Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Economics Update

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Real estate is still trending worse. We have the New York Times writing about how the troubles have gone global.*

We also are now seeing discounts up to 60% on the last sale price in bank auctions on properties in South Florida.

And it won’t get better soon, because when pollsters ask about buying a home, respondents reply, “What??? buy a house now??? Are you out of your bloody mind???“.

Energy prices are surging, with oil closing at a new all time high, $111.76/bbl.

Also, it looks like Wachovia is hemorrhaging, and so is cutting dividends and planning to offer stock for much needed capital.

*As an aside, I’m not surprised that Ireland is in this select group. The “Celtic Tiger” has always seemed to me to be closer to Thailand and Indonesia than the rest of the EU with its prosperity being almost completely driven by low wages and real estate, and Spain is a close second on this. This is not to say that they will become 3rd world countries, but that they both may end up far closer to EU members like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Croatia than they had previously imagined.†
†Mass flows of speculative capital always produce a nasty hangover.

Zimbabwean High Court Refuses to Force Release of Election Results

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The opposition is now calling for a general strike as a result.

Of note, there is also talk of a recount, which appears to be outright vote theft in an attempt to screw with the parliamentary results too.

For what it’s worth, if there is a villian in all of this outside of Mugabe and the ZANU-PF, it’s South African President Thabo Mbeki, who appears to be doing his level best to aid and abet the vote fraud in Zimbabwe.

I think that part of this is the sentiment among Mbeki and the ANC that as a “revolutionary” Mugabe is one of them, and part of this is being driven by electoral concerns: They are concerned that the principle of the democratic defeat of a revolutionary leader might at some later date be applied to the ANC.

Rand Could Not Write Her Way Out of a Paper Bag

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So says Harold Bloom, a professor of humanities and English at Yale, in response to an interview about the increasing number of grants from various titans of industry making grants requiring the study of, or chairs in, the studies of the works of Ayn Rand.

I would have to agree. I took an elective course in high school, Philosophy of Literature, and as a part of an extra credit assignment, I read, The Virtue of Selfishness, which I found to be less comprehensible, and more poorly written than Emmanuel Kant.

I’ve come to realize that in addition to piss-poor writing, it was incomprehensible because it was piss-poor thinking.

I recognized it as bullsh#@ as a 16 year old, and it was painful enough that I wanted nothing to do with her fiction.

Full disclosure, to the degree that I place myself in a philosophical school, and I try not to, I find it a waste of time, I consider myself to be a Jewish Existentialist Utilitarian with a rather Deist view of the universe.

As Daniel at Crooked Timber notes:

Although the Ayn Rand Institute is quoted as being basically approving of the trend, I think that a decent case can be made to the effect that the article is wrong to say that “While Rand, an advocate of free markets, would support a university’s getting paid to teach her works”. This is essentially a bribe to the university and as far as I can see, taking a bribe to compromise your own vision of an undergraduate reading list doesn’t fit in particularly well with Rand’s particular ethics of self-reliance and independent thought. I don’t even really think that having a university professorship endowed by a charitable foundation is particularly consistent Objectivism but there you go.

I’m a bit more cynical though.

She was a self parody in life, and now her philosophy is a self parody.

FWIW, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has some names and programs their report.

Obama Delegate Purge in California

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Well, we’ve had some shenanigans in delegate selection in California, where there are more candidates for Obama delegates than there were spaces.

Theoretically, the actual delegates are chosen at caucus, but the campaigns can, and do strike names from the list before the caucuses.

Originally, the Obama struck some 950 potential delegates off the list out about 1700 (about 55%), as opposed to about 40 out of about 1000 (4%) for the Clinton campaign, including Marcy Winograd, who sits on the Executive committee of the CA Dems, and contested the primary against hawk Jane Harman.

Apparently, their justification was that they were concerned about Clinton poaching their delegates (the Bitch made me do it defense), but of note is the fact that the people remaining were the bundlers and their girlfriends, so it was payback for the morally repugnant policy of bundling donations, one which the Obama campaign says that they do not need because of their massive small donor base.

It’s payback to the big donors.

Of note, once this all hit the fan, the Obama campaign backtracked, but it’s both stupid and sleazy.

Just another group of supporters to be thrown under the bus, as Obama is now signaling over “Don’t ask Don’t Tell”, where he’s nominally opposed, but won’t consider the position of candidates for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which means that we will see a military man lobbying against this, just like Colin Powell did, which sounds an awful lot like the dog whistle gay bashing that he did with Donnie McClurkin.

Oh, well, I guess that I’ll be holding my nose when I pull the lever (metaphorically speaking, it will be either Diebold or Optiscan in November) for him.

My expectations are now low enough that I don’t think that I will be disappointed.

Econ 101: Pay Cuts for Pilots Reduces Supply

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The New York Times, reporting on new dynamics in airline piloting as a career, lower wages and higher costs to enter the field, notes that there are now shortages of pilots.

When you can reasonably be expected to leave flight school with upwards of $100,000 in debt, and where starting salaries can be as low as $21,000 a year, and where senior level salaries have been cut by as much as 1/3, is it any wonder that the pool of entrants is shrinking?

It does not help that once you join an airline, you are pretty much a slave, since a move entails throwing out all of one’s seniority.

Safety is suffering too, with flight hours required for an interview falling.

More OOXML

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It appears that ISO is now working on “harmonizing” OOXML and ODF, and the Norwegian protest continues, though switching that vote would not be decisive.

However, there does appear to be an EU anti-trust investigation regarding their lobbying, (Note: the link is two months old, and so might be mooted by the vote).

My guess is that the fat lady has sung.

My other guess is that if OOXML were to become a real standard, Microsoft Office would not be certified as complying, if the experience of Internet Explorer is any guide.

Bullsh@$!!!!, John Yoo, Torturer Edition

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The National Lawyers Guild is calling for Yoo’s firing by UC Berkeley and his disbarment.

Additionally, they call for him to be tried as a war criminal.

Christopher Edley, Jr., the Dean of the UC Law School, is saying that while he disagrees with Yoo’s positions, it would be an infringement on academic freedom to take action against him.

Christopher Edley, Jr. is an embarrassment to the profession of law, and to the entire academic world for taking this position, though I don’t think that Edley should be fired for this.

The difference between espousing torture and engaging in a criminal conspiracy to promulgate actual torture.

There is a difference between a lawyer who defends a mobster, and a Consigliere, who actively aids and abets law breaking. Mr. Yoo was clearly the latter.

I would also note that in some of the lesser known Nuremberg trials, judges and lawyers were tried and convicted for their roles which consisted of supplying legal advice and justifications, just like Yoo:

Indictment

  1. Participating in a common plan or conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity;
  2. War crimes through the abuse of the judicial and penal process, resulting in mass murder, torture, plunder of private property.
  3. Crimes against humanity on the same grounds, including slave labor charges.

I would suggest that anyone on the UC fund raising or alumni list seriously consider their responses in the future.

Check out my earlier post on this matter merely referred to one of the General’s magnificent snarks, so you might want to look elsewhere for greater analysis.

FBI Goons Sent to Intimidate Wecht Jurors

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While it is normal for lawyers from both sides to talk with jurors following a mistrial, it is highly unusual, at least so far as I know, for the US Attorney to send FBI agents to interview the jurors.

Absent an allegation of something like juror tampering, it simply makes no sense. FBI agents are not trained as jury consultants or litigators, and as such are not the best choice for this task.

So now, at the end what was clearly a political show trial, one in which the prosecution could not meet the burden of proof, we are seeing a highly public harassment of those jurors at the direction of the US Attorney’s office.

When this is all over, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, and the rest of her bully boys, need to be fully investigated over their actions, which are a basic affront to the concepts of laws going back to perhaps the Magna Carta.

If wrongdoing is uncovered, they need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, with imprisonment and disbarment as the results.

Had to Rush Home

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Natalie was bleeding from her ear, and my wife had to take her to the urgent care clinic to get her checked out, the nurse would not put her on the bus, and I had to get home for Charlie’s bus.

Luckily, it was just an abrasion, probably from a scratch or a burst zit (Natalie is developing mild acne), so she was sent home with a tube of ear-friendly antibiotic ointment.

The logistics, however, were amazingly awful, as I am an hour commute from home.

The joys of being a parent.

Blog Meta, Days of the Week

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Here is the number of visitors to the site by day of the week since the start of the year.

I’m not sure why Tuesday and Thursday are my most popular days.

Day

Percent

Sunday

10.2%

Monday

15.6%

Tuesday

17.4%

Wednesday

16.0%

Thursday

17.7%

Friday

14.3%

Saturday

8.9%


This is out of the 100-120 readers a day that I average.

Rumors of 129915 Tons of Deadweight as VP

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Me bad, I’m confusing the Chevron oil tanker, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

There are rumors that McCain may pick her as a Vice Presidential pick.

I find this unlikely for a number of reasons:

  1. She is much too closely tied to Bush. It’s clear that she has a sort of fawning adoration about him, and the VP nominee needs to be McCain’s man, not Bush’s
  2. Republicans won’t vote for a woman.
  3. Republicans won’t vote for a black woman.
  4. The are consistent rumors regarding her sexual orientation.

I do no know, nor do I care, whether Condoleezza Rice is a lesbian, but it appears that a number of people in Washington do, or at least are very careful not to discuss this issue.

When the Washington Post decided not to kill 6 days of strips from Aaron McGruder’s strip The Boondocks, in which Huey and Riley decided that Rice needed to find a good black man, it published its reasons using remarkably circuitous language:

That was too much for the Post, which announced it would skip “The Boondocks” this week. “We had no way of knowing whether Mr. McGruder’s assertion that Condoleeza Rice had no personal relationship was true or not,” explained a Post spokesperson.

Emphasis mine

These rumors have dogged rice for some time, so absent her getting a beard (Yes, I know that this is the term for a gay man who marries a woman to cover up, but I don’t know the converse), I do not see her being on the ticket.

Of course, if you look at who seems to be McCain’s attack dog right now, which is generally the campaign role of the VP, and so would seem to have the inside track on the position, it’s Lindsay Graham, who has had rumors swirling around him for years.