not) global climate change may actually increase the North American growing season, and reduce the number of frosts and droughts. The only thing for sure about the weather is that we have no earthly idea what it will be. Anyway, why would shuttering Chrysler have any affect on weather?

Pestilence - Ditto above. What will change? Will the credit crunch make it harder to get fertilizer and insecticide, or will plummeting oil prices actually make them cheaper? Is there something about closing Bear Stearns or pink-slipping GM employees that increases the fecundity of grasshoppers or causes potato blight?

Drought - Reduced industrial output and a shrunken financial sector are not usually seen as harbingers of drought. On the contrary, increased focus on the basics of life should actually encourage better farming practices and soil conservation, and make more capital available to productive farmers. And if things do start getting dry for some reason, the easiest way to loosen up water resources is suspend whacko environmental rules, like those restricting water use in the Sacramento Delta becuae some invisible fish might get a sunburn. If you're still worried, water shortages may finally push us into nuclear powered or nanotube desalination and Israeli-style water conservation on farms (which is were most of our potable water is used), both of which would be beneficial long-term investments.

So where is all this talk of famine coming from? How could reduced financial activity cause food shortages in an efficient market? Beats me - I guess I'll have to keep an eye out for a good reason. Can you think of any?

Overall, I think food prices will come down with the cost of oil, and with people spending more of their limited cash on simple luxuries like barbecues, bake sales and ice cream (always a recession favorite) and less on gizmos and gadgets and gas guzzlers.

So eat up - there will be plenty.

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November 24, 2008

YOU MAKE ME FEEL LIKE A NATURAL - CITIZEN?

KC Jones writes in and asks:

JBD Oh Guru of politics, does this really have legs?
Supremes to review citizenship arguments

Short answer: no.

Long answer: Alan Keyes, who brought this action, is a political gadfly, like Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul: smart, great conservative ideas, good speakers, but totally unelectable.

Keyes jumped into the Illinois Senatorial campaign against Obama after the original Republican candidate and shoo-in Jack Ryan mysteriously had his sealed divorce papers made public, which chronicled his kinky requests of this former wife, ultrababe Jeri Ryan, who played Seven of Nine on one of the innumerable Star Trek sequel shows. (Similar dirty tricks happened to McCain and other previous Obama election opponents.) Keyes got trounced, Obama became Senator, and the rest is history.

Keyes has "standing" to file suit because he also ran for president this year, so he is more or less shooting in the dark to hose Obama. However, even if birth certificate irregularities were found, the Democrats would push through a law decreeing Obama to be a natural-born citizen. Similar questions were raised about McCain (who was born in the Panama Canal Zone) but that suit is moot.

UPDATE: Taranto agrees.

UPDATE 2: This guy is humping a leg.

Posted by: JBD at 02:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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November 22, 2008

STRESS - CAUSES, SYMPTOMS, CURES

Causes:

Mom in the hospital? Check.
Big deadlines at work? Check.
Lots of unknowns threatening those deadlines? Check.
Petty personalities obstructing progress? Check.
More food than exercise? Check.
Dry, hot, smoky Santa Ana winds? Check
Financial uncertainty? Check.
Obama gleefully selecting morons? Double check.

Symptoms:

Fatigued but sleepless? Check.
Papulopustular Rosacea flare-up? Check.
Snappishness? Check.
Increased mistakes & errors? Check.

Cures:

Mom improving dramatically? Check.
Sleep Number Bed and 3 days off work to sleep in? Check.
Marine layer, aka Catalina Eddy? Check.
Physical activity - walks, housework, a Los Al football game? Check
The Love of a Goddess? Double check.
The Love of Gooses? Triple check.

My natural reaction to stress is to talk and argue, bluster and bully, to try and dominate or control the cause, as amply documented on my Myers-Briggs.

This tendency is fine for handling lazy Irish farm hands, or for dealing with fellow Viking warriors, or for surviving invasions in the hills of Monaghan in Medieval times. Not so good for building industrial vending machines in 2008, or for dealing with a loving family.

So I internalize stress and try to keep a happy face (my adaptation to stress) as befits my role at work and as a dad. I also have a very noisy brain, which kicks into high gear when I have lots to think and worry about. This means that no matter how tired I am, or how comfortable the bed, there's always a party going on in the frontal lobes.

This is good for a lot of reasons, mostly because I often have my best insights and solve my worst problems during this nocturnal internal cable shout show. I can usually catch up on Sunday morning, my day off work when I can sleep in late enough for the REM dreams to clean the psychological house.

My nose is my best overall barometer of stress. My inherited hypertension used to be more volatile and therefore more predictive, but it stabilized 20 years at high normal since I started severely limiting caffeine and hard booze, so even on my worst days it's still OK. But put together a couple of the causes, and my nose goes to total WC Fields mode.

I have no idea how the Chief, who has 10 times as much to worry about, handles these same stressors. God love him, though, he does. He's the coolest customer under pressure I've ever seen.

Posted by: JBD at 03:58 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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November 09, 2008

THE GOOSE ROCKS THE HOUSE

Do you want to see who will be running your life in the future? No, not the Obamacrats. I'm talking computer geeks, the Joe the Plumbers of the Information Age.

Here is the Goose and his team at the software contest last week. The more balloons you have, the better you are doing. The Goose (far left) is next to one of the other two guys on his team. They have so many balloons that he looks like the Lawn Chair Balloonist.

Here is the Goose and his team accepting their 3rd place award. The Goose is far right, blue t-shirt, eyes closed, digging the moment, Next to him is his professor, Dr. Harrington. Who does he remind you of?

OK, before you get too loose with the geek comments, let's not forget a previous contest where the Goose was on the championship team.

CIF Division 1 Championship Football team, that is.