Author: Matthew G. Saroff

The UK is Not My Country

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And I don’t want it to be my country, and I don’t want to be….Take the Royal Family….please!

That being said, I really wish that we had their banking regulators:

Credit card giants have been given two weeks to agree to stop charging exorbitant rates to borrowers or risk losing their operating licences.

Ministers said they were giving Britain’s major lenders one last chance to prove they were not profiteering from the downturn. The ultimatum was delivered at a four-hour Whitehall summit called after The Independent disclosed some credit card and store card providers had raised interest rates – in some cases to 30 per cent – even though the cost of borrowing had fallen.

Perhaps we can trade them Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, for a few dozen Trident Missiles and future considerations?

Looks Like Netanyaho Will Be the Next Israeli PM

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He’s leading strongly in polls, here and here, and the Labor Party has triangulated itself into irrelevancy, with Kadima not being meaningfully to the right on either economics or security, and more progressive parties parties, particularly Meretz (also here) picking up the folks who oppose Thatcherite domestic policies.

Labor simply does not stand for anything any more, and the fact that it is basically tied with Meretz is an indication that it has no ideological base.

Now We See the Real Shrub

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So the elections are over, and now, unencumbered by future elections and even the remotest possibility of a political future, we see the real George W. Bush, and he makes the George W. Bush of the past 7 years look like Al Gore.

I first came across this when I found out that he had issued an executive order stripping 5000 employees of the BATF, some of whom are already represented by a union, of their collective bargaining rights.

Think Progress has a list of what he’s pushing through now, titled Bush’s Backward Sprint To The Finish, and it’s grim: (quoting directly)

  • HEALTH CARE
    • – Cutting medicaid
    • – Allowing healthcare workers to refuse “morally objectionable” procedures [meaning allowing anyone to refuse birth control and abortion at any time]
    • – Revising rules for international drug trials [more dead foreign babies]
    • – Narrowing the definition of combat related disability [meaning that if you get injured when your vehicle crashes because the vehicle in front of you gets blown up, it’s no longer “combat related]
    • – Allowing states to set premiums and higher co-payments
  • ENVIRONMENT
    • – Allowing mining near the Grand Canyon
    • – Discounting global warming when assessing species risks
    • – Weakening the Endangered Species Act
    • – Eliminating review of fishing regulations
    • – Allowing more emissions from power plants
    • – Opening protected land to energy development
    • – Allowing factory farms to self-regulate waste
    • – Altering solid waste definition
    • – Allowing snowmobiles in Yellowstone
    • – Allowing coal companies to dump dirt and rock into streams
  • CIVIL LIBERTIES
    • – Allowing guns in national parks
    • – Allowing broader law-enforcement monitoring
    • – Implementing the REAL ID Act
  • LABOR
    • – Making it harder to take time off
    • – Allowing truckers to work 14 hour days [More dead on the US interstates]
    • – Requiring labor unions to file extensive financial reports
    • – Making it harder to regulate toxic substances on the job
    • – Stripping collective bargaining rights from federal employees
    • – Relaxing rules on investment adviser conflicts of interest
  • ADMINISTRATION
    • – Moving political appointees to permanent posts

The complete list, with descriptions is at the link.

This is someone would not be satisfied until he destroys everything America really stands for.

NATO Meeting Finds Compromise at Meeting

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So NATO agrees to resume limited ties with Russia while also allowing for better ties with Georgia and the Ukraine without any road map to NATA membership.

Obviously, it makes sense to resume ties with Russia. They are geographically and historically very important in dealing with Iran and Afghanistan.

As to kicking NATO membership down the road for the two former Soviet Republics, that’s just stupid, but the best that could be had with Bush and His Evil Minions™ still in power.

NATO does not need expansion, and the idea that a nut job like Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili, or a man who seems to be actively in the running for nut job like Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko to have the ability to mandate actions on the part of three nuclear powers is absurd.

One of the great diplomatic missteps of the 1990s was the expansion of NATO.

Just imagine how bad it would have been if Georgia had been a NATO member when it launched its assault on civilians. Do governments in the rest of Europe want to be held hostage by someone like Mikheil Saakashvili?

Do the militaries in the rest of Europe want to have to share data with a country whose military was so completely penetrated by Russian intelligence?

The expansion of NATO has been driven by 3 things:

  1. The US desire for new markets for defense equipment.
  2. The desire by some players to treat Russia as a conquered nation, and to use NATO rub their face in their current status.
  3. The European goal of continental union.
  4. Dick Cheney and His Evil Minions™ want to recreate the bad old Russian bear, because it gets Republicans elected, so they keep poking Russia with a number of sticks, of which NATO expansion is one.

I will note that the rapid expansion of the EU, which is, after a civilian institution hasn’t gone well either.

One need only look look at Bulgaria, a virtual Mafia state whose accession to the EU was driven by pan European triumphalism, to a lesser degree places like the Baltic republics, which are engaging in genteel ethnic cleansing, and that whole “twins” thing in Poland.

Both the EU and NATO have over expanded because of this, and the possibility of adding Ukraine and Georgia gives me the willies.

If the road to a unified Europe is inevitable, and I think that it is near inevitable, then expansion can take part at a measured pace.

The greatest threat to a real European super-State policy is the EE’s collapse from overambitious expansion.

So, Tell Me How You Really Feel

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A review of the Windows Vista™ successor beta, Windows 7:

So far, Windows 7 looks and behaves almost exactly like Windows Vista. It performs almost exactly like Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista. In other words, Microsoft’s follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.

Ouch, though some of the things that it breaks may very well just be the fact that it’s beta, but the final analysis, which uses some fairly deep level diagnostics to see how the OS works is that, “We can now say with some certainty that Windows 7 is in fact just a repackaging of Windows Vista – an “R2” release, to use Microsoft’s nomenclature on the Windows Server side of the house.”

The folks at Microflaccid still do not get it. They don’t need a software upgrade drop, they need rewrite.

No Coherent Plan? Hoocoodanode?

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Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions™ are completely clueless

The head of a new Congressional panel set up to monitor the gigantic federal bailout says the government still does not seem to have a coherent strategy for easing the financial crisis, despite the billions it has already spent in that effort.

Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the oversight panel, said in an interview Monday that the government instead seemed to be lurching from one tactic to the next without clarifying how each step fits into an overall plan.

Hoocoodanode?

Hank Paulson is not trying to save anything but his friends and buddies back in Wall Street, and does not realize that much of that industry resembles a gangrenous limb, and requires amputation.

This is not just incompetence. It is incompetence and a complete unwillingness to do anything that might fix the problem, because that would make the high life style of the investment bankers largely obsolete.

Not Enough Bullets: The Ever Present AIG

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Or more specifically, the man who ran the company into the ground, Hank Greenberg, who is demanding more information on the government bailout of his former firm, because he feels that it may have adversely effected his portfolio:

Greenberg wants the government to do more for AIG, suggesting it provide guarantees to cover counterparty collateral agreements, according to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

(emphasis mine)

What was it that I just said about the WSJ Editorial Page again?

We really need to send the lot of them to prison.

The Last Refuge of Well Connected Nuts: The WSJ Ediitorial Page

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In this case it’s Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who continues to pimp the lie that the Rissians attacked first.

No, they didn’t. They knew that you would attack, and they knew when and where you would attack almost before you did, and so massed troops on their side of the border waiting for the balloon to go up, but you attacked first.

Being stupid, and having your state security apparatus thoroughly penetrated by a large unfriendly neighbor does not make you the victim of an attack. It just makes it either stupid or insane to launch an attack against their troops and allies.

You sir, notwithstanding your vaunted Western education, are both stupid and insane.

Economics Update

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First, we have some developments on the other side of the pond, with the Australian Central Bank lowering its rates by 100 basis points (1%), the most since 1991, and a major Russian investment bank is calling for a 20% depreciation of the Ruble, to boost exports.

It might be a good idea, depending on how export dependent the Russian economy is. It would boost local and export oriented industries.

On more general metrics of the credit crunch, Calculated Risk’s credit crisis indicators show little progress, and the fact that the rates on Treasuries have fallen off a cliff, with people getting virtually nothing (0.05%) for 3 months T-Bills, 2.68% on 10 year notes (a near record), and 3.17% for a 30 year note (a record).

Basically, this means that investors are paying the government to hold their money safe for them.

For what it’s worth, people are not trusting anything, including much in the way of US and European sovereign debt, with the cost of swaps to insure that debt skyrocketing.

In energy, we have OPEC deferring a production cut, and so oil is now firmly below $50/bbl, and retail gasoline falling to $1.812/gal, a price I never thought that I would see again, and the 76th straight daily drop.

Meanwhile, the the dollar has weakened though there is downward pressure on the Yuan from rumors that the Chinese will actively move to push the value down to boost their economy.

Posted Without Comment

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Link:

Last month’s federal backstop of Citi attracted some catcalls for letting the struggling bank’s management and shareholders off easy. But to former AIG chief Hank Greenberg — a persistent critic of the tougher terms the government has enforced in its rescue of the teetering insurer — the Citi deal is a paragon.

(emphasis mine)

Election Update

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Nothing on Georgia, polls haven’t closed, and I don’t have access to exit polls, this is all him, Al Franken,* in Minnesota.

The lede has to be that they found 171 uncounted ballots in Ramsey County, a Franken stronghold, and heads are exploding in the Coleman campaign.

Based on the percentages there, that should net around 30 votes for Franken.

Even so, there are indications that the two campaigns are trying to make nice, or at least appear to, as they are suggesting withdrawing some of their more stupid ballot challenges.

My suggestion: never trust a smiling Republican, and Norm Coleman is always smiling.

Meanwhile the good folks at TPM Election Central have a rundown on recent developments, in addition to the found ballots, we have a further narrowing in the vote, and the
Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, has instructed local election officials to separate rejected absentee based on the reasons for rejection, which indicates that he is taking Franken’s challenge to the rejection of about 1K ballots seriously.

My take is that it will all come down to the challenges, and that the Coleman campaign has been much more aggressive with these, so I would give a very slight advantage to Al Franken.

*It’s a roughly 30 year old reference to a running sketch on Saturday Night Live.

A Book Plug

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I enjoy reading his posts at Wetmachine, and I will be checking out excerpts online (links below):

From: John R. Sundman
To: me
Subject: A “Very Special” post-Thanksgiving message from John of Wetmachine

Hey Matthew,

Although I don’t comment much on 40 years, I do read it quasi-regularly. And I have had you on my blogroll for some while. On that basis, I take the liberty of sending you this “very special” message.

If you have any inclination at all to buy any of my books (especially a pre-order of The Pains), or to pimp them on your site, now would be a good time to do it.

I hate doing the hard sell, but the fact is that I’m unemployed and nearly broke, and selling these books is my only source of income. Of course, I could go back to driving a moving van, and will probably do so in January unless the economy is in a total shambles by then. I ran into my old boss, the crazy man called “Trip”, and he said I can drive for him whenever I want. But in these “shopping days” it seems to me that bookpimping might be a better use of my time.

The thing that’s scaring me, frankly, (besides missing the mortgage, and so forth) is that I haven’t yet pre-sold enough copies of The Pains to pay for an initial print run, and if I don’t see a few hundred more copies in the next week or so, I’m going to have to refund the money to everybody who has put in a pre-order.

So, I’m putting on the hard sell, & trust our relationship is strong enough to weather a little targeted spam. Which I will be custom-crafting to hundreds of my friends over this Thanksgiving break — thereby either re-igniting my novelistic career, or pissing off every friend I have, or both.

Perhaps you can pass this info along on my behalf?

Here’s the intro to The Pains, with an illustration I’m sure you’ll love,

http://www.wetmachine.com/item/1389

Here’s how to buy my books online:

http://www.wetmachine.com/shop/wetmachineshop.html

and here’s how by check:

http://www.wetmachine.com/order/orderprint.html

Happy post-Thanksgiving,

jrs

Google Ads: There Are Still a Few Bugs in the System

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OK, so a few days ago, I serve up an excerpt from a parody of Atlas Shrugged, so what does Google ads serve up?

Gifts for Proud Producers and Capitalists Everywhere!*

Ummmm….OK…I have nothing but contempt for Ayn Rand and routinely mock her and her followers, calling them “Randroids”, and in this case, I am spreading mockery of what she and her “Randroids” consider to be her magnum opus, and I get an ad serving a company dedicated to lionizing a horrible person and a lousy writer.†

Then again, perhaps the proprietor is mocking her too. There is a notice at the bottom of the page:

JohnGaltGifts.com is not in any way affiliated with or sponsored by the estate of Ayn Rand ®, the Ayn Rand ® Institute (ARI), Dr. Leonard Peikoff, or any other organization or company.

It appears to me that this means that the T-shirt and sticker maker is using the fruit of Ayn Rand’s intellectual output to enrich himself, which is specifically what Rand condemned.

If that’s the case, it’s a very subtle and sophisticated parody.

*I’m linking because I’m complaining, it’s only fair.
†While I have never read Atlas Shrugged, nor do I intend to, I have read The Virtue of Selfishness in 1980 as part of a philosophy of literature class in high school, and it was awful. Emanuel Kant was more readable.