Cobb

Welfare vs Unemployment Tolerance

Browsing David Goldman's blog about 22% underemployment I wondered about such an eventuality as 20% actual unemployment. At what point would supporters of a Welfare State actually start to behave like the investor class?

Any businessman knows that an increase in the entitlements of the welfare state undermines his business by making it easier on the unemployed and by raising taxes to pay for such programs. Conservatives regularly bark and scream about any tax increases as if the incremental bits will impoverish them permanently. But I think anyone can envision a scenario like the following:

I'm Joe Liberal and I have a commitment to a fair society. So I want to see Elroy Grabbag become a productive member of society. So I vote for welfare to get Elroy out of the gutter, and free health care for him to stay healthy. I don't mind paying more taxes. It's the price you pay for a fairer society. 

Last year I made 75k and paid about 25% in taxes. Meaning I take home about 56k. Comfy. I look at Elroy and realize that with his welfare and free health care, he's getting for free what I have to pay for. Still, I take pride in my responsibility to my fellow man - I mean, through my taxes, it's not like I invite the guy over for dinner. But now that unemployment is 20% - there's more Elroys around the place. And they're all stuck just like me because there are no new jobs and no growth in the economy. 

In fact, my local economy is doing lousy and we're knee deep in Elroys, but it's the Federal tax that's paying. So Sam Liberal in Georgia got a raise, and me, 10% of our company was laid off, meaning I have to do somebody else's job at work in addition to mine, and I'm lucky to have the job.

Well, crap. I'm not putting Elroy through college, but he's not becoming a productive member of society. He's just using my welfare and health care. I know it's not much, but I'd kinda rather have the extra dollars for my own family - because now I see how I could help my kids do better than I did. Like maybe get them to move to Georgia.

At some point, but probably only during a recession, does the idea take hold that there is no easy way to claw back the entitlements you gave up when life was easy and an incremental tax increase was not a problem. That should be especially evident now. Whether or not your party is responsible for the screwups in the economy which have resulted in the government being deeply in debt, you're going to have to pay for it. And the satisfaction one may get from seeing their socially responsible investments being managed by government programs will become tainted.

Furthermore, people ought to recognize that they cannot fight forever. You will one day turn your back on government and it will stab you. The reasonable thing to presume is that you are smarter and more possessed of integrity than the political proxies who would spend your dollars for you.

Besides, whom is your commitment to, Washington or Elroy?

Popular Crap I'm Ignoring

Every once in a while there is popular crap that I cannot avoid. And since I'm a bit bored with making comic strips, which I used to do with extraordinary snark, I've had to come up with a way to tell my readers that I don't care. So this is it.

I don't know who or what Lady GaGa is. Nor do I have any idea what is so interesting or not about some movie called 'Precious'. I cannot tell the difference between Luke and Owen Wilson. 

I have this thing called Surchur. Well, everyone does. So I go to Surchur.com and find out what's going on this very minute. So I will see these things, and if somebody asks me about it during the course of a day, then I may formulate an opinion. Amanda Knox, for example is up on Surchur and I have no idea if this is or is not an important person. 

If it gets to the point where it lasts a week or more then I'll probably do an Obligatory Seriousness. But sometimes I just say nothing because I'd just be flogging something stupid to death which is beneath what I ought to be about. 

Oh yeah. And no I don't watch Glen Beck or any TV news and I haven't listened to Rush Limbaugh since Operation Chaos. 

Paglia on Religion

Holy smokes. Paglia sides with intelligent conservatives in the Culture Wars. And she's right. You simply must listen to this entire thing because it's something you've never heard an American atheist say. 

I find it very interesting that at this particular moment that I'm starting into my review of the Arts. And her view of Architecture is rather like mine - I see it as something we still do well. Interesting that she goes back to the filmmaking of the post WW2 era to communicate her admiration for American art, though she does it to make one particular point about the artistry of religion rather than as the greatest exemplar of contemporary art. Or does she?

Camel Jockeys

Wouldn't it be fun to know which of the 8500 banks in the US are strong and which are weak?

Imagine, if you will, that the stock price of all the banks that are publicly traded were out of sync with the way that bank examiners and senior executives of the bank actually rated their performance? Imagine that a bank that looks strong to the public, based upon publicly available information was in fact startlingly weak and that disclosure of the information to bank examiners was the only thing that kept consumers from making a run on that bank?

Well you don't have to imagine because it's already been imagined. Actually, it has been realized on a need-to-know basis. And guess who doesn't need to know? You, peasant!

But I'm helping you know, because there are other ways of knowing things by recognizing the actions of people who actually know.

Several academic studies have examined whether and to what extent private supervisory information is useful in the supervisory monitoring of banks. With respect to predicting bank failure, Barker and Holdsworth (1993) find evidence that CAMEL ratings are useful, even after controlling for a wide range of publicly available information about the condition and performance of banks. Cole and Gunther (1998) examine a similar question and find that although CAMEL ratings contain useful information, it decays quickly. For the period between 1988 and 1992, they find that a statistical model using publicly available financial data is a better indicator of bank failure than CAMEL ratings that are more than two quarters old.

Hirtle and Lopez (1999) examine the usefulness of past CAMEL ratings in assessing banks' current conditions. They find that, conditional on current public information, the private supervisory information contained in past CAMEL ratings provides further insight into bank current conditions, as summarized by current CAMEL ratings. The authors find that, over the period from 1989 to 1995, the private supervisory information gathered during the last on-site exam remains useful with respect to the current condition of a bank for up to 6 to 12 quarters (or 1.5 to 3 years). The overall conclusion drawn from academic studies is that private supervisory information, as summarized by CAMELS ratings, is clearly useful in the supervisory monitoring of bank conditions.

Academics are people who know but have no money to put where their mouths are. I like the way that Taleb deals with them, but that's merely tangential here. My point is that CAMEL ratings exist and they would add clarity to our issues of ringfencing troubled banks, except that you and I cannot see them.

Last time I checked, I heard there was a shortage of bank examiners. Hmmm. I wonder how much that pays.

Bernanke's Crime

The surface cracks.

Chris Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics has sounded the alarm and I heard it. All this time we've been remarking about the incredible expansion of the Fed's balance sheet to several trillion, I didn't know that the way it was done was essentially illegal. It should have been done through the Treasury.

Now I seem to recall that there was much agreement that Paulson et al did not have the intellectual firepower of Bernanke and Geithner and so the Fed was doing what only it could do. But brainpower vs the law should result in the the law winning - especially at this level. 

The proper way for the Fed, who also alone may have the purchasing power, was for them to purchase Treasury certificates and the strict set of instruments that they are allowed by law to purchase as issued by the Treasury. The Treasury would then have the dubious assets of the troubled banks on *their* books, not on the Federal Reserve's. It matters which way these things are financed. 

OK they got away with it this time, but next time:

 The FRBNY not only used but abused the Fed's power's under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. In AIG, the FRBNY under Tim Geithner invoked the "unusual and exigent" clause again and again, but there is a serious legal question whether the then-FRBNY President and the FRBNY's board had the right to commit trillions without any due diligence process or deliberate, prior approval of the Fed Board in Washington, as required by law. The financial commitments to GS and other dealers regarding AIG were made always on a weekend with Geithner "negotiating" alone in New York, while Chairman Bernanke, Vice Chairman Donald Kohn and the rest of the BOG were sitting in DC without any real financial understanding of the substance of the transactions or the relationships between the people involved in the negotiations.

Was Tim Geithner technically qualified or legally empowered to "make deals' without the prior consent of the Fed Board? We don't think so. Shouldn't there have been financial fairness opinions re: the transactions? Yes.

We understand that the first order of business in any Fed audit sought by members of the Senate opposed to Chairman Bernanke's re-appointment is to review the internal Fed legal memoranda and FRBNY board minutes supporting the AIG bailout. These documents, if they exist at all, should be provided to the Senate before a vote on the Bernanke nomination. Indeed, if the panel established to review the AIG bailout and related events investigates the issue of how and when certain commitments were made by the FRBNY, we wouldn't be surprised if they find that Geithner acted illegally and that Bernanke and the Fed Board were negligent in not stopping this looting of the national patrimony by Geithner, acting as de facto agent for the largest dealer banks in New York and London. 

Or, why not a clawback now?

An Offhanded Dismissal of Today's Black Nationalists

A thoughtful reader asks questions in italics:

1.      As much as black people talk about black pride, why is the Black Nationalist Movement relegated to nothing more than a fringe movement.

Because there are three flavors of black nationalism right about now. The first and basically the only flavor that matters is black cultural nationalism. This is a soft kind of position that basically adheres to the idea that black culture is all that and Elvis was a vulture. You could think of the leader of the black cultural nationalists as Spike Lee. Cult-Nat types are basically interested in investing as much value, time and treasure into blackness, primarily out of love for blackness. It's all about the flavor and being immersed in it. All the cult nationalists range from your basic India Irie to the edge of hard afrocentrists. Any black dude who wears dreads is one of them unless he does it strictly for the chicks, including white chicks.

The second flavor of black nationalist is the separatist. Your Nation of Islam, New Black Panther types. The survivalists. The ones who rents Rosewood more than once. These types don't last long in the daylight, but you'll find them in most every black neighborhood. They'd never live anywhere but black neighborhoods. Sometimes they masquerade as Muslims, got to give the black power handshake, calls blackfolks Kings and Queens, thinks that Neely Fuller and Cress-Welsing are deep thinkers. Rarely do they keep their 'slave' names. Separatists aren't always militant, but they're almost always racist. As soon as you hear one say, "black people can't be racist", you know you've got a live one. Ask them about Tawana Brawley or Nat Turner... and bring a lunch.

The third flavor is a kind of black nationalist is the kind of neo-nationalist. They will simply say they are 'merely' pro-black, but they are exclusively pro-black, specifically about recycling black dollars. What they want most is black power for black people with black money, because by and large they are convinced that the world works in an ethnic mercantilist way. These are a class of bounders beholden to no tradition who will call themselves 'nouveau niggers' because they really have no other idea of what a black man with some power and money is like. They think that they are more reality based than the others, but they're playing an ahistorical game too.

All black nationalists think that racial integration is an iffy proposition. They will always prefer Malcolm X to MLK, and with some exceptions on the neo- side, always prefer Karl Marx to Adam Smith. They will sing the praises of black unity and are generally pissed that 'we cant get our thing together like the Jews' or whomever. What binds all black nationalists together is a sense of shame they feel for the race for which something MUST be done. And then you listen to their plan..


2.      To your knowledge, has their philosophy ever been tested (i.e. its followers win government office and successfully implemented any of its tenants)

Yes. It's a smashing success in black history departments all over America, and nowhere in Africa or anywhere else. Every black nationalist with any organizational dollars can be traced to one degree of separation from a black bookstore, black studies curriculum, or black media outlet. They all have to stay plugged into the continual intemolectual spew otherwise reality would knock some sense into their collectivist theories.  But outside of that same old mau-mau game, nobody is making any money being a black nationalist outside of the Nation of Islam, and the chitlin circuit that collects speaker fees from gullible undergrads.


3.      If not, would not cities such as Detroit and New Orleans provide a platform for their philosophy? Why haven’t they taken the lead on rebuilding these cities?

Because the political end of black nationalism is a dead end. Whether black political activists with a nationalist bent like it or not, white liberal Democrats have no patience for all that bullshit. Not that white liberal Democrats are not full of it themselves, but they know how to run political campaigns and control votes and dollars, and without them black nationalists have no organization, no infrastructure, no say. Hell, black nationalists don't even have a list of names of black nationalists.

That doesn't mean that black nationalist sentiments of the cultural, separatist and neo- strain don't matter in political contests and rhetoric. They do. Black nationalist words speak much louder than black nationalist actions, and those words count, and they appeal to African Americans on the fence - like memes of Obama getting shot. Or in defense of Mumia and Tookie. Or hateration against Obama as 'half-black'. But none of that influence is permanent. In the end, there is NO black nationalist organization of substance in America, meaning with money in the bank. (as compared to say... Ebony and Jet,  or Sucka Free Sunday) http://www.mtv.com/shows/sucker_free/series.jhtml

The most important thing to understand about Black Nationalism is that it has always battled with Christianity in general and the Black Church in particular. And it has always lost. That's really all you need to know.

4.      It is my theory that the Black Nationalist Movement is best left to those who live in their momma’s basement and quote Prof. George James to hide the fact that they just don’t want to work.

Oh plenty of them work, and they work hard. It's just that the work that they work doesn't work.

Sufficient Divinity

What a surprise it is to find in Taleb the ends of certain of my thoughts. On the plane over here to snowy Cleveland I had a couple brainstorms. Here is the killer question that occupies me for the moment.

Wait.

First of all, let me give you Taleb's take on religion which is squarely in line with mine. He asserts that religious people deal better with incomplete information. And he also suggests that those who are normalized by non-religious rationality tend to be overconfident. I think his term is 'empistemic arrogance' which is squarely Conservative as in Oakeshott.

So the question that popped into my head some 36,000 feet over the midwestern US was "What is sufficiently divine?" As soon as I thought it, Martin Amis' 'The Janitor on Mars' came to mind. There is much I do not recall about the story and will not do it justice in my brief description, but the salient bits are as follows.

A robot lives several dozen miles beneath the surface of Mars and comes to the surface to speak to Earth. The Martians who built that robot were essentially wiped out in a war with an advanced civilization from beyond the Solar System hundreds of millions of years ago. Earth itself was considered a backwater, rather like the growth on a discarded sandwich, and in all of human evolution it has not developed to the level of intelligence of this robot, which is itself only a planet janitor. The janitor is surly and dismissive of human science and technology and answers all of the great scientific mysteries in his boredom, but to no avail because Earth is doomed to be destroyed as part of some bargain made by the loss of Mars millions of years before. There is nothing the human race can do in its appeal to this robot to secure its survival - the robot is merely following the orders of its creator, who themselves were destroyed by an even greater civilization.

Is such a robot sufficiently divine to be considered God? If it can singlehandedly save the Earth from destruction or destroy it, what obligation would humanity have to figure out how to get it to be merciful? If the robot promised to build a warp-drive transport that would take a continent's fill of human scum to some other bog in the heavens, how many virgins would you sacrifice?

The point of this argument is that it is only rational to consider the destruction of mankind to determine mankind's moral obligation to itself. The ultimate value of life and meaning on Earth is best determined in light of such thought experiments. I think that Taleb would argue that this is what religion has been doing, or attempting to do since its invention.

In that respect, it is a fair suggestion to say that man is the only creature that thinks about God and then consequently re-evaluates the meaning of his own life. It doesn't matter whether that God is 'God' or a robot janitor on Mars which is only some idiot fraction of the powers that be in our own galaxy. It matters that it is sufficiently divine such that in contemplation of it's powers and intentions we must consider the fate of our species.

Next time somebody tells you global warming isn't a religion, you have a new answer.

That irresistible dig is not my point however. My point is that intelligent people are making incredible excuses and evading that which established religion is in order to create yet another religion in the guise of not-religion. They are hamstrung by the fact that their god must be provable. They are trying to invent something non-divine which will justify their frameworks as proper for estimating the mankind's moral obligation to itself.

Their answer will inevitably be war.

Galco Saturday

The best thing about Galco's is that getting home and opening up the sodas is not anti-climatic. In case you've been under a rock (which is often a good place to be when it's raining Tiger Woods stories), you should know about Galco's Soda Pop Shop. I was made aware a couple weeks ago, and now I hear there's an NPR story. Today there was even a book signing. First to the video that hipped me to the deal.

When I found that this guy and his joint were just 15 miles away from my house, I knew that I'd be making several trips. And so this weekend was the first.

First thing was that I had to herd the cats of my family which is getting more difficult to do by the day. We managed to get everyone together by 11am from sleepovers and sleepins and take the Pasadena freeway up to North Figeuroa into Highland Park. We made a quick stop at BofA and then turned left on York and headed to Avenue 54. That's because the Estrella Taco Truck is there. Yes a taco truck. The al pastor burrito (no guac, no sour cream) is a perfect balance. Just spicy meat held together in a perfect tortilla with the right amount of sauce, onion, & cilantro. You know there are still Americans who don't know what cilantro is. I know, hard to believe.

We wheeled back down York and pulled into Galco's. A bunch of dudes were hanging out in front eating and drinking sodas. In a glance I could tell they were either YouTubers or Oxy students. But it was the second incongruous group I'd seen in this East LA style 'hood. My family of course was the first.

Inside it is as bright and cheerful as in the color drenched video. Except the florescents weren't giving the color balance you saw in the video. But the excitement of seeing candy and soda from long lost memory was just as extraordinary as you would expect. The proprietor was there, and a bunch of employees were busily restocking shelves and pointing folks in interesting directions. The photographer took a shine to my kids. I grabbed a cart and went at it.

It took me a while to figure out what Nese, the owner, was on about when he talked about CRV and the monopolization of recycling by Coke and Pepsi. But by the time I got in the store I had figured it out. As soon as I saw a bottle of BubbleUp I remembered that I used to put them in my wagon and return them to Boys Market on Crenshaw for a few pennies each. It was the market that paid me the money and got me back in the store. They sent the bottles back to the bottler who washed them and reused them. Well the accounting geniuses at Coke and Pepsi realized that if they could get a good enough deal on recycled glass, it would be cheaper for them to make new bottles than to wash and relabel the old ones, especially as you realize many of the bottles were painted. So they argued for the support of CRV and that took their rewashing factories out of the supply chain. And it took the markets out too. So now the states run the CRV programs and they get the kickback from the bottlers, not the markets. You can argue that it's just a penny or two per bottle, but those pennies add up, and none of them go to the Galcos of the world.

But going to Galco's is not about sour grapes. It's about Nugrape and Big Red and Faygo Rock&Rye and Kackapoo Joy Juice and all those old brands you thought were gone. It's about crazy flavors you never knew existed much less made into a soda. I can't even imagine a Dandelion and Burdock soda, but there it is right at eye level on the shelf.

Moreover Galco's is about experiencing the kind of long tail personal retail that is a very rare thing in this country. There's a man running that store who reminds us that quality doesn't necessarily mean rarified and overpriced. Some of my favorite business success stories are about the man who didn't do a lot of market research or focus groups on a product, but instead assumed that the customer shared his own passion. Those guys don't often make the big time, but they make the 99th percentile because they can control the details.

You wouldn't think that there are details in soda, but there absolutely are. In fact, soda is exciting again. We've all been dumbed down with the mass market sodas, because as soon as you open the top on one of these rare brands you smell it. When is the last time you appreciated the smell of a soda before you chugged it down? I'm telling you it's a new experience. Not just shopping for the stuff, which is a delight in itself, but actually drinking it down.

My new favorite soda is Curiosity Cola. It's an astonishing drink. If you've ever had an IBC or a Jones, then you know how different a good soda can be from the mainstream brands. In my book the Fentimans are up a significant notch from them. I tried it with some Captain Morgan and it's an entirely new drink. Can't wait to taste it with Jack. Next I am dying to make a cucumber martini.

Now it's just like me to become a soda snob, but instead I have this wave of sadness in the realization of how we've all been ripped off and deprived of one of life's simple pleasures. It ought to be a no-brainer to go to the store and marvel at what kinds of goods are available after the culmination of thousands of years of beverage making. But we've just been swallowing swill. Galco's selection (and they're supplying restaurants too) is waking us up to something marvelous and oh so sweet. Tell your favorite bartender to get on board. 

It doesn't stop there. Galco's has old school candy. Yes including Nikl Nip wax lips and candy cigarettes. They have Flicks, Chick O Stick and Fruit Stripe gum. They've got C Howard's Violets, Razzles, Pop Rocks and Giant Pixy Stix. It's like going back in time. 

I expect Galco's to get slashdotted, and that's cool. He's not great because he's small, but because he's great.

Next Tuesday

Americans should do well to remember Wimpy, the hamburger scarfing cadge from the Popeye cartoon. No matter what day it was, Wimpy would always be asking for money for a hamburger for which he would gladly repay you on next Tuesday. Except that he never did. Something Popeye did would always come up distracting him from the collection, and Wimpy would grow fatter and wiser. No matter how much spinach he ate, Popeye never got his money back from Wimpy.

It turns out that Popeye is like most human beings when it comes to envisioning next Tuesday. According to the Long Now Blog a neuroscientist has shown that we don't pay much attention to consequences of the far future.

..the further an event lies in the future, the less people care about it. So if offered $100 now or $500 18 months from now, many people still take the $100. The consequence is that there’s little difference between President Obama promising 18 months from now versus 18 years from now. In the human ken, both are obscured in the mists of the distant future.

Maybe this is why it pays to punish your kids now instead of, 'next time for sure'. But it also reminded me of what I just read in Gladwell's new collection of old essays. It might be that Gladwell was the one who introduced us to Taleb. I never heard about him much before he published his Black Swan book when I started listening to Bloomberg about 18 months ago. But Gladwell wrote about his contrarianess in 2002.

Taleb's 'Emperica' investment strategy is brilliant by my reckoning, primarily because it so much resembles gambling. I hate gambling but I am illogical about it. I love investing but I'm illogical about it. Investing, according to popular wisdom means collecting interest on capital, and this is how fund managers present their products to the investing public. How do you make a small fortune? Start off with a large one. Let your money work for you by parking it away and letting it gain interest. All passive voice kind of stuff organized around a mental model in our minds that's very comforting. So we expect that a successful portfolio (but let's not deconstruct 'balanced portfolio' just yet) will give us some reasonable return in steady increments over time. That's what we grok to be a 'sound investment'. That a stock investment should produce 'revenues' like a growing business, in even predictable measures along a fairly narrow confidence interval. We like the sound of stuff like 2% per year.

Empirica turns that on its head by using hedges that normally lose money during normal times but pay off wildly during unpredictably chaotic times. In other words, Empirica plays longshots. Not just longshot winners but longshot events. Except it does so without doubling down. So you just pay to play what amounts to something that pays off like a life insurance policy on somebody else's life.

You just might have to wait until next Tuesday to get your moola. We don't like the sound of that.. Maybe you get 300% in four to seven years, but on average you lose money every day.

I like that kind of investment vehicle. Especially when I hear people who sound like they get paid to sound like they know what they're talking about tell audiences that recovery is just around the corner.

What I've just discovered is that Taleb digs Oakeshott. Actually, the way Taleb put it, Oakeshott is an intellectual hero of his. That's what kind of Conservative I am people. Just in case you missed it. Epistemological Modesty.

BTW: Here is Taleb's Paper Bleed or Blow Up. (h/t The Maanga)

Download Bleedblowup

Taleb Spells it Out

A couple notes. Taleb mentions the Zingales plan debt to equity swap for unforclosed homeowners and all the wrong things Obama is doing having effectively reversed the rewards of capitalism. Again this is perfectly sensible and yet we were right about why Zingales' plan has not materialized. There are no incentives for Congress and the crew in Washington to do the right thing. Amazing.

Memphis 29, Liverpool 22

"Elvis was a hero to most."
-- Chuck D.

According to Cecil Adams, this is true. But was Elvis better? No.

This question is tangential to an N-Word conversation that never ceases, and since I recorded a YouTube on it a few years back, I'm somewhat bound to answer recurrent questions. Part of my answer, then as now, is why would you follow the sub-culture of disreputable people? I mean if Elvis stole and 'white' people loved a thief, how upset can you get about that popularity? Obviously some people want to make a point about living in Babylon - the whole country's a sty, yeah we've heard that before. Except that there in fact was a civil war and blacks didn't, by and large, have to participate in their own violent manumission. In other words, there's always a better 'white' sub-culture. There's always a bigger fish and Cobb's Rule #4: Civilization is where you put it.

Bottom line, why get mad? If you hate the people who love Elvis, then love the people who love The Beatles or Hendrix or Muddy Waters or Beethoven or Miriam Makeba. Just don't be lumping them all together. Get in where you fit in.

There's another line from another song that I find more appropriate as the days go by. What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away. And this is what goes through my head whenever I hear people hating on Elvis. He was only a hero to the people you hate the most, not most people.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

This film is so unbelievably awful that I'm glad I stole it. Well, I didn't exactly steal it. I got it for free from a friend who ripped it. I don't know how he ripped it, but I'm glad as hell he did the normal version rather than the sort where various people involved in making the film blab over it. Which reminds me to tell you that 'A Scanner Darkly' is complete hooey as a film and if it had any chance of being anything beyond the book, that chance has been ruined by Dick's daughter telling me about some character her father lived with who thought he was crawling with bugs, and thus 10 minutes of film leaves me permanently disgusted.

That's about all the time I took with Sarah Marshall because in a fraction of that I could see that the reason she left naked boy had something to do with the complete ass who was kissing people in the airport in order to 'do something' about global warming. 

I am disconnected to the Christian who wants to show pity on the poor misguided freaks who are the subject and object of this excrescence. Sorry, you'll just have to take your case directly to the saints. As for me, I'm not having it. And if the flick is rated < R, I hope I can show enough of it to my children to disgust them as well. Or maybe not. No. Wrong. You don't send your son to a whore to show him what not to do. You say, trust me, you don't want to subject your immortal soul to that sort of radioactivity. It won't kill you straight out but the cell damage is real. 

Attention all devout Muslims in defense of Hasan, I understand exactly where you think you're coming from. If I believed that American men were like this asshat, I'd want to shoot them up too. I'd sign up to exterminate the kind of cretin who lays a woman in a one night stand and then immediately bursts into tears thinking about playing Dance Dance Revolution with his former babe. If this was the substance of American culture, I'd out takfir you, Abu. But let me help you understand something, and even abet your cause. Credits. At the end of every American movie are the names of the people responsible, and if you watch enough of them, and you have the appropriate software, you can trim down your lists to an appreciable dimension. They are still Them, and most people want Them put away. 

Fortunately for all of us, Them are particularly sensitive to the blistering heat of righteous criticism, which I am exercising here. There's no need for explosives, a finely place excoriation will suffice. And really, I've already wasted too much time thinking about it. 

Art at Cobb

I'm looking for a new wallpaper for my windows desktop. I ambled across a Picaso and then went to Guernica. It reminded me that my cousin had a very large print on his wall in Brooklyn, and I suppose that says a bit about my cousin and my family. I doubt that he still has it in Madison where he's raising his family. But it also reminded me that I would be remiss in my review of Western Civilization, that thing our Improper Empire is involved in defending against errant Islamists and other enemies of liberty, if I were not to consider our arts at length. 

We already know that popular film and music are degraded, music much more than film but film nonetheless. I can't imagine that there has been a significant and serious play on Broadway since Angels in America, although I didn't even bother to see that. People die of disease. So what? But we are geniuses when it comes to graphic art and architecture. The 'design' area of Western Civ is alive and kicking, and fewer places more innovative than videogames despite their mostly awful cultural content. Movies can be visually arresting, and I tend to watch them for that quality as well as their mix of storytelling through the medium though again, most of the stories are awful. (Remind me to compare and contrast 'Gran Torino' with 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall'). 

So I'm thinking back to Picaso and his peers, and fortunately, there is a top 200 poll that I have found at the Telegraph. I figure I'll go through it. I do so in parallel to my good virtual friend Gerard over at American Digest as an effort to find Something Wonderful over here. 

One of the very first CD-ROMs I ever bought, back when they called them CD-ROMs was a collection of several hundred paintings complete with text and audio narrations on their significance. I wore that sucker down, and I wonder where it is. But there were some extraordinary images from around the world and my favorites remain clear in my mind's eye without any particular attribution. 

Today it is not completely ironically, a videogame by the name of Assassin's Creed II that impels me to jump into a little online art collection, appreciation and criticism. As part of one of that game's side quests, collecting art for one's villa is included. So I must travel to Forli, Venezia and Firenze to pick up bargains. I recognized a few of the paintings and so it piqued my curiosity. What must there be on Google artwise? Well, quite a bit.

Back in 1986 when Xerox bet one of its farms on VAX technology, we used to wonder if anybody on the planet would scan documents at higher resolutions than 600dpi. It seemed, at the time, to be out of the question. And so Eeyore and his doubtful cousins ran the day about matters of online art appreciation saying it'll never happen. At this moment in Moore's Law's run (amok it seems) isn't it odd that as GE is in the process of selling NBC to Comcast what those megalomaniacs have in mind is piping more crap like Iron Man in HD? Now I enjoy watching metal monsters spit fire at Muhajadeen as much as the next barbarian, but there's a limit. And of late I am becoming fond of mocking those who capitalize on the tastes of peasants and then later pretend that they are too big to fail. So right about now I think it most appropriate to consider what efforts there are to retain and represent some of mankind's better visual creations onto the Internet, the second greatest creation of the 20th century (behind all that's nuke). 

So it begins. 

The Day Capitalism Died

Next year I'm going to get back into the market. It has been about 9 years since I dabbled. I had a nice little pile back then and I did will with a conservative portfolio through the times of irrational exuberance, like everybody else. Except I was very skeptical as I learned about the different classes of investors and came to understand what professional traders know that day traders do not. There are indeed some rigs in the game. All that said, I've put away some money and it's time to make it work. And I'm not going to be so edgy that I need to beat 4 percent.

So I started looking at ETFs and I found RSX. No it's not a Mazda, it's a Russian fund, and it's doing damned well. I sent that googled page over to my brother Doc who is carping about unemployment. And an old idea creeped into my head. Capitalism doesn't die just because the man running the government is a socialist.

It would seem that by definition, anyone dumb enough to be a socialist is less intelligent than Adam Smith. I exaggerate socialist stupidity, but Adam Smith understood something about the greed of men, socialists only understand the greed of businessmen. Limiting the greed of businessmen but giving everything by law over to the appetites of the masses is indeed a formula for self-destruction. This is why command economies that survive restrain the masses to an extraordinary degree. It doesn't auger very well for those who start in the peasantry but are clever enough to figure out how merchants make money. Where's the incentive for them to learn? Where's the law that protects them as they do? 

Just imagine the scenario. The great leader says "Who want's to make more money than the average prole?" Mee!" The hands fly up by the millions. "OK", he says. "I'm going to pass legislation to get a program started that will get you the government pass you will need to be a part of the production for the people." Yeah, right behind the cousins of everybody who's writing the legislation. The lottery is held and a new protected class is created, just like that. Free men don't wait for government legislation and business programs to figure out how to make money with their fellow men. They scheme about it over a beer at the local pub or turn their living room into a smoke filled room or sit up late nights in the dorm or walk into Mr. Peterson's corner store and ask for work. They read the Wall Street Journal or Motley Fool. They even try out for game shows. There are a million ways to make a buck and those dreams and schemes never stop percolating. Cigarettes trade in prison, sandwiches trade on the schoolyard. Every man is a market, you merely need to find his price.

Governments will always have some role in setting rules and regulating markets. But markets are between and among men and have always been because it is our nature to trade selfishly to eventual mutual benefit. Some men are clever traders and others are fools, but they are motivated by the same thing - their very nature as human beings. That never changes no matter what the balance of power. Capitalism dies when the human spirit dies. Anybody want to take a wager on when that happens?